earticle

영어

This article deals with two nationalisms, represented respectively by Nishida and Park Chong Hong. It has tried to argue that one of the most convincing reasons for their being nationalists was that they lived and did philosophy as embodied subjects who should lead their lives confined in a specific time and space. They thought and wrote in collusion with dominant political slogans such as Co-Prosperity and ‘the World under One Roof’ for Nishida and National Subjectivity for Park. One of the most salient features of being embodied subjects is the limit of perception constantly influenced by what they see, hear and by persons who they meet. One has to admit that the objects of perceiving, hearing and persons they meet are not their creations but mostly given to them. This fact explains why nationalistic sentiment unwittingly arise and is being easily strengthened. This sentiment is usually aleatory, one-sided, often violent, whose impacts fell on both Koreans and Chinese in 1930s and 1940s Nishida did not seem to be aware of. This article also argues that consciousness, embodied subjects, and nationalism pose the problem of others, which has not been dealt with in both Nishida’s philosophy of history and Park’s philosophy of national subjectivity. Thus they could not advance any sort of ethics of others. The first lesson which we may garner from the failure of Co-Prosperity is that we need to be awakened to the corporeality of nationalism. The second lesson is that, in order to advance any meaningful notion of a new Co-Prosperity in Asia for the 21st century, we should overcome the notion of the history-of-a-nation, and the political ontology which is closely connected to the absoluteness of whatever it is God, nation, or a historical period. Only then the psychological space to listen to colonial people becomes wide open. In case of contemporary Korean history, the best way to understand political clashes within during Park Chung Hee’s government, is to resort to differences in perceptions among Korean citizens. Lastly, one may ask as to the possibility of transcending the limit of embodied subjects. As a way of reply, the author only points to saintly figures such as the Buddha, Christ, perhaps Gandhi, as the possible models who were very much free from bodily desires and constraints of embodied subjects, which were allotted as an unavoidable destiny to all humans by many Western philosophers including Merleau-Ponty.