The will - a needless power of soul?

Abstract

It is commonplace in the philosophical literature the translation of the Aristotelian akrasia as “weakness of will”. This raises several important difficulties, far beyond a mere problem of translation. First of all, there is a growing consensus among scholars concerning the idea, held among others by Hannah Arendt, that there’s no concept in ancient Ethics that corresponds, behind some lexical appearances, with the Augustinian voluntas construed as a power or faculty fully autonomous with respect to reason as well as to appetites, free from every determination not reducible to its own self-determination, and uniquely responsible, therefore, for the actions it commands. Secondly, the Augustinian voluntas raises a host of unsolvable paradoxes, as, for example, the supposed infinity of will, or its ultimate reduction to mere arbitrariness. This annihilates the very role assigned to will, i. e., that of founding and explaining the responsibility of the self. Therefore, it seems far more reasonable to hold a view of human soul that, in the same vein as the ancient Greek Ethics, refrains itself from introducing additional elements in the traditional dichotomy Reason-Desires, even if the detailed description of their mutual interactions can be greatly refined thanks to the modern cognitive science.