Dennis Des Chene
Experience makes its mark on us in many ways. It leaves traces; it instills habits. A trace, as I define it here, is a quality of the soul or mind which is distinguished by its content. Aristotelian species and Cartesian ideas are traces. A habit I take, following Suárez, to be a quality of the soul which assists in the acts of a power of the soul, enabling them to be performed more easily and promptly. I will use the Latin word habitus for habits so understood.
This chapter examines the fate of habitus in early modern philosophy. In comparing just two authors, Suárez and Descartes, it can only suggest, schematically, how that fate is to be understood. My suggestion is that the role of habitus in Suárez’s psychology is occupied in Descartes’s by association, understood mechanistically, and by resolution—the mind’s act of binding itself to be guided by certain judgments. These, being acts of will directed toward ideas, are traces rather than habits.
No doubt the history is not so simple as this contrast makes it appear. Already in Suárez and Descartes, we must complicate the scheme: in Suárez’s case, by the fact that some habitus seem to be expressible as rules, and in Descartes’s by phenomena resembling the Suárezian habitus, in particular the readiness and ease with which certain judgments are said to be made or recalled. Nevertheless, I think the scheme offers a useful first approximation to the early modern history of habit.[1]
For philosophers now, the interest in the discussion is twofold. The first is that the problems to which the concept of habitus was a response are still with us: learning includes the acquisition not only of knowledge but of skill, and skill includes not only the bare how-to but also readiness and ease in use. Suárez’s discussion, like those of his Scholastic predecessors and contemporaries, offers a subtle analysis of habit in relation to the acts and powers of the mind; even after the Aristotelian framework itself has been discarded, it remains the case that the ambit of psychology includes if not habitus itself then at least the phenomena that habitus was intended to account for. Moreover, the treatment of habit in contemporary philosophy of mind tends to ignore the phenomenology that habit was meant to explain or to subsume it, insofar as it concerns intensity, under something like degrees of belief. In my view treatments of action and belief would benefit from the study of the work of Suárez and his contemporaries on habit.
In the Disputationes metaphysicæ, Suárez devotes a number of disputations to the Aristotelian categories, one of which is quality. Following Aristotle he divides quality into four kinds, the first of which consists of habitus and dispositio. Dispositio, which will become a key term for Descartes, is the “order of a thing having parts,” either actual, as in the case of something beautiful, or virtual, as in the order of virtues in the soul.[2] Habitus is first defined briefly as “a form which confers ease and promptness of operation,” and later more precisely as “a species of quality proximately ordered to assisting a power in its operation.” He takes note of but sets aside a broader sense of the term, found in Thomas for example, according to which habitus denotes any quality which disposes a thing well or ill in its esse (42§3no4, 26:611).[3] In this sense, but not in the stricter sense, health is a habitus.
Habitus in the stricter sense is of two sorts. Those of the first sort are required by a power in order that it should be conjoined with its objects. Intentional species are “like the seeds or instruments of objects by whose means they conjoin their virtue with the cognitive powers” of the soul; by their means alone are acts of sensing, remembering, and so forth possible. Suárez mentions these only to set them aside; they have been discussed in his De Anima.
Habitus of the second sort, though not required for the operation of a power, determine the manner of that operation. They are invoked to explain how it is that certain acts become easier and quicker to perform through repetition. We learn not only by acquiring species representing the things we know; and not only by combining representations in various ways so as to make judgments and demonstrations; we learn also by practice, we acquire skills. In what follows habitus denotes only the second sort of learning.
The essence of habitus is to assist in the operations of a power. Suárez argues that to do so a habitus must be stable (and thus distinct from the operations themselves, which exist only so long as they receive the “actual influx of the soul”: 44§1no6, 26:665), and it must inhere in the power itself, from which it is nevertheless distinct (since a soul can have the power without the habit).
Habitus need be invoked only to explain only the operations of those powers which exhibit some latitude in their operations, some indifference or indetermination. The acts of inanimate things are determined entirely by their powers and the objects they act on; nothing additional is required to explain either the act or its manner (no10, 666). It follows that the only powers of the soul in which habitus occur are the will and the intellect, and with them the sensitive appetite and the imagination or phantasia in those creatures that have will and intellect. The will is evidently free; the intellect is indifferent in its operation when evident cognition is lacking or when the relation between premises and conclusion is hard to follow, as in mathematics. Appetite, insofar as it can be governed by will and reason, must also be supposed to exhibit indifference. When, for example, the human good runs contrary to what the senses delight in, habitus may intervene so as to decide in favor of one or the other. For similar reasons, the imagination is said to be capable of acquiring habits.
Higher animals, or bruta, share with humans the faculties of appetite and imagination. It might be thought that they too can acquire habitus. After all, “sometimes an animal by performing several acts [of the same sort] acquires a facility or virtue for judging an object, concerning which it has no innate virtue or natural instinct” (44§3no1, 26:669). Augustine speaks of “custom” (consuetudo) among the beasts (83 Quæst., no. 36); Thomas says of animals that some sort of habitus can be attributed to them (Summa theologiæ 1pt2q50art3). Suárez argues that because in animals appetite and imagination are always entirely determined by their objects, there is no need to suppose that those faculties can take on habits. They no more need habits than a stone does in order to fall. What seems like habitus is merely a “firmer adherence” of the phantasma or species in the imagination. That, together with the object, determines the action of the animal (44§3no4, 26:670).
Habitus, then, are qualities of those powers of the soul which, because their operations are not entirely determined by their objects or by extrinsic causes, require something additional to explain certain aspects of those operations. That I am capable of judging whether two plus two is four follows from my having an intellect; but that I can do so quickly and easily follows from my having acquired the science of mathematics, and requires a new principle of explanation. That new principle is required, however, only in humans.
Practice makes perfect: habits seem to be caused, and Suárez holds that they are caused, by acts of the sort they assist in causing. Not only that but they are strengthened by repetition of those acts, and weakened if we cease to perform them. The role of repetition in forming habits, and the role of idleness in weakening them, both require explanation.
The cause of habitus is its corresponding act. That much was common ground. The precise nature of the effects of habitus, and likewise of their causes, was disputed. I will take as given Suárez’s conclusion that the effect of a habitus is the act it assists in, and not merely a mode of that act. The cause he also takes to be the act. The act functions as an efficient cause, and not, as Durandus thought, as a disposing cause, nor as Buridan thought, as the via by which the power in which the habitus inheres produces it (44§8no4, 5; 26:682).[4] In response to certain difficulties about the causation of the qualities of a thing by that thing’s own acts, Suárez draws on arguments made elsewhere in the Disputations, according to which an immanent act (which is the only sort at issue) is at once an actio (in the categorical sense) of its power and a qualitas. Acts by which habitus are produced do so by virtue of being qualities (44§8no13; 26:684).
It would seem that we have mutual causation of act and habitus. We might see here a positive feedback loop, especially since repeated acts can strengthen a habitus, and thereby incline the corresponding power more strongly to perform them. The eventual result would be that the power would always be inclined by habitus to the highest degree. To remove that difficulty Suárez notes that the habitus alone is never the sufficient cause of acts; it only assists the power in producing it.
The role of repetition. Experience seems to tell us that habits are acquired only by repeated acts (by consuetudo, custom). Aristotle in the Ethics says that virtues are acquired through teaching and experience, and that it takes time to acquire them. Yet that does not seem possible. If one act won’t do, then neither will many. The force of one could be multiplied only if several occurred together. But they do not. Even a virtuoso cannot perform the same piece twice at the same time. Thus it would seem that habits cannot be acquired at all.
Suárez, following Henry of Ghent, effectively turns that argument on its head. If a first act does nothing to alter the power that produces it, then a second act, confronted with a power still equally “indisposed” to being affected by it, will likewise accomplish nothing. But since acts do induce habits, we must conclude that by just one act a habit may be effected (44§9no6, 26:687).
Nevertheless practice does make perfect. We know from experience that habits can increase both in intensity and in breadth. A habit is more intense insofar as it inclines its power more strongly and to more intense acts; it is broader insofar as it assists in acts toward a greater range of objects. Charity properly nurtured not only becomes more intense, but also extends from the love of God to joy in the goodness that proceeds from him.
In general the intensity of a habitus corresponds to the intensity of the acts that cause it. Like Thomas, Suárez holds that the intensity of a habitus can be increased only by more intense acts. If sometimes we observe that acts of equal intensity make a habit more intense, that is because an act does not always bring about a habit whose intensity corresponds to its own. There may be, for example, in the power a tendency contrary to the habit—a relish for food, for example, which is contrary to temperance. Or else the power itself may resist alteration by an act by virtue of its indifference and “the inclinations it has toward other acts or objects” (§10no13, 693). Indifference, in other words, gives rise to inertia in the taking of habits.
The increase of breadth of habits becomes for Suárez the occasion for examining the “celebrated question” of the unity of habits (§11no9, 26:696). First of all, even if increase of breadth can sometimes be explained by supposing that some habits are complexes of qualities, to which more can be adjoined, still we must eventually arrive at qualities which are simple. Suárez holds that those simple qualities must themselves be habits (no23, 701).
How, then, is it possible for a simple habit to be extended to several objects? It can be if those objects all share the same “formal reason,” or if they are all connected by necessity so that “one is virtually contained in another” (no27, 702). If justice applies to a great many objects, and if it is simple, Suárez’s account directs us to look for a single formal reason under which all objects of justice can be subsumed; this turns out to be “saving the equality of each person in his possessions.” Or again since from love there follows, if the thing loved is absent, desire, and if it is possessed, joy, all those qualities of the soul, insofar as they are habitus, are “rooted” in the single habitus of love (no31, 703).
Just as habits grow through use, they decay through disuse. Because Suárez, in agreement here with Thomas, holds that everything, quantum est ex se, “postulates its own conservation,” and because habits, unlike acts, do not depend on the actual influx of their cause to exist, the cessation of acts cannot by itself be the cause of their decay. It is at most the occasion (44§12no4–11, 26:716–17). In general qualities are corrupted by their contraries; here habitus are corrupted by acts inconsistent with them, or (in the case of imagination and appetite) by the deterioration of the organs their powers require in order to operate. The cessation of the acts that brought about the habitus originally merely leaves the way open for corruption to occur; left to itself, the habitus will remain, in its final intensity.
Habits for Suárez are qualities of powers. They perfect those powers both by virtue of completing the determination of acts, and—when they are good habits—by virtue of inclining those powers, which may otherwise be indifferent, toward the ends for which those powers exist. Our appetite is, sadly, often indifferent as between the healthy and the harmful; its end, all the same, is to operate so as to promote health and other things beneficial to us. Temperance in appetite leads us to perform more easily and promptly those acts which are in fact beneficial.
Nevertheless habits do not represent the objects of the acts they assist in causing, nor the ends promoted by those acts. Considered in itself, a habit is merely the readiness to perform acts of a specific sort, and the acquisition of a habit, though integral to scientia (in the case of intellectual habits) or to acting morally (in the case of moral habits) is not the acquisition of any sort of intentional state. It is an instrument by which intentional states are translated into acts.
If in matters of explanation your instincts are Cartesian, you will be dissatisfied with the preceding. Explanations deal, you will say, in mechanisms and laws. Suárez has given us at best a description of the phenomena to be explained, and conceptual arguments showing how it is possible, for example, given what habitus and acts are supposed to be, for a habitus to be intensified by repeated acts. The only glimmer of an explanation is in Suárez’s treatment of animals, when the “firmer adherence” of the species in memory is said to explain the greater ease of action acquired through practice. It is not my purpose here to adjudicate between styles of reasoning in natural philosophy, but only to consider how Descartes, with his conception of explanation, treats some of the phenomena adduced by Suárez.[5]
The first steps toward the mechanization of habit are taken in the Treatise on Man. In its treatment of memory, phenomena which are also characteristic of habit are explained in terms of the motions of the animal spirits in sensation and their lasting effects on the brain. The animal spirits that issue from the pineal gland enter the nerves through pores in the interior surface of the brain, which is composed of fibers with intervals between them. By virtue of their motion, the spirits have sufficient force to “enlarge these intervals a bit, and to fold and dispose in various ways the small fibers they encounter in their paths.” They trace figures “which are related to those of the objects” of sensation, and as time goes by they do so better and better, “accordingly as their action is stronger, and lasts longer, or is more often repeated” (11:178). By that means the figures thus created in the brain are “in some manner conserved”, and can continue to direct the animal spirits so as to leave impressions on the gland even when the action of the object on the senses has ceased. The fibers acted on by the spirits acquire a disposition “by means of which they can be more easily opened” than before. Descartes compares the surface of the brain to a piece of cloth pierced by needles; even if the holes made by the needles close up, still they leave “traces” in the cloth which make the holes easier to open (179).
Association. By this means also the association of images can be explained. If two holes have been opened together several times, and if they “do not have the custom” of being opened separately, then they will both open even if only one of them is acted on by the animal spirits. This “shows how the recollection of one thing can be excited by that of another which was previously impressed on the memory at the same time.” Descartes later explains what we would call involuntary recollection in the presence of those movements of the spirits that account for the passions: the “humors” whose varied movements cause in us various passions point the pineal gland in various directions. If in the part of the brain toward which the gland is directed, “the figure of some particular object is impressed much more distinctly than any other,” the gland cannot but receive the impression made on it by the spirits when they encounter that figure (184). If several figures are impressed in that place, the gland will receive the impressions of all of them, in part or in whole; by this means the “creativity” of the imagination is explained. Thus the indeterminacy or indifference of imagination, on the basis of which Suárez holds that imagination can take on habitus, is merely apparent. It is an artifact of ignorance. Imagination, considered as a corporeal power, has no habitus.
What applies to memory applies more broadly to the acquisition of habits in animals—that is, to learned regularities of behavior. In a letter of 1646 to the Marquis of Newcastle, Descartes, responding it would seem to the citation of Montaigne and others according to whom animals have thought and understanding, briefly explains how animals can be taught to utter words “even though those words or signs need not be related to any passion” (21 November 1646). A magpie that has learned to say hello to its mistress when she arrives, has been made to connect the utterance (prolation) of the word to one of its passions, namely the “movement of hoping to eat”; this association will have been produced by giving it some morsel whenever it says hello in the right circumstances. When Descartes speaks here of hope, he means not a mode of thought or a passion properly speaking, but rather the movements of the animal spirits that in both humans and animals characteristically accompany the passion (Alquié 3:695).
Setting aside the question of whether these are fully mechanistic explanations—Descartes was content with them—what we seem to have is a transposition into more or less mechanistic terms of the doctrine by which Suárez explains the acquisition of traits of behavior in animals. The difference is that force by which memories are made to adhere, as Suárez puts it, more or less firmly in the brain is just what Descartes in his physics calls the quantity of motion. And though the figures created in the brain by sensation and passion have no intentional objects, and cannot be said to “intend” anything, we may attribute objects to them on the basis of their causal role in producing or being produced by thoughts in the mind.
Suárez and Descartes agree, though for different reasons, that animals have no habitus.[6] Suárez holds that in humans imagination and appetite, though corporeal, differ specifically from their analogues in animals, and admit of indifference; habitus is then invoked for them as for will and intellect to complete the determination of their acts. Descartes effectively denies that there is a difference; in humans too, imagination and appetite are corporeal, and exhibit no indifference.
Humans certainly acquire habits in the broad sense. The question is whether in Descartes’s psychology there is any need to suppose that habitus in Suárez’s restricted sense are required to explain the phenomena, and in particular to explain regularities in behavior.
Association again. It is clear, first of all, that some acquired traits can be explained by an extension of association. In animals, association occurs between impressions in the brain. In humans, some “corporeal actions” are joined with thoughts in such a way that to each action there is a corresponding thought which will occur on the occasion of that action. The Meditations argue that God has instituted certain relations of this sort so that from the thoughts produced by certain movements, actions will follow that help preserve the union. These relations are innate.
But we also have the capacity to acquire such relations, whether involuntarily through experience or voluntarily through practice. In the Passions, by way of explaining why love is joined with a “gentle heat in the chest” and with improved digestion, Descartes notes that certain experiences can give rise to enduring relations between corporeal actions and thoughts, and indirectly between one thought and another. Those who have “taken with great aversion some beverage when they were sick cannot eat or drink anything afterward which has a similar taste without having the same aversion; nor can they think of the aversion one has to medicines without having that taste return to their thoughts” (PA art107, 11:408; see also art136, 11:428–29). So too when the soul was joined with the body, the first passion it experienced occurred when it encountered “a foodstuff more suited than usual” to maintain the heat of the body, and thus preserve it. The soul thereupon loved that stuff; at the same time the spirits flowed from the brain toward the muscles, which in turn caused the stomach and the intestines to send more of the same stuff toward the heart. The relation that occurred on this occasion between bodily movements and love, and so also those movements, has since then “always accompanied the passion of love.”
Intensity. We can also control the intensity of our passions in various ways. New objects, or those that seem to us new, give rise to movements of the spirits in proportion to their novelty. To the force of those movements there corresponds a greater or lesser intensity of wonder. Sometimes wonder is excessive, and leads us to esteem objects more than they deserve. In general wonder decreases with repeated exposure. But if it leads us “to fix our attention only on the first image of the objects presented” to the mind (art78, 11:386), then it “leaves behind a habit (habitude) which dispose the soul to fix itself in the same way on all the other objects presented to it, provided that they appear even a little bit new to it.” An excess of wonder, and the stronger fixation of attention that follows from it, can lead to a habit of seeking novelties, an addiction one might say to wonder.
Wonder normally gives rise to a desire for knowledge of its object, and knowledge brings about a decrease in wonder. The habit of excessive admiration would amount to nothing other than the abnormal absence or weakness of that desire. But we might then ask whether combatting excessive wonder requires the formation of a habitus toward that desire—a thirst for knowledge, a greater readiness for inquiry. Descartes suggests that those people are given to excessive admiration who, though they have a sufficiently good common sense, nevertheless do not “have a great opinion of their sufficiency” (suffisance), or in other words who are diffident about their ability to acquire knowledge (art77). The natural condition is to have the desire to knowledge, with an intensity proportionate to the perceived novelty of the object. The habit of excessive admiration arises from a judgment that inhibits that desire. Given that judgment and the other qualities of mind required for wonder, we have all we need to explain the susceptibility of such people to wonder. It would seem that there is no need to invoke habitus.
The role of judgment. Judgments, then, can control the occurrence and the intensity of passions. In his “general remedy for the passions,” Descartes summarizes the means we have to attain mastery over the passions. The “easiest and most general remedy” for excess of passion is “to remind oneself that everything which is presented to the imagination tends to deceive the soul and to make appear to it reasons that serve to persuade it [to act on the object of the passion in accordance with that passion] stronger than they are, and those that serve to dissuade it weaker.” On that basis we should will ourselves to “consider and follow the reasons contrary to those that the passion represents,” even if they seem weaker (art211, 11:487). To moderate excessive desire, for example, we should consider that only our own thoughts are truly within our control; that judgment will tend to diminish the intensity of desire by putting its objects beyond our certain grasp (art144–46, and already in the Discours).
Judgments of this sort, which I will call resolutions, are clearly not habitus. They have intentional objects; they are traces rather than habits in Suárez’s sense. As in the case of excessive admiration, to explain the facility of the mind to have various passions, and the intensity of those passions, we need only invoke the circumstances of their production and the judgments by which they are controlled.
In Cartesian natural philosophy, intensities, if not reducible to force—that is, to quantity of motion—present a problem. Even in his psychology I think Descartes would have preferred to avoid reference to them. Habitus, whose task in Aristotelian psychology is to explain certain intensities—promptness, facility—attributable to the operations of certain powers of the human mind, is therefore to be avoided also. I have suggested that it is to be supplanted in two ways: first, by reference to physical structures like pores, and flows, whose perfectly respectable modes (figure and size in one case, speed and volume in the other) can be recruited to the task of explaining the phenomena previously explained by invoking habitus; second, by reference to resolutions, that is, to certain sorts of judgment.
Nevertheless there remain in the Cartesian setup certain ineliminable intensities—that of desire, for example—which cannot be entirely reduced to flows or to cognitive acts. In particular the dimension of weakness or strength of minds, in the face, say, of the tendency of wonder to bring about its own repetition, must be regarded as a feature of the mind not yet amenable to science.
Des Chene, Dennis. Physiologia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996.
———. Spirits and Clocks. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001.
Shapiro, Lisa. “What Do the Expressions of the Passions Tell Us?” Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy 1 (2003): 45–66.
Suárez, Francisco. Opera omnia. 28 vols. Paris: Ludovico Vivès, 1856.
Sutton, John. Philosophy and Memory Traces: Descartes to Connectionism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
———. “Porous Memory and the Cognitive Life of Things.” In Prefiguring Cyberculture: An Intellectual History, edited by Darren Tofts, Annemarie Jonson, and Alessio Cavallaro, 130–41. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002.
1. An earlier version of this paper was given at the conference “Transformations of the Soul,” Humboldt University, Berlin, November 2006, organized by Dominik Perler.
2. On dispositio, see Dennis Des Chene, Physiologia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996).
3. All references to Suárez are to the Opera omnia (Paris: Ludovico Vivès, 1856). The Metaphysical Disputations, first published in 1597, are included in volumes 25 and 26 of the Opera. References will be to disputation, section, and numbered paragraph; and to volume and page.
4. See Durandus, In Sent. 3dist33q2, and Jean Buridan Comm. in Ethicam 2q3.
5. On memory and traces in Descartes, see especially John Sutton, Philosophy and Memory Traces: Descartes to Connectionism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), and “Porous Memory and the Cognitive Life of Things,” in Darren Tofts, Annemarie Jonson, and Alessio Cavallaro, eds. Prefiguring Cyberculture: An Intellectual History (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002).
6. On Descartes’s physiology and its relation to the passions, see Dennis Des Chene, Spirits and Clocks (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Universiry Press, 2001); Lisa Shapiro, “What Do the Expressions of the Passions Tell Us?” Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy 1 (2003): 45–66.
Peter S. Fosl
While articulating his distinctive “solution” to the doubts of skepticism, a solution better understood as an embrace, Hume famously writes in Section 5 of the Enquiry concerning Human Understanding (1748) that “Custom, then, is the great guide of life.”[1] In the paragraph just preceding this remark, describing the great guide and how it leads us to think, feel, and judge in spite of the corrosive force of skeptical reasoning, Hume finds it suits his purposes to alternate “custom” with “habit”:
This principle is CUSTOM or HABIT. For wherever the repetition of any particular act or operation produces a propensity to renew the same act or operation, without being impelled by any reasoning or process of the understanding; we always say that this propensity is the effect of Custom. (EHU 5.1, p. 37)
This essay undertakes to explore the meaning of habit and custom in Hume’s thought and do so with special attention to the way this central feature of his work informs what might be called Hume’s critical philosophy. By “critical” philosophy, I mean both the sense in which Kant later used the term “critical,” to explore the limits of reason and the conditions of possibility for thought and action per se, but also something of the way “critical” has gained currency in political projects like “critical” race theory, as well as moral and aesthetic criticism and “critical theory” addressing the reading of texts. In other words, I wish to explore the load ideas of “custom” and “habit” bear in undertaking Humean forms of criticism. Consider first a number of salient qualities of habits and customs.
If nothing else, habit and custom are temporal. They require repetition across time, and they require those repetitions to count. Habit and custom become what Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002) calls “effective” in the sense of making it possible to appropriate historical meaning in new acts of meaning and understanding. Indeed, Gadamer calls the way historical meaning makes possible new ways of thinking and acting, “effective history” (Wirkungsgeschichte).[2]
Customs and habits in this sense largely constitute what Hume calls “common life,” and customs of this sort are necessary conditions of conceptual thought. As Hume tells us in A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–1740), that repetitions can be made effective through the mind’s capacity for finding resemblance underwrites the very possibility of thinking through general concepts and, in our language, using general, abstract terms.[3] In repeatedly applying a general, abstract term (for example, “book”) to a number of resembling particular experiences, we come to apply the term to new ones, as well as to the proper recollections.
In Hume’s account, when we encounter a word functioning as a general term, the mind recalls one of the particular instances named by the term, but also something else. In addition, the mind recalls or, more precisely, “revives that custom” of relating the initial perception to a specific group of other perceptions (Treatise 1.1.7, 19). In other words, the use of abstract, general terms is made possible through (1) an idea associated with that term plus (2) a habit or custom of relating that idea to others. It is not too much to say, in this Humean sense, that general concepts and general terms as they are effective in language themselves are species of custom.
As Donald W. Livingston has rightly argued, ideas per se, for Hume, are also themselves historical.[4] In Hume’s well-known formulation, ideas are “copies” of impressions that temporally precede them; and to understand an idea by rooting it or comparing it with the impressions from which it derives is an historical process, a kind of Humean conceptual archeology.[5] General concepts, as well as the ideas of individuals, then, are not only temporally composed of habits; they are also themselves historical artifacts, and apprehending the meaning of ideas is an historical project.
In this way, of course, Hume’s idea of custom labors in service of the early modern nominalistic project of displacing Platonic and Aristotelian theories of “form” (eidos) that had dominated much of the ancient and medieval worlds as the ground of thought in general and general terms in particular. The reorientation had preceded Hume, and his work caps in many ways nominalist, empiricist, and naturalist streams that stretch back to the ancient world.
For Plato, the meaning of general terms (e.g. “dog” or “good”) is grounded not in the many individual, particular objects of perceptual experience to which such terms refer but to transcendent “forms” that exist independently and in important ways beyond the world we perceive. For Aristotle, forms do not exist in a transcendent way, beyond the phenomenal world, but certainly remain independent of thought and language.
Ancient “atomism” and “skepticism,” however, develop alternatives to metaphysics and semantics grounded in forms, alternatives that resurface in modernity in the work of thinkers such as Pierre Gassendi, Galileo Galilei, and René Descartes. What philosophers have come to call “nominalism” during the Middle Ages advances the critical work of the ancients by exploring theories of cognition and meaning not dependent upon the independent existence of forms. Modern naturalists and empiricists—including Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, George Berkley, Joseph Butler, and Francis Hutcheson (all influences on Hume)—labor to articulate philosophical theories using terms defined more or less strictly by just the observed natural order, minimizing the explanatory role of things divine, transcendent, or otherwise unobservable.[6] Hume takes up and radicalizes the naturalistic, empiricist, and nominalist streams that preceded him, reconceiving, diminishing, and in some cases thoroughly excising not only “form” but also time-honored theoretical posits such as “substance,” causation, and “God,” as well as the realist pretensions of natural science. Hume, however, more radically and more systematically than those from whom he draws, situates thinking, acting, and meaning in a temporal and historical way.
While Hume follows other nominalists, empiricists, and naturalists in arguing that the “many” phenomena of each of the various kinds we encounter are not so because they are metaphysically rooted in “one” distinct metaphysical form (transcendent or immanent), he exceeds them by recognizing that it is our customs and habits, and not simply experience and our natural cognitive faculties, that do the job of collecting and cementing individuals into types. In other words, for Hume the many individuals of any specific kind are gathered under a general concept or term through the temporally and logically prior existence of a custom—that is, through the prior existence of repetitions of cognition, thinking, speaking, writing, and otherwise doing that renew themselves. These habits are themselves certainly underwritten and modulated by what Hume calls natural “principles of association.”[7] But without the linking work habit achieves over time those associations could not come to build and structure our effective historicity.
One might say then, anticipating the historical philosophies of the century that would follow him, as well as recent phenomenological and deconstructive critiques of “presence,” that Hume replaces the presence of both eternal Platonic and Aristotelian forms, as well as the presence of positivist sense data, with effective customary history across a temporal horizon that is not fully present—in other words, with habit. The universal is grounded in the particular for Hume through habit.
Hume observes, in fact, that “the far greatest part of our reasonings, with all our actions and passions, can be deriv’d from nothing but custom and habit” (Treatise 1.3.10, 81). But perhaps the best known among the habits of reasoning Hume describes is the habit of causal inference. After repetitions of experiencing one set of impressions that are both spatially contiguous and temporally successive in a regular way—in Hume’s terms as a “constant conjunction”—we come to feel a sense of “necessity” to their contiguity and succession such that the appearance of the one we call a “cause” brings to mind the expectation that the other, which we call the “effect,” is sure to follow, and to follow necessarily (Treatise 1.3.2). “Our idea, therefore, of necessity and causation,” writes Hume in the first Enquiry, “arises entirely from the uniformity, observable in the operations of nature; where similar objects are constantly conjoined together, and the mind is determined by custom to infer the one from the appearance of the other” (EHU 8.1, 63). Reason may be, in Hume’s famous phrase, “the slave of the passions” (Treatise 2.3.3, 266), but the passions are articulated and shaped by custom and habit.
Discursive reasoning of all kinds, then, depends upon habit, and habit leads us beyond ourselves, to the belief in a world that extends past our field of perception, to a past that extends beyond our memory, to others and to a self that we fictitiously think endures (Treatise 1.4.6, 170; EHU 5, 43). “All inferences from experience, therefore, are effects of custom, not of reasoning” (EHU 5.1, p. 37). In the Treatise Hume affirms: “Now as we call every thing custom, which proceeds from a past repetition, without any new reasoning or conclusion, we may establish it as a certain truth, that all the belief, which follows upon any present impression, is deriv’d soley from that origin” (Treatise 1.3.8, 72).
Søren Kierkegaard’s character Constantin Constantius, so compelling in his meditations on “repetition,” is from a Humean point of view, then, only in part right when he argues that it is through repetition that the self is maintained and that the universal can be reconciled to the particular.[8] Repetition does so, says Hume, not when it is resolute, the result of existential choice, but when it becomes habitual, customary, and historical.[9] And repetition becomes habitual, customary, and historical for Hume only through the possibilities of our humanness we find ourselves bound to—the natalities and fatalities of our human nature. That is to say, habits are a kind of human mimesis; or, rather, habits mimetically repeat human existence. Ideas for Hume are “copies” of “impressions,” but each new iteration or repetition of a habit in a sense also copies prior manifestations of that habit. So, habits are in a sense not only mimetic copies of the world as we experience it but also mimetic repetitions of ourselves as composites of prior and continuing habits.
Along just these lines, Kierkegaard’s Constantius argued that unlike Platonic “recollection,” repetition is forward looking: “repetition and recollection are the same movement, except in opposite directions, for what is recollected has been repeated backwards.”[10] And for Hume repetition that achieves the standing of habit and custom, or anyway emerges as habit and custom, is always and already forward looking, turning us toward a future that we expect will resemble our present as well as our past, grounding a belief in the uniformity of nature now, beforehand, and henceforth, leading us, for example, to believe, with characteristically Humean optimism, that the sun will rise tomorrow (Treatise 1.3.8, 73; EHU 4, 24).
In this sense of the always already forward-looking repetition of the past and our selves, habit functions as something like the Humean a priori—or what philosophers have come to call the toujours déjà, the immer schon da. It is not resolute choice or the temporal, projective existentialia of Dasein, according to Hume, that carry us from the present into a meaningful future on the basis of the historical past. It is, rather habit and custom that do so, the same sorts of habit and custom that in part compose what Hume calls common life.[11] Hume writes in the Treatise:
The supposition, that the future resembles the past, is not founded on arguments of any kind, but is deriv’d entirely from habit, by which we are determin’d to expect for the future the same train of objects, to which we have become accustom’d. (Treatise 1.3.12, 92)[12]
In this sense, human reasoning depends upon the prior historical ground of habit and custom. So, in a sense prior to all judgment, for Hume, lies the prejudice (or pre-judgment) of habit. Joel Weinsheimer finds a similar implication in Gadamer: “The startling consequence Gadamer draws is this: prejudices, which from the viewpoint of Enlightenment rationalism appear as obstacles to understanding, are historical reality itself and the condition of understanding it.”[13] In their function of underwriting standards of judgment, habits also approximate what Alasdair McIntyre means by “practices.”[14]
Moral judgments, unsurprisingly, depend for Hume upon custom and habit. Moral judgments apply to people’s character, but character is manifest in habits of conduct. So, moral judgments not only depend upon habit and custom but are about them. Moral judgments exhibit remarkable variation across time, space, and culture, too. Hume’s short essay, “A Dialogue,” appended to the second Enquiry, the Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals (1751), outlines how, among other things, what passed for morally proper conduct among the ancients would to moderns seem incestuous and murderous.[15] Variations, in fact, according to Hume, “are the natural effects of customs” (EPM, 121). Aesthetic pleasures are, for Hume, variable and shaped by custom, too.[16] Accordingly, writes Hume in his essay, “The Sceptic”: “You will never convince a man, who is not accustomed to Italian music, and has not an ear to follow its intricacies, that a Scotch tune is not preferable.”[17]
While, however, the habits of moral judgment exhibit substantial variation, the habits of sociability and discourse that expose us to the thoughts and feelings of others generate a countervailing effect and even bring us, according to Hume, to relatively impartial standards of moral judgment. As John P. Wright articulates Hume’s theory: “it is by constantly exposing our feelings to the feelings of others, and by hearing their judgments even in those cases which directly concern us, that we reach an impartial moral point of view.”[18]
Hume announces in a section of the Treatise entitled “Of the Effects of Custom,” that “nothing has a greater effect both to encrease and diminish our passions, to convert pleasure into pain, and pain into pleasure, than custom and repetition” (Treatise 2.3.5, 271). Custom and habit render various ways of thinking and feeling easy, agreeable, strong, and durable—constitutive of what Hume calls “calm passions” (Treatise 2.3.5, 271). The calm habit of mind characteristic of philosophy in particular (unlike the enthusiasm-generating habit of religion and “false” metaphysics) “insensibly refines the temper, and it [philosophy] points out to us those dispositions which we should endeavour to attain, by a constant bent of mind, and by repeated habit.”[19]
Habit, however, for Hume not only shapes the character traits of emotion, passion, and sentiment. Habit and custom also sculpt the dispositions and inclinations of will and conduct: “Custom has two original effects upon the mind, in bestowing a facility in the performance of any action or the conception of any object; and afterwards a tendency or inclination towards it, and from this we may account for all its other effects, however extraordinary” (Treatise 2.3.5, 271). But while custom renders feeling and acting easy and familiar, it can also intensify them. Custom can diminish the force of those feelings, beliefs, and practices to which people have little adherence (what Hume calls “passive habits”), but it can also reinforce beliefs and practices strongly embraced (“active habits”).[20]
Indeed, in an important sense, habit and custom exist only insofar as they exist in act and in conduct. It would be simply incoherent to say, “I am in the habit of X, but I no longer do that.” In fact, the very meaning of breaking or letting go of a habit (habit literally means “to hold”) is that the act is no longer performed. The intelligibility of the world, therefore, for Hume depends not only upon the propositional states we occupy but also upon our conduct in the world, our continuing historical actions in both word and deed.
As deed habit is more than a mental condition, state, or disposition. Habits are embodied. But as the loci of habit, bodies are also more than physical states, more than biochemical composites, and more than the particular causal sequences of any given moment. Our bodies are the sites where the historical sediment and accretions of many streams of culture, society, and civilization intersect and transect. Our bodies enact and are enacted by the intersections of the habits composing—among other lines of custom—race, class, gender, religion, taste, and the complex transactional bundle of habits composing identities. In this sense, too, our bodies are for Hume ideological.[21]
Habits, of course, can be broken; but to recognize this is also to acknowledge that habits are variable and contingent, fragile, and uncertified by anything beyond themselves. The contingencies that pervade Humean philosophy are what Gilles Deleuze recognizes as connecting Hume’s thought with his own. They are what, in Deleuze’s view, make both him and Hume “empiricists.”[22] Along similar lines, habits are what Stanley Cavell would call “unsponsored” dimensions of ordinary life.[23]
The variability and contingency of custom and habit does not mark, for Hume, however, a distinct boundary between judgments of natural science and those in morals and aesthetics. Through habit and custom as a prior condition of their possibility, judgments in morals, aesthetics, and the sciences share a common ground. Judgments in natural science vary over time, too, and what counted as scientifically uncontroversial among medievals became no longer so among moderns. Galen’s (129–c. 217 CE) theories of bodily humors and animal spirits endured in the habits of medicine for well over a thousand years—but they are now almost universally rejected. Indeed, as Hume writes in “The Standard of Taste”:
Though in speculation, we may readily avow a certain criterion in science and deny it in sentiment, the matter is found in practice to be much more hard to ascertain in the former case than in the latter. Theories of abstract philosophy, systems of profound theology, have prevailed during one age: In a successive period, these have been universally exploded: Their absurdity has been detected: Other theories and systems have supplied their place, which again gave place to their successors: And nothing has been experienced more liable to the revolutions of chance and fashion than these pretended decisions of science. (Essays, 242)
Among the characteristics of habits and customs Hume acknowledges, we also find that they may be either individual or collective.[24] When habits do become social, they produce conventions that, like sympathy, make it possible for people literally to come together (“convene,” literally meaning to come together) and overcome the separateness of persons that underwrites skepticism with regard to other minds. Hume’s parable of two rowers (Treatise 3.2.2, 315) exemplifies people who take up forms of conduct without verbal consent or argument but nonetheless are able to convene and achieve coordinated action. Without any scientific analysis of space and time, agency, transportation, water, and without the need of any formal agreements, contracts, or promises, the background conditions composed of habits of thought and action make it possible for people to sit down next to one another and pull against oars in coordinated ways, to in-habit forms of life that are aligned and in agreement.[25]
Tying this all together, then, we find that custom and habit comprise for Hume not only repetitive, social as well as individual, temporal-historical-embodied acts that compose character, shape pleasure as well as judgment, and ground the practices of rationality. We also find that habits and customs are variable and contingent.
The contingency of habits and customs lies at the heart of Hume’s philosophical program, and it underwrites especially his skeptical criticism in a way that precedes both analytic and continental critiques of rationalistic attempts to ground science, morality, aesthetics, and politics in the necessities and certainties of reason.[26] In every context, Hume’s critical agenda repeats itself along this formulation: “when we pass from the impression of one to the idea or belief of another, we are not determin’d by reason, but by custom” (Treatise 1.3.7, 97). Not belief in the causal connection, not the discursive connections of deduction or induction, not our conviction in the external world or the continuing existence of objects beyond our perception, not our moral judgment or our regard for the feeling and position of others, not our standards of taste, not our inclinations to believe in things supernatural, not the agreements that ground society and social conventions—none of these for Hume are ultimately grounded in reason. Indeed, for Hume, without custom reason is unable to establish even its own warrant.[27] Contrary to Samuel Clarke and the deists, contrary to the Cartesians and Spinozists, contrary even to the Newtownians and Lockeans, for Hume it is not reason but habit, custom, and history that ground our lives and their intelligibility. It is through habit and custom that we in-habit a meaningful and intelligible world, populated by people like ourselves. In this sense, habits and customs compose what Heraclitus called the ethos of our lives, the topoi or places of our thinking, speaking, acting, and meaning.[28]
That Hume holds our lives to be grounded in habit, custom, and history has led a number of commentators to misunderstand him as a deeply conservative traditionalist thinker of the same stream of thinking that produces Edmund Burke (1729–1797) and Michael Oakeshott (1901–1990).[29] In Laurence Bongie’s phrase, for example, Hume is the “prophet of the counter-revolution.”[30] Donald W. Livingston’s Philosophical Melancholy and Delirium (1998) and Hume’s Philosophy of Common Life (1984) pursue a similar reading. This interpretation in my view, however, misunderstands the normative power of Hume’s thought and rests on a fallacy of false alternatives.
Sir Leslie Stephen accused Hume of a “cynical conservatism.”[31] But the reading of Hume as a conservative traditionalist is earnest, and turns upon the way Hume refuses what Donald W. Livingston calls “political Cartesianism,” a view of philosophical activity as operating from a commanding, detached position that has transcended the “gross earthy mixture” (Treatise 1.4.7, 177), as Hume calls it, of “common life,” in particular human custom.[32] According to Hume in Livingston’s reading, “false” and pathological species of philosophy pretend to have completely transcended the customs of common life, acquiring what Nagel has called a “view from nowhere,” absolute autonomy and independence from history, culture, and opinion as well as its own overriding authority to pronounce judgments upon common life.[33] False philosophy and religion, in fact authorize in their mad “philosophical melancholy and delirium” (Treatise 1.4.7, 175) totalized judgments, judgments legitimating the wholesale overturning of the beliefs and practices of custom and history in favor of the ideal “plans of imaginary republics” purportedly spun from free-floating philosophical reason. In precisely the same way, Descartes announced that he was “razing” the whole of his past beliefs in favor of what his detached and solitary cogito—with its self-generated, self-verifying method—would establish.[34] Criticizing the political culture that put Charles I to death, Hume complains that theology and metaphysics of this pathological variety had corrupted and rendered dangerously malignant the ordinary worlds of politics and even commerce: “inquiries and debates concerning tonnage and poundage went hand in hand with . . . theological or metaphysical controversies” (History, 334).[35]
Although they are wrong in describing its implications, Livingston, Bongie et al. are right in their description of Hume’s critique of false philosophy, religion, and metaphysics. Humean skepticism does refuse the pretense of metaphysical claims about the causal connection, the external world, God, morality, and the self. In his trenchant claim that consent to agreement already presupposes the prior existence of society, Hume attacks social contract theory, the darling of political liberals and Whigs, in its attempt to establish rationally the basis of state and social authority (Treatise 3.2.1–11).[36]
Hume does argue that long possession and even conquest can be sufficient to establish sovereign authority over territory (Treatise 3.2.8–9). Hume refuses the existence of Lockean natural rights, grounding social relations instead in sympathetic and sentimental concord and secondarily on instrumental and deliberative rationality. Moreover, although Thomas Jefferson misunderstood Hume as a Tory, he properly understood that Hume’s History of England does not portray Charles I as a simple tyrant or follow a Whiggish historiography that posits an ancient constitution and charts the unfolding of liberty from the Magna Carta, or even prior to it in Anglo-Saxon social practices, through the English Civil War. Instead, Hume works to understand historical figures in their own context, in terms of the values, ideas, and rationality available to them at their time and not by timeless and placeless standards of judgment.[37]
The traditionalist and conservative reading of Humean philosophy, however, runs aground on the insistence with which Hume’s work advances reformist and even progressive ideas. Hume’s own political positions seem inclined in progressive directions, and the implications that may be drawn from his theory are in many ways even radical. Hume’s Natural History of Religion, his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, and various among his essays launch devastating criticisms of the false philosophies of both modern rationalistic religion and traditionalist religious enthusiasm, offering a naturalistic account of the development of religious belief and devastating criticisms of theistic teleology, intelligent design, immortality, providence,[38] and prohibitions against suicide.
Unlike the views of then-contemporary religious conservatives, Hume’s moral theory is naturalistic and Ciceronian. In a letter to Adam Ferguson he explicitly rejects popular Christian virtue, explaining that: “Upon the whole, I desire to take my catalogue of Virtues from Cicero’s Offices, not from the Whole Duty of Man. I had, indeed, the former Book in my Eye in all my Reasonings.”[39] Hume’s Treatise and Enquiries reject Christian values and character traits like humility, poverty, and meekness.[40] Hume articulates cutting-edge naturalistic accounts of mind, political theory, and epistemology. He generates critical norms militating against traditional beliefs and prescribes evidentiary practices like proportioning belief to the evidence, disciplining our causal judgments (Treatise 1.3.15), guiding the “general point of view” in our moral and aesthetic judgments (EPM 4, 407; 2.2.5, 362), as well as progressively configuring the architecture of the state to diminish faction (e.g., “On the Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth”). A supporter of American independence and the aspirations of the Glorious Revolution, Hume in his essays condemns slavery (e.g., “Of the Populousness of Ancient Nations”); and he praises emerging liberties of thought and publication (“Of the Liberty of the Press,” “Of Civil Liberty,” and “Of the Independence of Parliament”). More generally, Hume also supported the development of new economic relations and the newly developing natural and social sciences (e.g., “Of Commerce”). It should be unsurprising then that Hume’s essays were frequently consulted by revolutionaries and progressives in the newly established United States.[41]
Hume’s general philosophical prescription crystallizes in his skeptical injunction to eschew metaphysics and purported claims to transcendence. Instead, he argues, philosophers and other theorists should limit their work, as Voltaire might put it, to cultivating the garden of common life. Hume, along these lines, writes famously in the first Enquiry that, properly undertaken, “philosophical decisions are nothing but the reflections of common life, methodized and corrected” (EHU 12.3, 121). It is, however, in misunderstanding this methodizing and correcting project that those who have interpreted Hume as a traditionalist have erred. To infer from Hume’s rejection of false philosophical transcendence a normative embrace of traditionalist conservatism depends upon the erroneous position that traditionalist conservatism is the only alternative to false transcendence for a philosopher who roots so much of the human world in custom. It is not. Hume the skeptical, philosophical critic articulates another alternative.
The proper contrasting alternatives for Hume are not those of transcendence vs. custom and tradition but rather methodized custom vs. unreflective custom. In this, Hume seems to prefigure the contemporary progressive political philosopher Chantal Mouffe, who argues against both liberalism and traditionalism (as well as against Carl Schmitt and post-political anti-democratic politics in general) in favor of an alternative form of contested democracy.[42] Like Mouffe, Hume does not pretend to overcome otherness and faction through instrumental reason—either in the proprietary and instrumental rationality of Lockean liberalism, with the idealized forms of communication of which Habermas fantasizes, or even through simple but comforting conservative appeals to tradition.[43] Rather Hume accepts and acknowledges the often unpleasant persistence of difference and faction; and he works to manage them just skeptically, through provisional agreements and rules of reflection that emerge in a critical engagement with custom among the participants of a political contest.
When Humean “reflection” casts its gaze upon custom, it can, when properly disciplined, generate what Hume calls “general rules” of a “second influence” (Treatise 1.3.13, 102) rooted in custom itself.[44] These rules can subsequently turn back upon custom to methodize and correct it, but not forever or with the presumption of final closure. Although in common life we act by habit and custom in generally unreflective ways, as if by a “secret operation” (Treatise 1.3.8, 73), through our capacity for reflection we can nevertheless, like the Owl of Minerva, later look back upon and regulate habit and custom (Treatise 1.3.13, 99ff.). Custom, in short, can itself for Hume become the ground for revising and reforming custom, even in a progressive manner.
Consider as an analogy to politics the practices of language. The practices of vernacular English, for example, in common life are not grounded in an autonomous and sovereign act of philosophical transcendence or, for that matter, in divine revelation. The traditions and customs composing the ordinary languages of common life instead develop gradually, even naturally, over time in an unreflective way. By reflection only upon the customary practices of ordinary language, however, people can generate grammatical rules which then, in turn, can be deployed to discipline, correct, and methodize the linguistic practices of common life. People can do this, moreover, without the pretense of revelation or transcendence beyond the phenomena of common linguistic life, or the pretense of finishing language and bringing it to peaceful, final completion for all time. The process of reflectively methodizing general rules used to correct other general rules is for Hume an open-ended, zetetic process.
While criteria of criticism and judgment are initially generated through a reflective engagement with experience, through custom criteria of this sort become durable. They thereby compose what might be regarded, in contrast to mere “prejudice,” second-order customs of criticism. Hume describes this process in his influential essay on aesthetics, “Of the Standard of Taste”;[45] but the process of generating second-order critical customs is not restricted to aesthetic judgment. Criticism is underwritten by a similar process in scientific, moral, and also political judgment. Habits and customs related to gender and marriage, for example, might be revised—certainly not by metaphysical appeals to the divine or through self-evident principles of reasoning, but rather by appeal to second-order principles self-consciously generated from within common life itself. Conversations, dialogues, and contests about these topics situated in common life might in a Humean way enlist principles concerned with the usefulness, durability, and pleasures of the contingent habits we call, for example, “marriage,” “family,” “love,” “parent,” “liberty,” and “fairness,” that people currently inhabit, as well as alternatives to them. Think about how through critical Humean second-order reflections grounded in common life people might inhabit differently or cease to inhabit the habits of race.
Self-understanding critical theories and practices of this sort themselves even offer, for Hume, distinctive pleasures, at least for those who acknowledge skeptically the ultimately unsponsored status of reflective second-order criticism. Criticizing and correcting existing habits through second-order reflections rooted in the habitual matrix of common life itself yields a special ironic (and revealing) pleasure Hume describes in this way:
The vulgar are commonly guided by the first [kind of general rule, prejudice], and wise men by the second [kind of reflective general rules]. Mean while the sceptics may here have the pleasure of observing a new and signal contradiction in our reason, and of seeing all philosophy ready to be subverted by a principle of human nature, and again sav’d by a new direction of that principle. The following of general rules is a very unphilosophical species of probability; and yet ‘tis only by following them that we correct this, and all other unphilosophical probabilities. (Treatise 1.3.13, 102)
Reflectively generated second-order general rules subvert the metaphysical and epistemological realisms and enthusiasms dogmatists had recognized as philosophy. But this same kind of second-order reflection subsequently “saves” philosophy by offering a new, unsponsored direction to philosophical theory and criticism. This new direction resolves the puzzle facing traditionalist readers of explaining how Hume’s rooting so much of our lives in habit, custom, and history can be made consistent with his normative, reformist, and progressive criticism. It may seem to a dogmatist a “contradiction” that the habits constitutive of critical general rules subvert rationalism but also underwrite critical judgment.[46] But Hume’s progressive theory of habit exhibits how customs may be used critically to correct and to modify one another without the requirement of ultimate grounds beyond the practices of human life itself, or what Hume calls “common life.” In short, the reflective and progressive use of habit and custom as it functions in second-order general rules saves Hume from being understood in the figure of a Burkean conservative traditionalist, offering instead a “progress of sentiments” (Treatise 3.2.2, 321) in Humean thinking that is both critical and progressive.
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1. David Hume, An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, ed. by Tom L. Beauchamp (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 5.1, p. 38. Hereafter, EHU.
2. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd rev. ed., trans. J. Weinsheimer and D. G. Marshall (London: Continuum, 2004).
3. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, eds. David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), 20. Hereafter, Treatise.
4. Donald W. Livingston and James T. King, eds., Hume: A Re-Evaluation (New York: Fordham University Press, 1976), 213–18.
5. It would be interesting to compare Hume’s method and purpose, beyond just its empiricist epistemology, to French philosopher-sociologist Michel Foucault’s “archeological” investigations. See Foucault, L’archéologie du savoir (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1969).
6. Alexander Broadie and others have explored the extent to which Scottish philosophy and therefore the cultural tradition in which Hume was weaned exhibits especially strong anti-transcendent tendencies toward nominalism, naturalism, empiricism, and common life generally. Even the scholastic fourteenth-century Duns Scotus, born in Berwickshire near Hume’s family home, is often read as driving a more naturalistic epistemology against those of the high Gothic thinkers who had preceded him to the south. See A. Broadie, The Tradition of Scottish Philosophy (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1990).
7. Hume’s three “natural relations” among ideas are “resemblance, contiguity in time or place, and causation” (Treatise, 1.1.4, 12).
8. Søren Kierkegaard, Repetition, trans. and eds. H. V. Hong and E. H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983).
9. Augustine, immersed as he was in the discourse of ancient virtue, had some intimation of the importance of habit in recommending to unbelievers that they go through the motions of attending church because through the establishment of that habit real faith might emerge.
10. Kierkegaard, Repetition, 131. Kierkegaard criticizes Socrates’s ahistorical consciousness in Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments. Plato is well known for arguing in the Meno that knowledge manifests a special kind of remembering or recollection, an idea that underwrites philosophical claims to having grasped the a priori—or what is prior.
11. Heidegger would, on the other hand, argue that it is the ontologically prior projective structure of Dasein’s temporality that makes custom and habit possible, that gives ontological grounding to what we ontically call custom and habit. But what is really added to the idea of custom by saying this? Why should temporality (Zeitlichkeit) be more ontologically basic than custom? Or, rather, perhaps we might say that the implication of Hume’s “science of man” is that nothing can be more basic than custom (an idea with which, as a pun, anyway, Heidegger might actually agree). See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962).
12. That “like objects, place’d in like circumstances, will always produce like effects; and as this principle has establish’d itself by a sufficient custom, it bestows an evidence and firmness on any opinion, to which it can be apply’d” (Treatise, 1.3.8, 73).
13. Joel C. Weinsheimer, Gadamer’s Hermeneutics: A Reading of Truth and Method (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 170. I am grateful to Joseph A. Edelheit for many of these thoughts about Gadamer and references to Gadamer’s texts. See his “‘I don’t roll on shabbas!’ Jewish Identity and the Meaning of History in The Big Lebowski,” in The Big Lebowski and Philosophy, ed. Peter S. Fosl (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2012): 262–73.
14. For McIntyre, practices are “any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended.” Alasdair McIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982), 188.
15. David Hume, Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. Tom L. Beauchamp (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 111–23. Hereafter, EPM.
16. “If we consider all the hypotheses, which have been forme’d either by philosophy or common reason, to explain the difference betwixt beauty and deformity, we shall find that all of them resolve into this, that beauty is such an order and construction of parts, as either by the primary constitution of our nature, by custom, or by caprice, is fitted to give a pleasure and satisfaction to the soul” (Treatise, 299). Eva M. Dadlez, “The Vicious Habits of Entirely Fictitious People: Hume on the Moral Evaluation of Art,” Philosophy and Literature 26 (2002): 143–56. In “Of the Standard of Taste,” Hume writes: there are “two sources of variation” in aesthetic judgment, the “one is the different humours of particular men; the other is the particular manners and opinions” (Essays, 243).
17. David Hume, Essays Moral, Political, and Literary (with an apparatus of variant readings from the 1889 edition by T. H. Green and T. H. Grose), ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1985), 217. Hereafter, Essays. This is not to say that custom can actually change human nature, those dimensions of humanness we find through experience to be resistant to change, fixed and enduring. Hume accordingly—in the short essay “A Dialogue,” appended to the Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals—offers a counterpoint to the many instances of cultural and customary variability he had chronicled, that: “I shall conclude this long discourse with observing, that different customs and situations vary not the original ideas of merit (however they may, some consequences) in any very essential point, and prevail chiefly with regard to young men, who can aspire to the agreeable qualities, and may attempt to please. The manner, the ornaments, the graces, which succeed in this shape, are more arbitrary and casual: But the merit of riper years is almost every where the same; and consists chiefly in integrity, humanity, ability, knowledge, and the other more solid and useful qualities of the human mind” (EPM, 121).
18. John P. Wright, “Butler and Hume on Habit and Moral Character,” in M. A. Stewart and John P. Wright, Hume and Hume’s Connexions (State College: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), 116.
19. “The Sceptic,” Essays, 171. As Wright indicates, James Moore and M. A. Stewart argue that Hume may have advanced his view of the refining and tempering effects of the habits of philosophy in opposition to the Christian Stoicism of Francis Hutcheson, which instead emphasizes self-control through will rather than habit. M. A. Stewart, “The Stoic Legacy in the early Scottish Enlightenment,” in M. J. Osler, ed., Atoms, Pneuma, and Tranquility (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 273–96. James Moore, “Hume and Hutcheson,” in Hume and Hume’s Connexions, 23–57. See Wright, “Butler and Hume on Habit and Moral Character,” 111.
20. Hume, Treatise, 2.3.6, p. 272; in this Hume seems to have followed naturalistic moralist Joseph Butler. See Wright, “Butler and Hume on Habit and Moral Character,” 105–18.
21. In this sense, contemporary philosophers of the body and ideology such as Judith Butler and Slavoj Žižek are just catching up to Hume. See Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 2nd ed. (New York: Verso, 2009); and Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge, 1993).
22. Gilles Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, trans. Constantin Boundas (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001).
23. Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980). See Part I, Chapter 5, “The Natural and the Conventional” (86–128) and its subsection, “The Normal and the Natural” (111–28). See also Cavell’s essay, “Founding as Finding,” in This New Yet Unapproachable America (Albuquerque: Living Batch Press, 1989), 77–118.
24. If for some purposes “custom” and “habit” can be substituted for one another, Hume’s usage does suggest that “custom” is social or collective while “habit” is more properly individual. Hume does write in §9 of the first Enquiry of a “general habit” that “we” acquire, explaining that, “When we have lived any time, and have been accustomed to the uniformity of nature, we acquire a general habit, by which we transfer the known to the unknown” (EHU 81). But this usage seems to be actually about individuals, in the sense in which we each develop this habit.
25. Wittgenstein seems to refer to something like this kind of “agreement” at PI #355: “the point here is not that our sense-impressions can lie, but that we understand their language. (And this language like any other is founded on convention [Übereinkunft]).” Wittgenstein also writes, in a way reminiscent of Hume, that in following rules we ultimately do so “blindly” (PI #219) and “act, without reasons” (PI #211). Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1953). Cited as PI above.
26. For example, W. V. O. Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” in From a Logical Point of View: Nine Logico-Philosophical Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 20–46. Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Inquiry, trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970).
27. Hume’s skepticism characteristically does not argue that reason is incapable of determining truth, but that reason cannot establish its own warrant for its claim to do so. This interpretation, which I share, is argued effectively by David Owen in Hume’s Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). See Henry Allison, Custom and Reason in Hume: A Kantian Reading of the First Book of the Treatise (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), for a critical reading of Hume on custom and reason that defends a Kantian position but is sensitive to Hume’s views on custom.
28. “Man’s ethos [habit/character] is his daimon [fate, spirit, divinity, fortune]” (CXIV, D.19). Charles H. Kahn, The Art and Thought of Heraclitus: An Edition of the Fragments and Commentary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
29. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, expanded edition (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2010). Oakeshott’s article, “Rationalism in Politics,” first appeared in Cambridge Journal 1 (1947): 65–74. See also Sheldon S. Wolin, “Hume and Conservatism,” American Political Science Review 48, no. 4 (December 1954): 999–1016.
30. Laurence L. Bongie, David Hume: Prophet of the Counter-Revolution, foreword by Donald W. Livingston (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2002); originally published by Oxford University Press, 1965. See also: David Resnick, “David Hume: A Modern Conservative,” European Legacy 1.1 (1996): 397–402.
31. Leslie Stephen, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, 3rd ed., vol. 2 (New York: Peter Smith,1949), 181. See Wolin, “Hume and Conservatism,” 999.
32. See chapter 12, “Conservatism,” of Donald W. Livingston, Hume’s Philosophy of Common Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); and see “Cartesianism in Politics” (275–78).
33. Thomas Nagel, A View from Nowhere (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). Nagel plays off Spinoza’s recommendation to regard the world “sub specie aeternitatis,” under the aspect of eternity (Ethics II, prop. 44).
34. David Hume, The History of England, From the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Abdication of James the Second, 1688, 6 vols. (Boston: Phillips Sampson, 1854), Book V, Chapter lix, 334); hereafter, History. Descartes opens the first of his well-known Meditations on First Philosophy with this (in Livingston’s view ominous) announcement that: “Several years have now passed since I realized how numerous were the false opinions that in my youth I had taken to be true, and thus how doubtful were all those that I had subsequently built upon them. And thus I realized that once in my life I had to raze everything to the ground and begin again from the original foundations, if I wanted to establish anything firm and lasting in the sciences.”
35. For Livingston’s use of these quotes see, Hume’s Philosophy of Common Life, 317ff.
36. See also Hume’s essay “Of the Origin of Government” (Essays, 37–41).
37. Thomas Jefferson is well known for reading Hume as an illiberal Tory. In a 14 June 1807 letter to John Norvell Washington, Jefferson wrote that “as we have employed some of the best materials of the British constitution in the construction of our own government, a knowledge of British history becomes useful to the American politician. There is, however, no general history of that country which can be recommended. The elegant one of Hume seems intended to disguise & discredit the good principles of the government, and is so plausible & pleasing in it’s style & manner, as to instil its errors & heresies insensibly into the minds of unwary readers.” To William Duane on 12 August 1810, Jefferson wrote that Hume’s History “has spread universal toryism over the land.” On 25 November 1816, Jefferson wrote to John Adams that, “This single book has done more to sap the free principles of the English Constitution than the largest standing army.”
38. Hume, EHU §11: “were an effect presented, which was entirely singular, and could not be comprehended under any known species, I do not see, that we could form any conjecture or inference at all concerning its cause” (110–11, emphasis mine). He also writes in §11: “Are there any marks of a distributive justice in this world? If you answer in the affirmative, I conclude that, since justice here exerts itself, it is satisfied. If you reply in the negative, I conclude, that you have then no reason to ascribe justice, in our sense of it, to the gods. If you hold a medium between affirmation and negation, by saying, that the justice of the gods, at present, exerts itself in part but not to its full extent; I answer, that you have no reason to give it any particular extent, but only so far as you see it, at present, exert itself” (106).
39. Letter #13, in David Hume, The Letters of David Hume, ed. J. Y. T. Greig, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932), I:34. A passage in his essay “Of Eloquence” shows that Hume regarded Cicero (106–43 BCE) as one of the ancient world’s two greatest orators (Demosthenes being the other): “It is observable, that the ancient critics could scarcely find two orators in any age, who deserved to be placed precisely in the same rank, and possessed the same degree of merit. CALBUS, CÆLIUS, CURIO, HORTENSIUS, CÆSAR rose one above another: But the greatest of that age was inferior to CICERO, the most eloquent speaker, that had ever appeared in Rome” (Essays, 98). “The Whole Duty of Man” was a popular and influential book of Christian didactics published anonymously by, it seems, Richard Allestree.
40. Nicholas Phillipson, Hume (London: Penguin, 2011).
41. Samuel Adams, Benjamin Franklin, John Dickinson, Charles Lee, George Washington, John Randolph of Roanoke, Benjamin Rush, and Robert Carter of Nomini Hall are all thought to have been influenced by Hume. The 1780 Committee on Finance in the Continental Congress, for example, studied Hume’s economic essays, and in the 1787 Philadelphia Congress Alexander Hamilton appealed to Hume in arguing against legally penalizing corrupt officeholders. Hume also apparently taught Hamilton that an expanding commercial order is consistent, even complementary, with a stable republic. See Gerald Stourzh, Alexander Hamilton and the Idea of Republican Government (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1970). Garry Wills, Explaining America: The Federalists (New York: Doubleday, 1981). See Mark G. Spencer, Hume and Eighteenth-Century America (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2010); John M. Werner, “David Hume and America,” Journal of Philosophy 33, no. 3 (September, 1972): 439–56; and Donald W. Livingston, “Hume, English Barbarism, and the American Crisis,” in Richard B. Sher and Jeffrey R. Smitten, Scotland and America in the Age of Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 133–47.
42. Mouffe argues in favor of a kind of agonistic democracy that refuses the liberal-rationalist objective of overcoming conflict through reason and communication (in, e.g., Locke, Kant, and Habermas) in favor of a democratic theory that reconfigures conflict in a manageable way. In On the Political (New York: Routledge, 2005) she echoes both Hume’s rejection of political rationalism and also his progressive sympathies when she writes: “the belief in the possibility of a universal, rational consensus has put democratic thinking on the wrong track. Instead of trying to design the institutions which, through supposedly ‘impartial’ procedures, would reconcile all conflicting interests and values, the task for democratic theorists and politicians should be to envisage the creation of a vibrant ‘agonistic’ public sphere of contestation where different hegemonic political projects can be confronted. This is, in my view, the sine qua non for an effective exercise of democracy”; Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (New York: Verso, 2000), 3. Similarly, while Hume’s essay “On an Ideal Commonwealth,” thought by some to have influenced Federalist 10, presents technical means for managing faction, it does not pretend to eliminate faction. Sympathy, too, while mediating agreements among people, for Hume also has its limits. It may underwrite contingent alignments but not likely what Kant called a “perpetual peace.” See also The Return of the Political (New York: Verso, 1993).
43. Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, 2 vols., trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985).
44. See Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, chapter 2, “Cultural World and General Rules.”
45. David Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” Essays, 226–52.
46. It is just this replacement of reason with habit and association that leads Henry Allison to judge in favor of Kant over Hume. See Allison, Custom and Reason in Hume.
Clare Carlisle
Ravaisson on Habit and the Moral Life
That a bare and naked liberum arbitrium is a chimera is best seen by the difficulty, the long, long continuous effort, which is necessary merely to get rid of a habit, even if one ever so earnestly has made a resolution.
— Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers II, 1260 (1849)
Two of the most important moral philosophers in the European tradition have presented very different views of the role of habit in moral life.[1] In the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle states that “moral goodness is the child of habit, for we acquire the moral virtues by first exercising them.”[2] Kant, on the other hand, insists that habits must be excluded from the moral sphere; indeed, he suggests that “as a rule, all habits are objectionable.” In his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, Kant describes habit as “a physical inner necessitation to continue behaving in the same way we have behaved thus far,” which as such “deprives even good actions of their moral value because it detracts from our freedom of mind; moreover, it leads to thoughtless repetition of the same action (mechanical uniformity) and so becomes ridiculous.”[3] And in The Metaphysics of Morals he argues that “moral maxims . . . cannot be based upon habit (since this belongs to the natural constitution of the will’s determination); on the contrary, if the practice of virtue were to become a habit the subject would suffer loss of that freedom in adopting his maxims which distinguishes an action done from duty.”[4] As these passages indicate, Kant’s dismissal of habit is due to the dichotomy between necessity and freedom that separates his theoretical and practical philosophies, according to which the world of our experience and knowledge, conditioned by causal laws, cannot coincide with the domain of moral action, for the latter presupposes an absolutely free will. Insofar as a person acts out of habit, her actions are shaped by past actions and experiences, and seem removed from deliberation and rational choice; habit thus becomes a mere mechanism, an automatism that deprives the moral subject of her autonomy.
This sketch of the Aristotelian and Kantian accounts of habit is simplistic, but it provides a useful starting point for the present discussion of the role of habit in the moral life. Even more broadly speaking, we may attribute the negative evaluations of habit that we find in many modern philosophers—from Kant to Kierkegaard, and from Maine de Biran, through Bergson, to Sartre—to dualisms that are frequently identified as fundamental to philosophy since Descartes: between freedom and necessity; will and inclination; reason or spirit and the body; subject and world. Twentieth-century phenomenology set itself the task of finding a new philosophical perspective from which to challenge these dualisms, and in texts such as Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (1945) and Ricoeur’s Freedom and Nature (1950) we find an appeal to the phenomenon of habit in the service of this project—for habit, as Merleau-Ponty writes, “presents great difficulties to traditional philosophies.”[5]
However, over a century before these French phenomenologists directed their attention to habit, the philosopher Félix Ravaisson had argued that habit cannot be understood in mechanistic terms; that it overcomes the dichotomy between freedom and necessity; and that it forces us to think beyond the traditional alternatives of idealism and empiricism. Ravaisson was an Aristotelian, and was also strongly influenced by Leibniz—but his seminal essay De l’habitude (1838) reveals a preoccupation with these basic questions of modern European thought. In this chapter I will draw on Ravaisson’s essay, recently published in English as Of Habit, in order to reflect on the role of habit in moral life. If habit does play an important role in morality and ethics, then we must try to understand what it is, how it operates, and its relationship to human freedom. We cannot merely return to Aristotle, or espouse a more recent version of virtue ethics, without first inquiring further into the nature of habit, nor without considering its significance within the context of the history of modern philosophy.
Ravaisson’s Of Habit includes a section, toward the end of the text, that is devoted to the moral significance of habit. The author here refers to the English moralist Joseph Butler, who like Ravaisson situates his ethical thinking clearly within the Aristotelian tradition. Bishop Butler seems to have been the first thinker to remark on a double effect of habit that features in several subsequent discussions of the topic: in The Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, To the Constitution and Course of Nature (1736), he notes that habit strengthens action and weakens feeling—that, in other words, it has apparently opposing effects on the active and passive aspects of moral conduct. This “double law,” as Ravaisson describes it, is central to the analysis presented in Of Habit.
In Section 3 of this chapter, where I discuss Ravaisson’s views about habit and morality, I will return to the connection with Butler. Before this, though, we will see that the two thinkers are linked not only by the influence of Aristotle and by their conviction of the importance of habit in moral life, but also, historically, by an intervening century of scientific and philosophical discourse on the nature and operation of habit in general. Section 1 of my chapter examines this discourse, showing how it constitutes the philosophical background to Ravaisson’s discussion of habit. I will then examine, in the second section, Ravaisson’s own account of habit in general, and elucidate his view that habit cannot be adequately understood on the basis of dualisms between freedom and necessity, mind and body, will and instinct, et cetera—and that, more positively, this means that reflection on habit provides a basis for a philosophical challenge to these dualisms. The third section focuses on how this analysis applies to morality: I will show how Ravaisson, echoing Butler, develops Aristotle’s insights into the importance of habit in the moral life, and also responds to some questions that trouble Kantian ethics. In the fourth and final section I will draw out some further implications of Ravaisson’s analysis by considering an important practical issue that he does not address—namely, how to deal with bad habits. Here I suggest that when one has to counter the force of undesirable or unhelpful habits, this effort should be conceived, after Ravaisson, not as the struggle of a pure will against inclination, nor as a rational mastery of irrational impulses, but instead as the persistent endeavor to become aware of and attentive to the habits in question.
Ravaisson’s analysis of habit responds, though not explicitly, to certain philosophical issues that are raised by Aristotle’s account of the moral life.[6] In particular, we can identify in the Nicomachean Ethics two distinct concepts: ethos, which we may translate as “habit” or perhaps “practice,” and hexis, which comes from the verb ekhein, “to have,” and which may be translated as “disposition.” Aristotle states that “moral goodness is the child of habit (ethos),” and he defines the virtues as hexeis, or dispositions. Elsewhere he discusses the concept of hexis in terms of the distinction between potentiality and actuality: a hexis is a potentiality or capacity (dunamis) to act in a certain way, but this is itself acquired—that is to say, actualized— through a process of acting. For example, a hexis of mathematical knowledge is the actualization of a human being’s potential, qua human being, to have this knowledge, to grasp mathematics; on the other hand, the hexis is itself a potentiality or capacity that is actualized only when the agent is in the process of exercising his knowledge.[7] Hexis can thus be understood as a determinate, formed capability to execute a certain range of action—a capability that mediates between pure potentiality and activity itself, and which is a form of power distinct from both of these. This conception of hexis, actual in one sense and potential in another, remains rather ambiguous in Aristotle’s work, but in Ravaisson’s essay we find an attempt to think through the concepts of habit and disposition, and the relationship between them. We find, in fact, a Leibnizian interpretation of hexis in terms of a dynamic tendency to act in a particular way, and an explanation of how such a tendency is produced, over time and gradually, by habit—that is to say, by repetition.[8]
But Ravaisson’s analysis of habit also draws on, and responds to, a more modern philosophical discourse.[9] In Book II of the Treatise of Human Nature, David Hume acknowledges Joseph Butler in remarking that “custom encreases [sic] all active habits, but diminishes passive, according to the observation of a late eminent philosopher.”[10] Hume here generalizes Butler’s insight from the moral context in which it was articulated: both Hume and Thomas Reid invoke a principle of habit as the foundation of the intelligible order of experience, and thus of human judgment, although their commitment to empiricism prevents them from offering a positive account of habit itself.[11] By the end of the eighteenth century, this question of habit was taken up in France, particularly by Xavier Bichat, whose influential Physiological Researches on Life and Death included a more detailed examination of the double effects of habit.[12] In 1800 the Institut de France—no doubt prompted by Bichat’s work—announced an essay competition on the topic of the influence of habit on the faculty of thinking. This competition was won by Pierre Maine de Biran, whose lengthy essay exhibits the influence of both Bichat and the Scottish empiricists, but also ventures further in presenting an explanation of the effects of habit, and in combining physiological research with an emphasis on the will. Ravaisson takes up Maine de Biran’s account of habit, and makes many references to it in his own essay—but he gives to habit a very different, and wholly original, philosophical interpretation.[13]
At the heart of Ravaisson’s account of habit is what he calls its “double law.” This double law of habit is based on the distinction between activity and passivity, or between voluntary movement and sensation. Ravaisson formulates the double law of habit as follows: “The continuity or the repetition of passion weakens it; the continuity or repetition of action exalts and strengthens it.” More specifically, “prolonged or repeated sensation diminishes gradually and eventually fades away. Prolonged or repeated movement becomes gradually easier, quicker and more assured. Perception, which is linked to movement, similarly becomes clearer, swifter and more certain.”[14] This law gives expression to our everyday experience of habit and habituation: we find that repeating a certain action leads to this action becoming more dexterous, precise and efficient; we find that sense-data that are repeatedly or continuously present to us decline in intensity after some time. We say that we have become used or accustomed to something—to the color of my front door, for example, or to the way a pen feels when I hold it—to the point that we no longer notice it, are no longer aware of the sensations caused by the familiar object. Ravaisson remarks in Of Habit that “most of the authors who have examined habit have apprehended this law,”[15] but the most sophisticated discussion of it is provided by Maine de Biran, who makes the distinction between activity and passivity central to his analysis of habit.
We may turn briefly to Maine de Biran’s essay The Influence of Habit on the Faculty of Thinking (1802) in order to set out the key points of the analysis that were to be taken up by Ravaisson, while at the same time providing some background to the latter’s 1838 essay that will help to clarify the particularity and originality of its contribution to the philosophy of habit. Maine de Biran, himself drawing on earlier discussions of the double influence of habit, describes how “sensation, continued or repeated, fades, is gradually obscured and ends by disappearing without leaving any trace. Repeated movement gradually becomes more precise, more prompt, and easier.”[16] For Biran, this double influence serves to confirm his dualistic psychology, which identifies distinct systems of perception and sensation, belonging to distinct spheres of the voluntary and the involuntary. He argues that we cannot ascribe the two contrary effects of repetition to the same faculty of the mind, since to do so would be to make the seemingly absurd supposition “that this unique faculty can become at once more inert and more active by the same process of habituation.”[17] However, in the course of his discussion Biran struggles to maintain the distinction between activity and passivity, between a faculty of moving and a faculty of feeling: he argues, against any mechanistic interpretation of sensation, that even the most apparently passive experience involves a “sensitive activity,” that is to say “a real action peculiar to the sensitive organ which . . . gives the tone rather than receives it,” and he admits that activity and passivity are so intimately connected that “there is hardly any impression that does not result from their mutual co-operation.”[18] Nevertheless, he distinguishes sense-impressions as passive, insofar as they escape the agency of the subject, from the motor activity that is classed as activity proper, insofar as it is voluntary.
Integral to Biran’s analysis of habit is the claim that its influence can only be accounted for by a modification that “persists and more or less outlasts the impression.” Biran calls this modification a “determination,” which, he explains, “is effectuated when the organ or the central nervous system is returned to the same condition in which it was by virtue of the original action.”[19] This can happen “spontaneously,” in the absence of the original action, “by virtue of a lively force inherent in the organs.” Corresponding to passive and active impressions are “sensory determinations” and “motor determinations.” According to Biran, a motor determination is a “tendency of the organ or of the motor centre” to repeat an action. It is on this issue that his analysis moves beyond physiology, for he can only account for the being of such tendencies by invoking the metaphysical concept of potentiality or virtuality: determinations exist as powers that will be actualized under certain conditions, namely, “renewed external stimulation.”[20] Maintaining that the processes of thought are as subject to habit as physical movements, Biran argues that the imagination, which retains and synthesizes impressions, is constituted by determinations of the brain.[21]
From a philosophical point of view, one of the most interesting aspects of Biran’s philosophy is his account of self-consciousness, which, he claims, involves both activity and passivity. One’s sense of oneself can be identified with an impression of effort that is felt when the will, in initiating movement, encounters the resistance of the motor organs, which in turn encounter resistance from external objects. Effort is thus a sort of meeting point of activity (the will) and passivity (resistance). This allows us to see how the contrary effects of habit on active and passive elements combine into a unitary phenomenon: the passive element of sensation diminishes with repetition, while the active, motor element becomes more precise and assured—but because we are conscious both of our movements and of ourselves as moving through a feeling of effort, this feeling and consequently the self-consciousness it produces decline at the same time as activity is perfected. Eventually, voluntary movements become lost to consciousness: “the perception may become more distinct and more precise on the one hand, while on the other the individual is more completely blinded to the active part which he takes in it.” This means that habit “effaces the line of demarcation between voluntary and involuntary acts, between acquisitions of experience and instinctive operations, between the faculty of feeling and that of perceiving.”[22] The influence of habit might be best understood in terms of a distinction between activity and passivity, but at the same time the influence of habit itself undermines this distinction. One of the key conclusions that Biran draws from his analysis of habit, then, is that the faculties of feeling and perception are “indivisibly united.”
For Biran, reflection on the double law of habit leads to an ambivalent assessment of its influence: habit is the “general cause of our progress on the one hand, of our blindness on the other,” for while we owe to habit the facility, precision, and rapidity of our movements and voluntary actions, “it is habit also which hides from us their nature and quantity.”[23] Overall, however, his estimation of habit is more negative than positive, since he is most concerned with its influence on thinking, and as we have seen habit tends to blur the distinctions established by reason. At the end of his text Biran portrays habit as both a cause of erroneous belief and a force that binds people “servilely” to their routines, and his conclusion that “all that happens exclusively under the sway of habit should lose its authority before the eyes of reason”[24] could easily be attributed to Kant. Biran’s whole account of habit is characterized by tensions and inconsistencies that testify to a kind of struggle between reason and habit: on the one hand, there is the insistence on a dualistic psychology, and on the other hand the acknowledged failure clearly to separate activity and passivity, perception and sensation, the voluntary and the involuntary.
In Of Habit, Ravaisson retains the key elements of Maine de Biran’s account of the double law of habit. These can be summarized as follows:
the claim that sensations are the result of differences between two physical states—that is to say, of felt changes from one state to another;[25]
the distinction between activity and passivity: recognition of the contrary effects of repetition on activity and passivity produces the double law of habit;
the idea of passivity-within-activity and activity-within-passivity: sensation involves a kind of activity, and motor activity involves passive impressions insofar as movement meets resistance, producing a feeling of effort;
the interconnection of passivity and activity in action in general, and in self-consciousness in particular, produces the unified effect of the double law of habit;
the claim that habit cannot be accounted for solely in physical or mechanistic terms: the idea of a “determination” (understood as a kind of potency, potentiality or virtuality) that manifests itself as a “tendency” to respond to stimulus in a certain way.
However, whereas Maine de Biran wants to resist the way in which habit undermines the distinction between the voluntary and the involuntary, regarding this as a pernicious effect of habit that threatens rational thought, Ravaisson argues that in undermining this distinction—which is also that between will and instinct, mind and nature, freedom and necessity—habit reveals a deeper unity that cannot be directly apprehended by the senses, nor grasped by the rational understanding. For Ravaisson, the progress of actions, through the development of habit, from the sphere of will and conscious reflection to spontaneous, quasi-instinctive bodily responses, can be possible only insofar as there is continuity between the mind and the body, between freedom and necessity. And unlike Maine de Biran, he does not believe that distinguishing between activity and passivity requires him to posit two separate faculties of the mind.
This willingness to look beyond the dualistic framework within which Maine de Biran confines his reflection on habit might be due in part to the influence of F. W. J. Schelling, whose Munich lectures Ravaisson is thought to have attended in the early 1830s, and whose ideas were at this time promoted in France by Victor Cousin. In 1835, Ravaisson published a translation of Schelling’s preface to a volume of Cousin’s work;[26] Schelling, for his part, expressed his regard for Ravaisson, describing him in the Philosophy of Revelation as “a Frenchman to whom we owe important work on Aristotle.”[27] However, the extent of Ravaisson’s contact with and debt to Schelling’s philosophy is difficult to establish, and remains a point of disagreement among French commentators. Perhaps it was rather his intensive study of Aristotle in the years leading up to the publication of De l’habitude that allowed Ravaisson to gain some distance from the dualisms of modern thought, for Aristotle’s view that intellectual, moral, and technical capacities alike are acquired hexeis constitutes, it may be argued, “the exact metaphysical antithesis of the Cartesian order of method.”[28]
Having said this, Ravaisson’s advance on Maine de Biran is articulated in unmistakably modern terms: he argues that it is impossible to provide either a materialist or a rationalist explanation for the double law of habit. In particular, it is the tendency produced by habit that eludes materialism, while the accompanying decline of will and consciousness renders a rationalist account inadequate:
The gradual weakening of the sensations and the increasing ease of the movements could perhaps be explained hypothetically by some change (which anatomy has not discovered) in the physical constitution of the organs. But no organic modification can explain the tendency, the inclination whose progress coincides with the degradation of sensation and effort. The attempts made to explain the increasing ease and certainty of the movements, and the disappearance of sensation, by the progress of attention, of will, and of intelligence, might still be considered capable of a certain level of success. But if the sensation disappears in the long run because attention tires of it and turns elsewhere, how is it that sensibility increasingly demands this sensation that the will abandons? If movement becomes swifter and easier because intelligence knows better all its parts, and because the will synthesises the action with more precision and assurance, how is it that the increasing facility of movement coincides with the diminution of will and consciousness?[29]
Insisting that “both physical and rationalist theories are lacking on this point,” Ravaisson claims that the double law of habit “can be explained only by the development of a Spontaneity that is at once active and passive, equally opposed to mechanical Fatality and to reflective Freedom.” Here, in contrast to Biran, he positively affirms the way in which reflection on habit overcomes the distinction between activity and passivity, since the principle of habit underlies this distinction. While Ravaisson’s vocabulary now appears dated, his philosophical critique of mechanistic theories is not only historically interesting, but accords with contemporary critiques of mechanism that draw on developments in the neurosciences. As Catherine Malabou argues, the plasticity of the brain—its ongoing formation through the individual’s actions and interactions—that is central to current theories of neuronal functioning renders outmoded the analogy between brain and machine, and replaces rigid determinism with a new view of the brain as a “self-cultivating organ.”[30] It is therefore important to recognize the distinction between materialism and mechanism, and Ravaisson’s critique of the latter resonates with the most recent ways of conceptualizing the former.
Ravaisson describes the simultaneously active and passive “spontaneity” that develops through habit as an “obscure” or “secret” activity within sensibility. As we have seen, Biran had already posited a pre-reflective and involuntary “sensitive activity,” but Ravaisson develops this idea and uses it to explain the double law of habit. He argues that an activity within the sense-organs responds to stimulation by bringing the organ “up to the tone of the sensation” (this is what Biran describes as a “sensory determination”), thus reducing the difference that a renewed sensation will make to the organ, and so lessening the sensation’s impact and intensity. For Ravaisson, this “obscure” activity is nothing mystical or unfathomable, but rather the force of inertia: the “tendency to persist” in a particular way of being that the French philosopher, after Leibniz, identifies as “the universal law, the fundamental character” of all beings.[31] When sensations are continued or repeated, “there develops within sensibility . . . a tendency to persist in the same state to which the impression has brought it, or else to come back to this state,” and this explains why the difference “between the state of the subject and the state to which the external impression has brought it increasingly disappears,” causing the sensation to fade.[32] In the absence of the sensation to which the individual has become habituated, this activity will manifest itself as desire for the sensation. So, the same process that removes sensations from conscious awareness also creates an attachment to and a need for these sensations, which reveals itself only when the cause of the sensation is no longer present.
Since movements always involve a degree of passivity—that is, of resistance and a corresponding feeling of effort—the same “secret activity” (or desire) develops here, reducing resistance and effort and thus facilitating actions as well as making them less conscious. As Ravaisson explains, through habit
The [repeated] action itself becomes more of a tendency, an inclination that no longer awaits the commandments of the will but rather anticipates them, and which even escapes entirely and irremediably both will and consciousness. . . . In this way, continuity or repetition brings about a sort of obscure activity that increasingly anticipates (prévient) both the impression of external objects in sensibility, and the will in activity. In activity, it reproduces the action itself; in sensibility it does not reproduce the sensation, the passion—for this requires an external cause—but calls for it, invokes it; in a certain sense it implores the sensation.[33]
Behind the double law of habit, then, lies a single force; continuity or repetition weakens sensibility and excites the power of movement “in the same way, by one and the same cause: the development of an unreflective spontaneity, which breaks into passivity and the organism, and increasingly establishes itself there, beyond, beneath the region of will, personality and consciousness.”
Crucially, Ravaisson argues that this spontaneity is both intelligent and free even though it has left the sphere of will and reflection—even though it is “blind,” as he puts it. It is for this reason that his estimation of habit is so much more positive than Biran’s, who echoes Kant in identifying intelligence and freedom with reflection and the will. For Biran, the “blindness” of habit is an obstacle to knowledge, whereas for Ravaisson this same fact reveals an intelligence not confined to mental faculties, but dispersed throughout the body. He argues that although movements, as they become habitual, leave the sphere of will and reflection, they do not cease to be intelligent. A habit “does not become the mechanical effect of an external impulse, but rather the effect of an inclination that follows from the will.” Such inclinations are formed gradually, and when a habitual action is traced back to its origin in consciousness, one “always finds that it inclines towards the end that the will had originally proposed. But every inclination towards a goal implies intelligence”[34]—and this means that habit cannot be regarded as a mechanism. According to Ravaisson, habit does have a kind of necessity, but this is not physical or mechanical necessity, “not an external necessity of constraint, but a necessity of attraction and desire. . . . It is the final cause that increasingly predominates over efficient causality and which absorbs the latter into itself.”[35] The force of habit is not opposed to freedom, but rather follows from freedom: it is “a law of the limbs, which follows on from the freedom of the spirit”; “an inclination that follows from the will.”
On this account, then, just as intelligence is not confined to reflective thought, freedom and purposiveness are not confined to the will, and are therefore not annulled by habit, but rather made flesh: as habit develops, freedom increasingly pervades the body, and increasingly animates it. The goals that the will originally proposes become the form of the body. This formed body, or “habit-body,” as we might call it, is not a physical thing, but rather a dynamic unity of capacities and dispositions to move, to sense, to experience, and to understand in particular ways. What happens in habit is that freedom and intelligence become more immediate, in a sense more natural: “inclination, as it takes over from the will, comes closer and closer to the actuality that it aims to realise; it increasingly adopts its form. . . . The interval that the understanding represents between the movement and its goal gradually diminishes; the distinction is effaced; the end whose idea gave rise to the inclination . . . becomes fused with it.”[36] In other words, the progression of habit arrives eventually at the “immediate intelligence” of instinct: this is why habit can be called a “second nature.” Ravaisson puts this same point in different terms by stating that habit transforms ideas (i.e., goals, purposes) into actions, into concrete movements:
In reflection and will, the end of movement is an idea, an ideal to be accomplished: something that should be, that can be, and which is not yet. It is a possibility to be realised. But as the end becomes fused with the movement, and the movement with the tendency, possibility, the ideal, is realised in it. The idea becomes being, the very being of the movement and of the tendency that it determines. . . .
Ultimately, it is more and more outside the sphere of personality, beyond the influence of the central organ of the will—that is to say, within the immediate organs of movements—that the inclinations constituting the habit are formed, and the ideas are realised. Such inclinations, such ideas become more and more the form, the way of being, even the very being of these organs.[37]
Ravaisson here recognizes what Merleau-Ponty will later call embodied intelligence, a kind of “knowledge in the hands.” Merleau-Ponty follows Ravaisson in arguing that habit challenges a dualistic view of the human being, according to which the body is merely a mechanism while the mind is of a wholly different order:
[I]t is the body which “understands” in the acquisition of habit. This way of putting it will appear absurd, if understanding is subsuming a sense-datum under an idea, and if the body is an object. But the phenomenon of habit is just what prompts us to revise our notion of “understand” and our notion of the body. To understand is to experience the harmony between what we aim at and what is given, between the intention and the performance—and the body is our anchorage in a world.[38]
However, for Ravaisson reflection on habit not only challenges Cartesian and Kantian dualisms, and makes us look at the human being differently. He makes the further claim that insofar as habit is analogous to nature it reveals to us the inner reality of nature as a whole. Just as the progress of habit demonstrates the continuity between freedom and necessity, between mind and matter, within the human being, so it also shows us this continuity throughout nature—which is thus, like the human body, pervaded by a spontaneous unreflective intelligence that inclines toward, or rather desires, the good. In habit, we begin with the will and reflection and move down, as it were, to an unconscious immediacy of embodied inclinations. But Ravaisson argues that in fact this intelligent but unreflective spontaneity was there all along, as the very essence of nature, and that the reflective will is but the manifestation of this within the developed form of consciousness that distinguishes the human being from other creatures.
Ravaisson devotes a section of his essay to habit in the moral sphere. Here he simply applies to this sphere his general analysis, which as we have seen focuses on the “double law” of habit, and on the notion of an active tendency that is produced by habit. From an historical point of view, the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century discourse on habit here comes full circle, or folds back upon itself: the double influence of habit was first discussed, by Butler, in a specifically moral context, and subsequently taken out of this context, or at least generalized from it, by Hume in the Treatise; the Scottish empiricist philosophy of habit was then taken up in France by Bichat and Maine de Biran, whose analysis of habit was at once echoed and transformed by Ravaisson. By the time the latter comes to reflect on habit, then, Butler’s remarks on the double influence of repetition on moral conduct have been developed into a much fuller account that incorporates both physiological and metaphysical explanation. Only Ravaisson’s work brings together a clear formulation of the “double law of habit”; a properly philosophical attempt to explain this law, which challenges the dualisms of modern thought; and a return to the ethical considerations that were first highlighted by Butler. As we shall see, Ravaisson’s philosophy of habit also returns to the explicitly Christian context of the English bishop’s moral psychology.
When he turns to reflect on the moral significance of the effects of habit, then, Ravaisson recalls the discussion presented in Butler’s The Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, To the Constitution and Course of Nature. Having made a distinction between active and passive habits—the former including perceptions and actions of both the body and the mind, the latter denoting “associations of ideas” as well as feelings—Butler describes how active habits are formed and strengthened through repeated exercise, while “passive impressions, by being repeated, grow weaker: thoughts, by often passing through the mind, are felt less sensibly.” The examples he provides of the diminution of feeling clearly situate his discussion in the context of moral psychology: becoming accustomed to danger lessens fear; becoming accustomed to distress lessens pity. When we consider that actions are often motivated by feelings, we find that the dual effects of habit work in combination:
From these two observations together, that practical habits are formed and strengthened by repeated acts; and that passive impressions, by being repeated upon us, grow weaker; it must follow, that active habits may be gradually forming and strengthening, by a course of acting on such and such motives and excitements, whilst these motives and excitements themselves are, by proportionate degrees, growing less sensible, i.e., are continually less and less sensibly felt, even as the active habits strengthen. And experience confirms this; for active principles, at the very time that they are less lively in perception than they were, are found to be, some how, wrought more thoroughly into the temper and character, and become more effectual in influencing our practice.[39]
Butler does not make his view of the implications of this double law of habit especially clear, but his comments on the examples of distress and pity indicate that he regards the double law of habit as an aid to the development of a good moral character. Through habit, he suggests, a person will become less upset by the suffering of others but better able to act to help to relieve this suffering. Making reference to Butler, Ravaisson states that repetition “gradually leads the pleasure of action to replace the more transient pleasure of passive sensibility. In this way, as habit destroys the passive emotions of pity, the helpful activity and the inner joys of charity develop more and more in the heart of the one who does good . . . . [L]ove is augmented by its own expressions.”[40]
This argument raises questions about the role of feelings, or emotions, in the moral life—questions that neither Butler nor Ravaisson addresses. According to some theories of virtue—notably that of Aristotle—a virtuous person is one who has a settled disposition to feel in certain ways as well as to act in certain ways.[41] It would seem, therefore, that anyone wishing to develop such a moral theory has to consider the implications of the double law of habit. If habit causes feelings to decline, presumably to the point of expiration, then how is the role of emotional response—whether as a character trait; as the pleasure and pain accompanying virtuous and vicious acts; or as a motivational factor in action—to be accommodated? A preliminary answer to this question (which requires more extensive discussion than is possible here) must appeal to Ravaisson’s insistence, after Maine de Biran, that activity always includes an element of passivity, and passivity always includes activity. Indeed, prior to his discussion of habit in the moral sphere, Ravaisson contrasts active and passive sensation, invoking the example of two drinkers: the first, who drinks merely to get intoxicated, loses his powers of taste with repetition; the second, who is a connoisseur, develops a more refined and discerning palate. This distinction may be applied to the moral domain, and in fact gains some credibility when we consider a phenomenon such as compassion fatigue, which is most often discussed in the particularly passive context of seeing images of distress on television. The sympathy felt in this situation would, then, be a passive feeling that declines with repetition, whereas in a more active context—say, when training to be a counselor or therapist—a person may well develop a refined sensitivity to the suffering of others. Although Ravaisson does not explicitly present this argument in relation to morality, his emphasis on love indicates that in this sphere, as elsewhere, the distinction between activity and passivity rests on a more profound coincidence or unity: love is at once passive and active; at once a feeling and a power.
Ravaisson goes on to show how his philosophical analysis of habit’s progress from reflective will to spontaneous inclination applies to moral life. Just as motor habit develops to the point where it meets the immediacy of instinct, so moral habit can become a second nature:
Ultimately, in the activity of the soul, as in that of movement, habit gradually transforms the will proper to action into an involuntary inclination. Mores, morality, are formed in this manner. Virtue is first of all an effort and wearisome; it becomes something attractive and a pleasure only through practice, as a desire that forgets itself or that is unaware of itself, and gradually it draws near to the holiness of innocence. Such is the very secret of education: its art consists in attracting someone towards the good by action, thus fixing the inclination for it. In this way a second nature is formed.[42]
In a sense this just takes us back to Aristotle’s ethics—but, as I hope to have shown, in Ravaisson’s essay these insights are accompanied by both a detailed account of the operation of habit, and an appreciation of its significance from the point of view of the history of modern philosophy. More than this, however, the philosophy of nature that Ravaisson develops on the basis of his interpretation of habit provides a wider context for his moral psychology, for he finds that “it is the natural spontaneity of desire that is the very substance of action, at the same time as being its source and primary origin.” In other words, there is a natural orientation to the good that is prior to the exertion of the reflective will:
just as in movement, if it is the will that poses the goal in space, and determines the direction, it is not the will—or at least it is not reflective will—that works out and devises in advance the very production of movement; for this can only arise from the depths of instinct and desire, where the idea of nature becomes being and substance. In the same way, in the moral world the understanding distinguishes the end and the will proposes it, but it is neither the will nor the abstract understanding that can initially stir the powers of the soul at their source so as to push them towards the good. It is the good itself, at least the idea of the good, which descends into these depths, engendering love in them and raising that love up to itself. Will constitutes only the form of the action; the unreflective freedom of Love constitutes all its substance. . . . Nature lies wholly in desire, and desire, in turn, lies in the good that attracts it.[43]
In identifying this natural orientation toward the good that underlies the will, Ravaisson implicitly offers a response to the problem of motivation that persists within Kantian moral philosophy: why should I be moral? why should I heed the call of duty? why should I follow reason rather than inclination? why should the feeling of respect for the moral law outweigh other feelings and desires? Ravaisson’s solution involves the claim—which is based on his analysis of habit—that it is love rather than reason that grounds the moral life. This love constitutes, he suggests, a kind of “grace” insofar as the natural inclination to the good is something effortless, a gift given to the will to prepare it and guide it. “Nature is prevenient grace,” he writes, quoting the seventeenth-century theologian Fénelon.[44] For Ravaisson, nature itself may be regarded by human beings as a gift that is given prior to action, to assist and facilitate it, because the principle of nature is love, which expresses itself within each individual as a spontaneous desire for and tendency toward the good that precedes the understanding and the will. In the end, this love and desire that is the “intimate source of ourselves” can be identified as “God within us.” Just as he posits continuity between freedom and necessity, mind and body, will and instinct, so this “continuism”[45] encompasses the theological distinction between nature and grace. In Of Habit Ravaisson presents this conclusion as following from his philosophical analysis, rather than as a dogmatic basis for philosophical reflection. However, if, as I have suggested elsewhere,[46] the text has a circular structure and makes most sense read backward, so to speak, then the ontology of habit becomes more closely linked to a theology of grace.
It may well be that these conclusions of Ravaisson’s account of habit in the moral sphere appear rather optimistic. How, on this view, are we to explain our apparently natural inclinations toward what reason can recognize as undesirable ends, and the bad habits to which these inclinations often lead? Although he acknowledges that habit can degenerate into tics and addictions, Ravaisson does not address this question: curiously, he writes of grace but not of sin; of desire for the good but not of perversity. However, the theological interpretation that he appends to his analysis of virtue may illuminate rather than obscure the issue of vice, for in the Christian tradition the doctrine of grace is accompanied by the idea than people close themselves to this grace, turn away from it. Even if we put the religious vocabulary to one side and regard the word “gift” as signifying a pre-reflective, involuntary, natural orientation toward the good, we can quite easily recognize that a gift may be offered but not accepted: it may be unnoticed, ignored, or rejected. So, it may be that we have a profound inclination toward the good, that we are motivated by love, and yet a certain degree of ignorance distorts or displaces this tendency. It may even be the case that love is so essential to human life, so great a need, that its absence, withdrawal, or contingency is deeply disruptive. This would mean that Ravaisson’s optimism is at least compatible with the fact that people often have unhealthy inclinations—which, indeed, gain more force and thus become more problematic when they develop into habits. Furthermore, we may draw from his philosophical analysis of habit the terms in which to comprehend a person’s failure to receive, to appropriate or to utilize the gift of habit, for he understands passivity in two ways: as receptivity and as resistance.[47] Of course, both of these forms of passivity involve an element of activity and can be understood dynamically, as opening and as contraction. Ravaisson does not develop this distinction between receptivity and resistance, but doing so would not only help to account for the possibility of refusing what is given—such as a prevenient hexis or capability for virtuous action: a capability that, insofar as it is also an inclination, may be conceived as love itself—but would also enrich our understanding of human affectivity in general.[48]
Whereas Kant argues that habits are to be excluded from morality, Aristotle regards moral life as consisting in the avoidance or elimination of bad habits and the cultivation or preservation of good habits. While Kant opposes habit to freedom, moral virtue for the Greek philosopher is grounded in an acquired habit of choosing (hexis prohairetike), a gradual determination of desire, a shaping of freedom. Ravaisson, in showing that habit is not opposed to freedom and intelligence, gives us good reason to prefer Aristotle’s view to Kant’s, and also provides us with elements of the philosophical analysis of habit that is required in order to make progress with this kind of ethical theory. To conclude, I now wish to consider briefly how Ravaisson’s account of habit might contribute to moral practice. Is there anything in his discussion of habit that will actually help us to live well? Given that we do often find ourselves struggling against the force of old, unwanted habits, how can we bring about the transition from bad habits to good habits?
Let us first clarify the nature of the problem. We are beings who change and develop through time. It may well be that our habits reflect consciously chosen purposes, and are thus not essentially opposed to freedom and intelligence, but it is quite possible that we might change our purposes and yet continue to carry—indeed, to embody—habits that developed according to out-of-date purposes. We then find that our old but persistent habits are in conflict with our new goals, and this conflict will be particularly acute when the will has undergone a profound reorientation. We find in Augustine’s Confessions a description of precisely this predicament. Augustine, recalling his own struggle to live a pure life once he has converted to Christianity, comments on the famous passage in Romans 7, where Paul writes that “I can will what is right, but I cannot do it.” Augustine depicts habit as the constraining force:
the rule of sin is the force of habit, by which the mind is swept along and held fast even against its will . . . I was held fast, not in fetters clamped upon me by another, but by my own will, which had the strength of iron chains . . . [For desire had grown from my will] and when I gave in to desire habit was born, and when I did not resist the habit it became a necessity. . . . These two wills within me, one old, one new, one the servant of the flesh, the other of the spirit, were in conflict and between them they tore my soul apart.[49]
Here Augustine, like Ravaisson, finds that habit proceeds from “will” to “necessity,” so that desires come to be embodied, made “flesh”; they become, as the French philosopher puts it, “laws of the limbs that follow on from the freedom of the spirit.” But Augustine encounters a problem that Ravaisson does not consider: he finds himself with a habit-body that is in opposition to his “new will” to serve God and live a good life. In fact, what has happened in Augustine’s case is that his conception of the good life has changed: his telos is no longer sensual enjoyment—sought in one instance by stealing pears from the orchard—but the spiritual fruits of renunciation and obedience. Whereas he once equated freedom with licentiousness, he now seeks liberation from the bondage of his appetites and passions.
Ravaisson, whose moral thinking is clearly Aristotelian rather than Platonic, does not discuss or even acknowledge this possibility. Nevertheless, his analysis of habit suggests that conceiving the moral life in terms of a struggle between two opposed factions of the human being—between mind and body, between will and inclination—cannot lead to an adequate understanding of habit, and indeed will only exacerbate the kind of conflict that Augustine describes. Ravaisson’s account emphasizes the depth of habit, the way in which it reaches “all the way down” into the body: through habit certain purposes “become more and more the form, the way of being, even the very being of [the] organs,” and this manner of being is not just a shape or pattern but a dynamic tendency that has its own momentum. This explains why seeing things differently, changing one’s mind and even making a firm resolution are usually insufficient to counter the force of habit: will and reflection are powerful but, it seems, relatively superficial aspects of ourselves. Our very being is conditioned by habits whose rationales are long forgotten, or which may never have been grasped explicitly.
However, Ravaisson also indicates that habit is a reversible process. The fact that there is continuity from will to inclination implies that one can move by degrees in the other direction, too:
it is by a succession of imperceptible degrees that inclinations take over from acts of will. It is also by an imperceptible degradation that these inclinations, born from custom, often decline if custom comes to be interrupted, and that the movements removed from the will return to its sphere after some time. . . . Consciousness feels itself expire along with the will, and then come back to life with it, by a gradation and degradation which are continuous; and consciousness is the first, immediate and unique measure of continuity.[50]
When habits are to be undone, there are three practical points to take into consideration—and each of these is supported and illuminated by the discussion presented in Of Habit. First, just as habits take time to develop, to establish themselves in the depth of the lived body, so they take time to retreat. Getting rid of a habit may be a slow process that requires patience and persistence, and recognizing this is likely to help the struggling person to remain patient when no change of behavior is apparent. Kierkegaard writes of “the long, long continuous effort, which is necessary merely to get rid of a habit, even if one ever so earnestly has made a resolution,”[51] suggesting that unwanted habits are not to be countered by brute force, or by a single moment of clear vision and decision, but by a “long, continuous effort” to retrace the progress of habit gradually, just as the habit first developed through continuity or repetition and by a series of imperceptible degrees.
Second, the elimination of a habit is likely to be painful even when the habit is unhealthy. Ravaisson makes this point with respect to habits at the organic level, but it applies to other kinds of habit, too: “one becomes accustomed over time to the most violent poisons . . . the most unhealthy air and food become the very conditions of health.”[52] This means that giving up any habit, even an unhealthy one, will bring about a transitional period of instability and discomfort. On the other hand, the same point means that a new, healthier habit that is initially inconvenient and uncomfortable will eventually become natural and easy: “Movements or situations that initially are most difficult and tiring become over time the most convenient, and end up by making themselves into indispensable conditions of the functions to which they have always been associated”[53]—and it is for this reason, at least, that habit can be considered a form of grace. Ravaisson’s reference here to particular environmental and situational conditions also accentuates the contextual nature of habit: habits can be traced only partially within the physical body, for they are constitutive of a lived body that is irreducibly worldly, relational, intentional, erotic, responsive. This is why a change of scene is sometimes sufficient to break a habit, although if the change is temporary then the break may well prove, on returning home, to be merely an interruption. In his book on Proust—who, aided by Ravaisson’s legacy, is one of the great modern thinkers of habit—Samuel Beckett writes that “Habit is a compromise effected between the individual and his environment. . . . Habit is the generic term for the countless treaties concluded between the countless subjects that constitute the individual and their countless correlative objects.”[54]
The third and last practical point to be drawn from Of Habit is perhaps the most important: one way to deal with a tenacious unwanted habit is to lead it back to the sphere of consciousness, for only here can it be influenced by reflection and the will. As Ravaisson argues, habits take root in passivity: in sensations and in feelings that have faded to obscurity; and their activity, their power, is that of desire, need, attachment, craving. We can follow Joseph Butler in including in this category of passivity “associations of ideas,” those thoughts which pass through the mind unbidden, and perhaps unacknowledged. Several thinkers have observed that the power of habit lies to a great extent in the degree to which it remains concealed: Hume, for example, remarks that “custom, where it is strongest, not only covers our natural ignorance, but even conceals itself, and seems not to take place, merely because it is found in the highest degree”;[55] Kierkegaard writes that “of all enemies, habit is perhaps the most cunning, and above all it is cunning enough never to let itself be seen, because the person who sees the habit is saved from the habit. Habit is not like other enemies that one sees and against which one aggressively defends oneself; the struggle is actually with oneself in getting to see it.”[56] This “seeing” is not to be understood in intellectualist terms, for no act of cognition is going to change one’s embodiment. And if habit resides in passivity, rather than in the activities that manifest it, then this is where it must be “seen”: awareness of habit has to be cultivated at the level of sensations, feelings, and involuntary thoughts. This kind of awareness is deliberately cultivated in certain therapeutic and spiritual exercises—for example, in psychoanalysis or cognitive behavioral therapy, and in Buddhist meditation techniques, which reportedly provide accomplished practitioners with the ability to observe sensations, emotions, and thoughts as they arise, from moment to moment. This kind of awareness can itself become a capability and even a tendency—a hexis.
While the Kantian view of ethics would lead to the ignoring, dismissal, or suppression of involuntary affects, regarded as merely mechanical, a view that takes habit more seriously makes attentiveness to these affects, to the connections between them, and to the conditions under which they recur an important element of moral life. Developing the faculty of awareness of passive phenomena—which, after all, are available to attention at every moment—can gradually enable a person to discriminate between habits in order to choose which to maintain and which to let go of, which to yield to and which to resist. Moral practice, on this account, would consist not merely in the cultivation of good habits and the elimination of unwanted habits, but in preventing the latter from taking hold within the body through the development of a certain pattern of receptivity and resistance that is based on clear and experiential understanding. This might serve as a definition of practical wisdom.
Just as—to return once more to Aristotle—one swallow does not make a summer, and one brave act does not make a courageous person nor one drink an alcoholic, so a single moment of insight is unlikely to break a habit. This is why the techniques used to cultivate awareness of habits mimic the acquisition of habits themselves in the duration, frequency, and regularity of their repetition: the analysand sees her analyst four or five times a week; the Buddhist maintains a daily meditation practice; the patient undergoing cognitive behavioral therapy keeps a diary of her thoughts and feelings, and so on. Establishing these routines may be “first of all an effort, and wearisome,” as Ravaisson describes the development of moral virtues. His philosophy of habit suggests that techniques designed to support human development and flourishing—whether they operate within an ancient or modern, religious or medical paradigm—can share a theoretical basis in common with virtue ethics, and may thus be incorporated within that moral tradition’s understanding of the aims, criteria, and practices of a good life.
A final point that should be noted is that although Ravaisson’s analysis of habit as mediating between freedom and necessity resonates with materialist critiques of determinism, and with the most recent developments in the neurosciences, this does not imply that the latter eclipse or can replace philosophical reflection. Both Ravaisson’s vocabulary—of tendency, desire, intuition, virtue, love, and grace—and his method, which includes introspection and phenomenological description, exemplify the first-personal order of his thinking of habit, and this in turn is mirrored in its practical, ethical applications. Knowledge of cerebral functioning and neurogenesis, articulated always in the third person, is no doubt valuable, but such knowledge is not in itself psychically transformative, nor even morally significant, and will not by itself lead to human flourishing. A good human life can be lived in ignorance of scientific theory, but not in ignorance of habit.
Ameisen, Jean-Claude. La sculpture du vivant: Le Suicide cellulaire ou la mort créatrice. Paris: Seuil, 1999.
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by Joe Sachs. Newburyport, MA: Focus Publishing, 2002.
Beckett, Samuel. Proust. London: John Calder, 1965.
Bichat, Xavier. Physiological Researches on Life and Death. Translated by Tobias Watkins. Philadelphia: Smith and Maxwell, 1809.
Burnyeat, Myles. “Aristotle on Learning to Be Good.” In Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics, edited by Amélie Oksenberg Rorty, 69–92. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980.
Butler, Joseph. Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature. London: Bell and Daldy, 1857.
Cazeneuve, Jean. La philosophie médicale de Ravaisson. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1958.
Derrida, Jacques. On Touching. Translated by Christine Irizarry. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005.
Garver, Eugene. “Aristotle’s Metaphysics of Morals.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 27 (January 1989): 7–28.
Hume, David. Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975.
———. A Treatise on Human Nature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978.
Janicaud, Dominique. Ravaisson et la métaphysique. 2nd ed. Paris: Vrin, 1997.
Kant, Immanuel. Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. Translated by Mary Gregor. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974.
———. The Metaphysics of Morals. Translated by Mary Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Kierkegaard, Søren. Journals and Papers, vol. 2. Edited and translated by Howard V. and Edna H. Hong. Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1967–1978.
———. Repetition. Translated by Howard V. and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983.
———. Works of Love. Translated by Howard V. and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995.
Kosman, L. A. “Being Properly Affected: Virtues and Feelings in Aristotle’s Ethics.” In Rorty, Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics, 103–16.
LeDoux, Joseph. Synaptic Self. New York: Viking, 2002.
Leibniz, G. W. “Nature Itself; or, the Inherent Force or Activity of Created Things.” In Philosophical Texts, edited by R. S. Woolhouse and Richard Francks. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Maine de Biran, Pierre. The Influence of Habit on the Faculty of Thinking. Translated by Margaret Donaldson Boehm. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1970.
Malabou, Catherine. What Should We Do with Our Brain? Translated by Sebastian Rand. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008.
Marin, Claire. “L’être et l’habitude dans la philosophie française contemporaine,” Alter 12 (2004): 149–72.
Marion, Jean-Luc. Sur l’ontologie grise de Descartes. Science cartésienne et savoir aristotélicien dans les Regulae. Paris: Vrin, 1975.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. London: Routledge, 1994.
Ravaisson, Félix. “Jugement de Schelling sur la philosophie de M. Cousin, et sur l’état de la philosophie francaise et de la philosophie allemande en générale.” Révue germanique 3, no. 10 (1835): 3–24.
———. Of Habit. Translated by Clare Carlisle and Mark Sinclair. London: Continuum, 2008.
Rodrigo, Pierre. “La dynamique de l’hexis chez Aristote.” Alter 12 (2004): 11–25.
Schelling, F. W. J. Sämmtliche Werke. Vol. 11. Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta, 1856–1861.
Wright, John. “Hume and Butler on Habit and Moral Character.” In Hume and Hume’s Connexions, edited by M. A. Stewart and J. P. Wright, 105–18. State College: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995.
1. This chapter originally appeared in Inquiry 53, no. 2 (2010): 123–45.
2. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book 2, Ch. 1.
3. Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, trans. Mary Gregor (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974), 148–49.
4. Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), ms. 6: 409. See also 6: 407: “An aptitude (habitus) is a facility in acting and a subjective perfection of choice. —But not every such facility is a free aptitude (habitus libertatis); for if it is a habit (assuetudo), that is, a uniformity in action that has become a necessity through frequent repetition, it is not one that proceeds from freedom, and therefore not a moral aptitude.”
5. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 1994), 142.
6. For discussion of the role of habit in Aristotle’s ethics, see Myles Burnyeat, “Aristotle on Learning to Be Good,” in Amélie Oksenberg Rorty, ed., Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics, 69–92 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980); Eugene Garver, “Aristotle’s Metaphysics of Morals,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 27 (January 1989): 7–28; and Joe Sachs’s Preface and Introduction to his translation of Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (Newburyport, MA: Focus Publishing, 2002), vii–xvii.
7. See Aristotle, On the Soul, 417a23–b2. On Aristotle’s concept of hexis, see Garver, “Aristotle’s Metaphysics of Morals”; and Pierre Rodrigo, “La dynamique de l’hexis chez Aristote,” Alter 12 (2004): 11–25.
8. The concept of repetition is not itself problematized in Ravaisson’s text, and he often presents “continuity or repetition” as alternative—and, implicitly, equivalent—sources of habit. Like earlier philosophers of habit, he takes repetition for granted, ignoring the crucial question of the possibility of repetition: What is repeated? What counts as “the same”? This question was raised, albeit obscurely, by Søren Kierkegaard just four or five years after the publication of De l’habitude: in both Johannes Climacus, or De omnibus dubitandum est and Repetition (1843) the Danish philosopher notes the impossibility of repetition in both empirical reality (which is characterized by infinite variation) and in ideality (an atemporal realm of abstract identity). Kierkegaard argues that the possibility of repetition is “the most interior problem” and must be located “within the individual”—within subjective consciousness, conceived as the intersection or synthesis of ideality and empirical actuality—where “it is not a question of the repetition of something external but of the repetition of his freedom.” See Søren Kierkegaard, Repetition, trans. Howard V. and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 274–75; 304. Subsequently, philosophers such as Henri Bergson, Edmund Husserl and Gilles Deleuze have engaged extensively with this problem of repetition; for Ravaisson’s influence on later French thought, see Dominique Janicaud, Ravaisson et la métaphysique, 2nd edition (Paris: Vrin, 1997); for a short overview, see Claire Marin, “L’être et l’habitude dans la philosophie française contemporaine,” Alter 12 (2004): 149–72. The issue requires sustained discussion and cannot be explored adequately within the confines of the present chapter, where I follow Ravaisson in focusing on other aspects of the question of habit.
9. Ravaisson was responding to early modern scientific theories, as well as to philosophical discussions of habit; see Jean Cazeneuve, La philosophie médicale de Ravaisson (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1958).
10. David Hume, A Treatise on Human Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 424. For a discussion of Butler’s account of habit and its influence on Hume, see John Wright, “Hume and Butler on Habit and Moral Character,” in M. A. Stewart and J. P. Wright, eds., Hume and Hume’s Connexions (State College: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), 105–18.
11. See, for example, David Hume, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 43.
12. See Xavier Bichat, Physiological Researches on Life and Death, trans. Tobias Watkins (Philadelphia: Smith and Maxwell, 1809), 34–40.
13. Jacques Derrida comments that Ravaisson “derives his axioms from Maine de Biran,” but does not appear to recognize the originality of Ravaisson’s interpretation of his predecessor’s analysis. See Jacques Derrida, On Touching, trans. Christine Irizarry (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 155.
14. Félix Ravaisson, Of Habit, trans. Clare Carlisle and Mark Sinclair (London: Continuum, 2008), 49.
15. See Ravaisson, Of Habit, 121.
16. Pierre Maine de Biran, The Influence of Habit on the Faculty of Thinking, trans. Margaret Donaldson Boehm (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1970), 219.
17. Maine de Biran, The Influence of Habit, 87–88.
18. Maine de Biran, The Influence of Habit, 54–56.
19. Maine de Biran, The Influence of Habit, 68–69.
20. See Maine de Biran, The Influence of Habit, 70: “When this tendency passes from the virtual to the actual, as a result of renewed external stimulation, the individual wills and executes the same movement.”
21. See Maine de Biran, The Influence of Habit, 108.
22. Maine de Biran, The Influence of Habit, 104.
23. Maine de Biran, The Influence of Habit, 49; 100–1.
24. Maine de Biran, The Influence of Habit, 226.
25. This claim can be traced back to Bichat, Physiological Researches on Life and Death, 35–37.
26. See Félix Ravaisson, “Jugement de Schelling sur la philosophie de M. Cousin, et sur l’état de la philosophie francaise et de la philosophie allemande en générale,” Révue germanique 3, no. 10 (1835): 3–24.
27. F. W. J. Schelling, Sämmtliche Werke (Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta, 1856–1861), vol. 11, 328.
28. See Rodrigo, “La dynamique de l’hexis chez Aristote,” 25. See also Jean-Luc Marion, Sur l’ontologie grise de Descartes. Science cartésienne et savoir aristotélicien dans les Regulae (Paris: Vrin, 1975), chapter 1.
29. Ravaisson, Of Habit, 53–55.
30. Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain?, trans. Sebastian Rand (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 30. In this text Malabou argues that the neuroscientific concept of plasticity takes us “between determination and freedom”—see especially chapter 1.
31. See Ravaisson, Of Habit, 27. This dynamic conception of inertia has more in common with Spinoza’s conatus than with Newton’s mechanistic theory. Leibniz argues, contra Newton, that a body has “in itself . . . a tendency to persevere in what sequences of changes it has begun”: see “Nature Itself; or, the Inherent Force or Activity of Created Things,” in Philosophical Texts, eds. R. S. Woolhouse and Richard Francks (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 217. For a discussion of Leibniz’s influence on Ravaisson, see the Editors’ Introduction and Commentary in Of Habit, 13–14; 79–81.
32. See Ravaisson, Of Habit, 51.
33. Ravaisson, Of Habit, 51.
34. Ravaisson, Of Habit, 55.
35. Ravaisson, Of Habit, 57.
36. Ravaisson, Of Habit, 55.
37. Ravaisson, Of Habit, 55–57.
38. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 44.
39. Joseph Butler, Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature (London: Bell and Daldy, 1857), 108.
40. Ravaisson, Of Habit, 69.
41. L. A. Kosman offers an excellent discussion of this aspect of Aristotle’s ethics in “Being Properly Affected: Virtues and Feelings in Aristotle’s Ethics,” in Rorty, Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics, 103–16.
42. Ravaisson, Of Habit, 69.
43. Ravaisson, Of Habit, 71.
44. The notion of prevenient grace can be traced back to Augustine, who distinguishes between the “prevenient grace” that brings a person to the point of conversion; the “operative grace” that accomplishes the liberation from sin that occurs at the moment of conversion; and the “co-operative grace” that, following conversion, assists the liberated will’s pursuit of spiritual growth. Prevenient grace precedes the will and enables it, in spite of its sinful condition, to choose to seek salvation and to submit to God.
45. This term is used, disparagingly, by Derrida to describe Ravaisson’s thought; see On Touching, 156.
46. See the Editors’ Introduction to Of Habit, 15–17; and the Editors’ Commentary, 112–14.
47. On receptivity, see Of Habit, 31, 35–37; on resistance, see 43–45, 61. Just as Ravaisson conceives passivity as both receptivity and resistance, so he conceives activity as both spontaneity and force.
48. The distinction between receptivity and resistance lies at the heart of the concept of plasticity, which is employed in current neuroscientific theory. See Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain?, 5. In clarifying the distinction between plasticity and flexibility, Malabou accentuates the political significance of the former, which denotes a capacity for resistance as well as for the reception of form. The scientific sources for her conception of plasticity include Joseph LeDoux, Synaptic Self (New York: Viking, 2002) and Jean-Claude Ameisen, La sculpture du vivant: Le Suicide cellulaire ou la mort créatrice (Paris: Seuil, 1999).
49. Augustine, Confessions, Book VIII, Section 5.
50. Ravaisson, Of Habit, 57.
51. Søren Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers, ed. and trans. Howard V. and Edna H. Hong (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1967–1978), vol. 2, 1260.
52. Ravaisson, Of Habit, 63.
53. Ravaisson, Of Habit, 63.
54. Samuel Beckett, Proust (London: John Calder, 1965), 18–19.
55. Hume, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, 28–29.
56. Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love, trans. Howard V. and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 36.
David E. Leary
Habit in the Life and Work of William James
In June 1874, a thirty-two-year-old sometime instructor of anatomy and physiology at Harvard College ruminated on the situation faced by the novelist George Eliot, especially as regarded her recent novel, Middlemarch (1871–1872), which he had previously described as “fuller of human stuff than any novel that was ever written.”[1] “She seems to me to be primarily a moralist,” he wrote, though “she writes in an age of scientific analysis and skepticism, and her own lot has been cast in a circle whose way of feeling and thinking is particularly adverse to anything like moral unction or enthusiasm.” As a result, he continued, she “never gets her imagination fairly warmed and going without proceeding to reflect upon it herself and make a critical, often ironical, commentary as it runs.” Thus, “the mass of her mental energy never pulls together,” and the inner tension within her work leaves the reader “with an annoying uncertainty as to her purpose.” Ah, but “what she might have done in an age of belief, when the best thought around her was constructive and enthusiastic and strengthened her native feelings instead of throwing cold water on them”! Had that been her lot, she would have been “twice as great as she is now.”[2]
Thus wrote William James (1842–1910) in words he might have used to describe his own situation. For if Eliot was “married to [George] Lewes, hand in glove with [Thomas] Huxley, [Herbert] Spencer and a host of people” of that sort, as James said,[3] he himself was deeply engaged in reading the works of those same individuals and was thoroughly immersed in the same atmosphere, as represented and promulgated by his own older friend Chauncey Wright, a similarly and in fact even more aggressively and reductively minded empiricist.
Just two years before he offered this assessment of George Eliot, James wrote a draft of what he hoped to be his first publication in psychology, a manuscript now labeled a “Draft on Brain Processes and Feelings” (1872). In that draft, as he told a colleague seventeen years later, he “excogitated” a “conscious automaton theory” that depicted human thought and action as produced automatically and entirely by brain processes that cause feelings of effort and decision along with thought and action. Though we might feel that our will had something to do with our thought or action, in fact (James had written) that feeling was determined mechanically, just as the thought and action were. James never published this draft, and soon ceased to advance its central argument, having come to realize “grounds to doubt it.”[4] And seven years later, in an article entitled “Are We Automata?” (1879), he explained why he had become so adamantly opposed to that theory.
In this chapter I will review how James got from his earlier position, which so readily fit the scientific and skeptical tenor of his age, to his later position, and I will indicate how the views he began to articulate by the mid-1870s became central to the doctrines he presented in his magisterial Principles of Psychology (1890) and in his subsequent work in psychology and philosophy. Along the way I will make it clear that even before 1872, when he was attending lectures and doing physiological research in Harvard’s Medical School, James was a deeply engaged advocate of philosophy, which he was determined to advance through a thorough yet critical understanding of the biological foundations of human thought, feeling, and action. He viewed this scientifically oriented yet analytical approach to philosophy as a means of clarifying not just what is the case in human life, but also what should be life’s outcome. Morality, in short, was always interpolated in his thinking, teaching, researching, and writing. Although he took a biological view of cognition, and embedded it within a Darwinian selectionist framework (which he extended “all the way up” from the level of sensation through perception to cognition and beyond), his “naturalist approach” was not meant to eliminate consideration of “struggling with temptation” or the identification of the sources and targets of “true moral energy,” as he put it in “Are We Automata?”[5] Quite the contrary!
Habit, I plan to show, was the key to James’s solution of the dilemma that he faced as he weighed the intellectual attractiveness of an entirely materialistic and causal explanation of human existence (a mode of explanation accepted by many in his scientific and skeptical age) against the equally compellingly moral imperative to believe that he could and should live a responsible and meaningful life (a life in which real decisions were made about actually possible alternative courses of action). James’s interest in the nature and utility of habit reached back into the 1860s. It first appeared as a function of personal rather than professional concerns, initially revolving around his sensitivity to the possibly ameliorative effects that habits might bring into his life. For well before the beginning of his career, James sought greater direction and regularity in what he had come to experience as a somewhat random and purposeless life.
As already amply documented, James was the son of a wealthy and quirky father, whose whims assured that James spent much of his childhood and youth moving from place to place, from this to that side of the Atlantic, shifting tutors and schools, studying in one language and then another, while focusing now on science, now on art, now on something else, depending on whatever suited the present time, place, inclination, or available instruction.[6] And beyond the lack of sequential learning and personal stability that resulted from this fickle regimen, James was, by temperament, more than a little variable in his own inclinations. As his sister Alice famously put it, he was “just like a blob of mercury.” It was impossible to “put a mental finger upon him.”[7] Similarly, his brother Henry recalled that in their early years James “was always round the corner and out of sight.”[8] And later in life, James exhibited “an extremely impatient temperament,” as he himself admitted, adding that “I am a motor, need change, and get very quickly bored.”[9]
Countering this tendency, James believed from early on—as early as 1858, at the tender age of sixteen—that it “ought to be everyone’s object in life” to be “as much use as possible” in the grand scheme of things, not only because it is the “duty” of every person to be of “use,” but also because no one, and certainly not himself, “would wish to go through life without leaving a trace.” This personal concern about humans leaving a trace, not as passively mechanical objects but as actively choosing subjects who contribute “something which without us could not be,” was so persistently important to James that he reported nine years later, in 1868, that the only thing keeping him from giving up and committing suicide during those “skeptical intervals” when “the waves of doubt are weltering” was the “feeling that by waiting and living by hook or crook long enough I might make my nick, however small a one” and thus “assert my reality.” For James, only by asserting his personal reality, which he associated with “the thought of my having a will,” could he alleviate the depressive effects of contemplating the kind of determinism typically associated with scientific understanding and analysis.[10]
Habit figured in two ways during and after these crucial years of James’s personal development. In contrast to the “hundred side-tendencies, ambitions, interests” that pulled him this way and that, he came to realize that he had to choose “a few tolerable simple peaceable desires” and then pursue them with “simple patient monotonous” regularity. He felt that this alone—leading a life of more habitual behavior—would put him “on the path to accomplishing something some day.” (His behavior had been so erratic, he said, that “I feel as if the greater part of the past 10 years had [been] worse than wasted.”) And in addition to reforming his behavior, he determined that he had to cultivate “habits of attention and order in thinking,” including attending to the thought of “my having a will,” which alone could provide the “moral support” he so desperately needed.[11]
Such resolutions dot James’s diary entries and letters from the 1860s into the 1870s, as do indications of the many starts and stops that characterized his tortured, by no means linear progress toward personal maturity, mental health, and professional achievement. Making matters more difficult, his resolve was complicated by his decision not only to commit himself to scientific endeavors but also to persevere in his ruminations upon the philosophical implications of those endeavors. Consistent with his strenuous approach to other issues, James chose not to take the easier route away from science, by which he could have escaped a key source of his anxiety and depression. Instead he took what he considered to be the more honest and manly approach,[12] embracing his attraction to science as well as his concern for morality, thus assuring continued conflict between the specter of scientific determinism and his yearning for moral efficacy. It all came to a head, though not a final conclusion, in an often cited crisis that began in early February and culminated in late April 1870.
On February 1, 1870, James recorded in his diary that he had “about touched bottom” and had to “face the choice with open eyes,” whether to “throw the moral business overboard” or to “follow it, and it alone.” Saying that he would “give the latter alternative a fair trial,” he admitted that “hitherto I have tried to fire myself with the moral interest, as an aid in the accomplishing of certain utilitarian ends of attaining certain difficult but salutary habits,” but “in all this I was cultivating the moral int [i.e., interest] only as a means, & more or less humbugging myself.” Now, he wrote, “I must regard these useful ends only as occasions for my moral life to become active.” Whatever the immediate result of this conviction, James’s next diary entry is a drawing of a tombstone, commemorating the death of his beloved cousin Minny Temple on March 9. The entry after that, on March 22, is addressed to Minny and includes the comment: “Minny, your death makes me feel the nothingness of all our egotistic fury.” One can only imagine what was going through James’s mind at the time, but on April 30 he reported that
I think yesterday was a crisis in my life. I finished the first part of [Charles] Renouvier’s 2nd Essays and saw no reason why his definition of free will—the sustaining of a thought because I choose to when I might have other thoughts—need be the definition of an illusion. At any rate I will assume for the present—until next year—that it is no illusion. My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.
James ended the paragraph noting that if he was better by the coming January, he might “perhaps return to metaphysic study & skepticism without danger to my powers of action.” But in the meantime, he wrote, he needed to “recollect that only when habits of order are formed can we advance to really interesting fields of action” and that “one link dropped” from the interlocking chain of habit “undoes an indefinite number.” And further on in the same diary entry, he remarked that
Hitherto, when I have felt like taking a free initiative . . . suicide seemed the most manly form to put my daring into; now, I will go a step further with my will, [and] not only act with it, but believe as well; believe in my individual reality, and creative power.
Henceforth, he declared, he would put his faith in “the self governing resistance of the ego to the world.”[13] Whatever he wrote next has been torn from his diary.
The fact that James articulated a “conscious automaton theory” in his “Draft on Brain Processes and Feelings” (1872) written just two years after his famous declaration of free will, suggests the jagged path he still had to traverse, sometimes turning toward and sometimes away from a completely deterministic account of human behavior. In any case, James’s next diary entry—the next one not ripped from his diary—is dated February 10, 1873, and it records his decision “to stick to biology for a profession in case I am not called to a chair of philosophy.” Despite this prospect, James wrote that he would nevertheless continue to regard philosophy as his “vocation” and would “never let slip a chance to do a stroke at it.”[14] Then, on April 10, James reported in his diary that he had told Charles Eliot, his former chemistry teacher and the current and subsequently long-serving president of Harvard, that he would “accept the anatomical instruction [i.e., instructorship] for next year, if well enough to perform it.”[15] At the time, James was already engaged in teaching a semester-length course in comparative anatomy and physiology at Eliot’s prior request. Thus James had begun to move from attending lectures, doing laboratory research, and engaging in a wide range of reading, to his first gainful employment, which led in turn to his appointment as acting director of Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Anatomy (in 1874) and then as assistant professor of physiology (in 1876).
In the six years between his appointment to the Museum and 1880, in addition to teaching comparative anatomy and physiology, James offered the first course—a graduate course—in the new physiological psychology (in 1875), established and had his students use the first laboratory of experimental psychology in the United States (also in 1875), began teaching undergraduate and graduate courses in psychology under the auspices of the Philosophy Department (in 1877), delivered the Johns Hopkins University Lectures in Baltimore on “The Senses and the Brain and Their Relations to Thought” (1878), delivered the Lowell Institute Lectures in Boston on “The Brain and the Mind” (1878), directed the first Ph.D. in psychology—through the Department of Philosophy—at Harvard (in 1878), and finally received his coveted appointment as assistant professor of philosophy (in 1880). By then he had signed a contract (in 1878) to produce his Principles of Psychology and published his first substantive articles in psychology and philosophy (in 1878 and 1879). Thus he was well on his way to becoming the person who is now known as a founder of both scientific psychology and pragmatic philosophy.
To understand James’s development and then rejection of “conscious automaton theory,” and to situate his distinctive treatment of habit within its contemporary scientific context, we need to look back from his subsequent fame to the early 1860s, when he enrolled as a student at Harvard’s Lawrence Scientific School. Having just given up his study of art in Newport, Rhode Island, James came to Cambridge to fulfill an earlier interest in natural history[16] under the guidance of such distinguished scientists as the zoologist and geologist Louis Agassiz, the botanist and taxonomist Asa Gray, and the anatomist Jeffries Wyman. All three, in varying ways, were intimately connected to significant ongoing scientific developments—the first two (Agassiz and Gray) having particularly close, though quite different relations to Charles Darwin, whose revolutionary On the Origin of Species (1859) was then just two years old. In addition, James came into contact with Charles Sanders Peirce, another student at the Scientific School, who would become one of his most treasured intellectual interlocutors.[17] Thus, when James turned toward the study of medicine in 1864, and returned to it after a year-long research trip to Brazil with Agassiz (in 1865–1866), he already had a solid grounding in science. And while in the Medical School, working towards his 1869 M.D. degree, he continued to explore anatomy with Wyman even as he studied medicine with Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. In addition, during a break from his medical studies (in 1867), he spent time in Europe (in Berlin in particular), where he attended courses and lectures on physiology and was especially impressed by the eminent physiologist Emil Du Bois-Reymond’s research on electrical charges accompanying muscle action, a topic that would be relevant to James’s later understanding of habit. It was during this same stay in Europe that he became familiar with the experimental research of Hermann von Helmholtz and Wilhelm Wundt, and concluded that “perhaps the time has come for Psychology to begin to be a science.”[18] From that time on, his interest in “mental science” solidified and became more prominent in his thinking.[19]
All in all, the 1860s were a heady time for James, even given his well-known bouts of ill health, and he absorbed all that he could from class, reading, laboratory, and conversation. Throughout the decade, as he pursued coursework in chemistry, natural history, anatomy and physiology, he also followed the most recent developments in the scientific study of force, energy, and matter, and he supplemented his scientific studies by reading broadly in psychiatry, philosophy, and literature. Besides Peirce, his friends toward the end of the decade included James Jackson Putnam, later a leading neurologist; Henry Bowditch, a future pioneering physiologist in whose laboratory he would continue his own research into the 1870s; and Chauncey Wright, a philosopher with broad and lively interests, whom Darwin would invite to address “when a thing may properly be said to be effected by the will of man.”[20] The result of Darwin’s invitation to Wright was an important article on the “Evolution of Self-Consciousness” (1873). At the same time, in the early 1870s, Wright was active in the Cambridge Metaphysical Club in which participants (including James and Peirce) addressed many of the pressing philosophical issues of the time, especially in relation to the import of scientific theory and practice.[21] And in the same period James initiated correspondence with Charles Renouvier and then, in mid-decade, participated in a second philosophical discussion group that focused primarily on Hegel.
Though James started his formal course of scientific and medical study from a less advanced position than students like Peirce, he quickly demonstrated sufficient ability and insight to capture the attention of his teachers. One of those teachers, Charles Eliot, remembered later in life that James had been “a very interesting and agreeable pupil,” who supplemented his work in chemistry with “excursions into other sciences and realms of thought.” “He liked experimenting,” Eliot recalled, “particularly novel experimenting.” And noting that James “possessed unusual mental powers,” he added that James later came to be admired as a teacher and scholar for “his penetration, his mental alertness, and his free spirit.”[22] In fact, Eliot told James himself in 1894 that, among his many stellar achievements as president of Harvard, “your coming to the University and your career as a teacher and writer” had offered some of “my most solid grounds of satisfaction.”[23]
The main point I wish to make by reviewing this information is simple, but too rarely recognized: James made his initial mark and earned his later opportunities at Harvard by distinguishing himself in his early scientific studies and early teaching in scientific fields. He was not a dilettante who spied on science, psychiatry, or psychology from afar, much less from a proverbial armchair. He did his turn in the lab; he visited leading laboratories and attended lectures by leading scientists in Europe as well as in the United States; he became intimately familiar with the major scientific developments of his time; he reviewed significant works in anatomy, physiology, neurology, psychiatry, and natural history, including Darwin’s work, for major periodicals; he visited asylums and clinics; he was seriously considered for an appointment at the new research-oriented Johns Hopkins University as well as at Harvard; and due to his unusual linguistic abilities, he enjoyed direct access, like few others, to multiple national literatures and to the preeminent scientific and clinical research of his time: the French and German, in particular, as well as the British and just-then-emerging American research.[24] So when James aimed his gaze toward psychological phenomena, he was not only prepared through reading, thinking, and conversations about philosophical authors and issues, he was also prepared through his training in science, which allowed him to make the best possible sense of these phenomena from the perspectives of evolutionary, physiological, neurological, and even physical science.[25]
So what, then, about habit? And how did this topic—and James’s distinctive take on it—relate to James’s thoughts on “conscious automata”? We have seen that James turned to habit in the 1860s in the hope of bringing order and direction into his life, as he yearned not only for a sense of purpose but also to achieve something as the result of his own self-assertion. (The possibility of self-assertion, we saw, became for him a moral as well as scientific issue.) We have also noted that James spent the 1860s and ’70s developing a firsthand understanding of major developments in the natural, biological, and medical sciences. Habits, he came to know, had been discussed by Darwin and others in relation to instinct; and the evolutionary approach—especially the question, what are habits good for?—was soon at the forefront of his consciousness. But beyond reflecting on this evolutionary question, James approached habit from a physiological and, more specifically, from a neurological perspective. And he subordinated these perspectives, in turn, to the emerging view of the universe as a theater of energy and force. Thus, when he focused on leading-edge research regarding the activity of the nervous system, he tended to conceptualize it in terms of the flow and transformations of measurable electrophysiological “currents” and “impulses.”[26]
In this context, in 1870, James’s former teacher Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. delivered his notable Phi Beta Kappa address on Mechanism in Thought and Morals (1871). Although he explicitly stated that he was concerned only with “that part of mental and bodily life” that is “independent of our volition,” thus indicating that (in his view) not all human thought and action was purely mechanical, Holmes nevertheless presented a strong case for the operation of “mechanistic principles” in human experience.[27] Just two years later, James extended Holmes’s proposition, applying mechanistic analysis to all of human functioning in his “conscious automaton theory,” as he called it seventeen years later, using terminology made famous by Thomas Huxley’s celebrated address of 1874.[28] Interestingly, James admitted in his draft that he was offering only “a plausible hypothesis” and was doing so because he felt it necessary “to refute the charge that certain characteristics of thought cannot possibly depend on mere nerve action.”[29] Thus, his proposing of conscious automata could be interpreted as simply doing what he would be doing throughout the rest of his career: giving the devil his due. But even if that was all that he intended, it is still relevant to ask how he justified his later rejection of what he had presented in this draft as an intellectually viable argument, one that incorporated contemporary notions of “habitual channels” for nervous impulses and that reduced “the Will” to a “quantum of force” resulting from “oscillations” of “current,” which eventually overcomes “the mutual interferences and inhibitions of the conflicting waves” set up by these oscillations. What we typically regard as a voluntary “decision” at the end of this process, James conjectured, is simply a misconstrued sense of effort and achievement conveyed by prolonged tension followed by an abrupt resolution or action. The entire process is “determined mechanically” and “is not in essence a whit different from what we have all so often observed in flying a kite,” during which “the play of the various forces” make the kite dart up and down, left and right, before it suddenly “sweeps headlong from the zenith to the ground.”[30]
The soft spot in James’s drafted argument, which led to his later rejection of conscious automaton theory, was his explicitly stated recognition that while “in ordinary thinking association by contiguity plays a dominant part,” things are different in “rapt or passionate thought,” in which “association by similarity is a marked peculiarity.” In this latter case, James noted, “we are more intent” and “occult [distant and unexpected] analogies are apt to come to light.” As a result, we not only “generalize,” we also “make discoveries,” seeing that “at bottom this . . . is really nothing but a case of that.”[31]
In his draft, James swept the “peculiar” character of thought-by-similarity (thinking that is dependent upon the association of ideas, things, and properties that are similar) into the same explanatory scheme as thought-by-contiguity (thinking that is dependent upon ideas, things, and properties that have been experienced as proximate to one another in time or space), but the distinction between these two traditional ways of understanding human thought was the key to his subsequent liberation from—and critique of—a strictly mechanical account of human thought and action in lieu of an account that granted a consequential role to consciousness. The pivotal factors in this liberation were James’s adoption of Darwinian selection as a crucial function in mental dynamics, combined with his attribution of a directive role in selection to interest and attention. Although there seems to have been no single moment of inspiration for this constellation of factors, a reconstruction of his thinking from available records reveals that a confluence of ideas—ideas taken from at least three individuals (William Wordsworth, Chauncey Wright, and Shadworth Hodgson) in addition to Darwin himself—provided the context within which he reached conclusions that remained central to his thought—and to his understanding of habit—from that time forward.[32]
The first clear hint of this context was given in March 1873, when James reported to his father that he felt much better than he had over the previous year (i.e., from around the time he had written his conscious automaton draft). The principal factor, he said, was that he had “given up the notion that all mental disorder required . . . a physical basis” and now “saw that the mind did act irrespective of material coercion, and could be dealt with therefore at first-hand.”[33] This new conviction relieved his fear that he suffered, inescapably, from a physiologically based tendency toward neurasthenia, hypochondria, and melancholia—a fear that was far from assuaged by his articulation of conscious automaton theory.[34] Instrumental in his change of mind was not only his continued rumination upon Renouvier’s philosophy, but also his reading of Wordsworth, on whom he had been “feeding” for “a good while.”[35] More particularly, he had been reading and reflecting on Wordsworth’s long poem “The Excursion,” especially its fourth book (“Despondency Corrected”), which trumpets the healing effects associated with belief in “the mind’s excursive power,” which is to say, the mind’s ability (figuratively speaking) to walk about nature, not passively “chained to its object[s] in brute slavery” but rather actively conferring “order and distinctness” upon them. In short, Wordsworth’s theme was the productive marriage of mind and matter, in which mind contributes “interest” as well as “Will” to what otherwise would have been but “dull and inanimate” matter.[36] In offering a persuasive rendition of this theme, Wordsworth gave James “authentic tidings of invisible things.”[37] And even before James had worked out the intellectual implications of these tidings, the “persuasion and belief” that Wordsworth helped bring about had “ripened,” as Wordsworth himself put it, into a “passionate intuition” that would abide from then on at the heart of James’s psychological and philosophical thought,[38] namely, that each and every mind is characterized by the distinctive interests and willfulness that it brings to its activities.
James encountered the concept of interest not only in Wordsworth’s idealist poetry but also in Chauncey Wright’s and Shadworth Hodgson’s empiricist psychology and philosophy. Wright had no doubt expressed his views to James in personal conversations, but he also gave public voice to them in his “Evolution of Self-Consciousness,” published just one month after James had spoken with his father about Wordsworth’s beneficial impact. The crucial thing about interest, Wright claimed in this article, is that it directs one’s attention.[39] As a result, as James put it in 1875, “my experience is only what I agree to attend to.”[40] This individualizing of experience as a function of one’s own interest and attention became a crucial “law” for James, separating his emerging psychology from that of Herbert Spencer and Alexander Bain. As he said, “Spencer shrinks from explicit recognition of this law” while “Mr. Bain,” though “in principle” attuned to it, “does not work it out.”[41] Only Chauncey Wright had done so, James asserted, even though he was already aware of Shadworth Hodgson’s treatment of interest in Time and Space (1865). (In fact, he had begun a close study of this text in September 1873.) In later years it was Hodgson’s, not Wright’s, “law of interest” that James cited as crucially significant,[42] perhaps because of his greater sympathy with Hodgson’s overall philosophy.
The upshot was that James approached his first substantive publications and his first major public addresses (all occurring in 1878) with a firm determination to articulate a physiologically based psychology that disavowed conscious automaton theory—and any related mechanistic form of associationism—in lieu of attributing active roles in mental dynamics to interest and attention, which he came to see as not only compatible with Darwinian selectionism, but as illustrative of its reach into the realm of consciousness. Among the happy fruits of this conjunction of ideas, for James, was the possibility it opened up for the moral life, as advanced and structured through the action of consciousness and the development of habits.[43]
The first step in articulating his emerging views, in print, took place in James’s “Remarks on Spencer’s Definition of Mind as Correspondence” (1878), in which he criticized Spencer’s claim that the mind “adjusts” passively to its “outer relations” (i.e., its environment). To the contrary, James argued, the mind has “preferences and repugnances”—“subjective interests”—that guide its “selection,” from among the dense array of environmental stimuli, of only those features that matter to it. The mind, in other words, has “a vote” in what it takes in; “it is in the game, and not a mere looker-on.”[44]
James developed this theme further in his Hopkins Lectures on “The Senses and the Brain and Their Relation to Thought” (1878), which gave special emphasis to the role of selection in mental functioning. Then, in “Brute and Human Intellect” (1878), he returned to the issue of association-by-similarity, which he had treated in his conscious-automaton draft of 1872. But now, instead of reducing it to the same mechanistic explanatory scheme that seemed to work for association-by-contiguity, he noted that association-by-similarity depends upon active selection, that is, upon the mind’s dissociating of “interesting” features from the “originally vague syncretism [whole] of consciousness.”[45] And in his Lowell Lectures on “The Brain and the Mind” (1878), he elaborated upon this point, arguing that features, once dissociated, are then compared by the mind in light of interests that are typically unique to the individual. Thus, the notion of an “impartial consciousness” that accompanies but plays no active role in mental dynamics does not fit the apparent facts. Beyond this, James laid out a systematic view of the mind as selective at each level of functioning, from bottom to top: i.e., from sensation to perception to reasoning to aesthetic activity and finally to ethical deliberation and choice. Notably, this systematic approach culminated in “the moral life” in which “choice reigns supreme,”[46] and it reflected the overall Darwinian framework of James’s lectures and thought, a selectivist framework that James extended, through his knowledge of the nervous system as well as his observations of psychological processes, well beyond the boundaries set by Darwin himself.[47]
James spelled all of this out, in writing, in his article on “Are We Automata?” His explicit aim in this article was to show that the apparent functional utility of consciousness makes the existence of conscious automata unlikely. The crux of his argument revolved around the question, “Of what use to a nervous system is a superadded consciousness?”[48] Noting that consciousness has evolved across species and over time, he argued on both a priori and a posteriori grounds that the utility that prompted this evolution is almost certainly related to the fact that a selective consciousness, which can compare aspects of what is presented to it, can then focus its attention on the one that most closely accords with its vital interests. This would, in effect, “load the dice” so that the conscious individual could deal with the world in a way that is relevant to his concerns rather than suffer, without recourse, the utterly random impulses and responses to confront him.[49] As James put it in one of his most famous passages, repeated in his Principles of Psychology, “the mind is at every stage a theatre of simultaneous possibilities. Consciousness consists in the comparison of these with each other, the selection of some, and the suppression of the rest by the reinforcing and inhibiting agency of attention.”[50]
After stating this conclusion, James returned in his article to “the ethical field” and discussed “the true moral energy” involved in striving for ends that have come to the fore through “selective attention.”[51] Using the example of “an inebriate struggling against temptation,” he underscored how “the selective pressure of consciousness,” representing in this case the will to avoid alcohol, runs “counter” to “the strongest tendencies of automatic activity.”[52] Thus, he showed how “the moral business” that had concerned him from a much earlier age could be preserved and pursued within the domain of scientific analysis. And in referring to the “tendencies of automatic activity,” he introduced the topic (habit) that would become an essential part—both point and counterpoint—of his views on the active, even willful, activity of consciousness.[53]
Habit, as James had already noted in his Lowell Lectures on “The Brain and the Mind,” is “the great thing” that allows the cerebral hemispheres to be free for “higher flights.”[54] Lower levels of neurological functioning, he explained to his audience with a series of anatomical slides, are responsible for “fatal,” that is, automatic or instinctual, responses, but the higher centers are clearly essential to intelligent behavior. And more than anything else, he said, habit provides “the best explanation” of how “acts of intelligence” come to characterize human behavior. On the one hand, habits represent what an individual has learned; on the other, because they occur with a minimum of consciousness and decision-making, habits free up the individual to attend to unexpected matters that warrant intelligent response.[55] So, functionally, habits bring order to the typical routines of life while allowing consciousness to focus on events that fall outside those routines. Thus, they make good sense within an evolutionary scheme.
Though we have only James’s notes from his Lowell Lectures, it is clear that by October 1878, when the lectures took place, he had developed his basic ideas about the relation between brain functioning and mental processes, and between deterministic cerebral conditions and sometimes indeterminate cognitive and behavioral responses. And though he would go on to become famous for his descriptions of consciousness and his advocacy of the will, it becomes clear, as we review the development and structure of his thought, that it is habit, not consciousness or will, that holds his system together. Habit also provides a crucial means by which he was able to respond positively to the intellectual attraction of causal explanation while also accepting that there is a moral imperative—and an actual way—to live a responsible and meaningful life, one not absolutely predetermined by causal relations. Clearly, then, James’s treatment of habit resolved his earlier personal dilemma and inspired his distinctive way of integrating physiology, psychology, philosophy, and ethics.[56]
One of the things that distinguished James’s treatment of habit—the crucial element that he added to previous discussions of habit in the works of Spencer, Bain, and Carpenter—was his use of what he called “the Meynert scheme.”[57] As early as his Lowell Lectures,[58] James had recognized that Theodor Meynert’s neurological analysis of cerebral functioning provided the key to explaining “the education of the hemispheres,” which is to say, the process by which human action becomes intelligent.[59] Through a lengthy review of neurological evidence, extending well beyond anything undertaken by earlier empirical psychologists, James arrived at a modified version of the sensory-motor theory of cortical functioning as proposed by Meynert and John Hughlings Jackson.[60] Although James readily admitted “how ignorant we really are” regarding “psychogenesis,”[61] he nonetheless felt confident, on both theoretical and empirical grounds, that something like Meynert’s scheme, as modified by himself, approximated the neurological basis of habit formation.[62] James built up to this conclusion through a series of articles published in the 1880s.[63] What he expressed in The Principles of Psychology, with this and that additional flourish, was the result of these earlier cumulative efforts.
A fundamental distinction that James made was between instinctual reflexes, associated with the lower brain stem, and learned habits, associated with the cerebral hemispheres. All of scientific psychology, he felt, was developing, in the wake of evolutionary science, on the model of reflex action. The pivotal fact was that, in humans, the evolution of the hemispheres has allowed not only the emergence of full-blown consciousness but also higher orders of habit formation than we see in organisms with less developed and more rigid nervous systems. The evolutionary advancement represented by the hemispheres resides in their “plasticity,” which facilitates the establishment of new or altered neural pathways through which electrophysiological currents pass on the way from sensory input to motor output.[64] For James, electrophysiological currents always underlie conscious awareness, emotional feeling, and behavioral action, but the particular pathways by which these currents travel from the point of input to the point of output can be modified or even created anew. (This is what is made possible by the “plastic” nature of the hemispheres.) There is nothing mysterious about this, James felt: “The currents, once in [the hemispheres], must find a way out.”[65] If a pathway is blocked, some other “channel” will have to be found. Paths taken by electrophysiological currents may be either built-in or accidental, but they never come about initially as the result of conscious intent or willful effort.[66] Nonetheless, once a pathway has been made, consciousness can enter into the picture, ex post facto. This contention was central to James’s understanding of both habit and will, and it made good on his earlier claim that consciousness, as something that has evolved, must have some practical utility.
James’s classic illustration of habit formation was a child who has touched a lit candle and subsequently remembers the pain (in James’s term, the “image”) of having done so. He or she will then associate, by means of their neural connection, “the original tendency to touch” with the image of pain, and this association will inhibit “the touching tendency” the next time the child perceives a lit candle.[67] This inhibition of the electrophysiological impulse in turn will necessitate the traversing of a new pathway—a different route for the current to find its way out of the cerebral hemisphere. With repetition, as the current flows more and more readily down this new route, the initially conscious withholding of the hand from the lit candle will become unconscious and habitual.[68] In this way, humans—and to the extent that their lesser brain capacity allows, other animals—learn both what not to do and what to do when excitation enters the cerebral hemispheres from this or that internal or external source. And what can and cannot be done—as well as what habits are formed—depends upon the extant evolution of physical structure and the associated degree of consciousness. The important thing is that, whatever happens, whether habitual or non-habitual, there will always be a specific neurological substrate, and both consciousness and habits will remain firmly rooted in neurology.
In this scheme—and thus in James’s proposed physiological psychology as a whole—consciousness itself is now a causal factor. Images, or ideas in classical terminology, are posited as factors in the transmission or inhibition of neural impulses, acting now to keep the path open to action (when they prefigure desirable outcomes), acting at other times to close it (when they prefigure undesirable ones). And since “what is early ‘learned by heart’ becomes branded-in (as it were) upon the Cerebrum” so that “it becomes part of the normal fabric,”[69] it is crucial, James concluded, for each of us “to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy” by making “automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can.”[70] Reflecting the hard-earned lessons of his own life, James added that “there is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision,”[71] and then he proceeded to list a series of maxims that in his view would help to assure the establishment of “moral habits.”[72] He drew these lessons in large part from Bain, but he grounded his support of them on his preceding analysis of the plastic nature of neural structures, noting that “the physiological study of mental conditions is thus the most powerful ally of hortatory ethics.”[73]
Although James admitted that many habits in humans as in other animals are built upon instinctual tendencies, his primary concern was with those habits, especially in humans, that are unique to the individual and instrumental to living a good life. Striving for the latter, as we have seen, raised for James the conundrum of the will. He addressed this conundrum at length in his Principles, basing his proposed solution of it—a solution that satisfied both his scientific and moral inclinations—upon the same neurological structures and other factors encountered earlier in his analysis of habit.[74] In particular, he reached back to a basic premise of his chapter on habit: that a potential “innervation” of human conduct is sometimes associated, through experience, with an “image” of how we would feel “when the innervation [i.e., conduct] is over.”[75] If this “anticipatory image” provides no hindrance, the action will take place more or less automatically. But if it arouses resistance, the action will occur only if sufficient will is summoned. Such summoning occurs typically when the individual has an interest in the imagined outcome. That interest directs and sustains the individual’s conscious attention to the outcome, thereby triggering the action whose end has come to dominate consciousness. This directing and sustaining of attention to a desired end is, for James, equivalent to a willful assertion that it occur. As he put it in his Latinate terminology, it is the fiat (the decision to “let it be”) that constitutes “the essence of the voluntariness of the act.”[76] Intentionally affirming a mental idea or wish of this kind, James noted, “is the only psychic state which introspection lets us discern as the forerunner of our voluntary acts.”[77]
The key hypothesis underlying this account of willful action—action caused by conscious and even effortful attention to the idea of its consequences—is provided by James’s “ideo-motor theory,” which he elaborated upon Maudsley’s more restricted clinical observations of “ideo-motor action.”[78] According to Maudsley’s observations, the idea of an action, barring effective resistance, brings about that action. James may have been attracted to this premise, initially, because it represents consciousness—and more specifically, particular conscious ideas—as effectual, but he was probably persuaded that the premise is true by his reading about and experimental duplication of various phenomena associated with hypnotic states, in which an idea (i.e., a “suggestion”) is implemented without hesitation, unless some inhibitory obstruction takes place.[79]
However ironic it may seem, habit is important in James’s treatment of will. Once established, James argued, a habit can be triggered by “the idea of the end,” which “tends more and more to make itself all-sufficient.” So if the initiating idea is held long enough in consciousness, James continued, “the whole chain [of associated connections and final action] rattles off quasi-reflexly,” as described in his earlier chapter on habit.[80] Although in some cases “the bare idea of a movement’s sensible effects” is a sufficient “mental cue” to action, in other cases “an additional mental antecedent, in the shape of a fiat, decision, consent, volitional mandate, or other synonymous phenomenon of consciousness” must intervene “before the movement can follow.”[81] But when it follows, it tends to trace the path that has been established in the past, both by its electrophysiological current and by the behavioral outcome to which it has led. Though James gave only a single example of his own before referring the reader to relevant examples provided by Bain, he insisted that “it was in fact through meditating on the phenomenon in my own person that I first became convinced of the truth of the doctrine which these pages present.”[82] We have seen earlier some of the personal experiences that fed his meditations. In fact, it is noteworthy that his explanation of the will in 1890, wedded now to speculative yet experimentally grounded neurology and to the clinical observations of a leading psychiatrist, is amazingly consonant with Renouvier’s definition of free will as “the sustaining of a thought because I choose to,” which James had accepted as he struggled with the implications of scientific analysis and skepticism, way back in 1870.[83]
In the next pages in his chapter on the will, James went from a discussion of simple yes-no decision-making to more complex situations in which actions result from “deliberation” over multiple, often conflicting ideas about possible actions. He also discussed five types of decision, the feeling of effort, and two kinds of “unhealthy will”: the “obstructed will” that makes normal actions impossible and “the explosive will” that makes abnormal ones irrepressible. These are interesting and relevant discussions, as are his subsequent critique of pleasure and pain as “springs of action” and his philosophical ruminations on “free-will” and “the education of the will,” which include further neurological speculations. But we have covered enough to document our central contention that habit is at the foundation of James’s thought, providing a means for the emergence of distinctly human, purposeful behavior while also playing an essential role in other aspects of psychological functioning, including the will. All that remains to underscore is James’s contention that neither habit nor will creates options out of thin air; they can only tip the balance to or from one or the other extant idea by selecting or not selecting it for attention from among “the theatre of simultaneous possibilities” for human action.[84] But though the range of potential habits is constrained and the will is not radically free, both being dependent on material conditions and their conscious representation, they are nonetheless indelibly individual and consequential. Each person, as James had hoped to show, is in the game, each can make a difference, and each can leave a nick in the universe by the cultivation of his or her own habits and the assertion of his or her own will.
In subsequent works after the publication of The Principles of Psychology in 1890, James continued to direct attention to the importance of habit, most notably in his popular textbook on psychology (Psychology: Briefer Course [1892], an abbreviated version of his Principles) and in his Talks to Teachers (delivered throughout the 1890s and then published in 1899). In the former work, besides treating habit itself in a thorough manner, he emphasized that “what is called our ‘experience’ is almost entirely determined by our habits of attention,”[85] and he discussed a number of ways in which “the law of neural habit” has an impact on human thought, feeling, and behavior.[86] In the latter work, he hit many of the same notes, after defining education as “the organization of acquired habits of conduct and tendencies to behavior”[87] and before concluding with a Spinozistic plea that “you [should] make freemen of your pupils by habituating them to act, whenever possible, under the notion of a good,” which is to say, according to the idea of what, first, teachers and later the students themselves take to be good.[88] To the considerable extent that humans are “bundles of habit,”[89] he argued, their moral character will consist in “an organized set of habits of reaction.”[90]
At the same time, over the final decades of his life, a counterpoint to the positive representation of habit became increasingly apparent in James’s thought and work. This counterpoint had always been a feature, though a much less prominent feature, of his work. For instance, in his very first publication on philosophy, James contrasted philosophical thinking with common ways of thinking, saying that the philosophical student had to get into the habit of thinking unhabitually! As he put it, “philosophic study means the habit of always seeing an alternative, of not taking the usual for granted, of making conventionalities fluid again, of imagining foreign states of mind. In a word, it means the possession of mental perspective,”[91] by which he clearly meant the possession of a different perspective from that of common sense. This accorded with his understanding of “genius,” which he defined early on as the ability to make atypical analogical connections.[92] He repeated this definition in Principles[93] and expressed it two years later when he wrote that “genius, in truth, means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.”[94] In contrast, said James, most of us “have no eyes but for those aspects of things” which we have “already been taught to discern”—things that “have been labeled for us,” the labels then being “stamped into our mind.”[95] Thus, “most of us grow more and more enslaved to the stock conceptions with which we have once become familiar,” leading to a kind of “old-fogyism” in which our thinking and behavior are all too conventional.[96] So, while it may simplify and organize life to have routine ways of perceiving, thinking about, and responding to the stream of experience, James realized that there is a potential downside to this economy of habit. Hence, he felt that some individuals, at least, need to see and think and act outside the box, for the sake of others as well as themselves, lest habit become too much of a good thing, stultifying and routinizing rather than freeing and guiding us.
Perhaps it was James’s increasing dismay at the political and social conventions of the 1890s and early 1900s that aroused him, as it seems, to seek more pointedly new ways of thinking and acting after 1890.[97] But in any case, in his initial discussion of pragmatism, he represented the pragmatic philosopher as a “path-finder,” even a “trail blazer,” who sets out to identify new ways of trying to get to the “center” of the forest of experience.[98] It is probably relevant too that, after focusing on establishing psychology on a scientific basis over the preceding decades, James was now concerned, in his initial presentation on pragmatism, with making room for religious as well as scientific modes of understanding and living. Only a few years later, in Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), he discussed “the hot spot in a man’s consciousness” that constitutes “the habitual centre of his personal energy”[99] and explored how this habitual center of energy might be “converted” to another set of ideas (e.g., religious ideas) by that individual’s “growth into new habits.”[100]
Similarly, James expressed an increasing desire to break other kinds of barriers to innovation and revivification, such as restraints placed on the inner “energies” and “powers” of human beings.[101] Liberating and expressing those powers, he hoped, would free himself and others from being “victims of habit-neurosis” and from “habituation” to “literality and decorum.”[102] In sum, then, James seemed to be saying, in a variety of venues, that if habit can help us feel comfortable in a world of change, there are times when breaking habits, challenging beliefs, trying out new perspectives—and feeling uncomfortable—is more likely to prompt major advancements in knowledge, custom, and goodwill.
Perhaps James’s pragmatism can best be seen, in this context, as a way of moving from resting point to resting point along the path to fuller knowledge, more confident beliefs, and a better world. “A pragmatist turns his back resolutely and once for all upon a lot of inveterate habits dear to professional philosophers,” said James.[103] “Pragmatism unstiffens all our theories” while allowing enough lingering, if loosely held, “loyalty” to “older truths” to keep us sufficiently steady for the next step into a newer and better world.[104] As “mediator and reconciler,” pragmatism has “no prejudices whatever, no obstructive dogmas, no rigid canons. . . . Her only test of probable truth is what works best in the way of leading us” ahead, toward the goal of ever more useful thought and ever more satisfying life.[105] Perhaps it is useful to think of James urging us to develop a new habit of proceeding pragmatically, keeping one hand on the relatively known past as we reach for the relatively unknown future, striving for what is beyond our grasp but not beyond our hope.
Whether that is a useful thought or not—whether James’s pragmatism represents a blending of the habitual and unhabitual in a productive alliance—is an issue for another time. This chapter has been concerned primarily with exploring the role of habit in William James’s life and thought, and how it allowed him to mediate between his physiological studies, psychological speculations, philosophical conclusions, and moral aspirations. Though typically passed over as one of his more popular and least original contributions to psychology and philosophy, in fact his treatment of habit was crucial in allowing him to walk a fine line between scientific analysis (and objective determinism), on the one hand, and moral advocacy (and subjective indeterminism), on the other. It also allowed for the imposition of order upon relatively unstructured human experience (as readily illustrated in his own personal life), while providing a place, even if an admittedly small place, in which human will (considered in a new way) could be seen as playing a crucial role in the midst of an apparently all-too-material universe. And although James spent the rest of his career, after 1890, searching for a compelling articulation of a new metaphysics that would eliminate the chasm between mental and bodily processes—maybe it would be a new kind of materialism that was somehow aufgehoben to incorporate consciousness as a natural, evolved, and efficacious part of nature[106]—in the meantime his approach to habit and to the closely associated processes of cognition, feeling, volition, and action would have to “stand in,” however awkwardly at times, for this needed, eagerly anticipated, but indefinitely deferred conceptual and theoretical breakthrough.
James was not alone—and was far from the first—to show such interest in or to make extensive use of habit. He was well aware of earlier treatments by Aristotle, Augustine, the Scholastics, Jonathan Edwards, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and he was intimately familiar with the relevant philosophical ideas of Alexander Bain and Herbert Spencer, the physiological speculations of Thomas Laycock and William Carpenter, the psychiatric observations of Isaac Ray and Henry Maudsley, and the innovative thought of his own friends Chauncey Wright and Charles Sanders Peirce. He was also well informed about the recent results of experimental physiology and neurology in England, France, Germany, and elsewhere, including the research of David Ferrier, John Hughlings Jackson, and Theodor Meynert. His travels, studies, and reading—as random as they may have seemed to others—provided an unusually broad and solid framework for his creative thinking. It is probably safe to say that few twenty-first-century psychologists or philosophers, aside from a rather small group of dedicated James scholars, realize how deep as well as wide his reading, conversations, correspondence, and reflections were in the decades leading up to the publication of his Principles of Psychology, which in various ways provided the foundation for his subsequent work in philosophy as well as psychology. Everyone knows that Principles, his first book, was published relatively late in his career (he was forty-eight when it appeared), but a careful review of the preceding development of his thought has revealed how early he came to his basic ideas and how thoroughly he worked through their implications over the subsequent decades. In addition, tracing the development of James’s thinking has highlighted his intentions, the obstacles he met, and how he dealt with them. Seemingly simple ideas—even ones that he took directly from someone else—were often made to do distinctive work within the economy of his own evolving system of thought. This fact has often been missed by those who analyze elements of his thinking without sufficient understanding of their role within the entire corpus of his thought.
Hilary Putnam has remarked that “William James is a figure who simply won’t go away.”[107] One reason, as the neuropsychologist Richard F. Thompson has noted, is that “his views remain astonishingly contemporary.”[108] Regarding habit, for instance, James’s emphasis on plasticity “has only recently regained popularity in study of the neurobiology of learning and memory,” and his neurological speculations are now seen as advocating a “kind of connectionist machinery,” akin to contemporary theorizing. Indeed, so much is now going the way of James’s hypotheses—for instance, regarding the localization of functions and the basic structure of the brain as “a circuit, albeit an immensely complicated one”—that Thompson is confident that “James would be very pleased” by the recent body of neurological literature. Similar things have been said, from time to time, about James’s ideas in other areas of psychology and in philosophy as well. Bruce Wilshire is only one among many who have called for “a serious reconsideration of William James,” despite the “mixed bag” of “strengths” and “defects” that he sees in James’s work.[109] Even regarding the controversial topic of free will, anathema in scientific psychology and much of philosophy over the past century, James’s ideas and near analogues are once again receiving close, sympathetic, even appreciative attention.[110]
Further consideration of James’s views, then, can advance not only our knowledge of history but also our understanding of where matters currently stand and where they might be heading in the future. With regard to the topic of habit, in particular, this chapter has clarified and expanded upon some of the basic claims that James made: claims that have sometimes been simplified by others to the point of travesty. As Charlene Haddock Seigfried has said, rephrasing what John McDermott said before her, “James is delightfully easy reading the first time around, but gets more difficult with each successive reading.”[111] Unfortunately, few people bother to read James a second time, if they read him at all, and the vast majority of those who read him at all, read only selected portions of well-known classics, whether The Principles of Psychology, The Will to Believe, The Varieties of Religious Experience, Pragmatism, A Pluralistic Universe, The Meaning of Truth, or Essays in Radical Empiricism. Far fewer know about, much less read, the documents and other works (letters, diaries, notebooks, unpublished drafts, and early articles) that have made possible this reconstruction of his views on habit and associated matters and their relation to his views on science and morality as well as psychology and philosophy. With their aid we have seen how James used habit to mediate between scientific determinism and moral freedom, and thus to establish psychology and philosophy on a new foundation.
The philosopher Stephen Toulmin (1922–2009), a beloved teacher and dear friend to whose memory I dedicate this chapter, once observed that “philosophy has always flourished on half-fledged sciences.”[112] The still-fertile philosophical contributions of William James, emerging as they did from the half-tilled soil of new scientific research in anatomy, neurology, and psychology, provide as compelling an illustration as one could wish.
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———. “What Makes Life Significant.” In Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals.
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1. William James, Letter to Catherine Elizabeth Havens, 23 March 1874, in The Correspondence of William James, 12 volumes, eds. Ignas K. Skrupskelis and Elizabeth M. Berkeley (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992–2004), vol. 4, 486.
2. James, Letter to Catherine Elizabeth Havens, 13 July 1874, in Correspondence, vol. 4, 499.
3. James, Letter to Catherine Elizabeth Havens, 13 July 1874, 499.
4. James, Letter to Charles Augustus Strong, 21 October 1889, in Correspondence, vol. 4, 541.
5. William James, “Are We Automata?”, in Essays in Psychology, ed. Frederick Burkhardt (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 58.
6. See, for example, Gay Wilson Allen, William James: A Biography (New York: Viking, 1967); Daniel W. Bjork, William James: The Center of His Vision (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988); Howard M. Feinstein, Becoming William James (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984); Alfred Habegger, The Father: A Life of Henry James, Sr. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994); Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James, 2 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1935); Robert D. Richardson, William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006); and Linda Simon, Genuine Reality: A Life of William James (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1998).
7. Alice James, The Diary of Alice James, ed. Leon Edel (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1964), 57.
8. Henry James, Autobiography, ed. Frederick W. Dupee (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 8.
9. William James, “James on Tausch,” in Essays, Comments, and Reviews, ed. Frederick Burkhardt (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 190.
10. James, Letter to Edgar Beach Van Winkle, 1 March 1858, in Correspondence, vol. 4, 11–13, and James, Letter to Thomas Wren Ward, 7 January 1868, in Correspondence, vol. 4, 248, 250, italics added.
11. James, Letter to Thomas Wren Ward, 7 November 1867, in Correspondence, vol. 4, 225, and James, Letter to Thomas Wren Ward, 7 January 1868, 248, 250.
12. See Kim Townsend, Manhood at Harvard: William James and Others (New York: Norton, 1996).
13. William James, Diary [1] (1868–1873), in William James Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University.
14. Perhaps it should be noted that opportunities in philosophy were severely limited and that related scholarly expectations were very different at that time. At Harvard, there was only one professor of philosophy, Francis Bowen, in 1872. Bowen taught from the texts of Scottish philosophers and was one of the exceptions among contemporary academic philosophers in that he produced his own works on metaphysics, logic, and ethics. (Most simply taught from others’ texts or from their own commentaries on others’ texts.) Of course, there were some instructors who helped Bowen teach philosophy to the approximately 600 undergraduates at Harvard in 1872, but their prospects for advancement were far from good. In fact, only one of the instructors from the entire decade, George Herbert Palmer, ended up becoming a professor of philosophy at Harvard (see George Herbert Palmer and Ralph Barton Perry, “Philosophy,” in Samuel Eliot Morison, ed., The Development of Harvard University since the Inauguration of President Eliot, 1869–1929 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1930), xc, 3; see also Bruce Kuklick, The Rise of American Philosophy: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1860–1930 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977).
15. James, Diary [1].
16. See, for example, James, Letter to Edgar Beach Van Winkle, 1 March 1858, 14.
17. It is relevant to note that Peirce developed his own views on the importance of habit in the 1860s (see, e.g., Charles S. Peirce, “Some Consequences of Four Incapacities,” in The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, eds. Nathan Hauser and Christian Kloesel [Bloomington: Indiana University Press,1992]) and further developed those views in his later, more elaborate analyses of the relations among habit, action, doubt, and belief (see, e.g., Peirce, “The Fixation of Belief” and “How to Make Our Ideas Clear,” in The Essential Peirce). On Peirce’s views, see Sandra B. Rosenthal, Charles Peirce’s Pragmatic Pluralism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994) and Gary Shapiro, “Habit and Meaning in Peirce’s Pragmatism,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 9 (1973): 24–40.
18. James, Letter to Thomas Wren Ward, 7 November 1867, 226.
19. James used “mental science” as virtually identical with “philosophy.” For him the term covered not only recent and ongoing efforts to integrate scientific research with traditional philosophical concerns about the nature of thought, emotion, will, mind, and consciousness, but also other areas of study that deal with “the Human mind, its laws, its powers & the authority of its conclusions.” More specifically, as he wrote to President Eliot in 1875, these other areas of mental science encompassed logic, the history of philosophy, and metaphysics (including epistemology) (James, Letter to Charles W. Eliot, 2 December 1875, in Correspondence, vol. 4, 527). In arguing for his appointment in philosophy, primarily to teach the new physiological psychology, James pointed out that he offered what no “mere” philosopher or physiologist could: He had both “first hand acquaintance with the facts of nervous physiology” and knowledge of “the subtlety & difficulty of the psychologic portions” of the subject (Letter to Charles W. Eliot, 2 December 1875, 528). He soon expanded the argument about the benefit of a scientific background to philosophy as a whole, claiming that in the 1870s philosophy must, “like Molière,” claim “her own where she finds it,” and thus must turn to “physics and natural history” and “educate herself accordingly” (James, “The Teaching of Philosophy in Our Colleges,” 6). This obviously expanded the prospects for his own future in philosophy.
20. Charles Darwin, Letter to Chauncey Wright, 3 June 1872, in The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, ed. Francis Darwin (London: John Murray, 1887), vol. 3.
21. See Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001).
22. Charles Eliot, “William James” (1915), in William James Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University.
23. Charles Eliot, Letter to William James, 20 May 1894, in Correspondence, vol. 7, 504.
24. Regarding James’s scientific background, see especially Paul Jerome Croce, Science and Religion in the Era of William James: Eclipse of Certainty (1820–1880) (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995) and “William James’s Scientific Education,” History of the Human Science 8 (1995): 9–27. See also Perry, The Thought and Character of William James.
25. I emphasize this point, which will be relevant to the argument that follows, because of the repetitious acknowledgment in the literature on James regarding his idiosyncratic formal education and his own typically self-deprecating statements about the negative consequences of not having been sufficiently “drilled” in the sciences and logic in his younger days (see, e.g., James, Letter to Thomas Wren Ward, 7 November 1867, 225). This has led to a vision of James as less directly knowledgeable and less prepared than he actually was to be creative and effective in his chosen line of research (first in “mental science,” narrowly defined, and then, by extension, in other areas of philosophy). The relevance of science to his philosophical work beyond “mental science” can be underscored by the fact that the first course he taught in philosophy, other than physiological psychology, was “The Philosophy of Evolution” (in 1879). And he approached other philosophical topics, later, with the same scientifically informed consciousness that he brought to his work in psychology. It is relevant to add a word about his background in philosophy, which he had read and discussed with others since at least the early 1860s. It seems clear that he knew a wider range of philosophy, albeit unsystematically, than he would have known by simply following the standard college curriculum. There were, of course, no graduate programs in the subject at that time.
26. In the early 1860s James took Joseph Lovering’s physics course, which dealt with electricity among other natural phenomena. He also read William Grove’s Correlation of Physical Forces (1862), which presented the various natural forces as convertible into each other. And he returned again and again to reports of Michael Faraday’s research, including Faraday’s own Experimental Researches in Chemistry and Physics (1859). In the same period he read and re-read Ludwig Büchner’s Kraft und Stoff (1858) and found it difficult to shake its central theme that without matter there was no force, and without force there was no matter. The relevance of these overlapping ideas to his later interest in the electrophysiological research of Du Bois-Reymond, to his subsequent fear “that we are Nature through and through, that we are wholly conditioned, that not a wiggle of our will happens save as the result of physical laws” (James, Letter to Thomas Wren Ward, March 1869, in Correspondence, vol. 4, 370), and thus to his temporarily held “conscious automaton theory,” with its reduction of mental phenomena to physical matter and force, is obvious.
27. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Mechanism in Thought and Morals: An Address Delivered Before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard University, June 29, 1870. With Notes and Afterthoughts, in Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1891), vol. 8, 261–62 (italics added).
28. See John D. Greenwood, “Whistles, Bells, and Cogs in Machines: Thomas Huxley and Epiphenomenalism,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 46 (2010): 276–99, for details about Huxley and other figures in the subsequent conscious automaton debate.
29. William James, “[Draft on Brain Processes and Feelings],” in Manuscript Essays and Notes, ed. Frederick Burkhardt (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 253.
30. James, “[Draft on Brain Processes and Feelings],” 252, 255, 256.
31. James, “[Draft on Brain Processes and Feelings],” 253–54.
32. I could have listed Ralph Waldo Emerson as well, but his more general, pervasive, and chronic influence was consonant in this instance with the momentarily more acute impact of William Wordsworth, who had also influenced Emerson himself decades earlier. Still, it is worth noting that Emerson’s Americanized version of Wordsworthian ideas, as set forth (among other places) in his 1870 Harvard lectures on the “Natural History of Intellect” (1870), had a significant impact on James, whose familiarity with Emersonian ideas can be traced back to childhood. When James asserted, in 1873, that “I am sure that an age will come . . . when emerson’s [sic] philosophy will be in our bones,” he was acknowledging, he indicated, that Emerson’s ideas had already shaped his own “dramatic imagination” of the way things are (James, “[Notes on Art and Pessimism],” in Manuscript Essays and Notes, 295).
33. Quoted in Perry, The Thought and Character of William James, vol. 1, 340.
34. Whatever the source or sources of his newfound belief in the (at least) potential, relative, or temporary independence of mind from body, James was soon elaborating upon it in two reviews of the physiologist William B. Carpenter’s Principles of Mental Physiology (1874), which appeared just five months after James published an endorsement of Renouvier’s “original and simple” arguments for “the possibility” of “free-will” (James, “Renouvier’s Contribution to La Critique Philosophique,” in Essays, Comments, and Reviews, 266). While criticizing Carpenter for his “very inadequate” knowledge of recent physiological research as well as for his “descriptive” rather than “analytic” approach (which aligned Carpenter more closely with Bain and Spencer than Wundt and “the immortal Helmholtz”), James nonetheless gave special mention to Carpenter’s “copiously and variously illustrated” discussion of “ideo-motor action” (James, “Two Reviews of Principles of Mental Physiology, by William B. Carpenter,” in Essays, Comments, and Reviews, 270, 273). In another review, James outlined the basic premises of this loosely descriptive theory that a “volitional impulse” could assert itself in the natural flow of neural activity and then through repetition—“by virtue of the great law of habit”—bring about an action that becomes “automatic” and “so to speak, second nature.” And it could do this, James said, without violating the premise that “all mental action is correlated with brain function” (James, “Recent Works on Mental Hygiene,” in Essays, Comments, and Reviews, 278). These very general premises, embellished by James’s more sophisticated knowledge of neurology and his distinctive understanding of the role of interest-attention-and-selection, would soon define the core of his own views on the physiology of will and habit.
35. Perry, The Thought and Character of William James, vol. 1, 339.
36. William Wordsworth, “The Excursion,” in The Poems, ed. John O. Hayden ( New York: Penguin Books, 1977), vol. 2, 155.
37. Wordsworth, “The Excursion,” 152.
38. Wordsworth, “The Excursion,” 156.
39. Chauncey Wright, “Evolution of Self-Consciousness,” in Philosophical Discussions, ed. Charles Eliot Norton (New York: Henry Holt, 1877), 216–17.
40. William James, “Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie, by Wilhelm Wundt,” in Essays, Comments, and Reviews, 300.
41. James, “Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie, by Wilhelm Wundt,” 300.
42. For example, in William James, The Principles of Psychology, 2 vols., ed. Frederick Burkhardt (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), vol. 1, 538–41.
43. The year 1878 has been called, with justice, James’s annus mirabilis. His publications and lectures, drawing upon his evolutionary, physiological, and neurological knowledge, conveyed a distinctive understanding of sensation, perception, and cognition and established him as a significant newcomer in his chosen fields. Also, in June, he signed the contract that led, twelve years later, to the publication of his magisterial Principles of Psychology, and in July he married Alice Howe Gibbens, signaling the beginning of a considerable moderation if not a once-and-for-all end to his various nervous conditions. Finally, late that year, he submitted three additional articles for publication, including the article (published in January 1879) that explained his opposition to conscious automaton theory.
44. William James, “Remarks on Spencer’s Definition of Mind as Correspondence,” in Essays in Philosophy, ed. Frederick Burkhardt (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 21.
45. James, “Brute and Human Intellect,” in Essays in Psychology, 15.
46. William James, Lowell Lectures on “The Brain and the Mind,” in Manuscript Lectures, ed. Frederick Burkhardt (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 27.
47. James seems to have been the first individual to extend selectionism (which was still, then and for a good while longer, a highly debated characteristic of Darwinian evolutionary theory) from the domain of Nature in general to that of Mind in particular, which was still typically seen as somehow different from Nature. He first expressed his thoroughgoing selectionist view of mental processing in the late 1870s: “The highest and most elaborated mental products are filtered from the data chosen by the faculty next beneath out of the mass offered by the faculty below that” (James, “Are We Automata?”, 51). Hence, ideas and feelings regarded as ethically salient were selected from among aesthetically selected ideas and feelings, which were derived, in turn, from those ideas and feelings that were abstracted from the wide array of perceptions, which in turn were selected from among the mass of constituent elements produced by the senses, which had, after all, responded only to a rather narrow range of the full spectrum of ambient stimuli. At each level some possible sensations, perceptions, ideas, feelings, and reactions had been selected while others went unnoticed or ignored.
48. James, “Are We Automata?”, 41.
49. James, “Are We Automata?”, 51.
50. James, “Are We Automata?”, 51; repeated in James, Principles of Psychology, vol. 1, 277. Although James mentioned his famous analogy between the mind and a sculptor in the sentences following this passage in his 1879 article, he elaborated upon it in his Principles, creating another classic passage that helps to explain his thought on the role of consciousness: “The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as a sculptor works on his block of stone. In a sense the statue stood there from eternity. But there were a thousand different ones beside it, and the sculptor alone is to thank for having extricated this one from the rest. Just so the world of each of us, howsoever different our several views of it may be, all lay embedded in the primordial chaos of sensations, which gave the mere matter to the thought of all of us indifferently” (James, Principles of Psychology, vol. 1, 277). This passage makes it clear that James was a realist, though one (like Wordsworth) who felt that reality results from a productive interaction of mind and matter.
51. James, “Are We Automata?”, 58.
52. James, “Are We Automata?”, 59.
53. I should note that although James felt that he had shown that consciousness matters—that it can exert causal force—he admitted to a friend that “free-will is . . . no necessary corollary of giving causality to consciousness.” Someone who has a “fatalistic faith,” he said, is no more compelled to change his or her mind because of his (James’s) argument than a person who has a “freewill faith” is compelled to give it up because of a compelling argument in favor of non-conscious causality (James, Letter to James Jackson Putnam, 17 January 1879, in Correspondence, vol. 5, 34; see also James, Principles of Psychology, vol. 2, 1173–1182). In the end, as Renouvier said, the belief in free will is a matter of voluntary faith. James had addressed this issue, obliquely, five years earlier, when he argued in a letter to an editor that scientists like Huxley who claim to know what they can only assume are as much swept up in “the mood of Faith” as persons who do the same thing on behalf of religious beliefs or “moral speculation” (James, “The Mood of Science and the Mood of Faith,” in Essays, Comments, and Reviews, 115). James signed this letter “Ignoramus.” He had, of course, staked his own faith on free will and felt his belief was consonant with, if not a mandatory conclusion from, coherent principles and apparent facts. He similarly foreswore any possibility of giving “a coercive demonstration” in his extensive defense of his belief in indeterminism and free will in “The Dilemma of Determinism” (1884).
54. James, Lowell Lectures on “The Brain and the Mind,” 19.
55. James, Lowell Lectures on “The Brain and the Mind,” 18–19.
56. James’s originality, especially when it comes to his views on habit, has often been underestimated (see, e.g., John C. Malone, “William James and Habit: A Century Later,” in Reflections on The Principles of Psychology: William James After a Century, eds. Michael G. Johnson and Tracy B. Henley [Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1990], which is otherwise a useful and informative source). Because James drew upon the work of Bain, Carpenter, and Maudsley, among others, it is often thought that he was simply repeating what others had said. But in fact he brought to his reading of their works—and to his selective adoption of some of their ideas—a much more sophisticated understanding of evolution, physiology, and neurology than they possessed. Bain, for instance, had only a schematic knowledge of recent scientific advances, and his lack of facility in German blocked his access to the most recent literature, including the literature on the cerebral hemispheres, that was important in James’s assimilation and reformulation of his views on habit. Similarly, Carpenter’s knowledge of the body was based on old-fashioned empirical anatomy rather than the new experimental physiology. And Maudsley’s research was largely clinical in origin and nature. See Kurt Danziger, “Mid-Nineteenth-Century British Psycho-Physiology: A Neglected Chapter in the History of Psychology,” in The Problematic Science: Psychology in Nineteenth-Century Thought, eds. William R. Woodward and Mitchell G. Ash (New York: Praeger, 1982), and Lorraine J. Daston, “The Theory of Will versus the Science of Mind” (in The Problematic Science) and “British Responses to Psycho-Physiology,” Isis 69 (1978): 192–208, for useful historical background. James adopted their ideas only if they were compatible with the most recent experimental research, and only to the extent that their adaptation made sense within the context of this research and his own analysis of the facts presented in their works and in the general literature. More specifically, although he took descriptive examples and practical maxims regarding habits from Bain and Maudsley, he turned elsewhere when he was concerned about explanation rather than description. And in the same way, he took Carpenter’s description of “ideo-motor action,” purportedly involved in some “curiosities of our mental life,” and expanded it into a generalized “ideo-motor theory” that he (James) embedded, as Carpenter had not, within a contemporary neurological framework (see James, Principles of Psychology, vol. 2, 1131). Finally, with regard to Bain (and also to Spencer), it is worth noting that James’s critique of traditional utilitarianism, especially its emphasis on pleasure as the primary motive for human action, was but one source of the important conceptual distance James created between his views and theirs. This separation was apparent as early as James, “Two Reviews of Principles of Mental Physiology.”
57. James, Principles of Psychology, vol. 1, 38. On Meynert and James’s use of “the Meynert scheme,” see Frank Sulloway, Freud, Biologist of Mind (New York: Basic Books, 1979) and William R. Woodward, “William James’s Psychology of Will: Its Revolutionary Impact on American Psychology,” in Explorations in the History of Psychology in the United States, ed. Josef Brožek (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1984), each of whom emphasizes how James modified Meynert’s account—at once too mechanical regarding reflexes and too purposive regarding mental processes (James, Principles of Psychology, vol. 1, 80)—from a more up-to-date evolutionary perspective. What I wish to emphasize, in addition, is how James used his “correction of the Meynert scheme” (James, Principles of Psychology, vol. 1, 79) to change, in fundamental ways, previous associationist accounts of habit from which he retained much of his basic psychological vocabulary. The fact that his account sounded like earlier accounts by Spencer, Bain, Carpenter, and others has obscured the degree to which it was significantly different. For one thing, it attempted a causal explanation of association rather than a verbal description of it (James, Principles of Psychology, vol. 1, 566). For another, it switched pleasure or satisfaction from a motivation to a consequence of behavior (Principles of Psychology, vol. 2, 1156–64). Besides inspiring John Dewey’s (1896) classic discussion of “the reflex arc” and Edward L. Thorndike’s (1898) studies leading to “the law of effect” as well as anticipating B. F. Skinner’s (1938) operant psychology and later social learning theory (see William R. Woodward, “The ‘Discovery’ of Social Behaviorism and Social Learning Theory, 1870–1980,” American Psychologist 37 [1982: 396–410]), this provided a neurological basis for the kind of trial-and-error learning that Peirce and James saw as essential to pragmatic notions of progressive truth-approximating.
58. James, Lowell Lectures on “The Brain and the Mind,” 17.
59. James, Principles of Psychology, vol. 1, 36–39.
60. James, Principles of Psychology, vol. 1, 39–87.
61. James, Principles of Psychology, vol. 1, 84.
62. Another advantage of this scheme was that it also provided the basis for non-habitual thought, feeling, and behavior as well as the operation of the will, as we shall see.
63. Including, for example, James, “The Feeling of Effort” and “What the Will Effects,” in Essays in Psychology.
64. “Plasticity” was a term that James took from Darwin, who used it in reference to the modifiability of the entire physical organism (Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 12, 31, 80). This is relevant to note, given the evolutionary perspective from which James approached habit formation.
65. James, Principles of Psychology, vol. 1, 112.
66. James, Principles of Psychology, vol. 1, 113.
67. James, Principles of Psychology, vol. 1, 86.
68. James, Principles of Psychology, vol. 1, 119.
69. James, Principles of Psychology, vol. 1, 117.
70. James, Principles of Psychology, vol. 1, 126, italics omitted.
71. James, Principles of Psychology, vol. 1, 126.
72. James, Principles of Psychology, vol. 1, 127–131.
73. James, Principles of Psychology, vol. 1, 130. At the head of his chapter on habit in his own personal copy of the abbreviated version of Principles, James epitomized his argument and its moral significance by inserting this handwritten summary: “Sow an action, and you reap a habit; sow a habit and you reap a character; sow a character and reap a destiny” (James, Psychology: Briefer Course; see Richardson, William James, 315).
74. Just as habit is the subject of a fundamental chapter (ch. 4) toward the beginning of James’s Principles, so is will the subject of what is, in many respects, the culminating chapter (ch. 26) of this masterwork. Between these two chapters, which form virtual bookends that support and justify his psychological system, James frequently noted ways in which “the great law of habit” (James, Principles of Psychology, vol. 1, 521) plays a significant role in a wide variety of psychological phenomena, ranging across association (ch. 14), memory (ch. 16), sensation (ch. 17), perception (ch. 19), belief (ch. 21), reasoning (ch. 22), and the modification and elaboration of instincts (ch. 12). Most crucial to James, however, were phenomena associated with voluntary vs. involuntary action (ch. 26).
75. James, Principles of Psychology, vol. 2, 1110–1111. In treating the possibility of voluntary conduct, James assumed, as a prerequisite, that past involuntary movements have left a supply of images in the memory, which are available when the will is called into action (James, Principles of Psychology, vol. 2, 1109–1100).
76. James, Principles of Psychology, vol. 2, 1111.
77. James, Principles of Psychology, vol. 2, 1112.
78. James, Principles of Psychology, vol. 2, 1130–1135.
79. See, for example, James, Principles of Psychology, vol. 2, 1198–1201, and an early review of Ambrose Liébault’s work in James, “Du sommeil et de états analogues, by Ambrose Liébault,” in Essays, Comments, and Reviews.
80. James, Principles of Psychology, vol. 2, 1128.
81. James, Principles of Psychology, vol. 2, 1130, italics omitted.
82. James, Principles of Psychology, vol. 2, 1133.
83. James, Diary [1].
84. James, Principles of Psychology, vol. 1, 277.
85. William James, Psychology: Briefer Course, ed. Frederick Burkhardt (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 156.
86. See, for example, James, Psychology: Briefer Course, 225, 243, 254, 286, 278, 345–47, and 352.
87. William James, Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals, ed. Frederick Burkhardt (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 27.
88. James, Talks to Teachers, 344.
89. James, Talks to Teachers, 48.
90. James, Talks to Teachers, 108.
91. William James, “The Teaching of Philosophy in Our Colleges,” in Essays in Philosophy, 4.
92. James, “Brute and Human Intellect,” 30.
93. James, Principles of Psychology, vol. 1, 500.
94. James, Psychology: Briefer Course, 286.
95. James, Principles of Psychology, vol. 1, 420.
96. James, Psychology: Briefer Course, 286.
97. On James’s political and social concerns, see Deborah Coon, “‘One Moment in the World’s Salvation’: Anarchism and the Radicalization of William James,” Journal of American History 83 (1996): 70–99, and George Cotkin, William James: Public Philosopher (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990). Related expressions of concern were apparent in James’s criticism of the “blindness” of human beings to the inner lives of those unlike themselves (James, 1899/1983f), in his negative reaction to the “ice cream soda-water” quality and “irremediable flatness” of Chautauqua gatherings (James, “What Makes Life Significant,” in Talks to Teachers, 152, 154), and in his objection to the standardization of intellectual activity apparent in what he called “the Ph.D. octopus” (James, “The Ph.D. Octopus,” in Essays, Comments, and Reviews). And, of course, he was also well aware of the benefits of novel ways of thinking in science.
98. William James, “Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results,” in Pragmatism, ed. Frederick Burkhardt (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975).
99. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, ed. Frederick Burkhardt (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 162, italics omitted.
100. James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 197, italics added.
101. William James, “The Energies of Men,” in Essays in Religion and Morality, ed. Frederick Burkhardt (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982).
102. William James, “The Powers of Men,” in Essays in Religion and Morality, 151, 161.
103. James, Pragmatism, 31.
104. James, Pragmatism, 32, 35.
105. James, Pragmatism, 44.
106. James, Letter to Charles Augustus Strong, 21 October 1889, in Correspondence, vol. 6, 541.
107. Hilary Putnam, “The Permanence of William James,” in Pragmatism: An Open Question (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1995), 5.
108. Richard Thompson, “The Neurobiology of Learning and Memory: William James in Retrospect,” Psychological Sciences 1 (1990): 172–73.
109. Bruce Wilshire, “William James’s Pragmatism: A Distinctly Mixed Bag,” in 100 Years of Pragmatism: William James’s Revolutionary Philosophy, ed. John J. Stuhr (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 96, 107.
110. The scientific literature on consciousness, plasticity, and free will has exploded over the past decade or two. Jeffrey M. Schwartz and Sharon Begley, The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force (New York: Harper, 2002), and Roy F. Baumeister and John Tierney, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength (New York: Penguin, 2011) are but two of many accessible books, each written by a leading scientist working with a talented scientific journalist, that survey significant portions of this literature and reach conclusions remarkably consonant with James’s basic arguments. Both sets of authors recognize James as a notable predecessor.
111. Charlene Haddock Seigfried, William James’s Radical Reconstruction of Philosophy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), 173.
112. Stephen Toulmin, “The Logical Status of Psychoanalysis,” in Margaret Macdonald, ed., Philosophy and Analysis (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1954), 132.
Edward S. Casey
It was Bergson who first attempted to distinguish “habit memory” from “image memory.”[1] By the latter he meant any form of representation of past experience, typically via visualization; it is what we normally term “recollection.” Before Bergson made the pointed suggestion that there are at least two fundamental forms of memory, it had been widely assumed by philosophers and psychologists alike that there is only one basic kind of remembering, namely, recollecting. This was the case whether recollection is conceived in a transpersonal setting (as by Plato, who made it essential to all eidetic knowledge) or in a strictly personal context (which is how we tend to think of it today). Either way, recollection is considered to be reproductive in operation, proceeding by isomorphism—whether this be an isomorphism between dianoetic diagrams in the soul and the Forms, or between “ideas” that resemble “impressions,” or between mind and its own past being. The premise at work throughout this redoubtable tradition is that remembering, if it is to work at all, must replicate past events in an explicitly representational format. These events in turn make up the life history of the individual rememberer (this holds true even for Plato insofar as the history of a given soul includes episodes of viewing the Forms in a previous life). From the standpoint of this premise, it does not matter whether the replicative representations are mental in status (e.g., the notion of “ideas” in Locke, Hume, and Berkeley) or physiological in being (as Descartes was tempted to think and as “trace” theories have presumed from the nineteenth century onward). These options complement and mirror each other, and they accomplish essentially the same work.
Bergson’s recognition of habit memory in Matter and Memory put this whole tradition on notice in one stroke. It did so on two basic counts. First, the idea that there might be another fundamental type of remembering places in jeopardy the presumed primacy of recollection. It thus anticipated Husserl’s strikingly similar move of a decade later when “primary memory” was made more ursprünglich than recollection, revealing renamed “secondary memory” in Husserl’s lectures on internal time-consciousness.[2] Second, habit memory resists construal in the usual Cartesian alternatives of matter or mind. For the habitual in matters of memory is neither strictly mental (as in the case of “image memory”) nor entirely physical (as in trace theory). It is both at once, thoroughly mental and yet wholly bodily—as Aristotle first realized in linking hexis with character and virtue, neither of which is reducible to mind or to body.[3] At this point in time, we might be more inclined to cite style as the most revealing instance in which the habitual comes to concretion in a form belonging neither to res cogitans nor to res extensa. It is not therefore surprising to find Merleau-Ponty turning to style increasingly in his later writings as an important analogue of what he called the “habitual body” in the Phenomenology of Perception. In habit, character, virtue, and style alike, we find an inextricable commixture of intention and behavior, of animation by mind and enactment by body.
The threat to recollection posed by habit memory is thus not only a threat to its uniqueness or power as a prototype for all remembering. It is also a threat to the very idea that memory is either an exclusively mental affair (i.e., a strictly ideational form of re-experiencing the past) or something whose proper preserve is the body alone (e.g., the brain as a storage place for engrammatic traces; or muscle as a concourse of repeated patterns of behavior). Indeed, it even threatens the idea that memory is some admixture of both modes (as in “causal” theories of memory which expressly conjoin bodily and mental elements while keeping them pristinely distinct). Moreover, it acts to undermine the premise that remembering is a replicative replay of the past in some specifically representational guise. It introduces the alarming notion that we can remember the past without reproducing it in any identifiable representational format.
What then is habit memory as this was conceived by Bergson in a way that was potentially revolutionary for Western theorizing about memory? I shall sum up his richly detailed analysis in six points, each of which embodies a basic contrast with recollection:
It is “acquired by the repetition of the same effort,”[4] where repetition is irrelevant to recollection—which, when achieved, is achieved once and for all—it is essential to the formation of habit memories, which are cumulative and gradual in character and thus thrive on repetition.
Habit memory is at least partially dependent on will, that is, on continuing effort on our part: the repetition is typically a voluntary one (e.g., in the interest of learning a certain skill); recollection, in contrast, is “entirely spontaneous” (MM, 77).
Despite the willed character of its repetition, habit memory, once attained, takes its course in a strictly consecutive manner: “it is stored up in a mechanism which is set in motion as a whole by an initial impulse, in a closed system of automatic movements which succeed each other in the same order” (MM, 68); recollection, on the other hand, is typically instantaneous—or, if not this, occurs in a duration which is not restricted to any single order of unfolding.
As a direct consequence, habit memory becomes increasingly distant from its origin in time and place, which may in fact become altogether forgotten: “a learned recollection [i.e., one which has become habitual] passes out of time in the measure that the lesson is better known; it becomes more and more impersonal, more and more foreign to our past life” (MM, 72); whereas a pure recollection “retains in memory its place and date” (ibid.) and is therefore personal insofar as it reproduces a specific episode of the rememberer’s own past history.
Closely related to the fourth characteristic is the fact that habit memory does not look backward to the past but ahead to the future; as its past is wholly immanent in it, it tends to be directed at its own accomplishment in the near-term future: its “forward movement bears [it] on to action and to life” (MM, 71); recollections in contrast are exclusively backward-looking and depict the way things were, not as they now are or will be.
Most importantly, habit memory is an action, not a representation: “it no longer represents our past to us; it acts it” (MM, 70; his italics); we realize this in the fact that no special mark “betrays its origin and classes it in the past” (MM, 68); recollections, on the contrary, consist entirely in representing the past by means of such indices as date and place.
In presenting these six points of contrast, I am seeking to endorse Bergson’s actual descriptions of the two types of memory. His account of recollection qua “image memory” is highly debatable (for instance, his notion that dates and places serve as inherent marks of recollected scenes: enacted bodily[5] is not to be confused with remembering-how. This latter term I coin after Ryle’s notion of “knowing-how,” which has to do with the performance of skilled actions—in contrast with “knowing-that,” which concerns propositional knowledge.[6] There certainly is such a thing as remembering how to perform skilled actions—say, doing the breaststroke—and this in fact calls upon habit memory in the Bergsonian sense I have been discussing; but the two forms of remembering are not co-extensive. Skilled actions are only a subset—albeit the most useful and practically valuable subset—of habitual body memories, which also include many unskilled and unuseful actions such as slouching in a certain way, gesturing excessively when speaking, drooling unselfconsciously, or grimacing at insects. The list could go on almost indefinitely: until, finally, one’s entire personal being, one’s character or style, would be reached. For character and style—perhaps even virtue itself—are very much constituted by habit memories expressed bodily; and they may be more fully revealed in unskilled instances of habitual remembering than efficacious movements done with specific purpose of adapting ourselves more successfully to our ambiance.
A second distinction bears on the difference between “habitual” and “habituated” actions of the body. When I speak of “habitual body memory,” I shall be deliberately ambiguous as to which of two things I mean. On the one hand, “habitual” in a narrow sense refers to routinized actions undertaken wholly without premeditation. And, despite his belief that habit memory is situated squarely in the body—that “ever advancing boundary between the future and the past” (MM, 66)—Bergson does not tell us just how it is so situated: a task that will be left to Merleau-Ponty. What he does accomplish, however, is to show that there is “a profound difference, a difference in kind” (MM, 69) between habitual and recollective memory and that accordingly, the latter cannot be regarded unthinkingly as “memory par excellence.”[7] In spite of the further fact that “the two memories run side by side and lend to each other a mutual support” (MM, 74), their destinies are deeply different and we can no longer assume (as an entire tradition of Western thought has assumed) that one is merely a modality of the other.
I have begun with Bergson not just because of his proto-phenomenological descriptions (themselves based on the strikingly similar sensibilities which he shares with phenomenologists) but mainly because he introduces the topic of habit memory in a way that forms an indispensable prelude to Merleau-Ponty’s treatment of body memory in general. Not that this is an isolated case: Bergson is often the most effective escort into Merleau-Pontian reflection on many subjects, as Merleau-Ponty himself acknowledges in his “Eloge of Philosophy,” his inaugural lecture upon being appointed to the same chair of philosophy which Bergson had held at the Collège de France.
Before I come to focus closely on Merleau-Ponty’s own contributions, I would like to make three basic distinctions. First of all, habit memory is repetitive: not just as steps on the way to learning something (this is the sense of repetition stressed by Bergson) but also as exactly re-enacting earlier performances of the same action. An example would be the habitual action of staring my Honda Civic, an action which since first being learned has become routinized. On the other hand, “habituated” refers specifically to situations of being oriented in a general situation by having become familiar with its particular structure. Both skilled and unskilled actions, as well as routinized and non-routinized ones, contribute to habituation as knowing-your-way-around-somewhere. This latter is a main outcome of habitual body memory, but not the only one and not always the most important one.
The third distinction is that between the actual and the virtual in habitual body memory. Both types of habituality just distinguished bear a significant component of virtuality in their makeup—whether “virtuality” is taken to refer to what Ingarden has called Parathalthung, holding-in-readiness.[8] Part of what we mean by the “unconsciousness” of much habitual action in the narrower meaning draws on this sense of being “on tap,” of being ready to activate: so ready that conscious deliberation or decision is not called for and would even act to inhibit the action to be undertaken. The virtuality in question also alludes to the marginal position of most habitual body memories: their existence at the edges of our awareness and in a state which Freud would have called “preconscious.” It is precisely because of this marginal-yet-available position that so many of these memories arise in an unrehearsed way; we simply snatch them out of the pool of our immediately accessible resources for being-in-the-world in a fully functional way. Contrast this situation with that of recollection, where actuality is the dominant ontic mode: above all in the form of the historical actuality of the scene remembered. In recollecting the virtual is more an obstacle than a resource; it signifies the obscurely remembered, that which complete and veridical recollection attempts to overcome by reproducing an accurate representation of the past event being remembered.
At all times, in many different ways, Merleau-Ponty practices a form of transcendental speleology.[9] His is a philosophy of depths. Two kinds of depth are especially pertinent in the present context. The first is the depth provided by the body itself as it anchors perception and thought, imagination and memory—and habit: “habit has its abode neither in thought nor in the objective body, but in the body as mediator of a world.”[10] By situating habit in the body, Merleau-Ponty gives to habit a new depth of meaning and function which, though adumbrated by Bergson, is never worked out expressly by the author of Matter and Memory. The second kind of depth is that supplied by the past, which serves similarly to anchor our temporal being. In particular it subtends a hectic present and a projected future: a present and a future on which Sartre and Heidegger placed such stress respectively. One way of reading Merleau-Ponty’s early work (on which I am mainly drawing in this essay) is to say that it sought to provide past to a distended present and to an anticipatory future: and thus to ground the otherwise unanchored projects of Sartre and Heidegger. But in both cases the grounding is done via the body, which is described at one point as “our anchorage in a world” (PP, 144); for the past is given to us in and through the body as much as habit is. To this it must be added that however much the body is the “general medium” (PP, 146) for habit and the past—the place where they most deeply commingle—still they furnish to it in turn two indispensable dimensions of its own depth. In brief: no habit or past without body; no body without habit or past.[11]
One quite basic way in which this triad of interdependent terms is conjointly active is found in the notion of sedimentation, itself a depth-giving process. Sedimentation is implied by my very being-in-the-world, which must be as continually resumptive of acquired experience as it is pro-sumptive of experience still to come. In fact, sedimentation is the necessary complement of spontaneity, since these form the two essential stages of all “world-structure” for Merleau-Ponty.[12] It is revealing that in discussing sedimentation Merleau-Ponty mentions character as a leading example and describes in some detail the experience of knowing your way around a house. Both are aspects of “acquired worlds” which precipitate themselves into my ongoing experience. Even if sedimentation typically begins with a particular person or place, its main tendency is toward depersonalization and generalization (cf. PP, 137, 142). Only thus can we take in new contents of experience without being dumbfounded by them. Only thus too can we develop those patterns of behavior that identify us as continuous persons over time and make meaning possible in our lives. All of this happens inasmuch as in sedimentation—as in habit memory for Bergson—the past is fully immanent in the present, “dovetailed” into it (cf. PP, 140). But the past is not immanent there as an inert mass of accumulated items. The process of sedimentation is ever at work: intentional threads go back and forth between the body and its ever-changing phases, which are continually reanimated by current experience (cf. PP 130). If sedimentation is to be conceived as a precipitation of the past into the present, it is an active precipitation actively maintained.
What sedimentation teaches us, therefore, is that even at a moment of human experience when we might be most tempted to employ terms connoting sheer passivity—for example, as in the locked-in formation of sedimentary rocks, where depth signifies merely greater age or mass—an element of agency is at work, a factor of what Husserl would call “activity in passivity.”[13] And if habit memory is a main means of effecting sedimentation, and thus of giving a depth that is not objectively determinable, it cannot be through the working of the strictly habitual in the sense of the routinized: a routine is nothing but an inert pattern of behavior. The working of such memory must be accomplished by an active habituating. And this is precisely what the body effects, thanks to its sedimentary powers. Habituation here takes its most concrete form in the body’s inhabitation of the world, its active insertion into space and time: “we must therefore avoid saying that our body is in space or in time. It inhabits space and time” (PP, 139). In fact, the habituation which such inhabitation accomplishes involves a delicate dialectic between the implied passivity of enclosure (for space and time undeniably act to contain us) and the activity of getting to know our way around in a given circumstance. This is why it is true to say both that “I belong to [space and time]” and that in turn “my body combines with them and includes them” (PP, 140). Inhabiting, taken as a paradigm of the bodily expression of habit memory, is at once “wholly active and wholly passive” (PP, 428), in the world and of it. It is made possible by sedimentation even as it carries sedimentation itself to new depths.
What is habit itself in Merleau-Ponty’s view? It is ill conceived, according to him, when we think of it in terms of an association or interpretation of sensations, as an intellectual synthesis or form of knowledge, or as an involuntary action (cf. PP, 142–44, 152). It is always composed of motoric and perceptual elements in an inextricable mixture. Whereas its temporality is most adequately exhibited in the process of sedimentation, its spatiality is best construed in terms of an intuitive incorporation of the space in which it is enacted. Thus a typist employs certain bodily habits (in this case they are skills) so as to modulate manual space in a maximally dexterous manner. Not only is there an intuitive gauging of the positions of the keys on his or her typewriter, but the keys become part of the typist’s total intentional arc:
When the typist performs the necessary movements on the typewriter, these movements are governed by an intention, but the intention does not posit the keys as objective locations. It is literally true that the subject who learns to type incorporates the keybank into his bodily space. (PP, 145)
As a result of this incorporation—which can be considered the converse of the inhabitation effected by sedimentation—the bodily being of this subject is aggrandized: made more capacious because able to undertake a new multiplicity of projects. For this reason Merleau-Ponty maintains that “habit expressed our power of dilating our being in the world, of changing our existence by appropriating fresh instruments.”[14] But this is so only because habits are themselves “stable dispositional tendencies” (PP 146) whose very regularity and reliability allow them to assume this dilating role. At play here is an implicit spectrum that extends from spontaneity to habit and from habit to custom. A habit is quite settled in comparison with spontaneous action; but it appears itself to be spontaneous when contrasted with custom, which “presupposes the form of passivity derived from nature” (PP, 146). In having a habit (and we should keep in mind that habits are pre-eminently things we have as the origin of “habit” in habere, reminds us), we possess a world at once sedimented and open to free variation. Beyond the typist there is the organist, who provides Merleau-Ponty with a paradigm case of the creatively habituating: for the organist can adapt himself or herself within an hour to an organ he or she has never played before and differing markedly in structure from one’s customary instrument. Habituation of this sort lies on the capital of virtually inherent in all habits that have not degenerated into the strictly habitual—into customary routines. The latter lack the depth of innovating habituation precisely because they are the already fully actualized forms of response that limit adaptation to new circumstances. If the adaptive organist “settles into the organ as one settles into a house” (PP, 145), this is a house whose contents and décor are continually changing. An unadaptive being, delimited by custom alone, is confined to living in a house whose nature never alters. Habit is thus in a middle range position, situated between the very extremes of custom and spontaneity which it nonetheless serves to mediate.
Precisely because of this position, a critique of Bergson begins to emerge. Bergson’s two modes of memory need supplementing by a third mode based on an enriched notion of habit. (a) What Merleau-Ponty’s predecessor had called “habit memory” would be better entitled “customary memory”; it would include all remembering founded on repetition and lacking in creative habituation. (b) “Image memory” or recollection would remain an antithesis of customary memory; it is at once non-bodily and non-routinized. (c) Habit memory proper—or “habitual body memory” as I prefer to call it—exists between (a) and (b) in several ways. It combines repeatability with uniqueness (the organist has played many organs, but is now playing this new organ); permanence with transience (the skill of organ-playing is built into the being of the organist, yet is contingent on the coordinative capacities of his or her hands and limbs); perceptual with motoric action (the same organist sees and touches as he plays);[15] and self with world (the organ player with the music played).[16] Corresponding to this third kind of memory would be a form of being which Merleau-Ponty is at pains to describe at many turns in the Phenomenology of Perception: “near-presence” or “ambivalent presence” (PP, 81, 180). Such being is very like virtuality as discussed above, and it is exemplified in such things as horizon, things situated behind me, the imago of a parent, and the phantom limb. All of these call for “a middle term between presence and absence” (PP, 80), and all inhabit the phenomenal field (cf. PP, 80, 81ff., 106). They do so thanks to the role of the lived body in situating us in such a field. This body is therefore a “habitual body” or “virtual body” (PP, 82, 250) which acts to guarantee the actions of my merely momentary body while enlivening my strictly customary body.
It is evident by now that habit, a broadly mediating force, finds it own natural home in the body, itself conceived as the “mediator of a world” (PP, 145). But what does the body contribute specifically to habit—and thus, implicitly at least, to habit memory? At least four things.
First, the lived body’s prepersonal status facilitates its proclivity for the general, a proclivity crucial to habit as well: as the body “gives to our life the form of generality” (PP 146), so the full functioning of habits depends directly on their generalizability.
Habits take place in an intimate and familiar space which it is the task of the body to delineate. Without the intentional arc effected by the latter, there would be no region within which habits could deploy themselves. Bodily space thus provides “the matrix of habitual action” (PP, 104), a matrix within which virtual as well as actual movements emerge.
The body lends itself to habits through the mediation of gesture, which is thus an intermediary of intermediaries. It is as if the body itself were too sullenly permanent to be translated without remainder into habitual action. Much as a cultural tradition requires the medium of spoken or written expressions to come alive for individuals, the body calls for gestures to constitute habits. The organist moves habitually in a series of gestures, not in a set of mechanical movements: his body is an impersonal resource in the creation of the musical work through gesticulations which are the effective expressions of habit (cf. PP, 183).
Finally, the body gives to various spontaneities of imagination or thought a subsistence by activity embodying them, bringing them into a consistent core of our being where they can be habitually reenacted:
At all levels [the body] performs the same function which is to endow the instantaneous expressions of spontaneity with “a little renewable action and independent existence.” Habit is merely a form of this fundamental power. (PP, 146)
It is by “absorption” or “assimilation” (ibid.) that the body takes in the spontaneous in such a way as to deliver it over to habit, which mediates it still further in regular patterns of conduct.
Just here we need to pause and ponder a paradox. On the one hand, habit is for Merleau-Ponty a major clue to the nature of the lived body. This is evident, for example, in his interpretation of the phantom limb and of Schneider’s various afflictions: in both instances, whose discussion ushers in the very notion of a non-objective body, there is a mismatch between the habitual and the actual body, with bizarre and even devastating consequences. Because of habitual arm movements, I continue to believe in the existence of my actually missing limb; or I am reduced to the actuality of immediate sexual or verbal stimulation when I lack the sense of the virtual required for self-initiated movements of a habituating sort (not for those of a customary kind).[17] It is on the basis of observations and interpretations of this type that Merleau-Ponty can conclude that “the phenomenon of habit is just what prompts us to revise our notion of ‘understand’ and our notion of the body” (PP, 144, my italics). Even more generally, habit is a key to the ontology being developed in the Phenomenology of Perception: “here, as elsewhere, the relation of having . . . is at first concealed by relations belonging to the domain of being, or, as we may equally say, by ontic relations obtaining within the world” (PP, 174, his italics).
On the other hand, habit is also held to be “merely a form of [the body’s] fundamental power” (PP, 146). Rather than a crucial clue to the nature of bodily being, habit is here regarded as tributary from the body: derivative from it and dependent on it. As such, it is implicitly ranged with other expressive manifestations of the body: for example, style, living speech, and sexuality. With them, it constitutes a middle layer of human being located between the body itself and reflective thought. Although it thus regains its characteristic middle-term position, it loses the distinctiveness and paradigmatic quality which it possessed as the guiding thread for understanding the lived body.
What are we to make of this paradox, which seems to reveal a gaping inconsistency within Merleau-Ponty’s thinking? Two resolutions suggest themselves. First, we might say that two sorts of habit are at stake here: one, closer in meaning to the “habitual” in the larger sense discussed earlier, is so encompassing of bodily existence that no part of this existence is unhabitual; and in this way we would be constrained to approach body from its habituality, while body itself would become fixed at various moments into the habitual in the narrower sense of routinized habits. But this move fails to account for the fact that the freedom possessed by human beings is at once bodily and no habitual in either sense.
A second and preferable resolution is found in the following line of thought: habit is at once primary and secondary in its relation with body, albeit in different senses. Habit is secondary to body insofar as it represents a particularization of the body’s generalizing and sedimenting powers; it particularizes by establishing the special ways the lived body comes to inhabit the world in a regular and repeatable (rather than a purely spontaneous) fashion. Put differently: it gives the special depth of virtuality to a body that, lacking it, would be bound forever to the merely episodic and unrepeated. But habit in turn has a twofold primacy. First of all, it is in more intimate connection with the past than is any other power of human nature. If it is true that the past forms a permanent background of all my action and thought (cf. PP, 395); if the unreflective source of all experience, including bodily experience, is to be conceived as an “original past” (242, 280); if human “existence always carries forward its past, whether it be by accepting it or disclaiming it” (393); if “each present reasserts the presence of the whole past which it supplants” (42); and if, in short, “I belong to my past” (422)—then habit will have a privileged place in human experience, for it is at once the most pervasive and subtle way in which we are in touch with the past that we bear and that bears us. No wonder then that it can be exemplary of bodily being, which is wholly and yet nonspecifically rooted in the past. The specification begins with habit; and it is furthered by the habitual body memory which habit brings with it. In this way habit takes the lead over the very body which it requires for its own realization.
A second primacy of habit over body is located in the relationship between habit and the other so-called expressive phenomena with which Merleau-Ponty implicitly aligns it. Style, living speech, and sexuality, far from being simply coeval with habit, all presuppose it and employ it actively. For this role, “habitude” might be a more lucid term than “habit.” The former means “a settled practice or usage” (OED), and it connotes an ongoing activity whose reliability makes it indispensable to the pursuit of such things as speaking or making love. Consider only the way that everyone falls into characteristic speaking patterns, whether those of a dialect or idiolect, and how these are not merely matters of facilitation (which “habit” and especially “skill” are often taken to provide) but indicate the positive presence of a linguistic style that aids in recognition and understanding. Similarly, habitudes underlie erotic play: not just in enabling such play in some minimal sense but in making it distinctive of oneself in interaction with others. And style, in all of its many avatars, has a habitudinal basis, which subtends not just its identifiability over time or space but its ability to act as a unique mark of the being or thing which exhibits it (“that’s the way that Miró paints,” we say, wishing to capture the essence of his particular form of painting as well as its flair). Here the habitual is once more in the middle position: now between the body in its anonymous generality and the unique and highly personal expressiveness manifest in manners of speaking, in modes of sexual activity, and in matters of style.
It is time to return to the topic of memory now that we have an enriched sense of the role of habit and body in relation to each other. Merleau-Ponty himself singles out the past as an “inalienable dimension”[18] of body and habit alike. Indeed, given his preoccupation with the past in general and with the habitual body in particular, we should expect him to have presented us with a theory of habitual body memory. Yet we look in vain for any such theory—or even the sketch of one. A strange lacuna looms large in the very center of the Phenomenology of Perception. This is all the stranger in that this book contains a number of passages expressly critical of recollection as a paradigm for remembering (cf. PP, 19ff., 83, 180, 275, 393, 418–19). Taken together, these passages compose a veritable leitmotif of the book as a whole: just as we are told in the Introduction that the “projection of memories” through recollection cannot begin to explain ambiguous figures or perceptual illusions, so we are told near the end of Part Three that:
If the past were available to us only in the form of express recollections, we should be continually tempted to recall it in order to verify its existence, and thus resemble the patient mentioned by Scheler, who was constantly turning round in order to reassure himself that things were really there—whereas in fact we feel it behind us as an incontestable acquisition. (PP, 418–19)
Since the past exists for us as an “incontestable acquisition” largely because of the actions of our own habitual body, it would be only natural to think that Merleau-Ponty would have developed a notion of habitual body memory to fill the gap left by the diminution of recollection’s role in recapturing the past. That he did not do so is not likely to have been the product of a mere oversight. It testifies, rather, to a source of tension within his reflections on memory and the past which we must now confront.
The tension exists between two directions of thought. The first we are by now quite familiar with. This is the view that the past is deeply ingredient in the present—so much so that we can say (in a passage cited above) that “each present reasserts the immanence of the whole past which it supplants” (PP, 420, my italics). The only plausible receptacle for the past as an entire unit—in contrast with episodic details of it—is found precisely in the habitual body. Where else, how else, could the past effect such a subtle and complete ingression than in our bodily habits and habitudes? Part of the very meaning of embodiment is the capacity to incorporate items (whether they be thoughts, emotions, or other residua of the past) so thoroughly that they become one with the body, yet do not require auxiliary acts of cognition or recollection. The organist absorbs and assimilates the whole of his musically relevant past into his habitual body; as he tries out a new organ, he has this past literally in his hands and feet—and in such a way that their operative intentionality calls for no “interposed recollection.”[19] Indeed, on the basis of such an example as this one could go on to build a coherent notion of habitual body memory which might point to its specific forms of incorporation, its particular efficacy, and its own ways of being rule-bound.
Yet Merleau-Ponty does not go on to build any such notion. The reason why he does not—in the face of a manifest need to do so—is to be found in a second direction of his thought. This is a commitment to a direct realism of the past as given in memory. He comes to this from an admirable critique of the idea that the past must appear to us borne by intermediaries such as mental representations or physiological traces:
Psychology has involved itself in endless difficulties by trying to base memory on the possession of certain contents or recollections, the present traces (in the body or the unconscious) of the abolished past, for from these traces we can never come to understand the recognition of the past as past . . . memory can be understood only as a direct possession of the past with no interposed contents. (PP, 265)
But does this last sentence follow strictly from the preceding remarks? Granting the problematic character of the intermediaries (how do we know that they are of the past in the first place?), is it necessary to conclude that we directly possess the past? Are there not other ways of possessing it which convey it to us more subtly than do representations or traces—yet no less surely? The habitual body is itself one such vehicle. Tradition as conceived by Gadamer is another. (Indeed, as I have hinted, the body in its habitual being constitutes a personal tradition in its own right.)
In any case, Merleau-Ponty does not follow up on these possibilities because of his bedrock belief in the directly given character of the remembered past. In terms of this belief, the role of memory is to reopen time: a theme which is reiterated at several points in the text (cf. PP, 22, 85, 181, 265, 393). It does not matter that, at one late point, he draws misleadingly on Husserl’s notion of primary memory—in which the immediate past is directly given—as testimony for the unmediated givenness of the remote past as well.[20] What does matter is that the conception of the entire past as directly given forces Merleau-Ponty to look elsewhere than the habitual body or cultural tradition for the means of reopening time. The body in particular cannot effect such a reopening since its access to the past is inherently indirect; it is precisely as habit-bound that it gives us not the past per se (which, in the case of habits, would be the moments in which the habits were first learned) but the past as presently efficacious in habitual actions of all kinds. To borrow a metaphor which both Bergson and Proust employ: in the embodiment of the past in habits we witness the tip of an enormous pyramid whose total bulk is the past itself. Moreover, the tip is moving in a way the past is not: hence the effect of the past’s receding from us, a phenomenon which Merleau-Ponty can hardly deny. In fact, not only does he acknowledge that the past is “a mobile setting which moves away from us” (PP, 149), he also avers that the past is a “dimension of escape and absence” (413). Such admissions create problems enough for a direct realism of past existence. Compounding them is an equal insistence on the desirability of actively assuming the past and thereby transforming it in the present: “by taking up a present, I draw together and transform my past, altering its significance, freeing and detaching myself from it” (PP, 455). If we transform the past in the very act of taking it up to the present, it is difficult to see how we are ever in contact with an unadulterated, directly given past.
But let us keep our focus on the body—or more exactly, on its failure to serve as an adequate vehicle of a past which is supposedly given without mediation. The reason for this failure is straightforward: what the past as directly given calls for is contemplation, not action. As Bergson made abundantly clear, habit memory eventuates in actions: precisely in contrast with recollections, which are contemplative in nature (cf. MM, 66–70, 220). One might grant that there are contemplative modes of direct access to the past other than recollection—a possibility which neither Bergson nor Merleau-Ponty seriously considers—but that one has to insist that the habitual body is not such a mode; indeed, the latter even obstructs direct access while being nevertheless an effective indirect avenue. Thus it is in vain that the following passage struggles to make the body essential to the reopening of time:
The part played by the body in memory is comprehensible only if memory is, not just the constituting consciousness of the past [i.e., in recollection], but an effort to re-open time on the basis of the implications contained in the present, and if the body, as our permanent means of “taking up attitudes” and thus constructing pseudo-presents, is the medium of our communication with time as with space. (PP, 181)
But the body is engaged—as Merleau-Ponty himself shows so eloquently elsewhere in the Phenomenology of Perception—not in the construction of pseudo-presents but of massively layered and richly overladen actual presents show through with virtualities. If the body living this present is for the most part a habitual body, then the issue is not that of reopening the past (which would be retrogressive in character) but of carrying it forward into the future of eventual accomplishment. Just this action is the habitual body’s way of being memorious: incorporating the past and carrying it on in concrete action. No claim as to the past’s direct givenness needs to be made in order to support this view; in fact, making this puts us considerably off track, since it impels us to move beyond the body in its felt density into a contemplative mode in which clarity is a primary value: the body as we live it is anything but pellucid. In the circumstance, it is not at all surprising that Merleau-Ponty, divided against himself as to the nature of the past, should have no theory of habitual body memory. This is so in spite of the fact that, more than any philosopher since Descartes (and more even than Bergson), he has furnished a wealth of insight into habit, body, and memory. His masterful treatment of this august triad of terms taken separately masks, however, a lack of insight into their concatenation as “habitual-body-memory.”
I want to make two remarks in conclusion, one quite general and the other pertinent to this particular occasion:[21]
The first is that, beyond the question as to the character of habitual body memory itself, there is the question of whether this latter exhausts the types of body memory on which we can and do draw. My own recent work on this subject has led me to believe that traumatic body memory, erotic body memory, the body memory of being with others in various non-erotic ways, and still other types are all valid forms of bodily remembering. In this spectrum of types, habitual body memory and traumatic body memory stand out as extremes between which the other types are ranged. While habitual body memory is characterized by traits such as repeatability and virtuality, its traumatic counterpart manifests itself as characteristically unique (just this episode of pain is remembered) and as actual (otherwise the pain would have no continuing “sting”). It remains true, nonetheless, that habitual body memory overlaps the other types—with the normal exception of remembered trauma—and may even facilitate these others: much as we have seen bodily habitudes to act as enablers of style, sexuality, and la parole parlante. And when this is so, it is not merely a matter of providing these other kinds of body memory with substructures of skilled actions but of allowing them to be more innovative and less circumstance-bound than they would otherwise be. In short: habitual body memory is habituating as well as habituated in its operations and in its effects.
The second remark bears on the issue of depth in body memory. Here I only want to suggest that Merleau-Ponty’s views of body, habit, and memory are all concerned with depth in one form or another. Body is the main provider of depth to consciousness, and it does so through its anchoring and sedimenting activities. These latter are in turn borne forward by the infusion of habits, which lend a special depth of assurance, regularity, and scope. As for memory: it is a depth phenomenon through and through, a way to the depths of our being—as both Merleau-Ponty and Freud would affirm, though for different reasons. It is striking that at one point Merleau-Ponty develops his argument for a direct grasp of the past by analogizing non-recollective remembering to the perception of depth: neither is mediated by contents, both involve continued transitions, and in each something comparatively remote is made present (PP, 264–66, 423). If depth is defined as “the dimension in which things or elements of things envelop each other” (PP, 264–65), then remembering is ineluctably depth-drawn and depth-drawing. This is above all evident in the manner in which the past is said to encircle the present like an atmosphere or horizon:
To remember is not to bring into the focus of consciousness a self-subsistent picture of the past; it is to thrust deeply into the horizon of the past and take apart step by step the interlocked perspectives until the experiences which it epitomizes are as if relived in their temporal setting. (PP, 22; cf. also 264–66)
Remembering, in other words, is not only very like perceiving objects in depth: it is grasping objects in depth, only in the depth that time rather than space provides. Depth itself, as Erwin Straus demonstrated in The Primary World of Senses,[22] is spatio-temporal in character. Thus the depth of perception and the depth of memory are more than merely parallel; they are in the end the same depth, that of our being-in-the-world. But they are such, Merleau-Ponty would insist, only as experienced by the lived body and more particularly by the habitual body, which ties us to space as well as to time. Habits are movements in space even as they are amassments of their own repetition and deployment. This is why it could be claimed that habits “dilate our being in the world” (PP, 143) and why they are the very basis of our inhabiting the world. Such inhabiting is in turn something more than habitual just as it is something more than bodily; it is also profoundly memorial. The depth of familiarity which human inhabitation brings with it is a depth made possible by a habitual body memory whose full significance we are only beginning to fathom.
Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. Translated by N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer. New York: Doubleday, 1959.
Dewey, John. Human Nature and Conduct. New York: Random House, 1950.
Husserl, Edmund. The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness. Edited by Martin Heidegger. Translated by James Spencer Churchill and Calvin O. Schrag. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964.
———. Experience and Judgment. Translated by James Spencer Churchill and Karl Ameriks. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973.
Ingarden, Roman. The Literary Work of Art. Translated by George G. Grabowicz. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973.
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———. The Visible and the Invisible. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968.
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1. This chapter originally appeared in Man and World 17 (1984): 279–97.
2. The terms “primary memory” and “secondary memory” were first coined by James in his Principles of Psychology in 1890; but James refused to make one form of memory more basic than the other.
3. See Nicomachean Ethics, 1103a and 1114b–1115a. Aristotle is also notable for having distinguished two forms of remembering, not “primary” vs. “secondary” but “memoria” vs. “reminiscentia.” See Richard J. Sorabji, Aristotle on Memory (Providence: Brown University Press, 1972).
4. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer (New York: Doubleday, 1959), 68. (Hereafter referred to as MM.)
5. I say “as enacted bodily” since it cannot be denied that mental operations may also be fully habitual.
6. See Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1949), ch. 2.
7. Bergson, MM, 72. In the passage from which this phrase is taken, the expression is nonetheless applied to recollective memory alone.
8. See Roman Ingarden, The Literary Work of Art, trans. George G. Grabowicz (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 265–67, 330–31.
9. Merleau-Ponty himself speaks of “transcendental geology” (The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis [Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968], 258–59).
10. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (New York: Humanities Press, 1862), 145. (Hereafter referred to as PP.)
11. Consciousness projects itself into a physical world and has a body, as it projects itself into a cultural world and has its habits: because it cannot be consciousness without playing upon significances, given either in the absolute past of nature or in its own personal past” (PP, 137).
12. Cf. Merleau-Ponty, PP, 130. The mention of spontaneity reminds us that Merleau-Ponty is also seeking to counterbalance the predilection for spontaneity so evident in Kant and Sartre, neither of whom has an adequate notion of the concretely sedimented foundations of human experience.
13. Edmund Husserl, Experience and Judgment, trans. James S. Churchill and Karl Ameriks (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 108.
14. Merleau-Ponty, PP, 143, my italics. For a strikingly similar view of habit, see John Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct (New York: Random House, 1950), 41–45, 66–67.
15. “Every habit is both motor and perceptual because it lies . . . between explicit perception and actual movement” (PP, 152).
16. “The analysis of motor habit as an extension of existence leads on, then, to an analysis of perceptual habit as the coming into possession of a world” (PP 153).
17. For the discussion of the phantom limb in the context of habituality, see PP, 76ff.: and for Schneider, see esp. 135.
18. This phrase is applied to consciousness at PP, 266, but it applies even more convincingly to body and habit—as well as to thought (cf. 137) and to time itself (cf. 395).
19. The passage from which this phrase comes reads as follows: “I still ‘have in hand’ the immediate past without any distortion and without any interposed ‘recollection’.” (PP, 265; the phrase ‘have in hand’ is Husserl’s from The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness.)
20. Cf. PP, 416ff., where “transition synthesis” are held to like the two kinds of past; this overlooks their difference in kind: a difference explicitly pointed to by Husserl himself in his 1905 lectures.
21. The present chapter was first delivered as a lecture at a symposium on “Body, Depth, and Memory” held at the annual meeting of the Merleau-Ponty Circle in the fall term of 1982. The other speaker was Glen Mazis of Northern Kentucky University.
22. See Erwin Straus, The Primary World of Senses, trans. Jacob Needleman (Glencoe: Free Press, 1963), 379ff.