國立臺灣大學哲學論評

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This paper aims to examine and explore how David Pankenier, a prominent sinologist, interprets heaven’s mandate in the early Zhou by an account of “politico-religious imagination”. He argues that Zhou founders’ talk about heaven’s mandate is based on astrology and correlative cosmology, such that we can illustrate how, under the macrocosmos-microcosmos correspondence, heaven’s mandate could be a way of political legitimation and a representation of the development of rationalized religion. To establish and support this model, Pankenier invokes the accounts of Mircea Eliade, Kenneth Burke, and Peter Berger. Burke’s discussions of the analogical use of religious language demonstrate the possibility that a reversal in priority between the temporal and the eternal realms may occur when the language applied to the temporal realm is analogically applied to the supernatural being. In the case of heaven’s mandate, the word ming is first applied to rulers’ orders, but a sort of reversal in priority occurs when celestial phenomena become an actualization of the supernatural divine will, and heaven’s mandate becomes a justification for social order. This paper aims to explore this model and explicate it by invoking Kendall Walton’s theory of make-believe. I argue that by invoking the notion of make-believe, we can see more clearly both how the use of language functions and how “heaven’s mandate” manifests the development of rationalized religion.