The article attempts to clarify the problem of defining an action through ethical optics. Ethics is understood as a system of principles relevant to action. As Agamben has shown, the rules permit objectifying the ego and neutralizing the flow of life as forma vitae. From this perspective, the pragmatics of the subject is not merely a set of practices for self-management, where the most important task is complete control; it is instead strategies for the self-organization of a form of life through a rule which makes sustainability the main goal. The main difficulty in the pragmatics of the subject in this connection is dealing with akrasia. Akrasia is understood not as weakness of will but as heterogeneity in it, a lacuna or violation of the intentional structure of action in which the subject can both want and not want to act, or want to act in several directions at the same time in the sense introduced by Jon Elster. The article argues that the adaptation model of subject pragmatics, understood as a system of auto-references mediated by a rule is very similar to a cybernetic approach. If we compare Gregory Bateson’s The Cybernetics of “Self”: A Theory of Alcoholism and René Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy, an unexpected convergence appears. Bateson explains the effectiveness and sustainability of self-management in Alcoholics Anonymous groups by their use of the cybernetic principles of feedback, complementarity, and communication with the external. The rules for guiding the mind that Descartes introduces in his Meditations can be seen as principles for the subject’s self-government that enable escape from akrasia between doubt and faith not as modes of thought but as modes of will. Cartesian deduction and justification of rules follow the path outlined by Bateson: complementarity, feedback, and establishing a relationship with the external. The concept of akrasia can elucidate the way in which self-management and Descartes’ cogito ethics in a sense anticipate cybernetic governance models. This connection also explains why the ethics of the cogito and the pragmatics of the subject have been the most enduring features in the theory of the subject and are still standing after the onslaught of intense criticism from its opponents.