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

goodness. Munro calls this Confucianism Guojia rushu 國家儒術, or State Confucianism, and pits it against Philosophical Confucianism, or Rujia zhexue 儒家哲學. The latter focuses on the Mencian emotions, the primary value being humaneness (ren 仁) and forms of compassion or empathy. It retains the significance of social relations in choice making.¹²

Roetz directs his criticism toward the negation of an “inner psychic life” where the process of decision could take place on the grounds that the rites relieve the subject of the burden of forming their own judgement by laying down what is to be regarded as good and worthy.¹³ Starting from Herbert Fingarette, the subject, as portrayed in his provocative Confucius: The Secular as Sacred,¹⁴ is constructed as the bearer of roles, supposedly more concrete than the abstract holder of impersonal rules or universal principles of Western individualism.¹⁵ His concept can be summarized as follows: “man is not an ultimately autonomous being who has an inner and decisive power, intrinsic to him, a power to select among real alternatives and thereby to shape a life for himself. Instead, he is born as “raw material” that must be civilized by education and thus become a truly human being.”¹⁶ Henry Rosemont specifies how, on the one side, the modern Western concept of “abstract individual” is endowed with certain basic rights independent of gender, ethnicity, age, religion, personal abilities, time and space, and, on the other, the Confucian type of “role-bearing person” remains focused on the qualities of a human being, and is defined by a set of “concrete relations,” that is by the roles one is required to play with respect to others. Rosemont thinks that the latter approach is much more pragmatic than the philosophical stereotype of a disembodied, purely logical, and calculating autonomous individual as identified in contemporary Western society.¹⁷ Indeed, this contrast between Western “rights-bearing individuals” and Chinese “role-bearing persons” is suggestive but reductionist.¹⁸ According to Chad Hansen, the relationship between an individual and the others in the Chinese language is a relation of “part and whole” rather than that of “one and many.”¹⁹ Thus, the Western concept of the individual does not exist in ancient Chinese. Xu Keqian objects to Hansen that if the