Section 5: How to determine which kinds of pleasure are good and which kinds are bad

Pleasures differ from one another in kind

This is why pleasures also seem to differ in kind. For things different in kind are, we think, completed by different things (we see this to be true both in the case of natural objects and of things produced by craft, for instance, animals, trees, a painting, a sculpture, a house, an implement); and, similarly, we think that activities differing in kind are completed by things differing in kind. Now the activities of thought differ from those of the senses, and both differ among themselves, in kind. Therefore, the pleasures that complete different kinds of activities also differ in kind.

This may be seen, too, from the fact that each of the pleasures is bound up with the activity it completes. For an activity is intensified by its proper pleasure, since each class of things is better judged and brought to precision by those who engage in the activity with pleasure. For example, it is those who enjoy geometrical thinking that become geometers and grasp the various propositions better, and, similarly, those who are fond of music or of building, and so on, make progress in their proper function by enjoying it. In this way, the pleasures intensify the activities, and what intensifies a thing is proper to it, but things different in kind have properties different in kind.

That pleasures differ in kind will be even more apparent from the fact that activities are hindered by pleasures arising from other sources. For people who are fond of playing the flute are incapable of attending to philosophical arguments if they overhear someone playing the flute, since they enjoy flute-playing more than the activity in hand. In this way, the pleasure connected with flute playing destroys the activity concerned with argument. This happens similarly in all other cases, when one is active about two things at once, the more pleasant activity drives out the other, and if it is much more pleasant does so all the more, so that one even ceases from engaging the other activity. This is why when we are enjoying something very much we don’t throw ourselves into doing something else, and do one thing only when we are not much pleased by another (for example, in the theatre the people who eat sweets do so most when the actors aren’t very good).

Now since activities are made precise and more enduring and better by their proper pleasure, and hindered by other kinds of pleasure, evidently the two kinds of pleasure are far apart. For pleasures of a different kind do pretty much what proper pains do, since activities are destroyed by their proper pains (for example, if a person finds writing or doing math unpleasant and painful, he doesn’t write, or doesn’t do math, because the activity is painful). So an activity suffers contrary effects from its proper pleasures and pains, that is, from those that supervene on the activity because its nature. And kinds of pleasure foreign to an activity have been stated to do basically the same as pain–they destroy the activity, only not to the same degree.

How to determine which kinds of pleasure are good, which kinds are bad, which kinds are genuine, and which kinds are proper to a human being

Now since activities differ in respect of goodness and badness, and some are worthy to be chosen, others to be avoided, and others neutral, so, too, are the pleasures. For to each activity there is a proper pleasure. The pleasure proper to a worthy activity is good and that proper to an unworthy activity bad; just as desires for what is noble are praiseworthy and desires for what is bad are blameworthy. But the pleasures involved in activities are more proper to the activities than the desires for those activities. For the desire for an activity is separated from the activity both in time and in nature, while the pleasures involved in an activity are close to the activity, and are so hard to distinguish from the activity that it can be disputed whether the activity is not the same as the pleasure. (Still, pleasure does not seem to be thought or perception–that would be strange. But because they are not found apart they appear to some people the same.) As activities are different, then, so are the corresponding pleasures. Now sight is superior to touch in purity, and hearing and smell to taste. The pleasures of each, therefore, are similarly superior, and the pleasures of thought superior to these, and within each of the two kinds some are superior to others.

Each animal is thought to have a proper pleasure, as it has a proper function–namely, that which corresponds to its activity. If we survey animals species by species, this will also be evident; horse, dog, and human have different pleasures, as Heraclitus says ‘asses would prefer sweepings to gold’; for food is pleasanter than gold to asses. So the pleasures of different kinds of animals differ in kind, and it seems plausible to suppose that those of a single species do not differ.

But in the case of humans, at least, the pleasures do significantly differ. The same things delight some people and pain others, and are painful and disliked to some, and enjoyable to and liked by others. This happens, too, in the case of sweet things–the same things don’t seem sweet to a healthy person and a person with a fever, nor does the same temperature seem hot to a weak person and a person in good condition. The same happens in other cases.

But in all such matters that which appears to the good person is thought to be really so. If this is correct, as it seems to be, and virtue and the good person as such are the measure of each thing, those also will be genuine pleasures which appear pleasurable to the good person, and those things that the good person enjoys will be genuinely enjoyable. If the things the good person finds repellant seem pleasurable to someone else, that is no surprise. For there are many ways for people to become ruined and spoiled. But such things are not pleasurable, but only pleasurable to these people and to people in this condition. Those which are admittedly disgraceful obviously should not be said to be pleasures, except to a perverted taste.

Yet of those pleasures that are thought to be good, which kind of pleasure or what pleasure should be said to be that proper to human beings? Is it not plain from the corresponding activities? The pleasures follow these. Whether, then, the complete and supremely happy person has one or more activities, the pleasures that complete these activities will be said to be, in the strict, the pleasures proper to human beings. And the remaining good pleasures will be so in a secondary and fractional way, as are the corresponding activities.