Acrasia

Him fortuned (hard fortune ye may gheſſe) / To come, vvhere vile Acraſia does vvonne [live], / Acraſia a falſe enchauntereſſe, / That many errant knightes hath fovvle fordonne: […]

VVaſte your hours in the lap of diſſipation: reſign yourſelf up to the faſcinations of Acrasia; and ſport in the Bovver of Bliss. Cover your tables vvith delicacies, at the expence of your famiſhed clans.

It has been already remarked, that, by the humoral pathologists, organic diseases in general, and of course inflammation, were attributed to an akrasia or intemperies, consisting in an inordinate flow to certain organs of one or other of the four principal fluids of the body; that of blood producing the phlegmenous inflammation; that of yellow bile, the erythematic, or, as they call it, the erysipelatous; that of the black bile, the scirrhous; that that of the phlegm, the leucophlegmatic, or œdematous, an affection now known to be not of itself inflammatory, although a frequent consequence of inflammation.

The psychological doctrine of the Gorgias is more mature. It recognizes the presence in the soul of irrational or good-independent desires (epithymiai), and represents the virtuous soul as one characterized by harmony and order, which requires the restraining of desire […] The Protagoras, by contrast, denies the reality of acrasia and thus implicitly denies the existence of good-independent desires.

The root of all character weaknesses and all addictions is in acrasia; the root of failure also underlies acrasia, along with the personal ruins they become many lives due to this inclination to incontinence and to the cessation of the virtue of crasia – […] crasia is the virtue of force of self-control. The anecdote is told, to illustrate this concept, of the great French writer Victor Hugo, that he had to finish writing a novel within a certain period at the demands of his publisher, but this great character was very given to go out, socialize and district himself with other tasks – with the consequent waste of time and energy to write that this supposes – so, unable to beat his acrasia directly, he opted for an indirect way to beat it: he put all his clothes in a cupboard that was locked so that he could not go outside.

What I think this depicts is a relationship between the reasons we have to act and the action we do. This problem of acrasia suggests that sometimes we have those reasons. We think smoking is bad for health so the action we would expect is that we would refrain from smoking. Instead, we smoke.

So when the badness of a poor doctor or actor is said to be 'similar by analogy' to badness proper[…], and this is used to shed light on the 'similarity' between acrasia proper and the acrasias in respect of anger, honour, and gain[…], the thought must be that a bad doctor stands to doctoring more or less as a bad man stands to action, while a choleric acratic stands to anger more or less as an acratic proper stands to bodily pleasure.

Augustine's original interpretation of our human condition is that we struggle and fail to do what we want to do and know that we ought to do – the classical problem of weakness of will or acrasia. […] We recognize acrasia in ourselves […] it is an acrasia which is tied to specific weaknesses: the man who yearns for vodka, and who tries and fails to limit his vodka-intake, may have no serious difficulty in avoiding over-eating.

I earlier […] introduced a notion of ‘hard acrasia’, that is, of a conscious failure to live up to what I judge to be best in what I desire most, choose, and do. We need to distinguish this from ‘soft acrasia’: in cases of soft acrasia, the agent’s perception is dimmed and his judgement deflected, so that he acts in a way that he would not have chosen in a cool hour, with judgement and perception unimpaired, and yet not with conscious contrariety to an occurrent choice, in cases of hard acrasia, his perception is clear, his judgement unequivocal—and yet, out of weakness, he acts otherwise.

Socrates undertakes to press this indictment against that explanation of acrasia which he takes to be by far the most common of all: that men who know the better will do the worse because they are "overcome" or "defeated" by desire for pleasures.