Thursday, January the 3rd, 2008

Wrote, or made, some replies to annual New Year's greetings this morning. The end of the new year. How many annual routines will I have hereafter?
I have got 52 greeting cards so far. I had more than 100 of them in my days, but I have tried to decrease the number. The less, the better? In other words, I am walking out of my life.
As Kant put it; "(T)he categories are not in themselves cognitions, but mere forms of thought for the construction of cognitions from given intuitions." (p.153, Immanuel Kant, "Critique of Pure Reason", 2003, Dover Publications, New York) We can construct cognitions from given intuitions with categories. As categories are given by the culture we belong to, we can construct different cognitions from the very same intuitions.
The national debt amounts to trillions of yen. Is it OK to pass the accumulated liabilities down to the next generations? We have to think of the way to stop the negative sequence, both financially and culturally. The healthy and sound development of the younger generations is critically essential. Interiorization of extravagance imposes a burden on their development. Exteriorization needs diplomatic efforts of currently active generations. Risk-taking is unavoidable.
To get out of the debt-ridden situation, we have to try to avert current liabilities, and to ward off unreasonable historically "accumulated" ones. That needs a cultural revolution as well as a financial one.