Goryeo's 12th Century Diplomatic Policy Through Camus's Eyes

Albert Camus’s Philosophy of the Absurd

Albert Camus, the representative 20th-century French writer and existentialist thinker, begins his philosophy from the fundamental question: “Is life worth living?” What he discovered is the unavoidable confrontation between the human yearning to find meaning and the irrational world that remains silent. In this fundamentally unstable relationship, humans accept some facts and deliberately avert their eyes from others to maintain a clear cognitive framework. Such psychological mechanisms are instinctive and natural, but the moment one confronts what one had turned away from, great confusion and shock ensue — and this is the absurd.

The absurd is a concept that Camus devised to present life’s meaning, yet one can discover that the confrontation between human yearning and the world’s silence ultimately results in cognitive shock, and thanks to this, the absurd can be recalled in more diverse situations than one might think. To quote an example Camus gave, even science — the ‘thing to be believed’ as the essence of human reason — can feel absurd once one realizes it is merely a collection of the most rational hypotheses that could be overturned at any time.

According to his philosophy, the responses available to a human facing the absurd take three forms: denial, avoidance, and confrontation. Denying or avoiding the absurd is an escapist attitude of submitting to reality; Camus explains this more directly as turning to religion or physical suicide. Confrontation, by contrast, is a rebellious attitude that acknowledges the absurd as part of life yet refuses to surrender to fate, facing it head-on — and this, Camus considers the desirable way of life.

The Traditional Goryeo-Jurchen Relationship

The Tang dynasty was a rare type of empire in world history. It not only expanded its power greatly through strong military force, but also propagated its major civilizational achievements — the Three Departments and Six Ministries system, the Ritsuryō legal codes as governing systems, and the state ideology represented by the three teachings of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism — to its surroundings, seizing hegemony over East Asian culture. Goryeo’s national and ethnic pride stemmed fundamentally from the medieval East Asian multipolar system — known as the Haedong Cheonha-gwan (worldview of the East of the Sea) — and from Bulgukto Sasang (Buddha-land thought), but also from the cultural sense of achievement in having successfully imported and independently developed China’s advanced civilization.

Meanwhile, the Jurchens were objects of contempt for Goryeo. The Jurchens originated from the Mohe, a people who had already once been under Korean influence in Goguryeo, and from the contemporary Goryeo perspective, they were barbarians with hardly any cultural symbolism. The title for a Jurchen representative was Chujang (酋長, chieftain), and from Goryeo’s standpoint, they were a step below — those who paid tribute, submitted, or came to offer tribute. For instance, Wang Geon, who founded Goryeo, did not hesitate to call the Jurchens the “Northern barbarians with human faces and beastly hearts” (北蕃 人面獸心). This awareness of hierarchy was not much different for the Jurchens themselves; they recognized Goryeo as a superior civilization related to Goguryeo and Balhae, and employed diplomatic rhetoric expressing themselves as Goryeo’s beon (蕃, tributary frontier people).

This relationship persisted for approximately 200 years. After Balhae’s fall, the Jurchens were incorporated into the Liao dynasty yet called Goryeo the “parent country,” procured necessities through border trade, or naturalized in Goryeo to receive official positions — remaining as frontier existences under the protection and control of Goryeo’s civilizational sphere. Goryeo likewise utilized this asymmetric relationship with the Jurchens as a means to pursue border stabilization and as ideological grounds for achieving the legitimacy of the Haedong Cheonja-gwan within the state.

The Founding of the Jin Dynasty and Goryeo’s Turmoil

King Injong’s reign in the early 12th century is a period in Goryeo history that deserves close examination. While he was on the throne, power struggles emerged in various forms both domestically and internationally, and the political landscape changed rapidly. Excluding minor incidents like Song’s investiture proposal and request for a royal procession, and Hwang Ju-cheom’s request for imperial proclamation, the major political changes inside and outside Goryeo at the time can be summarized chronologically as follows:

Considering that his reign was a continuation of Goryeo’s heyday, serving the Jin dynasty was a difficult decision demanding a major shift in perception — paying tribute to barbarians who had long submitted to them — and internal opinion was split between the Seogyeong (Western Capital) literary aristocrats’ argument that they should also proclaim an empire and prepare to conquer Jin, and the Kaegyeong (Capital) literary aristocrats’ argument that their national strength was insufficient and Jin was powerful, so they should submit to Jin.

Regardless of which position was politically correct, in 1126 Yi Ja-gyeom, who held real power, decided on arbitrary submission to Jin, and Injong accepted it, sending a memorial to the emperor. Soon Yi Ja-gyeom was ousted, but the diplomatic line was not corrected, and after a long 15 years — precisely because it was submission to the Jurchens they had ignored as barbarians — in 1142 the Goryeo king was invested by Jin, and Goryeo officially began using Jin’s era name.

This sudden political flow threatened Goryeo’s Haedong Cheonja-gwan, triggering political conflict, which led to the Seogyeong relocation movement and then to an extreme form of resistance: Myeongcheong’s Rebellion. However, Myeongcheong’s Rebellion was not merely a movement to protect tradition and autonomy; to understand its significance, one must first examine the complex political terrain. In 1127, in the process of exiling the political giant Cheok Jun-gyeong, the vacuum was filled by the Seogyeong political force centered on Jeong Ji-sang, and Injong also favored them to check the traditional Kaegyeong literary aristocrats represented by Kim Bu-sik.

In this situation, as the Seogyeong faction proposed a radical forward-leaning policy of breaking the status quo through Seogyeong relocation and imperial proclamation, they came into conflict with the Kaegyeong faction, which maintained a pragmatic realist stance of preserving the status quo. Beyond mere political differences, the Seogyeong faction championed geomancy and Buddhist mysticism, while the Kaegyeong faction championed rationalist Confucian thought, and the situation escalated into a power struggle between the two political forces, an ideological conflict between the Gukpung-pa (National Style School) and Hanhak-pa (Chinese Learning School), and even a confrontation between Buddhism and Confucianism.

This tension ended when an unplanned rebellion broke out in the Seogyeong faction’s name and was suppressed. As a result, Goryeo’s hegemony passed to the Kaegyeong political force, the balance of power collapsed, and Seogyeong’s status was also lowered. The pragmatic sadaejuui (serving-the-great policy), Confucian conservatism, and Samhan succession consciousness that we know well today were solidified at this time upon the elimination of their rivals, or at least their foundations were laid.

Personal Assessment of the Two Ideologies

The situation 12th-century Goryeo faced was a massive absurdity at the state level, displaying all of the following: the human yearning to protect dignity and pride as an autonomous state succeeding Goguryeo’s glory; the powerful Jin dynasty established by the Jurchens, whom they had regarded as barbarians, mocking that belief; and the internal political conflicts arising from this reality. Borrowing Camus’s perspective, the divergent responses of the two main political forces of the time — the Seogyeong and Kaegyeong factions — can be understood differently as follows.

The Seogyeong faction’s argument culminates in conquering Jin, which could be seen as denial or rebellion against the world’s silence, but the official logic they used to persuade the populace and the king was mysticism-based hope — Buddhism and geomancy — and their movement was impossible without that belief, bringing it close to philosophical suicide. In particular, the belief that relocating the capital to Seogyeong and building a palace would solve all problems was, however emotionally satisfying, an attempt to cover the absurd with another irrationality instead of recognizing it with reason and fighting within it.

The Kaegyeong faction’s argument, by contrast, did not rely on emotional appeals to conquer Jin or blind faith, but accepted the humiliating reality as a condition of life for the state’s survival and pursued practical benefits such as resolving diplomatic tensions. This was an attitude of embracing the absurd as a human condition rather than denying or escaping it, and in confronting the absurd and walking one’s own path, it resembles the rebellious human. It was undoubtedly a means to maintain vested interests prior to philosophical reflection, but considering the outcome when the hardline Cheokhwa-pa (anti-peace faction) became mainstream in a similar dilemma reproduced 500 years later at the Byeongja Horan (1636), there is no great sense of incongruity in understanding the Kaegyeong faction’s gist as part of the attempt to hold onto reason — humanity’s only weapon against the absurd.

Personally, since there are no “what-ifs” in history, I want to refrain from saying which argument was correct. However, what remains regrettable is that immediately after this series of events, the military coup of 1170 (King Uijong’s reign) occurred, so the possibility of knowing what diplomatic line Goryeo would have taken toward Jin and what discourse would have circulated internally, had the state management philosophy been maintained normally, has been lost.