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The Tragedy of Beauty

There was a movie that came out a few years ago called "The Last Samurai" about Tom Cruise being brought into the last remaining samurai clan in Japan.  Many critics saw it as just a rip-off of "Dances with Wolves", which it was, but there was also there was this underlying theme of the Japanese concept of beauty, mono no aware .  Ken Watanabe, the head of the clan, explained this concept to Tom Cruise while describing the blossoms of a cherry tree.  They are beautiful because they only bloom once a year for a short while and then die.  If you tried to artificially maintain them you would take away what makes them beautiful, their life and their ephemerality. In the movie, the cherry tree was a metaphor for the beautiful and simple family clan that was dying away in the face of modernity.  But this metaphor underlies a more general concept of beauty.  The tragedy of beauty is not that it will one day fade away, but that this transcience and fragility is part of the
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Post-Modern Object-Relations Theory

One critique that I would have of Harry Guntrip's theory of ego, as well as with all object-relations theory, is that it places too much emphasis on the very early mother-child relationship. Certainly, as any parent will attest, a child's personality is in development from the very start. Object-Relations effectively holds the view that if something goes wrong here, you are doomed to a life of ego-failure, but if everything goes well, you develop an iron-clad ego, able to withstand any problem that comes your way. There are several problems with this, not the least of which there are several important personality elements (*cough*sexdrive*cough*) which develop later through biochemical means. Ego development may be hampered early on, but it may also be hampered or disrupted by later environmental effects. Even with the best mother-child relationship, because of the nature of our individual existence, there is no such thing as an un-failable ego. I imagine that child sol
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Dynamic Realism

I overheard a conversation today with a student who was deeply trouble by a suggestion in class (probably not a strong one) that the stories in the Bible never really happened, but are important because of what they represent. What is the response of someone who believes that the things in the Bible did happen? Is inerrancy the only way (either it did or didn't happen the way it says it does)? I feel that much of this problem arises from some combination of modernity attaching independent ontological significance to the sort of statement, "E happened", and the romantic notion that there could be some inner quality or essence which may never be revealed by outside action. Together these lead one to the conclusion that true significance comes from an event happening, and the meaning of the event is derivative from this first fact. Now that we have dissolved ourselves of an ontology based on formal logic, we may more clearly see that there is no such thing as "just
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