Mohism
It evolved at about the same time as Confucianism, Taoism and Legalism, and was one of the four main philosophic schools from around 770–221 BC (during the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods).
Mohism is best known for the concept popularly translated as "universal love" (Chinese: 兼愛; pinyin: jiān ài; lit.
According to Edward Craig, a more accurate translation for 兼愛 is "impartial care" because Mozi was more concerned with ethics than morality, as the latter tends to be based on fear more than hope.
This political structure consisted of a network of local units in all the major kingdoms of China at the time, made up of elements from both the scholarly and working classes.
Mohists developed the sciences of fortification[clarification needed] and statecraft, and wrote treatises on government, with topics ranging from efficient agricultural production to the laws of inheritance.
Mozi is known for his insistence that all people are equally deserving of receiving material benefit and being protected from physical harm.
The moral guide must then promote and encourage social behaviours that maximize the general utility of all the people in that society.
The concept of Ai (愛) was developed by the Chinese philosopher Mozi in the 4th century BC in reaction to Confucianism's benevolent love.
Mozi tried to replace what he considered to be the long-entrenched Chinese over-attachment to family and clan structures with the concept of "universal love" (jiān'ài, 兼愛).
Mohism stressed that rather than adopting different attitudes towards different people, love should be unconditional and offered to everyone without regard to reciprocation, not just to friends, family and other Confucian relations.
Later in Chinese Buddhism, the term Ai (愛) was adopted to refer to a passionate caring love and was considered a fundamental desire.
[5] Stanford sinologist David Shepherd Nivison, in The Cambridge History of Ancient China, writes that the moral goods of Mohism "are interrelated: An example of this would be, more basic wealth, then more reproduction; more people, then more production and wealth... if people have plenty, they would be good, filial, kind, and so on unproblematically".
With contentment with that which suffices, men will be free from excessive labour, long-term war and poverty from income gap disparity.
Rulers of the period often ritually assigned punishments and rewards to their subjects in spiritually important places to garner the attention of these spirits and ensure that justice was done.
The respect of these spirits was deemed so important that prehistoric Chinese ancestors had left their instructions on bamboo, plates and stones to ensure the continual obedience of their future descendants to the dictates of heaven.
Using historical records, Mohists argued that the spirits of innocent men wrongfully murdered had appeared before to enact their vengeance.
Mohists believed in heaven as a divine force (天 Tian), the celestial bureaucracy and spirits which knew about the immoral acts of man and punished them, encouraging moral righteousness, and were wary of some of the more atheistic thinkers of the time, such as Han Fei.
Prosperity or poverty are directly correlated with either virtue or vice,[7] respectively, so realised by deductive thinking and by one's own logic; not fate.
Mozi calls fatalism that almost indefinitely ends in misanthroponic theory and behaviour, "A social heresy which needs to be disarmed, dissolved and destroyed".
Mozi probably advocated this idea in response to the fact that during the Warring States period, the Zhou king and the aristocrats spent countless time in the development of delicate music while ordinary peasants could hardly meet their subsistence needs.
The Mohist canon (Mo Jing) described various aspects of many fields associated with physical science, and provided a small wealth of information on mathematics as well.
[12] One consequence of Mohist understanding of mathematics and the physical sciences, combined with their anti-militarist philosophy and skills as artisans, was that they became the pre-eminent siege-defense engineers during the period prior to the Qin unification of China.
Mozi and his disciples worked concertedly and systematically to invent and synthesise measures of benefit to defence, including defensive arms and strategy, and their corresponding logistics and military mobilisation.
Mozi travels 10 days and nights when he hears that Gongshu Pan has built machines for the king of Chu to use in an invasion of the smaller state of Song.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy suggests, in addition to the decline of siege warfare, "…the major factor is probably that as a social and philosophical movement, Mohism gradually collapsed into irrelevance.
The philosophy of language, epistemology, metaphysics, and science of the later Mohist Canons were recorded in difficult, dense texts that would have been nearly unintelligible to most readers (and that in any case quickly became corrupt).
What remained as distinctively Mohist was a package of harsh, unappealing economic and cultural views, such as their obsession with parsimony and their rejection of music and ritual.
Compared with the classical learning and rituals of the Confucians, the speculative metaphysics of Yin-Yang thinkers, and the romantic nature mysticism and literary sophistication of the Daoists, Mohism offered little to attract adherents, especially politically powerful ones.
