Chapter 58

The chapter opens with a pair that inverts every expectation about administration. When government is dull the people are honest. When government is searching the people are wanting.

The words are chosen carefully. The first describes a government that is muddled, unhurried and not looking very closely, and the second one that is investigative, precise and thorough. Ordinary political sense says the second produces order. The chapter says it produces a population that is deficient, incomplete, always found short, because a searching administration finds what it looks for and creates the categories in which people fall below the mark.

That is the same argument chapter fifty-seven makes about published laws producing thieves, and the two chapters stand together as the book's case against administrative precision.

The middle of the chapter turns to the instability of every judgement. Calamity is what fortune leans on, and fortune is what calamity lies hidden in, and who knows where it ends? The line became proverbial in Chinese and is the ancestor of a family of sayings about reversal, and it is not offered as consolation. The following sentence makes that clear: there is nothing straight, the straight turns strange again and the good turns monstrous again, and people have been deluded about this for a very long time.

What the chapter does with that is unexpected. It does not conclude that judgement is impossible or that nothing should be done. It concludes with four things the sage is: square without cutting, sharp without piercing, straight without stretching, bright without dazzling.

The four clauses that close this chapter are among the most precisely constructed in the book, and each has the same shape: a quality is affirmed, and the harm normally inseparable from it is removed.

Square without cutting. A square edge is what makes a corner sharp; the sage has the definiteness and not the wound. Sharp without piercing. Straight without stretching, which is to say upright without pulling anything into line. Bright without dazzling, which is illumination that does not blind the person it falls on.

The list is a direct answer to the problem the middle of the chapter raised. If the straight turns strange and the good turns monstrous, then the danger in any quality is its own excess, and the reversal the chapter describes is what happens when a quality is carried to the point where it damages. What is recommended is not the abandonment of the qualities but the removal of their edges.

That distinguishes this passage from a simple counsel of moderation. Nothing here is diluted. The sage is square, sharp, straight and bright, all four, and the four things subtracted are effects on other people rather than degrees of the quality itself.

The pattern echoes elsewhere in the book. Chapter twenty-eight says that the greatest cutting does not divide. Chapter forty-five says great straightness seems bent. Chapter fifty-eight is the version that is neither a paradox nor an appearance: the qualities are real, they are held at full strength, and their capacity to harm has been taken out of them.