pylduck: (Default)
pylduck ([personal profile] pylduck) wrote2002-05-10 08:07 am

. . .

Free, I want to be free! Frolicking in the summer sun, melting with cones of fruity and chocolately ice cream, I want to be free!

freedom

[identity profile] virtualexile.livejournal.com 2002-05-10 06:59 am (UTC)(link)
Why aren't you free?

Re: freedom

[identity profile] pylduck.livejournal.com 2002-05-10 07:51 am (UTC)(link)
:( Still trying to write this paper that was due Monday, then yesterday, and now it just must DIE.

Re: freedom

[identity profile] virtualexile.livejournal.com 2002-05-10 08:05 am (UTC)(link)
Well, you are free to let it die a natural death, but I presume you are unwilling to allow that for some other reasons?

Re: freedom

[identity profile] pylduck.livejournal.com 2002-05-10 08:19 am (UTC)(link)
There is no such thing as a natural death for such a monstruous creature as a seminar paper. I will euthanize it (or myself) today promptly by 1 pm, though, because though it is incoherent and poorly written, I have enough of my argument down on paper to suggest that I have been thinking...

Re: freedom

[identity profile] virtualexile.livejournal.com 2002-05-10 08:23 am (UTC)(link)
I prefer that you euthanize the seminar paper, but I am prepared to let you enter the great unknown ... so soon after we became "friends" ... because I know that none of us are permanent dwellers on this planet ...

;-)

Re: freedom

[identity profile] pylduck.livejournal.com 2002-05-10 08:30 am (UTC)(link)
Ironically (isn't it ironic, don't you think? or maybe not), I am currently writing about Plato's philosophy of the deathless, indestructible soul and the transmigration of souls. I'm reading in Phaedo Socrates's (so-crates) admonition against suicide as an irresponsible act in the care of the soul.

Re: freedom

[identity profile] virtualexile.livejournal.com 2002-05-10 08:42 am (UTC)(link)
Plato's full of shit :o)

Plus, if a soul is deathless, why should any of us mind either suicide or murder?

Re: freedom

[identity profile] pylduck.livejournal.com 2002-05-10 08:51 am (UTC)(link)
Plato's (Socrates's) argumentation makes no sense to me, either. How he proves that the soul (or anything) is indestructible is to say that a thing and its opposite can never co-exist, and hence must mean one simply retreats in the face of the other. One example Socrates uses is heat and cold. He says since heat can never be cold, when heat becomes cold it has not been destroyed, but has just left to another place. Whatever.

But in terms of the deathless soul, that's where he argues that the goal of the soul is purification with ultimate transcendence (as opposed to reincarnation), and that's where suicide and murder will set you back a few incarnations.

Re: freedom

[identity profile] virtualexile.livejournal.com 2002-05-10 09:01 am (UTC)(link)
If suicide will protect me from "purification" I'm all for it ;-)