Mohists and Daoists on the Attitude of the Creator towards Creations: Love vs. Freedom

Abstract

This article describes two types of relationship between the first cause of the universe and its creation in ancient Chinese philosophy – the Mohist and Daoist proper. Mohists describe the relationship between the personal supreme deity (‘Heaven’) and ‘All Under Heaven’ as a relationship of the greatest and all-encompassing love, which distinguishes between good and bad and is always on the side of the first; which is ready to share its excess resources and opportunities with its creatures, but is also ready to judge and punish them if they oppose those whom it loves. The Daoist ideal of relations between the absolute impersonal first cause of the world (‘Way’) and its creations is opposite of this in many aspects: the ‘great love’ of the ‘Way’ is ‘a kin to no one’, it does not evaluate anything, does not desire anything, does not aspire to anything, knows nothing and judges no one. It allows everything to form itself freely, giving it an infinite space of possibilities. An assumption is made about the connection between the understanding of the first cause as personal or impersonal with the interpretation of the relationship between it and the universe as love or as an indifferent free-giving in ancient Chinese philosophy, in connection with which a proposal is made to check this on the material of the Confucian understanding of the relationship of the first cause to creatures as a promising continuation of the topic.