Aristotle, Temperance, Pleasure, and Pain

Aristotle, Temperance, Pleasure, and Pain(1)

ABSTRACT: Aristotle argues that temperance is the mean concerned with pleasure and pain (NE 1107b5-9 and 1117b25-27). Most commentators focus on the moderation of pleasures and hardly discuss how this virtue relates to pain. In what follows, I consider the place of pain in Aristotle’s discussion of temperance and resolve contradictory interpretations by turning to the following question: is temperance ever properly painful? In part one, I examine the textual evidence and conclude that Aristotle would answer no to our question. The temperate person does not feel pain at the absence of appropriately desired objects. In parts two and three, I reconstruct some reasons why Aristotle would hold such a view based. My discussion here is based upon Aristotle’s discussion of continence and the unity of the virtues.

While the accounts of temperance in the Eudemian Ethics and the Nichomachean Ethics share some similarities, the treatment of the topic in the latter is much more developed.(2) As Charles Young argues, Aristotle draws a distinction between common appetites and peculiar appetites. The appetite for food when one hasn’t eaten for several hours is a common, natural appetite. The appetite for a particular food or a particular amount is peculiar. Temperance most properly concerns the peculiar appetites, because, Aristotle says, people don’t tend to go wrong about common appetites since the appetite disappears with replenishment (NE 1118b15-19).(3) A further refinement in the Nicomachean account comes at 1119a16-20. Here Aristotle distinguishes between pleasures conducive to health (called healthful foods by Young) and pleasures that do not interfere with health (called treats by Young). On this more positive account of temperance, one has temperance just in case one’s peculiar appetites for food, sex, and drink are determined by judgments about the contribution to or compatibility with healthfulness.(4) One nice result of this account is that temperance loses any connotations of austerity that it might have had. For a temperate person, on Aristotle’s account, enjoys treats to the extent that they are compatible with health.

This quick summary of the Nicomachean and Eudemian treatments of temperance, while showing some of the subtlety of Aristotle’s position, has selectively omitted a range of issues. The focus has been on pleasure rather than pain. Clearly the intemperate person enjoys consuming foods to an excess. However, it also surely is true that the intemperate person is pained by the absence of those peculiar things he desires.