Ravaisson and the Force of Habit

Mark Sinclair

Journal of the History of Philosophy, Volume 49, Number 1, January 2011, pp. 65-85 (Article) Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: 10.1353/hph.2011.0013

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Ravaisson and the Force of Habit

Mark Sinclair

it is hardly a secret that with the philosophy of David Hume a conception of habit comes to occupy center-stage within epistemological and psychological reflection. Habit or custom is the great guide of human life,1 particularly in that it conditions, as the ground of the association of ideas, all our inductions concerning the objects of experience, and our beliefs that causal relations obtain between them. Yet according to Hume, we cannot say what habit itself is. Certainly, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding describes a general and apparently common conception of habit or customterms which are presented as synonymousin the following manner: 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.2 This conception applies to habits of the mind and habits of the body: as a result of their repetition, certain acts come to occur without the express intervention of the will or the understanding. These acts are propensities, precisely because they occur without the guidance of the will or understanding; and such propensities are, for Hume, the effect of a cause, principle, or power that is habit. Habit or custom, then, is the principle that allows repeated acts to become propensities, but the nature of this principle remains closed to us:
By employing that word (custom) we pretend not to have given the ultimate reason of such a propensity. We only point out a principle of human nature, which is universally acknowledged, and which is well known by its effects. Perhaps we can push our enquiries no farther, or pretend to give the cause of this cause; but must rest contented with it as the ultimate principle, which we can assign, of all our conclusions from experience.3

This point is not further developed in the first Enquiry, and thus we remain, content or otherwise, with a problem: we know only that through their repetition operations come to occur at a remove from will and reflection, in a quasi-automatic
1 David Hume, Enquiries Concerning the Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1902), 44. 2 Ibid., 43. 3 Ibid.

Mark Sinclair is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Journal of the History of Philosophy, vol. 49, no. 1 (2011) 6585

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fashion, and not how or why they do so. In suggesting that we can push our enquiries no further, Hume seems to claim that we have no viable explanation for the phenomena of habit; and thus, by implication, that attempted explanations of habit either in terms of physical modifications of the body, or according to an increasingly proficient operation of an intellectual faculty, are scarcely compelling conjectures. Thomas Reid offers a more sustained treatment of the problem in the section of the Essay on the Active Powers of Man entitled Of Habit, but he arrives at a similarly aporetic conclusion:
I see no reason to think, that we shall ever be able to assign the physical cause either of instinct or of the power of habit. Both seem to be parts of our original constitution. Their end and use is evident; but we can assign no cause of them, but the Will of him who made us.4

Habit can be distinguished from instinct, since particular habits are acquired through life rather than given as a constituent of our biological nature. Yet habit is similar to instinct for two reasons: first, both instinct and habit are species of what Reid calls mechanical as distinct from rational principles of action, since both principles, he argues, are not a function of reflective agency. Second, it seems impossible to find a physical, material cause for either habit or instinct. As Reid continues,
With regard to instinct, which is a natural propensity, this will perhaps be easily granted but it is no less true with regard to that power and inclination which we acquire by habit. No man can show a reason why our doing a thing frequently should produce either facility or inclination to do it.5

Even though he classes habit and instinct as mechanical principles, Reid seems to argue not only that eighteenth-century knowledge of the biological structure and mechanics of the human being is insufficient to account for these principles, but also that such knowledge, even as it advances, never will be able to account for them. The present article is concerned with the response to this aporia that is provided in Flix Ravaissons text of 1838 entitled De lhabitude, which has recently been translated as Of Habit.6 I aim to show how Ravaisson, upon explicitly criticizing realist and idealistor physical and rationalist (H 55)approaches, offers a conception of habit as a way of being (H 25) that challenges and transforms the ontological grounds on which the Scottish philosophers are led to their epistemological skepticism concerning habit as a force or principle.7 This challenge, I contend, is still pertinent for contemporary philosophical reflection concerning both habit and ontology in general. In order to assess fully the historical significance of this

Thomas Reid, Essay on the Active Powers of Man (Edinburgh, 1788), 120. Ibid. 6 Flix Ravaisson, Of Habit, trans. and ed. C. Carlisle and M. Sinclair (London: Continuum, 2008). For the sake of brevity, I refer solely to the English pages of this bilingual edition (the original passages in French will almost always be on the preceding page) with the abbreviation H. 7 Ravaisson does not provide this response to the Scottish philosophers directly, and Of Habit contains only three notes, which I examine below, referring to them.
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challenge, however, in the first two sections of the text I show how Ravaisson, in articulating his own ontological approach, develops traditional accounts and explanations of what he terms the double law of habit, particularly those offered by his immediate predecessor in the lineage of French philosophers concerned with habit, namely Pierre Maine de Biran.8

1 . t h e d o u b l e l aw o f h a b i t
Ravaissons reflection on habit is wide-ranging and possesses a circular structure according to which the conclusions of the text serve to support its initial assertions. The first part of the essay discusses the role of habit in the vegetal and animal realms, but Ravaisson acknowledges that it is solely within our own experience, within the human realm examined in the second part of the text, that we can gain access to and knowledge of habit as a force, cause, or principle: It is only in consciousness that we can aspire not just to establish its apparent law but to learn its how and its why, to illuminate its generation and, finally, to understand its cause (H 39). In the third section of this article, I will show how Ravaissons essay brings into question the very idea of habit as a cause, but the apparent law which he seeks to explain is a double law, a law describing two sorts of empirical regularities:
The continuity or the repetition of passion weakens it; the continuity or repetition of action exalts and strengthens it. 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. (H 49)

Through their continuity or repetition, sensations on the one hand can fade to the point where we are no longer aware of them at all. To our dismay, sensory pleasures often fade, whereas we can become habituated to pains to the point that we (happily) hardly notice them at all. On the other hand, active perceptions, although they become more indifferent insofar as they involve less effort, become clearer, more assured, and more distinct. Through childhood, it becomes easier for us to perceive objects and distinguish sounds; and through adulthood, to add an example to the few provided in Of Habit, we might develop a taste for wine or

In the Anglophone world, little direct attention has been paid to Ravaissons essay, probably as a result of the absence of an English translation. It is often crudely described as presenting a mere synthesis of the ideas of Maine de Biran and F. W. J. Schelling; see, in particular, G. Boass introduction to Maine de Biran, The Influence of Habit on the Faculty of Thinking, trans. M. D. Boehm (Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins, 1929; Westport: Greenwood Press, 1970); and Frederick Copleston, A History of Philosophy: 19th and 20th Century French Philosophy (London: Continuum, 2003), 15558. More concerted readings have, however, been provided from the perspective of the work of Henri Bergson; see Ben-Ami Scharfstein, Roots of Bergsons Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943); Arthur O. Lovejoy, Some Antecedents of the Philosophy of Bergson: the Conception of Real Duration, Mind 22 (1913): 46583; and L. Susan Stebbing, Pragmatism and French Voluntarism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914). A brief and dismissive reading of Ravaissons essay is offered in Alberto Toscano, Theatre of Production: Philosophy and Individuation between Kant and Deleuze (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006). More recently, however, Clare Carlisle has studied the historical significance of Ravaissons ideas with regard to ethics: Between Freedom and Necessity: Flix Ravaisson on Habit and the Moral Life, Inquiry 53 (2010): 12345.
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whisky that allows us to distinguish the drinks flavors and nose more precisely, even if smell and taste are the most passive of the senses. Equally, in voluntary movement of the body, as in the acquisition of a skill, the movements frequently repeated become increasingly easy, prompt and precise. Effort declines to such an extent that action seems to occur without being explicitly governed by an act of will, or, in Humes words, without being impelled by any reasoning or process of the understanding. The argument is, then, that in the cases of both sensation, on the one hand, and perception or movement on the other, repetition brings about a certain retreat from conscious awareness; but sensations fade to nothing, whereas perception and movements become more assured, prompt, and precise. The name habit covers two sets of different effects, even if both these effects arise as a result of the continuity or repetition of a change. Ravaisson remarks that most of the authors who have examined habit (H 121) have articulated some form of this double law, and offers a list including the names of Destutt de Tracy, Xavier Bichat, Maine de Biran, and the Scottish philosopher Dugald Stewart. He traces its first discussion, however, back to Joseph Butlers Analogy of Religion of 1736, which distinguishes active and passive habits in moral life.9 Ravaisson does not refer to Hume in this connection, but the latter had indirectly acknowledged the importance of Butlers discussion in the section of A Treatise of Human Nature concerned with the effects of custom on the passions.10 In France, however, the distinction of active and passive habits was studied beyond the moral sphere: the different effects of repetition or continuity on sensation and judgment were discussed by the vitalist physiologist Bichat in his Physiological Researches on Life and Death of 1800;11 and Bichats insights were subsequently developed by Pierre Maine de Biran in the Influence of Habit on the Faculty of Thinking of 1802, which was presented as the winning entry to a competition organized by the Acadmie de sciences morales et politiques in which candidates were to determine what is the influence of habit on the faculty of thinking, or, in other words, show the effect that frequent repetition of the same operations produces on our intellectual

See Ch. V.II of Joseph Butler, Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1860); and Carlisle, Between Freedom and Necessity: Flix Ravaisson on Habit and the Moral Life. 10 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 424: And this is the reason why custom encreases all active habits, but diminishes passive, according to the observation of a late eminent philosopher; see also J. P. Wright, Butler and Hume on Habit and Moral Character, in Hume and Humes Connexions, ed. M. Stewart and J. Wright (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1995), 10518. It seems to be because Hume refers to active and passive habits so fleetingly that Ravaisson omits him from his list (H 121n23) of philosophers who have recognised the double law. In his 1792 Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind (vol. 2 of The Collected Works of Dugald Stewart [Edinburgh: Thomas Constable, 1854], 462 and 504), Dugald Stewart discusses at greater length Butlers distinction, but without attempting any philosophical explanation of it; habit, as Stewart will write in 1793, depends on causes of the nature of which we are ignorant (ibid., 24). 11 See Article 5 of Bichats Physiological Researches on Life and Death, trans. T. Watkins (Philadelphia: Smith and Maxwell, 1809), which bears the title, General Differences of the Two Lives with Respect to Habits.
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faculties.12 Ravaissons formulation of what he terms the double law is drawn almost word for word from The Influence of Habit on the Faculty of Thinking, and yet his explanation of this law differs markedly from those presented by Biran. Birans explanations of the double law are grounded in his dualistic psychology, an at once physiological and voluntarist psychology, the outlines of which, he argues, can be confirmed by the double law of habit itself:
Among the repeated impressions which gradually weaken, some continue to fade away and even completely vanish, whilst others, in becoming more indifferent, not only conserve all their clarity, but often acquire even more distinction. This fact alone, which is beyond contestation, would be enough, perhaps, to reveal an essential difference in the character of sensations, which deteriorate and vanish, and perceptions, which become clearer, even if we did not know in any other way this difference.13

We cannot ascribe the two different effects of repetition to the same faculty, as to do so we would have to suppose that this unique faculty can become at once more inert and more active by the same process of habituation, a supposition which seems to be absurd.14 The effects of repetition are thus taken to demonstrate an essential difference between perception and sensation, between what Biran had described in the introduction to his text as active and passive impressions. On this account, each of the five senses, to varying degrees, admits of a distinction between passively receiving an impression and actively apprehending it. Whereas for Biran passive impressions occur independently of the will, perception or active impressions, on the contrary, require the voluntary movement of the sense organs, which necessarily involves an awareness or apperception of the self as a willing agent. In this manner Biran presents the first outline of the psychology of the will that he develops in his later works: perception necessarily involves apperception of the self as an acting self [moi agissant]: the effort of physical movement comprises both my awareness of resistance and my awareness that it is I who moves, or who wants to move. The voluntary agent and the resistance it meets are, for Biran, the two terms of the relation necessary to ground the first simple judgment of personality: I am;15 and these two terms are given through

12 Before adding important notes to his winning entry of 1802 and publishing it, Maine de Biran had submitted an unsuccessful entry to the same competition in 1800. With the abbreviation, Influence, I refer to the published 1802 text in Influence de lhabitude sur la facult de penser, vol.1 of Oeuvres de Maine de Biran, ed. F. Azouvi (Paris: J. Vrin, 1987), and, after a forward slash in the references, to M. D. Boehms translation of Birans The Influence of Habit on the Faculty of Thinking, which does not contain some of the important notes mentioned above and which I have occasionally modified. A study of the evolution of Birans thinking between 1800 and 1802, which I am unable to examine here, is to be found in Henri Gouhier, Les Conversions de Maine de Biran (Paris: J. Vrin, 1948). 13 Biran, Influence, 163/87. It should be noted that in his Physiological Researches on Life and Death, Bichat had presented his reflection on habit as support for his distinction between organic and animal life, and that Birans account of the dual effects of habit has a comparable analytical and methodological purpose insofar as it is presented as confirmation of his distinction between active and passive impressions. On this point, see Jean-Marie Dgerando, review of Influence, by Biran, La Dcade philosophique, littraire et politique 11 (1803); repr., Influence, 35359. 14 Biran, Influence, 163/87. 15 The three quotations: Biran, Influence, 135/55.

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an awareness of effort, through what Biran terms here an impression of effort, which admits of degrees.16 It is within this framework, then, that Biran offers in the first part of his text explanations of the influence of habit on sensation, and then on perception and voluntary movement.17 Certainly, these explanations are proposed tentatively, and in the introduction to his text Biran even professesthus demonstrating the influence of Humes epistemological skepticismto be concerned solely with the influence of habit precisely because we know nothing of the nature of forces which manifest themselves to us only through their effects.18 Yet to claim that Maine de Biran remains with the how; Ravaisson goes back to the why of habit, is to be misled by both the title and the introductory remarks of the 1802 text, and, as will become clear, such a view does not take into account fully the notes that Biran added to the text before its publication.19 Biran first presents a hypothesis to account for the decline of sensations through their continuity or repetitiona conjecture that is offered not in order to discover the secret of nature, but to clarify further the facts, and to reveal what binds them.20 It should be noted that Birans conjecture is offered in implicit opposition to the one advanced by Bichat, who argues that sensations diminish through their continuity because sensation itself is always a function of mental comparison between the present sensation and those preceding it; a present sensation thus becomes less distinct to the extent that it can no longer be distinguished from those that preceded it.21 The Influence of Habit on the Faculty of Thinking attempts to delimit the intellectualism of Bichats account of sensation by highlighting its

Biran, Influence, 136/56. Given that effort constitutes the unity of will and resistance, the idea that it is an impression is problematic. Dominique Janicaud (Ravaisson et la mtaphysique: une gnalogie du spiritualisme franais [Ravaisson et la mtaphysique], [Paris: J. Vrin, 1997], 24) has shown how it gives rise to tensions in Birans text concerning the effect of repetitionof habiton this impression. I return to the question below, but in his later work Biran will come to argue that effort is not felt or sensed, but is rather a primitive fact of a different order, which gives us an immediate apperception of the self as what he will term a hyper-organic force, which cannot be separated from the body as a cause can be separated from its effects. 17 Biran gives the title On Passive Habits to this first part of his text, whereas the second part examining the Repetition of the Operations Grounded on the Use of Voluntary and Articulated Signs is entitled On Active Habits. That this distinction between active and passive habits is misleading given that the first part examines the habits of perception and motor actionwas already remarked by Destutt de Tracy, Rapport de M. Destutt de Tracy. Report on Influence of Habit on the Faculty of Thinking, by Biran. Acadmie des Sciences morales et politiques, 1802. Archival document in Institut de France, Archives de lAcadmie des Sciences morales et politiques (Cote B 6Rapport du 17 Messidor, An X). See Biran, Influence, 338/3334. 18 Biran, Influence, 132/52. 19 Janicaud, Ravaisson et la mtaphysique, 16. Translation mine. We still do not do justice to the originality of the 1802 text by recognizing that such a schematic distinction is complicated by the fact that staying with the effects does not exclude that his [Birans] study depends on certain presuppositions concerning causes (ibid.). As I show here, Biran does not merely presuppose certain causes of habit, but rather offers explanatory hypotheses concerning habits of both sensation and movement. Emmanuel Blondel (Ravaisson lecteur de Maine de Biran, in tudes sur Ravaisson, ed. J-M. Lannou [Paris: Kim, 1999], 24) offers a similar remark to that of Janicaud in claiming that in relation to an explanatory account of habit, Maine de Biran is here not essential [ne serait pas ici lessentiel]. 20 Biran, Influence, 164/88. 21 See Bichat, Physiological Researches on Life and Death, art. 5.
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inability to account for one particular aspect of the facts, namely the distress, malaise, disquiet or desire22 that we might feel when the cause or source of a sensation that has faded or vanished completely from our sensory awareness because we have become accustomed to itis then physically removed from us. An example of this, similar to the one that Ravaisson presents in Of Habit,23 would be the peculiar occurrence of our emerging from sleep during a road-journey when the car, and thus the continuous sound and vibrations accompanying the motion, have come to a stop. In order to account for both the fading of sensations and these feelings of disquiet, Biran posits a non-voluntary activity belonging to a principle of life resident in the sense organs; an activity that is more secret, more profound than that through which the self apperceives itself. It thus emerges that on this account passive impressions are not absolutely passive: the organs of sense may, as Biran writes, give the tone of a sensation as much they receive it, but this is executed in me without me,24 independently of the will. In fact, through the continuity or repetition of a sensation, it is this secret activity that lifts the tone of the sense organ, thus accommodating itself to the sensation and establishing a sort of equilibrium with it.25 For Biran, the faculty of sensing tends to, or strives for, this equilibrium, and the disquiet or desire felt in the absence of a sensation is a function of its rupture; the disquiet results from disequilibrium between the tone given by the organ and the now absent sensation. In the chapter of his text devoted to the Influence of Habit on Perception, Biran even seeks to root out a part of the secret of habit, and to untangle a few of the elements of its so very complex products, by unearthing the causes or principal circumstances of the perfecting of perception and movement through repetition. He identifies three such causes. First, the weakening of the passive, sensory aspect of a movement through its repetition facilitates the movement of the organs, as Biran argues in developing a claim advanced by Bichat: it is only when, for example, a child is no longer shocked, irritated, hurt by its sensations that it can come to perceive.26 Second, and more significantly, there is an increasing facility and precision of the movements in the particular organs themselves. In explaining this within a note added to his 1802 text before its publication, Biran attempts to go beyond materialist and intellectualist hypotheses. Against the former, the facility gained can hardly be explained in terms of a visible material alteration of the organ such as a gain in muscle mass, since even relatively effortless movements, which do not lead to this material alteration, become less remarked in their repetition. Against intellectualist hypotheses, Biran rejects
Biran, Influence, 172/97. Ravaisson, Of Habit, 30: Every uniform sensation that is repeated over a long period dulls sensibility, inducing sleep, all the more so when the sensation is strong and when sensibility is keen. Such is the ordinary effect of a continual swinging or rocking, or of a monotonous noise, particularly in childhood. 24 Biran, Influence, 135/55. 25 Biran, Influence, 164/88. 26 All quotations so far in this paragraph are from Biran, Influence, 17576/101. This is, it should be noted, Bichats sole explanation of the effects of continuity or repetition on judgment, and thus his explanation of sensory habituation is offered also as an explanation of the increasing facility of judgment.
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the claim that in habitual movements there occurs, unbeknownst to ourselves, an infinitely rapid succession of judgments or acts of will.27 Instead, he argues that by means of the repetition of originally willed movements there is a veritable effect of concentration28 in the organs; that the body is memory incarnate; that parts of the body have their own muscle memory. Such an effect of concentration is described by Biran as a determination, as a change that persists and survives beyond the impression. A motor determination, on the one hand, is a tendency of the organ or the motor center to repeat the action of the movement which has occurred for the first time. There is, as Biran claims despite his professed skepticism concerning our knowledge of forces, a lively force [une force vive] inherent in the organs that allows willed actions to involve less effort the more they are repeated.29 A sensory determination, on the other hand, is the tendency that the secret activity resident in the sense organs has to harmonize itself with a particular sensation. Biran does not draw out the philosophical significance of this idea of tendency or living force, which recalls the French vitalism of the eighteenth century. He presents the idea only ambiguously and hesitantly, and only on the basis of his basic aim to bring physics into metaphysics,30 that is, to develop, by means of a more physiological approach, the type of psychological analysis undertaken by the Ideological school in France. This physiological approach, it should be noted, was influenced by the naturalistic psychological speculationsthe neurophilosophy as two commentators have recently described it31of Charles Bonnet, according to which psychological phenomena are the result of vibratory movements of fibers in the nervous system; movements which suppose a change in the molecular or elemental state of the nerves themselves. Bonnet consequently accounted for the acquisition of motor habit as the result of determinations, understood as a changed state in the dispositions of nerve fibers that produces a tendency toward reproducing that same movement, or a disposition to execute that same movement.32 The influence of Bonnets thinking on Biran is particularly manifest in the latters presentation of the third cause for the increasing facility and precision of movement, namely the associations of movements and impressions in a common center.33 Such association, for Biran, occurs by means of the imagination, but the operation of the imagination, understood as a passive faculty, is rooted directly in determinations of the central organ, that is, of the brain. Although The Influence of Habit on the Faculty of Thinking bears the influence of Bonnets physiology, Biran does not in any way present or endorse a neurological
Biran, Influence, 179. This note does not appear in the English translation of the text. Biran, Influence, 148/70. 29 The quotations in this paragraph are from Biran, Influence, 148/69. 30 Biran, Influence, 132/52. I concentrate on Birans response to Charles Bonnets physiology here, but for an account of Birans inheritance of the tenets of the Ideological school and of Destutt de Tracy in particular, see Janicaud, Ravaisson et la mtaphysique, 1921. 31 Cf. Harry A. Whitaker and Yves Turgeon, Charles Bonnets Neurophilosophy, in Brain, Mind and Machine, ed. H. Whitaker, C. U. M. Smith, and S. Finger (New York: Springer, 2007), 191212. 32 Charles Bonnet, Essai analytique sur les facults de lme (Copenhagen: C. and A. Philibert, 1760), 57. Translation mine. 33 Maine de Biran, Influence, 182/105.
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explanation of the notion of a determination. Instead he appeals immediately to an idea of a lively force that cannot, as he seems to claim, be explained by anatomical changes. Hence it can be said that while Birans stated aim is to brings physics into metaphysics, this physics in and of itself containsor at least leads toits own kind of metaphysics insofar as both forms of habit are accounted for in terms of a tendency, a tendency to persist, which, he claims, can be understood neither in mechanical nor mental, neither material nor ideal terms.

2. the force of habit as an obscure activity

It is such a philosophical or metaphysical approach to habit that Ravaisson develops and renders more explicit in Of Habit. He acknowledges his debt to Maine de Biran by referring many times in his 1838 essay to The Influence of Habit on the Faculty of Thought.34 In contrast, however, to Birans concern for different causes of the two forms of habituation, Ravaisson attempts to provide a unitary explanation that undercuts his predecessors dualistic framework. This is based on the claimadvanced in Part II, Section 2 of his textthat both forms of habit occur by virtue of an obscure activity:
Continuity or repetition brings about a sort of obscure activity that increasingly anticipates [prvient de plus en plus] 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 passionfor this requires an external causebut calls for it, invokes it; in a certain sense it implores the sensation. (H 51)

On the one hand, there is an obscure activity operative in sensation, which is not a veritable activity (H 51) since it involves no effort, but is rather a tendency or desire (H 51) that can be understood to derive from passivity as much as from activity, and which becomes manifest to us in the absence of a sensation to which we have become accustomed. In this connection it is necessary to note, following Emmanuel Blondel, the subtle but significant displacement that Ravaisson has effected on Birans thinking: Biran had argued that the absence of such a sensation will produce distress, malaise, disquiet, desire in us as the psychological effect of a non-psychological determination, whereas Ravaisson argues that the desire is nothing but the habitual tendency itself.35 For Ravaisson, desire is not a property of the mind as opposed to the body, but is rather to be thought, as will become clear, as the prior ground of any possible opposition between the two. On the other hand, as effort declines in the repetition of active movements, and as the action becomes swifter and more assured, that action becomes 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 (H 51). In other words, the facility in an action gained
Emmanuel Blondel (Ravaisson lecteur de Maine de Biran, 1516) notes that there are, in fact, three modalities of reference to Birans work in Of Habit: 1) to precise passages of the original Henrichs edition of Birans 1802 text; 2) to this text in general; and 3) to Birans work as a whole with the term passim. Blondel also lists the texts of Biran, those published before 1838, to which Ravaisson could refer. 35 See Blondel, Ravaisson lecteur de Maine de Biran, 2526: Ravaisson will conserve the term desire for the ground of being, and not for a particular state of being (translation mine).
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through its repetition can become a pre-reflective desire, tendency or inclination to carry out the act, as Hume and Reid had already noted; but this inclination, in turn, can develop into the almost completely involuntary phenomena that we know as tics.36 In both passive and active habits, for Ravaisson, there is at work the same middle term between pure passivity and the activity of consciousness; and this middle term is a particular mode of activity that is characterized as secret or obscure precisely because it is not proper to consciousness and the conscious will.37 This claim certainly opposes Birans argument that the same faculty could not be responsible for both forms of habit, since if it were we would have to assume that the faculty becomes at once more passive and more active through repetition. Yet Birans argument fails to recognize that motor habits consist in the victory of pure, and that is to say, conscious activity as little as sensory habituation results from an increase in passivity; it is rather the case that both forms of habituation occur by means of a certain kind of spontaneity that is neither purely passive nor purely active. The argument also sits uncomfortably with other aspects of Birans analysis, particularly with his account of the forces underlying passive and active habituation as two species of determination, and also with his claim in the note cited above that there is a certain analogy between the two forms of habit.38 It seems, in the end, that Biran aims to mobilize his reflection on habit to support his distinction of passive and active impressions, whereas properly understood such reflection undermines this very distinction.39 In this connection, it should be noted that Biran attempts to justify his psychological dualism with reference to the double law of habit precisely because of the difficulty of isolating a level of pure passivity in experience, precisely because there is hardly any impression that does not result from the mutual support40 of activity and passivity. For Ravaisson, however, this difficulty should be understood as clear evidence against the psychological dualism that Biran proposes. In fact, nothing like pure passivity is given in experience because activity and passivity always work together as proportionately and inversely related (H 43); the more an experience is passive, the less it is active, and vice versa. Just as there is, for the human being, no pure activity of movement or perception that would exist without a measure of passivity, there is no such thing as a purely passive impression: In every sensation motility and
Cf. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 424. Ravaissons concern for motor habit as a positive inclination or tendency, and not merely as mere facility, may seem to contrast with Birans attempt to account for, as we have seen, the increasing facility and precision of movements. This, however, is merely a matter of emphasis, and in his first dissertation of 1800, Biran had already discussed the possibility of habitual tendencies becoming tics; see Biran, Influence, 72. 37 Ravaisson refers to this pre-consciousness but still intelligent force in a number of different ways: as an activity, it is characterised as obscure, secret, and internal, but it is also described as an un-reflected spontaneity and an obscure intelligence and, ultimately, as I will show, as grace; on this point, see Claire Marin, Lactivit obscure de lhabitude, in tudes sur F. Ravaisson: De lhabitude, ed. J.-M. Lannou (Paris: Kim, 1999), 4759. 38 Biran, Influence, 179. 39 Hence Georges Le Roy can note, at the risk of exaggeration, that the sole goal of Birans reflections on habit is that of establishing the soundness of the philosophy that inspires them (Les philosophes clbres, ed. Maurice Merleau-Ponty [Paris: Mazenod, 1956], 237; translation mine). 40 Biran, Influence, 136/56.
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perception have a role (H 49). It takes a very peculiar frame of mind to apprehend something like a pure sensation; and far from coming first, mere sensation, to cite Maurice Merleau-Ponty, is rather the last effect of consciousness.41 Instead of Birans distinction of passive and active impressions, then, Ravaisson apprehends, as I will show in the following section of this paper, a graduated continuum from the lowest levels of activity in more passive, sensory experiences to its highest levels in the clearest consciousness and voluntary apperception. In seeking to transform the dualist philosophical structure in which Biran frames his reflection, Ravaisson renders only more methodical and explicit his predecessors attempts to steer between realist and intellectualist, physical and rationalist (H 55) accounts of habit. On the one hand, intellectualist explanations in terms of developments in attention, the will, and/or intelligence encounter difficulties: the simple idea that sensation fades because we no longer pay attention to it cannot account for the fact that sensibility increasingly demands this sensation that the will abandons (H 53). In relation to habitual movements, the idea that there are any number of mental judgments or acts of will that pass unnoticed by the agent neither corresponds to nor explains our experience, given that the very problem of reflection on motor habits consists in understanding how acts appear increasingly to occur independently of the will and reflection. On the other hand, Ravaisson highlights the limitations of realist or physical interpretations of both forms of habit:
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 yet 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. (H 53)

Of Habit does not, then, dismiss outright the possibility of the discovery of organic changes accompanying both forms of habit, and although Bonnets ideas were largely hypothetical, contemporary neurobiology has offered accounts of such changes.42 Yet Ravaissons argument is that any physiological account will be insufficient to account for the tendency or inclination manifest in either form of habit, precisely because such tendency or inclination is no mere third-person or mechanical phenomenon, but is rather intrinsically related to the freedom of the will and to intelligence. The claim is that in our experience habitual acts present themselves as a form of spontaneity that is at once active and passive, equally opposed to mechanical Fatality and to reflective Freedom (H 55). If there is an empirical regularity dis41 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. C. Smith (London: Routledge, 1962), 37. See also Janicaud, Ravaisson et la mtaphysique, 23. 42 See, in particular, Robert Hawkins and Erich Kandel, Steps Toward a Cell-Biological Alphabet for Elementary Forms of Learning, in Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, ed. Gary Lynch, James L. McGaugh, and Norman Weinberger (New York: Guildford Press, 1984), 385404, for a neurobiological explanation of the basic forms of learning in animals that had been demarcated by behaviourist psychology: passive habituation, sensitivisation (the increase of reflex responses) and classical, associative conditioning. For a general and more recent introduction to the goals and methods of this neuroscientific approach, see Larry R. Squire and Eric Kandel, Memory: From Mind to Molecules (New York: Scientific American Library, 1999).

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cernable in the phenomena of motor habit, then these phenomena do not belong to a mechanical, lifeless nature, a realm of dead necessity. Habitual movements do not become the mechanical effect of an external impulse but rather the effect of an inclination that follows from the will; and even if habit leaves the sphere of will and reflection, it does not leave that of intelligence (H 55), given that they still incline towards a goal. From this perspective, Reids classification of habit as a mechanical principle of action has, in effect, decided everything in advance without sufficient regard to the particular nature of bodily action. Even though movements that have become habitual appear to be no longer controlled immediately by will and judgment, Ravaisson wants us to see that they possess their own sort of intelligence and drive. They are not merely, as Henri Bergson will have it in his discourse on Ravaissons life and work, the fossilized residue of a spiritual activity,43 since they possess an active principle that is neither mechanical nor exclusively a function of reflective thought. It is the same kind of obscure or secret active principle, Ravaisson claims, that underlies sensory habituation, and that makes itself manifest to us in the absence of a sensation to which we have become habituated. This appeal to a form of desire and inclination in sensory habituation may be less convincing than it is in relation to motor habits, since here the relation to conscious will is less obvious; and one should certainly hesitate before attempting to offer a metaphysical supplement to the explanatory power of modern neurobiological studies of passive habituation on the basis of what may be passed off as a psychological oddity that some might profess not to experience at all. Yet the weight of Ravaissons argument in its further elaboration falls on his conception of motor habits: attempts to explain motor habit in purely third-person, physiological terms not only misconstrue habitual tendencies or inclinations, but also remain with the problem of understanding how acts of will can result in physiological changes44and it is precisely this mind-body problem that, as will become clear in the following section, Ravaissons reflection on habit allows us to think beyond insofar as it transforms traditional conceptions of the body.

3. an active ontology of habit

Ravaisson seeks, then, to overturn emphatically realist and idealist explanatory accounts of habituation. Yet instead of remaining with an aporetic skepticism concerning the force of habit in the face of the unconvincing or even untenable
43 Bergson offers this interpretation within his discourse on Ravaisson that was rightly accused of Bergsonifying his predecessors work; see Henri Bergson, La vie et loeuvre de Ravaisson, in Oeuvres (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1959), 145081, at 146263; Ravaissons Life and Work, in The Creative Mind, trans. M. L. Andison (New York: Philosophical Library, 1946), 261300, at 274275). Though unfaithful, the interpretation has proved influential. It colors, for example, L. Susan Stebbings approach to Ravaisson within her Pragmatism and French Voluntarism, and Merleau-Ponty takes Bergson to task (Phenomenology of Perception, 142) on this interpretation of habit without appearing to realize that Ravaisson had, in effect, already rejected it. For studies of Bergsons inheritance of Ravaissons account of habit, see Alexandra Renault, Lhabitude chez Bergson: une esquisse du concept phnomnologique de Stiftung?, Alter 12 (2004): 79104; and Janicaud, Ravaisson et la mtaphysique. 44 We remain with the problem, need it be said, only if we find it impossible to eliminate reductively and materialistically our own conscious experience.

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nature of these hypotheses, he advances, in developing Maine de Birans ideas, a conception of an obscure activity that underlies both forms of habituation. It has been remarked that in so doing Ravaissons reflection moves from a phenomenological to a metaphysical level, from a description of our experience to an account of what goes beyond that experience and makes it possible.45 What I aim to show here, however, is that the originality and the success of his response to Hume and Reid ultimately depend on his conception of the secret or obscure activity proper to habit in ontological terms, according to a conception of being proposed in Part II, Section 3 of the text; and concomitantly that this ontological conception of the force of habit interrupts any distinction between physical or sensible phenomena and a metaphysical or super-sensible principle. First of all, apprehending the phenomena of motor habit in the way that Ravaisson proposes requires us to think beyond the ontological dualisms that we have inherited from Descartes in particular. Reflection on habit forces us to transcend the conception of an extended, mechanical material body that would stand partes extra partes opposed to a sphere of thought and freedom. Indeed, as Ravaisson writes, if movements are originally determined by a theoretically posited goal represented as an idea in the mind, in their continuity or repetition,
the idea becomes being, the very being of the movement and of the tendency that it determines. Habit becomes more and more a substantial idea. The obscure intelligence that through habit comes to replace reflection, this immediate intelligence where subject and object are confounded, is a real intuition, in which the real and the ideal, being and thought, are fused together. (H 55)

We are led to recognize an embodied intelligence or a cognitive corporeality, which transcends any possible opposition between a thinking subject and the objects of which it thinks: in the acquisition of motor habits, ideal goals come to constitute the very nature, the very being, of the organs of the body. The progress of motor habits consists in a descent of thought and will into bodily being. Hence what we have seen Biran present as a determination of the organs is conceived by Ravaisson according to a conception of being. The habituated body is not simply an extended, mechanical thing, since ideas and then habitual inclinations become more and more the form, the way of being, even the very being of these organs (H 57). What the body is, or (better) the manner in which the body exists, comes to be transformed through the duration or repetition of a change. It is initially in this sense that Ravaissons reflection on habit involves ontology: it incorporates
45 See Marin, Lactivit obscure de lhabitude, 47. Phenomenology is to be taken here in the broad and philosophically neutral sense of a descriptive account of experience, although my argument that Ravaissons phenomenology of habit cannot be separated from an ontology or metaphysics may point in the direction of more specific twentieth century interpretations of the term within the phenomenological movement. A particular use of the term, it should be noted, appears in Ravaissons essay of 1840 (La Philosophie Contemporaine: Fragments de Philosophie par M. Hamilton [La Philosophie Contemporaine], in Mtaphysique et morale [Paris: J. Vrin, 1986], 132, at 23), which discusses the development of European thought in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries from the perspective of Birans philosophy of the will: the Scottish school, insofar as it holds that one and the same philosophical method applies equally and in parallel to both internal and external phenomena, offers an abstract phenomenology (phnomnologie abstraite) of inner sense. Whether phenomenology for Ravaisson is necessarily abstract is a moot point.

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reflection on the possible modes or meanings of being. If we are unable to recognize that the verb to be can signify something other than, on the one hand, the presence of those extended objects occurring within a domain of mechanical law, and, on the other hand, the presence of minds or those thinking things belonging to a realm of pure freedom, then it will be impossible to offer a philosophical response, rather than a simply physiological one, to Hume and Reids impasse concerning habit. Yet Ravaissons argument is that an unprejudiced study of habit forces us to recognize the possibility, and even necessity, of revising such dualistic ontological categories. This conception of human corporeality seems to be influenced by Birans own account of le corps propre, of ones own body, that he presented in the development of his voluntarist psychology. In explicitly qualifying the general epistemological skepticism concerning forces that he had expressed in 1802, and in criticizing many traditional conceptions of the will, including that of Hume, Biran will argue that effort is a primitive fact of consciousness through which we have an immediate apperception of the will as a force or cause that is inseparable from and contemporaneous with its effects.46 On this account, the will is not something resident in a non-physical sphere called the mind that affects the body like the pulling of a trigger affects the cartridge in the barrel of a gun. Consequently, Biran argues not only that the body cannot meaningfully be subject to Cartesian skeptical doubt, given that the primitive fact of consciousness consists of the relation of will to the resistance that the body offers, but also that my body as I originally experience it is not my body studied from the outside by the physiologist. The body is rather conceived as belonging to an immanent subjective sphere that cannot be represented as an object partes extra partes. Biran develops this distinction between the subjective and objective body by distinguishing two modes of apprehending space: the body first of all appears to me in the form of a vague interior extension that cannot be represented in the form of a spatial image.47 The subjective awareness of my own body that twentieth century psychologists will later discuss in terms of the body image does not, according to Biran, take the form of an image at all. As commentators have often remarked, Biran offers this conception of the lived body as constitutive of the primitive fact of consciousness without ever renouncing the idea that there is an independent and still more primary level of nature and instinct prior to the advent of will and consciousness.48 As I have already remarked, it is precisely this dualism that Ravaisson seeks to overturn, and he does so by arguing that there is a continuum underlying the levels that Biran
See in particular the 1807 text, De laperception immdiate, vol. 4 of Oeuvres de Maine de Biran, ed. I. Radrizzani (Paris: J. Vrin, 1995). 47 For Birans conception of the body see, in particular, Essai sur les fondements de la psychologie, vol. 2 of Oeuvres de Maine de Biran, ed. F. C. T. Moore (Paris: J. Vrin, 2001). For critical discussions of Birans theses concerning the body, see the second part of F. C. T. Moores The Psychology of Maine de Biran (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970), and the readings offered by twentieth century French philosophers schooled in German phenomenology: Maurice Merleau-Ponty, LUnion de lme et du corps chez Malebranche, Biran et Bergson, ed. J. Deprun (Paris: J. Vrin, 1997); and Michel Henry, Philosophie et phnomnologie du corps: essai sur lontologie biranienne (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1965). 48 On this point, see, in particular, the tenth chapter of Merleau-Pontys LUnion de lme et du corps.
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distinguishes.49 This continuum, Ravaisson argues, is revealed to us by habit itself, insofar as it is by a succession of imperceptible degrees that inclinations take over from acts of will (H 57). Instead of an opposition between freedom and bodily necessity, the progress of habit manifests to us a continuum underlying habitual inclinations and movements governed by theoretically posited goals. The nature of the continuum is conceived as intelligence or as desire (H 61): there is a succession of imperceptible degrees between, first of all, desire as the being of the habituated body and desire in the form of the will, which, following Biran, Ravaisson holds to be the precondition of consciousness and of the theoretical positing of goals. It is in this manner that, as I claimed above, habitual actions are intrinsically related to the will and understanding even though they are no longer immediately controlled by the latter: apprehending the continuum underlying bodily habits allows us to recognize that the conception of an isolatable sphere of the will and understanding is an abstraction from a more primary truth. Yet Ravaisson goes on to argue that this continuum stretches all the way down to the tendencies that Biran, after Reid, ascribes to nature and instinct, to the most involuntary aspects of human being.50 For Ravaisson, experience shows us that nature and instinct cannot be completely isolated from habit, just as habitual tendencies can never be entirely separated from the will.51 Within a particular act a theoretically posited goal may be realized by means of any number of subsidiary and habitual movements. In other words, in a particular movement, at any particular point in time, different stages of the continuum of desire will be at work.52 Yet since habit makes this continuum manifest to us, Ravaisson can argue that habit can be considered as a method, as the only real method, for the estimation, by a convergent infinite series, of the relation, real in itself, but incommensurable in the understanding, of Nature and Will (H 59). Although reflection on habit was already used implicitly as a method in Birans text of 1802, here the problem to be solved is not that of isolating originally independent psychological or physiological faculties, but is rather that of overcoming Cartesian dualism and, at the same time, the Kantian antinomy between necessity
This conception of continuity is obviously influenced by Leibniz; see, in particular, New Essays on Human Understanding, trans. and ed. P. Remnant and J. Bennett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), IV.xvi.12, 471. 50 In this way Ravaisson responds to a problem that Biran had addressed in a footnote (Maine de Biran, Influence, 13839) in accounting for the genesis of effort and perception: resistance and will both presuppose each other, which for Biran presents a kind of vicious circle when attempting to account for how voluntary perception arises on the basis of passive impressions. As a way out of this circle, Biran argued that sensation already possesses a form of instinct, which, although nonvoluntary, encounters resistance, and that it is from out of this instinctive effort that the will arises. This hypothesis is problematic, as Janicaud notes, in that it undermines the specificity of effort within Birans analysis (Ravaisson et le mtaphysique, 26). In contrast, Ravaisson argues that there is neither will nor resistance prior to explicit consciousness, and that the will arises when an effortless antecedent tendency meets resistance (H 61). 51 Habit draws increasingly near to, perhaps without ever attaining, the reliability, necessity and perfect spontaneity of instinct. Between habit and instinct, between habit and nature, the difference is merely one of degree, and this difference can always be lessened and reduced (H 5759). 52 The gradual, or successive, fading of consciousness and will in the voluntary part of the movement corresponds, therefore, to the simultaneous series of the states of will and consciousness within the parts of the whole movement, from the region of will to that of nature (H 61).
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and freedom. Reflection on motor habits allows Ravaisson, in a manner that is doubtless influenced by F. W. J. Schellings project of transcendental idealism and Identittsphilosophie, to conceive freedom not as opposed to nature, but rather as inhabiting or animating the natural body in the form of inclinations or tendencies, that is, as the spontaneity of desire (H 57).53 Certainly, the ideas of inhabitation or animation that I have just advanced in order to elucidate Ravaissons conception of the body and continuity are ambiguous. They take us only part of the way along the path that Of Habit clears in addressing the problem of habit insofar as it might still be tempting to conceive of desire as residing somewhere other than the body, or as being somehow attached to it as a cause that would be separable from, and temporally prior to, its effects. The crux of the matter is that although Ravaisson initially describes the secret activity as a cause, desire is not to be thought in any such successive manner. As I noted above, Biran had already criticized traditional conceptions of the causality of the will as the succession of voluntary cause and effect, and Ravaisson is undoubtedly influenced by this.54 Crucially, however, he achieves a positive conception of habitual desire or activity by thinking it, once again, ontologically, as a determination of the being of beings; and in this connection it should be noted that, four years prior to writing Of Habit, he had already written a prize-winning dissertation on the sense and historical reception of Aristotles Metaphysics.55 On Ravaissons account, desire inhabits the body as being inhabits beings. There is a difference, as Martin Heidegger will emphasize in revitalizing the Aristotelian tradition of ontology in the twentieth century, between beings and being, between that which exists and its existence, just as here there is a difference between the body and the obscure activity or tendencies that animate it. Yet this difference is no ordinary difference between two things; and it is not a difference that can be

53 Habit, it should be noted, takes over the role that Schelling had ascribed to art in 1800 as the organon and document of philosophy (System des transcendetalen Idealismus, vol. 3 of Smtliche Werke, ed. K. F. A. Schelling (Stuttgart: Cotta, 185661), 627), but the continuum revealed by reflection on habit differs markedly from the identity of spirit and nature that Schelling attempts to think within his system of transcendental idealism. Concerning Ravaissons relation to Schelling, see Joseph Dopp, Ravaisson: La formation de sa pense daprs des documents indits (Louvain: ditions de lInstitut Superieur de Philosophie, 1933); D. Panis, Ravaisson et Schelling, Les tudes philosophiques 3 (1988): 395413; J.-F. Courtine, Les relations de Ravaisson et de Schelling, in Idealismus mit Folgen. Die Epochenswelle um 1800 in Kunst und Geisteswissenschaften, ed. H.-J. Gawoll and C. Jamme (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1994), 27391; and C. Mauve, Ravaisson, lecteur et interprte de Schelling, Romantisme 25 (1995): 6574. 54 In 1840, Ravaisson describes Birans conception of the force of the will as follows: Consciousness of motive activity is the immediate awareness of a cause, of a cause bound to its effect as an indivisible fact. It is not the abstract awareness of a mere capacity, of a cause existing apart from its effect, but rather of an active cause [cause agissante] and in its real efficaciousness (La Philosophie Contemporaine, 22). 55 A revised version of the dissertation was originally published in two volumes, the first in 1837, and the second in 1845, and has recently been reprinted in one volume: Flix Ravaisson, Essai sur la Mtaphysique dAristote (Paris: Les Editions du Cerf, 2007). This reprint is, however, unreliable and the original text of volumes 1 and 2 is available, respectively, at http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/ bpt 6 k 861141 .r=Essai+sur+la+metaphysique+d% 27 Aristote.langEN and http://gallica.bnf.fr/ ark:/12148/bpt6k86115c.r=Essai+sur+la+metaphysique+d%27Aristote.langEN.

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accounted for as a relation of succession between a cause and an effect, or as the relation of a condition to what it conditions.56 The point can be stated much more positively in saying that the phenomena of habit are the activity of desire rather than being the effects of the latter. It is for this reason, in fact, that the opposition of law and cause should be understood to constitute only a provisional approach to the problem of habit within Ravaissons text. As he goes on to argue, if the phenomena present a certain sort of regularity, compulsion, and even necessity, then this is a necessity of attraction and desire (H 57). The law of habit, as he writes with reference to Saint Paul, is certainly a law of the limbs, but it is at the same time a law of grace (H 57), the gift of an obscure, non-mechanical activity that arises from outside of the sphere of reflective thought, at least as such a sphere is determined in Cartesian or Kantian thinking. Desire and grace are here not counter-posed to an empirical law as cause to effect, or as noumenon to phenomenon; the law rather is desire and grace in operation. In other words, the very idea of a habitual tendency, inclination orto use the favored term of Humepropensity is to be thought actively according to the peculiar, obscure or secret activity that is nevertheless manifest as something other than a mechanical operation in the phenomena themselves. It is, in addition, for this reason that Ravaisson seems to bring into question the very idea of explaining habit: the actuality of the phenomena of habit is an inexplicable actuality of intelligence and desire (H 63). On this basis it is possible to respond fully to the aporia concerning the force of habit at which Hume and Reid halted their enquiries. Ravaissons active ontology of habit allows us to transform and overcome Humes distinction between habitual propensities and an unknown principle that brings them about. In concluding Of Habit, at the end of a section summarizing the text as a whole, Ravaisson writes,
The disposition of which habit consists, and the principle engendering it, are one and the same thing: this is the primordial law and the most general form of being, the tendency to persevere in the very actuality that constitutes being. (H 49)

Disposition is one of the traditional translations of the Aristotelian term hexis.57 Yet without referring directly to Aristotle on this specific point, Ravaisson argues that a habitual disposition is to be thought neither as a thing, nor statically as a state; understood as synonymous with the idea of tendency, it is rather meant ontologicallyas constituting the being of those beings able to acquire habitsand dynamicallynot only because dispositions are developed through time, but also

The later Heidegger will bring into question the very idea of an ontological difference precisely because it seems to lead us back to a transcendental conception of this difference as concerning a condition and what it conditions. See, for example, Contributions to Philosophy, trans. P. Emad and K. Maly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 266. 57 The sense of hexis, particularly in its relation to ethos, is ambiguous in Aristotles texts, but for a dynamic interpretation of the term issued independently of Ravaisson, see Pierre Rodrigo, La dynamique de lhexis chez Aristote, Alter 12 (2004): 1126; and Joe Sachs, preface to Aristotles Nicomachean Ethics, by Aristotle (Newburyport: Pullins, 2002). In this paragraph I situate the final lines of Ravaissons text in relation to Hume, but it can also be understood to relate to Aristotles distinction between hexis and ethos; there would be no need to distinguish the two, since ethos, in the sense of habitual actions, are the dynamic reality of hexis.
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because they will tend to realize themselves in genuine activity. Consequently, the essential point of the passage is that once acquired, habits are understood in an active and non-mechanical sense, then there is no need to separate them from the principle of their acquisition. The ability to acquire or contract habits is nothing other than the power or force underlying and constituting habitual propensities: a tendency of an action to repeat itself, and thus a tendency to persist in being, which constitutes the very being of those beings susceptible to habit. In this sense, habit is a disposition that includes our present skills or tendencies in addition to our ability to learn others: we acquire or contract (H 25) habits, for example, in learning to play an instrument, and the habits we have contracted allow us to acquire others, in learning to play that instrument better. The structure of motor habit, then, is not to be broken down, in the manner of Hume and Reid, into a) repeated acts, b) the propensity produced through this repetition, and c) an unknowable super-sensible principle that allows the propensity to be produced by the repetition, since the principle that allows propensities to be formed by repetition is manifest in them as a non-mechanical drive or tendency. In this way it also becomes clear that there can be no simple distinction between phenomenology and metaphysics in Ravaissons reflection on habit: his phenomenology of habit already involves and requires the recognition that there is an obscure, non-mechanical activity present in these phenomena.58 Certainly, as we have seen, the idea of such obscure activity is further elaborated by Ravaisson in ontological terms. Yet, as I have tried to show, this conception of being does not take us from a sensible to a super-sensible level. It should be noted, however, that in describing the most general law of being as the tendency to persist in the very actuality that constitutes being, Ravaisson signals the importance of Leibnizs conception of active force for his ontological interpretation of habit. For Leibniz, active force contains a certain act or entelechia and is thus mid-way between the faculty of acting and the act itself, and involves a conatus;59 it is a tendency, a kind of striving or drive, which will realize itself, will lead into genuine activity, as long as there is nothing to impede its realization. The description of habit as a tendency to persist draws literally from Leibnizs concomitant and positive interpretations of inertia, according to which a body considered in itself retains any impetus imparted to it, and remains constant in its mobility, thus having a tendency to persevere in whatever sequence of changes it has begun.60 Ravaisson is influenced, then, by this general conception of force, but his account of habit does not stand or fall with it. Of Habit does not constitute an appeal to a dogmatic notion of force that would fall under Humes skeptical critique, pre-

It is in this sense that Janicauds claim that in Of Habit the metaphysical reading is called for directly by the observation and the analysis is best understood; see Habiter lhabitude, Les tudes Philosophiques 1 (1993): 1723, at 19. Translation mine. We seem to have gone awry, however, if, following Marin, we argue that with the idea of obscure activity Ravaissons analysis moves from a phenomenological level to a metaphysical level (Lactivit obscure de lhabitude, 48; translation mine). 59 Leibniz, Philosophical Papers and Letters, 2nd ed., ed. L. Loemker (Boston: D. Riedel Publishing Co., 1969), 433. 60 Leibniz, Philosophical Texts, ed. R. Woolhouse and R. Francks (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 217.
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cisely insofar as habit as a force or tendency, as a tendency to persist, is first of all and most directly manifest to us in and as the phenomena of habit.61 In Part II, Section 3, Ravaisson does argue, however, that after apprehending this tendency within ourselves we can recognize different forms of the same tendency throughout the scale of beings, all the way down, through the animal and the vegetal realmswhich are susceptible, as Reid had noted in his Essays on the Active Powers of Man, in diminishing degrees to the power of habit62to the sphere of the inorganic. It is possible to argue that these realms stand as forms of one and the same tendency only on the basis of showing that there is continuity throughout nature as a whole, and for this Ravaisson provides an analogical argument, which he presents as the most powerful of analogies (H 65): just as there is a continuum underlying the Cartesian conception of mind and body, so too there is continuity in nature as a whole, from the inorganic realmwhich, as Leibniz had shown, can already be understood to manifest a certain force, activity, or tendencyall the way up to the human being. Continuity, and a continuity of desire, in nature as a whole is certainly not as evident to us as it is in ourselves, but for Ravaisson, the latter serves as the strongest possible justification, however indirect it may be, for any claim concerning the former.63

4. conclusion
Reflection on habit can serve as a method for philosophical thinking insofar as it enables us to think beyond the antinomy of freedom and necessity proper to Kantian thought, while even providing the basis for a philosophy of nature as a whole. Yet if we are to apprehend adequately the nature of the phenomena of habit, we must be alive to the question of being, which, for Aristotle, was the primary source of wonder for philosophers.64 We must be prepared to recognize in the verb to be more than an empty or self-evident concept, and thus to bring into question the understanding of being that is always and already inherent in any philosophical thinking. On this basis it is possible to transcend philosophically Hume and Reids aporia concerning the unknown principle producing habitual dispositions while overcoming the residual dualism of Birans thinking. For these reasons, I contend, Ravaissons thinking is still pertinent for us, and it is all the

On this point, Ravaisson writes, We do not see the exteriority of the actuality of things; we do not see their dispositions of powers. In consciousness, by contrast, the same being at once acts and sees the act; or, better, the act and the apprehension of the act are fused together. The author, the drama, the spectator are all one (H 39). 62 See Reid, Essay on the Active Powers of Man, 121: It is said, that trees and other vegetables, by growing long in an unkindly climate, sometimes acquire qualities by which they can bear its inclemency with less hurt. This, in the vegetable kingdom, has some resemblance to the power of habit; but in inanimate matter, I know nothing that resembles it. 63 Ravaisson describes this movement of the method of high philosophy, of metaphysics in his report on La philosophie en France au XIXmesicle ([Paris: Fayard, 1984], 300; translation mine) thus: This intimate constitution of our being, which consciousness allows us to know, is found, by analogy, to reside elsewhere, and then everywhere. 64 See Aristotle, Metaphysics, VII, 1028b57.
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more so in that, by developing Birans work, it anticipates the reflections within twentieth century French phenomenology concerning the lived body.65 By way of conclusion, it is important to remark that in Part II, Section 4 of his text, Ravaisson develops his response to Hume and Reids aporia by arguing that it is on the basis of his ontological interpretation of habit that the association of ideas can be explained. In a passage which contains the texts sole reference to Hume, Ravaisson criticizes the Scottish philosophers early conception of the association of ideas in the Treatise on Human Nature, according to which there are qualities inherent in ideas themselves that produce an association between them, which upon the appearance of one idea naturally introduce another.66 On Ravaissons account, habit as an obscure activity is the sole power required to account for such association: the inclination into which originally voluntary and conscious mental acts, operations and associations are gradually absorbed, is natural spontaneity (H 71). This spontaneity or obscure activity is present in mental operations, in the sphere of the abstract understanding and pure reason (H 67) as well as in the organs of the body. Certainly, the argumentative force of this account of the association of ideas depends on his interpretation of the force proper to sensory and motor habits. Yet with such an account Ravaisson intends to counter the claims of Dugald Stewart, according to which habits of the mind are to be understood according to a more profound principle than habit itself, namely the association of ideas.67 This approach begs the question of the force or principle that produces association in its different modes. It is in this light that Ravaisson characterizes, some thirty years later and with all due modesty, the singularity of his own argument in relation to the development of Scottish thought after Hume within his official report on Philosophy in France in the 19th Century (La philosophie en France au XIXme sicle):
Reid had said, but without attempting to prove it, that the association of ideas must be grounded in habit. In contrast, Dugald Stewart, tending much more than his teacher to an explanation by means of phenomena alone, was of the opinion that it is
65 It seems that Merleau-Ponty does not discuss Of Habit in any of his published texts or lectures, even though he taught a course on Maine de Biran and Bergson in 194849 (both authors were on the programme of the agrgation in philosophy). Janicaud (Ravaisson et la mtaphysique, 11) relates that Merleau-Ponty had claimed at his thesis defence that Ravaisson was of interest only as a precursor of Bergson. The importance of Ravaisson was, however, recorded by another French philosopher concerned with habit and the body, Paul Ricoeur, who writes in his Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and Involuntary ([Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1966], 286), originally published in French in 1950, that intuitions of that great philosopher are the source of many of the reflections in this book. On this reading, see Benoit Thirion, La lecture ricoeurienne de Ravaisson dans Le volontaire et linvolontaire, Les tudes Philosophiques 3 (2002): 37190. For an excellent survey of nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophical reflections on habit in France, and thus of Ravaissons legacy, see Claire Marin, Ltre et lhabitude dans la philosophie franaise contemporaine, Alter 12 (2004): 14972. 66 Hume, A Treatise on Human Nature, 1011. Ravaisson seems, in fact, not to have read Humes different account in the first Enquiry. 67 In arguing that it is not the association of ideas that explains habit; it is rather by the law, by the principle of habit that the association of ideas can be explained (H 73), Ravaisson refers (H 123n64) to the passage of Stewarts Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind that responds to Reids characterization of habit as denominating tendencies of both body and mind: With this observation I cannot agree, because I think it more philosophical to resolve the power of habit into the association of ideas, than to resolve the association of ideas into habit (258).

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rather habit that must be explained by the succession and the association of ideas. The author of a thesis Of Habit, submitted in 1838 to the facult des lettres de Paris, in drawing the association of ideas back to this phenomenon, explained habit by the inclination one has to repeat and imitate oneselfan inclination that itself can be reduced to the tendency, to the effort of all things to persevere in the actuality that constitutes their very being.68

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68 Flix Ravaisson, De lhabitude/La philosophie en France au XIXmesicle (Paris: Fayard, 1984), 218. Translation mine.