ABSTRACT
It is now time to try to draw together some of the main threads of the previous chapters. As I have remarked before, the problems about akrasia start, in Socrates, with the view that deliberate mischoice is impossible. The deliberations of reason cannot be disobeyed, because one’s judgments of what is best cannot be disobeyed, and the deliberations of reason determine what these are. Reason always exercises itself, in practical matters, on the question what it is best to do. This already sets the problem of akrasia as one about the possibility of a conflict between desire or passion on the one side and reason and calculation on the other. It also ensures that the question becomes one about the possibility of deliberate wrong-doing. This remains true in the later Plato, and also, though with a different picture of practical reason, in Aristotle. In both these authors, however, a distinction is made between desire for food, drink, sex and such like, and certain passions, particularly anger, in that the latter do, while the former do not, consist partly in views of how it is good to behave. Akrasia is the result of conflict between desire and reason, not between anger and reason. This contrast is abandoned by the Stoics. These desires and the passions are all assents to presentations about what is fitting to do now. Since in most people their reason is ill-developed and weak, the results of their reflections will not be full understanding, but presentations about what is fitting, to which a person may or may not assent Being overcome by anger receives the same account as being overcome by hunger or greed. There is nothing impossible in acting against the results of cogitation. Two things are, however, impossible: first, acting wrongly when one has attained full understanding; and secondly, acting deliberately contrary to an assented hormetic presentation. The Stoics therefore introduce two elements: the generalization of ‘akrasia’ to all passions, and the requirement of assent. It remains that the phenomena referred to as
akrasia are all to be seen in terms of the rule of passion, which is antipathetic to (proper) understanding.
