How To Master Self Control - Socrates (Socratic Skepticism)

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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”. As we said at the beginning, this video was  brought to you by NordVPN. NordVPN protects your information by hiding your IP address and  encrypting all the data you send or receive by tunneling your internet traffic through a  specially configured remote server.

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