A little more than three decades ago, China embarked upon a course of fundamental change in its economy and society, and we now have a tangible record, positive and negative, of what has transpired on these fronts. The trajectory of subjectivity – of moral life and life of the spirit – belongs to a rather different part of the larger story: more than thirty years after the winds of change started sweeping across the moral and spiritual landscape of China, the dust is still swirling around, and what has taken temporary shape is a veritable morass. All members of Chinese society, including myself, are part of this dust, this morass, and our understanding of our own situation is, for the most part, no less unsettled and confused.

One sign of this confusion is the way in which the question of political reform is typically approached and lack of progress and its consequences comprehended. It is a commonplace of both Chinese and Western analyses of the matter that political reform has lagged far behind economic reform and that political reform must catch up soon if China is to maintain its momentum of economic growth and prevent problems such as official corruption and social injustice from going completely out of control. While it contains a grain of truth, this piece of received wisdom only scratches the surface. Political reform is a value-laden process, and, as such, it can achieve a real breakthrough only if a corresponding breakthrough in values – even perhaps a revolution in values – takes place in Chinese society at the same time. What is the infrastructure of values that must exist if political reform is to make moral sense and command more than opportunistic support? What is it about the structure of Chinese society and its political system that stands in the way, not so much of political reform, as of the more fundamental transformation in values? Deeper if more elusive questions such as these must be addressed if we are to understand the tortured process of political reform and what is necessary for its prospects to improve. But these questions are also worth pursuing in their own right – as questions about the state of morality, subjectivity, and life of the spirit in China today. Indeed, they must be pursued in their own right if we look for answers of adequate depth and scope.

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Freedom, as understood and discussed in this book, does not mark the so-called end of history, with all that this admittedly elusive yet by no means vacuous concept implies. It only marks our place in the modern world – or brings us into it. To be free is the only way to be human under modern conditions of life. But what exactly are modern conditions of life? Do they not signal the end of history, a very symptom of the end of history? Do they not have a history that foretells what modern conditions of life can mean or amount to, and that forestalls or forecloses whatever possibility for substantial and meaningful agency we may think is open to us with our newfound freedom? Questions such as these are unavoidable given freedom’s ambiguous track record and its ambiguous relation to the good, and they add up to the imperative to treat freedom not as the panacea it is often so complacently taken to be but as a question – as perhaps the most important question for the modern human being.

But why must the modern human being confront this question in the first place? Or, what does it mean to say, as I have done, that to be free is the only way for us to act and to be under modern conditions of life?

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This chapter is in some ways a summation of everything that has gone before in this book. If Chapters 1 and 2 provide a diagnostic account of the moral crisis in post-Mao China without yet drawing on the apparatus comprising the notion of agency and the distinction between freedom and identification as different configurations of agency, and if Chapters 3–5 supply that apparatus, then this chapter attempts an analysis of the moral crisis against the conceptual backdrop of the distinction between freedom and identification. Instead of directly employing the terms of this distinction, however, I will work with variations upon them, that is, in terms of the contrast between devotion and introjection, between a leader-centered and a superego-centered morality.

This terminological shift is due to the fact that in this chapter I draw heavily on Freud, and the main reason I draw on Freud at this point in my inquiry is that his way of looking at certain things allows me to take a natural next step on the basis of my preceding ones. In particular, Freud’s ideas of the superego and group psychology make it possible for me not only to cast my preceding analysis of the moral crisis in a comparable yet different and enriching framework but also to bring an otherwise largely typological distinction (between freedom and identification) to bear, in a natural way, on what is involved in a possible transition in China today from one type of moral culture to another.

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This book could with good reason have ended with the last chapter. In that briefest of chapters I argued for approaching freedom in the spirit of a question, especially regarding its relation to the good, after having tried to show, in previous chapters, why freedom must be an important part of any solution to China’s moral crisis and, by implication, to many of its other problems. But I cannot quite resist the temptation, in this afterthought of a chapter, to make a modest beginning in taking up the question of freedom beyond arguing for its necessity. This is a rather different undertaking from what has been pursued in all the previous chapters and, for this reason, the attempt must be judged somewhat independently. While this final chapter obviously presupposes and builds on the main steps of argument in the previous chapters, it should not be deemed to weaken any of the latter if the further, tentative steps it takes do not constitute good enough answers to questions raised in the earlier. In this spirit, then, I shall pursue an idea about freedom that I should like to think is both definite and appropriately open, and I shall do so by taking some care to situate the question of freedom within the space of broader moral and political possibilities in the foreseeable future of China.

But I must first take a long detour devoted to reflections first on human nature and then on modernity. I see no better way to give a glimpse of the need for this detour than with reference to Marx’s cautionary methodological remarks directed at Jeremy Bentham, although utilitarianism is otherwise of no concern for my purposes.