"The man who was almost a man" speaks of Dave, who had conflicts with gaining recognition and respect, because he was young. He wanted to grow up and become a man. For this he bought a weapon, thinking that it would make him grow as a man. Seeking power, he buys this weapon, to feel powerful, unstoppable. All these conflicts of the dave age led him to make some bad decisions. The story well specifies this when he accidentally shoots a mule, and he cannot sustain the excuse he made up for it, and when he decides to take a train and go to a city where he would be able to man up.
He relies on experience and is too focused on senses. Plato says the senses are very unreliable.
Aristotle suggests that the morally weak are usually young persons who lack the habituation to virtue that brings the passions of the soul under the internal control of reason. According to Aristotle, like sleepy, mad or drunken persons who can “repeat geometrical demonstrations and verses of Empedocles,” and like an actor speaking their lines, “beginning students can reel off the words they have heard, but they do not yet know the subject” (NE 1147a19-21). A young person, therefore, can “repeat the formulae (of moral knowledge),” which they don‟t yet feel (NE 1147a23). Rather, in order to retain knowledge when in the grip of strong passions, Aristotle asserts that, “the subject must grow to be part of them, and that takes time” (NE 1147a22). Avoiding moral weakness, therefore, requires that we take moral knowledge into our souls and let it become part of our character. This internalization process the young have not had time to complete.
If moral weakness is characteristic of the young who have not yet taken moral knowledge into their souls, thereby allowing them to temporarily forget or lose their knowledge when overcome by desire in the act of moral weakness, it would seem that Aristotle‟s account of moral weakness does not in fact contradict Socrates‟ teaching that no one voluntarily does what they “know” to be wrong. Virtue does in fact seem to be knowledge, and, as Aristotle asserts, “we seem to be led to the conclusion which Socrates sought to establish. Moral weakness does not occur in the presence of knowledge in the strict sense”
