퇴계 고종기(考終記)의 교육적 함의

Abstract

The life of a human being is two-faced. Namely, humans are entities who possess the duplicity of life and death. The majority of them, however, view life as a positive concept, and death as something more negative. While birth is given in the absence of an individual's intention, it is possible enough for death to involve at least some willful elements. That granted, how should people act when faced with the crossroad of life and death? Recently, our society has seen a sharp rise in the number of suicides, which is becoming a major social problem; for example, teenagers' suicides committed because of their grade, twenties' and thirties' suicides caused by social life, forties' suicides caused by economical problems, and so on. In the end, the terminal point at which life arrives is death, and in order for an individual to receive positive remarks about that life after death, he or she should make sure that the final destination should not be death in vain but be sublime death. The purpose of this study is to review on what the beautiful ending of life is, based on the Toe-Gye's Ko-Jong-Gi(考終記), who was the great Confucian in Choson dynasty. In fact, the historical records in the Toe-Gye's Ko-Jong-Gi(考終記) are very simple. This paper, however, tries to examine and seek valuable meanings about life and death through Toe-Gye's Ko-Jong-Gi(考終記) in which his philosophical perspective on ending one's life and greeting death is well revealed, First is the positive value he had on the matter of life and death. Commonly spoken is the dichotomy in which the negation of life is equivalent to the positiveness of death, and the positiveness of life is to the negation of death. However, this is contradictory each other. The idea that the strong attachment toward life causes disgrace of death and that the negation of life leads to incorrect thought is definitely wrong. In addition, it is totally misled to think that death is referred to as a means to evade tough lives. Instead, more constructive than the idea above is the concept that the positiveness of life is that of death and the negation of life is disgrace of death. When facing death, only the people who have sufficiently enjoyed their lives and realized the core of the philosophy of life can end their lives gracefully. Second is the complete harmony between the filling and the emptiness. Our contemporaries have stronger material desires than ever. People are widely engaged in a competitive struggle in which they try to accumulate more wealth, gain power over others, and also communicate with others to keep the relationships in such a situation. However, as a proverb says, life is 'Naked came we into the world and naked shall we depart from it'. People are born and dead without belongings. That is the life. Competition and harmony is also a natural phenomenon happening in a society where we are living. Adequate balances are also required to maintain the society. Most suicide attempts made are caused by negative views on life, which might be results induced by the unbalance between the filling and the emptiness. Humans' value is recognized for itself in Nature. The attitude of life following the order of Nature is necessary for our contemporaries.