A common definition of emotion according to Western Psychology is: A psychological system that appraises internal or external, context-related causes in terms of their significance for the satisfaction of personal motives.” It has also been seen as a way to maximize reproduction of genes, since love enables parents to bond with their children and care for them, and fear galvanizes people to flee or intensely fight an attacker or predator. Emotion is often mainly located in the single person, who seeks pleasurable stimuli and avoids pain. But Louise Sundararajan, in Understanding Emotion in Chinese Culture, wrote that these don’t express some of the most prevalent ways that Chinese have thought about emotion.
Chinese have often considered emotion to be more collective and resonant with nature. Sundararajan noted that the modern Chinese term that comes closest to emotion is the compound qing gan, or gan qing. Qing in pre-Han Dynasty texts (before 206 BCE) primarily means “genuine,” “the facts,” or “what essentially is. It pertains to both the world and the combination of mind and heart (xin). In the former case, it means the true condition of a situation. Pertaining to mind-heart, it means “essential sensibilities and sentiments” or “a person’s deep feelings, convictions, and responses.” In a phrase, qing refers to manifestations of human nature, which ground people in reality. It discloses something that is true about both the person and world; it doesn’t sharply distinguish them. Both are considered to be deeply interrelated rather than separate entities. Confucian and Daoist traditions have been based on this idea.
Gan, the other half of the compound, is affectivity that connects us all. It can mean stirring or affecting, but it’s more often used in the passive sense of being stirred or affected.
Sundararajan wrote that gan is often part of two compounds, gan-ying (responsiveness) and gan-lei (responding in kind). Gan-ying literally means stimulating-responding. She writes that this isn’t a simple S-R (stimulus-response) relation, but rather a resonating feedback loop based on an intrinsic affinity between all things in a universe in which things deeply resonate with each other. Lei is an ancient word for category, and Sundararajan said that gan-lei means responding to things that share categorical correlations. The I Ching commentary attributed to Confucius said, “Things that accord in tone vibrate together. Things that have affinity in their innermost natures seek one another.”
So qing and gan refer to deep resonance within a resonant environment more than an individual’s private feelings.
Sundararajan notes that the Chinese approach to feelings and experience is holistic. It doesn’t reduce them to a single psyche.
Many facets of Chinese culture converged into this way of treating emotion as holistic, including language, music, architecture, ideas of power/virtue, and ideas of wind.
Traditions in India have treated emotion in a very different way. Other cultures have constructed emotions in magnificently diverse ways. We can look At/With/Beyond emotion and develop a wider range of ways to experience the world and each other.