Book VII

Since it is rare for a man to be godlike—as the Spartans usually put it: when they greatly admire someone, they call him “a godly man”—so the brutish person is also rare among human beings. It is found most among non-Greeks, and some cases also arise from disease or disability; and we also use the word as a reproach for those who surpass other people in vice. But we must make some mention of this sort of condition later; vice has been discussed before. We must now discuss lack of self-control, softness and luxury, and also self-control and endurance. 1145b For we should not suppose that each of these pairs concerns the same states as excellence and wickedness, nor that it is a different kind.note

As in other cases, we must set out the appearances and first work through the puzzles, and in this way show, ideally, all the reputable opinions about these feelings, or if not, most of them and the most authoritative. For if the difficulties are resolved and the reputable opinions are left standing, the matter will have been adequately shown.

There are some who grant part of this but not all. They agree that nothing is stronger than knowledge, but they do not agree that no one acts contrary to what seemed better; and so they say that when the uncontrolled person is overpowered by pleasures, he has not knowledge but opinion. But if it is opinion and not knowledge, and the conviction 1146a that resists is not strong but mild, as in people who are in two minds, we sympathize with someone who does not stick to such opinions against strong appetites. But we do not sympathize with wickedness, or with anything else that is blameworthy. Is it, then, practical wisdom that resists? For that is the strongest thing. But that is absurd: the same person will be at once practically wise and uncontrolled, and no one at all would say that it is characteristic of the practically wise person willingly to do the worst things.

Besides, it has been shown earlier that the practically wise person is someone who acts (for he is concerned with ultimate things) and has the other excellences. Further, if being self-controlled involves having strong and bad appetites, the moderate person will not be self-controlled, nor the self-controlled person moderate; for it is not characteristic of the moderate person to have excessive appetites, or bad ones. Yet the self-controlled person must have them. For if the appetites are good, the state that stops one from following them is bad, so that not all self-control is excellent; and if they are weak and not bad, there is nothing impressive in resisting them, nor anything great if they are bad but weak.

Further, if self-control makes one stick to every opinion, it is bad—if, for instance, it makes one stick even to a false one. And if lack of self-control makes one abandon every opinion, there will be an excellent kind of lack of self-control, like Neoptolemus in Sophocles’ Philoctetes: he is praiseworthy for not sticking to what Odysseus persuaded him to do, because lying pains him. Further, the sophistical argument, though false, creates a puzzle. Because sophists want to refute people by reaching paradoxical conclusions, so as to be thought clever when they succeed, the resulting syllogism becomes a puzzle. For thought is tied up: it does not want to stay put, since it dislikes the conclusion, but it cannot move forward, since it cannot undo the argument.note

So from a certain argument it follows that foolishness combined with lack of self-control is excellence. For because of his lack of self-control a person does the opposite of what he judges; but he judges that good things are bad and that he ought not to do them; so he will do the good things and not the bad. Further, the person who does and pursues pleasant things because he is convinced he should, and decides to, would seem better than one who does so not because of calculation but because of lack of self-control; for he is easier to cure, since he might be persuaded otherwise. But the uncontrolled person falls under the proverb in which we say, “When water chokes you, what should you drink after it?” For if he had been persuaded of what he does, 1146b he would have stopped once persuaded otherwise; as it is, though persuaded of one thing, he does another all the same. Further, if lack of self-control and self-control concern everything, who is the person who is uncontrolled without qualification? No one has every kind of lack of self-control, yet we say some people are uncontrolled without qualification.

The person who is uncontrolled without qualification is not concerned with everything, but with the same things as the self-indulgent person; nor is he uncontrolled simply by being related to these things (for then it would be the same as self-indulgence), but by being related to them in a particular way. The self-indulgent person is led on by decision, thinking he should always pursue the pleasure at hand; the uncontrolled person does not think so, but pursues it anyway. As for the suggestion that it is true opinion and not knowledge that people act against when they lack self-control, this makes no difference to the argument. For some people who hold opinions are in no doubt, but think they know exactly. So if it is because their belief is mild that people with opinion, more than people with knowledge, will act against their judgement, knowledge will not differ from opinion; for some people are no less convinced of what they believe than others are of what they know—as Heraclitus shows.

But since we speak of knowing in two ways (both the person who has knowledge but is not using it and the person who is using it are said to know), there will be a difference between doing what one should not while having the knowledge but not contemplating it, and doing so while having it and contemplating it. The latter seems terrible, but not if one is not contemplating it. 1147a Further, since there are two kinds of premise, nothing prevents someone who has both from acting against his knowledge, if he is using the universal premise but not the particular one; for what is done is particular.

The universal, too, differs: one universal applies to the agent himself, the other to the thing. For example, “dry food is good for every human being” and “I am a human being,” or “this sort of food is dry”; but as to whether this is this sort, either he does not have this knowledge or it is not active. So there will be an enormous difference between these ways of knowing, so that knowing in one way seems not at all strange, but knowing in the other seems astonishing. Further, human beings can have knowledge in yet another way than those just mentioned. For within having but not using, we see a difference in the state, so that one both has it in a way and does not have it—as with someone asleep, or mad, or drunk.

But this is just the condition of people in the grip of feelings. Fits of anger, sexual appetites and some other such things plainly alter even the body, and in some people they even cause madness. Clearly, then, we should say that uncontrolled people are in a similar condition to these. Saying the words that come from knowledge is no sign of anything: people in these states recite proofs and verses of Empedocles, and those who have just begun learning string the words together but do not yet know them; for the knowledge must grow into them, and that takes time. So we should suppose that people acting without self-control say the words the way actors do. Further, one might also look at the cause in the following way, in terms of natural science.note

One opinion is universal, and the other concerns particulars, which are already governed by perception. When a single one comes from the two, the soul must in one case affirm the conclusion, but in matters of production it must act at once. For example, if one ought to taste everything sweet, and this, as one of the particulars, is sweet, then someone who is able and not prevented must at the same time also do this.

So when the universal opinion is present forbidding us to taste, and there is also the other one, that everything sweet is pleasant and this is sweet (and this one is active), and appetite happens to be present, then the one opinion tells us to avoid this, but appetite leads us on; for it can move each of the bodily parts. 1147b So it turns out that one acts without self-control under the influence, in a way, of reason and opinion—an opinion that is contrary, not in itself but incidentally (for it is the appetite that is contrary, not the opinion), to correct reason. That is also why animals are not uncontrolled: they have no universal judgement, only imagination and memory of particulars. As for how the ignorance is dissolved and the uncontrolled person regains his knowledge, the account is the same as for the drunk and the sleeper and is not peculiar to this condition; we must learn it from the natural scientists.

Now since the last premise is a belief about something perceptible, and is what governs our actions, the person in the grip of the feeling either doesn’t have it, or has it only in a sense in which having it isn’t knowing but merely saying the words, as a drunk recites Empedocles. And because the last term is not universal, and doesn’t seem to be an object of scientific knowledge in the way the universal is, what Socrates was looking for also seems to turn out to be the case. For the feeling doesn’t arise when what seems to be knowledge in the full sense is present, nor is it that knowledge that gets dragged around by the feeling, but the perceptual kind. So much, then, for the questions whether the uncontrolled person acts knowing or not knowing, and in what sense someone who knows can lack self-control.

Some of the things that produce pleasure are necessary, while others are choiceworthy in themselves but admit of excess. The necessary ones are the bodily ones — I mean things like those to do with food and sexual need, the sort of bodily things we took to be the sphere of self-indulgence and moderation. The others are not necessary but are choiceworthy in themselves — I mean, for example, victory, honor, wealth, and other good and pleasant things of that kind. Now those who go to excess with regard to these latter, against the correct reason that is in them, we don’t call uncontrolled without qualification. We add a qualification — uncontrolled about money, or gain, or honor, or anger — and don’t call them simply uncontrolled, since they are different and are so called by resemblance. Compare Anthropos, the Olympic victor: 1148a the general account of “human being” differed only slightly from the account peculiar to him, but it was different all the same.note

Here is a sign of this: lack of self-control is blamed not merely as an error but as a kind of vice, either without qualification or in some particular respect, whereas none of these others is. Among those concerned with bodily enjoyments, the sphere in which we call people moderate or self-indulgent, the one who pursues excesses of pleasant things — and avoids excesses of painful ones, hunger and thirst and heat and cold and everything to do with touch and taste — not by decision but contrary to his decision and his thinking, is called uncontrolled. He is called so not with an addition, “about this,” as we say “about anger,” but simply without qualification. Another sign: people are also called “soft” with respect to these pleasures, but not with respect to any of the others.

That is why we group the uncontrolled person with the self-indulgent, and the self-controlled with the moderate, but none of those others: because they are concerned in a way with the same pleasures and pains. But though they are concerned with the same things, they are not concerned with them in the same way: the one kind decide on them, the other kind don’t. So we would sooner call someone self-indulgent who pursues excesses and avoids moderate pains while feeling no appetite, or only a mild one, than someone who does so because his appetite is intense. For what would the former do if he also came to have a youthful appetite, and violent pain at the lack of necessities?

Some appetites and pleasures are for things that are fine and excellent in kind (for some pleasant things are choiceworthy by nature); others are for their opposites; and others for things in between, as we distinguished earlier — money, for example, and gain, victory, and honor. With regard to all of these, both the fine kind and the intermediate, people are blamed not for being affected by them, having an appetite for them, and loving them, but for doing so in a certain way, and to excess. (So those who, against reason, are overcome by or pursue something that is by nature fine and good are not blamed — those, for example, who care more than they should about honor, or about their children and parents. These too are goods, and those who care about them are praised. Yet there is an excess even here, if someone were to fight even against the gods, like Niobe, or were to be like Satyrus, 1148b nicknamed “the father-lover,” about his father: he was thought to be quite foolish.) There is no wickedness, then, concerned with these things, for the reason stated: each of them is by nature choiceworthy for its own sake, though excesses of them are bad and to be avoided.note

Likewise there is no lack of self-control about them either; for lack of self-control is not only to be avoided but also blameworthy. But because the feeling is similar, people apply the term “lack of self-control” with a qualification in each case, as they speak of a bad doctor or a bad actor, whom they would not call bad without qualification. So just as we don’t in these cases, because each of these is not a vice but only similar to one by analogy, clearly in the other case too we should suppose that the only lack of self-control and self-control are those concerned with the same things as moderation and self-indulgence, while we speak of them in connection with anger by resemblance. That is why we say, adding a qualification, “uncontrolled about anger,” as we do “about honor” and “about gain.”

These states are brutish. Others arise through disease (and in some cases through madness, like the man who sacrificed his mother and ate her, or the one who ate his fellow slave’s liver). Others are diseased conditions or come from habit, such as pulling out one’s hair and biting one’s nails, or even eating coal and earth, and in addition sex between males. For these come about in some people by nature, in others from habit, as with those who have been abused since childhood. Now nobody would call uncontrolled those for whom nature is the cause, any more than we would call women uncontrolled because they take the passive rather than the active role in sex; and the same goes for those who are in a diseased condition through habit.

Having any of these, then, 1149a lies outside the limits of vice, as brutishness does too. And when the person who has them masters them or is mastered by them, this is not lack of self-control without qualification but lack of self-control by resemblance — just as someone in this condition with regard to anger should be called uncontrolled in respect of that feeling, but not simply uncontrolled. For every excessive state, whether of folly, cowardice, self-indulgence, or bad temper, is either brutish or diseased. Someone who is by nature the sort to fear everything, even the squeak of a mouse, is cowardly with a brutish cowardice, whereas the man who was afraid of the weasel was so through disease. And among the foolish, those who are by nature unreasoning and live by perception alone are brutish, like some races of distant foreigners, while those who are so through diseases, such as epilepsy, or through madness, are diseased.

It is possible to have one of these sometimes without being mastered by it — I mean, for example, if Phalaris had restrained himself when he had an appetite to eat a child, or for some bizarre sexual pleasure — and it is also possible to be mastered, not merely to have it. So just as with wickedness, the kind on a human scale is called wickedness without qualification, while the other kind is called wickedness with an addition — brutish or diseased — and not without qualification, in the same way it is clear that lack of self-control too is sometimes brutish and sometimes diseased, and only the kind that corresponds to human self-indulgence is lack of self-control without qualification.

So lack of self-control about appetite is more shameful. For the person who is uncontrolled about anger is in a way overcome by reason, whereas the other is overcome by appetite and not by reason. Again, we are more ready to forgive people for following natural desires, since we are more forgiving even of appetites when they are the sort common to everyone, and to the extent that they are common. And anger and bad temper are more natural than the appetites for excess and for what is not necessary. Take the man who defended himself for beating his father by saying, “He beat his own father too, and his father beat his”; and pointing to his little boy, he said, “And he’ll beat me when he grows up: it runs in our family.” Or the man being dragged along by his son who told him to stop at the front door, since he himself had dragged his own father only that far. Again, those who are more given to scheming are more unjust.

Now the angry person is not given to scheming, and neither is anger: it is open. But appetite is like what they say of Aphrodite, “guile-weaving, Cyprus-born,” and what Homer says of her embroidered girdle: “beguiling talk, which steals the wits even of the very shrewd.” So if this lack of self-control is more unjust and more shameful than the one concerned with anger, it is lack of self-control without qualification, and in a way a vice. Again, no one commits outrage while feeling pain; but everyone who acts in anger acts while feeling pain, whereas the one who commits outrage does so with pleasure. So if the acts that it is most just to be angry at are more unjust, then lack of self-control due to appetite is more unjust too; for there is no outrage in anger. It is clear, then, that lack of self-control about appetites is more shameful than lack of self-control about anger, and that self-control and lack of self-control are concerned with bodily appetites and pleasures. But we must grasp the differences among these very appetites and pleasures.

For as was said at the beginning, some are human and natural, both in kind and in magnitude; others are brutish; and others are due to deformities and diseases. Of these, moderation and self-indulgence are concerned only with the first. That is why we don’t call animals moderate or self-indulgent, except by metaphor, and only if one kind of animal differs from another as a whole in wantonness, destructiveness, and voracity. For they have neither decision nor reasoning; they have departed from nature, like madmen among human beings. 1150a Bestiality is a lesser thing than vice, though more frightening; for the better part has not been corrupted, as it is in a human being — the animal simply doesn’t have it. So it is like comparing something inanimate with something animate and asking which is worse: the badness of something that has no originating principle is always less harmful, and intellect is an originating principle.

So it is similar to comparing injustice with an unjust human being: in a way each is worse. For a bad human being could do ten thousand times as much harm as a beast.

Some pleasures are necessary and others are not, and the necessary ones are so up to a point, while their excesses are not, and neither are their deficiencies; and the same holds for appetites and pains. So the person who pursues the excesses of pleasant things, or pursues them to excess, and does so by decision, for their own sake and not at all for some further result, is self-indulgent. Such a person is bound to have no regrets, and so is incurable, since someone without regret is incurable. The person who falls short is his opposite, and the one in the middle is moderate. The same holds for the person who avoids bodily pains not because he is overcome but by decision. Of those who don’t act by decision, one is led on by pleasure, the other by the wish to avoid the pain that comes from appetite; so they differ from each other.

Everyone would think a person worse if he did something shameful while feeling no appetite, or only a mild one, than if he did it with intense appetite; and worse if he struck someone without being angry than if he did it in anger. For what would he have done in the grip of feeling? That is why the self-indulgent person is worse than the uncontrolled one. Of the types just mentioned, then, the one is more a form of softness, while the other is the self-indulgent person. The self-controlled person is opposed to the uncontrolled, and the enduring to the soft. For endurance consists in holding out, while self-control consists in mastering, and holding out is different from mastering, just as not being beaten is different from winning. That is why self-control is also more choiceworthy than endurance.

The person who falls short with regard to what most people resist and are able to withstand is soft and pampered — for being pampered is a kind of softness. He lets his cloak trail so as not to suffer the effort of lifting it, and though he imitates an invalid, he doesn’t think himself miserable, even though he resembles someone miserable. It is similar with self-control and lack of self-control.

For it’s not surprising if someone is overcome by strong and excessive pleasures or pains; it is forgivable if he puts up resistance, like Philoctetes in Theodectes’ play when bitten by the viper, or Carcinus’ Cercyon in the Alope, or like people trying to hold back their laughter who burst out in a guffaw, as happened to Xenophantus. What is surprising is if someone is overcome by pleasures and pains that most people can hold out against, and is unable to resist them — when this is not due to the nature of his stock, or to disease, as softness runs in the family among the Scythian kings, or as the female differs from the male. The person fond of amusement also seems to be self-indulgent, but he is really soft. For amusement is a relaxation, since it is a rest, and the person fond of amusement is one of those who go to excess in this. Of lack of self-control, one form is impetuosity, the other weakness.note

Some people deliberate but then, because of their feeling, don’t stick to what they deliberated; others are led by their feeling because they haven’t deliberated. For some people — just as those who tickle first don’t get tickled — if they perceive and see it coming in advance, and rouse themselves and their reasoning beforehand, are not overcome by the feeling, whether it’s something pleasant or something painful. It is especially the quick-tempered and the melancholic who are uncontrolled with the impetuous kind of lack of self-control: the former because of their haste, the latter because of their intensity, don’t wait for reason, since they tend to follow appearances.note

It is evident, then, that lack of self-control is not a vice (though perhaps it is in a way). For the one is contrary to decision, the other in accordance with decision. Still, they are alike in their actions. As Demodocus said against the Milesians, “The Milesians aren’t stupid, but they act just like the stupid”; so too the uncontrolled aren’t unjust, but they will do wrong.note

The one is the sort of person to pursue bodily pleasures that are excessive and contrary to correct reason without being convinced he should; the other is convinced he should because he is the sort of person to pursue them. So the former is easily persuaded to change, while the latter is not. For excellence preserves the first principle and wickedness destroys it; and in actions, that for the sake of which we act is the first principle, as the hypotheses are in mathematics. Neither there nor here does argument teach the first principles; it is excellence, either natural or habituated, that teaches right belief about the first principle. Such a person, then, is moderate, and his opposite is self-indulgent.

But there is someone who, through feeling, gets carried away contrary to correct reason: feeling masters him so far that he doesn’t act in accordance with correct reason, but not so far as to make him the sort of person who is convinced that he ought to pursue such pleasures without restraint. This is the uncontrolled person. He is better than the self-indulgent one, and not bad without qualification, since the best thing in him, the first principle, is preserved. Opposed to him is another person, who abides by it and is not carried away, at least not through feeling. It is evident from this, then, that the one state is excellent and the other bad.

There are some people who are prone to abide by their beliefs, whom people call stubborn: they are hard to persuade and not easily persuaded to change. They have something similar to the self-controlled person, as the prodigal has to the generous and the rash to the confident, but they differ in many respects. For it is feeling and appetite that the self-controlled person doesn’t change for, since, when the occasion arises, he will be easily persuaded; whereas it is reason that these people don’t change for, since they do take on appetites, and many of them are led by pleasures. The stubborn include the opinionated, the ignorant, and the boorish. The opinionated are so because of pleasure and pain: they enjoy winning if they aren’t persuaded to change, and are pained if their views are annulled, like decrees. So they resemble the uncontrolled person more than the self-controlled.

There are some who don’t abide by their beliefs, but not through lack of self-control — for example, Neoptolemus in Sophocles’ Philoctetes. It was, admittedly, because of pleasure that he didn’t abide by his belief, but a fine pleasure: telling the truth was fine in his eyes, and he had been persuaded by Odysseus to lie. For not everyone who does something because of pleasure is self-indulgent, or bad, or uncontrolled; only the one who does it because of a shameful pleasure.

Since many things are spoken of by resemblance, the “self-control” of the moderate person has also come to be spoken of by resemblance. For both the self-controlled person and the moderate one are the sort to do nothing contrary to reason because of bodily pleasures; 1152a but the self-controlled person has bad appetites and the moderate one doesn’t, and the moderate person is the sort not to feel pleasure contrary to reason, while the self-controlled one is the sort to feel it but not be led by it. The uncontrolled and the self-indulgent person are also alike: they are different, but both pursue bodily pleasures — the self-indulgent person thinking he should, the uncontrolled one not thinking so.

And he isn’t unjust, since he isn’t a schemer: one kind of uncontrolled person doesn’t abide by what he has deliberated, while the melancholic kind doesn’t deliberate at all. The uncontrolled person, then, is like a city that passes all the right decrees and has excellent laws but makes no use of them, as Anaxandrides joked: “The city willed it, the one that cares nothing for its laws.” The wicked person, by contrast, is like a city that does use its laws, but uses bad ones. Lack of self-control and self-control concern what goes beyond the state of most people: the self-controlled person abides by his reasoning more, and the uncontrolled person less, than most people are capable of.note

Of the kinds of lack of self-control, the kind the melancholic have is more easily cured than that of people who deliberate but don’t abide by it; and those who are uncontrolled through habituation are more easily cured than those who are so by nature, since habit is easier to change than nature. Habit, too, is hard to change precisely because it resembles nature, as Evenus also says: “I say that habit is long practice, my friend, and that in the end it becomes nature for human beings.” We have now said what self-control, lack of self-control, endurance, and softness are, and how these states are related to one another.note

It is held not to be a good at all, then, because every pleasure is a perceptible process of coming to be toward a natural state, and no process of coming to be is of the same kind as its end, as no building process is of the same kind as a house. Again, the moderate person avoids pleasures. Again, the practically wise person pursues freedom from pain, not what is pleasant. Again, pleasures hinder thinking, and the more one enjoys them, the more they hinder it — sexual pleasure, for example, since no one could think anything while engaged in it. Again, there is no craft of pleasure; yet every good is the product of a craft. Again, children and animals pursue pleasures. That not all pleasures are excellent is argued from the fact that some are shameful and objects of reproach, and that some are harmful, since some pleasant things cause disease. That pleasure is not the best thing is argued from the fact that it is not an end but a process of coming to be. These, roughly, are the things people say.

Again, since one aspect of the good is activity and another is state, the processes that restore us to our natural state are pleasant only incidentally. The activity in the appetites is the activity of the part of our state and nature that remains intact — since there are also pleasures without pain and appetite, 1153a such as the activities of contemplating, when one’s nature is not deficient in anything. A sign of this is that people don’t enjoy the same pleasant thing while their nature is being replenished as when it is settled: when it is settled they enjoy things pleasant without qualification, but while it is being replenished they enjoy even the opposites — sharp and bitter things, none of which is pleasant either by nature or without qualification. So these are not pleasures without qualification either; for as pleasant things differ from one another, so do the pleasures that come from them.

Again, it isn’t necessary that something else be better than pleasure, in the way some say the end is better than the process of coming to be. For pleasures are not processes, and not all of them even involve a process; they are activities, and an end. They arise not when we are coming to be something but when we are using something; and not all of them have some end distinct from themselves, only those of people being brought to the completion of their nature. That is why it isn’t right to say that pleasure is a perceptible process of coming to be; rather, it should be called an activity of the natural state, and instead of “perceptible,” “unimpeded.” Some people think it is a process of coming to be because it is good in the strict sense; for they think activity is a process of coming to be, but it is something different. To say pleasures are bad because some pleasant things cause disease is like saying healthy things are bad because some healthy things are bad for making money. Both are bad in this respect, but they are not bad on that account — after all, even contemplating is sometimes harmful to health.

Neither practical wisdom nor any other state is hindered by the pleasure that comes from it; only by alien pleasures. For the pleasures of contemplating and learning will make one contemplate and learn all the more. That no pleasure is the product of a craft is quite reasonable: there is no craft of any other activity either, only of the capacity for it — though the perfumer’s craft and the cook’s do seem to be crafts of pleasure. As for the arguments that the moderate person avoids pleasure, that the practically wise person pursues the painless life, and that children and animals pursue pleasure — they are all answered by the same point.

For since we have said in what sense pleasures are good without qualification, and in what sense not all of them are good, it is pleasures of this latter sort that beasts and children pursue, and it is freedom from the pain of these that the practically wise person pursues: the pleasures that involve appetite and pain, that is, the bodily ones (for these are of that kind), and the excesses of these, in virtue of which the self-indulgent person is self-indulgent. That is why the moderate person avoids these; for the moderate person has pleasures too.

So the chief good would be some pleasure, even though most pleasures may well be bad without qualification. And this is why everyone thinks the happy life is pleasant and weaves pleasure into happiness—reasonably enough. For no activity is complete when it is impeded, and happiness is something complete. That is why the happy person needs, in addition, the goods of the body, external goods and fortune, so as not to be impeded in these respects. Those who say that someone being broken on the wheel, or someone who falls into great misfortunes, is happy provided he is good are talking nonsense, whether they mean to or not. And because happiness needs fortune in addition, some people think good fortune is the same as happiness. But it isn’t, since good fortune itself, when excessive, is an impediment—and then perhaps it is no longer right to call it good fortune, since its limit is defined by its relation to happiness.

And the fact that all creatures, beasts and humans alike, pursue pleasure is some sign that it is in a way the chief good: “No report is ever wholly lost that many peoples…” But since neither the same nature nor the same state is best for all, or seems so, they do not all pursue the same pleasure either—though they all pursue pleasure. Perhaps, too, they pursue not the pleasure they think they do, or would say they do, but the same one; for all things by nature have something divine in them. But the bodily pleasures have taken over the inheritance of the name, because we most often steer our course toward them and everyone shares in them. So because these are the only ones people know, they think these are the only ones there are.

It is also clear that if pleasure is not a good and an activity, the happy person will not live pleasantly. For why would he need pleasure, if it is not a good and he can live painfully as well? For pain is neither bad nor good if pleasure is not; so why would he avoid it? Nor will the excellent person’s life be any pleasanter, unless his activities are too.

With pain it is the other way round: the bad person avoids not the excessive pain but pain altogether. For the pain contrary to the excess exists only for the one who pursues the excess.

Pleasure is thought not to be a worthwhile thing for these two reasons, as has been said: some pleasures are actions of a bad nature (either bad from birth, as a beast’s is, or through habit, as with bad people); others are cures, because they belong to something in need, and being in a good condition is better than coming into it; 1154b and these cures arise while we are being brought to completion, so they are worthwhile only incidentally. Further, bodily pleasures are pursued because they are intense, by those who cannot enjoy other pleasures; at any rate, such people contrive thirsts of a sort for themselves. When these are harmless, this is beyond reproach; when harmful, it is bad. For they have nothing else to enjoy, and for many people the neutral state is painful because of their nature. For an animal is always under strain, as the natural scientists also testify when they say that seeing and hearing are painful; but by now we are used to it, as they say.

Similarly, in youth people are in a condition like that of the drunk because they are growing, and youth is pleasant. People of a melancholic nature, on the other hand, are always in need of a cure; for their body is continually being stung because of its mixture, and they are always in a state of intense desire. And pleasure drives out pain—both the pleasure contrary to it and any chance pleasure, if it is strong. That is why they become self-indulgent and bad. But pleasures without pains do not admit of excess; these are pleasures in things pleasant by nature, not incidentally. By things incidentally pleasant I mean those that cure; for it is because the cure comes about through the action of the part that remains healthy that the cure seems pleasant. Things pleasant by nature are those that produce action of a given nature.

Nor is the same thing always pleasant, because our nature is not simple: there is something else in us as well, insofar as we are perishable. So if one element is active, this is contrary to the nature of the other, and when they balance, what is done seems neither painful nor pleasant. For if anyone’s nature were simple, the same action would always be the most pleasant. That is why the god always enjoys a single, simple pleasure; for there is an activity not only of motion but also of motionlessness, and pleasure is found more in rest than in motion. But “change in all things is sweet,” as the poet says, because of a kind of badness. For just as the bad person is the one prone to change, so too is the nature that needs change; for it is neither simple nor decent.