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

No less controversial is the Daoist idea of impermanence, according to which the self is abstractly separated from the surrounding social environment. One may think of the Daoist apparent paradox with the Zhuangzi’s “oblivion-dissolution of self” (無己) and Yangist “valuing self” (貴己).¹⁹ Xiao Gongquan regarded Zhuangzi’s political thought “as the most thoroughgoing of all individualisms, ancient and modern, Chinese and foreign, and it is also the most extreme of libertarian philosophies, ancient and modern, Chinese and foreign.”²⁰ Xu Keqian has convincingly pointed out the specific individualistic elements in Zhuangzi, such as the individual freedom (xuan jie 懸解), the “carefree wandering” (xiao yao you 逍遙遊) of the individual spirit without any restraints, the restrictions of social constructions such as laws, institutions, rituals, moral standards, and worldly concepts. The value and dignity of individual life (zhong sheng 重生) are combined with independence, autonomy, and privacy of individuals; the unconstrained self-development is manifested in the praise of eremitism, eccentrics, his distance from the society and common sense.²¹

A good example of this conceptual reframing is the method of observing objects elaborated by Shao Yong 邵雍 (1012–1077), which attests to how Buddhism and Daoism had influenced scholars’ perception of reality and the holistic involvement of the self in the “process of comprehensive observation of things” (guanwu 觀物). Shao postulated that the self is an obstacle if subjectively interposed before an object, and that only by “becoming” one with the thing being observed and by ultimately embodying it (tiwu 體物), can the observer can see things objectively, through the eyes of the world, as things see themselves, and therefore apprehend that there is no distinction between subject and object. This constitutes the so-called “reversal of perception” (fanguan 反觀) that smoothes the path toward perfect wisdom (zhishen zhisheng 至神至聖):

What we call reversal of perception is not the subjective “my” perception of things; if it is not “me” who looks at things, it is like looking at things through themselves. If it is like this, how could I myself be interposed? This means that I am conscious that I am a