How to Obtain the Virtue of TEMPERANCE (Aristotle's Ethics)

Temperance isn’t sexy.

Everywhere you look – adverts, Instagram, TV – you’ll see people doing the YOLO lifestyle.

Not giving a fuck is cool.

Saying “fuck it” and downing ten flaming jagerbombs is cool.

Hopping on Tinder and setting up three Netflix-and-chills for the week is cool.

Living without restraint is rock and roll, baby.

But there’s something deeper.

Men and women of substance, of quality, of power and persuasion, people who have gifts to give the world, those who are full in mind, body, and spirit are temperate people.

The person we’re striving to become, the virtuous person, isn’t the kind of person to tattoo YOLO on their arm.

Temperance is all about restraint.

Temperance, like courage, is a virtue of the “irrational parts”.

The main vice in opposition to temperance is self-indulgence, giving in to pleasure too much.

When it comes to acquiring the virtue of temperance, we’re focused on controlling two primary bodily pleasures:

eating food
sexual pleasure.

“Oh, man! But those are like my two favourite things!”

I hear your cries.

And I sympathise.

But being temperate doesn’t mean we become monks that fast for days on end or wear a chastity belt.

You can still partake, just don’t over-indulge.

When we over-indulge in sex or food, we drain our life source.

Food can be nourishing.

Sex, the physical expression of love, can be nourishing.

But think about all the times you overdid it and what were you fit for when it was finished?

Over-indulge in either of those two things and all you want to do is sleep.

You certainly don’t have the energy to leave a positive mark on the world, to carry out your duty.

It’s not just the quantity of these things we can overindulge in, but we must take into account the quality too.

You can eat too much food, but you can also eat too much of the bad food.
You can have too much sex, but you can also have too much of the wrong kind of sex.

Again, we’re going based off our inner compass here.

It’s not for me to tell you what’s right or wrong.

But for me draining a pint of ice cream first thing in the morning is self-indulgent.

That’s eating too much food and too much of the wrong food.

For me indiscriminate sex with people I don’t love or don’t have the capacity to love is the wrong kind of sex.

Even with people I do love, locking myself away in a hotel room and banging fifteen times over the course of twenty-four hours is inappropriate, excessive, self-indulgent, and wrong.

Masturbating twenty times a day and watching pornography is self-indulgent and the furthest thing from temperance I can imagine.

We’ve already mentioned that we find the virtue by going to the mean. The middle between two extremes, and those extremes are the vices. This is true for the majority of the virtues.

It’s also true in the case of temperance, but really the main vice we must concern ourselves with is over-indulgence.

The other extreme, not partaking of food or sex at all, is hardly a problem for most people. But you might be in the minority, so bear that in mind too.

the self-indulgent man is so called because he is pained more than he ought at not getting pleasant things (even his pain being caused by pleasure), and the temperate man is so called because he is not pained at the absence of what is pleasant and at his abstinence from it. The self-indulgent man, then, craves for all pleasant things or those that are most pleasant, and is led by his appetite to go for these at the cost of everything else; hence he is pained both when he fails to get them and when he is merely craving for them (for appetite involves pain); but it seems absurd to be pained because of pleasure.

Does pleasure cause you pain?

The pain of craving sex or bad food in excess and then the pain of not getting those things?

You are temperate when you are NOT pained in the absence of pleasure.

The restaurant is out of that chocolate cake you went there especially for?

No big deal.

Your girlfriend’s not in the mood for sex tonight?

No big deal.

In addition with you being all cool with not getting pleasure, you must also train yourself to dislike the things the self-indulgent person likes.

Gorging on ice cream sounds like a great Friday night to a lot of people, but you must learn to find the thought of that undesirable.

You’ll also learn to enjoy those things that are good for your health and you’ll desire these things moderately as long as they aren’t contrary to what is noble.

Aristotle puts it this way (bolded text is mine):

The temperate […] neither enjoys the things that the self-indulgent man enjoys most—but rather dislikes them—nor in general the things that he should not, nor anything of this sort to excess, nor does he feel pain or craving when they are absent, or does so only to a moderate degree, and not more than he should, nor when he should not, and so on; but the things that, being pleasant, make for health or for good condition, he will desire moderately and as he should, and also other pleasant things if they are not hindrances to these ends, or contrary to what is noble, or beyond his means.

So learn to look forward to and take pleasure from a morning green juice with fresh vegetables.

Learn to derive pleasure from yoga as a stress-relief tool.

If you had to think of ten healthy things that could replace ten unhealthy things in your life right now, you could do it in a heartbeat.

We already know what’s good for us.

We already know what things if we were to enjoy them more than the unhealthy option would make our lives a million times better.

Self-indulgence is more like a voluntary state than cowardice. For the former is actuated by pleasure, the latter by pain, of which the one is to be chosen and the other to be avoided; and pain upsets and destroys the nature of the person who feels it, while pleasure does nothing of the sort. Therefore self-indulgence is more voluntary. Hence also it is more a matter of reproach.

What Aristotle is saying here is that self-indulgence is worse than cowardice.

The person who does deplorable things for the sake of pleasure is way worse than the person who does deplorable things out of fear.

Cowardice we can all understand.

Dicking over your friends because you’ve got a chance at getting tail?

Not so much.

And the problem with indulging is that your appetite is never sated.

In fact, the more you try to chase pleasure, the more you attempt to sate it, the more it eludes you, the more your appetite grows.

You’ll never get the high you want from sugary foods.

Just like how coke-heads forever chase the high from the first line of coke, you’re on a bottomless journey to nowhere.

in an irrational being the desire for pleasure is insatiable even if it tries every source of gratification, and the exercise of appetite increases its innate force.

Be the teacher to your childish impulses – split yourself in two, govern yourself.

Stop trying to fill the void.

And don’t feel like you’re missing out on anything when you make the temperate choice.

As Marcus Aurelius says in Book Eight of the Meditations:

The good is necessarily a useful thing, and something that a person of real worth should make his special concern; but no such person would feel regret at having let a pleasure pass him by; so pleasure should be regarded as neither useful nor good.

You are becoming a person of real worth and that kind of person has no regrets at turning down pleasure because pleasure is not useful or good in and of itself.

But why abstain from pleasure?

Why teach yourself to separate the idea of pleasure from the idea of goodness?

Again, Aurelius weights in mightily on this subject in Book Nine:

One who pursues pleasure will not abstain from injustice […] anyone who is not himself neutral towards pleasure and pain, or life and death, or reputation and disrepute, to which universal nature adopts a neutral attitude, commits a manifest impiety.

The virtues are all connected.

We’re breaking them down one-by-one so we can focus on acquiring them more easily.

But at the end of the cycle, you will have become a cohesive whole.

When you strengthen one virtue, another virtue becomes strong too.

If you cannot be temperate, how can you exercise the virtue of justice?

Getting a handle on one virtue will help with getting a handle on all of the virtues.

the temperate man craves for the things he ought, as he ought, and when he ought; and this is what reason directs.

What ought you crave?

There’s no clever “get-around” here.

You know what’s good for you and you know what things that if you were to crave them would do you the best.

Imagine if you craved broccoli and chicken instead of pop tarts.

You can’t just say, “Oh, I ought to crave drinking a pint of whiskey every night and shouting at my kids.”

No, think about what you ought to crave and you’ll immediately, thanks to your reason, the daemon that dwells within you, have a bunch of things you know you ought to do.

So let’s get into the virtue assignment for this week.

Virtue Assignment for Temperance:

THIS WEEK:

– You’re going to monitor your impulses in regards to sex and food.

Switch the band on your wrist whenever you find yourself feeling pained by lack of pleasure or craving over-indulgence in pleasure.

You’ll probably find yourself switching wrists a lot.

This is much harder than switching wrists only when you over-indulge, because we will have thoughts of indulgence more than indulging actions.

And we want to monitor our thoughts and train ourselves not to put too much value on these pleasures.

Talk yourself through these times when you feel yourself craving. Ask yourself why. What’s the root reason you wish to indulge in that period of time?

And then ask yourself if it is any great problem if you were to abstain.

For example, many people will masturbate not because they are feeling sexual but because they are bored or using it as a coping mechanism to hide from anxiety or the problems in their life.

– This week, eat what is healthy, what you know will do you good, and eat in appropriate portions.

The Japanese have a saying: “Eat until 80% full” (hara hachi buu).

Practice stopping eating before you are completely full.

Don’t eat to the point of bloating.

Have goals for your eating (e.g. Fuelling after a workout, giving stable energy in the morning, foods for skin).

Do not aimlessly indulge.

– Moderate your sexual impulses.

This week, pornography and masturbation are off limits.

But sex for the purposes of love (love-making) is absolutely fine – treat it as the loving experience it is supposed to be, not like a drug addict getting their latest fix.

You don’t have to actually be in love with your partner in order to have sex in a loving way. Just be more mindful about what you’re doing and why you’re doing it.

– Try a healthy juice recipe at least a few days this week.

I recommend this recipe from Ben Greenfield’s Ultimate Human Performance course. When Ben first tried this recipe, he immediately had one of the best runs of his life. Now he uses it as a go-to whenever he wants to feel super good. This week is all about learning to feel good with healthy choices so make sure you try to this juice!

Ingredients: golf ball sized piece of ginger, 5-10 carrots, 1-2 chopped lemons, a handful of cilantro, blend this stuff then add and stir in 2 tablespoons of olive oil, a teaspoon of Aztec or Himalayan salt.

You can also try Ben’s ultimate human performance smoothie, which he eats for breakfast every morning. You’ll need 3-4 Brazil nuts or walnuts, 3 large kale leaves, 1 avocado, enough coconut milk to make the smoothie super thick (this smoothie is going to be thick enough to actually chew and eat, which is better than drinking), 2 servings of living fuel protein or super greens, a couple of pinches of cinnamon, a couple of pinches of salt. Blend this stuff then add a few pinches of coconut flakes, a handful of spirulina, then a few pinches of organic cacao nibs, then add the Brazil nuts or walnuts in and then give it another blend. You can also add a tablespoon of coconut oil or MCT oil. You could also throw a raw egg in there.

– And just like the previous week, keep a journal.

Write about what you’re finding difficult.

Figure out why you’re finding abstaining for specific pleasures difficult.

What’s your weakness?

What can you brainstorm to overcome it?