Kindred Spirit?
"the use of ideas should be strongly discouraged (except perhaps for mental gymnastics). In thinking, they have no true place. Their use corresponds to that of incantations in science. They are made up of misty thought-waste, confusions too entangled to be disentangled; bound together and made to look tidy by attaching an appellation – label, i.e., a sign. It is the tidiness of the sign which misleads. It is like a marmalade label carefully attached to an empty jar. Remove the label, and confusion vanishes: we see the empty jar, the bit of printed paper, and know there is no marmalade. And so with abstract terms and ideas. Consider liberty – we have already considered it. A name, and a confused description of certain activities and nothing more: no objective liberty. We have moreover distinguished between an idea on the one hand and hypotheses and opinion on the other. We make the distinction again. An hypothesis is an attempted explanation of facts: in the very act of proffering itself it requests its own annihilation: by proof to wit; an hypothesis is the half-way house of the thinking-process, the ultimate destination of which is knowledge of the concrete. Opinion is hypothesis with a dash of prejudice thrown in: it is an hypothesis behaving like a tiresome child. But an idea! An idea is a privileged assertion. It is seated high on a pedestal above question and offering no explanation. The only concern is to learn the most fitting form of rendering such idols allegiance – justice, law, right, liberty, equality, and the rest; each matched with a spouse, its negative. It is part of our work to shatter the pedestals: since idols dwindle to nothing, as soon as they touch common earth. If the process gives a sense of intellectual insecurity it merely shows upon what illusions the seeming security was based." – dora marsden,1913
"Here, then, we have it – the cause of Freedom. Freedom is the devil which drives. We must get a nearer view of it. What have we in mind when we say Freedom? We detect three elements: two notions and an atmosphere. There is the notion of a force, and a notion of a barrier which the force breaks through. A "breaking through" is the single complex which is the "getting free." A definite action, therefore, with a positive beginning and a definable end: limited in time and complete in its operation. There exists nothing in this which explains the vague unending thing called "freedom." To "get free" apparently is not freedom which is something which carries on an independent existence on its own account. This separate existence is the atmosphere. Freedom therefore is made up of loose association with the two notions which coalesce into the one action of getting free, plus an atmosphere. The action is the individual affair, the thing which must be done for oneself and permits of no vicariousness: the other, i.e., the atmosphere, is the part which one can create for others. This atmosphere is an interesting study: examined, it reveals itself, half swoon, half thrill. It is the essence of sensation, the food of the voluptuary. The thrill is the memory, the aroma of far-off fair deeds: the swoon is the suspension of intellect which allows vague association to make these deeds appear in part as one's own. Deeds, mark you ! definite things. Now we can ask the question: What is the relationship of the simple, normal, definable life-process of over-coming specific resistances which we call getting free to the vague symbolic indefinable thing called Freedom. The second is a blatant exploitation of the first. The first is an individual affair which must be operated in one's own person and which once done is over. The second is not an action: it is a worked up atmosphere, secured by culling special nose-gays of "free-ings," the most notable deeds of the most notable persons by preference – bunching them together and inhaling their decaying sweetness with exactly the same type of pleasure as that which the drugtaker and the drunkard get out of their vices. As tippling is the vicious exploitation of the normal quellching of thirst so the following after "Freedom" is the vicious exploitation of the normal activity of working oneself free of difficulties.." – dora m,1913
