DMB asked "The unexamined life is not worth living AND the unlived life is not worth examining. Don't you think?"
Well posed. Yep, turning that into some kind of either / or choice is the dumb option. Ian On Mon, May 4, 2009 at 3:52 AM, david buchanan <[email protected]> wrote: > > vonderwueste said to dmb: > You observed that life can seem pointless and repetitious ( in Detroit, for > example ). I think we can agree that you are observing a low quality static > holding pattern. I claim that your observation implies the hypothesis: There > must be a better way. I further claim that the only way to test this > hypothesis is to live differently. > dmb says:Oh, you're talking about my Detroit complaints. I see. For whatever > it's worth, I found a better way. I moved to Denver after college, where > people don't live like that. Not the people I know anyway. It has a different > culture. People spend time outdoors, the population is highly educated and a > lot of my friends are artists and such. I felt at home right away and now I'm > studying philosophy instead of working in a factory or whatever. As far as > I'm concerned, this is definitely a better way. > > vonderwueste said:Therefore talking, or hypothesizing, might be a necessary > first step towards a higher quality situation, but it is insufficient. One > needs gumption. And gumption is where the rubber meets the road. Gumption is > action. Gumption is taking chances. ...My point in all of this is that the > moq is meaningless if it is not actually applied in some living way. > > dmb says:A phrase from John Dewey springs to mind. Like Pirsig, he's a > pragmatist and a radical empiricist. He said something like, "thought is > action suspended". If were not stuck and things are working there is no need > for thought. But when a problem comes up and we get stuck it's time to step > back and look at the situation. Getting stuck stops us in our tracks and we > need to look at what's wrong. This applies to little things like weird noises > coming from the motorcycle, that little voice in the back of your head and to > larger, collective stuckness too. And in the case of the hero's journey, this > is how the story begins. The would-be hero has a problem. You know, like > Willard in that Saigon hotel room. Like Dorothy in those opening scenes. Like > Luke Skywalker on that wasteland of a planet, where he's stuck on the farm. > In all those cases, the protagonist can't just keep on acting in the same old > ways or they'll never get unstuck. If they just keep doing what they're doing > instead of figuring out a way to solve their problem, they're doomed. And, > yes, some people just go through life like that. They go to work, take a > vacation every now and then and do all the things that normal people do, but > they're stuck. It's a rut. It's not working. And yet nothing changes. And > then they die. > The great funeral procession. > The unexamined life is not worth living AND the unlived life is not worth > examining. Don't you think? > > > _________________________________________________________________ > Hotmail® has ever-growing storage! Don’t worry about storage limits. > http://windowslive.com/Tutorial/Hotmail/Storage?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_HM_Tutorial_Storage1_052009 > Moq_Discuss mailing list > Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. > http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org > Archives: > http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ > http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/ > Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
