세계를 수집하다: ‘物’에 대한 인식의 역사와 明代 출판물 속의 博物學

Abstract

The main purpose of study is to examine the ways to suggest ‘things(物)’ in texts of pre-modern period of China and the meaning of changes. How ‘things(物)’ are perceived and interpreted is one of important issues in terms of history of thought and history of scholarship since Great Learning(≪大學≫). Scholars had different interpretation about their academic purpose of ‘gewuzhizhi (investigating things and extending knowledge, 格物致知)’ and there used to be each different knowledge depending on ages. Previously, ‘Natural Histories(博物學)’ accumulated by individual knowledge about specific objects are an important studying method of intellects. However, intellects since ‘xin ruxue(新儒學)’ of Song Dynasty had a purpose of studying ‘universal principal(窮理)’ which penetrate the space and the whole of creation. Publications about natural histories like an encyclopedia consistently appeared. Among these publications about natural histories, though there were cases that perception of phenomenological ‘things(物)’ and broad learning(博學) were given serious consideration, many intellects since Ming dynasty tried to find the context which penetrated things rather than to collect and classify individual knowledge. In this case, ‘things’ was structured by language and incorporated into human history. Historicization of ‘things’ was established by premise of ascendancy of language. However, from the late Ming dynasty, the change of intellects’ affairs and things(事物) perception started to emerge. Language was mobilized for description of individual things. Naturalists collected, classified, and described individual objects rather than explored ‘universal principal(窮理).’ Though language was inevitably required in this process, the relation between language and objects was reversed. Language in publications like Bencaogangmu(≪本草綱目≫) or Tiangongkaiwu(≪天工開物≫) was downgraded as an instrumental existence for things. It was rearranged from perspective of values for human as an individual, out of 格致(investigating things and extending knowledge) concept on the basis of ‘Learning of the Way(道學)’ in search of moral completion and consensus, naturalists of the late Ming dynasty. It can be called a new perception about things between social meanings and objects Ming dynasty.