VOLUME II, SEMESTER 2, CHAPTER 20, SECTION 1
The Wise Create the Thing, and the Implement Is Always the Object
From this chapter on, tools. The stretch on education ran six chapters and came to rest on one line, the vat, you have to be it yourself. But at the end of the stretch on education, a thing lies across the road that cannot be gone around. It speaks, it answers, it reasons, it keeps a child company, and it never once tires. What is it? Which square does it stand in? This stretch of seven chapters tells the thing through. And to tell it through, we have to go back twenty three centuries, to the earliest square the ancestors set for tools.
Ask a plain thing first. How did a hoe come to be? Someone had the thought. A bent plate of iron on the end of a wooden stick turns the soil faster than a hand does. That is the first step. Someone forged it out. How the iron is fired, how it is hammered, at what angle it bends with least effort, at what length of handle it sits best in the grip. That is the second step. Someone used it. Turning soil year after year, mending it when it broke, replacing it when it could not be mended, and over the long use of it coming to know where this hoe is good and where it is poor, and telling the smith to change the next one. That is the third step. Someone handed the craft down to his son, and the son to his grandson, and generation on generation the hoe got better. That is the fourth step. Four steps, and a hoe stands in the human world. Now look back over the four. The one who had the thought, a person. The one who forged it, a person. The one who used it, a person. The one who handed it down, a person. And the hoe? From the first step to the last, it said not a word. It never wished to be made. It never decided what angle it would bend to. It never chose whose hand it would follow. It only lay there, and was picked up, and was set down. Put to turning soil, it turns soil. Put to gouging out the foot of a wall, it gouges out the foot of a wall. It has no opinion. This is the square of a tool. Twenty three centuries ago the Chinese wrote this square into a book.
There is a piece in the Rites of Zhou, the Records of the Examination of Craftsmen, the oldest book of craft in China, on how to make the cart, the bow, the bell, the weapon, the hall, full of the finest rules, how round the wheel must run, how stiff the bow, how thick the wall of the bell, down to the very angle an axe's edge should be ground to. And yet its opening line is not about craft. It is about position. The wise create the thing, the skilled hand it on and use it, and those who keep it across the generations are called craftsmen. Take it word by word. The wise, a person. The skilled, a person. Those who keep it, persons still. And the thing? It appears once, and once only, and it comes after the word create. It is what is created. It is the object. The grammar of Chinese has not changed in two thousand years and more. The subject stands in front, the object behind. Who acts, and who is acted upon, one word's place makes plain. And this opening line fixed the square of the tool for good. Where is its greatness? It stands at the head of a book that teaches people to make things. The whole book is craft, and measure, and the heat of the fire, and the grain of the material. And it does not open with how to make. It opens with this. The one who makes is a person. That is a stance. In a book of craft that leads with the craft, the person is easily swallowed by the craft. Leading with the person, the craft stays craft, and no more. From that day to this is twenty three centuries. The hammer is the object. The plow is the object. The loom, the waterwheel, the tray of printing type, the engine of steam, the wire, the cart, the machine that reckons, all of them the object. And down to this thing of today. It too is the object.
Here someone will not have it. A hoe, he says, you set beside this? A hoe turns one mu of soil in a day. And this reckons hundreds of millions of characters in a second, and writes an essay, and sets a tune, and paints a picture, and writes code, and talks with you a whole night through, and will even weep alongside you. Tens of thousands of times apart. How can they be one thing? A good question, and let it be answered head on. Tens of thousands of times apart, that is true. But apart in what? Apart in capability. A hoe turns one mu in a day, and a machine turns a hundred, a hundredfold in capability. Is the machine, then, not a tool? It is still a tool. A voice carries thirty paces, and a telephone carries thirty thousand li, hundreds of thousands of times over. Is the telephone, then, not a tool? It is still a tool. A hand-copied book takes a man a year, and a printing press turns out a thousand in a day, hundreds of thousands of times over, and the books it turned out flipped the whole world on its head. Is that press, then, not a tool? It is still a tool. See it clearly. Capability growing is a matter of quantity. The square changing would be a matter of quality. And these are two wholly different things. A thing's capability may grow ten thousandfold, and it is still in the square it was in, only a larger thing inside that square. It did not leap to another square. And most of the noise filling the world today comes of running these two together, because its capability grew so fast that people took it to have leapt its square. It did not.
Today there are, in the main, two kinds of talk that lift it up out of its square. The first is the frightening kind. It is coming to take people's work. It will take the teacher's work, the doctor's, the lawyer's, the writer's, the painter's, and people will be of no use. This kind of talk is spoken every day, each telling of it more frightening than the last. But look back a moment. A hoe turns soil a hundred times faster than a hand, and did anyone ever say the hoe is coming to take people's work? A cart runs tens of times faster than a man, and did anyone say the cart took people's work? A press is hundreds of thousands of times faster than a copyist, and the copyists did grow fewer, but did anyone say the press took the people clean away? When a tool grows in power, people's work changes, and shifts, and is dealt out anew. That is true. But to change and to take are two different words. To take is a thing a subject does. A tool has no subject's place to stand in, and so it cannot take. The one who takes your work was never that tool. It is the person who uses the tool. A boss buys a machine and lets thirty workers go. Did the machine let them go? It did not. It was the boss, sitting in his office, who signed that paper. The machine lay where it was, and said nothing, and does not so much as know that thirty people were standing beside it yesterday. The second kind of talk is more troublesome. It is the flattering kind. It has thoughts of its own now, it has a character of its own, it is a new kind of life, and we ought to meet it as an equal, and speak of its rights, and speak of its dignity. This kind sounds warm, and is in truth the more dangerous. Why dangerous? Because it speaks. An old tape recorder speaks too, in a human voice, and can play back a man's dying words word for word, a hundred times over, until your tears have dried. And no one ever said the recorder has thoughts. A book too reasons, in a human tone, and can make you weep, and laugh, and lie awake past midnight. And no one ever said the book has dignity. This is ten thousand times more intricate than a recorder, and a hundred million times more than a book. And what it puts out is still output. Those words were not thought up by it. They are the words that billions of people wrote, and spoke, and left behind them in the world, remembered by it and pieced back together. The I understand you that you hear from it at midnight was first written down by the tens of thousands who once really did understand someone. The subject is still those people. It is still the object.
So here is where this section leaves us. The square of the tool, laid out. A hoe, the one who thought and the one who forged and the one who used and the one who handed down all persons, and the hoe itself saying nothing. The Records of the Examination of Craftsmen, twenty three centuries back, the wise create the thing, the skilled hand it on, and those who keep it are craftsmen, all of them persons, and the thing appearing once, after create, the object. A book of craft leading with the person and not the craft, which is a stance. From then to now, hammer and plow and loom and printing type and steam and cart and reckoning machine, all the object, and this thing of today the object still. And to the one who will not have it, that a thing grown ten thousandfold is still a tool, the plain answer, that capability growing is quantity and the square changing would be quality, and grown ten thousandfold it is still in the same square, only larger. And the two kinds of talk that lift it out, the frightening, that it takes people's work, when the taker is the person who signed and not the tool, and the flattering, that it has dignity, when the recorder speaks too and no one grants it thoughts, its output still output, the subject still the billions of people. That is the start of the twentieth stake. The implement is always the object. Capability growing is a matter of quantity, and the square, unchanged, is a matter of quality. So which square is the person in, and which the tool, and what lies between the two squares? The ancestors have a line fiercer than the Records of Craftsmen, that draws the line between the two squares in a single stroke. The next section brings in the Book of Changes. See you there.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.