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Nicomachean Ethics X.5
One last chapter on pleasure, then we close out the EN with a discussion of happiness.
For this reason pleasures seem, too, to differ in kind. For things different in kind are, we think, completed by different things (we see this to be true both of natural objects and of things produced by art, e.g. animals, trees, a painting, a sculpture, a house, an implement); and, similarly, we think that activities differing in kind are completed by things differing in kind. Now the activities of thought differ from those of the senses, and both differ among themselves, in kind; so, therefore, do the pleasures that complete them.
Here we have finally reached the useful advice that this study of pleasure in the Ethics was after. It turns out that pleasures are the immaterial goals of our activities. Thus, if your life is not adequately pleasant, you need more goals to pursue, because you will find pleasure at the end of them. For that reason the goals need to be things you can actually bring to completion. Great tasks (like pursuing a Ph.D. in philosophy) will require a long time of working before any pleasure is obtained at the end. They may still be worth pursuing, but if your problem is that your life is unpleasant, pick smaller-scale activities that will lead you to success in a more reasonable period of time.
Now, that said, we have also learned that the noble is both more worthy of pursuit, and more ultimately pleasant. The great pursuits that are (or hopefully are) within your power can fall into that category. Pursuing them can be the mark of a good life; but you need to fit them into a life that also includes a lot of smaller-scale victories that can sustain you along the road.
This may be seen, too, from the fact that each of the pleasures is bound up with the activity it completes. For an activity is intensified by its proper pleasure, since each class of things is better judged of and brought to precision by those who engage in the activity with pleasure; e.g. it is those who enjoy geometrical thinking that become geometers and grasp the various propositions better, and, similarly, those who are fond of music or of building, and so on, make progress in their proper function by enjoying it; so the pleasures intensify the activities, and what intensifies a thing is proper to it, but things different in kind have properties different in kind.
To my certain knowledge we have here among us a mathematician, a professional musician, and an architect. Aristotle was thinking of men like you specifically when he wrote this.
This will be even more apparent from the fact that activities are hindered by pleasures arising from other sources. For people who are fond of playing the flute are incapable of attending to arguments if they overhear some one playing the flute, since they enjoy flute-playing more than the activity in hand; so the pleasure connected with fluteplaying destroys the activity concerned with argument. This happens, similarly, in all other cases, when one is active about two things at once; the more pleasant activity drives out the other, and if it is much more pleasant does so all the more, so that one even ceases from the other. This is why when we enjoy anything very much we do not throw ourselves into anything else, and do one thing only when we are not much pleased by another; e.g. in the theatre the people who eat sweets do so most when the actors are poor. Now since activities are made precise and more enduring and better by their proper pleasure, and injured by alien pleasures, evidently the two kinds of pleasure are far apart. For alien pleasures do pretty much what proper pains do, since activities are destroyed by their proper pains; e.g. if a man finds writing or doing sums unpleasant and painful, he does not write, or does not do sums, because the activity is painful. So an activity suffers contrary effects from its proper pleasures and pains, i.e. from those that supervene on it in virtue of its own nature. And alien pleasures have been stated to do much the same as pain; they destroy the activity, only not to the same degree.
"Proper" in this sense means "the one that belongs to the thing under discussion." It's not "proper" in the sense of etiquette. If you're lifting weights and you hurt yourself doing so, you'll stop (at least until you heal).
Now since activities differ in respect of goodness and badness, and some are worthy to be chosen, others to be avoided, and others neutral, so, too, are the pleasures; for to each activity there is a proper pleasure. The pleasure proper to a worthy activity is good and that proper to an unworthy activity bad; just as the appetites for noble objects are laudable, those for base objects culpable. But the pleasures involved in activities are more proper to them than the desires; for the latter are separated both in time and in nature, while the former are close to the activities, and so hard to distinguish from them that it admits of dispute whether the activity is not the same as the pleasure. (Still, pleasure does not seem to be thought or perception-that would be strange; but because they are not found apart they appear to some people the same.) As activities are different, then, so are the corresponding pleasures. Now sight is superior to touch in purity, and hearing and smell to taste; the pleasures, therefore, are similarly superior, and those of thought superior to these, and within each of the two kinds some are superior to others.
The last highlighted point is another practical warning. To return to the Ph.D. example, you may have a desire for a doctorate; but you won't do the activity as well if you don't take pleasure in it. Even a very strong desire might be abandoned, but if you're enjoying it you'll keep doing it. If you're not, it's very likely you won't (and certain that you won't if the proper pain associated with the pursuit becomes too strong, as it does for very many people: the process is arduous). If you find that you don't take pleasure in it, you probably won't ever be great at it.
Each animal is thought to have a proper pleasure, as it has a proper function; viz. that which corresponds to its activity. If we survey them species by species, too, this will be evident; horse, dog, and man have different pleasures, as Heraclitus says 'asses would prefer sweepings to gold'; for food is pleasanter than gold to asses. So the pleasures of creatures different in kind differ in kind, and it is plausible to suppose that those of a single species do not differ. But they vary to no small extent, in the case of men at least; the same things delight some people and pain others, and are painful and odious to some, and pleasant to and liked by others. This happens, too, in the case of sweet things; the same things do not seem sweet to a man in a fever and a healthy man-nor hot to a weak man and one in good condition. The same happens in other cases.
The idea that the animal has a proper function is Aristotelian; it's the telos of the thing. I have often thought that if you could ask the horse, he might prefer standing in a field eating all day to any of the various functions to which humanity has put him. But from our perspective, there's a proper function; and a horse pressed into service will indeed sometimes seem to be really enjoying performing. However, there's a danger that Aristotle is imposing a human perspective on the animal here rather than taking the animal's pleasure seriously on its own terms.
But in all such matters that which appears to the good man is thought to be really so. If this is correct, as it seems to be, and virtue and the good man as such are the measure of each thing...
This is a modification of Protagoras' position that 'man is the measure of all things,' which Plato had opposed by stating that a god ought to be the right measure. Aristotle declines both positions: no, it is only the good man who has the virtues who is the correct measure.
That, of course, is how we got to the ruling that the horse has a proper function of serving man's interests. A good man with the virtues said so and that's the standard, thus that is the horse's propepr function, quod erat demonstrandum.
...those also will be pleasures which appear so to him, and those things pleasant which he enjoys. If the things he finds tiresome seem pleasant to some one, that is nothing surprising; for men may be ruined and spoilt in many ways; but the things are not pleasant, but only pleasant to these people and to people in this condition. Those which are admittedly disgraceful plainly should not be said to be pleasures, except to a perverted taste; but of those that are thought to be good what kind of pleasure or what pleasure should be said to be that proper to man? Is it not plain from the corresponding activities? The pleasures follow these. Whether, then, the perfect and supremely happy man has one or more activities, the pleasures that perfect these will be said in the strict sense to be pleasures proper to man, and the rest will be so in a secondary and fractional way, as are the activities.
That invocation of 'the supremely happy man' as the judge of what pleasures are most proper gives us the jumping-off point for the discussion of happiness.
Nicomachean Ethics X.4
What pleasure is, or what kind of thing it is, will become plainer if we take up the question again from the beginning.
You've seen this move from Aristotle throughout, and as I've mentioned, it's a very common approach of his. He brings in a lot of machinery from the Physics about what makes motion possible. By "motion" means something technical again, which he will explain to you but it's not quite the way we use the word: it's any sort of process by which change comes to be.
Seeing seems to be at any moment complete, for it does not lack anything which coming into being later will complete its form; and pleasure also seems to be of this nature. For it is a whole, and at no time can one find a pleasure whose form will be completed if the pleasure lasts longer. For this reason, too, it is not a movement. For every movement (e.g. that of building) takes time and is for the sake of an end, and is complete when it has made what it aims at. It is complete, therefore, only in the whole time or at that final moment. In their parts and during the time they occupy, all movements are incomplete, and are different in kind from the whole movement and from each other. For the fitting together of the stones is different from the fluting of the column, and these are both different from the making of the temple; and the making of the temple is complete (for it lacks nothing with a view to the end proposed), but the making of the base or of the triglyph is incomplete; for each is the making of only a part.
A point he makes about motions that are for the sake of an end is that the parts of the motion generally have to come in a certain order. The temple example here is a little opaque, but the point is easy to understand: you have to make the foundation before you can raise the walls, and the walls need to be raised before a roof can be installed. So the thing coming-to-be has an order even over and above the form you are putting the material into: the process by which it can come to be is a determined feature of reality.
They differ in kind, then, and it is not possible to find at any and every time a movement complete in form, but if at all, only in the whole time. So, too, in the case of walking and all other movements. For if locomotion is a movement from to there, it, too, has differences in kind-flying, walking, leaping, and so on.
Locomotion is more in line with how we tend to use the word "motion," but there is also here a determined set of necessary things that have to be done in order. If I want to walk to the mountaintop I first leave my house, then I cross the forest, then I climb the slopes, and only then can I step onto the summit.
(There's another crucial point about locomotion in the Physics, which is that all of these motions involve locomotion: Aristotle's understanding of the way things come to be is that you have to bring things into contact physically; he does not for example have a concept of gravity. If you want to throw a rock into the lake, you have to go to the rock, pick it up, and then throw it. Why does it fall? Natural place, as mentioned in the commentary on II.1: the rock you threw is moving to where the elemental rock belongs in the universe, which it will do if not arrested. Why does it keep moving in the air after you let go of it? His theory was that the air moved out of its way when you threw it kind of circles around behind it and continues to push it along.)
And not only so, but in walking itself there are such differences; for the whence and whither are not the same in the whole racecourse and in a part of it, nor in one part and in another, nor is it the same thing to traverse this line and that; for one traverses not only a line but one which is in a place, and this one is in a different place from that. We have discussed movement with precision in another work...
The Physics, obviously.
...but it seems that it is not complete at any and every time, but that the many movements are incomplete and different in kind, since the whence and whither give them their form. But of pleasure the form is complete at any and every time. Plainly, then, pleasure and movement must be different from each other, and pleasure must be one of the things that are whole and complete. This would seem to be the case, too, from the fact that it is not possible to move otherwise than in time, but it is possible to be pleased; for that which takes place in a moment is a whole.From these considerations it is clear, too, that these thinkers are not right in saying there is a movement or a coming into being of pleasure. For [movement or coming-to-be] cannot be ascribed to all things, but only to those that are divisible and not wholes; there is no coming into being of seeing nor of a point nor of a unit, nor is any of these a movement or coming into being; therefore there is no movement or coming into being of pleasure either; for it is a whole.
What kind of things are not divisible, even conceptually? He has named some mathematical objects that don't really exist in the world; a point is defined as having no magnitude, so there's nothing to divide. But pleasure isn't a mathematical object either, of course. It is, however, still necessarily then immaterial, for all material things can be divided and have magnitude.
Since every sense is active in relation to its object, and a sense which is in good condition acts perfectly in relation to the most beautiful of its objects (for perfect activity seems to be ideally of this nature; whether we say that it is active, or the organ in which it resides, may be assumed to be immaterial), it follows that in the case of each sense the best activity is that of the best-conditioned organ in relation to the finest of its objects. And this activity will be the most complete and pleasant. For, while there is pleasure in respect of any sense, and in respect of thought and contemplation no less, the most complete is pleasantest, and that of a well-conditioned organ in relation to the worthiest of its objects is the most complete; and the pleasure completes the activity.
Here he is continuing the analogy to sight that he opened with: sight is in the organ of the eyes, but sight as we experience it is not material. You can close one eye, but you can't divide the experience you have of seeing into physical parts.
But the pleasure does not complete it in the same way as the combination of object and sense, both good, just as health and the doctor are not in the same way the cause of a man's being healthy.
This is a concept that was important to Aristotle: 'being healthy' causes health, so the fact that all your organs are properly working is what causes the experience of being healthy. A doctor can also cause you to be healthy, sometimes, by applying surgery or other techniques; but it is not the same way of causing your health, and indeed an inferior one if you can just be healthy.
(That pleasure is produced in respect to each sense is plain; for we speak of sights and sounds as pleasant. It is also plain that it arises most of all when both the sense is at its best and it is active in reference to an object which corresponds; when both object and perceiver are of the best there will always be pleasure, since the requisite agent and patient are both present.) Pleasure completes the activity not as the corresponding permanent state does, by its immanence, but as an end which supervenes as the bloom of youth does on those in the flower of their age. So long, then, as both the intelligible or sensible object and the discriminating or contemplative faculty are as they should be, the pleasure will be involved in the activity; for when both the passive and the active factor are unchanged and are related to each other in the same way, the same result naturally follows.
So pleasure is not like building a temple; it's not a motion or a movement because it can't be divided into parts. It's also not like the way in which seeing is the purpose of the eyes, because we also experience pleasure from seeing beauty, so it's an additional sort of end -- not one that supplants sight as the purpose of the eye, the end for which eyes are made, but another sort of end. It's not weird to have two ends, because in Aristotle you have four causes, each of which can have an independence (although they often don't; formal and final cause often turn out to be the same, or efficient and material).
How, then, is it that no one is continuously pleased? Is it that we grow weary? Certainly all human beings are incapable of continuous activity. Therefore pleasure also is not continuous; for it accompanies activity. Some things delight us when they are new, but later do so less, for the same reason; for at first the mind is in a state of stimulation and intensely active about them, as people are with respect to their vision when they look hard at a thing, but afterwards our activity is not of this kind, but has grown relaxed; for which reason the pleasure also is dulled.One might think that all men desire pleasure because they all aim at life; life is an activity, and each man is active about those things and with those faculties that he loves most; e.g. the musician is active with his hearing in reference to tunes, the student with his mind in reference to theoretical questions, and so on in each case; now 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.
They do admit of separation conceptually, however. Note the distinction, also technical in Aristotle, between a "motion" -- which this can't be because it has to be immaterial -- and an "activity." Activities can be immaterial and indivisible; in addition to these examples, the Unmoved Movers in Aristotle's Physics VIII and Metaphysics XII are supposed to be pure activities, i.e. Forms.
A pure activity can thus be everlasting, since there's no motion to complete and no material parts to wear out. That's one reason it's a puzzle for Aristotle that our pleasure activity comes to an end after a while, which he is explaining here.
Nicomachean Ethics X.3
Immediately this next chapter gets technical in a way that the book hasn't explained.
Nor again, if pleasure is not a quality, does it follow that it is not a good; for the activities of virtue are not qualities either, nor is happiness.
To understand what that sentence means, you have to know what Aristotle intends the word quality to describe. It is one of the categories, which he formalized in his work of the same name, and which provided a lot of the power of his metaphysics and logic. A quality is a thing like color, which inheres (it is usually said) in a substance. A substance is something that can reproduce, usually: horses or men or things like that. So a horse has a quality, which is to say that it might be brown or chestnut or black.
So if pleasure is not a quality, what is it exactly? It's not a substance for sure; nor is it a quantity, nor is it a relation (that category is very weird, as an aside: normally you or I would think that 'we have a relationship' if we know each other, so that's one relationship that exists between two people. In Aristotle, all the non-substantial categories have to inhere in something, so there can't be a relationship "between" us; what has to hold is that I have a relationship to you, and you separately have a different one to me).
Well, happiness is an activity, as we have heard him say several times now; and so indeed are the virtues, things you do and practice until they become habits. Habits are still activities, even if you aren't doing them right this second, because they continue as part of who you are all the time: a brave man, or a just man. It's something that's happening whenever you're around being yourself.
They say, however, that the good is determinate, while pleasure is indeterminate, because it admits of degrees. Now if it is from the feeling of pleasure that they judge thus, the same will be true of justice and the other virtues, in respect of which we plainly say that people of a certain character are so more or less, and act more or less in accordance with these virtues; for people may be more just or brave, and it is possible also to act justly or temperately more or less. But if their judgement is based on the various pleasures, surely they are not stating the real cause, if in fact some pleasures are unmixed and others mixed. Again, just as health admits of degrees without being indeterminate, why should not pleasure? The same proportion is not found in all things, nor a single proportion always in the same thing, but it may be relaxed and yet persist up to a point, and it may differ in degree. The case of pleasure also may therefore be of this kind.
Note that is not a determination that pleasure is of that kind; as often in ethics, we're talking about things that may be or probably are. As you are doubtless tired of hearing by now, this is the I.3 point.
Again, they assume that the good is perfect while movements and comings into being are imperfect, and try to exhibit pleasure as being a movement and a coming into being. But they do not seem to be right even in saying that it is a movement. For speed and slowness are thought to be proper to every movement, and if a movement, e.g. that of the heavens, has not speed or slowness in itself, it has it in relation to something else; but of pleasure neither of these things is true. For while we may become pleased quickly as we may become angry quickly, we cannot be pleased quickly, not even in relation to some one else, while we can walk, or grow, or the like, quickly. While, then, we can change quickly or slowly into a state of pleasure, we cannot quickly exhibit the activity of pleasure, i.e. be pleased. Again, how can it be a coming into being? It is not thought that any chance thing can come out of any chance thing, but that a thing is dissolved into that out of which it comes into being; and pain would be the destruction of that of which pleasure is the coming into being.
This one is a declaration, and one I'm not at all sure is true. I can think of things that have pleased me right away, although there's some ambiguity in quickly that could allow it to be an amount of time. I can be pleased almost instantly should, say, a beautiful woman bestow a kind word upon me; but there is some sort of 'coming-to-be' that involves sight and sound and the brain processing recognition.
They say, too, that pain is the lack of that which is according to nature, and pleasure is replenishment. But these experiences are bodily. If then pleasure is replenishment with that which is according to nature, that which feels pleasure will be that in which the replenishment takes place, i.e. the body; but that is not thought to be the case; therefore the replenishment is not pleasure, though one would be pleased when replenishment was taking place, just as one would be pained if one was being operated on. This opinion seems to be based on the pains and pleasures connected with nutrition; on the fact that when people have been short of food and have felt pain beforehand they are pleased by the replenishment. But this does not happen with all pleasures; for the pleasures of learning and, among the sensuous pleasures, those of smell, and also many sounds and sights, and memories and hopes, do not presuppose pain. Of what then will these be the coming into being? There has not been lack of anything of which they could be the supplying anew.
That is a very solid argument against the argument that this paragraph leads off with, which must have been a common opinion at the time. It's not just hunger, though; if you stop breathing, very quickly you will suffer pain as a result of it. Anyone who has swum in deep water remembers how good the first breath was once you broke free of the surface.
Nevertheless, what he's trying to get at is what pleasure itself really is, not just what it sometimes is. Any universal claim can be disproven by a single counterexample, and he has several.
In reply to those who bring forward the disgraceful pleasures one may say that these are not pleasant; if things are pleasant to people of vicious constitution, we must not suppose that they are also pleasant to others than these, just as we do not reason so about the things that are wholesome or sweet or bitter to sick people, or ascribe whiteness to the things that seem white to those suffering from a disease of the eye. Or one might answer thus-that the pleasures are desirable, but not from these sources, as wealth is desirable, but not as the reward of betrayal, and health, but not at the cost of eating anything and everything. Or perhaps pleasures differ in kind; for those derived from noble sources are different from those derived from base sources, and one cannot [experience] the pleasure of the just man without being just, nor that of the musical man without being musical, and so on.
So we're interested in pleasure itself, which makes these divisions of kinds of pleasure an interesting choice. The ignoble cannot feel the pleasure of a noble mind; and though there is some way in which pleasure is the same for all of us and in all cases, there are also distinctions we can make among them. Yet the answer that pleasure is good, "but not from these sources," leaves pleasure as a good -- even, he earlier suggested, the good if it is properly derived by the right kind of person.
The fact, too, that a friend is different from a flatterer seems to make it plain that pleasure is not a good or that pleasures are different in kind; for the one is thought to consort with us with a view to the good, the other with a view to our pleasure, and the one is reproached for his conduct while the other is praised on the ground that he consorts with us for different ends. And no one would choose to live with the intellect of a child throughout his life, however much he were to be pleased at the things that children are pleased at, nor to get enjoyment by doing some most disgraceful deed, though he were never to feel any pain in consequence. And there are many things we should be keen about even if they brought no pleasure, e.g. seeing, remembering, knowing, possessing the virtues. If pleasures necessarily do accompany these, that makes no odds; we should choose these even if no pleasure resulted. It seems to be clear, then, that neither is pleasure the good nor is all pleasure desirable, and that some pleasures are desirable in themselves, differing in kind or in their sources from the others. So much for the things that are said about pleasure and pain.
So pleasure isn't a quality, but it is a good; yet not, in fact, the good. Pleasure at least seems to accompany activities, although it isn't quite an activity itself: the virtues are, and pleasure is meant to accompany them, but we should do the virtuous things in spite of whether there is any pleasure attached to them.