Weon-Ki Yoo

10.18399/acta.2012.15.1.007

T’oegye Yulgok the Four-Seven Debate the Moral Mind-Human Mind Debate Hobal Theory Korean Neo-Confucianism

In sixteenth century Chosŏn Korea, T’oegye and Kobong initiated a debate over the relationship between the Four Beginnings and the Seven Feelings, their moral characteristics, and, also, their relationship to other psychological factors. This debate soon called for a successive debate between Yulgok and Ugye who asked more or less the same questions by focusing on the moral mind and the human mind rather than the Four and the Seven. Although Yulgok was debating with Ugye, his real opponent was T’oegye who was then deceased. Yulgok closely studied and rejected most of T’oegye’s theses on (a) the mutual exclusiveness between the Four and the Seven, (b) the identification of the Four with the moral mind and, also, of the Seven with the human mind, and (c) the mutual or reciprocal arousal of li and ki. In this article, I shall contend that Yulgok’s theory of mind is inconsistent in that he mistakenly identified the moral characteristics of the Four with those of the moral mind. I shall begin by examining Yulgok’s reasons for the rejection of the above mentioned theses. In doing this, we shall see the relationship between such psychological concepts as mind, nature, and feelings with respect to ontological concepts such as li and ki. In the end, we shall conclude that Yulgok has to give up the idea that the moral mind shares the same moral characteristics as the Four and the original nature.