The Mohist movement disappeared more completely than any other major strand of Warring States thought once the country was unified, so it is hard for us to imagine that through most of the period it was the chief rival to Confucianism for intellectual dominance. We will have to consider below the cause of the movement’s sudden and total demise, but we can here consider why the text itself, which did survive, attracted little interest and less devotion from Chinese scholars of imperial times. Partly the answer is that from mid Han times Confucianism became something like an official ideology and Mohism was considered not only as opposed to Confucianism, which makes it especially interesting to us, but as having been thoroughly refuted by Confucians, something that could never quite be said of texts that were later denominated Daoist. On top of that, Mo Di does not emerge from the text as a three-dimensional figure. The portrait of Confucius in the Analects, however much embellished by later legend, has made an indelible impression on Chinese throughout the centuries and on Westerners as soon as they began to learn about him, but Mo Di remains a voice more than a person. Finally, the style of the book is awkward and repetitious and lacks the expressiveness of the Mencius, the poetry of the Zhuangzi, or the intellectual seriousness of the Xunzi. Nonetheless, as the most widespread alternative to Confucianism in the Warring States period it deserves serious consideration.
The Analects, as we have noted, consists largely of aphorisms and anecdotes. The axial nature of the Analects derives from its use of old ideas in new ways, its introduction of new terms in the moral vocabulary, and its making ideas that were previously taken for granted available for reflection, but not from the development of logical argument. However unsophisticated in its oldest levels, the Mozi from the beginning introduces sustained argument, often directed toward the rejection or revision of ideas attributed to Confucius. A. C. Graham argues that it is with Mozi that “rational debate in China starts.” True as that may be, it is hard to see how, without the foil of Confucius, Mozi would have gotten started.
If Confucius can be understood in part because of his social situation on the border between the lowest level of the old aristocracy and commoners seeking the education that would allow them to become officials in state systems now more interested in merit than lineage, what can we say about the social situation of Mozi? We have no independent evidence for giving him a social location, but many have made inferences from the text itself, leading to the idea that he came from a somewhat lower stratum than Confucius, perhaps from the artisan class that was influential in urban settings and perhaps especially in the capitals of small states, for which Mozi seems to have been especially concerned. Michael Puett has noted the concern for craftsmanship in this text: “Indeed, metaphors of craft-building, constructing, and fashioning-are so prevalent in the Mohist writings that some scholars have argued that the Mohists were in fact a school of artisans.“75
A. C. Graham links Mozi’s status to his most distinctive teaching: “It would seem that Mozi was a man of low status, an artisan … and that this has something to do with his most distinctive innovation, that he judges institutions not by the tradition of Zhou but by their practical utility, by whether like the linchpin of a wheel they are beneficial to the people.“76 Puett underpins this practical emphasis of the Mohists with an argument for a basic difference with the Confucians as to the legitimacy of innovation at all. He notes that Confucius’s claim to be a transmitter rather than a creator (Analects 7:1) can be attributed to his modesty, but when placed beside another text may have a more far-reaching meaning:
The master said: “Great indeed was the rulership of Yao. So majesticonly Heaven is great, and only Yao patterned himself upon it. So boundless, the people were not able to find a name for it. Majestic were his achievements. Illustrious are his patterned forms [wen zhang].” 77
Puett argues that the Analects fairly consistently emphasizes “patterning” (wen, “pattern,” sometimes translated as “culture”) rather than innovating or creating, thus giving some substance to Mozi’s criticism of Confucius: “Gong Mengzi said: `The superior man does not create [zuo] but only transmits.’ The master Mozi said: `Not so … Desiring for goodness to increase all the more, I believe in transmitting the good things of the past and creating good things for the
Puett argues that Mozi’s positive evaluation of creation, not just transmission, is based on an understanding of Heaven as an active creator, not just a pattern to be imitated. Mozi writes:
Moreover, I know from the following reason that Heaven loves the people generously: It sets forth one after another the sun and the moon, the stars and constellations to lighten and lead them; it orders the four seasons, spring, fall, winter, and summer, to regulate their lives; it sends down snow and frost, rain and dew, to nourish the five grains, hemp, and silk, so that the people may enjoy the benefit of them. It lays out the mountains and rivers, the ravines and valley streams, and makes known all affairs so as to ascertain the good or evil of the people. It establishes kings and lords to reward the worthy and punish the wicked, to gather together metal and wood, birds and beasts, and to see to the cultivation of the five grains, hemp, and silk, so that the people may have enough food and clothing. From ancient times to the present this has always been so?9
Although in the above passage it appears that Heaven establishes kings and lords just as primordially as the sun and the moon, there is another passage that suggests original mankind was without rulers:
Mozi said: In ancient times, when mankind was first born and before there were any laws or government, it may be said that every man’s view of things was different. One man had one view, two men had two views, ten men had ten views-the more men, the more views. Moreover, each man believed that his own views were correct and disapproved of those of others, so that people spent their time condemning one another. Within the family fathers and sons, older and younger brothers grew to hate each other and the family split up, unable to live in harmony, while throughout the world the people all resorted to water, fire, and poison in an effort to do each other injury. Those with strength to spare refused to help out others, those with surplus wealth would let it rot before they would share it, and those with beneficial doctrines to teach would keep them secret and refuse to impart them. The world was as chaotic as though it were inhabited by birds and beasts alone.
To anyone who examined the cause, it was obvious that this chaos came about because of the absence of rulers and leaders.80
Here Mozi sounds almost like Hobbes, except that the source of the war of all against all is the absence of common views rather than the absence of law. But the solution is the same: rulers. Except that for Mozi the primary function of the ruler is to establish right views: “What the superior considers right all shall consider right; what the superior considers wrong, all shall consider wrong.”” At each level, from the local to the whole world, those below are to look to those above for the right standards, standards that elsewhere Mozi tells us can be discerned by taking the will of Heaven as a compass or a carpenter’s square, that is, as the model to be followed.82 In spite of the apparently relentless authoritarianism of Mozi’s view in the “Identifying with One’s Superior” section, the necessity of following the judgment of those above right up to the supreme ruler, the Son of Heaven, still Mozi says:
If we examine the reason why the world was well ordered, we find that it was simply that the Son of Heaven was able to unify the standards of judgment throughout the world, and this resulted in order.
But although all the people in the world may identify themselves with the Son of Heaven, if they do not also identify themselves with Heaven itself, then calamities will never cease. The violent winds and bitter rains which sweep the world in such profusion these days-these are simply the punishments of Heaven sent down upon the people because they fail to identify themselves with Heaven.”’
Although this may be a comment on the sad state of the times, when the judgment of the Son of Heaven (the vestigial Zh
ou king) was no longer in accord with Heaven, or perhaps even that there was in effect no Son of Heaven at the time, it does make clear that there was a standard other than the will of the superior, a substantive standard, the most basic idea of Mozi’s teaching, in terms of which any regime would in the end have to be judged. In the passage above that recounts Heaven’s creative efforts, the reason Heaven creates is stated to be because Heaven “loves the people.” And for humans to identify with Heaven means that they, too, must “love the people,” all the people, and without distinctions. Here we have the Mohist doctrine most commonly translated as “universal love (jian ai),” that Graham prefers to translate as “Concern for Everyone”84 and David Nivison as “impartial caring.“85 A brief description of what jian ai means is as follows:
Therefore Mozi said: Partiality should be replaced by universality. But how can partiality be replaced by universality? If men were to regard the states of others as they regard their own, then who would raise up his state to attack the state of another? It would be like attacking his own. If men were to regard the cities of others as they regard their own, then who would raise up his city to attack the city of another? It would be like attacking his own. If men were to regard the families of others as they regard their own, then who would raise up his family to overthrow that of another? It would be like overthrowing his own. Now when states and cities do not attack and make war on each other and families and individuals do not overthrow or injure one another, is this a harm or a benefit to the world? Surely it is a benefit.86
We will need to consider Mozi’s justification of the doctrine of jian di in terms of benefit, for that will lead us into a central issue concerning his teaching: his utilitarianism. But first we must consider another issue that the above passage raises, and certainly raised for the Confucians, the conflict between jian ai and filial piety (xiao). The Confucians accused the Mohists of having no fathers and no older brothers, of abandoning their filial obligations altogether if they had no higher obligations to their own kin than to anyone else. In the section on the Analects above we concentrated on its basic moral vocabulary and did not discuss this central application of Confucian ethics, namely, to the family. Yuri Pines raises an interesting question about the history of the idea of filial piety. He argues that the term xiao meant primarily lineage loyalty in early Zhou thought and that it actually fell into disrepute in the Spring and Autumn period, where loyalty to insubordinate lineages threatened the viability of states. It was, he argues, only with Confucius and/or the early Confucians that filial piety (xiao) begins to focus on the nuclear family rather than the lineage-that is, the focus is one’s obligations to one’s own father or to one’s own older brother-a much narrower focus than would have been the case earlier, though one in accord with social changes that were undermining extended lineages and making the nuclear family central, though never wholly abandoning concern with ancestors, and so with lineage. Brooks argues that filial piety is not prominent in the earliest level of the Analects, but becomes prominent only later. In any case, not only does it become prominent, but eventually it is seen as the basis of all other ethical obligations, such as loyalty to the ruler, and of the ethical virtues, even the central virtue of ren itself:
Master You said: “A man who respects his parents and his elders could hardly be inclined to defy his superiors. A man who is not inclined to defy his superiors will never foment a rebellion. A gentlemen works at the root. Once the root is secured, the Way unfolds. To respect parents and elders is the root of humanity [ren].” (1:2, trans. Leys)
But although Confucians always believed that Mozi’s teachings violated filial piety and so were to be rejected, they were not entirely immune to them. They argued that concern for one’s own relatives, though a primary obligation, did not mean that one should not be concerned for nonrelatives. For example, respect for one’s father, though primary, was to be complemented by respect for elders in general. And in one widely quoted passage in the Analects, a leading disciple of Confucius takes a view that does not seem to be wholly incompatible with that of Mozi:
Sima Niu was grieving: “All men have brothers; I alone have none.” Zixia said: “I have heard this: life and death are decreed by fate, riches and honors are allotted by Heaven. Since a gentleman behaves with reverence and diligence, treating people with deference and courtesy [li], all within the Four Seas are his brothers. How could a gentleman ever complain that he has no brothers?” (12:5, trans. Leys)
But what we have here, as is usual in the Analects, is an aphorism, pungent and to the point, an expression of moral universalism, but not a theory that can be generalized to all cases.
Graham notes that it is the relentlessness of Mozi’s logic with respect to jian ai that sets him off not only from the Confucians, but from all other thinkers of the time:
“Concern for Everyone” [jinn ai] is a concern for each person irrespective of relations of kinship with oneself. It is this relentless driving of a principle to its logical conclusion which gives Mohism its appearance of being foreign, not merely to Confucian thinking, but to the whole of Chinese civilization as in these few centuries [the Warring States period] it assumes lasting shape. No one else finds it tolerable to insist that you should be as concerned for the other man’s family as for your own.87
I am tempted to compare Mozi, the inventor of logic in China, with Parmenides, the inventor of logic in Greece. Each in his enthusiasm with his new toy pushed the implications to an extreme. Parmenides “proved” that Being doesn’t change-it just is. Change is illusory. He had pushed his metaphysical logic to a position that was at odds with any glance at the empirical world. Nonetheless he provided the impetus to later developments in logic that would be central for all Western philosophy. Mozi pushed his logic to an extreme not in metaphysics but in ethics. Although his successors, the “Later Mohists,” greatly advanced his rather crude beginnings in logic, their work ceased with the general collapse of Mohism at the end of the Warring States period, and logic did not become central in later Chinese thought. Perhaps pushing logic to absurdity in the field of ethics was more dangerous than in metaphysics. It didn’t take only scholars to sense that something was wrong. Indeed, later Mohists tried to moderate Mozi’s argument by holding that “although concern for others should be equal, irrespective of kinship, it is to the benefit of all that each should include among his duties the care of his own kin.“88
The problem with Mozi’s relentless logic is deeper than that involved in his doctrine of jian ai (universal love, Concern for Everyone, impartial caring), though it includes it. It concerns his notion of benefit (li, a homonym but a different word from li, ritual) as the motive for every action, which is generally called Mozi’s utilitarianism. As we have seen, Heaven has a prominent place in Mozi’s teaching, having created the world as we know it out of love for human beings. As in the Analects it is hard to imagine translating Tian as Nature rather than as Heaven. And indeed, Heaven has a will that humans should obey. What Heaven wills is yi, right; concretely it wills that “the strong will not oppress the weak; the eminent will not lord it over the humble; the cunning will not deceive the stupid.“89 Even the Son of Heaven must obey the will of Heaven. But then, here comes the rub:
Now people in the world say: “It is perfectly obvious that the Son of Heaven is more eminent than the feudal lords and that the feudal lords are more eminent than the ministers. But we do not know that Heaven is more eminent and wise than the Son of Heaven!”
Mozi said: I know that Heaven is more eminent and wise than the Son of Heaven for this reason: If the Son of Heaven does something good, Heaven has the power to reward him, and if he does something bad, Heaven has the power to punish him.90
As it turns out, and we find this over and over again in the Mozi, Heaven does indeed desire the right and the good, but it is the infallible benefit that will result in obeying the will of Heaven and the infallible punishment that will follow disobeying that are the final reasons for obe
ying the will of Heaven. Even the injunction of jian ai, universal love, is based on the fact that if everyone acted in accordance with it we would be better off than at present when we don’t. So, finally, it is in our interest to obey the will of Heaven and be concerned for everyone, impartially. It is this indelible utilitarianism that leads Heiner Roetz to characterize Mohism as postconventional, which is what he means by axial, though it is nevertheless postconventional at Kohlberg’s stage five, “the utilitarian, relativistic, social contract orientation,” and not at stage six, “the universal ethical principle orientation.””
Finally, if Heaven is so mechanically engaged in reward and punishment, it would seem that there is a limitation on a personal relation with Heaven. At least we cannot imagine Mozi saying, as Confucius does at Analects 11:9, “Heaven has abandoned Indeed, even in distress, Mozi affirms his basic view:
Master Mozi fell ill. Die Bi came forward and inquired,
“You claim, sir, that the gods and ghosts are clear-seeing and able to bring blessings or disaster; the good they reward, the bad they punish. Now you, sir, being a sage, why have you fallen ill? Would it be that something in your doctrine is bad or that the gods and ghosts do not clearly know?”
Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age Page 59