Against Better Judgment

Irrational Action and Literary Invention in the Long Eighteenth Century

Thomas Salem Manganaro

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780813947310
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Medieval & Early Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Robinson Crusoe recognizes it is foolish to leave for the open seas; nevertheless, he boards the ship. William Wordsworth of The Prelude sees the immense poetic task ahead of him, but instead of beginning work, he procrastinates by going for a walk. Centering on this sort of intentionally irrational action, originally defined as " akrasia " by the ancient Greeks and "weakness of will" in early Christian thought, Against Better Judgment argues that the phenomenon takes on renewed importance in the long eighteenth century.

In treating human minds and bodies as systems and machines, Enlightenment philosophers did not account for actions that may be undermotivated, contradictory, or self-betraying. A number of authors, from Daniel Defoe and Samuel Johnson to Jane Austen and John Keats, however, took up the phenomenon in inventive ways. Thomas Manganaro traces how English novelists, essayists, and poets of the period sought to represent akrasia in ways philosophy cannot, leading them to develop techniques and ideas distinctive to literary writing, including new uses of irony, interpretation, and contradiction. In attempting to give shape to the ways people knowingly and freely fail themselves, these authors produced a new linguistic toolkit that distinguishes literature's epistemological advantages when it comes to writing about people.

1

Akrasia and Explanation in Enlightenment Philosophy

How can an action be simultaneously intentional and irrational—that is, freely pursued but also knowingly in pursuit of an outcome understood to be for the worse? In the analysis of philosopher Agnes Callard, historically there have been two dominant ways of discrediting the reality of such an action, as can be considered through the following example:

He goes to the party, though he thinks he should stay home and study. What explains a weak-willed (or akratic) action like this one? One answer is that he is a pseudo-akratic: he doesn’t really believe he ought to study. Either he never fully believed that he should study, or perhaps he believed this once but temporarily forgets or suppresses it at the moment of action. Another answer is that he is an unintentional akratic: his desire to go to the party is so strong that it compels him, carrying him against his will like a strong wind.1

An akratic action, Callard writes, could thus be explained away by clarifying that the person’s real belief (deep down) did in fact correlate with the action at the time of the action; alternatively, it could be explained away by clarifying that the person’s action was not in fact free and so was not really an intentional action at all. In the first kind of account, the action is not irrational; in the second, it is not intentional. However, the philosopher who wants to defend the reality of akrasia—that the person in question both believed going to the party was ultimately for the worse, and that his action was voluntary—needs some other kind of explanation.

The difficulty would seem to lie in the desire to both eliminate logical conflict (presumably one of the goals of “explanation”) and still preserve the kind of conflict inherent to the idea of akrasia. In the passage above, the conflict is felt through the dramatic tension of a narrative: “He goes to the party, though he thinks he should stay home and study.” It is brief, but it is a narrative nonetheless, complete with a character, an event, and the drama of a psychological problem. There is an inclination in one direction (“he goes”) and another in the reverse direction (“though he thinks”). The drama lies in this conflict. What kind of an explanatory account, then, can preserve the drama of the narrative while also illuminating or clarifying what has occurred?

Callard suggests that the most common way philosophers have provided an account of akrasia has been to maintain that the akratic agent acts upon “the weaker reason”—a curious phrase, and an account that Callard ultimately argues is wrong, but her diagnosis of its usage through history is helpful for showing us how philosophers have grappled with this phenomenon.2 It is an approach, as we will see, that allows philosophers to maintain the reality of akrasia while preserving the sense in which a person fails him or herself. It also offers an expression that can be helpful for us as readers of literature when we seek to identify how literary works attempt to represent acting against better judgment. Callard elaborates on what she means by “the weaker reason”: “Having determined that he ought to do one thing, the weak-willed agent does another. On the standard view, he fails to act on his all-things-considered (i.e., what he considers his best) reason, but he acts on a reason nonetheless. He acts on his weaker reason, his (outweighed) reason to perform the akratic action.”3 In other words, for most philosophers who want to maintain the reality of akrasia, the akratic person does act upon a reason (so the act is intentional); however, it is a reason that he or she sees is “weaker,” indeed “outweighed” (this makes it irrational). Another way to say this is to say that the action is undermotivated: the person acts upon a reason, but it is not a good reason, and the person knows it. So one might explain the partygoer’s state by saying that he sees the stronger reason (that he should stay home and study) and the weaker reason (it would be fun to go out), and he acts upon the weaker reason. The action is undermotivated, because he knows the reason is unjustified. It is not a good reason for going out, but he’s acting on it anyway.

However, this sort of explanation also creates questions. How to account for the practice of neglecting a stronger reason for the sake of the weaker? As we will see, for philosophers like Aristotle and Augustine, this type of failure—the lack of follow-through, the disconnect, the ignoring or purposeful forgetting—becomes an important part of their theories of human agency. It is to be understood from within the intrinsically moral realm of practical reason that understands a trajectory from man-as-he-is to man-as-he-ought-to-be. This realm is, however, largely eliminated from the major strands of Enlightenment philosophy. As we will see, in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophy in question, if reasons are to be understood as causes, then there is no weaker or stronger; if a reason brought about an action, then it is, by definition, not weak.

This chapter provides a condensed intellectual history of akrasia in order to help us see how agential weakness—failing in action—is pushed out of the space of philosophical inquiry during the age of the Enlightenment. I focus on Callard’s phrase “the weaker reason” as a way to stay focused on what exactly becomes disallowed in philosophical explanations of action—a neglect, a silencing of what is known to be justifiable—and then, as I will consider in chapters 2 through 5, what finds new forms of articulation in literary writing. The end of this chapter will also briefly step outside of the historical trajectory in order to consider treatments of akrasia in essays from the 1960s by philosophers Donald Davidson and Iris Murdoch. This will help us see more clearly some of the epistemological privileges of literary strategies when writing about akrasia, except here we will consider those privileges not within literature (as will be the focus in chapters 2 through 5) but within more recent works of philosophy. Although this portion of the chapter does not explicitly contribute to the historical argument of this book, it lends to its theoretical argument by helping us see the importance of taking narrative, perspective, and character seriously for those who want to write about akrasia outside of the teleological/moral paradigms of human agency.

The chapter is split into four sections: the first centers on the cases of Aristotle and Augustine, the two philosophers who have bequeathed conceptions of akrasia/weakness of will unto philosophy; the second examines the elimination of akrasia in Thomas Hobbes, Benedict de Spinoza, and David Hume; the third looks at the somewhat more complicated case of John Locke, who both eliminates akrasia but also tries to preserve it through his use of narrative; and the fourth considers the privileges of the literary in writing akrasia in essays by Davidson and Murdoch.

The story told here rests upon much broader accounts regarding the transformations away from classical worldviews in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—specifically, around the idea of “explanation,” and the impacts of those transformations on theories of human agency. It is not my goal to try and provide that fuller story. My more limited focus here is on what happens to the concept of akrasia when teleological and moral modes of characterizing and explaining action are out of the picture, as with Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, and Hume. To go deeper into the past to set the stage for these changes to conceptions of “will” might mean turning to the University of Paris’s censuring of Aristotle’s treatises in the thirteenth century and in the writing of William of Ockham in the early fourteenth century, which resulted in the institutional strengthening of voluntarist theology; as told in the account of Thomas Pfau, it is in that period that we see a “momentous shift from the Thomistic synthesis of Aristotelianism and Augustinianism toward a Franciscan (voluntarist) theology—one wherein agents, situations, and meanings are no longer connected to an underlying rational order or substantial form but, instead, prove inherently discontinuous.”4 Alternatively, one could trace the growth and spread of Lucretian thought in “modernity,” suggested through Stephen Greenblatt’s story of Poggio Bracciolini’s discovery of Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things in 1417.5 Or one could follow Charles Taylor’s characterization of the invention of a form of “inwardness” that is tied to “disengaged reason” in Descartes.6 What will be especially significant to our investigation of Hobbes and his legacy, however, is the identification of the elimination of teleological and moral frameworks from philosophy. Alasdair MacIntyre brings out this change through the figure of Blaise Pascal in particular, in whom he perceives a synthesis of “a Protestant-cum-Jansenist conception of reason” on the one hand and “the conception of reason at home in the most innovative seventeenth-century philosophy and science” on the other. MacIntyre argues that this synthesis leads to an embrace of a new model of reason that “does not comprehend essences or transitions from potentiality to act; . . . it can assess truths of fact and mathematical relations but nothing more. In the realm of practice therefore it can speak only of means. About ends it must be silent.”7 Another way to see the loss of teleological reasoning might be to focus on Isaac Newton, who, as Louis Dupré has written, “himself avoided using teleological arguments, not in the first place because they interfered with mathematical deduction, but because they escaped observation”;8 his empirical method then “forbade him to introduce metaphysical speculations about a transcendent cause.”9 As we will see in the Enlightenment philosophers discussed here, if reasoning and explanation are strictly focused on what can be empirically perceived or rationally determined as immediately prior, resulting in a commitment to “cause” understood strictly as “efficient cause,” with teleological and moral explanations out of the picture, then human action becomes quite a different thing.

Before we get there, we will need to have a clearer grasp of what it means to explain action in moral and teleological terms, and what it might mean to say that someone who acts against better judgment acts upon “the weaker reason.” For this we turn to Aristotle and Augustine.

Akrasia as Failure in Action: Aristotle and Augustine

Aristotle and Augustine are often considered to be the two most fundamental early pillars that bequeath to a Western philosophical tradition the understanding of human agency as a domain that is separate from the domain of the merely intellectual. Their distinct paradigms have been broadly understood as combined in medieval Scholasticism and with the thought of Thomas Aquinas in particular, so it is worthwhile to examine the Aristotelian model as well as the Augustinian model as having originally formulated ideas that would be dominant (in different ways) within and through medieval and early modern philosophy and theology. For both, the notion of acting weakly or incontinently is an important possibility for human beings, and an essential consequence of this view is that the domain of agency is not strictly correlated with the domain of thought or reason.

Although Augustine did not know the work of Aristotle, both wrote in response to the claims put forward by Socrates in Plato’s Protagoras. In that dialogue, Socrates maintains that if a person acts freely and knowingly, then it is always in accordance with what he believes to be best. “No one who either knows or believes that there is another possible course of action, better than the one he is following,” Socrates says, “will ever continue on his present course when he might choose the better. . . . Then it must follow that no one willingly goes to meet evil or what he thinks to be evil. . . . When faced with the choice of two evils no one will choose the greater when he might choose the less.”10 For the Socrates of the Protagoras (it is less clear whether we ought to attribute this position to Plato), action is convertible with belief.11 If a man gives in to the rush of passion and commits a violent act, we simply say that he believed that act was the greater act. If he did not believe it was the greater act, then we must say he did the act blindly, ignorantly, or was compelled in some way to act in this manner.

Here is where we can identify Aristotle’s uniqueness as a philosopher focused on becoming (action, praxis) as separate from being, and on “practical” reason as separate from “theoretical” reason. As Hannah Arendt has put it, “The starting-point of Aristotle’s reflections on the subject [of the will/purposive choice] is the anti-Platonic insight that reason by itself does not move anything.”12 For Aristotle, akrasia serves as a central example that disaggregates reasoning from doing and allows him to deny that action is necessarily convertible with belief or knowledge.

Aristotle’s most prolonged discussion of akrasia can be found in book 7 of the Nicomachean Ethics. He defines the “enkratic man” (or the “continent man”) as he who feels the afflictions of contrary passions or appetites, but is able to control them. The enkratic man experiences inner conflict even as he does the right thing and for this reason is not considered perfectly virtuous. The “akratic man” (the “incontinent man”), however, is he who not only possesses passions and appetites that draw away from what is good, but he also succumbs to them in action despite knowing the correct action.13 How is this so? At one point, Aristotle puts it this way: “When appetite happens to be present in us, the one opinion bids us avoid the object, but appetite leads us towards it (for it can move each of our bodily parts); so that it turns out that a man behaves incontinently under the influence (in a sense) of a rule and an opinion, and of one not contrary in itself, but only incidentally—for the appetite is contrary, not the opinion—to the right rule.”14 This is a curious and heavily debated description, for the phrase “leads us towards it (for it can move each of our bodily parts)” seems to imply determinism and lack of freedom. But this interpretation is misleading, for the man, according to Aristotle, acts upon “the influence (in a sense) of a rule and an opinion” correlating to the appetite—in other words, it is a free and voluntary action that follows a rule or opinion correlated with the appetite. In an important sense, akratic action in Aristotle is voluntary: the incontinent man, h...