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

variations. The difficult and sometimes unstable interactions of the subject with the surrounding social environment is also presented on several occasions. Three examples may illustrate the paradoxical and contradictory perception of individuals versus their roles, their continuity and inconstances: (1) female virtue is expressed in “genuine love” that, according to Feng Menglong, manifests in the theory of chastity as well as in the virtue that allows courtesans to behave like concubines, and concubines like honored wives; (2) both coherence and incoherence are experienced in apparently absurd terms, such as the heroism of measuring up one’s supposed role in society, like in the cases of betrothed women, spouses, widows, and friends described in many tales, or the splitting personality in zhiguai; (3) the crisis of identity of the literati and their attempt to restore prestige like in some characters of Liaozhai Zhiyi or the enlarged self of some characters like Jia Baoyu. Thus, in a variety of schools and opinions, even in works penned by the same author, we can easily find lively contradictions and syncretic combinations. In short, various kinds of “individualism” grew in China, provided they were holistic, inclusive, and participative.

At any rate, the structure of the self is continuously challenged, or better yet, it is remolded through trials, confrontations, and “identity negotiations” with the broader society and within the social system. What appears constant is self-assertion, which is manifested in different directions, whether in the main current of orthodoxy or various marginal countercultures, through moral self-cultivation in the frame of a system of established rules and virtues and negating the selfish self or the reevaluation of desires and passions for self-interest and vital needs. Individual autonomy may be asserted by resistance against power’s censure and conformism but can be accomplished in different ways—the inner struggle for self-perfection, the freedom from external influences, or an aesthetic dimension.

Some scholars have discovered the pre-moral centrality of the self beyond any alleged ideological motivations: one’s “self-motivated”