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

personhood may be understood in Confucianism and Daoism.⁴ Rather, we will question the two concepts of individual autonomy and moral responsibility in a cross-cultural perspective, striving to examine some specific aspects of self-assertion, from the mentioned perspective of the feeling-self beneath the moral-social-self to the identification of the self with moral-social-self. How the subjects perceive and represent themselves should be reconstructed from a myriad of components, subjective elements, and factional judgements that can be found in different kinds of sources. In the face of such broad matter, only a few elements will be examined from a period in which reflections on selfhood, the contrast between private feelings and public morality, and the linkage between desires and subjectivity undergo considerable developments in Chinese cultural tradition. Although extremely subjective, due to the human need for immediate external recognition, emotion easily turns into a social and moral phenomenon.⁵ Consequently, the structure of the self is continuously interacting with the surrounding social environment through affective experiences, and this interaction is perceived differently according to different cultural backgrounds. Everybody recalls the famous Confucian formula: “By nature, men are nearly similar; by practice and habits, they become distant” 性相近也, 習相遠也.⁶ This sentence confirms that emotions and sensations are seen as being related to the “body-person” construction, and to psychological dispositions that are more or less permanent tendencies toward specific affective states. In short, during the continuous socialization process, affective and moral elements create the representation of the self, the “identity negotiation”; that is the way a person negotiates the meaning of their identity with society at large and justifies their conduct. The collective sense of self is constructed along with the individual self-perception. For all the aforementioned reasons, recurrent themes revolving around the self will be moral responsibility, how to deal with others and the self, resistance to external pressures, and adaptation to circumstances.

Cross-cultural and comparative approaches confirm that one’s concept of self and others is socially constructed, hence basically corresponding