Hallo, this is Dr. Bin Song at Washington College for the course of “Introduction to Comparative Religion: Eastern.”

The four stages of the development of Daoism can be summarized as follows:

Firstly, it starts as a seriously dissenting voice among the so-called hundred schools of thought in the period of Spring and Autumn and Warring States (770-221 B.C.E), with “dissent” here mainly understood as being against, or simply different from the emphasis of Ruism (Confucianism) on education, ritualization, social activism and ethical governance.

The gist of the dissent of Daoism from Ruism in their classical period can be briefly described as follows:

In face of the rampant social turmoil and interstate wars created by the collapse of the late Zhou Dynasty, Confucius diagnosed the origin of the social disease as the “under-civilization,” or “under-humanization” of each human individual. Therefore, in order to recover the social order and regain the so-called “peace under the heavens” as elaborated by the text of Great Learning, Confucius’s ambition was to build an independent school to provide people with a more universal access to education, and furthermore, to cultivate students’ virtues and knowledge via a broad learning process of the fruits of ancient civilizations. Ultimately, Confucius intended his students to become a noble-minded, exemplary human, the so-called Junzi, and hence, get hired by governments to serve the society as ethical and competent civil leaders. For Confucius, this process of education and self-cultivation of a junzi is the ultimate path for the society to recover the delicate ritual system that once functioned well in early Zhou Dynasty, and hence, to realize the sustainable development of the civilization.

However, for the Daoist philosophers, such as Laozi and Zhuangzi, they have different understanding of the situation. They thought the cause of social turmoil is not the “under-civilization” of human individuals. It is actually the “over-civilization” of human individuals when their innocent, naturally flourishing human life gets complicated by the increase of human knowledge, the artificiality of human intelligence, the unrestrained social competition and the advancement of technology. In other words, for Daoist thinkers, education leads to the over-development of human intelligence, and if individuals rely upon this advanced development of human intelligence to compete for limited social resource, chaos will follow and government will fall apart. Therefore, rather than calling for more education and social engagement of the so-called noble-minded, exemplary individuals, Daoist thinkers advocate less education and less social engagement of human beings in general. Ultimately, a primitive natural state of society, where each individual enjoys their life alone with little use of technology and sociality, will be the ideal society human beings could ever have.

Of course, this is a rather very sketchy account of the contrast between Daoism and Ruism, and I intend the value of this account to be more heuristic than prescriptive. However, an important angle to understand the origin of Daoism, similar to the case of Buddhism versus Vedic and Upanishadic Hinduism, is indeed to grasp how different and similar it is in comparison to the Ru school which Confucius helped to transmit and strengthen. This is also the reason why it is appropriate to teach the Daoist tradition after Ruism in our course.

Secondly, everything we just talked of transpired in the pre-Qin period of ancient China. After Qin Dynasty reunified the Warring States and was shortly replaced by another unifying dynasty, Han Dynasty, Daoism, mainly in the form of the so-called Huang-Lao thought, played a very prominent role of statecraft and governance in early Han Dynasty, largely from 202-130s B.C.E. The major sociological reason for such a prominent role is that the Daoist political philosophy, as indicated by the above account, largely takes a “laissez-faire” approach which precludes the substantial interference and proactive coordination of governments with local people’s economic and social activities. This mentality fit very well with the need of early Han Dynasty to recover itself from the devastating wars and turmoil caused by the dynastic change between Qin and Han. In this period of its history, Daoist thought also incorporated a cluster of thoughts and practices that flourished here and there in the vast Han territory, and developed features such as the practice of sorcery, divination, shamanistic rituals, longevity, medicine, and the cosmological speculation over the all-pervasive correlation of everything in the universe via the theory of yin/yang and five phases.

Thirdly, however, under the reign of the Emperor Wu (156-87 B. C.E), the central government of Han Dynasty intended more ideological unity of its political system. In front of the Emperor Wu, there were mainly three options for him to achieve this: firstly, Legalism, which emphasizes strengthening the central authority of an empire through a strict law system of reward and punishment. This school of thought was once adopted by the prior Qin dynasty. It helped Qin to win over enemies on the battlefield and thus reunify the territory, but it failed Qin in the later peaceful time since Qin’s harsh punishments upon its subjects engendered uncontrollable resentments and rebellions. Qin accordingly became one of the most short-lived dynasties in ancient Chinese history. In light of Qin’s failure, Legalism seemed not quite a choice for Emperor Wu.

The second choice was Daoism, which, as stated, was favored by the Han emperors prior to Wu for quite a length of time. However, the “laissez-faire” approach of statecraft might be good for a time of recovery from devastating wars, but not equally fit for the sustainable development of a country, since the growth of local economic and political powers needs coordination, and the unity of the central government needs to be supported by a strong ideology.

So, eventually, propelled by Ru scholars’ persuading efforts such as Dong Zhongshu (179-104 B.C.E), the Emperor Wu chose Ruism, one lineage of thought that cherishes the values of ancient civilization, emphasizes unity within diversity, and favors a soft approach via education, family-nurturing, and ritualized public life to regain the desired unity. In other words, in the eyes of the Emperor Wu, the Ru tradition incorporates the good sides, avoids the bad sides from other schools of thought, and more importantly, can serve the diverse needs of social classes while still being able to unify the entire country as a whole. This decisive policy-move by the Emperor Wu was named by later Historians as “taking down a hundred schools of thought, while venerating the Ru statecraft alone.”

Then, we got to the fourth stage of the development of the Daoist religion in ancient China. The impact of the edict of the Emperor Wu in Han Dynasty to elevate the status of Ruism turned out to be extremely profound and long-lasting for the entire history of imperial China until early 20th century. Ruism became a state ideology, and its vast knowledge about ethics, statecraft and ancient civilizations constitutes the major criteria by which varying dynasties and imperial courts select governmental-officials among young and ambitious literati via the system of civil-examination. In other words, Ruism became the intellectual and spiritual foundation of the social elite of ancient China. This drove Daoism and its devoted affiliates and sympathizers, who were once very powerful in the court of early Han Dynasty, to find alternative social spaces to survive and evolve. In this regard, the establishment of the theocratic regime Tian Shi Dao (The Way of Heavenly Master) by Zhang Daoling (34-156 C.E) in the remote southwestern areas and in a time of rampant peasant rebellions in late Han Dynasty was a milestone event. This was the first time Daoism got established as an organized religion, and such a Daoist religion also started to construct its pantheon of deities, compile its canon, build its monastery, officialize its rules of rituals and ceremonies, and hence get intertwined with families and communities of its surrounding local areas.

However, despite that Tian Shi Dao being the first organized Daoist religion in ancient China, there were various Daoist religions created in the later history, which had no organizational relationship with Tian Shi Dao. On the other hand, although the Daoist thought lost its favor in the imperial court under the reign of the Emperor Wu in Han Dynasty, it never completely disappeared from politics. Rather, certain reigns of emperors in some dynasties actually were quite fond of the Daoist religion, and saw themselves as a loyal devotee of those Daoist deities. For the everyday life of local commoners and folks, we also witnessed a ceaseless process of intermingling and mutual-generating of practices and thoughts among the Daoist, Buddhist, Western, folk religions and the dominant Ruist social ethics. For instance, you’ll find strong traces of the Buddhist breathing technique in the Daoist method of “inner-alchemy”; you’ll find Daoist groups sometimes quite fervently advocated the Ru ethic of filiality to parents, loyalty to rulers and humaneness to all beings; you can even find the Catholic idea of “purgatory” to be overtly taught in some of the Daoist canon. In other words, in the fourth stage of the development of Daoist religion, it constantly meanders, metamorphizes, and proliferates into a loosely recognizable body of the so-called Daoist religion which includes a vast array of deviance, devolution, and diversity.

Because of this, I believe you must feel somewhat confused if you decide to learn Daoism starting from the most recent form of a Daoist religious order in the contemporary world (just as the assigned video indicates), since it would lie at one very end of a history which has evolved for almost three thousand years, and thus, was itself predominantly featured by diversity rather than unity.

Nevertheless, all trees, no matter how much ramified and widespread they seem, have their roots. By the same token, no matter how diverse Daoist orders can be from each other, they almost all read Laozi and Zhuangzi, the earliest Daoist texts in the initial stage of Daoist religion. Therefore, for our introductory course on Eastern Religion, we’ll spend some considerable time to read these two texts as well. I hope via this approach of being introduced to Daoism, we can be equipped with basic intellectual tools to understand the later, more colorful development of Daoist religions.

Hallo, this is Dr. Bin Song at Washington College!

In this unit, let’s continue to talk about David Hume, not about his empiricist epistemology, but his so-called moral sentimentalism.

As discussed in last unit, Hume can be considered as a rare dissenting voice among modern thinkers, since he thinks it is “custom and habit” which plays the most dominant role in human knowledge about the objective natural world. His general attitude towards natural science, because of his emphasis upon custom and habit, remains modest since according to his theory, all human reasoning about cause and effect is based upon what we today call “induction,” and this implies that all scientific conclusions about causality are by no means certain and fixed once for all. Instead, they always succumb to testing, falsification and perfection, which is quite in line what we have discussed about Karl Popper’s thought on the distinction between science and pseudo-science, although Popper’s understanding of scientific methodology is somewhat different from Hume. In an era when the reputation of natural science was skyrocketing because of its unprecedented power of accurate prediction and technological transformation, we have to admire Hume’s modesty and reservation about how limited human knowledge can be.

However, in comparison with Hume’s ethics, I think the salient nature of Hume’s thought in epistemology will even pale. This is because Hume’s evaluation on the role of reason in morality is not even “modest;” it is actually a downright denial. In other words, Hume thinks in evaluating a character trait of human beings or their action as good or bad, virtuous or vice, morally right or wrong, “reason” does not play any role whatsoever. Therefore, contrary to the normal moral teaching (which we may hear too much during our daily conversations with each other) that urges human beings to listen to their reason rather than passion, Hume claims that reason, no matter how accurate and “true” it may sound, cannot play any role in motivating humans’ actions, and thus, it is actually passions, emotions, feelings, and in a word, sentiments which ultimately constitute the human judgement on moral virtues and vices.

Hume’s argument for this seemingly very counter-intuitive view is relatively easy to understand. He says “reason,” just as what he has mused in his epistemology, can only achieve two things: it is either about the relationship of “ideas” following the law of non-contradiction, or about cause and effect in matters of fact. The reasoning about the relationship between ideas can never motivate humans to act in their moral affairs because as explained in his epistemology, “ideas” are vague copies of “impressions”; they lack the vivacity and intensity of impressions such as the raw sentiments of pleasure and pain, and therefore, a mere contemplation of the ideas can never directly indicate the values of outside objects to human life, and hence, motivate human beings to react to these values. This is the reason why the presentation of data, statistics or mathematical reasoning in general rarely, if not never, motivates us to act morally towards a certain direction.

If reasoning is about cause and effect in matters of fact, considered by itself, this sort of reasoning is just to represent what happens objectively outside of human mind. Since it comprises of representations, this sort of reasoning would be like putting a screen between human mind and the outside world. In other words, since a mere representation of the outside world does not cause any direct perception of the good or bad of outside objects, reasoning in matters of fact cannot motivate our moral actions either.

Instead, Hume thinks that in order for any process of reasoning to have those possessive power to eventually grasp the attention of humans, and thus, motivate humans to react to circumstances, it needs to be conjoined with another fundamental component of human consciousness, that is the sentiment of pleasure or pain, as well as the triggered passions such as pride and shame, love and hatred. Understood in this way, the role played by reasoning in morality is merely twofold: firstly, if the awareness towards certain objects does cause the feeling of pleasure or pain, reason can help to check whether such objects exist or not, since one function of reason would be to represent the objects in the outside world. Secondly, the reasoning of cause and effect on matters of fact can help humans to find the means to fulfill their desires which are ultimately caused by the sentiment of pleasure or pain in the first hand. In other words, by all counts, it is the sentiment of pleasure or pain which helps humans to judge whether any outside object, such as a character trait of humans or any action, is morally good or bad, virtuous or vicious. Reason, using Hume’s own words, is just “the slave of passions,” and it can by no means be contrary to passions, since reason alone cannot motivate humans to act. What the normal moral teaching of listening to one’s reason rather than passions really conveys, according to Hume, is actually to use one passion to counteract another. This is because only passions can motivate humans’ moral judgment and behaviors, whereas reason merely comes afterwards to serve the actions out of passions as an instrument.

What is particularly interesting about Hume’s thought on the significance of sentiments in morality is that he thought while moral judgement is based upon the sentiment of pleasure or pain, it is not purely out of self-interest that humans evaluate certain deeds as virtuous or vicious. For instance, we can estimate certain character traits of our enemies, such as diligence, loyalty, or wisdom, as virtuous even if these virtues are contrary to our self-interest. Therefore, in order to have “sentiments” play the central role in moral judgment, Hume also thinks our moral consideration needs to be conducted from “a general point of view,” rather than from a merely selfish perspective. In other words, if we think certain character traits as being able to bring pleasure and joy to a certain human fellow or others, then, they can be judged as virtuous. This also brings us to another very important aspect of Hume’s ethical thought: sympathy. According to Hume, It is out of sympathy with the sentiments of human fellows that we ultimately deliver our moral judgment about virtue and vice regarding any potential moral event in human society.

When almost every named philosopher eulogized the triumphant role of reason in the modern era of Enlightenment, Hume’s skeptical voice towards reason using such a rigorous argument is really freshing, if not utterly convincing. It points out the limited role of reason in moral affairs, and most importantly, in order to live a good human life, individuals should pay more attention to cultivating their virtues, which are intimately interconnected with their moral sentiments, than acquiring advanced calculative power of human intelligence. Unfortunately, I do not think even today, human fellows have carefully listened to Hume’s advice. For instance, the educational system, from pre-K to higher education, is still dominated by a mentality of what I may call “intelligence first, and character second.” In other words, the cultivation of sentiments, emotions and feelings has not yet occupied a central role in the curriculum of modern educational institution. In this respect, I think philosophers and educators today really need to revive Hume’s thought for the sake of the general well-being of human fellows in modern society.

However, although Hume’s thought is indeed extremely valuable for reminding us of the significance of sentiments and passions for the good human life, his view that reason does not play any significant role in morality is also a little bit overstated, since he gives such a narrow definition of “reasoning” to make it exclusively address the relationship of lifeless ideas and represent objectively matters of fact. Defined as such, reason indeed has very little power to motivate moral thought and action. However, reasoning can also be about “values,” rather than just about ideas and facts. Per Hume’s analysis, the value of things ultimately derives from the sentiments they cause to human beings. However, just as indicated by his analysis of the role of “sympathy” in triggering our moral sentiments, “pleasure” has its different kinds, intensity and endurability. Accordingly, values of things to human life based upon such different pleasures can also be varying. In this sense, we can compare the values of things, character traits, actions, or even lifestyles and worldviews so as to “reason” about them in order to guide our moral reaction to things in the world. In other words, when things in the outside world affect us, our perceptions of them are normally entangled with our value judgments of them, and these value-laden judgments in turn can trigger a certain kind of emotions, which eventually motivate us to act. Actually, this identified sequence of stimuli – value-laden perceptions – emotions – behaviors is a major tool for today’s therapists to envision the significance of philosophy for mental health, since a philosophical understanding of certain aspects of human life can directly shape our perceptions of the outside world, which in turn will rectify certain kinds of self-defeating emotions such as stress, anxiety or depression due to our misperceptions of the value of things in the world.

Of course, my critique towards Hume is not a major one in comparison to his enormous contribution to the discussion about what really matters in morality among modern thinkers. In a certain sense, this critique can also be made compatible with Hume’s thought since moral sentiments are indeed a major source for our judgment of values of things in the world. In a word, if we include “values” as a major target of human reasoning, we can still claim “reason” plays a significant role in morality, and we indeed need to rely upon the cultivation of a specific kind of sentiments, which can be aided by our moral reasoning, to live a fulfilled good human life.