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

When you direct your thought, your innate knowledge knows that it is right if it is right, and wrong if it is wrong. You cannot keep anything from it. Just don’t try to deceive it, but sincerely and truly follow it in whatever you do. Then the good will be preserved and evil will be removed.⁸⁵

Before Wang Yangming, Chen Baisha 陳白沙 (1428–1500) shifted the search for wisdom from the investigation of things and the authority of scholasticism to the mind itself. Chen rejected external authority and emphasized the personal inner process of enlightenment. In Ch’en’s thought, the heart-mind becomes full of vital activity, the very “master” of the universe. This turned Zhu Xi’s system upside down and freed the individual seeker after truth from the bondage of orthodox authority.⁸⁶

After writing his “Self-reproach” (zize 自責), Zhang Lüxiang 張履祥 (1611–1674) identifies conscience with self and uses a series of compounds that begin with the prefix zi (self-), including the terms below that suggest the idea of reflexivity, autonomy, and “free will” as a choice between evil or good: “self-justification,” “self-indulgence,” “auto-damage,” “self-control,” “self-love,” “self-regulation,” “self-decision,” and “self-choice.”⁸⁷ Zhang states that “[e]verything depends on the self-acting of each individual. When his will to self-act is strong, he is capable of self-mastering. This will lead to self-loving. When his heart of self-love is firm, he is capable of self-direction […].”⁸⁸ Such an approach is consistent with the Mencian assumption of the original goodness of human nature and everyone’s ability to reaching wisdom is inborn.⁸⁹

Another thinker of the early Qing, Yan Yuan 顏元 (1635–1704), writes that “the ability of self-reforming depends on one’s desire to recover one’s original nature and one’s efforts in that direction.” ⁹⁰ Jiao Xun 焦循 (1763–1820) builds his argument on this very same assumption: he conceives of moral responsibility as stemming from one’s “conscience” (zhi 知), which in itself justifies the choice of manifesting his nature (consisting of sexuality and appetites) either at a responsible or at an animal level.⁹¹ The acceptance of Mencius’s concept of every person’s innate potentiality