Section 6: Lack of self-control with respect to anger is less disgraceful than with respect to bodily appetites

That lack of self-control in respect of anger is less disgraceful than that in respect of the appetites is what we will now proceed to see.

Anger _[25] seems to listen to argument to some extent, but to mishear it, as do hasty servants who run out before they have heard the whole of what one says, and then muddle the order, or as dogs bark if there is but a knock at the door, before looking to see if it is a friend. In this way anger, because of its heat and the hastiness of its nature, although it hears, _[30] does not hear an order, and springs to take revenge. For reason or imagination informs us that we have been insulted or slighted, and anger, reasoning as it were that anything like this must be fought against, boils up straightway.

Appetites or bodily desires, in contrast, springs to indulge themselves if reason or perception merely say _[35] that something is pleasant. Therefore, anger in a way _[1149b1] obeys reason, but the appetites do not. Lack of self-control regarding the appetites is, therefore, more disgraceful, since the person who lacks self-control in respect of anger is in a way conquered by reason, while the other is conquered by appetite and not reason.

Furthermore, we pardon people more easily for following natural desires, since we pardon them more easily for following such appetites as are common _[5] to everyone, and insofar as they are common. Now anger and bad temper are more natural than the appetites for excess, that is, for unnecessary things. Take, for instance, the man who defended himself on the charge of striking his father by saying “yes, but he struck his father, and he struck his, and (pointing to his child) this boy will strike me when he is a man; _[10] it runs in the family.” Or take the man who when he was being dragged along by his son bade him stop at the doorway, since he himself had dragged his father only as far as that.

Moreover, those who are more given to plotting against others are more criminal. Now a passionate and spirited person is not given to plotting, nor is anger itself–it is open. But the nature of appetite is illustrated by what the poets call Aphrodite, _[15] “guile-weaving daughter of Cyprus,” and by Homer’s words about her “embroidered girdle: “And the whisper of wooing is there, / Whose subtlety steals the wits of the wise, no matter how prudent.” Therefore, if this form of lacking self-control is more criminal and disgraceful than that in respect of anger, it is both lacking self-control without qualification and in a sense vice.

Further, no one commits wanton aggression with a feeling of pain, but everyone who acts out of anger _[20] acts with pain. In contrast, someone who commits wanton aggression does so with pleasure. Thus, if those acts at which it is most just to be angry are more criminal than others, the lack of self-control that is due to appetite is the more criminal. For there is no wanton aggression involved in the case of anger.

Plainly, then, the lack of self-control concerned with the appetites is more disgraceful than that concerned with anger. And self-control and the lack of self-control are concerned with bodily _[25] appetites and bodily pleasures.

But we must grasp the differences among these appetites and pleasures. For, as has been said at the beginning, some are human and natural both in kind and in magnitude, while others are inhuman, and still others are due to injuries to the organism or to diseases. Temperance and intemperance are concerned _[30] only with the first of these. This is why we call the lower animals neither temperate nor intemperance except by a metaphor, and only if a kind of animal exceeds another as a whole in wantonness, destructiveness, and omnivorous greed. They have no power of choice or calculation, but they are departures from the natural norm, as, among humans, _[35] madmen are.

Now inhumanness is less evil than vice, though more alarming. _[1150a1] For it is not that the better part has been perverted (as in regular human beings), it is rather that those who are inhuman have no better part. Thus it is like comparing a lifeless thing with a living thing in respect of badness. For the badness of that which has no originative source of movement [namely, a lifeless thing,] is always less hurtful, and reason is an originative source. _[5] Consequently, it is like comparing injustice in the abstract with an unjust person. Each is in some sense worse. For a bad person will do ten thousand times as much evil as a beast.