유가 귀신론의 사유 구조와 주희 귀신론의 독법

Abstract

In the traditional era, the political and metaphysical significance of sacrificial rituals was much more diverse and profound than today, and the description and definition of spirits (鬼神) as objects of sacrificial rituals have also been various since ancient times. As the Confucian ritual tradition took shape of its own, the concept of spirits began to be contemplated and thus philosophized, and at the time of Zhuxi it came to be formalized as one of the central concepts of Neo-Confucian ontology. Therefore, in order to understand the concept of spirits, it can be said that it is necessary to examine how the concept of spirits in the Confucian tradition, which is the ideological origin, is formed in the Confucian classics. In this paper, the discourse on spirits and rituals in Confucian classics is analyzed focusing on The Doctrine of the Mean and Mencius, and the two complementary positions on the sources and objects (spirits or ancestors) of the sacrificial rituals are presented to reveal the multi-layered structure of the concept of spirits, and to review critically the concept of spirits in previous studies in the light of the connection between the Confucian classics and Zhuxi’s understanding of spirits. From the comparative perspective with previous research, this study has two aspects of significance. First, by clarifying the structure of the theory of spirits in the Confucian tradition, which has not received much attention in the existing study of Zhuxi’s theory of spirits, it is possible to lay the groundwork for a richer consideration of the concept of spirits in the context of the studies of Confucian classics. Second, it proposed a more detailed exploration based on the academics of the traditional era by presenting a new angle of reading to existing attempts to consistently explain the concept of spirits in the entire system of Zhuxi’s philosophy.