Chapter 12

Chapter twelve is a short catalogue of ways in which stimulation impairs the faculty it stimulates. The five colours blind the eye, the five notes deafen the ear, the five flavours numb the mouth. Racing and hunting drive the mind wild, and goods that are hard to get warp conduct.

The numbers are not decorative. Five colours, five notes and five flavours are the standard classificatory sets of Chinese thought, and naming them is naming the whole ordered systems of vision, music and taste. What is being described is therefore not excess of a random kind but the fully elaborated cultural product of each sense, which is exactly what a court would supply.

The claim is not that colour, music and food are bad. It is that a sense worked to the limit of its refinement loses its capacity, and that the person who has eaten the most elaborate food available can no longer taste. This is chapter nine's argument about limits applied to perception rather than to possessions.

The final item breaks the pattern usefully. Goods that are hard to get do not impair a sense; they warp conduct, which moves the chapter from perception into behaviour and connects it to chapter three, where the same phrase appears in a political setting. The progression is deliberate: over-refinement first degrades the faculties, then it degrades the person, and then, in chapter three, it degrades the state.

The closing line of chapter twelve is a choice between two organs: the sage goes by the belly and not by the eye, and lets the one go in favour of the other.

The pairing is precise and easy to misread as asceticism. The belly is not being recommended as a virtue and the eye is not being condemned as a vice. A belly wants a definite and limited thing, is satisfied by it, and then stops wanting. An eye wants whatever it can see, is not satisfied by acquiring any of it, and generates further wanting from the acquisition. One appetite has a natural terminus and the other does not.

Read that way the line is not about restraining desire but about which desires can be met. The book is consistently suspicious of wanting that cannot be finished, and consistently untroubled by ordinary need: chapter three fills bellies while emptying minds, chapter eighty wants people to find their food sweet and their clothes fine, and chapter forty-six defines the calamity as not knowing what is enough rather than as having anything.

That distinction separates this book from the ascetic traditions it is often filed alongside. Nothing here recommends going without. What is recommended is preferring the kind of want that can be satisfied, and the reason given is practical rather than moral.