Mozi

Mozi the Chinese philosopher of the fifth century BC (c. 470-391 BC), founder of the Mohist school, who taught universal love, condemned aggressive war and wasteful luxury, and organised his followers into a disciplined band of craftsmen and defenders of besieged cities.

Life and the Mohist School

Mozi, whose personal name was Mo Di, was probably born around 470 BC and died around 391 BC, in the period between Confucius and Mencius. The sources say little of his origins; some traditions make him a craftsman or artisan, and his teaching is marked throughout by the concerns of the engineer and the practical man rather than those of the hereditary noble.

He founded a school that in many ways was the great rival of Confucianism during the Warring States period. The Mohists were organised in a manner resembling a religious order, with a leader, called the grand master, to whom members gave strict obedience. They were expected to practise frugality, to live simply, and to be ready to defend the weak.

The school produced ten core doctrines, among them the exaltation of the worthy, the condemnation of aggressive warfare, the promotion of economy in expenditure and in funerals, and the belief that Heaven and the spirits reward the good and punish the wicked. The followers of Mozi were famous for their skill in defensive warfare, and they are said to have marched to the aid of states threatened by unjust attack.

Universal Love and Its Arguments

The central doctrine of Mohism is jian ai, commonly rendered as universal love or inclusive care. Mozi argued that the disorders of the world arise from partiality, from the habit of loving one's own family, clan and state more than those of others, which leads to theft, usurpation and war. If everyone loved others as their own, these evils would vanish.

He defended this doctrine not primarily by appeal to sentiment but by argument. He asked what a wise ruler would wish for his people, answered that he would wish them fed, clothed and at peace, and then argued that universal love and the condemnation of aggression promote these ends while partiality frustrates them. His method is notably utilitarian, judging moral rules by their consequences.

From this he attacked the Confucian stress on the graded love of family and kin, which he believed to be the root of partiality. He also questioned the elaborate mourning rituals that kept officials from their duties for years, arguing that they wasted the resources of the state and harmed the people. Confucian writers answered him sharply, and the debate between the two schools over love and ritual was one of the great controversies of the age.

Against Aggressive War

Mozi is famous for his condemnation of offensive warfare. He argued that a ruler who kills a single man is punished as a murderer, yet a ruler who kills thousands in an unjust war is honoured as a hero. This inconsistency, he held, showed how perverse human judgment becomes when it is blinded by success and power.

He did not condemn all warfare. He distinguished aggressive war, which he opposed absolutely, from defensive war undertaken to resist an invader, which he considered just. The Mohists accordingly devoted themselves to the arts of defence, and several chapters of their book describe siege engines, fortifications and methods for holding a city against a superior army.

They were also reputed to be able to help a state withstand attack by diplomacy and by the reputation of their skill. A famous story tells how Mozi walked for ten days and nights to the state of Chu to dissuade its king from attacking Song, and how he defeated the engineer of the attack in a war game of models, so that the invasion was abandoned before it began.

Heaven, Knowledge and Logic

Mozi grounded his morality in the will of Heaven, conceived as a personal power that loves all human beings and desires them to love one another. Heaven rewards those who practise universal love and punishes the selfish and the cruel, and it is the ultimate guarantee that the moral order prevails. He also affirmed the existence of spirits who observe human conduct, though he discouraged wasteful sacrifice to them.

The later Mohists, in the chapters known as the Canons and the Major and Minor Illustrations, developed a remarkable body of logic, epistemology and semantics. They analysed the forms of valid argument, distinguished the senses of terms, and discussed the relation between names and things. Some passages anticipate distinctions that reappear in later logical and scientific thought.

They also produced a theory of knowledge in which the mind forms its conceptions from the testimony of the senses, and they distinguished various ways in which something may be said to be known. This interest in argument and evidence was unusual among the Chinese schools and shows the rationalist and technical side of the Mohist tradition.

Decline and Legacy

With the unification of China in 221 BC and the establishment of the Qin and then the Han empire, the Mohist school lost the political conditions that had sustained it. The Han state patronised Confucian learning, and Mohism fell into neglect. By the centuries that followed, the school had largely disappeared, and its book was preserved only in a corrupt and partial form.

Its disappearance was so complete that for many centuries Mozi was remembered mainly as a foil for Confucian writers, who cited him as an example of dangerous dogmatism. Only in the modern period did scholars recover the Mohist texts and appreciate the originality of the school, particularly its logic, its ethics of universal concern and its expertise in defensive warfare.

Mozi is now recognised as one of the most important philosophers of the classical age. His arguments for impartial concern, his criticism of the waste and violence of the aristocratic order, and his insistence that moral rules be judged by their consequences place him beside Confucius and Laozi as a founder of Chinese thought.

See also

• Mohism
• Universal love
• Confucianism
• Defensive warfare