Book 3
9
for a man who can produce jokes of a sort that will give pleasure to a person of good judgement even though the laugh is against himself will be midway between the vulgar man and the frigid. This is a better definition than that the thing said must not be painful to the victim whatever sort of man he may be—rather, it must give pleasure to the man in the middle position, since his judgement is good.
10
All these middle states, though praiseworthy, are not virtues, nor are the opposite states vices, for they do not involve purposive choice; they are all in the classification of the emotions, for each of them is an emotion.
11
But because they are natural they contribute to the natural virtues; for, as will be said in what follows,Not in Eud. Eth, but cf. Aristot. Nic. Eth. 1144b 1-17. each virtue exists both naturally and otherwise, that is, in conjunction with thought.
12
Therefore envy contributes to injustice (for the actions that spring from it affect another person), and righteous indignation to justice, and modesty to temperance (owing to which people even define temperance as a species of emotion), and the sincere and false are respectively wise and foolish.Truthfulness and mendacity contribute to wisdom and folly as νέμεσις and φθόνος do to δικαιοσύνη and ἀδικία, and αἰδώς(and ἀναιδεία) to σωφροσύνη(and ἀκολασία).
13
And the mean is more opposed to the extremes than the extremes are to one another, because the mean does not occur in combination with either extreme, whereas the extremes often do occur in combination with one another, and sometimes the same men are venturesome cowards, or extravagant in some things and illiberal in others, and in general not uniform in a bad way—
14
for when men lack uniformity in a good way, this results in men of the middle characters, since the mean contains both extremes.
