Comparing: Battleground Ignorance
The Art of War 6:6.5-11
This article continues our project explaining each stanza of Sun Tzu’s work. The English and Chinese are from my award-winning translation, The Art of War and The Ancient Chinese Revealed. Start here for the book’s opening lines.
These lines are from the second stanza of the sixth Section of Chapter 6 of The Art of War. They extend the lessons on knowledge and ignorance from the first chapter of the book. Ignorance and knowledge are a specific form of emptiness and fullness, also known as weakness and strength, the topic of this chapter. The specific focus here is how our ignorance of the time and place of a competitive meeting fails to give us the ability to prepare our strengths where they are needed.
Form of Battle
Positions have both place and form. Their key mental “places” are where we rank in people’s minds on the criteria they use for making decisions about us. The “form” of these positions are the characteristics of strength and weaknesses associated with those places. Place comes first since our physical places in the real world determines the minds in which we are judged. This was Sun Tzu’s point earlier as discussed in this article on Scarcity and Crowds.
This stanza has only eight lines, but those lines deal with the weakness of ignorance. In the previous article, the topic was the strength of knowledge. This following stanza is the counterpoint to that one.
In the quotations below, we summarize each Chinese character as a single English word shown in < > brackets.
<No> <know> <battle> <’s> <place>
<No> <know> <battle> <’s> <day>
A <battle> is a decision point at which our strengths and weaknesses are compared with and by others so a choice can be made. They have two important characteristics that define them: place and time. The place has a “distance” between the physical place of our positions and the key mental place of the comparison. That distance can be converted to time. Both the place and timing of this comparison are critical to shaping any decision. Place and time are connected, and our ignorance of either creates many potential forms of weakness.
Practical Strategy is a reader-supported publication, but between now and Christmas, all new articles will be free to everyone who registers.
The focus of this stanza is the Chinese character meaning <rescue>. In any comparison, we win on our strengths, but we lose on our weaknesses. When it comes to supporting others, we are more afraid of supporting a person who proves too weak in some way. Supporting any form of weakness is dangerous. <Rescue> is how we use our strengths to rescue our weaknesses.
<Then> <left> <no> <can> <rescue> <right>
<Right> <no> <can> <rescue> <left>
This echoes the article before the last on the balancing of opposites. In that article, the topic was how filling up on one strength always empties its complementary opposite creating a weakness. The point of that article was how we can find the weak points of others. The point here is its opposite: how we minimize our weaknesses with our strengths. Our ignorance of the place and time of battle makes it impossible to reinforce our weaknesses with our strengths, whatever they may be. In them terms of a mental comparison, these weaknesses and strength can take many forms, but here we use the physical analogy of time and distance to discuss them all.
This ignorance was the determining factor in one of the most famous battles in American history, the battle of Gettysburg, the bloodiest battle during our Civil War. General Lee of the southern forces had invaded the north with his army of Virginia, hoping to capture Washington D.C.. General Meade with the northern army was sent to stop them.
Neither army had good information about where the opposing forces were. They accidently ran into each other near the town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Both armies were unprepared for the coming battle, but the northern forces knew more about the potential battlefields nearby. Based upon this knowledge, Meade’s northern forces were able to secure the high ground on the first day of battle. The southern forces, at first outnumbering the northern army, faced them from the ground below.
This post is public so feel free to share it with friends.
The main strength of the north, however, was not just holding the high ground, but the length of their battle line. On the ridge and nearby hills, their line was a curved fish hook only two miles long. The southern army’s line of battle stretched for seven miles surrounding the ridge and hills on three sides. The determining advantage turned out to be how quickly the northern forces could reinforce the various parts of their line. The south attacked to the left on the first day, then the right on the second day, and finally the center on the last and decisive day, but the north was abled to reinforce their lines in each place. Because each addition of strength to weakness was quick, they were able to hold.
<Front> <no> <can> <rescue> <back>
<Back> <no> <can> <rescue> <front>
Over the course of the battle of Gettysburg, the numbers advantage initially belonged to the south’s General Lee. As the days past, however, more and more northern forces were brought into General Meade’s high ground from the surrounding areas. General Lee, in contrast, couldn’t even contact his own calvary, led by J.E.B. Stuart, who had gone too far east looking for the northern army. His ignorance of the battlefield meant that his troops could never be used productively because they were weary from travel.
Gettysburg illustrates the conversion between two types of weakness that often happens beneath the surface. The weakness of ignorance, not knowing the location of the battleground, often converts to the weakness of slowness. As Sun Tzu says in Chapter 11, section 2, line 16, “Mastering speed is the essence of war.” In order to master speed, we must choose the right battles based upon our knowledge of the strengths and weaknesses it will give us.
The Confusion of Ignorance
When we don’t actively work toward a certain place and time of comparison, confusion reigns.
<But> <situation> <distant> <is> <count> <ten> <miles>
<Near> <is> <count> <miles>
Here, Sun Tzu makes it clear that, while distance is important in these problems with speed, our main problem is ignorance. The “ten miles” here is contrasted with the “thousand miles” in the previous stanza (discussed in this article). In that verse, Sun Tzu wrote that a thousand miles was not too far if we know the time and place of the battle, but ten miles is distant if we don’t. Those mile count more when we are ignorant. Knowledge is worth a hundred times more than our weaknesses when we are compared because we use our knowledge to minimize the problems.