The 2nd World Humanities Forum

The 2 nd World Humanities Forum 

1(Thu) - 3(Sat) November 2012 / BEXCO, Busan, Republic of Korea 

Contacts 

whf@unesco.or.kr 

http://www.worldhumanitiesforum.org 

Proceedings 


Proceedings

Proceedings

SESSION 4 

Parallel Session 2. Call for Papers Session 385 

Parallel 2-1. The Humanities, Narratives, Memory, and Healing 387 

1. The Humanities and Medicine: Narratives of Illness and Suffering 389 

/ John Clammer (United Nations University) 


Proceedings 

2. Understanding of the Motherland and Narrative Representation of Healing Shown in 

the Novels of Korean-Japanese writer Yang-Ji Lee 409 

/ Jung-Hwa Yun (Ewha Womans University) 

3. No One Has Ever Died of the Humanities: Healing and Transcendence in the 

Contemporary World 426 

/ Elizabeth S. Gunn (Morgan State University) 

4. The Role of Memory for Healing in Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place 437 

/ Myung-joo Kim (Chungnam National University) 

Parallel 2-2. Language, Gender, and Senses 447 

1. Healing Thought: Therapeutic Philosophy and the Critique of Metaphysics 449 

/ Anthony Curtis Adler (Yonsei University ) 

2. The Practicing of Feminism as Healing Humanities 464 

/ Ra-Keum Huh (Ewha Womans University) 

3. Emotions and Humanities Healing: The Greek Philosophers and the Stoics’ 

Understanding of Emotions 478 

/ Wooryong Park (Sogang University) 

4. The Healing Function of Talchum 494 

/ Hyun Shik Ju (Sogang University) 

Parallel 2-3. Diseases, Pathology, and Social Healing 511 

1. Society as a Patient: Metapathology, Healing and Challenges of Self and Social 

Transformations 513 

/ Ananta Kumar Giri (Madras Institute of Development Studies) 

2. Princess Bari, Answering the Conundrum of Sufferings of the World 521 

/ Kang Ha Yu (Kangwon National University) 

3. Displacement as Disease: Exploring the Links between Traditional Healing and Well- 

Being in the Context of a Relocation Crisis 535 

/ Ronel P. Dela Cruz (St. Paul University Quezon City) 

4. Treatment of Hwabyung in Traditional Medicine with Four Elements of Non-Violent 

Communication 548 

/ Young-Wan Kim (Korea Institute of Oriental Medicine) 

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Contents

The 2 nd 

World Humanities Forum 

Proceedings 

Keynote Lecture 

The Human Sciences and the Healing of Civilizations 

/ Yersu Kim (Kyung Hee University) 

Catharsis by Confronting the Past: 

Lessons of Germany’s Double Burden of Dictatorship 

/ Konrad H. Jarausch (University of North Carolina) 

Regeneration by Complete Humanism 

* La régénéréscence par l’humanisme intégral 

/ Michel Maffesoli (Paris Descartes University Sorbonne)

The Human Sciences and the Healing of Civilizations 

Yersu Kim 

Kyung Hee University 

A miracle at Centum City? 

I would like to thank the organizing committee of this very important forum on World Humanities 

for placing enough confidence in me to give one of the keynote talks on a topic that is crucial for 

understanding the nature and the role of the humanities in today’s world. I can only say that I will do my 

very best to be worthy of that confidence, but I am not confident that that would be enough. 

Please allow me to engage in some personal reminiscences. Exactly 60 years ago, I left Korea for the 

unknown world of the United States, probably from the very place I am speaking at this moment. Centum 

City was at that time the place of Suyoung Airport at the westernmost corner of Busan, the temporary 

capital of the Republic of Korea, fighting for its very survival in the vortex of an international war that 

involved the United States, the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China, and sixteen nations of the 

United Nations, and of course two Koreas. The airport was the hub of much military air traffic, and a 

small corner was allotted to civilian use that connected the Korean peninsula to the outside world. 

After 48 hours of flight, stopovers, and being quite airsick, I landed in San Francisco. Although in a daze, 

I could dimly see that I was in a world totally different from the one I left two days ago, where I did not 

know how to operate a flush toilet, and my culinary and linguistic ability was only just enough to order 

tomato soup for all three meals. 

Buildings were taller than I had imagined. The streets were wide and clean, and full of tall trees and 

automobiles. The brightly colored houses were painted in yellow, pink and blue as only the houses in fairy 

tale books could be. People were clean and smiling and said “Hi” or “Hello” even to a bewildered boy 

from a far-off land. Everything seemed and looked better than what I had expected from what I had read, 

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heard and experienced from the American soldiers, stationed in Korea. It dimly occurred to me at the time 

that this new world, this new civilization would never be mine, too far away, too different from the one I 

was used to. But I was determined that I would do my best to learn as much as I could and bring it back 

home to make Korea a better place to live. 

Busan had been at that time the temporary capital of South Korea during much of the fratricidal war at 

the front line of the ideological confrontation between the so-called the Free World and the Soviet bloc. 

Busan, a port city of about a half million at that time the war broke out, was bursting at the seams with an 

influx of more than two million refugees from all parts of Korea. There were also soldiers of both Korean 

and foreign nationalities who were passing through Busan as one of the central points of deployment. The 

city swarmed with soldiers who had been wounded on the fronts and being sent to the hospitals or simply 

discharged without adequate provisions or care. 

The city simply was not capable of dealing with the situation. There was not enough food, the signs 

of malnourishment were obvious to everyone, and some even died of hunger. To say that housing was 

inadequate would be an understatement, and shanties and mud-huts sprang up in the many parts of the 

city, with attendant problems of sanitation, safety and fire protection. There was a serious shortage of 

water, making long lines of people with big buckets waiting for long hours for drinking water a part of 

the street scene. Begging in the street, burglary, and pick-pocketing were daily occurrences and seemed 

somehow to be “natural” parts of the daily life in this city. With the police forces overburdened, everyone 

was on his own, left to fend off as best he could whatever harm that might occur to him in this miserable 

city. 

There was of course easy money to be made in the hustle and bustle and the confusion of war. There were 

smugglers of much needed goods from such places as Japan, Hong Kong and Macau. Merchants dealing 

in illicitly obtained military goods made fortunes. While some serious-minded entrepreneurs began laying 

the foundations for their post-war business empires by beginning to meet the needs of the military and 

civilians, the easy money was accompanied by corruption in high and low places and decadent life styles. 

Prostitutes were a common sight in the streets, and cabarets, tearooms, and secret dance halls dotted the 

streets at nights. Some youths were deeply drenched in nihilism born of the miseries of daily life and 

hopelessness about the future. Sartre and Camus were much talked about, if little read. 

Even in the midst of misery and suffering, schools and universities were opening their temporary 

campuses. My school was putting up temporary classrooms in military tents on vegetable field at the 

outskirt of Busan. When the wind blew, we would be covered with dust from the field underneath our 

benches, which contained infectious remnants of human manure that had been used as fertilizers for 

10

vegetables. But that did not matter. We were all happy that we were fortunate enough to go to school 

again, and even having to resort to dim candles during frequent power outages could not dampen our 

sprit. Young males were conscripted to serve in the army and many lost their lives. But even more began 

to experience, in an indirect way, the West, in the military system that was based on the organization 

and management of the US armed forces. Many young military officers were sent to the US for training, 

thereby giving them first-hand experience of a culture and civilization so totally different from their own. 

When the cruelly destructive war came to an end with an inconclusive truce in 1953, Korea was one of the 

poorest countries in the world, if not the poorest. According to World Bank statistics, even as late as 1962 

the per capita GNI was $100, less than that of the many LDCs today, and certainly less than that of many 

Asian neighbors such as the Philippines and Malaysia. During the period from 1953 to 1960, as the rubble 

of the war was being cleared, more than 70 percent of the government income was from foreign aid, 

predominantly from the US through such diverse channels and institutions as ECA, UNKRA, ICA, and 

PL480. There are acronyms which may ring a bell with some older members in the audience who have 

lived through the times when Korea was poor and destitute. 

Today, a half century later, Busan stands transformed. Korea’s second largest metropolis after Seoul and 

world’s fifth busiest seaport by cargo tonnage, Busan is a modern city of 3,600,000. It was the host to the 

2002 Asian Games, the 2005 APEC Meeting, the 2010 G-20 Summit, and the 2011 Nuclear Summit. The 

Busan International Film Festival, held every year on these very premises, has become the largest and 

most talked about international film festival in Asia. Earlier this year, the population of Korea reached the 

50 million mark and our media celebrated the event with Korea’s symbolic entry into the 20-50 Club, a 

notional club whose seven members each have a population of more than 50 million and per capita GNI 

of more than US $20,000. It was emphasized in the media that Korea is the only member of the Club 

which has won independent after the end of World War II. 

A Craving for Healing 

A miracle at Centum City? A transformation of great magnitude has certainly taken place. A world has 

been created that was unimaginable in the minds of the youngster who left Suyoung some sixty years ago. 

Have Koreans not been “healed” from the misery and suffering from poverty and indignity? Has such a 

miracle at Centum City brought happiness and fulfillment to the people of Korea? 

Let us take a little detour to answer this seemingly simple question. 

A few weeks ago, a presidential hopeful, who had just been nominated the official candidate of the 

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opposition party, promised he would be a “healing” president. A committee has been formed by the party 

with a focus on developing policies to redress the anxiety of the people regarding housing, education, 

security and old age and youth employment, and was to be called the “healing policies committee”. The 

candidate of the governing party, for her part, came up with “the headquarters for the happiness of 50 

million” which would perform similar functions as the healing committee of the opposition party. The 

third candidate, a political neophyte, who gained national prominence by conducting youth concerts and 

mentoring the youth, has recently declared his candidacy for the office of president, vowing to become the 

“healing president” for Korea. There is an enormously popular television show called “Healing Camp”, 

which consists of well-known public personalities who publicly confess to past mistakes and unhappy 

moments in their lives and by the end of the show magically declare themselves “healed.” 

Korea is today awash with “healing” since perhaps the middle of last decade. There are healing walks, 

healing food, healing tourism, healing lectures, healing dances, healing equestrian clubs, and healing 

forest resorts and the list seems endless. The marketing industry seems to have found a new blue ocean 

where neglected products and activities make new appearances with “healing” label and naturally at 

substantially enhanced price. Bookstores have special counters selling books dealing with various aspects 

of healings. Books by Buddhist monks top the bestseller list and the demand comes from a wide range of 

social groups, spanning people in their 20’s to those in their 50’s and beyond. 

Healing is a restorative concept with many nuances. When we speak of healing in physiological 

sense, we refer to damage or disease suffered by an organism, and, in these terms, healing as a whole 

means resumption of the natural functioning of the biological system as a whole. Medical treatments 

would be more appropriate word for this process with well-defined procedures performed by trained 

and experienced experts. When we speak of healing in a psychological or spiritual sense, we refer to 

damage or suffering in the mind and soul. And through some non-physical process of “healing”, the 

resumption of normal and fulfilling existence becomes possible. 1 It is thus natural that many people seek 

healing in religion. More people throng to Christian retreats and temple stays – a few days of quiet and 

contemplation in secluded places of prayer and contemplation. Some people retreat to a more primitive 

mode of living close to nature and away from the conveniences of modern civilization. People thereby 

wish to be free from the stresses of daily life and to restore themselves through quiet and contemplation to 

an original state of purity for renewed energy and readiness for life. 

To judge from these trends toward healing in all sectors and aspects of Korean life, the answers to the 

1 cf. “Healing,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healing, accessed on September 22, 2012. 

12

questions we have asked a few moments ago seem to be a clear No. The miracle at Centum City has 

not brought happiness and fulfillment. This perception is corroborated by some interesting international 

statistics. Despite membership in the 20-50 Club, Korea ranks a distant 102nd place with the Satisfaction 

with Life Index released in 2006, 2 an index of subjective well-being pioneered by an analytic psychologist 

at the University of Leicester correlating factors of health, wealth, and access to basic education. Denmark 

ranks the highest, Bhutan ranks at 8th place, the US at 23rd and East Timor at 69th, China at 82nd, and 

Japan in 90th place. Korea does slightly better in the Human Development Index, 3 a composite statistic 

of life expectancy, education and income indices, published by UNDP. According to 2011 Human 

Development report, Korea ranks 28th with Norway in first place, France in 6th place and the US in 23rd 

place. 

In a comprehensive and enlightening paper given as the keynote address at the 11th International 

Conference on Philosophical Practice and Fourth International Conference on Humanistic Therapy, 

recently held in Chunchon, Korea, Sung-Jin Kim, a Korean philosopher who has been active in 

introducing philosophical practice in Korea, declares Korea is becoming a “therapy country”. 4 Presumably, 

he has made his judgment based on diagnosis that people are showing “more and more neurotic symptoms 

while they are trying to adjust themselves to all the dramatic changes of life style to the rapidly changing 

social environment”. 5 

Idea of philosophical practice or philosophical counseling began to be known to the public at large with 

the publication of the Koreans translation of Lou Marinoff’s Plato not Prozac 6 in 2000. Since then the idea 

spread quickly among Korean philosophers. The Korean Society of Philosophical Practice was founded 

in 2009, and has grown to the point of hosting the 11th international conference earlier this year. The idea 

of philosophical practice was further expanded into one of “humanities therapy” by scholars at Kangwon 

National University. With the support of the National Research Foundation of Korea, its Humanities 

Institute has been conducting researches on humanities therapy through conferences, colloquia and 

researches into healing methods for mental and emotional problems. According to Sung-Jin Kim, the 

demand of philosophical counseling and therapy in Korea is so high and the number of people who need 

2 cf. “Satisfaction with Life Index,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satisfaction_with_Life_Index, accessed on September 22, 

2012. 

3 cf. “Human Development Index,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Deveopment_Index, accessed on September 22, 

2012. 

4 Sung-Jin Kim, “Philosophical Practice in Korea: A Short History, A New Approach,” Proceedings of the 11 th International 

Conference on Philosophical Practice and the 4 th International Conference on Humanistic Therapy, Vol. I, Humanities 

Institute: Kangwon National University, p. 173. 

5 Ibid., p. 176. 

6 Lou Marinoff, Plato Not Prozac, New York: Harper Collins, 1999. 

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philosophical help is growing so rapidly that “no hesitation is allowed for us philosophers in Korea.” 7 

A Revival of the Humanities? 

We must also consider the surprising surge in the demand for the humanities we are witnessing today. To 

what extent this phenomenon is connected with the all-encompassing call for healing is difficult to gauge. 

Prima facie, it is a surprising and unexpected phenomenon. As late as 2002, there was a public decision to 

establish a committee to study policies dealing with what was considered to be the crisis of the humanities 

and the proposed policies that would have the effect of promoting and putting life into humanistic studies. 

I myself chaired the committee for five years with an increasing sense of frustration, and I must say the 

results were far from satisfaction. Representative of the crisis atmosphere in university humanities circles 

was a declaration in 2006 by a group of professors in humanities departments that the foundations for 

very survival of the humanities were under threat due to the blind belief in the logic of the market and 

efficiency. The association of deans of humanities colleges followed up the declaration by warning that the 

crisis of the humanities could lay waste the dignity of human beings and the authenticity of human life. 

The response came, surprisingly, from the market itself. To call this a response to the agonized cries of 

the academics is perhaps misleading, since the demand for restructuring of universities of the neo-liberal 

provenance had come primarily from the market itself in the name of demand and efficiency. Market then 

began to notice how Steve Jobs, the icon of the business world, said he would give all the technologies 

of Apple in return for a single meal with Socrates. Over the last four to five years, humanities programs 

for CEOs have sprung up like mushrooms after the rain and some programs have become so competitive 

as to institute screening procedures to sift out those who are serious about the humanities and those who 

are not. Costs are sometimes prohibitively high, but they are sometimes subsidized by the companies 

themselves as legitimate extracurricular activities of their CEOs. The CEOs go through weeks of rigorous 

evening studying Socrates to Confucius, Machiavelli to Sun Zi, Hermann Hesse to Han Young Man, 

Marx to Beopjeong. Not only businessmen participate, there are people from the financial world and 

government bureaucracy, judges, lawyers, university presidents, medical doctors, journalists, church 

leaders, and artists. 

Some business groups have internal programs and seminars with emphasis on the humanities. One 

group recently organized a CEO strategy meeting with the title “Understanding of the Humanities and 

Leadership.” This is how the chairman of the group saw the rationale for the meeting. In this difficult time, 

7 Kim, op. cit., p. 172. 

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what is important is how you can differentiate yourselves from other groups. The basis of differentiation 

lies on the understanding human being through the study of the humanities. Understanding what clients 

want and creating a creative and challenging work force – both of these tasks boil down to the problem of 

human beings. 8 

Is this what seems to be a see change in the attitude of Korean society toward the humanities for real? 

There is certainly an element of adroit commercialism in this humanities phenomenon. But it seems to 

have spoken to a deep need in the minds of Korean people. In 2010, Michael Sandel’s What is Justice? in 

Korean translation sold over a million copies and his lectures filled the halls seating thousands. Earlier this 

year, the lectures by Slavoj Zizek, a Slovenian philosopher of Marxist provenance, met with a reception 

of similar enthusiasm. The audience consisted not only of students but of young people in their 20s and 

30s coming directly from work. Paradoxically, Zizek, the Marxist, was sponsored by a medium to low 

end clothing brand. There are also lecture courses on various aspects of the humanities such as art, music, 

classics and philosophy organized by different foundations and local governments and most of them 

are overflowing with applicants. There are also humanities and philosophy courses for prison inmates, 

homeless. Some who are engaged in the humanities and philosophy, traditionally disciplines which prided 

themselves in being secluded in the isolated splendor of the ivory tower now visit homes of single moms, 

conduct care programs for the North Korean refugees and international families. 

Telescoped Development and Borrowed Cultural Synthesis 

Are these phenomena somehow related, and if so, how? I believe one has to go back to the early days of 

Korea’s entry into Western civilization in seeking an answer to this question. Korean economic, political 

and social development has been so unprecedented in the contemporary world that it requires a deep a 

careful understanding. In such an understanding lies at least part of the answer regarding the role which 

the humanities and philosophy play or fail to play in today’s world. 

Exactly 136 years have passed since Korea opened its door to the West. The Treaty of Gangwha with 

Japan signed under duress in 1876 was the beginning of an end to Korea’s traditional civilizational 

allegiance to the Sino-centric world. Six years later, in 1882, Korea signed Treaty of Amity and Commerce 

with the US. With the signing of the treaty, Korea opened its door directly to the ascendant West for the 

first time in its history. Then in rapid succession, Korea signed treaties with Great Britain and Germany in 

1883 and Russia in 1884 and France in 1886. 

8 cf. Chosun Ilbo, October 17, 2012, B6. 

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Defeated in a confrontation of civilizations and suddenly confronted with the vitality of Western 

civilization during the latter half of the 19th century, we blamed our own political and cultural tradition for 

all the stagnancy, ineffectiveness and injustice in our society. To be sure, there were such men as Ki-Rak 

Kwak and Sun-Hak Yoon, who attempted to mediate between civilizations with such doctrines as dongdo- 

seogi, which, while recognizing importance of Western technology, seogi, such as canons, steam ship, 

railways and the telegraph, believed the Eastern way, dongdo, originating in Confucian ethical norms, was 

superior to the Western way. They held that the Eastern way and Western technology could be separated 

from the original habitat and could be combined to meet the challenges of the West. But it was a classic 

case of too little, too late. We associated ignoble demise of Joseon Kingdom with a Confucian tradition 

rendered defunct by formalism, factionalism and a regressive world view. Then came to colonial distortion 

of the Korean cultural tradition as the record of mere subservience to China and therefore of no intrinsic 

value. The cultural synthesis that has been at the basis of political stability and cultural achievements was 

in deep disarray. Deprived of national dignity and history and the future, the de facto devaluation of our 

own tradition was deeply ingrained in the consciousness of the Korean people. 

We Koreans thus became a cultural tabula rasa and highly receptive to the political, social and cultural 

ideas and institutions that Americans brought with them after the defeat of Japan in the Second World War. 

The dissemination of these ideas and institutions and practices was all the more rapid and fundamental 

because they were part of the culture of a welcome liberator and later a powerful ally in the struggle for 

survival in the Korean War. There was a ready-made cultural synthesis which promised a way forward 

to survival and flourishing. Intellectual and political leaders had neither the time nor need to choose 

with discrimination among the goods offered by the new culture. The course of economic and social 

development necessitated borrowing many Western experiences and technologies. American culture, 

identified with Western culture in the popular mind, seemed inevitable part of experience, with all its fads, 

fetishes, disorders and aberrations. To be sure, the Confucian norms and attitudes continue to govern to 

this day the daily behavior of Koreans at a deeper level. But as explicit cultural ideals, these norms were 

as good as dead. In a virtual cultural tabula rasa, the conception of American economy and politics found 

ready and enthusiastic acceptance in the mind of Koreans. 

Such an acceptance brought about, through a painful and tortuous process of trial and error and of 

simple hard work, a measure of realization of the visionary expectations of power and affluence. Korea 

has become a postindustrial society, unimaginable half a century ago. In this sense, the transformation 

at Centum City is truly a miracle. The transformation brought about is a fair replica of the industrial 

civilization that the West, particularly America, had succeeded in creating during the last century and 

half by systematizing countless technological inventions and improvements. It guaranteed for man a 

material existence at the level never before enjoyed. The phenomenal increase in productivity attained 

16

y institutionalizing the fruits of science and technology promise not only the satisfaction of man’s basic 

wants, but also promises of the creation of accumulated material wealth that would enable man to develop 

his potentialities to the full. 

In this process of telescoped development based on a borrowed cultural synthesis, there was no need and 

no place for humanistic thinking about the ideas and values underlying what was considered a defunct 

civilization. In moments of perplexity and need, we needed only to turn to the ready-made cultural 

synthesis for inspiration and instruction. Given Korea’s defeat this civilizational confrontation in the latter 

half of the 19th century, reducing many centuries of humanistic achievements to a mere pile of useless 

papers, who can be surprised at the fact that the classical disciplines of the humanities even in their 

imported form became wholesale “useless” disciplines, of interest only to those few who made it their 

profession. There were of course some who made valiant efforts to revive the study of Korean history and 

philosophy, but colonialism saw to it that these efforts go nowhere. 

Fortunately for us Koreans, we were perhaps the last riders of the civilizational train that brought 

affluence, democracy and justice to a significant minority of people in the world. In 1945, Koreans 

adopted a civilization as embodied the American conception of economy, politics and culture. By that 

time, however, the inner dynamics and validity of this civilization were in disarray. The material and 

institutional side of the civilization was, to be sure, still basking in the splendor of high noon, but perhaps 

only of Indian summer. The intellectual and moral ideas and values of this civilization were undergoing, 

unnoticed except by a very few, a process disintegration and transformation. As early as 1888, the decade 

in which the treaty between Korea and the US was signed, and doors opened to the entrance of West into 

Korea, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote in the preface to his Will to Power thus: 

What I relate is the history of next two centuries, I describe what is coming, what can no longer 

come differently; the advent of nihilism. The future speaks even in hundred signs [...] For some 

time now our whole European culture has been moving toward a catastrophe, with a tortured 

tension that is growing from decade to decade; restlessly, violently, headlong like a river that wants 

to reach an end, that no longer reflect, and that is afraid to reflect. 9 

9 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power (ed. by Walter Kaufmann), 1967, p. 3, as quoted in Yersu Kim, “Interaction of 

Aesthetic and Intellectual Traditions” in Academy of Korean Studies and Woodrow Wilson Center, Reflections on a Century 

of United States-Korean Relations, New York and London: University Press of America, 1983, p. 110. 

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Boethius: The Consolation of Philosophy 

Healing, as I said a moment ago, is a restorative concept. Here two questions pose themselves. If healing 

is a restorative concept, what is the nature of the disease, damage and consequent suffering? What do we 

need to do to get back to the original state of normalcy and purity to which we would wish to be restored? 

To get a grip on these questions, I propose that we take another detour and go to Boethius’s The 

Consolation of Philosophy. 10 It is a fifth century Roman protreptic or exhortation with a specifically 

religious message, written in the prosimetric form, a combination of prose and verse. Following the 

Renaissance and the Reformation the work was translated into many languages of Western Europe, 

including various translations into English, and remained a recommended reading for every educated 

person until well into the 20 th century. 

Born into one of the aristocratic families which dominated Roman life in the final decades of the fifth 

century, Boethius became the leading figure in the Roman establishment with power and prestige. He 

was then suddenly accused to treason, imprisoned, and was finally put to death. The circumstances of 

his trial and the death are not clear but it is probably during his imprisonment that Boethius wrote The 

Consolation. 

Boethius is complaining bitterly about his unjust fall from power and grace. The figure of Philosophy 

appears and chases a way the muses of poetry who had been consoling him. Philosophy offers him a 

physician’s help. 11 In order to diagnose his ailment, Philosophy poses several questions to Boethius: 

whether the world is guided by the reason; to what end it proceeds; and what the essential nature of man 

is. 12 Though she finds Boethius’s answers less than satisfactory, Philosophy sees in them the hope for 

cure. Philosophy declares that she now knows “the further cause of your sickness, and it is a very serious 

one. You have forgotten your identity. So I have now fully elicited the cause of your illness, the means 

of recovering your health. […] Your true conviction of the government of the world provides us with the 

nourishment to restore you to health.” 13 

After a round of give and take with the prisoner, Philosophy comes to the conclusion that the defective 

10 Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy (Translated and with an Introduction by P. G. Walsh), New York: Oxford University 

Press, 1999. 

11 Ibid., p. 8. 

12 Ibid., p. 13. 

13 Ibid., pp. 16-17. 

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goods sought by human beings piecemeal are merely stages in the search for true good, which is the true 

means of happiness. This lies with God. Philosophy here makes an important point that defective goods 

sought piecemeal by humans must be gathered in unity. Philosophy makes the point that “the things 

sought by most men were not true or perfect goods… that the true good emerges when those aims are 

gathered into a single shape, so that sufficiency is identical with power, renown and pleasure. And indeed 

unless all are one and same they, have no claim to be counted among things worth seeking.” 14 

Step by step, Philosophy moves from the prisoners’ personal concerns and makes clear to him that 

consolation does not lie in prisoner’s attainment of mundane satisfaction. It lies rather in aspiring to 

and attaining knowledge of God, the Good. That knowledge will bring with it the realization that God 

orders all things justly. “So God is the highest good which governs all things peacefully, and orders them 

sweetly.” 15 A central feature of the freedom given to human beings is that they are able to choose their 

way. Humans cannot fully comprehend this process, but they are thus given the freedom to free himself 

from the shackles of earthly serfdom and rise to the contemplation of God. 

Civilizational malaise and cultural synthesis 

Does this early medieval language of exhortation to God have anything to teach us? In particular, what 

is the relevance of Boethius’s protreptic for the question we posed a few moments ago, namely what is 

the nature of sickness and suffering which philosophy and the humanities are called upon to heal? And 

how does he help us in conceptualizing the original state of purity and integrity toward which the healing 

should be directed? 

Once stripped of the early Christian language of the Roman era, it becomes clear that Boethius’s focusing 

on the discrepancy between values and ideas that are dominant in the society and the individual in need 

of healing. This can be seen in such questions as the relations between reason and governance, the final 

purpose of the world, and essential nature of man. This discrepancy results in the loss of identity for 

the individual. Philosophy’s final prescription and Boethius’s acceptance of it consist in seeing God 

as the embodiment of the One and the Good. The ideas are not just randomly selected ideas, but the 

essential part of the world in which a person lives and must live. And such a world order with ideas and 

values in coherent unity is represented as God. In secular language Boethius seems to be saying that it is 

civilizational analysis which gives consolation and healing to a person because he is suffering from what 

is essentially a civilizational malaise. 

14 Ibid., p. 62. 

15 Ibid., p. 67. 

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Culture and civilization of each time and place strive to forge optimal synthesis of ideas, values, and 

practices that would enable it to deal with the task of survival and flourishing. At some point in time and 

place, a synthesis thus achieved would be perceived by those inside as well as outside it to have achieved 

an optimal point, a reflective equilibrium in the process of interaction and interchange of ideas, values, and 

practices on the one hand, and recalcitrant but changeable reality on the other. A cultural synthesis thus 

achieved would be the basis of civilization. 

Such synthesis must constantly adapt its ideas, values, and practices to the ever changing or changed 

circumstance in order to function as the guide to survival and flourishing for humanity. Radical changes 

in the natural environment in which a particular civilization as situated may necessitate it. Some have 

been exterminated by imperialistic imposition. A civilization may lose a sense of direction at a certain 

stage of its development and may be confronted by another budding civilization that is more powerful and 

conceptually richer. The resulting transfer of allegiance, partial or total, may come through imperialism but 

it need not always be so, since the old civilizations may itself come to recognize its own inadequacies. 16 

In times of great transition and transformation, when the essential pillars of a civilization are in jeopardy, 

there would be serious grappling with historical and cultural alternatives before each culture, adopting and 

further developing some and discarding others. Danielle Eliseef, a French Sinologist, tells us about the 

“Confucian wave” 17 that gripped Europe in the last quarter of the 16 th century. When Histoire du Grande 

Royaume de la Chine by Juan Gonzalez de Mendoza was published in 1585, it became an immediate 

sensation and was translated into several European languages. Michel de Montaigne is said to have 

expressed his interest in a world much more “ample and diverse” than Europe and surpassing in some 

aspects the ancient civilizations of the Greeks and Romans. Matteo Ricci introduced Confucius to Europe. 

Chinese civilization continued to fascinate the Europeans in times of formation and evolution of a cultural 

synthesis in its early stage. One can only surmise what the result of the interaction between civilizations 

could have been had it continued its course unimpeded by other courses of events. What this “Confucian 

wave” shows clearly is the crucial importance of the humanities in the formation and evolution of cultural 

synthesis, which becomes the basis of civilization. 

16 cf. Yersu Kim, “The Idea of Cultural Identity and Problems of Cultural Relativism,” 

cf. Yersu Kim, “The Idea of Cultural Identity and Problems of Cultural Relativism,” Occasional Paper 40, Washington 

DC: The Woodrow Wilson Center, 1990. 

17 cf. Danielle Eliseef, “Les Valeurs Confuceenes: Un Ferment de l’Europe,” A Paper presented at a UNESCO conference 

cf. Danielle Eliseef, “Les Valeurs Confuceenes: Un Ferment de l’Europe,” A Paper presented at a UNESCO conference 

on “Dialogue Among Civilizations” in Paris, 2003, unpublished. 

20

Plea for Ecumenism in the Humanities: Human Sciences 

The nature of the damage, disease and suffering seems now clear enough. What we are suffering from and 

what is crying out for healing is civilizational. It is civilizational in the sense that many of the values, ideas 

and institutions that constitute the pillars of the cultural synthesis of the West that has served humanity 

so well in its task of survival and flourishing seem now to be increasingly irrelevant and sometimes 

counterproductive. Take, for example, conception regarding man’s relationship to nature. The Faustian 

will to shape the nature for the benefit of human being has been very strong in the cultural synthesis 

of the West. We are now in an ecological dead end and we do not know much about when and where 

the tipping point may be reached. Times we live in are times of great uncertainties. We speak of “risk 

societies” and “tired societies”. These terms indicate the sense that we have entered an age of uncertainty 

and simply do now know what will come next as a result of many actions and ways of life that we thought 

we were conducting in a “rational way”. We witness in Korea as well as in other societies of the world 

many senseless and brutal killings and we agonize over them because we do now know why they have 

occurred and what in our interpersonal relations has gone wrong to make crimes of such inhumanity and 

heinousness happen. We seem to have lost our way and seem to be living in a “lost” society. 

I suspect at the bottom of the present surge in demand for the humanities lies a fumbling search for some 

kind of new cultural synthesis. The long, drawn out process of the demise of the cultural synthesis of the 

West which had been at the basis of the miracle at Centum City is manifesting in particularly painful ways 

in Korea. Korea’s place in the sun has been secured on a borrowed identity, a borrowed cultural synthesis. 

Korea’s development during the last half century has been telescoped one, achieving relative affluence 

within a span of time two or three times shorter than that required by other societies. In this sense, what 

happened at Centum City is truly a miracle, and not simply a mirage. Just a few days ago, as I was writing 

these lines, a review of a book, written by a British journalist, caught my attention. The book is entitled 

Korea: The Impossible Country. 18 Why an impossible country? Firstly, according to the author in the 

interview, Korea has created economic and political miracles. Secondly, because Koreans are setting for 

themselves the standards of achievement that are almost impossible to achieve. 

Be that as it may, many of the developments that are taking place in Korea, in economy, politics, and 

humanities are happening elsewhere too. But somehow they seem to appear writ large in Korea. Our 

sense of loss of direction and waywardness in Korea is only that much greater because we have only a 

distant memory of the agony of identity building and creation. Joseon dynasty, Korea’s last, was a locus 

18 Joongang Sunday, September 30 – October 1, 2012, p. 12. 

21 

Keynote Lecture


Proceedings 

of political stability and cultural achievement because we have actively and creatively participated in the 

creation of a cultural synthesis that was the basis of an ecumenical Confucian world order for 500 years. 

Then the world turned topsy-turvy for Korea with a civilizational defeat by the Westernized Japan and 

then by the United States. 

The surge for the humanities may certainly have this element of being writ large. It is of course 

explainable partly by commercialism and the newly affluent’s taste for what looks like luxury. Hopeful 

sign is it is business enterprises which seem to be most serious about the humanities. It had been partly 

from the pressure of the market against “useless” learning that had led to the kind of restructuring 

of knowledge that occasioned the crisis of the humanities. Now the business leaders see that time of 

economic developments based on borrowed models of management and technology is over. They see that 

they have to be creative in order to stay ahead and even just to survive. The problem boils down to the 

problem of human beings. Ergo, the humanities, the sciences of human beings par excellence. 

Today, sadly for us, there is no cultural model that can effectively replace the old. Signs of civilizational 

transformation are everywhere, and there seems to be a definite direction toward which certain economic 

and political trends are moving. But it is far from clear whether such shifts are merely signs of an 

extension of the refurbished cultural synthesis of the West or a truly transformational moment in the 

evolution of civilizations. Science and technology are creating an unheard of opportunities even as they 

threaten the very foundation of human life. The economic turmoil that began in 2007 and the tragic 

disasters at the nuclear power plants in Fukushima last year attest to human being’s terrifying helplessness 

to deal adequately with the consequences of what we have ourselves wrought. Today, computers are 

getting faster such that some point to the specific year, 2045, barely 33 years from now, as the year when 

the computers will have become capable of whatever it is our brains are capable of. Given exponentiation 

of the growth of computers, human mind will be quickly eclipsed by artificial intelligence and what lies 

beyond that threshold will be unfathomable for the human mind. 19 

If there is a healing mission for the humanities of today, it is the first and foremost in the creation of a 

cultural synthesis that would be adequate to deal with these problems. That would involve search and 

reflection on knowledge and wisdom that would give meaning to the relationship between nature and 

human beings, on how a just society can be envisaged in which freedom and equality play appropriate 

roles, how the relationship between the individuals and community in which he has existential roots 

should be conceptualized, how to conceive what ultimately constitute the meaning of life, and many more 

19 Cf. Lev Grossman, “Singularity,” Time, 177-7, February 2011, pp. 25-31. 

22

questions that animate the current intellectual debate. 

These are times of challenge and opportunity for the humanities. It is clear that the humanities cannot 

exhaust itself as it is conceived in the modern bifurcation of knowledge into science and the humanities 

and its relegation to “lesser” part of knowledge. The humanities that would be adequate to the tasks of 

forging a cultural synthesis would need to be a more inclusive ecumenical activity, encompassing all the 

disciplines that contribute to understanding human beings and their lives, past, present and future. It would 

include not only ideographic classical humanistic studies but also the less nomothetic part of the social 

sciences and even some sciences such as genetics, artificial intelligence, and nano technology. It would 

be a call for the kind of knowledge sought after in movements such as consilience and convergence. The 

label for such an ecumenical science of human beings could be “the human sciences”, les sciences de 

l’homme, in the tradition of Fernand Braudel. It would be “a single adventure of mind, not even just the 

obverse sides of a single cloth, but the entire cloth itself, in all the complexity of its threads.” 20 

Is this task “almost impossible” to achieve? Therein, I submit, lies the challenge for all of us who are 

engaged in the human sciences not only in Korea, but everywhere. 

20 Fernand Braudel, “Histoire et Sociologie,” In Fernand Braudel, 

Fernand Braudel, “Histoire et Sociologie,” In Fernand Braudel, Ecrits sur l’Histoire, Paris: Flammarion, 1969, pp. 

85-86, as quoted in Immanuel Wallerstein, The Uncertainties of Knowledge, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 

p. 62. 

23 

Keynote Lecture


Proceedings 

Catharsis by Confronting the Past: 

Lessons of Germany’s Double Burden of Dictatorship 

Konrad H. Jarausch 

University of North Carolina 

One of the most vexing legacies of a defeated dictatorship is the question of what to do with its violations 

of human rights. During the “peaceful revolution” of 1989 in Eastern Europe, cautious voices warned 

against confronting Communist crimes so as to build a common future. They argued that citizens could 

only reconcile with each other by letting bygones be bygones. None theless, the vic to rious dissidents 

opened the prison gates to free political victims who were cal ling for justice. Once the spell of secrecy 

was broken, the public also clamored for infor ma tion about who was responsible for its prior suffering. 

Moreover, the newly enfranchised me dia published scan da lous revelations about the corruption of those 

who abused their power for personal gain. So as to legitimize the transition to democratic rule some 

post-Communist go vern ments sought to expose the misdeeds of their predecessors. 1 These conflicting 

approaches raise the funda mental question: Should a post-dictatorial country ignore prior crimes in order 

to move forward, or should it openly confront repression and atrocities in order to heal the pain? 

Especially in “pacted-transitions” like the democratization of Spain after the death of Gene ralissimo 

Franco, the impulse of forgetting has proven quite powerful. As compensation for giving up power 

peacefully, dictatorial elites have insisted not just on exemption from legal or economic punishment but 

on keeping their reputation unsullied, even if they knew full well that they had committed crimes. Former 

perpetrators and many collaborators argued that little would be gained by dwelling on their transgressions, 

because that would only continue internal con flicts. Rather than reopening old wounds, it would be much 

better just to forgive and forget in order to move on to a brighter future. For the sake of living in peace 

with one’s neighbors it see med sensible not to delve into their misdeeds under the dictator ship. Such 

1 A. James McAdams, ed., Transitional Justice and the Rule of Law in New Democracies (Notre Dame, 1997). Cf. also 

Helga Welsh, “When Discourse Trumps Policy: Transitional Justice in Unified Germany,” German Politics 15 (2007), pp. 

137-152. 

24

argu ments tended to find favor with groups who had something to hide while also appealing to a sense 

of generosity among the victors. 2 Hence some East European and Latin American coun tries de cided to 

forego transitional justice by maintaining a benevolent silence about prior crimes. 3 

In contrast, regime critics have argued quite insistently that lasting social peace could only be restored 

by openly confron ting the past, because then the ghosts could no longer haunt the living. In opposing 

impunity, victims of the military dictatorship in Argentina have stres sed the need to find out what hap- 

pened to the family members who simply disappeared, to dis cover the graves of murdered dissidents 

or to identify the chil dren who were taken from their parents so as to be able to mourn. 4 Most critical 

intellectuals emphasized the necessity of bringing per petra tors to justice in order to restore faith in the rule 

of law. They argued that untold victims of repres sion and violence needed both personal consolation and 

financial compen sation for their de stroy ed lives. In the long run, so they reasoned, a stable democracy 

required open discussion rather than sweeping previous atrocities under the rug. These claims rest both on 

the Christian teaching that forgiveness requires a prior confession of guilt and on the psychiatric theory 

that the soul can only achieve peace, if it honestly engages its own failings. 5 

For this debate, the German case is particularly instructive, since the Federal Republic has borne a 

double burden of dealing with two ideologically opposed dictatorships: After 1945, it had to confront the 

responsibility for unleashing the Second World War and perpetrating the mass murder of the Jews and 

Slavs in the Holocaust. After 1989, it had to deal with the ef fects of Communist repression that imprisoned 

GDR citizens behind the Wall. The effort to cope with the fascist past first coined the untranslatable 

term of Vergangenheitsbe wäl ti gung, i.e. mas ter ing the past, and later on the equally complex concept 

of Aufarbeitung, i.e. working through his tory. While the international community has made sure that 

the Germans would not escape their respon sibility for the Nazi crimes, internal pressure has kept the 

Communist violations of human rights in the public eye. Moreover, the success in creating a stable post- 

war democracy and the progress in reunifying a divided country have raised the question of what other 

count ries might be able to learn from the German effort to come to terms with its terrible past. 6 

2 Laura Desfor Edles, Symbol and Ritual in the New Spain: The Transition to Democracy After Franco (Cambridge, 1998). 

3 Monika Nalepa, Skeletons in the Closet: Transitional Justice in Post-Communist Europe (Cambridge, 2010). 

4 Carlos H. Acunia, “Transitional Justice in Argentina and Chile: A Never-Ending Story?” in John Elster, ed., Retribution 

and Reparation in the Transition to Democracy (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 206-238. 

5 Alexander Mitscherlich, The Inability to Mourn: Principles of Collective Behavior (New York., 1975) and Joachim 

Gauck, Winter im Sommer, Frühling im Herbst. Erinnerungen (Munich, 2009). 

6 These remarks draw on Konrad H. Jarausch, “Memory Wars: German Debates about the Legacy of Dictatorship,” in John 

A. Williams, ed., Berlin Since the Wall’s End: Shaping Society and Memory in the German Metropolis since 1989 (Cambridge, 

2008), 90-109; and “Double Burden: The Politics of the Past and German Identity,” in Jörn Leonhard and Lothar 

Funk, eds., Ten Years of German Unification: Transfer, Transformation, Incorporation? (Birmingham, 2002). 

25 

Keynote Lecture


Proceedings 

In order to explore whether to forget or to confront history, the following remarks will briefly examine 

the German struggle over coping with its dictatorial histories. These reflections will trace the evolution of 

memory culture rather than legal and administrative measures, since a public understanding of the past 

forms the basis for most judicial sentences and political deci sions. 7 First I shall focus on the laborious 

process of coming to terms with Nazi crimes which took decades to complete, since the establishment of a 

self-critical view had to overcome much public resis tan ce. Then I shall take a look at the post-unification 

dis cus sions about the Com mu nist dictatorship in East Germany which are still in progress since they 

are more recent, engen dering strong emotions in the new federal states. Thereafter I shall address the 

competition between the efforts to deal with the Nazi and Communist legacies in order to point out how 

the different memory regimes have influenced one another. And finally I shall conclude with some general 

comments on the relationship between truth, justice and reconciliation. 

1) Confronting Nazi Crimes 

Learning to deal openly with the horrible crimes committed by the Third Reich was a long and contested 

process, because the establishment of a critical approach to the past had to overcome strong public 

resistance. In order to prevent another World War, the victorious allies instituted a program of reorientation 

during the Potsdam Conference that sought to transform the defeated country’s entire political culture by 

“demilitarization, denazification and decar te li za tion.” When they returned from emigration, concentration 

camps and inner exile, the German opponents of the Nazi regime also insisted on a fresh start by repu di- 

ating the dangerous tradi tions of militarism, nationalism and authoritarianism which had brought about the 

cata strophe. But the majority of the population remembered the prewar years as a “good time” and refused 

to address its own complicity in the brutality of the war, the persecution of the Jews and the ex ploitation of 

the slave laborers. While official pronouncements admitted German guilt, private memories instead dwelt 

on their own suffering during and after the collapse. 8 

The military defeat of Hitler’s regime permitted the victorious Allies to combat Nazi propaganda myths 

by revealing the full extent of the atrocities perpetrated in the German name. The demobilization of the 

military machine, the dissolution of the Nazi Party, and the deconcen tra tion of the war industries sought to 

discredit militarism, displace party members and dis man tle the economic basis of aggression. Compulsory 

visits to nearby concentration camps and films of the skeletal survivors also demonstrated of inhumanity 

of Nazi policies to shocked German civilians. But it took the much publicized Nuremberg Trial of the 

7 Timothy Garton Ash, “Trials, Purges, and History Lessons: Treating a Difficult Past in Post-Communist Europe’, in Jan- 

Werner Müller, ed., Memory and Power in Post-War Europe: Studies in the Presence of the Past (Cambridge, 2002). 

8 Jeffrey Herf, Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanies (Cambridge, 1997). 

26

Nazi leaders and the subsidiary cases against the SS, the captains of industry and the medical profession in 

order to make public the full extent of war crimes. Moreover “crimes against humanity” had to be added 

as a new category so as to punish the genocide of Jews and Slavs. In order to sustain their in dictments, 

the prosecutors amassed an enormous amount of evidence in official documents and personal testimony 

which proved the murderousness of the NS-dictatorship beyond any doubt. 9 

Most of the Germans responded to the presumed accusation of “collective guilt” with incredulity and 

resentment, instead blaming the top Nazis for their misfortune. Excuses such as “I was just following 

superior orders,” “we did not know anything about the crimes” or “the other countries also did bad 

things” were popular, because they diminished personal res pon si bi lity. Though designed to establish the 

degree of individual guilt, the denazification process gra dually turned into a white-washing when most of 

its judgments classified perpetrators as mere fel low-travelers. While the Protestant Church admitted some 

failing in its Stuttgart declara tion, conser vative bishops and the Catholic hierarchy pleaded for the release 

of generals con victed of war crimes. Moreover, many collaborators who had been interned or lost their 

job were eventu ally reintegrated into government service through a general amnesty. Though Chancellor 

Konrad Adenauer courageously offered restitution to the Jewish community, the bulk of the electorate 

wanted the “politics of the past” to stop any further legal prosecution and debate. 10 

The renewed confrontation with the Nazi crimes in the FRG during the early 1960s came as somewhat 

of a surprise, because it went counter to public sentiment. Since the formulaic anti-Fascism of the 

GDR served to justify the dictatorship of the SED, many West Germans dismissed charges that old 

Nazis still held power as Eastern propaganda. But a series of highly publicized court cases such as the 

Einsatzgruppen trial in Ulm, the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem and the Ausch witz trial in Frankfurt drew 

public attention once again to the criminal past. Based on incri mi na ting documentary evidence and 

touching survivor testimonies, a minority of pro gres s ive jurists like Fritz Bauer decided to prosecute 

perpetrators before the statute of limitations would make legal action impossible. The establishment of 

a central clearing office in Ludwigs burg helped to assemble material for further court cases. Moreover, 

famous writers such as Hein rich Böll in his short stories, Günter Grass in the Tin Drum, Peter Weiss 

in his staging of the Ausch witz trial and Ralf Hochhut in the play The Deputy also issued searing 

9 Astrid M. Eckert, The Struggle for the Files: The Western Allies and the Return of the German Archives after the Second 

World War (Cambridge, 2012). 

10 Norbert Frei, 

Norbert Frei, 1945 und wir: Das Dritte Reich im Bewusstsein der Deutschen (Munich, 2005). See also Philipp Gassert 

and Alan E. Steinweis, eds., Coping with the Nazi Past: West German Debates on Nazism and Generational Conflict, 

1955-1975 (New York, 2006). 

27 

Keynote Lecture


Proceedings 

indictments. 11 

The overwhelming response to the US TV series on the Holocaust, aired in the Federal Republic in 

January 1979, reinforced this critical turn. Liberal media like Die Zeit, and Der Spiegel had already 

prepared the ground with their honest reporting, while an entire rebellious generation which had grown 

up since the Third Reich kept asking “Daddy, what did you do during the war?” The American TV 

series, directed by Marvin J. Chomsky, was so effective because it did not treat the murder of the Jews 

didactically, but used the form of a soap opera to dramatize the gruesome fate of the putative Weiss family 

of a Berlin doctor, hunted by a bureau cratic SS killer named Dorf. Seen by 10-15 million viewers, about 

a quarter of the West German TV audience, the miniseries, portrayed by gifted actors like Meryl Streep 

showed the entire trajectory of increa sing discrimination, killing by bullets, extermi nation in Auschwitz 

and painful survival. This dramatization evoked such an emotional response that the Bundestag was 

forced to extend the statute of limitation and the term Holocaust entered into the German debate. 12 

Local efforts to uncover traces of persecution and the transformation the concentration camps into public 

memorials supported the growing Holocaust sensibility by making the effects of Anti-Semitism visible. 

The methodological shift from an abstract “history of society” to a more tangible “everyday history” 

inspired historians and amateurs to research the effects of per secu tion where they lived, revealing a 

universe of forgotten Nazi detention facilities. Arresting the decay of former concentration camps, this 

increas ing public interest transformed sites of suffer ing like Buchenwald or Da chau into impressive public 

memorials. Ironically East and West Ger many began to compete by offering different versions of a critical 

approach, with the GDR extol ling the Com munist resistance and the FRG stressing the racist nature of 

genocide. 13 Grass-roots initiatives like Stolpersteine or plaques to murdered Jews on their former houses 

made the process of discrimination and the loss of Jewish culture visible. As a result, educated young Ger- 

mans identified with the racial victims and developed a diffuse sense of philosemitism. 

Yet among the older generation and the political right signs of discomfort con tinued to emerge which 

demonstrated an unwillingness to be self-critical. During the post-war decades an unofficial subculture 

of veteran reunions and rightist publications (Landserheftchen) maintained a more positive recollection 

of Wehrmacht exploits during the war. Fortunately the various neo-Nazi parties, initially forbidden but 

11 Annette Weinke, 

Annette Weinke, Die Verfolgung von NS-Tätern im geteilten Deutschland: Vergangenheitsbewältigung 1949-1969, oder 

eine deutsch-deutsche Beziehungsgeschichte im kalten Krieg (Paderborn, 2002). 

12 Peter Reichel 

Peter Reichel Erfundene Erinnerung - Weltkrieg und Judenmord in Film und Theater (Munich, 2004). 

13 Harold Marcuse, 

Harold Marcuse, Legacies of Dachau: The Uses and Abuses of a Concentration Camp 1933-2001 (New York, 2001); 

and David A. Hackett, The Buchenwald Report (Boulder, CO, 1995). 

28

esurrected in a tamer guise, never received enough votes to get into the federal parliament. But moderate 

politicians like Helmut Kohl also made occa sional missteps such as meeting with President Reagan 

in the Bitburg military cemetery which con tained Waffen-SS graves. When traditionalist scholars such 

as Ernst Nolte sought to relativize German crimes by pointing to the prior Stalinist mass murders as 

inspiration, they set off a fierce quarrel among the historians (Historikerstreit). 14 While liberal intel lectuals 

ultimately prevailed in main taining the critical consensus of public discourse, they were unable to stop the 

development of a xenophobic skin-head subculture among disenchanted youths. 

The post-unification tendency towards claiming victimization also revealed a desire to revise the critical 

memory regarding the Third Reich. In his Frankfurt Peace Price speech the writer Martin Walser ques- 

tioned whether Auschwitz ought to be used any longer as “moral club” for beating the Ger mans, pro- 

vok ing censure from Ignatz Bubis, the head of the Jewish commu nity. The novelist W. G. Se bald and the 

journa list Jörg Friedrich also called attention to the suf fering of German civilians during the “fire-storm” 

of Allied bombing, which had previously been somewhat neglected. Simi larly Günter Grass pointed to the 

plight of over 12 million fleeing from the Red Army in 1945 and expelled from their homes in the East 

in order to blunt the call of the Union of Refugees for a separate memorial to “flight and expulsion.” 15 

Pointing to Ger man suf fering during the War needed not to diminish responsibility for Nazi crimes, if its 

cau ses were clearly kept in mind. Chancellor Kohl suggested a compromise with the revised inscription of 

the Berlin war memorial Neue Wache which now pays tribute to all “Victims of War and Tyranny.” 

The erection of the new Holocaust Memorial close to the Brandenburg Gate, none theless, showed that 

self-criticism was here to stay. Though institu tions like the Topography of Terror or the Jewish Museum 

already addressed the topic, the redoubtable journalist Lea Rosh and the historian Eberhard Jäckel 

organized a citizens’ initiative which convinced Helmut Kohl that a symbolic expression of German guilt 

was needed in the new capital. In spite of much criticism directed against the necessity of further contrition 

as well as against its artistic form, Kohl chose the concept proposed by the architects Peter Eisenman and 

Richard Serra, which resem bled a Jew ish cemetery with 2,711 tomb-like columns of polished concrete. 

After an under ground “place of information” was added so as to help visitors decode the site’s meaning, 

the Bundestag voted the funds, and construction was completed in 2004. The memorial’s massive size and 

location close to the Bundestag created a permanent presence in the center of government, suggesting that 

14 Charles S. Maier, 

Charles S. Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust and German National Identity (Cambridge, MA, 1988). 

15 Thomas A. Kovach and Martin Walser, eds., 

Thomas A. Kovach and Martin Walser, eds., The Burden of the Past: Martin Walser on Modern German Identity (Rochester, 

NY, 2008); Jörg Friedrich, The Fire: The Bombing of Germany, 1940-1945 (New York, 2006); Günter Grass, 

Crabwalk (Orlando, FL, 2002). 

29 

Keynote Lecture


Proceedings 

national identity could be reconciled with a sense of guilt. 16 

2) Coping with Communist Repression 

The effort to deal with the Communist dictatorship was both similar to and different from the 

confrontation with the Nazi crimes. On the one hand, the regimes resembled each other as one-party 

dictatorships, supported by a well-oiled pro pagan da machine and a powerful secret service, which 

violated human rights. On the other, the GDR was a Soviet satellite, covered only one third of Germany, 

lasted three times as long and killed many fewer victims. In fact, its Communist ideology of egalitarian 

internationalism was diametrically opposed to the Fascist dreams of racist imperialism. 17 This perplexing 

mixture of resemblance and antagonism was bound to compli cate the process of dealing with the second 

German dictatorship which tried to avoid the earlier mistake of reluctant engagement by insisting on a 

more thorough reckoning from the beginning. Although emotions continue to run high in the East due to 

conflicting me mories of the GDR, the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Wall in 2009 has created an 

incipient consensus by establishing the notion of a “peaceful revolution” in the public mind. 

The quest for free speech as a fundamental human right was already part and parcel of the demo cratic 

awakening of 1989, seeking to tear the veil of secrecy from the SED regime. The most popular citizens’ 

initiative of the fall was the “New Forum” which proclaimed the need for an open discussion of the 

problems confronting the GDR, thereby trying to restore an indepen dent public sphere in which citizens 

could articulate their wishes. After ousting the dictator Erich Honecker, his successor Egon Krenz was 

forced to initiate a policy of “public dialogue” that gradually escaped his control. At the same time, the 

media threw off its prior censorship, with state television suddenly presenting unvarnished news and 

newspapers scandalizing the cor rupt life-style of the Socialist Unity Party in its suburban ghetto Wandlitz. 

The party’s pri vileges such as a separate grocery store, an indoor swimming pool or a hunting preserve 

seemed rather modest by Western standards. Propelled by freed victims of the regime, critical reckon ing 

with the GDR past therefore originated already during the overthrow of the SED. 18 

The records of repression became an important bone of contention during the post-dicta torial transition. 

When the secret service began to shred and burn its documents, alert dissi dents occupied its regional 

16 Jan-Holger Kirsch, 

Jan-Holger Kirsch, Nationaler Mythos oder historische Trauer? Der Streit um ein zentrales „Holocaust-Mahnmal“ für 

die Berliner Republik (Cologne, 2003). Cf. www.holocaust-denkmal-berlin.de. 

17 Günter Heydemann and Eckart Jesse, eds., 

Günter Heydemann and Eckart Jesse, eds., Diktaturvergleich. Theorie und Praxis (Berlin, 1998). 

18 Konrad H. Jarausch, 

Konrad H. Jarausch, Die Unverhoffte Einheit 1989/90 (Frankfurt, 1995); and Charles S. Maier, Dissolution: The Crisis 

of Communism and the End of East Germany (Princeton,1997). 

30

offices in December 1989 and when it leaked out that the Stasi was trying to survive by changing its name, 

the opposition stormed its Berlin headquarters in mid-January. Though the foreign espionage branch HVA 

succeeded in destroying its files and the Modrow government authorized the purging of personnel records, 

the dissidents captured kilo meters of files, documenting the prior repression in great detail. A curious 

alliance of the Eas tern com munist perpetrators and the West German government, afraid of disclosing 

their re spect ive secrets, wanted to seal or destroy this evidence. But the civic movement engaged in a dra- 

ma tic hunger strike in order to preserve the written record of injustice. In the end, the dissidents succeeded 

and the Bundestag established a special office for Stasi files (BStU) that offered access to victims and 

scholars, thereby laying an archival basis for a critical memory. 19 

The political confrontation with the SED-regime culminated in a “commission of inqui ry” which sought to 

discredit the Communist dictatorship. Meeting from 1992 to 1998, this parlia mentary Enquetekommission 

was dedicated to “Examining the History and Consequences of the SED-Dictatorship.” In a series of 

widely-publicized hearings, politicians, eye-witnesses and aca demic experts discussed the structures 

of the SED-regime in order to destroy apologetic myths and enlighten the public about the repressive 

character of the GDR. Since they revealed secrets such as the shady economic dealings of Alexander 

Schalck-Golodkowski, the televised discus sions reached a considerable audience. While conservative 

anti-Communists and regime victims painted a dark picture of the East German state, post-Communist 

partisans sought to defend its record as socially innovative, whereas moderate commentators tried to 

make sense of the many contradictions between humane goals and inhumane policies. Eventually, the 

Bundestag created a foundation to carry on with public education and historical research. 20 

Legal efforts to punish perpetrators and compensate victims turned out to be just as diffi cult after 

Communism as after Nazism, because they were constrained by the rule of law. Court ca ses were based 

on GDR laws as long as they did not conflict with FRG provisions, while for eign spies were excluded 

altogether, since Markus Wolf claimed that they were no different than the sleuths of the West. As a result, 

thousands of investigations led to hundreds of cases, but yiel ded only a few dozen convictions. It was 

easier to condemn border guards for shooting es ca pees at the Wall than to punish Stasi-chief Erich Mielke 

or the head of the security commit tee Krenz for their political responsibility. Organized in pressure groups, 

the victims clamored for re ha bili tation and com pen sation through laws “to undo the injustice.” While 

about 200,000 people received some payment for prior suffering, it proved more difficult to handle the 

19 Joachim Gauck, 

Joachim Gauck, Die Stasi-Akten. Das unheimliche Erbe der DDR (Reinbeck,1991). 

20 Andrew Beattie, 

Andrew Beattie, Playing Politics with History: The Bundestag Inquiries into East Germany (New York, 2008). Cf. www. 

stiftung-aufarbeitung.de. 

31 

Keynote Lecture


Proceedings 

more than one million claims for restitution of lost property. 21 As a result the high hopes for justice were 

often dash ed by the cold reality of legal procedure, leaving both perpetrators and victims dissatisfied. 

Resentment against blanket condemnation and Western lack of understanding triggered a nostalgic reflex, 

called Ostalgie, which made the GDR seem more attractive in retrospect than it had been in reality. 

Not surprisingly, former regime members in the party, the military or the security organs became rather 

defensive, feeling victimized by Western media, and voted for the post-Communist PDS. Intellectuals, 

who often had lost their jobs due to their ideological taint, clustered around the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung 

in a separate scholarly subculture, deba ting the reasons why Communism had failed. The majority of 

East Germans regretted the loss of their objects of daily life, which they had precipitated by switching to 

Western goods. There fore, a series of Ostshops started to revive familiar Eastern brands, offering the new 

citizens a sense of regional continuity across the rupture. Curiously enough, many Easterners failed to 

distinguish between criticism of the regime and their own lives, gradually replacing their recollections of 

shortage and repression with an illusion of a warm solidarity in the GDR. 22 

Artistic efforts to come to terms with the Communist past have presented more complex renditions of 

life under the SED dictatorship, seeking to balance the old security with the new freedom. A spate of 

autobiographical texts like Jana Hensel’s Zonenkinder described the transi tion from a regulated but 

protected GDR childhood to the excitement and insecurity of Western life-styles. Some authors like the 

film-directors of Sonnenallee or Goodbye Lenin took recourse to irony while contrasting the claims and 

realities of the East and the West with each other, using a light touch in order to explore the ambivalences 

of the two sys tems. 23 Other writers like Uwe Tellkamp of Der Turm or directors like Henkel von Donners- 

marck of The Lives of Others employed a more dramatic voice so as to portray the suffering of victims 

in the GDR, suggesting that the SED-dictatorship was not just a friendly summer camp. Intellec tuals like 

Christa Wolf have offered a whole spectrum of recollections, ranging from a defense of so cial ist ideals to 

an indictment of repressive practices – sometimes even within the same text. 24 

Less than one generation after the collapse of Communism, the academic controversy between harsh 

condemnation and sympathetic understanding of the GDR remains unresolved. Internal and external 

opponents interpret the SED regime as a brutal dictatorship, implanted by the Red Army, which violated 

21 A. James McAdams, Judging the Past in Unified Germany (Cambridge, 2001). 

22 Daphne Berdahl, “’(N)Ostalgia’ for the Present: Memory, Longing, and East German Things,” Ethnos (1999), pp. 192- 

211. 

23 Jill E. Twark, Humor, Satire and Identity: Eastern German Literature in the 1990s (Berlin, 2007). 

24 Klaus Scherpe, “After “After After the the GDR? GDR? Restoring Restoring Literature’s Literature’s Standing,” Standing,” in in Konrad Konrad H. H. Jarausch, Jarausch, ed., ed., 

United Germany: Debating 

Processes and Prospects (New York, 2013). 

32

human rights in order to retain power. They have revived the theory of totalitarianism, originally 

developed by German émigrés like Hannah Arendt, in order to equate the anti-democratic nature of 

Fascism with Communism. In contrast post-Communist intellectuals tend to defend the Enlightenment 

derived idealism of Socialism as a progressive quest for an egalitarian utopia. But they need to explain 

when and why this noble experiment failed in the end. Instead, more moderate scholars, supported by 

Anglo-American academics, empha size the tensions between the unquestioned dictatorial features of SED 

control and the relatively normal daily lives of East Germans as constitutive. The concept which I have 

sugges ted in order to reconcile this contradiction is the notion of a “welfare dictatorship.” 25 

This disagreement is also visible in the cleavages of the memory landscape of museums and exhibitions 

that deal with the GDR. On the one hand, condemnations of the Unrechts staat have motivated the 

transformation of former prisons like in Hohenschönhausen or the Linden strasse in Potsdam into 

memorials of brutal repression in which victims talk about their terrible suffer ing. On the other hand, the 

experience of everyday life in the East has inspired apolitical presen tations like the GDR-museum at the 

Spree or nostalgic impulses like the Trabi tours in Berlin. In order to meet the interests of world-wide 

tourists, the Berlin Senate has developed a “decentra lized Wall concept” which preserves a few remnants 

of the divisive barrier and drama tizes their effect in a special memorial at the Bernauer Strasse. Most 

controversial remains the fu ture of the crossing point at Checkpoint Charlie, since its commercialism 

clashes with plans for the construction of an international Cold War Museum to explain the world-wide 

context. The ultimate shape which the memorialization of the GDR will take is therefore still unclear. 26 

3) Reconciling Competing Memories 

The development of critical approaches to the past has been complicated by the ideo lo gical competition 

between anti-Fascism and anti-Communism as the foundation for a func tion ing democracy. Even if 

Fascism fortunately disappeared with the defeat of Hitler and Mussolini, other authoritarian regimes and 

military dictatorships of the Right have taken its place around the globe. Similarly, Communism has been 

overthrown from below in Eastern Europe and Rus sia, but developmental dictatorships of the Left are 

still in power from Cuba to North Korea, and with some economic modification in China and Vietnam. 

Developed as a form of resistance during the 1930s, anti-Fascism remains the ideological basis for leftist 

ideology, abhorring all forms of exploitation and repression. At the same time, the Cold War reflex of anti- 

Communism is still a powerful motive force for conservatives who fear social leveling and various kinds 

25 Konrad H. Jarausch, ed., 

Konrad H. Jarausch, ed., Dictatorship as Experience: Towards a Socio-Cultural History of the GDR (New York, 1999). 

26 Martin Sabrow, ed., 

Martin Sabrow, ed., Wohin treibt die DDR-Erinnerung? Dokumentation einer Debatte (Bonn, 2007); and Klaus-Dietmar 

Henke, ed., Die Mauer. Errichtung, Überwindung, Erinnerung (Munich, 2012). 

33 

Keynote Lecture


Proceedings 

of experiments. 27 Since both ideologies clash in the Federal Republic, the German case has impor tant 

implications for the world wide debate about developing a critical memory. 

The territorial division of memory regimes has hampered the global spread of the prin ciple of histo rical 

self-criticism. Western and Central Europe primarily remember the bru ta lity of the Nazi occupation, 

therefore attributing, like the Dutch, the respon sibility for all suffering to the Germans. The myth of the 

résistance in France allowed the restoration of democratic go vern ment by ignoring the evidence of mass 

collaboration, punished in a wave of épuration after li ber ation. Only gradually were critical scholars 

like Robert Paxton from the US or Henry Rousso in France able to dismantle the “Vichy syndrome” by 

pointing out that most Frenchmen had coope rated with the German occupiers, and the Laval government 

had even turned over tens of thou sands of hapless Jews to be annihilated in Auschwitz. 28 This growing 

Holocaust sensibility has made the racist violation of human rights a central international concern. Hence, 

acknowledge ment of the Holo caust has emerged as a new standard of civilized conduct, symbolically 

reaf fir med by the Stockholm declaration that it “must be forever seared in our collective memory.” 29 

In Eastern Europe, memory debates are instead dominated by the recollection of suf fer ing from Soviet 

atrocities, sometimes even downplaying the cooperation of local auxili aries in Nazi murder. This fixation 

on the misdeeds of the Communists is understandable, since their wounds are more recent and the 

discrepancy is greater between the liberationist rhetoric of anti-Fascism and the Red Army practice of 

rape, pillage and repression. The effort to legitimize na tio nal independence also involves pointing to 

Russian crimes, inspiring accusations of mass star vation during the Holodomor in the Ukraine and of the 

vicious repression of Hungarian wish es for independence in 1956, dramatized in the “House of Terror” in 

Buda pest. In cont rast to the courageous democratic activists around Memorial, the majority of patrio tic 

Russians and Bela rusians remain in deep denial about Stalinist crimes, preferring to cele brate their victory 

in the “Great Fatherland’s War” over the Fascist aggressors. Recent research has none theless poin ted out 

that in the Eastern “bloodlands” Soviet murder rivaled the beastliness of Nazi killing. 30 

In many ways the German case is unique, because there the debates about the Holo caust and the Stalinist 

crimes overlap, engendering an exceptionally critical memory cul ture. Compared to the nationalist 

27 Francois Furet, The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century (Chicago, 1999). 

28 Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France: Old Guard, New Order. 1940-1944 (New York, 1972); and Henry Rousso, The Vichy 

Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944 (Cambridge, MA, 1991). 

29 Stockholm declaration https://www.holocausttaskforce.org/about-the-itf/stockholm-declaration.html 

30 Claus Leggewie, Der Kampf um die europäische Erinnerung. Ein Schlachtfeld wird besichtigt (Munich, 2011). Cf. KonKonrad H. Jarausch and Thomas Lindenberger, eds., Conflicted Memories: Europeanizing Contemporary Histories (New 

York, 2007). 

34

tendency to downplay the Nanking massacre in Japan and the Italian penchant for claiming that everyone 

resisted the Fascists, international and domestic pres sure has forced Germany to confront its ugly past 

as chief perpetrator of the Holocaust. 31 The latest instance of this mechanism was the debate about the 

compensation of Slave Labo rers, which led to the establishment of a business and government foundation, 

paying out bil lions of Euros to survivors. At the same time the fall of the Wall has also compelled 

Germans to deal with the le gacy of Communist crimes, since tens of thousands of SED-victims de man ded 

legal punish ment as well as material aid. The internal effort to integrate the new citi zens during unification 

therefore sparked heated discussions about Stalinist repression. As a result, the Germans were forced to 

address the relationship between these two sets of memories. 

One way of resolving the competition between Fascist and Communist memories con sisted of looking 

more closely at the repressive practices of both dictatorships on the ground. Surprisingly enough, both 

the Nazis and the SED used the same places such as the concen tra tion camps of Buchen wald and Sach- 

senhausen or estab lished prisons in Bautzen, Brandenburg or Halle to incarcerate their opponents. As 

a result, two groups of victims now compete for erec t ing memo rials on the same sites, seek ing to high- 

light their particular suffering so as to establish the priority of their ideological mes sage. Ironically the 

patterns of persecution by pro secutors and informants, the harsh treatment of inmates, and the disinterest 

of outsiders were rather si mi lar under both regimes. Moreover, some Commu nists imprisoned under the 

Nazis sub se quent ly turned into guards while some NS-jailers found themselves imprisoned afterwards. 32 

Rather than quarreling about the primacy of anti-Fascism and anti-Communism, this resem blance 

suggests that it would be more constructive to pay attention to their actual relationship. 

Another method of dealing with the paradox would be to emphasize that both the Nazi and SED 

dictatorships were antidemocratic regimes, proposing alternatives to Western forms of moder nity. The 

revival of totalitarianism theory after the fall of the Wall highlighted the structural similarities of the one- 

party dictatorships in terms of the political science criteria of Carl Fried rich. Critics, however, quickly 

pointed out that such an approach risked equating two hostile re gi mes which had fought each other in the 

Second World War and committed different kinds of crimes such as racist ethnic extermination versus 

class-based killing by starvation and labor. As a result, scholars have turned to comparing both dicta tor- 

ships systematically in a Dikta tur ver gleich so as to establish where they resembled each other or where 

31 Richard J. B. Bosworth, 

Richard J. B. Bosworth, Explaining Auschwitz and Hiroshima: History Writing and the Second World War (New York, 

1993); Ian Buruma, The Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan (New York, 1994). 

32 Gabriele Schnell, 

Gabriele Schnell, Das Lindenhotel. Berichte aus dem Potsdamer Geheimdienstgefängnis (Berlin, 2012), rev. ed. Cf. Heike 

Roth, “Öffentliche Anhörung zum Konzept und zur Trägerschaft der Gedenkstätte Lindenstraße am 7. Juni 2012 in 

Potsdam” (Potsdam, 2012). 

35 

Keynote Lecture


Proceedings 

they were rather differ ent. Recent research has also paid more atten tion to their mutual learning, with the 

Nazi mass mur der copy ing Soviet crimes and Soviet repression imitating Nazi techniques. 33 Instead of ig- 

nor ing each other, both memory initiatives would benefit from confronting their mutual entanglement. 

The sterile moralizing about the priority of the Holocaust or of the Communist crimes might be overcome 

by a new effort at comparative genocide studies. The Polish Jewish survivor Raphael Lemkin coined this 

concept as description of the resemblance between both ideolo gi cal mass killings during World War Two. 

In its 1948 convention, the United Nations therefore forbade “the deliberate and systematic destruction, 

in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, reli gious, or national group.” By being ideologically neutral, the 

term genocide makes it possible to compare various cases of mass murder from the Ottoman persecution 

of the Armenians all the way down to Pol Pot’s crimes in Cambodia to the orgy of killing in Rwanda. 

Although beset with defi ni tional and empirical difficulties, statistical comparisons have established that 

the magni tude and form of mass murder committed by the Fascists and Communists were generally on 

the same scale. Therefore, a similarly critical effort is needed in order to investigate the causes, courses 

and consequences of all cases so as to be able to prevent their recurrence. 34 

The debate about repression, ethnic cleansing and genocide has begun to establish the critical approach 

to past crimes as global standard of civilization. The internationaliza tion of the Holocaust has played a 

crucial role in raising awareness of the connection be tween the admis sion of crimes and democratic rule 

as the continuing denial of Iran indicates. It took a mixture of academic research and journalistic exposure 

to overcome denials of the reality of mass murder of Jews and Slavs, so that the Holocaust could become 

the historical basis for a shared Euro pean identity. In the case of the Communist crimes, intellectual 

resistance to admitting guilt has been stronger yet, but even there the reality of massive transgressions 

cannot be disputed any lon ger. The symbolic meeting between Russian and Polish leaders at Katyn, 

the site of the Red Ar my’s mass killing of the Polish officers, was an important step towards improving 

relations be tween both neighbors. 35 Such encouraging examples need to be extended to other mi litary or 

leftist dictatorships so as to break the cycle of hatred and revenge at home and abroad. 

In this process scholars have a crucial role to play because they can establish the actu al facts and provide 

conciliatory interpretations. While selling thousands of copies, most kiss-and-tell memoirs of politicians 

33 Colin Ross, 

Colin Ross, The East German Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives in the Interpretation of the GDR (London, 

2002). 

34 Ben Kiernan, 

Ben Kiernan, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide from Sparta to Darfur (New Haven, 2007). 

35 Norman Naimark, 

Norman Naimark, Stalin’s Genocides (Princeton, 2010); and Eric Weitz, A Century of Genocide: Utopias of Race and 

Nation (Princeton, 2003). 

36

are ultimately self-serving, often covering up more than they re veal. Similarly journalistic exposes, 

announced with great fanfare, tend to scandalize the past through shocking disclosures rather than to 

provide judicious judgments. Due to their critical me thods and self-reflexive detachment, contemporary 

historians can help establish “what ac tually hap pe ned” in order to dispel partisan myths. Moreover, their 

transnatio nal discussions are also able to support internal critics and transcend the narrowness of chauvi- 

nistic interpretations so as to enhance mutual understanding. 36 The inter national school-book conferences 

supported by the Georg Eckert Institut in Braunschweig are such an endeavor that has brought scholars 

together from various countries so as to narrow their interpretative differen ces. 37 This effort has already 

helped to diminish hostile stereotypes between Germany and France as well as Poland. 

4) Aufarbeitung as Catharsis 

These remarks have proposed the thesis that confrontation with the horrors of the past is necessary so as 

to reach closure through a process which Aristotle called “catharsis.” In a simp le sense this elusive term 

suggests a purgation of the blood from evil humors. Closer to the issue is the connotation of purification, 

referring to the release fear and pity in Greek tragedy. More suggestive yet is another meaning of 

“intellectual clarification” in the audience via its vi ca rious participation. Psychotherapists like Sigmund 

Freud have picked up the concept in order to suggest a way of dealing with shocking experiences through 

a controlled release of emotions. A recent psychological summary claims: “Catharsis refers to the re- 

experiencing (partially or fully) of significant traumatic events, that have not been ade quately emotionally 

processed and are repressed, causing emotional, physical, or relation ship problems in the person’s life.” 38 

In deal ing with crimes of repression or mass murder, historians can play a similar the ra peutic role of 

containing destructive feelings through intellectually clarifying their cause. 

The examples of Hitler’s Holocaust and of Stalin’s crimes suggest that the attempt to come to terms with 

the past involves several successive steps. As in individual therapy, survivor experiences of repres sion or 

genocide indicate that coping with trauma must begin with break ing the wall of silence. The incredulity of 

the public has to be overcome, since it creates a barrier among bystanders who do not want to be troubled 

by facing their complicity in the horrors. More over, the reluctance of most perpetrators to con fess to 

36 Konrad H. Jarausch and Martin Sabrow, eds., 

Konrad H. Jarausch and Martin Sabrow, eds., Verletztes Gedächtnis: Erinnerungskultur und Zeitgeschichte im Konflikt 

(Frankfurt, 2002), pp. 9-73. 

37 Ursula A. J. Becher, 

Ursula A. J. Becher, 25 Jahre Georg Eckert Institut für Internationale Schulbuchforschung in Braunschweig (Hannover, 

2000). 

38 Donald Keesey, On Some Recent Interpretations of Catharsis,” 

Donald Keesey, On Some Recent Interpretations of Catharsis,” The Classical World, Vol. 72, No. 4 (Dec., 1978 - Jan., 

1979), pp. 193-205; and Esta Powell, “Catharsis in Psychology and Beyond: A Historic Overview” http://primal;-page. 

com/cathar.htm 

37 

Keynote Lecture


Proceedings 

crimes which they have committed has to be surmounted, since they correctly fear that their justifications 

will not be believed. Con fronted with such indifference, victims often have a compul sive need to share 

their stories in order to establish that the atrocities which trouble their dreams have actually happened, 

even if that seems implausible in retro spect. 39 Testifying is therefore their effort to convince the public 

of the reality of the crimes so as to gain a measure of sympathy for their suffering that might lead to 

punishment and compensation, even if the wrongs can never be fully righted. 

The creation of a critical memory therefore involves the sharing of eyewitness stories, the collating of 

different testi monies and the verification of competing claims. While an un bur den ing from horrors allows 

indivi duals to cope with survivor’s guilt, remembering is a social process as Maurice Halbwachs has 

indicated. The Spielberg interviews demonstrate how actual dimensions of suffering emerge by listening 

to different experien ces and com paring various accounts. As I have ar gued in Shattered Past, such 

exchan ges allow groups like the Displaced Persons or German expellees to shape collec tive recollections 

which standardize narratives of persecution as a basis for claiming re cognition and restitution. The airing 

of conflicting versions sponsored by different interests in a public de bate is a necessary part of the process 

of creating a memory culture, because it forces society to decide which rendition will be adopted by the 

media and in the schools. 40 Instead of being dictated from above by government fiat, this civil society 

discussion is essential for developing a pluralistic memory that supports democracy. 

In order to foster mutual understanding, such a public memory must be based on stre nu ous efforts to 

discredit propaganda by uncovering the truth of disputed incidents. In the Balkan Wars, NATO claimed 

that Milosevic was the aggressor, while Russia portrayed the Serbs as the victims of a Western plot. Only 

through investigative journalism and several court cases did the full tragedy of the Srebrenica massacre 

become public knowledge: The Dutch had an in ter est in downplaying the cowardice of their blue- 

helmeted peace keepers who refused to pro tect the imprisoned men and boys. The Serbian government 

and its offshoot in the Republika Srbs ka wanted to hide the mass killing of about 8,000 males. And the 

Bosnians sought to inflate what was undoubtedly the largest slaughter on the European continent after 

World War Two. The persecution of perpetrators like Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic was only 

credible when the Hague Tribunal also indicted Croatian general Ante Gotovina for similar mass mur der. 41 

In such cases, scholars have the responsibility of scrutinizing the truthfulness of the various claims. 

39 Steven Spielberg, 

Steven Spielberg, The Last Days: Steven Spielberg and Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation (New York, 

1999). 

40 Konrad H. Jarausch and Michael Geyer, 

Konrad H. Jarausch and Michael Geyer, Shattered Past: Reconstructing German Histories (Princeton, 2003). 

41 Isabelle Delpla, avier Bougarel, Jean-Louis Fournel, eds., 

Isabelle Delpla, avier Bougarel, Jean-Louis Fournel, eds., Investigating Srebrenica: Institutions, Facts, Responsibilities 

(New York, 2012). 

38

The final challenge in confronting an evil past is the fostering of forgiveness as a basis for a more 

constructive future. Inspired by Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu, the South African “Truth and 

Reconciliation Commission” has proven helpful in overcoming the deep-seated hatred, left behind by the 

white-supremacist apartheid regime. As in Latin America, its aim was not punishment but rather individual 

consolation and collective enlightenment about the crimes committed by the prior regime. While critics 

objected that the injustices cried out for legal redress, the full disclosure of the previous crimes did help 

create public awareness on which internal concord and external peace could be based. 42 Even other 

Eastern European countries have therefore started to open their Communist files. In the shadow of the 

Holocaust, the Ger man philosopher Karl Jaspers rightly insisted: “That which has happened is a warning. 

To forget it is guilt. It must be continually remembered. It was possible for this to happen, and it remains 

possible for it to happen again at any minute. Only in knowledge can it be prevented.” 43 

42 Priscilla B. Hayner, Unspeakable Truths: Facing Challenge of Truth Commissions (New York, 2001). 

43 Karl Jaspers, The Question of German Guilt (New York, 1948). 

39 

Keynote Lecture


Proceedings 

Regeneration by Complete Humanism 

Michel Maffesoli 

Paris Descartes University Sorbonne 

The word ‘caritas,’ a royal road of truth for Saint Augustine, has been weakened significantly in modern 

times. However, the word has found a new kind of vigor on the occasion of numerous charity events; it is 

a vigor of a social bond with love. The entire theme of ‘care’ is summarized here. 

Of course, ‘love’ in this context cannot be reduced to a private sense. Moreover, it doesn’t refer to the 

feeling shared by two persons for each other. ‘Love,’ in its full meaning, is an appropriate term to describe 

a general atmosphere in which a way of being together develops and blossoms. This is a basis for another 

form of social relation. This is not actually a new way but it has been hidden or at least marginalized 

throughout modern times and we need to see why. And Saint Augustine’s link between truth and “caritas” 

is timely, if we agree with each other, from a phenomenological perspective which acknowledges that the 

nature of truth is to be something which is discovered and ‘unveiled.’ 

Truth is not given once and for all and there is also the case of ‘a priori truth.’ However, considering the 

Greek etymology (aletheia), it refers to something that avoids oblivion and something that is unveiled. 

In this context, it is about unveiling the secret permanence of emotions in the societal game. It is about 

acknowledging that only life (in its complete meaning) has its rights. Citing Heidegger’s joyful expression, 

it is also about showing ‘dialectical maturity’ in order to completely address the elements of life. It is truly 

what differentiates abstract and unilateral thinking (seeing only one aspect of what is ‘real’) from concrete 

thinking which allows us to decipher its multiple aspects. We should thus find words that know how to 

make things happen. The words that reveal their intimate truth while unveiling these things. It is the way 

(the only way actually) to find possible healing for societies in crisis! 

Nevertheless, in order to fully understand the role of emotions, to decipher the logic belonging to ordo 

40

amoris (Max Scheler), it is necessary to admit that those who play the role of saying ‘what is’ are only the 

speakers of an ancient memory, in other words, the tradition, in contrast to what is conventionally defined 

as ‘correctness’ (unilateral, univocal). This considers the fact that being “an echo is more difficult and 

thus rarer than having an opinion and giving value to a point of view. Being an echo means endurance 

in thinking.” (M. Heidegger). Being an echo of the fact that life isn’t divided and that truth of life itself 

cannot be divided. 

This means that there aren’t on one hand emotions, which take care of and heal us and on the other hand, 

politics, in other words, power, knowledge, and the predictable. In contrast, feelings constitute part of 

public and private lives. Even if this sounds surprising, nothing and no one can avoid the strong ‘love’ 

(‘caritas,’ ‘care’) understood likewise. The role played by the emotional in administrative actions, in labor 

games, in professional requests and in reactions to diverse news items, all of this would encourage more 

lucidity in terms of ingredients used in the preparation and maintenance of social relations. 

In short, we cannot understand this idea if we don’t take into consideration its ‘Eros.’ The same is true for 

what concerns the mental atmosphere characterizing today’s era. We can even say that we are slaves to 

a mania and madness that we inherit. A ‘people’ is always subordinate to passions and emotions coming 

from afar and it is useless to believe that we have overcome these feelings. Ideological prejudices, racial 

reactions, diverse conventions and customs, specific language practices, cultural idioms, etc. The list is 

long for the ways of being and thinking that are far from being rational but rather passionate and such 

ways have been accumulated during a long period of human history. This is the period of CULTURAL 

TRADITION. 

Whatever was said and done during ancient times of which we have lost the memory, ‘it’ continues to 

work on the social body in its completeness. We had believed that we had overcome this sedimentation of 

collective passions and emotions and here it returns strongly and undeniably. Maybe in an analytical vision 

of societal power (this ‘groundwater zone’ nourishing the entire social life), should it be acknowledged 

that there isn’t a difference between energy and love (“what savants call energy and what mystics call 

universal love”)? 

That is why, beyond our prudent language use and below our disciplinary confinements (psychology, 

sociology, philosophy, theology…), it is appropriate to decipher a passionate basis from which arises any 

way of living together. That is because social consensus (cum sensualis) is essentially a shared feeling. 

This is what the ‘social contract,’ in its rationalism, had forgotten. This is what the emotional pacts, in all 

the areas, are rediscovering. This is what allows us to understand that societal ‘healing’ is possible. 

41 

Keynote Lecture


Proceedings 

To remember, let’s remind ourselves that it is only since the Renaissance period that an individual ‘me’ 

has been affirmed. Philosophers and historians effectively showed the paradigm shift going on with the 

invention of what ‘I think,’ making ‘self’ a centripetal force: everything goes back to this individual person 

thinking and acting by him or herself and for him or herself. The world is absorbed by the ‘me.’ This is the 

root of epistemological egotism, source of diverse egoisms (moral, economic, social, political, national…) 

that have characterized modernity. 

Panofsky has analyzed how this aspect ‘me’ was centrifugal in Europe in the Middle Ages; ‘me’ is 

thrown toward the world that surrounds it and even absorbed by it. In its strong meaning, there is 

altruism in current trends. Without giving moral connotation to this term, it is the other, in other words, 

social, geographical, ideological, religious consideration of the other, that determines what “me” is. This 

consideration of the other, is almost a mold, a forming form informing us of what each person is all about 

and the social world in its completeness. 

This is what ‘altruism’ is, in its epistemological meaning. Emergence of subjectivity starts from objective 

concepts: from a place, a tribe, and a religion. We are thus from one body: individual and social. In other 

words, this is importance that we give to meanings and sensitivity. ‘Realism’ was that of Saint Thomas 

Aquinas: “Because the meaning is also a form of reason like any cognitive power.” Sense like a ‘form 

of reason,’ isn’t this point focused on the connection of body and spirit? Isn’t it also focused on what I 

call the ‘entirety of being’ whose ‘perceptible reason’ is a good methodological leverage for a pertinent 

approach of this entirety? 

What is certain is that this ‘cognitive power’ of the perceptible is at the very heart of a postmodern 

paradigm thus discovering the pre-modern institutions and practices. The entirety of a medieval person, a 

person from a traditional society finds an echo in the ‘holism’ of diverse tribes (sexual, musical, sportive, 

and religious) constituting the mosaic of postmodern societies. Separation is no longer a question but 

what is regarded as important is connection or interaction among all the elements that the modern way of 

thinking has slowly dichotomized. 

Nature is connected to culture, the body is spiritualized, materialism becomes mystic and archaisms are 

technologized, work becomes prospective and creative, progressivity is combined with tradition, social 

ethics are beautified and so on. These oxymorons thus translate, in fact, the important role played by libido 

in social structure. In the image of organic solidarity that belongs to traditional societies, the spirit of 

postmodern times provides diverse emotions with a place of the front view in the arrangement of all that 

is social. 

42

We can remind ourselves that there were certain ancestors with such an understanding of the world, 

linking reason and sense. Without an exception, modernity is certainly based on domination of nature, the 

individual body, and body’s environment. However, in this functionalist and production-oriented future of 

civilization, ‘free thinkers’ constitute an exception. 

We can see in what aspect the pioneers of the 17th century were all lovers of eroticism and ‘forbidden 

books’ at the same time. We can see how they showed (almost) public contempt for ‘morals and religion’ 

and at the same time, fascination for ‘forbidden’ philosophy. Among all the radical authors, let’s think 

about Beverland(1650-1716), protagonist of the Radical Lights, specialist of the history of Greece and 

ancient Rome and the one who developed a philosophy of life from the liberation of libido and the 

glorification of passion. All of this constitutes a fundamental and universal characteristic of humanity. In 

this sense, he is a good analyst of a pantheist concept and a general theory of the erotic. In other words, 

this is a theory of an eroticism that isn’t reduced to the ‘functionality’ of reproduction but that 

irrigates life in its totality. 

The same is true for Saint Évremond despising “war, politics and religion” and trying to “distinguish 

himself from others similar to him through a subtle mix of philosophical spirit and love, through irreverent 

writing and a taste for refined pleasures.” A typical free thinker, Saint Évremond made great efforts to 

found and justify a close link between passionate and intellectual freedom. Therefore, nothing is separate 

from concrete reality but on the contrary, everything is deeply rooted in it. Such thinkers conserve the old 

ideal of an authentic humanism knowing how to savor the always renewed beauty of what is given to see 

and what is given to live on. Leaving things intact, “leaving them as they are,” we are characterized by a 

pleasure in which the body and spirit find the part that belongs to them, all the time, again and again. 

What truly brings back societal emotions is the fact that behind the narrow reason exists an instinctual 

force: the power of life. It is about all these non-rational causes, whether they be spiritual, social, ethnic, 

or educational, that achieve their goals by means of psychic operations other than reasoning. 

They constitute the basis of beliefs and prejudices whose importance is known in political, social and 

economic life. Always remember the expression used here: ‘non-rational’ causes but not irrational 

causes. In fact, even if these causes don’t depend on instrumental reason, in other words, they are oriented 

toward a precise (and faraway) goal, these causes still have an internal reason, expressing what is lived by 

the group which carries them. In this context, we can talk about a ‘ratio-vitalisme’ (Ortega y Gasset). 

As indicated, what is special for ‘ratio-vitalisme’ is that it “leaves something as it is” and doesn’t give 

it an external, moral order explaining what it “must be” or what we want it to be. This is exactly how 

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Heidegger characterized the power of desire: “Thanks to it, something has the fundamental power of 

being. Such power is fundamentally possible […].” There is a chain of reasons between power of being, 

leaving as it is, and making it be which is expressed at best in the structure of postmodern communities 

(tribes) beyond and below philosophical definition. The essence of these communities is certainly desire, 

sharing a taste, process of attraction, and everything that can be summarized with the expression ‘selective 

affinities’ (Goethe). This may be a basis for ‘healing’ induced by a complete humanism. 

What bewilders rational thinking is the fact that the relation to the other lies in the action to “leave as it 

is” rather than the fact of taking action: toward the natural world or the social world. However, this is 

such rudeness that characterizes the mental atmosphere of the era, in many aspects and in multiple ways. 

Losing interest in politics, getting tired of diverse forms of political participation (plus, let’s not forget 

about the hedonistic atmosphere contaminating most social phenomena), all these things emphasize the 

saturation of finalized energy and underlines the regeneration of energy with a passionate connotation. 

In short, energy isn’t accumulated but it is consumed. However, it is to clearly mention that the libido 

implying this passionate energy should not be reduced to a purely genital sexuality. As all the works by 

Jung show, it is about psychic energy that we will rediscover in the foundation of culture in general. This 

is in all the aspects of this culture: art, daily life, economy, politics, etc. This is this libido in its general 

meaning that is the basis of symbolic nature, another way of referring to ‘living together.’ This is what I 

say here ‘ordo amoris.’ This is characterized by a true humanism. 

This psychic energy (‘objective’ psyche, more specifically) is composed of all these habits, these diverse 

taboo atavisms and other ‘secret areas’ which contain hidden pleasures and the desire of being together. A 

being is rooted in the feeling and to be in love no longer means to be closed in one’s individual self which 

is significantly rickety and it doesn’t mean to be closed in a ‘duo’ (that of a couple) which is entirely 

economic. Rather, it is comparable to a state of diffraction in perpetual movement. What is formed is thus 

this ‘affectio societatis,’ the mystic basis of the entire political reality, and we begin to measure its effects 

again. 

In this context, to be in love, once its sweet connotation used in ‘romance novels’ or Harlequin books is 

removed, constitutes a kind of synthesis that spreads everywhere with an energy secretly forming societal 

friendliness. This is the underlying core of sociality where excess, games, dreams and imagination don’t 

fail to play an important role, while favoring acceptance, which is paradoxically lucid and unconscious, of 

human conditions. 

We can apply to such a state of ‘being in love’ the meditation by Heidegger regarding the word ‘be’: “The 

44

infinitive, what should be heard from this? This name is an abbreviation of a more complete expression: 

modus infinitivus, that is, the world of the unlimited, of the undetermined […].” In fact, there is “the 

unlimited” in emotions. Thus comes its spreading aspect that was celebrated in abundance by thinkers, 

poets, and, of course, those in love. It can, in essence, only be multiplied and spread. This is the emitter 

of a spiritual combat. This is what transforms everyone and everything. This is also what has the power 

to intoxicate the one whom we know is contagious. Then, what does the force of contagion of emotions 

mean? All that was divided desperately longs for a reunion. This is the nature of love! Distinction meant 

the supreme achievement of modernity. Fusion seems to be the vector of postmodernity. 

This is what makes shared passion an internal feeling of Res Publica (republic) and this ‘public thing’ is 

common to all. Such a concept cannot be understood simply through small reasoning if this isn’t enriched 

by all the potentialities of the perceptible. For Greek wisdom, ‘Eros’ is a mix of pleasure and wisdom. 

It is this mixed structure that is the beating heart of a community’s ideal. In contrast to any form of 

unilateralism, such a structure encourages us to hold the two ends of the chain: thought and desire. This is 

the thread of popular wisdom. This is also what we find in the social networks on the Internet. 

To make an ‘ode to perceptible reason’ or in other words, to know how to connect right reason and 

common sense, this is what can allow us to overcome the fundamental error of modernity: that of 

separation. We pay for this error at a high price. That is because if “analytical reason” (the very one that 

separates) enabled scientific advances that we know, if it generates technological development that softens 

social life, the well-being that will result from was made at the expense of “better being.” Ecological 

damage, the decrease of collective sense and the foolishness of the public are the most evident illustrations 

of this. 

As provocative as it may seem, it is the superiority of exacerbated consciousness and subjectivism that 

is reached by it. Such subjectivism is exactly what found its peak in the incommunicability of these 

same kinds of consciousness, with each of them confined to its small individual fortress. Surrounded by 

political, ideological and religious certainty, consciousness can only start a combat against another kind 

of consciousness equipped with identical weapons. The reason that reasoning resonates with the sound 

of war is that it is greedy. The rationalist systems as well as causes and effects of battles are fatal in their 

essence; they induce death. 

In its strict meaning, it is about ‘paranoia’ (a system of thinking that is well constructed, tilted and 

unilateral), denying all reality where we are: tradition, place, people, and culture. With all things being 

against “I think,” we must consider the previous and surrounding altruism. 

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In fact, there is paranoia in ‘progressism’ which is a big modern myth (which is not acknowledged as 

such). Progressism forgets the ‘progressivity’ of things, in other words, to be involved in the natural and 

societal world and to be rooted in the sensitivity of those who are alive. Such progressivity will reappear 

in postmodern ecosophy. 

In its ‘holistic’ perspective integrating the entire condition of humans, this postmodern ecosophy will 

bring back all the aspects (rational, sensitive, instinctive and emotional) of human nature. In addition, it 

has its ‘habitus,’ in other words (Aristotle, Saint Thomas Aquinas) its adjustment to a territory shared with 

others, or (Spengler), its situation of being rooted and thus growing under specific biological conditions. 

Here is truly what we can call the revolution induced by the return of senses and of sensitivity as well as 

that of body and tempers to a societal “reality” that is enlarged and enriched by all of its potentialities. 

Sensitive ecosophy (we understood well that it gives all its importance to emotions again) will be from 

now on an alternative to modern ‘normapathy.’ Modern normapathy, whether it is from religious, moral or 

political obedience (in any case, the logic is identical: ‘must be’), tries to rid itself of any risk (ideology of 

‘zero risk’), to reassure excessively, to antisepticize daily existence up to the point of making it incapable 

of resisting any intrusion of antibody or to the diverse adversities that actually constitute worldly 

conditions. However, it is well known that fear of abuses, excesses, and even that of disorder is in itself 

what leads to the most tiring immobilism. The ‘holistic’ concept allows the possible healing of the social 

body! 

The rise of emotions simply reminds us of the dialogue existing between ‘chaos’ and ‘cosmos’ and 

between order and disorder. Homo sapiens only exist in relation to Homo demens. Vitalism is structurally 

ambivalent. That is a ‘law of land’ can exist because there are the antinomic and the anomic. It is an 

internal, ambiguous, plural, polytheistic law whose ambivalence is no other than the movement or 

dynamics of nature as a whole. Inside their diverse impulses, body and spirit are united in a mixture 

without end. After all, the ‘devil of the flesh’ is a good illustration of this deeply rooted spirit. Isn’t this 

what popular wisdom used to call ‘affectus carnalis,’ or carnal emotions, a firm human impulse to adjust 

to and enjoy this world? 

This is thus what starts in the societal structure where ‘love’ plays an important role. It is the end of long 

domination of the heart by the cognitive. Let’s also not forget that this was an intuition of A. Comte. This 

was regarded as the object of ecstatic phantasmagorias, in a somewhat contemptuous manner. In the 

same vein, the ‘Religion of Humanity’ expressed in itself the firmly anchored conviction that “spirit isn’t 

destined to reign but to serve… In fact, the real command requires a force above all and reason was only 

the light; its impetus should come from elsewhere.” 

46

Thanks to its theoretical quirks, this enlightening remark emphasizes the role of impetus as another way 

of saying human dynamics. We could provide it with several names: dynamics (dunamis: force), energy, 

emotion, libido, etc. Anyway, it is an initial impulse which is at the origin of vital leap either individually 

or collectively and it ensures its principal command. It is by forgetting this fundamental element that we 

reach abstractization of social life correlated to uprooting of the human plant! 

In fact, if we want to understand a number of current phenomena (e.g. hysteria, sports gatherings, political 

effervescence, religious fanaticism, and other ways of expressing emotions), we may have to remember 

the sharp formula of Auguste Comte: “...spirit is always the minister of the heart.” In addition, before we 

reduce their works to dried schematism, Durkheim and his followers had a much more open concept of 

the role of emotions in collective consciousness. This is how they didn’t hesitate to regard sociology as 

“science of suggested desires.” It is a curious and beautiful anticipating formula in that it underlines not 

only the role of collective consciousness but also that of unconsciousness common to all in which anyone 

‘participates’ and that he or she shares with others, in an almost magical way. 

The attempt of interpretation, deciphering and decoding the signs belonging to a culture, can only pay 

attention to the expression of feelings. These feelings are “symbolic” and in the strong meaning of the 

term, they mean a process of acknowledging the other, in other words, a process of “being born” to oneself 

from altruism. It is thus a more intense “light” that is given by the connection of reason and sense. A 

swift light isn’t reduced to brightness offered by small reason, or by rationalism that is its epistemological 

expression. The light producing this illumination whose diverse institutions (religious, moral, and social 

ones) are always objects to be wary of. It is still such illumination that we need to learn to consider if we 

want to understand the social “mysticism” beyond scholars’ opinions (This combined opinion is quite 

moralizing). The contemporary tribes of such mysticism provide us with numerous examples. Also, as it 

is true, if we don’t take this term in a bad sense, that a number of “those who are enlightened” are growing 

in all areas of public life. 

Deep ecology, religious revival, charismatic movements, political extremism, “gay” fanaticism, esoteric 

recurrence, media’s mimicry, obsession with sports, and theoretical militancy confuse science and labor 

engagement. Under these circumstances, we can find, for the best and for the worst, a large number of 

examples of this “illumination” characterizing the Spirit of time! Moreover, we can at least say that these 

“illuminated persons” receive views and reactions through a logical conformity of which they are not 

conscious. In this regard, it is enough to “surf” several “lists of diffusion” such as a university association 

or such a sexual tribe in order to measure the scope of mimicry. 

The “laws of imitation,” which were applied in the case that we have just quoted, lie in the power of 

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contagion of emotions. It is a priori and without any reflexive basis that we react and think in such ways, 

that we will announce bitter critiques and apply inquisitorial processes. However, this is also thanks 

to such a feeling of belonging that we will participate in such things as charitable activities, vibrate in 

response to such collective emotions and engage in concrete forms of solidarity or daily generosity. 

The feeling of belonging and relation of belonging! Such intrusion of emotions transforms mechanical 

solidarity into a real, organic solidarity and it is characterized by its initiatory structure. We don’t judge; 

we follow our masters. We don’t exert our critical spirit; we try to deepen the order of things. We never 

define the “ideological tools of the State” in a critical way, using the jargon from the 1960’s. On the other 

hand, we create analogies and we use metaphors. In other words, in a poetic way, we trace “the real” 

that is complex, unstable and located inside existential dynamism. In an impulsive way, we are probably 

“enraged” collectively. Most often, we try to adjust to the world as it is and we do so in order to win the 

best part for ourselves and for the tribe we join. The harmony with the world and with others is truly the 

common denominator for all the past experiences. 

All of this brings back the underlying part of social being and unconscious excitement that it always 

generates. Thus comes the need to elaborate on a thought of the organic in accordance with vitalism 

which is generated from all the pores of the social body, in opposition to the dominating knowledge (that 

of functionalist “mechanics”). This is what is at the heart of “social healing.” Such a thought is no longer 

blessed tap water (holy water) but it is a thought that knows how to use aristocratic freedom offshore. 

As Proust said, “We become moral when we are unhappy!” However, what we can empirically observe 

is a revival of generalized hedonism. It always irritates the sad people preferring to criticize catastrophist 

analyses. Nevertheless, such hedonism is there (popular expression appetitus), such vital appetence for 

which certain good people show maintenance and renewed vigor. Cult of body and pleasure to consume, 

to enjoy the goodness of this world and to be attached to the present are often described as signs of deep 

“alienation” or exploitation of body and spirit. Can’t we rather acknowledge here the fact that we enjoy 

life? 

We enjoy a life that is strengthened, increased and doubled, expressing everyday popular wisdom that 

has always been friendly to love. Such love is like energy coming from the very nature of humanity, from 

those who are alive. It is a love that is not castrated by constant Judaeo- Christian (Semitic) moralism. It is 

a love that is an afterglow of the old pagan foundations and we could be quite right to call it Eros. 

In fact, there are permanent comings and goings in social dynamism (what Bergson calls “vital 

momentum”) between Love and Eros, between ordo amoris and social eroticism. Sense of belonging 

48

expresses this impulse which is found only in humans whose very nature is to aspire fusion, to bring 

together what is scattered. Wouldn’t it be the nostalgia of what Durkheim used to call “social divinity”? It 

means to be together like God. It is transcendence that is generated! 

It is the final destination of the analysis of a social structure where emotions occupy the principal place. 

This means that beyond a rationalism with devastating effects (destroying the planet and the consensus), 

we know how to integrate intuition into mystic experience. Intuition (intueri or to see the inside), which 

is the condition of possibility of any scientific discovery, is thus the methodological leverage allowing 

us to understand the close union uniting reason and sense. “Ratio-vitalism” reaches its peak in festive 

effervescence throughout time, our time in particular. 

An undeniable appetite for this world, this is what can lead to “healing!” Its roots are found in 

epicureanism and stoicism which, each in its own way, attest to the worldly radicality of enjoyment 

finding its own interactivity existing between reason and senses. 

Such senses are from the Middle Ages in “amor discretus” where “discretion” is synonymous with right 

judgment, in other words, the right judgment of oneself and the other and thus, sense of belonging that we 

can form between one and the other. Therefore, it is about a love controlled by the right judgment. This is 

the basis for the formation of social relations, that among tribes, that of “states” and nations in a complex 

and organic structure where understanding and sensibility occupy their own place. 

We recall that how and in what aspect “caritas,” “care”, love and desire are intimately intertwined and are 

at the very foundation of Aristotle’s “hexis” and Thomas Aquinas’ “habitus.” These notions bring back our 

permanent measures pushing us to act in one way or another. We thus see well how libidinal energy is at 

the very origin of multiple impetuses that move individuals and thus, favor their diverse reunions. It is by 

keeping this in mind that we could have an understanding (not concretely anymore) of postmodern tribes’ 

action for which emotional attraction and impulse never fail to play the most important role. 

It is exactly what Spinoza called “loving intelligence” in his pantheistic naturalism. Such “loving 

intelligence” means to “link together” (intellegere) all of the scattered elements of the complex “real,” 

starting from emotions. In fact, intelligence finds its essence only when it gathers together what is 

scattered. Intelligence is thus specific; it is about growing (cum crescere) with the very thing that it 

describes. In short, intelligence is rooted in everyday life and it thus contributes to common passions. 

Such rooting isn’t an easy matter as long as our mind tends to become separate from this humus which, 

however, constitutes a human. This can be radically defined like this: a return to the roots of a complex 

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and ambivalent human, a return which allows us to update the contemporary understanding of the “soul 

of the world” of the neo-Platonists. It could be called an unconscious soul, an emotional soul, a soul of 

nature, the way it is described doesn’t matter. It is enough to note that such an intuitive view allows us to 

underline the importance of the release of oneself into the other. The term empathy, frequently used these 

days, merely expresses such interaction between one and the other. In other words, it means to put oneself 

in the place of the other. This could be because we share the same feelings or, this could also be done to 

perceive the consequences of such reversibility. 

What is enabled by empathy is the situation in which Eros, combining all the impulses of life, pushes me 

to be detached from myself. In the Banquet, Plato shows that Love acknowledges its state of destitution; 

the other is needed. In short, perfection isn’t in Me but in Us. 

It is this mystical experience (We have seen some of its roots) that we will rediscover in the postmodern 

New Age: “to free oneself,” to be liberated from self, paradoxically encouraging oneself to be linked to 

the other. Some have been able to emphasize the relationship between heart (cor-cordis) and rope (chorda, 

gut). Related to the Old French “corder,” (to tie up), the modern French word “s’accorder” (to agree with 

each other) means to come from the heart that we share. Thus love means tying each other together. It 

is the Gordian knot constituting postmodern tribes, that of interrelation. In contrast to epistemological 

individualism, it is the prevalence of ordo amoris where dependence on the other (the Other) is essential. 

To express in another way, we can recall the position (if it is reasonable) of the philosopher Alain, 

emphasizing that in contrast to “contractualism,” society is based on friendship or diverse feelings. We can 

also see that in this context, society is an “extension of family.” Such metaphysical familialism is exactly 

the cause and effect of this movement of magnetization largely dominating social relations whose basis is 

impulsive, emotional, and affectionate, all things whose erotic element cannot be more evident. 

Thus facing tedious and somewhat brief social theories diagnosing general prostration on the rise: gloom, 

decadence, ennui, decline and other catastrophist characteristics, it is right to remember that we are 

observing multiple existential experiences rooted in the (re)birth of passion, desire and diverse emotions of 

the same water, revitalizing what is always and over again old and very young: the eternal togetherness. 

Here, it is the logic of “philia” that constitutes the backbone of society, sometimes secretly and sometimes 

in a paroxysmal way; what is beyond and below the tragic feeling of existence makes such logic 

acceptable, anyway more desirable than its entire disappearance. It is exactly the question asked by 

Cicero: “qui potest esse vita vitalis, quae non in amici mutua benevolentia conquiescat” (how can we have 

a livable life, if it wasn’t able to find ease in the mutual benevolence of friendship.”) 

50

Such “mutualism” of benevolence is exactly what constitutes the economy of all human changes, its 

structural “relationism.” Specific wisdom: ecosophy based on the permanent interaction of reason and 

sense. Put into a perspective that we continue to see in terms such as mutuality, cooperation, solidarity, all 

things refer to a lasting relation and even symbiosis between entities that are different and supplementary 

at the same time. Here, what is in question is “natural health” of all sociality. Deep sociality, while being 

hidden (we could say “secret” or “discreet”) still constitutes the culture of all “being together” over a long 

period of time. In this simple meaning, it is the humus soil, the good soil where togetherness can grow 

and develop. It is, in a way, dynamic rooting. It is also a “natural” characteristic which is closer to what 

Heidegger said about physis: emergence, blooming, movement of birth. 

Thus, “the nature of things that like to hide themselves.” Note the Heraclitean remark emphasizing 

the constant dialogue existing between the depth and appearance of what is. It is about withdrawal, 

concealment and shadow necessary for the whole of one’s life. It is what Heidegger specifies in the 

critique of “meta” physics denying the simple physics. In other words, such physics denies this world in 

accordance with a hypothetical heavenly world which is to come later on. Thus physis refers to “the act 

of rising up and flourishing, all to be revealed within oneself.” The rhythm of life can only be expressed 

from this fixed point, a basic source allowing and justifying the flow of what is. It is exactly what we can 

observe in a number of contemporary practices, in particular youthful ones: to stay inside oneself while 

blooming on the outside. An oxymoron such as “mystical celebration of body” effectively regenerates the 

role and function of display (body), starting from inwardness (spirit, soul). 

Such dynamics are expressed in a specific kind of living together: that of “mysticism” where each one, in 

his or her entirety, is only an element of a big group that surpasses each one and gives a meaning to each 

one. It is the “mystical body” of Catholic theology, the “subtle body” of oriental traditions, the collective 

spirit of Freemason-type symbolic logic; all things beyond the anatomical body and serving as a basis for 

a relation of belonging (ecosophy) between Me, altruism of the world and the others. In some sense, it is 

expanded and generalized eroticism. 

As for the expression “sensitive ecosophy,” it is about becoming attentive to this irrefutable vitalism 

which is expressed in so many ways. It is vitality that, beyond utilitarianism, emphasizes the unconscious 

importance of a culture of instinct no longer accepting to be reduced to a rationalistic civilization. Let’s 

meditate again on Heidegger: “Action is everywhere and display of a world is nowhere.” (ein Welten 

der Welt). However, what is happening is that such “display,” such search of a “beautiful life” and of a 

“better-being” (more than just “well-being”) appears in a spontaneous sociality surpassing the limits of a 

reasoning sociality. 

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Such spontaneity of life and of the vitalist “system,” which is developed little by little, is expressed in the 

concern to transform existence into a daily work of art. We can also measure its effects in the increased 

role given to imagination in all the areas of social life. It is not to forget exacerbation of feelings promoting 

all of these kinds of enthusiasm: political, social, charitable, religious, musical, sports, etc. where passions 

or more simply moods take the place of reasoning and even that of intellectual capability to understand 

the social “real.” 

There is lyricism in the current trend and it is romantic sensibility which is heated up by collective 

excitement and it offers a global and holistic vision of these human things that we had tended to strangely 

separate. Maybe it is to see there what M. M. Bakounine called “regeneration through love.” Meanwhile, 

Fourier celebrated “erotosophy” expressing the powerful return of imagination and phantasmagoria in the 

development and strengthening of the social relation. It is the return of common passions. 

By understanding this term in its original meaning, this is what Comte called the “sympathetic culture” 

belonging to entire humanity and ensuring its “moral regeneration.” This is an acknowledgement of the 

“predominance of feelings” able to maintain dissolution of what is social dominated by simple reason. 

Ecosophy restores feelings to the most important position in the structure of social life. Thinking about 

the memory of long, long ago of humanity, certain thinkers had shown the probable return to this ordo 

amoris, as early as the 19th century. It is this and this alone that can allow the beginning of regeneration 

of social life. 

52

La régénéréscence par l’humanisme intégral 

Michel Maffesoli 

UNIVERSITÉ PARIS DESCARTES SORBONNE 

Le mot « caritas » voie royale pour Saint Augustin de la vérité, s’est bien affaibli tout au longs des temps 

modernes. Sinon qu’il trouve dans les nombreuses manifestations caritatives une vigueur renouvelée. 

Celle d’un lien social où l’amour a sa place. Toute la thématique du « CARE » est là résumé ! 

Il ne s’agit pas, bien entendu, d’un amour que l’on peut réduire à la sphère privée. Non plus d’un amour 

désignant le sentiment éprouvé par deux personnes l’une pour l’autre. L’amour en question, en son sens 

plénier, est un terme commode pour désigner une ambiance générale dans laquelle s’élabore et s’épanouit 

une manière d’être-ensemble. Le fondement d’une autre forme du lien social. Manière pas forcément 

nouvelle, mais qui fut occultée, ou à tout le moins marginalisée, il faudra voir pourquoi, tout au long de la 

modernité. Et la liaison augustinienne entre vérité et « caritas » est opportune, si on s’accorde, dans l’optique 

phénoménologique à reconnaître que le propre de la vérité est d’être ce qui se découvre et se « dévoile ». 

Vérité non pas donnée une fois pour toute, pas plus que vérité a priori, mais bien, au plus près de son 

étymologie gecque (« aletheia ») : ce qui échappe à l’oubli, ce qui est dévoilé. 

En la matière dévoilement de la secrète permanence de l’affect dans le jeu sociétal. La reconnaissance 

que la vie, en son sens plénier, seule a ses droits. Et que dès lors il convient, pour reprendre une heureuse 

expression de Heidegger, de faire preuve d’une « maturité dialectique » afin d’aborder ces choses de la vie 

en leur entièreté. C’est bien cela qui différencie la pensée abstraite, unilatérale, ne voyant qu’un seul côté 

du « Réel », de la pensée concrète sachant en repérer l’aspect pluriel. Il faut donc trouver ces mots sachant 

faire advenir les choses. Mots qui en dévoilant ces dernières révèlent leur intime vérité. C’est là , et là 

seulement, que repose la possible « guérison » (Healing) pour des sociétés en crise! 

Mais, pour apprécier le rôle de l’affect, pour repérer la logique propre à l’ordo amoris (Max Scheler) 

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il est nécessaire, à l’encontre de ce qu’il est convenu de nommer le « correctness » (unilatérale, 

univoque), d’admettre que ceux qui ont pour fonction de dire ce qui est ne soient que les hauts parleurs 

d’une antique mémoire , c’est à dire de la TRADITION. Étant entendu qu’être « un écho est plus 

difficile et de ce fait plus rare qu’avoir un avis et faire valoir un point de vue. Être un écho, telle est 

l’endurance de la pensée » (M.Heidegger). Être un écho du fait que la vie ne se divise pas; et que la 

vérité de la vie, elle-même est indivisible. 

Ce qui veut dire qu’il n’y a pas, d’un côté l’affect, qui soigne et guérit, et de l’autre le politique c’est- 

à-dire le pouvoir, le savoir, le prévoir. Mais qu’au contraire les sentiments sont partie prenante de 

la vie publique et privée. Même si cela peut paraître étonnant, rien ni personne n’est indemne de la 

pétulance d’un « amour » (« caritas », « care ») ainsi compris. Le rôle que joue l’émotionnel dans l’action 

administrative, dans le jeu syndical, dans les revendications professionnelles, dans les réactions aux 

faits divers, tout cela devrait inciter à plus de lucidité quant aux ingrédients entrant dans l’élaboration et 

dans la perdurance du lien social. 

En bref, on ne peut pas comprendre le passé si l’on ne tient pas compte de son « Éros ». Il en est de 

même pour ce qui concerne l’atmosphère mentale caractérisant l’époque présente. On peut même 

dire que l’on est tributaire des manies et des folies dont on hérite. Un peuple est toujours soumis aux 

passions et émotions venant de fort loin, et qu’il est vain de croire dépassées. Préjugés idéologiques, 

réactions raciales, us et coutumes divers, pratiques langagières spécifiques, idiotismes culturels, 

longue est la liste des manières d’être et de pensée qui sont rien moins que rationnelles, mais devant 

tout à un passionnel, sédimenté sur la longue durée des histoires humaines. Celle de la TRADITION 

CULTURELLE. 

Ce qui a été dit et fait dans les temps anciens et dont on a perdu la mémoire, « ça » continue à travailler 

le corps social en son entier. On avait cru dépasser cette sédimentation des passions et émotions 

collectives, et voilà qu’elle refait un indéniable retour en force. Peut-être dans une vision analytique de 

la puissance sociétale (cette « nappe phréatique » sustentant toute vie sociale) faudrait-il reconnaître 

qu’il n’y a pas de différence entre énergie et amour : « ce que les savants appellent énergie et les 

mystiques amour universel ». 

Voilà pourquoi, au-delà de nos prudences langagières et en-deçà de nos enfermements disciplinaires 

(psychologie, sociologie, philosophie, théologie...), il convient de repérer le substrat passionnel à partir 

duquel s’élève tout vivre-ensemble. Le consensus (« cum sensualis ») social étant, essentiellement, 

un sentiment partagé. Ce que le « Contrat social », en son rationalisme, avait oublié. Ce que les pactes 

émotionnels, en tous les domaines, sont en train de redécouvrir. Ce qui permet de comprendre qu’une « 

54

guérison » sociétale est possible. 

Rappelons, pour mémoire, que c’est à partir de la Renaissance que se constitue l’affirmation d’un « moi 

» individuel. Les philosophes, les historiens ont bien montré le changement de paradigme s’opérant 

avec l’invention de ce « je pense », faisant de « soi » une force centripète : tout est ramené à cet 

individu pensant et agissant par lui-même et pour lui-même. Le monde est absorbé par le « moi ». Ce 

qui est la racine de l’égotisme épistémologique, source des divers égoïsmes (moraux, économiques, 

sociaux, politiques, nationaux...) ayant caractérisé la modernité. 

Panofsky a bien analysé en quoi au Moyen Âge européen ce « moi » est centrifuge, c’est-à-dire qu’il 

est projeté vers le monde qui l’entoure, voire absorbé par lui. En son sens fort, il y a de l’altruisme 

dans l’air du temps. Sans donner une connotation morale à ce terme, c’est l’autre, c’est-à-dire l’altérité 

sociale, géographique, idéologique, religieuse qui détermine ce qu’est le moi. Cette altérité est, 

quasiment, un moule, une forme formante informant ce qu’est tout un chacun et le monde social en son 

entier. 

C’est cela « l’altruisme » en son sens épistémologique. L’émergence de la subjectivité se fait à partir 

des intimations objectives : être d’un lieu, d’une tribu, d’une religion. Ainsi l’on est d’un corps : 

individuel et social. C’est-à-dire l’importance que l’on peut accorder aux sens et au sensible. Ce « 

réalisme » fut celui de saint Thomas d’Aquin : « car le sens, aussi, est une forme de raison comme tout 

pouvoir cognitif ». Les sens comme « forme de raison », n’est-ce point rendre attentif à la conjonction 

du corps et de l’esprit ? À ce que j’appelle l’entièreté de l’être, dont la « raison sensible » est un bon 

levier méthodologique pour une approche pertinente de cette entièreté? 

Ce qui est certain, c’est que ce « pouvoir cognitif » du sensible est au cœur même d’un paradigme 

postmoderne retrouvant, ainsi, les intuitions et les pratiques prémodernes. L’entièreté de l’homme 

médiéval, celui des sociétés traditionnelles, trouve écho dans le « holisme » des diverses tribus 

(sexuelles, musicales, sportives, religieuses) constituant la mosaïque des sociétés postmodernes. La 

séparation n’est plus de mise, mais bien la conjonction, l’interaction entre tous les éléments que la 

pensée moderne avait, à loisir, dichotomisés. 

La nature s’allie à la culture, le corps se spiritualise, le matérialisme devient mystique, les archaïsmes 

se technologisent, le travail devient prospectif en étant créatif, la progressivité intègre du traditionnel, 

l’éthique sociale s’esthétise et tout à l’avenant. Ces oxymores traduisant, de fait, l’importance que 

joue la libido dans la structuration sociale. À l’image de la solidarité organique propre aux sociétés 

traditionnelles, l’esprit du temps postmoderne redonne aux divers affects une place de premier plan 

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dans l’ordonnancement du tout social. 

On peut rappeler qu’il y eut quelques ancêtres à une telle conception du monde alliant la raison et les 

sens. Certes, la modernité se fonde sur la domination, sans distinction, de la nature, celle du corps 

individuel et celle du corps environnant. Mais dans ce devenir fonctionnaliste et productiviste de la 

civilisation les « libertins » font exception. 

On peut montrer en quoi les défricheurs du VIIe siècle étaient tout à la fois amateurs d’érotisme et 

de « livres interdits ». Comment ils affichaient un mépris (presque) ouvert « pour la morale et pour la 

religion » et ce conjointement avec une fascination pour la philosophie « interdite ». Parmi tous les 

auteurs radicaux pensons à Beverland (1650-1716), protagoniste des « Lumières radicales », spécialiste 

de l’histoire de la Grèce et de la Rome antiques, et qui développe une philosophie de la vie à partir de 

la libération de la libido et de la glorification des passions. Tout cela constituant une caractéristique 

fondamentale et universelle de l’humanité. Il est, en ce sens, un bon analyste d’une conception 

panthéiste et d’une théorie générale de l’érotique. C’est-à-dire d’un érotisme ne se réduisant pas à la 

« fonctionnalité » de la reproduction, mais irriguant la vie en sa totalité. 

Il en est de même de Saint Évremond méprisant « la guerre, la politique et la religion » et cherchant 

« à se distinguer de ses semblables par un mélange subtil d’esprit philosophique et d’humour, par 

une plume irrévérencieuse et un goût pour les plaisirs raffinés ». Type même du libre-penseur, Saint 

Évremond s’est employé à fonder et à justifier une liaison étroite entre la liberté des passions et la 

liberté intellectuelle. Donc rien qui ne s’abstrait par rapport à la réalité concréte, mais au contraire, 

s’y enracine on ne peut plus. De tels penseurs conservent le vieil idéal d’un humanisme authentique 

sachant apprécier la beauté, toujours renouvelée, de ce qui se donne à voir et de ce qui se donne à vivre. 

En laissant les choses en repos, en les « laissant être » on participe, ainsi, d’un plaisir dans lequel corps 

et esprit trouvent, toujours et à nouveau, la part qui leur revient. 

Ce que fait bien ressortir l’émotionnel sociétal c’est que derrière la raison étroite existe une force 

instinctuelle : la puissance de la vie. Il s’agit de toutes ces causes non rationnelles, qu’elles soient 

spirituelles, sociales, ethniques, éducationnelles, qui arrivent à leurs fins par des opérations psychiques 

autres que le raisonnement. 

Ce sont là les fondements des croyances, des préjugés dont on sait l’importance dans la vie politique, 

sociale ou économique. Gardons en mémoire l’expression employée: causes «non-rationnelles» 

et non irrationnelles. En effet, quoique ne dépendant pas d’une raison instrumentale, c’est- à-dire 

orientée vers un but précis (et lointain), ces causes n’en ont pas moins une raison interne, exprimant ce 

56

qui est vécu par le groupe qui en est le porteur. On peut parler, à ce propos, d’un « ratio-vitalisme » 

(Ortega y Gasset). 

La spécificité de ce dernier c’est, ainsi qu’on l’a indiqué, qu’il « laisse-être » ce qui est et n’impose pas, 

de l’extérieure une injonction morale précisant ce qui « doit-être », ou ce que l’on aimerait qui soit. 

C’est bien ainsi que Heidegger caractérisait le pouvoir du désir : « cela grâce à quoi quelque chose a 

proprement pouvoir d’être. Ce pouvoir est proprement le possible... » Il y a une chaîne de raisons entre 

le pouvoir-être, le laisser-être, le faire-être qui, au-delà ou en-deçà de la définition philosophique, 

s’exprime au mieux dans la constitution des communautés (tribus) postmodernes dont l’essence est 

bien le désir, le partage d’un goût, le processus d’attraction, toutes choses pouvant se résumer dans 

l’expression « d’affinités électives » (Goethe). Là est, peut-être le fondement de la guérison (« healing 

») induit par un humanisme intégral. 

Ce qui déconcerte l’entendement rationaliste, c’est que la relation à l’autre repose sur le « laisser- 

être » plutôt que sur le fait d’agir : sur le monde naturel ou le monde social. Or c’est bien une telle 

désinvolture qui est, à bien des égards et de multiples manières, ce qui caractérise l’atmosphère 

mentale de l’époque. La désaffection vis-à-vis du politique, la lassitude concernant les diverses formes 

d’engagement, sans oublier le climat hédoniste contaminant la plupart des phénomènes sociaux, toutes 

choses accentuant la saturation d’une énergie finalisée et soulignant la reviviscence d’une énergie à 

connotation passionnelle. 

En bref, l’énergie ne s’accumule pas, elle se dépense. Précisons, cependant, que la libido sous- 

entendant cette énergie présentéiste ne saurait se réduire à une sexualité purement génitale. Ainsi que le 

montre bien toute l’œuvre de Jung, il s’agit d’une énergie psychique que l’on va retrouver au fondement 

de la culture en général. Et ce dans tous les aspects de cette culture : art, vie quotidienne, économie, 

politique, etc. C’est cette libido en son sens général qui est le substrat de l’ordre symbolique, autre 

manière de dire le vivre-ensemble. Ce que je nomme ici « ordo amoris ». Ordre d’un vrai humanisme . 

Cette énergie psychique (psyché « objective », précisons- le) est constituée par toutes ces habitudes, ces 

tabous divers atavismes et autre « plis » dans lesquels se nichaient le plaisir et le désir d’être-ensemble. 

Un être enraciné dans le sentiment, faisant de l’état amoureux non plus un repliement sur un soi 

individuel bien rachitique, pas plus sur un « duo » (celui du couple) tout à fait économique, mais bien 

comme un état de diffraction en perpétuel devenir. Et constituant, de ce fait, cette « affectio societatis 

», fondement mystique de toute réalité politique, dont on recommence à mesurer les effets. 

En ce sens « être amoureux », une fois évacuée toute connotation doucereuse à usage de la « 

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bibliothèque rose » ou des romans de la collection Arlequin, constitue une sorte de synthèse 

disséminatrice, éparpillant ici et là une énergie constituant, secrètement, le liant sociétal. Ce qui est la 

centralité souterraine d’une socialité où l’excès, le ludique, l’onirique, l’imaginaire ne manquent pas 

de jouer un rôle d’importance, ce serait-ce qu’en favorisant l’acceptation, paradoxalement lucide et 

inconsciente, de la condition humaine. 

On peut appliquer à un tel « être-amoureux » la méditation que Heidegger fait à propos du mot « être 

» : « l’infinitif, que faut-il entendre par là ? Cette appellation est l’abréviation de l’expression plus 

complète : modus infinitivus, c’est-à-dire le monde de l’illimité, de l’indéterminé...». 

Il y a, en effet, de l’illimité dans l’affect. D’où son aspect irradiant qui fut, en abondance, célébré par les 

penseurs, les poètes, sans oublier les amoureux. Il ne peut, par essence, qu’être multiplié, démultiplié. 

Il est le projectile d’un combat de l’esprit. C’est en cela qu’il métamorphose tout un chacun et toutes 

choses. C’est aussi en cela qu’il a un pouvoir enivrant qui, on le sait, est contagieux. Que signifie donc 

la force de contagion de l’affect? Tout ce qui a été divisé aspire, profondément, à la réunion. C’est 

l’ordre de l’amour! La distinction fut l’aboutissement suprême de la modernité. La fusion semble être 

les vecteurs de la postmodernité. 

C’est bien cela qui fait de la passion partagée le sentiment intérieur de la Res Publica (République), de 

cette « chose publique » commune à tous, ne pouvant pas être saisie simplement par la petite raison si 

celle-ci n’est pas enrichie de toutes les potentialités du sensible. Pour la sagesse grecque, « Éros » est 

un mixte de plaisir et de sagesse. C’est cette « duité » qui est le cœur battant de l’idéal communautaire. 

À l’opposé de toute unilatéralité, elle incite à tenir les deux bouts de la chaîne : la pensée et le désir. 

C’est bien une telle concaténation qui est le fil rouge de la sagesse populaire. C’est cela même que l’on 

retrouve dans les réseaux sociaux propres à Internet. 

Faire un « éloge de la raison sensible » ou, ce qui revient au même, savoir ajointer la droite raison 

et le sens commun, voilà ce qui peut permettre de dépasser l’erreur-mère de la modernité : celle de 

la séparation. Erreur que l’on paye, de nos jours, au prix fort. Car si la « raison analytique » (celle 

justement qui sépare) permit les avancées scientifiques que l’on sait, si cela engendra le développement 

technologique qui adoucit la vie sociale, le bien-être qui en résulta se fit au détriment d’un mieux- 

être. Les saccages écologiques, l’abaissement du sens collectif, l’abêtissement des esprits en sont les 

illustrations les plus évidentes. 

Aussi provocateur que cela puisse paraître, c’est le primat d’une conscience exacerbée, et le 

subjectivisme auquel cela aboutit qui, justement, trouva son acmé dans l’incommunicabilité de ces 

58

mêmes consciences chacune enfermée en son étroite forteresse individuelle. Caparaçonnée dans ses 

certitudes, politiques, idéologiques, religieuses, la conscience ne pouvait qu’engager le combat contre 

une autre conscience munie d’armes identiques. La raison raisonnante résonne du bruit des guerres dont 

elle est avide. Les systèmes rationalistes, causes et effets de ces batailles, sont par essence mortifères : 

ils portent à la mort. 

En son sens strict il s’agit d’une « paranoïa » (système de pensée bien construit, surplombant, uni- 

latéral), déniant toute réalité à ce dans quoi l’on est immergé : tradition, lieu, ethnie, culture. Toutes 

choses faisant qu’à l’encontre du « je pense », l’on est pensé par l’altérité antécédente et environnante. 

Il y a, en effet, de la paranoïa dans le « progressisme » qui est la grande mythologie (ne se 

reconnaissant pas comme telle) moderne. Progressisme oubliant la « progressivité » des choses, c’est- 

à-dire l’implication dans le monde naturel et sociétal et l’enracinement dans le sensible du vivant. 

Progressivité qui va ressurgir dans l’écosophie postmoderne. 

Cette dernière, dans une perspective « holistique », c’est- à-dire intégrant l’entièreté du donné humain, 

va mette en jeu, dans une logique de réversibilité, tous les aspects : rationnel, sensible, instinctuel, 

émotionnel, de l’humaine nature. Son « habitus », également, c’est-à-dire (Aristote, saint Thomas 

d’Aquin) son ajustement à un territoire partagé avec d’autres, ou encore (Spengler) son enracinement et 

donc sa croissance dans un biotope précis. Voilà bien ce que l’on peut nommer la révolution induite par 

le retour des sens et du sensible, du corps et des humeurs, dans un « Réel » sociétal élargi et enrichi de 

toutes ses potentialités. 

L’écosophie sensible, ce qui on l’a bien compris redonne toute son importance à l’affect, sera dès lors 

une alternative à ce que fut la « normopathie » moderne. Celle-ci, qu’elle soit d’obédience religieuse, 

morale ou politique (leur logique est identique : « devoir-être »), s’emploie à évacuer tout risque : 

idéologie du « risque zéro », à sécuriser à outrance, à aseptiser l’existence quotidienne jusqu’à la rendre 

incapable de résister à l’intrusion des anticorps ou aux diverses adversités pourtant constitutives du 

donné mondain. Or il est bien connu que la crainte des abus, des excès, voire du désordre est cela même 

qui conduit à l’immobilisme le plus abrutissant. Conception « HOLISTIQUE » permettant la possible 

guérison du corps social! 

L’irruption des affects rappelle, tout simplement, la dialogie existant entre « chaos » et « cosmos », 

entre ordre et désordre. Homo sapiens n’est tel qu’en rapport avec Homo demens. Le vitalisme est, 

structurellement, ambivalent. C’est parce qu’il y a de l’antinomique, de l’anomique, que peut exister 

un « nomos de la terre ». Une loi interne, ambiguë, plurielle, polythéiste, dont l’ambivalence n’est pas 

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autre chose que le mouvement ou la dynamique de la nature en son entier. L’esprit et le corps en leurs 

pulsions diverses unis en un mixte sans fin. Après tout le « devil of the flesh » est une bonne illustration 

de cet esprit enraciné. N’est-ce point ainsi que la sagesse populaire nommait « affectus carnalis », affect 

charnel, cette pulsion humaine consistant à s’ajuster et à jouir de ce monde-ci? 

Ce qui est, donc, s’amorce dans l’ordonnancement sociétal où « l’amour » joue un rôle d’importance. 

C’est la fin de la longue domination du cognitif sur le cœur. Ce qui, ne l’oublions pas, était une 

intuition de A. Comte. Cela fut considéré, d’une manière quelque peu méprisante, comme l’objet 

de fantasmagories délirantes. Ainsi la « Religion de l’Humanité » exprimait chez lui la conviction 

fortement ancrée que « l’esprit n’est pas destiné à régner, mais à servir... En effet, le commandement 

réel exige par-dessus tout de la force, et la raison n’a jamais que de la lumière ; il faut que l’impulsion 

lui vienne d’ailleurs ». 

Remarque éclairante qui, à cause ou grâce à ses « manies » théoriques, accentue le rôle de l’impulsion 

autre manière de dire la dynamique humaine. De quelque nom qu’on veuille l’appeler : dynamique 

(dunamis : force), énergie, affect, libido, etc., il est une pulsion initiale qui, individuellement ou 

collectivement, est à l’origine de l’élan vital, et en assure le commandement principal. C’est en 

oubliant cet élément fondamental que l’on aboutit à une abstractisation de la vie sociale, corrélative au 

déracinement de la plante humaine! 

En fait, si l’on veut comprendre nombre de phénomènes actuels : hystéries musicales, rassemblements 

sportifs, effervescences politiques, fanatismes religieux et autres expressions de l’émotionnel, il faut 

peut-être se souvenir de la formule aiguë de ce même Auguste Comte : « ... l’esprit est toujours le 

ministre du cœur ». Et, avant qu’on ne réduise leurs œuvres à un schématisme desséché, Durkheim 

et les durkheimiens avaient une conception bien plus ouverte du rôle des affects dans la conscience 

collective. C’est ainsi qu’ils n’hésitaient pas à considérer la sociologie comme étant « la science des 

désirs suggérés ». Curieuse et belle formule anticipatrice, en ce qu’elle souligne le rôle pas simplement 

de la conscience collective, mais bien de l’inconscient commun à tous, et auquel tout un chacun, d’une 

manière quasiment magique, « participe » et communie. 

La démarche herméneutique, repérant et interprétant les signes propres à une culture, ne peut qu’être 

attentive à l’expression des sentiments. Ils sont « symboliques » ; et ce au sens fort du terme : processus 

de reconnaissance de l’autre, c’est-à-dire « naître » à soi à partir de l’altérité. C’est donc une « lumière 

» plus intense qui est donnée par la conjonction de la raison et des sens. Une lumière fulgurante ne 

se réduisant pas à la clarté offerte par la petite raison, ou par le rationalisme qui en est l’expression 

épistémologique. Lumière produisant cette illumination dont les diverses institutions (religieuses, 

60

morales, sociales) se sont toujours méfiée. Il n’en reste pas moins que c’est une telle illumination qu’il 

faut savoir prendre en compte si, au-delà de l’opinion savante, cette doxa bien moralisante, on veut 

comprendre la « mystique » sociale dont les tribus contemporaines donnent maints exemples. Et ce, 

tant il est vrai, si l’on ne prend pas ce terme en mauvaise part, que le nombre « d’illuminés » croît dans 

tous les domaines de la vie publique. 

Deep ecology, revival religieux, mouvements charismatiques, extrémismes politiques, fanatisme « gay 

», recrudescences ésotériques, mimétismes médiatiques, obsessions sportives, militantismes théoriques 

confondant science et engagement syndical, on peut trouver, pour le meilleur et pour le pire, une 

foultitude d’exemples de cette « illumination » caractéristique de l’Esprit du temps ! Et le moins que 

l’on puisse dire, c’est que ces « illuminés » sont pensés et agis par des conformismes logiques dont ils 

ne sont pas conscients. Il suffit, à cet égard, de « surfer » sur quelques « listes de diffusion » de telle 

association universitaire ou de telle tribu sexuelle pour mesurer l’ampleur du mimétisme. 

Les « lois de l’imitation » à l’œuvre dans les cas que l’on vient de citer, reposent sur la force de 

contagion de l’affect. C’est a priori et sans fondement réflexif que l’on agit et pense de telle ou 

telle manière, que l’on va promulguer des appréciations à l’emporte-pièce, et mettre en œuvre des 

processus inquisitoriaux. Mais c’est, également, en fonction d’un tel sentiment d’appartenance que 

l’on va participer à telle action caritative, vibrer à telle émotion collective et s’investir dans des formes 

concrètes de solidarité ou de générosité quotidiennes. 

Sentiment d’appartenance, rapportd’appartenance! Cette intrusion de l’affect, faisant d’une solidarité 

mécanique une réelle solidarité organique, participe de la structure initiatique. On ne juge pas : on 

suit ses maîtres. On n’exerce pas son esprit critique : mais on cherche à approfondir l’ordre des 

choses. On ne définit point, d’une manière ergoteuse, les « appareils idéologiques d’État », selon le 

patois des années 60 : mais on établit des analogies, on use de la métaphore. C’est-à-dire que d’une 

manière poétique, on suit à la trace un « Réel » complexe, labile et tout en dynamisme existentiel. 

Eventuellement, et d’une manière impulsive, on « s’indigne » collectivement. Le plus souvent on tente 

de s’ajuster au monde tel qu’il est, et ce afin d’en tirer le meilleur pour soi et pour la tribu à laquelle on 

participe. La syntonie avec le monde et avec les autres est bien le dénominateur commun à toutes les 

expériences vécues. 

Tout cela renvoie aux sous-sols de l’être-social et aux fermentations inconscientes qu’ils ne manquent 

pas de provoquer. D’où la nécessité, à l’encontre du savoir dominant, celui des « mécaniciens » 

fonctionnalistes, d’élaborer une pensée de l’organique étant en accord avec le vitalisme qui sourd par 

tous les pores du corps social. Voilà qui est au couer de la « guérison sociétale ». Pensée qui ne soit 

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plus un robinet d’eau bénite, celle du moralisme, mais qui sache user de l’aristocratique liberté propre 

aux démarches hauturières. 

Ainsi que le rappelait Proust, « on devient moral quand on est malheureux »! Or, ce que l’on peut 

empiriquement observer c’est bien la reviviscence d’un hédonisme généralisé. Ce qui ne manque pas 

d’irriter les esprits chagrins préférant fulminer des analyses catastrophistes. Mais cet hédonisme est là, 

expression populaire de l’appetitus, cette appétence vitale dont certains bons esprits vont montrer la 

perdurance et la vigueur renouvelée. Le culte du corps, le plaisir de consommer, de jouir des biens de 

ce monde et de s’attacher au présent sont souvent décrites comme des manifestations d’une profonde « 

aliénation » ou d’une exploitation des corps et des esprits. Ne peut-on pas, plutôt, reconnaître là le fait 

qu’on se régale de la vie ? 

D’une vie décuplée, démultipliée, double, manifestant, au quotidien, une sagesse populaire qui sut, de 

tout temps, être accueillante à l’amour. À l’amour comme énergie venant du tuf de l’humain, du vivant. 

Un amour non castré par le constant moralisme judéo-chrétien (sémitique). Amour rémanence d’un 

vieux fond(s) païen et que l’on pourrait, aussi bien, nommer Éros. 

Il y a, en effet, un va-et-vient permanent dans l’énergétique sociétale (ce que Bergson nomme « élan 

vital ») entre Amour et Éros, entre ordo amoris et l’érotique sociale. Rapport d’appartenance exprimant 

cette pulsion, propre à l’animal humain, qui aspire à la fusion ; à rassembler ce qui est épars. Peut-être 

est-ce là la nostalgie de ce que Durkheim nommait le « divin social » ? L’être-ensemble comme dieu. 

La transcendance qui s’immanentise ! 

C’est bien à cela que conduit l’analyse d’un ordonnancement social où l’émotionnel occupe la place 

principale. Ce qui implique qu’au-delà d’un rationalisme aux effets dévastateurs (destructeurs de la 

planète et du consensus) l’on sache intégrer l’intuition sur l’expérience mystique. L’intuition (« in- 

tueri », voir à l’intérieur), condition de possibilité de toute découverte scientifique étant, de ce fait, 

le levier méthodologique permettant de comprendre l’union étroite unissant la raison et les sens. « 

Ratio-vitalisme » atteignant son apogée dans les effervescences festives de tous les temps, du nôtre en 

particulier. 

Indéniable appétence pour ce monde-ci , voilà ce qui peut amener à la « guérison » ! Ce dont on 

trouve des racines dans l’épicurisme et le stoïcisme qui ,chacun à sa manière l’un de l’autre, portent 

témoignage de la radicalité mondaine d’une jouissance sachant trouver sa propre mesure dans 

l’interactivité existant entre la raison et les sens. 

62

Sens de la mesure que l’on retrouve, au Moyen Âge dans cet « amor discretus », où la « discrétion 

» est synonyme de discernement, c’est-à-dire de juste estimation de soi et de l’autre et, donc, du 

rapport d’appartenance que l’on peut établir entre l’un et l’autre. Il s’agit donc d’un amour régi par le 

discernement. C’est sur cette base que pouvait se constituer le lien social, celui des tribus, des « états », 

des nations en une architectonique complexe, organique, où l’entendement et la sensibilité occupaient 

la place leur revenant. 

On peut rappeler comment et en quoi la « caritas », le « care », amour et désir intimement mêlés, est 

au fondement même de l’ « hexis » chez Aristote, ou de l’ « habitus » chez St. Thomas d’Aquin. Ces 

notions renvoyant à la disposition permanente de notre être nous poussant à agir en tel ou tel sens. 

On voit bien, ainsi, comment l’énergie libidinale est à la source même des multiples impulsions qui 

meuvent les individus et, donc, favorisent leurs diverses agrégations. C’est en ayant cela à l’esprit que 

l’on pourrait avoir une compréhension, on ne peut plus concrète, de l’action des tribus postmodernes où 

l’attraction affectuelle et l’impulsion émotionnelle ne manquent pas de jouer un rôle de premier plan. 

C’est bien ce que Spinoza, dans son naturalisme panthéiste, nommait « l’intelligence amoureuse » : 

cette capacité, à partir de l’affect, de « lier ensemble » (intellegere) tous les éléments épars d’un « Réel 

» complexe. En effet, l’intelligence en son essence n’est telle que lorsqu’elle sait rassembler ce qui est 

épars. Elle est, alors, concrète : elle sait croître (cum crescere) avec cela même qu’elle décrit. En bref, 

elle est enracinée dans la vie de tous les jours et participe, ainsi, aux passions communes. 

Un tel enracinement n’est pas chose aisée tant l’esprit tend à s’abstraire de cet humus qui, pourtant, 

constitue l’humain. C’est cette radicalité ainsi définie : retour aux racines d’un humain complexe et 

ambivalent, qui permet de comprendre la réactualisation contemporaine de cette « âme du monde » des 

néo-platoniciens. Âme inconsciente, âme affective, âme de la nature, peu importe les appellations. Il 

suffit de noter qu’une telle vue intuitive permet de souligner l’importance de la sortie de soi dans l’autre. 

Le terme empathie, fréquemment utilisé de nos jours, ne fait qu’exprimer cette interaction entre l’un et 

l’autre : se mettre intuiti- vement à la place de l’autre parce que l’on éprouve des sentiments communs, 

ou pour percevoir les conséquences d’une telle réversibilité. 

Ce que fait bien ressortir l’empathie c’est que Éros, en tant qu’ensemble des pulsions de vie, me pousse 

à être décentré par rapport à moi-même. Dans Le Banquet, Platon montre que l’Amour reconnaît son 

état d’indigence : l’autre est nécessaire. En bref, la perfection n’est pas dans le Moi, mais dans le Nous. 

C’est cette expérience mystique, dont on a vu quelques racines, que l’on va retrouver dans le New Age 

postmoderne : « to free oneself », se libérer de soi incitant, paradoxalement, à se lier à l’autre. Certains 

ont pu souligner le rapport entre cœur (cor-cordis) et corde (chorda, boyau). En ancien français « corder 

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», s’accorder vient du cœur que l’on partage. L’amour consiste donc à s’encorder. Voilà bien le nœud 

gordien consti- tutif des tribus postmodernes, celui de l’interrelation. À l’opposé de l’individualisme 

épistémologique, c’est la prévalence d’un ordo amoris où la dépendance à l’autre (l’Autre) est 

primordiale. 

Pour exprimer autrement, on peut rappeler la position, si raisonnable, du philosophe Alain, soulignant 

qu’à l’encontre du « contractualisme », la société est fondée sur l’amitié ou les sentiments divers. Et 

qu’elle est, en ce sens, une « extension de la famille ». Ce familialisme métaphysique est bien la cause 

et l’effet de ce mouvement d’aimantation présidant, pour une bonne part, aux relations sociales dont 

le substrat, avoué ou non, est le pulsionnel, l’émotionnel, l’affectuel, toutes choses dont la composante 

érotique est on ne peut plus évidente. 

Ainsi face aux languissantes, et quelque peu sommaires, théories sociales diagnostiquant une une 

cachexie galopante : morosité, décadence, ennui, déclin et autres qualificatifs catastrophistes, il convient 

de rappeler que l’on assiste à de multiples expériences existentielles s’enracinant dans le (re)nouveau 

de la passion, du désir et divers affects de la même eau, dynamisant ce qui est, toujours et à nouveau, 

ancien et fort jeune : l’éternel vivre-ensemble. 

Il s’agit là de la logique de la « philia » qui, parfois souterrainement parfois, au contraire, d’une manière 

paroxystique, constitue l’ossature du corps social ; ce qui au-delà ou en-deçà du sentiment tragique de 

l’existence rend celle-ci acceptable, en tout cas plus souhaitable que son entière disparition. C’est bien 

la question posée par Cicéron : « qui potest esse vita vitalis, quae non in amici mutua benevolentia 

conquiescat», (« comment peut-on avoir une vie vivable, si elle ne pouvait trouver l’apaisement dans la 

mutuelle bienveillance de l’amitié »). 

Un tel « mutualisme » de la bienveillance est cela même qui constitue l’économie d’ensemble des 

échanges humains, son « relationnisme » structurel. Sagesse spécifique : écosophie, reposant sur 

l’interaction permanente de la raison et du sensible. Mise en perspective que l’on voit perdurer dans 

des termes tels que mutualité, coopératif, solidarité, toutes choses traduisant une relation durable, voire 

une symbiose entre des entités tout à la fois différentes et complémentaires. Il s’agit là de la « santé 

naturelle » de toute socialité. Socialité profonde qui, tout en étant cachée (on pourrait dire secrète, 

discrète) n’en constitue pas moins, sur la longue durée, la culture de tout être-ensemble. En son sens 

simple, le terreau, la bonne terre où celui-ci peut naître et se développer. Un enracinement dynamique 

en quelque sorte. Caractéristique « naturelle » à rapprocher de ce que Heidegger dit de la Phusis : 

émergence, épanouissement, mouvement d’éclosion. 

64

Ainsi : « l’être des choses aime à se cacher ». Remarque héraclitéenne soulignant la dialogie constante 

existant entre la profondeur et l’apparence de ce qui est. Le retrait, l’occultation, l’ombre nécessaire à 

l’entièreté de la vie. Cela Heidegger va le préciser dans sa critique d’une « meta » physique déniant la 

simple physique. C’est-à-dire refusant ce monde en fonction d’un hypothétique monde céleste, à venir 

ultérieurement. La Phusis désigne « le fait de se dresser en s’épanouissant, de se déployer en demeurant 

en soi ». Le rythme de la vie ne pouvant s’exprimer qu’à partir d’un point fixe, d’une source fondatrice 

permettant et légitimant l’écoulement de ce qui est. C’est bien ce que l’on peut observer dans nombre 

de pratiques contemporaines, en particulier juvéniles : demeurer soi-même tout en s’épanouissant vers 

l’extérieur. Un oxymore tel le « corporéisme mystique » fait bien ressortir le rôle et la fonction du 

déploiement (le corps) à partir d’une intériorité (esprit, âme) . 

Dynamique qui va s’exprimer dans un vivre-ensemble spécifique : celui de la « « mystique » où tout 

un chacun n’est qu’un élément d’un ensemble qui tout à la fois le dépasse et lui donne sens. C’est le 

« corps mystique » de la théologie catholique, le « corps subtil » des traditions orientales, l’égrégore 

de la symbolique franc-maçonne, toute choses dépassant le corps anatomique, et fondant un rapport 

d’appartenance, « écosophique », entre le Moi et l’altérité du monde et des autres. En quelque sorte une 

érotique élargie et généralisée. 

Au travers de l’expression « écosophie sensible », il s’agit de rendre attentif à cet irréfragable vitalisme 

dont les manifestations sont légion. Vitalité qui au-delà de l’utilitarisme, souligne l’importance du 

prix des choses sans prix : le luxe comme luxation du fonctionnalisme moderne, comme expression 

inconsciente d’une culture de l’instinct n’acceptant plus d’être réduite à une civilisation rationaliste. 

Méditons, encore, Heidegger : « Partout est l’action, et nulle part le déploiement d’un monde » (ein 

Welten der Welt). Or, il se trouve que c’est ce « déploiement », cette recherche de la « belle vie », d’un 

« plus-être » plus qu’un simple « bien-être » qui se fait jour dans une socialité spontanée outrepassant 

les limites d’une sociabilité raisonneuse. 

Cette spontanéité de la vie, et du « système » vitaliste, qui peu à peu se développe, s’exprime dans le 

souci de faire de l’existence une œuvre d’art au quotidien. On peut, également, en mesurer les effets 

dans le rôle accru accordé à l’imagination, et ce dans tous les domaines de la vie sociale. Sans oublier 

l’exacerbation des sentiments promouvant tous ces enthousiasmes:politiques, sociaux, caritatifs, 

religieux, musicaux, sportifs etc., où les passions, ou tout simplement les humeurs prennent la place du 

raisonnement, voire de l’entendement dans la compréhension du « Réel » social. 

Il y a du lyrisme dans l’air du temps, une sensibilité romantique passablement échauffée par les 

excitations collectives, et donnant une vision globale, holistique, de ces choses humaines que l’on 

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avait eu tendance à singulièrement séparer. Peut-être faut-il voir là ce que M. Bakounine appelait la « 

régénération par l’amour ». Fourier, de son côté, célébrait une « érotosophie » exprimant le retour en 

force de la fantaisie et de la fantasmagorie dans l’élaboration et la confortation du lien social. Le retour 

des passions communes. 

En comprenant ce terme en son sens fort, il s’agit là de ce que Comte appelait la « culture 

sympathique » propre au genre humain et assurant sa « régénération morale ». Il s’agit là d’une 

reconnaissance de la « prépondérance du sentiment » pouvant préserver la dissolution d’un social 

dominé par la simple raison. Écosophie, redonnent aux sentiments une place de premier plan dans 

l’architectonique de la vie sociale. Songeant à la mémoire immémoriale de l’humanité, certains 

penseurs avaient, dès le Ie siècle, montré le retour probable de cet ordo amoris. C’est cela et cela 

seul qui peut permettre la régénérescence de la vie sociale. 

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Proceedings 

Session 1 

Plenary Session 1 

Sufferings and Conflicts



Proceedings 


Sufferings and Conflicts 

1. Memories, Representations and Working through Genocides 

/ Daniel Feierstein (National University of Tres de Febrero) 

2. Nepal Searching for Democratic Soul 

/ Narayan Wagle (Author/Journalist) 

3. Clinical Healing or Pathological Reflection: the Imagination that 

Links Auschwitz with Fukushima 

/ Kyung Sik Suh (Tokyo Keizai University) 

4. Gilgamesh: A Mesopotamian Epic in Modern War 

/ Wai Chee Dimock (Yale University)

Memories, Representations and Working through Genocides 

Daniel Feierstein 

National University of Tres de Febrero 

This paper analyzes the consequences of terror on the identities of genocide survivors. It starts from the 

assumption that genocide in the modern world seeks to transform and reorganize the social fabric. Massive 

state violence is thus seen as instrumental and serving a broader objective: the breakdown, destruction and 

transformation of the identity of the survivors. This approach is rooted in Raphael Lemkin’s pioneering 

definition of genocide, but also in a careful analysis of the socio-political outcomes of Nazism and 

Stalinism, as well as those of the National Security doctrine, a counterinsurgency strategy developed by 

the CIA in the 1950s and 1960s and later implemented throughout Latin America. 

Although the focus of this paper is on the genocide carried out by Argentina’s last military government 

between 1976 and 1983, the example chosen can equally serve as an historical analogy for other cases 

of modern genocide. Of particular importance for comparative genocide studies, the paper examines 

how different legal definitions of social conflict – war, genocide and crimes against humanity – give 

rise to different narratives and different types of collective memory. In particular, it considers the 

impact these definitions have had or may have in the future on the collective working—through of the 

traumatic experience in terms of memory, representation and identity. It shows how each narrative mode 

of representation (war, genocide, crimes against humanity) defines and constructs the victims and the 

perpetrators in different ways. It also shows how each of these modes leads to analogies with different 

historical events, suggesting different causal explanations for what occurred and stimulating very different 

modes of intergenerational transmission and ways of relating to the present and to others. 

The purpose of terror is to destroy the self and the main outcome of trauma following systematic terror is 

the destruction of identity together with a breakdown of self-confidence and, consequently, of confidence 

in others. This has been the rationale of torture since the late Middle Ages, when it was first used by 

the Inquisition as part of the embryonic technology of power that would only become fully developed 

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in the twentieth century. Now, torture—which is a recurrent feature of modern genocide - would be 

unnecessary if the goal were simply to defeat or disarm the enemy. Torture sets out to achieve more than 

the destruction of the will to fight. Torture aims to erase the victims’ identity by forcing them to say or do 

things they should not say or do, such as denying their religious, national, political or sexual convictions, 

providing information that will harm loved ones, or giving their affection or sexuality to a subject that 

repels them. 

The most typical psychological response to memories of a traumatic experience is to block them from 

consciousness. The feeling remains but, because the memories cannot be processed in narrative form, they 

cannot be modified. Instead, they produce dislocations of identity; for example, repressed feelings are 

responsible for such diverse mental health problems such as phobias, hysteria, obsessions and repetition 

compulsion. Thus, unprocessed feelings are “played out” in endless ways that are harmful or problematic 

for the subjects and/or their social environment. However, what is repressed is only the subjective 

experience of the event that took place, not the event itself. 

At the social level, repetition compulsion is related to a transubjective phenomenon Kaës (1989) calls 

the ‘denegative pact,’ that is, an unconscious agreement not to mention the traumatic event. The pact 

shares the logic of repetition compulsion, but it also establishes a consensus that did not exist when the 

trauma was repressed. It operates on individual subjectivity, destroying any vestige of self-confidence 

that those involved in the pact may have had previously and preventing them from appropriating their 

own history. The pact alienates individuals not only from their own experience but from any narrative 

account of the traumatic event. They remain detached and unable to relate such stories to their own 

experience. 

But this pact is not only maintained in and through silence. Various discourses about the traumatic 

past help to produce a collective distancing and alienation from the traumatic event by using narrative 

procedures that deliberately exclude the first person and construct the narration as something that 

happened to others. At the same time, trauma produces a desensitization which, like repression, operates 

at the individual and subjective level, but also has cumulative social and historical effects. When 

caused by events affecting large population groups, this accumulated desensitization is experienced as 

meaninglessness and may be accompanied by cynicism or nihilism, satire or ridicule. In ideological 

terms it is expressed as the impossibility of trying to understand the traumatic event. Here, a deliberate 

and ideologically justified refusal to seek one’s own identity will be called the ideology of nonsense. This 

ideology is a more extreme form of repression because, far from challenging the denegative pact, it seeks 

to voice it at a conscious level, giving it narrative solidity and restoring some sort of coherent identity by 

denying the very existence of the self that was previously destroyed. 

72

The importance of narrative for nearly every area of our lives is now widely recognized. In the field 

of neuroscience, one of the most important discoveries of the last thirty years is that memories are not 

stored in the brain as complete video recordings of events, but as a set of fragmented and disordered 

experiences from which sense has to be made through a narrative or story. In the field of gross human 

rights violations, it is impossible to decide which explanatory framework best fits a particular historical 

event unless we consider the alternative narratives each one generates and its implications for working 

through trauma and rebuilding personal identities. This is especially true in an applied discipline such as 

law, where there may be fundamental disagreements about how events should be defined. 1 

Concepts are not facts - even though social scientists, historians and lawyers often confuse the two. 

Concepts are mental constructs – interpretative frameworks used to make sense of the facts. Thus, in the 

case of human rights violations in Argentina in the 1970s, it is impossible to decide whether or not these 

occurred, for example, in the context of a war or genocide simply by appealing to the facts (for example, 

the number of skirmishes and casualties; or the number of rapes, kidnappings and disappearances) because 

a number of different concepts can potentially explain the same facts. 

More than any other discipline, law plays a key role in the collective working through of trauma following 

systematic mass violence. This is partly because courts are authorized to detain and punish wrongdoers 

but also because judges’ sentencing decisions tend to become collectively sanctioned truths and stories. 

The important point to remember is that different concepts organize facts in different ways, giving the 

‘same’ facts different meanings. These meanings will inevitably be influenced by social attitudes towards 

the events in question. 

Reviewing the different legal concepts 

The widespread and systematic human rights violations committed in Argentina between 1976 and 

1983 can and have been described in numerous ways. Some descriptions have changed over time or 

have acquired greater or lesser social acceptance at different moments during and after the dictatorship. 

However, in legal terms these descriptions can be grouped under three separate categories, each with its 

own discourse. These categories are: war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity. In Argentina, the 

area of legal discourse is marked by an ongoing dispute over the meaning of two of these (genocide and 

crimes against humanity) while the third (war) has been appropriated by the defence lawyers and political 

supporters of those responsible for the crimes, both as a weapon to legitimize the defendants’ actions and 

This does not mean that it is not possible to make a doctrinal analysis of the possible defi nitions, but this belongs to an- 

This does not mean that it is not possible to make a doctrinal analysis of the possible definitions, but this belongs to another 

level of discussion, involves not memory processes and representation but the construction of lawsuits. 

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as a tool to secure their acquittal. 

These categories are not mutually exclusive or contradictory. On the contrary, some sociologists and 

historians work with two and even all three simultaneously. 2 Nevertheless, the different chains of 

reasoning associated with each concept lead not only to widely different understandings of Argentine 

history, but to different symbolic outcomes for trials and sentences. Consequently, both factors impact 

differently on the collective working through of trauma. 

War 

The discourse of war has taken many different forms in Argentina, some totally at odds with others, 

politically and ideologically. Moreover, although this discourse shaped common-sense understandings 

of the events at the time, it became quickly discredited after the dictatorship. Nowadays, it is kept alive 

among sectors of Argentine society close to the perpetrators, by a minority of former members of armed 

leftist organizations, and by small groups of academics. 

All the different discourses of war agree that the 1976-1983 military repression originated in the political 

climate and social mobilization of the late nineteen sixties. For the military and their civilian accomplices 

and sympathizers, the very essence of Argentine identity was threatened by subversion from abroad – 

a subversion instigated by Communists, atheists and Freemasons, among others. On the other hand, 

the armed leftist organizations saw ‘war’ as a response from the ruling bloc to the radicalization of the 

poorer classes and the emergence of militarized Peronist and/or Marxist revolutionary vanguards. In their 

view, the military coup of 1976 was a counter-revolutionary backlash to the expansion of socialism in 

Argentina, an expansion which began after the Peronist resistance movement (1955-1973) turned to the 

Cuban Revolution for inspiration and started to preach insurrection. 

The concept of “dirty war,” 3 used by the perpetrators refers to the fact that fighting did not take place in 

2 Such a combination is clearly present (even in the title) in Ines Izaguirre et al, Lucha de clases, guerra civil y genocidio en 

la Argentina, 1973-1983. Antecedentes. Desarrollo. Complicidades, (Class struggle, civil war and genocide in Argentina, 

1973-1983. Background. Development. Complicity), Buenos Aires, Eudeba, 2009. It clearly and explicitly juxtaposes the 

concepts of civil war and genocide and expressly excludes the notion of crimes against humanity. Their work is based on 

the previous works by Juan Carlos Marín, who started by viewing the events as war but quickly adopted the concept of 

genocide. 

3 Note that the concept of “dirty war,” created by the perpetrators and used exclusively by them in Argentina, now 

dominates foreign literature on the topic. From the twenty-first century, the term “dirty war” has been adopted by several 

Argentine academics who had deliberately ignored the term in the past without explaining in what sense the concept is 

used, how it relates to the perpetrators’ vision of the period, or what political and moral weight it presupposes, deriving 

as it does from French counterinsurgency doctrines. See its use, for example, in Marcos Novaro and Vicente Palermo, La 

74

the open on conventional battlefields. Because the insurgents were irregulars, clandestine police repression 

of civilian populations supporting guerrilla movements was thought to be more effective than directly 

targeting the guerrillas themselves. In fact, as is widely known, this counterinsurgency doctrine was first 

implemented by the French in Indochina and Algeria and later spread throughout Latin America by the 

U.S. School of the Americas. 

Using the concept of war in the case of Argentina presupposes that: 

) There were two social groups involved in the conflict, both with military capability and political power. 

2) War was a logical consequence of the escalating violence in Argentina. Therefore, whatever the Armed 

Forces set out to defend (the nation, the institutions, the status quo, oligarchic power), they were 

fighting in a “defensive” way. 

3) The terror unleashed on Argentine society after the coup of 1976 was an unintended consequence of the 

Armed Forces’ decision to fight left-wing violence. 

Genocide 

The concept of genocide refers to a premeditated and organised attempt to spread terror throughout 

society. Terror is not a by-product but a fundamental part of the genocide process. To argue that 

Argentina suffered genocide means, among other things, that there was a plan to reorganize society 

which sought to destroy social identity and social relations based on cooperation among autonomous 

agents. This destruction was brought about by killing a significant part of the national group (significant 

in number or in importance) and by using the terror thus caused to establish new forms of social 

relations and identity. 4 

Using the concept of genocide in the case of Argentina presupposes that: 

1) The victims can no longer be divided into ‘guilty’ or ‘innocent’ because terror is directed against the 

whole of society, including the perpetrators and their families. The definition of the enemy as “subversive 

criminals” is deliberately ambiguous and may include, as the Argentine perpetrators put it in one 

infamous public statement “the rebels’ accomplices, supporters, the indifferent and the timid.” 5 Terror 

dictadura militar 1976/1983. Del golpe de Estado a la restauración democrática, (The military dictatorship 1976/1983. 

From the coup to the restoration of democracy), Buenos Aires, Paidós, 2003. 

4 Daniel Feierstein, El genocidio como práctica social. Entre el nazismo experiencia argentina, (Genocide as a social 

practice. Between Nazism and the Argentine experience), FCE, Buenos Aires, 2007. p. 83. 

5 Statements by the then de facto Governor of the Province of Buenos Aires, Ibérico Saint Jean, to the International Herald 

Tribune, May 26, 1977. 

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was not a side-effect of a crackdown on armed leftist groups nor did the military aim primary to defeat 

these groups. The Argentine military used concentration camps to terrorize the Argentine national group 

as a whole, not just to intern radical or militarized groups. 

2) The military repression in Argentina was not a reaction to escalating violence but a project of social 

reorganization patiently and persistently pursued even before armed leftist organizations existed in 

Argentina and before the poorer sections of the Argentine population became radicalised. Although it 

was implemented with the excuse of a “fight against subversion,” it was in fact part of a continent-wide 

project - expressed in the National Security Doctrine - and so independent of whether local insurgent 

organizations posed any real threat of revolution. The existence of a continent-wide “reorganizing” 

project is obvious from the fact that it was implemented not only in countries like El Salvador, where 

there was almost certainly a civil war, but in countries like Guatemala and Argentina, where insurgent 

forces had no conventional military combat capability, and even in countries like Chile and Bolivia, 

where there were almost no armed actions against the State. 

3) The military repression was not a “defensive reaction” to left-wing violence, but rather an “offensive 

action.” It took advantage of the violence perpetrated by left-wing organizations to legitimatize its 

own use of terror but it was in no way dependent on these organizations. On the contrary it was, in 

principle, more or less independent of the guerrilla forces in the region. It had its own project - one that 

used concentration camps and terror to transform social relations based on reciprocity and cooperation 

into relations based on individualism and mutual suspicion. It sought to use informants and betrayal to 

destroy and/or transform patterns of social ties and with them, social and personal identity. 

It is worth pointing out that this particular way of conceiving and narrating genocide is less common 

outside Argentina. In most other cases genocide has been regarded as the result of racial or ethnic 

confrontation. Thus, there is a clear difference between studies of repression in Guatemala, which tend to 

stress the indigenous status of the victims, at the same time depoliticizing them, and studies of repression 

in Argentina, where race and ethnicity played only a marginal role. 

Crimes against humanity 

Using the concept of crimes against humanity in the case of Argentina presupposes that: 

1) The victims are seen as individual “citizens” persecuted by the State. The big difference between 

crimes against humanity and genocide lies in the fact that that genocide sees the victims as members of 

a “national group” whereas crimes against humanity treats them as politicized individuals who have 

suffered violations of their individual rights (to life, physical integrity, safety, or welfare). The victims 

76

of crimes against humanity are persecuted for their “convictions”, which are thought of as part of a 

“voluntary” identity they can adopt or discard at will - as opposed to an “involuntary” ethnic or national 

identity that people are born into. 6 

2) The discourse of crimes against humanity includes the notion of a “terrorist state” but unlike the 

discourses of war and genocide, it presents no consistent explanation about when or why the Argentine 

State began to commit these crimes. For example, the 1984 report Nunca Más (Never Again) drawn up 

by CONADEP (the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons) takes the view that state 

terrorism was an excessive and disproportionate response to left-wing political violence. Other authors, 

however, see state terrorism as an independent project, much more in line with the concept of genocide. 

In summary, the concept of “crimes against humanity” as applied in Argentina allows for two types of 

causal explanation of the repression (i.e. as a reaction to left-wing violence or as an independent project) 

while sharing a roughly similar vision of the victims as politicized individuals. 

It is instructive to examine other historical cases in which only one of these frameworks - war crimes, 

genocide and crimes against humanity - is generally accepted. For example, Spain undeniably waged a 

civil war between 1936 and 1939, with conventional battles fought by more or less professional armies. 

This has tended to exclude the possibility of interpreting the murder and torture carried out by the Franco 

regime during and after the Spanish Civil War as instances of genocide, even though the number of 

atrocities far exceeded those committed in Argentina between 1976 and 1983 and genocide might prove to 

be a much more revealing explanation. 

According to a recent estimate, 150,000 people were murdered by right-wing Nationalists during the 

Spanish Civil War and a further 20,000 were executed after the war had ended, with an additional 50,000 

put to death by the Republicans. 7 These killings are quite separate from the 200,000 soldiers killed in 

combat. One cannot help but wonder to what extent the conventional picture of a two-sided military 

conflict has made it impossible to obtain justice for atrocities committed far from the battlefront and for 

Spanish society as a whole to work through these traumatic events. 

The conventional view of the Spanish Civil War as war makes it difficult to appreciate that the systematic 

6 For the legal characterization of this discourse, see the amicus curiae presented by the Nizkor organization in the case 

heard in Spain against Adolfo Scilingo. The document can be found on the site www.radionizkor.org and was one of the 

items referred to by the Court of Spain to change the initial charge of genocide for one of crimes against humanity. 

7 Paul Preston, The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain, London, 2012. 

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terror exercised by Franco’s forces affected the whole of Spanish society (not just the Republican 

sectors). It also makes it more difficult to identify those responsible. Just to give one example: Spanish 

society still shows an almost complete lack of interest in the children appropriated by their parents’ 

murderers during and after the Spanish Civil War. In contrast, the efforts of the Grandmothers of 

Plaza de Mayo to uncover similar cases in Argentina have been well publicised. This discrepancy is 

surprising since the number of stolen children is calculated at around 500 in Argentina as opposed to 

30,000 in Spain, where the Spanish Catholic Church was involved in a clandestine adoption network. 

The link between memory and the present: we live in a “remembered present” 

Having described the three main ways human rights violations in Argentina are generally interpreted, I 

will now analyze their different implications for the present. As we will see, each interpretation impacts 

differently on our ability to work through terror, facilitating or hindering our capacity to work through 

and appropriate the past. I will consider five dimensions that can be affected by different interpretations of 

events: 

a) how the victims are described; 

b) how meaning is assigned to events; 

c) the types of analogies and comparisons allowed for by each interpretation; 

d) the necessary actions for working through terror and/or preventing its reappearance; 

e) generational transmission and mourning and the types of appropriation or alienation that each 

interpretation tends to produce. 

a) How the victims are described 

The criminal legal system uses the term victim to describe people affected both directly and indirectly by 

criminal actions. The concept of “indirect victim” will be useful when examining the effects of different 

narrative approaches and how they construct people as victims. The concept of “indirect victim” allows 

for a broader understanding of who is affected by terror and what relationship – if any - exists between the 

two types of victim. 

1) Although the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 extended civilian protection during times of war, 

the idea that the victims of armed conflict have a right to compensation was not seriously discussed 

until the 1990s and the positions of various courts and scholars vary considerably. Moreover, we 

have to distinguish between rights under international and national law, and between rights vis- 

à-vis a State or a non-State actor. Nevertheless, it is clear that the only victims in a war are those 

78

civilians harmed by lawful or unlawful conduct. The combatants in an armed conflict do not generally 

think of war as a crime or see themselves and the enemy as victims, whether direct or indirect. 

2) For those who claim that human rights violations committed in Argentina between 1976 and 1983 were 

genocide, however, the indirect victim is the Argentine national group. Genocide does not target specific 

political opponents or individual citizens, but the whole group; that is why the notion of “destruction of 

a group” is specific to the concept of genocide. This focus on the group poses a different approach to 

the relationship between victims and perpetrators. Even the perpetrators are, in a sense, victims, in that 

torture and murder have left indelible marks on them as well as on the rest of society. They, too, suffer 

a breakdown of social ties radically different from that which is produced by other conflicts, including 

war. 

3) The discourse of crimes against humanity does not set up a binary opposition between two more 

or less evenly matched opponents, as in war, but between the state and the rights of the individual 

citizen. This liberal approach sees the State as committing crimes against individuals whose rights 

it is supposed to guarantee. Consequently, victims – whether direct or indirect - are citizens whose 

rights have been violated in some way by clandestine and illegal repression. The big difference with 

genocide is that they are affected as individual citizens, rather than as members of a broader group. 

It is worth pointing out here that there is clear connection between the discourse of “crimes against 

humanity” and the concept of the “responsibility to protect”, a more recent discourse used to legitimize 

neo-colonial military interventions. The most direct and emblematic of these has been the bombing of 

the Libyan people during 20 and the intervention to overthrow Gaddafi’s dictatorial regime, with the 

intention of imposing a government more sympathetic to U.S. and European interests, particularly in the 

management of Libyan oil and the control of a geopolitically vital territory. 8 

b) How meaning is assigned to events 

The meaning of state-sponsored mass violence also varies depending on whether we describe 

them as war crimes, genocide or crimes against humanity. Except in rare cases of stalemate like 

8 For a geopolitical discussion of genocide and crimes against humanity and their redefinition in neo-imperialist terms, 

see Daniel Feierstein, “Getting Things into Perspective”, in Genocide Studies and Prevention. An International Journal, 

University of Toronto Press, vol. 4, no. 2, 2009, pp. 155-160, “The Good, the Bad and the Invisible. A Critical Look of the 

MARO Report “, in Genocide Studies and Prevention. An International Journal, University of Toronto Press, vol. 6, no. 

1, 2011, pp. 39-44. 

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the Korean War, the outcome of a war is usually defined in terms of victory and defeat. Thus, 

whatever their ideological perspective, those who interpret events in Argentina in terms of a 

civil war agree that the war resulted in a clear victory for the military regime. For the defeated, 

the primary focus is mainly on analyzing battles in order to understand where they went wrong. 

From the perspective of genocide, however, the meaning of the events far exceeds military strategy 

and tactics. After genocide, it is more important to understand how the national group and the social 

fabric have been transformed. In the case of Argentina, the defeat of the different guerrilla forces by the 

Argentine military is seen as less important than the radical transformation of society as a whole. Thus, the 

key issues implicit in the notion of “destruction of a group” as opposed to the more liberal “destruction of 

individuals” are: ) what Argentine society was like before it was transformed by terror; 2) how terror was 

internalized; and 3) how it continued to operate in society after the dictatorship had ended. 

From the perspective of crimes against humanity, meaning derives from the binary opposition of 

individual vs. the State. In this view, when the State abuses freedom and individual rights (human rights), 

individual autonomy is stifled and individuals are suffocated within a mass society where they are unable, 

either partially or wholly, to exercise their individuality. 

c) Types of analogies and comparisons allowed for by each interpretation 

The third focus of our analysis is the relationship between memory and the present. What other historical 

events does each narrative model typically bring to mind? Here we are particularly interested in how 

representations of the past affect current behaviour, learning or orientation towards the present and future. 

In Argentina, the term ‘revolutionary war’ tends to evoke a range of historical events from the prototype of 

the Russian revolution to revolutions closer to home, especially those in Cuba, Nicaragua or El Salvador. 

But not all such events are linked to mass annihilation. Several revolutionary and counter-revolutionary 

wars of the 1970s and 1980s were accompanied by state-sponsored genocide. This was especially true 

of El Salvador but also - to a lesser degree - Nicaragua and perhaps Guatemala. However, no mass 

annihilations were committed by either side during or after the Cuban revolution, which served as a model 

for the Latin American guerrilla movements until the 1990s. Nevertheless, where war and genocide did 

co-exist, an emphasis on one has tended to render the other invisible. In particular, genocide is apt to be 

written off as wartime excesses. This has an unfortunate effect on memory processes since transforming 

genocide into a by-product of revolutionary struggle somehow prevents us from examining it critically. 

The term ‘genocide’ tends to suggest the Holocaust, despite the numerous other extermination processes 

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that have taken place since 1945. But comparisons with the Holocaust can be misleading as well as 

enlightening. First, the Nazis’ apparent obsession with race has little or nothing to do with destruction 

processes in Latin America. Although this is clear in the case of Argentina, an overemphasis on racism as 

a motive for annihilating Guatemala’s indigenous population between 1960 and 1996 tends to obscure the 

political intentions that guided the process. I use the word “apparent” advisedly because, as I have argued 

elsewhere, Jewish identity was targeted for destruction by the Nazis more for political than for ethnic 

reasons. 9 

However, the concept of “partial destruction of the national group” not only allows us to break with the 

myth that genocide is driven by “irrational” hatred; it allows us to understand all the annihilations that 

have taken place during the modern era. And by recognizing that State violence is intended to affect the 

survivors as much as the direct victims, we are able to recognize more easily its effects in the present. 

We are also able to demand various collective responsibilities and, in doing so, to change the processes 

whereby we appropriate events or remain alienated from them. 

One positive aspect of analogies with the Holocaust is that after World War II an international consensus 

was forged that these crimes could not go unpunished. In Argentina, a popular catchphrase during the final 

years of the military dictatorship clearly expressed the rejection of impunity: “Even if you go to ground, 

like the Nazis you’ll be found”. 

The term “crimes against humanity” does not clearly conjure up any one historical event. Among the 

many human rights violations of the past, perhaps those committed by the Nazis are the most significant 

in scope and scale. But the Third Reich is associated in most people’s minds with genocide rather than the 

violation of individual rights. Instead, the most paradigmatic examples of “crimes against humanity” are 

likely to occur in the future, as new and increasingly broader international regulations and institutional 

bodies are created. Let us not forget that the International Tribunals and the International Criminal Court, 

as well as around half the current International Human Rights Conventions were not created until after the 

military dictatorship in Argentina had ended. 

Now that the anticommunist crusade of the Cold War era has been discredited, the neo-imperialist tool 10 to 

9 See: Daniel Feierstein, El genocidio como práctica social. Entre el nazismo experiencia argentina, (Genocide as a social 

practice. Between Nazism and the Argentine experience), FCE, Buenos Aires, 2007. 

10 For a discussion of this issue, see Daniel Feierstein, “El peligro del redireccionamiento de los conceptos del derecho in- 

“El peligro del redireccionamiento de los conceptos del derecho internacional: 

las Naciones Unidas, la Corte Penal Internacional y el nuevo papel de los ee.u u.” (The danger of reformulat- 

(The danger of reformulating 

the concepts of international law: the United Nations, the International Criminal Court and the new role of the U.S.), 

Revista de Estudios sobre Genocidio (Journal of Genocide Studies), Buenos Aires, EDUNTREF, vol. 3, November 

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legitimize international intervention is a human rights discourse preaching the “responsibility to protect” 

civilians and even the war on terror. This new direction in international order and international criminal 

law could be seen clearly in the US’s direct military intervention in Libya in 2011 after the UN authorised 

the use of “all necessary measures” to prevent attacks on civilians. 

Interestingly, the concept chosen to justify these new policies is the vaguest and most ambiguous of 

those discussed so far - “crimes against humanity”. In international criminal law, war and genocide are 

considered much more restrictively and this makes it far more difficult for “the international community” 

to intervene and “protect” on the basis of half-baked media reports alone. To prove the existence of a war 

or genocide there must be clear objective evidence (territorial control or professionalized armies for war; 

the intent to destroy a group for genocide). Yet it seems more and more that any act of state violence-and 

even non-state violence, as far as the International Criminal Court and some others are concerned - can be 

quickly classified as crimes against humanity. 

Thus, the concept of crimes against humanity is being progressively devalued as totally different practices 

are conflated. If the twentieth century was in Mark Levene’s view “the century of genocide, the twenty- 

first century may soon become one where crimes against humanity are used to legitimize and morally 

justify military intervention in cases where violence is not state-sponsored and/or not systematic, or where 

it may not even exist at all. Paradoxically, such interventions to “prevent” human rights abuses end up 

creating many more victims than they were intended to protect, while international “peacekeeping” forces 

use international resolutions to punish the perpetrators for their own purposes. 

d) Working through terror and preventing its reappearance 

It is clear, then, that different meanings and emotions are attached to war crimes, genocide and crimes 

against humanity, largely because of the different historical analogies that each category brings to mind. 

Consequently, each category suggests the need for a different course of action in the present. In this sense 

these different representations also play an eminently political role by mediating the link between memory 

of the past and present action. 

For those on the left who support the idea of a “dirty war” in Argentina, the task ahead is to continue the 

“struggle” on the cultural level. Public opinion has turned against the perpetrators and in favour of putting 

them on trial again; supporters of the “dirty war” hypothesis insist, fortunately with little success so far, on 

2009, pp. 83-97. 

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the need to strip the “alleged victims” of their the “aura of martyrdom” and reformulate our understanding 

of the years before the dictatorship. Although such discourses are promoted by a minority of Argentineans, 

they have a wide following in the case of the Spanish Civil War because of the strong dominance of the 

discourse of war which excludes other visions of the conflict. 

For those who think in terms of genocide in Argentina, the ways of “working through” are very different. 

Because the whole national group was affected, terror needs to be worked through at a group level. The 

social transformations that took place cannot be reversed by mere individual acts of will because they 

are anchored in a shared collective unconscious. Any attempt at prevention must take into account the 

tremendous force of what Freud calls repetition compulsion (the psychic need to repeat the unprocessed 

trauma again and again) as well as denegative pacts (a social phenomenon that reveals to what lengths 

individuals will go to repress trauma) and the various additional processes of desensitization. The rallying 

cry of “never again” heard at so many remembrance ceremonies must be understood in this context as an 

attempt to deny this compulsion to repeat the past. But trauma can only be worked through slowly and 

patiently – perhaps only when we have done a thorough job of discovering its complex and intricate scars 

on the collective psyche. 

For those who prefer the explanation of crimes against humanity, however, working through is fraught 

with obstacles. It is no coincidence that supporters of this view tend to practise denial. They attempt to 

“turn the page” on history through a wholesale condemnation of violence and the past in which subversive 

activity and state repression are lumped together as one. They do not understand that justice is the 

fundamental tool that would allow the past to be laid to rest. 

e) Generational transmission and mourning and the types of appropriation or alienation 

Abraham and Torok have developed an interesting notion to describe this level: the crypt. According to 

the authors: 

The unspeakable words and sentences, linked as they are to memories of great libidinal and 

narcissistic value, cannot accept their exclusion. From their hideaway in the imaginary crypt-into 

which fantasy had thrust them to hibernate lifeless, anesthetized, and designified- the unspeakable 

words never cease their subversive action. 11 

11 Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, 

Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis, Volume 1. Edited and translated 

by Nicholas T. Rand. Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1994, p. 132. 

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They add that. 

Should a child have parents ‘with secrets,’ parents whose speech is not exactly complementary 

to their unstated repressions, he will receive from them a gap in the unconscious, an unknown, 

unrecognized knowledge — a nescience — subjected to a form of “repression” before the fact. The 

“buried speech of the parent” will be “a dead gap without a burial place in the child. This unknown 

phantom returns from the unconscious to haunt its host and may lead to phobias, madness, and 

obsessions. Its effect can persist through several generations and determine the fate of an entire 

family line. 12 

Thus, these experiences, repressed and unprocessed in one generation, are unconsciously transmitted 

to the next generation. As the team at Chile’s Centre for Mental Health and Human Rights (CINTRAS) 

explains: 

The contents of the crypt are unspeakable for the subject because, despite being present psychically 

in the person who has lived them, they cannot talk about it. Because they are transmitted to the 

next generation as a phantom and cannot be represented verbally, they become nameless, their 

contents are unknown, but their existence can generate psychic disturbances. In the generation of 

the grandchildren, they generate unthinkable thoughts, because this generation is not aware that a 

secret hangs over an unresolved trauma. This can result in symptoms, bizarre feelings and emotions 

that occur without any apparent correlation with the psychic life of the family. 13 

Haydeé Faimberg describes this transgenerational transmission of trauma as “alienating identification” 

or “generational telescoping”, as the older generations’ experiences overrun those of their children and 

grandchildren. 14 The image comes from 19th century accounts of train accidents in which wagons were 

described as collapsing into each other like a folding telescope. Here we will examine how the different 

legal concepts discussed so far can affect this phenomenon. 

12 Ibid, p. 140. 

13 c i n t r a s, “Daño transgeneracional en descendientes de sobrevivientes de tortura” (Transgenerational damage in the offspring 

of survivors of torture), in c i n t r a s, eatip, g t n m/r j y sersoc, Daño transgeneracional. Consecuencias de la represión 

política en el Cono Sur, Santiago de Chile, Unión Europea-Gráfica l o m, 2009, pp. 48-49. 

14 For the concept of generational telescoping, see Haydeé Faimberg, “El telescopaje (encaje) de las generaciones - acerca 

For the concept of generational telescoping, see Haydeé Faimberg, “El telescopaje (encaje) de las generaciones - acerca 

de la genealogía de ciertas identificaciones” (“The telescoping of generations - on the genealogy of certain identifications”) 

in René Kaës, Haydeé Faimberg and others, Transmisión de la vida psíquica entre generaciones (Transmission 

of psychic life between generations), Buenos Aires, Amorrortu, 2006 (first edition, 996). 

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In the discourses of war and crimes against humanity, generational imprinting leads to relatively 

incoherent transgenerational legacy. In the case of war, the fallen are constructed as heroes and the mode 

of mourning tends to be melancholic. In the case of crimes against humanity, the tendency towards an 

abstract and blanket condemnation of all types of violence leads to detachment and so to denial. 15 

However, the idea of a militarized conflict between the guerrillas and Armed Forces has lost ground in 

Argentina, at least since the end of the Cold War, while the idea of a repressive, centralized State has also 

lost legitimacy. Even if we accept that there was a war in Argentina, the notions of war crimes and crimes 

against humanity produce visions of the past that are difficult to appropriate for the younger generations 

that have never participated in a war. Moreover, despite all the shortcomings of contemporary democracy 

in Argentina, the overwhelming majority of the population votes in elections and so governments are 

lawfully elected. If freedom of expression is still limited, this is not due to State censorship of the media 

but, as in other democratic countries, to the power of media corporations and other economic groups. 

Thus, the generation born after the dictatorship is dislocated from both types of discourse. For those who 

did not live through the events the discourses of war crimes and crimes against humanity tend to sound 

contrived since those who supposedly confronted each other in war no longer speak of continuing the 

military conflict, while a return of the military dictatorship is no longer a real threat to democracy. This 

younger generation tends to feel increasingly alienated by the discourse of war crimes and crimes against 

humanity because these relegate past terror to history, a history that belongs to their parents and which 

remains disconnected from their own experience in the present. 

For the victims’ children, this lack of intergenerational legacy has complex and profound effects. Some 

of these can be observed in activities as diverse as public protests organised by HIJOS, an acronym 

in Spanish for Sons and Daughters for Identity and Justice Against Oblivion and Silence, consisting 

of demonstrations outside perpetrators’ homes or at the restaurants and night clubs frequented by the 

perpetrators. They also include works by “Theatre for Identity”, poems by writers like John Terranova, 

films like Los rubios (The blond) by Albertina Carri and any film by Alejandro Agresti, all of whom 

belong to the generation of those who were children at the time of the 1976 coup or were born during the 

dictatorship. 

15 For the analysis of patterns of bereavement in addition to the classic work of Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” Col- 

For the analysis of patterns of bereavement in addition to the classic work of Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” Collected 

Works, op. cit, pp. 235-256, available on the third volume (“Loss”) of the trilogy of John Bowlby, Attachment and 

loss, op. cit, which performs a brilliant analysis of the different types of grief and its relationship to the possible construction 

of detachment, and inability to handle the effects of the absence. 

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Of course, confronting the effects of the three narrative models analyzed with the discursive logic 

of another generation involves broadening and deepening our analysis of the different memory and 

representation processes of how these are moulded and how they are linked to action. 

The need felt by the younger generations to demonstrate in public meant a break with the silence and 

closure imposed on - or, at least, accepted by - the older generations that lived through the terror. And 

these demonstrations began precisely in the years when the perpetrators enjoyed complete impunity and 

sought closure in the name of “national reconciliation”. Through their protests, the sons and daughters of 

the disappeared signified their refusal to accept this distorted legacy of trauma. With their cry of rebellion, 

they sought and continue to seek not only a link with their missing parents but with a missing generation 

– one that relinquished its parental roles and responsibilities as lawgivers, authorities, and dispensers of 

justice. 

These public protests appealed - and still appeal - to the State to exercise its responsibility. One of the 

demonstrators’ chants translates roughly as: “No justice? No closure? Then public exposure”. The failure 

of the generation that came through the terror to live up to its responsibilities has led to a revolt against 

order and authority among some of the younger generation, exposing a breakdown of intergenerational 

bonding in a society when justice is still denied. Although this plea for justice is directed at the State, 

it appeals primarily to a whole generation, a generation delegitimized because it failed to exercise its 

parental role by seeking justice. 

These appeals can also be identified in much of the creative literary and artistic output of the second 

generation, which questions or confronts the older generation. Some of these dissident voices are children 

of the disappeared; others are simply members of a generation. Their work forms part of a wider focus 

on the ways in which society was reorganised by destruction – a focus essential for working through 

trauma in both age groups. At the same time, the questions raised by the children could be an opportunity 

to demolish their parents’ denial of the past and open the way to the transmission of a legacy. Together 

they could give the past a different meaning and cope jointly with the crypt, seeking somehow to raise its 

sealed lid. 

Both generations need to understand how society and social behaviour have been reorganized by genocide, 

even if they approach the question in different ways. And each needs an intergenerational dialogue. Only 

by starkly facing pain, shame and guilt is it possible to construct a legacy capable of including the dreams, 

successes, problems and concerns of a generation, dreaming of a better world, and how it was marked by 

terror and by the consequences of terror. A terror that sought to destroy meaning as they had known it, to 

turn their experience into nonsense, to block any possibility of rebellion, and to reorganize the ways of 

86

conceptualizing the self and relationships with others, even with loved ones, even with their own children. 

One of the key conclusions of this study is that a fundamental objective of “reorganizing genocide” is 

desubjectification and desensitization, not only of the direct victims, but of the national group as a whole 

together with its complex web of social relationships and practices. As for what to call the violence of the 

970s, those who seek definitions need to examine the emotional transference between their own traumas 

and their descriptions of historical events. Otherwise, they risk becoming bogged down in abstract 

definitions without ever coming to grips with the heart of the matter and how it affects us, our parents and 

our children. Different concepts are likely to satisfy our needs in different ways. Being aware of this fact 

and acting responsibly is the least we can ask of ourselves and others. 

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Nepal Searching for Democratic Soul 

Narayan Wagle 

Author/Journalist 

When I was born, Nepal’s first popularly elected leader was still in jail. He had made the king very 

nervous, winning two thirds of seats of the parliament. The ambitious king couldn’t reconcile the fact 

that people’s huge and unprecedented mandate was not with him, but with his subject. The popular and 

determined prime minister had outlined the country’s political, developmental and social charter along 

with independent foreign policy. Just in one and a half years of the country’s first democratic exercise, 

the king began his misadventure to derail the process of democracy and development by people’s 

representative. Not for a short period as he promised, his misadventure lasted for decades. Nepal remained 

under the dark cloud of totalitarian royal regime. 

The king sacked the government, disbanded the parliament and seized every power of people’s system. 

Who cared about the constitution at the time when most of the countries in Asia and elsewhere were 

not democratically run? He mobilized the national army to arrest the prime minister, ministers and all 

important political leaders and put them in jail. Whoever compromised with him was released, and those 

who didn’t remain in jail for years. The leader was happy writing literary short stories, novels and letters 

to people close to him, rather than bowing down with the military backed king’s coup. He inspired the 

country with his ideology of centrist politics and ideas of pro-humane literature even from the heavily 

guarded cell. 

The four walls of the Kathmandu prison, guarded by the national army, now have been turned into a 

museum after his name, BP Koirala. 

The king, ruling from the royal palace, who made the life of Koirala, his followers and the Nepali citizens 

in large miserable, has also been turned into a museum now. Koirala Museum is visited by people to 

remember and reflect on how he and the peaceful political struggle suffered throughout history. And 

88

people visit the royal museum at the centre of downtown Kathmandu to see the kings and queens’ 

belongings and to get a sense of how they suppressed the people’s aspirations for so long from behind the 

most attractive landmark of the capital. 

That was the time of the early 1960s. That had been just 10 years of newly found freedom. When most of 

the neighboring countries were becoming independent from the British, Nepal was being freed from 100 

plus years of family rule. Not of the king’s family, but their kin. In fact, it was a military rule. The Rana 

family successfully maintained their grip on state affairs, making the monarchy a ceremonial head of state 

and ran the country with the military. Nepal had remained independent and safeguarded her sovereignty 

even during the fierce wars with the British in the south and with the Tibetans and Chinese in the north. 

The monarchy didn’t have any power and voice. People who asked for freedom and tried to rally against 

the rule were crushed. Some of the brilliant minds who showed their courage to stand up were hung, and 

several others were expelled from the country. 

There was no university. Only one campus, opened basically for Rana and their cronies’ children. There 

were a handful of schools. There was one Koirala family among the freedom loving people who were 

expelled and compelled to go reside in neighboring Indian towns. The senior Koirala had lost all his family 

property when he was punished by the rulers. He went into exile almost penniless with all his siblings 

and raised them in an atmosphere when Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru were championing for 

independence against the British rule. His young son BP connected himself with the Indian uprising for 

huge change and famously led a formation of the popular political party Nepali Congress and launched 

the first known democratic movement against the Ranas from India. 

The Ranas lost their best friend, the British in India. During the movement, the then king frustrated from 

his limitations inside the palace surprisingly went to take refuge in the Indian embassy and was eventually 

flown to New Delhi. The new leader in India Jawaharlal Nehru invited the Rana ruler from Kathmandu 

to have a trilateral agreement between India, the king and the Ranas. The king came back to Kathmandu 

with huge fanfare opening the country in a new democratic, free era. He formed an interim cabinet under 

the same Rana prime minister and managed to bring BP Koirala and others as ministers. That led to the 

ultimate fall of the Rana rule. 

Nepal was no longer a forbidden country on the global map. Foreigners were allowed to visit the middle 

age type of culture and society. Political parties were officially recognized. The country which welcomed 

airplanes before cars was slightly changing. The Ranas didn’t construct roads to connect to India but 

imported some cars. The cars were carried by porters in flock along the ups and downs and rivers of 

mountains. One flight a day from the closest town of India and the first foreign cars for Ranas symbolized 

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the change in Kathmandu as it saw some signs of the progress the outside world made while the country 

was asleep. 

But the transition never ended. The king didn’t fulfill his promises of holding election to Constituent 

Assembly. He appointed one prime minister and another to prolong the uncertainty and to consolidate his 

own power. Koirala ended up with an understanding of holding parliamentary election ten years down the 

line with the new king, Mahendra, after much exhaustion from the political turmoil under the constitution 

given by the king. He believed in the king to stabilize the parliamentary political system, participated in 

the first general election and got a landslide victory. But the monarchs who were limited inside the palace 

for so long weren’t happy at all losing again the power to political leaders. Thus, the king dismissed the 

political system he himself declared. 

Putting political leaders behind bars, the king imposed a party-less political system, himself becoming 

the executive head of the country. Koirala’s Nepali congress launched again a democratic movement 

from India which failed to win the confidence of the Indian government, which was facing a border war 

with China. India desperately wanted to keep Nepal under her influence in the new context of Chinese 

ambition. As Nepal is a sandwich country between the two giants, the king played politics. He made his 

own political opposition silent with Indian help and tried to cultivate good relationships with China too. 

The cold war between two neighbors helped the king survive with his undemocratic regime. 

Koirala was released after 8 years but wasn’t allowed to organize people. He was compelled to go into self 

exile again in India. He again tried to launch the movement from there, but Nehru’s daughter, Indira, the 

Indian prime minister, didn’t tolerate Koirala’s anti-king activities from her country. Realizing the urgency 

of consolidating sovereignty of the country and hoping to make the new king, Birendra, change his mind 

to open up the political system, he came back to the country with the principle of national reconciliation. 

He asked for a multi-party political system where the king could enjoy some power as the head of the 

state. 

Instead, Koirala was again arrested while coming back to his home country. That time, from Kathmandu 

airport, he was taken back to the same prison where he had spent several years before. He was charged 

with several cases and the government had pleaded for the punishment of hanging him in a court. Even 

from jail he didn’t change his mind for reconciliation with the king for the sake of the country. But the 

king had a different approach. He wasn’t ready to democratize power. After all, the power was transferred 

to him by his own father, the late king Mahendra. Koirala wasn’t released till some senior royal surgeons 

reported to the king that he had got cancer that seriously threatened his life. Then he was made free to 

travel to the US for treatment. 

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The king had different definitions of democracy and foreign policy. Just before Koirala came back from 

India, the king had declared Nepal as the Zone of Peace. He wanted to show Nepal, being the birth place 

of Gautam Buddha, is a peace zone. He wanted to put a shadow on his hollow political system where 

parties were banned and there was no freedom of expression. Down the line in his 14 years of active 

monarchy after the declaration, he managed to secure endorsements from over a hundred countries. 

Importantly, India never welcomed it. 

Koirala’s national reconciliation and the King’s peace of zone declaration didn’t match the reality of the 

political climate at the domestic and international fronts. The offer of reconciliation was rejected by the 

king and his declaration of peace zone propaganda wasn’t accepted by his most influential neighbor. The 

king’s peace declaration ultimately didn’t bear any fruit. Politically conscious students rose to the street in 

Kathmandu and elsewhere and compelled the king to declare a national referendum. That was to choose 

between multi-party democracy and ‘reformed’ party-less panchayat system. 

Koirala and his colleagues got an unprecedented chance to rally around the people all over the country, 

igniting the hope of democratic Nepal after a long gap. But the king’s government was all desperate to 

defeat the side of multi-party system, thus did every possible tactic manipulating the votes. The king 

remained in active power for the next decade. Till the backdrop of the falling of the Berlin wall in 1989, 

Nepal witnessed another people’s movement succeeding to reinstate a multi-party system after as long as 

30 years. 

Koirala had died due to the illness, much before the 1990 movement, and the reinstatement of his 

envisioned system. But he is still dominates political discourse of Nepali politics. The party he founded 

is at the center of politics, though the current crop of leaders is much weaker. His photos and political 

books are the most used in elections and party meetings. He dominated the politics of modern Nepal and 

remained as the main ideological and organizational opposition to the autocratic regimes- first of Ranas 

and then Rajas, the kings. 

After his death, his party, led by Gandhian Krishna Prasad Bhattarai, launched a Satyagraha movement for 

democracy. That was all peaceful sit in which gave huge moral challenge to the king. The reconciliation 

and satyagraha defined the much popular peaceful political tool against the suppressors. It changed the 

very political party which had launched armed struggle, primarily raiding military posts in the past. The 

party was realizing more of the essence, relevance and moral power of peaceful means of opposition. 

I grew up in the western hills witnessing the political awareness among teachers and students. The district 

of Tanahun was influenced by the NC ideals and inspirations. Thanks to the local leaders and the educated 

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people who got the chance to have higher education in the famous neighboring Indian city of Benares 

where Koirala was based for a long time during his self exile. 

I saw young leaders of the party visiting secretly our villages and talking to common people. They hid 

themselves from government agencies and used to avoid meeting possible government spies. They 

used to explain to the innocent villagers how the king’s system was running the country without any 

accountability and ruining the future of children. Development of the countryside was hugely neglected 

and schools and health posts were too far to reach to get services. The government was fearful of teachers 

since they were the ones who were the most literate and could easily become connected to the opposition’s 

political ideas. 

Teachers had noble ideas of social awakening. I remember my teachers at our high school privately 

reminding me and my classmates how we could contribute to society by doing social service and for 

that we needed to acquire some political beliefs. Whether democratic politics or politics of communists, 

we had to believe in any political line to be better students. That was the message. A student with clear 

political belief and commitment could be a good citizen in the future. Being under the huge influence of 

democratic front leaders of the banned party, we were ready to make any sacrifice for the country. 

But the restrictions were so heavy that if found involved in any political activities police posts used to 

keep record. For government jobs, candidates had to provide clearance from police. Thus, the possibility 

of being active in politics was to end the probability of the only available job opportunity. The private 

sector almost didn’t exist. Not only was political power centralized, the economy was also government 

controlled. The license system was strict. But teachers suggested that we grow with political conviction 

and work for a greater human cause. 

The people working for the government and the local bodies, the conservative class, was the support 

base of the king’s system. Families largely from ethnic communities dreamed of sending their sons to 

the national army, if they couldn’t get selected in the British or Indian army. We still have the old treaty 

of allowing our youths to get recruited in these two foreign armies. Others preferred government jobs, 

including teaching. For every opportunity, one needed good connections and favor. People who were close 

to the establishment used to get an easy chance. The local cronies of the system used to terrorize people 

for having independent minds. 

I remember pro-government local powerful man asking my father how I was growing up. If I was 

brewing some political ideas then I had no chance in the future to get job opportunities. On the one hand, 

the teachers who were our heroes used to promote us with political ideas and on the other hand there was 

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terror back in homes. That was a black and white kind of situation. The prohibited political parties were 

relying on the students and teachers for their own existence. Student organizations close to the parties 

became active. They launched a student movement from Kathmandu. 

Nepali students were marching towards the Pakistani embassy in Kathmandu to protest against the 

hanging of democratic leader Julfikar Ali Bhutto. The government mobilized police to crush the peaceful 

demonstration. That ignited the student leaders across political lines and the movement kicked off. It 

wasn’t limited inside the capital valley. The fire was spread everywhere. The initial days of 1980 were 

very different, but the courage shown by the youths made the king compromise with political leaders, 

especially Koirala, to hold a national referendum to choose between a party-less or multi-party political 

system. Surprisingly, the king’s choice of system won, though with narrow margin. 

Nepal is one of the most diversified countries, not only in geographical terms. Yes, in geographical terms it 

expands from the highest point of the world, Mt Everest and eight of the 14 tallest mountains above eight 

thousand meters, down south to the plains of Lumbini, the birth place of Gautam Buddha. In this different 

geographic and climate zones, many different ethnic communities have resided for centuries. More than 

one hundred ethnic groups exist and several different languages are spoken. The hills and mountain sides 

have always remained as remote areas, and the people are neglected by the state. 

Hindu is the vastly dominant religion. The kings modeled themselves as the latest incarnation of one 

popular Hindu god. They always religiously followed the rituals strictly and promoted the religion. 

Hence, they ignited god fearing people along with their non political state of affairs. They found it easy to 

consolidate their power on the religious line. On the other hand, Koirala was also a Hindu. But he wasn’t 

religious minded. He was very secular in his approach and lifestyle. But the fear factor in society was so 

prevalent that it was thought democracy was anti-Hindu. 

Another main source of the king’s power came from the national army. The army’s top brass were always 

selected from the royal family directly. The palace relatives were always promoted as the chief of the 

defense force. That was totally a monolithic organization. The state resources were monopolized. And 

the king played a foreign card. Being an active member of the Non Aligned Movement and the United 

Nations, sending army to Peace keeping postings elsewhere, the king managed somehow to manage the 

country’s independence. More than that, he had a good rapport with China to control influence from India. 

China looked for stability in her southern neighborhood, which borders the sensitive area of Tibet. On the 

other hand, the king used to give signals to India. If she pushed for democracy, he would become further 

closed to Beijing. He used to pick one man as the prime minister close to India at a time to show his 

confidence in New Delhi and another time used to change his man at the government who was believed to 

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not be so close to India. That was the card and bargain he was a champion for. 

The idea of the Hindu kingdom was promoted just to check the possibility of the rise of democratic 

demands. Democracy in the real sense could be secular. Because of the feudal system, people were poorly 

informed. Many new opposition leaders were jailed and some were hung. 

Any voice of democracy was targeted and blamed as foreign influence. The system had promoted a 

discourse of nationalism in their best capacity to manipulate the definition. Educational text books were 

rewritten. All the king’s men were the greatest propagandists. The government radio used their voices 

every day. The king meant for the country and anything against the system was anti-national. The idea of 

multi-party system was anti-national. 

Nepal has huge potential for hydro power exploration, from her huge rivers flowing down from the 

Himalayas. Still, it hasn’t been realized. We are still suffering from huge electric power outages, especially 

during winter, thanks to the political uncertainty. The king further made the nationalists so panicked that 

the water treaties in the past during the brief stint of democratic government were intentioned to sell out 

the rivers to India. We saw the wall paintings everywhere by the government blaming the banned political 

party as so anti-national that they sold out the rivers. The top leaders were either in jail or exile and had 

hard time coming up with convincing explanations. If they said anything there was no credible and 

influential media to make their versions public. The dark shadow of narrow nationalism of the king’s time 

is still hanging around. If the narrow mindset becomes a state policy once, it will have a long term impact 

in a nation’s life. Nepal is one great example. 

I came to Kathmandu for higher studies, leaving my village still terrorized by the dominant state policies 

discouraging freedom seeking students and teachers. Television was just introduced by the information 

ministry. But the government couldn’t stop international news airing. The Berlin Wall fell down. We saw 

the victorious Germans on screens. The banned political parties were organized under an inspirational 

leadership of one closest aid of the late Koirala. He appealed for democracy. His centrist party had 

managed to be united with leftist parties in the fight against autocratic monarchy. He famously said that he 

fought against the Ranas and three Rajas[kings] in his long life and that was the final moment to stand up 

and rise for freedom. 

People came to the streets in such numbers that it became another national people’s movement, toppling 

down the autocracy in a few weeks time. The king tried to crush the peaceful demonstrations and several 

innocent people died by police bullets. That fueled the movement. And it became more impressive. The 

king finally agreed to listen to the parties. The multi-party political system was reinstated after 30 years. 

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The interim government paved way democratic exercise, bringing out constitution and holding general 

elections. NC again came back to power with impressive majority in the parliament. The economy was 

liberalized. Constitutional guarantees had paved the way for private sector media. Government services 

were provided equally for everyone. People now had easy access to make passports and travel abroad. 

But the leaders, being new to state affairs, were busy wrangling in unnecessary internal power tussles. 

One left party was the main opposition, and they too were very new to open politics. The royal palace 

wasn’t happy at all with the new development because they had to give up power. But the new system 

still had given a very dignified role to the king as the constitutional head of the country. The king was 

still the supreme commander chief of the army. The army wasn’t under government control. The king 

tried to show his displeasure and the democratically elected governments subsequently couldn’t win the 

confidence of the army. 

As the elected government wasn’t delivering much and the hugely exaggerated people’s expectations 

weren’t being met. The economic opportunities were very limited. General people got desperate for rapid 

changes in their lives. So the youths flew to Korea, Malaysia and gulf countries. In the past, the open 

border with India was the only option for the Nepalese to go to a greater job market. Now the options 

were multiple. Now Kathmandu is a great hub, especially for gulf airlines, flying everyday thousands of 

low paid job seeker youths. 

I became a journalist in the newly found free press environment. My motivation was to write stories 

of general people and how their lives were changed or not changed at all. I witnessed the opposition’s 

political activities since the early days of my schooling, participated in student movements during school 

hours and later the national people’s movement during my college days in Kathmandu. I wanted to write 

about the common people who dreamt for a better future. And as a reporter I wanted to talk to them and 

check out the facts with the authorities. In fact, I wanted to be a university professor or a full time writer, 

but as soon as I got the chance to work in a newsroom I felt that it was what suited me best. 

The democratic practice was just about to come into place after the second general election when the 

Maoists party surprisingly launched their typical 20 th century armed struggle against the political system. 

In the name of establishing communism in the country, they first targeted the feudal structure of society. 

Initially, they were active in some remote hill district, cleansing all opponent political voices. They 

came out with much populist and propagandist programs of social reforms. They lacked a credible and 

pragmatic political ideology to suit present day reality domestically and internationally. They called 

themselves the messiah of the poor, marginalized and suppressed classes and communities. Their method 

was very violent. They raided police posts, seized arms and grew to such a powerful scale that they were 

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powerful enough to attack army barracks and take away sophisticated modern weapons. 

They created fear. The fear factor was so rampant that other people believing in other political ideologies 

were targeted and eliminated. Fear is the worst form of human activity. I had sensed the same kind 

of atmosphere when I was a child during the king’s days, and it was now, again, a very similar or 

worse situation everywhere. The Maoists were strategically smart. They mobilized the marginalized 

communities, gave loud slogans in favor of them. Their aspirations weren’t responded to even by the 

democratic system. The system was still structured in a way that many ethnic communities weren’t 

fairly represented in state organs. Some dominant social groups continued getting privileges even in the 

democratic era. 

From my newsroom, I saw the democratic system at the center slowly becoming helpless to tackle the 

Maoists. The youngest brother of the late Koirala was the prime minister. He was hated by the Maoists 

and the royalists as well. The king didn’t agree with him mobilizing the national army against the Maoists. 

The rebels were attacking army barracks and district headquarters and the government was becoming 

helpless. 

That was the time when the crown prince killed everyone from his family including the king and the 

queen in the infamous palace massacre. He had lost his balance while not getting a chance to get married 

with his beloved. The younger brother of the late king was made the king. The new king happened to be 

more ambitious, who wasn’t reconciling the fact that the monarchy had limited power after the change of 

1990. He made the prime minister resign. Another prime minister from the same party NC was in place, 

but the king made the new PM agree to dissolve the parliament. The election was out of sight due to the 

security situation. The king benefitted and later he sacked the PM to take full executive authority himself 

and fully mobilized the army. 

When my first novel Palpasa Café was published in 2005, the war at home was coming to a climax. 

On average, 8 to 10 people were getting killed every day. The country was totally in the dark as to how 

to move ahead. People were frustrated, political parties were becoming more and more helpless and 

hopeless. 

The constitutional monarch had become the country’s executive head, taking power unconstitutionally. 

The king’s major power was coming from the national army, which was fighting against the Maoist 

militants. A typical 20 th century ‘People’s War’ waged by some ambitious Nepali communists was 

dragging the peaceful Himalayan kingdom into much deeper conflict. 

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My novel was basically a simple human story exposing the war and how it was destroying the social 

fabric of the country. It was well received by critics and general readers in the sense that it was branded 

as an anti-war book, and it became an instant hit. It ultimately became an all-time best seller inside 

Nepal. My observation of the readers is that the story evoked the inner feeling, which was deep inside the 

sufferers of the war. 

As a journalist, I couldn’t capture the full story from human psychology. In our newspaper, most of the 

time, headlines used to be casualties. We counted the numbers of deaths. Everyday there were attacks 

and counter-attacks. Though we tried hard to get human stories in our news space, it had limitations. Out 

of that feeling, I wrote the novel. Both warring sides weren’t happy at all with the story. It was going to 

expose the war which they desperately wanted to cover up. 

For a writer, human is the major subject. Suffering is the main story. You would have different narratives, 

different characters, different context and different perspectives. But the soul is the human, and the human 

suffers. Similarly, wars might be different from one place to another, from one context to another. Every 

war has impacts on human lives. Unbearable impacts are expressed in different forms. Basically, the forms 

close to art, like literature, has so much relation with the impacts. 

Artists and writers tend to bring the extreme sides closer. They are pro human. This is their character. They 

want to celebrate human lives. But the extremists always ask for human sacrifices. This is the conflict. 

Writers are on one side and extremists on another side. Writers heal the human, extremists haunt. 

This is exactly what happened in our country. The extreme lefts, the armed radicals were at one extreme 

end, and the king with the army was at opposite extreme side. The intellectuals, writers, journalists, 

lawyers, doctors and teachers came together to give pressure naturally in a peaceful way. They provoked 

the pro-peace parliamentary parties to launch a peaceful movement. This did, but their voice wasn’t heard 

by the king. 

The Maoists changed their strategy and reached out to the political parties. The parties were in favor of 

constitutional monarchy, changed their stance and agreed to remove the monarchy. After the agreement, 

they called for the people’s movement. Kathmandu showed the world how a peaceful protest movement 

could change a war-torn country into a political settlement. 

Here comes another question in today’s complex realities. 

Removing the monarchy wasn’t that difficult. It was a question of one decisive people’s movement. The 

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question was black and white. Whether to have a monarchy or not? 

The question of building an enduring peace has many angles at which it can be looked at. Democracy is 

the source of long lasting peace in a country. But democracy isn’t a word. It is an interpretation. We in 

Nepal spent four years of Constituent Assembly defining democracy and failed. 

Initially, it was a question of the name of democracy. Whether real democracy, people’s democracy or full 

democracy? Every political force had a different choice, emotion, text and orientation. We defined to have 

inclusive democracy. It intended to lead to federal democracy. 

The electoral system changed. A mixed representative system was adopted. Candidates had to be 

proportional in terms of gender, ethnicity etc. The Constituent Assembly and the legislative parliament 

became one solid inclusive institution for the first time. It was more inclusive than any of south Asian 

country. The members took oath in their mother tongues. The oath taking ceremony was so colorful that 

every member was in different attire, was so musical that every member had different sounds to make. 

Nepal celebrated her unique diversity. 

But the process didn’t bear any results. The house couldn’t deliver on the constitution. One major reason 

was the inability of political parties to define federal democracy. Nepal seems a rather small country 

on the globe. Why? It is between the giants- India in the south and China in the north. But population- 

wise, Nepal is the 40 th largest country. So the issues of lasting peace and democracy are still a question of 

political settlement. 

The new constitution was mandated to settle all political issues. But the tenure of the house expired. There 

is no future election fixed. A coalition caretaker government is ruling the country. The differences among 

political parties are bound to widen. 

Though the armed conflict has concluded, the problems of one of the world’s poorest countries are to 

grow more in the vacuum. The transition is going to linger. 

Meanwhile, I published my second novel, Mayur Times, with a story of how the law and order situation 

has weakened and politicization of crime and criminalization of politics has taken root deeply in society. 

Nepal is over war, but the post-war situation doesn’t mean that it is good peace time. 

The country has come back to almost the same situation of being governed by unelected people. Nepal 

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is probably one of the few countries that have held elections very few times. Now the ruling alliance is 

adamant to pave way for consensus election government, and the opposition parties aren’t going to satisfy 

themselves till there is a new caretaker government. Equally importantly, the local bodies haven’t been 

elected for the last 16 years. 

Meanwhile, the parties are becoming fragmented. The Maoist party has split, and the new Maoist party 

is threatening to launch another armed struggle. And the leftist party is waiting for another break up. The 

ethnic community leaders in the party are preparing to form another party. The question of the basis of 

dividing provinces would be more critical down the line. 

India in the south is in favor of one or two provinces in the bordering area of Nepal so that they could have 

more strategic power over Kathmandu. Similarly in the north, China has given messages that the future 

provinces in Nepal shouldn’t be demarcated along ethnic lines. Their logic is if demarcated ethnically that 

would certainly impact the bordering of Tibet. 

Both giant neighbors have been aggressive in recent years thanks to their economic success. They have 

been more demanding. Both of them ask for political stability in Kathmandu for their own interests. Nepal 

is struggling with just three to four percent economic growth. The trade balance with both of the neighbors 

is widening. Due to its own domestic reasons, Nepal hasn’t been able to attract investment. Youths are 

fleeing from the country. Villages have been left by the youths where only elderly people, women and 

children take care of the families. 

In the last 60 years of modern time, Nepal hasn’t managed to stabilize its own political system. The 

four subsequent kings after then have interfered in the day to day politics. Political parties have failed 

in a number of occasions to prove their commitments and to deliver. The country heavily depends upon 

foreign aid for development expenditure. The government isn’t allowed to bring out a yearly budget. Due 

to the opposition’s pressure, it came out with a three month expenditure program. Thus, it has further 

halted economic activities. 

Nepal has always been looking for political settlement. Uncertainty and undemocratic atmosphere has 

always ruled. People haven’t been given the dignity to vote their representative in a free and fair way. 

Nepal has yet to value the core democratic human rights of its citizen. Election and periodic election is a 

must for any democracy and stability. We have been unfortunate enough in this basic aspect of modern 

civilization. Without accountability, the sense of democratic and transparent governance is nil. It has been 

very true in our case. Corruption in every sphere of life has made common man and woman frustrated. 

And there is no justice if there is no rule active. 

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When I reflect, I see Nepal has spared most of its huge opportunities in the past. And it is so even in 

the present. We have changed the constitution six times and still haven’t managed to draft a new one. 

Thousands of people have been killed in this long political fight in different times in the last six decades, 

and many have lost their properties. Many have been displaced. We are yet to come to terms. 

Parties could go to any extreme side. Any organization could launch any type of struggle. The Maoists or 

any type of extremist force could go underground again. 

The basic dignity of a free citizen is still a far cry. That is freedom from fear. Political stability, democratic 

structure, fair representation and periodic election can ensure freedom. In our case, fear factor has ruled 

the dictum. We aren’t free from the fear. 

In Search of Reconciliation 

Nepal is in peace time since the Maoist rebels came to agree on participating in open competitive politics. 

They surrendered weapons. Their fighters are finally being integrated into the national army after five 

years of comprehensive peace treaty with the government. The table has been turned. They became the 

largest party in the last constituent assembly- parliament and the coalition government is led by a Maoist 

leader. But the fear isn’t over from people’s mind. The Maoist party is divided, and a breakaway group of 

the party is threatening to rise to arms again. They seem determined to regroup the old fighters for a new 

unknown fight. They have started campaigning against the ruling coalition with much nationalist plank. 

We don’t have a solid peace culture. There is always history of political conflict. There is no coalition 

culture in the political party level. Whereas the interim constitution was promulgated aiming for 

harnessing consensus politics. Political parties naturally compete with each other; thus, consensus culture 

is a far away cry in our context, more and more along the way of transition politics. Consensus politics 

is for promoting culture of working together and develop a sense of co-existence. But from the political 

spectrum, from far left to extreme right, it has been a herculean task. Nepal urgently needed at least a 

coalition political culture to respect the diverse ethnic and regional social composition. The election 

system of mixed propositional, which doesn’t easily allow a single party to get majority, is for that culture. 

During a decade long Maoists war, more than 16 thousand people lost their lives from both warring sides- 

the state security forces and the rebels. The peace treaty promised to set up a truth and reconciliation 

commission to examine the war crimes and give justice to the victims. But the parties are still failing to 

constitute the commission and the families of victims are still crying for justice. The excesses of power 

and brutality are supposed to be examined and the culprits be punished. But the poor families are helpless 

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in the context of political division of constituting the commission. The party in power now obviously 

doesn’t want to come forward for it, with universally accepted norms of a truth finding mission. They 

would like to give blanket amnesty as the other parties who were in power in the past during war also 

would like to avoid any situation where they themselves are exposed. 

The consecutive governments formed different commissions to look after the human right violations 

during the peoples’ movement in 1990 and 2005 after much pressure from people. The commission 

reports were never publicized, and the actions were never taken against the violators. This tendency of 

power has always undermined the demand of justice and has made the victim families suffer more. So the 

general sense in the country is war time crimes are never investigated and the victims never get justice. 

It has further spread the fear that truth would never come out and reconciliation happen. Reconciliation 

is a major moral force to accept the political change and make the change lasting. Thus, the country has 

been facing the acute crisis of political stability. Stability first comes from the minds of citizen. If they feel 

cheated and get frustrated, there is always possibility of another surge. 

The fear doesn’t come from weapons. Moreover, it is from peoples’ mind. When war crimes aren’t 

investigated, human right violations aren’t examined and the culprits aren’t brought to justice, fear 

always dominates innocent people. The people whose property and land were occupied and seized during 

the war are still asking for return. The new powerful lot which captured others’ land and property are 

threatening the victims in return. So the war is over but the new fear of another war by another outfit is 

there and peace isn’t in the air. During the attempt to draft a constitution for four unsuccessful years, the 

expectations of many minority groups were heightened by different political forces. Since the constitution 

couldn’t be drafted due to sharp polarized political division, the groups are in the process of new political 

alignment. So the politics would be further polarized in the future, which will ultimately prolong the 

transition. Transition of interim constitution and caretaker government might continue and there would be 

no elections in the near future. 

The only positive aspect of Nepali society is that the people are liberal, they have a great quality of 

forgiveness and they cherish the harmony among the diverse composition of ethnic groups. So there is no 

sudden outburst against past atrocities. The economic capacity of the country hasn’t been expanded. Job 

opportunities are very limited. Thousands of youths flee to the gulf everyday for cheap labor jobs. The 

villages have been left to the elderly and the children. After the Maoists’ war began, the speed of youths 

leaving villages has increased dramatically. More people are coming to cities. So the poor villages, where 

most of the insurgent activities were concentrated, have changed- one visible change is most of them don’t 

have enough youths to show the vibrancy of the communities. 

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Time is another great healer. Though, nobody forgets the harsh suffering. The atrocities against someone 

in particular can hardly be forgiven and forgotten. For that, a civilized state should play a role. Healing 

the great sufferings of common citizens is possible only when there is a just democratic political system. 

The system is bound to ensure people the justice they deserve. Justice is for the dignity of citizens. Any 

democratic system would embrace people with dignity. Dignity is the very right of every citizen. 

The parties haven’t helped people to overcome the past sufferings, and they haven’t done enough to 

help people overcome fear. Fear is the main enemy of any citizen’s dignity. Fear is the worst enemy 

if it is coming from the inability of political parties to perform their roles. But at least the parties are 

in negotiating terms and the continuous dialogue among them is giving hope to people for a positive 

direction towards stability. 

The resilience of Nepali people is a great asset. There isn’t a single incident of people taking revenge 

of any past crimes against them during conflicts, even after knowing who were involved. But still, for 

a greater cause of having lasting peace and stability and to help people overcome fear of human right 

violations, atrocities and the power excesses should be brought to justice. The truth finding and helping 

reconciliation is very vital to give justice. Peace doesn’t come from state power, rather it comes from 

people’s mind. 

For the last 60 years of modern Nepal’s tumultuous political history, the political conflicts have made 

many people suffer. It is very ironic for a modern nation not to give justice to the people investigating 

crimes during conflicts. Thus, it hasn’t helped establish a lasting political system based on justice and 

helped people overcome fear. 

Both of my novels were based on the conflict, and the characters of the novels were taken realistically 

from society. I see the people resembling my characters and still not getting a sense of justice. That way I 

also feel helpless. But the writings and art creations on the issue for years have been one effective medium 

for general people remind the sufferings of others and relate to themselves. Currently, I am writing a third 

novel. This time as well, I haven’t overcome the historic hangover of the conflicts. This is also going to 

be another novel based on the conflicts. The stories are there. They have attracted writers’ attention more 

because the sufferers haven’t received justice. 

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Clinical Healing or Pathological Reflection: the Imagination that 

Links Auschwitz with Fukushima 

Kyung Sik Suh 

Tokyo Keizai University 

1. Introduction: the problem of this article 

The ‘impossibility of representation of Auschwitz’ or the ‘impossibility of testimony’ has been recurring 

themes that have been debated since the 1990s. The main problem I would like to address through this 

article is to expand this debate, which has been fixed in a certain time-space of Auschwitz and in the early 

20th century. I would like to bring these themes and debates to “here and now” for reflection. In other 

words, I would like to examine how to translate concepts such as ‘impossibility of representation’ and 

‘impossibility of testimony’ into universal terms to reflect on our current modern society and its people. I 

would also like to explore whether such reflections could be considered ethically sound. 

On 11 March 2011, the great Tohoku earthquake hit the eastern shores of Japan, which led to a “severe 

accident” at the first nuclear power plant in Fukushima. In late 20 , the Japanese government announced 

the ‘settlement’ of the incident with the ‘cold shutdown’ of the nuclear reactor. However, I do not have to 

mention that this was not a truthful statement that reflected the real state of the incident. 

Facing the ‘Fukushima’ incident, I began to reflect on problems of whether it would be possible to 

represent and testify on this case, and whether such testimonies would be accepted. You could say such 

inquiries were an attempt to examine the problem of the ‘impossibility of testimonies’ and link Auschwitz 

with Fukushima. If Auschwitz’s ‘impossibility of testimonies’ has caused the revival and continuation of 

the crisis, we could make an identical case for Fukushima in the future. If there are no testimony or if the 

testimonies could not be heard, Fukushima might as well continue to be resuscitated again and again in 

the future. There have recently been several symptoms indicating materialization of such fear. 

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2. Powerful of the earth, masters of new poisons 

I have twice visited the disaster site of Fukushima nuclear power in June and November 2011. These visits 

have led to an unexpected realization that the incident has “challenged our imagination.” 

Following my visit to Fukushima in November, I gave a lecture titled ‘The Witness of Isolation: Primo 

Levi’ at the International Peace Museum of Ritsumeikan University at Kyoto. And I met a poem through 

the occasion. 

The Girl-Child of Pompei 

Since everyone’s anguish is our own, 

We live ours over again, thin child, 

Clutching your mother convulsively 

As though, when the noon sky turned black, 

You wanted to re-enter her. 

To no avail, because the air, turned poison, 

Filtered to find you through the closed windows 

Of your quiet, thick-walled house, 

Once happy with your song, your timid laugh. 

Centuries have passed, the ash has petrified 

To imprison those delicated limbs forever. 

In this way you stay with us, a twisted plaster cast, 

Agony without end, terrible witness to how much 

Our proud seed matters to the gods. 

Nothing is left of your far-removed sister, 

The Dutch girl imprisoned by four walls 

Who wrote of her youth without tomorrows. 

Her silent ash was scattered by the wind, 

Her brief life shut in a crumpled notebook. 

Nothing remains of the Hiroshima schoolgirl, 

A shadow printed on a wall by the light of a thousand suns, 

Victim sacrificed on the altar of fear. 

Powerful of the earth, masters of new poisons, 

Sad secret guardians of final thunder, 

The torments heaven sends us are enough. 

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Before your finger presses down, stop and consider. 

20 November 1978 

Was this a poem that sang of Fukushima? Primo Levi had passed away 25 years ago and the ‘Dutch girl’ 

referred to in this poem is Anne Frank. The last four verses of the poem refer indeed to nuclear weapons, 

but, to me, they seem to sing about Fukushima. Levi’s imagination seems to linger on even after his 

death providing perspectives to events such as Fukushima. His imagination goes beyond the time-space 

dimension to link victims of ancient volcano bursts, victims of the Holocaust and victims of the nuclear 

weapons bombing. It is a sorrowful imagination indeed. 

Primo Levi was an Italian Jew and a survivor of the Nazi concentration camps. He wrote a record on 

his experience in the camps titled If this is Man, which has been translated and known to the Japanese 

population as Auschwitz is not over yet. Despite recognition as one of Italy’s prominent writers of the post 

war period who sublimated his testimony into literature, Levi ended his life by committing suicide at his 

home’s staircase in 1987. 

There is a description inside If this is Man of the daily nightmares Levi had in the camps. The dream is 

about Levi’s family’s neglect of his struggles when he tells them about it after being released. His sister 

even sneaks away to the next room in Levi’s dream. In a collection of essays he published called The 

Drowned and the Saved just a year before his death and forty years after his time at the camp, there are 

hints of tiredness for not being able to rightly convey his experience despite all his testimonies. 

Primo Levi was not just a witness of what actually happened at Auschwitz. He was also a witness to how 

difficult it was to testify to such history, how difficult it was to convey such experience and to eventually 

the ‘impossibility of testimony’ itself. 

3. The Tohoku earthquake and the minorities 

The first thought that occurred in my mind at the time that I heard of the Tohoku earthquake of March 

2011 was ‘whether the Korean-Japanese and other foreigners in Japan were okay.’ I was afraid not only 

of the damages from the earthquake and tsunami, but also worried about violence from demagogies 

that followed massive disasters. Amongst the confusion, the Asahi Newspapers published reports with 

the headlines such as ‘Foreigner Thefts’, ‘Riot Takes Place’, ‘Endless Rumours, not to be trusted’ on 26 

March that expanded on the rumours. 

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Reading these reports, I began to fear attacks against minorities due to such ‘groundless rumours.’ The 

reason I harboured such fears is due to an event in history of 90 years ago in Japan. 

On 1 September 1923 (Taisho 12), a magnitude 7.9 massive earthquake struck the Kanto region of Japan. 

It was the Great Kanto earthquake, which resulted in over 100 thousand deaths and missing people. It is 

estimated that some 6,000 Koreans and over 200 Chinese were killed along with tens of Japanese due 

to the event. But following the quake’s strike, rumours spread of ‘Koreans setting fire to houses’ and 

‘poisoning wells’ which led to attacks against Koreans by the Japanese. The army and police formed 

vigilante corps consisting of youth and fire-fighter groups. The members of the vigilante groups attacked 

Koreans with Japanese swords, fire hooks and bamboo spears. Since the Japanese defeat of the war in 5 

August 945, there has been no action taken by the Japanese government to find the truth, apologize or 

compensate for such event. 

In 2010, there were 2,134,151 foreigners registered residing in Japan. The largest group of foreigners 

residing in Japan are Chinese, being 687,156. The next largest group are Koreans/Chosun with 565,989 

and the third largest are Brazilians with 230,552. During the colonial era (before the end of the war in 

945), Koreans worked in coal mines or in 3D (Difficult, Dirty and Dangerous) factories near cities. There 

are many mines near Fukushima and Ibaraki, and therefore there are many Korean-Japanese still living in 

these regions today. 

The youth have been leaving the rural farming and fishing villages of Japan resulting in a sharp decrease 

in their population. The villages can no longer sustain their businesses due to the lack of workers. To solve 

such problem, Japan has begun to receive foreign labourers, which they refer to as trainees. However, 

because of their status as ‘trainees’ they receive a very low salary and there have been problems of human 

rights violations in their work environment. 

On 11 June, a man working in a dairy farm committed suicide in Soma city, Fukushima prefecture. It was 

after a month of throwing away milk that had been contaminated by the radioactive materials from the 

nuclear power plant disaster nearby. He confronted a situation where he had to sell some 40 cows due to 

a lack of income and mounting debt. He wrote his final words with chalk on the walls of the stable that 

was built from a loan, saying ‘if only there was no nuclear power plant.’ If you read the newspaper article 

on this incident closely, you will be able to find out that the wife of this dairy farmer was a Filipino. In 

an article (‘Parched lands and the ties of a foreign wife’ 25 July 2011, Asahi Newspaper) that follows the 

initial report, it is reported as follows: “The wife, age 33, is left alone in the isolated farm in the mountains 

where there isn’t even mobile phone coverage. She will have to now take care of her two children, a first 

grader and a pre-schooler, by herself. Not knowing proper Japanese, she is worried and sad that she must 

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ely on her neighbours to carry out the legal procedures related to her husband’s death.” How painful 

it must be for this woman, who has lost her husband and is left in a place where she has difficulty with 

communication and where she does not know the social system. 

I am worried that the foreigners residing in the disaster areas like the Filipino wife of the dairy farmer 

who are indeed members of Japanese society, may once again be abandoned because compensation 

and restoration programmes like ‘Japan’s restoration’ and ‘Endeavour Japan’ are carried out based on a 

nationalistic logic. 

Respect of others and equal treatment is necessary to build a society that live with and accept others 

including foreigners. However, Japan has not granted proper status to others that live in its society and 

even the Korean-Japanese that have lived in Japan since the colonial era. Hence, I believe it is a bit 

shameless for the Japanese to now start requesting more foreign workers to be allowed to come to Japan 

because of their current lack of labour. 

As mentioned above, the minorities are likely to be victims and their voices are unlikely to be heard in 

times of major disasters, wars and severe events. I believe this to be a problem of not the minorities but a 

problem of the imagination of the majorities. They lack the imagination to empathize with the pain of the 

minorities. 

4. The ‘impossibility’ of representation of genocides 

The most well known genocide is the massacre of Jews by the Nazi Germans, known as the Holocaust. 

There have been layers of difficulties in creating testimonial literature based on the phenomenon of 

‘genocides.’ First, the majority of witnesses of the event have literally demised due to the massacre. 

Second, many survivors tended to keep their experience to themselves and suppress their own dreadful 

memories. Third, even when testimonies are made, they are not conveyed to the audience and tend to be 

distorted when consumed. 

Furthermore, is it at first possible to represent an event such as Auschwitz? Its representation will likely 

lead to problems of under-representation, staleness and commercialization of the event. These kinds of 

concerns have been repeated since Theodor W. Adorno first claimed that “It is barbaric to write poems 

after Auschwitz.” 

The ‘culture’ (or ‘civilisation’ which is the opposite of ‘savage’) of madness that is implied in Adorno’s 

statement is itself considered to be barbaric. If the extreme materialisation of “barbarism of civilisation 

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itself” was the Holocaust, nuclear power could also be considered another materialisation of ‘civilisation’s 

savageness’ centred on the beliefs of scientism, ultra-utilitarianism and profit-centred thinking regardless 

of its military or peaceful usage as a power source. 

The complexity of such problems results in the difficulty of representing and testifying on events such as 

the genocides. The term of ‘impossibility of representation’ or ‘impossibility of testimony’ (of Auschwitz) 

refers to such overall phenomena. 

5. The lessons of ‘The Diary of Anne Frank’ 

Anne Frank’s family immigrated to Amsterdam, Netherlands from Frankfurt in 1933 when Hitler’s regime 

took power and began to suppress the population. However, by May 1940 Nazi Germany moved forward 

to also occupy the Netherlands. The Frank’s went into hiding in May 1942 until they were captured by the 

German Gestapo at their hiding place. The Frank’s were sent to Auschwitz after being captured, and Anne 

and her sister Margot were subsequently sent to Bergen-Belsen in late 1944. At the camp, the sisters were 

infected by typhus which led to their subsequent death in late February and early March 1945. 

The Diary of Anne Frank continues to have a great value to this day as a textbook of remembering the 

history of Jewish suppression and recognising the importance of peace-building. 

However, the readers of this book should also take note of the criticism by Bruno Bettelheim. Bettelheim 

was a Jew from Vienna, born in 1903 and is a survivor of the Buchenwald concentration camp. After 

immigrating to the US he became a prominent professor at the University of Chicago, specialising in 

development psychology. He left several articles reflecting on his experience at the concentration camp. 

He also committed suicide in 1990. 

In an article titled ‘The ignored lesson of Anne Frank’, he illustrated three psychological mechanisms that 

‘civilised people’ felt when first informed of the Nazi death camps. First, people believe that these abuses 

and massacres are conducted by only a mad minded few. Second, they neglect such reports of the events 

as propaganda or exaggerations. And third, while they believe the report, they tend to ‘quickly suppress 

the knowledge of horror as soon as possible.’ The reason for the success of the book, theatre plays and 

movies on the Diary of Anne Frank implies the wish to destroy the personality of the concentration camps 

and oppose the murderous character of such perception. 

I believe that praises for Anne Frank’s story cannot be explained without acknowledging that there is a 

wish to forget about the gas chambers behind them. We must admit our efforts to forget the horrors by 

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admiring Anne’s struggle to run away from the looming disaster by escaping into a world of poetic and 

delicate beauty. 

Bettelheim argues that the major success of the theatre plays and movies based on the Diary of Anne 

Frank is due to their ‘false endings.’ In the end, we hear the voice of Anne from afar. She says that “Despite 

all these terrible things, I believe that all people are still kind inside.” These unbelievable emotions are 

alleged to have come from the girl that had to witness the death of her sister before the same fate awaited 

her, the girl that had to face the death of her mother and the girl that had to witness the death of thousands 

of other children. These words cannot be justified by any passage that was left in Anne’s diary. 

These emotional words on the kindness of people seem to revive Anne Frank and seem to liberate us to 

confront the grave challenges that have been instigated by Auschwitz. This is the reason why we tend to 

feel good after reading her words. This is the reason why millions of people love these plays and movies. 

It is because that while these stories make us confront the existence of Auschwitz, at the same time they 

also steer us to ignore its meaning. If all people were kind inside, Auschwitz would never, ever have been 

possible and it would be impossible for a similar event to occur again. 

Bettelheim’s claim that the Diary of Anne Frank has been distorted internally through psychological 

mechanisms of suppression and defensive denial including a “willingness to forget about the gas 

chambers.” These are grave warnings that we should take note of. 

6. Frankl and Levi 

Victor E Frankl’s Night and Mist in Japan (originally Ein Psychologe erlebt das Konzentrationslager or 

Man’s Search for Meaning for the English version) is one of the masterpieces written by a survivor of the 

concentration camps. 

The writer was a psychoanalyst from Vienna that studied under Freud and Adorno. However, being a 

Jew his family was captured by the Nazi Germans when they took Austria and sent them to camps in 

Auschwitz. His parents, wife and children died in these camps, but he lived on. This book is a record of 

such bleak experience. 

The Japanese edition of this book has an Introduction by the editor dated August 1956. The Introduction 

has the following words. 

I wish to believe that “knowing for a person that seeks self-reflection is to go beyond one’s limitations.” 

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I also believe that we must endeavour to prevent such tragic journey happening again by political action 

and determinations in our everyday lives. 

The Japanese version of this book was published ten years after the war, when survivors of the Holocaust 

slowly began to introduce their literature and records. The public then also started to take notice of such 

publications. The Introduction by the editor mentioned above seems to illustrate the perception and 

determination of the publishing community at that time. This book subsequently became a bible to study 

the Holocaust in Japan and it continues to enlighten many today. 

However, the very foundation of this enlightenment viewpoint that believes in “people’s progress 

through knowledge” is being challenged today by wars, massacres and nuclear disasters brought about 

by scientism and ultra-utilitarianism. We are now faced with the question of whether indeed humans are 

capable of self-reflection and whether humans can go beyond their limitations through knowledge. Primo 

Levi was a person that struggled with such dire and difficult problems throughout his life. 

The most prominent Japanese scholar on Primo Levi in Japan, Professor Takeyama Hirohide of 

Ritsumeikan University, attempted a comparison of Frankl and Levi in his recent biography Primo Levi: 

the writer that saw the truth of Auschwitz (Gen So Sa, 2011). 

Primo Levi and Frankl both experienced the same concentration camps but had very different approaches 

to the experience. Frankl was interested mainly in the psychological changes of people in the camps. 

However, his central interests were not the usual prisoners that were exhausted by forced labour and 

eventually killed. His writing focused on how to survive in concentration camps and how to raise oneself 

in times of extreme conditions. He thought about the ‘meaning of agony.’ 

Through this journey, Frankl introduced Auschwitz as an environment of extreme conditions which led to 

enhancement of the human mind. He also believed there were deep meanings to be ‘sacrificed.’ He even 

used words such as ‘martyrs’ in some of his writings. 

Takeyama argued that Frankl’s writings “surfaced a strong religious emotion in the end” and evaluated his 

writings to be ‘moving’ but “having some kind of vague dissatisfaction.” What is the source of such “vague 

dissatisfaction”? 

Bruno Bettelheim who was also an Austrian survivor of the concentration camps and a psychologist had 

a different position. Bettelheim argued that calling the sacrificed of the camps as martyrs was a “sort of 

invented distortion to comfort ourselves.” 

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Such distortion could be considered as taking away the final perception of the sacrificed from them and 

neglecting the final respect that we could give to them. It could also be considered a denial to accept the 

full meaning of their deaths. We must not romanticize their death for the slight psychological liberation 

that is generated by such distortion. 

According to Bettelheim, Frankl’s writings seem to be strengthening our defensive denial and suppression 

by giving false comfort and liberation to the reader. Despite the horrible descriptions, Frankl’s strong 

religious interest seems to lead to a ‘moving’ conclusion that there are meanings to all pain. Based on this 

view, Frankl’s writings along with the Diary of Anne Frank became bestsellers by invoking such meaning 

and emotion. His writings also seem to support the ‘impossibility of testimony.’ 

In Takeyama’s abovementioned biography, he claims that Levi, unlike Frankl, “did not tend to rely on 

religion” and says the following. 

If Levi did not rely on religion, what did he pursue? The answer to this question seems to be the meaning 

of Auschwitz and why such things were built. 

When Frankl tried to show where the human mind leaned against when faced with extreme conditions 

such as Auschwitz, Levi focused on why such extreme conditions were made in the first place. Most 

people when faced with dire, extreme conditions ‘beyond their normal comprehension’ such as wars, 

massacres and natural disasters, they tend to consider such event as fate and the actions of the heavens 

and the gods. They tend not to understand the reasons behind the disasters for it is difficult, and they try 

to rationalize such events through a transcending existence. However, if the difficulties were the result 

of human’s, we must strive to ‘understand’ them and seek the reasons behind such actions even though it 

would be difficult. 

The difference between Frankl and Levi seems to be one of a ‘clinical approach’ focused on how to live 

in such dire conditions, and a ‘pathological approach’ emphasizing the reasons behind such reality. The 

two approaches are not mutually exclusive or conflicting. However, the two are often confused and seem 

to confront each other being on the same level. Also, they tend to be emotionally consumed by a distorted 

mindless message that says “it is important to seek how to live within one’s fate than ineffectively 

seeking to understand what one cannot understand.” While such acceptance might help the lives of some 

individuals, it will not help to seek the reason behind these terrible events and preventing their future 

recurrence. 

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6. “The Radius Paradox” 

The western region of Tokyo that I live in is 200 kilometres away from the site of the nuclear disaster. 

This is a subtle distance. Following the accident, the government announced the evacuation area to be 

within a 20 km radius of the site and announced the 30 km range to be ‘preparation areas for emergency 

evacuation.’ Later on it was found that there were areas beyond the 30 km boundary which were 

severely contaminated by radio-active materials. These areas were announced as ‘planned evacuation 

areas’ and shortly became uninhabited. However, there have also been experts that argued that the 

cities of Fukushima or Koriyama, which are tens of kilometres away from the nuclear plant, have also 

been contaminated by radio-active materials several times the level of Tokyo and should be considered 

uninhabitable for everyday life. 

Then is Tokyo, which is 200 km from the site, safe to live in? It seems not. It is likely that Tokyo will also 

be contaminated by radio-active materials that will flow into the city by wind, rain, rivers and the sea. It 

could also flow in through the distribution channels of various agricultural products and seafood. 

While it was impossible to conduct a thorough examination following the accident, it has now been 

confirmed one year following the event that it was just a work of chance that the nuclear power plant 

accident did not have any direct influence on Tokyo. Following the accident, the US government ordered 

its citizens residing in Japan to evacuate from within the 80 km radius range. This was not an overreaction, 

but turned out to be the right action based on better information and analysis. 

The Japanese government announced in late 2011 that the nuclear power plant that caused the accident 

to have reached a state of ‘cold shutdown.’ However, the power plant continues to be unstable to this day. 

Contaminated water continues to flow out from the reactors and it would not be a surprise if the pools 

containing the used fuel rods explode any day. The Fukushima nuclear power plant will continue to exert 

radio-active materials for several years onward. And it could be the source of an even more severe disaster 

if another accident occurs, such as another earthquake or tsunami. 

Despite such facts, most people in Tokyo have no plans of fleeing and continue on with their lives as 

usual. Furthermore, even people living in close distances to the nuclear accident site continue on with their 

lives. What are the reasons behind such inaction? 

The majority of people living further from the damaged site lack the imagination to think about the truth 

of such damage. It is not easy for a Tokyo citizen to sympathize with the difficulties of a Fukushima 

citizen. It is not easy for a Korean to sympathize with the vague anxiety and horror that the Japanese 

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people live with today. The further you live from the site on the radius, the more difficult it is to imagine 

the severity of the disaster. 

Then would you have a more urgent sense of anxiety and horror if you live closer to the damaged area? 

This also seems not to be true. People tend not to confront the dire truth of living in these close areas and 

tend to rely on easy, positive thinking. It seems that defense mechanisms such as denial and suppression 

that were mentioned above are strong in play. 

The people that continue to live in dangerous areas tend to rely on a ‘fabricated truth for comfort’ to 

console themselves. The people that are far are unable to properly imagine the event, while people close 

by turn their eyes away from the ‘painful truth.’ This wrong combination of forces tends to conceal the 

truth, undervalue the damage and avoid responsibilities. It only seems to help the people that would like 

to maintain the nuclear power plants for profit or potential military usage. In other words, they are helping 

the “sad secret guardians of the final thunder.” 

People that live further away from the damaged site should try to be more creative and imaginative in 

understanding the truth of the damage. And people that live near the damaged site must have the courage 

to face the harsh realities. The witnesses must endeavour to go beyond the ‘limitations of representation’ 

in their testimony and the common people must strive to use their imagination to go beyond their 

‘imagination’s limits.’ This is what our time requires from us to prevent a recurrence of such disasters. 

It is without need to say that the majority must also use their imagination to understand the pain of the 

minorities. 

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Gilgamesh: 

A Mesopotamian Epic in Modern War 

Wai Chee Dimock 

Yale University 

I would like to begin with a collaboration between Pulitzer-winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa and 

dramaturg Chad Gracia. In 2006 these two teamed up for a stage adaptation of Gilgamesh: the text was 

published by Wesleyan University Press, 1 the play was performed at the 92 nd Street Y in New York; at the 

Chicago Humanities Festival; at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston; and also in New Orleans, 

Komunyakaa’s home for many years. 

STAGING 

These were lean productions, with a small crew, no set to speak of, and about six actors doing double 

or triple duty, not only playing more than one role but also serving as handy stage props. Making 

ingenious use of simple objects, they produced a wealth of visual effects to make up for the bareness 

of the stage. In the Chicago performances by the Silk Road Theater Project, the Goddess Ishtar, for 

instance, was shown only as a silhouette, a face in the moon, an effect accomplished with a flashlight 

and stretched cotton over a hula hoop. Humbaba, the guardian of the cedar forest and Gilgamesh’s 

main adversary, was meanwhile represented by a bamboo frame covered with green and brown fabric, 

moved around by three actors. 

The Silk Road Theater Project called this kind of theater “stylized and actor-driven.” Another name for 

it would be poor man’s theater, low-tech, low-cost, using nothing more than the primitive resources of 

the dramatic medium. This does not mean low-quality performances: the Silk Road Theater Project is 

a respected company, the theater-in-residence at the First United Methodist Church, the oldest church 

1 Yusef Komunyakaa and Chad Gracia, Gilgamesh: A Verse Play (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2006). 

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in Chicago, housed in the historic Temple Building. Their two performances of Gilgamesh were at the 

Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago and at the Museum of Contemporary Art, part of the 

Chicago Humanities Festival. That season, 2008-2009, they were awarded grants from Google, IBM, 

the MacArthur Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Their low-budget production is 

rather a point of pride, the signature style of a theater with a particular vision of itself. Founded in 2002 by 

Malik Gillani and Jamil Khoury as a response to the anti-Arab and anti-Islam sentiments sweeping across 

the United States after the 9/11 attacks, the Silk Road Theater Project set out to be a grassroots theater, 

bringing back the multi-faith and multi-ethnic communities that once flourished on the trade routes linking 

China and India to the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe. The Komunyakaa-Gracia adaptation of 

Gilgamesh was very much in that spirit. 

I go into these details, because these empirical circumstances are almost never mentioned in theories 

of epic. While Mikhail Bakhtin draws on the language of theater to create an analytical vocabulary for 

the novel – for the “carnival” in Rabelais – the politics and pragmatics of stage adaptation are subjects 

that never come up when he discusses the epic, when he dismisses it as a dead-end genre, ossified and 

moribund, with only a past and no present, no future. 2 What difference does it make to see the epic through 

an empirical lens, through specific instances of translation, citation, and stage adaptation, instances of 

recycling that bring it back, break it up, and redistribute it across a variety of genres and media? How 

do these actions, often happening at irregular intervals and at locations hard to predict, complicate our 

understanding of this particular genre and of genres in general, both as an evolving field across time and 

as a cross-sectional spread at any given moment? 

The Komunyakaa-Gracia adaptation not only reaches back to the oldest known epic, a non-Western one, 

predating the Iliad and the Odyssey by a thousand years, it also reminds us of the largely local and largely 

ungeneralizable contexts for recycling, some having to do with the nitty-gritty of on-site production, and 

some much broader in scope, fed by large-scale events such as global terrorism and the 9/ll attacks. How 

do these input networks – macro and micro, and any number of intermediate ones in between – bear on 

the form of the epic, its morphological spectrum over the course of five thousand years, as well as the 

texture and minutiae of any particular example? What is the typical scale of operation for the genre, and 

how much variation might we expect as we go from one work to another, or even as we stay within the 

same work? 

2 M. M. Bakhtin, “Epic and Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: 

Univ. of Texas Press, 1981), pp. 3-40. 

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MASHUP 

The case of Gilgamesh is especially instructive. Unlike the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Sumerian epic was 

written, etched into clay tablets. There were no rhapsodes here traveling around, selectively rearranging 

the oral epics as they traveled. And yet, in its enormous range of variations – far more extreme than 

the Homeric epics – this Sumerian text stands as the earliest (and still most stunning) example of a text 

that was never integral to begin with, a text that came into being and continued to flourish only through 

multiple acts of translating, combining, and recombining. 

Gilgamesh was a historical king who ruled in the Mesopotamian city of Uruk around 2750 BCE. Legends 

about him probably arose shortly after his death; they were first written in Sumerian, a non-Semitic 

language with no relation to Akkadian, the Semitic language in which Gilgamesh would eventually be 

circulated across Mesopotamia. This earliest Sumerian material seemed to have existed as five separate 

poems for about a thousand years – long after the Sumerian people were overrun by their Semitic 

neighbors – till about 1700 BC, when they began to be collated and translated into the cuneiform script 

of the Babylonian language, a dialect of Akkadian. The best-preserved were 12 tablets collated a bit later, 

probably around 1200 BCE, by the scholar-priest, Sin-liqe-unninni, and eventually brought to the library 

of Ashurbanipal, king of Assyria (668-627 BCE). 

As is clear from this brief account, the making of Gilgamesh was long drawn out even in ancient 

Mesopotamia; the shape of the text and its basic features varied tremendously from one collator to another, 

one translator to another. These early efforts, however, were nothing like the monumental labor in the 

nineteenth century as European scholars were faced with hundreds and thousands of broken fragments of 

these clay tablets. 3 How to restore these to some legible order? Since the epic existed in so many different 

versions, put together by so many different scribes over such a long period of time, and since none of 

these had survived intact (even the most complete set, Sin-liqe-unninni’s, is missing approximately one- 

third of its lines), guesswork was unavoidable in the nineteenth century, and unavoidable in every modern 

translation. Stephen Mitchell’s, one of the most readable, uses Sin-liqe-unninni’s 12-tablet “Standard 

Version” as the primary source, filling in the gaps with words or lines from some other tablets and from 

the Sumerian poems. Andrew George’s 1999 Penguin edition and Benjamin Foster’s 2001 Norton Critical 

Edition go even further. In the Penguin, Sin-liqe-unninni’s “Standard Version” is presented along with four 

other versions: Babylonian texts from the early second millennium BCE; from the late second millennium; 

from the late second millennium, but from outside Babylonia; and finally, the Sumerian poems. In the 

3 David Damrosch, The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh (New York: Henry Holt, 

2007). 

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Norton, four texts are offered: the “Standard Version”; the Sumerian poems; a late second millennium 

BCE translation of Gilgamesh into the Hittite language; and finally a parody called The Gilgamesh Letter. 

Both the Penguin and the Norton use square brackets and ellipses to indicate either conjectural inserts or 

unfillable gaps in the text. 

What counts as the “text” of Gilgamesh – what is included and what is left out, how the gaps are filled 

and with what additional material – reflects the editor’s preferences more than anything else. These 

preferences can go quite far in remaking the text, giving it an up-to-date purpose, an up-to-date resonance. 

Stephen Mitchell, for instance, translating Gilgameth in the twenty-first century, cannot help seeing in 

the Mesopotamian epic “an eerie counterpoint to the recent American invasion of Iraq.” 4 Gilgamesh’s 

sudden announcement – “where the fierce monster Humbaba lives/ We must kill him and drive out evil 

from the world” – sounds in this context like the immemorial words of the “original preemptive strike.” 

Is this really a battle of good against evil, as Gilgamesh claims? “Everything in the poem argues against 

it,” Mitchell says. “As a matter of fact, the only evil we are informed of is the suffering Gilgamesh has 

inflicted on his own people: the only monster is Gilgamesh himself.” Humbaba, the targeted villain, “hasn’t 

harmed a single living being”: it is difficult to see him “as a threat to the security of Uruk or as part of 

the ‘axis of evil.’” On the contrary, as the guardian of the Cedar Forest, he “is a figure of balance and a 

defender of the ecosystem (having a monster of two around to guard our national forests from corporate 

and other predators wouldn’t be such a bad thing.)” 5 

Komunyakaa and Gracia do not claim for Gilgamesh quite this degree of contemporary relevance, 

although, as we will see, their play is not without topical accents of its own. Since theirs is not a translation 

but a stage adaptation – venturing into an entirely different medium – the allowable deviations are also 

much greater. Komunyakaa took full advantage of these, not only inventing entirely new characters but in 

some instances using the outline of the epic only as a loose-fitting shell to develop themes he had already 

been exploring elsewhere. The initial idea for the play had come not from him, but from Chad Gracia. 

Unlike Komunyakaa, a Pulitzer-Prize-winning poet, and unlike Stephen Mitchell, celebrated translator 

of the Bhagavad Gita, the Tao Te Ching, and the Book of Job, among other works, Chad Gracia is a 

dramaturg operating on a considerably lower level. (On his own website he is now listed as working in 

international trade and development, specializing in the Middle East.) It is fair to say that he is less the top 

dog in the theater world than a persevering fan of the Sumerian epic, determined to give it a contemporary 

staging. 

4 Stephen Mitchell, Introduction to Gilgamesh: A New English Version, trans. Stephen Mitchell (New York: Free Press, 

2004), p. 26. 

5 Ibid., pp. 29-30. 

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CORRUPTIBLE BODY 

Gracia was first introduced to Gilgamesh as a young reader, when he was reading Will Durant’s Our 

Oriental Heritage. 6 It was the beginning of a lifelong attachment. For weeks after reading it, he could 

not get this line out of his head: “I too must die, for am I not like Enkidu?” The line is Gilgamesh’s. He 

and Enkidu have been inseparable up to this point, it has not been an issue; after the slaying of Humbaba, 

however, this inseparability begins to unravel, thematically as well as psychologically. Gilgamesh does 

not want to be exactly like his friend at just this moment, for Enkidu has been singled out for punishment 

by the gods: of the two, he is the one who must die. This differential outcome is in some sense the logical 

extension of the initial difference between the two friends: from the first we know that Gilgamesh is part 

God (through his mother, Ninsun, he is supposed to be “two-thirds divine, one-third human), whereas 

Enkidu seems to be part animal: he is the “man-beast of the Steppe.” 7 Both companions, it seems, are only 

fractionally human, but fractional in opposite ways, pointing to two antithetical forms of identity. How do 

these get resolved? If humans are always going to be part-animal, part-god, which of these two will rise 

to the top, or – realistically – which of these two will turn out to be the non-negotiable baseline, the most 

fundamental fact about us? 

The death of Enkidu raises the question to a fever pitch. No longer fully human, is there enough humanity 

left for the corpse to resist being banished to the other side? How long can it put off that eventuality, how 

long can it hold on to its fractional species membership, before being relegated once and for all to a much 

lower rung of the taxonomic hierarchy? The very nature of “humanness” seems to hang in the balance 

here – our place in the animate and inanimate world, our relations to other living things, and to non- 

sentient organic matter. Who are our kin, our kind? Especially troubling here is the physicality of the body 

and its seemingly inexorable outcome. Doesn’t a body like that doom us to being more animal-like rather 

than god-like? What exactly does it mean to be tackled to, and coextensive with, a body that is perishable 

and corruptible? 

Gilgamesh is unsparing on this point. Rather than giving Enkidu a dignified and ceremonious end, the 

last that we see of him is as a corpse, a mount of dead flesh, its deadness accented by a small visual detail 

with maximum shock effect, a revolting close-up that we are not allowed to look away from. It is this 

small detail that is stuck in Chad Gracia’s mind. We can think of it as a moment of “microcization”: in this 

case, it takes the form Gilgamesh hanging onto the corpse, not letting go, until “a maggot crawled from 

6 Chad Gracia, “Collaborating with Komunyakaa: The Creation of Gilgamesh,” Callaloo 28 (Summer 2005): 541-44, 

quotation from p. 542. 

7 Komunyakaa and Gracia, Gilgamesh: A Verse Play, p. 27. 

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Enkidu’s nose.” 

Gracia was reading Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death at the same time as he was reading Gilgamesh, 

and it seemed to him that what Becker was saying about human beings – that we are “gods with anuses” 

– could have served as well as a motto for the Sumerian epic. 8 Gross physicality is, of course, a common 

sight in the epic – there are also numerous instances in Homer, especially in the Iliad – but Gilgamesh is 

unique in putting the maggot at center stage, magnifying it far beyond its objective puniness. This is the 

less-than-human emblem of the less-than-human baseline of our species: it unites all of us, and it unites 

our species to all other species. As common denominators go, this one is exceptionally low, setting the bar 

for species membership at a level where there is in fact no sharp distinction between humans and animals, 

and no sharp distinction between the so-called civilized and the so-called barbaric. Death seen up closes; 

fear of dying oneself; the instant degradability of the physical body – these are the basic ingredients that 

make up the epic landscape, shared by humans and animals alike. The genre is “primitive” in this sense: 

not only is Gilgamesh the oldest literature known to humans, its emotions also happen to be raw, visceral, 

not complicated. From the standpoint of evolution, they represent the most elemental brain processes, first 

evolved and robustly shared by a large number of animal species, having been there from the first and 

likely to be there till the bitter end. 

Rather than being permanently stuck in the past and cut off from the living world, as Bakhtin contends, 

the epic is the genre of the living world. It is the genre that carries forward the most physically grounded 

emotions known to humankind, a prehistoric continuum surviving into modern times, fears and hurts 

undiminished in strength, undiminished in its sway over the species. It is able to serve as this carrier 

mostly by remaining a “low” genre: low, both in terms of its simple, death-driven narratives, and in terms 

of the deflating view of humanity that such narratives call up. This is a genre that puts us on a spectrum 

shared with other life-forms – gods on the one end, worms on the other – not leaving much doubt where 

we stand eventually. “Mortals” – this is the label that the epic reserves for our species. It sums us up. 

And, when the end arrives, as it is guaranteed to do, the epic quite often marks that occurrence with a 

formal spasm of sorts: simultaneously magnifying, contracting, and disorienting, giving the end of life the 

hallucinatory intensity that fills every inch of space and shrinks to a smaller and smaller point. 

MACRO AND MICRO 

All of which is to say that the epic is doing active work on more than one scale, going back and forth 

8 Chad Gracia, “Collaborating with Komunyakaa,” p. 542. 

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between the large and the small and interweaving these two, bringing one to bear on the other, if not as 

an inverted prism then as a persistent counterpoint. Aristotle is wrong, then, to associate the epic only 

with the vexingly large. The vexingly small is equally within its province. In fact, simply on the basis 

of size, it probably does not make a lot of sense to maintain a strict separation between the epic and 

other genres, since its operating coordinates are far from uniform, with a broad spectrum of variation 

linked to an alternating rhythm, often crossing over into the territory that is traditionally assigned to 

other genres. 

In what follows, I would like to argue against a strict separation between epic and lyric. Rather than 

aligning the former only with the macro and the latter only with the micro, I would like to see these 

dimensional planes as up-and-down scalar variations that can be switched into and switched out of quite 

routinely, without too much fuss. Epic and lyric, on this view, are complementary registers, a functional 

duality perhaps present from the first, allowing the representational space to expand or contract as the 

need arises, alternating between the technically neutral bird’s eye view and the deliberately charged close 

up. While it still makes sense to think of lyric and epic as two more or less distinct genres, the “lyricization” 

of the epic is by no means oxymoronic, but an important operational dimension of the genre, making it 

scale-rich, scale-variable. 

The otherwise localized phenomenon of death, happening inside just one body, can be both hidebound 

and world-destroying for that reason, both center and circumference. In Gilgamesh it takes the form both 

of the concentrated repulsiveness of the maggot and of a reproducible story of grief and fear, occasioned 

by the corruptibility of the body and expanding to include many spinoffs from that event. It is a story 

populated by a host of gods and a host of ambiguously unclassifiable creatures (such as Humbaba or 

the Scorpion People). All have some relation to humans, to the mortals that we are. The epic is a multi- 

scale, multi-species environment. It is a genre that stretches the bounds of representation far beyond the 

customary borders of the “real,” turning the unthinkably alien into creatures visitable, conversable. It 

should come as no surprise, then, that one of the names the epic would adopt in the twentieth century is 

“science fiction.” For this is indeed one of the modern guises of the ancient genre, adding extraterrestrial 

species and interplanetary travel to its plot, but otherwise sticking with the same death-driven and life- 

seeking narratives, and the emotions they reproduce and reactivate. Intimation of mortality, the physical 

nature of the body, and the up-for-grabs definition of “humanness” itself – these basic ingredients of the 

Mesopotamian epic are also the basic ingredient of science fiction. 

This essay will indeed end with an episode of Star Trek as a twentieth-century recycling of epic, one that 

reaches back in self-conscious tribute to Gilgamesh. This example, and numerous others like it, suggests 

that the epic is best explored as a cascading form, with a downstream textual field exploding in volume, 

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energized by various projective arcs, and increasingly scattered across a variety of genres and media. 

The Star Trek episode is indeed a striking example of the latter, a transcribing and redirecting of those 

cuneiform tablets onto a non-text-based (or at least not strictly text-based) platform, one that is mass 

circulated, low in literary prestige but high in the number of viewers. The ease with which the epic can 

make it onto the TV screen points to at least three things: first, the genre seems to have an easily mobilized 

set of optics, a predisposition towards images, perhaps because humans have always been more visual 

than linguistic, because human emotions before the advent of language were triggered by visual cues; 9 

secondly, and for the same reason, popular culture is not a problem for the epic – it is entirely at home 

here, its primitive grieves and fears and its easily visualizable plots needing no exegesis, comprehensible 

even to the unschooled; finally, the frequency of recycling speaks to “lyricization” as one of the most 

important self-propagating mechanisms of the genre, since it is certainly not the entire epic, but a very 

small group of words that are selectively highlighted, extracted, and circulated anew, gaining new 

meanings and entering into new associations in an entirely different environment. It is not the large size 

of the epic but the portability of a tiny fraction of it that allows it to spread far and wide, to be cited and 

embedded over and over again, in countless new updates and remakes. 

But if so, portability would seem to rest on something like the non-integrity of the original text – the ease 

with which it can be broken up, pieces of it dislodged and taken elsewhere, mixed in with new material 

not only in foreign environments but often ones operating at a lower elevation. As we have seen with 

Gilgamesh, the general tendency for the epic, in the thousands of years of its unfolding, is to drift steadily 

downward: assimilating itself to more popular tastes, moving to more popular venues, speaking the street 

vernacular of the locals and, in the case of Star Trek, the media vernacular of a popular TV series. The epic 

is eminently “corruptible” in this sense – random composting is natural to it; fragmenting, fermenting, 

and disintegrating are its life-forces. Not only does the genre have a thematic interest in the degradability 

of matter, it is itself a part of that process, doing so with gusto, fed by the unsparing but microscopically 

vital downward percolations that carry the process forward. From this perspective, the maggot is not only 

a repulsive detail, it is a counter-intuitively lyrical detail, a closeup too minute for comfort but also life- 

giving in that minuteness. It keeps the epic going, just as it keeps the earth going. 

9 Antonio R. Damasio and Jonathan H. Turner, among others, have argued that emotions evolved much earlier than 

language did, and that pre-linguistic affect was largely visual in nature. See, for instance, Antonio R. Damasio, The 

Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (New York: Harcourt Brace, 999); 

Jonathan H. Turner, On the Origins of Human Emotions: A Sociological Inquiry into the Evolution of Human Affect 

(Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000). 

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THE MAGGOT AND THE BIOSPHERE 

What would a play look like that gives pride of place to the maggot, dedicated to the twin concepts of 

corruptibility and renewability? Chad Gracia started casting about for a playwright already thinking along 

those lines. Komunyakaa caught his attention right away, since this poet already has under his belt a poem 

entitled “Ode to a Maggot”: 

Brother of the blowfly 

And godhead, you work magic 

Over battlefields, 

In slabs of bad pork 

And flophouses. Yes you 

Go to the root of all things. 

You are sound and mathematical. 

Jesus, Chris, you’re merciless 

With the truth. Ontological and lustrous, 

You cast spells on beggars & kings 

Behind the stone doors of Caesar’s tomb 

Or split trench in a field of ragweed. 

No decree or creed can outlaw you 

As you take every living thing apart. Little 

Master of earth, no one gets to heaven 

Without going through you first. 10 

“Ode to the Maggot” was published in 2000, in Talking Dirty to the Gods. Komunyakaa was probably 

not thinking of Gilgamesh when he wrote this poem, and in fact its emotional orientation is significantly 

different. In Gilgamesh, the maggot is harsh, unstoppable, the voice of necessity from the biosphere. 

“Ode to the Maggot,” on the other hand, is almost a fond tribute to the “little/ Master of earth,” finding 

something “ontological and lustrous” where most people would only be repelled – a shift in perspective 

and in scale of attention that marks a shift from epic to lyric, recognizable even within a strict definition of 

10 Yusef Komunyakaa, Talking Dirty to the Gods (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2001). 

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those two genres. The shift is not too difficult, for the maggot in fact has the scalar flexibility that allows 

it to be at home in both genres, at home in the alternating rhythm that links the two. On a lyrical note, it 

reminds us that decomposing texts, like decomposing bodies, are the lifeblood of any generative process, 

a thought twined around the corruptibility of matter that it executes on the epic stage. This modern-day 

maggot, in short, has enough in common with the ancient one in Mesopotamia to convince Chad Gracia 

that Komunyakaa “had a Gilgamesh waiting inside of him all along.” 11 

EPIC DNA 

It is an interesting idea, a theory of literature based on the virtual guarantee of cross-time reproduction. 

Even as the epic carries forward the evolutionary psychology of the human species on a large scale, 

it would seem itself to be enacting a micro-evolution on its own, long drawn out, but apparently not 

especially precarious. What Chad Gracia is proposing, in fact, is a kind of literary genetics, a form of 

transcribing and transcoding, according to which the DNA of a text might lie dormant, with a “waiting” 

period of long duration, but eventually coming forth, spreading to unexpected places and interacting with 

these environments, producing new and altered copies of that long-distance genetic material. How do we 

otherwise account for the proven track record of Gilgamesh, its ability to get itself recycled over and over 

again, not always predictably, but not without some degree of regularity? 

Here, the answer might be both simpler and more inexorable than we think. For to the extent that the death 

of physical organisms has remained a hard fact across time – one of the key constants of the biosphere – 

and to the extent that most of us have remained unreconciled to it, unconsoled in its necessity, mortality 

might turn out to be the single most potent bit of epic DNA, carried forward without diminishment from 

century to century. The primitive devastations of Gilgamesh are no less devastating now than they were 

5000 years ago. It is the potency and transmissibility of this particular bit of genetic material that make the 

epic robust, durable, and reproducible. 

In the case of Komunyakaa, though, the epic DNA reproduced throughout his corpus might not even be 

mortality as a general condition, but rather the smaller, grosser pressure point that is the maggot. This 

particular fascination no doubt has something to do with his background and the entwined coarseness and 

delicacy surrounding death in that particular environment. Komunyakaa grew up in Bogalusa, Louisiana, 

40 miles north of New Orleans, the son of a carpenter. He was given the name James William Brown, but 

later reclaimed the African name Komunyakaa, the name of his grandfather, a stowaway from the West 

11 Chad Gracia, “Collaborating with Komunyakaa,” p. 544. 

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Indies (“My grandfather came from Trinidad/Smuggled in like a sack of papaya/.../ The name Brown 

fitted him like trouble”). 12 The family was poor. One of the effects of that poverty is that there is a kind 

of companionship with death, a companionship with the act of killing, and with what happens after the 

killing. In the “Meat” section of the long poem, “A Good Memory,” Komunyakaa writes: 

Folk magic hoodooed us 

Till the varmints didn’t taste bitter 

Or wild. We boys & girls 

Knew how to cut away musk glands 

Behind their legs. Good 

With knives, we believed 

We weren’t poor… Sometimes 

We weighed the bullet 

In our hands, tossing it left 

To right, wondering if it was 

Worth more than the kill. 13 

Someone who does this every day is going to have a very different attitude not only to meat consumption 

but to the edible nature of bodies. Hunger, a perennial problem in Bogalusa, would have been much worse 

if this had not been the case, if individual bodies were not so easily degradable, so easily absorbed back 

into the vital processes of the biosphere. It is this recycling-based aesthetics that gives the maggot an 

honored place in Komunyakaa’s poetry, giving it the same ontological centrality (if a somewhat different 

emotional charge) that it carried in Gilgamesh. And of course it was this small, diligent, and easily 

portable bit of epic DNA that would also accompany the poet as he went to war. 

Komunyakaa went to Vietnam. He was there from 1969 to 1970, working for the Army’s newspaper, 

The Southern Cross, covering the military action, and writing articles on Vietnamese history, which won 

him a Bronze Star. He also published a volume of poems, Dien Cau Dau, perhaps the most memorable 

poetry to come out of Vietnam War. In this volume, there is another poem, “We Never Know,” seemingly 

descended from Gilgamesh as well, reenacting the same divided tableau of one dying and one surviving, 

and once again putting flies and maggots at the center: 

12 Yusef Komunyakaa, “Mismatched Shoes,” in Magic City, p. 42. 

13 Yusef Komunyakaa, “A Good Memory,” in Neon Vernacular (Hanover: University of New England Press for Wesleyan 

UP, 1993), pp. 14-22, quotation from pp. 14-15. 

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He danced with tall grass 

for a moment, like he was swaying 

with a woman. Our gun barrels 

glowed red-hot. 

When I get to him, 

A blue halo 

of flies had already claimed him. 

I pulled the crumbled photograph 

from his fingers. 

There’s no other way 

to say this: I fell in love. 

The morning cleared again 

except for a distant mortar 

& somewhere choppers taking off, 

I slid the wallet into his pocket 

& turned him over, so he wouldn’t be 

kissing the ground. 

The dead man in the poem is a complete stranger, most likely an enemy combatant, someone the poet 

has just killed, someone he is supposed to kill. Yet this death is anything but routine. On the contrary, it 

is self-consciously lyrical: a spot of time special unto itself, luminous and overflowing with meaning, its 

smallness amplified into something much larger. It is fitting that this subjectively magnified event should 

be coupled with and offered in counterpoint to the larger narrative of war, here miniaturized in its turn, 

for death in combat is indeed a classic moment of scalar instability, oscillating between two or more 

phenomenal planes, between epic expanse and lyric compression, between the impersonal necessity of 

killing and the convulsiveness of death as bodily event. 

The poem begins, in any case, on a lyrical note, with a slightly blurred, almost hallucinatory image of the 

enemy combatant swaying and dancing. But it pulls back from that lyricization as it moves swiftly to the 

other end of the emotional spectrum, its descriptive lens zeroing in on the now-fallen body, with a “halo 

of flies” already gathered. It is unsightly, grossly reductive and deflating, turning the dead soldier instantly 

into a corpse just like any other corpse: edible flesh, food for worms. We could call this a moment of 

ecological realism, an impersonal, across-the-board recycling downward. But if so, this particular form 

of recycling is nonetheless one that acknowledges the subjectivity of each organism, rather than erase 

it completely. In fact, in a double-stranded structure almost like a double helix, the ecological realism is 

coupled here with a sentiment-based lyricism that counters it, a lyricism that grants the fallen soldier a 

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degree of individuality almost beyond what we might realistically believe. Startlingly, completely out 

of the blue, the poet announces that he has fallen in love. We don’t know who he has fallen in love with, 

whether it is the dead man himself, or the person in the crumbled photograph pulled out of his wallet just 

before he dies. But that almost does not matter. The identity of the recipient is less important than the fact 

that the sentiment is there, amplified and cherished and given poetic life. Both epic and lyric are honored 

by this alternating rhythm, a scalar flexibility that unmakes and remakes, as tender as it is hard-nosed. 

And the alternation persists. Komunyakaa now makes another gesture in the direction of lyric as he does 

one last thing: he puts the wallet back into the dead man’s pocket and turning him over, face up. These 

gestures, each deliberate, each unexplained, and all non-trivial, do not change the fact that the dead man 

is organic matter. They do not have the power to fend off the “blue halo/ of flies” that are most certainly 

there. On the contrary, it is the visceral proximity of those flies that makes the cross-stitched rhythm 

of epic and lyric so powerful, with two force fields intertwined and yet pulling in opposing directions, 

energized by that paradox, carrying forward both the non-negotiability of our physical end and the 

infinitely negotiable turns of textual reproduction. 

VARIATION AND MUTATION 

Since this alternating rhythm is so close to the expanding and contracting phenomenal planes of 

death in combat, 14 we should not be surprised that, in his more recent collection, Warhorses (2008), as 

Komunyakaa turns from Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan, the same genetic material from Gilgamesh and 

the same double-stranded structure would be brought along, put to work in these new environments. The 

cross-stitching of the large and the small is reflected this time in the very form of the poetry. In a long, 4- 

section poem called “Love in the time of war,” Komunyakaa devotes an entire section to the Sumerian 

epic, taking in the gods, the cosmos, but also lyricizing the death of one particular individual, turning it 

into an arresting micro-phenomenon: 

Gilgamesh’s Humbaba was a distant drum 

pulsing among the trees, a slave to the gods, 

a foreign tongue guarding the sacred cedars 

down to a pale grubworm in the tower 

before Babel. Invisible & otherworldly, 

14 In his classic meditation on historical method, Carlo Ginzburg also argues that war is an occasion interweaving the 

“extreme long shots” of macrohistory with the extreme “close-ups” of subjective experience. See Ginzburg, The Cheese 

and the Worms, trans. John and Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ Press, 1980). 

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he was naked in the king’s heart, 

& his cry turned flies into maggots 

& blood reddened the singing leaves. 15 

The death of Humbaba is given a context here, a psychology, not to say a visceral immediacy. Once again, 

the maggots are impossible to miss, although this key signifier has now been transferred from Enkidu to 

Humbaba. This unexpected shift suggests that the epic is perhaps distinguished above all by its “mutating 

genes,” that periodic shifts in its centers of gravity might turn out to be a crucial self-propagating 

mechanism, as important to the ongoing life of the epic form as anything that was written on the original 

clay tablets. Which is another way of saying that, for the cross-time continuum that is the epic, variation 

is the rule rather than the exception. Its ontology is the ontology of recycling: ongoing, ever-multiplying, 

often randomly generated. 

Humbaba is a case in point. As he appeared in the Mesopotamian texts, Humbaba was the guardian of 

the sacred Cedar Forest, restricted more or less to that sole function: he embodied a divine prohibition 

and, strangely, he was also supposed to be evil. Stephen Mitchell, as we have seen, has seized upon this 

apparent contradiction and turned it into a fable for our own time. According to him, the supposed evil of 

Humbaba is largely projected by Gilgamesh, a preemptive name-calling to justify a preemptive first strike. 

Komunyakaa and Gracia do not go quite so far, but, like Mitchell, they are also struck by Humbaba less 

as a substantive entity than as a cumulative rumor. With no demonstrable physical might, he is merely a 

rumbling sound. The stage directions say: “The marching-rolling sound of Humbaba’s approach is heard – 

circular. He is not seen. ‘Humbaba’ grows into a resounding echo.” 16 A creature of hearsay, Humbaba falls 

apart almost instantly in the stage adaptation. Enkidu says: “Humbaba is no god/ He is a small beast/ in a 

big forest./ He is only a roar/ among the night trees.” 17 

Humbaba as a small beast in a big forest is not strictly an invention by Komunyakaa and Gracia; it is not 

an absolute departure from the Sumerian epic. This ambiguously unclassified creature has always been an 

agent, a proxy; he executes the will of the gods and serves at their pleasure. And the Sumerian gods are 

nothing if not treacherous – it is Shamash, after all, who unleashes the thirteen winds that blind Humbaba 

and pin him down, turning his imminent victory over Gilgamesh into a defeat. Still, it takes the stage 

adaptation and “Love in the Time of War” to turn the fate of Humbaba into a fully imagined story about a 

low-level functionary, quite far down on the totem pole, done in by the higher power he serves, not only 

15 Yusef Komunyakaa, “Love in the Time of War,” Warhorses (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), p. 4. 

16 Gracia and Komunyakaa, Gilgamesh: A Verse Play, p. 49. 

17 Ibid. p. 50. 

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a “slave to the gods” (which is more or less what we might expect) but – surprisingly – always a “foreign 

tongue” to them, meaningless as far as they are concerned, a tongue they never bother to learn. 

In what sense is Humbaba a “foreign tongue”? It is a manner of speaking, of course, since there is no 

evidence anywhere that the actual language spoken by Humbaba requires translation. His foreignness 

to the gods – his status as an alien – comes rather from the fact that, existentially and taxonomically, he 

belongs to a different league, a different order: they are immortal, he is not. Unlike the gods, and very 

much like Enkidu, Humbaba is perishable and corruptible, and the flies and maggots are there to prove 

it. These creatures are nothing new, of course: they have always been with humans, with them “before 

Babel.” What is new, though, is that what is a given for human is now a given for Humbaba as well. Not 

even remotely god-like, he is no better and no different from his supposed adversaries. The label “mortal” 

applies to him just it does to him, making him an eternal underling, “invisible and otherworldly” to the 

gods. If there is any previous ambiguity about how to classify Humbaba, where he stands on the spectrum 

between gods and humans, the nature of his servitude and the nature of his death put that beyond doubt. 

The “humanization” of Humbaba – here, effectively a demotion – is indeed a significant departure from 

the Sumerian epic, a recycling so radical that I would like to call base modification. In “Love in the 

Time of War” it is not through Gilgamesh, and not even through Enkidu, but rather through Humbaba, 

that “humanness” is being defined, and defined in terms of its lowest common denominator, its physical 

degradation and psychological abjection. If the vitality of epic comes in part from a downdrift, a 

channeling of its emotional charge towards the lower rungs of the hierarchy, in the hands of Komunyakaa 

that downward momentum reinvents the genre even as it redraws the boundaries between what is human 

and what is not, giving us a transfigured baseline that is increasingly the center of gravity, and putting 

corresponding pressures on the shape of history told from that standpoint. For Komunyakaa, no less 

than for Stephen Mitchell, it is the history of the United States that recycles the Mesopotamian epic, that 

brings it up to the present. And, even though “slave to the gods” could have been just a catch phrase, the 

word “slave,” coming from Komunyakaa, is neither casual nor trivial. Nor is it casual or trivial that this 

particular layer of American history is being called up by the Iraq war, a military operation manned by 

those with no say in the process, “slaves” to higher powers who makes decisions from far above. What 

results from this base modification is a radical redrawing of the epic map, loosening the criteria for species 

membership even as it turns over the most vital part of the story to the lower ranks. 

RE-SCALING 

This outcome, so striking in “Love in the Time of War,” is not the only one possible, however. Even in the 

highly charged and overdetermined environment that is Iraq – ancient Mesopotamia doubling as a modern 

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theater of war – Gilgamesh can resonate in multiple ways, its variants by no means speaking with one 

voice or mutating in the direction. While it is true that any gesture toward Gilgamesh would involve some 

meditation on death, the descriptive radius and emotional texture can be very different. The spectrum 

of variants here is as broad as can be. Even that powerful signifier – the maggot – turns out not to be 

absolutely indispensable. It too can be set aside, giving rise to a Gilgamesh with different contours, and 

a different set of features brought into relief. Indeed, an alternative mapping can be made, also revolving 

around the death of Enkidu but on a slightly enlarged scale – a level of resolution not centered on the 

maggot but taking in the larger view of the differential fate of the two companions: one dead, the other 

still alive, and still mourning, still bent over with grief. This tableau has been there as well from the dawn 

of time. When the analytic lens is trained on the maggot, this larger picture tends to be in the shadow, but 

when the scale is readjusted, it comes into sharp and devastating focus. Indeed, an entirely new lineup 

of works emerges as being on a continuum with Gilgamesh on the strength of this tableau, including 

Komunyakaa’s “We Never Know” that we discussed earlier. This slightly scaled-up bit of genetic material 

is as tenacious and durable as the tenacious and durable maggot. The epic form that is Gilgamesh could 

not have flourished without frequent recycling of this alternative scene. 

Since the morphology of the epic form is so crucially dependent on scale, on the shifting constellations 

that phase in and out as we go from one level of magnification to another, it clearly takes more than one 

work, and more than the corpus of one author, to explore even a fraction of these possible outcomes. In 

what follows, I would like to consider some of these alternative recycling routes by turning from Yusef 

Komunyakaa to Brian Turner, another poet of the Iraq War, also citing Gilgamesh, but doing so in the 

spirit of a sequence of perpetual endings and perpetual beginnings, involving more than one person, and 

picked up again sometimes after thousands of years. 

Brian Turner was in Iraq in 2003, stationed with the 3 rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2 nd Infantry 

Division. I would like to discuss a pair of poems from Here, Bullet, a volume of poetry coming out of 

that experience. “Gilgamesh in Fossil Relief” wears its connection to the Sumerian epic on its sleeve; “A 

B Negative (The Surgeon’s Poem)” shows no sign of being connected at all. And yet this poem, about a 

patient named Thalia Fields who dies on the plane taking her to the hospital, is arguably part of the same 

epic cycle, returning again and again to the last moment of contact between the living and the dead and, in 

that way, returning again and again to Gilgamesh: 

... Thalia Fields is gone, long gone, 

about as far from Mississippi 

as she can get, ten thousand feet above Iraq 

with a blanket draped over her body 

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and an exhausted surgeon in tears, 

his bloodied hands on her chest, his head 

sunk down, the nurse guiding him 

to a nearby seat and holding him as he cries, 

though no one hears it, because nothing can be heard... 18 

The featured exhibit here is a woman, but otherwise she is much like Enkidu, stone dead, clearly and 

unmistakably and insultingly so. But, true to the contrapuntal rhythm that remains a surprising constant 

against the tremendous variation within the epic form, she is nonetheless not alone. The flight surgeon, 

bending over her in tears, his bloodied hands on her chest, is still holding on, not letting go, even if his 

labor is ultimately futile. They are strangers to each other; yet these hands are nonetheless a replay of that 

five-thousand-year-old scene between Gilgamesh and Enkidu, a replay of that ever-active gulf between 

the living and the dead, and our ever-active refusal to give in to it. 

All of this is implicit in “A B Negative (the Surgeon’s Story).” In “Gilgamesh, in Fossil Relief,” that ever- 

active refusal becomes the conceptual backbone for a different story, this time coming back explicitly to 

the Sumerian epic, paying homage to it but also revising its premise, its outcome, allowing for a different 

form of contact now across the line of mortality, and a haphazard but not impossible continuity of labor 

across time: 

In the month of Ab, late summer 

of the seventh century B.C.E., a poet 

chisels text into stone tablets, etching 

three thousand lines and brushing them by hand, 

the dust blown off with a whispered breath... 

In the mid-August heat of the year 2004, 

an archaeologist pauses over an outline 

of bone, one body’s signature in the earth, 

which he reads carefully with a camelhair brush 

and patience, each hairline fracture revealing. 19 

Once again, hands are in the foreground, in this case, two pairs of hands, almost like those of two manual 

18 Brian Turner, “AB Negative the Surgeon’s Poem,” in Here, Bullet (Farmington, Maine: Alice James Books), pp. 15-16. 

19 Brian Turner, “Gilgamesh, in Fossil Relief,” in Here Bullet, p. 53. 

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laborers: one to get those 3000 lines chiseled into the stone tablets, and the other to retrace these lines with 

the help of a camelhair brush, uncovering what the other has done and restoring it to the world, bringing it 

into the present. 

I could be pedantic and point out that the cuneiform tablets were clay tablets, not stone, and that 

Gilgamesh was in fact first deciphered, not in the 2 st century, but in the nineteenth, by someone named 

George Smith, not American but British, but who did in fact come from a working-class background, 

someone who had to learn Cuneiform on his own by spending his lunch hours at the British Museum. 20 

Brian Turner sets aside this larger picture to make way for the miniaturized story he wants to tell, namely, 

the story of laboring hands, performing a task begun by one and carried on by the other. Brian Turner 

is not, on the whole, a utopian poet, someone driven by an overly idealized sense of what is possible. 

The other poems in Here, Bullet are filled with body bags, with Iraqi policemen being blown up, and an 

American private committing suicide. “Gilgamesh, in Fossil Relief” is not a departure from these poems, 

but it is a different way to come to terms with those events, turning their large traumas into small moments 

of continuity that are responded to in kind and perpetuated in kind. This particular “lyricization” of the 

Sumerian epic not only reworks war into a humanly meaningful incident, it also affirms recycling as a 

death-powered form of life, beginning with mortality rather than ending with it. There is no better fate for 

Gilgamesh. 

20 David Damrosch, The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh (New York: Henry Holt, 

2007), pp. 12-15. 

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Proceedings 

Session 2 


Nature and Civilization, Science and Technology



Proceedings 


Nature and Civilization, Science and Technology 

1. New Forms of Harmony between Human and Nature 

/ Hwe Ik Zhang (Seoul National University) 

2. Becoming the Alien: Avatar and District 9 

/ Andrew M. Gordon (University of Florida) 

3. The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Technology: 

What Kind of a Future Will Human Beings Create? 

/ Peter L. Rudnytsky (University of Florida) 

4. Illness and Art 

/ Desmond Egan (Irish Poet)

New Forms of Harmony between Human and Nature 

Hwe Ik Zhang 

Seoul National University 

Nature’s order and irregular features 

The harmony between human and nature can be considered in various contexts. But the one based on the 

conventional understanding of the relation between human and nature might not be very fruitful, because 

our conventional wisdom concerning it is by far outstripped by our current understanding of ‘nature’ and 

‘human’ within it. We therefore begin by briefly reassessing what we currently understand about nature on 

this occasion. 

We now have a Big Bang cosmology supported by the ‘standard model’ of particle physics. 1 According 

to it, the fundamental stuff, Higgs field, condensed into various fields and massive particles through a 

process called Higgs mechanism. This is an order generating process, metaphorically compared with 

the condensation of liquid water from gaseous steam. This was only the beginning of a series of similar 

order generating processes. As the temperature of the universe declined further, more orders emerged: 

compound particles such as atoms, molecules, and some macromolecules. Also, large structures formed: 

galaxies, stars and other heavenly bodies including the planets. 

In the process of this order formation, random fluctuations at the microscopic level give rise to various 

temporary arrangements of matter, some of which, according to their respective stabilities, would be 

chosen to persist as recognizable macroscopic orders. This kind of order forming mechanism will be 

called as Higgsian, in the sense that it is a generalized form of the Higgs mechanism. This mechanism of 

order formation will be contrasted to another more sophisticated Darwinian mechanism, which will be 

explained later. 

1 Brian Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos (New York: Knopf, 2004). 

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In addition to the general order forming mechanism, we would consider the way how the variety of 

complex and irregular features all around us, like the shape of rocks and valleys, came to be in existence. 

Recently an interesting theory attempting to explain this was proposed. It is the theory of self-organized 

criticality. 2 

From the very first moment of its birth, the universe was never in a state of equilibrium but quite active 

with certain flows of energy and matter in many places. Some of them accumulate in certain places and 

aggregate into an order of extensive scale. This order embedded in this extensive aggregate arises out 

of the local interactions between the components which were in disordered states. The process is often 

caused by random fluctuations and accidental arrangements amplified by positive feedback. The resulting 

organization is generally decentralized and distributed over all the components of the system. As such, it 

is robust and able to survive repairing certain amount of damage or perturbation. This process is called 

self-organization, typical examples being formation of crystal, emergence of convection patterns in liquid 

heated from below, chemical oscillators and many other complex patterns. 

So far it is a typical process occurring in Higgsian order forming mechanism. But the really interesting 

feature of it is the so-called ‘self-organized criticality’. Once the system arrives at its attractor, its 

macroscopic behavior displays the spatial and/or temporal scale-invariance characteristic of a phase 

transition, which means, the system bursts into pieces of every sizes distributed inversely proportional to a 

certain power of the size itself. Many apparent irregularities seen around us are, in fact, the results of such 

bursts from systems having arrived at self-organized criticality. 

The best illustration is provided by the ‘sand pile’ model. Consider a child on a beach letting sand trickle 

down from the hand to form a sand pile. As the process continues, the pile becomes steeper, and some 

sand begins to slide. And eventually the sand pile becomes so big and steep that avalanches of sand may 

happen. At this stage the behavior can no longer be explained in terms of the individual grains. It should 

instead be understood from the global property of the entire pile. This behavior of the critical sand pile 

mimics several phenomena observed across many areas, which are associated with complexity. 

The complex and irregular features all around us thus indicate that nature operates, in many occasions, 

in the self-organized critical states. Some irregular hard fragments of broken pieces are later utilized as 

building blocks for a more complicated systems serving as reliable constraints. 

2 Per Bak, How nature works: the science of self-organized criticality (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1996). 

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This is the picture of nature’s primary order, with certain irregular features, which were shaped by the 

Higgsian mechanism and certain self-organized criticality. This corresponds roughly to the ‘physical’ 

composition of our world. We may call it ‘primary’ or ‘simple’ order in anticipation to the more 

complicated and interesting one, called as ‘secondary’ or ‘compound’ order, which the Darwinian 

mechanism would provide. 

Order, entropy and second law of thermodynamics 

The concept of ‘order’ seems to be abstract, but, in fact, quite concrete in the sense that it is measurable 

through the concept of entropy. These concepts are related to our notion of microstates and macrostates. 

In nature, states of physical system obey the dynamical laws and we can enumerate dynamically 

distinguishable states in principle. But many of such states present identical responses to any external 

probe and thus indistinguishable in practice. Therefore it is beneficial to group together a set of such 

states, called ‘microstates’, and designate it as a ‘macrostate.’ In many circumstances, the probability for 

the system to be in a microstate is identical to be in any other available microstate. Therefore, the number 

of microstates W belonging to a given macrostate corresponds to the probability of the system to be in that 

macrostate. In this sense, W is often called thermodynamic probability of that macrostate. 

A meaningful macrostate, to which only a few microstates correspond (i.e. W is small), would be 

relatively hard to be achieved because the probability is low. Such a rarity, by definition, makes that 

macrostate highly ordered. The ‘order’ Θ of a system in that macrostate is therefore related to the inverse 

of W, i.e. 1/W, and formally defined by Θ = log(1/W) = -log W for some technical convenience. Since 

the entropy of that system is defined to be log W, the order defined this way is just the negative entropy. 

Another measure of order associated with a macrostate in a metastable state is the “time required for that 

macrostate to be formed accidentally by pure chance.” This is because the probability of an event and the 

time required to arrive at it is inversely proportional. This point will be utilized in later discussion. 

One of the most fundamental principles in nature is the second law of thermodynamics. It is in fact very 

simple: Nature goes always from less probable macrostates to more probable ones. But that holds for the 

overall process. Some macrostates jointly participating with others might go inverse direction toward 

higher order, provided some others in the process lose order as much or more, in compensation for it. All 

order forming phenomena, Higgsian or Darwinian, are examples of such local inversion. 

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Nature’s secondary process of order formation 

In addition to Higgsian, nature invented another way to arrive at order, called Darwinian, which is more 

sophisticated but enormously effective. To discuss the Darwinian mechanism and the resulting ‘compound’ 

order, it is necessary to introduce the concept of ‘autocatalytic local order’(hereafter will be abbreviated 

as ALO). 3 It is a local order which performs itself as a ‘catalyst’ for producing another self-similar 

local order. Once such a local system has been produced, and assuming that it can catalyze at least one 

such system within its expected life time, it is only a matter of time such local order will occupy all the 

available sites in the whole system. And after that, the population of the ALO will persist for unlimited 

duration. 

Assume that a species of ALO appeared on a planet like Earth and the magnitude of the local order is the 

size of a microbe. Then, after a short period of rapid multiplication, there would be millions of (almost) 

identical copies of such a local order for an extended duration. This will make a favorable ground for 

the mutations to occur. Some mutated sets of ALO species may appear, and coexist for a while with the 

original ones. It is also possible that some of such ALO’s belonging to different species might possibly 

merge together to form a higher order species. This pattern of mutation may continue endlessly producing 

higher and higher order species. This is the basic elements of the Darwinian mechanism. 

To appreciate the efficacy of this mechanism, let us evaluate the time required for two consequent events 

to occur. Suppose that time T 1 is required for a local order O 1 to appear by pure chance, and time T 2 is 

required for a mutated local order O 2 to appear in the assumed presence of O 1. Then the total time T 

required for O 2 to appear from scratch would be 

T=T 1+T 2/n 

where n is the average expected number of O 1 at any moment during the period T 2(If a single O 1 persists 

all the time during T 2, n=1). 

Let us now assume that the life time τ of O 1 is much less than T 1. This is quite a reasonable assumption for 

highly organized local order, because it would be very hard to be formed accidentally(T 1 large), but rather 

easy to be disintegrated(τ small). 

3 The terms ‘autocatalytic’ and ‘catalyst’ employed here are generalizations from the terms normally used in chemical 

reactions. In biology, instead of ‘autocatalytic’, the term ‘self-reproducing’ is conventionally used. 

140

We can now compare the two processes: Higgsian and Darwinian. If the original local order, O 1, is non- 

autocatalytic, which means the process is Higgsian, n would be τ/T 1(O 1 appears once in T 1, but stays only 

τ after this appearance), while if it is autocatalytic, that is Darwinian, n is N, the average population of 

ALO during T 2. 

To estimate the numerical difference, let us assume that both T 1 and T 2 are one million year (10 6 year), the 

life time τ of O 1 is 3.65 day (10 -2 year), and the population of O 1, is saturated at N=10 5 . Further assume 

that O 1 makes two copied within its life time. It will take 17 generations (2 17 =131,072) to arrive at this 

saturated number. This means that 2 months are needed to get saturated. Then the estimated total time T 

required for O 2 to appear would be 

T=10 6 year + 10 14 year 

for Higgsian, and 

T=10 6 years + 10 years + 2 month 

for Darwinian. 

It means that you have to wait 100 trillion years (about seven thousand times the age of universe) after the 

appearance of original order to expect a mutated one in Higgsian process, while you need barely 10 years 

plus 2 month to get the same mutated one in Darwinian process! We should notice that the 100 trillion 

years needed to wait for O 2 to occur in Higgsian process means that it is such an enormously ordered 

object that it needs such a long time to achieve it accidentally. The magic of Darwinian process is that it 

made an order of such an enormous quality in such a short period. 

Where then lies the secret of it? We should not be deluded that the magic is hidden somewhere in the 

structure of the ALOs. Even with the identical structure, if the grounding order of the system on which the 

ALO locates is slightly different, the whole autocatalytic function may fail and no Darwinian mechanism 

operates. It is therefore necessary for an ALO to function as an ALO it should be part of a global order in 

which the autocatalytic activity is carried out in a close coordination between the ALO and the grounding 

order and also between the ALO’s themselves. In fact, the magic of Darwinian process lies in the ability of 

the whole system to expand a local order to be spread all over the space and time and work out all together 

the exploring task of higher order. In the above numerical example, 10 trillion ALOs appeared and took 

part in the searching endeavor to arrive at the mutated local order of such quality. 

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Properties of two different kinds of orders 

We have demonstrated that the ‘secondary’ order produced by Darwinian mechanism is so enormous 

that it is practically impossible to encounter comparable order formed through more general Higgsian 

process. Therefore, the two orders appear different in every respect, and look seemingly independent each 

other. But, as mentioned above, the secondary order is based only on a rich terrain of the primary order, 

and essentially inseparable from it. On the other hand, while the primary order is generally independent 

of the secondary one, it is also affected and continues to be altered once the formation of the secondary 

order is initiated. And this alteration of the primary order in turn affects the development of the secondary 

order, and so on and on. In this way the two orders are intermingled as a single undivided whole, once the 

secondary order gets started. 

Still, there are certain noticeable differences between the two orders. One of the characteristic differences 

arises in the relation between the part and whole. For the primary order, the order of the whole amounts 

roughly the sum of the orders of parts. For the secondary order, however, the order of the whole by far 

exceeds the sum of the orders attributed to the parts. This is another way of expressing the global character 

of the secondary order. Materially the system is composed of discernible composite partners, but the order 

of the system comes mainly from the relations between partners, rather than from the order of individual 

partners. In this sense, it is impossible for the secondary order to separate the system into independent 

parts. Once separated, the order is lost automatically. This is why we have called it ‘compound order’ in 

contrast to the ‘simple’ primary order. 

Another difference between the primary and secondary orders occurs in the stability of the order. Stability 

can be defined as the capability of maintaining the order of the system against external influences. It is, for 

instance, related to the ability of repairing externally imposed damages or perturbations. 

Primary orders, obtained through phase-transitions, chemical reactions, etc., adjusted by external 

conditions like temperature, are generally reversible and stable under external damage or perturbation. 

Meanwhile, the local orders accidentally obtained through fluctuation are generally unstable or metastable, 

but as we have seen such orders formed through Higgsian process are relatively poor. In many cases, 

such orders are initiated, maintained, and even accumulated by external flows. One interesting case is the 

one where the system arrives at the self-organized criticality. Any system arrived at this critical point will 

become unstable, and burst into many irregular fragments any time with relatively small triggering effect. 

Secondary orders, on the other hand, are generally located only in meta-stable states. While stable under 

normal perturbation, they may be destroyed by accidental impact exceeding certain threshold. These 

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orders, usually in the form of dynamic interrelations between coordinating partners, are vulnerable under 

internal as well as external fluctuation or perturbation. 

A model situation of the compound order 

To make the discussion more concrete, we will consider a model situation. Suppose that, by any chance, 

three kinds of components A, B, C are formed with certain densities of population in a large system. 

Assume now that the components A and B, being conjugate to each other, can properly be combined into 

a metastable state A*B, but it is, for some reason, very difficult to be achieved in normal circumstances. 

Assume also that A*B, once formed, can easily combine another component C into a more mature 

structure A*B*C, which can attract other A and B toward itself to facilitate the formation of another 

A*B and release it. This will make a model of ‘autocatalytic local order’(ALO), which could be formed 

accidentally against very low probability as a seed A*B, but once formed, grow into a mature body 

A*B*C and perform the autocatalytic activity producing another seed A*B. 

It should be noted here that all these phenomena are performed in highly dynamical and nonequilibrium 

circumstances. Accordingly, the components A, B, C here should not all be regarded as hard bodies with 

fixed material compositions. They might include relatively rigid parts which could be regarded for some 

purposes as ‘constraints’, and also include flexible ones which, while maintaining reasonably distinct 

appearances, could be so fluid that they might even be regarded as a part of a steady flow, constantly 

exchanging their material compositions with surroundings. In this regard, the material identity of ALO, 

namely that of A*B and A*B*C, is not absolute. It constantly exchanges matter and energy, and maintains 

itself only in close coordination with the rest of the system. In this sense, it is an inseparable part of the 

system with conditional status of existence. 

By the same token, the production of the next generation, A*B, is not wholly the workings of A*B*C 

alone. It is in fact produced by the whole system, the ALO performing only the role of ‘catalyst’. That 

is why we prefer the wording ‘autocatalytic’, rather than more conventional ‘self-reproducing’ or ‘self- 

replicating’. 

Stages of compound order formation 

The appearance of ALO, which would initiate a new world of compound order, might not be easy to arise 

from the ‘simple’ primary order. The probability of the initiation of ALO will definitely depend on the 

richness of the primary order prior to the happening of this event. Therefore, it is demanding to figure out 

a concrete circumstance which would facilitate the onset of such an event. 

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A n*B n*C n} Nn). It is self-sufficient and self-sustaining in the sense that it requires nothing essential from 

outside. 

It is therefore the most comprehensive entity possessing every property the notion of life might possibly 

signify. It might perhaps be claimed that it is too comprehensive, including everything but discriminating 

too little. In certain sense, it is. It even looks counter-intuitive as a possible definition of life. But it should 

be noticed that it includes all the bare essentials, nothing more nothing less, for a life to be a life. Nothing 

less than this can be a life alone in the universe. The reason something less than this sometimes looks like 

a life is that we unwittingly assume the remaining part of this in existence somewhere around it. It is quite 

natural on earth, where all that essentials are somehow granted. But it would be completely different in 

somewhere else in the universe. 

Needless to say, this conception of life should not be arbitrarily extended to any unnecessary scope, say, to 

the universe itself. It should strictly be a scientific concept specifically denoting the causally interconnected 

bundle of matter necessitating the appearance of life within itself. This causal relations leading to the life 

phenomenon should be identified by our best available knowledge including contemporary science. 

To the best of present knowledge, such an entity is expected to be a rare phenomenon in the universe, 

and on the spatial dimension it is extremely localized, compared to the known scale of our universe. So 

far, only one such life is known, which is the one located on our solar system. Framed on the sun-earth 

system, it was born some 4 billion years ago, and has been growing ever since. It includes every living 

beings, living now and ever lived on earth, including ourselves and all our ancestors up to the very first 

ALO on earth. It also includes all the necessary components for this compound order possible, organic 

and inorganic, incorporated as a functioning whole. 

Some criteria for the concept of life 

There is no doubt that, if an entity really deserves the name ‘life’, it would be the third entity mentioned 

above. But I have been reluctant to call it ‘life’ explicitly. Instead, I have called it ‘global life’ ever since 

I paid attention to this entity quite some time ago. 6 One reason for that is that it should be distinguished 

from the concept of ‘individual life’, in conjunction with which many interesting aspects of life can still be 

fruitfully discoursed. 

6 Hwe Ik Zhang, “The Units of Life: Global and Individual”, Paper presented at Philosophy of Science Conference in 

Dubrovnik, 1988. reprinted in Hwe Ik Zhang, Science and Meta-Science, HyonAmSa (2012). Also see Hwe Ik Zhang, 

“Humanity in the World of Life.” Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science 24 (December, 1989): 447-56. 

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At this juncture, I would present a verbal definition of (global) life employing terminologies closely 

analogous to that of Ruiz-Mirazo and Moreno: “Life is a self-sustained system embodying a complex 

network of autocatalytic local orders whose basic organization is specified by enduring material 

constraints which are generated through an open-ended evolutionary process”. Notice the similarity with 

that of Ruiz-Mirazo and Moreno except the notion of “a self-sustained system”, which indicates the body 

incorporating the primary order. 

To determine whether a concept is suitable to represent the idea of life, we can think of two possible 

criteria. One is the criterion of ‘liveliness’. This concerns whether the object is ‘alive by itself’ or not. A 

lily is alive in the field but it cannot be alive by itself. Once plucked out and thrown into the air it loses 

the liveliness. So lily by itself cannot represent the whole picture of life. It is only part of it. Same is the 

case for an animal species. An animal species cannot be alive by itself. It needs food and air. Then, what 

about the network definition of life provided by Ruiz-Mirazo and Moreno? It also fails. It cannot be alive 

without the supporting primary order. Only the global life can pass it. This is why the global life alone can 

be justified to represent the life in a genuine sense. 

Another criterion for an object to represent the idea of life is the criterion of death. If any entity can die, 

the usual interpretation is that it has a life which can be taken away. So the lily has a life. Same is true for 

an animal species, which can possibly be exterminated. Many objects that can die are, in fact, subsystems 

within a larger living system. These subsystems have such a characteristic that they can die without regard 

to the enclosing larger life but they cannot be alive without it. In other words, they pass the criterion of 

death, but do not fully satisfy the criterion of liveliness. For such case, it is quite appropriate to bestow 

the status of ‘conditional life’. All sorts of ‘individual life’ defined above occupy the ontological status of 

conditional life. 

Gaia, global life and self-organized criticality 

One of the interesting features of the compound order, i. e. the global life, is that the whole system might 

have been in a state of self-organized criticality (SOC). Per Bak, who initiated the theory of SOC, asserts: 

In the critical state the collection of species represents a single coherent organism following its 

own evolutionary dynamics. A single triggering event can cause an arbitrarily large fraction of the 

ecological network to collapse, and eventually be replaced by a new stable ecological network. 

This would be a “mutated” global organism. At the critical point all species influence each other. 

In this state they act collectively as a single meta-organism, many sharing the same fate. This 

is highlighted by the very existence of large-scale extinctions. A meteorite might have directly 

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impacted a small part of the organism, but a large fraction of the organism eventually died as a 

result. 

Within the SOC picture, the entire ecology has evolved into the critical state. It makes no sense to 

view the evolution of individual species independently. 7 

The global organism mentioned by Bak above is Gaia of Lovelock, which can roughly be interpreted as 

the ‘body of global life’. In this sense, the Gaia theory of Lovelock provides some important aspects of the 

‘physiology’ of global life. 

The arrival of SOC in global life is manifested in model simulations performed by Bak, and confirmed in 

reality by careful examination of immense fossil records by Sepkoski 8 and others. This SOC in global life, 

as suggested in the above quotation, has two major implications. 

Firstly, the network of species in the global life is so intensively connected that the whole system behaves 

as a single organism and may even collapse as a single entity. This feature, by emphasizing the unity of 

global life, greatly reinforces the conceptual scheme upon which the ontological status of global life is 

based. Secondly, the SOC in global life strongly indicates the fragility of the global organism. According 

to the characteristic property of SOC, a minor impact or unbalance in the system may trigger a major 

catastrophe. 

Other than the idea of Gaia, the concept of global life has been raised by some authors without a specific 

name for it. Margulis and Sagan, for instance, characterized life in a way remarkably similar to global life: 

So, what is life? Life is planetary exuberance, a solar phenomenon. It is the astronomically 

local transmutation of Earth’s air, water, and sun into cells. It is an intricate pattern of growth 

and death, dispatch and retrenchment, transformation and decay. Life is the single expanding 

organization connected through Darwinian time to the first bacteria and through Vernadskian space 

to all citizens of biosphere. Life as God and music and carbon and energy is a whirling nexus of 

growing, fusing, and dying beings. It is matter gone wild, capable of choosing its own direction in 

order to indefinitely forestall the inevitable moment of thermodynamic equilibrium-death. Life is 

also a question the universe poses to itself in the form of a human being. 9 

7 Per Bak, How nature works: the science of self-organized criticality (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1996) Chapter 8. 

8 J. J. Jr. Sepkoski, “Ten Years in the Library: New Data confirm Paleontological Patterns.” Paleobiology 19 (1993) 43. 

9 Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, What is life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), p. 49. 

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Compound order and intelligence 

The last passage in the above quotation is intriguing. How can life be a ‘question’ and impose it to itself? 

The life discussed so far is strictly composed of material bodies, however large and complicated it might 

be. Is it then possible such a mental attribute like a ‘question’ be raised out of this monster? 

To appreciate this, consider an analogous situation. Computers are simple material objects in every 

respect, but somehow perform fairly sophisticated mental tasks. The software, usually addressed in 

contrast to the hardware, is not a distinct physical body but an alternative depiction of the same object. 

One depiction may be called as the inner aspect and the other as the outer aspect of the same subject 

matter. 

A partner in a highly advanced compound order should, for the sake of maintaining this order, coordinate 

with other partners in a very close and delicate manner, and accordingly, develop a sophisticated 

dynamical mechanism for this coordination. This mechanism, at the standpoint of that partner, includes 

anticipatory readiness concerning the next move of other partners. 

Here comes a real surprise for this compound order. That partner, so far regarded as a material body, turns 

out to be a mental subject as well. In fact, all the mental activities performed by any subject, including 

mine and yours, are of this nature. The mentality and the physicality are not two distinct substances but 

just two modes of the same substance, one the subjective or inner mode, and the other the physical or 

outer mode. 

It is sometimes possible to translate any item in one mode to that of the other. For instance, the 

organization and motion in the physical mode are translated into the intelligence and behavior in the 

mental mode. For a close coordination with other partners, the mental subject needs a cute intelligence and 

intellectual activities. In this sense, ‘knowledge’ and ‘information’ are understood as necessary devices 

of cooperation, expressed in the mental mode, between subunits within the whole system of compound 

order. 

One of the interesting feats in this regard is that the ‘knowledge’ is flexible enough even to pose a ‘question’ 

in it. Normally the questions are answered by newly acquired information, but the process may continue 

to raise ever deeper questions. All these workings are an inherent property of nature, more specifically, 

of the compound order formed in it. In other words, the nature, or the universe, poses questions to itself 

through the frame of compound order, which is the life itself. 

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Does it mean that ‘life’ is “a question the universe poses to itself in the form of a human being,” as 

Margulis and Sagan assert enigmatically in the above quotation? To answer this question, we have to 

consider the possible meaning of human being in the frame of global life. 

Human being and the self-conscious global life 

If there remains a real mystery, probably irresolvable by advanced science, it is the subjectivity seemingly 

embodied in compound order. Any partner in the global life can be in the subjective mode, but can be 

depicted outwardly only in the objective mode. Both modes of existence are so familiar to us, in fact, that 

we seldom feel problematic about it. As a thinking and cognitive subject, we are already in our subjective 

mode, while the objects we recognize are in their objective mode. But the fact that objects are recognized 

in the objective mode does not necessarily mean that all the descriptions are made in physical terms. Many 

of the physical signals from objects may readily be interpreted and translated into more familiar mental 

terms. 

We can readily recognize and accept that other partners in many cases are in their subjective mode distinct 

from mine. But, interesting enough, it is also possible to have inter-subjective connections to form a 

collective subjectivity. The partner can not only be ‘you’ but also be included in ‘we,’ which means, within 

‘my’ subjective mode. The usual communications are familiar means making such connections possible. 

The human being, in the individual as well as the collective sense, is part of the global life. And like all 

other plants and animals, human acts as a partner in the global life and coordinates closely with others to 

maintain the compound order. Further, like all other partners, it can be in its subjective mode inwardly, 

and can be depicted in the objective mode outwardly. In this regard, human is not quite different from 

any other partners in the global life. If there is a difference, it seems to be a matter of degree rather than a 

matter of substance. 

But we find that there is an unbridgeable gap between being a human and being any other partner in 

this global life. It relates to the fact that the presently operating subjective mode, in which you and I are 

involved in this discussion, is none other than the human subjective mode. There is no way to escape from 

this fate once involved in the presently operating subjective mode. It is the fundamental attribute of the 

subjectivity itself. Once in it, no way otherwise. We can of course extend our subjectivity to include as 

many contents as the connections make it possible, but still it is extended ‘I’. Moreover, it seems that there 

is no non-human subjective mode operating in a comparable degree to our present one. In other words, we 

have no ‘You’ to call and listen to. 

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The only way we can proceed in our present subjective mode is to expend it. We, human being, need 

intelligence and perform mental activity as a partner in the global life to coordinate with all the other 

ones in it. That is the normal exercise of our intelligence and we are all familiar with it. But once we 

understand, or somehow feel, that the other partners are in fact part of the undividable whole, the global 

life, which can be regarded as an extended body of myself, then all these activities can be construed as 

something similar to our inner mental activities of self coordination within a single human body. 

We would then be in the subjective mode of the global life, the global self. We would feel pain if trouble 

is noticed anywhere in our global life, and would react, if judged necessary. Human being, as far as it is 

instrumental for the global self, occupies a special position in the global life. This is a position analogous 

to the brain or the ‘central nervous system’ in the human body. Indeed, there is a division of labor in the 

body of the global life: some species specialize in transforming solar energy into nutritious chemicals, and 

others in decomposing trashes into usable materials. What would then the specialty of human species be 

other than the intellectual and mental activities? 

Can the global life, as a whole, be qualified as a bona fide mental subject? Some controversies might arise 

on this matter. But as far as subjectivity is concerned, the clearest evidence is the subjective claim itself. If 

someone, whether the human being or not, explicitly claims that he or she identifies himself or herself as 

the global life in his or her mind, who could deny it? Obviously, we know that the life we are subjectively 

engaging is the undivided whole, the global life, and then who are we, other than the global life itself? 

Interestingly, this self-identification with the global life is not a novel phenomenon. Many sages and 

intellectuals of all age identified themselves with something very much like the global life. 

Tragic irony encountered on the global life 

It is now possible to claim that our global life has finally become a self-conscious being, since at least 

some conscious beings identifying themselves as the global life appeared. Indeed, the consciousness of 

the global life, if such be granted, would be the collective human consciousness which identifies itself as 

such. 

Once we accept this, it would be an event of cosmic significance. Our global life, born some four billion 

years ago, has grown to be of certain maturity, but until very recently it has been unconscious of itself 

just like a person in a vegetative existence. But now, through the human collective intelligence, it finally 

becomes conscious of itself. The consciousness within an individual person is marvellous enough, never 

easily imaginable on the basis of physical understanding, but the newly emerging global consciousness 

is even more marvellous and promising, opening a whole new era for the global life with the blessing of 

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unprecedented mental upheaval. 

Unfortunately, however, this is not the whole picture. Human beings have a tendency to severely distort 

the normal physiology of the global life, and even to extinguish it. This behavior of human beings 

to the global life is comparable to that of cancer cells to the host organism. Cancer cells themselves 

are not external agencies invading the host body, but just part of it. They simply multiply themselves 

uncontrollably, interrupting the normal functioning of the host organism, and eventually leading to 

the demise of it. Human beings, like cancer cells, have colonized substantial part of the global life, 

transforming it for the sake of their own prosperity and multiplication. 

It would then be a tragic irony that the global life, some four billion years after its birth, finally becomes 

intellectual and self-conscious only to find itself cancerously diseased by the same agent which makes it 

possible to be a conscious being. 

Then, what is the reason why such a marvellous intellectual being like human can become such a 

cancerous being in the global life? One clue can be traced to the prevailing rather narrow conception of 

‘life’. No sane person would gladly continue his business if he realizes that what he is doing is the very 

thing a cancerous cell is doing on his own body. 

But, for ordinary people, in their everyday business, it is seldom necessary or even possible to imagine 

the whole picture of the global life. They normally focus their attention on each single local order, and 

designate a notion of ‘life’ to its active mode. This notion of life serves to protect and provide means for 

the maintenance of a local order, which is of course vitally important for our normal life. This notion 

of life is, in fact, so accustomed to people that they are virtually enslaved by this conception. There are, 

however, costs to pay for this. First of all, it makes them fail to see the real dimension of life, vainly 

seeking its essence in the local order, namely, the individual living body. This makes them misjudge the 

value associated with life: overestimating the value associated with individuals while failing to see the real 

value the global life deserves. 

How can the harmony between human and nature be achieved? 

As every other species, the survival instinct of the human being is engraved on its genetic information. 

This instinct is naturally of two kinds. One is the preservation and multiplication of the individual self and 

the other is the cooperation with and conservation of the rest of the global life. Otherwise, the subsistence 

of the species would be endangered. But the balance between those two opposing tendencies may not 

always be sustained in an ideal position. As human civilization developed, it turned out that the instinct 

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engraved on the gene is not sufficient, because certain extra need of cooperation arises. The social laws 

and morality are one form of the cultural devices to amend the balance toward the cooperation and 

conservation. 

This amendment of balance, however, can be achieved more naturally by other means, namely, the 

acquirement of a higher self-identity, like a family, a community or a nation. With such a new self-identity, 

it is necessary only to invoke the instinct of self-preservation and make it directed toward the acquired 

higher order self. Human beings somehow possess the ability to shift inclination even by the mental 

manipulation of artificial self-identity. This tendency is most clearly demonstrated in the phenomena like 

sports. Once they take sides to one party (the artificial self), then there naturally appears the favoring 

tendency toward that direction. It is therefore expected that once they understand themselves as members 

of a ‘human family’, certain collective self-identity would appear, and this might solve many ethical 

problems within the human society. We can of course go one step further, and identify ourselves with the 

global life. This ultimate self-identity, regarding the global life as one’s own body, would help greatly to 

solve the global predicament mentioned above. 

There is, however, another problem which should be engaged by human being. It is the fundamental 

fragility the global life inherited within its compositional structure. As we have mentioned earlier, the 

global life is located at the point of self-organized criticality (SOC); by its characteristic property, a minor 

impact or unbalance may trigger a major catastrophe. But we should notice that, while it is a phenomenon 

of the global scale which should be understood from the global property of the entire system, it is 

fundamentally based on local interactions between the components which compose the system. Therefore, 

although the statistical character of the global phenomena remains unaffected, the local situation may be 

changed by inner maneuver of the participant agencies. For instance, whether a portion of the global life 

including the human species would be destroyed, or some other remote portion of it would get the tragedy, 

may depend on the local situation for which certain intelligent maneuvering is possible. 

Undoubtedly, human is the only being in charge of this. His intelligence as well as his mind is critical on 

this matter. Less than wisest judgment might trigger the demise of the human race and the most precious 

part of the global life. 

In summary, the relation between human and nature is not a relation between two independent agencies, 

but between two parts of a single living body, the global life, just like the relation between the brain and 

the remaining part of the body. The harmony between human and nature should, therefore, be the harmony 

between the brain and the remaining body, as well as the harmony between mental and physical activities. 

If the harmony between the human and nature is in danger, it means that the physical and mental health 

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of the global life is in jeopardy. Therefore, the most urgent task is to provide a whole new vision of life, in 

which the physiology and the possible malady of it should be understood and properly be diagnosed. The 

new forms of harmony between human and nature should then be explored and established on the basis of 

such endeavor. 

References 

Per Bak, How nature works: the science of self-organized criticality (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1996). 

Michael Boulter, Extinction: Evolution and the End of Man (New York: Columbia University Press, 

2002). 

Brian Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos (New York: Knopf, 2004). 

Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, What is life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995). 

Kapa Ruiz-Mirazo and Alvaro Moreno, “The Need for a Universal Definition of Life in Twenty-first- 

century Biology” in Information and Living systems - Philosophical and Scientific Perspectives, 

edited by Georgy Terzis and Robert Arp (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2011). 

Ed Regis, What is Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). 

J. J. Jr. Sepkoski, “Ten Years in the Library: New Data confirm Paleontological Patterns”. Paleobiology 19 

(1993), 43. 

Hwe Ik Zhang, “The Units of Life: Global and Individual”, Paper presented at Philosophy of Science 

Conference in Dubrovnik, 1988. reprinted in Hwe Ik Zhang, Science and Meta-Science, HyonAmSa 

(2012). 

Hwe Ik Zhang, “Humanity in the World of Life.” Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science 24 (December, 

1989), 447-56. 

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Becoming the Alien: Avatar and District 9 

Andrew M. Gordon 

University of Florida 

The recent science fiction films Avatar (2009) and District 9 (2009) deal with similar themes: the abuse 

of advanced technology to despoil the environment and to oppress and slaughter minority populations. 

Although both are fantasies set in the future, they are also relevant to contemporary environmental and 

racial conflicts. And Avatar and District 9 have similar plots: the protagonist, a member of the white 

oppressors, is sent to aid in the displacement of aliens from their homes. In both cases, the minority 

groups are the most alien beings possible: an extraterrestrial species. In the course of the narrative, the 

heroes are first physically and then psychologically transformed, taking on first the biological form and 

then the psychology of the alien race. Gradually, the hero crosses over and ends up leading the alien 

rebellion against the white imperialists. Both heroes are treated as race traitors and marked for death, yet 

both survive and aid the alien groups they have joined. In both films, becoming an alien, both physically 

and mentally, is envisioned as a radical form of healing from the sickness of human civilization. As 

Neill Blomkamp, the director and co-writer of District 9, says, “As he [the hero] becomes more alien, he 

becomes more human” (Blomkamp 2009). 

As a critic mentions, Avatar and District 9 are a continuation of white guilt fantasies in the movies. For 

the most part, in such movies we don’t see the aliens through their own eyes but through white eyes, and 

“whites still get to be leaders of the natives - just in a kinder, gentler way” (Newitz). Avatar and District 

9 are conversion narratives, cures for the disease of whiteness, part of a nearly century-long tradition 

in film, the myth of the white male hero who “goes native,” seen, for example, in the various cinematic 

retellings of Mutiny on the Bounty (1935, 1962, and 1984) and the tremendously popular western, 

Dances with Wolves (1990) (Vera and Gordon 2003, 67-83, 137-42). In such films, the hero begins as a 

colonial oppressor. He must be cured by prolonged separation from Western civilization, converted from 

imperialist to anti-imperialist by being inducted into a native tribe. In Mutiny on the Bounty, English sailor 

Fletcher Christian is seduced by a Pacific island paradise, a happy tribe, and a beautiful native maiden. He 

finally refuses to return home and leads his shipmates in a rebellion against the tyrannical Captain Bligh. 

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In Dances with Wolves, Lieutenant John Dunbar, a Union soldier wounded in the American Civil War, 

goes to the western frontier at the time of the Indian wars. There he is seduced by the paradise of the wide 

open plains, the noble savages of the Lakota Sioux, and a beautiful maiden (born white but raised by the 

Sioux). He renounces his white identity, takes the Indian name “Dances with Wolves,” refuses to return 

home, and leads his tribe against the U.S. cavalry. 

Avatar might be subtitled “Dances with Aliens” (Gordon and Vera 2009). In Avatar, the Marine Jake 

Sully lost the use of his legs in a future war and is offered a second chance on the distant moon Pandora, 

operating by remote control an avatar, a replica of one of the humanoid natives. There he is seduced by 

the paradise of a wild forest, a tribe of noble savages and a beautiful native princess. Ultimately, he refuses 

to return to Earth and leads the tribe in rebellion against their colonial oppressors, who are out to level the 

forest and force the natives from their homes. 

In contrast to these previous films, however, District 9 radically revises the cinematic myth of the hero 

who goes native. One critic defines Avatar as a liberal narrative and District 9 as a radical one (Reider 

2011). District 9 rejects the persistent strain of romantic mythology in the previous dramas about “going 

native.” The protagonist Wikus is at first made deliberately unsympathetic, neither a respected naval 

officer like Fletcher Christian nor a wounded warrior like John Dunbar or Jake Sully but a smug, petty 

bureaucrat in charge of the eviction of the extraterrestrial “Prawn” from a Johannesburg, South Africa 

slum. The Prawn are not handsome, noble savages but insectoid aliens, a hive rather than a tribe. Their 

environment is not a paradise but a slum into which they have been forced. There is no beautiful native 

princess; in fact, the hero acutely misses his human wife. Most significant, the transformation of Wikus is 

neither willed nor witting but accidental and involuntary, triggered by exposure to an alien chemical that 

alters him biologically into one of the Prawn. District 9 is a highly ironic tale about an anti-hero, a hero in 

spite of himself, a movie with strong elements of body horror, black comedy and political satire. It offers a 

scathing critique of the ills of contemporary civilization and a radical cure. 

The transformation of Jake Sully in Avatar from a white Earthman to an alien warrior on a distant planet 

is structured as a myth of the birth of a hero. Many popular science fiction and fantasy film series are 

myths about the coming of a messiah, a superhero who will liberate the city, the world, or the galaxy from 

the forces of evil: Superman, Batman, Spiderman, Star Wars, The Teminator, Harry Potter, The Matrix, 

or Avatar. Otto Rank argues that, like paranoid delusions, the hero myth is egotistical, “merely the means 

for his own exaltation” (Rank 1959, 94). Often this mythic hero has a dual identity: an everyday identity 

as Clark Kent or Jake Sully, versus a superhero identity as Superman, or, in Avatar, “Toruk Macto.” 

Sometimes the hero shuttles between two worlds and suffers a confusion between two identities, or he 

must symbolically die in order to be reborn into the heroic identity, as in The Matrix and Avatar. 

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Avatar is set in a dystopian future in which the Earth is a dying planet and has begun to colonize other 

planets in search of land and resources. Jake is torn between two worlds—a real world and a kind of 

dream world—and two identities: his real world identity and his avatar self in the dream world. His 

ordinary identity is Jake Sully, a white man from Earth, an ex-Marine Corporal in a wheelchair. But his 

superhero identity in the dream world is that of his avatar, which has the appearance of one of the Na’vi, 

a ten-foot tall, blue-skinned native. In the lush forests of Pandora, Jake has full use of his legs and is swift 

and powerful. 

The distinction between the two worlds is likened to the difference between waking and dreaming. Jake 

says in the opening, voice-over narration, “When I was lying there in the VA [military veterans’] hospital 

with a big hole blown through the middle of my life, I started having these dreams of flying. I was free. 

Sooner or later, though, you always have to wake up.” Yet the apparently dream images that accompany 

this opening narration—of swooping through clouds and over lush green forests—are prescient, for Jake 

will later experience these same views in reality on Pandora when he is transformed from a human into an 

extraterrestrial and learns to fly a banshee. 

To emphasize the distinction between the real and the dream worlds, Avatar references the film The 

Wizard of Oz. Colonel Quaritch tells the mercenaries newly arrived on Pandora, “You’re not in Kansas 

anymore,” alluding to Dorothy’s line when she arrives in Oz. Pandora has some of the same scary, 

beautiful, overwhelming potential as the dream world of Oz. Just as Dorothy can realize herself in Oz, so 

Jake can realize his true, heroic self on Pandora. 

Throughout the film, the images of dreaming and waking are connected with repeated images of sight and 

of death and rebirth. The film begins with Jake awakening in a capsule after almost six years in cryogenic 

suspension on the journey from Earth. Right after Jake says, “you always have to wake up,” there is a 

close up of Jake’s eye opening, an image which will be echoed in the film’s closing image of the eye of 

Jake’s avatar opening. He says, “In cryo, you don’t dream at all.” When the capsule opens, and Jake floats 

out in zero gravity, it is if he is being reborn from a tomb or womb. 

Continuing the motif of death and rebirth, as the ship descends into Pandora’s atmosphere, Jake flashes 

back to his twin brother Tommy’s cremation, and he says, “One life ends. Another begins.” Tommy’s 

death means a new life for Jake, who will take his brother’s place on Pandora. And the film ends as Jake 

lets his human body die so that he may live permanently in his alien body. In both the opening and the 

closing scenes, “One life ends. Another begins.” Jake’s last line in the film is “It’s my birthday, after all.” 

In Avatar, the hero must be reborn and grow up anew so he can become the messiah of this new world. 

Jake finds himself in his new avatar body, alone and lost in the forest at night, threatened by wild animals, 

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only to be rescued by the beautiful native princess Neytiri, who tells him, “You are like a baby…. No fear. 

But stupid! Ignorant like a child!” Neytiri becomes the mentor/mother/lover figure who will help him to 

grow up. 

At the opening of the film, Jake still defines himself as a Marine, even though he is a disabled vet. He says, 

“There’s no such thing as an ex-Marine. You may be out, but you never lose the attitude. I told myself I 

could pass any test a man could pass.” But, as a Marine, he feels inferior to his twin brother Tommy: “Yeah, 

Tommy was the scientist. Me, I’m just another dumb grunt going someplace he’s gonna regret.” 

Jake has money problems. Of his paralysis, he says, “They can fix a spinal, if you got the money. But not 

on vet benefits. Not in this economy,” suggesting the unfairness of this technologically advanced future. 

He takes the place of his dead twin as an avatar operator because, as a disabled veteran, it’s the best and 

perhaps the only offer he has. As the company tells him, “It’d be a fresh start. On a new world. And 

the pay is good. Very good.” He has contempt for the thief who killed his brother “for the paper in his 

wallet” and contempt for his fellow ex-soldiers on Pandora: “Back on Earth, these guys were Army dogs, 

Marines, fighting for freedom. But out here, they’re just hired guns, taking the money, working for the 

company.” Ironically, Jake is in the same position, taking the money and working for the company. 

The nameless corporation for which Jake works is only interested in money. Parker Selfridge, the 

company representative on Pandora, tells the scientist Grace Augustine, who is in charge of the Avatar 

program, “This is why we’re here: unobtainium. Because this little rock sells for $20 million a kilo.” To 

Selfridge, the Avatar program is “a little puppet show”; to the mercenary commander Col. Quaritch, it is 

“a bad joke.” They tolerate the program only because the natives are living on top of one of the richest 

deposits of the precious mineral, and the company is looking for a diplomatic way to force them to 

resettle. 

Although he believes that he could “pass any test a man could pass,” Jake quickly accepts the deal offered 

by Col. Quaritch, who represents the bad father. Quaritch, a fellow ex-Marine, flatters Jake’s military 

accomplishments when almost everyone on Pandora rejects him: his fellow soldiers look down on him 

as a useless cripple, “meals on wheels,” and the scientists with whom he works consider him a “jarhead 

dropout,” not a brilliant scientist like his dead brother. Quaritch, however, calls Jake “son,” treats him like 

a Marine under his command, and promises him newly functioning legs when he returns to Earth, saying, 

“Son, I take care of my own.” He needs a man on the inside he can control, a Marine “in an Avatar body.... 

I want you to learn these savages from the inside. I want you to gain their trust. I want to know how to 

force their cooperation or hammer them hard if they won’t.” So, out of mixed motives—“Semper Fi” 

loyalty to his Marine identity and to the commandant, along with a desire to be made whole again—Jake 

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becomes a spy. 

Jake’s compromise means he begins his mission with divided loyalties: Is he working for the good 

mother Grace, a botanist who respects Pandoran ecology and Na’vi culture? Or is he a traitor working 

for the bad father Quaritch, who treats the Na’vi like Custer treated the Indians? Later Jake also becomes 

split between his human identity as a Marine from Earth, and his alien identity as a Na’vi warrior. 

Jake’s movement between the two worlds later creates in him inability to decide which is the real world 

and which the dream world, and a resultant confusion of identity. Not until Jake resolves this identity 

confusion can he attain his predestined status as “Toruk Macto,” the mythic savior of the Na’vi. Neytiri 

tells him that “Toruk Macto” means “rider of the last shadow, the great bird…. Toruk Macto is mighty: he 

brought the clans together in a time of great sorrow.” 

Jake’s transformation from human to alien is gradual and goes through many stages. The first turning 

point occurs in the comic scene when he first operates his alien avatar. The awkward Jake towers over 

the humans in his alien body, has a long, waving tail, and is wearing only an embarrassing hospital gown 

open in back. He is so overexcited at regaining the use of his legs that he starts to run through the camp, 

faster and faster. When he stops, he wiggles his toes in the dirt—a simple pleasure which had been denied 

him for years as a paraplegic. This is the beginning of the freedom of which Jake had been dreaming in 

the hospital. 

He may have the alien body, but he knows nothing about the alien environment. On his first expedition 

with the science team, he flees a huge predator, gets lost in the woods, and tries to survive the night while 

surrounded by a pack of ferocious, hungry beasts. After Neytiri rescues him, he thanks her and asks her to 

teach him, but she rejects him: “You are like a baby making noise, don’t know what to do…. You should 

not be here. Go back.” 

At this point, fortuitously, Jake’s body becomes covered by floating luminous plants, “seeds of the sacred 

tree—very pure spirits,” which Neytiri takes as “a sign” from the goddess Eywa that Jake himself is a pure 

spirit. So she brings him home to her clan. This is the second major turning point in Jake’s transformation, 

and the first sign that he is destined to be the chosen one. 

Her father Eytukan, the clan leader, says Jake is “the first warrior dreamwalker we have seen.” To call the 

avatars “dreamwalkers” implies that they are somnambulists: they lie in capsules like coffins and seem 

asleep (or dead), and yet at the same time they walk around in false bodies. So Eytukan orders Neytiri 

to “teach him to speak and walk as we do,” so that he will no longer be a sleepwalker but awake like the 

Na’vi. So begins the next part of his transformation, his training by Neytiri, which leads ultimately to his 

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initiation into the tribe. 

At first, Jake is clumsy and they mock him. But he learns quickly, saying, “With Neytiri, it’s learn fast or 

die.” And he grows stronger: “My feet are getting tougher. I can run farther every day. I can trust my body 

to know what to do.” 

But Jake still does not fully understand or respect the Na’vi nature worship. He tells Grace that Neytiri is 

“always going on about the flow of energy, spirits of animals. I really hope this tree-hugger crap isn’t on 

the final.” Grace urges him to “try to see the forest through her eyes.” 

Jake’s third turning point, a major step in his acceptance into the clan, happens when he tames and flies a 

great bird. On his first flight, Jake experiences again the exhilaration of his first run with his new legs, a 

feeling underscored by swooping camera movement and soaring music. Now he is living his dreams of 

flying and feels truly free: “I was a stone cold aerial killer; death from above.” 

Jake now spends more and more time in his avatar body and neglects his human body, rarely bothering to 

eat, sleep, bathe, or shave. But he is growing increasingly confused about his identity. In his video log, he 

says, “Everything is backwards now. Like out there [among the Na’vi] is the true world and in here is the 

dream. It’s hard to believe it’s only been three months. I don’t know who I am anymore.” When Quaritch 

tells him that his work is over and he can leave that night for Earth, Jake stalls for more time to go through 

the tribal initiation ceremony. He no longer really wants to go home and give up his wonderful new life. 

He wants to become an alien, to be “one of them.” 

Jake’s voice-over narration at the initiation ceremony continues the motif of rebirth: “The Na’vi say that 

every person is born twice. The second time is when you earn your place among the people—forever.” 

Soon after this, he mates with Neytiri. 

At that point, things rapidly worsen. Jake stops a bulldozer from leveling the forest, rebelling against the 

company and showing his changed identity. He tries to warn the clan, “Do not attack the Sky People. 

Many Omaticaya will die,” but the warrior Tsu’tey will not listen. Quaritch cuts Jake’s connection with 

his avatar and slugs him, saying, “You found yourself some local tail and you just forget what team you’re 

playing for?” Later, when he confronts Jake in the climactic battle, he accuses him of being a race traitor: 

“Hey, Sully, how does it feel to betray your own race? You think you’re one of them? Time to wake up” 

(my emphasis). 

Jake and Grace fail to persuade the people to evacuate, and Quaritch and his helicopters attack with tear 

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gas and incendiaries. When Home Tree burns and falls, it evokes 9/11. When her father dies in the attack, 

Neytiri rejects Jake as a betrayer. Repeating what has become a refrain, Jake narrates: “I was a warrior 

who dreamed he could bring peace. Sooner or later, though, you have to wake up” (my emphasis). 

When Jake next returns to his avatar body, he finds himself alone in the burned forest: “Outcast. Betrayer. 

Alien. I was in the place the eye does not see.” When he says “alien,” he means “human”; at this point, 

the usual meaning of the terms has been reversed, just as the waking life and the dream life have been 

reversed. Outcast, with nothing else to lose, Jake tames the giant bird, flies back to the clan as Toruk 

Macto, the messiah, and they fall to their knees in awe. It is the only way he can return and unite the clans 

to defeat the company. 

The climactic battle is reminiscent of the fight of the Ewoks against the Imperial Stormtroopers in Return 

of the Jedi (1983): primitive forest dwellers use ingenuity and knowledge of the environment to defeat an 

opposing force possessing overwhelming technological superiority. In Avatar, Mother Nature takes her 

revenge, as even the beasts of the forest and the birds of the sky attack the invading Earthmen. Neytiri 

kills Quaritch by piercing his body with arrows. Then, in a Pietá image, she cradles Jake’s human body in 

her huge arms and revives him with an oxygen mask. 

Aside from the death of the villain, the bad father, Jake also has a rival who must be eliminated. As Otto 

Rank writes, the mythological hero’s doubles “are shadowy brothers who, like the twin brother, must die 

for the hero’s sake” (Rank 1959, 90). In Avatar, the hero’s twin brother dies so that Jake can be reborn, no 

longer disabled, and become the messiah. 

Later Jake faces another rival in Tsu’tey, the chief warrior and next head of the clan, his rival for the 

love of Neytiri, and the man who dismisses Jake from the tribe. Although Tsu’tey allies with him when 

Jake becomes Toruk Macto, Tsu’tey is killed in the climactic battle. In the mythic pattern, not only the 

evil father figure but all the hero’s doubles, brothers, or rivals must be eliminated for him to become the 

messiah. 

That Jake is crippled is in line with other disabled mythical heroes, such as Oedipus, whose name means 

“swollen foot.” Otto Rank suggests that “the physical defects of certain heroes” is a means by which “the 

reproaches of the father for possible defects or shortcomings are incorporated into the myth[…] the hero 

being endowed with the same weakness which burdens the self-respect of the individual” (Rank 1959, 

92). 

The villains in both Avatar and District 9—Col. Quaritch and Col. Koobus—are similar characters: 

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despicable racists whom the hero must finally confront in a duel to the death. As critics note, the Marine 

commander Quaritch is “hyper-masculine…. one dimensional, exaggerated” (Reider 2011, 46). He is 

a cartoon villain, a ruthless, trained killer. Quaritch has a dragon painted on the cockpit of his attack 

helicopter, and his code name in battle is “Papa Dragon.” Ironically, Jake resembles Quaritch: both are 

tough, wounded Marines who show no fear, and in the final battle, Jake rides a flying dragon (Fore 2011). 

Quaritch is not Jake’s double but an evil father figure, possessing Jake’s potential but turned to destruction. 

Although Quaritch is in certain respects admirable—fearless, determined, and hard to kill—he is a racist 

villain. He echoes George W. Bush, saying, “Our only security lies in pre-emptive attack. We will fight 

terror with terror.” A fascist, he stands in for the patriarchy, a “scapegoat for capitalism and colonialism” 

who must suffer “spectacularly violent punishment” (Rieder 2011, 46). 

In contrast, the Na’vi is a matriarchal society. Their goddess, Eywa, is associated with Mother Nature, 

which they venerate, whereas Jake says of Earth: “There’s no green there. They killed their Mother, and 

they’re gonna do the same here…. Unless we stop them.” At the end of Avatar, Jake says, “The aliens 

[meaning the Earthmen] went back to their dying world.” Avatar reinforces its ecological message through 

eye-popping visual effects, digital and 3D imagery, creating a beautiful alien landscape, a lush, tropical 

paradise complete with exotic flora and fauna. 

Avatar is a moral tale painted in broad strokes: the evil corporation and the mad mercenary, who are 

racists, destroyers of the environment, and care only for profits, versus the natives, who are noble savages 

spiritually attuned to nature, literally through their connection to the tree of life. When an ecological 

paradise and a noble people are threatened with destruction by technologically overwhelming invaders, 

the audience of course knows which side to root for. The hero realizes that his world is corrupt and 

destructive and that the natives are good, so he goes native. To underscore the racial allegory, the villains 

are white, whereas the Na’vi are played by non-white actors: Latinos and Latinas, African Americans, and 

Native Americans. 

On the one hand, Avatar sends numerous positive messages to an American and a global audience: it is 

progressive about the disabled, anti-racist, anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, pro-gender equality, and, above 

all, pro-environment. It has been called “the most expensive environmental advocacy commercial ever 

made” (Scheib 2009). It also mocks the imperialist rhetoric of the George W. Bush administration about 

“pre-emptive strikes” and “shock and awe” and the use of mercenary armies such as Blackwater. On the 

other hand, these liberal messages are purveyed through a regressive myth about a white messiah and the 

noble savages—a white messiah who is reborn as the noblest savage of them all (Gordon and Vera 2009). 

The plot of Avatar is a pastiche, recycled from a dozen movies about the adventures of a mythic white 

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hero in a distant land or on a distant planet, including Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Dune (1984), Dances 

with Wolves (1990), and The Last Samurai (2003). The elements are predictable: the hero shows 

tremendous ability, quickly learns the native ways, woos the beautiful native princess, is inducted into the 

tribe, and leads them in a struggle for survival and freedom against evil outsiders. The white American 

racial imagination seems to require such stories (Gordon and Vera 2009). 

Avatar is a racial fantasy for the Age of Obama. Like Obama, Jake is racially mixed: although he starts out 

as white guy, he ends up inhabiting the body of an aboriginal on an alien planet. And, like Obama, Jake is 

accused of being anti-capitalist and anti-white. Yet the movie is a very expensive capitalist product which 

resolves white guilt by dividing whites into two kinds: the evil mercenaries who destroy the environment 

and kill the native population on behalf of the greedy corporations; and the noble white messiah who goes 

native and leads the tribes (and a few good white allies) in a successful battle to preserve their land and 

their way of life against the evil whites (Gordon and Vera 2009). 

District 9 has many of the same elements as Avatar: both are fast-moving, special-effects SF adventures 

about an evil corporation and its evil mercenary army, featuring a white hero sent to relocate sympathetic 

extraterrestrials from their home, who is transformed into an alien and in the end takes up their cause. 

Nevertheless, although they may have similar stories, Avatar is a romantic myth continuing the Hollywood 

tradition of tales of the noble white hero who goes native and joins the noble savages, whereas District 9 

was made outside the Hollywood orbit and has many of the marks of independent or Third World cinema. 

Avatar’s production budget was between $250 and $350 million dollars; District 9’s was only $30 million 

(Cho 2009). 

Moreover, Avatar is rated PG-13, targeted to a family audience, whereas District 9 is rated R, aimed at a 

more adult audience, and is more hard-edged, complete with graphic violence, swear words, and sexual 

content. For example, District 9 includes vomiting, bloodshed, and gross-out scenes of body horror; the 

protagonist Wikus’ all-purpose expletive is “fuckin”; there is mention of interspecies prostitution; and 

Wikus himself is falsely accused of having intercourse with aliens, “doing it doggy style with a demon.” 

District 9 co-writer and director Neill Blomkamp says, “The film is two things: it is a Hollywood popcorn 

movie…. but it also needed to be as real as possible and as grounded as possible” (Blomkamp 2009). 

Half of the film is pseudo-documentary, consisting of interviews and television news reports or pseudo- 

found footage, such as laboratory experiments and surveillance tapes. Many shots are done with hand- 

held camera, images caught on the fly rather than the beautifully composed shots of Avatar. To further 

the realism, it was shot largely on location in Soweto, the densely populated Johannesburg, South Africa 

black ghetto, in a section with a hundred abandoned tin shacks built on landfill. Although the events 

164

are fantastic, the environment is real: garbage-strewn and disgusting. To add to the authenticity, the 

mercenaries use contemporary South African military vehicles, uniforms, and weapons. 

Aside from favoring realism over romantic mythology, District 9 also differs tonally from Avatar 

because of its strong elements of horror, black humor, and political satire. Avatar has no horror, takes 

itself seriously, and lacks satire except for Quaritch’s echo of a George W. Bush line. Simply by virtue of 

being set in contemporary Johannesburg, District 9 comments on South Africa under apartheid and post- 

apartheid. 

It is very much a local film. Neill Blomkamp is a young, white South African who moved to Canada. In 

Vancouver, ”I started working as a special effects artist…. then directing music videos and commercials” 

(Abramovitch 2009). In 2005, he returned to make a short film, Alive in Joburg, in which he interviewed 

black South Africans for their opinions about recent black immigrants to South Africa from Zimbabwe 

and Nigeria. Given the opportunity to make a feature film by the New Zealand producer/director Peter 

Jackson (of the Lord of the Rings trilogy), he kept some of the documentary features and changed the 

immigrants into extraterrestrials. 

Blomkamp’s interest was in “Western SF placed in Southern Africa.” He says, “Johannesburg is 

science fiction to me […] I fear that Johannesburg represents the future of the planet […] where we’re 

going with lack of resources and overpopulation […] Five percent of the population controlling all the 

wealth, and everybody else lives in abject poverty. If you want to see that future, just take a plane trip 

to Johannesburg.” He saw the contrast between the exclusive gated communities of the wealthy and the 

vast, sprawling slums of Johannesburg, and he wanted to capture the atmosphere of “an urban prison” 

(Blomkamp 2009). The title, District 9, alludes to District 6, a mixed-race area in Cape Town, South 

Africa, whose citizens were forcibly evacuated in the 1970s so that the district could be leveled and rebuilt 

for whites only (“District Six”). 

The genesis of the film, he says, was “layering science fiction into the apartheid world” (Blomkamp 

2009). In 1982, 28 years before the film’s present, a million “Prawn” arrived in a disabled spaceship 

hovering over Johannesburg. The premise resembles Alien Nation (1988), except that in that film the 

aliens look much like humans and want only jobs, whereas the Prawn are insectoid and unassimilable 

(Zborowski 2010). Helpless and destitute, the Prawn were housed in a temporary camp. A sociologist 

comments for the documentary: “What was a temporary holding zone soon became fenced, became 

militarized, and, before we knew it, it was a slum.” Even though the wall around District 9 has an 

idealistic slogan—“Paving the Way to Unity”—and a battered iron statue of a Human and a Prawn 

holding hands, the reality is ugly, as the Prawn are confined to their ghetto, exploited and brutalized. 

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Signs proliferate: “No Prawn Allowed.” One black woman, interviewed on TV, says, “They’re spending 

so much money to keep them there, when they could be spending it on other things. But at least they’re 

keeping them separate from us.” Another black citizen bluntly says, on camera, “They must just go.” The 

neighboring humans begin to riot, and it is decided to relocate the aliens. 

This black vs. Prawn conflict can be considered a political allegory about the xenophobia of the post- 

apartheid South African society, in which poor black South Africans rioted against destitute Zimbabweans, 

even killing some immigrants. According to Blomkamp, they hated the Zimbabwean refugees as “aliens 

who had arrived in their communities” (Blomkamp 2009). 

The Na’vi in Avatar live in harmony with their planet, and have a sophisticated culture and direct 

biochemical links to the ecosystem; the humans are the alien invaders. Jake says of the Na’vi, “There is 

nothing that we have that they want.” In District 9, however, the Prawn are the aliens intruding on planet 

Earth. But they come neither as the typical invading aliens out to conquer the planet nor as wise and 

peaceful visitors but as homeless indigents, undesirable aliens who can never be integrated. 

For most of the film, we are kept at a documentary remove from the Prawn. Our first glimpse of them is 

documentary footage of first contact aboard their stranded ship by a South African exploratory team. The 

Prawn are caught in a floodlight: a horde of grey, shambling monstrosities that initially elicit shock and 

horror. A reporter tells us, “The creatures were extremely malnourished. They were very unhealthy. They 

seemed to be aimless.” They are helpless refugees, charity cases. 

An entomologist says in an interview that they are insectoid, hive creatures. The Prawn in the colony 

are drone workers who lack initiative because “they lost all the upper leadership, for whatever cause, we 

presume illness.” They scavenge the garbage piles for anything usable and are thieving magpies who 

will steal the sneakers off your feet and engage in seemingly random violence. A sociologist says that the 

derogatory term “Prawn” “implies something that is a bottom feeder that scavenges the leftovers.” Not 

mentioned is that there is in Johannesburg a cricket called the Parktown prawn, “capable of large jumps 

when threatened, often ejecting an offensive black fecal liquid.” These pests eat anything, including cat 

food (“Parktown Prawn”). The movie gives the aliens all the attributes of the Parktown prawn. Unlike the 

handsome humanoids in Avatar, the Prawn are ugly, shiftless pests, ideal targets for racist paranoia. In the 

racist imagination, ethnic and racial others are viewed as animals or insects. As Quaritch says when he 

destroys the natives’ home, “That’s how you scatter the roaches.” 

Nevertheless, despite their insectoid features, the Prawn are relatable through their anthropomorphic 

shape: they have two arms, two legs, and a head, and they walk upright. Says Neill Blomkamp, “Because 

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you have to empathize with the aliens, they needed to have a humanlike face…. You can see that there’s 

an intelligent, sentient being behind the eyes, but it’s gross and you don’t want to be sitting next to it on 

the bus” (Blomkamp 2009). Like Spielberg’s E.T., they are ugly but have large, expressive, humanoid 

eyes. In addition, some of the Prawn comically adopt bits of human clothing. 

Moreover, despite the apparently aimless behavior of the drones, the Prawn are not primitives but possess 

an advanced technology that carried them across the galaxy. They have something the humans want: 

advanced weaponry. MNU (Multi-National United), the corporation tasked with relocating the Prawn, 

wants those weapons. An MNU scientist says, “Their technology is engineered in a biological manner and 

interacts with their DNA.” Whoever unlocks the secret, so that humans can operate Prawn weapons, will 

make billions of dollars. 

For that reason, MNU engages in grotesque medical experiments in a hidden lab, trying to uncover the 

secrets of Prawn DNA. Blomkamp says the idea of medical torture was taken from Nazi experiments, but 

there were also racial medical experiments during the apartheid regime. For example, “They were trying 

to develop pathogens that could affect a black genetic group and not a white genetic group” (Blomkamp 

2009). 

Just as we are at first distanced from the aliens for most of District 9, so we are distanced from the hero. 

Jake in Avatar is a crippled warrior made sympathetic through his voice-over narration. But Wikus van 

der Merwe, the white South African protagonist in District 9, is a weasel of a guy with a ratty mustache, 

a petty bureaucrat who zealously does the corporation’s dirty work of evicting the aliens. We are kept at 

a documentary remove from him. His mother says, “Wikus was not a very smart boy,” and his father-in- 

law says Wikus “was never very strong.” At first, his only positive characteristic is his deep love for his 

wife. Blomkamp says, “He’s a complete bureaucrat, this very anal, rule-following kind of guy. He’s a…. 

passive racist, an indirect racist” (Blomkamp 2009). 

Nevertheless, in the course the film, Wikus changes dramatically for the better. As Blomkamp says, “he 

goes through this staggering arc…. As he becomes more alien, he becomes more human” (Blomkamp 

2009). 

In the opening, the documentary alludes to an unspecified disaster which happened during the evictions. 

Wikus was blamed, and apparently he is either missing or dead. His mother and wife are very sad, but 

some co-workers denounce Wikus as a betrayer who can’t be forgiven. This arouses our curiosity at the 

beginning as to what he did and whether he is still alive. 

Wikus is elated and proud at being promoted by his father-in-law to field officer in charge of the eviction, 

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a dubious promotion due to nepotism. He takes his new authority very seriously and goes door to door 

among the Prawn shacks, grasping his clipboard, asking each alien to put a scrawl on a pseudo-legal 

eviction notice which most of them do not understand. Helicopters hover overhead, and heavily armed 

soldiers force unarmed Prawns to their knees and murder any resisters, like the Nazi liquidations of the 

Jewish ghettos. One South African critic attests to the authenticity of the scene: “The obvious value of 

turning the shack dweller into a real alien is that the film can deal with the […] processes by which we 

turn people into aliens, contain them, criminalise them, beat them and then evict them ‘for their own good’ 

[…] although it is a fantasy it contains more reality than we’re likely to find in […] the official consensus” 

(Pitmore 2009). 

Wikus is a zealous enforcer for the corporation, using bribery—cans of catfood for the adults and candy 

for the child aliens—and threats: when the alien called “Christopher Johnson” refuses to sign, he threatens 

to put his little son into child custody. 

Wikus is elated when he uncovers illegal caches of alien weapons or technology, but he is most 

despicable when he discovers an alien hatchery. He begins aborting the alien eggs by unplugging them 

from nourishment, a dead cow carcass. Then he is gleeful as the incubator is destroyed by flamethrower, 

explaining to the documentary filmmaker that “the popping sound, almost like popcorn,” that they hear 

is the sound of the Prawn eggs exploding. At this moment, Wikus seems not that different from the brutal 

mercenary Col. Koobus Venter, who smiles when he shoots a wounded, unarmed Prawn in the head. 

Things begin to change drastically for Wikus when he discovers a capsule in Christopher Johnson’s lab. 

He accidentally squirts himself in the face with the black fluid in the capsule, which is spaceship fuel, and 

the contamination begins the process of his transformation into a Prawn. He becomes weak and feverish, 

vomits, oozes black fluid from his nose, loses control of his bowels, and, most scary, starts to lose his 

fingernails. That evening, he vomits black fluid and collapses. 

At the hospital, when they cut the cast off his arm (he had been injured during the evacuations), to his 

horror he discovers that his left hand has changed into an alien claw. Immediately, Wikus is placed in 

quarantine and evacuated to the MNU lab. There he is poked and prodded and forced to shoot targets 

with alien weaponry. When he refuses to kill a live Prawn, they shock him with an electric cattle prod. 

Wikus is horrified. 

When they prepare to operate to harvest his valuable mix of human and alien DNA, Wikus goes berserk, 

jumps off the table, seizes a hostage, and escapes. For the rest of the movie, he is on the run from MNU, 

who want to recapture him because he is “the most valuable business artifact on Earth.” As Blomkamp 

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says, “Our protagonist flees to the area that he is responsible for creating and ends up in a shack, which is 

precisely what this guy kind of deserved” (Blomkamp 2009). Wikus now finds himself in a place similar 

to Jake after the fall of Hometree: alien, outcast, and alone. 

Yet the fundamental difference is that, for Jake, being an alien is voluntary and a reward, whereas for 

Wikus it is involuntary and a punishment. In that sense, District 9 resembles movies in which a white 

character is transformed against his will, by magic, into a person of another race, such as Finian’s Rainbow 

(1968), Watermelon Man (1970), and Zelig (1984) (Vera and Gordon 2003,146-50). Wikus is a racist who 

can only be redeemed by literally forcing him into the skin of the despised race he has been oppressing. 

But his physical and psychological change into an alien is gradual. 

At first, Wikus falls back on legalities and white privilege, as when he demands that a fast-food restaurant 

is legally obliged to serve him. And when he discovers an alien ship beneath the alien Christopher’s shack. 

Wikus says, “This is very illegal. This is a find…. Are you fuckers trying to fly this? You sneaky fucking 

prawns!” His mindset as an MNU bureaucrat and enforcer of the law in the ghetto comically clashes with 

his present situation as an outlaw who is half-Prawn and needs a place to hide. 

To his disgust, Wikus gains the alien taste for catfood. Next his teeth start falling out. When his wife rejects 

him on the phone, in despair Wikus attempts to chop off his alien left arm with a hatchet, succeeding only 

in amputating a claw. Later he is appalled to find the skin peeling off his body as it is being replaced by 

a Prawn carapace. Blomkamp calls this “body horror…. There’s nothing more horrifying that the idea 

that your body is coming apart at the seams…. You are turning into another being…. Does the structure 

of your brain turn into something else as well? At what point is Wikus no longer Wikus?” (Blomkamp 

2009). In this respect, the film recalls the physical and psychological torment of the hero of the horror 

movie The Fly (1986) who because of a botched lab experiment is slowly transformed into a monster, 

half-human and half-insect. 

Despite his accelerating physical transformation, Wikus still clings to his human identity. When 

Christopher’s little son compares his arm to Wikus’, saying “We are the same,” Wikus denies it: “We’re 

not the fucking same.” Yet if he is not yet a Prawn, nevertheless he is no longer the same heartless fascist 

bureaucrat. He admits to Christopher and Christopher’s son that the relocation camp he was touting is “more 

like a concentration camp.” 

When Wikus learns that Christopher can change him back into human shape if they can get to the 

mothership, he hatches a plan to recover the capsule containing the black fuel. He becomes a desperado, 

stealing alien weapons from a Nigerian gang and shooting his way out, then breaking into the MNU lab 

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with Christopher, killing several mercenaries and escaping with the capsule. According to Blomkamp, the 

film questions how far a man can be pushed until he crosses over “to become this mercenary rogue guy” 

(Blomkamp 2009). Wikus has now been pushed so far that he will stop at nothing. 

Stopping at nothing means that he is even willing to betray his Prawn friend. Christopher now says 

he must go home in the mothership to get help to rescue his people from the medical experiments he 

witnessed in the MNU lab, and he will return in three years. Unwilling to wait, Wikus hits Christopher in 

the head and takes off in the command module with Christopher’s son. When he slugs his friend, it makes 

us hate Wikus again, says Blomkamp. “Because, at his core, he’s kind of a dick” (Blomkamp 2009). You 

begin to wonder whether this character is redeemable. 

After that, the action speeds up to the climactic showdown, which is a three-way shootout between the 

mercenaries, the Nigerians, and Wikus. At first, Wikus flees like a coward from Koobus, but when he 

overhears Koobus’ plan to kill Christopher, he returns to rescue him. This is the turning point of the film: 

Wikus, who previously acted only for himself, now stays behind to fight so that his alien friend can get to 

his son, go to the mothership, and return home. 

Because of Koobus’ sacrifice, Christopher and his son succeed, and the mothership takes off. There may 

even be a religious allegory in a character named Christopher who wants to save his people, ascends into 

the sky, and promises to return, not in three days but in three years (Smith-Rowsey). The conversion of 

Wikus could then be seen almost as a religious conversion. 

In the climactic battle, Wikus in a robotic exosuit fights off the mercenary army and Col. Koobus. It 

resembles the climax of Avatar, but with weapons reversed because in Avatar the mercenary Col. Quaritch 

had the enhanced powers of exosuit armor. Finally, an exhausted Wikus crawls out of the damaged 

exosuit. Now further transformed, Wikus has one human and one enlarged alien eye. Koobus holds a gun 

on him, saying, “You half-breed piece of shit, I’m just gonna kill you myself,” like Quaritch in the climax 

of Avatar calling Jake a race traitor as he prepares to kill him. And, just as Jake is rescued at the last 

moment by the native woman Neytiri, so Wikus is rescued by a mob of the Prawn, who tear Koobus apart 

limb from limb . 

The film ends with a return to the documentary mode. “District 10 now houses 2.5 million aliens and 

continues to grow.” No one knows if Christopher Johnson “will come back and declare war on us,” and 

no one knows what happened to Wikus. His wife Tania has not given up hope; she just found a little metal 

flower on her doorstep, typical of the handmade gifts Wikus used to give her. In the film’s last shot, we see 

a Prawn on a garbage heap shaping a little metal sculpture. In his commentary, the director says, “I hope 

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the audience feels they’ve gone along on this journey with Wikus and that he redeems himself in the end” 

(Blomkamp 2009). 

Both films were very popular and have been widely praised and criticized. Avatar was praised for its 

beautiful cinematography, groundbreaking effects, and some of its liberal messages, but criticized for its 

clichés, bad dialogue, and preachiness. District 9 was lauded for its novelty, realism, and relevance to 

contemporary globalization and South African problems in the post-apartheid period, but criticized for 

being politically confused and perhaps reinforcing the racist messages it seems to be trying to deconstruct. 

One representative critic writes of District 9, “It decries xenophobia but presents a situation where 

progress and integration are rendered unimaginable. The film creates the alien identification figure that its 

plot requires [Christopher], but the script does not do enough to help us understand how he ‘fits in’ with 

the other aliens” (Zborowski 2010). 

In particular, the film spurred outrage among some Africans for its apparently racist representation of the 

Nigerian immigrants who have settled in District 9 and exploit the Prawns, and who are represented as 

vicious gangsters led by a superstitious and savage warlord. One critic wrote that this portrayal “spits in 

the faces of the millions of Nigerian citizens who devoted themselves to the anti-apartheid movement” 

(Ray 2010), and an online petition site asked the filmmakers to apologize to the Nigerian people (“District 

9 slander” 2010). But another African critic responded, “If District 9 ‘hates Nigerians’…. then it hates 

its powerful, white characters even more…. Blomkamp is forcing us to challenge our own perceptions 

about race and equality. He makes it clear the Nigerians are no better or worse than their white (or 

alien) counterparts, creating an unsettling sort of equality among the characters. And while the film may 

occasionally play on clumsy racial stereotypes, it also encourages us to challenge them” (Azikiwe 2009). 

Other critics concur: “No single group within South African society is presented in a sympathetic way, 

neither the MNU people or the military, nor the people on the streets or the ‘experts’ interviewed” (Gunkel 

and Konig 2010). 

In conclusion, I would have to say that District 9 is a more thoughtful movie than Avatar. Whereas 

Avatar sometimes spells out its messages in a heavy-handed way, District 9 allows the audience to sift 

through its various layers—faux-documentary and cinematic narrative—and reach our own conclusions. 

I enjoy Blomkamp’s dark sense of humor, his bureaucratic nerd hero and bizarre aliens who, unlike 

Cameron’s Na’vi, are “ignoble savages.” At first, both hero and alien are deliberately unsympathetic. In a 

typical science fiction movie, the Prawns would have been the villains, incomprehensible extraterrestrial 

monsters. We come to sympathize with the hero and the aliens only later, when we see that the fascist 

multi-national corporation and its mercenary army is far worse, more inhumane (and inhuman) than 

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anyone else in the film. 

Blomkamp says, “The thing of District 9 is that I’m not trying to be overly metaphorical or have 

any preachy lessons or any political standpoint other than I grew up in that environment, and I love 

science fiction, and I’m merging the two” (Abramovitch 2009). While writing the script with co-author 

Terri Tatchell, Blomkamp says he became aware “‘that all these very serious topics about racism and 

xenophobia and segregation would start to shine through the science-fiction-esque veneer…. I had to be 

very careful that I didn’t get too close to these serious topics with a film that’s mostly a summer thrill ride.’ 

He told himself, ‘It’s your first film. Use it as satire. Chill out” (Corliss 2009). 

If we consider District 9 as a satire, then its strategy becomes more understandable: it is not a racist film 

but rather a satire on racist stereotypes. Satire aims to ridicule people, institutions, or attitudes by pushing 

them ad absurdum, like Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal.” District 9 takes all the stereotypes of 

xenophobia and racist paranoia and realizes them in the Prawn, who are totally “Other”: ugly, violent, 

insect-like, shiftless, erratic, not that bright, thieving, incomprehensible in their language, and low and 

vile in their eating habits and behavior. They are straight out of a racist nightmare, inhuman creatures 

possessing every single negative attribute which the xenophobic imagination projects upon the “Other.” 

Having created these monsters, the film then challenges us nevertheless to sympathize with them, for they 

are stranded on a planet where they do not belong and will never fit in. Through Wikus’ interaction with 

Christopher and Christopher’s little son, we come to realize that they are intelligent beings who care for 

each other and have moral values, are our technological superiors, and are worthy of respect and decent 

treatment, not to be shunted aside into slums, to be exploited and brutalized. 

Both Avatar and District 9 suggest that contemporary Western civilization is so drastically ill that the cure 

might be for white people to become radically other, to transform themselves into aliens. Although I enjoy 

both films, District 9 is the more challenging and thought-provoking work. As one critic says, “District 9 

serves to highlight just how far cinema has come by depicting the human Self and the alien Other as two 

halves of the same whole” (Jones 2010, 122). 

References 

Abramovitch, Seth. 2009. “District 9 Director Neill Blomkamp: The Movieline Interview.” 

http://movieline.com/2009/08/11/district-9-director-neill-blomkamp/ 

Avatar. 2009. 20th Century Fox. Director/Screenplay: James Cameron. Producers: James Cameron 

and Jon Landau. Photography (3-D): Mauro Fiore. Music: James Horner. Cast: Sam Worthington 

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(Corporal Jake Sully), Zoe Saldana (Neytiri), Stephen Lang (Colonel Miles Quaritch), Sigourney 

Weaver (Dr. Grace Augustine), Joel David Moore (Norm Spellman), Michelle Rodriguez (Trudy 

Chacon), Giovanni Ribisi (Parker Selfridge), Laz Alonso (Tsu’tey), C.C.H. Pounder (Mo’at), Wes 

Studi (Eytucan), Dileep Rao (Dr. Max Patel). 

Azikiwe, Abayomi. 2009. “District 9’ Film Generates Controversy Over Depiction of Nigerians.” Pan 

African News Wire. September 8, 2009. 

http://panafricannews.blogspot.com/2009/09/9-film-generates-controversy-over.html 

Blomkamp, Neill 2009. District 9 DVD commentary. 

Cho, David. 2009. “‘Avatar’ Part 2, with David Cho: Who Remembers ‘District 9’?” The Awl. December 

18th, 2009. 

http://www.theawl.com/2009/12/avatar-part-2-with-david-cho-who-remembers-district-9 

Corliss, Richard. 2009. “District 9’ Review: The Summer’s Coolest Fantasy Film.” Time, August 13, 

2009. http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1916009,00.html 

“District Six.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_Six 

District 9. 2009. Tristar. Director: Neill Blomkamp. Writers: Neill Blomkamp and Terri Tatchell. 

Producers: Peter Jackson, Carolynne Cunningham. Co-Producer: Philippa Boyens. Music: Clinton 

Shorter. Photography: Trent Opaloch. Production Design: Philip Ivey. Cast: Sharlto Copley(Wikus 

van der Merwe), Jason Cope: Christopher Johnson, David James (Col. Koobus Venter), Vanessa 

Haywood (Tania van der Merwe), Louis Minaar (Piet Smit). 

Fore, Dana. 2011. “The tracks of Sully’s tears: disability in James Cameron’s Avatar.” Jump Cut 53. 

http://www.ejumpcut.org/currentissue/foreAvatar/index.html 

Gordon, Andrew M. and Hernán Vera. 2009. “Dances With Aliens.” Racism Review. http://www. 

racismreview.com/blog/2009/12/30/dances-with-aliens-james-camerons-avatar-movie-and-white- 

saviors/ 

Gunkel, Henriette and Christiane König. 2010. “You are not welcome here’: post-apartheid negrophobia 

& real aliens in Blomkamp’s District 9.” Dark Matter: In the Ruins of Imperial Culture. 7 Feb 

2010. 

http://www.darkmatter101.org/site/2010/02/07/you-are-not-welcome-here/. 

Jones, Matthew. 2010. District 9: Review. Film & History 40.1: 120-22. 

http://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/film_and_history/v040/40.1.jones. 

html 

Newitz, Annalee. “When Will White People Stop Making Movies Like Avatar?” 

http://io9.com/5422666/when-will-white-people-stop-making-movies-like-avatar 

“Parktown prawn.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parktown_prawn 

Pitmore, Richard. 2009. “Hold the Prawns.” The South African Civil Society Information Service 

website, September 14, 2009. http://www.sacsis.org.za/site/article/352.1 

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Rank, Otto. 1959. The Myth of the Birth of the Hero and Other Writings, ed. Philip Freund. NY: Vintage. 

Ray, Carina. 2010. “Humanizing Aliens or Alienating Africans?: District 9 and the Politics of 

Representation.” http://www.zeleza.com/symposium/949 

Reider, John. 2011. “Race and revenge fantasies in Avatar, District 9 and Inglourious Basterds.” Science 

Fiction Film and Television 4.1: 41-56. 

Scheib, Richard. 2009. Review of Avatar. http://0to5stars-moria.ca/sciencefiction/avatar-2009.htm 

Smith-Rowsey, Daniel. “From Santa Mira to South Africa: Updating the Invasion Narrative for the 21st 

Century.” JGCinema.com: Cinema and Globalization. 

http://www.jgcinema.com/single.php?sl=invasion-body-snatchers-dossier-horror 

Vera, Hernán and Andrew M. Gordon. 2003. Screen Saviors: Hollywood Fictions of Whiteness. Lanham, 

MD: Rowman and Littlefield. 

Zborowski James. 2010. “District 9 and its World.” Jump Cut 52. http://www.ejumpcut.org/currentissue/ 

zoborowskiDst9/ 

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The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Technology: 

What Kind of a Future Will Human Beings Create? 

Peter L. Rudnytsky 

University of Florida 

1 

In the sublime first stasimon of Sophocles’ Antigone, the Chorus sings of the seemingly limitless powers 

enjoyed by human beings. Man, the Chorus proclaims, can sail across the ocean in swift ships, plough 

the unwearied earth, capture beasts of land, sea, and air, learn languages to express his thoughts, build 

houses and cities, and even discover remedies for once-incurable diseases. There is only death, the Chorus 

somberly notes, from which man cannot escape. 

Even this rough paraphrase may suffice to convey something of the essential duality in the attitude 

expressed by Sophocles’ Chorus: on the one hand, the ode celebrates—much as will Shakespeare’s 

Hamlet two millennia later—“What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite 

in faculty”—while on the other hand, by its reminder of the finality of death, the Chorus likewise 

foreshadows Hamlet’s melancholy question, “And yet what to me is this quintessence of dust?” 

Indeed, the tension between exuberant optimism and tragic pessimism in the ode as a whole is distilled by 

Sophocles in its haunting first line, which reads in the original Greek: 

πολλὰ τὰ δεινὰ κοὐδὲν ἀνθώρπου δεινότερον πέλει· 

The Victorian translation of R. C. Jebb is instructive as much for what it gets wrong as for what it gets 

right about the line: “Wonders are many, and none is more wonderful than man.” For the words that 

Jebb translates as “wonders” and “more wonderful,” δεινὰ and δεινότερον, are both formed from the 

adjectival noun δεινῶς, which, according to the Liddell-Scott-Jones lexicon of classical Greek, has three 

principal meanings: (1) fearful or terrible; (2) marvelously strong or powerful; and (3) clever or skillful. 

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Jebb, it is clear, has captured the second of these meanings, and possibly also the third; but nothing at all 

of the first, which portrays the power of what is deinos not as something benign but rather as something 

inducing fear and terror in those who are exposed to it. 

Thus, Heidegger, in his profound philosophical meditation on this chorus in An Introduction to 

Metaphysics, translates deinos as unheimlich or “uncanny,” while Hölderlin, in his inspired poetic 

rendering, opts even more radically for ungeheuer, meaning “terrible” or “monstrous”: 

Ungeheuer ist viel. Doch nichts 

Ungeheuerer, als der Mensch. 

Or, in English: 

There is much that is terrible. But nothing 

That is more terrible than man. 

As Heidegger comments in part, “the deinon is the terrible in the sense of the overpowering power which 

compels panic fear, true fear; and in equal measure it is the collected silent awe that vibrates with its own 

rhythm.” On the other hand, Heidegger continues, “deinon means the powerful in the sense of one who 

uses power”; and, in summary, “the verse says that to be the strangest of all is the basic trait of the human 

essence, within which all other traits must find their place.” 1 

What Heidegger formulates in existential terms can also be understood from the vantage point of 

psychoanalysis. For it is clear that deinos is what Freud would call a “primal word”—that is, a word with 

two antithetical meanings, such as the Latin altus, which means both “high” and “deep,” or sacer, which 

means both “sacred” and “accursed”—and in translating deinos into German as unheimlich, Heidegger 

joins up with Freud, who devotes a paper to the phenomenon of the uncanny, which he explains as 

something encountered either in life or in art that one experiences as “strange” precisely because it is only 

too “familiar” (heimlich), except that it has been alienated from the subject by a process of repression. 

With the aid of Heidegger, Hölderlin, and Freud, therefore, we have found in the first line of Sophocles’ 

choral ode a starting point for our investigation into the paradox that makes humans “the strangest of all” 

beings, at once the most wonderful and terrible of creatures, a perspective that will guide as we turn now 

1 Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics (1935), trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven: Yale University Press, 

1959), pp. 149-51. 

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to reflect on the place of the work of art in the age of digital technology, and thus what it might mean to 

speak of the creative human being of the future. 

2 

In giving my address at the Second World Humanities Forum in Busan the title “The Work of Art in the 

Age of Digital Technology,” I mean to pay homage to Walter Benjamin’s classic essay of 1936, “The 

Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Written during what we can now recognize to have 

been the age of high modernism, Benjamin’s essay sets forth with great cogency many of the issues that 

continue to preoccupy us in the current postmodern era. 

Benjamin’s central concern is to elucidate what he terms “the social bases of the contemporary decay 

of the aura,” 2 with reference above all to the quintessentially twentieth-century arts of photography 

and film. For Benjamin, the “aura” of a work of art emanates from “its unique existence at the place 

where it happens to be,” and, because “the presence of the original is the requisite to the concept of 

authenticity,” it is precisely the aura that “withers in the age of mechanical reproduction” (pp. 222-23). 

In Benjamin’s analysis, the power of mechanical reproduction at once “substitutes a plurality of copies 

for a unique existence” and “detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition.” In keeping 

with Heidegger’s exposition only one year earlier of the antithetical meanings of Sophocles’ definition of 

man, moreover, Benjamin notes that both these consequences of technology are “intimately connected” 

with “contemporary mass movements,” and that their “social significance, particularly in its most positive 

form, is inconceivable without its destructive, cathartic aspect, that is, the liquidation of the traditional 

value of the cultural heritage” (p. 223). 

Benjamin’s formulations are astonishing in their prescience. His task, let me reiterate, is to examine the 

effects of technological innovation on the nature and experience of the work of art, a project that the 

ever-accelerating rate of change makes even more urgent in our own time. As if he could foresee the 

iconic Campbell’s Soup Cans of Andy Warhol, Benjamin writes, “To an ever greater degree the work 

of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproduction” (p. 226). Or, in a harbinger of 

the astonishing popularity of “reality TV,” Benjamin remarks: “Any man today can lay claim to being 

filmed” (p. 233). And, calling attention to the way that the proliferation of newspapers and other print 

media has changed the relationship between writers and readers, Benjamin anticipates the emergence 

of Internet blogs when he observes that “the distinction between author and public is about to lose its 

2 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, trans. Ralph Manheim 

(London: Fontana Books, 1973), p. 225. Subsequent page references will be given parenthetically. 

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basic character,” and “at any moment, the reader is ready to turn into a writer,” who, “as expert,” in some 

domain or another, “gains access to authorship” (p. 234). 

In short, Benjamin anticipates the advent of postmodernism, which Jean Baudrillard has characterized 

as marked by the emergence of a third order of simulation. In Baudrillard’s historical schema, the first 

order of simulation is associated with the premodern period in Western culture, in which the sign or image 

stands in place of the real object, while the second order arises during the modern period as the distinction 

between image and reality breaks down due to the proliferation of mass-produced copies in the Industrial 

Revolution. This shift from the first to the second order of simulation is the transformation in sensibility 

registered by Benjamin in his essay. Toward the end of the twentieth century, however, humanity has 

collectively reached the third order of simulation endemic to postmodernism, in which the sign usurps 

the vacated place of the thing, the copy becomes ontologically prior to the original, and “there is only the 

simulacrum.” 3 

Consider, against this backdrop, Benjamin’s quotation from Paul Valéry’s 1928 essay, “The Conquest 

of Ubiquity,” concerning the impact of technological progress on aesthetic experience: “Just as water, 

gas, and electricity are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our needs in response to a minimal 

effort, so we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and disappear at a simple 

movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign.” 4 It is, again, uncanny how what Benjamin, with the aid 

of Valéry, has to say about the way photography foreshadows the advent of the sound film in the modern 

era applies even more strikingly to the postmodern era, in which it is on our computers that images “appear 

and disappear with a simple movement of the hand,” and that which flickers before us on the screen is 

indeed “hardly more than a sign.” 

Valéry’s notion of the “conquest of ubiquity” figures centrally in Benjamin’s argument. For integral to 

Benjamin’s contrast between painting and film as visual media is the paradox that film offers, “precisely 

because of the thoroughgoing permeation of reality by mechanical equipment, an aspect of reality 

which is free of all equipment” (p. 236). In other words, the terrible yet wondrous power of “mechanical 

equipment” creates the illusion of an unmediated access to reality that depends on the spectator’s 

obliviousness to his reliance on the very “equipment” that makes the experience possible. By extension, 

the “aura” of a work of art that is embedded in a tradition, but which “withers” when art is mass-produced, 

3 Given that my subject is postmodernism, I have taken the liberty of relying on the summary of Baudrillard’s schema 

found in Wikipedia. For his own more nuanced exposition, see Jean Baudrillard, “The Precession of Simulacra,” in Simulacra 

and Simulation (1981), trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), pp. 1-42. 

4 Quoted in Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” p. 221. 

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has as its precondition “the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be” (p. 224), whereas 

the countervailing “desire of contemporary masses” to overcome “the uniqueness of every reality by 

accepting its reproduction” has as its corollary for Benjamin an equally ardent impulse “to bring things 

‘closer’ spatially and humanly” (p. 225), that is, the manufacture of a sense of immediacy that is all the 

more factitious for seeming to be indistinguishable from reality itself. 

It is, for Benjamin, the heightened importance of the mass in twentieth-century culture that ultimately 

provides “a matrix from which all traditional behavior towards works of art issues today in a new form” 

(p. 241). The role of technology in the mass-production of arts such as photography and especially film is 

mirrored by the rise of the crowd or mob as a force in social and political life. Benjamin’s essay, indeed, 

is structured around a series of binary oppositions that turns on the contrast between the responses to 

art by the individual spectator and a collective entity or mass. In Benjamin’s words, “distraction and 

concentration form polar opposites which may be stated as follows: A man who concentrates before a 

work of art is absorbed by it. He enters into this work of art,” whereas “the distracted mass absorbs the 

work of art” (p. 241). The individual spectator is to the mass, that is, as concentration is to distraction, as 

presence is to representation, but also, in a seeming paradox, as distance and detachment are to immediacy 

and participation, and as tradition is to what Benjamin terms “proletarianization” (p. 243). 

One has only to recite this litany of polarities invoked by Benjamin to be reminded of yet another, even 

more famous antithesis that has been deployed in a treatise on aesthetic experience to account, specifically, 

for the power of Greek tragedy. I refer to Nietzsche’s opposition between the principles embodied in the 

deities of Apollo and Dionysus, whom, in The Birth of Tragedy, (1872), he equates, respectively, with the 

plastic arts and music as well as with the realms of dreams and intoxication—or, in Schopenhauer’s terms, 

with the dichotomy between the world of appearances and the underlying substrate of the will. But if, for 

Nietzsche, the rebirth of tragedy in the modern world was dependent on a reawakening of the spirit of 

music—which, at this early stage of his career, he believed to be instantiated in the operas of Wagner— 

and, by extension, on a revival of the intuitive wisdom of Dionysus, for Benjamin it was, conversely, the 

gathering storm of collective intoxication that was responsible not simply for the disappearance of the 

aura of art works in an age of mechanical reproduction but above all for the threat of catastrophe that, in 

1936, he could see looming over Europe and, indeed, the world. 

The exact circumstances of Benjamin’s death in 1940 in the Spanish Pyrenees remain shrouded in 

mystery, but there can be no doubt that this German-Jewish Marxist mystic was one of the millions 

engulfed by the conflagration of the Holocaust. Thus, what Benjamin has to say about the “destructive” 

as well as the “positive” aspects of “contemporary mass movements” has at once an acutely personal 

and a broad historical significance. As he writes in the epilogue of his essay, “the destructiveness of 

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war furnishes proof that society has not been mature enough to incorporate technology as its organ, that 

technology has not been sufficiently developed to cope with the elemental forces of society” (p. 244). 

Benjamin’s warning on the eve of World War II concerning the dangers lurking in technology to human 

beings who may not be “mature enough” to harness its powers wisely returns us to Sophocles’ double 

vision in the choral ode of Antigone, and it confronts us even more starkly at the dawn of the twenty-first 

century. 

3 

In the July 1945 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, Vannevar Bush, a primary organizer of the Manhattan 

Project and Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, which promoted cooperation 

between the scientific establishment and the United States government, published an article, “As We 

May Think,” an abridged version of which was reprinted in Life magazine on September 10, 1945. Not 

coincidentally, it was in the interval between the two appearances of Bush’s article that the atomic bombs 

were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a turning point in human history in which Bush himself played 

a decisive role. 

Although Bush’s article has garnered considerable attention from contemporary scholars, it is still far less 

well known than Benjamin’s essay, to which it forms an intellectual and spiritual sequel. For whereas 

Benjamin’s essay takes stock on the eve of World War II of the changes wrought in human consciousness 

by advances in the modern technologies of mechanical reproduction, Bush’s article forecasts in truly 

remarkable ways the further revolutionary changes that are currently taking place in our own postmodern 

era of digital technology. 

Although it is impossible to read “As We May Think” without being reminded of the atomic bomb, it is 

alluded to only obliquely by Bush at the outset of his paper. Secure in the knowledge that the war not only 

in Europe but also in Japan had already been won, Bush looks ahead to the coming time of peace and 

poses the question, “What are the scientists to do next?” 5 Bush is concerned especially with physicists, 

who, of all scientists, “have been thrown most violently off stride” by their participation in the war effort, 

which has inspired them to invent “strange destructive gadgets,” as a result of which it has been possible 

for America “to turn back the enemy” and for those enlisted in the heroic struggle to feel themselves “part 

of a great team” (p. 101). 

5 Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think,” The Atlantic Monthly, July 1945, p. 101. Subsequent page references will be given 

parenthetically. 

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In words that echo the chorus of Antigone, Bush begins the main portion of his article by asking, “Of 

what lasting benefit has been man’s use of science and of the new instruments which his research brought 

into existence?” (p. 101). He responds by asserting that these inventions “have increased his control of 

his material environment,” specifically citing improvements in food, clothing, and shelter. Even more 

sweepingly, Bush credits science with bestowing upon mankind “a progressive freedom from disease and 

an increased span of life.” The dividends paid by these “new instruments,” he contends, extend from the 

physical realm to “improved mental health.” 

Although few people are likely to dispute Bush’s contention that science has been of “lasting benefit” 

to humanity in a variety of ways, there is, by comparison with Benjamin’s analysis, a naïve and indeed 

utopian quality to Bush’s celebration of progress. For when he states that the wonders of technology have 

not only improved man’s material lot but have also “increased his security and released him from the 

bondage of his bare existence” (p. 101), he seems oblivious to the reality that, despite America’s postwar 

economic boom, this was not a time of political security but rather of what W. H. Auden, in a poem 

published in 1947, christened the “age of anxiety.” It is as though, having himself been implicated first in 

the discovery and then in the use of atomic weapons, Bush is unable to grasp the cataclysmic potential of 

the “strange destructive gadgets” he and his colleagues have, as though in a fulfillment of Mary Shelley’s 

prophecy in her Romantic tale of the mad scientist Dr. Victor Frankenstein, “brought into existence” in 

their laboratories. Seen from this vantage point, Bush’s paper, prescient though it is in its anticipation of 

the Internet and other breakthroughs in the technological domain, takes on its greatest significance as a 

symptom of an anxiety exposed in the poetry of Auden and Sophocles but that he himself, as a scientist, is 

forced to repress—namely, that the same powers of the human mind that, as Bush affirms so eloquently, in 

“the speed of action, the intricacy of trails, the detail of mental pictures,” make it “awe-inspiring beyond 

all else in nature” (p. 106), are also what have brought us to the brink of collective annihilation and to the 

irreversible dissolution of, in Shakespeare’s words from The Tempest, “the great Globe itself, / Yea, all 

which it inherit.” 

Still, Bush’s blindness to the dark side of scientific progress is matched by his capacity—no less 

astonishing than that of Benjamin—to envision a future that has become our present. Bush focuses on the 

challenges posed by the rapidly accelerating accumulation of human knowledge, which is of little benefit 

if it cannot be accessed by those who seek it. As he sets forth the problem, “publication has been extended 

far beyond our present ability to make real use of the record. The summation of human experience is 

being expanded at a prodigious rate, and the means we use for threading through the consequent maze to 

the momentarily important item is the same as was used in the days of square-rigged ships” (p. 102). But, 

as he notes—and everyone who has watched the steadily dropping prices of computers, cell phones, and 

practically all other electronic products would have to agree—“the world has arrived at an age of cheap 

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complex devices of great reliability, and something is bound to come of it” (p. 102). 

Like Benjamin, Bush instances photography as a centerpiece of the technological changes that will 

continue to transform human life. Proposing a thought experiment, he conjures up for his mid-twentieth- 

century reader “the camera hound of the future” who “wears on his forehead a lump a little larger than a 

walnut” (p. 102). Inside of this protuberance, “there is film . . . for a hundred exposures,” and Bush notes 

that “it would be advantageous to be able to snap the camera and look at the picture immediately” (p. 

103). Continuing his experiment, Bush imagines that “the Encyclopedia Britannica could be reduced to 

the volume of a matchbox” (p. 103), and he goes so far as to recognize the indispensability of wireless 

technology in picturing “a future investigator in his laboratory” whose “hands are free, and he is not 

anchored” (p. 104), as he moves about and simultaneously photographs his observations and dictates his 

comments into a recorder, which are then synchronized with his visual images. Bush’s futuristic vision 

culminates in what he calls the “memex,” which he defines as a “mechanized file and library,” that is, “a 

device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized 

so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is,” Bush continues, “an enlarged 

supplement to his memory” (pp. 106-7). 

In the version of Bush’s article published in Life magazine, illustrations of both the walnut-sized camera 

and the memex are included, the latter of which is clearly what we would now recognize as a desktop 

computer. Bush describes it as consisting of a desk, on top of which “are slanting translucent screens, on 

which materials can be projected for convenient reading. There is a keyboard, and sets of buttons and 

levers” (p. 107). Bush has, therefore, forecast not only the personal computer and the digital camera but 

also, as we have seen, the extent to which so much of contemporary communication is hands-free or 

wireless. Even the electronically downloaded book is anticipated when Bush details how, on the memex, 

the user, by moving one of its levers, “runs through the book before him,” and “can add marginal notes 

and comments” to the text being viewed on the screen, while the guiding principle of the Windows 

operating system is reflected in Bush’s statement that since there are “several projection positions,” the 

operator of the memex “can leave one item in position while he calls up another” (p. 107). 

But though Bush accurately predicts so much of the contemporary world, our reality has outstripped his 

imagination in at least one respect. Despite the fact that his miniature camera allows the user to see the 

picture immediately, as is the case with digital equipment, Bush’s conception of “microphotography” 

(p. 103) still relies on film, and hence he has not fully made the transition from modernism to 

postmodernism or, in Baudrillard’s terms, from second-order to third-order simulation. But this limitation 

is inconsequential when compared to his most profound insight, which is, as I have already noted, that it is 

not enough to be able simply to improve how records are made and stored if one does not at the same time 

182

tackle the problem of how this vast “summation of human experience” is to be accessed and consulted. 

With respect to what we would call today the “search engine,” Bush makes the point that the human 

mind works not by artificial systems of indexing, whether alphabetical or numerical, but rather by “the 

association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain” 

(p. 106). It is this realization that gives rise to Bush’s panegyric to the faculty of memory as “awe-inspiring 

beyond all else in nature.” If we set aside Bush’s assumption that the memex must utilize microfilm and 

instead read back into his description our contemporary awareness of the Internet, this makes only the 

more astonishing his recognition that the “essential feature” of his futuristic invention is its capacity for 

“associative indexing,” whereby “any item may be caused at will to select immediately and automatically 

another” (p. 107). Thus, when we have purchased or even simply viewed a book on Amazon, this principle 

allows the computer to suggest other books we might also like to consider ordering. What is more, just 

as the mind lays down memory traces based on intricate webs of association, so, too, in the memex 

“numerous items” can be “joined together to form a trail,” and—as Freud said of the neuronal networks 

in the unconscious—these “trails do not fade” (p. 107). Indeed, despite his assumption throughout most 

of his paper that the memex will employ a material substance such as microfilm, Bush concludes by 

proposing that, just as information is transmitted between nerve cells and the brain by means of “electrical 

vibrations,” so, too, it is possible to imagine that in the technology of the future it will not always be 

necessary to “transform to mechanical movements in order to proceed from one electrical phenomenon 

to another” (p. 108). Here Bush achieves the conceptual turn to postmodernism, as data conveyed 

electronically are no longer confined to any physical space, in a way that would allow us to distinguish an 

original from a copy, but are rather set free in a virtual universe comprised entirely of simulacra in which 

we have, in Valéry’s phrase, completed the “conquest of ubiquity.” 

But if we now pause and reflect critically on Bush’s essay as a whole, what lingers even more indelibly 

in the reader’s mind than his gifts as a visionary is, as I have argued, his blindness to the dark side of 

scientific progress. It is as though, like the Victorian Jebb, he has translated Sophocles’ word δεινῶς only 

as “wonder,” and left out its antithetical meaning of man as something “fearful” or “terrible.” In his final 

paragraph Bush proclaims that “the applications of science have built man a well-supplied house, and 

are teaching him to live healthily therein” (p. 108). But if, as both Sophocles and Heidegger ask us to 

remember, it is only from death that human beings cannot escape, it is precisely this tragic awareness that 

has been “forgotten” by Bush—forgotten in the sense of being actively repressed from consciousness. 

And the death that confronts us is not merely of each of us as an individual but, for the first time in human 

history, that of our entire species—indeed, of all living species—a specter unleashed and symbolized by 

the “strange destructive gadgets” that are the demonic counterparts of the angelic memex. In diametric 

opposition to Bush, from Heidegger’s perspective man dwells not in the “well-supplied house” of science 

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but rather in the realm of the uncanny that “is the basic kind of Being-in-the World, even though in an 

everyday way it has been covered up.” 6 And if the notion that any kind of technology can teach us to “live 

healthily” is itself a delusion—a symptom of the mass psychosis that has put the entire planet in peril—it 

may be up to an enhanced respect for nature, cultivated by receptivity to the aura emitted by works of art 

embedded in a tradition, to save us. 

4 

Thomas L. Friedman, the three-time Pulitzer-Prize-winning columnist for The New York Times, begins 

The World Is Flat, the first of his two recent books on globalization and the fate of America and the world 

in the twenty-first century, by recounting a visit to Infosys, a leading information technology company 

headquartered outside Bangalore, India. It was here, upon pondering the statement by the CEO of the 

company that “the playing field is being leveled” in the global economy due to the revolutionary changes 

made possible by the emergence of a worldwide communication network, that Friedman came to the 

realization encapsulated in the title of his book, The World Is Flat; and he describes himself as being at 

that moment “filled with both excitement and dread.” 7 

That Friedman should have experienced in himself these antithetical emotions is not surprising since, 

though he does not use the word, they mark his entry into the twilight zone of the uncanny that, as has 

been my contention throughout these reflections, is integral to the surpassing power of the mind that 

makes human beings “the strangest of all” creatures. By way of conclusion, therefore, I shall first show 

how Friedman’s analysis of globalization in The World Is Flat extends the inquiry into the inherent 

ambiguity of technological progress of which the essays by Walter Benjamin and Vannevar Bush are 

landmarks for their respective eras; then I shall compare Friedman’s fundamentally optimistic vision in 

The World Is Flat to the far more sober assessment of where we are headed as a species and a planet that 

emerges from his sequel, Hot, Flat, and Crowded, published only four years later, in 2008. 

Among the striking points of contact between Friedman and both Benjamin and Bush is that Friedman, 

too, cites photography as an example of the transformations in everyday life that have been wrought 

by the latest advances in technology, though Friedman, unlike Benjamin, is referring not to mechanical 

reproduction but rather to digitization; and he therefore is able to experience in actuality what Bush 

6 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (1927), trans. John Macquerrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1973), p. 

322. 

7 Thomas L. Friedman, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 

2004), pp. 7-8. Subsequent page references will be given parenthetically. 

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could only see as a possibility on the horizon. As Friedman reports, not only is mail now something that 

one sends digitally from a computer rather than on paper through a post office, but the same is true for 

photography: 

Photography used to be a cumbersome process involving film coated with silver dug up from 

mines halfway across the world. I used to take some pictures with my camera, then bring the film 

to the drugstore to be sent off to a big plant somewhere for processing. But once the Internet made 

it possible to send pictures around the world, attached to or in e-mails, I didn’t want to use the 

silver film anymore. I wanted to take pictures in the digital format, which could be uploaded, not 

developed (And by the way, I didn’t want to be confined to using a camera to take them. I wanted 

to be able to use my cell phone to do it.) (pp. 64-65). 

Similarly, just as for Bush the user of the memex possesses an “enlarged supplement to his memory” 

that makes accessible the “summation of human experience,” which can be “consulted with exceeding 

speed and flexibility,” so, too, Friedman quotes Jimmy Wales, the originator of Wikipedia, as saying that 

he has “one simple goal: to give ‘every single person free access to the sum of all human knowledge” (p. 

95). Not to be outdone, it is likewise the aim of the search engine Google—the name of which is derived 

from the word “googol,” which means 1 followed by 100 zeros—as stated on its home page, “to organize 

the immense, seemingly infinite amount of information on the Web,’ just for you” (pp. 152-53). And 

just as Bush recognized that the “essential feature” of the memex would be its capacity for “associative 

indexing,” whereby “any item may be caused at will to select immediately and automatically another,” in 

consonance with the requirements of the user, so too, as Friedman points out, “the key breakthrough that 

enabled Google to become first among search engines was its ability to combine its PageRank technology 

with an analysis of page content, which determines which pages are most relevant to the specific search 

being conducted” (pp. 154-55). 

At the most general level, Friedman’s argument in The World Is Flat is that what he dubs the “triple 

convergence”—of the collapse of the Soviet Union along with the rise of Internet technology, of new 

ways of doing business, and of several billion new competitors in the global marketplace—has produced 

a transformation in contemporary life. As he summarizes his thesis, “It is this triple convergence—of new 

players, on a new playing field, developing new processes and habits for horizontal collaboration—that 

I believe is the most important force shaping global economics and politics in the twenty-first century” 

(pp. 181-82). According to Friedman, the interconnected changes that came to a head at the turn of our 

present century have inaugurated the third great era of globalization. Globalization 1.0, he says, lasted 

from 1492, when Columbus opened trade between the Old World and the New World, to approximately 

1800, and was driven by the power of nations. Globalization 2.0 extended from 1800 to 2000 and was 

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spurred by multinational companies, which profited first from falling transportation and then from falling 

telecommunications costs. Finally, Globalization 3.0, which commenced around the year 2000, derives 

its unique character, in Friedman’s view, from “the newfound power for individuals to collaborate and 

compete globally,” thanks not to horsepower or hardware but to software, “in conjunction with the 

creation of a global fiber-optic network that has made us all neighbors” (p. 10). 

Although formulated independently, Friedman’s analysis of the three eras of globalization dovetails with 

Baudrillard’s schema of the three orders of simulation, and it helps to elucidate the connection between 

economic and political developments and changes in the theory and practice of representation. Ever the 

realist, Friedman reminds his readers of the dangers of nuclear terrorism and the ways that the resources 

of the Internet can be exploited by the forces of darkness as well as of light. Still, the predominant 

tenor of Friedman’s outlook toward globalization in The World Is Flat is resolutely optimistic, to the 

point that he seems much closer in spirit to Vannevar Bush than to Walter Benjamin, to say nothing of 

Martin Heidegger. Thus, Friedman stresses how the newly “flattened” world gives “newfound power” 

to individuals rather than to states or to corporations, and he sees the fundamentally benign and wealth- 

producing changes brought about by digital technology as “the most important force shaping global 

economics and politics in the twenty-first century.” Indeed, as he writes at the close of his book, playing 

on the coincidence that the attack on the World Trade Center took place on 9/11/01, whereas the opening 

of the Berlin Wall took place on 11/9/89: “the two greatest dangers we Americans face are an excess of 

protectionism—excessive fears of another 9/11 that prompt us to wall ourselves in, in search of personal 

security—and excessive fears of competing in a world of 11/9 that prompt us to wall ourselves off, in 

search of economic security. Both would be a disaster for us and for the world” (p. 469). 

It is not necessary to dispute Friedman’s defense of free trade to question his assertions that the “two 

greatest dangers” facing Americans are economic and political protectionism. Surely both the United 

States and the world are in far deeper trouble than that, and the sense of uncanniness that led Friedman to 

describe himself as filled with “dread” as well as “excitement” during his visit to Infosys in Bangalore, 

India, invites closer scrutiny as a symptom of an existential malaise that returns us to the unflinching 

meditations on Sophocles’ choral ode in Antigone by both Heidegger and Hölderlin. 

As his titles makes plain, Friedman’s understanding of the dangers facing humankind in the twenty-first 

century has undergone a profound evolution between The World Is Flat and Hot, Flat, and Crowded. In 

place of the “triple convergence” of new economic actors, new technologies, and new forms of “horizontal 

collaboration,” Friedman now underscores how the technological revolution that has “leveled the global 

playing field” cannot be isolated from “two other enormously powerful forces” that “are impacting our 

planet in fundamental ways,” namely, “global warming and soaring population growth.” As Friedman 

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sums up his revised thesis, distilled in the three adjectives of his title, it is “actually the convergence of 

global warming, global flattening, and global crowding that is the most important dynamic shaping the 

world we live in today.” 8 Instead of referring to the present age as Globalization 3.0, Friedman now terms 

our epoch the Energy-Climate Era. 

A few of the statistics included by Friedman in Hot, Flat, and Crowded suffice to tell us most of what we 

need to know. The population of the world, which stood at 2.5 billion in 1950, is now over 6.7 billion, 

and is projected to grow by 2050 to 9.2 billion—an increase equivalent to the total number of people on 

earth as recently as 1950. Almost all of this growth, moreover, will take place in less developed regions (p. 

28). Roughly one quarter of the world’s people, moreover, still do not have regular access to an electricity 

grid (p. 155). By 2100, temperatures worldwide are expected to rise between 3 and 5 degrees Celsius—or 

5.4 and 9 degrees Fahrenheit—over preindustrial conditions, with catastrophic increases in sea levels, 

droughts, and floods as consequences (p. 44). Even now, one species is going extinct every twenty 

minutes, which is one thousand times faster than in the past (p. 141). Since the Industrial Revolution, 

the amount of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere has shot up from 280 parts per million to 384 

ppm, which is higher than it has ever been in twenty million years, and, if present trends continue, we are 

projected to reach as much as 560 ppm by 2050, and an unthinkable 800 ppm by 2075 (pp. 119, 212). 

Although avoiding this death spiral would require “a huge global industrial energy project” (p. 212), at the 

present time the United States invests a meager eight billion dollars—equivalent to the cost of nine days 

of fighting in Iraq—in research and development in energy, or only 0.8 percent of its revenues in a one- 

trillion-dollar-a-year industry (p. 185). 

Taking a synoptic view, the underlying problem is that we have created a vicious spiral, in which, as 

Friedman puts it, “rapid economic growth and population expansion—flat meets crowded—is driving 

the destruction of forests and other ecosystems at an unprecedented rate. The destruction of these forests 

and biodiversity-rich environments, in turn, contributes to climate change—flat and crowded meet hot 

and make it hotter—by releasing more carbon into the atmosphere” (p. 301). Hence, Friedman adds, 

“when it comes to climate change, human society has been like the proverbial frog in the pail on the 

stove, where the heat gets turned up very slightly every hour, so the frog never thinks to jump out. It 

just keeps adjusting until it gets boiled to death” (p. 48). One of the most profound insights to emerge 

from Friedman’s analysis is that, in contrast to the traditional notion of human beings as the masters of 

creation, the truth is that “we are the only species in this vast web of life that no animal or plant in nature 

8 Thomas L. Friedman, Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution and How It Can Renew America (New 

York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2008), p. 26. Subsequent page references will be given parenthetically. I sometimes 

omit the names of the sources quoted by Friedman in my own citations from his work. 

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depends on for its survival—yet we depend on this whole web of life for our survival” (p. 152). Tragically, 

however, although no other species depends on us for its survival, as we depend on nature, we do possess 

the power to destroy not only ourselves but also much of the life on the planet, whether through a nuclear 

cataclysm or through the slow burn of irreversible global climate disruption. 

What, then, are we to do about this grim picture? Although Friedman declares himself “a sober optimist” 

(p. 411), I think the truth concerning climate change is better expressed in the words of Harvard 

climatologist John Holdren: “The more aspects of the problem you know something about, the more 

pessimistic you are” (p. 125). What is clear, above all, is that it is no longer possible to reverse course 

by tinkering around the edges of the problem or through the efforts of individuals alone, however 

important these may be. Rather, what is required is a massive worldwide effort, led by the United States 

and seconded by China, “to replace the Dirty Fuels System with a Clean Energy System,” a radical 

transformation in our collective way of life that Friedman calls “a green revolution” (p. 199). 

Perhaps the greatest single obstacle to this change in systems is the lack of political will in the United 

States, a condition of lethargy and moral blindness that made even the recent modest reforms in our health 

care system a feat of Herculean proportions, and that seems likely to doom any efforts at comprehensive 

energy and climate legislation for the foreseeable future. Unless the United States is prepared to wean 

itself of its dependency on fossil fuels and make massive investments in clean-energy technology, it will 

be simply impossible for other countries to break the vicious spiral of an increasingly hotter, flatter, and 

more crowded world; and I see, alas, little evidence to justify optimism in any form. 

Still, one can continue to make the arguments in hopes of changing people’s minds. There are, I think, 

two fundamental points to be made. The first is pragmatic. It is that, in the words of one of Friedman’s 

authorities, “Mother Nature has not been fooled” (p. 260). Traditionally, capitalism has functioned by 

treating environmental waste as what economists term an “externality,” that is, a cost of doing business 

that is not borne by any of the parties involved in the transaction, and hence could be simply ignored. But 

now we are coming up against the limits imposed by “the ecological logic of capitalism” (p. 57). Thus, as 

another of Friedman’s sources explains, “Socialism collapsed because it did not allow the market to tell 

the economic truth. Capitalism may collapse because it does not allow the market to tell the ecological 

truth” (p. 259). This is why the only solution to our problems lies in government regulation of the market, 

to begin forcing business and consumers alike to bear the true costs of their carbon footprints, as well as in 

providing support at the federal level for clean-energy technologies. Given the entrenched resistance in the 

United States to “big government” and higher taxes, however, it is again difficult for me to see how there 

is any chance of a major course correction while there is still time. 

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The second point is moral and spiritual. Ultimately, as Friedman eloquently pleads, “the deepest truth of 

all” is that love for the environment “is a value that needs to be preserved in and of itself, not because it 

makes your bank account richer but because it makes life richer and always has” (p. 314). Whereas in 

political conflicts, such as the space race, there may be winners and losers, “in the earth race either we 

will all win or all lose” (p. 366), because a disaster in one country is a disaster for the entire world. Thus, 

for any country to “go green,” it must be “committed to the idea that there is something bigger than itself, 

its own community, and its own borders—that the state of the world really matters too” (p. 180). For the 

United States to embrace such an ethic of energy efficiency and environmental conversation would be a 

sign of humility that would, in turn, enable it to regain much of the moral authority it has squandered in 

recent decades, most egregiously by the invasion of Iraq in a tragically misguided response to the terrorist 

attacks of September 11, 2001. 

The dilemma we face as human beings is that the interests on whose behalf an appeal is most urgently 

needed—nature, children, and the future—are those with the least power and influence on their side. That 

is why, as Friedman argues, quoting the words of Rob Watson, CEO of EcoTech International and “one of 

the best environmental minds in America” (p. 6), our most precious commodity at the present time is “the 

one faculty that distinguishes us as human beings—the ability to imagine.” We need imagination, Watson 

continues, in order to be able to grasp the impact of “the nonlinear, unmanageable climate events that 

could unfold in our lifetime” (p. 119). 

And this is where the arts and literature come in. We study the arts, above all, not as a means to a 

utilitarian end, but as an end in themselves, as a way of sparking our imaginations and educating ourselves 

as whole persons. It follows, therefore, that in order to save nature we also must cherish art, because only 

if human beings cultivate the power of imagination and empathy will we continue to have a future to 

create. I began by quoting from the first stasimon of Sophocles’ Antigone, precisely because of my belief 

that it is from artistic masterpieces that we still have most to learn about the human condition, and that the 

essential paradox that makes man at once the most terrible and most wonderful of creatures remains as 

true today as it did in ancient Athens, notwithstanding the advances in technology that have profoundly 

transformed not only how we experience works of art but also every facet of our material existence. 

Although it will be necessary to await future meetings of the World Humanities Forum to discover 

what will have become of the earth in the next fifty or one hundred years, I would like to conclude by 

drawing two seemingly antithetical morals from these meditations on the theme of the work of art in 

the age of digital technology. The first is that science alone can never supply the wisdom that will guide 

us in its proper use. To suppose that we can reap the benefits of man’s awe-inspiring power to control 

nature without also assuming the dreadful costs of this responsibility is to forget the lesson elucidated 

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by Heidegger in his existential reading of Sophocles’ choral ode that “to be the strangest of all is the 

basic trait of the human essence,” and there is no escaping the uncanniness that haunts our being at every 

moment from its encounter with the finitude of death. 

But if science alone cannot save us, it is equally evident that unless we are finally prepared to face the 

impact of our collective actions on nature that we will be irrevocably lost as a species. Mother Nature, 

Friedman quotes Rob Watson as saying, “is just chemistry, biology, and physics,” and “everything she 

does is just the sum of these three things” (p. 139). Given that there is no abrogating the laws of nature, 

it is impossible to escape the realization that postmodernism, with its siren song that “there is only the 

simulacrum,” is but the mirror image of a naïve faith in science and technology, and must be discarded 

as an intellectual luxury we can no longer afford. Indeed, as a byproduct of late capitalism, life inside 

the postmodernist bubble is the philosophical counterpart to our addiction to fossil fuels. It can’t go on 

forever. In his influential treatise, The Postmodern Condition, Jean-François Lyotard states that whereas he 

employs the term modern to refer to “any science that legitimates itself with reference to a metadiscourse 

. . . making an explicit appeal to some grand narrative,” he defines the postmodern as an “incredulity 

toward metanarratives,” and he attributes this skeptical attitude to “progress in the sciences,” which has 

replaced the “grand narratives” of the past with “many different language games.” 9 

As the synergistically interacting pressures of climate disruption, rising energy consumption, and 

exponentially increasing population compel us to recognize, however, it is ultimately the “grand narrative” 

of evolution—nature as altered by the feedback loop of human behavior—that will seal the fate of our 

unique and irreplaceable planet. In The World Is Flat, Friedman quotes a passage from The Communist 

Manifesto, published in 1848, in which Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels reflect on the way that the 

Industrial Revolution, impelled by capitalism, has dissolved previous forms of human identity. Marx and 

Engels write: 

All fixed, fast, frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, 

are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid 

melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his 

real conditions of life and his relations with his kind. 10 

Everything that Marx and Engels say about the Industrial Revolution, which is synonymous with the age 

9 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979), trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian 

Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), pp. xxiii-xiv. 

10 Quoted in Friedman, The World Is Flat, p. 202. 

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of modernism or Baudrillard’s second order of simulation, is even more true for the Energy-Climate era, 

which is also the age of postmodernism or the third order of simulation. On the one hand, “all that is solid 

melts into air,” as information technology completes the “conquest of ubiquity” and the economic playing 

field is leveled. On the other hand, “man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions 

of life and his relations with his kind,” as we have at long last to come to terms with “the ecological 

logic of capitalism.” Whether we can marshal the resources of the imagination to face the reality of the 

environmental catastrophe that is already upon us, as well as to remove the still-looming threat of nuclear 

annihilation, will determine whether—and for how long—there will be creative human beings in the 

future. 

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Illness and Art 

Desmond Egan 

Irish Poet 

‘Madness, frenzy, je ne sais quoi, the sublime, inexplicable, ineffable, unnameable, indefinable, 

inexpressible, neuter, trace. These are some of the concepts used in Western culture to recognise 

the obscure movement by means of which literature composes itself into a strangely secret body of 

language’. 1 

Taking Frias Martin’s comment as a summary of the situation, I wish to address the question, Is there a 

necessary connection between Literature and ill-health or neurosis. I declare a special interest here, in that 

I ask the question as a poet. 

A necessary connection, I emphasise; not an accidental one. Art is created by human beings, by people 

who have all the limitations that flesh is heir to. This truism should be borne in mind in any discussion of 

art and illness - hence my opening quotation from Martins as a summary of popular misconceptions in 

the area of art and illness. Some artists, writers, poets will happen to be unhealthy in one way or another. 

Illness is part of life. It is an experience which, like any other, may have an influence on the artist. True, 

but there is a difference in kind between work undertaken as therapeutic exercise - by patients, say - and 

that of, someone like Frieda Kahlo or Gerard Manley Hopkins. They were sufferers, yes, but being artists 

they could pierce through their individual problems to some universal perception of a truth. 

No one escapes illness, of one kind or another; and all of us have to face up to the deep mystery of death. 

Because of his/her intense reaction to things; because of a greater capacity to feel, to understand and to 

express, the creative person is somewhat different from others; in some respects an outsider (as Colin 

1 Manuel Frias Martins, Em Theoria / In Theory, 2003, Ambar, Lisbon; p. 193. 

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Wilson famously explored); generally more vulnerable. We might expect that a poet, musician, or creative 

artist, because of his/her hyper-sensitivity - something well recorded in biographies and anecdotes - would 

seem and be more open to neurosis and eccentricity than the average, extrovert, person; and it is probably 

so. But to posit a necessary link between creativity and disease is to go too far and to misunderstand the 

already mysterious processes of any work of art. This leads, inevitably, to a simplified understanding, a 

vulgarisation of the concept, artist. 

For this reason, we should address the fundamental question, Is art born out of neurosis? Is there a 

necessary link, as is often assumed: the poet or painter as some kind of weirdo, a little crazy; a neurotic 

at best? Crucially, the artist is in control of his material/ fantasy/ emotion whereas the neurotic is 

controlled by it and is not, therefore, its master. This is the core of the matter - and Lionel Trilling, in his 

groundbreaking study, ‘Art and Neurosis’ 2 has pointed out as much, more than 60 years ago. 

Our emphasis on the question of control does not mean that we should overlook the fact that in creating, 

the artist gains some kind of release - as one does from doing anything well. Shakespeare suggests as 

much, as does his near-contemporary, John Donne (1572 - 1651), and quite explicitly, in his poem The 

Triple Foole: 

I thought, if I could draw my paines 

Through Rime’s vexation, I should them allay. 

Griefe brought to numbers cannot be so fierce, 

For, he tames it, that fetters it in verse. 

Yes - but, let us not overlook the phrase ‘he tames it’, nor the verb ‘fetters’. They emphasise the crucial 

issue of the poet’s taming or controlling the feeling rather than of being controlled by it. 

This, too, is surely why genuine art has something salvific to offer not only to the creator but to a suffering 

world, a world consumed by false values, a world that has lost its way and its nerve. Such relief, however, 

as Donne himself makes clear, is incidental to the creation, not descriptive of it. At this stage, may I be 

allowed to refer to a personal situation. Asked by an Amnesty group to write a poem for Peace, 3 I became 

convinced that at the heart of the world’s search for peace lies the conflict between what is beautiful, in 

nature as in art, as against the neurosis of fear, of pride, and of excess - so what I wrote, for whatever it is 

worth, became an attempt to express both the healing beauty of the ordinary and the conflict which denies 

2 Lionel Trilling, Art and Neurosis (USA, 1949). 

3 C.f. Egan, Elegies, Goldsmith, Kildare, (1996). 

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so much of the world that contact with nature: 

PEACE 

just to go for a walk out the road 

just that 

under the deep trees 

which whisper of peace 

to break the bread of words 

with someone passing 

just that 

four of us round a pram 

and baby fingers asleep 

just to join the harmony 

the fields the blue everyday hills 

the puddles of daylight and 

you might hear a pheasant 

echo through the woods 

or plover may waver by 

as the evening poises with a blackbird 

on its table of hedge 

just that 

and here and there a gate 

a bungalow’s bright window 

the smell of woodsmoke of lives 

just that 

but sweet Christ that 

is more than most can afford 

with the globe still platted in its own 

crown of thorns 

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too many starving eyes 

too many ancient children 

squatting among flies 

too many stockpiles of fear 

too many dog jails too many generals 

too many under torture by the impotent 

screaming into the air we breathe 

too many dreams stuck in money jams 

too many mountains of butter selfishness 

too many poor drowning in the streets 

too many shantytowns on the outskirts of life 

too many of us not sure what we want 

so that we try to feed a habit for everything 

until the ego puppets the militaries 

mirror our own warring face 

too little peace 

At this stage, perhaps we should consider the use of some of the artistic disciplines, such as painting, 

writing, sculpture.. as healing exercise? Therapeutic writing that is caught up in illness of one kind or 

another may be valuable as a kenosis, an emptying or getting rid of some mental or physical ailment 

- but it cannot of itself offer the energetic shaping of human experience, the plerosis, which true art 

exemplifies. The root of all neurosis, Norman Mailer once suggested in an interview, is cowardice, that 

is, an unwillingness or an inability to face up to reality. Therapeutic work may well help in this area but it 

is a different thing from artistic creativity. The latter always offers that confrontation which is part of its 

essence: all art is a confrontation, with no holds barred. Again, we are talking about somehow controlling 

experience rather than being controlled by it. 

This is the core of what I have to say. Any discussion about art and the artist must begin from a 

recognition of the basic gift of an artist: the ability, no matter what his/her personal human problems are, 

to shape experience in tranquillity, as William Wordsworth suggested, that peculiar tranquillity which 

can accommodate and objectify an expression of some aspect of the mystery of life. We do not deny the 

carpenter or electrician his craft; we must not deny the artist his/her peculiar gift and the fearlessness at 

its heart. The admonition most often given by Jesus Christ was, ‘Do not be afraid.’ Not even of dying: his 

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was a call to a world obsessed, at root, with death. The artist in his creativeness is not afraid. Therapeusis 

for those who are unwell may be fine and even necessary but we only create confusion by making false 

claims for it or by confusing its productions with something completely different. Part of the problem in 

distinguishing the valuable from the superficial in art nowadays lies precisely in such confusion. 

The fearlessness of the artist, his/her willingness to pierce through the temporary, the death-bound, so as 

to arrive at something of permanent truth, would seem important to confront the disease of fear. And that 

is why the therapy of genuine Art is so valuable for us all, and why mankind has always had its art and its 

artists. I do not say that art is useful basically as a therapy - though it may well be; I do say that Art is a 

kind of medicine. I do say that it and only it can offer the katharsis (catharsis) of pity and terror of which 

Aristotle speaks in his Poetics 4 : that peculiar feeling of enlargement as humans which we experience even 

in viewing a tragic drama. The release which comes from coming in contact with the expression of some 

emotionally charged insight - and therefore with the control of emotion. 

What Aristotle teaches us about dramatic tragedy is relevant to our experience of any of the other arts. 

Through our vicarious encounter with some profound issue; through the creator’s battle to understand and 

to express it and, in so doing, to discover something permanent in the face of all that is passing, we can 

gain a deeper insight into life, a greater compassion, and even, perhaps, a greater strength in facing up to 

death itself. As John Donne puts it in his wonderful poem, Death, Be Not Proud, 

One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally, 

And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die. 

One way or another, art offers some kind of eternal awakening. 

The world is full of physically or mentally sick people - but there are very few poets. If poetry is merely 

the outcome of disease, how explain this? How explain, for example, what Matisse said of Renoir in old 

age, after arthritis had caught hold of his fingers, gone so swollen and distorted that he had to tie the brush 

to his hand to hold it, 

While his body wasted away, his soul seemed to gain strength and he expressed himself with 

increasing ease. 5 

4 Aristotle, Poetics, 6, 1449 b. 

5 Quoted in Sandblom, Creativity and Disease, London 1992; p. IV. 

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Art is a going-inland, to take Patrick Kavanagh’s phrase 6 ; a seeing into the heart of things coupled with the 

ability to express this life-complexity, be it in musical, poetic, visual, sculptural, theatrical or film form. 

Such an act demands great psychic energy and the full commitment of someone who, by refining his/her 

talent, has achieved a personal style adequate to, 

snatch out of time the passionate transitory 7 

The artist, in personal life, may be diseased, neurotic, even a little crazy - but in his art he is whole and full 

of energy. Nietzsche somewhere remarks that all art is positive, an affirmation; optimistic at heart. It is the 

very opposite of sickness or madness, though the intense demands it makes may at times drive a hyper- 

sensitive person towards ill-health. 

And the artist, by definition, is hyper-sensitive, more vulnerable, never ‘quite fully at home’, as Rilke 

puts it, 8 in the hurly burly of everyday mindless living. Easily misunderstood, an outsider, to one degree 

or another; never quite fitting-in. For that reason, he will often be considered eccentric, a weirdo, slightly 

mad. But in the moment of creation, no one is saner, more wholly attuned to life, than the artist. 

Nor will he depend on the approbation of any audience more knowing than that of himself. Here we have 

the difference between a creative person and a dilettante. The history of Literature is littered with the 

stories of those who died unknown, under-appreciated, rejected by the outside world and often poverty- 

stricken - Hopkins, Kavanagh, McKenna, Pessoa, Mangan, Kafka... but who nevertheless persisted in 

their work, sustained by a belief in it and by the thrill of making it. Ars gratia artis: literary achievement is 

not defined by acceptance; au contraire: what fires the writer is, as Gerard Manley Hopkins puts it in his 

last poem, 9 

The fine delight that fathers thought... 

The roll, the rise, the carol, the creation 

Take the case of Hopkins; what he achieved in his poetry; where it came from; what it shows us about 

the suggested link between Art and Neurosis; and most of all, what we gain from his work. Much 

emphasis has been given - utterly disproportionately, in my opinion - to the sick melancholy of Gerard 

6 Patrick Kavanagh, The Complete Poems, Goldsmith, Kildare, 1984. 

7 Patrick Kavanagh, op cit. 

8 Rilke, The Duino Elegies, no.1, Selected Poems tr. Leishman, Penguin, London, 1964. 

9 Gerard Manley Hopkins, To R.B. 

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Manley Hopkins(1884-1889) during his last five and a half years in Ireland. 10 Those who do so, choose 

to see his ‘terrible’ sonnets as purely autographical, making the most basic of academic mistakes since a 

distinction always, and willy nilly, exists between the protagonist in any writing and its creator: ‘I’ is never 

‘just I’. Parallel to that, the strange integrity of an artistic theme, its amalgam of memory, imagination, 

thought, feeling - the mysterious, core of a poem - is being treated as somehow akin to a journalistic 

record of personal experience. To see Hopkins’s version of Job’s lament, Thou Art Indeed Just, Lord, 

as an autographical outpouring of near-despair, a neurotic expression of personal suffering, is to miss 

the point. Its amazing energy, its virtuosity of language, its mastery of the resources of poetry... are all 

expressions of vitality rather than of sickness; of belief, rather than of despair. Schiller once remarked that 

‘All art is dedicated to joy’ (‘Alle Kunst ist der Freude gewidmet’). Nietzsche offered a similar insight 

when he maintained that there is no such thing as pessimistic art, since all art is an affirmation of some 

kind of belief in life. To create a poem that is a poem takes enormous psychic energy. Those who harp on 

Hopkins’s sickness during those last Dublin years mostly overlook that. Nor have they any explanation 

for the magnificently affirmative sonnet, That Nature Is A Heraclitean Fire (And Of The Comfort Of The 

Resurrection), written a year before he died. It concludes with the powerful affirmation of those lines, 

And this Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond, Is immortal diamond. 

What, then, about Hopkins’s ‘sonnets of desolation’ (as W.H. Gardner labelled them), all of which he 

wrote in Dublin? As a writer, I can tell you how Hopkins felt after the outpouring of doubt and grief and 

almost (but not quite) despair that each of these wonderful poems embodies: he felt great! These ‘dark 

sonnets’ should be called ‘sonnets of hope’. For a start, not a single one of them declines into hopelessness. 

They are full of energy, itself a kind of belief. They also exemplify the flowering of his poetic genius in a 

crowning virtuosity of technique, despite the extremes of depression that Hopkins explores and catches in 

them. Take, at random, a few of the ‘darkest’, most anguished lines from one of these ‘dark sonnets’, No 

Worst, There Is None: 

O the mind, mind has mountains. Cliffs of fall 

Frightful. Sheer. No man fathomed. Hold them cheap 

May who never felt their steep or deep. 

Technically, this writing is exciting, fresh, and inventive. One is struck by the force of that repeated word 

‘mind’; by the compound adjective, ‘no-man-fathomed’ - a neologism and wonderfully evocative; by 

10 C.f. Norman White, Hopkins in Ireland, (Dublin:UCD, 2002). 

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the assonantal play of ‘steep’/ ‘deep’; the mountain imagery itself with its ‘cliffs of fall’ is an amazingly 

suggestive metaphor, one which he develops with an inventiveness worthy of Shakespeare and so on. 

Such mastery of the capacities of language is what helps to make possible this sonnet’s unflinching look 

at the human tragedy. Even those harrowing lines quoted are energised by a a belief in language itself and 

in the sacred function of poetry, which is to catch life on the wing. The poem is charged with belief, with a 

refusal to give up in the face of extreme anguish. With hope, 

Here! creep, 

Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all 

Life death does end and each day dies with sleep. 

Not very cheering, I agree, but he does look-for and mention, some kind of ‘comfort’ (this for a third time 

in the poem); and gives it weight at the finish. No tagged-on cliché or easy way out, no superficial formula 

- and yet, some kind of affirmation in living-on. This writing is not the product of neurosis. 

We need such poetry because it manages to catch in a few words the experience of struggling along 

in dark times, while refusing to cave-in. This is a hope sonnet, hope not least in poetry itself and in its 

resources, including those of rhythm, musicality, metaphorical reach. Hope, fundamentally, in the Word 

- for a Christian, the Lord of language and of creativity. The poem includes a cry to The Holy Spirit as 

Comforter and to Mary, ‘mother of us’. - and it finishes on a note of patience. St. Ignatius in his Spiritual 

Exercises advises, 

Let him who is in desolation strive to remain in patience, which is the virtue contrary to the 

troubles which harass him 11 . Interestingly, Hopkins wrote Patience, Hard Thing, in the spring of the 

following year. 

In his last poem, To R.B., written in April 1889, Hopkins acknowledges the energy necessary to write, 

with aim 

Now known and hand at work now never wrong. 

Sweet fire the sire of muse, my soul needs this; 

My aim in this short Lecture is to defend for Poetry the psychic wellbeing which it demands; to 

11 Quoted in Mackenzie, The Poetical Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins, OUP, Oxford, 1992; p. 460. 

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acknowledge that it takes shape in spite of, not because of, whatever limitation or illness the creator may 

be enduring. Or may not. Magnificently, art derives from energy, not from illness. Philip Sandblom, in his 

study, ‘Creativity and Disease’ reaches the same conclusion, 12 

In great artists, the passion to create generates a willpower strong enough to defy the worst disease. 

So, if we need art and its affirmation, what are we to make of the position of the arts in to-day’s world? 

A recent issue of the Swiss Pro Helvetia journal, Passages, asks, 13 

Is the allegedly art-loving public staying away from artistic events in droves? 

The answer, as anyone involved in the arts would agree, would seem to be Yes. Classical concerts are, 

for the most part, poorly supported; poetry books do not sell; ballet and theatre companies struggle for 

subsidies to survive; the novel has been replaced by mindless, journalistic, lit. A main reviewer for The 

Sunday Times publishes a book arguing that there are no criteria for art and that, therefore, the popular 

taste is decisive; a reviewer in The Irish Times, asked to choose her books of the year (2011) chooses 40 

titles. The recent closing ceremony for the London Olympics, which might have been a showcase for the 

great heritage of English culture, turned into one more Pop concert - resulting, as W.B. Yeats put it, in, 

The beating down of the wise 

And great art beaten down. 

But surely if, as I suggest, culture encapsulates the truth of things, and insight, and sanity’ and if ‘The 

truth shall set you free’ then the statement by Portuguese critic Frias Martins 14 that, 

Contemporary culture has displaced Literature from its centre, preferring more immediate 

pleasures such as (pop) music, video clips, cinema, multimedia performances etc. 

then this ‘anti-literary apocalypse’ which we all see unfolding is expressive of a global neurosis, that 

‘sickness in being’ of which the philosopher Gabriel Marcel has spoken and written so persuasively. A 

world without cultural values tends to be one in which real culture is not valued: a neurotic world, one 

more in need than ever of the healing and wholeness which great art can offer. 

12 Sandblom, op.cit., p. 200. 

13 Pro Helvetia, Passages, 51, vol. 3, (Zurich, 2009). 

14 Martins, op. cit., p.238. 

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Proceedings 

Session 3 

Parallel Session 1 

Perspectives, Approaches, and Practices 

• Parallel 1-1. Healing Humanities: Criticism and Defense 

• Parallel 1-2. Who Should Be Listened To? 

• Parallel 1-3. Healing Practices in the Humanities



Proceedings 

Parallel Session 1-1 

Healing Humanities: Criticism and Defense 

1. Humanities and Healing from Perspectives in and around 

Environmental Ethics 

/ Johan Hattingh (Stellenbosch University) 

2. Notes Toward a Typology of Consolation: Healing and Cultural 

Difference 

/ Yasunari Takada (The University of Tokyo) 

3. Feminism and the Humanities as Means for Healing: Focused 

on the Issue of Female North Korean Defectors 

/ Heisook Kim (Ewha Womans University) 

4. Humanities and the Crisis of Politics: from Kallipolis to Blade 

Runner’s L.A. 

/ Luca Maria Scarantino (IULM University)

Humanities and Healing from Perspectives in and around 

Environmental Ethics 

Johan Hattingh 

Stellenbosch University 

1. Introduction 

In the broad field of environmental philosophy and ethics, three different approaches, or groupings 

of perspectives, can be distinguished (Zimmerman 1993, vi-ix). The first could be identified as 

environmental ethics in the narrower sense of the word, characterised by the assumption that the solution 

to our environmental problems lies in moving away from our conventional human-centric ethical attitudes 

to grant moral considerability to non-human entities (Zimmerman 1993, vii). Holmes Rolston III, one of 

the founders of environmental ethics in this sense of the word in the 1970s delineated the central tasks of 

this approach to environmental ethics as follows: 

In practice the ultimate challenge of environmental ethics is the conservation of life on earth. In 

principle the ultimate challenge is a value theory profound enough to support that ethic. We need 

an account of how nature carries value, and an ethics that appropriately respects those values 

(Rolston 1991, 92). 

For the purposes of exploring the theme of the humanities and healing from perspectives in and around 

environmental ethics, I will discuss two examples of this approach to environmental ethics as it was 

articulated in the ethics of respect for nature of Paul Taylor, and in the land ethic of Aldo Leopold. 

A second approach to the broad field of environmental philosophy and ethics can be identified as radical 

ecophilosophy. Drawing on the countercultural movement in Western society, radical ecophilosophy 

includes deep ecology, ecofeminism, social ecology (Zimmerman 1993, vii), and to this could also be 

added the perspective of bioregionalism. As a radical approach to ecophilosophy, all of these perspectives 

endeavour to uncover the root causes of our environmental crisis as they can be found in fundamental 

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conceptual frameworks, basic attitudes, social institutions and the organizational formations of society. 

These perspectives also argue that our environmental crisis will not be resolved without a paradigm shift 

or revolution in society, entailing a profound transformation of the basic structure of society as well as 

the attitudes and philosophies underlying it. As such, these perspectives are sceptical of merely reforming 

certain aspects of society with a view to resolving our environmental crisis, for example by introducing 

tighter controls on industrial pollution or promoting recycling. These represent only the symptoms of our 

environmental crisis; what we need rather is to address its root causes (Zimmerman 1993, vii). For the 

purposes of this paper, I will also focus on two examples of this approach, namely the deep ecology of 

Arne Naess, and the ecofeminism of Karen Warren. 

A third approach to the broad field of environmental philosophy and ethics, however, argues that it will 

not be possible to introduce a profound expansion of our moral horizon to make provision for the moral 

consideration of non-human entities, and that it would be naive to hope for a profound cultural revolution 

that will bring an end to our environmental troubles. Zimmerman (1993, viii-ix) refers to this approach as 

reformist anthropocentric ecophilosophy, because it basically assumes that the only realistic, and perhaps 

most powerful basis to argue for the protection of nature and ecosystems is the instrumental value they 

have for humans, ranging from direct use value to amenity values, aesthetic values, spiritual values and 

existence values. According to this approach, it is ignorance, greed and short-sightedness that lies at 

the root of our environmental crisis, and this can be addressed by education, smart policies, appropriate 

incentives, and legislation all geared to promote the wise and sustainable use of nature. For the purpose 

of this paper I will discuss one example of this broad approach that builds on its strengths, and in my 

view overcome many of the problems posed by this approach. This is represented by the environmental 

pragmatism of Bryan Norton that emphasizes the multiplicity of values that humans have to take into 

account when making environmental decisions, and when they try to resolve environmental issues. 

With this in mind, it appears as if one can establish a clear link between environmental philosophy and 

ethics on the one hand, and an explicitly formulated aim to the healing of the earth on the other hand, to 

the healing of our ecological systems through reforming our decisions and actions, expanding our moral 

horizon, or radically transforming our thinking, culture and society as they relate to the natural world and 

how we interact with it. The general aim of environmental ethics indeed can be described as an effort to 

move humankind away from an environmentally destructive and an ecologically unsustainable mode of 

existence to one that rather contributes to the flourishing of all life on earth in a manner that is sustainable 

over time. 

In my experience though, such a link between ethics and healing is not in the forefront of environmental 

philosophy and ethics, at least not as I have encountered it over two decades of reading and studying its 

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main texts. The explicit link rather made is that between environmental philosophy and ethics on the one 

hand, and critical thinking – radical critique, for that matter – and in this critique to question, to question 

deeply, to confront, to oppose, to unsettle, to change, and to transform thinking and practice. The general 

argument in environmental ethics seems to push the notion of healing into the background, if the notion is 

entertained at all, and to rather focus on the problematic, destructive side of the thinking and practices that 

only takes into account aspects or parts of reality (for instance narrowly conceptualized human interests) 

and not the whole of life as it exists in its diversity and mutual ecosystemic inter-dependence. 

Against the background of these general observations I would like to focus in this paper in broad outline 

on the “target” of five important approaches to environmental philosophy and ethics – with a view to 

sketch something of the thinking and practices that they point out are environmentally destructive but 

in everyday life we tend to gloss over and effectively do very little about. My goal with regards to each 

perspective will be to show how they conceptualize the problem of environmental ethics, how they 

suggest we should analyse it, and how they propose we should position ourselves in relation to it, working 

towards overcoming it. 

In this overview I will also touch on what emerges positively from environmental ethics, formulated in 

general terms, as an alternative to the destructive mode of thinking informing the destructive practices 

leading to our environmental problems – and also discuss the conditions that are envisaged from the point 

of view of each perspective as prerequisites for these alternative thinking and practice to become visible, 

recognized, implemented and maintained. 

Being critical of laying a direct link between environmental philosophy and ethics and healing, I wish 

to preface this overview with a short exposition of the broad critical tradition of which the humanities, 

environmental philosophy and ethics alike form an important part. In this preface I will not only touch 

on some of the formal aspects of this critical tradition, but also point to some of the substantive ideas 

that emerged from this critical tradition, one of which is the insight that humans, in order to survive and 

flourish, need to acknowledge and respect their dependence on one another, in spite of any national, 

religious or cultural differences that may exist between them. Another insight is that humans, in order to 

survive and flourish, should acknowledge their fundamental dependence on natural ecosystems, and that 

human survival and flourishing are in fact dependent upon the survival and flourishing of non-human life 

on earth. 

2. Critical thinking and the humanities 

The central thesis informing this paper, is that western environmental philosophy and ethics forms 

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part of a broad critical discourse also present in the humanities in which highly problematic aspects of 

typically western thinking and practices are identified, unmasked, questioned and challenged, and highly 

useful ideas about human existence, survival and flourishing have been articulated. One of the central 

characteristics of this critical discourse is the process of endless self-questioning (see Derrida 2007). While 

such a process of endless self-questioning at first glance appears to be a perpetually self-undermining 

enterprise, a second, informed look at it quickly shows that it is precisely this process of endless self- 

questioning that over centuries constituted the heart of this critical discourse, yielding not only substantive 

positive insights, but also actively resisting efforts to determine and fix prematurely our ideas of what 

health and a healthy society may entail. Below, a few instances of this process of endless questioning will 

be sketched, together with some of its results and what it protested against. 

One of the manifestations of critical thinking in the humanities as a process of endless self-questioning 

can be found in the so-called hermeneutic turn in subject fields like philosophy, history, and the social 

sciences. While the history of philosophy as well as the social sciences was for a very long time dominated 

by a positivist ideal of knowledge according to which only empirical facts yielded knowledge that can be 

taken seriously, the hermeneutical turn represented a shift towards a critical interpretation of all of those 

factors, including the so-called subjective side of life, ideologies and power games playing themselves 

out in society, that influence the understanding of facts. This shifted the central question of understanding 

away from “What is the case?” and “Why is it the case?” to critical questions such as: “How come that we 

accept this or that as the case, and what are the social effects and implications of this? Who wins or who 

loses from accepting this and not that as the case, and through which mechanisms do some in society win 

and others lose?” 

Clear examples of this kind of questioning can be found in the work of Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, who 

have all been characterized as “masters of suspicion” (Ricoeur 1970, 32), since none of them accepted 

any interpretation of social reality as a true depiction of it, but rather as an epiphenomenon that can be 

related to “deeper lying” factors. For Marx, for instance, the liberal consciousness of the bourgeoisie 

believing in the idea of universal progress through growth of the market economy was an expression of 

a false consciousness, neglecting to recognize how social reality was produced by an unfair distribution 

of economic power. For Marx this false consciousness at the same time legitimised the dominant class 

position of a certain sector of society, thus fulfilling an ideological role. Nietzsche, in turn, saw dominant 

social ideas as the manifestation of a will to power, while Freud maintained that human behaviour could 

be better explained and understood as a from a rationalisation of the libido than from reason or rationality. 

Building on the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, this critical hermeneutics was taken further, each in his 

own way, by Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. Foucault focused on the mechanisms through which 

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identity and self are formed in western society, and showed how the format of knowledge, systems of 

normativity and subtle disciplinary practices circulating in the institutions of society create certain forms of 

individuality that are actually imposed on humans and not chosen freely by themselves. In fact, Foucault 

puts serious question marks behind the notion of free, individual choice, and rather calls for processes of 

becoming conscious of the societal mechanisms forming ourselves, and how these mechanisms not only 

limit us to certain forms of being, and preventing us from taking up others, but also enable and empower 

us to form identities that we concretely realize. As such, this critical consciousness, to some extent, limits 

the hold of societal power on our existence, and opens up new or other possibilities of being that can be 

explored, subject to the proviso, however, that societal power also generates and forms our thinking about, 

and realization of these alternatives. Foucault thus does not see in critical thinking a total liberation from 

context and societal power; he rather steers us into the direction of accepting the fact that we will never be 

totally free from power, but rather that we, to some limited extent, can question, challenge and limit that 

power by endless self-questioning (see Foucault 1984 and 1990). 

Derrida points us in the same general direction with his focus on the language we speak and how we, 

through a process of deconstruction, can become aware of the many ways in which we endeavour to 

determine meaning finally, “containing” and “fixing” it as it were to become stable and controllable. For 

Derrida this process of determination entails the danger, and even the violence, of excluding other or 

alternative meanings, leading to processes and institutional arrangements that close down possibilities 

of growth and renewal, instead of opening them up in provocative and challenging ways. To resist this 

violence of determination and closure, Derrida suggests we uncover and become aware of the processes 

in language by which we construct meaning and truth claims that are portrayed to be more coherent 

and “rational” than they actually are. For Derrida, the primary tool to achieve this is by showing how 

language can have the opposite meaning to what it is claimed to mean. This process of inversion of 

meaning he refers to as deconstruction – which is central to the strategy that he also refers to as endless 

self-questioning. As such, he sees deconstruction not as a self-undermining, futile exercise, destroying 

language and meaning. He rather sees it as our only hope to deliver us from the danger of final, eternally 

determined meanings. Our only hope to learn to finally live, he stated in his last interview, is this process 

of endless questioning (Derrida 2007; see also Derrida 1981). 

A second manifestation of this tradition of radical questioning in western culture has culminated in a 

vision of humankind as single human race with the earth as the common homeland of that race (The 

Universal House of Justice 2002; see also Laszlo 1994, and Morin and Kern 1999). In this vision, humans 

from different nations, cultures and religious backgrounds are not seen as fundamentally in competition 

with one another, but rather as mutually dependent upon one another for survival and flourishing, 

dependent as they all also are on the earth and the different natural systems characterising it for their 

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survival and flourishing. This notion of unity and interdependence clearly goes against the grain of the 

current organisation of international relations characterised as it is by tension, competition, violence, war 

and self-interested decision-making and action. This notion also goes against the grain of a conventional, 

western notion of the subject as an abstract entity standing loose and apart from any context, and able to 

realise itself in pure isolation from everything else. 

Both this organisation of the international order, and this notion of self are rejected from the point of 

view of unity and interconnectedness – the first in favour of an international order organised around 

principles of universal respect for human rights, fairness, social justice, participation and democracy, 

and the second in favour of notions of a relational self, embedded in a concrete context characterised by 

time and place, permeated by social institutions and ecological systems that evolve over time and have 

their own interrelated histories, affecting one another in many particular ways. In the perspectives from 

environmental philosophy and ethics that will be discussed below, these themes will be picked up again. 

A third manifestation of the tradition of radical critical thinking in western culture can be found in the 

liberal arts approach to tertiary education as it is most commonly practiced in the USA, drawing as 

it does on the philosophy of education of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Dewey, Nobel Prize winner 

Rabinadranath Tagore of India, Friedrich Fröbel of Germany, Johann Pestalozzi of Switzerland, Bronson 

Alcott of the USA and Maria Montessori of Italy (Nussbaum 2011, 18, 19, 35). Criticizing the sharp 

division that is conventionally made between the natural and the human sciences, as well as efforts to 

eliminate beauty, creativity, imagination, self-exploratory questioning and critical dialogue with peers 

from “serious” education in favour of measurable outcomes that will guarantee financial success in 

the world, the liberal arts approach to education emphasises that all students require these humanities- 

oriented components in their education in order to help form democratic world citizens that can approach 

problems and problem solving from a broad, inclusive, global point of view, instead of the narrow partisan 

perspectives often emanating from sectional, regional, national or cultural interests. As such, this approach 

to education openly makes a choice to foster and promote those characteristics and dispositions in 

students that can make a positive contribution to the building of democratic institutions, characterised by 

participation, respect for differences, dialogue, imaginative problem solving and partnerships (Nussbaum 

2011) – strengthening the emerging vision of humanity as one race with the earth as common homeland. 

Taken together, these three manifestations of the western tradition of critical discourse articulate a strong 

vision of humankind dependent upon one another and the ecosystems of the earth for its survival and 

flourishing. Common to all three of these manifestations, is the strategy of endless questioning, that 

suggests that any and every vision of humankind, and any and every form of interaction cannot be 

accepted on face value, but should rather be questioned deeply and endlessly to determine its origins, 

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structure, mechanisms of functioning, and its effects – on fellow human beings, as well as the earth and 

its ecosystems. In the section that follows I would like to give an overview and interpretation of five 

perspectives from environmental ethics that all, in their own manner, contribute to, and form part of this 

critical discourse – a discourse that never ceases to question and challenge. These perspectives will only 

be sketched in broad outline, focusing on the respective “targets” that are distinguished in each case, 

as well as the questions why these “targets” are identified, how they are questioned, and what kind of 

responses are envisaged with each perspective to overcome the problems posed by a particular “target.” 

3. Five perspectives from within and around environmental ethics 

3.1 The ethics of respect for nature of Paul Taylor 

The “target” of Paul Taylor’s ethics of respect for nature is, in short, human arrogance (Taylor 1986). 

For Taylor, this arrogance entails the view that humans are superior to all other living entities, with the 

practical implication that only the interests of humans are worthy of moral consideration. Taylor begs to 

differ strongly from this view on three grounds: firstly, he sees humans as members of the community of 

life that has evolved on earth; secondly, from an evolutionary point of view humans are fairly late arrivals 

in this community of life; and thirdly, because it is simply wrong to assume that non-human living entities 

have no interests that are worthy of moral consideration. 

According to Taylor, all non-human living things should be viewed as teleological centres of life. This 

means that every non-human living thing has in interest to realise its own good in its own way. An 

elephant, for instance, has an interest to flourish as an elephant in the way elephants flourish, and so does 

a tree and a fern to flourish as their respective kinds in their own way. This further means that non-human 

living things have interests that are independent from any human use value that can be derived from them. 

For Taylor, this implies that non-human living entities have intrinsic value – value of their own that they 

pursue in their own unique way, and as such, this intrinsic value deserves moral respect and consideration. 

An ethics of respect for nature has three elements to it, Taylor argues; The first element entails acquiring 

objective knowledge about the general conditions under which non-human living entities thrive in 

nature, and to progressively deepen and expand this knowledge through science. In many respects this 

is knowledge that humans to a large extent do not have, and thus it should be actively pursued. The 

second element is to recognize the individuality of non-human living organisms, which is to grasp their 

particularity. This entails a process of getting to know non-human living things in their uniqueness, how 

they differ from one another, and what their individual needs are. The third element entails a heightened 

consciousness characterised by a full awareness of that individual’s standpoint, i.e. its interests, and 

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then to ensure that the conditions under which these interests can be realised, are maintained and even 

improved upon. In practical terms, this entails the conservation of habitats, as well as their improvement – 

or restoration where they are damaged and the damage can be reversed. 

The further aspect of Taylor’s ethic of respect for nature entails doing justice to non-human living entities 

in cases where the satisfaction of legitimate human needs compatible with an ethics of respect for nature 

has inevitable impacts on non-human living organisms. For this purpose, Taylor has formulated certain 

priority principles that should be followed, boiling down to avoid interference with the lives of non-human 

living organisms as far as possible, and when interference cannot be avoided, to reduce that effect of it to 

as little as possible in terms of numbers and intensity, and to compensate for that impact. The latter could 

for instance be done by recreating a habitat elsewhere if it is destroyed in a certain place, or relocating 

individual non-human organisms to other places if they or their habitat stand to be destroyed for the sake 

of, for instance, building a library or a harbour essential to satisfying human needs. 

With an ethics like this, Taylor thus argues for biocentric egalitarianism. All life in all of its forms needs 

to be respected, since every living organism has interests and independent value that cannot be ignored 

from a moral point of view. In this, humans have no position that, from a moral point of view, makes them 

superior to any other form of life. Humans should rather behave as members of the community of life, 

and vice versa, any non-human living organism should be treated and respected equally as member of 

the community of life. There are no grounds for any exceptions, although Taylor makes provision for the 

principle of self defence in cases where non-human organisms are dangerous to humans, and humans do 

not venture wilfully into their territory to provoke them, and use minimum violence in such self-defence. 

3.2 The land ethic of Aldo Leopold 

The “target” of Aldo Leopold’s land ethic is the destructive power of mechanised man (Leopold 1949). 

While not a professional philosopher, and in fact preceding the emergence of theoretical environmental 

philosophy and ethics in the 1970s, Leopold articulated from the point of view of a practical 

environmental manager in the first half of the 20th century what happens when the interaction of humans 

with the land is mediated by technology, framed within a utilitarian calculus of costs and benefits: land 

becomes a commodity, and humans the conquerors of the land. For Leopold, this represents a crude 

reduction of both land and humans to something far less than they actually are, or can be. For him, land 

represents the community of life, and everything else that supports that life, and he argues that humans 

must become ordinary citizens of that community in a manner that their voices and votes do not count 

more than that of any other citizen. Such an ethic, however, Leopold points out, is not self-evident for 

the utilitarian oriented mechanised man. It is something that he will have to develop and learn, and as he 

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suggests in what is arguably one of his most famous essays (Thinking like a mountain), such learning 

often takes place when it is too late, and irreversible damage to an ecosystem, or damage that is very hard 

to reverse, has already been caused. 

In this essay, Leopold relates how he as a young field ranger in the Rocky Mountains participated in a 

wolf-eradication programme, assuming that it would be possible to replace wolves with hunters in order 

to keep the deer population under control, and through that, by removing wolves from the mountain 

range, enabling stock farmers a guaranteed income and preventing them from going bankrupt. However, 

when Leopold noticed how the deer population exploded after the last wolf and mountain lion was 

destroyed, because the hunters that were supposed to take their places proved to be inefficient, and the 

deer population destroyed the mountain range, and then died from lack of adequate grazing, he concluded 

that only a mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of a wolf. With this powerful 

metaphor he pointed out that the vision required to respect the community of life as a whole and every 

member within it, required much more than the short-term perspective of financial security dominated 

by cost-benefit analyses and the atomistic-mechanistic assumption that nature consists of discrete non- 

living “parts” that can be replaced at will by other parts with no real effect on the functioning of the 

whole. Instead, Leopold argues that nature should be seen as a living whole, a community of life, whose 

functioning is both complex and fragile, and of which we do not have complete knowledge. We therefore 

have to be very careful about our economic decisions, and always assess them for the impact they may 

have on larger spatial and temporal units. Ultimately, he argues, we should also consider geological 

time, the vision of a mountain, determining whether our decisions and actions will cause irreversible and 

permanent damage to the political, social, cultural, and ecological systems in which they are embedded. 

With this focus on the impact of decisions on the wider contexts within which they are embedded, 

Leopold (1949, 262) then formulated the central tenet of his land ethic in the following injunction: “A 

thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is 

wrong when it tends otherwise.” 

With this perspective, Leopold expands our moral horizon to include not only non-human living entities 

as that which should be morally considered, but also the land, the waters, the ecosystems and inorganic 

natural processes that make the existence of the community of life possible in the first place. But he goes 

further, and also argues for a transformation of our conventional human ethics that only takes human 

interests seriously. In his land ethics he calls for a reorganization of our moral thinking to focus on 

context, interdependence and interconnectivity, history, evolution and geological time. In this manner 

he articulated already before the actual emergence of environmental philosophy and ethics a theoretical 

academic field insight that has proven to be central in the transformative thinking of both the humanities 

and the environmental thinking of today. 

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3.3 The Deep ecology of Arne Naess 

The theme of a radical critique of the metaphysics and self-conception underlying consumer society 

is taken up in the deep ecology of Arne Naess (1982 and 1986). For him the “target” of environmental 

philosophy is the narrow, egotistical notion of self informing the consumerist life-style that has come 

to dominate the world. For Naess this self is immature in that it strives for realization through the 

accumulation and consumption of material goods and a high standard of living, and its only ecological 

worry is a shallow concern about pollution and habitat destruction that may jeopardise the consumerist 

project. Instead, Naess proposes a deep ecology that focuses on the root causes of our environmental 

predicaments. As Naess sees it, this root cause is the metaphysical notion of humans as separate and apart 

from nature, standing over and against it. Criticizing the image of “man in nature”, he rather develops the 

notion of mankind as part and parcel of nature – drawing among others on Gestalt theory, phenomenology 

and the philosophy of Mahatma Ghandi as sources of inspiration. 

Under these assumptions, Naess argues, a mature self, a big spirited self can emerge by using the mental 

strategy of identification with ever larger circles of being in which we as humans are embedded. In a 

though experiment to determine where the self is located, Naess points out that the self is not found 

somewhere within the mind or even the body of an individual; what we refer to as the self is rather 

formed by all of the relationships within which we are embedded that contribute to the formation of our 

consciousness and identity: the family, the clan, the village or town or city we live in, our immediate 

surroundings, the landscape, the continent we come from. All of this is part of ourselves, and we are 

connected to and part of it. Accordingly, Naess would not see environmental action as something that 

humans do for and on behalf of the environment. Protest against a dam that will be built in a valley, for 

instance, will rather be an act of self-defence. 

Arne Naess thus also emphasises ideas of interdependence and interconnectivity, and calls very strongly 

for a transformation of our deepest assumptions about nature, self, identity, consciousness, and self- 

realization with a view to overcoming our environmental crisis. He is criticized, however, for not taking 

ideology, domination and power relations explicitly into account in his deep ecology, which is clearly 

done in ecofeminist circles, in particular in the ecofeminism of Karen Warren, to which we turn next. 

3.4 The ecofeminism of Karen Warren 

In her famous essay “The power and the promise of ecological feminism” Karen Warren (1990) argues 

that patriarchy should be singled out as the root cause of our environmental problems – since it is 

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characterized by a logic of domination and exploitation that not only informs the interaction of men with 

women, but also that of humans with nature. This logic of domination, she points out, is characterized by 

three elements: dichotomous thinking in which a number of simplistic binary oppositions are clustered and 

combined to reinforce one another; hierarchical thinking in which the one pole of the binary opposition 

is given a positive value, while the other one is given a negative value; and an argument in which those 

associated with the positive values are portrayed as superior and justified in dominating those associated 

with the negative values and are portrayed and treated as inferior. 

As Warren correctly shows, the human-nature dichotomy and the male-female dichotomy are still 

functioning in an analogous and mutually reinforcing manner in many sectors of mainstream popular 

culture, and are supported by a wide array of similar dichotomies, each of which are given a place within 

a value hierarchy that allocates positive value to the male or human side of the dichotomies, and negative 

value to the female or nature side of the dichotomy. Combined with the argument that the superior side of 

a value hierarchy can legitimately dominate and exploit the inferior side, the social effects of this dualistic 

and hierarchical thinking is the portrayal of the domination of both women and nature as part of the 

normal order of things, and something that does not deserve any questioning or critical discussion. 

With this observation, Warren draws attention to the ideological functioning of the logic of domination 

in society: it privileges patriarchal power to dictate agendas of action, and silences through various 

mechanisms any protest and opposition that could be raised to that agenda. One of the mechanisms 

often used in this “silencing, is the portrayal of any protest as unreasonable or not normal. In particular, 

Warren argues, the voices of those women who are dominated and exploited by this logic are silenced, 

they are rendered speechless, so that even if they tried to speak out, their voices in protest and opposition 

are not heard. Accordingly, Warren formulates the agenda of ecofeminism as unmasking, opposing and 

overcoming this logic of domination and its silencing effects in any and every one of its manifestations in 

society. 

Central to this agenda for Warren is the strategy of giving voice to those who have been silenced by the 

logic of domination, something that could be achieved by foregrounding the experience of women who 

have become victims of patriarchy in their own lives, but also have become victims of the domination 

and exploitation of nature. As she argues forcefully in her article, dominated and oppressed women have 

many stories to tell and to share with the world, and the best way to capture these stories is by listening 

to the first person singular narratives of those who have become the victims of the logic of domination 

of patriarchy. In these “I”-narratives, Warren argue, experiences will be and are articulated that are not 

commonly found in theoretical writings. Instead, these narratives will be concrete and specific, articulating 

what was lived through in the context from which the narrative speaks, placing living and real issues in a 

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vivid and direct manner on the agendas of those concerned about environmental and feminist issues, and 

as such serve as inspiration for activist responses. 

Ultimately, Warren argues that this ecofeminist agenda and its strategies to give voice to the experiences of 

the victims of patriarchy will enable society to discard the logic of domination, its central argument and its 

dualist and hierarchical thinking. This could be done, she argues, in mode of thinking that does not discard 

the differences between men and women, or humankind and nature, but acknowledge these differences 

albeit in a manner that does not have the end result of domination and exploitation. What Warren argues 

for in the place of dichotomies and hierarchies is thus relational thinking in which differences are seen 

as nuances on a spectrum, the end points of which are not regarded as dichotomous poles but rather 

possibilities in a continuum. 

With these perspectives Warren articulates a radically transformative agenda for ecofeminism – in which 

not only the identities of male and female, or humankind and nature are rethought, but also the relationship 

between them, that is: their mode of interaction. Together with Val Plumwood, Karen Warren thus makes 

a positive contribution to the articulation of selves and identities in terms of their interdependence and 

internal connections. Her critical thinking points us in the direction of rethinking differences in a manner 

that does not see differences as a source of domination and exploitation, but as a source of building new 

connections and enriched selves and identities. 

From the practical world of environmental governance and management, however, the criticism is often 

heard that the radical, transformative perspectives likes those of deep ecology and ecofeminism discussed 

above, while making many legitimate points, have long-term agendas that will take too long for the 

positive results of societal or cultural transformations to really come into effect, and that environmental 

decision-makers who have to address environmental issues today require guidance that can be used 

immediately, and articulated in a practical language that can be understood by politicians and managers 

alike. A bold effort in the articulation of such a pragmatic approach can be found in the environmental 

ethics of Bryan Norton. 

3.5 The environmental pragmatism of Bryan Norton 

In his environmental pragmatism Bryan Norton (1991, 2003, 2005) responds to the embarrassment of 

environmentalists and managers alike that they have no common, practical language in which to articulate 

our environmental problems and the paths to follow towards resolving them. He argues that we have 

to move beyond theoretical, metaphysical and ideological language in this endeavour, and also beyond 

language that only makes use of single principles or value perspectives to articulate issues and solutions. 

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We rather need to accommodate a multiplicity of values in combination with one another, taking into 

account different kinds of environmental risks that we are exposed to, as well as the realities of the costs 

to address them. 

To develop such a language, Norton makes use of an approach in which learning from experience, the 

actual experiences and struggles of communities confronted with particular environmental challenges, 

and multiple scales of analysis stands central. Norton refers to this generally as the bases of adaptive 

management, in which the question of how communities actually value and make sense of things, 

environmental challenges and possible solutions included, should strategically speaking, be the point of 

departure. 

As Norton sees it, adaptive management is essentially an iterative, participative and democratic enterprise 

in which management targets, outcomes, plans and strategies are not defined unilaterally and finally 

by managers from a distant and technocratic point of view, but provisionally and in dialogue with the 

communities in which environmental problems have to be addressed. In such a process, Norton argues, 

it is important to identify clear indicators on which the communities involved agree in terms of which 

management success or failure can be measured, and if mileposts are not reached or overshot, adjustments 

can be made in time, before it is too late, to adjust targets, outcomes, plans, or strategies. 

A short illustration of what Norton has in mind with this pragmatic approach and practical language can 

be given with reference to a simple decision square (see Figure 1 below) that he has designed to guide 

thinking about different kinds of environmental risks and how to respond to them. The point of departure 

of this decision square is a risk typology that ranges from mere inconveniences to irreversible catastrophes. 

[Figure 1] Bryan Norton’s decision square depicting a risk typology, linked to severity and reversibility (Norton 2003, 172). 

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On this continuum, increments in risk severity can be indicated as varying degrees of real resource costs, 

severe economic dislocation, cultural or political impoverishment, biological impoverishment, and 

distinction (Norton 2003, 172). On this square, reversibility and irreversibility could be entered on the 

bottom line, with the most reversible inconveniences placed in the bottom right hand corner, and the most 

irreversible catastrophes like species extinction in the left hand corner. On the vertical axis low cost can be 

entered at the bottom, and high cost at the top. In combination with one another, all of the factors in this 

decision square could be portrayed as follows: 

With such a guide, one can plot in broad outline environmental risks and responses to it, and from its 

location on the square inferences can be made about the kinds of values that need to be considered in order 

to better characterize the risk and to think more clearly about possible responses. Small inconveniences 

that can be reversed at low cost will clearly require mostly short-term financial or economic values to 

decide about, while the location of a repository for nuclear waste storage that can have long term socio- 

political implications for a region or even cause biological impoverishment, and will be very expensive 

not only to locate but also to shift if it were to be initially located in the wrong place, will require processes 

of careful and sensitive political dialogue, community participation and long term thinking, over and 

above financial cost-benefit analyses to decide. 

By introducing the category in the decision square of irreversible catastrophe that will incur very high, 

if not incalculable costs to deal with, Norton is able to articulate the notion of non-negotiable thresholds 

that need to be defined by society, managers and experts in dialogue with one another. Thresholds like this 

will represent hard limits beyond which society has decided it should not go, and also stimulate policies 

designed to discourage decision-makers to approach these limits, creating safety margins that should be 

respected. When these non-negotiable thresholds are approached, Norton argues that cost-benefit calculus 

and purely utilitarian considerations are trumped by societal interests in safety, security, and stability, and/ 

or considerations preventing biological impoverishment or extinctions. This is another way for Norton of 

saying that we should spare no costs in ensuring that we do not approach these non-negotiable thresholds, 

and that in certain contexts when confronted with certain risks those risks cannot be traded off against 

possible economic gains that can be gained from it. 

While representing thus a reformist anthropocentric position in environmental ethics, Norton’s pragmatic 

approach need not be seen as a weak approach. On the contrary, it could function as radical as any of 

the other positions in environmental philosophy and ethics discussed above, and perhaps even have the 

advantage of speaking the language of managers, planners and politicians that can understand it from the 

outset. 

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4. Interpretation and Conclusion 

With this broad overview of a selection of perspectives from within and around environmental ethics it is 

possible to draw three strong conclusions about the theme of the humanities and healing: 

1. From the overview it is evident that environmental philosophy and ethics in its theoretical, practical, 

reformative, transformative and radical formats are primarily concerned with critical thinking that 

questions and poses challenges to conventional ways of thinking and conventional practices that lead 

to environmental risks and destruction. While these different perspectives in environmental ethics all in 

their own ways make a contribution to the transformation of our ethical thinking, to the expansion of 

the circle of what can and should be included in the realm of moral considerability, to taking seriously 

ecological and societal considerations that have been neglected before, to transforming practices and 

mental frameworks, to changing the structure and functioning of society, and to putting in place newly 

conceptualized practices, processes, institutions and modes of self-realization, little if any of these are 

linked directly by environmental philosophers and ethicists to the healing of society or nature in the 

conventional sense of the term healing. Instead, the link is rather made to a confrontation or engagement 

with society at large, prompting it to move away from an unsustainable and destructive development path 

to one that is sustainable and restorative in its main thrust. 

2. From the overview it is also evident that the different perspectives in environmental philosophy and 

ethics, sharing as they are in a broad critical aim, contribute in their own ways to a wider global discourse 

in which interdependence, democratic participation, and the unity of humankind as one race with the earth 

as common homeland are emphasized. In this discourse interdependence, democratic participation, the 

unity of humankind, and respect for the earth are emphasized as prerequisites or boundary conditions for 

the flourishing of human and non-human life on earth alike, together and in interaction with one another 

in a shared history, co-evolving in interaction with one another. As it is typical of the western tradition 

of critical thinking, these boundary conditions are not seen as substantive definitions or determinations 

of what this flourishing should entail, or what direction this history of co-evolution should take. It is 

rather a future oriented mode of thinking that is in principle always open for change and transformation, 

and as such calls for a continual process of exploration of possible ways of identity formation and 

self-realization, as well as a never-ending process of self-questioning in which any constraints to the 

flourishing of life and its openness to the future are identified and challenged. As it has been shown above, 

environmental ethics in its many different formats make an important and substantive contribution to this 

process of endless exploration and self-questioning. The enthusiasm and vigour with which environmental 

philosophy and ethics have taken up this role in the past four decades is a clear indication that its critical 

thinking and questioning is seen as part of a healthy process, without prescribing or pre-empting in any 

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way what exactly should be regarded as the final standard in terms of which the health of society should 

be determined. 

3. In the overview above it has been demonstrated that western environmental philosophy and ethics 

challenges the ideal and practice of unrestrained physical growth and development that is still to a very 

large extent prevalent in industrial societies, arguing that this ideal and practice is unsustainable in the 

sense of destroying not only the physical, or ecological basis of life on earth, but also the spiritual basis 

of human existence, i.e. the sense of wonder and respect for life on earth as an unfolding and evolving 

process with a worth of its own independent from the interests of human beings. In the overview above, 

it was also demonstrated that the unsustainable and destructive development path of industrial society is 

in part the result of the reduction of decision-making criteria about development to short-term economic 

considerations, and in part the result of the reduction of the notion of self-realization to that of acquiring 

material wealth and consumption of material goods. As such a critical enterprise, environmental ethics can 

easily be framed as a “healing” endeavour – its central aim and focus can easily be depicted as an effort 

to heal humankind from the illnesses of materialism, consumerism, autism, fragmentation, isolationism 

and abstract idealism. The irony, however, is that such a focus on healing will typically become part of 

the critical questioning of environmental philosophy and ethics itself, unravelling as it will do what the 

notion of health may entail in this context, questioning how the meaning of “health” was constructed and 

determined, how this meaning circulates and functions in society, who wins what by this through which 

mechanisms and who loses what ... So, as it was argued in the main thrust of this paper, instead of linking 

environmental philosophy and ethics with the notion of healing, environmental philosophy and ethics 

rather seem to suggest that it is healthier to question the notion of health and to keep on subjecting it to a 

process of endless questioning, rather than to try to finally determine what exactly “health” means and to 

try to implement that meaning in the world. Indeed, many efforts in the recent past to restore society to 

a state of health have ended in catastrophe, many dimensions of which have been irreversible and have 

come with incalculable costs. At least, this has been the experience in western culture. 

References 

Derrida, J. (2007) Learning to Live Finally: The Last Interview. Brooklyn: Melville House Publishing. 

Derrida, J. (1981) Positions. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 

Foucault, M. (1984) The Foucault Reader. Pantheon Books. 

Foucault, M. (1990) Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977-1984. New York: 

Routledge. 

Laszlo, E. (1993) The Multicultural Planet: The Report of a UNESCO International Expert Group. 

Oneworld Publications. 

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Leopold, A. (1949) A Sand County Almanac: And Sketches Here and There. Oxford University Press. 

Morin, E. and Kern, A.B. (1999) Homeland Earth: A Manifesto for the New Millennium (Advances in 

Systems Theory, Complexity and the Human Sciences). 

Naess, A. (1982) Simple in Means, Rich in Ends. An interview with Arne Naess by Stephan Bodian. The 

Ten Directions. Los Angeles: Los Angeles Zen Centre. 

Naess, A. (1986) The Deep Ecological Movement: Some Philosophical Aspects. Philosophical Inquiry, 

Vol. VIII, No. 1-2, pp. 10-31. 

Norton, B.G. (2003) Searching for Sustainability: An Interdisciplinary Philosophy of Conservation 

Biology. Cambridge University Press. 

Norton, B.G. (2005) Sustainability: A Philosophy of Adaptive Ecosystem Management. University of 

Chicago Press. 

Norton, B.G. (1991) Toward Unity Among Environmentalists. Oxford University Press. 

Nussbaum, M. (2011) Niet Voor De Winst. Waarom De Democratie De Geesteswetenschappen Nodig 

Heeft. (A Dutch translation by Rogier van Kappel of Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the 

Humanities, Princeton University Press, 2010.) Amsterdam: Ambo/Anthos Uitgevers. 

Ricoeur, P. (1970) Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. New Haven: Yale University Press. 

Rolston III, H. (1991) “Environmental ethics: Values in and duties to the natural world”. In F. Herbert 

Bornmann and Stephen R. Kellert (eds.), The Broken Circle: Ecology, Economics, Ethics, New 

Haven: Yale University Press. 

Taylor, P. (1986) Respect for Nature: A Theory of Environmental Ethics. Princeton University Press. 

The Universal House of Justice (2002) Message to the World’s Religious Leaders. Available at http:// 

www.bahai.org/selected-writings/message-worlds-religious-leaders/ 

Warren, K.J. (1990) “The power and the promise of ecological feminism”. Environmental Ethics, Vol. 12, 

No. 2, pp. 125-146. 

Zimmerman, M.E. (1993) General introduction. In Zimmerman, M.E. (general editor), Environmental 

Philosophy: From Animal Rights to Radical Ecology. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall. 

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Notes Toward a Typology of Consolation: Healing and Cultural 

Difference 

Yasunari Takada 

The University of Tokyo 

1. 3.11 and Healing 

Japan still remains in the aftermath of the 3.11, the disaster that happened in 2011, now officially named 

“the Great Earthquake Disaster in the Eastern Japan.” The disaster, as you know, was twofold: one 

is the natural disaster of earthquake and tsunami and the other the man-made disaster of radioactive 

contamination that happened at Fukushima no. 1 nuclear power plant. In both kinds of disaster, natural 

and/or man-made, those who suffered from them have clearly been in need of healing. When I was told 

the topic of the present conference it was natural that I was immediately reminded of the 3.11 disasters. 

It goes without saying that for the victims of the disasters, both natural and man-made, urgent was the 

healing, ranging from surgical treatment to psychiatric counseling. And after one year and a half it still 

remains the case. But my concern here is not with these aspects of healing: it is proper that they be dealt 

with in various departments of medical science. Instead, what I am concerned with here is the relationship 

between healing and culture because cultural difference matters much, as I understand it, in defining 

the characteristic and practice of healing. The idea may sound trite and it even belongs to a common 

knowledge, but it seems to me not worthless to examine this problematic of healing and culture as it 

presents itself in and around the 3.11 disaster. 

2. Two Impressive Features of 3.11 and Two Kinds of Healing 

When one talks about the 3.11 disaster, there are two impressive features that cannot be left unmentioned. 

One is the disciplined behavior of the people who suffered from the earthquake and tsunami, and the other 

is the confused state of affairs among those who were supposed be in charge of the nuclear power safety 

control. 

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It is said that nothing was more impressive than the self-discipline and peace of mind with which those 

who had undergone the horrendous earthquake conducted themselves. Foreign media reporting the 

disaster and its aftermath seems to have been particularly struck with the general composure the people 

showed in face of such a crisis. A few explanations are proposed for this admirable phenomenon. Some 

say that part of the reason can be sought in the fact that the Eastern Japan is sparsely populated and there 

is no big city in the areas badly hit by the earthquake and tsunami. 1 Others say that it is because of the 

backwardness and the severe weather of the Eastern district, due to which its people are used to patience 

and endurance. Each of the explanations may have a grain of truth in it but are not particularly convincing. 

A more general theory, as it happened, was proposed more than eighty years ago by a noted physicist, 

Torahiko Terada (1878-1935). According to him, nature in Japan has two faces, one being that of 

beautiful loving mother and the other that of terrifying strict father. If the former can find its exemplary 

representation in the beautiful landscape filled with a large variety of hilly features, the latter sees its 

expression in the frequent and violent earthquake. Both of them, however, have their ultimate origins in 

the volcanic activities. 

In Japan the mercifulness of Nature (the loving mother) is so profound and profuse that its 

inhabitants can easily feel themselves saturated with it, finding themselves comfortably nestling in 

her arms, while at the same time the severe punishments of Nature (the strict father) cut them to the 

bone to such an extent that its inhabitants think it useless to revolt against him. As a consequence, 

while sufficiently enjoying the blessings of nature, they have given up their will to revolt against 

nature and tried instead to accumulate the experience and knowledge about nature so as to 

accustom themselves to it. 2 

In Terada’s view, nature in Japan has in it both benign and malign sides. But they both have acted in 

a kind of collusion to produce the kind of mentality (human nature) that tends to feel at once comfort 

andresignation toward nature. Following Terada’s theory, it is not impossible to say that we witnessed a 

manifestation of this inherited second nature behind the self-discipline and composure of the victims of 

the 3.11 earthquake and tsunami. 3 

1 In the Great Kanto Earthquake that hit Tokyo in 1923, indeed, there was triggered off a massacre, in which a number of 

Koreans became the victims of groundless rumors. But basically, this was a politically motivated happening. 

2 Torahiko Terada, “The Japanese View on Nature” (1935), in Natural Disaster and the Japanese, ed. Tetsuo Yamaori (Tokyo: 

Kadokawa, 2011), pp. 123-24. 

3 Related to this feature of composure the victims of the natural disaster showed in the face of crisis is the nation-wide 

movement of compassion called “kizuna”, or ties or bonds both between the people and with the native land. Again, 

Terada sought a kind of its origin in the complicated and labyrinthine structure of natural topography, which has been 

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The second impressive feature was observable not in the behavior of the victims of the natural disaster but 

in the conduct of those in power who were responsible for the control and management of nuclear power. 

Admittedly, how those concerned (the cabinet, TPCO and NISA (Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency)) 

went about in risk management and what they did and did not has not yet been fully clarified and still 

awaits full investigation. But this much can be safely said: there was a panic, where proper control and 

management was hardly at work. That there seems to have been no command system ready to cope with 

the situation will reveal that no proper provision had been made against this kind of crisis. “Beyond all 

expectations” is the characteristic phrase those in the responsible position have kept repeating to describe 

the situation. 

We must be cautious about making judgments on the Fukushima incident until a full report will come out, 

but I think I am not alone in perceiving in the characteristic phrase “beyond all expectations” what Terada 

had to say about the typical Japanese attitude to nature, particularly in its terrifying aspect of strict father. 

“The severe punishments of Nature (the strict father) [earthquake and tsunami],” he says, “cut them to the 

bone to such an extent that its inhabitants think it useless to revolt against him. As a consequence, […] 

they have given up their will to revolt against nature.” The invention of nuclear power is nothing if not 

an ultimate instance of the “revolt against nature.” It is therefore not permissible for those engaged in this 

“revolt against nature” to confess that they failed to take every measure of prevention against any possible 

occurrence of disaster nature has in store, of which earthquake and tsunami are unfortunate but familiar 

stocks in trade. The confession of “beyond all expectations” that those responsible for nuclear power 

unwittingly made is revealing in that they were unaware of being engaged in the daring business of the 

“revolt against nature.” The origins and causes of this serious unawareness are obviously too complicated 

to elucidate, but there seem to be two major underlying assumptions that helped to make the confession 

possible. Firstly, it is likely that they simply regarded the business of nuclear power not as the ultimate 

case of the Western scientific tradition but simply as one of the imported technologies. A technology is a 

technology because of its being transferrable from one cultural tradition to another without carrying with it 

its background world view. And behind the invention of nuclear power is a distinct tradition, what Terada 

calls the “analytic science” of the West, whose ultimate origins Terada suggests have closely to do with 

the Judeo-Christian world view. 4 Secondly, because of the traditional attitude toward nature that has been 

persistently fostered on the Japanese Isles they found it difficult to recognize the basic distinction between 

further strengthened by the characteristic volcanic activities. “Such topography is not conducive to a nomadic people but 

instrumental to settling a people in a place. Those who are settled in this way as natives came gradually to assume their 

own local characteristics while accustoming themselves to their local climates. And at the same time they came to form a 

strong attachment to their native lands where they were settled” (Ibid., pp. 111-12). The similar argument and theme was 

to be further substantiated by Tetsuro Watsuji in his Fudo (1935, Climate and Change in English translation). 

4 Ibid., p. 124. 

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natural and man-made disasters. “Beyond all expectations” is a phrase that naturally comes out from those 

who “have given up their will to revolt against nature and tried instead to accumulate the experience and 

knowledge about nature so as to accustom themselves to it.” 

The point I’d like to make based on the distinction between natural and man-made disasters is that there 

is a corresponding difference in healing as well. At the risk of oversimplification the case can be made 

that the natural disaster calls for a course of affective adjustments while the man-made disaster demands 

a process of rational understanding. For the natural disaster is in its nature inexplicable and something 

ineluctable to comply with whereas the man-made disaster is susceptible rational analysis and something 

one can and must answer for. 

Discussion I’ve made above of the two impressive features about the 3.11 disaster indicates that the 

Japanese culture seems to be programmed to produce a peculiar mental disposition. Namely, it has a 

relatively high capacity to accommodate itself to natural disasters, while it shows, on the other hand, 

a rather limited capacity when it faces a man-made calamity. Now, this in turn suggests the possibility 

of cultural difference in the way the two kinds of healing take their effect. There can be a culture, for 

example, where, in sharp contrast to the Japanese, the mental disposition is programmed to accommodate 

itself less to natural disasters than to man-made calamities. But first it is necessary to take a close look at 

the supposed peculiarity of the nature and structure of the Japanese culture. 

3. Nature and Structure of Japanese Culture 

What I picked up for the examination of Japanese culture are the three intellectuals representing the high 

culture of postwar Japan: Shuichi Kato (1919-2008), Masao Maruyama (1914-1996) and Toshihiko 

Izutsu (1914-1993). Shuichi Kato, perhaps best known to the English-speaking world as the author of A 

History of Japanese Literature, was veritably a versatile intellectual. Trained as medical doctor but taught 

himself in literature, philosophy and art of both East and West, he established himself as a cosmopolitan 

intellectual and remained long as a leading critic. He is also remembered as a life-long civic activist 

in defense of the Article 9 of the Constitution. 5 Masao Maruyama, professor of political philosophy at 

the University of Tokyo and in his time an influential scholar-critic, was perhaps also familiar to the 

English-speaking world through a couple of his representative works, Studies in the Intellectual History 

5 ARTICLE 9. Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce 

war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes. (2) To 

accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be 

maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized. 

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of Tokugawa Japan and Thought and Behavior in Modern Japanese Politics. Although the former 

work received a due criticism of scholarly inaccuracy of over-reading or under-reading of Confucian 

scholar in the Edo period, it should be read in the same spirit in which the latter work was written, i.e., 

the philosophical diagnosis of Japan’s ultra-nationalism in its pre- and interwar period and the search 

for its remedy. For Maruyama, and for Kato as well, the fiasco in which the Fifteen Years War (from the 

Manchurian Incident of 1931 to the total capitulation in 1945) had come to an end proved the failure of 

Japan’s modernization, especially in its spiritual aspects. They were of the opinion that Japan was still 

in need of proper modernization in its spiritual sphere: modernization for them remained “an unfinished 

project.” Now, Toshihiko Izutsu, our third figure, is a slightly different kettle of fish. Well-versed in 

numerous languages, both classical and modern, he accomplished a comparative study on a variety of 

religious experiences in East and West to eventually become a world-noted Islamist. In 1962 he left Japan, 

where he had taught at Keio University for more than ten years to assume a professorial appointment 

at McGill University, Canada. And then in 1975 he was invited from the Imperial Iranian Academy 

of Philosophy at Teheran, where he stayed until 1979, when the outbreak of the Islamic revolution 

forced him to return to Japan. Among his numerous books in English are Ethico-Religious Concepts 

in the Qur’an, Sufism and Taoism, and Toward a Philosophy of Zen Buddhism. He preferred to be a 

cosmopolitan, wandering scholar, and as such belongs to the rare species among Japanese intellectuals, 

which includes Kato as well. 

These are the three personages, through whose examination I would like to bring out the nature and 

structure of the Japanese culture. But what strikes us most at first glass is their diversity: a critic, a 

scholar of political philosophy, and a philosopher of Oriental religions, but there are in fact two reasons 

why I chose these three intellectuals among others: (1) precisely because they were different from those 

philosophers of “Kyoto school” who were intent on building either a national philosophy or an Oriental 

philosophy serving the national end. It is true that one of Toshihiko Izutsu’s works, Consciousness and 

Essence (1982), purports to build “a synchronic system of Oriental philosophy” but it has nothing to do 

with any form of parochial nationalism. As for Kato and Maruyama, it was exactly with the critique of the 

wartime nationalism that marked the point of departure for their lifelong activities. Secondly I chose them 

(2) because Kato’s last work, Space and Time in Japanese Culture (2007), as I understand it, will provide 

us with a broad scheme, through which both Maruyama’s and Izutsu’s works are to be interrelated. 

3-1. Kato 

People in Japanese society, at its all levels, have a tendency to live only for the present, letting 

bygones be bygones and leaving the future up to the wind. The meaning of the present events is 

defined not in their relation to the past history or future prospect but on its own, irrespective of 

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what is gone and what it to come. 

The typical community, where days are spent in the characteristically present-oriented way, […] 

has such distinct boundaries that the behavior and attitude of its members toward its insiders is 

contrastively different from the one toward its outsiders. Behind such difference in their behavior 

and attitude is probably a strong communal sense of belonging together. Since such a community 

for them is a life-world, the strong sense of belonging together implies that their world is nothing 

but “here.” […] It seems to be the case, therefore, that in Japan people have found themselves 

living “here-now.” 6 

The upshot of Kato’s argument in his Space and Time in Japanese Culture is that the essentials of the 

Japanese culture can be found in its characteristic attitude toward and predilection for “here and now.” By 

this “here and now” he means that in the sharp distinction the Japanese culture will make between inside 

and outside, greater store is set of “the inside” (here) while in the perception of time, too, much is made of 

the momentary and ephemeral “now” rather than the long-term temporal perspective. Kato tries to prove 

this thesis in a comparative way, using the European conception of space and time as a kind of foil to 

reveal the Japanese distinction. 

While time in the Judeo-Christian tradition was conceived of as linear progression with its distinct 

beginning and end, time in the Japanese culture, as can be seen in the national foundation myth of the 

Kojiki (712), was considered linear but without its definite beginning and end. Genesis of the world in 

the Japanese tradition is characterized not by creatio ex nihilo but by “spontaneous emergence” without 

creator and without end. If in the Judeo-Christian tradition every event happening there happens once for 

all and its meaning is defined by its reference to the past and future events, in the Japanese culture the 

sense of such temporal coherence is feeble: it is often said and seriously that “let bygones drain in the 

water,” meaning “let bygones be bygones.” In the Judeo-Christian tradition time, being finite and one- 

directional, is susceptible of being structured and hence the history was conceived as a forward movement 

progressing toward its end, whereas in the Japanese culture time, taken essentially as an emergent 

moment, will not articulate itself into a structured history in its European sense of the word. 

The Greek conception of cyclical time without beginning and end (“anakuklesis” -- eternal return) 

indeed seems to offer a structure similar to the Japanese but with the difference that the Greek one was 

conceived on the model of the movement of the celestial spheres whereas the Japanese one does not look 

6 Space and Time in Japanese Culture (Iwanami-shoten, 2007), pp. 3-4. 

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up for a transcendent model but remains in and with nature. Its predilection for the ephemeral “now” can, 

therefore, find its local cohabitation with the sense of the natural cycle of four seasons. 

By the same token, Kato conducts a comparative diagnosis with regard to the conception of space 

peculiar to the Japanese culture. While the ancient Greek world was characterized by the diversity in 

and mobility among its peoples with different cultural and religious backgrounds, the Japanese culture, 

due to its geopolitical condition, has had a poor experience of being exposed to outsiders and strangers. 

If the demarcation that separated the Greek world from others was not fixed and its cultural space was 

always open to strangers (the only marker of distinction being solely in the use of the Greek language), in 

the Japanese culture the whole society is structured on the principle of distinction between “insider and 

outsider.” The Greek urge toward openness and universality was to be further strengthened by the Pauline 

revolution of Christianity in Europe, whereas in Japan its deep-grained tendency to distinguish the inner 

and the outside and then valorize the former was to be further consolidated by the two occasions of long 

seclusion policy, the first one in the period from 10th to 13th century for about 300 years and then the 

second one in the Edo period for about 250 years. In this way, the so-called primitive “village mentality” 

was preserved together with the principle of “insider and outsider” distinction, which exerted and in a 

sense still exerts its formative power in the basic conceptions of not only family and the country but also 

international relations. 

Now, the structure of subjectivity that will be formed under this temporal and spatial dispensation of the 

Japanese culture would be easy to surmise. Time will not structure itself, be it at the individual or at the 

historical plane, to bring about a trans-natural horizon: on the contrary, it can easily merge itself with 

nature at large. The subjectivity of such disposition is a far cry from the one formed in the Judeo-Christian 

tradition where time structures itself, at the supernatural level, in the contractual relationship between man 

and God. In short, time in the Japanese culture is not conducive to nurturing the independent and integral 

subjectivity. By the same token, the perception of space in the Japanese culture is prone to turn a blind eye 

to what is unfamiliar and foreign. The subjectivity formed in such a culture structures itself in a kind of 

narcissistic way and has a difficulty in breaking off and going beyond the horizon in which it always and 

already finds its cozy habitation. 

The conclusion Kato’s diagnosis reached that the essentials of the Japanese culture lie in its predilection 

for “here and how” sounds unexciting. Of course, he does not fail to see its positive aspects, especially 

in the exemplary instance of refinement in literature (e.g., haiku), painting (e.g. the Rimpa schools 7 ), 

7 Subjectification of the suibokuga (painting in India ink of Chinese origin). 

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architecture (e.g., the tea-ceremony room) and folk craft. These are the rare products the culture of “here 

and now” can take proud in, but they are almost all of them limited in the fields of esthetics. In other areas, 

particularly, history and philosophy, there are not many the culture of “here and now” can boast of in way 

of things or ideas. And the last thing it can boast of is its manifestation in the socio-political dimension: 

so-called “village mentality” and the structure of non-individualized subjectivity. That Space and Time in 

Japanese Culture concludes with a chapter that deals with the problem of exodus from “here and now” 

tells a lot about this state of affairs. To Kato’s ambivalent mind, the Japanese culture is praiseworthy in its 

esthetic dimension but as a political entity it is an ideological field to get away from. 

3-2. Maruyama 

Masao Maruyama was similarly concerned with and about the traditional cultural milieu of what Kato 

calls “here and now”. For, as they understood it, the persistence of the pre-modern mentality, was a 

good deal responsible for the devastating results of WWII. This recognition was decisive in their future 

intellectual career. (When the war ended Maruyama was at the age of 26 and Kato 21.) They were at 

one in thinking that the atrocious devastation of WWII had its origins in (a) the failure of modernization 

in its spiritual enlightenment and (b) the underestimated tenacity of the undercurrent of pre-modern 

mentality (the so-called “village mentality”), which had been fully manipulated for the service of fascism. 

The Japanese version of modernization was underdone in that it neglected to implant the “individual” 

and integral subjectivity, one of its essential components in its cultural soil, which alone could have 

countervailed the political manipulation of pre-modern emotions. Maruyama, therefore, took upon 

himself the twofold project that aims at firstly (a) an installation of an ideological apparatus, with which 

to help create the “individual” and integral subjectivity and secondly (b) an archeological study on the 

obstinate undercurrent of the pre-modern mentality --- he calls this obstinate undercurrent famously the 

“basso ostinato” of the Japanese cultural tradition. The investigation into the “basso ostinato” was done 

with vigor and rigor, for instance, in The Japanese Thought (1961) and Thought and Behavior in Modern 

Japanese Politics (enlarged ed. 1964), the latter being a study about its tenacious manifestations in modern 

Japan. 

Unlike the archeological study of “basso ostinato,” the attempt to install an ideological apparatus to 

foster the integral subjectivity is entrammelled with difficulties. Maruyama perceived that to realize the 

integral subjectivity, something of a superstructure approaching Judeo-Christian God would have been in 

order. He called this something “Das Allgemeine” and took to an arduous task of searching in the course 

of Japanese intellectual tradition after the very moments in which the seminal occasion for providing 

“Das Allgemeine” was left undiscovered. On one occasion, he believed that he found a version of “Das 

Allgemeine” in the thought of a Confucianist (in the person of Ogyu Sorai 1666-1728) and his school in 

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Tugawa era. The study was published as Studies in the Intellectual History of Tokugawa Japan (1952) 

but was criticized for being tainted by his wishful interpretation. On another occasion, this time more 

ingenious, he thought he could retrieve a kind of hidden “Das Allgemeine” by looking closely into the 

thought and behavior of those revolutionaries in Meiji era who fought out in the midst of the horns of a 

dilemma between pledged loyalty and self-convinced revolts. 8 Set in the context of the Meiji Revolution, 

when the choice of allegiance (whether to the Emperor or to the Shogun) was as crucial as the decision as 

to whether or not to end the seclusion polity, 9 the questioning of loyalty-or-revolts seems to have carried 

the theoretical possibility of bringing about a version of “Das Allgemeine.” Frankly, I cannot tell whether 

it has achieved its end or not. But what eventually matters is Maruyama’s impassioned search for “Das 

Allgemeine” --- the search as obstinate as is the presence of the “basso ostinato” of the Japanese culture. 

3-3. Izutsu 

If Kato and Maruyama had to find in the culture of “here and now” something seriously problematic, 

Izutsu saw in it an occasion for philosophical possibility. At the beginning of his philosophical reflection 

was a mysterious experience that Zen Buddhism apparently opened up for him. It was literally beyond 

description and it was precisely this unnamable that he decided to take up as the object of his lifelong 

scholarly analysis. It is no coincidence, therefore, that his consistent concern was with the questioning of 

the relation between “concept and reality,” or differently put between “articulation and experience.” 

Now, what is the reality-experience of Zen that is by nature beyond description? From the outset, there 

is an insuperable difficulty because the philosophy of Zen, i.e., the philosophical elaboration of Zen 

experience, is itself a contradiction in terms. If philosophy implies the process of “rational, discursive 

thinking and conceptualization,” then the Zen experience, its analytic object, will defy any kind of such 

process. 

[T]he Zen student is always rigorously admonished not to fall into the pitfall of conceptualization 

and ratiocination. He is to grasp the ‘truth’ [‘reality’] directly through an act of spiritual realization, 

away from all entanglements of thought. The intricacies of conceptual thinking about the ‘truth’ 

[‘reality’] are of such a nature that they inevitably induce the Zen student to deviate from the right 

path, thereby closing the door to the ‘real’ --- as Zen understands it --- experience of reality. And, 

as a matter of fact, there have occurred in the past not a few cases of philosophical distortion of 

Zen, i.e., the rational or intellectual manipulation of Zen ideas by those ‘philosophers’ who have no 

8 Loyalty and Revolt (Tokyo: Chikumashobo, 1992). 

9 “Revere/Restore the Emperor and Expel the Foreigners”; “Loyalty to the Emperor” vs. “Adherence to the Shogunate.” 

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experiential grasp of them. 10 

The reality-experience of Zen is immediate in its grasp. Any mediatory access to it, be it conceptual, 

rational, or intellectual, is not only wrong but also misleading. 11 The reality-experience that lies at the heart 

of Zen is something absolute and prior to any act of articulation. In a word, it is ineffable. The greatest 

paradox of Zen, however, is that “the non-articulated does not remain eternally non-articulated.” In fact, 

“it cannot but express itself --- in language.” This is by any account a non sequitur for those who are 

familiar with the Western philosophical tradition, at the base of which lies rational. But Izutsu insists, “[t] 

he emergence of language out of the Zen awareness of reality may ontologically be described as an event 

of the self-articulation of the non-articulation.” How can we make out this mysterious phenomenon? 

Fortunately, a hint or clue can be found in the history of Western philosophy. The Zen awareness of non- 

articulated reality bears a likeness to the position and awareness inherent in nominalism in medieval 

Scholasticism. Nominalism, as it was unfolded in the so-called “controversy of universals”, is the “doctrine 

that universals or general ideas are mere names without any corresponding reality.” In other words, 

nothing really exists but particular and singular objects. The question that immediately arises is how to 

grasp these particular objects without the mediatory assistance of general concepts, that is, linguistic 

articulation. The whole problem is bound up with the fundamental assumption that linguistic articulation 

is conceptual generalization. Imagine the case that we had to grasp a particular object without recourse to 

any general concepts and ideas, and we can see the type of difficulty, with which the Zen reflections are 

supposed to grope their way. Their end is the immediate grasping (not begreifen but greifen) of a particular 

reality. And, importantly, nothing is more particular and singular than a reality “here and now.” 

Now, as the analogy of nominalism implies, the opposite of the Zen type of reality-recognition is the one 

which harbors the aspirations toward and the predilection for the universal (as opposed to the particular). 

If the Zen type of reality-recognition aspires to the immediate grasping of the particular reality (“here 

and now”), then the universalist type aspires to reach the universal reality (“the transcendent”). There are 

then two types of reality, one particular-oriented, the other universal-oriented, and they are diametrically 

opposed one to the other in the vector of valorization. Usually the distinction between two opposing types 

of “reality” is emphasized neither in Western philosophy nor in Eastern thought. According to Izutsu, 

10 Toward a Philosophy of Zen Buddhism (Boulder, Colorado: Prajňā Press, 1982, p. x; originally Tehran: Imperial Iranian 

Academy of Philosophy, 1977). 

11 “[T]he world of Zen is a world of silence. [...] Philosophically, the Silence is the metaphysical Oneness of absolute nonarticulation, 

the reality before it is articulated into myriads of forms --- ‘your own Face which you had prior to the birth 

of your father and mother’, as Zen often says.” (pp. x-xi). 

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however, the distinction actually belongs to one of the prerequisite knowledge in the tradition of Islam 

philosophy. The universal-oriented reality is called “māhīyah” and the particular-oriented, “huwīyah.” 

Taking advantage of this basic recognition, Izutsu went on to build a synchronic system of oriental 

religious experiences in his landmark study Consciousness and Essence (1983). Here I cannot enter 

into any detail about this fascinating work. All I can and must do for the present purposes is to make the 

following three points. 

Firstly, the fundamental distinction of “māhīyah” and “huwīyah” in Islam philosophy gave rise to, in its 

curious transaction with medieval European philosophy, a pair of important terms in Scholasticism, viz. 

“quidditas” and “haecceitas.” The Latin terms are said to be invented by Duns Scotus (c. 1266-1308) and 

their dictionary definition says, “Whereas haecceity refers to aspects of a thing which make it a particular 

thing, quiddity refers to the universal qualities of a thing, its “whatness.” The “māhīyah” means literally 

“what it is” (in conceptual articulation) and it is, therefore, together with quidditas, a descendant of the 

Aristotelian “to ti en einai.” It is concerned with “essentia” (in contradistinction to “existentia”) insofar as 

it is grasped in conceptual articulation. The “huwīyah reality, in contrast, has nothing to with conceptual 

recognition. It is interesting to note in passing that when Duns Scotus (alias, Doctus Subtilis) regarded 

haecceitas as “ultima realitas entis” (the ultimate reality of being) he came close in spite of himself to the 

Zen master. 

Secondly, the oriental philosophy (including that of Zen), in Izutsu’s view, is largely characterized by 

its familiarity with depths psychology. The ultimate reality is believed to reveal itself from the profound 

realm of the unconscious. The unconscious realm is therefore not monolithic but conceived as layered 

strata of different degrees of unconsciousness. The function of ordinary language that articulates through 

concepts is there replaced by symbolic signs and images. If the ultimate case of haecceitas (the “here and 

now” recognition) is “an event of the self-articulation of the non-articulation,” it could be only grasped by 

means of these symbolic signs and images. And it should not be forgotten that since the case of haecceitas 

defies any form of conceptual articulation, it belongs to an instance not of “esentia” but of “existentia.” 

Thirdly, and this brings us to the conclusion of the present paper, i.e., the proper recognition in a binary 

opposition of the two types of reality, “māhīyah” and “huwīyah,” “quidditas” and “haecceitas,” or “esentia” 

and “existentia” will be useful, in several ways, for our purpose of configuring the postwar Japanese 

thought. As we have seen, Kato’s attitude to the Japanese culture is divided between his criticism of things 

political and his admiration of things esthetic. In the light of the two-reality perspective, it now becomes 

clear that his criticism is done on the side of “māhīyah,” “quidditas,” or “essentia” while his admiration 

of “here and now” on the side of “huwīyah,” “haecceitas” or “existentia.” The ambivalence he shows 

in his attitude to the Japanese culture is, as it turns out, actually a proof of his well-rounded perception 

232

on the two types of reality. The same holds true of Maruyama’s invention of the working hypothesis of 

“Das Allgemeine,” a version of “māhīyah”-“quidditas”-“esentia” principle that is wanting in the Japanese 

culture of “here and now.” Finally, Izutsu’s attempt at a synchronic system-building on the reality- 

recognition of haecceitas (“here and now”) gives us an occasion to recognize that the philosophysing on 

the basis of nothingness cannot be a monopoly of Japanese philosophy but is rather prevalent among the 

traditions of Asian thought. 

All in all, if one has to present a characteristic picture of Japanese culture in its nature and structure, it 

should be a dynamic one that has in mind the two types of reality, with “māhīyah”- “quidditas”-“essentia” 

on the one hand and “huwīyah,” “haecceitas” and “existentia” on the other. Must there be a room for what 

Kato calls “here and now,” there must be, in the same vein, a passionate regard to what Maruyama calls 

“Das Allgemeine.” This, in fine, is the lesson the great three masters of the postwar Japan has left for us 

for our frame of reference. 

4. Types of Healing and Cultural Difference 

My observation on the 3.11 disaster suggested that there be at least two kinds of calamities and these 

in turn require two kinds of healing. The kind of healing effective in dealing with natural disasters like 

earthquakes and tsunami is, it is easy to imagine, different from the kind of healing operative in the case 

of man-made calamities like radioactive contamination. If the former requires a hard and thorny course 

of affective adjustments, the latter calls for an arduous and persistent process of rational explication of the 

real facts of the case. 

My observation on the twofold disaster of the 3.11 also suggested that the Japanese culture seems to be 

characterized by its innate strengths in healing those who have suffered from natural disasters, while it 

is not well equipped with the healing resources in dealing with the victims of man-made disasters. This 

hunch of mine is corroborated by looking at the three representative thinkers of the twentieth century, 

who examined the nature and structure of the Japanese culture from their own respective standpoints. 

Based on the fundamental distinction in reality-recognition between “existentia” (“here and now”) and 

“essentia” (the transcendent), the three thinkers were of the opinion that the Japanese culture is far and 

away more predisposed to “existentia” (“here and now”) than to “essentia” (“universal and eternal,” 

i.e., the transcendent). For the cultural tendency of constant focus on “here and now” helps to create an 

environment (both human and natural) that is favorable to affective adjustments. In contrast, it would 

be largely for want of “essentia” perspective that those responsible for the management and control of 

nuclear power behaved so poorly. 

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Now, if the above holds true, further reflections are in order by way of conclusion. The Japanese culture, 

as it so happens, shows its inveterate attachment to the mode of “here and now,” which accommodates 

the people, in terms of healing, to natural disasters relatively better than others. In reverse is the case with 

regard to the man-made disaster and its healing. This means, to look at it from another perspective, that 

there can be another culture, where the two kinds of healing are differently disposed, where the people 

find it easier to be healed in the process of rational conviction than in the course of affective adjustments. 

Which type of healing has a better hand is decided by the nature and structure of a given culture. What 

is important, therefore, is the cultural self-knowledge. It is all the more important because culture is so 

programmed as to look natural and transparent to those inside, and those inside tend to be blind to the 

nature and structure of their culture. 

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Proceedings 

phenomena, their relation to mankind, their relation to me and my experiences are always being examined 

and analyzed in the humanities. If we exclude the meaning of things in my life and others’ lives in 

the humanities, it will become a very ambiguous discipline with uncertain identities. There could be 

criticism on how subjective and first-person perspectives can lead to knowledge. As people in today’s 

society believe that scientific knowledge is the essence of knowledge, knowledge of the humanities is 

often considered fake knowledge or an arbitrary attitude toward life. There have been and will be a lot 

of discussions on how we should define the characteristics of knowledge of the humanities. In order for 

the humanities to secure its strong identity in the current era with highly-segmented disciplines, it should 

have its own unique methodology and contents that stand out from other natural sciences and social 

science disciplines. And it should be held accountable for its unique identity as an independent academic 

discipline. 

Consilience, or the unity of knowledge, which has been promoted by some evolutionists and scientists 

as a breakthrough method of integrating different disciplines, is essentially about integrating the study 

of humanities’ understanding of people in natural science. It makes the understanding of people remain 

superficial and on the brief end of the spectrum. The study of humanities is a discipline based on thorough 

and serious self-examination and its therapeutic power originates from having a deep understanding of the 

inside of people. The study of humanities as means for healing is not a science discipline; rather, it is more 

like religion or arts. Unlike artistic work and religious belief, however, the humanities attempt to build a 

house in a systematic manner and to develop necessary tools and sophisticated skill-set training methods. 

As anyone can go into and come out from the house that is built in such a systematic manner, it can be 

said that the humanities have openness and flexibility. Openness and flexibility of the humanities can be 

regarded arbitrary when compared with objective knowledge concepts discussed by natural scientists. 

However, that is where the unique power of the humanities comes from. The power of the humanities 

lies in free and creative spirit and thoughts of people. The study of humanities builds a house based on 

thorough reasoning and critical thinking experiments conducted on humans. The world and people seen 

through the process of building the house in freedom encourage people to reflect on their lives and build 

a better understanding of their sorrows and emotional roots. Healing in the humanities comes from soul- 

searching and introspective understanding of people. We first need to understand the world we live in 

when we want to make peace with the world while we need to understand our being and life in order to 

heal the pain we experience. 

Given the premise that healing in the humanities is based on introspection and good understanding 

of human being, what does ‘the healing of the humanities’ mean? It starts from considering the study 

of humanities itself as the target domain to be introspected. The tradition of the humanities has been 

formulated based on the text called ‘Cannon’ both in the western and eastern parts of the world. The 

236

have some degree of universality. Although the conscious ‘I’ of women is unstable in metaphysical 

philosophy just like the conscious ‘I’ of people in general, there have been people who were called ‘women’ 

in the Confucius patriarchal culture throughout history. They were called ‘women’ and those women 

formed the foundation for conducting the analysis of social reality (systematic reality such as religion, 

laws and politics). The perception or the ‘will to the truth’ to figure out and explore the truth in the social 

reality paved the way for feminist philosophy. 

By reflecting upon this form of the existence of women, the humanities will experience healing in two 

ways. On the one hand, the healing of the humanities themselves and, on the other, the healing of women 

who have long been considered mere objects. Such process of healing can only be possible by having 

a reflective and soul-searching attitude. Reflectivity, one of the important methods used in philosophy, 

is essential in feminist theories (Harding 1991, 149-50, 161-63; Harding 1998, 188-94). Philosophical 

reasoning cannot be made without having critical attitudes. In order to remain critical of something, 

you have to keep a certain distance from the object for a while. The distance should not be too long, too 

far or too separated. When the negative connotations of critical mindset are pulled out, we get to meet 

with a reflective attitude. Reflectivity is created when the person is not too far from the object and is 

not entrapped in the object; rather, reflectivity is created when the person is able to go in and out of the 

object freely. That is why I would like to call reflectivity ‘thinking at the boundary.’ Reflecting on women 

and women’s experiences is a method to look into the lives of women who have remained invisible and 

inaudible in history so far. 

Those who examine the lives of women are typically not in a position with power or privilege because 

they are not in an absolute third-party position where they can form an appropriate distance from the 

object - not too far and not too close to the object. They are in a constantly changing position, not in a 

fixated position. This position is a good way of making the object visible and expressing the objective 

features of the object. When determining the object, those who examine the object should continue to 

ask questions about this position in order not to be affected by prejudice based on bias and stereotypes. 

When approaching reflectivity based on the concept of ‘for self-examination, of self-examination and 

about self-examination…,’ self-examination can be degraded to a mere theoretical concept of ‘infinite 

regress.’ In order to avoid such infinite regress, we have to keep a critical distance from the object for 

self-examination. That is, we have to break away from asking speculative questions without having any 

relations with the object and look into the object only in the dynamics of relationship with the object. In 

this way, we will be able to avoid the infinite regress of ‘for self-examination, of self-examination and 

about self-examination….’ 

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3. Female North Korean Defectors and Their Experiences 

We need to keep an objective distance while being empathetic about women in order to understand the 

true reality of women’s experiences. Korean women have undergone various experiences throughout 

the eventful journey of Korean history. As they experienced both the third world and the first world, an 

unprecedented and unique history of experiences is depicted by Korean women. Recently, there are newly 

emerging social phenomena triggered by the emergence of North Korean defectors in Korean society. 

Over 70% of them are women and their painful and traumatic experiences are as diverse and complicated 

as the experiences of South Korean women. Therefore, I would like to explore the issue of female North 

Korean defectors based on feminist reflectivity. 

The Phenomenon of North Korean residents defecting from North Korea has become a familiar 

phenomenon in recent years. So it is not difficult to find North Korean defectors around us. As of 2012, 

Ewha Womans University received 11 North Korean defector students (a gross total of 20) and the 

number is expected to grow further down the road. The number of North Korean defectors was fewer than 

1,000 even in the early 1990s and surpassed 10,000 in 2007 and 20,000 in just three years in 2010 (as of 

Nov 15, 2010). The average number of new North Korean defectors is estimated to be 3,000 a year, while 

the number of North Korean defectors in China stands at 30,000~50,000 according to the 2005 survey. 

The number began to grow drastically since 1998, and about 78% of North Korean defectors are women. 

The number of North Korean defectors grew markedly as North Korea underwent hardships, experienced 

the collapse of its social system and the number of people who died of hunger increased during the period 

of 1995-98. After the North Korean government began to distribute meals to only a limited number of 

workers, the socialist rationing system in the country began to fail and collapsed eventually, forcing North 

Korean residents to secure food for themselves and their family members. Since the year 1998, female 

North Korean defectors have been literally “sold” to China (the fact the phrase ‘sold’ is used for women 

living in the civilized world of the 21st century and the fact that such a disparaging phrase is used for 

the victims of human trafficking is lamentable) to take care of their parents, husbands or children, some 

voluntarily and some not-so-voluntarily. The reason many female North Korean residents escape from 

North Korea is that the North Korean government carries out a massive search for the missing head of 

family when the head goes missing under the country’s feudal patriarchal family system and that it is 

much easier for women to survive in China when they escape from North Korea. For example, many 

female North Korean defectors had to be engaged in the business of human trafficking organizations in 

China. The above example shows us the sorrow of female North Korean defectors had to experience. One 

Korean-Chinese female historian portrayed the tragic reality of facing North Korean defectors, saying 

that “although we are not in war, about half of our people are in worse situations than the comfort women 

240

during the Japanese colonization period.” 

In order to understand the difficulties facing female North Korean defectors, we need to understand 

the lives of female North Korean defectors themselves and the life of women in North Korea. The 

experiences of female North Korea defectors in North Korea, South Korea and China are hard to be 

generalized because individual experiences are formulated based on many different conditions. Hence, 

it is challenging to trace diverse experiences and, at the same time, it is important to look into the culture 

of North Korea as the perspective or worldview that constitutes the dominant perception of them, which 

is essential to build a better understanding of emotional and cultural incongruity of female North Korean 

defectors in the Korean society. Vice Principal Cho Myung-Sook mentioned three kinds of culture 

defining North Korean society. First is the Confucian patriarchal culture, which culminates in the worship 

of the Dear Leader and forms a political hierarchical structure that has taken firm root in North Korean 

society. Second is militaristic culture, which is straightforward and extreme and constitutes a method of 

survival – survive or die. In North Korea’s militaristic culture, residents become aggressive and get away 

with doing bad things under extreme situations, making people make more desperate efforts to ‘win or 

die,’ rather than learning the virtue of tolerance. Such attitudes of North Korean defectors are considered 

‘brazen’ in South Korean society, resulting in the further marginalization of North Korean defectors. Third 

is materialistic culture. The attitude that North Korean defectors show about God in Christianity, saying 

‘we have been lied to and fooled by visible things and people, so how can we believe in invisible things?’, 

highlights the cold and cynical mindset North Korean residents have about non-materialistic values. This 

also makes us think that it would be possible that North Korean society might put more emphasis on 

materialistic values than South Korean society does. North Korean people tend to believe that what they 

have to believe in is only ‘money and power in the hands of them,’ and North Korean society overflows 

with such materialistic attitudes. 

1) Confucius Patriarchal Culture 

Confucius patriarchal culture constitutes a foundation of both North Korean and South Korean societies. 

In the case of North Korea, Confucius patriarchal culture has been strengthened to sustain the country’s 

political, legal and cultural system of ‘worshiping the Great Leader’ and affects economically-active North 

Korean women in a paradoxical and comprehensive manner. One research paper stated that the prolonged 

economic difficulties in North Korea “allow the government and men to intervene in the activities of 

women in the form of systematic suppression, physical violence and bureaucratic exploitation” (Hong 

Min 2010, 6). In the name of supervising and managing residents, men take advantage of and suppress 

women inside and outside of home in everyday life. Inside the home, women are dependent family 

members who rely on the male head of family for survival. Let us take a little closer look at North Korea’s 

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Confucius patriarchal culture as follows: 

- Residential system based on patriarchal family system: In North Korea, there are patriarchal family 

documents that constitute the basis for the patriarchal family system. The late North Korean leader 

Kim Il-Sung ordered a dictionary-like resident document to be made and established a designated 

organization under the Resident Security Administration. Later, Kim Jeong-Il ordered to ‘re-examine the 

country’s thoughts and ideology’ and the designated organization investigated residents and purged the 

oppression forces. As complaints were raised, those who were involved in the activities of ‘Shim-hwa- 

jo (reformation)’ were sent to the reformation center for punishment. “If men (the head of family) or 

other family members were ‘involved in scandal or incident,’ all the family members, including the head 

of family, are held accountable for the problem under the guilt-by-association system and are penalized 

under the law (subject to reformation, rather than putting the issue to the court)” (Choi Jin-Lee 2010, 74). 

In this case, women become dependent in a subordinate relationship with the male head of family under 

the North Korean legal system. 

- Discrimination against single women: Single women are excluded from the allocation of houses under 

the national resident protection system and prohibited from taking business trips overseas. Married women 

are allowed to work within the residential area of her spouse. 

- Gender discrimination in food distribution: On July 1st, 2002, the North Korean government decided to 

exclude women from the target list for food distribution (at the official price that is one hundredth of the 

market price). Since then, women were forced to be engaged in economic activities and had to purchase 

rice at market price and the market was considered the place only for women, forcing women into a 

desperate situation to make money to survive. That is why women were forced to be engaged in economic 

activities on the market in North Korea. When the volume of food the male family head received from the 

government is small, women had no other choice but to leave the country to work to support their family 

members. 

- Gender discrimination in education and labor: Although the North Korean government promoted the 

policy of ensuring equality in provision of educational opportunities, such a policy was used as a mere 

mechanism to reinforce the power of the governing class. Social background is one of the factors limiting 

educational opportunities (e.g. entering into prestigious universities) in North Korea and women are 

concentrated in commercial colleges, light industry, nursing and educational colleges. In those typical 

sectors where women are concentrated, women receive less pay and are treated unfairly and they even 

take discrimination for granted. The following is what a North Korean woman had to say about the 

discrimination she faced: 

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Since my father was in a coal mine, I naturally thought I have to work in the coal mine too. So 

I don’t get discouraged or helpless because of discrimination. Even when we are engaged in the 

same work, men have their responsibilities and their share of consequences. Men are men. Women 

can work in the positions like a manager or supervisor of the restaurant or warehouse but I know 

that higher-level positions are open only for men. Plus, men get paid more even when men and 

women work the same hours. You know men are the head of family and thus they should get paid 

more. I don’t think it is discrimination (Go Young-Soon 2009, Hong Min 2010, 10). 

In North Korea, male workers are assigned to white collar work positions while women workers are 

assigned to less paying and harder work. Well paying hard work involving machinery or equipment is 

said to be given to male workers. According to Choi Jin-Lee, delivering goods on ox cart in rural areas, 

driving heavy machinery and other work that doesn’t require using cold water or using spade to cultivate 

farmland are all given to male workers. On the other hand, female workers have to be involved in harder 

work using cold water, bending the body forward to plant rice plants and weed rice paddies until finger 

nails crack. Still, female workers in North Korea get paid less than the male workers (Choi Jin-Lee 2010, 

76). 

- The market as the place for women: According to the Confucius value of the traditional four classes 

of society (scholars, farmers, artisans and tradesmen), in North Korea it is considered ‘embarrassing,’ 

shameful and low class to be engaged in trade. The official labor-force world is considered the domain of 

male workers whereas family and marketplace are considered personal places and the domain for female 

workers. The market is considered a private space in North Korea because the socialist North Korean 

government views the market as a place where private economic activities take place. According to one 

research paper, “the North Korean authorities forced female merchants to ‘wear skirts’ in the market, 

showing the fact that there is strong social prejudice in North Korean society.” The market is not properly 

recognized as the official economic activity place and therefore those involved in market activities are 

excluded from social security benefits while they had to work constantly to ‘earn bread’ as the bread 

earners of family (Hong Min 2010, 12). As North Korea promotes socialist economy, the market is 

regarded as the private space - not the official space - that is managed mainly by women. Women are also 

obliged to take part in political activities of civil groups in addition to taking care of their regular hard 

work. Due to the heavy burden of work and having to make money to support other family members, 

female North Korean workers often suffer from malnutrition, various diseases and other problems in the 

process of pregnancy, childbirth and childcare. Without receiving any benefits from the socialist regime, 

those female workers in North Korea are merely taking on all familial responsibilities under North Korea’s 

patriarchal family system. In North Korea, it can be stated that women are placed on the periphery of the 

authoritative society or on the periphery of the country’s patriarchal family system. 

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- Sexual exploitation: North Korean women have been exposed to sexual exploitation and forced to 

provide sexual favor as bribes to make a living since the 1990s. As husbands do not assume family 

responsibilities and the government turns a blind eye to the harsh reality facing women, women are 

exposed to psychological, linguistic and physical violence perpetrated by men in the market and other 

places for economic activities. Most women who have participated in market activities reported that they 

were harassed by police, market managers, party officials, transportation workers and soldiers. Hong Min 

called such a frame in North Korea the structure of government public officials and men living off women 

and exploiting and sexually harassing women. One North Korean defector said “there is a saying that 

female merchants and workers on the train are served for safety officers,” a vivid example showing the 

harsh reality facing women in North Korea. 

The emphasis on “innocent and obedient women”: Many pregnant female North Korean defectors 

who were caught and repatriated by Chinese authorities were forced to go through abortions or kill 

the infant right after giving birth, believing ‘they were not being faithful and became pregnant with 

Chinese seed.’ In extreme cases, pregnant women died in the process (Choi Jin-Lee 2010, 79). 

- A male-oriented society: According to Choi Jin-Lee, women are considered to have about “50%” 

of physical and psychological capacity of men in North Korea. And after getting married, women are 

considered “sexual slaves in male-oriented society and their positions in the family are relatively low due 

to social and systematic reasons. Therefore, women should be obedient in the face of violence perpetrated 

by predatory men in North Korean society (it is prohibited to defy male violence)” (Choi Jin-Lee 2010, 

77). 

2) Military Culture 

It is a widely-known fact that North Korean society is established based on military culture. As the history 

of North Korea is formed through the male-oriented anti-Japanese reform movements, women have been 

strictly excluded in North Korean history (Hong Min 2010, 8). The establishment of North Korea is based 

on the concept of reformist protests and armed struggle. In addition, constant anti-American protests, 

military confrontations with South Korea and efforts to bring down the South Korean government have 

played a pivotal role in the political operations of North Korea, justifying chauvinistic culture and thus 

marginalizing women in North Korean society. Hong Min’s approach is worthy of consideration: “Women 

can register their name only when their names are called by the Dear Leader Kim Il-Sung and his anti- 

Japanese reformist forces. Anti-Japanese armed protest and movements are merely a means of portraying 

women as ‘faithful and selfless wives.’ In North Korea, the Dear Leader Kim Il-Sung was above the law, 

implicitly allowing other men in North Korean to behave like the Dear Leader in their respective homes. 

244

Such a political regime was the reason behind violence running rampant at homes in North Korea” (Hong 

Min 2010, 8). 

- Authoritative and violent domestic culture: North Korea’s patriarchal family system put more 

emphasis on ‘keeping men’s appearance’ and ‘men reigning over women’ rather than on men assuming 

responsibility as the breadwinner of the family. The financial difficulties forced North Korean housewives 

to bear the double burden of domestic and outside work, taking care of house chores, childcare as well as 

making money to support her family members. Under the North Korean patriarchal family system, men 

don’t have to work hard to provide for their families and so they behave like parasites on women. Choi 

Jin-Lee stated that “North Korean men are brutally beating their wives again and again and there is no 

legal system in the country to protect battered wives” (Hong Min 2010, 8). 

- Devaluing life: In North Korea, the issue of abortion is very serious and there are no proper measures to 

protect maternity rights. 

As North Korea was in a state of war and under many other urgent financial circumstances and as gender 

equality was being promoted as part of socialist values, women were expected to work the same hours as 

men. Hard and grueling work that women had to perform in North Korea was considered reasonable in 

North Korean society, where feudal Confucian culture is combined with the socialist gender-equality in a 

weird manner, placing women under the multi-layered oppressive culture. North Korea’s military culture 

allowed violence against women to take firm root in society. Since the economic recession in North Korea, 

the lives of North Korean women are deemed to be tainted with the worst combination of socialism + 

patriarchal family system + military culture. Amidst the collapse of the country’s free food rationing 

system, childcare and education and national medical care system, North Korean women became the 

victims who assume all the responsibility. 

3) Materialistic Culture 

According to Marx who viewed religion as the opium of the masses, religious activities in socialist 

societies are severely restricted. North Korea is also a socialist society with materialistic worldview 

where people are not allowed to have religion or freedom of thought. After going through the economic 

recession, North Korean people began to believe that survival is the highest value and it is extravagant to 

talk about other abstract philosophical values. The lives of North Korean people were focused on making 

money and finding foods while their philosophy was also concentrated on Juche ideology. Thus, it is no 

wonder that North Korean people lack the ability to think philosophically and pursue an ideal vision while 

focusing only on visible and materialistic things. When people put materialistic ownership before other 

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values, their perspectives and views are changed accordingly. 

- Women as body: Hong Min said that “women were viewed as obedient bodies or objects that are used as 

labor-machines, childbirth-machines, childcare-machines and as tools for exploitation and mobilization to 

attain the country’s political and economic goals. In North Korea, women’s ‘bodies’ have been viewed as a 

tool for reproduction in the male-oriented hierarchical structure and as an industrial tool. Women’s ‘bodies’ 

were severely consumed throughout the industrial period in the 1950~60s and women were forced to use 

contraceptives to control childbirth and the population in the 1970~80s. Entering into the 1990s, North 

Korean women were exploited as reproduction machine to replace the workers who starved to death. 

Women’s ‘bodies’ have been exploited as means for engaging in labor in the name of ‘protection’”(Hong 

Min 2010, 9). This issue facing women is not confined to North Korea. In South Korea, women 

have been exploited as foreigner whores, tools for Korean geisha tourism and factory workers during 

industrialization. As shown above, even in South Korean society, there is a social mechanism to consume 

female bodies as tools used in the adult entertainment industry. 

What is unique in North Korean society is that both male and female bodies are owned by the government. 

It is known that a considerable portion of income of female loggers working in Russia and female North 

Korean workers who have worked in Eastern European countries was by the government. North Korean 

people are merely viewed as labor force working for the country. Under the materialistic notion, people are 

degenerated into tools for sustaining politics and the labor market. Karl Marx’s worldview of promoting 

an ideal relationship between human beings and the world and protecting the dignity of humankind via 

non-marginalized true ‘labor’ was distorted and disfigured in North Korea to define people as mere labor 

units or means for producing economic results that are owned by the central government. The reason 

is perhaps that North Korea was built based on an autocratic political system, which culminates in the 

worship of the autocratic Great Leader. 

- Background (personal background and class): There is no need to mention the significance of building 

materialistic foundations under the materialistic worldview. Nevertheless, the concept of such material 

foundation seems to be translated into a wider concept of encompassing social background of people. In 

North Korea, getting married for a better social status is deemed very hard. It is no exaggeration to say 

that personal background or material foundation is a determinant factor in defining almost everything in 

the North Korean society. Such personal background or material foundation has been one of the most 

important factors in determining people’s jobs and educational opportunities as well as marriage. 

In North Korea, when a lower-class person gets married to an upper-class person, their marriage is bound 

to fail no matter how much they love each other. For instance, if I get married to an upper-class military 

246

officer or undergraduate student, he would have no future because of the fact his wife is lower class. Due 

to the fact that his wife and families-in-laws are lower class, he is facing obstacles and suffering from 

disadvantages in society. If he wants to continue his married life with his lower-class wife, he would have 

to give up his career and social life because he would be excluded from opportunities like joining the 

socialist party and getting promoted to a higher position (Moon Kyung-Soon 2009, Hong Min 2010, 11). 

North Korea’s cultural background can be characterized into the above-mentioned three cultural 

characteristics. Those in the vested interests in North Korea say that it is easy to live in North Korea if 

you just turn a blind eye to the fatal and endemic problems existing in society. As time passes slowly and 

people don’t have to worry about food under socialist North Korean society, it doesn’t seem bad to live 

as women within a comfortable circle of life. But the problem is that such a circle is not guaranteed until 

death, and those within the circle have to make continued efforts to remain within the comfortable circle 

while feeling a sense of guilt towards those outside the circle. 

4. Who is Asking Us to Analyze Female North Korean Defectors? 

Those who major in North Korean Studies say that there are one hundred different stories when we 

interview one hundred North Korean defectors, indicating the difficulty of generalizing the experiences of 

North Korean residents defecting from the North for survival. 

Still, we might be able to try dividing such experiences of female North Korean defectors into the 

two categories: the first category of female North Korean defectors is those who arrive in China first 

before coming to South Korea and the second category is those who directly defect to South Korea. 

Vice Principal Cho Myung-Sook stated that those North Korean defectors who come directly to South 

Korea suffer from less emotional trauma while having a low understanding of South Korean culture and 

experiencing difficulties mingling with the South Korean society whereas those who cross into China first 

before coming to South Korea have more serious emotional trauma but have a higher understanding of 

South Korean society and adapt easily into society. Those who spent their adolescent years in the North 

Korea society during the collapse of the socialist regime after undergoing years of hardship have had a 

harder time adapting to South Korean society, organizational culture and educational system due to the 

collapse of values in their minds. It is because they tend to lack the capacity of determining what they 

should do and what they shouldn’t do and don’t feel any sense of guilt or shame for being illegal (In North 

Korea, when people live by law, they are bound to starve to death). Therefore, North Korean residents tend 

to lack capacity to think in a rational manner, have low self-esteem as well as a low sense of responsibility 

unlike South Korean residents who have legitimate fundamental values and conscience. That is why 

North Korean defectors experience difficulty mingling with South Korean society, language and culture. 

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The chaotic circumstances in North Korean society make North Korean people less competent in situation 

analysis and problem solving. That is why North Korean defectors remain on the periphery of South 

Korean society when they defect to the South. 

In South Korean society, North Korean defectors are considered ‘ignorant and unreliable people who 

don’t know much, people who become the burden of society, people whose minds are always on their 

family members left in the North, sick and chauvinistic people’(Hong Min 2010, 16). Unfortunately, we 

don’t know much about the current human rights conditions in the North, the physical and mental health 

of North Koreans and don’t even know if there are programs in South Korea designed to help them adapt 

to the new society. As a matter of fact, South Korea doesn’t have a well-organized and sophisticated 

adaptation programs for North Korean defectors. Vice Principal Cho Myung-Sook is highly skeptical of 

the education programs provided for North Korean adolescents who have defected to the South over the 

past ten years, being unsure of the effects of such education programs. In the case of female North Korean 

defectors, it is urgent to heal physical and emotional wounds inflicted on them. If South Korean society 

fails to provide healing and make them live on the periphery of the society, as it has done over the past 

long history of human rights violation against women, and if it just made passive efforts, it would take a 

step back to 50 years ago or 100 years ago. There have already been some cases of female North Korean 

defectors who were degenerated into prostitution in the red-light district of Japan. 

The stories of North Korean defectors and North Korean women who defect to the South are still 

unfamiliar to many of us. Most South Korean people don’t know about North Korean culture and society, 

making it hard for them to understand the lives of North Korean people due to conflicting ideologies. 

Female North Korean defectors experience inconceivable hardship and thus get to have a complicated 

and protective psychological mechanism, making it difficult for others to truly understand what they have 

gone through and feel. As they had to undergo unimaginable sufferings and hardships, North Korean 

defectors don’t trust or rely on others and don’t want to talk about themselves. Recalling her stay in China, 

one female North Korean defector said that “Koreans are even harder to be trusted…I had many close 

friends but I’ve never talked about my deep feelings and problems…even when I was drunk and crying, 

so when my friends asked me why I’m crying. I was not able to tell them my feelings and experiences, so 

I just said I don’t know why I’m crying. It is hard to become true friends with them on a person to person 

basis…I cannot tell the truth that I’m a defector from North Korea. No, I cannot trust them” (Choi Hyun- 

Shil 2012, 37). The stories of female North Korean defectors are shared through word of mouth and, in 

some cases, they are reproduced and distributed by mostly South Korean counselors, researchers or North 

Korean defector-turned-researchers or counselors. 

How should we regard the lives of female North Korean defectors from the perspectives of reflective 

248

humanities and the humanities as a means for healing? Is it possible for us to remove several layers of 

curtains and listen to frank voices of female North Korean defectors? The documents available for us tend 

to be deeply affected by ideology. The documents that are used as one of the important references for this 

research paper are ones published at the seminar hosted by the right-wing Rep. Park Seon-Young. Left- 

wing politicians have low interest in the issue of North Korean defectors and thus don’t conduct research- 

es on them. Rep. Yim Soo-Kyung called North Korean defectors ‘traitors’ while drunk. Because of the 

lack of information on North Korea, we don’t know much about male and female North Korean residents, 

defectors and their family members who are left behind in the North, which makes it difficult for us to 

determine the social identity of North Korean defectors and makes us form a linear judgment about their 

experiences. 

From the philosophical point of view, it is always difficult to determine the truth of things and events. 

Figuring out the relationship between visible and invisible things and between the belief and the facts is a 

philosophical challenge. Still, in analyzing and reasoning about humankind, reflectivity in the humanities 

can serve as one of the useful philosophical methods. The lives of people are changed on a consistent 

basis, and thus it is difficult to determine our lives at one go. In order to understand the life of a person or a 

group, we first have to admit that our observations and viewpoints cannot remain neutral. We are looking 

at things in a particular context or circumstance, based on which the judgment is made. The same is true 

for the process of observing and understanding female North Korean defectors. We hear a lot about them 

both directly and indirectly and in some cases we hear from female North Korean defectors themselves. 

However, even if we hear directly from North Korean defectors, that doesn’t change the issue. Female 

North Korean defectors themselves have to recall their experiences to tell others about their defection. 

Therefore, what they tell about their experiences is not always true even if the defector makes an honest 

statement. Reflective attitude in the humanities attempts to go in and come out from such overlapping 

multi-layered stories in order to view things in a more objective way (Tanesini 1999, 160-85), helping us 

learn how to approach the stories of people who suffer from wounds and traumatic experiences and how 

to show empathetic responses to such stories. When listening to the stories of North Korean defectors, we 

have to think about ‘who makes them speak,’ ‘who is representing them,’ ‘why they are saying such things 

here’ and ‘who is listening.’ Also, we have to try to understand the grammar of their language. Such multi- 

layered methods of looking and listening allow us to look inside and listen to the voice from inside them, 

thereby formulating the core of reflectivity. As explained above, reflectivity is one of the key elements 

exposing the objective facts (Harding 1993, 56-63). 

Talking about one’s experiences, looking at the experiences, listening to and writing about the experiences 

are essential for reflectivity. Such processes are required steps for healing. However, those North Korean 

defectors are not able to speak in the same manner as South Korean people and are not familiar with rhe- 

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torical expressions and tones commonly used by South Korean people. In other words, they tend to lack 

adequate ways to express themselves. There are violent and wild expressions used by North Korean peo- 

ple –such as “cutting one’s throat” and “cutting the throat open.” North Korean defectors have different 

ways of expressing themselves as opposed to South Korean people (for instance, they don’t usually say 

‘thank you’ to show appreciation), making them to think it would be better to remain silent to get along 

with South Korean people. If North Korean defectors get to learn sophisticated and elaborate methods of 

expressions used by South Korean people, it might be even harder for us to read their emotions hidden 

in the innermost corners of their heart. We ask questions and provide answers casually without putting 

special meaning, but such process is actually very daunting and challenging. While doing so, we express 

ourselves, look at and listen to others and again offer words to others. In such an interactive communica- 

tion process, both the speaker and listener get to intervene in the existence of each other and to experience 

changes in life. In order to have reflective communication, those engaged in communication must be 

truthful and sincere. When people talk to each other in an insincere manner, they are not considered to be 

having reflective communication and not able to talk to and listen to each other in a truthful way. 

How can we build truthfulness and sincere attitude? If they are built through the language engagement 

process of speaking, talking and listening, we would fall into a cycle. Donald Davidson, an American phi- 

losopher, talked about the principle of tolerance saying that we have to assume that the person is talking 

the truth so as to have truthful and sincere communication in the primitive interpretation process (Davidson 

1984, 134-37). Only when we assume that the person we are talking to is telling us the truth, are we able 

to continue the dialogue. In this manner, the truthfulness of both the speaker and listener is part of the in- 

tuitive requirements in communication (Kim Heisook 1999, 208-11). The truthfulness is something that 

should be considered - intuitively - part of preconditions, but is not something that can be proved through 

experiences. 

What should we pay attention to when I -as a female philosopher- approach the issue of female North 

Korean defectors? First and foremost, I should make their voice heard and view the world from their per- 

spectives to reveal the multi-layered nature of conversation and then interpret their message so that South 

Korean people can understand what North Korean defectors really meant to say. Then, I should help them 

examine their low self-esteem and the chauvinistic value they internalized in order to build a better under- 

standing of democracy and the value of their bodies. However, it is not easy to help female North Korean 

defectors, who are used to living within the strong groupist values and control in North Korea, to under- 

stand autonomy and responsibilities and have interest and desire to develop and grow themselves. It is not 

easy for female North Korean defectors who face the harsh reality of trying to survive to take some time 

to reflect on their lives and thoughts. They have to work every day to survive and thus might think self- 

examination and reflection are a luxury to them, which is the attitude that contributes in part to placing 

250

those women on the periphery of society. However, the efforts to understand culture can be made in their 

everyday lives as they get to meet with other people and having communication with others can contribute 

to boosting their self esteem. For female North Korean defectors who were entrapped in a closed circle 

without a way out, living in South Korean society is like solving an equation of higher degree. Only when 

the humanities are healed from the perspective of feminism will we be able to have power to heal the deep 

wounds inflicted on female North Korean defectors and provide them with support to solve the difficult 

equation of higher degree. 

References 

Kim Ae-Ryeong 2012, “Listening to Different Voice: Speaking Agent and Inaudible Anisotropism”, 

Korean Feminist Philosophy Issue 17, Korean Association of Female Philosophers, 2012. 

Kim Heisook 1999, “Culture, Language and Existence”, Philosophy Edition 61, Korean Association of 

Philosophy. 

Noh Gwi-Nam 2012, “Understanding North Korean Defectors and Anisotropism”, Korean Feminist 

Philosophy Issue 17, Korean Association of Female Philosophers. 

Choi Jin-Lee 2010, “The Issue of North Korean Women’s Human Rights and the Experiences of Imjingang 

Publishing in Solving the Issue”, I’m Reporting this Issue: Human Rights Infringement Against 

North Korean Women, hosted by Rep. Park Seon-Young, sponsored by the Alliance for Promoting 

Human Rights of North Korean Women, the 27th Policy Seminar (2010. 4. 28, Meeting Room in the 

Representative’s Office Building at the National Assembly) Documents. 

Choi Hyun-Shil 2012, “The Body of Women on the Korean Peninsula in the 20-21 Century”, Women’s 

Study Research Institute at Pusan National University, the Joint Seminar Booklet of Korean 

Association of Female Philosophers (2012. 5. 19). 

Hong Min, 2010 “The Human Rights Issues facing North Korean Women”, I’m Reporting this Issue: 

Human Rights Infringement Against North Korean Women, hosted by Rep. Park Seon-Young, 

sponsored by the Alliance for Promoting Human Rights of North Korean Women, the 27th Policy 

Seminar (2010. 4. 28, Meeting Room in the Representative’s Office Building at the National 

Assembly) Documents. 

Davidson, D. 1984, “Radical Interpretaion” Inquiries into Truth & Interpretation, Oxford: Clarendon Press. 

Harding, S. 1991, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 

__________ 1993, “Rethinking Standpoint Epistemology,” Feminist Epistemologies, New York: Routledge. 

__________ 1998, Is Science Multi-cultural? Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. 

Tanesini, A. 1999, Feminist Epistemologies, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 

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Humanities and the Crisis of Politics: from Kallipolis to Blade 

Runner’s L.A. 

Luca Maria Scarantino 

IULM University 

This paper addresses the idea of the “healing” power of the humanities – If any – in a way that focuses 

on their cultural and disciplinary autonomy rather than on externally defined agendas and sets of 

problems. On the one hand, it argues for an increased transdisciplinary approach within the humanities 

themselves as well as in relation to the social and natural sciences. On the other hand, it will show that 

the humanities, through their concepts and their critical function, are playing a role that goes far beyond 

the national scope where political governance historically belongs. The decreasing capacity of politics 

to rule the global changes of our world is often leading administrators to overlook the importance of the 

humanities; however, these disciplines play an essential role in opening human minds to an increasing 

cultural complexity. As such, they represent a major tool for cultural survival and coexistence in the 

global, intercultural space of present humanity. 

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Proceedings 


Who Should Be Listened To? 

1. Therapeutic Function of the Humanities: Black Studies and the 

African American Experience 

/ Tunde Adeleke (Iowa State University) 

2. Solidarity of the Subaltern Confronting the Globalization of 

Suffering: A Transmodern Critique of Zygmunt Bauman’s Liquid 

Modernity 

/ Yong-gyu Kim (Pusan National University) 

3. Divorce Disputes, Property Right, and Legal Pluralism in a North 

China Village 

/ Zhao Xudong (Renmin University) 

4. Difficult Dialogues: Perpetrators, Victims, Power, and the 

Legacies of Mass Violence 

/ Henry C. Theriault (Worcester State University)

Therapeutic Function of the Humanities: Black Studies and the 

African American Experience 

Tunde Adeleke 

Iowa State University 

The Black American experience embodied suffering at its worst. It was an experience birthed and nurtured 

in perhaps the most tragic and violent of human encounters. The enslavement of millions of Africans and 

their forcible transplantation to the New World which lasted for about three centuries unleashed a reign 

of terror, violence and dehumanization that had far-reaching and profound global consequences. Many 

contend today that black Americans still bear the scar of that suffering. Recalling his first encounter with 

his European captors as he was being loaded into the ship along with other bewildered and frightened 

slaves, eleven years old Olaudah Equiano wrote, 

the white people looked and acted, as I thought, in so savage a manner; for I had never seen among 

my people such instances of brutal cruelty….The shrieks of the women and the groans of the 

dying rendered the whole a scene of horror almost inconceivable…Every circumstance I met with 

served only to render my state more painful, and heighten my apprehensions and my opinion of the 

cruelty of the whites. 1 

The evil, fear and inhumane vibes European slave traders emitted foretold the greater horror and terror 

that awaited African captives in America. Equiano’s observation proved prophetic. The savagery he saw in 

the faces of those white slave traders mirrored the essence of what became the American South’s “Peculiar 

Institution”, and shaped the daily lives of slaves and experiences of generations of their descendants. 

Abject misery and dehumanization characterized slavery. 2 Imprisoned within this wall of degradation, 

1 Paul Edwards, ed., Equiano’ Travels: The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa the African. 

Long Grove: Illinois, 1996, pp. 24-25. 

2 Kenneth Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1956. Eugene 

Genovese, Roll, Jordan Roll: The World the Slaveholders Made. New York: Pantheon, 1969. 

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blacks had to device means of retaining a semblance of dignity and humanity. In other words, blacks were 

thrust into the most inhumane of environments which subverted and denied their humanity. As James 

Sidbury surmised; 

Over the course of the eighteenth century several factors, including the intensification of the 

Atlantic slave trade, the increasing economic and cultural integration of plantation America into 

European society, and the growing currency of Enlightenment notions of human progress, helped 

produce a conventional image of Africa in the Western imagination as a primitive and pagan place. 

‘Africans,’ according to this view, were a savage people who existed outside of the narrative of 

Western progress. 3 

The slave masters constructed a world of violence and brutalities. Within this world, slaves existed as 

beasts of burden. To justify slavery, slaveholders and their intellectual and pseudo-intellectual theoreticians 

from different disciplines including science, history, geography and theology developed a transmogrified 

portrait of Africa, and pontificated about the “darkness” and barbarism of the continent, and the inherent 

inferiority of Africans. 4 Notwithstanding this overwhelming force, blacks did not succumb or totally 

surrender to the dominant discourse of negation. Instead, slavery nurtured the seeds of its ultimate 

destruction. The brutalities and violence of slavery ignited in blacks a resistant and self-deterministic 

consciousness. Leading black nationalists of the time realized that the black struggle in America had to 

have as its component an intellectual arm, since much of the pains and anguish blacks experienced derived 

from intellectual falsehood. 5 In the second half of the eighteenth century, Equiano, Ignatius Sancho, 

Quobna Ottobah Cugano, Phyllis Wheatley, and many others struggled against the misery and debilitation 

of an imposed collective identity of negation “African”. They humanized themselves by not only 

contesting negation, but also counterpoising an empowering identity of survival and personal affirmation. 

They initiated a countervailing “discourse on African identity”; one that redefined Africa in positive and 

ennobling terms. 6 This counter-hegemonic and regenerative discourse would engage generations of black 

3 James Sidbury, Becoming African in America: Race and Nation in the Early Black Atlantic. Oxford: Oxford University 

Press, 2007, p. 6. 

4 Winthrop Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550-1812. Chapel Hill: University of North 

Carolina Press, 1968. Idus Newby, ed., The Development of Segregationist Thought. Homewood, Ill: The Dorsey Press, 

1968. George Frederickson, Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817- 

1914. New York: Harper & Row, 1971, also his, Racism: A Short History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 

2002. 

5 John Ernest, Liberation Historiography: African American Writers and the Challenge of History, 1794-1861. Chapel Hill: 

University of North Carolina Press, 2004. Stephen Hall, A Faithful Account of the Race: African American Historical 

Writing in Nineteenth-Century America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. 

6 James Sidbury, Becoming African in America, Chs. 1-3. 

256

activists. In other words, challenging and deconstructing the dominant and dehumanizing worldview 

became a trans-generational endeavor among black Americans. 

The brutalities and terror that defined the daily operations of the “Peculiar Institution” are etched 

indelibly in the memories and memoirs of slaves and former slaves. Frederick Douglass recounted in 

horrifying details how slavery destroyed the humanity of slaves, and the depth of terror and anguish 

that defined daily lives on the plantations. In both his Narrative (1845), and Life and Times (1881), 

Douglass left vivid accounts of this historical pain for posterity. 7 David Walker addressed in similarly 

gut-wrenching details the violent and demeaning character of slavery in his epic Appeal (1829) to “my 

much afflicted by suffering brethren,” in which he identified slavery as “the source from which most of 

our miseries proceed.” 8 Walker declared his “full and unshaken conviction, that we, (colored people of 

these United States) are the most degraded, wretched, and abject set of beings that ever lived since the 

world began…” 9 Walker’s conclusions are corroborated in hundreds, if not thousands, of testimonies of 

former slaves compiled by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in the 1930s, and in the narratives 

and autobiographies of countless other slaves. 10 One consistent theme in the narratives is the terror and 

bestiality that defined the institution of slavery. And it did not end with slavery. The theme of suffering 

was a continuum from slavery right through to the present. The violence of slavery was succeeded by 

an equally, if not more, dehumanizing post-slavery reign of terror encased within a pervasive Jim Crow 

culture which lasted through much of the second half of the 20 th century. During this period, the American 

landscape was littered with horrifying “human fruits.” Lynching; the spectacle of black bodies hanging 

from trees, the stench of burning flesh emanating from “human barbecues” polluted the nation. The 

age of lynching (1880-1945) witnessed hundreds, if not thousands, of hangings and burning of blacks, 

occasioned by sadistic orgies and frenzies, oftentimes involving whole families, including children, who 

congregated in main streets and town squares to bask in the torture, mutilation and burnings of black 

humans. 11 Such was the American racial and cultural landscape which lasted from the late-nineteenth 

7 Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself. New York: Signet 

Classics, 1997 (originally published in 1845). Frederick Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass. New York: 

Bonanza Books, 1962 (originally published in 1881). 

8 David Walker, David Walker’s Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World (revised edition). New York: Hill & Wang, 

1995, p. 1. (originally published in 1829). 

9 Ibid. 

10 John F. Bayliss, ed., 

John F. Bayliss, ed., Black Slave Narratives: Life Under Slavery as Told by its Victims in America. London: Collier 

Books, 1976. Norman R. Yetman, ed., Voices From Slavery: 100 Authentic Slave Narratives (African-Americans). New 

York: Dover Publications, 1999. See also his, When I Was a Slave: Memories From the Slave Narrative Collections. 

New York: Dover Publications, 2002. 

11 Jerrold M. Packard, 

Jerrold M. Packard, American Nightmare: The History of Jim Crow. New York: St. Martins Griffin, 2002. C. Vann 

Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow. 3 rd revised edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1974. Ralph Ginzburg, 

Hundred Years of Lynchings. Baltimore, MD: Black Classic Press, 1988. Joe H. Mitchell, 150 Years of Lynchings: 

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century to the second half of the twentieth. Key episodes that gripped national attention included the 

lynching of fourteen-year old Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi in 1955; an episode that ignited the 

flames of the civil rights movement, and the 1996 lynching of James Byrd in Jasper Texas, described 

by many as the last reported lynching of a black person in America. James Byrd was tied to the back of 

a truck by three white supremacists and dragged through a three-mile gravel road, and was slowly and 

sadistically dismembered. At the end, nothing of him was left. Human flesh littered the gravel road. 12 

The terror Equiano saw in the faces of his captors became the reality that ruled what many characterize 

as the American house of bondage. From its inception the black American experience exemplified 

dehumanization. As Herbert Aptheker emphasized, from the beginning, blacks confronted the critical 

challenge, among many others, of claiming and affirming their humanity. This was the existential struggle 

to reclaim their humanity in a culture/environment, and within the context of an institution, built on a 

denial and negation of that humanity. 13 It was not just the slave laws and state constitutions that were used 

to foster the culture of violence and terror; it was also education, or more appropriately, dis-education; 

that is, the denial of access to learning and the systematic use of ignorance to perpetuate and legitimize 

a culture of dehumanization. During slavery, it was a crime in most states to teach slaves the alphabets. 

Slaves simply did not go to school. Thus, slavery thrived on a culture of ignorance that socialized its 

black victims to develop self-loathing and inferiority complex, reinforcing in them a consciousness of 

negation and nothingness. Blacks were told they had no history, culture or heritage worthy of pride; and 

that they came from an environment of barbarism, primitivism and darkness. The intellectual foundation 

of black negation; the alleged absence of civilization in, and caricaturing of, Africa; the construction of 

Africa as a ‘dark” continent occupied by backward and primitive people; justified the enslavement and 

subordination of blacks. The goal was to legitimize enslavement by portraying slavery as a civilizing and 

positive force, the violence and horror notwithstanding. Over time, as Samuel Dubois Cook rightly noted, 

blacks developed a “tragic conception” of self, identity, history and heritage. 14 Though blacks confronted 

a destructive and disempowering culture, they refused to accept its reality, and struggled to challenge and 

reverse it. However, blacks soon realized that in order to effectively affirm their humanity, to overcome 

America’s Bloody Record in the Press. Joe Mitchell, 2002. Stewart Tolnay & E.M. Beck, A Festival of Violence: An 

Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882-1930. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992. Elliot Jaspin, Buried in the Bitter 

Waters: The Hidden History of Racial Cleansing in America. New York: Basic Books, 2008. 

12 Joyce King, Hate Crime: The Story of a Dragging in Jasper, Texas. New York: Anchor Books, 2002. Dina Temple- 

Raston, A Death in Texas: A Story of Race, Murder, and a Small Town’s Struggle for Redemption. New York: Henry Holt 

& Company, 2002. Stephen J. Whitefield, A Death in the Delta: The Story of Emmett Till. Baltimore, MD: The John’s 

Hopkins University Press, 1988. 

13 Herbert Aptheker, “Slave Resistance in the United States.” In Nathan I. Huggins, Martin Kilson and Daniel M. Fox, eds., 

Key Issues in the Afro-American Experience, vol 1 to 1877. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971, pp. 161-173. 

14 Samuel Dubois Cook, “A Tragic Conception of Negro History.” Journal of Negro History, 45, October, 1960. 

258

this culture of violence and suffering, to succeed in this existential struggle, they had to invoke not just 

physical responses such as escape, resistance and rebellion, but also epistemological. They had to attack 

and destroy the intellectual edifice of violence, the very ideological rationale of slavery. 15 

Since slavery and racism nurtured in black Americans a negative consciousness which served to 

undermine and negate their humanity, leading blacks realized that overcoming this existential challenge 

required self-deterministic affirmation of the will and desire to survive. In essence, this meant the forceful 

affirmation of their humanity. However, since that humanity was negated by a culture of intellectual 

racism, its reclamation would require frontal assaults on the edifice of that culture. In other words, 

to claim and exercise their humanity, blacks must challenge the prevailing and dominant intellectual 

discourse of invisibility, negation and negativism that had defined their existence in dominant national 

historical narratives. They had to reclaim for posterity, a noble, empowering and positive heritage and 

culture. Eighteenth century blacks such as Wheatley, Equiano, Sancho and Cugano developed positive 

counter-narratives of, and discourses on, the meaning of Africa. They theorized a different Africa; a 

positive Africa which soon functioned as a collective identity for resisting Eurocentric ideas. 16 Building 

upon this foundation, early nineteenth century black leaders of different backgrounds and orientation 

launched the abolitionist movement. To challenge slavery, they had to vigorously contest and debunk false 

ideas about their history and heritage. They had to challenge American culture of intellectual negation 

and hegemony. In the process, these “Pioneers in Protest”, as the late Earl Thorpe described them (James 

Pennington, William Wells Brown, William Cooper Neal, George Washington Williams, etc.), embarked 

on exposing the fallacies of American historical writings, and rescuing the black heritage and experience 

from its stranglehold by “researching” and publicizing the “truths” about American history and African 

heritage. They strongly believed that illuminating and highlighting the “truths” about their African history 

and heritage would eradicate the fallacies that were used to justify their enslavement. 17 As Stephen Hall 

underscored, these early black intellectuals; 

understood the necessity of focusing their challenge on contemporary nineteenth-century 

contradictions of history that privileged the rise of the Western hemisphere as the starting point for 

American history. For the black writers, the rise of the West coincided with the development of the 

slave trade and the demise of Africa. To respond to these charges, black writers in more expansive 

ways…honed a well-crafted historical discourse that accentuated their complex role in human 

15 John Ernest, Liberation Historiography. Stephen Hall, A Faithful Account of the Race. 

16 James Sidbury, Becoming African in America. 

17 Earl Thorpe, Black Historians: A Critique. New York: William Morrow & Company, 1971. 

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history […] 18 

They were not just “troubling” the pages of the writings of historians who had misrepresented their 

history, but also they “worked consciously and aggressively to ‘present a just view’ of black origins.” 19 

For these pioneers, there was no better point of departure than the very continent that had become the 

subject of caricature and negation; the one maligned to justify denying to them their humanity—Africa. 

They launched a gradual, systematic and determined efforts to research, study and publicize their African 

background and roots, to discover and publicize not just their rich history and culture, but also to affirm, in 

the process, their humanity and thus claim for themselves subject-status as agents and positive contributors 

to American development. David Walker discussed this issue in his Appeal. For Walker, as Stephen Hall 

argued; 

Rethinking the African American role in Western civilization required a systematic engagement 

with black achievements, ancient and modern. Walker turned to classical source to make an 

important point about the place of Africa in the history of the world: ‘When we take a retrospective 

view of the arts and sciences—the Pyramids and other magnificent buildings—the turning of the 

channel of the river Nile, by the sons of Africa or of Ham, among them learning originated and was 

carried thence into Greece, where it was improved upon and refined. 20 

In the referenced passage, Walker advanced a theme that would become a central canon of black 

intellectual protest; one that subsequent activists, including Martin Delany, would amplify—the antiquity 

of civilization in Africa, and Africa’s influence and impacts on Western civilization and culture. The 

rescuing of African history from the depths of Eurocentric neglect and more significantly, the re- 

affirmation of Africa’s preeminence in world civilization became a recurrent theme in nineteenth century 

black intellectual activism. Delany built his nationalism on a strong foundation of African historical and 

cultural preeminence. 21 

Regardless of their intellectual imperfections, the writings and publications of the “Pioneers” laid the 

foundation for future generations and genres of black intellectual activism. They wrote about their rich 

ancestry in Africa and their enslavement. They repositioned Africa and blacks as active and positive 

18 Stephen Hall, A Faithful Account of the Race, p. 51. 

19 Ibid, p. . 52. 

52. 

20 Ibid, p. . 42. 

42. 

21 John Ernest, Liberation Historiography, Stephen hall, A Faithful Account of the Race. Tunde Adeleke, UnAfrican Americans: 

Nineteenth-Century Black Nationalists and the Civilizing Mission. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 

1998. 

260

agents in world civilization. Most significantly, they claimed a central role for blacks in American national 

history from the Revolution through the Civil War and beyond. In their collective narratives, black protest 

intellectuals insisted that American achievements could not be accounted for absent black contributions. 

Thus, there was a connection between the historic pains and sufferings of black Americans and the rise of 

an intellectual avante-guard. Their humanity denied through intellectual deceits and fraudulent claims and 

assertions, blacks fought back and attempted to reclaim and reaffirm that humanity through the creation 

of an intellectual tradition that highlighted the essence and worth of Africa. The New Negro History 

Movement of the early twentieth century further solidified the foundation of Black history. Led by William 

E. B. Du Bois, Carter G. Woodson, Benjamin Brawley and many others, the “New Negro” intellectuals 

used their education, research and publications to solidify a foundation for, and gain respectability for, 

African History. They created the institutional structures and intellectual resources that established Black 

History as a respectable mainstream discipline, and, in the process, they laid the foundation for the future 

of Black Studies. 22 There was consequently a direct connection between the sufferings of black Americans 

and the emergence of an intellectual discipline: Black Studies. 

Black Studies emerged and institutionalized in the late 1960s out of the pains and anguish of the black 

struggle. Its roots are embedded in the riots, boycotts, protest marches, police brutalities and racist 

attacks of the civil rights movement. This context would transform Black Studies into not only a 

discipline that embodied the pains of black Americans, but the panacea for soothing, moderating and 

ultimately eradicating those hurts. This linkage between Black Studies and the black struggle, as this 

paper establishes, was birthed in the earlier attempts by eighteenth and nineteenth centuries back leaders 

and activists to use knowledge as a weapon of change; a means of challenging the dominant hegemonic 

narratives. From the beginning, therefore, the black struggle in America was about challenging and 

debunking a debilitating philosophy and worldview which entrapped blacks in a socio-economic, 

cultural and political “house of horror”; the Plantation. Thus, the black struggle was about overcoming 

and transcending this dehumanizing environment. This called for the creation of a countervailing, 

life-affirming intellectual heritage; a counter-hegemonic response to the dominant tradition, one that 

validated the black past, reversed centuries of deliberate and systematic mis-education, and functioned as 

a disciplinary intellectual frame for the black struggle. The civil rights movement brought this vision to 

fruition. The struggle was not just about civil and political rights. At its core, the civil rights movement 

was also about comforting and easing the historic pains that had become magnified in racial violence and 

brutalities. However, there was no consensus among civil rights activists on the course of action. While 

22 August Meier and Elliott Rudwick, 

August Meier and Elliott Rudwick, Black History and the Historical Profession, 1915-1980. Urbana: University of Illinois 

Press, 1986. Darlene Clark-Hine, ed., The State of Afro-American History: Past, Present, Future. Baton Rouge: 

Louisiana State University Press, 1986. 

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mainstream leaders focused intensely on civil and political rights, student activists grew increasingly 

impatient with what they perceived as the slow pace of change. Determined to accelerate the pace, they 

embraced and adopted the radical “Black Power” philosophy which ultimately would direct the attention 

of the activists to college campuses. 23 

The “Black Power” activists of the Students’ Movement concluded that civil and political rights 

would be hollow accomplishments without education; and were convinced that real knowledge was 

inconceivable absent engaging and obliterating the legacies of mis-education that continues to torment 

blacks psychologically and emotionally; legacies that, in their judgment, the colleges embody and 

nurture. Put differently, the student activists considered black liberation meaningless without uprooting 

the Eurocentric pedagogy that shaped American education. The need for intellectual and psychological 

emancipation, therefore, redirected the attention of black activists to educational reforms. 24 They sought 

education that would rid their minds and consciousness of ideas and ethos that had nurtured self- 

abnegating consciousness, ideas that had subverted black self-deterministic capacity, and induced self- 

hate and loathing. These activists realized that centuries of slave violence and racism; of exploitation 

and impoverishment, of helplessness and powerlessness had resulted in a fatalistic disposition of self- 

hate and self-loathing. Black self-esteem and confidence had to be restored through education that taught 

blacks to appreciate their heritage, their culture; to appreciate their roles as active historical persona in the 

American drama. This would only happen, they insisted, if blacks had their own space within American 

higher education; a space within which to nurture and propagate those counter-narratives that would 

reshape black minds positively. They began to advocate the creation of Black Studies; the foundation for 

which had already been solidified by earlier generations of activists. Their efforts ultimately resulted in 

the establishment of the Black Studies Program at San Francisco State College in late 1968, popularly 

acclaimed as the first in the nation. This became the catalyst for programs at other institutions such as 

Princeton, Yale, Columbia, New York and Ohio State. 25 

Within the Black Studies purview, blacks hoped to validate their history and experiences. Black Studies 

would become the disciplinary arm of the black struggle. It would function as the intellectual means of 

redemption, as well as the tool with which to heal the pains that continue to torment blacks. Ridding 

23 Noliwe M. Rooks, White Money, Black Power: The Surprising History of African American Studies and the Crisis of 

Race in Higher Education. Boston: Beacon Press, 2006. Talmadge Anderson & James Stewart, Introduction to African 

American Studies, Trans-disciplinary Approaches and Implications. Baltimore, MD: Black Classic Press, 2007, Ch. 2. 

Fabio Rojas, From Black Power to Black Studies: How a Radical Social Movement Became an Academic Discipline. 

Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. 

24 Ibid. 

25 Ibid. See also, Fabio Rojas, From Black Power to Black Studies. 

262

lacks of the tragic worldview became crucial to survival. Black Power advocate Malcolm X, for 

example, offered knowledge of African history as anti-dote for self-destructive ideas and consciousness, 

the key to overcoming and obliterating the psychological and emotional pains inflicted on blacks through 

centuries of slavery and intellectual racism. 26 Thus, the institutionalization of Black Studies heralded a 

new approach to African history and culture. It offered blacks their own distinct racial/cultural lenses 

through which they perceived their African heritage and culture. It afforded blacks a positive view 

of themselves, as well as a renewed self-confidence that enhanced self-esteem and worth. Africa, the 

foundation of Black Studies became the source for a new positive identity; a new sense of the self, and 

the means of psychological and emotional freedom from the shackles of the past. Malcolm X and fellow 

Black Power spokesperson Stokely Carmichael saw increased knowledge of Africa as the means to a 

new self and identity. It was not just knowledge of Africa, but reeducation about Africa, about heritage 

and culture that would help blacks defeat and overcome Eurocentric mis-education. As the quest for 

intellectual emancipating and empowering knowledge became part of the civil rights movement, black 

activists and emerging intellectuals used Africa to construct a counter-hegemonic epistemology; an Africa- 

centered epistemology which became the intellectual bulwark against cultural emasculation and a weapon 

in what was perceived as an existential struggle against Eurocentrism. This “African-centered” philosophy 

(Afrocentricity) shaped the early Black Studies programs through the 1970s, and ultimately became a 

dominant disciplinary paradigm by the late 1980s. 

The “Black Consciousness and Community Orientation” concept developed by the “founding father” 

of Black Studies forged a problematic link between the discipline and the social and psychological 

challenges of the black community. 27 Also, perhaps unintentionally, it set the stage for the racialization 

of the discipline. The intension no doubt was to create a mutually reinforcing relationship between Black 

Studies and the black community, reflecting the social dynamics of the context of institutionalization. 

The objective was for Black Studies to cater to the needs of its primary community and constituency; 

one that had been abandoned by America and had suffered and continues to suffer the scourge of neglect. 

Blacks would have to be imbued with a sense of responsibility to use their knowledge to improve the 

black community. Unfortunately, this had the unintended consequence of further racializing the discipline. 

The injunction to merge the academy with the community implied the marriage of theory and praxis. 

This underlines the healing power of the discipline. Black Studies cannot just be about researching 

and publicizing the “truth” about black history and culture, neither should it focus solely on exposing 

the fallacies of Eurocentric/American history. However soothing and therapeutic the exposure of such 

fallacies, they (i.e., the fallacies) constitute just a dimension of a greater problem. The other critical 

26 Malcolm X, Malcolm X on Afro-American History, New Edition. New York: Pathfinder, 1990. 

27 Talmadge Anderson & James Stewart, Introduction to African American Studies, pp. 35-36. 

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dimension, the praxis required black intellectuals to identify with, and use their knowledge to develop the 

neglected, powerless and helpless black community. This constitutes black intellectuals as avante-guard in 

the struggle to heal the deeper and larger wounds of the community. However noble this praxis function, 

ultimately it sets the stage for a ghetto-centric construction of Black Studies. 28 Emphasis on healing 

the historic pains and exposing the lies that had been used to inflict those pains and hurts undergird the 

problematic of intellectual credibility in Black Studies. Preoccupation with positively effecting black self- 

esteem has had far-reaching implications for what is taught in Black Studies, how it is taught, and by 

whom. There developed almost a schizophrenic preoccupation with ensuring that what is taught, and how 

it is taught, conform strictly to the dictates of Afrocentrism. This suggests, therefore, that those deemed 

“alien” to the black experience, whether by virtue of race or ethnicity become suspect, regardless of 

disposition and qualification. 29 

The belief was that only the victims and those who directly or indirectly share in their anguish could be 

trusted to interpret and represent the experience accurately. The use of race and ethnicity to determine 

qualification, competence and authenticity within Black Studies reinforced a siege/fortress mentality which 

further compromised intellectual credibility. The case against whites teaching Black Studies, according 

to one Afrocentric scholar, is fundamentally because they would “be reporting on it and interpreting 

it through the prism of their European experience (when what is needed is) an authentic presentation 

of the (black) experience.” 30 Another critic is opposed to whites teaching Black Studies because “their 

historic experiences disqualify them.” In his words, “discrimination can best be taught and understood 

by those who experience it. It is hard to read a textbook and understand what discrimination is about. It 

is a different thing altogether to live it.” 31 Asante is equally skeptical of whites teaching Black Studies. 

However, he concedes that it is possible for whites to teach Black Studies if such a person is “willing to 

make the necessary commitment to teach accurately and Afrocentrically” (emphasis mine), and has “the 

ability to frame blacks as historical agents.” 32 Such white professors must demonstrate not just knowledge 

of, but also “sensitivity to the genetic, social, and cultural links between Africa and Europe.” He insists on 

a priori vetting their “intellectual location, social orientation and moral investment.” 33 

Almost from the start, Black Studies assumed an ideological burden which would have far-reaching 

28 Tunde Adeleke, “Enduring Crises and Challenges of African American Studies.” Journal of Thought, vol. 32, number 3, 

Fall 1997, pp. 65-96. 

29 Ibid. 

30 Ibid., ., , p. p. . 73. 

73. 

31 Ibid. 

32 Molefi Asante, “Where is the White Professor Located” Located” Perspectives, vol. 31, number 6, September 1993, p. 19. 

33 Ibid. 

264

implications for scholarship. The ideological context of institutionalization created a racialized essentialist 

identity for Black Studies. It quickly became, in the perception of many, a discipline created by, and for, 

blacks. This racialization reflected the historical context. But there were also other considerations. Those 

who taught and administered the program in its early years were mostly black activists whose credentials/ 

qualifications derived largely from the fact of “being black” and the ability to claim affinity with, or 

having actively participated in, the black struggles. Academic qualification was simply not a priority. 

However, this would change as the field grew and expanded with the training of more professionals. 

Nonetheless, for over two decades after its inception, racial/cultural jurisdiction and credentialism shaped 

Black Studies. Whether by design or not, several of the early programs and departments were run by all- 

black faculty. There seemed to pervade an unwritten, racialized intellectual code; one that mandated an 

all-black faculty for Black Studies. The few whites who ventured into the field had difficulty gaining 

acceptance and credibility. Regardless of qualification, they were suspect. Race and ethnicity became the 

overriding credentials, and “experience”, rather than academic qualification, was much valued. 34 Thus, 

“being black” was presumed to confer to authenticity in Black Studies. There was an underlying fear and 

concern that whites could not be trusted to teach with the same conviction and passion as blacks; they 

simply could not be trusted to “tell it as it should be told.” This was premised on the belief that because of 

the centuries of Eurocentric mis-education, for Black Studies to be truly emancipated, it had to be rooted 

in Africa; it had to be truly a discipline by, for and about blacks/Africans. This racialized ethos defined the 

Afrocentric essentialist paradigm which assumed dominance from the late 1980s through the early 1990s. 

Adopted by leading Black Studies programs and departments, Afrocentrism became not just a defining 

paradigm for the field, but functioned as well as an ideological panacea for easing and eradicating the 

psychological and emotional pains blacks had experienced, and continue to experience, from Eurocentric 

mis-education. 35 

Thus, Black Studies developed a paradigm which fundamentally racialized the discipline. Race became 

the basis of legitimacy and authenticity. Advocates insisted that the field had to be constructed and 

taught “Afrocentrically” for it to truly accomplish its mission; otherwise it would just be another variant 

of Eurocentrism. Essentially, Afrocentrism locates Black Studies strictly and wholly within African 

34 Tunde Adeleke, “Enduring Crises and Challenges,” also Robert Blackey and Howard Shorr, eds., (Teaching Innovations 

Tunde Adeleke, “Enduring Crises and Challenges,” also Robert Blackey and Howard Shorr, eds., (Teaching Innovations 

Forum) “White Professors, Black History: Foray into the Multicultural Classroom.” Perspectives, vol. 31, number 6, 

September 1993, pp. 6-19. 

35 Molefi Asante, “The Afrocentric Idea in Education,” 

Molefi Asante, “The Afrocentric Idea in Education,” Journal of Negro Education, vol. 60, number 2, 1991, pp. 170- 

179. See also his, The Afrocentric Idea. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987; Afrocentricity. Trenton, NJ: Africa 

World Press, 1988; Kemet, Afrocentricity and Knowledge. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1990; “On Historical Interpretation.” 

In his Malcolm X as Cultural Hero and other Afrocentric Essays. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1993. 

Tunde Adeleke, “Black Studies, Afrocentricity and Scholarship: A Reconsideration.” Griot: Journal of African American 

Studies, Vol. 12, number 1, Spring 1993. 

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cosmology; reframing in the most positive sense, the history, culture and accomplishments of African 

civilizations, and the systematic use of the knowledge gained to empower blacks in their struggles. 36 

The injunction to teach “Afrocentrically”, therefore, suggests a willingness to affirm and validate Africa/ 

Blacks; to research and teach Black Studies strictly from an African perspective. This calls for forcefully 

critiquing and denouncing Eurocentric education, especially in regards to its negative impacts and 

enduring legacies. Most importantly, teaching “Afrocentrically” implies the instrumentalist combination 

of knowledge creation and dissemination with social engineering. This entails the therapeutic use of 

Black Studies to deal with and eradicate those negative, demeaning and self-loathing ideas that shaped 

black consciousness for centuries. In other words, the role of the instructor is not just to teach, but also 

ideological; to use Africa to empower students by challenging and reversing legacies of destructive and 

negative socialization. Due to paradigmatic imperative, Black Studies combined both academic and non- 

academic (instrumentalist) functions. It became a discipline for addressing not just the emotional and 

psychological pains, but also for eradicating the ills of the black community. 

The adoption of a racialized and ethnicized paradigm for Black Studies is intellectually problematic, 

especially in the context of emerging perspectives in the humanities and social sciences which privilege 

interdisciplinary and cross-cultural scholarship and discourses. As humans become citizens of emerging 

“global village”, and gravitate toward cultural citizenship, race and ethnicity become anachronistic as 

identitarian constructs and intellectual anchors. Put differently, just as the nation-state loses its grips on, 

and monopoly of, identity, so do race and ethnicity. The challenge for Black Studies scholars and scholars 

in the humanities generally is how to embrace this globalizing perspective without being constrained by 

the “Afrocentric” or any primordial identitarian ideology. The global and globalizing character of the 

black experience problematizes the use of race, ethnicity, or even culture, as paradigmatic frame for Black 

Studies. The ability to engage, validate and affirm multiple and complex experiences is at the core of the 

humanities. We live in a mutually reinforcing, mutually reflective universe defined by crosscurrents of 

influences and values. No credible humanities discipline can exist in isolation, driven solely by racially 

defined experiential ethos. It is important to clearly demarcate between an intellectual discipline and an 

ideological movement, each is characterized by fundamentally different objectives. While there may 

be shared and overlapping interests, the goals are fundamentally different. Black Studies cannot be 

constructed instrumentally and “Afrocentrically” and at the same time retain intellectual credibility. The 

Afrocentric paradigm is racially and culturally constricting. For intellectual credibility, the discipline has 

to be shared. This means not only that the field is open to everyone, but also that its philosophical frame 

privileges critical discourses with others; that it is an intellectual stream from which everyone is free to 

36 Ibid. 

266

drink, an embodiment of experiences that are not enclosed in, or delineated by, racial, ethnic or cultural 

walls. 

The sufferings of black Americans cannot effectively be relieved by a discipline grounded in the 

philosophy of pain; one which isolates blacks behind a cultural and racial boundary that discourages 

engaging other experiences. A paradigm rooted and grounded in pain would not foster interdisciplinary 

and inter-cultural researches and discourses. It would replicate an epistemology of pain that feeds the 

consciousness with negative and inhibiting recollections which hinder critical engagement with others. 

Pains are better relieved by experiences that inculcate in the victims the understanding that, however 

real, the pains do not, and should not, define one’s essence. In fact, it is in seeing how much blacks share 

with others, even the historic counter-hegemonic “other” that those pains are better analyzed, understood, 

and their effects relieved. An intellectual paradigm rooted in pain and defined by counter-narratives of 

negation, one which seeks to demonize and delegitimize the “other”, only replicates the very problem 

it was designed to eradicate, by evolving into what fundamentally is a disciplinary “ethnoscape” (to 

borrow Appadurai’s concept). 37 The pain is not relieved, but encased and perpetuated. Thus, Afrocentric 

fixation on race and identity politics negatively frames Black Studies as a protest discipline, a discipline 

fixated on shaping and re-shaping identity, constantly and perpetually on guard against perceived threats 

from the dominant society. As Gerald Early rightly noted, the entire Black Studies “enterprise seems 

more about authentication and restoration of identity than anything else.” This entraps the discipline “in 

a conceptual bind” which institutes the very problem it was created to destroy—“the act of imposing a 

unified identity upon a huge population of disparate people.” 38 There is also what Early characterized as “the 

political baggage” of the origins of Black Studies. This “baggage” compelled the imposition of a uniform 

identity upon a people without consideration for the wealth and complexities of their backgrounds and 

experiences. 39 As Early underscored, the “anti-establishment” origins of Black Studies created a “political 

baggage” which encouraged “dogmatic teaching, the quest for Afrocentric orthodoxy, and a pure African 

perspective of the world.” 40 The result is a cynical, anti-intellectual disposition that views with suspicion 

established canons of intellectual respectability. This is reflected in “the postmodernists denunciation of 

objectivity as Eurocentric, producing a vacuum that can be filled only by “correct” leftist or nationalist 

37 Arjun Appadurai, “Disjuncture and and Difference in a Global Cultural Economy.” In Mike Featherstone, ed., Global Culture: 

Nationalism, Globalization, and Modernity. London: Sage, 1990, pp. 297. 

38 Gerald Early, “A Place of Our Own.” The New York Times (on the web), April 14, 2002, p. 2. 

39 Stephen Howe, Afrocentrism: Mythical Pasts and Imagined Homes. London: Verso, 1998. Clarence E. Walker, We Can’t 

Go Home Again: An Argument about Afrocentrism. London: Oxford University Press, 2001. Yaacov Shavit History in 

Black: Afro-Americans in Search of an Ancient Past. London: Frank Cass, 2001. Tunde Adeleke, The Case Against Afrocentrism. 

Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2009. 

40 Gerald Early, “ “A Place of Our Own”, p. 3. 

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politics.” 41 There is also “the racial demarcation of the curriculum” which, according to Early, has “worked 

against the best interests of both the black professor and the black students by defeating a fundamental 

purpose of a liberal education: to learn about and to become experts in experiences outside yourself.” 42 

Further isolating Black Studies and thus eroding its intellectual credibility is the “Afrocentric” distrust 

of, and reluctance to embrace, mainstream education. Afrocentric scholars deem mainstream education 

inherently harmful to blacks. 43 Under the guise of scientific objectivity, rationalism and universalism, 

mainstream institutions function as conduits of Eurocentric hegemonic values. Rejecting rationalism, 

empiricism and objectivity, Afrocentric scholars advance relativism, and the construction of Black Studies 

within a racialized essentialist perspective rooted in, and one that positively reflected, the African world. 44 

This became the weapon of liberation, conceived dualistically and simultaneously to include academic 

and ideological dimensions. This racial essentialist epistemology became, for leading Afrocentric 

scholars, such as Molefi Asante, Amos Wilson, John Henrik Clarke, Marimba Ani, Maulana Karenga, 

Terry Kershaw and Na’im Akbar, the one and only viable and credible perspective for Black Studies 

and for educating blacks. Afrocentrism also functions as a kind of “collective consciousness” paradigm 

that uses racially and culturally shared negative experiences to shape in blacks an awareness of their 

collective pains. This shared awareness would supposedly inspire self-determination. This heightened 

state of “intellectual vigilance” which informs the Afrocentric paradigm shapes Black Studies in ways 

that conforms strictly to the goals of black liberation; the need to combat and deconstruct vestiges of 

Eurocentric education and socializing. 45 It is this construction of Black Studies that validates the racial 

credentialist problematic which delegitimizes anyone or interpretation not in conformity with Afrocentric 

view of history and reality; or anyone deemed racially and culturally “alien” to the unique experiences of 

the race. In other words, suffering, or the ability to claim a heritage of suffering, became a credentialing 

and legitimizing criteria and consideration. It soon became the defining and unifying underpinning of the 

essentialist pedagogy. Shrinkages in opportunity, coupled with renewed and relentless onslaughts on civil 

rights, and upsurge of ultraconservatism that targets social welfare reforms have exacerbated the crises of 

the black communities (poverty, unemployment, etc.) and bolstered the Afrocentric appeal as a weapon of 

liberation rather an intellectual paradigm. Oba T’Shaka urged continued adoption of Afrocentrism because 

41 Ibid. 

42 Ibid. 

43 Carter G. Woodson, The Mis-education of the Negro. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1990 (originally published in 

1933). Mwalimu J. Shujaa, ed., Too Much Schooling, Too Little Education: A Paradox of Black Life In White Societies. 

Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1994. 

44 Molefi Asante, Afrocentricity, pp 50-52. Terry Kershaw, “The Emerging Paradigm in Black Studies.” in Talmadge Anderson, 

ed., Black Studies: Theory, Method, and Cultural Perspectives. Pullman: Washington State University Press, 

1990, pp. 17-24. 

45 Molefi Asante, Afrocentricity, Ch. 3. 

268

“black communities are in crises…we have become infested by the western worldview.” 46 Amos Wilson 

presented Afrocentrism as the means of redressing historical wounds inflicted upon blacks, physical, 

psychological and emotional. He saw no more effective weapon of dealing with the myriad of challenges 

confronting blacks in America than to invoke and unfurl their “Afrikan” identity and heritage. 47 

How realistic is a racialized essentialist framing of Black Studies in the context of globalization and 

growing emphasis on connectivity and inter-disciplinary scholarship in the humanities? Can the 

humanities combine academic and extra-academic functions, especially if the latter are race-specific and 

culturally provincial, in a context, and in an intellectual milieu that privileges inter-disciplinary scholarship 

and discourses; one in which culture and identity fluctuate, and old cultural and ethnic boundaries 

become obsolete? Black Studies could conceivably assume extra-academic functions of therapeutic 

and instrumentalist nature due to the circumstance of its origin. The problem occurs, if and when, such 

functions become the essence of the discipline. For Black Studies to embrace and reflect emerging 

perspectives in the humanities, the discipline has to disengage from, or at the very least deemphasize, 

cultural and racial instrumentalism. Black Studies scholars, like others in the humanities must engage other 

experiences freely, and black students must expect exposure to a wide range of complex perspectives. 

The future of Black Studies depends on this openness and flexibility. The paradigm should acknowledge, 

affirm and validate the human experiences in their richness and diversity. Black Studies should not 

replicate racialized or culturally hegemonic grand paradigms or perspectives that shaped the context of the 

black experience; perspectives that were used to delegitimize “others” while being falsely represented as 

“universal’ and “objective.” As indicated above, Afrocentrism developed largely in response to what was 

perceived as the prevailing tendency to exalt as “universal” and “objective”, canons rooted in Eurocentric 

weltanschauung. Consequently, blacks felt that their heritage and contributions were neglected; and their 

values and cultures caricatured and delegitimized. Everything was conflated into a supposedly universal 

and objective worldview; a framework, in the judgment of Afrocentric scholars, for European hegemony. 

Afrocentrism was meant to free and protect blacks from this bondage, while also disrupting the legacies of 

their historic hurts. 

The Afrocentric construction of Black Studies, therefore, reflects a rejection of post-modern emphasis 

on inter-disciplinary discourses. There is clearly a reluctance to embrace post-modern or post-colonial 

assumptions, especially with respect to notions of globalism, connectivity and inter-culturalism. Suffering 

remains at the core of the problem. The critical question is: in what ways, if any, is the black American 

46 Oba T’shaka, 

Oba T’shaka, The Art of Leadership. Richmond, CA: Pan African Publications, 1990, p. 71. 

47 Amos Wilson, 

Amos Wilson, The Falsification of Afrikan Consciousness: Eurocentric History, Psychiatry and the Politics of White Supremacy. 

New York: Afrikan World InforSystems, 1993. 

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condition (poverty, racism, inequality, etc) moderated or mediated by post-modern or post-colonial 

developments? In other words, are the sufferings moderated by changing circumstances? Does the 

post-setting, however it is conceived (modern or colonial) necessarily safeguard, protect and preserve 

untrammeled, black rights and privileges? Does it preserve the fruits of their historic struggles? Indications 

are not reassuring. The upsurge of ultra-conservative attacks on social welfare reforms and public policies 

perceived to disproportionately impact the poor have only reinforced a sense of unease among black 

Americans. More recently, persistent attacks on civil rights culture, and blatant attempts in Republican 

controlled states to roll back the Voting Rights Act (1965), by restricting voting opportunities of minorities 

have only opened old wounds and reinforced the feeling that though the physical violence and sufferings 

of the past may have subsided, the political and cultural contexts remain pregnant with ominous 

consequences. Thus, for blacks, talks about trans-nationalism and cultural citizenship ring hollow. The 

enduring legacy of suffering and the looming threat of an unrepentant ultra-conservatism underscore 

the relevance of cultural vigilance and racialized worldview. We may live in a postcolonial world; 

the “colonial” is still very much alive for black Americans. Even in the postcolonial and transnational 

contexts, the violence, pain and anguish of the “colonial” establishment remain raw and fresh for black 

Americans, perhaps because for them, the concept “postcolonial” remains a distant illusion. The “colonial 

era” is still very much extant. Perhaps a “postcolonial” America, if and when it comes, would result in the 

easing of black sufferings. Contrary to some expectations, even the election of the first Black President 

has not ushered in the “post-racial”; a critical subtext to the “postcolonial”. In fact, as many now argue, 

the election of Barack Obama has, more than at any other time in American history further deepened the 

racial divide and animosity. It has revealed how distant the nation is from the “postcolonial” or “post-racial” 

termini. 

Afrocentric scholars, therefore, deem the trans-national vision an illusion. It is difficult to envisage any 

transcending, be it racial, ethnic or cultural in a global environment which continues in some form or other 

to replicate privileges; where racial inequities and inequality prevail. Hence, Afrocentrists who subscribe 

dogmatically to a conflict-driven perception of reality remain skeptical. They deem transcending of any 

sort a ruse; the “trans” a higher level of the old hegemonic order, an elevated platform for Eurocentric 

domination and exploitation, and thus an expanded terrain of black sufferings. Hence, they are leery 

of international/global engagements. 48 For them, black sufferings cry out for global attention. Blacks 

continue to languish beneath the veneer of American democracy. Their sufferings have morphed and 

48 Molefi Asante, 

Molefi Asante, The Painful Demise of Eurocentrism: An Afrocentric Response to Critics. Trenton, NJ: Africa World 

Press, 1990; Preface & chapt1. Marimba Ani, YURUGU: An African-Centered Critique of European Cultural Thought 

and Behavior. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1994. Haki Madhubuti, Enemies: The Clash of Races. Chicago: Third 

World Press, 1978. 

270

emanate from complex and often subtle sources—judicial, social, political and economic inequality 

and inequities, institutional and color-blind racism, and an unrepentant and virulent ultra-conservatism. 

This reality underscores, for many, the ever-present need for a distinct racialized pedagogy of resistance, 

an intellectual safety-valve, an “ethnoscape” even in an age when humans are supposedly increasingly 

being drawn closer, and traditional boundaries of racial, cultural and ethnic delineations deemphasized. 

In their judgment, blacks have yet to attain this noble “utopian” reality. Thus, Black Studies, a humanities 

discipline would remain saddled with this essentialist counter-hegemonic paradigm of “Pain”, even as 

humanities scholars worldwide explore ways of dismantling rigid disciplinary boundaries. 

References 

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Solidarity of the Subaltern Confronting the Globalization of Suffering: 

A Transmodern Critique of Zygmunt Bauman’s Liquid Modernity 

Yong-gyu Kim 

Pusan National University 

The Incident of Ssangyong Motor Company and the Globalization of Suffering 

Last summer, Slovenian thinker Slavoj Zizek made a sensational visit to the incense altar installed in 

front of Daean Gate, Deoksu Palace, during his trip to Korea. The altar was set up to commemorate a 

sequence of people who committed suicide or passed away in the wake of the 2009 lay-offs at Ssangyong 

Motor Company and the police suppression of strikes raged by workers. As many as 22 people killed 

themselves or lost their lives, including some striking workers and their family members and some non- 

striking workers gushed into an abyss of despair over the lay-offs. Why did so many people die? The 

foremost reason might have been extreme anxiety and pain experienced by people who suddenly fell into 

poverty after the lay-offs. But in her reportage on the Ssangyong Motor incident entitled Euijanori (Chair 

Play), writer Gong Ji-yeong attributes the most critical cause of the tragic deaths to the post-traumatic 

stress syndrome suffered by workers and their families over the police’s ruthless crackdown of the strikes. 

They were, in a sense, driven to death from the psychological shock of having the security of their lives 

shaken from the roots, the enormous violence committed by state power dashing their hopes and will for a 

rebound, and the trauma of disengagement and indifference of people around them. 

Personally, I cannot confront the despair they must have felt, nor do I have the courage to. Because 

approaching the complex reality of the incident is not easy and because trying to sympathize with their 

suffering would be presumptuous. However, the incident has too much in it for us to just walk away. 

Various complicated issues are implicated in it, such as how the neo-liberalist capital, a leading force of 

our contemporary society, has made workers powerless and to what extent global capital affects our local 

lives. 

Looking into the nature and character of the stakeholders related with the incident, we can see that the 

274

2009 Ssangyong Motor incident in Pyeongtaek was a very significant one in which local, national, and 

transnational problems were concerned all at once. Ssangyong Motor Company was sold to China’s 

Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation in 2004 and then handed over to India’s Mahindra Group in 

2009. This indicates that the identity of the capital was increasingly becoming transnational and blurred. 

Workers were confronted with unclear liquid ghostlike capital. The capital has completely different 

characteristics from domestic capital operating within the country. It is, basically, very exploitive of the 

labor it uses. When the dominant power of the nation-state was not weak as it is now, domestic capital 

maintained a certain level of attention to the welfare and protection of workers and their reproduction in 

the nation-state to secure a stable reproduction of labor and supply of good-quality human capital. But 

transnational capital seeks only capital at the expense of the wellbeing and welfare of its workers. 

Meanwhile, the nation-state, which is supposed to watch over this and protect workers or its ‘citizens,’ 

is incapable of doing it and even tends to acquiesce in the abusive capital. Colluding with many legal 

consulting companies which support the interests of transnational capital, the state ignores or oppresses 

the demands of workers, its citizens, using the police force. Just as capital wanders around like a ghost, 

transformed into zombie capital whose identity is ambiguous, the nation-state abandons its role as the 

‘social state’—which intermediates conflicts between labor and capital, protects workers, and manage 

their stable reproduction—and changes into the ‘security state’ which does not even mind having a war 

against workers in order to protect the generation of enormous profit for transnational capital. 1 As capital 

and state transforms in nature, the status of ‘labor’ undergoes a drastic change from the past. Workers 

are violently suppressed by the state which they expect to stand up against foreign capital to protect their 

rights. The bargaining power of labor unions weakens before the complex reality of capital, leaving 

workers with no one to turn to. They are pushed outside the legal protection through “ruthless violence 

executed by those who do not see people as people but as costs to be disposed of.” 2 Before capital and 

the state, workers are like ‘bare life’ in Agamben’s terminology. 3 In this condition, workers have to 

engage in life-or-death competition with fellow workers for survival in order to become regular workers 

or to maintain their non-regular employment. In short, non-regular work no longer means a temporary 

condition of suspension before entering regular work. It is a normal condition and reality of labor today. 

The real problem is that the survival game not only drives the players into a whirl of infinite competition 

1 On the ‘security state,’ see Zygmunt Bauman, 2005, Work, Consumerism and the New Poor, (London: Open University 

Press, 2005, 2nd ed.), pp. 96-100. 

2 Gong Ji-yeong, Euijanori (Chair Play) (Seoul: Humanist, 2012), p. 88. 

3 On homo sacer and bare life, see Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford 

University Press, 1998). 

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but also throws the entire society into a maelstrom of intense competition. It even divides us, who stay 

outside the competition, into ‘I’ and the other, or, we and they. Further, it makes us turn a cold shoulder 

to the plight of others, or, at best, be content with expressing sympathy. Because both disengagement 

and sympathy are based on ‘separation’ between I and the other and between we and they, they obstruct 

the formation of an understanding of the fundamental relationality between we and others. In Regarding 

the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag explains very well how dangerous both sympathy with and apathy to 

others’ plight are. She notes that insofar as we are indifferent to or feel sympathy with others’ suffering, 

we are barred from feeling that we are accomplices to what caused the suffering. According to Sontag, our 

sympathy with others’ suffering is, indeed, nothing but our impotence and our innocence. The indifference 

and sympathy are equal to our inability to understand the relationality between we and they and between I 

and the other. To overcome this, Sontag calls “to set aside the sympathy we extend to others” and urges us 

to reflect that our privileges are an extension of their suffering and “may ... be linked to their suffering.” 4 

What we need to do right now is to realize that my life is implicated in others’ suffering and they are 

implicated in my suffering. Moreover, we should realize that not just they but I can be a bare life before 

the violence of capital and the state. This awakening will enable us to understand the relationality and 

mutuality of suffering, to learn how to see the world together, and ultimately, to seek solidarity. 

The Crisis of Democracy and the Generation of Redundant Lives 

The Ssangyong Motor incident in Pyeongtaek demonstrates a typical case of revealing the manifestation 

of painful life beyond the boundary of a locality in Korea under the globalizing capital. Further, the 

incident demonstrates well how the global domination of capital drives democracy into crisis and how 

much suffering it generates and how widely it spreads it. Nowadays, democracy gradually erodes from 

“ruthless violence executed by people who do not see people as people but as costs to be disposed of.” 

The spread of violence results in the diffusion of suffering. The globalization of capital surpasses the 

effective zone of conventional democracy, more likely to leave democracy merely in hollow form and 

institution in the process. Many contemporary theorists refer to the crisis of democracy originated from 

tyrannical capital as the end of democracy, de-democratization, and post-democracy. 

In Post-Democracy, Colin Crouch argues that we are entering an era of post-democracy, in which formal 

elements of democracy still exist but “politics and government are increasingly slipping into the grip of 

the privileged elites.” 5 He maintains that given the difficulty of sustaining anything approaching maximal 

4 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Picador, 2003), pp. 103-104. 

5 Colin Crouch, Yi Han trans., Post minjujueui (Post-Democracy) (Seoul: Mijibooks, 2008), p. 11. 

276

democracy, declines from democratic moments must be accepted as inevitable.” 6 Wendy Brown, who is 

a more radical political scientist than Crouch is, defines the contemporary reality as de-democratization 

noted for “the domination of politics by capital, the overtaking of democratic rationality by neoliberal 

rationality and the juridification of politics, globalization’s erosion of nation-state sovereignty as well as 

the detachment of sovereign power from nation-states.” 7 According to her, de-democratization brings 

about two important consequences: on the one hand, democracy loses a necessary political form and 

container, and on the other, the state abandons all pretenses of embodying popular sovereignty and 

carrying out the will of the people. 8 In addition to those scholars, many theorists generally agree that 

democracy is facing a crisis since the globalization. What is problematic with the crisis of democracy 

is that the conditions of our lives have turned extremely uncertain and vulnerable from the foundation, 

as the responsibility for institutional protection and safety is shifted from the state to the individual. In 

consequence, people falling out of the system increase in quantity and those in wretchedness explode in 

number. Suffering is more and more generalized and individualized. 

There seems to be few theorists who capture this change better than Zygmunt Bauman. Because his 

writings superbly unravel how deeply and widely this change transforms our lives, I use his theory as 

the main basis of my argumentation in this paper. Bauman is well known to us for his concept ‘liquid 

modernity.’ As Karl Marx declared in The Communist Manifesto, ‘liquid modernity’ refers to the modern 

phenomenon that “all that is solid melts into air,” in that institutions and human relations, which were 

considered long-term and solid, e.g., individuality, time and place, life, labor, community and the like, 

melt fast and become liquid and ephemeral. Even human ideas such as death, life, love, aesthetics and 

so on are not exempt from the rapid change. In Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty, Bauman 

notes, based on the concept liquid modernity, that challenges never before encountered emerge in the 

developed parts of the world, generating a series of new and interconnected departures in culture. He lists 

five characteristics of those departures. First, as mentioned previously, modernity has made a passage 

from the solid to a liquid phase. The liquid phase refers to a condition in which social forms, previously 

regarded as solid, disintegrate and can no longer keep the same form as before as they decompose faster 

than the time it takes to become solid. Second, there has been the separation and divorce of power and 

politics, which were like a couple under an umbrella since the emergence of the modern state until quite 

recently. Much of the power to act effectively that was previously available to the modern state is now 

moving away to the politically uncontrolled and extraterritorial global space, while politics is unable 

6 Ibid., p. 19. 

7 Wendy Brown, “We are all Democrats Now...,” in Giorgio Agamben et al., Democracy in What State? (New York: Columbia 

University Press, 2011), p. 48. 

8 Ibid., p. 49. 

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to respond effectively to globally operating power since it remains local as before. Third, as communal 

and state-level support systems for individual failure and ill fortune no longer operate as before, the 

social foundations of social solidarity and collective action crumble. Community does not function in a 

meaningful way, and “interhuman bonds, once woven into a security net worthy of a large and continuous 

investment of time and effort, and worth the sacrifice of immediate individual interests ... become 

increasingly frail and admitted to be temporary.” Fourth, the framework and system of long-term thinking, 

planning and acting collapse. This leads to “a splicing of both political history and individual lives ... 

into a series of short-term projects and episodes which are in principle infinite, and do not combine into 

the kinds of sequences to which concepts like ‘development,’ ‘maturation,’ ‘career,’ or ‘progress’ (all 

suggesting a preordained order of succession) could be meaningfully applied.” Fifth, the responsibility for 

resolving the quandaries generated by vexing, changeable and liquid circumstances is passed from society 

to individuals. Individuals appear to be free to choose, but in actuality, they only bear the consequences 

and responsibilities for their choices. 9 

Those five characteristics, which form the basic assumptions of many of his books, do not look entirely 

unexcessive, but what Bauman tries to say here is that we have entered into a condition that individuals 

and capital are in direct confrontation without any mediation, as solid (pre)modern devices and solidarities 

such as state, community, society, and values, which used to intermediate capital and individuals, are 

left only in an empty crust or disassembled. In liquid modernity, ‘liquid’ refers to departures which are 

generated from the elimination, weakening, or disappearance of mediation. This change is manifest in two 

real changes. The protective covers and laws which used to defend individuals are no longer effective. If 

law is to write the continuation of the mediation into rules, the elimination and weakening of the mediation 

results in the weakening and disappearance of the law. Particularly, as the existing law is governed by 

other laws or powers outside its influence, the boundary between law and non-law is obscure, and chaos, 

disorder and lawlessness is routinized. In other words, those exceptional emergencies become normal. 

Further, in a lawless condition, individuals stand defenseless, like ‘bare life,’ before the exploitation of 

capital without any protective devices or a safety mechanism. Therefore, individual life and labor may be 

treated as ‘redundancy’ anytime if it is no longer useful to capital. 

Bauman interprets this change as a shift of paradigmatic criterion from ‘unemployment’ to ‘redundancy.’ 

According to him, unemployment presupposes the normal state of one’s employment in the future 

although one may be currently unemployed. That is, unemployment assumes that ‘employment’ is the 

normal condition and ‘complete employment’ is an ideal one. In contrast, in the concept of redundancy, 

9 For the summary of the five characteristics, I refer to and cite from Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Times: Living in an Age of 

Uncertainty (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), pp. 1-4. 

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edundancy itself is the normal condition. Redundancy signifies lives that are not used again or dumped in 

society, i.e., wasted lives. 

What is more serious than the generation of human refuse is that the redundant are regarded as thoroughly 

valueless in nature and also dangerous. It is defined as “a cancerous growth gnawing at the healthy tissues 

of the society, and a public enemy which threatens ‘our way of life’ and ‘our core values’.” 10 Bauman 

mentions various specific examples of superfluous populations, of whom he draws special attention to the 

underclass and refugees. The underclass and refugees are exemplary redundant products of globalizing 

capital. The former is the refuse produced in the process that capital exploits people in developed countries 

where it has already reached the limit. The latter are generated in the process that globally mobile capital 

exploits people and their lives in various latecomer countries and regions. Specifically, the former is 

produced out of already saturated well-trained labor in developed countries, whereas the latter are 

superfluous populations created in the process that global capital exploits impoverished and poor regions 

around the world. 

In Bauman’s view, the underclass is the human excess that is imagined in a completely different 

manner from the conventional working class. While the working class is represented from the view of 

employment, the underclass is represented from that of refuse. Further, the working class is posited in 

an image that it is able to play a useful role in society and make a meaningful contribution to social life, 

but the underclass is imaged in an entirely different way from the working class. They are imagined 

as “a class of people who are beyond classes and outside hierarchy, with neither chance nor need of 

readmission.” 11 They have no role to play, make no useful contribution to the lives of the rest, and exist 

beyond redemption. Their only role in society is making impoverishment and poverty look normal. 

Hence, their existence makes people regard poverty and destitution as an individual problem which does 

not require the society or the state to fix it. 

While the underclass is branded the enemy within, there are groups of people who are called external 

enemies flown in from outside. They are immigrants and refugees. Originating from somewhere outside, 

they pose a threat to Western society and cannot be incorporated into it. “Refugees, the displaced, asylum 

seekers, migrants, the sans papiers, they are the waste of globalization.” 12 Staying in camps installed in the 

periphery of the Western world which they cannot even enter, the “human waste is unable to play any role 

in the place of their arrival or sojourn.” They are treated as “strangers who are everywhere and nowhere 

10 Bauman, Wasted Lives: Modernity and its Outcasts (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004), p. 41. 

11 Bauman, Work, Consumerism and the New Poor (Bershire: Open University Press, 2005), p. 71. 

12 Bauman, Wasted Lives: Modernity and its Outcasts, p. 58. 

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at the same time (in the case of refugees)” 13 or as “the human waste of distant parts of the globe unloaded 

onto our own backyard” 14 who threatens the security of the Western world, like the underclass (in the case 

of migrants). Whether they are admitted to the Western society or not, they live wasted lives in indefinite 

alienation in camps or ghettos. 

As shown above, Bauman’s reasoning of liquid modernity and globalization unmasks amazingly well 

how fast human life and institutional forms like state and community are transforming. His analysis 

on the production of wasted lives and redundancy illustrates succinctly how much human suffering 

the globalization of capital creates and how fast their anxiety and pain increases with the shift of 

responsibilities from society to individuals. His delineation on the wasted lives of the underclass, migrants, 

and refugees, who are pushed to the margins as useless existences for making no contribution to society, 

presents an important theoretical reflection on how many subalterns are created by the globalizing capital. 

In addition, his discussion on redundancy makes a great contribution to developing Agamben’s analysis 

of the concept of homo sacer in the modern nation-state into an examination of the mode of life of homo 

sacer at the global level. 

The Limits of Liquid Modernity and Transmodern Solidarity 

Despite his excellent reflection and analysis, the alternatives and solutions suggested by Bauman seem 

to be pessimistic and rather weak, relative to the sharpness and richness of his analysis. He compares 

wasted lives to the old and the new big brothers toward the end of his book. The old big brother was that 

of ‘inclusion’ which controlled people and watched and prevented their deviance, whereas the new big 

brother is that of ‘exclusion’ which selects unfitting ones, labels them ‘waste’ and banishes them. What is 

more noteworthy comes in the next part. He argues, “at the dawn of the new century the biggest question 

to which we should find an answer is which of the two big brothers we would select.” 15 While we would 

like to make a different choice or have an alternative suggestion by which to forego making a choice, the 

question binds us constantly within the dilemma of choosing one of the two. It is a pessimistic question, as 

it tends to eliminate the possibility of asking many other questions. On the other hand, in the conclusion of 

Work, Consumerism and the New Poor, Bauman suggests an ideal alternative, which is very different from 

the one in Wasted Lives and very unlikely to be realized. Noting that the creation of ubiquitous redundant 

lives originates from the work ethic that payable labor is accepted as the sole value of labor, he urges to 

ponder on making a transition to an economy in which labor is separated from the labor market, that is, 

13 Ibid., p. 80. 

14 Ibid., p. 56. 

15 Ibid., p. 133. 

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one in which the integrity and dignity of human labor is acknowledged, for instance, a moral economy in 

opposition to the capitalist economy, or workmanship ethics. 16 These alternative options look plausible, 

but he hardly examines or addresses where the power and actors to execute the transition come from, thus 

making it sound hollow and idealistic. 

Now, let us take a critical look at the limits of Bauman’s theory. In my view, the reason why he cannot 

present a realistic alternative and a specific solution is that his analysis dwells too much on the liquid 

modernity which produces countless wasted lives and the grandiose unilateral process of the globalization 

of capital and overlooks the existence of various confrontational lives and the creation and continuation 

of values against the tide of the grandiose process within society. For him, the redundant are powerless 

and their lives are isolated from those of others. Paying so much attention to the one-way process in 

which the underclass, refugees, and migrants are represented in ‘wasted lives,’ he fails to recognize the 

fact that they have the potential capacity to debunk the logical fabrication of society which creates them 

or represents them as redundancy and refuse. In this regard, Bauman’s redundancy is both at once similar 

to and different from the subaltern as postcolonial theorists have said. While the redundant are clearly 

represented and readily defined, the subaltern are more fundamental, thus impossible to be represented in 

the existing diction and discourse. Their invisibility unveils that the established systems are parasitic to 

them and sustain themselves by wielding violence to them. 17 An example of this may be found in Spivak’s 

article, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” From the position of invisible subaltern women, Spivak sharply 

discloses the accompliceship of British imperialism and Indian patriarchy over Indian colonial women 

(widows) who were forced to commit suicide by their husband’s brothers after their deaths. In Jacques 

Ranciere’s scheme, Bauman’s redundancy is seen from the view of the police, whereas the existence of 

the subaltern is unveiled from the perspective of politics. Ranciere defines the concepts of ‘politics’ and 

‘police’ as the method and system of classifying the ways that people act, exist, and speak into different 

categories. The police carries out the function of ordering various places and positions composing the 

society, i.e., differentiation and distribution. It divides people into those who have a share in society and 

those who do not and controls or excludes the latter by giving them a certain fixed identity. In other words, 

the police is “a community of identities, set places and roles.” 18 Meanwhile, Ranciere defines politics as “the 

process of subjectification disintegrating the distribution of set places and roles.” 19 Politics disassembles 

and then reassembles the way of distributing shares on the principle of equality. According to this scheme, 

16 Bauman, Work, Consumerism and the New Poor, pp. 117-121. 

17 Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds.), Marxism and the Interpretation 

of Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988). 

18 Jacques Ranciere, Yang Chang-ryeol trans., Jeongchijeokin geoteui gajangjarieseo (Margins of the Political) (Seoul: 

Gil, 2008), p. 28. 

19 Ibid., p. 30. 

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Bauman’s analysis of redundant lives and existences approaches the viewpoint of the police. Unlike 

Spivak, Bauman does not seem to agonize over who will be the subjects to practice a ‘new distribution of 

parts and shares’ against the globalization of capital which creates suffering of many lives. 

Here I would like to take a closer look at the limits of Bauman’s theory, as they seem to be connected 

with his unique concept liquid modernity and further, the Eurocentric perspective. The concept of liquid 

modernity has three characteristics, which distinguish his theory from others on modernity. First, his 

theory on liquid modernity supposes, like postmodernism put forth by Fredric Jameson, Jean Baudrillard, 

and Jean-Francois Lyotard, that contemporary culture is not a new cultural phenomenon or logic separated 

from modernity, but it originates in it, only with a different speed of liquidity. In other words, liquid 

modernity is an extension of modernity, so its change can be comprehended by understanding the modern 

culture. This is similar to the theory of Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens. The globalization of capital 

is not a break with modernity but a critical momentum of accelerating the liquid culture of modernity 

in virtually all aspects, including time and space, humanity, life, emotions and so on. That is the second 

characteristic of his theory. The third one is that based on this conception, he asserts that liquid modernity 

is clearly different from the previous solid modernity. Liquid modernity signifies the liquid, temporary, 

and disintegrating cultural reality of today, a drastically different reality from the one criticized by critical 

theorists such as Max Weber who stressed the protestant ethic of work, Michel Foucault who analyzed 

modern disciplinary regimes of surveillance and discipline, and Adorno and Habermas who criticized 

totalitarian society and mass culture based on the rationality of control and identity. The greatest strength 

of Bauman’s analysis is that it captures the new cultural logic and phenomenon of modernity which is 

missing in the existing critiques of modernity. The cultural reality probed by the previous theories on 

modernity is different from the one we live in, which is a changed one. Hence, liquid modernity is not a 

break with modernity, as in postmodernism, nor a mere continuity of modernity, like in the conventional 

logic of modernity. Rather, it is a theory on internal departures of the extension of modernity. Despite 

those distinct features, however, Bauman’s modernity concept is not much different from those of 

other thinkers. His concept of liquid modernity shows a strong tendency of interpreting the postmodern 

analysis of cultural phenomena not as postmodern phenomena but as internal departures from modernity. 

Whether it is internal departures from modernity or a break from it, it is a very controversial issue. But 

this question is not a radical one as it presupposes a certain notion on ‘modernity’ itself. The notion 

hinges on two presuppositions on modernity. The first one is that modernity is based on rationality as a 

philosophical principle, scientific rationalism as a principle of comprehending nature, and Enlightenment 

as political thought, and human subjects develop progressively from a subjugated immature state to an 

autonomous mature one. The second one is that modernity began in modern Europe with several breakups 

and departures and then spread to the entire world, whether it was an imperialist expansion characterized 

by violent exploitation, or the diffusion of advanced civilizations. They are the two most important 

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presuppositions which buttress the Eurocentric view on modernity. Bauman’s notion of liquid modernity 

is also grounded on his own interpretation of the two presuppositions. While liquid modernity is an altered 

interpretation of the first presupposition, the globalization of capital is that of the second one. That is, 

liquid modernity represents the phenomena that with the deepening of the first presupposition, institutions 

and human relations which used to appear long-term, continuous, and perpetual became liquid, temporary, 

and fashionable. And the globalization of capital represents the process that liquid modernity originated 

in Europe turns planetary and produces countless wasted lives and suffering of the redundant around the 

world. 

However, the Eurocentric perspective of modernity regarding ‘modernity’ has been widely challenged. Its 

most critical problem is that it banishes out of modernity various forms of lives, existences, and values in 

numerous places within and outside of Europe. Negri and Hardt stress that modernity must be understood 

as a power relation rather than in terms of reason, Enlightenment, the break with tradition, secularism, 

and so forth. 20 To understand modernity as a ‘power relation’ means to give less focus on the dominant 

characteristics or the origin of Western modernity than on the lived experiences of domination and 

resistance in the West and of oppression and struggle between the Western and non-Western worlds. In 

particular, Negri and Hardt reject the perspective of origin and expansion and employ that of encounters. In 

this perspective, modernity did not occur in the specific place named Europe but in the process of clashes 

and compromises of different forces and colonial encounters of the Western and non-Western worlds. 

Working from the standpoint of colonial encounters, two facts unveiled: that “precolonial civilizations 

are in many cases very advanced, rich, complex, and sophisticated” and that “the contributions of the 

colonized to so-called modern civilization are substantial and largely unacknowledged.” 21 

Negri and Hardt do not say it directly but Enrique Dussel argues early on the close relationship between 

modernity and coloniality. In a paper titled “Ethnocentrism and Modernity” presented in Frankfurt in 

1993, Dussel criticizes that the Ethnocentric narrative on modernity is an irrational myth. Enrique Dussel, 

“Eurocentrism and Modernity,” 22 He emphasizes that the modernity concept was constructed on the basis 

of a complete concealment of the colonialization of America (dawned in 1492) and its consequences. 

Further, he distinguishes two opposing paradigms on modernity, the Eurocentric and the planetary. 

The Eurocentric paradigm is built on the logic of origin and expansion mentioned before. For Dussel, 

modernity is solely a European phenomenon: “Modern sovereignty develops spacially, according to 

20 Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, 

Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Commonwealth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), p. 67. 

21 Ibid., p. 68. 

Ibid., p. 68. 

22 Boundary 2, 1993, p. 65. For a detailed discussion on this, see Kim Yong-gyu, 

Boundary 2, 1993, p. 65. For a detailed discussion on this, see Kim Yong-gyu, Transmodernity and Ecology of Culture: 

Colonial Differences and a Critique of Eurocentric Modernity, Cogito 70 (August, 2011). 

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the Eurocentric paradigm, from the Italy of the Renaissance to the Germany of the Reformation and the 

Enlightenment, to the France of the French Revolution.” 23 In this paradigm, Europe is the center and 

only Europe can achieve universal modernity. Meanwhile, the planetary paradigm does not deny the 

central position of Europe in modernity, but highlights that the European centrality does not develop by 

itself, but from its relations with others existing outside Europe. European modernity is the “culture of 

the center of the world-system achieved through the incorporation of Amerindia” and a “result of the 

management of this centrality.” In other words, the centrality of European modernity is “not the sole fruit 

of an internal superiority accumulated during the European Middle Ages against other cultures. Instead, it 

is also the fundamental effect of the simple fact of the discovery, conquest, colonialization and integration 

(subsumption) of Amerindia.” 24 This expands the existing notion of Western modernity to the global level 

on the one hand and requires its fundamental revision on the other. 

This view emphasizes that the dark underside of modernity is coloniality. Dussel stresses the need for a 

complete shift in understanding modernity in the quest for a comprehensive reassessment and liberation 

of the cultures and values of numerous others who are oppressed and concealed by modernity/coloniality. 

For this, he proposes a new concept, transmodernity, by which he tries to embrace and transverse the 

duality of achievements and limitations of Western modernity by acknowledging oppressed others and 

their cultures. While Western modernity has been founded on the culture of the ‘rational myth’ built on 

the identity of the self without acknowledging others and their cultures, Dussel stresses a transmodern 

thinking based on the ‘reason of others’ who are oppressed by the culture of the self. Others and their 

cultures have been derogated as being “utterly worthless, meaningless, trivial, and useless.” 25 In his view, 

those people and their cultures did not disappear despite tantamount violence and oppression. That is 

because they were not completely integrated into the totality of the modern/colonial world-system and 

maintained the relationship of otherness and exteriority to it, i.e., living labor. Here, exteriority, a concept 

of Levinas, means transcendental otherness that cannot be integrated into totality; for Dussel, that is 

the condition which enables liberation from totality. According to him, because of the exteriority which 

hinders incorporation into the logic of the totality of Western modernity, or an “omnipresent and latent 

alterity,” 26 they still harbor vivid cultural richness. Relying on the rich cultures of others, Dussel defines 

that transmodernity “(as a project of political, economic, ecological, erotic, pedagogic, and religious 

liberation) is the co-realization of that which it is impossible for modernity to accomplish by itself” 27 . It 

23 Dussel, Beyond Eurocentrism: The World-System and the Limits of Modernity, in Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi 

(eds.), The Cultures of Globalization (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), p. 4. 

24 Dussel, p. 5. 

25 Dussel, Transmodernity and Interculturality: An Interpretation from the Perspective of Philosophy of Liberation, p. 17. 

26 Dussel, p. 17. 

27 Dussel, Ethnocentrism and Modernity, p. 76. 

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seeks “mutual realization of liberation through an incorporative solidarity ... between center/periphery, 

man/woman ... different ethnic groups, different classes, civilization/nature, western culture/Third 

World cultures, etc.” Dussel’s concept of transmodernity enriches the notion of subaltern even more and 

contributes to specificating the necessity of political solidarity. Thus, the subaltern not only plays the role 

of opening up the existing space in a new way at the conceptional level, but also emerges in the political 

stage as people seeking political solidity for the realization of equality. 

Now we understand why Bauman’s analysis of liquid modernity and globalization of capital is weak and 

idealistic in proposing alternatives and solutions. We also understand why Bauman excellently shows that 

the globalization of capital causes the globalization of suffering and produces so many wasted lives and 

immeasurable agony to them but does not view them as having potential capacity for change. To him, 

they are literally waste generated by liquid modernity and globalizing capital. Being controlled, surveilled, 

and deprived of political ability, they are merely the targets of the police. They cannot be connected with 

others in suffering because their suffering is individualized and separated. Therefore, there is no possibility 

of political solidarity among them. 

We need to look at the globalization of capital from an opposite standpoint from Bauman, that is, that of 

the subaltern. Bauman speaks on the creation of redundancy and waste from the view of the globalization 

of capital, but we should look at it from the view of the subaltern, living labor. Bauman has a top-down 

stance, but we need a bottom-up approach. This shift in position means more than having a different 

perspective; it enables us to posit a completely different understanding of suffering, i.e., the politics of 

solidarity. Those lives of refuse and waste are dead ones chased away by globalizing capital. What does 

suffering mean in modern-day capitalistic life? It means that living labor is used solely for producing 

capitalistic values in subjugation to the capitalistic relations, or they do not recognize themselves as such 

and live wasted lives thrown out of the loop of capitalistic relations. They suffer as slaves or excesses of 

capitalistic liquid modernity. The globalization of capital makes living labor into refuse and waste, but at 

the same time, it creates the subaltern of living labor around the world. An alternative way to confront the 

globalization of capital would be to connect their suffering and not individualize it. This ultimately means 

to cut the chain of the competitive game of survival which makes others’ living labor into redundancy, 

realize the relationality with others and spur their lives as well as our own, and build a new relationality on 

that basis. 

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Divorce Disputes, Property Right, and Legal Pluralism in a 

North China Village 

Zhao Xudong 

Renmin University 

…there is no place in the world where a marriage was seen as a privacy of the spouses themselves 

that anybody else couldn’t take an interest in. Fei Xiaotong (1981, 33). 

Introduction 

The history of Chinese people can be seen as one of recyling by which many current social phenomena are 

made sense. To the problem of marriage, it is also no exclusive. The ideology of modern China once has 

dominated under the basic tone of revolution. Anyway, revoulution (geming) will be sought as an excuse 

under which any rule or custom, unsatified the interest of some kinds of class, would be legitimately 

demolished under the name of “bad custom” (lousu). In this sense, a successful revolution, symbollically, 

is no more than a replacement of old custom with a new fashionable one. As a ridical transformation of 

the revolution, when it is exposed some kind of shortcomings, the socalled old custom will be revenuated 

and caught its own legitimate position in a social structure. The process is familer in social anthropology 

that is often called “model of oscillation” (Leach 1954) by which the developmental line of the Chinese 

modern history can also make sense. Pertain to my concerning about rural marriage and divorce, every 

revision on The Marriage Law might must be seen as a consequence of this kind of thought of revolution. 

This kind of revolutionary transformation was happened in the beginning in the urban area and then 

spreaded into the rural area. In the same time, marriage custom would be changed in a slow way in 

traditional village community than in urban settings. This hypothesis can be checked from my own 

collected divorce cases in the Li village of Hebei province in People’s Republic China, where I have done 

fieldwork for four months. On the one hand, there is a powerful state law of marriage; and on the other 

hand, there is also much more local costums on which the indegious ideas of marriage and property are 

circumscribed. 

286

Marriage contract and its custom 

The Li village, readdressed under my own naming, is situated in the eastern part of the county Zhao. The 

village was lived about 1100 households and 5000 people when I studied there in 1997 (Zhao 2003, 31). 

Marriage of the village, learned from my informants, was approval of being engaged as they were very 

young. A child, for example, even in his or her two or three-years-old, mother of the child would like to 

find a marriage target as soon as she had had a chance in talking with someone else. Once she knew a 

child of a family would be satisfied her own ideal target, she would find a matchmaker to help her to make 

a marriage appointment with the family of the ideal target. If the family agreed with the appointment, the 

mother of the child would exchange a formal tie (a note of marriage appointment) with the parents of the 

family. The tie is often written on a piece of red paper and exchanged in a selected day, i.e., jiri (a lucky 

day). The most important message that should be written on the tie is so-called shengchen bazi, meant the 

born time of children of both sides. 

Generally, each village always has men or women to whom they can calculate by themselves the harmony 

between someone’s born time and her or his future life. Those persons are often respected and called 

xiansheng (a mister). In Li village, they are often called nengren (an able man). Li Qinggang was at lest 

one of nengren in Li village from whom I learned a lot from him on the knowledge about the custom of 

the village before he died in 2001. He used to apply the traditional way of mingli (a rational of fate) to 

decide a fitness on born time between a boy and a girl. He once had showed his own collected book under 

the title of The Lucky or Unlucky Tables of Marriage Fitness Between a Man and a Woman (nannü nayin 

mingpei jixiong biao) which is written in a poetic form that is an expressive index of an mutual relational 

meaning of the different fitness, such as, jin (metal), mu (wood), shui (water), huo (fire), and tu (earth), 

between various men and women with different born time. It is also summarized in the following eight 

different kinds of combination. We are told: 

Wood pluses wood is forest. 

Their children should be educated. 

Wood and fire can be given birth each other. 

Happiness would be come if you were 

tolerant. 

Wood is created from earth. 

Wealth and treasures would be full 

of a basin. 

Male wood female wood 

The wood will be broken as wind is coming. 

Would be supported but not satisfied. 

Male wood female fire 

Harmony would be emerged just by 

obligation. 

A son born in the year of horse would be 

given emoluments. 

Male wood female earth 

Seed would be matured followed the 

flowering. 

A little regret of you is your son in 

weakness. 

287 

Many quarrels between the pair of spouses. 

Would be fallen into illness, weakness, 

and sadness. 

Quarrel would be happened once in a while. 

A long life you are and wife is virtuous. 

Husband and wife would be much more in 

harmony. 

Waiting for a lucky after practice on your 

moral integrity. 

Session 3


Proceedings 

Metal overcomes wood and changed into 

useful things. 

Charity with a deep belief. 

It is smoothly that wood is born from water. 

You will be flourished in the end. 

It will be half lucky because of its birth in 

going against. 

There is trust between the husband and 

wife. 

Fire is more powerful as it being added 

another fire. 

You should make a concession between 

each other. 

It is harmony just because earth is born 

from fire. 

Wealth and treasures would be full of 

your home. 

Male wood female metal 

You must be careful when you are walking. 

Peace and good in every year. 

Male wood female water 

It is going against when water upon water. 

Farm land surrounded kitchen smoke and 

much more cows and horses are grown. 

Male fire female wood 

The wife is dominant but the husband weak. 

You will have many more sons and 

daughters. 

Male fire female fire 

There are many quarrels between the 

husband and the wife. 

Worries on catastrophe then will be avoided. 

Male fire female earth 

Harmony and happiness will be got between 

the husband and the wife. 

Many sons and daughters will be born of. 

288 

The most basic thing is to work hard 

and save. 

Happy with your sons and grandsons. 

It is taken more efforts on your family 

property. 

More and more sons and daughters you will 

have. 

It will be high on your fame and gain. 

You would be no sons if you harmed a 

virtue. 

Family disturbance will be emerged. 

Sons should be given more education. 

A long life like a pine tree. 

Both of you will be supported. 

The fitness of a boy and a girl just got through above checking of born time is often led a marriageable 

marriage between them. A tie of marriage proposal will be asked written down on the male side. A general 

form of the tie is written as: “Request the honour of your permition, with a golden promise, the inferior 

dependant Li Wenzhong with respect.” 1 When the female side received the tie, rechecking of born time 

is necessary. After it has been done that there is no conflict between the two couples, a tie of marriage 

agreement is asked, a replying tie is often written as: “With the honor of your request: Our respected 

dependants of affinity with our respect Yue Zhongtai.” 2 The first exchange of tie is also called huantie 

which will be kept by the parents of both sides. When their children have grown up till the marriageable 

age, the male side should find a matchmaker to whom the affair of the engagement will be consulted. 

The engagement is also called xiatie (sending a note) which should be sent on the male side. The female 

side should be xietie (thanks for the note) after the note of the male has been accepted and received. The 

note of the male is often written as: “Request the honour of your clear meaning, with a golden promise. 

[Name of] the dependants of affinity”. 3 A xietie of the female is often written as: “With the honour of your 

request: Our respected dependants of affinity. [Name of] the dependants of affinity.” 4 Finally a banquet 

prepared by the male side is also needed that in which some of relatives of both sides and the matchmaker

will be companied and through which the date of wedding should be fixed. 

In generally, every village has special persons to write this kind of marriage notes (huntie). In the Li 

village, those tasks were charged by Li Qinggang before his death in 2001. He himself had kept A Manual 

Book of Notes (tiepu) in which many kinds of notes were included, such as note for son born, funeral rites, 

and for congratulation to the elderly people, etc. 

In rural China, high betrothal gifts (caili) given by the female side are often needed. Otherwise, it is 

said that the betrothal gifts would be absent to the girls of Li village although in the nearby villages the 

betrothal gift is still expensive. It is certainly that small money about 500 to 2000 yuan should be given by 

the male side on the day of engagement. But about a ten thousand yuan valued dowry will be returned to 

the male side on the day of wedding. By the way of high expensive dowry of the female side, the marriage 

would be thought of benefit to the girl because she would be little insulted after she has been married into 

the home of the male side. 

The ceremony of dowry receiving is often a public event in a Chinese village. In a general way, the dowry 

would be took and presented by the female side in the early morning of the last day before the wedding 

day. When the dowry is arriving, firecracker will be fired by the female side in the mean while persons 

of the male side will come out to receive the dowry. The whole village of the male side would also go 

together to view the lively event of dowry carrying to the home of the male. It is spread at once in the 

whole village that how many dowry and their concrete terms and the gossip about the wealth or poverty of 

the bride are. 

A wedding day in the rural area is often full of ritual and fun in public view. In the early morning as the 

sun not yet raised, the bridegroom will be accompanied with several village people to go to the bride’s 

home by cars. When they arrived at the bride’s home, she had often intended delay a period of time by 

which to denote her unwilling to leave her own parents’ home. It is also a time that the relatives of the 

bridegroom and of the bride can communicate each other. 

Before the bridegroom takes with the bride going out of the door of her home, the relatives of the 

bride daubed the bridegroom’s face with some of black pot ash. The bride afterward is carried by the 

bridegroom into the first one of the vehicle procession meeting the bride and her relatives. Firecracker 

will be fired as soon as the vehicle procession is being emerged on the entrance of the bridegroom’s 

village. In the same time, the bride’s family at once prepared their rites to meet the bride and her relatives. 

Participants taking part in those rites are those relatives of five-submission (wufu) on the bridegroom side 

and some key relatives of the bride side. It is certainly that all of the villagers of the bridegroom’s village 

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would be welcomed. The whole day of the wedding is occupied by the rituals, such as bai tiandi (to 

worship the Heaven and the Earth) and ren daxiao (to identify relatives in orderly), which should be done 

by both bride and bridegroom. By the way of those rites, a marriage relationship between the bridegroom 

and the bride is recognized that is obviously not recognized by the way of written forms than that of public 

rituals. In other words, after those lively rituals and events, anybody in the village knows who’s who is 

a new wife of somebody in the village. Feast after the rites of meeting is necessary in which relatives of 

both sides are treated with kind hospitality. 

Divorce in Traditional China 

Marriage is one kind of social ties by which a family is formed. An average family can be expressed 

in a reverse triangle pattern on the two top points of which are occupied by a pair of spouses and the 

lower point is their child or children (Radcliffe-Brown 1926, 160). Professor Fei Xiaotong declares 

that the relationship between the husband and wife can be seen as the contractual one. Not only can it 

be fitted in the society of one husband and one wife, it is also applied in the society of polyandry and 

polygamy, because all those societies are based on the marriage contract relationship between two or more 

individuals (Fei 1981, 77). If we accordingly saw a marriage relation as one kind of contract, it must have 

some kinds of condition or principle by which a contract would be concluded or canceled. Those kinds 

of condition or principles, if there were, would be combined with a society rather than with individuals. 

Under this sense, we had to talk about some transformation of marriage morals. 

In the same sense, one kind of marriage arrangement believed unreasonable in the present could be taken 

for grant in ancient societies; and an approved marriage in our culture would be thought of the slandered 

in other cultures. There is no other reason that can be used to explain those variations unless the different 

principles on the marriage contract being concluded or canceled were proposed. Divorce with wife, for 

example, in ancient China, which is often called chu (to send forth), qi (to abandon), fang (to send away), 

or xiu (to oust) etc. (Tai 1978, 77), would be never thought of a slandered thing. According to Dadai 

Liji (Book of Rites of Elder Dai), a classic of Confucianism, a husband is given power to send forth his 

wife if she is thought of under the following seven conditions, such as, being un-filial to her parents-in- 

law, having no son, adultery, jealousy, malignant disease, talking to much, stealing (Tai 1978, 85; Tao & 

Ming 1994, 254-61). 5 Generally speaking, kindred people of an abandoned wife have no good reason to 

argue with the husband that why his wife should be sent forth. Otherwise when somebody asked for the 

5 The Seven Conditions was given a little more revision and then kept in Tang Ordinances (Tang Ling) in a sequence as: 

having no son, adultery and licentiousness, being unfilial to the parents-in-law (or failing to serve them with care), talking 

to much, stealing, jealousy, malignant disease. Cited from: Tai (1978, 85). 

290

condition of the wife, the kindred people of the wife would manage to answer with the rhetoric words, 

such as dagui (great coming) or laigui (coming back), because people in that time conceived that most of 

responsibility should be attributed to the female side if she was expelled (Dong 1995, 277-85). 6 

In eras of the imperial China, before a modern nation-state was established, the relationship between the 

husband and wife was not directly controlled by a central state rather than a lineage or an ancestor. The 

status of a wife, in a consequence, would be affected by three kinds of power, i.e., power of ancestral 

temple or lineal orthodoxy, of her mother’s brothers and father’s sisters, of her husband (Tao 1934, 48). 

Many stories therefore haven been talked about that how a wife to whom her husband deeply loved also 

had been sent away as a punishment because the husband’s parents had had little harmony with the wife. 7 

Those ideas have been inevitably undergone some transformation. At least in a society of contemporary 

China, there is never a personal right of treatment on the dissolution of a marriage relationship at all. This 

kind of rights has been entrusted to an institutional authority under which all of divorce disputes would be 

resolved by the way of mediation or an adjudication being sent. The agency of the institutional authority is 

obviously of the national court located in different administrative levels. 

Property seeking in the divorce disputes 

As a basic-level court, how does it work on a villager’s divorce dispute? What are the principles that it 

will be depended How are those principles fitted to or conflicted with the local logic of life All those 

questions are my special considerations and tried to answer based on my own fieldwork and archives 

collection in Li village. 

In a nutshell, divorce is not a easy thing in the village. Bickering between the husband and wife is not 

always seen as a disordered thing in a family. Several couples even quarreled to the step of divorce but it 

had been in the finally ended and never mentioned again just through various mediations in the village. A 

real divorce would be happened if the bickering between the husband and wife never mediated at all. The 

6 It is certain that the divorce right on the side of husband doesn’t mean there is an absolute freedom. There are also rules 

of The Three Limitations (san buchu) by which some limited rights of a wife are being protected. The Three Limitations 

is recorded in Da Dai Li Ji as “a. If the wife has no place to return to. b. Having observed three years mourning for the 

parents-in-law. c. If the husband had been poor and humble at the time of marriage, and become rich and noble later” (Tai 

1978, 85). 

7 In Li Ji (Book of Rites), a Chinese classic, there is a section titled “li nei ze” (Rules of Governing Wife) that can also be 

seen as the principles of divorce. Some words concerned about inharmony between a wife and her parents-in-law which 

are recorded as: “A son is very approved his wife, nevertheless, his parents have no pleasure to her, she is therefore sent 

forth” (Cited from: Tao 1934, 49). 

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court mediation named shuohe (to persuade to bind together) will be initiated through which a final result 

of shuohe or panli (divorce through adjudication) will be achieved. In other words, divorce dispute will be 

resolved either in success by the way of mediation or failure into divorce via the adjudication of the court. 

The former one is called shuohe and the latter panli. 

Shuohe (persuade to bind together) 

There are several sets of binding rites that will be initiated after two families were engaged into quasi- 

marriage relatives. Those rites would have been hold as the two families were met in the first time till 

wedding had been hold. It is obviously that those rites would have been disappeared as a pair of couples 

could not live together anymore. In some occasions, a reasonable argument between the two sides of a 

marriage would be raised. 

When the husband and wife was falling into quarrels, a strategy most often mobilized is that of the wife 

will go back her own parents’ home living for a period of time. In the period, both sides of the spouses 

would be engaged into private mediations trying to restore an ordered state of the family. If one side of the 

spouses did not feel good after the private mediations had been done, generally speaking, their family life 

could not maintained on going, cadres of the Villagers’ Mediation Committee (cunmin tiaojie weiyuanhui, 

VMC) will come into the view to do mediations on the dispute. Nevertheless, a cadre of the committee 

told me that what they can do just some of limited things meeting a divorce dispute. If the husband and 

wife are being in a stage of bickering and wrangling (chaochao naonao), their neighbors and the cadres 

being called acting as mediators might be enough. If a pair of spouses had been bickered to the stage of no 

other way being picked up than that of divorce, the court would be played as the final mediator. Villagers 

wouldn’t go to court on the spur of the moment when they were just falling into a dispute. Otherwise, 

especially pertaining to the divorce cases, clients often go to the court for a resolution. Mediators in the 

village level will avoid of the dispute as soon as they recognize that a dispute at hand had been so difficult 

to be resolved. 

In the period as the wife lived in her parents’ family, one side of the couples may initiate to accuse to the 

court if she or he was being felt remaining difficult to live together after the various mediations of shuohe. 

The court will notice another client to prepare his or her reply and then follow a series of court mediation 

which is locally called zuo gongzuo (to do work on thought). The procedure of zuo gongzuo wouldn’t be 

initiated only by the legal institution itself. Popular authorities, such as old men and lineage leaders on 

both sides, also a formal mediator of the VMC, would be mobilized to fall into the case, though, not done 

in all such cases. The place of mediation would be happened in court, in homes of the clients and in an 

authorized institution, such as the VMC, etc. 

292

If a success was achieved through zuo gongzuo, anything could be fine, the family would be renewed into 

a harmony, otherwise, a failure achieved, the most difficult thing for the court was how to identify and then 

divide the original personal property of both sides. Although many of fayuan panjueshu (a court letter of 

adjudication) would be written down as “One can take away one’s own things,” 8 many cases were faced 

the blurred problem of what the meaning of ‘one’s’ is. Several wrong clients in the village conceived that 

the final adjudication of the court on property division would have been implied some kind of unfairness. 

The difficulty the court faced, however, is that there are almost few literal materials kept as evidence to 

certify one’s property. It is also obvious that when the husband and wife were being married, there was 

no necessary to record one’s property in a written form, or made clear on the division of one’s property. 

It is also difficult for a judge that which one of the things should belong to somebody or somebody else 

when a pair of couples falling into disputes and went to the court for a divorce. A judge would be often 

met some cases that on the female side something, such as ten suits clothes, as dowry would be argued, 

but on the male side they replied that there is nothing on the issue proposed by the female side. A dispute 

on marriage property, as a result, would be followed at once. A divorce dispute in this sense is resolved in 

distinct with other kinds of property dispute. 

According to above description of Li village, the establishment of marriage relationship is undergone a 

extreme complex process. This process, just as Fei (1981) mentioned, is being of a public displaying rather 

than that of a private thing. In other words, the relationship of husband and wife, in their own right and 

responsibility, is recognized through the way of the gift exchange. Dowry of a bride is socially required 

to be sent in the public. Details of the property would be deeply impressed and easily remembered by 

the relatives and villagers of both sides. It is certainly that the property wouldn’t be written down and 

prepared as an evidence for the court once the pair of couples was falling into a divorce dispute some day. 

The adjudication of the court, in contrast, is declared just according to the evidence that can be verified. 

There is confusing on idea of property. According to the law of the state, a property was approved only as 

it could be verified, but transforming of property in a marriage is realized through series of ritual display. 

The process of property transforming can be seen as an exchange of mutual trust through procedure 

of exchange from xiaotie to datie. An exchange of xiaotie witnessed before a matchmaker which is 

signified a mutual relationship might be seen as a rough recognition. As the boy and girl have grown up, 

8 Many divorce cases, the final adjudication letter will be written the words “One can take away one’s own things.” An 

adjudication letter of a divorce case happened in 1950s is recorded as “One can take away one’s own things. Also the 

male side should give a set of quilt and the nurture fee of children altogether 16 yuan to the female side in two times, one 

of which is on the fifteenth in eighth month of lunar year and another of which the fifth of the fifth month. Eight yuan is 

given in each time” (Cited from: The Divorce Archives of Zhao County’s Archives Bureau, Vol, 2, July, 1956). This form 

of adjudication writing can be found in many the adjudication letter of divorce. 

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a datie would be exchanged also before the matchmaker. Eating together of the parents on the both sides 

with the matchmaker is necessary. A formal affiliation would be really established and recognized after 

the exchange of the datie. Wedding day in harmony and lucky according to the lunar calendar will be 

arranged on the male side on which the bride will be taken and before day of which her dowry received. 

All of the rites, whether before or on the day of wedding, would be hoped to bind these two alien families 

into together and also a new small family could be created. Under the folk mentality, property division, 

in those ritual days shouldn’t be mentioned even just in words. The bridegroom wouldn’t be asked by the 

bride to write down a note to verify “so and so dowry is belonged to the bride herself.” It is obvious that 

each one of both sides knows very well which part of the property should be belonged to the male side 

and which part to the female. Although a woman is easily to remember and write down all of the terms 

as a judge asked her to fill an dowry inventory, it is difficult to her to find a witness to verify all of those 

terms was really belonged to her. Nevertheless, the judge is just to declare his adjudication according to 

the so-called “verified evidence” (ke chayan de zhengju). 

We can learn from a divorce dispute which was happened in 1990 in Li village. The plaintiff of this 

case is named Shi Yuncai whom was 38 years old in that year. Her own parents’ home is situated in the 

Dongzhuang village of Dongzhuang township. Her husband, now was the defendant, is named Feng 

Jingshan whom is a villager of Li village. The plaintiff sent a request to the local court “to ask for a 

permission of divorce with her husband.” Details about her request are that “1) their divorce could be 

permitted; 2) they have two boys and two girls and that of which she will bring up the younger boy and 

the younger daughter; 3) family property should be equally divided between them; 4) the contracted land 

and trees are asked to be equally divided between them.” Many villagers can not understand why the 

female side was suddenly proposed to divorce with her husband after their living together for 14 years. 

Causes of divorce presented by the plaintiff are included in her own indictment: 

The defendant married with me in 1978 through formal registration. We have born four children 

after our marriage. … After the marriage, our mutual affection is just being general, also the 

relationship with my mother-in-law. In the beginning years of our marriage, even I could live 

together with the dependant, we afterwards often fall into conflicts just for household chores. It 

is therefore led to a deterioration of the relationship with my mother-in-law. The defendant acted 

upon whatever his mother said and beat and scolded me at every turn. A rift of our affection of 

which had been flagged was emerged between us. … I request to divide the above property with 

the defendant in equally. 

A main reason of this civil case promoted into divorcing is that the existed contradictions between the 

wife and her mother-in-law. On the third day of September in 1990, a judge, named Zhao Cunzhi, of local 

294

Fanzhuang court received the defendant Feng Jingshan. The judge Zhao, according to the procedure of 

law, talked about the Article 76 and the Article 77 in the Law of the Civil Legislation to Feng and noticed 

Feng that he was asked to write a reply letter and submit it within fifteen days. On fifteenth of October 

in 1990, one month and a half month after, the judge Zhao Cunzhi called the defendant Feng Jingshan 

and the plaintiff Shi Yuncai to come to the court. The reply letter of the defendant hadn’t been submitted 

till then, the judge then asked Feng why the letter hadn’t be submitted to the court. Feng replied that his 

father-in-law had talked over between them, therefore, he felt no necessary to write the letter and submit. 

But the judge stressed that Feng himself gave up his own right of defendant. 

The judge then talked with both Shi and Feng which is belonged to one part of the court investigation 

and testimony. It also can be seen as one part of the court mediation. This mediation was achieved little 

success because the wife as a plaintiff still insisted on divorcing with the defendant. Two days after, the 

judge Zhao did his second mediation to the Plaintiff Shi. According to the record of local court, mediation 

on court had been enacted for three times. A mediation agreement had been finally achieved by the way of 

the judge Zhao Cunzhi going to do his persuasion to the families of both sides. Participants doing the work 

of mediation are certainly included the family members and the cadres of the village committee on both 

sides. Here authority of the formal court does not work singly rather than cooperated with political power 

of the state in village and informal authority of the old men of both families. Mediations on marriage 

disputes are often realized through the way of zuo gongzuo on both sides. Contradictions between the two 

clients are thus at least disappeared in the records of the local court. Both guys express their thankfulness 

on the agency of legal authority, i.e. the judge Zhao, whom has been seen as one kind of representative 

of formal legal institution of the state. Under the mediation of the authority of the court, an original social 

order is though of being recovered which would be embodied in the final mediation of the local court: 

Zhao Cunzhi: I have done work on both of you for a long time. I have also gone to your families of 

both sides to do work on your old persons. Managers of your villages have also done a lot of work 

on both of you. Through the way of mutual understanding on both sides, I will send Yuncai to Li 

village on the twentieth-two of this month. I hope you will be kept in mutual love and protection, 

mutual tolerant, and mutual understanding. Live better just for thinking about the four children and 

your family. It is needed to be mutual tolerant. Congratulate you on your happiness of family. Just 

be fine on everything. Would have more you want to say 

Shi Yuncai: Thanks for the regards and help of the court on our family. I was really thought of 

never being lived and insisted on divorcing with him. I have recognized my faults of previous 

thoughts and deeds through the court had done work on us. I will guarantee that we will talk over if 

we meet event in the future and never being quarreled each other. We will live a better life for those 

four children. 

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Feng Jingshan: Thanks the court for the regards and help on our family by which a family being in 

broken has been recovered. Our family could not exist if the court did not done deep and careful 

work on it. Both of us will work in concert in the future to make our life better. 

The wife in the divorce case had returned her own parent’s family to live more than four months before 

the case was sent to the court. There is a similar custom in Li village or near area that a woman often 

returned her own parent’s home to live when couples of a family were falling into a crisis. According to 

Maurice Freedman’s (1966, 60) literature research on Chinese lineage, the aim of a wife returning home 

is just seeking a support from her own parent’s family. Based on my own fieldwork, I thus believe that 

one kind of symbolic meaning of a returning wife is given condemnation on the male’s own family, and 

in the same time, mediation of the village people will be initiated. One of the families that I visited can be 

used as an illustration. A woman returned her own parent’s family to live because of being annoyed with 

her husband. A neighbor of her husband then went to visit the husband’s mother and said: “What’s matter? 

Let your son say something good to his wife and receive her home!” It is said that many cases of marriage 

crisis in the village have been successfully mediated in this way. On the other hand, to the woman that 

she wants her family dispute to be resolved on the court, her returning might be useful to avoid of the 

disturbance of her husband’s side. It is also convenient in this period to ask a lawyer being in guanxi with 

her family by which the final adjudication would be benefit on her own side. 

Depending on the whole narration of above case, a process of mediation on a divorce case could be 

learned. In the process of mediation, authority of the court as the third party is requested by both of the 

plaintiff and defendant. They have certainly different aims according to their different roles. Shi Yuncai, 

as a plaintiff, according to her real aim, would not be likely to divorce with the defendant that she might 

be just annoyed with her husband’s relatives. For example, she has been obviously annoyed with her 

mother-in-law and sister-in-law. But a problem is that those kinds of contradictions are being out of the 

scale of the state law. The plaintiff has to bring the case to the local court by which a so-called divorce 

case can be accepted by the formal legal institute of the state. Three principles followed can be used to 

justify her request of divorce: 1) do not recognize her husband’s relative as her relatives; 2) a small family 

is important which is just composed of husband, wife and their offspring; 3) property of the family is 

either shared by the husband and wife when it is bond together or divided in equally between the husband 

and wife when it is fallen into broken. The husband as a defendant now tries to maintain the family. He 

made a concession to wish his wife coming around to the correct way of thinking. The principles applied 

to support his justification are followed: 1) family is the most important; 2) property of the family is 

shared by husband and wife as it is combined into together and not easy to divide clearly as it is needed 

to be distributed. As a third party between the husband and wife, the judge is requested to do mediation 

according to the state law. Principles of the mediation can be roughly classified as: 1) It is important to 

296

maintain a family; 2) Treatment on a dispute is needed to be reasonable and legally. Here “reasonable” 

(heli) is meant customs and “legally” (hefa) is meant abiding by articles of law; 3) If the male didn’t insist 

on divorcing, a better way to resolve a dispute would be to maintain the existed marriage. 

To maintain a family steady can be seen as a common principle among those different principles abided 

by those three kinds of agent. It is also the basis that mediation can be realized. As a representative of legal 

authority, the judge would like to use moral persuasion to realize a principle of “a family maintaining is 

the most important” by which all those three persons can be falling into a common moral imagination. 

Panli (divorce by adjudication) 

The above mentioned case is successively resolved through court mediation in which principles of the 

court are often coincided with ones of custom through which a crisis family can be brought back to life. 

But if a divorce case is failed to be mediated, some kind of disagreements and even conflicts between state 

law and custom on definition of personal property will be often emerged. 

In 1991, the town court received a copy of indictment written by Li Dazhu who is a villager of Li village 

asking for reliving the relationship of illegal cohabiting with his wife Yao Shenghua whose parents’ family 

is located in Ge Datou village also belonged to the pear area of county Zhao. The clients of the divorce 

case didn’t register before they cohabited for which just because they hadn’t met the legal age of marriage. 

Now I will present the original documents of this case on a process of dissolution. At first, I will cite the 

indictment of Li Dazhuang, reply of his wife, and dialogues of the judge with both of them. 

Pertaining to the divorce case, many questions asked by the judge are based on a principle of making 

a fact clear. Both the plaintiff and the defendant are sought to enlarge their own property belongings as 

possible as they can which has been demonstrated in their respective replies. The judge Zhang Shunping 

talked with the plaintiff Li Dazhu in three times and with the defendant Yao Shenghua in five times. In 

addition, the judge himself also went to the village of the plaintiff and of the defendant to take evidence. 

He inquired the plaintiff’s father Li Zhenzhong once and also inquired the witnesses Yao Haijun in 

Yaojiazhuang village. In the following, I will respectively present the questions asked by the judge and 

replay of the clients and witnesses. The judge Zhang Shunping talked with Li Dazhu for two times 

that one of which was concerned about the background of the plaintiff’s first marriage and the other is 

concerned about the question of dowry of the female side. 

According to the court dialogue we know that many divorce case are easily transformed into a property 

dispute. All of those five dialogues between the judge and Yao Shenghua are concerned about the property 

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argument. The judge therefore wanted to investigate more clearly what is the dowry of the female side 

and their common property. Furthermore, the judge was more concerning about what is the significant 

evidence by which those properties of one of the two clients can be adjudicated. 

On both sides of the plaintiff and defendant, they tried to marginalize their own interest on property right. 

For the end of the marginalization, the common property of their family can be withheld on the male side, 

while the story of a color television which was absent in her dowry can also be invented on the female 

side. It may be also impossible to the judge trying to find out the legal facts of the belongings of property 

right. Although the judge inquired on witnesses, such as the plaintiff’s father, testimony like this is hardly 

to weight under the strict legal procedure. It is more difficult to check on how many items of the dowry 

are. Finally, the judge had to draw his adjudication according to the facts that could be testified. On the 

final decision letter (panjue shu), the judge’s adjudication is written down: 

1. To relieve the marriage relationship between the plaintiff and defendant. 

2. Their daughter Li Mei will be brought up by the defendant. The plaintiff is asked to send 

the fostering fee 150 yuan to the defendant before October 1 in every year until Li Mei can 

independently live. 

3. 1300 yuan bank savings will be equally divided between the plaintiff and the defendant. The 

plaintiff is asked to send 650 yuan to the defendant in the limited 15 days as soon as the decision 

letter has been begun in effective. 

4. Other disputes are rejected. 

According to the decision letter, the judge drawn his adjudication is based on the several basic principles 

in the following: 1) Division of property should be based on the testified facts; 2) There is a principle of 

equally division on the basis of testified property; 3) Their children should be fostered by both sides; 4) 

The law is used to care little about the un-testified facts. 

Three of the adjudicative principles are especially referred to “the testified facts” (ke chayan de shishi) 

which is a concept of jurisprudence. It is also a main characteristic of modern law that the authoritative 

judge drawn his adjudication on the evidences and facts provided by the plaintiff and the defendant. There 

is obviously a significant inconsistence of idea between the popular society and the state on what is meant 

on a legal fact. As coming from rural area, a plaintiff or a defendant often says some property is belonged 

to one of them but they can not always provide their own evidence to support their claim. As a result, they 

had to accept a final adjudication decided by an authoritative local court. Although some persons wanted 

to express their un-satisfactions on the adjudication and tried to appeal to a higher court, i.e. a city court, 

they often received a reply of “The original adjudication is maintained” (weichi yuanpan). On the one 

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hand, a city court would like to give sufficient respects on the adjudication of a local court by which a 

harmony relationship between them could be maintained, on the other hand, they would like to do weichi 

yuanpan just because of a practical difficult on testifying the concrete legal facts. They have to hurry 

through their adjudication or maintain the original adjudication which is thought of the best way of saving 

either on energy or on time. 

Some wrong cases will be unavoidable in the rural area because the testified fact requested by the legal 

adjudication is often uneasy to find out in a civil case. For the seeking of more benefit from the testified 

facts, a relational network existed in a popular society will be consequently embedded into the operation 

of a legal institution. In Li village, I had met a middle man whose name is called Li Ruiyun that he wanted 

to sell his own building to appeal to the county court. We have had a dialogue each other: 

The author: Why do you try to sell your building? 

Ruiyun: Don’t you need money to appeal? It is needed to send gift. Money is nothing. It would be 

really face losing if the appeal was failed. 

The author: Could the appeal be won if the gift was sent? 

Ruiyun: Don’t you think that they wouldn’t help to say something for us after we had sent a gift? 

The author: Are there many cases that appeal to the court through the way of sending a gift? 

Ruiyun: You feel no confidence if you haven’t send a gift. 

The author: If both sides have sent their own gift, how about you? 

Ruiyun: Competing on whose gifts being more and whose relational person being more important. 

The above interview has been given me an impressive image. Many likewise responds will be happened 

if you have chance to interview with clients of cases especially those of divorce cases. It is obviously 

difficult to find out a fact especially a legal fact. To do it is often needed to invest many human labors or 

materials that may be not easy to a local court. Many legal cases have been presented and demonstrated 

that judges of local courts are not easy to draw their own adjudication independent of clients otherwise 

they will be regulated and bounded by the local economics and social relationships (He 1995, 255-61). As 

a result, judges would like to drive a light carriage on a familiar road, only could reach their adjudications 

in bias. The state law has a whole set of abstract knowledge system in which the meaning of private 

property is clearly defined that an evidence is needed as it met a concrete case to verify some property 

belonged to him. Once it couldn’t be testified, the bias of a judge would be emerged. 

Conclusion 

Customarily, belongings of a private property is often seen as a clear event at lest in a village community, 

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especially on that of dowry which has always been ritually displayed in the community. When a man 

prepares his marriage, he is often needed to construct a new house and purchase some new furniture. He 

will prepare his wedding after the house has been finished. On the last day of the wedding day, the family 

on the female side will send the dowries to the bridegroom’s village. Those dowries will be moved from 

a tractor into the bridal bedroom which, in generally, will be done by the people of the bride’s family. 

All of these activities could be observed and witnessed by the village people. It is no necessary to write 

down a property list that on which whose property is declared. In other words, a written contract of dowry 

belongings is obviously unnecessary for the village people. 

Once a pair of couples couldn’t live together anymore, the dowry as property of a wife must be taken 

away and anyone else wouldn’t disagree on it. This kind of property right agreed in customary ideas and 

functioned in a rural community has never been effective after the same case has been appealed to a local 

court where evidence is necessary. There would be no trouble if both sides abided by the custom. Once 

the custom, however, has been offended by someone of them, belongings of a property would be often in 

confusing. Divorce cases, therefore, are the trouble one from a court’s point of view that for them is not 

easy to reach a fair adjudication. They had finally avoided the problem of property distribution or insisted 

on the administrative procedure of “the testified evidence” which, in some occasions, can be abused by a 

judge as a power resource through which some persons being in a near relation with the judge could be 

benefited. 

We can clearly see conflicts between the court which is a representative of the state law and the custom 

which is functioned in a popular society. As a judge reached his own adjudication, he would like to follow 

a principle that the legal fact is asked to present as clearer and simpler as possible. But the property 

relationship in a popular society is often various that which couldn’t be reduced to a clear legal fact 

without confusing. It is also seen as a best example of proverb that “Even a clear officer (qingguan) 

couldn’t resolve household affairs” (qingguan nanduan jiawushi). 

References 

Dong, Jiaqiu, 1995, A Study on History of Marriage in Ancient China. (Zhong Guo Gu Dai Hun Yin Shi 

Yan Jiu.) Guangzhou: Guangdong People’s Publishing. 

Fei, Xiaotong, 1981, Institutions of Reproduction. Tianjin: Tianjin People’s Publishing. 

Freedman, Maurice, 1966, Chinese Lineage and Society: Fukien and Kwangtung. London: Athlone Press. 

He, Weifang, 1995, “A social justice through the judicature—a perspective on the present situation of 

the Chinese judges.” (tongguo sifa shixian shehui zhengyi) In Yong Xia, ed., Towards the Age of 

Rights—A Study of Civil Rights Development in China(zouxiang quanli de shidai). pp. 209-84. 

300

Beijing: The University Press of Chinese Politics and Law. 

Leach, E. R, 1954, Political Systems of Highland Burma: A Study of Kachin Social Structure. London: 

The Athlone Press. 

Radcliffe-Brown, A. R., 1926, “Father, Mother, and Child” Man Nos. 103, pp. 159-161. 

Tai, Yen-hui, 1978, “Divorce in traditional Chinese Law,” in In David C. Buxbaum, ed., Chinese Family 

Law and Social Change in Historical and Comparative Perspective. pp. 75-108, Seattle and London: 

University of Washington Press. 

Tao, Xisheng, 1934, Marriage and Lineage. (Hun Yin Yu Jia Zu). Shanghai: Commerical Press. 

Tao, Yi, and Ming, Xin, 1994, A Institutional History of Chinese Marriage and Family. (Zhong Guo Hun 

Yin Jia Ting Zhi Du Shi). Beijing: The East Publisher. 

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Difficult Dialogues: Perpetrators, Victims, Power, and the Legacies 

of Mass Violence 

Henry C. Theriault 

Worcester State University 

Introduction 

The foundation of my previous work on perpetrator-victim relations in the long-term aftermath of 

genocide has been the assertion that any process addressing a case of mass violence that focuses on 

improved contemporary relations between the two parties is doomed to fail if it does not address (1) 

the actual impact on the victim group, in material, social, familial, and other dimensions and (2) the 

sharp power imbalance between perpetrator group and victim survivor group that results from the broad 

destructiveness of genocide for the victim group and the economic, political, demographic, social, identity, 

and other benefits for the perpetrator group. 1 This is not to say that tensions will not be reduced, but they 

will be reduced in ways that extend and even intensify the harms to the victim group and the benefits to 

the perpetrator group. 

My approach has been to examine typical conflict resolution models based on perpetrator-victim dialogue 

as they have been applied to particular cases, especially the 1915 Armenian Genocide, 2 and to show 

why these do not resolve the legacy of the case of mass violence, when ‘resolution’ is defined in a way 

that takes account of the needs and rights of the victims in a fair way. Based on this, I have argued that 

reparations are necessary to resolve the legacy of mass violence in a proper manner. 

My critique of the usual approaches to perpetrator-victim dialogue raises the question of what features 

1 Theriault, Henry C., “From Unfair to Shared Burden: The Armenian Genocide’s Outstanding Damage and the Complexi- 

Theriault, Henry C., “From Unfair to Shared Burden: The Armenian Genocide’s Outstanding Damage and the Complexities 

of Repair,” The Armenian Review (forthcoming). 

2 The Armenian Genocide should be understood as part of a broader Ottoman Turkish Genocide of Greeks, Assyrians, and 

Armenians from 1914 into the 1920s. The focus of my work on dialogue and reparations has been on the Armenian aspect 

of this overarching genocidal process, so I refer here to the Armenian Genocide specifically. 

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dialogue must have to be a productive part of a resolution of the legacy of a case of mass violence, but 

I have not taken up this issue in previous work. The question is perhaps crucial, as dialogue might be a 

necessary if not sufficient element of any resolution, because any resolution imposed without genuine 

perpetrator group participation and acceptance is bound to be unstable. 

Conflict Resolution’s Failure to Resolve 

I will begin by explaining the general argument I have used to challenge standard conflict resolution 

models as they have been applied to past mass violence and oppression. 3 These models typically focus on 

changing attitudes among both perpetrators and victims in order to eliminate or minimize the tensions that 

authors employing the model hold result from these attitudes. Though this is not necessarily stated, the 

attitudes are considered conceptual or discursive (linguistic) in the sense not merely that they are expressed 

in mental processes or words but that this is their essential nature. Such models thus hold that, despite the 

material reality of past violence or oppression, subsequent attitudes and expressions are separable from 

the prior violence or oppression and can be treated in isolation. On this view, the reason there are tensions 

between former victims and perpetrators is not because of the material process of violence and oppression, 

but because both groups maintain and express attitudes that negatively characterize the other group. 

The solution offered by such models is to change those attitudes and expressions so that they no longer 

cause tensions. Sometimes the model calls for beginning with changes to the expressions to try to impact 

underlying attitudes, sometimes with the attitudes as the apparent ‘root causes.’ Either way, the process is 

supposed to lead to a reduction or elimination of tensions and a ‘reconciliation’ of former perpetrators and 

victims. 

My critique is this. Changes at the discursive or conceptual level leave intact what is on the material level. 

But genocide, slavery, mass rape, and other mass violence or oppression are quite material. That is not to 

say that they do not have conceptual or discursive elements that are essential to the processes of violence 

or oppression. Certainly they do, as ideological frameworks, propagandistic manipulation, and so forth 

play significant roles in many if not all cases. But the effects of discourse and concept are real deaths, 

rapes, torture, expropriations of labor and property, and destruction of familial and community relations. 

It is through the operation of concrete force and power that attitudes and statements have the real effects 

they do. They do not emerge ex nihilo (out of nothing), but themselves are produced through concrete 

social and political forces and interactions. And, these material impacts themselves structure the long-term 

subsequent relationship of perpetrator and victim groups. 

3 Theriault, op. cit. 

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An exclusive focus only on the conceptual and discursive level does not alter significantly the material 

level. In other words, changing attitudes and eliciting positive statements by each group about the other 

does not alter the effects of the violence or oppression, such as the impoverishment of the victims and 

enrichment of the perpetrators; the demographic, political, and identity frailty of victims and the security 

of perpetrators; the level of trauma suffered by victim group members even of later generations; etc. It 

does not alter the relationship of domination that is the outcome of mass violence or long-term oppression. 

For instance, it is common to view the end of the direct killing phase of genocide as the end or suspension 

of the perpetrator-victim group relationship, as a cutoff that ends the material impact of perpetrators on 

victims. But what genocide does, quite the contrary, is put into effect a hyper-domination relation. If most 

genocide takes place in a context in which the perpetrator group had a pre-existing dominance over the 

victim group, the genocide is not a rupture that breaks the domination relation but rather its maximization 

or totalization. And, if nothing is done to address that extreme dominance relation, it remains intact far 

into the future. In fact, over time, the dominance increases, as the power of the perpetrator group over the 

victims becomes the basis for yet further increases in power, with the resulting greater power imbalance 

serving as the basis for another increase, and so on perpetually if no balancing forces are applied or come 

into play. 4 

What is more, conceptual and discursive adjustments do not alter the underlying commitments of 

perpetrator group members. Even if self-perceived attitudes might change, if a perpetrator group is not 

willing to offer meaningful reparations to the victim group, then this betrays a willingness to benefit 

from mass violence or oppression and, in essence, anything ranging from at the very least a culpable 

if thoughtless complicity in the violence or oppression to tacit agreement with the view that the victim 

group is in fact a fit target of violence or oppression. While members of the perpetrator group might 

espouse a view opposed to violence against or oppression of members of the victim group and genuinely 

feel that they are opposed to it, this feeling can coexist with a mental framework in which such a feeling 

is sufficient to resolve the case of mass violence or oppression, so the perpetrator group has no further 

obligation to the victims. It can coexist with a normalized, implicitly-held sense of hierarchy in which the 

‘neutral’ position is one in which the perpetrator group dominates the victim group, even though to most 

perpetrator group members, even progressives, this dominance relation appears to be an equal relationship. 

Either or both frameworks in turn can cause perpetrator group members to reject justice claims by victim 

group members for reparations – and even to condemn victim group members as self-interested, unfair, or 

4 These forces, it should be pointed out, might not be intended to address the past violence or oppression; but could be, for 

instance, an economic crisis in the perpetrator society, a crisis that is quite independent of any relationship with the victims 

or history of violence or oppression, yet which decreases the relative power of the perpetrator group vis-à-vis the victim 

group. 

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aggressive when they advocate for such things 5 – thus creating an ethical hierarchy or dominance relation 

of some or most members of the perpetrator group over some or many members of the victim group that 

parallels the concrete dominance relation that was produced or exacerbated by the original mass violence 

or oppression. In all of this, the positive attitude on the surface masks a deeper commitment to hierarchy 

over victims, a commitment of which perpetrators themselves might not be aware. 

I have pointed out the two things that this approach misses. First, material impacts persist through time 

and actually become in time causal forces themselves, unless or until they are mitigated directly. Thus, 

the impoverishment of victims is not only a result of, say, slavery, but even long after slavery has ended 

persists and causes further problems for the victims, keeping them in a lower political position, say, 

than the progeny of the master group. Second, the result of any mass violence or oppression is a deep 

dominance relation – differential power and status – that persists even if a situation of formal equality is 

established in the aftermath. 

A typical conflict resolution model should never be applied to a case of asymmetrical violence or 

oppression. A conflict resolution model assumes a mutual conflict that is driven more or less equally by 

both sides, which are locked in a more or less balanced antagonism. When this kind of model is applied to 

a situation of power asymmetry, it actually obscures the real structure of the (dominance) relationship. 

It should be noted that both insights are based on intellectual lineages in the humanities. Various rejections 

of idealism or a privilege of the mental over the material have emerged in the history of philosophy, 

particularly Western philosophy, culminating perhaps in Marx’s critique of what he viewed as Hegel’s 

‘one-sided’ privileging of the abstract over the concrete. 6 While Marx’s understanding of oppression 

is embedded in economic and sociological work, it was a philosophical insight into the relationship of 

the mental and material that grounded this work. Similarly, theorizations of power differentials hidden 

within apparently egalitarian or neutral structures reach high points with J. S. Mill, 7 Franz Fanon, 8 and 

Michel Foucault. 9 Mill identified the potential for domination within democratic structures, while Fanon 

presciently analyzed colonial domination to identify ways in which it would persist in the post-colonial era 

5 Ibid. 

6 See Karl Marx, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,” trans. Martin Milligan, in The Marx-Engels Reader, 

2 nd ed., ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1978), 107-108, 110-25; and Marx, “The German 

Ideology,” trans. and ed. P. Ryazanskaya, in The Marx-Engels Reader, 2 nd ed., ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W. W. 

Norton & Company, 1978), p. 175. 

7 John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, ed. Elizabeth Rapaport (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1978). 

8 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove, 1991). 

9 Michel Foucault, “Right of Death and Power over Life,” in The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley, 

vol. 1 of The History of Sexuality (New York: Vintage, 1990), pp. 135-59. 

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and Foucault revolutionized the concept of power as a structuring framework rather than an institutional 

or individual possession. Also from a philosophical perspective, Marilyn Frye developed a definition 

of and analysis of oppression that extends Foucault’s critique of hidden power structures and adds key 

insights into the way in which structural power functions in apparently innocuous direct interactions 

and relations between members of the dominant and dominated group. 10 Finally, Edward Said analyzed 

the role of misrepresentations of ‘orientals’ in modern imperialism and charted out the ways in which 

misrepresentations reinforced and supported imperialism as well as reflecting an imperial order in the 

colonial and post-colonial eras. 11 

Of a number of responses to arguments for reparations in cases of mass violence or oppression, one 

is particularly relevant here. The objection is often made that even advocacy, let alone attainment, of 

reparations will actually be counter-productive and foster increased rather than decreased tensions 

between the victim and perpetrator groups. Particularly in cases of long-past violence or oppression 

(say, Native American genocides or slavery, respectively, in the United States), later generations in the 

perpetrator group – many of whose own historical origins mean that their families were not even in the 

United States when the violence or oppression was perpetrated – feel that any imposition of responsibility 

on them is unfair. While it is beyond the scope of this paper to discuss in full this feature of the objection 

or respond to the complex issues it raises, suffice it to say that ‘responsibility’ is different from ‘blame.’ 

The latter depends on actually having participated in violence or oppression, while the former can derive 

from a much less direct connection to past events, including benefiting materially, socially, politically, etc., 

from that violence (for instance, financial benefits from an economy whose wealth is traced in part to slave 

labor in the past, use of land depopulated through genocide, etc.), denial that the past harms were done 

despite presentation of adequate evidence, or even voluntary celebration of the identity of the perpetrator 

group. 12 In this sense, ‘responsibility’ does not mean responsibility for the actual long-past harm in the 

sense of blame, but rather responsibility to address the impacts of that past harm in the present and future. 

10 Marilyn Frye, “Oppression,” in 

Marilyn Frye, “Oppression,” in The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory (Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 

1983), pp. 1-16, and Frye, “Sexism,” in The Politics of Reality, pp. 17-40. 

11 Edward W. Said, 

Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979). 

12 See Karen Kovach, “Genocide and the Moral Agency of Ethnic Groups,” in 

See Karen Kovach, “Genocide and the Moral Agency of Ethnic Groups,” in Genocide’s Aftermath: Responsibility and 

Repair, ed. Claudia Card and Armen T. Marsoobian (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007), pp. 50-70; Armen T. Marsoobian, 

“Acknowledging Intergenerational Moral Responsibility in the Aftermath of Genocide,” Genocide Studies and Prevention 

4, no. 2 (2009): pp. 211-20; and Theriault et al., “Resolution With Justice: Reparations for the Armenian Genocide – 

The Report of the Armenian Genocide Reparations Study Group,” draft, September 2012, p. 50, pp. 55-56, pp. 65-75. 

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Justice and Peace 

Despite the strength of arguments for responsibility, the potential backlash by perpetrator group members 

is treated as a neutral factor, rather than something for which members of the perpetrator group have 

moral responsibility. As a result, the usual response in political as well as academic circles is to determine 

what will minimize the tension, rather than to assign responsibility for it. This generally leads to the view 

that ‘justice’ and ‘reconciliation’ (‘peace’) are in tension and any increase in justice – for instance, by 

compensating the victim group for expropriated property – results in an increased tension, so the only 

way to achieve a reduction in tensions toward ‘reconciliation’ is to set aside entirely or in part the dictates 

of justice. For a recent case of mass violence or recently ended form of oppression (say, Apartheid), 

this could mean setting aside prosecution of key perpetrators; for a long-past case of mass violence or 

oppression, this could mean blocking reparations. 

In this context, it is essential to define the term ‘justice.’ There are many available concepts of justice 

discussed in reference to mass violence and oppression. Because this paper concerns long-past cases of 

mass violence and oppression, criminal justice is not a necessary component. In many cases – genocide 

of Native North Americans, United States slavery, the Tasmanian Genocide, the Herero Genocide, 

the Armenian Genocide, etc. – the major perpetrators most responsible are no longer living and thus 

cannot be punished. Even where some major perpetrators might be living, as in the case of the Comfort 

Women system, Holocaust, Cambodia Genocide, East Timor Genocide, Guatemala Genocide, Jim Crow 

discrimination in the United States, United States’ war crimes in Vietnam, Apartheid in South Africa, etc. 

– criminal prosecutions in themselves are inadequate for addressing the harms done to individual victims 

and the victim groups more broadly. Thus, criminal prosecutions might be part of an overall justice 

process, but will not be sufficient to meet the requirements of justice. 

Similarly, the concept ‘healing’ in the sense of removing the pain of past violence or past or present 

oppression is not possible even across multiple generations, because the effects of the harms continue 

permanently, but this does not mean that the psychological and material situations of victim groups cannot 

be improved. This does not occur naturally with the mere passage of time, which on the contrary tends 

to exacerbate the effects of mass violence or oppression (genocide victim groups lose their identity, fade 

demographically, etc.; denied economic reparations, formerly enslaved groups become poorer over time; 

and so on). 

For past mass violence and oppression, three elements appear necessary. First, the resolution must respect 

the rights of the victims. For instance, victims who were forced from land or lost land through illegitimate 

actions by the perpetrators (passage of unfair laws, fraud that was allowed by the government, etc.) should 

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have their land restored to them. This works symbolically as well. For instance, a recent court ruling in 

Argentina has recognized what has been labeled a ‘right to truth’ for members of victim groups. 13 Second, 

the resolution should be fair, in the sense that perpetrators should not be allowed to benefit from past mass 

violence or oppression. A member of the perpetrator group in possession of a business expropriated from a 

member of the victim group should be required to restore that business to the member of the victim group 

or, if that person is no longer living, a family member or common institution of the victim group. This also 

works symbolically: the correct history should be disseminated by the perpetrator group to ensure that the 

truth will be recognized and the harm done to the victim group understood – as in the case of the Comfort 

Women, Japanese school textbooks should include a description of this atrocity that is historically accurate 

and makes clear its ethical and legal unacceptability. 

Third, the needs of the victims arising out of their victimization must be addressed. The harms were 

done by the perpetrator group and the perpetrator group has a responsibility for addressing what victim 

group members need that they would not need if they had not been victimized. For instance, elderly 

Comfort Women experiencing physical suffering from the brutality, enforced drug addiction, harmful 

medical ‘treatment,’ and so forth often need extensive medical care. The Japanese government should 

be responsible for meeting the needs of victims that arise directly from their victimizations. This applies 

psychologically (symbolically) as well. In the same example, many Comfort Women have faced denial 

by the Japanese government and those supporting it of the facts of what was done to them, have been 

characterized as voluntary prostitutes by deniers, have been stigmatized in their own societies, and so 

forth. For vindication, the Japanese government should officially recognize and apologize for the full 

range of harms done to the Comfort Women. It should make clear that Japan and not the Comfort Women 

was responsible for what happened and that what happened was categorically wrong. Indeed, Japan bears 

responsibility for educating its own citizens as well as those in other countries about mass sexual violence 

and supporting a change in attitudes toward women and girls who are victimized by it. 

Kibibi Tyehimba has argued that any resolution that sets aside the reparative process called for by the 

dictates of justice actually leaves intact the prejudicial attitudes that the resolution is supposed to address, 

simply hiding them from view. As soon as victim group members advocate for their rights, the same 

attitudes and forces that resulted in harms in the past will be triggered in the perpetrator population. 14 

Indeed, I would extend this point to assert that setting aside justice concerns because of fear of a backlash 

13 “Turkey Slams Argentine Court Ruling on Genocide,” 

“Turkey Slams Argentine Court Ruling on Genocide,” Asbarez, 4 April 2011, http://asbarez.com/94660/94660/ (accessed 

October 15, 2012). 

14 Kibibi Tyehimba, “ 

Kibibi Tyehimba, “Reparations as Justice” (remarks presented at the “Armenians and the Left” symposium, City University 

of New York Graduate Center, April 2006). 

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from the perpetrator group actually reinforces the power of the perpetrator group over the victim group 

and extends the original harm. After all, it turns a refusal to accept responsibility by perpetrator group 

members into a veto over those advocating for victim group rights and needs. 

This suggests a deeper problem with the very concept of ‘resolution’ that is often employed in discussions 

of past violence or oppression. The goal of conflict resolution strategies is self-evidently the reduction of 

conflict, especially where that conflict is manifested as physical violence, discrimination, etc. Most conflict 

resolution approaches assume that a reduction in rhetorically-expressed animosity or concrete behaviors 

and actions harming the other group is the goal of the conflict resolution process. They typically focus on 

rhetoric and attitudes. But changed rhetoric and attitudes can obscure persistence of the same harms of 

past violence or oppression and the domination/subjugation produced or exacerbated by it. These surface 

changes can act as a cover, in fact, for increasing domination and harm. This is true of perpetrator rhetoric, 

for instance, that expressed regret over the past while the perpetrator group’s court system rejects any and 

all claims for compensation for past injuries. It is also true in the reverse sense for victim group members. 

After a long period of struggle against denial of the truth of what their group experienced (Armenian 

Genocide denial and denial of the Comfort Women atrocity are obvious examples), an accommodation 

with members of the perpetrator group that can be labeled a ‘resolution’ might be embraced by weary 

victim group members or might be accepted as the best that can be hoped for in the face of perpetrator 

group intransigence. In such a context, the expectations of victim group members have already been 

reduced due to the force and manipulation inherent in the hierarchy in which they engage the perpetrator 

group. At the very least, when the situation of domination by the perpetrator group has been normalized 

and victim group members have come to expect denigration, denial, ill-treatment, lack of basic rights, 

and so on, a reduction in any of that might appear to be positive progress and to warrant the satisfaction, 

contentment, or something similar on the part of victim group members. In sum, the subjective feeling 

that the relationship with perpetrator group members has improved does not indicate that the resolution of 

past violence or oppression is accomplished by what has produced the subjective feeling. That subjective 

feeling might coexist with preserved or heightened domination of and loss by the victim group. The 

‘resolution’ in this case will guarantee power of the perpetrator group and the ineffectiveness of the victim 

group. 

A resolution must not simply result in lowered tensions but must transform the context of those tensions 

as well. For instance, it should mitigate the power imbalance of the perpetrator and victim groups by 

requiring that the perpetrator group give up material advantages derived from the past violence or 

oppression. The subjective satisfaction of victim group members might, of course, reflect genuine strides 

toward a resolution, but all positive changes in the subjective experience of victim-perpetrator relations 

should be tested against the context in which they occur. If domination and injustice are still persistent 

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despite the subjective view that relations are positive, it is the material reality that determines when an 

actual resolution has been achieved. 

One approach to prevent the minimizing of justice in favor of a reduction of tensions between the victim 

and perpetrator groups has been to impose a minimum threshold on any resolution process between 

victims and perpetrators, such that justice requirements cannot be lowered below a certain level even if 

not doing so will preserve some level of tension between the victims and perpetrators. Amy Gutman and 

Dennis Thompson, for instance, have applied this approach to truth commissions that can include such 

things as the offering of prosecutorial amnesty. 15 The problem, however, is that this line of argument still 

accepts that the requirements of justice and of improvement in the perpetrator-victim relationship are in 

tension. Is this necessarily the case? And, if it is, is any stable and just resolution of a past case of mass 

violence or oppression possible? 

The answers to these questions might be seen to depend on whether the rehabilitation of perpetrator 

groups is possible. If it is, then it would appear that some process might at once allow justice to be given 

to the victim group while tensions would not be increased but instead reduced, as perpetrator group 

members exorcise from their political, military, cultural, social, and/or religious institutions, practices, and 

structures the attitudes, behaviors, hierarchies, and so forth put into place through mass violence against 

or oppression of the victim group or embedded features that drove the past mass violence or oppression 

and the entrenchment of which was reinforced by the fact that there was no accountability for that mass 

violence or oppression. 

It is unlikely that an externally-imposed resolution will contribute to the rehabilitation of the perpetrator 

group. As Hegel explained, the imposition of an external order on a given society is bound to fail; only 

an order that develops from the society itself will properly fit it. 16 Thus, not only is an externally-imposed 

resolution of a case of mass violence or oppression likely to provoke a backlash from the perpetrator 

group, but such a resolution might not actually fit the perpetrator group correctly. That is, it might not 

address the issues in the perpetrator group that need to be addressed. Only a process of internal change 

that is accepted by the perpetrator group can move the perpetrator group away from prejudice against and 

dominational tendencies toward the victim group. 

Jermaine McCalpin has emphasized this point in his contribution to the Armenian Genocide Reparations 

15 Amy Gutman and Dennis Thompson, “The Moral Foundations of Truth Commissions,” in Truth v. Justice: The Morality 

of Truth Commissions, ed. Robert I. Rotberg and Dennis Thompson (Princeton: Princeton, 2000), pp. 22-44. 

16 G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (New York: Oxford, 1967), pp. 178-79. 

310

Study Group’s forthcoming report. 17 According to him, the way to achieve this kind of perpetrator 

group transformation is through a ‘truth and reparations commission.’ He explains the importance of 

participation of members of the perpetrator group on the commission, which should consist of perpetrator 

group members, victim group members, and third-party members to ensure balance. Given the fact that 

any resolution of the Armenian Genocide must take place in the context of an aggressive, well-funded 

official governmental denial campaign, McCalpin argues that, unlike the previous Turkish-Armenian 

Reconciliation Commission, this new commission should take as its beginning point that the Armenian 

Genocide occurred and have as its charge determining what the appropriate response by the perpetrator 

group today should be. 

While this is a legitimate stipulation for the commission and thus a necessary condition that must be met 

if it is to have the salutary effects it is intended to, the question remains open as to how the perpetrator 

group will be moved to engage in such a process. It would seem that, if the process is entirely voluntary 

and the perpetrator group enters into it, it will already have been rehabilitated to the point where it accepts 

responsibility for the past and is committed to discharging its responsibility, while if it has not already 

been rehabilitated, it will not enter into a ‘truth and reparation’ process to begin with. It would seem that 

we are back to the problem of the mutual exclusiveness of justice and the reduction of tensions. 

In previous work, I have argued that the giving of reparations will demonstrate that a perpetrator group 

has undergone a transformation. Reparations are the result of a transformation, but I did not theorize the 

method of transformation. 

The problem is not solved by a perpetrator group-victim group dialogue approach that is supposed to 

foster an evolution of thinking by participants. Such a dialogue process is in essence a negotiation between 

unequal parties. Unless the power imbalance is countered, any negotiative process will tend to preserve 

that power imbalance. In the dialogue process, victim group members are in the position of attempting 

to change the status quo, which is the normalization of the results of mass violence and oppression. A 

just result typically requires dramatic changes. The perpetrator group is in the position of accepting or 

rejecting all requests or demands of the victim group. Thus, the very process of dialogue in the post-mass 

violence or post-oppression context gives an advantage to the perpetrator group, an advantage reinforced 

by the dominant position they are in generally. Even if a perpetrator group makes some concessions to the 

victim group that moves the situation a few steps closer to a fair outcome for the victims, it still controls 

how far toward such an outcome the process is allowed to move. In practice, the process never moves 

17 Theriault, “Resolution With Justice,” pp. 77-89. 

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very far. Indeed, the imbalance of power between the two groups can allow the perpetrator group to use 

the dialogue process to extend its advantages and benefits, so that a dialogue process that is supposed to 

produce a better situation in effect extends the original harm by perpetrators to the victim group. 18 Thus, 

for a dialogue process to succeed, it would seem to have to start with a rehabilitated perpetrator group, but 

the point of a dialogue process is that it is supposed to bring about perpetrator (as well as victim) group 

transformation starting from a state of entrenched opposition between the groups. 

The Path Forward 

The putative opposition between justice and stable resolution discussed above can be regarded as turning 

on the external-internal dichotomy. In a context in which the post-mass violence or post-oppression 

situation is taken as the natural or neutral status quo at least from the perpetrator perspective, any 

change in that status quo requires external force or coercion. But, a stable outcome is only possible if the 

perpetrator group members in general voluntarily accept the outcome, and this is typically possible only if 

the perpetrator group has a full role in the deliberation or process leading to that outcome; since the post- 

violence or post-oppression status quo is taken as neutral, however, the perpetrator group is unlikely to (in 

practice, virtually never does) accept substantive change to the status quo under such circumstances. It is 

not just that the process cannot be externally-driven if it is to succeed, but any internal process will tend 

toward a very different outcome from any external process. Thus, an internal process is highly unlikely to 

produce – and in practice would seem never to produce – a just outcome. Is there any way forward? 

Despite Hegel’s view that only an internally-driven, organically-developed process can transform a given 

society, his predecessor Rousseau recognized the challenge of a purely immanent construction of ethical, 

political, and legal structures and attitudes. For Rousseau, the process of ethical, political, and legal 

development could not come out of nothing: there needed to be some kind of originary force to begin it. 

Rousseau developed the notion of an external “law-giver” who would lay down the basic social contract 

to form a political unit. 19 Martin Thom suggests the possibility that Rousseau did not have in mind a 

particular individual as the law-giver, but used the concept as a sort of short-hand for social groups. 20 

Either way, the essence of the concept is that an external originary force is required to organize a society 

because the internal tools are not sufficient. 

This notion can be extended and applied to the question of perpetrator-victim group relations and 

18 Theriault, From Unfair to Shared Burden. 

19 Thom, Martin, 

Thom, Martin, Republics, Nations and Tribes (New York: Verso, 1995), pp. 69-72. 

20 Ibid., p. 70. 

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esolutions. Various forms of external pressure have been attempted to effect change in perpetrator-victim 

relations for long-past mass violence or oppression. These include the passage by other governments 

(usually at the national level, but sometimes from international organizations or of sub-national governing 

bodies) of resolutions calling for recognition and atonement by the perpetrator government. Typically 

outside pressure has been viewed as a hindrance for intergroup conciliation, because of the backlash that 

often comes from the perpetrator group. 21 

In addition to the problem of what ‘conciliation’ should mean in such a context, as discussed above, there 

is another issue. The backlash concern treats all perpetrator group members alike and ignores the tensions 

and complexities within it. The result is a situation in which any proposed resolution must satisfy the most 

extreme members of the perpetrator group to achieve a genuine reduction or elimination of perpetrator- 

victim tensions. Dialogue processes taking this as their goal therefore often focus on these most extreme 

members of the perpetrator group and ignore other more moderate and even highly progressive members. 

The extreme members are in effect given veto power over any attempt at progress in intergroup relations. 

They are the least likely to change their views and so the effort to help them transition to more positive 

attitudes is usually futile. Yet, by their refusal to overcome their prejudices and dominating position, they 

stop progress between the perpetrator and victim groups. An excellent example of this is the Turkish- 

Armenian Reconciliation Commission. 22 

While outside pressure might trigger extreme elements of the perpetrator group and alienate more 

moderate members who are not willing to confront their historical responsibilities directly, not challenging 

such people does not fix the problem but merely hides it from view while the attitudes and resistance of 

such perpetrator group members continue to prevent progress. What is more, for those who are resistant 

but at some level committed to progress, this kind of pressure can trigger critical re-evaluation of societal 

attitudes, practices, and institutions and thus progress. Perhaps more importantly, external pressure of 

this sort can provide support to those within the perpetrator group who are pushing for transformative 

rehabilitation away from the violence or oppression of the past, toward an improved situation for the 

victim group and better relations with the perpetrator group. It is important to recognize that perpetrator 

groups are not monolithic, but members exhibit an array of viewpoints and ethical commitments. Those 

pushing for positive change are typically active as resistance during the historical mass violence or 

21 Taner Akam, “Is There Any Solution Other Than a Dialogue” in 

Taner Akam, “Is There Any Solution Other Than a Dialogue” in Dialogue Across an International Divide: Essays Towards 

a Turkish-Armenian Dialogue (Toronto: Zoryan Institute, 2001), pp. 13-14; and David Phillips, Unsilencing the 

Past: Track Two Diplomacy and Turkish-Armenian Reconciliation (New York: Berghahn, 2005), pp. 27-36. 

22 For a comprehensive, though apologetic, history of the Turkish-Armenian Reconciliation Commission that confi rms this 

For a comprehensive, though apologetic, history of the Turkish-Armenian Reconciliation Commission that confirms this 

point, see Phillips. 

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oppression, as ‘righteous gentiles’ who saved Jews from the Holocaust, abolitionist white Americans 

who fought against United States slavery, and so on. And, they exist just as much in the long aftermath of 

violence or oppression. 

Rehabilitation of the perpetrator group does not require altering each person within the group, but on the 

contrary reworking the power dynamics within the group so that those committed to responsible relations 

with the victim group can lead the society toward them. While some within a society in this kind of 

transition will resist such changes, this should not be generalized to all members of that society. External 

pressure is not opposed by the perpetrator group in general, but rather only a segment, while the pressure 

actually supports another segment. The apparent opposition between ‘justice’ and ‘reduction of tensions’ 

thus turns out to be a misunderstanding of the situation based on essentialization of the perpetrator 

group, that is, viewing the perpetrator group as a homogenous identity group in which the attitudes and 

behaviors of all members line up in parallel, rather than as a complex of individuals and subgroups with 

varying attitudes, agendas, and ethical and political commitments. Even more than just being consistent 

with the change progressives in a perpetrator group pursue, external pressure is a support for the internal 

transformation they seek. What begins as external becomes internal. 

The inverse is true for victim groups in typical dialogue or truth commission processes. Given the 

assumption that pursuit of justice by victims group members hinders elimination or reduction of tensions 

with the perpetrator group, those organizing a dialogue or truth commission process typically exclude or 

marginalize those in the victim community who pursue justice claims, that is, those who are perceived as 

more extreme than others in the victim group. This is an imposition of power over the victim group, to the 

point of determining who its legitimate spokespeople are, and reflects an overarching tendency of at least 

some progressive as well as denialist members of the perpetrator group to assert control over the discourse 

on the past violence or oppression in what might be characterized as a normalized imperialist attitude. 23 

Balancing the power of the perpetrator group over the victim group in a dialogue or truth commission 

process starts with giving up this control and inviting various voices from the victim group in without 

interfering in the internal dynamics of the victim group – except to mitigate the effects of prior interference 

practiced during long-term oppression. As suggested above, it also includes breaking the power of 

reactionaries as well as resistant moderates to allow other representatives of the perpetrator group their 

proper role. Internal pressure can also be mounted by those committed to rehabilitation by pushing or 

compelling resistant members of the perpetrator group to comply with the requirements of the process. 

23 Theriault, From Unfair to Shared Burden. 

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For instance, progressive white South Africans could have worked to push Afrikaner ex-President Botha 

to appear before the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission instead of allowing him to 

ignore the subpoena. 24 External moral pressure is very helpful in such circumstances, among other reasons 

because it can affect members of the perpetrator group who are not ideologically committed to domination 

of the victim group. Yet, the process is internally-driven to the extent that the perpetrator group ‘polices’ 

itself and progressives prevent extremists from the perpetrator group from exercising power over victims. 

Another means of balancing perpetrator power is to challenge the tendency prevalent among progressive 

members of perpetrator groups to equate extremist positions within the perpetrator group – for instance, 

denying that a genocide occurred, that enslavement was cruel, etc., or rationalizing the violence or 

oppression by appeal to historical relativism (everyone did similar things in that age) – with strong 

positions in the victim group. Thus, Armenian ‘nationalists’ advocating reparations for the Armenian 

Genocide are equated with Turkish ultra-nationalists denying that the genocide occurred or considering 

it justified. This equation is possible only through the prism of differential power. In reality, in this case, 

while Armenian nationalism is far from perfect, they are generally a response to centuries of pre-Genocide 

oppression and the experience of largely accomplished annihilation. They should be understood as 

attempts to advocate for and defend a victim group the future viability of which a past genocide has made 

uncertain. Concerns about Turkish ultra-nationalism should not be automatically applied to Armenian 

nationalism; that is, Armenian political activists and advocates should not be demonized or punished 

because of the genocidal nature of some extremist Turkish nationalism. 25 

This plays out in other ways as well. There has been a tendency in recent years to misuse the term ‘trauma’ 

to apply to any kind of psychological bad feeling resulting from an external force or event. This has even 

been extended to attribution of trauma to perpetrators of violence or oppression based on their experience 

of victimizing others. While it might be true that perpetrators or oppressors suffer in some sense, this is not 

to be equated or even related to what victims suffer due to unjust harm done to them, and the term ‘trauma’ 

in a technical sense does not apply to what perpetrators experience. 26 Care has to be taken to ensure that 

the term ‘trauma’ is only applied to actual cases of trauma in a clinical sense. 

24 Gilbert A. Lewthwaite, “Nation Seeks Truth from Aging Symbol – South Africa: P. W. Botha Has Answers about Apart- 

Gilbert A. Lewthwaite, “Nation Seeks Truth from Aging Symbol – South Africa: P. W. Botha Has Answers about Apartheid-era 

Atrocities, but He Doesn’t Want to Give Them,” The Baltimore Sun, 8 June 1998, http://articles.baltimoresun. 

com/1998-06-08/news/1998159011_1_apartheid-botha-truth-commission (accessed October 15, 2012). 

25 Theriault, “Reparative Justice and Alleviating the Consequences of Genocide,” in 

Theriault, “Reparative Justice and Alleviating the Consequences of Genocide,” in The Armenian Genocide and International 

Law, ed. Antranig Dakessian (forthcoming). 

26 Theriault, “Against the Grain: Critical Refl ections on the State and Future of Genocide Scholarship,” 

Theriault, “Against the Grain: Critical Reflections on the State and Future of Genocide Scholarship,” Genocide Studies 

and Prevention 7, no. 1 (2012): pp. 131-32. 

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The granting of material and symbolic reparations can also be built into the dialogue or truth commission 

process. With each reparative step, the legitimacy of victim claims and needs becomes more and more 

established for members of the perpetrator group. This supports increasing progress in group relations. 

Conclusion 

This paper has argued that progress in perpetrator-victim group relations depends on structuring a 

dialogue or truth commission process in such a way that the deep disparity in power is balanced. This in 

turn depends on an inclusive approach to both the perpetrator and victim groups, bringing into the process 

participants typically marginalized in it. The question, ‘Who should be listened to?’ is a crucial one in 

this context. Especially important one is external support for those in the perpetrator group who advocate 

rehabilitation. This ensures that the process is an internal one from the perpetrator group perspective. In 

this way, the dictates of justice do not have to be externally enforced, but in fact become consistent with 

the hoped-for conciliation. 

References 

Akam, Taner. “Is There Any Solution Other Than a Dialogue” In Dialogue Across an International 

Divide: Essays Towards a Turkish-Armenian Dialogue. Toronto: Zoryan Institute, 2001. 

Fanon, Franz. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Constance Farrington. New York: Grove, 1991. 

Foucault, Michel. “Right of Death and Power over Life.” In The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. 

Translated by Robert Hurley. Vol. 1 of The History of Sexuality. New York: Vintage, 1990. 

Frye, Marilyn. “Oppression.” In The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory. Freedom, CA: 

Crossing Press, 1983. 

__________. “Sexism.” In The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory. Freedom, CA: Crossing 

Press, 1983. 

Hegel, G. W. F. The Philosophy of Right. Translated by T. M. Knox. New York: Oxford, 1967. 

Kovach, Kovach. “Genocide and the Moral Agency of Ethnic Groups.” In Genocide’s Aftermath: 

Responsibility and Repair. Edited by Claudia Card and Armen T. Marsoobian. Malden, MA: 

Blackwell, 2007. 

Lewthwaite, Gilbert A. “Nation Seeks Truth from Aging Symbol – South Africa: P. W. Botha Has 

Answers about Apartheid-era Atrocities, but He Doesn’t Want to Give Them.” The Baltimore Sun, 8 

June 1998, http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1998-06-08/news/1998159011_1_apartheid-botha-truth- 

commission (accessed October 15, 2012). 

Marsoobian, Armen T. “Acknowledging Intergenerational Moral Responsibility in the Aftermath of 

Genocide.” Genocide Studies and Prevention 4, no. 2, 2009, 211-20. 

316

Marx, Karl. “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.” Translated by Martin Milligan. In The 

Marx-Engels Reader. 2 nd ed. Edited by Robert C. Tucker. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 

1978. 

Marx, Karl. “The German Ideology.” Translated and edited by S. Ryazanskaya. In The Marx-Engels 

Reader. 2 nd ed. Edited by Robert C. Tucker. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1978. 

Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty. Edited by Elizabeth Rapaport. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1978. 

Phillips, David. Unsilencing the Past: Track Two Diplomacy and Turkish-Armenian Reconciliation. New 

York: Berghahn, 2005. 

Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Vintage, 1979. 

Theriault, Henry C. “Against the Grain: Critical Reflections on the State and Future of Genocide 

Scholarship.” Genocide Studies and Prevention 7, no. 1, 2012, 123-44. 

__________. “From Unfair to Shared Burden: The Armenian Genocide’s Outstanding Damage and the 

Complexities of Repair.” The Armenian Review. Forthcoming. 

__________. “Reparative Justice and Alleviating the Consequences of Genocide.” In The Armenian 

Genocide and International Law. Edited by Antranik Dakessian. Forthcoming. 

Theriault, Henry C., Alfred de Zayas, Jermaine O. McCalpin, and Ara Papian. “Resolution With Justice: 

Reparations for the Armenian Genocide – The Report of the Armenian Genocide Reparations Study 

Group,” draft, September 2012. 

Thom, Martin. Republics, Nations and Tribes. New York: Verso, 1995. 

“Turkey Slams Argentine Court Ruling on Genocide.” Asbarez. 4 April 2011. http://asbarez. 

com/94660/94660/ (accessed October 15, 2012). 

Tyehimba, Kibibi. “Reparations as Justice.” Remarks presented at the “Armenians and the Left” 

symposium, City University of New York Graduate Center, April 2006. 

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Healing Practices in the Humanities 

1. Healing Words: Philosophy in the Treatment of Mental Illness 

/ Peter B. Raabe (University of the Fraser Valley) 

2. Instances of Philosophical Counseling and Byzantine Philosophy 

/ Shlomit C. Schuster (Center Sophon) 

3. Healing Practices in the Humanities 

/ Kayama Rika (Rikkyo University) 

4. Healing Practices in the Humanities: A Search in Progress 

/ Jeanette Fourie (Lyndi Fourie Foundation)

Healing Words: Philosophy in the Treatment of Mental Illness 

Peter B. Raabe 

University of the Fraser Valley 

Why do I teach philosophy to students who will become professional psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, 

psychotherapists, clinical psychologists, counsellors, and social workers? 

My counselling practice has advanced far beyond dealing with simple issues such as helping someone 

decide which one of two job-offers to accept. I’m dealing with clients who have been patients of 

psychoanalysts and psychotherapists, people who have been diagnosed with serious mental illnesses that 

have had a significant impact on their lives. 

When I tell others about how I treat these so-called mentally ill people with philosophy I’m always 

met with disbelief. The assumption is that either, I’m lying and I’m probably applying a more medical 

methodology—one that is more psychological, or more scientific than philosophy. Or it is assumed that 

the so-called mentally ill person wasn’t mentally ill at all—they must have been misdiagnosed. 

The first time Samantha came into my office she looked like she had been crying. Sam told me she was in 

her early 40’s and still single. She began her story by saying she lacked meaning in her life. She wanted 

to know what the meaning of life is. That’s why she had come to me, knowing that “philosophers talk 

about that kind of stuff.” She told me she had lost several close friends to cancer over the past year or 

so. She said she had been working at a dead-end job then found herself a better job, only to have to deal 

with dishonest employees who were stealing from the company. After finding and quitting several more 

minimum wage jobs she decided to open a small business with a friend. But the friend fell in love and 

abandoned her by leaving the country with her new boyfriend, leaving Sam with enormous bills to pay 

off all by herself. She said she had been able to deal with all of this and keep smiling until her favourite 

aunt, whom she had been very close to, died unexpectedly. Sam said that her deceased uncle had been 

abusive to her aunt, and had sexually molested Samantha when she was a child. She said when her poor 

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aunt died she was no longer able to be happy. She was struggling with taking a course at university but 

couldn’t see the point of it any longer. Her medical doctor diagnosed her as clinically depressed and put 

her on anti-depressant medication. But the drugs didn’t help and Sam tried to commit suicide not long 

before she came to see me. I asked her what had prevented her from killing herself. She said she felt her 

death would be too hard on the few people who still cared for her. She had voluntarily admitted herself 

into a psychiatric ward, and was put on more medications. The clinical psychiatrist assigned to her case 

pronounced her “too stressed out to get anywhere” and simply gave up trying to help her other than by 

giving her prescription drugs. 

Is it true that philosophy can help someone who has been diagnosed as mentally ill? The answer to this 

question depends on how ‘mental illness’ is defined. Before it can be decided which treatment modality 

is best in dealing with mental illness it’s necessary to establish what is actually meant by the term ‘mental 

illness’. But even before that can be established it’s necessary to first of all determine what exactly is 

meant when there is talk of ‘the mind’. 

1. Mind and Brain 

It is not possible to go into a detailed discussion of the various theories that have been put forward on how 

to define the mind and the brain in this short essay. Suffice it to say that generally, in the mental healthcare 

literature there is great confusion as to whether the mind and the brain are two things or one, and whether 

they are in fact even different ‘things.’ In most of the mental healthcare literature the two terms are used as 

though they were synonymous. For example, throughout his book Philosophy of Pharmacology professor 

of psychiatry Dan J. Stein uses the term “brain-mind” to indicate that they are not separate entities, and 

without ever defining exactly what he means by “mind.” 1 But in his book The Mind and its Discontents 

Grant Gillett gives a very effective definition of what the mind is all about. He writes, 

A mental life is a narrative construct or product of the integrating activity of a concept-using 

subject as a person in relation to others…. Thus, acting and relating are the foundations of the 

psyche rather than merely receiving, assembling, and connecting representations. 2 

What Gillett means is that the words ‘mental’ or ‘mind’ don’t refer to any concrete objects, such as 

neurons or ganglia in the brain. Instead they refer to the person’s ‘narrative’ non-material elements such 

as beliefs, values, and assumptions that we have as individuals and which we share with others. These 

1 Stein, Dan J. Philosophy of Pharmacology. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 

2 Gillett, Grant. The Mind and its Discontents (2 nd ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, p. 138. 

322

propositional mental elements define each person as a unique individual among others. The brain is 

universal to all living creatures, but each creature does its own thinking and therefore has a unique mind of 

its own. The brain is the container; the mind is the content. It is much easier to change your mind than to 

change your brain! Whenever there is talk of a mental illness what is actually being referred to is problems 

in the content that is the mind. 

In philosophical counselling we don’t deal with the so-called medical model of psychopathology: “the 

physical or chemical lesions interfering with the information processing function of biological systems.” 3 

Our work involves the ‘semiotic being’ —the person for whom meaning matters—and the thoughts which 

generate the emotional domain of that human being. The person’s beliefs, values, and assumptions are the 

fertile mental ground from which feelings emerge, and within which problems sometimes develop. For 

example, a person might believe that his wife is being unfaithful. He has based this belief on the fact that 

she has been absent from home on a number of evenings. (The truth is that she has been secretly spending 

money from the household budget to attend a weight-loss group, but is reluctant to tell her husband about 

it). When he asks her where she has been in the evenings, she is evasive and makes up a story he knows 

is not true. The husband now has the justified but false belief that his wife is cheating on him. This can 

create feelings in him of sadness, hopelessness, low self-esteem and so on. His situation has created what 

psychology refers to as ‘cognitive dissonance’— a troubling conflict of beliefs, values, and assumptions. 

False or troublesome beliefs which are not resolved can become so powerful that the suffering individual 

may in time stop enjoying living a ‘normal’ life. This then can lead to the diagnosis of any number of so- 

called mental illnesses, such as depression. 

The second time we met Samantha was worried about the stigma of having been a mental patient. She 

said psychiatry and the pill approach to her problem had not been helpful. She knew that meaning and 

happiness can’t be found in a pill. But she admitted that it had helped her to feel better just having a 

couple of weeks’ rest in that psychiatric hospital bed. She felt frustrated at having to work at a dead 

end job and not being able to get past the feeling of being overwhelmed by sadness and emptiness. She 

also said she was surprised by the fact that I—a philosopher—was talking with her about her ordinary 

everyday problems. She had been expecting me to bring up “grander philosophical issues.” I told her that 

personal problems are always connected with the grander philosophical issues. But it’s difficult, if not 

impossible, to focus on a theoretical discussion of the grander issues when personal problems are causing 

pain. She said that, given all the bad stuff that has happened in her life, she decided that maybe the best 

approach would be to “just accept” things, to just give in. We talked about a lot of negative things that had 

3 Nature and Narrative: an introduction to the new philosophy of psychiatry. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003, 

p. 120. 

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already happened to her in the past, and I tried to have her see that much of it was what others had done 

to her, and was really no fault of her own. She agreed that for most of her life she had been defined by 

others, and that she was expected to be the person whose happiness was often sacrificed for the benefit of 

others. In philosophy this is called a utilitarian approach—where it’s acceptable to sacrifice the happiness 

of one person for the benefit of others. But philosophers know that the theory of utilitarianism only seems 

reasonable when you’re not the one being sacrificed. 

The following week she phoned me, crying, to tell me she wouldn’t be coming to our scheduled session 

the next day. She said she was scared of talking about bad things. I assured her we didn’t have to talk 

about anything she didn’t want to. Philosophical counselling doesn’t require us to walk down any dark 

emotional paths we would rather avoid. She said that while part of her feels that there’s nothing good 

about her, deep down in her heart she believes she’s actually a decent person. I told her that she definitely 

seemed like a good person to me, but that events and other people in her life have led her to doubt herself. 

Then she told me she had decided to reduce her medications, and wondered if this might be what’s causing 

her to feel so sad. I told her that when people reduce their anti-depressant medications the withdrawal 

symptoms can bring on all sorts of strange emotions, and it’s likely that some of what she’s feeling are just 

the drugs not wanting to let go of her. She eventually calmed down and agreed to come to the next day’s 

session. 

Our discussion the next day was about trust. She had been abused by her uncle as a child; in her early 

teens she had been grabbed off the street and sexually molested by a stranger; in high school a teacher 

had made inappropriate advances to her and two other girls. Later her boyfriend of many years became 

drunk, belligerent, and violent with her. The therapist she had trusted suddenly moved away to a foreign 

country without first telling her. Her friend and her favourite aunt died, thereby also abandoning her. She 

said she used to be a very giving person, but couldn’t be that way any more because so many people had 

taken advantage of her. Her father demanded she share the burden of caring for the family. Her mother 

had come to depend on her to be the care taker of her younger siblings, as well as being the strong one 

she could lean on for emotional support. And while she had been doing her best her mother had expected 

better of her. I couldn’t resist asking her, ‘what it means to do better than your best?’ Of course there is 

no answer to this question. Samantha had grown weary of the heavy burden she was carrying. She had 

collapsed under the weight, and was now guilt ridden for no longer being able to continue. Sadness and 

hopelessness seemed to be the only emotions she could find in herself in response to the misery that had 

been her difficult life thus far. 

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2. Mental Illness: Cause and Effect 

A mental illness is not a biological problem with the physical brain. It is a problem with a person’s mental 

narrative: a mistaken belief, a misguided assumption, or confused perception, etc. The mental illness that 

is referred to as depression is the result of problems in reasoning: such as, for example, a man’s justified 

but mistaken belief that his wife is being unfaithful. The cause of the depression is not at all a so-called 

chemical imbalance in the physical brain. That would be a mistaken causal assumption. But it would also 

be a mistaken causal assumption to say that the man’s depression causes him to have feelings of sadness, 

hopelessness, and low self-esteem. 

Depression doesn’t cause anything. The word ‘depression’ is a diagnostic label that always only refers 

to a collection of symptoms, never a cause. Below are two diagrams to illustrate the difference between 

a cause and a collection of symptoms which lead to a diagnosis. The first one shows how the effect — 

influenza — is often mistakenly cited as being the cause of the various symptoms. 

Influenza does not cause a headache, fever, and coughing. A virus causes those symptoms. The symptoms 

in combination are labelled ‘influenza’ or ‘the flu’. Medication can be given to alleviate the symptoms, the 

headache, fever, and coughing. But in order to heal the body when a harmful virus attacks, medication 

must be given which fights the virus itself and not just the symptoms. The second illustration shows how 

the effect — depression — is often mistakenly cited as being the cause of the various symptoms. 

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Depression does not cause sadness, hopelessness, or low self-esteem. Life problems, such as the husband’s 

belief that his wife is cheating on him, cause those symptoms which are then labelled ‘depression’. 

Biologic psychiatry makes two critical errors in defining mental illness. First, it takes a realist attitude to 

mental illness. It assumes that the mind and mental functions are reducible to the operations of the brain. 

It reduces mental illnesses to disordered molecular or cellular structures in the brain. Realist biological 

models of mental function and mental illness locate the pathological qualities of psychological conditions 

in the material properties of brains, not in the symbolic systems or propositional content which constitutes 

the mind. 4 

The second mistake is that biological psychiatry reifies mental illness by defining symptom-based 

diagnoses as ‘quasi-disease’ entities. But a symptom, or even a cluster of symptoms, is not an objective 

natural entity. That would be like saying that a belief (such as that one’s wife is cheating) is a material 

object. 

The ontology of mental illnesses then is founded on two misconceptions: that the mind is the same as 

the brain, and that the diagnosis of a mental illness is identical to the discovery of an organic disease. 

Neither of these perspectives is justified. In North America a mental illness is entered into diagnostic 

manuals and into professional practice, not by empirical biomedical research, but by a majority vote of the 

editorial committee which compiles and publishes the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and 

Statistical Manual of Mental Illness (DSM). 5 

What is the ontological status of a mental illness such as depression when that mental illness is simply a 

label applied to a collection of symptoms? The answer is, it has no material existence in reality at all, no 

ontological status whatsoever. The classification of mental illnesses is the result of what has been called 

“insidious reification” which refers to the conceptual creation of disease entities and treating them as 

though they actually have a substantive existence. 6 The various symptoms in combination — sadness, 

hopelessness, and low self-esteem — are reified and discussed as if this distress were a unified illness or 

disease known as ‘depression.’ 

4 Horowitz, p. 143, 3. 

5 For a detailed discussion of how a collection of symptoms are given the status of a mental illness, see Psychiatric Diagnosis 

and Classification. Mario Maj et al. editors. West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons, 2002. 

6 See a discussion of this issue in the book, Essential Philosophy of Psychiatry by Tim Thornton. Oxford: Oxford University 

Press, 2007, p. 180-181. 

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Medication can be prescribed to alleviate these symptoms, but these pharmaceuticals don’t eliminate 

the cause of depression: the individual’s various life problems that have become difficult to deal with. In 

order to actually ‘heal’ the mind when serious distress arises — that is, in order to alleviate the suffering 

and distress — something must be done to help the sufferer think through and resolve the problematic life 

issues that are the real cause. 

The words ‘mental’ and ‘illness’ make a peculiar combination. It’s odd to speak of ‘mental illness’ as 

some sort of existing entity because the term ‘mental illness’ refers simply to problematic or confused 

thinking. No one would think to use the term ‘thought illness’ or ‘belief illness’. The word ‘illness’ is 

totally inappropriate when it’s associated with thoughts or beliefs. And yet that’s exactly what ‘mental 

illness’ refers to: problematic thoughts and beliefs. That’s why philosophy is so very helpful in dealing 

with mental illnesses: because philosophy is very good at dealing with problematic thoughts and beliefs. 

But what about so-called ‘more serious’ mental illnesses? Surely philosophy isn’t up to the task of helping 

someone with a ‘serious’ mental illness, is it? 

In the next few sessions Samantha and I discussed whether she was at fault for the many terrible things 

that had happened to her in her life. We worked at changing the depression she was experiencing into 

something more like justified anger at those individuals who had treated her so badly or expected too 

much from her. 

In our fifth session Sam mentioned how silly she felt for having asked in our first session if we could talk 

about the meaning of life. I told her people often start their conversations with me like that, and that it’s 

a legitimate question in philosophy. But we both knew that there were more important personal issues to 

deal with first in Sam’s life. So she asked me if suicide is ever justified. This led to a long discussion about 

why people commit suicide. What we found is that there are many reasons. Sam felt in her case it seemed 

like she had been afraid of losing herself. She had felt like she was being shredded. Other people had 

taken pieces of her; they had defined her in many different ways without allowing her to be herself; and 

they had left her feeling empty and undeserving of herself. She found it difficult to put into words—what 

it feels like to lose yourself. But I told her I understood what she was saying: her attempted suicide was 

not her desire to end her life, but her attempt to hang onto the little bit of herself that was still left. For her, 

suicide was a way to save her own life. This discovery by the two of us put her attempted suicide into a 

totally different light, one that allowed her to finally stop feeling guilty for trying to be herself. 

We also discussed her feelings of guilt for spending money on buying some music CD’s. She said she 

felt guilty for not having used the money to care for others. I mentioned that the famous philosopher 

Immanuel Kant argued that it’s not only imperative to care for others but it’s also necessary to care for 

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oneself. We agreed that it just makes logical sense: if you don’t look after yourself, how can you care for 

others? Samantha’s questions about her own religious beliefs surrounding a woman’s caring role in the 

Christian family took us well into those deeper philosophical issues she had wondered about earlier: the 

definition of evil, the nature of sin, and even the nature of God. We also discussed whether it’s ever right 

to stick to your own values when they conflict with those of the rest of the family. 

3. Why I Teach Philosophy to Therapists and Counselors 

The idea that philosophy can be helpful to people in a very practical sense is not a new concept. For 

example, more than two thousand years ago the pre-Socratic philosopher Epicurus characterized 

philosophy as therapy of the soul or mind. He maintained that the arguments made by philosophers are 

just meaningless if they don’t relieve any real human suffering. 7 In 45 BC writing about how people 

should learn to deal with their own mental distress, Cicero wrote in his Tusulanae Disputationes 

There is, I assure you, a medical art for the soul (mind). It is philosophy, whose aid need not be 

sought, as in bodily diseases, from outside of ourselves. We must endeavour with all our resources 

and all our strength to become capable of doctoring ourselves.” 8 

Then around the beginning of the Christian Era Seneca wrote in his letter to Lucilius, 

Shall I tell you what philosophy holds out to humanity Counsel. One person is facing death; 

another is vexed by poverty... All mankind are stretching out their hands to you on every side. 

Lives have been ruined, lives that are on the way to ruin are appealing for some help; it is to you 

(philosophers) that they look for hope and assistance. 9 

In her book titled The Therapy of Desire, Martha Nussbaum examines three major schools of philosophy 

in the early Greek times. She finds that the Epicureans, the Stoics, and the Skeptics were all concerned 

with the practice of “compassionate ‘medical’ philosophy” 10 —that is, philosophy applied to the 

alleviation of human mental suffering. 

7 Text 124. Porphyry “To Marcella.” 31 (221U). In The Epicurus Reader. Brad Inwood and L. P. Gerson trans. (Cambridge: 

Hackett, 1994.) 

8 Quoted in Martha C. Nussbaum. The Therapy of Desire. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP. 1994, p. 14. 

9 Quoted in Hadot, Pierre. Philosophy as a Way of Life. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995. 

10 Ibid., Nussbaum, p. 40. 

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The early psychoanalysts also saw the value of philosophy, although not in its academic form. In his 1942 

introductory address at the Conference for Psychology in Zurich, Switzerland, Carl Jung told his audience, 

I can hardly draw a veil over the fact that we psychotherapists ought really to be philosophers or 

philosophic doctors—or rather we already are so, though we are unwilling to admit it because of 

the glaring contrast between our work and what passes for philosophy in the universities. 11 

Freud 12 references Plato when describing dream work. 13 Psychotherapist Albert Ellis, the originator 

of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT) in the early 1950’s, employs the sort of critical 

and creative thinking strategies found in informal logic courses that are now part of any college or 

university philosophy department’s undergraduate curriculum. 14 Ellis points out that “much of the 

field of psychotherapy always has been and still is admittedly philosophic” and that his own approach 

“stems directly from philosophic positions—particularly the outlooks of Epictetus and the ancient 

stoics, and of the phenomenalists, existentialists, and pragmatists.” 15 Psychoanalysts such as Rollo May 

were routinely using philosophical techniques and ideas as a part of the counselling process as early 

as 1953. 16 May appeals to Descartes, Mill, Kafka, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre as he describes 

his therapeutic method as one in which the client comes to a “consciousness of self-identity.” Erich 

Fromm 17 uses Marx and Hegel as a springboard to an understanding of the human condition, sick 

individuals, and sick societies. In another work he appeals to Aquinas and Spinoza to reinforce his 

perspective on human struggles and human desire. 18 R. D. Laing references Sartre, Heidegger 19 and 

Kierkegaard 20 as he explains how human sorrow is the result of “the creation of a false self” rather than 

living authentically. 

Other contemporary psychiatrists have also argued more recently that continental phenomenology is 

11 Jung, Carl G. (1957) “Psychotherapy and a Philosophy of Life.” In Essays on Contemporary Events. R. F. C. Hull, 

trans. Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press. 1989 ed., p. 45. 

12 Freud, Sigmund. General Introduction to Psychoanalysis. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1975. p. 153. 

13 This information is adapted from the essay “Philosophical Counselling: An Almost Alternative Paradigm” by Sara Waller 

in Philosophy in the Contemporary World. Vol 10, No. 2. 

14 Ellis, Albert. Handbook of Rational Emotive Therapy. Albert Ellis and R. Grier eds. New York: Springer, 1977. 

15 Ellis, Albert. “Philosophy and Rational-Emotive Therapy.” Counseling and Values. Donald Biggs et al, eds. Washington: 

American Personnel and Guidance Association, 1976, p. 49, 50. 

16 May, Rollo. Man’s Search for Himself. New York: Dell Publishing, 1953. 

17 Fromm, Erich. Beyond the Chains of Illusion. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1962. 

18 Fromm, Erich To Have or to Be. New York: Harper and Row, 1976. 

19 Laing, R.D. Self and Others. New York: Viking Penguin, 1990. 

20 Laing, R.D. The Divided Self. New York: Viking Penguin, 1990. 

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essential to psychiatry and ought to be part of any training curriculum. 21 What does all this philosophy do 

for the suffering individual? 

In counselling one of the functions of the philosophical counsellor is giving suffering individuals the 

thinking or reasoning tools they may not already possess that will help them alleviate their distress. This 

is where the process of intentional teaching comes in which goes beyond the immediate problem solving 

effort. Albert Einstein once wisely said that you can’t solve a problem by using the same thinking that got 

you into the problem in the first place. Healing or therapy results when the distressed individual has been 

shown new approaches to resolving mental distress, and been taught new reasoning skills—and learned 

how to use them—to resolve his or her own problems without having to depend on a clinical therapist 

or medical doctor. Today there are a growing number of philosophers willing to work with individuals 

outside of the traditional academic setting. And there are a growing number of students, even at the 

University of the Fraser Valley, who are working towards becoming therapists and counsellors, who are 

studying philosophy and putting it to use in helping others. 

Philosophy as counselling or therapy is based on four foundational premises: 

First, the mind is not the same as the brain. The mind is the contents of the brain, and those contents are 

propositional; they consist of beliefs, values, and assumptions. The mind is not a solid object; it consists 

of narrative constructs or products of “the integrating activity of a concept-using subject as a person in 

relation to others.” 22 

Second, mental problems are not the same as organic brain problems: changing one’s mind is not the same 

as changing one’s brain. 

Third, a person’s beliefs, values, and assumptions can cause mental distress, which in turn can cause a 

diagnosis of so-called mental illnesses. 

And fourth, good philosophical discussions can alleviate and prevent much of this distress. So-called 

mental illnesses and emotional disorders are the result of life’s conflicts and complications, and the 

associated beliefs, values, and assumptions, etc. Good philosophical discussions in therapy are different 

from hypothetical academic discussions. Philosophical counselling deals directly with personal life 

21 Parnas, Josef and Dan Zahavi. “The Role of Phenomenology in Psychiatric Diagnosis and Classifi Classification.” cation.” In Psychiatric 

Diagnosis and Classification. Mario Maj et al, eds. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 2002, p. 138–162. 

22 Gillet, Grant (2009). The Mind and its Discontent. New York: Oxford University Press. 

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problems. Some problems may require changes in the person’s life circumstances. Others require an 

examination, and perhaps an alteration of, the beliefs, values, and assumptions which have led to those 

problems. 

Philosophy can also be helpful to individuals who are not suffering from any specific diagnosable mental 

disorders, and yet are miserable. For example, one client explained to me that he had everything he 

could want—a house, money, a good job, and so on—but he said he was depressed. He felt like his life 

was empty and meaningless. Over the course of just a few sessions we discovered that the many years 

he had spent in the financial world left him feeling like he had accomplished nothing of value with his 

life. In fact he had been so engrossed in his goal of personal enrichment that he had not even considered 

getting married. Now he was feeling well-off but lonely, accomplished but unfulfilled, secure but selfish. 

We decided together that the ‘treatment’ for his so-called depression should be for him to volunteer at a 

local charity serving meals to the poor, and generally being helpful to the homeless and the destitute. This 

worked out very well because his acts of kindness for others eventually led to two good outcomes: his life 

felt much more meaningful to him, and he discovered a soul mate in one of the women volunteers. 

During another session, Samantha told me something very surprising. I have had clients tell me about all 

sorts of diagnoses with which various therapists and clinicians had labelled them. But Sam had received 

a diagnosis from her therapist that I had never encountered before. This expert had told her she believed 

Sam was suffering from demon possession. That was her professional diagnosis: Demon Possession. 

Sam explained how this bizarre diagnosis had caused her a lot of distress and worry. It had also made it 

impossible for her to discuss the meaning of life, or anything else for that matter, with this therapist. She 

had not gone back to this therapist after that. But then she asked me hesitantly if I thought that, perhaps, 

this diagnosis might be accurate. Could her suffering be due to some demon inside her? 

This led us once again into discussion of the nature of reality—a metaphysical question: could reality 

logically contain evil demons that can invade a human body? Could some mental illnesses be caused by 

Satanic spirits? I told Sam that in philosophical counselling we never make diagnoses and certainly not the 

diagnosis of demon possession because there is no logic to it, except in a religious way. It’s not possible to 

make metaphysical sense of a material world inhabited by non-material entities that could interfere with 

the lives of material human beings. 

But what exactly is this mysterious thing called ‘philosophy’ that challenges religious conceptions of 

reality? Simply put, philosophy is examining the reasons we—and others—have for the values we hold as 

good and the beliefs we hold to be true. Such an examination can free us from blindly following tradition, 

slavishly obeying authority figures, or acting only on our feelings. When philosophy is defined in this way 

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it leaves no doubt that it is perfectly suited as treatment for the more common so-called ‘mental disorders’ 

such as depression and mood swings. However philosophy has also been demonstrated to alleviate the 

suffering of those who have been diagnosed with so-called ‘serious’ or ‘clinical’ mental disorders that were 

once considered organic brain diseases such as ‘clinical’ depression, schizophrenia, paranoia, and more. 

Treatment outcome studies have shown that therapies based on philosophical discussions, in clinical 

psychology called ‘talk therapies,’ are the most effective in not only resolving seriously troubling issues, 

but in long-term effect and benefit. 23 Again, a mental disorder is not an organic problem of the material 

brain; it is instead a problem within a person’s mental narrative, within the mind’s propositional content 

which are beliefs, values, and assumptions. So it is no wonder that talk therapies have been found to be as 

effective, and in some cases more effective, than medications—and without the horrible side effects. 24 And 

these talk therapies are all just philosophy under a different, psychologically-sounding name. 

But philosophical counselling is not time travel. If the family the person grew up in was dysfunctional, 

if there was emotional mistreatment of family members, or if there was physical abuse, it’s not possible 

to go back and ‘fix’ that past with counselling. I tell my clients I’m willing to help them achieve any 

goal that is morally permissible, reasonable, and possible. Of course it’s reasonable to want the past to 

be different; but it’s not possible. So how can counselling help when the past is painful? Again, the past 

can’t be changed; it is what it was. But a person’s beliefs about the people and the events of the past 

can be examined and changed if necessary. And a person’s beliefs about who they are, and their level of 

responsibility for past events, can be scrutinized and changed if necessary to be more in tune with who 

they actually are, and wish to be, in the present. 

I’ve had many clients who felt that as children they were somehow responsible for their own mistreatment. 

We examine this belief about themselves and their beliefs about others to see if they are all justified. What 

we often find, of course, is that children mistakenly blame themselves for the terrible wrongdoing of their 

parents and other adults. This belief can remain with them well into adulthood in the form of guilt, shame, 

regret, low self-esteem, and so on. A philosophical examination of the past can bring release from this 

undeserved suffering. 

23 For a discussion of CBT as the best treatment for depression, social phobia (SP), obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), 

For a discussion of CBT as the best treatment for depression, social phobia (SP), obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), 

panic disorder (PD), and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), see Pathological Anxiety: Emotional Processing in 

Etiology and Treatment edited by Barbara Olasov Rothbaum. New York: Guilford Press, 2006, p. 123, 132, 143, 160, 

204, 208, 254; See also Gerald Corey’s Theory and Practice of Counseling and Psychotherapy. 5th ed. Pacific Grove: 

Brooks/Cole Publishing, 1996, p.170. 

24 Frank, Jerome D. and Julia B. Frank. 

Frank, Jerome D. and Julia B. Frank. Persuasion and Healing 3rd ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 1993, 

p. 219. 

332

Sam said her mother and father felt that a family is the only thing that brings meaning. She said they were 

very disappointed in her for not yet being married at her age and not having the children they had been 

looking forward to. She explained again how everyone in her family always expected so much from her. 

She was seen as the strong and capable one, the one who took care of things and looked out for all the 

others. But when her doctor put her on anti-depressants it sent the message to everyone that she was no 

longer the super woman they had been looking up to. Sadly, her admission of her vulnerability did not get 

her the support she was hoping for. Instead there was disappointment for her weakness from her parents, 

and silent condemnation from her siblings. This led to our discussing who defines who we are. Are we 

autonomous beings who define ourselves; are we socially constructed; or are we a combination of both 

She pointed out that she believed that, in order to be a good person, she had to be available to help others 

at all times. But I reminded her that in a previous discussion we had come to agree with philosophers who 

said that to be a good person, to be a moral person, it’s enough that we try not to cause harm to others in 

what we say and do. There is no requirement to constantly benefit others with the things we say or do. 

That can only be expected of saints and super heroes. She said she was very tired of trying to be a super 

hero. 

In several sessions that followed Samantha mentioned that she had never had any real desire to be married. 

She wondered if this was normal. This led to a discussion about what is considered normal in our society 

and why. She felt marriage would demand even more of her than had already been demanded of her in 

the past. She mentioned again how she had felt abandoned by friends and loved ones, and at the same 

time drained by family members who expected her to give more than she was physically, emotionally, 

and spiritually able. She now decided to give up trying to live up to all the expectations of others, and 

wondered what was reasonable to expect of herself. In the next few sessions, spanning a number of weeks, 

Sam came to stop worrying about “falling apart” as she called it, and having to go back into the hospital 

psychiatric ward. She said she was feeling much more in control of her own life because she had come to 

accept the fact that she had the right to make decisions about her own life, to live her life as she saw fit. “Yes, 

it’s good to be there for others,” she said, “but it’s also essential to look after myself.” In philosophy this 

perspective—that each person’s life is what they make of it—is called existentialism. 

I believe I may be the first philosopher to teach a university course in philosophy specifically designed 

to improve the professional skills of future mental healthcare workers: students on the road to 

becoming therapists, counsellors, and social workers. But this doesn’t mean that I’m the only person, 

as a philosopher, to see a problem in how mental illnesses have become almost exclusively defined as 

medical or biological disorders of the material brain. There are an increasing number of psychotherapists 

and counsellors who disagree with the biomedical model of mental illness, and who recognize that 

philosophy ought to be acknowledged as having a rightful place in the practice of mental healthcare. They 

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acknowledge that philosophy can be an effective treatment or therapy for non-biological mental illnesses. 

Professionals in the many fields of mental healthcare have themselves often commented in their writings 

on how much a part of therapy philosophy already is and ought to be. For example: 

“Philosophy is unavoidable, because we always operate from within a context of beliefs, 

presuppositions, and background understandings.... I believe that Freud... was quite wrong when 

he claimed in his Weltanschauung lecture that ‘philosophy has no direct influence on the great 

mass of mankind; it is of interest to only a small number even of the top layer of intellectuals and is 

scarcely intelligible to anyone else.’” 25 

All practitioners in the field of psychotherapy “are already dealing with philosophical questions 

all the time; indeed, no one in our field in practice or theory, can possibly avoid it. The real issue is 

whether a given practitioner is doing so consciously and explicitly or only implicitly (i.e., without 

being aware of it).” 26 

“It is not necessary of course, nor indeed desirable, that every psychiatrist should become a 

philosopher. But if philosophy is to make a substantial contribution to the subject, all psychiatrists 

should have some exposure to philosophical thinking in their training, backed up with the 

opportunity for more detailed study for those with special aptitudes and interests.” 27 

“Psychotherapies use symbolic systems to heal the minds of sufferers and so are rooted in 

philosophical and religious systems of healing.” 28 

“...Philosophy does have tools which, in principle at least, can help psychiatry to achieve better 

understanding of [its own conceptual] problems.” 29 

In the treatment for mental health problems, “What is needed is philosophy as well as science.” 30 

There is also an entire book dedicated to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, counsellors, and social 

25 Hersch, Edwin L. From Philosophy to Psychotherapy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 2003, p. 345. 

26 Ibid., p. 267. Italics in the original. 

27 Fulford, K. W. M., “Mind and Madness: New Directions in Philosophy of Psychiatry.” In Philosophy, Psychology, and 

Psychiatry. Griffiths, Phillips A. editor: Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994, p. 19. 

28 Horwitz, Allan V. Creating Mental Illness. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002, p. 182. 

29 Fulford, K. W. M. Ibid., p. 15. 

30 Ibid., p. 24. 

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workers titled Critical Thinking in Clinical Practice. 31 Its aim is to improve the quality of judgements and 

decisions made by mental health care workers. Its author draws extensively on one of the oldest fields in 

philosophy: informal logic, more commonly referred to as critical thinking. 

Philosophy as it is applied to therapy and counselling is based on three foundational premises: mental 

problems are not the same as brain problems; a person’s beliefs, values, and assumptions can cause so- 

called mental problems; and good philosophical discussions can alleviate and prevent many of these 

problems. But some people argue that psychotherapy is the best method to use when trying to help those 

afflicted with mental illnesses. Interestingly, when you look at the description of some of the foremost 

approaches to psychotherapy you find that they are all already solidly based on philosophy. In the book 

Theory and Practice of Counseling and Psychotherapy Gerald Corey, a professor of counselling and 

licensed psychologist, describes them this way: 

Psychoanalysis is said to have “touched on philosophy, psychology, sociology, art, and 

literature...” 32 Freud and Jung were both thoroughly educated in philosophy. 

“Existential therapy can best be described as a philosophical approach that influences a 

counsellor’s therapeutic practice.” 33 

Person-centered therapy is “a humanistic approach that grew out of the philosophical background 

of the existential tradition.” 34 

Gestalt therapy is “phenomenological as it focuses on the client’s perception of reality. The 

approach is existential in that it is grounded on the here and now and emphasizes that each person 

is responsible for his or her own destiny.” 35 

Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT) “has always been characterized by being highly rational, 

persuasive, interpretative, directive, and philosophical.” 36 

31 Gamberill, Eileen. 2 nd ed. New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, 2005. 

32 Meissner, William W. “The Future Role of Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic-Oriented Therapy.” In The Challenge to 

Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy. Stephan De Schill and Serge Lebovici eds. Londaon: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 

1999, p. 110. 

33 Corey, Gerald. Theory and Practice of Counseling and Psychotherapy.” 5th ed. Pacific Grove: Brooks/Cole Publishing, 

1996, p. 170. Italics in the original. 

34 Ibid., p. 199. 

35 Ibid., p. 224. Italics in the original. 

36 Ibid., p. 318. 

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Modern day Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy (REBT) is said to combine humanistic, 

philosophical, and behavioural therapy. 37 As well as being heavily influenced by the ancient 

philosophy of Stoicism, it owes “a philosophical debt” to a number of other sources that have 

influenced its development such as the philosophical writings of Immanuel Kant, Baruch Spinoza, 

Arthur Schopenhauer, Karl Popper, and Bertrand Russell. 38 

Reality therapy (RT) is concerned with “teaching people more effective ways to deal with the 

world…. The reality therapist functions as a teacher and a model.” 39 

Classical behaviour therapy today goes beyond mere Pavlovian behavioural conditioning and 

deals with emotions and meaning. 40 

Even a particularly psychological approach like the Adlerian therapy “includes identifying and 

exploring mistaken goals and faulty assumptions” “...it pays attention to the individual way in 

which people perceive their world... how the individual believes life to be.” 41 

These are all, undeniably, an application of philosophical discussion and inquiry. Each of these methods 

is deeply indebted to philosophy. None of them resemble anything like a biomedical or pharmaceutical 

approach to brain disorders, yet all of these ‘talk therapies’ are said to be quite successful in treating 

individuals suffering from diagnosed mental illnesses. The reason for the successes of talk therapies lies in 

the fact that they employ philosophical discussions in the treatment of the so-called ‘mental illnesses’ with 

which individuals suffering from mental distress have been diagnosed. 

4. Conclusion 

In her final visit Samantha told me how it upset her when one of her long-time friends told her that she 

would probably continue to suffer from the mental illness of depression for the rest of her life. Sam said 

that she was convinced her friend was just wrong, and that others are wrong when they say depression is 

a disease that can’t be cured. She pointed out that she had stopped feeling depressed several sessions ago, 

and that over the last four months philosophical counselling had led her to see herself in a very different 

37 Ibid., p. 317. 

38 Dryden, Windy. Reasons and Therapeutic Change. London: Whurr, 1991, p. 4. 

39 Ibid., pp. 264, 273. 

40 Ibid., p. 285. 

41 Ibid., p. 139, p. 135. Italics in the original. 

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light. She said she no longer considered herself a victim of the cruelty of others, or as abandoned by 

people who had died, or as a superwoman who must live up to the high expectations of family members. 

She had made the decision to continue her education, and aim for the university degree she had always 

wanted. 

Why do I teach philosophy to students who will become professional psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, 

clinical psychologists, counsellors, social workers? Because the therapeutic and counselling theories 

students are taught in their university psychology and counselling courses focus almost exclusively on 

the methodology: the process of applying this or that approach to a diagnosed collection of symptoms. 

Students learn the procedural ‘how’ of various methods; they learn ‘what’ to say, without ever learning 

the meaningful ‘why’ of the philosophy behind those methods. They learn how to go through the motions 

of asking questions without understanding why some questions are better than others, without knowing 

how to recognize the reasoning problems within the painful narratives presented by their patients and 

clients, and without knowing what issues to focus on in order to form the best questions or resolve ethical 

dilemmas. 

Philosophy in a therapeutic or counselling relationship involves helping the patient or client examine the 

reasons he or she has for the values they hold as good, and the beliefs they hold as true. This will enable 

them to free themselves from blindly following tradition, slavishly obeying the dictates of authority 

figures, or acting only on their feelings. But in order to help the patient or client conduct a beneficial 

examination of his or her beliefs, values, and assumptions the therapist or counsellor must first become 

thoroughly familiar with all the subtle nuances of the practice of a legitimately philosophical inquiry. This 

is what I teach my students. 

I teach them that in my private philosophical counseling practice I apply all the different areas of 

philosophy to my clients’ problems, many of which had previously been diagnosed as mental illnesses: 

• critical thinking: a young woman who is so shy she doesn’t know how to live a normal life. This 

involves examining the reasons why she has such low self-esteem. 

• the philosophy of human nature: the man who wonders how he can make a significant life decision 

where the most profitable choice goes against what he considers to be his true, altruistic, nature. 

• metaphysics: the man who feels that the characters in the books he reads and the stories he writes 

have more reality than he can find in the people around him. It leads him to doubt his own physical 

existence. 

• epistemology: the young woman who is consulting a psychic who claims that her current life 

problems will be alleviated is she comes to know who she was in a previous lifetime. This also raises 

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a number of a metaphysical questions. 

• ethical theories and applied ethics: various individuals who are trying to decide whether to, and how 

to, be honest with a teacher, an employer, or a lover. 

• philosophy of religion: the highly intellectual man whose passionate belief in God has led to him 

being diagnosed with schizoid-affective disorder. 

• social and political philosophy: the man who is trying to decide whether to accept a high-paying job 

in a military weapons manufacturing company. This is also a moral issue. 

• feminist philosophy: the young woman who believes she will be a failure in love and life because she 

believes she is ugly. 

• the meaning of life: the wealthy retired man who, after a long life of running a very successful 

business, feels his life has been mostly empty of value. 

There is the growing number of professionals in the field of mental healthcare who have come to recognize 

and accept the fact that the mind is not the same as the brain, and that many so-called diagnosable mental 

illnesses are not biological brain malfunctions, and therefore don’t require drug treatment. Interestingly the 

Royal College of Psychiatrists in London recently added to its curriculum for higher specialist training “a 

substantial section on philosophy, covering relevant areas of conceptual analysis, value theory, philosophy 

of science, philosophy of mind, and phenomenology.” 42 They have come to recognize and acknowledge 

the value of philosophy in treating so-called ‘mental illnesses.’ 

So much of what is done to patients today is still, unfortunately, based on the mistaken assumption that 

mental problems are somehow caused by the biological mechanisms or chemistry of the brain. What is 

often ignored is that mental health problems have to do with the non-material mind: the person’s beliefs, 

values, and assumptions. They are often complex life problems that are not at all that simple to fix with 

only the help of family members or friends. But they are the sort of problems that are indeed fixable 

with the help of someone trained in philosophy. The reason why I teach philosophy to students who are 

studying to become professional psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, clinical psychologists, counsellors, and 

social workers is to help them improve their ability to create healing philosophical words that will permit 

them to alleviate all sorts of human distress that is mistakenly diagnosed as ‘mental illness’. 

Samantha stayed in touch with me by phone and by e-mails for another year after our philosophical 

counselling sessions had ended. And I’m pleased to report that her messages in that year acknowledged 

the healing power of the philosophical discussions we had shared together. 

42 Fulford, Bill et al. Ibid., p. 2. 

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References 

APA (American Psychiatric Association) (2000). Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 

4th edn, text rev. Washington, DC: APA. 

Averill, James R. and Thomas A. More (2000). Happiness. In Michael Lewis and Jeannette Haviland- 

Jones (eds.), Handbook of Emotions. New York: Guilford Press. 

Ben-Ze’ev, Aaron (1996). Typical Emotions. In William O’Donohue and Richard Kitchener, (eds.), 

Philosophy of Psychology. London: Sage Publications. 

Bergo, Bettina. Psychoanalytic Models: Freud’s Debt to Philosophy and His Copernican Revolution. In 

Jennifer Radden (ed.), The Philosophy of Psychiatry. New York: Oxford University Press. 

Campbell, Neil (2005). A Brief Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind. Orchard Park: Broadview Press. 

Corey, Gerald (1996). Theory and Practice of Counseling and Psychotherapy. 5th edn. Pacific Grove: 

Brooks/Cole Publishing. 

Frank, Jerome D. and Julia B. Frank (1993) Persuasion and Healing 3rd edn. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins 

University Press. 

Fulford, K.W.M., Tim Thornton, and George Graham (2006). Oxford Textbook of Philosophy and 

Psychiatry. New York: Oxford University Press. 

Gillet, Grant (2009). The Mind and its Discontent. New York: Oxford University Press. 

Hansen, Jennifer. Affectivity: Depression and Mania. In Jennifer Radden (ed.), The Philosophy of 

Psychiatry. New York: Oxford University Press. 

Hersch, Edwin L. (2003). From Philosophy to Psychotherapy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 

Horowitz, Allan V. (2002). Creating Mental Illness. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 

Jung, Carl G. (1957) “Psychotherapy and a Philosophy of Life.” In Essays on Contemporary Events. R. 

F. C. Hull, trans. Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press. 1989 edition. 

Kirsch, Irving, et al. (2008) Initial Severity and Antidepressant Benefits: A Meta-Analysis of Data 

Submitted to the Food and Drug Administration. (http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/ 

info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.0050045) 

Maj, Mario et al. (eds.) (2002). Psychiatric Diagnosis and Classification. West Sussex: John Wiley & 

Sons. 

Sartre, J-P. (1948). The Emotions: Outline of a Theory. New York: Philosophical Library. 

Simon, Laurence. (2003) Psychology, Psychotherapy, Psychoanalysis, and the Politics of Human 

Relationships. Westport, Conn.: Praeger. 

Stein, Dan J. (2008). Philosophy of Psychopharmacology. New York: Cambridge University Press. 

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Instances of Philosophical Counseling and Byzantine Philosophy 

Shlomit C. Schuster 

Center Sophon 

Introduction 

Philosophy has a long tradition in helping people reflect on the questions and difficulties of life. 

Sometimes it has been used to cure, but mostly philosophers comprehend what is the truth, wisdom, and 

virtue in the life of the individual and the society, or they consider existence in a metaphysical sense. In 

this lecture, I present two instances of Philosophical Counseling or Philosophical Practice. I will start with 

the modern approach and then show how the ancient Byzantine approach can enrich modern practitioners. 

Philosophical Practice and Philosophical Psychoanalysis 

The modern approach I present is the practice of the German philosopher Dr. Gerd Achenbach 

(Achenbach 1984; Achenbach and Macho1985; Schuster 1991, 219-223; Schuster 1995, 51-55; Schuster 

1999). Achenbach’s original conception of philosophical counseling is essentially different from how 

some philosophers these days use the term philosophical counseling for a type of philosophical therapy 

with fixed therapeutic goals. 

In 1981 Achenbach was the first one who institutionalized philosophical practice as a modern day 

counseling practice. Some of his clients -- or visitors in Achenbach’s terminology—had already tried 

everything that today’s society offers as an antidote for mental suffering and existential questions. 

Finally people arrived for help at the office of a sympathetically listening skeptic. Achenbach’s aim 

is to offer the public an alternative to psychotherapy, but not an alternative therapy. His practice also 

includes philosophical psychoanalysis: an understanding of people’s past that leads to a philosophical 

understanding of the self. He explicitly states that philosophical practice is no therapy at all (Achenbach 

1984). Clinical diagnoses and treatment, along the lines of the medical paradigm of therapy, are absent in 

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Achenbach’s approach, yet philosophical counseling can have therapeutic results. Nevertheless, the aim 

for sessions with a philosopher is to philosophize without holding a therapeutic intention. 

Achenbach resists turning his praxis idea into a method, and prefers to keep the style of conversation 

indeterminate and open-ended. The empty set of knowledge presented in this approach has been 

compared by Achenbach to Nicholas Cusa’s idea of “Learned Ignorance.” This 15 th century 

philosopher-theologian had been influenced by the concept of the “Via Negativa” in theology. The 

concept of the Negative or Apophatic way has been most boldly expressed by the 5 th century Pseudo- 

Dionysius, in a small treatise called The Mystical Theology (Dionysius the Areopagite 1993). Apophatic 

thought is also presented in the writings of other Byzantine philosophers and theologians such as 

Saint Basil the Great, Saint Gregory the Theologian, Saint John Chrysostom, and Saint Maximus the 

Confessor, and many others (Lossky 1991). 

An exemplary apophatic description of God is taken from the Divine Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom: 

“God ineffable, beyond comprehension, invisible, beyond understanding, existing forever and 

always the same.” The Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew finds the apophatic way present in Neo- 

Platonism, and Scholasticism, and he writes “in fact all religions adopt—to one degree or another – a 

fundamental negative approach to God”. Typical of the Byzantine Orthodox negative theology is that in 

its transcendence of all formulations and definitions it rather identifies “with personal encounter and a 

loving relationship with God in the communication of prayer” (Bartholomew 2008). In a similar sense 

in Achenbach’s approach the personal encounter and friendly relationship with the client stands central; 

theorizing about the interaction in psychological or other terms cannot comprehend that event. 

Nevertheless Achenbach gives some subtle suggestions, some “road signs,” that can help other 

philosophers aiming to follow suit. Of these road signs, four basic ones are the following: 

1. A sincere communication between the philosophical practitioner and the visitor, based on a 

“beyond-method” method. 

2. The importance of dialogue, as that which enlivens and flows from being. 

3. “Auslegen”—a looking for explanations—in which the practitioner becomes united with the 

problem, not by imparting his own understanding of it, but by giving the visitor a fresh impulse 

to explain him or herself. 

4. The innovative component of dialogue, the element of wonder in philosophical practice, which 

does not allow for fixed viewpoints, standard attitudes, or permanent solutions. 

Achenbach’s approach has proven to be a beneficial and a secure philosophical way of aiding persons in 

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thinking through the difficulties of daily life. Though some other philosophical practitioners may find it 

desirable to develop and practice philosophical counseling after their own taste, I find that Achenbach’s 

ideas contain all that is needed for practicing philosophy in a responsible and professional way. 

Philosophical psychoanalysis in the context of philosophical practice can be compared to philosophical 

autobiographical narratives. These often demonstrate how one can understand the personal life outside 

of the formally institutionalized ways of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. In The Philosopher’s 

Autobiography: 

A Qualitative Study I demonstrate by analyzing in dept the autobiographies of Saint Augustine, Rousseau, 

and Sartre that they came to self-understandings that were informed and transformed by their own 

philosophical understandings. But not only these, but many other philosophers worldwide and throughout 

the ages practiced self-reflection and self-transformation through different forms of autobiographical 

writing. I listed about 200 references to philosophers with such autobiographical lives (Schuster 2003). 

Some prominent among these are Plato, Aurelius, Abelard, Dante, John Stuart Mill, Kierkegaard, and 

Russell. 

Studying these different lives shows how relatively of little importance Freudian or Jungian and other 

medical psychoanalytic understandings are in the understanding of the lives of these great thinkers. There 

are indeed multiple alternatives to a deep understanding of the self. 

Byzantine Philosophy 

To consider ancient practices of philosophy helpful for modern philosophical counseling maybe 

questionable for some, yet when reading ancient texts persons are often surprised by how little the 

human condition has changed. A current book by the title Facing the World: Orthodox Thoughts on 

Global Perspectives (Archbishop Anastatasios 2003) shows how relevant Byzantine philosophy is for 

contemporary issues such as human rights, globalization, environment, and dialogue for the understanding 

of different religions. 

Byzantine philosophy dates from Late Antiquity unto the Middle Ages, and it questions deeply our 

ordinary daily lives, as well our modern day preoccupation with healing and personal happiness and well- 

being. At the other hand in its quest for the philosophical-spiritual realm it conveys great opportunities for 

the healing of body, mind, and soul. 

Byzantine philosophy blends Judaic, Christian, and Hellenistic ideas with a focus on knowing and 

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following the way of life that has been exemplified by Christ. 1 At the beginning of Christ’s public 

appearance as teacher and healer, he read a passage from the Bible book Isaiah (61: 1), in which the 

presence or anointing of “the Spirit of the Lord” is associated with encouraging those in need, healing the 

broken hearted and the downtrodden, freeing those that are captivated, and making the blind to see. This 

verse was then acknowledged as the future realization of Christ’s life from then on. The practitioners of 

Byzantine philosophy accordingly focused on how it could be possible for them to acquire and remain 

in this “Spirit of the Lord.” They found the way to such spiritual state of blessedness by obedience to the 

Gospel commandments, and through practicing virtues, asceticism, and noetic, or philosophical prayer 

(Metropolitan Hierotheos 2003; Igumen Chariton 1997). Spiritual readings and spiritual writings in words 

or symbols (such as icon paintings) are as well considered mental prayer and may transform the life and 

well-being of those participating in these activities. 

The Byzantine sages strove for philosophical enlightenment. This striving for the best possible 

understanding of all things is similar to philosophical counseling in having a philosophical conceptual 

aim. Those that attained in lesser or greater extent the lofty aim of enlightenment, obtained additionally 

therapeutic benefits for themselves and others. 2 Unlike the many kinds of enlightenment known 

from various other religious traditions, the Byzantines did not search for visions or spiritual gifts and 

revelations; their striving was essentially for being good and humble servants of Christ. The teachings 

of Christ were the philosophy par excellence for them and were considered in many aspects similar 

to ancient Greek philosophy. However, some scholars find that there are differences among the early 

Christian theologians in regard to accepting philosophy as theology: some rejected philosophy, others 

accepted it partly, and others embraced it all. (Viglas 2005, 1 (3), 5-9). But in general, for the Byzantines 

philosophy was not the servant of theology, it was theology. 

The sources that instruct in the Byzantine way of life are plenteous. Some of the classical texts in this 

domain are The Sayings of the Desert Fathers (collections of sayings going back to the first centuries 

of Christianity), The Institutions and The Conferences of John Cassian (4-5th century), The Evergetinos 

(a Greek collection of spiritual concerns for which answers were assembled from records about saints 

and sages up to the 11 th century), and The Philokalia (Byzantine writings collected and edited in the 

18 th century with the subtitle: “writings in which is explained how the mind is purified, illuminated, and 

perfected through practical and contemplative ethical philosophy”). 

1 For Byzantine philosophy, see: Cavarnos 2003; Viglas 2006, p. 3, pp. 73-105; Tatakis 2007. 

2 For sources on healing, see Larchet, 2002 and Father Kees, 2009-2011. 

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It is possible to say that the 20th century saw a Byzantine revival (Louth 2008, 188-202), which is still 

engulfing more and more people on a global scale. In the context of this talk I can only give directions for 

further inquiries in this special branch of philosophy. The practical application of Byzantine studies for 

workgroups or in individual dialogues on the virtuous life and other topics has proven to be rewarding 

from a philosophical, therapeutic, and spiritual viewpoint. How philosophical counselors can introduce 

and benefit from these old, yet ever new understandings I will exemplify in the continuation of this paper. 

Some examples of Byzantine thought for daily life and for philosophical counseling sessions 

When a philosophical counselor listens to the problems of the client, questions can be asked that help the 

client to rethink and see the problem from a different perspective. It can also so be suggested that a client 

reflects on philosophical or spiritual texts such as The Sayings of the Desert Fathers (see an exemplary 

selective reading further on in this paper). Also a particular topic can be discussed that seems helpful for 

the client, and the topic is found in a Byzantine source. For example one can discuss the very different 

conceptualization of death then and now. In our global society there seems to be very little time and 

reason to think about death, and to come to terms with this issue many people go into therapy or read 

psychological based information on the subject. Mourning about death, or being affected through it, in one 

form or another, is soon considered pathological. 

In the Byzantine area reflection on the subject dead was considered particularly beneficent for daily life. 

Not only did the fear of eternal judgment caused persons to repent by daily remembering death, it had also 

an effect on the legal system and on behavior in warfare. Since death was seen as a journey to a world of 

no return, it was considered that persons had to be given a change to prepare themselves for the life in the 

world to come, and this was a reason to spare the lives of criminals and soldiers on the battle field. Though 

there was plenty of bloodshed in the many wars fought under the Byzantine Emperors, there was also a 

respect for life that was exceptional for that age. The lives of persons were spared to give them a change 

to repent. “This reluctance to take a person, life, even when legally and morally permissible, is exceptional 

in the history of mankind and surely merits further study. For it was not until well into the second half of 

the twentieth century that such sentiments were forcefully expressed and received broad support.” (Dennis 

2001). In general Byzantines believed in an after life and death was a transitional matter. “The only reason 

for fear was if one was not prepared. Death was not the end of life but a change of life. As life itself was a 

journey, so death was a journey. If you had packed the necessary provisions and if your documents were 

in order, then you had nothing to fear and you would arrive safely at your new destination” (Dennis 2001). 

In the Evergetinos (Bishop Chrysostomos et al. 1988) Saint Ephraim the Syrian (306-373) explains the 

Byzantine view on death as follows: 

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For brothers and sisters, the period of time which we have at our disposal for repentance is our life 

on earth. Indeed, happy and blissful is he who has never once fallen into the nets of the Enemy. If, 

however, someone who was entangled in the nets of the Enemy has been able to break those nets 

and escape from the captivity of the Devil, he too should consider himself blessed; for, though we 

live in the flesh, in this way we are saved from the onslaught of the enemy of our souls, just as a 

fish escapes from the nets of the fisherman. Because, as we know, if a fish is caught and succeeds 

in breaking the net and dashing to the depths, he is saved as long as he is in water; but when he is 

dragged up in the net by the fisherman to dry land, then he can no longer help himself. The exact 

same thing happens to us: that is, as long as we live in the present life, we have received from God 

the authority and power to break the bonds of the evil intentions of the enemy by ourselves and to 

cast aside, through repentance, the burden of our sins, being most assuredly brought to salvation 

and inheriting the Kingdom of God. However, if the fearful command of death falls upon us and 

the soul leaves the body, and the body is placed deep in the tomb, then we are no longer able to 

help ourselves, just as the fish, when it is taken out of water, after being caught by the fisherman 

and safely placed in his fishing basket, cannot in any way be saved. 

Father Ephraim’s saying on death may give persons a new perspective on death and life. And even for 

those who do not believe in the existence of God there is good common sense in the idea that one has to 

live life now as good as possible. 

Byzantine readings 

There are various sources of for the sayings of the desert fathers. A good introduction to the different 

texts is Desert Christians: An Introduction to the Literature of Early Monasticism (Harmless 2004). 

The wisdom of the desert fathers is mostly expressed in short stories or in aphorisms. This category in 

Byzantine philosophy is called “patristic thought” and is outlined by its narrative style such as in wisdom 

literature. I selected the following exemplary sayings (Orthodoxwiki.org and Ward 1975) for reading 

together with a client or for the client to read alone and contemplate on at home. 3 

3 Quotations are all cited from the copyright free site Orthodoxwiki.org with exception of those quotes marked as (Ward 

1975). 

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Abba Anthony 

When the holy Abba Anthony lived in the desert he was beset by accidie, and attacked by many sinful 

thoughts, he said to God, ‘Lord, I want to be saved but these thoughts do not leave me alone; what shall 

I do in my affliction How can I be saved’ A short while afterwards, when he got up to go out, Anthony 

saw a man like himself sitting at his work, getting up from his work to pray, then sitting down and plaiting 

a rope, then getting up again to pray. It was an angel of the Lord sent to correct and reassure him. He heard 

the angel saying to him, ‘Do this and you will be saved.’ At these words, Anthony was filled with joy and 

courage. He did this, and he was saved (Ward 1975). 

Some brothers came to find Abba Anthony to tell him about the visions they were having, and to find out 

from him if they were true or if they came from the demons. They had a donkey, which died on the way. 

When they reached the place where the old man was, he said to them before they could ask him anything, 

‘How was it that the little donkey died on the way here?’ They said, ‘How do you know about that, 

Father?’ And he told them, ‘The demons showed me what happened.’ So they said, ‘That was what we 

came to question you about, for fear we were being deceived, for we have visions which often turn out to 

be true.’ Thus the old man convinced them, by the example of the donkey that their visions came from the 

demons (Ward 1975). 

Abba Anthony said, ‘I saw the snares that the enemy spreads out over the world and I said groaning, “What 

can get through from such snares?” Then I heard a voice saying to me, “Humility” (Ward 1975). 

Abba Abraham 

Abba Abraham told of a man of Scetis who was a scribe and did not eat bread. A brother came to beg him 

to copy a book. The old man whose spirit was engaged in contemplation, wrote, omitting some phrases 

and with no punctuation. The brother, taking the book and wishing to punctuate it, noticed that words 

were missing. So he said to the old man, ‘Abba, there are some phrases missing.’ The old man said to him, 

‘Go, and practice first that which is written, then come back and I will write the rest.’ 

Abba Ammonas 

Abba Ammonas was asked, ‘What is the “narrow and hard way?” (Mt. 7.14) He replied, ‘The “narrow 

and hard way” is this, to control your thoughts, and to strip yourself of your own will, for the sake of God. 

This is also the meaning of the sentence, “Lo, we have left everything and followed you”’ (Mt. 19.27). 

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Abba Arsenius 

It was said of him that he had a hollow in his chest channeled out by the tears which fell from his eyes all 

his life while he sat at his manual work. When Abba Poemen learned that he was dead, he said weeping, 

‘Truly you are blessed, Abba Arsenius, for you wept for yourself in this world! He who does not weep 

for himself here below will weep eternally hereafter; so it is impossible not to weep, either voluntarily or 

when compelled through suffering’ (i.e. the latter suffering in hell). 

Abba Bessarion 

Abba Doulas, the disciple of Abba Bessarion said, ‘One day when we were walking beside the sea I was 

thirsty and I said to Abba Bessarion, “Father, I am very thirsty.” He said a prayer and said to me, “Drink 

some of the sea water.” The water proved sweet when I drank some. I even poured some into a leather 

bottle for fear of being thirsty later on. Seeing this, the old man asked me why I was taking some. I said 

to him, “Forgive me, it is for fear of being thirsty later on.” Then the old man said, “God is here, God is 

everywhere.”’ 

Abba Cronius 

If the soul is vigilant and withdraws from all distraction and abandons its own will, then the spirit of God 

invades it and it can conceive because it is free to do so. 

Abba Daniel 

Abba Daniel said, ‘At Babylon the daughter of an important person was possessed by a devil. A monk 

for whom her father had a great affection said to him, “No-one can heal your daughter except some 

anchorites whom I know; but if you ask them to do so, they will not agree because of their humility. Let 

us therefore do this: when they come to the market, look as though you want to buy their goods and when 

they come to receive the price, we will ask them to say a prayer and I believe she will be healed.” When 

they came to the market they found a disciple of the old men setting there selling their goods and they led 

him away with the baskets, so that he should receive the price of them. But when the monk reached the 

house, the woman possessed with the devil came and slapped him. But he only turned the other cheek, 

according to the Lord’s Command (Matt. 5:39). The devil, tortured by this, cried out, “What violence! The 

commandment of Jesus drives me out.” Immediately the woman was cleansed. When the old men came, 

they told them what had happened and they glorified God saying, “This is how the pride of the devil is 

brought low, through the humility of the commandment of Christ”’(Ward 1975). 

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Abba Dioscorus 

A brother questioned Abba Poemen in this way, ‘My thoughts trouble me, making me put my sins aside, 

and concern myself with my brother’s faults’. The old man told him the following story about Abba 

Dioscorus (the monk), ‘In his cell he wept over himself, while his disciple was sitting in another cell. 

When the latter came to see the old man he asked him, “Father, why are you weeping?” “I am weeping 

over my sins,” the old man answered him. Then his disciple said, “You do not have any sins, Father.” The 

old man replied, “Truly, my child, if I were allowed to see my sins, three or four men would not be enough 

to weep for them.” 

Abba Elias 

Abba Elias, the minister, said, ‘What can sin do where there is penitence? And of what use is love where 

there is pride?’ 

Abba Evagrius 

Abba Evagrius said, “Take away temptations and no one will be saved.” 

Abba Hilarion 

From Palestine, Abba Hilarion went to the mountain to Abba Anthony. Abba Anthony said to him, ‘You 

are a welcome torch which awakens the day.’ Abba Hilarion said, ‘Peace to you, pillar of light, giving 

light to the world.’ 

Abba Hyperechius 

It is better to eat meat and drink wine than to eat the flesh of one’s brethren through slander. 

Abba Isaiah 

(Abba Isaiah) said to those who were making a good beginning by putting themselves under the direction 

of the holy Fathers, ‘As with purple dye, the first coloring is never lost.’ And, ‘Just as young shoots are 

easily trained back and bent, so it is with beginners who live in submission.’ 

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Abba Isidore 

Abba Isidore went one day to see Abba Theophilus, pope of Alexandria and when he returned to Scetis the 

brethren asked him, ‘What is going on in the city?’ But he said to them, ‘Truly, brothers, I did not see the 

face of anyone there, except that of the archbishop.’ Hearing this they were very anxious and said to him, 

‘Has there been a disaster there, then, Abba?’ He said ‘Not at all, but the thought of looking at anyone 

did not get the better of me.’ At these words they were filled with admiration, and strengthened in their 

intention of guarding the eyes from all distraction. 

Abba Isidore the priest 

(Abba Isidore the priest) said, ‘If you fast regularly, do not be inflated with pride, but if you think highly 

of yourself because of it, then you had better eat meat. It is better for a man to eat meat than to be inflated 

with pride and to glorify himself.’ 

Abba John of the Cells 

Abba John of the Cells told us this story: ‘There was in Egypt a very rich and beautiful courtesan, to 

whom noble and powerful people came. Now one day she happened to be near the church and she wanted 

to go in. The sub-deacon, who was standing at the doors, would not allow her to enter saying, “You are 

not worthy to enter the house of God, for you are impure.” The Bishop heard the noise of their argument 

and came out. Then the courtesan said to him, “He will not let me enter the church.” So the Bishop said 

to her, “You are not allowed to enter it, for you are not pure.” She was filled with compunction and said 

to him, “Henceforth I will not commit fornication anymore.” The bishop said to her, “If you bring your 

wealth here, I shall know that you will not commit fornication anymore.” She brought her wealth and the 

bishop burnt it all in the fire. Then she went into the church, weeping and saying, “If this has happened to 

me below, what would I not have suffered above?” So she was converted and became a vessel of election.’ 

Abba John the Dwarf 

Abba John the Dwarf said, ‘There was a spiritual old man who lived a secluded life. He was held in high 

estimation in the city and enjoyed a great reputation. He was told that a certain old man, at the point of 

death, was calling for him, to embrace him before he fell asleep. He thought to himself, if I go by day, men 

will run after me, giving me great honor, and I shall not be at peace in all that. So I will go in the evening 

in the darkness and I shall escape everyone’s notice. But lo, two angels were sent by God with lamps to 

give him light. Then the whole city came out to see his glory. The more he wished to flee from glory, the 

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more he was glorified. In this was accomplished that which is written: “He who humbles himself will be 

exalted”’(Luke 14:11). 

Abba John the Persian 

It was said of Abba John the Persian that when some evildoers came to him, he took a basin and wanted to 

wash their feet. But they were filled with confusion, and began to do penance. 

Abba Lucius 

Some of the monks who are called Euchites went to Enaton to see Abba Lucius. The Old man asked 

them, ‘What is your manual work?’ They said, ‘We do not touch manual work but as the Apostle says, 

we pray without ceasing.’ The old man asked them if they did not eat and they replied they did. So he 

said to them ‘When you are eating, who prays for you then?’ Again he asked them if they did not sleep 

and they replied they did. And he said to them, ‘When you are asleep, who prays for you then?’ They 

could not find any answer to give him. He said to them, ‘Forgive me, but you do not act as you speak. 

I will show you how, while doing my manual work, I pray without interruption. I sit down with God, 

soaking my reeds and plaiting my ropes’, and I say “God, have mercy on me, according to your great 

goodness and according to the multitude of your mercies, save me from my sins.” So he asked them if 

this were not prayer and they replied it was. Then he said to them, ‘So when I have spend the whole day 

working and praying, making thirteen pieces of money more or less, I put two pieces of money outside 

the door and I pay for my food with the rest of the money. He who takes the two pieces of money prays 

for me when I am eating and when I am sleeping; so, by the grace of God, I fulfill the precept to pray 

without ceasing.’ 

Abba Macarius 

One day Abba Macarius the Great came to Abba Anthony’s dwelling on the mountain. When he knocked 

on the door, Anthony came out to him and said to him, ‘Who are you?’ He replied, ‘I am Macarius.’ Then 

Anthony went inside and shut the door leaving him there. Later, seeing his patience, he opened the door 

and received Macarius with joy, saying to him, ‘I have wanted to see you for a long time, having heard 

about you.’ He rendered him all the duties of hospitality and made him rest for he was very tired. When 

evening came, Abba Anthony soaked some palm-leaves for himself, and Abba Macarius said to him, ‘Allow 

me to soak some for myself.’ He replied: ‘Do so.’ Having made a large bundle, he soaked them. Then 

sitting down in the evening they spoke of the salvation of the soul, while they plaited the leaves. The rope 

which Macarius was making hung down through the window in the cave. Going in early, blessed Anthony 

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saw the length of Abba Macarius’ rope and said, ‘Great power comes out of these hands’ (Ward 1975). 

Abba Macarius was asked, ‘How should one pray?’ The old man said, ‘There is no need at all to make 

long discourses; it is enough to stretch out one’s hands and say, “Lord, as you will, and as you know, have 

mercy.” And if the conflict grows fiercer say, “Lord, help!” He knows very well what we need and he 

shows us his mercy’ (Ward 1975). 

Abba Matoes 

A brother went to Abba Matoes and said to him, ‘How is it that the monks of Scetis did more than the 

Scriptures required in loving their enemies more than themselves?’ Abba Matoes said to him, ‘As for me I 

have not yet managed to love those who love me as I love myself.’ 

Abba Moses 

It happened that Abba Moses was struggling with the temptation of fornication. Unable to stay any longer 

in the cell, he went and told Abba Isidore. The old man exhorted him to return to his cell. But he refused, 

saying, ‘Abba, I cannot.’ Then Abba Isidore took Moses out onto the terrace and said to him, ‘Look 

towards the west.’ He looked and saw hordes of demons flying about and making a noise before launching 

an attack. Then Abba Isidore said to him, ‘Look towards the east.’ He turned and saw an innumerable 

multitude of holy angels shining with glory. Abba Isidore said, ‘See, these are sent by the Lord to the 

saints to bring them help, while those in the west fight against them. Those who are with us are more in 

number than they are. Then Abba Moses gave thanks to God plucked up courage and returned to his cell 

(Ward 1975). 

Abba Pambo 

The same Abba Theophilus, the archbishop, came to Scetis one day. The brethren who were assembled 

said to Abba Pambo, ‘Say something to the Archbishop, so that he may be edified.’ The old man said to 

them, ‘If he is not edified by my silence, he will not be edified by my speech.’ 

Abba Pimen 

A man may seem to be silent, but if his heart is condemning others, he is babbling ceaselessly. But there 

may be another who talks from morning till night and yet he is truly silent, that is, he says nothing that is 

not profitable. 

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Amma Theodora 

Amma Theodora said, ‘Let us strive to enter by the narrow gate, Just as the trees, if they have not stood 

before the winter’s storms cannot bear fruit, so it is with us; this present age is a storm and it is only 

through many trials and temptations that we can obtain an inheritance in the kingdom of heaven.’ 

She also said that neither asceticism, nor vigils nor any kind of suffering are able to save, only true 

humility can do that. There was an anchorite who was able to banish the demons; and he asked them, ‘What 

makes you go away?’ ‘Is it fasting?’ They replied, ‘We do not eat or drink.’ ‘Is it vigils?’ They replied, 

‘We do not sleep.’ ‘Is it separation from the world?’ ‘We live in the deserts.’ ‘What power sends you away 

then?’ They said, ‘Nothing can overcome us, but only humility.’ ‘Do you see how humility is victorious 

over the demons?’ 

Abba Theodore 

It was said about (Abba Theodore) that, though he was made a deacon at Scetis he refused to exercise 

the office and fled to many places from it. Each time the old men brought him back to Scetis, saying, ‘Do 

not leave your diaconate.’ Abba Theodore said to them, ‘Let me pray God that he may tell me for certain 

whether I ought to take my part in the liturgy.’ Then he prayed God in this manner, ‘If it is your will that 

I should stand in this place then make me certain of it.’ Then appeared to him a column of fire, reaching 

from earth to heaven, and a voice said to him, ‘If you can become like this pillar, go be a deacon.’ On 

hearing this he decided never to accept the office. When he went to church the brethren bowed before him 

saying, ‘If you do not wish to be a deacon, at least hold the chalice.’ But he refused, saying, ‘If you do not 

leave me alone, I shall leave this place.’ So they left him in peace. 

Abba Tithoes 

The way of humility is this: self-control, prayer, and thinking yourself inferior to all creatures. 

Abba Zacharias 

One day Abba Moses said to brother Zacharias, ‘Tell me what I ought to do’ At these words the latter 

threw himself on the ground at the old man’s feet and said, ‘Are you asking me, Father?’ The old man said 

to him ‘Believe me, Zacharias, my son, I have seen the Holy Spirit descending upon you and since then I 

am constrained to ask you.’ Then Zacharias drew his hood off his head put it under his feet and trampled 

on it, saying, ‘The man who does not let himself be treated thus, cannot become a monk.’ 

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Abba Zeno 

Abba Zeno said, ‘If a man wants God to hear his prayer quickly, then before he prays for anything else, 

even his own soul, when he stands and stretches out his hands towards God, he must pray with all his 

heart for his enemies. Through this action God will hear everything that he asks.’ 

Conclusion 

Philosophical counselors may encourage persons to transcend or change their difficult private, social, 

or political situations, through practicing the philosophical understandings they together arrive at in 

philosophical counseling sessions. 

Though Byzantine philosophy may not be interesting for everybody, for the philosophical counselors, and 

clients that it does appeal to, it can be a rich source of inspiration, philosophical enlightenment, and even 

healing. When persons want to transform their lives, they often need a living example of transformation. 

From various Byzantine texts, and personal contacts with practitioners of the Byzantine way, a modern 

philosophical counselor can learn to a great extent how to achieve a virtuous and ascetic life in which 

noetic prayer is for the benefit of all. 

References 

Achenbach, Gerd. B. 1984. Philosophische Praxis. Cologne: Juergen Dinter. 

Achenbach, Gerd B. And Thomas Macho. 1985. Das Prinzip Heilung. Cologne: Juergen Dinter. 

Archbishop Anastasios. 2003. Facing the World: Orthodox Thoughts on Global Perspectives. New York: 

St Vladimir’s Seminary Press 

Bishop Chrysostomos. 1988. The Evergetinos, A Complete Text. Etna, California: Center for Traditionalist 

Orthodox Studies. 

Cavarnos, Constantine. 2003. Orthodoxy and Philosophy. Belmont, Ma: Institute for Byzantine and 

Modern Greek Studies. 

Dennis, George T. 2001. Death in Byzantium Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 55. (www.doaks.org/resources/ 

publications/dumbarton.../dp55ch01.pdf.) 

Dionysius the Areopagite. 1993. Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works. New York: Paulist Press 

International. 

Father Symeon Sean Kees. 2009-2011. Orthodox Christian Medicine; The healing of soul and body 

through the ancient Orthodox Christian Way of Life. http://orthodoxhealing.blogspot.com. 

Harmless, William. 2004. Desert Christians: An Introduction to the Literature of Early Monasticism. 

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Oxford: Oxford University Press. 

Igumen Chariton of Valamo. 1997. The Art of Prayer: An Orthodox Anthology. New York: Faber and 

Faber. 

Larchet, Jean-Claude. 2002. The Theology of Illness. New York: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press. 

Lossky, Vladimir. 1976. The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. New York: St. Vladimir’s 

Seminary Press. 

Louth, Andrew. 2008. The patristic revival and its protagonists. In The Cambridge Companion to 

Orthodox Christian Theology. Edited by Cunningham, Mary B. and Theokritoff, Elizabeth. 

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

Metropolitan Hierotheos of Nafpaktos. 2003. A Night in the Desert of the Holy Mountain: Discussion with 

a Hermit on the Jesus Prayer. Levadia, Greece: Birth of the Theotokos Monastery. 

Patriarch Bartholomew. 2008. Encountering the Mystery: Understanding Orthodox Christianity Today, 

London: Doubleday Press, 2008. 

Orthodoxwiki. 2005. Sayings of the Desert Fathers. (http://orthodoxwiki.org/Sayings_of_the_Desert_ 

Fathers) 

Schuster, Shlomit C. 1991. Philosophical Counselling. Journal of Applied Philosophy 8 (2): 219-223. 

Schuster, Shlomit. C. 1995. Report on Applying Philosophy in Philosophical Counseling. The 

International Journal of Applied Philosophy 9 (2): 51-55. 

Schuster, Shlomit C. 1999. Philosophy Practice; An Alternative to Counseling and Psychotherapy. Praeger 

Publishers: Westport, Conn. 

Schuster, Shlomit. C. 2003. The Philosopher’s Autobiography: A Qualitative Study. Westport, CT: Praeger. 

Tatakis, Basil N. 2007. Christian Philosophy in the Patristic and Byzantine Tradition. Rollinsford, NH: 

Orthodox Research Institute. 

Viglas, Katelis. 2005. Mysticism and rational spirituality: When theology meets philosophy in Byzantium. 

European Journal of Science and Theology 1 (3): 5-9 

Viglas, Katelis. 2006. A Historical Outline of Byzantine Philosophy and Its Basic Subjects. Res Cogitas 3: 

73 -105. 

Ward, Benedicta. 1975. The Sayings of the Desert Fathers. Kalamazoo, Michigan: Cistercian Publication. 

354

Healing Practices in the Humanities 

Kayama Rika 

Rikkyo University 

Seeing from my viewpoint as a psychiatrist, Japanese society has been troubled by various “symptoms”. 

I think they might not simply be Japanese cultural phenomena; rather, they might be indicators of a 

pandemic of psychological problems that the global society will have to face in the near future. So I will 

introduce some of them which became serious social problem in recent years in Japan. 

1. 2011 appears to be the 14th straight year for the annual suicide count to exceed 30,000, according 

to tentative statistics recently released by the National Police Agency. 

2. Bullying in the schoolyard or in the hallways between classes is a common occurrence in many 

countries. But in Japan, ijime, bullying at school, is a much more serious social problem. In 

Japan, this bullying behavior sometimes escalates to the point where the victim commits suicide. 

3. Hikikomori, or severe social withdrawal, in Japan’s young people has been a prominent public 

mental health concern since around 2000. On the other hand, more recent, concern is a syndrome 

dubbed “modern-type depression”. This catchy name has quickly and widely spread to the public 

via Japan’s mass media and internet-related media, yet there is no consensus guideline for its 

diagnosis and treatment, which has led to confusion when dealing with the disorder in clinical 

practice. 

4. Recently, young people in Japan have begun to use new electronic media technologies, including 

cell phones and the Internet, with increasing frequency. But anonymous communication among 

adolescents often involves cyber-bullying, which can lead to mental health problems in victims. 

5. It appears new type of ultranationalist groups in Japan. The groups are openly anti-foreign in 

their message, and unafraid to win attention by holding unruly street demonstrations. They are 

considered to be the Net far right (so called “Neto-uyo”), because they are loosely organized 

via the Internet, and gather together only for demonstrations. At other times, they are a virtual 

community that maintains its own Web sites to announce the times and places of protests, swap 

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information and post video recordings of their demonstrations. Most of their members appear to 

be young men. Kunio Suzuki, one of the members of well-known far-right group says the group 

is not racist, and rejected the comparison with neo-Nazis. Instead, he said he had modeled his 

group after another overseas political movement, the Tea Party in the United States. 

It seems they are young men and women who feel disenfranchised and disappointed in the society and their 

leaders. They have got damaged. They always feel strong anxiety but they can’t face it directly, so they are 

looking for someone to project their inner world. 

Now, many young voters have embraced a largely unknown new party led by a brash young leader who 

promises a drastic overhaul of the government. That party, the Japan Restoration Association, was formally 

inaugurated in September 2012, by its leader, the mayor of Osaka, Toru Hashimoto. This 43-year-old 

man former television commentator and a lawyer came out of nowhere four years ago to electrify Osaka 

and his ability to do what few national leaders have seemed able to: push through painful changes. Mr. 

Hashimoto battled labor unions to slash deficit-ridden budgets and impose performance requirements on 

schoolteachers. 

Now, he is taking his antiestablishment insurgency to the national stage, naming about 350 candidates, 

most of them political neophytes trained at Mr. Hashimoto’s own political “cram school,” to run in 

parliamentary elections expected as soon as November. His charisma has made the group a feared force in 

Japanese politics, seemingly overnight. 

In the interview by the newspaper the following, he emphasized the necessity for competition. 

Question: We first want to ask you about your vision for Japanese society that you want to realize as 

a politician. Will you pursue economic growth at any cost, or would you be satisfied with a lifestyle 

that matches the current state of the nation? Which are you seeking? 

Hashimoto: The level of lifestyle of the Japanese right now from a global perspective is a luxurious 

one equivalent to a five-star hotel ranking. Clean water flows when one turns on the faucet and the 

level of education and medicine is high. There is unemployment insurance and pension and as a last 

gap, there is also public welfare. To enjoy all that requires a great deal of cost. The decision must 

first be made on whether we can maintain that level or not. While there is no need to seek a level 

for Japan that goes beyond the current one, I want to at least maintain that current level (Hashimoto: 

Give politicians ‘carte blanche’ on policies, The Asahi Shimbun, February 13, 2012). 

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At the same time, He insisted that people needed to have the strength which can stand the pressure of the 

competition. 

Q: You are a strong person, but not everyone in society is strong. What would you say to such 

people? 

A: I would ask them: “Are you willing to allow the level of lifestyle in Japan to fall? Would you be 

happy with a level similar to Southeast Asia?” If people want to maintain Japan at the current 

level, then people will have to make the effort. 

And it is most characteristic that he told a form of carte blanche by electors is required to the politician. 

Q: While you have called for a “politics that can decide,” would that not lead to self-righteousness 

among leaders? 

A: Although we would allow discussions to be made fully, in the end a decision will have to be 

made. The more you recognize and allow a wide variety of value systems, the greater the need 

for a method of making a decision. That is what I mean by a “democracy that can decide.” The 

people selected by the voters should be given the authority to decide. I believe that is the role of 

elections. 

Although lawyers can only do what is written in the contract of engagement, this is not the 

case with politicians. It will not be possible to include everything in a campaign manifesto that 

is presented to the voters. Politicians would be unable to act if their range of discretion was 

narrowed through a long list of specific policy measures. In elections, candidates should set out 

the general direction in their appeals to the public. It would be a form of carte blanche. 

I think there is a serious pathology which should be treated in the Japanese society. 

What went through our minds as we enthusiastically awaited for the appearance of Hashimoto was a ‘quiet 

public will’ that entreated him to do something—to do anything he could to liberate us from the anxiety 

and fear. While I use the term ‘quiet’ because of the formless nature of this ‘something’ we wanted, I have 

also explained that it was not a calm or casual request rather it required urgent action without delay. 

Hashimoto was greeted with enthusiasm because he clarified directions such as the following: 

‘Approach everything you come up against by making it simple and easy to understand’. 

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‘Set forth clear opposing schemes consisting of such things as new and old, as well as ally and 

enemy’. 

‘Whittle down your choices into two and give a clear positive or negative response to both’. 

However, I have noted that when considered from a psychopathological perspective, all these directions are 

somewhat unsound defence mechanisms for avoiding anxiety or conflict, and that by their very nature they 

do not lead to solutions. 

One characteristic of particular concern is that many of these directions’ are similar to a number of the 

primitive defence mechanisms that can be considered even more psychological in nature than the emotional 

defence mechanisms described by Freud. In Chapter three, I have explained how the binary choice between 

‘black or white’ is similar to the emotional mechanism of splitting. 

The concept of splitting has been attributed to the French psychiatrist Pierre Janet, a contemporary of 

Freud’s, and studies have suggested that it then caught Freud’s attention, and finally being clearly defined 

by Freud’s daughter, Anna Freud. 

American psychoanalyst Otto F. Kernberg used the concept of splitting to explain the pathology of 

borderline personality disorder. According to Kernberg, many of the inner aspects of those with borderline 

personalities consist of ‘bad parts’ and ‘unpleasant parts’. These parts of their personality sometimes cause 

them to attack and destroy both themselves and others, which they know brings ruin both on themselves 

and others. 

Because of this, the defence mechanisms that they take as a last resort to protect both themselves and others 

are classified as splitting. By creating, separating and protecting ‘completely good things’ in their internal 

and external worlds, they strive to prevent themselves from being tainted by their bad and unpleasant parts. 

This behavior is similar to someone whose room is mostly dirty, creating a completely clean corner and 

calling it their ‘sanctuary’ and keeping only this part of their room spotless. However, the more they 

maintain their sanctuary, the more noticeable the surrounding grime becomes and their irritation with it 

grows stronger. 

The frightening aspect of this process is that in some cases, these values of ‘good parts/good people’ and ‘bad 

parts/bad people’ that they have defined in their minds suddenly reverse places. Returning to the example of 

the room, what they had been maintaining as their sanctuary suddenly becomes something alarming; they 

feel contaminated by what they now feel is ‘All a big lie! It is because of this lie that I cannot breathe!’ and 

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then launch an all-out assault against this part. In this instant, though, they are besieged with severe regret 

over what they have done, lamenting that ‘I destroyed such an important thing. Why did I do that?’ thus 

allowing their innate ‘unpleasant parts’ to increase rapidly with sentiments such as ‘I really am despicable!’ 

People with borderline personalities whose values are always determined on the basis of whether they 

are accepted by those dear to them are constantly beset by feelings of emptiness resulting from their 

fundamental lack of understanding of who these really are. Such people feel that their lives are great when 

many people like them and they are popular, during which times they have a sense of being useful to 

others; however, the moment they are alone, a sense of emptiness plagues them and they feel that ‘I might 

as well be dead’. Some even experience suicidal ideation. 

Although splitting—i.e. between these extreme dichotomies or choices between two things—is a 

pathological emotional mechanism, it also has certain benefits. It allows people to feel that they need not 

face their anxieties or emotional problems and that they need not give them any more attention than they 

already have. 

However, splitting is not a phenomenon we see only in individuals’ mental disorders. 

Naturally, a number of other phenomena come into existence through the mechanism of splitting, 

from modern Japanese politics to the simplified yardstick of ‘to sell or not to sell’—i.e. market 

fundamentalism—that forms the foundations of our modern economic world. 

So, what exactly is the nature of the anxiety and conflict in society that market fundamentalism strives to 

avoid through the mechanism of splitting? Is this not a situation in which, according respect to the minority, 

‘meaningful products for humanity can also be found among those that do not sell’ and ‘a product’s good 

quality does not mean it will sell well; in fact, even bad products sometimes become bestsellers’? 

In other words, as long as market fundamentalism persists, uncertain elements and market complexities 

that cannot be explained using simple logic can all be dealt with as exceptions. This approach makes it 

acceptable to avert one’s eyes from the elements of humanity that are complex or difficult to understand. 

Since the second half of the 20th century, human beings have been looking away from these complex 

and incomprehensible aspects by mobilizing a variety of forces to visualise and systematise splitting-like 

emotional attitudes in creating market fundamentalism. They have thus created a world in which one does 

not have to predict circumstances that favour minorities nor even acknowledge the possibility that such 

unforeseen circumstances may occur. 

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In a sense, people living in this world find it extremely comfortable, a world with no troubling thoughts, 

where one need not worry about things. 

As long as people continue to choose between only yes and no in the choices presented to them, wait for 

someone to check their answers with a sense of anxiety and are happy or sad depending on whether they 

got it right or wrong, only then such people survive without feeling doubt, shame or pain because they are 

never rationally aware that they are being ruled by bipartite thoughts. Their psychological worlds, though, 

are completely devoid of profundity, like a single stick that consists solely of a black end and a white end 

that one spins to make a decision. 

When the stick is spun around, will the result each time be black or white? People with borderline 

personality disorders are convinced that these colours genuinely represent their own feelings and will, 

which they believe might reverse at any given moment. In addition, it is not so much for the individual 

concerned who is worried but those around him or her who are constantly affected by that person. More 

specifically, people with these disorders also seem unable to store the types of conflicts in their minds 

which are the subjects of traditional psychoanalysis. That said, people with these disorders have slight 

worries of their own because their personality does not always make them happy. They are constantly 

in a state of anxiety over whether they will make the wrong choice next time, as a result of which they 

sometimes expend all of their energy worrying and exhaust themselves. Furthermore, as they constantly 

experience unreasoning irritation and anger in their daily lives and as long as they avoid confronting the 

fundamental sources of conflict, they cannot understand why they are irritated. In an unending cycle, they 

seek even greater sources of stimulus, desiring ‘more extreme choices’ or applaud those involved in a harsh 

battle over ‘right or wrong’ in place of them and further exhaust themselves. 

In recent years, in addition to a vague sense of anxiety or feelings of depression the reason for which they 

cannot explain, 90% of first-time patients visiting consultation rooms report feeling very irritated or as 

if they are about to lose their temper. That is, this feeling of depression does not develop into a deep and 

complex depression but quickly becomes feelings and behaviours that defy explanation such as irritation, a 

vague sadness or annoyance. 

In her book Why Psychoanalysis? (New York, Columbia University Press, 2003), French psychoanalyst 

Élisabeth Roudinesco states the following: 

Patients reject psychotherapy that takes a long time and demand that psychotherapists should cure 

them of their irritation and sadness very quickly. When the psychotherapist cautions them that this 

process will take time and that they need to discover their innermost self, a self that is completely 

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unknown to them, they frown in displeasure and say that they do not have time for such things and 

that the psychotherapist must have some kind of device or medicine—something more ‘scientific’— 

that will help them get better more quickly. They believe that a form of therapy that works quickly 

and gives visible and easy-to-understand results is more ‘scientific’. This provides another example 

of such patients’ using the emotional defence mechanisms highlighted in Chapter One. 

However, looking back through history, we see examples in which this type of efficient and rational thought 

pattern—one that fits well with contemporary society’s behaviours such as not thinking about what cannot 

be seen, impatience with processes and preferring simple bipartite choices—has brought about terrible 

mistakes. I refer here to tragedies brought about by despotism. Japan, too, has committed such mistakes. 

Conclusion 

To this point, I have attempted to explain the types of psychological conditions that have been imposed 

upon those people living in Japan since the economic bubble burst. These psychological conditions are in 

general by no means ‘completely healthy’ from the psychiatric perspective, and it is unclear whether they 

cause or result from psychological abnormalities. However, I have clarified the following phenomena that 

currently exist in Japan: 

• The popularization of short sentence-type social media and the unquestioning belief of information 

derived through these 

• Launching an all-out attack on ‘enemies’ whom someone has identified 

• Forced bipartite choice to either completely agree or disagree with opinions on divisive types of 

issues 

• Expectations of a leader who makes everything simple and clear, hoping to rely on that leader to 

resolve all issues 

In discussing all these phenomena, I found that people experiencing strong anxiety and conflict do not 

attempt to confront their feelings and causes in order to gain insights into them, but they resort to ‘desperate 

measures’ in an attempt to maintain their emotional stability. Psychiatrists apply a variety of terms to this 

behaviour, including ‘rationalization’, ‘denial’, ‘manic defence’, ‘projective identification’ and ‘splitting.’ 

These psychological defence mechanisms were explained by such psychoanalysts as Sigmund Freud, Anna 

Freud and Melanie Klein. 

A problematic characteristic of these psychological defence mechanisms is that the people who use them 

do not realise that they are doing so. They are also convinced that they are only opposing someone else’s 

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unfair actions. During the course of clinical practice, we carefully explain to patients that they are not 

getting angry because of someone else’s unfair actions but because they are avoiding confronting their 

own problems by projecting problems within themselves on enemies in their immediate surroundings. 

Furthermore, the only solution to their problems is to strengthen and to resolve them and to help face their 

inner selves. This solution is what I mean by ‘gaining insights.’ 

Of course, this process takes considerable time and effort and requires both the patient and the practitioner 

to experience certain ‘pains’. However, failure to complete this process will not solve the issues; no 

matter how many times they lash out at those they feel have wronged them, their action will provide only 

momentary relief. 

At the personal level, this type of incident may result in simply severing connections with the person at 

whom they have lashed out. However, things are different when it comes to society and other countries. 

Looking back through history, we find in all cases of war a type of logic based on psychological defence 

mechanisms, such as turning attention away from domestic anxieties or attacking another country to deny a 

decline in one’s own national strength. 

In her book, Even so, Japan Chose to go to War (Asahi Shuppansha, 2009), Japanese historian Yoko Kato 

states that when Japan entered the Pacific War—i.e. when it mounted a surprise attack on Pearl Harbour— 

its national strength, both military and economic, was that of ‘a country that could not fight a protracted 

war in any real sense’. She introduces someone who calmly reacts to these circumstances, ‘believed that if 

Japan could not fight a protracted war, it should have acknowledged from the outset that it could not enter 

this war’. Hironori Mizuno, a military critic despite his experience as a navy captain, advocated pacifism at 

the end of the Taisho period/early Showa period, an era of pervasive militarism. 

However, with his ‘extremely decent opinions’, Mizuno chose to criticise the war and ignore contemporary 

military authorities. He stated that ‘Japan has lost its capability to engage in an unaided war. However, 

much it expands its navy armaments during times of peace, in the end it amounts to little more than a house 

built of cards’. To quote Kato: 

[…] [C]itizens do not take discussions of this kind seriously. The discussion soon moves on to other 

subjects. We cannot fight a protracted war; therefore, do we use a geographical pincer movement 

on the Soviet Union, or do we make a pre-emptive strike? In other words, it becomes a two-way 

choice.’ 

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Why do military authorities and citizens fail to take discussions of this type seriously and move on to 

other subjects? Why did they frame this foolish choice in which, although the country could not endure 

a protracted war, events proceeded in a war-like direction with a final decision to initiate a pre-emptive 

strike, regardless of the facts? It would seem that behind this course of action was a psychological defence 

mechanism in which Japan ignored its anxieties, fears and trepidation, and convinced itself that it was those 

‘fiendish Americans and British’ who were in the wrong and that Japan was completely in the right and had 

limitless power (Remark 2). 

At the individual level, this defence mechanism may simply mean an end to relations with the person 

attacked, but it can lead to tragedies such as the Pacific War at the national level. Similar decisions were 

driven by this same mechanism that may have been made throughout history; however, we are not talking 

here about events that occurred a thousand years ago or on the other side of the world. The Pacific War 

occurred a mere several decades ago in Japan, within the lifetime of those now experiencing the economic 

crisis. 

Human beings mobilise psychological defence mechanisms unconsciously and without understanding this 

process, and so they continue to vehemently deny that they are doing so. Because they fail to realise what 

they are doing, they sometimes make terrible mistakes and irrational decisions, thus causing disastrous 

tragedies. 

To repeat, this is human nature. Although Freud first identified the Oedipus Complex in Greek drama, it 

is the source of a range of behaviours and symptoms that constitute the unchanging essence of humanity 

across all of recorded history. At the subconscious level that is our core, people do not change so easily. 

Some might argue that although this mechanism might have driven the decision to begin the Pacific 

War, we would not make such an ill-considered decision in the 21st century. This line of reasoning is 

unpersuasive because it ignores the operation of the subconscious defence mechanism. After all, we must 

remember that projecting one’s latent anxieties and fears onto the outside world and attempting to attack 

and destroy them in that context results in only momentary feelings of wellbeing. 

With this behaviour’s characteristics in mind, how should we attempt to resolve these issues? In present- 

day society, when a person states their opinion, others expect them to present concrete proposals or 

counterproposals when refuting another’s opinion. Although this expectation might at first glance appear to 

be constructive, as we have said, it is also in some ways a pathological response. 

Thus, by merely stating that the behaviours and events that currently occur in society result from 

psychological defence mechanisms and that we must be aware of this process, which strikes me as 

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somewhat irresponsible unless one further offers concrete proposals to resolve this problem. Therefore, I 

propose the following strategies: 

(1) Knowing history 

As stated above, human beings do not change easily, even over the course of centuries. They repeat the 

same mistakes time and again. In Kato’s aforementioned book, she states the following: 

I ardently wish to be able to draw upon a wide range of case studies from among the information I 

have obtained, find the most appropriate one and select instances from history and use them. 

Furthermore, drawing upon the ideas of historian Ernest May, she appeals to administrators to ‘want to 

know about history’. I also think that understanding history is desirable. Members of the general public 

may be caught up in work and their daily lives and they lack time to reflect upon history; despite this 

situation—or perhaps precisely because of it—society’s leaders need to examine history and learn from it. 

(2) Exercising one’s imagination 

The fact that we live in a world in which vast sums of money travel around the globe in an instant, in 

activities such as online trading, does not mean that we need to make every decision instantly. In this paper, 

I have highlighted the dangers of becoming excessively drawn into the world of finance or the Internet and 

making instantaneous judgments and decisions. 

Furthermore, a simple pair of opposing options is not appropriate for resolving every issue; instead, such 

a limited either/or choice forces us to declare a position with which we agree only in part, when the best 

option may actually be neither of those presented. 

By underpinning people’s statements and behaviours, we find a number of hidden reasons, backgrounds 

and internal motives that make them say or do things. Even an email that simply says ‘Okay’ might 

represent involved irresolution or a complex sequence of events leading to that decision. We need to 

develop greater empathy for what people are thinking and we need to use our imagination both for 

that empathy and for resolving problems. The assumption that a person’s verbal statements or physical 

behaviours represent the sum total of that person can lead to serious misunderstandings, which, in the 

societal or national context, develop into senseless wars and tragedies. 

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(3) Writing things down 

We must now ask by what means we should develop empathy for others’ thoughts and feelings and 

consider them during the appropriately deliberative process of making judgments. 

While there is no method for achieving this goal, I feel that diligently writing things down would be useful. 

Furthermore, rather than simply reporting things objectively, it is important to participate while observing 

and creating what in anthropological terms is called an ethnographic account. 

In his book, Clinical Writing: An Ethnography for Psychiatric Nurses (Igaku Shoin, 2008), Kazumasa 

Matsuzawa recommends that rather than recording objective data on a medical card like a doctor, the ward 

nurses use such ethnographic accounts to create records while maintaining deep involvement with patients. 

He advises the following: 

As stated, in providing care to patients, we nurses daily experience a range of sympathetic and 

emotional types of fatigue. Sometimes the exhaustion is overwhelming and we feel crushed by the 

burden; sometimes we just stand there wordlessly; sometimes we become angry; and, at other times 

we can do nothing and are at our wit’s end; at still other times we feel a bit of joy in our hearts. 

Matsuzawa continues with an ‘even so …’ and asserts, ‘I believe that new issues remain as they were in 

how we locate, evaluate and treat the significance of these feelings in nurses’ subjective domain for specific 

nursing activities’. 

Because of this situation, we need to describe all aspects of these events and ‘explain the complex elements 

and contexts that constitute them through detailed ethnographic investigations and reconstructions’. 

I believe that recording one’s own feeling—including negative ones—while recognizing and accepting 

them allows one to reflect upon them and reconstruct reality from that basis. 

This method, I feel, is valid—even essential—not only for those in the nursing profession but also in our 

daily lives. 

Records such as 140-character long Twitter messages or photographs posted on Facebook as a record of the 

day’s events are not valid substitutes. We need to take sufficient time in our lives to think about things. And 

above all else, we also need a bit of courage to honestly confront the feelings that arise from this process. 

The key to the entire process is our decision to exhibit this bit of courage. Although that alone may seem an 

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extremely small choice, I believe it will result in important improvements. 

In psychoanalysis, there is the theory of “projective identification”. It is a term first used by Melanie 

Klein to describe a process whereby parts of the ego are thought of as forced into another person who is 

then expected to become identified with whatever has been projected. Japanese young people with strong 

anxiety choose friends, themselves, and foreigners as obvious target. That is, “projective identification” is 

one of bad way of healing that they found by themselves. 

Next, I would like to point out another curious phenomenon in Japan. 

It is the booming of New Age science. Especially there are many books by native Japanese authors on 

questions of spiritual energy, spiritual awakening and life after death. The various Japanese terms for 

‘spiritual’ and ‘spirituality’ have become more and more popular, although it is difficult to discern what 

they actually mean. However, every year many incidents and troubles occur related to fake or evil “spiritual 

counsellors”. 

If they are not fake and evil, there are still serious problems. People sometimes depend on their counsellor 

deeply, so they cannot decide anything by themselves. I think it also one of the ways of healing which is 

not suitable. 

Then what is the better solution for these serious social symptoms? I think it is no way to heal the people 

without facing their inner anxiety or fear for the own society and the features. 

In psychoanalysis, insight is a process whereby one grasps a previously misunderstood aspect of one’s own 

mental dynamics. It refers to a specific moment, observable during the treatment, when the patient becomes 

aware of an inner conflict, an instinctual impulse, a defence, or the like, that was previously repressed or 

disavowed and that, when it emerges into consciousness, elicits surprise and a sense of discovery. 

This will be a hard way and it takes long time to get insight for every young people in Japan and other 

countries, however it is the last chance to achieve not the current diversion or comfort but the true healing. 

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Healing Practices in the Humanities: A Search in Progress 

Jeanette Fourie 

Lyndi Fourie Foundation 

This South African journey from Physiotherapy lecturer at University of Cape Town to a Quantum 

Energy Coach has been initially excruciating and now an exciting adventure. It started with the death of 

our daughter Lyndi in Dec 1993 at the hands of the Azanian Peoples Liberation Army. The multiple roads 

to find healing for myself and for the men who were directly responsible for her death, now includes 

a passion for healing for all ex-combatants in SA who still suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder 

(PTSD). 

Eighteen years since South Africa embarked on a democratic government with Nelson Mandela at the 

helm, and the apartheid autocracy at an end, we are experiencing growing poverty, crime, corruption and 

political uncertainty. 

This paper will cover my personal journey with regard to helpful modalities of healing experienced by 

myself and then extrapolate the possibilities of using these in; communities, workplaces, national and 

universal settings. 

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (1995-1998) started the process of conciliation in South 

Africa, where in spite of many positive results; it has left a trail of unhappy people in the wake of having 

their wounds reopened without repair, in itself a further trauma. Psychological assistance was offered to 

survivors, however, it is not honoured by African Traditional beliefs, nor by many who consider therapy 

to indicate that one suffers from mental instability, and so went largely unused. Political perpetrators were 

not offered any therapeutic assistance, even after receiving amnesty. 

I appeared at the Commission of enquiry which dealt with our daughter’s death and found it helpful, in 

that I could hear the young men who attacked and witness their recounting of the chants of delight that 

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evening en route to the Heidelberg Tavern. They were saving their people and South Africa from ongoing 

oppression and their supporters cheered and laughed. It was difficult to hear their joy in the context of our 

daughter’s death. I took the opportunity to tell them who Lyndi was and that she could have been their 

friend, working for change in SA. Now she is dead! 

This paper will cover the theory of trauma, healing courses which I have attended and trained in to find 

help for those suffering from (PTSD) and the resultant addictions, and abuse to which their families 

are subject. The most recent Healing of Beliefs through Quantum Energy Coaching is a remarkable, 

uncomplicated, and fast way of transforming the lives of individuals, their families and I trust also their 

communities, our nations and the world. 

Rabbi Twerski a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and medical 

director of the Gateway Rehabilitation Centre in Pittsburgh USA is quoted in the South African Sunday 

Independent Newspaper of 4 September 2005 as saying 

“After half a century in psychiatric practice, I know without a doubt that the source of addiction 

is spiritual deficiency. Irrespective of whether we are religious or atheist, all human beings are 

spiritual by nature and spirituality is the cornerstone of our recovery”. A patient of Twerski’s helped 

him to understand that the cure to addiction was not to be found in the medical or psychiatric realm 

because the source of addiction does not lie there. It goes without saying that Twerski strongly 

urges people suffering from addiction problems to join Alcoholics Anonymous or a recovery 

programme based on the Twelve Steps. “These are spiritual growth programmes that nurture the 

development of self-esteem and self-forgiveness, which are the essential ingredients of happiness” 

he states. It is about overcoming strong emotions like anger and resentment that destroy the 

spiritual nature of human beings and drive millions of people towards addiction. 

What is Twerski referring to by the spiritual nature of human beings? If Twerski is correct what is it that 

we need to direct our energy towards in order to facilitate healing from addiction? 

The American Heritage Dictionary (1975) defines spiritual as: 1. Of, relating to, consisting of or having 

the nature of spirit; not tangible or material. 2. Of, concerned with, or affecting the soul. 3. Of, from, or 

pertaining to God; deific. 4. Of or belonging to a church or religion; ecclesiastical; sacred. 5. Pertaining to 

or having the nature of spirits; supernatural […] 9. The emotional nature in man as distinguished from his 

mind and intellect. 

Soul is defined as: 1. The animating and vital principle in man credited with the faculties of thought, 

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action, and emotion and conceived as forming an immaterial entity distinguished from but temporally 

coexistent with his body. 2. Theology. The spiritual nature of man considered in relation to God, regarded 

as immortal, separable from the body at death, and susceptible to happiness or misery in a future state. 3. 

The disembodied spirit of a dead human being; a ghost; shade. 

Wikipedia has a broader and more recent and embracing approach to defining spirituality: Spirituality 

is belief in an ultimate or an alleged immaterial reality 1 ; an inner path enabling a person to discover the 

essence of his/her being; or the ‘deepest values and meanings by which people live.’ 2 Spiritual practices, 

including meditation, prayer and contemplation, are intended to develop an individual’s inner life. 

Spiritual experiences can include being connected to a larger reality, yielding a more comprehensive self; 

joining with other individuals or the human community; with nature or the cosmos; or with the divine 

realm. 3 Spirituality is often experienced as a source of inspiration or orientation in life. 4 It can encompass 

belief in immaterial realities or experiences of the immanent or transcendent nature of the world. 

Considering Twerski’s statement that addiction is the ‘deficiency of spirituality’, Is it likely that the 

disconnection of the human from self, others and the Divine, or centre of the Universe is the challenge we 

face? And how do we facilitate connection with self, other and transcendence or connection with a greater 

power? 

I discovered personally how this happens as an adult, when hurt and pain are a constant part of one’s daily 

life. Mine was the experience of abuse as a woman and the death of Lyndi. Imagine how much more 

serious this hurt and pain of abuse and violence is as a child. I have formulated a law of humanness in an 

attempt to understand this process; and then added the experience of others in relation to the role of trauma 

and violence. 

A Law of humanness 

I know for my own self, that when I have been hurt, I hurt back. At times in the most unconscious 

(unplanned) way - I call this the law of humanness - it tends to perpetuate hurt, which can get way out 

1 Ewert Cousins, preface to Antoine Faivre and Jacob Needleman, Modern Esoteric Spirituality, Crossroad Publishing, 

1992. 

2 Philip Sheldrake, A Brief History of Spirituality, Wiley-Blackwell 2007, pp. 1-2. 

3 Margaret A. Burkhardt and Mary Gail Nagai-Jacobson Spirituality: Living our Connectedness, Delmar Cengage Learning, 

2001, p. xiii. 

4 Kees Waaijman, Spirituality: Forms, Foundations, Methods. Leuven: Peeters, 2002, p. 1. 

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of hand. Richard Holloway 5 says it like this: “We seem to have a wired-in instinct for retributive justice, 

for getting even with those who cause us hurt. If we are too weak to take straightforward revenge, we 

sometimes find surreptitious ways of getting back at our tormentors.” Like doing and saying unspeakable 

things behind the backs of those who dominate and bully us, or rationalise the taking of pens or more 

from the workplace where relationships are less than collaborative and the boss too wealthy anyway! This 

understanding has led me to believe that evil is ‘exercising our potential to hurt ourselves and others.’ 

James Gilligan 6 , a psychiatrist who worked for over two decades in the Massachusetts prison system 

with the most violent prisoners and the criminally insane, found that shame and then guilt are the deadly 

emotions which cause violence (See Hawkins, Map of Consciousness, p.10). Shame works to deaden 

the feelings of being human, and it is the breeding ground of rage. Unfortunately the retributive justice 

practiced in most prison systems causes more shame and humiliation. Shame a boy in his home, shame 

a group in its neighborhood and you are likely to get responses you don’t like. Shame a petty criminal 

in prison, and you may get a serial murderer after his term has been served. Gilligan’s perspective is not 

aimed at having us pardon those who have broken the law; he believes that understanding the causes of 

this epidemic of violence is the first step towards preventing it for future generations. 

Richard Rhodes 7 recounts research done by Lonnie Athens who experienced the trauma of a home where 

his father beat and demeaned his mother and siblings. As an adult Athens did research in prisons to find 

out: Why they kill? This is the result of that research which nearly cost him his life when a prisoner 

attacked him: 

Four stages of violentization Prevention 

1. Brutalization – seeing others suffer violence. Stop physical punishment of children 

Personal horrification (father on mother is the as acceptable behaviour 

worst - because of the confusion with loving) 

2. Belligerence – A response to powerlessness Mobilise support rather than isolating 

picked up at home, school or in neighbourhood and rejecting the child 

3. Violent Performance – exultant, proud to be Provide alternative means of dealing 

5 Holloway R. On Forgiveness - How can We Forgive the Unforgiveable? Edinburgh, Scotland: Canongate Books, 2002. 

6 Gilligan J. Violence - Our Deadly Epidemic and Its Causes. New York, USA: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1996. 

7 Rhodes Richard. Why They Kill – The Discoveries of a Maverick Criminologist, Vintage Publishers, USA. 2000. 

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seen as a celebrity by peers – gang support with inner and outer conflict 

4. Enjoys the sense of success as a dangerous Difficult to remediate – because - - 

celebrity, becomes a decision / choice to act empathy is seriously diminished 

Malevolently. 

Athens suggests that this is not an inevitable process, it happens over time. He expresses gratitude to a 

neighbour who picked up on his personal trauma at home (Stage 2) and mentored him through school and 

encouraged his university participation. However, unfortunately the struggles with self-esteem persisted 

throughout his adult life. 

This work supports the notion of ‘restorative justice’ rather than ‘punitive justice’ for youth who are in 

trouble at home, school and with the law. 

Violence is also given recognition and acceptance in society via the justice system. The English political 

theorist Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) was the first modern thinker to argue for the creation of a more 

‘rational’ and therefore a more ‘economical’ order of violence backed by popular consent rather than 

divine right. Through a social contract individuals transfer their ‘natural right’ to exercise power through 

violence to a common sovereign authority (the state) which claims a monopoly on the use of violence. 8 

8 Realpolitik refers to the idea that the essence of politics consists of a ceaseless struggle for power, 

material goods, and the control of the means of violence. 9 

This suggests that ‘civilised society’ depends on the state to avenge our murderous hurt, and to consider 

those who take it into their own hands to be either sick or savage. War would be further evidence of our 

right to take revenge - the law of humanness plus the structural violence of the state, despite horrendous 

carnage and the perpetuation of hate and violence on both sides. This has been witnessed recently in 

USA’s response to the Twin Towers attack, the ongoing Middle Eastern conflict, Ireland and many African 

States: Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda and Sudan 

Quantum Physics: a new understanding and its implications 

I grew up in a strict Christian home, where the prophetess Ellen White in the mid 1800’s was inspired 

8 Jacoby Susan. Wild Justice: The Evolution of Revenge, Harper and Row, USA, 1984. 

9 Steger MB. Peacebuilding and Nonviolence: Gandhi’s Perspective on Power. Christie D, Wagner RV, DuNann Winter D, 

Editors. Peace Conflict and Violence, Peace Psychology for the 21st Century.New Jersey, USA: Prentice Hall Inc., 2001. 

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with a ‘health message’ for the Seventh Day Adventist Church. The principles which she espoused were 

indicators for healthful living they were counter to the popular life style. These principles have now been 

scientifically demonstrated over the years to be both valid and valuable. White wrote many times about 

the importance of the mind-body-spirit connection. However, as a physiotherapist with conventional 

anatomy and physiology training this was not apparent. I have searched for evidence of this connection 

and now resonate with the explanation of quantum physics and energy healing. 

Dawson 10 explores the background in order to explain Matrix Reimprinting, an energy healing technique 

using tapping on the face and upper body, which is known as Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT). I will 

use his work to summarise the concept. 

A basic understanding of the science of the Matrix or Field was brought to light in the 1940’s by the father 

of quantum theory, Max Planck. Until then Newtonian physics had taught us that matter is solid and 

energy is a separate entity, furthermore, it was thought that space was a vacuum. Quantum energy theory 

has discovered that: 

• The world is not solid. It is actually composed of electromagnetic energy, which in turn is 

composed of various atomic and subatomic particles. Our solid world is in fact an illusion – 

underlying it is a vibrational reality. It is fact that the particles that we are comprised of vibrate 

so fast makes us appear solid. An analogy we like to use is the electrical fan: when it stops, 

you can see the gaps in between the blades, but when it spins, it appears to be one solid object. 

Similarly, as the atoms which make up our physiology vibrate, we appear to be a single entity, 

but really we are energy in motion. 

• We are linked by a web. Part of the previous scientific paradigm included the presupposition 

that up to 90 percent of our cosmos was comprised of empty space. In The Divine Matrix, 

Gregg Braden 11 points out the flaw in this logic: If it is really vacant, then there’s a big question 

that must be answered: How can the waves of energy that transmit everything from our cell- 

phone calls to the reflected bright light bringing this page’s words to your eyes travel from 

one place to another? Just as water carries ripples away from the place where a stone is tossed 

into a pond, something must exist that conveys the vibrations of life from one point to another. 

Quantum physics has taught us that what once was believed to be empty space contains the 

great net that connects everything in our universe: the Matrix (Divine). 

10 Dawson Karl and Allenby Sasha. Matrix Reimprinting using EFT. Rewrite your Past,Transform you Future. Hay House. 

2010, p. 4. 

11 Braden Gregg. The Divine Matrix. Hay House. 2007, p. 26. 

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• We send our thoughts out and they are attracted back. Our understanding of this 

unified energy field has also brought with it the knowledge that we are creators of our own 

realities, because what we focus on sends ripples into the Matrix that reflect back to us in our 

experiences. The film and book The Secret by Rhonda Byrne and works by Esther and Jerry 

Hicks such as Ask and It is Given have awakened countless people to the understanding that 

we get what we focus upon in life. Many of us have now learned that the universe responds to 

consciousness and our thoughts become our reality. Our beliefs, fears, hopes and dreams are 

all reflected back to us by the Matrix in the world that surrounds us. This ‘Law of Attraction’ 

is vibrational. We attract experiences of a vibrational frequency that is similar to our own. 

Whatever we are putting out comes back to us in a life experience that matches our own signal. 

To some people, the idea that we ‘create our own reality’ in this way has seemed offensive. 

This is because it may be seen as putting blame on those who have created a reality which 

is less than desirable. However, as we will explore later, much of what we attract is related 

to our earlier life experiences and we can change our point of attraction by directly working 

with these experiences. So we are not to blame for the reality we have created, but rather 

empowered to do something about this reality with this knowledge and understanding. 

• We can change how we experience life. As well as the unified energy field that connects all 

beings, there are also local fields around our own body which shape not only our physical form 

but also our behaviours, our customs and our habits. These fields are different from the Matrix, 

because they are local to us. But at the same time they are sub-fields that are part of the Matrix 

(Divine). This explains how we are all interconnected to each other and to the Matrix (author’s 

addition). Dawson suggests that these local fields may be the same as the subconscious mind. 

In relation to this, we would like to offer a unique view on why the Law of Attraction hasn’t appeared to 

work for some people. All the life experiences that we have had create pictures/beliefs in our local field. If 

they are positive and supportive, they help us to attract more of what we want. But if they are negative and 

destructive, we attract more of the same. Simply wishing for different experiences when we have these 

destructive pictures/beliefs in our field will not change our point of attraction. 

Changing behavioural fields. As well as shaping form, fields also shape sociological patterns, customs, 

behaviour and habits of mind. They impose rhythmic patterns on the nervous system which affect the 

sensory and motor regions of the brain, impacting behaviours. 12 Every species, including humans, has 

some sort of inherent instinctive behaviour. We learn this through morphic resonance with the members 

12 Sheldrake Rupert. The Presence of the Past, Inner Traditions. Bear and company. 2000, p. 198. 

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of our species who have gone before us. Learned behaviour is different, and becomes established through 

resonance with ourselves. Our morphic fields become habituated when we repeat certain patterns and 

behaviour. Learned behaviour and the fields that accompany it are in fact an important part of our 

socialization process. There would be no structure in our life without these fields. Every form of behaviour 

from the simple act of brushing our teeth to the more complex one of communicating with members of 

the opposite sex has its own field which has been created by our life experiences and is reinforced by self- 

resonance. 

Many of these behavioural fields may be supportive and nurturing. If, for example, your life is structured 

and organized then you have probably formed positive behavioural fields around functioning. If your life 

lacks structure then your behavioural fields may be more chaotic. And if you have very obsessive qualities 

about being ordered or are even expressing a condition such as obsessive compulsive disorder, your 

behavioural fields around being organized have become too strong. 

So how do we change our behaviour? We have all heard the saying “You can’t teach an old dog new 

tricks.” This refers to the challenging nature of changing a behavioural field. Say there is something you 

want to change about yourself and you believe this time you really can do it. You may tell everyone you 

are going to do it. You set a date, and put all your energetic resources into changing. You have a good first 

day. You feel confident and may even talk about your success. This goes on for a few days or even weeks. 

You might even think you have conquered your bad habit. If it’s eating chocolate, you might think it’s OK 

to have just a little bit now and then. If it’s exercising regularly, for example you might think it’s OK to 

skip it once or twice, isn’t it? Or it may be that someone has upset you, so you justify slipping back into 

old ways just for a while, to get over it. It’s a temporary blip anyway. You’ll be back on track tomorrow. 

Then, bang, you’ll be straight back into the old pattern and back to square one. Sound familiar? 

What is really happening here? The more you repeat something, the stronger its field becomes. So if 

you have a long-standing way of behaving, its resonance has great strength, and thus a great influence over 

you. When you decide with energy into this decision and actively make the change, you start to tune into 

a new field, an opposing field if you like. Consider this in relation to Sheldrake’s remark: ‘A field brings 

about material effects while the system is tuned into it. But if the tuning is changed then other fields come 

into play: the original field disappears.’ By tuning into this new field you feel completely different. The 

new field has its own resonance and you may feel confident, sure and able to because of this resonance. 

However, if you decide, too soon, that you have ‘cracked it’ and you believe, too early, that this new field 

is totally stable, you may slip back into your old ways with all the confidence that you have from the 

resonance of the new field. The trouble is that as soon as you do slip back you tune into the old field – that 

old field that resonates so strongly with you. 

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It is very challenging to change behaviour with willpower alone, because willpower comes from the 

conscious mind, and the conscious mind does not override the subconscious, or the fields, In fact, we 

believe that the subconscious mind and the fields may be one and the same thing. So what’s the solution? 

With Matrix Reimprinting a unique Field – Clearing Technique helps to tune into and stabilise new fields. 

Quantum Energy Coaching puts new beliefs into the subconscious/local field which move the old negative 

images of self out of the field and result in new attractor patterns, but one will still needs to take action for 

life to truly transform. 

Trauma and the Freeze Response. We frequently talk about the flight-or-fight response; the freeze 

response is mentioned rarely and understood less. In fact it is often inaccurately seen as a sign of 

weakness. One feels shamed that ‘I didn’t fight back’, ‘I should have run away’, I didn’t move, I just let it 

happen.’ Yet the freeze response is a biological state which is designed to aid our survival. Wild animals 

when surviving a chase by predators, demonstrate the freeze by dropping to the ground and then tremble 

or shake, with deep breathing and perspiring. After doing so it will get up, shake itself off and apparently 

be none the worse for its ordeal. By doing this it seems that it has released all unconscious memory of the 

attack. We are different: we don’t discharge the freeze response. In fact, if we shake after a traumatic event 

we are often encouraged to calm down, some take a drink to calm their nerves. Because of this, we store 

the trauma, instead. David Berceli 13 has developed an exercise routine called Trauma Release Exercise 

(TRE) which release the chronic tension in all the muscles concerned with tremor, which are mainly 

located in the pelvis and lower back area. Chronic contracted muscles here are one of the major causes of 

low back pain. These exercises can actually lead to relief from chronic pain. 

The understanding of the ‘quantum connection’ as in mind-body-spirit has been explored by Bruce 

Lipton 14 . As a cell biologist whilst working at Stanford, he was cloning stem cells several decades before 

this field came to the forefront of science. From his work he made some significant discoveries. He has 

shown that genetics (DNA) does not control biology in the way it has been supposed. ‘Environmental 

signals’ are primarily responsible for selecting the genes expressed by an organism. Most people 

believe that the conscious mind controls our physiology, but in fact, almost all of it is controlled by the 

subconscious mind, which has data processing power perhaps a million times greater than the conscious 

mind, and is in charge as much as 99 percent of all our activity. 

Apparently the human energy field both permeates the entire body and radiates to the outside, meters 

13 Berceli David. Trauma Release Exercises: A Revolutionary New Method for Stress/Trauma Release. BookSurge 

Publishers. 2005. 

14 Lipton Bruce. Biology of Belief – Unleashing the Power of Consciousness. Hay House Inc. 2005. 

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beyond the body’s surface. According to Lipton every cell has an antenna tuned into signals broadcast by 

the mind as well as the environment. Perceived danger causes physical bracing and psychological bracing 

so that our belief systems include patterns of protective behaviour. This can result in a state of chronic 

stress which holds the body in the ‘freeze response’ and reduces the immune response. 

Lipton shares a radically new understanding which has emerged at the cutting edge of cell science. It 

is now recognized that the environment, and more specifically, our perception (interpretation) of the 

environment, directly controls the activity of our genes. Environment controls gene activity through a 

process known as epigenetic control. This new perspective of human biology does not view the body 

as just a mechanical device, but rather incorporates the role of the mind and spirit. This breakthrough in 

biology is fundamental in all healing for it recognizes that when we change our perceptions or beliefs we 

send totally different messages to our cells and reprogram their expression. This explains how people can 

have spontaneous remissions or recover from injuries deemed to be permanent disabilities. 

It also answers my question, at least more satisfactorily than any previous explanation of the mind, body 

and spirit connection. 

David Hawkins 15 describes a map of consciousness which has been formulated through kinesiological 

testing of many thousands of people. As we look at the Map of Consciousness, it becomes clear that the 

calibrated levels correlate with specific processes of consciousness – emotions, perceptions, or attitudes, 

worldviews and spiritual beliefs. 

The critical response point in the scale of consciousness calibrates at level 200, which is the level 

associated with integrity and courage. All attitudes, thoughts feelings, associations, entities, or historical 

figures below that level of calibration make a person go weak when tested with kinesiology. Those that 

calibrate higher than 200 go strong. This is the balance point between weak and strong attractors, between 

negative and positive influence. 

At levels below 200, the primary impetus is personal survival, although at the very bottom of the scale 

– the zone of hopelessness and depression – even this motive is lacking. The higher levels of Fear and 

Anger are characterized by egocentric impulses arising from this drive for personal survival. At the level 

of Pride, the survival motive may expand to comprehend the survival of others as well. As one crosses 

the demarcation between negative and positive influence into Courage, the well-being of others becomes 

15 Hawkins DR. Power vs Force – The Hidden Determinants of Human Behavior. Hay House, USA. 2002. 

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increasingly important. By the 500 level, the happiness of others emerges as the essential motivating force. 

The high 500s are characterized by interest in spiritual awareness for both oneself and others, and by the 

600s, the good of mankind and the search for enlightenment are the primary goals. From 700 to 1,000, life 

is dedicated to the salvation of all of humanity. 

Reflection on this map can bring about a profound expansion of one’s empathy for life in its variety of 

expressions. If we examine ostensibly less ‘virtuous’ emotional attitudes, we realize they’re neither good 

nor bad; moralistic judgments are merely a function of the viewpoint from which they proceed. The 

empathy derived from contemplating this Map of Consciousness will hopefully make the path to Joy a 

shorter one. The key to Joy is unconditional kindness to all life, including one’s own, which we refer to 

as compassion. Without compassion, little if any significance is ever accomplished in human endeavour. 

We may generalize to the greater social context from individual therapies, wherein the patient can’t be 

truly cured or fundamentally healed until he invokes the power of compassion, both for himself and 

others. At that point, the healed may become a healer, a wounded healer. 

A Map of Consciousness 

God View Life View Level Log Emotion Process 

Self Is Enlightened 700-1000 Ineffable Pure Consciousness 

All-Being Perfect Peace 600 Bliss Illumination 

One Complete Joy 540 Serenity Transfiguration 

Loving Benign Love 500 Reverence Revelation 

Wise Meaningful Reason 400 Understanding Abstraction 

Merciful Harmonious Acceptance 350 Forgiveness Transcendence 

Inspiring Hopeful Willingness 310 Optimism Intention 

Enabling Satisfactory Neutrality 250 Trust Release 

Permitting Feasible Courage 200 Affirmation Empowerment 

Indifferent Demanding Pride 175 Scorn Inflation 

Vengeful Antagonistic Anger 150 Hate Aggression 

Denying Disappointing Desire 125 Craving Enslavement 

Punitive Frightening Fear 100 Anxiety Withdrawal 

Disdainful Tragic Grief 75 Regret Despondency 

Condemning Hopeless Apathy 50 Despair Abdication 

Vindictive Evil Guilt 30 Blame Destruction 

Despising Miserable Shame 20 Humiliation Elimination 

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From 200 down increased use of force. From 200 up increased use of authentic power. 

My personal journey into the healing arts, started with Physiotherapy as an eighteen year old, I practiced 

my profession with fulfilment and the enjoyment of facilitating healing for clients and then, learning for 

students at the University of Cape Town. After Lyndi’s death, I discovered the richness of forgiveness and 

conciliation and spent time on a doctoral degree studying the process that I had experienced. In 2004 I did 

a course in ‘Capacitar.’ The facilitator was also the originator and a most inspirational person by the name 

of Patricia Cane. Cane had been a nun, and has subsequently devoted her life to popular education in the 

healing Arts through Capacitar. This introduction prepared me for the cutting edge Energy work to follow. 

I have listed conventional Psychiatric and Clinical Psychology, as well as Spiral Dynamics to present an 

inclusive picture of possible modalities. However, I concur with Twerski that for PTSD and specifically 

addictions the Energy work is more powerful. In particular TRE and QEC to which considerable space 

has been devoted in this paper. 

• CONVENTIONAL MEDICAL, PSYCHIATRIC AND CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGICAL EXPERTISE 

Addiction is a treatable condition. The first phase of treatment is withdrawal from the problem substance/ 

activity. There are both physical and psychological effects that occur when substance-taking stops, 

including such physical signs as nausea and vomiting, chills and sweats, muscle cramps and aches, 

sleeplessness, shifts in heart rate, even fever. Emotional effects include depression, anxiety, irritability, 

and mood swings. Withdrawal symptoms typically last for three to five days. While they are rarely life- 

threatening, medical supervision is usually provided in residential treatment programs, and medications 

may be given to ameliorate the acute discomfort of withdrawal. 

Behavioral therapy and counseling are important elements of treatment. Cognitive behavioral therapy 

is often used to help patients identify, avoid, and cope with situations in which they are most likely to 

abuse drugs or activities. The technique of motivational interviewing is often employed to remind people 

of their values, as a way of avoiding use. Family therapy may be provided to help the patient maintain a 

supportive environment and improve family functioning. Rehabilitation programs are often needed to help 

patients regain necessary job and other skills. 

www.psychologytoday.com/basics/addiction/treatment 

• THERAPEUTIC SPIRAL MODEL 

Safety and Containment with Action Methods 

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The Therapeutic Spiral Model (TSM) was developed to address the limitations of both talk and action 

therapies (Hudgins, 2002, 2000). TSM provides helping professionals with rapid, safe, effective action 

techniques for treating trauma. This model maximizes the effectiveness of psychodrama while helping 

the clinician stabilize the client in a safe structure built on prescriptive roles for containment, restoration 

and observation. 

More about this model on 

http://www.therapeuticspiral.org 

• CAPACITAR 

Capacitar is a Spanish word meaning to empower, to encourage, to bring one another to life. The belief is 

that through nurturing, listening, and responding to the deeper wisdom of body and spirit, people can heal, 

empower, and transform themselves, their families, their communities, and their societies. 

Capacitar enables people to do this by sharing simple practices of healing, team building, and self- 

development working in a way that all are empowered to act out of their own source of strength and 

wisdom. Capacitar has programmes in 15 States in the USA and many other countries including Central 

and South America, Eastern and Southern Africa, Indonesia and East Timor. 

I did this training in 2004 and 2005. It introduced me to the philosophy and practice of Eastern healing. 

This healing model is embraced as the gardener, who tends to the needs of the garden by ensuring the 

correct amounts of water, earth, air and fire/light/energy, as opposed to the Western medical model which 

sees the healer as a mechanic who fixes what is broken. 

Capacitar consists of mind-body-spirit practices, including EFT (emotional freedom technique) Thai Chi, 

Head Holds, Visualisations, Acupressure for emotional healing, Breathing. And Meditation. 

www.capacitar.org 

• THE JOURNEY PROCESS 

Brandon Bays, the originator of The Journey, has been involved with healing practices for many years 

and suggests that; for those who are out of touch with their emotions, as most people are who suffer 

the disconnection of trauma, particularly participants who have used substances to dull their pain, fear, 

irritability and anger. This process is a very healing one - The Facilitator can take an individual and/or 

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groups through the ‘Journey Process.’ The purpose is to uncover the emotions that have trapped one in a 

modus operandi which no longer serves ones best interests. To discover the source of ‘who one was meant 

to be’ before the trauma and damage was suffered. To forgive the perpetrators of that damage – who come 

to ones consciousness during the process. Brandon Bays pioneered this Journey process as the key to 

healing. In just six-and-a-half weeks her football-size uterine tumour disappeared in 1992. This process 

has since helped thousands all over the world to access healing and forgiveness. 

www.brandonbays.com 

• TWELVE STEP PROGRAMME 

This well-known method of dealing with addiction, referred to by Twerski, suggests dependence on a 

Greater Power as used in Alcoholics Anonymous and many other Support Groups. The benefits are well 

recognised and advantaged by the weekly support of an AA meeting which encourages continued sobriety. 

In so far as the trust aspect is concerned, the relationship between addiction and spirituality is brought to 

light in the Twerski’s quote above. 

Dawkins suggests that there can be no recovery until the subject experiences an essential change of 

personality. This the basic change first manifested by AA founder Bill W. – a profound transformation 

in his total belief system, followed by a sudden leap in consciousness. Such a major metamorphosis in 

attitude was first formally studied by the American psychiatrist Harry Tiebout, who treated a hopeless 

alcoholic who was the first woman in AA. She underwent a profound change of personality to a degree 

unaccountable through any known therapeutic method. In the first of a series of papers on this observation, 

Tiebout documented that she was transformed from an angry, self-pitying, intolerant, and egocentric 

creature to a kind, gentle, forgiving and loving person. This example is important because it clearly 

demonstrates how key this element of transformation is in the recovery from any progressive or hopeless 

disease. Quantum Energy Coaching goes right to the centre of this problem in putting new beliefs about 

the self into the Subconscious field, which can result in profound transformation. 

• NONVIOLENT COMMUNICATION 

Originated by Marshall Rosenberg, a doctor of psychology in the USA, He suggests that most of us have 

been educated from birth to compete, judge, demand, and diagnose – to think and communicate in terms 

of what is ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ with people. At best, communicating and thinking this way can create 

misunderstanding and frustration. And still worse, it can lead to anger, depression, and even emotional or 

physical violence. His academy of nonviolent communication supports a process of communication which 

embraces: 

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1. The concrete actions we observe (without evaluation) that affect our well-being 

2. How we feel in relation to what we observe 

3. The needs, values, desires, etc. that create our feeling 

4. The concrete actions we request in order to enrich our lives 

Consciousness and compassion are at the heart of this process, otherwise it is just another way of 

manipulation, with smooth talk, in order to get what one wants. 

www.CNVC.org / e-mail: cnvc@CNVC.org 

• BE FREE PROGRAMME 

A Life Style programme which deals with the whole person in an ancient yet revolutionary way. The 

acronym NEWSTART is used to remember the components of ensuring that nutrition, exercise, the use 

of water inside and out, sunshine, temperance, air, rest and trust in self and the Divine are all brought to 

consciousness and assistance given to change of life style where needed. 

This programme offers hydrotherapy, massage, exercise, the use of water and sunshine, charcoal poultices 

applied to the abdomen and linseed to detoxify the system internally. South African herbs including 

Sceletium and Graffonia are used in this revolutionary way of assisting the whole process of withdrawal 

without the usual awful symptoms. Instead of replacing one addiction with another, as often happens in 

rehabilitation. Nutrition is addressed through a complete plant based diet. Spirituality is addressed, once 

the forebrain is functioning normally again, and the road to self is discovered in this new paradigm. The 

programme has demonstrated success with chronic illnesses like high blood pressure, diabetes mellitus 

and substance addictions. 

www.befree.co.za 

• MATRIX REIMPRINTING 

Matrix (We are interconnected through a universal energy field called The Field, The Divine, The Matrix). 

Matrix Reimprinting is grounded in popular psychotherapeutic theory about trauma. At the moment 

the trauma occurs, if we can’t fight or take flight, we feel isolated and realize there is no way out, we 

simply freeze. Our chemical responses protect us biochemically from being emotionally and physically 

overwhelmed, and as our consciousness freezes, part of us splits off energetically. At this point an ECHO 

(Energetically Consciousness Holograms) is created, which is held in the Matrix, in our personal field 

(subconscious). Similar events will trigger a similar response and so we suffer stress, anxiety, phobias, and 

so on, which affect our interactions in everyday life and eventually take their toll on our physiology and 

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cause disease. 

Matrix Reimprinting can release the energy of the trauma and bring about permanent healing through 

changing the pictures in the field. So if you have negative life pictures that are holding you in the past, you 

can change them for positive ones by creating new positive pictures to replace the traumatic 

www.matrixreimprinting.com 

• TRAUMA RELEASE EXERCISES 

Stress/Trauma is part of everyday life in the 21 st century. The issue is that we have not found a successful 

way to manage it. Not until the ground-breaking work of Dr David Berceli Ph.D. who, studying animals 

in the wild, realized that we have inhibited the one safety valve we need to discharge stress after it 

happens: the tremoring mechanism. 

Berceli devised a simple to learn exercise designed to invoke these natural organic tremors in muscles 

associated with curling up when we are in danger, the flexor muscles. 

By tremoring we are able to release, for the first time, the toxic build-up of stored chemicals, which make 

us stressed and eventually ill. The stored stress/trauma in the body is released relatively quickly, over 

several weeks, by doing the short exercise routine. This restores the body to its natural state of balance 

and deep relaxation. Professions involved in witnessing or dealing with shocking or stressful situations 

can benefit from using this exercise as a self-maintenance practice. When combined with psychological 

interventions, PTSD is curable. 

www.traumaprevention.com 

• QUANTUM ENERGY COACHING 

I am privileged to have learned this skill from the founder of this school of coaching. Dr Melanie Salmon 

is a Medical doctor and Gestalt Practitioner who has trained for several years in holistic energy medicine 

modalities along with Lawrence, her husband. Salmon acknowledges (verbally) that she became frustrated 

with conventional Medical management of clients with depression and addiction challenges, she searched 

for a more effective methodology and put together a process based on her findings of Heart-Math Institute, 

Psych-K, Kinesiology and Quantum Physics. 

QEC is based on the Gestalt principle of Holism. This means considering everything with equal 

importance: the individual and the context of ‘field’ that s/he is part of. 

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QEC is based on the fact that we have a natural innate ability to heal ourselves. Through our limiting 

beliefs, we create blockages, mentally and physically, which interfere with healing and a spontaneous joy 

(level 600 on the map of consciousness). If we remove the blocks, the body heals itself. 

Through a process of respectful enquiry, we learn which thoughts, attitudes and beliefs stand in the way 

of our clients’ health and happiness. The limiting beliefs are most often out of our awareness. The art of 

Gestalt enquiry is to bring them into awareness. We then have the option of whether or not to adopt a 

different set of beliefs, which we can programme into the subconscious mind, replacing the old ones. The 

process includes a technique called ‘cardiac coherence’ which ensures a resonant frequency with the brain, 

an optimal state for new learning. 

QEC teaches how to support these powerful processes so that there may be assimilation and integration. 

The ultimate aim is to empower people to begin their own healing journey. 

The aim of QEC is to be freed up mentally and physically to enjoy our lives. 

www.onevisionafrica.com 

E-mail: admin@onevisionafrica.com 

Conclusion 

This paper is in agreement with Twerski’s strong conviction: “I know without a doubt that the source of 

addiction is spiritual deficiency. Irrespective of whether we are religious or atheist, all human beings 

are spiritual by nature and spirituality is the cornerstone of our recovery.” In a search for healing 

modalities for South African Ex-combatants struggling with PTSD, I link spirituality with what Quantum 

Physics identifies as the Matrix (Divine), the energy that connects all beings in the Universe. Our personal 

energy fields both conscious and subconscious interact with the Universal energy through beliefs e.g. 

Unconditional Love, which through QEC can be programmed into the subconscious if the person is 

willing and has access to the skills. Authentic new beliefs are positive, present tense and in the first person. 

For example, ‘I am loved unconditionally and I love unconditionally.’ For many who have been abused as 

children and then again through state oppression or war – trauma has displaced the personal energy field 

or spiritual connection with others and with the Divine (Matrix) which results in the low levels of shame, 

guilt and anger demonstrated on the Map of Consciousness. 

Imagine what the effect of Quantum Energy Coaching for young and older prisoners could be in society. 

We (The Lyndi Fourie Foundation) are working on facilitating QEC for the Warders of the prison where 

Mandela was held captive for many years, Pollsmoor Prison in the Western Cape of South Africa. Our 

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vision is also to deal with the aftermath of the trauma of war during the apartheid freedom struggle, 

bringing healing from PTSD to all ex-soldiers and their families. 

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Proceedings 

Session 4 


Call for Papers Session 

• Parallel 2-1. The Humanities, Narratives, Memory, and Healing 

• Parallel 2-2. Language, Gender, and Senses 

• Parallel 2-3. Diseases, Pathology, and Social Healing



Proceedings 


The Humanities, Narratives, Memory, and Healing 

1. The Humanities and Medicine: Narratives of Illness and Suffering 

/ John Clammer (United Nations University) 

2. Understanding of the Motherland and Narrative Representation 

of Healing Shown in the Novels of Korean-Japanese writer Yang- 

Ji Lee 

/ Jung-Hwa Yun (Ewha Womans University) 

3. No One Has Ever Died of the Humanities: Healing and 

Transcendence in the Contemporary World 

/ Elizabeth S. Gunn (Morgan State University) 

4. The Role of Memory for Healing in Gloria Naylor’s The Women of 

Brewster Place 

/ Myung-joo Kim (Chungnam National University)

The Humanities and Medicine: Narratives of Illness and Suffering 

John Clammer 

United Nations University 

From many perspectives suffering is a paradigm of the human experience. This was certainly true for 

the Buddha, who saw suffering as the foundational quality of human experience (and who of course also 

offered a method for overcoming it), and in most medical sociology, which is predicated on the fact of 

suffering and could hardly exist without it. As we will see and discuss in the subsequent chapter, trauma 

(surely an extreme form of psychic and emotional suffering) is a common by-product of war, revolution 

and criminal violence. Hinted at there, but here to be considered in detail, is the relationship between 

development and suffering. While underdevelopment and its manifold deprivations can certainly be 

described as both a form of violence and of suffering (Scheper-Hughes 1993), a case can certainly also be 

made that so is development. The erosion of cultures, displacement of peoples, forced landlessness and 

urbanization, the economic and social impacts of globalization, all force upon people experiences that 

they have not chosen and certainly do not necessarily better their lot. Yet despite the ubiquity of suffering, 

it has attracted little attention from the social sciences – remarkably little and perhaps scandalously little. 

To speak of ‘poverty’ is to name an abstract category, an economic status, but does little to reveal the 

experience of deprivation that the category label conceals; to speak of ‘untouchability’ is but to name 

a social status in a hierarchical system of castes, but it does little to illuminate the daily humiliations of 

exclusion and denigration and its immense psychic effects that the status entails. Anthropology has been 

particularly remiss in this respect. For all its vaunted self-advertised expertise in ethnography, in practice 

concern for such disciplinary preoccupations as kinship, ritual, oral tradition or local level political 

organization, have led to a resounding silence on the question of the inequalities and everyday suffering 

that frequently pervade the societies that anthropologists mostly elect to study (for a notable exception see 

Kleinman, Das and Lock 1997). 

Earlier studies of, if not of suffering per se, at least of the structures of inequality that frequently give rise 

to them, have been largely swept under the anthropological carpet. Significantly studies of suffering in 

society shows that such suffering is frequently generated by the cultures of those very societies as much 

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as by “objective” forces of war, revolution or economic restructuring. Many of these studies have come 

primarily from theologians, especially those associated with liberation theology (Chopp 1986, Gutierrez 

1983), while empirical ones have come mainly from those who have followed the endemic violence 

of societies such as Guatemala, El Salvador and Argentina (for a range of examples see Feitlowitz 

1998, Grandin 2000), postcolonial theorists and students of the violence of modernity such as Enrique 

Dussel (Dussel 1995) and Zygmunt Bauman in his later writings (Bauman 2004). Implicit in many of 

these studies, although rarely stated as such, is the question of the violence of development. Certainly 

colonialism, the process of modernity and their latest manifestation as globalization, are all of them 

complicit in containing or advancing by another name the concept and practice of “development” (Sachs 

1995). The links between modernity, violence (especially structural violence) and development are clear. 

The question then becomes how to place the suffering that they generate and/or which are generated by 

the existential qualities of being human, at centre place in social analysis, so that its causes can be more 

fully understood with a view to its alleviation, and by what methodology such suffering might be grasped 

and understood. 

Development theory has a tendency not to dialogue with other sectors of social theory, and yet in empirical 

development studies issues of health are one of the central concerns. Medical sociology and medical 

anthropology while focused on cultural constructions of illness, patterns of medical care and the cultural 

management of illness through ritual and other mechanisms, in fact have at their centres the problem 

of human suffering even if they do not explicitly identify it as such. The interesting methodological 

possibility then arises of linking the discourses of development sociology and the sociology of medicine 

by way of the analysis of the causes and management of suffering. The question then is, ‘can medical 

models illuminate the problem of suffering in development contexts?’ The answer is certainly a qualified 

yes, and what follows is an exploration of this potentially creative interface and its implications for 

development discourse and practice. 

Suffering and Development 

The problem of suffering has always been central to humanity and its cultures. A great deal of what 

passes for religion is actually a wrestling with the problem of suffering, whether expressed in the idiom of 

Buddhism (suffering as arising from attachment and desire), or, as in the Judeo-Christian tradition, defined 

primarily as the problem of evil. Although perhaps posed primarily as a theological or metaphysical 

question, in practice it is the cultural negotiation of suffering that actually preoccupies most actual people 

– cultural explanations of suffering (as with Azande witchcraft), the diminution of such suffering by way 

of magic, ritual, healing techniques and medicines, the identification of specialists in the relief of suffering 

(doctors, shamans, witchdoctors, mediums), and techniques of prevention and protection. Such an 

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approach applies particularly, although not exclusively, to illness, but may in some cases also be applied 

to more “structural” forms of suffering such as war, natural disasters, the social, cultural and economic 

displacements of modernization and development (forced migration because of dam construction, loss of 

traditional livelihoods as a result of the expansion of agribusiness and plantation agriculture, loss of land 

for airport or road construction), or through the violence of colonialism and the new economic activities 

(slavery, mining, plantation labour) that it enforces on subject peoples (for a classic instance see Taussig 

1980). It is also the case that cultures themselves are a major source of suffering for their own members 

by way of patterns of social exclusion, torture and other methods of punishment, warfare, socially 

sanctioned forms of violence, neglect and educational, psychological and other performative stresses and 

expectations. Social theory is itself often complicit in this. Its recent preoccupation with the “Other” and 

with the politics of difference, extended not only to humans but to nature as well, rather than with seeking 

a philosophy of interrelationship and mutual dependency, has if anything intensified the tendency to see 

cultures as separating rather than as including, even as critical theory and postmodern deconstructionism 

have proved very efficient at critique, but very weak indeed at any positive form of reconstruction. The 

interplay of structural violence and individual suffering then becomes a key interface. Exploring this 

interplay in the context of development then becomes our objective. 

Suffering, as the Buddha clearly saw, is part of the human condition, and not just a peripheral part at 

that for much of our species. As David Morris suggests “Unlike robots or rabbits, humans possess a 

tendency towards repeated and often protracted illnesses that seem finally less a flaw in our design than a 

mysterious signature” (Morris 1998, 1). And even as the search for perfect health is a universal and ancient 

impulse, so too is the search for the perfect society, as evidenced by the perennial attraction of utopias 

throughout history. If the perfect society cannot be found, at least we seek the good society – the best that 

the imperfections and limitations of human thinking and conduct can conjure. Whatever the criticisms 

that have been made (often quite rightly) of the concept of “development”, what can certainly be said in 

its favour is that it does (or should) represent the impulse towards the alleviation of unnecessary suffering 

and the achievement of higher and potentially reachable levels of social justice. But just as illness has 

been attacked by the mechanical and science based intervention of biomedical medicine (with its many 

victories, but with the corresponding marginalization of traditional medical systems and their accumulated 

wisdom), so the problems of underdevelopment have been attacked with all the resources of a “scientific” 

economics and all the managerial paraphernalia of policy science, planning and forecasting. Both depend 

on a mechanistic model and the assumption that there are objective “problems” to be “solved” by the 

application of scientific reasoning. Neither has taken seriously the necessary convergence between on the 

one hand biology and culture and on the other between culture and development. The result has been not 

only the very incomplete treatment of illness by biomedicine and even the generation of what Ivan Illich 

has called “Iatrogenesis” – medically induced diseases - the existence of which led him to the conclusion 

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that “The medical establishment has become a major threat to health” (Illich 1990,11). Its more radical 

critics would say that the same thing is true of development. Both certainly operate in an environment of 

very incomplete knowledge, strongly political agendas often driving their allegedly scientific objectives, 

little awareness of the long term outcomes of their well-intentioned interventions and little insight into the 

deep subjectivity of the subjects of their activities – patients or those being “developed”. 

Yet for all their limitations, hidden often behind their hubris and lack of acknowledgement of the very 

failures from which as much can be learnt as from the successes, is a common concern with human 

suffering, whether expressed in illness or in the deprivations and exclusions of poverty. And they are in 

any case connected – poverty and its attendant chronic or acute malnutrition is at the basis of many if not 

most of the sicknesses experienced in the “Third World”. While culture shapes and provides (however 

imperfect) models for suffering, the afflictions that provide so much of the “signature” of being human 

are common to all of us. While politics is the cause of much suffering, suffering itself lies beyond politics 

– it is a universal language and as such the basis for a new form of philosophical anthropology – not the 

seeking for an “essence” of human nature, but a critique of the nature and sources of that suffering, a 

critique that points to such remedies as are within our power. This modesty is necessary as a clear lesson to 

be derived both from the limitations of biomedicine and of development: while both have very honourable 

intentions, both may be working with the wrong model that still controls thinking, education and practice 

in the respective fields: a biomedical one in the case of medicine and a still (despite disclaimers) largely 

economistic one in development. While both have shown remarkable successes in addressing certain 

(especially acute) crises, neither provide a clear model of health or of the good society. Both tend to 

operate with the false philosophical view that there are discrete, concrete “problems” to be “solved” 

rather than with a view of the embeddedness of their particular fields in the complex and indeterminate 

context of culture and in relation to deep change – the slow and fundamental shifts rather than the 

easily discernable and measurable “social trends”- in which global society is now and has always been 

situated. Much as we desire one, there is no “cure”, no ultimate “fix”: rather there must be a new model 

of understanding suffering as a key interface between the existential condition of being human – our 

species being to use Marx’s term – and the cultural negotiation of that suffering. While the issue certainly 

and ultimately touches upon theological questions, here it will be understood as a matter of sociology, but 

of a deep sociology that goes beyond the empiricist and mechanistic premises of so much conventional 

sociology (Clammer 2008). 

Any adequate (especially culturally adequate) conception of development must accordingly encompass 

the economic, political and natural conditions that define its parameters, and also the experience of those 

faced with the actual life-conditions of underdevelopment and the often wrenching transformations that 

accompany change, perhaps to a better state, or perhaps just to a different one. This, as we have seen in 

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chapter four, is a somewhat different notion from the recent anthropological rediscovery of “indigenous 

knowledge” (e.g. Sillitoe 1998; Sillitoe, Bicker and Pottier 2002). In that approach the ethnoscience of 

developing societies is seen as being functionally recoverable and applicable to the development process, 

in particular in such areas as agriculture and healing. It says however little or nothing about the experience 

of development or of the destruction, transformation or re-negotiation of that traditional knowledge 

under the impact of development or its larger frameworks such as globalization or colonialism. Again an 

analogy with medicine greatly helps to clarify this. David Morris discusses the case of the critic Anatole 

Broyard who, prior to his death from prostate cancer in 1990 kept a diary reflecting on his own illness and 

his relationship to the medical system that was attempting to treat him. In that diary Broyard emphasizes 

the power of narratives to make sense of experience, including in his case a not statistically uncommon, 

but personally devastating experience. As Morris summarizes it: “He emphasizes that narrative contains 

or releases therapeutic powers. A sick person, he contends, can make a story out of illness as a way 

of trying to ‘detoxify it’. In seeking to detoxify his own illness, Broyard experiments with inventing 

‘mininarratives’ and exploring the resources of metaphor: ‘I saw my illness as a visit to a disturbed 

country… I imagined it as a love affair with a demented woman who demanded things I had never 

done before’” (Morris 1998, 45). Such narratives of course do not need to be written: the oral history of 

development and maldevelopment is undoubtedly richer than the sparse written record. What is significant 

about them is that they allow the “victims” of even apparently intolerable situations to find, if not meaning, 

certainly humour, a sense of self-worth and a meeting with reality (change, struggle, deprivation) on their 

own terms rather than being the victim of determinism. As Morris summarizes the case ‘The patient,’ he 

insists, has to start by treating his own illness not as a disaster, an occasion for depression or panic, but as 

a narrative, a story. Stories are anti-bodies against illness and pain. The storyteller – according to Arthur 

W. Frank (another cancer patient who turned his experience into narrative) – is the new figure of the 

postmodern patient: no longer a victim of disease, not the object of medicine, but a person struggling to 

recover and to reshape the voice that illness so often takes from us” (Morris 1998, 48). 

Narrative, Development, Empowerment 

Narrative, then, is a form of empowerment, available alike to the very poor and to the very rich. And 

its necessity may be increasing as with the advent of the “risk society” with its unknown, diffused, 

untraceable dangers and problems, the sense of lack of control over the environment by the average 

individual increases. The disempowering consequences of development as much as of medicine then need 

to be confronted. And again we can see the parallels between development and mechanistic biomedicine: 

Postmodern illness, because of its complicated links to the culturally constructed environment, 

ultimately demands that we rethink the sources of medical knowledge. Laboratory tests and scientific 

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studies cannot reveal everything that doctors need to know. The social, cultural and personal 

dimensions of illness must be understood through other means, and one neglected but useful source 

is narrative. Narrative, we might say, constitutes a mode of understanding appropriate for situations 

too variable and too untidy for laboratory analysis. Further, storytellers thrive at the margins of 

power, casting a skeptical eye on contemporary culture, and their somewhat independent status 

permits them to offer impassioned critiques, visionary alternatives, and an outsider’s objectivity. 

Narrative may also require readers to confront self-consciously the ways in which their culture 

has taught them to think about illness, to imagine ways in which they might experience a healthier 

relation to the earth. The United Nations reports that fourteen million children die annually from 

causes related to environmental degradation. For the children, if not for ourselves, we need to hear 

from voices silenced or over-whelmed by the prevailing biomedical discourse of science, policy 

analysis, and cost containment. We need a knowledge that comes with narrative (Morris 1998, 89). 

As with medicine, so with development. Morris here however seems to be speaking mainly of the writer, 

the outsider. Here though I prefer to speak, as with the case of Anatole Broyard, of the voice of the 

individual: the average and actual person caught up in the process of forced change and of the personal 

opportunities, energies and restructuring of subjectivities that it so often entails. 

An obvious parallel between development and medicine is that both involve a sense of violence being 

done to the self – medically through illness and the sense that one’s body has been “invaded”; development 

through forced, unchosen and uncontrollable changes that come not primarily from the natural world 

(although with the human manipulation and modification of the environment, even that is becoming 

increasingly part of “culture”), but from “artificial”, that is to say humanly engineered interventions 

– dams, agribusinesses, urbanization, industrialization, new economic forms – that are the source of 

migration, land loss, famine, new illnesses, cultural loss. Furthermore, decades of “development” have 

not had an appreciable linear effect on disease eradication. Not only have “new” diseases (AIDS, SARS, 

Avian Flu for example) emerged, but older diseases such as malaria, asthma and rabies have made startling 

comebacks, in the case of malaria almost certainly as a result of climate change as well as resistance to 

the overuse of pesticides. Development has proved to be like one of those games in which no sooner is 

one peg knocked into its hole than another one pops up. In fact a general law of all policy science would 

seem to be that the application of any given policy will have unforeseen consequences not anticipated in 

the original plan and which will give rise to the need for yet further policies. Much development then, 

like much biomedicine, is devoted to the eradication of symptoms, not necessarily of the real underlying 

disease or its ultimate causal factors, which reside as much in the complex relationships between illness/ 

development and culture as they do in the biological or socio-economic environments. “The main point 

is that, although life expectancy has increased, a high-tech, energy dependent, consumer lifestyle has not 

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ought the developed world a period of unprecedented health. Historian Roy Porter rightly warns against 

the facile and long standing prejudice that equates civilization with the spread of disease (Porter 1993). 

The serious question is not about the health value of civilization but about what kind of civilized society 

we want. Along with their benefits, unfortunately, affluence, technological development, and biomedical 

progress in Western nations have accompanied the rise of new or intensified illnesses. By-products of 

development have in fact left industrial nations vulnerable to a growing list of maladies that bodes ill for 

future generations” (Morris 1998, 104). There are additionally two major consequences of this pattern 

of development – its immense negative impact on the environment (which in turn has disease generating 

implications) and its unequal impact on the so-called developing or underdeveloped nations which may 

well be the victims of global processes (global warming being just the most obvious) of which they are in 

no way the authors. 

There are some major consequences of this: the aforementioned principle that all policies contain 

unexpected outcomes; the recognition of the principles of ignorance (we are doing our best, but in an 

environment of very incomplete and constantly evolving knowledge) and of caution (when we are not 

sure, as is usually the case, of the outcome of our actions/policies, proceed with great slowness and care); 

that there are no “solutions” but two other things: temporary fixes that will dissolve in the ever dynamic 

environment in which cultures exist and indeed is a major characteristic of cultures as such, and shifts of 

perception. This latter point is important: even as the construction of a meaningful narrative of suffering 

confers meaning on illness to a patient and may indeed and often does lead to healing, even paradoxically 

in terminal cases (Levine 1987), so too the experience of the violence of development can and does lead 

to the transformation of that experience through parallel means. An equally important consequence is 

the recognition of imperfection, of what Ian Craib has called “the importance of disappointment” (Craib 

1994). Even as we have learnt that perfectionist utopias all too readily lead to totalitarianism despite 

their imaginative possibilities and stimulation (Jacoby 2005), so too in development the grasp of the fact 

both that there are no final solutions and that development is in fact an art rather than a science becomes 

apparent (Kaplan 2002). The objective problems exist, but they can be managed, if only to an imperfect 

degree, both by the techniques of development and by the subjective relationships to the processes of 

development expressed through articulated or unarticulated narrative forms. There are no conclusions, 

only temporary closures. But the process of development itself, as experienced in particular by those 

being “developed” requires listening as much as prescribing, even as it does in the context of biomedicine. 

It also requires attention to that profoundly neglected dimension of culture – the emotions. Loss, grief, 

excitement, powerlessness, empowerment, fear, apprehension – a whole geography of the emotions 

shaped by the particular culture and its specific vocabulary of feelings attend the experience of change and 

the reshaping of society around oneself (for example Clammer 2000). The external processes of so-called 

social change and the inner processes of the reshaping of subjectivities, go hand-in-hand and are in fact 

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interpenetrating and dialectical experiences. As the old “basic needs” approach to development insisted 

two decades ago, it is the quality of experience that makes any development process a success, not its 

delivery of material goods which are only a means to enhancing that quality of life, not in themselves the 

goal. 

Medical Models and Development 

Development requires a critical holism – the perception of the (often hidden) linkages of things and 

events and the awareness that the artificially separated dimensions of development – economics, gender, 

sociology, environment and so forth – in fact constitute a single interactive system often obscured by 

ideology, bad methodology or the arbitrary nature of academic disciplinary boundaries, and a constant 

vision of what “development” is ultimately for: presumably the alleviation of human suffering and the 

establishment of the conditions for the best possible quality of life for the greatest number, that quality 

of life including the enhancing of sustainable relationships with the larger biosphere on which all life 

depends. Within that understanding of development growth is secondary to other considerations and 

preeminently to social justice, a term encompassing not only equitable distribution of resources and 

rewards, gender and age equality, political access and representation, the meeting of basic human needs 

including psychic and emotional ones and freedom from torture, trafficking, forced labour and similar 

unsought impositions, but also a sense of fairness, autonomy and creativity. While the former factors can 

to a large extent be measured, the latter are, while equally important, more subjective and are expressed, 

amongst other means, in the narratives and autobiographical accounts of life experiences that peoples of 

all cultures constantly generate and tell or perform. 

Medical sociology has begun to recognize something very similar – that illness is not just an objective 

condition, but also a relationship to the world that must be made sense of in some way by the patient, and 

also by the medical practitioner whose therapeutic interventions are likely to be much less successful if the 

“story” in which the patient’s experience is embedded is not acknowledged and to some extent empathized 

with. Anthropologists working with traditional health systems which do centrally acknowledge those 

stories, and modern biomedical systems which mostly do not, yet which are rapidly encroaching on and 

eroding the traditional modes, have clearly identified the critical role that the narrative of suffering and 

the supposed causes of that suffering play, both in the ontological environment of the indigenes and in the 

success of biomedical or alternative therapies (Samson 2004). Development theorists however have not 

drawn on the vocabulary of medical sociology and medical sociologists have not for the most part related 

their work to the development context. So clearly a potentially very valuable interface exists here waiting 

to be explored. Probably the only point of contact has been with the elaboration of the notion of ‘social 

suffering’ explored by Arthur Kleinman, Veena Das and Margaret Lock and their collaborators (Kleinman, 

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Das and Lock 1997) in which a number of instances of collective suffering including the Holocaust, 

political widowhood in South Africa, torture, the Chinese cultural revolution, and the relationships 

between religions and suffering are explored. It is significant that two of the three editors of the collection 

are medical anthropologists and Kleinman in particular has devoted an entire book (Kleinman 1988) to 

the analysis of illness narratives, a study to which we will shortly return. 

In the introduction to their collection, Kleinman and his co-editors define social suffering as that 

“assemblage of human problems that have their origins and consequences in the devastating injuries 

that social forces can inflict on human experience” (ix) and point out that this suffering is a shared and 

therefore social experience and that while this can occur anywhere in practice it falls disproportunately on 

the poor and powerless. The issues that they list, including political violence, social breakdown, uprooting 

and forced migration, infectious diseases, mental health problems, have their roots in the political 

economy of globalization and underdevelopment and sometimes in the bureaucratic or well intentioned 

policies designed to alleviate the suffering that they in the end intensify. The representation and experience 

of suffering all too often become “professional” problems to be dealt with bureaucratically by “experts” 

or “agencies” and in a phrase resonant to students of development studies “Existential processes of pain, 

death, and mourning are metamorphosed by these historically shaped rationalities and technologies, 

which, again all too regularly, are inattentive to how the transformations they induce contribute to the 

suffering they seek to remedy” (x). Whether the result of violent or routine suppression, “social suffering 

ruins the collective and intersubjective connections of experience and gravely damages subjectivity” (x). 

The outcome of this is that a fresh methodology is required to address these issues of suffering: “The 

authors discuss why a language of dismay, disappointment, bereavement, and alarm that sounds not at 

all like the usual terminology of policy and programs may offer a more valid means for describing what 

is at stake in human experiences of political catastrophe and social structural violence, for professionals 

as much as for victims/perpetrators, and may also make better sense of how the clash among globalizing 

discourses and localized social realities so often ends up prolonging personal and collective tragedy” 

(xi). This is important for the exploration of the linkages between culture and development, as not only 

are cultural representations of suffering involved, but experiences of suffering are often used for current 

political purposes, to fuel hatred for example as we have seen so graphically in the Balkans, giving rise to 

yet another cycle of suffering. 

It is also important to overcome the impoverishment of theory that stems from its failure to acknowledge 

suffering and the fact that much of this suffering is a societal and cultural failure and is indeed caused 

by certain forms of culture. It is also often the case that theory itself divorces the humanistic analysis of 

meanings, feelings and subjectivities from the “hard” world of social policy, yet the whole thrust of the 

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argument here (and that of Kleinman and collaborators) is that this is an entirely unwarranted separation 

and is itself the cause of further suffering. Poverty lies at the base of a huge amount of social suffering 

and as Oscar Lewis demonstrated decades ago (without the need to commit oneself to his controversial 

“culture of poverty” thesis), poverty is also an experience, one demanding endless survival strategies, 

adaptations and daily confrontation with the starkness of an existence without safety nets or fallback 

positions. To confront both the structural and existential dimensions of poverty it is necessary to grasp 

the full dimensions of the problem and of the experience. And to do so is to render easier the expansion 

of the moral community, which in a globalized environment is to move a little closer to the ideal of a 

genuinely global or cosmopolitan sense of citizenship and solidarity (in the context of conflict situations 

see the deeply sensitive analysis in Lederach 2005). And since the ultimate end of both academic research 

and social policy should be the relief of suffering through understanding and action, a holistic grasp of 

its fullest dimensions is a prerequisite for its alleviation and response at the deepest human level. Integral 

development requires holism: the relating to one another or the synthesis of the various disparate levels 

at which social science and policy discourse operates. The key to this is culture: the mechanisms through 

which subjectivities are formed and expressed and the narratives which give shape to life experiences, 

including, perhaps especially, extreme ones, the ones that exist within the realm of suffering. 

It is for this reason that Kleinman’s attention to the interpretation of the illness experience is particularly 

significant (Kleinman 1988) and I will discuss his insights here with a view to relating them to the broader 

question of social suffering, the very problem that “development” is charged with resolving. This is 

important I think because it suggests a whole new model of approaching development, a truly humanistic 

one rooted in culture and with a convivial, equitable and sustainable culture as its final outcome. At the 

beginning of the book Kleinman relates how through two experiences with quite different patients of 

greatly differing ages, he came upon the central theme of his study – that it is possible (for the doctor, 

usually fixated on the disease) to hear from the patient about the actual experience of illness and that 

listening and witnessing can help to order that experience in ways that can have great therapeutic value 

(Kleinman 1988, xii). This, he realized pointed to a holistic model that connects body, self and society 

and that this complex set of relationships is inevitably mediated by culture even as it points to universal 

qualities of the human condition: “The study of the process by which meaning is created in illness 

brings us into the everyday reality of individuals like ourselves, who must deal with the exigent life 

circumstances created by suffering, disability, difficult loss, and the threat of death…Illness narratives 

edify us about how life problems are created, controlled, made meaningful. They also tell us about the 

way cultural values and social relationships shape how we perceive and monitor our bodies, label and 

categorize bodily symptoms, interpret complaints in the particular context of our life situation” (Kleinman 

1988: xii). We can at once see the resonances of this statement with development as it is the narratives of 

the subjects of development that take central place and as the development practitioner is recast in the role 

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of interpreter rather than as the agent of intervention in the lives of others that s/he may not and probably 

does not fully or even partially understand. But on the other hand, contact with development realities 

and the experience of real social suffering, can shock the practitioner and the planner out of their own 

culturally mediated and common-sense view of the world into a deeper grasp of the extent and structure 

of the problems that stand revealed to them – not as statistics, but experientially, as truly human life as it is 

lived by a scandalous majority of the world’s population. 

Furthermore, chronic illness, like trauma, displacement and the manifold dislocations of development, 

“becomes embodied in a particular life trajectory, environed in a concrete life world” (ibid., 31), to 

be endowed with both personal and interpersonal meanings, particularly when the ties that bind the 

individual (emotional and affective ones as much as purely social) are severed or damaged. Sociologists 

who have belatedly discovered both the body and the emotions as key elements of culture and social 

behavior will recognize that the affective relationship to events, personal and collective, is a vital aspect 

of the relationship to and management of, change. The parallels again between the medical field and 

development are close and for the development practitioner as for the doctor: “The role of the health 

professional is not so much to ferret out the innermost secrets…as it is to assist the chronically ill and 

those around them to come to terms with – that is, accept, master or change – those personal significances 

that can be shown to be operating in their lives and in their care. I take this to constitute the essence 

of what is now called empowering patients” (ibid. 43). Here we see a powerful corrective to the over 

domination of the objective, structural or technical aspects of development. The process of change, 

especially when that change involves displacement, cultural loss and the cutting of emotional bonds to 

places, kin, work, familiar nature, deeply involves the emotions and subjectivities of those effected, their 

self concepts and senses of personal worth and competency. These are questions that involve the ethics of 

development every bit as much as the technologies of development. 

But to stress only the violence of development would be a mistake. Also involved and indeed stimulated 

by change rather than by the stasis and immobility of a traditional and conservative lifestyle, is the 

possibility of human transformation and of positive social and cultural changes that lead to greater 

empowerment and freedom. Knowledge of the forces that are creating change can dramatically increase 

the strategic possibilities of the relatively powerless by understanding and thus to some extent controlling 

the mechanisms of exploitation that abound in most societies. To borrow a phrase from Habermas, 

this is the point at which the life worlds of the developee/patient intersect with the social system and a 

negotiation of meaning and strategic possibilities begins in which as far as possible the subject seeks the 

possibility of the decolonization of the personal life world by the forces that have made unacceptable 

incursions into it whether this is done by personal resistance, political means or by cultural ones, including 

recourse to myth, religion, fantasy and the freedoms of the imagination (Clammer 2008b), all mechanisms 

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against demoralization. The practical need then for the most part is not to “represent” those undergoing 

development, but to give them voice and to hear those voices when they speak. As a patient of Kleinman, 

so appositely puts it: “We have powerful techniques but no wisdom. When the techniques fail, we are left 

shipwrecked” (Kleinman 1988, 142). 

Healers and “developers” then have much in common: both are concerned with listening as well as doing, 

encouragers of the recounting of narratives of suffering and displacement to emerge, empowerers rather 

than simply technicians, and operating in a deeply and inevitably cultural context, one in which culture 

is not merely a added extra to the technical interventions of the developmentalist, but is the very medium 

in which the whole discourse is embedded and expressed. As with the chronically ill, in development 

there may be no “cures”, but rather in seeking a methodology for addressing often intractable and 

permanent conditions “The essence of that methodology is captured by the words empathetic listening, 

translation, and interpretation, which I take to be the craft of the clinician who treats illness, not just 

disease” (Kleinman 1988, 228). The necessity of ethnography, in clinical practice and in development, is 

thus paramount. Rather than the practice in many development agencies of having a token anthropologist 

to perhaps review the “cultural impact” of technical, infrastructure or economic policies that are going 

to be implemented anyway, the deep understanding and appreciation of culture becomes a prerequisite 

for any satisfactory development intervention on the one hand, and the maintaining and advancing of 

the integrity of the culture in question should be an absolutely central part of any development policy 

on the other. The necessity of discovering the models that the developee/patient are employing is vital if 

the developer/physician is to know what they want from the situation, a knowledge necessary to be able 

to help at all with the empowerment of the subjects of the development process, or what Kleinman calls 

the “remoralization” – the instilling or rekindling of hope – of those subject to wrenching changes that 

force them to redefine their own place in the world of meanings and social networks on which they have 

previously relied as their primary maps. 

Seen from this perspective, development itself becomes a meaning-centered activity in which care not 

control and empowerment not management are the central methodological elements (a perspective that 

has major implications for development education and the teaching of development studies). None of this 

is exclude the political and structural dimensions of development, but rather to infuse them with a spirit of 

cultural sensitivity and compassion that is so sadly lacking in so many mainstream development models 

and has rightly led to the attacks on the very concept of development itself led by Wolfgang Sachs and 

others. In fact such an approach to development requires not only a grasp of those political and structural 

factors as well as the cultural and moral ones – the latter which the very field of “development ethics” 

has emerged to fill (Goulet 1995) – but also of history. As the philosopher Alastair MacIntyre has wisely 

said “ In successfully identifying and understanding what someone else is doing we always move towards 

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placing a particular episode in the context of a set of narrative histories, histories both of the individuals 

concerned and of the settings in which they act and suffer” (MacIntyre 1981, 197). By so often cutting 

itself off not only from the study of culture, but also from history, postcolonial studies and theories of 

modernity and postmodernity, development studies has done itself a grave disservice, one not only of 

intellectual concern, but even more so because of its damaging effects on practice and policy in the real 

world. 

Suffering and Methodology in Development Studies 

One of the main thrusts of this volume has been that the existential issues that actually engage people 

on an everyday basis are actually what “development” is all about, and that culture, often treated as an 

abstract category with little real or concrete content or as an essentialized notion of some kind of collective 

identity, is in fact a shorthand for the strategic means by which people attempt to manage the tensions and 

problems (including illness). This has some fundamental methodological implications. As Kleinman and 

Kleinman phrase it 

Humanizing the level at which interventions are organized means focusing planning and evaluation 

on the interpersonal space of suffering, the local, ethnographic context of action. This requires not 

only engagement with what is at stake for participants in those local worlds, but bringing those local 

participants (not merely national experts) into the process of developing and assessing programs. 

Such policy-making from the ground up can only succeed, however, if these local worlds are more 

effectively projected into national and international discourses on human problems. (This may 

represent the necessary complement to the globalization of local images. 

Perhaps it should be called the global representation of local contexts.) To do so requires a 

reformulation of the indexes and instruments of policy. Those analytic tools need to authorize deeper 

depictions of the local (including how the global – e.g., displacement, markets, technology – enters 

into the local). And those methodologies of policy must engage the existential side of social life. 

How to reframe the language of policies and programs so that large-scale social forces are made to 

relate to biography and local history will require interdisciplinary engagements that bring alternative 

perspectives from the humanities, the social sciences, and the health sciences to bear on human 

problems. The goal is to reconstruct the object of inquiry and the purpose of practice (Kleinman and 

Kleinman 1997, 18-19). 

That is indeed the goal. But to reach it requires a new blend of the detailed and ethnographic analysis of 

culture and its existential dimensions, a grasp of the structural qualities of globalization, and an awareness 

of the social justice aspects of social change. 

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In illustrating this necessary triangulation the Kleinman’s analysis of the methodological characteristics of 

a humane approach to contemporary world problems continues as follows: 

Ultimately, we will have to engage the more ominous aspects of globalization, such as the 

commercialization of suffering, the commodification of experiences of atrocity and abuse, and the 

pornographic uses of degradation. Violence in the media, and its relation to violence in the streets and 

in homes, is already a subject that has attracted serious attention from communities and from scholars. 

Regarding the even more fundamental cultural question of how social experience is being transformed 

in untoward ways, the first issue would seem to be to develop historical, ethnographic, and narrative 

studies that provide a more powerful understanding of the cultural processes through which the 

global regime of disordered capitalism alters the connections between collective experience and 

subjectivity, so that moral sensibility, for example, diminishes or becomes something frighteningly 

different: promiscuous, gratuitous, unhinged from responsibility and action. There is a terrible legacy 

here that needs to be contemplated. The transformation of epochs is as much about changes in social 

experiences as shifts in social structures and cultural representations; indeed, the three sites of social 

transformation are inseparable. Out of their triangulation, subjectivity too transmutes (Kleinman and 

Kleinman 1997, 19). 

This viewpoint relates not only to the understanding of past and present development contexts, but also 

to potential future ones, especially where suffering is likely to be involved and which can be anticipated: 

“Well-intentioned intervention after the fact is no substitute for strong action to prevent atrocities from 

arising…Perhaps it is time to admit that atrocity in the past does not discourage but in fact invites 

atrocity in the future. From the scandalous carnage of World War 1 to the innumerable murders of the 

Leninist and Stalinist regimes, the countless victims of the Holocaust (condensed into a single abstract 

figure, six million) to the bloody outrages in Bosnia and Rwanda, our age of atrocity slips into and out of 

consciousness with the casual appeal of a transient news item. We fail to decipher the clues that would 

rouse us to an alarmed vision” (Langer 1997, 54, 59). 

Widening the Moral Community 

Suffering, while individually felt in the pain of each discrete individual, is also then a social phenomenon 

– it has its roots all too often in the unnecessary infliction of that pain by social, cultural, economic 

and political mechanisms that could well be otherwise. Mourning can be for individual loss, but also 

for collective trauma – ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, the “disappearances” of the years of military 

dictatorship in Argentina, inter-communal atrocities in Rwanda, vicious civil war in Sierra Leone, the 

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deep violence of colonialism in the Belgian Congo, the experience of hunger in the Ethiopian famine or 

the post-cyclone devastation in Burma made immeasurably worse by the incompetence and intransigence 

of the desperately corrupt military regime there. The recognition of this collective dimension has some 

fundamental moral, political and methodological implications. The key to these is the recognition that 

we are all complicit in one way or another – by our silences and our ignoring or turning away from these 

glaring problems and the obscene poverty of a vast mass of the human family, by allowing the activities 

of our “democratically” elected governments and their actual secrecies, corruption and quiet violations of 

human rights in far off places in the interests of business or “national security”, through our consumption 

habits which allow us to benefit, perhaps unconsciously in the objectively negative and destructive 

dimensions of globalization and neo-imperialism, through the ways in which the media romanticizes 

poverty and commodifies other people’s experience of starvation, abuse or atrocity. Methodologically we 

have to grasp the extent to which our “scientific” and managerial approaches to development diminish 

the full dimensions of the experience of suffering, and to allow back into analysis a significantly cultural 

(including religious) dimension. As Vera Schwartz puts it “The Jewish view of suffering insists that pain 

can teach us something in proportion to our willingness to question the limits of human knowledge itself. 

Simply put, suffering both humbles us and clarifies our minds” (Schwartz 1997, 127). Suffering is perhaps 

the primary challenge to human knowledge, yet an epistemology of pain hardly exists (and interestingly 

the sketches for such a project that do, exist mainly in the realms of literature and art, not in the analyses 

of the social sciences – for example Sebald 2003). 

The rather recently discovered field of the sociology of the body for example, has yet to fully assimilate 

the fact that suffering is, often quite literally, inscribed on the body - through torture, illness, malnutrition, 

disfigurements caused by constant hard labor – and that such disfigurement is itself a cause of social 

stigma, loss of confidence and withdrawal. Anthropology too is complicit here: despite the critiquing of 

the moral and other consequences of cultural relativism, especially from the view point of the formerly 

colonized “this rethinking has not yet eroded a tendency, registered in many of the social sciences but 

perhaps particularly in anthropology, to confuse structural violence with cultural difference. Many are 

the ethnographies in which poverty and inequality are conflated with ‘otherness’” (Farmer 1997, 277). 

The notion of culture then is very loaded. Arguments for “multiculturalism” or the rights and dignities of 

particular communities, “tribes” or “races”, or even, as Amartya Sen has pointed out, of religions (Sen 

2007), can easily become arguments for exclusion, stigmatizing or persecution, of special privileges for 

some and the denial of those same resources or rights to others. It is not a neutral term and is embedded 

in one dimension in the particular life worlds and experiences of specific communities, their historical 

experiences, local ecologies and social arrangements, and in another in the larger politics of an unevenly 

globalized world, very much including its cultural politics which contains inevitably ideas and prejudices 

about ethnicity, gender, religion, class and the other classical dimensions of social inequality together with 

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the agency of actors – individuals on the one hand negotiating their identities in a shifting socio-economic 

environment, and states and multinational actors (including, very centrally, business) with their own 

agendas of power and profit on the other. The problem of suffering focuses these issues like perhaps no 

other, and for this reason must be located at the core of debates about globalization and about the nature (and 

responsibilities) of culture. 

So do too they raise questions about “professional” involvement in development. In much the same way 

that Ivan Illich has argued that the medical profession has become a major threat to health, so it might 

be argued that a culturally ill-informed development practice is a threat not only to health, but also to 

lifestyles, memories, rootedness and a strong sense of the self. Speaking of medically induced diseases 

Illich proposes that “My argument is that the layman and not the physician has the potential perspective 

and effective power to stop the current iatrogenic epidemic” (Illich 1990, 12) and to reverse the counter- 

productivity of so much “development” when measured against the ideals of human happiness (c.f. 

McKibben 2007). As he continues: “A professional and physician based health-care system that has grown 

beyond critical bounds is sickening for three reasons: it must produce clinical damage that outweighs its 

potential benefits; it cannot but enhance even as it obscures the political conditions that render society 

unhealthy; and it tends to mystify and to expropriate the power of the individual to heal himself and to 

shape his or her environment. The medical and paramedical monopoly over hygienic methodology and 

technology is a glaring example of the political use of scientific achievement to strengthen industrial rather 

that personal growth” (Illich 1990, 16). Even as the proportion of doctors, clinical tools and hospital beds 

has not significantly effected the emergence of disease patterns – morbidity is redefined but not reduced, 

so too the vast development and aid budgets at the disposal of development “experts” has not significantly 

reduced the incidence of poverty or produced notable progress in the achievement of the laudable UN 

Millenium Goals. Large systems and their staffing with “experts” in fact can and does easily produce what 

Illich terms “social iatrogenesis”: 

I will speak of ‘social iatrogenesis,’ a term designating all impairments to health that are precisely 

due to those socio-economic transformations which have made attractive, possible, or necessary by 

the institutional shape health care has taken. Social iatrogenesis designates a category of aetiology 

that encompasses many forms. It obtains when medical bureaucracy creates ill health by generating 

increasing stress, by multiplying disabling dependence, by generating new painful needs, by 

lowering the levels of tolerance for discomfort or pain, by reducing the leeway that people are 

wont to concede to an individual when he suffers, and by abolishing even the right to self-care. 

Social iatrogenesis is at work when health care is turned into a standardized item, a staple; when 

all suffering is ‘hospitalized’ and when homes become inhospitable to birth, sickness and death; 

when the language in which people could experience their bodies is turned into a bureaucratic 

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gobbledegook; or when suffering, mourning, and healing outside the patient role are labelled a 

form of deviance (Illich1990, 49). 

As with medicine, so also with development that is not rooted in culture and genuine human needs. 

As Illich rightly notes, many of the factors that influence human life and satisfaction are beyond the 

intervention of experts anyway. Supplementary to his notion of social iatrogenesis, he also proposes the 

concept of “cultural iatrogenesis”: “It sets in when the medical enterprise saps the will of people to suffer 

their reality. It is a symptom of such iatrogenesis that the term ‘suffering’ has become almost useless 

for designating a realistic human response because it evokes superstition, sado-masochism, or the rich 

man’s condescension to the lot of the poor. Professionally organized medicine has come to function as 

a domineering moral enterprise that advertises industrial expansion as a war against all suffering. It has 

thereby undermined the ability of individuals to face their reality, to express their own values, and to 

accept inevitable and often irremediable pain and impairment, decline and death” (Illich 1990, 133) – the 

“importance of disappointment” mentioned above. This is not to paint a gloomy picture of human life as 

nasty, brutish and short: it is to indicate that the barriers against it being nice, humane and long are often 

generated not by factors beyond human and social control, but by the very interventions that those same 

humans and societies, often in the name of progress, development, growth or science, impose on each 

other. 

It is what Illich calls the “specific counter productivity” of too much or inappropriate institutional 

intervention that in his view brings about these effects and results not in the alleviation of poverty, but 

rather its modernization. “The persons most hurt by counterproductive institutionalization are usually not 

the poorest in monetary terms. The typical victims of the depersonalization of values are the powerless 

in a milieu made for the industrially enriched. Among the powerless may be people who are relatively 

affluent within their society or who are inmates of benevolent total institutions. Disabling dependence 

reduces them to modernized poverty. Policies meant to remedy the new sense of privation will not only 

be futile but will aggravate the damage. By promising more staples rather than protecting autonomy, they 

will intensify disabling dependence” (Illich 1990, 220-1). Illich, unlike Kleinman and his collaborators, 

specifically includes development agencies, welfare, aid, and international relief efforts amongst these 

counterproductive institutions. While this may be a difficult position to defend in contexts of humanitarian 

emergencies, in broader structural terms we see here a convergence between the arguments against over 

institutionalized medicine and over institutionalized top-down development. The recovery of health and 

the recovery of ecological sanity and just development are parallel and interlinked processes. Given that 

a huge amount of suffering is man-made, the tools to counter this are at hand, but they do not reside by 

any means exclusively in technical and managerial methods, but in culture, values, spirituality, resistance, 

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imagination and the ability to draw on experience in order to design a more desirable, rational, attractive 

and ecologically supportable future. If many of our current problems are the side effects of strategies that 

were designed to alleviate these very problems, then it is to this dysfunctionality of our planning processes 

that critical attention must be directed. And of course as we have suggested, culture is implicate in this 

too – not only as a source of solutions, but often as the source of the pain. But if it is our civilization that 

has brought us to this impasse, then it is our civilization that must change. This is where the role of the 

cultural critic takes a central place and not a subservient role to that of the economist. If what lies after 

“development” is the good life, then that life must be defined in cultural terms, but in full awareness of 

the fact that culture is not necessarily neutral in the generation of human suffering. The goal then becomes 

to nurture a culture that is genuinely humane, enriching and ecological and which builds and sustains the 

human relationships and economic patterns that contribute to the creation of the communities in which the 

best flowering of the human spirit can flourish without injustice and in full realization of our position as 

but one species in an intricate and marvelous total biosphere. 

References 

Bauman, Zygmunt (2004) Wasted Lives: Modernity and its Outcasts. Cambridge: Polity Press. 

Chopp, Rebecca (1982) The Praxis of Suffering. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. 

Clammer, John (2000) “Received Dreams: Consumer Capitalism, Social Process and the Management of 

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No One Has Ever Died of the Humanities: 

Healing and Transcendence in the Contemporary World 

Elizabeth S. Gunn 

Morgan State University 

This is not a conventional piece of liberal arts writing. It is academic – that is, scholarly in its seeking 

– finding connections among a range of texts: philosophical, historical, critical, psycholinguistic, and 

spiritual. 1 However it does not offer a critical or literary analysis of anything. I do not claim to have written 

a definitive essay on any aspect of these fields of study. Nor do I claim to have written anything definitive 

about the authors or about the specific texts under review here. Rather, I am hoping to trace meaningful 

and healing links among them. Yet this is not a prescriptive piece, but more of a contemplative, mindful 

reading of the place of the humanities as a healing instrument in our contemporary world. As a matter of 

course, I believe and will argue that specific texts written by Victor E. Frankl, Michel Foucault, and Pema 

Chödrön speak to the healing nature of the humanities in the present-day global context. It is through 

humanistic thought in its broadest and most inclusive definition that I read Man’s Search for Meaning 

(Frankl), Society Must Be Defended (Foucault), and Practicing Peace in Times of War (Chödrön). Before 

situating these texts in their contemporary humanistic context, it is critical to note that I speak from a 

position of western privilege. 

I am from the United States of America, and thus can only speak critically from this location. I wish to 

defer to colleagues, and indeed to entire populations, wherever and whenever appropriate and necessary. 

Mine is one opinion among thousands, millions. It is important to add, however, that being charged with 

unearned privilege, I believe one must use it toward the better. To do so, one must discover what “better” 

1 The word “spiritual” fell out of common usage during the year 400AD. It has seen a resurgence in the Twentieth- and 

Twenty-First Centuries. It is often thought of now as oppositional to the material rather than to the religious. I do not argue 

that spirituality and transcendence are synonyms, rather that they are colleagues – the latter is not dependent on the 

former for the healing that I find in the texts under study here (Kurtz, 26). Chögyam Trungpa dedicates an entire volume, 

Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, to the idea that spirituality is often understood in the west as accruable. Trungpa 

reads language as ego driven “I” versus solid object in which we fall into the illusion of separateness. 

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means to others. Then one must become an ally. I adhere to Jonathon Glover’s words in Humanity: A 

Moral History of the Twentieth Century: “Some atrocities are not past but present. Those of us who are 

lucky in living elsewhere should not be inhibited from thinking about them. Journalists risk their lives 

to let us know the terrible things that are being done while we live in relative security. Victims painfully 

narrate their experiences so that we may understand. Often they do this in the belief that, if the world 

hears, there will be an outcry and something will be done…. Those of us who think about these episodes 

[Bosnia, Rwanda] at a distance will sometimes get things wrong. And of course, understanding is not 

enough to stop the horrors. But the alternative, the passive response, helps them keep going” (5). In other 

words, my race and nationality predispose me to cultural incompetence – I teach at a Historically Black 

University in Baltimore, Maryland, where my gracious students are quick to remind me of this every day 

– and taking advantage of one’s privilege happens so subtly, that I would be remiss not to offer this in the 

way of an introduction. Therefore, I am grateful for the opportunity to include my opinion among many 

voices working toward healing through the Humanities in the Twenty-First Century. I am grateful for the 

opportunity to speak and more importantly, to listen. 

If we take a broad view of the Humanities in the contemporary world, some might say we are not 

doing so well. In a 2010 article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Frank Donoghue reminds us that 

the Academy is not synonymous with the Humanities. Whereas the Academy is thriving in the areas 

of corporate sponsored sciences, technology, engineering, and mathematics, the humanities are not. 

Donoghue’s article titled, “Can the Humanities Survive the 21 st Century?” reviews the jaw-dropping 

attrition rate of our field from the mid 1800’s until today: “between 1915 and 1995, the total number of 

faculty jobs in the humanities declined by 41 percent, while the total number of faculty jobs in the social 

sciences increase by 222 percent” (3). The United States passed a federal act into law in 1980 which 

“stipulated that federally financed research done by faculty members that results in patents belongs 

not to the professors but to the universities that employ them,” meaning, that universities have become 

investment opportunities for big business. The Bayh Dole Act also “inaugurated the era of earmarked 

corporate donations […]. The shift in the material base of the university leaves the humanities out in the 

cold” (4-5). If, as Donoghue argues, the Humanities survive the Twenty-First Century, they will do so with 

an exodus from the Academy into literary circles, philosophical publications, and the like. I believe this 

has already begun to happen, and our task is to be good stewards of our field…or fields (in the spirit of 

pluralism). While studying the Humanities will not necessarily make one moral 2 – nor should it – I believe 

2 In When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times, Pema Chödrön offers the practice of bodhisattva training 

which include meditation practice, tonglen, and six paramitas which are the six activities of the servants of peace. She 

writes, “the paramitas are also called transcendent actions because they are based on going beyond the conventional notions 

of virtue and nonvirtue. They train us in stepping beyond the limitations of dualistic views altogether and develop 

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the strength lies in leading one toward ethics and awe. This is my aim in contributing to the conversation 

set forth by the 2 nd Annual World Humanities Forum. 

No one ever died of the Humanities, so they say. However, the Humanities, as concerned with the human 

condition, have long tried to reveal and understand fears, desires, motivations, solitude and agony in 

human depths. 3 More specifically, in the Modern and Post-Modern eras, the Humanities have sought to 

understand what happens when nation-states decide what is good and evil, why certain bodies live and 

other bodies die. Societal extractions of the “other” have been a theme of study throughout the history 

of the Humanities, and may be studied retroactively, presently, and through futurity. The Humanities 

are intrinsically relevant to understanding the human condition in all of its innumerable manifestations 

because, transculturally, the “other” continues to be the receptacle of violence and suffering. The 

Humanities work to reveal and promote agency to those people, histories, and cultures that have been 

sublimated. 

Modernism has argued that “all that is solid melts into air,” though rarely has the ephemeral been 

associated with the practice of systematic patience engendered by narratives of loving kindness as 

voiced in exploratory branches of psychoanalytic texts and in western philosophical texts concerned with 

contemporary eastern thought. The Modern (modernism, modernity, and modernization), as a normative, 

western text, may be loosely defined as a process of systematic self-consciousness of its own becoming. 

Prevalent in theories on the Modern are basic assumptions that it is inescapable and that no system lays 

beyond its reach. Therefore, privileged notions of modernism are tautologies, only resisted by revealing 

them as such. Modernist theories of resistance have challenged the monolithic tautology, though others 

have responded by asking if alternative modernisms are still caught up in old spaces of asking and/or 

declaring agency? How to move past narratives of hegemony and revolution? If paternalistic modern 

a flexible mind. One of the main challenges of this camp would be to avoid becoming moralistic. With people coming 

from all nations, there would be many conflicting opinions about what was ethical and what was unethical, about what 

was helpful and what was not. Very soon we’d probably need to request the most tamed and awakened people there to 

lead a course on flexibility and humor!” (126). 

3 In Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, he writes, “One may…hope to be freed from a part of one’s own 

sufferings by influencing the instinctual impulses. This type of defense against suffering is no longer brought to bear on 

the sensory apparatus; it seeks to master the internal sources of our needs. The extreme form of this is brought about by 

killing off the instincts, as is prescribed by the worldly wisdom of the East […]. If he succeeds, then the subject has, it is 

true, given up all other activities as well – he has sacrificed his life; and, by another path, he has once more only achieved 

the happiness and quietness” (29). I quote Freud’s theory psychoanalytic theory on the inverse of the “pleasure principle,” 

that is the “avoidance of suffering principle,” in its close relationship to what Frankl, Foucault, and Chödrön provoke. 

What they provoke is a narrative on humanity. Whereas for Chödrön practicing peace in times of war starts by embracing 

groundlessness, for Freud it is about gaining pleasure and avoiding suffering. For Freud, suffering might be the delay of 

the pleasure principle, the deference of desire, or the avoidance of death. 

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narratives have been the guiding thought throughout the last five hundred western years, and its solidity 

ephemeral, that is always turning back in on itself for reification, then how to speak beyond the text of 

modern subjectivity? Victor Frankl, Michele Foucault, and Pema Chödrön interact with subjectivity 

beyond the modern through Transcendence. Through this practice in each his or her own way, these 

authors engage with subjectivity not as something enraptured in a modernist struggle; rather, these 

authors speak to a level of intuitive knowledge that transcends time and space. It is a way to side step 

the beleaguered modern: through its narratives on liberation, intuition, patience, and desire, ecstasy and 

enlightenment. 

Modernity is belayed by thick, cumbersome, instructive notions of progress and war. The ability to reveal 

the hegemonic and dominant structures at work behind a regulatory system are at once empowering and 

dismantling. In Foucault’s, Society Must Be Defended, the author moves from the fatalist conscription of a 

subjugated people, that is of an underprivileged majority, into a revelatory space in which he finds a power 

outside the relational (250). 

Humanistic thinkers such as Victor Frankl, Michele Foucault, and Pema Chödrön, among others, interact 

with subjectivity beyond the modern through Transcendence. In The Will to Meaning: Foundations 

and Applications of Logotherapy, Frankl speaks from psychoanalytic tradition of the Symbolic though 

wrestled free from Freudian and Lacanian determinism. In Foucault’s, Society Must Be Defended, 

the author moves from the fatalist conscription of a subjugated people, which is of an underprivileged 

majority, into a revelatory space in which he finds a power outside the relational. Similarly, contemporary 

western appropriations of Buddhism as elucidated by Chödrön in Practicing Peace in the Time of War, 

transcend time with a narrative of loving kindness. Loving kindness, intuition, or noble knowing seeks to 

understand thought as language – not pre-discursive, 4 but rather that through which through suffering and 

4 Judith Butler’s revisions of Lvi-Strauss, Freud, and Lacan reveal that any cultural or psycho-sexual narrative of original- 

Judith Butler’s revisions of Lvi-Strauss, Freud, and Lacan reveal that any cultural or psycho-sexual narrative of originality 

and/or sexual binaries is false. Queer Theory has done much to uncover the dangerous pretenses of origins. Elizabeth 

Wright summarizes the Lacanian mirror stage as such: “The child looks in the mirror and is delighted by several qualities 

of its own image simultaneously […] it now gains a sense of wholeness, an ideal completeness, and this is all without 

effort. This gratifying experience of a mirror-image is a metaphorical parallel of an unbroken union between inner and 

outer, a perfect control that assures immediate satisfaction of desire. Lacan calls this pre-linguistic, pre-oedipal stage the 

realm of the ‘Imaginary.’ He takes the infant to be modeling himself on the mother […] but this model is an illusion, 

since the mother is assumed, like the mirror-image […] to respond to every impulse […]. First, the child imagines itself 

to be the desire of the mother in a sense that it is all the mother desires […]. The child wants to become all that would 

satisfy the mother’s lack, in psychoanalytical terms becoming the ‘phallus’ for the mother, all that would complete her 

desire. The mother herself has suffered deprivation, by division from her own mother, and by denial of her own father, 

and can thus be drawn into a collusion with the child that it will assuage the lingering pain of those separations […]. The 

absence of a gap for the child between a concept and its application is a proof of the concept’s inadequacy; the ego-concept 

has never been tested in use. The gap appears with the initiation of the child into the order of language, what Lacan 

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meaning may be calmly examined. Through this practice in each his or her own way, these authors engage 

with subjectivity – and the other – at the level of intuitive knowledge that transcends time and space. 

Thinkers have been talking about healing for millennia. It might seem a bit more critical now in the epoch 

of the aforementioned “stem” fields. What role do the Humanities play? Perhaps we are the only ones who 

can say no one has ever died of what we do. In fact, the Humanities often offer a way to transcend through 

liberation, intuition, patience, and desire, awe, ecstasy, wonderment, and enlightenment. 

Table 1: From Whence Transcendence May Come 5 

Michel Foucault Victor Frankl Pema Chödron 

Defend Society From: 

Colonization and Effacement 

Society Finds Logos or Spirit 

Meaning In: 

Art, Choice, Change, and 

Transcendence 

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Society Transcends Through: 

Finding the Invisible 

Awareness 

Pausing 

Staying with Groundlessness 

I will begin with psychoanalytic literary analysis’ contribution on desire as that, which is transformative 

and transcendent, that which touches the ecstatic. In The Will to Meaning: Foundations and Applications 

of Logotherapy, Frankl speaks from a psychoanalytic tradition of the Symbolic though wrestled free from 

Freudian and Lacanian determinism. Frankl’s psychoanalytic theory of subjectivity centers “logos,” that 

is on meaning as spirit, “without any religious connotation” (18). Here transcendence is the engendered 

desire to find meaning in suffering. For Frankl, the modern subject is not stolen away through a death 

drive or a pleasure principle; rather, for Frankl, logotherapy as transcendence provides the subject a 

catalyst from “fear that meaning and purpose might be imposed upon ourselves” and toward the tension 

aroused by transcendence, spirit, or meaning-fulfillment. 

calls the ‘Symbolic Order.’ The structures of language are marked with societal imperatives – the Father’s rules, laws 

and definitions, among which are those of ‘child’ and ‘mother’” (100-1). In Gender Trouble, Butler argues that the Law 

does not make the divide (binaries); rather, the divide or sex/gender system makes and maintains the Law. Moreover, no 

pre-linguistic, pre-discursive moment exists before the Law. In other words, what is outside Lacan’s Symbolic, supposedly 

outside of the Law of the Father, is what also constitutes it but cannot be touched because it is outside the realm of 

language. Butler follows this thread by revealing how the Symbolic and the Real are conflated in psychoanalysis and this 

conflation maintains dominant narratives of sex, gender, sexuality, and kinship: “by instituting the Symbolic as invariably 

phantasmatic, the ‘invariably’ wanders into an ‘inevitably,’ generating a description of sexuality in terms that promote 

cultural stasis as a result” (71). In Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex, she continues to explain that the 

performance of any notion of origin is not something necessary performed by the individual, but a ritualized, almost invisible 

expectation reiterated and reiterated by hegemony. 

5 This is a very brief sketch of my mindful reading of these authors.

Victor Frankl wrestles with the historiography of psychology, and argues for a way beyond what could 

be called the social and the modern. He does so through what he calls the “noetic phenomena, or the 

noological dimension – in contradistinction to the biological and psychological ones” (17). Frankl terms 

this the spiritual condition, and he is quick to term this in the anthropological rather than the theological 

sense. For Frankl, logos means spirit, “without any primary religious connotations” (18). In keeping with 

modernism, Frankl’s theory at first is about consciousness or awareness which he extrapolates to societal 

systems. He is adamant about moving beyond the modern through what he terms the “capacity of self- 

transcendence” (18). For Fankl, the moment of transcendence rests with choice. 

What if we think of modernity as pathology? Then, according to Frankl, “we cannot break from the 

tautology of the modern as long as we confine ourselves to the psychological dimension” (28). Indeed, 

“pathology is ambiguous in that, in a given case, we still have to search for the logos of pathos, for the 

meaning of suffering” (28). For Frankl, the pleasure principle is “self defeating [in that] the more one aims 

at pleasure, the more his aim is missed. In other words, the very ‘pursuit of happiness’ is what thwarts it’” 

(33). Therefore, the purpose is creativity, not pleasure. In other words, pleasure is the effect of meaning 

fulfillment. “Only if one’s original concern with meaning fulfillment is frustrated is one either content 

with power or intent on pleasure” (35). In terms of modernity, therefore, society geared toward pleasure 

fulfillment through acquisition of power is doomed. According to Frankl, “the collective obsessive fear 

that meaning and purpose might be imposed upon ourselves has resulted in an idiosyncrasy against 

ideals and values” (47). For Frankl, tension “is not anything to avow unconditionally. A sound amount of 

tension, such as that tension which is aroused by a meaning to fulfill, is inherent in being human and is 

indispensable for mental well-being” (48). According to Frankl, the collective consciousness brings forth 

the imagined community (as in Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities) through symbolic, through 

the language of responsibility. For Frankl, “freedom threatens to degenerate into mere arbitrariness unless 

it is lived in terms of reasonableness” (49). 

Frankl writes, “according to one definition, meanings and values are nothing but reaction formations 

and defense mechanisms. As for myself, I would not be willing to live for the sake of my reaction 

formations, even less to die for the sake of my defense mechanisms” (54). For Frankl, meaning, logos, 

“is characteristic constituent of human existence that it transcends itself, it reaches for something other 

than itself” (55). Therefore, the modern reaches beyond the confines of argument of old and new. It resists 

universality for specificity in that meaning may be created systemically and resisted systemically and 

individually. Underlying his theory rooted in a psychoanalytic, modernist tradition, Frankl does account 

for the social, all the while believing in transcendence. 

Modernity is routinely defined in terms of the western industrial revolution, what is termed “scientific 

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discovery and progress,” and the new middle classes associated with mass production and capitalism. 

It is “the cult of reason, and the ideal of freedom within the framework of an abstract humanism…the 

orientation toward pragmatism and the cult of action and success” (Calinescu 41). This occurs roughly 

from the very late 1700’s to the mid 1800’s. The other side of modernity, modernism, is often considered 

hostile to all that modernity encompasses. Modernism is in its most general definition an aesthetic 

movement or movements associated with the avant-gardes. Of course, the avant-gardes in part maintain or 

stem from the romantic notion of “anti-bourgeois attitudes” (42). In Western terms for example, Dadaism 6 

and surrealism, 7 among other artistic expressions, constitute modernism. In short, modernism is a move 

toward a purity of a system, namely language. 8 

Foucault’s lectures at the College of France center on the way in which the subject becomes a subject, 

or the ways in which they are subjugated by power. He holds that power relations are perhaps best 

understood as forces established through real war or through peace which in turn is another manifestation 

of war. He traces the domination of others through power by arguing that power circulates as evidenced 

by redistributions of power and the processes of subjugation from the Roman Empire to the 18 th century 

in England and France. History reflected laws which reflected the sovereign power of the king. Citing 16 th 

and 17 th century England and French historiographies, Foucault reads the interjection of discourses on 

race as the jostling of monarchical sovereignty and supposed natural rights. 

Thus emerges the discourse of race struggle in which one race will claim its natural, biological heritage to 

create discourse that moves from the desire to defend a kingdom against the common enemy to one that 

seeks to defend the society itself against the “other race, the subrace” (61). Empires and kingdoms give 

way to societies and nation states as the nobility wrestles with the monarchy to recuperate diminishing 

power. Foucault continues with the English history of the Normans and Saxons, the Levellers and the 

Diggers, to suggest that the ensuing war and struggle for right (the struggle not to be dominated) was the 

first to introduce a binary societal schema “with national phenomena such as language, country of origin, 

ancestral customs, the density of common past, the existence of archaic right, and the rediscovery of old 

laws” (110). 

6 Dadaism is traditionally defined defi ned as a sort of anti-art movement begun in Zurich in 1916. Though Dadaism by its defi defininition rejects definitions, its purpose was to create a non art, or at least an absence of meaning. Dada deliberately defies 

reason, and the viewer attributes meaning. 

7 Surrealism is traditionally associated with Andr Andr Breton’s 1924 “The Surrealist Manifesto” in which he describes the ten- tenants 

of surrealism as a combination of the conscious and unconscious in defiance of conventional reason. Of course, the 

surrealist movement is often associated with Freud in that dream imagery was brought forth onto the canvas or page. 

8 I take the majority of this information on modernity and modernism from Matei Calinescu’s Five Faces of Modernity: 

Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernsim. Durham: Duke UP, 1987. 

432

Foucault spends some time on Boulainvilliers, whose task it is to present Louis XIV’s successor with a 

sort of annotated version of a “general study of the situation of the economy, institutions, and customs of 

France” (127). The report was compiled by nobility, a group to which Boulainvilliers pertains. Thus, as 

the nobility struggles to regain from the king its dwindling power, the nobility is charged with creating a 

state of affairs; subsequently, the prince is bound to the compilation of knowledge of the nobility. They 

are locked in circular power relation which, according to Foucault, eventually shifts in that someone 

other than the king begins to create historiography. Historical knowledge is no longer the reification of 

monarchical sovereignty, rather, “the subject who speaks in history is therefore displaced, but the subject 

of history is also displaced in the sense that the very object of the narrative is modified…the modification 

of the first, earlier or deeper element now allows rights, institutions, the monarchy, and even the land itself 

to be defined in relation to this new subject” (133-4). The new subject is “society,” that is, the “nation.” 

The nation begins to speak, but it is already a plurality of groups and voices. Thus, “this is no longer 

the glorious history of the power; it is the history of the lower depths, its wickedness, and its betrayals” 

(135). Power moves from that of telling the history of divine/mythological/monarchical wars to that of 

negotiating the institution of “rights:” “history gave us the idea that we are at war; and we wage war 

through history” (172). It is the history of the struggle for knowledge in that knowledge is power. It is the 

history of revolution. Society, that is the collective potential for enlightenment, must be defended. 

Similarly, contemporary western appropriations of traditional eastern thought, namely of Buddhism as 

elucidated by Chödrön, transcend time with a narrative of loving kindness. Loving kindness, intuition, or 

noble knowing may be achieved by seeking to understand thought as language – not pre-discursive, but 

rather that through which suffering and meaning may be calmly examined. In Taking The Leap: Freeing 

Ourselves from Old Habits and Fears, Chödrön centers her discourse on shenpa, the concept that tries to 

force the solid from that which is ephemeral. Shenpa may be broadly defined as attachment, that which 

we hold onto emotionally, interpersonally, socially, nationally and internationally. In other words, it is how 

something, anything – person, place, or thing – hooks us. This happens at every level: “Maybe we come 

home from work and we’re tired and we just want some peace; but at home all hell is breaking loose for 

one reason or another, and so we start yelling at people. What is our motivation? We want some happiness 

and ease and peace, but what we do is get everyone else worked up too. 9 This is a familiar scenario in our 

9 According to Sigmund Freud in Civilization and Its Discontents, “we are threatened with suffering from three directions: 

from our own body, which is doomed to decay and dissolution and which cannot even do without pain and anxiety as 

warning signals; from the external world, which may rage against us with overwhelming and merciless forces of destruction; 

and finally from our relations to other men. The suffering which comes from this last source is perhaps more painful 

to us than any other. We tend to regard it as a kind of gratuitous addition, although it cannot be any less fatefully inevitable 

than the suffering which comes from elsewhere” (26). 

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homes, in our work places, in our communities, even when we’re just driving along and someone cuts in 

front of us and then what? Well, we don’t like it, so we roll down the window and scream at them. War 

begins when we harden our hearts, and we harden them easily – in minor ways and then in quite serious, 

major ways, such as hatred and prejudice – whenever we feel uncomfortable” (16 Practicing). 

Just as Foucault deconstructs the aggressions of the modern, and as Frankl finds meaningful knowledge 

through purpose, Chödrön understands monolithic discourses through their process of becoming a 

storyline, a normative discourse on history, war, futurity. Chödrön frames shenpa as that which enables 

individual or systematic labeling that “can lead to prejudice, cruelty, and violence; and in any time or place 

when prejudice, cruelty, or violence occur, where it’s directed be one being toward another or be groups of 

beings toward other groups, there’s a theme that runs through: ‘This person has a fixed identity, and they 

are not like me” (66). 

Thus a way through the modern, through steely houses of discursive languages and discursive thoughts, 

through histories, hegemonies and dominant narratives on power and the relational is Transcendence, 

that is to say a kind of ecstasy unbound by time and space. In each case, Foucault, Frankl, and Chödrön 

engage with subjectivity not a modern repetition; rather, the subject may find freedom through intuitive 

knowledge stored in benevolent contact, awareness of, and conscious contact with the divine. 10 

In his article “Humanities in the Twenty-First Century,” Bill Smoot asks, “Why study the Humanities?” 

He answers by reminding us that “they do speak to us, and they offer to our imaginations situations 

we have yet – and may never – experience, the better to understand when – and if – we find ourselves 

confronting the choices faced by Odysseus, Antigone, or Hamlet.” Or, we find ourselves confronted with 

10 Countless traditions growing forth from the fi rst two branches, Theravada and Mahayana, inform contemporary Western 

Countless traditions growing forth from the first two branches, Theravada and Mahayana, inform contemporary Western 

appropriations of Buddhism. Sakyong Mipham grew up in the United States while living a Tibetan Buddhist tradition. 

In Turning the Mind Into an Ally, he writes that “we spend our lives clinging to an imaginary identity cobbled together 

from different thoughts and concepts, trying to keep it happy, and that is why we suffer. This isn’t a sin, it’s an ancient 

habit perpetuated by our bewildered minds […]. The bewildered mind is weak because it is distracted. It’s distracted by 

the overriding need to maintain the comfort of ‘me.’ It is meditating on discursiveness and self-absorption that leads to 

suffering, because the bewildered mind can’t go beyond itself. When difficulty arises, it’s unable to cope. When the unexpected 

occurs, it reacts from the limited perspective of wanting to stay happy in a small place. So if we’re threatened, 

we strike out with anger. If somebody has something we want, we automatically feel jealous. If we see something we 

like, we feel desire. We might not even question these responses […]. What makes us happy and what makes us sad 

come down to volatile outer conditions, circumstances that are constantly changing. This adds up to bewilderment and 

suffering for us” (18-19). Indeed, I recently worked on an interdisciplinary project in the new field of “human terrain:” 

the federal government is seeking to codify human reactions in combat and conflict zones around the world. Psychologists 

and sociologists have studied human motivations for centuries. Perhaps a contribution from the Humanities would 

be to understand how to pause vis-à-vis attachment at every level of social interaction. 

434

a decision on how to respond to what and to whom we encounter when we go home each night. 

Underlying our tension is a fear of death or groundlessness: that which is elusively beyond our control. 

It is that over which societies are in war/societies’ war, that over which privileged bodies live, and the 

Other dies. In the meantime, we delay, we defer. We find the Other as intentional referent in a system of 

signs and symbols whose meaning always implies a decision. The tension is tantamount to understanding 

the Humanities and its critical role in the contemporary world. The Humanities may be thought of as a 

contextualizing of decisions at every level of the human experience: the death drive; avoidance of the 

death drive; searching for ground; losing ground. But the Humanities must reveal the sinister dangers of 

binaries. If we believe in freedom as Mr. Victor E. Frankl does, then we might quote him saying: “Freedom 

threatens to degenerate into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness” (49). A sound 

amount of mindfulness of tension, critical thought, and accountability may lead to Transcendence. At 

the deepest level, what is at stake is a paradox: Transcendence is the haunting sense of incompleteness 

that stirs the Humanities. By revealing the structures that bind societies to notions of wholeness and 

completeness, we are unbinding the Other, and by proxy, ourselves. After all, they say no one has ever 

died of the Humanities. If they slip away, who’s to say we won’t? 

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References 

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. 

Verson: New York, 2006. 

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1999. 

__________. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York, Routledge, 1993. 

Calinescu, Matei. Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, 

Postmodernsim. Durham: Duke UP, 1987. 

Chödrön, Pema. Practicing Peace in Times of War. Shambhala: Boston, 2006. 

__________. Taking The Leap: Freeing Ourselves from Old Habits and Fears. Shambhala, Boston, 

2009. 

__________. When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times. Shambhala: Boston, 2002. 

Donoghue, Frank. “Can the Humanities Survive the 21 st Century?” The Chronicle of Higher Education. 

The Chronicle Review. September 5, 2010. 1-6. 

Foucault, Michel. “Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975-1976.” Picador: 

New York, 2003. 

Frankl, E. Victor. The Will to Meaning: Foundations and Applications of Logotherapy. Meridian: New 

York, 1988. 

Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents. W.W. Norton and Company: New York, NY, 1961. 

Glover, Jonathan. Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century. Yale UP: New Haven, 2001. 

Kurtz, Ernest, and Katherine Ketchman. The Spirituality of Imperfection: Storytelling and the Search for 

Meaning. New York: Bantam Books, 2002. 

Mipham, Sakyong. Turning the Mind Into an Ally. Riverhead Books: New York, 2003. 

Smoot, Bill. “Humanities in the Twenty-First Century.” Edutopia. July 20, 2011. 1-2. 

Trungpa, Chögyam. Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism. Shambhala: Boston, 2002. 

Wright, Elizabeth. Psychoanalytic Criticism. A Reppraisal. New York: Routledge, 1998. 

436

The Role of Memory for Healing 

in Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place 

Myung-joo Kim 

Chungnam National University 

Black women writers in the last few decades have provided mechanisms of spiritual healing through 

their texts. Slavery, oppression, discrimination, segregation, marginalization, poverty, and violence have 

inflicted psychic devastation on black people in general since they landed on their new home, and so 

there have been a great need for healing. Toni Morrison’s many magnanimous protagonists are often 

healers, and likewise Alice Walker’s Celie becomes her own healer by writing letters to God. Like her 

contemporaries, Gloria Naylor also creates characters who heal heart, soul, and body as well. What is 

special about her, is that for healing Naylor, as Marjorie Pryse notes, highlights “connection rather than 

separation” and “transforming silence into speech.” 1 Naylor’s characters come to the realization that they 

are all connected, and that sense of connectedness typically comes at the moment of telling and sharing 

their past stories whether they are painful or glorious as articulation is always a powerful way to heal 

oneself and others. 2 

What I am trying to argue here is how such a sense of connectedness is made possible. That sense may 

come like an epiphany at a certain mystic moment when all of a sudden you transcends any immediate 

reality, all boundaries collapsing and everything coming within a special order and unity where you 

are part of it. Or that sense may be achieved by breathing, the old Eastern traditional way to reach the 

ultimate reality. However, for Gloria Naylor, it is through memory, an absent presence, that all people find 

themselves interconnected and interdependent and so they finally come to be able to start over again. 

1 Marjorie Pryse and Hortense J. Spillers, eds. Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition (Bloomington: 

Indiana UP, 1985), p. 5. 

2 Carol P. Christ in her Diving Deep & Surfacing stresses the importance of storytelling for women, in that articulation 

helps women awaken to a sense of self and the world. 

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It is well known that both individual and collective memories affect the formulation of identity to 

a great extent. So we could say I am what I remember; we are what we remember. What I member 

constitutes my identity. Sigmund Freud has said that “it is rather the rule than the exception for the past 

to be preserved in mental life” 3 perhaps without any loss, which means no memory disappears but only 

hidden under consciousness. That statement holds true for collective memory, also. As Carl G. Jung 

writes, the whole human history is contained in an individual psyche as expressed in his term ‘collective 

unconsciousness.ʼ 4 Luce Irigaray goes even further. As a practitioner of the Eastern breathing through 

which the body turns into spirit, she realizes that the body as well as the psyche is a container of all 

human memory. We ourselves are bodily and psychically a living human history. So we are what we 

remember individually and collectively. 

That’s why both personal and political amnesia are devastating to a person and a society as well. So trying 

to remember the lost memory has become a trendy task now, and it is undeniable that the task is a matter 

of overriding importance. On an individual level, amnesia, whether unconsciously intended or externally 

caused by some accident, inflicts overwhelming damage on a person’s identity. Without memory, s/he is 

not what s/he is anymore. On the other hand, political and historical amnesia on a collective level tends to 

distort reality for the vantage of the privileged. To reinscribe the lost memory contributes to the correction 

and complement of history as a whole. In the same vein are the feminist’s attempt to empower women 

and restore their divinity as well by discovering a goddess tradition or myth, and the black’s attempt to 

find their family root or to enact the going-back-to-Africa movement. If my personal memory makes who 

I am, it is not so difficult to realize that the collective history and tradition which I belong to also constitute 

who I am. For the reason, memory has a healing power restoring back to the wholeness. 

Now black experiences are not particular to the black only but they are universal and ubiquitous on 

this planet; they epitomize more or less a general human condition. Although slavery was abolished, a 

similar institution remains in a form of corporational subjection, blind mammon worship, and all kinds 

of relational despotism. Discrimination and segregation are not just racial but also based on region, 

educational rank, wealth, and many others. So black healing, which has been practiced to deal with 

overwhelming injustice and suffering, could work for all whose everyday life is full of inordinate strain, 

competition, and weariness more than any other times. 5 

3 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontent (New York: W.W.Norton & Company, 1961), p. 20. 

4 Carl G. Jung, Man and his Symbols (New York: A Windfall Book, 1964). My statement is inferred from the following 

statement of June: “[...] if we are to see things in their right perspective, we need to understand the past of man as well as 

his present. That is why an understanding of myths and symbols is of essential importance” (58). 

5 Byung-Chul Han diagnosed modern disease-depression and fatigue-as a symptom of inordinate competitiveness in his 

Mudigkeitsgesellschaft. 

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Overwhelmed by the horrendous massacre of 9/11 and following wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Judith 

Butler in her Precarious Life attempts to discover a way to deal with grief not by going directly to 

a revengeful war but by stressing that the world is intricately connected and interdependent. As a 

healing antidote to such a destructive violence which is dominant in today’s world, she proposes a 

sense of interdependency. However, she immediately confesses she does not know how to “theorize” 

interdependency. 6 All she can suggest for solution as a materialist and white westerner is Levinas which 

evokes a respect for the irreducibility and incomprehensibility of “face” as a basis of his ethics. Levinas’s 

ethics does not go beyond his emphasis on mutual respect, further enough to stress that individual 

existence is never self-sufficient but depends on others, and that an individual is not saved until all are 

saved. There is no individual salvation because all individuals constitute the whole macrocosm, while 

an individual being remains a whole as a microcosm. It is to realize that my own salvation will not be 

completed until all creatures are saved. Such an idea seems unthinkable for those who cannot agree to 

the view that there are powers, greater than self, invisible, intangible, and so unprovable except through 

feeling in silence. Unless one admits the existence of such a power, there is no way to prove that all 

creatures are interconnected and interdependent because there is no visible lines or detectable dynamics 

that would connect them all. 

In this paper, I argue it is through memory that interdependency could be theorized. Offering memory 

as a mechanism of spiritual healing, Naylor succeeds to embody the fact of mutual dependency through 

characters’ experiences. To say briefly, memory serves an important function to enhance the feeling of 

interdependency which leads to spiritual healing. Memory as a healing power for Naylor is not supposed 

to be selective; it is to encompass all whether it is painful or glorious; for if any part is missing, we as 

a person is deficient. Life swirls sometimes against a rugged ravine and other times runs across a flat 

meadow peacefully. Whether a raging torrent or a peaceful stream, they all constitute life’s flow. Or like 

an ocean, memory “ebb and flow, ebb and flow, but never disappear” (192) 7 like the indomitable black 

girls on Brewster Place. In addition to that, Naylor’s memory as a healing power activates analogical 

imagination, which transcends the immediate reality and makes a connection of the concrete to the 

abstract, or of the individual to the collective. In memory, time and space sometimes shrink or other times 

stretch, and so an unexpected connection is made, by which one comes to realize that one’s existence is 

totally dependent on others. Moreover, memory as remembrance empowers people simply by reviving 

their past history, and induces an impetus to start over again by enacting hope and vision because, as 

6 Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004), p. xiii. 

7 All documentation of the quotes from Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place (New York: Penquin Book, 1982) 

will be parenthesized from here. 

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Naylor herself points out in her interview with Tomeido Ashford, healing means “starting over again.” 8 

It is true that reviving old trauma is often painful; even so, healing is possible only by going back to the 

trauma and see it as it is. The process of remembrance also involves opening eyes unto the positive but 

forgotten aspect of the whole self. We are what we remember, again. To regain the forgotten part will 

restore the self to its whole entity. 

Naylor’s first novel The Women of Brewster Place is composed of seven short stories with recurrent 

characters and unifying themes. Over all, the seven stories deal with mainly eight women who survive 

personal devastation and rise again “like an ebony phoenix” (5). Among the eight, Lorraine may seem 

the only failure on surface, but looked closely she herself is a person who recovers “firmness” in her 

nature after talking with Ben although later gruesome violence is inflicted on her. Her insanity at the end 

of the section is only forced upon her from outside, whereas her inner integrity is retained and expressed 

in her constant self-defence. Also her victimization turns out to provide an outlet to explode the rage 

accumulated in people’s consciousness. So, the novel in general enacts a vision to triumph over suffering 

and pain. 

The novel starts with a question which is posed by Langston Hughs’s poem. “What happens to a dream 

deferred?” At the end of the novel, the reader finds the black girls’ dream has not dried up, nor festered; it 

may seem to sag at first but it finally does explode. At the end of the novel, we see the “colored daughters 

of Brewster, spread over the canvas of time, still wake up with their dreams misted on the edge of a yawn” 

(192). They may be destroyed but not defeated. Here, Hughs’s another poem may work as an epilogue to 

fit into the theme. 

Hold onto your dreams 

For if dreams die 

Life is like a broken-winged bird 

That cannot fly. 

Hold fast to dreams 

For when dreams go 

Life is a barren field 

Frozen with snow. 

8 Tomeido R. Ashford, “Gloria Naylor on Black Spirituality: An Interview,” MELUS. 

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As many critics discern, the novel is about dreams, dying dreams but never defeated dreams. It is 

interesting to see that the word dream implies two distinctive meanings at the same time. One of its 

meanings is equal to fantasy and illusion which are associated with dreams in sleep, something that 

departs from reality and so is not worthy being kept, while the other means hope for the future, this time 

something worthwhile. Considering the wish-fulfillment quality of dreams in sleep as Freud asserts, 

however, dreams as hope are not so different from an illusion as seen at first glance. Jung also says that 

most symbols and stories in individual dreams come out of collective memories. And dream as a hope is 

also based on memory as much as dream at night is on daytime or unconsciously accumulated memory. If 

the novel centers around dreams, memory is deeply involved with its central theme of dream. 

Now how do memories contribute to the healing process of characters in the novel? Before examining the 

roles of memory, we need to see what memory is or should be to function as a healing power. Ciel, who 

has been “a knot at the base of Mattie’s heart” (176) all along, says at the end of the novel, 

But I kept saying one day when I’ve gotten rid of the scars, when I’m really well and over all 

that’s happened so that she can be proud of me, then I’ll write and let her know [...] And I stopped 

believing that it ever would (177). 

Mattie immediately compliments her insight, crying “Thank God, you found that out” (177). Ciel is a 

granddaughter of Eva Turner, and gets married to Eugene, being attracted by his smell which reminds her 

of her Southern home town. They have a baby, but when Eugene comes to know another baby is coming 

with no job, he urges her to abort the new baby, being impatient about the burden. But even after abortion, 

Eugene tries to leave her, and their arguments ends up with Ciel’s awakening to his “arrogance and 

selfishness” (100) and her decision to live on her own, and most tragically with their toddler baby Serena’s 

electrocution. Her death utterly bends Ciel’s soul and body, leaving her in the “ranges of a personal hell” 

(102). She severely suffers from the loss which cannot be even mourned. Although Mattie heals her 

pain, a scar never disappears but remains as a part of memory even after being healed. Although Ciel’s 

final realization that she can never get rid of the scar occurs in Mattie’s dream, it holds true in Naylor’s 

framework of ideas. No memory can be or should be eradicated. Any of its portion cannot be done away 

with. Just as wholeness is important to one’s identity, all-embracing memory is crucial to base a firm 

ground of being on which one can start over again to bloom into a rich and full life. So healing is not a 

matter of eradicating a certain unpleasant memory, which is impossible, but it means starting over again 

by accepting all as they are. 

Mattie’s own life history attests to the importance of keeping memory as it is. In a similar way to Ciel’s, 

Mattie was once attracted by Butch who detests getting into a rut, living a life like eating sugarcane. He is 

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clever enough to spit out the wedge before it gets strawy; he takes only the sweetest part. So he is unable 

to take responsibility and go steady with anybody. In a way, Mattie looks to be influenced by him for a 

while. “When her mind would reach out behind, she forced herself to think only of the back road to the 

house, the feel of summer, the taste of sugarcane, and the smell of wild herbs” (25). She forces herself to 

forget the bitter part of her memory, being selective recalling the past just like Butch. 

Her partiality to the sweet portion of memory entails another form of partiality, this time, in her love 

for Basil, her son. When she mistakenly moves out to save her son from rats’ bite, blundering through 

the town with no plan or direction, she comes across Eva Turner, who advises that “you can’t keep him 

runnin’ away from things that hurt him. Sometimes you just gotta stay there and teach him how to go 

through bad and good of whatever comes” (31). Mattie does not listen nor understand its meaning until 

she completely loses her son who has grown up to be a feeble-minded irresponsible young fugitive. It 

costs her a lot to learn the lesson that one can start over again only when accepting the whole, not partial 

truth. Truth sets us free. All inclusive memory attests to the fact that the good depends on the bad and vice 

versa. The sweet and the bitter come together to form a sugarcane; to make a whole, two contraries are 

interdependent. 

In addition to the memory’s healing capacity as a container of total truth, its transcending power over 

time and space makes analogical imagination possible by broadening the vision and making unexpected 

connection among dissimilar things. In memory, the past and the present coexist. Any linear chronological 

arraignment or duration is not meaningful in memory. As Naylor describes, 

Time’s passage through the memory is like molten glass that can be opaque or crystallize at any 

given moment at will: a thousand days are melted into one conversation, one glance, one hurt, and 

one hurt can be shattered and sprinkle over a thousand days. It is silent and elusive, refusing to be 

damned and dripped out day by day; it swirls through the mind while an entire lifetime can ride 

like foam on the deceptive, transparent waves and get sprayed onto the consciousness at ragged, 

unexpected intervals (35). 

However, it is not just time in memory that shrinks and stretches at will. Space also leaps over boundaries 

in memory. Such a transcending function of memory helps making connection. Ben shares his painful 

memory with Lorraine after she is denied by her neighbor and even by her lover Theresa. Sharing their 

memories, Ben identifies Lorraine with his daughter whom he was not able to protect from sexual 

exploitation; her friendship with Ben strengthens her and gives “firmness” enough to assert herself. She 

is ready to start over again although her healing is only momentary. Another identification over time and 

space is made between Lorrain and Ciel. It is in Ciel’s dream that she becomes a person, Lorrain, who 

442

was victimized by the town gangsters. Ciel says, “And there was a woman who was supposed to be me, I 

guess. She didn’t exactly like me, but inside I felt it was me” (179). Lorrain is identified with Ciel in terms 

of severe suffering and pain that they go through. 

More importantly, all of Brewster women identify themselves with Lorrain by madly yanking each 

stained brick out of the wall, feeling the blood stain is their own blood. In Mattie’s wish-fulfilling dream, 

all women project their pain into the wall which has been forgotten as a mere fixture of the town. Now 

awakened to their own pain through Lorrain’s victimization, they explode, attempting to break down the 

wall. The wall is the central symbol of the novel, representing the communal memory of discrimination, 

abandonment, isolation, segregation, and dispair. Their gesture to tear down the wall is an act of recalling 

their forgotten bitter memory and rebelling against what it represents. They all become one by identifying 

themselves with the communal memory. Toward the end of the novel, we see a sunny day after a week of 

rain, and the novel ends with Etta’s hopeful cry, “We’re gonna a party” (189). A new day is dawning, and 

people are ready to start over again. That’s healing. Here, memory is a matrix from which a new life is 

born. 

It is always amazing to see the old throbbing pain is often recalled with detached aloofness, although some 

pain newly starts to throb again when recalled, but of course, with less intensity. It is because once pain 

is incorporated into memorial space it is put into perspective. One finally acquires a proper perspective to 

enable us to make an unexpected connection among separated events and people and find meanings for 

all. So remembrance itself involves a healing process. There is something we would never see until we 

stop and see. That stop is a moment of remembrance, looking back. Mattie regrets her son has not been 

able to heal himself unlike Ciel. She says to Ciel, “Guess he ain’t been as lucky as you yet. Ain’t run out 

of highway to stop and make him think” (178). Mattie makes the point that what makes Ciel successful in 

self-healing is she has been able to transcend life’s flow and see it from a proper perspective by stopping 

and looking back. 

Likewise, Kiswana’s conflict with her mother is resolved when they together look back their immediate 

family history. Mrs. Browne responds to her daughter’s angry accusation calling her “a white man’s 

nigger who’s ashamed of being black” (85). 

I am alive because of the blood of proud people who never scraped or begged or apologized for 

what they were. They lived asking only one thing of this world -to be allowed to be. And I learned 

through the blood of these people that black isn’t beautiful and it isn’t ugly black is! It’s not kinky 

hair and it’s not straight hair- it just is (86). 

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She continues to talk about her own brave grandmother who “held off six white men with a shotgun when 

they tried to drag one of her sons to jail for ‘not knowing his place’” (86), and ends her moving speech 

with “that’s not being white or red or black that’s being a mother” (86). She reminds Kiswana of another 

tradition of being itself which has been handed down from mothers to mothers, besides her political 

activism of keeping the African tradition. The communal memory of mothers’ sacrifice for survival brings 

about their reconciliation. The remembrance heals a rip in the relationship between the mother and her 

daughter. 

Etta Mae Johnson goes through a similar healing process. Her constant affairs with men is closely related 

to her wish of acquiring a material and spiritual security for which she has fought against the hostile world 

like a “greased cobra” (56) and “a bantam” (59). After all frustration, her final false expectation about a 

deceptive preacher is destined to be crushed. At dawn after a night with the preacher, she looks at the wall 

for the first time since she came to Brewster. By looking at the wall, she shares the communal memory 

of “broken spirit” (72) with others, and turns into a member of the community from an outsider who has 

been reluctant to belong. And then she recalls Mattie who constitutes a main part of her memory. In spite 

of her cruel words and behaviors toward Mattie, Etta knows she would find healing love and comfort in 

Mattie thanks to the years that they have shared together. 

Cora Lee also finds an impetus to move on with hope when she recalls her old school days when she 

loved learning, especially Shakespeare. Her cultural memory, which has been forgotten among the debris 

of every day juggling, awakens her to the reality that babies would grow up to be adults. Then she begins 

to dream, this time, a real dream for the future; her “dumb-ass” children could be responsible and reliant 

contributors to the society. 

Besides, food and house are the agencies through which memory is retained and, when recalled, proves 

spiritual healing. Eva’s food and house are symbolic of healing when they are kept in memory. 

This novel provides a three-layered healing process. As pointed out, storytelling itself offers healing, 

giving an articulation to chaotic experiences. On the writer’s side, storytelling plays a therapeutic role, 

putting her individual and collective memories into proper perspective. Also, the novel itself is about 

healing by presenting suffering characters who start over again through memory. Third, healing occurs 

on the side of the reader while reading, who identifies and sympathize with the characters. The reading 

process requires long duration during which the reader’s individual and collective memory is in turn 

evoked and infiltrated into fictional experiences. So both writing and reading involves healing, and 

memory plays an important role in healing by its inclusive, connecting, and remembering function. 

444

References 

Ashford, Tomeiko R. “Gloria Naylor on Black Spirituality: An Interview,” MELUS 30, no.4 (2005): 

73-87. 

Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso, 2004. 

Christ Carol P. Diving Deep & Surfacing: Women Writers on Spiritual Quest. Boston: Beacon Press, 1980. 

Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontent. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1961. 

Han, Byung-Chul. Mudigkeitsgesellschaft. Translated by Tae-Whan Kim. Seoul: Munhak & Jisung Co, 

2012. 

Irigaray, Luce. Between East and West: from Singularity to Community. Translated by Stephen Pluhacek. 

New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. 

Jung, Carl G. Man and his Symbols. New York: A Windfall Book, 1964. 

Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Plume, 1987. 

Naylor, Gloria. The Women of Brewster Place. New York: Penguin Book, 1982. 

Pryse, Marjorie and Hortense J. Spiller, eds. Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition. 

Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1985. 

Walker, Alice. The Color Purple. New York: Pocket Books, 1982. 

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Language, Gender, and Senses 

1. Healing Thought: Therapeutic Philosophy and the Critique of 

Metaphysics 

/ Anthony Curtis Adler (Yonsei University) 

2. The Practicing of Feminism as Healing Humanities 

/ Ra-Keum Huh (Ewha Womans University) 

3. Emotions and Humanities Healing: The Greek Philosophers and 

the Stoics’ Understanding of Emotions 

/ Wooryong Park (Sogang University) 

4. The Healing Function of Talchum 

/ Hyun Shik Ju (Sogang University)

Healing Thought: Therapeutic Philosophy and the Critique of 

Metaphysics 

Anthony Curtis Adler 

Yonsei University 

In Book Gamma of his Metaphysics, Aristotle declares that there is a science that studies “Being as 

Being and those things belonging to Being with respect to [what it is in] itself (to on hē to on kai ta toutō 

huparchonta kath’ hauto)” (1003a). This science, he continues, is different from all the other particular 

sciences, since it alone theorizes Being “universally” (literally: with respect to the whole) as “Being.” All 

the other sciences, in contrast, carve off some smaller portion from the whole, and concentrate on this. 

Aristotle wrote the texts of Metaphysics in the 4th century B.C., though they were not compiled under 

that name until the first century C.E. Almost two and a half millennium have since past, yet Aristotle’s 

conception of a science of “ontology,” the theorization of Being as Being, remains a matter of great 

controversy. It is a provocation, a stimulus to philosophy that cannot be easily dismissed. Indeed, it has 

become “controversial” as never before. One could even say that, in the twentieth century, the possibility 

of a “science of Being” has become one of the main questions both uniting and dividing the two schools 

of philosophy that have become known, respectively, as “continental” and “analytic philosophy.” Both 

“continental” and “analytic” philosophers would call into question the pretensions of “Metaphysics” to 

theorize the ultimate nature of reality, challenging the philosophical terminology and conceptualities that 

had come into being through the reception of Aristotle’s thought, culminating in the late middle ages, but 

that continued to hold sway over the discourse of philosophers even as they struggled, in the early modern 

and beyond, to free themselves from the heavy yoke of scholasticism. 

Yet they would conceive of this project of liberation in very different ways. “Analytic” philosophers 

were, from the first, concerned with developing an account of logic, language, propositional truth that 

could accommodate the new discoveries in mathematics and the natural sciences. They approached the 

problems of philosophy with the ingenuity and brilliance of engineers --- inspired by the possibilities 

of the future, compelled by the exigencies of the present, and largely unburdened by the claims of the 

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past. For an engineer, the past is the history of failures and successes; one can learn much from it, but it 

has no prescriptive force. Even when they extended their interests in other directions, or even abandon 

this project altogether, they remain engineers at heart. Whatever the other differences and similarities 

between them, “continental” philosophers differ from “analytic” philosophers in one absolute sense: there 

is something that keeps them from thinking like engineers; from thinking that thinking itself can be a form 

of engineering, or at least not just a form of engineering. 

What is this? A certain weight of the past, of tradition --- but also the weight of the future. To begin 

engineering a solution to a problem, one must feel confident that the problem that one faces is the real 

problem, the problem that matters. Real engineers, one imagines, are never troubled by doubts in this 

regard: the problem has been given to them, and it is not their place to question it. The most extraordinarily 

difficult problems in engineering are difficult because the problem itself is clear; it is the solution that is 

unknown. The “continental” philosopher, in contrast, never has the confidence that he really knows what 

the problem is. He believes that problems (such as the question of Being) have been handed down to him, 

but that the meaningfulness of these questions – their ability to speak to us now – is anything but self- 

evident. He recognizes that he understands these questions from a perspective that has been formed by 

the answers that have already been given to him, and that, in order to recover a sense for the question, it 

is necessary to return to the past, to understand the question from out of the past, and work towards the 

possibility of a future discourse in which a new approach to the question might be possible. 

The difference between “analytic” and “continental” philosophy, in this way, comes down to 

fundamentally different claims about the nature of the “specious problems” that have haunted philosophers 

in the past. For the “analytic” philosopher, these Scheinprobleme (“seeming, false problems”) are mere 

consequences of the historical failure to formulate the problem in the right way. For the “continental” 

philosopher, these problems, and the solutions that have been given to them, are symptoms of deeper, 

hidden, more radical problems, and in this way they have an evidentiary value that must be taken very 

seriously. If Immanuel Kant remains such an important figure for both traditions, it is because his critical 

philosophy allows both these interpretations. While he proposes a “Copernican revolution of philosophy,” 

arguing that if the questions of philosophy is formulated in the right way – if we understand that they 

concern appearance for the subject rather than absolute reality – , then we can dismiss the traditional 

questions of Metaphysics and their dogmatic solutions, he also recognizes that these metaphysical errors 

are symptomatic of a contradiction that inhabits human reason and that explains its “peculiar fate.” 

Human reason is both finite and infinite, and hence tends of necessity to overstep the limits that it imposes 

on itself. 

The example of Kant is instructive. It suggests that, done well, “continental” and “analytic” philosophy 

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will again approach one another; and that they have perhaps always approached each other, converging in 

their insights despite radically different approaches. But it is still worth asking: why is it that philosophy 

took such different turns, and that, even now, these approaches seem so far apart. I would propose, 

tentatively, that it has something to do with the emergence of engineering as an academic “master 

paradigm” – a genuine and legitimate rival to philosophical theorizing as traditionally conceived. This is 

no where so clear than in pure mathematics. Euclidean geometry has always been intimately bound up 

with the fate of philosophy. Plato conceived of geometry as a preparation for philosophy, and Kant took 

his departure from the “truth” of geometry. Euclidean geometry, traditionally conceived, exemplifies a 

theoretical model of truth and knowledge (of epistēmē): starting out from a set of axioms that present 

themselves as self-evident, and following generally valid principles of reasoning, we deduce theorems, 

such as Pythagoras’s law. For the Greeks, geometry was the principle form of mathematical reasoning, 

and what we now think of as algebra remained dependent on geometry. But eventually, algebra would 

emerge as an independent discipline (this is often ascribed to Al-Khwarizmi), and, during the early modern 

era, with Descartes’ “analytic geometry” and Leibniz and Newton’s calculus, algebraic symbolization 

would gain ever greater independence from geometry. The result was that ultimately mathematics, which 

had once rested comfortably on a naive and intuitive geometric foundation (despite the conundrums, such 

as the problematic status of Euclid’s fifth axiom – the parallel axiom), would now seem to be perched on 

a void. The number systems that mathematicians, in their manipulation of abstract symbols, depended 

on, such as the real number system (the continuum), began to seem extraordinarily strange, paradoxical, 

and fundamentally mysterious when removed from their intuitive geometric basis. It is at this point that 

pure foundational mathematics became engineering: one had a clear “problem” – one knew what one 

needed. The challenge, clearly recognized by Dedekind and taken over by Frege, the “father” of Analytic 

philosophy, and then Bertrand Russel, was to “construct” the numbers that working mathematicians need 

from elementary structures, and perhaps even on the foundation of logic. It is a testament to the depth 

of the connection between engineering and philosophy that would emerge, suggesting a paradigm shift 

that is far more radical than those which have been recognized by historians of philosophy, that what 

is perhaps the single greatest achievement of human engineering in the history of mankind, the digital 

computer, is a more or less direct result of these mathematical and philosophical investigations. With the 

digital computer, thinking itself becomes a problem of engineering. 

If we understand in this way the difference of “analytic” and “continental” philosophy, it is not hard to see 

why Aristotle’s call to metaphysics as a science of Being would have such vastly different significance for 

philosophers whose insights were often quite convergent and who were equally “opposed” to metaphysics 

as traditionally conceived. We must, first of all, avoid drawing the false conclusion from what I have 

said. Even though the founding fathers of “analytic philosopher” were far more intimately involved in the 

project of the foundations of mathematics than continental philosophers of equivalent stature, it would 

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be a terrible mistake to think that the latter, being as it were “wooly headed” quasi-poetic creatures, 

either have nothing to do with mathematics, or merely appropriate it, as Allan Sokal would have it, to 

perverse “post-modern” ends. Edmund Husserl, the father” of phenomenology, was a mathematician by 

training, and came to philosophy by way of mathematics. His student Heidegger had considered writing 

a dissertation on the “Being of Number.” Jacques Derrida’s early introduction and translation of Husserl’s 

treatise on the origin of geometry played a crucial role in the development of deconstruction. The question 

of mathematics loomed large from the beginning, and “continental” philosophers were not blind to the 

power of the new mathematical accounts of number. When recently, Alain Badiou, author of a lucid and 

rigorous if accessible account of John Conway’s theory of “surreal numbers,” claims that “mathematics is 

ontology,” he is not taking a radically new turn, but rather returning to this primal scene of the “parting of 

the ways.” 1 

The difference, rather, is that for the “analytic” philosopher the question: “what is number?” is, or can be, 

clear. The difficulty is answering this question --- but the challenge of answering (undertaken by Frege 

in an extraordinary text) demands clarity in the question, even if, making the question clear requires 

rethinking the very nature of meaning and truth. 2 For the “continental” philosopher, the question, 

however clear it might seem, and however pressing the answer might be for upholding the possibility 

of mathematical and scientific knowledge, opens onto another question. What is number? – what does 

it mean for a number to be? What is Being, such that numbers can be? The “continental” philosopher 

becomes awake to the possibility, and indeed becomes disturbed by the possibility, that the questions that 

present themselves with such lucidity (at least a potential lucidity) that we could “engineer” an answer are 

themselves not false, not wrong, but in a sense still at the surface of thinking. He wonders if “engineering 

philosophy” only becomes possible because, as a result of the success of metaphysics and the “answers” it 

has given – answers that continue to structure how we think – , philosophy has lost a sense for its deeper 

and more radical questions, and perhaps above all for the question of Being. For “Analytic philosophy,” 

Aristotle’s definition of ontology and of the questions proper to it seems to be a relic of the past. These 

questions are ill-conceived, and can be discarded, since they contribute nothing to answering the questions 

that we face. For the “continental” philosopher, the question of Being – as Heidegger will put: the question 

of the sense of Being – calls us to “deconstruct” the history of metaphysics, and its solutions, so as to 

become again capable of understanding the sense of this question. 

At this point, you, in the audience, might be wondering: what on earth is he – am I – speaking about. 

1 This claim is developed at length in his Being and Event, tr. Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum, 2005). 

2 Gottlieb Frege, The Foundations of Arithmatic: A Logico-Mathematical Inquiry into the Concept of Number (Evanston: 

Northwestern University Press, 1980). 

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What does any of this have to do with “healing”? I have, granted, taken a circuitous path; and I have done 

so deliberately, even though, granted, writing, for me (and this is also why I cannot be an “analytical 

philosopher”) is never quite as deliberate, never quite as much like engineering, as the engineer in me – 

whose voice and desire is still quite strong despite my affinity to the “continental” tradition – would like. 

But I had a clear sense of where I wished to end up, even if the path to that destination was itself, at times, 

a revelation. 

What I have hoped to show, above all, is that analytic and continental philosophy are both, for want of 

a better word, good ways of thinking: different, but good. Done well, they work together, from their 

distance, to uphold the dignity of questioning and answering, which is always threatened by the double 

danger: “questions without real answers” and “answers without real questions.” These dangers are clear 

enough when either is done poorly: either one becomes lost in a self-satisfied obscurity that refuses 

the clarity of the concept, or discourse degenerates into the petty debating of “positions.” But there is 

also another danger, which is more insidious the more that it presents itself as a solution. The danger of 

premature reconciliation: a reconciliation that is forced, that is sought after through the artificial means 

of a metadiscourse that seeks to attain something that, as Hegel well recognized, can only happen with 

the fullness of time; and perhaps only when both of the opposed sides become irrelevant in the wake 

of something else. The name for this and for every such reconciliation is healing – and the concept of 

“healing,” as I will suggest, governs over this reconciliation in triple sense. It names the goal (“a healthy 

philosophical discourse” – one which is not so bitterly divided); the “means” (a discourse of “healing,” of 

reconciliation, by more broad-minded philosophers); but, most importantly, it names the hidden source of 

unity between “continental” and “analytic” philosophy that will allow them to be reconciled, since they 

are already, deep in their hearts, reconciled. Bringing these together, we could put it this way: “a healing 

discourse will heal philosophy of its painful division by demonstrating that both analytic and continental 

philosophy have to do with healing.” The scapegoat, in this wondrous medicinal ritual, is metaphysics: 

they are both “healing” thinking from the “unhealthy” effects of metaphysics. If healing is able to have 

this amazing curative power over philosopher, it is because it interacts in a most intriguing way with the 

“difference” between “analytic” and “continental” philosophy which I have mentioned. Healing, and 

medicine more generally, presents the correlate of engineering: a non-philosophical discourse and practice 

that came to serve as a master discourse for philosophy, in so far as it articulated the point at which a “parting 

of ways,” at once constitutive of philosophy and disruptive of philosophy, could take place. The Classical 

correlate of the pair “engineering”/ “historical sensibility” was “medicine”/ “eros.” Philosophy could offer 

a cure to desire, or it could expose itself to the danger of desire. Plato was torn between both possibilities. 

By the Hellenistic period, philosophy would have resolved itself into either “science” or a “way of life”: 

purely intellectual eros, or practical healing. Carried over into the philosophical discourse, the rhetoric of 

healing amounts to this: a fundamental failure to get at what is really at stake. 

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Returning briefly to Aristotle’s Metaphysics, we find a sense for the complexity of the relation of 

philosophy and healing. The second section of Book Gamma begins: 

“Being” is said in many ways, but in relation to some one thing and one nature, and not merely as a 

homonym (as a word that sounds the same but has completely difference meanings), but as “healthy” 

[is said] always in relation to “health,” either guarding it, or producing it, or being a sign of it, or 

receptive of it. 

The claim, on the surface, is straightforward enough. The word “being” is used differently, but not in the 

way that “bank” is used differently. In the case of “bank,” there are two senses that have basically nothing 

to with one another and are only accidently related through a common sounding name. “Being,” in 

contrast, is said differently in the same way as “health.” A medicine is healthy because it produces health. 

A certain food is healthy because it “guards” health. A “healthy” skin tone is a sign of health. These words 

mean “health” in different, but essentially related ways. 

The philosophical implications are immense, and also directly concern the relation of a “continental” 

and “analytic” approach. Whereas “analytic” philosophers will seek to dissolve the problems of ontology 

by pointing out the confusion between the “existential” and “copulary” use of “being,” Heidegger will 

return to Aristotle’s insight that the unifying sense of being cannot be conceived in terms of the relation 

of a genus to a species. But what interests me here is the choice of example. Why did Aristotle choose 

“health”? It is a good example, of course, but I would suggest that something much more is at stake. 

Perhaps Aristotle recognized that health, like Being, is one of those terms which touches on almost 

everything; which can relate to almost everything. Every natural substance, every form of human activity, 

can be healthy or unhealthy. Every aspect of appearance can potentially serve as a sign of health or 

unhealth. Health, this is to say, is a perspective from which the totality of human life can be appraised and 

considered. Moreover, though, health is the perspective which is most likely to be taken by a certain kind 

of person. It is the perspective of the sort of everyday rationality that has raised itself beyond superstition 

and yet remains deaf to the higher, deeper, more dangerous claims of philosophy – the sort of everyday 

rationality for which the goods of the body and of a still body-like soul remain the highest goods; for 

which the purpose of life is to keep on living without suffering and pain. It is the rationality that is averse 

to risk and danger, unless it takes the form of a risk of the cure, and for which the infinite mind has been 

put in the service of guarding finite goods. Treated from the perspective of health, philosophy itself must 

appear like a dangerous thing. Is love and friendship healthy? Is politics healthy? Is thinking healthy? Is 

life itself... healthy. It is no surprise that, in Plato’s Symposium, the third to speak about love, following the 

pure rhetorician (Phaedrus) and the legal expert (Pausanius), but before the comic poet (Aristophanes), 

the tragic poet (Agathon), and the philosopher Socrates, is the medical doctor Eryximachus. His words, 

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somewhat banal as they are, are soon superceded. 

For Plato, the chief rivals of the philosopher were sophists and poets. This is perhaps because, for Plato 

(and Socrates), philosophy had to assert its rights against those who claimed an immediate, intuitive, but 

unreasoned access to the truth. Aristotle, we might say, already began to recognize that, with his “scientific” 

reformulation of philosophy, sophists and poets no longer could give us much to fear. A far greater danger, 

intimate to scientific philosophy and yet still infinitely far from it, was the physician; the one who would 

reduce everything, and even what is highest – politics, friendship (love), and the truth – to the terms of 

health. 

It is precisely this danger that we still face, now more than ever, and that threatens to derail both 

continental philosophy and analytic philosophy. 

The idea that philosophy should be understood as a therapy is often identified above all with the post- 

Tractatus Wittgenstein. In the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein took over Frege and Russel’s 

project – trying to explain how truthful statements are possible while rigorously circumscribing the 

limits of what can be said – by showing that the logical structure of propositions resembles the logical 

structure of the world. In his later philosophy, however, he would come to realize that it was wrong to 

try to articulate a single account of language and the propositional truth. He would come to think of 

language as consisting of innumerable different, irreducible “language games,” each with its own rules. 

The standard philosophical conception of language, in which “names” refer to “things,” is merely one 

very simple language game. It cannot be generalized; and indeed no single theory of the essence of 

language is possible. This suggests, in turn, that traditional philosophy has allowed itself to fall into error 

by failing to recognize how words are really used in the “language games” that belong to various “forms 

of life.” Instead of trying to describe these language games, which is the proper method for philosophy, 

philosophers have instead come up with explanatory pictures – abstract, misleading, and one-sided – for 

the essence of language. 

Nothing that I have yet said would justify a therapeutic understanding of philosophy. The concept of 

“language games” and “forms of life” could justify a purely theoretical vision of philosophy, in which 

the proper philosophical method does not reject theoretical knowledge as such, but merely its tendency 

toward abstraction and reductionism. The therapeutic reading of Wittgenstein involves a further claim: that 

the end of philosophy is not to achieve knowledge, but to “cure” reasoning of the delusions, endemic to 

traditional philosophy, that make it impossible to get on with other things, be they the pursuit of properly 

scientific knowledge or simply life itself. It is in this way that the §133 of the Philosophical Investigations 

is often read: 

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It is not our aim to refine or complete the system of rules for the use of our words in unheard-of ways. 

For the clarity that we are aiming at is indeed complete clarity. But this simply means that the 

philosophical problems should completely disappear. 

The real discovery is the one that makes me capable of stopping doing philosophy when I want 

to. – The one that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions which 

bring it itself in question. – Instead, we now demonstrate a method, by examples; and the series of 

examples can be broken off. – Problems are solved (difficulties eliminated), not a single problem. 

There is not a philosophical method, though there are indeed methods, like different therapies. 3 

The literature on Wittgenstein is vast, and there is certainly much debate as to whether his philosophical 

method (to the extent that he has a single such method) is principally “therapeutic” or “theoretical.” I do 

not hope to answer this, or offer more than the most summary reading of Wittgenstein. What I would 

suggest, however, is that his therapeutic tendency is intimately related to his engineering approach to 

philosophical problems. Philosophy itself is a problem that must be solved. And this problem, the problem 

of philosophy, consists in the way in which it keeps on presenting particular problems to the philosopher, 

who in each case is duty-bound to solve them. For Wittgenstein, the consummate philosopher-as-engineer, 

the only way to “move on” is to engineer an absolute solution to all philosophical problems. But, in a 

certain way, one could say that these problems only exist because philosophy has always been in the 

business of engineering solutions that would explain how human language is able to do what it does. To 

engineer a “perfect solution” would be to reverse-engineer the multitude of language games and forms of 

life that the philosopher, seeking solutions, has always turned away from. 

This, I think, explains both the tremendous seduction of Wittgenstein’s approach and its limits, or indeed 

– perhaps – its pointlessness. If you think of philosophy as engineering, and yet not simply as engineer 

(who is usually just happy to be constructing solutions), but rather from the perspective of a philosophical 

engineer who, through an extraordinary insight, has become aware of the Sisyphean nature of his own 

task, then the “therapeutic” solution seems like the only answer. But if you do not think of philosophy as 

engineering – if you think that the philosopher is not one who is compelled to answer, and thus “do away 

with,” philosophical problems that present themselves with a certain immediate clarity, but rather one who 

seeks to put himself in the position in which he can begin to sense philosophical problems in their depth – 

and above all by getting past the “engineering” perspective that imposes itself on us – then Wittgenstein’s 

3 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, tr. G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2001), p. 44. 

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therapeutic approach appears as nothing more than a rather long, and no doubt instructive, Sackgasse (one- 

way-street) in the history of philosophy. Seen from another perspective, the struggles of past philosophers 

and the systems of concepts that they have contrived might appear as anything but vain and unprofitable 

errors. Rather: they could seem like extraordinary attempts to grasp hold of elusive, difficult truths by 

entering into the proper form of questioning. If metaphysics, nevertheless, must now appear questionable, 

it is not because the struggles of philosophers towards conceptual clarity have been pointless, but rather 

because metaphysical answers seem to foreclose more radical forms of questioning. 

Because, in the manner that I have suggested, the therapeutic method of late Wittgenstein arises out of 

the engineering approach to philosophy that he himself carried out with an extreme consequence, I do 

not think it, in and of itself, offers either a solution to philosophy as such, or a challenge to philosophy 

as such. Rather, it signals a turning point in his philosophy, of meaning only for his philosophy – in 

which the engineering approach turns back upon its origins, discovering that the questions, to which it 

seeks answers, are born of disquiet within philosophical thought itself. Incapable of getting outside the 

engineering approach to which he remained profoundly committed, Wittgenstein – and this is both the 

source of his rigor and his superficiality – could not really ever quite get to the point of wondering if 

the incessant problems with which philosophy tormented itself were not themselves symptoms of other 

questions that we must begin to ask ourselves, but can only begin to do so if we wager ourselves on 

concepts that we know to be fallible and provisional. 

In Wittgenstein, this is to say, philosophical therapy is justified as the mark of the absolute commitment 

to a certain philosophical path. What is much more troubling is when this therapeutic approach is put to 

use in order to “heal” its rifts, and above all, the rifts between “analytic” and “continental.” In the name of 

“healing,” the divisions in philosophy, and philosophy itself, will be put to rest. I have already suggested 

how this “cure” operates, but now I will turn to a recent manifestation of this “healing” approach. 

In the year 1999, right at the end of the century that had seen philosophy become so divided, Harvard 

University Press republished an English translation of a short text by Franz Rosenzweig, titled 

Understanding the Sick and Healthy: A View of World, Man, and God. Franz Rosenzweig ranks, together 

with Levinas and Martin Buber, as one of the great Jewish philosophers of the twentieth century, and his 

Star of Redemption is a masterwork of the dense, obscure, rich style for which “continental philosophy” is 

known. While Rosenzweig engages in a sustained and far-reaching critique of the Western philosophical 

tradition, he does not reject the idea that thinking must find its own language to express itself. Rather, 

he opposes a new idiom to the idiom of metaphysics. But this new idiom (which itself involves a kind 

of engineering) is put in the service of becoming open to a “Jewish” thinking, embodied in scripture, 

that is prior to the truth of Greek philosophy. Understanding the Sick and Healthy involves the attempt 

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to communicate the “new thinking” of the Star of Redemption in a more accessible, and less recondite 

language. What makes this republication so interesting is the author of the “new introduction,” included 

together with the old introduction by Nahum Glatzer: none other than Hilary Putnam, a celebrated analytic 

philosopher known for his work in the philosophy of science. 

In the introduction, which is reprinted in his 2008 book “Jewish Philosophy as a Way of Life: Rosenzweig, 

Buber, Levinas, Wittgenstein,” Hilary Putnam seeks to show the philosophical similarities between 

Rosenzweig’s “little book” and the work of late Wittgenstein. As he explains, anticipating the bafflement 

of his readers – and especially those who are familiar with his own body of work: 

To my enormous surprise, I found this work reminding me of the last philosopher in the world I 

had expected to compare with Franz Rosenzweig, namely, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and I propose to 

explain a part of the illumination I find in Rosenzweig by presenting such a comparison. 

Wittgenstein? Rosenzweig and Wittgenstein? Yet, on reflection, the comparison should not be as 

startling as it first seemed to me, for both thinkers are influenced by Kierkegaard (if Wittgenstein 

was not a theist, he nevertheless had an obvious sympathy with religion), and both share a 

profoundly critical attitude toward the traditional philosophical search for a theory of the ‘essence’ 

of things. I cannot imagine Wittgenstein reading through Rosenzweig’s The Star of Redemption. 

Yet I can very easily imagine him reading and enjoying Rosenzweig’s “little book” (It was 

Wittgenstein, after all, who remarked, “When Tolstoy just tells a story he impresses me infinitely 

more than when he addresses the reader,” and in the present book Rosenzweig adopts the manner 

of a storyteller.). 4 

Hilary Putnam’s introduction does an admirable job of opening up the text, and leading into it, without 

preempting the need to let it speak for itself. His treatment of the similarities between Rosenzweig and 

Wittgenstein is more suggestive than exhaustive, and he resists giving a simplistic account of these. It is 

difficult, however, after reading Rosenzweig’s “little book,” to avoid concluding that the deepest similarity 

between them rests on a shared “therapeutic” or “healing” concept of the task of thinking. The illusion to 

Kierkegaard is decisive. As Putnam writes: 

What philosophy represents here is not a technical subject at all, but a temptation to which all who 

think of themselves as religious may be subject at one time or another: the temptation to substitute 

words, especially words which have no religious content because they have no internal relation to a 

4 Hilary Putnam, “Introduction” in Franz Rosenzweig, Understanding the Sick and the Healthy: A View of the World, Man, 

and God, tr. and int. Nahum Glatzer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 2. 

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genuine religious life, for that kind of life. This is the very temptation that Kierkegaard was centrally 

concerned with combating. Kierkegaard didn’t combat the temptation to substitute abstract talk for 

actually living the religious life because he imagined that most nineteenth-century Danish Christians 

were about to become metaphysicians – obviously not! Rosenzweig did not think that most twentieth- 

century German Jews were about to become Hegelians. These existentialist thinkers saw metaphysics 

as an exaggerated form of a disease to which we are all subject. It is this “disease” that the “physicians” 

in Rosenzweig’s parable are out to diagnose and cure. 5 

While this “healing” project stands at the periphery of Wittgenstein, who is driven to it by the necessity 

of his philosophical compulsions, it is central to Rosenzweig, who, in this sense, is able to give a more 

radical, but also more “abstract” or “reductive” formulation of it. As Putnam puts it, a bit earlier: “Although 

Wittgenstein says that the roots of philosophical illusion lie deep in our language and deep in us, he never 

attempts to provide a detailed account of these roots. For Rosenzweig’s purposes, however, it is essential 

to do just that.” 6 

This last point is decisive. It suggests what is really at stake for Putnam, the Atheist --- but ethnically 

Jewish philosopher – in returning to his Jewish roots. Nothing else than the roots of the “healing project,” 

and the “metaphysical disease” to which it answers, that he also finds in Wittgenstein. But why is 

“metaphysics” itself a disease? What are these roots that Rosenzweig will discover? The answer appears 

in one particular telling passage. Invoking Aristotle’s famous claim that philosophy begins with wonder, 

Rosenzweig describes how the philosopher, wondering as others wonder, becomes impatient: “...he is 

unwilling to accept the process of life and the passing of the numbness wonder has brought. Such relief 

comes too slowly. He insists on a solution immediately – at the very instant of his being overcome – and 

at the very place wonder struck him. He stands quiet, motionless. He separates his experience of wonder 

from the continuous stream of life, isolating it. / This is the way his thought proceeds. He does not permit 

his wonder, stored as it is, to be released into the flow of life. He steps outside of the continuity of life and 

consequently the continuity of thought is broken. And there he begins stubbornly to reflect. Of necessity, 

he must hook the “problem” from where he stands. He has forcibly extracted thought’s “object” and 

“subject” from the flow of like and he entrenches himself within them. Wonder stagnates, is perpetuated in 

the motionless mirror of his mediation: that is in the subject. He has it well hooked; it is securely fastened, 

and it persists in his benumbed immobility. The stream of life has been replaced by something submissive 

– statuesque, subjugated.” 7 

5 Putnam, “Introduction,” p. 3. 

6 Putnam, “Introduction,” p. 2. 

7 Franz Rosenzweig, Understanding the Sick and the Healthy, pp. 40-41. 

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Philosophy is “diseased” because it stands off from the flow of life. Health is life, the flow of life: 

everything fixed and congealed into a determinate form is unhealthy, deathly. What is interesting about 

this passage is not only an obvious and unrepentant vitalism from which Putnam makes no attempt to 

distant himself. Rather, it is that philosophy here, through a sort of radical lapse of “historical sense,” 

appears purely as the “engineering” of solutions to feelings of wonders (philosophical questions) that 

the philosopher, in his impatience, refuses to release back into the flux of life. The affinity between 

Rosenzweig and Wittgenstein is profound, but, for just this reason, Rosenzweig’s therapy has nothing 

more to say to philosophy, or even ordinary thinking, than Wittgenstein’s. To generalize – to move from a 

specific therapy for a specific, singular problem to a panacea for diseased philosophical thought as such – 

is to turn the specific act of philosophical therapy into what we might best call an “ideology” of health; the 

enforcement of “health” and “healing” as an self-evident, everyday perspective that foreclosed philosophy, 

politics, and love. 

I do not wish to suggest that Rosenzweig himself prescribed to this “ideology” of health – though I do 

find his critique of metaphysics in the name of a new, religious thinking, based on grammar and the three 

fold relation of God, the world, and man too simplistic. Rosenzweig himself saw the convalescence from 

philosophy, which he imagines as a three-week cure in a sanitarium, as the beginning rather than the end. 

Thus he writes in the final chapter of his “Little Book” – titled “back to work”: 

It is so difficult to realize that all verification lies ahead, that death is the ultimate verification 

of life, that to live means to die. He who withdraws from life may think he has avoided death; 

however, he has merely foregone life, and death, instead of being avoided, closes in from all sides 

and creeps into one’s very heart, a petrified heart. If he is to be restored to life he must recognize 

the sovereignty of death... There is no remedy for death; not even health. A healthy man, however, 

has the strength to continue towards the grave. The sick man invokes death and lets himself be 

carried away in mortal fear. In health, even death comes at the “proper” time. 8 

This insight, no doubt, passes far beyond all superficial rhetoric of “healing,” and suggests that 

philosophical therapy is not the absolute panacea of perfect quiescence, but the preparation for a life lived 

toward another deeper truth, and for a thinking that is disquieted by a deeper wonder. 

Health, for Rosenzweig, is fundamentally a living towards, rather than in flight from, death. Metaphysics 

is the flight from death through the false eternity of philosophical constructs. This last thought, I would 

8 Rosenzweig, Understanding the Sick and the Healthy, p. 103. 

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argue, opens onto a more penetrating philosophical perspective than the ideology of “healing.” To follow 

this out, though, it is necessary to invoke another “Jewish” thinker about whom Hilary Putnam has 

nothing to say in his book on Jewish philosophy: the avowedly Atheist Sigmund Freud. Freud, of course, 

is the founder of psychoanalysis, which is at once a “body of theoretical knowledge” – even a “science” 

– and “therapy.” Yet his thought, I would suggest, involves a very different, richer and more challenging, 

understanding of what “healing” is. “Healing,” for Freud, has nothing to do with achieving “perfect 

peace”: rather, psychoanalysis opens us up to the disquiet at the core of our being by allowing us to live 

with this truth. This is what Eric Santner, in his book on Freud and Rosenzweig, understands, applying a 

Freudian concept, as the uncanny. 9 

It is not difficult to imagine why Hilary Putnam might pass over Freud: psychoanalysis represents a 

challenge to the concept of science (consisting of propositions, based on evidence, that are falsifiable) that 

continues to dominate analytic philosophy. From such a perspective it is not too difficult to accommodate 

poetry, religion, or mysticism: none of these really overlap with the domain of Empirical science. 

It is possible to say, as Hilary Putnam will: “I am still a religious person, and I am still a naturalistic 

philosopher... A naturalistic philosopher, but not a reductionist.” 10 A system of thought like Freudian 

psychoanalysis, building an edifice of concepts that lack clear empirical reference and propositions 

that cannot be falsified, offers a more disquieting, indeed absolute challenge, to the dominant forms of 

naturalism, even if Sigmund Freud, unlike the three philosophers Putnam will speak about, did certainly 

consider himself both a naturalist and an ardent atheist. 

If we look at one of Freud’s early manuscripts, his “Project for a Scientific Psychology,” 11 we find a hint 

of how Freud’s own scientific premises can lead to a concept of science that will ultimately challenge the 

“engineering perspective,” offering the prospect of a very different critique of metaphysics, and a different 

sense for what philosophy might be. In this text, Freud, seeking a biological basis for psychoanalytic 

insight – it is here indeed that his reductionist tendencies are greatest – distinguishes between exogenic 

and endogenic stimuli. Exogenic stimuli come from “outside” the organism, and involve an excitation 

of “sensory” neurones that, conveyed to “motor” neurones, leads to an immediate ceasing of the original 

stimuli. You poke a worm with a stick; it moves away. Endogenic stimuli, such as hunger and sexual 

desire, are much more subtle and curious. In this case, the stimulation originates within the organism. The 

9 Eric Santner, The Psychotheology of Everyday Life: Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig (Chicago: University of 

Chicago Press, 2001). 

10 Hilary Putnam, Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to Life: Rosenzweig, Buber, Levinas, Wittgenstein (Bloomington: 

University of Indiana, 2008), p. 5. 

11 Sigmund Freud, “The Project of a Scientific Psychology,” in The Origins of Psycho-analysis, tr. James Strachey (New 

York: Basic Books, 1954), pp. 347-445. 

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organism can no longer get away from the stimulus; there is no longer a space in which it could get away. 

Instead, it can only seek to quiet the inner disturbance by transforming the world; but this requires it to 

become more powerful, more alive and quick, and hence more subject to the very stimuli that it seeks to 

still. 

The “Project” is manifestly reductionist. Yet the structural opposition between the exogenic and endogic, 

I would argue, provide a powerful means to discovering the complicity between the “engineering” 

approach of analytic philosophy and a “healing” approach that undoes philosophy. What I have referred 

to as the “ideology of healing” may be regarded as a special case of what I will call “ideology as such”: 

the projection of endogenic events onto an exogenic space. (A simple, everyday example: we believe that 

we love the one whom we love because of who he or she is. Love becomes a positive exogenic stimulus 

– pursuit as the opposite of flight). The essence of the “engineering” approach to philosophy consists in 

regarding all “philosophical problems” as if they were “exogenic stimuli” that must be “dealt with” by 

constructing a solution and thus finding a way out. Wittgenstein’s genius consists in taking this “engineering 

approach” to its furthest consequence – he is not held back by ordinary, more human scruples – at which 

point it becomes clear that the “exogenic” problems must be folded back into an “endogenic” root. But, at 

just this point, the “therapeutic” model of philosophy intervenes: instead of seeking to live in “endogenic” 

truth, it imagines an ultimate “way out” from the compulsive need to find “ways out.” At the very moment 

when Wittgenstein has exhausted “ideology,” leading us like Moses to the threshold, the “therapeutic 

approach” seeks to dismiss philosophy, to dismiss thinking: as if thinking and ideology were the same 

thing. 

Seen from this perspective, we can get a better sense for the proper critique of metaphysics. The problem 

with metaphysics is not the abstraction of its concepts, or its tendency to interrupt the flow of “ordinary 

life” and distort “common sense.” Ordinary language, as Putnam (and Wittgenstein) reminds us, is itself 

subject to “delusion,” but these delusions have nothing to do with the inherent, necessary, and benevolent 

abstraction that, as Levi-Strauss has demonstrated, belongs to the “ordinary language” of even the most 

so-called primitive cultures. The source of delusion, rather, is the extroversion of the endogenic; the 

projection of all the problems of life out into a world in which we can cope with them by engineering 

solutions. The problem with metaphysics, rather, is that by remaining dependent, in the formulation 

of its concepts, on metaphors drawn from an exogenetically articulated space, it merely presents, in a 

more subtle, sophisticated, sublimated form the cardinal error of ordinary language. This explains why 

the linguistic turn, properly conceived, presents such a powerful philosophical antidote to metaphysics. 

metaphysics has, from the beginning, involved the attempt to extrovert language into the world – and this 

gesture remains even when the “metaphysical baggage” has been discarded, as with the referential theory 

of meaning in favor with analytic philosophers. Radically conceived, the linguistic turn involves returning 

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language to an endogenic signification – precisely what Psychoanalysis (above all Lacan) does when it 

tries to understand the signifier in terms of desire. 

It is for this reason that pragmatism (to which Putnam also prescribes) and ordinary language philosophy, 

seductive as they are for those who have cannot see past the “ideology of health,” are so dubious, despite 

(indeed because of) the overwhelming claims of “common sense” that they marshal to their side. In place 

of the many errors of metaphysics, they give us its cardinal error. Common sense and ordinary language, 

and the belief that there are “things to do” out there in the world, are not the remedy for metaphysics, but 

the fountainhead of its mistakes. Of course: there are things to do; everyday life is also important, in some 

sense much more important. Health, and healthy living are good, very good. The errors of metaphysics are 

merely more subtle, abstract versions of the errors necessary to live; errors that are of the very essence of 

healthy life. But everyday life is not living towards and in truth – though the life in truth is also not a life 

outside the everyday; not a life lived in the caves of mystics or the solipsistic ovens of philosophers. 

Rosenzweig’s “new thinking,” as Putnam recognizes, does pass beyond the threshold, getting to the root of 

the “philosophical disease.” Yet I would suggest that “religion” becomes another way of extroverting the 

endogenic. Rosenzweig’s God is no longer onto-theological, no longer conceived as the “ultimate being.” 

Instead, he becomes the pure essence of extroversion. The notion of the “Other” could itself be understood 

in this way as a purely, rigorously relational conception of exteriority. Freud’s “Moses and Monotheism” 

could be seen as an answer to this. But it is his notion of the “death drive,” of the drive toward death as the 

most radical “endogenic” tendency of our being, of which provides the most radical answer to the claims 

of religion. Yet perhaps the endogenic is merely the perversion of the exogenic. Between endogenic and 

exogenic truth no reconciliation is possible. We are left with a decision. To do philosophy, to think is to 

decide for a truth, without sufficient justification, and to commit to living in it. Healing, which seeks to 

vacate decisions before they can be made, is the death of philosophy and of any truth. 

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The Practicing of Feminism as Healing Humanities 

Ra-Keum Huh 

Ewha Womans University 

Introduction 

The Humanities are the act of uncovering human values. Through this act, it tries to realize the existential 

value of human beings. The main objective of ‘Humanities Healing’ could be understood as restoring 

self-dignity through self-reflection based on humanities and providing the strength to discover that ray of 

hope in the midst of despair. Humanities helps those who feel isolated or hurt to look back on their lives, 

to break through the siege of hopelessness and by encouraging an autonomous and confident approach 

in daily life, to regain command of their own lives. Therefore, the healing power of the humanities could 

be expanded and applied to people of all social classes and all generations who are undergoing hardships 

in various circumstances. In today’s world, everyone is in dire need of the strength to find one’s place in 

society. This strength is found when, through self-reflection, one recovers one’s sense of self-dignity and 

endeavors to enhance the quality of one’s own life and lead a life of action. We can find evidence of this 

dire need through the numerous news articles detailing the current popularity of religious ascetic practices 

such as ‘meditation’ and ‘healing.’ 

The following excerpt from a news article presents the opinions of experts on the reason for such interest 

in healing. 

[…] Experts see this healing syndrome that has swept over Korean society as the result of the 

uncertainty and isolation that people feel in today’s hyper-competitive atmosphere where to fall 

behind means to become a loser. More and more people are getting hurt by the demands of this 

fast-paced society and of human relations but they keep on living without receiving proper healing 

because they don’t know how. Hwang Sang-min, a psychology professor at Yonsei University, said, 

“While everyone is aware that their lives are difficult, they are not able to discover any meaning in 

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their lives to make it worthwhile.” He also saw the conditions for a happy life having changed with 

the hyper-competition of this knowledge-based society having shaken up stability and bringing 

about frequent changes within families or workplaces. “This generation had been living by running 

straight ahead without looking back. Now, the concept of quality of life is shifting from living 

according to a capitalistic order to living according to one’s true desires.” “Healing is different 

from ‘well-being,’ which is the concept of living well for oneself. Instead of fulfilling one’s greed, 

healing teaches one to let go of the greed and pursue a restoration of relations.” 1 

We could attempt to analyze from various angles the recent ‘healing syndrome’ of people trying to look 

after their own hurts but as the article points out, this phenomenon, people seeking relief from the hurt 

and fatigue they feel in this competitive society, speaks to the sense of anxiety manifest in our society. 

Although Korea is now considered a world economic power, this change took place in only a few decades. 

While undergoing this change, Korean society came to be ruled by an optimistic view about economic 

development and the belief that ‘money solves all problems.’ However, the darker side to this change was 

the accumulation of anxiety and fatigue from a fight for survival and of the hurt and despair of those who 

lagged behind in the competition. The fact that Korea’s suicide rate is the highest among OECD member 

countries points to the consequences of such a ‘pressurized society.’ While the welfare budget might have 

gotten bigger, life expectancy might have gotten longer due to medical advances and the state of nutrition 

might have gotten better, the record-high suicide rate shows how weak our society has become in the 

mental foundation of discovering a meaning of life. 

The introduction of a multi-cultural lifestyle as Korea moves toward becoming a global society also 

provides a backdrop to this phenomenon. People are aware that the life goals and life models that they had 

grown up seeing are no longer maintainable in a global society. Yet they are unable to set a new direction 

for their lives and this has led to a sense of serious anxiety. For example, Confucius’ teaching that “at 15 

years of age, one should set one’s mind on studies” is no longer applicable in today’s world. Education 

is no longer about learning about human nature. It is now about job training and achieving survival and 

wealth. In today’s world, even if one spent most of one’s 20s studying for a test, one’s place in society 

would not be guaranteed. This is not how the previous generation had lived. The average life cycle, in 

which one marries in the 20s and finds one’s place in society in the 30s is no longer applicable. Marriage 

is now a choice, not the essential step it had been for the majority of adults in the past. The gender roles 

of men and women have shifted greatly. Families used to be a source of strength in overcoming life’s 

hardships, providing a meaning to life. However, families nowadays no longer play the role they used to 

1 Lee Eun-joo, Kim Jung-eun. “South Korea is in Healing.” Seoul Daily News, Aug 18, 2012, online news version. 

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in the past. Ultimately, people are undergoing changes that make it harder for them to find direction in 

their lives. At the same time, everyone is seeking meaning for their lives. 

However, the recent popularity of healing seems to concentrate on ‘spiritual healing’ gained through 

religious ascetic practices and meditations and this has some limits. Can the pain that one feels when 

having failed in a social relationship or falling behind in social competition be healed only by self- 

examination? Most of the techniques trending today seem to pursue healing through such a direction of 

transcending the context of life. That is, it seems to advocate a self-reflection of how ‘worldly’ one has 

become and to gain peace of mind and mental stability by recovering an ‘unworldly’ spiritualism. If this 

is misconstrued as a “the world is how I view it” transcendentalism, this form of healing will merely be 

preserving the order of reality that is producing so much pain and victims, and it will expose people to 

continual relapses. 

If so, in which direction should humanities be applied as to bring healing? Humanities, as an act of 

exploring the significance of human being, should not stay at asking questions. By asking questions in 

humanities, they should go on to discover their own value and to practice the value that they discovered. 

As such, humanities healing should include the following: the act of questioning which problems in 

the order of today’s world bring mental and physical pain to humans and the act of restoring the self- 

autonomous ability of humans to change the world. I would like to explore the possibility of this answer 

in the practice of feminism which has taken place in the past half-century. In order to do so, I will start by 

considering a discussion that has recently taken place in humanities with its healing as its main objective. 

1. A Humanities Paradigm of Healing 

Focusing on the fact that humanities plays an important role in embracing human pain and restoring self- 

dignity, an application field of philosophical practice called ‘philosophical consultancy’ is garnering 

much attention. In this field, the therapeutical element found in the distinct function of philosophy is 

reinforced. “Philosophical consultancy is a field where philosophers trained in consultancy help those who 

are suffering from a confusion of values, those who are unable to find the key to solving their problems 

or those who suddenly feel despair at the meaninglessness of life. In helping these people, the consultant 

philosophers show them how to overcome their difficulties on their own.” 2 Lee Jin-nam introduces 

2 Germany’s Gerd Achenbach is considered to be a founding figure of the field of ‘philosophical consultancy’ in which 

a philosophical approach is taken in mental and emotional therapy sessions. Actual application of this consultancy in 

medical field began in earnest when Gerd Achenbach established a philosophical consulting clinic in 1982 and conducted 

clinical therapy sessions through philosophical consultancy. Consultant philosophers try to help people solve issues that 

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philosophical consultancy with the following words: “The subjects of philosophical consultancy are 

people suffering from an illness of the mind. The most effective way to treat them is conversing with 

them in counseling. The person who conducts the healing are the subjects themselves. The external role 

of the consultant philosopher is to discuss with the subjects any inherent discrepancies in the subject’s 

view on the human or the world found during the course of counseling and to help them resolve these 

discrepancies through philosophical thinking.” 3 

In a recently published article, Lou Marinoff, a major proponent of philosophical consultancy, diagnosed 

the many problems that modern humans experience as ‘cultural illness’ and prescribed humanities as the 

way to solve illness that come from cultural factors. 4 

“Overall, the wide range of health issues that bother people living in advanced economies - depression, 

the interest in obesity, social anxiety disorders, sexual disorders, nameless disorders that come from the 

side effects of taking a cocktail of prescription drugs - are illness that arise from cultural factors and not 

from biological causes. These illness are problems that touch upon the core of humanity. To lead fulfilling 

lives, these illness must be approached from a humanities’ perspective and be resolved within the field of 

humanities.” 

However, the specifics of the diagnosis and prescription that the author introduced in his article were a 

bit baffling to me. I have no objections to his diagnosis that the amazing advances in modern science 

and technology have, rather than promoting human health and happiness, become tools with which large 

pharmaceutical corporations and the insurance industry have used to colonialize human bodies. This 

speaks to the context of a barren capitalistic life in this time and age when even humanistic values are 

being calculated in terms of how much they are worth money-wise. However, we need to take another 

look at his argument that implicitly points to the development of a secular humanities as the reason for this 

colonialization. Mr. Marinoff’s argument is that although the humanities of Enlightenment, the philosophy 

of nature and empirical philosophy replacing theological explanations, freed humans from the dogmatic 

and despotic rule of religion, it also led to the age of mechanism and determinism breeding the so-called 

“paradox of Enlightenment.” This is how “secular humanities,” alongside the myth of modern science that 

even humans could be understood in terms of cause and effect, started turning into nihilism and a denial of 

anyone can experience, such as the moral dilemmas, workplace conflicts, confusion of values and objectives, confusion 

rising from human relations and sense of self-identity and a sudden sense of loss, through philosophical conversations. 

An actual philosophical consulting process applies the thoughts of those who provided philosophical wisdom helpful in 

examining life regardless of the field they worked in, such as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Freud and Einstein. 

3 “Humanities Healing for a Happy Life.” Report on Humanities Korea Project Phase 1. Kangwon National University. 

4 Lou Marinoff. The 11th International Conference on Philosophical Practice. Kangwon National University. July 16, 2012. 

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human nature. This, in turn, led to a new ‘cultural illness’ as yet experienced by humankind. The problem 

rises with Mr. Marinoff’s following opinion on humanities and anti-humanities. Mr. Marinoff seeks the 

source of modern man’s illness in the spirit of postmodernism that has its roots in secular humanities. He 

calls the contemporary era a post-modern, post-Christian, post-humanities, post-intellect age and sees this 

as the context for modern man’s illness such as nihilism and depression. 5 

If this is the cultural cause breeding modern man’s illness, which direction should humanities healing 

take? Should it return to the modern, to Christianity, to traditional humanities? If the spirit of humanities 

which can help people escape nihilism and hopelessness is not to found by returning to traditional 

Christianity or traditional Humanities, in which direction of humanities could it be found 6 As Mr. Marinoff 

argues, did secular humanities and a cause-and-effect understanding of humans lead to this post-modern 

nihilism? 

The problem is not in the secularity found in the modern spirit of mechanism but in its tendency to think 

of oneself as being representative of the spirit of humanities. Thus, the more dangerous thing would be 

to diagnose the post-modern spirit of humanities, which attempts to deconstructe such representative 

understanding of human, as the source of cultural illness. The problem is not in a mechanistic or secular 

understanding itself but in trying to establish the absolute truth that applies to everything. 

The post-modern spirit of humanities is a critical approach to the problems arising from the “uniqueness of 

representation” that Enlightenment humanities upheld. If we keep in mind the limits of the Enlightenment 

humanities with its belief that one single truth was applicable to all metaphysical existence, we could 

actually use the post - moden spirits as an exit strategy to heal philosophical illness. 

A change in epistemology, the shift from postulating one single truth about the world and thoroughly 

investigating the truth to allow for a multiple of truths, took place in the Linguistic Turn of 20 th century 

philosophy, when truth (or the awareness of truth) was seen to be dependant on language. Since then, 

many humanities studies have been conducted in the form of seeking meaning in the humanities from 

a linguistic context. The results of such endeavors could be seen as post-humanities. Therefore, post- 

humanities is not anti-humanities. It is humanities after a shift from a realism- and fundamentalism-based 

5 Lou Marinoff (2012), “Humanities Therapy: Restoring Well-Being in an Age of Culturally-Induced Illness.” Proceedings 

XI-ICPP & HT2012 The 11th International Conference on Philosophical Practice and the 4th International Conference on 

Humanities Theraphy, pp. 27-43. 

6 In his paper, Mr. Marinoff expressed hopes in an Asian spirit of humanities but he stops at expressing such hope and does 

not present a concrete alternative. 

468

paradigm of seeking one representative humanities truth to an anti-realism and linguistic paradigm. 

A post-modern deconstruction is not based on a nihilistic logic that states that there is no truth. Rather, 

it points to the falsity of the belief that there is only one single truth and it is a humanities exploration 

developed through the interaction of various competing statements of truth. As such, post-modern 

humanities is not the cultural source of modern illness. Rather, it could even be a useful resource in 

healing these modern illness which are brought about by a culture upholding one representative truth. A 

humanities paradigm accepting the possibility of multiple truths will open doors for humanities resources 

which had been excluded and suppressed under the rule of a single, absolute truth. Such a spirit of 

humanities is based on the acceptance that all human understanding and human value are influenced by 

particular cultural values and as such, no one knowing of truth could claim the privileged rights. With 

such a paradigm, different humanities beliefs formed in different contexts are not judged as being wrong 

or evaluated as being immature. Instead, their contextual significance is taken into consideration. 

Post-modern humanities accept the limits of partial human knowing, unlike traditional humanities 

which aim to give the privileged rights to episteme. As such, post-modern humanities lays the stage for a 

humanities of communication. 

Such humanities of communications are to be accepted as a means for the modern human to find answers 

when looking for a new direction of life in face of new social changes. It is inappropriate to regard it as a 

nihilistic tendency which produces today’s cultural illness. 

2. Feminist Humanities for the Socially Weak 

Feminist humanities, which led to women’s self-awareness as an subject, contributed to the development 

of a paradigm of humanities open to the possibility of multiple truths. Feminism starts by criticizing the 

patriarchical power structure which tries to place women and men in hierarchical order according to sex 

differences, presupposing that the differences between women and men are essential. It could be defined 

as theoretical and practical activities for the liberation of women. 

This is no different from declaring that women are equal to men as human agents. Such declaration also 

signifies that women are agents who understand the meaning of life based on their own life experiences. 

The source of power behind the practice of feminism lies in women trying to investigate the nature of the 

society and culture that they belong to by standing at a distance from it. They then try to investigate how 

their society maintained the patriarchal order through viewing history from their own perspective. That is, 

it is born through the efforts of asking questions about the significance of the world and answering these 

questions by reviewing history and the women’s own experiences. As such, the practice of feminism is 

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inseparable from the exploration efforts of humanities. 

Feminist humanities researchers have discovered in their exploration of the history of humanities that in 

a humanities tradition that upheld one representative type of humans, a humanistic ideal was established 

and only those who fit this ideal were accepted as a human subject in humanities. Those who didn’t fit 

the profile were considered deficient and lacking and subordinate to the subject. Instead of pursing their 

own understanding of humans and the world, they were forced to stay at an inferior position in which they 

were to follow the rules and play the roles that were given to them. However, the ability to criticize based 

on principles of humanities led to women uncovering that such representative humanity was a particular 

ideology based on the experience of men who were in a dominant position in the patriarchical hierarchy. 

This, in turn, fostered a sense of subjectivity among women. Now, women could place themselves in the 

position of human subject and define for themselves where their pain came from. 

The pain that comes from not having one’s beliefs and actions respected, the anger that comes from not 

being accepted as a being who can think and act for oneself were not restricted to some women only. The 

self-contempt, hopelessness, despair and anxiety are commonly found in all those who are placed in a 

socially marginal position. Feminist humanities was an effective method used by women to encourage one 

another when placed in a socially weak position and to change the age-old culture and systems that kept 

women to the sides. As such, feminist humanities could be a model of humanities for all those whose self- 

dignity have been harmed by socially-construed standards or categories. feminist humanities did not add 

to the burden of women’s pain by finding the cause of the pain in the women themselves. Nor did it allow 

women to stay in a self-deceptive mode by telling them to transcend their surrounding circumstances 

in their minds. Instead, feminist humanities chose to uncover in the social context the circumstances of 

life that were causing women pain. Thus, women were able to find the power of affirmation to liberate 

themselves in this collective effort calling for changes in social order. 

In such efforts, the thing that is needed above all is new language. The main task of feminist humanities 

was an investigation of language necessary to reevaluate oneself, understand relationships and interpret 

the world based on one’s own experiences, feelings and thoughts. The language forming the rules of 

patriarchal life were not appropriate for revealing the problems that women were wrestling with or for 

healing the damaged self-identity of women. Oftentimes, the language would even have a suppressive 

function. For example, the word ‘women’ does not only refer to the biological sex. It is an aggregation 

of meanings forming a series of implicated regulations and relationships controlling women’s lives 

overall, from where women should stay, what they should do or not do, who they should interact with 

or not interact with, how they should behave. Unless one knows the implications, one cannot be said to 

understand the word ‘women’ correctly. 

470

These regulations on how women should live have also taken place in the process of daily living. 

Comments such as “Women are beautiful” or “A mother’s sacrifice is a noble thing” must have brought 

life-assuring joy to some women and some mothers in the beginning. However, now they have become 

some sort of regulations and virtues that all women are to uphold as a matter of fact. In this context, they 

are no longer joy-giving or life-affirming sayings but normative values that women are forced to uphold. 

Now, beauty or noble sacrifice are no longer choices that women can make as principal agents. Women 

are no longer agents of this value. Rather, these virtues have now become systems that turn women 

into ‘the others,’ objects that can be controlled by the ruling powers. Thus, women feel skepticism and 

hopelessness in practicing what must have once brought them joy. Her life is still being praised for its 

beauty or sacrifice but her existential agency is being ignored. 

In a situation where what women can say and cannot say are defined, to go against that definition is to go 

against the rules of the community. Thus, women came to suffer a ‘nameless illness’ in which they felt 

trapped in a room without any exits. 

How were women able to find their exit from such illness? feminist humanities tries to provide the exit 

through the job of deconstructing the self-identity of women that was formed through these normative 

customs. This is the job of analyzing and deconstructing the series of regulations that formed the meaning 

of ‘women.’ Regulations that are thought to be unbreakable and traditions that are considered essential 

to our ethnical identity and praised as being ‘good’ and ‘beautiful’ are merely the products of particular 

historical and political practice. It is important that we have the discernment to see that such traditions 

are neither inevitable laws of nature or inherent human ways. Anthropological research conducted by 

distancing oneself from one’s own culture, using methods such as genealogy research from a feministic 

perspective or studying the orders of other cultures are an effective way of promoting such discernment. 

3. A Deconstructive Analysis of Self-Identity 

One begins to see the normative order that had been suppressing oneself in a relative point of view when 

one deconstructs its meaning. This also allows one to bring up questions that had been considered taboo 

until now. One is able to talk about problems that had been giving them pain but were hidden until now 

as private shame. The awareness that one was not able to talk about this problem because one had been 

oppressed, that the source of the problem lies not in the personal shortcomings of oneself becomes a 

source of strength to talk about problems that one had been burying inside until now because one had 

not been able to discover the cause. The uncovering of such problems are oftentimes taken as subversive 

challenges to society but for those who had been oppressed, they represent a liberating exit. We can 

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find a similar situation in the writing of Chung Jin-hong on healing found in the context of religious 

communities. 

This is no different from discovering the most effective exit to escape the ‘reckless bondage’ of 

idiomatic expressions. I feel that a change in language is no different from a change in the world. 

Therefore talking in a new language is meeting with a new exit strategy that didn’t exist before, of 

revealing one’s pain which isn’t being recognized by the authorities. In actuality, a new language 

is not a coincidence. It is the product of selves who had no other choice but to express themselves 

in another language. By experiencing carefreeness coming from not holding back from asking 

questions, by sharing one’s loneliness by exposing it publicly, by fearlessly confessing that there 

are self-oppressive chains within oneself in relations to the religious community which were in 

someways self-tormenting, by taking the courage to do so and receiving the consolation that one 

could not get from one’s superiors from other ‘outsiders,’ one breathes in a ‘return to self.’ 7 

Speaking out about one’s pain against social stigma is not only significant for restoring one’s self-identity. 

By expressing in language one’s pain, one begins to let society know that such pain exists. Expressing 

one’s pain is the act of letting others know of such pain and this holds significance on a social level. It 

is an act of transforming a private emotion into a social event. It is an effort to create a new linguistic 

community that can express one’s pain in a meaningful manner. It is, in a way, an effort to bring about a 

social change that can alleviate one’s pain. 8 

In this way, people who are hurt need a language to talk meaningfully about their own experiences and 

to think in a different manner. The normative language of the patriarchical world that has ruled the lives 

of women was considered sacred as if its meanings held unchanging truths. However, the meanings in a 

language are created within the life process of the community that uses the language. They are not given 

7 Chung Jin-hong (2012), “What I want to think about in regards to the healing phenomenon.” Philosophy and Reality. 

Issue 94, pp. 84-85. The point of this article is aligned with the thought behind the practice of women’s liberation. Mr. 

Chung writes about how believers who loyally adhered to religious regulations within the a religious system would 

suddenly feel religious skepticism and despair. Here, we can see that this is similar to the existential situation of women 

placed in an oppressive situation. 

8 By criticizing the falsity of single-truth humanities, feminists were able to develop new humanities approaches. Our 

society is a democratic society which upholds equality and universal citizenship in principle. However, one can discover 

that it is still ruled by a male-centric social order and thought. feminist humanities uncovers and brings to surface the 

surrounding events, everyday life styles and common preconceptions our society holds that make this a gender-divided 

society. In the process of revealing how many gender-discriminating acts and systems were rationalized and accepted by 

our society in the name of tradition and customs, of uncovering the truth that the language and rules applied to women in 

the name of ‘morality’ and ‘duty’ were merely practices in a patriarchical and male-centric society, women can experience 

healing of their damaged self-identity, coming from seeing oneself as an incapable being, and restoration of their selfdignity. 

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truths reflecting unchanging existences. In this sense, the world of meanings in language is not complete 

or fixed. As linguistic philosophers put it, it is a life form in that it is always open to change. Changes to 

the life environment is followed by changes in everyday life and changes in linguistic meanings. 

The meanings in a language are not the minds of the language user or the external substance that the 

language refer to. It is created and transformed in the practice of the language community. Based on this 

premise, our understanding of self needs to change as well. 

Generally, we are used to defining self by linking it to an identity that is maintained unchanged despite 

any external changes. However if who I am is not independent from the linguistic context in which it 

is spoken, ‘I’ in a changing linguistic context cannot be approached as the unchanging essence of ‘I.’ 

In particular, it seems impossible to talk about who I am in relation to an unchanging essence in this 

modern society where the context of language usage is multi-layered and mixed up. As a simple example, 

my identity as a woman and as a humanities scholar is determined in multi-layers in the context of the 

patriarchical practice that the members of our society share in and in the context of the democratic practice 

that has developed since early modernity. A context of relationship-centered order and a context of 

individual-centered order that transcends relationships, my identity already holds an inherent contradiction 

because it is created in these two disparate contexts. 

As such, feminism does not take the concept of self as an ‘essence’ based upon the foundations of 

identity. Instead, it takes the concept of self as a non-unificative or active process taking place within the 

boundaries of history, society and culture. That is, feminism sees the individual self as a ‘work in progress’ 

being processed amidst the contradictions and conflicts that cause the fragmentation of one’s subjecthood. 

In feminism, the appropriate concept is an existential self. Who I am can only be told through what I 

choose in a particular situation. There is no given essence that makes me, me. As such, ‘finding one’s lost 

self’ might be a rhetorical expression but it does not hold an accurate understanding of the self. 

Women hold a lot of internalized negative and conflicting concepts about themselves, due to the long 

history of women having been peripheral beings. The more areas of life I participate in, the more 

complicated the relationships I forge become, the more I experience myself as a complex, conflicting 

and fragmented being construed of disparate meanings. The concept of self in feminism is constructed 

in this context. 9 The modern understanding of humans was that the fragmented, conflicting, ambiguous 

9 It seems the situation that we find ourselves in is a situation in which we must ask and question who we are in a scene 

where different contexts of life overlap and clash. In such situation, the humanities of before with its premise that all 

humans have a core essence that makes the individual and are a unique, unchanging and adjusted unit does little to help. 

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and fickle nature of self were symptoms of the mental illness or weakness of the person. Feminism, on 

the other hand, saw this as positive traits of self which helped one be more considerate of oneself and of 

others and which led to one forming relations with others by treating them as equals. These were traits 

that a flexible self should possess. A flexible self is open to meeting others and allows change to itself in 

relationships with others. 

The ideal of a well-adjusted and unified self seems to have come from imagining a subjectivity who forms 

his or her perspective in a place that transcends the circumstances of life and views the world and fellow 

humans through this perspective. As discussed above, this is a far cry from a self that struggles with the 

despair, sense of loss and anxiety that comes from leading one’s life in the realities of life. Moreover, the 

self is a far more complex materialization of a sub-conscious level to be seen as a well-adjusted beliefs 

system. In this sense, the traditional concept of self is not an appropriate concept to be used in humanities 

healing. 

4. Feminist Method of Conscious-Raising 

There are several humanities methods for healing people in pain. The process of distancing oneself 

from the shared beliefs, attitudes and emotions that have already become familiar and examining them 

autonomously is a thought process that those who are socially isolated must go through to heal the pain 

they have. The method for one who asks about the grounds for the rules that oppress oneself to establish 

one’s place and to explore until finally reaching an answer that one can accept, this is the method of 

philosophical analysis. As mentioned above, the process of uncovering how the regulations and concepts 

that oppress oneself is used in one’s society and finding out on whose experiences they are based on 

can be helpful not only to those who are socially isolated and hurt but to those who are suffering from 

problems of individual aspects. 10 

An efficient method of humanities healing could be taken through works of humanities that reflect on 

The traditional schema that humans are thinking agents and that the most supreme human act is to contemplate the world 

doesn’t help, either. Instead, the concept of human as an existence within the process of forming interactive meanings 

rising from a mesh of language is more appropriate not only for the socially weak but for the situation that all humans find 

themselves in today. In the traditional concept of a self or subjecthood that does not change through time or experience, 

the possibility of change over time is denied. Now, subjecthood is understood as itself being a process in change. With 

the important role that language and social interactions play in forming the self, one’s position in social relations also 

becomes an important factor in forming one’s subjecthood. 

10 Individual aspects and social aspects are not sharply divided but rather, interconnected most of the times. 

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human lives but feminism often uses the method of collective dialogue. 11 If we look for this model in 

ancient times, we can first consider the Socratic dialogue. His philosophical method was not a rational 

contemplation of intuitively understanding the principles that penetrated the world. Instead, Socrates 

chose the method of holding conversations in everyday language, a method much more useful for sharing 

the worries of life. 

Moreover, the Socratic dialogue is collective, not a one-on-one dialogue such as those that usually take 

place between a therapist and a patient in healing therapies such as modern psychoanalyses. Socratic 

dialogues usually start off their themes with abstract concepts so that the entire group can share the theme. 

For example, a dialogue is initiated with formal concepts such as ‘justice’ or ‘love’ which allows for 

anyone to talk about their experiences or thoughts. When bringing up experiences that they believe are 

related to the theme, the participants in the conversation express their beliefs and react to others expressing 

their beliefs. This is how a collective dialogue is carried out. This process not only reveals the set of beliefs 

that the participants each hold but also lets them realize by listening to the beliefs of others that their own 

beliefs are only one part of a bigger whole. Participants may come to see the contradictions in the beliefs 

that they had once been so sure of. Furthermore, they might discover inherent contradictions in shared 

beliefs that are considered common sense. Through this process, by participating in the rearrangement of 

the relations between beliefs, humans can, although tentatively, reach a completely new conclusion. The 

Socratic dialogue plays the midwife in such intellectual process. 

The Socratic dialogue is an example of open exploration through which modern humans suffering from 

disorders deriving from conceptual confusion can find answers to questions such as how they should live, 

who they are and what they want. The Socratic dialogue is not a monologue in which one person does all 

the questioning and answering. The important thing to remember is that this dialogue should be conducted 

among those from different backgrounds who share an interest in the same theme. 

Despite these advantages, the Socratic dialogue has certain limits as a method of sharing and resolving 

actual problems of life because it is a method of argumentation used to distinguish what is right or wrong. 

Many problems of life are of a nature that cannot be solved by distinguishing what is right or wrong. In 

fact a number of problems do not have anything to do with right or wrong in the first place. If we take into 

11 Most of the classics read as humanities traditions were completed in a patriarchical culture and do not cover the problems 

that women want to ask. In many cases, they contain prejudices against women. That is why feminist humanities relies 

not only on these classics but on various other types of resource materials on women’s lives to uncover women’s stories 

that were not included in the classics and buried in history. 

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consideration the fact that our awareness is dependent on the language we use, the sort of problems of life 

that could be solved by sorting out what is right or wrong are the simpler problems. 

Feminist humanities recognized the limits of a dialogue conducted in the form of a courtroom debate 

distinguishing what is right and wrong. Instead, it uses a method of conscious-raising through collective 

dialogue. Here, also, participants express their thoughts on the theme. However, the dialogue is centered 

on the participants’ stories of their experiences and cases that they had seen in relation to or in association 

with the theme of the dialogue. That is, this is a form of collective conversation in which participants 

feel free to express their emotions, moods and feelings regardless of the problem of what’s wrong and 

what’s right. Moreover, this collective dialogue provides a stage for self-narration in which participants 

can reveal who they are in front of others. A fragmented, ambiguous and fickle subjecthood is reborn as 

a story through the process of self-narration in front of others. In this regard, it becomes a process of self- 

creation. 

Conclusion 

This paper began with the position of understanding the limits of humanities as a means to discover the 

answer to the questions, ‘Who am I’ and ‘How should I live’ when believing that there is one correct 

answer. We can verify that this was not a valid position for everyone just by looking back on the history 

of humanities. To be accurate, this was humanities as practiced by those in authoritative positions, subject 

who possessed the necessary conditions to represent humanities understanding. As such, it is somewhat 

inadequate for shedding light on and exploring problems of life for those who were not accepted as 

representative subjectivity of humanities. From the start, the objective of traditional humanities was 

never to be a humanities in which those in the peripheries and those in pain can participate and form their 

subjecthood. Therefore, one can hardly expect this humanities to give healing and caring for the painful 

suffering of the socially vulnerable who are unable to claim representative positions. 

This paper emphasizes that humanities healing for the socially weak, those who are most vulnerable and 

inevitably hurt, cannot be found in a paradigm seeking one great, representative truth. Instead, it must be 

found in a paradigm that allows for a multiple of humanities understanding. Only a paradigm open to the 

possibility of multiple understandings can listen attentively to the life stories experienced from various 

positions of society and allow these peripheral participants to voice their own words. 

A humanities paradigm that allows for multiple subjectivities and multiple understandings uses 

conversation as an important method of humanities exploration. Conversation is where different agents 

meet because of the undeniable fact that they live in the same community. When we all live in the same 

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community, our different positions and meanings cannot exist like isolated islands, existing alongside one 

another but never interacting. They are now aware that their life story only tells part of the truth and are 

situation-based and limited. When agents meet with such awareness, they meet to go beyond their partial 

perspectives and communicate with others. How these partial awareness will collide and clash, how they 

will be interconnected and adjusted or compromised is not decided beforehand. No one has the authority 

to decide what the final answer is. 12 

This paper presents such humanities dialogue and healing methods based on the experience of feminism 

having applied them to heal the self-identity of women who were in pain. Healing cannot be achieved 

merely by the internal and spiritual recovery of the individual. This might be a necessary condition but 

not a sufficient condition. An internal and spiritual recovery might restore one’s self-esteem and give one 

the strength to carry on but as long as the social order that had excluded the individual in the first place 

continues to exist unchanged, the individual will return to the same social order as the same ‘loser’ and 

‘disqualified person.’ 

In the restoration of a damaged self for those who were socially excluded or isolated, as in the case of 

feminist humanities, one needs not only to examine oneself but to garner the strength to publicly express 

one’s pain. Only then could one start cracking at the social and cultural regulations and orders that 

excluded and pained one and begin to change them. Humanities healing can only be completed when 

accompanied by social changes. 

12 Only by acknowledging the practical circumstances of today’s life that is creating a spirit of deconstructive humanities 

and which differ greatly from the past, can we acquire an accurate understanding of the illness that these circumstances 

are producing. The same goes for dealing with these illness and healing people from them. When the significance of an 

illness is wrongly construed, the prescription based upon such inaccurate diagnosis would cause more harm than good. 

This is because it would be adding yet another factor of confusion to the formula. Only when we accurately understand 

the context in which the illness is being produced, can we look for ways to heal or treat it. 

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Emotions and Humanities Healing: The Greek Philosophers and 

the Stoics’ Understanding of Emotions 

Wooryong Park 

Sogang University 

I. Preface 1 

When reviewing the healing of the humanities of modern man’s pain and difficulties, one can first 

consider the healing of emotions or sentiments. Generally, the modern man experiences anger, a sense 

of deprivation, dejection, isolation and despair, which are all emotional states. In order to resolve such 

emotional pain, one must start by better understanding such emotions. 

Since ancient times, emotions have been regarded as something negative in the West. Academic studies on 

emotions have been conducted for a long time in the West, and one of the rhetorics commonly used since 

ancient days is “emotions are the slaves to reason.” 2 This example shows how human emotions have been 

regarded since the early stages of history as something inferior and negative compared to reason. In fact, 

early interest in emotions occurred as by-results in the process of philosophers discussing reason. In this 

process, emotions were considered a threat to reason and with the potential of endangering philosophy 

and philosophers. 3 

Such comparisons became the direct cause of the birth of two philosophical perspectives on emotions. 

First, it led to the view that emotions are inferior to reason. That is, there was a thinking that emotions 

1 The introduction was written based on the author’s work “The Intellectual Tradition of Understanding Emotions in the West,” 

Seoyangsaron 102 (2009), pp. 321-57. 

2 One of the most enduring metaphors of reason and emotion has been the metaphor of master and slave, with the wisdom of 

reason firmly in control and the dangerous impulses of emotion safely suppressed, channeled, or (ideally) in harmony with 

reason. Robert C. Solomon, “The Philosophy of emotions,” in Handbook of Emotions, Third Edition. Michael Lewis et al eds. 

(New York: Guilford Press, 2008), p. 3. 

3 Ibid. 

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were more primitive, less intelligent and more dangerous than reason and had to be controlled by reason. 

Second, and more importantly, humans came to accept the dichotomy of reason-emotion as something 

natural in our minds. That is, reason and emotions existed as two distinct systems in nature and were 

conflicting and mutually hostile forces found within the human soul. 4 

Even philosophers who tried to unite reason and emotions and integrate one into another constantly 

claimed the two were different and that reason was superior. This tradition begins with Plato. Plato saw 

the human soul as comprising of three parts or functions reason, desires and will but considered it ideal 

for reason to rule the soul entirely. 5 Such attitude since ancient days of dividing the human into reason and 

emotions became a predominant or staple concept in the intellectual tradition of the West and continued 

into the modern era. One modern philosopher who inherited such tendency was Rene Descartes. 

The first scholar to purposefully study emotions as a discipline was the American philosopher and 

psychologist William James. In an 1884 edition of Mind, a late 19th century philosophy journal, he 

published an article titled, “What is an emotion?” This article was instrumental in drawing the public’s 

attention to the subject of emotions. In this article, James defined emotion as the “physiological response 

that always comes in the aftermath of a feeling.” 6 This definition indicates that even into the 19 th century, 

emotions were considered a phenomenon in which the physiological aspect was more dominant. 

However, such understanding of emotions presents a considerable problem when keeping modern 

humanities healing in mind. If emotions are merely a physiological response and have no cognitive or 

reflective elements, there is no possibility of emotional healing within humanities healing. There does 

exist in the intellectual traditions of the West, a tradition of viewing emotion not just as a physiological 

response but a phenomenon with a cognitive element. This tradition continues from Plato and Aristotle, 

continuing through the Stoics, passed on by Spinoza and David Hume and reaching onto Freud in the 19 th 

century. 7 

This paper aims to present, based on such understanding of emotions, the perspective that emotions have 

a cognitive element and that this could be a crucial method in the healing of emotions. First, it will go 

4 Ibid. 

5 Simo Knuuttila, Emotions in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 7. 

6 Solomon, What Is an Emotion?: Classic and Contemporary Readings, 2nd edn. (New York : Oxford University Press, 2003), 

p. 1. 

7 The author has anthologized Western traditions that view emotions favorably in the above-mentioned “The Intellectual Tradition 

of Understanding Emotions in the West,” (2009). 

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over concepts of emotions by Plato and by Aristotle and verify the contents seeking a cognitive element. 

Next, it will compare the methods by the Epicureans and by the Stoics of getting rid of emotional desires. 

Finally, it will point to the legacy of the Stoics’ therapy of emotions as found in religion, philosophy and 

psychological treatments. 

II. A New Understanding of the Concept of Emotions in Ancient Greece: Plato and Aristotle 

1. Plato 

A philosophical analysis of emotions was first introduced by Plato (427-347 B.C.) and further developed 

by Aristotle (384-322 B.C.). Plato’s The Republic is perhaps the first methodical explanation ever given 

on the state of human emotions. In The Republic, while discussing the ideal state and the good human life, 

Plato divides the human soul into three parts reason, spirit and appetite. 8 The reason loves knowledge and 

wisdom. The appetite pursues immediate physical pleasures while avoiding pain. The spirit in the middle 

is where emotions related self-confidence and self-assurance are located. Plato did not think that these 

three parts would achieve wholesome harmony on their own. On the contrary, he considered it natural that 

there would be frequent conflict among the parts. 9 

In his earlier dialogues, Plato seemed to regard all desires and emotions outside reason as arising from the 

body. This is particularly marked in Phaedo, where he reflects upon the significance of death and the fate 

of the human soul. The dichotomy of soul-body divides the immortal and rational function of the soul and 

the ephemeral and irrational function of the human body. 10 Plato does not see any positive element in the 

desires and passions of the body. This is an attitude indicative of Plato’s early asceticism and this has led 

to Plato being perceived as a philosopher whose objective was to transcend desire and passion as much as 

possible. 11 

However, in The Republic and other dialogues during the middle of his life, Plato sees desire and emotion 

as movements of the soul. Plato’s attitude towards desire and emotions in these writings differ slightly 

from that found in his earlier work of Phaedo. 12 The area of desire includes fundamental biological desires 

8 Plato, Republic, 4.435-441c: 9.580d-583a, Knuuttila, Emotions, p. 7 

9 Ibid. 

10 Plato, Phaedo 66b-e, Knuuttila, Emotions in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy, p. 7. 

11 Plato, Phaedo, 66e67a, in M.C Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy 

(Cambridge, 1986), pp. 151~152; A. W, Price, Mental Conflict (London, 1995), pp. 36-40. 

12 Knuuttila, Emotions, p. 7. 

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and impulses and these mechanically avoid pain and seek immediate pleasure. In this perspective, it is 

similar to the instincts of animals. A human driven by animal instincts is pitched to and fro by the impulses 

rising from changes to his body and his surroundings. 13 

Nevertheless, while emphasizing the difference between the rational and the irrational, Plato did not 

consider desire and emotion to be irrational in that he considered them to be completely void of any 

cognitive elements. 14 Plato saw these as having ways to express themselves and considered it possible to 

interpret them as having an evaluative and balanced attitude. Plato saw sexual lust, thirst and hunger as 

the strongest human desires but didn’t consider such animal instincts were all there was to the function of 

human desire. 15 Although, Plato does emphasize the differences between the rational side and the irrational 

side, he didn’t think that the carnal and sensual side of humans was void of any reason in the sense that it 

was non-cognitive. 16 These desires had their own way of expressing themselves and therefore their actions 

could be seen as including attitudes of evaluative statements. 

As such, Plato saw that an aspect of cognitive function, as well as the instinctive aspect, affected human 

desires. Desires recognize whether the fulfillment of that instinct brings comfort or discomfort, and have 

the ability to evaluate the situation based on the predictions of pleasure or pain which would follow that 

fulfillment. 17 The desire for wealth, in particular, belongs more to the cognitive side. 18 

Courage is the part of the human soul in which a proactive and self-evaluative cognitive element can be 

found as a primary element. The act of courage share a link in physiological change with the act of desire. 

Courage is naturally given the position of serving reason. 19 Courage can help the efforts of reason, based 

on the foundations of acknowledgement, honor and self-esteem, to acquire knowledge and to align the 

essence of human existence with the true form of human’s place in the universe. In this perspective, Plato 

treats the emotional response of courage as something cognitive. 20 Courage rising in a soul without order 

rears exaggerated belligerence and bluff. 21 However, the emotional response of courage is based on value 

appraisal, which is closer to an evaluation based on reason rather than on desire. 

13 Plato, Republic 4.439b~d; 9.580d~581a, 586a~c., in Knuuttila, Emotions, pp. 7-8. 


15 Plato, Republic. 4.437d; 9.580e. 


17 Plato, Republic. , 4.442a; 9.583e-584c. 

18 Ibid, 9.581a. 

19 Ibid, 4.440a-441a. 


21 Plato, Republic, 4.441c-e; 9.581a-b; 586c-d. 

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W. W. Fortenbaugh argues that after writing The Republic, Plato changed his thoughts on emotions. 22 

This change occurred when Plato realized through philosophical debates at the Academy, that certain 

parts of the moral and political issues dealt with in The Republic had given a flawed analysis of emotional 

responses. 23 Fortenbaugh states that Plato’s dividing of the human soul into three parts is especially 

problematic when connecting emotions with psychology. Plato himself, to a certain extent, shows signs 

of awareness that there were limits to using the three-part model as a foundation to categorize emotions. 24 

In The Republic(4.443d), Plato implies that there could be more than just three parts. When discussing 

the distress that poetry can invoke, as well as emotion such as sorrow, pity and joy, Plato talks about 

distinguishing the rational side and the irrational side. 25 He refers to the latter as having an intricate and 

complex nature. 26 Thus, when desire is connected to physical impulses such as hunger, thirst and sexual 

lust, which are hard to be accepted as reason, this is expanded into the area of cognitive evaluation as well. 

Fortenbaugh points out that Plato began to see emotions as a special dimension of cognitive process. 27 

Moreover, he claims that Plato attempts to explain the difference between emotional response and rational 

reflection as these two being two forms of cognitive activities. That is why Plato clearly differentiates 

emotions from physical senses and basic impulses. Thus, cognitive process are divided in calculation and 

reflection on one parter and good or painful feelings on the other. According to Fortenbaugh’s claims, after 

The Republic, Plato’s attitude towards emotions shifted towards focusing on the cognitive aspect once he 

accepted the positive side of emotions. 28 

22 poetics, politics and ethics (London: Gerald Duckworth, 1975, 2008), pp. 9-12, 23-25, 31-33. 


24 Ibid., p. 12. 

25 Knuuttila, Emotions, p. 5. Recent exemplary writings discussing the human emotions has portrayed in ancient Greek poetry 

and tragedies are as follows: D. L. Cairns, The Psychology and Ethics of Honour and Shame in Ancient Greek Literature 

(Oxford: Carendon Press, 1993); B. Willams, Shame and Necessity (Berkeley, LA., and London, University of California 

Press, 1993); M.W. Blundell, Helping Friends and Harming Enemies: A Study in Sophocles and Greek Ethics(Cambridge: 

Cambridge University Press, 1989). 

26 Plato, Republic, 10.603d-604b in A. W. Price, Mental Conflict (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 68-9. 

27 Knuuttila, Emotions, pp.14~15. 

28 Such change of perspective by Plato will be covered more in detail in the next part. 

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2. Aristotle 

It is clear that Aristotle took from Plato the idea of compositional analysis of emotions. However, the 

two philosophers hold different views on emotions. 29 Aristotle follows Plato in dividing the human 

soul into rational and irrational parts but he does not completely separate the two. He avoids making a 

sharp distinction between the rational, or cognitive, elements of emotions and the irrational, or physical, 

elements. This is because, Aristotle acknowledged, this being a very complex-dimensioned problem, 

that emotions could be both irrational and rational. Also, Aristotle understood the two parts of reason and 

emotion inevitably being united as one. 

In addition, Aristotle did not see the human being as a completely rational being, acknowledging that there 

was an ‘emotional element’ that could ever be erased or ignored in human nature. That is why Aristotle 

thought that while a human completely succumbing to desire fell to the level of an animal, it was also 

foolish and irrational to deny one’s passion and live as an ascetic, as this was denying human nature. 30 

Aristotle presents detailed analyses on various emotions in Rhetoric. He differentiates four fundamental 

elements constituting emotions - cognition, psychic affect, bodily affect, and behavioral suggestion or 

impulse. One marked characteristic of Aristotle’s approach to emotions is his interest in emotions as 

pleasurable or non-pleasurable methods of becoming aware of oneself in various situations. 31 

Aristotle, in Ethics and Politics, states that humans have a rational and social nature and accordingly 

a great human life naturally includes developing rational skills and participating in various forms of 

social activities. 32 He believed that there existed various emotions related to issues discussed in social 

systems, actual life and actual philosophy and that there was value in analysing the functions providing 

the cognitive content and motive of emotions. 33 A socially learned emotional paradigm plays an important 

role in Aristotle’s theory of ethical education. That is, the crucial question is how to train and teach young 

people to participate in the emotional forms of culture in the direction of fostering habits of feelings and 

emotions that contribute to a good life. 34 


30 Marvin Perry, An Intellectual History of Modern Europe (Boston, 1993), p. 20. 


32 Aristotle, Ethica Nicomachea, ed. I. Bywater, OCT(Oxford: Carendon Press, 1988), 1.7-9, 2.1-5. 

33 Ibid., 2.6-8. 


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Aristotle defined emotion as “the things on account of which the ones altered differ with respect to their 

judgments, and are accompanied by pleasure and pain: such are anger, pity, fear, and all similar emotions 

and their contraries.” 35 In particular, Aristotle shows deep interest in how a human undergoing a particular 

experience would, through some process of conscious thinking, reach a pleasurable or non-pleasurable 

emotion. 

This is why Aristotle avoids treating emotion as an irrational or uncontrollable response to a situation. 

We might not be able to justify our emotions at times but just as often as not, we indeed can justify them. 

Aristotle develops this perspective in Nicomachean Ethics. In this writing, he perceives virtue (such as 

courage or generosity) to be a problem of feeling the right thing. Therefore, a courageous person is not 

immune to fear in a dangerous situation but nor does he or she let fear take over him or her. Aristotle 

claims that we can create our emotions through education and habit. 

According to Aristotle’s Rhetorics, the characteristics of many emotions show a strong reaction to the 

behavior of others. Aristotle found anger interesting because he saw it as a moral force and a natural 

response to being attacked, something that was able to be developed and stirred by reason and rhetoric. 

Aristotle’s analysis of anger shows his complex perspective on emotions. The element that he considers 

crucial when analyzing anger is the concept of slight. A slight, which can be taken as a sign of scorn, spite 

or insolence, is the main factor that makes a person feel anger. 

Aristotle thought that the desire for revenge took center in a person’s emotions when the person 

underwent a process of imagination stimulated by the fact that he or she was slighted. Aristotle’s concept 

of emotions meant that he saw the behavioral element of revenge as being central to the emotion of anger. 

As such, Aristotle’s analysis of anger is complex in that it includes an emphasis on its cognitive element, 

a reflection of its concrete social context, its tendency to express itself in action and its cognition of a 

physical stimulus. 36 

Anger is one of the most marked virtues Aristotle talks about in his Nicomachean Ethics. In Nicomachean 

Ethics, Aristotle writes in detail about what situation justifies anger and what degree or intensity of anger 

is justifiable. He saw forgiveness as a virtue but made it clear that this was so only in certain situations. 

He claimed that not feeling anger in a situation where one should feel anger was not a virtue but a vice 

instead. Aristotle also talked in length about fear when explaining about courage. Aristotle attempted such 

35 Aristotle, Rhetoric 1378e20-1380a4, in Robert C. Solomon, What Is an Emotion? (2nd ed.) (New York: Oxford University 

Press, 2003). p. 6. 


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a detailed analysis of the essence of emotions because he saw them as being an important part of analysing 

ethics. 37 

According to Aristotle, humans feel pleasure because they can recognize it. 38 Joy comes from cognition, 

so remembering or expecting something is enough to make one feel pleasure. 39 Through such analysis, 

Aristotle draws the conclusion and emotions are an essential element to living a good life. Aristotle said 

that when humans recognize something, they also recognize the fact that they are having a recognization. 40 

That is, if pleasure as a joy comes in a cognitive form, it must always occur on a conscious level. 41 

Aristotle’s analysis is important in that it analyzed emotions as evaluations. 42 If someone smiled in a 

friendly manner at you, you would feel a warm feeling towards that person. This, in Aristotle’s view, is 

because you evaluated the smile as a sign of affection. A emotion is an evaluation of a situation from the 

perspective of the importance that it takes in our interest. With Aristotle’s concept of emotions, evaluation, 

or appraisal, came to be understood as being crucial in understanding emotions. 

Aristotle’s view of seeing emotions as evaluations was adopted into modern psychology by Magda 

Arnold and J. A. Gasson in the 20th century. They claimed that in all emotions, knowledge, evaluation and 

judgment came first. 43 

37 Ibid. 

38 Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1370a27-8 in Knuuttila, Emotions, p. 29. 

39 Ibid., 1370a30-1. 

40 Aristotle, Ethica Nicomachea, 9.9. 1170a29-32. 


42 Keith Oatley, Emotions (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), p. 42. 

43 M. B. Arnold and J. A. Gasson, “Feelings and emotions as dynamic factors in personality integration,” in M. B. Arnold and J. 

A. Gasson eds., The Human person (New York: Ronald, 1954), p. 215. 

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either mentally or physically. The only way to reach this stage as taught by Epicureans was something 

similar to Aristotle’s virtue of temperance. For Epicureans, it was important to acquire a balanced state 

of satisfaction to overcome dissatisfaction in the process of life. Therefore, the only virtue in the eyes 

of the Epicureans was a prudent discernment deciding and evaluating the maximization of pleasure and 

minimization of pain among various possible pleasures. 48 

In this context, Epicurianism is a philosophy seeking the healing of pain, and above all, peace of mind. 

Compared to the logical reasoning of Plato and Aristotle, it seeks these objectives through more exoteric 

and practical methods. Ultimately, the Epicureans’ purpose is to free the human being from all sources of 

pain in the soul. 49 

2. The Stoics 50 

The Stoics had an even larger influence than the Epicureans. The Stoic way of thinking crossed from 

Greece To Rome and lasted about 600 years. Their Principal Greek philosopher was Chrysippus. Famous 

Roman Stoics include Seneca, playwright and millionaire, Epictetus, who had been a slave, as well as 

Marcus Aurelius the emperor. Stoics took in and expanded on many teachings of Plato and Aristotle. 

However, the Stoic explanation of emotions didn’t garner as much attention as that of Aristotle because 

they included the discussions on emotions as part of a bigger discussion on ethics. 51 Not only did they 

think emotions was a complex state that included cognition, impulse and behavior, they believed that the 

cognitive process leading to emotions was morally destructive. 52 But whereas Aristotle took emotion to be 

essential to the good life, the Stoics analyzed emotions as a conceptual error, conducive to misery. 53 

Two Stoic philosophers in particular, Seneca and Chrysippus, were instrumental in developing a more 

advanced cognitive theory of emotions some 2,000 years ago. Emotions, in their view, were judgments on 

a human’s position in the world. 54 For the Stoics, emotion was “a cognitively -induced impulse to act or 

48 Kim Yang-soon, “Humanism in the Ancient Greece and Rome”, p. 24. 

49 Ibid. 

50 Cicero’s ‘Methodical Interpretation of the Stoics’ Therapy of the Emotions’ which should be included in this chapter 

is excluded due to limits of presentation time and paper. The author plans to include this theme when writing a formal 

dissertation. 

51 Lyons, “The Philosophy of Cognition and Emotion”, in Hand book of Cognition and Emotion, ed. by Tim Dalgleish and Mick 

Power (New York and Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 1999), p. 24. 

52 Ibid. 

53 Solomon, “The Philosophy of Emotions”, p. 5. 

54 Ibid. 

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plan for emergency action, caused by the subject making a judgement or forming a belief about the current 

state of affairs and what one should do about it.” 55 Thus, fear was an impulse to run away or fight one’s 

way out of trouble, resulting from the subject’s negative judgment that he/she was caught in a dangerous 

situation and must do something about it, quickly. 56 

Seneca, a prominent figure among Roman Stoics, interpreted anger from a cognitive aspect as well. 57 For 

Seneca, the impulse of violence arose from recognizing an injury or a slight. As Aristotle had done so, 

even if emotions were meant to be controlled by reason, the stimulus of emotion itself occurred through 

reason. 58 Seneca was in accordance with Aristotle when writing that anger was an impulse of revenge in 

face of a slight and seeing it as a motivation for action. 

However, Seneca distinguished the desire of revenge in face of a slight with a sadistic aggression, when 

cruel people feel pleasure by giving pain to others. 59 Seneca thought that people easily resort to violence 

as a response because of their strong pride and that people’s feelings were hurt easily because of this pride. 

Seneca also showed interest in the efforts to suppress the impulse of revenge even in the midst of anger. 

He believed that such efforts were the most reliable way of preventing anger from turning into violence. 60 

Like the Epicureans, the Stoics thought that emotions were to be extirpated. Like them, they thought that 

the keys to these operations were desires, but at this point two schools differed. Whereas the Epicureans 

worked by diverting attention from the illusory and unnecessary, the Stoics thought that to free oneself 

from emotions, one must free oneself from most kinds of desires. 61 

Marcus Aurelius thought passions were not good, but he was not scathing about them. He recognized that 

“passion’s revulsion from reason at least seems to bring with it a certain discomfort, and a half-felt sense 

55 Lyons, “The Philosophy of Cognition and Emotions”, p. 24. 

56 Ibid. 

57 One of the most discussed writing during the cognitive-affective debate of the 1980s was Hans Toch’s article on Seneca’s 

perspective on anger and violence, published in a US psychology journal. Toch had been studying anger and its suppression for 

a long time and offer this short but concise explanation on Seneca’s approach to anger as part of the cognitive-affective debate. 

(H. Toch, Violent Men, Chicago, 1969: “The management of hostile aggression: Seneca as applied social psychologist”, 

American Philosophy of Emotions 38, pp.1022~1025. 

58 Solomon, “The Philosophy of Emotions”, p. 6. 

59 Ibid. 

60 Lazarus, “The Cognition-Emotion Debate: a bit of history,” in Hand book of Cognition and Emotion, ed. by Tim Dalgleish and 

Mick Power (New York and Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 1999), p. 6. 

61 P. Jones, An Intelligent person’s guide to the classics (London: Duckworth, 1999); M.C. Nussbaum, The therapy of desire: 

Theory and practice in Hellenistic ethics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); R. Sorabji, Emotion and peace of 

mind: From Stoic agitation to Christian temptation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 

488

of constraint”. 62 The real trouble came with desires: too much wanting of money because it feels as if we 

deserve it, the assertion of power because we know the other person is wrong, the push towards sexual 

gratification because it feels compelling. Desires have their own sense of rightness about them. 63 

The first Roman Stoic philosopher to give a proper explanation of cognitive emotions was Chrysippus. He 

saw emotions as having two movements. First, like Charles Darwin’s snake-escape reflex, is involuntary. 

Chrysippus called it a first movement. Darwin’s reflex had a physical component - jumping backwards 

- but no doubt also a mental component - fear. You will have experienced such mental first movements 

yourself: perhaps alone in the house, you hear a strange noise. You startle and feel suddenly afraid or on 

your guard. second movements are more considered. They are of what one might do about the agitation 

of the first movement. Chrysippus argued that the second movements were the real emotions. With them 

one can decide what is truly important. For the Stoics, no externals are important. By extirpating wrong 

desires, one can extirpate the second movements, in which we consent and translate urges into deliberate 

action. 64 

In the Stoics’ view, emotions depended on how we evaluated a situation. when we evaluate them as 

deriving from things that are worthless, we can free of envy, anger, disappointment. One should therefore 

indifferent to them. If one evaluates them properly, they empty and ephemeral in comparison with matters 

that are permanent and worthy. The Stoics thought the ability to reason derives from one’s soul, which 

they thought tobe divine. An emotion makes a certain desire, a certain course of action, urgent. The issue 

is to distinguish the important from the merely urgent, and to give one’s assent to those second movements 

that are important. 

So what is permanent and worthy of desire? The Stoic answer is that only character, in its virtue, 

rationality, and kindness. 65 

IV. The Influence of Stoics 

1. Religion 

Although much of the argument about reaching non-attached states of mind is distinctive to the Stoics, the 

62 Marcus Aurelius(c. 173), Mediations,(M. Staniforth, trans.), (London: Penguin), 47 in Oatley, Emotions, pp. 47-8. 

63 Oatley, Emotions, p. 48. 

64 Ibid., p. 48. 

65 Ibid., p. 49. 

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attitude that a Stoic achieves came close to Buddhism, 66 In Buddhism, one realizes that the notion of a self 

who is successful, or accomplished, or indeed has any fixity in time, is an illusion. As with Stoicism, there 

are practices and exercises to achieve a certain frame of mind. In this frame, it’s not that emotions don’t 

happen. It is rather that one observes them and lets them pass, rather than being caught up in their vortices. 

The Stoics’s idea was that we should cultivate virtue - be good people in the world - and after that, 

everything else fits into place. The idea has been assiduously adhered to by the three influential 

monotheistic religious practices: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. For example, if we love God, all else 

follows. Lesser matters can be evaluated as lesser. 

There was a wide-spread tendency among early Christians to view that the bad emotions, which the 

ancient Stoics strove to extirpate, became sins. 67 Evagrius Ponticus nominated eight bad thoughts which 

were like Chry- sippus’ first movements: thoughts of gluttony, fornication, avarice, distress, anger, 

depression, vanity, and pride. 

Later the Roman Catholic church settled on a number of sins that was more resonant that eight. the 

number of deadly sins became seven: gluttony, lust, avarice, envy, anger, sloth, and pride. all are emotions, 

or have an emotional quality. The danger and the sin occur, according to church teaching, when one 

indulges them with full consent, in what Chrysippus would regard as the second movement of thinking 

how to act. 68 

2. Spinoza 

Twelve centuries after the breakup of the Roman Empire lived two great rationalist philosophers: Rene 

Descartes and Baruch Spinoza. Both wrote books about emotions. Descartes, in his book Passions of the 

Soul, analyzed emotions in a way that would lay foundations for scientific analyses of the brain. Spinoza, 

in his book The Ethics, 69 analyzed them principally in order that we, his readers, could understand their 

meaning and our place in the universe. 

66 Ibid., p. 50. 

67 Refer to the following work for detailed explanation on this alteration. R. Sorabji, Emotion and peace of mind.: From Stoic 

agitation to Christian temptation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 


69 B. Spinoza, On the Improvement of the Understanding, the Ethics, and Correspondence (R. H. M. Elwes, Trans.) (New York 

Dover, Modern edition 1955). 

490

Spinoza recognized in emotions some of the same paradoxes as had the ancient Stoics. He saw people 

trying to control their emotions, but in doing so making themselves only more subject to them. His most 

striking chapter heading was “On human bondage.” To escape this bondage, one must understand that 

the universe is an expression of the mind of God, so each one of us is part of that expression. Rather than 

each of us being a separate speck who might bounce off other specks in the vast universe, we are part of 

it, more like wrinkles in a giant cloth. As we realize this, we start to see our mistake in thinking that we 

are prime movers in what happens, struggling to control things, and getting frustrated and angry when our 

desires are not met. 

If we understand the world the way as it is, then we have what Spinoza called active emotions, based on 

love for the world as it is, and on love for others. If we struggle against it, we have what Spinoza called 

passive emotions, thinking that our desires ought to be fulfilled. We then are caught up in bitterness, envy, 

resentment, based on confused ideas. 70 Here, for instance, are two of Spinoza’s definitions. For example, 

Spinoza offered the following two definitions: 

Definition 7. Hatred is pain accompanied by the idea of an external cause. 71 

Definition 23. Envy is hatred, in so far as it induces a man to be pained by another’s good fortune, and to 

rejoice in another’s evil fortune. 72 

When Spinoza points to the idea of an external cause of hatred, his intends us to see ourselves caught up 

not in asserting our freedom, which he says is a confused idea, but in bondage. He invites us to re-evaluate 

the idea. his radical twist on the idea of emotions as evaluations is that by accepting them, we can start to 

be of the bondage in which they hold us. For Spinoza, he intriguing idea is that to be free of the control 

of emotions over us, we must first accept them. It is an idea that became central to many of the secular 

systems of psychotherapy that began with S. Freud. 73 

3. Psychiatric treatment 

The modern inheritance from the ancient traditions of mental practices that engage with potentially 

destructive human emotions is psychotherapy. It is a set of practices started in Vienna by Sigmund Freud 

70 Oatley, Emotions, pp. 51-2. 

71 Spinoza, The Ethics, p. 176. 

72 Ibid., p. 178. 


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at the end of the nineteenth century which, by the beginning of the twenty-first century, has spawned 

hundreds, perhaps thousands of variants. Like the ancient Epicureans, Freud based the practices of his 

kind of therapy, which he called psychoanalysis, on the idea that some of our desires unconscious. For 

Freud, the principal desire is for sex. He thought sex was the source of all creativity. 

By contrast, the second problematic desire - for aggression - is destructive. The central notion of 

psychoanalytic therapy was that although they are unconscious, these desires nonetheless affect our 

behavior pervasively. While they remain unconscious, their effects occur without our being able to do 

much about them. They remain outside our power. Freud’s answer, then, was excavate in ourselves these 

desires, bring them to the surface, and make them conscious. 74 This archeological metaphor was one of 

Freud’s favorites. Once one had brought one’s disowned intentions to consciousness, it would be possible 

to take responsibility for them, and in that movement we could be free of their tyranny over us. 75 

Tim Beck was working as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist when he realized that many of the thoughts 

that patients had, (which, according to Freud, were to spoken aloud during therapy so that the therapist 

could analyse them by suggesting their unconscious origins), were not really quite unconscious. Rather, 

they hovered at a kind of threshold between the conscious and the unconscious. In a therapy session, they 

might seem too unimportant, or too embarrassing , to say out loud. Yet it was these thoughts (Chrysippean 

first movements) that were the real culprits. From this insight, Beck developed cognitive behavioral 

therapy. 76 

V. Conclusion 

Cicero thought that the lifestyle the Epicureans pursued was weak and cowardly. As a result, Cicero did 

not find anything positive in the Epicureans’ therapy of the mind. Cicero did not see the advice to distance 

oneself from thinking (avocatio), and to divert one’s attention to other matters (revocatio) was bad in 

itself, but he thought that the Epicureans’ advice to think about past and future pleasures was ineffective as 

a healing solution for intense pain and even harmful to the soul. 77 

74 Please refer to the following work for detailed explanation. Sigmund Freud, The Origins of Psychoanalysis: Letters to Wilhelm 

Fliess 1887-1902 (M. Bonaparte et al eds.)(New York: Basic Books, 1954). 


76 Please refer to the following two works for detailed explanation. A. T. Beck et al, Cognitive Therapy of Depression (New York 

: Guilford, 1979); S.D. Hollen et al, Cognitive-behavioral treatment of depression in Handbook of depression I. H. Gotlib et al 

eds. (New York: Gilford, 2002), pp. 383-403. 

77 Knuuttila, Emotions, p. 74. As mentioned above, Cicero’s theory will be dealt in a separate dissertation. 

492

In healing the modern person’s pain through a humanities’ approach, philosophy which deals with the 

human emotions can be a ‘medicine for soul.’ A philosophical method of healing difficulties and pain 

that the modern person experiences by inheriting the thoughts of Aristotle and of the Stoics of the ancient 

times, as well as Spinoza and Hume in the modern times, would have a remarkable advantage as a healing 

method. 

From the late 20 th century unto today, the social order of neo-liberalism has made the majority of the 

population suffer under a cold reality of ‘winner-take-all.’ With the gap between the rich and the poor 

reaching extreme limits, many people who are driven to an underclass or temporary worker status suffer 

with the sense of deprivation and isolation while struggling to survive. Therefore, what is first needed of 

the modern person is to get rid of the futile desire within himself or herself. If a minority of humankind 

threw away their greed, this could be a world where the majority of humankind can co-exist. 

Also, whether conscious or buried in our subconscious, we need to recognize the true form of the desires 

that are lurking within us. Only then would we be able to encounter the opportunity to free ourselves from 

the ‘tyranny of emotions’ or the ‘human bondage.’ Above all, each one of us should have sympathy 78 for 

those around us who are suffering and foster a benevolent emotion of healing the pain of others. This is 

an urgently needed virtue that will help us attain our own peace of mind and happiness as well as help the 

majority of humankind who are living a hard reality. 

78 Please refer to the following work for the concept of ‘sympathy.’ Wooryong, Park, “The Ethical Philosophy of Scottish 

Enlightenment: Adam Smith’s ‘sympathy’ and ‘impartial spectator,’” The 1 st World Humanities Forum Presentations (Korea 

National Comission for UNESCO, 2011), pp. 244-54. 

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The Healing Function of Talchum 

Hyun Shik Ju 



The study of talchum, or mask dance, flowered during the 1970s and 80s and ensuing studies followed the 

steps of these standardized researches, usually focusing on a few themes such as the social functionality 

or the origin of talchum. Research on social functionality focused on the lower class’ social resistance 

that grew in the late Joseon Period with the development of commercial capitalism and urbanization. 1 

Meanwhile, research on the origin of talchum approached the topic with hypothetical theories that it 

originated from sandahee (makeshift stages made for medieval masked drama), from instrumental music, 

or from pungmul (farmers’ musical instruments). 2 

These researches, meaningful as pioneer works, failed to address the powerful healing potential talchum 

has as drama. Even studies that partially recognize the healing function only focused on how the ruling 

class used talchum to maintain the existing class system. These studies explain that the ruling class 

allowed their servants to resolve their suppressed emotions and desires through drama, and as a result, the 

ruling class was able to maintain the class system. This explanation is wanting because it does not include 

the transformation process of individuals and groups that takes place through talchum performance. 3 

Talchum inherently has powerful potential to heal. This is suggested by the custom handed down in Hahoe 

Village, that is, if villagers felt there was an ill omen in the village, then they took it as a sign to perform 

Hahoe byeolsingut (Hahoe village ritual to serve the village spirit) and Hahoe talnori (Hahoe village mask 

1 Jo Dongil. History and Principle of Talchum. Hongseongsa. 1979. 

2 Lee Duhyeon. Korean talchum. Iljisa. 1981. Seo Yeonho. On Site Study of Korean Handed down Performance. Jipmundang. 

1997. Jo Dongil. Op.cit. Park Jintae. Study on Korean Mask Play. Saemunsa. 1985. Kim Yeolgyu. “Talchum in the Context of 

Reality.” Finding Classic Literature. Kim Yeolgyu et al. Munhakgwa Jiseongsa. 1976, pp. 383-407. 

3 Kim Ukdong. Aesthetic of Talchum. Hyeongamsa. 1994. 

494

dance). Describing talchum as a subversive satire of the lower class and an attack on the ruling class, or 

saying the opposite, that it was a safeguard mechanism that supported the yangban system by weakening 

the hostile public sentiment, attaches too much importance on only one side of the socio-psychological 

meaning talchum performance has. This paper starts out from this point of criticism and attempts to 

understand talchum’s healing functionality comprehensively. 

This paper is based on the following assumptions from a drama therapy perspective. First, talchum creates 

a stage for the suppressed unconscious, so the act of participating in talchum itself is a healing process. 

Second, the gwangdae, or performer, plays the role of therapist to the village audience, but because he 

reflects and transforms the life experience of the village community as a village member as well, he 

himself is a patient. Third, therefore, talchum is the transformative process of the self and community, 

recovered to health from illness through care and healing. To illustrate this point, the first part of the body 

will explore the overall structure that talchum performance has as a drama therapy process. Afterwards, 

the second part will identify the performance form 4 of each episode and explore which factors or drama 

therapy techniques are actually used in the talchum episodes. 

Of course, there are many ways to approach drama therapy. Some examples include cognitive healing, 

behavioral healing, or psychoanalytic healing derived from analytic healing or object relations theory. 

However, one of the most widely accepted drama therapy theories today is Sue Jennings’ EPR theory 

(Embodiment, Projection, Role), a developmental paradigm that charts the progression of dramatic play 

in human life. Another is Robert J. Landy’s approach to drama therapy through role playing and Phil 

Jones’ approach based on Jenning and Landy’s approach, but with additions of play, ritual, symbolism and 

metaphor. 5 

However, the purpose of this paper is not to use these various drama therapy theories as tools of analysis 

to mechanically analyze which drama therapy techniques exist in talchum. Rather, the drama therapy 

theories will be applied to talchum to find out if the talchum performance has inherent healing aspects, 

then what “affected part” it is healing, and what the gained “health” is. In other words, by studying the 

process of drama therapy and the talchum scenes assumed to be the factors of technique, this paper will 

illustrate the meanings “illness,” “healing,” “health” have in the cultural context manifested in talchum 

4 The talchum performance scenes in this paper are from the following recording. Lee Duhyeon. Korean Mask Plays. Gyomunsa. 

1997. 

5 Sue Jennings. trans. Lee Hyeowon. Dramatherapy. Ullyuk. 2003. Robert J. Landy. trans. Lee Hyeowon. Persona and 

Performance: The Meaning of Role in Drama, Therapy, and Everyday Life. Hakjisa. 2010. Phil Jones. Drama as therapy: 

theory, practice, and research 2nd ed. Routledge, 2007. 

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talchum and gut, to life’s insight, as they leave the therapeutic space. 

Therefore, the talchum procedure itself inherently contains the structural form for natural therapy 

as shown by how it is staged with gut and by how it deals with life’s problems and experiences and 

dramatizes them. 

3. Drama Therapy Techniques in Talchum 

3.1 Embodiment: Creating Time and Space for Therapy 

Life expressed in talchum is the life of the body. The world reenacted in talchum is made aware in the 

body and through the body. The oral sound overflowing with breath, exaggerated gesture, the spatially 

close movements through dance medium, masks carved in curves, colorful clothes, and music resonating 

through the various instruments, make it possible for the participant to understand the world through 

concrete, sensorial subjectivity rather than in an abstract manner. Then, what therapeutic functions 

accompany the dramatic bodily expression of talchum? 

In the Chimnori (literally translates to “acupuncture play”) episode in the Songpa sandaenori, the 

character Meokjung’s nephews lie on stage. They are suspected to suffer from gwangyeok. Gwangyeok 

is sudden indigestion accompanied by heaviness in chest, not being able to vomit or relieve oneself. 

The character Sinjubu appears and applies acupuncture to the four joints of hands and feet to help chi 

flow through their bodies. Then, as soon as he has applied acupuncture, the eight Meokjungs get up at 

surprising speed. 

One of the key principles of drama therapy that uses the body is to make the patient himself use his 

“potential” body more effectively. In other words, the patient breaks out of the force of habit, and even 

if he is not familiar with it, inhabits himself in the new body frame and establishes a new relationship 

between the body and self, which leads to the identity change of the patient. That is why during drama 

therapy patients practice making new voices and dynamic gestures. 10 

The scene where the Meokjungs pop up from near-death state after getting acupuncture treatment from 

Sinjubu induces a comic effect on the first level. But the comically exaggerated gestures imply that the 

feeling for the body’s potential to recover abnormally fast is the most proactive affective element 11 that 

10 Ibid., pp. 229-230. 

11 For more on the body’s active affective component refer to Michelle Maiese, Embodiment, emotion, and cognition. Palgrave 

498

makes up the actor’s existence. Awareness of the self is mainly transmitted through the body. The recovery 

process of Haeseo Meokjungs is thought to be dormant but it is stronger than any existential sense and by 

forming a relationship between the self and body, stages the creation of a new identity. 

In the Nojang (literally translates to “old esteemed monk”) episode of Bongsan talchum, the old monk’s 

gesture is meaningful from the perspective of drama therapy. The Nojang is a respected old monk, but he 

is portrayed as being affected by Somu. The Nojang episode, shortly, is the fall of the old monk. There 

is no dialogue, but the Nojang gestures his interest in Sojang. For example, he runs to the corner as if 

not knowing what to do with his aroused feeling. Afterwards, he opens his fan and looks at Somu from 

a distance. Then, he throws away the monk’s rod yukhwanjang, and runs to the other side corner passing 

by Somu, only to look at her again. After repeating this action two or three times, Nojang still fails to buy 

Somu’s heart. Then he dances with his hands and takes off the Buddhist rosaries and puts them around 

Somu’s neck. 12 

Other than discovering the body’s potential, taking up a different identity and “transforming the body” 

also has therapeutic effect. The patient takes on the identity of another character or object by acting the 

role of a character different from the usual self, or expressing kinetic objects like water. By adjusting to 

the body of a dramatic persona, the patient gets to change his usual identity into another form. 13 

The deviating actions by Nojang, unbecoming to a monk, has so far been interpreted as a satire on the 

fall of the religious class. But, the transcendental religious space is considered transcendental because it 

stems from the cognitive freedom that does not distinguish how secular baseness is a contrasting area. 

Could not the fall of Nojang, that was until now seen as fallen Buddhism, be understood to symbolize 

the true structural aspect where a transcendental existence has to directly conflict with the inner world 

in order for it to become a transcendental existence? 14 It embodies an identity element that exists 

internally, and through this, provides an area for the monk’s religious self to explore the base emotions, 

character, and experience that it had not felt before. The body is the inner source of self and is the zero 

degree of objective self. We cannot deny that a therapeutic effect exists when Nojang makes a “bodily 

transformation” into a seducer which brings to the forefront what was unclear to the self before because it 

Macmillan. 2011., p. 26. 

12 This description follows Lee Duhyeon’s description. Lee Duhyeon (1981). Op. cit., p.164. 

13 Jones. Op. cit., pp. 230-232. 

14 For more analysis of the Nojang episode interpreted from this perspective, refer to Yu Minyeong. “Korean’s Beauty as shown 

in Korean Traditional Theater: Focused on the Bongsan talchum and Kkodugaksi noreum”. Dosoleomun 1 st edition. Department 

of Korean Literature, Humanities, Danguk University. 1985, pp. 45-61. 

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provides direct communication between the unconscious and the conscious. 

In the Miyalchum (literally translates to “Miyal’s dance”) of Bongsan talchum, an old man is reunited 

with Miyal. He tells her of the sufferings he went through after the two were separated in the chaos. 

Another therapeutic technique factor can be found here. In particular, there is a scene where the old man 

tells Miyal of how he met with the sandaedogam people and refused to give in to their demand for him 

to pay tax. Then they stole his hat and attire and he had to go about with a hat made out of dog leather. 

Exploring a troubling memory related to the physical body during drama leads to an act of exploring the 

social, political forces carved in the physical trauma. The physical body can function as a different system, 

so it can function as a social body. “Exploring the forces related to bodily memory” of the past imbues 

to the current body temporal depth where the body’s horizon can be expanded. In other words, the active 

exploration of the memory remnant in the body strengthens the body’s potential to create meaning and 

allows a person to take interest in a socio-cultural relationship the body does not experience usually. That 

is the creation of therapeutic space. 15 

As the old man’s dialogue suggests, he had to wear a hat made out of dog leather because of the 

bureaucrats’ tyranny. The old man who is the subversive class to the social and political power of the 

bureaucrats, is limited to wearing certain things. However, due to the “trace left on the body,” or the dog 

leather hat, the old man and Miyal become aware of the socio-political force affecting their body, and 

can use that awareness to form a different relationship to their bodies, which has therapeutic effect. The 

body’s potential, bodily change, and the remnant memory left on the body are decisive factors that create 

a therapeutic time and space during the talchum’s dramatic activity. Because the performer’s body can’t 

be separated from the external environment, that is, the time and place where talchum is performed, the 

performer’s body holds a dual position as an agent and object. Therefore, the renewed relationship with 

the body becomes the base for the renewed relationship with the environment. 

3.2 Projection: Projecting Inner State 

According to Sue Jennings, the projection phase follows the embodiment phase from the perspective 

of the children’s dramatic development. During initial infancy, bodily and sensorial actions take up the 

biggest part of the child, but as the child grows, he projects his emotions into objects outside of his body 

and enjoys more complex experience. 16 Therefore, the projection technique used in drama therapy is 

different from projection in psychoanalysis, which is a defense mechanism where one blames another 

15 Jones. Op. cit., p. 232. 

16 Jennings. Op. cit., pp. 70-73. 

500

person for his unsatisfied needs. Dramatic projection, in its therapeutic meaning, expresses one’s internal 

conflict through an external object which allows the individual to form a new relationship with himself. 17 

In Halmimadang (literally translates to “Grandmother episode”) in Hahoe talnori, an old woman appears 

and laments her fortune through the beteulga, or loom song. Her fate is pitiful indeed. The old woman 

mournfully sings the beteulga complaining about her hard life as a woman, wearing a small gourd tied to 

her bent over back and a white towel on her head. Her gesture of sighing deeply and looking into space 

builds on the sorrow. However, when the musician asks her what she did with the ten herrings she bought 

yesterday she replies, “I cooked one for the old man and ate nine” wiping out any negative emotion she 

had been expressing until then. People play the role of eating characters throughout their lives, but their 

eating purpose differs for each age group. For example, the act of eating during infancy is related to play, 

eating during adolescence is related to appearance, and eating during adulthood is related to taste, but 

eating during old age is done merely out of necessity. 18 However, based on this relationship between 

eating and age, the old woman is deviating from the role of her age in regards to eating. In reality, it is 

almost impossible for an old person to have enough energy to finish off nine fish at the same time. In 

the end, the old woman might be projecting her hardships on the loom song but through the medium of 

“herring,” she comes to terms with the negative conflict she has with herself and adjusts her emotion to 

express the vitality of life. 

Chwibarimadang (literally translates to “Chwibari episode”) in Yangju byeolsan daenori is also 

noteworthy when it comes to projection. In this stage, the character Chwibari also plays the role of his son 

Madangi. He sits a doll on his lap and uses ventriloquism to mimic baby voices. Chwibari goes back and 

forth the dialogue between the adult and child which shows the skillfulness of the performance. However, 

couldn’t Chwibari playing two roles be interpreted as an experience where Chwibari projects his other 

side? It is as if a patient uses the doll as a means to express his unconscious matter. To Chwibari, it is a 

joy to watch his son Madangi learn to read. However, while he sings to Madangi the Korean alphabet, 

he laments his position which expresses the suffering he must endure as a father. In summary, Chwibari 

projects the joys and sorrows as the head of a family through the doll, the child proxy, and through this, 

explores his life. 

As seen above, the characters of Halmi episode and Chwibari episode use songs or objects like food 

or doll to externalize their inner world. There is no other counterpart role. However, in the end, the old 

woman and Chwibari project their thoughts and feelings into the external objects, and end up seeing and 

17 Jones. Op.cit., pp. 137-154. 

18 Landy. Op. cit., p. 253. 

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feeling themselves, and create a therapeutic space where they can renew, expand, and transform their 

relationship to the self. This is very similar to the “small world” technique 19 in drama therapy where 

the patient is given dolls, drawings, sculpture, clay, dialogue, etc. and are told to project their inner 

conflict into the objects, releasing their unconsciously suppressed feelings. However, when considering 

that talchum is another virtual (as if) world using the medium of mask, we soon realize that the act of 

performing talchum in itself is a projected area where the performing agent can explore, expand, build on 

and discover the self. In other words, if wearing the tal, or mask in itself, is the process of standing outside 

and looking at the self, then it would be worthy to discuss the therapeutic function which forms the basis 

of talchum. 

3.3 Play and Ritual: Rehearsal as Another Existential Method 

Talchum can also be called “talnori” (literally translates to “mask play”). As can be deduced from the 

individual names Sandaetalnori (“sandae mask play”), Ogwangdaenoreum (“five gwangdae play”), 

Yaryu (“outing”), Kkokdugaksinoreum (“puppet play”), talchum performance takes place in a space where 

reality and play meet. What kind of therapeutic functionalities do these play factors have? 

One of the plays that often appear in talchum is the sensory-motor play. For example, take the Omjung 

and Mokjung episode in Yangju byeolsandae nori. In one scene, Mokjung rips off Omjung’s hat and attire 

and eats them. Omjung was using his hat to describe sorghum pancake and mungbean pancake, and the 

hungry Mokjung thought that the hat was the actual food and ate them. The almost dizzying overturning 

play is a stage for vertigo. The food system of everyday life is applied and expanded to costume, and the 

stability that food had is suddenly destroyed. 

Mimicry, which is the imitation of the gesture and dialogue of others, also appears often. In 

Dongnaeyaryu, Yangban Won calls his servant Malttugi saying “Hey Malttugi!” and makes a gesture of 

cocking his ears. Then Yangban Cha and Yangban Mo copy him in calling Malttugi and cocking their ears. 

Then the bachelor of the head house also follows the voice and gesture of the three older men, but he adds 

comic variation to the voice or gesture, inducing laughter. Even if the mimicry requires the self to become 

another person, the person must first realize that he is separate from the other. The act of mimicking occurs 

when there is an assumption that the mimicking person and the mimicked are distinguished. Therefore, the 

mimicking play of talchum creates a mixed middle area where the self and other are mutually dependent 

yet separate from each other. 

19 For detailed explanation, refer to Jones. Op. cit., pp. 144-145. 

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afterworld) to comfort the spirit and guide her to the afterworld. It is the same for Yongnam area talchum. 

In particular, in Suyeongyaryu, when the old woman dies, a pallbearer sings the hearse song carrying 

the coffin out of the house-as such, the traditional funeral process was reenacted. How to deal with 

sudden death that has intervened in life is a very important issue that needs to be dealt by the surviving 

community. Reversely speaking, the body serves as a physical basis that acts as a “necropolitics and 

biopolitics of the survivors.” In talchum, rituals such as gut or funeral processes, display Miyal’s body 

publicly and intervene with her body, and through this, control the uncertain feeling that the surviving 

people have due to death. Just because the survivors have witnessed her death does not mean that Miyal’s 

sorrow is going to resolved. However, even if there is nothing resolved in reality, the “expression of 

‘han’ (sorrow) emotion” caused by Miyal’s sudden death helps the survivors approach the wishful 

experience of reaching the end of existence like rejecting the suppressed. 22 As a result, it terminates the 

self-consciousness of each of the performing actors and imbues stability called continuity and solidarity in 

their community, providing the gwangdae and audience alike an experience of renewing the world. Unlike 

play, ritual pursues the feelings of control, but it still pushes the performing actor of talchum to change 

into another identity, providing therapeutic effect. 

Play and ritual are commonly used techniques in drama therapy. For example, during drama therapy, play/ 

game is prepared to introduce the patient’s spontaneity and creativity, and an effective ritual is devised 

to give a stable force to the past events that the patient experienced. 23 The chaos-like play and cosmos- 

like ritual form a whirlpool mixed in talchum, allowing the participants to rehearse different methods of 

existence. Haeseo talchum performance has therapeutic functions because its fundamental performance 

structure is based on the identical twins play and ritual. 

3.4 Symbol and Metaphor: Expanding the Concept of Self through Indirect Experience 

Usually, symbol and metaphor are thought of as speaking and writing strategies used to effectively 

get the message across from the speaker to the audience. However, with the appearance of cognitive 

linguists like George Lakeoff, the perception of symbol and metaphor, which had been limited to rhetoric, 

changed. According to cognitive theory, rhetoric is not just a method of expression. Lakeoff explains that 

the real function of symbol and metaphor is the mental experience of association, trying to approach a 

new situation or a hidden meaning based on one’s familiar world. As such, expanding one’s experience 

and boundary is possible through symbolism and metaphor; so when trying to handle an inner problem 

22 Experiencing ‘han (deep sorrow)’ does not only exist as a solidified lump of emotion, but also the moment when that lump is 

liquidized. Therefore, “han” should not be seen as a fixed psychological phenomenon. Op. cit., pp. 259-261. 

23 Jones. Op. cit., p.165, p. 253. 

504

indirectly and not directly, symbolism and metaphor have therapeutic effect. 24 

In Kkokdugaksi noreum (“puppet play”), Park Cheomji builds a monastery at a propitious site after the 

Pyeongyang Inspector dies, in order to hold the post-death 49th day ritual. However, after the monastery 

is built, Park Cheomji destroys the building he built with his own hands. As Kim Wook-dong points out, 

if building a new house symbolizes human birth, then destroying a newly built house symbolizes death in 

a narrow sense, and the end of universe if translated broadly. 25 However, the inevitable death symbolized 

through the destroyed monastery is reenacted during the play as well. For example, there is a blood bath 

scene in the play where the characters in Kkokdugaksi noreum-Pijori1, Pijori2, Gwipari, Small Park 

Cheomji, Pyo Shangwon, Dongbangsak, Mukdaesa etc-are all bitten to death by the monster Isimi. Just as 

Park Cheomji destroyed the monastery he built with much effort, there is no reason why all the characters 

are bitten to death by the monster Isimi. The repeated act of destruction, and repetition of death urges 

are only left as “symbol.” However the stage with dissolving, collapsing, breaking scenes is grouped 

into one symbolic sign and transmitted to the performers as various groups of potential meaning. It is a 

process where the fantastic world inside the unconscious mind is expressed outwardly, like the dream in 

psychoanalysis. The symbolic staging of this destructive instinct provides an opportunity to the audience 

to participate in their personal experience in a more uncertain way. Because it is an expansion of one’s 

own experience, the presentation of repeated death drive engendering derivative open meaning becomes 

the basis for understanding the symbol of Kkokdugaksi noreum as a therapeutic tool. 

In talchum, “metaphor” is created especially when another person’s identity is involved. In the Yangban 

espisode in Suyongyaryu, Su Yangban describes the bachelor of the head family saying “the bachelor 

standing there is like a well-built swallow. When he sits, he is like a peony, and when he stands he is like 

a wood opal.” He expresses his pride of being a yangban by beautifying the bachelor’s appearance. In 

the Ogwangdae episode of Goseong ogwangdae, Malttugi portrays the yangbans, who are standing, as 

“puppies gathered in an empty lot and turtles gathered in a pond,” associating them to puppies or turtles 

and making fun of yangbans. In Miyalchum episode of Bongsan talchum, the old woman remembers the 

separated old man as having a handrail forehead, a scoop-like chin, dog-like nose, broad cheeks and beard 

like a lacquer brush, expressing her resentment. Therefore, the bachelor of the head family, yangbans, old 

man and other characters that represent original concepts, is spoken of in a roundabout manner compared 

to swallows, puppies, handrails, etc. that are familiar areas and complementary concepts. By doing so, 

a new cognitive image is formed and strong emotional involvement is formed. The creative process of 

24 For more on the therapeutic effect of metaphor, refer to Jeong Seongmi. “Metaphor, the language of emotion and humanities 

therapy.” Inmun gwahak yeongu 24 th edition. Research Center of Humanities, Gangwon University. 2010, pp. 201-220. 

25 Kim Ukdong. Op. cit., p. 111. 

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metaphorical reality contributes in setting a special relationship between the talchum performers with the 

objects, so it provides another process of therapy of self exploration and transformation. 

In addition to the above, many symbols and metaphors can be found in talchum. The creation of symbolic 

and metaphorical situations probably made it possible for associative meaning and emotional value to 

communicate in the stage of performance. That process associates the performers to the uncertain meaning 

of the performance stage and allows them to expand the individual self, another therapeutic process. 26 

3.5 Role Playing: Deconstruction and Growth of Identity 

When discussing a person’s identity, usually the essence of the person is brought forth. Identity is defined 

as something that forms the inner basis, thought, personality, and emotion that is stable and continuous, 

predictable and unchanging. However, from when discussing roles, the assumption that a person has 

only one identity would not be correct. During the early stage of human development, we “receive” the 

initial role of infant, then, as we grow older we “acquire” secondary roles decided by social relationships- 

physical role, cognitive role, definitive role, and socio-cultural role. Then we “act” the received and 

acquired roles according to context, and create an acceptable personality. These acted roles form 

various collective roles, and only when these role systems are healthy, can the human be mentally and 

physically free from illness. A healthy role system refers to having the flexibility to expand and retract 

one’s self portrait to fit the endless role changes. In this view, a person’s identity is not found in a fixed 

actual essence. Rather, the deconstruction and rebirth of the self following the expansion and reduction, 

intersection and separation of role system, in other words, the self that exists in a fluid relationship found 

in transformative flexibility is the true meaning of identity. 27 

Therefore, the act of a performer wearing a “mask” that is different from his usual role, and it is an 

experience trying to skillfully act the possibility of transforming and shifting existing roles within the 

role systems where various roles are grouped together. Then, what are some scenes where the therapeutic 

meaning role playing of talchum is clearly shown? 

In the Yonggam and Halmi gwangdae chum (literally translates to “old man and old woman dance”), the 

jangu player suggests to the old woman to sing the ibyeolga, or farewell song. The jangu player advises 

26 For more on the use of symbol and metaphor as techniques of drama therapy, refer to Jones. Op. cit., pp. 241-269. 

27 Related to the human development stages, Robert Landy emphasizes the dramatic development of role receiver, role acquirer, 

and role player. According to the role approach, an important purpose of dramatherapy is to gain the health of role system. 

Randy. Op. cit., pp. 68-84. 

506

her that if she sings the song well, then she might be able to find the old man easily again. So the old 

woman takes his advice and sings the ilbyeolga in the jinyang rhythm. One of the therapeutic methods 

related to role playing in drama therapy is to take fictitious matters like story, song, sculpture, art, and 

make the patient play the role of the storyteller, singer. In this scene, the jangu player is the therapist and 

the old woman is the patient. And the old woman singing a fictitious matter is a type of reenactment of 

role training to get in touch with the suppressed inner self. 

In the Pungja tal episode (literally translates to “satire mask”) of Tongyeong ogwangdae, there is a scene 

where the yangbans tell Malttugi, who had been making fun of them, to talk about himself. Then the 

“servant” Malttugi reveals that his ancestor‘s family is of a prestigious line and goes on to brag about his 

grandfather and father’s high posts. He rebukes the yangbans saying that “you are not even worthy to be 

servants in my household.” Rebuked, the yangbans call Malttugi Park Saengwon and beg him to spare 

them, but Maltuggi dismisses them because he does not even want to look at them. The reenactment of 

this scene is Maltuggi’s fantasy acted out in dramatic reality. Malttugi is a yangban’s servant, so the scene 

of being higher than the yangbans and rebuking them is something that is only possible in his imagination. 

Another therapeutic technique related to drama therapy role playing is to make the patient act themselves 

in the context of past, present, future, and fantasy situations. Therefore Malttugi’s loud rebuke is the 

expression of another role in a fantasy situation that was suppressed. 

In the monk episode of Gasan ogwangdae, unlike the other nojang (old monk) talchum episodes that 

are silent, the old monk in this episode says the dialogue “let us rid of monkhood.” Then he takes off his 

monk hat, throws away and breaks the wooden block, tears off the Buddhist rosaries necklace, breaks 

the bamboo cane he was using, and throws off the broad-sleeved Buddhist robe he was wearing. As 

mentioned above, the monk’s fall process is partially a criticism of society. However, when viewed from 

the process of true seeking, just as the monk Wonhyo drank rotten water from a skull, the old monk’s fall 

includes dialectics of the sacred and the profane. In this sense, we cannot deny that the episode where 

the old esteemed monk destroys his monkhood has therapeutic meaning. In drama therapy, the patient is 

asked to separate his identity and to act out a special aspect of himself, which forms the basis of playing 

a creative role in everyday life. For example, playing one’s “arm” or “leg,” or separating the roles in life 

that one would like to sabotage and acting it out. Performing oneself has therapeutic functions that will 

form the potential identity. Therefore, the old monk’s fall should not be seen only from the satirical aspect. 

Rather, it is a sufficiently worthy task to view the monk’s fall as a performance of the role that is denied by 

the self, and a method of self exploration through expressing life’s experience and problems. 28 

28 For detailed information on how to take on roles, refer to Jones. Op. cit., p. 193. 

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2005. pp. 313-345. 

Park Jintae. Study on Korean Mask Play. Saemunsa. 1985. 

Park Jintae. Study on Hahoe byeolsingut Formation and Structure. Dissertation of Department of Korean 

Literature, Korea University. 1988. 

Bae Heesuk, Lee Seonhyeong. “Effect of Group Language Therapy using Play has on the Language and 

Social skills of Children with Language Disability and Lack of Social Skills.” Drama yeongu 34th 

edition. Hanguk drama hakhoe. 2011. pp. 223-252. 

Seo Yeonho. On Site Study of Korean Handed down Performance. Jipmundang. 1997. 

Shin Eungyeong. Pungryu : Source of East Asian Aesthetics. Bogosa, 1999. 

Yu Minyeong. “Korean’s Beauty as shown in Korean Traditional Theater Focused on the Bongsan 

talchum and Kkodugaksi noreum.” Dosoleomun 1st edition. Department of Korean Literature, 

Humanities, Danguk University. 1985. pp. 45-61. 

Lee Gyeongmi. “Phenomenological Approach to Dramatherapy Focused on the Expansion of experience 

through ‘Drama’ and the Role of Therapist.” Hanguk yeongeukak 45th edition. Hanguk yeongeuk 

hakhoe. 2011. pp. 269-292. 

Lee Duhyeon. Korean Talchum. Iljisa. 1981. 

Yun Ilsu. “Effect of Therapy and Intervention of Psychodrama.” Drama yeongu 37th edition. Hanguk 

drama hakhoe. 2012. pp. 85-116. 

Jeong Seongmi. “Metaphor, the language of emotion and humanities therapy.” Inmun gwahak yeongu 

24th edition. Research Center of Humanities, Gangwon University. 2010. pp. 201-220. 

Jo Dongil. History and Principle of talchum. Hongseongsa. 1979. 

Choi Byeongwook. “Background and Establishment, Definition and Target of Humanities Therapy.” 

Research Center of Humanities, Gangwon University. Theory and Principle of Humanities Therapy. 

Sanchaek. 2011. pp. 11-36. 

3. Foreign Reference 

Carlson, Marvin. Performance : a critical introduction. Routledge, 1996. 

Jennings, Sue. trans. Lee Hyeowon. (Sue Jennings) Dramatherapy. Ullyuk. 2003. 

Jones, Phil. Drama as therapy : theory, practice, and research 2nd ed. Routledge, 2007. 

Johnson, David Read. trans. Kim Sejun et al. Current Approaches in Drama Therapy. Sigma Press. 2011. 

Landy, Robert J. trans. Lee Hyeowon. Persona and Performance: The Meaning of Role in Drama, 

Therapy, and Everyday Life. Hakjisa. 2010. 

Maiese, Michelle. Embodiment, emotion, and cognition. Palgrave Macmillan. 2011. 

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Diseases, Pathology and Social Healing 

1. Society as a Patient: Metapathology, Healing and Challenges of 

Self and Social Transformations 

/ Ananta Kumar Giri (Madras Institute of Development Studies) 

2. Princess Bari, Answering the Conundrum of Sufferings of the 

World 

/ Kang Ha Yu (Kangwon National University) 

3. Displacement as Disease: Exploring the Links between 

Traditional Healing and Well-Being in the Context of a 

Relocation Crisis 

/ Ronel P. Dela Cruz (St. Paul University Quezon City) 

4. Treatment of Hwabyung in Traditional Medicine with Four 

Elements of Non-Violent Communication 

/ Young-Wan Kim (Korea Institute of Oriental Medicine)

Society as a Patient: 

Metapathology, Healing and Challenges of Self and Social 

Transformations 

Ananta Kumar Giri 

Madras Institute of Development Studies 

In order to speak of a social pathology [...] we require a conception of normality related to social 

life as a whole. The immense difficulty involved in this project has been made evident by the 

failure of social-scientific approaches that have sought to fix the functional requirements of 

societies solely through external observations. Since what counts as a developmental goal or as 

normality is always culturally defined, it is only by a hermeneutic reference to a society’s self- 

understanding that social functions of their disorders can be determined. Thus we may have a 

defensive possibility of speaking of social pathologies within a culturally contingent notion of 

normality, since we can limit ourselves to an empirical description of what a given culture regards 

as a disorder. [...] A paradigm of social normality must, therefore, consist in culturally independent 

conditions that allow a society’s members to experience undistorted self-realization. [...] The 

question then becomes crucial whether it is a communitarian form of ethical life, a distance- 

creating public sphere, non-alienated labor or a mimetic interaction with nature that enables 

individuals to lead a well-lived life(Axel Honneth, 2007, Disrespect, pp. 34, 35, 37). 

The patient of our time is less concerned with the state of his morals than that of his finances 

(Victor E. Frankl, 1967, Psychotherapy and Existentialism: Selected Papers on Logotherapy, p. 

112) . 

A dynamism would have been the norm and routine of our life. To tell you the truth, that 

spontaneous dynamism is the health of our life [...] With our sacred conservatism if we bound 

ourselves only to what is there then there would be lots of mud in the pond of our life. So there 

should be a continued process of cleaning up mud which means we would have to continuously 

widen the paths so that new streams of waters can enter there (Chitta Ranjan Das, 2010, Yoga 

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Samanyaya: Prabeshika, pp. 2-3). 

Introduction and Invitation 

Health and healing are perennial challenges of life but in modernity our approach to it is predominantly 

atomistic, reductionisitic and one-dimensional. We reduce the problems of health, ill-being and disease 

to individuals and do not relate to the wider environments of culture and society. We adopt a bio-medical 

approach to health and do not realize health as a multi-dimensional journey of wholeness which includes 

body, mind, soul, society, nature and cosmos. As Hans-George Gadamer (1996) challenges us in his The 

Enigma of Health: The Art of Healing in a Scientific Age, we do not realize that health is something that 

cannot be simply made and produced. “Instead of being the result of manipulation or forceful intervention, 

our health is something that each and everyone of us take care through the way in which we lead our 

lives.” Our life is a journey of wholeness even when for existential reasons it is lived in parts. But when 

parts do not realize the integral connection among themselves, it creates a condition of pathology at the 

levels of self and society. 

A holistic engagement with health challenges us to realize that health is not just a matter of the individual. 

The health of an individual depends upon the health of a society as the illness of an individual is crucially 

shaped by the pathology of society. Unfortunately in sociology, social work and social welfare the 

discourse of social pathology has been replaced over the reigning discourse of social deviance which 

puts the blame squarely on the individual for his or her condition of disease and disruptive behaviour. 

Fortunately for us there is the rise of the discourse of social suffering in sociology, anthropology and social 

theorizing which seeks to relate social suffering and illness to wider systems of self, culture and society. 

Society as a Patient: With and Beyond Social Suffering and Social Pathology 

Recently scholars such as Pierre Bourdieu, Arthur Kleinman, Veena Das and John Clammer have 

challenged us to understand the work of social suffering (Bourdieu et al 1999; Clammer forthcoming; 

Kleinman et al. 1997). Before we discuss briefly this discourse of social suffering, it is helpful to relate 

this to the concept of society as the patient as it was articulated by Lawrence K. Frank a long time. In his 

initial essay on the subject and then the book with the same title, Frank challenges us to realize: “There is 

a growing realization among thoughtful persons that our culture is sick, mentally disordered and in need 

of treatment. This belief finds expression in many different forms and from a variety of professions. [...] 

Anyone who reflects upon the present situation [...] cannot but fail to see that we have passed from the 

condition in which deviations from a social norm were to be regarded as abnormal. Today we have so 

many deviations and maladjustments that the term ‘abnormal’ has lost almost all significance” (Frank 

514

1933; also see Frank 1948). 

In his work, Frank challenges us to understand the shifting contours of social normality and abnormality. 

He also challenges us to realize how a particular organization of society makes society a patient. He 

suggests that “the competitive system and distortion created by the ineptness of our practices for 

socializing in the home and the school” makes society a patient (cf. Frank 1933). A system of society 

which produces large-scale poverty and impoverishment makes a society a patient. Without wholesale 

apriori characterization and condemnation, it is helpful to keep the concept of society as the patient as a 

work of investigation to find out what kind of organization and consciousness of society makes it a patient. 

In the contemporary Indian context, the persistence of caste discrimination and caste-based violence 

makes Indian society a patient. Similarly the reign of neo-liberalism with a brutal policy of extraction of 

resources for profit making and accompanying cut of expenditure on health care and social well-being 

makes many contemporary societies all over the world patients. 

In their work on social suffering, The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Societies, 

Pierre Bourdieu et al. tell us how societies are being made patient under a neo-liberal regime. They also 

present us other instances of social suffering in their own society, i.e. France. In their collaborative work, 

The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society, Pierre Bourdieu and his colleagues 

tell us about different ways in which social suffering is produced. In his essay, “The View from the State,” 

Patrick Champagne writes: “The ‘meditatization’ of ‘social malaises’ has the effect of proliferating all 

sorts of publications and reports to describe, explain and ‘treat’ these ‘malaises,’ so bringing them into 

the open” (Bourdieu et al. 1999, 213). About the way the school system produces outcastes, Bourdieu 

and Champagne write: “[...] the school system turns into a permanent home for potential outcasts” (ibid., 

422). About the way social suffering creates wasted lives, Bourdieu writes: “Malik is 19 and has already 

‘lived a lot.’ When we met him he was doing—without many illusions—an unpaid internship, giving him 

minimal training, he had to find for himself to fulfil a poorly defined path of study at a nearby, low-ranked 

suburban high school” (ibid., 427). Bourdieu here points to institutionalized violence. He also speaks 

about “poisoned gifts”: “Superhighways that turn out to be dead-end streets” (ibid., 511). How with social 

suffering public streets become a desert street. 

Such an articulation of social suffering can be related to related reflections on these by psychologists, 

sociologists and philosophers. In his classic work on suffering and healing, Victor Frankl (1979) tells 

us about the collective neurosis of our times which has following main symptoms: a) an ephemeral 

attitude to life; b) the fatalist attitude toward life which “misinterprets and misrepresents man as a product 

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of environment” (ibid., 115) 1 ; iii) “conformist or collectivist thinking” (ibid., 115); iv) denial of one’s 

own personality. For Frankl, the neurotic who suffers from the fourth symptom, fanaticism, denies the 

personality of others” (ibid., 116). For Frankl, “[...] all the four symptoms can be shown to derive from 

fear of and flight from freedom and responsibility; yet freedom and responsibility together make a man a 

spiritual being” (ibid., 117). 

Frankl’s pointer to issues of freedom and responsibility also remind us of the reflections of Eric Fromm 

who tells us how escape from freedom constitutes pathology of our times. To this problem of escape of 

freedom, we can also add the problem of escape from responsibility. Building a sane society challenges us 

to realize both freedom and responsibility and create an institutional and personal context for this. In this 

journey we can walk with both Gandhi and Emmanuel Levinas and strive to embody both freedom and 

responsibility which contributes to building a healthy self and healthy society. 

To these reflections on social pathology, we can also invite the insights of sociologist Richard Sennett and 

philosopher Soren Kierkegaard. In his The Corrosion of Character and other works, Sennett tells us how 

contemporary organization of work and time especially the valorization of “no long term” “corrodes trust, 

loyalty and mutual commitment (see Sennett 2000; also Sennett 2006 & 2012). Kierkegaard tells us about 

despair which constitutes a “Sickness unto Death” (1842). For Kierkegaard, “So to be sick unto death is, 

not to be able to die—yet not as though there were hope for life; no, the hopelessness in this case is that 

even the last hope, death, is not available. [...] So when the danger is so great that death has become one’s 

hope, despair is the disconsolateness of not being able to die” (1848, 345). Kierkegaard very insightfully 

links certain aspects of contemporary despair to the working of the state: “The minimum of despair is a 

state which (as one might humanly be tempted to express it) by reason of a sort of innocence does not 

even know that there is such a thing as despair. So when consciousness is at its minimum the despair 

is least [...]” (ibid., 348). Kierkegaard’s pointer to the working of the state in creating despair and then 

asserting that there is no such thing as despair can be understood the way modern state sees and ignores 

like a state and do not shed tears for this (cf. Scott 1998). State creates large-scale displacement but its 

conscience is least developed to acknowledge the pain and suffering created by the State. 

But while state creates despair, this condition of despair can also be transformed. In fact, creative selves, 

1 What Frankl writes here for depth psychology is relevant in all efforts in restoring health and healing in the face of such 

neurosis: A depth psychology which considers its main task to be that of ‘unmaking’ comes in most handy for the neurotic’s 

own tendency towards ‘devaluation’ (1967, 114). Depth psychology here has a spiritual dimension which can also 

become part of all work of restoration of generation of health and healing. 

516

association and social movements do transform such conditions of despair. They seek to heal the wounds 

of self and society. This is both social healing and social therapy which calls for a new realization of 

meaning in the lives of individuals and societies. Frankl had spoken about logo therapy, a soulful therapy 

which can contribute to healing. We need an accompanying social logo therapy which can contribute to 

healing the wounds of society. 

Social Healing and the Calling of Metapathology 

Social suffering creates social pathology; society becomes a patient. But to transform social suffering we 

need transformative social actions, institutional transformation and transformation of what Bourdieu calls 

“institutional bad faith.” We also need creative suffering and voluntary suffering on the part of individuals 

and social institutions for transforming conditions of suffering. As Goethe had said a long time ago: “There 

is no condition which cannot be ennobled either by a deed or by suffering” (quoted in Frankl 1967, 123; 

also see Murthy 1973, Toynbee 1948). While social suffering is produced by society, transformation of 

suffering calls for voluntary co-suffering on the part of both self and society. Gandhi, Victor Frankl and 

Chitta Ranjan Das have urged us to realize the significance of voluntary co-suffering for transforming 

suffering in the lives of both individuals and societies. 

The calling of voluntary co-suffering challenges us to transform an existent social distinction between 

normal and pathological. We know social and cultural movements challenge the existing definition of 

normality and pathology in the direction of dignity and co-realizations. Along with the work of socio- 

cultural and socio-spiritual movements, we also need creative self who can undertake suffering for 

the sake of realizing beauty, dignity and dialogues. Their work may be considered pathological by 

others but this is not a normal and conventional pathology. This is metapathology as Abraham Maslow 

challenges us to realize. Transforming social pathology and social suffering are calling for embracing 

work of metapathology on the part of creative self, associations and social movements in a society. Such 

movements create a condition for fuller self, social and cultural realization on the part of participants (cf. 

Honneth 2007). While existing distinction of normality and pathology blocks fuller cultural realization, a 

voluntary embrace of metapathology creates a space and condition where self and society can fully realize 

themselves. 

This also creates condition for social healing. Social healing and social therapy calls for being together 

in vibrant communication and deep meditations and helping each other heal our wounds, listen to our 

stories and realize our potentials. It depends upon creating what Vygotsky had told a long time ago “zones 

of proximal development.” Recently Louis Holzman has insightfully applied Vygotosky’s insights and 

creates performative circles of social therapy where the participants become each other’s therapists, which 

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goes beyond a dual model of the doctor and patient (cf. Holzman 2009). It is an instance of holistic and 

collaborative social therapy. 

Healing and the Challenges of Self and Social Transformations 

In the context of a perfected of killing where we kill not only reality but also possibility, we need a new art 

of healing which is multi-dimensional—political, spiritual, medicinal as well as meditative. In our society, 

the pursuit of a short-term time perspective and the work of what David Harvey (1989) calls “space-time 

compression.” Our contemporary organization of time creates anxiety and stress which are produced by 

structures of politics and economy so that we remain perpetually anxious and lose our spirit of creativity 

and resistance. A new art of healing has to address this question of temporality and create a new pregnant 

spatiality and temporality where we can breathe with ease and love and can give birth to each other and a 

new being and a new society (Giri 2012b). 

Health as a Journey of Wholeness 

Health is not just absence of disease; it involves an all around development of individual and society. 2 

Good health depends upon a good life and good society. While healing is both noun and verb, health is a 

noun. But for realization of health we need to realize it as simultaneously noun and verb. As a verb, health 

is not only activistic but also meditative. Realization of health depends upon both appropriate action and 

meditation. Action and meditation help us realize health as a continued journey of wholeness. 

In his work on health and healing, Hans-George Gadamer challenges us to realize and restore wholeness 

for the sake of health. Chitta Ranjan Das, a creative thinker from India, also presents us similar and added 

challenges. For Das (2010), realizing health is a continued journey of climbing towards peaks of self 

and society in the midst of disease, illness and ugliness of various kinds. For Das, to oppress others is a 

disease as it is to tolerate oppression. So for a healthy self and society, we would have to resist domination 

and oppression. A healthy person does not just adapt to society especially its systems of domination and 

disease; rather she tries to transform such conditions (see Giri 2012a). A healthy person does not betray 

himself and the potential of society which awaits a fuller realization. 

Resonating with the spirit of Lawrence Frank, Das raises a number of questions about wider structures of 

2 As the famous definition of health by World Health Organization states: “Health is a state of complete physical, mental 

and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.” 

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society and modes of thinking which produce illness and social pathology. For Das, caste system and a 

sense of fatalism that one cannot change one’s fate contributes to production of illness and pathology in 

self and society. Similarly use of science and technology for profit making and warfare without concern 

for human well-being and social welfare contributes to production of social pathology. Das does not 

believe in an absolute distinction between health and disease as he challenges us to realize that every 

diseased person has a deeper yearning within himself or herself for being healthy. Similarly he challenges 

us to transform the one-sided hierarchical relationship between the doctor and patient. For Das, “One is 

not just either a patient or a doctor; it is not just the case that the doctor would prescribe and the patient 

would obey. Both have to listen to each other.” 

The reflections on Das and Gadamer on health and healing also remind us about the classic work of 

Alfred Korzybsky (1933) on science and sanity. For Korzybsky, “Until recently we have had a split 

medicine. One branch, general medicine, was interested in the ‘body’ (soma); the other was interested 

in the ‘soul’ (‘psyche’). The net result was that general medicine was a glorified form of veterinary 

science, while psychiatry remained metaphysical. However, it has been found empirically that a great 

many ‘physical’ ailments are of a semantogenic origin” (ibid.). Korzybsky pleads for an integration of 

the body and soul for realization of health. This also calls for a new grammar of life in which we realize 

health as simultaneously a noun and verb of action, meditation and transformations which includes both 

the horizontal and vertical dimensions of our lives, intension as well as extension. 3 It calls for a new art of 

integration (cf. Giri 2010). 

3 Earlier we have argued about the limits of the distinction between noun and verb. This also points to limits of existing 

modes of defining things. Korzybsky here challenges us to realize the distinction between definition by intension and 

definition by extension: “If we orient ourselves predominantly by intension or verbal definitions, our orientations depend 

mostly on the cortical region. If we orient ourselves by extension or facts, this type of orientation by necessity follows 

the natural order of evaluation, and involves thalamic factors, introducing automatically critically delayed reactions. In 

other words, orientations by intension tends to train our nervous system in a split between the functions of the cortical and 

thalamic regions; orientations by extension involves the integration of cortico-thalamic functions. Orientation by extension 

induce an automatic delay of reactions, which automatically stimulates the cortical region and regulates and protects 

the reactions of the usually over-stimulated thalamic region” (Korzybsky 1933, lviii). Korzybsky further writes: “I may 

add that all existing psychotherapy, no matter of what school, is based on the partial and particular extensionalization of a 

given patient” (ibid., lx). 

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References 

Bourdieu, Pierre et al. 1999. The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society. 

Cambridge: Polity Press. 

Das, Chitta Ranjan. 2010. Byakti O Byaktitya [Person and Personality]. Bhubaneswar: Pathika 

Prakashani. 

2011 Yoga Samanyaya: Prabeshika. Bhubaneswar: Pathika Prakashani. 

Clammer, John forthcoming. Culture, Development and Social Theory: Social Suffering and Alternative 

Discourses of Social Transformations. London: Zed. 

Giri, Ananta Kumar. 2010 “Towards a New Art of Integration.” Paper presented at the international 

symposium on “Learning across boundaries.” Luxemborg. 

2012a “Beyond Adaptation and Meditative Verbs of Co-Realizations.” In idem, Sociology and Beyond: 

Windows and Horizons. Jaipur: Rawat Publications. 

2012b “Towards a Vibrant and Pregnant Spatial and Temporal Creativity” Paper presented at Goethe 

Institute, Chennai, February 2012. 

Gadamer, Hans-George. 1996. The Enigma of Health: Art of Healing in a Scientific Age. 

Frank, Lawrence K. 1933. “Society as the Patient.” American Journal of Sociology. 

1948. Society as the Patient. Rutgers. 

Honneth, Axel. 2007. Disrespect: Normative Foundations of Critical Theory. Cambridge: Polity Press. 

Frankl, Victor. 1967. Psychotherapy and Existentialism: Selected Papers on Logotherapy. 

Hammondsworth: Penguin. 

Kierkegaard, Soren. 1989 [1848]. Sickness Unto Death. London: Penguin. 

Kleinman, Arthur, Veena Das and Margaret Lock (eds.). 1997. Social Suffering. Berkeley: University of 

California Press. 

Korzybsky, Afred. 1933. Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General 

Semantics. Lakeville, Connecticut: International Non-Aristotelian Library Publishing Co. 

Holzman, Lois. 2009. Vygotsky at Work and Play. London: Routledge. 

Murty, K. Satchidananda. 1973. The Realm of Between: Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. Simla: 

Indian Institute of Advanced Study. 

Scott, James C. 1998. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have 

Failed. New Haven: Yale U. Press. 

Sennett, Richard. 2000. The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New 

Capitalism. New Haven: Yale U. Press. 

2006. The Culture of New Capitalism. New Haven: Yale U. Press. 

2012. Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation. New Haven: Yale U. Press. 

Toynbee, Alfred J. 1956. A Historian’s Approach to Religion. New York: Oxford U. Press. 

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Princess Bari, 

Answering the Conundrum of Sufferings of the World 

Kang Ha Yu 

Kangwon National University 

1. Rewriting Princess Bari in the 21 st Century 

In Korean shamanist rituals, or gut, there are those to lead the dead up to the heavens. These are ‘Jinogi 

gut,’ ‘Ananpak gut,’ and ‘Ogu gut.’ In these rituals, the shaman sings and dances a Seosamuga, or an epic 

shamanist song, about Princess Bari. It is a shamanistic myth about a princess who was abandoned right 

after birth, coming back with the water of life obtained from the afterlife for her parents. 

Princess Bari is a song about a goddess, sung to pray for the souls of the dead and to comfort the living. It 

has been orally transmitted for a very long time. The story is reborn by Hwang Sokyong’s book, Princess 

Bari (Korean title: Baridegi) 1 . The writer kept the basic structure of the abandoned princess going into 

the afterlife, but added a new meaning of abandonment in the 21 st century. The new version is unique and 

different because it doesn’t repeat the original version, but encompasses the writer’s perception of reality 

in this world. 2 

Baridegi is a story about a girl named Bari. Regardless of her will, she travels from North Korea to China 

and then to the UK. The story tells of a girl’s experience of forced immigration in the midst of haughty 

capitalism and globalism, so the work has provided an important meaning in discussions regarding the 

1 Hwang Sokyong, Baridegi, Changbi, 2007. 

2 In Hwang Sokyong’s Shimchung, the Road of Lotus Flower, Hwang stated that “the perspective and the momentum of 

my book Shimchung is different from the perspective of Chae Mansik, when he newly wrote Shimhakgyu Jeon. They 

are both based on the realities of the times when they were written.” (Hwang Sokyong, “Preface: Publishing the Revised 

Edition”, Shimchung, the Road of Lotus Flower, Munhakdongne, 2011, p. 696). Baridegi will also be the deep and honest 

thought on ‘now and here’ that the writer is in. 

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current issues of the side effects of capitalism, immigration, and the diaspora. 3 

In Hwang’s book, Baridegi, all of the world’s sufferings caused by rapid globalization, such as violence, 

forced immigration, prejudice, misunderstanding, antagonism, conflict, poverty, and discrimination are 

included. The reason that this story is more than the sufferings of a girl named Bari is because the causes 

and the phenomena that make the characters suffer are not just individual issues. They are all linked to the 

human society and the social institutions in a complex and multilayered way. 4 Therefore, the sufferings 

experienced by Bari in Baridegi is an individual suffering, as well as the sufferings of all of us living in a 

divided, hurtful, confusing, and ironic world. And furthermore, it is the pains of all of us, ‘mankind,’ living 

in a huge society. This is why ‘we’ 5 must discuss pain and healing. This paper is not about a logical and 

scientific analysis on pain. It is about a story of a girl’s life, questioning the pains of human beings, who 

are relational beings as well as social beings. 

2. Bari, Traveling the Bitter World 

There are various similarities and differences between Seosamuga and Hwang’s Baridegi. Among the 

differences, just looking at the amount written about the current life and the afterlife, descriptions of the 

current life takes up a bigger portion in Baridegi. In the myth, Bari’s childhood, the ten or so years she 

spent growing up with Birigongduk grandparents, is quite short. However, with the help of the writer’s 

imagination, that period is reborn as a long journey across North Korea, China and the UK. 

Unlike other studies, which mainly covers Bari’s journey in the current life, this paper aims to look over 

the afterlife portion of the journey, which is comparatively shorter than the current life part of the story. 

However, the afterlife that Bari travels is a rendition of what today’s people think of the afterlife. 6 So, even 

if we cover the story about the afterlife, it is inevitably a story about today’s world. Therefore, the journey 

3 There are so many studies about Hwang’s Baridegi with the words ‘diaspora’ and ‘immigration’ in their titles. This paper 

will not list the studies. 

4 “Grouping human issues into groups make us realize that these phenomena cannot be regarded as psychological or 

medical issues, therefore ‘personal’ issues. On the other hand, it shows that in many cases, personal issues are closely 

linked to social issues.” Arthur Klienman, Veena Das, translated by Ahn, Jongseol, Social Suffering, Greenbee, 2002, p. 

10. 

5 The word ‘we,’ is a concept that can be easily fabricated and falsified, “from the closest relationships like family and 

friends, to encompass states and companies” (Seo Kyungsik, Can Sufferings and Memory Bond, Chulsoo and Younghee, 

2009, p 53-54). The word ‘we’ in this paper is a macro and inclusive term, which goes beyond the barriers of state, 

ethnicity, and race. 

6 “‘Oh, it is horrible.’ Chilsung thinks. ‘That is the hell that you built in your world. That is why the same hell is here as 

well.’” Hwang Sukyong, Baridegi, p. 267. 

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into the afterlife is a recreation of today’s world. So it could be a clearer method to look into the current 

life. 

As Bari in the Seosamuga did, Bari in the novel is born as the seventh daughter in a family living in 

Chungjin, North Korea, and is immediately abandoned after birth. After being rescued by a white dog 

raised by the family, Bari lived without any difficulties for a while. However, due to economic and 

political reasons, the family is separated. Bari and her grandmother secretly crossed the river and went in 

to China. In China, her sister, Hyuni and her grandmother suddenly die. After their death, thanks to the 

help of a man named Miccuri, she goes to a massage parlor named Nakwon (Korean word for paradise). 

In Nakwon, she befriends a girl named Shang. With the help of the Shang couple, she moves to Dalian 

and seems like her happiness is just beginning. However, she comes across some money issues again, and 

against her will, she is illegally smuggled into the UK. After working at a diner in Chinatown, she works 

as a foot masseuse at Tonking Salon. She meets Ali, a muslim, gets married to him, and finally feels that 

her life will be happy from then on. However, her husband Ali goes to look for his brother who is involved 

in an international terrorist act and Bari has to raise her child alone. 

Unlike the original story where Bari dramatically meets her parents who abandoned her, and goes to 

the afterlife for her parents, Bari in the novel is abandoned repeatedly. She is abandoned at birth, again 

with the death of her grandmother, and again when she is separated from Shang, her only friend, after 

smuggling into Britain. After her marriage, she is abandoned again by her husband as he leaves her to look 

for his brother Usman. She is tragically abandoned in the world again as her baby dies in an accident. 

(1) The Road to the Afterlife, the Familiar Journey 

She was named ‘Bari’ because she was abandoned at birth. Like her name, she repeatedly suffers the 

pains of ‘abandonment’ as if it were her destiny. At the end of increasing pain is the journey into the 

afterlife. In the myth, Princess Bari embarks on the journey after reuniting with her parents. She receives 

much cheering and farewell as she goes, 7 but in the novel, Bari begins her journey in a most painful 

moment. She had cried herself to sleep after losing her daughter, Holiya, whom she gave birth to without 

her husband. At her lowest, most humble and painful moment, Bari’s journey begins. After repeated 

abandonment and pain, what awaits her is the most difficult journey: a journey into the afterlife. 

7 “The King gave Princess Bari huge jade, silk clothes, smooth bamboo hat, and a jar, shoes and a walking stick made out 

of casting iron.” Kim Taegon, Choi Unsik, and Kim Jinyoung, Korean Myths, Siinsa, 2009, p. 229. Moved by the reunion 

with her parents and after reconciling with her parents, Princess Bari embarks on her journey receiving all the necessities. 

However, the situation is exactly the opposite for Bari. She embarks on her journey without anything. 

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In the myth, Princess Bari had to go though many hells. 8 Likewise, Bari must go through multiple layers 

of hell. With the help of grandmother and Chilsung, she arrives at the watchtower of a ship. From there, 

she sees that she must go through three seas of hell, the sea of fire, sea of blood, and sea of sand, to get to 

Mushei Castle, at the end of the western sky. 9 The hell that reflects, projects, and compresses the human 

world shows that the sufferings of this world are that much complex and multi-layered. 

The sea of fire, which she crosses first, shows the world’s war and carnage through burning cities and 

people. War is the most violent act. It is the act that destroys human beings, families, the world, and 

civilizations 10 . That is the true nature of the sea of fire. 

After the sea of fire is the sea of blood. It is where boats filled with the souls of the dead float by. It makes 

us think of the meaning of pain and death. People who cannot enter the afterlife cry in pain on their way to 

the afterlife. They are on different boats according to the different pains they have suffered. It is here that 

Bari meets the most number of people. It shows that there are more than one or two different types of pain. 

That there are a more diverse and complex causes and shapes of pain. At the sea of blood, symbolizing 

both life and death, Bari meets the first boat passing by. 

Scenes change relentlessly. It shows here and there inside the ship. Negroids, Caucasians, and 

Mongoloids are all on the boat. It is a ship filled with souls who starved to death, fell ill to death, 

harassed to death, worked to death, beaten to death, exploded to death, burned to death, drowned to 

death, and overanxious to death (Hwang, 268). 

A soul that died painfully asks Bari “Please answer me quickly. Why are we in so much pain? Why are 

we here?” (Hwang, 268). However, Bari, even though she is a living soul, does not know the meaning. 

Looking at the painfully dying souls, she does not hastily say or criticize that it is all their faults. This is 

possible because Bari herself has been through so much pain. Bari has a special psychic gift of being able 

to travel to the afterlife, but she does not have the power to save them. Listening to their painful cries and 

questions, she continues her journey, only answering them that she will tell them on the way back. 

On the second boat crossing the sea of blood, there are the lost souls of the people sacrificed voluntarily 

8 “There were blade mountain hell, fire mountain hell, poisonous snake hell, ice hell, pitfall hell, baeam hell, and gate hell.” 

Kim Taegon, Choi Unsik, and Kim Jinyoung, Korean Myths, p. 230. 

9 “‘First is the sea of fire, then the sea of blood. Last is the sea of sand, where even a bird’s feather sinks. After you pass 

that, is the Mushei Castle.’ ‘Where is that?’ ‘The end of western sky.’” Hwang Sokyong, Baridegi, p. 266. 

10 “War is the biggest and most brutal violence of all. It is because it destroys human, families, nations, and cultures that 

man made.” Kim Chisoo, Wounds and Healing, Moonji Publishing, 2010, p. 36. 

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and involuntarily under the guise of world justice and peace. Ali’s brother Usman, who was involved in an 

international terrorist act, is also on that boat. 

On the boat are people lined up holding spears, arrows, swords and guns. There are also people 

with their hair everywhere. Some lost their arms, legs, or neck. They wore bloodied uniforms, with 

bandages, prosthetics, and eye patches. Their arms are outstretched, flailing. 

Usman in a white and round hat with beard yells at me. 

Bari, tell me why evil prevails in the world, and why we are with our enemies (Hwang, 269). 

On the boat are people with swords, spears, guns, and other weapons, and the people who have been 

hurt by them. Also, enemies who fought against each other were on the boat together. They ask Bari 

why evil always wins and why the enemies are on the same boat. Usman asks Bari a question, but Bari 

only answers that she will give them an answer on her way back. The third boat crossing the sea of river 

appears. 

There are young and old men with beards and stern faces and women wearing hijabs with 

concerned faces. There are also women with faces distorted from fire and with bodies filled with 

bloody scars and bruises from flogging, women wearing loose clothes covering their faces with 

burka, and strange men with bombs on their chests. They shake their fists and ask Bari. Tell us 

what the meaning of our deaths is! […] I will answer you on my way back (Hwang, 270). 

This is the pain of the victims of violence under the guise of tradition and justice. Women wearing hijabs 

and burkas, women flogged for violating tradition, women who lost their lives from honorary killing, and 

men who have killed those women due to wrong beliefs all cry out in pain. The cause of their pains is not 

individual. It must be seen from a more macro perspective. It is caused by culture and tradition in a world 

that we shared for a long time. Bari still cannot answer their questions. 

While seeing the boats pass by, Bari does not answer any of their questions. On the last boat crossing the 

sea of blood, she sees the people who have hurt her. 

In the quietness, Bari hears a creepy laughter. He he he, ha ha ha. Officials who took away her 

father, men who drove her away from home, men who have sold and harassed Bari’s sister, Mii, 

who crossed the Tumen River alone, gamblers from Dalian, and men from the boat that she 

smuggled into the UK are all on the boat. […] Ah, most of all, the scary and ugly Shang is glaring 

at me. On this boat are the things that you hate the most. When will we be free? […] I will never set 

you free. […] When will we free from you? […] I will tell you on my way back (Hwang, 270-271). 

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On the last question, Bari finally answers that she will never let them go. It is because even though she is 

a psychic, she is also only a human, not free from the bonds of hate and resentment. However, to the next 

question asking when they will be freed, she answers that she will tell them on her way back. 

While crossing the sea of blood, Bari receives four questions. She is a psychic, but she is incapable of 

solving her own pains, and answering others’ questions. Even though she can see the afterlife, in the 

face of the universal, somber and solemn question of life and death, Bari cannot give any answers. To 

the people who cry out in wanting to know the meaning of life and death, Bari does not act in a solemn 

and domineering way. On the other hand, she listens and tells them that if she finds the answers, she will 

let them know. Even to the people who have sold her and hurt her, she first cries out that she will never 

forgive them, but in the end, she unconsciously tells them that she will let them know later. 

Like so, hell is a familiar road, filled with people she has met before during her current life. Even though 

they are already dead, the dead souls on the boats crossing the sea of blood do not know the meaning 

of death. It must be because they did not know the meaning of life, which is connected to death. Where 

would she find the answers to the souls’ questions? 

(2) The Familiar Taste of the Water of Life 

Bari promises the souls that she will find the answers to their questions and continues on her journey. She 

is a psychic who knows the past and the present of a person by touching their feet. She is a being who 

understands the unknown afterlife, but the writer holds off finding the answers in the holy world, or the 

godly world. This is expressed in the novel by Bari being unable to see the future even though she can see 

the past and the present. Also, it is expressed in the criticism on the religious leaders she meets on the sea 

of sand. 

There is something moving far away. They wear different clothes and hold up different scriptures. 

The Protestant minister in black suits and tie, Catholic priest with a long black gown, a Hindu 

Brahman wrapped in white clothing with one bear shoulder, a Muslim imam with long clothes and 

a white hat, a Buddhist monk with shaved head and yellow cloth, and a Jewish rabbi with a black, 

round kippa hat all barely standing on the sand and screaming in undistinguishable words. […] 

They are screaming at the top of their lungs, but because they are trying to out scream each other, 

the words are all mixed, and do not mean anything (Hwang, 272). 

The writer criticizes all religions’ fallacy in that they all speak solemnly about life and death and proclaim 

salvation, but in the end, they do not accept one another and repeat division and quarrels. All the religions 

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in the world that sink into the sea of sand and rises back up again do not have any answers to the world’s 

conflict and pain. By putting the religious people, filled with fallacies, hypocrisy and arrogance but 

pretend to be solemn, on the sea of sand, on the way to hell, the writer draws a line to religious salvation 

and holy salvation. 

Bari, a psychic, is no exception. Bari has the ability to talk to Sook, who is a mute, and to her dog, 

Chilsung, and can see the past of a person by touching their feet. However, she does not know her future, 

or give answers to the questions asked by people crying out in pain. Instead of sermons, advice, and 

proclamations of teachings, Bari stands at the other end of the line. Bari reads the low points and the pains 

in a person’s life and mind by touching their tired and dirty feet as a foot masseuse. She does not rule or 

stand in front of people. With that ability, she stays at the lowest, the dirtiest place. Therefore, Bari does 

not act as if she ‘knows’ everything about human pain and salvation, but shares with people by exposing 

her ignorance to the world’s pain. 

Bari crosses the sea of fire, blood, and sand receiving heaps of questions about pain. Then, she reaches 

Mushei Castle at the end of the western sky. She asks Satan, disguised as an old man, about the Water of 

Life. He answers weakly, “It is impossible that such a thing exists. We do have a well, but it is just water 

to make food” (Hwang, 280). That was the disappointing answer she received after going through all the 

troubles to come to Mushei Castle. 

Bari turns and walks out the back door of the room. At the end of the stairs, there is a small garden 

and a small well. She ran towards the well and drinks up the water with her hands a couple of 

times. It tastes cool and sweet like her well back home. But that is it. Disappointed, I get up 

(Hwang, 280). 

Bari stands up ‘disappointed’ after drinking the water from the well that tastes like the water back home. 

She had expected the Water of Life to be something special, but unlike Princess Bari in the myth, there 

was no Water of Life that she could proudly carry back. 

On her way back, she meets the first, grey boat. People ask her the question once again. Against her will, 

a young girl’s voice answers the question. To the question asked by the bitter souls of all races, a voice 

within Bari answers. 

It is because of the desires of human beings. To eat better, wear better, and live better, they harassed 

us. That is why the god riding the boat with you is also in pain. Forgiving them will be helping god 

(Hwang, 282). 

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A girl’s voice comes out from within Bari, who drank the Water of Life, which is just normal water. The 

voice says that the cause of the pain is desire, and forgiveness is the answer. On her way back, Bari meets 

people on the second boat, including Usman. 

Do you know why evil always wins? Why we are here together with our enemies? Nobody is a 

winner in a war. The definition of the current life is always in half (Hwang, 282). 

Wars began with a good cause: to eradicate evil and to pursue a just and peaceful world. However, 

in trying to create a peaceful world with violence, they only created consumptive fights and victims. 

No matter what just causes it has, violence only begets more violence, and it does not solve anything. 

Usman’s question of why only evil prevails in the world stems from a mindset of putting good and bad in 

a conflicting manner. On the flip side, the enemy will repeat the same mindset from the opposite position, 

so a solution seems far away. This is why Usman and his enemies are on the same boat. Identifying friend 

or foe makes us to define each other as enemies, others, and evil. If friends are absolute good and foes 

are absolute evil, all fights will end with ‘evil’s victory.’ Bari’s answer that no one wins in a war and that 

justice in the world is only an imperfect half and means that as long as inconsiderate and narrow-minded 

division exists, there is no true victory in the world. 

As dividing becomes more dense, pain grows and maximizes. Clearly dividing friend and foe might 

dissect the world, but can’t put the world back together. Human desire and greed that pry in that boundary 

only make that line more distinct. 

Next comes the boat with women in hijabs and burkas, women flogged to death, honor killed women, and 

men with bombs on their chests. On that boat are many people sacrificed under the name of man-made 

‘tradition’ and ‘justice.’ 

Tell us the meaning of our death! 

God’s sadness is because of your despair. He will not be in despair with you (Hwang, 283). 

Bari answers that it is because of the forced submission that has been going on so long that no one knows 

it is wrong, tradition that does not change because sometimes it is similar to beliefs, and despair arising 

from walls such as culture and prejudice. Bari learns from her ‘daily life’ that they can be saved from 

despair when they recognize and consider others. 11 The wall that has been built for a long time is so strong 

11 “Mr. Tan from Tonking Salon believed in Buddhism. Mr. Lou would murmur a mantra-like prayer endlessly when he 

was resting after cooking. Many people living in Chinatown went to Taoist temples to burn incense and pray. Luna and 

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that people give up. But if human beings give into despair, god will not be able to do anything and be 

filled with sadness. It is because god can help man, but living is one’s own job. 

Next is the quiet fourth boat. On that boat are the people who have hurt Bari. Shang, who made Bari’s 

daughter Holiya Sooni die is also on that boat. The boat filled with people who Bari hated is still tied to 

Bari with hate. Inside Bari’s hurting mind, Holiya’s voice answers for her. 

The things you hate the most are on this boat. When will we be freed? 

My mom is tied. When my mom untangles herself from hate, you will be freed (Hwang, 284). 

Through the voice inside of her, she faces the truth behind hate. 12 She is a psychic who can go from the 

current life to the afterlife. But she realizes that even she is not a perfect being, and that she is only a 

person consumed in hate and despair. The pain inside her is not reverted to her personal fault. On the other 

hand, it is pain of an individual left in a world filled with global capitalism, racial hostility, and religious 

conflict. Bari’s experience of human trafficking, the September 11 th terrorist attack, the London subway 

terrorist bombing, and even Holiya’s death is not because of her own fault. In a world where we do not 

live alone, we are all victims and perpetrators. 

Pain is caused by personal faults as well as societal pain from war, religious conflicts and terrorism 

arising from intangible things such as hate, conflict, and prejudice rampant all over the world. Therefore, 

the faults of a man in a world cannot be blamed only on him, and the society that allows existence is not 

innocent. Pain is both personal and universal. 

Bari found the Water of Life at the end of the dangerous road that she went holding bells and tri-colored 

sprays. The Water of Life was just normal water that we cook with and wash our clothes with. It is 

daily life itself. Water of Life is the water from the well of everyday life filled with pain. The deep and 

encompassing healing power of the Water of Life is told by Bari’s grandmother. 

When I asked for the Water of Life, the Jangseung (Korean totem pole) told me that the water that 

we use to cook and wash clothes, that water is the Water of Life. […] When I sprayed the Water of 

Life that I brought, my sick parents got well and the sick world was healed (Hwang, 81). 

Mrs. Sarah were from Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, but they were born in Britain. They went to church and believed in 

Jesus. They freely crossed over different manners and courtesies according to their traditions.” Hwang, Baridegi, p. 225. 

12 “Shang, you bitch! I will kill you. I later realized that Shang had only provoked something in my heart. The grudge was 

about everything that had hurt me throughout my journey.” Hwang Sokyong, Baridegi, p. 262. 

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The Water of Life that Bari drank heals not only her ‘father’s’ illness and brings him back to life, but also 

the Water of Life that heals the world. She could not bring back the Water of Life which creates bones 

and flesh and lets the blood flow. But by drinking it and becoming one with it, she is able to answer the 

souls’ questions. Could we say that the questions we ask during our lives and the sufferings of life are less 

painful than the physical pain of bones and flesh falling apart and blood drying up? 

The fact that the Water of Life was just normal water means that the answers to the questions on our pain 

are not in books or learned from scholars. It is earned by ourselves, in our lives, while we ask the questions 

to ourselves. The world we live in is painful like hell, but the water that brings back life to people and the 

world is in our lives. 

(3) Wounded Healer 

Although the depth might differ, pain is indiscriminate to all beings. It is universal in the sense that all 

people go through it, and it is the most unique emotion in the sense that it is an experience that we cannot 

explain vividly to anyone. 13 The people from all ranks and classes, races, and ethnicities that Bari met 

were not free from pain. The pain is caused by individual fault, but pain is also our destiny in the sense 

that we all live in complex relations and societies. Bari had experienced indiscriminate and merciless pain 

since birth, so she gladly begs for others’ pain. 

Help Mrs. Emily. 

I said quietly. Becky answered in a hoarse voice. 

You are not in a position to worry about others (Hwang, 239). 

Deep pain and sorrow not only makes us fall into the depths of a bottomless pit. By experiencing pain 

with all our body, we earn the healing power that can be understood and can console others, and we 

become immune to pain. Immunity to pain is earned through pain. Why did the writer put Bari in the 

epicenter of pain and sufferings? The writer said, “Shamans sang the pains and sufferings that Bari, the 

original shaman, experienced. By doing this, they considered themselves as ‘tortured healer of pain’ or 

‘suffering solver of sufferings.’” 14 

13 “Suffering, in other words is experiencing life and death which means that ‘we exist among people.’ It is subjective and 

at the same time, far apart from the world of matters and men.” Hannah Arendt, trans. Lee Jinwoo and Tae Jungho, The 

Human Condition, p. 104. “Experiencing physical pain that is so strong that it makes us forget about everything else it 

the most intimate feeling. It is a feeling that we cannot tell anyone else.” Arthur Klienman and Veena Das, trans. Ahn 

Jongseol, Social Suffering, p. 25. 

14 Hwang, Baridegi, p. 294. 

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Bari goes beyond the pains to console and embrace the wounds. But Bari is only a human being, filled 

with scars herself. She gave birth to her only child, Holiya, without her husband in a foreign land. But 

her daughter dies suddenly, and she is abandoned in the lowest depths of the world. It is then that Bari 

asks, “God, why are you making me suffer, when I have done nothing wrong? What difference does it 

make when I have faith and is dependent?” (Hwang, 263). The question that Bari asked, “Why me?,” is a 

question we have all asked in our lives. It is the cry against repeating pain that we experience even though 

we live diligently, hard, and have done nothing wrong. It is also the cries of the people living in the era of 

pain. 

After listening to Bari’s story, the old Abdul consoles Bari by telling his story. He tells Bari that after 

seeing his innocent wife and children being shot to death, he resented god. 15 He also says that misfortunes 

and pains are the outcomes of ‘our’ deeds. 16 The pains and sufferings in life are there for ‘us’ to lead 

excellent lives. 17 The answer that it is ‘our’ fault means that not only individuals, but also the human 

relations and the society all are responsible. At the same time, it is the writer’s request to widen our 

perspectives from ‘me’ to ‘us.’ That is why the writer proposes global citizenship as the answer, which 

transcends race, ethnicity, and nation. This work is meaningful in that it globalizes Korean literature, 

but all the more meaningful is that it sees the world in a macro view, and it voluntarily joins in with the 

pains of the world. Breaking down barriers and wounded healer Bari’s difficult journey to hell, are the 

consolations and compassion for all the suffering people. It is also the writer’s hope that ‘we’ who drink 

the Water of Life every day, take on the role of the wounded healer. 

3. New Identity of ‘Global Citizen’ 

There is no such thing as Water of Life 

Ha ha ha. Stupid, the water that you drink is the Water of Life. 

No one can bring back the Water of Life. 18 

15 “I resented god as I left Jammu and Kashmir after my wife and daughters were executed. How could he give so much 

pain to such good people! But anyone with flesh, all throughout his/her life, already experiences hell. Hatred is the hell 

that you build.” Hwang, Baridegi, p. 263. 

16 “Continued human interest on each incident that arise among people shows us that in defining human, sufferings are 

fundamentally ‘social.’ Also, observing the diversity of human society conjures up an existential reverberation that all 

pain takes up a part of ‘our’ world.” Arthur Klienman and Veena Das, trans. Ahn Jongseol, Social Suffering, p. 25. 

17 “God’s nature is to watch. There is no color, share, laughter, tears, sleep, oblivion, star, or end, but is everywhere. 

Misfortune and pain is everything we have done. The ups and downs are there to teach us to lead excellent lives. That is 

why we must overcome them and enjoy the beauties of life. That is what god wants from us.” Hwang, Baridegi, p. 263. 

18 Hwang, Baridegi, p. 280. 

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When Bari is disappointed after knowing that there is no such thing as the Water of Life, the black crow 

that showed her the way laughs and tells her that the water she drank and was disappointed in, the water 

with the cool and sweet taste like the water home, that is the Water of Life. The Bari in the myth who 

carefully brings home the Water of Life is nonexistent in the novel. The Water of Life goes inside Bari 

and becomes one with her. The Water of Life that the writer writes does not exist apart from us. It gains 

its meaning and strength when it becomes one with us. Bari is the psychic who connects the living and 

the dead, and the current life and the afterlife. She became a true ‘healer’ because she has experienced the 

lowest points of life, been through the deepest, most excruciating pain, and cried for her and others. 

They say that life is bitter. But is it only bitter? We need immunity in life. That immunity isn’t brought by 

someone else. Like Bari, it is earned by experiencing pain. Also, like Bari’s grandmother and the Satan in 

the Mushei Castle said, the Water of Life is the ordinary water we cook and wash our clothes with. The 

answers to our pain are in our lives. It is the endless questions, reflections, soul-searching, and insights on 

our lives that make the Water of Life. 

The endless pain that the North Korean defector Bari experiences on her journey from North Korea to 

China and to the UK tells us that the fundamental cause of that pain doesn’t bud from individual issues. 

The writer says that the world that we must pursue goes beyond the barriers of nationalism and patriotism. 

It is a world where all people are considered and cared for. The identity of the people living in that world 

is ‘Global Citizen.’ 19 

Hwang took out the traditional meaning of ‘filial piety’ from the Seosamuga Princess Bari. In that 

place, Hwang is proposing a new story of the birth of the ‘global citizen.’ In traditional society, ‘filial 

piety’ goes beyond the unilinear perspective of saving a sick father. It has a bigger meaning that sustains 

families and communities. The global citizenship that the North Korean defector Bari conveys also has a 

similar meaning. She contemplates personal pain and understands the pain of others. This creates a more 

expansive and flexible human community, world of reconciliation and forgiveness, and an ‘orderly, whole 

world.’ 20 

19 (Hwang Sokyong, interview) “There is no such thing as a globally shared ‘literary trend.’ Sharing the current life of 

ourselves and the Korean peninsula with the people around the world is the writer’s road to become a ‘global citizen,’ 

free of national borders or nationalities.” Hwang Sokyong, “Overcoming Conflict and Antagonism, to find the Water of 

Life in the 21 Century”, Baridegi, p. 298. 

20 “In a person’s life, the feeling that the world completes something whole with orders is a prerequisite for happiness.” 

Kim Uchang, “Globalization and Universal Ethics: Acceptance, Rights, Cultural Values”, The 1 st World Humanities 

Forum Proceedings, 2011, p. 3. 

532

A society without alienation, discrimination, and pain was never realized. Utopia might still be a faraway 

dream in the future. However, “there are more humane and less humane societies.” 21 Whichever it is, if 

it is the world where person, who are destined to be social and relational, must live in, pain is inevitable. 

The meaning of ‘global citizen’ proposed by the writer goes beyond the meaning of a citizen living in a 

world. It is born in a world where the barriers of ethnicity, race, and national borders are broken down. 

As society’s civilization develops, the distinction between friend and foe takes place more often. As that 

distinction becomes clearer, pain will increase. Breaking down the myriad of borders, differences, and 

discriminations is not proposed by an individual. It must become a type of public opinion cultivated by all 

global citizens. 22 Only when an individual gains dignity as a human being, and not from the identity built 

by gender, nationality, and ethnicity, he/she gains the ability to understand the pain of others, who have an 

equal value of life as anyone. 

It is not because Bari is a psychic with special talents that she crossed the river of pain. Bari’s psychic 

ability is shown when she empathizes with and understands the pain of others. The answer to the pain 

that we have because we are relational, social, and global beings is the ‘dailiness’ of the Water of Life that 

heals us. That daily life will become the world where the concept of ‘we’ is infinitely expanded. Therefore, 

we must earn a new identity of a global citizen, which transcends ethnicity, race, nationality, gender, and 

age. 

The pain and conflict of the people Bari met at the sea of blood are created by different causes, such 

as conflict, desire, selfishness, and hate. From those emotions, war, terrorism, forced immigration, 

discrimination and violence arise. They have different names and forms, but they are all pains. A bigger 

problem is that this pain not only sickens an individual, but also sickens all social beings, societies, and 

civilizations. Though it is true that we must try and seek social and scientific analyses, and ultimately, 

solutions to the primal causes of pain and sufferings of humanity, we must always keep in mind that 

reflection on the values of each and every human being should be the foundation upon which harmonious 

and peaceful community is built upon; a humanity for reconciliation and healing. 

What can the humanities do for the world’s pains? Literature is one branch of the humanities. It holds in 

the stories of the people in the world. It helps people to have a wider perspective of the world by viewing 

21 Kim Uchang, Freedom and Humane Life, Thinking Tree Publishing, 2007, p. 16. 

22 Arendt, said that “education, ingenuity, and talent cannot replace the compositional factors of public opinion. Public 

opinion is the adequate place for human excellence.” Hannah Arendt, trans. Lee Jinwoo and Tae Jungho, The Human 

Condition, p. 102. Human excellence is not something that is individual. It must be agreed and understood by everyone, 

something that can create cooperation. 

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the status and relationships of many beings in a macro way. It is a made up story, but there is truth about 

the world and life in literature. This is why we read a fake, made up, imagined, and trivial story. 23 

References 

Hwang, Sokyong, Baridegi, Changbi, 2007. 

Hwang, Sokyong, Shimchung Munhakdongne, 2011. 

Kim, Chisoo, Wounds and Healing, Moonbi Publishing, 2010. 

Kim, Taegon; Choi, Unsik; Kim, Jinyoung, Korean Myths Siinsa, 2009. 

Arendt, Hannah; translated by Lee, Jinwoo; Tae, Jungho, The Human Condition, Hankilsa, 2008. 

Cassirer, Ernst, An Essay on Man, Chang, 2008. 

Klienman, Arthur; Das, Veena; translated by Ahn, Jongseol, Social Suffering: Socialistic, Medical, and 

Cultural Anthropological Approach to Human Suffering Greenbee, 2002. 

Suh, Kyungsik, Can Sufferings and Memory Bond, Chulsoo and Younghee, 2009. 

Kim, Uchang, Freedom and Humane Life, Thinking Tree Publishing, 2007. 

Kim, Uchang, “Globalization and Universal Ethics: Acceptance, Rights, Cultural Values”, 1 st World 

Humanities Forum Proceedings 2011. 

Park, Seunghee, ‘Method of Bonding between Ethnicity and the World – “The case of Hwang, Sokyong’s 

Baridegi”, Hanminjok Eomunhak (Vol. 77), 2010. 

Yoo, Kyungsoo, “Diaspora’s Imagination for Multifaceted Communication – The case of Hwang, 

Sokyong’s Baridegi”, Comparative Korean Studies (Vol. 17), 2009. 

Kim, Heonseon, “Comparative Research on Goddesses Travelling the Afterlife – Princess Bari, 

Tentyuhime, Inanna”, Comparative Folk Culture Studies (Vol.33), 2007. 

Park, Junggeun, “Princess Bari-type of Vision in a Multicultural Society Caused by Diaspora – The case 

of Hwang, Sokyong’s Baridegi” The Review of Korean Cultural Studies (Vol.31), 2009. 

Lee, Myungwon, “The Lowest Paradise in a World Without Any Promises – The case of Hwang, 

Sokyong’s Baridegi”, Culture/Science (Fall Edition), 2009. 

23 Kim Chisoo, “Moved by Trivial Stories”, Wounds and Healing, p. 22. 

534

Displacement as Disease: Exploring the Links between 

Traditional Healing and Well-Being in the Context of a 

Relocation Crisis 

Ronel P. Dela Cruz 

St. Paul University Quezon City 

Contemporary works on the idea of place among cultural anthropologists have been looking at social 

identities and well-being arising from a sense of rootedness in place. 1 The growing scholarly interest on 

the idea of place, albeit vary from distinct premises and diverse methodologies, indicates the importance 

of place in human experience. Various literature provide essential insights into how places shape human 

consciousness, how human beings understand themselves in relation to place, and how individuals and 

communities respond to the changing conditions of place or to the experience of relocation or exile. 2 What 

is strikingly evident in the study of place is the way these diverse perspectives and fields have been seen 

as related to one another. The idea of place seems to demand such interdisciplinary work; its complexity 

requires the bringing of multiple perspectives to bear upon our understanding of who we are as placed and 

displaced people. It also reminds us that while place has undeniably personal significance, one’s sense of 

place always touches upon and is shaped by larger social, cultural and political forces. 

The concept of sense of place has been employed to describe the attitudes, beliefs, meanings, and 

interpretations that people associate with a particular place. Anthropologist Keith Basso observes 

that places are as much a part of us as we are part of them. 3 The estrangement of people from places 

1 For a helpful overview of recent trends in this area, see Steven Feld and Keith H. Basso (eds), Senses of Place (Santa Fe 

NM: School of American Research Press, 1996), pp. 3-11. 

2 J. Nicholas Entriken, The Betweenness of Place: Towards a Geography of Modernity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University 

Press, 1991); John B. Jackson, A Sense of Place, A Sense of Time (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994); Yi Fu 

Tuan, Cosmos and Hearth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), and Space and Place: The Perspective of 

Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977). 

3 Keith H. Basso, Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache (Albuquerque: University 

of New Mexico Press, 1996). p. 4. 

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personally and culturally important to them is widespread and alarming in the current phase of economic 

globalization and cultural homogenization. Gradually, we are losing the sense of what it means to dwell 

within a particular place, to become intimate with the landscape and be shaped by it. It is not easy to 

calculate the costs of losing our sense of place on our sense of well-being. But as the ever-growing body 

of evidence suggests, the costs are immense and a new form of suffering emerges from placelessness that 

has detrimental effects to individual and community’s self-identity and well-being. 

This study explores the link between the displacement and the community’s well-being in the context of 

Fuga Island. It demonstrates how people’s “sense of place” is integral to their well-being and how the 

situation of poverty, land insecurity, and human rights abuses in the island are causing “disease” in the 

community physically or biologically, emotionally, and socially in the form of conflicts and violence. It 

then explores the role of Fuga Island’s traditional healers or herbolarios (as they are called by the locals) 

in responding to this situation. 

Guiding the project design is a qualitative approach in exploring and understanding the inhabitants’ sense 

of place through the perspective of traditional healers in the context of an impending relocation and land 

loss. Using participant observation and focused group discussions (FGDs) to gather narratives, the study 

explored the link between traditional healing and the community’s well-being. Meeting the elders with 

their kindred spirits were rare encounters that are intuiting, reflecting and introspecting. After gathering 

the data, the narratives of the healers and other sources of data were encoded in NVIVO 7, a software 

designed for qualitative approaches that helped in the analysis of themes, trends, and patterns from the 

narratives. 

Fuga Island: a cultural landscape 

Fuga Island is one of the islands of the Babuyan Group in northern Philippines. With a total land area 

of almost 10,000 hectares, the island is home to more than 2,500 Ilocanos (an ethno-linguistic group 

inhabiting the northern Philippines). The island is surrounded with fine white beaches and has numerous 

sites for scuba diving, snorkeling, and fishing. The villagers primarily rely on swidden farming and 

fishing. The island is also constantly subjected to strong winds and typhoons. From August to December, 

the villagers could hardly cross the sea going to mainland Claveria due to strong winds and treacherous 

waves. 

The Island’s cultural heritage has been shaped by its colonial past. The Spanish colonizers who came 

to the island named it Babuyan Chico. For the villagers, the old church Sta. Ursula de Isla Fuga is an 

important historico-cultural legacy left by the Spanish missionaries. Related to this religious structure are 

536

the unique customs and traditions that are still practiced in the present particularly the Komedya, a drama 

tradition which reflects the early Christianization of the local villagers. The local leaders recognize the 

importance of these practices in order to rekindle among the youth love and appreciation of their cultural 

heritage. Nowadays, villagers use the extant ruins of the church for their weekly prayer meetings. 

Archaeologists discovered a burial jar culture among the island’s early inhabitants. Prehistoric burial 

jars are found all over the island. An archaeological mapping of the island reveals that the entire place is 

encircled with burial sites considered sacred places by the villagers. 

Suffering is the lot of majority of the people in the island. The history of the Ilocano community in the 

island is a history of alienation. The arrival of the colonial masters significantly changed their way of life. 

Freedom and abundance were altered with imposed restrictions and tight control of the island. The people 

who farmed the island for many generations have to beg for a piece of land from Spanish authorities. 

Others worked as helpers in the cattle farms of the Spanish civil authorities. 

The situation barely changed after the Spaniards left and the Americans took control in the early 1900s. 

Decade after decades, poverty marks the lives of the people of Fuga Island. They do not have a stable 

source of income; they lack access to basic social services such as education, transportation, and 

electricity. Due to its distance from the mainland, the island is practically isolated. Access to basic health 

services is lacking as well. Infant mortality and cases of malnutrition are high. Villagers mostly rely on 

their traditional healers for their health needs. For many generations, they rely on the expertise of these 

healers aside from the fact that they are the immediate authorities to turn to in case a family member gets 

sick. The continued destruction of the island’s marine resources made life more difficult for the villagers. 

The situation is worsened by a culture of silence. People are wary to share their experiences to outsiders 

for fear that these will be used against them. Fear reigns in the island. 

These social problems are rooted in the conflict over ownership of the island. When I interviewed elder 

and traditional healer Enrique dela Cruz, he told me he was afraid that all the natives were going to be 

forced to leave the island. He opened up and began telling how life deteriorated over the years. He shared 

that the biggest problem in the island is hunger. “There is not enough food. We are not free. The owner 

controls us. The rules are extremely tough. If we disobey, we will be kicked out of the island.” 

Fuga Island is a contested land. A certain Alfonso Lim claims to have bought the island and sold it to 

another businessman Tan Yu. He dreamt of converting the island into a word-class recreational facility, a 

“model city of the 21st century, without squatters.” When his $50 billion fantasy island project began, a 

new batch of guards was deployed in the island to monitor the villagers. The presence of armed security 

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guards and the atrocities they committed created constant fear and insecurity among the people. 

After Tan Yu’s death, the guards abandoned the island and the natives experienced a brief respite from 

their oppression and hardships. They are now temporarily free to expand their farms. They are allowed to 

renovate and expand their huts which are now dilapidating for decades because they are not allowed to cut 

trees. Their farm produce is not even sufficient for family consumption. The constant struggle to survive 

is the main reason why many villagers, particularly the educated members of the communities, decided to 

migrate to the mainland. 

Contested Landscape 

Today, the Burgundy Realty Corporation, one of the primary investors of Tan Yu’s multi-billion dollar 

fantasy island, claims ownership of the island. It also deployed security guards to monitor the place from 

“illegal activities” which for the corporation means the illegal settling of the villagers since the land is 

privately owned. Moreover, the entire island is considered part of the Cagayan Economic Zone Authority 

(CEZA). The CEZA was created by Republic Act 7922 and was signed by former President Fidel Ramos 

in 1995. It envisions transforming northern Cagayan into an “international city, a world-class center and 

gateway for economic growth for the Philippines linking the dragon economies of Asia and the First 

World.” 4 Senate President Juan Ponce Enrile, who hails from Cagayan, pushed the CEZA Act of 7922. 

The economic zone covers the town of Sta. Ana and the islands of Fuga, Barit and Mabbag in Aparri town. 

It is intended to link up trade with Taiwan, Hong Kong, China and the United States. The development 

of the Cagayan Special Economic Zone and Freeport involves the creation of a transshipment industry, 

agro-industrial development, endowments of foreign technology, and development of tourism and leisure 

facilities. According to its Master Plan for the period 2011-2016, Fuga Island, together with Palaui 

Island and Cape Engaño, will be sites for sustainable tourism and leisure development. CEZA intends 

to make Fuga a haven for investors, including those from Taiwan and Hong Kong who are interested to 

permanently reside in the country. 

Even with claim of ownership by Burgundy Realty Corporation and the development plan of CEZA, 

the people of Fuga Island believed that they have the right to live in the island as many generations did 

before them. Their families have been living in Fuga before the coming of the Spanish missionaries. 

Their claim to the island is also based on their conviction that they have taken care of the land and its 

surrounding waters for centuries. The destruction of the island’s resources and the poverty that came along 

4 Cagayan Economic Zone Authority at http://ceza.gov.ph/development-plan/medium-term-development-plan-2011-2016 

538

with it are conditions created by outsiders claiming ownership of the land. The tight control imposed by 

armed security guards prevented the people from protecting the island from exploitation and degradation. 

According to the villagers, their strong connection with the island that spans generations have given them 

a sense of responsibility to care and protect the island as one would treat a family member. 

Sense of Place among the Villagers 

At the most fundamental level, the villagers described their connection to the island across time and space 

- where and when they were born, lived, and worked in relation to the island. Their spatial and temporal 

relationship with Fuga Island served as the foundation upon which their experiences and knowledge were 

built. Being connected to the island means developing historical and geographical ties to the place. 

Being connected to the island also means experiencing the island. Whether they grew up with their farm 

or “fell in love” with its scenic beauty, their descriptions of their relationship to the place resonates with 

accounts of firsthand experiences – ancestral migration, childhood adventures, community events, wildlife 

encounters, and work routines. For many villagers, the island provided the perfect backdrop for social get- 

togethers. Altogether the villagers have had a variety of meaningful experiences throughout their lives, 

each contributing to their connection to Fuga Island. 

Being connected entails knowing the island. Born and raised in Fuga Island or having made the island a 

home, the villagers had acquired a certain familiarity with the island’s landscape and the community that 

strengthens their connection to the island. Every place in the island has its story and this story is passed 

on from generations. The stories which connect the lives of each family and which in turn connect each 

family to the island is a source of meaning-making for the community. 

The rhythm of life in the community revolves around such knowledge of the island which enabled them to 

adapt in the changing environment. They know the types of crops to cultivate. They know how to cope up 

with the typhoons that frequent the island throughout the year. They know how to protect the island from 

forest fires. They are familiar with the terrains of the island: coral reefs, hills, forests, cliffs, caves, springs, 

and beaches. They are aware of the various changes in the island’s landscape - wildlife, burial sites and 

caves, vegetation, ethnobotany and zoology. The villagers emphasized the value of direct experiential 

knowledge and knowledge passed down to family members. Many of them described how learning about 

the island, especially its ecological significance, has influenced what Fuga Island means to them. 

The island held a range of meanings to community members. The people’s various connections to 

the island are expressed symbolically. Fuga Island is referred to as “ina” or mother, “a special place,” 

“a sacred place,” “a gift,” “our life,” “our heritage,” “our home,” “our roots” and “where we can be 

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ourselves.” The people are aware and appreciative of the many benefits—tangible such as the land on 

which they can grow their crops and build their houses, as well as intangible benefits, such as spiritual 

connection, cultural and historical identity and psychological well-being. 5 Fuga Island is seen by its 

community members as endowed with abundant resources and biodiversity sustaining their families for 

generations. Overall, the meanings articulated by study participants reflected broad dimensions: the island 

as a gift, as a mother, as source of identity and the as nature. The four dimensions and their underlying 

categories and properties comprise the web of shared meanings local community members ascribed to the 

place. 

Villagers often describe the island as having healing effects. The men proudly speaks of gazing at island’s 

beauty as a way of restoring wearied bodies after working the whole day in the farm. Enjoying the cool 

breeze along the beach of Fuga had become a communal ritual providing rest and serenity after a day’s 

struggle. Villagers expressed a strong emotional bond or attachment to the island such as these statements 

that came out of my interviews: “This is my home and I will die here,” “My ancestors lived here for many 

generations and I cannot imagine abandoning this place. It is like abandoning one’s family, one’s root,” 

“Fuga has been so much part of our lives and my children’s lives. All my memories of my family and 

children are here.” 

People’s accounts of what Fuga Island means to them clearly illustrate that the social construction and 

expression of meanings are not static processes. Meanings evolved, as new experiences and knowledge 

were gained. Some villagers acknowledged that before they became aware of its uniqueness and 

ecological significance, they “need to suffer from the harsh rules and restrictions of outsiders.” A few 

villagers articulated a change of meaning. Local politics, management restrictions, and the ongoing 

development in the island had affected their relationship to the island. 

Healing in the Midst of Suffering: The Vocation of Traditional Healers 

Health is an important concern of the people of Fuga Islands which in turn explains the prominent 

role played by traditional healers in the community. The role of the healers is perceived as crucial in 

maintaining harmony in the community. Villagers regard their healers as the keepers of the community’s 

well-being. Much of the people’s beliefs of the sacred, of good and evil, of order and harmony, of the 

cause and meaning of an illness, of suffering and death, are derived from the articulation of their revered 

5 Ronel P. Dela Cruz, “People and Space as a Factor in Community-Based Development in Fuga Island,” SPUQC Journal. 

Vol. 1, no. 1 (2008): 1-30. 

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healers. Claiming a mandate from God through dreams and their great ancestors, the healers shape and 

influence the lifeworld of the community. Involving the community in their rituals, they facilitate the 

healing process through meaningful explanations of the causes of their illnesses thus influencing their 

behaviors and reinforcing cultural values of the community. 

There are fifteen traditional healers (herbolarios) in the island. Each village has its own herbolario where 

people go to when they are sick or suffering. The vocation of these herbolarios stems from their desire to 

help people which according to them, appear in their dreams. Becoming a herbolario is a vocation which 

is passed on from generation to the next. They tirelessly serve the community and would willingly respond 

at any time of the day that they are needed. They cannot resist people knocking during wee hours to attend 

to their sick relative. People often told them that with the poverty and exploitation they have, they are their 

constant refuge. 

The healers are committed to the well-being of the community as manifested in their rituals and practices 

which bring forth healing and wholeness both physically and socially. The sick are not restored to their 

physical health but his or her relationships with others including spirits present in nature. With their 

presence, communal values are reiterated; difficulties are shared and transcended, solidarity is fostered as 

the villagers are confronted with various forms of struggles. With the lack of basic social services in the 

island, these healers are the people’s resource and refuge in many aspects of their lives. With their help, 

the villagers create a common vision and draw strength to face the challenges of living in the island. The 

traditional healers regard faith as a source of inner strength to build a community that is just, caring, and 

trusting. They live out a spirituality that celebrates community, that is oriented to seeking and promoting 

well-being of all, and inspires hope in the midst of sufferings and powerlessness. 

Ethnomedicine: healing traditions 

The traditional healers believe that Fuga Island is home to many spirits. The place is inhabited by ancient 

spirits, both good and bad. Traditional healers regard bad spirits as ‘banbanig,’ spirits who can change into 

various forms to deceive and frighten the people. With the insidious presence of spirits in the island, the 

healers see the interaction between the spirit-world and the material-world. What distinguishes traditional 

healing from medical treatment is the strong emphasis on spiritual healing as an inseparable component 

of all healing; healing that has as its objective the relief of intra-familial, interpersonal and communal 

stressors at the same time and on an equal level of importance as the relief of the symptoms of physical 

illness. 

When members of the community bring their sick members, the healers assume that they encountered 

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spirit(s) (nakadalapus). The healer begins the diagnosis after reciting his/her oraciones (prayers said in 

Latin). There are familiar diagnostic methods employed by the healers. First is the talado, where the healer 

asks the members of the family to butcher a chicken and scrutinize its entrails. When the liver has wounds, 

the healer assumes that the patient encountered (nakadalapus) a bad spirit and then describes what kind 

of spirit, where the encounter was and what remediation is to be made. The other method is the tako, a 

diagnostic ritual using rice grain (sometimes they use ginger) to determine if the patient encountered a 

spirit. The healer gets nine grains and put them in a white plate with water. After the orasyon is performed, 

calling the help of the spirits, the healer interprets the formation of the grains. If the grains form a crooked 

pattern, the patient is assumed to have encountered a bad spirit. Other diagnostic method is santiguan, 

where the healers used candles and a plate with water. The candle is placed around the plate, Latin prayers 

are recited and then followed by the healers interpretation and explanation of the cause and meaning of the 

illness. 

Unlike scientific medicine, the healers’ way of treating an illness involves members of the family and 

the community. Families are required to pray together and to prepare the things to be used for the ritual. 

Offering advice and admonishment to families is part of the entire process of healing. Given the credibility 

of the healer in the community, s/he facilitates the healing processes through meaningful explanations of 

their illnesses as well as the ability to influence behavior and reinforce cultural values of the community. 

They provide culturally relevant explanations of immediate and ultimate causes of health problems in 

the island. Moreover, the healer draws on symbols to help the sick person understand the cause of his/her 

illness and how s/he can be restored to health. The healer persuades the sick person that the problem can 

be related to some part of the mythic world. In this community, the healer, the sick person and the family 

usually agree on these core meanings. 

After their diagnosis, the healers initiate the process of dialogue with the spirit-world. Communicating 

with the spirits, the healer performs the atang, a ritual compose of prayers, food and dialogue. Before 

the ritual, the healer requests a sumptuous meal. Food includes rice cakes, eggs, tobacco, and wine. The 

content of the dialogue details the encounter of the patient, reparation for trespassing the spirit’s territory 

and food to appease the angry spirit. Herbal medicines are prescribed after the ritual for the patient to fully 

recover from his spirit-encounter. 

The foundational element in traditional healing is cosmic religion - the spirit world. This system of 

meaning has structures and functions that reflect human psychological, social, and biological needs for self 

and others. Spirits reflect a personality model and a theory of the fundamental aspects of consciousness. 

These healers use spirit constructs to represent personal and social dynamics. Spirit beliefs produce 

psycho-physiological manipulations through their meanings and attachments, including the management 

542

of emotions, construction of relations between self and others, and the use of these systems to alter 

emotions. Healers mostly recommend herbal medicines that abound in the island. During the interview, 

the researcher identified almost twenty herbal medicines in the island being used by these healers. The 

author took plant samples for identification of its other biological uses and photochemical contents. 

Some healers prescribe taking a pilgrimage (suknal) to religious sites outside the island (Our Lady of 

Piat, Our Lady of Manaoag, Apo Baket in Sinait Church in Ilocos Norte) and procession (libot) around 

the island. This is done if the diagnosis requires the entire participation of the villagers. The social healing 

processes derived from group participation and the telling of stories of illness. Winkelman 6 describes 

pilgrimage as a form of personal and popular empowerment produced by a journey to a site with religious, 

historic, and mythological significance. The pilgrimage may begin as an individual quest, but it is 

typically part of a collective physical movement which brings the social dimension of the pilgrimage to 

the experience, where one recounts one’s story of illness and search for cure with fellow travelers. These 

connections provide significant personal meaning and emotional release from guilt, shame, and promises. 

These experiences induce healing through a realignment of self-concept, status, and identity with the 

other, both cultural and divine. 

Fuga Island is frequently visited by inhospitable weather and typhoons. If they are not able to win God’s 

favor and blessing (mapatangan), the healers summon a week-long procession from the east point 

(Kiking) to the west point (Mudoc village) of the island. Villagers start their procession in the month of 

February. They offer flowers, prayers and their produce during the procession. At the end of the ritual 

ceremony, they will place their offerings in a float and allow the waves to carry them away to the sea. 

Villagers practice this gift-giving and offering so that life will be easy and bountiful for them. During the 

procession, they will also make a halt to every farm (kaingin) and pray. The procession is usually led by 

the elders and the cantors in the island. In every sitio, the patron saint will be met by the villagers as they 

pray and sing. According to the elders, once they win God’s favor (mapatangan) rain will pour even in the 

middle of the procession. This religious practice in the island fosters communalism and bayanihan among 

the villagers. These practices are tied up with their relationship with the land. Invoking God’s blessing for 

a bountiful harvest is very much part of their annual religious practices. 

Do these healing practices and strategies really work? Do really cures happen? These questions were 

asked during the interview and group discussion. Efficacy is “the perceived capacity of a given practice 

to affect sickness in some desirable way.” 7 Fuga healers assert that they are credible in their practice 

6 Michael Winkelman. Culture and Health: Applying Medical Anthropology. (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2009). p. 337. 

7 Allan Young. “The Anthropology of Illness and Sickness,” Annual Review of Anthropology, (1982) 11: 257-85. 

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since the community continues to bring their sick to them. They were able to alleviate their pain and treat 

their illnesses. From the perspective of medical anthropology, healing is efficacious when biomedical 

changes take place; curing is efficacious when the villagers who seek it say it is. In the island, healing 

is effective if the sick person is socially restored to the community. This is one of the responsibilities of 

the healers of the island. Efficacy is always a cultural construct. 8 This means that the healing process is 

considered effective when the bonds between the individual sick person and the community, weakened by 

disease, are strengthened, social values are affirmed, and the notion of social order no longer threatened 

by illnesses and death. Healing is effective when the individual experience of sickness has been made 

meaningful, personal suffering shared, and the individual leaves the marginal situation of sickness 

and is reincorporated back into the social body. In other words, healing boils downs to meaning and 

the transformation of experience. The change or transformation is created by all who are involved and 

effectively enact culturally authorized interpretations. When bad spirits (aplaw) are exorcized, the patient 

believes the cause of the problem is gone. This conviction is affirmed by the healer and encouraged by the 

social circle. The life problems may or may not still be present but their perception is no longer the same. 

Traditional healing and people’s health care 

Primarily, people go to a traditional healer seeking healing for their illnesses which is understood as both 

having physical and spiritual dimensions. In medical anthropology, effective health care and wellness 

requires an understanding of the patient’s perspectives: their views of his/her illness; and how the patient 

and family view the origin, significance, and implication of the condition for their life. The healer’s 

interaction with all the members of the sick family is important as s/he attempts to elicit explanatory 

models that connect or explain their system of meaning within which their maladies and treatments are 

understood. These members were recognized as healers because of their commitment to the well-being 

of the community as manifested in their practices like free healing services, family counseling during 

sickness, advocates the community to respect the island, keeper of their cultural traditions, and consultant 

in matters related to the life of the island. 

In general, the people in the island believe that it is God who heals them and their community. Every time 

the healer performs his ritual to cure a sick member of the village, the family members and their neighbors 

are requested to join the ritual. This is a form of social healing for the community every time they perform 

the healing ritual. Winkelmann affirms the healing effects of communal ritual: “Ritual practices heal by 

8 Arthur Kleinman. “Towards a Comparative Study of Medical Systems: An Integrated Approach to the Study of the 

Relationship of Medicine and Culture,” Science, Medicine and Man, (1973) 1:55-56. 

544

meeting fundamental human needs for belonging, comfort, and bonding with others. Rituals integrate 

and bond people, enhancing social support systems, group identity, and self-development. Community 

bonding elicits biologically based attachment processes, facilitating adaptive change and healing for 

individuals and groups.” 9 

The traditional healers are perceived as community members with an expanded kind of identity. They are 

publicly seen as persons called to serve the community; serving a larger social reality than their personal 

life. Their vocation is a call that one attributes to a superior source. It is always a call from a social reality 

that is deemed greater than the mere individual self. The call is to participate in social movements working 

to reconstruct society in a way that better serves its members. 

Personal and Communal Transformation 

Called to heal the community requires transformation in both the life of the healer and the community. 

The healer is a man and woman of faith whom the community emulates. Common among their vocation 

stories is the element of faith which strengthens them in their healing ministry. They recognize God 

as the healer of the community and believe that they are the instruments in their roles as healer, father, 

mother, public servant, and elder. With this multi-pronged role, faith is shared with the community while 

recognizing the need to cultivate it as they mature in their healing vocation. It is their faith that strengthens 

them as they wrestle with spirits in order to restore their patients back to health. As the healers mature in 

their calling, they gained confidence in their faith and works. They acquired and developed tibay ng loob 

(inner strength) and tiwala sa sarili (self-confidence) as they practice their calling. 

The healers of Fuga perceive their work as a form of solidarity, a way of partaking in the social burden 

of the community. Here, the healers recognize their bigger role outside their families and are challenged 

to be a model to the community by promoting good relationships. Difficulties in the community are 

overcome because of the expression of solidarity or the bayanihan spirit encouraged by the healers when 

s/he performs healing ritual. A significant component of the healing ritual is the exhortation of the healer 

to gather all the members of the family and discuss the prognosis of their sick member. This is also the 

time to be together as a community sharing their struggles, problems, community needs, aspirations for 

the future and the like. The ritual brings community healing both physically and spiritually. Sickness, 

illness and disease in the island are moments to reflect as a community, hence, communal relationship is 

also restored. 

9 Michael Winkelman, Culture and Health: Applying Medical Anthropology, p. 342. 

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Majority of the villagers demonstrate a strong trust in the healers of the island. With their presence, 

communal values of bayanihan and damayan are strengthened and affirmed. They serve as a “uniting 

force” in the village particularly in times of hardships and distress, a situation that has become a normal 

way of living in the island. Sometimes communal quarrels are pacified through their intervention. In 

times of difficulties, they admonish the people to help one another by sharing what they have order to 

survive. The villagers learn the value of solidarity because of their healers who are always with them, 

accompanying them in the struggles and difficulties. 

The Traditional Healers and the Well-Being of the Community in the Midst of Displacement 

The traditional healers play a critical role in the transformation of their communities. Gifted with special 

skills and talents to heal, these healers are regarded by the community as wisdom keepers, interpreters 

of traditions, performers of communal rituals for healing and memories, looked by the community as 

guardians and respected elders who provide vision for the community members. While the community is 

deprived of basic social services, the presence of traditional healers, including their indigenous knowledge 

systems, can improve the quality of life for all the villagers through the development of indigenous 

healing and traditional medicines. 

In the midst of the ongoing relocation crisis, these healers exhibit their commitment to the well being of 

the community in myriad ways. Violence and conflicts constantly arise in the community because of the 

situation of insecurity and worsening poverty. Respected for the wisdom and concern for the community, 

the traditional healers are the ones to whom the community go to in order to mediate and to settle disputes. 

Communal issues that threaten the villages like illegal cutting of trees, dynamite fishing, use of cyanide, 

illegal pebble poaching, desecration of burial sites and decimation of exotic flora and fauna of the island 

are raised by these healers to the local barangay for communal action. For instance, the villagers sought 

the counsel of one healer Agapito Balbag about the ongoing pebble poaching in the island. After a couple 

of dialogue with him, the villagers made a collective stand to protect their coast from poachers and 

outlined some course of action including reporting to higher authorities. Elder Agapito reiterates that the 

island is a gift to them, a source of their daily existence. “We are the island. If they will take away from 

us, then we all die”, he said. Some traditional healers proposed a local ordinance to protect the old church 

ruins and penalize those who illegally cut trees. 

The wisdom of these healers influences the worldview of the villagers in terms of their sense of place and 

commitment to protect the island. Elder Claro dela Cruz aptly puts it: 

“We are blessed with plants/herbs that we can use for various illnesses and ailments. The entire 

546

island is our medicine while it is also a source of sickness. When people get sick, I always remind 

them to treat the island with respect and care. People look at our healing activities as a form of 

solidarity (damayan). We help ourselves in times of difficulties here in the island.” 

The role of the traditional healers as keepers and interpreters of their island traditions can be best seen 

in the practice of Komedya de Isla Fuga, a drama tradition originally based on the Christianization of 

the Muslims but is now reinterpreted by the healers as a way of training young people to be responsible 

members of the community through inculcating the values of discipline, prayer and devotion. This drama 

tradition, according to the healers, asserts their identity and history since they have been performing this 

during for several decades. It becomes a part of their life; celebrating life in the midst of unfreedom and 

fear and rely on the generosity of God for a healthy and bountiful harvest free from typhoons, pestilence 

and calamities. 

The life and stories of these healers attest that wellbeing is lived in the island amidst internal and external 

economic threats. As wisdom keepers, they are in touch with the lifeworld of the people: their troubles 

and ailments, their conflicts and struggles, their hopes and dreams. They live out their vocation in the 

context of samahan that practical experiences of illness, chaos in social relations and personal problems 

are interpreted and given new meaning. Furthermore, they involve the community in their rituals thereby 

facilitating the healing process through meaningful explanations of the sickness, influencing their 

behavior, and reinforcing cultural values of the community. 

The community recognized these healers beyond their role as healers of their illnesses. Their vocation 

to heal extends to their commitment to uplift the lives of the people of Fuga Island, accompanying them 

in their struggles and in celebrating their hopes and joys. The healing rituals and practices bring forth 

restored relationships and wellness in the community. With the relocation crisis, these healers are the 

people’s refuge and leaders who are committed to their well-being. With their help, the villagers create a 

common vision and draw strength to face the challenges of living in the island. 

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Treatment of Hwabyung in Traditional Medicine with Four 

Elements of Non-Violent Communication 

Young-Wan Kim 

Korea Institute of Oriental Medicine 


The development of information society in the 21st century and complex living environments have 

increased the level of stress among contemporaries and given rise to various diseases. Hwabyung (“anger 

illness”) is one of the more notable diseases that have surfaced amidst various interpersonal relationships 

in modern society. 

We go on living our lives forging various interpersonal relationships with others in various environments. 

The type of relationships we form with others as a member of society becomes one of the deciding 

factors of our quality of life. These relationships have a mutual impact on people both on a conscious and 

subconscious level, and a social consensus is formed when ideas are exchanged through dialogue. 

Non-violent communication (“NVC”), also called compassionate communication, or the language of life, 

was developed by Marshall B. Rosenberg. NVC helps see the world in terms of accepting existence in 

itself, mutual respect and contribution, co-prosperity and integration, cooperation, and peace. 

Based on observations, feelings, needs, and requests, NVC seeks to discover strategies that allow 

everyone’s needs to be met through mutual respect and bonds. The aim of NVC is to maintain one’s 

determination while still being empathetic, and to listen to the ideas of others while continuing the 

conversation. 

When expressing one’s feelings in a conversation, specific language communicates the emotional state 

more clearly and accurately than when using vague or abstract language. The “stage where one’s feelings 

about an action are verbally expressed” has been written into a “Feeling List” comprising of feelings that 

548

are felt when one’s needs are met and unmet. 

When people’s needs are met, they feel a sense of satisfaction in the easiness of their lives. On the other 

hand, when a desired need is not met, their minds are filled with self-anxiety and agony, and unmet needs 

accumulate over time to become stress. 

Thus, exchanging ideas through conversations will reduce emotional conflict and needs while enhancing 

the sense of satisfaction. In modern society, however, the lack of communication relatively decreases 

opportunities to meet needs and causes an increase in mental stress. 

The concept of stress was first used in the 1850’s as a means to explain the repressive pressure and tension 

occurring in the mental domain, not just in bodily organs, and it has been studied through a scientific 

approach of orthodox medicine in modern times. 

Stress is caused not only by physical stimuli such as noise, the cold, and unfamiliar environments, but 

also by feelings and thoughts such as love, hatred, rage, and joy. Stimuli that cause stress in people can 

be categorized as either external or internal. External stimuli are events that take place in the surrounding 

environment and can include various problems that arise in interpersonal relationships, parting, death, and 

physical exhaustion. Internal stimuli are all the needs of the internal body such as sexual needs, need for 

dependency, and aggressive instincts. 

Thus, stress occurs when a person’s ability to cope with external or internal stimuli is weakened or 

lacking. If these circumstances persist and stress accumulates over time, stress becomes chronic and 

causes mental instability and conflict, eventually leading to hwabyung (“anger illness”). 

In oriental medicine, hwabyung is deemed to be caused by changes in the “seven emotions,” where 

extreme stimuli impact changes in the physiology and causes stress. 

2. Four elements of non-violent communication applied in healing hwabyung in traditional 

medicine 

hwabyung occurs in the heart, or the mind, and is related to emotions such as rage. It is a symptom that 

occurs while such feelings are left undealt with (and needs are left unmet) and is expressed in the form of 

anger. 

Hwabyung has long been referred to as ulhwabyung (“depression anger illness”) in Korea and defined 

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and encouragement gained from talking to the therapist and forming a bond. Thus, he is able to overcome 

his delusions of unmet psychological needs and better adapt to society. The reduction of mental pressures 

cures hwabyung and the patient becomes healthier both mentally and physically. 

The stories of Siksungsahu and Nokjin are two representative cases of curing hwabyung through 

talking. Supportive psychotherapy was used so that the patient can face his problems and overcome it by 

supporting his weakened self. This method of treatment recovers and strengthens the patient’s damaged 

defense mechanism, and is centered around rapport between the patient and the therapist, enabling patients 

faced with problems derived from everyday life to overcome them and move on. 

Thus, the techniques mentioned in Table 1 can be used to reassure, persuade, or give suggestions to the 

patient, and create an environment of encouragement, advice, and explanation. The patient’s tension and 

anxiety are reduced by the therapist’s warm, empathetic attitude. 

Conversations for Treatment in Supportive Psychotherapy 

Reassurance Therapist maintains authority and remains neutral to reassure the patient 

Ventilation 

Abreaction 

Support 

Persuasion 

Suggestion 

Help the patient discuss various things he cannot share with others 

Verbalization of problems reduces tension and dissatisfaction 

Reducing accumulated stress or tension by expressing suppressed thoughts and 

emotions without realization 

Reducing anxiety and conflict and thereby enhancing social adaptability of the patient 

by listening with an open attitude 

Strengthening the patient’s weakened self by appealing to a sense of reason, 

determination, and moral ethics using authority as therapist 

Strengthen sense of self and help self-critique through recommendation and 

explaining, using mutual trust instead of force 

Suggesting reduction of symptoms and improvements in condition as a means of 

treatment 

From the above table, we can see that the treatments used in “Donguibogam” and “Samguk Saki” are 

utilizing the same psychotherapy techniques used in modern oriental medicine. At the same time, the 

conversational treatments to cure hwabyung make use of the four elements of NVC. 

Non-violent communication is a method of sincere communication using peaceful language used in 

everyday life that enables people to maintain character even in difficult situations. Thus, it is likely that 

NVC was naturally a part of the traditional treatment methods of hwabyung. 

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- Observation of situation in its true context 

- Expression of feelings upon observation 

- Verbalization of how these feelings are related to internal needs 

- Expressing through request what is wanted from others 

These four elements of NVC allow clear communication of one’s ideas to exchange information required 

in a conversation. In the traditional treatment of hwabyung, this information allows observation of the 

patient’s condition and its treatment by learning the patient’s specific needs and possible solutions through 

conversation. Each of the four elements of NVC are applied flexibly depending on the circumstances of 

the individual and society. 

Feeling List 

Feelings when needs are met Feelings when needs are not met 

impressed, touched, moved, thrilled, overwhelmed, 

ecstatic, exuberant 

grateful, thankful 

amused, pleased, delighted, jubilant, happy, glad, 

blissful 

554 

worried, distant, dismal, fearful, concerned, distracted, 

withdrawn 

afraid, terrified, petrified, appalled, frightened, scared, 

petrified, timid 

warm, tender, loving, comfortable, sheltered, loving, uneasy, nervous, tense, jittery, restless, anxious, distressed 

sentimental, cordial, friendly 

uncomfortable, disturbed, abashed, perplexed, flustered, 

enlivened, rejuvenated, satisfied, refreshed, appeased, self-conscious, displeased, distressed, unpleasant, 

rested, renewed, reassured, revived, carefree 

frustrated, troubled, unsettled, awkward, unnerved 

sad, mournful, longing, yearning, sorrowful, wistful, 

rested, soothed, composed, intimate, friendly, relaxed, 

relieved, equanimous, light 

pining, moody, miserable, appalled, regretful, dismal, 

pitiful, doleful 

hurt, disheartened, remorseful, coldhearted, discouraged, 

indifferent, disappointed 

lonely, solitary, empty, alienated, dejected, desolate, 

comfortable, calm, quiet, mellow, tranquil, still, serene dreary, weak 

interested, intrigued, fascinated, entranced 

energetic, thrilled, elated, valiant, invigorated, vivacious, 

sanguine, lively, ardent, confident, encouraged, 

depressed, helpless, listless, gloomy, melancholy 

tired, burnt out, exhausted, weary, lethargic, 

annoyed, tedious, devastated, frustrated, beat, dull, 

agitated, worn out, bored 

disgusted, repulsed, horrified, contempt 

confused, dazed, embarrassed, bewildered, mortified, 

baffled, ashamed 

excited, aroused, expectant, giddy, optimistic, eager angry, furious, upset, aggravated, enraged, incensed, 

indignant, resentful, livid

As in the case of “Donguibogam” and “Samguk Saki,” descriptions of occurrence of hwabyung from the 

seven energies caused by accumulated unmet needs use similar language to that used in the Feeling List. 

Similarly, language used to treat hwabyung is similar to the feelings used to describe when needs are met. 

Moreover, the objectivity and neutral attitude required of therapists when treating patients with hwabyung 

is similar to the precautions of using the four elements of NVC – “distinguish observation from evaluation 

to see things as they are,” “distinguish feeling from thought to see as one actually feels,” “distinguish 

needs from means and methods to see the actual cause of the feeling,” and “distinguish request from 

coercion to see concretely and positively.” 

Need List 

Autonomy 

freedom to choose one’s dreams, goals, and values, 

freedom to choose plans and methods to fulfill one’s dreams, goals, and 

values 

Celebration celebration for birth of life or realization of dream 

Mourning mourning for loss of a loved one or a dream 

Interdependence 

Integrity 

Play laughter, fun 

gratitude, empathy, community, consideration, love, 

contribution to enrich life, acceptance, trust, 

security, warmth, understanding, mental stability, 

honesty, respect, support, intimacy, communication 

sincerity, respect for individualism, creativity, significance, reward, selfconfidence, 

self-respect 

Spiritual Communion beauty, inspiration, harmony, order, peace 

Physical Nurturance 

air, water, food, free movement, exercise, 

protection from life threats, rest, sexual expression, 

habitation, physical contact (affection) 

The therapist’s job is to help the patient cure hwabyung, or in other words, fulfill basic human needs as 

described in Table 3. 

The treatment of hwabyung through conversation in orthodox medicine begins from the understanding of 

various problems in the patient’s life through communication and bond between humans. This requires 

a completely objective observation of the patient. Treatment of hwabyung rooted deep inside the mind 

through mutual communication means to reduce various psychological factors arising from stress in 

modern society. 

The Giungoroen treatment, used as a form of supportive psychotherapy in orthodox medicine, treats 

hwabyung by conversation based on true communication focused on the patient’s condition, mental state, 

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and current emotional disturbance. 

Here, conversation is used as a means to reduce the mental factors that cause hwabyung and to adjust the 

mental state and emotional activity of the patient. 

Conversational treatment as used in orthodox medicine utilizes each of the four elements of non-violent 

communication to reduce unmet needs that ultimately cause hwabyung. 

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Proceedings 

Session 5 


Organizers’ Session 

• Parallel 3-1. UNESCO: Narratives of Change 

• Parallel 3-2. MEST/NRF: Healing Humanities in Korea 

• Parallel 3-3. Busan City: 20C Busan, its Scars and Healing



Proceedings 


UNESCO: Narratives of Change 

1. Narratives as Healing: Perspectives from Environmental History 

/ Gregory Quenet (University of Versailles-Quentin-en-Yvelines) 

2. Tiger-Human Conflict in the Sundarbans: A Historicized Account 

/ Ranjan Chakrabarti (Vidyasagar University)

Narratives as Healing: Perspectives from 

Environmental History 

Gregory Quenet 

University of Versailles-Quentin-en-Yvelines 

Narratives have the power of engagement and transformation. Bringing together people in a common 

pattern, narratives can coalesce them around shared values and representations, interpretations of the 

past and projections toward the future. Past natural disasters proved that a group struck by a catastrophe 

and unable to produce narratives will have great difficulties to recover. A narrative is a powerful tool to 

describe human acts within a network of relationships, processes and systems. The configuration of events 

into a plot is as meaningful as the mathematical models and algorithms built by the natural sciences. This 

literary form also provides us with intensive education opportunities about the meaning of change by 

taking us into the heart of the human value system. 

However, this reflexive approach needs a careful methodology. By writing stories about change, we 

divide the causal relationship of an ecosystem with a rhetorical razor (William Cronon) that defines what 

is included and excluded, relevant and irrelevant, empowered and disempowered. In the act of separating 

a story from non-story events, we wield the most powerful, yet dangerous, tool of a narrative. A narrative 

succeeds to the extent that it hides discontinuities, ellipses, and contradictory experiences that would 

undermine the intended meaning of its story. Whatever its overt purpose, it cannot avoid a covert exercise 

of power. It inevitably sanctions some voices while silencing others. 

Without a plot to organize the flow of events, everything happening on the planet will be much harder – 

even impossible to understand. Two main plots are possible in relation to environmental change. On the 

one hand, we can narrate history as a story of improvement that is somehow more positive. On the other 

hand, we can tell stories in which the plot eventually falls toward an ending that is more negative. These 

plots are cultural constructions, so deeply embedded in our language that they resonate far beyond local 

places. Placed in a particular historical or ideological context, neither group of plots is innocent: both have 

hidden agendas that influence what the narrative includes and excludes. So powerful are these agendas 

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that not even the scholar as author entirely controls them. 

What distinguishes stories from other forms of discourse is that they describe an action that begins, 

continues over a well-defined period of time, and finally draws to a definite close, with consequences 

that become meaningful because of their placement within the narrative. Completed action gives a story 

its unity and allows us to evaluate and judge an act by its results. The moral of a story is defined by its 

ending. As Aristotle remarked, “the end is everywhere the chief thing.” Narrative is a peculiarly human 

way of organizing reality, and this has important implications for the way we approach the reality of 

climate change. 

Some non-human events can be said to have properties that conform to the Aristotelian beginning- 

middle-end requirement of storytelling, as when an individual organism (or a species or a mountain or 

even the universe itself) is born, persists and dies. One can tell stories about such things – geologists 

and evolutionary biologist often do – but they lack the compelling drama that comes from having a 

judgeable protagonist. Things in nature usually just happen, without raising questions of moral choice. 

Many natural events lack even this much linear structure. Some are cyclical: the motions of the planets, 

the seasons, or the rhythms of biological fertility and reproduction. Others are random: climate shifts, 

earthquakes, genetic mutations, and other events, the causes of which remain hidden from us. One does 

not automatically describe such things with narrative plots, and yet environmental histories, which purport 

to set the human past in its natural context, all have plots. Nature and the universe do not tell stories; only 

we do. Nature is unlike most other cultural subjects in lacking a clear voice of its own. 

Future narratives face another important constraint in that scholars do not tell stories by themselves. They 

write story as members of communities, and they purposely or unconsciously take those communities into 

account as they work. People tell stories with each other and against each other in order to speak to each 

other. Stories are made by intercommunications between tellers and readers. 

562

Tiger-Human Conflict in the Sundarbans: 

A Historicized Account 

Ranjan Chakrabarti 

Vidyasagar University 

The aim of the present research article is simple. It gives a rounded historicized account of the human- 

tiger conflict in the Sundarbans, the mangrove tiger land in the Bengal delta. In the Sundarbans, the tiger 

had always been at the centre of economic, social, cultural and religious life of the people. This was the 

case in the past and it still is. The people of the Sundarbans had been considering the tiger as a vermin 

since times immemorial. Here the local jungle deities like Dakshin Roy, the tiger god, and Banbibi are 

worshipped by both the Hindus and Muslims. 1 

I. Human-wildlife conflict 

The structure of human-wildlife conflict has undergone a qualitative change in the post- Second World 

War era. Modern conservationist ideas have done away with (at least theoretically) subsistence and 

defence hunting or hunting as sport in South Asia. Indiscriminate slaughter or lethal control of animals 

does not take place in modern times. 2 What bothers us in recent times is not so much the direct killing or 

lethal control of animals by the humans but the continuous expansion of human settlements, industry and 

agriculture with the support of modern sophisticated technology. This is continuously eating up the habitat 

1 The local people of the Sundarbans always give the tiger a very reverential treatment, they never utter the word ‘bagh’ 

(the Bengali word for tiger) instead they call the tiger Baramiya (senior headman) and the crocodile chhotamiyan (junior 

headman); see Sutapa Chatterjee Sarkar, The Sundarbans: Folk Deities, Monsters and Mortals, New Delhi, 2010, passim; 

also Annu Jalais, Forest of Tigers: People, Politics and Environment in the Sundarbans, Delhi, 2009, passim. 

2 The animal right activists and the animal liberation movements have played a significant role in this context. Peter Singer, 

a leading spokesman for animal rights, bears the dubious honour of having made popular the term ‘speciesism’ as an epithet 

to describe those most of us, he says – who believe the differences are in kind, not just degree. The evocation of and 

comparison to racism is explicit, see Peter Singer, Animal Liberation : A New Ethics For Our Treatment of Animals, New 

York, 1975, passim. In the opening sentence of the volume Singer writes: “This book is about the tyranny of the human 

over non-human animals”, p. ix. 

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of wild animals causing food shortage or threatening their lives in various ways. Elephant-train collision, 

bird-aircraft collision, deer-automobile collisions symbolize this fundamental human-wildlife clash. Large 

carnivores require larger habitats for their survival and with the shrinkage of the corridor their roads are 

now crossing with the humans more frequently. 3 It is against this backdrop that the history of the problem 

of human-tiger conflict in the Sundarbans has to be understood. We shall see that apart from the shrinkage 

of the corridor there are certain unique bio-geographic factors behind the human-tiger conflict in the 

Sundarbans. 

II. A Brief History of the Sundarbans 

The Sundarbans has a unique history, nature and landscape 4 . It is half water and half land. It is a terrain 

where land making has not yet come to an end. It is a place that had been alternately inhabited and 

deserted. It is perhaps the only place on earth that is threatened by cyclones, tidal waves, lack of fresh 

water, an unfriendly terrain, tigers, crocodiles and poisonous snakes. It is a unique tigerland where tigers 

are usually described as confirmed man-eaters. 

The Sundarbans is the largest mangrove forest and the only mangrove tiger land in the world where the 

tiger occupies the pinnacle of both aquatic and terrestrial food web. The area lies south-east of the city 

of Kolkata (Calcutta) 5 in the 24 Parganas District of West Bengal and forms part of the Gangetic Delta 

which borders the Bay of Bengal. Shared between two neighbouring countries, Bangladesh and India, 

the larger part (62% of the total mangrove ecosystem) is situated in the southwest corner of Bangladesh. 

The western boundary of the Bangladesh Sundarbans follows the Harinbhanga – Raimangal – Kalindi 

river system and joins with the Indian Sundarbans. 6 The total land area is 4,143 square kilometer and the 

remaining water area is 1,874 square kilometer. 

The Indian Sundarbans is one of the tiger reserves under the Project Tiger launched in 1973 to save tiger 

3 See M.R.Conover, Resolving Human-Wildlife Conflicts: The Science of Wildlife Damage Management, New York, 2002, 

passim. 

4 The nearest equivalent of the Sundarbans, in more ways than one, is the Everglades National Park in Florida (USA), see 

Michael Grunwald, The Swamp : The Everglades, Florida and the Politics of Paradise, New York, 2007. 

5 The Indian city of Calcutta gave up its British colonial name with effect from January 2001 and came to be known by its 

original name Kolkata, see The Telegraph, 2 January, Kolkata, 2001, also http://www.highbeam.com/doc/IGI-68590471. 

html 

6 India was partitioned in 1947 which resulted in the creation of two independent nation states India and Pakistan. The 

colonial province of Bengal was divided into East Pakistan and the Indian province of West Bengal. East Pakistan broke 

away from Pakistan in 1971 and became another independent nation – Bangladesh, see Willem van Schendel, The Bengal 

Borderland: Beyond State and Nation in South Asia, London, 2005. 

564

from extinction. 7 In terms of biodiversity, the Sundarbans contrasts the other large mangrove forests for 

its extraordinary diverse wildlife and designated as UNESCO’s world network of International Biosphere 

Reserves since 2001. The biosphere reserve programme in the Sundarbans originally started in the early 

1970s and it was set up with the basic objective of conserving and developing a new knowledge base 

about the biodiversity of a region to emphasize that humans are an integral part of the ecosystem and 

that local communities should be actually integrated with and brought into the orbit of the conservation 

programme. This is all the more necessary in view of the fact that some three million people live in this 

biosphere reserve. They depend directly on forest and forest-based resources since agriculture is not 

productive enough due to saline water. The core area of the Sundarban National Park has been designated 

as a World Heritage site. Besides production functions of the forest, it provides natural protection to life 

and properties of the coastal population in cyclone prone Bangladesh and southern West Bengal. 8 This 

unique natural zone has a unique history. 

III. Tiger and the Raj 

It is not difficult to reconstruct a rough sketch of the general history of the Sundarbans during the pre- 

colonial period but the detailed history of the tiger-human conflict in that region is available only after the 

advent of British colonial rule. This limitation is applicable to the history of the tiger-human conflict in the 

entire South Asian sub-continent. 

While encountering the orient, the Europeans developed certain stereotypes in their own perceptions of 

the Indian sub-continent which had an enduring legacy. The image of the tiger is one such stereotype. 

The essential elements of the tiger’s image are cruelty, furtiveness and treacherous elegance. The British 

response to the tiger is an amazing compound of fear, hatred and admiration. The British saw the tiger as 

a magnificent animal who establishes its overlord ship of the Indian jungle. The craze for tiger-skin and 

7 Mahesh Rangarajan, India’s Wildlife History, Delhi, 1998, pp. 95-107. The Project Tiger initially started as a task force set 

up within the Indian Board of Wildlife chaired by Dr Karan Singh, minister for health and family planning. It was precisely 

at this time that global voluntary groups made their way into the Indian environmental scene. Most important among 

them was the World Wildlife Fund or WWF. 

8 Rathindranath De, Sundarbans, Delhi, 1990, pp. 1-4. Recent experience of cyclones and storms shows how important 

such natural protections are in neutralizing the impact of storms or cyclones. Haiti was hit by deadly tropical storms in 

May and September 2004. Nearly 5,000 Haitians lost their lives and homes during these severe storms. The cleaning of 

trees in the Haitian highlands had aggravated the tragedy that shook Haiti. Destitute and lacking alternative sources of 

fuel, Haiti’s poor have cut down most of their trees for fuelwood and charcoal. In doing so they have lost a valuable service 

provided by forested watersheds-the moderation of local flood runoff and the prevention of massive mudslides. Interestingly 

the same storms that devastated Haiti had less impact on neighboring Puerto Rico, where highland watersheds are 

mostly forested. For further details see Sandra Postel, Safeguarding Freshwater Ecosystems, in State of the World 2006 : 

A Worldwatch Institute Report on Progress Toward a Sustainable Society, New York and London, 2006, pp. 41-60. 

565 

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skins of other big cats spread far beyond India. The art of taxidermy 9 developed to amazing proportions. 

The lifelike taxidermised tiger heads in the drawing room wall of the sahib was made to look alive, scary 

and fearful. The practice of displaying shikar-souvenir as drawing room show-piece came to be intimately 

associated with the culture of the ruling race or class and with the memories of the Raj. The cost of a 

medium size shikar expedition in the nineteenth century would be around Rs.500. 10 The amount included 

the cost of sending the railway parcel of the skin to Vaningen and Vaningen of Mysore for finally dressing 

up the tiger for the sahib’s drawing room. 11 

As British power in India expanded the information as to the deaths caused by tiger began to pour in. 

By the second half of the nineteenth century it was estimated that 1600 people were killed by tiger each 

year. 12 Again, it was estimated that each tiger was capable of killing cattle worth between 300 pounds 

and 600 pounds in a single year. 13 This was precisely why the tiger was defined as a vermin. This status, 

shared with the other big cats, was emphasized by the fact that they were such successful and prolific 

animals, inhabiting a great variety of habitats, from the far south to the mountains of the north. It became 

imperative from the point of view of the British colonial rulers to order the ‘bad tiger’ in particular. This 

resolution to order the tiger was actually an integral part of a much broader strategy of power which 

sprang from the spirit of European enlightenment and the urge of the colonial rulers to superimpose new 

cultural patters and sensibilities on the dominated society. The tiger, therefore, had to be done away with 

to ensure the security of individual life and property which was one of the most publicized aspects of the 

ideologies of Raj. 14 

9 Taxidermy is the technology associated with processing of animal skin. It is the art of preparing, stuffing and mounting 

animal skin used to decorate the homes of the richer classes. Contemporary newspapers and handbooks on shikar featured 

regular advertisements by the taxidermists. Cuthbertson and Harper were well known taxidermists of Calcutta. They ran 

their regular office at 10, Government Place, Calcutta. 

10 Y. D. Gundevia, In the Districts of the Raj, Bombay, 1992, pp. 205-6. 

11 Ibid., p. 206. 

12 J.M.Mackenzie, The Empire of Nature, Manchester, 1988, pp. 168-98. 

13 Ibid., p. p. 180. 

180. 

14 Any number of documents can be cited to substantiate the statement. In the colonial accounts we fi find nd the image of the 

‘man-eater’ or the ‘bad tiger’. The contemporary literature on hunting, authored mostly by white shikaris, the forest department 

proceedings, the government gazette notifications - all seemed to be somewhat obsessed with the image of the 

man-eating tiger and the probable causes of the change over from animal to human flesh. The tiger, if it was a man-eater, 

had to be ordered, the wild orient had to be disciplined and brought under reason. This is the voice of enlightenment and 

this voice comes in very clearly in Kipling’s Jungle Book: “The law of the jungle, which never orders anything without 

a reason, forbids every beast to eat man except when he is killing to show his children how to kill, and then he must hunt 

outside the hunting grounds of his pack or tribe, the real reason for this is that man killing means, sooner or later; the arrival 

of white men on elephants, with guns […]. The reason the beasts give among themselves is that Man is the weakest 

and most defenseless of all living things, and it is unsportsmanlike to touch him.” 

It deserves mention here that Shere Khan, the villainous character in the Jungle Book, was lame or physically crippled 

and inclined to man-eating. Thus the tiger shot would have to be preferable a ‘man-eater’. The tiger, whose behav- 

566

IV. The Royal Bengal Tiger of the Sundarbans 

Hundreds of Europeans on board the Calcutta bound vessels cruising through the waters of Hooghly, 

keeping the Sagar Island on their right, hardly noticed the Sundarbans, they were mere passengers 

who looked yet did not observe. Those who attempted to describe the landscape did so carelessly, and 

rather indifferently as the site appeared to be discouraging and grim. The passengers, who arrived in the 

eighteenth century unenthusiastically, recorded the mud-banks, flooded low lying jungles, sandbanks 

and the reddish brown waters of the surroundings through which they passed. By the beginning of the 

nineteenth century however colonial knowledge about the Indian landscape had advanced and generated 

a new curiosity among the Britons. There are two major threads that run through the texts relating to the 

Sundarban landscape penned by these voyagers 1) it was viewed as a dangerous terrain, a place of deadly 

fever, of ferocious tigers and crocodiles, 2) the region became identified with the ‘barbaric’ practice of 

infanticide practiced by the Hindu devotees in the Sagar Island. 15 

The earliest concrete reference to the notoriety of the tigers of the Sundarbans is to be located in the 

writing of Francois Bernier who visited the Sundarbans in 1665. Here is a passage about the beast from 

the Travels in the Mogul Empire: 

‘Among these islands, it is in many places dangerous to land and great care must be had that the boat, 

which during the night is fastened to a tree, be kept at some distance from the shore, for it constantly 

happens that some person or another falls prey to tigers. These ferocious animals are very apt, it is said, to 

enter in to the boat itself while people are asleep, and to carry away some victim who, if we are to believe 

the boatmen of the country, generally happen to be the stoutest and fattest of the party’. 16 Colonial records 

are packed with tales of European deaths when people were seized by tiger on journeys, on picnics, 

or out hunting, as many graves in European cemeteries would testify. The most famous such incident 

iour does not conform to reason or to the supposed ‘Law of Jungle’ may well be the target of the shikari; Cf. Rudyard 

Kipling,Jungle Book,Mahwah (New Jersey),1985, pp. 4-5. If ‘man-eaters’ could not be found, they could be manufactured. 

Even normal tigers, if killed by the shikari by mistake, could be constructed as ‘man-eaters’! If shikar-texts are 

minutely examined, we find that many of the shikar expeditions against the ‘man-eaters’ clearly conform to a recognizable 

paradigm-the white shikari responding to the call of the helpless villagers and taking charge of the ‘bad tiger’. Percy 

Wyndham, who was the Collector of Mirzapur, the district with the reputation of being a first-rate shikar district, and 

later the Commissioner of the Kumaon Division, was more popularly known in the district as Bagmaroo sahib. He was 

ever ready with his rifle when the villagers complained to him about a tiger harassing them or playing havoc with their 

cattle in the village, Cf. Y. D. Gundevia, In the Districts of the Raj, Bombay, 1992, p. 167. 

15 Some of the earliest observers like Buchanan Hamilton who had traveled and botanized on the eastern shores of the Bay 

of Bengal, however, found the area full of luxuriant vegetation, Cf. David Arnold, op.cit., p. 84. 

16 Francois Bernier, Travels in the Mogul Empire, London, 1914, p. 24. 

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was the death of Sir Hector Munro’s son in the Sundarbans in 1792. 17 Munro’s seizure by a tiger was 

a commemorated in Staffordshire ornaments and may well be the origin of the remarkable mechanical 

toy Tipu’s tiger, taken at the capture of Seringapatnam in 1799 and displayed in turn at the East India 

Companies offices, the Indian Office and since 1879 at the Victoria and Albert Museum. There are certain 

marked differences between the Sundarban tiger or Bengal tiger and his cousin the Indian tiger. The 

unique mangrove swamp and the special ecological effects of the tidal waters of the sea undeterred by 

any flow of fresh water have turned the Bengal tiger a born fighter and survivor. A special feature of the 

mangrove habitats is that its entire land mass gets submerged during a cyclone and the land animals have 

to play amphibious role. Here the tiger swims and swims very well. 

V. Tiger-Human Conflict in the Sundarbans in the Colonial Period 

The British colonial authorities were quick to grasp the point that the Sundarbans, if reclaimed, could be 

transformed into a revenue yielding area. We shall now turn to see how this motive to maximize revenue 

triggered off a period of tiger-human conflict in the Sundarbans. The history of reclaiming the Sundarbans 

forest is fascinating. At the time of British East India Company’s acquisition of political power in India 

the forests of the Sundarbans extended to the vicinity of Calcutta. The initial attempts of reclamation in 

the eighteenth century were unsuccessful. The reclamation work took off in full swing from the second 

decade of the nineteenth century. It was indeed a very difficult task. One of the major challenges came 

from the tigers. The land reclamation project achieved very little success due to the depredation of tigers. 

The coolies (workers) had to be accompanied by shikaris (hunters) who fired their guns occasionally 

to frighten away the tigers that abounded in the forest. The tiger often attacked the forest clearers and 

committed such fearful havoc that work had to be temporarily postponed at times. L.S.S. O’Malley 

recorded in the Bengal District Gazetteer: 

‘The writer has come across a well authenticated instance where such a man-eater charged into a line of 

some 6 or 8 men, working along a bund, at about 8 or 9am carried of a man in their midst’. 18 On many 

occasions the project had to be completely given up in the face of hostile tigers and the land already 

reclaimed would eventually again turn into jungle. 19 

17 Mackenzie, op.cit., op.cit., p. p. p. 179. 179. 

179. 

179. 

18 L.S.S. O’Malley, Bengal District Gazetteer, 24 Parganas, Calcutta, 1914, pp. 19-20. 

19 Thomas Bacon, First Impression and Studies from Nature in Hindustan, London, 1837, pp. 2-3. Bishop Heber arrived 

on the mouth of river Hooghly in 1823. Thomas Bacon reached the fringes of the Sundarbans on his way to Calcutta 

in 1831. Bacon’s account too confirms this trend. He noticed that though the adventurers had cleared small spaces and 

erected a few shabby houses, but tigers, more than once had driven out the enterprising settlers. He too found a flat and 

swampy shore with scattered tall trees and thick jungle. With a large glass he spotted something like deer grazing amid 

568

W.W.Hunter’s representation of the Sundarbans as a fearful place – ‘a sort of drowned land, covered with 

jungle, smitten by malaria, and infested by wild beasts’ - brought the earlier emergent descriptions of 

the area to its culmination. In his 60 page seminal essay, published in 1875, Hunter endorsed the earlier 

accounts and portrayed the Sundarbans as a sort of drowned land, broken up by swamps, intersected by 

a thousand river channels and maritime backwaters, but gradually dotted, as the traveler recedes from 

the seaboard, with clearings and patches of rice land. 20 The tract is one vast alluvial plain, where the 

process of land-formation has not yet ceased, he noted. The forest in the Sundarbans is very dense and 

walking on the jungle is difficult due to the swampy watery land, he opined. For a visitor every moment 

of his journey through the vast watery wilderness, with the tigers and crocodiles lurking here and there, 

was an exploration of the mystic tropical jungle. Some parts of the interior of the Sundarbans, in the 

past, were impenetrable (the southern interior). With trees and brushwood intertwined and dangerous 

looking creeks running into the darkness in all directions, the shimmering tidal waters bordered by the 

mangrove trees, it appeared to be a world of fantasy to Englishmen like Hunter. 21 The Sundarbans was 

yet another space where the European ‘selves’ and the Indian ‘other’ started interacting as entities that 

remained fundamentally the same at the end of the road. They have dialectically constituted one another’s 

understanding or ideas of a given space. Thus the colonial constructions of the Sundarbans were hybrids 

that were partly colonial and partly indigenous and often neither of the two. The Raj in nature was neither 

wholly empire nor entirely native. The indigenous people of the Sundarbans too considered the terrain 

as difficult and dangerous, a place full of banda (bushes) and kada (mud) and infested with tigers and 

crocodiles. 22 Thus there were occasions when the indigenous and foreign perceptions were in tune with 

each other. The combinations often resulted in the creation of new ecological or environmental ideas 

relating to management and exploitation of the then little known natural world. 

To ensure smooth collection of forest revenue from the Sundarbans, it became very urgent to protect the 

lives of woodcutters. The woodcutters and honey gatherers entered the forest at a particular time of the 

year. A party of woodcutters usually consisted of 15/20 men and 1/2 fakirs. 23 None of them would go 

into the forest to cut wood unless accompanied by the fakir who is supposed to protect them from the 

tigers. 24 They would start their work only after making an offering to the jungle deities like Ban Bibi or 

the swampy grassy place. He was told of instances of tigers swimming off from the coast to a considerable distance. 

20 W. W. W. Hunter, 

Hunter, Hunter, A Statistical Account of Bengal, Vol. I, District of 24 Parganas and Sundarbans, London, 1875, pp. 287- 

90. 

21 Ibid. 

22 Sibsankar Mitra, Sundarbaner Arjan Sardar (in Bengali), Kolkata, 1955, pp. 3-5. 

23 It is widely believed in the Sundarbans that the fakirs have the power to tame the tigers and thereby protect the people 

whom they would accompany. 

24 Hunter, op.cit., pp. 311-12. 

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Dakshin Roy. 25 The forest revenue from the area continued to rise though at a heavy cost. The Baramiyan 

was taking a heavy toll. Between 1881 and 1912 more than 2500 people were killed by the tigers in 

the Sundarbans. 26 The actual number was higher as only 50% of such cases were actually reported to 

the authorities. Moreover, the figure does not include the cases which were brought to the notice of the 

District Administration alone and not subsequently reported to the Forest Department. In 1885 alone, 

116 woodcutters were carried away from a single para or station and the work came to a standstill. 27 

The matter had reached such an alarming proportion, that the Secretary to the Government of India, 

Department of Revenue and Agriculture wrote to the Secretary to the Government of Bengal (No. 430 F, 

Dt. Simla, 1913): 

‘Apart from the loss of life, this state of affairs interferes greatly with the proper working of the 

valuable Sundarbans forest and the Government of India trusts that no efforts will be spared to 

reduce the number of these pests’. 28 

The government was convinced that all or most of the tigers of the Sundarbans were ‘man-eaters’ and the 

destruction in them of as many tigers as possible appeared to be the only way of lessening the number of 

casualties. But, the encounter with the beast, on the ground, was mostly left to the indigenous shikaris, 

who were always looked upon as incompetent, unskilled and effeminate. The government adopted 

a policy of rewards to induce the indigenous shikaris to destroy the tigers. Under the sanction of the 

government, in the notification dated the 16 th November, 1883, published in the Calcutta Gazette, the 

Rangers and Foresters in charge of the 8 chief revenue stations in the Sundarbans reserved forest, were 

authorized to pay rewards for killing tigers. In 1883 the amount of the reward was Rs. 50 for each full 

grown tiger and Rs. 10 for each tiger cub. The shikaris were required to produce the skin and skull of the 

animal to the forest officials to receive the reward. 29 The value of the reward was raised from time to time 

and any such increase in the value of the reward was intimately associated with fresh depredation by tigers 

in the jungle. In 1906, the amount of the reward was raised to Rs. 100 for each full grown tiger and Rs. 20 

for each tiger cub. Again in 1909 the amount was further raised to Rs. 200. This was done in view of the 

fact that more than 500 people lost their lives in the 36 months between 1906 and 1909. 30 

There took place a large scale slaughter of this magnificent animal in the Sundarbans. This researcher 

25 Ibid. 

26 PRF, 1868-1921. 

27 PRF for 1884-85, p. 57. 

28 PRF for 1911-12, p. 9. 

29 PRF for 1883-84, p. 92. 

30 PRF for 1881-82 through 1912-13. 

570

has compiled a figure to demonstrate the magnitude of this large scale massacre of the tiger population 

with the direct patronage of the colonial government. Between 1881 and 1912 more than 2400 full grown 

tigers were killed in the Sundarbans. 31 As a part of the flat out attempt to wipe out the man-eaters of the 

Sundarbans, free tiger shooting passes were distributed to almost everyone who applied for it without 

paying any heed to the ability, skill, experience or even identity of those self-styled shikaris. According 

to one available estimate between 1918 and 1926, 298 free tiger shooting permits were issued to native 

shikaris. 32 

This policy of mass slaughter of tigers had only a moderate effect on the number of casualties. In fact, 

annual statistics of casualties at times showed an upward trend, though there can be little doubt that the 

tiger population in the Sundarbans continued to dwindle. By 1928 the Forest Department itself came to 

acknowledge that “tigers have become comparatively scarce in the Sundarbans Division” 33 and it decided 

to reduce the number of free tiger shooting permits. The authorities did not realize however, that, what 

was at issue was not the number of tigers in the jungle but the prey-predator gap which accounted for 

the attack on the woodcutters. The crux of the problem and the man-eating behavior of the animal could 

be attributed to the fast declining deer population, the natural prey of tigers. The shikaris ostensibly bent 

on shooting tigers for reward were unable to resist the temptation of shooting deer whenever they got 

a favourable opportunity. The official reports testify to the fact that deer poaching in the Sundarbans 

reached an alarming proportion between 1915 and 1940. In 1919, when there was a remarkable decrease 

in the number of persons killed by tigers the Conservator of Forest acknowledged this point in his annual 

report and emphasized on the necessity of keeping down deer poaching in the Sundarbans. 34 The Annual 

Report on Game Preservation for 1939 informs us that the permit holders were allowed to shoot one 

deer per trip and the number of deer killed in that year was 448. It was discovered later that the shooters 

wounded about 896 deer. The majority of which most probably, died in agony from maggot infested 

wounds. 35 Instances like this can be multiplied. Thus, the permit holders did shoot for meat or profit in the 

Sundarbans. The forest officials acknowledged in their reports that the number of guns licensed, in the 

village bordering the forest, was very considerable and that it was one of the root cause of deer poaching. 

One forest official lamented in 1919: 

It is now certain that had guns never been allowed so freely in former years, there would have been 

31 Ibid. 

32 PRF for 1918-19, 1926-27. 

PRF for 1918-19, 1926-27. 

33 PRF for 1928-29. 

PRF for 1928-29. 

34 PRF for 1916-17. 

PRF for 1916-17. 

35 Annual Report on Game Preservation in Bengal for the Year Ending 31 st March 1939, Calcutta, 1940, p. 9. 

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sufficient game to ensure that the tigers did not take to man-eating and all loss of human life and 

revenue of previous years would never have occurred. 36 

Another factor which frequently contributed to the periodic enlargement of the prey predator gap was 

tropical cyclonic storms which bring tidal waves and floods in the Sundarbans. The monsoon in this 

part of Bengal consists of a series of cyclonic depressions, which follow each other in more or less close 

succession up the Bay of Bengal. The October cyclones are examples of the most intense tropical storms. 

Such cyclonic storms occasionally resulted in the flooding of the Sundarbans, thereby dwindling the deer 

population. 37 Such floods occurred in the Sundarbans in 1909 and again in 1919. The cyclone of 1919 

features prominently in the forest department records. In 1919, the authorities attributed the increase in 

the number of men killed by tigers to the cyclone which made natural food scarce. 38 The report states 

two incidents in which tigers climbed into sleeping shelters built on machans and the lifting of one of the 

inmates on each occasion. This aggressiveness, the report recorded, ‘is attributed to the fact that enormous 

number of deer was killed or drowned in the storm wave which accompanied the cyclone of October last, 

which upset the balance between tigers and their natural prey, and induced them to attack men. 39 

VI. Tiger-Human Conflict in the Sundarbans in the Post-colonial Era 

Today the Sundarbans is primarily known as a tiger reserve. Interestingly, the setting up of a tiger reserve 

and its maintenance in this unique mangrove swamp involved the handling of a whole range of unknowns 

and the production of new knowledge. It was imperative to find answers to a series of questions like how 

many square kilometers would be assigned to per tiger, what kind of plants would be preferred, how to 

ensure the availability of tigers’ natural food without causing any harm to the biodiversity of this unique 

zone, and so on. The Sundarbans Project Tiger itself was a project of managing an uncharted territory, but 

this endeavour, in turn, triggered off new problems, which were not anticipated. 

Politics, capitalism and science all function on global connections. Each enlarges its sweep to satisfy 

universal aspirations. But, as they move on they change and reshape themselves in the face of the on- 

ground local encounters. 40 In this section I will try to demonstrate how the post-colonial Sundarbans 

reserve can offer an excellent opportunity to test this encounter between the global and local and how the 

36 PRF for 1918-19. 

37 O’Malley, op.cit., p. p. 133. 

133. 

38 Annual Report on Game Preservation in Bengal for 1909-10, p. 20. 

39 Ibid., p. p. 1. 

1. 

40 Anna L. Tsing Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection, Princeton, 2005, pp. 1-2. 

572

unpredictable effects of the global encounter across difference lead to the construction of new objects of 

knowledge which in its turn again call for management and investigation. 41 

Environmental awareness and environmental politics would be an ideal space to draw up a balance 

sheet of the achievements of the universal. It is in this particular domain that a rudimentary structure of 

globalization first started to surface in the post-Second World War era. The concept of ecology originated 

in the nineteenth century and was intended to cover the study of the supposed equilibrium between 

organisms and the external world. Ecology, however, was not considered as a very important science until 

after World War II. The emergence of the post-war North American urban industrial complex brought 

forth the large-scale development of ecological and environmental knowledge. In the 1950s and 1960s 

environmentalism had primarily remained as a social movement of the North. It made the North aware 

of the ongoing degradation of global environment and of the fact that the United States manufacture 

and sell across the globe a pesticide like the DDT that can eventually end up in the bodies of penguins 

living innocently at the South Pole. Environmentalism gradually adopted trans-boundary approaches in 

the 1970s and 1980s drawing recognition to problems like pollution, climate change, species loss that 

could not be contained in a single country. One of the earliest global manifestations of this environmental 

concern was the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, Sweden in 1972 

and the subsequent launching of the United Nation’s Environment Programme. 42 When this campaign 

reached the South, the Northern conservation priorities like saving tigers, rescuing elephants or protecting 

biodiversities were superimposed on its environmental agenda. 

It was strongly urged by the European wildlife biologists that only in the forests of India and the mangrove 

swamps of Bangladesh were there tigers in sufficient numbers to warrant an effort to save this endangered 

species. At its Tenth General meeting in New Delhi in 1969, the International Union for Conservation 

of Nature resolved that the estimated 2000 members of the South Asian sub-species (Panthera Tigris) 

in India, East Pakistan, Nepal and Bhutan were a viable breeding population. The Indian political and 

scientific opinion too proved to be favourable. India imposed a ban on tiger shooting in 1970, the Wildlife 

Protection Act was passed in 1972, the Indian Board for Wildlife was set up in 1972 and the Project Tiger 

41 This issue of the engagement of the universal with the local has been approached by a number of scholars from various 

standpoints. Michael Adams (Beyond Yellowstone Conservation and Indigenous Rights in Australia and Sweden, in 

Garth Cant et al (eds), Discourses and Silences, Christchurch, New Zealand, 2005) saw the problem in terms of an interplay 

between the two fundamental aspects: human-nature relationship and western-indigenous relationship. He shows 

the two are linked. Other recent works like Gunnel Cederlof (ed.), Ecological Nationalisms, Delhi, 2006, too saw the 

problem as a contest between issues and spaces within and beyond the nation. Anna L. Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography 

of Global Connection, op.cit. saw it in terms of friction resulting in dialogues across difference, between the local and the 

universal. 

42 Donald Worster (ed.), The Ends of the Earth, Cambridge, 1988, Introduction. 

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was launched in 1973 in 9 reserve forests. The Project Tiger initially started as a task force set up within 

the Indian Board of Wildlife chaired by Dr Karan Singh, Minister for Health and Family Planning. 43 It was 

precisely at this time that global voluntary groups made their way into the Indian environmental scene. 

Most important among them was the World Wildlife Fund or WWF. 44 The tiger proved to be good choice 

because of its existence in different regions across India. It helped to broaden the ecological scheme in 

various ways. Its protection also involved the protection of tiger’s natural food supply and it thereby 

helped to broaden the project in multiple directions in the future. Preserving India’s wildlife was integral 

to a nationalist project to save its emblem. Project Tiger played a key role in broadening ecological 

perspective. It was clearly a single-species scheme to start with, but the position accorded the tiger in the 

food chains generated a logic that took the scheme further and started flashing new light on other species 

like deer, lion, monkey, rhino and on water resources and vegetation as well. 

The implementation of the Project Tiger involved human displacement as many villages were removed 

from the buffer zone and people were allowed to remain only in a few buffer areas. Hundreds of people 

were removed for each tiger being protected. The ideal size of the reserves as suggested by international 

wildlife biologists would be 3000 square km, but India with an ever increasing population had no other 

option but to opt for less than 1500 square kilometers for each of these reserves on an average. In the 

case of Sundarbans the size is even smaller. The task force predicted that with the increase of the number 

of tigers they would eventually start roaming outside the core and the buffer zone. 45 In the case of 

Sundarbans and other reserves the prediction has come true. Clashes between Forest Department staff and 

the local villagers in the Sundarbans are very common. The root of these clashes range from poaching, 

fishing to human deaths caused by the intrusion of tigers. 

The conflict between humans and tigers in the Sundarbans also originates in the socio-economic condition 

of the local people and the man-eating habit 46 of the tigers. The per capita income in the Sundarbans is 

estimated to be less than half that of the state average. In the struggle for survival thousands of people 

enter the forest braving the crocodiles, sharks and tigers in order to gather honey, cut woods and catch 

fish. This brings them face to face with the tigers. Sometimes the tigers enter the villages near the buffer 

43 Paul Greenough, Pathogens, Pugmarks, Pugmarks, and and and Political Political Political ‘Emergency’, ‘Emergency’, ‘Emergency’, Paul Paul Paul Greenough Greenough Greenough and and and Anna Anna Anna L.Tsing L.Tsing L.Tsing (eds), (eds), 

(eds), Nature in 

the Global South, op.cit., pp. 201-230, also Mahesh Rangarajan, India’s Wildlife History, Delhi, 1997, pp. 94-107. 

44 Mahesh Rangarajan, op.cit.,op.cit.,pp.pp. 94-107. 94-107. 94-107. The The The WWF WWF WWF pledged pledged pledged over over over a a a million million million dollars dollars dollars to to to help help help save save save the the the tiger tiger tiger in in in Asia. Asia. Asia. Estab- 

Estab- Estab- Estab- Established 

in the early 1960s, the society was a major catalyst for governmental action in India, where the Indian Prime Minister 

readily agreed to personally supervise the project. 

45 Paul Greenough, op.cit., p. p. 211. 

211. 

46 This man-eating habit has been evoked by the periodic shortage of natural food-chain. The man-eating habit of the tigers 

in the Sundarbans, therefore, can be attributed to the unique biogeographic environment. 

574

zones and take away men, women or their cattle. It is a place where tigers kill hundreds of people a 

year, but since they are a protected species, killing a tiger that has been preying on a village brings in the 

government authorities to mete out punishment. Getting killed by a tiger was a terrifying prospect for the 

near and dear ones of the dead. The new widow and the victim’s children are forbidden to cry and taught 

to say their father had died of diarrhea because if exposed the family members are forced to pay for the 

dead trespasser and are treated like criminals. 

Amitav Ghosh in his remarkable prize-winning book Hungry Tide gives a graphic account of this conflict 

between the indigenous people of the Sundarbans on the one hand and the tiger on the other. He describes 

how a tiger was accidentally trapped in a livestock pen while trying to take away a calf. An angry mob 

quickly gathered and the incapacitated animal was attacked with sharpened staves. At first one of the 

boys thrust a sharpened bamboo pole through a window and blinded it. Piya, the American cetologist, the 

central character of the novel, tried her best to save the animal but in vain. She was helpless in the face of 

a hostile crowd. Even her associates Horen and Fokir sided with the mob and participated in the killing. 

Such occurrences are very common in the Sundarbans. The incidence described in the novel is illustrative 

of a fundamental and yet delicate issue that continues to surface prominently in the global debates relating 

to management of nature. The setting up of the tiger reserve led to the creation of a host of new unknowns 

including the human-tiger conflict. The conversation between Kanai and Piya regarding the killing of the 

tiger that followed later brings out the essence of the several flashpoints of this complex problem. 47 

The issue of the tiger-human conflict in the Sundarbans, depicted in the above story, has its roots in the 

policy pursued by both the colonial and the post-colonial state in India. The colonial forest policy, geared 

by global capitalism, led to the dislocation and degradation of the local people and the post-colonial 

project of tiger conservation further contributed to their misery. The forest policy of the post-colonial 

state has excluded the indigenous people from the Sundarbans tiger reserve. They have been deprived 

of the right to use the forest and it has preserved the forest only for the animals. To avoid the hostilities 

of the local people towards the state policy of conservation, the involvement of resident people in the 

management of resources has been recommended by global agencies. The biosphere reserve programme 

and the conservation of tigers in the Sundarbans are based rhetorically on a highly participative approach 

of the local communities. But the on-ground implementation of the tiger conservation had neglected the 

enormous local knowledge about ecosystem and wildlife the people of Sundarbans have. Thus the gap 

47 Amitav Ghosh, 

Amitav Ghosh, The Hungry Tide, Delhi, 2004, pp. 289-295. The issue of tiger-human conflict in the Sundarbans is wellknown 

and an important issue in the debate relating to conservation. Amitav Ghosh, though a fiction writer, has undertaken 

extensive field-trips to the core area of the Sundarbans and there is ample evidence to show that it is an accurate 

depiction of reality. The present researcher has verified this during his field trips to the Sundarbans. 

575 

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between the universal official rhetoric of conservation and the actual formulation of policies aimed at 

empowering local communities has widened. The forest officials congratulate themselves on the rapid 

increase of tiger population but all is not well in the Sundarbans. Smugglers and poachers, supported by 

political and business interests and sheltered by local communities, raid the protected forests for valuable 

exports. 48 As the local people are hostile to the official conservators, the poachers operate with ease. State 

surveillance in the protected forest is mainly through the Forest Department, whose officials were known 

to exploit their position for private gain. They played a pivotal role in poaching timber, deer meat and tiger 

skins. The Sundarbans also provided shelter for those who lived off river robbery and who exploited the 

existence of the border to develop two new specializations: kidnapping and piracy. 49 

Conclusion 

In the Sundarbans, the tiger has always been at the centre of the problem of managing this unique natural 

world and the problem of ordering the frictions between the local and the global has been essentially a 

problem of managing the tiger-human conflict. I have tried to demonstrate in this essay that this project 

of managing the tiger-human conflict has a long history. The structure of tiger-human conflict in the 

Sundarbans has undergone a qualitative transformation in the post- colonial era. In early British India 

the Sundarbans remained as a ‘mystic drowned land’, ‘dangerous’, ‘unknown’ and difficult to manage 

or order. In course of time however, the Europeans realized its potential as a hidden natural resource and 

took necessary measures to transform it into a revenue yielding forest. This job led them to embark upon 

the project of taming the tigers. But the task of taming the tigers was left in the hands of the indigenous 

shikaris (hunters). The British rulers were convinced that the local people armed with sound indigenous 

knowledge and would be better able to combat the man-eaters in this dangerous terrain. The post- 

colonial state, on the other hand, had excluded the local inhabitants and their knowledge in their project of 

conservation. To the locals, managing the tiger threat could have been simpler than facing intrusions of the 

colonial or the modern state at different points of history. 

48 Contemporary Indian newspapers like Anandabazar (Kolkata, India), The Statesman (Kolkata, India) and The Telegraph 

(Kolkata, India) are packed with relevant information regarding lawlessness and tiger poaching in the Sundarbans National 

Park. In the 1990s, the trade in the skin of Royal Bengal Tigers, was extremely lucrative as the Bangladeshi and 

Indian elites were prepared to pay large sums of money for this exclusive item of interior decoration. The situation in 

Indian and Bangladesh Sundarbans is more orless identical. Big Big cat is big business. business. China China functions as the manufacturing 

hub for medicines made from tiger body parts. The poaching boom in the Sundarbans can be attributed to this 

international Chinese medicine trade. After adequate processing in China, they are exported to UK, USA, Australia and 

Japan. According to one report, it may be possible to kill a tiger with the help of poachers by spending only 5,000 Indian 

rupees, which would fetch $50,000 from the international market; see The Times of India, October 12, 2005. 

49 Willem van Schendel, The Bengal Borderland: Beyond State and Nation in South Asia, London, 2005, p. 274. 

576

The shortsightedness of official conservation policy in independent India has reflected the disrespect 

for the enormous indigenous knowledge of the local communities in managing the tiger-threat. This 

indigenous knowledge is used by the officials when convenient and then discarded but never stored for 

use in the future. The relevance of traditional knowledge of biological resources needs to be understood 

in the context of the social and cultural milieu of the entire community including the surrounding habitats. 

But unfortunately, the local communities have never been asked to be a part of the decision-making 

process. The universal rhetoric of conservation and its implementation created new complexities which in 

their turn have alienated the local communities. This alienation of the indigenous people from the official 

project of conservation has made the new unanticipated crises more unmanageable in the Sundarbans. 

Professional foresters, wildlife biologists and other experts, who were involved in the policy making that 

led to the final implementation of the Project Tiger had failed to foresee the pervasiveness of the tiger- 

human conflict in the Sundarbans in the long run. The general impression that can be gathered from the 

official literature relating to the size and extent of the reserve may appear to be comprehensive in terms of 

classification or quantification. But the realities on the ground are different. The forces of industrialization 

in a globalised world have been continuously threatening this reserve in recent times. Ever increasing 

human settlements have occupied a large space in the buffer zones of the Sundarban National Park. The 

decrease of fresh water flow has increased the salinity of water and seriously disturbed the ecosystem of 

the region. The increasing in flow of city effluents from the nearby city of Kolkata is further contributing 

to the problem. Its magnitude has become alarming, as a large number of water bodies in nearby urban 

areas that previously acted as natural filters, have disappeared as real estate promoters convert them into 

housing estates. As a result the city effluents are now directly received by the biosphere reserve and are 

causing great harm to the mangrove forest and the natural food chains. This is exerting some impact on 

the already existing man-eating habit of the Sundarban tiger and the consequential intensification of the 

tiger-human conflict in this mangrove forest. Species of fishes and other water lives may soon disappear 

in both Indian and Bangladesh Sundarbans. Even 150 years ago, the Sundarbans was the home to the one 

horn Indian rhino, the Javan rhino, wild buffaloes and river dolphins. All are now extinct. Interestingly 

enough, the problems like tiger-human conflict, species loss or the general degradation of the unique 

biogeographic environment of the Sundarbans took place under the ideological umbrella of the global 

projects like ‘biosphere reserve’, ‘project tiger’, or ‘eco-tourism’. 

Thus the interior of the Sundarbans and the ongoing changes therein, still remain unmanaged. The 

intrusion of the colonial state, the implementation of the Project tiger by the post-colonial state or the 

introduction of the biosphere reserve programme under the forceful international pressure inflicted a new 

kind of misery on the local people of the Sundarbans and further aggravated the problem of tiger-human 

conflict. As far as the state responses to the issue of forest use were and are concerned, there seems to 

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be little fundamental difference between the colonial and post-colonial state. To the locals, managing 

the tiger threat could have been simpler than handling the intrusions of the state at different points of 

history. During the Raj the slogan was ‘kill the tiger’ – but with the coming of the Project Tiger the slogan 

had changed into ‘save the tiger’, but the saving of the tiger was to be carried out again at the cost of a 

renewed tiger-human conflict in a far greater magnitude than ever before. 

578



Proceedings 


MEST/NRF: Healing Humanities in Korea 

1. The Humanities Policy and Their Social Contributions in Korea 

/ Kidong Song (Ministry of Education, Science and Technology) 

2. Humanities Therapy: Theory and Practice 

/ Young E. Rhee (Kangwon National University) 

3. The Division Trauma of Koreans and Orality Healing 

/ Jong Kun Kim (Konkuk University) 

4. Deficiency, Expression and Mind Healing: Focusing on Selective 

Mutism 

/ Sunmi Hong (Wonkwang University)

The Humanities Policy and Their Social Contributions in Korea 

Kidong Song 

Ministry of Education, Science and Technology 

I. Introduction 

1. Crises Facing Korean Society and the Humanistic Healing 

In December 2011, a fourteen-year-old boy jumped out of his apartment veranda, leaving behind a note 

describing vividly the horrible violence he had suffered for the previous nine months at school. Since 

then, Korean society has been undergoing the year of 2012, as before, in the turmoil of school violence. 

In addition, sexual crimes against children and youths have steeply increased in number from 857 in 2007 

to 2,053 in 2011. Sexual violence, where there was a case at Gwangju Inhwa School for the Hearing- 

Impaired in 2005, was reignited as a hot social issue by the film The Crucible, which was watched by 

about 4.6 million people. In addition to the direct violence, a number of socio-structural contradictions 

such as high rates of suicide and divorce as well as the polarization between the rich and the poor have 

caused sufferings to us all. How can these sufferings be healed? 

Billions of people in the world live a bustling life as they are born, grow old, get sick, and die. Although 

they are all mortal after a short span of life, the fact that they exist in this world for a certain period of 

time is undeniable. Whether high or low in social status, rich or poor, or even good or evil, each and every 

person has an equal right and valuable worth as human beings. In this sense, we have to give a warm 

helping hand constantly to the socially weak around us. 1 However, the reality is so formidable that a lot of 

people drop out of the social competition and become hostile to the society which frustrates them. They 

1 Jeonju University News. 19 September 2012. Cited from a column written by Kim Seung-jong, Dean of the College of 

the Humanities: “The humanities are based on the spirit of love and care for the socially underprivileged, which ultimately 

leads us toward the road to true happiness.” 

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never admit to their own lack of ability or regret their own faults; on the contrary, at every opportunity 

they undertake a bigger retaliation against those who are presumed to forsake them. How can our society 

control them? Can they be changed if we take such strong and harsh measures of punishments–such as 

electronic anklets, disclosure of offender profiles, life imprisonment, death penalty–or if we issue vouchers 

for households with low-income and in absolute poverty to guarantee the minimum cost of living for 

them? How can we “change people”? The answer lies in the humanities. 

The humanities are academic disciplines which aim at “understanding human beings.” 2 They enable us 

to reflect on ourselves, then to care for others around us, and finally to accept their sufferings as our own. 

Experiencing others’ sufferings as our own—this is the true spirit of the humanities; it is also the only 

way to the fundamental solution of the contradictions of our society. 3 Since this virtue of sympathy is a 

capacity which is absolutely necessary for a meaningful human life not only for the underprivileged, but 

for ordinary people as well, a humanistic approach for all the people around us should be adopted on both 

social and governmental levels. The key to the fundamental change of Korean society is in the hand of the 

humanities. 

2. The Crisis Facing the Humanities 

The humanities enable us to reflect on our own life and to realize what it is to live with self-respect as a 

human being. However, the socially weak who are caught up in living have almost no opportunity to be 

in contact with the humanities and think of themselves as having nothing to do with it. Ordinary people, 

who have a need for humanistic knowledge, also cannot afford to be engaged in the humanities because 

of the urgent problems of reality, such as improving grades, finding a job, and so on. In particular, the 

neoliberal logic of the market, which has expanded ever since the 1997 financial crisis, drastically altered 

the landscape of universities in Korea. Professors have been driven to so-called “achievement-oriented” 

methods, which hinges on the quantity of papers, while the presumably “unprofitable” disciplines, such 

as philosophy, history and literature, have gradually been turned away in society as college students have 

crowded to “profitable” majors. 4 This fact was demonstrated by a recent research—“An Analysis of the 

Actual Conditions of the Humanities Education and Its Promotion Measures” conducted by professor 

Hong Byung-sun—which analyzes the results of a survey of 2,000 high-school and college students on 

2 The notion of “humanities” is known to come from the Roman political thinker Cicero’s words, “the inquiry into man, the 

study of man.” 

3 Jeonju University News. 19 September 2012. 

4 According to statistics provided by the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology in 2010, the average rate of 

enrollment in doctoral courses in the humanities and social sciences was 12.6%, compared to 21.3%-23.4 % in natural 

sciences and engineering during 2005-2008. 

582

the actual conditions and demand of humanities education. According to this research, although most 

high-school and college students in Korea recognize the necessity and importance of the humanities 

education and want to receive it, they hesitate or neglect to participate in it due to preparations for the 

college entrance examination for high-school students and grade management and job preparation for 

college students. 5 Given its fundamental quest for the essence and root of man, society and the world, 

the humanities is powerlessly turned away as being unable to promise immediate material rewards in 

the rapidly changing society of today despite its potential to bring about fundamental change in Korean 

society. 

3. A New Move of the Humanities for Social Change in Korea 

In recent years, new light began to be shed on the importance of the humanities among corporations 

and CEOs. According to a diagnosis done by Samsung Economic Research Institute, “in dealing with 

phenomena such as the global financial crisis, which are difficult to predict with statistical analysis 

techniques, humanistic insights have been the focus of attention as an alternative. The humanities, which 

inquires into human nature and stress a historical perspective, is a very powerful tool which can be used to 

predict future business environments.” In particular, the global financial crisis has made people reconsider 

the management system focused on financial engineering and technology and has increased the need to 

have a balanced humanistic thought. This kind of diagnosis explains why CEOs and executives of so 

many corporations are now absorbed in humanities studies. In fact, the humanities craze is becoming 

popular again; various humanities courses have recently been opened like the Supreme Leader Course at 

Seoul National University, the Advanced Program for Culture and Arts at Korea University, and so on. 6 

In addition, the online revival of the humanities is also remarkable. About twenty online communities 

and websites are active and accompanied by offline discussion or reading studies. There are also other 

communities sponsored by book-related companies or operated by voluntary groups. Among the examples 

presented below, KB Rainbow Humanities provides a variety of humanistic contents including philosophy, 

films, and documentaries through a website and runs a series of columns on aesthetics, documentaries, 

philosophy, happiness study, architecture, cinema, etc. 

Now with the social need for the humanities revived, the development of the Internet and other IT 

5 “Humanities Education Neglected at High Schools and Universities: Because of University Entrance Exam and 

Preparation for Jobs.” Newsis. 14 February 2012. 

6 Samsung Economic Research Institute, “Future Management Alternative is Nothing But the Humanities,” Korea Herald 

Business. 23 February 2012. 

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Proceedings 

technologies broadens opportunities for academic content to be digitalized and shared by the general 

public as well as builds an environment in which consumers participate actively in the academic 

production through social media. With such a social atmosphere and technological advances, it is 

necessary to disseminate the humanities, which constitute the essence of human life and has been handed 

down to us by our ancestors. At the present moment, when the neglect of life and the blind pursuit 

of materialism prevail and social conflicts rapidly grow with the increase of the aged, early retirees, 

naturalized citizens, North Korean refugees, etc., the humanities is greatly needed as a forum in which we 

can explore some implications that different humanistic traditions from various cultures can have for the 

impending tasks facing the twenty-first century. 

1. Humanities Cafe: http://www.thinkntalk.net/ 

Humanities-Related Online Communities and Websites 

2. Yes24 Humanities of Hope Campaign: http://inmun.yes24.com/main/index 

3. KB Rainbow Humanities: https://otalk.kbstar.com/quics?page=C025580 

4. POD CAST Choi Jin Gi’s Humanities Lectures: http://itunes.apple.com/kr/podcast/id459005831 

5. Art and Study: http://www.artnstudy.com/ 

6. Moontak Network: http://moontak.cafe24.com/ 

7. Humanities Museum: http://www.kmoh.org/kmoh_pro02a.html 

8. Book Academy Renai21: http://www.renai21.net/ 

9. Bookstore Indigo: http://www.indigoground.net/ 

10. Foundation Academia Platonica: http://www.platonacademy.org/HumanitiesSpread.php?method=spreadinfo&P 

HPSESSID=e3ea259b63133aad9dc07b9463e15e59 

11. “The Humanities on the Street” Campaign by the National Library of Korea: http://www.nl.go.kr/tour/ 

12. Jeongdong Art and Culture Academy: http://blog.daum.net/sangsangculture 

13. Inmun Cast: http://itunes.apple.com/kr/podcast/id493859279 

14. ePhilosophy: http://ephilosophy.kr/ 

15. Community for Alternative Studies: http://www.ecoleerasmus.org/ 

16. The Greenbee Publishing Co.: http://www.greenbee.co.kr/blog/ 

17. Daejeon Cultural Action: http://www.djca.or.kr/djca_new/intro.htm 

18. Logos School: http://www.logosschool.co.kr/ 

II. Policies for the Promotion of the Humanities in Korea 

1. The Objective of the Promotion of the Humanities 

Policies for the promotion of the humanities, which are carried out by the Ministry of Education, Science 

and Technology, are based on the Sciences Promotion Act (former Sciences Promotion and Credit 

Guarantee, Etc. for Students Loans Act) and related regulations. The promotion of the humanities is part of 

584

the academic research promotion project. Its objectives are as follows: first, to foster world-class institutes 

of humanities and regional studies which perform socially relevant, interdisciplinary researches; and 

second, to expand the extent of the humanities by enhancing the communication between the humanities 

and the public and to lay grounds for a cultural nation by strengthening the social role of academics. 

2. The History of the Promotion of the Humanities 

After 1963 when the Ministry of Education (now called the Ministry of Education, Science and 

Technology) implemented the system of academic research assistance funds based on the education 

act, the support for research by professors in the fields of the humanities and social sciences began. The 

launching of the Korea Research Foundation (now called the National Research Foundation of Korea) 

in 1981 in particular marked a moment when the current research support system in the fields came into 

existence. 

The year of 2007 was also a historical turning point for the promotion of the humanities. At the opening 

ceremony of Humanities Week in 2006, deans of humanities colleges from around the country declared “the 

crisis of the humanities” and announced their determination to promote them. After this, the Humanities 

Promotion Program, estimated at 40 billion won a year, began in 2007. The representative projects are: 

support for the Humanities Korea (HK) project, support for humanities writings, and the popularization of 

the humanities. 

3. Budgets for Supporting the Humanities by Year 

The humanities-related budget provided by the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (including 

support for humanistic research as basic studies) has continued to increase after 1963. From 2002, the 

budget for the fields of the humanities and social sciences has rapidly expanded: during the following ten 

years, an average of 91.6 billion won was funded annually through the project for fostering and supporting 

basic studies, while as of 2012, a total of more than 150 billion won is being invested for the promotion of 

research in the field of the humanities. 

585 

Session 5

y the government in universities. The National Research Foundation of Korea, Report on the Analysis 

of Research Activities at Universities (November 2011). 

4. The Effects of the Humanities Promotion Policy in Korea 

Owing to the sustained implementation of the humanities promotion policy, quantitative achievement in 

research in the fields of the humanities and social sciences has continued to increase. A case in point is 

that compared to 2004, the number of research papers in the fields increased by 65.2% in 2009 (23,334 in 

2004, while 38, 568 in 2009). 

Increasing Trend of the Number of Research Papers in Vnd Social Sciences 7 

587 

(Unit: Piece) 

In addition, as shown in the changing rates of the publications of research papers in international journals, 

the international research capacity of Korean researchers has also risen. 

Distribution of Research Paper Publications in the Humanities and Social Sciences during 2009-2011 8 

Humanities & Social Sciences 2009 2010 2011 Total 

SCI 104 (2.7%) 79 (2.3%) 245 (6.8%) 428 

non-SCI 3,380 3,335 3,341 10,056 

Total 3,484 3,414 3,586 10,484 

By fostering human resources in the humanities and establishing world-class institutes of humanities, the 

Humanities Korea project in particular has created a turning point for humanities research at universities 

to be expanded from department-centered to institute-based research. This project has set up the centers 

7 National Research Foundation of Korea. “Making the Knowledge Map of Academic Research in the Humanities and 

Social Sciences.” Policy Research Report (2010), p. 8. 

8 Data gathered from the research supporting systems of the National Research Foundation of Korea. 

Session 5


Proceedings 

of gravity for research by taking the lead in research in the fields concerned. It also has changed the 

paradigm of research support and achievement in the humanities field: that is, the existing individual- 

centered academic research system has been transformed into a joint research system to solve problems in 

humanities through communication with society. The following diagram shows the achievements of these 

policy efforts in terms of the increase in humanities-related research papers and the cultivation of excellent 

future researchers. 

Achievements by the 

Humanities Korea 

Achievements by the Humanities Korea (HK) Project during 2007-2011 

Participating Researchers and 

Manpower Training Results 

The projects for the popularization of the humanities are intended to enhance communication with 

ordinary citizens by calling on humanities scholars at universities and research institutes to provide 

various lectures for the general public, including Lectures by Eminent Scholars in the Humanities 9 and 

Humanities Lectures for Citizens, 10 and by publishing a collection of humanities books. This project has 

raised citizens’ concern and awareness of the humanities and provided opportunities for them to have 

access to the humanities in their daily life. The Humanities Lectures for Citizens in particular has become 

the Korean version of the Clemente Course 11 by conveying academic achievements in the humanities and 

9 Humanities lectures by eminent scholars are intended to enhance the public’s concern and understanding of the humanities 

by providing a series of open lectures and writings by Korea’s top-level humanities scholars. For four years since 2007, 

this project offered a total of 200 high-quality lectures with over 300 participants per lecture. It also provides digital 

content services through the Korean Research Memory (KRM), the website of the Lectures by Eminent Scholars in the 

Humanities, and the Korean Open Course Ware (KOCW) of the Korea Education and Research Information Service. 

10 Humanities lectures for citizens are designed to open and operate humanities lectures for a variety of socially 

underprivileged people including the youths, the disadvantaged (the homeless and prison inmates), and so on. 

11 The Clemente Course in the Humanities is a unique educational institution founded in 1995 to teach the humanities at the 

college level to the most disadvantaged in society including the homeless, the poor, prisoners, etc. Instead of mobilizing 

them for a job training, this course helps them reflect on their own life for themselves. By doing so, it seeks to enable 

them to gain self-respect, raise the quality of their own life, live an active life, and ultimately establish themselves as 

authentic citizens in society. 

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social sciences to all walks of life, from general citizens to the disadvantaged. In addition, other various 

programs in the fields of the humanities and social sciences, including Humanities Week and the World 

Humanities Forum, have expanded opportunities for the general public to enjoy the achievements in the 

fields. 

The Number of Participants in Humanities Week by Year 

2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 Total 

Organizations 14 22 16 15 33 100 

Individuals 30,000 34,000 38,000 40,000 55,127 197,127 

The Number of Participants in the First World Humanities Forum (November 2011) 

Invited 

Speakers 

Advance 

Registrees 

On-Site 

Registrees 

Academic 

VIP 

589 

Invitees 

by the 

Organizer 

(Unit: Person) 

PCO Staff Volunteers Total 

Domestic 29 366 1,017 2 87 15 15 40 1,571 

Foreign 27 9 7 1 4 - - - 48 

Total 56 375 1,024 3 91 15 15 40 1,619 

III. Healing and Humanities 

1. Selection of the Subject 

As mentioned above, the humanities are academic disciplines which search for ways in which we live 

as authentic human beings by understanding ourselves and others. Therefore, there is an inseparable 

relationship between the humanities and the notion of healing. In particular, in 2012 we can find around 

us a lot of people who get hurt. At the background against which we suffer from violence, isolation, and 

failures lie: conflicts caused by excessive competition; selfishness with little regard for others and the 

community; the unreasonable gap between the rich and the poor; poverty in abundance; maladjustment to 

rapid scientific and technological advancements and the consequent social divide; the crisis in the global 

environment; psychological unrests arising from ill adaptation to the rapidly changing social environment; 

and the isolation of individuals and discord between them as a result of the dismantlement of traditional 

communities. In this context, under the theme of “Healing and Humanities,” the Ministry of Education, 

Science and Technology is planning to hold Humanities Week from 29 October to 4 November and the 

Second World Humanities Forum from 1 to 3 November 2012. By reflecting on contemporary society 

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from the perspectives of the humanities, these projects are designed to search for alternatives that can 

heal the sufferings and wounds of individuals, society, and history. It is expected that these efforts will 

contribute to fostering deliberative individuals and a community of dignity through the humanistic 

reflection on self and the world. 12 

Under the theme of “Healing and Humanities,” we can think of the following questions: 

• What are the characteristics of contemporary society which gives us sufferings and wounds? 

• How can the sufferings be overcome and the wounds be healed? 

• What can the humanities do to heal the wounds of youths and give them hopes? 

• How do I have to live to achieve a harmonious coexistence between my neighbors, the community, and me? 

• What contributions can the humanities make to a meaningful life and the nation of dignity? 

• What can the humanities do for the “setting and development of world-historical agenda”? 

2. Cases of Putting “Healing and the Humanities” into Practice: Humanities Lectures for Citizens 

Recently, there was a report in the Dong-A Ilbo regarding a philosophy class at a middle school. The 

uncontrollable behavior of middle school students in Korea are so notorious that there is even a joke that 

the North Korean military does not invade South Korea for fear of them. The students attend lectures on 

12 The Committee for the Popularization of the Humanities. “The Rationale for the Selection of the Theme of ‘Healing and 

Humanities’ in 2012.” 

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human violence and raise hands competitively to present their opinions about how to eliminate violence. 

Considering a survey result which shows that the primary reason for school violence is “just for fun,” the 

most important task now is to teach our children how to understand and sympathize with others. In 2011, 

this task was being put into practice by “Philosophical Lectures for the Caring and Healing of the Middle 

School Students Living in Vulnerable Areas,” one of the Humanities Lectures for Citizens projects for the 

popularization of the humanities. This project was carried out by professor Huh Woo-Sung of Kyung Hee 

University. 

The Humanities Lectures of the Gayagol University of Hope for “Happy Village and a Happy Life” 

was undertaken by Dong-Eui University for the residents of Anchang village, a representative slum area 

located between Dong-gu and Jin-gu, Busan. In order to promote the participation of local residents, 

the project adopted a hands-on training method combining lectures, discussions and field trips under the 

themes of the local community, myself, life, and happiness. It was reported that this project contributed 

not only to enhancing the self-respect of the participants but also to making an atmosphere of consensus 

and communication between the university 

and the regional society. For example, a 

woman, who has always had a difficult life as 

she was a recipient of the government’s basic 

living subsidy, disabled, and a breast cancer 

survivor, said that she applied for the lectures 

to become happy and gained hope for life 

through them. This heartfelt statement makes 

us realize once again why the humanities are 

so urgent in our life. 

In addition, other cases, including Humanities Therapy by the Institute of Human Sciences of Kangwon 

National University, Humanities for Unification by the Humanities Research Institute of Konkuk 

University, and Mind Humanities by the Institute of Mind Humanities of Wonkwang University, are also 

good examples illustrating how the humanities can heal our mind. 

IV. The Future of the Humanities Policy and Its Tasks in Korea 

In order for the humanities to meet the demands of “social responsibility” through its contributions to 

society, it must seek ways to communicate with the general public. It would not be authentic humanities 

if it stayed in an ivory tower without communicating with the public. The point is for the humanities to 

be “humanities for all,” which tends to people and embraces them. While the popularization project for 

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the humanities has hitherto been focused on creating social demand for it and supporting spontaneous 

activities in various areas, from now on, an emphasis should be put on publicizing the importance and 

implications of the humanities rather than on providing humanities content. 13 The evaluation of existing 

projects and some directions toward which future projects should be implemented for the popularization 

of the humanities can be summarized as follows: 

The Medium and Long-Term Policies for the Popularization of the Humanities 

Period Project Direction 

2006-2010 

2011-2013 

2014-2016 

The Trial Period for Popularization 

(Creation of Social Demands for the Humanities and Support for Spontaneous Activities in Various 

Areas) 

The Settle-Down Period for Popularization 

(Expansion of Social Demands and Systematization of Support) 

The Flourishing Period for Popularization 

(Active Responses to Social Demands) 

Social Networking Services (SNS) in particular will allow for various methods of communication and 

for the spread of information on the humanities. In order to facilitate close communication between 

the humanities and the masses and the dissemination of information on the humanities, the Ministry 

of Education, Science and Technology has operated websites, blogs, Twitter accounts, and Facebook 

accounts since October 2012. The ministry is now introducing humanities lectures, providing information 

on the humanities and holding various public participation events including the contest of essay reviewing 

lectures. 

- Website: inmunlove.nrf.re.kr 

- Naver Blog: blog.naver.com/inmun_love 

- Twitter: twitter.com/univinmest 

- Facebook: www.facebook.com/inmunlove 

* The Humanities Popularization Logo 

SNS Websites for the Popularization of the Humanities 

13 Choi Hwan-jin. Evaluation of the Humanities Popularization Project and Some Suggestions for Its Directions in the 

Future (National Research Foundation of Korea, 2011). 

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In addition, it is necessary to extend video services, which are provided only for the Lectures by Eminent 

Scholars in the Humanities, to the Humanities Lectures for Citizens in order to allow everyone free access 

to humanities content. Consider the case of the singer Psy, who rose to the rank of global star with the 

song “Gangnam Style” through YouTube, and the case of TED 14 through which a huge number of people 

throughout the world can enjoy high-level lectures for free anytime and anywhere. Given the powerful 

influence of free digital content, it is time to devise ways to utilize them. 

In order to make integrated use of humanities’ assets (including persons, cultural properties, lectures, 

hands-on programs, festivals, etc.) and to strengthen ties with local governments through a linkage 

between regional cultural programs and academic activities, the “Humanities City” project was launched 

on a pilot basis this year. This project can be said to be a Korean version of the “European Capital of 

Culture” series by the European Union and the U. S. project “We the People” designed by the National 

Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to explore significant events and themes in the American history. 

It is expected that Suwon and Tongyeong, designated first as humanities cities this year, will provide 

opportunities to excavate local humanities assets and allow citizens of the regions to be healed through the 

humanities. 

After its inception in 2011, the Second World Humanities Forum will proceed in a more developed format 

in 2012. While the first forum was a ground on which distinguished scholars from around the world 

discussed the philosophical foundation and social role of the humanities under the theme of “Universalism 

in a Multicultural World,” the second forum will deal with the practical contributions of the humanities 

under the main theme of “Humanities and Healing.” It is also expected to discuss the establishment of 

a system of cooperation between nations at the roundtable on the promotion of the humanities in each 

country. In the future, the World Humanities Forum will require a multidimensional approach which 

combines both academic and popular traits. Also, in order for Korea to be a key player in the international 

initiative in the field of the humanities, it is worth attempting to designate a “World Humanities Week” by 

14 TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) is a global set of conferences owned by the private non-profit Sapling 

Foundation, formed to disseminate “ideas worth spreading.” TED was founded in 1984 as a one-off event. The annual 

conference began in 1990, in Monterey, California. TED’s early emphasis was technology and design, consistent with 

its origins in the Silicon Valley. The events are now held in Long Beach and Palm Springs in the U.S. and in Europe and 

Asia, offering live streaming of the talks. They address a wide range of topics within the research and practice of science 

and culture, often through storytelling. The speakers are given a maximum of 18 minutes to present their ideas in the 

most innovative and engaging ways they can. Past presenters include Bill Clinton, Jane Goodall, Malcolm Gladwell, Al 

Gore, Gordon Brown, Richard Dawkins, Rodney Mullen, Bill Gates, educator Salman Khan, Google founders Larry 

Page and Sergey Brin, and many Nobel Prize winners. TED’s current curator is the British former computer journalist 

and magazine publisher Chris Anderson. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TED_(conference) 

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the Korean government in cooperation with UNESCO. Along with “International Arts Education Week,” 

which will be jointly undertaken by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism and UNESCO, this 

effort will contribute to creating Korea’s world leadership in the field. In addition, since a high-level of 

participation from around the world is essential for the World Humanities Forum to build up recognition 

as an international event in the field of the humanities, it is necessary to actively taking advantage of all 

the official diplomatic channels including UNESCO, the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology, 

the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, overseas Korean embassies, and so on. 

Recently, the international credibility of the Korean economy and its future is rising rapidly. In the 

uncertain global economic environment of today, Korea’s real ability to perform a leading role in the 

world comes from the Korean people. In this sense, we can expect that the spirit of the humanities will be 

able to help us enrich our soul and enhance the dignity of our country. 

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Humanities Therapy: Theory and Practice 

Young E. Rhee 

Kangwon National University 


Various statistics show that there is a correlative relationship between national income and happiness 

index, which stands true only until a certain critical point of national income but beyond that point they 

do not affect each other. According to World Bank statistics in 2011, Korea ranked 14th in terms of 

GDP. According to 2012 OECD health statistics, the average Korean lived 80.7 years as of 2010, which 

was 0.9 years longer than the OECD average of 79.8 years. However, Korea ranked first in the world in 

terms of death by suicide, with 33.5 people out of 100 thousand taking their lives, which was 12.8 more 

people than the OECD average. 

Keynes explained the phenomenon of “poverty midst plenty” as being a phenomenon where 

productivity increases but inventory is accumulated due to lack of demand, resulting in higher 

unemployment. Modern governments seem to have succeeded in overcoming the structural poverty 

Keynes pointed out but are now faced with another more serious form of poverty, which is “mental 

poverty midst materialistic plenty.” The gap between materialistic abundance and mental abundance 

cannot be resolved with Keynes’ policy of overcoming poverty. This shows why modern man is 

suffering from various mental problems despite living in unprecedented abundance. The first version 

of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) published in 1952 listed 106 types 

of mental disorders, but DSM-IV published in 1994 categorized as many as 297 types. We face 

the paradoxical situation in which the types of mental disorders are increasing as more scientific 

development is made and civilization progresses. 

It is clear that the quality of human life cannot be improved without resolving the mental poverty 

amidst material abundance. Material abundance may be achieved through revolutions in science, 

technology, social institutions, but mental poverty cannot be healed through those ways only. How can 

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the imbalance between mental and material be solved? Mental poverty and the disease of mind are 

human illnesses and existential illnesses which are unrelated to materialistic abundance, so they must 

be understood, explained, and healed from a humanities perspective. Then, how can humanities achieve 

this goal? 

The purpose of this paper is to provide my answers to those questions. I shall introduce humanities 

therapy as a powerful way to heal depression and other diseases of mind now spreading throughout 

the world across generations, races, and nations. I shall review the theory and methods of humanities 

therapy, thereby suggesting its identity (what) and method (how). My discussions will go as follows. 

First, in section two, I shall introduce the origin and agenda of humanities therapy and Kangwon 

National University’s Humanities Therapy Project. In section three, I shall explain the diseases of 

the mind as the object of humanities therapy, and examine their types and characteristics, and a brief 

diagnosis system. Sections four and five shall discuss the methods of humanities therapy. In section 

four, I shall introduce the teleological model as a specific model for humanities theory, and in the 

following section five I shall describe a specific case of how humanities therapy was applied clinically. 

2. Humanities Therapy 

Humanities therapy is a reaction to the global problem of the mental poverty among material abundance 

and also a product specific to contemporary Korea. Korean humanities scholars were alarmed by the 

phenomenon that traditional values of humanities were slowly and steadily disappearing in the world’s 

leading global IT environment. In 2006, Korean university professors announced the “crisis of Korean 

humanities.” Following this announcement, various diagnostics were suggested on how humanities 

came to the point of crisis, and the Humanities Korea project was started in 2007 as a governmental 

solution. 1 

Against this background, the notion of humanities therapy was introduced in 2007 through the 

Humanities Therapy Project in Kangwon National University. The Humanities Therapy Project 

introduced humanities therapy as an academic discipline with theoretical foundations and not as just 

a technique to treat the disease of mind. The official agenda of the Humanities Therapy Project is 

“‘Humanities Therapy’ for Promoting Humanities.” The Humanities Therapy Project suggested the 

following normative rationales for our society to study humanities therapy. 2 

1 Refer to Young E. Rhee (2011) for more information on how humanities therapy was created in Korea. 

2 Humanities Therapy Project of Kangwon National University (2007). 

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• Personal mental crisis and the growth of pathological phenomena in modern societies 

• Isolation from society and crisis of humanities 

• Misunderstanding of humanities 

• Academic closing of humanities 

• Minor role that humanities takes in the plan of regional and national development 

As seen above, humanities therapy was first suggested as a study not only with a purpose of healing 

mental diseases rife in modern society, through this kind of activity, but also with a secondary purpose 

of reviving and recreating the value of humanities to overcome the humanities crisis. It will not be easy 

to establish humanities therapy as a new academic discipline, so that much preparation will be needed 

for its establishment as an academic area. 

The Humanities Therapy Project of Kangwon National University defines humanities therapy as the 

following: 

Humanities therapy is a new discipline that aims to develop practical humanities therapy contents by 

integrating therapeutic parts of literature, philosophy, language, and art in order to achieve the final goal 

of mental well-being. 3 

Following the definition above, the Humanities Therapy Project of Kangwon National University 

is composed of philosophy therapy, literature therapy, language therapy, arts therapy, and history of 

therapy. The project’s task is to unite the studies done in five parts and to create humanities therapy as a 

discipline. 

An academic field with therapeutic purpose gains specific identity through making its target and 

method concrete, so the more unique its target and method, the clearer its identity is. The term “therapy” 

appeared in humanities therapy does not exactly correspond to the term used in medical treatment, 

but the theory and method may be specifically applied to reality through practical activities and its 

effectiveness will be proven. From this perspective, humanities therapy is a good example of practical 

humanities. For the past five years, the Humanities Therapy Project of Kangwon National University 

has, through its research and practice, successfully spread the significance and necessity for humanities 

therapy both at home and abroad. As a result, the Humanities Therapy Project is planning to set up a 

humanities therapy course at the graduate level and the Humanities Therapy Agency of Kyungpook 

3 Ibid. 

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National University plans to set up an interdepartmental course at the undergraduate level. As such, 

humanities therapy will soon be officially taught in Korean universities. 

The Humanities Therapy Project of Kangwon National University has hosted annual international 

conferences on humanities therapy. During the 2012 conference in particular, it hosted the 11th 

International Conference on Philosophical Practice (ICPP). 4 The 11th ICPP was opened under the 

theme of “The Multiplicity of Therapeutic Practice in Philosophy and Humanities” for four days and 

45 scholars from 24 countries abroad along with 30 Korean scholars. There were four keynote lectures 

and 80 presentations made to discuss in depth the therapeutic role which philosophy and humanities 

have in modern society. The conference not only provided a venue in which humanities therapy and 

philosophical practice could be combined, but also an opportunity to review the theories and methods 

of humanities therapy developed so far. 

The Humanities Therapy Project of Kangwon National University used theories and methods developed 

in various therapeutic activities in elementary schools, local welfare centers, military camps, prisons, 

and North Korean Refugee Centers. The materials collected through these practical activities provided 

the basis to confirm and revise those therapies, methods, and models. During the third stage of research 

started from 2013, the Humanities Therapy Project will categorize the humanities therapy contents by 

humanities studies and complete the task of establishing a humanities therapy discipline. 5 

I have so far briefly explained how humanities therapy was first created and developed so far, around 

Humanities Therapy Project of Kangwon National University. Below, I will discuss the object and 

method of humanities therapy. 

3. Disease of Mind 

The object of humanities therapy is people suffering from disease of mind. Then, what exactly is 

disease of mind? The disease of mind discussed in this paper is different from mental illness or mental 

disorder and is used more broadly. This broad concept of disease of mind stands opposite to the broad 

concept of health, which can be found in the World Health Organization (WHO) Charter (1946). 

4 For more information on the 11th International Conference on Philosophical Practice & the HT2012, refer to website www. 

ht21c.org. 

5 For more information on Humanities Therapy Project, Kangwon National University, refer to website http://www.humantherapy. 

co.kr. 

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Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of 

disease or infirmity. 

Let us define “disease of body” as a state where physical well-being, as written in the WHO charter, has 

been disturbed; and “disease of mind” as a state where the mental and social well-being has not been 

fulfilled. 6 We know from experience that mental diseases have many different aspects. Youngjin Kim 

(2004) classified diseases as physical disease, mental disease, and philosophical disease. 7 According to 

his classification, mental disease may be approached from psychiatric aspect and philosophical aspect. 

For example, depression is a representative mental disease of modern man. Scientists say that severe 

depression occurs when dopamine, a kind of neurotransmitter, is secreted less than the average amount. 

If this explanation is correct, then drugs like Prozac may be used to control dopamine secretion and 

control severe depression. Albeit obvious, not all mental diseases may be subject to humanities therapy, 

and people who secrete small amounts of dopamine by nature, should get psychiatric help. However, 

it does not mean that all depression patients are in need of psychiatric help. Marinoff points out that 

depression has the following four aspects: 8 (a) problem with the brain, (b) side-effect of amphetamine 

and alcohol, (c) trauma during youth, (d) severe moral or financial dilemma. According to Marinoff, 

(a) and (b) are cases that need psychiatric help and (c) is subject to psychological treatment and 

philosophical counseling and (d) can receive philosophical counseling. If depression has such diverse 

aspects, then we would not be able to treat that disease by emphasizing just one aspect. The main object 

of humanities therapy is philosophical disease as defined by Kim and (d) as classified by Marinoff. 

Here we find the justification and need for humanities therapy. 

The disease of mind as the second level, that is, philosophical disease, is an existential disease that man 

suffers from having to live as a human. One must understand its causes in order to treat philosophical 

disease. Philosophical disease may be classified as the following: 9 

• Ontological cause: loss of purpose in life, confusion in world view 

• Epistemic cause: error in perception, error from ignorance, misuse of knowledge 

• Logical cause: formal fallacy, informal fallacy 

6 I am not saying that body and mind can strictly be separated just because the disease of body and mind can be distinguished. 

The notion of disease of mind in this paper is based on the theory of embodied mind that is actively being discussed in cognitive 

science recently. For more information on the theory, refer to A. Clark and D. Chalmers (1996), F. Valera, E. Thompson, E. 

Rosch (1991), Young E. Rhee (20008a, 2010b). 

7 Kim Youngjin (2004), pp. 36-37. 

8 L. Marinoff (1999), pp. 32-34. 

9 Young E. Rhee (2010), p. 40. 

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• Moral cause: loss of morality, lack of moral judgment standard 

• Aesthetic cause: loss of aesthetic sense, lack of aesthetic judgment standard 

The system introduced above incorporates the traditional fields of philosophy in order to classify and 

diagnose philosophical disease. Other humanities disciplines including literature have their own system 

of understanding human life, so they might suggest different classifications from the above one. Some 

might be concerned about the conceptual confusions that could occur if every humanities discipline 

introduces its own classification, but that is an unfounded worrying. Considering the fundamental and 

comprehensive nature of humanities, we should think of the variety in classification as an advantage 

and not as a weakness. In this case, we need to remember that humanities is not science (this does 

not necessarily mean that it contrasts with science either). In order to explain human life, diversities 

found in theoretical level and methodological level are essential conditions to understand and heal 

philosophical disease. 

Philosophical disease is a disease suffered by the average man. Therefore, we cannot call it a disease or 

disorder in ordinary meaning and we should not call a person with philosophical disease a “patient.” A 

person suffering from philosophical disease, on the one hand, is not clearly a patient, but on the other 

hand he is ailing from an existential disease, so conversely speaking, he is a true patient. Kim states 

that philosophical disease is more value-oriented than physical disease or psychiatric disease, and 

causes more suffering to others rather than the patient himself. From this perspective, philosophical 

disease appears as a social pathology. Kim lists Korea’s unique examples of philosophical diseases 

as chauvinistic nationalism, filial piety egoism, gang activities, distorted Juche ideology, loyalty, 

ostracism, etc. 10 

From this perspective, objects for philosophical disease can be societies as well as individuals. We have 

seen through history how a specific society lost social health for a certain period of time and showed 

pathological phenomena, for example, Hitler-led Germany from 1933 to 1945 and American society 

from 1950 to 1954 swept by McCarthyism. Many scholars have diagnosed the cause of philosophical 

disease of modern society. For example, Marcuse pointed out in One-Dimensional Man (1964) that 

Western society had developed an “overconsumption disease.” The public in a consumption-centered 

society were dazzled by advertisements and promotions and pursued objects that could fulfill their 

unnecessary needs, and gave up their dream of a better society that could have been achieved otherwise. 

Meanwhile, Byung-Chul Han stated in Tired Society (Müdigkeitgesellschaft, 2010) that modern man 

10 Kim Youngjin (2004), p. 37. 

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was living in an achievement society where endless positivity was acknowledged. Whereas traditional 

society produced lunatics and criminals, achievement society gave birth to depressed patients and 

loser due to the pressure to achieve. How could the disease of Korean society that has played a role in 

ranking Korea first in terms of suicide be explained? As Marcuse diagnosed, the cause of our society’s 

disease might be due to economic, mental bankruptcy from overconsumption. Or, the primary cause 

of suicide might be depression, and as Han diagnosed, 11 depression cannot only be analyzed from the 

perspective of “economy of self,” but be seen in the context of society. What has become clear through 

Marcuse and Han is that the causes of philosophical disease lie in social structure and that an effective 

way to heal philosophical disease is to approach it at both the individual and social levels, and that the 

focus should be on prevention rather than treatment. 

4. Teleological Model 

Until now we have examined the disease of mind and in particular philosophical disease as the object 

for humanities therapy. With this, we have answered the what-question. Now, let us take a look at the 

how-question. How can we treat philosophical disease? 

The therapy model that I will introduce in this paper is the “teleological model”. My model is based on 

two theories, which are the theory of embodied mind and the teleological explanation on action. I will 

briefly go over the two theories, and then discuss the teleological model. 

The theory of embodied mind understands the mind in relation to the body and the environment 

where the body lies. The argument that the mind is embodied must be understood ontologically and 

epistemologically. The mind is embodied ontologically means that the mind is made in the biological 

base of brain and nervous system, and therefore, this implies epistemologically that the body’s 

function must be considered in order to fully understand the mind. Because of this characteristic, the 

embodied mind theory contrasts with the substance dualism, which strictly separates the body and 

mind, or physicalism that considers the two as equal, but it can be compatible with property dualism 

or functionalism. 12 The embodied mind theory also emphasizes the role of environment where the 

mind and body function. If the body plays an important role in the process of cognition, then the 

11 Han Byung-Chul (2010), p. 26. 

12 There are different versions of embodiment. For example, Damasio (1999, 2003) and Edelman (2004) bases embodiment on 

non-reductionist property dualism but Clark’s embodiment is closer to functionalism. Cognitive science has been dominated 

by symbolism and connectionism since the 1970s. The embodied mind theory is fast rising as a third research program in the 

field of cognitive theory since the 1990s. The embodied mind theory is also called the embodied cognition, extended cognition, 

distributed cognition, situated cognition theory. 

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PI scheme can be applied to explain suicide in the following way: 

• Tom intends to save his reputation. 

• Tom considers that he cannot save his reputation unless he commit suicide. 

• Therefore, Tom attempts suicide. 

If someone asks why Tom tried to commit suicide, the proper explanation for it is that Tome tried to 

save his reputation by committing suicide. 

Von Wright’s PI scheme was proposed to explain action, but we may apply it as a therapy model. When 

the embodied mind theory and von Wright’s PI scheme are combined, we get the frame for teleological 

model of therapy. 15 The teleological model has the following four therapy steps: 

• Step 1: Write the world one is in. 

- Physical environment 

- Mental environment 

- Social environment 

• Step 2: Identify one’s purpose, intentionality, and intention. 

- Is p a real purpose or intentional object? 

- Is p a mid-point purpose and not the final one? 

- Is p worth pursuing? 

• Step 3: Write one’s moral principles or virtue system. 

Here therapist’s task is to help the visitor to start from the specific world written and reflect on the path 

to achieving purpose using the moral principle and virtue system. For the therapy to be successful, not 

only therapist’s skilled experience, but also the wisdom and willpower of the patient are also required. 

• Step 4: The visitor determines if the path he had thought of in the previous step is the true solution, 

and shares the results of the therapy with her society. 

One of the common and fatal problems that occur in counseling is that counseling ends when therapist 

15 Young R. Thee (2012). 

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thinks that visitor’s problem has been resolved, and that visitor herself also acknowledges that. But 

philosophical therapy may be not be terminated at that point, mainly because the solution that visitor 

thought of might be temporary or superficial, and not a real solution. With time, visitor may realize that 

her problem still remains. This occurs when visitor did not go through sufficient reflections in each step. 

Therefore, visitor must always go through the process of reflecting whether her problem has been truly 

resolved. When visitor’s problem has been truly resolved, she is obliged to share her experience with 

other people, and in this sense, visitor who has completed therapy, is already a humanities therapist. By 

sharing her experience with others she participates in increasing the health of her society. 

There are worksheets used in humanities therapy with the teleological model. Below is a basic 

worksheet used in the beginning stage of counseling. 

• Physical Environment 

• Psychological Environment 

• Social Environment 

Worksheet 

• _______________________________________ / reason (principle, virtue) 

• _______________________________________ / reason 

• _______________________________________ / reason 

- 

- 

- 

• Purpose 

5. Case Study 

For the past five years, I have applied the teleological model to military soldiers and prisoners, and 

tested its validity and efficiency and updated the model. Below is a therapy case report of a soldier 

who experienced serious difficulty in adjusting to military camp life. I have not used his real name, 

following counseling rules. 

* * * 

When I met Corporal Kim Cheolsu, he was 23 years old. He was of small stature and dark complexion, 

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and looked nervous. I held 13 counseling sessions with Corporal Kim over the course of one year. 

The first three sessions were spent understanding Corporal Kim’s situation, and with the exception of 

the last session, nine sessions were allocated to exploring a path from Corporal Kim’s situation to his 

purpose. 

Corporal Kim received boot training and was assigned to an infantry division artillery regiment in the 

frontline. Corporal Kim said that he and everyone at camp faced serious problems from the day he 

arrived at there. The first problem was that Corporal Kim had a weak physique and could not adjust 

to the artillery regiment. Corporal Kim weighed 59kg, so it was difficult for him to carry artillery 

weighing 20-80kg. His weakness was often pointed out during military training. His low training score 

gradually made him an outsider to his comrades. Fellow comrades who shared barracks with him 

stopped talking to him, and Corporal Kim started to become more stressed. When the problem became 

severe and evident, his battalion commander moved him to administrative division, but he could not 

adjust there either. Having dropped out of high school, he did not know well how to do administrative 

work and people ignored him, making it difficult to do work. The battalion commander then assigned 

him to ammunition management team, but he was detained at the guard house because he smoked near 

the ammunition storage during his duty. Lastly, he was assigned to the kitchen, but he got into many 

fights with lower ranking soldiers who ignored him, so in the end he was assigned to miscellaneous 

tasks without a specific position. Corporal Kim told those around him that he was deeply hurt by this 

and that he felt suicidal urges. That is when I met Corporal Kim. 

Through counseling I learned about Corporal Kim’s family situation and his childhood. Corporal Kim’s 

father had worked in a big company, but he continued to fail in stock investments, went bankrupt, and 

became an alcoholic. He was violent towards his family and tried to poison himself several times. When 

Corporal Kim was in fourth grade, his mother ran away from home because of the repeated violence of 

his father’s, and his father remarried six times. When I asked Corporal Kim if he had any girlfriends, he 

answered that he had several before entering military service, but now he had none. The longest he had 

been in a relationship was six months. What I found out from many soldiers with adjustment problems 

was that they had an unhappy childhood and no girlfriends. Corporal Kim’s time in school was rocky. 

He could not pay for school fees oftentimes and missed classes often. He only had three or four school 

friends who grew distant from him when he complained that they did not come often enough. 

Corporal Kim filled out the worksheet as following: 

• Physical environment: weak physique 

• Psychological environment: about to attempt suicide 

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• Social environment: treated as an outsider 

• Purpose: none 

My primary goal in counseling was to guide Corporal Kim to find a purpose, at least, in his military 

life. Corporal Kim said that he had never thought about what he wanted to become. He thought that 

having a dream in his life was a luxury he could not afford. Corporal Kim’s philosophical disease 

seemed to be due to ontological cause because he suffered from a loss in purpose of life or did not 

consider one. Viktor Frankl called this type of the disease of mind “existential vacuum,” 16 where its 

primary symptoms are ennui, disinterest, moral and mental confusion. Through two sessions Corporal 

Kim said that his current purpose was to safely complete his military service without causing any 

trouble. 

The therapy method that I used was to help Corporal Kim achieve his purpose in a way he enjoyed. 

Corporal Kim said that he had never voluntarily read any poem or novel by himself other than fantasy 

novels. I proposed that he tell a story pretending that he had been stranded in an uninhabited island by 

himself when his ship sank. At first, Corporal Kim was hesitant in speaking, but with time he started to 

use his imagination more freely. He would sometimes draw pictures on paper or write brief writings. 

Starting from the fourth session, he searched and printed out a picture of two men adrift on the island 

and said that one of them was himself. He said that the other man was his father, and as the story 

unfolded, he thought of situations where he could punish his father, such as making him starve. 

When he became tired of telling stories about the island, I told him the summary of Robinson Crusoe, 

read him a few excerpts and asked him what he would have done in that situation, and whether he 

agreed with Robinson Crusoe’s actions. When I asked him “What would it be like to live in an island 

alone?” he answered that “At first, it would be inconvenient but I would get used to it.” Corporal Kim 

did not feel the need for anyone else. I asked him to write down what he did after work in order to find 

out about his life in the barracks. Because he was a senior soldier he did not have to clean the barracks 

or do other miscellaneous work. He said that when everyone in the barracks watched TV, he alone read 

fantasy novels. When I asked him why he did not watch TV like the other soldiers, he said “It’s no 

fun.” 

I needed to encourage Corporal Kim to form relationships with other people. We watched the film 

Yes Man starring Jim Carrey and talked about the movie. In the beginning of the film the protagonist 

16 V. Frankl (1969), pp. 44-45. 

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continues to say “no” to everything and lives a timid life, cut off from friends. Then, his life changes 

after participating in the “Yes” seminar that states that positive thinking brings good luck. We talked 

about which life was more ideal. Corporal Kim acknowledged that the latter was more. We agreed 

at this point to devise a strategy to improve his social environment. I talked with the instructor and 

officers at camp to form an encouraging atmosphere. The first strategy was to “make one friend.” I 

asked Corporal Kim to think of one person he could befriend among any of the higher or lower ranking 

officers, and he pointed out sergeant Park Ilsu. Sgt. Park had sometimes spared some kind words to 

him. We talked about how Corporal Kim could approach Sgt. Park. Two weeks later he tried talking 

to Sgt. Park and they watched TV together at the barracks. I encouraged Corporal Kim to continue to 

try holding conversation with Sgt. Park. However, his efforts were crushed because Sgt. Park spoke ill 

of Corporal Kim in the bathroom to another person, not knowing he was there. There were difficulties 

along the way, but before Corporal Kim completed his military duty, he improved up to the point of 

playing soccer with Sgt Park and others and snacking with comrades at the store. 

The second strategy we planned was to “write to family.” Corporal Kim had a father and older sister. 

At first, he reacted negatively to this strategy, writing to his father in particular, because he thought 

that it would mean succumbing to his father. He had sometimes called his older sister over the public 

phone to ask her to send necessities to the camp, but once she sent the wrong materials, and they had 

a big fight, and he had not contacted her afterwards. I asked Corporal Kim to start by writing to me so 

that he would get used to writing letters. I said that he could write about his thoughts on the counseling 

he was receiving and any requests he had to me. The letters he wrote were sent to me through a 

noncommissioned officer. The first couple of letters were awkwardly written, but he thanked me for 

listening to him and suggested that we watch more entertaining films like Yes Man. I wrote back to 

Corporal Kim and not long afterwards he started writing to his father and older sister. His father did not 

write back to him but sent a message that he had received the letters through his older sister who came 

to visit him. 

I continued to counsel Corporal Kim for three months after he left army, but it had to stop when he 

found employment at a logistics company in Busan. My counsel to Corporal Kim was not able to reach 

the fourth and last step, but using the typical humanities methods of imagining, story-telling, writing, 

and reflecting, Corporal Kim was able to reach his goal in the army and return to society safely. 

6. Conclusion 

I examined the identity of humanities therapy through its theory, method, and case report. Humanities 

therapy heals the disease of mind, in particular philosophical disease, with the spirit and methodology 

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of humanities. The concept of philosophical disease, its classification, and teleological model are 

philosophical, but they belong to the scope of humanities therapy because they use the spirit and 

methodology of humanities. The teleological model used here will be developed into an integrated 

model afterwards by adding phenomenological, literary, and artistic factors. 

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610

The Division Trauma of Koreans and Orality Healing 

Jong Kun Kim 

Konkuk University 

1. What is Reunification Humanities? 

Academic discussions on reunification in the reality of the still-divided Korea usually take place in the 

social science field. It is true that humanities studies on reunification lack system and have only been 

sporadically conducted in the fields of literature or history. There are a few reasons humanities has been 

unable to think in earnest the issues of division and reunification. First, there is the tendency to view 

reunification as a physical process. That is, people tend to view reunification as the political and economic 

transition from the present system or structure where one ethnic race has been divided into two states into 

a single, ethnical state. Second, there is a division habitus 1 working behind the familiarity of reunification. 

While the overcoming of division and reunification is a familiar and widely-accepted concept, the 

accumulation of the division habitus deriving from state violence and self-censorship based on the mutual 

hostility between the South and the North and the competition between the two states has inhibited focus 

on the problem, induced oblivion and obstructed academic research. The third reason is a simplistic and 

romanticized understanding of reunification. Discussions on reunification in humanities have so far been a 

return to the myth of recovering homogeneity based on the sentiment of ethnical homegeneity or based on 

the ideal of building a homogeneous nation. 2 

Because of such reasons, academic discussions on reunification has until now been usually considered 

1 Division habitus is the system of tendencies and beliefs when the ruling dynamics of a ‘division order’ or ‘division structure’ 

consisting of the relations among bodies, objects and places created by the history of division are enchased in ‘bodies.’: Park 

Yeong-gyun, “A Philosophical Reflection on the Habitus of Division”, The Epoch and Philosophy, Korea Society of Philosophy, 

2010, pp. 378-379. 

2 Kim Seung-min, “Division, Reunification and Korea’s Humanities”, A Humanities Paradigm of Reunification, Seonin 

Publishing, 2011, p. 17. 

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exclusive property of the field of social science, and humanities has been unable to present a systematic 

and long-term vision on the issue of Korea’s reunification. Reunification humanities is an answer to the 

demands of the times and the academics, and it is an approach to the issue of Korea’s reunification using 

humanities research methods aiming to overcome division and reach reunification through a humanities 

mindset. As such, we have set “Reunification Humanities of Communication, Healing and Integration” as 

our agenda. 

The viewing of reunification as the building of a homogeneous state or the restoration of an ethnic race’s 

homogeneity has led to extreme violence between the South and the North. The South-North reunification 

issue turns to violence when the desire for homogeneity leads to the unacceptance of the other side’s 

differences. Therefore, humanities that ponders on how to overcome division and achieve reunification 

should first attempt to comprehend ‘the others.’ 

Communication in reunification humanities is based on the premise of ‘the otherness of others’ and points 

to a ‘teaching and learning relationship.’ Communication that acknowledges such otherness aims not for 

a ‘return to primordial home’ in the past but for the ‘building of a new reunification community’ in the 

future. 

The division of North and South has seen a history of the libido of a people desiring to achieve the dream 

of building a homogeneous state dashed in the process of modernization in the context of Japan’s colonial 

rule and leading to a clash between the left and the right which accumulated in a tragic civil war. Because 

Koreans have gone through a division trauma, we need to identify the hurt and go through a process of 

healing. Another task that reunification humanities must pursue in its efforts to overcome division and 

achieve reunification is to find the direction of healing the division trauma. 

Reunification is not merely a merging of two systems or a political and economic merger. It is a 

sociocultural integration and the merging of the ‘bodies’ of South and North, a merger of social bodies. It 

is a process of leaving the divided social body and building a new social body in a reunified society. From 

this perspective, transforming the division habitus into a habitus of solidarity and fraternity means not 

only tearing down the walls of division but ultimately transforming the two different societies of the South 

and the North and creating a united ethnic community as a future society. This can be achieved through 

communication, solidarity and overcoming differences with the power of creation. 

Reunification humanities aims to achieve the challenges of communication, healing and integration 

through a creative reinterpretation of values and ideologies based on ‘commonness and differences,’ a 

healing process of the division trauma and the transformation of the division habitus into a shared life 

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culture based on ethnicity. Not only does it aim for such systemic integration, reunification humanities 

hopes to create a sociocultural commonality that could act as an actual foundation for reunification, a life 

as a ethnic community and a social body of a reunified society. 3 

Reunification humanities presents such a future-oriented vision of reunification and sees not only the 

South Koreans as the main agents of reunification but includes the 8 million ‘Korean diaspora,’ equivalent 

to 10 percent of the domestic population. Humanities research enabling communication, healing and 

integration among Koreans all over the world is the essence of reunification humanities. 

As found in the concept of reunification humanities explained above, this paper also focuses on ‘the 

humanities of healing’ and aims to discuss the concept of division trauma, which forms a critical point of 

concern in the issue of reunification and explores ways of healing the trauma. In order to further grasp the 

realities of division trauma, this research conducted interviews with members of a group that retain trauma 

and tried to present aspects of actual trauma while also pondering the effects of healing discovered in the 

process of interviews. 

2. The Concept and Aspects of Division Trauma 

In this paper, division trauma refers to the negative effects that Korea’s division, the Korean War, the 

killing and violence that took place in the duration of the division structure and the control of the state had 

on individuals. 

Division trauma is a linking of trauma, the psychological term generally used for ‘post-traumatic stress 

disorder (PTSD),’ to the historical event of division. This is done because when using terms such as 

‘division wounds’ or ‘division scars’ to describe the negative effects caused by division, the magnitude 

of the issue is attenuated. It is hoped that by applying the term ‘trauma,’ people would understand that 

wounds from the division are real and that they should be healed. 

When viewing the formation of communication and integration among people as the essence of 

reunification humanities, the first issue that needs to be solved is the healing of the emotional wounds of 

the Korean people caused by the division. Unless the division trauma is healed first, there can be no true 

integration or reunification. 

3 Kim Seung-min, “Division, Reunification and Korea’s Humanities”, “A Humanities Paradigm of Reunification”, Seonin 

Publishing, 2011, pp. 27-32. 

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The concept of division trauma can be discussed by categorizing its collective and individual natures. 

There is the collective trauma of having our desire for a national state being thwarted in the history of 

Japanese colonial rule and division. There is also the trauma from the Korean war when conflict rose to 

a climax. Also the mutual hostility and sense of fear in society generated in both South and North Korea 

as the political powers tried to use the conflict to their advantage led to a division trauma of a collective 

nature for our people. 4 

On the other hand, there are individuals who live with post-traumatic disorders. There are those who 

personally experience the trauma of war and fear such as war veterans, people who witnesses massacres, 

those who came South during wartime, those who went to the North or were kidnapped and taken to 

the North against their will, their family members and those who defected from the North after the war. 

These are division traumas of an individual nature. When these division traumas on an individual level are 

categorized into types, one can discover aspects of a collective trauma in them. 

The division trauma has continued with the systematization of state violence and the narration of division 

that has penetrated the people’s minds and their relationships with one another. The division system and 

narration of division ironically had the trait of using the division trauma and reproducing it. The division 

trauma exists to the background of the division system and division narration influencing our daily lives 

extensively. 5 

The incidents of conflict between the South and the North while the division system continued on after 

liberation from Japan and the Korean war are almost too numerous to list. Incidents, big and small, 

that could be seen as historical and having widely influence society have taken place, from the Jeju 4.3 

Incident and the Yeosun Incident from before the Korean War to present day. Although detailed statistics 

on such incidents were not included in this paper, the following chart briefly outlines some of the most 

important incidents. 

4 Kim Seong-min Park Yeong-gyun, “A Contemporary Reflection on the Trauma of Division”, The Epoch and Philosophy 21-1, 

Korea Society of Philosophy, 2010, pp. 173-174. 

5 Lee Byeong-soo, “The Characteristics and Ethics of the Division Trauma”, The Humanities Paradigm of Reunification, Seonin, 

2011, p. 195. 

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Period Incident Region of Occurrence 

April 3, 1948 

-Sept 21, 1954 

Oct, 11, 1948 

June 25, 1950 

Oct 25, 1950 

Dec 14, 1950 

Jeju 4.3 Incident 

Yeosun 

Incident 

Breakout of 

Korean War 

Chinese 

Communist Army 

join the war 

Pulling out of 

Heungnam 

July 27, 1953 Truce Agreement 

Truce Presentday 

After 1999 

Kidnapping of 

South Korean 

fishermen 

Surge of North 

Korean defectors 

Throughout 

Jeju Island 

Honam southern 

seacoast and 

vicinities of 

Mount. Jiri and 

Mount. Baekun 

Throughout the 

Korean Peninsula 

Ethnic Koreans in 

China 

North Korea 

Throughout the 

Korean Peninsula 

Coastal areas 

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Aspect and scale of division trauma 6 

- First recorded massacre on a national level 

- At least 25,000 to 80,000 victims 

- 300,000 Jeju residents affected 

- Civilian massacre by rebels 

- Damages caused in battles with rebels 

- Plundering during the suppression of rebels 

- 1 million killed in South Korea 

- 1.13 million killed in North Korea 

- Civilian massacre by US army 7 

- Civilian massacre by South Korean army 

- Civilian massacres by People’s Court 

- 6.5 million war refugees (as of March, 1951) 

- 55,000 to 60,000 deployed prior to the Korean War 8 

- 20,000 participated in the war against the United States 9 

- 10 million family members separated 

- 450,000 war veterans 

- 200,000 war widows 

- 100,000 war orphans 

- Among 3,796 abducted South Koreans, 3,316 were 

able to return home 

- 427 kidnapped fishermen (as of Nov 2008) 10 

- Over 23,000 North Korean defectors 

The tragic trauma experience during the Korean War did not end with the war. Both South and North 

Korea punished people for guilt-by-association and caused trauma to the surviving family members. 

Even when restricting the range of guilt-by-association to immediate family members, such punishments 

increased the number of those affected by trauma four- to five-fold. 

6 Statistics on scope of casualties and damages were taken from online encyclopedias. 

7 Information on civilian massacre by US army were taken from http://www.koreanmassacres.com 

8 Kim Jung-saeng, The Secret Entry of Joseon’s Voluntary Army and the Korean War, Myeongji Publishing, 2000, requoted 

from p. 159. 

9 The Compilation Committee for Footsteps of Ethnic Koreans in China, Foundation, Beijing: Minjok Publishing Company, 

1994, requoted from p. 77. 

10 Eum Gyeong-seon·Jang Jae-hwan, The Truth about the Kidnapped Fishermen of East Sea Coast, Sorak News, 2008, 

p. 56. 

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Another point to consider is the torture that South Koreans abducted by the North (mostly fishermen) 

after the truce had to endure. As shown in the chart, almost 90 percent of the abductees were able to return 

home and it may seem their trauma was limited. However, because they had spent some time in the North, 

albeit against their will, they were stigmatized by the South Korean government. They were kept under 

surveillance and their freedom was restricted even after returning home. Even their family members had 

to suffer because of guilt-by-association. 

Whether the incident was big or small, the point of focus is that there are always people who are 

traumatized at the scene of incidents. Although not shown in the chart above, there were numerous local 

incidents involving war casualties, victims caught between pro- and anti-communist campaigns. Indeed, 

the division trauma that’s happened since the division can be seen as being nationwide. 

South Koreans have a tendency to talk about the damages done to South Koreans when we talk about the 

trauma of division. However, the Korean War was fought by both the South and the North, and the trauma 

that the North Koreans endured must also be considered. One must not forget that the guilt-by-association 

that family members of those who went North suffered in South Korea was probably similarly, if not more 

adversely, experienced by family members of those who went South in North Korea. 

In addition, the division trauma is often found in overseas Koreans as well. Many ethnic Koreans living 

in China had to join the North Korean army once the Korean War started and others were forced to fight 

in the Chinese Communist army once China decided to join the war to counter the US presence in the 

Korean Peninsula. Their trauma could also be seen as division trauma and included when considering 

the issue. Seen from this perspective, the geographical scope of the division trauma deriving from the 

division of the Korean Peninsula far exceeds the boundaries of our territories, signifying that this is a 

comprehensive issue indeed. 

According to recent statistics, the accumulated number of North Korean defectors was only about 1,000 

until 1999. This rose to 23,000 by March, 2012. Most of the later cases were those who crossed over to 

China to find food as the economic situation in the North got worse. Many of them had to live some 3 

to 4 years or even 7 to 8 years wandering around China before being able to come to the South. They go 

through much suffering during this period in China. Those who are fortunate enough to come to the South, 

again go through the painful process of assimilating into South Korean society. Their trauma could also be 

seen as trauma caused by division. Therefore, division trauma is a nation-wide, race-wide and on-going 

issue. 

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3. Methods of Orality Healing 

The diagnosis and treatment of trauma takes place through psychiatric counseling programs. Parallels for 

the diagnosis and healing of the division trauma could be found here. As such, life interviews are widely 

used and evaluated to be the most appropriate as the method of approach to division trauma. 11 

Counseling programs to treat trauma in psychiatry takes place over several sessions so that the progress 

of treatment can be observed. Similarly, in order to diagnose and heal the trauma that the interviewee has, 

the life interviews should be conducted over several sessions. The interviews should be conducted in such 

direction that the interviewee can talk about his or her life experiences. While inducing the interviewee to 

talk naturally about his or her life, interviewers will be able to detect the symptoms of trauma in the words 

and by analyzing this, verify the effects of the diagnosis and healing. 

Healing through interviews is similar to already existing storytelling or writing therapy but there is a 

difference. While orality healing and storytelling therapy are similar in that they both use speech as 

the medium, storytelling therapy usually takes the form of counseling and short interviews asking for 

fragments of memories. This is different from the narrative of life story that is found in life interviews. 

Also, while writing therapy might have the advantage of the final result being a well-structured narrative, 

there is the considerable difference that it uses writing, not speech. In oral interviews, interviewees have 

to reconstruct memories and tell their story on the spot. Writing assignments, on the other hand, give 

writers the opportunity to review their writing and express their memories in refined language. Also 

oral interviews are possible even with subjects who remain at the elementary level of oral culture are 

uncapable of expressing themselves in writing. 12 

Theoretically, trauma treatment and recovery should be conducted in three stages: the stage of establishing 

a sense of safety for the victims, the stage of remembering and expressing condolence for the situation in 

which the trauma occurred and the stage of connecting all this back to reality. According to this theory, 

oral life interviews pertain to the second stage. Remembering the situation in which the trauma occurred 

and expressing one’s feelings about it is a form of story recounting and this is what oral life interview is 

about. 

11 Kim Jong-gun, “The True Nature of Trauma as Seen through Orality”, The Journal of the Humanities for Unification 51 st Issue, 

Konkuk University Humanities Research Institute, 2011, pp. 39-41. 

12 The ‘elementary level of oral culture’ is an important concept in Walt J. Ong’s Orality and Literacy. It is a cultural level of 

perceiving the world through narrative and speaking based on memories when one is unable to read or write. 

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This is the process of persuading victims with trauma to reach deep within and draw out complete and 

detailed accounts of the trauma. Such reconstruction process transforms the memory of the trauma and 

integrates it into the life story. General memories are easily formed and easy to talk about. However, 

memories of trauma are not expressed in language and are static. First accounts of trauma are usually dull, 

stereotypical and unemotional. Untransformed trauma accounts are said to be in the pre-narrative stage. 

The story doesn’t progress with time and the speaker doesn’t express any emotions or opinions. Memories 

of trauma are often compared to still pictures or silent movies. Trauma treatment is like trying to add 

music and language to this. 13 

Human memories are formed as explicit memories once a person acquires language skills. Memories of 

trauma are cases when excessive shock leads to the memory remaining in the level of implicit memory. 14 

Treating such memories of trauma consists of transforming an implicit memory, in which physical senses, 

emotions, images are separated, into an explicit memory. It could be called the process of integrating 

pieces of emotional and sensory memories into a new coherent memory. 15 

At this point, we can once again verify that life interviews are an appropriate method for oral therapy. 

A short interview might provide some insight into the present state of the subject, but it has limits to 

understanding the subject’s innermost pain. 

A historial recounting of past experiences in chronological order is insufficient for healing trauma. Life 

interviews, because they have the traits of being fiction in that the interviewee reconstructs his or her own 

identity in present tense by expressing his or her experiences, might sound like rambling or grumbling, but 

because they include emotional memories, they are appropriate for diagnosing and healing trauma. 

13 Herman, Judith Lewis (translated by Choi Hyeon-jeong). Trauma and recovery: The aftermath of violence from domestic abuse 

to political terror, Planet, 2007, p. 292. 

14 There are two memory systems in the human brain. One is the implicit memory and the other, explicit memory. Implicit 

memories are of a subconscious level and activated immediately after birth. Having to do with the gray matters of the cerebral 

cortex, these include non-language memories such as emotional, sensory and behavioral memories. Explicit memories are 

formed at around the age of three when a child acquires language. Having to do with hippocampus, these include language 

memories such as narrative memories, autobiographical memories, memories of experience, and memories of vocabulary. 

Experience a trauma can induce a great shock that paralyzes the brain’s information system and oppress the function of the 

hippocampus which controls the storing of day-to-day memories. Instead, the gray matters are activated and made to store the 

negative memories and emotions. That is why memories of trauma are usually stored in form of implicit memories in the gray 

matters of the right-side brain. The memory of the trauma is scattered into pieces of strong sensory, imagery and emotional 

memories and stored without becoming an integrated and coherent memory. That is why it is difficult for victims of trauma 

to talk about their memories of trauma, making it difficult for them to unburden the suffering they feel (Kim Jun-ki, The 

Psychology of Healing as Seen in Movies, Sigma Books, 2009, pp. 82-83). 

15 Kim Jun-ki, The Psychology of Healing as Seen in Movies, Sigma Books, 2009, p. 83. 

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integrate it, not to exorcise it. The basic premise of psychological therapy is that truth holds the power to 

restore and recover once its spoken outloud. 17 

Ultimately, through the reconstruction of the story, the trauma becomes a ‘new story’ and no longer a 

source of ‘shame and insult’ but rather, a medal of ‘dignity and value.’ Reconstructing the event helps the 

victim ‘recover a lost world,’ 18 in the words of one actual interviewee. As such, it can be said that a life 

story containing the memories of trauma and the process of telling the story has healing effects. 

Some of the specific methods in reconstructing stories that various case studies have shown to be effective 

in healing trauma are direct exposure, flooding and testimonies. The flooding method is a conversion 

method such as role-playing. The testimonial method involves recording the interviewee’s account and 

going over the recording to connect the fragments into a cohesive testimony. The subject is then asked to 

read the testimony aloud, which has the effect of alleviating the aftereffects of fear. 

This author also witnessed similar cases in the process of publishing contents of interviews. After 

recording four sessions of life interviews with a female North Korean defector, I met with her and 

asked her to read the transcript of the recorded interviews and tell me if there were any corrections to be 

made. While reviewing her interviews, the interviewee showed signs of great pride that she was able to 

accomplish this task. She seemed impressed with herself that she was able to give such a detailed account 

of the trauma that she herself had until now been afraid to talk of. 

The testimonial method of trauma healing shows how the act of telling one’s story, or orality, can alleviate 

major post-traumatic disorder symptoms in the stage of trauma recovery. In conclusion, life interviews in 

which victims are asked to recount in detail their past experience and the shock and hurt that they felt, are 

in themselves a process of trauma healing. 

4. Diagnosis and Possible Healing of Division Trauma through Orality 

As seen above, the division trauma that has taken place inside us can be expressed through various 

symptoms. Interviews that diagnose the individual division trauma symptoms and find ways to heal 

them can lead to direct and tangible healing effects but such work takes much time and effort. Therefore, 

the task of typing and categorizing the aspects of division trauma found in sample interviews in order 

17 Herman, Judith Lewis (translated by Choi Hyeon-jeong). Trauma and recovery: The aftermath of violence from domestic abuse 

to political terror, Planet, 2007, pp. 301-302. 

18 Herman, 2007, p. 302. 

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to explore ways of healing is necessary. In this paper, we would like to present the most relevant and 

authentic cases of North Korean defectors as found among various division trauma types. 

This author has previously published a book based on records of life interviews conducted with North 

Korean defectors. 19 The interviews were not single events but conducted throughout four to five weekly 

sessions. 20 In a first-time interview, the interviewee was asked to share any oral literature that she had 

encountered while living in North Korea and her overall life experience in the North. However, within the 

first 30 minutes, the interviewee professed that she couldn’t think of anything more to say about North 

Korean folklore or culture. The interviewers then cautiously asked her about her experience of defecting 

from the North. After a pause when she seemed to be organizing her thoughts, and the interviewee started 

talking. Once she started, she talked extensively about her defection and the life she left behind in North 

Korea. She said she had started going to church since coming to the South and that she found much solace 

in religion. It seems that she has had experience giving testimonies in church about the tragic situation 

in North Korea and her defection. In the testimonies, she talked about memories she had about certain 

traumatic experiences she had gone through. However, the memories she shared were only sporadic and 

they seemed not have reached a heart-felt level of story-telling. Because life interviews ask the person to 

narrate his or her entire life, the person reconstructs the memories of trauma as he or she talks about major 

life elements such as families and marriage. 

The interviewee first tried to defect in 1997 when North Korea was going through a food shortage, 

often referred to as the March of Suffering. She was caught and sent to a concentration camp for six 

months. Her husband died during imprisonment and on her second attempt to defect in January 1999, she 

succeeded. She went into hiding in China for eight years. In 2007, she came to South Korea and was able 

to find work as a live-in housekeeper for a female professor at a theological seminary. 

The information obtained during the interviews were shocking and the interviewee herself had much 

to say, so the interview was conducted over five sessions. The interviewers were able to see the trauma 

that the interviewee harbored as she talked about her life. This author has used the term ‘North Korea 

defection trauma’ when categorizing the traits of trauma found in North Korean defectors. The traits of 

19 Kim Jong-gun Jung Jin-ah, March of Suffering, Stories of North Korean Defectors, Pakeejeong Publishing, 2012. 

20 The interviews were conducted as following. 

Dates and number of sessions : 6 weekly sessions beginning from April 9, 2010. 

Venue: Konkuk University Humanities Building Room 611 

Interviewee: Han Yeong-suk (pseudonym, 60 years old at the time of interview) 

Interviewers: Kim Jong-gun, Kim Ye-sun 

Main Topics: Life in North Korea including the experience of defecting, lifestyle in North Korea, adapting to South Korea 

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trauma found among North Korean defectors as a group can be largely categorized into separation trauma, 

state violence trauma that they endured while in the North and in China and social violence trauma that 

they experienced after coming to the South. However, the diagnosis of each individual’s trauma should 

be conducted in detail and as the diagnosis can be found in the interviews themselves, they will not be 

referred to as particular types in this paper. 

This paper aims to present examples that could count as major symptoms of post-traumatic stress 

disorders such as the repeated mentioning of a subject or exaggerated expressions of emotions as found 

in the interviews. By diagnosing these symptoms as trauma, this research hopes to find the possibility of 

healing them. 

< Case Study 1> The painful memory of getting separated from a son because of hunger 

[Interviewer: What was the hardest thing you had to go through when you were in the North?] 

The most painful days of my life were.. In the 1970s and 80s, they gave out rations, what little 

they gave, once every 15 days. Only workers could get rations. Farmers got their entire year’s food 

supply once a year in the fall. Workers included university professors, school masters, you name 

it. You got your rations twice a month and that was it. So when I was keeping house in the 70s 

and 80s, we at least got rations. But we had to live 15 days on the rations. But sometimes they’d 

only give enough for 13 days and you were still expected to live 15 days on it. They’d do that 

sometimes when the state was running short on food supplies. 

So we didn’t have things like snacks in North Korea. My child never saw snacks being sold in 

stores when growing up. He was born in 1971 and he lived without ever having seen a snack. If he 

never saw a snack, it means it was worse for children born after him. Things got much worse. 

So, in North Korea, eating rice for us North Koreans was unimaginable, something that only 

happened once in a blue moon. That’s how rare rice was. So, we got corn for our rations. That’s 

what we lived on all our lives, rations of corn. So, at least we got that in the 70s and 80s. 

But starting from 1993, I was unable to get any rations. Since ’93, no, since ’91 and ’92, you only 

got rations if the ration distribution center got any food from the state. If the distribution center got 

food that day, you got rations. If it didn’t get any, you didn’t get any. That’s how we lived. And 

then in ’94 Kim Il Sung died and we didn’t get any rations whatsoever in ’95 and ’96. No food 

whatsoever. So, in North Korea, we don’t have anything like private property. You don’t have your 

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own house, your own savings. There is no you. So if the state doesn’t give, the entire country has 

to starve. And still the state didn’t give any rations out, and that time, ’96 and ’97, were the hardest 

for me. 

And I’m saying this... if only my son was still here... I wouldn’t be saying this and bringing up 

my son... there is a reason I’m saying this. The reason this was the most painful to me was that in 

January 1997, my son left home to defect. He left in January 1997, and 1997 was the worst year 

ever in North Korea. In the summer of 1996, there wasn’t a single healthy person walking in the 

streets of North Korea. Everyone was starving. 21 

In order to make the interviewee’s story more comprehendible, the interviewers divided the story into 

chapters according to the subject and titled the chapters. Stories about hunger, food shortage, economic 

hardships accounted for 30 percent among 84 chapters. The excerpt included above is about how her 

eldest son had to cross over to China to escape the hunger. This is the story that she started with when 

asked about the hardest thing that she had to go through while living in North Korea. The late 1990s was 

called the age of the March of Suffering, when the earliest of defectors made their way over to China 

to escape starving to death. The interviewee herself defected to escape hunger. The hunger that the 

defectors felt at that time didn’t stop at the level of simple hunger. It was so severe that it was inevitably 

accompanied by fear of death by starvation. Therefore, one can conclude that the fear of death by 

starvation has left a traumatic imprint on this interviewee. To the interviewee, hunger is inextricably linked 

with death. Her husband died in prison of starvation and a neighbor to whom she was close with and who 

attempted to defect with her, also died of hunger. That is why she expressed sympathy towards a woman 

she recounts having met in prison, who was imprisoned for having killed and eaten a human. “I would 

have done the same,” she admitted. Hunger made her experience separation from her son, and this led to 

the fear of hunger that she experienced herself. 

One of the major symptoms of trauma is repetitive re-experience, and the interviewee clearly showed this 

symptom in her interview. From stories of her own experience to accounts of what she saw or heard from 

others, the keywords ‘hunger’ and ‘death’ were constantly repeated. She expressed strong anger towards 

the North Korean government, commenting that it should perish for having made its people starve to 

death like this. She even said that she wished the United States would send bomber planes to bring the 

government to a quick end. This could be seen as a state of hyper-arousal. 

21 Kim Jong-gun Jung Jin-ah, March of Suffering, Stories of North Korean Defectors, Pakeejeong Publishing, 2012, pp. 48-49. 

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The fear of dying of starvation was an ongoing fear for the interviewee. On the first day of the interview, 

at mealtime with the interviewers, the interviewee barely ate anything. She said she had gotten so used to 

starving in the North that even now, she couldn’t eat much. Even after eight years in China and two years 

in the South, she was holding on to a rigid perception that food was only necessary to alleviate hunger. 

This could be seen as another traumatic disorder. 

The interviewee’s trauma deriving from having experienced hunger became a major theme during the 

series of interviews conducted, manifesting through various subject matters. However, at the fourth 

interview, interviewers could sense that her hard-line tone had somewhat begun to soften. Although this 

softening came when she was talking about how difficult it is to adapt to South Korea’s overly competitive 

society, she repeatedly stated that she wouldn’t have left the North had she only been given a decent 

amount of corn and salt rations. 

“If they would only not arrest me for having run off to the South and if they would only give me food, I’d 

go back to North Korea.” These words showed how her perspective of North Korea, the land of hunger, 

was changing. It was changing from being an object of fear to an object of longing. Her psychological 

state, repeatedly talking about the fear of hunger and expressing pent-up anger, became alleviated with 

the repeated interviews and she relaxed her rigid view of North Korea and now saw it has a livable place 

‘if it only had food.’ Such alleviation of fear and tension is the result of having repeatedly recounting the 

memories of fear that the interviewee experienced herself and the beginning of a healing process. 

< Case Study 2> Protesting the perceived prejudice that female North Korean defectors are promiscuous 

Our professor, the professor that we are working with here, told me something when I had just 

arrived here two years ago. One evening she said to me, 

“We need to educate North Korean defectors on relationships and teach them the virtue of chastity. 

So many North Korean women have husbands back home and still find men to live with when 

staying in China and then go on to find new husbands here in the South. This is shameful behavior 

for Korean women. So many North Korean women seem to be unaware of this.” 

That’s what she said. Now, our professor is a highly-respected person. But I immediately 

responded, 

“Professor, don’t say such things. Who are you trying to teach about chastity? You should try 

walking in their shoes. How dare you say such things without having gone through what they did? 

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Chastity is a luxury in situations of life or death. How could you teach women who’d gone through 

such situations without having experienced it yourself? Would they listen to you? Would they hear 

your words? You would be insulting them.” 

That’s what I said. And our professor, she’s a good person, she said, 

“You’re right” 

and she listened to me. Then she said, 

“You’re right. You’re absolutely right. I shouldn’t have said that.” 

That’s how I stopped her from saying such things. 

So I said, 

“How dare you try to educate people on ethics without having gone through the things they have 

and lived in the environment they have? How dare you try to preach? It’s preposterous.” Am I not 

right? That’s what I told the professor. Don’t ever do that. That’s what I tell all South Koreans. 

“Don’t you try to preach without knowing what you’re saying.” 

Am I not right? Am I wrong? I am saying everything I want to say here. I’m saying this because 

you’re listening and understanding. I heard about someone who had to live in a household where 

there were several unmarried brothers and she had to sleep with all of them in turn. That’s how 

women are being sold in China. 22 

The interviewers could perceive throughout the interview the respect and gratitude that the interviewee 

felt towards this female theology professor who supported her after her arrival in South Korea. However, 

in the excerpt included above, the interviewee showed an outburst of emotions. The professor was a 

figure she respected and the person who gave her a job, but the interviewee could barely control her 

feelings when she showed fierce, almost-furious resentment towards her for taking issue with the concept 

of chastity among female Northern Korean defectors. She was strongly rejecting the professor because 


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she felt the professor was taking issue with the human trafficking and sexual assaults that female North 

Korean females become vulnerable to while staying in China. There is no evidence to point that the 

interviewee or her daughter had been placed in such situations. However, in her interview, she mentioned 

how parents would tell their daughter, who driven by hunger attempted to cross the Dumangang river, to 

stay alive at whatever cost, even by selling herself. She went on to say how no parent would ever blame 

their daughter if she was forced to sell herself to survive. The interviewee recounted in tears a story she 

said she had first heard from a woman she met when hiding in China. A young couple escaped by crossing 

the Dumangang river, leaving their elderly parents and four-year-old son behind. They pretended to be 

siblings, and when the wife was sold to a Chinese man, she had to sleep with her new ‘husband’ while 

her husband could only watch in silence. Although it wasn’t a trauma that she herself experienced, the 

interviewee identified herself with the victims of sexual assault or at least felt a strong bond to them when 

hearing their tragic stories. 

The most common trait of post-traumatic stress disorder experienced after being sexually assaulted is the 

repeated alternation between hyper-arousal (a state of increased tension marked by such psychological 

effects as anxiety, anger and fear and physical effects as quickened heartbeat and breathing) and hypo- 

arousal (a state of dulled reaction marked by a lack of emotions and slow heartbeat and breathing). 23 

When the interviewee, who was usually gentle-mannered, expressed explosive anger towards the female 

professor, whom she had talked about with great respect until now, it could be understood that she was 

experiencing a state of hyper-arousal. The interviewee continued in this state throughout the interview. 

She would mimic the angry tones in her story while glaring at the interviewers and she showed shortness 

of breath. The interviewee, while not having been sexually assaulted herself, had been directly impacted 

by the trauma that the collective group of her fellow female North Korean defectors had experienced and 

this had left imprints on her. 

The point at the end of the interview when the interviewee appealed to the interviewers to agree to what he 

or she said is a window into exploring the clues to healing trauma disorders. “Am I not right? Do you hear 

me? I am pouring out my heart here. I feel like I can say anything because you listen and understand.” 

Such an appeal could be interpreted as an expression of will by the interviewee that she wanted to unload 

all the pent-up anger inside now that she felt a certain bond with the interviewers. This is similar to the 

results of the healing effects of a testimony. The interviewee felt secure enough at this point that she 

could talk about all the painful memories she was harboring inside. This could be recognized as a point of 

healing in orality healing. 

23 Kim Jun-ki, The Psychology of Healing as Seen in Movies, Sigma Books, 2009. p. 143. 

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Case Study 3> Discovering leisure after coming to South Korea 

It was last summer. I went to the outdoor market as usual, this place called Gildong Market. It’s 

a marketplace with shops lined on both sides. I went to the market to do some grocery shopping 

because every month, I hold a party for a group of fellow North Korean defectors at my place. So 

I was walking around the market shopping for groceries, and there were these two middle-aged 

women. They seemed to be in their forties and they were walking towards my direction. As they 

were passing me by, one woman turns to the other and says, 

“Hey. Let’s go to my house and share a bowl of cold noodles.” 

That’s all she said. 

But when I heard those words, I suddenly felt numb. My head felt like it was swirling. And then, I 

couldn’t remember where I was or why I was holding this bag and which direction I was headed to. 

I felt completely numb. All in the middle of the market, the moment I heard those words. I thought 

to myself, 

‘What am I doing? People are going to stare at me. I should get going but I don’t know where I 

came from and where I should go.’ 

I was so flustered. But when I told this to the professor, she didn’t seem to understand. 

“Why?” she asked. 

So I came [to the interview] and said, 

“I heard those words and it felt like my heart stopped beating all of a sudden.” 

And the professor asked, 

“Why?” 

You know- we were never able to say those words all our lives. 

“Hey, let’s go to my house and share a bowl of cold noodles.” 

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How my heart froze at these words (sobbing). So I said to the professor today, I feel so wronged. 

I am a good-natured person, I have a lot of friends. But in North Korea, in this country the words, 

“come to my place and share a bowl of cold noodles,” don’t exist. These words don’t exist there. 

So when the two women said those words and passed me by, I felt so emotional. You know, 

professor, the two women said those words and passed me by and those words hit me square in my 

heart and I couldn’t remember which way I was supposed to go at the moment. I stayed stuck in 

the same place for a long time, toing and froing.“ 

That’s how it was. That’s how we lived. We did. If we ever got a bowl of noodle to cook, we had to 

feed our children first. I couldn’t possibly ask my friend while walking outside, 

“Come in and have a bowl of noodles before you go.” 24 

The interviewee would often refer to the hunger she had felt in North Korea and talk about times when 

she would suddenly feel dull while going about her day even after coming to South Korea. She talked 

about a time when she had gone to the market and felt her senses go dull when overhearing a conversation 

between two middle-aged women. It was a simple conversation in which one woman invited the other to 

her home to enjoy a meal of a bowl of cold noodles. These words, however, had a flashback effect and 

made the interviewee recall her days of suffering back in North Korea. She talked about the time when 

she witnessed her neighbor die of starvation but wasn’t able to share her measly portion of corn stew. 

She also recalled how she had no money to go to the funeral of the elderly neighbor who had been her 

midwife when she gave birth. The conversation between the two women in which one offered to share her 

food with the other must have triggered flashback memories of the interviewee’s tragic past experiences. 

When she overheard the two women, she suddenly lost her sense of reality and couldn’t remember where 

she was, what she was doing there and where she was headed to. 

When considering that avoidance and numbness are two major symptoms of trauma disorders, one can 

diagnose this situation as the manifestation of such symptoms. Ultimately, the interviewee, upon returning 

home, appealed to the female professor who was conducting the conversation that she had no other choice 

but to do what she did while her trauma remained. Such aspect can also be understood as an aspect of 

trauma healing in orality healing. The act of recounting the injustice one is suffering at the time of the 

trauma and asking for sympathy is a good example of how an orality situation can be used for healing. 


628

5. Remaining Problems 

The above-mentioned examples are classical displays of the major symptoms of trauma found in an 

interviewee’s oral account of his or her life experience. Such examples of trauma are manifested diversely, 

differing from individual to individual. However, these need to be categorized if they are to be generalized 

as the collective trauma of North Korean defectors instead of being seen as personal experiences of 

individuals. This author has previously attempted to categorize the accounts of the North Korean defectors 

into types. 

The trauma that North Korean defectors showed could be categorized into dispersion trauma, state 

violence trauma, social violence trauma, etc. Such categorization was overly broad and not adequate to 

be applied in specific cases of healing. Further detailed categorization was required. For example, the first 

case study dealing with fear of starvation could be typed as trauma of death by starvation. The second case 

study could be typed as trauma of human trafficking. Other commonly-found trauma types found among 

North Korean defectors were traumas originating from injuries sustained while being chased by the 

Chinese security police, from the fear experienced when crossing the Dumangang river and when crossing 

the Mekong River. It is this author’s opinion that such categorization would contribute to formulating 

methods of diagnosis and treatment of division trauma for orality healing. 

Literature, which focuses on narration, captures a different point from the study methods of orality that 

other social sciences such as sociology, anthropology and history emphasizes. These disciplines focus 

on recreating the narrative through the recollections that the interviewee experiences himself or herself. 

However, in the actual practice of investigating orality, it was discovered that the interviewee talked 

about other people’s experiences in almost equal amounts as about her own experience. Rarely did the 

interviewee show objectivity just because it was someone else’s story. As in the second case study, the 

interviewee put in her own emotions and evaluations into these stories. There were also times when 

listening to or recounting stories of those sharing her own tragic fate, she would experience similar or 

same trauma symptoms. Further deliberation is needed on how to process this aspect. 

References 

Kim Gui-ok et al, Memories of a War: The Orality of the Cold War, Seonin, 2008. 

Kim Gui-ok, “The Life Experiences and Identity of Defectors to South Korea in Settlements-Based on 

Sokcho ‘Abai Village’ and Gimjae ‘Yongji Farm’”, Seoul National University Ph. D. dissertation, 

1999. 

Kim Gui-ok, Separated Families, neither anti-communist warriors nor communists…, Yeoksabipyeongsa, 

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2004. 

Kim Seong-rye, “A Methodical Reflection of Feminist Orality”, Feminist History Writing: Study Methods 

of the History of Orality, Arche, 2012. 

Kim Seung-min, “Division, Reunification and Korea’s Humanities”, A Humanities Paradigm of 

Reunification, Seonin Publishing, 2011. 

Kim Seong-min Park Yeong-gyun, “A Contemporary Reflection on the Trauma of Division”, The Epoch 

and Philosophy 21-1, Korea Society of Philosophy, 2010. 

Kim Jong-gun, “The True Nature of Trauma as Seen through Orality”, The Journal of the Humanities for 

Unification 51 st Issue, Konkuk University Humanities Research Institute, 2011. 

Kim Jong-gun, “The Memories of Ppalchisan as Seen in the Lives of Women from the Jirisan Vicinity”, 

The Journal of the Humanities 47 th Issue, Konkuk University Humanities Research Institute, 2009. 

Kim Jong-gun, “The Historical Trauma of North Korea Defectors and the Manifest Aspects of the 

Defection Trauma”, The Historical Trauma of Koreans, Seonin Publishing, 2012. 

Kim Jong-gun Jung Jin-ah, March of Suffering, Stories of North Korean Defectors, Pakeejeong 

Publishing, 2012. 

Kim Jun-ki, The Psychology of Healing as Seen in Movies, Sigma Books, 2009. 

Kim Jung-saeng, The Secret Entry of Joseon’s Voluntary Army and the Korean War, Myeongji Publishing, 

2000. 

Park Gyeong-yeol, “The Relative Truth of the 4.3 Incident as Seen in the Lives of Jeju Women”, The 

Journal of the Humanities 47 th Issue, Konkuk University Humanities Research Institute, 2009. 

Park Yeong-gyun, “A Philosophical Reflection on the Habitus of Division”, The Epoch and Philosophy, 

Korea Society of Philosophy, 2010. 

Park Chan-seung, The Korean War in Villages, Dolbegae, 2010. 

Eum Gyeong-seon·Jang Jae-hwan, The Truth about the Kidnapped Fishermen of East Sea Coast, Sorak 

News, 2008. 

Ong, Walter J. (translated by Lee Ki-woo·Lim Myeong-jin), Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of 

the Word, Moonye Publishing, 1995. 

Lee Byeong-soo, “The Characteristics and Ethics of the Division Trauma”, The Humanities Paradigm of 

Reunification, Seonin, 2011. 

Lee Im-hwa, War Widows, Breaking the Silence in Korea’s Modern History, Chaekgwahamkke, 2010. 

Herman, Judith Lewis (translated by Choi Hyeon-jeong). Trauma and recovery: The aftermath of violence 

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The Compilation Committee for Footsteps of Ethnic Koreans in China, Foundation, Beijing: Minjok 

Publishing Company, 1994. 

630

Deficiency, Expression and Mind Healing: 

Focusing on Selective Mutism 1 

Sunmi Hong 

Wonkwang University 


We intend to look for ways to apply humanitarian mind healing using psychoanalysis through explorative 

research into deficient and hurting minds and into selective mutism, which manifests itself when the 

deficiency affects self-expression. 

The object of healing in this context is the mind hurting from the relations that are formed from the 

moment when a human, a social animal, is born. A human being establishes not only organic but inorganic 

relations; and the mind gets hurt when there is a deficiency of something – when the desire, or what a 

human wants, is not fulfilled from relations as relations fall apart or become distant. Therefore, the hurting 

mind affects relation either causally or consequentially and influences a society where such relations are 

formed. 

When we heal the mind, the subject looks for a way of healing from the pain arising out of deficiency, in 

other words the shortage that the subject experiences from the social relation. This takes into consideration 

the nature of humans as social organisms and puts emphasis on the importance of social health of humans, 

which is determined by relations. It is needless to say that social health is one of the preconditions to a 

healthy state as the WHO’s definition on health includes not only physical and mental health but also ‘social 

well-being.’ 

From the moment when a human starts to exist, he is no longer alone but forms a relationship with an 

1 This paper received 2010 government grant (Academic Research Project Fund of Ministry of Education, Science and 

Technology) from the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2010-361-A00008). 

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object. Therefore, relations hold an undetectable presence to human being. From the linguistic perspective, 

even when relations are terminated, it shall be described as ‘severed relation’ or ‘non-existent relation.’ 

Health related to social relation is important especially for modern day humans who lead their basic 

biological life through social activities - economic activities - evolved from primitive or outdated ways 

of life. Such relations can be said to be ultimately founded on the relationship with family members. It 

has already been proven by a number of scholars that someone who has healthy family relations during 

childhood leads a healthier life in a society where many more relations are formed. 

We intend to define the hurting mind arising from the relational deficiency from a psychoanalytic 

perspective and to explore ways to address physical pain resulting from such a mind. 

From Sigmund Freud, who, as the founder of psychoanalysis, provides the foundation for our study, 

to the more contemporary Jacques Lacan, it has been pointed out that the unconscious experience of a 

person with a family during his childhood has a widespread affect on his sexual instinct, personality, 

social behavior as well as his creative activities or creation. If the unconscious experience is unfortunately 

a traumatic one, sometimes from the etiological context, such experiences stay dormant in a child as 

if a screen of memory and is expressed in a negative manner - for example, a neurotic episode. 2 The 

motivated trauma may represent itself in various symptoms; but it is also directly present or implies itself 

as maintaining close relations with the event that caused the trauma. While various phenomena including 

symptoms may confuse the investigation into cases, neurosis - for example, hysteria - always talks about a 

specific event. 3 

In order to address neurotic symptoms, Freud suggested that when a patient is made to remember the 

event causing the hysteria, to refresh the feelings associated with the event, to describe the event in most 

details as possible and verbally express the feelings, the symptoms disappear and do not reoccur. In other 

words, for successful treatment, psychological processes carrying the emotion at the time of occurrence of 

the traumatic event should be verbally expressed. 4 It is not easy, however, to recount the event, much less 

to express the feelings of a traumatic event. Moreover, when the response or retaliatory feelings stay with 

the patient over time, remaining in the memory, it is not easy to find the correct expression for the original 

feeling. Therefore, it is difficult for the subject to completely know the feeling when the traumatic event 

2 Sigmund Freud et J. Breuer, Études sur l’hystérie, PUF, 1956, pp. 1-2. 

3 «Un trauma est toujours suspect […] Vous ne pouvez jamais êre sû qu’un souvenir n’est pas souvenir-éran. […] un 

souvenir tel qu’il est imaginairement revéu – ce qu’est un souvenir-éran – est toujours suspect. Une image bloque toujours 

la véité.» in «Conféences aux Université nord-améicaines; Yale University, Kanzer Semina», Jacques Lacan, Scilicet n° 

6/7, 1975, pp. 7-31. 

4 Sigmund Freud et J. Breuer, Études sur l’hystérie, PUF, 1956, p. 4. 

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occurred. Lacan suggested that a trauma is a ‘defective knowing (un savoir défaillant)’ without knowing 

what ‘I’ think. 5 

Therefore, to Lacan, when a trauma that suddenly surfaces cannot be described with words, it no longer 

is symbolic, and the trauma becomes a linguistic deficiency. You cannot say everything. As soon as it is 

spoken with words, a gap starts to exist in the reality of the event. It is deficiency of signifiers in linguistic 

structures. Structurally, a deficiency in others (S(A/)). 6 While humans are ‘speaking beings’ that create 

fragments of trauma, they are traumatized with the words being said. When faced with practical functions, 

trauma inherently becomes deficiency. The subject who does not wish to speak is born another way, 

sometimes using a means called symptoms. Freud’s Wolf Man had nightmares of wolves and trees due to 

his complex relationship with his father, but the trauma prevented him from doing anything: Lacan pointed 

out that in a situation where nothing can be done, there only was an act, not any behavior or action, 7 which 

in a Lacanian sense J. Miller expresses as suicide of the subject. 8 Miller, however, stressed that the subject 

is born in a different way. That is, to be born again in others, put linguistically, ‘you are.’ But the trauma is 

not expressed with words or symptoms. The trauma goes through the process of suffering and suppression 

coming from the situation that does not allow any movement or action, or is demonstrated as hysteric 

symptoms. For example, trauma results in physical symptoms as paralysis of face, and/or limbs, as well as 

autism, or linguistic barriers as was evident in Freud where he spoke in Latin losing his mother tongue of 

German. 

They are kinds of neurotic symptoms, a responsive mechanism to a situation. 

Here, we will apply the healing method of transitioning signifiers of deficiency which is demonstrated 

as symptoms into expressions with images. This is to give an opportunity for fragmented images of 

memories, which are hovering in the unconsciousness of a subject without finding the signifiers of 

languages or the difficult system of symbols that fails to form a sound to be expressed not with language 

but with other means. 

Such images recreate the conditions of traumatic experience and represents cries of the hurting mind and 

the earnest desires of a patient with trauma, going through the process of healing the mind by filling or 

removing the gap - deficiency - in the extension of the signifiers turned into words. 

5 Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, Livre XVI, D’un Autre à l’autre, Paris, Seuil, 2006, p. 274. 

6 Jacques Lacan, Ecrits, Paris, Seuil, 1966, p. 818. 

7 Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, Livre XI, Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse, Paris, Seuil, 1973, p. 50. 

8 Miller J. - A., «Jacques Lacan : remarques sur son concept de passage à l’acte», Mental, Paris, avril 2006, n°17, p. 21. 

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2. Childhood and Registration of Image 

It is relations that cause motivation among the subject and works as a foundation. Under relations, desire 

is created, and desire with the instinct for expression is demonstrated through creative activities or creation 

itself. The relation between image and desire of the latter is mutual motivation and result. Symbolic images 

are vivid memories of subjects focused with instinctive desires. Symbols with more vivid symbolism 

are results of more vivid memories. The images, whether unconsciously or consciously, are recreation of 

fragmented scenes from traumatic conditions and scars with traumatic traces. Images are spread out as 

fragmented memory and give identity to the represented. 

In the process, the gap of the deficiency links the fragments 9 like welding, and it glides among the gaps to 

allow the sound submerged in the sea of silence to vocalize. The sound will be verbalized. The meaning of 

signifier and signified will be delivered to us more clearly. Along the process, we can expect a treatment 

effect on selective mutism as a symptom of a hurting mind by using psychoanalysis and art therapy. 

The traumatic period we choose is childhood. Both Freud and Lacan gave meaningful consideration for 

both time and field in the process where unconscious desire becomes motivation. It includes implications 

from the tragedy of the Oedipus complex. One is the childhood and the other is where there is a transition 

from unconscious to Oedipus exit, or the family that creates the incestuous desire. 

As image is related with desire, it can be a path leading us to unconsciousness. If the image maintains 

expression of unconscious desire, signifies relations and is from the period when the childhood desire is 

registered, it will not be difficult for us to find the trace of traumatic experience of childhood when we 

analyze and interpret the drawings of the client. 

Desire is destined to accompany deficiency. The desire is expressed through creation or creative activities. 

The relation between image and desire is mutual motivation and consequence at the same time. It is the 

period when a person feels deficient in linguistic ability and in expression as well as experiences the reality 

where deficiency and the bulging desire for expression is oppressed. It is also a childhood where a person 

has such unconscious and traumatic experience as to feel that the unconsciousness does or tries to castrate 

oneself. It is also a period where the unconscious mental mechanism of the superego is being created: as 

restrictions and taboos are learned without clearly knowing the interpretation, analysis or logic of the cause 

and effect and reasons; guilty conscience is experienced; and oppression starts to kick in. 

9 Michel Lapeyre, Clinique freudienne, Paris, Anthropos, 1996, p. 15. 

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According to Antoine Vergote, the analysand who returns to his childhood during the process of creation 

- the event reoccurs to the analysand and he draws his childhood - dreams of a child through a drawing. 10 

In the process, whether it is something that exists or a vehicle to lead, many surrounding aspects are 

interpreted as signals for the relationship between a child and a mother. What is created into an image 

can be interpreted as symbol of mother. For example, the image of a house that is being recollected along 

with one’s childhood is a memory of old and recent relationship with one’s mother. The image is filled 

with the value of affection created from the history of the relationship. But at the same time, the image 

may carry significance through such various experiences as departure to unfamiliarity, return, internal 

closure and opening. It is like a door being opened for lost time, and it starts to let its presence known as 

if something completely new has taken the place of the existing which was there meaninglessly without 

being recognized. 

Therefore, the image drawn by the analysand provides a style and an implication from a distant childhood. 

The image drawn reflects his current feelings and the history that he experienced. The feelings from all 

relations and the mood of relations are being visualized into the image. That is why interpreting a child’s 

drawing is like interpreting the mother who is significant to the child. It is like interpreting the family 

relation. 

3. Deficiency and Creator 

When a subject loses something that he desires or has some deficiency, the subject will represent the object 

of desire or the deficiency as vacant. If the subject is still at the stage of linguistic deficiency not to mention 

the stage of recollection, the ‘place of object’ will be a gap or a pit like a black hole, instead of being an 

aesthetic emptiness. The gap/pit must be the consequence of desire and obsession coming from ones own 

deficiency as if the empty space in the image. 11 In her paper ‘In Work of Art and the Leap of Creator,’ 

Melanie Klein took an example of the absence of a mother’s image to infer that the subject launches a 

vicious attack and destroys the implication of the shape of his mother. Of course this case involves hatred 

accompanying the love for his mother. To a child, the metaphysical world of the mother’s body represents 

hostility or paranoia. In Melanie Klein’s theory, a premature oedipal desire gives rise to the obsession 

of fear of castration in boys and girls who are terrified of stealing the implication of the father’s penis or 

mother’s body. The obsession will come from the fear of being alone from the ‘loss of love’ and ‘loss of the 

object of love.’ 

10 Antoine Vergote, La Psychanalyse à l’épreuve de la sublimation, Paris, Les Editions du CERF, 1997, p. 167. 

11 Mélanie Klein, Essaie de la psychanalyse 1921-1945, Paris, Payot, 1968, pp. 259-261. 

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The lack of the image of a mother is like a stage where an image of a mother is not expressed due to 

obsession with the mother. Avoidance from mentioning the mother may represent advanced obsession 

with the mother. When a girl who is afraid of her mother’s physical attack does not look at her mother, the 

obsession is being emphasized. The existence of true loving mother is diminished by the fear of an awful 

one. Such implied image stays at the child’s current existence, at the present state of a child with symptom. 

At a later state, the implication of fear evolves. Instead of fearing for maternal attack, change occurs due to 

the loss of a true mother and what the girl is truly fearful for is being left alone, abandoned. At this, Melanie 

Klein gives an analogy that the most spectacular painting on a painter’s wall is sold. It is the loss of a space 

formerly filled. It was made empty. But the space has not disappeared. The space is still there. What has 

disappeared from the subject is an entity that has moved to a different place instead of expiring. On the 

other hand, didn’t you want the wall to be made empty? How can you describe the empty wall with words? 

In the inner side of a female subject, the meaning of the empty space is like herself with some deficiency. 

But wasn’t the empty space formerly filled? The empty wall cannot be filled with emptiness and it may 

return despondency to her. “The empty space” was a space in itself and therefore is an existence. A space 

inside the owner may be the feeling as if something is missing from one’s body. The empty space, which 

was once felt as something that cannot be made whole, is filled. When you look at the wall and imagine a 

painting on it, even if you want to get rid of it again, the act of imagining refills the wall. It is the intention 

of the reaction that follows the destroyer’s desire to recreate. This is how “a painting is a means for 

recreation.” Therefore an empty space becomes a space for correction, desire to transform into something 

good, psychological bias toward mother, recreation of such bias, and the recognition of a need to draw. 

Clearly, the action of a creator has the function of corrector to a subject. The correction, however, is 

dependent on intervention of ego as well as instantaneous and relative correction of an object - even when 

without the impulse of instinct. And the object, in this instance, is the narcissistic self that loves oneself that 

forms a part of the subject. In the end, correcting an object is to correct the subject himself. 

4. Deficiency and Desire Conspired with Image 

To speak about Lacan’s image of desire, the image is explained through its relation with the object that 

induces deficiency or castration. The image carries the relations where deficiency causes desire and desire 

gives rise to deficiency. To a psychoanalyst, “human desire is desire for the others.” 12 While to Freud, the 

object of desire is from the lost object; to Lacan, petit a. The desire holds libido and becomes libidinal desire. 

12 Jacques Lacan, “Introduction à la structure de l’angoisse”, L’ Angoisse, Séminaire X, PUF., 1982, p. 32. 

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Proceedings 

5. Selective Mutism from Deficiency 

The author intends to focus on loss of words, especially selective mutism out of various reactions related 

to traumatic experience. The research will begin by stressing selective mutism as a kind of reaction from 

traumatic experience. 

While temporary or selective aphasia in a child may represent serious neurosis of autism, an adult may 

demonstrate pretend aphasia related to depression or autistic condition. Compared to the complete loss of 

speech, or aphasia, selective mutism is loss of speech when faced with one or many particular situation(s) 

combined. The psychoanalysis finds the period or location where such symptoms, which are still being 

discovered, are established on childhood and family which is of the highest interest as the period and 

location for forming unconscious experience. 14 Moreover, selective mutism may be demonstrated in front 

of a particular person. While the symptoms of selective mutism are not often recognized at home during 

childhood, they tend to intensify when the child starts to attend a school, where the symptoms are identified 

by teachers. This means that selective mutism is demonstrated in a way that a child with a good command 

of language in front of family members or someone familiar does not or cannot speak temporarily or to a 

particular person. Many people who experience mutism actually complain lack of speech in a particular 

situation. 

It can be viewed as a neurotic symptom and a kind of response mechanism toward a condition. While 

temporary or selective aphasia in a child may represent serious neurosis of autism, an adult may demonstrate 

pretend aphasia related to depression or autistic condition. 

It is an exemplary demonstration of a theory on neurotic mechanism which helped establish Freud as a 

prominent psychoanalyst. Selective mutism that entails such Freudian interpretation and Lacan’s linguistic 

deficiency can be viewed as the mind hurting. 

There are many causes for selective mutism from a number of clinical cases. Historical causes include 

neurotic response of the child’s family, namely unresolved psycho dynamic conflict with an overly 

protective mother or stern and emotionally distant father. Also, early trauma or change in the environment 

can be identified as a clear inducer for the condition. Recently, attempts have been made to connect selective 

mutism in a child with social phobia in adults, and studies are under way to interpret it as a symptom or 

subtype of anxiety disorder or social anxiety in childhood. Such hypotheses have the tendency to view 

14 Judith A. Yanof, Langage, Communication, and, transfrence in child Analyse I. Selective mutisme: The Medium is the 

message II. Is child Analysis really analysis?”, Journal of the American Psychoanlytic Association, 44:79-119, 1996. 

638

children as excessively shy and withdrawn and rigid in social context. 

Therefore, there is a possibility to explore selective mutism on the basis of psychoanalytic theory. As the 

study of psychoanalysis has interest on the subject and object (Object a), to put it differently, the relationship 

between the subject and the object of desire, it can be an attractive methodology for the purpose of research 

that values relations. 

The intended approach is to apply the process of addressing symptoms that can be treated as a result of 

traumatic experiences to the analytic process of psychoanalysis. That is, based on the theory of deficiency, 

to apply to patients of selective mutism the analytic process of healing a hurting mind by encouraging the 

patient to speak about one’s traumatic experience where he cannot respond or intends to retaliate against and 

to express the object of one’s deficiency/desire. Expression of the object of deficient desire leads to treatment 

of one’s neurotic symptom. Art supplies will be used to utilize images in the process of leading deficiency 

into expression. 

The author intends to introduce the method of mind healing with a case of selective mutism. The case of P 

(age 14, female, middle school student) is a classic example of the concept of DSM-IV that defines selective 

mutism. Like many other cases, P’s selective mutism was identified by teachers whom she met when she 

first entered nursery and elementary school. The initial treatment started 3 years from when the parents were 

first notified of the problem. The treatment was resumed when P was in middle school. My encounter was 

during the period of second treatment. P was diagnosed with selective mutism by a doctor. I intend to stress 

the need for support and cooperative medical treatment from medicine to enhance humanitarian healing. I 

started the healing process based on the medical diagnosis of a doctor. I intend to analyze the image shared 

by P and identify the direction of the mind healing. 

P did not speak during classes and was extremely shy. She has a grandmother, both parents and a younger 

brother. There was no particular aspect in family relation that might have caused the social problem. 

Therefore, healing just like any other analysis began ambiguously without knowing the reason. The only 

prior information was from the mother that P could not talk out of shyness. As the case did not have any 

consciously identified family problem, I decided to take the analysis process to first encourage P to use 

drawings without giving any keywords and afterward explain the drawing with words. 15 

15 The author intends to put strict restriction on detailed description on the healing process and personal details of the client 

as the intention of introducing the case is to highlight the ‘deficiency’ and inner world demonstrated by the image rather 

than focusing on the actual research case. 

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The objective of healing was to improve the ability to respond spontaneously and to express herself by 

providing P with a sense of security and trust as she complained that when she was asked a question during 

class she felt terrified and could not speak. Healing in the cognitive perspective helped her to recognize that 

various interpretations and responses are possible for a situation or an event and provided her with the sense 

of security and confidence that her response could be right and that during the healing process any mistake 

or fault should not be a problem. It was also recognized that at school a mistaken response or an error does 

not bring about significant responsibility or shame, and discussions also accompanied to help P be aware 

of the mistaken response or error among colleagues. In order to improve her ability to respond quickly, to 

boost confidence, to choose the most relevant response by diversifying her response, we chose to apply such 

a method, as thematic drawing test images of the suggested subject are drawn with various interpretations. 

Behaviorally, I encouraged P to make big movements or loud sounds to infuse her with confidence and to 

provide behavioral healing. They were done on P only without the help of parents or school. 

The images from the healing process prove our psychoanalytic theory. Pic 1 shows that P was withdrawn 

and lacking confidence as the size of the small house in HTP suggests. P refused to draw any person. During 

the second session, when I encouraged her to draw a person, she drew characters (Pic 3). Next was to 

prepare a name tag. P also drew a character, not a person, and wrote ‘what are you looking at’ suggesting 

high passivity in exposing herself and gave herself a comical nickname. The nickname demonstrated playing 

with the signifier of her name by adding an “o” sound, which is like the middle syllable of “ko-yang-i(cat).” 

In particular, the rather bold expression, ‘what are you looking at,’ seemed to express her inner aggression. 

The phrase and the satisfactory smile on the character’s face were impressive. It was in stark contrast with 

her speech pattern, which was so quite that special attention was needed to hear her, and her extremely 

careful attitude, timid laugh or smile. Afterward, P asked if she could draw something she liked, and she 

drew a cat (Pic 5) with her full name clearly under it. To gauge her sociality, I gave her paper and a medium 

that only had symbolic representation. Also, inside the school that P created was a cat. Though small in size, 

it was a cat that gazes down at her school. P said she thought about cats often at school. P also said that her 

relationship with friends at school was at a level that did not give her any stress, stating that she could find 

meaning and calm from gazing and observing them. When P did decalcomania to freely express her inner 

world (Pic 7), she expressed the image as “an Amazon forest with the sea and the sun circling around.” 

When given the theme of fishbowl utilizing the symbolic connection of the signified and asked to draw a 

family of fish (Pic 8), P exposed signifier of fish family members with various facial expressions and of two 

fish expressing love. Next, when presented with an apple tree with various shapes of apples, P expressed her 

relationship with the family without any filter. Unlike before, P took the initiative in explaining her family 

members and became more active and engaged. P was given an opportunity to express her idea on ‘man and 

woman,’ that is, the inner world of sexual value (Pic 10, 11). When given the idea of a room door being open 

and the thematic image, P drew her cat (Pic 12). P explained that it was her cat that her grandmother killed 

640

while P was away at nursery by feeding the cat some rat poison because it was too cumbersome for her to 

take care of. P said she hated her grandmother for killing the cat she loved. P also said that the grandmother 

yells at her mother but that P had a good relationship with her father. P said that her mother preferred her 

brother. The family relations were explained with the death of the cat. When encouraged to bring a new cat 

home, P refused, saying, “my grandmother might kill it again.” She said that she came back home one day 

only to find out that her cat was dead. She felt sad but soon was shocked to find out that it was killed with 

poison; so shocked to lose words. Her father and grandmother had a big argument over it. She said it was 

her father and her who liked the cat the most. Then she said to mimic the sound of the cat and said “mew” 

with such gust and valor that P had never shown before, as if inhibited sound was finally coming out. When 

I said such a brave cat with a strong voice will escape easily from her grandmother, she was very happy. 

I was able to understand that when P said her father only played computer games, she meant to say that 

the relationship with her father felt distant after the death of the cat, which they both loved, for they failed 

to find an alternative mutual pleasure. P visualized ‘her brother in puberty and her with fish’ (Pic 13). As P 

decorated the drawing with flowers unlike her frequent expression of jealousy to her brother, I encouraged 

P to have ‘confidence’ and recommended drawing therapy where she can draw bold lines (Pic 14). When 

encouraged to make a creation to restore her sense of pride and emotional stability by completing a project, 

P wrote the name of her favorite celebrity. She drew her playing in the ground with a boy that she had a 

crush on and then fish (Pic 17). And P explained her drawing, saying that she liked the boy. And on the 

theme proposed next, P said it was the staircase of an apartment she had to climb, and finished the drawing 

with a lightening rod. As she became much more active, I conducted HTP and KHTP, which were the pre- 

tests on her before the healing process, and P was able to draw a person. She was much more confident 

drawing bold lines, and she recreated the image of the person coming closer to the house. 

Around that time, P’s mother suggested to end the session as there was improvement in P’s interaction with 

friends, answering questions during class and responding to people in general. 

6. Conclusion 

The paper reviewed the theory on psychoanalysis regarding traumatic experiences that leave behind the 

signifier of deficiency and the images applied to heal the trauma. In the process, we were able to witness 

the replacement of desire as addressed in the study of psychoanalysis. The loss of an object of love and 

discovery of its replacement helped regain confidence – the celebrity that gives her pleasure instead of the 

cat that was no longer present as well as a celebrity and a boyfriend as gorgeous as her father who played 

with the cat. 

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While experiencing the loss of her object without any proper response, without saying anything about 

the loss – though she cried – she might have closed her mouth to stop speaking as if wanting to become 

someone who could not speak. Whether silence or paralysis, all symptoms are like a signal to the outside 

world. It is like ‘what you want’ – want you want to say – or your guilty conscience. Or maybe, by 

recreating your non-responsive response – the response of not doing anything – at the time when the event 

happened, you might want to go back to when it happened and undo it. Our duty as provider of mind healing 

is to interpret the signal correctly, let the client recognize the cause of hurting mind and the meaning of 

deficiency, and ultimately strengthen the deficiency. 

A human, due to his inability, often lives with losing the object with which he has relation. When it is an 

object of love, he lives on with grief and the deficient object inside. When we say hurting mind, it refers to 

the existence of deficient object in the mind. Sometimes, the deficient object can be found – only with the 

precondition of accurate recognition of the deficient object and when the problem was only due to not-so- 

active ‘response’ of oneself. When such inappropriate response is recognized and expressed appropriately, 

and if the object still exists, we can have it back. But how can we heal the mind hurting from deficiency of 

an object that we cannot find or have back? This is when replacement or sublimation comes in – while you 

cannot accurately recreate the cat and the love of the father enjoyed with the cat, you can still find joy and 

pleasure from your favorite celebrity or another object that excites you. Then, we need to know what the lost 

object means. 

The fragment from recollecting traumatic experience of loss does not only function as a signifier but also 

as signified and symbol. The meaning that is correctly identified and replaced can compensate for the 

deficiency and fill the gap created by such deficiency. The order of thematic drawings that goes between 

symbol and imaginary world by means of association and provides signified and signifier is not different 

from the psychoanalysis theories addressed earlier. Therefore, we can use the psychoanalysis theories which 

are criticized and avoided due to the Oedipus complex, an unconscious trauma borrowed from the myth 

more actively in art therapy and in healing the mind. 

When the hurting mind from all kinds of relations is healed, restoration of the damaged or lost relation 

means improved expression of the object – like expression of loving the object. Therefore, in the process of 

mind healing, as they have difficulty in expressing their minds with ordinary language, we should give them 

the opportunity to express with works of art the desire or parts of deficiency being held inside and should 

have the ability to accurately interpret the signified and signifier expressed in the image. As mind healing 

with images promotes communication – improved ability to express – with the outside world in various 

methods, social relations can be improved, and the subject’s social wellbeing to recognize self-presence can 

be advanced. 

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References 

Badiou. Alain, Roudinesco. Elisabeth, Jacques Lacan, Passé Présent, Paris, Seuil, 2012. 

David R. Hawkins, Power Vs. Force : The Hidden Determinants of Human Behavior, Hay House Edition, 

February 2002. 

Carton. Solange, Chabert. Catherine, Corcos. Maurice, Les silence des émotions, Paris, Dunod, Paris. 

Freud, Sigmund et Breuer, J., Études sur l’hystérie, PUF, 1956. 

Greig. Philippe, L’enfnat et son dessin, Cahors, ERES, 2003. 

Klein. Mélanie , Essaie de la psychanalyse 1921-1945, Paris, Payot, 1968. 

Lacan. Jacques, “Introduction à la structure de l’angoisse,” L’Angoisse, Séminaire X, PUF., 1982. 

-Écrits, Seuil, Paris, 1966. 

-«Conféences aux Université nord-améicaines ;Yale University, Kanzer Semina», Scilicet n° 6/7, 1975. 

-Le Séminaire, Livre XI, Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse, Paris, Seuil, 1973. 

-Le Séminaire, Livre XVI, D’un Autre à l’autre, Paris, Seuil, 2006, p. 274. 

Lapeyre. Michel, Clinique freudienne, Paris, Anthropos, 1996.. 

Royer Jacqueline, Que nous disent les dessins d’enfant, Paris, Hommes et Perspectives, 2005. 

Miller J.-A., «Jacques Lacan : remarques sur son concept de passage à l’acte ,” Mental, Paris, avril 2006, n°17. 

Schack. Juliane, Comprendre les dessins d’ enfant, Canale, Marabout, 2000. 

Vergote. Antoine , La Psychanalyse à l’épreuve de la sublimation, Paris, Les Editions du CERF, 1997. 

Yanof. Judith A., Langage, Communication, and, transference in child Analyses I. Selective mutisme: The 

Medium is the message II. Is child Analysis really analysis?,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic 

Association, 44:79-119, 1996. 

Kwank Young-Sook, “Play therapy of a six year old with selective mutism,” Journal of Child & Adolescent 

Psychiatry, Volume 3 Number 1, 1992. 

American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder, Fourth Edition 

(DSM-IV), Korean translation by Lee Keun-Hoo, Seoul, Hanamedical, 1995. 

Min S ung-Kil, Latest Psychiatry, Seoul, Aljokak, 2008. 

Shim Eung-Chul, Psychology and Life, Seoul, Seohyunsa, 2008. 

Lee Young-Shik, Nam Bum-Woo, Kim Jong-Bum, “First experience of treatment of 15 old boy showing 

selective mutism with Fluoxetine,” Journal of Korean Neuropsychiatric Association, Volume 35, 

Number 2, 1996. 

Kim Tae-Ryun, Seo Bong-Yeon, Lee Eun-Hwa, Hong Sook-Ki, Korean Children’s Apperception Test 

(K-CAT), Seoul, Korea Guidance, 1993. 

Jung Sun-Joo, Hong Ka-Eui, “Clinical feature of children with selective mutism and prognosis,” Journal of 

Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, Volume 6 Number 1, 1995. 

Cho Soo-Chul, Pediatric Psychopharmacology, Seoul, Seoul National University Press, 2000. 

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Proceedings 


Busan City: 20C Busan, its Scars and Healing 

1. Poésie Dedicated to the Forefront of Korean History 

/ Yol-Kyu Kim (Sogang University) 

2. The Scars and Healing of the Korean War Refugees 

/ Chulwook Cha (Pusan National University) 

3. Sansoo Lee Jong-Ryul’s National History: The Scars of Wounds 

and the Current History 

/ Man-joon Park (Dongeui University) 

4. Envisioning a Modern Busan at a Corner of Sanbok Road 

/ Dong Jin Kang (Kyungsung University)

Poésie Dedicated to the Forefront of Korean History 

Yol-Kyu Kim 


1) Busan, the Status of its Topography 

Busan is located in the southeastern part of the Korean peninsula. The city has its back against the Korean 

peninsula and proudly faces the sea. Its location and geographical features tell us that Busan is a vanguard 

city that sits in the eastern end of the country. 

In many cases, people liken the Korea peninsula to the shape of a rabbit and Busan to a tail of the rabbit, 

but this makes no sense. Busan is not a tail of the rabbit, but is more similar to a mouth of a tiger that is 

closed tight toward the direction of the sea. 

And Busan overlooks both East Sea and South Sea, which tranquilly surround the city. In other words, 

Busan proudly looks down at the sea where the sun rises at dawn and the sea is connected to the Pacific 

Ocean. 

From Haeundae Beach to Gwangalli Beach and Busan Port, and again to Nampo, Songdo, Gamnae and 

to Dadaepo, the coastlines are endless across hundreds and thousands of meters, and they wrap their arms 

around Busan. Reaching beyond the Straits of Korea, Busan overlooks Japan, China and countries in 

Southeast Asia and the Pacific Ocean. As illustrated above, Busan is located along the coast and facing 

the ocean in front of it. It is truly a city that is located at the forefront or at the so-called cutting edge of the 

Korean Peninsula, and thus can be called a vanguard city of Korea. 

In addition, other topics can also be brought up in relation with the geographical location of Busan – being 

at the forefront of the Korean Peninsula. 

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‘This region is like the neck of the country (Nam-Yo-In-Hoo: )’ and like ‘the keyhole of 

the country (Seo-Moon-Swae-Yak: )’ 

The above-mentioned words are engraved on the monuments standing on both sides of Jaseongdae 

( ) located in Busanjin. 

Nam-Yo-In-Hoo means ‘the neck of a remote country in the southern region’ while Seo-Moon-Swae- 

Yak refers to ‘the Door in the West is locked.’ The former describes the topological location of the city, 

indicating that Busan is located in the region, which is equivalent to the neck of the Korean Peninsula. 

Nam-Yo ( ) literally means the remote area in the southern part of the Korean Peninsula, which 

highlights the topographical location of Busan in comparison with the entire Korean Peninsula. Since the 

city is both the front and the end of the Korean Peninsula, it is liken to the neck of the country. 

In other words, Busan is like the neck or the throat of the human body. As you are well aware, the throat 

is like a lifeline for people. People eat food, breath in and out using their throat. It is the throat ( ) that 

acts as a gateway sending air into the lungs and food down into the stomach. 

Located at the southern forefront of the country, Busan is like the throat that serves as a gateway of the 

Korean Peninsula or the lifeline of the country. 

Such a topographical location of Busan is highly symbolic because it demonstrates the roles and 

responsibilities of the city in Korean history and culture and has highly symbolic and cultural worth. 

Busan is indeed at the forefront of Korea not just in its topographical location but also in the country’s 

history. 

2) The History of Busan began as early as the Prehistoric Times… 

Busan is Korea’s largest metropolitan city that includes Dongrae, Sasang and Gijang and its history dates 

back to prehistoric times. Korea’s No.1 port city, Busan, existed at the forefront of the Korean Peninsula 

even at the beginning of the country back in the prehistoric times. 

‘In the beginning, there existed the port with people. Its name is Busan.’ 

Surprisingly, archeological ruins of the Bronze Age and the Neolithic Age as well as the Paleolithic Era 

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have been discovered in various parts of Busan. 

Chungsapo of Haeundae Beach is one of the major ruins inherited from the Paleolithic Era. 

Chungsapo is a small town located along the shallow shore of a long estuary at the end of ‘Greeting the 

Moon Hill’ of the small peninsula in the Southeastern region of the city. Chungsapo is overlooking the 

vast open ocean and has fine sandy beaches as well as the port with the blue sand. 

If you miss the scenery of Seokguram’s morning, 

You will regret it. 

When you see the evening moon in Haeundae, 

You will miss it more and more. 

Hooray, it is so magnificent. 

Hooray, it is so beautiful. 

The country’s nature boasts scenic beauty. 

The above is the lyrics of the popular song of the 1930s: ‘The Eight Views of Korea.’ “The more I see the 

evening moon in Haeundae, the more I miss it” is portraying the evening moon that shines more brightly 

in the areas of Chungsapo located at the end of ‘Greeting the Moon Hill.’ Chungsapo is the place where 

the history of Busan originated and the remnants of the Paleolithic Era still stand today, and thus it is 

rightly the very place to sing about the evening moon in Haeundae. Our ancestors in the Paleolithic Era 

must have sung about the evening moon shining over the Moon Hill. Then, Gowoon Choi chi-won named 

the place with a beautiful evening moon ‘Haeundae’ to assign it a meaning. 

There are other relics from the Neolithic Era (7,000~8,000 years ago) that have been found in Busan. 

The shell mound from the Neolithic Era – in addition to shell mounds from the Paleolithic Era – 

was discovered in Jwa-dong and Joong-dong. Other relics from the Neolithic Era were also found in 

Beombang-dong, a Busan district located on the boundary of Busan and Gimhae and on the boundary of 

Dongsam-dong and Yeongsun-dong. 

The topic of ‘the Prehistoric Busan’ may be able to be discussed separately because there are considerable 

amounts of relics from prehistoric times. Of those relics discovered, particularly those remnants found in 

Chungsapo, Jwa-dong and Joong-dong highlight the fact that the area of Haeundae was a central place in 

the Prehistoric Busan. 

Today, Haeundae is one of the most popular tourist attractions and popular beaches across the country. 

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Way back in prehistoric times, it was a hub of the prehistoric culture that laid the foundation for its history. 

As a matter of fact, people have lived, survived or enjoyed their lives in the area of Haeundae throughout 

the course of the past ten thousand years. 

Haeundae is not the only the place where the relics from the prehistoric times were discovered. Shell 

mounds and dolmen from the prehistoric age were discovered in Dongsam-dong in Yeong-do, an area on 

the right side of Haeundae as well as Oryukdo and at the end of the inner harbor of Busan. Shell mounds 

from the Bronze Age were found in Dongrae, an inland area located far from the sea. 

The coastline reaching Haeundae to Yeong-do and the land reaching Yeong-do to Dongrae account for 

four-fifths of the entire land in Busan Metropolitan City. And it can be stated that Busan has historic traces 

not just from the Neolithic Era and the Paleolithic Era but also from the Bronze Age, and it was already a 

metropolitan city way back in prehistoric times. 

In short, Busan is a city that preserves the site from the prehistoric times and is at the forefront of the 

country not just in terms of its topographical location but also in terms of its history. 

3) The Rich History that Shines Even More over Time 

As explained above, Busan has long been a place for living for people throughout history, way back from 

the Paleolithic Era, which dates back over 10,000 years. 

Some academic researchers surmised that Busan underwent the Neolithic Era for approximately 4,000 

years from B.C. 5000 to B.C. 1000 and argued that quite many people began to live in the city of Busan 

since that time. Such a supposition was made based on the discovery of shell mounds found in a total of 

18 sites in Dongsam-dong, Yeongsun-dong, Amnam-dong, Dadae-dong, Geumgok-dong, Gangdong-dong 

and Noksan-dong. 

The fact that many shell mounds from the Neolithic Era were found in Busan indicates that the city was a 

place for living and a nesting place for people in the Neolithic Era. Way back in ancient times, Busan was 

already a place for people living alongside the coastline of the region to make a living and to survive. It 

may be no exaggeration to say that Busan was not merely an ocean city; rather, it was like the ocean itself 

that provides people with the means of survival. 

Entering into the historic period after going through prehistoric times, Busan continued to play a certain 

role in sustaining people’s lives in the region and leave its trace in history. 

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Dolmens found in Doogu-dong in Geumjeong-gu, Shin-ri in Gijang and Boonjeol town in Migeum-dong 

tell us that Busan also went through the Bronze Age. 

There are six dolmens or stone graves in Boonjeol town. To make a dolmen, people had to bury a 

deceased person in the ground and lay a horizontal stone supported by several vertical stones. In some 

cases, a horizontal stone was laid directly over the ground without being supported by vertical stones. 

Stones used for dolmens are really large and make us wonder how people in the Bronze Age moved 

such large stones and what kinds of devices they might have used to move stones. Dolmens, which used 

extremely large stones, were obviously dedicated to some eminent figures of the Bronze Age. It is said 

that only the heads of communities or leaders were buried beneath the dolmens. In other words, only 

leaders of tribal societies had the honor of being buried beneath the dolmens during the Bronze Age. 

As pointed out above, as several dolmens were discovered in the three sites of Busan, it is possible to 

guess that the city must have been a residential area during the Bronze Age and large tribes lived in several 

parts of the city during that Age. 

However, the relics from the Bronze Age are mostly found on the mountain sides, areas far from the 

ocean, indicating that the era when people ate clams for survival was passed by then and the agricultural 

era must have begun sometime during the Bronze Age. Back then, people living in Busan were scattered 

across both the coastline and the mountain side. 

The ironware made of cast iron excavated from a shell mound in Nakmin-dong in Dongrae tells us that the 

Iron Age followed the Bronze Age. In more than 10 ancient tombs found in Yeonnam-dong, iron knives, 

iron tips and iron axes from the Period of the Three States were excavated. 

In a shell mound found in Nakmin-dong, molten iron pieces were excavated, telling us that there must 

have been a steel mill or smelting factory in the area back in the very early history of Korea. Considering 

this fact, Busan is also a pioneering city in Korean history that is on the cutting edge of national history. 

Of many ironware remains excavated in the region, the ancient tomb found in Bokcheon-dong must be 

emphasized as one of the major discoveries. There were many iron hatchets, iron chisels, sickles and 

arrowheads that are considered to be from the 4 th century or 6 th century inside the ancient tomb. 

As seen above, a series of discoveries of the remnants and relics from the Neolithic Era, the Pathologic 

Era and from the Iron Age have continued in Busan. It can be stated that, since prehistoric times, the city 

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has experienced vivid details of Korean history from the Period of the Three States to the Gaya Period. 

That is so true. As a major port city of the country, Busan has been shining throughout the long and varied 

history of Korea. The older the relics get, the brighter the history of them will shine. Busan has long been 

at the forefront of Korean history as a major port city throughout prehistoric times. 

4) At the Forefront of Korean Medieval Times 

Supported by its topological location and geographical characteristics, Busan has gone through a long 

detailed history of the country. Rather than passively overcoming the rough waves of history, the city 

undauntedly fought back the waves and built its own history. Haeundae and Dongsam-dong were the 

places of origin for the prehistoric times and the city again underwent the ancient and medieval times 

to reach the pre-modern and the modern period. Through a long and eventful journey of history, Busan 

continued to build its own history in a highly proactive manner. 

That is why the history of Busan is like an epic. The history of Busan itself is like an epic journey that 

penetrates the entire history of Korea. In this sense, no other cities in Korea can match Busan. 

Korea’s international relationship during medieval times was limited to relationships with Japan and 

China. Unfortunately, China was a suzerain country and Korea, as a vassal country of China, was in a 

subordinate relationship to China. Therefore, there could be no conflicts or confrontations between the 

two countries. 

However, the diplomatic relationship with Japan was different. Japan was both a gateway to international 

trade and a base camp for Japanese raiders ( ). Japan’s position was very obvious in the regions along 

the coastline of the southeastern part of the Korean Peninsula, especially in Busan. The city served as an 

outpost of Japanese invaders and thus it bore the brunt of troubled relations between Korea and Japan. 

Japanese trading and living quarters on the Korean Peninsula were called Waegwan and, in Busan, there 

was one of the major Waegwans in Busanpo. Japanese people first settled in Busanjin, the military base 

in Busan, and later moved their settlement to the downtown of the city. The old settlement of Japanese 

people in Busan was called ‘Gogwan: Old Japanese Settlement’ or ‘Googwan: Former-Japanese 

Settlement.’ That is why the area in Sojeong-dong is called ‘Gogwan’ or ‘Googwan.’ 

Due to the city’s geographical and historic standing, Japan chose Busan as an outpost of the invasion into 

the Korean Peninsula during the Japanese invasion of Korea in 1592. Japan occupied the city and used it 

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as its forces’ rear base during the invasion. That was the time when the Japanese forces built the ‘Jaseongdae 

Japanese Fortress’ in Busan. 

Of approximately 20 fortresses built by Japanese forces during the Japanese Invasion of Korea in 1592 

and the following invasion during the period from 1597 to 1598, the only fortress that has survived 

throughout the history of the country is the ‘Jaseongdae Japanese Fortress’ in Busan. 

The ‘Jaseongdae Japanese Fortress’ is in stark contrast to the ‘Dongpeyonghyun ( ) Fortress’ found 

in Danggam-dong. The ‘Dongpeyonghyun ( ) Fortress’ was built to fight against the invading 

Japanese forces sometime around the mid Goryo Dynasty whereas the ‘Jaseongdae Japanese Fortress’ 

was built by Japanese forces. In other words, Busan has two different kinds of fortresses that were built by 

Japanese forces and by Korean people to fight against them. Having the fortresses of both the enemy and 

friendly forces is a very rare case - even on the Korean Peninsula. 

Meanwhile, there is another historic site ( ) that could be compared in stark contrast to the ‘Jaseongdae 

Japanese Fortress.’ That is one located in Busanjin called ‘Jeonggongdan.’ ‘Jeonggongdan’ was built to 

honor Cheomsa ( ) General Jeong Bal who gave his precious life while fighting against Japanese 

forces during the Japanese invasion of Korea in 1592. 

After occupying Busan, Japanese forces stayed in the city for as long as 7 years, and during that time they 

built ‘Jaseongdae Japanese Fortress.’ Although ‘Jaseongdae Japanese Fortress’ and ‘Jeonggongdan’ are 

located in Jwacheon-dong and Beomil-dong respectively, they are located very close to each other and 

both are located within Busanjin. 

As illustrated above, Japanese people moved their settlement (Waegwan) within Busan several times and 

continued to live in the city during the Joseon Dynasty Period. That is, Busan local residents and Japanese 

people lived close to each other in the same neighborhood. 

Based on the above historical evidence, we can say that Korean people and Japanese people coexisted 

in Busan during the Joseon Dynasty Period. However, there are other examples highlighting the 

confrontational relationship between Korea and Japan during the Joseon Dynasty Period. 

The relationship between the ‘Jaseongdae Japanese Fortress’ and the ‘Dongpeyonghyun ( ) 

Fortress’ and the relationship between the ‘Jaseongdae Japanese Fortress’ and the ‘Jeonggongdan’ indicate 

the hostile relationship between the invading Japanese and the Joseon Dynasty’s defending forces. 

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To sum up, Busan was an outpost of the Japanese invaders that bears the brunt of the confrontational 

relationship between the Joseon Dynasty and Japan. As the Joseon-Japan relationship was one of the 

important diplomatic relationships for the Joseon Dynasty, it can be argued that Busan was again at the 

forefront of Korean history during the Joseon Dynasty. 

5) At the Forefront of Korean Modern Times 

Busan continued to act as a pioneering city that is at the forefront of Korea’s pre-modern and modern 

history and culture. 

While Korea was under Japanese colonization, Busan served as a spokesperson for Korean history. The 

portrait of Busan drawn at that time shows the vivid history of Korea while under Japanese colonization 

( ) or under Japanese rule. 

At that time, Busan was boasting its status as a major port city of the country where ‘government ( ) 

ferries’ come and go. The #1 pier was dedicated to the ferries that come and go between Shimonoseki and 

Hakwan ( ) in Japan and Busan on a regular basis. To Japanese people, Busan was a gateway city to 

Korea–a Japanese colony–and that is why Busan began to flourish during that time. 

In the early days of colonization, Japanese people built a new town around Yongdusan, where Waekwan 

was located. At the top of Yongdusan, Japanese people built the ‘Yongdusan Shrine ( )’ to worship 

their gods and turned the whole mountain into a sanctuary. 

Considering the fact Yongdusan was a guardian mountain ( ) of Busan overlooking the entire Busan 

port and the new town alongside the ocean and was located in the central part of the city, it can easily be 

guessed why Japanese people turned the mountain of Yongdusan into their sanctuary. Japanese people 

obviously wanted to tell Korean people that Busan is a sacred land of Japanese people that their gods look 

after the land. 

In the areas around Yongdusan, Japanese people built their malls and residential units. The areas include 

Daechung-dong to the north, Changsun-dong, Shinchang-dong, Bupyeong-dong, Bosoo-dong, Chochang- 

dong, Toseong-dong to the west, Gwangbok-dong, Nampo-dong to the south and Choongang-dong 

and Donggwang-dong to the east. Huge bustling new town areas located on the foot of mountains of 

Yongdusan and Bokbyeongsan fell into the hands of Japanese people and resembled Japanese territory. 

Japanese new towns and residential areas became the downtown in Busan and the streets around Japanese 

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areas were well paved and clean, which was in sharp contrast to the residential areas for Korean people 

located in Yeongjoo-dong, Choryang-dong, Soojeong-dong and Beomil-dong. The so-called ‘downtown’ 

in Busan was entirely owned by Japanese people during the Japanese rule. 

As the downtown in Busan was inhabited by Japanese people, Korean people had no other choice but to 

live on the outskirts of the city. The flatland in Choong-gu and Seo-gu used to be the downtown occupied 

by Japanese people while the small and crowed towns located on the slopes of the mountains were where 

Korean people were forced to live. 

Ami-dong, the village name that was written in Chinese character – Gokjeong ( ) – and read 

‘Danimachi,’ Boomin-dong and Namboomin-dong were the poor areas of the city where Korean 

people resided. Other Korean villages, located on the slope of the mountain in Dongdaeshin-dong and 

Seodaeshin-dong, were no different. All the Korean towns are in such dire condition. 

Considering such sharp contrast between the Japanese residential areas and the Korean residential areas 

during the Japanese colonization, it may be no exaggeration to say that Japanese people occupied the 

central part of Busan and forced Korean people to the outskirts of the city during the Japanese rule. 

The ethnic composition of residential areas in the city highlights the sad reality of the Japanese rule when 

the tyranny of oppressive rulers existed in the country. It also indirectly shows the plight of Korean people 

who barely survived under the colonial rule. That being said, Busan was a symbolic city showing the 

plight of Korean people during the Japanese colonial period. 

In this regard, again, Busan was placed at the forefront of Korean pre-modern history during the Japanese 

colonial period. The city is a representative example showing the harsh reality facing Korean people 

during the Japanese colonial period where they had to live on the outskirts of the city in their own country, 

as if they were living in someone else’s houses, while Japanese people were living a well off lifestyle on 

Korean land. 

6) Busan, a Port City and Pier City 

The status of Busan during the Japanese colonial period can be well illustrated with its title called the ‘port 

city’ or ‘pier city.’ As pointed out earlier, Busan has been boasting its status as a major port city of the 

country where ‘government ( ) ferries’ come and go. 

In addition to being the port for ferries, Busan was also the place where the ‘Gyeongbu (Seoul-Busan) 

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Railroad Line’ began. When I was in the elementary school, the school even taught us the song about 

Gyeongbu (Seoul-Busan) Railroad Line. The reason Gyeongbu (Seoul-Busan) Railroad Line is 

emphasized so much is that it was highly important for maintaining the status of Busan. 

In the early days of the Japanese colonial period from the 1930s to the 1940s, only a few Koreans – such 

as Korean students studying in Japan and those compulsory laborers who were forced to perform hard 

labor in Japan – were able to go aboard the ferries arriving on the #1 pier. 

Crying and looking back Busan port, 

there was a moonlight shining down on the railing of the ferry. 

Saying goodbye is sad 

Saying goodbye is depressing. 

This song is sung by Nam In-Soo in 1939 to describe the sorrow and struggle those laborers who were 

forced to go to Japan to perform hard labor through the compulsory manpower draft of the Japanese 

government. 

Then, there was another song about Busan introduced to Korea: 

Spring flowers bloom on Camellia Island, 

But seagulls at Busan port are still weeping for my brother, 

Whenever ferries come in and turn around right beside Oryukdo, 

I shout your name but there is no response. 

Please come back to Busan port, my dear brother. 

This song became very popular in 1975 when a large number of Korean compatriots in Japan visited their 

mother country Korea via the port city Busan. 

There was also another song about Busan: 

Coming back, coming back, 

To visit the mountains and rivers of my homeland, 

How much I missed the rose of Sharon, 

How much I yearned for the Taegeukgi (the national flag of Korea), 

Chatter seagulls, waves, please dance with me, 

There is a ray of hope shining down on the head of the returning ship. 

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As shown in the above lyrics of the songs about the city, Busan was welcoming the returning ships 

coming to Busan port amid much fanfare. 

Busan became a pioneer in Korean history during the period before and after Korea’s liberation from 

Japanese colonial rule. Compared with other cities in the country, Busan was the city that rode the great 

waves of change in Korean history. And Busan port was at the heart of the city. 

The pioneering spirit of the city reached its culmination during the Korean War. As an outpost of the 

South Korean forces, Busan ports – especially piers in the northern side of the city–played a strategically 

essential role in the battle against North Korean forces. 

During the Korean War, the UN forces – comprised of the forces of 16 countries such as the US, the UK, 

French, Canadian and Dutch forces – came and went from the #1 pier in Busan. Weapons and other war 

supplies were transferred to the #2, #3, #4 piers and to the central pier. As the logistics base and the rear 

base, Busan port contributed to the victory of the UN forces. 

I was working as an interpreter for the UN forces on the #2 pier during the Korean War. And one 

American General told me emphatically that “it would be impossible to win this war without these piers 

and ports in Busan.” 

What the American General told me still resonates with me today. At that time, the piers were full of 

laborers who worked around the clock to deliver the weapons, munitions and war supplies to the front 

lines of the war. On the center of the site where laborers worked on day and night shifts, 24 hours a day, 

that American General uttered such words. 

As the rear base, Busan port contributed significantly to the victory of the South Korean forces to end 

the tragic war on the Korean Peninsula. In this regard, Busan port is standing tall in the center of Korean 

history. 

7) ‘40 Stairs,’ Yeongsun Hill and the Hillside Shanty Town 

There is the UN cemetery in Daeyeon-dong, Busan. The remains of 2,300 war dead from 11 countries 

are buried at the UN cemetery. This is why Busan became a place where people ruminated on the Korean 

War, which began on June 25th, 1950 and ended in July, 1953. Throughout the war, Busan was horribly 

ravaged and had to endure the harsh twists of the country’s history. 

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As the sole logistics base in the rear, Busan was entrusted with tremendously important missions. At the 

same time, Busan served as the shelter and food source for refugees, displaced people and North Korean 

compatriots who defected from North Korea at that time. The currently widely-renowned port city ( ) 

Busan was back then called ‘the shelter city Busan’ or ‘the interim capital city’ as the city was packed with 

refugees and displaced people whose number might surpass that of local residents. 

Notably, the area on the slope of Bokbyeongsan and around Yeongsun Hill was especially crowded with 

refugees and the ‘40 stairs’ were located at the heart of that region. 

A wanderer crying while sitting on the staircase of 40 stairs, 

Stop crying and tell me what is wrong, 

A refuge girl from Gyeonsang Province living in a shanty town 

felt sorry for him and asked what is wrong. 

A wanderer in this song refers to not just a wanderer, but a refugee who fled to Busan during the Korean 

War. He was one of 600,000 war refugees who fled to Busan where the number of local residents was 

only about 400,000. North Korean compatriots who defected from North Korea were also part of the war 

refugees who settled in the shelter city Busan. 

While most of the 600,000 war refugees were scattered across the city, an overwhelming majority of them 

settled in the area near Yeongsun Hill. Most war refugees were so poor and ragged and lived in crammed 

shanties and shacks – or the so-called ‘Hakobang.’ The shelter town for war refugees in the area near 

Yeongsun Hill was also called the ‘Hillside Shanty Town.’ 

When you go up to the 40 stairs, you may see ‘Yeongsun Hill’ reaching to the south and north side and the 

‘Hillside Shanty Town’ was formed there along the ridges. A huge bunch of war refugees settled there in 

the ‘Hillside Shanty Town,’ which was like the country’s wounds left from the Korean War. 

Ever since the Joseon Dynasty, ‘Yeongsun Hill’ has served as a highly important passage way and a 

community of quite many people. For instance, when the high-level government official from Dongrae 

had to come to Busanpo to greet the Japanese envoys, they had to go through ‘Yeongsun Hill.’ The name 

‘Yeongsun’ was created in the late Joseon Dynasty. Ironically, ‘Yeongsun Hill’ or the important passage 

way for people with the 40 stairs in the middle became the ‘Hillside Shanty Town.’ 

When you go down the 40 stairs and walk down the well-paved street in Choonang-dong, you may see the 

Busan train station and piers. In the areas near the Busan train station and piers, war refugees living in the 

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shanty town scraped their living day by day and lived from hand to mouth. Milk powder porridge supplied 

by the US forces or by the relief organization was the only food available for them to alleviate their hunger 

and those war refugees had to be engaged in all kinds of hard labor to scratch a living. They had to be 

engaged in extremely heavy labor at the train station, but the situation was even worse on the piers. 

They had to sweat profusely to unload and deliver various war supplies from the huge freight vessel. 

Working as A-frame coolies and porters, they devoted themselves to the transportation of war supplies 

because they had no other choice if they wanted to make a living. 

Thus, those war refugees living in the ‘Hillside Shanty Town’ had to endure various hardships. While 

suffering from extreme poverty, they barely made a living day by day and had to go up and down the 40 

stairs as well as ‘Yeongsun Hill’ everyday to go home with difficulty and fatigue. 

The suffering those war refugees in Busan went through shows the pain and hardship the entire nation had 

to go through during the Korean War. It also shows the tragic history of Korea, which is presently divided 

into two countries. Therefore, we can say that Busan – especially the area near the 40 stairs and the ‘Hillside 

Shanty Town’ – vividly shows the wounds or damage of inflicted on Korean people during the Korean 

War from 1950 to 1953. During this period, again, Busan acted as a pioneering city in the country that 

bore the brunt of the consequences of the brutal Korean War. 

8) Busan Portrayed in the Poem 

This is a gateway to this country 

Where the spirit of the country is well preserved, 

The range of mountains stretching from Baekdusan 

Reaches the Pacific Ocean and blends amazingly with the blue wave. 

The above is the first stanza of ‘the Song in Praise of Busan Tower’ written on the stone in front of Busan 

Tower in Yongdosan Park. ‘The Song in Praise of Busan Tower’ is a eulogy ( ) to Busan Tower and a 

paean ( ) devoted to the city of Busan. 

There is another poem devoted to the city of Busan: 

The blue horizon is much higher than the city ( ), 

And the wind blowing from metrological observatory around the hill flows to the northwestern 

side. 

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The lonely steamship ( ) passes through the foreign land near the blackish tropic ( ). 

The dreaded empty desert ( ) surrounds the crystal color wind tunnel ( ). 

A small protrusion in the east and the fine fishing port ( ) in the south of the peninsula, 

the streets are desolate as in the daydream ( ) and like a big catch of fish from a distant cruise 

( ). 

Yoo Chi-Hwan portrayed the city of Busan like this in his poem ‘the Drawing of Busan ( )’ in 1939. 

The part describing the city “the blue horizon is much higher than the city ( )” captured my attention 

the most as it depicted the scenery of Busan where the horizons are seen from any part of the city’s 

mountain slopes and the horizon is so high that you would think that the sea looks up to the horizon. 

In 1947, Yoo Chi-Hwan again wrote the poem about the city of Busan under the same subject ‘the 

Drawing of Busan ( )’: 

Poplar trees on this hill cannot grow further because they reached the blue sky. This is the port near 

that hill. 

The remote region ( ) that is seen from far away appears like the horizontal line ( ). 

The view is tranquil and fine stars are twinkling. 

Riding the black wave swells like the mountains, 

The ships are resting at port and come and go again like the foals. 

The trees along the city streets where I walked on create shadows on the ground. 

The sea is shining like the silver light as they are washed by the vast ( ) sounds of the waves 

( ). 

Yoo Chi-Hwan wrote the poem about Busan as described above. 

The part “poplar trees on this hill cannot grow further because they reached the blue sky. This is the 

port near that hill” touched my heart as it delicately described the geographical location of Busan, a city 

surrounded by the mountains and overlooking the ocean. The mountains surrounding the city of Busan 

are relatively high compared with other mountains in cities. And the poem described the high-altitude 

mountainous terrain very well in the part “poplar trees on this hill cannot grow further because they 

reached the blue sky. This is the port near that hill.” 

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While depicting the high hills and mountains in Busan in such a manner, the poem ‘the Drawing of Busan 

( )’ also described the scene of the waves rolling roar, the sounds of the waves ( ), the sea 

that is shining like the silver light as well as the topological location of Busan. The landscape of the high- 

altitude Mountains gives people a fresh feeling and inspiration while the vast sea opens out before people 

in Busan. It is the very city that is located in a propitious site of the country. 

9) Busan Presented in Korean Pop Song 

Busan is a port city filled with the songs and the sea in the city is always rising with the songs about it. 

The waves of the sea in Busan sing songs about the city sometimes in a quiet way other times in a more 

expressive way. 

How many K-pop songs ( ) about Busan are there? Perhaps, 40 or 50? If not, over 50 or 60? No. That 

is not the answer. There are more than 100 songs about Busan in Korea. It is unthinkable for other cities in 

Korea to wish that as many as 100 songs would describe the city. 

The songs about Busan cover every corner of the city ranging from Haeundae Beach and Camellia Island 

to the east, Nakdong River to the west, the international market, Yeongdo, Yeongdo Bridge and Oryukdo 

to the south to Dongrae to the north of the city. The lyrics talked about the city’s sea, the new town and the 

streets in the city. Busan is literally the voice, K-pop music and the song. 

‘Busan chick’ is called and ‘Busan aunt’ hums a song while ‘Busan guy’ shouts and ‘Busan man’ mutters. 

It is like all the citizens of Busan sing together in chorus. 

Of many songs about Busan, the song of farewell – the song on goodbye- kept going round and round in 

my head. 

Crying and looking back Busan port, 

there was a moonlight shining down on the railing of the ferry. 

Saying goodbye is sad 

Saying goodbye is depressing. 

The above grief-song was sung by a man who was forced to go to Japan to perform hard labor through 

Japan’s conscription of mandatory manpower draft. Under the militaristic mandatory manpower draft 

( ), Japan forced Korean men to go to Japan to be engaged in severe manual labor during the colonial 

rule. 

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I cried, shouted and struggled. 

Only a cold crescent moon is illuminated at Pusan port. 

Who am I looking for, 

Where should I go, 

I just cried, gripping the railing of the Yeongdo Bridge. 

In the song written above, ‘the Nostalgic Yeongdo Bridge’ is also crying for the goodbye. There is another 

song that portrays the Yeongdo Bridge as the bridge of goodbye where people bid farewell to their loved 

one. 

I’m a trader in the international market. 

I miss you, Geum-soon. 

I miss my hometown. 

Over the railing of the Yeongdo Bridge, 

There is only a lonely crescent moon above my head. 

Through the singer’s imaginative empathy with the crescent moon, the singer’s loneliness is seen through 

the lonely crescent moon in the song. This song was sung by a man who fled his hometown in the North 

to come to Busan in the South during the days of the 1.4 (January 4 th ) retreat. 

On January 4 th , 1951 while the Korean War was raging in earnest, the UN forces began to retreat from 

Heungnam Port in South Hamgyeong Province in the North. Along with the UN forces, as many as 

14,000 war refugees fled to the South on the US transport vessel – or the so-called LST. During the days 

of the 1.4 (January 4 th ) retreat, this man was forced to leave his lover in the North so he was weeping and 

singing about the grief of goodbye at the Yeongdo Bridge. 

As shown in the lyrics of the songs about the city, Busan served as the shelter for war refugees where they 

gathered together to survive and sustain their lives. There was another song that appeared under such dire 

circumstances: 

I cried, shouted and struggled. 

Only a cold crescent moon is illuminated at Pusan port. 

Who am I looking for, 

Where should I go, 

I just cried, gripping the railing of the Yeongdo Bridge. 

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This song was sung to war refugees and they all cried together. As described in the song above, more than 

600,000 war refugees continued to endure and suffer through the hardships in Busan - the shelter city and 

the city that was called the interim capital city of the country. 

Busan port is stained with the tears and pain of people saying goodbye to their loved ones. The situation 

was not much different at Busan train station: 

A light rain is drizzling down quietly. 

The sad Busan train station filled with people bidding farewell, 

Good bye and good bye. 

The whistle of the train is crying so hard. 

Refugees’ lives are full of hardship 

and still I don’t forget the shanty town there. 

A lady from Gyeongsang Province is crying so sadly. 

The sad Busan train station filled with people bid farewell. 

The song is about the period after brutal Korean War, which ended in 1953, when war refugees began to 

go back to Seoul during the days of the Korean Army’s recapturing of Seoul on Sep 28 th , 1950. 

In some cases, people who said goodbye to each other met eventually met again in Busan. In this sense, 

Busan was a place of reunion for them. 

Spring flowers bloom on Camellia Island, 

But seagulls at Busan port are still weeping for my brother, 

Whenever ferries come in and turn around right beside Oryukdo, 

I shout your name but there is no response. 

Please come back to Busan port, my dear brother. 

This is the song describing the period around the year 1975 when a number of Korean compatriots in 

Japan visited their motherland Korea. Having yearned for their returns, those Korean compatriots in Japan 

visited their native country via the port city Busan (To be more accurate, Busan port). 

The song shouts their long-cherished wish, ‘Come back to Busan Port’: 

Coming back, coming back, 

To visit the mountains and rivers of my homeland, 

How much I missed the rose of Sharon, 

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How much I yearned for the Taegeukgi (the national flag of Korea), 

Chatter seagulls, waves, please dance with me, 

There is a lay of hope shining down on the head of the returning ship. 

At last, Busan port was able to welcome the returning vessels. As people said goodbye to their loved ones 

to come to Busan and settled in the city to bond with the environments and people there, the city became 

their second home one day. 

Until one day the closed road is opened to my hometown, 

I may have to sell cigarettes here in the international market. 

Try living in Busan, you will soon feel so attached to the city 

And it will become your second hometown. 

A lady from Gyeongsang province is holding my hands. 

Busan, a city where people had to say goodbye to their loved ones and suffered from depression and 

loneliness, became a place of reunion and affection. Such a changing status and history of Busan is also 

well illustrated in the lyrics of K-pop songs. 

The pain of having to bid farewell to their loved ones and their reunion after liberation are all right there in 

the lyrics of K-pop songs. In addition to showing the history of Busan through the stories of people saying 

goodbye to their loved ones and their reunion, the lyrics of North Korean K-pop songs also talk about 

the lives of war refugees in Busan who fled their hometown to come to the city and the stories of their 

returning home during the days of the Korean Army’s recapturing of Seoul on Sep 28 th , 1950. 

K-pop songs about Busan show the pre-modern and modern history that this nation had to endure and go 

through. In this respect, it can be stated that Busan has been at the forefront of Korean history, standing 

tall as a major port city in Korea. The proud and unique status of Busan is well above other cities across 

the country in Korea. 

664

The Scars and Healing of the Korean War Refugees 

Chulwook Cha 

Pusan National University 

Introduction 

Many of the people living in Busan are linked to North Korean refugees. Busan was not a war hot spot. 

It was the provision capital, and a safe place. Near the end of the war, some of the refugees moved to 

Seoul or someplace near North Korea, but many settled down in Busan. Many success stories of North 

Korean refugees were told in the Busan International Fish Market. Their will to survive was that strong. It 

excellently shows the efforts made by the refugees in Busan, where they had nowhere else to go. 

For me, the refugees were research subjects. Their refugee experience, settling down in Busan, and their 

impact on today’s Busan, were all materials for analysis. Refugees were easily found near Danggam- 

dong, Ami-dong, Gamcheon-dong, Busan International Fish Market, and Uam-dong. As I gained interest 

in the refugees, I realized that people around me, including my colleagues and college friends knew many 

of them. They easily introduced me to them. Refugees were that close to us. As I met them, my prejudice 

of seeing them only as research materials changed. I was amused and interested in their past, and they told 

me of their past sufferings in tears. I felt sorry and realized a different meaning of interviews. 

My research was still in preliminary stages. Research on refugees living close to the Northern border 

was showing some progress, 1 but I was not interested in refugees living in provision capital or around 

us. In Busan’s history, refugee related studies are limited to studies on the settling down of refugees. 

This is because refugees weren’t popular research subjects. It also means that there is a lack of effort 

and necessity in creating a social consensus on the experiences and scars of the refugees. Today, many 

1 Kim, Gwi-ok, Experiences and Identities of North Korean Defectors – Bottom up Research on the Defectors, Seoul National 


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refugees have become old, and are passing away one by one. In order to understand today’s Busan, and to 

recreate and heal the refugees’ scars, a historical research must take place. 

My research on the refugees was a mere effort to know simple historical facts. The materials I collected 

also are limited. This paper also has a limit. I hope this paper sparks more studies on healing the scars of 

the refugees. 

1. Forced Evacuation and Abandoned People 

1) Sudden Refuge 

During the Korean War, individuals, rather than the state, had to look out for themselves. As of March 

1951, Seoul ranked first in terms of origin of refugees (165,878), Kyunggi Province (32,599) ranked 

second, followed by North Korea (33,891), Southern Kyungsang Province, and Kangwon Province. 2 

We can see that the whole country was filled with people fearing of the war. Among them, my research 

focuses on the refugees from North Korea. Among those who settled down in Busan, some had come 

to Seoul right after the liberation and then evacuated to Busan during the war, and some evacuated 

to Busan after the Jan. 4 th retreat. The latter divides into those who came directly to Busan, and those 

who settled down somewhere else first, and then had finally come to Busan. Many of the former case 

refugees were public servants or landlords during the Japanese colonial era. These people were called 

‘rebels’ in the North Korean regime, and had to flee. In the beginning, most of them lived in Yong- 

san region’s Haebangchon. 3 After the Korean War broke out and the Chinese Communist Army took 

over Seoul, they moved once again because they thought that they could not survive under Communist 

Army rule. 

My focus is on the second case of refugees. During the Jan. 4th retreat, refuge began with retreating 

soldiers due to the intervention of the Communist Chinese army. According to my research, at the time, 

public servants, such as workers of the railway system evacuated. Also, there were vigilantes from the 

Korean and the UN troops’ occupied territory after the Sept. 28th recapturing of Seoul. However, most 

of the refugees fled because of the rumor that the ‘Chinese Communist army is flooding in from North.’ 

Regardless of the refugees’ occupation or social status, the evacuation took place ‘suddenly.’ Moreover, 

2 So, Man-il, “Inflow of Refugees to Busan and Government Responds during the Korean War” Master’s thesis, Dong-a 

University Department of History, 2009, p. 53. 

3 Lee, Moon-Ung, “Research on the Formulation and Ecological Process of Islands-Looking at Haebangchon Yongsan-gu 

Seoul City” Seoul National University Department of Sociology, Master’s thesis, 1966. 

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the refugees thought it was a ‘temporary’ fleeing, so they had to abide by the requests of the soldiers to 

evacuate. 

I just had to go because they said I had to go. I never thought of it as a refuge. People were saying 

that they were coming down from north. I asked them why, and the people were saying that 

the Chinese Communist army was coming. So people kept going. So I went down and down. 

(inaudible) Back then, you followed other people. You can’t decide the route, because you didn’t 

know the geography. So I kept going and going, and came all the way to Incheon (Shin, Ui-seop). 

The sudden evacuation tore families apart, and brought about economic difficulties to the refugees. No 

matter who you were, a vigilante or a person swept up by the army’s retreat, you had to go to a safer place. 

The refugees came only with the family members they were with at the moment of evacuation. Other 

family members were lost. Yim, Soon-hee had to flee when her father was away on a business trip. Mr. 

Cha fled to find his parents and siblings. Lee, Gi-hwal had to flee on his way to meet his father, who was a 

vigilante. All of the refugees that I interviewed stressed that their evacuation happened out of the blue. All 

of them didn’t know that the evacuation will be prolonged. Their priority was to be safe. They all thought 

that they would be with their families soon. Many of the refugees were only with one or two of their 

family members because of the sudden evacuation. Lee, Gi-hwal’s experience of the evacuation moment 

is as follows. 

My father became a vigilante after the Korean army came. In my neighborhood, soldiers fought 

from dawn till dusk, and the Chinese Communist soldiers finally fled at night. The next day, I went 

to the tochka, and there were so many shell casings. Ten or more guns were thrown away. We gave 

them to our neighbors. The vigilantes stuck knives in front of their guns. When I came back home, 

my mother told me to find my father at the townhouse. On the way to the townhouse, people were 

in a frenzy. There were no vigilantes at the townhouse. People were running out from the newly 

built roads. I was fifteen at the time. I didn’t go back home. I was swept up by the running crowd. 

The sun set, and I climbed over a mountain and realized that I was in a place called Parkchun, 50 li 

(around 25 kilometers) away from home. 

This is a testimony made by Lee, Gi-hwal. He is from Nam-meon, Taecheon-gun, in Northern Pyungan 

Province. His father was a vigilante. He was swept up by the fleeing crowd at the age of fifteen, on his 

way to find his father. After then, he never reunited with his mother. Like this case, many of the refugees 

did not know why they were fleeing. Most of them were alone, swept up by the crowd. 

Because it was so sudden, many of the refugees weren’t prepared to sustain their living. Some were 

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fortunate to only walk short distances. However, others had to walk for days or months. They couldn’t 

keep much on them. They had to find food every day. During my research, I found out that some refugees 

from North Korea brought with them small and valuable assets, such as gold. According to Kim, Jin-sang, 

a realtor in the Busan International Fish Market during the war, some refugees paid in gold to buy good 

places for their shops. It didn’t happen often, but it is easy to assume that many refugees brought portable 

valuables. However, most of the refugees didn’t get to bring valuables. They had to sell the clothes on 

their backs to buy food. 4 

However, during the evacuation, many realized that their evacuation was not ‘temporary.’ In Hamgyung 

Province, most of the refugees used LSTs or private boats. People from Pyungan Province and Hwanghae 

Province walked, or if there were railway officers in the village, they took trains. Moving by ship did not 

automatically mean safety. Families were separated on different boats. A family was separated because the 

boat that his wife and children were on couldn’t sail due to bad weather. 5 Others on foot had to watch their 

friends die. They went on south not eating or sleeping. 

There were several routes that the hurried refugees took in coming to Busan. First is coming directly to 

Busan from North Korea during the Jan 4 th retreat. Second is going westward first to Gunsan or Incheon 

during the Jan 4 th retreat, and then coming to Busan around liberation. Third, refugees from Hamkyung 

province were separated to East Sea coastal cities, such as Ulsan, or to Geoje Island. After the cease— 

fire, they moved to Busan due to shortage of government food relief and deteriorating living conditions. 

However, these were not the only routes. There were other routes that the refugees took in coming to 

Busan. 

2) Difficulties in Earning Citizenship 

The refugees were not allowed to settle down in Busan automatically due to government inflow 

restrictions. The government’s official reason was to prevent any social issues arising from the sudden 

inflow of people to Busan. There was also the fear that unverified people might threaten the government. 6 

Despite the sudden evacuation, the refugees had to undergo ideology verification. There is a lot of 

4 Kwon, Jeong-rim tells that after fleeing to Daejeon, they had to sell the clothes on their backs for food, because they didn’t 

have anything. Many refugees had to sell anything of value not to starve. 

5 Kim, Jong-gun, “The Truth of the Trauma of Division Seen Through Interviews,” The Humanities for Unification 51, 

2011, pp. 53-57. 

6 Cha, Chul-wook; Ryu, Ji-seok; Son, Eun-ha, “Migration and Living Space of the Refugees in Busan during the Korean 

War”, Collection on Korean Culture (Minjokmunhwa nonchong) 45, 2010, pp. 255-259. 

668

evidence pointing to the fact that many refugees who came to Busan were held in prison camps, screened 

on whether they were members of the North Korean Labor Party. Kim Duk-sung remembers being 

screened at Dongrae prison camp. Another more indirect method of ideology evaluation was joining the 

army. Park, Young-ae’s husband was a vigilante back home. He voluntarily joined the army after coming 

to South Korea because he believed that he had to show his will to ‘crush North Korea’ to become a 

South Korean citizen. All enlisting refugees had similar reasons. Lee, Gi-hwal worked the fatigue duty in 

the army. He says that other soldiers called him a commie and beat him because of his short hair, so he 

worked harder than anyone else. 

Yes, my mother was quiet small but courageous. When we were evacuating after the Korean War 

broke out, my mother slipped and fell while crossing the frozen Daedong River, and her arm broke. 

So I found a handcart, put her on the cart and continued our journey. We walked all the way to 

the Seodaemun Police Station. It took us a long time. It took us 29 days to come to Seodaemun 

Police Station. When we arrived, we saw that they were sending all young men away to the army. 

My father made one mistake. We had quite a lot of North Korean money. We should have left the 

money back home, but my father hid the money in three pillows. So we were being investigated at 

the Seodaemun Police Station, and they asked us what those pillows were. The policeman heard a 

crackling noise, and told other officers to cut open the pillow. Commie’s money spilled out of the 

pillow. The policemen reported it to their superiors, and they said to shoot us all unconditionally 

because we were all commies. The young men were sent to the army, and the rest were executed. 

There were two older sisters-in-law, my mother, my father, and my older brother. My older brother 

was old. More than fifty, nearly sixty-years-old. They put us in a cell underground and said that 

they were going to execute us. Because it was during a war, society had become lawless. So when 

they said that they were going to shoot us, they shot us. So I saw my family being dragged away. 

And I was sent to Inchon at night. After that, I rode the LSD to Jeju Island. 

This is the unbelievable story of Hwang, Jong-yeop. Because of their North Korean money, they were 

framed as commies. Adults were executed and he was sent away to the army. He tried to look for his 

parents afterwards, but did not find them. So he believes that they were executed back then. In order to 

prove that he wasn’t a commie, he voluntarily joined the U.S. army and the guerrilla unit after deserting 

the army he was forced to join. He worked so hard to prove his innocence. 

Regardless of his will, he was forced to flee from home, separated from his family, and received ideology 

screening according to national standards. It wasn’t his will to evacuate, but the process, settling down, 

and all of the responsibilities to pass the screening and to become a South Korean citizen were up to him. 

The refugees accepted that fact. They blamed themselves for their separation, the refuge, and their poverty. 

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2. Forgetting the Refuge and Settling Down in Busan as a Replacement 

The purpose of healing historical traumas is to heal or alleviate social illness to create a healthier society. 

Many researchers mention oblivion as a method of healing. Yoo, Jae-chun cites Nietz and stresses that 

“For us to lead a healthier life, we need to know how to forget as well as remember.” It is said that for a 

human being or an ethnic group to sustain their healthiness, they must have the capability to heal their 

wound, replace the loss, and to reproduce the broken parts. 7 Therefore, they need something to replace 

the loss to heal. And it is though this that they forgot their memories. 8 The wounds that the North Korean 

refugees bear must go through a healing process of their own. However, it can also be healed through their 

resilience to replace their loss or the energy to recover. We will now look at how the refugees self-healed 

their wounds. 9 

The refugees had to live on with unbearable memories. The energy that helped them live was oblivion and 

adaptation. The hurt that they felt during evacuation did not stand out because of the circumstances they 

had to face while settling down in Busan. They had to find a home and to live. That helped the refugees 

from remembering. After the cease fire, they realized that they could not go home and reunite with their 

loved ones. That resignation was also a method of forgetting. It was the settling down that allowed them to 

forget and to resign. There were diverse means to settling down in Busan. Some got married and created 

a family. Others found jobs to make a living, or made friends and formed relationships. Of course, these 

were only temporary reliefs. When the effects wore off, the horrible memories came back. 

The refugees themselves stress that marriage was a form of resignation and oblivion. Of the refugees in 

their seventies that I could meet today, most of them got married in Busan before or after evacuation. To 

the refugees, their partners were the separated families, homes, and the people to share their everyday 

sufferings. 

Most of the refugees married other North Korean refugees. They did so because they had hope that one 

day, when the war is over, they could go back home. They were away from home, but to them, their 

partners were like home. To the North Korean men, the North Korean food that their wives made, such as 

7 Yoo, Jae-chun, “The Role of Historical Studies in Humanities Treatment Studies – the Case of the Efficacy of History and 

the Issue of Healing Perception Conflicts,” Humanities and Science Journal 26, 2010, p. 501. 

8 According to the parties in need of oblivion (the victim and the perpetrator), it can heal wounds, and sometimes, it can act 

as a stimulus that worsens the wound. 

9 This is to distinguish the healing process between the self-effort to heal and healing with outside help. This chapter is 

about the former, and the latter will be discussed in the next chapter to see whether the wounds of the refugees can be 

healed through external relations. 

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Bindaedduck and mandu, helped to forget the longing for their mothers. 

Lee, Gi-hwal married a refugee from Kangwon Province. She had lost her parents during the war. When 

Lee cried on national holidays thinking of his mother, his wife, who was enduring a much bigger wound, 

would console him. His wife’s consolation was the biggest source of comfort that helped him bear 

through his difficulties. Fortunately, his wife earned money with him, so they were able to put food on 

the table every day, and that also made him happy. His wife had stored the clothes that he wore during the 

evacuation, which was handmade by his mother. To him, his wife was a person to share and empathize 

with his wounds. 

However, those replacements were like opium. It helped you forget the immediate pain, but it wasn’t a 

cure. Hwang, Jong-yeop who was framed as a commie for having North Korean money at the Seodaemun 

Police Station came to Busan, and got a job at an iron bar factory. He remembers that the happiest time of 

his life was when he met his wife through a friend and got married at the factory. He was so happy that he 

forgot his past sufferings. However, after his wife passed away, all of the pain came back. The thought of 

his hometown, parents, and siblings made him lonely. 

Frankly speaking, I am too old to say this, but I am so very lonely. I sleep alone, and I wake up 

alone. I constantly think of my hometown, my parents, and my brothers and sisters. I can never 

forget them. After my wife passed away, I have no one to turn to. Of course I have my children, 

but they are all grown up and living independently. So I can’t turn to them now. The loneliness just 

follows me around all the time (Hwang, Jong-yeop). 

The pains that he had forgotten due to his marriage were creeping up on him again after her death. From 

this, we can tell how much his wife had meant to him. In other words, his wife’s presence had helped him 

forget the war’s scars. 

Other than getting married and creating a family, the diverse human connection, such as neighbors, 

colleagues, and hometown friends all became opportunities to share their emotions. The attachment to the 

place where these relationships were forged also became opportunities to forget. During the research, I 

found out that there were a lot of small gatherings (kye: a kind of traditional private fund, whose members 

chip in a modest amount of money to create a fund for later use). Among the gatherings, there were those 

who went to the meetings to meet North Koreans and share their sentiments. Others were those who 

placed more importance in the new relationships they forged while settling down in Busan. The former 

gatherings include Yibukdominhoe (North Koreans’ Association). Lee, Gi-hwal started to attend the 

Association’s meetings in his thirties. He says that meeting North Koreans and speaking in North Korean 

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dialect helped him lessen his yearning. 

My research found that the refugees went to many meetings with the people they met in their 

neighborhoods while settling down in Busan. In particular, there is a gathering in the Refugee Village in 

Uam-dong, Nam-ku. The gathering has been ongoing for more than 40 years, 10 and more than 60% of its 

members are North Korean refugees. As time passed, different people came to the meetings. The meeting 

could last so long because people came to the meeting to share their daily lives and to post job offers. In 

Danggam-dong, there is a hometowners’ gathering, like the ‘Shinmak-kye’ made by people from Shinmak 

region in Hwanghae Province. However, most of the gatherings in Danggam-dong centered on those who 

lived in the neighborhood. Most of the gatherings held regular meetings and parties, and when there is a 

family event, the meeting gave gift money. It was very important for the refugees because most of them 

didn’t have many family members. The gatherings were the place to forget their loneliness. 

The relationships the refugees forged while settling down were the replacements for the connections they 

lost during the war and the evacuation. The awareness that they were all refugees and the relationship with 

their neighbors all helped to self-heal their wound. However, the permanency of the oblivion made by 

replacements and the conclusive effect of it in the healing process needs further research. 

Another replacement that stands out during settling down in Busan is economic activity. Lee, Gi-hwal’s 

wife said that she was “happy that I was married and had food on the table.” This shows that earning a 

living was an important factor in forgetting pain. Among the interviewees, it was clear that the current 

economic situation intervened in conjuring up past memories. Even though they led a happy life with 

many friends and were successful in terms of money, if they were in economic difficulties now, they were 

reliving their past sufferings. There is a difference between the refugees living in Danggam Market area 

and Busan International Fish Market area. The former are in somewhat difficult situations now, and the 

latter have achieved some success in the market. The two groups remember their pasts differently. It is 

because the people living in difficulty think that their past sufferings are the reason for their instability 

today. 

Vendors at big marketplaces such as the Busan International Fish Market or Busan Market remember 

10 Testimony by Kim, Young-ja (female, 76 years old, from Chungjin, Northern Hamkyung Province, recorded on Feb. 

Testimony by Kim, Young-ja (female, 76 years old, from Chungjin, Northern Hamkyung Province, recorded on Feb. 

26 th , 2012). This gathering takes place every fourth Sunday at lunch at a restaurant near Jasungdae. The members of the 

gathering used to live in one village. Now some of them have moved to other communities. I attended their meeting and 

observed. They spend a couple of hours conversing about daily lives and family issues and they part. The participation 

rate is quite high. Even people who had to go to church tried hard to attend. 

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earning money as a very pleasant memory. Lee, Gi-hwal, who was separated from his mother, looked 

as if he had forgotten all of his sorrow while speaking about his experiences as a vegetable vendor, ice 

flake vendor, and managing a manufacturing business. It seems that earning a lot of money was replacing 

the loss. However, Park, Young-ae’s husband works in Danggam-dong. He worked in the back office of 

Poongsan Metal. He earned bigger paychecks than others. He led a satisfactory life, leading the company’s 

volleyball team. However, after retirement, his business failed and the economic hardships conjured up 

his past sufferings. It is from here that we can see that the current situation plays a big role in whether the 

wound of evacuation can be replaced or not. Also, we can see that healing a refugee’s wound must not be 

done in an individual level, but a societal level. 

Family, houses, relationships with people around them, new friendships, and economic stability all 

became opportunities to become attached to the area the refugees lived in. 11 There are a lot of refugees 

who think Busan as their base, and are attached to it. The attachment and settling down could also be 

another replacement for healing the refugees’ wounds. 

3. Refugees and Researcher: Sympathy and Limit 

Yoo, Jae-chun proposed the recreation of the trauma and the process of sympathizing-healing-historicizing 

as a method to heal historical traumas. 12 He also proposed talking as a method of recreation and sympathy. 

Therefore, he stressed that the roles of historians and the oral statements are very important. Through 

oral statements, history of an individual or a group that isn’t recorded in the documents can be restored. 

This can be the beginning of healing an individual or a group’s scar. 13 Therefore, healing the scars of 

Korean War refugees can also be done through this process. Some people argue that oral statement is a 

method of cultural healing. They explain that human beings show their desires through words, and that 

their emotions are relieved through words, so that it can heal wounds. While talking, the interviewee and 

the researcher get to share their emotions. Also, the interviewee shows his/her emotions, so it is said to 

have a healing effect. However, even though making oral statements is effective, there isn’t any academic 

research on it. 14 

11 Cha, Chul-wook; Kong, Yoon-kyung, ”The Settlement and Placeness of North Korea Refugees for the Korean War,” 

Cha, Chul-wook; Kong, Yoon-kyung, ”The Settlement and Placeness of North Korea Refugees for the Korean War,” 

Journal of Sokdang Academic Research of Traditional Culture 47, 2010, pp. 293-298. 

12 Yoo, Jae-chun, op. cit., pp. 508-509. 

Yoo, Jae-chun, op. cit., pp. 508-509. 

13 Kim, Ho-yeon; Um, Chan-ho, “Seeking Humanities Treatment Using Oral History,” 

Kim, Ho-yeon; Um, Chan-ho, “Seeking Humanities Treatment Using Oral History,” Humanities and Science Journal, 

24, 2010, p. 369. 

14 Yoon, Taek-lim, ”Oral History Interview and Historical Trauma: Possibility for Combining the Task of Seeking Truths 

Yoon, Taek-lim, ”Oral History Interview and Historical Trauma: Possibility for Combining the Task of Seeking Truths 

with Healing Historical Wounds,” Humanities and Science Journal, 30, 2011, p. 400. 

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Interviewee and researcher relations are different from forming relations with friends or spouses. Of 

course this process can be understood as a socialization of an individual’s memory, but forming a sense 

of empathy takes more time. The socialization that takes place here is the relationship among people who 

live in a same place, like family. Among the people in the relationships, some might not have experienced 

the same traumatic events, but these relationships can help them forget and replace their scars. Their 

empathetic bond isn’t directly linked to the scars of the Korean War. A bigger bond comes from their daily 

lives that they share with their families or neighbors. However, a relationship between an interviewee 

and a researcher is somewhat different. The key point is whether they can form a bond and share their 

feelings in a short period of time. It is inevitable that there isn’t enough time to form a bond. However, the 

interviewee realizes that he/she can earn something different from the researcher that he/she can’t get from 

his/her family or friends. The interviewee expects that a social consensus will be formed about what they 

have experienced, and that it goes beyond just being an individual’s experience to become recognized 

as official history. This expectation helps to overcome the limitations in forming a bond between an 

interviewee and a researcher. This paper will also look into the efforts that have been taken to form social 

bonds with the refugees. 

In a conversation with an interviewee with historical scars, historical researchers emphasize that their scars 

are not caused by individual reasons, but a historical and a social one. In fact, based on my experience, 

overall, interviews with the refugees went smoothly. They easily agree to the researcher’s persuasion that 

they are important parts of Busan’s history and that their lives and history must be organized. During their 

evacuation, living as refugees, and while settling down, the refugees have never thought of themselves 

as the main characters in history. Or, they might have thought that what they have been through was 

important, but because no one recognized them, they never had the chance to speak. But a researcher 

gives them the chance to speak. This is why refugees and researchers form bonds easily. 

Interviewees commonly say that they have never told the process of evacuation and their lives in detail as 

they do during the interview. They have never told their stories in detail to their families or friends. Only 

relevant parts were told in pieces. It seemed that the interviewees gained trust in the researcher because 

the researcher listened to their stories, which did not receive much attention by others. However, the 

content that they told the researcher was limited. The interviewees emphasized the process of evacuation. 

How many days they have walked, how they evaded bombings, how they survived while others died, 

and other facts to emphasize that they were the survivors. In these stories, they are proud that they have 

accomplished something great. Also, they are proud of earning money in Busan. It almost feels as if they 

are telling a story of a mythical victory when they say that they created their lives from scratch. On the 

other hand, what the interviewees do not like to talk about is their failures. From this, we can tell that 

they forgot their pains by remembering victories instead of scars. Stories filled with sorrow, buried deep 

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in their hearts, were also not told easily. Stories about their families, ideologies, and brutal lives needed 

more trust to be built between the researcher and the interviewee. There were some interviewees who 

told their stories in tears. Kim, Jung-sook is not a North Korean refugee, but she came to live in Ami- 

dong during the Korean War. She showed tears saying that she suffered because her husband was addicted 

to gambling, and that it was her fault that her children had the same blood as her husband, and was also 

addicted to gambling. I confirmed that a researcher was meaningful as a listener and a person to empathize 

with. Refugees thought that the pain that they experienced were their entire faults. It is up to the researcher 

to understand their pain at a social and national level, not an individual level. This is the process of 

historicizing, and that process will be helpful in healing the refugees’ traumas. 

The biggest pains for the refugees are related to the family members they left back in North Korea. The 

personal guilt that only they evacuated and that their family members didn’t remains as the bigger scar. 

Lee Gi-hwal, who I mentioned before, was born in 1936, in Taechon, Northern Pyungan Province. He 

met his father by chance during the Jan. 4 th retreat while evacuating alone, but he never reunited with his 

mother. The pain of refuge life was more than words can say, but every national holiday, the memories 

of his mother made his heart sick. His wife understood his pain, and stored the clothes that he wore while 

evacuating, which his mother made herself, even till this day. The clothes were donated and are shown in 

the Provision Capital Memorial Hall in Busan, which opened in September 20 th , 2012. Lee feels relieved 

that his experience has gone beyond an individual level to a level that can form a social consensus. 

Their scars will be healed when not only the researcher, but also the nation, which is responsible for the 

war, understand the refugees’ lives and create a bigger social consensus. 

Conclusion 

The Korean War that began sixty years ago is still ongoing. The divided nations seem far away from 

reuniting, and the silent, deep sorrow of the people who sacrificed due to their nation’s violence is also 

still ongoing. The refugees who were separated from their family and evacuated from their homes are not 

hoping. They are giving up. 

This paper is about the possibility of healing the scars of the Korean War refugees. I have not done 

research on the actual healing of the refugees’ scars. So I hope this paper shows the need to heal the 

refugees’ scars, and works as its starting point. There are still many refugees living in Busan. However, 

there aren’t any proper efforts to historicize their experiences. There are so few references about the 

refugees. Without their oral statements, it will not be easy to fill in the important gap in our history. What 

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is hopeful is that recently, intermittent research and analysis are taking place. 

Recently, the Provision Capital Memorial Hall was reopened as a Korean War Museum. It is special in the 

sense that prior museums showed experiences of a nation undergoing war, but this museum emphasizes 

the lives of the refugees during wartime. Researchers and public entities must become the medium where 

they can create a social consensus about the refugees’ experiences. The sufferings must not disappear, 

untold in the refugees’ hearts. They must be evaluated as events that we all empathize. Researchers must 

prove that the refugees’ experiences are not meaningless, but that they hold historical importance and 

value. Therefore, the history created from these experiences must be taught and celebrated. And we need 

to begin creating a celebrated culture through museums. 

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Sansoo Lee Jong-Ryul’s National History: 

The Scars of Wounds and the Current History 

Man-joon Park 

Dongeui University 


What does the past do for us? Is history referring to the narrative formulated to reproduce the stories of the 

past in the order of time? The answer is no. History is not a mere reproduction of memories of people, yet 

history is something that determines the reason for our being, our lives, our identity as well as the direction 

of our lives. This paper is written based on the premise that history has a unique status and is something 

that determines the reason for our being, our lives, our identity as well as the direction of our lives, rather 

than the mere reproduction of memories of people about the past. 

It is not difficult to ascertain such a status of history. Why did the Chinese government come up with 

the Dongbei Project 1 (China’s history falsification project for the history of the Koguryo Empire, which 

has the root of Korea’s present identity and legitimacy)? Simply put, it is like declaring war over the 

possession of memories about the past. Although it is not a war that is fought with guns and other weapons, 

it is a diplomatic war claiming the territorial rights over a certain piece of territory. From the Chinese 

government’s perspective, it is a project to establish a uniform multi-ethnic nation theory to stabilize the 

Northeast Asian region and build a strong historical identity of the country. If you look into the details of 

the project, however, the Chinese government is obviously trying to falsify the history of the Northeast 

Asian region in a biased and opinionated way. 

1 Dongbei Project refers to the research project of the Borderland History and Geography Research Institute ( 

) under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences on history conducted for five years since 2002. Dong-Book- 

Gong-Jeong is short for the research project on the history and current situation of the Northeast Asian region ( 

). 

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The ongoing dispute over territorial rights between South Korea, Japan, China and Russia is centered 

on the same perception of history. Why is the dispute over territorial rights the same as the dispute over 

history? The two disputes are the same in the sense that both are forcing the wrong ‘outside’ understanding 

of history and of our memories of the past. In addition, the two disputes are the same in the sense that they 

both are trying to destroy the ‘inner’ order of our memories of the past. The dispute over territorial rights 

and the dispute over history have the same background and same intention. They are constantly trying to 

falsify the history of our society and our lives. In other words, they are not merely attempting to formulate 

the narrative of the stories of the past. The memories of the past and the truth about the past still have 

historical value and significance in today’s world. To people of today, history is another name for ‘truth, 

justice and the future outlook.’ As we were not able to heal the scars of the past, correcting the history of 

the country is all the more important. Now, we get a clearer picture of the problem and have all the reasons 

to correct our history. 

The world has increasingly become globalized and smaller day by day. How close did the regions, 

countries and ethnic groups get? As the world has become smaller through globalization, it may be natural 

to think that the regions, countries and ethnic groups may have gotten closer and closer. However, that 

is not the case. If you look beneath the surface of those relationships, ‘exotic things (foreign and strange 

things)’ and ‘indigenous things’ and have simply coexisted while ‘imperialism’ and ‘national legitimacy’ 

have been mixed in a globalized world. Such a coexistence of conflicting elements resulted in a variety 

of hybrid cultures, changing the landscape of power and authority. That is why there have been strong 

‘resistance’ and ‘merger’ movements throughout history. The ‘beautifully (?)’ conjured slogan ‘the most 

localized thing is the most globalized thing’ is created against such a background. 

What matters here is a balance of power. Facing the ‘globally’-powerful movement to constantly reproduce 

similar memories of the past in a systematic manner and to transform everything in the region, how 

should we make resistance movements to leave our trace in history? The global movement to reproduce 

history is so strong that it surpasses the special limitations and ethnic nature of people. Diverse opinions 

on the interpretation of globalism conflict with each other in this region. South Korea is no exception. We 

cannot turn a blind eye to the concept of nation and our national identity that is about to collapse due to 

globalization. 

I’m not saying that we have to look for ways to look into and analyze the multilayered structure of 

historical perception. What I’m arguing is that we have to pay attention to the weakened national identity 

that is losing its cohesive force as a historical theory. 

It is the eyes or the perception that are ‘paying attention’ to something. When we see and perceive 

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something, ‘seeing’ and ‘knowing’ is the essence. Therefore, the problem is not the past itself, but our 

perception of the past. History is ‘history’ that is essentially perceived, which is again allowing us to draw 

a clearer picture of the problem. We are not taking issue with the subjective composition of narrative in 

history. What we are emphasizing is different from this. 

First, it is urgent to free us from the arbitrary order that manipulates our past events that have no inherent 

relationship. Freeing us from such an arbitrary order is called ‘liberation.’ What we need is the attitude to 

take the initiative to re-draw our history and autonomously take lessons from historical time. 

Not all past events are absorbed into the uniform name of history. Our historical sketch of the past is largely 

based on the current view of our identity and thus is bound to be different depending on the current view of 

identity. 

True, our past events are reproduced not merely based on memories and awareness. Reproduction of the 

past is the realistic process of interpreting situations that are inherited from the past. In that sense, historical 

time is current and practical, which makes it differentiated from ‘natural time.’ From the perspective 

of ‘natural time,’ all regions across the world are in the same order of time. However, historical time is 

different. It flows along the horizon of practical time. Natural time flows regardless of history whereas 

historical time stops when the practical time is put to a halt. That is the reason that we cannot talk about 

the past without having a clear outlook for the future. The mere reproduction of past events is distinct 

from building a ‘historical’ understanding of the past and putting the historical perception into practice. 

Based on the premise and a critical awareness of the problems we have, this paper is to examine the history 

associated with Sansoo ( ) Lee Jong-Ryul ( , 1902-1989), a national historic man ( ) of 

Korea and to explore Busan’s scars of wounds from the past and the future outlook for healing such scars. 

2. Why Lee Jong-Ryul? 

The reproduction of the past events of Busan becomes very specific when it is associated with the special 

nature of Busan. Busan was a symbolic space connecting us to the historical perception, and we store 

numerous historical experiences and knowledge and call up and disseminate them whenever the need 

arises. 

Busan port is a symbol of the port city Busan. Busan port has a long and proud history that is said to have 

been the most flourishing port in the Northeast Asian countries of South Korea to China, Japan. In addition, 

the diplomatic relations of the Joseon Dynasty were centered on Waegwan (Japanese trading and living 

quarters in Korea), especially Waegwans in Busan. Back then, Busan was a beachhead for establishing 

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and maintaining diplomatic relations with Japan. Economically, Busan was also a hub for merchant trade 

between Korea and China and between Korea and Japan, 2 and its trade surplus was high enough to cover 

the total government expenditure of the Joseon Dynasty and to provide enormous boost to the domestic 

economy. 3 

Busan had to endure and go through hardships and difficulties due to its reputation as a major port city 

in Korea. During the Japanese invasion of Korea in 1592, which was understood as an international 

war involving three Northeastern Asian countries of Korea, Japan and China, Busan had to suffer from 

hardships since it was chosen as an outpost for Japanese invaders and as the base for the Japanese forces 

for the following seven years, thus having to suffer from hardships for a long period of time. That is why 

there are still clear scars in Busan that are left from our ancestors’ resistance and fighting back against 

foreign forces. 

Let’s think about the 36-year history of the Japanese colonization. It was the first time when the country 

was directly and completely occupied by foreign forces. The buzz 4 words describing the Japanese 

colonization period are ‘culture politics,’ ‘degeneration of politics’ and ‘fraudulent politics.’ How frustrated 

and furious must Korean people have felt? Our ancestors made their resistance and protests when they 

were suppressed, discriminated and despised. And in Busan, an outpost city of Japanese colonial rule and 

oppression, such resistance and protests were fiercely staged. In the city of Busan, a historical fruit that was 

born as the city’s geographical feature is combined with the city’s traditional anti-invader national spirit. 

The national independence movement, which was mainly led by Baeksansanghwae, led to the youth 

movement since the protests of pier workers in the 1920s, Shinganhwae movement and the red labor union 

establishment movement in the 1930s and other various national libration movements in Busan. In terms 

of the strength and resilience of the protests and liberation movements, Busan stood out from other cities in 

the country and showed an unprecedented fighting spirit. 5 Korea’s liberation and independence, which were 

the results of resilient protests, then contributed to achieving the ideological independence and autonomy 

2 Although the name of Waegwan has been changed from Sampo to Doomopo, Jeolyoungdo and to Choryang over time, 

the history of Waegwan has always been centered in Busan. Kim Yong-Wook, The History and Spirit of Busan, p. 37. 

3 It was in the fourth year of King Sukjong’s reign in the Joseon Dynasty that Waegwan was relocated to the area near 

Yongdosan in Busan. Since then, Waegwan has been in the same area for approximately 200 years. The size of Waegwan 

in Busan was the largest among Waegwans in the Northeast Asian countries, reaching up to 110,000 pyeong. Kim Yong- 

Wook, The History and Spirit of Busan, pp. 90~91. 

4 These words were used by Korean people to criticize and ridicule the Japanese colonialism during the pupil politics period 

(1919-1930). In the word ‘culture politics,’ the Chinese character for ‘culture’ also stands for mosquito ( ) and toad ( ). 

The ‘degeneration ( ) of politics’ was uttered to ridicule and challenge the culture politics of the Japanese ruler. 

5 The Korean Culture Institute of Pusan National University, The History and Culture of Busan, p. 171. 

680

of the country. The spirit of such resistance movements and protests continued in the social movements 

of the city in the aftermath of Korea’s liberation from Japanese colonialism and in the process of building 

a foundation for an autonomous national country, 6 which in turn paved the way for the growth of anti- 

authoritarian democratic movements afterwards. 

Now is the time to answer the question. Why Lee Jong-Ryul? 

Lee Jong-Ryul was chosen as a major historic figure who went through a series of historic events and thus 

is a symbolic figure that highlights Japan’s colonial oppression, discrimination, contempt and Korean 

people’s resistance, protests and fight against Japanese rule, the anti-foreign, anti-feudalism, and anti- 

imperialism that emerged in Korea, the country’s liberation from Japanese colonization and autonomous 

independence, national movements of liberation, anti-authoritarian movements and democratization. 

3. Who is Lee Jong-Ryul? 

Sansoo Lee Jong-Ryul was born in Jookjang-myeon, Pohang-si, North Gyeongsang Province on Jun 6th, 

1902. At the age of 21, in 1921, he joined Jeomgook Public Elementary School located in Jeomgook- 

myeon, Euisung, where he met with Park Myeong-Jin, a patriot who dropped out from Choongang High 

School in Seoul. Meeting with Park Myeong-Jin became a meaningful turning point in his life as he learned 

the pre-modern history of the country from Park Myeong-Jin and the existence of the interim government 

of the Republic of Korea through the education on politics provided by the Hogyeong Physical Education 

Institute. 7 

The Hogyeong Physical Education Institute was established by Park Myeong-Jin. Breaking away from the 

conventional movement in support of a return to the monarchy, Lee Jong-Ryul established a whole new 

approach to the anti-Japanese movements. 

Lee Jong-Ryul put the spirit of anti-feudalism into practice in Euisung and fought against the tyranny of 

6 The social movement in Busan was focused on gaining autonomy and independence and thus had no other choice but to 

fight against the authoritarian military government. Despite the continued oppression of the military government and its 

use of force, the social movement to build an autonomous nation and independent economy continued to be staged and 

became fiercer. In Jan 1946, the ‘Busan Citizens’s Rally’ was held in Busan with the enthusiastic participation of citizens. 

The Korean Culture Institute of Pusan National University, The History and Culture of Busan, p. 171. 

7 The Hogyeong Physical Education Institute was an association of young boys in the region established to promote anti- 

Japanese sentiment among young people. Park Myeong-Jin was the Chairman and the Secretary while Lee Jong-Ryul 

served as the Vice Secretary. 

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feudal lords. Lee Jong-Ryul and Park Myeong-Yok—a brother of Park Myeong-Jin—visited Baekjeong 

Village and bowed, which was an astonishing incident in Euisung, a highly conservative region where 

strict hierarchy existed between feudal lords and vassals. This episode—highlighting the personality and 

character of a young patriot Lee Jong-Ryul—has become a legendary tale in Jeomgook Public Elementary 

School. 

After joining Dongmyeong School in Andong, Lee Jong-Ryul met Lee Hyung-Gook, Yoo Dong-Boong, 

Lee Ji-Ho and joined other patriotic activities and was deeply influenced by them. Dongmyeong School 

was a private school established to promote a mass-education drive in the late-Korean Empire period and 

had strong anti-Japanese sentiments. Lee Hyung-Gook, Yoo Dong-Boong and Lee Ji-Ho, eminent anti- 

Japanese patriotic activists in the Andong region became unforgettable teachers to Lee Jong-Ryul and Lee 

Hyung-Gook. Yoo Dong-Boong and Lee Ji-Ho continued their teacher-student relationship with Lee Jong- 

Ryul throughout his life. 

In 1924, Lee Jong-Ryul entered Baejae Junior High School and became a founding member and a member 

of the executive committee of Gyeongseong Youth Association, 8 a socialist association of young people. 

Back then, Gyeongseong Youth Association was considered a youth organization promoting relatively 

systematic popular movements on unification compared with other youth associations. 

As Lee Jong-Ryul began to participate in the activities of Gonghak Association (the student’s anti-Japanese 

movement association) in 1925, he became more actively engaged in anti-Japanese movements. The 

Gonghak Association was the student’s movement organization established with the aim of promoting 

autonomous and independent social science research. Lee Jong-Ryul took the initiative and led the 

foundation of Gonghak Association. The ultimate purpose of establishing the Gonghak Association was 

to study social science with ‘joint forces’ and to strengthen ‘solidarity’ to fight against Japanese colonial 

education. It was the first students’ organization on social science research in Korea and the organization 

that opened a new chapter in the Korean students’ anti-Japanese movements by facilitating the students’ 

secret activist activities. The Seongjin Association, which led the anti-Japanese movements in Gwangju 

later, was a secret student association that shared fundamental themes with the Gonghak Association. 

8 In the early 1920s, the youth movements were at the heart of the socialist movement. In 1924, young activities established 

the United Joseon Youth Association. Hwayo faction, Seoul faction and Bokpong faction, the major factions in the socialist 

movements back then, attempted to seize the control of the youth movement in the country by organizing the New 

Youth Association, the Seoul Youth Association and the Gyeongseong Youth Association respectively. At that time, most 

socialist youth movements were associated with those young activists. The Gyeongseong Youth Association held its inaugural 

assembly on Dec 11th, 1924. 

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Although the Gonghak Association was forced to dissolve by the Japanese rule, its themes were sustained 

in the Joseon Students’ Science Research Institute, thus opening a new chapter in the student movement 

and becoming a central organization that led to the Jun 10th independence movement (hurray movement) 

in 1926. While preparing for the Jun 10th independence movement, Lee Jong-Ryul was arrested and taken 

into custody by police in Gyeonggi Province, where he met Han Yong-Woon, who greatly inspired him to 

pursue his activist movement. 9 

After the Jun 10th independence movement (hurray movement) in 1926, Lee Jong-Ryul was admitted 

to Waseda University in Japan to pursue higher education. He organized the Federation of Joseon Youth 

Associations in Japan. The Federation of Joseon Youth Associations in Japan was a united federation of 

Korean young people’s associations in Japan designed to unify the youth movement across Japan. 

In 1927, Lee Jong-Ryul led the establishment of the Tokyo Branch of the Shingan Association. The 

Tokyo Branch of the Shingan Association protested against the tyranny of the Governor General while 

not accepting the Japanese colonial rule as a legitimate government. It launched the Gwandong Region 

Association opposing the tyranny of the Governor General in Korea in September 1927. 10 While serving 

as a member of the Shingan Association, Lee Jong-Ryul was able to build a firm belief in promoting 

national independence through the efforts made by national associations and federations - such as the 

Shingan Association - and began to recognize it as the essential element required to achieve the successful 

revolution of Joseon. Lee Jong-Ryul devoted himself to the activities promoting the vision of the Shingan 

Association and his endeavors whole serving in the National Gyeonyang Association and the National 

Independent Unification Central Council showed his ideology and enthusiasm in the national independence 

movement. 

While being actively engaged in the anti-Japanese national independence movement, he was also serving 

as a high-level executive official of the Confederation of Joseon Associations in Japan. The Confederation 

of Joseon Associations in Japan was a united confederation of major associations of Korean people 

9 The Jun 10th independence movement was a big project led by the Joseon communist party, Cheondoism followers and 

other nationalists. Those engaged in the initial preparation of the independence movement were arrested right before staging 

the movement. Later, students–led by the Joseon Student Social Science Research Institute–conducted independence 

hurray movement. Lee Jong-Ryul was also arrested and taken into police custody in Gyeonggi Province together with 

Han Yong-Woon and other leading patriotic activists. Kim Sun-Mi, The Historical Re-examination of Sansoo Lee Jong- 

Ryul’s National Revolution Theory, pp. 247-8. 

10 The Gwandong Region Association opposing the tyranny of Governor General was comprised of 14 relevant associa- 

The Gwandong Region Association opposing the tyranny of Governor General was comprised of 14 relevant associations 

including the Confederation of Joseon Workers Union in Japan, Tokyo Branch of Shingan Association, the Students’ 

Association, the Federation of Joseon Youth in Tokyo and the New Science Research Institute. 

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organized in Japan. 

In 1928, Lee Jong-Ryul also established the ‘Joseon Student Strike Safeguard Alliance in Japan.’ After 

Lee Jong-Ryul came back to Korea, he was arrested as a mastermind behind the national students’ alliance 

movement under the Public Order Act. At that time, he was a teacher at a village school for children 

of the disadvantaged in Seoul. Together with Lee Hyun-Chul and Jang Hong-Yeom, he printed slogan 

posters – which said ‘Rise Up, Joseon Students’ – in Japan and sent them to Korea via mail and distributed 

them to stage nation-wide anti-Japanese protests in school strikes. Lee Jong-Ryul began to teach at the 

village school in Seoul after July 1927 when he was expelled from Waseda University due to the ‘Korean 

Research Society’ incident and came back to Korea. 11 

In 1930, Lee Jong-Ryul, Hyun Joon-Hyuk and Yoo Jin-Oh established the Social Status Research Center in 

order to analyze the reality facing domestic society and thus lay logical grounds for their social movements 

and activities. In Jul of the following year, Lee Jong-Ryul launched the monthly magazine Leereota and 

served as a publisher and editor-in-chief. 12 Leereota mainly covered domestic issue articles denouncing 

Japan’s policy to divide the country, its colonialism policy, analysis of various domestic social movements 

and incidents, and international articles dealing with the political and economic status of other countries 

around the world and analysis of international circumstances. 

Around that time, Lee Jong-Ryul began to actively participate in the emancipation movement called the 

equity movement to liberate the lowest class of society and also in the equity youth avant-garde alliance. 

The activities of the equity youth avant-garde alliance were investigated by police in Gwangju in 1933 and 

members of the alliance were severely tortured through the investigation process. As a result, the alliance’s 

national network was revealed, and a total of fourteen people were put to trial. Thirteen people were 

found not guilty but Lee Jong-Ryul was sentenced to three years and six months of imprisonment and was 

imprisoned in Gwangju Prison till Nov 1936. 

In 1938, he was again imprisoned and horribly tortured in Gongjoo Prison on charges of violating the 

Publishing Act and the Public Order Act. Even after he was released from prison, he was placed on 

probation by the Governor General. Since the 1940s, he disguised himself as a ‘charcoal burner in 

11 The village school refers to the Seoul Village School ( 

The village school refers to the Seoul Village School ( ) that Lee Joon-Ryul established. After Lee Joon-Ryul 

came back to Korea in Jul 1928, he began to teach at the school in September 1928. 

12 The monthly magazine 

The monthly magazine Leereota was launched in Jul 1931 and published 57 issues for a period of four years and seven 

months until 1936. 

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Gapyeong’ who burns and sells charcoal and lived in Gail-ri, Seolak-myeon, Gapyeong-gun, Gyeonggi 

Province to avoid repression in the late colonial period. On Aug 10th, 1944, he again joined hands with the 

Joseon National Foundation Alliance to continue his anti-Japanese underground activities. 

Lee Jong-Ryul continued his activities to promote national revolution even after Korea was liberated from 

Japanese colonial rule in 1945. He was actively involved in the establishment of the Joseon Academy of 

Science, which declared nationalist ideology. He firmly believed that establishing a unified government of 

the North and the South is the only way to avoid division of the country and national war and to achieve 

national autonomy. Against such a backdrop, he established the National Geonyang Association to put his 

firm belief into practice. 

In January 1946, the National Geonyang Association was launched by Lee Jong-Ryul to provide support 

to the process of building the national revolution party. As a matter of fact, the National Geonyang 

Association was an organization that shows the essence of Lee Jong-Ryul’s historical view that promoted 

the national revolution movements to stage nationalist unification movements and promote a national 

independent and autonomous country. The Association recognized such national revolution movements 

as a historical challenge facing the country as it was about to take a step toward the establishment of an 

independent country. 

In 1947, the National Geonyang Association formed the organization of people to promote democratization 

and independence movements. During that period, Lee Jong-Ryul was engaged in democratization and 

nationalist movements to raise awareness of the public through publicity activities as an editor-in-chief of 

Democratic Daily. 13 ‘Min-jok-geon-yang ( )’ is a word created by Lee Jong-Ryul, which means ‘we 

should build and promote a nation.’ 

In the 1950s, Lee Jong-Ryul conducted the autonomous national unification movement as the country went 

through the tragedy of the Korean War. He recognized the Korean War as part of the national revolution 

movement and continued to pursue the establishment of an independent nation. 

In 1951, Lee Jong-Ryul was asked by the then Vice President in the interim capital city of Busan to serve 

13 Kim Gyu-Shik was the president of 

Kim Gyu-Shik was the president of Democratic Daily and Shin Ik-Hee, who ran for presidential election in 1956, was 

the newspaper’s advisor. Lee Jong-Ryul tried to implement the unification policy by participating in the Shin Il-Hee’s 

camp that promotes non-violent political negotiations and national unification based on the peaceful unification theory 

of the National Gunyang Association. However, Lee Jong-Ryul’s such efforts were aborted because Shin Il-Hee passed 

away while campaigning in the presidential election. 

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as a professor at Pusan National University. At the Pusan National University, he taught political ideology, 

Korean political history and the theory on political party and formed an academic and practical network 

with other professors and students at Pusan National University and in the political science department 

of Donga University. Together with his students, in 1954, Lee Jong-Ryul organized the National Culture 

Association to support the establishment of an independent nation. 

The National Culture Association was Busan’s leading organization to promote public activist campaigns 

back in the late 1950s. A number of progressive intellectuals in Busan and other regions in South 

Gyeongsang Province participated in such campaigns. The public activist campaigns continued until the 

year 1960 when the National Culture Association handed over its roles and missions to the Democratic 

National Youth Alliance. The Democratic National Youth Alliance served as the basis of the country’s 

autonomous national unification movements, which was led mainly by the National Independent 

Unification Central Council. 

During the period from 1957 to the late 1950s, Lee Jong-Ryul was engaged in anti-foreign nationalist 

independence movements together with like-minded people in Busan and served as an editorial writer to 

Busan Daily and International Daily, writing articles to help the public build awareness of the national 

revolution theory. 14 He also served as an editorial writer and editor-in-chief of Yeongnam Daily, a leading 

newspaper in support of the opposition party and progressive political forces in Daegu. Lee Soon-Hee, 

the president of Yeongnam Daily, provided full support to the Democratic National Youth Alliance and 

National Independent Unification Central Council. Through the process, Lee Jong-Ryul was the medium 

for Lee Soon-Hee to provide resources and support to the Democratic National Youth Alliance and 

National Independent Unification Central Council. 

The national resistance movements in Mar. and Apr. 1960 served as an opportunity for Lee Jong-Ryul 

to pave the way for full-fledged national democratic movements. In early May 1960, Lee Jong-Ryul 

established the Democratic Nationalist Youth Council (tentative name) for young people in Busan to stage 

new political protests for national revolution. The establishment of the Democratic Nationalist Youth 

Council was proposed by 114 promoters and the title was later confirmed to be the Democratic National 

Youth Alliance (hereinafter referred to as Min-min-chung). Min-min-chung declared that we should build 

our independent history through people’s capitalist democratic and national revolution movements and 

pursued the autonomous youth movement in pursuit of unification. 

14 One of the major articles is “The Political Science for Millions of Readers,” a newspaper serial that ran 41 issues since 

One of the major articles is “The Political Science for Millions of Readers,” a newspaper serial that ran 41 issues since 

late 1958 in International Daily. 

686

The establishment of Min-min-chung encouraged Lee Jong-Ryul to establish the National Autonomous 

Unification Central Council (hereinafter referred to as Min-ja-tong). After he established Min-ja-tong, 

Lee Jong-Ryul concentrated on expanding the organization of Min-ja-tong based on anti-foreign national 

autonomous movements in a broad endeavor to put his national revolution theory of pursuing autonomous 

national foundation movements into practice. To him, Min-ja-tong was a medium for him to consolidate 

forces to pursue both unification of the country and national revolution. 

After Min-ja-tong became a national organization in 1961, Lee Jong-Ryul played a critical role in putting 

together unification policies as part of Min-ja-tong’s key projects. Lee Jong-Ryul was a person who 

pursued large-scale unification movements for the first time in Korea since the Korean War. 

In addition to participating in Min-ja-tong’s activities, Lee Jong-Ryul took the initiative in establishing 

Nation Daily in February 1961. The initial name of the newspaper was ‘Public Daily’ but was later changed 

to ‘Nation Daily’ at a suggestion Lee Jong-Ryul made in a gathering in preparation for the newspaper’s 

foundation. The name of the newspaper is deeply associated with the nature of this and highlights Lee 

Jong-Ryul’s political position during the period of the national resistance movements in Mar. and Apr. 

Lee Jong-Ryul planned to turn Nation Daily into a newspaper dedicated to the national revolution theory 

by integrating national movement forces and publishing articles to raise people’s awareness of the nation. 15 

However, in just three years since its very first issue published on Feb. 13th, 1961, Nation Daily was 

forced to shut down by the military coup forces upon publishing # 92 issue. Lee Jong-Ryul was arrested on 

charges of the activities in Min-ja-tong and involvement in the Nation Daily incident and was sentenced to 

ten years’ imprisonment in Seodaemoon Prison. 

Lee Jong-Ryul took over Gaewoon Junior High School in Yangsan, South Gyeongsang Province after he 

was released in Dec. 1965. Since then, he continued to conduct national education campaigns and collapsed 

from a stroke while he was coming back from his visit to the historical site dedicated to Ahn Hee-Jae, an 

independence movement activist, in 1974. Until he passed away after years of struggle with the stroke, Lee 

Jong-Ryul exerted his utmost effort to promote national revolution movements. On Mar 13th, 1989, Lee 

Jong-Ryul left his final words “Min-jok-geon-yang-sa-ro (toward national foundation),” a slogan in pursuit 

of people’s revolution and national revolution in history, and the ‘Sa-cheak-dang: the avant-garde party that 

15 Refer to the following publication on 

Refer to the following publication on Nation Daily and its founder Lee Jong-Ryul: Kim Ji-Hyeong, “Nation Daily and 

Sansoo Lee Jong-Ryul,” The Historical Re-examination of Sansoo Lee Jong-Ryul’s National Revolution Theory, pp. 314- 

348. 

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promotes national revolution’ and passed away at the age of 87. 

4. Is Lee Jong-Ryul alive or dead? 

What is the life of thought? It is “a concrete and effective force that lifts up the generation in historical 

crises and helps it move forward.” 16 This then leads to another question. Is Lee Jong-Ryul alive or dead? 

Is his ideology and thought still relevant for people of today as we try to rescue our history and move it 

forward into the future? 

Lee Jong-Ryul stated that “all social theories should be understood based on its historical time and 

conditions” and “it is natural that Marx and Engels, [who were living in a different society at a different 

time], were not able to speak for our country’s revolution in a logical sense.” 17 In short, academic theories 

and ideologies cannot be understood in isolation and they should be considered together with their 

historical and social background. We can apply this to Lee Jong-Ryul’s theories and ideologies. How 

about his theories and ideologies? Are they alive or dead? Our answer is that ‘Lee Jong-Ryul is still alive’ 

meaning that his theories and ideologies are still relevant for today’s society in Korea. Why is that? 

Let us first look into this perception of problems and methodologies for healing used in his People’s 

Revolution Theory. Drawing a clear picture of the problem is like making a diagnosis of problems facing 

society, and it is essential to make an accurate diagnosis of problems in order to heal the wounds caused by 

such problems. It is difficult to talk about healing and correcting the problems without having an accurate 

diagnosis because it is possible to come up with correct and practical treatment methods for healing 

problems only when we make a correct diagnosis. 

1) Diagnosis of Problems and Methodologies for Problem Solving in the People’s History 18 

“Theories should be verified thoroughly to see whether they are based on falsified background knowledge 

or on the historical truth in a critical and analytic manner.” 19 Only when we make critical analysis and 

introspection of the past and history, can we move our history forward into the future. What does this 

mean? This means there have been people who tried to distort our history, not looking at it as it is, and 

16 Lee Jong-Ryu, National Revolution Theory, p. 23. 

17 Lee Jong-Ryu, National Revolution Theory, p. 238. The phrase in [ ] is written by the author. 

18 People’s History ( ) is a term created by the author to make a distinction between the ‘Lee Jong-Ryul’s correct 

history’ and the general history. 


688

there are still those people who are trying to adjust and use history to their advantage. A case in point is the 

conservative vested interests and those in power in current Korean society. 

Introspection on the past is taking stock of the past and coming back to the current reality. However, the 

eyes of the conservative forces are fixated on the past and remain there. That is why the conservative make 

no introspection on the past. When someone introspects on the past, he or she is bound to come back to the 

current reality. Without coming back to the current reality and applying the lessons learned to the current 

reality, it is hard to say that the person has fully introspected on the past. The present reality is where the 

historical lessons are being applied. Introspecting on the past means that the person is trying to apply the 

lessons learned from the past history to the present reality. Through critical analysis and examination, we 

can introspect on the past and determine our current history and accordingly pave a new historical path 

( ) for the future. 

Without having a correct understanding of history, we cannot understand what the current problems are 

and analyze the historical truth behind the cause of the problems, which means it is all the more important 

to accumulate historical references. Then, Lee Jong-Ryul asks us the following question: where is our 

historical path headed? To which direction is our history moving forward? By asking such questions, we 

will be able to draw a clearer picture of the problems in our history. 

History ‘marches forward on the historical path,’ which means that history is walking on the path of 

history. Then, is history walking on the historical path spontaneously? The answer is no. If something is 

moving spontaneously, that is not history but nature. History is not the same as nature. History needs the 

right historical path, the right direction and the following movements. The order of building history is as 

follows: historical path-route-strategy-practice-historical path. The forward-looking historical perception 

paves the way for the historical path and route, which in turn determines strategies, tactics and practices. 

In short, the historical path opens up when historical practices are implemented. 20 ‘People forces’ or the 

general public played a role in the progress of history. That leads to another question: why does history 

change its composition and nature? By trying to answer this question, we will be able to draw a clear 

picture of the problems. 

20 Park Man-joon, “The Historical Philosophy and Ideology of People’s Revolution,” The Historical Re-examination of 

Sansoo Lee Jong-Ryul’s National Revolution Theory, pp. 29~34. In the developments of historical path, the historical 

path is the beginning and putting the theory into practice is the end. Then, is putting the theory on historical path the 

completion of history? No. The historical route has a circular structure where practices again meet with the historical 

path. That is why it is said that the historical path opens up with practices. Of course, the historical path before putting 

the theory into practice and after putting the theory into practice is different. The historical path after putting the theory 

into practice is a new historical path that is heading people progressively toward into the future. 

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Lee Jong-Ryul called the society with people with many different interests a ‘political society.’ In political 

society, there exist constant confrontations between public forces. In People’s History, political society is 

the same as historical society. Is the history always going in the direction for promoting virtue or pursuing 

new values, instead of the opposing direction? That is the third question People’s History asks. 21 

2) People’s Revolution Theory 

We saw that Lee Jong-Ryul’s theory is still relevant today by examining the perception of problems in 

People’s History. Based on the clear picture of problems as shown in the above three examples, Lee Jong- 

Ryul asked and tried to answer the question: where should our history be headed in the future in People’s 

Revolution Theory? People’s revolution is short for National Revolution and People’s Revolution. 

When we think of national revolution, Lenin’s national revolution instantly comes to our minds. On Jul. 

20th, 1920, Lenin declared that “People in China and Joseon should make national revolution not the 

socialist revolution movements” in his remarks made at the International Communist Party Convention. 

His remarks emphasized that the historical events in the Northeast Asian region–such as Korea and China– 

should be understood and analyzed in a different manner and thus remedy or measures applied to those 

countries should be different from the ones applied to the countries in other regions of the world. Also, 

what he was trying to emphasize is that it is highly important to conduct scientific analysis of historical 

facts in different regions in the world to build an appropriate understanding of the history of each region 

and the differences. 

Lenin, who lived in the era of financial capitalism, is living in a different historical time when compared 

with Marx, who lived in the era of industrial capitalism. According to Marx, the confrontation between 

laborers and capitalists is inevitable and unavoidable. In the process of promoting national revolution, it 

is more efficient and beneficial for laborers to join hands with capitalists as one nation to fight against the 

oppression of imperialistic foreign forces. Ignoring such possibilities of national movements and insisting 

socialist revolution or communist revolution is just ‘an anti-national and anti-revolution act,’ 22 which were 

well shown in the example of Hyun Joon-Hyuk, a leader of the branches of the Joseon Communist Party in 

the five Northwestern Provinces, who insisted the three-step revolution theory (national revolution-socialist 

revolution-communist revolution). 

21 In People’s History, the winner in the battle between the force of stepping forward exerted by the public and the oppos- opposing 

force of power is always the force of stepping forward. Is People’s History a merely optimistic and idealistic theory? 

The analysis of the cycle involving the historical path and practices demonstrates that it is not merely being optimistic. 


690

In this regard, national revolution can be divided into two kinds. The national revolution in Hyun Joon- 

Hyun’s three-step revolution theory is completely different from the national revolution in People’s History 

and is also different from Lenin’s national revolution. Lenin’s national revolution is merely a step in the 

two-step revolution theory. According to Lenin’s revolution theory, national revolution is followed by the 

socialist revolution. 23 

In People’s History, the path that history should be headed to can only be built through national revolution, 

indicating that only national revolution is required other than other socialist revolution, communist 

revolution and other kinds of revolutions relevant for the generation. Does that mean that history is 

completed through national revolution? No. “The national revolution is not a completion of history with a 

clear beginning and end; rather, it is the initial ( ) process through which the history is built.” 24 In other 

words, national revolution is the process to complete history rather that something that puts an end to 

history. Then, what are the following ( ) steps required after national revolution? That must be people’s 

revolution. In this sense, Lee Jong-Ryul’s People’s Revolution Theory is essentially in the same vein as his 

slogan Min-jok-geon-yang-sa-ro ( ): Historical Path toward National Foundation. 

Min-jok-geon-yang stands for the movement that promotes national foundation. In other words, it is 

referring to ‘the high-level scientific socialist society movements to build a people’s country, force and 

architecture of promoting people’s bourgeoisie democracy.’ In short, Min-jok-geon-yang is the movement 

promoting both national foundation and people’s foundation, which doesn’t mean that the nation should 

be built first to promote people’s foundation. The national revolution is the process of revolution that is 

implemented to build a nation and dissolve it afterwards. In this regard, Lee Jong-Ryul’s national theory 

stands out from other nationalism theories that view the national scheme as the ultimate alternative. 

Then, what are the sequences of the stages of human revolution and national revolution? Is national 

revolution following human revolution naturally and automatically? Not at all. The term Min-jok-geon- 

yang-sa-ro ( ) shows the answer. National revolution is ‘the following step of the revolution 

and also a prelude to human revolution.’ 25 Human revolution is a following step of national revolution 

to complete the entire historical path, and thus it can be called a culmination of the true national history. 

23 The term ‘national revolution’ began to spread after Lenin used it in “The Thesis on National and Colonialism Issues.” 

National revolution refers to a revolutionary national movement that is different from advanced bourgeoisie movements 

in colony countries. However, Lee Jong-Ryul used the term ‘national revolution’ as an abbreviation for ‘ordinary 

people’s capitalist democratization national revolution.’ Kim Sun-Mi, Lee Jong-Ryu’s National Movements and Political 

Theory, Paragraph 2, Chapter 2. 

24 Lee Jong-Ryu, 

Lee Jong-Ryu, National Revolution Theory, p. 70. 

25 The Memorial Foundation of Sansoo Lee Jong-Ryul, Collection of Publications of Sansoo Lee Jong-Ryul 1-2, p. 392. 

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That is, national revolution is an economical, social and historic revolution that rescues the history and 

that contributes to the detailed contents of the human history. When history gets changed, the society – the 

historical place – also gets changed and consequently people living in society also get changed. That is why 

national revolution takes place at first, followed by human revolution and people’s revolution. 

“All the accomplishments of national revolution are likening to the root of human revolution while the 

accomplishments of human revolution can be likened to branches and flowers of national revolution.” 

And “although the root, branches and flowers have different characteristics, they’re are all part of a single 

organic being.” 26 Here, ‘organic being’ refers to the general status and theoretical meaning of people’s 

revolution. In other words, it refers to the comprehensive process of people’s revolution that rescues people 

from the historical crisis and puts them onto the new historical path. 

Why is the revolution that rescues people from historical crises and puts them onto the new historical path 

called people’s revolution? What is the reason? As demonstrated in the case of other names and titles 

created throughout the history, the term people’s revolution was created to describe the unique essence 

of what it refers to. 27 People’s revolution is focused on the direction of human history whereas citizens’ 

revolution in the pre-modern era is centered on economical, political and social essence. The direction of 

human history refers to the historical path toward achieving human values in a whole new sense. 

People’s revolution is the process of rescuing our people from historical crises and helping people move 

forward on a new historical path. 28 That is why it is considered both national revolution and human 

revolution. Overcoming the ‘marginalization of people’ or ‘marginalization of humanity’ in the social and 

human sciences is like people’s revolution when their ideologies are taken into account. That is because 

such marginalization is caused in the political and social relationships of economic forces, and people’s 

revolution is the only way to resolve such marginalization. 

That doesn’t mean resolving the issue of marginalization and rescuing people from the depths of despair 

incurred by marginalization is not the same as ‘the recovery of humanity.’ When we say we ‘restore’ 

something, it is about re-gaining something that we have lost. Then, from which period should we have to 

restore our humanity? There is no exemplary humanity existing in the world, and we didn’t have it in the 

beginning. That is why people change accordingly as society changes. 

26 Lee Jong-Ryu, 

Lee Jong-Ryu, National Revolution Theory, p. 71. 

27 The revolution that brought the history of the medieval times into the pre-modern era is called capitalist democratization 

The revolution that brought the history of the medieval times into the pre-modern era is called capitalist democratization 

revolution or citizens’ revolution. 

28 The reason Lee Jong-Ryul emphasized national unifi cation is directly related to this. Without achieving national unifi ca- 

The reason Lee Jong-Ryul emphasized national unification is directly related to this. Without achieving national unification, 

our national identity would remain ‘ragged, ripped off and fallen to the ground’ and the only way to restore ‘the 

falling national identity values’ is to unify the divided country. Lee Jong-Ryu, National Revolution Theory, p. 117. 

692

Human revolution is the historical path that leads to ‘the direction of contributing gradually to the formation 

of personality.’ The ‘direction’ is the ideological orientation of people’s revolution. What is the ideology 

for people’s revolution? What does rescuing personality and helping people march forward on a new 

historical path do? Although we have explored them to some extent, we need to see the changing status of 

people in the history of humanity in order to have a concrete understanding of the ideology. To this end, 

the research on history is important and essential 29 since it is all the anti-human and inhumane incidents or 

facts in human history that human revolution is trying to resolve. 30 

The ideological orientation of human revolution is part of the stage in human history. That is, human 

revolution is designed to denounce all anti-human events or incidents of the past and to encourage the 

gentle and kind nature in people that tend to help and support each other to become heroes and heroines, 

thus achieving the ‘noblest and most-urgent ideal of human history.’ What is noteworthy is the fact that 

the problems facing people today become the problems facing all of humanity, which in turn spark the 

problems facing the nation. That is because ordinary people are the protagonists in our history and history 

cannot exist without them. Therefore, we should continue to build our truthful history by having a correct 

understanding of the problems that were placed in front of them. 

5. Conclusion 

Now we know that the life of Lee Jong-Ryul is a manifestation of his thoughts and ideologies, and his 

thoughts and ideologies were well present in his acts and life. We now also know that Sansoo Lee Jong- 

Ryul is a representative person who highlights historical milestones and turning points in Busan - such 

as the People’s resistance movement against the oppression and discrimination by foreign forces, anti- 

Japanese and anti-foreign movements, liberation and self-achieved autonomy of the nation, the national 

movements to attain Korea’s liberation from Japanese colonial rule, anti-authoritarian and democratization 

movements. 

As pointed out earlier, the problem is that his life and ideology is still relevant for us who are living in the 

present day. His wounds are our wounds and healing those wounds would help heal our wounds made in 

the current historical age. 

29 According to people’s history, ‘history is drawn by the heroes of the history’ and they are the gentle and kind nature of 

ordinary people who help each other while cooperating to make a living together in the production activities. Lee Jong- 

Ryul, Let’s Look into Gimi, p. 141. Lee Jong-Ryu, National Revolution Theory, p. 151. 

30 For more information on anti-human and inhumane events and activities in human history, refer to 

For more information on anti-human and inhumane events and activities in human history, refer to National Revolution 

Theory, pp. 150~151. 

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1) Ordinary People’s Capitalism 

Kim Jin-Sook, Korea’s first female welder, was standing on crane No. 85 on Yeongdo shipbuilding yard on 

Jan. 6th, 2011. Why did she climb on the crane? The place was where Kim Joo-Ik took his own life after a 

129-day sit-in eight years ago. However, it is not the place where Kim Joo-Ik desperately cried for justice 

and died alone, rather it is an icon for hope. 

As ordinary citizens jumped on the hope bus, they let society know who Kim Jin-Sook is. That is how hope 

comes to us. 

Some say it is ‘the bridge where citizens and laborers meet together,’ while others call it ‘the solidarity of 

marginalized and oppressed people.’ That is true. It is a voluntary alliance of solidarity that is free from 

segmentation and isolation. Crane No. 85 and the hope bus are symbols of such solidarity. While sending 

the 3 rd hope bus, she said that “when we are busy, we had to work day and night for a week. Many people 

dozed off while waiting in line to get lunch, but we didn’t dare to ask for a day off. I had blisters that 

popped up on my fingers and my lack of skills with scissors made me damage the fabric. Every time I 

damaged the fabric, I was hit on the cheek and kicked by the manager, so there were always bruises on my 

calves. Still, I was able to endure all those difficulties waiting for payday on the 7 th .” 

Is this ordinary people’s capitalism? The answer is no. How could the historical path where ordinary 

people become the protagonists under the social ideologies of capitalism and democracy look like 

that? I’m astonished at Lee Jong-Ryul’s analysis of historical facts, capitalism and People’s History. 

A couple of decades ago, he already saw through the essence of capitalistic reality facing us – the 

reality of nothing ( ) in People’s History - in today’s world. 31 What makes the reality nothing? In a 

nutshell, it means society lacks democracy, autonomy, independence, ordinary nature, equality as well 

as democratic productivity. That is why ‘ordinary people’s capitalistic democratization and national 

revolution’ can be an alternative, which is designed to build a democratic, autonomous, independent, 

citizen-oriented, productive and equal national society. 

Lee Jong-Ryul divided capitalism into centralized capitalism and ordinary people’s capitalism while 

dividing democracy into bourgeoisie democracy (capitalist democracy) and proletarian democracy (labor 

democracy). Then, he divided capitalist democracy into centralized capitalist democracy and decentralized 


694

citizen-oriented capitalist democracy. Therefore, there is a fundamental difference between citizen-oriented 

capitalist democratization national revolution and the citizens’ revolution of the western world (capitalist 

democratization revolution). Considering the fact that both are based on the same political philosophy of 

private property-based capitalism, citizens’ revolution is the same as national revolution. However, we are 

in a situation to pursue citizen-oriented economic schemes in a neo-liberalism and imperialistic order, and 

that is why our revolution is distinct from the revolution of the western world in nature. 

2) Democracy 

Citizens in the west and citizens in our society have been different and remain different as of now. Thus, 

capitalism and democracy in the west and in our society have been different and remain different in 

nature. That is why citizen-oriented capitalistic, democratic national revolution is proposed. When history 

changes, society and people change. And when society is in a different age and has different historical 

characteristics, capitalism and democracy in that society - as well as its nationalism - should change. 

Busan has always been a place where democratic and nationalistic political activities take place. It was a 

place where citizens were engaged in the movement to restore national sovereignty to fight Japanese forces. 

Citizens in Busan have continued to be engaged in the movement to build a nation after Korea’s liberation 

from Japanese colonization. That is not it. Busan citizens were major forces behind the national resistance 

movements in Mar. and Apr. The only problem is that such ‘democratization movements’ still continue 

these days. 

Democratic Park in Busan, the symbol of the city and the city’s national resistance movements in Mar. 

and Apr. is not and should not be a place for beautiful rituals to heal the wounds of the city; it should not 

be a memorial (the substitute of memory) where people merely recall one’s mind and reflect on the past. 

Fixating the past on the past and thinking the past is gone is leading to the death of history and the past. 

Therefore, Democratic Park in Busan should not become a fancy park that is consumed like a cultural or 

touristic product regardless of its historical significance. Rather, it should become a productive place to 

create and promote history for democracy. 

3) Nation Unification 32 

It is not easy to come up with a realistic alternative to our history and social revolution. One of the major 

32 As our nation was not united in a single nation, the correct term is ‘reunifi ‘reunification’ cation’ - not ‘unifi ‘unification’. 

cation’. 

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reasons can be found in the reality of our country being divided. What does that mean? When the nation 

is divided, its autonomy and democracy are undermined and society becomes anti-autonomous and anti- 

democratic. The national division is a historical reality that shows anti-autonomous characteristics of our 

society most vividly and is an existential foundation for anti-democratic forces. Therefore, unification 

should be promoted in an autonomous and democratic manner. That is why People’s History emphasized 

Yeong-ou ( : controlling) foreign forces, autonomous route, min-jok-geon-yang independent route, 

from which strategies and tactics for national unification come out in the form of ‘national unification Sam- 

min-non-check (three-step people’s strategies).’ 33 

Controlling (Yeong-ou) foreign forces doesn’t necessarily mean expelling or driving out foreign forces. 

Rather, it means we have to proactively adjust their presence on our own land. Depending on how we deal 

with foreign forces, the responses of foreign forces and their effects would become different. Controlling 

(Yeong-ou) foreign forces is about responding to the invasion and oppression of the foreign forces 

without losing our autonomy and independence and implementing strategies to build an autonomous 

and independent nation. In addition, people’s great ego tactics are also required to take control of foreign 

forces. 34 

The process through which we achieve unification of the nation will determine the direction of the future 

society after the unification. Unification by foreign forces is just a forced physical unification of the 

country, which doesn’t necessarily lead to the path toward a democratic and autonomous unified nation and 

doesn’t transform our society into the right direction. 

Therefore, the division and unification of the nation is not a distant discourse that is far from our everyday 

life. It is not something that is not affecting our lives. So we can’t say it would be good to achieve national 

unification, but it is ok if the country remains divided. Why did so many people give their precious lives for 

the cause of realizing an autonomous and democratic world? As highlighted in the ideological orientation 

of people’s revolution, unification of our nation will allow us to live more like human beings. 

33 National unifi cation Sam-min-non-check (three-step people’s strategies) ( 

National unification Sam-min-non-check (three-step people’s strategies) ( ) refers to Min-jok-geonyang 

independent route ( ), people’s autonomous extraterritorial strategies ( ), 

people’s absolute ego tactics ( ). 

34 Being segmented and confronting with each other like children are like part of the nation’s unifi cation tactics and strate- 

Being segmented and confronting with each other like children are like part of the nation’s unification tactics and strategies 

to control foreign forces and to promote Min-jok-geon-yang independent route. Unification is the resounding victory 

for our absolute ego that evolves and develops our national history. 

696

4) In-jong-seong ( ) & In-eui-neung ( ) 

People’s History provides a message of hope to the problems of oppression, isolation, marginalization and 

hardships of people throughout history where ordinary citizens are not the protagonists in the historical 

time. What is the message Kim Jin-Sook tried to convey standing on Crane No.85? That is ‘I’m also 

human,’ and ‘I want to be treated like a human being.’ People’s History calls this ‘In-jong-seong’ and ‘In- 

eui-neung:’ people living and being treated like human beings. This refers to the idealistic term ‘Seong- 

neung,’ where all negative personalities are removed. 

In the term ‘Seong-neung,’ ‘seong’ refers to the Chinese character that means the existential status and 

meaning of human being, while ‘neung’ refers to the status and meaning of practical activities. The 

existential status in ‘seong’ is combined with a practical ‘neung’ to show that ‘Seong-neung (humanity)’ 

evolves over time according to social and historical conditions. ‘Seong’ is influenced by ‘neung’ and ‘neung’ 

is influenced by ‘seong’ in a reciprocal interaction. That is why people change when history evolves over 

time. That is what ‘In-jong-seong’ and ‘In-eui-neung’ means in people’s revolution. National unification 

and revolution are required for people to live like human beings and to be treated like human beings and 

‘In-jong-seong’ and ‘In-eui-neung’ exist to achieve such revolutions. 

‘In-jong-seong’ and ‘In-eui-neung’ refer to people who exist and live in a democratic way, people who 

exist and live in an autonomous way, people who exist and live in an independent manner, people who 

exist and live like ordinary citizens and people who exist and are treated equally with other people. 35 

References 

Gang Man-Gil, “The Theory on Ethnically Homogenous Nation Establishment in National Independence 

Movement,” Korean Nationalism Theory, Chang-Bi, 1982. 

Kim Min-Hwan, The Research on Nation Daily, Nanam Publishing, 2006. 

Kim Sun-Mi, “The Historical Re-examination of Sansoo Lee Jong-Ryul’s National Revolution Theory,” 

Doctoral Thesis at Pusan National University (Aug, 2008). 

Kim Ji-Hyeong, “Nation Daily and Sansoo Lee Jong-Ryul,” The Historical Re-examination of Sansoo Lee 

Jong-Ryul’s National Revolution Theory, Seonin, 2006. 

Kim Yong-Wook, The History and Spirit of Busan1-2, Jeonmang Publishing, 2001. 

35 The existence and life is the same thing. That is why Lee Jong-Ryul called In-jon-seong and In-eui-neung the ‘both 

sides of one existence’. 

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The Research Institute of National History, National Revolution Theory, Deulsam, 1989. 

The Research Institute of Democratic Society, The Historical Re-examination of Sansoo Lee Jong-Ryul’s 

National Revolution Theory, Seonin, 2006. 

Park Man-Joon, “The Research on Sansoo Lee Jong-Ryul’s People’s Revolution Theory,” The Region and 

History 18, 2006. 

Park Man-Joon, “The Historical Philosophy and Ideology of People’s Revolution,” The Historical Re- 

examination of Sansoo Lee Jong-Ryul’s National Revolution Theory, Seonin, 2006. 

Park Joon-Gun, “The Historical and Philosophical Meaning of March and April Democratic Movements,” 

Analysis and Outlook of Korean Democracy, Hangaram, 2000. 

The Korean Culture Institute at Pusan National University, The History and Culture of Busan, Pusan 

National University Press, 1998. 

The Busan Democratic Movement Publication Commission, The History of Democratic Movements in 

Busan, 1998. 

The Memorial Foundation of Sansoo Lee Jong-Ryul, Collection of Publications of Sansoo Lee Jong-Ryul 

1-2, Deulsam, 2001-2. 

Lee Il-Gu (Lee Jong-Ryul), Let’s Look into Gimi, Moorimsa, 1979. 

Lee il-Gu (Lee Jong-Ryul), The Current Political Issues, International News, 1960. 

Lee Jong-Ryul, National Revolution Theory, Deulsam, 1989. 

Lee Jong-Ryul, The Division of Country in History and National unification, Tongmoongwan, 1971. 

Jang Dong Pyo, “Sansoo Lee Jong-Ryul’s National Movements and National Revolution Theory,” Region 

and History 10, 2002. 

Choi Jang-Jip et al., Analysis and Outlook of Korean Democracy, Hangaram, 2000. 

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Envisioning a Modern Busan at a Corner of Sanbok Road 

Dong Jin Kang 

Kyungsung University 


Busan is the oldest modern city of Korea that has a history 

of over a hundred years. For the past four to five decades of 

rapid growth, Busan has been a place that has been below 

average in terms of urban development patterns, which 

makes the city look just like other cities. 

This process that produces such likeness has caused the 

city to lose its unique city identity. Amidst rapid growth, 

the system for transmitting tradition to modernity in the 

city was destroyed just because it was thought to be old and 

meaningless. Many people feel deeply sorry for this reality. 

Busan Customs Office destroyed during the Construction 

of Busandaegyo Bridge (Destroyed in 1979) 

699 

Cities Have Trends. They Look Alike. 

Even at this right moment, Busan is losing 

its past memories bit by bit. They are 

vanishing for no reason, and the remaining 

memories do not seem to mingle with the 

present. Of course, new memories are being 

made. But, still the dim old memories that 

only Busan has are hard to meet. 

Busan should take its own path. No doubt, 

the traces and memories of this place 

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made in the 20 th century are the treasures representing the Busan identity. So, it is natural that we have 

something meaningful to pass on to future generations in the 21 st and 22 nd centuries. 

Busan’s modern history started with the sea. Without the sea, Busan’s modern time would have flown to a 

different direction changing the modern history of Korea as a whole. Busan, that is, Busan Port, has a very 

close relationship with the sea and mountains. It can be safely said that Busan’s modern history goes along 

with the history of Busan Port, though it depends on how one determines the exact boundaries of Busan 

Port. Some may limit the port area up to the wharfs and the seaside area. Others may cover the hinterland 

of the port and the sea where maritime transportation is made. The latter would be the answer. 

Center of Modern Busan: Busan Port Area 

700 

During modern times, Busan experienced 

a series of constant plunderage, glory and 

shame to and from the sea. This includes 

Japanese plunderage since the end of the 

Korean Dynasty, the opening of Busanpo 

Port for friendly relations with Japan in the 

beginning of the 15 th century, war in Busan 

during the Japanese invasion in 1592, the 

utilization of Busanpo Port as a base to fight 

against the Japan, the forced port opening 

by Japan, and the utilization of Busan as a logistics base by Japan to conquer the continent. Shortly after 

Korea gained independence from Japan, Busan still stood in the middle of modern Korean history as 

a destination for fleeing amid the Korean War and the following national rehabilitation and economic 

development. 

In the center of change in Korea in the 20 th century lies Busan. Whether passive or active in the change, 

Busan has been the backbone of Korea’s development in the 21 st century. This is an undeniable truth, and 

this makes Busan stand out. This paper also focuses on the features of Busan in terms of space. 

2. Modern Busan: Changes in Urban Space 

Human settlements in Busan were first made in the Neolithic Age. Busan is still changing regarding its 

space, having gone through the Open Port Period, the Japanese Rule, and Korean War. People consider the 

first 100 years right after the Open Port Period to be the most influential period in Busan’s development. 

But to be exact, we should go back 400 years from now.

It was about the time that the Sea Blockade policy was implemented due to pressure from Myng Dynasty, 

China. The policy blocked Korea out from other countries. For several hundreds of years, Korea could not 

see beyond its seas and was eventually lost in envisioning its future. 

Without insightful understanding and vision regarding the sea, Busan’s modern history was in continual 

confusion. It was a land of Japanese plunderage and a site for overcoming of uncontrollable national 

crises. Its weak ability to quickly overcome the situation shattered its modern history apart like an 

unfinished quilted wrapping cloth. 

However, as the cloth pieces come into one whole and are closely woven together, Busan’s fragmented 

modern history, for sure, can be filled with past memories and traces so that they can cover and cure the 

scars of the 20 th century. 

2.1.1 The Sea Blockade Period and the Open Sea Period (~1945) 

In 1407 Jepo and Busanpo Ports were 

opened as windows to Japan. Though 

they served for trade with Japan, it was 

a meaningful opening as it was made 

independently. Busan’s port history began 

around this time. After the Japanese 

Invasions in 1592 and 1597, Busanpo 

Port had been the port of Korean prisons 

and of Korean envoys to Japan. For two 

centuries, from the beginning of the 17 th 

century, Choryang Woigwan served as 

independence-driven diplomatic and 

exchange arena between Korea and Japan. 

After that, the site provided the foundation 

of Busan’s modern history. 

Landscape of Woigwan in the mid- 

19th Century (Re-designed Painting 

based on the Original Painting by 

Byeonbak from Daenaebu Art School 

that is re-designed) 

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The port opening in 1876 was made under pressure, but it was the first official port opening in Korean 

history. Also, it made Busan the city of port for international trade and initiated the start of Japanese 

plunderage of Korean land. 

Until the 1930s, Busan’s modern history was a history of reclamation and flattening of land for space 

expansion. In 1883, a port customs office was built followed by the constructions of piers and a bonded 

warehouse (one wing), which were registered as Korea’s first maritime projects. For three years from 

1909, flattening of the mountain in what is now known as the Daecheong and Jungang-dong area were 

implemented. In the flattened area (now Saemadang), large public facilities were constructed, such as 

Busan Station and Busan Customs. Also, in the reclaimed area (now Jungang-ro), a neo-modern landscape 

including cable cars was formed. 

After that, two port construction projects were implemented (first: 1911~1918, second: 1919~1928) 

changing the sea map of Busan. The first project erected two piers (now Pier 1), which formed a 

transportation system for Japanese rule by connecting the piers to the railroad (that is, connecting Busan 

Station and Busan Port). Upon completion of reclamation in the 1930s, a bridge (now Yeongdo Bridge) 

connecting the islands to the mainland was built to expand the urban area. Near the bridge was Mt. 

Yongmisan, which turned into a reclamation site to relocate Busan city government as the hub of politics, 

public administration and economy. 

2.2 Independence and Post-Korean War Period (1945~1962) 

Korea’s independence from Japan brought revitalization to modern Busan. Busan Port became the window 

through which Korean expatriates returned to Korea after their forced duties under impressment and 

draftings or from overseas independence movements. 1.5 million out of the total 2.5 million expatriates 

settled in Busan, but the city suffered hardships due to the lack of infrastructure causing those people to 

live in shacks or on streets (the population increased to 150,000 over two years since the independence, 

and to 450,000 in 1947). 

We can say modern Busan, with the influx of repatriates, had a history of filling towns and undeveloped 

areas of the city. Such history went on throughout the course of the Korean War. The then-interim national 

capital was Busan, and it was filled with people fleeing from elsewhere (refugee camps set up in what is 

now Mt. Yongdusan, Mt. Bokbyeongsan, Daecheong—dong, ports, Yeongdo Island, Jeokki, Choryang 

and the hillside of Sanbok Road, Beomil-dong areas). 

At that time the population was 900,000 (which includes around 500,000 refugees), and those who could 

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2.3 Post-City Status Elevation to Direct Government Control (1963~1994) 

In 1963, Busan was the second largest city in the country and was elevated to a city directly controlled by 

the central government. The status change led to the expansion of urban planning areas. In the following 

year, the construction of Sanbok Road was completed (now from Choryang and Maryknoll Hospital), and 

stripped the refugees’ villages of the notion of illegal residence. 

After that, projects improving the quality of life were put in place: notification to change Mt. Yongdusan 

Park and Geumgang Park formed under Japanese Rule and other scenic spots (now Taejongdae and 

Morundae) into public parks, apartments and Busan Department Mall in Yeongju-dong and Chungmu- 

dong. Korean troops were dispatched to Vietnam at Pier 3 for eight years starting from 1964; and the 

bascules on Yeongdo Bridge were closed in 1966, both of which are very important in that they changed 

the meaning of Busan’s modern history in the 60s. 

Sanbok Road, War Refugees’ Shelter (1971) 

704 

In the 70s and 80s, abundant 

government support for constructing 

infrastructure brought in prosperity 

in Busan. The opening of Gyeongbu 

Expressway helped Busan Port 

develop further into an international 

trade gate. Other projects also 

contributed to the development 

of the port: Namhae Expressway, 

Sasang Industrial Complex, Gimhae 

Airport, Busan Tower, Piers 5~8, Busandaegyo Bridge, Urban Expressway, etc. This period can be refered 

to as the period of space renovation and expansion over the past traces. It was a period of infrastructure for 

the industrial foundation of Busan. 

2.4 Post-City Status Change to Metropolitan City (1995~) 

In the 1990s, Busan experienced the construction of new ports and the relocation of the city government, 

which caused the fall of North Port and the Gwangbok and Nampo-dong areas, and the core of modern 

Busan. The fall was not properly managed and therefore, damaged Busan’s unique modern characteristics. 

In 2004 then-president Roh Mu-Hyun ordered a water-friendly waterfront renovation project at the North 

Port. People expected the project to keep the port’s uniqueness as Korea’s first open port, but it turned out

to be the completion of the first phase only, which was the reclamation of Piers 1~4 with no hope for the 

continuation of the project. The old city government complex could have been another modern Busan 

place of the past, but it was sold to profit-searching large companies rather than serving as a means of the 

modern time, changing into a restored Mt. Yongmisan or connecting Yeongdo Bridge. To sum up, Busan 

between the late 90s and the mid-2000s seems to have made little effort to combine its modernism with 

urbanism. 

On the other hand, the once Japanese Oriental Development Company, which was later used as the 

American Embassy, was transformed into the Busan Modern History Museum (2003). The Busan 

International Film Festival helped Busan acquire a worldwide reputation as a filming location. These 

changes provided a chance to re-acknowledge the value of space and landscape of modern Busan. At 

the end of the 2000s emerged discussions on the concept of creative city and urban regeneration, which 

reviewed the value Sanbok Road had. It was a time of reassuring Busan’s modern features as globally 

differentiated assets. 

Film Locations in Busan (2000~2008) 

3. Space Features of Modern Busan 

Over the past century, Busan had gone through unique development. As of September 2012, it is hard 

to put in one sentence the impression modern Busan offers. For one, there is a context which cannot be 

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precisely defined. Generally, for a city to be recognized as possessing context, it should have a grand 

landmark, but Busan does not have one. Moreover, Busan has similar things that are tangled but in not so 

much an overwhelming fashion. That is Busan now. 

I recently published a column in a cultural journal, saying that the modern image of Busan is ‘the beauty 

of groups gathered together.’ Modern Busan is certainly different from other cities in the West where 

strong symbolic features are apparent. Rather, Busan has a narrow, long and multi-leveled topography, un- 

planned residential areas unprepared for the unexpected war, and ports and piers of different sizes, which 

all form the modern image of Busan. Maybe a cultural landscape is closest to describing the city’s image. 

Fascinating Gamcheon Village Silhouette at Seongbuk Market 

Each feature does not stand out from one another but stay together in groups. That is the most prominent 

and valuable difference of modern Busan. For example, there are groups of old houses on the hills, 

various industrial heritages including warehouses on ports that support time-honored industries (logistics, 

ship-making, fisheries), modern-style shops alongside streets throughout the old downtown area, one or 

two-story houses and modern structures found along Sanbok Road and Yeongson Hill, stairways of up 

to 186 steps and houses standing shoulder to shoulder on both sides of the stairs, thousands of alleys and 

communities and the alley culture in them, infrastructure driving the world’s fifth largest logistics and 

transportation industries (railroads, stations, overpasses, tunnels), conventional markets and streets that 

have stories and themes of ordinary Busan citizens, large parks of up to 70-year-old history, just to name a 

few. 

All of them are time-honored assets interconnected with community life, geographical shape and 

heights, and urban industries in Busan. They are not enough to be entitled as official cultural assets to be 

preserved. They may be swept away under urban development. 

The reason for this lies within. In the background of modern Busan lie the Japanese Rule and Korean War, 

706

all negative attributes. 

The pre-modern period was forcefully accompanied by the Japanese Rule all through the modern period. 

Everything was naturally in chaos. Things created during this time have been destined to be denied. 

About 70 years have passed since gaining independence from Japan, about twice as long as the 36 years 

of darkness. On the back of this period lies the time of today. If we pull away the previous periods just 

because we do not like them in our time, the 70 years will stumble. 

Unfortunately, the Korean War that broke out five years after the independence gave us no time to discuss 

modern Korea. The impoverished shacks were turned into the urban space of Busan. At this point, no one 

could deny the equation: out of poverty means into urban development. That way Koreans had to take 

urban development solely for development’s sake, not for the restoration to the former condition. There 

were no other choices. They became aggressive, not giving a second thought to others and to their own 

damage when it comes to urban spacing. 

Space characteristics of Busan can be divided into two types. 

3.1 Space Type 

3.1.1 Ecologically developed urban organizations remain strong. 

Busan’s geography is very much unpredictable. There seem to be no fixed frames. People give a mixed 

description of Busan as a complicated city or fascinating city. That is especially true when looking at the 

old downtown areas where Busan shows its strongest modern features. 

Just like the filling and the warp threads in weaving, streets meet streets, and streets meet lands to create a 

city. It is called urban fabric. Urban fabric also can be respectively referred to as infill, which means non- 

movable infrastructure and other structures, and support which is the opposite of infill. 

The old downtown and its vicinity have different space types: a rectangle plaid developed from Choryang 

Oigwan; a block pattern developed along the long and narrow plain area; mirage-looking alleys developed 

in the high lands; and large lands were developed along the ports due to transportation and industry- 

friendly environment. 

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Urban Design of the Old Downtown in Different Patterns and on Different Scale 

Topographic Pattern that Looks like a Wriggling Dragon 

Those patterns were developed from 300 to 130 years ago. In the patterns, there is a harmony of different 

spaces: space left by the Korean War, space of residential types and blocks made amid intensive urban 

development, and space of un-renovated communities and their old memories. 

The multi-leveled topography pattern provides layers of life in multi-levels. The rugged topography taught 

708

people compliance. Fragmented pieces of land along Sanbok Road and other little roads connecting the 

pieces are stretched to the old downtown and ports. The winding lines of roads are the patterns of survival 

and the joys and sorrows of the people of the city. 

As such, from now on, you may not become emotional or romantic as visitors feel when they see the 

alleys, slopes of steps, and narrow paths. Now, it is crucial that the renovation of these areas be geared 

toward restoring the time-honored patterns focusing on each small pattern’s unique characteristics, not 

toward large-scale block making after tearing down everything in the areas. 

People often say, “Three thousand stitches cannot beat guide rope” and “Nothing is complete unless you 

put it in final shape.” They point out the importance of the main stream or backbone. Instead, it could be 

possible that people now hopefully say, “Old alleys make money,” “Old steps remain and life gets better,” 

or “If small old houses are well managed, life will turn prosperous.” 

3.1.2 Contours are alive. 

When one has noticeable looks on his/her face or balanced volume on the sides of the face, we say he/she 

has obvious contours of the face. The same applies to a city. If the contours of the city are alive, the city 

has a three-dimensional effect. This effect is created not by efficient land use and the differentiated usage, 

but by the multiple levels in its topography. 

Two methods are used to make the three-dimensional effect prominent. One is to erect skyscrapers in 

groups so that the skylines significantly fluctuate along the outlines of different sizes of buildings. The 

other is to develop the city without damaging the time-honored structures and the original topography and 

geography. In order to maintain the image of modern city, Busan shall take the latter method. 

In order for the city contours not to be interrupted, other structures should not block the ridgeline of the 

city, and structures should not stand out from one another. The steep-sloped hills have slowed down 

the city’s economic development pace. The economic crisis in the 90s accidentally contributed to the 

maintaining of the current ridgelines of the city. 

Contour of Modern Busan When Viewed from North Port Renovation Site 

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old alleys and hills to a fall as the need for vehicles (parking spaces) and spacious townhouses increased. 

The living heritages defined in this paper cover the items that are far from today’s life. Most of them are 

viewed as uncomfortable, time-consuming, old-fashioned and narrow. 

Life in Mountain and on Hill Life at Sea and Port 

The challenge we have to take now is to catch two rabbits at the same time. We need to preserve the 

above-mentioned living heritage, and also, improve all the conditions of the modern time many people 

have lived in. Sanbok Road has remained the same ever since its massive transformation back in the 

90s when shacks (unregistered) from the past turned into fancy houses and townhouses. This is maybe 

because the narrow and steep-sloped alleys do not go with profit-making economic principles. 

Such background has changed the renovation of constructing taller and wider buildings into the idea of 

regeneration for living together. As a result, Busan is undergoing various projects such as renaissance 

in Sanbok Road, happy communities, construction of structures from the modern time in order to bring 

modern Busan back to life. 

Nonetheless, the end of such movement looks distant. The rigid and rigorous lifestyle of the past has 

prevented us from changing from quantity to quality, from quick development of hardware to slow 

development of software regarding the content and story based welfare and culture. 

3.2.2 The history of Busan in the modern time matches that of Korea in the same period. 

Cities are where people come to live together in harmony. Among others, port cities provide a 

wonderful living base for people to live for an affluent future based on lots of resources both in land 

and in the sea. 

Busan is a city of staple industries first developed in the modern time including fisheries and logistics. 

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Although Busan yielded its ship-making and manufacturing industries to Geoje and Gumi, respectively, 

it still is on the frontline in logistics and fisheries, which represent the industrial history of Busan and of 

Korea. 

Closed Namseon Warehouse Should be Restored 

712 

From modern time Busan’s perspective, its 

industrial history has yielded industrial heritage. 

This heritage is the sites and facilities of Busan’s 

many different industries—agriculture, iron 

and steel-making, mining, fisheries, logistics, 

manufacturing, ship-making, and more. Most of 

the heritage remains in the old downtown and at 

the ports. Plants and warehouses which are closed 

still remain in their mega-structures. Rather than to 

just destroy them, they should be considered as a 

preservable industrial heritage, and therefore, renovated into structures that offer urban functions. That is 

why they attract attention from home and abroad in terms of reusing and recycling of resources. 

The modern period in Busan is also represented 

by the world’s fifth largest logistics and fisheries, 

which recorded a record trade volume of a billion 

dollars. For the past ten decades, the industries 

we remember enjoyed record prosperity, and 

this growth happened where water and land 

met. No doubt Busan has invaluable assets. 

Learning from the mistakes made in the course 

of the development of the North Port, Busan 

desperately needs, though time-consuming, 

careful decision and consideration in regard to 

industrial heritage in logistics, fisheries and ship- 

making at South Port. 

Closed Namseon Warehouse Should be Restored

4. Conclusion 

Busan is located at the southern tip of the Korean peninsula. Amidst the mountain ranges stretching south 

from inland lies a network of roads and railroads in and around the city. At the end of the network is the 

sea, making Busan the gateway to the world out there. Such a geographical fork has made Busan stand not 

on the end but on the cutting edge. 

As such, Busan does not feel afraid of the challenges coming from nowhere up front or behind. The front 

blocked by the tangled mountains has given the city resilience to overcome unexpected challenges; the sea 

has made the city dream of infinity. However, at the same time, the city often fell into self-complacency 

and passiveness, and the lack of opportunities to be compared with others discouraged the city from 

developing based on liberty. 

Fortunately, the world is changing. The world now makes cities change to have self-management and 

self-protection. Having an edge that differentiates a city from others is considered a great virtue in city 

development. Busan also stands in line with this trend, gradually restoring its characteristics from its 

modern time. 

The aim should be to identify the roles Busan played for Korea in the 20 th century and the memories and 

traces Busan left so that they can regain their own space and original functions. They will push Busan 

forward to entering the time of renovation. 

As such, two suggestions can be made. First, it is necessary to establish the Busan Modernity Preservation 

Foundation. Historical cities everywhere, not only in Korea but in other countries, are pleasant and 

rememberable places to visit not only because they have many cultural assets, but because they have 

the atmosphere and landscape that local people and surrounding nature make in harmony. Therefore, 

identifying more means of memory and traces of modern Busan will transform Busan into a new modern 

Busan. 

In order for this to happen, Busan’s modernity should continue to be identified and preserved. The marks 

and traces of the past modern Busan and its potential should be identified and listed. This should include 

not only the current cultural assets but also many other small things: various worn-out historical structures, 

old roads, souvenirs, sites, industrial heritage, peculiar cultural sceneries, figures and arts, monumental 

accidents, old forests and street trees-which should be archived. At the same time, multi-faceted 

renovation projects should follow to turn them into new traces and memories of the city. The projects 

include restoration, preservation, improvement and maintenance, renovation, expansion, relocation and 

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change of usage. 

This is not an easy task. Things should be considered as to who should do it and how the needed funds 

should be raised, because the existing public institutions and civil organizations alone cannot handle 

it. That is why the above-mentioned foundation should be established. With the foundation, Busan’s 

modernity will be viewed rightly. 

Second, it is necessary to introduce the concept of Busan Future Heritage. Things change rapidly. It may 

not be always viewed negatively. What makes Korea strong is the people’s driving force and unity, which 

are rooted in the Korean culture of rapidity. One side effect of this culture is that sometimes, valuable 

things are missed. Since the 1960s, things have been development-oriented. Change will continue, and 

development trends will also continue to outpace preservation movements for some time. 

On the other hand, what journalist Jane Jacobs and urban anthropoligist Lewis Mumford noted 50 years 

ago is becoming a reality. Their statements have some keywords: local, small things, local culture, 

cultural industry, creative cities, low-rise, old buildings, people, urban emotions, walking, borderlines, 

multiple stories, low-rise and high-density, location features, semi-public space, regeneration, community, 

neighborhood, alleys between houses, and urban history. All of them are directly and indirectly related 

to what Busan is pursuing and should pursue. Among them, Busan Future Heritage will be one that will 

preserve things which may possibly vanish and should be passed on to the future generations. 

Though some of them may not be valuable enough to earn the title of heritage, possible candidates are 

as follows: winding Sanbok Road, the site of crane groups at Jaseongdae Port, Sailo at Yanggok Port, 

Yeongdo Bridge, Busandaegyo Bridge, Gukje Market, Gupo Market, an array of used books shops in 

Bosu-dong, 40-step stairway and nearby stairs, 186-step stairway, alleys in the old downtown, Gongdong 

Fish Market at dawn, docks of Hanjin Heavy Industry Co., Gudeok Gym, Jeroi Lighthouse, seawalls and 

bonded warehouses at South Port, Pier 1, Pier 2, woman merchants in Jagalchi Market, port stew, dried 

seafood stands in Jagalchi Market, sashimi, grilled mackerels, wheat noodles, Busan Tower, food stands 

in Nampo-dong, Baekgudang Bakery, Halmae noodles, green onion pan-fries in Dongnae, Sanseong rice 

wine, nuts pancakes at BIFF Square, sunset at Daedaepo Beach, sunrise at the sea near Songjeong, the 

island full of camellia flowers, Nakdonggang River, Gwangadaegyo Bridge, closed sections of Donghae 

Nambu railway, Gudeok Stadium, UN Park, Mt. Yongdusan Park, Taejongdae, Yigidae, Haeundae Beach, 

Hongtipo inlet, Jangrimpo inlet, Cheongsapo inlet, Gudeokpo inlet, Jeungsan, Yeongju East Tunnel, 

overpass in Munhyeon, Busan Civil Park (to be established), hot springs in Dongnae, Baeksan Sanghoi 

(restored), Namseon Warehouse (restored), Baekje Hospital, cultural village in Gamcheon, Maejukjo 

Village, Anchang Village, Mt. Bokbyeongsan, Gwannam-ro, Daebyeon Port, anchovies and seaweed in 

714

Gijang, etc. 

The above heritages may not have significant economical effects, but will serve as a way to go back in 

time to remember modern Busan many years ago. They remain to be evaluated and better appreciated by 

the citizens of Busan. 

Modern Busan in the past will no long be remembered negatively and as an inconvenience. Modern 

Busan today will be attractive based on creativeness and grace. Future heritages will be the infrastructure 

of blessing that gives meaning to the existence of Busan and its new prosperity in the future. 

References 

Jo Seong Tae Kang Dong Jin 2009. “Analysis on Change of Shoreline of Busan Port”. Urban Design 

Institute of Korea Journal 10-4, pp. 249~265. 

Cha Chulwook 2011. “War and Busan People: What the War Left Behind”. Lecture on studies on Busan: 

studies on Busan, Meet on the road. Lecture material. 

Choi Hae Gun 2001. My Love, Sea of Busan. Busan: Busan Metropolitan City. 

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