A short Plutarch essay arguing that the soul's diseases (vice, anger, folly) are worse than the body's, because they harm the sufferer while also robbing him of the power to notice or fix them.
"Animine An Corporis Affectiones Sint Piores" ("Whether the Affections of the Soul or of the Body Are Worse") is a brief diatribe from Plutarch's Moralia that takes up a stock rhetorical question of ancient moral philosophy: are we hurt more by physical illness or by moral and psychological sickness? Plutarch argues unambiguously for the latter. Bodily disease comes from nature and from outside; the soul's evils, by contrast, begin as our own deeds before they become our sufferings, so we are complicit in our own worst injuries in a way we never are with a fever.
The essay's central move is a comparison of symptoms. Physical disease announces itself through pulse, pallor, and pain, and the sick person seeks a doctor because he knows he is sick. Diseases of the soul "escape the notice of most people precisely because they are evils" - the very faculty that would judge the sickness, reason, is the thing that is diseased. Plutarch pushes the analogy through vivid cases: the man with a fever lies still and submits to treatment, but a person seized by anger, love, grief, or ambition is driven into frantic, often public, action at exactly the moment he most needs quiet. He invokes Euripides' mad Agave, who does not recognize her own son, as the extreme instance of a mind too sick to know it is sick, and contrasts her with the ordinary patient with ophthalmia who begs for treatment.
Plutarch closes with a striking scene-setting move, gesturing at the actual crowd gathered for lawsuits and contests in the marketplace before him, likening the seasonal rush of litigation across "Asia" to a recurring epidemic. Every lawsuit, he suggests, if examined like a patient, could be traced to a specific passion - anger, rivalry, unjust desire - that begot it. The essay exemplifies Plutarch's characteristic method in the moral essays: mixing Homer, Aesop, Democritus, and tragedy with everyday observation to press a philosophical claim about self-knowledge and moral responsibility.
“For disease arises in the body through nature, but vice and depravity concerning the soul are first a deed and only then a suffering of the soul itself.”
— Animine An Corporis Affectiones Sint Piores · read this chapter →
“if you open yourself up from within, you will find a varied and much-suffering storehouse and treasury of evils, as Democritus says”
— Animine An Corporis Affectiones Sint Piores · read this chapter →
“the soul, through disbelief in its own sickness, not knowing what it needs, refuses the remedy even when it is at hand”
— Animine An Corporis Affectiones Sint Piores · read this chapter →
“yet many people call anger courage, and call passionate love friendship, and call envy rivalry, and call cowardice caution”
— Animine An Corporis Affectiones Sint Piores · read this chapter →
“just as a storm that prevents putting in to harbor is more dangerous than one that merely prevents sailing, so the storms of the soul are heavier”
— Animine An Corporis Affectiones Sint Piores · read this chapter →
It is a short essay arguing that psychological and moral sickness - anger, folly, vice, grief - is worse than physical illness, because it both causes the sufferer to act wrongly and blinds him to his own condition, unlike a fever, which he readily recognizes and seeks treatment for.
Because bodily disease is only suffered, while vice is first a deed we commit and only afterward becomes a suffering; and because reason, the very faculty that would diagnose the soul's sickness, is itself impaired by that sickness, so the sufferer often does not know he is sick.
He cites Euripides' mad Agave, who in her frenzy does not recognize her own son and boasts of bringing home a hunting trophy, as the extreme example of a mind too diseased even to perceive what it is doing - contrasted with an ordinary patient who recognizes his illness and begs a physician for help.
He points to an actual crowd gathered for lawsuits and contests and reads it as a symptom of an epidemic of the soul, arguing that if you traced each lawsuit to its origin you would find it born of anger, rivalry, or unjust desire rather than genuine grievance.
He opens with Homer's judgment that man is the most wretched of creatures, uses Aesop's fable of the fox and the leopard to illustrate inner versus outer variety, cites Democritus on the soul's inward store of evils, and quotes Euripides' Bacchae for the Agave scene.
Moralia: Ad Principem Ineruditum · Moralia: Adversus Colotem · Moralia: Amatoriae Narrationes · Moralia: Amatorius · Moralia: An Recte Dictum Sit Latenter Esse Vivendum · Moralia: An Seni Respublica Gerenda Sit · Moralia: An Virtus Doceri Possit · Moralia: An Vitiositas Ad Infelicitatem Sufficia · Moralia: Apophthegmata Laconica · Moralia: Aquane An Ignis Sit Utilior · Moralia: Bruta Animalia Ratione Uti · Moralia: Comparationis Aristophanes Et Menandri Compendium