Only when Tao, te, and ren are all lost, it asserts, “then there is li. As to li, it is the thin edge of loyalty and faithfulness, and the beginning of disorder.” For the Confucians, li was the key to harmonizing with the Tao; for the Taoists, it was the last step of calamitous decline in the quality of human experience. For the Confucians, the goal was to integrate the artificial constructions of the human patterning instinct; for the Taoists, it was to deconstruct what the patterning instinct had forged.
Differences between confucianism and taoism. C intergrates. T decomposes
