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

well-being of the individual is assured by limiting the desires and being content with what one has.²⁵ This explains why this cultivation of self in Daoism and Confucianism can be considered as a kind of individualism which could coexist in the thought of one person without conflict and is different from the modern Western concept of individualism.

Finally, from the self-cultivation perspective, we cannot ignore the peculiar ideas of some Wei-Jin writers, those of the Taizhou School (Taizhou xuepai 泰州學派) as well as the rehabilitation of desires of the late Ming.²⁶ They help us understand the role of the subject in Confucianism, the expansion of the image of human beings vis-à-vis the discrete but constant search for individual autonomy in Chinese culture. In this regard, Yūzō Mizoguchi has noted that “Chinese intellectual history records three periods in which the private was treated affirmatively: during the Six Dynasties (220–589), the Ming-Qing transition, and the late Qing. The affirmation was severally differentiated, though, during the Six Dynasties, it was the internal world of the private self; during the Ming-Qing transition, it was private ownership; and during the late Qing, it was individual social and political rights.”²⁷ Next, we will examine some elements of the pluralist search for self-autonomy in traditional and modern China.