innovations and acceptances

until i get comfortable in some sort of schedule with blogging, i'm going to continue to post past pieces or excerpts of pieces that i've written. it should allow the reader to get to know me a bit until i have the time to share more recent developments.

today's reflects my return from my school-hosted study abroad experience in Osaka, Japan, where i studied japanese, buddhism, zen, and some cross-cultural psychology at Kansai Gaidai University.　（関西外大、大阪、日本。）

here's to breathing...

Innovations and Acceptances of my Study Abroad Experience

I think the best way for me to talk about my study abroad experience is through two mediums: philosophy (both of the Western tradition and the contemporary modern sense), and a girl. Both are integral parts of me, and so they are the things that, for me, changed through my experience.

About the time of midsummer before my leave to Japan, I was growing restless in my studies. I wasn’t very well read, but I knew (and felt I understood) Kant and his predecessors back to the time of the preSocratics well enough to give me a general layout of the business (despite its many reformations since Hegel, Husserl, Wittgenstein, and many others). I became upset over the absurdity of laws of contradiction and identity, convinced that every venue came to a dead-end and left no room for much needed critique. I can’t remember what I’d chosen first – to embark on the study abroad experience, or to simply go to Japan by whatever means the school could provide – but I know I ached for a different world where these rules didn’t so formidably limit my speculation. My thoughts begged for freedom.

Before that summer even, though, there stood something – someone – whose presence seemed my sanctuary, and with whom all my philosophy and theology was in constant struggling. It wouldn’t have been so much so, I suppose, if I hadn’t loved her. Myself a devoted humanist and her (M---) a fundamentalist Protestant, I’m not sure how attraction had brought us together since about January of our sophomore year; but it did, and I gave myself over to a new devotion to understand her. On the human level we related so intimately well; but in the more abstract realm, our views seemed cultures, even worlds, apart at times.

Within the second semester of the year I was gone, M--- also studied abroad. With long periods between contacts, we shared stories and emotions but on average kept to ourselves to allow the new environments to have their effects. I know I for one was experiencing a kaleidoscope of feelings, engaging in a new language to me, as well as in a new set of values that sooner than later brought me to the mysterious and enlightening world of Zen.

More than that, I was learning in both these categories very quickly, doing whatever it took to immerse myself into my surroundings, to participate in a wholly different sort of philosophy and lifestyle. In my host family situation, I fought to surpass a self-implemented sense of isolation from understanding, finding the things we had in common, talking extensively with my host mother (my okasan) over things I couldn’t quite grasp. I felt I was in such great care, even in the middle of this earthquake of a cognitive shift; it all taught me of the non-essentiality to everything, forcing me to let go of my predispositions, of both ‘myself’ and ‘people’, and discover the quiet reality that understanding was in no way a destination for me to reach – a realm of universals bridging the connection among nations – but an ever impending process, a passive activity that supports amidst the heterogeneity both nations and the affirmation of nations as “imagined communities.” Without really knowing its definition, I slowly became an advocate for pluralism and a student of meditation.

In the meantime, my love for M--- went through periods of intensifying and longing, and heartbreak. At sometime around the turn of the new year, once the cycle had become a little less agonizing, she wrote to affirm her own intense attachment to me. My world has been in many ways encapsulated in reaction and response with her since.

Today, I’ve recognized my growing intrigue with philosophy and the sciences again. Proposing for my senior seminar an encouragement for a basically new evolutionary science called meme theory, I’m including a fresh perspective in the form of a sort of meta-ethic for addressing our heterogeneity and epistemological transition. The coming years, backed by the immanent globalization movement, will undoubtedly be dedicated (at the very least by me) to a revitalizing pluralism, undermining things from the negatively assumptive characteristics of our current‘’human rights’ generalizations, to our everyday ‘blinder’ tendencies against regarding influences as moral proponents in themselves as processes (versus the more common implementation of intention directing intention via coercive principles of conduct). Things like meme theory and cybernetics (already having many Buddhist-like implications) will continue to guide my interest for a while, I imagine, and I also hope to continue my Japanese studies (language and all), if for nothing else its nostalgic yet enlivening qualities. I couldn’t have found my way to so much love of the spirit without my experience in Japan.

Finally, how my stay in Japan influenced the other (and no less significant) aspect of my life: M--- and I have enriched our relationship through our time apart and together again. Our views, different as they may be from where we started, haven't exactly come any closer, but I like to think that our respect for each other has expanded enough to give us hope for our special friendship. In an essentialist sense, I can still feel myself pulled towards her, enraptured by the idea of being with her in some timeless, context-less fashion – just the two of us in a world of change and confusion. But now I recognize the limits and stagnation of any part of a groundless, inconstant system closed to the rest, and know that in the journey of my understanding and forgetting I will always have what can’t be haved: the meaning of M--- is as much a part of me as I am of the world. Where cultures collide, there will always be with all of us the meanings that are a part of each of us, and in that sense, we can never lose.

Bennett’s stages from ethnocentrism to ethnorelativism (from Towards Ethnorelativism):

Denial
-- Isolation
-- Separation

Defense
-- Denigration
-- Superiority
-- Reversal

Minimization
-- Physical Universalism
-- Transcendent Universalism

Acceptance
-- Respect for Behavioral Difference
-- Respect for Value Difference

Adaptation
-- Empathy
-- Pluralism

Integration
-- Contextual Evaluation
-- Constructive Marginality