Plato and Aristotle's Ethics

Robert Heinaman, Robert Heinaman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351910750
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This volume, emanating from the Fourth Keeling Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy, presents essays and comments by nine outstanding scholars of ancient philosophy, which examine the influence of Plato on the development of Aristotle's ethics. The essays focus on the role of pleasure in happiness and the good life (Christopher Taylor and Sarah Broadie), the irreducibility of ethical concepts to value-neutral concepts (Anthony Price and Sarah Broadie), the relation of virtue to happiness (Roger Crisp and Christopher Rowe, Terry Irwin and Sir Anthony Kenny), the role of the requirement of self-sufficiency in determining the content of happiness (John Cooper and Sir Anthony Kenny), and the question of whether the just man should be a participant in the political life of his city (Richard Kraut and Christopher Rowe).

Chapter 1

Pleasure: Aristotle’s Response to Plato

C.C.W. Taylo

Aristotle discusses pleasure in the context of lively debate both about its nature and about its value, of which we have evidence in his own writings and those of others, above all of Plato.¹ For him the question of value predominates. His treatment of the topic belongs to the ethical treatises, not to his discussion of the soul and its faculties, and while both principal discussions include accounts of the nature of pleasure those accounts are subordinated to his evaluative interests; his primary concern is to give pleasure its proper place in his account of the best form of human life, and it is because that concern requires a proper understanding of what pleasure is that the account of its nature engages his attention.

Aristotle’s survey of current views on the value of pleasure reveals a wide range of conflicting opinions, from Eudoxus’ identification of pleasure with the good at one extreme to, at the other, the denial that any pleasure is good, either in itself or incidentally. This diversity does not lend itself to the eirenic project mentioned in Eudemian Ethics (hereafter EE) I.6 of showing that every opinion possesses some truth. While some apparent conflicts can be reconciled some theses have simply to be rejected, the best that can be done for them being an explanation of how people have come to hold them (Nicomachean Ethics (hereafter NE) 1154a21-b20). Aristotle himself is firmly committed from the outset to the view that pleasure is an inseparable attribute of the best life. The EE begins from the unargued claims (a) that the good is eudaimonia and (b) that eudaimonia is the finest, best and pleasantest of all things (1214a1-8). In NE thesis (a) is first declared to be established by universal consent (1095a17-20) and later established by an argument to the effect that eudaimonia alone fulfils the formal criteria of the good, viz. those of being sought for its own sake alone and of being self-sufficient (1097a15-b21). A further argument leads to the substantive account of human good as ‘activity of the soul in accordance with excellence’, i.e. the excellent realization of specifically human capacities (1097b22-1098a20). This is confirmed by a number of arguments to the effect that that kind of activity possesses some agreed marks of the good life; one such mark is that the life of excellent activity is intrinsically pleasant (1099a7-28), leading to the position which is the starting-point of EE, that the good life is finest, best and pleasantest (1099a23-31). The thesis that the life of excellent activity is intrinsically pleasant seems partly to rest on the basic intuition that a wholly satisfactory life must be pleasant (otherwise it would lack a feature which counts significantly towards its being worthwhile), but is also supported by a thesis which is less obviously part of common evaluative consciousness, viz. that ‘the person who does not enjoy fine actions is not good’ (1099a17-18). Though Aristotle does say that no one would call a person just unless that person enjoyed acting justly (a18-19), it is not obvious that that is an unbiased report of actual contemporary Greek usage, independent of his own substantive view, derived from his account of the psychology of virtue and the process of habituation necessary to inculcate virtue, that it would not be correct to call anyone virtuous who did not enjoy acting virtuously.

Given this prior commitment to the intrinsic pleasantness of the good life, Aristotle’s discussion of pleasure has two main functions. First he has to rebut arguments which purport to establish that pleasure cannot contribute to the good life, either because pleasure is bad, or because it is not good. This defensive strategy will lead him to give an account of pleasure in so far as he seeks to show that those who expel pleasure from the good life do so because they have mistaken views of what pleasure is. Further, his own account of pleasure should provide some additional positive arguments in support of the thesis that pleasure is at least inseparable from the good life.

The contents of the discussions of pleasure in NE bear out these suggestions. As is well known, the work contains two treatments of the topic, VII. 11-14 and X.1-5, with a certain degree of overlap in subject-matter, but no cross-references, either explicit or implicit, in either direction. They are clearly two independent discussions which owe their position in the text of NE to the hand of an editor, possibly Aristotle himself but more plausibly a later redactor, and since NE VII is one of the Books common to both versions of the Ethics, it is generally assumed that its discussion of pleasure belongs originally to EE, and further that that discussion is earlier than the one in NE X. (I shall return to the question of the temporal relation of the two discussions at the end of this paper.) The discussion of Book VII is very largely devoted to the examination, leading to the rebuttal, of arguments hostile to pleasure, to which is appended a brief statement of Aristotle’s positive view. In Book X, by contrast, the positive view is set out much more elaborately, while the anti-hedonist arguments appear as arguments against a thesis which is absent from VII, namely Eudoxus’ thesis that pleasure is the good. Most of these arguments are rebutted, but Eudoxus’ thesis is not explicitly endorsed, and the ensuing discussion appears to point rather to pleasure’s being an inseparable aspect (or perhaps accompaniment) of the good than to its being the good itself.

I shall not attempt to deal with all the issues raised in these complex passages,confining myself instead to a single central issue. Both passages contain criticism of a certain view of the nature of pleasure, seen as foundational to many of the arguments hostile to pleasure which Aristotle is attempting to rebut. This is the view of pleasure as a perceived process of replenishment of a natural lack, and thereby a return from a state of deficiency, where something necessary to the proper functioning of the organism is lacking, to a state of equilibrium and thus of normal function. The terminology in which this view is stated is not always so specific as that which I have just used. At 1152b12-14 the first argument for the position that no pleasure is good is stated as follows: ‘every pleasure is a perceived coming into being (genesis) of a natural state, but no coming into being is of the same kind as its completion, e.g. no process of building is the same kind of thing as a house’. While ‘perceived coming into being of a natural state’ is less specific than ‘replenishment of a natural lack’, the discussion of 1152b25-1153a7 strongly suggests that replenishments of lacks are at least paradigm cases of the pleasures described by the theory; the examples mentioned include cases in which nature is ‘replenished’ (1153a2-6), which are contrasted with cases like pleasure in thinking, where there is neither distress nor desire, ‘because one’s nature is not deficient’ (1152b36-1153a2). (The genesis terminology and its application to cases of physiological deficiency recall Plato, Philebus 53c-54e, where the view of certain clever people that pleasure is always a process of coming to be, never a state of being, is applied to the pleasures of eating and drinking to reduce to absurdity the claim that the good life is the one devoted to those pleasures.) Similarly in Book X we have at 1173a29-b20 a series of arguments against the theory that pleasure is a process of change (kinêsis) and a coming into being, arguments which have some overlap with those from Book VII just mentioned. Here too the only kind of process mentioned is that of replenishment, the theory is said (b13-15) to be based on consideration of the pleasure and distress associated with food and drink (trophê), and the concluding argument is that the pleasures of thought etc. which involve no distress cannot be processes of coming to be ‘since there has been no lack of which there could come to be replenishment’ (b15-20). The evidence therefore suggests that the account of pleasure as the perceived coming into being of a natural state is not an alternative theory to that of pleasure as the perceived replenishment of a natural lack, but merely a less specific designation of that very theory.

The theory is familiar from well-known passages of Plato, notably Gorgias 494-7, Republic 585d-e and Philebus 31-2. The paradigm cases are those of pleasures in the satisfaction of bodily-based appetites, especially those for food, drink and sex. The Gorgias passage illustrates the simplest stage of the theory. Bodily appetite is either identified with or seen as arising from bodily deficiency, which is experienced as unpleasant. This unpleasant consciousness (lupe) prompts the agent to make good the deficiency, and the process of filling up the deficiency (anaplêrôsis) is experienced as pleasant. There are a number of unclarities even at this stage. First, it is unclear whether distress and pleasure are literally identified with physical deficiency and physical replenishment respectively, or are thought of as effects of those physical conditions. It is implied, though not explicitly stated, that pleasure and distress involve awareness, but it is not clear whether that is awareness of physical deprivation and replenishment, or awareness of pleasure and distress themselves. If the former, is the thought that (a) pleasure and distress are the awareness of those physical conditions, or (b) that those conditions, given that the agent is aware of them, are pleasure and distress?² A further set of problems arises from the assimilation of sexual desire to the model of hunger and thirst. In the latter two cases bodily desire can plausibly be seen as a response to physiological deficiency, dehydration, lack of protein, carbohydrate etc., and physiological deficiency can be identified as such by its reference to bodily functioning; without appropriate solid and liquid nourishment bodily function is impaired, and pleasure is (or is a response to) the process of restoring proper functioning. But sexual desire cannot plausibly be seen as a response to a physiological deficiency which impairs bodily functioning; either it is simply a response to a lack of sexual pleasure, in which case the physiological model loses its explanatory force, or else it is a response to a lack of sexual activity, which is itself conceived of either as a precondition of proper bodily functioning, or (perhaps more plausibly) as part of that functioning.³

The application of the theory to sexual pleasure can thus be seen as an extension (in one way or another) from the cases where it has the clearest application. Given one kind of extension, desire is seen in both kinds of case as a response to a deficiency, and pleasure as bound up with the making good of that deficiency, though it is only in the primary cases that the deficient items can be identified as constituents of the organism, whose mutual adjustment is a precondition of correct functioning. Given the other kind, desire is a response to deficiency in some cases and excess in others, and pleasure is a response to the restoration of equilibrium in both. A further extension is exhibited by the application to mental pleasures in Republic IX; as hunger and thirst are states of bodily deprivation, and bodily pleasures are the making good of those lacks, so ignorance or lack of understanding can be seen as states of mental deprivation, and the making good of those lacks in learning as mental pleasures. Here too the question arises of what it is that is lacking; is it a precondition of proper mental functioning, which would assimilate the mental case to those of hunger and thirst, or is it that functioning itself, which would rather assimilate it to the sexual case? If the acquisition of knowledge or understanding is thought of as a prerequisite of the exercise of those faculties, then the model of hunger and thirst is appropriate. But if the soul is seen as lacking understanding of some subject-matter, then making good that lack would appear to consist in coming to have that understanding, which is not a process identifiable as completed prior to the exercise of understanding. One might think of the dissatisfaction of someone trying to make sense of a complex pattern, say a visual or musical pattern; that dissatisfaction is alleviated when and only when one has come to see the pattern, and one has come to see it when and only when one has seen it. So having come to see it is not a prerequisite of seeing it.

There are, then, some unexpected complexities in the replenishment model of pleasure, not only in its extension to mental pleasures, but also in its application to those very cases of bodily-based appetites which originally suggest it. But even setting these complexities aside, the model has a general feature which makes it particularly problematic for someone who, like Aristotle, seeks to assure the place of pleasure in the good life. For according to the model pleasure is seen as something essentially remedial, as bound up with (to use a deliberately vague expression) the process of getting rid of an imperfect and undesirable state. It seems at best an alleviation of the troubles of the human condition; consequently it is hard to see how pleasure thus conceived could have any role in the ideally good life, much less be a necessary feature of it. Hence it is not surprising to find Aristotle in NE VII citing arguments which rely on this model in support of the theses that no pleasure is good (1152b12-15) and that pleasure is not the good (1152b22-3).

A possible response to this objection would be to accept that the constant fluctuation of deficiency/desire and replenishment/pleasure is a necessary feature of human life. The ideally good life, envisaged as free from deficiency and its associated distress, is not a possible human life, though perhaps it might be possible for some other creature, such as a god (provided that the god is conceived non-anthropomorphically). Yet traditionally the life of the gods was regarded as blessed (makarios) in the highest degree, and the blessed life as supremely pleasant (NE 1152b5-7). If the replenishment model is accepted, either those traditional beliefs would have to be abandoned, or the model would have to be construed as a model of human pleasure only, and divine pleasure conceived as something altogether different. On either account the defence of pleasure which the model allows is comparatively weak; pleasure is not something to be hoped for or aspired to for its own sake, but is at best something to be welcomed as an amelioration of our imperfect condition.⁴ And even that welcome, it would seem, should be qualified; for if pleasure is essentially remedial, arising when a deficiency is remedied, would we not do better to avoid those deficiencies in the first place than to seek to remedy them? As Socrates argues against Callicles, it would surely be the height of irrationality to seek to have an itch in order to have the pleasure of scratching it (Gorgias 494c-d), yet on the replenishment model that ought to be a paradigm of a pleasure. Even if one distinguishes necessary pleasures, i.e. those arising from deficiencies whose satisfaction is necessary for human life, from unnecessary, the tendency of the model will be to favour asceticism. For the strategy recommended by the model will be to remedy only those deficiencies which cannot be avoided, and any deficiency whose satisfaction is not necessary for survival can, it seems, be avoided by eliminating the desire which generates the deficiency. Thus to someone subject to sexual desire lack of sexual activity is perceived as a deficiency; but if one ceases to want sex one no longer feels the lack of it.

The replenishment model is not, then, well adapted to assure the place of pleasure in the good life. It also has some independent defects. First, as Plato had pointed out (Republic 584b, Philebus 51b-52b) many kinds of pleasures are not preceded by episodes of desire. So I can enjoy e.g. the smell of a rose, or a beautiful view, or memories of childhood holidays, without previously having desired to have, or felt any lack of those experiences. The scent is wafted through the open window, the view is disclosed at the crest of the hill, the pleasant memories simply occur to me, all without any antecedent longings. Here the phenomenology gives no support to the replenishment theory. Of course that does not refute the theory, since not all deficiencies make themselves apparent in desire; I may suffer from vitamin C deficiency without any desire to take vitamin C (or indeed without any awareness of the deficiency). But if the replenishment theory is not supported by the phenomenology in these cases, the onus must be on the proponent of the theory to show why the cases are best described in terms of the theory. In the vitamin C example physiological theory enables us to identify the deficiency independently of phenomenology; proper bodily functioning requires a certain level of vitamin C, and failure to maintain that level reveals itself in various symptoms, which may have nothing to do with desire for substances containing vitamin C. But in the cases of pleasure cited above nothing analogous allows us to identify any unfelt lack; why should we suppose that my delight in the scent of the rose is prompted by the making good of a deficiency of which I was unaware, however that deficiency is to be identified (on the problem of identification see below)? One might perhaps adopt that theory as the best explanation, or, at the extreme, in default of any other possible explanation; both strategies require examination of possible alternatives, and a more careful examination of the replenishment model itself.

Earlier we saw that the most plausible application of that model to sexual pleasure was the following: the model postulates that sexual activity is necessary to a worthwhile life, and consequently explains the experience of the lack of it as unpleasant, and the experience of the making good of that lack as ple...