Tag Archives: culture

Japan’s imitation of the West

Memes often travel between neighboring countries and cultures like genetic material travels between bacteria in a colony. The imitation by one culture of another is rarely a pure copying though, but usually a kind of creative act: a selection, curation, editing, emphasising, painting over. But the distance between some cultures is greater than between others. Edward […]

Concert review: free jazz at Nanahari, Sep 19

The performers: Kevin McHugh from the US on piano, Hugues Vincent from France on cello, as well as an Australian clarinet player, and Japanese cello and flute players and a drummer. The venue: Nanahari – “seven needles”, 七針 – a small basement in Hachobori, east Tokyo, in an authentically Showa-era building. We are partly transported […]

Values 2: Human reason is reactive

Previously I wrote about Nietzsche’s assertion that philosophers must create values, and a distinction between scholars, scientists and philosophers was made. The focus now shifts to the faculty of reason and its contrast with another mode of thinking. Reason can be understood as man’s ability to think according to precise rules. Logic is one such […]

Values 1: Philosophy, science, and their relationship

This is hopefully the start of a short series of posts in which I attempt to relate the concepts of value and value creation, in particular as they were understood by Friedrich Nietzsche, to the modern world, in some kind of way. Comments of all kinds are encouraged! In the beginning (understood as ancient Greece), […]

Partitioning idea spaces into containers

Some scattered thoughts on idea flows. The global idea space is partitioned in various ways. One example would be peoples speaking different languages. English speakers all understand each other, Japanese speakers all understand each other, but there are relatively few people who speak Japanese and English very well. We can understand this situation in an […]