受心学思潮影响，公安派文人认为常和奇并非事物本身所具备的物质属性，而是人们在认知过程中产生的感觉性概念，由此得出不能以一己见闻来定义、衡量整个世界的观点。为了达到“视奇为常”的精神境界，公安派文人往往对奇持一种积极的态度，并在常、奇二者之间以奇自居，由此对常发起一股猛烈的撼动与冲击。具体到人格领域，公安派所谓的奇人有以下三种类型——遗世独立的宗教奇人、经世致用的豪杰之士、骨趣兼备的文人才士，而独立性是三者的共同特征。公安派正是将独立自主的奇人品格灌注到文学创作之中，通过与复古派在古今、学古等问题上的诸多龃龉，构建了自身在晚明文坛上奇人的文学姿态。

Influenced by Wang Yangming’s “doctrine of the mind” (xinxue), literati of the Gong’an school held the opinion that the normal (chang) and the exceptional (qi) are concepts derived from people’s cognitive process rather than the material attributes of things, Hence, they maintained that the world could not be defined and measured by any individual's views. To achieve the spiritual goal of “seeing the normal in the exceptional”, the Gong'an school literati sided with the exceptional and vehemently attacked the normal. For the Gong’an school, the exceptional people fell into three types: religious recluses, heroes with practical statecraft, and literati with integrity and taste, and common to all the three types of people was their independent spirit. Overall, literati of the Gong’an school built their unconventional literary dispositions in late Ming literature by introducing the independent personalities to literary creation.