'THE FREEDOM OF THE INNER BEAST : 'Reason and more intellectual pleasures are shunned in favor of bodily pleasures'

'Reason and more intellectual pleasures are shunned in favor of bodily pleasures. In discussing temperance at III.xi-xii, Aristotle explains how the licentious man pursues bodily pleasures as opposed to intellectual pleasures because these bodily pleasures are readily available (especially amongst opulent societies) and plentiful. Thus the hedonist approaches and evaluates the world not based upon reason, but based upon animalistic or brutish scales of pleasure-maximization/pain-minimization[4]. Reason then is almost viewed as an enemy, it being the “agent of destruction” which, combined with the inner-voice of traditional morality (a person’s conscious), seeks to destroy hedonism by returning the individual to more normal levels. '


http://jroberts.blogs.com/letters/2007/12/aristotle-and-h.html