The context for VII is Socrates’s Protagoras, which rejects the idea that akrasia is possible at all.
On the Socratic view, nobody ever acts against their better judgement: they think that if S knows that X is better than Y all things considered, then S will choose X over Y.
“No one goes willingly toward the bad or what he believes to be bad.”
So Socrates attributes apparent akrasia to mere ignorance.
This is important to him because he thinks that knowledge is “a fine thing capable of ruling”, i.e. if you have knowledge then you must surely act in line with it.
Methodologically, VII proceeds much like the rest of the NE, using Aristotle’s dialectic method to examine the seemingly-false Socratic view, then extract what is true from it.
In particular, it seems obvious that people sometimes do act against what they take to be best.
He explicitly tells us in VII.1 that he’ll start with the appearances (phainomena), then go through the puzzles (aporia), and aims to confirm that the common beliefs (endoxa) are [mostly] correct.
Aristotle’s goal here is to find a middle ground that validates the phainomena that akrasia really does exist, while vindicating Socrates’s position that knowledge isn’t a slave dragged about by everything else.
So he needs to describe the manner in which the akrates has partial but not full knowledge.
Aristotle distinguishes between six states of character.
From best to worst:
Divine virtue – heroic excellence
Virtue (arete) – stable disposition to act and feel rightly
Continence (enkrateia) – has base appetites but overcomes them with reason
Incontinence (akrasia) – has base appetites and is overcome, despite knowing better
Vice (kakia) – chooses bad actions after deliberation, believing that they’re right
Bestiality – sub-human depravity
So, the akrates acts against their better judgement or knowledge of what is right.
They take some action φ despite being aware that a more choiceworthy action ψ exists and is open to them.
Note that Charles (2010) argues that this modern gloss corresponds poorly with Aristotle’s notion of akrasia, which is broader and involves e.g. “being out of control”.
The enkrates also has shameful appetites, but is able to overcome these non-rational desires and follow the action in accordance with reason.
When introducing the weak/impetuous distinction, Aristotle makes an analogy with tickling: if you have foresight, then you can modulate your emotional reaction and avoid laughing when tickled (VII.7).
So perhaps the manner of the enkrates’s control over their emotions is similar to this: they can see what is going to happen, and they manage to exert rational influence over their competing desires, ultimately doing the right thing.
Aristotle distinguishes between two types of akrasia, depending on whether or not the agent reaches a decision.
Weakness (astheneia) is where you deliberate and reach a decision but do not act on it, because the motivational force of prohairesis is defeated by a stronger appetitive pull.
Impetuosity (propeteia) is where you act without deliberating at all.
Akrasia proper is about agents’ responses to choiceworthy and necessary pleasures (i.e., bodily pleasures); other kinds of pleasure (e.g. honour, wealth) are linked with only qualified akrasia.
The paradigmatic case of akrasia is with a sensually akratic person, who sees something pleasant and jumps towards it.
They have no justification whatsoever by their own lights for what they do (Charles).
Someone who has qualified akrasia with respect to spirit (e.g. they’re angry and retaliate) is less shameful, because they at least reason but do so faultily.
“Spirit would seem to hear reason a bit, but to mishear it” (VII.6)
In particular, the reaction is something like: “I’ve been insulted, so I should retaliate”, without reasoning through if retaliation is warranted (even they know that it isn’t always).
So structurally this is a bit like impetuosity, but with a little more deliberation: their spirit acts “as though it had inferred” (1149a33–34).
People who overcome/are overcome by bestial desires are not even qualifiedly akratic; they fall outside the framework altogether (VII.5, 1148b19–29).
Rather like how Aristotle casts temperance and bravery as duals (one is about pleasures, one is about pains), Aristotle thinks akrasia/enkrateia have duals about pains: softness and resilience.
The soft agent is analogous to the akratic agent (overcome by pains); the resilient agent goes with enkratic agent (feels pains but overcomes them).
Akrasia is claimed to be more shameful than softness, for similar reasons to the discussion in III.12: it’s less excusable to succumb to pleasures than to pains.
Conversely, continence is better than resilience “for endurance consists in resisting, while continence consists in conquering, and resisting and conquering are different, as not being beaten is different from winning;”
Akrasia is only when you take an action contrary to the right decision, not all examples of changing your mind following a decision. There are no examples of “good akrasia”.
So if you change your mind because of fine pleasures (e.g. the pleasure of telling the truth), that’s not an instance of akrasia (example of Neoptolemus in VII.9).
What does the akrates know, and where does their failure lie?
What is the nature of the akrates’s knowledge?
Aristotle rejects two potential explanations of what the akrates’s action is conflict is with that are extremities of knowledge, to establish his next move that the akrates has a partial form of knowledge.
Their action might conflict with belief (weaker than knowledge).
But reneging on mere belief is not blameworthy in the way that akratic action is, so they can’t be the same.
Also, beliefs can be held as strongly as knowledge – so there’s not much reason to think that knowledge is any more resistant to being overcome than beliefs.
Their action might conflict with phronesis (strongest form of knowledge).
But this is just a contradiction: nobody can be at once prudent and incontinent! The prudent person acts on their knowledge.
Aristotle then draws out three distinctions to help flesh out the sort of knowledge the akrates could possess (VII.3).
Having vs using knowledge: it’s possible to possess knowledge without attending to it.
If you’re not attending to your knowledge, it’s understandable that you could take the wrong action, like the akrates.
Universal vs particular premises: choosing right actions requires particular knowledge, not merely universals.
And on Aristotle’s account, what the akrates lacks is precisely this particular knowledge: they have but do not use it.
They retain their universal knowledge (both having & using), and it is not overcome by appetites.
Having-without-using qua asleep/mad/drunk vs qua awake/sane/sober.
It’s perfectly ordinary to have-but-not-use knowledge: e.g., I can know that Paris is the capital of France even if I’m not attending to it right now.
But the specific mode of having-without-using exhibited by the akrates is like that of “those asleep or mad or drunk”.
i.e., they have degraded access to their knowledge because of passions disrupting cognitive faculties: they can’t attend to the knowledge they have even when it would be relevant.
This explains why it’s not easily fixable: if the akratic had-but-didn’t-use their knowledge qua awake, then you could just remind them to attend to it, and they’d snap out of akrasia. But what actually happens is the passion needs to subside, like waking from sleep.
Taking all this, Aristotle concludes that the akrates has a failure in applying practical syllogism.
Someone deliberating correctly would reason as follows:
(1A) Nothing sweet ought to be tasted.
(2A) X is sweet
(CA) Therefore X ought not to be tasted
The akrates gets some of the way through the reasoning above, but their appetites interfere, leading them to also reason as follows:
(1B) Everything sweet is pleasant
(2B) X is sweet
(CB) Therefore X is pleasant
So, despite them knowing the universal (1A), they don’t properly reach the right conclusion (CA).
The impetuous agent doesn’t reach it at all.
The weak agent does reach it, but not fully: he “has it and says it but does not know it, like the drunk repeating the verses of Empedocles”.
There’s debate about whether the “final proposition” that the akrates fails to have/know in the first syllogism is (2A) or (CA).
Price thinks it is the last premiss in the syllogism (e.g. something like “this would be unhealthy”). This is based on a textual reading of the Greek.
Also, on Price’s account the akrates just reasons through a single syllogism, where (2A) is replaced with the faulty (2A’): everything sweet is pleasant and this is sweet, with appetites driving action.
This means that there’s no room for “hard akrasia” – acting against a fully-intact judgement – because the weak akratic is just mouthing the conclusion, not grasping it at all.
Charles thinks it is the conclusion, mapping Aristotle’s distinction between the akrates which “does not have [it]” vs “has it and says it but does not know it” onto the familiar impetuous/weak divide.
If it’s the minor premiss the akrates fails to grasp, then you might think they’re not acting voluntarily, because they have ignorance of the particulars.
But we can resolve this; see puzzles below.
In either case, the failure of the akrates is in possessing and applying their particular/ “perceptual” knowledge (whether at the premiss or conclusion).
This allows Aristotle to conclude that it is perceptual, not full, knowledge, that is dragged about.
Specifically, it’s “dragged about” in the sense of being degraded & disrupted by the passions.
The akrates can say the premiss (2A), but don’t properly engage with it due to their bad appetites.
Or, for the weak akratic on Charles’s account, they can mouth the perceptual conclusion (CA) without being properly committed to it.
Evaluating akrasia
Akrasia is worse than enkrateia, but not so bad as vice, because the agents differ in their orientation to their bad actions.
The akrates starts from the right principle (arche) but takes actions contrary to that, and will later feel regret for doing so.
This contrasts with the vicious agent, who has a distorted conception of the good which means they have a positive affective response to their bad actions.
Among the vices, akrasia is compared in particular to intemperance, and considered less bad.
The intemperate person feels no regret, so they don’t have the right feelings to habituate themselves towards developing virtue.
“He is intemperate; for he is bound to have no regrets, and so is incurable” (VII.7 1150a19-23).
For the intemperate person, they decide to pursue excess. This is worse than the akrates whose prohairesis was correct but then ignored.
Recall that prohairesis is the thing that best reveals character.
One aporia Aristotle raises is that it might seem like the intemperate ought to be more curable, because you could just persuade them to pursue the right ends (VII.2, 1146a31).
This can be addressed with the fact that prohairesis is a deliberative desire (i.e. not merely intellectual), and the failing desiderative component in an intemperate agent cannot be changed with persuasion.
See also Charles (2010).
It’s not immediately obvious why enkrateia should be less good than virtue, if you’re still doing the right actions.
You can explain this in terms of internal motivation: the enkrates lacks a harmony among the parts of the soul which the virtuous agent possesses.
i.e. it would be better if their non-rational part desired what was fine, rather than needing to be overcome by the reasoning part.
See also Coope discussion above about phronesis.
Perhaps there’s also a degree to which the right action taken by the enkrates is less reliable.
Notice that this means that genuine virtue isn’t about winning an internal struggle of reason vs appetites; it’s not having the struggle.
But this is somewhat in tension with the discussion in III about bravery, claiming that the virtuously brave person finds death painful and faces it unwillingly.
Overall, the most natural synthesis of Aristotle’s view is that the failure of the akratic agent is a shortcoming in the rationally-calculating part of the soul (VI.1, 1138b7-9).
It’s not a failure of willpower, because this doesn’t fit with impetuosity.
We can explain the weak akrates this way: they know what they ought to do and simply lack the strength to follow through on their judgement.
But impetuous akrates’s reasoning never gets off the ground! So there was never any deliberation whose conclusions they abandoned for want of willpower.
You could call it a failure of knowledge (either after Socrates, or Aristotle’s reinterpretation of full vs incomplete knowledge), but that also doesn’t fit with the impetuous agent.
It’s a bit strange to say that they’re ignorant, when the trouble is that they don’t deliberate at all.
The best way to understand akrasia is a shortcoming in the rationally calculating part of the soul, which means that they lack the corresponding virtue of phronesis.
The prudent person deliberates excellently and acts on that; both subtypes of akrates fails this in some way:
The weak akratic deliberates but fails to act on their deliberation
The impetuous akratic fails to deliberate at all
You might wonder whether a flawed character is the defining characteristic (since this is required for phronesis), but that doesn’t distinguish adequately between the akrates and enkrates.
Both have exactly the same inappropriate desires, and both (in the weak akratic’s case at least) can deliberate to the right conclusion.
But the self-controlled agent’s reasoning is better (though still not excellent) in the sense that it has motivational efficacy – they are committed to their prohairesis in a way the akrates isn’t.
So we should identify akrasia with a defect in the rationally-calculating part of the soul.
Puzzles about akrasia
You might wonder in what sense the impetuous akratic acts against their decision, given that they don’t deliberate. There are a few interpretations:
They had reached prohairesis at an earlier point, either to refrain from that particular action (so they directly violate it), or as a general policy (e.g., “I will eat healthily” but then having cake).
The trouble with this is that in many cases the impetuous agent probably won’t have ever deliberated about this situation; they really are just acting on the spur of an appetite.
Alternatively, they might have an undeliberated commitment to abide by their conception of their ends.
E.g., their end is to attain eudaimonia, which they perceive as involving moderation and virtue, and then acting impetuously violates this decision.
But this stretches the idea of prohairesis rather a lot; it’s rather more like wish (boulesis).
You might worry that the akratic agent is not really acting voluntarily, if they fail to grasp the particular premiss.
Recall that X is involuntary if (i) the principle isn’t in the agent, or (ii) the agent acts from ignorance of the particulars.
So we can resolve this quite easily: the akrates (like the drunk) acts in ignorance, but not from ignorance.
The cause of their ignorance is their own passion, which is in the agent.
Aristotle makes this analogy himself: “Clearly, then, we should say that incontinents have knowledge in a way similar to [drunks and madmen]” (VII.3, 1147a10-18)