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

but a terrifying confusion of interests, passions, and diverse opinions.”⁸ While for the right wing, individualism was guilty of undermining the traditional ordering of society, further criticisms came from the left wing. Saint Simonians blamed individualists for considering “the individual as the center of social life,” for “preaching egoism” and parting with socialists. For other socialist thinkers, individualism signified “the autonomy, freedom, and sacredness of the individual values which had hitherto taken a negative, oppressive, and anarchic form but could henceforth only be preserved within a cooperative and rationally organized social order.”⁹ For liberals, instead, it was the ability to master oneself without “being swallowed up by mass society,” to become independent from any form of conformism, and reduce state intervention as much as possible. This notwithstanding, no definitive achievements have been produced in the Western age of Enlightenment, as these have been continuously challenged and hindered at theoretical and practical levels; authoritarian social arrangements of various kinds have struggled to create “citizens” rather than passive “subjects,” while the world is full of small or big lords who are benevolent and pretend to avoid using hard power but have to repress, censure, torture the impertiment, the dissident, the “other.”

“Individual” and “self” are concepts evolving over time and space, embodying a set of heterogeneous meanings which are partly the result of the varied interpretations from different intellectual traditions.¹⁰ They can be understood as two poles of respectively “independent” and “interdependent” schemas,¹¹ whereby the representation of the self is framed by the fuzzy interaction of private and public spheres, the collective memory of past experiences and present conditions.¹² The individual’s image and self-identity are therefore nurtured by society and its rules, while in one’s self-reflection it is perceived as something unique and independent from society while belonging to a common general category (e.g., cultural environment and communities) at the same time.

Chinese philosophy has often represented individuals in terms of social categories that define their duties toward their groups and society,