Dan Glover said to dmb:
....why don't you address the real question? I mean, these are all great quotes
and all but they tell me nothing about your labeling freedom as negative. Do
you have even one shred of evidence that Robert Pirsig writes about negative
freedom? If so, I would love to see it. And more, I will admit I am mistaken.
dmb says:
One shred and you'll admit that you're mistaken? Okay, I'm very skeptical about
any such admission but here you go...
"The hippies had in mind something that they wanted, and were calling it
"freedom," but in the final analysis "freedom" is a purely NEGATIVE goal."
In the afterward to ZMM, Pirsig says his book "offers something larger than
mere freedom. It gives a POSITIVE goal to work toward that does not confine."
"The hippies had in mind something that they wanted, and were calling it
“freedom,” but in the final analysis “freedom” is a purely NEGATIVE goal. It
just says something is bad. Hippies weren’t really offering any alternatives
other than colorful short-term ones, and some of these were looking more and
more like pure DEGENERACY. Degeneracy can be fun but it’s hard to keep up as a
serious lifetime occupation."
"When they call it freedom, that's not right. 'Freedom' doesn't mean anything.
Freedom's just an ESCAPE from something NEGATIVE. The real reason it's so
hallowed is that when people talk about it they mean Dynamic Quality."
"...when you add a concept of "Dynamic Quality" to a rational understanding of
the world, you can add a lot to an understanding of contrarians. Some of them
aren't just being NEGATIVE toward static moral patterns, they are actively
pursuing a DYNAMIC GOAL."
"Everybody gets on these NEGATIVE contrarian streaks from time to time, where
no matter what it is they're supposed to be doing, that's the one thing they
least want to do. Sometimes it's a DEGENERATE NEGATIVISM, where biological
forces are driving it. Sometimes it's an ego pattern that says, "I'm too
important to be doing all this DUMB STATIC STUFF."
AND here's one where we see the CONCEPT in other terms, same idea in other
words.
"But sometimes it's Dynamic, where your whole being senses that the static
situation is an enemy of life itself. That's what drives the really CREATIVE
people -the artists, composers, revolutionaries and the like- ...But they're
not being contrary in a way that is just DECADENT. They're way too energetic
and aggressive to be decadent. They're fighting for some kind of DYNAMIC
FREEDOM from the static patterns. But the DYNAMIC FREEDOM they're FIGHTING FOR
is a kind of morality too."
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/md/archives.html
