Tuesday September 30, 2010

• Mozi- Mohist thought.
• Is a polytheist.
• This is the key to morality- religious conviction, its is the key to fixing China.
• Mozi never got important enough to burn his books.
• Active and teaching during the 400’s BC.
• Mozi was once a confucian but then left the confucians. Why? Who knows, but there are several hints in his book. One of his complaints, was that they were such lavish spenders. He had issues with how much pressure there was on sons concerning filial piety. Prim and proper funeral directors was what the confucians had become. He establishes his own school of thought but he also doesn't like the fact that the confucians ignore the divine realm.
• It was a soft gnosticism and for Mozi, that was too wishy-washy. He doesn't like Confucius’ lenience concerning the divine.
• Mozi takes the confucius virtues and turns them upside down. Ren was not the most important- Yi was. Yi means uprgihtness or righteousness. It is correct human conduct.To be righteous, you have to be aided by the world of the supernatural.
• Confucius- the universe is everything. Mozi insists that transcending nature is the divine realm and therefore we shouldn’t only be concerned about nature. The divine realm needs ti be worried about as well.
• Does Mozi reject ritual? No, but he believes that a funeral must be simple and dignified. They need to show mourning.
• He believes that Ren is the determination and focus on doing good.
• Is appalled by high degrees of love. He thinks its wrong to love one’s own mother more than other mothers and wrong to love one’s sons, more than other sons. Jian Ai- he believed in universal love.
• Mozi believed that the world would fall apart if people loved selfishly. Others needed to be loved more.
• Mozi is fascinated by numbers and technology and, he gives a perfect definition of a circle.
• Loves debates and logic- he loves precise analytical thought.
• He has faith in the innate goodness of human beings but that alone is not enough.
• Since people are not perfect, they cannot achieve righteousness. He believed in ethical seers- ppl who encouraged you to do right and punished you for doing wrong. These seers would be Government officials- teachers as well as police. 2 jobs combined into one.
• Can you compel all to believe? No. There are some who just won’t believe in his way of thinking. Mozi is not what you would call, a deeply introspective and philosophical type, the test for him is whether a practice or idea is good or not; leading, therefore, to the benefit of the people.
• He is practical, utilitarian, and believed in regimentation. He also believes in punishment for those who do bad.
• He wants ppl to believe that bad things happen when ppl stop believing.
• Mozi thinks of the divine real, as something anthropomorphic.
• Anthropomorphic- having the nature of a human.
• For Mozi, the great beyond is capable of human emotion, such as sorrow when we misbehave and happiness when people do good.
• He was sincerely worried that the divine realm would think that humanity itself was a cosmic misfit, AND, that it would ultimately be destroyed.
• He uses heaven and the divine realm interchangeably.
• Heaven is capable of anger and joy; when we blow it, heaven begins to send natural disasters. Mozi believed that that was heaven sending the world a little hint of destruction to come.
• He mostly talked about the wrath of heaven instead of the pleasures of heaven. Probably because he believed that China was behaving very badly anyways.
• He concluded that if you behaved well, the concept of universal love would just come. Humanity would just get it.
• “Partiality of love is wrong”. It can lead to, according to Mozi, war. War ist he ultimate abomination for him. He was living in a time where the states were warring with each other and he could not stand it.
• Not loving each other can lead to huge mistakes.
• He dreaded war. He thinks that the continued presence of war would lead to the cosmic destruction of humanity.
• Is he a complete pacifist?
• No. He is not. IF you do not seek war, but war seeks you, it is okay to fight, but only defensively.
• He becomes a specialist in protecting cities from getting attacked.
• There are allowed to be archers standing on top of the walls that are built, in order to protect the city.
• Mozi idealizes the past. Long time ago in antiquity, things were great.
• The recipe for the greatness of antiquity was the fact that people believed in the divine.
• Mozi’s fate? He fades away 200 or 300 years after his death. His movement didn’t go anywhere.
• WHY? Why did Mozi not take hold?
• Maybe because he talked about things that were too hard for human beings to do.
• Mozi didn’t have faith in human capacity to fix things.

• Mencius beat up on Mozi’s beliefs all of the time. He thought it was stupid to love other people more than your own. How, he asked, is that possible? It is not the natural order of things to do so.