the Lüshi Chunqiu 吕氏春秋 and other sources to demonstrate how traditional models were called into question and expounds that there were cases of actions grounded in the moral “self” or in the inner “nature” of the moral being rather than in past models. Emulation is an universal process that occurs in any civilization. The role of imagination in mimesis—the creative process of development by assimilation of “models,” figures, and persons—and the evolution in the conceptualisation of the mimetic phenomenon in Western intellectual history have been studied by Gebauer and Wulf, Mimesis: Culture-Art-Society; and Hüppauf and Wulf, Dynamics and Performativity of Imagination.

32. See the previous two notes.

33. See Fingarette, Confucius, 22. See, for instance, zhizhe bu huo 知者不惑 “the wise is free from perplexities” (Lunyu, Zihan 子罕, 29; and Xian Wen 憲問, 28). Fingarette claims that “there is no genuine option: either one follows the Way or one fails. To take any other ‘route’ than the Way is not a genuine road but a failure through weakness to follow the route. Neither the doctrine nor the imagery allows for choice, if we mean by choice a selection, by virtue of the agent’s powers, of one out of several equally real options.” (Fingarette, Confucius, 21).

34. Rosemont, “Notes from a Confucian Perspective,” 468.

35. Fingarette “Comments and Response,” 199–200. See also Fingarette, Confucius, 21; and Mapping Responsibility.

36. Fingarette, Confucius, 18. Thus, “the central moral issue for Confucius is not the responsibility of a man for deeds he has by his own free will chosen to perform” (35). Two decades later, this question has been tackled again by Rosemont (“Rights-Bearing Individuals and Role-Bearing Persons,” 71–101).

37. Fingarette, Confucius, 34.

38. Fingarette, “Reason, Spontaneity, and the Li,” 218. See also Roetz’s critical comments (Confucian Ethics of the Axial Age, 1–22, 149–184).

39. Fingarette, Confucius, 34. This distinction may recall another debate of the second part of the twentieth century, that on shame and guilt orientations.

40. Schwartz, The World of Thought in Ancient China, 79. For Schwartz, Confucian superior man (junzi) has more individual autonomy than the guardian of Plato’s “Republic” (113). Wang Yunping (“Autonomy and the Confucian Moral Person,” 262–264) criticizes Schwartz, contrasting another autonomy and another choice in early Confucianism, in terms of different understandings of freedom: instead of a critical decision based