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

understanding of the specific perception of the self and conflicted mind in China come from investigations into iconographic documents. In The Compelling Image, James Cahill analyzed the rise of portraiture in the late Ming as the effect of an increased interest in the individual, as well as an influence from European paintings. Through the analysis of the cultural encodings in portraiture and the external and internal factors of individualism in Qing painting, Richard Vinograd, in Boundaries of the Self, points to the Chinese emphasis on family affiliation and social roles rather than on the Western value of personal autonomy.²¹ The Moral Circle and the Self, a volume edited by Kim-Chong Chong, Sor-hoon Tan, and C. L. Ten, offers new elements on the concepts of self and autonomy. Other contributions can be found in volumes such as Self as Image in Asian Theory and Practice, edited by Roger Ames, T.P. Kasulis; and W. Dissanayake, which includes “Figures of Identity” by S. Goldberg that deals with the self-identity of males and females as constructed in traditional visual arts by resorting to so-called “correlated elements” (ganlei 感類). The relevance of the same ganlei in identifying individuality is confirmed in female iconographic representation.²²

In this study, the search for an “autonomous self” and an autonomous space is mainly discussed in the first part; the second part deals with its ethical sphere, the sense of responsibility, and the ideological background.²³ The period of enquiry is circumscribed to late imperial China, although basic concepts need to be traced back to Classical China. I apologize for a certain amount of repetition of themes concerning the basic self-motivated nature of humans,²⁴ the fragility and yet importance of the two concepts of the self and human responsibility, the natural graduality of altruism, body-mind unity, tension for individual autonomy, ethical and cognitive functions of emotions. These concepts prove to be the bases for a discourse on personality, ethics, and aesthetics in any cross-cultural analysis.

In the face of a large number of studies on the primacy of harmony in Confucian theory and structure of society, historians have not dedicated