Abstract
An analysis of temperance must acknowledge that desire is intimately involved with pleasure.1 For both Aristotle and Aquinas there are two realms from which pleasure arises; either the intellect or the sensate aspects of existence. While their detailed account of human nature analyzes these “parts” in a way that gives the impression they are distinct and separate, in fact, there is a very close relationship between these pleasure faculties.
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Notes
As Aquinas put it in ST I-II 32.2 ad 3, “desire is chiefly a craving for pleasure.” See also ST II-II 141.3: “Desire denotes an impulse of appetite towards the object of pleasure, and this impulse needs control, which belongs to temperance.”
There are pleasures not attached to bodily functions, namely, the intellective functions which are “desirable in themselves” (NE 7.4.2).
See also, ST II-II 141.4; I-II 60.5; II-II 123.12; and II-II 141.3 where he states, “temperance...is chiefly concerned with those passions that tend towards sensible goods, viz. desire and pleasure.”
Within NE see 1.13.15-20. See also The Rhetoric 1370a 17-27, and Eudemian Ethics 2.1.15-20. In Aquinas see ST I 79-82; also note his Commentary on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, trans. C. I. Litzinger. Notre Dame: Dumb Ox Books, 1964, pp. 79–81.
As James Wallace writes in Virtues and Vices, p. 62, the view that holds the virtues as determining the outcome of “two struggling elements” has its point but maintaining this dualism cannot suffice for a philosophical account of human psychology and the virtues today. Rather we must be mindful of our susceptibility to “conceptions that prevent us from seeing how they [sensitive and intellective faculties] interact.”
Kenny, Anthony. Aquinas on Mind. New York: Routledge, Inc., 1993, p. 60. See also The Moral Virtues and Theological Ethics, pp. 66-71, and The Definition of Moral Virtue, pp. 93-104, for examinations of these appetites.
Ambrose also held that regulation of passion should include the intellectual appetite. Book One of De officiis ministrorum assumes an understanding that passions of the mind stand in need of modesty, temperance, and seemliness. “Mental motions” are the particular concern of seemliness (I.98). Even the search for truth must be held to the standard of “what is seemly” (I.122). In the passage where he writes of guarding the pure inner life, he refers to a “sobriety of mind” (I.12). The outward movements are simply indicators of inward attitudes. “For the condition of the mind is often seen in the attitude of the body. For this reason the hidden man of our heart (our inner self) is considered to be either frivolous, boastful, or boisterous, or, on the other hand, steady, firm, pure, and dependable. Thus the movement of the body is a sort of voice of the soul” (I.71). Augustine, also recognizes in The Morals of the Catholic Church, 19.36, both physical and psychological aspects of temperance when he writes that the duty of temperance is to “scorn all bodily delights, and the popular applause, and to turn the whole love to things divine and unseen.” See On the Morals of the Catholic Church, trans. R. Stothert, in Basic Writings of Saint Augustine, ed. Whiney J. Oates, vol. 1, New York: Random House, 1948, p. 337.
Aristotle rules out the need for temperance in response to intellectual desire, the pleasures of which are of a purely mental sort. The intellectual desires include ambition and the love of learning (NE 3.10.2).
See also ST I-II 17.7; 30.1; 59.2; 59.5; II-II 158.8.
For the identification of the intellectual appetite with the will, see ST I 59.4; 82.5; I-II 8.1.
Fabric of Character, p. 6.
Note also a reference regarding the aggressive faculty in which the virtue courage is located. In this question (ST II-II 162), the aggressive faculty which is located in the sensitive appetite, is said to belong instead to the intellective appetite. “Now the irascible may be taken in two ways. First in a strict sense, and thus it is a part of the sensitive appetite,...Secondly, the irascible may be taken in a broader sense, so as to belong also to the intellective appetite....The irascible understood in this broad sense is not distinct from the concupiscible power” (ST II-II 162.3). If the aggressive faculty, which is located with temperance in the sensitive appetite, can be said to be in the intellective appetite indistinguishable from the impulse faculty, then it follows that the same can be said of the impulse faculty, namely, that it is in the intellective appetite.
It should be noted here that Aquinas, in part, follows Augustine in this account of studiousness when he writes: “Augustine says (De morib. eccl. 21): ‘We are forbidden to be curious: and this is a great gift that temperance bestows.’ Now curiosity is prevented by moderate studiousness. Therefore studiousness is a part of temperance” (ST II-II 166.2). Augustine should be recognized as an essential source in prompting Aquinas to explicitly treat this notion of intellectual temperance. In De moribus ecclesiae catholicae 21.38 Augustine writes: “Quamobrem recte etiam curiosi esse prohibemur, quod magnum temperantiae munus est.” See Bauer, Johannes B. Sancti Avreli Avgvstini Opera, 6:7 Corpvs Scriptorvm Ecclesiasticurvm Latinorvm, Vol. 40, ed. Johannes B. Bauer, Vindobonae: Hoelder-Pichler-Tempsky, 1992.
For example, NE 7.4.4 puts the relationship this way, “And hence we class the unrestrained man with the profligate (and the self-restrained with the temperate), but not those who yield to anger or the like, because Unrestraint and Profligacy are related to the same pleasures and pains. But as a matter of fact, although they are related to the same things, they are not related to them in the same way; the profligate acts from choice, the unrestrained man does not.” See also NE 7. sections 3.2; 4.2; 5.9; 7.1; 8.4-5; and 9.5-7.
The passage in full reads: “Now those who against the right principle within them exceed in regard to the latter class of pleasant things, we do not call unrestrained simply, but with a qualification—unrestrained as to money, gain, honour or anger—not merely ‘unrestrained’; because we regard them as distinct from the unrestrained in the strict sense, and only so called by analogy” (NE 7.4.2).
Charles Young refers to “intellectual temperance” in “Aristotle on Temperance,” pp. 541-542. It is a matter of self-knowledge and “consists in a consciousness of one’s place and of the limits that this implies.” On the other hand “moral temperance” is that virtue which concerns self-control rather than self-knowledge. According to Young, Plato presents moral temperance as a product of intellectual temperance. Aristotle’s focus is somewhat different. Intellectual temperance for Aristotle is to “know one’s place in the community of souls;” to realize one’s animality and be properly, or morally oriented toward it.
Roberts, Robert. “Emotions Among the Virtues of the Christian Life,” p. 56.
The Moral Psychology of the Virtues, p. 167.
The Moral Psychology of the Virtues, p. 162.
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Carr, M.F. (2001). A Normative Account of Temperance. In: Passionate Deliberation. Philosophical Studies in Contemporary Culture, vol 8. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-0591-3_4
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