Does Aristotle Reduce Feelings to Abstract Experiences of Pleasure?

One would have to consider significantly more aspects than those discussed so far, for an accurate presentation of the Platonic-Aristotelian analysis of what in contemporary language is called feeling or emotion. However, a basic evaluation of the individual aspects that have been discussed thus far has already become possible; one that, I hope, will also be able to counter the objection that a rational analysis such as that proposed by Plato and Aristotle can never do justice to the richness of the world of feeling.

If one approaches the Aristotelian arguments as he presents them (for example in the central chapters devoted to pleasure in book 10 of the Nicomachean Ethics) from the perspective that a feeling is an essentially non-rational, psychic complex (and one could proceed analogously for Plato), it seems as though Aristotle only had a very limited concept of feeling. He appears to consider feelings only under the aspect of whether arbitrary activities are experienced as pleasurable or without pleasure, as agreeable or disagreeable. It thus seems as though the entire complexity, internal disparity, and, especially, the quite concrete “intelligence” of feelings has been left out of consideration.

However, against this objection, we may note that it is not Aristotle who robs feelings of their nuances and their intelligence. Rather, this is merely the impression that arises, if, while reading his texts, one accepts as self-evident the presupposition that feelings have a fundamentally unique mode of existence, one that is independent of conscious rationality.