XXII (心: Part 1)

Last fall a potential faculty member (who is now a faculty member) gave a job talk about the dangers of assuming that a given word or concept in English will translate into Chinese, and then proceeded to outline some teaching practices that instructors could use to do a kind of cross-cultural interrogation of said word or concept. Specifics aside, the example they used to draw a contrast between English and Chinese was the word "heart," or Chinese, "心," (xīn). In English or more broadly, in the West, one's heart is the emotional center of a person. If one makes a decision with one's heart it means that one is making a decision with emotion. Letting your heart "speak" is to let emotion, whatever that is, dominate your thoughts. Thus implying that thoughts are not emotions but something else, a something else that usually originates in the brain or more abstractly, the mind. These kinds of divisions are fundamental in the West where Artistotle's ethos, pathos, and logos are still hiding in every corner of the modern world. A presumably rational mind creates abstract thoughts which are then translated into language for the purposes of communication. Emotion, or the heart, is presumed to be part of the body mass, a thing both unknowable and uncontrollable (except by those who are strong enough to marshal their inhuman desires a la the charioteer in Plato's Phaedrus).

Yet 心 in the Chinese is where both the emotions and the mind are located. What this means is that thinking is not necessarily separated from feeling and in fact, can be seen as one in the same time. 心 feels and thinks. That is not to say that mind/body separations are not also achieved in this image of Chinese philosophy and thought (see Slingerland and Chudek, 2011), but that the distinction between thought and feeling in the East, so called, are not so clearly demarcated as they are in the West. For me, understanding this difference has been helpful towards the ends of understanding why some things are done they way they are done here in China. For example, in May I traveled to Nanjing where I visited the museum and memorial for the Nanjing Massacre. The museum part, which already is an imposition that I'm not sure the creators of this place would make (i.e. if the memorial and museum can be separated), is essentially a history museum. There are artifacts from the battles and the occupation, narratives and pictures, a clear route to take through the building, and lots and lots of placards to read. What was interesting however in relation to the discussion above, at least to my American eyes weaned on Smithsonian style museums, is that the translated into English placards frequently described the horrors of the Japanese invasion in emotional terms. That is to say, they used adjectives like "brutal," and "terrible," and "horrible," and "awful" to describe what happened. To me this seems to contrast with the almost clinical view of history represented in American museums whose task is to present the "facts" of history, not editorialize them. Thus, the museum told the story of the Nanjing Massacre as well as how one should feel about these events. 

The broader implication here is that history is not just a series of events told through a sequence of facts, but that it also has a moral component: How one remembers is as important as what one remembers. One thinks and feels. Relating this back to 心, more generally then, every fact has an emotional component. Knowledge is not something that exists in the realm beyond but is tied to human intention. Following from this reasoning, in the case of the Nanjing Massacre memorial/museum it is not that the placards were poorly written, or that they were propaganda towards the ends of promoting negative public sentiment towards the Japanese (though I think many would argue that they do), but that a presentation of the correct facts also requires a presentation of the correct intentions through which to regard those facts. In other words, one always thinks with their heart and it is folly to pretend otherwise. Further, the law is not only about reason but about morality as well. In the West, or at least the United States, the post-moderns have hit upon a version of this idea for some time now, and at present, the lack of a publicly agreed upon objective reality is increasingly a major problem when it comes a shared public discourse. Though it is easy to see these disagreements through the lens of American politics and their competing factions (e.g. Republicans, liberals, progressives, alt-right, etc.), I think it is also possible to read this disagreement though the concept of 心, that is, that there is one side who believes in the province of objective facts, and thus, in the modern institutions of democracy and their laws, and that there is one side who believes that facts and feelings are inseparable. I do not think that these sides are divided along political lines.