[KS] KSR 1998-11: _Chong Yagyong: Korea's Challenge to Orthodox

[Stephen Epstein]

Chông Yagyong:  Korea's Challenge to Orthodox Neo-Confucianism, by Mark
Setton, State University of New York Press, 1997. (ISBN 0-7914-3174-6)

Reviewed by John I. Goulde
Sweet Briar College

[This review first appeared in Acta Koreana, 1 (1998): 160-63]

The Chosôn Period (1392-1910) in Korea is well known as a period when
Neo-Confucian orthodoxy dominated the political, philosophical, religious,
and social landscape. It is also a period when this same orthodoxy became
so inextricably tied to factionalist politics and regionalist agenda, that
by the late Chosôn period it had became an obstacle to modernization,
national independence, and the creation of a democratic state. Before it
was abandoned, though, there were serious attempts to re-envision the
Confucian tradition, to make it more practical and more responsive to the
ethical and social needs of the Korean people, to reestablish the
relationship between Confucian self-cultivation and political application,
and to free it from its centuries-long preoccupation with metaphysical
questions. It was these two latter issues, the supposed conflict between
self-cultivation and political practicality and the endless debates about
metaphysical problems that had divided Korean scholars regionally during
the 16th century and had led to political factionalism in the court.  By
attacking the metaphysical theory of Neo-Confucian orthodoxy, these late
Chosôn scholars sought to recover something of the practical Confucian
humanism of the pre-Ch'in period and to overcome the apathy of an
entrenched bureaucracy in regard to the lives of the common people.
Foremost among these reformers was Chông Yagyong (1762-1836), also known as
Tasan.

Setton's study of Tasan, his intellectual heritage, his place within the
history of Chosôn Confucian philosophy, and his philosophical innovations
and reforms is a timely one. At no other time has there been as much
interest in Korea's early modern period as there is today. Tasan represents
for many today a seminal thinker and founder of political modernization.
His writings about the relationship between government and the people
appeal to modern Koreans concerned with democratic values. His call for
reform of administrative structures and law so that government may better
serve the needs of the people resonates in the minds of modern Koreans who
wish to make their own society more equitable and just.

While the modern use of Tasan is dictated by the needs of Koreans
confronted by issues of modernization, participation in the global economy,
and the shift from authoritarian military rule to civilian government,
Tasan's own world and world outlook was very different from that of Koreans
today. Understanding what Tasan's philosophical contributions meant within
the context of 18th and 19th century Korea and how those contributions were
related to conditions created in the 16th and 17th centuries is a whole
other matter.

Setton's study does much to clarity and to contextualize what Tasan and
other reformers of the period were attempting to do. Native Korean
scholarship and current Korean interest in Tasan assumes that as a member
of the Practical Learning Movement (the Shirhakp'a), Tasan attacked
Neo-Confucian learning and orthodoxy in order to replace it with some form
of modern utilitarianism or pragmatism. This is far from the case. Setton
demonstrates in his first chapter (Tasan's Intellectual Heritage) that
Tasan's critique of Ch'eng-Chu Learning was done from within the Confucian
tradition, not from outside it. His concern with developing an integrated
ethical philosophy that would transform the nature of Korean government was
in fact as much a continuation of the earliest Chosôn period Confucian
concern for "practical affairs" as it was a critique of the excessive
Korean dependence on and sacralization of the authority of the Ch'eng-Chu
tradition of Neo-Confucian Learning. Setton also demonstrates that Tasan
built this philosophy upon the work of his immediate predecessors, who,
like Tasan, were influenced by the writings and insights of members of the
Evidential Learning Movement in Ch'ing China and the Ancient Learning
Movement in Tokugawa Japan. Setton rightfully argues that it was not "in
spite of Neo-Confucian learning" but as a part of a centuries-long
Neo-Confucian attempt to understand the classics, that Tasan's philosophy
and critique of Ch'eng-Chu learning should be understood. Tasan was as
orthodox a Confucian scholar as the Sung scholars he criticized.

Setton also does the reader a service by dealing with the issue of
factionalism in the Chosôn period. Modern Korean scholarship on the
Practical Learning reformers all but ignores this issue, as though
Practical Learning emerged as a new stage in Korean thought only after
factionalized Neo-Confucianism had declined. Tasan was himself a member of
the opposition Southerner lineage, and we should expect that his
philosophical critique of Ch'eng-Chu orthodoxy was as much motivated by the
need to attack the establishment ideology that kept Southerners out of the
government as it was an attempt to recover the true and practical meaning
of Confucian texts. Setton demonstrates that factional disputes were
indispensable in the development of Practical Learning and served to open
up new areas of inquiry and investigation into the meaning of Confucian
ideas. Southerners benefited from their own exclusion from government and
when they turned to the investigation of such "unconventional" and
"unorthodox" traditions as  "Western Learning" (Catholicism). Evidential
Learning, and Ancient Learning they did so in the full knowledge that they
were defending their right to freedom of interpretation in the face of an
increasingly conservative and narrow-minded bureaucratic adherence to
Ch'eng-Chu orthodoxy. Southerners adopted from these movements the spirit
of  "verification of the facts" and applied it not only to their
reexamination of the classics and the Ch'eng-Chu commentarial tradition,
but also in such fields as history, geography, technological development,
and policy proposals for reform. Tasan's own call for a return to
"classical learning" (susahak) though not the direct result of a factional
dispute, was nevertheless a product of his own factional allegiance to the
Southerners and their tradition of criticism that began with Yun Hyu
(1617-80) and was carried on by Yi Ik (1681-1763).

After giving the context for understanding Tasan, the history of Confucian
factionalism, and the various issues that became part of the Practical
Learning movement, Setton turns to a philosophical analysis of Tasan's
"classical learning."  This is the longest and most complicated section of
the book since Setton is dealing with Tasan's own commentaries on classical
texts, which include comments and criticisms of the Ch'eng-Chu commentaries
on the same texts.  Setton focuses on Tasan's reinterpretation of the Four
Books and the Book of Changes, texts that were at the heart of Ch'eng-Chu
Learning.  Through philological and historical reconstruction of the
meaning of those texts and through an analysis of how those texts were
interpreted in the commentarial tradition of the Ch'eng-Chu school, Tasan
was able to demonstrate that on the issues of human nature,
self-cultivation, and the practical ordering of society the Ch'eng-Chu
school had misinterpreted the meaning of the classics. He showed how
extraneous (Buddhist and Taoist) elements such as principle and material
force (li / ch'i)  had been introduced into Confucian tradition by the Sung
philosophers and had become the basis for the elaboration of a system of
fixed cosmological objects (virtue, mind, nature, heaven, principle) that
had no basis in the classical texts and even obscured their meaning. In
Tasan's view, the introduction of static ontological categories into the
discussion of ethics  robbed the Confucian tradition of its dynamic and
person-engaging character. Tasan argued from the classics that human nature
was dynamic and characterized by graded levels of appetites, desires, and
affective tendencies that seek fulfillment through right action. Human
nature was not the embodiment of a cosmic principle (or a Buddha-nature)
that had been obscured by physical, social, and mental endowments, as
Ch'eng-Chu commentators had argued. This reformulation of the understanding
of human nature allowed Tasan to enunciate an understanding of
self-cultivation (the pursuit of the morally satisfying) as a psychological
process of deliberate and autonomous choices that would result in human
happiness. It also allowed him to abandon the cosmological dualism that was
present in Ch'eng-Chu Learning and had been the focus of centuries of
debate and speculation. Since self-cultivation or moral action could only
be done through engagement with the outside world, Tasan argued that there
could be no conflict between the Confucian goals of self-cultivation and
the right ordering of society. The right ordering of society through moral
action was itself self-cultivation and the only medium through which one
could personally acquire sincerity of the will and the rectification of the
mind.  When applied to the area of politics and social leadership, Tasan
could argue that all humans were equal in their ability to produce right
relations (virtue) and were not hampered in doing so based upon their
mental or physical endowment. Moral leadership or the ability to arouse the
people to moral action came from the people as a whole, who, according to
Tasan, selected leaders from among themselves.

Tasan's "classical learning" thus is a repudiation of the moral determinism
implied by Ch'eng-Chu Learning and its inability to accept the Mencian
proposition that all human were potentially sages. Tasan restricted the
meaning of virtue and self-cultivation to the objectification of moral
tendencies. Great sages like Yao and Shun were not moral by nature, but by
self-nurture. The practical ethics taught by Confucius and Mencius was
nothing more than the nurturing of natural moral tendencies, not the
uncovering of a virtuous nature endowed at birth.

Finally Setton compares Tasan's critique of Ch'eng-Chu Learning to that of
Ch'ing Evidential Learning scholars and Tokugawa Ancient Learning scholars
and notes where there were direct influences and where there were
differences. Setton demonstrates that it was the Tokugawa scholars who
seemed to have had the greatest influence on Tasan and themes and attitudes
developed in Japanese scholarship resonate in Tasan's personal writings.
This last chapter is intended to show how Tasan's philosophy represents a
major contribution to the development of Korean Confucanism in the 19th
century even while it benefits from and builds upon contemporary
scholarship from abroad.

This study does an admirable job in advancing our knowledge of Tasan's
philosophical contribution to late Chosôn period Confucian philosophy by
demonstrating how Tasan built upon the intellectual trends and insights of
Chinese, Japanese and Korean predecessors and contemporaries. By doing this
comparative analysis, the peculiar nature of Tasan's philosophical
reformulation comes into sharp focus. Setton also grounds Tasan firmly
within the history of Confucianism within Korea and demonstrates that
Tasan's work, though a direct challenge to the Neo-Confucian orthodoxy of
the day, must be seen as being part of an ongoing tradition of Confucian
scholarship, rather than, as some moderns think, being opposed to it.

JOHN I. GOULDE
Sweet Briar College

Citation:
Goulde , John I. 1998
Review of Mark Setton, _Chông Yagyong:  Korea's Challenge to Orthodox
Neo-Confucianism_
Korean Studies Review 1998, no. 11
Electronic file:
http://www.mailbase.ac.uk/lists/korean-studies/files/ksr98-11.htm
[This review first appeared in Acta Koreana, 1 (1998): 160-63]






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