- Length
- 400 pagesJohnston, The Mozi: A Complete Translation, 2010
- Reading
- DemandingReadable with attention; assumes no other book
- Availability
- In printA current standard edition is available
Mozi
The first argued philosophy in China, produced by a disciplined organisation of craftsmen and military engineers who defended cities under siege for free and believed that every practice should be judged by whether it helps people. It lost, disappeared for two thousand years, and was put back together by textual scholars in the eighteenth century.
- Date
- c. 5th-3rd century BC
- Attributed to
- Mozi and the Mohist school
- Region
- The state of Song, northern China
- Language
- Classical Chinese
- 1929 English, Y. P. Mei Partial; public domain in most jurisdictions Attested
- 2010 English, Ian Johnston The first complete English translation; in copyright Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Exchange — Both: answers an earlier work and drew a later one
- Form
- Compiled
- Method
- Demonstration — Proof from premises the opponent already grants
- Transmission
- Recovered — Lost to circulation and recovered from a surviving copy
- Standing
- Revived — Out of circulation and read again
The dominant rival to Confucianism in the classical period, extinct within a few centuries, and unread for nearly two thousand years until Qing scholars reconstructed the text.
What the book says
The book of an organised movement rather than of a thinker, and it reads like one. The doctrinal core is a set of ten positions, each argued in a chapter that begins by stating the problem, gives reasons, cites precedent and answers objections - the first recognisable philosophical argument in Chinese. Care should be impartial rather than graded: the trouble in the world comes from people caring more for their own family, state and person than for others, and if everyone regarded others' as they regard their own, none of it would happen. Offensive war is condemned at length and on grounds of arithmetic - the cost in lives, harvests and equipment exceeds any gain, and a state that kills one man calls it murder while a state that kills ten thousand calls it glory. Lavish funerals and three years of mourning are attacked as ruinous. Music is attacked as expenditure the poor pay for. Officials should be promoted on merit regardless of birth. Heaven wants people's welfare and rewards accordingly, and fatalism is false because it makes effort pointless. A separate group of later chapters, dense and damaged, works on definition, inference, optics, mechanics and geometry, and is the only sustained work on logic produced in early China.
What it argues
That the standard for any doctrine, custom or policy is whether it benefits people, and that almost nothing inherited passes. The test is stated explicitly and is the first methodological rule in Chinese philosophy: check a claim against precedent, against the evidence of what people have seen and heard, and against its consequences in practice. Applied to affection it yields impartiality; applied to war, condemnation; applied to funerals, music and mourning, abolition. Heaven is invoked, but as a standard rather than a mystery - Heaven wants human welfare, which is why welfare is the measure.
What it answered
Analects c. 5th-3rd century BCConfucius and disciples
The Confucians, by name and in detail. The dispute is not about whether one should be good but about what makes a practice good, and Mozi's answer - its results - was new. He also has an argument the Confucians could not easily meet: they claim to revere antiquity, but the ancients they revere were themselves innovators, so reverence for the old is not even consistent on its own terms.
What answered it
Mencius c. 4th-3rd century BCMencius
Mencius, at once and with contempt, defending graded affection as the root of morality rather than its enemy. Zhuangzi objected that the Mohists made life joyless and that their doctrine was too hard for anyone to follow, including themselves. Xunzi agreed with the Confucians against impartial care but adopted the Mohist habit of sustained argument, which is one reason his book reads so differently from the Analects. The school itself vanished after the Qin unification and left no successors.
How it argues
By stating a thesis, giving reasons for it, answering objections, and citing evidence - the first time this is done in Chinese, and the reason the Mozi is harder going than the Analects. The prose is repetitive and unliterary, which later readers held against it; the repetition is the sound of a case being made rather than an aphorism being polished. The later logical chapters go much further, developing definitions and a technical vocabulary for inference, and they are the closest thing early China produced to a formal logic.
The moment
The Warring States, when the scale of warfare was increasing sharply and philosophical schools were competing for the ear of rulers. The Mohists were unusual in being an actual organisation with a leader, a chain of command and a specialism: they were experts in defensive fortification who travelled to besieged cities and worked for nothing. The chapters on siege engineering that survive in the book are technical manuals, and the ethics and the engineering are the same project.
How it travelled
Badly. Mohism was one of the two great schools of the classical period and by the Han it was gone; the book survived only because it had been included in a Daoist collection, where it sat unread for centuries. Its recovery is a scholarly achievement of the Qing dynasty, when evidential scholars began repairing the corrupt text, and the logical chapters were not intelligible again until twentieth-century work. Its modern reputation is high and recent: impartial care and consequentialist reasoning read very differently after Bentham than they did before.
The strongest objection
Mencius', and it is not easily dismissed. Impartial care asks a person to weigh a stranger's child equally with their own, and either that is psychologically impossible, in which case the doctrine cannot guide anyone, or it is possible only by uprooting the affections that make people care about anything at all. The Mohist reply - that impartiality is about how one acts rather than how one feels, and that the family is where impartial concern is learned rather than what it competes with - is a good answer and is not clearly the book's own. The text as we have it presses the harder version.
Why read it
For the arguments against war, which are the best in ancient literature and have lost none of their force, and for the sheer strangeness of finding a fully worked consequentialism in fifth-century China. Skip the triadic repetitions; read one version of each doctrinal chapter and then the anti-war material.
- First printed
- 1445
- First in English
- 1929
- Digitised
- Yes
Eighteen of the seventy-one chapters are lost and several survivors are corrupt, particularly the logical ones, whose text was badly damaged before Qing scholars began repairing it. The doctrinal chapters exist in triads - three parallel versions of the same argument - which is thought to reflect three branches of the school.
Mei's 1929 English is out of copyright in most jurisdictions. Johnston's complete translation of 2010 and the Graham and Fraser studies are in copyright.
Where it stands
Revived, and increasingly cited outside China as an independently developed consequentialism that arrived two thousand years before the European version, with a different account of why welfare matters.
On quoting this book
The Chinese is public domain; the usable English is in copyright and the older versions render the technical vocabulary loosely. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
Almost nothing is known about Mozi, including whether the name is a surname or a nickname meaning ink or tattoo, which would suggest a convict labourer. The relation between the three parallel versions of each doctrinal chapter is disputed and bears on whether the school split into branches. The dating of the logical chapters and their relation to the rest of the book are unresolved. And whether Mohism disappeared because it lost the argument, because it lost its organisational base under the Qin, or because its social constituency was destroyed is a real historical question with no agreed answer.