Alexander of Aphrodisias on Pleasure and Pain in Aristotle1

Abstract

The nature of pleasure and its role in human psychology and ethics attracted many early Greek philosophers such as Prodicus and Democritus, and then engaged almost all of the best minds of the Platonic Academy, sparking a series of intense intra-school debates. In these debates Aristotle’s understanding of pleasure has a particularly noteworthy and extraordinary status. In contrast to Plato, subsequent Platonists, and the early Greek tradition as a whole, which associate pleasure with a restorative process, the satisfaction of desire, or the quality of our positive affect,2 Aristotle offers an energeia-based definition of pleasure, which connects pleasure with the exercise (energeia) of our natural faculty in its good condition, a goal-immanent and self-realized activity. There are, however, two distinct treatments of pleasure in the Nicomachean Ethics, each of which seems to describe the way in which pleasure is connected with energeia differently. While according to Book VII, pleasure is the unimpeded activity of the natural state (ἐνέργειαν τῆς κατὰ φύσιν ἕξεως, EN VII.12.1153a14), in Book X Aristotle maintains the following: