Chapter 6 - Aristotle on pleasure and activation

Summary

As in Plato’s corpus so in Aristotle’s, the topic of pleasure arises in numerous passages. By far the most important of these occur in Aristotle’s ethical writings, specifically in Eudemian Ethics and Nicomachean Ethics, more precisely still in Eudemian Ethics, Book 6, sections 4–5 and sections 11–14; and in Nicomachean Ethics, Book 3, section 10; Book 7, section 4–5 and sections 11–14; and Book 10, sections 1–5.

An ethical treatise transmitted in the Aristotelian corpus and entitled Magna Moralia also contains an important discussion of pleasure (precisely, at Magna Moralia 2.7). There has been a long-standing debate over the authenticity of this work.

One further substantial treatment of pleasure occurs in Aristotle’s rhetorical treatise Rhetoric 1.11. Here again the treatment is closely related to ethics. At least, one of the central concerns of Aristotelian ethics is the cultivation of emotional dispositions, and one of the central concerns of rhetoric is manipulation of emotions.

There are also numerous, more cursory treatments or mentions of pleasure scattered throughout Aristotle’s corpus, for example, in the following logical, metaphysical, physical, biological, and psychological works: Posterior Analytics, Topics, Categories, Physics, On the Generation of Animals, On the Soul, and On Sense-Perception and Sensibles. Finally, pleasure plays an important role in a number of the surviving fragments of Aristotle’s Protrepticus, a work whose title translates as “Exhortation” and which, in contrast to all of the other works mentioned, was intended for a relatively broad and public audience as opposed to committed students of philosophy and specifically those of Aristotle’s school, alternately known as the Lyceum or Peripatos.