Against Better Judgment: Irrational Action and Literary Invention in the Long Eighteenth Century by Thomas Salem Manganaro (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Against Better Judgment: Irrational Action and Literary Invention in the Long Eighteenth Century by Thomas Salem Manganaro Stephanie Insley Hershinow MANGANARO, THOMAS SALEM. Against Better Judgment: Irrational Action and Literary Invention in the Long Eighteenth Century. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2022. 250 pp. $95.00 cloth; $39.50 paperback; $29.50 e-book. I kept meaning to write this review of Thomas Salem Manganaro's Against Better Judgment: Irrational Action and Literary Invention in the Long Eighteenth Century, a [End Page 348] learned and engaging book about how literature and philosophy differently approach problems of intention and action. But then, there were always other tasks that seemed a bit more urgent—grading and emails, meetings and, well, more emails. And of course there was Twitter to scroll. So, while I wanted to tell you about Manganaro's careful close readings and playful explications of philosophical writing, I also kept putting it off. Fortunately for me, Against Better Judgment recurs to the example of procrastination as a particularly resonant form of akrasia—that phenomenon wherein one recognizes what action is right and acts otherwise anyway. So even as the review remained incomplete, Manganaro prompted me to think about my own failure, that stubborn irrationality, with new depth. This is a book that compels the reader to reflect on personal experience, on all of the ways that we have struggled with our own judgment and the other things that get in the way. But more forcefully, the book prompts renewed attention to some thorny moments in long eighteenth-century literature, and it gives us a vocabulary to understand those moments' operations in a new way. Manganaro takes as his subject the ancient Greek concept of akrasia, which later enters Christian thought as what St. Augustine calls "weakness of the will." Some of the examples in the text pick up on the inheritance of this religious context, while others take the akratic on new journeys. Among a strong recent slate of books on eighteenth-century literature and philosophy, Manganaro's stands out for its ingenious approach: he considers a concept absent in eighteenth-century philosophy rather than one at its center. A complement to Jonathan Kramnick's Actions and Objects (Stanford University Press, 2010), which is energized by the nondistinction between philosophy and literature in the eighteenth century, Manganaro instead illuminates places where philosophy and literature become distinct, developing their own methodologies and commitments. As he explains, an influential line of Enlightenment thought all but eliminated the possibility of akrasia when it moved away from teleological forms of explanation. By these accounts, it's simply not possible to act against one's judgment; one is instead just a dupe of other, stronger forces. This gap in philosophy opens up an opportunity for literature. As Manganaro makes clear, however unthinkable akrasia becomes for Enlightenment philosophers, it's all over the place in literature of the period, if only we have the interpretive skills to see it. For fiction to depict the akratic in legible ways, "it needs to be careful about phrasing, about the perspectives it takes, about the level of psychology it describes, about the metaphysical paradigms it upholds, about its attention to time, and even about its use of rhythm" (3). And for readers to pick up on the complex moral, aesthetic, and philosophical implications of akrasia, we have to perceive these formal cues. After a brisk and illuminating introduction, the book devotes five chapters to various genres of writing. Chapter One covers philosophical writing, focusing on the thinkers you might expect (Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Hume) but offering the more surprising revelation that akrasia falls out of these thinkers' understandings of action, "instead replaced by models of irrational action as based in either compulsion or ignorance" (18). The chapter ends with a useful comparison of the eighteenth-century philosophical terrain with that of the twentieth and twenty-first, when akrasia returns in the work of Donald Davidson, Iris Murdoch, and Agnes Callard. Manganaro doesn't just draw out insights to be applied to literary texts; he also reads these philosophers as a literary critic, showing how the way they discuss akrasia in thought experiments is central to how they...