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.So since not all the excellences give rise to pleasantactivity, except to the extent that pleasant activity touches on the end itself(1117b15 16), and since the end is by nature, in accordance with the goodwithin a virtuous life, therefore even if the means towards these ends give riseto painful activities, the ends themselves do not, but are good and pleasant.Thismust be the mark of a good life, that what it aims at in the multifarious dailyactivities is pleasant because good.The lovers of the fine are, thereby, lovers ofthe pleasant, even if the way to it is not always pleasurable activity.6 MIXED PLEASURES, GOODS, TRUTHSThe pursuit of virtue in a good life may involve activities that are harmful inone way or another: reflection may be harmful to health, just as boxing may.But Aristotle argues that the fact that pursuing these ends involves harm doesnot make these ends bad: these sets of things, then, are bad in this one respect,but that is not enough to make them bad (1153a19).The means to the endsof reflection and boxing may involve activities with harmful consequences; butthese bad consequences do not make boxing and reflection themselves bad.Itdoes, however, make them mixed goods, and it does introduce some badness intothe life of the virtuous agent who pursues them.Thus the virtuous life is not a life of pure pleasure, but contains some mixedpleasures some pleasures involving some pain.This pain is not associated withthe ends of the activities of virtue, but with the necessary means towards thoseends achievement.This does not make the achievement of the ends themselvesunpleasant, but it does make these activities mixed pleasures, in so far as themeans towards the achievement of the pleasure involve pains.So the life of thevirtuous person will be a life that contains mixed pleasures and, hence, potentiallyat least, conflict between the things that he finds pleasant.Aristotle reaches this conclusion having shown that that the mark of the goodand the pleasant is the determinate, but having further argued that the determinate,despite its nature as such, can accept the more and the less.This doctrine ofmixed determinates, as we may call it, is extended in the Nicomachean Ethics toa further domain, besides that of the good and that of the pleasant: the domainof the true.Aristotle says that correctness of judgement is truth, and at the sametime everything that is the subject of a judgement is also already determinate(1142b11 12).We may, therefore, expect that the same implications about thedeterminate will follow in the domain of the true as we found in the cases of thegood and the pleasant. 256 Theodore ScaltsasThis expectation is vindicated.We saw in the domains of the good and thepleasant that the fact that the determinate can accept the more and the less doesnot mean that every good thing and every pleasant thing will have their bad andpainful respects.What it does mean is that some good or pleasant things areaccompanied by bad consequences or painful experiences either by chance, orsometimes, even, because of the nature of the activity itself.Correspondingly, inthe case of truth we would expect, not that every judgement should have somefalse aspects to it, but that some judgements that even the person of full epistemicvirtue will make will be false in some respects either by chance, or sometimes,even, because of the nature of the judgement itself.And this is just what Aristotlesays about moral generalizations (1107a28 32):we should not simply state this [about the doctrine of the mean] in general terms; weshould also show how it fits the particular cases.For with discussions that relate to actions,those of a general sort [katholou logoi] have a wider application, but those that deal withthe subject bit by bit are closer to the truth; for actions have to do with particulars, andthe requirement is that we should be in accord on these.Consider such general statements about action and the practical as Aristotle sexample in this context the claim that with regard to feelings of fear andboldness, courage is the intermediate state (1107a33 b1).Such general claimsdo not always fit the particular cases very well; in some circumstances they mightnot be right at all [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]