Chapter 32

The chapter opens with a claim about size that is really a claim about power. The way is constantly nameless. Though the uncut block is small, nobody in the world can make a subject of it.

The verb is political. To make a subject of something is to bring it under a ruler, and the sentence denies that anything in the world stands above the block. What protects it is not strength but the absence of a handle: something without a name cannot be entered in a register, assigned a rank, taxed or commanded. That is a real observation about how early states worked, and it is the same insight chapter one gestures at when it distinguishes the nameless from the named.

The middle of the chapter says what would follow if a ruler could hold to it. The ten thousand things would submit of their own accord. Heaven and earth would join and send down sweet dew. The people would be even, without being ordered.

Sweet dew is an omen image, one of the standard signs that a reign is in accord with heaven, and its appearance here is a rare instance of the book using the conventional vocabulary of good government. What it attaches the omen to is not virtue, sacrifice or correct ritual but the ruler holding to something nameless, which is an unusual condition to set for a portent.

The last clause is the practical one. The people would be even of their own accord, without an order being issued, which is the outcome chapter fifty-seven describes at length and the standard by which the book judges a government throughout.

The second half of the chapter is about what happens once naming begins, and it contains one of the book's few pieces of unambiguous procedural advice.

Once the block is cut there are names, and once there are names one should know when to stop. Knowing when to stop is how to stay out of danger.

The sequence is important. Cutting is not forbidden and naming is treated as its inevitable consequence: distinctions get drawn, offices get created, categories multiply, and each new name generates the possibility of further ones. The chapter does not ask for a return to the uncut condition. It asks for a limit, and it locates the danger not in having names but in not knowing when the supply of them is sufficient.

That is the same structure as chapter forty-four, which says to know what is enough and meet no disgrace, and chapter forty-six, which calls not knowing what is enough the greatest calamity. In all three the fault is unbounded continuation of something that was fine while it was bounded.

The chapter closes on an image that reverses the direction of everything before it. The way is to the world as rivers and seas are to the streams that run into them. Rivers and seas are lower than what feeds them and gather it without effort, which is the figure chapter sixty-six develops into a rule for rulers and chapter sixty-one turns into diplomacy. Here it functions as reassurance: whatever proliferation of names occurs upstream, the direction of flow is unchanged, and everything ends up in the same place.