riverside of Dasan Ecology Park Traditional Cache
riverside of Dasan Ecology Park
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Dasan Ecological Park
Jeong Yak-yong(1762–1836, styled Dasan) was a leading Korean philosopher in the late Joseon Dynasty. He has been usually regarded as one of the greatest thinkers in so-called "Practical Learning" (silhak). Jeong thought that Neo-Confucianism, the dominant ideology of the time lacked practicality and relevance to his time, suggesting the need to reappreciate the spirit of the early Confucianism, i.e., practicality. Jeong Yak-yong and his brothers were also among the earliest Korean converts to Roman Catholicism.
Jeong was born, and also ended his days, in modern-day Namyangju, Gyeonggi province. Jeong served the government in a variety of capacities throughout his life. He supervised the construction of Hwaseong Fortress in Suwon in the early 1790s. In 1794, he served as secret royal inspector of Gyeonggi province, investigating misconduct by other officials. This opened his eyes to the scale of official misconduct, and may have inspired much of his later writings.
Jeong is known above all for his work in synthesizing the Neo-Confucian thought of middle Joseon. In the process, he wrote widely in fields including law, political theory, and the Confucian Classics. He sought to return Confucian scholarship to a direct connection with the original thought of Confucius. He called this return to the classics "Susa" learning, a reference to the two rivers that flowed through Confucius' homeland.
In the service of this idea, Jeong criticized the philosophers of his time for engaging in both fruitless etymological scholarship and pursuing philosophical theory for its own sake. He argued that scholarship should be re-focused on more important concerns such as music, ritual, and law. This was not only an intellectual but a political assertion: he argued that the gwageo examinations by which people qualified for royal service should be reformed to focus on these concerns.
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