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Weakness of Will (Episode 35)
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Why do you do things you know you shouldn’t?
The ancient term for doing what you knew wasn’t best for was akrasia or weakness of will. Plato and Aristotle believed in it. The Stoics did not. What this means and why it matters for us today is the subject of this episode.
(01:04) What is Weakness of Will
(11:54) Plato on Weakness of Will
(22:22) Aristotle
(28:44) The Stoics
(36:31) The Early Stoic Solution
(41:27) Epictetus and Weak Beliefs
(49:14) Nonreflective Judgments
(53:18) Practical Upshot
***
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Transcript
Introduction to Personal Growth Questions
00:00:00
Speaker
Looking at this whole discussion, whether you side with the Stoics or, you know, Aristotle and Plato or something like this, the whole discussion is a paradigm shifting focus from what should I do to why do I fail or how do I become the kind of person that acts the way I should act. And I think that's a valuable paradigm shift when we're doing, you know, moral philosophy or transformative philosophy.
Exploring Stoicism with Michael Trombley
00:00:23
Speaker
Welcome to Stowe Conversations. In this podcast, Michael Trombley and I discuss the theory and practice of stoicism. Each week we'll share two conversations, one between the two of us, and another we'll be an in-depth conversation with and experts.
Weakness of Will: Ancient Philosophers' Views
00:00:40
Speaker
And in this conversation, Michael and I talk about weakness of will. We discuss why it matters, why this question was of such central importance to the ancient philosophers, and why the Stoics did not believe it exists. Here is our conversation. Do you want to kick us off, Michael?
00:01:04
Speaker
Yeah, I want to talk about this one. For me, this is a topic I really like. It's something that when I was doing my PhD in philosophy I published on, I think it's a really interesting and important topic both for moral development and for understanding stoic psychology and as a way of framing or thinking about our own social or own kind of personal failings or ways that we could personally improve. So to start things off, what is weakness of will?
00:01:32
Speaker
It's not something we talk about all the time. It's not something we've probably all experienced, but it's not something that is part of common language or common discussion.
Defining and Understanding Weakness of Will
00:01:42
Speaker
So weakness of will is technically speaking, whenever you've determined a certain course of action, a certain choice to be the best thing to do, all things considered, considering all the possible things you can do, that you agree this is the best thing to do, this is the right thing to do for yourself, but you do something different.
00:02:02
Speaker
or you lack the emotional affect, the kind of personal energy to go along that line. So it's either being tempted into an opposite or not being motivated to act at all, even though you recognize this is the best thing to do, this is the best thing you should do.
00:02:22
Speaker
So it's the idea that the will, whatever you want to call that, whatever motivates you is weak or it lacks the power to carry out what you rationally judge to be best. This is where we get the language for weakness of will. We'll dig into that a bit. You know, we have to be careful when we talk about a will, but again, it's this idea that.
00:02:41
Speaker
Even though the mind says one thing, the spirit cannot carry it out. It's also called a krasia in ancient Greek philosophy, which literally means, you know, God of War is a famous PlayStation game. The main character's name is Kratos. Kratos is the word for power. A krasia.
00:03:02
Speaker
that's not having power. So it's like a lack of self power. It's a lack of self control. So you can't, you don't have the power, the self power to motivate yourself to do what you recognize to be the best thing to do.
Real-life Examples of Akratic Behavior
00:03:14
Speaker
So moving out from this abstract level into some particular examples, the particular examples, I have some that I've written down beforehand. So something like failing to quit smoking when you determine it's the best thing to do. This would be an example of weakness. I really want to quit. I really want to change this habit, but I just can't help it, even though I know it's bad for me, even though it's not something I want to do. Lying in bed and sleeping in when you know you have chores to do.
00:03:39
Speaker
So you want to get out of bed. You want to start your day. You want to be productive, but the temptation is keeping you there, keeping you, keeping you stuck sleeping in. Another is, you know, along the same lines is succumbing to any sort of temptation when you know, you'll regret it later. So it's really important and weakness of will. It's not just.
00:03:59
Speaker
It's not just this lack of action, it's this really discrete recognition that you're not doing what you want to do. And so this recognition that, oh, I'm going to regret this, or I'm currently regretting this, or this frustration of why am I doing this? Another common example is when you give up on long-term plans that you know are best for you when you act for a short-term reward.
00:04:24
Speaker
So you say, look, I want to, you know, it could be a diet, you know, an exercise regime, it could be investing, it could be pursuing, you know, an education degree, something where you say, you know, I know this is best for me. I know this will yield the most rewards long-term. I recognize that, but I'm not able to do it. I keep prioritizing short-term priorities.
00:04:45
Speaker
And another example is when you fail to become become the kind of person you want to be through an act in action and what again I'm pulling out is any kind of situation where you really you're really clear on that's what I want to be doing that's the kind of person I want to be and you're failing to act in that way you're failing to live up to that. One thing about weakness of will.
00:05:06
Speaker
And why I think it's worth talking about, it's important to talk about, especially when we think about stoicism, when we think about self-improvement, is it something that's tightly linked to, as I mentioned before, regret and shame.
Emotional Impact of Weakness of Will
00:05:17
Speaker
So it's these instances where you know you're acting poorly, where you recognize you're doing what you shouldn't be doing and you can't help yourself and you don't like yourself for it. You're frustrated with yourself for it. Any other examples you want to add or thoughts on that before I move on?
00:05:35
Speaker
Let's see. So always important to be careful with definitions here. So what we're talking about is the case where you've determined that some action is best overall and you see that it's open to you. I think that's important that it's something that is possible that you could have done.
00:05:59
Speaker
But nonetheless, find yourself taking some other course of action. So that's the only bit I would also emphasize is that you have the option to do otherwise, but you don't is an important part of weakness of will here.
00:06:16
Speaker
Yeah, it's a good example. Like you could recognize, oh, it would be all things being equally much better if I was a famous basketball player, if I was, if I was as good at basketball as LeBron James. And I'm very upset with myself for not being that good, but that's not something I can do in the moment where you, you know, you can get out of bed in the moment. You can, you know, choose not to, not to smoke a cigarette, you know, at least in that, in that one instance.
00:06:38
Speaker
So the option is available to you. It is on the table and you're taking something else off the table. Yeah. And that's a really good clarity there. And in terms of definitions, because I know.
00:06:49
Speaker
I know people rightfully will not like the phrasing of weakness of will. I like weakness of will because I think it just makes more sense in English. It's more intuitive. You start talking about Cresia. It doesn't resonate in the same sense, but it's really important that it doesn't matter if you believe in a will or not.
00:07:09
Speaker
I think did not believe in a will. If there's some sort of modern sense, like we speak of like free will. We speak of, you know, this idea that there's this thing inside of me that can choose freely. And then the idea, when we talk of weakness of will, it can seem like I'm saying that thing is weak. That's not really necessary to discuss the phenomenon. What's necessary to discuss the phenomenon is, as you said, is this idea that you recognize a course of action is the better thing, is the best thing, all things being equal.
00:07:39
Speaker
It's available to you and you do otherwise. And that, we don't need to get complicated in the idea of a will. I don't think the Stoics believed in a will. We've talked about this before. We have a couple of episodes on Stoic psychology. They believed in, you know, your capacity to reflect and choose an ascent to impressions and feel motivation depending on the judgments you make. If you want to call that a will, that's fine, but they don't believe in something kind of external to that or separate from that that you would call a will.
00:08:05
Speaker
And then the reason I like to talk about this is that this topic was really important for schools of ancient philosophy, and it is the primary concern for the progressor. I think modern ethics has a real focus on what is the right thing to do.
00:08:23
Speaker
and ancient ethics had a much greater focus on how do you become the kind of person that does good things? How do you transform yourself, transform your emotions, your motivations, your character traits? And so when you look at philosophy as asking those questions, these kind of questions now that are in the realm of positive psychology, the phenomenon of weakness of will becomes much more important because I can sit down and I can open a book today and I can say, well,
00:08:51
Speaker
philosopher is telling me I should do this. That's not really the issue. The issue is, you know, can I motivate myself to do it? Even if I believe it. I like when I study ancient philosophy, not only are you getting access to some truths, you're getting access to knowledge, but you're also getting access to kind of a paradigm, a way of thinking about self-improvement and a paradigm that values some questions as being more important than others, like this question of virtue ethics.
00:09:18
Speaker
This idea of self-improvement, this idea of philosophy as a way of life, that's all an ancient philosophy way, a stoic way of approaching these questions. And the question of weakness of will was really important for them because they were focused on transformation. So maybe it's something you haven't thought about, but it's certainly something you've experienced and there's benefit to thinking about it and reflecting on what these, you know, these really smart people had to say about it.
00:09:41
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. I think the point about paradigm is always key. I think when we talk about some of these examples, it's useful to go to different modern examples, like whether you all smoke a cigarette or thinking about procrastination or this sort of thing. But it always is a useful reminder to keep in mind that the way a lot of these ancients thought about these questions was different. So they might not have started with.
00:10:07
Speaker
say, these individual questions, what should I do in this scenario? But as you mentioned previously, there might be more questions around who should you be rather than thinking about particular one-off decisions or what does my role require of me? Or in some other philosophies, what is my family or some other larger unit where you're not even thinking of yourself as an individual making the decision?
00:10:33
Speaker
So, I think that's a great point to call out that there's a different paradigm, different ways, different questions they may ask about situations we encounter.
00:10:45
Speaker
Yeah, totally. That's a good way of putting a kill up. And there's different questions they may ask. This was a question that was really important to them. And you phrase this virtue ethics as, you know, what kind of person should I be? And every school, regardless of the answer to that question, says, well, you at the very least want to be the kind of person that can act in the way you think is best.
00:11:04
Speaker
It's a non-starter. You can have these disagreements between the Epicureanism, the Epicureans, the Stoics, all the ancient philosophy schools, but the best way to act, but nobody would think the person who can't motivate themselves to act in the way they think is best is getting it right. That's going to be wrong no matter your picture. For this conversation, the way I wanted to structure it, we're going to talk about what Plato and Aristotle had to say on this, because they're really the people who
00:11:29
Speaker
put the question on the table, set the stage for it, set the terms of the discussion. And the Stoics are then going to come in and offer unique responses to these questions that are going to have a lot of implications for the way you think about, as you said, your own procrastination, your own kind of guilt or regret or frustration with yourself if you consider yourself a Stoic or if you're using Stoic lessons to drive self-improvement.
Philosophical Perspectives: Aristotle vs. Plato
00:11:54
Speaker
So starting now with Plato and Aristotle and then getting to the Stoics. So Plato lived around, maybe around 50 to 80 years prior to the founding of Stoicism and its popularity, really important figure in ancient Greek philosophy, wrote a number of dialogues that covers different topics in ancient philosophy, often with Socrates as a character.
00:12:21
Speaker
And in the Republic, which is his most famous dialogue, it's about political philosophy, but it's also really about ethical philosophy. It's also about the parallels between an ethical individual and an ethical state. And in the Republic, Plato covers weakness of will or this phenomenon. And the way that he explains it is he uses a metaphor when he talks about the soul.
00:12:45
Speaker
And he talks about the soul as being divided into three parts. So that's the rational, the spirited, and the appetitive, the thing that has appetites, desires for pleasure. So the rational desire is the good, the spirited desires honor, and the appetitive desires pleasure and physical goods, you know, nice things. So you can think of the rational in Plato's view, the person who really embodies the rational soul, that's kind of
00:13:11
Speaker
maybe a philosopher and philosophers tend to put themselves at the top of the pyramid. You can think of someone who is motivated by what they think is just and best and motivated by reflection on these deep philosophical ideas.
00:13:29
Speaker
If the spirited is somebody who desires honor, so these types of people that are spirited, this doesn't just mean you're something like a celebrity. It could mean you're often framed in terms of being maybe a politician. In Plato's Republic, they're framed as the police, the soldiers, the people who regulate or enact the kind of the laws in the ideal states established by the rational.
00:13:54
Speaker
And the appetitive are the people who, as I said, like most things, you know, want fine food, want a nice house, want, you know, these kinds of physical pleasures. And when Plato talks about ethics, he says, look, we all have these three parts of ourselves. Even though some people have more than others, we all have these three parts and they're all competing and they're all balancing and they need to exist, right? If we didn't have
00:14:18
Speaker
Even the philosopher, the philosopher didn't have the appetitive part of themselves. They wouldn't eat food, right? They wouldn't, it wouldn't feel that motivation for these things. If they didn't have the spirited part of themselves, they wouldn't feel anger when it was appropriate. They wouldn't desire revenge when it was appropriate and these kinds of things. So we all have these parts, but the key to ethical improvement is balancing these parts appropriately.
00:14:41
Speaker
So you don't want your life inappropriately dominated by one of these over the other.
00:14:49
Speaker
And the metaphor Plato uses for this is he is one of a charioteer guiding two powerful horses. So if the rational part of your soul is the charioteer, then the spirited and the appendive parts of your soul are those two horses. And ideally those are providing motivation, they're providing energy, they're providing inspiration, but the rational part of your soul is able to direct to that energy appropriately.
00:15:14
Speaker
And so for play though, really simple answer, what is weakness of will? What's happening when I stay in bed? What's happening when I procrastinate? What happens when I, you know, get really angry, even though I know I shouldn't be angry anymore, or I should, this is not an appropriate time to be upset? Well, what's happening is that one of those parts of the soul is dominating the other, is dominating the rational, overpowering the rational. So the charioteer is losing control of the horses.
00:15:40
Speaker
So your rational mind tells you to quit smoking, it considers the side effects, it thinks about how smoking will affect your long-term financial goals, but the repetitive part of yourself wants to smoke, and these things are out of sync, or rather they don't have the same kind of power relation, and you end up being
00:15:59
Speaker
directed by the repetitive part. And that's why you feel confused or guilty or feel like, you know, I know it's best, but I can't help myself because this other part of you is just overpowering. It's more powerful. That's Plato's take on it. So I suppose one question is something you alluded to previously. Where's this question of the will coming into play? Is that a useful concept when you're thinking about Plato's account?
00:16:31
Speaker
No, so I would say the will is not really is, as I said, it's not really going to be in Aristotle or Plato. There's some arguments, Brad, in what makes this argument that we start to see this idea of the will originate in Seneca, but Aristotle and Plato are both writing before Seneca. So there's not this idea, again, depends what you mean by will, right? There's not this idea of the will as being
00:16:54
Speaker
the motivational thing that exists separate from this part of the soul, in Plato's account, all three of these things kind of have a will, which is to say, what I mean by will is all three of these things have motivational power, right? And so there is not a will that's weak. There is three parts of yourself with motivational power that one of those is winning out over the other, or in this case, when either of those beat out the rational one,
00:17:22
Speaker
than the rational one experiences this phenomenon of, oh, I really know I should get out of bed and do chores. I really know this important, but I just can't do it. I just don't feel like it. I just, and what that is is that's, that's the motivational power of that kind of, you can use different metaphors. You think of an animal side of yourself. You think of the lizard brain. You can use whatever example you want or metaphor you want, but that's winning out in the motivational battle. Right. So not a singular, not a singular will, but multiple motivational forces.
00:17:52
Speaker
It's similar to when people might talk about something like, oh, part of me wants to go out tonight, but the other part of me wants to stay and study if you're a student or something of that sort, or prepare for some presentation, what have you. It's similar to that model where you almost have different selves, if not different selves, things that are close to selves. Do you think that maps on well?
00:18:16
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's exactly right. Like as you, the language users was exactly right. Part of me wants to go party and part of me wants to stay at home. And that's Plato's point is that these are literal parts of you, right? So the idea is that that wouldn't even be, that wouldn't be a metaphor. That would be an accurate description of what's going on. So yeah, totally right. Right, right. Excellent. And why does Plato think that we let this happen?
00:18:43
Speaker
So I mean, there's a couple of answers to this. One developmentally is kind of a poor education. So Plato's argument in the Republic is, look, we need to train kids appropriately from the beginning so that they get this balance right from the start. Because once this cycle gets out of balance, it gets really hard. And not only that, but the thing is that
00:19:05
Speaker
We'll get to this a bit in Aristotle, but there's this idea of here, what I was talking about was the rational part of your mind says, oh, I want to stay home and study. We're going to sound very boring with these examples, but I swear I partied a bit when I was a student. The rational part of you says, oh, I want to stay home and study. And the repetitive part says, no, I want to party.
00:19:24
Speaker
That's somebody who's actually pretty healthy or in Plato's view is in a pretty good position. The flip of it, as Plato would say, the tyrant, that's the person who's actual part of themselves serves the repetitive part of themselves. He would say, the person who is very crafty in their accumulation of wealth so that they can buy all the things they want or very crafty. You see this, people with, let's say, a drug addiction,
00:19:52
Speaker
can come up with very intelligent schemes or strategies to fulfill that drug addiction. And Plato's account here would be, look, well, that's not actually, there's not even a conflict there between the rational and the repetitive. The rational is now actually helping the repetitive part of yourself. It's become, it's become a slave to that part of itself, part of yourself, which for him is a, is a perversion of the natural balance. Right, right.
00:20:18
Speaker
So there was, to go back to your original question of why would that happen? I think one is Plato would say is, look, you haven't been raised properly. So these things have gotten out of balance. And then two, once they're out of balance, you, you're not letting it happen because you're actively, you're either, you're either so far gone that you don't think anything's wrong with this, or you're trying to fight, you're just losing that fight because the other part has gotten stronger over time, again, with this kind of developmental picture.
00:20:48
Speaker
Right, right. The question letting it happen sort of almost presupposes this more modern notion of a will that is sometimes subject to or needs to negotiate with forces that are external to yourself. But what Plato is saying is,
00:21:04
Speaker
No, you have these three parks and that is your, it's not as if you're letting, there's part of you that lets one or some other one of them happen. It's a negotiation between all of those three at one time. Yeah, that's exactly the right way to put it is a negotiation. And Plato's argument in the Republic is that, you know, what is justice? Well, justice is
00:21:30
Speaker
having things do the things that are appropriate to them. And so, if we have a just soul, an ordered soul, well then, we don't remove the appetitive part, we don't destroy the spirited part, but we have them do what they're supposed to do. And again, to return to the metaphor, he would say it would be like if you had a horse in the charioteer's seat.
00:21:53
Speaker
That's what happens when the repetitive part of you is controlling you. It doesn't make any sense, right? It's not doing what it's supposed to do. The, the repetitive and the spirit of parts of you are supposed to provide strong motivational information. It's supposed to direct you, but the rational part of yourself is the one who's supposed to make the, make the ultimate call on if those strong motivations towards pleasure or kind of honor and fame are the right things to do. All things considered. Yep. Yep. That makes sense.
00:22:22
Speaker
Cool. So really interesting. I love this stuff. I think it's super fascinating. So moving on to Aristotle. So Plato was, you know, he was the super, super famous, probably the most famous ancient Greek philosopher. And then Aristotle was his student. And Aristotle, a lot of Aristotle's work is kind of either nuanced scene or criticizing Plato's work and it's interesting dynamic. And Aristotle talks about weakness of will, but he adds this interesting, I guess, dynamic to it.
00:22:51
Speaker
where he really contrasts it, because we're talking about this in terms of moral progress, and he contrasts it with the intempered person. So that would be the person who does the bad things but doesn't experience weakness of will. In the translation here, that I'm going to read from, weakness of will is translated as incontinence. That just means lack of self-control. It's all referring to the same thing. But when I say incontinence, I mean weakness of will or accresia here.
00:23:20
Speaker
So to quote Aristotle on this, he says, the intemperate person, as we said, is not prone to regret since he abides by his decision.
00:23:28
Speaker
But every incontinent person, that is someone with weakness of will, is prone to regret. For vice resembles diseases such as consumption, while incontinence is more like epilepsy. Vice is a continuous bad condition, but incontinence is not. For the incontinent is similar to those who get drunk quickly from a little wine and from less than it takes most people. The vicious person does not recognize that he is vicious, whereas the incontinent person recognizes that he is incontinent.
00:23:58
Speaker
And Aristotle's point here is that, look, even though you feel a lot of regret when you experience weakness of will, it's actually better to experience weakness of will than to just be an intemperate person, to be a vicious person. So this is from the Nicomachean Ethics, and the idea being that it's
00:24:21
Speaker
At least you recognize what you're doing is wrong and you feel regret afterwards, or at least there's some conflict there. And if there's conflict, well, then you can be directed in the right direction. If there's no conflict, you're just acting poorly and you don't feel bad about it. Well, you might feel better in the moment. You may feel better short term, but this is actually a worse position to be in, in terms of yourself, your progression. So I like that idea. I like that idea of, of.
00:24:48
Speaker
And then though, in other words, weakness of will is not necessarily a bad thing. I think it communicates, you know, we're talking about these, these like kind of non moral examples of like smoking or getting out of bed. But we can easily use these, these more moral examples of while you fell into being really angry with someone or being really rude, or you fell into some sort of temptation, you know, you cheated on your partner in a way that really harmed them or something like this, we can use these kind of more moral examples.
00:25:18
Speaker
And in those cases, Aristotle's just pointing out, look, it might not feel great, but it's better to be there than to not feel that regret at all, because then it's a lapse in judgment. It's epilepsy and the idea being that it's this kind of really intense failing in the moment, but not something that you experienced the entire time because you're not vicious. And I thought that's an interesting flavor to it. And to go back to Plato's metaphor, it's better that the charioteer
00:25:47
Speaker
uh, you know, occasionally fails to control the horses. Then the other example, you know, where the charioteer is, is directing the horses in the wrong direction intentionally, or the horses are, you know, directing the, directing the, the chariot itself.
00:26:03
Speaker
Yeah, well, just on the last, the last issue is pretty interesting because sometimes it seems like we, when we're dealing with others, we prefer that they communicate, they recognize what the right thing to do was, even though they did the wrong thing. But other times we seem to prefer the person who is consistent and at least sort of openly displays their flaws and sort of an interesting question why that is. And I think, I suppose my first initial stab at that would be that
00:26:34
Speaker
Oftentimes, we sort of suspect the person who is, say, they apologize for what they did. They say they know it was wrong or they did the wrong thing anyway. Perhaps we suspect that they're not being completely honest. So that's just what people do now when they make mistakes.
00:26:52
Speaker
Yeah, that would be my, that would be my guess is the idea is like, it's better to know you, you have a bad car, you know, and the brakes don't work than to think it's a good car and you go to slam on the brakes and the brakes don't, and you know, and you get into an accident because the brakes don't work. Right. It's just that I think pragmatically we prefer certainty. And then so people with people who are regretful or change their behavior or say, I knew it was wrong, but I did anyway, it's, it's kind of like, it's, it's very uncertain for us to relate to. And that that's like.
00:27:23
Speaker
That kid, that's scary. I think that's my call. I don't think, you know, and that's, that's an example of a friendship, right? If I think of something like a, like a child or something, or if I, you know, if I had a child, I'm sure I would prefer the child who regretted, you know, being mean to their friends or regretted stealing. I'm sure if I was looking at that relationship, I would prefer that to the person who was the child who was consistent in their vice and not at all regretful.
00:27:48
Speaker
Right. I suppose there's, there's the hope that yes, you did the wrong thing this time, but next time you'll do the, do the right thing. And then the, you know, we'll see what happens next time. And that'll cause people to update appropriately. It's always interesting if you now turn this back on yourself and think.
00:28:05
Speaker
when you have regrets, are you like the person who is going to the motions and acting some play of regret or do you in fact regret what you just did? And that's another way of framing this issue of whether weakness of will happens, right? Because if it doesn't happen, then why are you regretting? Yeah, this idea of are you regretting the consequences or are you regretting the
00:28:30
Speaker
the decision. Do you recognize that I was wrong or do you just wish you existed in a world where you could get away with that and it wouldn't have the consequences associated with it? But yeah, as you brought up this idea of whether weakness of will exists,
00:28:44
Speaker
So let's jump into the Stoics because the Stoics have a pretty controversial hot take here, I would say. And so we, we've been going along this conversation, just assuming weakness of will is a thing, right? Because we gave you some examples at the start of the conversation. Yeah, I know. I sometimes I recognize I should do chores and I don't do them. Sometimes I, I sleep in, sometimes I procrastinate. Sometimes I know I have a test the next morning and they go out with friends. We all do these kinds of things, right? So obviously there's weakness of, and I feel bad about it or I think, well, it was a bad decision.
00:29:12
Speaker
So obviously weakness of will exists, and Plato and Aristotle had some things to say about it, so they knew what they were talking about. But the Stoics, like many things, the Stoics are very famous for saying controversial things, right? The idea that virtue is the only good, we kind of take it for granted on this podcast, very controversial thing to say. They're a very strange thing to say. So they're famous for these kind of paradoxes or controversial claims. So one of the ones that the Stoics have is that weakness of will does not exist.
00:29:39
Speaker
So that entire thing we've been talking about, this idea that I recognize that path A is better to do, all things being equal. I'm able to do path A, or choice A, and I choose not to do choice A, I do choice B instead. The Stoics categorically deny this is possible. I think it is impossible. It never happens. Weakness of will does not exist.
Stoic Denial of Weakness of Will
00:30:04
Speaker
And the reason they argue for this is
00:30:07
Speaker
We had a conversation previous on stoic psychology but a quick breakdown of stoic psychology again is they have this idea that that psychology is a very simple or motivation to act is a very simple four-step process. First we receive an impression so you know our friend says hey do you want to come out tonight even though you have a test tomorrow?
00:30:27
Speaker
make a judgment about that impression we say it's either you know yeah that's a good thing to do or that's a bad thing to do we reflect on it that's the second step third step is we make a decision then once we've made that judgment we receive a motivation motivational impulse which was to say if we decided yes it's good to go party we will go party and if we say no it's better to study we will study so on this stoic picture you can't have
00:30:53
Speaker
between beliefs at the same time fighting against each other. You can't have different parts of your soul fighting against each other. They famously argued for a unified soul, which was very controversial at the time because you were going against Plato who talked about these three parts. There's only one part. There's that part that's reflecting on the impression. There's that part that's making a decision.
00:31:15
Speaker
And because of all of our motivations are the results of this belief, this judgment, we cannot genuinely believe something, cannot genuinely believe that we ought to get out of bed to go do our chores or that we ought not to go party and fail to have the motivation or and have our motivation fail us. We can't genuinely believe it's better to stay home and study and then go out and party. It's impossible. This is also why
00:31:41
Speaker
Maybe that sounds weird. That's also why they believe what's called intellectualism, right? Which is something we talked about before, which is this idea that nobody does bad willingly. And the reason nobody does bad things willingly is that it's impossible to think something is the bad thing to do and do it.
00:31:59
Speaker
Anytime you do something, you think it's the right thing to do. No, you think it could be complicated, right? Like you could have to steal food to feed your family, let's say. And you could say, well, I'd rather not steal the food to feed my family, but all things considered, I'd rather steal the food and feed my family. I'd rather take the consequences of stealing to feed my family.
00:32:21
Speaker
So you can have complicated decisions. You can have multifaceted decisions, but you can't think all things being equal or all things considered, given my options, this was not the right choice, but I did it anyway. Impossible. Brains don't work that way. And that's why we can forgive people because we know that if they do wrong things, the stoic says, if they do something wrong, they thought it was the best option available to them. It might, they might be mistaken. You might be ignorant. Might not be the best option available to you.
00:32:48
Speaker
But you always think it's the best option available to you. And that's just how our brains work. Practice Stoicism with Stoa. Stoa combines the ancient philosophy of Stoicism with meditation in a practical meditation app. It includes hundreds of hours of exercises, lessons, and conversations to help you live a happier life. Here's what our users are saying.
00:33:12
Speaker
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00:33:25
Speaker
With Stoa, you can really get a sense of how to take yourself out of your thoughts and get a sense of how to handle different difficult situations. Find it available for a free download in the Play Store and App Store. I think jumping in next part will be useful. How does the Stoa explain the cases we went through?
00:33:49
Speaker
Yeah, so let's keep it going. So the next thing to think about is, okay, well, that's all fine and good, Stoics, but we gave you all this counter evidence. We gave you all these examples. I experienced that every day when I have to have to go to work, when I rather stay home and play video games.
00:34:06
Speaker
I experience my will being strong in that case, but sometimes I lose out. So I'm strong in that case, but sometimes I'm not. Sometimes I procrastinate. I do all these cases like we were talking about earlier. I don't go and exercise when I know I should. I deviate from my diet.
00:34:24
Speaker
you know don't call somebody I know I should call these kinds of these kinds of feelings that I recognize are bad things to do so there's a paradox here right that seems intuitive the first half of this episode that people were probably nodding along again that makes sense that maybe maybe Plato's right about having three parts of the soul maybe not but he's certainly not wrong that these kinds of things happen so how do the Stoics is playing this how would they
00:34:45
Speaker
commit to this. And again, returning to that, we really want to commit to this because that gives us intellectualism, that gives us this. It also, taken to extreme, gives us the stoic claim that knowledge is virtue, right? If you know what to do, you will do the right thing. That's another controversial stoic claim. So the stoics need to preserve, they need to
00:35:10
Speaker
save this because otherwise, yeah, otherwise we, we, we lose one of the most important ethical claims. We lose the, really the way they think about self improvement. You could know what to do, but not do it, in which case you would not be, not be virtuous just to make that crystal clear.
00:35:29
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. So the reason knowledge is virtue for the Stoics is because they think if you know what to do and the right and the reason why it's the right thing to do, you will always do it and you will always act correctly. If you have the knowledge, you will act correctly because motivation comes from belief. So knowledge is virtue. I, as opposed to someone like Plato who says, you know, you can have a great rational part of your soul, but that could be controlled that has read the good books, understands things, but is being controlled by the repetitive and spirited parts of yourself.
00:35:58
Speaker
So in terms of how the stomachs are going to preserve this, they have a couple, couple arguments. So, and what I want you to think here is for people listening, I want you to think about your physical experience when you encounter a situation like this.
00:36:14
Speaker
So what it feels like phenomenologically, like what it feels like when you live in these kinds of situations. And after this podcast, think about the next time you encounter a situation like this and what it feels like is happening in your mind and what it feels like is happening really with your motivation and your behavior and kind of take a second to feel that. So imagine yourself, I'm just going to use the getting out of bed example as an easy one because it's really simple.
00:36:40
Speaker
You're nice and tucked in, you're warm in bed, but you set a plan for yourself to clean the house today. And you know that if you don't clean the house today, you're gonna have to clean the house after work or have a dirty house. Neither are worth being nice and warm in bed, but there you are in bed. So what's going on here? So the first option that the Stoics provide is that you don't have a weakness of will, you have two competing beliefs.
00:37:09
Speaker
So this is the idea that you don't really believe getting out of bed is best, all things considered. You think it might be good in terms of getting your chores done, but you also recognize that staying in bed is good in terms of feeling nice and staying warm. So you have two things that you value and you say, oh, I should do this. What you mean is that's one kind of getting out of bed is one type of good thing I could have, but staying in bed is another kind of good thing I could have. And those things are competing.
00:37:36
Speaker
So you're not acting in a weak-willed way, you just regret staying in bed later when now you have to do your chores. It was just a kind of spontaneous competing of beliefs. One of those won, probably the short-term belief, and then later you regret that because now you have to face the consequences of your choice. So that's the idea. There's no real, no real at the same time conflict. It's just this. And this was the old stoic way of answering this question. So this is, this was the stoic question.
00:38:05
Speaker
up until Epictetus, who I think provides some new answers to this, but this was the way Zeno and Chrysippus answered this. And so the question is, well, it feels like it's happening at the same time. It doesn't feel like I have two beliefs. It feels like I'm being ripped in two. And they would just say, look, your mind is vacillating. It's moving between these two beliefs so quickly. It's judging why it's picking one, picking the other, picking one, picking the other. And in that case, it feels like you're being pulled in two directions at the same time. But really, you know, our minds don't work that way.
00:38:34
Speaker
If I'm just understanding this view correctly, I think the extension of this is that sometimes we have desires to do something. I desire to smoke a cigarette, or we might have desires about other desires. So I desire to not desire to smoke another cigarette, what you could call second order desires. And there's a, you can have two of these,
00:39:00
Speaker
desires or here we could talk about, instead of desires, beliefs, first order and second order belief. And when you say, I preferred that I had done something else, what you might be referring to there is just your second order beliefs or desires, even if it's a case that there's no sense in which on net you preferred to abstain from smoking the cigarette in this example.
00:39:28
Speaker
Yeah. So I think that's right. So there's the first order and second order belief. They can also, they also don't need to be first order and second order, right? Because you can just be choosing between two things. They can just be two complete competing beliefs with one of them being the one that you feel like afterwards you should have done or was the better thing to do. Like they can both be pleasure related, right? Like it can be like.
00:39:51
Speaker
sitting on the couch and you want to go out to watch a movie and you just end up lying on the couch, they can both be pleasure related or fun related. It doesn't have to be always this idea of like, well, I should be studying, but I'm not going to study. But as you pointed out, yeah, one of those can be a second order belief as well. That's the idea that you want to be the kind of person that doesn't smoke or you recognize that there's like long-term benefits to not smoking and you desire those long-term benefits. But the key point here, I guess, is that
00:40:19
Speaker
There's no, there's no weakness of will, which is this idea that you believe something is better to do. You can choose it and you're not doing it. It's not happening. You're just wrestling between two beliefs. It feels like it feels like you're losing, but really it's just the mind winning. It is, it is the mind winning. And then you regret it later for whatever reason, either because as you said, it was second order. So it's the one that kind of comes to mind or because, you know, when you think about it later, you end up landing on the other one.
00:40:50
Speaker
Yep. Yep. Absolutely. Cool. So that's one answer. That's the original stoic wave answer to the question. And then we'll begin to Epictetus. Epictetus, I think because he works with students.
00:41:02
Speaker
starts to answer some new, or provide some new answers to this, or really at least emphasize them. I think these are things the old Stoics argued about, or established, but Epictetus, there's no evidence that this is new in Epictetus, but it's something that he really emphasizes because he's working with students that are struggling with these kinds of questions. So one is these two competing beliefs. The second answer is that you had a weakly held belief, or you did not hold a belief very strongly.
00:41:27
Speaker
So we'll get back to our example. This is that, you know, I believe when I'm going to bed at night, I say, look, I'm going to get up at seven in the morning and I'm going to go for a run. And I genuinely believe that the night before there's no two competing beliefs. There's no wrestling going on. I just genuinely, I genuinely a hundred percent feel that way. And I have a motivation to do that.
00:41:46
Speaker
But I hold that belief pretty lightly. I'm not very convinced on it in a deep way. And then when I wake up and it's cold and dark in the morning, I changed my belief. I just changed my mind. And I give up that first belief.
00:41:58
Speaker
And again, maybe I come back to regret it later. Maybe the next morning when I'm setting my alarm, I think, ah, I made the wrong call, but there's no magic going on here. There's no kind of weird conflict. You just, you just changed your mind because you didn't believe strongly enough. And this idea of kind of, so the Stoics will call this a weak ascent.
00:42:18
Speaker
And this is really important for ethical improvement. And this is why the Stoics thought the weak ascent is the idea of why the Stoics thought that virtue was perfect. You either a perfect person or you weren't. You either had knowledge or you didn't. And the reason for that is that
00:42:38
Speaker
And it is that, you know, people that are progressing in stoicism can believe many of the same things as the sage. We can believe many of the same things as the stoic ideal, but the stoics will argue that we believe them weekly, right? We're like the person who sets the plan to get up the next morning and go for a run. And so when we're drunk, when we're faced with temptation, when situations get really hard for us, we give up these stoic beliefs.
00:43:03
Speaker
I can be a stoic. I can be a stoic when I'm walking down the street and the, you know, he's rude to me on the street and I say, amazing. I'm such a great stoic. I don't think it matters what people think of me. But, you know, when somebody calls me a terrible philosopher or some, or they, they get at one of my more core insecurities, I give that up and I get upset. It was a weakly held belief. I believed it, but I didn't believe it very strongly.
00:43:25
Speaker
And so that's why virtue is a perfect thing, because when you have knowledge, the Snokes even talk about this, they give this metaphor of kind of everything locks into place like a puzzle, but then it has to solidify. It has to form in an unshakable form.
00:43:44
Speaker
And so that's, that's, that can explain this kind of phenomenon, weakest sense, weakly held beliefs. That's something the Stoics think is, that's what they think is going on when we have these kinds of regrets. So we change our mind, not that some sort of subconscious, again, not that our, our, our will is being weak in any kind of sense, our will is being strong. We're just changing our mind.
00:44:07
Speaker
Right. So let's walk through this case a little bit. So suppose I have a instance of weaknesses of will. I intend to do A, even though I thought there's some other option B that would be better for me. On this picture, I have a weekly held belief.
00:44:27
Speaker
that B was better for me. It's not strong because I end up doing A anyway. So then I come up to regret my action, say. Yeah. So let me take a run at it again. Thanks for clarifying. Weakness of will is the phenomenon of you currently, if it exists, it's the idea that you currently believe this is the best thing to do. You can do it and you're not doing it.
00:44:56
Speaker
And so the Stoics would say that that temporally, you cannot currently believe it is the best thing to do and not do it. The idea is yesterday night when you went to bed, you believed it was the best thing to do. And then when you got up, you changed your mind. So it's not, it's that idea of it can't be happening. You can't still believe it and not do it. So you must have changed your mind on that.
00:45:22
Speaker
So I suppose we could say it's weak in the dispositional sense. Things have to be abstract, things have properties that are dispositional, which means that there are things that will tend to happen or things that are disposed to happen in some way. You might say that someone is disposed to be happy, which means there's all
00:45:47
Speaker
wide range of different situations they could find themselves in. And for most of those situations, they will be happy in those worlds. But so if we say that someone has a weak belief, that might mean that, you know, you're willing to get out of bed to go on a run, as long as you don't feel tired when you wake up. And which is to say it applies to a
00:46:11
Speaker
low number of situations. So it might be weak in that sense. So when you wake up and you don't, you feel tired, you're not really believing that you ought to go on a run because your belief was I ought to go on a run if I wake up and I don't feel tired.
00:46:28
Speaker
Yeah, that's a, I guess I want to push that a bit Caleb, not to get into any gritty of this. There's, there's, I think the Stoics do think you can change your mind when faced with temptation. So the view you gave was something where it was like a kind of an unreflective belief.
00:46:45
Speaker
where you thought you wanted to go for a run, all things considered, but what you actually believed was you only wanted to go for a run if you weren't tired. But I think the argument here is that you can actually change your mind when you're confronted with intense situations. So you do actually believe that you want to go for a run no matter the situation, but when you're confronted with sleepiness,
00:47:09
Speaker
You're silly examples, but when you're confronted with the, the incredible sensation of sleepiness, you do genuinely change your mind. So it's not just, it's not just that you didn't, cause I just want to clarify the difference between not considering everything. This is like you, you actually change it. You actually throw away that, oh, it is actually not better to go for a run all things. I changed my mind. You know, that's the idea. Yeah. Yeah.
00:47:39
Speaker
Yeah, that's interesting. I think I prefer the, so I guess there's sort of two, there's a version you stated where you believe that you want to go on a run at 7 a.m. or the version that you could call it the
00:47:55
Speaker
I'm not entirely sure what name this view has yet, like some sort of dispositionally weak belief or beliefs are actually quite narrow type view where what you actually believe is that you will go on a run if you don't, if you aren't tired or something like that. And that's what actually reflects your state of mind the night before.
00:48:18
Speaker
So these are two slightly different views. I suppose one, the main difference is in one when you're confronted with an obstacle, you change your mind. And that's the traditional weekly held belief view that Epictetus had. And then in the other, you realize that what you believe was something more narrow and it doesn't apply to the situation.
00:48:46
Speaker
So those are the two, those are the two, two different views. Yeah. And both are helpful. Both are helpful ways of thinking about things. And I absolutely believe that the other one exists, right? Where you just like, you really learn what you, what you thought. I mean, I think when you're bringing that example of like, we're using running and sleeping, but I think of like.
00:49:03
Speaker
you know, teenagers who sometimes feel like they have very strong beliefs, but will realize through exposure situations that, okay, you know, there's some more nuance or particularity to this. Yeah, I think that's a good distinction between the two of those. I want to get to this third one, which is another interesting one that Epictetus talks about. And the third is uncritical judgment. So a kind of non-reflective, non-critical judgment.
00:49:30
Speaker
So this is the idea that we can act in a way that conflicts with our belief without realizing we're doing that and then feel guilty later. So maybe I consider all things being equal, that it's better to not be lazy, and I set the plan to not be a lazy person, but then in the morning I don't realize staying in bed counts as lazy. So I am in a sense, in one sense,
00:49:55
Speaker
Acting contrary to a belief I currently hold to be true. That belief has not been given up. It's not been overpowered by another belief. But I don't realize I'm acting in a contradictory way. So we should almost add a nuance because it is, you believe choice A is best and you believe choice A is best. You have choice A available to you.
00:50:19
Speaker
But you choose option B, recognizing option B is not option A, or somehow cuts out option A. It's like that realization that makes weakness of Will's thing, that idea that I know in the moment, I know I'm doing what I shouldn't be doing. That's what weakness of Will is. I know I shouldn't be doing it, but I'm doing it anyway. And so this idea of uncritical judgment is this idea that
00:50:41
Speaker
You know, so we say, okay, well, what happens when these good stoics do bad things or these progressive stoics do bad things? It seems like they're acting quite like a, like weakness of will, but he says, well, no, sometimes people just act unreflectively. Some people, they don't realize they're acting against a belief they currently hold.
00:50:57
Speaker
You know, so the bad example is kind of a weird example here, but you could imagine someone who thinks it's wrong to hurt people's feelings, but then acts rashly, says something that hurts someone's feelings, and then in retrospect, realize they acted in a way that hurts that person's feelings, or realize in retrospect that, oh, you know, if I insult their haircut, of course it's going to hurt their feelings.
00:51:16
Speaker
I just didn't realize saying you have a bad haircut was going to hurt their feelings. I didn't realize that in the moment. So, you know, the person could have navigated the situation successfully. They sat down and thought about it, but they acted in a non-reflective, non-critical way. And so they didn't realize they were acting against the core belief and they feel guilty afterwards. And they say, oh, and then afterwards they reflect and say, ah, that's not, I know that's not what I should have done or that that's not what I should have done.
00:51:43
Speaker
So it's a knowledge mistake caused by a careless action. And that's the third way this kind of phenomenon can come up, according to Apictetus. Yep. Sometimes people just don't realize that their beliefs are in conflict. It's a new thought. Yeah. You gotta, you gotta have a list. You gotta walk around prepared to cross check.
00:52:02
Speaker
Yeah, cool. So that's the stoic solution. So going back over those, we talked about weakness of will. We gave some examples of what that is or what it looks like it's happening, cases where it looks like it's occurring. We talked about what Plato and Aristotle had to say about why it occurs or how you compare it against other kinds of people.
00:52:27
Speaker
And then the stoics came in, bam, controversial claim. That's actually not happening in any of those situations because that's impossible. It's impossible to think it's the right thing to do and do something else. Here are some reasons why you could have two competing beliefs. So it feels like there's a conflict, but it's a simultaneous conflict, but you're actually just negotiating.
00:52:47
Speaker
You could have a weekly held belief that you give up in front of temptation, or you could just be uncritical non-reflective. You could not realize there's a conflict there. And then you realize there's a conflict later, but you didn't in the moment when you were acting. So all things being equal. I mean, I guess I'll get your view. How do you think, do you think the Stoics do a good job of kind of solving that paradox of it seems like these situations exist. It seems like that a weakness of will is occurring. They say, no, do you think they're successful? What are your thoughts?
Aligning Beliefs and Actions in Stoicism
00:53:18
Speaker
I think, yeah, in general, I think that I'm doubtful that weakness of will as it's sketched out occurs. And I suppose the main sort of practical upshots, if you will, from
00:53:33
Speaker
these stoic views is that you think less about say aligning different parts of yourselves and more about what judgments am I making in these different situations and how do I act, how do I think in these different situations and then work from there and it's more focused on and as a stoic you're more focused on a unitary picture
00:54:00
Speaker
of your mind and you're more focused on what kind of judgments am I making in these situations than you might be if you had, say, a more platonic picture. Yeah, I think that's exactly right, right? Like, I think you can be ultimately quite unproductive.
00:54:17
Speaker
To think of ourselves as battling with an irrational part of ourselves, or battling in platonic terms within a pedative or spirited parts of ourselves that will always exist. It's an essential part of us. I'm always going to want these, these, these pleasures. I'm always going to want to be popular or to get revenge. And I just have to, or to, you know, have these, these, these spirited reactions to situations. And it's about getting those things out of control. I think that's a non-productive way to think about yourself.
00:54:46
Speaker
And, and as you said, I think you put it really well, this focus instead on judgments rather than controlling necessary parts of yourself, but saying, no, really, what am I thinking here? What am I believing here? And what motivations is that producing and taking instead of saying, Oh, my will was weak.
00:55:03
Speaker
You know, I really liked the way Caleb, you framed it earlier, which was this idea of, you know, Oh, I thought I wanted to run in the morning. When I woke up, I, I learned something about my belief. I learned that I didn't really want to do that as much as I thought I did, or that I only want to do that at a very small circumstance, right? Not confronted with the demon of tiredness. Like you can take failures as, as feedback about your judgments and about your belief systems rather than taking.
00:55:28
Speaker
failures to act the way you think you want to act as, oh, well, I guess the, you know, I guess the. Appetitive part of me won that time. It's a very different way of looking at, you know, the struggles we go through as we all try to become better people. Yeah, that's, I think that's right. I think it's also related to this.
00:55:50
Speaker
idea that or one framework where I'm thinking about decisions is suppose you're in a place where you're experiencing some temptation and the question is, what am I going to do now? Am I going to sleep in?
00:56:06
Speaker
And another way to frame that is, am I going to be the kind of person who sleeps in, which means anytime I find myself in a situation like this, I will make whatever decision I make now for the rest of my life. And that's one way to frame it. And I think that can be motivating. And it also connects with the view about judgments, because in a real sense, you are judging in these situations.
00:56:34
Speaker
do I wake up or do I sleep in? And there's less room for saying something like, oh, I'll sleep in this time, but next time things will be different.
00:56:47
Speaker
And I think that the stoic challenge or the one challenge from these kinds of views is, well, in what sense are they going to be different? That whatever that difference is, either the situation is going to be different or your thinking pattern that's produced your decision needs to be different.
00:57:06
Speaker
And the situation's not up to you, but your thinking patterns are. And your thinking patterns in that very moment are, if they're not different now, why will they be different in the future? I suppose this is one way to put the challenge.
00:57:24
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, it was a beautiful way of putting it. And I guess the challenge is one of responsibility, right? Responsibility to clarify what you believe, to make a clear claim that if you're doing this, it's because you think it's best. And if you think it's best, it is the thing that you should do every time you face the situation. And to, that's a strong claim to make. So there's, there's kind of a responsibility on the actions and the choices you take. And I find that, I find that quite an inspiring way to frame it. Yeah. I thought that was really nice killed.
00:57:53
Speaker
Thanks. Thanks. Yeah. Well, how do you, how do you think about this? I think some of the general question back on you, how do you think about this stoic view of weakness of will either theoretically or, you know, practically, how does it come to, come to play? Yeah. I mean, it's in situations like this. I wish I had a bit better background in neuroscience or something like this. Like I was listening to a podcast by Angela Duckworth, who's a psychologist at University of Pennsylvania.
00:58:18
Speaker
And she was talking about how in contemporary psychology, there's this idea that you can have your pleasure center, like whatever motivates pleasure as being attuned differently to what produces motivation.
00:58:32
Speaker
And I was listening to it and obviously I'm a stoic nerd. So I was like, oh, there, I finally got a picture of how, you know, maybe weakness of will could exist. Cause I couldn't understand how weakness I was, I was really endorsed to the stoic view. I couldn't understand how weakness of will could exist. It didn't seem
Moral Philosophy: Becoming the Right Person
00:58:47
Speaker
clear to me. And it's like, ah, that's what might be happening is that, you know, you might, you might experience extreme motivation for things that no longer yield pleasure. So the example she was using was like something of like extreme drug addicts.
00:59:02
Speaker
And so when you're a drug addict, when you start taking drugs, you feel pleasure and motivation. It's this positive cycle, but then the pleasure drops, but the motivation remains again, not a neuroscientist. No, my ancient philosophy of mind reasonably well, but I thought that was like, oh, that's something I should learn more about. And that was something that I was chewing on. That's kind of the fact of the matter. That's something that I, you know, I don't, I don't, I don't want to stake a claim in what I think is a contemporary psychological issue. But I think of the paradigm shift.
00:59:33
Speaker
yields a lot of benefits for the reasons we just talked about, about thinking, you know, I'm, I'm not just succumbing to something. I'm not just being weak in the moment. I'm making kind of a value judgment about this is the way life is, should be lived. And there's a kind of a stronger responsibility to that. That's the stoic view. And I also think the kind of shifting of the focus
00:59:53
Speaker
Looking at this whole discussion, whether you side with the Stoics or, you know, Aristotle and Plato or something like this, the whole discussion is a paradigm shifting focus from what should I do to why do I fail or how do I become the kind of person that acts the way I should act? And I think that's, that's a valuable paradigm shift when we're doing, you know, moral philosophy or transformative philosophy. Got it. Got it. Yeah. How would the first one work? The picture is that you.
01:00:23
Speaker
believe it would be better for you to do something else in a sense that it would be more, it sounds like it would be more pleasurable for you to do something else, but you're more motivated to do this other thing. Either because you, I would assume that you would feel bad if you didn't do it would be some of the main motivation. Yeah. So the idea that big to us is really clear about this, that
01:00:53
Speaker
when motivation and good are necessarily tied together at a pre-rational level. So there, we have preconceptions of good such that if, if I think something is good, I have to feel motivation towards it. I have to pursue it. And all that we would need for weakness of will to be true is a case where I could feel motivation towards something that I do not recognize as good.
01:01:23
Speaker
Got it. And as long as that is possible, then weakness of will is possible. So as long as, as long as it's genuinely possible to recognize something, this is not good. This does not bring me happiness. This does not provide the kind of life I want to have, but I, but I, you know, neurologically experience a compulsion towards it. As long as that is possible, there's that separation between motivation and recognition of value. If that's possible at a,
01:01:53
Speaker
kind of brain chemistry level, then weakness of will would be that weakness of will would be the situations where, you know, the drug addict recognizes I have a compulsion. This is not good for me. This does not bring me pleasure. There is no positive effect, but I experience at a, again, at a neurological level, a compulsion to do this action anyway, because of the motivation dial is still turned up very high.
01:02:19
Speaker
Got it, got it. Yeah, so the idea is you just feel a compulsion and there's no real value judgment behind the compulsion. Yeah. But it's hard to show how you would know that's true, especially since you know that if someone who has been using a drug frequently and
01:02:41
Speaker
they are labeled as addicted or they see themselves as addicted. Once they've met that frequency, that means probably if they'll stop using the drug, they'll feel bad. And probably I would assume one reason to use a drug is that you'll not get serious withdrawals or something like that. So just to throw this back at you, your way of saving the stoic claim
01:03:02
Speaker
is to say look what's going on when you have a compulsion is yeah you don't get access to good anymore but it becomes about staving off the bad which you're also making a judgment is a thing you don't want right you don't want the bad that's that's your way of that is that accurate yeah well that's what that's i think that's one
01:03:22
Speaker
I would imagine probably for people who feel compulsion, that's the main reason to do it is that they would feel bad if they didn't do it. Since it does seem like people build up a tolerance to the positive effects. I'm pretty fast. Yeah, that makes sense. And then so then the claim would be something like that.
01:03:41
Speaker
The drug addict recognizes that by taking the drug, they're not getting access to pleasure anymore or not getting access to things they want, that they're abstaining from or avoiding the things they don't want, or some of the things they don't want, which is withdrawal, psychological distress.
01:03:59
Speaker
from not satisfying the compulsion and things like that. So then you end up in a situation where instead of, it's almost a flip weakness of Socratic intellectualism, where instead of saying they do it because they think it's best, it's like they're doing it because they're avoiding what's worst. Yeah, yeah. That's a good way to put it. I think that's probably pretty close to what I would think is usually going on. Though I imagine that there are some
01:04:24
Speaker
some edge cases to this. It seems like the sort of thing where probably, you know, the world's a big place that probably there are compulsions that don't match up to value judgments. But for the most part, I would expect something like this is what's going on.
01:04:37
Speaker
Yeah, it could also be the case. And that's a totally reasonable thing to take. I mean, I think ancient philosophy tends to go on kind of extremes sometimes. It is totally possible to be like weakness of will exists in extreme edge cases. That's not what's going on when you can't motivate yourself to get a, to go for a run or to do your chores or to, you know, not act in a selfish way that hurts your friends. So don't, you know, don't appeal to those edge cases and take on that kind of stoic responsibility instead. Right. Right. Yep. Absolutely.
01:05:09
Speaker
Well, cool. Anything else on this? No, that's it for me. Super fun. I really like this topic. I think it's fun. I want to talk about it. So glad I could, I could share with you and the listeners. Yeah. Well, let us know what y'all think about this. If you thought it was interesting, if you thought it was useful, always love getting the emails about our podcasts and what we're doing here. So send us a note if you like, otherwise till next time. Thanks Michael.
01:05:35
Speaker
Thanks for listening to Story Conversations. If you found this conversation useful, please give us a rating on Apple, Spotify, or whatever podcast platform you use, and share it with a friend. We are just starting this podcast, so every bit of help goes a long way.
01:05:50
Speaker
And I'd like to thank Michael Levy for graciously letting us use his music. Do check out his work at ancientliar.com and please get in touch with us at stoameditation.com if you ever have any feedback or questions. Until next time.