First, Aristotle plans to examine self-control. Self-control is associated with endurance and manliness; its contrary, incontinence, is associated with softness and effeminacy.
With any luck, we’ll find that this gendered characterization is not essential to Aristotle’s formulation but is just an artifact of the sexist assumptions of his culture.
Aristotle’s method here, as it has been elsewhere, has been to start by looking at the particulars of how people use words and concepts and then try to describe and make consistent the models implicit in these usages — rather than starting with a theoretical model of what the words and concepts should mean and then trying to cram it down onto the vulgate.
So he reviews a set of common opinions about self-control:
Self-control (and endurance) are thought to be good and praiseworthy; incontinence (and softness) bad and blameworthy.
A person with self-control resolves to do something and then does it, while an incontinent person makes resolutions but lacks sticktoitiveness.
The incontinent person is aware that what he or she is doing is bad, but is unable to resist his or her appetites.
The person with self control is aware that appetites are tempting but is able to keep his or her rational mind in charge rather than letting appetite take the reins.
People say that temperate people also have self-control and endurance.
However, not everyone with self-control is thought of as also temperate.
The words “self-indulgent” and “incontinent” are sometimes used interchangeably, other times to mean somewhat different things.
There is disagreement as to whether self-control comes in degrees or is something you either have or you don’t.
Some people believe that if you have practical wisdom, you cannot be incontinent; other people think that it’s possible to be practically wise and yet fail to practice self-control.
People are sometimes said to lack self control in regard to things like anger, honor, or gain (not merely in regard to pleasure, as was the case for Temperance/Self-Indulgence, which Aristotle covered in book three).
In the opening section of the seventh
book of The Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle
interrogated the folk psychology of his day to ask what it had to say about
self-control and its lack, and he came up with a list of things that are
popularly believed about self-control and some other things on which there
doesn’t appear to be any consensus.
In the second section, Aristotle continues this inquiry, in the hopes that he can come up with a coherent concept of self-control that more-or-less agrees with the popular use of the term.
How is it that someone can know the difference between right and wrong in some
circumstance, and yet choose the wrong over the right?
Socrates thought this was inherently contradictory: people only make choices
by choosing what they believe to be right, so that whenever they choose
something wrong they do so because they were factually mistaken about it and
incorrectly believed it to be right.
Aristotle says flatly that “this view plainly contradicts the observed facts.”
He wants a better explanation. How is it that someone comes to know what the
right course of action is and then does something else instead? Does that
person change his or her mind? Does some other part of the soul take over
the reins from reason and override reason’s choices? Does the knowledge of
right and wrong evaporate on contact with certain sensations or temptations?
Is the supposed knowledge of right-and-wrong that the incontinent person
displays at first actually only an unexamined opinion that doesn’t survive
contact with real life?
Some people think that it is some form of prudence or practical wisdom that
makes people change their minds at the last minute and choose vice over
virtue — sort of a “that virtue looked pretty good until I saw it up close
and then I realized I liked the vice better” or
“da
mihi castitatem et continentiam, sed noli modo” (Lord, give me
chastity and continence, but not right away). Aristotle thinks this is silly.
Prudence and incontinence are contradictory, and willingly choosing vice over
virtue is never an example of practical wisdom.
Self-control is all about resisting temptation. So to some extent it’s,
ironically, in opposition to Temperance. If you’re Temperate, you don’t
really have strong temptations to vice — your appetites are good ones,
your desires are virtuous ones. For this reason, if you’re Temperate you
don’t have strong temptations that need to be resisted, and so you won’t
exhibit self-control, or if you do, it will be a perverse sort of self-control
that inhibits you from doing things that are good.
Self-control can be mere stubbornness, if the point-of-view you’re valiantly
sticking to is a stupid or vicious one. And, on the other side of the coin,
it can be praiseworthy to vacillate or change your mind if there is reasonable
doubt as to whether your original game plan is virtuous or not.
Sophists have used this to formulate an uncomfortable paradox in which they
ask their listeners to agree that someone who is both perfectly foolish and
perfectly incontinent is thereby virtuous, since he or she will stupidly
decide to do something vicious and then incontinently fail to follow through,
doing something virtuous instead.
Someone who deliberately does something vicious is, to some extent, more
amenable to change than someone who incontinently flips to viciousness at
the last minute in the face of temptation. It’s possible to persuade the
former of his or her error, but for the latter no amount of persuasion is
going to do the trick.
Finally, as was mentioned in the previous section, some people are said to
have or lack self-control about some thing in particular (say, money, regard,
power); but there’s also a sense in which we can say some people just plain
lack self-control, even though they may not lack self-control in some of
these particular areas. What do we mean by this?
This all presents quite a tangle, which Aristotle will attempt to untangle
in the coming sections.
I’m curious as to how “hypocrisy” fits in this model. It seems to share some
characteristics with incontinence, though maybe mostly with the weak version
in which the original, virtuous point of view was more “opinion” than
“knowledge.”
Hypocrisy is big in modern popular ethical thought — there’s no gotcha
that’s a better gotcha than some “family values” Republican getting caught
with his pants down, for instance, and political bloggers are always trying
to catch each other making absolute pronouncements on opposite sides of the
same issue for partisan reasons. People don’t seem to beware
hypocrisy, exactly, as though they thought of it as inherently harmful, but
they’re reluctant to be caught in it because it is embarrassing.
(This is almost no more than a sport — like photographing celebrities without
their make-up on for the tabloids.)
But since Aristotle thinks that politics is an important thing for thoughtful
people to engage in, and that the purpose of politics is, in part anyway, to
legislate and guide citizens in ethical behavior, it seems that there is a
public counterpart to the private weakness that is incontinence, and that
would be hypocrisy.
In the previous section, Aristotle noted the various and conflicting philosophical and popular notions about self-control and its absence.
In this section he intends to dump the ones that are no good and to pull the remainder together into something coherent and useful.
Among the questions Aristotle thinks need to be addressed are these:
When a person fails to exercise self control, is he or she acting
wrongly in spite of knowing better, or as an example of
not knowing better?
If the former, what sort of knowledge is this that seems so feeble in
guiding the behavior of the person without self-control?
Is self-control domain-specific, that is, does it apply to certain
temptations or varieties of temptation and not others, or is it more of a
general thing having to do with temptation in general?
Are self-control (resisting the temptation of pleasure) and endurance
(putting up with pain) two aspects of the same basic character trait, or
are they distinct?
Is self-control (and its absence) distinguished by the object matter
(the things that are so tempting that they cause lack of self-control) or
by the attitude of the subject (the way in which these tempting things
are pursued), or by some combination of the two?
What is the relation between self-control and temperance?
The last question is easy to answer: it’s all in the attitude. The intemperate
person gives into temptation because he or she doesn’t see anything wrong in
doing so. The incontinent person, on the other hand, gives into temptation
despite at least seeming to have had inclinations to the contrary.
Aristotle wants to entertain the idea that there is a sort of in-between state
between having knowledge and not having it. He says that people who are
asleep, insane, intoxicated, infuriated, carried away by lust, and other such
things, can enter states in which their behavior is not influenced in a
reasonable way by their knowledge. Incontinence, he says, is probably some
sort of mental condition like these.
The fact that incontinent people can articulate the right decisions they
should have made and the right reasons for those neglected decisions just
means that they know enough to fake it — like “actors on the stage.” They
haven’t internalized and identified with the ethics they’ve learned to
pantomime — they know the words, but not the music.
What sort of ignorance is someone exhibiting who behaves at one moment as
though they knew right from wrong and who nonetheless the next minute does
the wrong thing? Aristotle suggests that it is ignorance of
particulars, not of universals that is to blame. This
is terminology associated with the syllogism:
universal premise
All men are mortal
particular premise
Socrates is a man
conclusion
Socrates is mortal
When carried away by a passion or overwhelmed by temptation, you lose track
of the particular. There are two types of premise: subjective and objective.
A subjective particular premise might be “I am a man,” while an objective
particular premise might be “Socrates is a man.” Aristotle says it stretches
credibility to think that you’d lose track of a subjective particular premise,
but it’s entirely possible that your vision might get cloudy about objective
particular premises.
Our ethical reasoning has, according to Aristotle, this syllogistic form. We
have moral codes, in the form of universal premises, and we understand the
world around us in terms of particular premises that sometimes lock into
one or more of these universal premises and compel us to realize a conclusion,
which, in the case of ethical reasoning, should also compel an action (or
compel us to desist from an action).
One possibility is that the person without self-control has conflicting
universal premises that haven’t been well-integrated. So if, for instance, you
have the universals of “eat delicious food at every opportunity” and “don’t
take what does not belong to you” and you find a chocolate eclair in the
fridge at work, what do you do? On spotting the eclair you form the two
particular premises “that eclair does not belong to me” and “that eclair is
delicious food” and come to two contradictory conclusions: “don’t take it!”
and “eat it!”
Aristotle says that because the “eat it!” case has a sensual desire associated
with it, where as the “don’t take it!” case does not, it is that much easier
to translate the “eat it!” conclusion into actual action, and so it can win
out in the weak person. Somehow, the presumptive conclusion (“eat it”)
combined with the sensual desire blinds the incontinent person to the
inconvenient facts (“that’s not yours”) that might interfere with the
satisfaction of the desire.
I don’t know if I’d restrict this to sensual desire, the way Aristotle does.
I think things like fear of social ostracization, lust for power or prestige,
anticipation of financial reward, and things like that can be just as
blinding. But I’m willing to accept the idea that it is particular premises,
not universal ones, that are what get disrupted in the incontinent person.
(You may notice that this seems to have circled around to the idea that
incontinence is a variety of ignorance — Socrates’s idea that Aristotle seemed
hostile to at first. Aristotle acknowledges this in this section.)
I wish he’d say a bit more (maybe he will) about what happens when two rules of
behavior collide like this. The incontinent person says “two rules conflict,
telling me to do opposite things? which one will feel better?” Whereas the
wiser person says something like “two rules conflict, telling me to do opposite
things? which one is more important here, or is there a third rule that governs
cases like this, or can I reformulate the rules in a justifiable way so they
don’t conflict anymore?”
The debate about tax resistance as it’s conducted by people who aren’t
resisters and who disapprove of resistance often resolves into a debate about
particular premises: “Taxation is theft.” “No it isn’t.” “If you pay taxes you
are complicit in what the government does with the money.” “No you aren’t.”
All of this involves jockeying on the playing field of universal ethical
premises (“Being robbed is bad and to be avoided” or “Being complicit in mass
slaughter, torture, and other such crimes is bad and to be avoided”) in the
hopes of compelling (or at least justifying) behavior.
It looks like it’s a stretch to see this as a problem of self-control /
continence. Sometimes war tax resisters, for example, will look at other folks
in the peace movement and ask, incredulously, “how can you pay to support what
you say you oppose?” as though it were a matter of having drawn an obvious
conclusion from preexisting premises and uncontrovertable facts and then,
incontinently perhaps, disregarding the conclusion. But it seems like
something more than simple sensual desire is causing people to reject
particular premises like “taxation is theft" or “taxpaying makes you
complicit.” There are complex institutions and webs of propaganda designed to
justify the opposite conclusions (and it might even be that one or both of
those premises are false, in which case rejecting them would be entirely
rational).
These NWTRCC National Gatherings are intense. By the end of the
day my brain is all mushy and I have to strain to process one more piece of
information. The time difference got to me too, a bit. I thought I was clever,
booking an early-morning flight so I could get home mid-day and have some time
to unwind. I didn’t think that it would mean waking up at 2:30
AM home-time to get to the airport.
While I was in our session on war
tax resistance counseling skills training, coincidentally, I got an email
from someone seeking war tax resistance counseling who had read my blog and
had gone from feeling like tax resistance would be too overwhelming and
difficult to feeling hopeful that there would be a method that would be right
for her. So the heartwarming glow from the meeting has followed me home to my
inbox.
I’m home, hopefully for a good while. I’ve been away more than not lately, and
as the lady with the nice shoes says, there’s no place like home. My
work-for-a-living work is on an uptick lately, too, but I hope I’ll be able to
keep up the pace here at The Picket Line.
Are some people incontinent in general, or do people display
incontinence with respect to certain things?
What is the relationship between continence and temperance, and between
continence and endurance?
Aristotle says that there are two categories of pleasure that can prompt
incontinent behavior: “necessary” pleasures (things like food and sex), and
certain other pleasures that are worth pursuing but that people are prone to
pursue to excess (things like victory, honor, and wealth).
The pleasures in the first category (and associated pains, like hunger,
thirst, and excesses of heat & cold) are the same as those that were the
concern of temperance and intemperance (a virtue and vice Aristotle covered
in book three). When incontinence is
displayed here it is incontinence without qualification — not only a
fault but a kind of vice, Aristotle says.
The difference between continence/incontinence and temperance/intemperance is
that temperance or intemperance is a choice and a habit of character — an
exercise of the will — while incontinence is contrary to choice — a
failure of will.
For those pleasures in the second category, however, continence and
incontinence is only so with respect to the particular pleasure.
Indeed, it is not continence or incontinence proper, but is only given those
names by analogy. People who display one of these qualified varieties of
incontinence are not vicious but are merely excessive to a fault in pursuit
of good things.
I’m not sure why Aristotle distinguishes this from a vice; it seems to me
that a habit of character that leads to someone pursuing some good or
avoiding some bad excessively would qualify as a vice if in fact it is a
fault and “bad and to be avoided” (not just a harmless eccentricity).
In the fifth section of the seventh book of The Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle develops a new categorization scheme to organize the sorts of pleasures that can prompt a lack of self control, including, this time, certain pathological cases.
First, there are those things that are pleasant by nature.
Some of these are pleasant without qualification and to any creature capable of feeling them.
These correspond to the natural pleasures mentioned in the previous section: things like the discomfort of hunger, and the pleasure of eating; the pleasure of sex; the bodily sensations that lead animals to avoid extremes of temperature and seek out a comfort zone; things of that sort.
Others of these natural pleasures are only pleasant to certain sorts of creatures: there are specifically-human pleasures and pains that other animals do not take part in, and further there are pleasures and pains that only certain sorts of people participate in (not everybody takes pleasure in making art, for instance, or is pained by poorly-made coffee).
The other category of pleasures contains those that are not naturally pleasant but that are pleasant to some people because of some pathology:
some physical malady like madness or disease
a habit acquired in childhood as a result of trauma or abuse
psychopathology, or “brutishness”
In these categories are people who commit savage and difficult-to-understand crimes (your Jeffrey Dahmers and the like), pedophiles, people with obsessive-compulsive disorder, pica, or phobias, and things of that sort.
Aristotle says that these things are not really varieties of incontinence but are something else.
Those whose lack of self control has natural causes like disease or injury “no one would call incontinent,” while those whose lack of self control comes from “a morbid condition as a result of habit” or from brutishness is exhibiting something “beyond the limits of vice.”
Such lack of self control, whether “morbid” or “brutish,” may come and go, may sometimes be mastered and may other times get the upper hand.
Such wickedness is super-human, not a merely human weakness, and lack of self control in such areas also goes beyond normal human bounds.
The other varieties he has discussed are mostly caused either by the temptations of pleasure or by aversion to pain.
Aristotle says that loss of self-control due to anger is less shameful than these, for the following reasons:
Anger is at least partially obedient to the demands of our reason or better nature, but is just ineptly so.
(He compares this to an over-sensitive watchdog that barks every time anyone approaches the door, whether or not it is a stranger.)
Appetite (the temptation of pleasure or aversion to pain), on the other hand, seems deaf to reason.
Someone conquered by anger is conquered by a flawed, primitive argument, but an argument nonetheless; someone conquered by appetite is conquered by appetite alone, not reason of any variety.
Anger is more natural & normal than excessive appetites, which are abnormal and grotesque.
People motivated by appetite are more prone to guile and premeditation, while anger is more of a sudden and unplanned thing.
Anger is a painful condition, while the wantonness of self-indulgence is pleasurable.
morbid (for instance, phobias or obsessive fetishes)
Continence, lack of self control, temperance, and intemperance only concern items in the first of these categories (although the terms can be used metaphorically to describe people and behavior in the other two).
Brutishness is less evil than vice, but is “more alarming… for [in brutish people] it is not the better part that has been perverted… they have no better part.”
Still, says Aristotle, a vicious person will do ten thousand times the harm of a brutish one.
People with self control are able to resist the temptation of pleasure when it is excessive or might lead them to do something they know is wrong.
People with endurance are able to put up with pain and unpleasantness when they can and they know that such is the right thing to do.
Perhaps these are just flip sides of the same basic trait.
As has been mentioned before, loss of self control means giving into temptation or retreating from what is unpleasant despite knowing that it is the wrong thing to do; intemperance means giving into temptation or shirking unpleasantness because you don’t see anything wrong with doing so.
Because of this, Aristotle says the intemperate person is “without regrets, and therefore incurable [incorrigible], since a man without regrets cannot be cured.”
There is an additional issue: with regards to certain pleasures, some people are motivated by the pleasure itself, and others are motivated by quenching the pain that comes from the desire for the pleasure.
Think of the gourmand as opposed to the person who is famished, or the person who loves sex and the person who is sex-starved.
Each one can behave similarly in their pursuit of the pleasure they’re after, but the motives are subtly different.
With these things in mind, we can rank these various responses to pain and pleasure.
Worst is the person who does wrong in pursuit of pleasures that aren’t particularly strong, just because he or she doesn’t have any compunction: the intemperate person.
Not so bad are those who are tempted by strong desires, or dissuaded by great pains.
Also not so bad are those who lose it due to sudden anger.
Better yet is the patient or enduring person, who is able to put up with pain and unpleasantness for worthy goals.
And best of all is the continent person, who habitually avoids excesses of pleasure from a well-formed character.
Next, Aristotle describes the nebbish, wimp, or pansy.
The sort of person “who drags his robe after him, that he may not be annoyed with the pain of carrying it… who, imitating an invalid, does not think himself a wretched creature, although he resembles one who is.”
This person is the counterpart of the intemperate person who foolishly gets carried away by even insignificant pleasures: the nebbish is stymied by even insignificant pains and inconveniences.
Some such people are just naturally fragile and they can’t really be blamed for it, but in other people this tendency is blameworthy.
Aristotle says that people who are overly-fond of sport and amusement may be exhibiting a form of this: using these distractions to escape from their day-to-day troubles.
Finally, Aristotle subdivides lack of self control into two varieties:
weakness
failure, due to being carried away by emotion, to stand by the
conclusions of one’s deliberation
impetuosity, precipitancy
failure to deliberate, instead allowing oneself to be led by one’s
emotions
In the eighth section of the seventh book of The Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle reiterates that self-indulgence or intemperance is a worse vice than the weakness of incontinence or lack of self control (which is not, strictly, a vice since it is not a matter of choice but is action contrary to choice).
The compilers looked on the reputed works of Aristotle as “sacred books,” and
considered themselves under obligation not to suppress any of the material
which they found.
Consequently they incorporated in the text several versions of the same thing,
even where they differed but slightly from one another: just as a Christian
might regard the various accounts of the same events in the Gospels as of
equal value and entitled to preservation in their original form.
The different ways in which they arranged and combined the duplicates may be
accounted for by supposing that they endeavoured not to restore accurately an
original order, but rather to make a context which would read with some
appearance of continuity out of the actual fragments, adding and
taking away as little as possible. There seem to be undoubted traces of
connecting sentences written by a compiler: but the condition of the text
indicates that it was a rule in some books at least to make such work a
minimum; if this is so it would be caused by the same feeling as that which
prompted the preservation of the duplicates.
So to some extent The Nicomachean Ethics reads as
though someone were trying to write a transcript of Aristotle’s lectures by
compiling the bits of his students’ lecture notes found in the dumpster behind
the school at the end of various terms and trying to make them coherent.
This section, in particular, seems redundant — merely restating with new
language and different examples what has been said before in other sections.
It would be interesting to follow Wilson’s lead and to try to assemble a
version of this book, or of The Nicomachean Ethics as
a whole, that organizes the essentials well and perhaps less reverently, a bit
like Stock did for books one through five.
Self-control bears some relation to sticktoitiveness. You make up your mind
and then you follow through on the decision you’ve made, even if it’s
uncomfortable to do so or tempting to do something else instead. But this
resembles stubbornness: sticking to your decision just because you’ve made
it, even if circumstances change or it turns out to have been a bad decision.
So does self-control mean sticking to your guns when you’ve made a decision,
or sticking to your guns when you’ve made a good decision, and only
so long as it remains a good one?
The opening paragraph of this section is difficult to parse, and remains so in
those of the translations I consulted. If
I had to guess, I’d say that Aristotle is saying that a person with good
self-control exercises this self-control wisely, to stick with good
choices, arrived at through deliberation. He or she makes choices for the
purpose of what is good, and it is really what is good that he or she is
sticking to, not the choice itself (though usually these will coincide, and so
it will appear that it is the choice that is the criteria).
Someone who is truly obstinate is not really exercising self-control — is not
holding steadfastly to a rational choice aimed at good — but is yielding to
passion and appetite in a parody of self-control. The stubbornly opinionated,
for instance, yield to the pleasure of believing themselves righteously
correct and hate the pain of admitting that they are wrong, and so they are
hesitant to listen to good arguments in opposition to their opinions.
Aristotle mentions also that sometimes you may find that you have to break a
promise (and thus behave “incontinently”) for honorable ends. (Here, he
mentions the character of Neoptolemus in Sophocles’s Philoctetes, who
feels honor-bound both to lie to Philoctetes for the sake of Odysseus, and not
to lie for the sake of being an honest person.) This is, Aristotle says, a
case of being incontinent because of being tempted by pleasure, but in this
case the pleasure is the pleasure of being honorable, not some “disgraceful
pleasure,” so this does not count as self-indulgent or incontinent.
He hearkens back to a couple of earlier arguments:
the twelfth and thirteenth
sections of book six in which he distinguished practical wisdom from mere
cleverness (practical wisdom aims at what is good, while cleverness may aim at
any old thing), and the second
section of this book in which he insisted that incontinence is
not a variety of practical wisdom (in other words, the incontinent
person doesn’t change his or her mind at the last minute because of a
sudden better grasp of the situation).
He brings forward a new analogy to explain the difference between the
incontinent person and the intemperate one. The incontinent person is like a
city that has good laws on the books but that doesn’t enforce them; the
intemperate person is like a city with bad laws.
He also emphasizes here that continence is not a binary thing that you either
have or don’t have. It’s measured on a scale — the continent person has more
self-control than the average person, the incontinent person less.
Finally, he notes that incontinence due to impetuosity (failure to deliberate
at all) is easier to correct than incontinence due to weakness (inability to
stick to the choices you make by deliberation). Also, incontinence that is
acquired by bad habit is easier to correct than incontinence that is innate
(though he notes that habitual incontinence can become as-if-innate over time).
We’re not quite finished with book seven of The Nicomachean Ethics yet, but Aristotle shifts topics here, and I thought I’d try to do a wrap-up of his ten — sometimes overlapping, and at least once just plain contradictory — sections on the subject of self-control.
Self-control is what you exhibit when, after you have deliberated on the right course of action and have chosen the right thing to do, temptation tries to steer you in another direction and you resist temptation, doing the right thing anyway.
Lack of self-control happens when you are unable to resist this temptation, and you choose wisely but don’t follow through on the choice you have made.
This differs from temperance and intemperance, in that the temperate person doesn’t really suffer from strong temptations to begin with, and the intemperate person doesn’t choose wisely to begin with.
Temperance and intemperance are a virtue and a vice, because they are character traits formed from habitual choice.
Self-control and its absence aren’t a virtue and vice but are some other sort of thing (lack of self control isn’t a choice but acting regardless of choice).
So self-control is not the same as temperance, nor is it quite the same as saintliness (a nearly-divine, superhuman self-control).
Similarly, lack of self-control is not the same as intemperance, nor is it quite the same as brutishness (a nearly-subhuman savagery).
Self-control is also distinct from stubbornness.
The person with self-control decides to do the right thing and sticks with that determination.
The stubborn person, by contrast, makes a decision and sticks with the decision, whether or not it is, or ends up being, the right thing.
Stubbornness indeed is a variety of intemperance: favoring the pleasure of self-righteousness or decisiveness over actually being virtuous.
Self-control comes in degrees; it’s not an either you have it or you don’t sort of thing.
Some people are more continent, some people less so.
Self-control in the face of tempting pleasure is something like endurance in the face of discouraging pain.
Some people are tempted by pleasure; some by quenching the pain of desire for pleasure.
(In the one case, we would need self-control; in the other, we would need endurance.)
The nebbish lacks endurance, and folds under insignificant inconveniences; people who are overly-fond of recreation may also escape the unpleasantnesses of life in this way.
Lack of self-control is not the same as indecisiveness.
It can be difficult to weigh competing ethical demands, and circumstances can change, so it is possible to make a deliberate ethical choice and still have good reason to change your mind at some point.
Changing your mind in the service of virtue is no vice.
That said, lack of self-control is not some sort of last-minute prudence, as some would have it, in which a virtuous action looks unappealing up close and so you rationally abandon it.
Lack of self-control is never a variety of practical wisdom.
Lack of self-control can be seen as a lapse of knowledge, akin to being asleep, insane, or intoxicated.
Although incontinent people can articulate the reasoning behind the choice they made (but then abandoned) this only means that they know how to fake reasonable understanding; they haven’t really understood.
Somehow they have lost track of the particular premise in a syllogism in which they have accepted the universal.
You are more likely to do this when there is a competing syllogism whose conclusion offers the bait of sensual pleasure.
Lack of self-control can be divided into four varieties and two types:
It can be general (lack of self-control in the face of necessary pleasures, like food or sex — the same general subject matter as temperance), in which case it is lack of self-control proper.
Or it can be specific (lack of self-control in the face of certain pleasures that, while good in themselves, can be carried to extremes, like victory, honor, or wealth), in which case it isn’t really lack of self-control, but is sometimes called that metaphorically.
A third variety is lack of self-control in the face of certain things that aren’t typically pleasant, but are so in certain people due to some pathology or other: people who obsessively eat paper, or people who have a sadistic psychopathology, for instance.
People who have a lack of self-control as the result of pathology aren’t really exhibiting lack of self-control as Aristotle is using the term; neither brutal savages, who are something “beyond the limits of vice” — more alarming perhaps, but probably less harmful than actual vice.
A fourth variety is not prompted by the temptation of pleasure but by the fury of anger.
This is less-blameworthy than the varieties prompted by pleasure, as anger is a natural human thing (whereas excessive pursuit of pleasure is abnormal and grotesque), is partially obedient to reason, is less-premeditated, and is inherently unenjoyable.
The two types of lack of self-control are 1) failure to stick with the conclusions of your deliberation due to being carried away by emotion (“weakness”), and 2) failure to deliberate in the first place, letting emotion take over from reason (“impetuosity”).
Of these:
Impetuosity is easier to correct than weakness.
Lack of self-control acquired through bad habit is easier to correct than innate lack of self-control.
Between the intemperate person and the person with a lack of self-control, Aristotle is of two minds as to which is more correctable.
On the one hand, you can persuade the intemperate person using reason, while the person without self-control is evidently impervious to reason.
But, on the other hand, the person without self-control performs wrong actions regretfully, while the intemperate person is without regrets and therefore without any motive to change.
The concluding sections of book seven of The Nicomachean Ethics concern pleasure, and whether it is something good, bad, or it-depends.
Pleasure is also the subject of book ten.
These sections also appear in The Eudemean Ethics, which seems to be considered a less-mature treatment of the subject by Aristotle.
For this reason, some of our panel of translators and commentators omit them in favor of book ten (Browne, Gillies, Lewes, Vincent), include them as an appendix (Chase), or include them but label them “superfluous” (Grant); others are content to include them on equal footing with the rest of The Nicomachean Ethics.
I think what I’ll do is go through these sections through to the end of book seven, then skip ahead to book ten before circling back and finishing off with books eight and nine (both of which concern friendship).
But first, a quick review of what Aristotle has already said about pleasure and pain:
Pleasure and pain are primary motivators.
A virtuous person takes pleasure in virtuous activity.
“[T]he whole concern both of virtue and of political science is with pleasures and pains; for the man who uses these well will be good, he who uses them badly bad.”
The pleasure of being virtuous is distinct from “disgraceful pleasure” and it’s no vice to pursue the pleasure of virtue.
When trying to find the virtuous mean between vicious extremes in some dimension of behavior, a good rule of thumb is to aim toward the less-pleasant extreme as this may help counteract your natural bias toward the more-pleasant one.
While pleasure and pain are primary motivators, they do not compel action; acts motivated by pleasure or pain are still voluntary acts.
There are three ways to go wrong in seeking pleasure: you can delight in the wrong thing, in the right thing but to excess, or in the wrong manner (or some combination of the three).
Giving in to pain is less shameful than giving in to pleasure.
If you are careful, as you form your moral character you will develop a nous that aims toward truth and virtue; if not, your nous will be dominated by a love for pleasure.
There are pathological pleasures pursued due to disease, injury, trauma, ingrained habit, or an innately disturbed nature.
Putting up with pain in order to do the right thing — endurance — is the flip-side to self-control, or resisting the temptation of pleasure in order to do the right thing.
Good and Pleasure are different sorts of things, so no pleasure can be a good.
This because:
Every pleasure is a sort of activity; but a good is a static end, not an activity.
Temperate people avoid pleasures; but virtuous people (temperance is a virtue) don’t shun what is good.
Practical wisdom teaches us how to avoid pain, but not how to pursue pleasure.
Pleasures interfere with rational thinking; for example, it’s difficult to keep your syllogisms straight in the midst of a good rogering.
Every good is a product of some art, but there is no such thing as an “art” of pleasure.
Children and brutes pursue pleasure, so it isn’t the sort of ultimate end only refined people know to pursue.
Some pleasures may also be goods, but most are not.
This because:
There are some pleasures that are “actually base and objects of reproach.”
There are harmful, unhealthy pleasures.
Although all pleasures are good, at least in so far as they are pleasant, the ultimate good cannot be pleasure.
This because:
As argument #1a also puts it, pleasure is a process and the ultimate good is an end.
Aristotle has already declared eudaimonia — happiness, fulfillment, flourishing — to be the ultimate end of human life, and he says that most people would consider pleasure to be at least a component of happiness (and wouldn’t you expect eudaimonia itself to be pleasant?).
So he wants to investigate these arguments critically, which he will do in the following sections.
Some of his counter-arguments address multiple arguments at once, and so it can be hard to keep track of which is which, but I’ll try to bring them under some sort of ordering scheme here and in the sections that follow.
Arguments:
1a
Good and Pleasure are different sorts of things, so no
pleasure can be a good.
This is because every pleasure is a sort of activity; but a good is a static end, not an activity.
3a
Although all pleasures are good, at least in so far as they
are pleasant, the ultimate good cannot be pleasure.
This is because, as argument #1a also puts it, pleasure is a process and the ultimate good is an end.
Aristotle’s answer:
Remember that there are two types of goods: things that are good in and of themselves, and things that are good for something.
This is also true of things, states of being, processes, and the like: some are good, or bad, in general; others only good or bad with respect to some particular person or circumstance.
While it’s true that the pleasures of, say, quenching hunger or thirst can be thought of as incidental pleasures accompanying our transition to an end-state of satisfaction, you can also think of these pleasures as accompanying the unimpeded activity of our activities of drinking and eating: in other words, the pleasure is in the activity itself, not in the end-state it’s aiming for.
Note that there are other pleasures of unimpeded activity (the pleasure of contemplation, for instance) that don’t involve returning our bodies to a satisfied end-state but that are pleasurable all the same.
Note also that there are different sorts of pleasures involved in eating whatever is put before you because you are famished, and eating a delicious meal with just an ordinary appetite; gustatory pleasure isn’t just the pleasure of banishing hunger.
Not all pleasures are means towards ends.
Some indeed are themselves ends.
They don’t just arise from attaining some end, but they arise from the process of engaging in activity.
Sometimes it’s the journey, not the destination.
Argument:
1d
Good and Pleasure are different sorts of things, so no
pleasure can be a good.
This is because pleasures interfere with rational thinking; for example, it’s difficult to keep your syllogisms straight in the midst of a good rogering.
Aristotle’s answer:
While there are pleasures that can impede rational thought, there are also pleasures that accompany rational thought and don’t impede it at all.
Argument:
2b
Some pleasures may also be goods, but most are not.
This is
because there are harmful, unhealthy pleasures.
Aristotle’s answer:
It’s a case of bad logic to say that because some pleasant things are unhealthy, pleasures must not be good.
It would be like saying that because some healthy things are expensive, healthy things must not be good.
There’s just no connection.
If a pleasure is unhealthy it is bad at promoting health, but is not simply bad for that reason.
Argument:
1e
Good and Pleasure are different sorts of things, so no pleasure
can be a good.
This is because every good is a product of some art, but there is no such thing as an “art” of pleasure.
Aristotle’s answer:
Arts concern the creation of things; pleasure is a variety of activity.
So there is no such thing as an art of an activity, though there can be an art of exercising a certain faculty that gives rise to an activity in pursuit of a concrete end.
So, okay, if you grant that every good is the product of an art, perhaps pleasure cannot be such a good.
But in some sense, the arts of the perfumer or the gourmet are
arts of pleasure, are they not?
Arguments:
1b
Good and Pleasure are different sorts of things, so no pleasure
can be a good.
This is because temperate people avoid pleasures; but virtuous people (temperance is a virtue) don’t shun what is good.
1c
…and because practical wisdom teaches us how to avoid pain, but
not how to pursue pleasure.
1f
…and because children and brutes pursue pleasure, so it isn’t
the sort of ultimate end only refined people know to pursue.
Aristotle’s answer:
Again, there are some pleasures that are good without qualification, and other pleasures can be good or bad for different people and in different circumstances.
Children and brutes pursue the latter sort without the benefit of practical wisdom; the temperate person knows to avoid those pleasures that can lead to lack of self-control and other types of excess, but even the temperate person has pleasures.
First, he notes that pain certainly is bad. Some pain is just plain
bad without qualification; other pain is bad because it interferes in our
pursuits. This doesn’t meet any of the original objections head-on. It seems
to me to suffer from some of the same problems as the blanket objections to
pleasure that Aristotle is arguing against. Even if pain is typically a bad to
be avoided, isn’t it sometimes something to be sought out? The pain of hunger
is to be avoided… unless you’re trying to lose weight and then it’s a sign
that your body is burning fat. The pain of nausea is to be avoided… unless
you’ve been poisoned, in which case, reach for the ipecac.
Aristotle’s point is that if pain is clearly bad, its opposite, pleasure, must
be good.
Aristotle is responding to the views of Speusippus, which must have been very
tempting to him, since they have a very Aristotelian find-the-happy-medium
feel to them. To Speusippus, both pain and pleasure were deviations from the
good in opposite directions. So to him, pleasure wasn’t the opposite of pain,
but pleasure and pain were equally opposite to the happy medium — the same way
Aristotle’s opposing vices (e.g. cowardice and rashness) were opposites to the
virtue (courage).
Aristotle next responds to some of the specific arguments he outlined earlier:
Argument:
2a
Some pleasures may also be goods, but most are not. This
is because there are some pleasures that are “actually base
and objects of reproach.”
Aristotle’s answer:
“[I]f certain pleasures are bad, that does not prevent the chief good
from being some pleasure, just as the chief good may be some form of
knowledge though certain kinds of knowledge are bad. Perhaps it is even
necessary, if each disposition has unimpeded activities, that, whether
the activity (if unimpeded) of all our dispositions or that of some one
of them is happiness, this should be the thing most worthy of our choice;
and this activity is pleasure. Thus the chief good would be some
pleasure, though most pleasures might perhaps be bad without
qualification.”
You must consider pleasure to at least be part of a happy life; a person
who is virtuous in every other way but is experiencing great pain, not
pleasure, can’t be said to be happy.
Argument:
1f
Good and Pleasure are different sorts of things, so no pleasure can be a good. This is because children and brutes pursue pleasure, so it isn’t the sort of ultimate end only refined people know to pursue.
Aristotle’s answer:
This is actually a point in favor of the idea that pleasure is the chief
good. If everybody, even brutes and children, pursues pleasure, there
must be something to it.
People who pursue base pleasures don’t necessarily have the wrong idea
about what is good, but are kind of like moths who fly into lanterns by
mistake, guided by a generally-correct instinct to aim for light.
In this section, Aristotle comes very close to endorsing hedonism: the idea
that pleasure is the ultimate end of activity. This is not the
conclusion he comes to in book ten, however.
They suggest that “pleasure” has two subtly different meanings in the books
seven and ten. In this book, book seven, Aristotle defines pleasure as a
thing, as the unbridled exercise of a faculty, which is itself a good thing.
In book ten, Aristotle defines pleasure more as an epiphenomenon that crowns
or accompanies the unbridled exercise of a faculty, where it is the activity
itself, and not the pleasure that accompanies it, that is the good.
So in book seven, Aristotle says that pleasure is the unbridled exercise of a
faculty; the unbridled exercise of a faculty is good; therefore, pleasure is
good. In book ten, Aristotle says that the unbridled exercise of a faculty is
pleasant; the unbridled exercise of a faculty is the good; therefore the good
is pleasant. A different perspective, but not exactly contradictory.
I was reminded, while reading this, of Robert Nozick’s
Experience
Machine. In this thought experiment, Nozick asks you to imagine that you
can plug yourself into a machine that thoroughly simulates reality for you in
such a convincing way that you cannot help but believe that it is reality.
Furthermore, you can program this simulation to maximize your pleasure beyond
anything possible in real life. Would you plug in?
Nozick noted that there’s something repulsive about the thought of plugging in
to this machine, and concluded that this repulsiveness means we must want not
only to feel pleasure, but to feel it as part of our real participation in the
real world. He decided that therefore hedonism must not be correct — that the
ultimate good must be more than just pleasure.
Some pleasures may also be goods, but most are not. This is because there are some pleasures that are “actually base and objects of reproach,” and because there are harmful, unhealthy pleasures.
Aristotle’s answer:
Aristotle reminds us of his division of pleasures into the necessary, bodily
pleasures, like the pleasures from satisfying appetites for food or sex, and
certain other pleasures like those from gaining wealth, earning honors, and
the like. Some people say that the bodily pleasures are base and to be
avoided, while only certain of the other pleasures are worth pursuing. But
Aristotle wonders if this is the case, why the pains associated with
the body are still considered bads to be avoided. If the good associated with
relieving pain isn’t really a good to be pursued, doesn’t this mean that pain
isn’t really a bad to be avoided? That is absurd; everybody avoids bodily pain
and tries to relieve it when it happens.
Aristotle says that when we say an intemperate person is bad for pursuing
bodily pleasures, we don’t really mean that the pleasures themselves aren’t
good, but that the person pursuing them is doing so excessively or in the
wrong way.
There are two reasons why bodily pleasures are particularly attractive. One
is that they dispel bodily pain. The contrast with the opposing pain can make
bodily pleasures appear to be more pleasant than they actually are. The other
is because of a more complex issue of human psychology.
Bodily pleasures have a vivid, tangible intensity. People who are unaccustomed
to more refined pleasures are easily overwhelmed by such intense bodily
pleasures. In fact, some people artificially induce pains in themselves just in
order to heighten the pleasure of relieving them. (I’ve noticed this in myself.
My coffee addiction is largely motivated by being able to wake up in the
morning and know immediately a very pleasant thing I can do for myself — that
is, to make myself a cup of joe — that is mostly pleasant because it dispels
the withdrawal symptoms of waking up after many caffeineless hours.)
Although there is a school of thought that says that all creatures strive for
a satisfied equilibrium point — hungers satisfied but not over-sated, neither
too hot nor too warm, and so forth — for many people, such a neutral state is
actually painful. All animal life, humans included, is a sort of writhing,
violent struggle. Why are children so prone to ecstatic extremes of emotion?
It is because of their physical growth — this writhing struggle at its most
violent — causing “a kind of chronic intoxication.” People tend to pursue
bodily pleasures and to banish bodily pains in such a way as to throw
themselves off-kilter, increasing the violence of their mood swings and
encouraging yet more destabilizing pursuits.
Wiser people pursue healthy pleasures — ones that aren’t simply a remedy to a
contrasting bodily pain but ones that enhance or improve or participate in an
already healthy faculty. Such pleasures are ones that you cannot pursue to a
destabilizing excess.
Why is it, Aristotle asks, that we can’t simply discover our pleasant thing,
and then stick with it, milking the pleasure all our lives long? This is
because we are imperfect, material creatures: part soul and part body. By
honoring the pleasures of one part of us, we may neglect or even harm the
other part. If we were of a more unified stuff, rather than this
hastily-swirled alloy, there would be a pleasure that was also the
pleasure — the best one and the only one we would have need to pursue.
God, for instance, must have such a single, continuous, and simple pleasure — not a pleasure of repair or restoration, but one of a state of rest that is
already perfect. Our pleasures, though, are not of this kind. Many involve
change and transition. It is what is bad and defective in us that loves change
so much; the best pleasures are simple and unchanging.
This last paragraph introduces many new and strange ideas about human and
divine nature. It seems an odd note for Aristotle to end the book on, though
Grant says that he will bring some of
this up again in book ten.
