1. Introduction
On the occasion of the first anniversary of Kim Ji-ha's death, a reappraisal of Kim Ji-ha's thought as a philosophy of reconciliation and coexistence has recently come to the fore. Kim Ji-ha's thought, which suffered a severe ordeal first from the conservatives and a second time from the progressives, was throughout his life constantly misunderstood on account of the blunt truths that were welcomed by neither the progressive nor the conservative camp; yet after his death its value is now being reappraised.
That Kim Ji-ha's thought was misunderstood had its cause not only in his career, which crossed back and forth between progressive and conservative, but also in his manner of expressing his thought, which he articulated through aesthetic and artistic expressions ranging across the many fields of East and West, past and present. In general, the ideological transformation of Kim Ji-ha is broadly divided into the materialist nationalist he was when first made known to the world through "Five Bandits" (Ojeok), the philosopher of life who waged the Yulryeo movement, and, in his later years, the aesthetic thinker of the Bap (rice) thought and of Huingeuneul (White Shadow). However, although his thought is highly creative in its mode of expression, it is not easy to grasp what consistency there is to his ideological changes, so much so that he himself even recommended to acquaintances the writings of Hong Yong-hui—who wrote the first doctoral dissertation on him[1] and conducted the last interview with him[2]—as an introduction to his own theory.[3] Although his thought was understood merely as the aesthetic discourse of a practical thinker rather than as the thought of a systematic theorist, there is an atmosphere of agreement at the memorial academic conferences of both the left and right camps that his thought was consistently one of reconciliation and coexistence toward the left and right camps alike, and it therefore shows the possibility of being consistently re-illuminated from the standpoint of coexistence.
Kim Ji-ha's thought of reconciliation and coexistence, having stood at the center of controversy throughout his life as he crossed back and forth between the left and right camps, is also evaluated in ways split into two extremes. Although his thought is sometimes disparaged in the progressive camp as the very model of opportunism, all agree that, with regard to reconciliation and coexistence, his contribution left a great achievement in reconciliation and coexistence with the most difficult object of all—the past one wishes to hide and the shameful tradition.
One of the reasons Kim Ji-ha's philosophy of life stirred so much controversy is that the philosophy of life, today, was not confined to a single philosophy of the domain of life but could become a vast paradigm shift in the human and social sciences, which had been weighted toward materialism. Indeed, just as Kim Ji-ha had anticipated,[4] after postmodernism the philosophy of life became a vast new paradigm of the human and social sciences that replaced materialism. Among the philosophies of life in today's human and social sciences, Kim Ji-ha's philosophy of life has been positioned as the self-generated philosophy of life of a thinker representative of Korean materialism, and has thus become especially controversial.[5]
Although Kim Ji-ha left much controversy in ideological terms, in the culture and arts of seeing, hearing, speaking, and moving, he revived lost methods as though reuniting a family that had parted through domestic discord. It is from Kim Ji-ha that the mask dance, madang-nori (open-yard play), gukak (Korean traditional music), pansori, salpuri dance, and the like—familiar to us today—escaped from the shameful blemish one wished to hide, like third-generation Black people, and came to be reconciled as arts that act successfully upon our eyes, ears, mouth, and nose. That the much-debated thought of Kim Ji-ha was realized as art within everyday life is what differentiates it from ordinary thought.
The printmaking art of Oh Yun, the salpuri dance of Lee Ae-ju, the pansori of Im Jin-taek, the mask dance of Chae Hui-wan, the gukak of Kim Yeong-dong, nongak and pungmul, the popular songs of Cho Yong-pil,[6] and the like—when we today, wearied by Westernized culture and art, wish to rest even a little, what allows us to rest is the many kinds of national art created under the influence of Kim Ji-ha. In fact, before Kim Ji-ha, national cultural art was in a state where scarcely more than its name was transmitted, and only after his narrative poems (damsi) represented by "Five Bandits" did national cultural art come to be noticed by social activists as a tool usable for changing daily life, and thus became revitalized. The contribution of national cultural art to Korean democratization—almost the only successful case amid colonial circumstances—was exceptional and needs to be reappraised. Therefore, although Kim Ji-ha's thought of reconciliation and coexistence has hitherto been discussed mainly in the fields of thought and literature, it needs to be reappraised in the field of culture and art, where his influence appears most directly.
Kim Ji-ha left a vast autobiography and also published voluminous theoretical works explaining in various ways the occasions of his ideological changes. And although there have been countless studies of him, amid the absence of any consistent theory of Kim Ji-ha's ideological changes that could dramatically alter the assessment of him, various discussions unfolded on the occasion of the first anniversary of his death.[7]
Although reappraisals of Kim Ji-ha's thought were made in various ways at the diverse academic conferences held during the first year after his death, discussions that explained his ideological changes through a comparison of Donghak thought and Jeungsan thought—which frequently appear in Kim Ji-ha's thought—are rare. That, despite the clear fact that Donghak thought and Jeungsan thought greatly influenced Kim Ji-ha's thought, the influences of the two systems of thought have not been compared, is due in some part to the fact that even within Donghak thought and Jeungsan thought themselves, the comparison of the two has not been much studied.
Synthesizing the above discussion: in that Kim Ji-ha's philosophy of life synthesizes the great transformation of the paradigm of the human and social sciences and is a self-generated philosophy of life reflecting the changes in Korean thought represented by Donghak and Jeungsan thought, the study of Kim Ji-ha's philosophy of life needs to be furnished with a more universal theoretical framework that has not previously been studied. Therefore, this paper seeks to present liminality and revitalization—anthropological methods discussed in the field of national cultural art—as concepts for studying the consistency of Kim Ji-ha's thought. This paper seeks, in particular, to apply these two concepts to a comparison of Donghak thought and Jeungsan thought, frequently mentioned as the thought that influenced him, and thereby to examine the consistency manifested in the transformation of Kim Ji-ha's thought. Indeed, although there have been representative studies in the fields of literature and thought concerning the consistency of Kim Ji-ha's thought—such as "From Burning Thirst to the Sea of Life" and "The Unity of God and Revolution"—cases analyzed with an anthropological framework are rare.
Liminality, which set out from the meaning of "threshold," was originally a field of anthropology, that of the rite of passage that appears commonly across the cultures of the world. Liminality was a term denoting the ambiguous intermediate state, like a threshold, that appears in the process of passage. What makes this concept of liminality useful for reconciliation and coexistence is that, just as countless rites of passage are carried out in this ambiguous intermediate state, so too the change that is reconciliation and coexistence is accomplished. In the end, liminality became the standard of "de-bordering" that serves as the basis of change, and after Victor Turner, who introduced liminality into the theory of rites of passage, anthropology—which had studied the cultures of primitive peoples—expanded into an analytical framework for contemporary everyday culture, encompassing countless works of modern theater and even national art. Even Erving Goffman's theory that all everyday life is theater is variously applied in the field of drama therapy. Today the theory of liminality has become a powerful theoretical framework capable of countering the traditional Aristotelian theory of catharsis after Nietzsche, and has become a concept that comprehensively encompasses Brecht's theory of the alienation drama and Artaud's theory of the Theatre of Cruelty, which had been proposed as alternatives to Aristotelian theory. Just as the theory of liminality began in the part concerning the application of anthropological theory to modern drama, the analysis of the thought of Kim Ji-ha, a playwright, through liminality has likewise been reinterpreted from the study of drama.
It was also from Kim Ik-du, a scholar of Korean drama theory, that the concept of liminality was taken note of as a clue for interpreting Kim Ji-ha's thought.[8] Kim Ik-du, introducing to Korea the theoretical works of Victor Turner, the theorist of liminality, drew out the ideological characteristics of Korean arts such as madang-geuk (open-yard theater), nongak, and pungmul-gut. Interacting with Kim Ji-ha, Kim Ik-du proposed liminality as a concept for understanding Kim Ji-ha's thought, and, regarding the Donghak and Jeungsan thought that influenced his thought as well, pursued their point of connection through the concepts of Donghak and Junghak, centered on that liminality.[9] Kim Ik-du has stated that the significance of Kim Ji-ha's thought lies in the fact that the liminality of reconciliation and coexistence—which could not, in the end, be found through the worldview of Aristotle's conflict-based drama at the place where postmodernism, which had many similarities with Kim Ji-ha's thought, finally failed—can be found in Kim Ji-ha's Eastern liminality, and that this liminality can be found within Kim Ji-ha's thought as it moves from Suun's Donghak to Jeungsan's Junghak.[10] Indeed, Kim Ji-ha is today spoken of as the progenitor of K-literature.
Revitalization is a concept in which liminality is further expanded, and it explains the process by which liminality changes into a national movement. Although Donghak thought and Jeungsan thought are different systems of thought, they have in common a characteristic shared with other colonial cultural movements that reinterpreted and revitalized national culture as liminality during the colonial era. The national cultural revival movement through the reinterpretation of national culture in the colonial era has hitherto been explained in anthropology by the theories of liminality and revitalization.[11]
The liminal performing-arts culture such as the Korean madang-geuk, which Kim Ji-ha noticed early on, was noticed—like China's Peking opera—as an alternative to Western art, and Kim Ji-ha's thought, which began from open art forms such as the madang-geuk and the narrative poem (damsi), is consistently reflected thereafter in his philosophy of life and elsewhere. Although Kim Ji-ha did not, during his lifetime, explain his thought with attention to the concept of liminality, he left the traces of many liminal concepts, such as "Namjoseon" (the South) and "Huingeuneul" (White Shadow).
This paper is one that seeks, on the basis of the concept of liminality in Kim Ji-ha's thought discovered by Kim Ik-du, to interpret the consistency manifested in the transformation of Kim Ji-ha's thought as the process of transformation of the Donghak thought and Jeungsan thought that influenced his thought. Although studies analyzing Kim Ji-ha's thought with the concept of liminality have been attempted since Kim Ik-du,[12] this paper, unlike existing studies, seeks to examine the process of change of Kim Ji-ha's thought by adding the process of change from Donghak thought to Jeungsan thought. Revitalization is a theory holding that, in situations of cultural crisis such as colonial circumstances, there commonly appears, culturally, the shared feature whereby a national culture like a rite of passage is revived so as to overcome the crisis. This is because revitalization is a useful concept that can provide the historical background for applying the theory of liminality to the analysis of the thought of a colonized country such as Korea.
Although Donghak thought and Jeungsan thought are systems of thought that influenced the formation of Kim Ji-ha's thought, in the larger framework the national cultural-artistic revival that Kim Ji-ha achieved is rather, to a great extent, an achievement of reinterpreting Donghak thought and Jeungsan thought. This paper seeks to understand the Donghak thought that influenced Kim Ji-ha's thought by the concept of liminality, and Jeungsan thought by the continuity of revitalization that completed that concept of liminality, and thus to interpret the process of transformation of Kim Ji-ha's thought through the theory of the revitalization of liminality.