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

because grass and trees have life and vitality. But when they see tiles and stones broken and destroyed, they cannot avoid feeling a sense of concern and regret. This is because their benevolence forms one body with tiles and stones.¹¹

In his survey of Wang Yangming’s new meaning of “extending or realizing moral knowledge” (zhizhi 致知),¹² Liu Shu-hsien explores the notion of the self through the lens of the Mencian model of humaneness, ren, and a person’s inability to bear (buren 不忍) the suffering of other beings. When the “petty person” achieves this knowledge, they can transform themselves into a “great person” and becomes one with Heaven and Earth and the myriads of things. If not obscured by selfish desires, one’s behavior is then harmonized, and the many relationships that binds one to other human beings and things are reconciled at all levels. The self is nothing but the result of this set of relationships whereby other people and things are not extraneous objects but intimately related to each other. Thus, we may deduce that a holistic self is not a paradox if understood as the state of being in unity with society and the cosmos.

The social orientation of this renewed notion of self is manifested in the representation of emotions. Emotional regulation and manifestation are inherent in ritual propriety (li) and the virtue of reverence-respect (jing 敬), but they are also accomplished in addressing aesthetic emotions, especially when these are embedded in discourses of social harmony, requital (bao 報), and love subordinate to social values. Yet morality here does not merely imply adaptation to rules, conventions, and externally defined models, but most importantly the identification of the self with one’s self. However, it is a question of the extent to which the moral mind of the “great person” is autonomous from society, the degree to which rules are internalized, and the person’s response to them.¹³ In other words, the main problem facing Wang Yangming’s new construction of an autonomous individual concerns the relation between “internalization,” “individual re-creation,” and “autonomy.”