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

constantly in a variety of situations, and thereby assert the “fragmentation of characters.” Diana Tietjens Meyers develops a “five-dimensional account of the self”: the self as unitary, social, relational, divided, and embodied, while for J. David Velleman the self is simply one’s “narrative center of gravity.”² In the field of natural sciences, neuroscientists have cast doubts on the concept of individuality, and the latest research by biologists on the microbiome have also provided important clues about the complexity of biological identity.³ From a psychoanalytical point of view, the cultivation of self may be the product of self-celebration that underestimates the biological essence of human beings. This biological essence has been focused on by social neurosciences and new biocultural disciplines.⁴ In what follows, such determinations of identity and similar ontological digressions on the controversial metaphysical consistency of the individual will not be pursued further, but this short survey of a few issues concerning the self could not be avoided.

It is thus no wonder that the self, the “true self,” even if is considered the natural and spontaneous essence of the subject, in many doctrines is the result of intense cultivation and long discipline. In other words, the self is the final aim, whether it is reached through a hard discipline that makes it free from the alienation of desires and external things, or conceived as self-realization by the fulfilment of original desires, or affirmation of one’s conviction. Thus, we may meet different paths but also the acknowledgement of different selves, as well as debates on self/no-self and different meanings attributed to it.

We shall now proceed by acknowledging that the self is always a “social” concept that is formed in the individual through interaction with other members of a group; as such, both the subjective perception of one’s self and its collective image are cultural products. The social construction of the self has been explained as being based on an identity-related notion of face, which expresses the social value that subjects claim for themselves through interaction with other members of a community, and as the sense of self-identity acquired through such interaction.⁵ But from a modern