19 박노자 Modern View of Joseon 朝鮮 Confucianism: Overcoming the Modernist Biases

Vladimir Tikhonov
2 hrs · 



Going to be published soon - my opus on how 1930s' Marxists (mis)interpreted Tasan and other presumed "Sirhak" thinkers into something close to the antagonists of the "feudal system" (although they at that point were careful enough to add a host of caveats to it). My argument - they were not necessarily that wrong in perceiving the world-systemic transition to capitalism as the essence of the global "big picture" for 18-19th centuries. BUT they had a very serious issue with ignoring ChosOn Korea's specificity. There was a marketizing tendency there too, and marked growth in monetary transactions. But it happened on a different scale compared to Canton etc. Development is uneven and combined, nothing wrong with it and it does not "depreciate" Korea's extremely eventful and deeply meaningful 18-19th C. story. The idea of viewing Korea's early modernity in a Marxist way is sound per se. But we have to be very careful about both universal and locally specific threads of the historical narrative....



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Modern View of Joseon 朝鮮 Confucianism: Overcoming the Modernist Biases Focused on the 1930s Marxist Interpretations of Sirhak 實學 Movement






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Emanuel Pastreich what do you think of 함석헌's 뜻으로 본 한국역사?
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Emanuel Pastreich As someone who has translated both Dasan and Yeonam, I have some interest in this topic.
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Vladimir Tikhonov Well, it was a nationalist Christian vision of Korea's teleologically ordained "national destiny". I would classify it together with 단재, 담원 and 민세's "history of spirit" approaches. Not exactly the same thing as history as an academic research subject, I guess.
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Journal of Toegye Studies Volume 2 Number 1                                                                                         ISSN 2635-9685

(Vol.2, No.1, 2019)∣pp.85~113

Modern View of Joseon 朝鮮

Confucianism: Overcoming the

Modernist Biases

Focused on the 1930s Marxist Interpretations of Sirhak 實學 Movement

Vladimir Tikhonov (Pak Noja 朴露子)*³⁾

Vladimir Tikhonov (Pak Noja) graduated from Leningrad State University and took his PhD in ancient Korean history from Moscow State University. He has taught at Kyunghee慶熙 University (Seoul, 1997-2000) and State University for Humanities (Moscow, 1996). Since 2000 he has worked at Oslo University. Currently he is a professor of Korean and East Asian Studies at the Department of Cul ture Studies and Oriental Languages, within the Faculty of Humanities. His research focuses on the history of modern ideas in Korea. Recent publications include: Social Darwinism and Nationalism in Korea: The Beginnings (Brill, 2010) and Modern Korea and its Others: Perceptions of the Neighbouring Countries and Korean Modernity (Routledge, 2015); an as co-editor Buddhist Modernities - Re-inventing Tradition in the Globalizing Modern World (Routledge, 2017) and Military Chaplaincy in an Era of Religious Pluralism (Oxford University Press, 2017). He took South Korean nationality in 2001.

Abstract

The 1930s witnessed a number of important developments in the intellectual life of Korea, which was under Japanese colonial rule at the time (1910-1945). Amidst the nascent growth of modern-type academia, Korean Studies attracted huge interest, as Korean intelligentsia attempted to counter the Orientalist assumptions of Japanese colonialist scholarship. This paper focuses on one concrete case of intellectual contention, namely regarding the attempts of 1930s Korean Marxists to interpret the iconoclastic, non-orthodox Sirhak Confucians of Joseon Korea (1392-1910) as precursors of modernity and critics of “feudalism.” Special emphasis is put on the Marxist reinterpretations of Dasan Jeong

* This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2017S1A6A3A02079082)

Yagyong 茶山丁若鏞 (1762-1836), who was regarded as an adept of Western learning, a pioneer of modernity and the foremost antagonist of Joseon Dynasty’s “feudal system.” These interpretations were further deepened in both North and South Korea after the 1950s: nationalistic scholars on both sides of the Korean divide made Dasan, in fact a staunch conservative unwilling even to contemplate any loosening of Joseon’s slavery system, into a proto-democrat and a champion of societal equalitarianism. The present paper argues that the pre-1945 Marxists were “modernising” Dasan in much more careful way than the post-1945 nationalist scholarship in both Koreas. However, their presentist take on Dasan, combined with a disregard of Joseon realities and a focus on the global picture of Western advances and Korea’s assumed indigenous responses to them, did in fact constitute an act of epistemic violence which contributed to the nationalist nurturing of the historical myths in both Korean states after 1945.

Key Words: Sirhak, Dasan, Orientalism, Japanese colonialism, Baek Namun 白南雲, Choe Ikhan崔益翰.

1.     Introduction

Our view of the past is always a presentist interpretation. While not necessarily disregarding the facts per se, a presentist viewpoint always tends to emphasise facts currently regarded as more timely and important, and interpret it in ways strongly influenced by contemporary discursive struggles.1) In this way, the space of memory is always a battlefield. However, after the heat of battle has cooled, professional historians are usually able to come up with reflections on what was disregarded and neglected in the midst of the struggle. Some of the interpretative biases end up being corrected, and the academic community – sometimes in conjunction with the broader public – comes to understand certain episodes of the past in a more nuanced, inclusive and less teleological way. However, such a reflexive view over past discursive struggles in no way guarantees that biases of different kinds will not subsequently appear. Indeed, as long as present-day interests continue to dominate our general perception of the past and the present-day, and desires and concerns continue to be projected on our picture of the bygone days, “objective” history will remain an

1)  Fendler, Lynn. 2008. “The upside of presentism” Paedagogica Historica 44/6: 677-690

impossible aim. However, critical reflections over bygone historical battles do help to advance our historical consciousness, potentially preventing us, at the very least, from re-applying past interpretative biases again to different historical episodes and issues. In this way, historiographical reflection is the engine moving forward history as an academic discipline.

For both Korea and Japan, it was “modernity” that shaped images of the past for the most part of the twentieth century. Japan’s claim to rule over colonised Korea was to be underpinned by an extremely self-serving, teleological vision of history in which Japan, uniquely among the East Asian states, was following a sort of predestined historical trajectory towards its modern glories. By contrast, subjugated Korea was to be proclaimed as not only “pre-modern” but also as predestined to stagnation and unable to reach the coveted “modernity” by itself, due to what the Japanese colonialist scholars defined as its pre-eminent cultural flaws. Confucianism, as the dominant philosophy of the fallen Joseon Dynasty, was a natural target for colonialist deprecation, aimed at legitimising the colonial conquest in the name of Japan’s purported “modernising mission.”2) However, there was one salient difference between the frame through which the Japanese colonialist scholars viewed Korea’s Confucian heritage, and the general trends of the European Orientalist dismissal of the cultural or religious identity of the colonised elsewhere: Confucianism, including its Korean variety, could not be summarily dismissed as long as Japan’s own imperial ideology demonstrated strong neo-Confucian traits. Indeed, the Imperial Rescript on Education (Kyōiku ni Kansuru Chokugo教育ニ關スル勅語, 1890) and other important ideological landmarks of modern Japan deployed the Confucian phraseology of “loyalty,” “filial piety” and ‘self-sacrifice” in their attempt to construct Japan’s own version of authoritarian statist nationalism.3) So, it was not Confucianism per se but rather the

Korean way of appropriating it that was targeted for the Orientalist denigration.

2)  See a summary on the Japanese colonialist historiography in: Gim Yongseop. 1966. “Ilbon Hanguk e iseoseo Hanguksa seosul (Korean History Writing in Japan and Korea),” Yeoksa hakpo 31: 128-147.

3)  On the “morality” discourse in late Meiji Japan, see: Gluck, Carol. 1985. Japan’s Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 102-127.

A typical example, Takahashi Tōru高橋亨 (1877-1967), Japan’s best-known “Korea hand” and the author of the seminal 1929 article on Joseon Korea’s Zhuxian 朱子學 tradition which pioneered the classification of Joseon Confucian thinkers into lineages primarily emphasising respective principle (ri 理) and material force (gi 氣) ,⁴⁾ developed a framework for dealing with Joseon Confucianism in his brochure Chōsenjin朝鮮人 (Koreans), published in 1921 by the Academic Department of the Japanese Government General in Korea.5) According to Takahashi, the undoing of Korean Confucianism was its “slavish obedience” to the Zhuxian dualism of principle and material force, to the extent of not allowing any other Confucian schools to develop. Takahashi accused the Confucians of Chosōn Korea of dogmatic rejection of the new teachings of Wang Yangming王陽明as well as neglect towards the Qing philological studies of the late eighteenth-early nineteenth centuries. Takahashi’s conclusion was that Koreans were the only people in the world who had worshipped the same philosophical dogma for more than a half millennium. Moreover, this dogma was of foreign – Chinese – provenance, and this fact made it possible for Takahashi to additionally accuse Korean Confucians of blindly worshipping imported ideas while lacking their own. Of course, this pitiful picture of Joseon Confucianism painted by Takahashi was to contrast with his depiction of Japanese Edo-period Confucianism, with its abundance of both Yangming School thinkers and practically-, rather than simply doctrinally-minded scholars.6)

Certainly, colonial experts on Korean history did not fail to acknowledge the stature of such figures as Dasan Jeong Yagyong (1762-1836), an exegete of the Confucian classics with deep interests in many fields including geography, medicine and technology, whose theories arguably represented a challenge to the Zhuxian dogmas. Ayugai

4)  Takahashi Tōru. 1934 [1929] “Richo Jugakushi ni okeru Shuriha Shukiha no Hattatsu” (Development of the “Principle Faction” and “Material Force Faction” In Yi Dynasty Confucianism) In Chōsen Shina Bunka no Kenkyu (Research on the Sinitic Culture in Korea). 141-281. Keijō [Seoul]: Keijō teikoku daigaku.

5)  Takahashi Tōru. 1921. Chōsenjin (Koreans). Keijō [Seoul]: Sōtokufu Gakumukyoku. See also the recent Korean translation: Ku Inmo, transl. 2010. Singminji Joseonin eul Nonhada (Debating the Colonized Koreans). Seoul: Tongguk Daehakkyo Chulpanbu.

6)  Gu Inmo, transl. 2010. Singminji Joseonin eul Nonhada, 20-21, 25-43.

Fusanoshin鮎貝房之進 (1864-1946), another of the “old Korea hands” known for his expertise on Korea’s pre-modern past, published a journal article on Dasan as early as in 1912, emphasising Dasan’s role as an opponent of the canonical Zhuxianism of the dominant Patriarchs” Faction (Noron 老論) and his interest in Western scientific ideas. However, from Ayugai’s viewpoint, the iconoclasm of the kind Dasan represented was an exception rather than the rule in pre-modern Korea. weakened as it was by factional struggles inside its ruling class and its general ‘subservience” to the letter of Zhuxian dogma.7)

This colonialist misrepresentation expectedly provoked the resistance of the colonised. A broad spectrum of Korean intellectuals, from nationalistic academics and educators (many of whom, in fact, studied themselves in Japan) to Marxists, were involved in de-constructing the colonialist image of a helplessly dependent and stagnant Joseon Korea. Marxists, whose take on Dasan and other iconoclastic, non-orthodox Confucian thinkers of the Late Joseon period who since the early 1930s were being often collectively referred to as the Sirhak School (although in reality they hardly ever constituted any single coherent academic lineage)8) is the focus of the present paper, were doing their best to prove that Korea, like Japan or any other country, was simply following the universal laws of historical development. This affirmation of Korean history’s universality was only commendable per se, especially given the fact that it was to serve as an argument against the colonialist stance denying any potentiality of independent development for Koreans. The Marxist belief in the centrality of the development of European capitalism with its derivatives, liberalism and modern science, for the modern part of the universal history was also understandable, although the ways in which it often was articulated exposes 1930s Korean Marxists to retrospective accusations of somewhat naïve Eurocentrism. Affirming Europe’s centrality to world history simply for its own stake hardly was,

7)  Jeong JongHyeon. 2018. Dasan eui Chosang (The Portrait of Dasan). Seoul: Sinseoweon, 71-75.

8)  Baker, Donald. 1981. “The Use and Abuse of the Sirhak Label: A New Look at Sin Hu-dam and his Sohak Pyon.” Gyohoesa Yeongu 3: 183-254.

however, the intention of colonial-age Marxist historians. The universality of global historical development, exemplified by the growth of capitalism in eighteenth- nineteenth century Europe or the 1917 socialist revolution in Russia, was to give realistic hope for Korea’s own liberation from the colonial yoke as a part of the worldwide revolutionary movement.9) However, as I will attempt to demonstrate in this paper, the deductive, top-bottom manner of reasoning of the 1930s Marxists who strove to find at any cost the analogues of the global (by which we mean “European”) historical developments in contemporary Joseon Korea, constituted an act of epistemic violence vis-à-vis the inevitable specifics of Joseon history. Whereas the colonial-age Marxists were doing their best to make clear that, all the “general similarity of the historical trends” notwithstanding, Dasan still was a far cry from being a “propagandist of freedom ideas,” the post-1945 discourses on Dasan in both North and South Korea went exactly in this direction, unconditionally “modernising” Dasan into a direct forerunner of modernity. This mythologisation of Dasan and Sirhak, related as it was to the ideological demands of post-colonial Korean societies, represented, in a way, the further deepening of the logic of 1930s Marxist interpretation of Dasan.

2.     Dasan of the Nationalists, Dasan of the Marxists

As we might expect, Korea’s own cultural nationalists could not fail to respond to colonial Orientalism. What is noteworthy, however, is that in many cases, and not necessarily only these of the Marxists, this response followed the rules of the modernist game introduced by the colonisers who themselves had appropriated it from the Western historiography.10) Foremost amongst these rules was the decree that the sacred shibboleth of “modernity” was not to be questioned. It also remained

9)   See, for example, the analysis of the notion of universality in Baek Namun’s (1894-1979) historiography here: Bang Gijung. 1992. Hanguk GeunHyeondae Sasangsa Yeongu (Studies on Korea’s Modern and Contemporary History of Ideas). Seoul: Yeoksa Bipyeongsa, 129-137. On Baek Namun’s appreciation of Dasan, see below.

10) On Meiji period’s history research in general, see: Mehl, Margaret. 1998. History and the State in Nineteenth-Century Japan. London: Macmillan Press.

a textbook truth, for Korean nationalist scholars as well as their Japanese colonialist counterparts, that the “desirable” history was to teleologically lead to the fruits of modern development.11) The difference between the colonisers and their nationalist antagonists was in their views on the existence, or lack thereof, of such a “desirable” history in the Korean case. The latter, in contrast to the former, were eager to argue that Koreans were moving towards the predestined goal of “modernity” themselves, and could in theory have reached it on their own, even without Japanese interference. On Confucianism, the nationalist scholars were prepared to agree with Takahashi’s categorisation of Korean Neo-Confucian thinkers into introspective ones who were primarily interested in principle理, and the more extrovert, pragmatically oriented scholars who prioritised material force 氣.¹²⁾ There was, however, one salient difference between them and the likes of Takahashi: they were much more interested in that group of less dogmatic and more practically oriented seventeenth-nineteenth century scholars, who by the late 1920s-early 1930s were being lumped together as the Sirhak (Practical Learning) School. These scholars, who often demonstrated serious interest in Western science and even Western religion (Catholicism) were the best argument in favour of the thesis that Korea, if left alone, could have attained the dream of modernity on its own.

One of the first modern, Japanese-educated nationalist intellectuals of the colonial age to seriously engage with the Joseon Confucian philosophical legacy was Hyeon Sangyun玄相允 (1893-?), later known for his pioneering outline history of Korean Confucianism (1949).13) Already in the colonial period, he devoted a number of popular scholarly pieces to the practically oriented late Joseon thinkers. In fact, he was among the first researchers to use the term Sirhak for characterising these thinkers as a group. Naturally enough, his interest was largely centred on Dasan who had

11)  On the privileging of modernity in modern Korean historiography, see Em, Henry. 2013. The Great Enterprise: Sovereignty and Historiography in Modern Korea. Durham: Duke University Press.

12)  Gim Gyeongho. 2015. “Talsingmin gwa Hanguk Yugyo” (Post-colonialism and Korean Confucianism) Yugyo Sasang Munhwa Yeongu 62: 91-124.

13)  Hyeon Sangyun. 1949. Joseon Yugyosa (History of the Korean Confucianism). Seoul: Minjung Seogwan.

already been promoted as a giant of “political and economic learning” by such earlier nationalist intellectuals as Chang Jiyeon張志淵 (1864-1921). The centennial anniversary of Dasan’s passing was celebrated in 1935-1936 by much of colonial Korea’s nationalist intellectual milieu. Two years prior to that, Hyeon dedicated a journal article to Dasan, in which he compared the Confucian pragmatist to the earlier Scottish thinker and seminal economist, Adam Smith (1723-1790). While Korea had its own “economic school”, the difference between it and Britain was, according to Hyeon, the Joseon Dynasty’s inability to implement its teachings. While in his later works Hyeon demonstrated a more favourable attitude towards Joseon’s orthodox Neo-Confucian thought, this article simply contrasted the scholastic debates of the Neo-Confucians after Toegye Yi Hwang 退溪李滉 (1502-1571) and Yulgok Yi I栗谷李珥 (1536-1584) with the pragmatic, down-to-earth attitude of Seongho Yi Ik星湖李瀷 (1681-1763) and his school, which included Dasan.14) One more article on Dasan followed a year later (“Yijo Yuhak sasang eui Jeong Dasan gwa geu wichi” 李朝 儒學史上의 丁茶山과 그 位置, 1935).¹⁵⁾ There, Hyeon more or less followed Takahashi in representing the Joseon Neo-Confucian world as having been monopolised by the Zhuxian dogmas. However, against this stagnant backdrop Hyeon highlighted the role of what he was now terming the Sirhak movement – centred on Seongho and Dasan – in shifting focus towards the pragmatics of the administration and economy and pioneering the reception of the Western scientific ideas. In such a way, the Japanese colonialist scorn towards the “unmodern” legacy of the Korean Confucianism was at least partially refuted. Korea’s Neo-Confucianism as a whole could be stagnant and dogmatic but the Sirhak movement, with its supposedly imminent proto-modern traits, was to appear as the saving grace of Joseon’s Confucian history.

Yet another proponent of the Sirhak-centred vision of Joseon Confucian history,

14)  Hyeon Sangyun.. 2000 [1934]. “Yijo Yuhak gwa Dasan Seonsaeng” (Yi Dynasty’s Confucianism and Teacher Dasan) In Gidang Hyeon Sangyun Munjip (Literary Collection of Gidang Hyeon Sangyun). 368-372. Seoul: Gyeongheui Daehakkyo Chulpanbu.

15)  Hyeon Sangyun.. 2000 [1935]. “Yijo Yuhak Sasang eui Jeong Dasan gwa geu Wichi” (Jeong Dasan and his Place in the History of Yi Dynasty’s Confucianism) In Gidang Hyeon Sangyun Munjip. 397-401.

Jeong Inbo鄭寅普 (1893-1950), was a colourful figure, who, in a way, symbolised a certain degree of continuity between the pre-modern, authentic Confucian tradition and a modernist retelling of Korea’s traditional past. Born to a distinguished scholarly family and raised as a heir to the Late Joseon tradition of Wang Yangming School studies, Jeong, by the 1930s a professor at Yeonheui延禧College and a prominent public intellectual, was fond of contrasting the Wang Yangming School’s emphasis on authenticity and innate, embedded nature of knowledge against the penchant for uncritically accepting the authority of Zhu Xi which was supposedly so characteristic of Joseon Dynasty’s average Confucians.16) As he lamented in his own contribution (timed to the celebration of Dasan passing’s centennial) “Yuilhan Jeongbeopka Jeong Dasan Seonsaeng Seoron” (唯一한 政法家 丁茶山 先生 敍論, “The Prologue to the Writing on the Unique Legal and Political Thinker, Jeong Dasan”), serialised in Donga Ilbo 東亞日報, September 10-15, 1934: “self-respect forever morphed into the veneration of China as soon as our capital was moved to the banks of the Han River following the downfall of the Goryeo 高麗Dynasty”; all the diverse “theories on mind and human nature, righteousness and the cosmic principle (…) could astonish an eye, but they were nothing more than other people’s words, not my own.”

The liberation from the heteronomy of Zhuxian learning first came, according to Jeong, with the arrival of more pragmatic statesmanship by such seventeenth-century figures as Gim Yuk金堉 (1570-1658, Joseon’s Prime Minister in 1651-2 and 1655) or Chang Yu張維 (1588-1638, Minister of the Right in 1637-8). However, the systematisation of “authentic” scholarship rooted in Joseon’s own needs, took place only due to the efforts by Seongho and Dasan, whom Jeong considered, in broader sense of the word, a part of Seongho’s scholarly lineage. Jeong maintained that Dasan was a genius whom his own epoch rejected, and that he strove to renovate Joseon on the basis of practically oriented, non-dogmatic scholarship which represented

16)  Jeong Deokki, 2015. “Widang Jeong Inbo eui Sirhak Insik gwa Hangmun Jucheron” (Widang Jeong Inbo’s Understanding of Sirhak and his Theory of the Scholarly Subjectivity) In Yeonsei Daehakkyo Yeoksa Munhwa Hakkwa BK Plus Saeop Team, eds, Geundae Hangmun gwa Joseonhak Yeongu (Modern Scholarship and the Research on Korean Studies), 71-111. Seoul: Seonin.

a “synthesis of Eastern and Western ideas” and at the same time was in sync with the iconoclastic currents in the contemporaneous Qing academic milieu. Importantly, Jeong, as well-versed in the art of interpreting Confucian classics as he was, did not deny that Dasan strongly emphasized the exegesis of the Confucian canon in his life work; he explained, however, that Dasan was attempting to interpret the classics in the clearest and least confusing way, with popular enlightenment in mind.17) Jeong’s emphasis on the “illness” of uncritical subservience vis-à-vis China and its official Zhuxianism which supposedly befell Joseon practically from the time of its founding and which Seongho and Dasan as well as their older predecessor, Bangye Yu Hyeongweon磻溪柳馨遠 (1622-1673), were assumedly attempting to “cure,”¹⁸⁾ indeed were not fully dissimilar to Takahashi’s assumptions about Joseon-era Koreans” “innate” propensity to blindly imitate China. However, whereas Takahashi tended to downplay the significance of Yangming School and other iconoclastic currents in Joseon’s intellectual history and sharply contrasted the intellectual ferment of late eighteenth-century Qing China with the purported ‘stagnation” in Joseon Korea, Jeong provided his readers with an elaborate genealogy of Late Joseon’s pragmatic thought (which also included a number of figures from the Yangming School lineage) and emphasised the similarity between Dasan’s quest for authentic scholarship and the philosophical inquiries of his contemporaries in Qing China. Seen this way, Joseon was not a static, stagnant “vestige” of antiquity of the kind which the Japanese colonialist scholars were so fond of describing; on the contrary, it was marching towards the same teleologically ordained goal of modernity, with its emphasis on pragmatism, practicality and subjectivity, as the rest of humanity. While Jeong’s accentuation of “authenticity” was definitely related to the philosophic tradition of his own Yangming School lineage, it also did not deviate from the standard definitions of epistemological and aesthetical modernity – centred around individuals’ inner

17)  Jeong Inbo, 1983 [1934]. Tamweon Jeong Inbo Jeonjip (Complete Works of Tamweon Jeong Inbo). Seoul: Yonsei Daehakkyo Chulpanbu, 68-86.

18)  Jeong Jonghyeon. 2018. Dasan eui Chosang, 100-102.

worlds and recognition of their unique subjectivity – as accepted in Korea’s intellectual milieu in the 1920s and 1930s.19)

While Hyeon or Jeong were rather conservative nationalists, the nascent Marxist scholarship of colonial-age Korea was, interestingly enough, broadly sympathetic to the same picture of retrograde Neo-Confucians versus progressive Sirhak pioneers. Marxists too were keen to find the traces of pre-ordained movement towards modernity in the Joseon past: after all, from the Marxist point of view, such movement constitutes the teleological essence of history developing from feudalism towards capitalism and then hopefully further, to the bright socialist future. Korea was no exception. On the contrary, colonial-age Marxists, hopeful for the perspective of first anti-colonial and then socialist revolution in Korea, were even more eager than their nationalist rivals to draw a well-systemized picture of the Korean traditional society, its Confucian ideologists included, dutifully following the “world-historical rule” of modernity- oriented development. Unlike the nationalists, Marxists were less obsessed with personalities and more interested in the larger socio-economic structures. Personalities were, in the end, simply a part of the superstructure reflecting the developments in society’s socio-economic basis. However, as long as Confucian personalities were concerned it was again Dasan and Sirhak movement that stood in the centre of Marxist response to the Japanese Orientalist (mis)interpretations of Korea’s Confucian history. They attracted a special interest not only as Korea’s endogenous proto-modernists, but also as possible harbingers of modernity’s alternative, non-capitalist version. Indeed, Yun Yonggyun尹瑢均, a graduate of Keijō Imperial University京城帝國大學 who pioneered academic study of Dasan’s socio-economic ideas in early 1930s Korea, claimed in his 1930 and 1931 contributions to a Marxist student journal, Sinheung 新興, that Dasan was not only simply a “pioneer of modernity”: more than that, his ideas on the equalitarian distribution of land were even “Communist.” At the

19)  Gim Yeongchan. 2004. “Singminji Geundae eui Naemyeon gwa Pyosang” (Inner Side and Representations of the

Colonial Modernity) In Gim Hyeonsuk et. at, eds. Singminji Geundae eui Naemyeon gwa Maeche Pyosang (Inner Side and Media Representations of the Colonial Modernity), 9-36. Seoul: Gipeun Saem.

same time, however, Yun was academically-minded enough to acknowledge that Dasan’s immediate goal was to deal with the increasing number of landless vagrants and the tendency towards concentration of landholdings in the hands of richer landlords. “Communist” Dasan, it had to be acknowledged, indeed strove to preserve peasant holdings as the tax basis of the ruling dynasty and uphold the existing status distinctions.20) Rather self-contradictory statements of this kind, with Dasan being simultaneously interpreted as an indigenous forerunner of “historical progress” to come and realistically assessed as a thinker of his own time, are quite typical, as we will see later, of 1930s Marxist writings on Dasan.

Baek Namun (1894-1979), a pioneering Korean Marxist historian educated in Japan and, coincidentally, Jeong Inbo’s colleague and friend at the Yeonheui College where both were teaching, also considered Dasan the central figure in Late Joseon history of ideas as a whole. In his contribution to the centennial of Dasan’s passing (“Jeong Dasan eui Sasang” 丁茶山의 思想 Donga Ilbo, July 6, 1935), Baek construed the history of Korea’s eighteenth and early nineteenth century as the story of the struggle between the progressive tendency towards the development of monetary exchange, market economy and eventually capitalism on the one side, and the feudal exploitation ideologically sustained by the Neo-Confucian dogmatism on the other side. Feudalism was facing its terminal crisis, visible from the inability of the ruling bureaucracy to control the rent-seeking behaviour of its own local agents, notorious for levying extortionist taxes on the new-born toddlers and dead parents of the commoner taxpayers. The opposition to feudalism, buoyed by the rising tide of the “naturally growing” monetary exchange, was, as Baek saw it, taking a form of religious protest. The acceptance of Catholicism, this “vanguard of capitalist expansion”, was a sign of the progressive development, while the Neo-Confucian anti-Catholic repression epitomised the anti-modern feudal reaction. Baek likened the anti-Catholic persecutions, like the large-scale Sinyu辛酉purge of 1801 – which eventually sent Dasan into his

20)  Yun Yonggyun. 2018 [1930, 1931]. “Dasan eui Jeongjeongo” (On Dasan’s Well-Field System) Reprinted in: Jeong JongHyeon. 2018. Dasan eui Chosang, 201-228.

eighteen years-long exile – to the papal persecution of the natural scientists in the context of European Counter-Reformation. That Catholicism, obviously no friend of the liberal reforms in late eighteenth-century Europe (as Baek himself acknowledged by mentioning the papal repression of modern science), was to be assigned a role of an “anti-feudal opposition” in contemporary Korea, was indeed a serious self- contradiction in Baek’s logic, which Baek offered no further explanation for. In his picture, Dasan, a “feudal” yangban philosopher persecuted for his supposed conversion to Catholicism, was a harbinger of the modern changes, which the contemporaneous Joseon government was stubbornly rejecting, inflicting harm on its own country by refusing to trade with the Western powers. While Dasan’s association with Catholicism and Western thought was in the focus of Baek’s argument, Korea’s pioneering Marxist historian made also an important caveat: all his relative progressivity notwithstanding, Dasan “cursed the feudal society” only “passively,” never fully liberated himself from “feudal ideas” and did not attempt to actively propagate the “ideas of freedom.”21) This caveat demonstrates the soberness and meticulousness of the Marxist historical analysis, and the efforts not to exaggerate Dasan’s “proto- modern” stature which Baek was assiduously making. Nevertheless, the main conclusion is abundantly clear: Dasan was an adept of supposedly progressive European thought par excellence and was also, albeit half-heartedly, a critic of Joseon “feudalism.” When Baek revised and enlarged his paper for a journal publication (August 1935), the point was made even more clearly. Baek additionally mentioned American independence, the French Revolution, the first railways in Britain and the invention of the electric telegraph as the background against which Dasan supposedly came to critically reflect on Joseon Korea’s conditions, ending up as an adept of Western learning out of his admiration for “freedom ideas” and his protest against the “feudal closing of the country” and “class rule by the yangban scholar-officials.”22)

21)  Baek Namun. 1991 [1935] “Jeong Dasan eui Sasang” (Jeong Dasan’s Ideas) In Baek Namun Jeonjip (Collected Works of Baek Namun). Vol. 4. 113-116. Seoul: Iron gwa Silcheon.

22)  Baek Namun. 1991 [1935] “Jeong Dasan 100nyeonche eui Yeoksajeok Euimi” (The Historical Meaning of Jeong Dasan’s Centennial Anniversary Celebration) In Baek Namun Jeonjip. Vol. 4. 117-121.

The relationship between Sirhak – represented by the towering figures like Dasan – and the religious imports from the West were indeed intriguing for the pioneering Marxist thinkers of 1930s Korea. On the one hand, as good Marxists, they were not supposed to harbour any illusions about Christianity. Indeed, Korea’s pioneering Communists had already started their anti-religious movement by the early 1920s, aiming at Christianity in particular. While acknowledging its role in introducing Western culture to Korea, they accused Christianity of being essentially non-scientific and superstitious, of de facto supporting capitalism by “anaesthetising” the believers instead of sensitising them to the realities of class oppression, and of general social conservatism. Some Christian activists attempted to counter these accusations by introducing the notion of Christian socialism to Korea but, by and large, church reaction to socialist ideas was indeed mostly of rather inimical kind.23) On the other hand, especially as the grip of Japanese colonial rule was being further tightened from the late 1930s, there was some room to take a second look at Christianity and its role in Korea. After all, it was among few institutions not directly controlled by the colonial state, and it represented something qualitatively different from the “Imperial Way” ideology of the totalitarian statehood.²⁴⁾ Thus Im Hwa林和 (1908-1953) – the poet and critic who led the Marxist literature movement of the 1930s – went as far as to suggest in a 1941 journal publication that Christianity in Korea (as well as in Japan or China) played a role essentially different from that it had in the Western societies where its doctrine “did not possess any elements accelerating the collapse of the feudal system and nurturing the new bourgeois culture.” In East Asia, by contrast, the advent of Christianity was a direct consequence of the European maritime trade, an element in capitalist development; moreover, what primarily interested the Sirhak scholars, Dasan included, in the Western books, was early modern science

23)  Kang Weondon. 1992. “Ilche ha Sahoejueui Undong gwa Hanguk Gidokkyo” (Korean Christianity and Socialist Movement during the Period of the Japanese Imperial Rule). In Gim Heungsu, ed.Ilche ha Hanguk Gidokkyo wa Sahoejueui (Korean Christianity and Socialism during the Period of the Japanese Imperial Rule). 25-57. Seoul: Hanguk Gidokkyo Yeoksa Yeonguso.

24)  On the ideological formations of “imperialization” in late colonial Korea, see: Poole, Janet. 2013. When the Future Disappears: The Modernist Imagination in Late Colonial Korea. NY: Columbia University Press, 1-17.

rather than religion as such. Christianity provided a tool of self-reflection regarding the long-term Neo-Confucian domination over the realm of Korean thought; as to the nineteenth-century Korean peasant converts to Catholicism, they were mainly attracted by the egalitarianism of the universal brotherhood offered by popular Catholic literature. In a word, according to Im, Christianity was an important catalyst of the “collapse of Korean feudalism” as well as the soil on which Korea’s new culture was nurtured.25) However, as we will see below, not every contemporary Marxist was prepared to integrate Catholicism into the genealogy of Korea’s early modern transformation. For some, giving too much credit to any religion was in itself problematic: Dasan was to be left as primarily an adept of broadly Western rather than specifically Catholic learning.

A vision of Dasan’s importance for Korea’s modern development broadly similar to that of Baek Namun was further concretised in the works of Choe Ikhan (1897-?), a Japanese-educated Marxist scholar and Communist activist who extensively engaged with Dasan’s texts and later spearheaded research into the Sirhak school in North Korea, where he moved after liberation from Japanese rule in 1945. Not unlike Jeong Inbo – whose work he often referenced in his own writings – Choe was a rather special personality: he managed to experience the full spectrum of modern Korea’s ideological developments, from orthodox Neo-Confucianism to socialism. In his youth, he studied under Myeonu Gwak Chongseok 俛宇郭鍾錫 (1846-1919), a revered heir to the Yeongnam 嶺南School of Neo-Confucianism whose academic lineage went back all the way to Toegye Yi Hwang. The apprenticeship to Gwak was followed by an infatuation with modernity and nationalist ideas and a stint at Waseda University早稲田大学. There, Choe was, in turn, introduced to Marxism, becoming a member of an early Communist group of Korean students in Japan, the Sun and Moon Society (Irweolhoe 日月會). Several Communist groups, the Sun and Moon Society included, formed the underground Korean Communist Party in April 1925.

25)  Im Hwa. 2009 [1941]. “Gidokkyo wa Sinmunhwa” (Christianity and New Culture) In Im Hwa Munhak Yesul Jeonjip (Collected Works of Im Hwa: Literature and Art), Vol. 2. 296-308. Seoul: Somyeong.

Choe Ikhan participated in the Party’s activities in the most active way (he was elected the Party’s Organisational Secretary on September 20, 1927), but his socio-political engagements were interrupted when he was arrested by the Japanese police on February 2, 1928. After a seven- year-long stint in the colonial prisons, the Confucian-turned-nationalist-turned-Communist returned to Seoul where the underground Communist Party was no longer in existence. Consequently, as a number of other ex-militants, Choe switched to academic and journalistic pursuits. And, due to his first-hand experience of Confucian education, it was only natural that Korea’s Confucian past stood in the centre of his interests.26) It has to be remembered that Choe’s scholarly interests were indeed broader than Confucianism per se. As a result of his research on Dasan’s opus magnum, Mongmin Simseo 牧民心書 (“Admonitions on Governing the People,” 1818),27) and other sources on Joseon Korea’s institutional history Choe came up, for example, with first-ever outline history of pre-modern

Korea’s societal relief policies, Joseon Sahoe Jeongchaek Sa 朝鮮社會政策史 (“The

History of Social Policies in Korea”, 1947).28) Choe moved to North Korea in 1948, and his meticulous research contributed greatly to the early development of the academic studies on traditional Korea there.

Choe’s serialised articles, entitled altogether “Yeoyudang Jeonseo reul Tokham” 與猶堂全書를 讀함 (“Reading [Dasan’s] Yeoyudang Jeonseo”, Donga Ilbo, December 9, 1938 to June 4, 1939) are perhaps the most detailed and comprehensive research on Dasan ever appearing in colonial-era Korea’s periodicals. A staunch Marxist, Choe paid indeed little attention to Takahashi’s selective depreciations of particularly Korean Confucianism: from Choe’s viewpoint, any Confucianism, in whatever from and wherever, was a “cultural product of the Oriental feudal societies” and at the

26)  Song Chanseop. 2011. “Joka ga Jakseonghan Choe Ikhan (1897-?) Yeonbo” (Choe Ikhan’s (1897-?) Life Chronology Compiled by his Nephew) Yeoksa Yeongu 20: 271-298.

27)  This classic was recently translated into English: Choi Byonghyon, transl. 2010. Admonitions on Governing the People: Manual for All Administrators. Berkeley: University of California Press.

28)  Song Chanseop. 2011. “1940 Nyeondae Choe Ikhan eui sahoe Guje Jedo Yeongu - 『Joseon Sahoe Jeongchaek Sa』(1947) reul Jungsim euro” (A Study on the Social Relief System [in Traditional Korea] by Choi Ikhan in 1940s: focusing on the History of Social Policies in Korea) Yeoksa Gyoyuk 120: 227-260.

same time an ideology “rationally supporting the dignified life of their dominant classes.” As Choe saw it, the degradation of Confucianism into “pseudo-learning and evil custom” followed the downward trajectory of the ruling classes which used these teachings in their interests; in the very end, Confucianism became simply a tool of “oppressing and crushing all the progressive elements of human life.”29) Choe, indeed, found few reasons to be more merciful towards the Catholic missionaries, through which the classic Chinese translations of the Western books came into the hands of Gwangam Yi Byeok 曠菴李檗 (Yohan Yi, 1754-1785) and the other Catholic pioneers whom Dasan closely interacted with. As Choe remarked, religion and science had already parted their ways in Europe in the age of Renaissance: Jesuit missionaries coming to East Asia were using the ideas of Copernicus (1473-1543) and Galilei (1564-1642) in order to attract the attention of East Asian scholars, but they were in no hurry to reveal to their local interlocutors the truth about the Catholic church’s persecutions against the pioneers of modern astronomy.30) Contrary to Baek Namun’s and Im Hwa’s benign vision of Catholicism as relatively progressive compared to Joseon’s own Neo-Confucian dogmas, Choe emphasised the rather lukewarm attitude of Seongho vis-à-vis Catholicism as it was (Seongho saw a number of similarities between Catholicism and Buddhism)31) and defined Dasan’s engagement with Western science, and not Western religion, as the essence of his greatness. Attempting to situate Dasan in the context of what he himself saw as the mainstream of global history, Choe, just as Baek Namun had done several years earlier, reminded his readers that Dasan’s youth, the 1770s, 1780s and early 1790s, was the time of the epochal shifts in the Euro-American part of the world. Choe listed American independence, the French Revolution and the Polish struggle for the preservation of country’s dying statehood as the crucially important events temporally coinciding with Dasan’s formative years. The events in Paris in 1789 signalled “the most basic

29)  Choe Ikhan. 2016 [1938-1939]. Yeoyudang Jeonseo reul Tokham (Reading [Dasan’s] Yeoyudang Jeonseo). Seoul: Seohae Munjip, 104.

30)  Choe Ikhan. 2016 [1938-1939]. Yeoyudang Jeonseo reul Tokham, 115.

31)  Choe Ikhan. 2016 [1938-1939]. Yeoyudang Jeonseo                     , 108-110.

change in the organization of human culture”;32) against such a background, it was of paramount importance that Dasan was, first and foremost, a diligent student of the faraway European teachers.

Accordingly it was, indeed, Dasan’s posture of learning from the “advanced West” that earned Choe’s highest praise. Choe did his best to situate Dasan in the context of the global scientific development: Korea’s greatest thinker was born exactly 130 years after Galilei published his epoch-making comparison of the Copernican and

Ptolemaic systems, Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo (Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, 1632) and 96 years after Newton’s (1643-1727) discovery of universal gravitation and the physical quality of light (which Choe placed around 1666). In addition, Dasan had to learn whatever Western science he could access via the writings of the missionaries who, as Choe once again put it, used the scientific theories in order to cast the “bait,” in search of educated converts. Dasan thus had to be praised for “eating the bait” and studying the science of the missionaries in defiance of all the associated political dangers, in order to share these discoveries with the Joseon public; yet another praiseworthy trait of Dasan was, according to Choe, his willingness to propose learning science and handicrafts from China while at the same time countering Sinocentric theories and effectively “de-centring” the Middle Kingdom.33)

Viewed from our current angle and compared against the much less reserved and less nuanced praise of Sirhak and Dasan by nationalistic contemporaries and the future scholars, Choe’s take on Dasan perhaps has to be commended for its noteworthy sobriety in delineating Dasan’s achievements and limitations. Making clear that whatever Dasan could learn were at best smatterings of the pre-existing Western scholarship carried to East Asia by Catholic missionaries – who also had a different, and not necessarily very “scientific” agenda of their own – Choe also emphasised

32) Choe Ikhan. 2016 [1938-1939]. Yeoyudang Jeonseo reul Tokham, 118-119. 33) Choe Ikhan. 2016 [1938-1939]. Yeoyudang Jeonseo                , 171-175.

that Dasan’s crowning achievement was an epistemological shift rather than a full-blown socio-political reform program. While the later scholars redefined Dasan’s short treatise on the origins of country magistrate system, Weonmok原牧, as “proto- democratic” or suggestive of the inchoate development of popular sovereignty notion,34) Choe makes it abundantly clear that Dasan remained a “monarchist” and an adept of the Confucian “moral politics,” with their focus on the rulers” “civilising influences” upon the ruled. At the same time, as Choe saw it, Dasan managed to historicize the emergence of autocracy out of relatively equalitarian original human communities and, in his other famed short treatise, Tangron湯論 (Exposition of King Tang) redefined the supreme power as a product of a historical shift from a down-top to the top-down modes of the political representation. Dasan’s historicizing approach highlighted the role of the ruled as the original source of the societal power and could imply a measure of relativization of the current mode of the governance “from above,” but never developed into a structured theory of political reform challenging the existing system of governance. As Choe formulated it, whereas Benthamite utilitarianism advocated the greatest good for the largest number of the beneficiaries, Dasan, at best, saw the benefits for the majority as a secondary derivate from the success of rulers” moral self-cultivation and “civilizational influence.” This having been said, the degree to which Dasan took the position and interests of the majority into consideration and contextualized the power of the ruling minority as a result of historical shifts (rather than an unchanging constant of the human affairs) was, according to Choe, a major achievement per se.³⁵⁾

The arguments deployed by the colonial-age Korean thinkers were fully adequate for their place and time – that is, for the circumstances of the discursive battle over Joseon Dynasty Confucianism in which they had to be engaged. The battles of this kind were raging all over Asia: Chinese modernist thinkers were foregrounding the

34)  See a critical overview of such views in both North and South Korean scholarship since the 1950s in: Gim Jinho.2013. “Dasan JeongchI sasang e Daehan “Min”kweon iron” Bipan” (Criticism of the Application of “Popular Rights Theory” to Dasan’s Political Thought) Gukhak Yeongu 23: 347-377.

35)  Choe Ikhan. 2016 [1938-1939]. Yeoyudang Jeonseo                     , 231-240, 243-254.

allegedly progressive and equalitarian Mohist School墨家, as largely rediscovered by the philologists of late imperial China,36) Buddhist scholars were mastering the art of modernist Buddhist apologetics with an emphasis on the supposedly scientific nature of the Buddhist teachings,37) and Indian scholars were rediscovering the materialism of ancient India.38) In the fight against colonial Orientalist (mis)perceptions of Asia and Asians as inherently unable to progress, the history of philosophy was to be re-assessed from an explicitly presentist viewpoint and utilised as a discursive weapon of sorts. And in Korea and elsewhere, in fact all around the Asian and African periphery of the West-centred capitalist system, the epistemic privileging of “modernity” was to be taken for granted by the combatants in these ideological battles. The history of the past was to mirror the situation of the present where the modern nation states were triumphing over the traditional polities. The best hope for the colonised was, in fact, an independence universally understood as transition towards modern national statehood modelled after one of the Western patterns (classical capitalist or Soviet). Marxists, with their penchant for placing the protagonists of their historical accounts into the concrete socio-economic context of the periods in question, sometimes contributed to checking and balancing the usual modernist exaggerations through more meticulous historicization of the proud narratives of new-born or reborn nations’ past. They were, however, in complete agreement with modernity – by definition, measured against the modern European developments – being made into the epistemological axis of the newly produced national narratives. The question, however, is whether privileging “modernity” and making the whole pre-modern history appear as a prelude to the teleologically ordained modern development makes any sense today, with modernity widely seen as the principal reason for the ecological crisis of potentially apocalyptic proportions and generally treated as the object of deeply critical reflection rather than the pre-ordained apex

36)  Defoort, Carine. 2015. “The Modern Formation of Early Mohism: Sun Yirang’s Exposing and Correcting the Mozi” T”oung Pao 101/1/3: 208-238.

37)  McMahan, David. 2008. The Making of Buddhist Modernism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 89-117.

38)  Chattopadhyaya, Debiprasad. 1959. Lokayata: A Study of Ancient Indian Materialism. New Delhi: People’s Publishing House.

of the human history.39) In the case of the Joseon Confucian history, modernist interpretation, with its focus on the allegedly progressive Sirhak, clashes with a number of facts perhaps better known to today’s researchers than to their colonial-age predecessors who had shaped our paradigm of the understanding of Joseon Confucian history. Was Dasan, a heir to the academic lineage stretching all the way back to Toegye,40) and a staunch proponent of the maintenance of both slavery and the hereditary status system,41) really a proto-modern thinker of the kind Baek Namun or Choe Ikhan were attempting to paint? Was Sirhak ever a unified, coherent group, and can it be termed “movement”? And was not a relatively tolerant attitude towards Western science a trademark of Confucian pragmatism in general rather than of a particular Confucian school? Indeed, Dasan’s mastery of Western geometry, optics or astronomy was hardly exceptional by the standards of Korea’s late eighteenth-century intellectual elite, and was mostly dependent on the rather outdated Jesuit missionary sources42) which also implied that the great Joseon scholar could hardly ever familiarise himself with contemporary Western developments, be it the French Revolution or American independence. While Dasan could be indeed iconoclastic in his rejection of the time-honoured Five Elements theory, or in his rather personalist understanding of Heaven and general emphasis on human subjectivity in his philosophical writings and poems,43) and such iconoclasm must have reflected important cultural and ideological shifts in late Joseon’s changing social environment, should measure the Korean philosopher be measured against the standards of his European contemporaries with whom he never had any direct contact throughout his life?

39)  Spaargaren, Gert, Mol, Arthur P. J. and Buttel Frederick H. 2000. “Introduction: Globalization, Modernity and the Environment” In Spaargaren, Gert, Mol, Arthur P. J. and Buttel Frederick H., eds. Environment and Global Modernity. 1-17. London: Sage.

40)  Yi Gwangho. 2006. “Toegye Yi Hwang eui Simhakjeok Ihak i Dasan Jeong Yagyong eui Dodeoknon Hyeongseong e michin Yeonghyang” (The Influence of Toegye Yi Hwang’s Studies of Heart-Mind on the Formation of Dasan Jeong Yagyong’s Theories of Ethics) Hanguk Sirhak Yeongu 12: 21-45.

41)  Mongmin Simseo, Fascile 8 (Yejeon 5, Pyeondeung). See also: Gim Yeongsik. 2014. Jeong Yagyong eui Munje teul (Problems of Jeong Yagyong). Seoul: Hyean, 29-40.

42)  Gim Yeongsik. 2014. Jeong Yagyong eui Munje teul, 212-141.

43)  Torrey, Deberniere. 2010.” Separate but Engaged: Human Subjectivity in the Poetry of Dasan Jeong Yagyong Journal of Korean Studies 15/2: 95-122.

3.    In Place of Conclusion: beyond the Modernisation of Dasan and Sirhak

To be sure, the modernist interpretations of Sirhak or even the phenomenon of

Dasan were never monolithic and unitary, even inside the time and space of Korea’s 1930s. While a prominent nationalist writer, An Jaehong安在鴻 (1891-1965), characterised

Dasan’s Weonmok as a “socio-democratic” treatise in 1935, and this characterisation was approvingly cited by one of South Korea’s seminar systemisers of the official nationalist view of Sirhak, Hong Iseop洪以燮 (1914-1974), in 1959,^[1][2]) Choe Ikhan demonstrated a much more nuanced approach in his 1938-39 series on Dasan. He made clear that Dasan’s views, all the novelty of his historicizing approach and his attempts to relativise the hierarchical governmental system of East Asia’s centralised monarchies notwithstanding, essentially constituted a self-reflection by a member of a ruling class caught in a serious crisis rather than a challenge to this ruling class.45)Indeed, Choe’s pre-Liberation approach to Dasan was perhaps more scholarly and objective than his own post-1945 take on Dasan, more openly influenced by the political considerations. His opus magnum on Sirhak and Dasan, published in Pyeongyang in 1955,^[3]) the same year when Gim Ilseong 金日成, North Korea’s supreme leader, made his famous speech emphasising “self-reliance” (juche 主體) in ideological work and chiding Soviet Koreans in positions of power for their inattentiveness to the splendour of Sirhak tradition, made Dasan into a champion of “democracy,” although it noted at the same time his failure to develop scientific materialist views. Choe went as far as to liken Dasan’s project of restoring China’s ancient Well-Field system 井田制 (which was supposed to guarantee the state’s tax income and prevent the loss of the land by the peasantry) to Russian late nineteenth- century populist Narodniks’ interest in building socialism via resuscitation of the traditional peasant obshchina community. ⁴⁷⁾ With Dasan promoted into the ranks of Korea’s home-grown “revolutionary democrats,” the advent of Marxist socialism to 1920s Korea could be portrayed as more of an endogenous development, in good “self-reliance” spirit. Choe Ikhan, as we saw above, never made claims of this kind before 1945. However, even Choe’s pre-1945 portrait of Dasan hardly can be free from the charges of epistemic violence:48) Sirhak as a significant Other of the contemporary architects of the Korean historical identity was being constructed on the basis of the interpretation which, indeed, had little to do with the Sirhak scholars themselves.

Of course, not only the Marxism of Choe Ikhan’s own times but also much of today’s global historiography would define the age of Dasan as the time directly predating and partly overlapping with the “great divergence” of the early nineteenth century when Western Europe, with its nascent industrialism and growing modern science, starting its unprecedented jump, increasingly differentiating itself from older civilisational centres, East Asia included, in its standards of productivity, incomes or literacy.49) Indeed, by the late eighteenth century, East Asia was already in a position of learner rather than teacher, vis-à-vis such imports from the West as Copernican astronomy, Newtonian physics, or improved gunnery.50) With the larger picture like this in mind, there is undeniably a strong temptation to assess Dasan primarily from the vantage point of his encounters with the West – mediated via the Jesuit writings in classical Chinese – and the (dis)similarity of his views with that of his European contemporaries. And, while the suggestions that Dasan managed to develop a “popular rights” theory directly corresponding with the contemporary

47)  Choe Ikhan, 1955. Sirhak pa wa Jeong Dasan, 487-489. On the ideological uses of Dasan in North Korea, see: David-West, Alzo. 2001. “Between Confucianism and Marxism-Leninism: Juche and the Case of Jeong Dasan” Korean Studies 35: 93-121.

48)  On the notion of the epistemic violence in constructing one’s Other on the basis of extraneous interpretations, see: Spivak, Gayatri. 1988. “Can the subaltern speak?” In Nelson, Cary and Grossberg, Laurence, eds., Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. 271–313. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

49)  Pomeranz, Kenneth. 2000. The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

50)  Landes, David S. 2006. “Why Europe and the West? Why Not China?” Journal of Economic Perspectives 20/2: 3–22.

European quests for more contractual and balanced interrelationship between the rulers and the ruled51) are hard to accept at their face value, it is also undeniable that a shift of sorts was taking place. Indeed, Dasan’s focus in Weonmok and Tangnon on the assumed system of nominating higher-ups by their subordinates in ancient times and the well-being of the ruled as the ultimate goal of the government, while albeit patently Mencian in its spirit, does strike a different note if compared to much of Joseon’s theory of statecraft, with its emphasis on the minutiae of the bureaucratic rule. It is undisputable that the epochal changes of the age, from the crisis of the Joseon polity (which Choe Ikhan accentuated in his writings on Dasan) to the intensified international flow of knowledge, made at least some Joseon thinkers, Dasan among them, more reflective and more disposed to broader historical analyses, often more focused at relativising and re-thinking some of the most sacrosanct contemporary institutions than many of their predecessors.

However, at the same time the characterisation of Dasan as a persecuted proto- moderniser and an adept of Western knowledge par excellence, as strongly proposed by both Baek Namun and Choe Ikhan, constitutes an act of epistemic violence against the late Joseon thinker, cast in a role he hardly could ever envision for himself. While definitely interested in imported science, Dasan envisaged himself as, first and foremost, an exegete of the Confucian canonical writings. He made it abundantly clear in his writings that he considers the “laws of the sages” sacred and basically inviolable,52)and was deeply worried about the progressing weakening of the traditional hereditary status distinctions between the yangban lineages and the rest of the population.53)A rather socially conservative thinker, he wanted to strengthen the system of slavery which was economically so important for the status and prestige of yangban clans, and concurrently ensure that the local authorities were able to control the non-yangban petty officials and richer peasants and protect weaker

51)  Jo Gwang. 1976. “Jeong Yagyong eui Minkweon Euisik Yeongu” (Research on Jeong Yagyong’s Consciousness of Popular Rights) Asea Yeongu 19/2: 81-118.

52)  Gyeongse Yupyo (Deathbed Petition for Governing), Fascicle 7 (Jeong jeoneui 1).

53)  Bal Go Jeong nim Saengweon non (The Preface to Gu Yanwu’s Treatise on the Junior Degree-holders)

commoners from the violence on the part of their stronger neighbours. It was abundantly clear to him that Joseon’s system of government was no longer up to the task of controlling private rent-seeking on the part of its own local administrators and could not fully enforce its own laws in the local communities; however, his preferred recipes for mending the system had indeed little to do with what we commonly conceptualise as “modernity”, be it abolition of bound labour or status equality.54) Would not defining such a thinker primarily in the context of West- generated modernity – as Choe Ikhan and Baek Namun did in the 1930s – be tantamount to an act of epistemic violence towards an intellectual who lived and worked inside the framework of a completely different reality, even if his lifespan coincided with and was in diverse ways indirectly influenced by the world-historical changes with Europe as their epicentre? Why should not it be possible to acknowledge that, while being – in a larger sense of the word – a part of the global transformation towards an economy based on commercial production and monetary exchange, a more participatory polity and a society less constrained by the hereditary status system, the Joseon Korea of Dasan’s time manifested at the same time its own special traits, stronger persistence of ascribed statuses or Confucian political orthodoxy (obviously visible from Dasan’s spirited defence of slavery or the “laws of the sages”) being some of them? Should not the global development towards economic, social or political modernity be viewed as highly uneven and combined – a view which would allow integrating relative conservatism of such unorthodox Joseon thinkers as Dasan into the larger picture of late eighteenth-early nineteenth century global changes?

Of course, the modern scholarship on Joseon Confucianism in general and Sirhak in particular has long developed far beyond its colonial-age pioneers. However, the modernist framework dating back to the discursive battles of the 1920s and 1930s still underpins much in the way how Sirhak is being represented in both North and South Korea.55) It may be timely to critically reflect on this framework, with a view

54)  Gim Ho. 2013. “Dasan Jeong Yagyong eui “Minju” Gyehoek” (The “Democracy” Project of Dasan Jeong Yagyong) Dasan gwa Hyeondae 6: 289-325.

to paint a picture of Joseon Confucian developments which would be closer to the historical realities of the past rather than the expectations of the present. It is undoubtable that late Joseon Korea was undergoing important changes, with at least some of its finest intellectuals growing increasingly critical of Zhuxian dogma, pragmatically appreciative of the scientific developments elsewhere and more relativist – or at least broadly-minded – in their approach towards the received truths of statecraft. Dasan has to be given due credit for exemplifying this trend. But it would amount to an act of epistemic violence to measure him against the contemporary developments in faraway Europe – as 1930s Korean Marxists indeed did, albeit with the best of intentions.

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