The Four-Seven Debate on Moral Sentiments

The Four-Seven Debate (sadan chiljeong nonjaeng) takes its name from the two categories of moral and emotional experience at its center: the Four Beginnings (sadan) that Mencius identified as innate sprouts of the four cardinal virtues - commiseration as the sprout of benevolence (in), shame and dislike as the sprout of righteousness (ui), deference and compliance as the sprout of propriety (ye), and the sense of right and wrong as the sprout of wisdom (ji) - and the Seven Feelings (chiljeong) enumerated in the Book of Rites (Liji) chapter on the meaning of rites: joy, anger, sorrow, fear, love, hatred, and desire. The philosophical question these two lists raised was not merely classificatory but properly metaphysical: do the Four Beginnings and the Seven Feelings arise from fundamentally different sources within the mind (li versus qi), or are the Four Beginnings simply a specially pure or well-regulated subset of the broader class of feelings that the Seven Feelings already exhaustively cover?