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

ascribed to the self were quite different from those of modern Western individualism.

The debate on desires and principles with its gradual but significant changes is meaningful for the evolution and pluralism of opinions on personhood. Neo-Confucianism largely maintained its traditional suspicions toward desires, but a part of it evolved from initial severity to gradual acceptance as a basis for a new common morality. Zhu Xi’s standpoint appears much more moderate than that of many of his followers, even though he emphasizes the “victory of Heavenly principles over selfish desires.”³ His main idea can be best encapsulated in this passage from Lunyu: “[h]e who possesses humaneness, if he wishes to assert himself, he seeks the assertion of others; if he wishes to expand himself, he seeks the expansion of others. [And] do not do to others that which you would not like to be done to you.”⁴ By analogy, one should put oneself in other people’s shoes and find in one’s desires an indispensable means of extending one’s humanity to everybody (推己所欲以及於人). One can hardly avoid notice how this process of “extension or universalization of desires” (tuiyu 推欲)⁵ roughly corresponds to the law of reciprocity being upheld by several world religions and philosophical traditions. This makes it possible for us to compare it with the modern Western concept of “sympathy” as put forth by Adam Smith who has (re)interpreted it in terms of a eudemonic criterion for emotional participation in the feelings of others.⁶ Such an attitude is thus found also in the thought of Zhu Xi. Many criticisms against him should be leveled instead against his disciples because Zhu Xi had a moderate position regarding desires, but his disciples took to the extreme the contrast of principles-desires and made Neo-Confucianism more ascetic.

There were also other intellectual currents that in various ways helped broaden existing knowledge about the self and its action.⁷ The most remarkable contribution to the development of a new understanding of the self and fundamental element in this process of conceptual reframing comes from the aforementioned School of Mind. The growth