남명 조식의 ‘물’ 인식과 인문정신

Abstract

This study set out to investigate how Nammyeong Jo Shik perceived"water" and thus his humanistic spirit. Water contains contradictoryqualities in it including Clean and cloudy, stop and flows, andcomfortable and intensity. Nammyeong closely observed thosequalities of water and exercised his literary imagination derived fromthem. Although he had various perceptions of water, he mainly focusedon the essential cleaning, original, and dangerous qualities of water. Based on them, he projected his ideas of cultivation, study, andorientation toward people onto the images of water, turned them intoworks, expanded them to his spirits of respect, practice, and criticism. Water was working deep in those expansions. The core of his humanistic spirit is criticism based on thepeople-oriented ideology. Standing up against the oppression of abody infringing humanness, he widely criticized the maladministrationof monarchs, greed of officials, and loss of scholars' integrity. Themain target of his criticisms was the maladministration of monarchsbecause they were ultimately responsible for the crises of the times. Nammyeong had a critical humanistic spirit, whose origin was hiscritical Su Yang theory. That is, he emphasized both "Jonyang(存養)" and "Seongchal(省察)" with a side point to the latter, which means thathis Su Yang theory was closer to "Su: stopping human greed" than to"Yang: preserving the natural law." Here, one can discover the originof his humanistic spirit open to realism.