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

On the one side, the content of insights revealed by these autonomous minds is always the same set of social values that are found in most Confucian Classics: obedience to proper authorities (Daoxin, or Moral Mind, teacher, father, ruler). When the mind is finally cleared, these will spontaneously emerge coupled with emotions. The emotions contain the cognitive understanding of the fact that with clarity comes tranquility, lack of disequilibrium, and end of separation from others. Wang Yangming was not different from the orthodox scholars who followed the School of Principle to equate selfish emotions and desires with bandits and mountain rebels, and he stated that it was more difficult to struggle against the former than the latter,¹⁴ according to the equation “maintaining the heavenly principle” (cun tianli 存天理) corresponds to “eliminating human desires” (qu renyu 去人欲).¹⁵ Wang proposed the application of an iron moral censorship of theater to inculcate noble sentiments in people and castigated all licentious words and melodies current in popular literature: only the edifying stories of loyal subjects and virtuous children could be retained so that, through the reawakening of the innate awareness of good (liangzhi), the people could return to the sound customs of ancient times.¹⁶ Cua notes that intention (yi) in Wang Yangming may not be interpreted as ordinary desire, unless we distinguish between primary desires—in other words, moral desires to do good—and secondary desires, such as the desire to eat or to travel.¹⁷ In this context, Wang Yangming’s conception may be interpreted as a simple further “internalization” of the Confucian moral rules, the “collective social mind,” rather than as an expression of an “authentic individual conscience.” Indeed, it may be speculated that for Wang Yangming the collective social mind and subjective conscience were one and the same thing, in that the latter ended up by deriving its very existence from the former. Furthermore, Wang Yangming’s values without a doubt were Confucian, and he was convinced to restore them through the method of individual self-reform; after mentioning the ideal society of the mythical period of the Sage Kings, when the five basic relationships (wulun 五倫) were perfectly enforced, he stated that at that time teachers taught