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

as toward the moment when these weaknesses lead to the fall of actual sin. This debate was initiated by Augustine, who analyzed the “three steps leading to sin.” Even though in China no analogous effort has been made to explore human weaknesses concerning original sin, there is still considerable interest in the psychological mechanisms behind the moral choice between good and evil. Even if there is no Lord who searches the heart and tests the kidney of humans, deep is the practice of “vigilance in solitude” (shendu 慎獨). As expounded earlier while referencing the famous Zhongyong’s passage (喜怒哀樂之未發，謂之中。發而皆中節，謂之和), an important element linking emotion with the sphere of ethics—the so-called “metaphysical moment” that marks the distinction between weifa and yifa—has been introduced as a key debate on self-cultivation by Neo-Confucianism. It is against this backdrop that Neo-Confucians, by combining early Confucian reflections on human responsibility and shame, came to implicitly recognize human liberty and responsibility. Their contribution was based on the assumption that a person can follow various “ways,” even wrong ones, but only one of these is the “Way.” Human beings therefore cannot ignore the past and their psychophysical nature if they intend to modify the future. Excluding a few extreme cases discussed at length in this chapter, willpower and personal determination are thought to be enough to overcome all predetermined conditions and achieve proper behavior.

Chinese traditional scholarship has paid scarce attention to the theoretical problem of free will and its limits. Writers have concentrated on the process of self-cultivation, specifically how to acquire virtue and wisdom. The question at hand was not the lack or weakness of will, but the causes of failure; that is, what was believed to constrain the development of a person’s innate tendency toward good. Thus, even if determination (zhi) was considered to be the controller of temperament and qi energy, the main focus of attention was how differences in the composition of this energy among people entail different starting points in the efforts to reform one’s self. Humans are different for the various degree of purity and turbidity of their energy, favorable or unfavorable social and natural