Should a struggling state pay for music? Mozi and Xunzi’s quarrel

I write my dissertation on the Later Mohist canons, which means I spend my days defending a school most people know, if at all, as the one that disliked music. My friends in the conservatory find this hilarious. "Your philosophers," one of them said, "would have shut us down." She is not entirely wrong. But the argument between the Mohists and their Confucian critics about music is one of the best early debates I know about what the arts are for, and both sides deserve a fairer hearing than they usually get.

Music in the Confucian world

In early China, music (yue) was not a private pleasure. It was paired with ritual (li) as one of the two great instruments of social order. Court music accompanied sacrifices, banquets, archery contests and diplomatic meetings. The Analects report that when Confucius heard the Shao music in the state of Qi, he did not notice the taste of meat for three months. For the Confucians, the right music shaped the right dispositions; the wrong music corrupted them.

This music was expensive. Archaeologists have recovered from the tomb of the Marquis Yi of Zeng, dated to around 433 BCE, a set of sixty-five bronze bells hung on a great lacquered frame, tuned so precisely that they can still be played. A set like that required metal, foundries, skilled casters, trained performers and the labor of people who were not, meanwhile, farming.

Mozi's argument

Mozi (c. 470–391 BCE) and his followers judged every doctrine and practice by one test above all: does it benefit the people? Among the Mohists' tests for any doctrine was whether, put into practice, it brought benefit to the state and the common people. The chapter of the Mozi traditionally titled "Condemning Music" applies that test without sentiment.

The argument is not that music is ugly. The Mohists concede that the sound of bells and drums is pleasant to the ear. The argument is about cost and benefit. The people suffer three great troubles: the hungry go without food, the cold go without clothing, the weary go without rest. Does striking great bells and playing pipes relieve any of these? It does not. Yet making instruments requires heavy levies on the people. Performers must be young and strong, so they are taken from the fields and the looms. And rulers and officials who spend their days listening neglect governing. On balance, elaborate music is a loss. A benevolent person, the Mohists say, would forbid it.

Notice how modern this sounds. Mozi is often described as the first systematic consequentialist, and "Condemning Music" is consequentialism applied to cultural spending. It asks the question every finance ministry asks about the opera house.

Xunzi's reply

Xunzi (c. 310 to after 238 BCE) answered in a chapter usually called the "Discourse on Music", and he addresses Mozi by name more than once. His argument starts from a pun the Chinese script makes possible: the character for music, yue, is the same as the character for joy, le. Music, he says, is joy.

Human beings cannot be without joy, and joy cannot stay hidden; it comes out in sound and in movement. If that expression is left without guidance, it becomes disorderly, and disorder harms everyone. So the ancient sage kings composed proper music to give joy a form. Xunzi's famous contrast is that ritual distinguishes while music unites. Ritual marks out roles: elder and younger, host and guest, ruler and minister. Music, played in the ancestral temple or the village or the family hall, draws people who hold those different roles into a shared harmony. Those who hear it together come to feel together.

This fits Xunzi's wider view of human nature. Unlike Mencius, he held that our nature left to itself tends toward conflict, and that goodness is a deliberate construction, built through ritual, teaching and music. On his view, cutting music to save money is like cutting the foundations of a house to save bricks.

What each side got right

I think Mozi was right about something Confucians preferred not to see. The music he attacked was palace music: bell sets like the Marquis Yi's, performed for rulers, paid for by levies on people who would never hear it. His complaint was about who bears the cost and who gets the benefit. That is a question about justice, and Xunzi never fully answers it. When Xunzi talks of music uniting the village and the family, he is describing something quite different from what the Mohists were condemning.

But Xunzi was right about something Mozi's own theory should have counted. Mohist consequentialism measured benefit mostly in material terms: food, clothing, rest, population, order. Yet the Mohists themselves cared enormously about social order and about people identifying with shared standards. If music really does bind people together, if it produces the cohesion that makes cooperation possible, then it is a benefit by Mohist lights. Mozi's error was not consequentialism. It was an incomplete inventory of consequences.

A comparison, and a conclusion

Plato, in the Republic, also wanted music regulated for the sake of the city. He kept some musical modes and excluded others, because he believed modes shape character. Like Xunzi, he thought music was too powerful to be left alone; unlike Xunzi, his first impulse was to restrict rather than to cultivate. Confucius and Plato are often paired as moralists about art, early ancestors of the view that art should be judged by what it does to character. Mozi is the odd one out, the critic who asks not whether music improves souls but whether it feeds anyone.

My own conclusion is that the right question is neither Mozi's nor Xunzi's alone. It is not "does music benefit?" but "whose music, paid for by whom, benefiting whom?" A society that taxes the hungry to ring bells in the palace deserves Mozi's contempt. A society that cuts the village choir and the school band to balance its books has forgotten Xunzi's point, that people who never sing together will find it harder to do anything else together.

My friend in the conservatory, I am happy to report, has decided Mozi would have made an exception for her string quartet, since they play in hospitals on weekends. I told her that is exactly the kind of argument he would have wanted her to make.

For readers who want the texts, Ian Johnston's complete translation of the Mozi and Eric Hutton's complete translation of the Xunzi are both reliable and readable.