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We want to be ready to act in a crisis, but it’s hard to stay vigilant and keep an edge when nothing ever seems to happen that calls forth our abilities. The motivation to stay sharp atrophies, and we’re lulled into apathy and complacency. As a result, men’s standards, self-respect, discipline, and all-around hardihood get soft.
Idleness kills manliness.
Idleness Kills Manliness
Brett and Kate McKay
In the constrained vision, where man cannot directly create social results but only social processes, it is as characteristics of those processes that freedom, justice, power, and equality have significance.
A Conflict of Visions
Thomas Sowell
The goals were power and wealth; the cultural capital that could secure those goals was courtly elegance or refinement (miyabi). The more elegant the person, the more desirable. An expression of that courtly elegance was an enhanced sensitivity called aware, later commonly expressed more fully as mono no aware. Deriving from a common exclamation meaning “ah!,” it signals coming across something striking. Mixed with attentiveness to the ephemeral, aware transformed the traditional Buddhist resignation toward impermanence into an aesthetic of poignancy. The cherry blossoms, for example, are all the more stunning because they bloom for such a short time.
Engaging Japanese Philosophy – A Short History
Thomas P. Kasulis
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