Aristotle → Nicomachean Ethics → Book Ⅹ (pleasure, eudaimonia)

In the first section of the tenth book of The Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle takes a fresh look at pleasure, reminding us of the reasons why a study of pleasure and pain is important to the ethicist.

First, virtue is all about developing a well-formed character, and this must crucially start in childhood. Pleasure and pain (positive and negative reinforcements, if you like) are the rudders by which children are educated.

Second, pleasure and pain remain primary motivators throughout life. The mark of a virtuous person is that he or she takes pleasure in acting virtuously.

The hedonists believe that pleasure is itself the ultimate good at which activity does, or ought to, strive. Other people say that, on the contrary, pleasure is actually bad and should be avoided.

Some of these people who think pleasure is bad are actually persuaded that this is true; others merely say that it is true because they think people would be better off if they believed it, as people tend naturally to over-indulge in pleasures unless they are strongly dissuaded. Aristotle thinks this deceptive teaching style is unwise, since a teacher who strategically teaches that all pleasure is bad but at the same time pursues certain pleasures he or she actually believes to be good, is exhibiting a hypocrisy that will certainly be noticed by students and will tend to discredit the teaching in general. It is better to teach by making statements you believe to be true, as these will be more likely to line up with the facts as your students perceive them directly, and will enhance the credibility of your teaching.

In the trailing sections of the seventh book of The Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle criticized several arguments that pleasure was not good, or at least was not the good.

In the second section of the tenth book of The Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle begins to look at the arguments of the hedonists, who suggested that pleasure indeed was synonymous with the good.

He ascribes these arguments to Eudoxus of Cnidus, and since no works of Eudoxus have survived, we’ll have to take his word for it:

1. All creatures aim for particular things that are good for them; a good indication of what the chief good is would be that which all creatures aim for; whatever specific things creatures aim for, they all ultimately aim for pleasure; therefore, pleasure seems to be the chief good.
2. Similarly, pleasure’s opposite − pain − is universally avoided, which provides additional support for the idea that pleasure is universally considered good.
3. People don’t seek pleasure as a means to something else, but as an end in its own right.
4. Any other good that you can think of would be better if pleasure were added to it, and it is only by good that good can be increased.

Aristotle thinks the fourth of these may be a good argument for pleasure being a good, but not for it being the good. Plato used a similar argument against hedonism, saying that any pleasure you can think of would be better with wisdom added to it, so pleasure itself cannot be the greatest good or it could not be made better in this way.

The other arguments he does not meet head-on here. Instead he launches into a defense of common-sense, experimental reasoning on ethical questions like these. He’s answering philosophers who say that even if all creatures aim toward pleasure and avoid pain, perhaps they are all mistaken. He thinks this sort of approach is ridiculous:

For we say that that which every one thinks really is so; and the man who attacks this belief will hardly have anything more credible to maintain instead.

There is something both attractive and frightening about a statement like this one. I read it and think, “well, okay, that’s a pretty good heuristic maybe, but can you really discount the possibility that there’s something that everyone thinks really is so but that you could discover was indeed not so? What is it that Einstein did, for instance, but prove that what everyone thought about time and space turned out to be incorrect?”

But I think you can read Aristotle here to be saying something a little more restrained. More like: “Don’t think you’re being clever by redefining your terms so that they don’t match what everybody else means by them. Of course you’ll discover fantastic paradoxes and curious enigmas that way, but they’ll only be the result of traps you’ve set for yourself by misusing language.”

Aristotle finishes this section by looking at the argument that while pain and pleasure may be opposites of each other, they may equally be opposite of good − in the same way “too much” and “too little” are opposites of each other, but also opposites of “just right.” Aristotle thinks this reasoning is faulty. According to him, this sort of logic only applies to things that are in the same class, and pleasure and pain are not:

For if both pleasure and pain belonged to the class of evils they ought both to be objects of aversion, while if they belonged to the class of neutrals neither should be an object of aversion or they should both be equally so; but in fact people evidently avoid the one as evil and choose the other as good; that then must be the nature of the opposition between them.

In this way, the pleasure-pain continuum is different from, say, the boorish-buffoonish continuum of a virtue like good humor. All other things being equal, more pleasure is always better than less. But sometimes more light-heartedness is a good thing, and sometimes more sobriety is a good thing: the virtuous person aims for the golden mean.

In the third section of the tenth book of The Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle addresses more arguments against pleasure as a good:

Pleasure is not a quality, while good is, so pleasure cannot be a good.

Aristotle rejects the idea that a good must be a quality. Virtue and eudaimonia are goods, he insists, and they aren’t qualities either.

Pleasure admits of degrees, that is, something can be more or less pleasant, whereas a good is simply good.

Here, too, Aristotle rejects the premise that a good must be binary. Justice, bravery, and temperance, for instance, are good, and you can certainly say of a person that they are more or less just, brave, or temperate. Health, too, is certainly good, and you can be more or less healthy; you don’t merely have the choice of being healthy or not.

Pleasure is a kind of process or coming-into-being, while the good must be a static and perfect end-state.

Aristotle doesn’t think that this characterization of pleasure as a process or coming-into-being is right. For instance, he notes that movements may be fast or slow, but people don’t characterize pleasures as being fast pleasures and slow pleasures (we may become pleased rapidly or slowly, but this is something different). Aristotle also addressed this argument in book seven.

Pain is what happens when some aspect of a person’s body deviates from its normal equilibrium, while pleasure is merely the restoration of this equilibrium.

Aristotle thinks that this is a case of overgeneralizing from the particular cases of hunger/nourishment and thirst/quenching. There are other pleasures, like the pleasure of learning, the pleasure of smelling pleasant odors, the pleasure of listening to music, the pleasure of reminiscence, and so forth, that don’t have to do with quenching the pain of being out of equilibrium. This argument, also, Aristotle addressed in book seven.

Pleasure cannot be a good, because some people are pleased by vicious and disgraceful things.

Aristotle says that it is unwise to rely on pathological cases to make arguments like these. You wouldn’t say that the sun must not be bright because blind people can’t see it, you would just add an exception to your general rule for people who can’t see properly. Similarly, you might say of pleasure that pleasure is desirable, though being pleased at vicious and disgraceful things is not, just as wealth is desirable, though ill-gained wealth is not. Or you might say that there are different sorts of pleasures, and the ones derived from virtuous action are qualitatively different.

But, having dismissed several arguments against the idea that pleasure is a, or the, good, Aristotle ends by backing off from hedonism, and putting forth some arguments of his own:

• A friend is better than a flatterer. A friend looks out for what is good for us, not just what we want or find pleasant, and this makes a friend more valuable than a flatterer. This seems to show that we value something more highly than pleasure.
• Although children can have ecstatic raptures of pleasure such that adults can only wistfully envy, no adult would really choose to live their life with the intellect of a child in order to have access to this. This too seems to show that we value some things above pleasure.
• Given the opportunity to gain pleasure by doing some disgraceful deed, even if you knew you’d never be caught and punished, you still wouldn’t do it (would you?). This shows, also, that some things we value more highly than pleasure.
• There are other things that Aristotle thinks we would still value highly even if pleasure never accompanied them: “seeing, remembering, knowing, [and] possessing the virtues.”

He concludes by taking the middle ground: Pleasure is not the good, and some pleasures are not good at all, but some pleasures are good, either because of the sort of pleasure they are or because of what prompted the pleasure.

In the fourth section of the tenth book of The Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle attempts to define pleasure.

First, pleasure is not a movement, or a becoming, or a striving of some sort, but it is a complete thing in and of itself. That is, it is not something like “building,” the end of which is the thing being built, but is instead something like “seeing,” the end of which is just seeing. It also is not something that progresses over time from start to finish, or from origination to culmination or completion, but instead pleasure is complete in every moment in which it exists.

That said, any pleasure can be qualitatively better or worse than another. The best pleasures are those in which a well-tuned faculty is able to feast upon the best sort of object-matter for that faculty: for example, the sense of smell encountering a forest after a rainstorm. The activity of a faculty being exercised in such ideal conditions is one that is crowned and completed by pleasure.

Why is it, Aristotle wonders, that we cannot just be perpetually in a state of pleasure? “Is it that we grow weary?” He sees two possible reasons:

1. Pleasure accompanies activity, and people just simply do not have the endurance to keep up any activity perpetually.
2. Sensation requires some novelty, and any particular stimulus will cease provoking its corresponding mental state if it is repeated too often.

Pleasure seems to be a sign that we are living our lives ideally and thriving to the utmost. “[L]ife is an activity, and each man is active about those things and with those faculties that he loves most,” [and] “pleasure completes the activities, and therefore life, which they desire. It is with good reason, then, that they aim at pleasure too, since for every one it completes life, which is desirable. But whether we choose life for the sake of pleasure or pleasure for the sake of life is a question we may dismiss for the present. For they seem to be bound up together and not to admit of separation, since without activity pleasure does not arise, and every activity is completed by the attendant pleasure.”

In the fifth section of the tenth book of The Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle continues to examine pleasure.

He has said before that pleasure is a sort of epiphenomenon that crowns and completes certain robustly-pursued activities. Here he says that there seem to be different kinds of pleasure, depending on which kinds of activities they accompany. For example, the pleasure that comes from delighting the senses is a different sort of pleasure than that which comes from engaging in pleasant contemplation.

A pleasure intensifies and spurs on the activity it is related to, so that, for instance, the best mathematicians will be those who take pleasure in manipulating numbers and discovering proofs. On the other hand, pleasures that are not related to a particular activity can hinder that activity. For example, if you take great pleasure in music, you may have a difficult time paying attention to a lecture if there is music playing nearby. In this way, a pleasure that isn’t associated with a particular activity can be just as distracting and discouraging as a pain that is.

If you are engaging in two activities at once, the one that gives the most pleasure will tend to dominate your attention. If you’re scarfing down popcorn at a bad movie, you’ll be paying attention to the popcorn; at a good movie, you’ll be paying attention to the movie.

Since pleasures are particular and each is associated with certain activities, just as some activities are virtuous, others are vicious, and others are neither, some pleasures are good, others are bad, and others are neutral. The pleasure that comes from virtuous activity is a good pleasure; any pleasure that comes from behaving viciously is a bad sort of pleasure.

Pleasure is kind of like desire in this respect (that some desires, like some pleasures, are good and others are bad, depending on what sort of activity they are associated with). But pleasure is more tightly-bound to activity than desire is, since pleasure is coextensive with the activity, whereas desire precedes it or may even exist in its absence.

So pleasures can be ranked in their goodness based on the goodness of the activity with which they are coupled. Some pleasures are better than others. But this isn’t true in an absolute way, but only relative to the being that is perceiving the pleasure. For instance, what sort of pleasure is good for a person isn’t the same as what sort of pleasure is good for a dog.

So what pleasures are most good for people? Between people there is variety in what individuals find pleasing, and even in a single person, different things will be pleasing to them in different circumstances. To answer the question of what pleasures are the best ones, look for what the most virtuous people find pleasant. If we know what are the best and most virtuous activities, we simultaneously know that the accompanying pleasures are the best ones. (Any pleasures that are said to accompany vice hardly deserve the name of pleasure at all.)

In the sixth section of the tenth book of The Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle begins to wrap up his argument by bringing us back to eudaimonia, that difficult-to-translate word that Aristotle has put forth as his candidate for the ultimate end we all ought to be aiming for.

Aristotle reminds us of what he’s already said on the subject (mostly in Book Ⅰ):

• Eudaimonia is an activity, not a disposition.
• Eudaimonia is among those activities that are good in and of themselves, not those that are good for the sake of something else.

Two things that seem to meet this description are 1) virtuous actions, and 2) recreational actions. Both are done for their own sake (remember that Aristotle has said that the virtuous person does virtuous acts for the love of acting virtuously, and not for any utilitarian results).

There’s a sort of vulgar understanding of “the good life” in which recreation takes a big role (“Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous”). But Aristotle thinks it’s a mistake to look to the decadent ruling class to figure out what the ends of life are. If recreational amusement were the ultimate end of life, how trivial life would be. Instead, look to the virtuous.

Recreation has its place, not as an end in and of itself, but as a way of relaxing in preparation for, or to recover from, more noble activity. That is to say that, truly understood, recreation isn’t an end to itself but is a means to an end after all. A life of eudaimonia is a virtuous one, which is more a matter of exertion than amusement, pleasurable though it be.

Way back in book one, Aristotle teased us with the idea that there were three types of people: the vulgar, to whom simple pleasures are the ultimate good; the political, to whom honor is the ultimate good; and the contemplative, whom he promised he’d explain in due time. That time has finally come.

In the seventh section of the tenth book of The Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle says that the best and most prized variety of eudaimonia is the contemplative life, the life of a philosopher. This should come as no surprise, since that’s the kind of life Aristotle decided to live.

Reason, Aristotle says, is the best of the human faculties. And the objects of reason are the best object-matter there is for a faculty to operate upon. So it follows that the unimpeded and vigorous exercise of reason, accompanied by the pleasure that crowns such unfettered use of a faculty, ought to be the best sort of pleasure there is to be had: a recipe for eudaimonia in the highest.

Philosophical contemplation is something that you can do on a nearly continuous basis, stopping only to tend to bodily needs now and again, assuming your life is such as affords you the time away from life’s necessities to philosophize. Even granting that philosophy requires some “leisure” time, it’s still something that’s more available to people than many other pleasures: people are self-sufficient to practice philosophy; all it requires is you, your mind, and some breathing room.

Compare this to, say, the person of honor practicing justice. This is a virtue, but it’s less self-sufficient in that not only do you need just as much freedom from life’s necessities to practice justice as to practice philosophy, but you also need some sort of occasion that calls for justice and some people to practice your justice on or with.

Furthermore, justice is usually about restoring a just stasis: either completing some mutually-beneficial transaction in a just way, or restoring justice to a scenario in which injustice has intruded. Either way, the act involves participating in an uncomfortable transition state, one in which justice is a necessary exertion, on the way to a just and correct end state in which you can relax and set the tools of justice aside. Philosophical contemplation, on the other hand, is complete and enduring: it isn’t a tense transition between states, and it doesn’t seek an end state that makes itself obsolete.

As with justice, so with bravery or politics: The purpose of the brave warrior is to win the peace, not just to keep picking new fights; the purpose of the art of politics is not to practice politics but to establish and maintain a polis in which people have the stability and bounty that enables them to pursue arts more noble than politics.

It seems to me that Aristotle here is backtracking a bit from his earlier insistence that the virtuous person practices virtues for the sake of being virtuous, not for any other ends that happen to be associated with the virtue. In other words, the just person behaves justly for the sake of acting justly, not for the sake of what is just; the brave warrior fights bravely for the sake of being courageous, not for the sake of winning the battle; and so forth. On the other hand, he’s certainly right that justice doesn’t make sense without there being some injustice that needs to be corrected or avoided; bravery doesn’t make sense in the absence of some threat worth facing; and so forth. Contemplation, on the other hand, only requires that you be capable of contemplating and have the leisure time in which to do so.

He ends this section by regretting that our nature as contemplative souls wedded to animal bodies means that we are unable to simply plunge into a life of unceasing philosophical contemplation (we have this body we have to attend to). But make no mistake, the contemplative part of us is superior to the animal part of us. The reasoning part of humans is a spark of the divine inside of us, our most true self, and we ought to attend to this spark, and thereby “so far as we can, make ourselves immortal, and strain every nerve to live in accordance with the best thing in us.”

Remember also that in another section of book one, Aristotle thought it was important to ask whether humans have a purpose — a function, like the way eyes are for seeing with or a shovel is for digging. He concluded that the exercise of our rational faculties must be our unique purpose, since nothing else other than humans is able to do it. He didn’t take this argument much further there, but he applies it to his conclusion here: “That which is proper to each thing is by nature best and most pleasant for each thing; for man, therefore, the life according to reason is best and pleasantest, since reason more than anything else is man. This life therefore is also the happiest.”

In the eighth section of the tenth book of The Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle expands on his theory that a life of pleasant, vigorous philosophical contemplation is one of superior eudaimonia and therefore the best sort of life to have.

He pauses to praise the other virtues: justice, courage, practical wisdom, and the like. They are also important, and the virtuous person engaged in virtuous acts has a variety of eudaimonia as well. But philosophy is something above this. By all means, practice those virtues when opportunities arise, but you don’t need the right opportunity in order to practice philosophical contemplation: you just need a little breathing room.

Aristotle puts forth the following additional argument for why a life of philosophical contemplation must be the most perfect eudaimonia: Imagine the gods, blessed and happy above anything possible to mortals. Do we expect them to be bothered by virtues like justice, courage, liberality, or temperance? These things would be trivial and ridiculous among the gods. There is nothing they need accomplish, nothing they need set right. But the gods are active, not just inert and frozen like statues — what sort of activity is worthy of their interest? Contemplation is the only activity that remains that is worthy of the gods, and it follows that it is the thing in people that the gods most appreciate.

The fact that eudaimonia is not available to non-human animals is a clue also that it is closely tied to reason. Eudaimonia “extends… just so far as contemplation does” and in fact is some form of contemplation.

Our other priorities — the things we must do to make ends meet or to live a virtuous life — should be seen in this context, and we shouldn’t take any of them to excess. It’s good enough to have the necessities; you don’t need the luxuries. It’s good enough to be noble; you don’t have to be Lord High Noble.

Get yourself settled in life so that you can take care of yourself, behave honorably, and then devote yourself to philosophy. This is the highest calling a person can have, and the most eudaimon life a person can live.

And that just about covers it. One more chapter to go.

In the ninth and final section of the tenth and final book of The Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle says… we’re not done yet:

Surely, as the saying goes, where there are things to be done the end is not to survey and recognize the various things, but rather to do them; with regard to virtue, then, it is not enough to know, but we must try to have and use it, or try any other way there may be of becoming good.

Good philosophy will convince people who are receptive to it to live better lives. But for most people, a good argument is not sufficient to make them a good person. Virtue is a matter of character, and character is a matter of habit, and it is difficult to change habit with mere words.

Indeed, if you haven’t been brought up right, you are impervious to logical arguments, not knowing their value, so philosophical arguments like these cannot help you. And furthermore, you don’t care about what is good and noble, because your untutored natural inclinations have warped you instead to care only about simple, animal pleasures.

So in order for Aristotle’s insights into the good and noble to be of use to the mass of people, we need two things:

education

so that the youth will be brought up to be able to understand and respect good philosophical argument, to value what is honorable and good, and to inculcate habits of temperance and resilience

punishment

so that people who are impervious to philosophical argument and who do not value what is honorable and good may be persuaded by means they do respect to do what is right

And with this, we have left the realm of individual ethics and entered that of politics. (Aristotle, like any good author, has primed us for his sequel.)

People ought to come together to promote the virtue of everyone in the community. A system of law is a good way of doing this, Aristotle thinks, in part because it is something that can be attended to rationally, and in part because when people submit to laws rather than to rulers, there is less resentment involved (nobody likes to be dominated by some other person, but if everybody is dominated by the same law it’s less galling, even if the effect were the same).

For this reason, the art of legislation is a worthy one. Legislation is the practical science of making people good. Unfortunately, Aristotle says, the science of legislation is underdeveloped. The philosophers who have tackled the problem are inept theoreticians with no practical sense for the subject, but the most skilled practitioners of the art of politics don’t tend to share their philosophy in any rigorous way.

Aristotle intends to correct this deficiency in his Politics.

This brings us to the end of The Nicomachean Ethics, but I skipped from chapter seven ahead to chapter ten, so I still have the two chapters on friendship to cover before we’re really through.