Individual Autonomy and Responsibility in Late Imperial China By ...

not only acquired markedly pathological, individualistic, and aesthetic connotations but also played an important role in the positive reassertion of one’s own personality. Their peculiarities encompass a broad range of passions and fixations, including blind affection (qingchi 情癡), book mania (shuchi 書癡), and other obsessions, such as the compulsion to collect rare rocks (shichi 石癡), grow flowers (huachi 花癡), and so on. If from a purely subjective point of view such terms represent a way to express a new trend in the lifestyle of the intellectual elite, their ideological and social meaning cannot be underestimated. Emblematic is the hermetic prose of Lei Sipei 雷思霈 (jinshi 1601)—a member of the Gong’an Circle—as encapsulated in his preface to Xiaobitang Ji 瀟碧堂集 (Collection of Yuan Hongdao’s Essays and Poems): “telling what people would like to say, telling what people cannot say, telling what people dare not to say” (言人之所欲言，言人之所不能言，言人之所不敢言).⁵⁸ This assessment was in line with Wang Yangming’s words:

Now I believe in my innate conscience, and for me what is right is right and what is wrong is wrong. I spontaneously behave, without care of covering up. Only now I started to have the mind of the unrestrained. Let all the people of the world say that my deeds do not fulfil my words, but for me, it is all right. Shangqian went out and said: “Only such a belief is the lymph of a sage!”⁵⁹

The term kuang in this excerpt is used ambiguously; it appears in Mencius’s anecdote about Confucius’s withdrawal (jinxin xia 盡心下): Confucius found himself without disciples able to pursue the true Middle Way; being unable to assure himself of getting such disciples, he took into consideration the idea of accepting those who either impetuous or cautious (lit. kuangjuan 狂狷/獧). On the one hand, as expounded in the Analects, the quality or state of being unrestrained is seen as a weakness, a second choice, or an imperfection;⁶⁰ on the other hand, although such attitude is easily criticized, it is mostly regarded as the “lymph” of sagehood, because it reflects the spontaneous working of the innate conscience.⁶¹ Worthy of note here is the expression “the mind of an unrestrained” (kuangzhe xiongci 狂者胸次) which is a fundamental