Creatures of habit: The problem and the practice of liberation

Continental Philosophy Review

Volumn 38, Issue 1-2, 2005, Pages 19-39

  Carlisle, Clare ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS   (United Kingdom)

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EID: 55449126391     PISSN: 13872842     EISSN: 15731103     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1007/s11007-005-9005-y     Document Type: Article

References (49)

1. Gilles Deleuze, Empiricism and .Subjectivity, p. x.
2. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, p. 91.
3. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book Two, Chapter One.
4. More specifically, Hume suggests that habit accounts for our belief in the principle of causation: we become so accustomed to the constant conjunction between two objects or events that in time the mind connects them automatically, and, in accordance with its tendency to "spread itself over the external world", mistakes its own habit for a necessary connection between the things themselves. See Hume, A Treatise on Human Nature, Book I, Part III, Section xiv.
5. Merleau-Ponty (echoing Schopenhauer) develops the concept of the "lived body", or "my own body", in order to present an account of human embodiment from the inside, as it were - without either objectifying the body, or denying the physicality of selfhood.
6. Aquinas offers a careful analysis of 'habitus' in general before discussing virtue in particular, but his account is rather dry and narrow, overlooking the richness and complexity of habit considered phenomenologically. See Aquinas' Summa Theologia volume 22, Q.49-52.
7. Étienne Gilson's The Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas includes a useful discussion of habit; see pp. 244-251.
8. The Oxford English Dictionary.
9. William James, Psychology, Briefer Course, in James McDermott (ed.), The Writings of Wi/liamJames, pp. 9-10. Gilles Deleuze makes a similar point inDifference and Repetition, p. 75.
10. Gilles Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, p. 66. This echoes Evanus' maxim: "It comes, my friend, by practice year on year - and see: At last this thing we practice our own nature is," which is cited by Aristotle to illustrate his view that habit is "a second nature" - see
11. the Nicomachean Ethics, Book Seven, Chapter Ten.
12. William James, op. cit., Psychology, Briefer Course, p. 12.
13. Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, p. 44. Hegel makes a similar point in his Philosophy of Mind, p. 143.
14. This may be regarded positively or negatively, according to one's preference for order and stability, or spontaneity and originality: Krishnamurti, for example, speaks rather disparagingly of the fact that "the mind likes to function in grooves, in habits: it is safe, secure..."; Krishnamurti, The Impossible Question, p. 129.
15. See also Beginnings of Learning, pp. 141-147.
16. A parallel may be drawn between this philosophical view and Pierre Bourdieu's use of the concept of 'habitus' in the social sciences. Bourdieu, building on the work of Durkheim and Mauss, makes 'habitus' central to his theory of practice - and here, as I suggest above, this proposes an alternative to understanding action as purposive, and as originating from the free will of a pure, discreet subject. See Bourdieu, Practical Reason, pp. 79-81. Mauss discusses his notion of 'habitus' in his lecture on 'Body Techniques'; see Sociology and Psychology pp. 95-123, and especially pp. 101-102. For a discussion of the concept of habit in sociology (focusing in particular on Durkheim, Weber and the history of the discipline) see
17. Charles Camic, 'The Matter of Habit', The American Journal of Sociology vol. 91, no. 5 (March 1996), pp. 1039-1087.
18. Gilles Deleuze, Empiricism and .Subjectivity, p. x. See also pp. 92-93: "Anticipation is habit, and habit is anticipation: these two determinations - the thrust of the past and the élan toward the future - are, at the centre of Hume 's philosophy, the two aspects of the same fundamental dynamism... Habit is the constitutive root of the subject, and the subject, at root, is the synthesis of time - the synthesis of the present and the past in the light of the future."
19. ibid., p. 66. This echoes Bergson's observation that habits are not themselves natural, but what is natural is the tendency - or more to the point, the habit - to contract and develop habits; see p. 44. For an illuminating discussion of Deleuze and Bergson, see Keith Ansell Pearson's Germinal Life: the Difference and Repetition of Gilles Deleuze, especially pp. 20-76; 209-224.
20. ibid., p. 85.
21. See, for example, Sangharakshita's The Taste of Freedom, pp. 19-20.
22. Nagapriya, Exploring Karma and Rebirth, p. 57. Here the author includes a diagram illustrating "the cycle of habit formation." For discussion of the translation of samskara,
23. David Carpenter, 'Practice Makes Perfect: The Role of Practice (Abhyasa) in Patanjala Yoga', Yoga: the Indian Tradition, ed. lan Whicher and David Carpenter, pp. 40-45;
24. and Lakshmi Kapari, La Notion de Samskara dans L'Inde Brahamique et Buddhique, pp. 475-503.
25. Stephen Collins, Selfless Persons, p. 202.
26. For a clear explanation of this doctrine, see Peter Harvey, An Introduction to Buddhism, pp. 54-60. Early Buddhist texts identify twelve 'links' in the chain of conditioned arising, and since each link is dependent on all the others it is explained by the cycle as a whole. In this way, the doctrine suggests an alternative transcendental analysis of habit to the one presented below.
27. Lilian Silburn, Instant et Cause, p. 200.
28. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 78.
29. ibid., p. 73.
30. (See note 21 above.)
31. The notions of synthesis and retention are discussed by Husserl in his Analyses Concerning Active and Passive Synthesis and Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness, and Deleuze's analysis draws on this aspect of Husserl's philosophy.
32. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, pp. 74-75. See also p. 70 for Deleuze's interpretation of the Humean imagination.
33. On this point, see Samuel Butler's Life and Habit, p. 4. This text offers an interpretation of life in terms of habit that closely resembles the Indian philosophy of karma and rebirth: Butler regards human history not as a succession of distinct beings but as a series of connected actions, so that each individual life contains and expresses the memories of former lives. He suggests that our habits precede our existence as individuals, so that the experience of the race is "the experience of a single being only, repeating in a great many different ways certain performances with which he has become exceedingly familiar... We must suppose the continuity of life and sameness between living beings, whether plants or animals, and their descendants, to be far closer than we have hitherto believed; so that the experience of one person is not enjoyed by his successor, so much as that the successor is bonâfide but a part of the life of his progenitors, imbued with all his memories, profiting by all his experiences - which are, in fact, his own - and only unconscious of the extent of is own memories and experiences owing to their vastness and already infinite repetitions." (p. 50)
34. It is often supposed that people become less plastic, less impressionable as they grow older, when habits harden into a fixed character that is increasingly difficult to alter. William James remarks rather wistfully that if only the young were to realize "how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while they are in the plastic state..."; William James, op. cit., Psychology, Briefer Course, p. 20.
35. ibid., p. 14.
36. Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu is preoccupied by this theme, depicting habit as "an annihilating force which suppresses the originality and even the awareness of one's perceptions... a dread deity, so riveted to one's being, its insignificant face so incrusted in one's heart, that if it detaches itself, if it turns away from one, this deity that one had barely distinguished inflicts on one sufferings more terrible than any other and is then as cruel as death itself." See Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, volume 5, p. 478.
37. See Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 145.
38. See Donna Farhi, The Breathing Book.
39. Nietzsche describes eternal recurrence as 'the ideal of the most high-spirited, alive and world-affirming human being who has not only come to terms and learned to get along with whatever was an is, but who wants to have what was and is repeated to all eternity'. See Beyond Good and Evil, Section 56, and also The Gay Science, Section 341; Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Chapter Three, 'The Convalescent'.
40. See Jay Garfield 's excellent commentary to his translation of Nagarjuna's The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way (especially pp. 103-123) for a discussion of the Buddhist doctrine of conditioning and emptiness. Garfield presents these difficult ideas in the context of western philosophical debate, drawing parallels with Hume's analysis of causation.
41. See also Peter Harvey, An Introduction to Buddhism, pp. 99-102.
42. This suggests another paradox of habit, and by implication a paradox of selfhood: the concept of habit raises the question of origins - of a first, free, unconditioned action - and yet such an action would be excluded from the concept of habit as its 'other'. Habits only begin when originality is lost or concealed. Two possible responses to this elusiveness of the origin are mysticism and mythology: a function of myths is to account for 'the first time' (see Mircea Eliade's The Myth of Eternal Return). Jacques Derrida teases out the connection between myth, habit and writing in 'Plato's Pharmacy': "One thus begins by repeating without knowing through a myth - the definition of writing: which is to repeat without knowing." See Dissemination, p. 75.
43. In the context of the rest of Romans 7, this passage suggests a conflict between the mind and the body: the mind obeys the spiritual law of God, but the body is ruled by the law of sin. (The significance of the term 'flesh' (sarx) in Paul's writings is complex: it is sometimes neutral, sometimes negative; it sometimes refers quite straightforwardly to the physical body, but it can also mean moral weakness and sin. See John Ziesler, Pauline Christianity, pp. 77-80.) But maybe the distinction between mind and body refers to the conscious and the unconscious - to intention and to habit. "It is no longer I who do it": not the conscious self, but the unconscious "sin that dwells within me". This 'no longer I' is in fact the habit that preserves the I, preserves the old self whom one now sees, desires to overcome, and yet remains conditioned by.
44. Augustine, Confessions, Book VIII, Section 5.
45. ibid., Book VIII, Section 10. See also Book X, Section 40.
46. John Dalrymple, Simple Prayer, pp. 60-63.
47. Mahasatipatthana Sutta (or 'Great Discourse on Establishing Awareness'), p. 3.
48. Ibid., pp. 5-7.
49. Yuasa Yasuo's The Body discusses various Asian practices, such as Buddhist meditation, kundalini yoga and acupuncture in the context of the philosophical accounts of the body suggested by Henri Bergson and Merleau-Ponty; see especially pp. 161-201. Catherine Pickstock's After Writing: on the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy interprets the medieval Roman Rite, the theology of the Eucharist and other forms of Christian liturgy in the light of a concept of repetition developed from Derrida's reading of Plato; see especially pp. 23-25; 106-108; 220-266. Pickstock concludes her essay by suggesting that "every Eucharist is an essential repetition of the incarnation", so that "our attempt to return to our divine origin is not so much a journey towards God, as a journey towards God's entry into our body - both physical and relational - which really happens... And whereas in Plato, the body is ultimately left behind, in Christianity, the spirit and the body together might be received back again on the eschatological morning."