VOLUME III, SEMESTER 3, CHAPTER 30, SECTION 1
The hard thing is not the dividing, it is the weighing
The whole chapter before, three ancestors all spoke of the divide, all spoke of dividing right. And they left us one hard bone together: labor, in the end, how is it weighed. This chapter drives straight into this hardest thing. First say clear why the hard thing was never the dividing, it is the weighing.
One, the dividing is in truth an easy thing
Do not rush. First look at a thing turned the other way round: the dividing is in truth not hard at all.
A basket of apples, a hundred of them, divided among five men. You say, twenty each. And it is divided, no one will reckon it wrong. A plot of ground, one mu, divided between two houses, half a mu each. And it is divided. As long as that share each ought to get is fixed, to set the hand to the dividing is the simplest thing under heaven, a schoolchild can do it. The act of dividing things itself was never the problem.
The true problem sits before the hand is set to the dividing. That share each ought to get, how was it fixed. On what ground should this man get twenty, that man thirty. On what ground is Cook Ding’s one share of labor worth more apples than the knife changing cook’s one share. This work of fixing the share, that is the hard one. And fixing the share leans on weighing. You must first weigh out each man’s one share of labor, before you know how much to give him.
Hold this layer fast. The dividing is the fruit, the weighing is the cause. What we argue over every day, contest, feel to be unfair, seems to be an unfair dividing, but the root is all in a weighing gone off.
Two, why this thing labor is so hard to weigh
So why is labor so hard to weigh. Because this thing labor and the apple, and the ground, are not goods of one kind at all.
The apple is easy to weigh. You count the number, one is one. The ground is easy to weigh. You take a measure to it, one mu is one mu. These things have one good in common: they can be seen, they can be touched, they can go on the scale, they can be laid to the measure. But labor. Take your labor out and let me look. You cannot take it out. Labor has no shape, no weight, you cannot set it on the scale and weigh it.
More troublesome still, labor hides inside the result, tangled with other things. One chair is made, and in it is the merit of the timber, the merit of the machine, the labor of the man who made the chair, and the labor of the man who first drew the chair. These several tangle together, and how do you pick that one man’s one share of labor out alone. You cannot pick it clean. This is the hardest place in weighing labor: it is without shape, it hides in the result, it tangles into one ball with others’ labor, with the tool, with luck.
Three, one same force, worth how much, changes moment to moment
Weighing labor has a third weight of hardness. Even one same man, spending one same share of force, what it is worth is not nailed down, it changes moment to moment.
Last term ran a reasoning, call it back. One same craft, and the more men who can do it, the less it is worth, the fewer who can do it, the dearer. In a village where every man can mend a pot, the craft of pot mending trades for not a few coins. But if in the whole village only one man is left who can mend a pot, every house’s pot must beg him, and that one pair of hands turns dear. The craft did not change, the man did not change, the force spent did not change, yet what it is worth changed heaven over earth. What changed is scarcity.
So this weighing of labor must look also at how hard that one share of labor is to find at the moment. It looks not only at how much force you spent, how big a matter you brought off, but at how many men in this world can bring off the same. The fewer who can, the dearer your one share of labor. This layer makes the weighing of labor harder still. Because it is not the weighing of a dead number, it is the weighing of a live number, floating with the age, floating with more men or fewer, floating at every moment.
Four, yet man never stopped weighing for its being hard
Up to here you may sink a little: labor so hard to weigh, without shape, tangled, and floating besides, then had we not best not weigh it at all, and divide any old way.
No. Man never stopped weighing for its being hard. Just the reverse, man thought out every kind of way, and would weigh it out at all costs. Why must he weigh it. The last chapter, Xunzi told it through: make not the divide clear, and the group cannot form. Weigh not that one share of labor, and the share each ought to get cannot be fixed. Fix not the share, and this crowd of men cannot gather and hold, they scatter. So this weighing of labor, however hard, must be done with the head lowered and set to it. Because undone, man cannot live as a group, and living not as a group, man falls back to that plight, running slower than the horse, weaker than the ox.
And so, over more than two thousand years, man made rule after rule for weighing labor. Some coarse, some fine. Some can weigh this kind of labor, cannot weigh that kind. Some good to use today, and by tomorrow no longer work. These rules each have their use, each their fault. The next section brings the main few rules man made out one by one, to see what each weighs, and what each lets slip.
Five, the cook not tending the kitchen, the priest does not cross the vessels
Before closing this section, call an ancestor, to set the measure of this weighing straight. Zhuangzi ran a line: though the cook does not tend his kitchen, the priest at the sacrifice does not cross over his wine vessels and the meat stands to take his place. So runs the line in the Zhuangzi.
Put it plain. The cook is the cook. The priest is the one who presides at the sacrifice. The wine vessels and the meat stands are the vessels of the rite. This line says: even should the cook not do his cooking well, that man presiding at the sacrifice will not cross over his own heap of wine vessels and rite vessels, and go to cook in the cook’s stead.
What does this line tell. It tells that each man has his own position, each has his own one share of labor to weigh. The cook’s labor is to make the food good. The priest’s labor is to preside over the rite well. These two shares of labor are weighed by two different rules, they cannot be mixed. You cannot take the rule that weighs the cooking, to weigh that one share of labor at presiding over the rite. This line of Zhuangzi’s points out the first rule of weighing labor: different labor takes a different rule, each weighed in its own position, one rule cannot weigh all under heaven.
This rule is exactly the lead into the next section. Since one rule cannot weigh all the labor under heaven, then how many rules in the end did man make, each weighing what. The next section shows.
Six, what this section set, crossing to the next
Good. This section set a most needful telling apart: the hard thing was never the dividing, it is the weighing.
The dividing is the fruit, the weighing is the cause. To divide things is the simple act a schoolchild can do, and the hard part is the fixing of the share before the hand moves, and the fixing of the share leans on weighing. Yet labor is a thing sorely hard to weigh: without shape, it cannot be taken out for the scale, it hides in the result, tangled into one ball with the tool and with others’ labor, and what it is worth floats moment to moment with scarcity. Hard as this, man never gave it up, for without weighing out that one share of labor, the share cannot be divided, and man cannot gather into a group.
The position this section set is: these four words, distribution by labor, their heaviest, hardest, most easily gone wrong part, presses whole onto one word, the weighing.
So which few rules did man make in the end to weigh labor. What does each weigh, and what does each let slip. The next section sets these few rules, one by one, onto the table.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.