---
title: "Measure and Excess"
sousTitre: "Diminishing, contenting oneself, bounding desire: Lao Tzu, Marcus Aurelius, and Montaigne before the boundless."
description: "Three traditions, three ways of thinking the limit against the limitless. First, we distinguish what each says—then listen for what resonates."
date: 2026-06-07
lang: en
tradition: undefined
auteurs: ["Lao Tzu", "Marcus Aurelius", "Montaigne"]
---
# Measure and Excess

Always more. That is the briefest formula one could give to an age—and ours may answer it better than any other. More production, more calculation, more speed; more earth upturned to extract the metal that will drive machines demanding still more. Growth is no longer a means in service of an end; it has become its own end, and we call crisis anything that slows it. Yet there exists a very old intuition, shared by men who never read one another, that this *always more* is not the health of a world but its sickness—that beyond a certain point, to take still more is already to lose.

The intuition is common, but it is not thought the same way everywhere, and that is the whole point. A fourth-century BCE Taoist, a second-century Stoic emperor, a Renaissance gentleman from Périgord: three ways of perceiving the limit, which it would be lazy to collapse into a single wisdom of "less." The Tao does not diminish for the same reasons Marcus Aurelius is content, and neither speaks the language Montaigne uses about the greed of conquerors. First, we distinguish. What resonates afterward will be all the clearer.

## I. Lao Tzu: The Way That Subtracts

Western wisdom, since Socrates, has almost always been a wisdom of acquisition: one seeks to know more, to possess better, even if it be virtue. The *Tao Te Ching* takes the opposite path. Its slope is not accumulation but subtraction—as [the emptiness of the hub makes the wheel turn](https://viasophia.org/articles/2026-06-03-le-moyeu-vide/), it is by what it removes that the sage becomes capable.

  
    為學日益，為道日損。損之又損，以至於無為。無為而無不為。
  
  Celui qui se livre à l'étude augmente chaque jour (ses connaissances). Celui qui se livre au Tao diminue chaque day (ses passions). Il les diminue et les diminue sans cesse jusqu'à ce qu'il soit arrivé au non-agir. Dès qu'il pratique le non-agir il n'y a rien qui lui soit impossible.

*[損 · sǔn]* The verb Julien renders as "diminish" means to cut away, to lessen, to make decline. It is the exact opposite of 益 (*yì*, to increase), which opens the sentence. The Way does not add one discipline to another: it removes.

The movement described here is not a bitter deprivation, the tightening of a belt. It is the lightening of one who gradually sheds what encumbered him without his knowing. To study is to load the mind each day with one more piece of knowledge; to follow the Way is to remove from it each day one desire. And the end of this subtraction bears a name that has provoked much ink: *non-action*, *wu-wei*.

*[無為 · wú-wéi]* Literally "without acting." Not inertia, but action that adds no constraint to the course of things—action that need not force because it follows the slope of reality. Its opposite is not rest, but bustle.

One would entirely mistake the meaning by reading this as an ode to laziness. Non-action is not the refusal to act; it is the refusal to force. He who forces adds his effort to the resistance of things, and resistance grows with effort; he who follows the course obtains without constraining. That is why the chapter ends with a paradox that is no longer one: *nothing is impossible for him*. Maximum efficacy coincides with minimum intervention. Excess, here, is not merely a moral vice: it is a mistake in physics. To force is to misunderstand the Way.

Hence a second lesson, even sharper, which directly targets this *always more*:

  
    持而盈之，不如其已；揣而銳之，不可長保。金玉滿堂，莫之能守；富貴而驕，自遺其咎。功遂身退天之道。
  
  Il vaut mieux ne pas remplir un vase que de vouloir le maintenir (lorsqu'il est plein). Si l'on aiguise une lame, bien qu'on l'explore avec la main, on ne pourra la conserver constamment (tranchante). Si une salle est remplie d'or et de pierres précieuses, personne ne pourra les garder. Si l'on est comblé d'honneurs et qu'on s'enorgueillisse, on s'attirera des malheurs. Lorsqu'on a fait de grandes choses et obtenu de la réputation, il faut se retirer à l'écart. Telle est la voie du ciel.

The overfull vessel spills; the over-sharpened blade dulls; the room filled with gold cannot be guarded. Lao Tzu does not moralize about wealth; he observes a law: what is brought to its fullness calls for its reversal. Plenitude is unstable, the summit the beginning of a fall. And the last sentence seals it all: *to withdraw after the work is accomplished—such is the way of heaven* (功遂身退，天之道). The limit is not a rule sages have decreed to curb the ambitious; it is the manner in which heaven itself proceeds. The sun at its zenith declines; the full moon wanes. To know when to stop is not to obey a morality; it is to align with the rhythm of the world. The Taoist measure is cosmological before it is ethical. It says less *you must* than *this is how all things go*.

## II. Marcus Aurelius: The Part and the Whole

The Stoic also speaks of measure, and he too grounds this measure in the order of the world. But this world is not the silent, processual Way of the Tao: it is a rational *Nature*, a city, a great body governed by a reason that foresees. The difference is not merely verbal. Where the Tao asks that one add nothing, the Stoic asks that one *consent*—that one say yes to the place assigned to him in an order that surpasses him and has meaning.

> O world, all that accords with your harmony accords with me; nothing is for me premature or late that comes in its time for you. All is fruit for me, O nature, that your seasons bring forth. All comes from you, all lives in you, all returns to you.
>
> — **Marcus Aurelius**, *Meditations*, livre IV, § 23. éd. canonical ref; from the French of Jules Barthélemy-Saint-Hilaire, Wikisource.

This is a prayer, and it must be heard as such. The emperor does not grit his teeth in resignation; he assents. The decisive word is *accords*: what accords with the harmony of the whole accords with me, because I am not a whole, I am a *part*. All Stoic excess lies in forgetting this condition of part—pretending that a fraction may conduct itself as if it were the whole, wanting for itself a fate different from that which the whole assigns it.

*[μέρος / ὅλον]* Stoic thought revolves around the relation of the part (*méros*) to the whole (*hólon*). The sage is he who knows himself a fraction of an order, and who wills what the order wills. The vicious man is the fraction that dreams itself a totality.

Marcus Aurelius returns again and again to the man who "knows how to be content with the fate he receives in the universal order of things." To be content: not from lack of ambition, but from exactness. To desire beyond one's part is to desire a falsehood, to want the world not to be what it is—and to make oneself miserable for [what does not depend on us](https://viasophia.org/articles/2026-06-06-ce-qui-depend-de-nous/). And the emperor finds, to express measure, an image Lao Tzu would not have disdained—that of a nature that bounds itself:

> What is truly marvelous in the art of nature is that, having set limits for itself, it transforms into its own substance all that within it seems made to decay, age, and become useless [...]. It knows, then, how to be content with the space that is its own, with the matter that belongs to it, and with the art that is peculiarly its own.
>
> — **Marcus Aurelius**, *Meditations*, livre VIII, § 50. éd. canonical ref; from the French of Jules Barthélemy-Saint-Hilaire, Wikisource.

Nature rejects nothing outside itself because there is no *outside itself*: it has no place to cast its debris, so it transforms them. Here is an economy without waste, content with its space and its matter. The contrast with our way of producing is so direct that it is better not to press it: it suffices to read. For the Stoic, wisdom is to imitate this restraint—to live as a part that knows it is only a part, and that demands of the whole neither more space nor more matter than what falls to it.

One already sees where the two paths diverge. The Tao subtracts desire to cease forcing a course that suffices; it says nothing of meaning. Marcus Aurelius consents to a part because he believes the whole governed by a just reason. The first lightens; the second obeys. The first follows a process; the second fits into an order. To confuse them would be to lose what makes each precious: one does not console in the same way the man who believes the world meaningful and the man who holds it a river without intention.

## III. Montaigne: The Mirror and the Superfluous

With Montaigne, the air changes. No rational cosmos, no celestial Way: a man who has read the Ancients, who observes his century, and who turns judgments inside out like a glove. His measure is neither cosmological nor providential. It is critical. It arises from a shift in perspective.

In the chapter *Of Cannibals*, Montaigne listens to the account of a man who lived twelve years in Brazil, and he draws from it a sentence that has echoed through the centuries:

> I find nothing barbarous or savage in what is told me of this nation, except that everyone calls barbarous whatever is not practiced in his own country.
>
> — **Montaigne**, *Essays*, livre I, ch. 30, § Of Cannibals. éd. canonical ref; from the French of the Michaud edition, 1907, Wikisource.

*[barbarie]* The 1907 modernization softens the impact of the 1595 text, where Montaigne wrote that everyone "calls barbarism whatever is not his own custom." The meaning remains: barbarous is a word always pronounced upon others, never upon oneself.

The blow lands precisely where it matters: not on the customs of these peoples, but on the position from which we judge them. To call the other "barbarous" is to erect one's own custom as the measure of all things—a gesture of excess if ever there was one, for it knows no bounds. And here is what Montaigne observes among these men called savages: not the absence of law, but a strange rightness of desire.

> They have the good fortune to limit their desires to what their natural needs require, and everything beyond that is superfluous to them.
>
> — **Montaigne**, *Essays*, livre I, ch. 30, § Of Cannibals. éd. canonical ref; from the French of the Michaud edition, 1907, Wikisource.

*To limit their desires*: the same measure, found among those Europe deems primitive. But—and this is where one must be as wary of Montaigne as one follows him—he does not make this measure a metaphysics. He does not say, as Lao Tzu does, that it is the way of heaven; nor, as Marcus Aurelius, that it is the order of Nature. He holds up a mirror. He opposes to the greed of his world the image of another, and leaves us to blush. His measure is an *ad hominem* argument addressed to an entire civilization.

For the other term of the comparison, he names without hesitation. In the chapter *Of Coaches*, evoking the conquest of the New World, his prose abandons irony for indignation:

> How many cities razed, how many nations exterminated, how many millions of men put to the sword, what upheavals in that fair and rich part of the world—for the trade in pearls and pepper! Wretched victories!
>
> — **Montaigne**, *Essays*, livre III, ch. 6, § Of Coaches. éd. canonical ref; from the French of the Michaud edition, 1907, Wikisource.

*For the trade in pearls and pepper.* All excess lies in the disproportion of that sentence: entire nations against spices. The savage is not the naked man who limits his desires to his needs; the savage is he who razes cities for pepper, and calls it victory. Montaigne does not deduce measure from an order of the world—he makes it arise from scandal. His limit is the name of shame.

## Synthesis: Three Foundations of the Same Restraint

Three times measure, and three times something else. For Lao Tzu, the limit is a fact of the Way: the full reverses, heaven withdraws after the work, and one lightens to cease forcing. For Marcus Aurelius, the limit is a fact of reason: I am a part of a meaningful whole, and wisdom is to will my portion without coveting another's or the whole's. For Montaigne, the limit is a fact of nothing at all—it is a moral demand born of a displaced gaze, the mirror held up to a civilization that has lost the sense of the superfluous.

It is essential not to flatten these differences under a "universal wisdom of frugality." The Taoist would not renounce the world: he follows it better than the busy man. The Stoic does not contemplate an indifferent river: he obeys a providence. Montaigne founds nothing in heaven: he accuses. One says *this is how it is*, another *this has meaning*, the third *this is unworthy*. Three grammars of the limit—process, order, conscience.

And yet they turn toward the same adversary, who has not aged. This adversary might be called the *limitless*: the conviction that there is never a point to stop, that fullness calls for more-fullness, that every boundary is an obstacle to be crossed rather than a form to be respected. Lao Tzu answers with the vessel one does not fill; Marcus Aurelius, with nature content with its space; Montaigne, with natural needs beyond which all is superfluous. Three times, the same thing is said: there exists an *enough*, and to lose sight of it is the beginning of ruin. There remains a question these wisdoms could not pose, and which has been [addressed elsewhere](https://viasophia.org/articles/2026-06-06-fetichisme-marchandise/): in the age of the commodity, is excess still a desire the soul can correct, or has it passed into things themselves?

That this diagnosis comes from ages and places that knew nothing of one another should give us pause. A world that mines its seabeds, that turns its mountains for the metal of its machines, that measures its health by its growth alone, does not have before these texts the comfort of finding them quaint. They do not describe another world: they name, in advance, our own—and they name it from the only place from which it is still possible to see it, the place of the limit.

## Closing

In the foreground of Poussin’s painting, a giant strides toward the east. It is Orion, the boundless hunter, and he is blind; on his shoulder, a tiny man points him toward the rising sun. Colossal strength does not know where it is going; it takes a small measure, perched high above, to serve as its eyes. The image silently says what the three texts say in words: power without limit is blindness, and it is the smallest that sees.

There remains Lao Tzu’s sentence, the most stripped-down of the three, which commands nothing and accuses no one: *diminish, and diminish again*. It is not certain we still know how to hear it. But it waits, intact, for us to return to it.

---

**À lire aussi**

- [Le moyeu vide](https://viasophia.org/articles/2026-06-03-le-moyeu-vide/)
- [La table qui danse](https://viasophia.org/articles/2026-06-06-fetichisme-marchandise/)
- [La retraite intérieure](https://viasophia.org/articles/2026-06-02-retraite-interieure-marc-aurele/)
- [Ce qui dépend de nous](https://viasophia.org/articles/2026-06-06-ce-qui-depend-de-nous/)
- [Agir, et lâcher le fruit](https://viasophia.org/articles/2026-06-05-agir-lacher-le-fruit/)

## Sources

- Lao Tzu, *Tao Te Ching (The Book of the Way and Its Virtue)* — Imprimerie nationale, 1842 (Wikisource); from the French of Stanislas Julien, Imprimerie nationale (https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Le_Livre_de_la_voie_et_de_la_vertu)
- Marcus Aurelius, *Meditations* — Wikisource (trans. Barthélemy-Saint-Hilaire); from the French of Jules Barthélemy-Saint-Hilaire, Wikisource (https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Pens%C3%A9es_pour_moi-m%C3%AAme)
- Michel de Montaigne, *Essays (Of Cannibals I.30; Of Coaches III.6)* — Wikisource (Michaud edition, 1907 — modernized spelling); from the French of the Michaud edition, 1907, Wikisource (https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Essais/%C3%A9dition_Michaud,_1907)


Canonical source : https://viasophia.org/en/essais/2026-06-07-mesure-et-demesure/