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Li Zhi, Confucianism and the Virtue of Desire. By Pauline C. Lee. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012. Pp. xiii + 186. Hardcover $75.00, isbn 978-1- 438-43927-3. Paper $24.95, isbn 978-1-438-43926-6. eBook $24.95, isbn 978-1- 438-43928-0.
Although widely known among intellectual and literary historians as one of the most iconoclastic Chinese authors of the sixteenth century, Li Zhi ... (1527-1602) had never been the object of a dedicated monograph in English until the publication of Pauline C. Lee's Li Zhi, Confucianism and the Virtue of Desire. In this elegantly written book Lee focuses on the philosophical contributions of Li Zhi. In four chapters she reconstructs his philosophy of desire, spontaneity, and authenticity through an in-depth reading of select autobiographical, literary, and philosophical texts. This methodology has resulted in an important contribution to Chinese intellectual history.
In the first core chapter, "Life Stories," we are introduced to a commentary Li Zhi wrote on his own life, "A Sketch of Zhuowu: Written in Yunnan." (The appendix conveniently includes a full translation of this and the other two texts at the core of Lee's analysis.) The text is emphatically not read as a foundation for a conventional biographical sketch - one would be mistaken to read this as intellectual biography. Instead the author analyzes the text as a creative adaptation of the traditional genre of the commentary and related biographical genres, and argues that in it we can detect "an ethics of genuine expression" (p. 22). Genuine expression is the result not so much...