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but for now let’s get on with how to master self-control from the philosophy of Socrates.
Socrates was the founder of Western philosophy and one of the most famous philosophers in the world.
He lived in ancient Greece between 469 and 399 BCE, yet surprisingly
never wrote anything in his life. What remains of his philosophy today actually comes from Plato,
Aristophanes and Xenophon who described the dialogues between Socrates and various Athenians.
These writings formed what is now referred to as ‘The Socratic Dialogues’.
For Socrates, philosophy is a quest for wisdom and
in the Socratic dialogues he often questioned the beliefs of the people he was talking to.
His way of asking questions gave birth to the type of philosophy called Philosophical Skepticism.
Socrates was an embodiment of not only true wisdom, but also true courage. When he was old,
he was imprisoned after the government of Athens accused him of corrupting the youth
and failing to acknowledge the city’s official gods. Instead of attempting escape, he chose
to take responsibility for himself. He was then sentenced to death. Teaching philosophy was the
mission of his life and he encouraged everyone to question everything, no matter the risk.
One fundamental teaching of Socrates refers to the theme of self control. According to Socrates,
wisdom or philosophy allows people to adopt self-control and to do what is right in their
life. To achieve self control, people must be free from their appetites for bodily pleasures,
like food, drink, sex and other physical comforts.
For example, Socrates was famous for going barefoot and dressing as simply as possible,
managing to control his own passions, desires, and appetites. His asceticism - or severe
self-discipline - is difficult to follow in our modern lives as for many of us such a lifestyle is
neither practical nor desirable. In spite of this, he can still teach us to enhance our self-control,
and to help you better understand his teachings regarding the mastery of self-control and how best
to implement them into your own life, here are 3 lessons from the wisdom of Socrates:
Be in control of your bodily desires Socrates says “If you don’t get what you want,
you suffer; if you get what you don’t want, you suffer; even when you get exactly what you want,
you still suffer because you can’t hold on to it forever.”
Socrates said that individual desires must be postponed in the name of a higher ideal.
According to Socrates in the book Phaedo, also called “On The Soul”, one of the best-known
dialogues of Plato, it is not enough to consider the bodily pleasures as bad or worthless,
but we should avoid them as much as possible, because they distract us
and affect our capacity of reasoning. If we don’t have rational control over our desires,
we won’t be able to make smart decisions in life and this would lead us towards unhappiness.
The key towards happiness and virtue, virtue meaning the same thing as wisdom for Socrates,
is to turn our attention away from bodily pleasures and instead turn it towards the soul.
Bodily pleasures include indulging in food, sex or anything which gives us a feeling of extreme
physical satisfaction. In some ways, Socrates recommends an ascetic, or austere, lifestyle.
For example, he said that philosophers “oppose the body in every respect” and that they “avoid
pleasures, desires, pains, and fears to whatever extent is possible”. According to Socrates,
the common people, the non-philosophers, have an impure soul, always slaves to their bodily
desires, letting it bewitch their actions. Even when entirely conscious and in control of their
actions, such people will willingly act in the direction of accomplishing their worldly desires.
By contrast, philosophers focus on the pleasure of learning, on gathering knowledge, on understanding
the truth, of what justice means. Thus, they escape the prison of bodily pleasures. Just like
the philosophers described by Socrates, instead of focusing on our bodily desires, we need to find a
higher aim in life, something that is greater than ourselves, than our temporary existence.
If we live in a world of personal desires, chasing them one by one, we can never be happy, no matter
how many we fulfill. If we cannot fulfill them, we will suffer, we will also suffer if we do fulfill
them because eventually we will realize we cannot hold on to them forever. Even if we satisfy them,
new desires will come. No matter how much food you eat now, after a few hours you will
be hungry again. Or, if your relationship is based solely on physical attraction,
eventually this will fade and you will be left with someone you share no connection with
and an unhappy relationship that will most likely end bitterly and prematurely.
If you covet money and the trappings of a wealthy lifestyle, no amount of money will ever be enough.
The more money you make, the more things you will find to buy.
It is better to find a goal that transcends one’s own life. For example, instead of focusing
on making a lot of money just to enjoy luxury vacations, fancy cars or an oversized house,
it will make you happier over the long-term if you focus on making this world a better place.
No matter your profession, instead of focusing on getting the most highly paid job in the industry,
you should focus instead on getting a job or starting a business
in which your skills and talents will have the highest positive impact on society.
In the case of physical love, instead of focusing on the physical pleasure you get
from your relationship with your partner, it is better to focus on the connection you two have,
on the intellectual connection with your partner, on the hobbies and life goals you share together,
and if you choose to do so, building a family together and raising the next generation.
We need to escape the prison of selfish personal desires and interests, we need to expand our
areas of interest and formulate goals that are higher than our individual existence.
We can never really be free and happy if we are slaves to our bodily desires.
We can only control ourselves and our lives if we don’t let bodily desires direct our lives.
Be Just To quote Socrates: “One should
never do wrong in return, nor mistreat any man, no matter how one has been mistreated by him.”
For Socrates, justice is one of the main human virtues and it is better to be just
than unjust. Socrates believed that we have three parts of the soul: reason,
“logistikon”, spirit, “thymoeides“ and appetite, “epithymetikon”
and he points out that one is just when each of the three parts of the soul performs its function
and does not interfere negatively with the others. Reason being a goal-seeking and measuring faculty,
should be in charge of ruling over the spirit and appetite, as its primary function is to rule
through the love of learning. However, we cannot go anywhere in life without spirit and appetite,
the power of spirit and appetite are indispensable for life itself.
It is considered that the spirit is the part of the soul which manifests anger or other strong
emotions. When the spirit performs its function well, the spirit obeys the directions of reason,
while strongly defending the entire soul from external invasion - when for example
someone accuses you of lying and you need to immediately reply by defending yourself,
and from internal disorder - when you have an important event, you feel a lot of anxiety,
but your reason tells you that you can perform better when you are calm, so the spirit tries to
follow the reason by trying to regulate your behavior, tempering the feelings of anxiety.
The function of appetite is to produce and seek pleasure. In spite of the fact that the appetite
can have its own goals, for example going to a restaurant to eat your favorite meal , it cannot
differentiate between short-term satisfaction and goals that can produce long term happiness.
It is only reason that can formulate the right goals to achieve long term happiness.
For example, if your favorite meal is not a healthy meal, eating it every day would
be damaging for your health. Therefore, it is important to follow your reason,
only in this way you will have a chance at long-term happiness.
Justice is defined by Socrates as a natural balance of the soul's parts making injustice
an imbalance. What makes us unjust is usually a lawless attitude given by the fact that we are
slaves to our desires, when the appetite governs over the functions that should be
performed by reason or spirit. If we experience and act on this state, sooner or later we will
experience disorder and regret, potentially becoming unsatisfiable and even fearful.
In Plato’s “Republic”, where Socrates appears as a main character, it is said that anyone who is not
a philosopher, has a divided soul, the three parts interfere with each other and thus there is an
imbalance. He posits that philosophers are capable of directing their appetite as their decisions are
taken by reason. However for the rest of us, it is not a trivial thing to resist one’s own appetite.
To be just, according to Socrates, we need to pay attention to which part of our soul rules us.
For example, a characteristic pleasure of philosophers is learning,
a characteristic pleasure of egotists is being honored, a characteristic pleasure of narcissists
is making money. Then, Socrates proved that some characteristics are better than others
and he proved that the characteristics of philosophers are the best.
Socrates believed that there are lower and higher pleasures, the lower pleasures being the
bodily pleasures that we get from food, drink, sex, comfort etc. while the higher pleasures
are the intellectual ones, like the pleasure of learning. We should pursue the ‘lower’ pleasure
only insofar as it is necessary for survival, as the lower pleasure is not even true pleasure,
it is just the absence of pain. Also, he calculated that the life of a philosopher king,
who is the embodiment of a just person, will be 729 times as pleasant as that of a tyrant,
the unjust person, whose life is governed by desire for the lowest pleasures. Thus,
according to Socrates, just people are in general happier than the unjust people.
There are many cases of tyrants or dictators who abused their population, stealing money
from the poor just to meet their insatiable desire for power and a luxurious lifestyle.
The more selfish we are, stepping on other people, mistreating them, just to follow our own interests
and desires, the less we will be capable of changing this behavior in the future. Once someone
tastes a life of luxury by doing immoral actions, it is difficult to go back to a moral life.
What one can learn from this teaching of Socrates in order to be a just person is to be more
detached from worldly pleasures, such as the love of money, fame, sex, food and so on. We need to do
what we can to ensure we get a good education, say learning philosophy as well as practical things
which expand our knowledge of world, and - if we have more than we need, to not lose ourselves in
pursuing a lavish lifestyle; we need to engage in collaborative activities with other people,
to make sure that our actions do not hurt others or better yet, actively support and bring each
other up. If we do so, it will become easier to be just, virtuous, to treat others in a fair way
and it will allow us to have more control over ourselves in general.
3. Know yourself
As Socrates so simply said: “Know thyself.”
“Know thyself” is one of the Delphic maxims and was the first of three maxims
inscribed in the Temple of Apollo at Delphi according to the Greek writer Pausanias,
together with “nothing to excess" and "certainty brings insanity".
When Socrates was asked to sum up the entire philosophy,
he replied: ‘Know yourself.’ Thus, knowing ourselves can be the meaning of one’s own life.
Wisdom or philosophy teaches us to have self control and to do what is right
in life. According to Socrates, to have a high level of self-control and confidence,
we should know ourselves deeply. Not everything that we can know about ourselves is important.
What is important are the things related to the inner core of who we are, not trivial things like
when you were born for example, but rather things like: what are your talents or passions? What is
your real personality? What kind of behavioral patterns do you usually follow in life? What are
your vulnerabilities? Are you more emotional or rational when making decisions? How do
you handle conflicts? What qualities do you find attractive? How self-confident are you? And so on…
We often underestimate the importance of knowing the answers to these type of questions. A lack of
self-knowledge can lead us into difficult situations. For example, not knowing your
real talents or passions can make you follow the wrong career in life, say, choosing medicine over
a career in music because it’s what your parents want. Not knowing that you prefer creative tasks
to organizational skills and taking a promotion into management, not knowing that you are a
very emotional person and love to interact with people and connect with them, you risk falling
into a career where there is too much routine and not enough human interaction, and so on.
We can see that knowing ourselves can make our lives much happier, but deeper than that, knowing
ourselves can put us in much more control of our life. When we know all of our weaknesses, then we
can predict when these weaknesses will show up and we can mitigate their impact. For example, if you
suffer from nerves when public speaking then you can practice simple techniques like remembering
simple cues that you can easily recall to prompt you at points you get know you get stuck,
looking over the audience, not at them while strongly visualizing your practice until it
feels like practice, if only for a moment, or even just pausing and taking a deep breath.
Knowing yourself is a long process and it requires getting some life experience.
There will be painful episodes - it’s all part of the process and often the best way to learn more
about your true self. In order to properly learn from the life events you go through,
you need to make sure that at the end of each day, you revise the day, meditate over the events that
happened and how you reacted, on the things you did well and those you didn’t, and to understand
the reasons why. Through many such iterations, you will start to learn more and more about yourself
and, based on this knowledge you gather, you will create methods and strategies to mitigate
your weaknesses, better preparing you for future events and gaining more control over yourself
and of your life. Or, as Socrates so simply put it - “The unexamined life is not worth living”.
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