The highest good is like water.
Water gives life to the ten thousand things and does not strive.
It flows in places people reject and so is like the Tao.— Tao Te Ching 8 (Feng/English)
The same text translated by Red Pine:
The best are like water
bringing help to all
without competing
A comment on this text by Wang Pi (included in Red Pine’s edition, p. 17):
The Tao does not exist, but water does. Hence, it only approaches the Tao.
Charles S. Peirce would agree that the highest good does not exist, although it is real. In this he differed from most Western philosophers of his time.
The modern philosophers — one and all, unless Schelling be an exception — recognize but one mode of being, the being of an individual thing or fact, the being which consists in the object’s crowding out a place for itself in the universe, so to speak, and reacting by brute force of fact, against all other things. I call that existence.
— Peirce, CP 1.21 (from the “Lowell Lectures of 1903,” Lecture IIIa)