Delphic Maxim 14: Control yourself
I’ve set myself the challenge of responding to each Delphic Maxim for 15 minutes a day.
14. Control yourself
When I first read Nicomachean Ethics, the thing that stood out most to me was Aristotle’s notion of temperance. My reading of this virtue was that the extremes of emotion, gluttony and indulgence that we engage in from day to day were — naturally — pretty inappropriate, and that striving towards temperance was about moderating everything in life.
But actually the Aristotelian Virtues, while they do aim towards a kind of ‘golden mean’, don’t forbid people from pleasure, and they don’t deny the role that emotion plays in life. They’re about deliberate habits that improve your moral character. So while extremes in any given domain of life and action aren’t necessarily desirable, at the very least we should strive to be in control of ourselves.
I imagine this is why I find Achilles such a moping, shit character in The Iliad. While he’s slighted by Agamemnon, who steals his victory-slave-prize Briseis (so really the whole situation is morally compromised from the outset), Achilles slumps into a huge tantrum. He doesn’t seem to exert control over his emotional state, it’s very un-hero-like. And it eventually leads to the death of his cousin and best friend Patroclus. It’s this that returns Achilles to combat, leads to his dishonourable dragging of Hector’s body around the city of Troy, and generally depraves the entire conduct of the Greeks throughout the back-end of the Trojan War.
I should say that I am generally on the side of Troy — I think the Trojans were pretty hard done by for the simple mistake of Paris. But then it was Paris’ lack of self control that got them into the war in the first place. By stealing away Helen of Troy from her husband Menelaus, Paris brought the wrath and rage of the Greeks to the gates of Troy. Once again, hubris brings people unstuck, and lack of self control causes problems.
If there is one character in the Greek epics who, in my view, epitomises self control, it is Odysseus (cunning, wily, wise, Odysseus). In part this is because he is always thinking strategically, but also because he is a virtuous leader: he understands the price of hubris, he considers the second and third order effects of the choices he makes. His Odyssey lasts for ten years, and like any ten year journey the challenge is to endure and survive, to make it to the end not by ‘winning’ (as though everything in life where a competition — it isn’t) but simply by getting there.
Alright, enough ancient Greek reflections, what has this got to do with today?
We live in a world of instant gratification and practically unlimited riches. We have security and safety like never before in history: as Steven Pinker argues, life is less violent and safer now than at any time in human civilisation. We have access to food, water, electricity, internet, education and entertainment. The diseases that affect the affluent West today are diseases of abundance: we are lazy, we eat too much, we spend too much time sitting around indoors. We let our minds decay into permanent distraction — we don’t take the time to focus, think deeply, plan, reflect, philosophise. We are scared by the void, paralysed by indecision, we stare at flickering screens all day long looking for meaning, or waiting for the next like, comment or re-post.
Self-control isn’t about deprivation and denial. It’s about making deliberate, conscious, even strategic choices about our lives. It’s about recognising what we are doing and when we are doing it, owning those decisions, and not allowing things over which we do have control to instead control us. Temperance is a virtue not in denying ourselves pleasure or fun or friendship — those things are good themselves. It’s about keeping a sense of balance and order in our lives, so that our lives are lived as best as they can be.
