Section 2: Discussion of current opinions about self-control

Now we may ask (1) how a man who judges rightly can lack self-control. That he should behave so when he has knowledge, some say is impossible; for it would be strange—so Socrates thought—if when knowledge was in a man something else could master it and drag it about like a slave. For Socrates was entirely opposed to the view in question, holding that there is no such thing as the lack of self-control; no one, he said, when he judges acts against what he judges best-people act so only by reason of ignorance. Now this view plainly contradicts the observed facts, and we must inquire about what happens to such a man; if he acts by reason of ignorance, what is the manner of his ignorance? For that the man who lacks self-control does not, before he gets into this state, think he ought to act so, is evident. But there are some who concede certain of Socrates’ contentions but not others; that nothing is stronger than knowledge they admit, but not that on one acts contrary to what has seemed to him the better course, and therefore they say that the person who lacks self-control has not knowledge when he is mastered by his pleasures, but opinion. But if it is opinion and not knowledge, if it is not a strong conviction that resists but a weak one, as in men who hesitate, we sympathize with their failure to stand by such convictions against strong appetites; but we do not sympathize with wickedness, nor with any of the other blameworthy states. Is it then prudence whose resistance is mastered? That is the strongest of all states. But this is absurd; the same man will be at once prudent and lacking in self-control, but no one would say that it is the part of a prudent person to do willingly the basest acts. Besides, it has been shown before that the man of prudence is one who will act (for he is a man concerned with the individual facts) and who has the other virtues.

(2) Further, if self-control involves having strong and bad appetites, the temperate man will not be self-controlled nor the self-controlled man temperate; for a temperate man will have neither excessive nor bad appetites. But the self-controlled man must; for if the appetites are good, the state of character that restrains us from following them is bad, so that not all self-control will be good; while if they are weak and not bad, there is nothing admirable in resisting them, and if they are weak and bad, there is nothing great in resisting these either.

(3) Further, if self-control makes a man ready to stand by any and every opinion, it is bad, i.e. if it makes him stand even by a false opinion; and if the lack of self-control makes a man apt to abandon any and every opinion, there will be a good lack of self-control, of which Sophocles’ Neoptolemus in the Philoctetes will be an instance; for he is to be praised for not standing by what Odysseus persuaded him to do, because he is pained at telling a lie.

(4) Further, the sophistic argument presents a difficulty; the syllogism arising from men’s wish to expose paradoxical results arising from an opponent’s view, in order that they may be admired when they succeed, is one that puts us in a difficulty (for thought is bound fast when it will not rest because the conclusion does not satisfy it, and cannot advance because it cannot refute the argument). There is an argument from which it follows that folly coupled with the lack of self-control is virtue; for a man does the opposite of what he judges, owing to the lack of self-control, but judges what is good to be evil and something that he should not do, and consequence he will do what is good and not what is evil.

(5) Further, he who on conviction does and pursues and chooses what is pleasant would be thought to be better than one who does so as a result not of calculation but of the lack of self-control; for he is easier to cure since he may be persuaded to change his mind. But to the person who lacks self-control may be applied the proverb ‘when water chokes, what is one to wash it down with?’ If he had been persuaded of the rightness of what he does, he would have desisted when he was persuaded to change his mind; but now he acts in spite of his being persuaded of something quite different.

(6) Further, if the lack of self-control and self-control are concerned with any and every kind of object, who is it that lacks self-control in the unqualified sense? No one has all the forms of the lack of self-control, but we say some people lack self-control without qualification.