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

necessary, and they should be accepted; others can be avoided through wise choices, and it is reasonable to do so. Another situation is death for the right cause (盡其道而死者，正命也).⁴⁷ Here death is determined by the free choice of the subject who follows what they believe to be a correct behavior but at the cost of their own life.⁴⁸ This is to follow Heaven Decree in the meaning of the moral way.

In light of what has been discussed, the concept of “psychophysical nature” (qizhi zhi xing 氣質之性), as reorganized and elaborated by Zhang Zai 張載 (1020–1077)⁴⁹ and inherited by the whole Neo-Confucian tradition, now needs to be contrasted with Mencius’s pure moral nature (the so-called benxing 本性, or benran zhi xing 本然之性). Insisting on Mencius’s good “nature of Heaven and Earth” (tiandi zhi xing 天地之性), Zhang distinguishes the concrete positive and negative behavior of men and defines psychophysical nature as the energy that all humans are made of, and which, in an uneven way, influences all human feelings. Human nature, on the contrary, is innately good in so far as it corresponds to the supreme principle or to human ethical dispositions, their moral potentiality. At the same time, the real tendencies of humans are acknowledged as such in the very notion of psychophysical nature by taking into account a person’s actual character and ascribing human imperfections to the ways the principle is activated by qi energy. The occasion of evil derives solely from the movement of qi which in its essence is scattered about in various forms. It is within these forms that opposites arise and opposition leads to conflict and discrimination, which in turn may provoke unbalance or deviations from the original emptiness. As a consequence, differences among human beings—firm and soft, phlegmatic and anxious, talented and incapable—are due to the partiality of this qi energy (人之剛柔、緩急、有才與不才，氣之偏也).⁵⁰ The cause of these differences is to be sought in the formation of a person at the moment of the accidental condensation of the energy which permeates all beings, with their birth being “fortuitous” (ouran 偶然) and independent of the will of the principle.⁵¹ During this process of formation, human nature can be marked by any change in energy—from