This tripartite volume appears in Brillâs Emotions and States of Mind in East Asia series.1 It is dedicated to the analysis of emotions and collective imagery in Chinese culture side by side with an analysis of discussions of love in European philosophy and literature in order to render visible the differences and resemblances between them. This series is the best place to publish our collective effort to survey the long-term representations, intellectual elaborations, and the imagery to capture the notion of love in the Chinese and European civilisations.
Let us begin with the âpre-historyâ of our volume. During the conference âHistoire intellectuelle des émotions, de lâAntiquité à nos joursâ,2 both P. Santangelo and G. Boros presented the results of their research. In the subsequent discussions, they realized the affinities between their thoughts about the eternal topic of love. Shortly afterwards, they started to outline a volume to present to the learned readers in China and the Western world a survey of the evolution of the concepts of love in these parallel civilizations. Later, they met again in Budapest and Rome, and the main outlines of the work unfolded almost by themselves. They became increasingly fascinated with the idea of the volume not only because of the importance of the topic, but also of the challenge to present the paths that European and Chinese civilizations took during the centuries, almost independently from each other. Intriguing questions posed themselves: if love is universal, what kind of differences can be observed in the two cultures regarding love and its intellectual elaborations? Can these differences be explained solely by reference to differences in the structures and vocabularies of the Chinese and the European languages? Obviously not. The differences are not confined to the linguistic and semantic fields: words have their independent history in each culture and the semantic contents of âequivalentsâ do not exactly overlap. Moreover, the two ancient and independent cultures have developed a series of conceptual tools and categories that usually do not correspond. How can these obvious first findings be elaborated on in a scholarly volume that is historical and philosophical at the same time?
At the beginning, our intention was to create a comparative history of both paths. Later, however, we became more and more aware of the risks of such a thoroughly comparative enterprise. We were convinced of the necessity to avoid being misled by ideological preconceptions and yielding to oversimplification. Finally, it became more and more evident that the only practicable method was to present the two paths separately. The reader is offered the possibility of reflecting on and comparing the manners in which the two civilizations contributed to the symbolic representation of the fundamental topic of love.
Thus, our volume aims at no direct and overall comparison between the two cultures of love. The temptation was great, but it could only have issued in superficial observations. Rather, we invite our readers to reflect upon the symbolic representations of love in both cultures presented in largely â and purposively â independent essays about the characteristic love-topics. The attentive reader will find various hints at differences and resemblances. In one chapter, they will find a sample of comparison between the Chinese âHistory of Loveâ (1630) and the European âDe amoreâ (12th century), without breaking our own rule of abstinence: comparisons on an elementary level must necessarily be made already for being able to affirm the otherness of the cultures we deal with.
We had to limit our surveys in time and space. Our aim was not to create the comprehensive history of love as an emotion. The chapters of this volume concentrate their explicative efforts on love as object and/or instrument of a cult and its cultural representations in philosophy and literature, both religious and secular (insofar as these approaches can be differentiated at all). Therefore, the volume is not to be considered a complete manual of the history of love, although it does make the claim to be read as an essential contribution to such a manual. It contributes to an understanding of the love-related phenomena, offering some general outlines of the long-term evolution of the concept of love.
Gabor Borosâ research was supported by the research project âSelf-interpretation, Emotions, Narrativityâ (NRDIO K 120375). Especial thanks to Natália Borza and Sam Gilchrist Hall for helping to improve his English style.
Especial thanks to Natália Borza and Sam Gilchrist Hall for helping to improve his English style.
Paolo Santangelo and Gábor Boros
Notes
The last volumes are Historicizing Emotions: Practices and Objects in India, China, and Japan, ed. by Barbara Schuler, and Mario Sabattini, Zhu Guangqian and Benedetto Croce on Aesthetic Thought. With a Translation of the Wenyi xinlixue æèºå¿çå¦ (The Psychology of Art and Literature), edited by Elisa Levi Sabattini.
Paris, 23-25 May 2013, organized by Piroska Nagy and Damien Boquet, Colloque Histoire intellectuelle des emotions de lâAntiquité à nos jours, Vème rencontre EMMA, at the Reid Hall, Paris.