[author]LIAO Yi

[content]

 LIAO Yi

PhD in Law, Professor of Law School, Wuhan University

Abstract: In the knowledge genealogy of legal science, the image of "emotion" is generally chaotic, weak and negative. But such an image has not always been like this. The interpretation of emotion by "legal science" in a broad sense is long-term and multi-dimensional. In the pre-disciplinary period, early legislators and philosophers provided support for the tradition of emotional interpretation in legal science from the perspective of ideas and experience. In the disciplinary period, out of the need to construct an autonomous knowledge system, legal scholars emphasized the normative evaluation of emotion by legal rationality and the assimilation of rational emotional knowledge to legal doctrine. In the post-disciplinary period, legal science, in addition to the established schema of rational cognition, seeks the subject momentum and response path of emotional interpretation in a broader knowledge field with an extensible "inside-outside" wide angle. For the system construction and functional development of legal science, emotional interpretation not only has rich normative and practical cognitive value, but also has hidden and crucial epistemological implications. Only by eliminating the confrontation between reason and emotion and taking a new epistemological holistic equilibrium view as a guide, can legal studies hope to conform to elegant aesthetics and turn from a rigid command to a human nature study that commends a beautiful mind.
Keywords: legal studies; "law and emotion" research; emotional interpretation; disciplinarization; epistemology

Introduction: Emotional Issues in Jurisprudence

In the current legal knowledge system, the image of "emotion" is generally chaotic, weak and negative. For a long time, people's understanding and views on emotions have formed a complex discourse system. Philosophy, literature, medicine, ethics, rhetoric, aesthetics, law, political thought and other research fields overlap and even hinder and destroy each other. Faced with "emotion" that is difficult to define, jurisprudence seems to have no choice but to adopt the strategy of "simplifying the complex" and construct a theoretical premise of "weak emotion" with the help of the binary opposition between reason and emotion. For example, in the rational construction of positivist jurisprudence, the law as a "sovereign command" can legitimately "intimidate" scattered emotions. With the rise of rationalist legal views, even the hermeneutic jurisprudence that emphasizes "reflective equilibrium" can hardly escape the confinement of emotional negativity and change the consistent belief in "life's integrity". Ronald M. Dworkin's "Herculean judge" has become a classic metaphor for emotional control of legal professionals.

In the existing legal cognition, if there is "legal emotion", then first of all, it refers to respect and obedience to legal authority, or "legitimate love of law". Secondly, it refers to the emotions that the law attempts to regulate, as well as the related formal rituals, practices and emotional discourses - they belong to the "emotional system" in the sense of anthropology and sociology. Finally, it refers to the negative emotions that are the deep meaning of legal sanctions. In this sense, "sanctions are also the medium for forming contempt or disgust and bringing shame to it". Other types of emotions and overall logic are either classified as a cluster of negative conditions of law, or are considered to have no direct connection with law, and have no clear position in the legal knowledge system. Even in the view of some legal scholars who intend to correct the deviation, "legal emotion" is difficult to constitute a universally valid principle, whether it is manifested as a sense of personality or dignity at the personal level, a sense of justice at the social level, or a sense of identity at the national level.

The emergence of the above situation is not unrelated to the knowledge position formed in the history of law. Since modern times, due to its self-recognition of its special scientific attributes, although jurisprudence does not exclude the investigation of behavior and psychology, it is unwilling to be similar to the observation-experimental research of sociology and psychology. In comparison, it pays more attention to the normative analysis of "reason" rather than the factual research of "emotion". Jurisprudence holding this position can discuss the dialectical interactive relationship between "reason" and "emotion" in depth through the normative analysis of philosophy. But for it, answering "what is emotion" is more difficult than analyzing "what is law" because "emotion" is more difficult to define than "law" in concept.

Words can express what people want them to express, but when the definitions are inconsistent, it will cause trouble. When people use terms such as affect, feeling, mood, expressiveness, passion, emotion, and sentiment interchangeably to express various emotional conditions, theoretical troubles have already appeared. In order to promote knowledge production, some scholars use "emotion" as a core concept and adopt other words to describe various variants of "emotion". This centralized, inclusive, and multi-level definition of "emotion" is not perfect, but it can provide an important reference for the emotional interpretation of law.

Based on the existing emotional theory and the relationship between law and rationality, we can divide "emotion" into three types. The first type is natural emotion that is closely related to feelings, emotions, expressions, and passions. In a broad sense, it is a description of the physical and mental activities of living beings in the world. The basic semantics lies in expressing the mind itself and the behavior it inspires, and the focus is on describing the process of spontaneous actions driven by feelings and desires. In this sense, various reactive actions of people due to external stimuli, such as joy, anger, sadness, fear, love, and hatred, are all common emotional phenomena. The second type is social emotions that restrain desires and are close to rationality. When natural sciences study emotions, they emphasize the exploration of universal laws based on biology; when humanities study emotions, they are good at revealing the personal inner activities of emotional subjects; and when social sciences study emotions, they hope to discover the social laws of emotions. It is not difficult to find the knowledge style of emotional social science in concepts such as "moral sentiment", "moral emotion" and "collective emotion". At the confluence of humanities and social sciences, social emotions that conform to specific virtues constitute the knowledge foundation of legal rationality. The "sense of justice" that people often talk about can be regarded as the prototype of this kind of emotion. When justice as a virtue is widely felt by members of society, it will produce intense emotional reactions to oppression, corruption or injustice. The third type is the process and result of the complex movement of natural emotions and social emotions. As Martha C. Nussbaum said, if we rely solely on principle-based emotions without injecting some strong love and attachment, then everything will be too calm and too superficial to support people's long-term adherence to justice and consensus. When social emotions and natural emotions are combined, new emotional movements such as "political emotions" and "love and compassion" will be generated. In terms of operational results, natural emotions, social emotions, or a combination of the two, either accept rational norms or reshape them, or deviate from rationality, or transcend rationality.

More importantly, the interpretation of emotional issues in law has undergone a long period of knowledge evolution. If we fail to see this, it will be difficult for us to thoroughly understand the mechanism and pattern of the generation of existing legal knowledge and to truly change the knowledge habits of rationalist law. In summary, in ancient times, people's discussions on "law" were either broad or subtle, but they all had to be coupled with the cognition of natural reason and natural emotion to generate fair legislative or judicial knowledge. In modern times, rationalist epistemology has emerged, which has obscured the cognitive connection between law and natural emotion in the short term. With the development of epistemology, social emotions have gradually attracted the attention of legal scholars due to their unique cognitive functions and have become an important ally in the construction of rational knowledge. Knowledge production represented by the interdisciplinary research of "law and emotion" is approaching the critical point of the change of legal knowledge schema, making important revisions to the rationalist legal paradigm and forming a possible alternative plan. The overall narration of this kind of knowledge history may be the key to resolving the emotional problem in law.

This article strives to combine history and theory, first completing the narrative of the emotional knowledge history of law, and then constructing a new analytical framework for epistemological reflection. Epistemology is rooted in epistemology, which is a holistic reflection on knowledge as a result of cognition, including discussions on the historical evolution of knowledge, its essential attributes, and the standard of justification. Epistemology based on emotional epistemology pays special attention to the rational cognitive function of emotion. If law is to reflect on the complex "emotion" in terms of epistemology, it must first return to its original meaning, that is, law was not a specialized discipline, a category of social science, or an integration of legal profession skills at the beginning, but a kind of knowledge and wisdom that has existed since ancient times. The formation of the discipline of law (disciplinarization) is the product and symbol of the maturity of the field of legal knowledge. When the field of legal knowledge is transformed into a relatively independent "legal discipline", it means that the norms and laws of relevant knowledge production have been basically established and have been generally recognized. Therefore, with disciplinarization as the boundary, the emotional interpretation of law can form a long-term, multi-dimensional narrative of knowledge history.

1 Prototypes and traditions in the pre-disciplinary period

The way in which law interprets emotions, as well as the knowledge implications of emotions, all occur in specific historical circumstances and are by no means static. In the generation and evolution of legal knowledge about emotions, is there a fundamental break, which means that the "emotional alienation" of law is a new product of modernity? Or, only by returning to the past in spirit can people find the secret recipe for the reconstruction of legal knowledge in the genealogy of ancient emotional knowledge? In any case, we need to examine the prototypes and traditions of legal knowledge with emotions as the clue.

1.1 The Legal Prototype of Emotional Knowledge

In primitive societies where modern law is unknown, how people use unique norms to deal with life and communication issues constitutes a strange legal knowledge problem in the eyes of anthropologists. No matter how difficult such knowledge is to understand, it can be generally confirmed that the "law" in primitive societies is often centered on basic natural emotions. Through various forms of application, it forms an institutional bond that maintains individuals and groups and ensures the overall coordination of members' psychology and behavior. This kind of "law" in the psychological sense is of course not the same as the specific "law" as a mandatory norm, and there is often a fierce conflict between the two. For example, in the indigenous society of the Trobriand Islands studied by Bronislaw Malinowski, the strong matriarchal legal system is accompanied by relatively weak emotions, while paternal love, which is not so important in law, is supported by strong personal feelings. In addition to this most important conflict, other emotions (such as love) sometimes conflict with the law. But there is a more common situation, that is, as long as the parties are gentle and smooth enough, the above conflicts will not lead to fundamental opposition within the community. This reflects the coordination between law and emotion in primitive society, and also confirms an important conclusion of legal anthropology, that is, primitive law has a certain flexibility and is not as rigid as people imagine.

With the emergence of political superiors, the emotional expression of primitive society has gradually become a concern of the formal legal order, and it is no longer a matter of personal casualness. When formal law intervenes in emotional expression, it means that a more clear normative standard can limit the spontaneity of emotions and shape the behavior pattern that people abide by together. At this time, basic natural emotions will still use their own power to question or directly resist the emotional normative standards of the law. As Karl Mannheim said, knowledge is biased or ideological, which stems from people's initial emotions of "distrust and suspicion" of others, especially opponents; knowledge is also objective, which is also affected by initial emotions. Suspicion of false consciousness is not uncommon in primitive society. For example, the prophecy of a prophet may be questioned by himself or others. Therefore, the law has to compromise with natural emotions in the struggle, which creates a formal knowledge thoroughfare for the law to absorb emotions, and also leaves an informal knowledge channel for emotions to challenge the law.

In the process of promoting this kind of interaction, the basic expression of natural emotions, in addition to being transformed into various social emotions and forming a knowledge tradition expressed in words and symbols in institutionalized relations, continues to maintain the vitality of challengers through mysticism, skepticism and other means. In the increasingly intensified social conflicts, the emphasis on forging and promoting formal knowledge is the "propriety" emotion of the legislator. The "legislator" here can be understood as the prototype of the founder of the political system in the classical sense. In order to obtain the "sympathy" of natural emotions and their dominant groups, legislators need to express their roles through "interpretive discourse". "These interpretive discourses are based on a certain community tradition, and their purpose is to make the discourse formed in this community tradition understandable to the knowledge system formed in that community tradition." As long as the legislator pursues "propriety" in emotion, regardless of whether this standard is clear, it can ultimately remind people to train their morality in social interactions, so that they can more keenly and correctly see the requirements of society and restrain their inappropriate emotions. This kind of "appropriate" standard was not originally dominated by rational utility. Rather than being a specific emotion, it was regarded as a "sacred" mixture of basic natural emotions (a kind of knowledge prototype created by social emotions).

1.2 The intellectual tradition of emotional interpretation

The generation of the legal tradition of emotional interpretation is inseparable from the drive and guidance of the knowledge prototype, but it also requires the intervention of new subjects to produce the effect of lasting influence. In the classical era, philosophers were the representatives of this subject. In order to deeply explore the concept of law, philosophers, based on the experience of model legislators, opened up a dual interpretation route of reason governing emotions and desires, and emotions coordinating desires and reason. For example, Socrates in Plato's writings can be described as an emotional lover of wisdom, and the "Utopia" he constructed is also a "Beautiful City" with emotions as the hub and balanced desires and reason. Plato not only introduced "emotions" as the third part of the soul, and shaped a "passion" that is easily influenced by reason and regulates improper desires (typically anger with justice against oneself), but also confirmed the powerful cognitive ability of "desire", which is more prominent in his late philosophy (such as the interpretation of love). On the basis of Plato's doctrine, Aristotle simplified the dialectic of the three-part mind into the dominance of reason over desire, and used the dualistic "two-pole" system to find the appropriate mean between excess and scarcity, and established a cognitive schema specifically for emotion. In his view, all types of emotion involve a key element, namely the function of judgment, while impressions (Phantasia) or physical impulses that are not judged by the mind are not considered emotions. Therefore, "every virtue is the product of rational control of passion." It is generally believed that Aristotle's emotion theory is more in line with the practical requirements of politics and society, and has the effect of rational cognition of emotional phenomena in legal practice. However, such a theoretical route is too partial to rationalist epistemology, which has caused the ontology of emotional knowledge to be suspended for a long time, and the significance of emotion for the generation and operation of law is therefore unclear.

In the face of the relationship between law, emotion and rationality, the ancient Chinese sages and philosophers emphasized the overall coordination of emotion in their stance and methods, rather than the unidirectional dominance of rationality. The "emotion" mentioned by the ancient Chinese has rich connotations. It not only includes emotional feelings, but also points to emotional experience; it not only includes experiential experience, but also contains transcendental experience. Compared with the rigid political and criminal rule, the ancient Chinese prefer to achieve emotional harmony in community life through the rule of ritual and music, because the rule of ritual and music is believed to be easier to reach the depths of people's hearts than the rule of political and criminal rule. For example, the issue of "straightness" in Confucius's "father conceals for his son, and son conceals for his father" involves the original emotion that is higher than ethics and legal norms. Through the emotional analysis of "straightness", we can see a kind of Chinese theory of justice: the foundation relationship between original emotion and ethics, morality, and law is actually the foundation relationship between basic natural emotion and the construction of social norms and its institutional arrangements. In the sequence of "differential love-unified benevolence" based on respect for basic natural emotions, the social legal emotional logic that runs through the private and public spheres is presented. The pre-Qin legalists opposed taking personal feelings as the basis of law, because only by opposing personal feelings can the law guarantee the unity of measurement and decision-making, "the ultimate law cannot be missing" ("Shenzi·Yiwen"). However, it does not deny the differences in closeness, respect, seniority, and nobility that reflect social emotions.

Judging from the concept of scientism, the ancient Chinese’s discussion on the relationship between law and emotion focused on “understanding”, and was even somewhat arbitrary, lacking the rational subject and its justification concerns in Western epistemology. However, it is undeniable that this kind of social emotional knowledge about legal principles plays a wide range of supporting functions in moral cultivation, political order and social stability. This also directly affects the institutional shaping and method selection of dispute resolution. For example, the expression of “emotional and rational law” shows that the traditional thinking mode of “following emotion-understanding reason-seeking law” contains the legal practice wisdom based on emotional cognition. Although the dispute over “emotional and rational law” has a long history, the supporting function of emotional cognition for legal practice has always been relatively stable. No matter how the later Neo-Confucianism opposes human desires, it has to leave a broad legal space for “human feelings”. The connection between the principles of heaven and the law of the country with human feelings as the hub is not only the knowledge schema that has long dominated ancient China, but also has a very important inspiration for the construction of modern rule of law.

2 Norms and assimilation in the period of disciplinarization

Objectively speaking, in the historical process of transition from tradition to modernity, the disciplinarization of law has not caused a fundamental split in the tradition of emotional knowledge. The emphasis on rational cognition by jurists and legal experts continues the tradition of emotional knowledge of legislators and philosophers. However, due to the need to construct an autonomous knowledge system, the disciplinarized law must complement the normative evaluation of social emotions by legal rationality, and at the same time achieve the assimilation of rational social emotional knowledge to legal doctrines, which leads to relevant difficulties and limitations in the process of knowledge evolution.

2.1 The Difficulty of Normative Evaluation

In general, since the discipline of legal studies is subject to institutionalized limitations of knowledge norms in terms of research subjects, objects and methods, the knowledge resources it mobilizes are increasingly concentrated on the needs of constructing legal rationality, and the existing emotional knowledge forms are constantly evaluated in a typological and normative manner through the normative lens of scientism. For emotions that have been incorporated into the legal knowledge system, further refinement and empirical interpretation are required to dissect their operating mechanisms and improve the knowledge details within legal doctrines to directly meet the needs of constructing ideal legal authority. For those emotions that were first excluded but then allowed in, they must be reinterpreted and go through the process of doctrine. For emotional knowledge that is still excluded, new explanatory rationales must be added. For emotional knowledge in a state of doubt, it will be left to future knowledge practice for verification, or it will be selectively absorbed or still return to the valley of doubt.

When Western jurisprudence raised its "autonomous" head and clearly expressed its demand for separation from theology, a knowledge movement to re-evaluate the relationship between emotion and rationality has begun. Rational analysis of emotions has become the norm in the era of cognitive change. In the view of Niccolò Machiavelli, being feared is much safer than being loved, because fear means fear of punishment, and this fear is something that even ungrateful people cannot escape. Regardless of whether people at that time supported this specific humanistic stance or agreed with the rational normative construction of dynasticism, the legal knowledge change caused by specific social emotions (such as "fear" as Machiavelli said) still happened. The law that attempted to be completely separated from theology, philosophy and political skills was based on the fear emotion of protecting secular life and guarding against the fate of death, forming a new unified personality knowledge construction. Basic social emotions have been temporarily placed in the normative evaluation of legal rationality. The producers of legal knowledge have also alleviated the panic and helplessness when facing the knowledge black hole because of the theoretical shelter with the "separation proposition" as the core, and obtained the subject qualification and basic power of normative justification. In this regard, the famous "separation proposition" of analytical jurisprudence does not represent the final victory of rationality, but the normative evaluation requirement of legal rationality on social emotions.

In this knowledge system, the game between social emotion and legal rationality will certainly continue. Legal rationalists like Montesquieu are still full of piety in their hearts, with a "great restless mind that cannot be satisfied by reason". On the surface, jurisprudence seems to be separated. However, the knowledge schema provided by theology, philosophy or political science can still be used by jurisprudence to evaluate new secular social emotions through transformation, so that it can continue to enjoy grace and let the sacredness of law shine with new knowledge glory. The so-called knowledge evaluation norms of legal rationality have in fact been controversial. The mansion of rationalist jurisprudence can stand on the knowledge foundation of emotional organization, typification and hierarchy in terms of text, but in practice it is difficult to get rid of the powerful reaction of social emotional knowledge. "Reason" can only retreat until David Hume said that "reason is a product of calm emotions, not the kind of reason that truly distinguishes truth from falsehood". Whether legal rationality plays a decisive role in social emotions, and how to distinguish the boundaries between emotional facts and legal norms, are actually deliberately avoided in the disciplined legal knowledge system.

As far as China is concerned, the process of legal discipline since modern times has not completely solved the problem of legal rationality's normative evaluation of emotions. After the Qin and Han Dynasties, the metaphysical meaning of "emotion" in China gradually faded, and its physical color became increasingly strong. The rule of sages coexisting with monarchy emphasizes the control of people's emotions and passions, and this control, as the origin of rational behavior, is believed to promote the harmony of social life. The history of legal Confucianization can also be understood as a process in which formal legal knowledge has become increasingly strict in controlling social emotions. However, unlike Western jurisprudence, the domination of law by heaven in traditional Chinese culture is closely related to the assumption that human feelings support heaven. With the expansion of social emotions in legal knowledge, the "reason" represented, based on, and proved by law has also been continuously strengthened. At the same time, the "implicit" characteristics of traditional culture contribute to the invisible flow of social emotional knowledge and avoid its open disputes with formal legal knowledge. Of course, this may also exacerbate the "darkness" of social emotional knowledge, resulting in the lack of institutional channels for the explicit expression of emotional discourse. The "awakening of desire" at the turn of the Ming and Qing dynasties triggered a shift from "heavenly principles" to "emotional principles". This shift can be seen as a major trend in China's early modern cultural thought. Against this background, the lack of Confucian classics and legal studies in the evaluation of emotional norms has become increasingly significant, and new social emotions urgently need the precise identification and recognition of formal knowledge. However, on the issue of regulating emotions, the legal studies and Confucian classics and legal studies introduced from the West seem to reach a superficial consensus, but it is difficult to generate an evaluation system with a balanced function.

2.2 Limitations of knowledge assimilation

Due to the long-standing problem of rational evaluation of emotional norms, both dogmatic jurisprudence and empirical jurisprudence have to admit a certain dangerous rational supremacy assumption in order to realize the dream of a "system" for knowledge development. Under the guidance of rational supremacy normative evaluation, emotional knowledge can be called upon, but it does not need to be always available. In the view of some legal scholars, "once we give a name to an emotion, it has its own life." "In law school, we learn to put horror into words and conceal its true essence. The core of law school training and cultivation is to refine the pre-existing loyalty to authority into positivism, which is the original legal textualism that ordinary people obtain in school and at home." This type of legal knowledge seems to have the power of "law" as Franz Kafka called it, which can be attracted by crimes at any time and anywhere, and has the right to call, interrogate, and judge the ghost of any emotional knowledge. The unique typification and definition of jurisprudence makes the rich experience contained in emotions be cut by overly simplified norms. The exclusion of so-called dissimilar qualities in the process of definition by law is mainly based on the purpose of the person responsible for typification. The theory of justice constructed by legal scholars is inevitably regarded by psychoanalysts as the embodiment of legal unconsciousness: it embodies the unknown desire to escape from happiness, as well as the fear of others and impossible society, and attempts to ignore and expel the horrific trauma at the core of society, but fails miserably.

Unlike rationalist jurisprudence, rationalist jurisprudence does not seek to dominate emotions from the perspective of knowledge, but has deep doubts about whether to accept the assimilation of social emotional knowledge. In addition to emotions of respect and admiration similar to sacred love, social emotions such as anger, fear, worry, and sadness may undermine the "knowledge authority" defended by rationalist jurisprudence. Even the respect and admiration for the law must be discerned through the prism of rational knowledge to avoid falling into the superstition of blindism. For natural emotions, social emotions, or the composite form of the two, rationalist jurisprudence generally places them on the edge of the knowledge system, and then selectively incorporates them based on the possibility and actual degree of normative evaluation around the needs of reality. For this reason, "legal emotion" can be constructed as a new theoretical concept. It is closely related to concepts such as legal behavior, legal consciousness, legal attitude, and legal concept, and serves the central task of legal norm justification from a macro perspective. Micro-oriented legal emotion discourse is more common in today's legal textbooks and research papers. However, these legal discourses have not been assimilated and tempered by social emotional knowledge. They are mostly patchworks and accessories adapted to the justification of legal norms, and it is difficult to say that they are normative and scientific. The above situation reflects the "ideology" of rationalist legal epistemology: law has nothing to do with emotion in essence, uses emotion in norms, and restrains emotion in implementation.

As for the more "mild" rational legal knowledge, it can re-order the changeable emotional materials in its own knowledge system through the acceptance of the scientific concept of "emotion", and form a normative evaluation mechanism for emotional phenomena. But at the same time, the assimilation of social emotional knowledge into law is still difficult to get rid of inherent limitations, and even adds new limitations. For example, the emotional rationalization of sociological jurisprudence is more "pragmatic" than previous types of legal knowledge, but it still cannot resolve the contradiction between sociology and jurisprudence in emotional knowledge. Under the ever-expanding knowledge circulation pattern, it is not impossible for jurisprudence to be both emotionally and rationally oriented, but it is indeed difficult to break away from the framework of legal rational epistemology. Even if the emotional knowledge production of jurisprudence pays more attention to experiments and empirical rules and provides greater technical support for legal practice, the ontological "withdrawal" seems to be irreversible. When the scientific rationalist law replaces the classical emotional balance principle and becomes the essence of lawmaking and implementation, the original holistic emotional knowledge has to accept the division of legal skills. In addition to the epistemological division of legal ethical principles, the so-called practical rationality of law and the knowledge it generates are usually limited to the outline of the effectiveness hierarchy of the intrinsic value system of the legal order. Therefore, the emotional normative discourse produced by legal studies is similar to a kind of "framework assembly": emotional principle discourse is mainly transplanted from moral theory and ethical research; emotional rule discourse is taken from psychology, life sciences, etc., and then filtered through legal normative science, and enters the legal knowledge system in fragments.

Why is it that in the modern era of accelerated scientific development, emotional research has made great strides forward, while legal theory has become cramped? This is because any disciplinary knowledge has its own difficult-to-overcome historical conditions and development limitations. "Until today, legal scholars have not yet discovered the real law and connected them with 'nature', either human nature or the nature of things (Dinge), which makes their academic work often appear dull." Even if the legal discipline has sufficient knowledge production capacity, the integrity, relevance and dynamism of emotional problems in modern society are difficult to be fully accommodated by any "science". The existing rationalist stance of the legal discipline is difficult to be compatible with the multiple subjects and generation logic of the emotional knowledge system, and it does not care about the assimilation of emotional science knowledge, and even has concerns.

3 Changes and responses in the post-disciplinary period

The differentiation, expansion and overlap of the emotional system in contemporary society will inevitably lead to huge changes in the relevant knowledge forms. In the post-disciplinary period, beyond the established schema of rational cognition, law attempts to seek the subject momentum and response path of emotional interpretation in a more daily and broader knowledge field with an extensible "inside-outside" wide angle. This change not only expands the knowledge scope of law, but also enhances the ability of knowledge autonomy.

3.1 Knowledge transformation of "law and emotion" research

In the post-disciplinary era that emphasizes the integration of disciplines and the fit of knowledge, the idea of isolating rational cognition from subjective desire is obviously not feasible. As John Finnis said: "We have to admit that the reflective equilibrium state in social science can only be achieved in certain people, that is, people who use a large amount of data and a thorough understanding of other people's practical views and concerns in order to make correct judgments about true human prosperity and true practical rationality." The shift from rationalism to pragmatism has forced legal professionals to recognize the status of non-scientific factors such as intuition, imagination, habit, motivation, and empathy. The realist legal movement further reminds legal scholars to reveal the inner emotional logic of legal actors and make a more unified description of the real legal environment, process and nature. It is these factors that have triggered the legal knowledge transformation of emotional interpretation.

In the past three decades, through continuous efforts to break the boundaries of disciplines, the progress of "law and emotion" research has been remarkable. This multidisciplinary knowledge aggregation movement has brought new atmosphere to the exploration of the complex relationship between emotion and law. Interested researchers have drawn on knowledge from natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities to uncover specific emotions and related phenomena that permeate the legal system. Initially, they were only interested in challenging the ubiquitous binary opposition between rationality and emotion. Later, with the joint efforts of legal scholars and philosophers, important questions such as the nature of emotion and its role in law were raised. From different disciplinary perspectives, researchers use external disciplinary knowledge to re-explain, interpret, and evaluate various implicit or explicit emotional assumptions, and to explain the emotional significance of legal reasoning, legal doctrines, legal actors, and legal systems. The knowledge resources of natural science, social science, and humanities research on emotion have been presented accordingly in the study of "law and emotion", such as the dynamic research of sociologists and psychologists on collective decision-making and group emotions, and the research of philosophers and legal scholars on responsibility evaluation, the role of morality in law, and other issues. While transforming and utilizing external disciplinary knowledge, legal scholars pay special attention to the exploration of specific solutions. In terms of interpretation methods, the "three-step" procedure is followed: first, explain the emotional characteristics of legal issues; second, analyze these characteristics through interdisciplinary research; and finally, construct actual normative claims through understanding and integration.

In terms of specific theoretical approaches, the emotional center, emotional phenomenon, and emotional theory approaches that focus on external disciplinary knowledge form an overall response and balance with the legal doctrine, legal theory, and legal actor approaches dominated by internal legal knowledge, showing the internal and external interconnected characteristics of the "law and emotion" knowledge field. In terms of its initial integration, the emotional-centered legal doctrine approach focuses on studying the specific emotions reflected in the law, and discusses its origin, purpose, function, intrinsic value, and appropriateness, which raises doubts about the legitimacy of legal norms themselves. There is a great theoretical tension between emotional law and legal emotions in this approach. Due to the differences in the definition of specific emotions in different disciplines, scholars often have very different research conclusions on the same emotional theme. The change in this situation mainly depends on the development of emotional science, and cannot be solved by the construction of internal legal knowledge. The legal action research approach of emotional phenomena focuses on emotional issues in legal practice, and strives to explore complex and difficult psychological processes or behavioral mechanisms in order to achieve better inclusion of emotional expression in legal norms. The approach of linking emotional theory and legal theory selects a relatively certain theoretical framework in advance to explain the legal normative meaning. The interpretation of emotion in law and economics and feminist legal theory are representatives of this type. They also have the problem of conflict of disciplinary knowledge framework and re-disciplinarization. As an example of the knowledge change of legal interpretation of emotion, the impact of "law and emotion" research is twofold. On the one hand, it reminds people to reconsider some long-standing ideas, which believe that rationality and emotion are separate in the perception of law; rationality enjoys privilege, and emotion is considered to violate the law and should be controlled and managed. This separation and asymmetry has been widely and deeply criticized from the multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary perspective of "law and emotion". As an important epistemological achievement, more and more scholars have turned to accept a new type of emotion with a more "cognitive" color, that is, emotion can purposefully help people make moral and rational choices, and it should be an integral part of law and public decision-making. On the other hand, the reflection on rationalism in the study of "law and emotion" is still based on a de facto multidisciplinary context, and the knowledge achievements of interdisciplinary and interdisciplinary research are rare. In theory, the contradiction between reality and ought not only continues to exist, but also becomes more prominent. Knowledge construction guided by ought and based on change strategy can consolidate or renovate the original types of emotional knowledge through more finely focused scientific tools, and provide emotional norms to relieve the new era situation, but it is difficult to fundamentally change the established rationalist cognitive position.

3.2 The overall response of the legal knowledge system

As the influence of external disciplines on law deepens and the debate on the scientific nature of law unfolds, the legal knowledge system has to respond to the knowledge transformation of emotions as a whole. Max Weber had a premonition of this earlier: "The more we ourselves are involved in the following emotional reactions, such as anxiety, ambition, envy, jealousy, love, fanaticism, pride, hatred, loyalty, devotion and various desires and the irrational behaviors derived from them, the more we can understand them sympathetically. This is true even when we cannot understand the intensity of the emotions in an empathetic way and cannot intellectually calculate the impact of emotions on the direction and means of action." Although rationalism still has a strong advantage in the production of legal knowledge, legal rationalism that excludes emotions has become unsustainable in epistemology and methodology. The rational interpretation of legal knowledge is developing in a "gentle" direction that emphasizes advanced emotional abilities.

The epistemological "emotional turn" or "the fusion of emotion and reason" provides direction and inspiration for the overall response of the legal knowledge system. In the new epistemological perspective, rationalism and emotionalism need to support and reflect each other, and work together to achieve a holistic interpretation of the mind and behavior, the individual and society. In contemporary China, in order to respond to the difficulty of interpreting emotions as a whole, law has actively entered the fields of neuroscience, psychology, sociology, economics, cultural theory, etc., and sought resources in the vast knowledge base of natural sciences, social sciences and humanities. As a result, a more open legal epistemology (including but not limited to legal methodology and theories of legal cognition, reasoning, argumentation, etc.) has also been promoted. From emphasizing the rational critical function of legal practice to questioning the scientific truth attribute of legal knowledge, the epistemological reflection of law is getting closer and closer to the central issue of emotional interpretation. As a key step in the overall response, law gradually expands the scope of "law" in terms of knowledge objects, and regards "emotion and reason" as an important conceptual container. For example, in the new legal culture research, in addition to the legal knowledge expounded by the elites, law should also widely absorb and apply emotional knowledge, because emotional knowledge carries the legal attitudes of ordinary people and many daily emotions scattered in the legal system. Similarly, in the perspective of political law, although law has a strong elitist and professional color, its background is dyed by daily emotions and reason. Under this cognitive approach, legislators are like loyal and honest craftsmen. When expressing the law, they cannot add unknown pigments according to their own preferences. The plain, simple, precise, concise and elegant legal discourse style just represents a neutral, restrained, impartial and harmonious emotional state. In legal practice, emotional uncertainty will increase the risk and cost of regulation, so it requires prudent action by the governance subject. Focusing on the relationship between law, reason and emotion, scholars have theoretically interpreted the law as a tool for change, trying to echo the knowledge focus on emotion in legal doctrine, legal social science and legal culture research.

On the basis of the expansion of knowledge objects, jurisprudence began to shift from "law that regulates emotions" to "law of emotion itself" as the interpretation benchmark. Both "legal emotion" and "emotional law" can become legitimate sources of legal knowledge. When the two are inconsistent, the law of emotion itself is in a superior position in knowledge. The ever-evolving research on emotion science can not only provide basic knowledge for the identification of legal facts, but also has important knowledge value for interpreting emotions in legal norms and even the emotions of legal norms themselves. In the West, the legal form theory based on rationality and the psychological theory focusing on the expression of legal interests have achieved functional complementation and framework fit in the knowledge structure. For the production of legal knowledge in contemporary China, legal scholars should conduct an in-depth and thorough analysis of the emotional causes of disputes, because this is the basis for the analysis of facts and norms. At this time, the logic of emotion is not equal to the logic of formal norms, nor is it the logic of substantive values, but should be explored based on the trajectory of complex movement.

In terms of the development of knowledge functions, law is gradually returning to the cognitive integration of basic emotions. Borrowing the expression of "emotionology", law can focus on studying "the attitudes and standards of a society or a specific group in society towards basic emotions and their appropriate expressions, and the ways in which social institutions and systems reflect and encourage these attitudes in human behavior." If emotions cannot be transformed into some kind of circulated knowledge through understanding, then it will be a major deficiency for law or any other career that can be called "learning". Achieving a deep understanding of the nature of emotions is particularly important for law. This is not only because law has always been oriented towards good norms, but also in view of the increasingly universal "emotional society" that is the human survival situation, law also needs to form a new emotional knowledge schema through the re-systematization of existing normative knowledge under the stimulation of new problems. In this regard, domestic scholars have made some theoretical explorations, mainly from the perspective of legal history and sociology of knowledge. For the emotional interpretation of law, deeper legal philosophical reflection and reconstruction still need considerable progress.

4 The knowledge mechanism of legal interpretation of emotions

For the system construction and functional development of legal knowledge, emotional interpretation not only has rich normative and practical cognitive value, but also has implicit and crucial epistemological implications. In this regard, we can use Jean Piaget's theory of cognitive and emotional development to explain it from the perspective of knowledge generation mechanisms such as assimilation, response and balance through critical reflection.

4.1 Assimilation: The emotional interpretation tradition of legal knowledge

Assimilation is a cognitive process through which people integrate new materials of perception, movement or concept into existing schemas or behavior patterns. The basis for legal knowledge to assimilate the changing emotional knowledge lies in its unique power position. Here, people either seek the truth themselves or comment on the efforts of others to seek the truth. In the context where judicial power and knowledge power are not distinguished, the reflective dimension of law itself is not easy to be recognized. For example, law students are always reminded that the law is only interested in specific truths (such as who committed this crime, how the responsibility for this accident should be distributed), and not to waste time on so-called truths within the framework of philosophy or science. This original knowledge power situation of law largely limits the logic of emotional knowledge assimilation.

Assimilation does not lead to a change in the schema, but it affects the increase of the schema's connotation, so it is an integral part of the development of the knowledge schema. With the expansion of legal practice's assimilation of emotional materials, the attitude of the legal knowledge schema towards emotions will undergo subtle changes. For example, in the process of investigating a case in court, finding the truth of a legal event usually involves the reasoning of participants and bystanders about the general truth, or even about whether the truth can be discovered. Legal professionals, including police, prosecutors, judges, etc., should also reflect on their explicit or implicit assumptions about "truth" in their daily work, and take seriously the various factors that affect the rational cognition of law, especially emotions as the opposite or reference of rationality. Philosophical, psychological, historical, and sociological research on knowledge will also form some external pressure on the original knowledge position of law. However, the "self" of law does not easily allow external practical feelings and disciplinary discourse to interfere with the established knowledge order. The epistemology of the legal "self" generated from this is not the product of the epistemology of other disciplines entering the legal field; on the contrary, it is a constraint factor that affects the entry of external knowledge into the legal field, and it is also the key support for the assimilation of external knowledge. Therefore, the external knowledge introduced by law focuses almost entirely on scientific knowledge, and rarely examines the right and wrong of non-expert opinions and the judgment of order and chaos, virtue and vice, which are the knowledge focus of daily legal judgments.

4.2 Response: Changes in legal knowledge in the emotional turn

When faced with a schema that is incompatible with an existing stimulus, people either create a new schema that can accommodate this stimulus or transform the existing schema so that the stimulus can conform to it. These are two basic forms of knowledge response. Response not only triggers knowledge development (qualitative change) but also leads to knowledge growth (quantitative change). This is also generally consistent with the knowledge evolution of emotional interpretation in law.

The epistemological migration from classical jurisprudence to modern jurisprudence reflects the former revolutionary schema; the change from modern jurisprudence to so-called postmodern jurisprudence reflects the latter improved schema. Based on the need to shape the emotions of new political entities such as the nation-state, modern legal knowledge needs to shape the order of various emotions with new schemas, and establish the cognitive unity and certainty of rational emotional subjects based on the love and belief in the new political law. This forms a sharp contrast with the schema of philosophers' virtue legislation and knowledge legislation for themselves in the classical era. The former schema is a diffuse knowledge assimilation mechanism, while the latter schema moves towards a centralized knowledge response. In the social and cultural context of modernity, the legal knowledge schema has a centralized nature, as well as an authoritative, definite emotional identification, type and disposal framework, in order to respond to the normative needs of those irrational natural emotional knowledge (such as feelings, emotions, passions, moods, etc.). With the rise of rationalist epistemology that interprets basic social emotions, the territory of the legal knowledge empire has been continuously strengthened in norms. However, the diffusion and uncertainty of modern social emotions make it a puzzle that transcends legal technical knowledge and even scientific principles. In order to solve this puzzle, modern jurisprudence is bound to move towards epistemological reflection on "self". Studying how people (especially officials) understand what is sin and what is chaos, and how they explain and prove knowledge to legal authorities has become a highlight of current legal theory exploration. On this basis, the exploration of the emotional logic of legal scholars' knowledge production is a more complex second-order observation. Similar to the behavioral logic of historians, legal scholars' knowledge production is deeply influenced by emotions, the choice of research direction and goals is full of emotions, and the research objects are often chosen according to emotional bias. In short, through the knowledge response to new emotional issues, jurisprudence has begun to clarify the need for self-reflection in theory. This kind of self-reflection does not provide direct raw materials for legal knowledge, but it can deepen the understanding of the deep structure of legal knowledge.

4.3 Equilibration: A legal knowledge system with emotion as the hub

Equilibration is very important for the growth and development of knowledge. If a person always assimilates but does not respond to stimuli, what will be the result of intellectual development? Such a person will only have a few large schemas throughout his life, and will not be able to develop the differences between things, and most things will be confused. If people only respond but do not assimilate, then they will only have many trivial and non-generalized schemas, and will regard most things as completely different, and will not be able to find the commonalities of things. Both extremes will lead to intellectual deformity. A certain balance between assimilation and response is as necessary as these two processes. As far as factors such as inheritance, action experience and social interaction that affect the development of knowledge are concerned, their coordination is also an important part of "equilibrium".

The balance of legal knowledge is a process of transformation from imbalance to balance. In the face of external stimuli of emotional knowledge, we can reasonably assume that the original assimilation mechanism of law has been working. Because as long as this state is balanced, there will be no need for knowledge response. Only when imbalance occurs and people's existing knowledge schemas cannot explain new stimuli will the motivation for equilibrium and the knowledge response process be triggered. Once a knowledge response occurs, people usually try to assimilate the stimulus again. For example, when "law and emotion" emerged as a new research field, a large amount of knowledge assimilation followed, which represented the efforts of legal knowledge in the post-disciplinary period to pursue "balance". However, once a new stimulus appears, continuous large-scale assimilation is bound to lack explanatory effectiveness, and the broken equilibrium state needs to be restored through a new response. In this regard, the balance of legal knowledge can be regarded as a certain cognitive equilibrium state achieved at a certain moment in the assimilation process, and such a balance is always provisional.

For emotional interpretation, this provisional nature of legal knowledge balance is quite obvious. In the face of emotional issues, in addition to assimilating the content, function and structure of its own knowledge, law must also respond to the stimulation and challenges of new external knowledge. Viewing law as a normative hermeneutics is only the result of a provisional balance of knowledge. In order to prevent law from becoming increasingly closed under modern social conditions, it is more reasonable to assume that the subject and content, object and scope of legal knowledge are not predetermined, but are secondary issues subject to the overall knowledge generation mechanism. In the face of the complex and diverse ways of generating emotional knowledge, law needs to respond continuously.

Based on the emotional interpretation schema of modern legal knowledge, the knowledge position of rational domination of desire is widely established in different cultural contexts. Although people's interpretation of legal rationality presents a pluralistic appearance, the overall view from the perspective of knowledge history still does not deny the hierarchical principle of legal knowledge hierarchy, that is, legal knowledge, as a mirror of legal knowledge/power relations, focuses not on its independence or originality, but on the normative description that fits the sovereignty/truth will. Of course, there is no lack of various alternative discourses that impact, question and refute the mainstream legal knowledge paradigm, but these discourses cannot constitute an overall force and are difficult to change the established power hierarchy and knowledge order.

In addition to rational domination of desire or desire against rationality, is there no more balanced schema for legal knowledge? In order to better achieve the fit of knowledge, it is necessary for us to re-lock "jurisprudence" in the ideal knowledge production context, and reconstruct the position of emotion in the legal knowledge system by discovering the equilibrium mechanism required for the domination of legal rational knowledge. In fact, philosophical thinking about the relationship between rationality, emotion and desire has long been reflected in the history of major civilizations. However, due to the difficulty of historical reproduction cognition, we adopt a certain hermeneutical approach and continue to explore on the basis of integrating the generation mechanism of emotional knowledge. In terms of the development of the legal knowledge system, positioning "calculated rationality" and "emotional feelings" as coupled generation elements and embedding a systematic interpretation of balanced emotions in the binary opposition structure of rationality and desire will help shape a new schema of legal knowledge that integrates the known and faces the future.

Conclusion

When knowledge was not yet disciplinary, the interpretation of emotion in the broad sense of law was multi-dimensional, including mysterious perception, innate intuition, mixed experience, and many expected and imagined factors. Due to the need to construct normative knowledge, the attitude of law oriented to practical rationality towards emotion is generally manifested as internalizing the justice tendency of the natural mind through a limited review with a sense of mysterious awe, and keeping it unchanged in a universal context. Early legislators and philosophers provided support for the tradition of emotional interpretation in law from the perspective of ideas and experience. At this time, the emotional interpretation of law, through the vague distinction between legal and illegal, chooses to recognize or exclude, and at the same time conforms to the power of mysticism and skepticism, forming a wide range of evaluation reservations.

The "autonomy" of the modern legal knowledge system benefits from people's new understanding of emotion. The autonomy of knowledge refers to the self-generation of laws by knowledge in a certain field and acting accordingly (such as circulation, interaction, display, disagreement, conflict, etc.). The key to the autonomy of the legal knowledge system lies in the establishment of self-discipline, especially how knowledge can achieve the unity of "desire", "feelings" and "perfection". "Feelings" can be said to be the most prominent symbol of the autonomy of legal knowledge. Without it, knowledge will always be just an "outsider" for the subject; there will also be confrontational games between knowledge subjects, and it is difficult to form a complementary and symbiotic relationship. The knowledge law created by the fusion of emotion and reason is difficult to be controlled by personal will or power, and can carry the spirit of "autonomy". In this regard, we can apply Jean-Jacques Rousseau's words to this: in the republic of legal knowledge, "each individual, when he can be said to be making a contract with himself, is constrained by two relationships: that is, to the individual, he is a member of the sovereign; and to the sovereign, he is a member of the state." If the law that emphasizes rational cognition actively isolates the ally of emotion, then the infinitely expanding desire for truth will inevitably lead to the prevalence of authoritarianism, and then destroy its own knowledge autonomy. On the contrary, by explaining complex and difficult emotional issues, the rationality of law can be better trained, which is conducive to the self-legislation of knowledge.

To this day, the study of "law and emotion" is still not a recognized discipline, and its complex sources of knowledge have posed a challenge to the legal knowledge system. In the past two thousand years, people's extensive discussion of the concept of emotion is usually for the purpose of philosophy, religion, morality or the latest scientific psychology. However, as a power facility for regulating knowledge production, law is present on a regular basis, and its related knowledge is constantly questioned by emotional knowledge. Law is in a contradictory situation of closed norms and open knowledge, but it has to deal with complex emotional issues and constantly introduce external knowledge. Multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary "law and emotion" research still faces the difficult task of re-disciplinarization. Once the re-disciplinarization is completed, a new round of knowledge response problems will inevitably arise. It can be seen that the "emotional turn" of law is subject to strict historical and theoretical constraints. Even if the relevant knowledge has developed to a certain extent, if there is a lack of scrutiny of knowledge evolution and corresponding epistemological updates, it is difficult for the existing schema of mainstream knowledge to undergo a qualitative change.

If law is to establish a close relationship between rationalism and emotionalism, it must give true respect to the expression of de-hierarchical emotional knowledge. It must not only respond to it sensitively in an empathetic way, but also comprehensively update the concepts and approaches, principles and methods of interpretation, so that the various parts of the existing knowledge system can be connected in a super cycle. Only by eliminating the confrontation between rationality and emotion and guiding it with a new epistemological holistic equilibrium view, can law hope to conform to elegant aesthetics and turn from a rigid command to a human nature that commends a beautiful mind. The knowledge practice of legal interpretation of emotions can thus show the trend of integrating physical knowledge, mathematical-logical knowledge and social-conventional knowledge, and achieve touching progress based on rational cognition.