Bull-headed readers, should any be found in the Hall, will find themselves discussed in this section.
Is the man continent who abides by any and every rule and any and every choice, or the man who abides by the right choice, and is he incontinent who abandons any and every choice and any and every rule, or he who abandons the rule that is not false and the choice that is right; this is how we put it before in our statement of the problem. Or is it incidentally any and every choice but per se the true rule and the right choice by which the one abides and the other does not? If any one chooses or pursues this for the sake of that, per se he pursues and 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.
So, properly speaking, it is not incontinent to abandon a bad decision or a stupid rule. You could say so in a way, since it's similar to the most proper ('without qualification') use of the term in that it means not living up to your rule. But if it was not a good rule, probably because your upbringing misled you as to what the most worthy thing to do was (as sometimes it does, as for example when the young are taught to admire antiheroes instead of heroes), the wise man will reform the rule and adjust his behavior accordingly.
There are some who are apt to abide by their opinion, who are called strong-headed [or bull-headed --Grim], viz. those who are hard to persuade in the first instance 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.
Yes, for example, the rash man has a vice rather than a virtue; the prodigal likewise. Thus, bull-headed stubbornness is a vice, whereas tenacious continence is a virtue. But not, we shall see at the end of this chapter, as good a virtue as actual temperance, as liberality is not of the scale of magnificence and the love-of-lesser-but-proper-honor is less than true magnanimity.
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 argument 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 sometimes do; so that they are liker 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 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.
In the story Neoptolemus is a boy, and Odysseus persuades him to lie to Philoctetes, who was given the bow of Heracles, in order to obtain access to that bow. Neoptolemus does so under the persuasion of his famous elder, but eventually is overcome by guilt and admits the truth. Thus, here he did not obey his 'rule,' or choice; but it was a bad rule. Aristotle cashes this out as a sort-of persuasion by pleasure, since the boy hasn't achieved the right age to have fully-formed first principles from which to reason (i.e., his noble upbringing is not complete and, indeed, it is being deformed a bit by Odysseus here).
Since there is also a sort of man who takes less delight than he should in bodily things, and does not abide by the rule, he who is intermediate between him and the incontinent man is the continent man; for the incontinent man fails to abide by the rule because he delights too much in them, and this man because he delights in them too little; while the continent man abides by the rule and does not change on either account. Now if continence is good, both the contrary states must be bad, as they actually appear to be; but because the other extreme is seen in few people and seldom, as temperance is thought to be contrary only to self-indulgence, so is continence to incontinence.
Since many names are applied analogically, it is by analogy that we have come to speak of the 'continence' the temperate man; for both the continent man and the temperate man are such as to do nothing contrary to the rule for the sake of the bodily pleasures, but the former has and the latter has not bad appetites, and the latter is such as not to feel pleasure contrary to the rule, while the former is such as to feel pleasure but not to be led by it. And the incontinent and the self-indulgent man are also like another; they are different, but both pursue bodily pleasures- the latter, however, also thinking that he ought to do so, while the former does not think this.
So just as the incontinent is better than the self-indulgent because the incontinent at least has the right rule though neither obey it, so too the temperate man is better than the continent because he has the right attitudes towards pleasure even though they both ultimately do the right thing.
To do the right thing is good; to do the right thing for the right reason is better; but to do the right thing because it is pleasant is proof of a virtuous character. That reaches all the way back to Book I.8 and I.9 in which Aristotle argued that the virtuous life was pleasant, because virtue was a habituated character and living according to one's habits is pleasant.
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