Plutarch: Is Vice Enough to Make a Man Unhappy?

Plutarch, Samuel White (T) · Living the Life Series · 8 pages

A fragment from Plutarch's Morals, published there under the title “Whether vice is sufficient to render a man unhappy,” translated by Samuel White, corrected and revised by William Watson Goodwin with Emerson's introduction, Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1878, Vol. IV, pages 498–503. Eight pages, the shortest of the six Plutarch pieces here.

The argument is compressed and turns on a single asymmetry. Men earnestly seek wealth, the fragment observes, and yet cannot enjoy it by reason of the trouble that attends it — so the thing pursued as a remedy for unhappiness does not supply one. Against that, vice is said to be sufficient of itself to produce misery, needing no aid from instruments: it requires no external circumstance to work with. The other half of the asymmetry is then argued from endurance. Poverty, slavery, war, external calamity of every sort and even death in cruel forms may all be borne by a heroic spirit — and an instance is offered from India, of widows going to the funeral pile with joy — so that none of these, however severe, is sufficient by itself to make a person miserable. The conclusion drawn is the one the title asks after: that all the ills of Fortune together cannot produce misery without vice, while vice alone both ruins and destroys. The head-note adds the observation that gives the piece its sting — that the utterly vicious man nonetheless thinks of himself as a thoroughly moral one, so the condition described is precisely the one its sufferer cannot detect.

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