Goodness, how these proto-Existentialists lose themselves in vagaries of Essence, Ens and Ontology--

My private joke with myself is that, in making a word/thing of something-behind (substantive-in) the random flickers on the cave wall of phenomena, our earnest Indo-European grammarians have mistaken Oncology for Ontology.  It's not a nice joke.  The point is that what's really wrong with Occidental civilization is the utter failure of its philosophers and thinkers to understand themselves or the species that they so wrongly reflectingly stand apart from.

Which is why lately I've been immersing myself in the floating world of Ihara Saikaku, and other non-judgemental but scrupulously clean neo-Confucianist/Buddhist/Shintoists. I've concluded that the great environmental boost-up for Japanese sensibilities and spiritual refinement (which makes the Japanese approximately as far ahead of the rest of humanity, as we Homo Sapiens Sapiens are of Homo Neanderthalis) is/has ever been their volcanic hot springs.  Seriously.  Getting clean, staying clean makes you smart. And I would say, now that I think about it, that that's why Horace, and Catullus, and Ovid and Virgil are such wonderful poets: bathing four hours a day.