Philosopher
Im Yunjidang
1721–1793
Also known as Yunjidang
Joseon Neo-Confucian, among the few women of her time to write philosophy, who held that each thing has its own embodied nature and that women have the same moral potential as men.
Few women of the Joseon dynasty wrote on Neo-Confucianism, which demanded training in classical Chinese; Im Yunjidang was one of them. Her brothers followed Yi I’s account of material force; she did not.
Her views touched the central question of the Horak Debate of her century: whether humans and other beings share the same moral nature, or differ through variations in material force. Her conviction that men and women are morally equal was later echoed by Korea’s early Catholics, and another woman Neo-Confucian of the period, Gang Jeongildang, also wrote on human nature and practice.
Key ideas
- Each thing has its own nature
- Disagreeing with Yi I’s account of material force, Im held that every thing, or every kind of thing, has a nature of its own, bound up with its body, while still holding that principle is endowed by Heaven.
- Women’s equal moral potential
- Bodies and temperaments differ, but the nature each person receives from principle is untouched by those differences, so a woman can become as good as any man.
- Sagehood through self-cultivation
- Sagehood is reached through self-cultivation, not settled in advance by status or gender, which turned a metaphysical debate into an argument for equality.
- Tradition
- Korean
- Region
- Joseon, Korea
- Period
- Joseon
- Themes
- Women and gender
Influences
Where these links come from
- Im Yunjidang argued against Yi I. Source: Kevin N. Cawley, Korean Confucianism, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Sources
- Kevin N. Cawley, Korean Confucianism, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy