Temperance

Plato treats temperance (sophrosyne) as one of the four cardinal virtues of the Republic, together with wisdom, courage, and justice. On his account, temperance is not the excellence of any single part of the soul or city, but the agreement of the whole that reason ought to rule. Where justice is the harmony that assigns each part its proper work, temperance is the consent of the lower elements to be governed by the higher. The temperate man is said to be master of himself because, as Socrates explains, there is in the soul a better and a worse principle, and temperance obtains when the better has the worse under control.

In the Gorgias, Callicles maintains that only those unable to satisfy their desires praise temperance, and that luxury and license, if provided with means, are virtue and happiness. Socrates replies by comparing the intemperate man to a vessel full of holes, never able to be filled, and the temperate man to one whose desires are limited and so capable of satisfaction. The life of order is preferred to the life of insatiable appetite not because pleasure is denied, but because without measure pleasure cannot be secured. The question how far pleasure itself admits of measure is taken up again in the Philebus, where the best life is said to mix knowledge with moderate pleasure rather than to pursue pleasure alone.

The erotic dialogues add a further dimension. The temperate soul is not one that has extinguished desire, but one that has redirected it. The philosopher's eros for wisdom takes the place of the appetite's eros for perishable goods. Temperance, on this view, is mastery and redirection of passion toward its proper objects rather than the mere absence of passion. That account of desire is treated more fully under the idea of Desire, and the ranking of pleasures under the idea of Pleasure and Pain.

Plato's definition of temperance as the ordering of pleasures and desires, and as the agreement that reason should rule, supplies the terms in which later writers work. Aristotle will specify the pleasures with which temperance is strictly concerned and distinguish temperance from continence. Epictetus will press self-mastery toward non-attachment to externals. Aquinas will retain the rule of the better over the worse within a theology of creation and ordered appetite. The general theory of the virtues, within which these distinctions are made, is considered under Virtue and Vice.

Aristotle defines temperance by reference to pleasure and pain, and more precisely by reference to the bodily pleasures that human beings share with other animals, the pleasures of touch and taste. Self-indulgence attaches to us not as men but as animals, and to delight in such things above all others is, in his phrase, brutish. Temperance is the mean with respect to these pleasures: the temperate person neither pursues them to excess nor falls short of them so far as to take no delight where delight is proper. Licentiousness is the excess; insensibility, which Aristotle holds is scarcely human, is the defect.

The mean is not an arithmetical average but relative to the agent and the circumstances. What is temperate for one constitution or way of life need not be temperate for another. Reason, and more particularly the virtue of prudence, determines where the mean lies in a given case. The endurance of pain, central to courage, enters temperance only incidentally: the self-indulgent man is pained more than he ought at not getting pleasant things, whereas the temperate man is not pained at their absence or at abstinence from them. The relation of temperance to courage, justice, and prudence is treated more fully under those ideas and under Virtue and Vice.

Aristotle also distinguishes the temperate person from the continent. Continence is reason's capacity to check a still immoderate desire in a particular situation; temperance is the habitual condition in which desire itself has been moderated to accord with reason. The temperate person has no need of continence, for the pull toward excess has been educated away. Continence is better than incontinence, yet it remains a lesser achievement than temperance, in which right action is also pleasant. Those who appear moderate from birth, or who restrain one appetite only to indulge another, are not on that account temperate in character.

Aristotle's analysis of temperance as a mean concerning the pleasures of touch and taste, and his distinction between temperance and continence, become the standard framework for later moral philosophy. Aquinas will incorporate both into a Christian account of the passions and of creation. Epictetus will move from moderation toward indifference to externals. Montaigne will take up the claim that moderate enjoyment augments rather than diminishes the pleasure of life. The cultivation of temperate character through habit is discussed under Habit and under Education.

Epictetus presents temperance as freedom through non-attachment. For the Stoic, appetite is troublesome even when its objects are not themselves wrong, for it inclines toward externals as such. The person who desires even moderate pleasure remains dependent on circumstances that are not up to him. The aim of the discipline is therefore to locate desire exclusively in what is up to us, our judgments and choices, and to meet all externals with equanimity. On this view, temperance is less a mean between excess and defect in bodily pleasure than a refusal to make the soul's peace hang upon such pleasure.

The sage, accordingly, does not take measured delight in food and drink as the Aristotelian temperate person does. He is largely indifferent to them, taking what is offered and making little of privation. Physical pleasures are at best preferred indifferents: things one may choose when available, yet things that cannot harm or help the moral agent. True temperance is the condition of the person who can take or leave with equal ease. That account of what lies within and without our power is closely related to the discussions of Will, Desire, and Fate.

The practical program is severe. Epictetus recommends daily exercise in identifying every desire for external things and withholding assent from the impression that it matters. The training begins with small things and advances toward greater indifference. The process is lifelong and requires constant vigilance. Its intended fruit is freedom from the anxiety that appetite brings and from the disappointment that follows when appetite is denied. Whether such indifference is a perfection of temperance or a departure from the mean is a question later writers will press.

Epictetus pushes temperance from moderation toward detachment. His program appealed to Christian writers because it seemed to resonate with ascetic practice, yet Aquinas will argue that indifference to created goods can go too far: the creation is good, and ordered enjoyment of it is not a moral failure. Montaigne will counsel against zeal even in the pursuit of self-control. Freud will treat the renunciation of instinct as the price civilization exacts, whether that renunciation is framed as Stoic freedom or as social duty.

Aquinas gives the most systematic scholastic treatment of temperance in the Summa Theologica, taking over Aristotle's account of the mean while placing it within Christian theology. Temperance moderates the sensitive appetite with respect to the pleasures of touch, chiefly those of food, drink, and sexual activity. Unlike the Stoic who tends toward indifference to such goods, Aquinas holds that creation is good and that proper enjoyment of its goods is not a moral failure; only disordered enjoyment is. When reason curbs desire for bodily pleasures, it is not to lessen sensual pleasure as such, but to keep concupiscence from clinging to it beyond the bounds of reason.

The governing idea is ordered appetite. Sexual desire ordered to procreation and the bond of marriage is good; the same desire disordered from those ends is vice. Food and drink taken for nourishment and fitting pleasure are goods; gluttony is their disorder. Aquinas also elaborates the parts and associated virtues of temperance: shamefacedness, honesty, abstinence, sobriety, chastity, and modesty in bearing and dress. Each addresses a different field in which appetite or display may be rightly or wrongly ordered. Taken generally, temperance may be defined as a disposition of the soul moderating any passions or acts so as to keep them within bounds, and in that sense it overflows into the other virtues, much as fortitude may strengthen temperance against the enticements of pleasure.

Asceticism raises a further question. On the natural plane, total abstinence is not temperance, any more than over-indulgence is. Yet in those who tend toward the divine similitude, Aquinas allows a perfecting or heroic temperance that, so far as nature allows, neglects the needs of the body, and in those who have attained the divine likeness a temperance that knows no earthly desires. Continence and voluntary poverty may then be requisite for religious perfection, even though they exceed the mean of ordinary civic virtue. The distinction between natural and supernatural perfection of the virtues is taken up again under Sin, Virtue and Vice, and Religion.

Aquinas's account became the standard of Catholic moral theology on temperance for centuries. It preserves Aristotle's insight that temperance concerns ordered pleasure rather than its destruction, while insisting on the theological setting of creation, fall, and redemption. On the social side, he limits the extent to which human law may enforce every act of temperance, confining positive law chiefly to those vices injurious to others and to the common good. Montaigne will defend natural pleasure without the doctrinal architecture. Mill will raise the question how far external authority may regulate private temperance at all, a question treated under Liberty and under Law.

Montaigne approaches temperance with marked skepticism toward both Stoic indifference and Christian asceticism. Against the demand that wisdom conquer or suppress the natural pleasures of food, drink, company, and physical comfort, he defends their goodness when enjoyed with acceptance and without craving. He magnifies temperance beyond any single virtue and makes it the measure of the sound pursuit of every sort of good, including virtue itself. Without temperance, he holds, we can corrupt things that in themselves are laudable; we may grasp virtue so that it becomes vicious if we embrace it too stringently and with too violent a desire.

The maxim "nothing overmuch" thus applies to virtue as well as to pleasure-seeking. Montaigne opposes those who say there is never any excess in virtue, and confesses that an immoderate zeal even for the good astonishes him. He likewise counsels sobriety in philosophy: taken moderately, it is pleasant and useful; taken beyond the limits of profit, it ceases to be either. On the positive side, he holds that temperance augments the pleasure of life rather than diminishing it. The regimen that stops the drinker before drunkenness, the glutton before surfeit, and the lecher before disease is not, on this view, an enemy to pleasure. The temperate life, as Plato had already said in the Laws, is gentle in its pains and pleasures, whereas the intemperate life is violent in both.

Montaigne is also skeptical about the connection between moral doctrine and practice. The philosophers who wrote most elaborately on temperance were not always more temperate in their lives, and the moralist who has read the right books may still be a glutton. Temperance, if it is achieved, is formed by practice and character rather than by theoretical knowledge alone. That concern with what actually forms the self, and with the diversity of human constitution, anticipates later empirical approaches to character and is continuous with the discussions of Habit, Education, and Experience.

Montaigne's defense of moderate enjoyment and his warning against zeal even in virtue remain a standing counterweight to both ascetic and purely theoretical accounts of temperance. Where Aristotle prescribed the mean and Aquinas the properly ordered appetite within a theology of creation, Montaigne asks what works for human beings in their actual variety. Mill will inherit the empirical concern when he argues for personal liberty in matters of self-regarding conduct. The question whether moderation is itself a condition of every virtue is considered under Virtue and Vice.

Kant places temperance within his account of duty and autonomy rather than within a doctrine of the mean concerning pleasure. Self-mastery is a duty, not because pleasure is bad, but because allowing inclination to override the moral law is a failure of rational self-governance. The temperate person, on this view, is not primarily one who enjoys pleasures in the right measure, as on Aristotle's account, but one who has made self-command a matter of rational principle. Moderation in the affections and passions, self-control, and calm deliberation are, Kant affirms, good in many respects and even seem to constitute part of the intrinsic worth of the person, though he does not think temperance deserves to be called good without qualification.

The chief difference from the classical tradition lies in the role of inclination. For Aristotle, the temperate person takes pleasure in appropriate objects; the absence of tension between desire and right action is the mark of virtue fully achieved. For Kant, the moral worth of an act depends on its being done from duty rather than from inclination. Acting temperately because one enjoys temperate pleasures has, on this analysis, no moral worth of the kind that counts for the good will; acting temperately because one judges it to be one's duty, even against the grain of desire, has moral worth. Continence, which Aristotle treats as incomplete virtue, becomes for Kant the clearer context in which moral credit is earned.

The result is a reordering of the classical hierarchy. The more natural temperance becomes, the more the agent delights in the right things, the less room remains for that struggle in which duty is shown to rule inclination. Whether this consequence is a strength of the duty-based account or a reason to prefer the older theory of character is left open by the debate itself. The general problem of moral motivation, and of the relation between duty and happiness, is treated under Duty, Will, and Happiness.

Kant transforms the question of temperance from one about ordered pleasure into one about rational autonomy and the structure of moral motivation. Mill will reject the deontological framework and return to a consequentialist account of higher and lower pleasures, while defending liberty against the legal enforcement of temperance. Freud will ask why the program of rational self-command so often fails, and what psychic costs the failure exacts. The broader theory of the will that underlies Kant's view of self-mastery is discussed under Will.

Mill's treatment of temperance is primarily political. In On Liberty he argues for the harm principle: society has no legitimate authority to interfere with conduct that affects only the agent. The principle bears directly on temperance. If a person's drinking or eating habits harm only himself, the state has no right to prohibit or penalize them. Mill writes against the temperance reform movements and sumptuary legislation of his day, insisting that consumption is in the first instance a private matter. A man who through intemperance becomes unable to pay his debts or support his family may justly be punished, but for the breach of duty to family or creditors, not for the extravagance as such. No person ought to be punished simply for being drunk; a soldier or policeman may be punished for being drunk on duty.

This political restraint does not imply that Mill endorses intemperance as a way of life. In Utilitarianism he argues that higher pleasures, intellectual and aesthetic enjoyments, are superior in kind to lower pleasures, and that a character capable of the former lives a better life. Temperance toward bodily pleasures is instrumentally valuable for the full enjoyment of the higher ones. The distinction between qualities of pleasure continues the classical ranking of pleasures, though within a utilitarian rather than a teleological framework. The related questions of happiness and of the good life are treated under Happiness and Pleasure and Pain.

Mill insists, however, on the separation of personal self-development from social enforcement. Even if intemperance is bad for the individual, coercive temperance is worse, because it infantilizes the person and blocks the formation of self-governed character. The way to produce temperance is persuasion and example, not law. Prohibition teaches compliance rather than self-mastery, and so tends to destroy the autonomy whose exercise would yield virtue. Aquinas had already limited human law to the more grievous vices and to those injurious to others; Mill sharpens that limitation into a principle of liberty. The extent to which law may regulate the sphere of temperance is discussed under Law and under Liberty.

Mill's liberalism reframes temperance as a question of political philosophy as well as of personal virtue. The internal standard elaborated by Aristotle and Aquinas becomes, for him, a matter of personal liberty rather than of communal enforcement. Freud will later argue that the temperate behavior civilization requires is itself a form of instinctual renunciation, whether or not the state codifies it in law. The social aspects of temperance, including the temperance of rulers and citizens and the problem of luxurious excess, remain a standing theme under State and under Wealth.

Freud treats temperance chiefly as the renunciation that organized social life exacts from the individual. Civilization, he writes, has been built up under the pressure of the struggle for existence by sacrifices in the gratification of the primitive impulses, and is forever re-created as each individual, joining the community, repeats the sacrifice of instinctive pleasures for the common good. The sexual instincts are among the most important of the forces thus utilized; their energy is sublimated, turned aside from a sexual goal toward ends that are no longer sexual and are socially more valuable. Temperance, on this account, is not first a freely acquired virtue but a structural requirement of social cooperation.

The psychic mechanism is guilt and the growth of the superego. As civilization's demands are internalized, the superego becomes stronger and more severe, punishing instinctual satisfaction even in imagination. The more the individual renounces, the stronger the internal authority grows, and the more guilt it generates for any remaining satisfaction. There is no stable equilibrium: the civilized person remains under perpetual internal pressure. The neurotic is one in whom this mechanism has become pathologically exaggerated, which on Freud's view means that neurosis is the normal condition writ large. His theory of the transition from the pleasure-principle to the reality-principle, in which the ego learns to postpone gratification and renounce certain sources of pleasure, reflects traditional notions of temperance under another name.

Freud does not conclude that civilization should be abandoned or that temperance is worthless. He recognizes that uninhibited instinctual life would mean the end of social cooperation and of cultural achievement. He resists, however, every idealization of the virtuous life that conceals its cost. The temperate person is paying a price, whether or not the price is acknowledged, and the happiness gained through renunciation is purchased with the unhappiness of that renunciation. The tradition from Plato through Kant, in praising self-mastery, did not fully account for this economy. Related questions of desire, emotion, and the structure of the mind are treated under Desire, Emotion, and Mind.

Freud closes the classical conversation on temperance by making explicit what earlier moralists often left implicit: that self-mastery has an unconscious economy, and that its costs are borne in the repressed life of the individual. Whether the renunciation civilization requires can be moderated without undoing social life remains, on his own showing, an open question. The clinical problems of addiction, compulsion, and disordered appetite that later psychology describes may be read as one record of the burden he names.