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The Four-Seven Debate: An Annotated Translation of the Most Famous Controversy in Korean Neo-Confucian Thought (S U N Y Series in Korean Studies)

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"Neo-Confucianism" is a term that refers to a broad range of thinkers and intellectual movements that developed in the "middle ages" in China, and then spread to Korea and Japan. Neo-Confucians sought to explicate, propogate, and defend the Confucian tradition against Buddhism and Taoism, which they saw as decadent. However, many people (including myself) think that Neo-Confucianism is itself heavily influenced by Buddhist metaphysical concepts (especially Zen Buddhist ideas). Nonetheless, Neo-Confucianism is a very interesting philosophical movement in its own right.

As this book's title indicates, the "four-seven debate" is the most famous controversy in Korean Neo-Confucianism. The topic initially seems pretty dry. The issue is how to reconcile the list of FOUR emotional reactions that the ancient Confucian Mencius identifies as the basis for human virtue (e.g., sympathy is the basis for benevolence, disdain is the basis for righteousness, etc.) with the list of SEVEN emotions that appears in texts such as the Mean. Now, before you say "Who cares?" and click on another link, let me give you an interpretation of what this is really about.

Neo-Confucians think that everything in existence is composed of LI ("principle"), an underlying metaphysical structure shared by all things, and CH'I, which is variously translated, but refers to an intrinsically unstructured "stuff." "Principle" cannot exist without CH'I to inhere in, but CH'I cannot exist without "principle" to structure it. So far so good. But in both Chinese and Korean Confucianism a question arises about how principle and CH'I are related. People in one tradition (that associated with the philosopher Chu Hsi, see Daniel Gardner's translation, Learning to Be a Sage) hold that the principle can be conceptually abstracted from its embodiment in CH'I, and that doing so makes it easier for us to be guided by principle. However, those in the other wing of Neo-Confucianism (that associated with the philosopher Wang Yang-ming, see Philip J. Ivahoe's Ethics in the Confucian Tradition) hold that it is a distortion to separate principle and CH'I even conceptually.

The importance of this debate is that the Chu Hsi wing thinks you can read the classic texts to learn the abstractions of principle, and thereby cultivate yourself ethically. The Wang Yang-ming wing insists that all right action is inherently context sensitive, so you have to rely more on your innate moral sense than classic texts.

Scholars will note that I have oversimplified a bit, but I hope I've brought out some of the reason that this book is interesting. I should also note that the translation seems very good, and that the parties to the debater wrote very clearly about this issue, so if you're willing to think carefully about philosophical issues you can follow the debate.