Marion Eggert

This paper treats the semantics and metaphorics of “heart” (sim, chin. xin 心) in a small sample of texts, loosely describable as ego-documents, authored by Korean literati of mid to late Chosŏn times (sixteenth to nineteenth century), texts that thus (because of the selfidentification of these literati) count among the (Neo-)Confucian tradition. A brief section on the semantics of sim also demonstrates that Neo-Confucian literati were aware of their metaphoric use of the word “heart.” Heart metaphors are found to fall broadly into one of three categories of master metaphors: HEART IS AN OBJECT, HEART IS A SUBJECT/AGENT, and HEART IS A CONTAINER/SPACE, the latter with the two sub-categories of “HEART IS A STOREROOM” and “HEART IS A HOUSE/SHELTER.” With very few exceptions, heart metaphors in all of these categories reveal upon close scrutiny not only a body-mind dualism but also differentiations of the self, only certain layers of which are metonymically represented by the “heart.”

How does religion-like meaning formation function outside of overtly religious communication? Does such meaning formation take place in Confucianism, and if so, in which way? This article approaches these questions on the basis of a prose vignette from the Confucian scholarly milieu in 18th century Korea. By subjecting the text first to a sequence analysis and then to a metaphor analysis, it is shown that a religioid moment is created by means of a metaphor that equates reading and writing with “dwelling” and “departure” (very much in the sense of Tweed’s “crossing and dwelling” [2006]): a place for the self is granted through transcendence of the self. This demonstrates the potential of Confucianism to create religioid meaning beyond the (otherwise frequent) recourse to gods and spirits or the appropriation of vocabulary and concepts from other traditions.

Confucianism lack transcendence in the sense of (a set of) ideas that allow a distancing of self from world and society, beyond politically motivated reclusion, or is it entirely bound to the normative power of the factual? As a contribution to tackling these conjoined questions, this article discusses the use of metaphor in two long songs (gasa) by 16th century Korean literati who certainly self-identified as Confucians: Song Sun's "Myeonangjeongga" and Jeong Cheol's "Gwandong byeolgok." Through a study of figurative language in these two works, it is shown that true metaphoricity does take place, but more conspicuously and effectively at the level of extended metaphor than on the level of individual similes; and that a major effect of this metaphoricity is the creation of a sense of transcendence. By emphasizing the important place of the expression of transcendence as a liberating force in both poems, the paper makes an implicit argument concerning the religious dimension of Confucianism that an immanence-transcendence distinction, the code of religious language, is at work in Confucian texts, serving Confucian aims.

Cultural conceptions of humanity (the quality of being human) hinge to a large extent on the distinctions drawn between human and non-human animals. The question of how much humanity (the quality of being humane) is both ascribed and extended to animals certainly contributes considerably to this conceptualization. As a first foray into questions about the construction and depiction of human-animal relationships in pre-modern Korean literature, this article looks at the literary treatment of three kinds of domestic animals – cats, dogs, and horses – in a small sample of literati writings from the thirteenth to the nineteenth century.

Religion and Secularity traces the history of the conceptual binary of religion and secularity in Europe and the repercussions it had in other regions and cultures of the Eurasian continent during the age of imperialism and beyond. Twelve authors from a wide range of disciplines, deal in their contributions with the trajectory, the concepts of „religion“ and „secularity/secularization“ took, as well as with the corresponding re-configurations of the religious field in a variety of cultures in Europe, the Near and Middle East, South Asia and East Asia. Taken together, these in-depth studies provide a broad comparative perspective on a penomenon that has been crucial for the development of globalized modernity and its regional interpretations.

Up until the present day, Confucianism has been a major factor in the normative discourses of East Asia. At first glance, it has sided with the preservation of the old and against innovation, according to Confucius’s self-declaration that he “only transmits and creates nothing new.” This also describes the historical role that Confucianism in distinction to other philosophies has actually played over long stretches of time. Nevertheless, Confucian ethics contains structural features, figures of thought and ideas which point beyond mere traditionalism. They reflect the deep crisis of tradition against the background of which Confucianism came into existence and which has left its mark on it. They could set free a dynamic that made it possible to distance oneself from the Confucian tradition within this tradition itself and open it up to something new, if not in terms of its creation then at least in terms of its acceptance and support. This potential also intrinsically relates to the possibility of a “modern” Confucianism. The following three short essays do not claim to give a comprehensive account of the outlined problematique. It is only intended to throw a light upon some of the corresponding thought formations that developed in ancient China and explore by a few examples the extent to which the said potential has actually been realized in later Confucian discourse in Korea and Japan, assuming that border crossing might be among the factors to unleash it.

In the modern Korean self-imagination, the feeling of unresolved injury, han, plays a prominent role. Pre-modern Korea, however, seems to have set much greater store on forgiveness than on resentment. Legends and vernacular narratives foreground as morally exemplary characters who respond to harm done to themselves with magnanimity. Literati discourse of the sixteenth to early nineteenth centuries, informed to a growing degree by what was perceived as Confucian orthodoxy, increasingly noted the moral perils of indiscriminate forgiveness for the sake of social harmony. However, character evaluations in writings about deceased persons exhibit marked appreciation for leniency. Intimate conversations in texts composed for death rituals, coming close to real-life situations, testify to indirect forms in which forgiveness was requested and granted corresponding to a more generally observable culture of implicitness. An Appendix elucidates the ambivalences in ancient Confucianism and the shifts in ensuing understanding that allowed for the complexities of Korean Confucian’s attitudes toward forgiveness.