Section 10: Temperance

After courage let’s discuss temperance, since both courage and temperance seem to be the virtues of the nonrational parts of the soul.

We have already said that temperance is a mean concerned with pleasures. _[25] For it is less concerned with pains and not concerned with pains in the same way. Intemperance is also manifested in the same area. Now, therefore, let us determine with what sort of pleasures they are concerned.

We may assume the distinction between bodily pleasures and pleasures of the soul, such as love of honor and love of learning. In the case of pleasures of the soul, the lover of each of these delights in what he is a lover of, while the body isn’t being affected at all, _[30] but rather the mind. People who are concerned with such pleasures of the soul aren’t called temperate or intemperate. Nor, again, are those who are concerned with the other pleasures that are not bodily. For people who are fond of hearing about and talking about others, and who spend their days on whatever random things are happening are called gossips, but not intemperate. _[35] Likewise, those who are pained at the loss of money or of friends are not called intemperate. _[1118a1]

Temperance must be concerned with bodily pleasures, but not even all of these. For people who enjoy objects of vision, such as colors, shapes, and paintings, aren’t called temperate or intemperate. Yet it would seem possible to enjoy even these either as one should, _[5] or to enjoy them in excess or deficiently.

And so too is it with objects of hearing. No one calls those who delight excessively in music or plays intemperate, nor those who enjoy these to the degree they should temperate.

Nor do we apply these names to those who delight in odors, unless it be incidentally. We do not call people intemperate who excessively enjoy the smell of apples, or roses, or incense. _[10] Rather, people are called intemperate who delight excessively in the smells of perfumes or of gourmet dishes. For intemperate people delight in these smells because these smells remind them of the objects of their appetites. And one may see even other people, when they are hungry, delighting in the smell of food. But to delight in this kind of thing is the mark of the intemperate person. _[15] For these are objects of his appetites.

Nor is there in animals other than humans any pleasure connected with these senses, except incidentally. For dogs do not delight in the scent of hares, but in eating of them; while the scent told them the hares were there. Nor does the lion delight in the lowing of the ox, but in eating it; _[20] while the lion perceived by the lowing that the ox was near, and therefore appeared to delight in the lowing. Similarly, a lion does not delight because he sees “a deer or a wild goat,” but because he is going to make a meal of it.

Temperance and intemperance, however, are concerned with the kind of pleasures that the other animals share in (which therefore appear slavish and beast-like), namely, _[25] the pleasures of touch and taste.

But even of the pleasures of taste, animals appear to make little or no use. For the business of taste is the discriminating of flavors, which is done by winetasters and people who season dishes. But such people scarcely take pleasure in making these discriminations, or at least intemperate people do not. Instead, intemperate people take pleasure in the actual enjoyment, which in all cases comes through touch, _[30] both in the case of food and drink and in the case of sexual pleasure. This is why a certain gourmand prayed that his throat might become longer than a crane’s, implying that it was the contact that he took pleasure in. Thus, the sense with which intemperance is connected is the most widely shared of the senses, namely, touch. _[1118b1] And intemperance would justly seem to be disgraceful, because it attaches to us not insofar as we are humans but insofar as we are animals.

To delight in such things, then, and to love them above all others, is beast-like. For we must exclude the pleasures of touch most appropriate to free people, such as those of the gym, _[5] a healthy massage or heating. For the contact characteristic of the intemperate person does not affect the whole body in the way a massage does, but only certain parts of the body.