What the Empty Space Is For

Chapter eleven of the Tao Te Ching states one of the text's clearest arguments through three ordinary objects rather than through abstract claim. Thirty spokes unite in one nave, the chapter says, but it is the empty space at the axle that lets the wheel turn and be useful at all. Clay is shaped into a vessel, but the vessel's use depends on the hollow space its walls enclose rather than on the clay itself. A door and windows are cut from a wall to make a room, and it is the empty space within that gives the room its use. Each image works the same way. The solid, visible material, the spokes, the clay, the wall, is what a viewer notices first, yet the chapter insists that what actually does the useful work is the absence at the center, the nothing the solid material is arranged around. James Legge's translation renders this chapter's title as the use of what has no substantive existence, a phrase that states the chapter's whole argument in a single line before a reader even reaches the three images themselves. The chapter's own conclusion draws the moral directly, that what is present is treated as valuable while what is absent is what does the work, a claim placing the empty and the unseen ahead of the solid and the obvious as the true ground of usefulness, one of the Tao Te Ching's most concrete statements of a theme that runs through the whole text.