Reviving Habit: Félix Ravaisson's Practical Metaphysics

Although it arrives long after its original's effects have been felt, this first English translation of Ravaisson's 1838 Of Habit is in some ways quite timely. Lest one neglect its historical significance, the brief text arrives surrounded, outnumbered even, by extensive critical, exegetical and promotional apparatuses. As the editors show, Ravaisson redeems habit from Enlightenment detractors who saw it as a stultifying mechanism, recovering the ontological and ethical centrality it had for Aristotle while merging it with a pantheistic Christian metaphysics. His work occupies a key place in post-Kantian philosophy, its influence passing through Hegel to the phenomenology of Heidegger and the vital materialism of Bergson and Deleuze. It therefore provides us with an occasion to reflect on the importance of habit in the philosophy of these later thinkers and in the political thought their work inspires.

In his revaluation of habit, Ravaisson returns freedom and intelligence to nature and the body from which they had been expelled by the Kantian ideal of rational autonomy. Yet he also poses challenges for those who oppose the spontaneity of nature to the normative power of reason. In habits, Ravaisson argues, ideas are embodied and nature is imbued with intelligence, even morality. It is a virtue of this publication that it will provide an occasion for English readers to struggle with the ambiguities of this double assertion. All who seek in habit a middle way between the philosophical antinomies of freedom and necessity will benefit from Ravaisson's peculiar and nuanced account of their interchange.

Following Aristotle, Ravaisson describes habit as an active "virtue" rather than a mechanical effect. It is not a state, or even a series of changing states, but a spontaneous inclination that arises from duration, the recurrence and persistence of changing impressions. Unlike inorganic material, living organisms both undergo and initiate change in a complex double movement of passivity and activity: "Life continually suffers external influences; and yet it nevertheless surmounts them…" (31) From changing durations, habit abstracts or "contracts" an orientation to the future, a direction and a goal; its telos is not autonomous but emergent. (25) Habit so understood traverses nature – which Ravaisson distinguishes from mere matter - in a hierarchical continuum that is both capitulated and recapitulated in human beings. Along the continuum, "receptivity diminishes and spontaneity increases. Such is the general law of the disposition, of the habit." (31) The capacity to form habits is therefore the very sign of human freedom, the mode by which will and idea become actual.

Ravaisson documents increasing spontaneity in the development from mineral to vegetal, animal and finally human life. Even crystals manifest idiosyncrasy, growing to form a variety of distinctive patterns.

A superior degree of life, however, implies a greater variety of metamorphoses, a more complicated organization, a higher heterogeneity. Consequently, there must be more diverse elements; for the being to absorb them into its own substance, it must prepare and transform them. To do so, it must approach them with a suitable organ. Hence it must move, at least in parts, in external space. Ultimately, there must be something – whatever its nature might be – in the being that allows external objects to make an impression on it, and which consequently determines the appropriate movements.

(33)

Human beings are therefore distinguished by their ability to contract a multiplicity of habits from durations. This superiority is grounded in a combination of sensitivity with creative modification, a greater ability to receive, prepare and transform difference. In other words, human beings are greater and higher because they are capable of more differentiation. Like other animals, they have a greater range of motion than vegetables. Additionally, they possess a greater temporal flexibility. Both receptivity and activity are multiplied by this capacity for spatial and temporal movements. Hence, both the ability to be affected (to absorb) and to affect (transform) involves agency.

The spontaneity of habit is especially indicated by "intermittency." To suspend and then initiate action indicates an increasing independence from stimulus, the gathering of agency in the interim. Animals run and hide, grimace and whimper...