相偶性 윤리학으로서의 仁說 ― 丁若鏞과 阮元

Abstract

Chong Yag-yong (丁若鏞) and Ruan Yuan (阮元) lived in the same period and confronted with enormous pressure of the imperial ideology -- Cheng-Zhu’s doctrine (程朱理學). Coincidentally, both of them proposed the ethics of companion (相偶性的倫理學). Early in the Han dynasty , “Jen”(仁) had been interpreted as “companion”(相人偶). But this interpretation had been neglected for a long time. The ethics of companion radically opposed to the transcendental point of view that defines Jen in the light of Xing-li (性理) it also refuted the viewpoint of natural philosophy which interpreted “Jen” as “Shen”(生); it disapproved the most popular explanation that “Jen” is love, either. They advocated the companionate morality, which means morality only exists between human beings. In other words, morality is the ethics of the reasonable mutual relationship and the essential meaning of “ethics” is the morality which originated from human’s act toward the others. Among those Confucian explanations of “Jen”, “companion” is the most modern sense of one, because it could indicate the existence of “the other”. There’s no reliable evidence showing that Chong and Ruan influenced each other — though they shared the same insight. This case demonstrates that thoughts have their inner dynamic power to develop themselves. Under the parallel conditions, people could develop the similar theories individually.