2019, Vol., No.29

PHILOSOPHY·THOUGHT·CULTURE 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 0.5

pISSN : 1975-1621 / eISSN : 2092-0873
https://journal.kci.go.kr/insewtdgu

Hongdaeyong is the most interesting person in his era, not only because he made great achievements in science, but because he emphasized the importance of moral relativism. He claimed that people should not look down on animals from a human perspective, but should respect their values themselves as meaningful as our own. Accepting multiple values was a radical idea, because almost all the other Neo-confucian scholars had a rigid value system and considered humans to be far more important than any other creatures on earth. His transformation began when he visited Qing. There he saw a new culture, and had some connection with Chinese scholars in academic and emotional way. These experiences transformed him from a neo-confucian into the post neo-confucian. The process of change shows the transition of his understanding about Theory of Liqi(理氣) and the relationship between human and animals(物). Hong Dae-yong followed the stream of Nak-school(洛論) study at his early age. But he had critical issues about the concept of Li and Xingshan(性善) which is the basic premise of Neo-confucianism at the same time. On the other hand, experiences at Qing were eye-opening for him, which made him stop interpreting animals according to human moral values and try to respect values of other being itself. This leads to 北學論, which claims the change in the past ideology to perceive other being and accept various perspectives.

Choe Hangi’s philosophy is generally classified as “empiricism,” but it is also characterized by “metaphysical elements.” The starting point of this paper is the fact that these two facets of Choe Hangi’s philosophy made their appearance at different periods of time. Whereas empiricist viewpoints prevailed in his earlier works, a metaphysical system came into view in his later works. This paper explains this change as his attempt to compensate for the insufficiency of his earlier empiricist philosophy in providing an ethical framework by establishing a metaphysical system. In Gicheukcheui, Choe Hangi proposes a scientific methodology of chucheuk(推測). This methodology, useful as it may be in exploring nature, has limitations in explaining ethics due to the fact that conclusions drawn by an empirical procedure inevitably have only relative truth values. In Gihak, he assumes that the universal principle of unhwa-liand establishes a metaphysical system of sadeungunhwa. Theoretically, moral values should be derived from unhwa-li and daegi-unhwa; however, Choe Hangi adopts an approach to justifying the conclusions drawn by an empirical procedure via the metaphysical system. In that way values are justified, and the governance standards are endowed with a more absolute status. From these observations, it can be inferred that the two facets of Choe Hangi’s philosophy, empiricism and metaphysical elements, originate from his pursuit of empirical methodology while securing the absolute primacy of moral values.

There are two discourses on death in Tolstoy’s novel, The Death of Ivan Illich, and they have some parallels in Heidegger’s Being and Time, regardless of the contexts in which Heidegger quotes the novel. Heidegger introduces Tolstoy’s novel in his footnote of Being and Time, illustrating the ordinary people’s understanding of death. Through the medium of the heuristic moment of the protagonist in the context of the novel, one can say that Tolstoy was thinking of two kinds of death, like Heidegger. Following Kimura Bin’s(木村敏) three kinds of death, that is, the death from the perspectives of the first person, of the second person and of the third person, this paper applies it to Tolstoy’s and Heidegger’s understanding of death, and analyses Ivan Illich’s understanding process of death as a transition from the third person’s perspective to the first person’s or a transition from death in unauthentic existence to that in authentic existence.