Chapter 47

The chapter makes the boldest epistemological claim in the book and makes it in two lines. Without going out of the door, one can know the world. Without looking out of the window, one can see the way of heaven. Then the sting: the further out one goes, the less one knows.

Taken as a claim about information it is plainly false, and it has been read as false by critics for a very long time. Nobody learns the price of grain in a distant province by sitting still. The chapter is not making that kind of claim, and the terms it uses are the evidence: what is known without leaving is the world as a whole and the way of heaven, which are patterns rather than particulars.

The argument, spelled out, is that the pattern is present wherever you happen to be standing, because it is what makes everything else the case. If returning is how the way moves, that is observable in a breath, a season or a household, and no amount of additional travel makes it more observable. Adding instances to a pattern you already have is not learning.

The second half of the chapter attaches the claim to the sage in three parallel clauses: he knows without going about, names things without seeing them, and completes without acting. The third of those brings the epistemology back into line with the book's central term, which suggests the chapter is not an isolated boast but an application of non-action to knowing.

The line about going further and knowing less remains the most quotable and the most contested sentence in it.

Chapter forty-seven belongs with a group of passages that are suspicious of learning, and the group is worth assembling because the objection in each is slightly different.

Chapter forty-eight draws the contrast most cleanly: in the pursuit of learning something is added every day, and in the pursuit of the way something is dropped every day. Learning is not attacked; it is characterised as accumulation, and the way is characterised as subtraction, so the two are different operations rather than rivals.

Chapter twenty opens, on some readings, with an instruction to abandon learning and be free of worry, and then shows what that costs in the most desolate passage in the book. Chapter three warns against making the people knowledgeable. Chapter sixty-five says that people are hard to govern because they know too much, and it is the chapter most often cited against the text.

Chapter forty-seven adds the epistemological objection: extension does not deepen. And chapter seventy-one adds the qualification that saves the group from being simply anti-intellectual, since it praises knowing that one does not know and calls the opposite a defect.

Read together they are not one position. Some of the passages object to accumulation as a distraction, some to knowledge as a political instrument, and at least one values a specific kind of self-knowledge very highly. What they share is a rejection of learning as a stock to be built up, and a preference for a smaller thing held clearly.

The chapters have been used to justify both intellectual modesty and the deliberate keeping of populations in ignorance, and both uses have real support in the words.