Chapter 71

The chapter is four short clauses and they turn on a single distinction. To know that one does not know is best. Not to know and to think one knows is a defect. Only by recognising this defect as a defect can one be free of it. The sage is free of it because he recognises the defect as a defect, and that is why he is free of it.

The repetition in the last two clauses is not padding. The chapter is describing a condition that is cured by being identified, which is unusual, and the doubling enacts it: the statement has to be made twice because the recognition is the remedy, and there is no further step to describe.

That structure explains why the chapter sits where it does. The book is generally suspicious of accumulated learning, and chapters forty-seven, forty-eight and sixty-five have all said so in different registers. This chapter is what stops the group from amounting to a rejection of knowing as such, because it praises a specific piece of knowledge very highly and calls its absence the one thing wrong with anybody.

The defect named is not ignorance. Not knowing is the ordinary human condition and the chapter does not treat it as a fault. What is faulty is the second-order error of taking oneself to know, and the chapter treats that as the only illness worth naming.

There is no elaboration, no example and no application to government, which makes this one of the very few chapters that address a reader as a private person with nothing else attached.

The word this chapter uses four times, rendered above as defect, is the ordinary word for illness, and reading it that way changes the register of the whole passage.

On that reading the chapter is not grading kinds of knowledge. It is diagnosing. Thinking you know when you do not is a sickness; recognising it as a sickness is the treatment; and the sage is not sick because he has performed that recognition. The parallel is medical rather than epistemological, and the chapter's odd insistence on naming the thing as a sickness before it can be cured makes ordinary sense in that frame.

The book uses illness and health language elsewhere in the same way. Chapter twenty-four calls self-display a tumour of an action. Chapter fifty-five says that adding to life is ill omened and that forcing the breath is violence, and calls the harmony of the infant a condition at its height. Chapter fifty describes people who move toward death because they live too thickly. In each case a fault is described as a disorder of a living process rather than as a wrong choice.

That vocabulary is one of the reasons the book was so readily absorbed by traditions concerned with the body, and it also explains a general feature of the text: it almost never blames. A person who thinks he knows is not condemned, and the sage is not praised for virtue. One has a condition and the other does not, and the difference between them is a recognition rather than an effort.