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What Does It Mean To Be Free Essay

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The first thing you must know about freedom is that freedom is not one thing, but rather a topic that can be further broken down. Freedom has been broken down by many different people over time, but Berlin’s work off of the foundations of Kant represent the majority of other analyses. Kant thought of freedom not as a topic but a concept. The thing about his definition as a concept is that each question of freedom is also a question of “what should I do”. Berlin says there are two forms of freedom, positive freedom, and negative freedom. These two types freedom are also known as freedom to and freedom from. Freedom from, is a freedom we get as a result of the past, whereas freedom to, is a freedom we get from ideas. The ideas of Berlin are easily adapted to other interpretations of what freedom or liberty are, and for this reason work best as a tool to break down and decipher what freedom and or liberty really are. Freedom in the beginning of American politics was negative liberty as they wanted to have freedom from the different …show more content…

Each petition shows assimilations between the slaves and the colonist as a way to pull on an empathetic string, or at least that seemed to be the intention. Each petition showed a different interpretation of what it meant to be free. Without a concept of true freedom the slaves were only able to work off of what knowledge they had in there condition of eternal slavery. The different expressions of what slaves saw freedom as is an interpretation similar to ones that we now. The petitions were not an interpretation with the same level of education as we would see today in a modern analysis. However better than modern interpretations we can see what freedom is to those with none. Slavery acted as a dystopia for future negative liberties to be weighed against, and evidence of this is simply how often the topic of slavery comes up and is used as a situation against all

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