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

The search for a new language to express the genuine emotions of the true self took various forms. The thought of some Ming and Qing thinkers, the literary reform triggered by the Gong’an Circle, and the development of self-reflexive approaches to narrative texts are noteworthy.⁵² A common thread that connects them all is the rhetoric of paradox, in particular, the paradoxical equation of madness and foolishness with wisdom, which cannot, however, be simply reduced to a kind of “conventional unconventionality.”⁵³ This was, in fact, the outcome of a major shift of perspective whereby the self is imbued with a new sensitivity, new social values, new aesthetics and, most importantly, a new perception of reality which runs counter to the prevailing “vulgar” logic of bureaucratic power and wealth accumulation (sushi 俗士, fansu 凡俗, and shisu 世俗).⁵⁴ Since one’s identity as individual hardly escaped the all-pervasive influence of others who watched, judged, and regulated social interactions on the basis of culturally defined collective values, the only way the individual value of self could be fostered and individual identity achieved was to distinguish oneself from others and reverse commonly accepted criteria of evaluation.

Literary production was very much seen as a means to reverse conventional values. The use of terms such as “foolish” and “crazy” became so frequent in literary works that it soon came to epitomize a new kind of taste for the counterculture circles. At the same time, the discourse on the authenticity and nonconformity of literati became more and more connected with that of the originality and unicity of each individual.⁵⁵ Chen Que, for instance, was against echoing others or letting himself “be outer-directed” (不肯隨聲附和) in his study, work, and personal life.⁵⁶ The revival of some debasing words—in use since the Chinese Middle Ages to either indicate the intellectual abilities and behaviors of extraordinary individuals, or normal cognitive and evaluative functions—represents a conscious attempt of a part of the elite to (re)affirm one’s self by means of a distinctive aesthetic sensibility and new values that depart significantly from those of bureaucrats and businessmen.⁵⁷ Terms like “madness” (chi 癡, kuang 狂), “obsession” (pi 癖, dai 呆) and “clumsiness” (chun 蠢, yu 愚)