The cultural critic Hyungchul Shin was invited to lead the fifth seminar of DOOSAN Curators’ Workshop on June 29th, 2016. The seminar began with Shin’s question ‘how do we write?’, and continued with reading together short responses to his question. Drawing analogy between writing and building a house, Shin explained using the right material where it is needed in order to build a substantial house, and emphasized that the determinant of the level of necessity and quality of text depends on whether or not the writing captures the writer’s ‘consciousness’. He also commented that the process through which a writer casts his question and finds his own answers is like a revelation of his consciousness.
 
Shin continued on and classified the consciousness through three subjects: Meaning of Life (rarely found), Non-Violent Life (which directs at violent judgement on the inner world and truth of others), and Empathy and Consolation (as an effort to understand an indirect experience). Shin focused on empathy and consolation, looking at the origin and the concept of ‘sympathy’ and ‘empathy’, which are two similar words with different concepts. He explained that sym-pathy means ‘being with an emotion’ or being ‘with the same emotional state’, while em-pathy means to ‘immerse in an emotion’ and thus trying to be ‘in the same emotional state’ . 1
 
In A Small, Good Thing and Cathedral, Raymond Carver meditates that the sympathy (state) and empathy (action) for others is actually difficult to maintain, or even arrive at. This is because human beings are not programmed to instinctively feel emotions, and immersing oneself emotionally in something he or she has not experienced cannot reflectively be possible. Shin stated that for this reason, he feels the need for ‘study of emotions’. He added that study of emotion is about thinking together about Heidegger’s idea of ‘State-of Mind’ which the self inescapably feels in a social structure coexisting with others, and Foucault’s concept of ‘governmentality’ which explains the effect the period has on the people living in it.
 
Literature is a channel into a world we do not know, and helps us to study about emotions. For example, poems by Emily Dickinson must be read by those who wish to study about human sorrow. During the seminar, the participants read in order: My Life Closed Twice Before its Close, After Great Pain, A Formal Feeling Comes, Who Am I by Siseup Kim, Lovely Memory by Dong-ju Yoon, Sonnet 73 by William Shakespeare, and The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost. The seminar looked at a short writing about the writers and descriptions on their poems, and led to an in-depth conversation on the consciousness of the writers.
 
1. Shin, Hyung-chul, , Munhakdongne, 2015