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

“storage site” of virtuous or negative qualities—a complex of attributes that a person possesses that distinguishes onself from another. More socially and conceptually constructed than the xing form, it experiences feelings, emotions, or desires, and is frequently associated with personal interests; it might be rightly or wrongly taken as a kind of standard for measuring others.¹⁸ The term shen often includes a notion that transcends the pure body, a broader notion of person, which Mark Elvin renders as “body-person” and Dorothy Ko “body-self.”¹⁹ Thus, while ti is the concrete physical body with its limbs—besides its various symbolical uses—shen is the site “where personal values and moral autonomy are constructed, and it is an inner focal point of awareness to which one returns after being involved in the external world.”²⁰ Finally, another word worth to be examined is wo 我.

It is common knowledge that in China—but not only in China—the “self” is a field of “selves” constructed through a plurality of roles and ritually defined relationships which locate one within a given social nexus.²¹ The scarce relevance of metaphysical arguments in my analysis—especially when drawing comparisons with the European debate on free will and determinism—does not, however, call into question centripetal definitions of the self as a mind endowed with will.²² Self-cultivation, therefore, implies not only a process of moral quest but also a central role of the self with an inherent decisional and transformational ability (zhineng 知能)—the sum of the qualities that make one person identical to or different from others and contribute to self refining and growth.²³ In particular, it is assumed that respect for the individual can be more concretely inquired by concentrating on the “space” left between the search for individual autonomy and warnings against pursuing one’s self-interest. Paradoxically we can find that warnings and education against desires and passions were an attempt to enlarge the self by freeing it from the alienation of outside things and external enslavement. Xunzi expressed this tension, stressing that “revering the self and making it master of things” (zhongji yiwu 重己役物) against “letting the self be alienated by things” (Yiji weiwuyi 以己為物役).²⁴ On the Daoist side, the