The I, the non-I, and a past that has to be lived

Shin Chae-ho did not treat history as a row of past events. He treated it as the product of conflict and struggle inside a person and among peoples. He named that struggle with two short words: the I (a), the subject who looks from its own standing, and the non-I (bia), the other outside it or the presence that stands against it. A true history, in this telling, is one that reflects the facts as they are, so that a people can know its past accurately and found a self-standing identity. History, he says, becomes a living truth when it is felt and inhabited, not only seen.

That is why the scope of Joseon history mattered to him. If the I is to see itself, the record cannot quietly drop the ground on which it stands. The critique that follows is not a quarrel about taste. It is an argument about what was left in, and what was left out, when the past was written down.

What Samguk Sagi leaves out, and two searches for a just community

Kim Bu-sik's Samguk Sagi, in Shin's reading, carries a Goryeo-period habit of serving a larger power. Early Goryeo, he writes, held two currents: warriors who favored a northern advance, and a Confucian group that prized diplomacy with China. After a long collision, Kim's side won, and its view settled into the chronicle. Shin holds that Joseon's cultural roots were narrowed or cut on purpose. Eastern Buyeo, Northern Buyeo, and Balhae are missing — stretches of the ancient past, he says, that a people cannot ignore without weakening its own origin. The telling, he adds, is unreliable in other ways: the same person split into several, the same event written more than once. That this chronicle, with Samguk Yusa, is what later ages inherited is tied to the years after Goryeo fell to the Mongols, when self-standing language was suppressed and Kim's history was the one that could remain.

Beside that reading, Plato's Republic and Rousseau's Social Contract are set next to each other as two attempts, far apart in time, to name a just community. Both ask about the origin and purpose of the state and about the legitimacy of power. Plato looks to the rule of philosophers; Rousseau to a community founded on the people's general will. One centers order and the harmony of ranks; the other, equality and freedom. The comparison is given in those lines, as this reading has them.

Sources

1. a reading of Shin Chae-ho's Joseon Sanggosa on history as a struggle between the I and the non-I, and of his critique of Kim Bu-sik's Samguk Sagi, with a brief comparison of Plato's Republic and Rousseau's Social Contract as this account sets them out.

Last updated: 14 November 2026