Chapter 45

The chapter opens with five clauses in the same shape, each pairing a superlative with the appearance of its opposite. Great completion seems defective. Great fullness seems empty. Great straightness seems bent. Great skill seems clumsy. Great eloquence seems tongue-tied.

The first two are given a consequence that the last three are not: the use of the apparently defective thing is unimpaired, and the use of the apparently empty thing is inexhaustible. That is the argument. What looks finished has nothing left to do, and what looks full has nowhere for anything to go, so the marks of incompleteness are the marks of a thing that still works.

The list belongs with the sayings quoted in chapter forty-one, where the great square has no corners and the great vessel is finished late, and the two chapters may be drawing on the same stock of formulae. What distinguishes this one is that it moves from the paradoxes to a piece of physical observation and then to a political conclusion, in three sentences.

The physical observation is that moving about overcomes cold and keeping still overcomes heat. Both are true and both are ordinary: exertion warms a person, stillness in the heat does not add to it. The pairing sets up the last line, which selects one of the two as the general standard rather than treating them symmetrically.

That line is the chapter's conclusion and its link to the rest of the book: clear stillness is the standard of the world. Chapter twenty-six had already made stillness the ruler of restlessness. Here it is promoted from a personal quality to a public measure.

One clause of this chapter had a career of its own. The phrase saying that great skill seems clumsy became a standing term in Chinese aesthetic and craft vocabulary, used of calligraphy, painting, poetry and pottery, and it names a quality that later criticism prized very highly: work whose mastery shows as apparent artlessness rather than as visible finish.

The connection to the rest of the book is direct. Chapter twenty-seven had already said that a good traveller leaves no tracks and a good reckoner needs no counting sticks, which is the same claim about the invisibility of competence. What this chapter adds is the appearance term. The expert does not merely leave no trace; the expert positively looks worse than the competent journeyman, because the marks by which skill is usually recognised are the marks of a stage below mastery.

That is a testable claim about a real phenomenon rather than a paradox. Polish, symmetry and evident control are what a maker produces while still demonstrating capability, and they are the first things to go once the maker stops demonstrating.

Two cautions come with the idea, and later Chinese criticism was well aware of both. Deliberate clumsiness is not the thing being described, since a contrived roughness is another kind of display. And the standard cannot be applied from outside, because genuine incompetence and apparent clumsiness look identical to anyone who cannot do the work.

The book itself is a case in point. Its plainness, repetition and refusal to argue are either the marks of a text that has stopped performing or the marks of a disorderly compilation, and readers have taken it both ways.