Emotion Language,” 523–543; and Palazova, “Where are Emotions in Words?.”

9. See chapter 1 of this book which dealt wtih similar questions involving the concepts of personal autonomy and dignity.

10. Perkins (Heaven and Earth Are Not Humane, 2) notes that “free will” is one of the categories extraneous to Chinese tradition. For a cross-cultural analysis of the concepts of will, free will, and freedom, see Chenyang Lee, “The Confucian Conception of Freedom,” 902–919. One of the few contributions on the topic is Marchal and Wenzel, “Chinese Perspectives on Free Will,” whom I thank for allowing me to read the draft of their manuscript before its publication.

11. Marchal and Wenzel, “Chinese Perspectives on Free Will,” 374.

12. Peimin Ni, “Seek and You Will Find It,” 195–196. Munro (“The Family Network, the Stream of Water, and the Plant,” 279) writes on the different approach in China: “The central problem in self-cultivation is not the proper exercise of free will, as is hypothesized in so much of Western ethics. Rather, it is how to remove obstacles that prevent the natural growth of the mind through principle […] this means that the problem is identifying and then removing selfish thoughts.” See also Jiang Xinyan “Mencius on Moral Responsibility,” 141–160, and Wong, “Early Confucian Philosophy and the Development of Compassion,” 187–189.

13. As is well known, in his treaty on the development of freedom and the consciousness of freedom in history, Friedrich Hegel gives a negative evaluation of Chinese culture. By stressing the dependence of conscience on law (Hegel, The Philosophy of History. 137, 144, 145, 147), he states the intrinsic “immorality” of Chinese Confucian culture (ibidem, 128, 148). This perception of Confucianism, although often criticized, has deeply influenced many historical and philosophical currents.

14. In his book review of Heaven and Earth Are Not Humane by Franklin Perkins, On-Cho Ng offers an insightful explanation of Chinese culture’s different position and its less dramatic representation of evil. The central conundrum in the Western notion of theodicy of the Almighty God permitting evil and injustice presupposes an all‐powerful Godhead that is one other than the cosmos—a creator and ordainer of the universe. In contrast, “in classical Chinese thought, the cosmos is conceived as a self‐generated and self‐generating naturally ordered and harmonious entity, giving rise to the idea of the consonance, linkage, and mutual attunement between humanity and the universe, wherein the cosmogonic and cosmological process is an ‘organismic’ one (according to Joseph Needham),