Chapter 13

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 To receive favour is to have acquired something that can be withdrawn by someone else, and to have entered a relation in which one's standing is held by another party.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.

The second half of chapter thirteen contains an argument that runs somewhere unexpected.

The reason I have great trouble, it says, is that I have a body; if I had no body, what trouble would I have? That looks like the opening of a familiar move in which the body is the source of suffering and the goal is to be free of it, and a good deal of Indian and later Chinese religious literature does make exactly that move.

This chapter does not. The conclusion drawn is that the world may be entrusted to a person who values the world as they value their own body, and cared for by one who loves the world as they love their own body. Having a body turns out to be the qualification rather than the affliction.

The logic is that vulnerability is what makes care intelligible. A ruler who can be hurt understands what hurting means, and a ruler with nothing at stake is the wrong person to hand a state to. The book's whole political posture depends on this: the sage of chapter seven who puts himself last is preserved, not dissolved, and the low ground of chapter eight is a position occupied by somebody.

It is worth registering how much this rules out. There is no doctrine of liberation from embodiment anywhere in the book, no soul separable from a life, and nothing that could be described as salvation.