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NE 7.5: morbid pleasures: homosexuality...
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Thomas
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Nov 05, 2006 09:01 PST
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Indeed Aristotle condemns homosexuality, refraining from it would be a form of restraint but only metaphorically so, since restraint really applies to heterosexuality (natural pleasures) or food. Here indeed Aristotle sounds very conservative to us moderns...
Thomas
1148b15-1149a24:
V. Besides those things however which are naturally pleasant, of which some are pleasant generally and others pleasant to particular races of animals and of men, there are other things, not naturally pleasant, which become pleasant either as a result of arrested development or from habit, or in some cases owing to natural depravity. Now corresponding to each of these kinds of unnatural pleasures we may observe a related disposition of character.
[2] I mean bestial characters,like the creature in woman's form that is said to rip up pregnant females and devour their offspring, or certain savage tribes on the coasts of the Black Sea, who are alleged to delight in raw meat or in human flesh, and others among whom each in turn provides a child for the common banquet ; or the reported depravity of Phalaris. [Phalaris's well-known practice of burning human victims in a bronze bull]
[3] These are instances of Bestiality. Other unnatural propensities are due to disease, and sometimes to insanity, as in the case of the madman that offered up his mother to the gods and partook of the sacrifice, or the one that ate his fellow slave's liver. Other morbid propensities are acquired by habit, for instance, plucking out the hair, biting the nails, eating cinders and earth, and also *sexual perversion* [amazing how Victorian Rackham was in translating aphrodisiôn tois arresin : "sexual intercourse between males" (Irwin) In any case, this judgment by Aristotle goes a long way from Socrates' attitude towards homosexuality in the Symposium. To Aristotle it is a "morbid propensity" Th.]. These practices result in some cases from natural disposition, and in others from habit, as with those who have been abused from childhood.
[4] When nature is responsible [in the case of morbid natures (Gauthier & Jolif)], no one would describe such persons as showing Unrestraint, any more than one would apply that term to women because they are passive and not active in sexual intercourse; nor should we class as Unrestraint a morbid state brought about by habitual indulgence.
[5] Now these various morbid dispositions in themselves do not fall within the limits of Vice, nor yet does Bestiality; and to conquer or yield to them does not constitute Unrestraint in the strict sense, but only the state so called by analogy; just as a man who cannot control his anger must be described as 'unrestrained in' that passion, not 'unrestrained.'
(Indeed folly, cowardice, profligacy, and ill-temper, whenever they run to excess, are either bestial or morbid conditions.)
[in other words Aristotle is saying that a gay man who would resist his homosexual impulses would be showing restrain by analogy, since real restraint only concerns natural health pleasures like heterosexual sex or eating food. Th]
[6] One so constituted by nature as to be frightened by everything, even the sound of a mouse, shows the cowardice of a lower animal; the man who was afraid of a weasel was a case of disease. So with folly: people irrational by nature and living solely by sensation, like certain remote tribes of barbarians, belong to the bestial class; those who lose their reason owing to some disease, such as epilepsy, or through insanity, to the morbid.)
[7] With these unnatural propensities it is possible in some cases merely to have the disposition and not to yield to it: I mean, for instance, Phalaris might have had the desire to eat a child, or to practise unnatural vice, and refrained; or it is possible not merely to possess but to yield to the propensity.
[8] As therefore with Vice, that natural to man is called simply vice, whereas the other kind is termed not simply vice, but vice with the qualifying epithet bestial or morbid, similarly with Unrestraint, it is clear that the bestial and morbid kinds are distinct from unrestraint proper, and that the name without qualification belongs only to that kind of unrestraint which is co-extensive with Profligacy of the human sort.
[9] It is clear then that Self-restraint and Unrestraint relate only to the objects to which Temperance and Profligacy are related, and that unrestraint in relation to anything else is of another kind, which is only so called metaphorically and with a qualification.
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