Incontinence (philosophy) - Later Developments

Later Developments

For Augustine, incontinence was not so much a problem of knowledge (knowing but not acting) but of will: he considered it a matter of everyday experience that men incontinently chose lesser over greater goods.

In Dante's Inferno incontinence manifests itself as "a Leopard, nimble and light and fleet", representing the self-indulgent sins of the first circles of hell. The mutual incontinence of lust was for Dante the lightest of the deadly sins, even if its lack of self-control would open the road to deeper layers of Hell.

Akrasia would thereafter appear as a character in Spenser's The Faerie Queene, representing the incontinence of lust, followed in the next canto by a study of that of anger; and as late as Jane Austen the sensibility of such figures as Marianne Dashwood would be treated as a form of (spiritual) incontinence.

With the triumph of Romanticism, however, the incontinent choice of feeling over reason became increasingly valorised in Western culture. Blake wrote that "those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained". Encouraged by Rousseau, there was a rise of what Arnold J. Toynbee would describe as "an abandon (ακρατεια)...a state of mind in which antinomianism is accepted – consciously or unconsciously, in theory or in practice – as a substitute for creativeness".

A peak of such acrasia was perhaps reached in the 1960s cult of letting it all hang out – of breakdown, acting out and emotional self-indulgence and drama. Partly in reaction, the proponents of emotional intelligence would look back to Aristotle in the search for impulse control and delayed gratification – to his dictum that "a person is called continent ot incontinent according as his reason is or is not in control".

Arguably, however, irrationality continues to play a major part in what have been seen as the incontinent voices of postmodern discourse.