Abstract

The Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle contains two treatises on pleasure and pain, which present different positions on the nature of pleasure and its relation to the supreme good for man. Contrary to the standard approach, which accounts for these differences by assigning these treatises to different periods of Aristotle's philosophical development, I trace their differences to the general thematic development of the Ethics as a whole. This is achieved by an analysis of the themes of pleasure and pain and their relation to the topic of happiness in the order in which they are presented in the Nicomachean Ethics. ;The first book of the Ethics reveals that Aristotle rejects the life of sensual pleasure as the best life for man but accepts the pleasure linked with moral virtue as an element of the supreme good or happiness. Books II-VI of the Ethics point out how pleasure and pain function in the moral life. The conclusion reached by the analysis found in these books is that those pleasures that accompany virtue are good but those that either prevent virtue or lead to vice are bad. Various relations are also discovered between specific moral virtues and the pleasure or pain that the possessors of such virtues would experience. The first ten chapters of Book VII describe the man who is truly virtuous as alone partaking of a kind of pleasure that is free from pain. In the first treatise on pleasure and pain, found in the last four chapters of Book VII, Aristotle describes the activity of soul in accordance with moral virtue as it appears to the man who possesses moral virtue. It is experienced by him as pure enjoyment, as the combination of pleasure and psychical activity in one. In Books VIII and IX Aristotle shows that the activity of true friendship, even more than the activity of soul in accordance with moral virtue, is to be identified with the supreme good for man. This leads to the conclusion that pleasure cannot be the supreme good because, if it were, true friendship would be impossible. The treatment of pleasure in the tenth book of the Ethics deals with the pleasures found in sensation and thought, unlike the first treatise in Book VII, which dealt primarily with the noble pleasure that accompanies the morally virtuous action. Pleasure, as presented in the second treatise, is shown to be essential to, but not identical with, its activity. Finally, the concluding chapters of Book X identify the supreme good with the activity of contemplating, which is seen to have its own unique pleasure, functioning in the manner ascribed to pleasure in its relation to activity in the second treatise on pleasure. ;The Nicomachean Ethics is thus shown to be a consistent, unified work in its dialectical treatment of the topics of pleasure and pain. The differences in the two treatises on pleasure and pain are shown to be understandable when each treatment of these topics is taken as a necessary stage in the gradually unfolding complex description of the human good, which Aristotle presents in his Nicomachean Ethics