Conceptualisation of Desire in Confucian Discourse and Modern Discourse: An Investigation of Metaphors by Tracing the Mapping

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-511-9_65How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Confucius; Human desire; Frame semantics; Conceptual blending; mapping

Abstract

The sustaining of the Confucian philosophy within the Chinese conscience has facilitated the collective growth of the nation. Among the various ideas from the Confucian philosophy, the idea of “desire” has been one of the crucial factors that have proliferated moral order, self-development, and social harmony. This study aims to explore how desire is conveyed in the modern world within the Chinese society and how it is different from the Confucian notion. This study employs an integrative framework of frame semantics of Fillmore and conceptual blending theory of Fauconnier to explore how “desire” is mapped onto moral order, self-development, and social harmony. This study compares the traditional idea of Confucius about desire with the modern depiction of the concept in the 1994 movie Eat Drink Man Woman by Ang Lee to understand the deviation of the present-day conversations staged in Chinese culture from the traditional denotations. After the analysis, this study found that the present-day notion of desire is still mapped onto the three concepts symmetrical to the traditional notion. Thus, this study provides a novel integration to conduct a diachronic comparison.

Copyright

© 2025 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Tianyi Tian
PY  - 2025
DA  - 2025/12/31
TI  - Conceptualisation of Desire in Confucian Discourse and Modern Discourse: An Investigation of Metaphors by Tracing the Mapping
BT  - Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Literature, Art and Human Development (ICLAHD 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 566
EP  - 575
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-511-9_65
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-511-9_65
ID  - Tian2025
ER  -