Cheung Chan-fai (The Chinese University of Hong Kong)

Eros and Qing: The Idea of Love in the West and China

Love plays a central and powerful role in human experience. For the Western philosophical and cultural traditions, love is one of the most important themes. Plato's idea of love as eros in Symposium establishes a definitive ground of all subsequent philosophical discussion on the problem of love. However, it is interesting to note that there is virtually no thematic discussion on love in the Chinese philosophical tradition. Love rendered as qing has been a great theme in literature rather than in philosophy. This talk will discuss the cultural difference in the discourse of love: the Western tradition of love as a metaphysics of eros; while the Chinese understanding of love as a phenomenology of qing.