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

to be, because it would already be. It is, therefore, no strange anomaly partly to will and partly to be unwilling. This is actually an infirmity of mind, which cannot wholly rise, while pressed down by habit, even though it is supported by the truth. And so there are two wills, because one of them is not whole, and what is present in this one is lacking in the other.¹⁰⁸

This passage represents a model of the Christian psychomachy.¹⁰⁹ The Neo-Confucian perspective, in contrast, does not equate “principle” with “reason,” and a distinction is made between “egoistic desires” and “principle” (e.g., human nature): there is no original sin, no struggle between body and soul, reason and passions.¹¹⁰ The Chinese word for “mental illness” (xinji 心疾) may recall the “weakness of will” as portrayed in the history of moral thought in Europe,¹¹¹ or even resembles Augustine’s aegritudo animi (infirmity of mind) to some degree, but any similarity applies only at the most superficial level of analysis.

It is difficult to find such a dramatic representation of the inner moral conflict in Chinese texts. This relative disinterest toward moral dilemmas does not necessarily signal an ignorance of moral responsibility, absence of psychological conflicts, or doctrinal inadequacy in the sense of a wrong behavior caused by lack of virtue or self-cultivation. What is important is not the free will, whether there are options for a choice derived from the rational capacity for critical evaluation. In Confucianism, the morality of a decision does not depend mainly on whether the agent is able to exercise freedom of the will at that moment, but rather on human nature with its innate emotional responses and the constant self-cultivation process.

Any moral system cannot avoid discrepancies between its principles in practical situations, discrepancies that allow wide spaces of evaluation and decisions even in a hypothetically heteronomous society. Analogously, the lack of dramatization does not mean lack of inner conflicts both in the pre-Qin and imperial period. It is useful here to refer to the brief account of the conflict experienced by Zi Xia 子夏, a disciple of Confucius, who felt the “temptations” of the world clashing with the ideal of morality