This text is part of:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
[1246a]
[26]
But1 one may raise the question whether it is
possible to use any given thing both for its natural purpose and
otherwise, and in the latter case to use it qua
itself or on the contrary incidentally: for instance, with an eye qua eye, to see, or also just to see wrong,
by squinting so that one object appears two—both these uses
of the eye, then, use it because it is an eye, but it would be
possible to make use of an eye but to use it in another way,
incidentally, for example, if it were possible to sell it or to eat
it. And similarly with
the use of knowledge: one can use it truly, and one can use it
wrongly—for instance, when one spells a word incorrectly on
purpose, then at the time one is using knowledge as ignorance, just as
dancing-girls sometimes interchange the hand and the foot and use foot
as hand and hand as foot.2 If then
all the virtues are forms of knowledge, it would be possible to use
even justice as injustice—in that case a man will be
behaving unjustly by doing unjust acts as a result of justice, as when
one makes ignorant mistakes from knowledge; but if this is impossible,
it is clear that the virtues cannot be branches of knowledge.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.