Chapter 56

The chapter opens with the line most often quoted from this book after the first sentence of chapter one, and most often quoted against it. One who knows does not speak, and one who speaks does not know.

The obvious objection is that the sentence is itself speech in a book of five thousand characters, and readers have been making it for as long as the text has circulated. The objection is not fatal but it is not trivial either, and the book has no single answer to it. Chapter two recommends teaching without words. Chapter forty-three says such teaching is matched by few in the world. Chapter seventy admits that the words are easy and that nobody understands them. Chapter eighty-one opens by saying that trustworthy words are not fine.

What the chapter itself claims is narrower than the general paradox suggests. The verb is closer to holding forth than to speaking at all, and the target throughout the book is assertion, display and the setting up of positions, which is the same fault chapters twenty-two and twenty-four attack in the person who considers himself right.

The rest of the chapter is a set of instructions, four of which appear again elsewhere. Block the openings and shut the gates, which chapter fifty-two also gives. Blunt the sharpness, untie the tangles, soften the glare, settle with the dust, which chapter four applies to the way itself.

That reuse is worth noticing. The four clauses describe the way in chapter four and a person here, and the book makes that transfer without comment, which is as close as it comes to saying what the practice is for.

The chapter ends by describing a person in terms of what cannot be done to him, and it does so in three pairs. He cannot be made close and cannot be made distant. Cannot be benefited and cannot be harmed. Cannot be raised and cannot be brought low.

The six terms are the ordinary instruments of a court. Access, favour, reward, punishment, promotion and disgrace are the levers by which any government moves the people it employs, and the chapter states that all six find no purchase. The figure being described is not defiant and is not in opposition; he is simply outside the range of the mechanism.

That is why the last clause follows as it does: for that reason he is honoured by the world. Honour arrives precisely because it cannot be conferred, which is the same structure as chapter thirty-four, where greatness follows from never claiming it, and chapter two, where merit stays because it is not held.

The condition is given a name in the middle of the chapter, rendered as the dark identity or profound sameness, using the same word for dark that closes chapter one and that chapter fifty-one attaches to power. It names a state of being merged with things rather than positioned among them, and the six impossibilities are consequences of it: all six require a person to occupy a place relative to others, and someone who has settled with the dust does not.

Read politically, the chapter describes the one kind of official a ruler cannot manage. Read privately, it describes a freedom purchased by giving up every form of standing, which is a considerable price and one the chapter does not pretend is small.