Chapter 7

Chapter seven starts from an observation about duration. Heaven lasts and earth endures, and the reason given is that they do not live for themselves; not living for themselves, they are able to last.

The move from that to human conduct is immediate. The sage puts himself last and finds himself in front, treats his own person as external and finds it preserved. The chapter then asks its own question: is it not because he has no private ends that his ends are accomplished?

This is one of the passages that makes readers uncomfortable, and the discomfort is worth naming rather than smoothing over. The chapter appears to recommend selflessness on the grounds that it works out better for the self, which is either a paradox with something in it or a piece of advice that cancels itself. If a person puts themselves last in order to end up first, they have not put themselves last.

The book does not resolve this and does not seem to notice it as a problem, which is itself informative about what kind of text it is. It is not building an ethical system in which motives have to be consistent. It is stating, repeatedly and from many angles, that the direct pursuit of an outcome tends to prevent it, and leaving the reader to work out what to do with a piece of knowledge that changes if you act on it deliberately.

Chapter seven is the first clear instance of a pattern that runs through the whole book, and seeing it here makes the later chapters easier to read.

The pattern is that a desired result is obtained by the route that appears to abandon it. Heaven lasts by not living for itself. The sage in chapter two keeps his merit by not claiming it. The sage in chapter twenty-two is seen because he does not show himself, is distinguished because he does not assert himself, has merit because he does not boast. Chapter twenty-four states the same list negatively: standing on tiptoe, nobody stands steady. Chapter thirty-four says that because the way never makes itself great, it is able to accomplish greatness. Chapter sixty-six puts a ruler above the people by having him speak from below. Chapter eighty-one says the sage has more the more he gives away.

The frequency matters. A single paradox is a rhetorical flourish; the same structure appearing in a dozen chapters, applied to duration, reputation, merit, greatness, authority and wealth in turn, is a claim about how things generally go.

What the book never supplies is a mechanism. It does not explain why the indirect route works, and it does not distinguish cases where it would not. That absence is why the text has been read as profound observation and as evasion, sometimes by the same reader in the same afternoon, and it is the reason its commentarial tradition is so large.