Monday, March 3, 2014

Yéol Lecture by Emanuel Pastreich

Park Jiwon (1737-1805)
Yesterday I attended the Yéol Lecture, which was given by Emanuel Pastreich, on the philosophy and fiction of the 18th-century sage Park Jiwon. Pastreich, who teaches at the College of International Studies of Kyung Hee University and is director of the Asia Institute, began his talk with an overview of the Joseon Dynasty, which he argues laid many of the foundations for the development of modern Korea. The founder of the Joseon Dynasty, Yi Sŏng-gye, was a military man, but he was also a thinker who sought to reconstruct Korean society on a philosophical basis. Yi was drawn to the ethical system of Confucius, with its emphasis on how to live a good life in the here and now, in contrast to belief systems that preached the need to escape practical realities and earthly bonds as the source of suffering. The turn toward Confucianism, according to Pastreich, provided the foundations of good governance which enabled the Joseon Dynasty to rule Korea for almost 500 years.

The Joseon Dynasty was notable for employing scientific and objective methods in its practice of governance. The civil service examination was the key element in its effort to ensure that the most capable individuals would run the government. Although some kind of national examination system was in place during the previous dynasties dating back to the 8th century, it was during Joseon that the exam became the primary avenue to positions of political power. Pastreich pointed out that the yangban, which is frequently translated as nobility, did not originally refer to a class but designated those individuals who had passed the exam. The exams were in principle open to anyone except for slaves and those who belonged to the lowest class, such as those who made their livelihood as butchers. Of course, the children of the wealthy had the decided advantage of being able to dedicate long hours to study, so that in practice, the nobles came to dominate the ranks of the officials.

Pastreich pointed out, however, that the Joseon emphasis on merit was connected to a concern for objectivity. The Joseon Dynasty kept annals for 400 years in order to be able to analyze political decisions and events in an objective and dispassionate manner. Neither government administrators nor the king was allowed to interfere with the writing of the official record. Indeed, the king himself did not have access to these documents. Pastreich told a story in which the king fell from his horse. The king pleaded with the chronicler not to record for the ages this embarrassing incident. The annals in the end reveal the powerlessness of the king over the writing of history: not only did the scholar record the king's mishap, but also documented the king's own request that this moment of humiliation be suppressed.

The concern for objectivity resulted in a certain premodern version of checks and balances in the Joseon Dynasty. The fact that the king was denied access to the annals meant that it would have been supremely difficult, if not impossible, for any sovereign to believe truly that reality could be transformed to adjust to his wishes. Objectivity was associated not only with an understanding of practical realities, with the capacity to respond crises in the most appropriate and advantageous way, but was also strongly identified with a moral outlook. The civil service examination, Pastreich observes, demanded not the regurgitation of facts but focused on ethical questions, asking the student what would constitute the right course to take in complicated moral predicaments.

The second part of the lecture focused on the philosopher and writer Park Jiwon, who was born in 1737 and whose work Pastreich has translated. He emerges in Pastreich’s account as a kind of reformer within Joseon, who renewed the ossified Neo-Confucianism of his day with a close study of the lives of ordinary people. The scholar-officials of the time had become more inward and disdainful toward worldly realities because of the Manchu takeover of China. The collapse of the Ming Dynasty, so deeply admired by the scholar-officials that Joseon, not yet recovered from the trauma of the Hideyoshi invasion, became embroiled in another devastating war with the Manchus, led them to the resigned belief that the only way to maintain the Confucian virtues was to be as independent as possible of a China that was now ruled by barbarians. The idea of Korea as “Little China” took hold during this period, the belief that the best part of the Chinese intellectual tradition had been preserved in Korea.

Park took a dissenting view. He visited China to observe the day-to-day life of the common people. Park thought that it was important to understand the lived reality of China, instead of honoring the ideal China that the barbarians had irrevocably ruined. In Park’s stories, beggars discuss philosophical questions, and virtue is revealed as something even the lowliest people, like collectors of human feces, are capable of practicing. Park was driven by the conviction that virtue should overcome social barriers. Though out of favor with his time, Park and his work came to be valued by later generations, who sought to modernize Korea. They found in it the inspiration to embrace technological innovation as well as to reaffirm the meritocratic outlook underpinning the civil examination system.

Pastreich’s wide-ranging talk presents a fascinating points of comparison not only with respect to modernization in the West and in East Asia but also to the divergent ethical systems driving modernity in these different civilizations. It is interesting that modernity in the West has been frequently advanced and driven by the repudiation of morality. The political philosophies of Machiavelli and Hobbes for example are defined by the effort to overcome or constrain the influence of Christianity. Morality has not only proven itself to be destructive – the corruption of the Church is far more noxious and more difficult to remedy than the corruption of kings - but also generates an erroneous way of viewing the world as such. Power, not faith or virtue, is what runs the world and what constitutes the appropriate object of analysis for political theory. This account of modernity as the repudiation of faith is not without its critics – the Asia Times columnist Spengler bitingly observes that the separation of church and state was not accomplished by “the masses rallying in public squares waving little books of quotations from Chairman Hobbes,” while Giambattista Vico argues that Hobbes’ idea of secular peace derives from Christianity itself. It is hard to deny that Christianity, especially Christian morality, has played an immensely influential role in the formation of secular liberal society, even as faith has waned in much of the West and is now waning in the US as well.

But the categorical rejection of virtue does not appear to be constitutive of Korean modernity, as it has been of Western modernity. It would seem that the idea of a social existence without reference to the authoritative power of virtue is properly unthinkable within a Confucian horizon. Whether this incapacity leaves a culture vulnerable to some nasty surprises as modernity unfolds, or if it protects a society from the antinomianism excesses of liberal individualism, is the vital question. As John Gray puts it in an essay on George Santayana, liberalism has become “a political religion of man-worship which had lost the humility, and indeed the skepticism [regarding human powers], that informs the historic Western religions” (Gray’s Anatomy, 75). Liberalism, in its hubris and obliviousness to the conditions of social unanimity under which human beings have lived for millennia, has become its own worst enemy. In Pastreich’s talk, it is the Joseon ideal of objectivity that emerges as an antidote to the loss of historical consciousness and the anxious self-assertion that is endemic to modernity in its late stages. The commitment to objectivity is inseparable from good governance, as well as good art and good science, for they all require the readiness to subject one’s thoughts and actions to a higher and necessarily external standard, regardless of whether this standard arises in response to the slaughter-bench of history, the caprices of nature, or the providence of God. The rejection of harsh standards might be a sought-after luxury in affluent societies, for it pays out in the wages of self-justification. But under conditions of privation and danger, it can only mean the death and destruction of what one holds dear. 

Reference:

John Gray, "Santayana's Alternative," Gray's Anatomy: Selected Writings. London: Penguin, 2009.