In this course, we shall practise the art of slow reading by looking at passages discussing emotions in philosophical texts from before China’s unification in 221 BCE. Since these texts are written in Classical Chinese, reading slowly comes naturally to most of us. However, reading slowly is also a methodology, related to close reading and some aspects of the philological approach. In this course, we shall read slowly on purpose in order to discover layers of meaning that are easily lost in faster modes of reading.
In the 4th century BCE, Chinese philosophy began to display a shift of attention inwards and an explicit division of the inner and the outer man. The realm of emotions became a focus of major philosophical interest. In the same period, terms such as qíng 情 and (less often) zhì 志 began to be used to refer to the category of emotions, as did collocations of antonyms such as xǐ nù 喜怒 ‘joy and anger’ and āi lè 哀樂 ‘sadness and pleasure’. Before this, specific emotions had often been discussed both in poetry and philosophy, but it was only now that the general category of emotion appeared on the stage.
In Europe, the distinction between inner and outer man and the increasing focus of attention inwards is often seen as marking the advent of modernity. In China, a similar change took place several hundred years before the Common Era. While comparative studies will not be the focus of this course, knowledge of this background provides our readings with additional significance.