If pressed to extract a single overriding ‘message’ from the text, it would be this:
Perform your calculations for everything liable to calculation, but also think very deeply about what people are capable of. — (from the Amazon link)
Notable misinterpreters of The Art of War—including Trump—view it as a treatise on how to crush one’s enemies rather than as a manual on converting enemies to your point of view https://t.co/2tr0kvWceU
— GEN (@GENmag) January 7, 2020
This might be the book that finally convinces me to download Kindle, even though I find reading more than two pages of text on a screen exhausting:
… Michael Nylan, a professor of early Chinese history at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of a few academic books of history and criticism, has completed a fresh translation of The Art of War — fresh both for the fact that she is the first woman scholar to do so and also because she has worked to move the reader’s focus away from the book’s brute military elements, which comprise only two of the 13 chapters, and toward its psychological and peacemaking ones…
GEN: How is your interpretation of “The Art of War” fundamentally different from previous ones?
Michael Nylan: The people who’ve been interested in The Art of War are, of course, not only men, but [most] tend to be interested in the war part of it when, actually, The Art of War is pretty much an anti-war treatise. It’s only if you haven’t been able to outmaneuver your enemies by various means and you’re attacked that The Art of War will tell you how to conduct a war as ruthlessly as possible — but that’s about two chapters’ worth out of 13, and most of the rest is far more interesting…Throughout the book, there’s unusual concern for those at the lowest rungs of society. There’s unusual concern that you don’t kill innocent civilians. There’s unusual concern that you consult people as widely as possible and that when you have to calculate going to war, you do so in the hopes that you will be killing as small a number as possible…
What’s a significant, specific divergence between your translation and previous ones?
For one, many of the previous translations treat it more or less like Machiavelli — all about deception and duplicity when, actually, deception and duplicity are pretty much [confined to] a single chapter that is usually translated as “spies.” For instance, the same word that means “spies” means “a gap that has been introduced,” so a lot of that chapter should not specifically be about spies but rather about how to introduce a division within the enemy’s population while keeping no division within the home forces…Was your translation a collaborative process?
I had three students fairly well along in their PhD program, all of whom had a specific interest in Sun Tzu, so we formed a little working group. Since one of them had done two tours in Iraq, he brought quite a bit of expertise that the rest of us lacked. I believe that none of us, no matter how smart, is sufficient unto a good text. People will have insights that would simply escape me…