An Emancipation of the Mind

Political corruption, instability, and conflict are the natural results of the abandonment of reason.

Unreasonable distributions of wealth have always turned their fire on reason.

The Enlightenment was a scene of intellectual conflict that drew upon utterly foreign cultures in the ancient world and in the New World to destabilize systems of oppression. It was not a unified program but a process of creative intellectual destruction.

This liberalism relies upon the idea that consciousness is not a thing but an activity; that its elemental constituent is not some soul-like substance but the activity of understanding; that it knows itself and the world only imperfectly, through its reflections on the world and itself; that its freedom is a matter of degree and a function of its u

Consciousness, according to Douglass, inhabits the frame of things; it finds itself only by stepping outside of itself and seeing itself in and through its encounter with the object. Douglass then states this theory concerning the inherently reflective nature of consciousness in language that is pure Feuerbach: "The process by which man is abl