Book 7: Characters Other Than Virtue and Vice.
Chapter 4: Of incontinence in the strict and in the metaphorical sense.
So much, then, for the question whether the incontinent man knows or not, and in what sense it is possible to act incontinently with knowledge. We next have to consider whether a man can be incontinent simply, or only incontinent in some particular way, and, if the former be the case, what is the field in which the character is manifested.
It is evident that it is in the matter of pleasures and pains that both continent and hardy and incontinent and soft men manifest their characters.
Of the sources of pleasure, some are necessary, and others are desirable in themselves but admit of excess: “necessary” are the bodily processes, such as nutrition, the propagation of the species, and generally those bodily functions with which we said that profligacy and temperance have to do; others, though not necessary, are in themselves desirable, such as victory, honour, wealth, and other things of the kind that are good and pleasant.
Now, those who go to excess in these latter in spite of their own better reason are not called incontinent simply, but with a qualifying epithet, as incontinent with respect to money, or gain, or honour, or anger — not simply, since they are different characters, and only called incontinent in virtue of a resemblance—just as the victor in the last Olympic games was called a man; for though the meaning of the name as applied to him was but slightly different from its common meaning, still it was different.
And this may be proved thus: incontinence is blamed, not simply as a mistake, but as a kind of vice, either of vice simply, or of some particular vice; but those who are thus incontinent [in the pursuit of wealth, etc.] are not thus blamed.
But of the characters that manifest themselves in the matter of bodily enjoyments, with which we say the temperate and the profligate are concerned, he who goes to excess in pursuing what is pleasant and avoiding what is painful, in the matter of hunger and thirst, and heat and cold, and all things that affect us by touch or taste, and who does this not of deliberate choice, but contrary to his deliberate choice and reasoning, is called incontinent—not with the addition that he is incontinent with respect to this particular thing, as anger, but simply incontinent.
A proof of this is that people are also called soft in these latter matters, but not in any of the former [honour, gain, etc.].
And on this account we group the incontinent with the profligate and the continent and the temperate (but do not class with them any of those who are metaphorically called continent and incontinent), because they are in a way concerned with the same pleasures and pains. They are, in fact, concerned with the same matters, but their behaviour is different; for whereas the other three deliberately choose what they do, the incontinent man does not.
And so a man who, without desire, or with only