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

and changing the traditional definition of the individual as merely being part of a social group.³³

Final Comments

The red line of individual autonomy and responsibility goes from Zhu Jiyou’s defiance of Emperor Yongle’s cultural policy to Dai Zhen’s primacy of personal desires as the key for social harmony. While Wang Yangming helped establish a new perspective on individuality that assessed the priority of liangzhi over doctrine and scholastic teachings, Wang Gen divorced sagehood from belonging to the ruling class and refocused on the concept of ziran as the true response to one’s innate sense of morality and spontaneous natural expression of self. Li Zhi and other thinkers of the Taizhou School continued this line of inquiry. Their respect for individuality was based on the belief in the natural feelings of humans and the elevation of desires to the basis of morality.

The reevaluation of individual autonomy and the rehabilitation of passions and desires were given a new impulse in the late Ming cult of qing. If we consider qing as one of the central concepts in Chinese philosophy and literature, at least by late imperial times, we can understand how the construction of self was achieved and interwoven with the “revitalization of tradition.” We can talk of “revitalization” instead of “reversal” because new attitudes and values enriched traditional rules: uncovering the basic unavoidable self-motivation of humans was revolutionary, but at the same time, humans’ interdependence and reciprocal needs were reaffirmed,³⁴ and the legitimation of desires was established on the basis of their universality rather than their subjectivity.³⁵

This reconstruction of the self was strengthened by the emphasis on personal autonomy. The strongest argument on the independence of judgment and opinion was probably Yan Yuan’s:

When you write your opinion, you should only worry if it is right or wrong, and do not mind whether it complies with or is different from that of others. If you consider it true, even if it is