Nicomachean Ethics VII.13-14

These last two chapters close out the long Book VII, one of the more technical books of the EN.

13

But further (E) it is agreed that pain is bad and to be avoided; for some pain is without qualification bad, and other pain is bad because it is in some respect an impediment to us. Now the contrary of that which is to be avoided, qua something to be avoided and bad, is good. Pleasure, then, is necessarily a good. For the answer of Speusippus, that pleasure is contrary both to pain and to good, as the greater is contrary both to the less and to the equal, is not successful; since he would not say that pleasure is essentially just a species of evil.

Speusippus succeeded Plato as the head of the Academy. He was deeply suspicious of Plato's notions about the Good, and of forms in general; Aristotle, though he differs as well, rejects Speusippus' particular critique.

And (F) if certain pleasures are bad, that does not prevent the chief good from being some pleasure, just as the chief good may be some form of knowledge though certain kinds of knowledge are bad. Perhaps it is even necessary, if each disposition has unimpeded activities, that, whether the activity (if unimpeded) of all our dispositions or that of some one of them is happiness, this should be the thing most worthy of our choice; and this activity is pleasure. Thus the chief good would be some pleasure, though most pleasures might perhaps be bad without qualification.

Theologically later Christian Aristotelians will accept that the chief good lies in contemplation of the divine, which is supposed to maximize pleasure, beauty, and knowledge all at once. The idea that 'some pleasure' could be good even though most pleasures are bad -- so bad that we should push pleasures off like the old men at the gates of Troy looking upon Helen -- is nevertheless surprising.  

John Stuart Mill, the Utilitarian, defends a version of this idea himself. Utility is supposed to be the pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain; against the charge that this is merely hedonism, he said that the fact that people can't think of higher pleasures says more about them than about pleasure. Perhaps the highest pleasures do include things like contemplation of the divine, which might excel the lower pleasures we have been warned against so sternly.

And for this reason all men think that the happy life is pleasant and weave pleasure into their ideal of happiness-and reasonably too; for no activity is perfect when it is impeded, and happiness is a perfect thing; this is why the happy man needs the goods of the body and external goods, i.e. those of fortune, viz. in order that he may not be impeded in these ways. Those who say that the victim on the rack or the man who falls into great misfortunes is happy if he is good, are, whether they mean to or not, talking nonsense. Now because we need fortune as well as other things, some people think good fortune the same thing as happiness; but it is not that, for even good fortune itself when in excess is an impediment, and perhaps should then be no longer called good fortune; for its limit is fixed by reference to happiness.

And indeed the fact that all things, both brutes and men, pursue pleasure is an indication of its being somehow the chief good:

The above section is one of the times that Aristotle talks about fortune and happiness. Happiness is the goal of ethics, we know from Book I. Yet things that we can't control ourselves -- such as whether or not we receive honors from others -- aren't thought worthy of being the goal of ethics because that goal should be something that lies within our power to do or not do. 

Finding that Lady Luck (Agatha Tyche) is so involved with our happiness thus ought to make us wonder about happiness as the proper end of ethics. Yet it turns out that fortune's limits are set by our natural capacity for happiness rather than the other way around: so it does, in a way, depend on us and what is internal to us. We are lucky if we get what we need, but not more, for the 'good luck' of winning more ends up being an impediment to us realizing our happiness after all. We have to perfect what is within ourselves, and to hope only for that which allows such internal perfection.

Not-Bombs at Party HQs

On J6, were pipe bombs placed outside DNC and RNC party HQs?

The documents obtained by Just the News show that both bombs — one planted at the Democratic National Committee and the other at the Republican National Committee — were filled with chemical building blocks of black powder, each was equipped with a 60-minute kitchen timer, and each had destructive potential.

But most notably, the FBI laboratory report never uses the word “viable” to describe either bomb. Both devices never exploded and were discovered about 16 hours after the FBI claimed they were planted outside both major party headquarters. 

My friend Jim Hanson* and I looked over the photos of the 'bombs' that the FBI posted and determined we didn't think they were in fact functional bombs. The use of a kitchen timer, which just rings a bell instead of setting off an electrical charge that could trigger an explosion, was one tell: they look like time bombs, having a timer, but they'd then need significant additional mechanics to set off a charge. 

If we're talking about 'the chemical building blocks of black powder,' well, that's charcoal, sulfur, and saltpeter (as Star Trek fans know). Those aren't explosive unless properly mixed.

The kitchen timers were for just 60 minutes, by the way, and the bombs were discovered 16 hours after being planted. 

* It occurs to me that I should mention that Jim Hanson was trained in building such things as a Green Beret, and that he won sanctions in a lawsuit filed against him by Mohamed Mohamed, the father of a boy who built the timing mechanism for a bomb as a school prank. The boy, Ahmed Mohamed, had been invited by Obama to the White House in a big publicity stunt alleging anti-Muslim prejudice. Jim's expertise in the matter has thus been vetted by the courts and found in his favor; the family, he tells me, returned to Qatar rather than pay up.

Can this Divide be Bridged?

Sadly it appears that the SECDEF (SECWAR?) is not planning mass firings at today's in-person meeting of much of the top military leadership; indeed, the President also attended in person, further consolidating American military command in one physical location at one time.

The Washington Post managed to get several military "leaders" to voice concerns about the whole business of this administration being in charge.

Military leaders have raised serious concerns about the Trump administration’s forthcoming defense strategy, exposing a divide between the Pentagon’s political and uniformed leadership as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth summons top brass to a highly unusual summit in Virginia on Tuesday, according to eight current and former officials.

The critiques from multiple top officers, including Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, come as Hegseth reorders U.S. military priorities — centering the Pentagon on perceived threats to the homeland, narrowing U.S. competition with China, and downplaying America’s role in Europe and Africa.

President Donald Trump will attend the abrupt gathering of generals and admirals at Marine Corps Base Quantico, where Hegseth is expected to deliver remarks on military standards and the “warrior ethos,” even as uniformed leaders fear mass firings or a drastic reorganization of the combatant command structure and the military hierarchy.

Before the Afghanistan withdrawal, may of us who have worked with the military would have defended it as a structure that is designed to produce leaders with both education in the military science and experience in practical command. After that example, it is hard to credit the idea that the process still identifies the best men and women and promotes them to the highest positions; nor the idea that valid criticisms from those closest to the front are heard or considered by top commanders, even if they must challenge political figures in order to protect the warfighters on the front lines. 

One might have hoped that this session would be used less for "morale boosting" and more for cleaning house.  

Nicomachean Ethics VII.12

Now that the common claims of the Wise are on the table, we can begin the analysis. 

These are pretty much the things that are said. That it does not follow from these grounds that pleasure is not a good, or even the chief good, is plain from the following considerations. (A) (a) First, since that which is good may be so in either of two senses (one thing good simply and another good for a particular person), natural constitutions and states of being, and therefore also the corresponding movements and processes, will be correspondingly divisible. Of those which are thought to be bad some will be bad if taken without qualification but not bad for a particular person, but worthy of his choice, and some will not be worthy of choice even for a particular person, but only at a particular time and for a short period, though not without qualification; while others are not even pleasures, but seem to be so, viz. all those which involve pain and whose end is curative, e.g. the processes that go on in sick persons.

Those processes have changed, but you can still see the point. Generally being cut open with a knife is neither pleasant nor good for you, nor is it good to have a part of yourself cut out; but if you are sick and need surgery to remove a diseased part of yourself, it can be good for you to be cut open with a knife even if it isn't good for everyone. Since it enables a return to health and therefore pleasure, it can even be an activity that is ordered towards pleasure in a way -- though it is unlikely to be pleasant in itself. 

(b) Further, one kind of good being activity and another being state, the processes that restore us to our natural state are only incidentally pleasant; for that matter the activity at work in the appetites for them is the activity of so much of our state and nature as has remained unimpaired; for there are actually pleasures that involve no pain or appetite (e.g. those of contemplation), the nature in such a case not being defective at all. That the others are incidental is indicated by the fact that men do not enjoy the same pleasant objects when their nature is in its settled state as they do when it is being replenished, but in the former case they enjoy the things that are pleasant without qualification, in the latter the contraries of these as well; for then they enjoy even sharp and bitter things, none of which is pleasant either by nature or without qualification. The states they produce, therefore, are not pleasures naturally or without qualification; for as pleasant things differ, so do the pleasures arising from them.

Here we can see what Aristotle would make of our affection for hot sauces made out of chilies engineered by American scientists to be much hotter than anything in nature. Just as he says, when you're hungry and are restoring yourself by engaging in appetitive processes, some of the "sharp and bitter" things you might enjoy aren't necessarily pure pleasures in themselves, yet in the moment they can be quite enjoyable.

(c) Again, it is not necessary that there should be something else better than pleasure, as some say the end is better than the process; for pleasures are not processes nor do they all involve process-they are activities and ends; nor do they arise when we are becoming something, but when we are exercising some faculty; and not all pleasures have an end different from themselves, but only the pleasures of persons who are being led to the perfecting of their nature. This is why it is not right to say that pleasure is perceptible process, but it should rather be called activity of the natural state, and instead of 'perceptible' 'unimpeded'. It is thought by some people to be process just because they think it is in the strict sense good; for they think that activity is process, which it is not.

That may be a little opaque because it turns on a logical distinction that isn't obvious if you haven't read more of Aristotle than just this. The difference between an activity and a process here is that a process is a set of things one does in order to obtain something else, whereas an activity is a thing done for itself. Happiness is an activity, i.e., the very eudaimonia we've been seeking in the ethics is something that you do in order to do it. It is, as it were, its own end: we aren't seeking something else by flourishing and being happy, but rather, we are flourishing and being happy just because we want to flourish and be happy.

A process aims at something, and because it does so that something is more important than the process itself. It's worth going through the process, in other words, in order to obtain the end that the process seeks. You might do the work of building a garden in order to do the work of growing tomatoes and peppers in order to do the work of harvesting them in order to do the work of cooking with them in order to do the work of canning the results in order to obtain delicious food that will last through the winter. That's a process with a product. The product is obviously superior to the process because you are willing to go through all the laborious steps in order to obtain it. 

(B) The view that pleasures are bad because some pleasant things are unhealthy is like saying that healthy things are bad because some healthy things are bad for money-making; both are bad in the respect mentioned, but they are not bad for that reason-indeed, thinking itself is sometimes injurious to health.

Indeed it is. Havamal 54-6.

The DB Laughs

This is actually perfectly excusable if, and only if, most of those "leaders" won't be immediately after the meeting. Otherwise....

Nicomachean Ethics VII.11

There is a surprising beginning to this short chapter.

The study of pleasure and pain belongs to the province of the political philosopher; for he is the architect of the end, with a view to which we call one thing bad and another good without qualification. Further, it is one of our necessary tasks to consider them; for not only did we lay it down that moral virtue and vice are concerned with pains and pleasures, but most people say that happiness involves pleasure; this is why the blessed man is called by a name derived from a word meaning enjoyment.

This is a place where ancient Greek ethics differ sharply from Christian ethics. The later Christian Aristotelians would not accept that the political philosopher was in any sense the "architect" of the ultimate end of human life, in view of which we could call things 'good' or 'bad' without qualification. They would not in fact assign this to any human agent, not even priests or Popes, but to God alone.

The debate over whether men or 'a god' was the right locus of this, however, was not alien to the ancients. Plato has Socrates discuss the matter in some detail in the Euthyphro, coming down on the opinion that only the divine could serve this funciton; while the famous Protagoras the Sophist defended the thesis that 'man is the measure of all things.' There is also a Platonic dialogue called Protagoras, in which the thesis receives a small discussion as part of a larger inquiry into the nature of virtue.

Now (1) some people think that no pleasure is a good, either in itself or incidentally, since the good and pleasure are not the same; (2) others think that some pleasures are good but that most are bad. (3) Again there is a third view, that even if all pleasures are good, yet the best thing in the world cannot be pleasure.

These numbers were added by the translator to help you keep the arguments straight. We will now see elaborations of each of these common arguments; you will by now be familiar with Aristotle's habit of laying out what is commonly thought by the Wise, especially when he doesn't really agree with any of them. He likes to lay out and address their views before giving his own. 

(1) The reasons given for the view that pleasure is not a good at all are (a) that every pleasure is a perceptible process to a natural state, and that no process is of the same kind as its end, e.g. no process of building of the same kind as a house. (b) A temperate man avoids pleasures. (c) A man of practical wisdom pursues what is free from pain, not what is pleasant. (d) The pleasures are a hindrance to thought, and the more so the more one delights in them, e.g. in sexual pleasure; for no one could think of anything while absorbed in this. (e) There is no art of pleasure; but every good is the product of some art. (f) Children and the brutes pursue pleasures. (2) The reasons for the view that not all pleasures are good are that (a) there are pleasures that are actually base and objects of reproach, and (b) there are harmful pleasures; for some pleasant things are unhealthy. (3) The reason for the view that the best thing in the world is not pleasure is that pleasure is not an end but a process.

The coming chapters will address these arguments.  

Riding the Park

Saw baby elk near this bull. They have white spots like a fawn. Lots of energy for a big creature like an elk.

Newfound Gap.

The Little River.

UPDATE: 

Baby elk.

Same view of Newfound Gap by evening. 

Picnicking.

“Waylon’s Place,” Townsend, TN.

The Smoky Mountains Bike Week is here in Maryville, TN.

Shape-Note Tent

I always try to get a short video of this for Tex. 

Mountain Heritage

I trust you have all seen a moonshine still before.

The Cherokee Stickball exhibition was at this year's Mountain Heritage Day. This blog has been in existence for more than two decades, so I have probably told all of my family stories before. Our part of the mountain heritage on display was this part. 

My grandfather was a welder, my father's father. He had seven brothers and one sister, so his father my great-grandfather couldn't pass the farm on to all of them. Being one of the younger sons, my grandfather had to find something else to do, and he tried trade school. He almost quit because he despaired over being able to make welds that weren't ugly, but one of his instructors talked to him about it and realized what he was upset about. The instructor took a hammer and hit one of the admired pretty welds, which shattered under the blow. He hit my grandfather's, and it held. "You've got your whole life to learn to make 'em pretty," said the instructor, so a welder my grandfather became. During World War II he wasn't able to re-enlist in the Army due to that skill, so he ended up working at the Oak Ridge facility making what turned out to be atomic bombs.

During the Great Depression, though, there wasn't even welding work to be had. As a result, he turned his hand to making moonshine stills for the bootleggers. 

He was also a mechanic, and after the war opened a service station where he did body work and tuned the greatest era of cars ever made -- though he was located on the route of what became I-75 and did much of his work in long-haul big rigs. He would have known almost any of these inside and out. So would my father, who grew up working on them alongside my grandfather -- and occasionally racing them illegally in the mountains. Dad later became an upstanding and law-abiding citizen after his wilder youthful days.

If you follow the link above, my grandfather standing in front of a 1940 Chevrolet.

I do love a classic pony car.

You don't see a lot of GTOs, at least locally. This one comes equipped with tartan, a hint of Western North Carolina's intense level of Scottish-immigrant heritage.

I always like a good hot rod.

Nothing like a Thunderbird.

A classic Chevy and a Ford Fairlane.

I always say that nostalgia for me looks like Smokey and the Bandit, which is exactly where and how it was when I was growing up.

Cherokee Stickball

I have watched them play this for years, and I still have no idea what the rules are. Some have one stick and some have two, and frequently they wrestle each other to the ground or tackle each other in pig piles. Sometimes they throw the sticks away to focus on the wrestling. There’s a ball. No idea how you score.

I used to live near Ballground, GA, which was reputedly the place where the Cherokee and the Creek would gather to play this game in lieu of war. Sometimes: there was a brutal war fought there at least once, which caused the Creek to retreat far to the south. 

UPDATE:

Don’t know if anyone scored or won, but the game is over. They all came together and slapped hands like at a little league game, then did this ritual with whoops while the referees(?) tossed water in the air onto the players. 

UPDATE: I asked some of the players to explain the rules after the game. Apparently there are two sticks on either side that serve as a goal, which are hard to see because they're just unadorned sticks stuck upright in the ground -- I think in the top picture you can see them, with leaves still on them so you might have thought they were sapling trees. You can score by carrying or throwing the ball through them. You can't pick the ball up with your hands, only a stick; but if you catch it in the air with your hand you can carry and throw it with your hands. You can discard or pick up sticks at will, so if somebody throws down their stick to wrestle you can grab theirs and deny them the ability to scoop the ball off the ground. 

Apparently the black-short team won, although exactly when any of them scored was opaque to me as a viewer. They didn't even get excited about it.

One Year On

A year ago this morning I started five hours of chainsawing my way out to the highway and two weeks without power. Even a year on the worst effects of the hurricane are still visible. Parts of the Blue Ridge Parkway will need another year of repairs; I-40 is kind of open for limited traffic with major delays. 

It was quite an experience. The main thing I learned was to look to your community and not to the Feds for help in such times. Help each other and stick together, and have faith in the people but not the government. An amazing amount of charity effort came flowing in through roads that were barely open, or flown into tiny airfields some of which didn’t formally exist. 

Hopefully the two storms forming off the coast blow back to sea. We don’t need them. 

A Little Truth Finally Outs

I suppose we knew this all along, but it's nice to see it finally come out.

The FBI finally acknowledged to Congress that 274 plainclothes agents were embedded in the January 6 crowds in Washington.

As the years have scrolled by since that momentous day, we've learned that Buffalo Shaman here was actually allowed in by the police, with whom he spoke on several occasions during the adventure; he was nonviolent and allowed to enter without force. I learned from a friend on hand that day that the Park Police were understaffed if anything; we've learned that the National Guard was requested but denied by Congress; we've learned a great many similar things. There was some rioting on the one side of the building, but a lot of the people were let in: there is video of police opening the barricades and the doors. 

We had already received an admission from the FBI that dozens or hundreds of their informants were present in the crowd. Now we know it actually had agents* in plainclothes in large numbers in the crowd. "The news comes in the wake of claims by the U.S. Department of Justice Office of Inspector General that the FBI had no undercover personnel in the Jan. 6 crowds."

That changes the flavor of the whole thing, doesn't it? Not an insurrection any more: an information operation designed to leverage popular anger and protest at legitimate election tomfoolery in several states, and turn it into a cause for the Federales to consolidate power. As late as the 2024 election season the DOJ was still lying to us all about this in official reports. I recall that they walled off the Congress and deployed the National Guard afterwards for months. 

* The FBI and the CIA use the term "agent" very differently. An "agent" for the CIA is not a CIA officer, but a foreign national they've recruited to execute their plans within the host country. This term is almost wholly misused by Hollywood accounts of what the Agency does, where a 'secret agent' is supposed to be the James Bond type of CIA officer: these are in fact called "operations officers." An "agent" for the FBI is an officer and employee; an 'agent' in the CIA's sense is called a "confidential informant" by the FBI. Thus, the admission here is that the FBI had actual secret police agents throughout the crowd on 6 January 2001.

The Age of Arthur

AVI posted this site earlier this week, but it belongs at the Hall as well. This entry, which AVI also noted, is a good starting point because it validates the exercise of trying to study the historicity of Arthur. After that there's just a wealth of good information about the era. 

It is an era about which good information is difficult to discern. I believe it was Chesterton who wrote, though I cannot find the reference, that the era was one in which legends were born out of history: one generation was suffused with bureaucratic notes on the logistical shipments from Rome, and within a short time there were the disciplined chronicles of the Anglo-Saxons. Yet for a space, for a while, we have only stories of men striving with giants and dragons: and there among them is Arthur, with the cross pinned to his shoulder, holding against the tide. 

Anti-Revolutionaries

Today Vodkapundit has an article for subscribers that is based on a play on the name of the famous Beatles song about revolution. I don't subscribe so I didn't read it, but I did read something interesting about the Beatles not long ago. It was some remarks by Lemmy Kilmister, the founder, lead singer, and bass player of Motörhead. I won't censor his remarks, which would be very much against the spirit of the man.

“[T]he Beatles were hard men,” he wrote in his 2004 memoir White Line Fever. “[Manager] Brian Epstein cleaned them up for mass consumption, but they were anything but sissies. They were from Liverpool, which is like Hamburg or Norfolk, Virginia – a hard, sea-farin' town, all these dockers and sailors around all the time who would beat the piss out of you if you so much as winked at them. Ringo's from the Dingle, which is like the fucking Bronx.”

He continued: “The Rolling Stones were the mummy's boys – they were all college students from the outskirts of London. They went to starve in London, but it was by choice, to give themselves some sort of aura of disrespectability."

Hard men they may have once been, for all of the fact that they came to be emblems of the Flower Children thanks to Lennon. I'm prepared to take Lemmy's word on that. It's interest, though, that the song that Vodkapundit is riffing off of contains a cautionary note very appropriate to our own moment. In fact it's repeated three times as variants:

But when you talk about destruction
Don't you know that you can count me out?...

But if you want money for people with minds that hate
All I can tell you is brother you have to wait...

But if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao
You ain't gonna make it with anyone anyhow...

The hard men from the sea-faring town didn't want to see things burned down. Neither do the working class of today, for whom all this recent celebration of murder and mayhem is unlikely to be a winning stance. 

Even the real revolutionaries had a note of caution.

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

I think even most people who really are worried about the current administration recognize that it's a passing moment. Trump is nearly eighty and on his last term; the odds of his work surviving him in a recognizable form are not high. Whoever replaces him, which right now might be many people even if the Democrats lose the next election, that person will be of a very different character. 

It's not the time for blood right now, no more than after the election of 2020. Prudence, often like phronesis being defined as "practical wisdom," indeed dictates. 

This being more of a Motörhead sort of blog, I'll close with them instead.

Incontinence and Alcohol

We've just finished Aristotle's long inquiry into the problem of incontinence. Probably the clearest case of human incontinence lies with alcohol, where very often we have known that another drink isn't the best choice and that we have to get up tomorrow, but we're out with friends or listening to moving music and decide that just one more won't hurt. There are many similar cases, so many that it has filled libraries with folk songs and country music, and hardly any blues music fails to mention 'the whiskey.' 

Readers know that I do an annual alcohol fast of 30 days, which I used to do in January but decided this year that I would move to another time of year. (January is miserable enough.) This time I chose to do it now, and am a week into it as of today; the reason is that I am combining it with training for a Strongman competition that is coming up on the 18th of October. 

To help myself with it this time, I decided to try one of the several apps that claim to be of use on the point of reducing one's drinking. Some of these use hypnosis; I didn't want one of those both because I doubt the efficacy of hypnosis. Others had social groups you could join, but I don't like socializing nor people all that much. There were several other options, alcohol as mentioned being one of the chiefest of human trials and many people having issues with it. 

I picked one called Reframe, which promised that it would "use neuroscience" to assist. What it turns out to mean by that is that it explains the neuroscience to me, a bit at a time and day-by-day. This is actually an excellent approach for me personally, even if it isn't the right one for everyone; I enjoy learning new things and find the information persuasive in a way that other things might not be for me. 

What I have learned so far is that alcohol has both immediate and long-term effects on several important hormones and receptors that affect the brain and have follow-on effects on your emotional state. It causes spikes in dopamine and seratonin, affects glutamate and GABA receptors. The effects of all of these interactions are to increase your sense of happiness and well-being, while reducing your ability to feel troubled about things. Over time, the natural production of all of these things can be affected such that your body adapts to what had been spikes by producing less of its own feel-good things. 

That provides a ready explanation for how something like 'incontinence' can develop. The right rule that was developed out of youth's good upbringing and study runs into what is in fact an altered reality: the brain is no longer capable of generating the world of youth, and has come to rely upon alcohol at some level to carry part of the weight of creating what was once a natural sort of happiness and well-being. 

This of course underlines the importance of things like these 30 day fasts in order to allow the brain to trend back to normal, and to give the self another opportunity to redraw the lines and enforce proper limits. 

It's information that also might have made the puzzle of incontinence less troubling to the Greeks, had they known of it. To put it in Aristotle's terms, alcohol makes the brain into something like the Lesbian Rule, because the brain as the measuring device ends up being bent and adapted to the world. 

This doesn't disqualify Aristotle's general approach, however: it remains true that one's habit ends up informing and even defining one's character. We understand the mechanism better now, and can make better decisions thereby. 

Nicomachean Ethics VII.10

Finally, the last chapter on incontinence.

Nor can the same man have practical wisdom and be incontinent; for it has been shown that a man is at the same time practically wise, and good in respect of character. Further, a man has practical wisdom not by knowing only but by being able to act; but the incontinent man is unable to act-there is, however, nothing to prevent a clever man from being incontinent; this is why it is sometimes actually thought that some people have practical wisdom but are incontinent, viz. because cleverness and practical wisdom differ in the way we have described in our first discussions, and are near together in respect of their reasoning, but differ in respect of their purpose-nor yet is the incontinent man like the man who knows and is contemplating a truth, but like the man who is asleep or drunk.

Indeed, the incontinent man is likely to be drunk; excessive drinking is the clearest case of incontinence, though not the only one.  

There's a slight ambiguity there that I think is helpfully cleaned up: the incontinent man isn't unable to act per se, but unable to act in accord with what he knows is the right rule. He does act, just not well. 

And [the incontinent man] acts willingly (for he acts in a sense with knowledge both of what he does and of the end to which he does it), but is not wicked, since his purpose is good; so that he is half-wicked. And he is not a criminal; for he does not act of malice aforethought; of the two types of incontinent man the one does not abide by the conclusions of his deliberation, while the excitable man does not deliberate at all. And thus the incontinent man like a city which passes all the right decrees and has good laws, but makes no use of them, as in Anaxandrides' jesting remark,

The city willed it, that cares nought for laws; but the wicked man is like a city that uses its laws, but has wicked laws to use.

Now incontinence and continence are concerned with that which is in excess of the state characteristic of most men; for the continent man abides by his resolutions more and the incontinent man less than most men can.

Strictly applied, that makes "most men" neither continent nor incontinent in what Aristotle likes to call 'the unrestricted sense' of the terms; most men therefore vary between the states, rather than being defined by either state. 

Of the forms of incontinence, that of excitable people is more curable than that of those who deliberate but do not abide by their decisions, and those who are incontinent through habituation are more curable than those in whom incontinence is innate; for it is easier to change a habit than to change one's nature; even habit is hard to change just because it is like nature, as Evenus* says:

I say that habit's but a long practice, friend,

And this becomes men's nature in the end.

So this is a version of what will end up being a core doctrine for Aristotle, the idea of 'second nature.' I have spoken of this already, in the commentary on VI.13; the idea is going to be that you have a 'first nature,' i.e. the nature you are born with, and also a 'second nature,' that which your habituation builds into a permanent character. The second nature will end up being dominant over the first nature, training and guiding it, yet will be as difficult to defy as your first nature can be. 

We have now stated what continence, incontinence, endurance, and softness are, and how these states are related to each other.

This is one of the longer inquiries in the EN, and not the most pleasant. The inquiry into friendship will be of more interest to most of you, I think. 

* I'm not sure which Evenus is intended by Aristotle here; probably not the river god, but perhaps one of the other two associated with the Iliad. However, my guess is it really might be Evenus the poet, whom Socrates mentions in the Phaedo and to whom Socrates ascribes the character of a philosopher. 

Nicomachean Ethics VII.9

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). 

Nicomachean Ethics VII.8

More on incontinence and repentance. 

The self-indulgent man, as was said, is not apt to repent; for he stands by his choice; but incontinent man is likely to repent. This is why the position is not as it was expressed in the formulation of the problem, but the self-indulgent man is incurable and the incontinent man curable; for wickedness is like a disease such as dropsy or consumption, while incontinence is like epilepsy; the former is a permanent, the latter an intermittent badness. And generally incontinence and vice are different in kind; vice is unconscious of itself, incontinence is not (of incontinent men themselves, those who become temporarily beside themselves are better than those who have the rational principle but do not abide by it, since the latter are defeated by a weaker passion, and do not act without previous deliberation like the others); for the incontinent man is like the people who get drunk quickly and on little wine, i.e. on less than most people.

This last analogy is a little ironic, because the kind of person who gets drunk quickly and on little wine is most likely to be the one who usually abstains completely. A tolerance is generally the product of practice, and the heavier the practice the greater the tolerance is likely to become.

Fat Bear Week

The National Park Service is having some fun. 

Call them whatever you like while they’re far away. You have to be delicate, though, if the bears are close enough to hear you. 

Nicomachean Ethics VII.7

Still more examination of incontinence and softness. We are about halfway through this book after today.

With regard to the pleasures and pains and appetites and aversions arising through touch and taste, to which both self-indulgence and temperance were formerly narrowed down, it is possible to be in such a state as to be defeated even by those of them which most people master, or to master even those by which most people are defeated; among these possibilities, those relating to pleasures are incontinence and continence, those relating to pains softness and endurance. The state of most people is intermediate, even if they lean more towards the worse states.

Now, since some pleasures are necessary while others are not, and are necessary up to a point while the excesses of them are not, nor the deficiencies, and this is equally true of appetites and pains, the man who pursues the excesses of things pleasant, or pursues to excess necessary objects, and does so by choice, for their own sake and not at all for the sake of any result distinct from them, is self-indulgent; for such a man is of necessity unlikely to repent, and therefore incurable, since a man who cannot repent cannot be cured.

Necessary pleasures include sex for the purpose of procreating children, without which society and civilization would cease to exist; eating and drinking; and certain other necessary bodily functions. The unnecessary pleasures include fine wines and silken sheets and so forth. So you can go wrong by pursuing an excess of unnecessary pleasures, but also by pursing to an excess the necessary things. 

This is the first mention of repentance as a concept, and a core concept: those who cannot repent cannot be cured. The object here is not to save them, as in their souls; it is to fix them in the present life, so they become virtuous rather than vice-ridden people.