Moderation: The Gateway Virtue
The moderation of finite goods opens a path to infinite ones.
Life presents many pleasures.
These can be good in themselves: the delight of a good conversation with friends, the joy of an afternoon walk in the spring, the pleasure of a good meal and conversation with family, the satisfaction of reading a good novel or poem.
Happiness itself obviously involves pleasure. While happiness is not identical with pleasure or reducible to it, it would certainly be odd to think of someone as happy who never or only rarely experienced pleasure.
The Uses and Abuses of Pleasure
But pleasure, as we all know, is a two-edged sword.
On the good side, pleasure is not only enjoyable in itself, but it can also be a motivating force for us. The reward of enjoying a well-cooked steak might move us to fire up the grill. The delight we anticipate in attending a concert might help move us to get out the door at the right time. The reset we feel after a hard workout might provide an extra nudge to put on our running shoes. And so on.
Yet pleasure, as we know, can can also take us off track. The temptation of scrolling through the news, or social media, or a favorite blog can distract us from more pressing concerns at work. The pleasure of enjoying gourmet meals can quickly turn into an expensive and unhealthy habit. The enjoyment of wine or cocktails, taken in excess, can be a roadblock to living a healthy life.
Some of these pleasures might not even be that “bad” but they still distract and demotivate and dampen our spirits. The experience of waking up after falling into a scroll-hole on the news usually does not leave one feeling motivated. That is human, and understandable, but we might also make it more avoidable.
So, we can use pleasure for useful and worthy ends—as well as distracting or even harmful ones. Pleasure can literally draw us away (Latin: de–trahere) from what is most important to us. Most of us probably fall into both habits throughout the course of our day. How, then, can we wield the sword of pleasure in our life so that we use it well, to cut through the thickets, and not cut ourselves?
Moderation: The Excellence of Enjoyment
The ancients thought we needed some virtue that would moderate or temper our relationships to pleasure, especially to more basic pleasures (food, drink, sex). These are all all pleasures of touch and we share them with lower animals.
The word temperance, another word for the virtue of moderation, has an interesting etymological history. It seems to be related to the Latin word tempus meaning time. To do something with temperance is to do it at the right time and season. To fast during the fasts and to feasts during the feasts.
When we do things at the right time, we can really enjoy them. It is not any fun to have a party when no one else is in a festive mood. And it’s no fun to pop a bottle of champagne when your friends are still studying or working.
Similarly, eating and drinking beyond measure can obviously keep us from fully delighting in the very food and drink we are hoping to enjoy. The person with the greatest pleasures is not the hedonist but the virtuous man or woman, the one who has become excellent at enjoying life: the right amount at the right time.
Who do you think takes greater pleasure in a good bottle of wine? It is probably the sommelier who has trained his mind and palate to discern and enjoy. The point here is not to be a prude, or somehow resistant to enjoying what should be enjoyed, but rather to increase our pleasure precisely through moderation.
In this sense, the virtue or human excellence of moderation is a gateway virtue. Moderation does not curb our delight but it allows us to experience delight in a fuller and more ordered measure. Anhedonia—literally: pleasurelessness, or we could also say, prudishness—was a defect in the eyes of the ancients.
Of course, the opposing defect is that of excess: the immoderate enjoyment of pleasure that actually destroys our ability to enjoy in the first place. One must enjoy things in due measure, which means refraining from them at certain times.
To think of another example, if we binge on television shows at night, we are probably going to reach a point of feeling sick. I don’t know about you, but one can have a hangover from scrolling and streaming, just as much as one can have one from drinking. To enjoy these more fully, we need to moderate them.
Moderation: The Gateway Virtue
We mentioned above that temperance comes from the Latin word tempus: doing things in the right time or season. And that word tempus is possibly related to the same root as the verb tenere: to hold or to stretch. This may be related to the word for time which we still refer to in English as a “stretch” of time.
If we can play off this verbal history a little, we might come to see that temperance also “stretches” us in different ways. To temper a musical instrument is to tune it so that it can play its best. And tempered steel becomes both harder and more elastic. The excellence of temperance does both of these things for us.
First, it puts us in tune with ourselves. Too much of a good thing is, well, too much. Temperance allows us to choose the right amount. This is going to be different for everyone. The amount of food and drink that we take is obviously going to depend on our size, activity, context, and so on. Enjoying these good things keeps us tuned up and in tune with ourselves: tempered.
Second, moderation also strengthens and softens us, like tempered steel. The ability to say “no” to attractive pleasures makes us more likely to meet our goals without distraction. The mythic challenges of Odysseus in his return not only involved cyclopes, storms, and whirlpools, but also the stupor-inducing fruit of the Lotus eaters, the treacherous beauty of the Sirens’ songs, and so on. These mythic symbols all have ordinary yet direct parallels in our own lives.
Odysseus escapes these lures in order to arrive at a greater good: returning home to his wife and son on the island of Ithaca, ten years after the war at Troy. No joy can compare to this homecoming, despite the challenges and temptations.
So moderation is a gateway in another sense. It frees us to pursue higher goods by preventing our enslavement to lower goods. This enslavement is immortalized in the poem by the witch-goddess Circe who turns the men of Odysseus into swine by feeding them spiked cheese and wine. The imagery is clear: the misuse of even good things can turn us into animals and push us off our track for home.
These higher goods also include the enjoyment of spiritual truth, beauty, and goodness. If we are always thinking about the next chocolate bar, it’s hard to enjoy a painting by Vermeer, or a symphony by Haydn, or a novel by Jane Austen. By moderating our use of finite goods, we free ourselves to enjoy wider horizons. For those who believe in God, that includes spiritual pursuits. From this perspective, moderation frees us from the finite to enjoy the infinite.
Takeaways: Using Pleasure Well
So, where does that leave us?
Pleasures are good: they are a part of our happiness, they can motivate us to pursue meaningful goals, and they accompany purposeful activity. The highest pleasures accompany the highest kinds of activities.
But pleasures can also take us off course from higher goals: we can get distracted at work by social media, numb ourselves with food and drink, and become lost in the pursuit of what we share with the animals.
So: moderation is a key virtue in a human life. This tempering and tuning of our desires allows us to better engage both the enjoyable aspects of the pleasures of touch without letting them take us off course.
Strategies for moderation are manifold, as I plan to discuss in the future. But I hope that this article, at least, provides a wide-angle approach to the question of moderation and pleasure as a whole, as something worth thinking about. What pleasures contribute to your life? What pleasures take you off course? How might you address those challenges with actions that build moderation?
Simply keeping in mind the idea that moderation is a No for the sake of a greater Yes can be an important step on the journey. So, too, can the reminder that moderation is not about the elimination of pleasure, but about using pleasure well, so we can enjoy things more not less than we otherwise would.