A Project for Northeast Asian Sensitivity: Politics and Religion of Sympoiesis in Northeast Asia

Northeast Asia, in which we Koreans live, is a specter-like concept unlike our empirical commonsense. Unlike when the tribunal trade system under the name of Sinocentrism functioned well, Northeast Asia in the present is not a sympoietic community but a community of interest due to historical traumas following their respective pain and suffering from their histories. and their trauma. Thus, it is hard to say that the nations and people in the Northeast Asia region have a sense of identity as Northeast Asians. In this situation, climate change, ecological crises, the pandemic, and so on firmly warn us that our common destiny will be a co-destruction, if we Northeast Asians share a sense of living and making life together. This artile examines if Northeast Asian religiosity can plait senses of symbiosis and sympoiesis into our ways of living. The four-seven debate in Joseon Neo-Confucianism says that we can cultivate a sense of becoming human through four emotional thresholds like sympathy(惻隱之心). Although there is already and always a risk when religious sensitivity can be corrupted in its justification for a totalitarian ideology, religious concepts like sympathy in Confucianism and compassion in Christianity can help us a lot to recognize the fact that we are entangled with all other beings in the Northeast Asia region on the globe, living with them and forming actor-networks.