English abstract of an article published in Korean. The full text is available in Korean only.
Abstract
Objectives This study reexamines the concept of angong (眼孔, the "eye-aperture") in the Tae admonition (兌箴, Volume 2) and the Dokhaeng chapter (獨行篇, Volume 3) of Yi Je-ma's Gyeokchigo (格致藁). It proposes that Yi reduces the whole of Confucian self-cultivation to a single act of metacognition—the discernment of deception (察乎詭詐, chal-ho-gwesa)—whose instrument is the angong, and that this metacognition carries a circular limit which Yi himself made explicit.
Methods Using the 1940 first edition (edited by Han Du-jeong) as the base text, collated with Ji's annotated translation (2001) and Lee's Dongmu Yugo (1999), passages were examined in four stages (original text, literal translation, annotation, interpretation), building upon the relational-field reading established in the first paper of this series.
Results Three findings are presented. First, the Tae admonition relocates the center of cultivation—shifting all eight items of the Great Learning onto a single act, the discernment of deception—from the practice of virtues to perception itself. Second, the four-type angong passage of the Dokhaeng chapter specifies the disguise structure—clear on the surface, turbid at the core—that perception must penetrate; the distortion is largely optical rather than volitional. Third, the metacognition is circularly limited: the observer's own sincerity governs what the observer can perceive (己誠未盡則人僞難悉), so a turbid mind cannot perceive its own turbidity. Yi designated the Dokhaeng chapter as "lamp and firefly, not sun and moon," acknowledging this as the system's blind spot, while locating the point of intervention in the practice of returning to sincerity (反誠).
Conclusions The metacognition of Gyeokchigo is at once the foundation of cultivation and a self-limiting structure. The limit is formally comparable—as analogy, not identity—to the indistinction of Ego and Self in Jung; Yi's response is not a complete solution but the practice of returning to sincerity (反誠), which is reserved for the next study.
Key words Medicine, Korean Traditional; Philosophy, Medical; Metacognition; Cognition; Deception; Korea
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Choi Jang-hyuk | Doctor of Korean Medicine · Director, Dongjedang Korean Medicine Clinic