On Weakness of Will – The Solution (Column 173)

The article purports to solve the problem, but it didn’t solve it. All I found was wordplay and a semantic sleight of hand, unfortunately. A decision not to choose is, in every respect, still a choice. The correct solution, in my opinion, is that the original desire is weak to begin with. Even a person who makes a “firm” decision to go on a diet is telling himself a story about his willingness to go all the way. A decisive and absolute choice is an illusion.

It seems to me that you don’t really disagree with premise 2; you’re simply changing the definitions, so that the term “desire” in the context under discussion has a different meaning that does not contradict premise 2.

Can one go in a different direction?
After all, the question arises: why does a person make decisions for the future if everything ultimately depends on his desire at the moment of action? If his desire changes at the moment of action, then the initial decision was pointless. And if he ends up making the same choice, then the first decision becomes superfluous. The obvious and banal answer is that the initial decision changes the weighting of future considerations: the consideration “it is healthy to lose weight” will receive a higher score if it comes in the wake of an initial decision to go on a diet.
In other words, in the earlier choice you choose to create a strong future consideration.
Now, what happens if I decided on a diet and at the moment of action I backtracked on my decision? Did my desire change? It seems to me that usually it did not. It simply turns out that the initial desire did not grant enough points, even though I mistakenly assessed it as a sufficient desire (there was an illusion in identifying the total number of points that the initial desire granted = in identifying its intensity). Why didn’t I want, from the outset, a desire that would grant many more points? Because I didn’t want to. Here the decision is free and value-laden.
Where is “weakness of will” here? “Weakness of will” is the felt gap between the high score I thought the initial desire granted and the score it actually granted (the weakness is not in the power of the capacity to choose, but in the chosen content of the desire—namely, in its power to act). A strong desire is one that has the power to create a strong consideration; a weak desire is one that has the power to create a weaker consideration. The assessment of the content as containing points beyond a certain threshold turned out to be mistaken and illusory, and in fact the desire was to grant far fewer points = the desire was weaker than I had assessed. The disappointment is that, when all is said and done, I did not want to give sufficient force to the future consideration, even though I deceived myself into thinking that I did. A person is prone to err by overestimating the number of points contained in his desire, and only the Knower of secrets can testify to this beforehand.
(Does that make sense?)

Hello Yisrael. I’m sorry I caused distress to a Jew during the intermediate days of the festival. But since you are declaring rather than arguing, it is hard for me to respond. As for your explanation itself, I already explained היטב why it solves nothing.
I wish you that from now on you should have a happy festival, and be only joyful.

I didn’t understand the claim. As far as I can tell, I did not change the definition of any term. I am claiming that a person wants one thing and does something else, in the same sense as in the previous post. Except that this situation is possible when the second action does not stem from his desire.

It is certainly possible and desirable to propose additional directions.
As for your claim itself, if I understood correctly then you are repeating the suggestion that speaks of different levels of desire (not binary ones), and I already explained that I really do not agree. If that is the intensity with which I wanted the thing, then that is what I wanted. And if now the weighting has changed, then now I want something else. This does not explain the feeling of failure in any way, unless you see it as an illusion. Some of your sentences imply that the feeling of failure is the result of a mistake in assessing the intensity. That does not seem to me to be an explanation of failure at all, but perhaps of an illusion of failure. It may be an intellectual failure, not a volitional-moral one.

What I mean is this: at the stage of the question we also treated the choice and decision to go for the easy solution and let automation do its thing as part of the desire, and therefore premise 2 was correct; whereas at the stage of the solution, we narrowed the definition of the term “desire” (and from that point on, the decision to let automation do its thing is no longer defined as “desire,” and therefore premise 2 no longer holds).
The only thing that changed was the definition, no?

Not at all. That is a claim, not a definition. My claim is that a person can want something, but sometimes (when he chooses not to choose) it is not his desire that causes the act to be performed. What is new in the solution is that not every action of ours is driven by desire, while at the same time there are cases in which the responsibility is still ours (that is, it is not coercion). Again, this is a claim, not any change in definition.

Not exactly.
Desire is binary—either one wants or one doesn’t.
But what one wants—that is, the content of the desire—changes.
The intensity of the desire is part of its content, not part of the power to desire.
When I took it upon myself, I thought my desire was saying: “I will diet at any cost” (strong intensity), but at the moment of action it became clear that even back then I had deceived myself, and my desire had already been saying: “I will diet, but not if it becomes very difficult” (weak intensity).
Can’t this gap between my assessment of the content of the desire and its true content produce the feeling that the actual content is disappointing—that it is weak content?

It still sounds to me like wordplay and definitions. Because in the end you are standing before two paths and choosing *of your own will* to let automation act.
Maybe there is something I am missing here. I need to think about it some more..

After Heaven granted me the merit of independently arriving at the view of great authorities, I would like to raise a difficulty that, in my opinion, follows from the explanation proposed here for weakness of will.

According to the proposed explanation there are two kinds of regret: the first, regret of the kind of “a new face has come here,” meaning that a value-based or instinctive change occurs in the person, and the new person is one who would not have sinned. The second is the understanding that the act is wrong and that it was done through the sinner’s own fault. As we saw, the second type of regret can, in principle, exist even at the very time of the sin itself.
Regret is one of the conditions of repentance. But what kind of regret is meant? It seems that the second kind is not really an alternative. If we claim that this regret—which can in principle be felt even during the sin—is what is required for repentance, we get the absurd situation of “immersing while the creeping thing is still in his hand.” A sinner who feels, during the sin itself, weakness of will has in fact repented at the very time of the sin, and that does not seem plausible.

We are left, then, with the first type of regret. But here it seems that such a threshold requirement for repentance sets the bar too high. According to the analysis given in the article, the value-based/instinctive change required here is that the “psychological topography” be such that the next time a person encounters a similar situation, even if he does not activate his power of choice and remains on “automatic pilot,” he still will not sin. To me at least, that is an excessive requirement. Must we, in order to atone for a sin, change to such an extent that in the future a similar trial will not even arouse in us the slightest hesitation?

This turns “the Knower of secrets can testify about him” into a requirement even more demanding than it appears at first glance.

This really is just wordplay. What practical difference does it make whether this is the content of the desire or the desire itself? Bottom line: he wants to do X with intensity Y, and he did exactly what he wanted.
I repeat again that what you are describing is, at most, an intellectual failure and not a volitional-value failure. He simply did not read himself correctly. That is just a mistake, not a failure, and not a weak desire as opposed to a real desire. His real desire was weak, but that is precisely what his desire was.
Beyond that, if indeed that is what he wanted, then whence the disappointment? Disappointment is the result of a mismatch between something and what I expect of it. But if that is what I wanted, there is no reason to be disappointed.

The first type is not regret but a change of desire. Once I wanted X and now I want Y. Failure and regret are the situation in which, at the time of acting, I did not act in accordance with my desires and values.
As for regret as part of repentance, according to my view this is regret over having handed myself over to the topographical pattern and having let go of the reins. I did this because I did not place the possible consequences before my eyes. Next time I will place them before myself, and then perhaps I will not repeat this mistake.
According to Nadav’s suggestion (is that you?), this is character work done before the sin. So yes, a person is required to decide to improve his character traits so that in the future he will not sin. Not necessarily that he will carry this out (and it is also not clear that this can be carried out). Repentance is judged “as he is there.” By the way, this is not about a total change of the pattern that would cause me automatically to act correctly. It is about a change in the pattern such that it will not require such great effort from me (a lessening of the slope), and then I will not let go of the reins, but will decide to invest energy and climb the mountain.
By the way, in my article on repentance I touch on exactly this question and explain that this is the special grace involved in doing repentance (which by definition is impossible).

If I understand correctly, you are not proposing a practical solution, but merely returning to the model of body versus soul (what you cited in the name of the Tanya). The topographical model perhaps adds to the explanation of weakness of will, but in the end there was a body here that made a decision according to what was right for it, against the soul, which chose not to choose according to what was right for it. By the same token, one could claim that the body simply won the argument. From my experience, sometimes the body decides to climb the mountain in order to achieve goals of its own, so the argument that the person decided not to decide and let the topographical pattern decide for him does not always hold.

I will add thoughts that arose for me over the last year about the death of the evil inclination, following Ramban’s comment on the verse “days in which there is no desire” (since it is Shabbat Sukkot, after all). The evil inclination is not only a factor blind to the existence of the soul and acting for its own goals. Sometimes the evil inclination pokes a finger in the soul’s eye or does things against the soul. The evil inclination also becomes more refined over time and is no longer willing to want things it once would have wanted. The struggle of the evil inclination, or the body, with the good inclination, or the soul, causes the body to become aware of the soul’s goals. On the one hand, this awareness serves it in order to poke a finger in the soul’s eye, but it also changes the evil inclination, or the body. The body is no longer what it once was. Over time it internalizes the soul, even if only as a result of the struggle with it. The process will continue until the evil inclination dies and there will come days in which there is no desire. The goals of the soul will become the goals of the body, and the body will no longer have goals separate from those of the soul. This is in fact the World to Come as the Mishnah in Avot characterizes it—days in which there is no repentance and good deeds, because there is no room for the body’s sins and transgressions. All that remains is to enjoy the radiance of the Divine Presence. However, the sages already said that repentance and good deeds are better than all the life of the World to Come. Better to seize the opportunity and repent while repentance still has meaning, before the evil inclination dies and we are left only with the good inclination.

The line of thought is not complete. There are still aspects touching on female sexuality as it has been liberated in the sexual revolution that I am still pondering and that require clarification before we can claim that the evil inclination will finally die, but already now one can sketch initial outlines.

If I thought I wanted “to diet at any cost” and it turned out that I wanted “to diet only if it isn’t hard,” I can be disappointed that I thought I had reached a high level (in which by means of my will I bend the pleasant and enjoyable before the useful), but in practice it turns out that I did not really want that and remained on a lower level. (There is a certain side of a person by which he knows what the higher level is, even if he chooses to give lower considerations priority. That is not really contrary to premise 2, by the way.)
According to this approach, the feeling of “weakness of will” is not really literal; rather, it is more a feeling of sorrow that, contrary to what I thought my desire was, I actually chose a minimalist and lower-level decision and did not truly want to reach a high level.

I still haven’t understood your view, because a person is torn over whether to choose the hard path or to let go and allow nature to do its thing; these are two options standing before him, and whichever he chooses is still very much his own choice. Defining the decision to let go of the hard path as “lack of desire” is, on its face, just a game of definitions. Where exactly is my misunderstanding rooted?

I’m not Nadav but Phil. (By mistake I typed my name without switching the keyboard to Hebrew.)

I still haven’t fully understood your answer. If the regret is over having handed myself over to the topographical pattern, then regret of this kind can, as I claimed, exist even at the very time of the sin itself. Is it plausible that one could sin while at the same time repenting?

And if we are talking about the character work that precedes the sin, as Nadav suggested, then that belongs to the first type, which you define as a change of desire rather than regret.

I don’t know how you got here to body versus soul and everything that follows from it.
As I understand it, I offered a very good explanation and nothing is lacking. In situations where you think the explanation of the decision not to decide does not work, then apparently there is no justification for speaking of weakness of will there. I definitely agree that there are such situations, and I did not claim otherwise. What I claimed is that when there is weakness of will, this is probably the explanation for it.

Hello Rabbi!
Still thinking about the proposal…
Meanwhile it occurred to me that this is the distinction between sin and crime: sin is not taking hold of the reins and handing them over to the forces of the pattern, while crime is an active choice of sin, a choice in which, at the moment of committing the sin, there is no feeling of weakness of will…
And there is something else as well that I still need to think about and define.
I want to propose a small change… It’s not that the person “chooses” not to choose, because then the difficulty about that very choice immediately arises; rather, perhaps he does not choose to choose, and so he is handed over to the forces that pull him and choose in his place. It sounds like wordplay, but it seems to me that there is a fine point here. I mean that the state in which a person does not choose in his actions is a natural state that one need not choose—it is the point of departure that exists on its own whether he wants it or not. What stands before him is the possibility of changing the point of departure and choosing to choose… I basically want to remove the slippery concept of “choosing not to choose”…
You don’t need to activate the power of choice in order not to choose; it is something that happens anyway if the person does nothing…
I hope I managed to explain myself…
Happy holiday!

Roni, we are repeating ourselves. I already explained that your statements are meaningless in my view. If I thought I wanted the diet with great intensity and was mistaken, then I did not really want it with great intensity. And that is what I really wanted. So what is the disappointment about? Because now I do want it with great intensity? I already explained that disappointment and failure are supposed to refer to the moment of performance, not to now.
Replacing disappointment with sorrow changes nothing. There is no failure here. You are sorry in light of your current values, and therefore this does not explain why the act is considered a failure even in the circumstances that prevailed at the time it was done.

As for my view, your misunderstanding lies in the fact that you think that when I speak about a choice not to choose, I do not regard it as a choice. I agree: it is a choice in every respect. Where did I say anything else? On the contrary, that is my whole point.
But what stands here to be chosen is not whether to do X or Y, but whether to choose what to do or not to choose (to surrender to the pattern). And if I decided not to choose (which, as noted, is a full-fledged choice), this still means that I want to do X (if I were choosing). But it makes possible a situation in which I nevertheless do Y. Therefore such a situation explains everything: the feeling of failure, because I am responsible and not coerced, and at the same time I did not do what I did not want.

Regret in the sense of a feeling of failure can also exist at the time of committing the sin. It seems to me that this is an experience familiar to all of us. Repentance is drawing conclusions from that regret.
Character work done before the sin is of course not repentance. Where exactly did I say such a thing?

In the conventional sense, the difference between sin and crime is the difference between inadvertence and deliberateness. You are right that inadvertence is very similar to handing over the reins to the pattern (and therefore one brings a sin-offering, because there is a degree of negligence and responsibility here, unlike coercion). But my claim is that even a deliberate sin is such a case.

I am willing to accept your change. I did not enter here into the question of what the default is, and when I spoke of choosing not to choose, that certainly can also be non-choice (but one in which I have the possibility of doing otherwise, and therefore I bear responsibility for what I decided, whether actively or passively). Perhaps your distinction here is what differentiates between sin and crime: that a sin considered inadvertent is passive non-choice, while crime is choosing not to choose.

Even if you did not decide whether to reach for the cake, somebody decided to reach for the cake. Aside from electrical factors in your brain, there is no physical force in the environment that activated the muscles so that the hand reached for the cake. From what I understood, that is why you brought the Tanya’s discussion of the animal soul and the divine soul. Something in the body decided against your will to eat the cake. The topography only describes the factors that influence the body, but it cannot be understood literally as though the person were a stream of water moving between hills according to the topography.

It is not his body that is the stream of water, but his consciousness. His “desire” is not created by a decision, but handed over to the pattern.

The rabbi is right. My intention was to distinguish between rebellion and iniquity—that is, between sinning out of spite and sinning out of appetite.
Iniquity is non-choice (and of course I have the possibility of deciding to choose to choose, and then choosing good or evil…), while rebellion is an active choice of evil.
I did not quite understand the end of the rabbi’s remarks. If the default is that a person is led by the forces pulling him, what does it mean to choose not to choose actively? Or does the rabbi mean situations in which the forces pull a person toward the good, and the person actively chooses evil—but then that is not choosing not to choose, but choosing evil, what I called rebellion above.

I’m still not sure I understood you.
You wrote:
“And if I decided not to choose (which, as noted, is a full-fledged choice), this still means that I want to do X (if I were choosing). But it makes possible a situation in which I nevertheless do Y. Therefore such a situation explains everything: the feeling of failure, because I am responsible and not coerced, and at the same time I did not do what I did not want.”
If you chose not to choose, then what is the disappointment about? After all, that is what you prefer—to surrender to the moment. Do you mean to say that the disappointment is that the decision to surrender to the moment did not lead to the same result you would have gotten had you chosen to choose? Do you mean to say that the feeling of “weakness of will” is sorrow over the fact that one cannot keep a diet without resisting automatic nature? (I can understand such disappointment, but that is not “weakness of will”).

This is still a kind of dualism that is unclear to me: if consciousness flows, then what is the choosing factor that does not flow?

In this context I remembered something that may be related:
https://yuddaaled.wordpress.com/2018/07/09/%d7%a0%d7%98%d7%99%d7%9c%d7%aa-%d7%99%d7%93%d7%99%d7%9d/

I did not understand the solution. If the choice not to choose is not a failure, how can what follows from it automatically still be considered a failure?

In my humble opinion, the choice not to choose really is a failure. This choice is not really a choice to do what is right, but a choice to do what is easiest. That is, I do not accept the first claim that a person always wants to do what seems right to him in the balance of all considerations. He chooses not to choose precisely because he does not want to weigh what is right, even regarding the question whether it is more right to choose or not to choose. And likewise he does not weigh whether it is right to choose whether to choose or not, and so on.

Indeed, I meant this mechanism of the rabbi’s, and what I was talking about was another aspect of the matter. What the rabbi calls the topographical pattern I call a horse. That is, a person, in his body and soul—or his psyche and soul—is likened to a horse and its rider. At every given moment a person has the choice whether to take the reins in hand and direct the horse where he wants, or to let the horse gallop according to its “will,” in accordance with the laws of physics and biology dictated by the external environment and his internal instincts.

One can decide not to choose, and one can simply be dragged along. I am not sure that this difference is really important.

It is weakness of will because if I had thought about the outcome I would have decided to be a chooser. I decided to ignore the outcome.

The choice not to choose is a considered decision. But it was made when the result (what I would be dragged into doing) was not before my eyes. In the end I was dragged along, and I am to blame for that, and therefore there is failure here.
I understand your final formulation as a restatement of my proposal in different words.

The desire decides to paralyze itself (to become passive), and now consciousness flows and lets the environment push it wherever it happens to go. What now creates the commands to the limbs is not desire, but the environment, which directly activates those instructions.

Hello Rabbi Michael, greetings and a happy holiday.
Before I try to present a solution, I will present the problem as I understand it. (As you noted, it is very difficult to discuss such a complex question without a systematic presentation.)
Assumptions:
1. Every action our body performs has a cause; there is no randomness.
2. There are two types of causes that activate us:
A. Mechanical causes—causes in which our consciousness does not participate, such as the beating of the heart or breathing (or uncontrollable urges).
B. The conscious self activates the body out of awareness. Even in a state of strong urges (psychological topography, in your terms), it is not the urges that act, but the self that acts; the urges only enter the system of considerations of the agent acting out of awareness, and after weighing all the urges, the self acts consciously.
3. Only actions done out of awareness are considered voluntary actions.
From all this it follows that every voluntary action is always correct in the eyes of the agent, and therefore there is no place for feelings of guilt.
For: voluntary action = out of awareness; out of awareness = the conclusion of deliberation.
The statement “a person acted willingly while being aware that the action was not right” = “this person acted willingly while not wanting to act,” a statement containing an internal contradiction.
All of the above contradicts our basic intuition that we act in full awareness even though we recognize the incorrectness of the action, and therefore we feel guilt.

Your solution: our urges, our psychological topography, can activate us unconsciously, involuntarily; except that the willing and conscious self chooses to give the topography “permission” to act mechanically, without awareness, in our body.
1. Intuitively I cannot agree. I am aware that even when I act in accordance with my urges, I am the one acting in full awareness, I am the only one acting and not my urges. (“I and not an angel; I and not… a messenger.”)
2. Even if I agree that after giving the urges permission to act they act independently, the very act of granting permission is a voluntary act, and that permission is given explicitly to a specific urge at a specific time in a specific situation, etc. My consciousness recognized the propriety of a certain urge acting independently, so again we have returned to the original problem. (You addressed this problem; I only sharpened it by noting that the permission is not general but specific to a particular urge at a particular time in a particular situation, etc.)
Attempt at a solution: within our system of deliberation there are two separate systems of considerations:
A. Considerations of good and evil (morally right or not), considerations of beneficial and harmful (health-wise right or not), etc., etc.…
B. Considerations of satisfying urges, drives, and fears. For example: I long to sleep, but I am afraid of missing the prayer service because I would be embarrassed when entering the synagogue late.
I long to do something forbidden, but I fear the fires of Gehenna.
These are entirely separate and parallel systems. What is morally right is irrelevant to my urge-based considerations; the intensity of the urge will not change because of the moral judgment of the desired act, and morality will not change in the least because I have a strong urge to perform an immoral act.
Therefore, when we are in a situation where there is a conflict between urges and morality, we have no ability to perform a weighing that arrives at the conclusion of “right” or “not right.” There is no such thing as a weighed desire that includes moral and instinctive considerations. Something can be morally right but instinctively not right, or instinctively right but morally wrong. We have two parallel paths and we must choose with whom to go. Therefore, when we choose the urge, even though morally it is not right, we are acting with full awareness and full desire, but we are aware that it is not morally right because the instinctive urge did not morally legitimize the situation, and that is why feelings of guilt arise.

Hello Rabbi. I enjoyed the solution very much, except that one difficulty remains for me:
At the stage of the challenge, in the third premise you assumed that there is regret, and the basis for this premise was the basic human feeling. And here is the question:
In my humble opinion, a person also feels regret over acts in which he does feel that he chose, but chose incorrectly. If so, why is there such regret?

I did not understand the two difficulties you raised regarding my proposal. But beyond that, it seems to me
that in your proposal you are reverting to the (mistaken, in my opinion) description of weakness of will in Wikipedia: a person indeed did what he decided, but because his inclination overcame his morality he has a feeling of failure. But if he decided on his act, then that was what he wanted. So where is the failure? It is only an illusion of failure.
What you wrote, that there is no bottom line of all the considerations, is just semantics. You do not explain why he acted as he did: do you think he did not weigh the urge and the values and arrive at a weighted decision? So why did he do it? Was he coerced? That is not failure. And we have returned to the same difficulty.

If there really is such a feeling (and I am not sure there is), then it is necessarily not failure in the sense I defined, but a change of desire: it is looking at the act that was done in light of the new desire I now have, where of course there is no fit (nor should there be). This is disappointment with the outcome, not with the mode of action.

I would like to raise another point—actually, another proposed solution:
If we assume a new premise: every person has an inner point of truth—one may call it a soul and the like—and it is a kind of gift from God that is supposed to guide his life, and in fact all his decisions ought to be aligned with that point.
If we say this, perhaps it would also resolve the contradiction: true, the person chose the consideration that seemed right to him at the moment, as in premise number one, but the consideration “forgot” to take into account that inner point of truth within him, and afterward the person feels a contradiction between his inner world and what he in fact chose—and that is the regret.
(I sense that the rabbi wants to avoid this kind of explanation, and I would be glad to hear why.)
Thank you

I’m not avoiding it. I just think it isn’t correct.
Adding this inner point, even if it exists, adds nothing to the discussion. At most it points to the source of our moral/halakhic decision (or conscience). But from there on, everything remains as I described: from the totality of considerations I arrived at a decision and that is what I did. So what is the feeling of failure about? And if I was coerced, then again there is no failure here.
What you are proposing is a feeling of failure because the inclination overcame morality (or what is proper). That is the standard description of weakness of will for everyone, but I already explained that this does not solve the problem (that is exactly how Wikipedia described it).

I understand what you are saying (I think).
But that still does not justify a feeling of guilt. True, you are responsible for the outcome, and true, the outcome is contrary to what you would want to happen, but your feeling of guilt is unjustified because in such situations you really do prefer to choose not to choose, and you acted according to your preferences.

The difficulties raised by Yaakov M. are completely real, and I also completely agree with the first difficulty: a conscious person is not a ball. As long as he performs some active action, it necessarily follows that he decided to perform it—whether he decided to study deeply the meaning of the action, its morality, and its implications, or whether he decided to go with the flow and do it without too much thought; in any case, he and he alone decided to perform the action (I am speaking about active doing and not passivity, where there are indeed cases in which he does not choose the matter).
The second difficulty he presents you addressed yourself, and did not solve, but in fact it is the other side of the coin of the first difficulty: the choice not to weigh the value of the act but to do it without too much thought is a choice in every respect.

The solution, as I understand it, is that since weakness of will is a subjective feeling of the person and not an objective reality, one can בהחלט say that a person decides, in principle, to mark certain acts as proper and desirable (morality, diet, etc.) together with a measure for all of these, and when he prefers to perform an action that contradicts his principles, he is sorry about it.
I think this is what Rambam means in the Eight Chapters, that the human soul is one—that is, all the functions of the soul (intellect, emotion, desire, and imagination) converge into one entity that decides what to use at any given moment. Therefore there is no obstacle to a person wanting to perform an action that, in his understanding, he ought not to perform, and therefore he has feelings of guilt over it.

I will explain myself: there is an assumption in the rabbi’s words that the feeling of failure stems from doing an act without first weighing what is right. I am trying to challenge this—that perhaps even when there is prior weighing, as long as it ignores my inner point, it will arouse the feeling of failure.

This is the difficulty because of which I myself hesitate about this solution, and I wrote it in my post. But as stated, I tend to think that it does solve it, because although I preferred not to choose, not at any price. The consequences were not before my eyes. If they had been before my eyes, I would not have decided not to choose. Except that I myself hid them from my eyes, and therefore I am not coerced regarding this.

I understood completely, and I do not agree that it solves the problem. I wrote why.

I can only repeat what I wrote. I never claimed that this is not a choice in every respect. It is indeed a choice, but I hid the implications from my eyes, and that is the failure (if they had been before my eyes, I would not have done it).
Your proposal was written in the post, and I rejected it. It is basically exactly the description in Wikipedia: you explain that he acts with full choice against his values out of interest or inclination. I explained why I think that is not correct.

Directly upon what? On the hand? On consciousness? On desire?
On the hand—it makes no physical sense.
On consciousness—we are back to dualism (consciousness and desire).
On desire—we are back to the paradox.
In short, your solution did not solve the problem in my view, or it added nothing to the previous solutions (dualism).

The solution I propose, if I am not going in a dualistic direction, is that in weakness of will a person succumbs to the imagination that he is a mechanical creature incapable of overcoming his impulses. That is, I change the first premise. A person does not always do what is right in his own eyes. A person does what is right in his own eyes in accordance with his self-image of what a human being is. A person who has a mechanical self-image will choose actions that serve that mechanical self-image. A person who has a self-image of a being with choice will choose actions that serve what is right in his eyes according to his will.

The first difficulty I raise about your solution was described well by hag; I will try to sharpen it further.
The essence of your solution, as I understand it, stems from the assumption that an action driven by the psychological topography is an action without my awareness and desire, and one that does not arise from deliberation, and therefore the categories of right/wrong do not apply to it. I cannot accept this assumption, because even when I am drawn after inclination I am aware that I am the one acting with full awareness and full desire.
Regarding my proposal, you comment that this is only semantics, since in the end there was a decision—either from an inclusive weighing, in which case the outcome of the weighing is that the act is right, or the inclination overpowered the intellect, in which case it is coercion.
I will sharpen my proposal again. What I chiefly want to say is that there is no ability to weigh separate systems of considerations such as “good and evil” together with “desirable and undesirable.”
The fact that in the end there was a decision is not because there was a weighted result here, but because I chose to go after a certain system of considerations. That is the point of choice. Even in your view, choice is not a system of considerations but the starting point. If at the very point of choice itself there is a consideration, then there is no choice here; there is only deliberation.

I do not understand the difficulties you raised. They were all explained well.
As for your proposal, where is the guilt here? The failure?

But then the question arises regarding the choice to choose. If the person wants to activate choice with sufficient intensity to overcome the mountain that has been created, then why did he not activate it? And if he does not want to, then no wonder he failed.

You are speaking about choosing a particular act, and I am speaking about a state of choosing in general.

I see, but then the question arises: why did he not activate the choosing state at all?
If he wanted to activate it and nevertheless could not, that proves he has no choice.
And if he did not want to, then he should not be surprised that he failed.

He did not activate it because he wanted to “rest.” What is the question? He is not surprised that he failed; he is sorry that he failed.

Hello.
The question that arises for me is whether, at that moment of throwing off responsibility and abandoning free choice, that person does not already know what he is going to choose. If so, it is clear that the proposal is not a solution, and personally it is hard for me to think of a situation in which I did not know what was going to happen, as though someone else had performed the action.
In any case, without having read the previous post either (so if there is nothing new here just ignore it), I think the solution could be based on “everything is in the hands of Heaven,” like the case of Pharaoh. That is, clearly every person has free choice, and most of us are capable (once in a while) of making the surprising move—that move we did not expect ourselves to make—but usually that does not happen. Usually—at a level of almost no free choice. Yet the choice whether to believe is given into our hands at every moment (and the actions we perform strengthen or weaken the choice in either direction of the faith vector, just as one mitzvah leads to another mitzvah, etc.). I do not know whether this really solves the problem; I just think it expresses (at least for me) the mechanics of sin and repentanc

It is less guilt and more shame. Most of the time we like to see ourselves as beings with choice, and then at the moment of action we are revealed as mechanical beings. It is a very shameful moment, after which a person wants to bury himself. All the grand talk turns out to be empty, and the person just looks for a corner in which to hide his disgrace.
Who understands the calculations of Heaven? And seemingly, from things you wrote, a person could deny free choice and claim that a person is compelled by his inclination (coerced, in the formal halakhic sense). And still, most of us believe in free choice, and when the body behaves mechanically against our will, I am filled with shame.

Usually he does know, but he ignores it. He hides the consequences from himself and behaves as though that is not what is on the table.

That does not explain weakness of will.

Shame is not weakness of will, since it is done from the perspective of now. Therefore it is not a solution, but simply a denial of the condition of weakness of will.

Then I probably did not understand your words. As I understand it, this explains things in a way similar to the rabbi’s, except that instead of that throwing off of responsibility from oneself, there is a basic root of believing or not believing. After the decision (which does not stem from the evil inclination) whether to believe or not, the act becomes almost deterministic. (And this is in fact exactly throwing off responsibility, because it is not likely that the bottle will flow upstream without an external force such as choice.) The regret is the feeling about the lack of faith that dragged you into sin.

If I understood correctly, then when a person returns and sins, he is already coerced according to the rabbi’s model, the opposite of Aristotle’s famous statement that the drunkard who gets himself into sin should be treated with extra severity. It seems a little illogical to me to say, on the other hand, that every sin is the state of Israel on Carmel—a deed lacking choice.
Another point (and perhaps flowing from this): why not simply erase the first claim and say that desire does indeed determine the act, but not always—meaning that it is not true that what seems right to a person is what he wants to do.

You write

“This is indeed a choice, but I hid the implications from my eyes and that is the failure (if they had been before my eyes, I would not have done it).”

First of all, factually that is not correct. A person on a diet has pangs of conscience even if, when he ate the cream-filled snack, he was fully aware of the implication for his diet. More than that, I find it hard to identify cases in which a person was not aware of the additional aspects of his choice, whether it was a moral wrong or a transgression. Do you really think that at the time of performance the person momentarily forgot those aspects??
In addition, the problem is that since this is the person’s choice, what room is there for pangs of conscience? The same issue applies equally to the formulation you propose: a person who by choice decided not to consider the implications of the act but to do it here and now will bear the consequences of his choice, and his conscience ought not to trouble him for not examining the act.

I lost you. If you are explaining things as I do, then what is the discussion about?

I emphasized that for me these two stages do not come one after the other. They can occur synchronically. The person averts his eyes from the implications, even though in the background they exist, and thus allows himself to sin. It is like a person who jumps into a pool from a great height with his eyes shut so as not to see. He of course knows the depth and is afraid of it, and yet shutting his eyes helps him perform the action. Therefore, in my view there is no coercion here at any stage, but the blame is at the initial stage (letting go of the reins).

You can erase any one of the three claims; the question is what is more plausible and what is less so. I explained why it seems more plausible to me to erase the second rather than the first.

I deny the reality the rabbi raised—the reality in which you stand on the side and let reality decide. I have not experienced such a reality, and therefore I doubt whether it even exists. What I am proposing is similar in result, but for a different reason. The reason is that those sins originate in lack of faith, but their operation is carried out in a way that borders on determinism with respect to our ability to predict the outcome. In this way, the reality in which I stand on the side and choose not to choose does not exist. What does exist is a reality in which I stand before forces so strong that it is hard for me to resist them, and all of this because of my lack of faith at that time. I do not want to do the act, but the reality I created almost completely prevents me from being able to resist. The feeling of anguish and sadness stems from my state of awe at that time

1. But how would you interpret the saying of the sages: once a person has committed a transgression and repeated it, it becomes to him as permitted? For if only in the first sin the person let the ball start rolling, how can one say that with respect to the later times it is not that same first sin?

2. How does your claim about the charted middle way fit with the outlook that one mitzvah leads to another mitzvah and one transgression leads to another transgression? It seems that the rabbi’s definition fits more with the Mishnah about idleness leading to sin.

3. And in fact the rabbi explained how a person can commit a sin, but how does this still solve our whole experience of struggle or hesitation and then finally acting? Why is there hesitation at all? When will we know that a person who ate failed and did not struggle, and when did he choose not to choose at all? In what way will he be considered coerced, and when will he be considered merely inadvertent (if deliberate sin has already been determined in the first choice, animal soul)?
Thank you, Matan

Lack of faith is a vague term. Unless you clarify it, you have not proposed a solution. You believe less? Then again you did what you wanted. That returns us to the first proposals, which I explained are not a solution.

1–2. I see no problem at all. But even if there were a problem, it would not bother me. I proposed a solution to a philosophical question, and fitting it to the sages neither adds nor subtracts.
3. I already explained several times that these are not two temporally successive stages. I do not see the problem with hesitation. The hesitation is whether to be a chooser or not.

Let me ask again, with your permission. If we connect your words with the previous post on repentance, it follows that the penitent sinned by once acting on automatic, and his repentance is to act like the righteous person—from deliberation and choice. If so, how do you attach so much importance to the whole process of the penitent if what he manages to achieve is exactly the same choice and action as that of the righteous person who did not sin?
I think that only if we take into account the fact that a person has conflicting desires can we solve the problem and say that a person sins because he does not always actualize his desires. But two processes do not always happen non-simultaneously; they can indeed happen at the same time. Yet when we look at human beings from an overhead perspective, how can we ignore the fact that we are influenced by previous acts we have already done?
I would be glad to hear your response

I did not understand the difficulty. My claim is that the process of repentance has value in itself. Working on returning to being a chooser (as well as being a chooser) has value in itself. That is in addition to the value of the specific choice you make and the value inherent in being a chooser.
If a person has conflicting desires, that may solve problems for you (which in my opinion do not exist), but it does not explain weakness of will.

I admit I have not checked this enough, but it seems to me that one can solve the problem of “weakness of will” if we assume that claims A and B (that a person wants to do what seems right in his eyes, and that in the absence of constraints he does what he wants) refer to the act itself, except that in actions of “weak” will, “a person performs an action that he himself thinks is ‘not right’” because of the results it will bring about, and therefore the feeling of guilt also comes.
I’m just throwing this out as a direction, and it may be possible to translate your proposal into these terms…

As for your point, if he does something for the sake of the result, then that is what he wanted to do (in order to achieve the result). I do not understand what is new here.

I thought about the rabbi’s demand that I clarify the term. As I see reality, there is a basic choice whether to believe in the existence of the Creator or not. That choice is disconnected (at least initially) from any involvement of the evil inclination. So what is the reason not to believe at the beginning? In my humble opinion, there is no essential reason (almost anyone is capable of both states; the main point is that people choose options simply because they can). After that initial choice, human beings tend to act in accordance with that choice, and at every given moment return, with feedback from their actions, to that choice of faith. When a person who chose to believe commits a sin, he also weakens his freedom of choice in the choice of faith, and as a result the person is dragged into a reality in which it will be hard for him to guard himself from sin. Throughout the deterioration, the person suffers and feels bad as a result of his actions because of that basic choice of faith. When does he stop feeling bad? When, on that question of whether to believe or not, the scale tips more toward lack of faith (which now can be the result of that feedback). So according to this, the action I performed was not really done by my free choice (great strength or heavenly assistance is needed to get out of the cycle), but the choice to believe still exists in me and causes suffering in me. It is still fresh and not especially well thought out, but this is how it is beginning to become clearer to me.

I did not understand a word. And it is also hard for me to discuss time spans this large. But if it has become clear to you—then excellent.

Eli—
What do you think about the following solution:
First of all, one must distinguish between a natural desire (appetite) and a desire to desire (real desire). Returning to the example of diet and cake: let us say that the person wants (craves) the cake, but he wants to want to diet. The difference is that it makes sense to say that he does not want to want to eat the cake; that is, he would agree, for example, to take a pill that would cause him to stop wanting to eat cake, but clearly he would not agree to take a pill that would cause him to stop wanting to diet.
The desire to desire can become an ordinary desire through the exercise of free choice. To the extent that a person decides, by free choice, to invest more mental effort, he can turn the desire to desire into a greater ordinary desire.
If the person succeeded in translating the desire to desire into a “stronger” desire than his appetite, then he will act according to what seems right in his eyes.
Regarding Donald Davidson’s claims, let us say this:
– A person has a real desire to do what seems right in his eyes, where what seems right in his eyes is determined according to all considerations except appetites.
– A person exerts mental effort in order to turn a real desire into an ordinary desire.
– The person will act according to his refined desire, which equals the desire that is the result of exerting mental effort on the real desire, minus the natural desire.
– Weakness of will occurs when the person did not exert enough mental effort to overcome the appetite.

Rabbi Michi—
I do not understand what “wants to want” means. Wants to crave? If so, what have you gained? If he wants to crave, then that is a desire. If not—then there is no desire here, and why would he do it? It seems to me this solves nothing.
The correction you proposed to Davidson says that desire is everything except appetites. Then why does he follow the appetites, if he does not want to? Again, in my opinion you have solved nothing.
By the way, there are posts here on weakness of will, and it would have been worth posting this there.

Eli—
It seems to me there is a problem here of definitions, so I will try to sharpen the concepts. When I said “ordinary choice,” or “appetite,” what I would now like to define as “impulse,” and appetite, for example, is an instance of a pure impulse. When I said “desire to desire,” I would now revise that and say hopes/dreams/the person’s true desire.
I claim that a person can turn his true desire into an impulse by exercising free choice. The more mental effort a person exerts, the more he can turn his true desire into a stronger impulse.
A person does not necessarily do what he wants; rather, he does the sum total of all his impulses.

Again, I do not see here a solution to the question. Why should I care whether you want to have some impulse or not? The important question is what causes you to act on it: either it is coercion (the impulse compels you, and an impulse cannot be conquered), in which case you are exempt; or it is what you want/choose to do, in which case you acted according to your desire. It is impossible for you to act without this being your desire. That is the difficulty, and you did not answer it.

I claim that there is no room to speak of conquering impulses. Just as the sum of the forces on a body determines its acceleration, so the sum of the impulses on a person determines his behavior. Except that we have the ability to convert our true desire into an impulse by means of a new actor called mental effort. The more mental effort one exerts, the more the true desire becomes a greater impulse. If one exerts enough, it overcomes the other impulses and we do what we want. Otherwise, we do not do what we wanted, and we feel disappointed. That is weakness of will. The reason this is not coercion is that we could have exerted more mental effort, and we chose not to. And presumably you will ask me: if we wanted that, why didn’t we exert more mental effort? The answer is that it is hard to exert mental effort, and that is what we work on in the process of repentance—how to exert more mental effort so that we can do what we really want to do.

You are already circling back to my solution.

Blessed be He who directed me aright 🙂

Hello.
I just read the articles, and I feel I did not understand.

The rabbi himself raised the difficulty that seemingly we have only moved one step back: one can still ask why the person chose to throw away the reins and not choose.

The rabbi answered that he had momentary comfort. And that is what he really wanted.

But I do not understand—so what?

Even in that momentary comfort he knew that it was not right to put himself in a state where he was not choosing.
So why did he do it if he was not coerced? Or else he did want it.

I explained that he did not choose to do X, which is bad in his eyes, but chose not to choose and hid the implications from himself. A person is a complex creature. Clearly, in such a case he bears responsibility for what he did, but there is no case in which he chooses directly an act that he does not want to do. Sometimes it is convenient for a person to be led rather than to lead (himself), and he ignores the implications. It seems to me that we are all very familiar with such situations.

But the contradiction still remains.

Since when he chose not to choose, he knew that in truth he wanted to choose and not to put himself in a state without choice?

There is no contradiction here at all. He wanted to enter a state without choice, and he entered it.

If so, then he wanted not to choose more strongly!

The rabbi asked how every act of choice is itself unintelligible.

If the intellect pushes more strongly, it should win.
And if desire or emotion, or whatever we call it, is stronger, then that should win.

And if it is fifty-fifty, then a person should not do anything.

What is the answer to that?

How does the act of choice take place, and how does freedom of will exist?

We are repeating ourselves. I already explained.

But why did I choose to hide the consequences from my eyes? Because I weighed all the considerations of whether to hide the consequences from myself or not, and I decided to hide them. It is infinite. Any answer we give, in which the person chose something, he chose it because he weighed the considerations whether to do it or not, and the considerations guided him to act as he did.

You are begging the question. It seems to me I explained this in the post (I no longer remember). I did not weigh things. My inclination influenced me, and I yielded to its influence by hiding the consequences from myself.