춘추전국시대의 벗 담론

Abstract

In this article, I tried to investigate how the relationship of friends was recognized and defined at the public level during the Spring and Autumn Warring States Era, based on the discourse of friends of the age. To this end, first, I looked at the idea for the base of being-friend at the Spring and Autumn Warring States Era. Next, I noted that the Spring and Autumn Warring States was an era in which ethical order and system were being built toward that of the unified empire amid fierce competition among Hundred Schools of Thought, and that friend ethics were treated abundantly in this process. Based on this, I examined the discussion that can extract the concept of a friend's existential and social status among such ethical discourses. Also, I looked into how people thought of their friends' social status at the time. In conclusion, I argued that at the ethical level, the social status of friends was established at the boundary between core ethics and non-core ethics, blood ties and non-blood ties, and public and private. In this process, it was confirmed that the friends of the Spring and Autumn Warring States period were considered both in terms of 'private-personal and equal relationship' and in terms of 'public-social relations and equal relations'. Moreover, considering that the absolute majority of the discourse of friends did not get out of the magnetic field of "leader(君子)’s ethics", it can be said that the discourse of friends in the Spring and Autumn Warring States period was carried out with the latter relationship which considered as the default value. Therefore, friend ethics could be incorporated into an item of Five Core Relationships(五倫).