Lao Tzu, also known as Lao Tan (dān Dan), was an objective idealist of Confucius's contemporaries. The date of his birth and death and his lineage are no longer certain. According to Sima Qian, it seems that Confucius once asked Lao Tzu about "etiquette." He had served as a historian of the Zhou Dynasty, and when he saw the zhou dynasty decay, he returned to his hometown of Chuguo Ku County (in present-day Guide, Henan) to become a hermit. The extant book "Lao Tzu", also known as the "Tao Te Ching", is a book with rich philosophical content, which is a rhyming poem written in folk proverbs, with a full text of more than 5,000 words. Although this book was written in the early Warring States period and was not written by Lao Tzu, it can basically represent Lao Tzu's thought. During the Cultural Revolution, the Lao Tzu book found in the Han tomb in Mawangdui, Hunan Province, was arranged in a different way from the traditional Lao Tzu, with the Dejing in the front and the Daojing in the back. For this situation, it is still in the process of research and discussion. Today, we still use the traditional book "Lao Tzu" as the material for analyzing Lao Tzu's thought.
Lao Tzu lived in a transitional era when slave society began to disintegrate and feudal society began to rise. From lao tzu and the history of Lao Tzu, Lao Tzu represents the idea of the decline of the slave-owning class in this period. In the face of the turbulent society, Lao Tzu is both dissatisfied with reality and powerless; he feels his own decline, but he is not willing to perish like this, and he fantasizes about driving back the wheel of history in an attempt to save his destiny.
Politically, Lao Tzu also lost faith in the system of rules and regulations of the declining slave-owning class and advocated its abandonment. He was even more disgusted by the system and new things of the new landlord class, attacking them, denouncing the extravagance and profligacy of the feudal rulers, accusing them of heavy taxes on the people and waging cruel wars, causing the fields to be deserted, the people starving to death, and calling them "thieves" of bandits. But Lao Tzu did not speak for the people, but only the old class that had stepped down, insulting the newly brought upstarts. So, what kind of society did Lao Tzu idealize? He advocated "doing nothing" and "ruling without doing anything." That is, he said: "I do nothing and the people are self-sufficient, I am quiet and the people are self-righteous, I have nothing to do and the people are rich, I have no desire and the people are simple" (Lao Tzu, chapter 57). Therefore, it is necessary to "abandon wisdom at all" and follow nature in everything, returning to the era of ignorance of "knotted rope". This era is "small country and widows", but when you hear chickens and dogs, people don't interact with each other, so the world is too peaceful.
Lao Tzu's regressive view of history is philosophically expressed in his idealism. Lao Tzu proposed the "Tao" as the root of all things in the world, in addition to God and God, to the cosmology (also philosophically called the view of nature, ontology). This seems to be a materialist point of view, but the "Tao" proposed by Lao Tzu is not a material entity, but a kind of nothingness and trance, which transcends time and space and also transcends people's understanding, and people cannot hear, see, or touch it, and is an absolute spirit that is formless, silent, and still. This spiritual "Tao" is also called "nothing", "great", "one" and so on in lao tzu.
Then, how does all the material things in the world come from nothing? That is, how does the spirit become material? Lao Tzu said that this process of change arises naturally, and that the Tao itself has no purpose and no will, and that everything in the world produced by it does not "dominate" it, which is called natural inaction. Lao Tzu's cosmogenesis theory seems to be different from the "God" who created everything, but his spiritual "Tao" of nothingness, as the root of the world, is still idealism. To exist by hanging the "Tao" outside of human knowledge is philosophically called objective idealism.
Lao Tzu belongs to objective idealism in his cosmology, but when he observes social turmoil and the complex changes in nature, especially when he sees the decline of the slave-owning class and the vagaries between the new and old ruling classes, he has produced some simple dialectical ideas. For example, he abstracted the complex changes of all things in the world into the long and short, the rigid and the weak, the intellectual stupidity, the victory and defeat of life and death, etc., which are both opposites and unified, he said: "There is no mutual birth, difficulty and easy to become one, length and shortness, high and low, sound harmony, and back and forth" (Lao Tzu, the second chapter of Lao Tzu), the two sides of the contradiction, one side must exist according to the existence of the other. This contradictory unified view is a major development in the history of human understanding. Not only that, but Lao Tzu also proposed that the development of things can be transformed in the opposite direction, that is, the so-called "movement of the opposite way" (Lao Tzu, Chapter 40). This is an important understanding of Lao Tzu's view of "movement". These simple dialectics of Lao Tzu have an important place in the history of Chinese philosophy. But he regarded the transformation of opposites as an unconditional absolute transformation, exaggerating the unity of opposites into absolutes and becoming relativism. Therefore, Lao Tzu departed from certain conditions to talk about the dialectical thought of transformation, and in his idealistic system, had to go down the path of metaphysics.
Some idealists after Laozi, such as Zhuangzi, inherited and developed Laozi's relativism and together with Lao tzu became the "Lao Zhuang philosophy" in history, and most of the later idealistic philosophies were on this basis, with the different times, constantly extended and played. The materialists, on the other hand, transformed the "Tao" of Lao Tzu's idealism into the "Tao" of materialism, and inherited and correctly brought into play Lao Tzu's dialectical thought. Therefore, Lao Tzu and the book "Lao Tzu" have a great influence on the history of Chinese philosophy. Some of its philosophical sayings are also often quoted by people in their daily lives.