Temperance

Plato makes temperance (sophrosyne) one of the four cardinal virtues in the Republic, alongside wisdom, courage, and justice. While justice is harmony among all parts of the soul and city, temperance is specifically the agreement within the soul and city that reason should rule. It is the virtue of the whole soul accepting the proper order rather than the virtue of any one part: the lower elements consenting to be governed by the higher rather than seeking to reverse the arrangement.

The erotic dialogues add depth. The temperate soul is not one that has killed desire but one that has redirected it. The philosopher's eros for wisdom replaces the appetite's eros for pleasure. Temperance is not the absence of passion but the mastery and redirection of passion toward proper objects. This is why the philosopher can be simultaneously erotic and temperate — the desire is intense, but its object is the eternal rather than the perishable.

In the Philebus, Plato examines pleasure and pain directly, arguing that the best life mixes knowledge with moderate pleasure rather than maximizing pleasure alone. The pure life of pleasure, untempered by reason, is not the best life. The proportions matter, and temperance is the virtue that calibrates the mixture rightly — knowing how much pleasure to admit and when reason should check the appetite's demand for more.

Plato sets the standard that all subsequent accounts must meet: temperance as rational mastery of appetite, not mere suppression but proper ordering toward better ends. Aristotle will refine this with his doctrine of the mean, Epictetus will push it toward radical detachment, and Freud will argue that Plato's aspiration generates the very neuroses civilization pays for.

Aristotle gives temperance its most precise ethical analysis. In the Nicomachean Ethics, temperance (sophrosyne) is the virtue of the appetitive part of the soul with respect to bodily pleasures, specifically pleasures of touch and taste. The temperate person neither indulges pleasures excessively nor is indifferent to them; they take pleasure in appropriate objects in appropriate measure, for the right reasons, at the right time. Licentiousness (excess) and insensibility (deficiency) are the opposing vices.

The doctrine of the mean is essential here. The virtuous response to pleasure is not the maximum nor the minimum but the right amount in the right circumstances. Aristotle is careful to note that the mean is not arithmetical but relative to the individual: what is temperate for the athlete is not the same as what is temperate for the person of sedentary habits. This is not relativism but recognition that excellent functioning differs by constitution and circumstance.

Aristotle also distinguishes the temperate person from the continent (enkratic) person. The temperate person has no pull toward excess; they take pleasure in moderate enjoyment and feel no temptation to go further. The continent person feels the pull of excessive pleasure but resists it through will. Continence is a lesser achievement than temperance, though far better than incontinence. The goal of moral education is temperance — the condition in which right action is also pleasant — not merely the willpower that fights against appetite.

Aristotle grounds temperance in the nature of bodily pleasure rather than in abstract duty, making it a matter of proper human functioning. Epictetus will push further toward detachment; Aquinas will incorporate this analysis into a Christian account of the passions and creation; Freud will use the analysis of libido and its regulation to explain why Aristotle's program so often fails in practice.

Epictetus reframes temperance as freedom through non-attachment. For the Stoic, the problem with appetite is not that it inclines toward wrong objects but that it inclines toward externals at all. The person who desires moderate pleasure is still dependent on circumstances beyond their control. The Stoic aim is to locate desire exclusively in what is "up to us" — our judgments and choices — and to accept all externals with equanimity. This is more radical than Aristotle's mean.

The Stoic sage does not take pleasure in appropriate food and drink in the right amount; the sage is largely indifferent to food and drink, taking what is offered and making nothing of privation. Physical pleasures are "preferred indifferents" at best — things one might choose when available but that cannot genuinely harm or help the soul. True temperance is freedom from the necessity of choosing at all, the condition of the person who can take or leave with equal ease.

The practical program is severe: daily practice of identifying every desire for external things and withholding assent from the impression that it matters. Epictetus recommends progressive desensitization, beginning with small things and working toward greater indifference. The process is lifelong and demands constant vigilance. The payoff is freedom from the anxiety that every appetite brings, and from the disappointment that follows when appetite is denied.

Epictetus pushes temperance toward detachment rather than moderation. His account appealed to Christians because it resonated with asceticism, but Aquinas will argue that indifference to pleasure goes too far: the creation is good, and taking appropriate pleasure in it is not a moral failure. Freud will note that Epictetus's program demands the same repression of instinct that civilization imposes, and that both generate costs.

Aquinas provides the most systematic scholastic treatment of temperance in the Summa Theologica, drawing on Aristotle's account of the mean while integrating it with Christian theology. Temperance moderates the sensory appetite for pleasures of touch and taste — primarily in food, drink, and sexual activity. Unlike Epictetus, Aquinas insists that the creation is good and that proper enjoyment of its goods is not a moral failure; only disordered enjoyment is. The body is not the soul's enemy.

The key concept is ordered appetite. The temperate person does not destroy or suppress appetite but directs it toward its proper object in proper measure. Sexual desire ordered to procreation and the bond of marriage is genuinely good; sexual desire disordered from these ends is vice. Food and drink enjoyed for nourishment and appropriate pleasure are goods; gluttony is their disorder. The theological dimension is not rejection of bodily life but its proper ordering within a framework of creation, fall, and redemption.

Aquinas also elaborates the parts and "daughters" of temperance — shamefacedness, honesty, abstinence, sobriety, chastity, modesty in bearing and dress. Each addresses a different domain in which appetite can be properly or improperly ordered. Temperance is not one act but a disposition that pervades an entire way of living, shaping how the virtuous person presents themselves in every context where appetite or display is possible.

Aquinas's account became the standard Catholic moral theology of temperance for centuries. It preserves Aristotle's insight about proper pleasure while insisting on the theological context. Montaigne will press in a similar direction — taking pleasure as genuinely good — while stripping away the doctrinal architecture. Mill will raise the further question of how far external authority can legitimately regulate private temperance at all.

Montaigne approaches temperance with characteristic skepticism toward the moralists. Against both the Stoic demand for indifference to pleasure and the Christian demand for asceticism, Montaigne defends the naturalness and goodness of physical pleasure enjoyed with acceptance and without craving. The Essays defend what he calls the "natural pleasures" — food, drink, company, physical comfort — against the philosophical prejudice that true wisdom requires their conquest or suppression.

"I, who boast of embracing the pleasures of life so carefully and particularly, find in them, when I look at them thus minutely, very little but wind," he writes — but the conclusion is not asceticism. The finding is that pleasure passes, not that it should be refused. The temperate person takes present enjoyment without clinging to it. Excess and deficiency are both failures, and Montaigne thinks the moralists who counsel deficiency are making the same mistake in a different direction, trading one form of obsession for another.

Montaigne is also skeptical about the connection between doctrine and practice. The philosophers who wrote most elaborately about temperance were not notably more temperate in their lives; the moralist who has read all the right books can still be a glutton. Temperance, if it exists, is formed by practice and character, not by theoretical knowledge. The person who has achieved it typically cannot explain how, while the person who has mastered the theory typically has not achieved it.

Montaigne's empirical, self-directed approach to temperance anticipates modern psychology. Where Aristotle prescribed the mean and Aquinas prescribed the properly ordered appetite, Montaigne asks what actually works for actual human beings in their actual diversity. Mill will inherit this empirical concern when he argues for personal liberty in matters of temperance.

Kant relocates temperance within his account of duty and autonomy. In the Critique of Practical Reason and the Groundwork, he argues that self-mastery is a duty — not because pleasure is bad but because allowing inclination to override duty is a failure of rational self-governance. The temperate person is not primarily one who enjoys pleasures in the right measure (Aristotle's account) but one who has made self-command a matter of rational principle.

The crucial difference from Aristotle is the role of inclination. For Aristotle, the temperate person takes pleasure in appropriate objects; no tension between duty and desire arises, and the absence of tension is the mark of virtue fully achieved. For Kant, the moral worth of an act depends on its being done from duty rather than inclination. Acting temperately because one enjoys temperate pleasures has no moral worth; acting temperately because one judges it to be one's duty — even against the grain of desire — has genuine moral worth.

Kant's account therefore produces a paradox that the classical tradition would find perverse: the more natural temperance becomes — the more the temperate person genuinely enjoys the right things — the less moral worth their actions carry. The struggle for self-mastery, which Aristotle treats as a sign of incomplete virtue, is for Kant the clearest context in which moral credit is earned. This places him at odds with the entire ancient tradition from Plato through the Stoics.

Kant transforms temperance from a question about ordered pleasure into a question about rational autonomy and the structure of moral motivation. Mill will reject Kant's framework and return to a consequentialist account. Freud will explain why Kant's program of rational self-command so often fails — and why the failure generates something worse than the original appetite.

Mill's treatment of temperance is primarily a political one. In On Liberty, he argues for the harm principle: the state has no legitimate authority to interfere with behavior that affects only the individual themselves. This directly engages the temperance question: if someone's drinking or eating habits harm only themselves, the state has no right to prohibit or penalize them. Mill is one of the founders of modern anti-paternalism, and the temperance reform movements of his day were his most pressing application of the principle.

This does not mean Mill endorses intemperance. In Utilitarianism, he argues that higher pleasures — intellectual and aesthetic enjoyment — are genuinely superior to lower pleasures and that cultivating a character capable of the former produces a better life. The person who can enjoy poetry, science, and friendship is not merely happier by sum but happier by kind. Temperance toward bodily pleasures is instrumentally valuable for the full enjoyment of the higher ones.

But Mill insists on the crucial distinction between personal self-development and social enforcement. Even if intemperance is bad for the individual, coercive temperance is worse, because it infantilizes the person and prevents the development of self-governed character. The way to produce temperance is persuasion and example, not law. Prohibition destroys the very autonomy whose exercise would produce genuine virtue — it teaches compliance rather than self-mastery.

Mill's liberalism reframes the temperance question as a question of political philosophy. The internal standard of virtue that Aristotle and Aquinas elaborated becomes, for Mill, a matter of personal liberty rather than communal enforcement. Freud will supply the final irony: the temperate behavior Mill recommends is the same instinctual renunciation that civilization imposes, and that renunciation generates the very unhappiness that makes people intemperate.

Freud offers the darkest account of temperance in the tradition. In Civilization and Its Discontents, he argues that civilization is built on instinctual renunciation — the systematic suppression of sexual and aggressive drives for the sake of social cooperation. The price of civilization, and therefore of the temperate behavior it demands, is chronic unhappiness. Temperance is not a natural achievement but a coerced sacrifice, and the coercion comes not only from outside but from the internalized authority that becomes the superego.

The mechanism is guilt. As we internalize civilization's demands, the superego grows stronger and more severe, punishing instinctual satisfaction even in imagination. The more we renounce, the stronger the superego becomes, and the more guilt it generates for any remaining satisfaction. There is no equilibrium: the temperate civilized person is under perpetual internal pressure. The neurotic is simply someone in whom this mechanism has become pathologically exaggerated — which means, in Freud's view, that neurosis is the normal condition writ large.

Freud does not conclude that civilization should be abandoned or that temperance is therefore worthless. He recognizes that the alternative — uninhibited instinctual life — would mean the end of social cooperation and all cultural achievement. But he resists every idealization of the virtuous life. The temperate person is paying a cost, whether or not they know it, and the happiness they achieve through temperance is purchased with the unhappiness of renunciation. The tradition from Plato through Kant concealed this economy; Freud makes it explicit.

Freud closes the classical tradition of temperance by revealing what it cannot acknowledge: that the self-mastery praised from Plato through Kant has an unconscious economy, and that the costs are borne by the repressed rather than acknowledged by the virtuous. The modern psychology of addiction, compulsion, and eating disorder is, in part, the clinical record of what Freud predicted.