한말 유학자의 위기의식과 근대문명 담론 비판 - 艮齋 田愚의 梁啓超 비판을 중심으로 -

Abstract

This paper is an analysis of the writings of Jeonwu, who was a Confucian scholar and criticized the scholarship of Liang Qichao of China at the time of great changes on the threshold of modernity, when the shock of Western civilization was shaking all the systems and institutions of the Joseon society to its foundations. As a distinguished thinker, politician, writer and journalist representing modern China, Liang Qichao had a great impact on Chinese people with his vast output of editorials and writings, as well as on the Confucian intellectuals of Korea at the end of the Korean Empire(1897~1910), who were engaged in the patriotic enlightenment movement. One of the harsh critics of Liang Qichao would be found in Jeonwu, a Confucian scholar at the time, who left to posterity the largest number of critical reviews of the discourse of the Chinese man of letters. To be sure, most of the Confucian scholars in Korea at the end of the Korean Empire were in agreement on their disapproving stance on the ideas and theories of Liang Qichao. Most of them, however, remained just sporadic occurrences and perhaps no one ever challenged Liang Qichao’s thoughts and pointed out their potentially harmful consequences as much as Jeonwu did. An analysis is made of Jeonwu’s criticism of the ideas of pragmatism and utilitarianism, freedom and equality, the people’s rights and nationalism that he found in Liang Qichao’s discourses. Particularly, Jeonwu singled out the ideas of equality and the people’s rights as two major threats that would undermine the moral principles he conceived. He understood that the concept of equality was an attempt to see the relationship of the ruler and the ruled, father and son, and husband and wife on equal terms, and as such, a misleading and malicious idea that would overthrow the Confucian order. Jeonwu criticized that behind these ideas were the motive to put the people under the tyranny of the government. His intention was to keep the Confucian order by underlining the duty and role, rather than the rights, of the individual as the agent of moral practice. The ideas of Liang Qichao were a result of his struggle to see a modern civilized country established in China, by means of creating sinmin(新民) in urgent circumstances of the invasion of the Great Powers of the world. As a Confucian scholar, on the other hand, Jeonwu was concerned with preserving the values and purity of Confucianism and understood Liang Qichao as a figure who forsook the moral principles of humanity by giving the first priority to the wealth and power of the nation.