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The Mohists and the Disputers

Mozi founded a movement that rivalled the Ru; its later members wrote the canons on argument preserved in the book that bears his name. Beside them worked the disputers (bianzhe), among them Hui Shi, active around 313 BCE, and Gongsun Long (c. 320–250 BCE); the Han library filed them together as the “School of Names”. Both used the same word for the activity: disputation, bian.

The Mohist “Lesser Selection” says what disputation is for: by it “we clarify divisions between this (shì) and not-this (fēi) to examine the guidelines of order and disorder; clarify points of sameness and difference to discern the patterns of names (míng) and stuff (shí); and settle benefit and harm to resolve uncertainty and doubt” (tr. Fraser). Its end is order and the benefit of the people.

The method is standards. “None has yet accomplished anything without standards”, the Mohist chapter “On the Necessity of Standards” begins (tr. Mei). Every claim is held to three: its basis in “the deeds of the ancient sage-kings”, its verification “by the senses of hearing and sight of the common people”, and its application, “adopting it in government and observing its benefits to the country and the people” (Mozi 35). To speak without a standard is like “determining the directions of sunrise and sunset on a revolving potter’s wheel”. And a dispute has a winner. “Disputation is contending over a ‘that’; winning disputation is fitting” (Canon A74): when one calls a thing “ox” and the other “not-ox”, they cannot both fit, so one must fail to fit. “To say that disputation has no winner is necessarily not fitting” (B35). The Zhuangzi’s “who shall adjudicate?” takes the opposite view (The Daoists).

The disputers made disputation an end in itself, on their critics’ telling. Hui Shi “had many methods and his books filled five carts”, in the words of the Zhuangzi’s “Tianxia” chapter, which lists his ten theses, from “the utmost great has nothing outside it: call it the great one; the utmost small has nothing inside it: call it the small one” to “go to Yue today and arrive yesterday” and “love the myriad things widely; heaven and earth are one body”. The disputers answered him with paradoxes of their own, “and responded to Hui Shi without end all their lives”. Gongsun Long’s “White Horse” argues: “‘Horse’ is what names the shape; ‘white’ is what names the colour; what names the colour does not name the shape. So I say a white horse is not a horse.” A later introduction to his book gives the aim as the Confucian one, the rectifying of names: “pained by the scattering of names and stuff … he wished to extend this disputation to rectify names and stuff and so transform the world”. In it he refuses Kong Chuan, who offers to become his pupil if he drops the white horse: “what I am known for is the white-horse argument; if I drop it, I have nothing to teach.”

Their critics all asked what the disputing was for. “Tianxia” says of Hui Shi: “He took opposing others as the substance of his activity and desired to make a name for himself by defeating others” (tr. Fraser); “he chased the myriad things and did not come back: like silencing an echo by shouting, a body racing its shadow. Sad!” Of the disputers: they “can defeat others’ mouths, but cannot persuade their hearts”. Sima Tan granted that the school of names had to be examined for its rectifying of names, but found that it “decides everything by names and loses people’s feelings”. The fa texts went further and named “the hard and the white” among the talk that ends laws and commands (The fa tradition).