1 Harvard University Political Theory Colloquium For 11 March 2010 ...

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It is adumbrated perhaps by Dante (who thinks he is following Aquinas and
Aristotle) when he speaks of the incontinent man as one who ‘lets desire pull
reason from her throne’ (Inferno, Canto V). Here there are three actors on the
stage: reason, desire, and the one who lets desire get the upper hand. The third
actor is perhaps named ‘The Will’ (or ‘Conscience’). It is up to The Will to
decide who wins the battle. If The Will is strong, he gives the palm to reason; if
he is weak, he may allow pleasure or passion the upper hand. (Davidson 2001
[1980], 35).
While the focus of this paper is on the Protagoras, it is important to begin by
recognizing that ‘weakness of will’ is no more adequate as an interpretation of the
Republic. While I cannot discuss how to read the tripartite model of the soul in detail
here, any account of Republic tripartition should recognize that it is not ‘The Will’ who
‘decides’ which part of the soul wins a battle, but reason – the part of the soul with which
the person as a whole is to identify – which either rules or fails to rule. True, there is a
third part of the soul beyond reason and desire (better translated as appetite), the thumos,
but its alliance with reason – while this can help to instantiate the latter’s rule – does not
give it the sole palm of decision as to whether reason will rule. Nor should such rule by
reason be cast in terms of occurrent ‘choice’, as the image of giving the palm implies, or
in terms of active ‘letting’ another part take control, as the quotation from Dante
suggests. For the issue in the Republic is whether or not thumos and epithumia are
aligned with reason: in the fully virtuous agent, or even the merely well-brought-up one,
this alignment will be both dispositionally embedded in all parts of the soul through the
virtues and also realized in occurrent judgments and actions. 5
If neither the Protagoras nor the Republic should be understood in terms of
‘weakness of will’ (the one denying it, the other acknowledging it), should they
nonetheless be understood as respectively denying and acknowledging some
understanding of akrasia? I contend that the phenomenon often described as ‘denial of
akrasia’ in Plato’s Protagoras, and by extrapolation the contrasting ‘acceptance of
akrasia’ in his Republic, is better understood in both contexts as ‘explanation of
weakness of virtue due to a failure of the executive rule of knowledge’. It is the failure of