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

good and evil, where evil and sin are explained as a consequence of the freedom to reject goodness. The discussion over responsibility as free will is embedded within this dichotomy, but while such debate has long animated European history, in China it has remained almost ignored. Not only has Confucian ethical theory ignored any controversy on moral responsibility, with its exceptions and excuses, but descriptions of the dramatic laceration of the soul as being caused by the choice between passions and duty, flesh and spirit, are also pretty rare.¹⁴ Then, the question that has been raised is if “free-will” arises in Chinese philosophy or if Chinese philosophers were unaware of the free-will problem. If this is a question that concerns the human condition, how can a culture ignore it? Or is this question a typically Judeo-Christian philosophical debate for a different stance toward morality and personhood? Does the role of inner intention versus objective effects in responsibility depend on culture and religion? Marchal and Wenzel have demonstrated that voluntary actions for which one can be blamed or praised are theorized and discussed with different arguments and sensitivity in the long and varied Chinese philosophical traditions.¹⁵

Moreover, in premodern and modern Europe, discussions on causality brought to the determinism dilemma on a concatenation of causes and cross effects, the coincidence between a series of randomness and human free action.¹⁶ Ideas analogous to those of ancient Greek’s physical atomism and deterministic laws of nature are not easy to find in China. Instead of a cause-effect linear sequence, the universe is conceived as an organicist whole in an endless process of change where all existences are continuously interrelated, and the networks of mutual connections are well represented by the yin-yang polarity and the interaction of five elements-phases, as depicted in the commentaries of the Yijing.¹⁷ Autonomy is then paradoxically a spontaneous adaptation to changes. For individual agents, it is important how collective identity is conceptualized as something entertained by individuals, not ready-made or defined by external roles.