We begin with the examination of opinions worth considering, as we have been doing throughout.
Eudoxus thought pleasure was the good because he saw all things, both rational and irrational, aiming at it, and because in all things that which is the object of choice is what is excellent, and that which is most the object of choice the greatest good; thus the fact that all things moved towards the same object indicated that this was for all things the chief good (for each thing, he argued, finds its own good, as it finds its own nourishment); and that which is good for all things and at which all aim was the good. His arguments were credited more because of the excellence of his character than for their own sake; he was thought to be remarkably self-controlled, and therefore it was thought that he was not saying what he did say as a friend of pleasure, but that the facts really were so. He believed that the same conclusion followed no less plainly from a study of the contrary of pleasure; pain was in itself an object of aversion to all things, and therefore its contrary must be similarly an object of choice. And again that is most an object of choice which we choose not because or for the sake of something else, and pleasure is admittedly of this nature; for no one asks to what end he is pleased, thus implying that pleasure is in itself an object of choice. Further, he argued that pleasure when added to any good, e.g. to just or temperate action, makes it more worthy of choice, and that it is only by itself that the good can be increased.
Aristotle uses that bolded argument himself in other places to prove that existence is the greatest good, for all things -- not only men but small animals -- pursue it, both by striving to avoid death and by striving to reproduce and extend their existence. The unification of existence and goodness is of great use to later thinkers from monotheistic traditions, who identify perfect existence with God: Avicenna is the greatest of these, but Aquinas also adopts the argument without modification into his Summa Theologiæ.
Here, however, Aristotle is intending to reject the argument as presented. The hedonistic approach to ethics is not satisfying to him.
This argument seems to show it to be one of the goods, and no more a good than any other; for every good is more worthy of choice along with another good than taken alone. And so it is by an argument of this kind that Plato proves the good not to be pleasure; he argues that the pleasant life is more desirable with wisdom than without, and that if the mixture is better, pleasure is not the good; for the good cannot become more desirable by the addition of anything to it. Now it is clear that nothing else, any more than pleasure, can be the good if it is made more desirable by the addition of any of the things that are good in themselves.
This is a solid argument, and classically Greek in its structure. They are looking for "the" good, not "a" good. If we're going to identify that thing -- it is an assumption already that there is or ought to be a single good -- we need to find something that won't be improved by adding anything else to it. This is because if anything else could make X better, then X is not by itself the pure good.
When we get to existence, we can show that at least most beings will accept it even if it is stripped of other goods -- many will choose to continue to live in pain, rather than to die. Yet even there we can't show that existence plus the absence of pain (and presence of pleasure) wouldn't be better than existence alone. The later monotheistic thinkers will assume that a perfect existence will include the goods, but for the pagan Greeks that won't do: if we are looking for the good, we need something that is self-sufficient.
What, then, is there that satisfies this criterion, which at the same time we can participate in? It is something of this sort that we are looking for. Those who object that that at which all things aim is not necessarily good are, we may surmise, talking nonsense.
There Aristotle rejects the alternative position to the basic argument, and therefore accepts that "that at which all things aim is necessarily good" as a consequence.
For we say that that which every one thinks really is so; and the man who attacks this belief will hardly have anything more credible to maintain instead. If it is senseless creatures that desire the things in question, there might be something in what they say; but if intelligent creatures do so as well, what sense can there be in this view? But perhaps even in inferior creatures there is some natural good stronger than themselves which aims at their proper good.
Nor does the argument about the contrary of pleasure seem to be correct. They say that if pain is an evil it does not follow that pleasure is a good; for evil is opposed to evil and at the same time both are opposed to the neutral state-which is correct enough but does not apply to the things in question. For if both pleasure and pain belonged to the class of evils they ought both to be objects of aversion, while if they belonged to the class of neutrals neither should be an object of aversion or they should both be equally so; but in fact people evidently avoid the one as evil and choose the other as good; that then must be the nature of the opposition between them.
This should be familiar from the early parts of the EN, when we were talking about virtue as the balancing point between two opposites. Aristotle is showing that pleasure and pain are clearly in opposition, not both middle figures in the neutral sector between oppositions. Yet given the overall structure of the work that implies, of course, that neither pleasure nor pain will be 'the Good,' but some state between them -- perhaps closer to one than the other, but in any case in between.
No comments:
Post a Comment