In working on this book I discovered a mountain of scientific research on self-control—research that continues even as you read these words. Neuroscientists are working to unravel the biology of temptation and restraint, while psychologists have studied the ability of small children to postpone gratification—and then followed these kids into middle age, discovering that youthful self-control predicted success in later life. Other researchers have looked at the effect on self-control of loneliness, glucose, urban living, mobs, exhaustion, and countless other factors. Still other scientists have implicated self-control deficits in divorce, crime, obesity, and addiction. Their findings are fascinating and can help us understand who we are and how we should live. Soon enough we’ll get to them. But after marinating in these issues for a while, I discovered that the very best guides to weakness of the will held no tenure, had no graduate degrees, and dealt with the problem without magnetic resonance imaging devices for peering into the skulls of undergraduates.
The ancient Greeks nailed it anyway. They grasped its importance, built it into their social system, and thought about it in sophisticated ways. They saw clearly that self-command is about time but also freedom, and that pleasure, like so many things, is only bad when taken to extremes. Most of all, they recognized human weakness without letting themselves off the hook.
The Greeks’ profound concern with all this was manifest early on, long before the classical period of Plato and Aristotle, when Homer took appetite and self-mastery as his themes in his two great epic poems. Both The Iliad and The Odyssey are shot through with the recognition that people are weak, no matter how strong they may be on the battlefield. Even gods, after all, are subject to desire. Think of Ares and Aphrodite, snared in their lovemaking by Aphrodite’s husband, Hephaestus, who chains them in their shame for all the gods to see. Temptation bedevils all of us. But if The Iliad is about the consequences of yielding to it (Helen, after all, is temptation personified), The Odyssey is about the heroism a man can show in mastering temptation, and it is this second epic which no serious student of self-control can afford to ignore.
The Hero
Who else but Odysseus could be the star of this story? As a hero, Odysseus had it all—strength, courage, and enough sex appeal to turn the head of more than one goddess. His best-known qualities—the ones that have defined him for the ages—are shrewdness (it was “wily” Odysseus, as Homer often called him, who cooked up the Trojan horse caper that ultimately ended the war) and tenacity, for his relentless drive to reach home. But his greatest strength is the combination of these two things, which form the basis for his extraordinary self-mastery.
What Odysseus had was enkrateia, which means roughly “self-command.” Enkrateia seems to be about conflict: between the parts of oneself, but also between freedom and slavery, for defeat meant subjugation. This is what happened to women after a lost war, and weakness of the will shamefully implied emasculation. (For the Greeks and others, temptation was routinely seen as female.) The connection between enkrateia and virility is long standing, and since temptation was always a threat, masculinity was ever shadowed in peril. Self-mastery was how you kept your balls, and it took vigilance. “Miserable wretch,” Socrates says at one point in alarm, “are you reckoning what will happen to you if you kiss a beautiful youth: instantly to be a slave instead of a free person.”
Odysseus is shrewd, but his genius is the way he puts his wiles at the service of his determination, in the case of the Sirens even turning those wiles against himself. Our hero, you’ll recall, is on his way home from the sacking of Troy. Knowing he won’t be able to resist the song he’s about to hear, he finds a way to enforce his own wish not to succumb to it—a wish he knows perfectly well he will soon repudiate under the spell of the music. The Odyssey, in fact, is all about temptation, and Odysseus survives the decade-long journey—he alone of all his men— back to Ithaca because when it counts, he can resist. Again and again they are waylaid by their appetites, getting high by eating lotus, getting themselves turned into pigs—living symbols of excess!—at a feast, and most tragically devouring the cattle of Helios, which they slaughter despite their leader’s warnings.
In The Odyssey, impulsiveness always leads to problems, and even Odysseus himself succumbs occasionally—as when he taunts Cyclops during his getaway from the giant’s cave, revealing his identity and thus allowing Poseidon to take revenge—but that only makes him human. Part of the guy’s charm is that he isn’t some willpower superhero; he can be rash as well as prudent, and when he’s challenged, his cleverness sometimes deserts him, especially as the result of his desire for renown. Nor does he shy away from pleasure—he indulges happily with Circe, for example. He’s no ascetic; his talent is for knowing when to indulge and when not to, which is why he is something of an ideal. “Whenever a present or future hurt may be avoided, or an advantage gained, his self-restraint is never wanting,” one nineteenth-century critic observed, with only a little exaggeration, “but, failing this, he nowhere shows himself unwilling to gratify either his appetites or his passions.”
The Polis
Self-control remained an obsession in the later “classical” period, around the fourth century BCE, the time of Plato and Aristotle, which is what we mostly think of when we think of ancient Greece. Greek ethics in this period boils down to a single phrase: meden agan, or nothing to excess. Someone who adhered to this principle was said to possess sophrosyne, which means something like temperance or self-mastery. A person who wasn’t sophron must have had some moral deficit and lacked a kind of integrity. The classicist Helen North in her wonderful study of the subject, which appeared in the immoderate year of 1966, nicely described the key components of sophrosyne as “the control of appetite by reason and the harmonious agreement within the soul that this control should be exercised.”
So having sophrosyne means that you have a grip on your desires and you are glad that you do. It’s not about self-denial; rather, the emphasis here is on finding a place between too little control (always a danger) and too much, which is not so great either. Implicit in subordinating appetite to reason is the idea of deferring gratification. “Sophrosyne is related to the Greek tendency to interpret all kinds of experience—whether moral, political, aesthetic, physical, or metaphysical—in terms of harmony and proportion,” North explains. “It is an expression of the self-knowledge and self-control that the Greek polis demanded of its citizens, to curb and counterbalance their individualism and self-assertion.”
The idea here is not to suppress individuality or freedom but only to keep them within bounds to avoid personal and social chaos. Plato understood this when he argued in The Republic that citizens and the state should have the same four cardinal virtues: wisdom, courage, justice, and sophrosyne (sometimes rendered as “self-discipline”). “Self-discipline stretches across the whole scale,” he wrote. His ideal republic was not a democracy. Thus, his ideal of sophrosyne lay not just in men’s control of their desires “for the pleasures of eating, drinking, and sex” but also in men’s “obedience to their rulers,” which in the absence of freedom can seem cowardly or subservient.
But sophrosyne in a democracy is something else again, something honorable and freely chosen yet also essential, as it was in fourth-century Athens, where it could be a badge of freedom and virility (at least for the minority of Athenians who were free men). Called “the fairest gift of the gods” by Euripides, sophrosyne came to be seen as an Athenian virtue, one identified not just with democracy but also with upward mobility and maturity.
Perhaps the most direct and formidable argument for it comes in Plato’s Gorgias. Socrates’s foil in this great dialogue is Callicles, a proto-Nietzsche of sorts who argues shamelessly that happiness comes from self-indulgence. People praise self-restraint out of cowardice, in his view, and an inability to satisfy their passions. He held that convention is a mere expedient of the weak, and laws are merely the ropes that society’s pathetic majority use to bind the strong. In his view, the temperate “are really fools, for how can a man be happy who is the servant of anything? On the contrary, I plainly assert, that he who would truly live ought to allow his desires to wax to the uttermost.”
Hedonism is a virtue for Callicles, but one available only to the strong—to the few, in other words. His is a vision of goodness restricted to the elite, who are practically defined by the ability to give rein to their pleasures. But Socrates’s emphasis on self-mastery makes virtue available to all. Self-control obviates the need for tyrannical power to feed one’s passions; advocating sophrosyne only requires making each person his own ruler, an act that would prove enormously empowering— and appealing to those who were neither slaves nor aristocrats. As North tells us, “The same spirit as animates the reforms of Solon (the insistence on measure, the balancing of one party against the others, the instinct for moderation . . .) leads to the adoption by the emerging middle class of the virtue that symbolizes their innermost aspirations.” The Athenian conception of self-control was thus a bourgeois phenomenon, and some flavor of sophrosyne would remain identified with the middle-class forever after—which probably accounts for some of moderation’s more recent disrepute.
The political importance of self-control was particularly evident in the compact city-state known to the Greeks as the polis. The polis was a small place, lacking in privacy. People went about on foot; servants and family members were everywhere. Athens at its ancient peak was a prime example, a polis of just a few thousand native citizens (and thousands more women, children, and slaves). Day-to-day life in classical Athens went on with minimal state supervision—there were no police officers, censors, or curfews—but your fellow polis-dwellers were all around you, and they were watching. “Each and every inhabitant was a potential agent of the polis,” the classicist James Davidson tells us, adding that the courts depended on witnesses, including domestic servants, to attest to almost anything that might be contested—and most everything was.
Outside the legal arena, there was the matter of public opinion. People of similar social station would tend to know—and talk to—one another. Reputation would matter enormously. “It is in the growth of the polis that we see conditions especially favorable to the development of sophrosyne,” North tells us. “The polis by its very nature required a much greater exercise of restraint.”
Contrast the intimacy of the polis, however suffocating, with the disinhibiting anonymity and vastness of the modern city—or perhaps worse, the modern sprawling suburb, with its blur of traffic and ubiquitous big-box stores dispensing goods as if they were Pez. If the polis enforced sophrosyne by its intensely personal nature, the modern city is much more likely to be a breeding ground for the affliction known as akrasia, and ever since the ancients put a name to it, it has given philosophers fits.
The Problem
To the Greeks, akrasia simply meant a lack of self-command, so that your desires run away with you contrary to the dictates of reason. The akratic acts against his own better judgment. And this is where the problems occur, because how could anyone do such a thing? Surely your judgment simply changed. As Socrates says in the Protagoras, “No one goes willingly toward the bad.”
Yet who among us hasn’t? It’s a thorny problem. Philosophers disagree over what it takes to be akratic, or whether akrasia even exists. Socrates was perhaps the most famous dissenter; although his views seemed to evolve (and we mainly know what Plato tells us), he mostly insisted that you couldn’t choose a course of action you didn’t think was good. If you seemed to make such a choice, you were probably just acting on faulty or insufficient knowledge. Akrasia thus was a kind of ignorance.
Perhaps Socrates took this somewhat idealistic view because he excelled at self-restraint, especially where the urges of the body were concerned—and he must have had plenty of temptation, given that he was surrounded by admiring young men whose charms were not lost on him in a culture that countenanced homosexuality under certain circumstances. In Plato’s Symposium, one of several Socratic dialogues that belong on any self-control reading list, we learn that Socrates has spent the night under the same cloak as a willing—nay, eager!—Alcibiades, the fairest of youths, yet made no overtures. And this wasn’t for want of desire on the part of the philosopher, who discloses in another Symposium (this one by Xenophon) “that he does not remember a moment of his life during which he was not in love.”
Socrates may have been strictly correct about akrasia, but human experience suggests that if he was, it was only on narrow technical grounds, and even then the case is hardly closed. “Of Socrates,” wrote the philosopher E. J. Lemmon, who was obviously a believer, “we can say that as a plain matter of fact he was just wrong—acrasia [sic] does occur, or in Aristotle’s phrase, knowledge just is, however sad this may be, frequently dragged about by desire.”
Traditionally, akrasia was rendered in English as “incontinence,” but perhaps owing to the snickering inspired by the word’s urinary tang, it’s more often translated on this side of the Atlantic as “weakness of the will,” although this leaves out cases of what might be called negligent absence of the will. The term incontinence can capture these and has other advantages too, not least the vivid way it conveys a humiliating loss of control, a failure of the muscles charged with holding things in until the appropriate time and place can be found to let them out.
Psychologists have lately likened willpower to a muscle, complete with speculation about how to build it up and under what circumstances even the strongest wills become exhausted, but there are some important differences. You can resist murdering your exasperating next-door neighbor forever, but sooner or later, if you can’t find a bathroom, no power at your disposal will keep you from wetting your pants. Moral fiber and muscle fiber have only so much in common. As John Dewey says, “We need to discriminate between the physical and the moral question.”
Akrasia is a mysterious affliction, neutralizing principles, anesthetizing inhibition, and blurring farsighted vision so that you can do the kind of thing for which you might hate yourself in the morning. It often involves ignorance, but largely as the result of self-deception: just this once; it’s not that fattening; I’ll stop smoking tomorrow; my wife will never know. Akratic self-deception can be dangerous, as we learned all too recently from the bankers who, in the period leading up to the crash of 2008, had every reason to have faith in their complex (and little understood) financial technologies instead of focusing on the risks. “Faith,” Friedrich Nietzsche tells us, “is the will not to know.” Yet the bankers’ ignorance is hard to distinguish from incontinence, for they surely acquiesced in their own deception just as I might acquiesce in violating my own diet.
Anyway, akrasia simply isn’t supposed to resemble a banker. I prefer to think of it as a young woman in dark glasses, strategically torn jeans, and flip-flops, bearing a Starbucks cup as she emerges painfully into the blinding light of day. But here I am only indulging in some age-old masculine stereotyping, for literary history is littered with powerful females portrayed as tempting men away from self-mastery—and in the process, threatening their manhood. There’s a seductress of knights in The Faerie Queene by the name of Acrasia, for example, a “false enchauntresse” reminiscent of Circe, who waylaid Odysseus and his men. Given what we know about male impulsivity, it might be fairer to portray akrasia here as a raw-boned slacker dude fueled by Walmart cola and focused intensely on a video game, thumbs twitching madly in the basement of his mother’s house in the middle of the night.
Yet Edmund Spenser’s conception of akrasia as seducer remains essentially sound even from the relatively gender-neutral perspective of our own times. Or perhaps the seducer is really temptation itself, and akrasia describes the process of being seduced—of acquiescing to our own subversion by doing the thing we should not, possibly against at least some of our own wishes. We go along in spite of ourselves, perhaps in both trepidation and relief, giving in as if to a wayward lover whom on principle we ought to resist. Like such a lover, akrasia is habit-forming; one episode tends to lead to another and therefore threatens to make us into something we might not want to be. “We are what we repeatedly do,” Will Durant wrote in summarizing Aristotle on this score. “Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.”
The Guru
Aristotle (384–322 BCE) grew up in Macedonia and at seventeen became a pupil of Plato, who in turn had been a pupil of Socrates. After two decades at Plato’s Academy, Aristotle was hired by King Philip of Macedonia to tutor his teenage son, who would become Alexander the Great. But what matters here is that, for all who lie awake at night wondering about the problem of self-control, Aristotle was the sage of sages, for self-mastery was central to his ethical system as well as his conception of the good life: “I count him braver who overcomes his desires than him who conquers his enemies, for the hardest victory is the victory over self.”Aristotle’s work on this subject, in his Nicoma-chean Ethics, shines a beacon so strong that it illuminates our lives to this day.
To Aristotle, the object of life was eudaimonia, a form of happiness that he was careful to distinguish from mere pleasure or amusement. He had in mind something larger, something we might call a good or virtuous life, which philosophers lately have sometimes described as human flourishing. And he recognized that pleasures taken to excess could threaten this life, leading to misery. The solution was to live according to the mean, avoiding both excess and deficiency.
Notice that too much and too little are both considered vices (although “one of the extremes is always more erroneous than the other”); this implies that the good life isn’t made of continuous self-denial—or for that matter, the mindless suppression of zeal. On the contrary, what Aristotle is talking about here is something like suitability—about doing the right thing at the right time in the right way for the right reasons. The implication is that there are times when immoderate actions are precisely what the situation calls for; the devil is in knowing when this is. Ideologues see such circumstances everywhere: “I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice,” Barry Goldwater famously said in accepting the Republican presidential nomination in 1964. “And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”
So the mean isn’t just about ordering a medium coffee or leading a life of mildness. To modern ears moderation sounds dull, but, in fact, it can be heroic; to Aristotle, the moderate person—the person who moderates his behavior to the occasion—is “magnificent,” the immoderate merely vulgar. Finding and adhering to this mean will not be easy, and even with the best of intentions we find ourselves veering toward one pole or the other. Getting it right takes knowledge and effort, just like achieving happiness, and cultivating good habits can help us with this challenge. In keeping with his emphasis on deeds, Aristotle intuited what psychologists would later demonstrate, which is that one right choice piled on another would raise the likelihood of future right choices, resulting eventually in the edifice of a good life. “Refrain tonight,” Hamlet urges his mother. “And that shall lend a kind of easiness/To the next abstinence; the next more easy;/For use almost can change the stamp of nature/And either master the devil, or throw him out.”
Aristotle also understood that living the sort of virtuous life he had in mind—perennially holding the reins of one’s appetites and emotions, indulging them when appropriate and suppressing them when not—imposes an enormous burden for any of us by ourselves. So he emphasized the role of friends—not acquaintances, or contacts, or drinking buddies, but real friends. These serious friendships take time to develop, he recognized, and we are unlikely to have many of them, but they’re invaluable because they foster virtue. Besides, happiness is not something that happens overnight, or as the result of some quick fix. “The good for man,” Aristotle argued, “is an activity of the soul in accordance with virtue . . . in a complete lifetime. One swallow does not make a summer; neither does one day.”
It’s striking how much Aristotle anticipates the questions that bedevil us today, not just in everyday life but in the lab as well. He tries to address, for example, to what extent we are responsible for our happiness. “Is happiness something that can be learnt, or acquired by habituation or cultivated in some other way, or does it come to us by a sort of divine dispensation or even by chance?” Might it be hereditary, in other words? Or are we just victims of happenstance, subject to the whims of fate (the arrival of a fortune, the loss of a loved one, the curse of ill health)? Aristotle allows for these things, noting that misfortunes, if they are numerous and severe enough, can have an impact; it always helps to have the gods smile on us. But he defines happiness as “a kind of virtuous activity of soul,” and this activity is clearly within our powers to undertake. On that basis, we’re heavily responsible for our own happiness—and even at least partly for our dispositions. “Wickedness,” Aristotle says flatly, “is voluntary.”
It’s fair to say that the disease model of addiction never gained any traction with Aristotle. In The Nicomachean Ethics he carefully analyzes voluntary (as opposed to compulsory) behavior and moral responsibility. “An act is compulsory,” he writes, “when it has an external origin of such a kind that the agent or patient contributes nothing to it.” Examples might be a person on a sailboat carried off by the wind, or someone on the street thrown into a van by kidnappers.
While recognizing some gray areas—sailors might have to toss cargo overboard to save themselves in a storm, a voluntary act mandated by circumstances—Aristotle takes a pretty hard line on most behavior. He has no patience for the notion that pleasure can have a compulsive effect on us because “it would make all acts compulsory.” Even going to the dentist results in the pleasure of keeping one’s teeth. Nor is ignorance any excuse, unless it’s a very particular kind of ignorance; for example, shooting your enemy because you hadn’t yet learned that a ceasefire was signed. Beyond this, ignorance of right and wrong, including the ignorance induced by drunkenness or rage, is simply inadmissible.
Yet ignorance, for Aristotle, was not something to gloss over lightly (as we must unfortunately do here); on the contrary, his analysis of it made it possible for him to answer Socrates’s question of how someone could fail to restrain himself even if he knows that what he wants to do is such a terrible idea.
The answer is that while we may possess knowledge, we are not always using it. I may know, for instance, where we hide a spare key at our house, or how to say “grapefruit” in French. But as I sit here typing, imagining an impatient reader, I am not using this knowledge, and, in fact, researchers have found that people who were made to think of self-discipline (by having to unscramble sentences about it) immediately made more future-oriented snack choices than those given sentences about self-indulgence. Put in mind of what they already knew—in effect, pushed to use their knowledge—they acted more in keeping with it.
But why don’t we have this knowledge when we need it—at a bar, for instance, or a casino? Aristotle seems to have understood perfectly what scientists like George Loewenstein would later prove about hot and cold states, observing that “outbursts of anger and sexual appetites and some other such passions, it is evident, actually alter our bodily condition, and in some men even produce fits of madness.”
That’s no excuse, of course. In general, Aristotle was impatient with excuses and finger-pointing. He noticed our inconsistent tendency to take credit for worthy actions while blaming things outside ourselves— drugs, circumstances, fate—for the unworthy things we do. Aristotle thought we ought to own up to both and implies that we’re responsible for a lot more than we typically admit. We’re responsible for our moral states, for example; a pattern of dishonesty and dissipation will lead to actions in keeping with these traits, yet we’re responsible nonetheless, because we create the patterns that we are victims of. We might have formed different habits. We might even have formed different dispositions, since as Aristotle asserts (and some modern psychologists also contend), “we ourselves are in a sense partly responsible for our dispositions.”
Aristotle won’t even exonerate us for how we look, a stance that should carry particular sting for modern-day Americans. He notes that blindness from birth or illness is beyond reproach, but not the loss of eyesight from too much drinking. Similarly, we bear responsibility for our appearance when it is shaped by our own acts or omissions. “Nobody blames those who are naturally ugly,” he observes, “but we do blame those who become so through lack of exercise and care for their appearance.”
As you might imagine, Aristotle had a good deal to say about incontinence. Akrasia, he contended, is of two kinds. The first type is the one that beset John Cheever when he reached for the bottle despite his earlier resolve not to. It’s happened to all of us. We resolve to work, but sit down to watch an inning of the ball game, and get up nine innings later, having known the whole time that we were supposed to be doing something else. Or perhaps we’ve resolved to eat a healthier diet, but then find an excuse to make gluttons of ourselves. This all-too-familiar form of akrasia Aristotle called astheneia, which means, roughly, weakness. The weak person does what is bad in full knowledge of what is good, and therefore lives in conflict with himself. He knows appetite ought to submit to reason; his problem is what most of us would call willpower.
The second type of akratic, Aristotle said, suffers from propeteia, or impetuosity, the psychology of which is very different from astheneia. This impetuous akratic acts without even thinking of whether he does good or ill. His appetites are simply allowed free rein, inevitably to the detriment of himself and others—if only because he belongs to them, rather than vice versa. He is led by them blindly, like a bull by a nose ring.
Responsible people tend toward astheneia, but the irresponsible, almost by definition, are given to propeteia, and much of the time, when we decry a lack of self-control in others, this is the kind of akrasia we are criticizing. “He’s so thoughtless,” we might say in anger or disgust. We all know people like this; the akratic of this type makes noise in theaters, has a terrible temper, gets into fights, can’t keep a job, lies all the time, is a stranger to sexual fidelity, and so forth. Extreme cases qualify for a medical diagnosis: antisocial personality disorder. Such impulsive akratics do not get much sympathy; we tend to forgive lapses in willpower more readily than indifference, perhaps because weakness at least reflects good intentions.
But Aristotle implied that failing to enact your will was no less a shortcoming than not bothering to have one. In doing so he was pointing out the terrible ethical pitfalls of reckless action—much as Harry Frankfurt would later, in calling such a person a wanton. Hannah Arendt would make a similar connection while covering the 1963 trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Eichmann, it seems, had not reflected much on the morality of his actions, prompting Arendt to make the sobering observation that “such thoughtlessness can wreak more havoc than all the evil instincts taken together.”
Drinking It All In
For all their philosophizing, the ancient Greeks understood the importance of social structures in enabling individuals to keep themselves in line. In ancient Athens, as James Davidson reminds us, “appetites were managed constantly and minutely through a series of ubiquitous practices. Each cup should contain more water than wine, each mouthful more bread than meat.”
The utility of these practices, so many of which have been swept away in the haste and atomization of modern life, is apparent in the tradition of the symposium itself, which was basically a highly ritualized drinking party. The protocol for these events was well established and shows how helpful ritual can be in promoting pleasure by keeping it within bounds. Except for a ceremonial taste of undiluted wine at the beginning, the wine was always mixed with water to produce a drink perhaps as potent as modern beer, and the number of kraters (urns, basically, for mixing wine) was limited in advance, often to three. The size of the cups and the pace of the drinking was controlled as well, and the aim was socializing rather than inebriation, although everyone must have gotten a buzz. Plato’s Symposium, in fact, opens with a discussion of how the guests, still hungover from the previous night’s antics, are going to drink. The Greeks apparently knew instinctively that these decisions were best made in advance, in front of one another, and in the sober light of reason.