Heaven’s Silence in the Mengzi

In China, writing arises to divine the divine, to let heaven speak. Yet contra the cosmology of early divination, early philosophy mostly agrees with Confucius (Kongzi): “heaven doesn’t speak.” For Kongzi, Laozi, Zhuangzi, and Hanfeizi, heaven’s silence is its perfectly effortless efficacy, which we should try to emulate; for Xunzi, it is a silence we should distance ourselves from via ritual, creating worldly order and stability instead. This presentation expounds Mengzi’s speculatively rich middle position, building on Franklin Perkins’ reading. For Mengzi, we should perfect our naturally good and heaven-bestowed, yet thereby ‘unscripted’ (spontaneous, divinely unplanned) dispositions, for want of maximal resilience in the face of everything heaven in complete moral silence enacts, viz., the outrageous caprice of human fates and fortunes. Human self-cultivation thus flips heavenly silence back on itself, achieving heaven’s absolute self-knowing as humanity’s tragic self-consciousness. Our very inability to reconcile with fate is heaven’s "heavening" in silence.