Section 9: Self-control compared with dispositions that seem similar

Is the person self-controlled who stands by any and every reason and by any and every choice? Or is the person self-controlled who stands by the right choice? And is the person who abandons any and every choice and any and every reason someone who lacks self-control? _[30] Or is someone who lacks self-control a person who abandons the reason 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 according to itself the true reason and the right choice by which the person with self-control stands and the person without does not? For if anyone chooses or pursues _[35] this for the sake of that, according to itself he pursues and chooses the latter, _[1151b1] but incidentally the former. But when we speak without qualification we mean what is according to itself. Therefore, in a sense the one stands by, and the other abandons, any and every opinion; but without qualification, the true opinion.

There are some people _[5] who are prone to stand by their opinion, who are called heard-headed or stubborn, namely, those who are hard to persuade into something and are not easily persuaded to change once they’ve decided. These have in them something like the self-controlled person, but they differ in many respects, just as a wasteful person is in a way like the generous person and an overconfident person like the confident one. For it is to feelings and desires that the self-controlled person will not yield, since sometimes he will be easily persuaded. But it is to reason and argument _[10] that stubborn people refuse to yield, for they do acquire desires and many of them are led by their pleasures.

Now people who are stubborn are opinionated, ignorant, and boorish. The opinionated ones are influenced by pleasure and pain, since they delight in the victory they gain if they are not persuaded to change their opinions, and are pained if their decisions become null and void as _[15] decrees sometimes do. So that they are more like the person who lacks self-control than the self-controlled person.

But there are some people who fail to stand by their beliefs, but not as a result of lacking self-control. For example, consider 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 _[20] to tell the lie. For not everyone who does anything for the sake of pleasure is intemperate, bad, or lacking in self-control, but only someone who does it for a disgraceful pleasure.

Since there is also a sort of person who takes less delight than he should in bodily things, and does not stand by reason, someone who is intermediate between him and the person who lacks self-control is the self-controlled person. For the person who lacks self-control _[25] fails to stand by reason because of too much of something, whereas the other fails because of too little. The self-controlled person, however, stands by reason and does not change on either account. Now if self-control is good, both the contrary states must be bad, which is actually how they appear to be. Yet because the other extreme is seen in few people and rarely, _[30] for that reason self-control seems to be contrary only to the lack of self-control, just as temperance seems to be contrary only to intemperance.

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 reason for the sake of the bodily pleasures. _[35] But the self-controlled person has bad desires, whereas the temperate person does not. _[1152a1] And the temperate person is such as not to feel pleasure contrary to reason, while the self-controlled person is such as to feel contrary pleasure but not to be led by it.

The person who lacks self-control and the intemperate person are also like one another. They are different, but they both pursue bodily pleasures [contrary to reason]. The intemperate person, however, _[5] thinks that he should pursue these pleasures, whereas the person who lacks self-control does not.