Plutarch: The Passions of the Soul or Diseases of the Body?

Plutarch · Constitution of Man Series · 9 pages

A short piece from Plutarch's Morals in the translation of S. White, from the Goodwin revision of 1878 with Emerson's introduction. It opens from Homer's cry, contemplating the various kinds of mortal animals and comparing them in respect of their lives and habits, that no creature is weaker, more calamitous or blinder than man — attributing to man the unhappy primacy of superiority in miseries.

The comparison Plutarch then draws is asymmetrical, and that asymmetry is the argument. The body has many diseases, but they are readily perceived; the soul does not readily perceive its own maladies, and worse, even mistakes them for indications of soundness. From that follows the practical difference: the man diseased in body willingly yields himself to the care of the physician, while the unruly passions of the soul resist a cure — and are therefore, on Plutarch's reckoning, the more fatal of the two. It is a compact statement of the problem the whole of this section addresses, which is why it sits here rather than among the Hellenic material.

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