|
NE 7.6: anger and irrational desires
|
Thomas
|
Dec 01, 2006 17:06 PST
|
1149a24-1150a8:
[1] Let us now consider the point that Unrestraint in anger [thumos] is less disgraceful than Unrestraint in the desires [irrational desire: epithumia].
Now it appears that anger does to some extent hear reason, but hears it wrong, just as hasty servants hurry out of the room before they have heard the whole of what you are saying, and so mistake your order, and as watch-dogs bark at a mere knock at the door, without waiting to see if it is a friend. Similarly anger, owing to the heat and swiftness of its nature, hears, but does not hear the order given, and rushes off to take vengeance. When reason or imagination suggests that an insult or slight has been received, anger flares up at once, but after reasoning as it were that you ought to make war on anybody who insults you. Desire on the other hand, at a mere hint from [the reason or] the senses that a thing is pleasant, rushes off to enjoy it. Hence anger follows reason in a manner, but desire does not. Therefore yielding to desire is more disgraceful than yielding to anger, for he that fails to restrain his anger is in a way controlled by reason, but the other is controlled not by reason but by desire.
[2] Again, when impulses are natural, it is more excusable to follow them, since even with the desires it is more excusable to follow those that are common to all men, and in so far as they are common. But anger and bad temper are more natural than desire for excessive and unnecessary pleasures; witness the man who was had up for beating his father and who said in his defence, "Well, my father used to beat his father, and he used to beat his, and (pointing to his little boy) so will my son here beat me when he grows up; it runs in our family"; and the man who, when his son was throwing him out of the house, used to beg him to stop when he got to the door, 'because he only used to drag his father as far as that.'
[Aristotle seems to see anger as a hereditary trait, hence more forgivable. -Th]
Again, the craftier men are, the more Unjust they are. [3] Now the hot-tempered man is not crafty, nor is anger, but open; whereas desire is crafty, as they say of Aphrodite:
Weaver of wiles in Cyprus born
and Homer writes of her 'broidered girdle'
Cajolery that cheats the wisest wits.
As therefore unrestraint in desire is more unjust as well as more disgraceful than unrestraint as regards anger, unrestraint in desire is Unrestraint in the strict sense, andis even in a certain sense Vice.
[4] Again, a wanton outrage gives pleasure to the doer, never pain, whereas an act done in anger always causes him a feeling of pain. If then things are unjust in proportion to the justice of the anger they arouse in the victim, unrestraint arising from desire is more unjust than that arising from anger; for anger contains no element of wanton insolence.
[5] It is clear therefore that unrestraint in one's desires is more disgraceful than unrestraint in anger, and that it is in relation to bodily desires and pleasures that Self-restraint and Unrestraint are really manifested.
[6] But we must distinguish among the bodily desires and pleasures themselves. As was said at the beginning, some of these are human and natural both in kind and degree, some bestial, and some due to arrested development or disease. Now it is only with the first class that Temperance and Profligacy are concerned; hence we do not use the terms temperate or profligate of the lower animals, except metaphorically, of certain entire species distinguished from the rest by their exceptionally lascivious, mischievous, or omnivorous habits; for animals have neither the faculty of choice nor of calculation: they are aberrations from nature, like men who are insane.
[7] Bestiality is less than vice, though more horrible: for the highest part is not corrupted, as it is in a man , but entirely lacking. So that it is like comparing an inanimate with an animate thing, and asking which is the more evil; for the badness of a thing which has no originating principle--and intelligence is such a principle--is always less capable of mischief. (It is therefore like comparing Injustice with an unjust man: one is worse in one way and the other in another). For a bad man can do ten thousand times more harm than an animal .
[Aquinas clarifies this last section:
"Therefore, to compare a beast with a bad man to discover which is worse, is like comparing a non-living creature with a living one. Non-living creatures, like fire that bums or rock that crushes, do more damage but are farther from the notion of fault. Badness in a thing without an inner principle of its actions is always less blamable since less fault can be attributed to it -badness in man is imputable because he has a principle making him master of his own actions. This principle is the intellect that the brutes lack. Therefore a beast is compared to a man as injustice to an unjust man."
|
|
 |
|
