xylosper's notebook

There are so many things called culture on the world.
Why people call them culture?
The reason is to make themselves special beings distinguished from nature.

For instance, the behavior that human being eats food is food culture, while the action that an animal does is food habit.
Although there is no difference between human beings and animals in having something to eat, it is only human being’s behavior that is called culture.
Some person tries to discriminate between them through the act’s elegance or savageness.
However, natives’ deeds to eat food like animals are also referred as food culture, so it’s impossible to distinguish through such a thing like their behaviors.
Then, what make natives’ eating called culture?
It is the truth that the natives are men.
If an action is culture is determined by not the action itself but its subject.
Men have become distinguished beings themselves by calling their behaviors culture.

What it means that human beings become special?
Before the culture dawning, they were nothing but one species of the many creatures that belong to nature.
Not until they became distinguished through the culture could they separate themselves from the nature.
Consequently, they have begun to control and govern the nature by standing above that, achieving the civilization of today.

Human beings are placed under restraint; social suppression and natural limitation.
They are limited beings, so it doesn’t any significance to consider being free from interference or binding.
Instead, that they pursue freedom should be brought into focus.

Men have been seeking freedom.
Medieval feudalism and capitalists’ oppressing labors made them pursue freedom and equality, and it resulted in the birth of two kind of democracy; liberal democracy for freedom and social democracy for equality.
Through the collapse of the Soviet Union and the isolated state in which North Korea is placed, the former is thought as what made better choice.
Besides, the pursuit of freedom caused many paradigms and ideologies, and the society has been developed by many movement or revolutions for freedom.

Seeking for freedom influenced scientific aspect as well as social aspect.
Human beings invented an aircraft to be free from gravity, and they can go to the space nowadays.
They have developed the means of transportation and communication to be free from limitation in time and space.

If men weren’t anxious for freedom, there was no development of today in the society and science.
Mankind has progressed constantly, and it will succeed until he obtains freedom.
It is freedom that motivates human beings to grow and makes them strive for advance.

Generally speaking, peace is the state of not being worried or disturbed in any way.
However, peace doesn’t come from absence of anxiety.
Instead, peace relieves people by making them forget their worries.

There is no way to eliminate all anxieties from a man, because it is impossible to be free from all natural disasters, even though all artificial threats were removed.
Here is the necessity of peace.
If a person endeavored to get rid of everything to worry about, he couldn’t lead a regular life.
Thus, men have chosen to forget the menaces which are outside their capacity rather than live fearfully with them.

South Korea can be taken as an example for this.
The Korean War has not finished but called off hostilities since 1953.
The situation which Koreans are under may be regarded as that under fear from possibility of returning to war.
If they did nothing but were scared of it, they couldn’t lead economic lives normally.
Instead, they have forgotten it because of lasting truce, and they could achieve post-truce rehabilitation of Korea.

Learning is the process that gets him to know about his limit.
It is more important for a child to recognize what he knows than what he doesn’t know, and he takes many tests to check it.
However, paradoxically, they make him realize his limit in the end.

This can be compared to the roof which is like a pyramid.
Each place has the ceiling of different height each other.
At first, the extent of the knowledge young children learn is wide, but there is no profundity in it yet.
As approaching the ceiling by studying, they can see the contour of the roof.
They judge their capacity with the contour, and they do ponder and decide the way for their future.
As a result, the field they can study more is confined, but the depth of their understanding gets deeper and deeper.
They cannot know their active place and perceive when they should be modest until they reach the highest ceiling, and then they can rely on themselves finally.