Abstract

The Laozi, the Sima Fa, the Mozi and SAE overlap at one place: all four refuse to treat war as an ordinary policy option, and each sets up a condition of permission — by attitude, by purpose, by norm, by structure.

A stronger reading has to be ruled out at once. The four do not share a last-resort condition. The Sima Fa's to stop war by war, then war is permissible is a condition of justification; the Mozi's division between attack and chastisement is a condition of standing. Neither is a last-resort condition. Of the four, only Laozi and SAE hold one explicitly.

Four kinds of reason mark out different ranges. An attitude-type reason can lead to not fighting at all; a structural one cannot. A purpose-type reason supplies war with a legitimate result still to be attained, and therefore structurally permits widening the war for the sake of that result. A norm-type reason depends on a position that can adjudicate what is right.

And the Mohists defending cities give Theorem One's second face a real test — one this volume adjudicates. They also constitute a counter-example to a universal proposition of volume six, and force it to be rewritten.

1. How Thick the Overlap Is, and What It Is Not

Laozi 31: weapons are instruments of ill omen, not the instruments of a gentleman; he uses them only when he cannot do otherwise, and holds calm restraint the highest. Chapter 30 runs the same way: he who assists a ruler with the Way does not coerce the world with arms — such affairs are apt to rebound. The Sima Fa, Renben: so if killing men brings peace to men, killing is permissible; if attacking a state is out of love for its people, attacking is permissible; if war stops war, then even war is permissible. The Mozi, Against Offensive Warfare III, answering the challenge that Yu, Tang and King Wu all campaigned and all became sage kings: you have not examined the class of my words, nor understood their reason. Those were not what is called attack; they are called chastisement. And SAE's Theorem One: cannot-not — the carrier of cultivation is breached, and cultivation in a gentler form can no longer continue.

All four refuse to treat war as an ordinary policy option, and each builds a condition of permission out of attitude, purpose, norm and structure. The overlap is real, and it is narrower than it looks. What the four share: none accepts advantageous, therefore permissible; all require an extra gate before war begins; and all place that gate high in their own system — Laozi in the two chapters on arms, the Sima Fa in its opening paragraph, Mozi across three whole chapters, SAE at Theorem One.

What the four do not share is the character of that gate. Reading all four as the precondition every other road has been walked does not hold. Laozi: uses them only when he cannot do otherwise — a last-resort condition indeed. SAE: the carrier breached, the gentler form no longer possible — a last-resort condition indeed. The Sima Fa: killing that brings peace is permissible, war that stops war is permissible — this is a condition of justification. It does not ask whether other roads have been walked; it asks what this war serves. A war serving the ending of war is permitted by this reason even if other roads remain. The Mozi: those are not attack, they are chastisement — this is a condition of standing. It does not ask whether other roads have been walked; it asks which class this campaign falls into. Chastisement need not first show that the roads other than chastisement are exhausted.

So of the four, only Laozi and SAE explicitly hold a last-resort condition. And the fourfold division is precisely the device that prevents the misreading: state first that the four are of different kinds, then check what each marks out. Press them into one common point at the start and every later section will be supplying reasons for a common point that does not exist.

2. The Attitude Type: Laozi, and One Exit

Laozi's cannot do otherwise hangs on a judgement about weapons themselves: they are instruments of ill omen. Fine weapons are instruments of ill omen; all things may come to detest them, so one who has the Way does not dwell with them. The form of the argument is: this thing has a bad property in itself, all things detest it, so a man of the Way does not keep company with it — and therefore using it can only be being forced with no other course. It is a judgement about the character of the object, and what follows from it is an attitude — calm restraint above all, victory not to be admired, a victory in war to be received with the rites of mourning.

An attitude-type reason can lead to not fighting at all; a structural one cannot. Laozi's leaves an exit, and he walks toward it himself: since weapons are of ill omen, the best choice is not to use them at all. Chapter 30's does not coerce the world with arms and chapter 31's one who has the Way does not dwell with them both point that way.

SAE's cannot-not closes that exit. Once the structural condition is met, not fighting is not an option — it merely transfers the cost elsewhere, and usually to the part of the population least able to bear it. The difference is not one of degree. Laozi's criterion allows a man to say I will not take part in this, and supplies him a complete reason for that choice. SAE's does not, because it asks not shall I take part but is this situation already without another form.

And there is one thing Laozi has that SAE lacks. Chapter 30: he who assists a ruler with the Way does not coerce the world with arms; such affairs are apt to rebound. This is a judgement about blowback, and where it appears is worth noting: it is in the judgement about going to war, not in the judgement about means. SAE's treatment of blowback is concentrated at the layer of means — §12 on how deceit suppresses one's own subjecthood, and the four mechanisms set side by side in volume three all act on means. Theorem One has no such item. It asks is it unavoidable; it does not ask how will this come back on us. The item can be taken up, and the taking has a difficulty: add will it rebound to Theorem One and Theorem One acquires a component of consequence-calculation — which is exactly what the next distinction is meant to keep it clear of. How to take it up is left open.

Victory not to be admired is a second overlap, and the reasons still differ. A victory is not beautiful, and he who finds it beautiful delights in killing men… where the slain are many, weep for them in sorrow; a victory in war is to be received with the rites of mourning. §8 agrees with the conclusion: not losing is not winning. Laozi's reason: weapons are of ill omen, so success with them is not a good thing either. SAE's reason: military outcome is one dimension and passing the principle is another; winning does not constitute legitimacy in principle. The coverage differs: by Laozi's, no victory in any war deserves admiration, because weapons are of ill omen. By SAE's, a defensive war that passes the principle is not something whose completion cannot be acknowledged — what cannot be acknowledged is the inference that victory itself constitutes legitimacy. So the two block different things: Laozi blocks the glorification of war, SAE blocks settling the principle by the outcome. One blocks widely, the other blocks one specific inference squarely.

3. The Purpose Type: the Sima Fa

So if killing men brings peace to men, killing is permissible; if attacking a state is out of love for its people, attacking is permissible; if war stops war, then even war is permissible. Three sentences of one structure: the act itself — killing, attacking, warring — is not legitimate, but if it serves a legitimate result — peace, love of the people, the ending of war — then it is permitted. This places war inside a chain of means: there is an end to be reached, war is one available means to it, and within that scope it is permitted.

A purpose-type reason supplies war with a legitimate result still to be attained, and therefore structurally permits widening the war for the sake of that result. The argument: if war's permission derives from the result it serves, then so long as that result is not yet attained, this war has not yet completed its legitimacy. Continue the war in order to stop war is coherent inside this reason — it is not an abuse of it. And this is not a consequence pressed onto the text from outside. The Sima Fa writes it out itself.

4. The Extension the Sima Fa Gives Itself

In the same chapter, on the disposition after the guilty have been chastised: on entering the territory of the guilty, do no violence to the spirits, hold no hunts, damage no earthworks, burn no houses, fell no forests, take no livestock, grain or implements. Seeing the old and the young, escort them home unharmed; even meeting the able-bodied, if they do not resist, do not treat them as enemies; if they are wounded, give them medicine and send them back. This code is real, and finer than most traditions of its era. It should not be passed over. No desecration of shrines, no hunting, no wrecking of waterworks, no burning of houses, no felling of timber, no seizing of livestock, grain or tools; the old and the young sent home; the unresisting not made enemies; the wounded treated and returned.

But the clause that follows is another matter: the guilty having been chastised, the king and the feudal lords shall set that state in order, raise up the worthy and establish the enlightened, and restore its proper offices. The Sima Fa, Renben, places just punitive war and post-war political rectification within one and the same normative architecture. That is a textual fact: one chapter, one sequence of norms — first the prohibitions governing conduct on entering enemy territory, then, immediately, the rectification of that state once the guilty have been chastised. The two are contiguous in the text.

The next step is this volume's own reading, and is marked as such. If war's permission derives from the result stopping war, then securing that result belongs to the war; and a state just chastised will generate fresh disorder if its internal order is not rebuilt — so on this reason rebuilding is entailed. The text does not assert that inference. The Sima Fa nowhere says because the purpose is to stop war, political rectification is necessary; it merely places the two together. That the juxtaposition has a structural reason is this volume's holding — interpretation, not quotation. And a note on the state of the text: the five surviving chapters are the remnant of a larger ancient corpus, formed principally in the scholarly milieu of Warring States Qi while preserving an earlier stratum of military ritual, so one should not draw a strong claim about authorial logic from two propositions sharing a chapter.

But even taking only the layer of textual fact, the contrast with SAE stands. §18 prohibits precisely the act of setting that state in order, raising up the worthy and establishing the enlightened — and the Sima Fa writes it into the sequence of norms for a just war. Two normative systems giving contrary provisions at one and the same place: that does not depend on any interpretation at all.

5. Where Theorem Three Stands Here, and One Cross-Tradition Correspondence

Theorem Three requires that war be directed toward ending. But ending is not the same as attaining a legitimate result. The content of ending is: domination broken, and the possibility restored for the other party to organise itself. It does not include making the result. A situation in which domination has been broken and the other party then falls into disorder is, by Theorem Three, ended; by the Sima Fa, incomplete.

The difference can be stated precisely. The Sima Fa's terminus lies in the state of affairs — is that country now settled. SAE's lies in the relation — has the domination been broken, has the other party recovered the position from which it decides for itself. A state of affairs can be produced by the victor. A relation cannot.

And one correspondence across traditions. In the Doctrine of Right §60 (1797) Kant permits compelling an unjust enemy to adopt a constitution unfavourable by its nature to war — the same act. The two reasons are entirely different: Kant's runs through Recht (the character of that state's constitution is a property identifiable from outside), the Sima Fa's through the stopping of war (the result must be secured). Two wholly different paths landing at the same place shows this is not one tradition's deviation. It is the common exit of the practice of setting a legitimate goal for war — once legitimacy derives from a result to be attained, securing the result belongs to the war, and the most direct way to secure it is to build the order on the other party's behalf. (Kant's provision is treated in full in volume one of this series.)

6. The Norm Type: the Mozi, and That Adjudicating Position

The argument of Against Offensive Warfare I is an analogy. A man enters another's orchard and steals his peaches and plums, and all condemn him; killing an innocent man, stripping him of his clothes, taking his spear and sword, is more unrighteous still than taking another's horse or ox, because the injury to others is greater. In such cases the gentlemen of the world all know to condemn it. Yet when it comes to the great unrighteousness of attacking a state, they do not know to condemn it; they follow along and praise it and call it righteous. Can this be called knowing the distinction between righteous and unrighteous? The structure is clear: unrighteousness increases with the injury done — and this is an inconsistency in logic, not a divergence in values. Mozi presses it to the extreme: killing one man is one capital crime, killing a hundred a hundred; while attacking a state kills by the ten thousand and is called righteous — seeing a little black one calls it black, seeing much black one calls it white. That is not a difference in values but an inability to tell black from white.

But in Against Offensive Warfare III, answering the challenge, Mozi introduces a division: those are not what is called attack; they are called chastisement. The division is clean, and it places the whole weight on one thing: who adjudicates whether this is attack or chastisement. Mozi's criterion is to promote what benefits the world and eliminate what harms it — a substantive standard requiring someone to certify it. And the instances he cites for the three sage kings all appeal to the mandate of Heaven: the Miao were in great disorder and Heaven decreed their destruction; Xia's virtue was in great disorder and Heaven then commanded Tang. In his setting the adjudicator is Heaven, and Heaven's will is displayed through portents — a sun-prodigy at night, three days of blood-rain, a dragon born in the temple, a red bird bearing a jade tablet.

A norm-type reason depends on a position from which what is right can be adjudicated. This is isomorphic with just war theory, which likewise requires a position from which to determine who the just party is — and among states no adjudicator acknowledged by all parties exists. That structure is treated in full in volume five; two points only are recorded here. First, SAE does not establish that position. Theorem One does not ask whether this war is attack or chastisement; it asks after structural conditions verifiable from outside.

Second, what Mozi has and SAE does not must be acknowledged. The analogical argument of Against Offensive Warfare I does not depend on the mandate of Heaven — it is a pure consistency argument, and anyone who grants that greater injury is greater unrighteousness must accept its conclusion. Its force is independent of the adjudicating position, and it engages precisely the class of opponent SAE finds hardest: one who justifies aggression by saying his side is righteous. Mozi's method is not to argue about righteousness with him, but to point out that his measure differs between small matters and large. SAE can use this, and SAE currently has no equally forceful form of it.

7. Bude-yi and Bude-bu

Bude-yi — having no alternative — is a judgement about the agent's situation. Bude-bu — cannot-not — requires structural conditions verifiable from outside. Of the four, Laozi comes closest, since bude-yi does structurally point at there is no other way rather than at unwillingly. But the centres of gravity differ. Bude-yi centres on the agent — he was forced to it, he had no other choice, he did it and took no pleasure in it; Laozi's calm restraint above all and victory not to be admired say exactly this. Bude-bu centres on the situation — whether those forms are still open, irrespective of what the agent wants or feels.

And so bude-yi can be sincerely mistaken; bude-bu cannot. A man can sincerely feel he has no alternative. Fear, humiliation, misinformation, incomplete knowledge can all produce that feeling, and produce it without a trace of insincerity. Laozi's criterion has no guard against this, because it was never about the structure of a situation. And in this matter, being sincerely mistaken is as fatal as being insincere. This is SAE's practical reason for putting the criterion in structure rather than in attitude — not that structure is finer than attitude, but that a feeling cannot be reviewed, and the cost of war is not borne by feelings.

One cost must be acknowledged at once. Whether a structural condition can be verified is itself a question: whether cultivation in its gentler form can still continue cannot be counted the way one's own casualties can be counted. So the difference stated above is a difference in principle — an attitude-type criterion is unverifiable in principle, while a structural one is verifiable in principle and not always in practice. The difference is real, and it is smaller than it looks.

8. The Mohists Defending Cities: the Material

The Mohists did not merely oppose offensive war; they organised armed parties to help other states hold their walls. This is the only material in pre-Qin China that can be brought to bear on the second face of Theorem One. Gongshu: Gongshu Ban had built scaling ladders for Chu, to attack Song; Mozi set out from Qi and walked ten days and ten nights to Ying, and persuaded first Gongshu Ban, then the king. The king conceded the argument: well said — even so, Gongshu Ban has made me scaling ladders; I must take Song. The argument did not stop the war.

There followed the simulated siege: Mozi unfastened his belt to make a wall and used slips of wood for engines; Gongshu Ban deployed nine changes of siege machinery and Mozi repelled all nine — Gongshu Ban's engines were exhausted and Mozi's defence had margin to spare. Gongshu Ban said he knew how to defeat him but would not say it; Mozi said he knew it too, and would not say it either. Asked the meaning, Mozi answered: Gongshu's intent is nothing more than to kill me. Kill me, and Song will be unable to hold and can be attacked. But my disciple Qin Huali and three hundred others already hold my defensive implements upon the walls of Song, awaiting the invaders from Chu. Though you kill me, you cannot cut them off.

Preparing the City Gates opens with Qin Huali asking how a small state may be defended, and Mozi's answer is not about equipment: our walls and moats repaired, defensive implements ready, firewood and grain sufficient, superiors and inferiors in mutual affection, and further the aid of the neighbouring lords — by these one holds. And though the defender be skilled, if the ruler does not employ him, still one cannot hold… therefore the defender must be skilled and the ruler must honour and employ him; only then can one hold. The second passage lists fourteen conditions for holding a city, and its conclusion is very strong: where not one of the fourteen is present, then even a skilled man cannot hold it.

9. Isomorphic with §11, and the Gate of Genuine Rising

Preparing the City Gates makes the internal condition of a community a necessary condition of a city's defensibility, isomorphic with §11 of the treatise. Of the fourteen, walls, moats, towers, implements, grain and terrain are material conditions; while officials and people in accord, the ruler trustworthy and just and the myriad people delighting in him without end, the graves of fathers and mothers are there, deep resentment against the enemy and great merit toward one's superiors, rewards clear and credible and punishments severe enough to be feared — these are conditions internal to the community. This is deepening cultivation is national strength in Warring States form — whether a community can hold itself depends on its internal condition, not on how good a technician it has hired.

And the defender must be skilled and the ruler must honour and employ him; only then can one hold corresponds to the genuine rising gate on the second face of Theorem One. The force of the sentence lies in its negative form: however good the defender, if the ruler does not employ him, the city still cannot be held. Mozi is not discussing courtesy; he is stating an operational fact — the party being defended must itself want to defend. And the practice recorded in Gongshu matches: Mozi went first to dissuade the attacker while sending disciples to assist Song's defence, not to take it over. Nowhere in the chapter does he demand that Song hand over command, and nowhere does he establish anything in Song.

10. The Gate of the Intervening Party's Own Interests: a Determination

Among the four gates on the second face of Theorem One, the hardest is that an intervening party must have interests of its own — the gate exists to prevent deciding on others' behalf whether they should resist. What were the Mohists' own interests? They were not men of Song. Gongshu adds one detail at its close: Mozi returned, and passing through Song it rained; he took shelter in a gateway, and the gatekeeper would not let him in. The state he had saved did not know him, and would not let him in out of the rain. That detail rules out any motive of reward.

The Mohists' defence of cities satisfies the gate, but their interest lies at the level of a community's continued existence, not at the level of benefit. Mohism was a community with a definite doctrine, a definite organisation, a definite way of life; and that community's continuation required one condition — that there exist a number of independent small states, some of whose rulers were willing to listen and to employ them. In a world annexed to the end, that condition disappears. Mozi calculated this himself in Against Offensive Warfare II: of the states enfeoffed in antiquity, those destroyed by offensive war are beyond counting; Ju in the east was a very small state, wedged between great ones, and in the end perished. In a world where the small states have all been swallowed, Mohism has nowhere to go. So stopping attacks is not altruism; it is guarding one's own carrier — only that carrier is not property or territory but a world in which small states still exist and someone is still willing to hear a doctrine.

The consequence of this determination is that the sense of the gate is broader than first supposed: it does not require the intervening party to have material gains or losses at stake, only that the intervening party's carrier of cultivation genuinely depends on the outcome of the intervention. The contrary possibility must be stated. Read more strictly — requiring a direct, identifiable common interest between intervening and intervened — the Mohists do not satisfy it, and Theorem One would then determine that the practice closest to 15DD in pre-Qin China does not hold. This volume adopts the broad reading, on the ground that the strict reading would exclude all cross-community assistance, which is not what this gate exists to prevent. What it exists to prevent is deciding on others' behalf whether they should resist — and the Mohists left precisely that decision to the other side.

11. The Halting in Gongshu Is Not of Sunzi's Type

Sunzi's attacking the enemy's plans is destroying the other side's design so that it cannot stand. In Gongshu the king's plan was not destroyed: having conceded the argument he still said I must take Song. What changed the outcome were two things — the result of the simulated siege, nine attacks repelled nine times; and the fact that three hundred men were already on Song's walls with defensive implements. This is making the attack fail on cost, not making the plan fail.

And its precondition is that the defence was already in place. Had Qin Huali's three hundred not been on Song's walls, neither the advocacy nor the sand-table exercise would have stopped the king — Mozi says so plainly: kill me, and Song cannot hold, and can be attacked. This is a historical specimen of §10's not fighting is also preparing, and the specimen gives a more specific form: preparation is part of what makes attacking-the-plan work, not the next step after it has failed. Sunzi's four-rung sequence — attack the plan, attack alliances, attack the army, attack cities — implies a temporal order; in Gongshu, preparation and persuasion proceed simultaneously, and preparation is the condition of persuasion working at all.

This bears directly on Theorem One's threshold. If preparation is the condition of attacking-the-plan working, then attacking-the-plan exhausted cannot be understood as saying everything one can say while unprepared. And this is a concrete instance of a more general dependency: determining whether that threshold is satisfied requires knowing what options attacking-the-plan and attacking-alliances comprise and under what conditions each works — which is execution-layer knowledge, and SAE explicitly does not do the execution layer. A layer of principle may declare that it does not do the execution layer. It may not declare that it does not depend on one. The full treatment is in volume six.

12. Mohism as a Counter-Example, and the Rewriting

The proposition tested here comes from volume six, and is stated in full because everything in this section depends on it. Original form, universal: constraints on the enemy-facing side can be generated by reciprocal equilibrium — one does not strike a state in mourning, does not exploit a natural disaster, drums only once the enemy has formed his ranks; such rules arise and persist because the other side observes them too, and a violator meets the same treatment next time. Whereas on one's own side there is no counterparty to enforce. Who redeems the soldier's standing to be informed? Who makes a commander pay for violating it? In a one-directional structure where reward, punishment, life and death all issue from the commander, no mechanism can stabilise such a constraint — such constraints therefore lack the conditions of their generation. That proposition flagged Mohism as a possible counter-example, because the Mohists were a transnational organisation whose internal discipline was enforced by no state's military law.

Mohism is a counter-example to the original universal form, and forces the rewriting of its domain and its table of mechanisms. To say Mohism is not a counter-example, only an addition does not hold: if the original proposition is universal — no generative mechanism on one's own side — then a single sample with a non-reciprocal constraint on that side is a counter-example. Lu's Questions records that Mozi sent his disciple Sheng Chuo to serve Xiangzi Niu; Xiangzi Niu invaded Lu three times and Sheng Chuo followed him three times. Hearing of it, Mozi sent Gao Sunzi to request his withdrawal — he recalled his own student. His reason: to speak of righteousness and not act on it is knowingly to transgress. It is not that Chuo did not know; his salary outweighed his righteousness. This is a discipline on a member of one's own side, and its support is not reciprocity: Sheng Chuo could not punish Mozi, and Mozi had nothing to fear from him.

But its support is not humanity is an end either — this distinction is the easiest thing in the section to misread. What stabilised Mohist discipline was a bundle of institutional conditions, not the standing of a norm on its own: rules acknowledged as constitutive of the community (not to keep them is not to be a Mohist); an internal authority and review mechanism (the office of the Grand Master); real consequences for violation (recall, expulsion); exit a real and not merely nominal possibility (voluntary entry, and one may leave); a channel for appeal and reinterpretation (the Mohist tradition of disputation). The character of this bundle must be stated: these five are candidate conditions generalised from a single sample, untested for necessity or sufficiency, and Mohism has all five is itself overstated — the Grand Master and expulsion have textual support, rules acknowledged as constitutive is supported by to speak of righteousness and not act on it is knowingly to transgress, while the channel of appeal comes from a general impression of the Mohist tradition of disputation, for which this volume has no specific citation.

And a distinction must be carried through: why a norm holds and how a norm comes to be stably enforced within an organisation are two things. Humanity is an end does not fail because institutions are inadequate — in a community without a Grand Master, treating a person merely as a means is still not legitimate. And that the office of Grand Master could stabilise discipline does not show that the discipline was legitimate. So what this section gives is a hypothesis about institutional stability, not a judgement about the source of norms.

The rewritten form: self-limitations on the enemy-facing side can be stabilised by reciprocity; self-limitations on one's own side cannot depend on the other party's retaliation, and must be stabilised otherwise — by internal rights, procedures, membership structures, or institutional review. Reciprocity is not the only mechanism by which constraints are generated. This form has a real boundary of application: Mohists could leave Mohism; soldiers cannot leave an army. All five conditions fail in a conscript army — membership is not voluntary, the cost of exit is death, there is no internal review, there is no channel of appeal. So after the revision, a conscripted army still falls on the side of the conditions of generation are absent. And the corollary attached to the original proposition is unaffected: a constraint hung on reciprocity is effective only on the face where reciprocity obtains, while a criterion hung on humanity is an end takes effect without requiring the other party to be capable of retaliation. That is the practical reason for placing a criterion on the ground rather than on custom — custom disappears where reciprocity disappears, and on one's own side there was never any reciprocity to be had.

13. Left Unresolved in This Volume

Laozi's such affairs are apt to rebound is a blowback mechanism situated in the judgement about going to war, and Theorem One has no counterpart — SAE's blowback mechanisms all sit at the layer of means. Whether to take it up is undecided, and the difficulty is that taking it up would add a component of consequence-calculation to Theorem One, which the distinction between bude-yi and bude-bu exists precisely to keep it clear of.

The broad reading of the own-interests gate has an undetermined boundary: what counts as depending on? Does a community that merely cares, in thought, about another's fate satisfy it? This volume does not answer. And that preparation is a condition of attacking-the-plan working deepens Theorem One's threshold into a dependency on execution-layer knowledge, treated in volume six.

Finally: the consistency argument of Against Offensive Warfare I — seeing a little black one calls it black, seeing much black one calls it white — engages the class of opponent who justifies aggression by claiming righteousness more directly than any form SAE currently has. Whether SAE should adopt an argument of the same type has not been considered.

14. A Note on the Title

This volume, like the rest of the series, keeps its correction records in the body: withdrawn propositions, narrowed claims and reductions are marked where they occurred rather than silently repaired. They are kept for a reason — a framework that requires cannot-not be questioned must be the first thing questioned, and a text that shows no sign of ever having erred gives its reader no way to judge how its determinations were reached.

In this volume the point bears on the title itself. A title such as Four Ways of Having Nowhere Left to Go would presuppose that all four traditions share a last-resort condition — and the first section shows they do not. What a volume is called must answer to what it can establish.