Understanding human nature through taste: Dasan Jeong Yak-yong's account of human-nature-as-taste

This essay investigates Dasan Jeong Yak-yong's (1762-1836) account of human-nature-as-taste, by comparing his commentaries on significant chapters in the Mengzi to Zhu Xi's commentaries. Dasan argues that human nature is understood through giho, taste sentiments and desires, and not as Principle (li). I first introduce Dasan's account of human-nature-as-taste in his commentaries to 3A1 and 7A4. Next, I argue that giho is most appropriately translated as "taste," because this term captures the dispositional characteristics of giho as a mental faculty as well as its mental effects, such as desires, sentiments, and preferences. I then examine Dasan's and Zhu Xi's commentaries on 6A7 and 6A6, to illustrate how Dasan's view of human-nature-as-taste interprets the chapters differently from Zhu Xi's metaphysical account of human-nature-as-Principle, which Dasan considers as unsupported by the philological and contextual grounds. This exploration of Dasan's empirical account of human-nature-as-taste, serving as a preliminary for a philosophical study of his reinterpretation of the Confucian Classics and his performative account of moral self-cultivation, will provide us with an alternative perspective to the Neo-Confucian metaphysic-epistemic account of human nature.