Continence and Pleasure

Book 7 opens with the observation that there are three dispositions to be avoided in moral character: vice, imperfect self-control (akrasia), and brutishness. The opposed positive dispositions are virtue, perfect self-control, and the heroic or godlike. Akrasia is the book's central subject. The question it raises was treated by Socrates as a paradox: since no one would knowingly choose what is worse for themselves, apparent cases of weakness of will must be cases of ignorance — the person did not really know the better course. Aristotle rejects this. Akrasia is a real and common phenomenon that requires explanation rather than denial.

His explanation turns on the distinction between having knowledge and using it. The akratic person possesses the general principle ("excess is harmful") but in the moment of temptation the particular perception ("this pleasure is available now") overrides the activation of that principle, so that the conclusion it should generate ("don't do it") never becomes operative. The person acts, knows they are acting wrongly, and afterward recognises the failure. This is different from the vicious person, who does not see the action as wrong; and from the merely intemperate, who does not experience the internal conflict. The akratic person is, in a morally significant sense, better than the vicious person: they have the right general values; they just cannot always make them govern.

The second half of Book 7 takes up pleasure, surveying three positions: that pleasure is bad, that only some pleasures are good, and that pleasure is the highest good. Aristotle's own account distinguishes pleasure from process: pleasure is not the movement toward a natural state (like eating when hungry) but the activity of a faculty in its natural, unimpeded condition. Bodily pleasures fill a lack and so are accompanied by the prior pain of lack; but intellectual pleasures are not preceded by this kind of deficiency. The book ends by noting that bodily pleasures in excess — the pleasures the akratic person is typically overcome by — are not bad in themselves but bad in excess, and that the self-controlled person is not one who feels no desire but one whose desires do not override reason.