Seeing and Unseen: The Embodied Dimension of Confucian Emotional Ethics

A profound inquiry into the knowledge system and discursive formation of Confucian ethics requires us to clarify the cognitive modes,paradigms of thinking,and narrative logic that underlie its intellectual discourse,and to investigate the generative mechanism of ethical discourse through the interaction between textual thought and the experiential world.Seeing (“见”) is a capacity of synaesthetic perception;it is also the emergence of affective awareness.Seen and unseen constitute the “critical moments” of Confucian ethics.The ethical nature of seeing highlights the embodied thinking characteristic of Confucian emotional ethics.As human-machine symbiotic civilizations emerge,the embodied empathetic and benevolent ethics marked by “seeing” in Confucianism can contribute to the development of a model of embodied emotional ethics that goes beyond mere calculation and simulation,thereby laying a more philosophically grounded foundation for universal embodied intelligence that better aligns with human life experiences.