Daoists are ethical thinkers of an unusual sort (Ivanhoe)

Like most traditional Chinese thinkers, Daoists are ethical realists, though of an unusual sort. They believe that true and correct value judgments reflect objective features about the world, and they do not hesitate to criticize those who fails to accord with what is proper and fitting. Though they insist that spoken ways - that is, ways of life that can be decribed and codified - are incomplete and flawed, this does not entail and should not be taken as implying that they reject the idea that there is a normative dao for the world. The Daodejing goes to considerable lengths describing how elusive and indistinct the true dao is. Among other things, it is ineffable, but this does not mean either that it does not exist or that we cannot understand it.

The Daodejing describes a mystical ideal in the sense that those who realize the Way lose a strong sense of themselves as distinct, autonomous agents and to some extent are thought to merge into the dao's underlying patters and processes. In such a state, one does not conceive of oneself as apart from and independent of the rest of the world. While aware of himself and the things around him, such a person does not stand back to view and analyze the dao. Since he sees himself as inextricably intertwined with the overall harmony of the dao, he never assumes the perpective of a narrowly self-interested agent seeking to maximize his individual well-being. Any such higher-order perpective is alien to the Daoist ideal. The Daoist sage is guided by prereflective intuitions and tendencies rather than by preestablished or self-conscious policies or principles.

Chapter 38 describes the history of the decline of the Way from an earlier golden age to its present debased state. This decline is characterized by an increasingly rational and self-conscious picture of the world - an explicit and consistent account of the world - the antithesis of the ideal described above. The dao declined as civilization and high culture arose. On the level of individuals, this means that as one becomes more self-conscious of one's actions, as one reflects upon the things one does and seeks to understand why one does them, one becomes increasingly alienated from one's own true nature and world. More and more, one comes to see oneself as cut off from and independent of the greater patterns and processes of the dao. And through a course of increasingly complex and abstract intellectualization, one loses touch with one's most basic sensibilities and deepest promptings. At this stage, the various virtues that are heralded as the highest achievements of civilized society become vehicles for hypocrisy, deceit, and fraud. Society represents this same phenomenon writ large. (Adapted from the Introduction of The Daodejing of Laozi, by Philip J. Ivanhoe, 2002, Indianapolis 2003)