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I've been reading Bernard Williams's remarkable book Shame and Necessity, a study of agency and responsibility in Greek tragedy and how these concepts relate to our own. (Williams's style is a model of lucidity, the English philosophical style at its very best.) One topic in the book (pp. 44-46) is the notion of akrasia, unhappily translated as either "weakness of will" or "incontinence" (!), about which there is a vast scholarly literature. (And a computer model!) I had a sort of Proustian moment as I was reading these pages, since the original topic of my dissertation was going to be "akrasia and rhetorical theory." I was fascinated at the time (1973-1976) with two things: 1) the debate over predestination and election in Christian theology, with specific reference to the debate on this topic within Lutheranism (which never quite made up its mind) and within the Calvinism/Arminianism controversy--all of which turns on the notion of human agency and the will, and 2) the apparent absence of a strong sense of the will (knowing what is good, but choosing evil instead) in ancient Greece--leading to Socrates's seemingly odd statement that "virtue is knowledge," or knowing the good and doing it are the same thing. The fact that Augustine both had a strong sense of predestination AND wrote a Christian rhetoric seemed like an interesting tension or contradiction in his writing.

Tom Farrell then came along and directed my attention to the Frankfurt School, and David Zarefsky did the same with the New Left historians of the Cold War, so I decided (did I?) to take a different scholarly path, one I don't now regret. But still, I wonder if I might have had something intelligent to say on my original topic. Seems like a good thing for me to work on in retirement, should that ever come along. But how about you, dear Readers? Was there an original scholarly passion you had that got deflected along the way?

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