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Brecht’s Materialist Ethics between Confucianism and Mohism
- Philosophy East and West
- University of Hawai'i Press
- Volume 66, Number 1, January 2016
- pp. 122-145
- 10.1353/pew.2016.0006
- Article
- Additional Information
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This essay examines how Brecht’s long-standing engagement with the philosophies of Confucius and Mo Zi helped to shape a materialist perspective that is far more complex than what is suggested by one of his most famous lines: “Food is the first thing. Morals follow on” (The Threepenny Opera [1928]). The essay’s primary references are two texts by Brecht, which remained fragments and are not (yet) available in English translation: his notes for a play on the Life of Confucius (1940–1941) and an extensive collection of shorter prose texts from the 1930s, first published posthumously in 1965 under the title Me-ti: Buch der Wendungen (Mo-zi: Book of turns).