Mozi by Mozi
Published -390 · 130,000 words · about 10 hours at an average pace · Philosophy, Classic Literature
How hard is Mozi to read?
Mozi scores 52 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 72 out of 100
- Argumentative and technical vocabulary including the Mohist Canons' invented logical and geometrical terms, which are among the hardest passages in classical Chinese.
- Sentence structure: 64 out of 100
- Plain repetitive prose in the doctrinal chapters, but the Canons are so corrupt and compressed that reconstructing a sentence is itself a scholarly problem.
- Abstraction: 80 out of 100
- Formal ethical argument with a stated criterion of justification, plus a treatise on definition, inference and physical properties.
- Information density: 70 out of 100
- Doctrines are stated with their proofs, objections and replies, and the technical chapters pack a definition into a handful of characters.
- Narrative indirection: 32 out of 100
- The most direct of the classical Chinese philosophers; positions are announced, numbered and defended.
- Symbolic density: 34 out of 100
- Almost no figurative language. The wheelwright's compass and the carpenter's square appear as standards of measurement, not as metaphors.
- Ironic distance: 48 out of 100
- Mozi is sarcastic in the chapters attacking Confucians and in his dialogues with rulers, but he never says the opposite of what he means.
- Resolution withholding: 36 out of 100
- Every chapter reaches its conclusion; what is unresolved is textual, since large parts of the book are lost or garbled.
- Structural complexity: 66 out of 100
- Seventy-one chapters of which eighteen are lost, with core doctrines preserved in triplicate and the Canons transmitted in a scrambled state.
How Mozi is regarded
Mozi holds a literary regard score of 70 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.