Byeon Yeongman: Colonial Korea's Alternative Modernity

Abstract

The article deals with Byeon Yeongman (1889-1954), a man who had the reputation of being one of the sharpest critics of Western modernity in early modern Korea and one of the brightest literati, well-versed both in traditional Sino-Korean and Western learning, during the colonial period. However, after his death he was mostly ignored by South Korean scholarship, partly because he consciously positioned himself outside of the main political and cultural fractions of the day and was consequently alienated from them. He was an odd bird for more mainstream “cultural nationalists” on the right who condemned him for “writing for simple amusement,” and he was completely ignored by both Communists and anarchists on the left, his visible sympathy towards more egalitarian ways of distributing wealth notwithstanding. However, he managed to develop a consistent logic of criticism against the modern life from a position which may be characterized as a sort of “spiritual individualism” and which drew both on Nietzsche’s ideas and on age-old “moral individualism” of the Confucian tradition.