Heaven and Earth Are Not Humane

The Problem of Evil in Classical Chinese Philosophy

Franklin Perkins

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780253011763
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Eastern Philosophy

That bad things happen to good people was as true in early China as it is today. Franklin Perkins uses this observation as the thread by which to trace the effort by Chinese thinkers of the Warring States Period (c.475-221 BCE), a time of great conflict and division, to seek reconciliation between humankind and the world. Perkins provides rich new readings of classical Chinese texts and reflects on their significance for Western philosophical discourse.

1 Formations of the Problem of Evil

Problems of Evil

This project originated out of reflections on Susan Neiman’s Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy. Neiman’s book brilliantly integrates careful historical studies with a broad narrative of the development of modern European thought. What made it so interesting to me was its ability to present philosophical discussions specific to particular places and times in a way that appeared to illuminate human issues beyond that historical context. This broader relevance is what enables the history of philosophy to be philosophy. Of course, few would now openly claim that a study of European philosophy suffices as a method of addressing the human condition, a phrase that itself sounds outdated. Neiman evades the problem by invoking a vaguely bounded “we,” suggesting significance for “us” while avoiding universalistic claims about human beings.¹ The “we” for whom only Europe is relevant, however, probably no longer exists.

The history of philosophy gains its philosophical value in part from its comparative dimension, at least implicitly laying out a contrast between past ways of thinking and current forms of thought. This contrast helps illuminate the limits of contemporary thinking and to open up other possibilities. In this context, one can see that a contrastive approach restricted to alternatives within one lineage or tradition—even one as diverse and polyvocal as that of the West—is restricted both in its ability to reveal limits and to open up new possibilities. With no point of reference outside Europe, we cannot even recognize what might be peculiarly European. Imagine someone whose goal was to understand the city of Chicago as well as possible, and so spent his or her entire life residing only in Chicago and learning only about Chicago. Such a person would develop a kind of expertise, but would not even make a great tour guide, being unable to know what features were most distinctive. On a theoretical level, such a person would have a limited understanding of cities and of Chicago, precisely because he or she would have no way to distinguish the two.

My original intention was to write a paper to raise these points, to argue that there is no problem of evil in Chinese philosophy, and thus to show that the relevance of the problem of evil is largely limited to peculiarities of Europe. Indeed, if we take evil to be ontologically distinct from bad, and we take the problem to be reconciling that evil with an omnipotent and benevolent God that creates everything ex nihilo, then this problem of evil is absent in Chinese philosophy. But the problem of evil proved harder to evade than I initially assumed. One finds a persistent concern among classical Chinese philosophers with the fact that bad things happen to good people and with what this means for our relationship with the world, with nature, and with the divine. The link between shifting ideas of the divine in Warring States China and the European problem of evil has been noted by a wide variety of interpreters. Perhaps the first one to make an explicit connection is Max Weber, who in 1915 briefly mentioned that Confucians faced the “eternal problem of theodicy” (1964, 206). Homer Dubs ends his book on the philosophy of Xúnzǐ with a chapter called “Idealism and the Problem of Evil” (1927, 275–94). Lee Yearley, Robert Eno, Chen Ning, and Mark Csikszentmihalyi all claim an early Chinese concern with “theodicy,” a term invented by Leibniz for the attempt to justify God’s goodness in the face of the world’s evil.² Robert Eno, for example, attributes the emergence of philosophy from religion in China to an attempt to address the problem of “theodicy,” arguing that the decisive question was this: “[H]ow can a deity prescriptively good allow a world descriptively evil?” (1990a, 27). A. C. Graham does not invoke theodicy or the problem of evil explicitly, but takes the fourth century as a transition from a social crisis to a metaphysical crisis characterized by a “profound metaphysical doubt, as to whether Heaven is after all on the side of human morality” (1989, 107). This “metaphysical doubt” can be traced back to the collapse of the Western Zhōu in the eighth century BCE, which initiated five centuries of conflict and war, known as the Spring and Autumn (770–481 BCE) and the Warring States (475–222 BCE) periods. Yuri Pines thus begins his account of the thought of the Spring and Autumn Period with the chapter “Heaven and Man Part Ways” (2002, 55–88).

As is often the case in comparative studies, we must refuse a simple dichotomy between difference and identity. It is as true to say that the problem of evil is present in Chinese thought as it is to say there is no problem of evil there.³ Rather than argue about the cross-cultural applicability of this problem, I will trace out the various problems that emerge in China around the observation that bad things happen to good people. The point may seem trite. We have all heard that life is not fair. Yet this truism is inherently problematic. If most people are motivated by hopes for reward and fear of punishment, then a series of ethical problems follows: Why should I be good if it is not rewarded? Are there more efficacious ways of ensuring success? There are also questions about the purpose of life: Should we struggle against the world or retreat from it and cultivate acceptance? What kind of success does a good life require? Another series of problems centers on the psychological challenges of dealing with uncertainty and failure: How do we remain committed to virtue in the face of failure? Can we cultivate ourselves so as to attain some level of peace of mind or even joy? All of these are practical questions in ethics, politics, psychology, and so on, but they also are philosophical questions. They are the kinds of questions that classical Chinese philosophers took as most central to the problem of evil.

The remarkable thing about the fact that bad things happen to good people is that so many traditions have been built on denying it. Some try to explain away appearances of unfairness, as some Christian ministers explained Hurricane Katrina as a just response to the decadence of New Orleans. More often, the suffering of this life is excused by pointing beyond it, to eternal life in heaven and hell or to karma in past or future lives. Why would so many traditions insist on denying the obvious? There are always limits to the actions society and government can monitor and control, so there is always the temptation to act badly with the hope of escaping punishment. But, in the words of the Mòzǐ, heaven sees what you do even in the “forests and valleys, in dark and distant places where no one lives” (26: 192–93; cf. Johnston 2010, 26.1). The denial of the problem of evil, however, goes beyond what we might call the “Santa Claus effect” (making a list, checking it twice . . .). At stake is not just the existence and nature of God. Nor is it simply a matter of satisfying a desire for justice. Neiman explains the foundations of the problem thus:

Every time we make the judgment this ought not to have happened, we are stepping onto a path that leads straight to the problem of evil. Note that it is as little a moral problem, strictly speaking, as it is a theological one. One can call it the point at which ethics and metaphysics, epistemology and aesthetics meet, collide, and throw up their hands. At issue are questions about what the structure of the world must be like for us to think and act within it. (2002, 5)

What is ultimately at stake in the problem of evil is the status of human beings. Theo-dicy is always anthropo-dicy. If the basis of the universe resembles us—sharing our concepts and values—then we are radically different from other natural things. It makes us special and gives our concepts and values an objective foundation. The problem of evil fractures this alignment. Seeing that bad things happen to good people reveals that the universe is not ordered according to our values. It suggests the world (or its creator or divine force) is neither human nor humane, leaving a sense that our values and concepts are merely ours. As Heidegger says, the tragic condition in which we find ourselves illuminates the way in which we are “uncanny” (unheimlich) in the sense of being not at home (unheimisch) in the world (1996, 71).

This rupture seems to leave two unappealing choices—we side with the human or we side with the world/the divine. There is an obvious absurdity in railing against the universe or cursing God. The Zhuāngzǐ tells us that “things do not conquer heaven” (6: 260; cf. Mair 1994, 58), and gives this story: “Don’t you know about the praying mantis? It brandished its arms to block the chariot wheel, not knowing that it could not be victorious in bearing it, affirming the fineness of its own ability” (4: 167; cf. Mair 1994, 36). It is not just that resisting the world is futile and dangerous. If we are products of the universe or creatures of God, what possible ground could we stand on to turn back and decry it? The ability to label the world as bad requires the objective status of good, but if the basis of the world is bad or amoral, where could the good get this status? Labeling the world as bad or evil is probably ultimately incoherent. The difficulty is compounded by the fact that different people consider different things good, so that the unity of “the human” itself is in question. All of this suggests that we give up our labels and, as the Zhuāngzǐ recommends, just go along with things. Yet such resolve overturns all conceptions of morality. There is something reprehensible about accepting or affirming the kind of world that appears before us, as we see if we take seriously Alexander Pope’s famous statement in the “Essay on Man”: “Whatever IS, is RIGHT.” Once we say that children being washed away in a tsunami or chopped apart by machetes is right, can we claim to have morality at all?⁴

The connection between the problem of evil and the status of the human lies at the heart of this book. My claim is that in China as in Europe, the recognition that bad things happen to good people disrupted the mutual support between a divine force that grounded and enforced human values and the confidence human beings placed in those values. While it would be going too far to take this realization as the birth of philosophy, it marks a fundamental shift in philosophical reflection, precisely because it throws philosophy itself into question, shaking the groundwork that allows us to take our understanding of the world for granted. This book is a study of that shaking and the responses to it. This focus explains the juxtaposition of ancient China and early modern Europe. A comparative project must take up analogous tensions and movements of thought. Given the contin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Abbreviated Citations
• Half title
• Introduction: Philosophy in a Cross-Cultural Contex
• 1 Formations of the Problem of Evil
• 2 The Efficacy of Human Action and the Mohist Opposition to Fate
• 3 Efficacy and Following Nature in the Dàodéjīng
• 4 Reproaching Heaven and Serving Heaven in the Mèngzǐ
• 5 Beyond the Human in the Zhuāngzǐ
• 6 Xúnzǐ and the Fragility of the Human
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author