Relation to oneself· Body and lifenamed middle
Temperance
Axis: Bodily pleasures — Should we distrust the pleasures of the body, or celebrate them?
Neither renunciation nor excess: enjoy the pleasures of the body, but in measure. Temperance is not the enemy of pleasure but its right ordering: to savor what is good at the right moment, without becoming its slave. Pleasure is a good as long as reason stays in command.
Movements 1
Aristotelianismexplicit
Aristotelianism rejects both asceticism and intemperance: pleasure is not the good, but it completes activity as beauty completes youth. Bodily pleasures are legitimate so long as they keep to the set by temperance, yielding a very moderate position, barely on the accepting side.
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, X, 4-5 · Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, III, 10-11
Philosophers 4
Aristotleexplicit
Pleasure is neither the good nor an evil: it completes the activity as the bloom of youth crowns the young. The virtue of temperance is the between intemperance and insensibility, the latter defect being itself a vice, hence a position just past the balance point, on the side of a measured celebration.
Nicomachean Ethics, X.4 (1174b); III.11
Show inferred positions (3)
Socratesinferable
Indifferent to luxury, going barefoot and wearing the same cloak in every season, Socrates does not for all that condemn pleasure: he feasts at the and can drink all night without drunkenness. His sobriety is not the asceticism that takes the body for an enemy, but a temperance that uses everything without being its slave.
Plato, Symposium, 220a and 223c-d · Xenophon, Memorabilia, I, 3, 5-15
Thomas Aquinasinferable
Against the contempt for the body found in certain traditions, Thomas holds bodily pleasures to be good in themselves, willed by God and necessary to life: pleasure completes the natural operation. But the virtue of temperance submits them to reason and to the final end, neither condemning nor exalting them. Hence a position of balance, equidistant from asceticism and celebration, faithful to the .
Summa Theologiae, Ia-IIae, q. 34 (the goodness of pleasures)
Zhuangziinferable
Zhuangzi neither mortifies the body as a prison of the soul nor erects pleasure into an end: he takes it for a moment of the flux to be welcomed with ease, without greed or disgust. "Caring for the vital principle" is neither asceticism nor debauchery but the care not to wear out one's life by exhausting it in desires or fears. The position is properly median, a playful temperance that follows the natural of the body without making it either an enemy or an idol.
Zhuangzi, ch. 3 (The Secret of Caring for Life)