Erica Brindley, author of Individualism in Early China: Human Agency and the Self in Thought and Politics, just published a piece on “Individualism in Classical Chinese Thought” for the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Brindley’s whole article is worth a careful read, not to mention the aforementioned book; I assume the article is in part a distillation of the book. Here are a couple of excerpts:
To the extent that the self is conceived as physical, embodied, and dynamic, the early Chinese “self” necessarily entails a different definition of “individual.” While there is no clear term in Classical Chinese that might translate consistently into “individual,” this latter term facilitates discussion of those aspects of the self that emphasize its particularity within a whole. We use the term “individual” here to refer to early Chinese notions of self that concern not so much the subjective, psychological sense of “self,” but the qualities of a person that mark him or her as a single, particular entity capable of exerting agency from within a web of relationships. In other words, we refer to the individual not as an atomistic, isolated, and undifferentiated part of a whole, but as a distinct organism that must serve particular functions and fulfill a unique set of relationships in the worlds of which he or she is a part. The individual is thus a unique participant in a larger whole—integral to both, the processes that define the whole, as well as to the change and transformation that stems from itself.
