Concerning with the interpretations made upon the Four-Seven Debate between Yi T’oegye 李退溪 (1501–1570) and Ki Kobong 奇高峰 (1527–72), most of the contemporary Chinese and English academic works concentrate on the characterization of the Four Beginnings 四端, and pay little attention to that of the Seven Emotions 七情. As far as I am concerned, though their depictions of the Seven Emotions are relatively rare and sporadic, there is a universal trend penetrating their understandings of the Seven Emotions which could be traced back to the philosophical legacies left by Immanuel Kant, William James and Sigmund Freud. To be specific, the Seven Emotions are treated as natural and sensible phenomena, pertaining with human beings’ physiological states and excluding the participation of consciousness....[ Read more ]

Concerning with the interpretations made upon the Four-Seven Debate between Yi T’oegye 李退溪 (1501–1570) and Ki Kobong 奇高峰 (1527–72), most of the contemporary Chinese and English academic works concentrate on the characterization of the Four Beginnings 四端, and pay little attention to that of the Seven Emotions 七情. As far as I am concerned, though their depictions of the Seven Emotions are relatively rare and sporadic, there is a universal trend penetrating their understandings of the Seven Emotions which could be traced back to the philosophical legacies left by Immanuel Kant, William James and Sigmund Freud. To be specific, the Seven Emotions are treated as natural and sensible phenomena, pertaining with human beings’ physiological states and excluding the participation of consciousness. This characterization also contains connotations on other issues of the Chinese philosophy, like the method of moral self-cultivation. In my thesis, I intend to demonstrate the inappropriateness of this naturalistic approach. On one hand, by utilizing the cognitive theory of emotion developed from 1970s, I will point out some theoretical problems inherent in the naturalistic notions of the Seven Emotions; on the other hand, I will tackle the issue of psychological determinism embraced by Contemporary New Confucian scholars like Lee Ming-huei 李明輝 and Yang Cho-hon 楊祖漢, which is relevant with the problem that whether or not cognitive elements could be incorporated into emotion. In the end, I will also provide a rough, but new interpretation of the Seven Emotions in the Four-Seven Debate from the perspective of the cognitive theory of emotion.