On smoking/not-smoking, in particular...

I can say that "weakness of the will" -- though perhaps the philosopher is satisfied with such an explanation -- was the worst way of approaching my desire to smoke and not-smoke.

When you want something there's no way to "summon a will" which makes you "not-want" -- you'll want it all the same.

Sometimes this leads into a cycle of sorts -- a sinner sins, asks forgiveness, is saved, sins again, asks forgiveness....

There's an odd pleasure-cycle to redemption which I think the "weakness of the will" at least can feed into, which is counter-productive to anyone who desires to actually change what they are doing.



I say "in particular" since I'm reflecting on quitting smoking -- last one I had was some 7 to 8 years ago.



Which is also to say: In a way the question opens up asking us to confess -- and the confessional was the only way to display skin in the game.

I don't think Nietzsche is really in conflict with the Platonists on this particular point. They certainly allow that different appetites can be more powerful than the rational appetites.

A key distinction here is that the desire for knowledge/truth (intellect) is not the only rational appetite. The will has the desire for goodness as its formal object. So—and there are difficulties in mixing psychologies of course—I don't think Nietzsche would necessarily deny the desirability of the rule of the will in this respect. For the will not to rule is necessarily for a person to be conflicted about their actions. There is weakness of will whenever someone does one thing, but experiences the understanding that another course of action was truly better, and desires to have done that instead. Obviously, not many thinkers are "pro-regret."

It would be a mistake to think that the will is always in conflict or competition with the lower appetites. It often isn't. For example, we can be hungry, and also understand that it is good for us to eat. The goal, on the Platonist account, is precisely for the appetites not to be in conflict. The higher part reaches down and shapes the lower parts through training and habituation in the virtues. The idea here is that this actually allows the lower appetites to be most satisfied as well, because the person functions more as a complete, self-determining whole, less as a collection of warring parts, and so is actually able to succeed at meeting the other desires. The "tyrannical man," by contrast, is prone to confusing "wants" and "needs" and thus making himself miserable. The image in the Phaedrus is a contrast between a chariot with two well-trained horses (the appetites and passions) and one where the horses pull in different directions and the chariot careens around aimlessly, going where neither horse wants to go. (The point, pace some of Nietzsche's portrayals of Plato and Socrates, is not to kill the two horses though lol, but actually to make them better off.)

Where disagreement seems more relevant is in the existence of the will's formal object, that there is a good to know and desire. Another difference is in the subject, although the Platonist tradition is less far away from Nietzsche then it might first seem here, because it's actually in agreement about the competition of the appetites and lack of a stable subject. It's just that this is the state of the soul when it is sick, the "civil war in the soul." So the difference is really more about the capacity to overcome this (and the desirability of doing so).

When you want something there's no way to "summon a will" which makes you "not-want" -- you'll want it all the same.

That's not normally the idea though. It isn't that one simply chooses to not want something, at least not normally. It's primarily a description of the phenomenological experience of conflicted desire and an explanation of why people "do what they know is wrong/what they actively regret." The continent person doesn't suffer from weakness of will (on Aristotle's typology), and yet they still desire vice. By contrast, the incontinent person knows vice is wrong, but does it anyway, and the person in a state of vice acts poorly and prefers doing so.

Certainly, there is the idea that a person can change their desires, or that they can be changed by training, education, etc. That is, desire is not a black box, but can be shaped intentionally. This is Harry Frankfurt's idea of a second order volition, an effective desire to have or not have another desire (something he sees as crucial to freedom and personhood). But this is normally framed in terms of habituation and long-term changes, which is certainly the case for something like smoking.

There's a sense in which I can understand akrasia -- where I've dedicated myself to do such and such, like quit smoking, that the "rational" frame makes sense of -- but I'm more inclined that Nietzsche is right in that when I quit smoking it's because my desire to quit smoking was more powerful than my desire to smoke, for whatever reason/cause.

I had to work on not-wanting in order to stop-wanting. And that was a desire I built up in order to stop-want — Moliere

Exactly. Daniel Smith contrasts the hierarchical relation between rational will and passion that Timothy seems to be describing with Nietzsche’s subordination of rational will to passion.

Now: to be sure, we can combat the drives, we can fight against them. Indeed, this is one of the most common themes in philosophy, a Platonic theme that was taken up by Christianity: the fight against the passions. In another passage from Daybreak , Nietzsche says that he can see only six fundamental methods we have at our disposal for
combating the drives. For instance, Nietzsche says, (1) we can avoid opportunities for its gratification (for instance, if I'm combating my drive to smoke cigarettes, I can stop hiding packs of cigarettes at home, which I conveniently “find” again when I run out), or (2) we can implant regularity into the drive (having one cigarette every four hours so as to at least avoid smoking in between), or (3) we can engender disgust with the drive, giving ourselves over to its wild and unrestrained gratification to the point where we become disgusted with it (say, smoking non-stop for a month until the very idea of a cigarette makes me want to vomit) And Nietzsche continues with several other examples.

But then Nietzsche asks: But who exactly is combating the drives in these various ways? His answer is this: The fact “that one desires to combat the vehemence of a drive at all, however, does not stand within our own power; nor does the choice of any particular method; nor does the success or failure of this method. What is clearly the case is that in this entire procedure our intellect is only the blind instrument of another drive which is a rival of the drive who vehemence is tormenting us….While ‘we' believe we are complaining about the vehemence of a drive, at bottom it is one drive which is complaining about the other; that is to say: for us to become aware that we are suffering from the vehemence [or violence] of a drive presupposes the existence of another equally vehement or even more vehement drive, and that a struggle is in prospect in which our intellect is going to have to take sides” (Daybreak

09). What we call thinking, willing, and feeling are all “merely a relation of these drives to each other” (BGE 36). In other words, there is no struggle of reason against the drives, as Plato, for instance, held. What we call “reason” is, in Nietzsche's view, nothing more than a certain “system of relations between various passions” (WP 387), a certain ordering of the drives. What then do I mean when I say “I am trying to stop smoking”—even though that same I is
constantly going ahead and lighting up cigarettes and continuing to smoke? It simply means that my conscious intellect is taking sides and associating itself with a particular drive. It would make just as much sense to say, “Occasionally I feel this strange impulse to stop smoking, but happily I've manage to combat that drive and pick up a cigarette whenever I want.” Instinctively, Nietzsche says, we tend to take our predominant drive and for the moment turn it into the whole of our ego, placing all our weaker drives perspectivally farther away, as if those other drives weren't me but rather something else, something other inside me, a kind of “it” (hence Freud's idea of the “id,” the “it”—which he also derived from Nietzsche).

“The ego,” Nietzsche writes, “is a plurality of person-like forces, of which now this one now that one stands in the foreground as ego and regards the others as a subject regards an influential and determining external world.”3 When we talk about the “I,” we are simply indicating which drive, at the moment, is strongest and sovereign. “The feeling of the ‘I' is always strongest where the preponderance [Übergewicht] is,” Nietzsche writes, although the so-called “self-identity” I seem to experience in my ego is in fact a differential flickering from drive to drive.

Indeed, this is one of the most common themes in philosophy, a Platonic theme that was taken up by Christianity: the fight against the passions

Well, that's Nietzsche's account. I think that, whatever his other merits, he is not a particularly accurate (or charitable) student of Plato, and especially not of the Christian Platonist tradition. This sounds to me more like the "buffered self" of the neostoicism of the German Protestant pietism that Nietzsche grew up with. The passions are morally neutral in the Christian Platonist tradition, and essential to the beatific vision. Their proper and harmonious orientation is what matters.

Not that Nietzsche is entirely wrong. The Phaedo could be read in this light. I think it's harder to make this case in light of the whole corpus though, and much harder for the Christian tradition generally, granted that some influential texts do seem to advocate for a sort of war against the body and passions. This is more a predilection of the late-antique Pagans though, particularly an ambivalence towards or neglect of embodiment (we're talking about a tradition that birthed a cult of bodily relics afterall, whose key focus is the resurrection of the body and the embodiment of God).

It would make just as much sense to say, “Occasionally I feel this strange impulse to stop smoking, but happily I've manage to combat that drive and pick up a cigarette whenever I want.”

Would it make just as much sense? People don't generally talk this way at least, right? And my exposure to the Eastern tradition makes me think that this is in not a distinctly Western, Platonist influenced tendency. The distinction between Ātman and Prakṛti for instance.

It would be sort of bizarre for someone to say: "I was tempted on my work trip, and unfortunately my sex drive was not strong enough to make me cheat on my spouse." To me at least, being hungry seems quite phenomenologically distinct as compared to intellectually willing something. There is also a passive element to some appetites; people often talk about the passions as something that happens to them, and I can think of examples of this from literature that spans a lot of different cultures and epochs.

Instinctively, Nietzsche says, we tend to take our predominant drive and for the moment turn it into the whole of our ego, placing all our weaker drives perspectivally farther away, as if those other drives weren't me but rather something else, something other inside me, a kind of “it” (hence Freud's idea of the “id,” the “it”—which he also derived from Nietzsche).

I am not sure about this part either. It seems fully possible to experience weakness of will and not to identify with the dominant desire in this manner. This gets back to the idea of the passions in some sense happening to us. I would hardly claim that literature has always described things thus, but it seems like it often has, perhaps even usually. Furor descends on Aeneas, a great rage "comes upon" the Trojan women when they decide to burn their own ships. Homer's Greeks are the same way.

Of course, Nietzsche also appeals to the Greeks on this point. I guess I'm just not sure if it might suggest a different take. Certainly other ancient lit does, e.g. Genesis 4:7 — "sin is crouching at the door. Its desire is for you, but you must rule over it," makes a pretty clear distinction (the passion in this case being wrath, the murder of Abel)—or maybe this merely explains why the Jewish tradition and Plato got on so well together.

It would make just as much sense to say, “Occasionally I feel this strange impulse to stop smoking, but happily I've manage to combat that drive and pick up a cigarette whenever I want.”

Would it make just as much sense? People don't generally talk this way at least, right?

It would be sort of bizarre for someone to say: "I was tempted on my work trip, and unfortunately my sex drive was not strong enough to make me cheat on my spouse. — Count Timothy von Icarus

What’s the difference between saying ‘occasionally I have a strange impulse’ and ‘I have an impulse to perform an immoral act’? The difference is that the use of moral language like ‘cheating’, ‘murdering’ and ‘stealing’ as opposed to value-neutral terms like ‘having sex with’ , ‘killing’ and ‘taking from’ follows upon the interpreting of an act as immoral. And Nietzsche’s point is that we only arrive at such moral interpretations after the stronger drive has won out and we justify its success posthoc as being the ‘moral’ choice. If we don’t consider picking up a cigarette whenever we want to be a moral act, it is because the drive to smoke is in a close battle with the drive to quit. If we became fully convinced that there were no solid reasons to quit (health, economic or hygiene), then we would with good conscience consider our decision to smoke not to be the less moral choice.

Well, a wrinkle here is that weakness of will doesn't necessarily have anything to do with any sort of "moral" consideration, only practical judgements. Actually, pre-modern ethics makes much less of a distinction between the moral and the practical, the former just being part of the latter.

And it isn't the case that we always engage is such post-hoc rationalization. People will often say that what they are doing is bad (morally, or merely practically) as they are engaging in the act, or shortly after.

That's a difficulty here, sometimes we engage in post hoc rationalization, oftentimes we don't. But weakness of will is simply pointing to the phenomena of knowing/understanding "doing x would really be better," and instead doing y. There isn't any real moral valance to: "I should take the trash out now because I won't want to do it in the snow tomorrow morning, but I'm not going to because I feel tired." It's simply dissonance between the intellectual appetitive faculty (the will) and one of the concupiscible appetites (for rest).

So, I would say that Nietzsche is right about a certain sort of phenomenon. However, the rational appetite is still phenomenologically distinct from the sensible appetites, and this distinction shows up throughout the history of world literature. It is not the case that the "I" is nothing but warring drives, else people would not so often describe passions and appetites as something that happens to them. They wouldn't rationalize sometimes and not others. This doesn't make the passions and appetites external of course, it just points to there being different faculties (i.e., the nous is not a sort of Cartesian homunculus, but neither is it indistinct).

First of all, we should ask, "What does ' wrong ' mean?" Our definition of right and wrong will never be one, and labeling a person as bad based solely on one of the many definitions of right and wrong is not logical.
The most mindful way to answer the question "Do we come into this world as good or bad?" is that we are neither born good nor bad; we just come into this world as an empty slate, and start shaping our personality by the reactions we give to the acts we face in the outer world.