Philosophy & ThoughtGreek → English
Akrasia
/əˈkreɪziə/noun
Acting against one's own better judgement while knowing perfectly well what the better course is.
The Greek roots
ἀ-
a-
without, lacking
κράτος
krátos
power, command
Literally: “lack of command”
The story of the word
Aristotle gives a whole book of the Nicomachean Ethics to it, because Socrates had denied that such a thing could happen at all: if you truly know the good, he argued, you do it. The literal sense is want of command over oneself. Modern philosophers went back to the Greek word because weakness of the will imports a faculty called the will that Greek ethics never had.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → English
- First recorded
- 20th century
Same family
democracyautocrataristocracybureaucracy
In a sentence
Every unopened running shoe in the cupboard is a small monument to akrasia.
He described his own akrasia with unusual precision and then did nothing about it.