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Power and Habit Matthias Haase (Universität Leipzig) 1. Creatures of habit In the investigation of mind, Hegel complains, habit tends to be “passed over as something contemptible”.1 Of course, no one would deny that we are creatures of habit, in a way. But that fact about us is usually not regarded as the pride of creation. Hegel thinks that this is a mistake. In his Philosophy of Mind, the concept of habit marks the anthropological difference. As the culmination of the chapter on “Anthropology”, with which Hegel begins his investigation of mind, the treatment of habit is supposed to articulate the specific way in which the corporality of a rational animal is its own act, in a sense in which that of a mere animal is not. We are told that a thinking being is a being that gives itself its a nature which, for this reason, is “rightly called a second nature”. (E §410) Even though the talk of rationality as “second nature” has recently become a celebrated slogan in certain quarters, the thesis that having a second nature is distinctive of rational animals tends, in the same quarters, to be passed over. On the received view, the difference is a matter of what, in the course of a normal upbringing, comes to be second nature. After all, dogs can be habituated. Even the lone wolf in its natural habitat does things habitually. There are whole books about it – with entries entitled “eating habits”. Accordingly, it looks like the concept of habit can’t be that through which to understand what the translations of Hegel tend to render as “spirit” and what nowadays is often discussed under the title of the specifically “rational”, “self-conscious” or “autonomous” way of being minded that elevates us over the mere animals – the “brutes” or “beasts”, as the tradition calls them. The contemporary debates in the philosophy of mind tend to be organized around the assumption that if the anthropological difference is to come out as one kind or principle, rather than degree, then the powers characteristic of having a mind in the relevant sense must be shown to differ principally from what gets to be called “mere”, “pure” or “blind habits”. Against this background Hegel’s thesis appears bizarre. What he says might begin to sound less outlandish once one considers the possibility that what is meant 1 See Hegel, E §410. 1 by “Gewohnheit” and rendered in the translations as “habit” might be what Aristotle calls “hexis” and Aquinas translates with “habitus” and about which the latter says that, according to the philosopher’s teaching, neither the brutes nor God have it.2 But, of course, the mere fact that they say it too hardly makes it less strange. In the following I want to argue that this peculiar bit of Aristotelian orthodoxy should be saved from oblivion, since it is an intrinsic part of the proper definition of a rational power – a dynamis metalogue. (((Sadly, it turned out that I will focus on raising the problem to which it should, on another occasion, turn out to be the solution.))) The assumption that the concept of habit doesn’t capture what is distinctive of us is deeply rooted in modern approach to mind. Even Hume for whom it is all just habit would agree that since the “beasts” have habits too, the way in which “men surpasses the animals” doesn’t come into view as long as one just reflects on what it is to be in a habit; one has to look at what we are in the habit to do. Of course, when the line is drawn in the Humean fashion it is not all that elevating. As Hume has it, the bare notion of habit already introduces the concept of reason. We are told the animal’s “actions proceed from a reasoning that is not itself different, nor founded on different principles, from that which appears in human nature.” For: “From the tone of voice the dog infers his master’s anger, and foresees his own punishment.”3 So understood, the words ‘reason’, ‘mind’ or, if you will, ‘spirit’ describe something that can be found throughout the animal kingdom; it is just that some are, as it were, more ‘spirited’ than others. Whether we are considering how the refinement of a thinker exceeds the capacities of “animals” or those of “children” or the “common people” – all the same: it is just a matter of degree.4 Kant rejects this picture of human beings as vulgar. But, on the face of it, he shares Hume’s account of what a habit is. As Kant sees it, another’s habit rightly arouses “disgust in us”, since it is, as it were, like witnessing the brute within breaking through: 2 Aristotle, XX; Aquinas, Summa, XX That unanimity among the three is not an accident. In the introduction to his Philosophy of Mind Hegel claims that De Anima it is “still the only work of speculative interest on this topic” and that the “main aim of a philosophy of mind” must thus be to “make its lessons available again”. (E § 378). 3 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, Book I, Part III, Section XVI, p. 177. 4 As Hume puts it in famous footnote in the Enquiries, the way “men […] surpasses the animals” is to be understood by first considering the way in which “one man surpasses another”. Once the latter is clear, “the difference between men and animals will be easily comprehended”. For it is difference of the same kind: a matter of degree. See David Hume, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding, Section IX, p. 84 FN 1. 2 Habit (assuetudo) […] is a physical inner necessitation to proceed in the same manner that one has proceeded until now. It deprives even good actions of their moral worth because it impairs the freedom of the mind and, moreover, leads to thoughtless repetition of the very same act (monotony), and so becomes ridiculous. – Habitual fillers (phrases used for the mere filling up of the emptiness of thoughts) make the listener constantly worried that he will have to hear the little sayings yet again, and they turn the speaker into a talking machine. The reason why the habits of another stimulate the arousal of disgust in us is because here the animal in the human being jumps out far too much, and because here one is led instinctively by the rule of habituation, exactly like another (non-human) nature, and so 5 runs the risk of falling into one and the same class with the beast. Kant defines a habit is a mechanism of instinctive repetition that constitutes a “physical inner necessitation”. Given this assumption, the only way to reject Hume’s dictum that “reason is the slave of the passions” is to hold that reason is opposed to habit. A few of pages before the passage just quoted we are told that “virtue” should be entirely free of it: the “adherence to one’s duty […] should never become habit, but always emerge new and original from one’s way of thinking (Denkungsart)”. (BA 36) Excusable exceptions having to do with the frailty of old-age aside, all habits are branded “reprehensible”.6 The common judgment about habit is less austere. We all have some; and it is not that having one necessarily makes one bad person. So it might be agreed that it would be attractive to somehow steer between the two extremes just rehearsed. But why should the peculiar piece of Aristotelian orthodoxy be required for this purpose? One might think that all that is needed to prevent the Aristotelian wisdom that the virtues are acquired through habituation and are thus habits in the ordinary sense of the word from collapsing into Humeanism is a distinction between two species of the genus habit – as John McDowell would put it: the “bit of common sense” that the relevant kind of habituation is not adequately described in terms of “conditioning” or Wittgenstein’s unfortunate wording “Abrichtung”, but is properly characterized with the more tender talk of “Bildung” and “initiation”.7 The kind of habit that is acquired in this way is not exercised in blind, automatic and mechanical repetition; its proper actualization exhibits the appropriate sensitivity to what is called for by the specificities of the situation at hand.8 5 Ibid., BA 40. 6 Kant, Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht, BA 40. 7 See John McDowell, Mind and World, p. 88. 8 Once this picture is on the table it is tempting to think that something along these lines would also be the charitable reading of Kant. After all, what figures in the passage I quoted above under the title of “Denkungsart” is clearly supposed to be something in the order of a hexis or habitus – some 3 What is striking about Hegel’s treatment of habit is that his text resists this way of dissolving the issue. Hegel doesn’t deny that the characterizations that are emphasized when habit is spoken of “disparengingly” are on target. To the contrary, he says himself that a habit is constituted through “repetition”, that it is a kind of “mechanism”, that it is instantiated “without consciousness” and that the “form of habit” is, as such, “open to any accidental content”. (E §410) At the same time we are told that the element so defined is “indispensable for the existence of all intellectual life in the individual” and that it “encompasses all levels of the activity of mind”, including mastery of a language, knowledge, skill and virtue.