I have been studying Aristotle’s concept of pleasure presented in the Nicomachean Ethics, for the last 5 years. What is pleasure according to Aristotle, and what role does it play in Aristotle’s moral theory? 

Inquiries into Aristotle’s pleasure are, of course, not new. Many scholars have examined them. Mostly because very different from our common understanding of pleasure as a sort of feeling or sensation, Aristotle defines pleasure in terms of energeia, a Greek term that he himself coined and developed in his Metaphysics, which is often translated as “activity,” “actualization,” “actuality.” So one of the central tasks is to understand what it could mean to say that pleasure is an activity, or an actuality. If we tell someone, “pleasure is an activity,” it doesn’t immediately make sense. We say playing soccer is an activity. Pleasure is what we can gain from playing soccer, not the playing itself. 

Similar problems arise in other translations. 

We can’t just say Aristotle’s claim is confusing because we’ve chosen the wrong English translations, or that pleasure is an activity only makes sense in Aristotle’s time. Rather, we should take Aristotle’s view seriously and take the metaphysical significance of energeia seriously in his account of pleasure.

Another complication is that Aristotle’s discussion of pleasure and energeia differs in the two books of the Nicomachean Ethics. In Book 7, he claims that pleasure is an energeia. But in Book 10, he claims that pleasure is a supervenient end of energeia. 

One way to interpret Aristotle’s account is to say that pleasure is a byproduct of activity. Here, the activity means action, such as playing soccer, listening to music, eating ice cream, etc. On this view, pleasure is a kind of experience that supervenes on action. 

This reading aligns well with Book 10, where Aristotle says that pleasure is a sort of supervenient end of energeia. But it doesn’t fully explain what pleasure is, beyond saying that it’s an experience that arises in our action. It tells us the relationship between pleasure and action, not the nature of pleasure itself.

Another way to interpret Aristotle’s account is to understand energeia not as “action,” but as the exercise of psychic faculties—such as perception and thinking. According to some scholars who hold this view, the verb form energein shares a similar meaning with the term chresthai—which means “to use” or “to activate.” So in this reading, energeia means exercise, particularly the exercise of psychic faculties such as perception and thinking, and pleasure either is, or supervenes on, that exercise.

This interpretation goes deeper in telling what could be the psychic structure of pleasure as something that being identical to or supervenens on. By “psychic structure,” I mean what Aristotle describes about the soul. What is it about the soul that constitutes pleasure?

But there are some serious problems that this second interpretation faces. The biggest one is that pleasure derived from actions cannot be a single and unified experience. If pleasure is identified with the exercise of certain faculties, then it is hard to explain the pleasure that comes from the exercise of not only one but two faculties as a single experience. 

With the limitations of these two interpretations, I propose an interpretation that goes deeper in telling the exact psychic structure that pleasure is/supervenes on than the first kind of interpretation, and better preserves the unity of pleasure in action than the second.