Kitap 3
1
We must next attempt to decide about Temperance and Profligacy. The term profligate (unchaste) has a variety of meanings. It means the man who has not been (as it were) chastised or cured, just as undivided means one that has not been divided; and these terms include both one capable of the process and one not capable of it: undivided means both that which cannot be divided and that which though it can be has not been;
2
and similarly with unchaste —it denotes both that which is by nature incapable of chastening and that which, though capable, has not actually been chastened in respect of the errors as regards which the temperate man acts rightly, as is the case with children; for of them it is in this sense that the term unchaste ἀκόλαστος(lit. incorrigible ) often means no more than naughty (Solomon). is used,
3
whereas another use of it again refers to persons hard to cure or entirely incurable by chastisement. But though profligacy has more than one sense, it is clear that the profligate are concerned with certain pleasures and pains and that they differ from one another and from the other vicious characters in being disposed in a certain manner towards these; and we described previously the way in which we apply the term profligacy by analogy.This seems to refer to words which must have been lost at Aristot. Eud. Eth. 1221a 20 (Solomon).
4
Persons on the other hand who owing to insensitiveness are uninfluenced by these pleasures are called by some people insensitive and by others are designated by other names of the same sort;
5
but the state is not a very familiar one nor of common occurrence, because all men err more in the other direction, and susceptibility and sensitiveness to pleasures of this sort are natural to everybody. It specially attaches to persons like the boors who are a stock character in comedy—people who steer clear of pleasures even in moderate and necessary indulgences.
