AN INTERPRETATION OF ARISTOTLE’S

THEORY OF PLEASURE

Matthew S. Strohl

A DISSERTATION

PRESENTED TO THE FACULTY

OF PRINCETON UNIVERSITY

IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE

OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

RECOMMENDED FOR ACCEPTANCE

BY THE DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY

Advisers: John M. Cooper and Hendrik Lorenz

November 2008

3333865

3333865 2008

© Copyright by Matthew S. Strohl, 2008. All rights reserved.

iii

Abstract

Pleasure is a mysterious thing. It tends to accompany the experiences we consider most

worthwhile. Most of us make a lot of decisions, large and small, on the basis of our desire

for it. If asked what it actually is, however, hardly anyone could give an answer that would

not immediately crumble under the slightest scrutiny. Most people, I take it, think that

pleasure is a particular feeling. This idea seems to me to be clearly and egregiously false.

There is no feeling one necessarily experiences when one takes pleasure in solving a math

problem that one also necessarily experiences when one takes pleasure in swimming in a

mountain lake.

Contemporary philosophers rarely worry about what pleasure is. I can’t say why this is the

case, but I will emphatically say that I believe the topic is as deserving as any of serious

inquiry. Things were very different in antiquity. Both Plato and Aristotle theorized

extensively about pleasure in most of their major ethical writings. They considered questions

about the nature and value of pleasure to be absolutely central to the project of ethical

inquiry.

This dissertation is about Aristotle’s theory of pleasure, which I believe may very well be

basically the correct theory. Aristotle rejects the ubiquitous notion that pleasure is a feeling,

and so, despite its being over 2300 years old, his theory may seem quite radical to modern

readers. While I do spend some time in this dissertation trying to show that Aristotle’s

theory is both relevant and defensible, my central aim is not to do so, but rather is to clarify

what the theory, as articulated in its final form in Nicomachean Ethics X.1-5, actually

amounts to.

My strategy is first to develop an interpretation of Aristotle’s account of what pleasure itself

is, and then, on the basis of this interpretation, to develop corollary interpretations of other

parts of his theory of pleasure. By proceeding in this way, I aim to arrive at a coherent

overall interpretation that makes manifest the connections and dependencies between the

theory’s parts.

In Chapter One, I present my interpretation of Aristotle’s account of what pleasure is. I

argue that he thinks that pleasure is a certain aspect of perfect activity of awareness, namely,

its very perfection. In Chapter Two, I show how the interpretation presented in Chapter One

can make sense of a number of texts that have often been taken to imply that Aristotle

thought that pleasure was a full-fledged activity rather than an aspect of activity. In Chapter

Three, I discuss Aristotle’s famous claim that pleasures differ in kind in virtue of differences

in kind among the activities they arise in connection with. I argue for a way of understanding

this claim based on the interpretation of his account of pleasure that I give in Chapter One. I

also argue that Aristotle recognizes a sense in which pleasures differing in kind can be

compared in degree of pleasantness. I claim that, for Aristotle, degree of pleasantness

consists in degree of perfection.

iv

To Duma, for getting me out of bed in the morning.

v

Contents

Acknowledgements .................................................................................................................. vi

Introduction ............................................................................................................................... 1

Chapter One: Pleasure as Perfection ......................................................................................... 7

1: Perfect Activity ................................................................................................................. 9

2: Three Prominent Interpretations of Aristotle’s Account of Pleasure .............................. 22

3: Pleasure as Perfection ..................................................................................................... 28

Chapter Two: Pleasure, Process, and Activity ........................................................................ 33

1: Aristotle’s Criticisms of the Phileban Account of Pleasure ............................................ 35

2: An Interpretive Problem in Aristotle’s NE VII Discussion of Pleasure.......................... 48

3: Process and Activity in NE X.......................................................................................... 59

4: A Puzzle About Pleasure and Process ............................................................................. 71

Chapter Three: Aristotle’s Qualitativism and the Comparability of Pleasures ....................... 75

1: Aristotle’s Qualitativism ................................................................................................. 76

2: Qualitativism and Comparabilism................................................................................... 91

3: Pleasantness as Degree of Perfection .............................................................................. 96

Bibliography .......................................................................................................................... 109

vi

Acknowledgements

I began thinking about Aristotle’s theory of pleasure in the fall of 2002, while an

undergraduate at Cornell University. I owe a long-standing debt of gratitude to Terry Irwin,

who introduced me to the topic in the context of supervising my honors thesis on Epicurean

hedonism. He was an incredible advisor who held me to what seemed at the time like

impossibly high standards, but who was always warmly encouraging. I doubt I would have

gone on to write a dissertation in ancient philosophy had I not received his support and

guidance early in my development as a student of the subject.

During my time as a member of Princeton’s philosophical community, from 2003 to 2008,

my philosophical outlook and my thinking about Aristotle’s ethics and his theory of pleasure

in particular have taken so many twists, turns, leaps and strides forwards, backwards and

sideways that I barely recognize myself as the same philosopher. Princeton’s philosophy

department has given me the most rewarding graduate education I could have hoped for. I

have benefited in more ways from my interactions with people there than I could possibly

list. I am very fortunate to have found my way there.

This project has directly benefited from conversations with Derek Baker, Lara Buchak,

Bridget Clarke, Anne Eaton, David Hilbert, Des Hogan, Mark Johnstone, Colin Klein, Marco

Lopez, John Maier, Connie Meinwald, Ben Morison, Jessica Moss, Jozef Müller, Paul

Muench, David Sherman, and Michael Smith. I presented an early version of Chapter One in

Princeton’s Dissertation Seminar, where I received very instructive comments from Tristram

McPherson, Nick Stang, and others. Jill Ray, Ann Getson, Anna Faiola, and Joann Zuczek

have been extremely helpful over the years, and have been a delight to work with and around.

I wish to specially thank three people who I have considered mentors during my time at

Princeton, and who have contributed immeasurably to the development of my thinking about

this topic and countless others. Alexander Nehamas has shown me time and time again

(usually by example) what it is to live a philosophical life and what the value is in doing so.

He has been an endlessly fascinating interlocutor and a ready source of kind encouragement

and guidance. Hendrik Lorenz has worked closely with me on nearly every bit of work I’ve

done on ancient philosophy since I arrived at Princeton. His generosity, patience,

rigorousness, clarity, and above all his remarkable philosophical acumen make him a truly

great teacher. Every part of this dissertation has benefited in countless ways from what he

has taught me. Lastly, I must acknowledge how privileged I am to have had John Cooper as

an advisor. I was told before deciding to study at Princeton that when one writes a

dissertation, what one needs most in an advisor is someone who will mercilessly demolish

one’s bad ideas, but will also recognize and nourish the good ones lurking among the

confusion and nonsense. I was also told that John is in a league of his own in this respect.

He has exceeded his reputation. His searching and unfailingly acute feedback has played an

absolutely crucial role in turning this project from an enthusiastic mess to a piece of work

that (I hope) makes useful progress on what I consider to be an important and interesting

topic.

vii

Josh Strohl, Alexis Strohl, and Jacob Collins have been my best friends since childhood, and

have always been there to share happy times with me and to support me when I’ve needed

them. Patti and Jon Strohl always gave me the freedom to be the person I want to be, and

they didn’t doubt me (much) when I was a 16 year-old kid from Horseheads, NY who read

some Nietzsche and decided he wanted to become a philosopher. I am deeply grateful to

them.

Finally, I must attempt to express my gratitude to Corinne Gartner, who has been my partner

during the years I’ve spent working on this project. She listened with the patience of a saint

to my endless, lightning-fast ramblings and profane outbursts of frustration and triumph as I

read and reread the literature, brainstormed, felt overwhelmed, made progress, got stuck, had

breakthroughs, lost and regained interest, wrote and rewrote, and—finally—completed a

dissertation. She gave me helpful feedback on early drafts and helped with formatting the

final version. Most importantly, she has been and continues to be a loving companion and

wellspring of comfort and joy.

1

Introduction

Elizabeth Anscombe famously remarked, concerning the concept ‘pleasure’:

The ancients found this concept pretty baffling. It reduced Aristotle to sheer

babble about ‘the bloom on the cheek of youth’ because, for good reasons, he

wanted to make it out both identical with and different from the pleasurable

activity. Generations of modern philosophers found this concept quite

unperplexing…. The reason is simple: since Locke, pleasure was taken to be

some sort of internal impression.1

Aristotle devotes a great deal of attention to issues about pleasure in the Nicomachean Ethics.

The text contains two long discussions of the topic: one in Book VII, chapters 11-14, and the

other in Book X, chapters 1-5. These discussions are rich with remarks concerning, e.g.,

whether pleasure is in any way good, and whether pleasures differ in kind. But it is

notoriously difficult to extract from these discussions Aristotle’s view of what pleasure itself

is, an issue which he clearly means to be addressing in X.1-5, and which one might take to be

crucial to the coherence of his theory of pleasure as a whole. As the above quotation from

Anscombe indicates, Aristotle has often been charged with being inconsistent, confused, or

impossibly equivocal about the issue of what pleasure itself is.2

Anscombe’s charge that Aristotle wanted to make pleasure out to be both identical

with and different from pleasurable activity points to the central challenge that an interpreter

of Aristotle on this issue faces: finding the middle ground between, on the one hand,

identifying pleasure with pleasurable activity and, on the other hand, making them too

distinct from each other. Aristotle writes:

The pleasures in activities are more intimately related to the activities than the

desires for them. For the desires are distinguished from the activities in time

and in nature, but the pleasures are close to the activities, and so little

1 Elizabeth Anscombe, “Modern Moral Philosophy,” 27.

2 See, e.g., W.F.R. Hardie, Aristotle’s Ethical Theory, 314; C.C.W.Taylor, “Pleasure:

Aristotle’s Response to Plato,” 19-20; David Bostock, “Pleasure and Activity,” 251.

2

distinguished from them that disputes arise about whether the activity is the

same as the pleasure. Still, pleasure would seem to be neither thought nor

perception, since that would be absurd. Rather, it is because pleasure and

activity are not separated that to some people they appear the same. (1175b30-

35)3

Here he denies that pleasure is identical to pleasant activity, but he asserts that pleasure is

nevertheless not something separate from the activity it arises in connection with.4

Aristotle’s brusque argument that pleasure is not identical to pleasant activity may seem to be

fallacious. He infers this conclusion from the observation that it would be “absurd” (atopon)

to identify pleasure with perception or thought. One might agree, however, that pleasure in

general is not the same thing as perception or thought in general (since many perceptions and

thoughts fail to be pleasant), but still think that individual instances of pleasure are identical

to individual activities of thought or perception. For example, one might think that when

someone takes pleasure in seeing a beautiful landscape, the pleasure the person experiences

is identical to the person’s activity of seeing. It is very uncharitable to think that Aristotle

neglected this rather obvious alternative, however, and so it is reasonable to infer that when

he denies that pleasure is either thought or perception he is not merely denying that pleasure

in general is identical to thought or perception in general. I suggest that we should take him

to mean that perceiving is one thing and taking pleasure in doing so is another, and likewise

with thinking and taking pleasure in doing so. In a case where an activity is performed under

the right conditions and is in fact pleasant, the pleasure is conceptually and psychologically

3 Translations of passages from the NE are based on Irwin’s but have sometimes been

modified. Translations of passages from other works of Aristotle’s are based on the

translations in The Complete Works of Aristotle, edited by Jonathan Barnes. 4 I take it that the notion of separateness in play here is the same one introduced in

Categories 2 at 1a25. If a pleasure is not separate from the activity it arises in connection

with, then the pleasure cannot exist without the activity.

3

distinguishable from the activity as a whole. Aristotle thinks that this is so obvious that to

deny it would be “absurd.” He acknowledges that when we theorize about what pleasure is,

the inseparability of pleasure from activity of thought or perception might lead us to identify

the two, but he insists that this view is clearly implausible.

What sort of account does Aristotle’s contrast with when he insists that pleasure is not

separate from activity? Anscombe notes that in modern times it has become commonplace to

think of pleasure as an “internal impression.” She has in mind the idea that pleasure is a

certain feeling that is caused by various sorts of activities but that is separate from these

activities and is similar in all cases. J.C.B. Gosling gives a succinct account of this view’s

central commitments in his 1969 book Pleasure and Desire:

‘Pleasure’, then, is a word used to refer to a certain sort of feeling, identified

by the way it feels, not by context. Learning the word, therefore, is a matter

of learning to identify this feeling and distinguish it from others. In this it

resembles butterflies in the stomach. Unless a person has had such a feeling

and observed its peculiar feel, he is very likely to misapply this description.

Similarly, if a person has failed to note the special feel of pleasure, he will be

likely to claim to enjoy things which he does not in fact enjoy at all.5

Gosling’s example of “butterflies in the stomach” is well chosen. This feeling might be

caused by anticipation of public speaking, by an unexpected encounter with someone one has

romantic feelings for, or by the approaching summit of a roller coaster’s first hill, but in all

cases it is phenomenally similar. According to theories of pleasure in this vein, pleasure is a

particular feeling that we are naturally attracted to and that we experience as a result of

engaging in certain activities.6 For various reasons, it is important to Aristotle’s ethical

5 J.C.B. Gosling, Pleasure and Desire: The Case for Hedonism Reviewed, 30-31.

6 Henry Sidgwick is a paradigmatic example of a philosopher who explicitly adopts this style

of view: “I propose therefore to define Pleasure—when we are considering its “strict value”

for purposes of quantitative comparison—as a feeling which, when experienced by intelligent

4

theory that pleasure is not a feeling of this or any other kind. Aristotle wants to avoid both

the claim defended by anti-hedonists (he mentions his associate Speusippus) that pleasure is

in no way good, and the claim defended by hedonists (he mentions Eudoxus) that all pleasure

is good. He takes it to be a well-grounded popular opinion that the best life must contain

pleasure (1153b14-15), and he thinks that the anti-hedonists must implausibly and

unacceptably deny this fact (1154a1-6). At the same time, he denies that all pleasure is good,

since pleasure that arises in connection with base activity is itself base (1175b28). He

occupies middle ground between hedonism and anti-hedonism by claiming that pleasures

differ from one another in kind, and thus in moral status, in accordance with the differences

in kind of the activities that they arise in connection with.

This view is ruled out by theories that take pleasure to be a particular feeling.

According to such theories, a virtuous person who takes pleasure in helping someone and a

vicious person who takes pleasure in harming someone both experience the same feeling.

We might say that it is admirable to take pleasure in the one case and despicable in the other,

but we cannot say that the pleasure itself has a different moral status in the one case than in

the other. If the pleasure a virtuous person derives from a virtuous activity might just as well

have arisen in connection with a vicious activity so far as its own nature is concerned, it

could not inherit from the virtuous activity a moral status that depends on aspects of that

activity in particular.

I hold that, for Aristotle, pleasure is not a feeling that our activities give rise to, but

rather is an aspect of the activities themselves. This is why it might seem that Aristotle

makes pleasure both identical to and distinct from the activity that it arises in connection

beings, is at least implicitly apprehended as desirable or—in cases of comparison—

preferable.” Methods of Ethics, 7th

ed., 127.

5

with: it is an integral aspect of the activity, but it is distinguishable from the activity as a

whole. In Chapter One, “Pleasure as Perfection,” I develop an interpretation of Aristotle’s

account of what pleasure is along these lines, on the basis of a close reading of the second

half of NE X.4. I argue that, for Aristotle, pleasure is the perfection of a perfect activity of

awareness. The overarching aim of the next two chapters is to develop an interpretation of

central elements of Aristotle’s theory of pleasure on the basis of this interpretation of his

account of what pleasure is.

In Chapter Two, “Pleasure, Process, and Activity,” I address the question of the

metaphysical status of pleasure. Many commentators have thought that Aristotle holds that

pleasure is a kind of activity. This contrasts with the view I defend, according to which

pleasure is not itself an activity, but is rather an aspect of a certain kind of activity. I try to

show that the textual evidence that is often taken to support the view that pleasure is a kind of

activity supports the view that pleasure is an aspect of activity at least as well, and moreover

that there are some strong considerations in favor of preferring the latter view.

In Chapter Three, “Aristotle’s Qualitativism and the Comparability of Pleasures,” I

discuss Aristotle’s view that pleasures differ in kind in virtue of the differences in kind

among the activities they arise in connection with, which I call his ‘Qualitativism’. I suggest

an interpretation of this idea according to which the way that pleasures differ in kind is

explained by their nature as the perfection of the activities they arise in connection with. I

argue that this interpretation is preferable to the strongest alternative interpretation on

philosophical and textual grounds. In this chapter I also consider an issue that has been of

great concern to modern ethical thinkers: the question of whether pleasures can be compared

in degree of pleasantness. On the prevailing modern view that I’ve mentioned already,

6

according to which pleasure is a kind of feeling, it is relatively unproblematic to make

comparisons in degree of pleasantness. On the other hand, modern views that have some

kinship with Aristotle’s Qualitativism, particularly the views defended by John Stuart Mill,

face serious difficulties on this front. If pleasures differ in kind, they may not all fall on a

single quantitative scale on which they can be compared, and yet there is strong motivation

for thinking that there must be some legitimate way to compare them. I argue that Aristotle’s

theory is able to resolve this difficulty. I suggest that, for Aristotle, degree of pleasantness

consists in degree of perfection. I also argue that this view is a deliberate revision of

common views about the matter, and that this being the case we should not expect it to

cohere with all of our ordinary intuitions, but that it does satisfy the core intuition that

pleasures can in some sense be compared in degree of pleasantness.

7

Chapter One: Pleasure as Perfection

I hold that there is exactly one place in the NE where Aristotle means to give an

account of what pleasure itself is, namely, the second half of Book X, chapter 4 (particularly

1174b14-1175a3).7 In this passage, Aristotle gives an account of what it is for an activity to

be perfect, and says that pleasure is what in some sense perfects a perfect activity. This

discussion culminates in the passage Anscombe calls “sheer babble,” the notorious simile of

the bloom:

Pleasure perfects [teleioi] the activity—not, however, as the state does, by

being present in (the activity), but as a sort of supervenient perfection

[epigenomenon ti telos], like the bloom on those in the prime of youth.

(1174b31-33)8

Although it is difficult to see what Aristotle means in this passage, I think that if it is

interpreted in connection with a close examination of the immediate context it is possible to

extract from it an account of what pleasure itself is that allows it to be distinct from pleasant

activity, and yet does not make it out to be something separate from such activity. As I will

argue, Aristotle implicitly restricts the class of activities that can be pleasant to activities of

7 One might think that he gives another account in VII.12, where he writes, “[Pleasure]

should instead be called an activity of the natural state, and should be called not perceived,

but unimpeded (1153a14-15).” I argue in Chapter 2 that in this context Aristotle is not

talking about pleasure itself, but rather about that which is pleasant. 8 Irwin translates ‘teleioi’ as ‘completes’ and ‘telos’ as ‘end’. I substitute ‘perfects’ for

‘completes’ because Irwin translates other words in the passage related to ‘telos’ as ‘perfect’

rather than ‘complete’, and I do not see any reason to translate the word in two different ways

in this context. Also, although ‘perfection’ is admittedly a weighted translation of ‘telos’,

‘end’ is also quite weighted. If ‘telos’ is understood as ‘end’, the passage heavily favors the

view that for Aristotle pleasure is the final cause of an activity (a view that Irwin endorses in

his note on this passage). The word ‘telos’ does not always mean 'end' or ‘goal’; it can also

mean ‘completion’, ‘fulfillment’, or ‘perfection’, and, as I will argue in section 3 of this

chapter, it seems that in this context Aristotle uses it to mean ‘perfection’.

8

awareness, that is, to exercises of capacities for awareness.9 An activity of awareness is

perfect when the capacity being activated is in a good condition and is active in relation to a

fine object. The view I will ultimately defend is that for Aristotle pleasure is an aspect of

perfect activity of awareness, namely, its very perfection. That is, pleasure is the character

that a perfect activity of awareness has in virtue of the good condition of the capacity being

activated and the fineness of the object that this capacity is active in relation to.

Spelling this view out further will require a detailed examination of the passage that

precedes the simile of the bloom. This chapter will proceed from here in three sections.

First, I will reconstruct Aristotle’s account of what it is for an activity to be perfect, and I will

defend this account against the objection that it implausibly excludes many activities that we

ordinarily think are pleasant. Second, I will discuss the three ways of interpreting Aristotle’s

account of pleasure that past commentators have favored, and I will discuss the analogy

Aristotle draws concerning pleasure and health, which is a central piece of evidence for two

9 It is perhaps controversial to say that Aristotle would recognize such things as ‘activities of

awareness’. As we see in De Anima I.1, at 403a26ff, Aristotle thinks that mental phenomena

such as anger have physiological underpinnings (in the case of anger, the boiling of the blood

around the heart). An activity of perception or thought, one might think, is not an activity of

awareness, but rather is an activity involving both awareness and various physiological

processes. Hendrik Lorenz argues on pg. 213 of his paper “The Assimilation of Sense to

Sense-Object in Aristotle” that it is reasonable to apply to activities of perception the familiar

Aristotelian principle that “terms which in one of their uses denote a form-matter composite

can also be used to denote the form, or matter, of the thing in question” (cf., On Generation

and Corruption I.5, 321b20-23; Metaphysics Η.3, 1043a29-36). Conscious perception stands

to the physiological processes that underlie it as form to matter, and so ‘perception’ can be

used to refer to the mental dimension of perception in abstraction from its physiological

underpinnings. I agree with Lorenz that this application of the principle is reasonable, and I

suggest that it is also reasonable to apply the principle to other activities, such as thought.

The idea would be, then, that while activities of thought or perception do have physiological

underpinnings, it is in line with Aristotelian principles to use the term ‘activities of

awareness’ to pick out the mental dimension of such activities in abstraction from the

material dimension.

9

of the three views. Third, I will present and defend my interpretation of the simile of the

bloom and of Aristotle’s account of what pleasure itself is.

1: Perfect Activity

In the passage beginning at 1174b14, Aristotle explains what it means for an activity

to be perfect. He writes:

Every perceptual capacity is active in relation to its perceptible object, and

perfectly active when it is in good condition in relation to the finest of its

perceptual objects. For this above all seems to be the character of perfect

activity, and it doesn’t matter if we ascribe it to the capacity or to the subject

that has it. Hence for each capacity the best activity is the activity of the

subject in the best condition in relation to the best object of the capacity. This

activity will be the most perfect and the most pleasant. (1174b14-20)

We can see from this passage that when Aristotle speaks of “perfect activities,” he means

activities that involve the perfect activation of a capacity. In order for a capacity to be

perfectly activated, the capacity must be in the best condition, and must be active in relation

to the finest type of object that it by nature engages with. There must be, as it were, a “fit”

between object and capacity, such that when a capacity in such a condition is active in

relation to such an object, the resultant activity will involve the fullest possible exercise of

the capacity.10

Take, for example, the activity of listening to music. In the most perfect case,

10

It is not entirely clear how Aristotle accounts for the phenomenon of distraction in a case

where a capacity in the best condition is active in relation to a fine object. He writes at

1175b3-6, “For lovers of flutes, for instance, cannot pay attention to a conversation if they

catch the sound of someone playing the flute, because they enjoy flute playing more than

their present activity; and so the pleasure proper to flute playing destroys the activity of

conversation.” The idea might be that when Aristotle gives his account of perfect activity he

does not make explicit the condition that the subject who performs the activity must do so

with attention and must not be engaged in a competing activity. Alternatively, the idea might

be that part of what it is for a capacity to be in a good condition is that its exercise must not

be impeded by lack of attention or by a competing activity. The former interpretation is

supported by the consideration that it would be strange to think that when we are engaged in

10

the listener will be someone with flawless hearing who has had a great deal of practice

listening to complicated pieces and whose capacities for listening have been perfected

thereby. The piece of music that serves as the object of her activity of listening will be

among the finest things to hear, and therefore will be such as to make full use of her perfectly

developed capacities for listening when they are active in relation to it.

There are very good grounds for thinking that Aristotle means to restrict this account

of perfect activity to activities of awareness. A strong piece of evidence is 1175b30-35,

which I quoted and discussed above. Aristotle says, “disputes arise about whether the

activity is the same as the pleasure,” and then says, clearly meaning to comment on these

disputes, “pleasure would seem to be neither thought (dianoia) nor perception (aesthêsis).”

This substitution of ‘thought or perception’ for ‘activity’ indicates that Aristotle treats

thought and perception, which are activities of awareness, either to be exhaustive of the types

of activities that can be pleasant, or to be two paradigm cases of types of activities that can be

pleasant. Following 1174b20-23 (quoted above), he writes:

For every perceptual capacity (aesthêsis) and every sort of thought (dianoia)

and study (theôria) has its pleasure; the most pleasant activity is the most

perfect; and the most perfect is the activity of the subject in good condition in

relation to the most excellent object of the capacity. (1174b20-23)

one activity and become distracted by another one this distraction somehow constitutes a new

deficiency in the capacity exercised by the first activity. The latter interpretation is supported

by the consideration that it allows us to take Aristotle to mean exactly what he says when he

writes, “Every perceptual capacity is… perfectly active when it is in good condition in

relation to the finest of its perceptual objects.” I am inclined to favor the latter interpretation.

In De Sensu 7, Aristotle characterizes the soul’s faculties of awareness as in a way

constituting a unity. When the exercise of one faculty impedes the exercise of another, this

impediment can be thought of as a deficiency in the condition of the impeded faculty, insofar

as the condition of the impeded faculty is partly constituted by its relations to the other

faculties with which it forms a unity. I return to this issue in section 1 of Chapter Three.

11

Here Aristotle makes it clear that he means for his account to apply to activities of

perception, thought and study, and so it would seem dianoia and aesthêsis are not exhaustive.

Study, or theôria, however, is also an activity of awareness, and there is no textual or

philosophical reason to think that Aristotle’s account of perfect activity extends to activities

besides activities of awareness. 11

It might in the context seem strange that Aristotle says that a perfect activity results

when a capacity in the best condition (or at least a good condition) is active in relation to the

finest or best of its objects. When we think of occasions when we experience pleasure, many

involve capacities in an unremarkable condition engaged with less than exceptional objects,

like a cup of diner coffee or a movie about pirates. Moreover, there are clearly many cases

where people whose capacities are in a thoroughly bad condition take pleasure in something

in no way fine. Gerd Van Riel, in his book Pleasure and the Good Life, objects to Aristotle’s

theory along these lines:

On the other hand, it is not clear why only a perfectly performed activity can

yield pleasure. Pleasure can have the opposite effect: it can bring (short) relief

from the impediments that prevent a perfect performance of an activity. My

activity of listening does not have to be perfect in order for me to be able to

enjoy music. Even if my ear is affected by a serious disease and I can hardly

hear, I can still enjoy music. (77)

Aristotle’s account of what pleasure itself is focuses on the case of maximally perfect

activity, which is presumably what leads Van Riel to think that Aristotle holds that only such

11

Aristotle clearly also thinks that emotions can be pleasant, and so this tripartite division

may still not be exhaustive. In Book 2 of the Rhetoric he writes: “The emotions are all those

affections that so change men as to affect their judgments, and that are also attended by pain

or pleasure (1378a20-23).” There is no need to enter into the debate about precisely what

sorts of things Aristotle thinks the emotions are. Regardless of whether or not they fall under

the classification scheme of perception, thought, and study, Aristotle clearly thinks they

involve some kind of activity of awareness, and so their case does not provide any reason to

doubt that Aristotle means to restrict the class of activities that can be pleasant to activities of

awareness.

12

activity is pleasant, but, as I will argue, Aristotle thinks that perfection comes in degrees, and

that a less perfect activity can be pleasant. His account of what pleasure itself is focuses on

maximally perfect activity because, as we will see, he thinks that the most fully human

pleasures will arise in connection with such activity. He holds that less perfect activities

cannot give rise to fully human pleasures, not that they cannot give rise to any pleasures at

all. Before elaborating further, it will be worthwhile to say more about why Aristotle thinks

that a maximally perfect activity requires “the best condition” and “the finest object.” This

will help to show why Aristotle focuses on the case of maximally perfect activity in his

account of what pleasure itself is.

I have characterized a perfect activity as one where a capacity in the best condition is

active in relation to the finest of its objects and is thereby fully exercised. The fact that an

activity involves the full exercise of a capacity is not, however, sufficient for the activity to

be perfect. This is vital to the plausibility of Aristotle’s account, since all sorts of activities

“max out” various capacities but fail to be pleasant. It might take just as much listening

acumen to sort out the sounds in a crowded restaurant as it does to digest a Mozart

composition, and it might be just as complicated a task to discern the flavors of a pile of

rotting leftovers as it is to savor a gourmet meal. As Anthony Kenny put it, “The most

sensitive nose in the world put in front of the most powerfully smelling manure in the world

will not necessarily find the experience pleasant.”12

It is one of the central tenets of Aristotle’s ethics that human beings have an essential

nature and that some activities count as proper realizations of it while others do not.

Aristotle thinks that a correlative claim holds for pleasure:

12

Anthony Kenny, Action, Emotion and Will, 149.

13

Each animal seems to have its own proper pleasure just as it has its own

proper characteristic activity; for the proper pleasure will be the one that

corresponds to its activity. (1176a3-4)

When Aristotle says, “Every perceptual capacity… is completely active when it is in good

condition in relation to the finest of its perceptible objects,” he means that the capacity is in

an appropriate condition for some aspect of the proper realization of human nature, and that

the object, in virtue of being fine, is apt to facilitate the full exercise of a capacity in such a

condition. A perfect activity is not merely one that fully exercises a capacity; it is an activity

that fully exercises a capacity so as to achieve the proper realization of the capacity’s nature

as the capacity that it is and as a part of human nature more broadly.

Why does Aristotle think that a capacity must be active relative to the finest of its

objects to achieve a proper realization of its nature? What exactly ‘the fine’ means in

Aristotle’s ethical writings is an extremely complex and controversial issue, but I can say a

few things that will help to elucidate the role that fineness plays in NE X.4. The Greek word

for fine, ‘kalon’, is often translated as either ‘beautiful’ or ‘noble’. ‘Fine’ is a good common

ground between these translations, as it captures both the aesthetic and the moral

connotations of the term. In Metaphysics M.7, in the context of claiming that the

mathematical sciences say and prove things about the fine, Aristotle writes, “The chief forms

of fineness are order and symmetry and definiteness (1078a36-b1).” Aristotle thinks that in

cases of perfect activity, the suitability of an object to fully activate the relevant capacity is

linked with its order, symmetry and definiteness.

Aristotle famously claims in NE I.7 that excellent performance of the human

characteristic activity consists in activity of the soul expressing virtue. In II.6 he gives a

characterization of virtue:

14

Virtue, then, is a state that decides, consisting in a mean, the mean relative to

us, which is defined by reference to reason, that is to say, to the reason by

reference to which the practically wise person would define it. It is a mean

between two vices, one of excess and one of deficiency. (1106b36-a3)

The proper realization of human nature involves a certain kind of proportionality and

orderliness. It lies in finding the mean between excess and deficiency in all areas of human

life. In the practical domain, the proper realization of human nature involves an agent, e.g.,

placing proportionate import on the various demands that weigh upon her in a set of

circumstances. The capacities of the virtuous person are in a condition such that they require

fine objects—ones that have the right kind of order, symmetry and definiteness—for their

full activation. This suggests a connection between virtue and taking pleasure in the fine.

Aristotle makes this connection explicit in NE I.8:

Now the things that please most people conflict, because they are not pleasant

by nature, whereas the things that please lovers of the fine [i.e., virtuous

people] are pleasant by nature. Actions in accord with virtue are pleasant by

nature, so that they both please lovers of the fine and are pleasant in their own

right. (1099a12-15)

The practically virtuous agent expresses her practical wisdom by reasoning about fine actions

and outcomes, and takes pleasure in doing so. There are also virtues of the theoretical

intellect and virtues of character (i.e., of non-rational desires and feelings), and these are

similarly related to fineness. The fullest realization of human nature requires that the

practical, theoretical, and non-rational aspects of a person’s soul be in a virtuous condition,

such that their full activation requires engagement with the finest objects.

One might worry that while the picture I have been developing makes sense in

application to pleasures that involve refined taste and judgment, it does not seem apt for

simple pleasures, such as the pleasure of appreciating the flavor of a candy bar. It would

seem bizarre to think that candy preferences will track fineness in the case of a virtuous

15

person. Suppose an especially virtuous person enjoys Twix bars but is not especially fond of

Snickers bars, and a non-virtuous person has the opposite preference. Is the pleasure the

former takes in eating a Twix bar somehow more proper to humans than the pleasure the

latter takes in eating a Snickers bar? I take it that what Aristotle would say here is that there

is a fairly wide range of ways one’s taste for such simple pleasures could develop that are

compatible with being a well-developed human being. Aristotle writes:

Sight differs from touch in purity, as hearing and smell do from taste; hence

the pleasures also differ in the same way. So also do the pleasures of thought

differ from these; and both sorts have different kinds within them. (1175b36-

a3)

Peter Hadreas has argued—I believe correctly—that this ranking of sense modalities

and other forms of cognition in purity is based on the extent to which each apprehends

order.13

The class of objects appropriate to properly engage a virtuous person’s capacities is

more determinate for purer sense modalities and forms of cognition than for less pure ones.

There is not much order and definiteness to be had for simple activities of touch and

ingestion of foods, and so the greater affinity that virtuous people have for fineness will not

distance them very much from non-virtuous people with respect to such pleasures. The

salient difference between a virtuous and a non-virtuous person with respect to such

pleasures is not as to which ones the person prefers, but rather as to the way in which the

person partakes of them. The virtuous person will partake of Twix bars in a moderate way,

and indeed will take pleasure in awareness of the moderate character of his activity in

addition to the pleasure he takes in the activity itself. The pleasure the virtuous person takes

in the moderate way he enjoys his Twix bar is what separates him from the non-virtuous

13

Peter Hadreas, “The Functions of Pleasure in Nicomachean Ethics x 4-5,” 161-163. I

revisit and expand on this idea in section 3 of Chapter Three.

16

person (the non-virtuous person will not enjoy this pleasure at all), and he might as well be

eating a Snickers bar rather than a Twix bar as far as this other pleasure goes.

Aristotle writes:

In fact, however, the pleasures differ quite a lot, in human beings at any rate.

For the same things delight some people, and cause pain to others; and while

some find them painful and hateful, others find them pleasant and loveable….

But in all such cases it seems right that what is really so is what appears so to

the excellent person. If this is right, as it seems to be, and virtue, i.e., the good

person insofar as he is good, is the measure of each thing, then what appear

pleasures to him will also really be pleasures and what is pleasant will be what

he enjoys. And if what he finds objectionable appears pleasant to someone,

that is not at all surprising; for human beings suffer many sorts of corruption

and damage. It is not pleasant, however, except to these people in these

conditions. Clearly, then, we should say that the pleasures agreed to be

shameful are not pleasures at all, except to corrupted people. But what about

those pleasures that seem to be decent? Of these, which kind, or which

particular pleasure, should we take to be the pleasure of a human being?

Surely it will be clear from the activities, since the pleasures are consequences

of these. Hence the pleasures that perfect the activities of the perfect and

blessedly happy man, whether he has one activity or more than one, will be

called the fully human pleasures to the fullest extent. The other pleasures will

be human in secondary, or even more remote ways, corresponding to the

character of the activities. (1176a10-29)

In this passage Aristotle makes two important distinctions. He distinguishes between

activities that are pleasant without qualification and activities that are pleasant in a qualified

way, and he distinguishes between fully human pleasures and pleasures that are human in a

secondary (or even more remote) way. The activity or activities of the perfect and blessedly

happy person constitute the fullest possible realization of human nature (which is precisely

why the person counts as perfect and blessedly happy), and so the pleasures that arise in

connection with the activity or activities of such a person are the most fully human pleasures.

I suggest in light of this passage that Aristotle’s account of what pleasure itself is focuses on

maximally perfect activity because the most fully human activity or activities are maximally

17

perfect.14

They involve the exercise of capacities in the best condition in relation to the finest

objects. We must bear in mind that Aristotle’s account of pleasure is given in the context of

a work about the human good, and that his primary concern in giving an account of pleasure

is to give an account of the most fully human kind of pleasure. He makes it clear that he

does not mean to deny that activities of awareness that are less than maximally perfect can be

pleasant. Recall that he uses superlatives in his account of perfect activity: “Hence for each

capacity the best activity is the activity of the subject in the best condition in relation to the

best object of the capacity. This activity will be the most perfect and the most pleasant

(1174b18-20).” Aristotle says that maximally perfect activity is the most pleasant activity,

but there is no reason to interpret him as saying that it is the only pleasant activity.15

He

allows that activities that are in some way inferior to maximally perfect activities can attain

some degree of perfection. The most perfect activity will be the most pleasant activity, but

all of the activities that Aristotle delineates in the passage quoted above as those that “seem

to be decent” are pleasant in a straightforward, unproblematic sense. If a person’s capacity

for listening is in a good condition (but not the best one) and is active in relation to a piece of

music that is only moderately fine, but that is apt to fully exercise the person’s capacity in the

condition that it is in, that person’s activity of listening is perfect and therefore pleasant.

It also could of course happen that a person whose capacity for listening is in the very

best condition listens to a piece of music that is fine, but not among the finest. In such cases

14

This is not to say that all maximally perfect activities are fully human. It is clear from

Metaphysics Λ.7 that the activity of God is maximally perfect, but obviously it is not a

human activity. Also, there might be maximally perfect activities that are human in a

secondary way. For instance, it might be the case that a maximally perfect activity of the

sense of touch (e.g., the world’s finest backrub received when one is most able to appreciate

it) is not one of the activities that make up a blessedly happy life, and so is not fully human. 15

I discuss the connection between an activity’s degree of perfection and its degree of

pleasantness in the second chapter of my dissertation.

18

the object is not apt to fully activate the person’s capacity, but it is apt to activate it to a high

degree. In such cases the fit between object and capacity is imprecise and the activity is less

pleasant than it would be if the object were better suited to fully exercise the capacity. It

might happen that when an object fails to fully engage a capacity a person becomes bored

and her attention becomes lax, and this lapse of attention constitutes an impediment to the

exercise of the capacity and thus puts the capacity in a worse condition. The object may be

apt to fully exercise the capacity in this worse condition. Take, for example, a case where a

very astute fan of movies goes to see a film that turns out to be mediocre. The person may

initially be bored by the film, but may end up enjoying it as a piece of light entertainment

watched with a relaxed attitude and not with the focus and concentration with which she

would watch a better film.

Aristotle also distinguishes in 1176a10-29, quoted above, between activity that is

pleasant without qualification and activity that is pleasant in a qualified way. I expressed the

concern earlier that it may seem as though Aristotle is committed to denying that the

activities of someone whose capacities are in a bad condition and are active in relation to

objects that are in no way fine could pleasant. This would be a wildly implausible position.

Some vicious activities, such as gorging on fast food or committing adultery, are clearly

sometimes pleasant for the people who engage in them. It may seem as though Aristotle is

denying this when he writes, “Clearly, then, we should say that the pleasures agreed to be

shameful are not pleasures at all, except to corrupted people.” When Aristotle says that

shameful pleasures are not pleasures at all, he does not mean that there is no sense

whatsoever in which they are pleasures. After all, he says in this very sentence that they are

pleasures for corrupted people. Aristotle often says that X is not Y when he really means that

19

X is not Y without qualification.16

His remark here should be understood in this way. He is

saying that shameful pleasures are not pleasures without qualification, but that they are

pleasures for corrupted people. He illustrates his point at 1173b22-24:

For we should not suppose if things are pleasant to people in a bad condition

that they are pleasant, except to these people, just as if things are healthy or

sweet or bitter to sick people we should not suppose that they are healthy,

sweet or bitter except to them.

Take, for example, chemotherapy. The drug treatments in chemotherapy are not healthy for

a person in a normal condition. What is healthy for a person in a normal condition provides

the standard of what is healthy without qualification, and so the drug treatments in

chemotherapy are not healthy without qualification. For some people with cancer, however,

these drug treatments are healthy, and so it is correct to say that they can be healthy for

someone with cancer.

In the case of pleasure, a shameful activity that is pleasant for a vicious person but is

not pleasant for human beings who have developed in the natural way is only pleasant for the

vicious person. The qualification “for the vicious person” must be added when we call such

an activity pleasant, and so the activity is not pleasant without qualification. It is not

immediately clear, however, from what Aristotle says in this passage how it could be that

base activities are pleasant even for the vicious person, given that such activities involve

capacities that are in defective conditions being exercised in relation to non-fine objects. It

might seem that such activities fail to be perfect to any extent whatsoever. I suggest that

although he does not explicitly say so, it is reasonable to speculate that Aristotle does in fact

think that certain base activities are perfect in a way. They are perfect in the sense that they

16

A good example is NE VII.4, where Aristotle says that someone who is akratic about spirit

or wealth is not akratic, when what he means is that such people are not akratic without

qualification.

20

bear a certain resemblance by analogy to activities that are perfect in the primary sense. In

Metaphysics ∆.16, Aristotle writes:

And thus we transfer the word ‘perfect’ to bad things, and speak of a perfect

scandal-monger and a perfect thief. (1021b17-19)

Things, then, that are called perfect in virtue of their own nature are so called

in all these senses, some because they lack nothing in respect of goodness and

cannot be excelled and no proper part of them is found outside, others in

general because they cannot be exceeded in their several classes and no part

proper to them is outside; the others are called perfect in virtue of these first

two kinds, because they either make or have something of the sort or are

adapted to it or in some way or other are referred to the things that are called

perfect in the primary sense. (1021b30-1022a3)

Perfect activities involve a “fit” between a capacity in the best condition and the finest of

objects, such that the capacity is perfectly exercised. There may also be a fit in cases of

shameful activity, but the fit will be between a capacity in a corrupted condition and an

object that is apt to fully exercise a capacity in such a condition. A thief who is superlatively

good at thievery can rightly be called a perfect thief. He is not a perfect thief in the primary

sense of perfect, since his thieving ability is not strictly speaking good, but he is a perfect

thief insofar as his thieving ability stands to the art of thievery in a way that resembles by

analogy the way that, e.g., a perfect doctor’s medical abilities stand to the art of medicine.

Likewise, an activity that involves the full exercise of a capacity in a corrupted condition can

rightly be called a perfect activity even though it is not perfect in the primary sense, since it

resembles by analogy activity that is perfect in the primary sense. Aristotle’s account of

perfect activity can therefore be extended to the case of shameful activity. This is not to say

that Aristotle counts certain shameful activities as pleasant merely because they are in some

respects analogous to pleasant activities. Just as chemotherapy can be genuinely healthy for

a person with cancer, shameful activities can be genuinely pleasant for a person in a corrupt

21

condition. The term ‘perfection’ is extended to such activities by analogy, but the activities

involve a character of awareness that the person who performs them finds attractive, just as

activities that are perfect in the primary sense do. A shameful activity can indeed be

genuinely pleasant for the person who performs it, but the pleasantness of such an activity

depends on the corrupted condition of the capacity it activates, just as the healthiness of

chemotherapy for someone with cancer depends on the person’s illness, and so shameful

activity is not pleasant without qualification, just as chemotherapy is not healthy without

qualification.17

It seems clear that this is enough to answer Van Riel’s objection that Aristotle’s

account does not allow that some activities that we intuitively consider to be pleasant are in

fact pleasant. Aristotle does not claim that only maximally perfect activity is pleasant, he

just focuses—for clear and understandable reasons—on this type of pleasure in his main

account of what pleasure itself is. A decent activity that is perfect to some degree but not

maximally perfect is pleasant without qualification; it is just not one of the quintessentially

human pleasures. A shameful activity is not pleasant without qualification, but may be

pleasant for the person who performs it.

17

My interpretation of Aristotle on this point contrasts with an interpretation suggested by

Julia Annas in her paper “Aristotle on Pleasure and Goodness”: “For Aristotle, one cannot

pursue pleasure regardless of the moral worth of the actions that are one’s means to getting it.

Rather it is the other way round: it is one’s conception of the good life which determines

what counts for one as being pleasant (288).” I disagree with Annas that what counts for one

as being pleasant is determined primarily by one’s conception of the good life. In many

cases, the condition of non-rational aspects of one’s soul plays the primary role in

determining what counts as pleasant for one. This is especially evident in cases where an

agent exhibits akrasia, or lack of self-control. In such cases, what one takes pleasure in is

directly at odds with one’s conception of the good life. Annas thinks that the possibility of

akrasia creates a serious difficulty for Aristotle’s theory of pleasure (294). This “difficulty”

is easily resolved if one accepts the interpretation of this part of Aristotle’s theory of pleasure

that I propose.

22

2: Three Prominent Interpretations of Aristotle’s Account of Pleasure

Following the account of perfect activity of awareness that I have been discussing,

Aristotle gives his most direct statement in NE X.1-5 of what pleasure itself is:

Pleasure perfects the activity—not, however, as the state does, by being

present in (the activity), but as a sort of supervenient perfection

[epigenomenon ti telos], like the bloom on those in the prime of youth.

(1174b31-33)

Gosling and Taylor outline the three ways the view expressed in this passage has traditionally

been interpreted:

Here there have been three styles of view. First, that of the majority of

commentators holds that pleasure is the formal cause of actualization;

secondly, not always distinguished from this or the following has been the

view that pleasure is some subtle extra perfection added to the perfection of

actualization; and thirdly, there is the view adopted by Gauthier and Jolif

themselves, that pleasure is the final cause of (perfect) actualization.18

I hold that all three of these ways of interpreting Aristotle’s view are unpromising. The

second type of interpretation, according to which Aristotle sees pleasure as an “extra

perfection,” over and above the perfection of the pleasant activity, relies heavily on

Aristotle’s statement that pleasure is a “supervenient perfection.” I believe that this

statement can be understood in a different, better way, however, and given that this type of

view is unattractive for independent reasons, it seems best to do so. 19

Proponents of this type

of view will find themselves hard pressed to clarify what precisely the “subtle extra

perfection” in question is, given that Aristotle himself does not explicitly describe any such

thing. Gosling and Taylor indicate at 11.3.12-19 that proponents of this type of interpretation

18

J.C.B. Gosling and C.C.W. Taylor, The Greeks on Pleasure, 241-242. 19

I give my own interpretation of what Aristotle means when he calls pleasure a

“supervenient perfection” in section 3 below.

23

typically make pleasure out to be some kind of feeling or fuzzy glow that perfect activity

gives rise to. Gerd Van Riel endorses a version of this view:

Pleasure is of this kind: it is not the intrinsic perfection of an activity, but

rather a surplus, a quality that supervenes on it. Aristotle thus clearly

acknowledges that activity and pleasure are not identical. Pleasure may be an

extremely desirable and gratifying surplus, which makes us perform an

activity even more ardently but the activity as such can be performed without

the pleasure. (58)

Van Riel concludes from his interpretation that Aristotle, by his own lights, should maintain

that a perfect activity can fail to be pleasant. He thinks that Aristotle should say that pleasure

is a surplus quality that may normally be caused by the perfection of an activity but that,

given its discrete psychological existence, sometimes might not be (74-5). Aristotle in fact

rejects this claim and maintains that perfect activity of awareness is necessarily pleasant

(1174b29-31). Van Riel thinks that Aristotle has failed to follow his account of pleasure to

its final consequences and so has gotten this point wrong. It seems to me that this

consequence of Van Riel’s interpretation, rather than leading us to conclude that Aristotle

misunderstood the ramifications of his own view, should be taken to indicate that the

interpretation itself is incorrect. Indeed, this issue highlights what is wrong with any

interpretation of Aristotle’s account according to which pleasure is taken to be something

like a “subtle extra perfection” or “surplus quality”: such interpretations fail to appreciate

Aristotle’s insistence that pleasure is not something separate from activity. Pleasure is not a

feeling or quality of our awareness that is independent of the activity that it arises in

connection with. Rather, as I will argue, it is an aspect of perfect activity of awareness, and

so cannot exist separately from such activity. Moreover, it is an essential aspect, and thus if

one engages in a perfect activity of awareness then ipso facto one experiences pleasure.

24

The first and third types of interpretation that Gosling and Taylor summarize are

based on different ways of understanding an analogy Aristotle draws that is usually taken to

compare pleasure to health. After giving the account of perfect activity that I discussed in

section 1, Aristotle goes on to write:

Pleasure perfects the activity. But the way in which pleasure perfects the

activity is not the way in which the perceptible object and the perceptual

capacity perfect it when they are both excellent—just as health and the doctor

are not the cause of being healthy in the same way. (1174b23-26)

This analogy has often been understood as part of Aristotle’s positive account of what

pleasure itself is. The Greek word ‘aition’, translated as ‘cause’, has a broader meaning than

the English word. An aition is something that can be referred to as an explanation. Aristotle

discusses four types of aitia in Physics II.3: formal, final, material, and moving.20

In the

passage quoted above, the doctor should be understood as the moving cause of being healthy,

in that he contributes to bringing it about that a patient is healthy by intervening to make

changes in the patient’s body. Health has been understood as either the formal or the final

cause of being healthy.21

Most commentators think that Aristotle means to claim in this

20

Very roughly, something’s moving cause is the source of its internal principles of change

and rest, its material cause is that which it is composed of, its final cause is its goal or

purpose, and its formal cause is its essence, i.e., the set of features it has in virtue of which it

is the thing that it is. 21

The idea that health is the final cause of being healthy (i.e., that the condition of being

healthy has as the goal it aims at by nature the good of health) is very strange, and it is hard

to believe that this is what Aristotle has in mind, but Gauthier and Jolif, Aristote: l'Ethique à

Nicomaque, argue that the analogy should be interpreted in this way (839-841). The

evidence they adduce is unimpressive. They point to two places in the NE where Aristotle

refers to health as a final cause, namely, 1094a8 and 1145a7-9. In both of these places,

Aristotle says that health is the end aimed at by the art of medicine. The art of medicine is

the art of bringing it about that people become healthy, and so it does aim at health as its

goal. This clearly does not imply that health is the end or goal of being healthy. Irwin holds

that pleasure is the final cause of perfect activity, but concedes that in this analogy health

should be understood as a formal rather than a final cause (305-306). He does not attempt to

25

passage that the capacity being activated and the object it is active in relation to, taken

together, stand to pleasant activity as the doctor stands to being healthy, whereas pleasure

stands to pleasant activity as health stands to being healthy. Commentators who favor the

first type of interpretation outlined by Gosling and Taylor think that Aristotle’s point is that

pleasure perfects a perfect activity not by bringing about or contributing to its perfection, but

rather by being its formal cause. Commentators who favor the third type of interpretation

interpret the passage similarly, but think that the way in which pleasure perfects a perfect

activity is by being its final cause.

I disagree with both of these ways of interpreting the passage. It is not obligatory to

infer from the analogy Aristotle draws between pleasure and health that Aristotle thinks that

pleasure is in any way a cause.22

Indeed, it is not obligatory to understand the analogy as part

of Aristotle’s positive account of what pleasure is. It is more natural to understand the point

being made as a purely negative one, given that Aristotle says that the way in which pleasure

perfects the activity is not the way in which the capacity and object perfect it, and then says

that “health and the doctor are not the cause of being healthy in the same way” to elucidate

what he means by this. A doctor is the cause of being healthy by making changes in a

person’s body that help to bring it about that the person be healthy. Health is a cause of

being healthy as well, but not by helping to bring it about that a person be healthy. Likewise,

the capacity and object perfect an activity by contributing to or helping to bring about its

perfection. Pleasure perfects the activity, not by contributing to or helping to bring about its

reconcile the way he understands this analogy with his overall interpretation of the second

half of X.4. 22

Here I am in agreement with Van Riel, Pleasure and the Good Life, 55-56, and Hardie,

313.

26

perfection, but rather in some otherwise unspecified way. There need be no implication that

this other way involves being a different kind of cause.

On this more natural way of reading the passage, Aristotle’s point is not that pleasure

stands to pleasant activity as health stands to being healthy, and so there is no reason to infer

that Aristotle thinks of pleasure as a cause. This is an attractive result, as both the view that

pleasure is a final cause and the view that it is a formal cause face serious difficulties. The

final cause of an activity is its end or goal. Even if we were to grant that in all cases pleasure

is a goal of perfect activity (which is not obvious), characterizing pleasure as a goal of

perfect activity does not tell us anything about what pleasure itself is. It merely gives us a

relation that it bears to perfect activity in all cases. Aristotle begins the chapter by saying,

“What pleasure is, or what kind of thing it is will become clearer if we take it up again from

the beginning (1174a13-14).” His aim is clearly to give an account of what pleasure itself is,

and not merely to give an account of its relation to activity.

Moreover, at 1175a15-17 Aristotle writes:

Pleasure perfects [people’s] activities, and hence perfects life, which they

desire. It is reasonable to think, then, that they also aim at pleasure, since it

completes each person’s life for him, and life is choiceworthy.

Proponents of the view that Aristotle’s account of pleasure at 1174b14-1175a3 makes it out

to be a final cause interpret the simile of the bloom as saying that pleasure perfects activity

by being an end or goal of such activity.23

That is to say, they think that the way in which

pleasure perfects an activity is by being among its goals. The passage I have just quoted,

however, indicates that this is not right. Aristotle says there that pleasure is a goal because it

23

Irwin, notes, 306; Gauthier and Jolif, Aristote: l'Ethique à Nicomaque, 842.

27

perfects activity, which is unacceptably circular if the way in which pleasure perfects activity

is by being among its goals.

The view that Aristotle thinks that pleasure is the formal cause of perfect activity is

also unattractive. The formal cause of an activity is something like the set of features of the

activity that make it the activity that it is. Aristotle makes at least one remark in Book X that

indicates that he does not think of pleasure in this way. He writes:

For nothing human is capable of continuous activity, and hence no continuous

pleasure arises either, since pleasure follows (hepetai) the activity. (1175a4-

6)

In this passage Aristotle speaks of pleasure as “following” activity. It is not immediately

clear exactly how he understands ‘follow’ here, but 1175b30-33 makes it clear that he thinks

that pleasure is not temporally distinguished from activity, and so he cannot mean that

pleasure follows activity in the sense that it comes after it in time. The thought seems to be

that pleasure follows activity in the sense that it depends on activity for its being, such that

one cannot experience pleasure if one is not engaged in activity. This way of understanding

‘follows’ makes the inference Aristotle is making clear: continuous pleasure is impossible

because pleasure cannot occur without activity and continuous activity is impossible.

Aristotle’s choice of words would be very strange if his view were that pleasure is the form

of pleasant activity. The form of an activity is what makes it the activity that it is in the first

place; it would be strange to speak of it as following the activity or as depending on the

activity for its being. The interpretation I favor, which I am about to spell out in detail, is

much better equipped to accommodate the sense in which Aristotle thinks that pleasure

“follows” activity. Pleasure, on my interpretation, is a particular aspect that an activity of

awareness has when it is performed under certain conditions. It does not come after the

28

activity in time, but it depends on the activity for its being, and so it can rightly be described

as “following” the activity.

3: Pleasure as Perfection

All three types of interpretations of Aristotle’s account of pleasure that past

commentators have favored are unattractive, and none of them, it seems, are supported by

conclusive evidence. My own view is that, for Aristotle, pleasure is simply the perfection of

a perfect activity of awareness, the very perfection that is brought about by the good

condition of the capacity activated and the fine object it is active in relation to. Sarah

Broadie briefly considers this interpretation, but notes that most commentators think that the

simile of the bloom rules it out.24

It is worth quoting the passage containing the simile yet

again:

Pleasure perfects the activity—not, however, as the state does, by being

present in (the activity), but as a sort of supervenient perfection

[epigenomenon ti telos], like the bloom on those in the prime of youth.

(1174b31-33)

The phrase that Broadie identifies as the major obstacle to the interpretation I favor is

‘epigenomenon ti telos’, translated here as ‘a sort of supervenient perfection’. Many

interpreters think that Aristotle means to say that pleasure is something that supervenes on

the activity that it arises in connection with, and therefore that it cannot be the perfection of

that very activity, but must be some extra perfection. As I argued in section 2, however,

interpretations along these lines face problems of their own. I suggest that there is an

alternative way of understanding this passage that supports the interpretation I favor.

24

Sarah Broadie, Ethics With Aristotle, 336-337.

29

The word ‘epigenomenon’ is usually translated as ‘supervenient’, which is not a bad

translation, although it may be somewhat misleading. The word literally means ‘coming to

be in addition’, or, even more precisely, ‘coming to be on top’. As Broadie notes, many

readers take Aristotle to be saying that pleasure is something that comes to be in addition to

perfect activity, and they think that the point of the simile of the bloom is that the bloom is

some extra quality that people come to have at the prime of their youth, just as pleasure is an

extra quality an activity has when it is perfected. She says in a footnote that if one wants to

resist this interpretation the only viable alternative she can see is to say that pleasure

supervenes on the underlying state.25

Her reason for thinking this seems to be that the only

two candidates explicitly mentioned in the sentence are the activity and the state, so that if

pleasure is not taken to supervene on the activity, it must be taken to supervene on the state.

She also says that if we understand pleasure as supervening on the state, pleasure would seem

to be identical to perfect activity, which is clearly not Aristotle’s view. I am not convinced

that taking pleasure to supervene on the state compels us to identify pleasure with perfect

activity, since one might think that even if Broadie is right to say that perfect activity

supervenes on the state, something else could supervene on it as well. In any case, it seems

that Broadie has neglected an alternative way of reading the passage. When Aristotle says,

“perfects… as the state does, by being present in (the activity),” he is giving one example of

something that perfects activity by contributing to or helping to bring about its perfection.

As I discussed in section 1 of this chapter, it is clear from the passage preceding the simile

that both the state of the capacity and the object that it is active in relation to perfect activity

25

Ibid., 364.

30

in this way.26

I do not think that Aristotle means to say that pleasure comes to be in addition

to the activity or (merely) the state. Rather, I think he means that it comes to be on top of the

perfecting contributions of the state and object. Pleasure perfects a perfect activity of

awareness by being the very perfection that it has in virtue of the goodness of the state of the

capacity being activated and the fineness of the object that it is active in relation to.

I would paraphrase the passage containing the simile of the bloom as follows:

Pleasure perfects the activity—not, however, as the state and object do, by

contributing to its perfection as causes or constitutive conditions of its

perfection, but rather as a perfection that arises on top of these things that

contribute to its perfection, like the bloom on those in the prime of youth.

I take it that the point of the simile of the bloom is to elucidate what Aristotle means by ‘a

perfection that arises on top’. The bloom is the aspect of youthfulness that a person has in

the prime of youth, when they have reached the stage in their development where their

maturation from childhood to young adulthood is complete, and when their sexual

attractiveness is thereby perfected.27

It is not merely the set of features they have in virtue of

26

One might worry that the language of ‘being present in the activity’ cannot apply to the

object in the way it can to the state, since the object is something external. I do not think this

poses a problem for my reading, since Aristotle makes it clear in De Anima II.5 that

perception and (we can justifiably infer) other forms of awareness involve the assimilation of

a faculty of awareness to an object. Because of this assimilation, it is correct to say that the

object of an activity of awareness is in a way internal to the activity. 27

The word translated as ‘bloom’, ‘hôra’, is usually linked with a young person’s sexual

attractiveness. Aristotle uses the word in this way at 1157a8. Van Riel, Pleasure and the

Good Life, 57, and Hadreas, “Aristotle’s Simile of Pleasure at NE 1174b33,” 371-3, think

that the simile of the bloom does not in fact refer to the bloom that young people have, but

rather to a bloom that comes much later in life. The basis of this claim is that the word

translated as ‘those in the prime of youth’ is ‘akmaioi’, and the akmê (or prime) of life is,

according to Aristotle, something that is reached much later. They think that the hôra is the

condition that people at their prime are in, in virtue of being at their prime. Van Riel and

Hadreas may be right, but I do not think that the evidence they offer is conclusive. The word

‘hôra’ is used in the passage I’ve just pointed to to refer to the bloom of youthfulness, and at

1118b11 in the NE Aristotle quotes a passage from Homer where ‘akmazôn’, related to

akmaioi, clearly means ‘being in the prime of youth’. Even if Van Riel and Hadreas are

31

which they count as being in the prime of youth (rosy cheeks, the beginnings of a beard,

etc.); it is the overall result of the juxtaposition and interaction of these features. It is not an

extra quality that arises in addition to these features, but rather is the cumulative effect that

arises, as it were, on top of them. Likewise, pleasure is the character that an activity of

awareness has in virtue of the interplay between the goodness of the capacity being activated

and the fineness of the object it is active in relation to. It is the cumulative result of these two

perfecting contributions. Another way to put the view I’m suggesting is that the features that

contribute to an activity’s perfection are lower order features of the activity, while pleasure is

a higher order feature. An activity has the feature of being pleasant in virtue of its lower

order features and the relations among them.

I have argued in this chapter that, for Aristotle, pleasure is the perfection that is

brought about in an activity of awareness when the capacity being activated is in a good

condition and is active in relation to a fine object. It is the way we experience the fit between

object and capacity. Take, for example, the case of going for a swim on a hot day. This

involves an activity of touch as the swimmer’s hot skin comes in contact with the cool water.

The water is an object that is well-suited to perfectly activate the swimmer’s over-heated

organ of touch. The pleasure that the swimmer experiences when he jumps into the water is

the cumulative effect of the condition of his capacity and the aptness of the water to perfectly

activate it. Take also the case of reading a mystery novel. If a person takes pleasure in

reading the novel, it is because the person’s cognitive faculties are in a good condition for,

e.g., puzzling over clues. The pleasure he takes in reading the novel is the result of the

correct, it is still possible to interpret the passage in much the same way as I have suggested.

The bloom would be understood as a perfection arising on top of the features in virtue of

which a person at the prime of life (rather than at some younger age) counts as being in their

prime.

32

novel’s aptness to engage faculties in such a condition. In these examples, the pleasure the

subject experiences is an aspect of awareness, but it is not some feeling over and above the

pleasant activity. It is rather the character the activity gains in virtue of the fit between the

condition of the capacity being activated and the object that it is active in relation to.

33

Chapter Two: Pleasure, Process, and Activity

I argued in Chapter One that Aristotle thinks that pleasure is a certain aspect of

perfect activity of awareness, namely, its very perfection. This interpretation contrasts

sharply with the often accepted view that Aristotle thinks that pleasure is an activity all of its

own, of a special type, that accompanies the activity that it is taken in. For convenience, I

will call the view that for Aristotle pleasure itself is an activity the Activity View. My

ultimate aim in this chapter will be to further expand and defend my interpretation by

showing that certain crucial considerations that might seem to support the Activity View do

not in fact have to be taken to do so. I will argue that the interpretation I favor can make

sense of the texts that have led people to adopt the Activity View at least as well as the

Activity View can.

In the course of making this case, I will discuss in detail some of Aristotle’s

arguments against a strain of anti-hedonism that is based on the theory of pleasure that Plato

develops in the Philebus. The discussions of pleasure in NE VII and X include many clear

references to the Philebus, and contain several arguments opposing the theory of pleasure

found in that dialogue. In the Philebus, Plato has Socrates argue (or favorably consider) that

pleasure is the perceived restoration of one’s natural physical harmony.28

In giving this

account of pleasure, Plato does not distinguish between that which is pleasant and pleasure

itself. Plato’s account of pleasure as a perceived restoration entails that pleasure is what

Aristotle calls a process (kinêsis). For Aristotle, a process is a change that can be divided

28

‘Perceived’ here should be understood broadly, as including non-sensory forms of

awareness, since Plato clearly thought that, e.g., learning can be pleasant. I am translating

by ‘perceived’ forms of the Greek verb aisthanesthai, and while that verb is, by Plato’s time

and in Plato’s writings, often used specifically to indicate sense perception, its basic meaning

is that of “being aware” or “conscious.” See LSJ and, e.g., Apology 22c.

34

into parts and that progresses towards some end, such that as more of its parts come to pass it

comes progressively closer to arriving at its end. Aristotle argues in NE VII that pleasure is

not a process, but is rather an activity (energeia), but does he also not explicitly distinguish

between pleasure itself and that which is pleasant. In NE X, as I discussed in section 1 of

Chapter One, he does distinguish between pleasure itself and that which is pleasant, and, as I

interpret him, argues for the view that while that which is pleasant is an activity of

awareness, pleasure itself is something quite different in nature from an activity.

This chapter will proceed in four sections. In the first section, I will discuss the

Phileban theory of pleasure, and the criticisms of this theory that Aristotle gives in NE VII.

His argument for the claim that pleasure is an activity rather than a process is imbedded in

these criticisms; it is, notably, not set out either in this discussion or on its own as a theory of

what pleasure is. I will develop an interpretation of the NE VII discussion according to

which when Aristotle claims (in so many words) that pleasure is an activity, he is not

claiming—if we speak in terms of the neglected distinction—that pleasure itself is an

activity. In the second section, I will examine in greater detail the question of what Aristotle

means when he says that pleasure is an unimpeded activity of the natural state, particularly in

cases where we take pleasure in connection with a process of restoration. I will argue that,

contrary to what many commentators have thought, there is no need to suppose that Aristotle

had worked out a determinate theory of pleasure when he wrote Book VII. I will suggest that

we should instead attribute to him a view that is relatively inchoate and indeterminate, but

that can plausibly be taken as an earlier stage in the development of the view that he held

35

when he wrote Book X.29

In the third section, I will discuss arguments Aristotle makes in

NE X.3-4 that one might take to be arguments for the Activity View, especially if one

understands the connection between the Book VII and Book X discussions in a certain way

(different from the way I will propose that it should be understood). I will make the case

that, contrary to what is often thought, the argument in X.3 is actually for a very different

claim than the one in X.4. I will argue for an interpretation of the argument in X.4 according

to which it does not entail that pleasure is an activity, but rather that pleasure is complete in

the same sense that activity is. I will claim that this way of understanding the argument fits

well with the interpretation of Aristotle’s account of what pleasure is that I defended in

Chapter One and is at least as well motivated as the way of understanding it that favors the

Activity View. In the fourth section, I will consider a puzzle that my interpretation gives rise

to. If, for Aristotle, that which is pleasant is perfect activity of awareness, and pleasure itself

is an aspect of such activity, then how can processes such as listening to a piece of music

unfold over time or doing a crossword puzzle be pleasant? I will argue that in these cases,

the proper specification of what the agent takes pleasure in connection with is not a process

but is in fact an activity.

1: Aristotle’s Criticisms of the Phileban Account of Pleasure

Early in his discussion of pleasure in NE VII, Aristotle gives a brief statement of the

Phileban account of pleasure that he will go on to criticize, namely that “Every pleasure is a

29

This, along with the fact that it includes discussions of topics not treated in the NE X

discussion of pleasure, could be part of the reason that Aristotle (or a later editor) chose to

include VII.11-14 in the NE.

36

perceived becoming towards a natural state (1152b13).”30

It is worth noting, first of all, that

this formulation uses the term ‘becoming’ (‘genesis’) rather than process (‘kinêsis’). It seems

that Aristotle shifts to the term ‘genesis’ in NE VII because he means in particular to address

the views of the “subtle thinkers” Plato refers to at 53c in the Philebus, or other thinkers who

took up their views:

Socrates: But what about the following point? Have we not been told that

pleasure is always a process of becoming (genesis), and that there is no being

at all of pleasure? There are some subtle thinkers who have tried to pass on

this doctrine to us, and we ought to be grateful to them.31

For Aristotle, a becoming (genesis) is a type of process (kinêsis). A process is any change

progressing towards some end. A becoming is a process where the relevant end is the

coming into being of a substantial individual, whereas other types of processes have as their

ends changes in the incidental features of substantial individuals. Plato did not make the

same distinction, no doubt in part because he did not recognize a robust metaphysical

distinction between perceptible substantial individuals and their non-substantial features.

According to Plato’s subtle thinkers, pleasure is the coming into being of natural harmony.

30

I will remain neutral on the question of whether a ‘perceived becoming’ or ‘perceived

restoration’ in NE VII or in the Philebus means ‘a becoming/restoration that is perceived’ or

‘the perceiving of a becoming/restoration’. I believe that, at least in the Philebus, the latter is

most likely the correct construal, but this is controversial and does not matter for my

purposes in this chapter. Note that if Aristotle does construe Plato to mean the latter, one

might worry that he is stacking the deck against the Phileban view, since he himself thinks

that perception is an activity rather than a process or becoming. This need not be the case

however, since Plato in the Philebus clearly thinks of perception as a process that a subject

undergoes. 31

The “subtle thinkers” he means to refer to are no doubt Platonists. It is not clear whether

Plato is slyly referring to himself and his followers or whether he has some other particular

individual or individuals in mind. Translations of passages from the Philebus are taken from

Dorothea Frede’s translation, found in Plato: Complete Works, edited by John Cooper, but

may be slightly adjusted in some places.

37

After the passage quoted above from the Philebus, Plato has Socrates go on to argue that

pleasure cannot be good if it is a becoming:

Socrates: But that for the sake of which what comes to be for something

comes to be in each case, ought to be put into the class of the things good in

themselves, while that which comes to be for the sake of something else

belongs to another class, my friend.

Protarchus: Undeniably.

Socrates: But if pleasure really is a kind of generation, will we be placing it

correctly, if we put it in a class different from that of the good?

Protarchus: That too is undeniable. (54c-d)

Plato accepts the general principle that if something is a becoming, it cannot itself be good.

This principle serves as the groundwork for a certain strain of anti-hedonism that at least

some Platonists championed.32

It seems, then, that in the formulation of the Phileban view

that Aristotle gives in NE VII, he uses the term ‘becoming’ because he means to criticize the

argument from Philebus 54c-d that I’ve just pointed to and the style of anti-hedonism that

emerges from it.

It will be useful to make a further clarification concerning Aristotle’s statement of the

Phileban account of pleasure. As I discussed in Chapter One, Aristotle is very careful in

Book X to distinguish between that which is pleasant and pleasure itself. I interpret him as

claiming in Book X that that which is pleasant is in all cases perfect activity of awareness,

and that pleasure itself is the perfection of such activity. Aristotle makes no such explicit

distinction in Book VII, but many commentators have thought that he must have one or the

other notion in mind when he says that pleasure is a perceived becoming. One could interpret

him as saying that pleasure itself is a perceived becoming, or as saying that a perceived

becoming is what is pleasant in all cases where we experience pleasure. Take, for instance,

the pleasure of eating and becoming sated when one is hungry. The Phileban view Aristotle

32

Aristotle names Speusippus as one such Platonist in NE VII.

38

refers to could either be that the pleasure one experiences when one eats just is the perceived

becoming of satiety, or it could be that whatever pleasure itself actually is, what gives rise to

it when one eats is the perceived becoming of satiety.

I suggest that it is not necessary to suppose that Aristotle had this distinction actively

in mind when he wrote NE VII. I do not mean to imply that he was probably unaware of or

confused about it. His primary purpose in the Book VII discussion of pleasure is to refute a

certain strain of anti-hedonism. His opponents do not recognize this distinction, and while it

would be open to Aristotle to object to their views on the basis of considerations that depend

on the distinction, this is not what he in fact does. The arguments he makes do not explicitly

trade on the distinction, and so he may just not have thought it would be of any use to

mention or employ it when he wrote the discussion. These arguments can, however, be most

plausibly interpreted under the supposition that—deliberately or not—Aristotle treats the

question ‘what is pleasure?’ as interchangeable with the question ‘when we experience

pleasure, what is it that happens in us that is pleasant?’ That is, I think that what Aristotle in

fact does in Book VII is to give an account of that which is pleasant, even though he may not

be thinking of it in these terms. I will support this claim by developing an interpretation

under the supposition that it is true. If supposing this claim to be true yields an interpretation

with independent textual and philosophical merit, this is a consideration in favor of accepting

it.

Aristotle gives several arguments in NE VII against the view that pleasure cannot be

good. I will primarily be concerned with two connected arguments that together constitute a

refutation of the Phileban theory of pleasure that the type of anti-hedonism he is concerned

39

with is based on. I will quote the long passage containing both arguments at this point,

inserting a space to mark the transition between the two arguments:

Further, since one sort of good is an activity and another sort is a state, the

processes that restore us to our natural state are pleasant incidentally. The

activity when we are experiencing appetite belongs to the rest of our state and

nature. For there are also pleasures without pain and appetite such as the

pleasures of contemplating, those in which our nature lacks nothing. A sign

of this is the fact that we do not enjoy the same thing when our nature is being

refilled as we enjoy when it is eventually fully restored. When it is fully

restored, we enjoy things that are pleasant without qualification, but when it is

being refilled, we enjoy even the contrary things. For we even enjoy sharp or

bitter things, though none of these is pleasant by nature or pleasant without

qualification. Hence [these pleasures] are not pleasures [without

qualification] either; for as pleasant things differ from one another, so the

pleasures arising from them differ too.

Further, it is not necessary for something else to be better than pleasure, as the

end, some say, is better than the becoming. For pleasures are not becomings,

nor do they all even involve a becoming. They are activities and an end, and

arise when we exercise [a capacity], not when we are coming to be [in some

state]. And not all pleasures have something else as their end, but only those

in people who are being led toward the completion of their nature. That is

why it is a mistake to call pleasure a perceived becoming. It should instead be

called an activity of the natural state, and should be called not perceived, but

unimpeded. (1152b33-1153a15)

Each argument is a response to one of the legomena from VII.11. The first seems to be

directed towards the one at 1152b12-15: “The reasons for thinking [pleasure] is in no way

good are these. Every pleasure is a perceived becoming toward nature, but no becoming is

the same kind of thing as its end—for instance, no [process of] building is of the same kind

as a house.” The second is clearly a response to the one at 1152b22-23: “To show that the

best good is not pleasure, people say that pleasure is not an end, but a becoming.”

The first of these two legomena states an argument for the claim that no pleasure is in

any way good, whereas the second states an argument for the weaker claim that pleasure is

40

not the best good. The first argument is very similar to the argument in the passage from

Philebus 54c-d, quoted above. The argument is based on the principle that that for the sake

of which something comes to be is in the class of goods, whereas the something that comes

to be for the sake of that thing is not. In the first of the two legomena, this principle is

deployed (just as it is in the Philebus passage) to show that since every pleasure is a coming

to be of a natural state (and therefore is for the sake of that state), pleasures cannot be in the

class of goods. The second argument is a weaker version of the same basic argument. It

does not require that that which comes to be for the sake of something cannot be at all good,

it just requires that that which comes to be for the sake of something is not as good as that

which it comes to be for the sake of.

It seems that the two responses Aristotle gives to these legomena in the passage at

1152b33-1153a15, quoted above, should be taken together. In the first argument, he suggests

an alternative account of pleasure that he thinks can make sense of all the cases that the

Phileban account can make sense of, and argues that there are additional cases of pleasure (he

specifically mentions contemplation as one such case) that constitute counterexamples to the

Phileban account, and that his own account can accommodate them. He then gives a further

reason for thinking that there are such counterexamples, and moreover for thinking that they

extend beyond contemplation. The second argument is essentially just a more developed

statement of the alternative account Aristotle suggests in the first argument, coupled with a

brief argument that on this account, the argument from the second legomenon for the claim

that pleasure cannot be the best good fails. One can see, then, why the two should be taken

together. The former does not tell us very much about what the alternative account actually

41

amounts to, whereas the latter does not give us reasons to prefer the alternative account to the

Phileban account.

The alternative account that Aristotle suggests is that pleasure is activity rather than

process (as before, I take him to be treating ‘pleasure’ as interchangeable with ‘that which is

pleasant’). He introduces the first argument by distinguishing between two types of goods,

states and activities, because he wants to show that the fact that pleasure is not a state does

not establish that it cannot be good: it could also be an activity. He then writes, at 1152b34-

36, “…the processes that restore us to our natural state are pleasant incidentally. Here the

activity when we are experiencing appetite belongs to the rest of our state and nature.”

Aristotle does not deny (as the Phileban account maintains) that the processes that restore us

to a natural state are pleasant. He proposes, however, that they can only be pleasant

incidentally, whereas activities can be pleasant in their own right. He claims that a process of

restoration is pleasant only insofar as it forms an incidental unity with a pleasant activity. He

further clarifies this idea below, in VII.14:

By incidentally pleasant things I mean pleasant things that are curative; for the

[process of] being cured happens along with some action of the part of us that

remains healthy, and hence undergoing a cure seems to be pleasant.

(1154b17-19)

Aristotle claims here that when we are being restored, the actual restoration merely seems to

be the seat of the pleasure we experience. In fact, he claims, what is pleasant is some action

or other in the part of us that remains healthy, and the restoration is rightly called pleasant

only in the sense that it happens in close conjunction with the pleasant activity. It may well

be Aristotle’s view that the activity is caused by or in some other way bound up with the

restoration, and so the connection between the two may be tighter than the mere fact that they

happen at the same time. I will postpone discussing this issue for now, since the question of

42

what precisely the pleasant activity is in such cases is very controversial. The crucial point at

this juncture is that Aristotle thinks that his account of pleasure as activity can make sense of

the pleasures connected with restoration without saying that processes of restoration are

pleasant in their own right, as the Phileban theory takes them to be.

If Aristotle’s alternative account can in fact make sense of the pleasures connected

with restoration at least as plausibly as the Phileban account can, this shows that there is no

reason to prefer the Phileban account, but does not yet give us a positive reason to prefer

Aristotle’s. The first positive reason to prefer his account that Aristotle offers is that there is

a counterexample to Plato’s account that he thinks his own account can make sense of—

namely, contemplation, that is, thinking about theoretical matters in such a way as to be

exercising one’s knowledge of them. He claims that contemplation can be a pleasure, but

that it does not depend on a prior lack and is not a process. To see why this is the case, it is

helpful to contrast contemplation with learning. Plato writes in the Philebus:

Protarchus: But, Socrates, what are the kinds of pleasures that one could

rightly regard as true?

Socrates: Those that are related to so-called pure colors and to shapes and to

most smells and sounds and in general all those that are based on

imperceptible and painless lacks, while their fulfillments are perceptible and

pleasant. (51b)

Socrates: Then let us add to [our list of true pleasures] the pleasures of

learning, if indeed we are agreed that there is no such thing as hunger for

learning connected with them, nor any pains that have their source in a hunger

for learning.

Protarchus: Here too, then I agree with you.

Socrates: Well, then, if after such filling with knowledge, people lose it again

through forgetting, do you notice any kinds of pain?

Protarchus: None that could be called inherent by nature, but in our reflections

on this loss when we need it, we experience it as a painful loss.

Socrates: But, my dear, we are here concerned only with the natural affections

themselves, apart from reflection on them.

Protarchus: Then you are right in saying that the lapse of knowledge never

causes us any pain. (51e-52b)

43

Plato thinks that there is some lack in our nature that is filled when we learn something, and

therefore that the pleasure of learning fits the account of pleasure as a perceived becoming

towards a natural state. He does not consider, however, a case where we have some item of

knowledge but are not actively contemplating this article of knowledge, and then come to

actively contemplate it. He discusses forgetting and then relearning in the passage quoted

above, but it would be implausible to claim that each time we stop actively attending to some

article of knowledge what is in fact happening is that we are forgetting it, and then when we

come to attend to it again we are relearning it. I know, for instance, that polar bears have

four legs. I rarely attend to this piece of knowledge, but when I do I can do so instantly,

without undergoing any kind of process that could plausibly be described as learning.

Aristotle thinks of the transition from merely knowing something to actively

contemplating it as a transition from first to second actuality. He introduces this idea in De

Anima II.1 and then discusses it at length in II.5. The basic idea is that having knowledge of

something is an actuality in the sense that it is a realization of the human potential to know,

but it is also in another way a potentiality, since having knowledge amounts to having the

capacity to actively contemplate what one knows. It is wrong, however, to describe the

condition of having knowledge but not attending to it as a lack in our nature that comes to be

filled when we contemplate. Having knowledge is rather an actuality of our nature that

underlies the further actuality of active contemplation. We see, then, why Aristotle thinks

that contemplation is a counterexample to the Phileban account of pleasure. The transition

from knowing to contemplating cannot be a process restoring a lack and leading us to a

natural state, since the condition of knowing is already a natural state. Contemplating is an

44

activity of this natural state. That is, it is an exercise of a capacity that we have in virtue of

our soul being in the natural state of having knowledge. The state itself is not changed in

virtue of this exercise, unlike in the case of drinking when one is thirsty, when the restorative

process of hydration changes the state of the relevant aspects of our constitution.33

After giving this counterexample, Aristotle writes:

A sign of this is the fact that we do not enjoy the same thing when our nature

is being refilled as we enjoy when it is eventually fully restored. When it is

fully restored, we enjoy things that are pleasant without qualification, but

when it is being refilled, we enjoy even the contrary things. For we even

enjoy sharp or bitter things, though none of these is pleasant by nature or

pleasant without qualification. Hence [these pleasures] are not pleasures

[without qualification] either; for as pleasant things differ from one another,

so the pleasures arising from them differ too. (1153a2-7)

It is somewhat ambiguous what Aristotle is referring to when he says ‘a sign of this’, but it

seems that he must be referring to the claim made in the previous sentence, that “there are

also pleasures without pain and appetite, such as the pleasures of contemplating, those in

which our nature lacks nothing.” I say this because what he goes on to do is to argue that

once we have been restored, we take pleasure in different things than we do while we are

being restored—things that are pleasant without qualification, in the sense that taking

pleasure in them does not presuppose any lack or deficiency in our nature.34

I do not see how

this could be taken as an argument for any of the other claims made in the previous portion of

the passage, but it is clear how this argument could be taken to support the claim that I’ve

suggested it is meant to support.

33

It is beyond the scope of this discussion to fully elaborate the metaphysical status of the

transition from knowing to contemplating. See Lorenz, “Assimilation” for an illuminating

discussion of this issue. 34

See section 1 of Chapter One for a detailed discussion of Aristotle’s distinction between

something being pleasant without qualification and being pleasant in a derivative way.

45

Take the case of having a sore throat. While one is in this condition, one might take

pleasure in sucking on very strong lozenges, because they soothe one’s throat. Once one

recovers from this condition, however, one no longer enjoys the strong lozenges, and instead

takes pleasure in sucking on candy, which would not have been pleasant when one had the

sore throat. Aristotle’s point is that the fact that we enjoy the lozenges when we are being

restored and the candy afterwards indicates that enjoyment we take in the lozenges depends

on the presence of pain and lack, whereas the enjoyment we take in the candy does not. This

is not meant to be a decisive argument, it is just supposed to be a sign supporting Aristotle’s

claim that there are such pleasures, which is more than adequate in the context. The

counterexample of contemplation is a powerful consideration on its own; this further

argument just helps us see that contemplation is not a special case, and that there are a wide

variety of counterexamples to the Phileban theory.

As I discuss above, Aristotle next gives his response to the argument that pleasure

cannot be the best good, since that which comes to be for the sake of something cannot be as

good as that for which it comes to be for the sake of. His response is that this argument fails

because, as he has just argued, “pleasures are not becomings, nor do they all even involve a

becoming (1153a9-10).” He then restates his account of pleasure as activity rather than

becoming, but this time he elaborates further. He writes:

[Pleasures] are activities and an end, and arise when we exercise [a capacity],

not when we are coming to be [in some state]. And not all pleasures have

something else as their end, but only those in people who are being led toward

the completion of their nature. That is why it is a mistake to call pleasure a

perceived becoming. It should instead be called an activity of the natural

state, and should be called not perceived, but unimpeded. (1153a10-15)

It might seem that Aristotle’s implication that pleasures in people who are being led toward

the completion of their nature have something else as their end is in tension with his claim

46

that pleasures are not becomings. I take it that when he implies that some pleasures have

something else as their end, he is including incidental pleasures. We have seen that he thinks

that restorative processes are incidentally pleasant. They are pleasant insofar as they form an

incidental unity with an activity that is pleasant in its own right. When he claims that

pleasures are not becomings, however, he must be excluding incidental pleasures and

speaking strictly about that which is pleasant in its own right.

This passage adds two elements to his account of pleasure as activity. First, he makes

it clear that by ‘activity’ he means the exercise of a capacity. Second, he adds the condition

to his account that a pleasant activity of the natural state must be unimpeded. He indicates

that this condition is analogous to the condition in the Phileban account that a pleasant

becoming towards a natural state must be perceived. In the Phileban case, the idea is that a

becoming towards a natural state is a pleasure provided that it is perceived, so it would seem

that Aristotle’s idea is that an activity of a natural state is a pleasure provided that it is

unimpeded.35

Aristotle gives a brief indication in VII.13 of how he understands the ‘unimpeded’

condition:

That is why we all think the happy life is pleasant and weave pleasure into

happiness (eudaimonia), quite reasonably. For no activity is perfect if it is

35

Plato explains why this condition is required at Timaeus 64b, as translated by Donald Zeyl

in Plato: Complete Works: “When even a minor disturbance affects that which is easily

moved by nature [e.g., eyes or the eardrum], the disturbance is passed on in a chain reaction

with some parts affecting others in the same way as they were affected, until it reaches the

center of consciousness and reports the property that produced the reaction. On the other

hand, something that is hard to move [e.g., bones or hair] remains fixed and merely

experiences the disturbance without passing it on in any chain reaction.” There are

disturbances or restorations that take place in parts of the body that are insensate, and these

restorations should not be counted as pleasures. Similarly, Socrates says at Philebus 43a-c

that some restorations are too slight to reach our awareness, and so they should not be

counted as pleasures.

47

impeded, and happiness is something perfect. That is why the happy person

needs to have goods of the body and external goods added [to good activities],

and needs fortune also, so that he will not be impeded in these ways. Some

maintain, on the contrary, that we are happy when we are broken on the

wheel, or fall into terrible misfortunes, provided that we are good. Whether

they mean to or not, these people are talking nonsense. (1153b14-21)

His idea seems to be that external goods are required for eudaimonia because their absence

impedes the performance of the activity or activities that constitute it. The account of

eudaimonia he gives in I.7 states that eudaimonia is activity of the soul expressing virtue. If

one falls into terrible misfortune or is strung up on the wheel, one cannot perform such

activity, or at least cannot perform it with an adequate degree of perfection. One might still

have the relevant virtue, and so might be “good” in the sense that one’s soul is in a good

state, but eudaimonia is not a matter of possessing goodness, it is a matter of expressing it in

one’s activities.

Extending this model to other examples of pleasant activity, take a case where one

listens to a concert, but is surrounded by people who are eating popcorn. One’s capacity for

listening may well be in its natural state, but one’s activity of listening will be impeded by all

the distracting sounds competing with the music. One will not be able to perfectly exercise

the capacity, and so, Aristotle thinks, one’s activity of listening will not be pleasant. Take

also a case where one has a terrible foot pain and goes out for a gourmet meal. Even if the

food is very much the sort of food the person usually enjoys, and his capacities for eating and

discerning flavors are in their natural state, the person may well not take pleasure in eating,

since the pain he feels in his foot may impede the exercise of these capacities. He may not be

able to focus in the usual way on the flavor of the food he’s eating since he is constantly at

least partly attending to the intense pain he feels.

48

2: An Interpretive Problem in Aristotle’s NE VII Discussion of Pleasure

Aristotle’s view, then, is that pleasure is the activity of a capacity in its natural state,

provided that activity is not in some way impeded. I will now address the question of what

precisely counts as the pleasant activity when we experience pleasure. Aristotle makes it

clear that in the case of contemplation, the pleasant activity is just the activity of

contemplating. Likewise, the pleasure of eating a tasty meal when in a healthy natural state

just is the activity of tasting and eating. It is very difficult, however, to see what the pleasant

activity is in cases where one takes pleasure in connection with a restoration—the cases

Aristotle calls ‘incidental pleasures’. There has been a good deal of debate about this issue

among modern commentators, and it is best to begin consideration of it by discussing the

more prominent interpretations. I will discuss the views suggested by G.E.L. Owen, J.C.B.

Gosling and C.C.W. Taylor, and David Bostock. My own view, briefly, is that there is no

need to think that Aristotle had a fully worked-out positive theory in mind when he wrote the

Book VII discussion of pleasure. All the text justifies us in saying is that, for Aristotle when

he wrote the discussion, when we experience pleasure in connection with a process of

restoration, the primary seat of the pleasure is not the restoration, but rather is rather an

unimpeded, awareness-involving activity of some element or other of our constitution that

remains in its natural state despite the disruption that creates the need for a restoration. We

must bear in mind that Aristotle’s primary aim in this section of the text is not to give a

theory of pleasure, but rather is to respond to various related strains of anti-hedonism. To

achieve this aim, it is not necessary for him to offer a fully worked-out alternative theory. It

is sufficient if he establishes that whatever precisely pleasure is, it is of a type such that the

arguments of the anti-hedonists do not apply to it.

49

G.E.L. Owen writes:

Very well, even in convalescence there is a pleasure which is valuable by [the

Platonists’] standards, for the real pleasure is, as he will shortly put it

(1153a14), “an activity of the natural state”; not the trudge back to health but

the exercise of actual health. But where is this healthy activity to be found in

convalescence?... He is claiming, I take it, that any actual pleasure associated

with convalescence consists in the proper functioning of the healthy residue of

the patient.36

Owen’s view is that when I am pleased in connection with recovery from an illness, the

pleasant activity is the functioning of the parts of my body that are not afflicted with the

illness.37

This interpretation is unattractive. It immediately faces a severe difficulty when we

consider that we experience a certain pleasure when we are convalescing that we stop

experiencing once we have recovered. If Owen were right and the pleasure of convalescing

were the functioning of the parts of us that are healthy, then, one would think, we should be

able to continue to experience this pleasure once we recover, and moreover we should

experience additional pleasure due to the functioning of the parts of us that have been

restored.

One could defend Owen’s view against this kind of objection by saying that we do in

fact continue to experience the pleasure we experience while convalescing after we have

recovered, but that the pleasure is no longer intense, due to the fact that it is no longer mixed

with pain, so that we do not notice it. This strategy is unpromising, given that Aristotle says:

Further, bodily pleasures are pursued because they are intense, by people who

are incapable of enjoying other pleasures. Certainly, these people induce

some kinds of thirst in themselves. What they do is not a matter for reproach,

whenever [the pleasures] are harmless, but it is base whenever they are

harmful. These people do this because they enjoy nothing else, and many

36

G.E.L. Owen, “Aristotelian Pleasures,” 141. 37

A similar interpretation is suggested by Gerd Van Riel at 130-131 in “Aristotle’s

Definition of Pleasure: A Refutation of the Platonic Account.”

50

people’s natural constitution makes the neutral condition painful to them.

(1154b2-6)

He acknowledges such a thing as a ‘neutral condition’ (‘mêdeteron’), which is presumably a

condition which for normally functioning people is neither pleasant nor painful. He implies

that people sometimes induce thirst in themselves because the neutral condition is painful to

them. He must mean that due to impatience, addiction, or some other feature of their

constitution, the absence of bodily pleasure and pain is itself for some people painful. It

seems that Aristotle would not say this if he held the view Owen attributes to him. If his

view were that we continue to experience pleasure once we have finished convalescing,

except without the intensity caused by mixture with pain, then he would not say that the

neutral condition is painful for the class of people in question, but rather would say that the

condition of experiencing non-intense pleasure, or pleasure unmixed with pain, is painful for

them. Indeed, the very fact that Aristotle recognizes such a thing as a neutral condition spells

trouble for Owen’s view. The neutral condition must be something like the normal,

unremarkable functioning of the body. On Owen’s view, Aristotle would think that this

counts as pleasure.38

Another problem with Owen’s interpretation is that it has difficulty explaining why

Aristotle does away with the condition from the Phileban account that the relevant bodily

activity must be perceived. If there is some aspect of our body’s normal functioning that

does not in any way affect our awareness, it is clearly wrong to say that such functioning is

pleasant. At the very least, if one were to defend a view according to which there can be

38

One might worry that the relevant neutral condition is not the condition between pleasure

and pain, but rather is the absence of desire. This does not seem possible. The word

‘neutral’ (‘mêdeteron’), implies that there are two alternative conditions, and that the

condition in question is neither of them. The absence of desire would not be called a neutral

condition in this context.

51

pleasures that do not enter into our awareness, one would have to say a good deal to justify

such a drastic revision of our intuitive conception of pleasure. Aristotle does no such thing,

but given that he explicitly addresses the fact that the Phileban account holds that restorations

must be perceived, he is clearly aware of the reasons for adding such a condition.

Owen would have to say that the ‘unimpeded’ condition implies or contains the

‘perceived’ condition. This is not completely impossible, though it is very implausible. One

could make the case that one way an activity can be impeded is for it to fail to enter into

one’s awareness. There are some cases, however, such as the growth of hair and fingernails,

where the normal functioning of the body simply cannot enter into our awareness, and it

seems obviously wrong to say that this is because these “activities” are always impeded.

Moreover, even if it were possible to make an account along these lines seem plausible, it is

still a huge stretch to say that such an account should be attributed to Aristotle, given that he

explicitly says that we should replace the ‘perceived’ condition with the ‘unimpeded’

condition, and says nothing whatsoever to indicate that the ‘perceived’ condition is implied

by or contained in the ‘unimpeded’ condition. It is far more plausible to think that Aristotle

replaced the one condition with the other because he only counts activities that involve

awareness as ‘activities of the natural state’.39

I will develop this idea further below, in

connection with my discussion of Bostock. First, I will say a few things about the view

suggested by Gosling and Taylor.

Gosling and Taylor write:

When Aristotle argues that pleasure is not a process of change by in effect

showing that it is a kind of actualization, which of the two contrasts just

39

This strategy is not as viable for Owen, given that (it seems) he includes activities of the

nutritive soul as being among the pleasant activities that accompany convalescence, and, as I

will discuss below, such activities do not necessarily involve awareness.

52

distinguished is he trying to make? If it is the contrast between change and

actualization as such (sometimes referred to subsequently as ‘the weaker

contrast’) then his point must be that what constitutes enjoying something is

not undergoing some change, but realizing some potentiality. It would not, of

course, follow that the event described was not also an instance of a process of

change. (309-10)

Hence it would surely have to be admitted that the standard exercise of

musical capacity is the playing of a piece, and of chess-playing capacity the

playing of a game. But those activities are kinêseis. It appears, therefore, that

Aristotle can both recognize such serial activities as music as pleasures and

insist that the enjoyments of those activities are not kinêseis only if he is

upholding the weaker of the two contrasts which we have distinguished.

(314)

They point out that for Aristotle, processes such as drinking and building a house are

themselves activities, in the sense that they are exercises of capacities, and they are pleasant

qua activities rather than qua processes. In the Book X discussion of pleasure, as I will

discuss in section 3 of this chapter, Aristotle clearly uses ‘activity’ to mean something much

more specific than mere exercises of capacities, but it is possible that he did not have this

special use in mind when he wrote Book VII, so Gosling and Taylor’s view is worth taking

seriously.

A big problem for this interpretation is that it has a very hard time making sense of

the passage discussed above, where Aristotle clarifies what it means to say that restorative

processes are pleasant incidentally:

By incidentally pleasant things I mean pleasant things that are curative; for the

[process of] being cured happens along with some action of the part of us that

remains healthy, and hence undergoing a cure seems to be pleasant.

(1154b17-19)

Gosling and Taylor have to say that in cases where we experience pleasure in connection

with a restoration, the restorative process qua activity is pleasant in its own right, whereas the

restorative process qua process is pleasant incidentally. This requires that the unity of the

53

process qua activity and the process qua process is only incidental. First of all, it seems very

odd to think that Aristotle would say that this unity is incidental. Even if we accept this idea,

however, their interpretation is unacceptable. Aristotle explicitly says that when we undergo

curative processes, the pleasure we experience is an activity of the part of us that remains

healthy, which is a different part of us than the part that is being restored. It does not seem

plausible to think that the process of undergoing the cure qua activity is an activity of a

different part of us than the process of undergoing the cure qua process, and it is clear that

the latter happens in the part that is being restored. It seems, then, that the process of

undergoing a cure qua activity cannot be understood as an activity of the part of us that

remains healthy. Moreover, Aristotle says that what is pleasant in its own right is an activity

of the part of us that remains healthy, and that undergoing the cure merely seems to be what

is pleasant in its own right, but on Gosling and Taylor’s view, undergoing a cure is what is

pleasant in its own right, albeit qua activity. On the basis of these considerations, it seems

that we can rule out Gosling and Taylor’s interpretation.

There is a problem left, indicated in the passage expressing their view that I quoted

above, about how Aristotle can make sense of the pleasure we take in processes like doing a

crossword puzzle or listening to a piece of music. Gosling and Taylor’s primary motivation

for their view is that it has an easy time making sense of these cases. I will discuss in section

4 of this chapter a way of solving this problem that does not require us to allow that in this

context Aristotle counts the exercise of any capacity whatsoever as an activity. At this point

I will discuss the interpretation suggested by Bostock, which I am very sympathetic to,

though I think that it can be strengthened by making some subtle adjustments.

Bostock writes:

54

The doctrine, then, that there is an activity in some unimpaired part of us,

which is what is really pleasant, is certainly meant to apply to ordinary cases

of eating when hungry and drinking when thirsty, and it is very plausible to

suppose that it was evolved mainly with these cases in mind. But what is this

activity? Well, let us recall the argument from book X, chapter 3. The

pleasure cannot just be the replenishment, for the replenishment takes place in

the body, whereas we do not say that it is the body that is pleased (1173b9-

11). The pleasure, then, does not take place in the body. So where does it

take place? The obvious answer is ‘in the mind’. And what is it that goes on

in the mind when one’s body is replenished, and one is pleased by this?

Evidently, the perception of this replenishment. In the standard case, my

perceiving faculties will not be at all impaired, and I can taste, touch, and feel

perfectly well when I am not thirsty. So the thought is that what I enjoy is

not, as we loosely say, the drinking, but rather the taste of the drink, its

cooling touch in my throat as it goes down, and very possibly the bodily

feeling that I have, which can only be described as feeling that the drink is

doing me good, as my thirst disappears. These are perceptions, and

perception is certainly something that Aristotle counts as an activity, of the

kind that can be (or be completed by) a pleasure, whereas the drinking itself is

a process. My suggestion, then, is that in a so-called ‘pleasure of

replenishment’ Aristotle’s view is that the pleasure is to be found not in the

replenishment itself but in the perception of it. It is this perception that is the

associated activity of an unimpaired part of us.40

This view is in most respects very attractive. It makes excellent sense of why Aristotle

replaces the ‘perceived’ condition with the ‘unimpeded’ condition. If the relevant activity is

a perception, there is certainly no need to add the condition that it needs to be perceived. 41

It

also yields a picture of Book VII that fits well with what Aristotle says in Book X. As I

argued in Chapter One, in that discussion Aristotle defines pleasure itself as the perfection of

a perfect activity of awareness. If, as I have suggested, we understand Aristotle in Book VII

to be talking about that which is pleasant (but without being self-conscious about insisting on

this), and we accept Bostock’s view, then the Book VII and Book X discussions fit together

very neatly. We could read Aristotle in Book VII as saying that that which is pleasant is in

40

David Bostock, “Pleasure and Activity,” 268-9. 41

Bostock, “Pleasure and Activity,” uses the term ‘perception’ to narrowly refer to sense

perception (as opposed to the broader usage discussed in footnote 28 at the beginning of this

chapter, where it refers to any form of awareness).

55

every case an unimpeded activity of awareness, i.e., a perception or thought, and then in

Book X as replacing the ‘unimpeded’ condition with the similar but perhaps more demanding

‘perfect’ condition and saying that pleasure itself is the perfection of perfect activities of

awareness.42

I think that this is approximately the right thing to say, with the qualifications that

Bostock slightly over-interprets Book VII and that the relationship between VII and X is not

quite so seamless. Throughout his essay, Bostock treats the Book VII and Book X

discussions as though they were written for inclusion in a single work, freely appealing to

passages from Book X to support his interpretation of VII. This is not exegetically sound,

however. Nearly all commentators agree that Book VII was originally written as part of the

Eudemian Ethics, whereas Book X was written for the Nicomachean Ethics later in

Aristotle’s life.43

As I have suggested, it seems that there is no good reason to think that Aristotle in

fact had fully worked-out the theory of pleasure he presents in NE X when he wrote NE VII.

We cannot rule out the possibility that he had in fact worked out this theory, but if he did,

then he did not see the need to spell it out so as to make the points that he wanted to make.

We can make very good sense of the arguments in Book VII without saying anything as

determinate as what Bostock suggests we should say about the theory of pleasure that

underlies them. We do need to say that something is left unsaid in Aristotle’s account if we

42

‘Perfect’ may be more demanding than ‘unimpeded’ in the sense that it may be taken to

require not just the lack of impediments, but also the presence of various positive, facilitating

conditions. C.C.W. Taylor, in footnote 17 in his paper “Pleasure: Aristotle’s Response to

Plato,” indicates that he understands ‘impeded’ in VII to mean the same thing as ‘perfect’

does in X, but does not give any justification for holding this view. 43

A notable exception is Kenny, who argues in The Aristotelian Ethics: A Study of the

Relationship between the Eudemian and Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle that the EE is later.

56

are to make sense of his replacement of the ‘perceived’ condition with the ‘unimpeded’

condition, but it seems that there is a reasonable story to tell here that is more conservative

than Bostock’s.

Aristotle writes:

That is why it is a mistake to call pleasure a perceived becoming. It should

instead be called an activity of the natural state, and should be called not

perceived, but unimpeded. (1153a12-15)

The reason the Phileban account requires the ‘perceived’ condition is that there are some

becomings towards a natural state that do not affect our awareness. The simplest explanation

of why Aristotle leaves this condition out of his own account is that he thinks of an activity

of the relevant natural state as something that by its very nature involves in some way an

alteration of our awareness. I cannot say conclusively why he fails to explicitly mention this,

but I can offer some speculation. For Aristotle, in this context, ‘activity of the natural state’

does not denote the exercise of any natural capacity whatsoever, but rather only conscious

activity of a human subject.

Aristotle writes in NE I.13:

Consider the nonrational [aspect of the soul]. One [aspect] of it, i.e., the cause

of nutrition and growth, would seem to be plantlike and shared [with all living

things]; for we can ascribe this capacity of the soul to everything that is

nourished, including embryos, and the same capacity to full-grown living

things, since this is more reasonable than to ascribe another capacity to them.

Hence the virtue of this capacity is apparently shared, not [specifically]

human. For this part and this capacity more than others seem to be active in

sleep, and here the good and the bad person are least distinct; hence happy

people are said to be no better than miserable people for half their lives. This

lack of distinction is not surprising, since sleep is inactivity of the soul insofar

as it is called excellent or base, unless to some small extent some movements

penetrate [to our awareness], and in this way the decent person comes to have

better images [in dreams] than just any random person has. Enough about

this, and let us leave aside the nutritive part, since by nature it has no share in

human virtue. (1102a32-b12)

57

And he writes in EE 2.1:

We also neglect any other part of the soul that there may be, e.g., the nutritive,

for the above-mentioned parts are peculiar to the human soul; therefore the

excellences of the nutritive part and that concerned with growth are not those

of man. For if we speak of him qua man, he must have the power of

reasoning with respect to his governing principle and action…. (1219b37-41)

Early on in both of these ethical works, he explicitly mentions the nutritive soul and says that

it will not be a concern of the treatise. He is concerned with the human good, and activities

that do not in some way involve awareness are not relevant to this good, except insofar as

they are conditions of possibility for it (that is, insofar as they are external goods). Aristotle

says at the beginning of the NE VII discussion of pleasure:

Pleasure and pain are proper subjects of study for the political philosopher,

since he is the ruling craftsman of the end that we refer to in calling something

bad or good without qualification. Further, we must also examine them

because we have laid it down that virtue and vice of character are about pains

and pleasures, and because most people think happiness involves pleasure—

that is why they also call the blessed person by that name (makarios) from

enjoyment (chairein). (1152b1-8)

Pleasure is taken to be relevant to the human good (and there is no indication that this is just

because it is an external good), which would not be the case if it were not something that

figures in our awareness. When Aristotle comes around to stating his view that pleasure is an

unimpeded activity of the natural state, it can be assumed that he is excluding the activities of

the nutritive soul. The only activities that are relevant to the human good are ones that

exercise aspects of the soul that in some way involve awareness. This explains why he then

replaces the Phileban ‘perceived’ condition with his ‘unimpeded’ condition. Unlike

processes of restoration, there is no risk that an activity of the natural state will fail to affect

one’s awareness. If we understand ‘perception’ more broadly than Bostock does, as

encompassing not just sense perception, but all modes of awareness, then I do think that

58

Aristotle’s view in VII is that what is pleasant when one undergoes a restoration is an activity

of perceiving, since all activities of the non-nutritive soul involve awareness and so are in

this broad sense activities of perceiving.44

There is not sufficient evidence, however, for thinking, as Bostock does, that when

Aristotle implied in Book VII that what is pleasant when we undergo a process of restoration

is the perception of that process, this was on the grounds of the worked-out theory of

pleasure presented in Book X. His arguments against the anti-hedonists merely require that

what is pleasant in such cases is an unimpeded activity of the natural state, which we can

assume means an activity of the natural state of some aspect of the soul other than the

nutritive. I take it, then, that we are not entitled to conclude that the connection between the

Book VII and Book X discussions of pleasure is that they spell out two different parts of a

unified theory belonging equally to both, the former giving his account of that which is

pleasant and the latter giving his account of what pleasure itself is.45

What we should say

instead is that in Book VII, in the course of arguing against Phileban anti-hedonism, Aristotle

employed ideas that indicate that he had made significant progress in developing the view he

held when he wrote Book X that that which is pleasant is in all cases a perfect activity of

awareness, even though he may not yet have arrived at the final version of this view or

worked out the arguments and analyses found in X that to his satisfaction establish it as true.

44

For all Aristotle says in Book VII, he may have thought, for instance, that in some cases of

restoration what is pleasant is an emotional mode of awareness, and he may not have held a

determinate view about whether emotions are activities of thought, sense perception, or

something else. 45

C.C.W. Taylor tentatively endorses this type of view in “Pleasure: Aristotle’s Response to

Plato,” where he retreats from the view he and Gosling defended in The Greeks on Pleasure

and acknowledges that he finds Bostock’s interpretation of Book VII persuasive.

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3: Process and Activity in NE X

In NE X, Aristotle explicitly addresses the question of what pleasure itself is. I

argued in Chapter One that he thinks it is the perfection of a perfect activity of awareness. A

difficulty this interpretation faces is that there are passages in X.3-4 which one might think

are most naturally read as implying that pleasure itself is an activity. I will first discuss a

passage from X.3, and argue that the standard way of interpreting the passage is untenable.

On a more plausible interpretation, the passage does not imply that pleasure itself is an

activity. I will then discuss two connected passages from X.4, and argue that although at this

point he is in fact talking about pleasure itself, the argument he gives should not be taken to

imply that pleasure itself is an activity, but rather should be taken as an argument for the

claim that pleasure itself is complete in the same way as a certain type of activity is.

Aristotle writes in X.3:

They hold that what is good is complete/final (teleion), whereas processes and

becomings are incomplete, and they try to show that pleasure is a process and

a becoming. It would seem, however, that they are wrong, and pleasure is not

even a process. For quickness and slowness seem to be proper to every

process—if not in itself (as, for instance, with the universe), then in relation to

something else. But neither of these is true of pleasure. For though certainly

it is possible to become pleased quickly, as it is possible to become angry

quickly, it is not possible to be pleased quickly, even in relation to something

else, whereas this is possible for walking and growing and all such things [i.e.,

for processes]. It is possible, then, to pass quickly or slowly into pleasure, but

not possible to be in the activity of pleasure quickly [or slowly], i.e., to be

pleased [quickly or slowly]. (1173a29-b4)

At the end of this passage, Aristotle speaks of ‘being in the activity of pleasure’ (‘energein

kat’ autên’, where ‘autên’ refers to ‘hêdonên’). Given that it is very clear that in X.4-5

Aristotle means to give an account of pleasure itself, one might naturally think that this is his

concern throughout X.1-5. One might therefore think that when Aristotle speaks of being in

60

the activity of pleasure in this passage, he is implying that pleasure itself is an activity. One

might think that his argument is that it is impossible to be in the activity that is pleasure

quickly or slowly. I do not think that this is right. I will argue that all Aristotle means when

he speaks in this passage of ‘being in the activity of pleasure’ is being actively, as opposed to

potentially, pleased.

At this point in Book X, Aristotle has not yet started to give his account of what

pleasure itself is. He turns to this inquiry at the beginning of X.4, when he says “What, then,

or what kind of thing, is pleasure? This will become clearer if we take it up again from the

beginning (1174a13-14).” In X.2-3, he is responding to various legomena, just as he is in

VII.12, except that here he addresses the views of hedonists as well as anti-hedonists. In the

passage quoted above from X.3, I take it that Aristotle means to be arguing against the same

anti-hedonist argument that he argued against in VII.12 by claiming that that which is

pleasant is an activity rather than a process. It may seem that he is addressing a different

argument here, since here the argument he attributes to his opponent is that pleasure cannot

be good because it is not “teleion”, which is usually translated as ‘complete’ in this context,

whereas in VII.11 the argument he attributes to his opponent is that pleasure cannot be good

because it is the becoming of a good and no becoming is itself good. It seems, however, that

on the most plausible way of understanding what he means by ‘teleion’ in the X.3 passage,

the anti-hedonist argument turns out to be very similar to the one he refers to in VII.11.

I take it that in X.3 the word ‘teleion’ should be translated as ‘final’ rather than

‘complete’. Something is final in the relevant sense if it is pursued for its own sake.46

If

46

Cf. NE 1.7, 1097a25-28: “Since there are apparently many ends, and we choose some of

them (for instance, wealth, flutes, and, in general, instruments) because of something else, it

is clear that not all ends are final.”

61

something is pursued for the sake of some further end, and one would have no reason to

pursue it if it did not promote that end, then one does not consider this thing a good. If one

pursues something for its own sake, however, one does consider it a good. We can see, then,

that if the relevant meaning of ‘teleion’ is ‘final’, the anti-hedonist argument is very similar

to the one Aristotle introduces in VII.11. The argument in VII.11 rests on the principle that if

something is for the sake of some good, then it is not itself good, which is very similar to the

principle that if something is not final, then it is not good. The only difference is that the

VII.11 principle implies that something cannot be pursued both for the sake of something

else and for its own sake.

Moreover, as John Cooper has argued, Plato did employ this notion of finality in the

Philebus, and so it is not at all a stretch to think that an anti-hedonist argument based on the

theory developed in the Philebus would involve the notion of finality.47

At Philebus 20d,

Socrates asks, “whether the good is necessarily bound to be final (teleon) or not final,” and

Protarchus replies in the affirmative.48

Cooper argues that ‘teleon’ should be construed as

‘final’ here rather than ‘complete’ because when Plato actually gives an account of the good,

it is not something ‘complete’ in the sense of containing all the goods. Also, the argument at

Philebus 54c-d, discussed in section 1 of this chapter, can be plausibly understood as an

application of the criterion that the good must be final, especially since it is immediately

followed in the text by arguments that can be understood as applications of the other criteria

for goodness Socrates lays out at 20d and following.49

At any rate, even if this is not how

Plato meant to be using the word ‘teleon’, this is very likely how Aristotle understood him to

47

John Cooper, “Plato and Aristotle on ‘Finality’ and ‘(Self)-Sufficiency’.” 48

Note that ‘teleon’ is a variant spelling of ‘teleion’, not a different word. 49

I mean that the argument in 54e-55b can be interpreted as an application of the criteria that

the good must be ‘choice-worthy’ and ‘sufficient’.

62

be using it, since Aristotle clearly has the relevant passage from the Philebus in mind when

he spells out his criteria for the specification of the good in NE I.7. I won’t argue for this

further here; it is sufficient to say that it is plausible to think that Aristotle understood Plato

as having a notion of finality that he employed in connection with his examination of

pleasure in the Philebus.

The X.3 passage in question has usually been understood very differently. Most

commentators think that ‘teleion’ in this context means complete in form. The passage has

presumably been understood in this way because the argument Aristotle gives in it bears a

certain similarity to arguments that he gives in X.4 where he clearly means to be saying that

pleasure is complete in form.50

A passage from Metaphysics Θ.6 helps elucidate what is

meant by ‘complete in form’:

Since of the actions which have a limit none is an end but all are relative to

the end, e.g., the process or making thin is of this sort, and the things

themselves, when one is making them thin are in movement in this way (i.e.

without being already that at which the process aims), this is not an action or

at least not a complete one (for it is not an end); but that in which the end is

present is an action. E.g., at the same time we are seeing and have seen, are

understanding and have understood, are thinking and have thought: but it is

not true that at the same time we are learning and have learnt, or are being

cured and have been cured. At the same time we are living well and have

lived well, and are happy and have been happy. If not, the process would

have had some time to cease, as the process of making thin ceases: but, as it

is, it does not cease; we are living and have lived. Of these, then, we must call

one set processes and the other activities. (1048b18-28)51

50

E.g., Owen lumps the X.3 argument in with the arguments from X.4 on pg. 149. Gosling

and Taylor do the same on pp. 310-11. 51

N.B., Myles Burnyeat suggests, in “De Anima II 5,” 43, that Aristotle may have written

this passage for inclusion in an ethical work.

63

Here Aristotle gives us what is known as the “perfect-tense test” for determining whether an

action52

is a process or activity. An action is an activity if the truth of a present tense

ascription of it to an agent implies the truth of a perfect tense ascription, and it is a process if

it doesn’t. For instance, ‘X is seeing’ implies ‘X has seen’, and so seeing is an activity, but

‘X is building a house’ does not imply ‘X has built a house’, and so building a house is a

process. This test tracks whether or not an action is essentially a progression towards some

end. If it is, then while one is performing the action one has not yet reached the end, and so

one cannot yet have performed the action, in the sense of having completed it. If an action is

an activity, on the other hand, it is not essentially a progression towards an end. If one does

any amount of seeing at all, one has completed some seeing, and so one has seen. If I were

looking at something and suddenly the room went dark before I had stopped looking, it

would not be correct to say that I hadn’t looked at the thing. If, on the other hand, I were

tying my shoes and the light went out before I was finished and had to stop, it would be

correct to say that I hadn’t tied my shoes. Activities are complete in form in the sense that

while they are being performed they do not lack anything that would be required for them to

count as the activities that they are. Any amount of seeing is fully an activity of seeing.

Processes, on the other hand, are not complete in form. While a process of house-building is

going on, it does not yet count as a complete process of house-building. The end has to be

reached before this can be the case.

It is clear why one might think that the meaning of ‘teleion’ in the NE X.3 passage is

the same as in the Metaphysics Θ.6 passage. Asking whether something can be done more

52

‘Actions’ translates the Greek word ‘praxeis’. In this context, the term does not have any

special or technical meaning, as it does in other contexts. It should just be taken to mean

‘things that subjects do’.

64

quickly or more slowly is another way of testing whether it is a progression, since only

progressions admit of quickness and slowness. This is true because quickness and slowness

are measures of the number of units of change that occur per unit of time.53

If an action

cannot be broken down into units of change, then it does not admit of quickness and

slowness. Take the cases of house-building and seeing. House-building can be divided into,

among other units, that of setting up walls. If a given process of house-building requires

putting up four walls, then the house-building proceeds more quickly if two walls are put up

in an hour than it does if only one wall is put up in an hour. Seeing, on the other hand,

cannot be divided up in an analogous way.54

It has no units that could proceed at a faster or

slower rate, and so it is not a progression and therefore not a process. This test could be seen

as another way of testing whether an action is complete in form.

If we look at the passage more closely, however, this interpretation doesn’t hold up.

The passage begins, “They hold that what is good is complete, whereas processes and

becomings are incomplete, and they try to show that pleasure is a process and a becoming”

(1173a29-31). The ‘they’ here are the anti-hedonists who took up the arguments of the

“subtle thinkers” from the Philebus (or perhaps who were these subtle thinkers). The

reference to ‘becomings’ makes this clear, as does the immediate context of the passage. As

I discussed, construing ‘complete’ as ‘final’ makes it easy to see how the argument Aristotle

is replying to can be understood as an argument these anti-hedonists would have made. It is

not at all easy to see how this could have been an argument made by these anti-hedonists if

53

This is in fact somewhat more complicated for Aristotle, given his idiosyncratic conception

of time, but what I say here is adequate for my purposes. 54

Some commentators have objected that at least in some cases, seeing and other actions that

Aristotle counts as activities can be similarly divided up. I will address this worry in section

4 of this chapter.

65

‘complete’ is construed as ‘complete in form’. For one thing, it is not at all clear why

Aristotle would think that the anti-hedonists even had a notion of completeness in form

(whereas, as I say above, it is very clear why he would think they had a notion of finality).

This notion comes into play for Aristotle because it is what distinguishes processes from

activities, but the anti-hedonists he is responding to don’t recognize the process/activity

distinction. In VII.12, part of Aristotle’s reply to them is that they only recognize states as

goods, but that there are in fact two kinds of goods, states and activities. If one thinks that

the sense of ‘teleion’ in X.3 is ‘complete in form’, one must think that for whatever reason

Aristotle chose to recast one of the anti-hedonists’ arguments in terms of a notion they did

not recognize. This still does not work, however, since it is not at all clear what argument he

could be recasting. The arguments they give revolve around the theme that pleasure is the

becoming of a natural state, and so the state is what is good, not the becoming of the state. A

state cannot be understood as complete in form in the Meta. Θ.6 sense, since it is not an

action. Neither the perfect-tense test nor the quickness and slowness test can be applied to

states.

I take it, then, that the X.3 passage quoted above should not be lumped together with

the X.4 passages, and should instead be construed as responding to the same legomenon that

Aristotle responds to in VII.12 by arguing that that which is pleasant is an activity rather than

a process (i.e., the one introduced at 1152b12-15). The argument he gives in the X.3 passage

does bear some resemblance to the Meta. Θ.6 argument, as well as to the arguments in X.4

that pleasure is complete in form, but this is to be expected. He is responding in X.3 to the

argument that pleasure cannot be good because it is a process and processes are not final.

His reply is that pleasure is not in fact a process, and so it is not surprising that the argument

66

he gives relies on a test for determining what does and what does not count as a process.

This argument is very different from the one he gives in VII.12, where he argues that the

activity model for pleasure can make sense of all the cases that the process model can make

sense of, and can also make sense of cases such as contemplation that the process model

cannot make sense of. That argument may be thought to be somewhat weak, since it does

not strictly rule out the possibility that the process model correctly describes some pleasures

while the activity model correctly describes others. In the X.3 passage, he gives a more

robust argument that (if it is sound) does show that no pleasure could be a process.

The conclusion of the argument is: “It is possible, then, to pass quickly or slowly into

pleasure, but not possible to be in the activity of pleasure quickly [or slowly], i.e., to be

pleased [quickly or slowly] (1173b2-4).” I suggest that when Aristotle says ‘energein kat’

autên’, translated as ‘being in the activity of pleasure’, this should not be understood to imply

the technical Θ.6 notion of activity, but rather just the more common notion of activity where

it is opposed to potentiality. ‘Being in the activity of pleasure’ just means being actively

pleased. I take this suggestion to be supported by the fact that immediately after Aristotle

uses the phrase ‘energein kat’ autên’, he says ‘legô d’hêdesthai’, translated above as ‘i.e., to

be pleased’. The force of the ‘legô’ can be taken to be ‘I just mean’, such that the point of

the phrase ‘legô d’hêdesthai’ is to clarify that when he speaks of ‘being in the activity of

pleasure’, he just means ‘being pleased’, and not anything more specific or technical that

would imply that pleasure itself is an activity in the Θ.6 sense. The conclusion of the

argument, on this reading, is that it is possible to transition from being potentially pleased to

being actively pleased quickly or slowly, but that it is not possible to be actively pleased

quickly or slowly. Understood in this way, the argument establishes what Aristotle aims to

67

establish in this passage: that pleasure is not a process, and thus that the anti-hedonist

argument in question fails. I see no textual or philosophical reason to prefer a reading of the

passage that entails that pleasure is an activity in the Θ.6 sense. I take it, then, that the X.3

passage should not be taken as evidence in favor of preferring the Activity View to the

interpretation I argued for in Chapter One.

I will now turn to the arguments Aristotle gives in X.4 for the claim that pleasure

itself is complete in form. These arguments are often taken to indicate that Aristotle thinks

that pleasure itself is an activity.55

An important motivation for interpreting X.4 in this way

is that completeness in form is the criterion Aristotle uses in Meta. Θ.6 to distinguish

processes from activities. One might think that if he argues at length in X.4 for the claim that

pleasure is complete in form, it must be because he thinks that pleasure is an activity. I will

argue first that there is a plausible alternative to this interpretation, and second that it is at

least as well-motivated as this interpretation is.

I will quote only the beginning of the long passage where Aristotle discusses this

claim, since this part captures the main point, and most of the remainder of the passage is

spent making more fine-grained points that are peripheral to my concerns:

What, then, or what kind of thing, is pleasure? This will become clearer if we

take it up again from the beginning. For seeing seems to be complete at any

time, since it has no need for anything else to complete its form by coming to

be at a later time. And pleasure is also like this, since it is some sort of whole,

and no pleasure is to be found at any time that will have its form completed by

coming to be for a longer time. That is why pleasure is not a process either.

For every process, such as constructing a building, takes time, and aims at

some end, and is complete when it produces the product it seeks, or [in other

words, is complete] in this whole span of time [that it takes]. (1174a13-21)

55

E.g. Irwin, in Notes, pp. 304-5; J.O. Urmson “Aristotle on Pleasure,” 333.

68

First, I want to draw attention to the first two sentences of the passage. As I mentioned

earlier, I take this to be a clear indication that Aristotle means to be discussing pleasure itself

as opposed to that which is pleasant. I say this because X.4-5 appears to be a unified

discussion, and it is very clear for reasons I discussed in Chapter One that in the second half

of X.4 and in X.5 he means to be discussing pleasure itself, as explicitly distinguished from

that which is pleasant. It would be unacceptably ad hoc to claim that in the first half of X.4

he uses the term ‘pleasure’ to mean that which is pleasant and then shifts to the other usage

unannounced.

With this in mind, I take this passage to express an argument for the claim that

pleasure itself is complete in form, and therefore is not a process. He is no longer responding

to legomena at this point; he is giving a positive account of pleasure. Still, part of the reason

it is important to him to emphasize that pleasure itself is not a process is no doubt that he

means to be distancing his own view from the Phileban theory in this respect. The Platonists

did not distinguish between pleasure itself and that which is pleasant, but it still makes sense

that Aristotle, in having and insisting on that distinction, would consider the view that

pleasure itself is a process to be a salient alternative to his own view. I have claimed that his

own view is that pleasure itself is the perfection of perfect activity of awareness. It seems

clear that this view is at least compatible with the passage from X.4 quoted above. If we plug

the account of what pleasure itself is that I claim we should attribute to him into this passage,

we get: “No [perfection of a perfect activity of awareness] is to be found at any time that will

have its form completed by coming to be for a longer time.”56

Perfection is an aspect that a

56

I do not mean to imply that at this point in the discussion Aristotle means for pleasure to be

understood as the perfection of a perfect activity of awareness. My point is just that the

69

perfect activity of awareness has in virtue of its being performed under certain conditions that

either do or do not obtain. If the conditions obtain even for an instant, the activity is perfect

for that instant, and its perfection cannot be made more complete in form (more a case of that

perfection) by any progression that is spread out over time.57

These conditions may,

however, obtain to a greater or lesser extent, and so an activity of awareness can become

more perfect. Becoming more perfect is indeed a progression, but this does not entail that

being perfect is a progression. I take it, then, that it is not necessary to take the X.4 passage

quoted above to imply that pleasure itself is an activity. The argument can be made sense of

under the supposition that he is thinking of pleasure itself as an aspect of activity. I will now

turn to the question of how well-motivated my reading of the passage is in comparison with

the reading that supports the Activity View.

As I have discussed, Aristotle says in Meta. Θ.6 that completeness in form is what

distinguishes activities from processes. This naturally inclines one to think that when he says

in NE X.4 that pleasure is not a process because it is complete in form, he means to imply

that it is an activity. This inclination is compounded if one rejects my suggestion that in

VII.12, when Aristotle says that pleasure is an activity rather than a process, he is giving an

account of that which is pleasant. If one thinks that he saying that pleasure itself is an

activity in VII.12, then one would naturally think that he is repeating this idea here.

In X.5, at 1175b30-35, Aristotle unambiguously rules out the view that pleasure is

identical to the activity that it arises in connection with, and so if one reads the beginning of

argument he gives here is compatible with the account of pleasure that (I claim) he spells out

later on in X.4. 57

I should add the qualification, which I will discuss in section 4 of this chapter, that the

conditions may depend on the occurrence of a progression. This does not imply that the

perfection that arises when the activity is performed under these conditions is made more

complete in form by the progression.

70

X.4 as saying that pleasure is an activity, one has to say that his view in Book X is that

pleasure is a further activity over an above the activity that it arises in connection with. I

take it that this gives us strong reason to prefer my reading. It is hard to see what the further

activity could be, but presumably the idea is that it is the activity of enjoying a perfect

activity of awareness. As I discussed in my introduction, a central feature of Aristotle’s

account is that he thinks that pleasure is not something separate from the activity it arises in

connection with. This is not a decisive consideration, but I find it hard to see how the view

that pleasure is a further activity over and above the activity it arises in connection with does

not entail that it is separate from this activity. If being a different activity from a given

activity does not make something separate from that activity, then there must be a

complicated story about the relationship between the two activities. There is no passage in

the context that can be plausibly construed as explaining what this relationship amounts to,

and so proponents of the Activity View have to say that Aristotle leaves this very crucial part

of his view unstated.58

I claim, then, that while it may seem that the most natural way to read the first part of

X.4 is to take Aristotle to be arguing there that pleasure itself is an activity, there are strong

reasons for thinking that this is not in fact how it should be read. I want now to draw

particular attention to the fact that he does not at any point in this passage say that pleasure is

an activity. He says that its form is complete. If he means to imply that pleasure is an

58

Perhaps one could try to construe the “bloom of youth” passage as spelling out what this

relationship is, but I cannot even begin to see how this would go, and at any rate, one would

have to do some elaborate interpretive acrobatics that one could avoid if one takes what I

take to be the simpler and more plausible route of rejecting the Activity View. Irwin

endorses the Activity View, but reads the bloom passage as saying that pleasure is a final

cause of perfect activity (306).

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activity, it would be very easy for him to just come out and say this. He says it over and over

again in Book VII where, I claim, he is not using ‘pleasure’ to refer to pleasure itself. There

is only one place in the whole of X.1-5 where a word related to the word for pleasure and a

word related to the word for activity are associated with each other, and that is the passage in

X.3, discussed above, where he says, “It is possible, then, to pass quickly or slowly into

pleasure, but not possible to be in the activity of pleasure [quickly or slowly], i.e., to be

pleased quickly [or slowly] (1173b2-4).” As I have argued, this passage certainly does not

have to be taken to imply that pleasure itself is an activity. Judging by appearances, Aristotle

is being very careful not to say that pleasure is an activity.

In fact, I take the only legitimate consideration in favor of reading the beginning of

X.4 in a way that implies the Activity View is that this reading fits more neatly with the

Meta. Θ.6 passage. This is a weak consideration, however, since the Metaphysics passage

does not imply that only activities are complete in form. It merely implies that no action that

is not an activity is complete in form. I take it, then, that the interpretation I suggest is at

least compatible with the Metaphysics passage, since I take that passage not to exclude the

possibility that an aspect of an activity can be complete in form.

4: A Puzzle About Pleasure and Process

I would like to conclude by thinking a little about a puzzle that I alluded to earlier: if

Aristotle thinks that that which is pleasant is perfect activity of awareness and pleasure itself

is the perfection of such activity, how does he make sense of the pleasure we take in doing

things like listening to musical performances and doing crossword puzzles that seem to be

processes?

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Owen offers one solution:

“So if I find working at cross-word puzzles more enjoyable than

contemplating their solutions, that is surely because for me the puzzling has

the form of a self-contained activity like juggling, not that of an end-directed

operation like recovering one’s stamina or building a house. At any moment

that I say I am working at such a puzzle I can say I have worked at it (cf. Met

1048b18-35), and that use of the perfect would not be open to me if I

described myself as solving the puzzle.” (143)

He suggests that when I enjoy working on a crossword puzzle, what I enjoy is being engaged

in working on it, not the process of progressing step-by-step towards finishing it. This is a

good start, but things are somewhat more complicated.

Bostock articulates the difficulty that remains:

Upon my account, Aristotle’s explanation of a ‘pleasure of replenishment’

involves the ability to perceive a process, and many of the examples he cites

himself are the perceptions of processes, e.g., listening to a piece of music

(1175a14) or watching a play (1175b12). But perceiving a process would

seem to be itself a process, i.e., something whose form (which identifies it as

the perception that it is, say, a hearing of Beethoven’s Ninth) is not

completely realized at any time at which it is going on. This, however,

appears to be a point that he has simply overlooked. (272)

Listening to a piece of music does involve a kind of progression. One of the conditions that

must be in place for an activity of awareness to count as perfect is that the capacity being

exercised must be active in relation to a fine object. In the case of listening to music, the fine

object is a fine musical performance. A fine musical performance, however, is a progression.

Its fineness depends in part on how well its sequential parts fit together. One might think that

listening to a musical performance must therefore be understood as a progression, in which

case listening turns out to be a process rather than an activity.

I do not think that we need to say this. An activity of awareness is perfect when it is

the activation of a capacity in good condition in relation to a fine object. The fineness of the

object can depend on its being a progression without the activity of perceiving it being a

73

progression. To make this intuitive, consider a case where I am enjoying a concert when

suddenly a swarm of killer bees invades the theater and the performers are forced to stop

playing before they finish the piece of music they are performing. If we say that what I was

enjoying was ‘listening to such and such a piece of music’, then the perfect-tense test from

Meta. Θ.6 fails. It is not true that I listened to the piece of music. But why think that this is

what I was enjoying? It seems bizarre to say that the killer bee invasion retroactively made it

true that I had not been experiencing pleasure. If someone had asked me in the middle of the

concert whether I was experiencing pleasure at that point in time, it would not have made

sense to say that I wouldn’t be able to answer until I found out whether the performers would

be able to finish the piece. It seems that what I am enjoying is ‘listening to music’, where

‘music’ is understood not as a complete piece of music, but rather as what I am hearing

moment by moment. It may be true that what I am hearing moment by moment must have a

certain connection with what preceded it and with what I expect to follow it in order for me

to enjoy listening to it, but this does not imply that at each moment I am enjoying the entire

piece of music and not simply what I am hearing at that moment.

I am in sharp disagreement with Gosling and Taylor:

Thus while one may indeed enjoy every move in a chess game, it is likely to

be essential to one’s enjoyment that one sees each move as contributing to the

development of the game from start to finish, and if the game is left

unfinished, one’s enjoyment is no less curtailed than the game itself. (313)

Even if the pleasure one takes in playing chess depends on thinking of each move in a chess

game as part of a progression that one thinks of as careening towards the completion of the

game, it does not follow that one has not taken pleasure in playing chess if the game does not

end up being completed. The complexities of the progression that each move is imbedded in

74

are what make it a fine object for thought and are what make it apt to fully activate the

relevant capacity. What I am actually enjoying at each moment is not the progression of the

game, but rather the thinking I am doing at that moment, the object of which might be a

move that is pleasant to think about only in the context of the progression of the game.

Perhaps there is some further pleasure one can experience at the conclusion of a chess game

when one contemplates the game as a whole, but this is different from the pleasure one

experiences in direct connection with the actual playing of the game.

I take it, then, that the pleasure we take in connection with things like listening to a

piece of music and solving a crossword puzzle can be made sense of on the interpretation of

Aristotle’s theory of pleasure that I have proposed. Although the objects of these activities

are essentially progressions and thus are incomplete in form while they are going on, the

activities themselves are complete in form at any time while we engage in them.

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Chapter Three: Aristotle’s Qualitativism and the Comparability of Pleasures

Aristotle famously claims that pleasures differ from one another in kind in virtue of

the differences in kind among the activities they arise in connection with.59

I will call this

view ‘Qualitativism’ about pleasure.60

Qualitativism might seem difficult to make sense of,

in part because it cuts sharply against the prevailing modern conception of pleasure as a

single kind of feeling. My central aim in this chapter is to elaborate what Aristotle’s

Qualitativism amounts to and what his reasons are for holding it. I will also make a case that

it is a far more plausible position than it might initially seem, and that it is compatible with

many of our ordinary intuitions about pleasure.

In the course of making this case, I will discuss modern versions of Qualitativism and

difficulties they face and I will argue that although Aristotle does not explicitly address these

difficulties, his theory provides sufficient resources to resolve them. An important issue I

will be concerned with is that Qualitativism might seem to imply that some pleasures cannot

be compared to each other with respect to their degree of pleasantness, since differences in

kind between pleasures might seem to render such comparisons impossible. I will call the

claim that some pleasures cannot be compared with one another in pleasantness

‘Incomparabilism’, and the denial of this claim ‘Comparabilism’. Intuitively,

Incomparabilism is difficult to accept. We often choose to do one activity rather than another

because we think that it would be more pleasant, even when we are choosing between

activities that differ markedly in kind. For instance, we might decide to skip a fancy meal to

59

Throughout this chapter I use ‘pleasure’ to refer to pleasure itself as opposed to that which

is pleasant. 60

My choice of this term is due to the connection between this view of Aristotle’s and the

view held by John Stuart Mill that pleasures differ in quality as opposed to merely in

quantity. This connection is discussed in the second and third sections of this chapter.

76

attend a lecture entirely because we think that we would enjoy the lecture more than we

would enjoy the meal.

In section 1 of this chapter, I will discuss Aristotle’s Qualitativism and the arguments

that he gives in support of it in NE X.5. I will suggest an interpretation of his Qualitativism

that is based on the interpretation of NE X.4 that I defended in Chapter One, according to

which pleasure is the perfection of a perfect activity of awareness. In section 2, I will discuss

the tension between Comparabilism and Qualitativism, paying some attention to modern

views. In section 3, I will adduce evidence for attributing a version of Comparabilism to

Aristotle, and propose a way of reconciling it with his Qualitativism.

1: Aristotle’s Qualitativism

I argued in Chapter One that, for Aristotle, pleasure is the perfection of a perfect

activity of awareness. A perfect activity of awareness is one where a capacity for awareness

that is in good condition is active in relation to a fine object of the kind naturally suited to be

an object of that mode of awareness. Aristotle allows for instances of derivative perfection,

where a capacity may fail to be in a good condition and the object that it is active in relation

to may fail to be fine, provided that there is a certain type of fit between the object and the

condition of the capacity that is being activated. In such cases, the object that a capacity is

active in relation to must be apt to facilitate the full exercise of the capacity, given the

condition that the capacity is in at the time and under the given circumstances. Pleasure is

the character that such an activity has in virtue of the fit that exists between the object and the

condition of the capacity.

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This picture naturally suggests a way of understanding Aristotle’s Qualitativism,

which I will discuss shortly. First, however, it will be useful to consider the interpretation of

Aristotle’s Qualitativism that would be suggested by the Activity View, which I objected to

in Chapter Two. The Activity View is the view that, for Aristotle, pleasure itself is an

activity, distinct from whatever activity of awareness is being enjoyed. T.H. Irwin, who

accepts the Activity View, briefly states the way he understands Aristotle’s Qualitativism:

Aristotle’s way of distinguishing pleasures shows that he does not think

pleasure is some introspectively uniform state, or that its different sources

(‘pleasant things’) are merely different and interchangeable instrumental

means to the same end. The pleasure of dice playing, for instance,

sunbathing, and music are different in kind, not merely in origin.61

Irwin thinks that when Aristotle says that pleasures differ in kind in virtue of the differences

in kind among the activities they arise in connection with, he means that for each kind of

activity of awareness, there is a kind of pleasure-activity (an activity that is a pleasure)

peculiar to it. When someone takes pleasure in listening to a song, that person engages in a

certain pleasure-activity that is different in kind from the pleasure-activity one engages in

when one takes pleasure in tasting a strawberry.

I find this way of interpreting Aristotle’s Qualitativism difficult to understand. Upon

introspection, it does not seem to me that when I enjoy tasting a strawberry I do something

different than when I enjoy listening to a song, except insofar as I am engaged in a different

kind of activity of awareness. Even if we grant that a sensible story about what it means for

two pleasure-activities to differ in kind can be told, the covariance in kind of activities of

awareness and the pleasure-activities that arise in connection with them is still very

mysterious. There must be taken to be some important relation between the two that

61

Irwin, Glossary, 342.

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Aristotle has left unexplained. The core difficulty a proponent of the Activity View faces in

interpreting Aristotle’s Qualitativism, I take it, is that if pleasure is a distinct activity from the

activity it arises in connection with, pleasure and activity lack the kind of tight connection

that would provide a ready explanation of their covariance in kind. I will now argue that on

the interpretation of Aristotle’s account of pleasure I propose in Chapter One, according to

which pleasure is the perfection of a perfect activity of awareness, it turns out that pleasure

and activity are connected in a way that entails their covariance in kind.

The capacity that is activated when, e.g., we study philosophy is different in kind

from the capacity being activated when we eat something sweet. Likewise, the objects that

we think about when we study philosophy are different in kind from the objects that we

perceive when we eat something sweet. It seems to follow naturally that the character that an

activity of studying philosophy has in virtue of the fit between the condition of a capacity for

thought and its object would be different in kind from the character that an activity of tasting

something sweet has in virtue of the fit between the condition of a capacity for perception

and its object. Aristotle does not explicitly state that this is what he means when he says that

pleasures differ in kind, but this seems to me to be a very plausible outline of what he has in

mind, both because it makes good sense in conjunction other views that I take him to hold

about the nature of pleasure, and because it fits well with what he does say in his discussion

of Qualitativism.

I will proceed in this section of the chapter to go through some of the arguments

Aristotle gives in NE X.5, with a view to developing an interpretation of his Qualitativism

along the lines that I’ve just suggested. X.5 begins:

Hence pleasures also seem to differ in kind. For we suppose that things that

differ in kind are perfected by things that differ in kind. That is how it

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appears, both with natural things and with artifacts—for instance, with

animals, trees, a painting, a statue, a house, or an implement. Similarly,

activities that differ in kind are also perfected by things that differ in kind.

Now activities of thought differ in kind from activities of the capacities for

perception, and so do these from each other; so also, then, do the pleasures

that perfect them. 1175a21-28

This passage is difficult to interpret, since Aristotle does not spell out the sense in which

natural things and artifacts that differ in kind are perfected by things that differ in kind. It

will be helpful to revisit a passage from Metaphysics ∆.16 that I discussed in Chapter One:

Things, then, that are called perfect in virtue of their own nature are so

called… [in some cases] because they lack nothing in respect of goodness and

cannot be excelled and no proper part of them is found outside, [and in other

cases] in general because they cannot be exceeded in their several classes and

no part proper to them is outside. (1021b30-1022a1)

Take the case of an artifact, such as a bed. A perfect bed is one that cannot be exceeded in

goodness as a bed, or at least that lacks nothing required for it to be a good bed and that does

not lack any element that is proper to it as a bed.62

A bed with a comfortable mattress that is

missing one leg would fall short of being perfect, as would a perfectly functional bed that is

too soft to promote good posture while sleeping. A bed is perfected by having all the

features that are necessary for it to serve its purpose, and by having features that are

sufficient for it to be unable to be exceeded in goodness, or at least to lack nothing required

for goodness.

It is tempting to infer that when Aristotle says in NE X.5 that things that are different

in kind are perfected by different things he means that the features that are necessary and

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I take it that the condition ‘unable to be exceeded in goodness’ corresponds to the notion of

a maximally perfect activity that I discussed in my first chapter, whereas the weaker

condition ‘lacking nothing required for goodness’ corresponds to the notion of a (merely)

perfect activity.

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sufficient for their perfection are different in kind. But this cannot be right. Aristotle has

said in X.4:

Pleasure perfects the activity. But the way in which pleasure perfects the

activity is not the way in which the perceptible object and the perceptual

capacity perfect it when they are both excellent—just as health and the doctor

are not the cause of being healthy in the same way. (1174b23-26)

I argued in Chapter One that we should interpret this passage as saying that pleasure perfects

an activity not in the way that the object and the condition of the capacity do, by contributing

to or helping to bring about its perfection, but rather in some as yet unspecified way. On my

reading, this way turns out to be that pleasure perfects an activity by being its very

perfection; that is, by being the character that the activity has in virtue of the perfecting

contributions of the object and the condition of the capacity. If I am right about this, then the

argument Aristotle gives in the passage from X.5 quoted above does not work if that which

perfects an artifact is understood as the features of the artifact that contribute to its

perfection, since this is not the sense in which Aristotle thinks of pleasure as perfecting an

activity. The idea must instead be that what perfects an artifact is understood as its very

perfection, that is, as the character that it has in virtue and as a result of the perfecting

contributions of its features.

One might worry that all of an artifact’s features contribute to its perfection, and thus

that cordoning off its perfection from its character in general is a vacuous enterprise. It

seems to me that this worry can be dissolved if we distinguish between positive and negative

ways of contributing to a thing’s perfection. In the passage from Metaphysics ∆.16 quoted

above, Aristotle says that in order to count as perfect a thing must be either unable to be

exceeded in goodness, or at least lacking nothing required for goodness, and also must have

no part that is proper to it outside of it. In order for the latter condition not to be redundant, it

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must mean something different from ‘lacking nothing required for goodness’. The idea

seems to be that the condition that no part proper to a thing can be outside of it if it is to be

perfect states the negative condition that is required for a thing to be perfect, whereas the

condition that it must be lacking nothing required for goodness states the positive condition

that is required. That is to say, the condition that no part proper to a thing can be outside it

merely establishes that the thing must not have a serious defect or missing essential element;

this condition establishes that for a bed to be perfect, it must first be a normally functioning

bed. The condition that a thing must be lacking nothing required for goodness establishes

that the thing must have the positive contributions necessary for it to be good or fine, as

opposed to merely functional; it establishes that for a bed to be perfect, it must be very

comfortable, offer excellent back support, etc.

In this context, then, saying that what perfects an artifact or natural thing is its very

perfection should be understood as meaning that what perfects an artifact is the character that

it has in virtue of the features that make a positive contribution to its perfection. We need to

bear this in mind when we interpret Aristotle’s claim that the things that perfect artifacts that

differ in kind themselves differ in kind. It is helpful to think about particular examples.

Take, for instance, a perfect bed as opposed to a perfect cat (Aristotle explicitly lists animals

as an example in the X.5 passage quoted above). A perfect bed is one that is an optimal thing

to sleep on. For it even to count as a bed it must of course have four legs, a mattress, be able

to support the weight of a human being, etc. These features make a negative contribution to

its perfection, in that they are the minimal conditions that must be met for it to be a normally

functioning member of its kind. For a bed to be perfect, it must in addition be soft enough to

be comfortable and must also offer appropriate support to the back. These features make a

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positive contribution to its perfection. It is important to clarify that its perfection is not

merely the sum of this latter set of features, but rather is the overall effect of their

compresence and interplay. It is the bed’s character of being optimal to sleep on, abstracted

from its character of being merely something that it is possible to sleep on.

A perfect tiger, on the other hand, is one that (let’s suppose) is maximally good with

respect to its ability to survive and reproduce. It must first of all be a tiger, and so must have

stripes, teeth shaped for tearing into prey, etc. For it to be a perfect tiger, it must have stripes

that camouflage it well and are attractive to tigers of the opposite sex, and its teeth must be

sharp and strong enough to be well-suited for tearing into prey. The tiger’s perfection is not

merely the set of features that make such positive contributions to its perfection, but rather is

the overall result of the compresence and interplay of these features. It does not seem at all

mysterious that Aristotle would count this as something different in kind from a dog’s

character of being a perfect hunting companion for humans, and certainly not that he would

count it as different in kind from bed’s character of being optimal to sleep on. This character

of a bed seems, evidently, to be something peculiar to beds, as perfect, distinct from

whatever corresponds as the perfect character of an animal or an artifact of a different kind.

It is a character deriving from the interplay and relationship among a specific set of relevant

contributing conditions; since these differ in kind from one type of thing to another, the

perfect character to which they give rise differs as well.

Aristotle’s point is that the same holds true for activities. The features that make

positive contributions to the perfection of an activity of studying philosophy are different in

kind from the features that make positive contributions to the perfection of an activity of

tasting something sweet, and the overall result of the compresence and interplay of these

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features is different in kind as well. The pleasure derived from studying philosophy is a

perfection of that particular activity, and therefore it is a perfection peculiar to it. It

necessarily differs in kind from the perfection of an activity of tasting something sweet.

The basic form of this argument, then, is that things that are different in kind are

perfected by things that differ in kind (which can be seen clearly to hold in cases of artifacts

and natural things), and that this principle holds for activities of awareness. Aristotle goes on

in X.5 to fortify this argument by offering a series of considerations in favor of Qualitativism

based on empirical observations about pleasure. He writes:

This is also apparent from the way each pleasure is proper to (sunôikeiôsthai)

the activity that it perfects. For the proper (oikeia) pleasure increases the

activity; for we judge each thing better and more exactly when our activity

involves pleasure. If, for instance, we enjoy doing geometry, we become

better geometers, and understand each question better; and similarly lovers of

music, building, and so on improve at their proper characteristic activity when

they enjoy it. Each pleasure increases the activity, and what increases it is

proper to it; and since the activities are different in kind, what is proper to

them is also different in kind. (1175a29-b1)

When Aristotle says that each pleasure is proper to the activity that it perfects, I take him to

mean that each pleasure bears a certain relation to the particular activity that it perfects and to

that activity only. The word translated as ‘proper’, ‘oikeia’, has the connotations of ‘akin to’

and ‘intimately connected with’, which may indicate that the relation in question has to do

with the close connection between the character of a pleasure and the character of the activity

that it arises in connection with. Aristotle points to the phenomenon of pleasure “increasing”

the activity that it arises in connection with. All else being equal, when one takes pleasure in

performing an activity, this leads one to perform it for a longer period of time, more adeptly,

with more enthusiasm, etc. If one enjoys thinking about a math problem, one will think

about it with greater focus and persistence than one would if one did not enjoy thinking about

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it. Aristotle gives a somewhat opaque argument for Qualitativism on the basis of this

phenomenon: “Each pleasure increases the activity, and what increases it is proper to it; and

since the activities are different in kind, what is proper to them is also different in kind.” The

idea here, I take it, is that the fact that pleasure increases the particular activity that it arises in

connection with indicates that it bears a special relation to this activity. This relation entails

that the pleasure differs in kind from pleasures that are connected with activities that differ in

kind from the activity that it itself is connected with. That is, the relation is such that if A

bears it to B, and C bears it to D, and B and D differ in kind, it follows that A and C differ in

kind. It seems to me that the interpretation of Aristotle’s Qualitativism that I have been

defending can help to make sense of what this relation is and how this argument is supposed

to work.

Before spelling this out, it will be helpful to look at the next argument that Aristotle

makes in NE X.5, since it makes a connected point:

This is even more apparent from the way some activities are impeded by

pleasures from others. For lovers of flutes, for instance, cannot pay attention

to a conversation if they catch the sound of someone playing the flute, because

they enjoy flute playing more than their present activity; and so the pleasure

proper to flute playing destroys the activity of conversation. The same is true

in other cases also, whenever we are engaged in two activities at once. For

the more pleasant activity pushes out the other one, all the more if it is much

more pleasant, so that we no longer even engage in the other activity. Hence

if we are enjoying one thing intensely, we do not do another very much. It is

when we are only mildly pleased that we do something else; for instance,

people who eat nuts in theaters do this most when the actors are bad.

(1175b1-13)

This is not a new line of argument. It is meant to support the claims that pleasures are proper

to the activities they are connected with, and that this entails that they vary in kind along with

the activities. Aristotle points to a case where someone who is a lover of flute music is

engaged in a conversation, but then hears flute music, and stops paying attention to the

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conversation as she takes pleasure in connection with listening to the flute music. This

empirical observation may seem false, especially in so far as we think that some pleasures

synergize with each other. For instance, one may find that they enjoy smoking a cigar while

they listen to music, so that they take the two pleasures to enhance rather than detract from

each other. Aristotle does not address this worry, but it does seem that there is a plausible

story for him to tell. If I think about why smoking a cigar increases my enjoyment of

listening to music, it seems that it is because smoking relaxes me, and helps me to stop

running through the events of the day or thinking about what I need to do the next day, and

instead focus on the music. One of the conditions that must be in place for an activity to be

pleasant is that the capacity being activated must be in a good condition. In this case,

smoking actually improves the condition of my capacity for listening by relaxing me and

thereby removing various conditions that would otherwise impede my capacity for listening.

It could also be that focusing on music contributes further to my degree of relaxation and that

this enables me to enjoy smoking more than I would if I were sitting in silence. Aristotle

could say, then, that the synergy between the two pleasures exists not because each directly

increases the activity that the other is connected with, but rather because each creates

conditions that are conducive to the good performance of the activity that the other is

connected with. It seems plausible to think that an Aristotelian theory of pleasure could

explain in this manner all such cases of synergy between pleasures.

In the next section of X.5, Aristotle explains how this phenomenon supports his

argument:

Since, then, the proper pleasure makes an activity more exact, longer, and

better, whereas an alien pleasure damages it, clearly the two pleasures differ

widely. For an alien pleasure does virtually what a proper pain does. The

proper pain destroys activity, so that if, for instance, writing or rational

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calculation has no pleasure and is in fact painful for us, we do not write or

calculate, since the action is painful. Hence the proper pleasures and pains

have contrary effects on an activity; and the proper ones are those that arise in

connection with (epi) the activity in its own right. And as we have said, the

effect of alien pleasures is similar to the effect of pain, since they ruin the

activity, though not in the same way as pain. (1175b13-24)

This passage helps a great deal to illuminate how Aristotle understood the sense in which a

pleasure is “proper to” the activity it is connected with. It will be helpful to return to the

example of hearing flute music while one is engaged in conversation. Suppose I enjoy

conversation, but I absolutely adore flute music. I am engaged in conversation, and I

experience pleasure in connection with this activity. Suddenly, I catch the sound of flute

music in the distance, and I begin to listen to it. As I begin to take pleasure in listening to it,

this pleasure increases my activity of listening, and I start focusing on it more and more

intensely. Meanwhile, I am increasingly distracted from the conversation, to the point where

my capacity for conversing is in a bad condition, and I stop taking pleasure in connection

with the conversation. Aristotle’s point is that there must be something about the character

of the pleasure I take in listening to the flute music that increases my activity of listening

rather than my activity of conversing. Both activities are going on at the same time, and at

least at the beginning I am experiencing pleasure in connection with both. If the pleasures

connected with the two activities were the same in kind (as would be the case if, e.g.,

pleasure were a single feeling), there would be no explanation as to why the pleasure

connected with my activity of listening increases that activity but impedes my activity of

conversing. The pleasure of listening must be the kind of thing that increases the activity of

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listening but impedes the activity of conversing, and so must be different in kind from the

pleasure of conversing, which is the kind of thing that increases the activity of conversing.63

Aristotle may seem to have neglected an alternative explanation of this phenomenon.

If one thinks that pleasure is a single feeling, one might think that instances of this feeling

bear certain causal relations exclusively to the activities they are connected with. On this

view, if I am enjoying listening to flute music and conversing at the same time, I experience

two instances of the same feeling that have distinct sets of causal relations. The pleasure

connected with listening to flute music may be related to the activity of listening in such a

way that it increases it, but be related to the activity of conversing in such a way that it

impedes it. This view is somewhat plausible, but it does not fit well with the phenomena. It

does not seem right to think that when I take pleasure in two different activities

simultaneously I experience two instances of the same feeling. I don’t even understand what

it would be to experience two instances of the same feeling at the same time. It is not clear to

me how this would be phenomenally different from experiencing one instance of the feeling.

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Aristotle says in the passage under discussion that an alien pleasure does virtually what a

proper pain does. Aristotle does not give an account of pain in NE X.1-5, but one might

reasonably infer that just as pleasure is the character an activity has when there is a good fit

between capacity and object, pain is the character an activity has when there is a poor fit

between capacity and object. Take, for instance, someone has been working on a philosophy

article for twelve hours and decides to stop and rest. The person is mentally exhausted, and

so if she is later compelled to think about a philosophical problem to answer an email from a

student, she will have difficulty focusing and her activity of thinking about the problem will

be impeded in various ways. The impeded condition of her activity of thinking, on the

suggestion being considered, counts as pain. The pain the person experiences will cause her

to do a progressively worse job thinking about the problem; it will do virtually the same thing

an alien pleasure has been seen to do. This seems like a much more plausible account of pain

than the one naturally suggested by the Activity View, according to which pain is an activity

distinct from the activity that gives rise to it. It seems very odd to say that pain is something

one does that is separate from a painful activity. Pain would seem to be something that

happens to a subject when a subject does something, not something a subject does.

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The interpretation of Aristotle’s Qualitativism that I’ve proposed fits well with this

line of argument. If pleasure is the perfection of a perfect activity of awareness, then it is

easy to see the sense in which pleasure is proper to the activity it is connected with. The

pleasure of listening to flute music is the character that the activity of listening has in virtue

of the interplay between the fineness of the flute music being listened to and the good

condition of one’s capacity for listening. The relation between a pleasure and the activity it

arises in connection with is a very close one, and is clearly a relation that a pleasure can bear

only to that activity. It is also easy to see why pleasure, understood in the way I suggest,

would increase the activity it arises in connection with. Take a case where I have just had

my morning coffee and am feeling prepared to concentrate and in the mood to read. I pick

up a good book and quickly start to take pleasure in reading it. The fit between the condition

of my capacity for reading and the quality of the book causes me to become increasingly

focused as I read and to read more quickly and with greater attention to detail. Suppose in

the course of reading the book in this focused way I come to a realization about something I

had not understood previously, and I begin to think about the book in a deeper way than I

was capable of when I began to read. The condition of my capacity for reading is now in an

even better condition and I begin to enjoy the book even more and thus read it with even

greater focus. This strikes me as a very plausible way of explaining the phenomena

surrounding the pleasure of reading. The same basic story can be told about even, e.g., the

pleasure of sitting in the sun. The warm feeling of the sun leads us to continue to sit in the

sun and to focus on the pleasant sensation of the sun’s warmth more attentively. The

example of hearing flute music during a conversation can be understood in a similar way.

The fit between the music and the person’s capacity for listening leads him to focus his

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attention on the music, which in turn puts his capacity for conversation in a worse condition,

and so the person stops enjoying the conversation.

These, then, are the four main arguments Aristotle gives in favor of Qualitativism. I

have suggested a way of interpreting his overarching view and have tried to show that it fits

well with the relevant texts. I don’t claim to have given conclusive evidence in support of

the view I suggest, but I hope that I have shown that the view is in some respects very

attractive (at least more so than the interpretation naturally suggested by the Activity View).

I also hope that the neatness with which this interpretation of Aristotle’s Qualitativism fits

with the interpretation of his account of pleasure that I defended in Chapter One lends

additional plausibility to both views. Before turning to the issue of Comparabilism, I will

expand the interpretation of Aristotle’s Qualitativism that I have suggested by briefly

discussing a particularly vexed related issue, namely, the way pleasures vary in moral status

along with the activities they arise in connection with.

Aristotle writes in X.5:

Since activities differ in degree of decency and badness, and some are

choiceworthy, some to be avoided, some neither, the same is true of pleasures;

for each activity has its own proper pleasure. Hence the pleasure proper to an

excellent activity is decent, and the one proper to a base activity is vicious;

for, similarly, appetites for fine things are praiseworthy and appetites for

shameful things are blameworthy. And in fact the pleasure in an activity is

more proper to it than the desire for it. For the desire is distinguished from it

in time and in nature; but the pleasure is close to the activity, and so little

distinguished from it that disputes arise about whether the activity is the same

as the pleasure. (1175b24-33)

As I mentioned in Chapter One, Aristotle’s view that pleasures differ in kind enables him to

occupy middle ground between hedonism and anti-hedonism. He thinks that some pleasures

are good and others are bad, and that their goodness or badness correlates with the goodness

or badness of the activities they arise in connection with. He thinks that this follows from the

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fact that pleasure is proper to the activity it is connected with. He briefly supports this claim

by arguing that since desire to engage in an activity is either good or bad depending on the

activity’s moral status, a fortiori this is true of the pleasure that is taken in connection with an

activity, since pleasure is more proper to an activity than desire for it.

The interpretation of Aristotle’s Qualitativism that I’ve suggested is again helpful.

Consider two cases where a person must watch a child being tortured. In one case, the

person is appalled by what she sees and experiences great discomfort. In another, the person

is very amused by the torture and takes pleasure in watching it. The two activities of

watching have the same object, but in the latter case the person’s capacities for watching are

in a condition such that the sight of a child being tortured is a suitable object to engage them.

There is a “fit” between the condition of the person’s capacities and the scene of the child

being tortured. In the other case, the person’s capacities are not corrupted in this respect and

so the person does not experience pleasure at the sight. The activity of watching that

involves pleasure is morally bad, whereas the one that doesn’t is not. Notice that what

differentiates the two is that in the one case there is a fit between object and capacity,

whereas in the other case the person’s soul is in a different condition and so there is no such

fit. If pleasure just is the aspect that the activity has in virtue of the fit between object and

capacity, it is clear why the pleasure the person takes in connection with her bad activity of

watching would itself be something bad. It is the very aspect of the activity that

differentiates it from the non-bad activity of the person who does not take pleasure in

watching the same scene.64

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A remark Aristotle makes at 1099a17-20 in NE I.8 may be taken to corroborate this

interpretation: “For besides the reasons already given, someone who does not enjoy fine

actions is not good; for no one would call a person just, for instance, if he did not enjoy doing

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2: Qualitativism and Comparabilism

Qualitativism has important ramifications for quantitative hedonism, the view that

one ought to act so as to maximize the pleasure one experiences, and quantitative hedonistic

utilitarianism, the view that one ought to act so as to maximize the total amount pleasure

experienced by the members of one’s community. These positions have depended on the

idea of a “hedonic calculus,” that is, a method of determining which of a set of possible

outcomes would contain the most pleasure for an agent or group of agents. Such a calculus

may be possible if pleasure is assumed to be a single feeling or kind of feeling. Pleasures

could be measured by calculating the product of their intensity and duration, and then a

calculus could be used to add up the total value of the pleasure contained in a given outcome,

and then alternative outcomes could be compared in terms of their total values. Jeremy

Bentham developed a classic version of the hedonic calculus:

To a person considered by himself, the value of a pleasure or pain considered

by itself, will be greater or less, according to the four following circumstances:

1. Its intensity.

2. Its duration.

3. Its certainty or uncertainty.

4. Its propinquity or remoteness.65

Bentham’s calculus depends on the idea that all instances of pleasure are feelings of a single

kind that can be measured in intensity and other quantities according to a universal scale.

According to Qualitativism, however, pleasures differ from one another in kind. One might

reasonably suppose that it is impossible to compare pleasures differing in kind on a single

just actions, or generous if he did not enjoy generous actions, and similarly for the other

virtues.” This passage implies that taking pleasure in fine actions is in some sense essential

to being good, which is accounted for by the interpretation of X.5 that I propose. 65

Jeremy Bentham, The Principles of Morals and Legislation, 28.

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numerical scale. Suppose I am faced with a choice between listening to music or eating a

steak. How can I determine which would be more pleasant if the pleasure I get from

listening to music is a different kind of thing from the pleasure I get from eating a steak? As

I said at the beginning of this chapter, I call the view that some pleasures cannot be compared

with respect to their degree of pleasantness ‘Incomparabilism’ and the denial of this view

‘Comparabilism’. The worry quantitative hedonism and hedonistic utilitarianism faces, then,

is that Qualitativism may imply Incomparabilism, and Incomparabilism renders a

thoroughgoing hedonic calculus impossible.

John Stuart Mill famously tried to rescue hedonistic utilitarianism from this worry by

devising a non-quantitative version of it, which I’ll call ‘qualitative hedonistic utilitarianism’.

He writes:

It is quite compatible with the principle of utility to recognize the fact, that

some kinds of pleasure are more desirable and more valuable than others.66

Mill thinks that the pleasure of reading a good book, for instance, is simply a better and more

desirable thing to experience than the pleasure of playing darts. An obvious worry with

qualitative hedonistic utilitarianism is that it seems that what is being pursued is no longer

the maximization of pleasure, but rather the maximization of some other value that pleasures

are ranked according to. It might seem that one would need to replace the hedonic calculus

with a way of calculating whatever the value is that makes one pleasure better and more

desirable than another. F.H. Bradley objected to qualitative hedonistic utilitarianism along

these lines:

If you are to prefer a higher pleasure to a lower without reference to

quantity… [y]ou have no standard to estimate by, no measure to make

comparisons with. Given a certain small quantity of higher pleasure in

66

John Stuart Mill, On Liberty and Other Essays, 138.

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collision with a certain large quantity of lower, how can you decide between

them? To work the sum you must reduce the data to the same denomination.

You must go to quantity or nothing; you decline to go to quantity and hence

you can not get any result. But if you refuse to work the sum, you abandon

the greatest amount of pleasure principle.67

Bradley thinks there is a fundamental contradiction in Mill’s style of utilitarianism. Calling a

theory “utilitarian” means that it holds that we should aim at maximizing something or other.

In order to maximize something, there must be a way of determining which of a set of

alternative outcomes would have the maximum quantity of it. Bradley thinks that the only

way this is possible is if there is a scale measuring the quantity of some value that all

outcomes can be placed on. If one wants to deny that the value is something other than

pleasantness, one must say that superiority in quality is reducible to superiority in quantity of

pleasantness. Mill’s theory therefore seems to face a dilemma, since it holds that some

pleasures are more desirable than others, but denies that there is a quantitative scale on which

their desirability can be ranked. He does seem aware of this difficulty, and attempts to

explain how alternative outcomes can be compared without reference to a quantitative scale

by adopting what I will call ‘Best Judge Comparabilism’.

He writes:

If I am asked, what I mean by difference of quality in pleasures, or what

makes one pleasure more valuable than another, merely as a pleasure, except

its being greater in amount, there is but one possible answer. Of two

pleasures, if there be one to which all or almost all who have experience of

both give a decided preference, irrespective of any feeling of moral obligation

to prefer it, that is the more desirable pleasure. If one of the two is, by those

who are competently acquainted with both, placed so far above the other that

they prefer it, even though knowing it to be attended with a greater amount of

discontent, and would not resign it for any quantity of the other pleasure

which their nature is capable of, we are justified in ascribing to the preferred

enjoyment a superiority in quality, so far outweighing quantity as to render it,

in comparison, of small account. (139)

67

F.H. Bradley, Ethical Studies, 119.

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I do not think that Best Judge Comparabilism has promise as a way to respond to Bradley’s

objection.68

The idea behind it is that if there are two judges, one who has experienced the

pleasures of reading and playing darts and the other who has experienced only the pleasure of

playing darts, we all ought to defer the judgment of which pleasure is more desirable to the

one who has experienced both. This is reasonable enough, but it seems implausible to think

that this is what the desirability of pleasure actually consists in. It seems that the preferences

of the Best Judge couldn’t just be arbitrary if we are to grant them this kind of normative

authority; they must be taken to track some characteristic of the pleasures being judged.

Whatever this characteristic turns out to be would seem to be what desirability actually

consists in, and the degree of desirability a pleasure has would seem to reduce to the degree

to which it has this characteristic or the quantity of it that it has.69

The “Best Judge” test just

gives us a way to measure the quantity of a pleasure’s desirability.

It seems, then, that Best Judge Comparabilism fails in its aim of offering a way to

choose between pleasures on the basis of their desirability as pleasures without collapsing

into a quantitative version of Comparabilism. The question, then, is whether one should

simply abandon Comparabilism if one thinks that Qualitativism is true. It was not open to

68

N.B., Mill likely derived this view from thinking about Rep. IX, 583a ff., where Plato has

Socrates argue that certain pleasures are more pleasant than others on the basis of the fact

that experienced judges prefer them. Aristotle briefly rehashes this argument at EE 1235b31

ff. Both Plato and Aristotle treat the preferences of experienced judges as indications that

some activities are superior to others pleasantness. Mill, as I go on to discuss in this section

of the chapter, does not follow their lead in this respect. He is apparently committed to the

idea—suggested by neither Plato nor Aristotle—that degree of pleasantness in some sense

consists in or reduces to the preferences of experienced judges. 69

Bradley makes a similar objection, on page 119 of Ethical Studies: “We find higher

pleasure means nothing but the pleasure which those who have experienced both it and others

do as a fact choose in preference. Higher then, as we saw above, has no meaning at all,

unless we go to something outside pleasure, for we may not go to quantity of pleasure.”

95

Mill to do this, since he was trying to construct a theory of hedonistic utilitarianism, which

must be able to accommodate Comparabilism. Aristotle, however, did not hold a normative

theory that fundamentally requires a commitment to Comparabilism, and so the question

remains of whether he was or might have been an Incomparabilist.

Incomparabilism is sharply at odds with common intuitions about pleasure. We often

think and act in ways that presuppose that two activities that are wildly different in kind can

be compared as to their degree of pleasantness. I may, for instance, face a decision between

visiting an art museum and playing football. There may, of course, be many sorts of

considerations that I may weigh in making my decision, including the value of what I may

learn at the museum, the instrumental value of the exercise I will get if I play football, etc.

One of these considerations may be the degree of pleasantness I expect that each alternative

will have. I may even decide entirely on the basis of this consideration. I may think, for

instance, that since it is my one day off that week I should do whatever I would enjoy the

most, regardless of any other considerations about the value of the two options. It may be

very difficult to make a comparison, given how different the pleasures one is choosing

between are, but we still often think that there is a way in which the pleasures can at least in

principle be compared.

Cases of this sort seem to be so ubiquitous that any Incomparabilist theory faces an

uphill battle. Even if it is compatible with our intuitions to think that in some very extreme

cases two pleasures are so different that they cannot be compared, there are clearly an

abundance of cases where two activities that are different in kind seem to be comparable as

to their degree of pleasantness. Given that the principal motivation for Incomparabilism is

Qualitativism, it is hard to see how one could construct an Incomparabilist theory that allows

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comparison in most cases but excludes comparison in very extreme cases. Incomparability

should come hand and hand with difference in kind.

I do not think that Incomparabilism should be attributed to Aristotle. In addition to

the fact that Incomparabilism faces intuitive difficulties, I think there are good textual

reasons for thinking that Aristotle was committed to a version of Comparabilism. Given that

there is a tension between Comparabilism and Qualitativism, however, it would be

uncharitable to attribute both views to him without telling a story about how his theory is

equipped to reconcile them. In section 3 of this chapter, I will make the case that we should

in fact attribute a version of Comparabilism to Aristotle, and also propose a way of

reconciling it with his Qualitativism.

3: Pleasantness as Degree of Perfection

I discussed the following passage from NE X.4 at length in Chapter One:

Hence for each capacity the best activity is the activity of the subject in the

best condition in relation to the best object of the capacity. This activity will

be the most perfect and the most pleasant. For every perceptual capacity and

every sort of thought and study has its pleasure; the most pleasant activity is

the most perfect; and the most perfect is the activity of the subject in good

condition in relation to the most excellent object of the capacity. (1174b18-20)

In this passage, Aristotle indicates that he recognizes that there is a sense in which some

activities are more pleasant than others. This does not imply Comparabilism, since it does

not imply that all pleasures can be compared in pleasantness, but it does indicate that

Aristotle should not be taken to accept a stronger version of Incomparabilism, according to

which no pleasures can be compared in pleasantness. This is not a trivial point. Given that

Aristotle does not think that pleasure is a feeling, it is not open to him to give a

straightforward analysis of degree of pleasantness in terms of its intensity and duration. He

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does not explicitly give an alternative analysis, but the passage just quoted provides sufficient

motivation for attempting to reconstruct one.

In 1174b18-20, quoted above, Aristotle states what it is for an activity to be the most

perfect of its kind (i.e., the most perfect way of exercising the relevant capacity), and then

states without further explanation or argument that such an activity will also be the most

pleasant of its kind. I suggest that we should take Aristotle’s view to be that an activity’s

degree of pleasantness consists in its degree of perfection. This interpretation renders the

inference in question unproblematic, and moreover fits well with the overall interpretation of

Aristotle’s theory of pleasure that I’ve been developing. If pleasure is taken to be the

perfection of a perfect activity of awareness, it seems prima facie reasonable to say that an

activity that is more perfect is thereby more pleasant.

Another important piece of evidence is found in NE I.8:

Happiness, then, is best, finest, and most pleasant, and the Delian inscription

is wrong to distinguish these things: ‘What is most just is finest; being healthy

is most beneficial; but it is most pleasant to win our heart’s desire’. For all

three features are found in the best activities, and we say happiness is these

activities, or one of them, the best one. (1099a24-31)

I take it that the fineness of an activity of awareness corresponds to the fineness of its object.

1174b18-20 makes it clear that one of the conditions that determine an activity’s degree of

perfection is its object’s degree of fineness. Taken in conjunction with these two points, the

passage just quoted corroborates the interpretation that I’ve suggested. It implies that degree

of pleasantness correlates with degree of fineness, and we have seen that degree of perfection

also correlates with degree of fineness. The simplest and (it seems to me) most plausible

explanation of the correlation between these features of an activity is that an activity’s degree

of pleasantness just is its degree of perfection.

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There are, however, further complications. A passage from X.7, where Aristotle

discusses the connection between contemplation (theôria) and happiness (eudaimonia), is

relevant:

Besides, we think pleasure must be mixed into happiness; and it is agreed that

the activity in accord with wisdom is the most pleasant of the activities in

accord with virtue. Certainly, philosophy seems to have remarkably pure

(kathareiotêti) and firm pleasures, and it is reasonable for those who have

knowledge to spend their lives more pleasantly than those who seek it.

(1177a22-27)

This passage makes it clear that Aristotle thinks that pleasures that differ in kind can be

compared in pleasantness. He says here that activity in accord with wisdom, by which he

means excellent theoretical contemplation, is the most pleasant of the activities in accord

with virtue. Excellent theoretical contemplation is not the same kind of activity as, e.g.,

activity in accord with the virtue of temperance. The comparison Aristotle makes in this

passage between excellent theoretical contemplation and other virtuous activity therefore

implies that he thinks that activities that differ in kind can be compared in pleasantness. This

does not strictly imply Comparabilism, but it indicates that unless there is some principled

reason for him to allow that some activities differing in kind but not others can be compared

in pleasantness, he is committed to Comparabilism. I do not think that there is such a reason.

I cannot argue directly for this negative claim, but I will attempt to strengthen the case for

attributing Comparabilism to Aristotle by elaborating what it means to say that degree of

pleasantness consists in degree of perfection and adducing further textual evidence for taking

this to be Aristotle’s view. I will first discuss the notion of ‘purity’ introduced in this

passage, which I take to be crucial to understanding what it means to say that pleasantness

consists in degree of perfection. Once I have done this, I will give an account of the way in

which pleasures that differ in kind can be compared in pleasantness on Aristotle’s theory.

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In NE X.5, Aristotle uses purity as an example of a way that pleasures can differ in

kind:

Sight differs from touch in purity, as hearing and smell do from taste; hence

the pleasures also differ in the same way. So also do the pleasures of thought

differ from these [pleasures of sense]; and both sorts have different kinds

within them. (1175b36-a3)

I take it that in saying that sight differs from touch in purity, he means to imply that sight is

purer than touch. I also take him to be implying that hearing and smell are purer than taste,

and that pleasures of thought are purer than pleasures of sense. The overall ranking would

place thought first, followed by sight, followed by hearing and smell (probably hearing is

ranked above smell), followed by taste, followed by touch. One reason for thinking this is

that 1177a22-27, quoted above, implies that the pleasure of theoretical contemplation is

among the purest pleasures. Another reason is that this ranking roughly corresponds to the

informal ranking of pleasures that Aristotle gives in NE III.10, in the context of discussing

temperance. He does not explicitly mention purity in that discussion, but he does imply that

the pleasures he ranks higher are more appropriate to human beings as such. Whatever

precisely purity is, it is clearly linked with fineness and virtue, and therefore with

appropriateness for human beings as such.

Francisco Gonzalez has argued that in NE discussion of pleasure, ‘purity’ should be

taken to mean degree of formal identity between a sense or faculty of thought and its object.

He writes:

In saying, however, that one kind of sensation is purer than another, Aristotle

is implying that the identity of a sensation with its object allows of some

variation. Though the senses of touch and taste do not involve a material

identity with their objects, they nevertheless, through the need of physical

contact, involve the matter of their objects in a way which is not the case in

seeing and hearing. Because taste and touch come into contact with the matter

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as well as the form of the object, they cannot be identified with the object to

the extent that sight can.70

The suggestion which can now be made is that for Aristotle an activity is most

pleasurable according, not to the amount of pleasure it possesses, but to the

way in which it is pleasurable. Some activities contain pleasure in themselves

while in the case of others pleasure, though originating in the activity itself, is

directed towards or dependant on something distinct from the activity. To the

degree that an activity is its own object it will be pleasurable in itself.71

This is an interesting view, and I think the part of it expressed in the first of these two

quotations, where Gonzalez suggests that the purity of a sensation has to do with the degree

of assimilation between sense and sense-object, is on the right track. The suggestion made in

the second quotation, on the other hand, that when Aristotle speaks of one activity as being

more pleasant than another he means that it is less dependant on something distinct from

itself, seems incorrect. If this were Aristotle’s meaning in using comparative and superlative

forms of the word for pleasant, he would be using these terms in a very non-standard way

that he could not possibly expect a reader to decode without explicit clarification. I will

revise and expand on Gonzalez’s proposal that the purity of an activity of awareness consists

in the degree of assimilation between the capacity being activated and the object it is active

in relation to, and then connect this view with the suggestion I have made that degree of

pleasantness consists in degree of perfection. First, though, it is crucially important to

consider evidence from Plato’s Philebus, which Gonzalez neglects.

As I argued in Chapter Two, Aristotle responds to views from the Philebus in both

the NE VII and X discussions of pleasure. Plato uses the word ‘pure’ (‘katharos’, related to

‘kathareiotês’) several times in the dialogue. It is very likely that when Aristotle talks about

the purity of pleasures in NE X, the notion he has in mind is connected in some way with the

70

Francisco Gonzalez, “Aristotle on Pleasure and Perfection,” 155. 71

Ibid., 157.

101

notion of purity found in the Philebus. Plato has Socrates state a general account of purity,

using whiteness as an example, and connects this account with the Phileban theory of

pleasure:

Socrates: Let us take whiteness first, if you have no objection.

Protarchus: That is fine with me.

Socrates: Now, how can there be purity in the case of whiteness, and what sort

of thing is it? Is it the greatest quantity or amount, or is it rather the complete

lack of any admixture, that is, where there is not the slightest part of any other

kind contained in this color?

Protarchus: It will obviously be the perfectly unadulterated color.

Socrates: Right. But shall we not also agree that this is the truest and most

beautiful of all instances of white, rather than what is greatest in quantity or

amount?

Protarchus: Certainly.

Socrates: So we are perfectly justified if we say that a small portion of pure

white is to be regarded as whiter than a larger quantity of an impure

whiteness, and at the same time more beautiful and possessed of more truth?

Protarchus: Perfectly justified.

Socrates: Well, now, we don’t need to run through many more examples to

justify our account of pleasure, too, every small and insignificant pleasure that

is unadulterated by pain will turn out to be pleasanter, truer, and more

beautiful than a greater quantity and amount of the impure kind. (53a-c)

‘Pure’ is used here to mean lack of admixture. This is a non-technical, ordinary usage of the

term. Socrates says in this passage that pure pleasures are ones that are not mixed with any

pain. I do not think that Aristotle takes up this view of what it is for a pleasure to be pure,

since he does not accept the theory of pleasure that underlies it, but this passage from the

Philebus is nevertheless very helpful. On the theory of pleasure expressed in the Philebus,

pleasure is the perceived restoration of a disruption of one’s natural harmony. In order for

one to experience pleasure, one’s natural harmony must be disrupted in some way, so that

there is something to be restored. If the disruption is perceptible, it is a pain. Some

disruptions, such as forgetting a piece of knowledge, are imperceptible and therefore

painless, but others, such as hunger, are perceptible and painful. The pleasure of eating (for

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sustenance) is, on the Phileban theory of pleasure, the perceived restoration of hunger. In

order to experience this pleasure, one must still be hungry to some degree while one is

eating; otherwise there is no disruption to be restored. The pleasure of eating is therefore

necessarily mixed with the pain of hunger. A pure pleasure is one where the disruption it is

conditioned by is painless, while an impure pleasure is one where the disruption is painful.

Aristotle does not seem to equate the purity of pleasure with its lack of admixture

with pain. He ranks the pleasures of thought above the pleasures of sight in purity, even

though the pleasures of sight may, on his theory, be completely free of admixture with pain.

I have argued that Aristotle thinks that pleasure is the perfection of a perfect activity. I

suggest that when he speaks of the purity of pleasure, he means lack of admixture with

imperfection. As I argued in Chapter One, section 1, Aristotle thinks that perfection comes in

degrees. The more perfect an activity is, the freer it is from imperfection, and the purer the

pleasure that arises in connection with it will be. This suggests a way of making sense of the

connection between degree of purity, degree of perfection, and degree of pleasantness. Plato

suggests in Philebus 53a-c, quoted above, that a small amount of pure whiteness is whiter

than a large amount of impure whiteness, and that a small amount of pure pleasure is more

pleasant than a large amount of an impure pleasure. Aristotle may have thought of degree of

pleasantness along similar lines.

It is necessary to make a further clarification. In NE 1175b36-a3, the passage from

X.5 discussed earlier in this section of the chapter, Aristotle uses purity as an example of a

way that pleasures differ in kind in accordance with differences in kind of the activities they

arise in connection with. Pleasures that are more pure arise in connection with activities that

are more pure. A plausible interpretation of what Aristotle thinks the purity of a pleasure

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consists in should be able to say what the purity of an activity consists in, and be able to

explain why and how the degree of purity of a pleasure corresponds to the degree of purity of

the activity it arises in connection with. This is a difficult point, but I think the rough outline

of what one should say is fairly clear. The most obvious candidate for what the purity of an

activity consists in is lack of admixture with potentiality. Although he does not use any term

related to ‘pure’ in the context, in Metaphysics Λ Aristotle gives an account of God as

activity completely free from potentiality that I take to be relevant. Moreover, he directly

connects this account with his account of pleasure. He writes:

But if there is something which is capable of moving things or acting on them,

but is not actually doing so, there will not be movement; for that which has a

capacity need not exercise it…. Further, even if it acts, this will not be

enough, if its substance is potentiality; for there will not be eternal movement;

for that which is potentially may possibly not be. There must, then, be such a

principle, whose very substance is activity. (1071b12-20)

And thought in itself deals with that which is best in the fullest sense. And

thought thinks itself because it shares the nature of the object of thought; for it

becomes an object of thought in coming into contact with and thinking its

objects, so that thought and object of thought are the same. For that which is

capable of receiving the object of thought, i.e., the substance, is thought. And

it is active when it possesses this object. Therefore the latter rather than the

former is the divine element which thought seems to contain, and the act of

contemplation is what is most pleasant and best. If, then, God is always in

that good state in which we sometimes are, this compels our wonder; and if in

a better state this compels it yet more. And God is in a better state.

(1072b18-26)

We see in these passages that if we make the reasonable supposition that Aristotle would

describe the activity that is God as pure (indeed the purest of all activities), then Gonzalez’s

suggestion about what the purity of an activity consists in is very much on the right track.72

72

The fact that Aristotle considers excellent theoretical contemplation the purest activity

available to human beings suggests that he considers the activity that is God to be the purest

104

He suggests that the extent to which an activity of awareness is pure depends on the degree

of assimilation between the relevant sense or faculty of thought and its object. These

passages from Meta. Λ indicate that this is true, not for precisely the reason Gonzalez

suggests, but because the more thoroughgoing such assimilation is, the less admixed with

potentiality the resultant activity will be. A sense or faculty of thought is potentially an

object of the relevant kind, in the sense that the sense or faculty of thought has the potential

to be assimilated to that object. When a sense or faculty of thought is assimilated to an

object more fully, this potentiality is more fully activated and so the resultant activity is less

admixed with potentiality.

These passages from Metaphysics Λ strongly indicate that the conditions under which

an activity is more pure are connected with the conditions spelled out in NE X.4 under which

an activity is more perfect. In X.4, Aristotle says that an activity is more perfect just in case

the capacity being activated is in a better condition, and the object that the capacity is active

in relation to is a finer member of the relevant class of objects. The connection between

these conditions and the conditions under which an activity is more pure is not

straightforward. A fully pure activity—the activity that is God—is not an activation of any

capacity at all. What one should say, I take it, is that the goodness of the condition of a

capacity consists in the degree to which the capacity is in a condition such that it is ready to

be activated in way that fully realizes its nature as the capacity that it is. Aristotle says at

Meta. Λ 1072b18-20, quoted above, “And thought in itself deals with that which is best in

itself, and that which is thought in the fullest sense with that which is best in the fullest

sense.” A capacity for thought or perception is by nature a capacity for apprehending the

activity of all, since excellent theoretical contemplation is the closest approximation of the

activity that is God that humans can attain. Cf. NE 1177b26-1178a2.

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best object of the kind that it is a capacity to apprehend, where ‘best’ means finest, most

orderly, and most akin to the nature of God. This being the case, a capacity for thought or

perception is most fully activated—and the resultant activity is thus least admixed with

potentiality—when it is engaged with the best object. An activity’s degree of purity and its

degree of perfection thus come hand in hand with each other. An activity is least admixed

with potentiality (i.e., most pure) when it involves the fullest possible exercise of the relevant

capacity, and a capacity is most fully exercised when it is in the best condition and active in

relation to the finest object of the relevant kind (i.e., when it is exercised most perfectly).

We can now see why the degree of purity of a pleasure correlates with the degree of

purity of the activity it arises in connection with. When an activity is more pure it is more

perfect, which entails that the pleasure that arises in connection with it is less admixed with

imperfection, and so is more pure. The fact that Aristotle links the purity of an activity with

its degree of pleasantness can thus be taken to corroborate the interpretation I suggest,

according to which an activity’s degree of pleasantness consists in its degree of perfection.

Now I will return to the question of whether Aristotle accepted a version

Comparabilism. The passage from Philebus 53a-c, discussed above, is a useful starting

point. There Socrates suggests that a small amount of pure white is whiter than a large

amount of impure white, and similarly that a small amount of pure pleasure is more pleasant

than a large amount of impure pleasure. The suggestion that, for Aristotle, an activity’s

degree of pleasantness consists in its degree of perfection can elaborated along similar lines.

Comparabilism is the view that any two activities can be compared in pleasantness. Since all

activities have a definite degree of perfection, Comparabilism follows from the view that

degree of pleasantness consists in degree of perfection. One might object, however, that this

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view is so distant from ordinary beliefs about what pleasantness consists in—namely, that it

has to do with intensity—that it fails to satisfy the intuitions that motivate Comparabilism.

It seems that Aristotle’s theory is equipped to answer this objection. His theory, as

I’ve reconstructed it, is certainly very distant from ordinary beliefs about what pleasantness is

and which activities are most pleasant, but it can satisfy the intuitions that motivate these

ordinary beliefs and moreover explain why these beliefs are so widely held even though they

are false. Aristotle says in NE VII.14 that many people become attached to certain bodily

pleasures because their juxtaposition with pain creates a feeling of intensity, which they

mistake for pleasantness. This leads such people to mistakenly believe that these bodily

pleasures are more pleasant than non-intense pleasures, such as the pleasure of theoretical

study. Immoderate indulgence in bodily pleasures destroys one’s character over time, and

puts one in a condition where one is incapable of enjoying the pleasures that a virtuous

person enjoys. Intense pleasures are most pleasant for a person in a corrupt condition, and

this is true because they arise in connection with the fullest possible activation of such a

person’s capacities given the condition they are in. Even for people in a corrupt condition,

pleasantness corresponds to degree of perfection.73

Aristotle’s view, I take it, is that the

activities that are pleasant for people in a corrupt condition are less perfect and so less

pleasant than the pleasures of a virtuous person, even though a person in a corrupt condition,

perhaps because of this very condition, may not believe this to be true. The common opinion

73

For a given individual in a given corrupt condition, an activity is more pleasant if it is more

perfect in the derivate sense discussed in section 1 of Chapter One. The maximum degree of

pleasantness that an activity engaged in by a person in a corrupt condition can attain depends

on how corrupt the person’s condition is. A person is more corrupt if the objects their

capacities are in a condition to be fully activated by are more shameful (where ‘shameful’

(‘aischron’) is the opposite of ‘fine’ (‘kalon’). The less corrupt a person is, the more perfect

the most perfect activity the person can engage in will be.

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that pleasantness corresponds to intensity can be attributed to widespread excessive

attachment to bodily pleasures.

Activities can be ranked in pleasantness on an objective scale by degree of

purity/perfection. This scale disregards quantities like duration. Any amount of a more pure

activity ranks above any amount of a less pure one. This may seem inadequate to explain

ordinary cases where one compares pleasures that differ in kind and chooses between them.

Isn’t it more tempting to choose an hour of watching horse races over 30 minutes at the

museum than to choose 30 minutes of horse races over an hour at the museum? I take it that

Aristotle can say two things about such cases. The first is that when considerations like

duration come into play, one is no longer choosing purely on the basis of which activity will

be more pleasant, but is also weighing practical considerations about, e.g., how to minimize

down time. The second is that figuring quantities like duration into choices between

pleasures can reflect a misunderstanding of the nature of pleasure and a corruption of one’s

character. People may often choose between pleasures on the basis of duration, but this may

be based on a systematic mistake and may have the result that in many cases the people in

question unwittingly choose a less pleasant activity over a more pleasant one.

I take it, then, that Aristotle is committed to a version of Comparabilism. Aristotle’s

Comparabilism, as I’ve reconstructed it, is very different from Mill’s Best Judge

Comparabilism. Aristotle’s theory holds that pleasantness reduces to a quantifiable feature

that activities have in their own right: degree of perfection. This theory may not

accommodate a universal hedonic calculus of the sort that Bentham and others thought a

theory of pleasure should accommodate, but this is to be expected, given that the utilitarian

108

idea of a hedonic calculus is bound up with the conception of pleasure as a feeling, a

conception that Aristotle forcefully, and in my view correctly, rejects.

109

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