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.
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