Paradoxically, though (Central) Europeans are more sceptical of these four elements, their tradition still more readily recognises the subjective/aesthetic existential condition in much wider areas of life than the more bourgeois Anglo-American thought which, again paradoxically, has lost faith in "genuinity" and "primordial sincerity of acting" in spite of its stronger (Enlightenment) optimistic belief in progress and what not. This is, arguably, the result of seeing the world through the glasses of austere, "colder", mechanicist science/culture whose key beliefs are mentioned above.
Being a Central European myself, I cannot say I completely agree, at least a far as "genuinity" and "primordial sincerity of acting" are concerned. :?
Then you may not have become aware of Continental Philosophy and intellectual history on which your society's based on...
It all started from Nietzsche, de Saussure, Kierkegaard and Husserl (and later Freud), tradition of
Lebensphilosophie.
To Americans, this branch of Continental Philosophy has until recently been virtually alien, because they jumped into the Darwinist bandwagon of positivist natural/social science besides their Lockean materialist conception of capitalism (where the right to hold private property was front and center) and post-Jacksonian and pragmatic "common sense philosophy". Its key manifestation was industrialism (and later,
in extremis, Marxism). The second source was Britain. You can read more at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_philosophyI quote:
From the early 20th century until the 1960s, continental philosophers were only intermittently discussed in British and American universities. Mentions of continental philosophy were usually dismissive or hostile. However, due to student demand, philosophy departments began offering courses in continental philosophy in the late 1960s and 1970s. With post-modernism in the 1970s and 1980s, analytic philosophers became more vocally opposed to the methods and conclusions of continental philosophers. Derrida, for example, was the target of polemics by John Searle and, later, assorted signatories protesting an honorary degree given to Derrida by Cambridge University.
While American and British universities continue to offer courses devoted to continental philosophy, the divide between analytic and continental philosophy is more explicit than it was prior to the 1960s. The majority of academic periodicals in philosophy today, which are analytic journals, only accept papers "written in a broadly analytic style". The differentiating terms, "continental" and "analytic", appear with increasing frequency in book titles. Meanwhile, university departments in literature, the fine arts, film, sociology, and political theory have increasingly incorporated ideas and arguments from continental philosophers into their curricula and research.http://www.autodidactproject.org/guidlebn.htmlTo be sure, the Western, or, Anglo-American, post-industrialist
popular culture, in highlighting popular entertainment and consumerism, which cannot be dissected from aforementioned values, has been uniting in the past century towards "the American way," much to the chagrin of many Continental thinkers.
My point all along was that
criticism of this current is to be found in Continental, i.e. European thinkers, and that the Japanese do not approach the issue similarly.
A normal person from the street who hasn't read on the subject may not even realize this. Reading about these things is, however, my job
- To be exact, no-one experiences the world similarly, but nevertheless "the guidelines", or epistemes in Foucaldian terminology, can be dissected through careful studying.
