Chapter 9
Relevant texts:
Book VII, chs 11–15; Book X, chs 1–5 Problems of interpretation
• How is pleasure connected with eudaimonia?
• What precisely is pleasure?
Critical issues
• Is the fulfilled life necessarily pleasurable?
• Is whether we live a fulfilled life or not partly a matter of luck?
‘Fulfilment’ is also a good translation since it suggests something which cannot be improved upon. But it also has at least some over- tones of satisfaction. Even if fulfilment is not directly a feeling like pleasure or enjoyment, could we really say that a life was a fulfilled life if it were not also at least broadly speaking an enjoyable life? Is fulfilment a particular kind of pleasure?
Pleasure is discussed in two different places in the Ethics, once in Book VII at the end of the treatment of moral failure, and once at the start of Book X, introducing the final definitive discussion of eudai- monia. Neither discussion refers to the other, and it remains something of a puzzle why they are both included in the Ethicsat all. This puzzle provides one of the most obvious reminders that Aristotle wrote two treatises on ethics. Book VII is one of the books which is common to both the Nicomachaean Ethicsand the Eudemian Ethicsas those books have come down to us; Book X appears only in the Nicomachaean Ethics. Was the original home of Book VII in the Eudemian Ethicsor not, and was it written earlier or later than Book X? Commentators have more commonly taken the view that the Book X passage is the later, and have detected a more detailed and sophisticated discussion of the issues than is to be found in Book VII. But this view is by no means beyond challenge, and a good case can be made for dating the two passages in the reverse order.1I shall not attempt to settle these issues here; I take the view that the differences between the two passages are not so radical as to indicate any important shift in Aristotle’s position. They may well reflect the fact that discussions of the issues involved had a slightly different focus depending on who was actively involved at different times.
Each passage fits well enough into its immediate context. In Book VII, where Aristotle has already discussed the role that desires, and especially bodily desires, have to play in cases of moral failure, it makes good sense to discuss pleasure. So at the beginning of VII, 11 Aristotle says he has to discuss pleasure, since virtue and vice are con- cerned with what people find pleasurable and painful; and most people think that a fulfilled life must be pleasurable. Yet, since moral failure 1
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1See Gosling and Taylor [1982], chs 11 and 15 for an excellent and detailed account of the various possibilities.
is often occasioned by a misdirected desire for pleasure, it might well seem that pleasure is morally suspect, or at least that many pleasures are morally bad. At any rate, the highest good clearly cannot be pleasure, given the link between pleasure and moral failure. At the beginning of Book X, Aristotle repeats the same point about the con- nection between pleasures and the moral virtues. Moral education, in both its methods and its results, depends upon encouraging people to take pleasure in what is fine and noble, and to feel discomfort at what is base. Besides, pleasure and pain are very important when it comes to living a fulfilled life. So, reasonably enough, the focus in VII is on whether some pleasures, far from being bad and leading us astray, might actually be good and somehow contribute to the fulfilled life;
and in X, the introduction to his final thoughts on eudaimoniaconsists of asking whether pleasure might not be thegood. Of course, Aristotle has already in I, 5 brusquely dismissed the life of pleasure-seeking as fit only for brutes, and he can hardly be asking us here to reconsider thatjudgement. But, he now asks, is there nosense in which a fulfilled life could be described as the pleasantest? Is fulfilment not delightful after all? Should we expect the morally admirable life to be great fun?
To be enjoyable? Satisfying?
The issues as they appeared to Aristotle
Eudoxus Eudoxus was a philosopher who came to Plato’s Academy at about the same time as Aristotle first went there. Aristotle gives his opinions and arguments a good airing in X, 2.
Eudoxus thought that pleasure was the good, because he saw that all animals, rational and non-rational, aim at it. Moreover, in any domain it is the fitting which is worthy of choice, and the most fitting which is most worthy of choice. The very fact that everything is drawn to the same thing points to the fact that it is best (for each thing finds what is best for it, just as it finds its own proper food), and that what is good for everything – what everything aims at – is the good . . . He thought the same result
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followed from consideration of the opposite: pain in itself is to be avoided by all, so the parallel would be that pleasure in itself is choiceworthy. Again, what is most choiceworthy is what is not chosen because of or for the sake of something else. And this everyone would admit is how it is with pleasure. Nobody would ever ask what is the point of pleasure, since it is worth choosing simply for its own sake.
(X, 2, 1172b9–23) Some of the phrases which Aristotle uses in this thumbnail sketch of Eudoxus are worth noticing: ‘what all things aim at’ is exactly the phrase which Aristotle himself uses to conclude the first sentence of his Ethics: ‘. . . so it has been well said that the good is what everything aims at’. Again, Aristotle claims that eudaimoniais complete, precisely because it is chosen for its own sake and not for the sake of anything else. It makes no sense to ask what one wants a fulfilled life for. One might be forgiven for concluding that Aristotle must surely endorse the position which he attributes here to Eudoxus.
But things are not so simple. In the middle of the passage I have just cited, Aristotle inserts a cautionary remark. People were swayed by what Eudoxus said, he suggests, not so much because of what he said, but because Eudoxus had a reputation of being a sober and virtuous man rather than a mere pleasure-seeker. The suggestion is that Eudoxus’s arguments could easily be represented as an encouragement to a life devoted to the pursuit of pleasure, despite how Eudoxus himself interpreted them in practice. So one question, to which we shall have to return, is precisely how far Aristotle does accept Eudoxus;
and one way of sharpening that question is by asking exactly what Aristotle takes the relationship to be between pleasure and living a fulfilled life. Is there no sense in which a fulfilled life must be the most pleasant life one could have? What exactly is the difference between aiming at fulfilment and aiming at a life of pleasure?
The physiology and psychology of pleasure
Everyone knows what pleasure is – until one tries to define it. When we think of the variety of instances, we perhaps begin to realize that 1
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it is not going to be at all easy to give a clear account. Consider some examples: having a hot bath at the end of a tiring walk; spending an evening with a close friend one has not seen for some time; having one’s aching muscles expertly massaged; mountaineering; listening to music; solving a crossword puzzle; having a philosophical argument;
playing rugby; playing chess; gardening. Even if these are all activi- ties which give one pleasure, it is surely quite implausible to say that there is one experience which they all give. Certainly there is no one sensationwhich is produced by all these; and even using such a vague term as ‘feeling’ does not help. There is no one feeling experienced when playing rugby and when spending an evening with a friend or solving the crossword. At most one might say that these are all things one can enjoy doing. But that simply demonstrates the enormous flex- ibility of the term ‘enjoy’. The two Greek words he¯done¯and he¯desthai, which correspond more or less to ‘pleasure’ and ‘to enjoy’, are just as flexible as their English equivalents.2
The Greek philosophers made one attempt at explaining the nature of pleasure by relating it to a physiological process, and in par- ticular to the process of replenishing some deficiency or meeting some physical need. Thus the pleasure of downing a pint consists in making good a lack of fluids in the body. As a refinement on this view, it might be suggested that the change need not be to supplement a deficiency, but rather to restore the balance required by nature. If one is convinced by this as an account of the delights of slaking one’s thirst, or restor- ing one’s tired muscles, it is tempting to try to extend the theory to cover pleasures which are not, or at least not obviously, physical plea- sures at all. Perhaps, for instance, the pleasure of seeing one’s long absent friend is the process of making up for a lack of affection, and listening to music is a kind of mental massage?
This last suggestion marks in fact two shifts. The first is the shift from a mere physiological change to a perceivedphysiological change.
Not just any change will be a pleasure; not even any change which repairs a defect, or fills up a deficiency. The slow healing of a wound,
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2He¯done¯, like its English derivative ‘hedonism’, can suggest that the pleasures are rather disreputable, or that the pursuit of pleasure is all too single-minded;
but, as in English, it can equally well have a perfectly good sense.
for instance, is not in itself a pleasurable process. The change has to be perceived: and that is tantamount to accepting that pleasure, even bodily pleasure, somehow involves more than a purely physical process. The second shift comes with the recognition that when it comes to pleasures which are not bodily pleasures, any talk of repairing defects or filling up deficiencies or restoring balances is a metaphor- ical rather than a strictly literal account.3 So caution needs to be exercised when non-physical pleasures are explained in terms of the change from deprivation to fullness. The physical model may indeed be enlightening, but must not be unduly pressed.
General moral arguments
Many of the same arguments of a broadly moral character which we might think of as telling against basing morality upon the pursuit of pleasure were current in Aristotle’s day. Hedonism has a bad name with us, just as the pursuit of he¯done¯had for many Greeks. Morality requires us to do our duty, and as often as not requires that we avoid pleasures in order to do as we should. In any event, many pleasures are undesirable; and some pleasures are not merely undesirable, they are positively corrupt or perverted. Moreover a life devoted to the pursuit of pleasure is very likely to miss out on many of the most worthwhile activities.
Aristotle’s comments on the moral arguments
At the beginning of VII, 13, Aristotle briskly says that such arguments and the others which are usually advanced simply fail to show that pleasure is not good. They do not show even that it is not thegood.
He dismisses, almost in a series of one-liners, many of the moral arguments aimed at showing that pleasure cannot be good. ‘Good’ can be said quite generally and without qualification; or it can be said in relation to particular individuals and circumstances. The same applies, 1
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3At least this is true in many cases. There may, of course, be instances where mental states are altered by purely physical means, and feelings of depression, say, are replaced by feelings of well-being by means of appropriate drugs.