Favour and Disgrace Are Both Alarming

Chapter thirteen opens with a line that sounds like a mistake and is not: favour and disgrace are equally alarming.

The explanation the chapter gives is that favour is a lowly thing, so that getting it is alarming and losing it is alarming. The point is about the structure of dependence rather than about the pleasantness of the two states. To receive favour is to have acquired something that can be withdrawn by someone else, and to have entered a relation in which one's standing is held by another party. The anxiety begins on arrival, not on removal.

Anyone who has been promoted knows the observation is accurate. The chapter is making the sharper claim that the two conditions are not opposites at all but the same condition at two moments, and that treating them as opposites is the error.

The passage belongs with the book's recurring interest in what a person is dependent on. Chapter nine warns about wealth and rank held with arrogance. Chapter forty-four asks whether reputation or the person matters more. Chapter twenty describes the speaker's indifference to the general merriment. In each case the target is not the good itself but the exposure that comes with holding it on someone else's terms.