Physical imperfection

Physical beauty has long been idolised in human culture. However, some philosophers have pointed out that it has become a modern ethical ideal. The ability to reshape ourselves has led to demanding social norms to modify and conform.

Buetow and Wallis have recently drawn directly on wabi-sabi as a way of responding to these damaging ideals of perfection and symmetry.5 Reframing our social understanding of what counts as beautiful, might help move away from the pervasive pathologising of normal variation and age-related change. Wabi-sabi might influence education and debate about cosmetic surgery and related treatments in a way that would plausibly encourage human flourishing.

Specific wabi-sabi traditions, (eg, kintsugi) might have direct applications—for example, supporting patients who choose to embrace rather than erase their scars.6

Disability and disease

Societal attitudes to physical imperfection overlap with attitudes to disability and disease. So in a similar way, wabi-sabi might support a non-perfectionist attitude to illness and impairment, embracing the notion that these are natural and inevitable, and can at least sometimes bring special value and beauty. This would depart from the Aristotelian notion of health as perfection, and equation of disease with vice.7 It might have more in common with the attitude of the stoics.

An attitude informed by wabi-sabi might help health professionals to revise in a positive way the language that they use in talking to parents or patients when the break the news of a diagnosis of a significant disease or disability. However, a wabi-sabi attitude might not simply line-up with the contemporary suggestion that disabilities are ‘mere differences’.8 Imperfections do not always detract from the value of a life, but neither are they necessarily neutral. The broken bowl is not left in pieces—it is repaired with loving attention and care.

Death

Finally, wabi-sabi might infuse and improve our attitude towards mortality. It would imply that the transience of human existence is not necessarily something to regret. Such an attitude might help health professionals to cope with the nature of their work.

Might it also be of benefit for patients? Some have suggested that Buddhist teachings and mindfulness would alleviate death anxiety and promote death acceptance in terminally ill patients. Wabi-sabi might have a place in palliative care for patients (from Buddhist or other backgrounds) who would wish for such spiritual support. It is less clear, perhaps, how helpful the ideas of wabi-sabi would be to patients who are already anxious and distressed by the prospect of their death.

An attitude of acceptance (rather than seeing death as a failure of medicine) would be entirely compatible with modern approaches to palliative care. However, it is possible that wabi-sabi might have some more radical implications. One possibility is that we might think about the concept of a ‘good death’ in partly aesthetic terms.9 Another is the idea that solitude or even loneliness are not necessarily negatives at the end of life. That might seem an odd suggestion. But as often evoked by the haiku masters, an attitude of wabi-sabi means that loneliness can sometimes be valued and even treasured.

Autumn twilight falls,

The road ahead stretches out

Empty and forlorn.1 ,i