akrasia

English

Etymology

Learned borrowing from Ancient Greek ᾰ̓κρᾰσῐ́ᾱ (akrasíā), a variant of ᾰ̓κρᾰ́τειᾰ (akráteia, “lack of power, debility, impotence; lack of self-control, incontinence; self-indulgence”), from ἀκρατής (akratḗs, “having no authority, powerless; unable to exercise self-control, incontinent”) + -ῐ́ᾱ (-íā, suffix forming feminine abstract nouns). Ἀκρατής (Akratḗs) is derived from ᾰ̓- (a-, prefix forming terms having a sense opposite to the stems or words to which it is attached) + κρᾰ́τος (krátos, “might, strength; dominion, power”)^[1] (ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *kret- (“insight, intelligence; strength”)) + -ής (-ḗs, suffix forming third-declension adjectives). Doublet of acratia.

Pronunciation

(Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /əˈkrɹeɪ.zɪ.ə/, /-kɹæ-/
Audio (Southern England): (file)
(General American) IPA^(key): /əˈkrɹeɪ.zi.ə/
Homophone: acrasia
Hyphenation: akras‧ia

Noun

akrasia (countable and uncountable, plural akrasias)

(philosophy, uncountable) Lack of physical or (especially) mental strength; poor willpower; also, the tendency to act contrary to one's better judgment; (countable) an instance of this.
- 1887 June, W E Gladstone, “The Great Olympian Sedition”, in The Contemporary Review, volume LI, London: Isbister and Company , →ISSN, →OCLC, page 762:
  His [Homer's] Olympian gods live by passion and propensity rather than by principle; their besetting sin is a fault of inclination to what they like, not of absolute malignity; it belongs to the akrasia, not the absolute kakia of Aristotle.
- 1890, W E Gladstone, “Section IV: Rudiments of Ethics”, in Landmarks of Homeric Study , London; New York, N.Y.: Macmillan and Co., →OCLC, subsection IV, page 91:
  The Atasthalié of Homer seems to hold to his Atè a relation resembling that between the kakia and the akrasia of Aristotle: the one indicating innate mischief, the other only inadequate means of defence against evil when it solicits from without.
- 1972 summer, Arthur Cody, “Weakness of the Will”, in Synergist: A Publication of the Office of Academic Affairs, volume 5, number 2, Chicago, Ill.: Northeastern Illinois University, →OCLC, page 115:
  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.
- 1989, A W Price, “Aristotle on the Varieties of Friendship”, in Love and Friendship in Plato and Aristotle, Oxford, Oxfordshire: Clarendon Press, →ISBN, page 144:
  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.
- 1994, John M Rist, “Soul, Body and Personal Identity”, in Augustine: Ancient Thought Baptized, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire: Cambridge University Press, published 2000, →ISBN, page 137:
  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.
- 1995, T D J Chappell, “The Varieties of Akrasia”, in Aristotle and Augustine on Freedom: Two Theories of Freedom, Voluntary Action and Akrasia, London: Palgrave Macmillan, published 1998, →DOI, →ISBN, part I (Aristotle), page 98:
  If there are six severally necessary and jointly sufficient conditions of full-blooded akrasia, then perhaps the way to classify the varieties of akrasia and non-akrasia is by means of the statistical array generated by considering the permutations of the six conditions of akrasia. […] Examining this array may make it clear which types of akrasia logically cannot occur; what the range of possible partial akrasias is; and what kinds of cases are not akrasias at all.
- 1995, A W Price, “Plato”, in Mental Conflict (Issues in Ancient Philosophy), London; New York, N.Y.: Routledge, →ISBN, page 92:
  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.
- 1995, Gregory Vlastos, “Socrates on Acrasia”, in Daniel W. Graham, editor, Studies in Greek Philosophy, volumes II (Socrates, Plato, and Their Tradition), Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, →ISBN, part 1 (Socrates), page 50:
  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.
- 1999, Edward Halper, “The Unity of the Virtues in Aristotle”, in David Sedley, editor, Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, volume XVII, Oxford, Oxfordshire: Oxford University Press, →ISBN, page 130:
  The paradigm case of akrasia is the person who seems to know that a certain type of food is healthy but is none the less led by desire to eat a more pleasurable food instead. This is an act of akrasia, rather than immoderation, because the agent appears to know better. But his desires are somehow able to prevail over his reason, and he acts as if he were immoderate. Aristotle proposes a variety of explanations for akrasia […]; on my reading, his implication in all is that, despite appearances, the akratic lacks practical wisdom.
- 2012, Laurence J. Kirmayer, Ian Gold, “Re-socializing Psychiatry: Critical Neuroscience and the Limits of Reductionism”, in Suparna Choudhury, Jan Slaby, editors, Critical Neuroscience: A Handbook of the Social and Cultural Contexts of Neuroscience, Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, →ISBN, part V (Beyond Neural Correlates: Ecological Approaches to Psychiatry), page 316:
  The structure of the brain exerts constraints on what is easy or difficult to compute—resulting not only in the limits of specific cognitive abilities but in the bounded nature of everyday rationality and our propensity for certain types of systematic biases, errors, and akrasias.
- 2024 March 21, Shayla Love, “Why do we do things that are bad for us? The ancient philosophers had an answer”, in Katharine Viner, editor, The Guardian‎, London: Guardian News & Media, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 2024-03-29:
  The concept of akrasia comes from a debate in ancient philosophy about whether it is possible to act against what you know to be good. […] It's important to take a nuanced view of akrasia and separate it from will power, said Reinout Wiers, a psychologist at the University of Amsterdam and the author of a book on akrasia and addiction. […] Kalis added that changing your environment might be a better way to resist akrasia than trying to improve your willpower. These changes are called commitment devices: they don't allow you to change your mind.

Usage notes

Often used to refer to the discussion of the philosophical concept in book VII of the Nicomachean Ethics by the Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle (384–322 B.C.E.).^[1]

Not to be confused with acrasia (“lack of self-control; intemperance, excess; also, irregular or unruly behaviour”), which is sometimes used as a variant spelling of akrasia, despite some overlap in meaning.