PhilosophersLao-tseu (Laozi)

Lao-tseu (Laozi)

Follow the Way (Dao) through non-action.

DaoismVIe s. av. J.-C. ? (tradition) ChinaLegendary founder of DaoismThinker of the Way (Dao)Critic of power and ritualUncertain author
Daodejing, 8, 76 and 78

Water: the weak overcomes the strong

What it claims

The highest good is to be like water: supple, useful to all, in the low place the crowd despises, without competing. Whoever fights no one receives no blame.

Why

What is supple goes with life, what is rigid with death, and water, the weakest of things, overcomes the hardest.

Valid with an implicit premise

Nothing is softer than water, yet it carves valleys and wears away stone. The Daodejing draws a way of life from it: be supple, stay low, do not compete. The text reasons through images and observations of nature; the form P1, P2… → C is our reconstruction, and it makes visible a leap that the poetry hides.

P1In nature, the supple and weak go with life, the stiff and hard with death: the newborn is supple, the corpse is stiff; the young shoot is tender, the dead tree is dry.
P2Water, the weakest thing in the world, overcomes what is hard and strong: nothing surpasses it at that.
P3So, in general, the weak overcomes the strong and the soft the hard. Everyone knows it, but no one puts it into practice.
P4 · implicit premiseWhat prevails and sides with life in nature is also the best way for a human being to live.
Therefore the highest good is to be like water: supple, useful to all, in the low place the crowd despises, without competing. Whoever fights no one receives no blame.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.
Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P4, the computer finds a case where the supple prevails in nature, but this says nothing about the best way for a human to live.
There are two leaps. First, P3 generalises from a few examples (water, plants, the body): that is induction, which logic cannot guarantee; we write it as a premise. Then, with P4, the conclusion follows. Without P4, nothing forces us to move from "what happens in nature" to "what is good to do": that is the hidden premise, and the most disputed one.
Analogy. In judo you do not block your opponent's force: you yield and use their momentum. In an argument, whoever raises their voice stiffens; whoever stays calm lets the other wear themselves out. The Daodejing takes the example of the tree: the one that has grown strong gets cut down.

Objections

3

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

Hume 1739 · attacks premise 4

One cannot derive an "ought" from an "is". That the supple prevails in nature is a fact; that it is good to be supple is a value judgement, which follows from no fact. One may add that nature also shows the opposite: the hard, strong shark has survived very well for millions of years.

no reply
summary: their text is not yet in our corpus
No reply possible: objection raised in 1739, after the author's death (-500).
Nietzsche 1887 · attacks the conclusion

Turning weakness into a virtue is the lie of the weak: one calls one's fear "humility" and one's inability to take revenge "gentleness". Nietzsche targets Christian morality, not the Daodejing, but the objection applies: is praising the low place not a way of consoling those who have no choice?

Lao-tseu replies
Lao-tseu What the text already says
The text asks us to "know the male and keep to the female" (Legge: "who knows his manhood's strength, yet still his female feebleness maintains"). So the low place is kept by someone who also knows strength, not by someone who has only ever known weakness.
The debate goes on (our summary) A Nietzschean would answer that calling oneself strong while choosing the low place is precisely weakness's cleverest disguise.
C
Chinese history (unification by Qin) 221 BC · attacks premise 3

In 221 BC the hardest, most heavily armed state, Qin, swallowed all the others and unified China. Often in history, the strong does indeed overcome the weak. The examples of water and plants are chosen, not representative.

no reply
summary: their text is not yet in our corpus
We have not yet found a direct reply by Lao-tseu in the texts.
The debate goes on (our summary) Chapter 76 does say that "he who relies on the strength of his forces does not conquer", but that restates the thesis rather than answering the example. Defenders of the text point out that Qin collapsed by 206 BC, fifteen years after unification, and that several of the first Han rulers, who lightened taxes and punishments, claimed Laozi's inspiration (the Huang-Lao current). The objector would answer that the Han nonetheless kept most of Qin's administration and laws: hardness did not do so badly.