Affective Knowing in Wang Yangming

Abstract Wang Yangming 王陽明 (1472–1529) has provoked controversy from his day to our own with his teachings about varieties of knowing ( zhi 知). A notable dimension of Wang's theoretical philosophy is his repeated insistence that the inherent reality of both the heartmind itself, and of knowing, is deeply affective in nature. While scholars have often noted Wang's emphasis on affect, we argue that affect is more fundamental to his view than previous interpretations have generally recognized. We develop an affect‐first interpretation of Wang's view of knowing in three steps. First, we show how joy, sorrow, and stillness jointly characterize the inherent reality of the heartmind. Second, we argue that the affective nature of our heartminds was important to Wang for two reasons, namely that it explains how the heartmind can be self‐sustaining and self‐correcting. Finally, we make explicit how Wang's innovative notion of good knowing ( liangzhi 良知) relates to the heartmind's affective inherent reality and fits together with other varieties of knowing. On our account, liangzhi is the heartmind's inherent reality as viewed through the lens of its responsiveness to the myriad things in the world. We argue that Wang's concepts of “extended knowing” or “genuine knowing”—which are the same thing—are nothing more than pure episodes of liangzhi. Taken as a whole, Wang's account of the heartmind's ways of knowing is consistent and distinctive, notable both for its influence within Neo‐Confucianism and its potential to catalyze new lines of thinking today.