- 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.