The Nicomachean Ethics — trans. F. H. Peters (1881)
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The translator’s English as printed (F. H. Peters). The original-language text is not held; names are romanised as the translator printed them.
knowing in the full sense, but to repeating words as a drunken man repeats the sayings of Empedocles. And thus, since the minor premise is not universal, and is thought to be less a matter of real or scientific knowledge than the universal judgment [or major premise], that which Socrates sought to establish seems to be the case ; for when passion carries a man away, what is present to his mind is not what is regarded as knowledge in the strict sense, nor is it such knowledge that is perverted by his passion, but sensitive knowledge* [or the intuitive apprehension of the particular fact], ofincon- 4. So much, then, for the question whether the 1 tinence in , , -*- the strict incontinent man knows or not, and in what sense it and m the metaphorical is possiblc to act incontinently with knowledge. We sense. '- -^ o next have to consider whether a man can be incontinent simply, or only incontinent in some particular way,t and, if the former be the case, what is the field in which the character is manifested.
It is evident that it is in the matter of pleasures and pains that both continent and hardy and incontinent and soft men manifest their characters.
Of the sources of pleasure, some are necessar}^, and 2 others are desirable in themselves but admit of excess : " necessary " are the bodily processes, such t As a man may be greedy (awXats). or greedy for a particular kind of food.
* But the reason why his knowledge fails to control his action is not that it is "sensitive knowledge of a particular existence " or fact, instead of scientific knowledge of universals, but that the fact does not come home to him in its true significance : he says it is bad, but says it as an actor might, without feeling it ; what he realizes is that it is pleasant.
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as nutrition, the propagation of the species, and other bodily processes, with which we said that profligacy and temperance have to do ; others, though not necessary, are in themselves desirable, such as victory, honour, wealth, and other things of the kind that are good and pleasant.*
Now, those who go to excess in these latter in spite of their own better reason we do not call incontinent simply, but with a qualifying epithet, as incontinent with respect to money, or gain, or honour, or anger — not simply, since they are difierent characters, and only called incontinent in virtue of a resemblance — just as the victor in the last Olympic games was called a man; for though the meaning of the name as applied to him was but slightly different from its common meaning, still it was different, t
And this may be proved thus: incontinence is blamed, not simply as a mistake, but as a kind of vice, either of vice simply, or of some particular vice ; but those who are thus incontinent [in the pursuit of wealth, etc.] are not thus blamed.
But of the characters that manifest themselves in the matter of bodily enjoyments, with which we say the temperate and the profligate are concerned, he
* Called also airXwi oryaBd, " good in themselves," as in Y. 1, 9 (c/. Y. 2, 6), and iKrhs ayaOd, " external goods," as in I. 8, 2.^ t As we do not know the facts to which Aristotle allades^^ can only conjectnre his meaning. It may be that the man in question had certain physical peculiarities, so that though he '• passed for a man " he was not a man quite in the common meaning of the name. So Locke a£ks (Essay iv. 10, 13), "Is a changeling a man or a beast ?"
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y^rlio goes to excess in pursuing what is pleasant and avoiding what is painful, in the matter of hunger and thirst, and heat and cold, and all things that affect us by touch or taste, and who does this not of deliberate choice, but contrary to his deliberate choice and reasoning, is called incontinent — not with the addition that he is incontinent with respect to this particular thing, as anger, but simply incontinent.
A proof of this is that people are also called soft 4 in these latter matters, but not in any of the former [honour, gain, etc.].