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disgraceful than that in respect of anger, it is both incontinence
without qualification and in a sense vice.
(4) Further, no one commits wanton outrage with a feeling of pain,
but every one who acts in anger acts with pain, while the man who
commits outrage acts with pleasure. If, then, those acts at which it
is most just to be angry are more criminal than others, the
incontinence which is due to appetite is the more criminal; for
there is no wanton outrage involved in anger.
Plainly, then, the incontinence concerned with appetite is more
disgraceful than that concerned with anger, and continence and
incontinence are concerned with bodily appetites and pleasures; but we
must grasp the differences among the latter themselves. For, as has
been said at the beginning, some are human and natural both in kind
and in magnitude, others are brutish, and others are due to organic
injuries and diseases. Only with the first of these are temperance and
self-indulgence concerned; this is why we call the lower animals
neither temperate nor self-indulgent except by a metaphor, and only if
some one race of animals exceeds another as a whole in wantonness,
destructiveness, and omnivorous greed; these have no power of choice
or calculation, but they are departures from the natural norm, as,
among men, madmen are. Now brutishness is a less evil than vice,
though more alarming; for it is not that the better part has been
perverted, as in man,-they have no better part. Thus it is like
comparing a lifeless thing with a living in respect of badness; for
the badness of that which has no originative source of movement is
always less hurtful, and reason is an originative source. Thus it is
like comparing injustice in the abstract with an unjust man. Each is
in some sense worse; for a bad man will do ten thousand times as
much evil as a brute.
BOOK_7|CH_7
7
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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 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.
The man who is deficient in his pursuit of them is the opposite of
self-indulgent; the man who is intermediate is temperate. Similarly,
there is the man who avoids bodily pains not because he is defeated by
them but by choice. (Of those who do not choose such acts, one kind of
man is led to them as a result of the pleasure involved, another
because he avoids the pain arising from the appetite, so that these
types differ from one another. Now any one would think worse of a
man with no appetite or with weak appetite were he to do something
disgraceful, than if he did it under the influence of powerful
appetite, and worse of him if he struck a blow not in anger than if he
did it in anger; for what would he have done if he had been strongly
affected? This is why the self-indulgent man is worse than the
incontinent.) of the states named, then, the latter is rather a kind
of softness; the former is self-indulgence. While to the incontinent
man is opposed the continent, to the soft is opposed the man of
endurance; for endurance consists in resisting, while continence
consists in conquering, and resisting and conquering are different, as
not being beaten is different from winning; this is why continence
is also more worthy of choice than endurance. Now the man who is
defective in respect of resistance to the things which most men both
resist and resist successfully is soft and effeminate; for
effeminacy too is a kind of softness; such a man trails his cloak to
avoid the pain of lifting it, and plays the invalid without thinking
himself wretched, though the man he imitates is a wretched man.
The case is similar with regard to continence and incontinence.
For if a man is defeated by violent and excessive pleasures or
pains, there is nothing wonderful in that; indeed we are ready to
pardon him if he has resisted, as Theodectes' Philoctetes does when
bitten by the snake, or Carcinus' Cercyon in the Alope, and as
people who try to restrain their laughter burst out into a guffaw,
as happened to Xenophantus. But it is surprising if a man is
defeated by and cannot resist pleasures or pains which most men can
hold out against, when this is not due to heredity or disease, like
the softness that is hereditary with the kings of the Scythians, or [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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