Republished: East Asian Romantic Core Values

From John Wallace, one of my favorite professors at Cal, his final thoughts on the East Asian Romantic Core Values. Generous offering, inspiring!

1 Some of my core assumptions:

* from Buddhism/Freud: empty self

* from Lacan: Identity loops through another, so what it means to be you includes your place in an intimate relationship, family, social groups and so on, and so cultural differences are real

* from study of literature & Derrida: central role of narrative — narrative is the primary activity for creating the illusional (“imaginary” in Lacanian terms) content of the personal self (and ideas can alter the structure of one’s psyche)

* from Foucault, Kristeva and Nakanishi: history is real, the past is in the present

* from Irigaray, Cixous (critique of phallocentrism of language and culture) and female friends: men have problems seeing beyond their testosterone

* from recent developments in brain science: the experience of the self reaches across multiple structures from the most constructed and discursive (language-based) conceptual notions of who one is to the deepest, reptilian brain and later limbic system (both of which are experiences non-discursively); further, the experience of love, as a compressive self-event, stretches across all of these but, on the other hand, since the physiology of the female and male brain are different, the experience of love may well be substantively different

2 Where you are in terms of romance: not building families so traditional has yet to kick in (what it means to be happy once a family is built: prosperity, stability, love between partners, children, children’s welfare (envisioning future or not)

3a Fundamental difference in dominating philosophies of East Asian and European culture: Confucianism complicit with social order; Taoism complicit with cosmic order – both suggest that one finds one’s place within that order and both do not deny the value of secular success (material, corporal); Christianity posits a higher authority with the highest social mode being communion with God’s will through the exercise of one’s free will and God’s kingdom is not on earth and values spiritual matters over physical. (paradigms of devotion and self-sacrifice are acts of free will – know thyself -- that indicate one’s honoring of another, God or one’s partner … sacrifice in the Confucian context means acceding to the system)

3b Position of women: Greece had a closer affinity to Middle Eastern and Asian attitudes towards women. Christianity changed this through the cult of the Virgin Mary and the Catholic assertion of the sacred state of marriage.

3c Cyclical & Layering vs. Discrete & Linear: love is a frame of mind so psychological this type of layering is understandable, and the cosmos penetrates this world …. Heaven and earth are separate, love is a real act not just a frame of mind (the layering example: movie 2046)

3d Confucianism, Buddhism and Shintoism do not take up the issue or sexuality or romantic love directly (the mark of romance, a certain sort of obsessive frame of mind, is seen as disruptive in the West seen as discovery of something true so “lost” on the one hand “passionate” on the other)

3e Desire: desire may or may not be socially disruptive (argument in Chinese as to whether man is fundamentally good or bad – but ultimately rather humanist); desire in Greece is towards the beautiful which can be redirected as towards the good and this becomes in the Christian context desire toward God as part of the manifestation of faith, so desire orients the person towards the good (which allows the desire within a sexual relationship a different interpretation)

4a Loneliness is a core experience, speaks to that because of notion of intimacy and companionship

4b Sexuality is a core experience, romantic notions participate in lust

4c Desire is a core experience, a romantic partner, to the extent that he or she is viewed as a prize object, is possessed and protected from the possession of others

5a We have bodies; bodies have chemical imperatives and they are real

5b We have psychic structures, these, too, have real imperatives: the psyche is empty at the center and spends a life trying to convince itself that is not so (Freud and Buddhism); the psyche is thus profoundly lonely and fearful … loving someone or something is a solution to this

5c We exist within a social matrix, we cannot transcend this, social imperatives are as penetrating as corporal and psychic imperatives but more complex

6 Beyond the imperatives the experience of love is built along clues of the cultural context but, in that that is a diverse field, individual contribution is very important

7 “Love” is a catch all term; we need precision but in that it vaguely refers to our core imperatives we need both catch all terms and precise terms