The Self and its Imagined Spaces: A Genealogy of Emotions in Medieval China

Early Chinese conceptions of the self were strikingly spatial. In contrast to much of what we find in ancient and medieval accounts in the West, where there was a predominant concern with establishing the temporal continuity of a person throughout life and beyond the death of the body, Chinese thinkers from early on were particularly concerned with the problem of how to situate the self in the world. Thus in antiquity we find the self at the center of a set of concentric circles radiating outward from the individual to the family, state, and, eventually, the world. During the Han dynasty (206 BC to 220 CE) the self was envisioned as a node within a vast web of physically interconnected entities that acted upon and responded to one another, as part of a unified model of cosmic resonance. In the early medieval period (mid-3rd century onward) there emerged a highly visual conception of the self as an internalized landscape. This was most evident in religious Daoist meditative practice, which involved visualizing and activating the gods and spirits that resided within one’s body, but it was also prevalent in accounts of art, poetry and music, in which creative expression necessitated travel through an imaginative landscape conjured by the mind. In my presentation I will discuss how these spatial conceptions of the self were linked to the evolving discourse of emotions, and what implications they had for imagining human possibilities of thought and action.

Curie Virág is an intellectual historian of early and medieval China and is currently an assistant professor in the department of East Asian Studies at the University of Toronto. She is interested in the history and philosophy of ethics, self-cultivation, and aesthetics, and has dealt primarily with evolving conceptions of emotions, mind, intelligence and agency in pre-1200 philosophical, religious and literary texts. Her current book project, Emotions in Medieval China, is a sequel to Emotions in Ancient China (near completion). Recent articles and chapters include “The Intelligence of Emotions? Debates over the Structure of Moral Life in Early China” (L’Atelier du Centre de Recherches Historiques), “Self-cultivation as Praxis in Song Neo-Confucianism” (John Lagerwey, ed., Modern Chinese Religion. Value Systems in Transformation), “Early Confucian Perspectives on Emotions” (Vincent Shen and Kwong-loi Shun eds., Handbook of Confucian Thought), and “Emotions and Human Agency in the Thought of Zhu Xi” (Journal of Song Yuan Studies).