Critical Affinities: Nietzsche and African American Thought

8. Unlikely Illuminations:Nietzsche and Frederick Douglasson Power, Struggle, and the Aisthesis of Freedom

This chapter strives to illuminate affinities between Frederick Douglass’s conception of freedom and the slavery he escaped and Nietzsche ’s view of struggle, which indicates a similar conception of the dynamic of perversions of power and its transfiguring possibilities.The two complement each other in unexpected ways. Douglass provides accounts of slave experience that illustrate how his resistance through struggle offered him a transformative aesthetic experience of meaningful freedom.This realization of power is specifically one not motivated by revenge and resentment of the sort Nietzsche describes as characteristic of slavish morality in the first essay of his On the Genealogy of Morals.Much of Nietzsche’s writing aims at investigating how meanings or values are produced,and especially the ways in which their genealogies are marked by efforts to effect sensations of power. Nietzsche provides some relevant criteria for distinguishing creative from destructive struggles, the kinds of transformations they effect, and the forms of power they afford and cultivate.This Nietzschean framework supports Douglass’s impression that he has a superior character when emerging out of struggles that enable him to gain a sense of his freedom. To some, my objective here might seem perverse, perhaps even repulsive—why endeavor to bend Douglass to Nietzsche, or attempt to read Nietzsche as if he were a progressive egalitarian? After all, does not one powerfully articulate the moral reprehensibility of slavery while the other is a philosopher of mastery and domination who actually 8 Unlikely Illuminations: Nietzsche and Frederick Douglass on Power, Struggle, and the Aisthesis of Freedom CHRISTA DAVIS ACAMPORA 175 advocates a new kind of slavery1 and is perhaps even “a cruel racist”2 through and through? What is to be gained by performing the hermeneutic gymnastics required to illuminate any similarity between these two writers, and would not doing so constitute an injustice to the intent of each?3 I am quite mindful of these concerns, although the confines of this chapter do not permit me to thoroughly address all of them. Ultimately, I argue that both Douglass and Nietzsche share a conception of human power and how it might seek or produce meaningful freedom.The purpose is not to show that they ultimately share the same ends in their projects but rather that they hold certain complementary positions that, when considered in tandem, deepen our appreciation of the respective projects in which they were involved.The goal of reading Nietzsche alongside Douglass is not to render Nietzsche more palatable or to offer his apology against the charges of racism,as if by mere association with Douglass Nietzsche appears more sympathetic to the concerns of oppressed blacks. Nor is it my objective to show that what Douglass can merely express as his personal experience in narrative form Nietzsche actually renders more truly philosophical. I am not trying to give Nietzsche the face of Douglass or see the specter of Nietzsche illuminating Douglass’s experience. Instead, the real work of this chapter is to further explore the relevance of imagination for moral deliberation (broadly conceived to include consideration of the sort of person one aims to become). Reading Douglass and Nietzsche together on power as it relates to the felt quality or aisthesis of freedom provides entrée to further investigation of practices of resistance and the relation between aesthetic and moral freedom.Attentive to these unlikely illuminations, we can better appreciate ways in which the acquisition of meaningful freedom is an accomplishment achieved through a dynamic of social and individual cooperation and resistance that is not necessarily hostile to the pursuit of meaningful community. In fact, I draw an even stronger conclusion—far from destroying or minimizing the significance of our relations to others, the aisthesis of agency, realized in struggle, educes erotic and imaginative resources vital for shaping a collective identity of who we are and the future we want as ours. I. Douglass’s oft-cited account of his fight with the slave-breaker Covey in his second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom,4 176 Christa Davis Acampora clearly indicates that despite the tortures of slavery, Douglass longed not to simply reverse the terms of his subjugation in order to brutalize his captors. Douglass cites his resistance to Covey as the ignition of his struggle for freedom.A striking feature of Douglass’s account is the way in which he perceives the use of power and the value of struggle. He is...