Temperance Was Never About Enduring — What the Ancients Told You to Let Go Of

Introduction: The Word Carries the Sound of Gritted Teeth

The word temperance carries the sound of gritted teeth. Before the thing you want, you hold back. The thing you want to eat, you refrain from. The wish to take it easy, you press down. By the amount you endure, you become noble — such a feeling is steeped into this word.

But this understanding has a source. And that source lies in nearly the opposite place from what the word temperance originally pointed to.

Plenty of people are looking for the practice of temperance. What this article examines is the premise beneath it: what the temperance the ancients spoke of was, and how it was turned inside out in the modern age.

Let me give the conclusion first. Ancient temperance was not a technique of enduring but a technique of letting go. And what was to be let go was not desire itself but the attachment to external evaluation.

The Dichotomy of Control — What Is Within Reach and What Is Not

First, back to the source. The core of the ancient Stoic philosopher Epictetus’s Enchiridion lies in the distinction called the dichotomy of control.

In the world there is what is within your power and what is not. Within your power is only your own judgment and the disposition of your heart. On the other hand, some things stay outside your power however you wish. Your body, your property, your reputation, what others think — none bends to your will. So what the wise should do is release attachment to what is beyond their power and concentrate the heart on what is within it — so he taught.

What is decisive here is that the core of Stoicism was, originally, a technique of letting go. It was never a practice of adding on and competing over the quantity endured. Quite the reverse. It was a practice for gently releasing what you had been gripping.

The ancient Stoics did have exercises of deliberately taking on cold and hunger. But their aim was not to boast of the quantity endured. It was to thin, in the body, the attachment to what lies outside your hands. The exercise was, throughout, a means toward letting go.

But the modern “Stoic” extracts only that means and sets it in the place of the aim. It fans, rather, the very attachment to outward achievement that Epictetus said to let go of.

What to Let Go Is Not Desire but Attachment

What, then, is that “beyond your power” for us living now? Epictetus’s answer is plain. Others’ evaluation. The world’s reputation. How you are seen. However strongly you wish, these do not bend to your will.

From here a precise distinction arises. What to let go is not desire itself. What to let go is the attachment to external evaluation wound around the desire.

These two are often conflated. But they are wholly different. Set side by side I want to eat something sweet and I want to be seen as a person who can abstain from sweets. The former is a mere sensation born from your interior. The latter is a dependence on external evaluation, taking in others’ gaze. They seem alike, yet their sources differ entirely.

Modern self-denial makes people unfree because it binds these two together and casts them, as one, as the enemy. When you try to cut off desire, you deeply want, at the same time, the evaluation a self who can cut off. That is, trying to let go of desire, you grip, rather, the attachment to external evaluation anew. You grip tight what should truly be let go, and treat as enemy what may be held — here is the core of the mix-up.

What, then, becomes of desire once you let go of attachment to external evaluation? It ceases to be enemy or sin. It returns to being mere information about yourself. What you find pleasant, what moves your heart. Desire changes its form into a clue that tells you who you are.

This differs from surrender to desire. It is to treat desire head-on as material for knowing yourself.

The Order Had Been Reversed

Reread the source and one more inversion comes into view: an inversion of order.

Studying yoga or Eastern thought, there is a period when you grasp moderating food or restraining desire as tasks to be achieved — clear a hard restriction and you can rise a stage higher. But as you deepen the study, you notice the order seems reversed.

Moderating food and restraining desire were, originally, not things to restrict but things that come to be so, naturally, as the result of advanced practice. When something inner is put in order, a state that outwardly looks that way follows, after the fact. The order was, throughout, inner first, outer after.

Yet modern practice extracts only the outward form that should appear last, and tries to imitate it, by force, first. It skips past the essence and imitates only the result.

This is like imitating only a craftsman’s hand movements. Those movements are merely the result that welled out naturally at the end of long training. So imitating the movements themselves first does not make the skill dwell in you. An imitation with the order mistaken resembles only the outside, and the inside stays empty.

That modern temperance, however earnestly it traces ancient practice, looks somehow to spin its wheels has its reason in this inversion. It placed the result in the seat of the cause.

▸ On this order — once what you face toward is set, behaviour follows after — see habits are not something you run by will.

Two Questions Help You Tell Them Apart

Still, in daily life this telling-apart is hard. Is this feeling I now hold an attachment to external evaluation? Or a genuine wish from within? Two questions serve as clues.

The first question is whose standard is this? When you notice yourself about to hold something back, stop once. This question does not judge the act itself. It merely, quietly, lights up the source of the motive. For the same abstaining from alcohol, whether you abstain to match someone’s ideal or abstain having tasted the discomfort of a hangover yourself — the source differs entirely.

The second question is to quietly remove the reward. Imagine that, even if you carried the temperance through, no one would know and not even a record would remain — would you still want to do it? What this experiment lays bare is the centre of gravity of the motive. Attachment to external evaluation shines only when the light of others’ gaze strikes it. So put out the light and the shine goes out. A wish that rose from within, by contrast, keeps burning quietly even in the dark where no one watches.

Note that this is not a new menu of discipline. I do not mean to hand you a mechanical criterion — if there is a future you want, you may abstain; if not, do not. What this question prompts is not a verdict but a dialogue with the wish deep inside you.

Conclusion: Freedom Does Not Lie Past Cutting Off

The understanding that temperance is enduring drew the meaning out of the ancient word and borrowed only the letters on the signboard. True temperance was a technique of letting go, and what was to be let go was the attachment to external evaluation.

Let me redefine, at this point, the freedom Epictetus meant. Freedom is not the elimination of desire. It is to discern what is within your power and what is not, and to lift the heart quietly away from attachment to others’ evaluation.

Letting go, too, is not something achieved by force. The more you clamp it down by force, the more it rebounds and returns all the larger. True letting go is not something won by fighting but the quiet that arrives of its own accord when the inside is filled and what you face toward is set. The words of two thousand years ago can, at this point, at last be received rightly again. The whole picture of this argument — sovereignty — is gathered in why trying to be stoic drives you further from freedom.

References

Academic papers and theory

• Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. Intrinsic Motivation and Self-Determination in Human Behavior (1985) Plenum Press

Classics

• Epictetus, Enchiridion
• Marcus Aurelius, Meditations