Thursday, April 11, 2013

The Virtues: Temperance

What I really like about Aristotle is that he seems to understand that the virtues are to be achieved by human beings, which means that he accounts for imperfection and a realistic process of working towards that virtue.
I particularly like his account of Temperance because I think it is what slips under the radar most often. Temperance is a discipline that regulates a person's craving for physical pleasure, and its extremes are licentiousness and insensibility. The former is a person who is completely obsessed with physical pleasure, to the point where being deprived of it causes the person pain. Insensibility is not all that common, but it could be a person who has become out of touch with their senses. Ideally, a person would feel appropriate amount of pleasure and direct it towards the correct things.

Some examples I could think of were:

Amber Sweets
Y'know, Paris Hilton from Repo: The Genetic Opera. She is completely obsessed with getting the physical high from zydrate, not to mention her only concern is what she looks like... Extreme #1? Check.

The second extreme was a bit harder to find... If anybody is familiar with the series Supernatural, you'll be familiar with this character. Castiel is an angel that is sent to guard the Winchesters. To do this, he must take on a human vessel. Because he is an angel, Castiel ends up forgetting about human needs and does not feed his vessel. This insensibility and disconnect with the body is evident in an episode where Famine (one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse) makes an appearance, and Castiel succumbs to the cravings in excess. This could've been avoided if he had been more in touch with the need to satisfy the body.

Nom nom, Cas.

1 comment:

  1. Great examples. I like how you are applying Aristotle to popular culture.

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