The Complete Aristotle (eng.)

hindrance to thought, and the more so the more one
delights in them, e.g. in sexual pleasure; for no one could think
of anything while absorbed in this. (e) There is no art of
pleasure; but every good is the product of some art. (f) Children
and the brutes pursue pleasures. (2) The reasons for the view that
not all pleasures are good are that (a) there are pleasures that
are actually base and objects of reproach, and (b) there are
harmful pleasures; for some pleasant things are unhealthy. (3) The
reason for the view that the best thing in the world is not
pleasure is that pleasure is not an end but a process.
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12
    These are pretty much the things that are said. That it does not
follow from these grounds that pleasure is not a good, or even the
chief good, is plain from the following considerations. (A) (a)
First, since that which is good may be so in either of two senses
(one thing good simply and another good for a particular person),
natural constitutions and states of being, and therefore also the
corresponding movements and processes, will be correspondingly
divisible. Of those which are thought to be bad some will be bad if
taken without qualification but not bad for a particular person,
but worthy of his choice, and some will not be worthy of choice
even for a particular person, but only at a particular time and for
a short period, though not without qualification; while others are
not even pleasures, but seem to be so, viz. all those which involve
pain and whose end is curative, e.g. the processes that go on in
sick persons.
    (b) Further, one kind of good being activity and another being
state, the processes that restore us to our natural state are only
incidentally pleasant; for that matter the activity at work in the
appetites for them is the activity of so much of our state and
nature as has remained unimpaired; for there are actually pleasures
that involve no pain or appetite (e.g. those of contemplation), the
nature in such a case not being defective at all. That the others
are incidental is indicated by the fact that men do not enjoy the
same pleasant objects when their nature is in its settled state as
they do when it is being replenished, but in the former case they
enjoy the things that are pleasant without qualification, in the
latter the contraries of these as well; for then they enjoy even
sharp and bitter things, none of which is pleasant either by nature
or without qualification. The states they produce, therefore, are
not pleasures naturally or without qualification; for as pleasant
things differ, so do the pleasures arising from them.
    (c) Again, it is not necessary that there should be something
else better than pleasure, as some say the end is better than the
process; for leasures are not processes nor do they all involve
process-they are activities and ends; nor do they arise when we are
becoming something, but when we are exercising some faculty; and
not all pleasures have an end different from themselves, but only
the pleasures of persons who are being led to the perfecting of
their nature. This is why it is not right to say that pleasure is
perceptible process, but it should rather be called activity of the
natural state, and instead of ‘perceptible’ ‘unimpeded’. It is
thought by some people to be process just because they think it is
in the strict sense good; for they think that activity is process,
which it is not.
    (B) The view that pleasures are bad because some pleasant things
are unhealthy is like saying that healthy things are bad because
some healthy things are bad for money-making; both are bad in the
respect mentioned, but they are not bad for that reason-indeed,
thinking itself is sometimes injurious to health.
    Neither practical wisdom nor any state of being is impeded by
the pleasure arising from it; it is foreign pleasures that impede,
for the pleasures arising from thinking and learning will make us
think and learn all the more.
    (C) The fact that no pleasure is the product of any art arises
naturally enough; there is no art of any other activity either, but
only of the corresponding faculty; though for that matter the arts
of the perfumer and the cook are thought to be arts of
pleasure.
    (D) The arguments based on the grounds that the temperate man
avoids pleasure and that the man of practical wisdom pursues the
painless life, and that children and the brutes pursue pleasure,
are all refuted by the same consideration. We have