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Franklin Perkins : Heaven and Earth Are Not Humane: The Problem of Evil in Classical Chinese Philosophy . (Bloomington : Indiana University Press , 2014. Pp. xiii, 295.)
Book Reviews
For Franklin Perkins evil entails bad things happening to good people. He aspires to discuss the classical Chinese texts on their own terms while showing their relevance to universal issues of concern, putting them into dialogue with Western thinkers. He couches the issue in terms of theodicy, that most futile and frustrating of intellectual endeavors. The question of evil arises, he says, in a context that defines the good in anthropocentric terms, recognizes that the world is not good on those terms, and postulates a being responsible for the world and itself good on those terms (36). The title, though, is from the Laozi: Heaven and earth are unkind (buren--"not ren," ren being the supreme Confucian virtue, variously translated as love, Goodness, benevolence, kindness, "humanness"). Grappling with the reality of evil led Western thinkers away from confidence in God. The Chinese thinkers became skeptical of the position of man.
Perkins does not devote a separate discussion to the ideas of Confucius (or Kongzi, as he calls him) in the Analects, but takes early Ru (in English: Confucian; Perkins's usage here may be on the way to becoming conventional, but it still strikes me as a pedantic affection that adds nothing to the analysis) thinking as a kind of base point. He then takes up the usual suspects in roughly chronological order (roughly: there is some ground to think the Zhuangzi is prior to the Laozi; but Perkins's order serves his expository purposes) as they react to issues raised by Confucius.
Confucius believed the Mandate of Heaven had collapsed, but found in the human person the image and embodiment (if we would only live up to it) of a moral order inherent in the universe. Mozi attributed less to the human person and more to Heaven, which wishes well to human beings and rewards and punishes us to the extent that we wish...