by Aristotle
Now of appetites and pleasures some belong to the class of things generically noble and good—for some pleasant things are by nature worthy of choice—while [25] others are contrary to these, and others are intermediate, to adopt our previous distinction, e.g. wealth, gain, victory, honour. And with reference to all objects whether of this or of the intermediate kind men are not blamed for being affected by them, for desiring and loving them, but for doing so in a certain way, i.e. for going to excess. (This is why all those who contrary to reason either are mastered by or pursue one of the objects which are naturally noble and good, e.g. those who busy [30] themselves more than they ought about honour or about children and parents—for these too are goods, and those who busy themselves about them are praised; but yet there is an excess even in them—if like Niobe one were to fight even against the [1148b1] gods, or were to be as much devoted to one’s father as Satyrus nicknamed ‘the filial’, who was thought to be very silly on this point.) There is no wickedness, then, with regard to these objects, for the reason named, viz. because each of them is by nature a thing worthy of choice for its own sake; yet excesses in respect of them are bad and to be avoided. Similarly there is no incontinence with regard to them; for [5] incontinence is not only to be avoided but is also a thing worthy of blame; but owing to a similarity in the passion people apply the name incontinence, adding in each case what it is in respect of, as we may describe as a bad doctor or a bad actor one whom we should not call bad, simply. As, then, is the case we do not apply the term [10] without qualification because each of these conditions is not badness but only analogous to it, so it is clear that in the other case also that alone must be taken to be incontinence and continence which is concerned with the same objects as temperance and self-indulgence, but we apply the term to anger by virtue of a resemblance; and this is why we say with a qualification ‘incontinent in respect of anger’ as we say ‘incontinent in respect of honour, or of gain’.
[15] 5 · Some things are pleasant by nature, and of these some are so without qualification, and others are so with reference to particular classes either of animals or of men; while others are not pleasant by nature, but some of them become so by reason of deformities, and others by reason of habits, and others by reason of bad natures. This being so it is possible with regard to each of the latter kinds to discover [20] similar states; I mean the brutish states, as in the case of the female who, they say, rips open pregnant women and devours the infants, or of the things in which some of the tribes about the Black Sea that have gone savage are said to delight—in raw meat or in human flesh, or in lending their children to one another to feast upon—or of the story of Phalaris.
[25] These states are brutish, but others arise as a result of disease (or, in some cases, of madness, as with the man who sacrificed and ate his mother, or with the slave who ate the liver of his fellow), and others are morbid states resulting from custom,62 e.g. the habit of plucking out the hair or of gnawing the nails, or even coals or earth, and in addition to these paederasty; for these arise in some by nature and in others, as in those who have been the victims of lust from childhood, from habit. [30]
Now those in whom nature is the cause of such a state no one would call incontinent, any more than one would apply the epithet to women because of the passive part they play in copulation; nor would one apply it to those who are in a morbid condition as a result of habit. To have these various types of habit is beyond the limits of vice, as brutishness is too; for a man who has them to master or be [1149a1] mastered by them is not simple incontinence but that which is so by analogy, as the man who is in this condition in respect of fits of anger is to be called incontinent in respect of that feeling, but not incontinent.
For every excessive state whether of folly, of cowardice, of self-indulgence, or [5] of bad temper, is either brutish or morbid; the man who is by nature apt to fear everything, even the squeak of a mouse, is cowardly with a brutish cowardice, while the man who feared a weasel did so in consequence of disease; and of foolish people those who by nature are thoughtless and live by their senses alone are brutish, like [10] some races of the distant foreigners, while those who are so as a result of disease (e.g. of epilepsy) or of madness are morbid. Of these characteristics it is possible to have some only at times, and not to be mastered by them, e.g. Phalaris may have restrained a desire to eat the flesh of a child or an appetite for unnatural sexual pleasure; but it is also possible to be mastered, not merely to have the feelings. Thus, [15] as the wickedness which is on the human level is called wickedness simply, while that which is not is called wickedness not simply but with the qualification ‘brutish’ or ‘morbid’, in the same way it is plain that some incontinence is brutish and some morbid, while only that which corresponds to human self-indulgence is incontinence [20] simply.
That incontinence and continence, then, are concerned only with the same objects as self-indulgence and temperance and that what is concerned with other objects is a type distinct from incontinence, and called incontinence by a metaphor and not simply, is plain.
6 · That incontinence in respect of anger is less disgraceful than that in respect of the appetites is what we will now proceed to see. Anger seems to listen to [25] reason to some extent, but to mishear it, as do hasty servants who run out before they have heard the whole of what one says, and then muddle the order, or as dogs bark if there is but a knock at the door, before looking to see if it is a friend; so anger by reason of the warmth and hastiness of its nature, though it hears, does not hear [30] an order, and springs to take revenge. For reason or imagination informs us that we have been insulted or slighted, and anger, reasoning as it were that anything like this must be fought against, boils up straightway; while appetite, if reason or perception merely says that an object is pleasant, springs to the enjoyment of it. Therefore anger obeys reason in a sense, but appetite does not. It is therefore more [1149b1] disgraceful; for the man who is incontinent in respect of anger is in a sense conquered by reason, while the other is conquered by appetite and not by reason.
Further, we forgive people more easily for following natural desires, since we [5] forgive them more easily for following such appetites as are common to all men, and in so far as they are common; now anger and bad temper are more natural than the appetites for excess, i.e. for unnecessary objects. Take for instance the man who defended himself on the charge of striking his father by saying ‘yes, but he struck [10] his father, and he struck his, and’ (pointing to his child) ‘this boy will strike me when he is a man; it runs in the family’; of the man who when he was being dragged along by his son bade him stop at the doorway, since he himself had dragged his father only as far as that.
Further, those who are more given to plotting against others are more unjust. Now a passionate man is not given to plotting, nor is anger itself—it is open; but the [15] nature of appetite is illustrated by what the poets call Aphrodite, ‘guile-weaving daughter of Cyprus’, and by Homer’s words about her ‘embroidered girdle’:
And the whisper of wooing is there,
Whose subtlety stealeth the wits of the wise, how prudent soe’er.63
Therefore if this form of incontinence is more unjust and disgraceful than that in respect of anger, it is both incontinence without qualification and in a sense vice.
[20] Further, no one commits wanton outrage with a feeling of pain, but every one who acts in anger acts with pain, while the man who commits outrage acts with pleasure. If, then, those acts at which it is most just to be angry are more unjust, the incontinence which is due to appetite is the more unjust; for there is no wanton outrage involved in anger.
Plainly, then, the incontinence concerned with appetite is more disgraceful [25] than that concerned with anger, and continence and incontinence are concerned with bodily appetites and pleasures; but we must grasp the differences among the latter themselves. For, as has been said at the beginning, some are human and natural both in kind and in magnitude, others are brutish, and ot
hers are due to [30] deformities and diseases. Only with the first of these are temperance and self-indulgence concerned; this is why we call the lower animals neither temperate nor self-indulgent except by a metaphor, and only if some one kind64 of animals exceeds another as a whole in wantonness, destructiveness, and omnivorous greed; these have no power of choice or calculation, but they are departures from what is natural [1150a1] as, among men, madmen are. Now brutishness is less evil than vice, though more alarming; for it is not that the better part has been perverted, as in man,—they have no better part. Thus it is like comparing a lifeless thing with a living in respect of [5] badness; for the badness of that which has no source of movement is always less hurtful, and thought is a source. Thus it is like comparing injustice with an unjust man. Each is in some sense worse; for a bad man will do ten thousand times as much evil as a brute.
7 · With regard to the pleasures and pains and appetites and aversions arising through touch and taste, to which both self-indulgence and temperance were [10] formerly narrowed down, it is possible to be in such a state as to be defeated even by those of them which most people master, or to master even those by which most people are defeated; among these possibilities, those relating to pleasures are incontinence and continence, those relating to pains softness and endurance. The state of most people is intermediate, even if they lean more towards the worse [15] states.
Now, since some pleasures are necessary while others are not, and are necessary up to a point while the excesses of them are not, nor the deficiencies, and this is equally true of appetites and pains, the man who pursues the excesses of things pleasant, or pursues to excess necessary objects, and65 does so by choice, for their own sake and not at all for the sake of any result distinct from them, is [20] self-indulgent; for such a man is of necessity without regrets, and therefore incurable, since a man without regrets cannot be cured. The man who is deficient is the opposite; the man who is intermediate is temperate. Similarly, there is the man who avoids bodily pains not because he is defeated by them but by choice. (Of those who do not choose such acts, one kind of man is led to them as a result of the [25] pleasure involved, another because he avoids the pain arising from the appetite, so that these types differ from one another. Now any one would think worse of a man if with no appetite or with weak appetite he were to do something disgraceful, than if he did it under the influence of powerful appetite, and worse of him if he struck a blow not in anger than if he did it in anger; for what would he have done if he had [30] been strongly affected? This is why the self-indulgent man is worse than the incontinent.) Of the states named, then, the latter is rather a kind of softness; the former is self-indulgence. While to the incontinent man is opposed the continent, to the soft is opposed the man of endurance; for endurance consists in resisting, while continence consists in conquering, and resisting and conquering are different, as not [35] being beaten is different from winning; this is why continence is also more worthy of choice than endurance. Now the man who is defective in respect of resistance to the [1150b1] things which most men both resist and resist successfully is soft and effeminate; for effeminacy too is a kind of softness; such a man trails his cloak to avoid the pain of lifting it, and plays the invalid without thinking himself wretched, though the man [5] he imitates is a wretched man.
The case is similar with regard to continence and incontinence. For if a man is defeated by violent and excessive pleasures or pains, there is nothing wonderful in that; indeed we are ready to forgive him if he has resisted, as Theodectes’ Philoctetes does when bitten by the snake, or Carcinus’ Cercyon in the Alope, and [10] as people who try to restrain their laughter burst out in a guffaw, as happened to Xenophantus. But it is surprising if a man is defeated by and cannot resist pleasures or pains which most men can hold out against, when this is not due to heredity or disease, like the softness that is hereditary with the kings of the Scythians, or that [15] which distinguishes the female sex from the male.
The lover of amusement, too, is thought to be self-indulgent, but is really soft. For amusement is a relaxation, since it is a rest; and the lover of amusement is one of the people who go to excess in this.
Of incontinence one kind is impetuosity, another weakness. For some men [20] after deliberating fail, owing to their passion, to stand by the conclusions of their deliberation, others because they have not deliberated are led by their passion; since some men (just as people who first tickle others are not tickled themselves), if they have first perceived and seen what is coming and have first roused themselves and their calculative faculty, are not defeated by their passion, whether it be pleasant or [25] painful. It is keen and excitable people that suffer especially from the impetuous form of incontinence; for the former because of their quickness and the latter because of the violence of their passions do not wait on reason, because they are apt to follow their imagination.
8 · The self-indulgent man, as was said, has no regrets; for he stands by his [30] choice; but any incontinent man is subject to regrets. This is why the position is not as it was expressed in the formulation of the problem, but the self-indulgent man is incurable and the incontinent man curable; for wickedness is like a disease such as dropsy or consumption, while incontinence is like epilepsy; the former is a [35] permanent, the latter an intermittent badness. And generally incontinence and vice are different in kind; vice is unconscious of itself, incontinence is not (of incontinent [1151a1] men themselves, those who become beside themselves are better than those who possess reason but do not abide by it, since the latter are defeated by a weaker passion, and do not act without previous deliberation like the others); for the incontinent man is like the people who get drunk quickly and on little wine, i.e. on [5] less than most people.
Evidently, then, incontinence is not vice (though perhaps it is so in a qualified sense); for incontinence is contrary to choice while vice is in accordance with choice; not but what they are similar in respect of the actions they lead to; as in the saying of Demodocus about the Milesians, ‘the Milesians are not without sense, but they do [10] the things that senseless people do’, so too incontinent people are not unjust but they will do unjust acts.
Now, since the incontinent man is apt to pursue, not on conviction, bodily pleasures that are excessive and contrary to right reason, while the self-indulgent man is convinced because he is the sort of man to pursue them, it is on the contrary the former that is easily persuaded to change his mind, while the latter is not. For [15] excellence and vice respectively preserve and destroy the first principle, and in actions that for the sake of which is the first principle, as the hypotheses are in mathematics; neither in that case is it reason that teaches the first principles, nor is it so here—excellence either natural or produced by habituation is what teaches right opinion about the first principle. Such a man as this, then, is temperate; his contrary is the self-indulgent.
[20] But there is a sort of man who is carried away as a result of passion and contrary to right reason—a man whom passion masters so that he does not act according to right reason, but does not master to the extent of making him ready to believe that he ought to pursue such pleasures without reserve; this is the incontinent man, who is better than the self-indulgent man, and not bad without qualification; for the best thing in him, the first principle, is preserved. And [25] contrary to him is another kind of man, he who abides by his convictions and is not carried away, at least as a result of passion. It is evident from these considerations that the latter is a good state and the former a bad one.
9 · Is the man continent who abides by any and every reasoning and any and every choice, or the man who abides by the right choice, and is he incontinent who [30] abandons any and every choice and any and every reasoning, or he who abandons the reasoning that is not false and the choice that is right? this is how we put it before our statement of the problem. Or is it incidentally any and every choice but per se the true reasoning and the right choice by which the one abides and the other do
es not? If any one chooses or pursues this for the sake of that, per se he pursues and [1151b1] chooses the latter, but incidentally the former. But when we speak without qualification we mean what is per se. Therefore in a sense the one abides by, and the other abandons, any and every opinion; but without qualification, the true opinion.
There are some who are apt to abide by their opinion, who are called [5] strong-headed, viz. those who are hard to persuade and are not easily persuaded to change; these have in them something like the continent man, as the prodigal is in a way like the liberal man and the rash man like the confident man; but they are different in many respects. For it is to passion and appetite that the one will not yield, since on occasion the continent man will be easy to persuade; but it is to [10] reason that the others refuse to yield, for they do form appetites and many of them are led by their pleasures. Now the people who are strong-headed are the opinionated, the ignorant, and the boorish—the opinionated being influenced by pleasure and pain; for they delight in the victory they gain if they are not persuaded to change, and are pained if their decisions become null and void as decrees [15] sometimes do; so that they are more like the incontinent than the continent man.
But there are some who fail to abide by their resolutions, not as a result of incontinence, e.g. Neoptolemus in Sophocles’ Philoctetes; yet it was for the sake of pleasure that he did not stand fast—but a noble pleasure; for telling the truth was noble to him, but he had been persuaded by Odysseus to tell the lie. For not every [20] one who does anything for the sake of pleasure is either self-indulgent or bad or incontinent, but he who does it for a disgraceful pleasure.