2. The Philosophy of Life and the Liminality of Donghak Thought
If Donghak thought is reappraised as an alternative modernity unparalleled in world history, then the Donghak Peasant Movement is being reappraised as even the first popular event in world history, surpassing the French Revolution.[13] Indeed, today, when the hidden reality of the French Revolution is coming to light, there even emerge appraisals holding that, contrary to what has hitherto been known, the actual beginning of modernity was not the French Revolution but the Donghak Peasant Movement. What is pointed to as the detonator of transformation in the Donghak thought that became the occasion of the Donghak Peasant Movement is the liminality manifested in Donghak thought.[14]
What first turned Kim Ji-ha toward the philosophy of life was Haewol's thought of the Three Reverences (samgyeong), but what he began as the practical basis of the philosophy of life was the Catholic thought of Teilhard de Chardin and practice through Catholicism. However, just as Donghak, too, created a new self-generated system of thought under the influence of the Catholicism then called Seohak (Western Learning), Kim Ji-ha's philosophy of life was likewise once again converted into the self-generated philosophy of life of Donghak.
The theory of liminality was at first a concept of cultural anthropology that set out from the theory of ritual and rite that is the rite of passage, but it is a term that was expanded by Victor Turner into a universal concept applied across the whole of social and cultural change. Victor Turner's theory of liminality is broadly classified into liminality and communitas.
Liminality is a term first coined by Arnold Van Gennep (1873–1957). The Latin "limen" is a word denoting the threshold—the boundary region moving from the first stage of the rite of passage to the second, that is, from separation to transition—and liminality is a term derived from "limen." Liminality, by momentarily departing from value, possesses an ambiguous, indeterminate, and vague attribute. For this reason, liminality is frequently likened to death, the womb, darkness, androgyny, desolation, solar and lunar eclipses, and the like.
Victor Turner, while studying a certain African tribe, came to discover a peculiar fact. The members of that tribe were brave, strong, and responsible. What he came to learn through the village's traditional coming-of-age ceremony for thirteen-year-old boys was that, at an appropriate time, adult men would secretly enter the sleeping quarters, wrap the boys in cloth, and abduct them. They take them to a place entirely unknown to them and then disappear. The place into which these children are thrown is precisely liminality. Thrown into a crisis they have never before undergone, the children come to realize that they have been cast into mountains whose surroundings they know nothing of. At first they weep and wail in confusion, but their weeping does not bring their parents. The elders of the tribe visit once a month to ask after them and give advice. Amid such an environment the children learn how to survive. The children learn a very strong sense of cooperation, comradeship, and solidarity—"If we are to survive here, we must band together"—and come to have an intense sense of social solidarity and belonging. After undergoing such a process, they return to the village and perform the coming-of-age ceremony. The community in which the children, before undergoing the coming-of-age rite, thus learn while surviving together on their own as members of a community, is called communitas.
Victor Turner's concept of the social drama is a reinterpretation of the rite-of-passage theory of the folklorist-anthropologist Arnold Van Gennep. According to Van Gennep, human beings experience rites of passage when they face a crisis of survival, or when they pass through unfamiliar territory or undergo a change of status. The rite of passage includes the process of "separation → transition → incorporation." The cultural anthropologist Victor Turner regarded Van Gennep's concept of the rite of passage as a socially universal principle and structure, not merely as ritual. Victor Turner expanded Van Gennep's concept of the rite of passage into all domains of society, culture, and religion, and called it the "social drama."[15]
Victor Turner's social drama is expanded into something that functions like myth for Eliade. However, whereas for Eliade myth is a story related to a single sacred age, Turner argued that myth serves present-day psychological and social purposes by broadly furnishing experiences that lie astride the boundary of consciousness. This is the same as accepting the argument of the ritualist school in mythology. Whereas the ritualist school connected myth and ritual in order to justify ritual itself, Turner connects ritual and myth with a focus on the point that myth and ritual alike perform the psychological function of helping one pass more smoothly through the painful transitional processes of life. That Victor Turner's theory of social drama draws attention in the interpretation of crisis situations is due to the point that it informs us, most comprehensively yet in most detail, of the method of overcoming crisis. Today communitas is applied not only to ritual but to domains such as society, politics, religion, culture, and art.
Victor Turner states that the social drama is a theory explaining the changes of "a universal socio-cultural phenomenon occurring worldwide." According to Victor Turner, all social dramas and conflicts pass through the dialectic of "structure → anti-structure → structure," and, concretely, through the stages of breach—crisis—redress/healing—reintegration/schism. Whereas Van Gennep concentrated his interest on the rites performed at life's crises—for example, coming-of-age ceremonies, weddings, funerals, childbirth, and pregnancy—Victor Turner took note of the fact that most rites and events possess the process or form of passage. In short, Victor Turner came to take an interest in the second of the three stages, transition—that is, in the time-space of the threshold or doorsill placed on the boundary line that is neither this stage nor that stage—and, thinking that this second stage, transition (that is, anti-structure), was the key to resolving calamity, he began his study of the symbolic system of ritual in earnest, employing terms such as limen, liminality, liminoid, communitas, anti-structure, and the cultural subjunctive.
Communitas is a term concerning human interrelationality, and Victor Turner presented two types of human relationality: the juxtapositional interrelation and the either/or interrelation. The former refers to the structural state of existing society—that is, the structured and differentiated social mode of political, legal, and economic status—while the latter denotes the relatively undifferentiated social mode in which, at the transitional phase of ritual, organization is not complete. The latter corresponds precisely to anti-structure. In this sense, communitas may be said to be a de-structured community in a state of "anti-structure" that transcends the dimension of structure, or of "non-structure" that has abolished structure.
Communitas and liminality, which constitute anti-structure, are closely related yet distinguished. Liminality concerns the modes of being, situations, and conditions of individuals or groups. By contrast, communitas concerns the mode of human interrelation revealed in liminality.
Liminality is an intermediate state and process, filled with all possibilities and latent power, that one passes through in order to depart from an existing social, cultural, or symbolic system or order, lose one's former status, and be reincorporated into a new system. Communitas is essentially a relationship among individuals of a concrete and distinctive nature. Such individuals are not divided by role or status but form free relationships among themselves.
The characteristics of anti-structure are as follows. First, anonymity. Within communitas, human beings generally become anonymous beings. The participants in the ritual are represented as possessionless, wearing identical dress. All the secular marks of identification they had held in existing society—status, property, occupation, rank, standing, privilege, and the like—disappear or are homogenized. Second, equality. In a state where existing social status and standing have all been nullified, a strong sense of comradeship and equality is fostered among the initiates, and egalitarianism is actively accepted. Third, the paradoxical power of the weak. In the anti-structural situation, social roles and authority are reversed, and there appears the phenomenon whereby the weak seize authority and the strong are deprived of it. A person of low standing rises to a high position, or a person of low standing or status comes to possess, permanently or temporarily, a sacred attribute. This has as its purpose the framing of society's mode of existence.
The world of anonymity and equality that liminality and communitas show has points of similarity with the world shown by René Girard's scapegoat theory, but it presents new points as well. Like the age of disorder that requires liminality, Girard's scapegoat theory held that when mimetic desire becomes rampant in society and difference and order disappear, a scapegoat is created, and only after the scapegoat has died is order restored. However, the theory of liminality differs from scapegoat theory in that it regards the period requiring a scapegoat as a period of development through passage, and likewise regards the rite of passage as a process of development.
After Victor Turner's death, his wife Edith Turner (1921–2016) further expanded the scope of application of communitas, explaining that it appears in nearly all domains of life. She presented not only the communitas found in rites of passage, festivals, music, and sports, but also new categories such as the communitas of work (labor), of liberation, of resistance, and of disaster.
What makes liminality important in a crisis situation is the redress/healing stage among the four stages of the social drama—breach, crisis, redress/healing, reintegration/schism. Today, what most greatly influences redress/healing in the social drama is the various media of society, including social networking services (SNS). However, what comes to the fore when the media of society alone cannot resolve conflict—as with COVID-19—is liminality.
For theorists of liminality, liminality is regarded as a keyword that encompasses the contemporary Eastern and Western thought that criticizes modernity. Lee Yeong-ran presents Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of the body, Derrida's deconstruction, Whitehead's process philosophy, Deleuze's philosophy of becoming, Kim Sang-il's Han thought, and Korean Seon-do thought as integrated within the theory of liminality.[16]
What Donghak presented differently from existing Eastern thought, and by which it could draw attention as liminality, is said to be the "bearing/serving" (mosim) of Sicheonju. Although it took the same transcendent God as its object of faith, what made it different from Seohak (Western Learning) is that Donghak bore the transcendent God into its own interior and thereby created a domain of liminality. The so-called intermediate domain between transcendence and immanence is born in Donghak's Sicheonju. Through this, the Sicheonju practice and Donghak thought as a rite of passage, resolving the countless problems of the time, are born. In the process of change of Kim Ji-ha's thought, too, this moment of "bearing/serving" appears as a very important moment.
The starting point of Kim Ji-ha's art and thought is also said to have set out, contrary to what is generally expected, from surrealism. Although as a practitioner he did not present a systematic theory, from early on he boasted an enormous volume of reading. That he completed "Five Bandits" in a mere three days is said to have been a concentration of his prior reading. Narrative poems (damsi) such as "Five Bandits" were the fruit of his long effort, begun in high school, to link surrealism with Korean tradition.
Kim Ji-ha's attempt to link surrealism and tradition may be regarded as the beginning of the liminality manifested in his thought as it subsequently unfolded. Through the narrative poem, Kim Ji-ha sought to realize an intermediate form between surrealism—an extreme form of Western development—and pansori, the acme of Eastern art; and this model was expanded and came to be inherited by his juniors, such as Oh Yun, Im Jin-taek, Kim Yeong-dong, Lee Ae-ju, and Chae Hui-wan.
The continuity of Kim Ji-ha's philosophy of life can also be found in his early attempt to seek the liminality of surrealism and national tradition. The clue to Kim Ji-ha's philosophy of life is his famous encounter with Donghak thought—the Three Reverences thought of Haewol Choe Si-hyeong—through the grass that blooms within his solitary prison cell. Although Kim Ji-ha was not a materialist, in an age when the opposition between materialism and idealism arose as a problem of existence, what healed his physical and mental illness in the solitary cell was the vitality of the grass—that is, the tree-of-heaven (gaegajuk-namu)—that took root on the cement floor of the solitary cell,[17] and the Three Reverences thought of the Donghak practitioner Haewol Choe Si-hyeong, who sought to bear/serve the vitality of that grass.[18] Donghak, which had borne God in the mind, developed by Haewol's time into the liminal stage of bearing/serving life, and in this intermediate state Kim Ji-ha experienced a state like that of the Limitless (mugeuk) and the Supreme Ultimate (taegeuk) before the first differentiation; and, as in other rites of passage, in this intermediate state Kim Ji-ha's illness was healed, and this healing power he called life. Kim Ji-ha once again experienced what Donghak thought had done in curing the illnesses of the many common people of that time. The existential opposition between materialism and idealism was a problem that could be resolved in life.
Kim Ji-ha's experience in the solitary cell was, like the contemporary philosophy that speaks of a turn "from materialism to language," quite a Copernican turn, and the philosophy of life that Kim Ji-ha experienced is today evaluated as a self-generated philosophy of life. Although the philosophy of life that Kim Ji-ha first presented at the time was very unfamiliar, it was a turn close to foresight in today's world, where ecology and environment have become the mainstream of popular movements. In particular, Kim Ji-ha's philosophy of life was valuable in that it was a Korean self-generated philosophy of life capable of responding to the countless philosophies of life of the West. The position that Kim Ji-ha's philosophy of life occupies in today's philosophy of life has been well organized by Lee Jeong-bae.[19]
In Korea, the discourse of life began its discussion while seeking alternative values. This means that the mainstream value within Korean society still lies in economy and development. Even though it acquired new names such as sustainable development and green growth, because the center of gravity still lay in the latter, it was distant from the discourse of life. But people have begun to be well aware that, unless growth changes into "maturity," growth is in the end a road leading to mutual destruction. That the catchword of the twenty-first century is simplicity, unlike the earlier period that spoke of freedom and equality, also reflects this changed reality. The number of people who seek to live with the minimum of material things, exercise eco-intelligence within the distribution process of goods, and put biomimicry—living in accordance with nature—into practice is also gradually increasing. This shows that the value of life is beginning to rise as a central discourse, no longer the possession of a minority. To this end, there have begun to join in: the books of A. Schweitzer and H. Jonas, who investigated the metaphysical aspect of life; the books of J. Rifkin and J. Lovelock, who made known the actual state of the ecological crisis; F. Capra's new-science spirituality; Kim Ji-ha's self-generated science of life and life movement; Professor Jang Hoe-ik's "theory of the whole-life" (onsaengmyeong-non); and, more recently, the French philosophy of life that refuses to be a footnote to Platonic thought and is grafted onto the theory of evolution, the biophilia of E. Wilson, author of Consilience, and the discourse of life of American process thought. Of course, the philosophies of life of the various religions that regard life as a religious value—including the Cheonbugyeong—have also developed as discourse; and Western ecofeminism, introduced through the clues to the philosophy of life found in Daseok Yu Yeong-mo and Ham Seok-heon, likewise took charge of one axis of the discourse of life, helping to bring about the birth of Chung Hyun-kyung's "salimist" spirituality and Lee Eun-seon's Korean "life (生物) feminist spirituality." The thought of Ken Wilber, who advocated the Holarchy that overcame and sublated the extremes of the modern (hierarchy) and the postmodern (heterarchy), also has ample value to be introduced as a philosophy of life. Some practitioners such as Cheon Gyu-seok and Yun Gu-byeong, who experiment with their own value of life in the domain of community, are likewise parts to which this paper ought to pay attention, but they will be set aside owing to constraints of space.
Although the genealogy of Kim Ji-ha's philosophy of life is rooted in Donghak, the connection between Kim Ji-ha's philosophy of life and yet another self-generated philosophy of life draws attention. If we seek, diachronically in the past, the philosophy of life related to Kim Ji-ha's philosophy of life, it is connected with the life movement of Muwidang Jang Il-sun; and although this is said to originate in the Catholic philosophy of life, there had already been the philosophy of life of the Yu Yeong-mo and Ham Seok-heon lineage.
If we link the philosophy of life of the Yu Yeong-mo and Ham Seok-heon lineage with Kim Ji-ha's thought, both systems of thought are connected to Eastern tradition—in particular, to the thought of connection of Zhuangzi. Although Ham Seok-heon was a disciple of Yu Yeong-mo, the two were also influenced by the non-church movement of Japan's Uchimura Kanzō; and the indigenous interpretation of Christianity—that is, the interpretation connected with Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism, and with Zhuangzi—is also connected with Cho Man-sik, who influenced Yu Yeong-mo. Although Huayan and the Yijing make connection center on harmony and coexistence, both, with their symmetry and correlative thinking, show a difference from the West.
If we examine synchronically the philosophy of life related to Kim Ji-ha's philosophy of life, we may cite the seemingly unrelated Yi Mun-yol. Professor Jeong Jin-hong of Seoul National University, a representative Korean scholar of religion, organized the history of Korean religion into the Buddhism of mythos, the Confucianism of logos, and the Donghak of theos, and viewed the development of Protestantism after Liberation as an extension of Donghak,[20] holding that Donghak inherits this.[21] From Jeong Jin-hong's viewpoint, Yi Mun-yol, a renowned Protestant-themed novelist, may be said to have stood in the same position as Kim Ji-ha from the standpoint of the inheritance of Donghak.
Besides Yi Mun-yol, another writer who may be contrasted with Kim Ji-ha's philosophy of life is Park No-hae. Park No-hae, who, as a worker, displayed literary ability equal to Kim Ji-ha's, after long imprisonment like Kim Ji-ha's, transformed—unlike Kim Ji-ha—into a peace activist. What made Kim Ji-ha different from Yi Mun-yol or Park No-hae is that he found the roots of his own thought in Donghak thought and Jeungsan thought. From the standpoint of liminality, as Jeong Jin-hong mentioned, Kim Ji-ha's position has significance in that the Donghak and Jeungsan thought he chose secured the continuity of the liminality of Korean thought.
If we expand Jeong Jin-hong's theory and connect it with Deleuze's theory, we may conceive a Korean theory of harmony and coexistence. Deleuze divided the harmony that is life—on the basis of Kant's theory—into connection, disjunction, and conjunction, and these, according to Jeong Jin-hong's principle, can be connected respectively to the Eastern Buddhism, Daoism, and Confucianism. As appears in the change of Korean thought from Donghak to Jeungsan, the meaning of harmony in Kim Ji-ha's thought too can be examined as having developed from harmony to coexistence.
The liminality manifested in Kim Ji-ha's thought as it appears in the concept of "life" continuously appears thereafter in Yulryeo, Huingeuneul (White Shadow), Bap (rice), Namnyeok (the South), and the like. Each concept is a concept in which the practical attribute is further strengthened. Liminality, which carries the meaning of boundary, is expanded into a concept of the limit-situation, like that of existentialism.[22] Lee Gang-ha, who has interpreted Kim Ji-ha's poetic world through liminality, interprets the limit-situation in the three domains of Kant's epistemology, existentialism's ontology, and the axiology of homo sacer; and, on the axiological side, says that liminality appears as homo sacer, the marginal person of society, so that Kim Ji-ha's poetic world appears as a ceaseless dialogue with this homo sacer.
Liminality, presented as a rite-of-passage solution to the limit-situation, is today being expanded even into a single concept that unifies the theories of various contemporary thinkers. Lee Yeong-ran, an actress and theater theorist, integrates within the theory of liminality the various contemporary systems of thought summarized by Lee Jeong-bae.
As is said of the ancient city, liminality becomes the detonator that creates the culture of a new age, and what Kim Ji-ha rediscovered through the philosophy of life is the task of completing this through revitalization.