Section 9: Self-control and its lack are not the same as keeping or breaking a resolution

Is the person self-controlled who abides by any and every rule and any and every choice, or the man who abides by the right choice, and is the person who abandons any and every choice and any and every rule someone who lacks self-control, or he who abandons the rule that is not false and the choice that is right; this is how we put it before in our statement of the problem. Or is it incidentally any and every choice but per se the true rule and the right choice by which the one abides and the other does not? If anyone chooses or pursues this for the sake of that, per se he pursues and chooses the latter, but incidentally the former. But when we speak without qualification we mean what is per se. Therefore in a sense the one abides by, and the other abandons, any and every opinion; but without qualification, the true opinion.

There are some who are apt to abide by their opinion, who are called strong-headed, viz. those who are hard to persuade in the first instance and are not easily persuaded to change; these have in them something like the self-controlled person, as the prodigal is in a way like the liberal man and the rash man like the confident man; but they are different in many respects. For it is to passion and appetite that the one will not yield, since on occasion the self-controlled person will be easy to persuade; but it is to argument that the others refuse to yield, for they do form appetites and many of them are led by their pleasures. Now the people who are strong-headed are the opinionated, the ignorant, and the boorish-the opinionated being influenced by pleasure and pain; for they delight in the victory they gain if they are not persuaded to change, and are pained if their decisions become null and void as decrees sometimes do; so that they are liker the person who lacks self-control than the self-controlled person.

But there are some who fail to abide by their resolutions, not as a result of lacking self-control, e.g. Neoptolemus in Sophocles’ Philoctetes; yet it was for the sake of pleasure that he did not stand fast-but a noble pleasure; for telling the truth was noble to him, but he had been persuaded by Odysseus to tell the lie. For not every one who does anything for the sake of pleasure is either intemperate or bad or lacking in self-control, but he who does it for a disgraceful pleasure.

Since there is also a sort of man who takes less delight than he should in bodily things, and does not abide by the rule, he who is intermediate between him and the person who lacks self-control is the self-controlled person; for the person who lacks self-control fails to abide by the rule because he delights too much in them, and this man because he delights in them too little; while the self-controlled person abides by the rule and does not change on either account. Now if self-control is good, both the contrary states must be bad, as they actually appear to be; but because the other extreme is seen in few people and seldom, as temperance is thought to be contrary only to intemperance, so is self-control to the lack of self-control.

Since many names are applied analogically, it is by analogy that we have come to speak of the ‘self-control’ of the temperate person; for both the self-controlled person and the temperate person are such as to do nothing contrary to the rule for the sake of the bodily pleasures, but the former has and the latter has not bad appetites, and the latter is such as not to feel pleasure contrary to the rule, while the former is such as to feel pleasure but not to be led by it. And the person who lacks self-control and the intemperate person man are also like another; they are different, but both pursue bodily pleasures–the latter, however, also thinking that he ought to do so, while the former does not think this.