"That which encompasses the Myriad cares": Subjectivity, knowledge, and the ethics of emotion in Tang and Song China.
详细信息
文摘
This is a study of the diverse, intriguing ways in which thinkers in China, from the sixth to the twelfth centuries, understood and made sense of the emotions. It traces the role of emotions in their ethical visions and seeks to construct an intelligible history of how, in this period of profound change, prominent thinkers conceived of the self and the sources of order, meaning and value in human life. Methodologically, I have attempted to open a space for intellectual history that goes beyond the search for the social, cultural, and political contexts of thought, on the one hand, and the history of "philosophical doctrines" and intellectual lineages, on the other---approaches that have dominated the historical study of past thought.;My inquiry proceeds through an examination of the shifting philosophical discourse surrounding the concept of qing---the term in Chinese most commonly rendered as "emotion." Rather than tracing the history of meanings of qing per se, I examine the notion in terms of the ethical and conceptual predicaments of individual thinkers. I begin with Liu Xie's (ca. 465--522) ambitious literary treatise, the Wenxin Diaolong and the early Tang collection of Classics commentaries, the Wujing Zhengyi (mid-seventh century). These early visions serve as the backdrop to my discussion of Tang and Song thinkers: Han Yu (768--824), Ouyang Xiu (1007--1072), Shao Yong (1011--1077), Zhang Zai (1020--1077), Su Shi (1037--1101) and Zhu Xi (1130--1200).;Historically, my study shows that the intellectual landscape of the Tang and Song periods was composed of vastly different ethical visions of thinkers who, faced with the reality of an uncertain, fragmented world, put forth a diverse range of proposals to reconcile the sense of division between inner and outer, personal experience and objective meaning. Philosophically, it demonstrates the deep ambivalences and complexities that characterize thinking about emotions, providing further insight into the ways in which emotions are linked to the processes of conferring meaning and value.