Things only 'show up' for us as they do, as Heidegger would put, in and through practical engagements with the world that enable objects to have significance and salience - as hammers, pots, trees or whatever.

The garden is as good a symbol as you can find of a dialectic between spheres of experience - of culture and nature - that presuppose one another.

An abiding and central concern of philosophy and religion alike is the fear that the world is alien to human beings, that nature is, in Hegel's words, 'out and out other' to 'spirit'. It's easy enough to see how 'constructivist' or 'humanist' conceptions are efforts to dispel this fear.

I think that Asian versions of 'ineffabilism' have an advantage over the best-known Western ones, like Schopenhauer's. They are free from the dualistic image of the world of experience as the joint product of mind and reality.

It would be through individual effort, inspired perhaps by reading Nietzsche's books, that the Overman might emerge, not through social or educational engineering.

Between nature and music there seems to be an elective affinity: they fit together, and when they do experiences of an ineffable kind are generated.

I rather shared Nietzsche's conception of the kind of individual that an ideal education should be cultivating. 'Authenticity' is not Nietzsche's term, but as used by some existentialists, it nicely captures what Nietzsche admired - the resolve of an individual person to forge his or her own 'table of values', to be emancipated from strait-jacketing conventions, traditions, and ideologies. As embodied in the 'Overman', authenticity is the antidote to 'bad' nihilism.