한국의 문헌에 나타난 장애인관 = Views About People with Disabilities in Korean Literature

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Views about people with disabilities in different periods of Korean history show various ways how general people treated people with disabilities. Ancient and new-style novels demonstrated negative views about people with visual impairments while contemporary novels show positive views about those people. However, most of the people with hearing impairments in Korean contemporary literature were treated negatively and did not have sound self-concept.
Korean literature describes people with disabilities as being spiritless. General people considered that the causes of disabilities were resulted from committing sins and breaking taboos and; therefore, most of the people with disabilities appeared in Korean literature were viewed negatively and as a burden. Some people explain that this prejudice towards people with disabilities expressed in the Korean literature comes front Korean traditional mentality of fatalism and shamanism. Buddhists reason that Karma resulted in disabilities. The thought of reincarnation and Karma intertwined with the notion of mercy from Buddhism and perfect virtue from confucianism, both of which are the basis of Korean mentality. withthis thinking structure, people who were buddhists and confucians treated people with disabilities sympathetically and mercifully.
There are several reasons that the Korean people have this prejudice towards people with disabilities. The first reason of the prejudice is related to universalism. Korean people have strong consciousness for homogeneity and reject heterogeneity. Korean traditional society needed common and average people to maintain an settled, agrarian society and this made the consciousness for homogeneity strong.
The second reason of the Korean people's prejudice towards people with disabilities has to do with perfectionism. Individuality was not well accepted in Korean society. Instead, people with a little of everything were respected. Therefore, general people held people with disabilities in contempt because they considered those with disabilities as imperfection. The people with disabilities had to be outsiders and individuals separated from the society with average and perfect people.
The third reason is related to transposition. In a society, there is a mechanism that people formulate and sacrifice the inferiority to resolve their own frustration. In ancient Korea, the nobility suppressed the lower classes and the lower classes suppressed people with disabilities. Therefore, the prejudice towards people with disabilities in ancient Korean society came form this mechanism.
The fourth reason of the prejudice towards people with disabilities in the ancient Korean society is the lack of meta-cognition. Europe and America developed with individuality based on meta-cognition of each person him/her-self while Korea did not have the basis and developed with perfectionism of other people's views. Consequently, people who did not have something that other people have were considered as the inferiority.
In Korea, the prejudice towards people with disabilities comes from the perfectionism. However, according to philosophical human studies, there is no perfect person. When people recognize we progress and change, the prejudice against people with disabilities will disappear. After all, from the view of a philosophical human study, disability is one of the common phenomena.