What the First Part Is About

The thirty-seven chapters of the Dao part circle a single difficulty: the thing the book is about cannot be said, and the book is made of words. It opens by stating the problem outright, that a way which can be put into words is not the constant way, and then proceeds for five thousand characters anyway. Every subsequent chapter is written in the shadow of that opening admission, which is why so much of the part proceeds by negation, by paradox and by pointing at ordinary objects.

The objects are its best known feature. A cart is useful because of the hole at the hub. A pot is useful because of the space inside it. A room is useful because of the doorways cut in the walls. Water benefits everything and contends with nothing and settles where people do not want to be. A valley is defined by what is not there. An uncut block of wood is worth more than anything that can be made from it, because once it is cut the possibilities are gone.

The political material in this part follows from the same principle rather than sitting beside it. A ruler who acts least is best, and the best of all is one whose people barely notice him and say afterwards that things happened by themselves. Prohibitions produce the behaviour they name. Exalting the worthy produces competition. Prizing rare goods produces theft. The consistent recommendation is subtraction: remove the occasions rather than punishing the consequences, which is the political form of the same argument that finds usefulness in a hole.