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.
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