Hide browse bar Your current position in the text is marked in blue. Click anywhere in the line to jump to another position:
chapter:
chapter 1chapter 1chapter 1chapter 1chapter 1chapter 1chapter 1chapter 2chapter 2chapter 2chapter 2chapter 2chapter 2chapter 2chapter 2chapter 2chapter 2chapter 2chapter 2chapter 3chapter 3chapter 3chapter 3chapter 3chapter 3chapter 3chapter 3chapter 3chapter 3chapter 3chapter 3chapter 3chapter 3chapter 4chapter 5chapter 7chapter 8chapter 9chapter 10chapter 11chapter 12chapter 13chapter 14
This text is part of:
Search the Perseus Catalog for:
View text chunked by:
- bekker page : bekker line
- book : chapter : section
Table of Contents:
[2]
If so, why are the pains opposed to them evil?
since the opposite of evil is good. Perhaps the true view is, that the necessary pleasures
are good in the sense that what is not evil is good; or that they are good up to a point:
for though you cannot have excessive pleasure from states and movements which cannot
themselves be in excess of what is good, you can have excessive pleasure from those which
themselves admit of excess. Now you can have an excess of the bodily goods; and it is
pursuing this excess that makes a bad man, not pursuing the necessary pleasures, for
everybody enjoys savory food, wine, and sexual pleasure in some degree, though not
everybody to the right degree. With pain it is the other way about1: one avoids not merely excessive pain, but all
pain; for the opposite of excessive pleasure is not
pain at all, except to the man who pursues excessive pleasure.
1 Whereas bodily pleasure is good in moderation and bad only in excess, all pain is bad; but this does not mean that the absence of excessive pleasure is bad, for it is not painful to the good man.
Aristotle in 23 Volumes, Vol. 19, translated by H. Rackham. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1934.
The Annenberg CPB/Project provided support for entering this text.
Purchase a copy of this text (not necessarily the same edition) from Amazon.com
show
Browse Bar
hide
Places (automatically extracted)
View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.
Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.
hide
Search
hideStable Identifiers
hide
Display Preferences