#56: You're not weak-willed, according to Socrates
Your weakness of will is one of your inner critic's favourite topics. She can go on for days about how weak-willed you are. But, did you know that, over the centuries, philosophers have had a tough time making any coherent sense of the idea of weakness of will - and that, according to some philosophical heavy-hitters like Socrates and R. M. Hare, there is no such thing? You don't hit the snooze button or use your writing time to watch cat videos because you're weak, on this view. You do it because your values are glitching. And framing it this way opens the door to finding solutions that don't involve piling shame and guilt on yourself.
Pre-order my book, For F*ck's Sake! (UK link, US link, or via Amazon)
Episode transcript:
You’re listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. I’m Dr Rebecca Roache. I’m a coach and a philosopher at the University of London, and week by week I’ll be drawing on philosophical analysis and coaching insights to help you dump perfectionism and flourish on your own terms.
Hi everyone! I’m sat here in my running clothes while doing this episode - one of my tricks to motivate myself. The idea is that taking these clothes off without having been for a run would be too depressing, so I have to make sure I go for a run to avoid that happening. It usually works. Actually, it’s always worked, except for the day of the deadline for the final submission of my book manuscript back in January - and that was such an unusual set of circumstances that I managed to forgive myself. Or perhaps I was just distracted by having unburdened myself of the book. Talking of the book - and I promise I hadn’t planned to promote it here, but since I’m on the topic - it’s available to pre-order! It’s called For Fuck’s Sake. There’s an asterisk in there, of course - just the one, mind - but apart from that I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how light a touch the publisher is taking to censoring it. Lucy Randall, my wonderful, patient, understanding editor at Oxford University Press, sent me the cover design just over a week ago, and I am in love with it. It’s due to be released in the UK and the US on 1st November.
But you didn’t come here to listen to me talk about my book. You came here - well, for a podcast episode, of course, but also to see if I’ve made good on the promise that I made last week to complete those forms I needed to complete for the ALCS so I can collect my royalties. So, here is my on-brand imperfect update. I’ve started, but I haven’t finished. I’m battling to get into my account. I can’t get the verification email to arrive. I might have to send them an email to ask for help. Of course, if I’d bounced straight from the last podcast episode to sorting this out without delay, I’d have probably wrapped it all up, but of course I didn’t do that, I left it until the last minute, when I needed to start putting this episode together and so needed to tell you all about how I’ve done what I set out to do. Stay tuned for more updates. It’s not where I hoped to be, but it’s an improvement on the zero progress I’ve made on this over the past decade or so. But even so, I’m a bit annoyed with myself for not having done more, as I planned. I know this is something I need to do - it’s something I want to have done - and yet I haven’t done it. Does that sound familiar? I expect it does. What do you do when you find yourself in this sort of situation, where you are not doing something that you sincerely believe that you should be doing? I expect you feel bad about yourself, don’t you? There’s a bit of shame, a bit of guilt, a bit of frustration. You probably tell yourself that you’re weak-willed. That’s a real favourite among my coaching clients. Most of them are weak-willed, according to them. And in fact, in many cases, the belief that we’re weak-willed shapes our entire approach to motivating ourselves. I see lots of people who are incredibly self-critical, and who believe that they need to be self-critical, because they’re so weak-willed that without a hefty dose of criticism they simply wouldn’t get anything done. Now, not only is that a misguided view of how motivation works: as I explained in episode #23: The way you’re trying to motivate yourself is all wrong, the evidence points to self-compassion, and plenty of reward, being important parts of motivation, and self-punishment being pretty ineffective. Ignoring all that, though, in this episode I want to take issue with your belief that you’re weak-willed.
I know that it seems pretty obvious to you that you’re weak-willed. You feel it, after all - every time you find yourself hitting the snooze button on the alarm when you know you ought to get out of bed; every time you scroll through cat videos on Instagram when you know you ought to be writing; every time you help yourself to a third slice of cake when you know you ought to order a kale smoothie instead - and, my personal favourite, every time you stay up reading nonsense on your phone when you know you ought to have gone to bed hours ago. Of course we’re weak-willed in situations like this. Aren’t we?
Well, not according to philosophers. There’s a very long history in philosophy of being puzzled by the mere possibility of weakness of will. If it’s really the case, as it seems to be in the sorts of situation I’ve just mentioned, that we sincerely believe that a particular choice is the right one to make, all things considered, then how is it possible that we can voluntarily do something else? How is it possible to hit the snooze button when the alarm goes off when what we really want, all things considered, is to get out of bed? Usually, we’ll explain this sort of situation by saying something like, ‘Well, yes, all things considered I really do want to get up early, but at the moment the alarm goes off I lose sight of that and just want to go back to sleep’. This sort of explanation is satisfactory in the sense that it does a decent job of capturing how it feels to be in that situation. Of course the lure of a warm bed is hard to resist, regardless of how well the rest of the day (and maybe even the rest of our lives) would go if we were to get up. That’s not difficult to understand. We’ve all been there. But that hasn’t been enough to satisfy philosophers.
This puzzle goes all the way back to Ancient Greece, and to Socrates, who didn’t believe in the possibility of weakness of will. In Plato’s Protagoras, Socrates says, and this is a quotation: ‘nobody does anything under the idea or conviction that some other thing would be better and is also attainable, when he might do the better.’ End of quotation. What does this mean for you, lying in bed, rudely awakened by your alarm, and reaching to hit the snooze button? Well, it means that, at least at that moment, you don’t really think that getting out of bed would be better, all things considered. You can’t think that, according to Socrates. What you really think is the best course of action is going back to sleep. There’s no weakness of will involved. You’re just doing what you value most. It might be that, at times when your alarm is not buzzing at you, you value something different. But that’s irrelevant to the question of what you do at the moment your alarm is buzzing.
Now, Socrates’ view is controversial, and there are plenty of philosophers who have disagreed with him over the years. But, even those who disagree take themselves to have a lot of explaining to do. Making weakness of will make sense is not a simple matter - and you can tell your inner critic I said so.
But my aim here is not to get to the bottom of finding the most coherent and sensible account of weakness of will. My aim, as always, is to draw from the debate insights and reflections that I hope will provide a fresh and helpful perspective on some of the problems many of us face. And I want to do that here by looking at the argument of someone who agreed, more or less, with Socrates: the 20th-century British philosopher, R. M. Hare. According to Hare, in order to find out what a person’s values are, it’s better to look at how that person behaves, rather than what they say about what their values are. This is a familiar, ‘actions speak louder than words’ type of point. When it came to considering weakness of will, Hare reasoned in the opposite direction to the way most of us naturally do. Most of us, I think, would explain our hitting the snooze button as follows: All things considered, I believe that getting out of bed when the alarm sounds is the best thing to do. By hitting the snooze button, I acted contrary to what I believe is the best course of action, which reveals me to be weak-willed. In other words, we start by confidently asserting that we value getting up on time, and conclude from the fact that we acted contrary to that value that we’re weak willed. Hare would do it the other way round. He’d start by looking at our actions, and ask: what does this behaviour reveal about this person’s values? And he’d conclude that, since you hit the snooze button when the alarm went off, you can’t really value getting up when the alarm goes off, regardless of what you might claim. What you value is going back to sleep. That’s not to say that you don’t care at all about getting up early. It’s just that you value it less than you value going back to sleep - at least at the moment when the alarm goes off. There’s no weakness of will on this account. There’s just you acting on what you value most at that moment.
This account is pretty counter-intuitive, isn’t it? We feel like we’re being weak when we hit the snooze button while thinking to ourselves ‘I really ought to get up’ - but if we take Hare (and Socrates) seriously, we’re not weak at all. We’re rational beings, acting in harmony with our values - at least, with the values we hold at that moment. Counter-intuitive it may be, but I like this account - by which I mean that I find it helpful, not that I think it’s right. One reason I like it is that it doesn’t involve ascribing to ourselves a pejorative term like ‘weak willed’. When we ascribe pejorative terms to ourselves, we basically just hand over the mic to our inner critic and then sit back to await a monologue on our various faults. So, it’s always helpful to avoid that. Now, there remains a problem to solve: the fact that you keep hitting the snooze button in the mornings, when you think that really you should be getting out of bed and getting on with your day. But, if we put on our Socratic hat, the problem here isn’t that you’re weak. The problem, rather, is that your values at the moment that the alarm goes off are not the values that you have the rest of the time. When the alarm goes off, you value going back to sleep above all else. So, the next thing to do is ask: what can you do to ensure that your values at the crucial moment are the values that you hold the rest of the time? In other words, what can you do to ensure that even at the moment when the alarm is sounding, you value getting out of bed more than you value going back to sleep?
I bet that, framed in this way, you are brimming with ideas about how you can address this issue. Without your inner critic hijacking your thoughts by shaming you for being weak and lazy, you’re able to think clearly about what to do. One course of action would be to make hitting the snooze button less attractive than it currently is. Perhaps you could go to bed earlier so that you’re ready to get up when the alarm sounds. Perhaps you could put the alarm on the other side of the room so that you can’t reach the snooze button. Alternatively, you could make getting out of bed more attractive than it currently is. Get in something really nice for breakfast. Spend some time the evening before making your workspace nice and welcoming so that it’s more inviting the following morning. You get the idea. You can think of what’s going on here as playing with a set of scales: on one side you’ve got the choice that you think you ought to be making, and on the other side you’ve got the choice that seems more attractive in the moment. The problem is that, at the crucial moment, the second side has more weight. And you can try to counteract that by removing some weight from that side, or adding weight to the other side, or both.
Sometimes it’s helpful to dig a bit deeper into why our values are liable to change at the crucial moment. Let’s take another of the examples I mentioned earlier: scrolling through cat videos when you think that really you ought to be writing. Now, you can approach this the way I suggested you approach your snooze button habit, by tinkering with the weights on each side of the scales. You could, for example, block instagram on your phone so that you can’t look at cat videos. You could do something to make the process of writing more rewarding - one good resource here is the website, focusmate.com, through which you can pair up with a stranger via video call for short sessions during which you both commit to get a certain thing done, and then share at the end how you got on and congratulate each other. But sometimes we - and I have my hand up here - avoid writing for complicated reasons. Sometimes we’d do pretty much anything to avoid it, meaning that it can be difficult to tinker with the weights on either side of the scales. Sometimes, for whatever reason, it’s not in our power to do the thing we think we should be doing. That might be because of things like anxiety and ADHD and fear and having staked our entire sense of self-worth on our writing project, which unfortunately the culture of academia often encourages us to do. When we respond to our lack of progress by beating ourselves up about being weak-willed, we miss all of this. We don’t help ourselves at all when we do that. So let’s, instead, start by noting that, at the crucial moment - that might be when you sit down at your laptop and open the Word document you’re working on, but perhaps you don’t even get that far, perhaps you don’t even make it within 10 metres of your laptop - even though getting this writing project done is something you really want to achieve, you find you’ll do anything to avoid it. Cat videos, Wikipedia pages about celebrities you’ve never heard of, travel guides for cities you’ve no desire to visit, whatever - these things become irresistible. And you’re not weak-willed, remember - you just, for whatever reason, suddenly find stuff like this way more interesting and enticing than the writing project that you care deeply about. Your values are glitching, as my kids would put it. The glaringly obvious question, at this point, is: why? Because, it’s not the content of this stuff that’s enthralling. (Ok, maybe that’s the case with the cat videos, but not with the irrelevant Wikipedia pages and unappealing travel guides.) So, what is it that these distraction activities are giving you, that you don’t get from working on your writing project? In a lot of cases, they’re attractive because they soothe the anxiety that arises because you value your writing project so much - and in that case, that’s something that you’d benefit from tackling head-on. Aside from the obvious medical route, I’ve talked about writing anxiety in various episodes of this podcast, including episode #40: Why I took SO BLOODY LONG to write my book, and episode #9: Cancel your productivity anxiety, but in all honesty, this has come up in more episodes than I can remember. Alternatively, perhaps you’re taking too much of an all-or-nothing approach to getting your writing done. There’s no rule to say that it can never involve regular breaks to watch cat videos. And there’s plenty of scope to make important progress on your writing even when you’re not working on your writing at all - I talked about that in episode #19: Not writing is an essential part of writing, and episode #20: Don’t just write it - ferment it!
I think that, essentially, the lesson we can learn from the way that Socrates explains away weakness of will, and the view that Hare takes of it, is this: we need to do better than simply yelling at ourselves ‘I shouldn’t be making these choices!’ when our choices don’t align with the values that we most strongly identify with, like finishing a thesis or getting up on time or eating healthily. Instead, accept that we’re making these non-ideal choices. Accept that they happen, and that they’re going to keep happening. And then, following Hare, ask: what do these behavioural choices reveal about the values we hold at the moment we choose to engage in that behaviour? Dig deep. Try to understand what’s going on. Write down what those values are - just describe them, don’t judge them - and if you find it hard to stop judgment from creeping in, try shifting your perspective and asking yourself what you’d conclude about someone else’s values if they were behaving in the way that you do. Once you have that list, think about whether you identify strongly with those values. If there are any on the list that you hold only at odd moments - like when your alarm goes off - but not the rest of the time, have a think about what action you can take to bring them into line with your more enduring values. Treat it as a problem-solving exercise. You don’t solve a problem by standing there shaking your head and bitching about how lazy and weak it is. You solve a problem by coming up with a course of action that you believe is going to make a change in the right direction. It’s cause and effect; it’s not good or bad. Good luck, my rational friend.
I’m Dr Rebecca Roache, and you’ve been listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe on whatever podcast app you like to use. I want to help as many people as I can with these episodes, and I’d really appreciate it if you’d share the podcast with any friends who you think might find it useful, and if you’d consider leaving a review on your podcast app. If you’d like to support the podcast financially, you can do that at patreon.com/academicimperfectionist. For more information about me, the podcast, and my coaching, please visit the website - academicimperfectionist.com. You’ll find links there to The Academic Imperfectionist on Twitter and Facebook too. If you have an idea or a request for a future episode of The Academic Imperfectionist, please drop me a line, either via my website or by tweeting your idea with the hashtag #AcademicImperfectionist. Thank you for listening, and see you next time!
Enjoy the show?
Please leave a review in Apple Podcasts.
Don’t miss an episode - subscribe using the links below!