The Transformation of Substance and Function in Tasan’s Philosophy:
Neither Confucian Nor Western
Don Baker (University of British Columbia.)
When T’oegye Yi Hwang was near the end of a long life of philosphical contemplation, he penned a couple of pages on the meaning of a very important dyad in Neo-Confucianism, ch’e- yong (體用). Ch’e and Yong, like so many important terms in Neo-Confucianism, are difficult to pin down to one definition each. As T’oegye noted, when Confucians talked of ch’e and yong, they could use those terms to mean repose and response, stillness and movement, the unmanifest and the manifest, or human nature and human emotion. Speaking metaphysically (when speaking of the Dao and li-理 ), they used the term “ch’e” to refer to the as-yet-undifferentiated, and the term “yong” to refer to the myriad differentiated processess and events human beings encounter in the world. When they referred to material objects, they used the term “ch’e” to refer to the activity an object is able to engage in, such as the ability of a vehicle to move, and “yong” to refer to the actual carrying out of that activity, such as the actual movement of a cart over land or a boat over water.1 In other words, when in used in reference either metaphysically or to material objects, ch’e is potential and yong is the actualization of that potential. Two centuries later, Sunam An Chŏngbok made a similar distinction between ch’e and yong, pointing out that when there is no movement, Confucians talk of “ch’e” and when there is movement, Confucians
1 Yi Hwang, T’oegye chŏnsŏ, “Sim much’eyong pyŏn”, 4l: l6b-17b (vol. I, pp. 9l8-9.)
talk of “yong,” so ch’e and yong are more two different modes of operation rather than two totally different things.2
Because ch’e and yong are more like two different modes of operation than two different things, I left them untranslated in the paragraph above instead of using the normal English translations of “substance” and “function.” I agree with Antonio Cua that “translation of ti [K.
ch’e] as “substance’ may be misleading from the Western philosophical point of view.”3
Normally, in English “substance” refers to some solid object capable of independent existence, some concrete individual, or to the underlying material foundation of what some thing actually is.
In philosophical discourse, it was traditionally used with those meanings as well as to refer that part of something which remains the same though it may change in physical appearance. In traditional Western philosophy, substance is usually paired with attribute, contrasting what is essential with what is incidental.4
The term ch’e, on the other hand, when it is paired with yong, is used to talk about action, or modes of operation, rather than about existence. Ch’e in this context gets much of its meaning from the term it is paired with. Yong has a very different reference than attribute does. An
attribute refers to what something looks like. Yong tells us what it does. In other words, ch’e and yong are terms used to talk about what happens or does not happen rather than what is
2 An Chŏngbok, Sunamjip 12:1a.
3Antonio S. Cua, “On the Ethical Significance of the Ti-Yong Distinction,” Journal of Chinese Philosophy 29:2 (June, 2002), p. 164
4 See, for example, “Substance and Attribute” in Paul Edwards, ed. The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (New York: Collier Macmillan, 1967, vol 8, pp. 36-40 and in Ted Honderich, ed.
The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1995), pp.858-9
essentially and what is incidentally. It’s a difference between a focus on doing and a focus on being. Though function may be an acceptable translation for yong (though we could also translate yong as use, activity, or application),5 substance is in most contexts not an acceptable translation for ch’e. I prefer to translate ch’e and yong as “not-yet-actualized potential” and
“actualized potential.” In other words, ch’e usually tells us what something can and should do, and yong tells us that it has done or is doing.
The difference between ch’e and yong, on the one hand, and substance and attribute, on the other, is more than just a difference in language usage or a sign of a difference in terminological preference. That difference reflects an underlying disparity in fundamental philosophical
perspective. In other words, the ch’e, paired with yong, reflects one way of looking at the world and our place in it while substance, as that term has been used in traditional Western philosophy, reflects an entirely different way of looking at the world.
For the purposes of this paper, when I say traditional Western philosophy, I mean the medieval philosophy of Thomism, which Koreans were exposed to in the 17th and 18th centuries through the writings of such Jesuit missionaries in China as Matteo Ricci (1552-1610) and Francesco Sambiasi (1582-1649). It is this Catholic philosophy, introduced in such works as Ricci’s Tianzhu shiyi [The True Significance of the Lord of Heaven] and Sambiasi’s Lingyan lishao [On the Seoul], that challenged the way Korea’s Neo-Confucians thought about what was real and what was not, and what was important and what was not. Moreover, it is this philosophy
5Chung-ying Cheng, “On the Metaphysical Significance of Ti (Body-Embodiment) in Chinese Philosphy: Benti (Origin-Substance) and Ti-Yong (Substance and Function” in Journal of Chinese Philosophy 29:2 (June 2002, p. 153.
that influenced the thinking of Tasan Chŏng Yagyong, one of the most creative thinkers in all Korean history and the primary subject of this paper.
Nouns, Verbs, and Philosophical Differences
Thomistic philosophy classified reality into nouns (substances), on the one hand, and adjectives and verbs (attributes) on the other. In European languages, including of course the Latin that was the language for philosophical discourse in medieval Europe, the noun occupied the center of gravity. In Latin and the other Indo-European languages to which the Jesuits were accustomed, nouns, and the corresponding concept of substance, are so powerful that a
discussion of verbal or adjectival concepts often leads to nominalization, or “entification,” a term coined by the linguist Alfred Bloom to describe the Western tendency to "talk of properties and actions as if they were things.”6 Transformed by entification, real becomes Reality and “to be”
becomes Being.
Such a tendency to transform actions, processes and qualities into abstract entities is much weaker in Hanmun. A verb can stand in a subject or object position within a Hanmun sentence without having to be nominalized.7 There is no need for morphological signals to indicate that a verb has been transformed into a noun. Chan Hansen calls this “synthatic mobility.”8 Christoph
6 Alfred Bloom, The Linguistic Shaping of Thought (Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1981), p.37.
7 Graham A.C., “‘Being’ in Classical Chinese,” J.W. M. Verhaand, ed. The Verb “be”
and its Synonyms (Deerdrecht: Reidel Publ. Co, 1960), vol. 1, p. l7
8 Chad Hansen, “Chinese Language, Chinese Philosophy, and ‘Truth’,” Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. XLIV, no. 3 (May, 1985), pp. 498
Harbsmeier prefers the term “functional suppleness.”9 Whatever label you apply to this feature of Hanmun, the philosophical impact is the same: the language Neo-Confucian philosophers used to frame their arguments did not require them to distinguish as sharply between an action and an actor, or between a characteristic and that which that characteristic is a characteristic of, than the languages used by European philosophers did. What it did require them to do, however, was to focus on what had happened, was happening, or was likely to happen rather than on what was, is, or will be.
That is because, in the Hanmun that was the preferred language for philosophical discourse in Korea, the verb was more powerful than the noun.10 For example, in classical Hanmun, there were no true adjectives, as a separate and distinct class of nominal modifiers. Instead, stative verbs played the corresponding role. In addition, verbalization of nominal concepts occurred much more frequently than true nominalization of verbs. A particularly relevant example of such verbalization is a line used by Han Yu (768-824) in his condemnation of Buddhism, which was often cited by Confucian polemicists for centuries afterwards. Han urged the Chinese Emperor to weaken Buddhism and restore Confucian values by laicizing Buddhist monks (in ki in -人其人), literally "make human beings of those human beings", with the noun "human being"
9 Christoph Harbsmeier, Language and Logic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) in Joseph Needham, ed. Science and Civilization in China, Vol 7. Part I, p. 126
10 I agree with A.C. Graham, “The Relation of Chinese Thought to Chinese Language, ” in Disputers of the Tao: Philosophical Arguments in Ancient China (La Salle, Illnois: Open Court, 1989). pp. 389-394 I disagree with with David L Hall and Roger T. Ames say in Thinking Through Confucius (Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1987), pp. 298-99.
They assert that the noun in dominant in Classical Chinese.
serving as a verb in the sense of “to turn into normal human beings.”11 Another example of a noun as a verb is "embody" (ch’e ), the term adopted by Zhu Xi to refer to the penetration by a mind into an object it is studying.12 Ch’e could be used as a noun referring to a human body, but in this instance it was used to mean “to enter into” or “to embody,” revealing that the term ch’e, from the dyad ch’e-yong, could itself designate a function.13
When the reverse of verbalization occurred and a verb was nominalized, that verb usually maintained the formal characteristics of a verb, taking the verbal negative pul instead of the nominal negative mu. One well-known example is the statement in Mencius that "there are three things which are unfilial, and to have no posterity is the greatest of them." (Pulhyo yusam, muhu wida)14Unfilial, derived from the verb "to be filial," took the verbal negative, though posterity took the nominal negative.
The differing emphases on nouns and verbs are relevant to a discuss of what ch’e and yong meant in a Neo-Confucian context since, in a verb-centered language, function has priority over
11 Han Yu, “Yuan Dao” [Essentials of the Moral Way], Changli xiansheng wenji [The collected writings of Han Yu], Siku congkan edition, 11: 1a-3b
12 Zhuzi quanshu, 44:12b-13a; For other uses of ti/ch’e as a verb, see Chung-ying Cheng, “On the Metaphysical Significance of Ti,” pp. 145-6
13 Christoph Harbsmeier, in Language and Logic, volume 7, part I, of Joseph Needham, ed.
Science and Civilization in China, pp. 139-142, provides several more examples of nouns, even compound noun phrases and proper names, functioning as verbs.
14 Mencius, IVA, 26 (Legge, p.313). A.C. Graham claims true nominalization of individual v in which the verb would take a nominal negative, is quite rare in classical Chinese. "Being in Classical Chinese, pp. 4,17.
erbs,
substance, just as substance dominates function in a language built around nouns. Consequently, in the Neo-Confucian lexicon even “substance” had a functional definition. Ch’e was often defined simply as inactive function when it was paired with yong, which would then be defined as active ch’e.15 As Neo-Confucians used those two key terms in philosophical discourse, ch’e could not be grasped or explained without reference to yong, and yong could not be explained without reference to ch’e. They were two sides of the same coin. T’oegye’s discussion of ch’e and yong, therefore, represents mainstream Neo-Confucianism.
The Thomistic and Neo-Confucian definitions of reality, of the ultimate nature of the world in which we live, were constructed with totally different linguistic building blocks, leading to totally different premises, which, in turn, led to totally different visions of the universe. The universe, as Thomists described it in Latin, consisted of substances, autonomous islands of being, enriched by attributes of appearance and function affixed to those separate substances. In
contrast, a network of interrelated events constituted the Neo-Confucian universe. As in the modern process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947), an object in Neo-
Confucianism was interpreted as a focus for activity rather than as a nodule of being.16 That is why a recent translation of the Zhongyong [The Doctrine of the Mean] into English translates
15 Zhu Xi quanshu, 44:36b. For more on ch’e and yong, see Chan, Wing-tsit, “Substance and Function,” Chu Hsi: New Studies (honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1989), pp. 222–234.
16 "Alfred North Whitehead", Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol. 8, pp.290-96.
mul (物), normally translated as thing, as a focus of the events and processes that swirl around it rather than as a solid object.17
Mainstream Neo-Confucians identified a mul by those patterns that determined that entity’s relationships with other entities. In other words, a Neo-Confucian entity was defined by how it fit into its environment. Thomistic philosophers formulated definitions based instead on those characteristics that distinguished entities from the other entities around them. Thomists preferred to define an entity by separating it from its environment. This Thomistic conception of substance as independent existence was almost incomprehensible to eighteenth-century Koreans who saw the entire universe as one vast interrelated organism, and were more interested in how things interacted with other things around them than with what things were in themselves.
Debating the Existence of an Immortal Soul
We see this incompatibility of these two different world views in the Korean Neo-
Confucian reaction to the Catholic argument for the existence of the immortal soul. Both Ricci and Sambiasi had written that the soul exercises three functions: animation, perception, and thought. According to them, death merely suspended the functions of animation and perception until the resurrection at the end of the world, when an individual’s soul would again be united with his or her body.18 One early 18th-century critic of Thomistic philosophy, Sin Hudam
17Ames, Roget T and David L. Hall. Focusing the Familiar: A Translation and Philosphical Interpretation of the Zhongyong (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001).
18 Ricci, Matteo. Douglas Lancashire and Pter HuKuo-chen, S.J.,trans. The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven (St. Louis: The Institute of Jesuit sources, 1985), p. 147; Francesco Sambiasi,
“Lingyan lishao” [On the Soul] in Li Zhizao, ed. Tianxue chuhan [An Introduction to
(1702-61), replied that it made no sense to talk of life that was not alive and sensation that was insensible. To say that such powers were unusable was no different from saying that they no longer existed. In other words, “substance” could not exist apart from its functioning. Besides, he asked, how were the souls of the dead supposed to enjoy the happiness in heaven that the missionaries promised as a reward for good behavior or suffer the pain in hell that was said to await sinners, if neither sinners nor saints were capable of feeling anything? "If what the Catholics say about men and women becoming lifeless and insensible after death is true, then why would anyone bother to seek a reward in heaven after death?"19
Sin Hudam, as did other mainstream Neo-Confucian thinkers, used the word “soul” to refer to the functions of living and perceiving rather than to some thing that lived and perceived.
Therefore Sin believed that the missionaries from the West contradicted themselves when they claimed that the soul was immortal because consciousness somehow survived the loss of life and sensation. He pointed to what appeared to him to be a logical inconsistency in the Catholic description of anima. Sambiasi and Ricci had written that plants had only an animating soul, animals had an animating and perceiving soul, but human beings had a soul that possessed the powers of animation, sensation, and cogitation. Sambiasi warned that these three faculties did not represent three separate souls in man. “Anima is one, not three. The rational soul also has the powers of life and sensation.”20
Heavenly Learning], reprinted as Ch’ŏnhak ch’oham (Korean reprient of Tianxue chuhan) (Seoul: Asea munhwasa, 1976), p. 312.
19 Sin Hudam, “Sŏhakpyŏn” [On Western Learning], in Yi Manch’ae, ed. Pyŏgwip’yŏn [In defense of the right against the wrong] (Seoul: Yŏrhwadang, 1971). pp. 44-5.
20 Sambiasi, p.312; Ricci, The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven, pp. 145-47.
Sin charged that this affirmation of the unity of the soul conflicted with Catholic teachings on the immortality of the soul. Catholics admitted that the ability to live and perceive was perishable, since neither animals nor plants had immortal souls. Yet if the human soul was one, and its animating, perceiving, and reasoning powers inseparable, then it should follow that human beings must either retain life and sensation as well as consciousness after death or retain none of them. Any other outcome contradicts the unity of the soul.21
At the core of the Catholic argument was the Thomistic notion of substance. As Ricci explained it, a substance was something, such as a horse, that could stand alone and therefore did not depend on anything else. The opposite of substance was an attribute, or accident, a quality that was dependent on something else for its existence or operation, such as the color white as seen on a white horse.22 You could point to an animal and say “that is a horse” no matter what color it was, but you could not point to a color and say “that is white” unless you were pointing to something such as a horse which was white.
In other words, a substance was any entity, material or immaterial, capable of independent existence. Substance corresponded to the grammatical subject of a sentence in an Indo-European language —it was that which predicates were predicated of and which was not itself predicated of anything else.23 One example of a substance was, of course, the human soul. The soul was the subject of such sentences as “the soul lives,” “the soul perceives,” and “the soul thinks.” As the subject of such sentences, the soul was a substance and therefore was independent of the predicates living, perceiving, and thinking and could be separated from them.
21 Sin, ibid
22 Ricci, The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven, p.109.
23 “Substance and Attribute”, The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol. 8, pp.36-40.
The Catholic argument for the immortality of the soul could not be convincingly rendered into Classical Chinese. The static, separated substances of Western ontology could not fit into the dynamic, organic world of Neo-Confucianism. In Thomistic thought, the line between substance on the one hand, and attribute and function on the other, was clearly drawn. The soul was a substance. Life, sensation, and thought were its functions. Though life was impossible without a soul, a soul could exist without life. The soul after death could continue to provide a base for consciousness.
In mainstream Neo-Confucianism, consciousness was centered in the mind, not the soul.
For a conscious personality to survive death, the mind had to survive. Yet the mind was not an immortal substance, in the Western sense of an incorruptible object. The term “mind” (心) more
often than not referred to a state of activity or, rather, inactivity, to a phase rather than to an entity. The mind at rest, before it had manifested a reaction to external or internal stimulation, was ch’e, not substance. That mind, once stimulated, moved in response and became function.24
We can see this argument that the mind, as the seat of consciousness, could not be
distinguished from its stillness and movement in the writings of T’oegye. For T'oegye, as for Sin Hudam, there was no thing called a mind which sometimes moved and sometimes was still and yet was separate from those two stages of activity, nor was the soul an object to which the mind adhered and which existed independently of the operations of the mind.25 In contrast to Jesuits
24 As Wing Tsit-chan has explained,” Everything can be either substance or function and is both substance and function." “Patterns for Neo-Confucianism: Why Chu Hsi differed from Ch’eng I”, JOURNAL OF CHINESE PHILOSOPHY, 5:2 (June, 1978), p.116.
25 Yi Hwang, T’oegye chŏnsŏ 41: l6b-20b.
who wrote that the soul possessed the power to rest in quiet repose or to respond to the outside world, T'oegye and his disciples said that the mind was that repose and response. Therefore, once the mind was no longer alive to react to external stimulation, it was no longer a mind. When there was no human mind, there could be no human soul. When “substance” is inseparable from function, life after death is inconceivable.
The gap between the Catholic and the Neo-Confucian concepts of substance is particularly noticeable in Ricci’s denunciation of the Neo-Confucian teaching that all things form one substance (which is what Ricci thought ch’e meant). Ricci argued that if there were no real substantial differences between fathers and sons, rulers and subjects, and elders and juniors, then Confucian moral principles were meaningless, since those principles consisted primarily of rules governing how human beings should interact with other human beings within a hierarchical social order.26 For a Neo-Confucian, however, the statement that all things form one ch’e in no way negated the real differences distinguishing one human being from another. The ch’e that underlay cosmic unity was the universal network of appropriate interactions, the li that was the ontological ground of the universe. All things partook of that fundamental ch’e because all things had roles allotted them by li within the universal pattern of interrelationships that was the cosmos.
What Ricci misinterpreted as pantheism was an assertion of moral unity throughout the universe, a declaration of the ethical imperative for human beings to abandon those selfish biases which hindered cooperation with the universal natural order.
Ricci’s criticism of the way Neo-Confucians used the term “ch’e” assumed that ch’e was always used as a static noun, as a reference to some underlying unchanging sessence. However,
26 Ricci, The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven, pp. 229.
though ch’e might operate grammatically as a noun in much Neo-Confucian discourse, it actually had the dynamism of a verb in that it was used to refer to what things could do.
Thomistic substance, with its focus on what things were in themselves, shattered the unity of being which Neo-Confucian ch’e represented. Because Ricci did not understand that the term ch’e referred not to a thing but to events, processes, and interactions that were as yet unmanifest,
unrealized, undifferentiated, unmoved, in other words, to as yet unactivated function, he misunderstood what Neo-Confucians meant by all things being of one ch’e. Because Neo- Confucians did not think ch’e as in equivalent to the Western concept of substance, individual, solid packets of being beneath and apart from all activity and function, few could be persuaded by the Jesuit argument for the immortality of the soul.
Because he misunderstood the Neo-Confucian concept of ch’e, Ricci ridiculed Neo- Confucian charts showing the role of yin and yang in generating the universe by labeling them
“weird symbols with no referent in the real world.”27 Sin Hudam's angry response was that to deny yin and yang was to deny the earth at man's feet and the sky above, since heaven, compared to earth, was warm, light, and active (in other words, it was yang) and earth, compared to heaven, was cold, dark, and passive (in other words, it was yin).28 Sin saw that once again Ricci
misunderstood Neo-Confucian terms as naming substances, things, when Sin knew that they really referred to modes of interaction.
Ricci also launched an attack on the core Neo-Confucian concept of li. Ricci understood li as “principle” and therefore he denied it could play the creative role Neo-Confucianism ascribed to it. He failed to see understand that term actually referred to the dynamic patterns of
27 The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven, p.107.
28 Sin, p.79.
appropriate interactions that generated order in the universe. According to Ricci, li, as principle, could only exist in conjunction with some concrete object. In Thomistic terminology, principle was an attribute, a secondary characteristic of an entity, rather than a substance, the core entity itself. Before the universe began, there were no principles. When no things exist, there can be no attributes of things. Only when God created the universe did principle appear. God, not li, was the Creator and Organizer of the universe.29
In addition, principle was unconscious and incapable of self-movement or volition.
Therefore it could not have created on its own the world, which contains the conscious and moral mind of man. “Principle can not give what it does not possess. Because principle does not have intelligence and consciousness, it cannot produce intelligence and consciousness.”30
Ricci misunderstood li because he thought his noun-centered language reflected the very structure of the universe, one in which separate and distinct substances, not interactive processes, were primary. Since there was no separate and distinct object we could point to and call li, li was not a substance, not a primary component of the universe. In his view, therefore, it must be merely an incidental characteristic, an attribute.
When Ricci derided li as a subordinate property, an attribute incapable of serving as the definig characteristic of anything, he was thinking of li as comparable to the white color on a white horse. The horse may be truly white, yet he would still be a horse if he were brown instead.
Therefore in no way could whiteness be conceived as essential to the horse's existence nor could whiteness be credited somehow with any part in the production of horses.31 However, when Neo-
29 The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven, pp. 109-119.
30 The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven,., p. 115.
31 The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven, p.109.
Confucians talked of li, they talked, not of properties or attributes, but of functional relationships.
A example frequently used was the normative pattern that governed the behavior of a subject toward his superior and of the ruler toward his subject or that which regulated the duties of a son toward his father and the obligations of a father toward his son. As understood by Neo-
Confucians, li determined more what someone should do than what he or she looked like.
Since mainstream Korean Neo-Confucians pictured entities primarily in terms of their roles in the network of interrelationships which constituted the cosmos, with those roles allocated according to li, the universal moral Pattern of selfless harmonious interaction, they could not permit Ricci to dismiss li as dispensable. In their function-based ontology, eliminating the assigned roles of an entity from its identity casts that entity into an abyss of nothingness. Sin found ludicrous Ricci's description of li as a non-essential, secondary characteristic. He complained that Ricci treated li as though it were some tumor that suddenly appeared out of nowhere and attached itself like a parasite to some already existing object.32 Unstated in Sin's criticism, because the obvious did not need to be stated for his Neo-Confucian audience, was the explanation Cheng Yi had provided: “That which is inherent in things is li [which determines what a thing’s function is].”33 In other words, li can not be extrinsic because li determines the role entities should play within cosmic network of appropriate interactions, and it is those roles that define what things are. Such a conception of li does indeed render Ricci's presentation
32 Sin, p.79.
33 Chan, Wing-tsit. trans., Reflections on Things at Hand, Compiled by Zhu Xi and Lu Tsu- chieZuqian (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967), p. 16. The example Cheng Yi gives here is the principle of a table: “According to principle it can hold things.”
ludicrous. It is only to be expected that Sin would conclude, “Ricci does not understand li at all.”34
Tasan, substance, and a new approach to Confucianism.
Sin Hudam was a staunch Neo-Confucian who did not allow Western philosophical writings to change his fundamental philosophical perspective. A year after Sin died, another Korean philosopher, one who would be much more open to Western ideas, appeared. That man was Tasan Chŏng Yagyong. (1762-1836) When Tasan was still young and impressionable, he read some of those Catholic-authored missionary publications from China and was at first impressed by them. As he later confessed to King Chŏngjo, when Tasan was trying to counter a threat to his political career his youthful involvement with Catholicism posed, “I was infected with Catholic ideas when I was young, as delighted with them as a child would be with a toy.”35 However, when the government started killing Catholics for their refusal to adhere to
government regulations regarding ancestor memorial rituals, Tasan abandoned the infant Korean Catholic community he had helped found. He spent the rest of his life writing Confucian texts, including commentaries on all the great Confucian Classics. (He had time to do that during the 18 years he spent in exile from 1801 to 1818 because of his connection to Korea’s first Catholic community.) Ever mindful of the deadly hostility of his government toward Catholicism, Tasan was very careful never to say anything explicitly favorable to Catholic ideas in any of his writings. However, he also departed significantly from mainstream Neo-Confucianism in his
34 Sin, p. 80.
35Chŏng Yagyong, Yŏyudang chŏnsŏ [the complete works of Chŏng Yagyong] I:, 9, 43b
interpretations of the Confucian Classics, and we can identify Catholic influences in some of those departures.
Tasan did not go so far as to accept the Catholic belief in the immortal soul, at least as far as we can tell from his collected writings. The closest he came to that Catholic belief was his assertion that human beings are a composite formed of both material and immaterial components.
However, he doesn’t say that composite is a “substance” or a ch’e. In fact, in this passage, he uses ch’e in the standard Neo-Confucian sense of potential rather than thing. He cites Mencius saying that the “Great Ch’e” is the immaterial component in human beings, which is contrasted with the “Small Ch’e,” the material component. Tasan explains this as a distinction between that which allows us to think and understand, and to recognize the moral good and pursue it (the Great Ch’e) and that which generates our desires for physical pleasure (the Small Ch’e).36 In other words, the two components of a human being are not substances but two potentialities, two capacities.
We can see another instance of Tasan using ch’e to mean potential in his discussion of T’oegye’s advocacy of “abiding in reverence. Tasan notes that abiding in reverence is a
prerequisite for gaining the insight we need to act properly. He writes, “abiding in reverence is the foundation of morality. It is what makes it possible (ch’e) for us act properly. But we have to build on that foundation and that potential to seek out and identity the moral principles that should guide our actions. Identifying those moral principles is the application (yong) of that
36Chŏng Yagyong, “Simkyŏng milhŏm” [Personal Experience with the Heart Classic], Yŏyudang chŏnsŏ [the complete works of Chŏng Yagyong], II: 2, 25a-b.
potential and the fruit growing out of that foundation.”37 So again we can see that, for Tasan, ch’e usually doesn’t mean a static essence that defines what something is. Rather it means what
something can do.
There are also instances, of course, in which Tasan uses ch’e in a sense that can be best translated as “essence” or even “body” rather than “function.” For example, when he discusses his understanding of the Lord Above (Sangje), he says “the ch’e of Sangje is such that Sangje takes no material form nor makes any sound. We can perceive Sangje’s presence but we cannot actually see him. We can perceive Sangje’s voice, but we cannot actually hear him.”38 Here Tasan is warning against confusing Sangje with various physical objects in the heavens such as stars and therefore he stresses what Sangje is not, i.e., he is not a physical entity. However, most of the time when Tasan uses the term ch’e and pairs it with yong, he uses it in the standard Neo- Confucian sense of unactualized potential, contrasted with actualized potential.
For example, Tasan avoids using the term ch’e when he discusses the meaning of the key Neo-Confucian metaphysical concept of li, even though he shows obvious influence of the Catholic pairing of substance with attribute. Breaking with centuries of Neo-Confucian tradition,
37 Chŏng, “Tosan sasungnok” [A record of my admiration of T’oegye], Yŏyudang chŏnsŏ, I:
22, 6a
38Chŏng, “Ch’unch’u kojing” [a detailed examination of the Spring and Autumn Annals], Yŏyudang chŏnsŏ, II, 26, 16b. I am beholden to Park Chongch’ŏn, “Chŏng Yagyong ŭi sin’gwan-e taehan chonggyosajŏŏk haesŏk” [An explanation of Tasan’s concept of God from the standpoint of religious history], in Center for the Study of Religious Issues at Seoul National University, ed. Yugyo wa chonggyohak [Confucianism and Religious Studies] (Seoul: Seoul National University Press, 2008), pp. 16 for this citation.
Tasan denies an independent status to li, the dynamic network of interrelationships that constitutes the Neo-Confucian universe. Borrowing terminology he could only have learned from Jesuit publications, Tasan writes that li is always attached to something else. (依附之品). In
other words, it is an attribute. Ki, on the other hand, according to Tasan, is a substance. He doesn’t use the word “ch’e”for substance, since that term has other connotations in Neo-
Confucianism. Instead, he says ki“exists in and of itself”(自有), which is the way Catholic
philosophers defined“substance.”39 Tasan applies the Catholic metaphysics of substance and
attribute to the key Neo-Confucians concepts of li and ki without explicitly adopting the Catholic understanding of the term ch’e because he wanted to keep ch’e for use in discussions of unactualized potential and didn’t want to to present a explanation of ki that somehow implied to Neo-Confucian readers it was more potential than the actual primary environment through which li acted.40
Tasan also shows Catholic influence in his move away from the Neo-Confucian focus on events and processes toward a focus on actual concrete objects. Because of his tendency to see the world in terms of substances more than in terms of actions, he challenges the traditional understanding of some core Neo-Confucian terms, such as yin and yang. For example, Tasan agrees with Jesuit missionaries in China that yin and yang cannot play the creative role Neo-
39 Chŏng, “Chungyong kangŭi” [Lectures on the Doctrine of the Mean], Yŏyudang chŏnsŏn, 2: 4, 65a. For the Catholic definitions of substance and attribute see Ricci, p. 108.
40 See Chŏng Min, Chŏng Yagyong ŭi ch’ŏrhak [the philosophy of Chŏng Yagyong] (Seoul:
Yihaksa, 2007), pp. 64-67, 94-97.
Confucian cosmology assigns them. He points out that yin and yang are simply labels for things that are dark or light and are not concrete entities in themselves that we can point to. Since they are not material objects themselves, he argues, they cannot create any material objects. Instead, he says heaven combines with heat to generate wind, fire splits the heavens to generate thunder, water cuts into mountains to sculpt mountains, earth blocks up water to create ponds and lakes, and so on. Tasan rejects yin-yang cosmology for more concrete explanations of how the universe came to be and why it operates the way it does.41 Of course, Neo-Confucians never s that yin and yang were concrete things, as Sin Hudam could have told him. Tasan is misled by his substance-oriented perspective into believing that Neo-Confucians made claims they nev actually made.
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He does the same with the Five Phases (五行). He says that fire, water, wood, metal, and dirt are just five things out of a myraid things that exist in the universe. How could those five alone produce the rest, he asks?42 He also says, in his commentary on the “Hungfan” section of the Book of History that is the locus classicus for the Five Phases,43 that the Five Phases are just five of the many material objects created by Heaven. There is nothing special about those five.
We could just as easily talk about four, six, or eight basic elements, if we wanted to. However, later generations misread that early text as saying that there were only Five Phases, no more, no less, and that they were the building blocks of the cosmos in a correlative cosmology. This, he
41 Chŏng, “ Chungyong kangŭi,” Yŏyudang chŏnsŏn, 2: 4, 1b-2a.
42 Chŏng, “Chungyong kangŭi,” Yŏyudang chŏnsŏn, 2: 4, 3a.
43 James Legge, “The Shoo King,” in The Chinese Classics (Hong King: Hong Kong University Press, 1960), vol. III, p. 320-326.
says, is a mistake. We should go back to the original meaning of the Classics and treat dirt, fire, water, wood, and metal as the five basic material entities (in other words, substances) that they are.44
Tasan’s insistence on reading terms literally, in terms of substances, as seen in his
discussion of yin, yang, and the Five Phases, also led him to define another basic Neo-Confucian assumption, that human beings share one “substance” (ch’e) with the cosmos. Tasan launched a frontal assault on the core Neo-Confucian notion that human beings form one body with the universe, along with its accompanying assumption that human beings and animals share the same basic nature. Reading the term ch’e in its narrow literal meaning of “body,” rather than in its more common philosophical meaning of potential or un-activated function, Tasan argued that it is contrary to both the words of the Classics and the nature of the real world to say that all the things in the universe share one “ch’e.” “How can we possibly think that we share one body with plants, trees, and animals?” he asked.45 Tasan could only ask that question because he
understood “ch’e” in its literal sense, as a separate and distinct physical entity rather than as one node in a network of interactions.
Tasan was drawn to the Catholic notion of separate and distinct substances because of his own personal experience with self-cultivation. In mainstream Neo-Confucianism, since human beings, like everything else in the universe, are inextricably intertwined with the cosmic network of appropriate relationships that constitutes the universe, human nature is essentially good. In other words, it is our nature to act in accordance with the cosmic network in which we are
44 Chŏng, “Sangsŏ kohun” [Ancient lessons from the Book of History] Yŏyudang chŏnsŏn, 2:
25: 30a-31b.
45Chŏng, “Chungyong Kangŭi”, Yŏyudang chŏnsŏ, II, 4: 8b-9a.
embedded. However, Tasan, in reflecting on his own attempts to consistently adhere to the moral principles of Confucianism, realized that he interacted with people and the world around him as a separate and distinct individual. That was the only way he could explain his inability to live up to his own high moral standards. Tasan seized upon the notion of individual substance as a way to explain his own moral frailty and that of humanity in general.
Tasan and the Modern World View
Much of what Tasan had to say when he wielded his substantial perspective against core Neo-Confucian concepts echoes what Matteo Ricci and others wrote in their Thomistic criticism of Neo-Confucianism.46 Moreover, though it would be a mistake to see Ricci and his missionary colleagues in China as representing modern Europe, Tasan’s adoption of a a greater focus on individual concrete objects rather than the interactions among them was a step toward the world- view that underlay early modern science. By shifting attention from nebulous concepts of cosmic processes toward specific material objects, Tasan took a preliminary step toward conceiving the universe in quantitative rather than qualitative terms. In addition, by treating yin, yang, and the Five Phases as natural objects of limited scope, he began the process of separating cosmology from axiology. This shift in perspective paved the way for a science that could study nature on its own terms instead of imposing moral assumptions onto unconscious natural objects and giving them a moral role. In other words, he extracted the “is” from the “ought,” a prerequisite
46Two articles in English that discuss the influence of Jesuit publications on how Tasan thought about the material world are Yung Sik Kim, “Science and the Confucian Tradition in the Work of Chŏng Yagyong,” Tasanhak [Journal of Tasan Studies], vol. 5 (June, 2004), pp.127-166, and Song Young-bae, “A Comparative Study of the Paradigms between Dasan’s Philosophy and Matteo Ricci’s Tianzhu shiyi,” Korea Journal, 41:3 (Autumn, 2001), pp. 57-99.
for objective scientific observation of the natural world. For a Korean living in the late 18th and early 19th century, these were bold steps, steps he probably would not have taken if he had not been stimulated by reading Western philosophical texts imported from China that showed him a different way of looking at the world.
That does not mean, of course, that Jesuit missionaries in China should get all the credit for Korea’s first steps toward modernity. Tasan deserves much more of that credit. First of all, he was not the only one who read those books. But he was one of the few (Hong Taeyong and Pak Ch’iwon are two others) who incorporated elements of the natural philosophy in those books into his own philosophy. He was intelligent enough, and creative enough, to recognize that there were some flaws in the traditional Neo-Confucian perspective on the natural world, and that Western philosophy could help heal those flaws. He was also creative enough to incorporate those Western ideas he found useful into a philosophy that was still, at its core, Confucian. He used his new notion of substance, for example, to propose new ways of reading the Confucian Classics. And, being the good Confucian he was, he claimed that he was actuallly restoring the original reading rather than proposing a radically new interpretation.
Tasan kept one foot solidly in the Confucian world even as he stretched his other foot toward the West. In doing that, he constructed a bridge between East and West. Unfortunately, since his philosophical writings were not widely read until the 20th century, few in the 19th century knew about the bridge he built and therefore few tried to cross it. However, just because Tasan did not have much impact on his time, we should not downplay how important his
accomplishment was. Tasan shows us that it is possible to draw insights from both Western and Confucian traditions and use them to build a coherent philosophy. That is a contribution we who live in multi-cultural globalized world today can appreciate, and should learn from.