Legalism Creates Lawbreakers, Not Resourceful Citizens

By Author: Solo Chen
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Rather than educating and cultivating the people, or allowing the "hawkers" of particular theories to create particular desires to indoctrinate the people the sage ruler trusts the people's ability if they are provided with the two concerns of government: food and health. Hawkers, scholars representing themselves as having true knowledge of the Way, are to be kept "at bay," seemingly from both the people and the ruler. In other chapters, the sage ruler of the Daoist state places himself below the common people so that they uphold him, yet do not find him burdensome; he puts his concern behind that of the people so that their way is not blocked, and they regard him as harmless. In his refusal to contend, no one contends with him. This model of governing places authority in the ruler's potential or possibility, which allows space for the heart of the people and so unites the sage ruler and the people. As Hans-Georg Moeller writes, "The sage-ruler takes on the place of emptiness or non-presence while Shoes Online the people take on the place of fullness or presence". The Daodejing imagines ...
... an agrarian Utopia where the farmers' bellies are full and they need not struggle.

The Daodejing also addresses the deformities of Legalism, offering a wonderful tautology: that the more laws, the more lawbreakers. Still, more than through any particular skirmish, it responds to Legalism through its radical emphasis on the failure of human striving, defining, and controlling. As soon as humans know beauty, they know ugliness, for being and non-being entail each other. As much as a Legalist might want the laws to rule, and as much as a Confucian might want ren to be cultivated, their privileged concept entails the opposite; and the possibility of the opposition, however repressed, never disappears. Eighty-one chapters on diversity in themselves are a response to those seeking stability. How might the refusal of Cheap Shoes struggle and control, deliberation, and persuasion be useful to a ruler How are the various lacks, binaries, and tautologies of Daoism persuasive Unlike the reverence for tradition and self-cultivation that the Analects requires of the ruler, unlike Legalism's sterile set of laws, the Daodejing offers a corrective vision of how a state might work. Rather than ask for a leader's constant, striving presence committed to a particular virtue, the vision is persuasive in that it argues for opening up possibilities by refusing Confucian nostalgia and Legalism's external controls. In its offering of future potentials, the Daodejing engages Otherness. It opens up the possibility of difference in the natural order and, in doing so, recognizes the ruler and the people as capable of finding their way through time. Its optimism about human potential contrasts with its caustic attack on Confucian tradition, simply "hawks" "veneer." Legalism, on the other hand, creates lawbreakers, not resourceful citizens.

The Daodejing's innate ambiguities and openness acknowledge the gulf between human beings and demonstrate the natural bridging that humans do through interpretation. Perhaps the Daodejing does not offer a handbook to an emperor, but it offers a corrective response to the rules and strivings toward stability of Confucianism and Legalism. It does this in its acknowledgment of diverse meaning and of the human willingness to interpret and discuss paradox and radical ambiguity. Further, the Daodejing offers more than the tolerance of diversity; after all, tolerance, too much like pity, comes from a place of privilege. One can tolerate only if one has the choice not to tolerate, not to engage, not to acknowledge. Instead, the Daodejing aims at radical equality and openness to organic change and possibility: the high might be low; what is sound harmonizes with silence. The strivings of persuasion are not significant in a world of constant shifts, gaps, and absences. What difference is there between yes and no? And paradoxically implied in this last question, what point is there to naming, dialogue, or persuasion