Temperance, the Stoic virtue of knowing what is enough

Of the four Stoic virtues, temperance is the one you get to practice most often. Few days ask for great courage, but every day has meals, purchases, screens and conversations, and each of them has a point past which more stops helping. This page gathers what Seneca, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius and Musonius Rufus said about that point, each passage in a public-domain translation or, for Musonius, a labeled paraphrase. For how temperance fits with wisdom, courage and justice, see the four virtues.

What temperance is

The Greek word is sōphrosynē, built from the words for “sound” and “mind.” The Romans said temperantia, and older English translations use temperance, moderation and self-control almost interchangeably. The Stoics defined every virtue as a kind of knowledge. Courage knows what should be endured; temperance knows what is worth choosing, and so what is worth passing up (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (opens in a new tab)). They divided it into good discipline, seemliness, modesty and self-control (Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (opens in a new tab)).

The measure itself comes from need. Seneca wrote the next passage from exile on Corsica, to his mother, who was grieving for him. He wanted her to know he lacked nothing that mattered.

The body’s list is short: warmth, food, water. Seneca’s verdict on everything else is blunt: “all desires beyond these are vices, not necessities,” and “Nothing is sufficient for covetous desire” (Consolation to Helvia 10). Put in practical terms, that is temperance: you let need set the limit, because appetite never will. It doesn’t mean living on the minimum. It means knowing where the minimum is, so that everything above it is a choice you make rather than a hunger you serve.

In the next chapter he explains why appetite can’t set the limit.

Seneca’s test is what happens when a want is supplied. Hunger ends with a meal. The wish for a nicer car doesn’t end with the nicer car; within a year it has found the next one. If feeding a want makes it louder, you know which kind it is. Whoever keeps within nature’s limits “will not feel poverty,” Seneca says, and whoever doesn’t “will always be poor, however great his wealth may be” (Consolation to Helvia 11). On the same salary, one person can feel rich and another poor, depending on what each thinks is necessary. The consolations guide summarizes the rest of the work.

What temperance is not

Temperance is easy to confuse with its neighbors. Three mix-ups are common.

It is not hostility to pleasure. The Stoics classed pleasure as an indifferent, like health and wealth: having it doesn’t make a life good, and lacking it doesn’t make a life bad (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (opens in a new tab)); the idea is set out in preferred indifferents. The word did double duty, though. As one of the passions, pleasure meant an irrational elation over something that seems worth choosing, and that the Stoics did count as a fault; its sound counterpart was joy (Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (opens in a new tab)). Seneca, arguing with an Epicurean, describes virtue as something that inspects pleasures before letting them in.

“You indulge in pleasure, I use it” is the whole distinction. The Stoic eats the good dinner and enjoys it. What changes is where the good mood comes from, and Seneca puts it in the moderation rather than in the dinner. Marcus admired the same balance in his adoptive father, Antoninus Pius, who, in Marcus’s description, enjoyed comforts without fuss when he had them and didn’t miss them when he didn’t (Meditations 1.16).

It is not austerity for show. Going without can become a performance: the competitive fast, the cold plunge posted for an audience. Epictetus warns against exactly this in Enchiridion 47: if you live cheaply, don’t boast about it, and if you train yourself to endure hardship, keep it to yourself. Plain living done for an audience is about the audience. The guide to voluntary discomfort covers that kind of training.

It is not a temperament you are born with. Some people seem naturally moderate, and it is tempting to think you either have it or you don’t. Marcus disagreed. In a note to himself, he lists qualities that need no natural gift at all.

Much of that list is temperance: “contentment with thy portion and with few things,” “no love of superfluity,” “freedom from trifling” (Meditations 5.5). Marcus does write “aversion to pleasure,” a sterner phrase than any of Seneca’s above. But read what frames the list: these qualities are “altogether in thy power,” with “no excuse of natural incapacity.” If you think of yourself as someone with no self-control, then by Marcus’s reasoning that is an excuse, not a description.

Temperance in the sources

The Stoics didn’t leave temperance abstract. They applied it to meals, clothes and houses, the body, conversation and pleasure itself.

Food and drink

Musonius Rufus, the Roman Stoic who taught Epictetus, gave lectures on food and on clothing and shelter. The standard English translations of his lectures are not in the public domain everywhere, so they appear here in the app’s labeled paraphrase.

Musonius’s own advice on diet was strict: he favored cheap, readily available food such as fruit, vegetables, milk and cheese (Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (opens in a new tab)). You don’t need his menu to use his standard. Eating to live rather than to indulge can be checked at any meal by asking what job the food is doing. A sandwich at your desk can be lunch, or consolation for a bad meeting, or a way to put off the next task. Only the first is food doing its job, and nobody else needs to know which it was.

Clothes, houses and things

The useful part is the test. Musonius judges clothes and houses by the job they do for the body, which gives a clear answer for a winter coat and a much less clear one for a fourth winter coat. Applied to a purchase, the test asks what the thing is for, and whether being seen with it is part of the answer. Marcus names simple living among the things he learned from his mother, in the first book of the Meditations.

Marcus grew up in a rich, well-connected family and became emperor, and he still counted a way of living “far removed from the habits of the rich” among his mother’s gifts.

The body

Notice what Epictetus doesn’t say. Eating, drinking and exercise “should be done”; he isn’t asking anyone to neglect them. His complaint is about proportion. These things belong “as subordinate things,” serving a life rather than running it. When a weekend is planned around its meals, or a week’s mood rides on a workout streak, the order has flipped.

Speech

Restraint in talk counts too, and for many people it is harder than restraint at the table. The longest chapter of the Enchiridion is a list of rules for conduct, and much of it is about speaking.

Read as rules, these sound stiff. Read as questions to ask before you speak, they are useful. Is this necessary? Is it about other people, and if so, is it blame, praise or a comparison? Am I telling this story for them or for me? The questions take a second, and they catch a good share of what you would later wish unsaid. Anyone who has sat through a colleague’s full account of marathon training knows why Epictetus included the last one, and so, probably, does anyone who has given one.

Pleasure and freedom

The Stoic case for temperance ends in freedom. Seneca again, from On the Happy Life:

The person who lets pleasure lead doesn’t end up with more of it. He is “tortured by its absence or choked by its excess,” owned by the thing he thought he owned, and in the end he “sells himself to pleasure” (On the Happy Life 14). That is the real argument. Pleasure isn’t the enemy; the trouble is that someone run by appetite has handed over something worth more, the ability to choose. Seneca’s own word for it, a few lines further on, is liberty.

How to practice temperance

Temperance is built in small decisions, so practice it in small decisions.

• Set the measure before the moment. Decide how much while you are calm: one glass, one episode, a fixed amount to spend this weekend. Seneca’s measure was need; yours can be a number chosen in advance, because the moment itself is a poor judge.
• Ask who it is for. Before a purchase, ask whether you would still want it if no one else ever saw it. If the honest answer is no, you have found the line.
• Use one meal a day as practice. Notice whether you are eating from hunger or from habit. You don’t have to change anything at first; Musonius treated the table as the place where self-command begins, and noticing comes before changing.
• Say less than you could. In one conversation today, say what is necessary and stop. Skip the comparison, the verdict on the absent colleague, the long story about yourself.
• Look back at night. The Evening Examination asks which virtues you practiced, with no score. Temperance is often the easiest to spot: the reply you didn’t send, the second helping you passed on, the laptop closed at a reasonable hour.

When a specific decision is in front of you, the free virtue check asks where restraint is needed alongside what wisdom, justice and courage ask of you.