동아시아의 근대화와 인문학 = Modernization and the Humanities in East Asia

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

The Confucian tradition as the corpus of humanistic thinking in China became challenged by the impact of Western powers in the mid-19th century. After decades of trying to modernize the country, the Chinese finally abolished the civil service examination system in 1905. Following the death of the Confucian institution, they witnessed an iconoclasm which led to a disintegration not only of China´s political world order but also of its basis of Sinocentric idea of the traditional humanities. This conclusion of the May Fourth movement would be reincarnated by the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s. The problem is that, during the century of iconoclasm, no reconstruction of the humanities has been made. Today´s China is still searching for an alternative norm.
As for Japan, its modernization can not be in any context interpreted as the 'westernization.' On the contrary, Japan´s traditional humanities, an amalgamated body of the kangaku(漢學) and the kokugaku(國學), survived the Western impact. The very continuity and uniformity of the Japanese humanities generated an exceptional way of thinking for the ongoing 'successful' modernization, and finally established an anti-Western expansionist ideology for the colonial empire: the Japanese Orientalism.
The contemporary Korean humanities are suffering from a trifold problem. First of all, it cencerns with a universal aspect of the Chinese humanities. With the collapse of the Chinese world order, traditional Korea´s cultural periphery lost its center. Secondly, the Establishment of the contemporary South Korean humanities is dominated by students either of the Japanese Orientalism or of the American Orientalism. The Orientalism, as E. Said criticized, has speculated that Japan would be historical model. The idea was supported by a heavily materialist-oriented norm of modernization at the expense of the humanities. Thirdly, the ideological conflict between the two Koreas has made monocular both South and North Korean intellects.
However, the problem of Korean should not be confined into a notional one. It is a localized edition of global conflicts of the 20th century: Conflicts between universalism and parochialism, rhetoric and practice, tradition and modernity, material modernization and the humanities and son on. In this context, neither China´s deconstructive experience nor Japan´s 'success' story can serve as an uncontested model for the reestablishment of the humanities in Korea. On the other hand, if the Korean humanities successfully attain a totally new direction and an innovative methodology because of their own modern historical experiences, they will expectedly provide a key formula for the future of the humanities in general.