Chapter 5. Other Maps of Holding

5.1Sun Tzu: Restraint as Waiting

The Art of War is usually placed in the Warring States period, later than the traditional account of Sun Tzu himself, who in that account was a commander of the ancient state of Wu. It is a short treatise of thirteen chapters. The English text used here is Lionel Giles's translation of 1910, among the standard English versions and still in wide circulation. It is a book about war and should be read as one: its subject is not ethics but effectiveness.

The study treats conflict as a problem of cost. Chapter I opens by calling the art of war a matter of vital importance to the State, a matter of life and death, a road either to safety or to ruin. Chapter II puts a price on it: an army of a hundred thousand men with provisions enough to carry them a thousand li, and expenditure at home and at the front — entertainment of guests, small items such as glue and paint, sums spent on chariots and armour — reaching a thousand ounces of silver a day. What a protracted campaign does to such a force: if victory is long in coming, the men's weapons will grow dull and their ardour damped; if a siege is laid, strength is exhausted; if the campaign runs on, the resources of the State will not be equal to the strain, and other chieftains will rise to take advantage of the extremity. Stupid haste in war has been heard of, but cleverness has never been seen associated with long delays, and the great object should be victory rather than lengthy campaigns. The point closes with: "There is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare."

Against that cost chapter III sets a rank of achievement. Best of all is to take the enemy's country whole and intact; to shatter and destroy it is not so good; better to capture an army entire than to destroy it. The rank is given directly: to baulk the enemy's plans, then to prevent the junction of the enemy's forces, then to attack the enemy's army in the field, and worst of all is to besiege walled cities. On the siege the chapter is concrete: the preparation of mantlets, movable shelters and implements of war takes three whole months, the piling up of mounds three months more, and such are the disastrous effects of a siege, with one third of the men slain while the town still remains untaken. The excellence itself is stated in one sentence: "Hence to fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting."

Chapter III also states what victory depends on: five essentials. A commander wins who knows when to fight and when not to fight; who knows how to handle both superior and inferior forces; whose army is animated by the same spirit throughout all its ranks; who, having prepared himself, waits to take the enemy unprepared; and who has military capacity and is not interfered with by the sovereign. Victory lies in the knowledge of these five points. Two of them are about holding: knowing when not to fight, and waiting while prepared for an enemy who is not.

Deception runs through chapter I as ordinary method rather than as an exception to be ashamed of. All warfare is based on deception; when able to attack, to seem unable; when using forces, to seem inactive; when near, to make the enemy believe the commander is far away, and when far away, to make him believe he is near. Such military devices must not be divulged beforehand. The general who wins a battle makes many calculations in his temple before the battle is fought, while the one who loses makes but few. This study's reading of that passage is not a moral claim about deception; it is a claim about credibility: a posture the other side can read precisely is worth nothing.

The condition that makes all of this work is knowledge, and chapter III states it: "If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles." The passage continues: if you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat; and if you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle. Chapter I states the same demand in another form, as five constant factors — the Moral Law, Heaven, Earth, the Commander, and Method and discipline — and as seven considerations by which victory or defeat can be forecast: which sovereign is imbued with the Moral Law, which general has most ability, with whom lie the advantages derived from Heaven and Earth, on which side discipline is most rigorously enforced, which army is the stronger, on which side the officers and men are more highly trained, and in which army there is greater constancy both in reward and punishment. The sentence about a hundred battles is about fear and prediction: a commander who knows both sides can act without terror because the outcome stops being a mystery, while one who knows only one side wins and loses in turn.

The instrument has a single sharp edge: a stop is only as good as the knowledge behind it. A hold can be a strategic act, grounded in what has been measured about both sides, or it can be a posture, which is to say a guess with a confident shape. The two look identical from the outside. The difference shows up only later, when the knowledge is confirmed or fails.

Three limits must be stated. First, Sun Tzu writes for a commander who has an enemy. In an ordinary organisation there may be no enemy at all: the goods at the gate are not adversaries, the lock does not want to win, and the person whose request is delayed is not the other side of a contest. Reading colleagues as enemies is a distortion this study will not make. Second, the knowledge the study asks of the holder is knowledge of both sides, while in working life it is usually held on one side only. Third, the study can be flattering: a tradition that calls restraint a technique makes the holder of the stop look skilled, which is the appearance of a small control dressed as world-holding power.

What remains is a simple and demanding claim: waiting is a decision with content, and its content is what has been learned. Applied to a workplace it becomes a question asked of any restraint: what is known about the situation being held, how is it known, and what would signal that the time to stop waiting has arrived.

5.2Han Feizi: The Two Handles

Han Feizi was a thinker of the state of Han who went to Qin and died there in 233 BCE; the collected works carry his name. The Han Feizi is a long compilation, and one of its chapters is called "The Two Handles" (二柄).

The chapter opens by naming what keeps a ruler's ministers in place. The Chinese reads: "明主之所導制其臣者，二柄而已矣。二柄者，刑德也。" This study renders the sense as: "The means by which the enlightened ruler guides and controls his ministers are the two handles and nothing more. The two handles are punishment and favour." Each handle is defined in the chapter: killing is punishment, giving rewards is favour. Ministers fear punishment and want reward; when the ruler uses both handles himself, they obey. The handles are not instruments of policy but the means by which anyone answers to one person.

The chapter then shows what happens when the handles are given away. The minister Tian Chang asked his ruler for offices and rewards, then distributed them himself to the ministers and the people; the ruler lost the favour-hand, Tian Chang used it, and the ruler was assassinated. The minister Zihan told his ruler to keep reward for himself and to hand over punishment; the ruler lost the punishment-hand, Zihan used it, and the ruler was taken hostage. The chapter summarises the pair: Tian Chang used only favour and Duke Jian was assassinated; Zihan used only punishment and the Song ruler was taken hostage. Against this it sets a single image: "夫虎之所以能服狗者，爪牙也，使虎釋其爪牙而使狗用之，則虎反服於狗矣。" This study renders the sense as: "That by which the tiger can subdue the dog is its claws and teeth; if the tiger puts down its claws and teeth and lets the dog use them, the tiger will in turn be subdued by the dog." Once the handles are in the wrong hands, power itself moves.

The chapter's second subject is matching words to deeds. The ruler must match the words a minister states to the work given and the achievement reported. When the achievement fits the work and the work fits the words, reward follows; when they do not, punishment follows. A minister who speaks in big terms but produces little is punished — not for the small result, but for the mismatch. A minister who speaks modestly and produces much is also punished, because the mismatch itself does harm. The chapter illustrates this with a ruler who, waking from sleep, found that a robe had been put on him while he was cold. He punished the official whose task it was to keep him warm, for neglecting his duty, and also the official who had put on the robe, for overstepping his office. He did not dislike the cold; he judged that the harm of overstepping was worse. If ministers keep to their posts and their words are true, the chapter concludes, they cannot form cliques.

The chapter's third subject is what it calls the ruler's two dangers. One is relying on the worthy: when a ruler shows that he values the capable, ministers will decorate their conduct to please him, and their true feelings will no longer be visible — a ruler of Yue who loved courage so that many sought death lightly, a king of Chu who loved slender waists so that many starved, a ruler of Qi who favoured his inner palace so that a servant castrated himself to serve there. The second danger is making appointments without judgement, which leaves affairs unsettled and unsuccessful. In both cases the failure is the same: the ruler's own preferences give ministers the material they need to intrude on him. The chapter's remedy is a single command: remove your likes and dislikes, and the ministers will show their true form. When they show their true form, the great ruler is not obscured.

This map answers Chapter 1's first and fourth questions directly. What restrains is the handle. When it should be removed is the wrong question for this map, because the handle is not meant to be removed; it is meant to stay with the holder. And a restraint is defined not only by what it stops but by who is able to stop it, bypass it, or talk it away. If an approval can be obtained by pressure, by relationship, or by the promise of a favour later, the handle has been lent even though no rule has changed.

Applied to ordinary working life, the map asks who holds the stop at any given gate. A return principle at a receiving centre, a decision not to issue a label before a work order is verified, an approval that must precede a payment — each is a handle in Han Feizi's sense, and each can be examined for the same thing: whether the person who holds it actually holds it, or whether it has quietly passed to someone else.

The map has a cost. Han Feizi's account flattens motive. On its terms every refusal is a play for position, every act of withholding is an attempt to make others answer to the holder, and every subordinate who resists is a rival. That reading cannot account for the worker who follows a rule because it seems right to follow it, for the holder of a stop who suffers from holding it, or for a restraint that costs its own holder as much as anyone. A map that sees only interests will describe some scenes well and misread others badly.

The flattening has a second effect. If everyone is acting for handles, the person who waits — who stands at the gate, or waits after a call has been forwarded — disappears, because on this map waiting is simply what people do when the handles are elsewhere. The study's third question, what restraint costs and who pays it, cannot be answered by a tradition that reads the world as a contest among holders. Chapter 12 will return to this gap from another direction. For now the point is only that Han Feizi gives a clear account of who holds a stop, and pays for that clarity by narrowing what a human being can be doing.

5.3Laozi: Governing by Not Disturbing

The Dao De Jing is a short work of about eighty-one chapters, written in verse and aphorism, and attributed to Laozi. Its English translations disagree, so this section works from one text only: James Legge's translation of 1891, chapter by chapter. Legge marks in brackets any words of his own; his chapter 48 rendering puts "on purpose" in brackets when it speaks of doing nothing, meaning those words are his addition to the Chinese and not the text's own.

Non-action. The term Legge renders as doing nothing runs through the work as a quality of governing, not a refusal of it. Chapter 37 says the Tao, in its regular course, does nothing for the sake of doing it, so there is nothing which it does not do; the brackets are again Legge's. Chapter 48 puts the same as a practice: the one who follows the Tao diminishes his doing day by day, arriving at doing nothing on purpose, and then there is nothing he does not do. Chapter 57 gathers it into a ruler's speech: a sage will do nothing of purpose, keep still, take no trouble, and manifest no ambition, and the people will then be transformed, become correct, become rich, and attain the primitive simplicity of themselves. Chapter 65 says plainly that governing is difficult because people have much knowledge, and that the ruler who governs by his own wisdom is a scourge to the state while the one who does not is a blessing. Chapter 66 adds the shape of such a ruler: he who wishes to be above men puts himself below them by his words, and he who wishes to be before them places his person behind them.

Ruling by not disturbing. The title given to this map is this study's own rendering; the text speaks of diminishing one's doing and of doing nothing on purpose, and does not use the word "disturb". Chapter 60 opens with the sentence "Governing a great state is like cooking small fish." Chapter 57 says a state may be ruled by measures of correction and weapons by crafty dexterity, but that the kingdom is made one's own only by freedom from action and purpose. Chapter 58 warns that the government which meddles and touches everything works ill and brings disappointment.

The multiplication of prohibitions. Chapter 57 states the mechanism directly: "In the kingdom the multiplication of prohibitive enactments increases the poverty of the people." The same chapter goes on to say that the more implements for profit the people possess, the greater the disorder in state and clan; that the more acts of crafty dexterity men possess, the more strange contrivances appear; and that the more display of legislation there is, the more thieves and robbers there are. Chapter 75 gives the answer in its own words about why a people resist governing: "The people are difficult to govern because of the (excessive) agency of their superiors (in governing them)". The text names specific mechanisms; the reason they produce disorder is this study's reading, not the work's.

Softness against hardness. Chapter 78 states the general knowledge and then denies that it is practised: "Every one in the world knows that the soft overcomes the hard, and the weak the strong, but no one is able to carry it out in practice." Chapter 43 says that the softest thing in the world dashes against and overcomes the hardest, and that what has no substantial existence enters where there is no crevice. Chapter 36 puts it as "The soft overcomes the hard; and the weak the strong." Chapter 8 gives the image: the excellence of water is in its benefiting all things and in occupying, without striving, the low place which men dislike. Chapter 11 supplies another image: the thirty spokes unite in the nave and the wheel's use depends on the empty space for the axle; clay is fashioned into vessels and their use depends on the empty hollowness; the door and windows are cut from the walls and the room's use depends on the empty space within.

What this gives the study. It supplies an instrument the earlier maps lack: a restraint can be the decision not to add another control. Every scene in Part II raises the question of whether a further rule, approval or verification is needed; this map names a way of answering no that is not ignorance or indifference but deliberate diminishing of one's doing. That reading is this study's; the text says what a ruler gains from governing in that way, and does not use it to describe a gate, a label or an approval.

Three limits must travel with the map. First, non-action is not the absence of a decision: on the text's own account it belongs to a ruler, and this study holds that someone is answerable for the decision not to add a control, as for any other; a philosophy of not interfering can make a real decision look like no decision at all. Second, what the text says of rulers who stand back is not always true of working life. Chapter 4 describes systems in which a failure that is not stopped propagates to whoever is nearest the break; the person who did not act has left harm to reach them. Third, not disturbing is a sentence that benefits whoever is comfortable now; Chapter 10 will describe exactly that pattern when a manager's delay leaves an employee unsure whether leaving is allowed. This study will therefore use this map to ask whether a further control is needed, and not to praise whoever chose not to add one. Section 5.4 sets beside it a map that assumes the opposite: a rule that is never broken does not survive.

5.4Machiavelli: When a Rule Is Broken

The fourth map comes from Italy in the early sixteenth century. The Prince was written by Niccolò Machiavelli after his removal from Florentine public service and published in 1532, five years after his death. Addressed to a prince who holds power or wants it, it draws on Roman history and the recent politics of the Italian city-states. It is not a book about organisations, nor about morality in any ordinary sense; it is a book about what holding requires. Five chapters are at issue — VIII, XV, XVII, XVIII and XIX — in the translation by W. K. Marriott, in the order they appear.

Severities well and badly used. Chapter VIII concerns those who have obtained a principality by wickedness. It takes Agathocles, who rose through the military ranks to become Praetor of Syracuse and seized the princedom by killing senators and the richest of the people, and asks why such men can hold power long. Severities, it says, can be badly or properly used, and the properly used kind "are applied at one blow and are necessary to one's security, and that are not persisted in afterwards unless they can be turned to the advantage of the subjects." Severities of the other kind multiply with time rather than decrease. Injuries ought to be done all at one time, so that being tasted less they offend less, benefits given little by little. Chapter VIII thus separates severities applied once from severities that accumulate.

What a prince must know. Chapter XV turns to the qualities for which men are praised or blamed. How one lives is so far distant from how one ought to live, that he who neglects what is done for what ought to be done sooner effects his ruin than his preservation. It states that "Hence it is necessary for a prince wishing to hold his own to know how to do wrong, and to make use of it or not according to necessity." A prince cannot possess or observe all the qualities considered good, so he must avoid the vices that would lose him his state, and where that is impossible may abandon himself to them. Chapter XV supplies the premise of this section: the holder of power must sometimes do wrong, and must choose when.

Loved or feared. Chapter XVII is headed Concerning Cruelty and Clemency, and Whether It Is Better to Be Loved Than Feared. It sets Cesare Borgia, whose cruelty reconciled the Romagna and restored it to peace and loyalty, against the Florentine people, who, to avoid a reputation for cruelty, permitted Pistoia to be destroyed. The chapter's answer: one should wish to be both loved and feared, but because uniting them is difficult, "it is much safer to be feared than loved, when, of the two, either must be dispensed with." Its reasons: men are ungrateful and fickle, entirely the prince's while he succeeds and turning against him when danger approaches, and fear rests on a dread of punishment which never fails. The chapter sets a condition: a prince ought to inspire fear in such a way that, if he does not win love, he avoids hatred, and he can endure being feared while he abstains from the property of his citizens and subjects and from their women. Chapter XVII does not say cruelty is right; it says a prince must weigh the risk of hatred against the risk of being despised, and that a few executions which offend the individual are more merciful than too much mercy which allows disorders to injure the whole people.

Keeping faith. Chapter XVIII is headed Concerning the Way in Which Princes Should Keep Faith. Every one admits how praiseworthy it is in a prince to keep faith, yet those princes who have done great things have held good faith of little account. "Therefore a wise lord cannot, nor ought he to, keep faith when such observance may be turned against him, and when the reasons that caused him to pledge it exist no longer." It says this in the context of contest: the one method proper to men is the law, the other to beasts; because the first is frequently not sufficient, it is necessary to have recourse to the second, and a prince must avail himself of both the fox and the lion. It adds that it is unnecessary to have all the good qualities, but very necessary to appear to have them: to have them and always to observe them is injurious, to appear to have them is useful. Chapter XVIII gives appearance a weight it does not give reality, though it does not say appearance matters more; the prince who neglects either has failed.

Contempt and hatred. Chapter XIX is headed That One Should Avoid Being Despised and Hated, and states its principle in a phrase: "how to avoid those things which will make him hated or contemptible." Hatred is provoked above all by rapaciousness, and by being a violator of the property and women of his subjects; contempt by being considered fickle, frivolous, effeminate, mean-spirited or irresolute. A prince ought to show in his actions greatness, courage, gravity and fortitude, and in his private dealings with his subjects that his judgments are irrevocable. The chapter surveys the Roman emperors from Marcus the philosopher down to Maximinus, and concludes that either hatred or contempt has been fatal to them. Chapter XIX's finding is that a prince must manage the appearance of strength and the absence of resentment together.

What this gives the study. These five chapters give the study a new subject: the exception, and the price of the exception, as a standing feature of rule. Carl Schmitt served the Nazi regime from 1933, and critics read his theory of the exception in that light. Where Chapter 2's Schmitt asks who decides the case that no rule covers, Machiavelli asks a more practical question — what must the rule-breaker look like afterwards, for the rule to still mean something. An exception that is recorded, limited and closed teaches the people inside the rule that the rule has edges; an exception repeated without record teaches them that the rule is a suggestion. The first lesson costs the holder of the rule some authority, the second costs the rule itself. Chapter 13 returns to this when it gathers the conditions under which a restraint should be withdrawn; Chapter 6 of Part II uses it where a prohibition meets a request.

What this map must not be allowed to do. This study takes from Machiavelli the structure of the argument — that a rule's survival depends on how it is broken, not only on whether it is broken — and not the remedy. The chapters read do not teach that cruelty is right: chapter XV says the prince must know how to do wrong according to necessity, and chapter XVII discusses cruelty in terms of what it achieves, not of what is right. The records contain no case that calls for cruelty, and none that would support such a conclusion. The map is used for its diagnosis of rule; its prescriptions are left where they belong.

5.5Four Maps Compared

The four maps are now set side by side against the four questions Chapter 1 left standing: what restrains here, what does it protect, what does it cost and who pays, and when should it be removed. The table below is a summary of the four arguments as this study uses them, not a verdict on any of them.

Each map flatters restraint in its own way, and each also warns against it. Sun Tzu makes control a technique available to whoever knows more, and warns that knowledge may be absent exactly when it is claimed. Han Feizi makes holding the mark of a competent ruler, and warns that handles can be lent, bypassed and taken. Laozi makes restraint a form of wisdom, and warns that adding rule breeds disorder, so that the cost of doing too much is as visible as the cost of doing too little. Machiavelli makes restraint the price of survival, and warns about the cost of consistency: a rule that is never tested cannot be relied on, and a rule that is tested constantly cannot be believed.

The asymmetry is worth naming, because it will shape how the records are read in Part II. Three of the four maps assume that the holder of the restraint knows what is being done and that holding is the central task: Sun Tzu makes control a technique; Han Feizi makes it the ruler's instrument; Machiavelli makes it the survival of the rule itself. Laozi is the exception, as the next paragraph shows. Only Machiavelli, and only in passing, turns to ask what the restraint looks like to the people who live inside it, and none of the four gives sustained attention to the person who waits. The study's own commitment, made in the Introduction and repeated wherever it becomes necessary, is not to let any of these maps answer the third question by itself.

There is also one map whose warning runs against the other three. Laozi's argument is that restraint can be the decision not to add a control, and that too much rule is a defect. The other three maps treat holding as the thing that must be done, and differ only about how — Machiavelli, as Section 5.4 has said, goes further, since a rule that is never broken cannot survive at all. This study will use Laozi's map to ask a question that Sun Tzu, Han Feizi and Machiavelli all assume has already been answered: not how well the restraint is held, but whether the restraint should exist at all.

The decision this chapter arrives at is therefore methodological, and it is the last decision of Part I. The ten records in Part II will be read with all four maps within reach and with none of them as a verdict. Where a map fits, its gains and its risks will be shown together, as Chapter 3 requires of any tradition. Where a map fits badly — where an ordinary control is made to look like a contest for handles, or where a small delay is made to look like a campaign — the study will say so and set the map aside for that scene. The four maps are instruments. The records decide which instrument a scene calls for, and Chapter 6 begins with the first two of them: a prohibition that outlives the reason for it, and a prohibition that meets a request to break it.