Daoism and Promises

[quartknee509]

I started thinking about Daoism and living without a fixed agenda and
the idea of promises came up. So many people have their hearts broken
because someone could not keep a promise. Promises are fixed
agendas...they set us up to fail. If we do not promise anything, we
will be flexible in our goals and take things as they come, much like
living a daoist life.

[onei...@osu.edu]

I think believing promises set us up to fail is true, but on the other
hand it gives us security. Without promises we would all be insecure
and through this we wouldn't trust anyone. I think that promises
themselves are fine, its the people who break them that have ruined
it. Maybe instead of avoiding promises everyone should just focus
harder on not breaking them. This is probably more of a confucian
thought to focus on the person.

[Nicholaos Jones]

oneil's reply to this post brings out a very important idea: promises
are connected to issues about security and preditability. Daoists
would see promises as a way of trying to guarantee something that
cannot be guaranteed. We make promises in the hope that, in making
them, the world will go the way we'd like it to go: promises are a way
of trying to control nature. But sometimes promises should be broken:
for instance, if your friend asks you to hold his weapons for him
until he asks for them, and you make a promise to do that, but then
one night your friend shows up in a drunken rage demanding his guns so
he can shoot some guy he was arguing with at the bar, you should
probably break your promise -- because if you keep it, you're not
being a good friend. I suspect Daoists might think of promises as
what people resort to when they lack trust -- if they would just trust
the flow of nature, they wouldn't try to control that flow with
promises.