The Complete Aristotle (eng.)

follows that folly
coupled with incontinence is virtue; for a man does the opposite of
what he judges, owing to incontinence, but judges what is good to
be evil and something that he should not do, and consequence he
will do what is good and not what is evil.
    (5) Further, he who on conviction does and pursues and chooses
what is pleasant would be thought to be better than one who does so
as a result not of calculation but of incontinence; for he is
easier to cure since he may be persuaded to change his mind. But to
the incontinent man may be applied the proverb ‘when water chokes,
what is one to wash it down with?’ If he had been persuaded of the
rightness of what he does, he would have desisted when he was
persuaded to change his mind; but now he acts in spite of his being
persuaded of something quite different.
    (6) Further, if incontinence and continence are concerned with
any and every kind of object, who is it that is incontinent in the
unqualified sense? No one has all the forms of incontinence, but we
say some people are incontinent without qualification.
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3
    Of some such kind are the difficulties that arise; some of these
points must be refuted and the others left in possession of the
field; for the solution of the difficulty is the discovery of the
truth. (1) We must consider first, then, whether incontinent people
act knowingly or not, and in what sense knowingly; then (2) with
what sorts of object the incontinent and the continent man may be
said to be concerned (i.e. whether with any and every pleasure and
pain or with certain determinate kinds), and whether the continent
man and the man of endurance are the same or different; and
similarly with regard to the other matters germane to this inquiry.
The starting-point of our investigation is (a) the question whether
the continent man and the incontinent are differentiated by their
objects or by their attitude, i.e. whether the incontinent man is
incontinent simply by being concerned with such and such objects,
or, instead, by his attitude, or, instead of that, by both these
things; (b) the second question is whether incontinence and
continence are concerned with any and every object or not. The man
who is incontinent in the unqualified sense is neither concerned
with any and every object, but with precisely those with which the
self-indulgent man is concerned, nor is he characterized by being
simply related to these (for then his state would be the same as
self-indulgence), but by being related to them in a certain way.
For the one is led on in accordance with his own choice, thinking
that he ought always to pursue the present pleasure; while the
other does not think so, but yet pursues it.
    (1) As for the suggestion that it is true opinion and not
knowledge against which we act incontinently, that makes no
difference to the argument; for some people when in a state of
opinion do not hesitate, but think they know exactly. If, then, the
notion is that owing to their weak conviction those who have
opinion are more likely to act against their judgement than those
who know, we answer that there need be no difference between
knowledge and opinion in this respect; for some men are no less
convinced of what they think than others of what they know; as is
shown by the of Heraclitus. But (a), since we use the word ‘know’
in two senses (for both the man who has knowledge but is not using
it and he who is using it are said to know), it will make a
difference whether, when a man does what he should not, he has the
knowledge but is not exercising it, or is exercising it; for the
latter seems strange, but not the former.
    (b) Further, since there are two kinds of premisses, there is
nothing to prevent a man’s having both premisses and acting against
his knowledge, provided that he is using only the universal premiss
and not the particular; for it is particular acts that have to be
done. And there are also two kinds of universal term; one is
predicable of the agent, the other of the object; e.g. ‘dry food is
good for every man’, and ‘I am a man’, or ‘such and such food is
dry’; but whether ‘this food is such and such’, of this the
incontinent man either has not or is not exercising the knowledge.
There will, then, be, firstly, an enormous difference between these
manners of knowing, so that to know in one way when we act
incontinently would not seem anything strange, while to know in the
other way would be