Chapter II, Sec. 1 (a–c): Modernity, Eastern Origins & Learning (學)

Section 1. Modernity and Indigenous Modernity

a. Modernity and the Consilience of Sacred and Profane

The concept of "Modernity" has been venerated as a symbol of civilization across both East and West — a defining quality that liberated humanity from the shackles of darkness and restored the power of reason. Modernity may be defined as a mode of life that takes science and technology as the foundation for understanding the world, combining them with capital and the state to objectify nature and human beings and to administer them efficiently.¹ Modernity was a universal value discovered by humanity through the trial and error of a long history, and thus "modernity" came to represent a shared aspiration of the world. Before the modern era, humanity lived under the dominion of power, and it was only after collective struggle for liberation from absolute power that modernity was attained. Lee Do-heum (이도흠) describes the power of the modern age as follows:

Humanity emerged from the Middle Ages — that "garden of magic" — and ushered in a contemporary world governed by reason and science. The power of modernity was truly immense. It dismantled the world ruled by ignorance and barbarity through reason and science, and redesigned it on the basis of the principles of rationality and scientific knowledge.² Over more than a million years of human evolutionary history, modernity was an unprecedented era that for the first time freed humanity from the material terror of nature and starvation, and — though relative deprivation remained — allowed ordinary citizens to enjoy the material abundance once reserved for emperors. Human life expectancy, which had barely exceeded thirty years, expanded after the modern era to eighty years today; humans, having ascended to a god-like status, finally became largely atheists and materialists instead.

Modernization, modernity, and modernism have all been central topics of contemporary society. Compared to modernism, modernization and modernity are said to generate relatively little disagreement regarding their definitions. Modernization refers to a series of technological, economic, and political developments associated with the Industrial Revolution and its effects, while modernity refers to the social conditions and modes of experience that emerged as results of those developments.³

However, the consequence of unleashed desire was that modernity once again brought humanity to the brink of unprecedented annihilation, and post-modernism — a critical theory of modernity — gained enormous popularity. Critique of modernity has grown fierce, yet this is precisely because modernity was an era that conferred benefits upon humanity unlike any before; the question of why such benefits arose is still under investigation.

Weber, the most representative theorist of classical modernity, summarized modernity as the "rationalization of all of society" and subdivided it into (1) rational capitalism, (2) a rational legal-administrative system (the rule-of-law state), and (3) rational social differentiation. Weber's argument on modernity is said to be concentrated in the famous "Author's Preface" to his Collected Essays in the Sociology of Religion.⁴ In Weber's writings, modernity is compressed into "rationality." In response, the post-modernists — theorists who critique modernity — identify this rationality as the core problem of modernity. Post-modernists argue that the rationality of the modern age is summarized as reason-centrism (logocentrism), grounded in Descartes' (René Descartes, 1596–1650) methodological skepticism — "I think, therefore I am" (Cogito, ergo sum) — and they contend that this rationality is the cause of the numerous problems of modernity. Post-modernists argue that modernity as a narcissistic identity — denying Ideas and God, and re-establishing all laws of cognition, existence, and value from within the self — inevitably leads to a conclusion like that of Sartre (Jean-Paul Sartre, 1905–1980): "Hell is other people."⁵ Accordingly, they call for a relational, generative, processual, and deconstructive rationality that accommodates the other. Post-modernity can be defined as a tendency that resists modernity and pursues its alternatives.⁶

Critiques of Descartes' reductionist rationality originate, in the longer view, from the expressivist metaphysics of Spinoza (Baruch Spinoza, 1632–1675) and Leibniz (Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, 1646–1716), and their contemporary moment was developed in different fields by Nietzsche (Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, 1844–1900), Bergson (Henri-Louis Bergson, 1859–1941), and Husserl (Edmund Husserl, 1859–1938), eventually reaching the representative post-modernity theorists such as Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida (Jacques Derrida, 1930–2004), and Lacan.⁷ Post-modernism was introduced to the United States by René Girard (René Girard, 1923–2015) — who is today called the savior of Christianity — and became unusually prominent even in the United States, where analytic philosophy dominates, eventually becoming one of the main currents in European and American humanities and social sciences.⁸ Consequently, critiques from the perspective of traditional Anglo-American philosophy and orthodox modernity have also grown louder.⁹

The advances achieved by modernity compared to previous eras, and the changes after modernity — that is, the differences between "modernity" and "post-modernity" as argued by post-modernist theorists — can be summarized as in Table 1 below. In this paper, "post-modernity" and "post-contemporaneity" are used interchangeably.¹⁰

The post-modernism debate was triggered by the French student movement of May 1968 and became highly active in Korea as well in the 1990s. The post-modernism debate in Europe, especially France, began with the dispute between Sartre's Existentialism and Lévi-Strauss's (Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1908–2009) Structuralism, but subsequently this debate extended into a critique of the modern rationality represented by Sartrean existentialism and of Communism, forming a grand current in contemporary philosophy such as post-structuralism theory.¹¹

[Table 1: Overview of the Medieval, Modern, and Post-Modern Eras¹²]

| | Medieval | Modern | Post-Modern | |---|---|---|---| | Superstructure | God-centered | Human-centered | Ecological paradigm | | | Dominance of the Sacred | Principle of reason and rationality | Deconstruction of reason-centrism | | | God is truth | Absoluteness and universality of truth | Relativity and unknowability of truth | | | Superstition and magic | Science | Indeterminacy of scientific (truth) | | | The Good, or God, is Beauty | Secularization of art; pursuit of self-purposiveness | Heterogeneity, hybridity, and deconstruction in art | | | The self subordinated to God | Subject | Intersubjectivity | | | Space of life | Reality | Simulacrum | | | Roman and Chinese centrism | Eurocentrism | Globalization and localization | | | Script of the center | Script of the state | Image | | Base | Feudal system | Capitalist system | Late capitalist system | | | Pre-industrial society | Industrial society | Post-industrial society |

The reason why post-modernity discussions have grown increasingly important is that modernity, despite its epochal achievements, has come to approach humanity as an even greater danger. Accordingly, not only have numerous studies on post-modernity focused on critiquing modernity, but considerable research has also been conducted on alternative modernities. Research on alternative modernity has centered primarily on the concept of Multiple Modernities — which, like post-modernity theory, focuses not so much on theoretical speculation as on the history of modernity as it appeared in cultural spheres different from the West. Multiple Modernities is distinguished from alternative modernity. The theory of Multiple Modernities is said to have first made its organized appearance in the special issue of the journal Daedalus titled "Early Modernities" in 1998. Comparative historical sociologists such as Shmuel N. Eisenstadt (1923–present), Björn Wittrock (1945–present), and Johann Pall Arnason (1940–present) are said to represent this position.¹³

Furthermore, they argue that today's modernity must be understood as a global modernity encompassing Western modernity, and that — as seen in the case of Song dynasty China — this constitutes a Multilayered Modernity resulting from the mutual interactions of multiple civilizations. That is, before Western modernity there existed a proto-modernity, and after Western modernity came a colonizing-colonized modernity, which has since become today's multilayered global modernity.¹⁴ The argument is that the "fetishism of European modernity" — the view that modernity originated only in the West — constitutes a major obstacle to the construction of alternative modernities today.

Proponents of alternative modernity propose the Consilience (統攝, encompass) model as an alternative to Western modernity centered on Cartesian rationality. This consilience is not the biological consilience proposed by E. O. Wilson (Edward Osborne Wilson, 1929–2021), but rather a socio-religious model of modernity that transforms the boundary between the Sacred (聖) and the Profane (俗). In consilience, the center does not exclude the periphery but includes and controls it. Modernity signifies the transition from "Consilience 1" — in which the Sacred (聖) encompassed the Profane (俗) after the Axial Age¹⁵ — to "Consilience 2," in which the Profane (俗) encompasses the Sacred (聖). In Consilience 2 as well, the Sacred has not disappeared but has merely retreated from the position of control, and has in fact become more important. This consilience theory can well explain both Weber's account of Western modernity — including Calvin's doctrine of predestination — and the early modern development of Song dynasty China achieved through Neo-Confucianism rather than Western modernity. For, as explained in the sociology of religion, the relationship of consilience between Sacred and Profane — the intensification of the divine through the reallocation of Sacred and Profane — is a universally human phenomenon.¹⁶ The development of history through the intensification of the divine via the reallocation of Sacred and Profane is said to be a hidden developmental formula in the intellectual history of China.¹⁷

Consilience explains the religiosity underlying rationalization and thus illuminates the contradictory role played by Confucianism in East-West modernity — a role that has not yet been well understood. The prominent case of Liang Qichao (梁啓超, 1873–1929), the representative modernization theorist of China who was a contemporary of Weber, provides an illustrative example. His attempt at the modernization of China through Confucianism failed. Weber's observation was accurate: Liang Qichao did not realize that Western modern rationality was a modernity that inwardly encompassed religiosity, and his attempt to achieve modernity through a Confucianism stripped of its religiosity was precisely the reason for the failure of his Confucian modernization.¹⁸

Multiple Modernities can be applied to Donghak (동학, 東學) as well. Donghak can be interpreted as the culmination of the Joseon trend of "everyone becoming a literatus (yangban)," a trend traceable from the period after the Imjin War (Japanese invasions of 1592–1598) through to Jeong Yak-yong. The similarity between Donghak and the Protestant Reformation, which became the precursor of Western modernity, has been noted by several scholars. If modernity is the consilience transition in which the Profane (俗) encompasses the Sacred (聖), then Donghak Thought can be understood as an alternative modernity. Indeed, Daesoon Thought — which emerged some 120 years after Donghak Thought — had already foreseen that such modernity would become a great threat and calamity to humanity.¹⁹

More than 120 years later, modernity has in fact been identified as the cause of the current crisis of human extinction, and numerous studies have been conducted to seek solutions for its reconstruction. Discussions of post-modernity are now framed in terms of reflexive modernity — emphasizing reflection on modernity, as in the work of Beck and others²⁰ — or Zygmunt Bauman's (1925–2017) Liquid Modernity, which emphasizes the processual and fluid characteristics that impede decision-making.²¹ Post-modernism has now become one of the mainstream currents in European continental and Anglo-American intellectual circles. Yet, as the prominent social scientist Jürgen Habermas (1929–present) has observed, despite much research, the modern age remains an incomplete project and object of reconstruction — one in which late modernity cannot yet be discussed.²² In fact, tracing the etymology of the word "modern" reveals that modernity itself may carry the meanings of both the "modern" and "post-modern" simultaneously.

The Oxford Dictionary defines "mode" — the etymology of "Modernity" — as "now, here." Despite prolonged debate, the ultimate origins of this etymology remain unclear. Although many theories of modernity have been proposed, it has not yet been established why the new current of thought that countered the Middle Ages was named "Modernity." There is, however, a theory that the word mode — meaning "now, here," which had been in use since before the Roman era — is related to a pre-Christian Gnostic tradition also connected to the Chinese character "巫 (mu/shaman)"; and that since modernity originated as a counter-culture against Christianity, it adopted this term to emphasize its oppositional character.²³ Since modernity and post-modernity overlap in today's reality, "now, here" can mean both modernity and post-modernity simultaneously. In any case, the etymology of "Modernity" itself demonstrates that modernity may carry the meanings of both the "modern" and the "post-modern" at the same time.

This paper seeks to draw attention to Indigenous Modernity (Autogenous Modernity, 자생적 근대성) as a concept of modernity capable of synthesizing alternative modernity, Multiple Modernities, post-modernity, multilayered modernity, reflexive modernity, and liquid modernity. Indigenous Modernity means that there was modernity within our own tradition, and that there existed a modernity that revived our tradition in opposition to Western modernity. If one overcomes the Weberian consciousness of modernity and escapes the Western perspective, it becomes possible from an objective and historically grounded standpoint to discover indigenous modernity in Donghak Thought and Daesoon Thought. It is useful to examine the pioneering approach of Harold J. Berman. In 1983, he published a study on the formation of the Western legal tradition. According to him, when we re-narrate the past, we must "go beyond Marx and Weber" and also overcome the errors of various Western nationalisms, religious prejudices, and the historical materialism and ideal-type analysis of the nineteenth century. Regional nomenclature provides one example: the distinction between East Asia and Southeast Asia is not based on historical reality and internal logical structures, but is rather an arbitrary division based on the strategic regional configuration of the United States after World War II — a flawed practice that could, if applied carelessly, paralyze intellectual inquiry.²⁴ Such attempts have been made by the Kyoto School (京都學派) in Japan and by Wang Hui (汪暉) and others in China, and have become widely known.²⁵

In the West, modernity is a concept that allowed individuals to regain the personal freedoms lost to ecclesiastical power through the secularization of religion — particularly the Reformation — thereby enabling industrialization. In the East, modernity was a concept that liberated the people from irrational forms of oppression, despite the enormous suffering inflicted by the West. Accordingly, when discussing modernity, the West has primarily emphasized disenchantment through the Reformation and Industrial Revolution, while the East has primarily emphasized autogenousness — that is, nationalist movements. Twentieth-century modernism, which can be considered the symbol of modernity, is also interpreted, even in the field of art where it manifests most clearly in everyday life, as a cultural hybrid produced by the propagation of East Asian culture to Europe beginning in earnest in the sixteenth century.²⁶ Scholars who argue for the Eastern origins of Western modernity contend that even multilayered modernity is an insufficient concept for explaining reality, because Western modernity itself is already a cultural hybrid produced by the propagation of East Asian culture to Europe.

Indigenous Modernity also simultaneously manifests both the character of modernity and of post-modernity. Just as the compressed modernization achieved by non-Western regions constituted material modernization, alternative modernity likewise compresses both modernity and post-modernity. Post-modernity theorists argue that the indigenous modernity that appears in non-Western regions may be more suited as an alternative modernity than the post-modernity sought within the West itself. This has been termed "Thinking from the Outside" and became a major basis for post-modern theory after structuralism. Moreover, the recently emphasized Eastern origins of Western modernity draw even greater attention to Multiple Modernities as post-modernity — that is, to indigenous modernity. Since the advent of the New Science movement, many researchers have sought alternatives to modernity in actual Eastern thought. Since the emergence of post-modernism, this search has expanded from the sciences to the humanities and social sciences, and in particular, modernity and post-modernity have formed a point of convergence where Eastern and Western religious thought meets. Modernity always becomes most clearly visible through comparison with the medieval and post-modern.

As with the consilience theory of Multiple Modernities or the theory of reflexive modernity, modernity today has become a problem of reflection — a power striving to escape its own limits — namely, the boundary between the Sacred and the Profane: the problem of Liminality. In the case of the East in particular, it becomes the problem of the Liminality of Correlative Thinking (상관적 사유), which is the methodological approach of Eastern philosophy. The ultimate Liminality becomes the will to choose the Sacred over the Profane.²⁷ Because human beings ceaselessly seek to leave the Profane and move toward the Sacred, religion — the search for ultimate reality — comes into being.

In this regard, the modernity of Korea today is being sought from Donghak.²⁸ It is held that the concept of the nation-state first arose in Korea through Donghak. However, this concept of modernity beginning with Donghak is deeply contested. Colonial modernity theorists regard Donghak as mere ideology. For the colonial modernity theorist, Donghak is simply the resistance of a powerless populace.²⁹ For the internal development theorists, Donghak is a manifestation of the sprouts of modernity, but lacks an ideational background. However, Donghak is grounded in the intrinsic principle of Eastern thought — "the principles of the universe are inherent in the body, and thus the mind of the people is the mind of Heaven" — and is related to the indigenous modernity of the East, namely the Liminality of Correlative Thinking. The use of the term "Donghak" can be said to express the distinctive problematic consciousness of Donghak.³⁰ Among all the world's civilizations that resisted Western imperialism, only Korean Donghak made the methodology of scholarship — as did Nisbett — its primary theme of resistance. Until now, Donghak has been studied only from the perspective of popular resistance movements, and thus needs to be re-examined from the standpoint of intrinsicness in terms of paradigm and methodological approach.³¹ Just as with tradition, a balanced perspective is needed when it comes to modernity.

Focusing on this point, this paper presents existing prior research that studies Donghak Thought through its philosophical methodology of thought in a diachronic manner from the perspective of "the continuity and transformation of tradition,"³² with the aim of understanding the philosophical methodology of Donghak Thought through a deeper approach, and through this to understand the context and validity of the indigenous modernity proposed by Donghak Thought and Daesoon Thought.

Daesoon Thought foresaw long ago — more than 120 years in advance — the crisis of human extinction caused by the distorted Western concept of modernity that excluded the East. Weber distinguishes between the early capitalism initiated by the Puritan spirit of Protestantism and modern capitalism today, focused solely on economic efficiency.³³ Weber's observation that the character of capitalism — the defining feature of modernity — had changed is correct, but his theory that capitalism could only arise from the Western Christian perspective has been refuted both theoretically and practically by the East's overtaking of the West today.³⁴ The concept of modernity proposed by Daesoon Thought — a modernity of Haewon-sangsaeng (解冤相生, the resolution of grievances and mutual beneficence) fusing East and West — stands out as a new solution to the problem of reconstructing the concept of modernity.³⁵ There is also an analysis that the worldwide boom of the Korean Wave (Hallyu) can be attributed to Korean religious philosophy as it is well represented in Daesoon Thought.³⁶ The concept of modernity proposed by Daesoon Thought — like other Eastern thought traditions — is only now revealing its true meaning in an era where Western science has reached its most advanced stage. At the time, the modernity that Daesoon Thought proposed through its synthesis of Eastern and Western thought was largely misunderstood, obscured by the dazzling glamour of Western material civilization. An opening for understanding only emerged when Western modernity became the epicenter of the modern crisis, and as numerous efforts to reconstruct modernity — including post-modernism — sparked a new-scientific turn in ontology, epistemology, and axiology across all fields of Western humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences, with Eastern Studies being proposed as the next stage beyond the New Science.³⁷

b. The Common Oriental Origin of Western Modernity and Indigenous Modernity

Today, unlike in the past when East Asia was evaluated as a stagnant civilization, research is proliferating showing that it was the modern West that was actually influenced by the East — this at a time when the three East Asian nations are the only non-Western civilizations to have achieved economic growth surpassing the West. Alongside recent research results in East Asian cultural studies, the indigenous modernity of modern Korea — long treated merely as an independent heritage of a bygone era — is also being reevaluated.³⁸

Examining the research of Thomas Metzger (Thomas A. Metzger, 1933–present) — who, unlike Weber (who could not read Chinese characters), could read Chinese and applied Weber's method to arrive at conclusions diametrically opposed to Weber's — one begins to understand the "indigenous modernity" of the East.³⁹ The recent findings on the sprouts of Eastern modernity — in connection with the theory of Eastern influence on modern Western culture — provide elements for reconstructing Korea's indigenous modernity and tradition. Furthermore, the interpretation of the modernity of Eastern culture from an Eastern perspective by Western scholars such as François Jullien, Andre Gunder Frank, John Hobson, Herrlee Glessner Creel, and Alexander Woodside (1938–present) is also a factor prompting the reconsideration of Korea's indigenous modernity and tradition.⁴⁰

The distinguishing characteristic of Donghak-related thought that sets it apart from other religious movements in the world at that time was its assertion of the Eastern origins of Western modernity. The Eastern origins of Western modernity — expressed indirectly in Donghak through terms such as "Donghak" and "again, the Great Opening (다시 개벽)" — appear even more explicitly in Daesoon Thought, which claims to be the "true Donghak," through the examples of Matteo Ricci⁴¹ and the eminent monk Jinmuk (진묵, 震黙),⁴² who respectively transferred the Civilization Deity (문명신, 文明神) and the Tao-transmission Deity (도통신, 道通神) of the East to the West. Even at the time when Donghak Thought was being established, the "Sinocentrism of Western Learning" (西學中原論) — the view that the origins of Western learning lay in China — was dominant in China, and in Korea as well it was being further developed after Seo Myeong-eung (서명응, 徐命膺).⁴³

Since China's May Fourth Movement (五四運動), traditional Eastern scholarship has been denigrated as irrational, pre-modern learning. Yet in Europe as well, the repudiation of traditional Eastern scholarship was a phenomenon that had occurred barely more than one hundred years earlier. On the contrary, in Europe — from the time of Matteo Ricci through the Age of Enlightenment — in what was called the "China craze" (chinoiserie), scholars who formed the foundations of modern thought, including Voltaire (1694–1778), Adam Smith (1723–1790), and Rousseau (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1712–1778), unanimously sought the basis for their own arguments in Chinese thought transmitted by Matteo Ricci. Europe's viewing of Chinese civilization as pre-modern began only when colonialism commenced after the Enlightenment. Documents from that period, which have been declassified today, clearly reveal the concealed Eastern origins of Western modernity.⁴⁴

Looking at the records of that era, Chinese society — which was more morally upright than Europe even without religion — appeared as a fine alternative to European society, which did not even shy away from fratricidal religious warfare under the pretext that the absence of religion leads to moral decay. In Europe at the time, where the basic conditions for freedom and equality — such as the civil examination system (科擧制) — had never existed and the Christian tradition was strong, the conditions were ripe for accepting China's secularized rational tradition without the side effects of imperial despotism.⁴⁵ In fact, Adam Smith's "invisible hand" — which today represents modernity — and Rousseau's theory of natural rights are said to be concepts developed by European intellectuals who were studying Chinese civilization, drawing inspiration from Eastern thought.⁴⁶

Weber's starting point for defining rationality as modernity — a universal value of humanity — appears to lie in Hegel's Absolute Spirit (Absolute Geist). Since the etymology of "universal" derives from "catholic," this appears to have been a very traditional issue in the West. Though the West called Christianity "catholic" and made it a universal truth, it experienced the countless contradictions of the Middle Ages. Once again, in the modern era, it can be said that Western modern thought — beginning with Descartes — represented the effort of the West to re-establish universality. Hegel stands in the lineage of Descartes and Kant.

The rationality Weber discovered appears to have had in mind Hegel's universal value, or Absolute Spirit, which develops through dialectics. Hegel assumes Western modern society to be the most developed modern society and places Eastern societies and others beneath it, explaining the process from primitive society to Western modern society dialectically. Weber accepted Hegel's view of Eastern society as a society in which the Absolute Spirit had not developed as far as in Western society, and designated Eastern society as pre-modern society or a patrimonial bureaucratic system; this became Weber's theory of Eastern society.

Weber's theory of Eastern society remains important today because his theory continues to be — even at present — the basic perspective through which the West views Eastern society, or through which Eastern intellectuals — in societies where Western influence is dominant — view their own societies. Although it has been nearly a hundred years since Weber advanced his theory of Eastern society, the absence of any counter-argument centering on the methodological approach to Weber's theory means that, when discussing indigenous modernity, this must necessarily be the first point of departure.

Metzger applied Weber's theory but, unlike Weber, argues that it was Easterners who possessed a tension like that of the Protestants. The tension of Easterners toward the world — manifested as a consciousness of anxiety and concern (憂患意識, uuhwan-uisik) — can be seen in the profiles of those who dedicated themselves to realizing democracy when Western democratic thought entered the East. From an Eastern perspective, democracy is an extension of bureaucracy rather than a revolution from below, and the extension of bureaucracy is a process of "inner sageliness and outer kingliness" (內聖外王); hence the extension of bureaucracy is true historical progress. The unparalleled development of East Asia today proves the validity of this Eastern perspective. In fact, there is also research suggesting that Donghak Thought had the character of a Reformation with respect to Neo-Confucianism, and that Joseon society was actually more civic in character than Western civil society.⁴⁷

Applying Metzger's theory, Eastern society turns out to be closer to modernity. If so, it becomes crucial to examine why modernization did not occur in the East before the West, and why the seeds of modern thought could sprout in the East earlier than in the West. Like Metzger, even though the consciousness of anxiety (憂患意識), which Weber speaks of, was more advanced in the East than in the West, the reason modernization occurred later in the East than in the West is related to the Eastern culture's emphasis on empathy. Eastern culture was ahead in terms of modernity through empathy, but fell behind the West in terms of modernization — the industrialization of modernity.

If we further distill Weber's theory of Eastern society, it can be summarized as follows: the East lacks rationality — that is, the East lacks consistency. The consistency Weber speaks of here is a Kantian consistency, as understood in the German society heavily influenced by Kant. As Weber sees it, Neo-Confucianism claims to emphasize Li (理, principle/reason), but there is no demonstration. Without demonstration, the principles of Neo-Confucianism do not constitute rationality (rationality) in Weber's sense.

However, recent scholarship is revealing that Weber's theory was shaped by Kant's influence at the time, which caused him to exclude discussions prior to Kant. Before Kant, Eastern thought in the West was considered rationality itself, unlike Kant's view. Rather, in the Age of Enlightenment, since Christian doctrine — the religion of the West — symbolized superstition, Enlightenment thinkers sought to adopt Chinese rationality under the banner of Enlightenment in order to eliminate the irrationality of Christian doctrine.

As exemplified by the May Fourth Movement (五四運動), when Donghak Thought was emerging, most of China — like Meiji Japan — took Westernization as the model of modernity; however, Donghak-related thought identified the Eastern origins of Western modernity and sought to integrate East and West. In particular, both thought systems sought to find responses to the global crisis brought about by Western modernity. Therefore, Korean modernity can serve as an alternative modernity to the crisis of modernity. Contrary to common wisdom, modernity actually originated in the East, and Korea — where Neo-Confucianism was more developed than in China — was ahead of China in this regard.

In the eighteenth century, Hume and Adam Smith interpreted Confucian thought — transmitted to them through Matteo Ricci — through the concept of "sympathy/empathy" and sought to establish a new foundation for Western moral theory.⁴⁸ The commonality between Confucian thought and the Enlightenment had already been noted, and a multilayered modernity theory was proposed viewing the commonalities between the two as coincidence; however, recent developments in empathy theory and the rediscovery of historical materials are revealing that the influence was in fact direct.

After learning from the East that ethics through empathy was possible, the West developed modernity through a reflection on unilateral submission to God. However, Western modernity soon became biased toward materialism and caused human arrogance, producing many problems. Consequently, reflexive modernity and post-modernity — which reflect on the modern age once again — were explored. What is important about Eastern indigenous modernity is that it constitutes a reflexive modernity that emphasizes reflection more than Western modernity. In particular, the empathy that is said to be the origin of Western modernity becomes meaningful when combined with reflection.

The background against which indigenous modernity is proposed lies in the debate between modernity and post-modernity raised by post-modernism. Modernity achieved countless advances compared to the Middle Ages, but also generated many serious problems, prompting the search for an alternative modernity.

c. "Learning (學)" as the Formal Framework of Indigenous Modernity

As the crisis of Western learning has become apparent, even the philosophy of science — which had dogmatically claimed that only Western learning qualified as science — has seen mounting calls for self-reflection. In the philosophy of science today, science is also used in the sense of Paul Feyerabend's methodological anarchism (Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge).⁴⁹ Methodological anarchism in science refers to a contemporary philosophy of science that holds that, as long as there is consistency and predictions match results — like Deng Xiaoping's "white cat, black cat" theory, where any cat that catches mice is a good cat — anything may be called science regardless of whether it fits the theoretical framework of normal science (the established scientific standard). This paper also employs the concept of the scientific character of Eastern learning from the perspective of methodological anarchism, but in a more restricted sense.⁵⁰ The scientific character of Donghak that this paper seeks to argue includes not only the methodological anarchism that traditional Eastern science also possessed, but additionally the falsifiability of being able to comparatively explain Eastern science through the theoretical structure of analytical, mainstream science. Conservative philosophy of science restricts science to falsifiable disciplines. In the Kuhnian school of philosophy of science, which regards science as a paradigm — a kind of collective agreement — the incommensurability of two sciences is emphasized; however, even for two sciences that are incommensurable due to methodological differences, if one can explain a new science using the terms of existing science and reveal their relationship — as with Lakatos's research programs — theoretical compatibility can be considered yet another form of falsifiability. Theoretical compatibility refers, for example, to the characteristic whereby the theory of relativity was able to explain all of Newtonian theory, and quantum mechanics was able to explain all of the theory of relativity. The reason Eastern science in Daesoon Thought has theoretical compatibility with Western science is attributable — as shown in Daesoon Thought — to Matteo Ricci's (Imadu, 이마두) transmission of Eastern science to the West (Jeon'gyeong [전경, 典經], "Gyoun" [교운, 敎運] 1-9).

The most distinguishing feature of Donghak as a religious thought — distinguishing it from other religions — is that it expresses religion through the academic term "hak (學, Learning)." Expressing religious thought through the term "hak" is consistent with the East Asian tradition of calling Confucianism "seongnihak (性理學, Neo-Confucianism)" for a long period. In fact, in East Asia, even Catholicism was called "seokhak (西學, Western Learning)," and other religions were likewise expressed through the academic term "hak." One reason why religion was traditionally expressed as "hak" in the East is that Eastern religion had a background in the natural sciences of astronomy and geography; and, as in the case of Dong Zhongshu (董仲舒, 176 BCE?–104 CE), who advocated the theory of natural disasters and anomalies (災異說, Jayi-seol), there was a tendency for astronomy and geography to take precedence over religion, and Eastern religion possessed a holistic character not distinguished from natural science.

The chapter "Nonhangmun" (論學文, Essay on Learning) in the Donggyeong Daejeon (東經大典, Eastern Canon), in which the term "Donghak" first appears, explains that the difference between Eastern religion and Western religion lies in the methodological approach to thought, such as the "individual-mindedness (各自爲心, gakja-wi-sim)" of Western Learning.⁵¹ In the study of East Asian religion, the methodological prerequisite that must first be resolved is the establishment of the religio-phenomenological meaning of "hak." It has long been argued that studying Eastern religions through the phenomenology of religion — the major contemporary methodology in religious studies — requires a phenomenology indigenous to East Asia.⁵²

In fact, recent research drawing attention to the "hak" of Donghak is being attempted in various ways. However, existing research that pays attention to "hak" has been conducted primarily at the level of "self-cultivation theory" (修養論, suyangnon) in Donghak, which receives much attention today; research paying attention to the phenomenology of religion and religio-anthropological study as a philosophical methodology unique to Korean religion has been rare.

The philosophical methodology of "hak" today falls broadly within the domain of worldview in the phenomenology of religion. The full emergence of worldview as an object of research in the phenomenology of religion today began with Ninian Smart (Roderick Ninian Smart, 1927–2001). The introduction of worldview as an object of research in phenomenology of religion, which was fully established beginning with Ninian Smart, traces back — from a wider perspective — to Dilthey (Wilhelm Dilthey, 1833–1911), the founder of hermeneutics, who used hermeneutics to demonstrate the intrinsic value of the humanities as opposed to the natural sciences.⁵³

Ninian Smart developed a "cross-cultural" phenomenology by mediating between Eliade's archetype-theoretic phenomenology of religion and van der Leeuw's "power"-centered phenomenology. This "cross-cultural" phenomenology broadly divides worldview as an object of religious-scholarly research into two categories. In Ninian Smart's cross-cultural phenomenology, religion can be seen as a system necessary for human beings to understand and live in the world, and this is further divided into a "Welterklaerungssystem" (World Explanation System) and a "Lebensbewael-tigungssystem" (Life Problem Overcoming System).⁵⁴ Ninian Smart further divided these into seven dimensions; these two categories are useful from the perspective of the "hak" as a religious methodology. Although Ninian Smart's theory may be criticized as yet another typology like Eliade's, Jonathan Z. Smith has acknowledged that Eliade's typology — despite its ambiguities — is a useful explanatory system for characterizing the features of religion.

When religion is thus divided into a "Welterklaerungssystem" and a "Lebensbewael-tigungssystem," the phenomenology of religion can be connected with the anthropology of religion, which studies religion as a process of human problem-solving. In the anthropology of religion, humanity's problem-solving through religion has been studied in three broad directions: principle, process, and structure.

First, with respect to principle, we can cite Arnold Van Gennep's (1873–1957)⁵⁵ theory of the "rite of passage" (通過儀禮, rite of passage) and Victor Turner's theory of Liminality — which developed from the "rite of passage" theory. The rite of passage theory, which explains the process of an individual's transformation into an adult, becomes, at the macro level, the Liminality theory that transforms an entire society. Applying this to the study of Donghak Thought, one can regard Donghak Thought and the Daesoon Thought that followed it as a single rite of passage. In the case of Kim Ji-ha (김지하), the liminal character of Donghak-related thought was expressed through the "Aesthetics of White Shadow" (흰 그늘의 미학); and in Daesoon Thought as well, there is research that has examined the Cheonjigongsa (天地公事, the Works of Renewing Heaven and Earth) from the perspective of liminal ritual.⁵⁶ This paper, building on Kim Tae-su's (김태수) research on the formal aspects of Cheonjigongsa, intends to focus on content-related aspects connected to modernity, utilizing the latest research results on Liminality.⁵⁷

Next, with respect to structure, the theory holds that each tradition manifests its own distinctive structure, and that each religion can be explained by differences in structure. If the dimension of principle viewed the worldview of religion as a "Life Problem Overcoming System," the explanation from the dimension of structure is closer to a "World Explanation System." Anthropology explaining religion from the structural dimension broadly traces its methodology to the philosophy of science in the Anglo-American and continental traditions. Both the Anglo-American and continental traditions explain "hak" through the term "paradigm." Yet their meanings differ. In the Anglo-American case, paradigm is related to the consent of a community.⁵⁸ In paradigm theory, since a particular truth is only a set of sequential hypotheses, changing the method can result in a different thing becoming truth. A paradigm is a kind of cognitive framework; when a new theory has a different problem framework, established scientists say it is not normal science. It took a long period of consensus-building within the scientific community before Einstein's theory of relativity was recognized as science. The fact that Eastern yin-yang-five phases (음양오행, eum-yang-o-haeng) thinking is not currently incorporated into science is arguably not a matter of scientific validity but rather a result of the paradigm (norm) that recognizes only reductionism as science.

From the perspective of paradigm, Eastern "hak (學)" takes "Correlative Thinking" (상관적 사유, sanggwan-jeok sayu) as its distinctive norm. "Correlative Thinking" is a term contrasted with "analytical thinking": whereas analytical epistemology holds that all things are independent and must be dissected in order to be cognized, Correlative Thinking is a mode of cognition that recognizes all things as interconnected and inseparable, and thus must be apprehended through their correlative relationships.

There has also been research that demonstrated through large-scale experiments that the methodological differences between Eastern and Western learning apply to the actual thinking patterns of contemporary Easterners and Westerners.⁵⁹ There is also research revealing that the yin-yang theory — the representative theory of Correlative Thinking — is actually a Correlative Thinking that has analytical thinking hidden within it.⁶⁰ From the perspective of Correlative Thinking, analytical thinking is also, at its core, a cyclical way of thinking — and thus ultimately a concealed Correlative Thinking. A study summarizing Eastern Correlative Thinking is the research of Jeong Woo-jin (정우진). Based on such research, the philosophical methodological approaches of East and West today can be broadly categorized into two: the Eastern generative method and the Western ontological method.⁶¹ Correlative Thinking corresponds to the Eastern generative method of thought — a deductive principle that generates from above to below — and this Eastern generative method of thought manifests broadly as Correlative Thinking and synchronicity.⁶²

Finally, with respect to process, worldview as religion can be understood as revitalization. Revitalization is a concept put forward in the revitalization model of the religious scholar Anthony F. C. Wallace. Revitalization appears in the process of cultural acculturation — in the process of accepting other learning systems — and becomes an important method for examining worldview as religion. This is because a religious worldview that does not change despite external changes can be understood as a process of the continuity and transformation of tradition, and this is accomplished through revitalization.

Bearing in mind the concept of "hak (學)" as a philosophical methodology as examined above, this study intends to employ simultaneously and in a three-dimensional manner the three methods of the anthropology of religion — which studies worldview as religion within the continuity and transformation of tradition — in order to compare Donghak Thought and Daesoon Thought. The continuity and transformation of tradition in Donghak Thought and Daesoon Thought manifests primarily through changes in the meanings of key terms and concepts. Therefore, this paper focuses on the key terms of the two thought systems, while using all three perspectives — structure, principle, and process — simultaneously and in a three-dimensional manner to grasp the continuity and transformation of their meanings. Through this, from the perspective of religion as worldview, the paper seeks to verify the extent to which Daesoon Thought was faithful to the continuity and transformation of the Eastern and Western traditions inherited by Donghak, using this as a criterion for determining whether Daesoon Thought can hold significance as the "true Donghak" (참동학).

d. The Theoretical Background of Indigenous Modernity: The East-West Distinction

In Donghak Thought and Daesoon Thought, the concept of East and West — that is, the distinction between East and West — appears as a very fundamental distinction, as exemplified by terms such as "Donghak" (Eastern Learning) and "true Donghak." If the East-West distinction appears as a fundamental distinction in philosophical thinking, then it is necessary to examine what the criterion for this distinction is and why the East-West distinction is fundamentally important.

Research on the differences between Donghak and Seokhak (서학, 西學, Western Learning) has been conducted in various areas, including differences in methodological approaches to thought between East and West. Empirical research on the differences in cognitive approaches between Easterners and Westerners from the perspective of cognitive psychology (認知心理學) was recently verified through experimental psychology by Nisbett (Richard Eugene Nisbett, 1941–present). In Nisbett's experiments, for Asians the world appears as a complex place subject to collective control rather than individual control, while for Westerners the world appears relatively simple and subject to highly individual control — the two worlds are truly different, he argues. In fact, Nisbett found that when watching a bird in flight, Westerners remember the number of birds while Easterners remember the background.⁶³

Various explanations have been offered regarding the methodological differences in thought between East and West. First, Feng Youlan (馮友蘭, 1894–1990) explained them through the difference between commercial and agricultural cultures. Feng Youlan argued that there was no epistemology in the East; the reason for this was that while commerce — which requires distinguishing the essence and substance of one's trading partner — developed in the West, the East, blessed with a favorable natural environment, placed importance on intuitive cognition in agriculture, and thus did not need an epistemology that distinguishes essence and substance as the West did.⁶⁴

Beyond the difference between commerce and agriculture, Kim Pil-nyeon (김필년) analyzed the origins of the East-West difference — which can be condensed into collectivism versus individualism — through the geo-environmental differences between Greece and the Warring States period of China during their respective Axial Age periods. Kim Pil-nyeon argues that in the West, logic developed because many different peoples lived together and required clear communication, while in China, since the issues of the Warring States were political problems, inner ethics developed.⁶⁵

Unlike environmental determinism, Park Dong-hwan (박동환) — who is credited with having developed a distinctively Korean logic — also explains the East-West difference, particularly Korea's distinctiveness, through a linguistic model. He argues that Korean logic is a circular logic of empty-word determination, where the periphery determines the center — different from that of both the West and China. Because Korean logic is the logic of empty-word determinism, it has the circular characteristic of being able to integrate any new theory whatsoever.⁶⁶

Owing to the differences between East and West, the actual cultures of East and West — as Nisbett argues — can be typologized by the relationship between whole and part. Choe Bong-yeong (최봉영) argues that each civilization can be classified according to whether it views the individual and community from an individualistic or holistic perspective: Western Christianity moves from a holistic-subordinate worldview, which views God and humans as hierarchically subordinate, to the modern individual-aggregate worldview; China has a holistic-partial (統體-部分者的) worldview; and India has a holistic-dependent origination (統體-緣起者的) worldview.⁶⁷

In the West, structural anthropologists represented by Lévi-Strauss demonstrated through their debates with existentialism that the thinking of primitive peoples also has structural principles no less sophisticated than Western thinking exemplified by existentialism. Structural anthropology called the indigenous people's system of thought "Savage Mind"⁶⁸ and argued that it consists of symmetrical thinking, like yin-yang. Applying the principles of structural anthropology to East and West, the fundamental cause of the differences between East and West would be that the symmetrical thinking — the "savage mind" — has been applied differently depending on the region. According to structural anthropology, the holistic thinking characteristic of the East is closer to symmetrical thinking, and this can be more rational than Western analytical thinking. Buddhism in particular is said to constitute the most circular form of symmetrical thinking: because Buddhism possesses śūnyatā (空, emptiness) — the apex of symmetrical thinking — it is said to coincide with the symmetry of all things.⁶⁹

After the emergence of structural anthropology, the West sought to find an "Outside Thinking" — a means for reflecting on Western thought — through the concept of Immanence (내재성, naejaesong). Immanence refers to the tacit rules shared within a specific culture, a characteristic that cannot be known without standing outside of it. For example, for a fish that lives its entire life in water, water becomes an immanence that is difficult to know without leaving the water. The immanence of the West that the West discovered — centered on post-structuralists — was the substance theory (実体論, substanceism), which Matteo Ricci had used when criticizing the Eastern correlative thinking of yin-yang and the five phases. Aristotle's substance theory is the theory that if the logical explanation of change is to be coherent, the process of change must necessarily be explained through substances possessing properties — atoms, earth-water-fire-wind, God, and so on. According to Matteo Ricci's substance theory — influenced by Aristotle — since the ultimate substance is God, the yin-yang-five phases and the li-qi theory (理氣論), which do not explain change through substance as God does, are not logical. In a cyclical worldview, the starting point of reality is not substance but resonance (感應, gamung).⁷⁰ François Jullien argues that while both East and West aimed at the unity of opposites, the immanence of the East — which does not posit substance — was able to escape the dogmatism characteristic of the West, albeit at the cost of lacking the concept of substance. Resonance becomes the precondition for the Eastern way of understanding things as resonance.

Post-structuralists such as Deleuze (Gilles Deleuze, 1925–1995), Foucault (Paul-Michel Foucault, 1926–1984), and Derrida (Jacques Derrida, 1930–2004) sought "Outside Thinking"⁷¹ — that is, the immanence of the West — because they had discovered traces of dogmatism in Western thought.⁷² The crossroads of Western thought — which led to the discovery of existence, but also to its expulsion — lay in the dogmatism of substance. Although Derrida and others criticized this dogmatism through terms such as "grammatology" and "phonocentrism," as Kim Ik-du (김익두) argued, what caused Western dogmatism — as also revealed in Aristotle's theory of tragedy — was the theory of substance, and there lay the inability to find an alternative within the West.

Deleuze, who devised the concept of immanence, criticized substantiality but did not critique the East.⁷³ Jullien used Deleuze's concept of immanence to seek "Outside Thinking" in the East. Jullien paid attention to the immanence of the East — which aims at the unity of opposites but does not posit substance. According to him, the holistic thinking of the East — though lacking the concept of substance — was able to escape the dogmatism of the West. Furthermore, Jullien demonstrates that the Eastern immanence was the very opposite of the Western, and thus Mencius's cultivation-theory concept of existence — rooted in this Eastern immanence — was of the same character as the moral foundation of Western modern thought, and can serve as an alternative case of problem-solving for Western thought.⁷⁴

Wang Hui (汪暉, 1959–present) — who has sought alternative modernity in Chinese thought — argues that it is possible to find an alternative modernity applicable to the contemporary world through the process of transformation of Eastern Correlative Thinking from antiquity onward. Wang Hui argues that as the feudal order of the Zhou dynasty collapsed, the Confucian thinking of the three dynasties of Xia-Shang-Zhou — centered on kings and aristocrats — was transformed. Wang Hui points to the error in the existing interpretation that Confucius's concept of Ren (仁, benevolence) was a rationalization of the sacredness of the Zhou dynasty's rites and music, which originated in shamanism, and argues instead that it was an attempt to restore it. By the same principle, he views the disaster-anomaly theories (災異論, jayi-ron) of the Han and Tang dynasties — in which strong centralized prefectural systems replaced feudalism — or the li-qi theories of the Song, Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties centered on bureaucracy — as also representing the restoration of a collapsed sacredness. Wang Hui — who gained world renown by pointing out errors in existing research on Lu Xun — argues that alternative modernity grounded in Chinese thought is also possible alongside the restoration of tradition.⁷⁵ Wang Hui's theory of alternative modernity corresponds to the Western theory of alternative modernity in that it explains modernity through the transformation of the relationship between Sacred and Profane.

Lim Heon-gyu (임헌규), who studies Confucian thought through the mind-body relationship in analytic philosophy, argues that the empathy-based interpretation of the mind in Mencius's famous "child falling into a well" passage — which formed the basis of Neo-Confucianism — has not yet been verified in terms of philosophy of mind, but that if it were verified, it could become an important philosophy of mind theory that comprehensively resolves problems that modern philosophy of mind has failed to solve through its mind-body relationship.⁷⁶ This could serve as an analytic-philosophical counter-argument to critiques of Correlative Thinking made from within analytic philosophy.⁷⁷

Hwang Tae-yeon (황태연), who has been tracing the Eastern origins of rationality found in Western modernity since Matteo Ricci, argues that the actual rationality of the West is not the Kantian rationality Weber spoke of, but rather the Confucian rationality of Confucius and Mencius, which was accepted before Kant.⁷⁸ Analytic philosophy — which represents rationality today — can, compared to Confucian rationality, be seen as the dogmatism latent in Western substantiality.

In sum, the differences in the thought systems of East and West arose from various causes, but can be summarized as the difference in immanence: the West's individual-substantial attribute versus the East's holistic attribute. Regarding the Western substance versus the Eastern attribute, Eastern thought can interpret this as the difference in yin-yang attributes found in texts such as the Huangdi Neijing (黃帝內經, Yellow Emperor's Classic of Internal Medicine). In the Huangdi Neijing, among the body's meridians (經絡), the yin meridians (陰經絡) with yin attributes flow upward from below, while the yang meridians (陽經絡) with yang attributes flow downward from above. Applying the yin-yang distinction of the Huangdi Neijing to the East and West: people of the West — who possess yang attributes — have a substantial thought system that moves from self to universe, like the yin meridian (upward from below); while people of the East — who possess yin attributes — have an attributive and holistic thought system that descends from the universe to self, like the yang meridian (downward from above). In the East, where the Earth Qi (地氣) is yang, people become yin-people (陰人) with yin attributes in order to maintain the balance of yin and yang; in the West, where the Earth Qi is yin, people become yang-people (陽人) with yang attributes. In Donghak Thought this is called "individual-mindedness (各自爲心, gakja-wi-sim)" of the West; in Daesoon Thought as well, the Jongun (鐘韻, Bell Resonance) expresses this as "Heavenly Qi descends (天氣下降, cheonggi-hakang) and Earth Qi ascends (地氣上乘, jigi-sangseung)," reproaching Western modernity — which thinks of the world from the self upward according to the principle of yin — for ultimately falling into material gain and profit (財利).

e. Correlative Thinking as the Philosophical Methodology of Indigenous Modernity

[Note: The text of subsection (e) was not present in the source file; the file ends at the passage above concluding the East-West Distinction section. The translated content above represents the complete text of the source file as provided.]