In Rinrigaku, Watsuji argues that ethics is the study of what it means for us to be human. How we think about the nature of human existence, he says, dictates the ways in which we understand our ethical values. Hence, he criticises Western philosophical conceptions of the modern subject, arguing that the Western rendering of subjectivity is both problematic and foreign
If you don't know it, Ecclesiastes is a collection of Old Testament verses in which the eponymous title character discourses on the apparent meaninglessness of pleasure, accomplishment, wealth, politics, and life itself in the face of the infinitude of the universe and the absolute perfection of God. It is the source of many of our most cliched phrases, such as there is a time for everything and there is nothing new under the sun.
The child is expected to take a specific role in that world, a place that is stable and certain. The rules and goals are set by the adults in the child's world. At the same time, at play and with its peers the child experiences a completely free world. It is open to all possibilities, even those beyond the child's physical limits. It's as if the child is free in a room, with walls, ceilings and floors that protect it from actual danger.
Perfectionism is philosophically encapsulated by an existential conviction. Many perfectionists are not only certain of the objective validity of their rigid way of living; they're also emboldened by the sense that their lives have an objective meaning, afforded to them in the way a god may grant his messiah a grand objective. Peers and loved ones question the perfectionist's obsessiveness because its root is often hidden, protected from the slings and arrows of reason. Perfectionism persists in large part because it remains unchallenged.
In Mahayana Buddhism, sunyata - often translated as "emptiness" - doesn't mean that nothing matters. It means nothing exists with a permanent essence. Everything is constantly changing and without fixed self-nature. Seeing through the illusion of an enduring, separate self can be liberating.
In that sense, it's not so different from a lab experiment, where researchers set the stage and observe what unfolds. The aim of these often fantastical scenarios is just as serious: to test, stretch, or even shatter our intuitions about how the world works.
Robinsonâs characters constantly embody a Midwestern sense of impotence, vulnerably trapped in the contradictions of their environment, desperately crying for some relief from life's chaos.
In The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry articulates that painâs resistance to language not only makes sharing experiences of suffering difficult but also actively destroys the very language we use to convey them.
