Privelege Was Re: [lbo-talk] Re: Maoist cleanup drive hits

Charles Brown cbrown at michiganlegal.org
Tue Jan 9 06:54:57 PST 2007


andie nachgeborenen

Now, philosophically, if that's what we want to discuss, you only find the idea of a law you give to yourself alienating because you think of the law as something given to you by someone else. Setting up your own ideas and following them -- raising the building in your head before you put it on the ground -- is what the old man (yes, yes, I know, why should we listen to him, what did he know about anything) said distinguished the architect from the bee. It's called self-determined imaginative creativity. I guess I think that will do as an account of freedom I can live with.

^^^^^^ CB; Isn't the first step in this mastery of necessity ? Before you start giving "laws" to yourself, you have to master the "laws" forced on you by nature or something outside you, no ?

^^^^^^^

Your own idea of freedom, which seems to be lack of interference by anything, including your own mind, is merely negative -- Hobbes and Locke might applaud it. I don't diminish the importance of such freedom, but really don't think it's enough. It leaves the poor and the rich equally free to sleep under bridges and beg in the streets. And I don't see how leaving the mind out of sex is supposed to make it more liberating.



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