Individual Autonomy and Responsibility in Late Imperial China By ...

Chapter 9

Heaven, Destiny,
Mind, and Will

Heaven and Destiny

The concepts of “heaven and destiny,” “heart-mind,” and “will-determination” or “heart-mind-commitment” must be taken into consideration. According to Confucian morality, the agent responds uniquely to their moral/aesthetic conscience without being influenced by external fears or hopes. The agent is not motivated by either rewards or punishments of gods or spirits. But Confucian masters since the beginning were conscious of the objective limits of human will and elaborated a kind of doctrine of freedom of choice by identifying a “space” in the debate on heaven and destiny. In other words, for destiny or fate we presuppose that there are conditions that are given and immutable, ones that individual agency cannot change or control.¹ Therefore we will come back to destiny in the section on will and determination, with the whole discourse on psychophysical energy, its purity and turbidity and its effects on the moral progress of the individual. Such concepts are thus closely related to moral responsibility because the clear, maybe naïve, distinction between