Aristotle's Dialogue with Socrates by Ronna Burger

Author:Ronna Burger
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2016-11-02T04:00:00+00:00

Pleasure by Nature and the Good

Book VII turns from the discussion of psychic conflict to the investigation of pleasure and pain with a remarkable statement of intention:

It is the task of the political philosopher [the one philosophizing in the political manner] to contemplate pleasure and pain; for such a one is the architect of the telos looking toward which we speak of one thing as simply bad, another good. (1152b1–3)

The “political philosopher” makes his appearance here for the first and only time in the Ethics, not accidentally, it would seem, just after Aristotle has come to his most complete acceptance of the Socratic understanding of human motivation.29 Political philosophy now takes over the architectonic role assigned in the first book to politike ̄—political practice, or the science of politics—insofar as it is directed to the human good as its end. But the telos at this point seems to be something the political philosopher designs, which becomes in turn the standard for what is regarded as good or bad. If he is to carry out the task assigned to him as architect of the end—the contemplation of pleasure and pain—he must stand at some distance from the opinions of the city and conventional morality in its concern with praise and blame. The account in Book VII moves so far in that direction that it ends up treating human life as just one form of life among others, all inclined by nature toward the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain.30 The assignment of this naturalistic account to the political philosopher almost sounds ironic: if this moment marks a new stage in the movement of the argument of the Ethics, the turn to nature in Book VII and the treatment of pleasure that comes with it must be nothing more than a necessary beginning for the path political philosophy must pursue.

Indeed, following that path leads finally to revisiting the topic of pleasure at the outset of Book X. According to some commentators, the accounts in Books VII and X are too overlapping, according to others, too distinct, to have been intended as parts of one work.31 The treatment of pleasure as it develops throughout the Ethics with all its twists and turns, culminating in this double account, seems more than anything else to have furnished scholars with evidence for the fragmentary character of the work. If there is, on the contrary, an argument that makes the Ethics a whole, those same twists and turns in the treatment of pleasure would have to be understood as signs of the movement of that argument. That movement is indicated, to begin with, simply by the way the late accounts, in both the seventh and the tenth book, raise the question, What is pleasure? Other matters in the Ethics elicit the Socratic ti esti question, What is it? 32 No other discussion, however, requires or allows the kind of theoretical analysis we are led to in asking, Ti esti pleasure? In wrestling with that question,

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