Self-Command

Meeting the unfamiliar

An imagined exploration

The suspended wooden model turns with a motion you did not expect. Your finger is already planning a small improvement to the demonstration. Before it arrives, you fold your hands behind your back and ask the maker what touching would change. The most successful movement in the room is, briefly, the one you do not make.

Self-Command restrains an impulse when following it would cause needless harm. Discovery can make an action feel urgent simply because it is available. A pause lets consent, purpose and consequence enter before your hand or words alter someone else’s work. Restraint protects the chance to engage more intelligently a moment later.

Self-Command: finding the balance

The pause can end in action. Once the relevant person explains what is welcome, participation may be exactly right.

Self-Command gives…

A choice between impulse and consequence.

What Self-Command makes possible

You can remain eager while giving the other person’s purpose a place in the encounter.

Self-Command in ordinary life

Shared equipment

Ask before adjusting a setting someone else is using.

An exciting rumor

Pause before forwarding it and consider privacy as well as accuracy.

Nearby virtues, different work

Temperance

Temperance moderates appetite over time; Self-Command restrains a particular impulse.

Prudence

Prudence weighs consequences; Self-Command creates room for judgment before acting.

Self-Command and its counterfeits

Suppressed curiosity is a counterfeit of Self-Command: punish the wish to understand instead of directing it well.

After-the-fact permission is a counterfeit of Self-Command: act first and present apology as restraint.

How to cultivate Self-Command

• Notice the start of the impulse.
• Pause long enough to ask what it would change.
• Choose a permitted way to pursue the underlying interest.

Try it today

Before making a small unsolicited adjustment to shared work, pause and ask whether it is wanted.

This practice concerns unnecessary interference. Do not delay a necessary request for help or treat silence under coercion as virtue.

Questions worth returning to

• What am I about to change for somebody else?
• Could the same interest be pursued by asking first?

Keep the practice proportionate

These pages offer ideas for reflection and character practice, not professional advice. Choose practices suited to your circumstances and abilities. You may adapt, pause, or skip an exercise; putting yourself or someone else at risk is not proof of virtue.

Quotations and further reading

Seven readings, one for each day. All remain available here. Historical arguments and fictional dialogue are identified in their source notes.

1. If you are dazzled by the semblance of any promised pleasure, guard yourself against being bewildered by it; but let the affair wait your leisure, and procure yourself some delay.

   Epictetus · The Works of Epictetus
   Enchiridion XXXIV; printed p. 392; scan leaf 416
   Epictetus · Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1865; translation based on Elizabeth Carter, by Thomas Wentworth Higginson
   Greek original; English translation based on Elizabeth Carter, by Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1865).

   The pause separates attraction from action. The page uses it to protect another person’s work, without adopting the passage’s suspicion of pleasure as a whole.

2. It is not that he cannot move the chessmen just as he pleases, but if he does so then there can be no play.

   Rabindranath Tagore · Sadhana: The Realisation of Life
   IV
   Rabindranath Tagore · 1916 text; Project Gutenberg #6842; author’s preface credits translation assistance
   English presentation of Bengali discourses; preface credits passages translated by Satish Chandra Roy and Ajit Kumar Chakravarti, and Realisation in Action by Surendra Nath Tagore; individual passage translator not identified.

   In Tagore’s theological chess analogy, unconstrained motion destroys the activity. A visitor’s freedom to move a hand does not make every intervention appropriate.

3. No one pretends that actions should be as free as opinions.

   John Stuart Mill · On Liberty
   CHAPTER III. OF INDIVIDUALITY, AS ONE OF THE ELEMENTS OF WELL-BEING.
   John Stuart Mill · Walter Scott Publishing Co.; introduction by W. L. Courtney; captured edition undated; Project Gutenberg #34901

   Mill distinguishes action from thought when effects on others enter. Interest in a model is different from permission to alter it.

4. Then comes the conflict of our lesser man with our greater man, of our wishes with our will, of the desire for things affecting our senses with the purpose that is within our heart.

   Rabindranath Tagore · Sadhana: The Realisation of Life
   III
   Rabindranath Tagore · 1916 text; Project Gutenberg #6842; author’s preface credits translation assistance
   English presentation of Bengali discourses; preface credits passages translated by Satish Chandra Roy and Ajit Kumar Chakravarti, and Realisation in Action by Surendra Nath Tagore; individual passage translator not identified.

   Tagore sets immediate desire against a more encompassing purpose. The pause lets the wish to learn govern the wish to touch.

5. Begin by prescribing to yourself some character and demeanor, such as you may preserve both alone and in company.

   Epictetus · The Works of Epictetus
   Enchiridion XXXIII; printed p. 389; scan leaf 413
   Epictetus · Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1865; translation based on Elizabeth Carter, by Thomas Wentworth Higginson
   Greek original; English translation based on Elizabeth Carter, by Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1865).

   The historical advice asks for a consistent chosen manner. Considerate restraint should not depend on whether the maker happens to be watching.

6. There is no natural connection between strong impulses and a weak conscience.

   John Stuart Mill · On Liberty
   CHAPTER III. OF INDIVIDUALITY, AS ONE OF THE ELEMENTS OF WELL-BEING.
   John Stuart Mill · Walter Scott Publishing Co.; introduction by W. L. Courtney; captured edition undated; Project Gutenberg #34901

   Mill resists treating energy as moral failure. The curious visitor can remain eager while learning to direct the impulse.

7. but to propound things sincerely with more or less asseveration, as they stand in a man’s own judgment proved more or less.

   Francis Bacon · The Advancement of Learning
   THE FIRST BOOK OF FRANCIS BACON; OF THE PROFICIENCE AND ADVANCEMENT OF LEARNING, DIVINE AND HUMAN.
   Francis Bacon · Cassell & Company, 1893; edited by Henry Morley; Project Gutenberg #5500

   Bacon asks speakers to calibrate assertion to proof. Restraint applies to a premature declaration as well as to an interfering hand.

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