Book VII.
Aristotle's Ethics
177
Next. “No Pleasure is the work of any Art.” What else would you expect? No active working is the work of any Art, only the faculty of so working. Still the perfumer's Art or the cook's are thought to belong to Pleasure.
Next. “The man of Perfected Self-Mastery avoids Pleasures.” “The man of Practical Wisdom aims at escaping Pain rather than at attaining Pleasure.”
“Children and brutes pursue Pleasures.”
One answer will do for all.
We have already said in what sense all Pleasures are good per se and in what sense not all are good: it is the latter class that brutes and children pursue, such as are accompanied by desire and pain, that is the bodily Pleasures (which answer to this description) and the excesses of them: in short, those in respect of which the man utterly destitute of Self-Control is thus utterly destitute. And it is the absence of the pain arising from these Pleasures that the man of Practical Wisdom aims at. It follows that these Pleasures are what the man of Perfected Self-Mastery avoids: for obviously he has Pleasures peculiarly his own.
XIII
Then again, it is allowed that Pain is an evil and a thing to be avoided partly as bad per se, 1153b partly as being a hindrance in some particular way. Now the contrary of that which is to be avoided, quâ it is to be avoided, i.e. evil, is good. Pleasure then must be a good.
The attempted answer of Speusippus, “that Pleasure may be opposed and yet not contrary to Pain, just as the greater portion of any magnitude is contrary to the less but only opposed to the exact half,” will not hold: for he cannot say that Pleasure is identical with evil of any kind.