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and those who are incontinent through habituation are more curable
than those in whom incontinence is innate; for it is easier to change
a habit than to change one's nature; even habit is hard to change
just because it is like nature, as Evenus says:
I say that habit's but a long practice, friend,
And this becomes men's nature in the end.
We have now stated what continence, incontinence, endurance, and
softness
are, and how these states are related to each other.
11
The study of pleasure and pain belongs to the province of the political
philosopher; for he is the architect of the end, with a view to which
we call one thing bad and another good without qualification. Further,
it is one of our necessary tasks to consider them; for not only did
we lay it down that moral virtue and vice are concerned with pains
and pleasures, but most people say that happiness involves pleasure;
this is why the blessed man is called by a name derived from a word
meaning enjoyment.
Now (1) some people think that no pleasure is a good, either in itself
or incidentally, since the good and pleasure are not the same; (2)
others think that some pleasures are good but that most are bad. (3)
Again there is a third view, that even if all pleasures are good,
yet the best thing in the world cannot be pleasure. (1) The reasons
given for the view that pleasure is not a good at all are (a) that
every pleasure is a perceptible process to a natural state, and that
no process is of the same kind as its end, e.g. no process of building
of the same kind as a house. (b) A temperate man avoids pleasures.
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NICOMACHEAN ETHICS 97
(c) A man of practical wisdom pursues what is free from pain, not
what is pleasant. (d) The pleasures are a hindrance to thought, and
the more so the more one delights in them, e.g. in sexual pleasure;
for no one could think of anything while absorbed in this. (e) There
is no art of pleasure; but every good is the product of some art.
(f) Children and the brutes pursue pleasures. (2) The reasons for
the view that not all pleasures are good are that (a) there are
pleasures
that are actually base and objects of reproach, and (b) there are
harmful pleasures; for some pleasant things are unhealthy. (3) The
reason for the view that the best thing in the world is not pleasure
is that pleasure is not an end but a process.
12
These are pretty much the things that are said. That it does not follow
from these grounds that pleasure is not a good, or even the chief
good, is plain from the following considerations. (A, a) First, since
that which is good may be so in either of two senses (one thing good
simply and another good for a particular person), natural constitutions
and states of being, and therefore also the corresponding movements
and processes, will be correspondingly divisible. Of those which are
thought to be bad some will be bad if taken without qualification
but not bad for a particular person, but worthy of his choice, and
some will not be worthy of choice even for a particular person, but
only at a particular time and for a short period, though not without
qualification; while others are not even pleasures, but seem to be
so, viz. all those which involve pain and whose end is curative, e.g.
the processes that go on in sick persons.
(b) Further, one kind of good being activity and another being state,
the processes that restore us to our natural state are only incidentally
pleasant; for that matter the activity at work in the appetites for
them is the activity of so much of our state and nature as has remained
unimpaired; for there are actually pleasures that involve no pain
or appetite (e.g. those of contemplation), the nature in such a case
not being defective at all. That the others are incidental is indicated
by the fact that men do not enjoy the same pleasant objects when their
nature is in its settled state as they do when it is being replenished,
but in the former case they enjoy the things that are pleasant without
qualification, in the latter the contraries of these as well; for
then they enjoy even sharp and bitter things, none of which is pleasant
either by nature or without qualification. The states they produce,
therefore, are not pleasures naturally or without qualification; for
as pleasant things differ, so do the pleasures arising from them.
(c) Again, it is not necessary that there should be something else
better than pleasure, as some say the end is better than the process;
for leasures are not processes nor do they all involve process-they
are activities and ends; nor do they arise when we are becoming
something,
but when we are exercising some faculty; and not all pleasures have
an end different from themselves, but only the pleasures of persons
who are being led to the perfecting of their nature. This is why it
is not right to say that pleasure is perceptible process, but it should
rather be called activity of the natural state, and instead of
'perceptible'
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NICOMACHEAN ETHICS 98
'unimpeded'. It is thought by some people to be process just because
they think it is in the strict sense good; for they think that activity
is process, which it is not.
(B) The view that pleasures are bad because some pleasant things are
unhealthy is like saying that healthy things are bad because some
healthy things are bad for money-making; both are bad in the respect
mentioned, but they are not bad for that reason-indeed, thinking itself
is sometimes injurious to health.
Neither practical wisdom nor any state of being is impeded by the
pleasure arising from it; it is foreign pleasures that impede, for
the pleasures arising from thinking and learning will make us think
and learn all the more.
(C) The fact that no pleasure is the product of any art arises naturally
enough; there is no art of any other activity either, but only of
the corresponding faculty; though for that matter the arts of the
perfumer and the cook are thought to be arts of pleasure.
(D) The arguments based on the grounds that the temperate man avoids
pleasure and that the man of practical wisdom pursues the painless
life, and that children and the brutes pursue pleasure, are all refuted
by the same consideration. We have pointed out in what sense pleasures
are good without qualification and in what sense some are not good;
now both the brutes and children pursue pleasures of the latter kind
(and the man of practical wisdom pursues tranquil freedom from that
kind), viz. those which imply appetite and pain, i.e. the bodily
pleasures
(for it is these that are of this nature) and the excesses of them,
in respect of which the self-indulgent man is self-indulent. This
is why the temperate man avoids these pleasures; for even he has
pleasures
of his own.
13
But further (E) it is agreed that pain is bad and to be avoided; for
some pain is without qualification bad, and other pain is bad because
it is in some respect an impediment to us. Now the contrary of that [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]