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 Lauren Kopajtic Thomas Salem Manganaro, Against Better Judgment: Irrational Action and Literary Invention in the Long Eighteenth Century ( Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia Press, 2022). Pp. 250. $95.00 cloth, $39.50 paper. The central question Thomas Manganaro takes up in this important and welcome book is this: how to write akrasia, a condition where an agent acts against their own better judgment. His opening example rewrites a scene from Defoe's Moll Flanders, where Moll lapses and returns to her trade as a thief; his closing example offers two versions of a scene from Shakespeare's Macbeth, showing how Macbeth's action of killing the king can be represented as intentional or irrational. The central contribution of Manganaro's book lies here, in working through how one's choices in representing irrational action can explain away or render mysterious the [End Page 146] phenomenon itself. While Manganaro reads several seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophers as denying or explaining away akrasia at the cost of losing a phenomenon we should seek to understand, he reads a suite of eighteenth-century writers of prose fiction, life-writing, and poetry as preserving the phenomenon through the invention of new literary forms. Manganaro uses akrasia as his primary case of irrational action, preferring it to Aristotelian "incontinence" and Augustinian "weakness of will," prominent in Christian frameworks. Akrasia is difficult to pin down, and that slipperiness is an important variable in the argument of this book. Manganaro offers a working understanding of akrasia as a condition of individual agency where one knows what would be the best thing to do, but either freely does not do it, or chooses to do something different, and less good (2). Akrasia is not bad action out of ignorance, nor is it inaction through constraint; akrasia is intentionally doing something you know to be worse than an alternative that is known and readily available. It is important for the history of treatments of this phenomenon, and for Manganaro's own treatment, that akrasia appear paradoxical. This paradoxicality is what attracts attempts to represent, explain, and understand the phenomenon. But these attempts run into an obstacle: explanation and understanding rely on representation, and representation of this phenomenon is a challenge. As Manganaro describes it, "the core difficulty lies in the fact that the piece of writing needs to maintain two seemingly contradictory truths at once: first, that the person believes that there is an available course of action that is better to pursue, and second, that the person freely and intentionally pursues a different course of action" (3). The representation of akrasia, then, requires special literary forms. But, and here lies the problem Manganaro finds with the philosophical approaches to akrasia, representations aiming at explaining akrasia will explain away the phenomenon, and representations aiming at preserving akrasia will fall short as explanations, because the "values" of literary writing "clash" with the values of explanatory writing (39). How to write akrasia, then, will depend on why one seeks to write akrasia, and some whys will not be possible to jointly satisfy. Chapter 1 shows that the dominant forms of systematic philosophical writing in the long eighteenth century were inadequate to this challenge, which resulted in the elimination of the phenomenon. Manganaro begins with Aristotle and St. Augustine, for whom the phenomenon of akrasia was real and worth grappling with, and then turns to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophers and two twentieth-century philosophers, Donald Davidson and Iris Murdoch, who mark out what is needed in a proper study of akrasia. Manganaro argues that Hobbes, Spinoza, and Hume each eliminate akrasia, with Locke holding a more complicated place. Manganaro does not argue for the reality of akrasia, relying instead on Davidson's entreaty to preserve the phenomenon, so it is difficult to see what exactly the "Enlightenment philosophers" got wrong, but it seems to be that their elimination is unjustified because it is based on the limited resources of the dominant philosophical frameworks and methods of the moment, and not on the persuasiveness of their arguments. Remaining chapters focus on how literary authors...