Xunzi by Xunzi
Published -250 · 160,000 words · about 13 hours at an average pace · Philosophy, Classic Literature, Essays
How hard is Xunzi to read?
Xunzi scores 55 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: 74 out of 100
- A large technical vocabulary of ritual, music and psychology, with terms such as li, wei and lei used in precise senses Xunzi defines himself.
- Sentence structure: 66 out of 100
- Long parallel-prose periods with stacked analogies, the most formally constructed argumentative writing of the classical period.
- Abstraction: 86 out of 100
- Sustained philosophy of nature, mind, language and social order, including an explicit theory of how names attach to things.
- Information density: 76 out of 100
- Dense with citation from the Odes and Documents, with each essay answering several rival schools at once.
- Narrative indirection: 34 out of 100
- Xunzi states his thesis, marshals his analogies and reaches his conclusion; there is no ambiguity about who is speaking.
- Symbolic density: 52 out of 100
- The steamed plank, the ground blade, the sponge-like mind and the ritual vessels are recurring figures, used as arguments rather than as poetry.
- Ironic distance: 50 out of 100
- He attacks named contemporaries with cold sarcasm, especially Mencius and the sophists, but never disguises his own position.
- Resolution withholding: 38 out of 100
- Each essay closes its case, though the tension between a bad nature and an invented goodness is left doing work he does not fully settle.
- Structural complexity: 54 out of 100
- Thirty-two self-contained essays plus verse riddles, mostly by one hand, in an order that carries no argument of its own.
How Xunzi is regarded
Xunzi holds a literary regard score of 77 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.