Nosa Gi Jeong-jin: The Defense of Right Learning and the Absoluteness of LiVolume 7 of the Korean Neo-Confucian Masters Series
Nosa Gi Jeong-jin (蘆沙 奇正鎭, 1798-1879): Nosa, writing in the turbulent nineteenth century, provided much of the philosophical grounding for the Wijeong cheoksa (衛正斥邪) movement. Faced with the challenge of Western sciences, Catholic doctrine, and shifting geopolitical pressures, he sought to articulate a coherent defense of what he understood as the essential moral and cultural framework of Confucian civilization. His work exerted significant influence on loyalist thinkers confronting the crises of the late Joseon period.This volume examines the thought of Nosa Gi Jeong-jin, often described as a final defender of Neo-Confucian orthodoxy. While not without basis, such characterizations are ultimately limiting. This study argues that Nosa should instead be understood as a philosopher of reconstruction, engaged in rethinking the conceptual foundations of the tradition at a moment when their coherence could no longer be assumed.At the center of his work is a reinterpretation of the classical formulation "unity of principle and differentiation" (理一分殊). Against views that separate unity from multiplicity or reduce differentiation to material force, Nosa insists on their internal relation: differentiation is the articulation of unity, and unity exists only through differentiation. From this follows a broader reconfiguration of nature, mind, and moral cultivation.Rather than dividing his thought into discrete domains, this book traces its internal coherence, showing how metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics remain inseparable. Through a close textual approach, it reconstructs a line of inquiry shaped by the need to preserve clarity amid the gradual destabilization of shared concepts. In doing so, it presents Nosa not as a figure at the end of a tradition, but as one who reopens its most fundamental philosophical questions.
The Korean Neo-Confucian Masters Series has emerged from a long-standing sense that the intellectual achievements of Korean Confucianism deserve fuller recognition within global scholarship than they have thus far received. While studies of Song-Ming (宋明) Confucianism in China, and of its diverse reinterpretations in Japan, have accumulated over many decades, the Korean tradition-despite its remarkable subtlety and sustained philosophical creativity-has often remained at the margins of broader academic discussions. The present series aims, in a modest but deliberate way, to redress that imbalance. It introduces seven thinkers whose works not only defined the contours of Joseon intellectual life (朝鮮, 1392-1910) but also contributed to the wider development of East Asian philosophy.
