Study Guide

The Nicomachean Ethics Book 2, Chapter 7 (1107a29-1108b10)

By Aristotle

Book 2, Chapter 7 (1107a29-1108b10)

Aristotle wants to get down to the nitty-gritty and discuss his theory of excess, mean, and deficiency in detail.
He's going to run specific characteristics through the spectrum.
Between the extremes of fear and confidence, we have courage. An excessively confident person is reckless. Not good.
When we speak of pleasure and pain, Aristotle says that the mean is moderation. Licentiousness is the excess.
He can barely conceive of a person who is deficient here, especially with pleasures, so he makes up a name: the "insensibles."
When dealing with money, the mean is liberality. The excess is prodigality (spending way too much) and deficiency is stinginess.
Then he gets more abstract and speaks of honor/dishonor. The golden mean is "greatness of soul."
Can you guess the deficiency? Yeah. It's "smallness of soul."
But these terms aren't for workaday individuals—they're for heroes.
For the rest of us there's ambition (i.e. excessive desire for honor) and being "unambitious" (the deficiency).
There's no name for "just right ambition," though it might be either "ambitious" or "unambitious" depending on whom you ask.
And though anger doesn't really have a name for its degrees, Aristotle will concoct some: "gentleness" (the mean), "irascible" (excess), and—wait for it—"unirascible" (deficiency).
The last characteristics deal with conversation. Truthfulness is the mean for a truthful person. For a playful speaker, the mean is witty/wittiness. The mean for pleasant behavior is friendliness.
Aristotle spends a very little time on the passions, which he claims also have a "middle term" to them.
So a bashful person is just right, while shameful or shameless person is in the extreme.
In terms of how we react to people around us? Indignation is a mean between envy and spitefulness.

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The Nicomachean Ethics Book 2, Chapter 7 (1107a29-1108b10)

By Aristotle

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