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

Contributions in Literary Production

We have already briefly mentioned the contributions made by writers like Feng Menglong, Tang Xianzu, and those in the Gong’an Circle, in which literary and philosophical discourses were often interconnected. Feng Menglong’s work is crucial for its pondering over the cult of passions (qing). This is evident in his well-known History of Love (Qingshi Leilüe),⁹⁰ and his comments in the preface of other collections in which he celebrates love passion as the true morality and a means of enforcing Confucian virtues. In Mountain Songs (Shan’ge), however, he seems to give up any sublimation and moralization of love for a vitalistic interpretation; he endorses clandestine love—another kind of qing—which is pictured as authentic fulfilment of desires. The reversal of values inherent in this love relationship is expressed most notably in the introduction: “borrowing from the genuine love between man and woman as an antidote for the fake medicine of moralistic rules” (借男女之真情，發名教之偽藥).⁹¹ Authenticity is the foundation of his cult of qing. Feng’s search for a new language to convey true and essential feelings apparently leads to a sort of “anti-Romantic Romanticism,” which to some extent oversimplifies the phenomenon being observed: purposely avoiding any sublimation of emotions would inevitably reduce love to an everyday need, yet, on the other hand, such avoidance offers a gallery of both heroic and cynical, engaged and ephemeral cases. A good example is seen in another one of Feng’s collections, the Sack of Wisdom (Zhinang), where the object of satire and scorn is, as usual, the pedant and inflexible Confucian. Here, although Feng offers multiple examples of zhi 智, he concludes by defining “wisdom” as a practical ability—precisely, that ability which is based on the freedom of individual judgment and enables people to overcome difficulties. Feng’s notion of wisdom is, therefore, a synonym for “applied intelligence,”⁹² including schemes, strategies, and cunningness that help circumvent social conventions and help one face particularly challenging situations and preserves one’s well-being. He finds it admirable that men and women of different social backgrounds have the ability to solve every kind of problem ranging from the small