Laozi 老子 ("the Old Master")

Each being has its own nature, its way of being so of itself, which wisdom consists in letting unfold rather than thwarting. To live well is not to invent oneself freely but to recover the uncarved block (pu), the unhewn simplicity one had before culture sculpted it. The ideal is not self-creation but a return to a given nature.

Dao De Jing, ch. 28 and 19 · Dao De Jing, ch. 32 and 37

"The five flavors dull the palate, racing and hunting madden the heart": sensory excess wears and misleads, and the sage prefers sobriety, "the belly rather than the eye." This is not an asceticism of mortification but a frugality attuned to the natural, which trims excess without condemning simple pleasure.

Dao De Jing, ch. 12 · Dao De Jing, ch. 9 and 67

The Taoist sage dwells in the present moment and the flowing course, without projecting himself into designs for the future, which belong precisely to the forced action he rejects. Yet there remains an orientation toward an original state to be recovered, the Dao before distinctions, which lends his thought a strand of memory-return. The future as project is all but absent.

Dao De Jing, ch. 16 and 64

The world is not ruled by a benevolent providence: "heaven and earth are not benevolent, they treat the ten thousand beings as straw dogs," with the indifference of an impersonal process. Yet this impersonal course is not tragic: whoever accords with it finds peace, and the alternation of opposites ensures no extreme lasts. It is a serene, unillusioned tonality rather than a metaphysical optimism.

Dao De Jing, ch. 5 · Dao De Jing, ch. 2 and 58

Laozi distrusts proclaimed codes and duties: "when the great Dao is lost, benevolence and righteousness arise," a sign of a virtue already fallen into artifice. Right action is neither obedience to a rule nor the calculation of an outcome, but the expression of an inner state attuned to the Dao, the virtue (de) that acts without parading itself as virtuous. It is, for want of any alternative, a virtue ethics, but a spontaneous virtue that denies itself as a code the moment it is named.

Dao De Jing, ch. 18, 19 and 38

The proliferation of rules is for Laozi a symptom of decadence, not a remedy. Rightness cannot be codified; it comes from a supple, living accord with the situation, which places Laozi on the side of the spirit against the letter, out of distrust of every letter.

The more laws and edicts there are, the more thieves and robbers multiply.Dao De Jing, ch. 57

Dao De Jing, ch. 57 and 38

Chapter 80 sketches a dreamed community: a small, sparsely peopled country that forgoes machines and travel, returns to knotted cords for counting, where neighboring villages hear each other's singing yet never visit. This nostalgia for a pre-civilizational simplicity is a regulative ideal turned toward the past, more utopian than realist, even though it presents itself as a return rather than a construction.

Dao De Jing, ch. 80

Laozi does not believe history climbs toward the better: the proper movement of the Dao is return, and civilization has made the human fall from his original simplicity. But his aim is not the conservation of institutions, rites and hierarchies, which he criticizes just as much: it is a primitivism that would go back behind tradition itself, which places him on the side of refusing progress without making him a conservator of established forms.

Dao De Jing, ch. 18, 19 and 38 · Dao De Jing, ch. 16 and 25

The sage "hoards nothing: the more he gives to others, the more he has." Self-effacement, holding back and not pushing oneself forward, is paradoxically what raises and preserves one: it is by struggling for nothing that one becomes indispensable. Altruism here is less a duty than an effect of non-action, which dissolves calculating egoism without turning it into heroic sacrifice.

Dao De Jing, ch. 81 · Dao De Jing, ch. 7 and 66

The distinctions of beautiful and ugly, good and bad, are for Laozi correlative carvings the mind projects: "all know the beautiful as beautiful, and there is the ugly." One might read a relativism here. But these oppositions are relative to a ground that is not, the Dao and the course of nature, which supplies a norm: to follow the natural. The norm is thus real and universal, even as it dissolves particular human codes.

Dao De Jing, ch. 2 · Dao De Jing, ch. 25 and 51

The Dao is not a separate god ordering the world from above: it is the immanent matrix from which all things arise and to which all return, which "gives birth to the ten thousand beings" without commanding them, nourishing them without possessing them. The sacred, here, has no world-behind: it coincides with the very course of nature. Yet this immanence keeps a residue of the inaccessible, since the Dao remains obscure and prior to all distinction, which holds the score back from the extreme.

Dao De Jing, ch. 25 and 51 · Dao De Jing, ch. 4 and 42

Evil does not come from a corrupt human nature but from what corrupts it: affected knowledge, craving, institutions that pit a person against their naturalness. "Abolish wisdom, discard knowledge, and the people will benefit a hundredfold": it suffices to cut away artifice for an original goodness to reappear, like uncarved wood before it is sculpted. This trust in the natural, close to Rousseau, sets him apart from pessimism.

Dao De Jing, ch. 19 and 28 · Dao De Jing, ch. 3 and 65

The sage cultivates calm and an empty heart, and one finds "heaven and earth are not benevolent," an image of serenity without sentimentality. Emotional disturbance arises from attachment and desire, that is, from a wrong relation to the course of things, and dissolves in quietude. The leaning is toward mastery of the affects, but without the Stoic intellectualism of a judging reason: rather an appeasement through return to the natural.

Dao De Jing, ch. 5 and 16