Creatures of habit: The problem and the practice of liberation (original) (raw)

Theologies of Habit: From Hexis to Plasticity

Body & Society, 2013

This article examines medieval and early modern theologies of habit (those of Augustine, Aquinas and Luther), and traces a theme of appropriation through the discourse on habit and grace. It is argued that the question of habit is central to theological debates about human freedom, and about the nature of the Godrelationship. Continuities are then highlighted with modern philosophical accounts of habit, in particular those of Ravaisson and Hegel. The article ends by considering some of the philosophical and political implications of the preceding analysis of habit.

Habit and the Limits of the Autonomous Subject, Body and Society, 2013

After briefly describing the history and significance of the nature-reason dualism for philosophy this paper examines why much of the Kantian inspired examination of norms and ethics continues to appeal to this division. It is argued that much of what is claimed to be rationally legitimated norms can, at least in part, be understood as binding on actions and beliefs, not because they are rationally legitimated, but because they are habituated. Drawing on Hegel's discussion of ethical life and habit it is argued that human subjects identify through self-feeling, not reason, most practices and norms as their own. It is on this basis that norms are taken not just as the basis for action but are constitutive of human identity, an identity that is spiritual, embodied and affective. While habit is central to the way Hegel reconfigures ethics and norms as well as the distinct model of freedom that he develops in his social and political thought, habit, it will be argued, has its limits as a model for human freedom, limits

Habit and Freedom in Merleau-Ponty and Ricoeur

Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 2017

Philosophical debates on habit often emphasize its ambivalent character: once habitualized, voluntary activity becomes natural. Consequently, the ambiguity of habit is the ambiguity of freedom and nature. This view was recently criticized by Claude Romano for its lack of conceptual clarity. Focusing on the phenomenology of habit as developed by Ricoeur and Merleau-Ponty, and in response to Romano, this essay shows not only that habit cannot be stripped of its ambiguity, but also how this ambiguity affects our understanding of subject and freedom.

A History of Habit: From Aristode to Bourdieu

Accordingly, I take the volume at hand as a landmark achievement in its field. If it is taken as such, it deserves to be evaluated by stringent criteria. If such criteria are applied, a few observations should be made. All fifteen contributions in the book, bar two, explicitly mention the pragmatist tradition of philosophy and Mead's membership in it. However, not one of the contributions makes any analytic use of the following pragmatist principles that are central in Mead's thought as well: (l) A fallibilistic basic conception of human action, resulting in (2) a replacement of theory of knowledge by a theory ofinquiry. Further consequences of the above suppositions are more indirect, but just as important: (3) a new conception of meaning, by which meaning is understood (3a) from the logical point of view as constituted by triadic relations and (3b) from an empirically descriptive point of view as a phenomenon that widely transcends the human mind and human language , a phenomenon "almost coextensive with life" as Mead once put it. Accordingly, there is still some further work to be done in showing how timeless a thinker Mead really was (and is) and how his thought has firm roots in a unique tradition. This task has become much easier thanks to the contribution of the present volume. Lanham, Lexington, 2013, xi + 315, incl. index. The collection by Sparrow and Hutchinson gathers together (mostly) philosophers and (a few) sociologists to discuss the ever fascinating yet surprisingly underplayed theme of habit: its history and place in the western philosophical tradition, from the ancients to the contemporary scene. A collection such as this has been long overdue, and surprisingly so, given the centrality of habits in our understanding and organization of ourselves and of the world. We human beings are in fact complex bundles of habits embodied in practices. Hence, our limits and possibilities are at least partially governed by the way in which we habitu-ate, dishabituate, and re-habituate ourselves. Although their presence is widely acknowledged, what such bundles of habits are and even more interestingly what we can make of them (and of ourselves through them)

Phenomenological considerations of habit: Reason, self-presence and knowing in habitual action

keywords habit, knowing, phenomenology, embodiment, hermeneutics JameS mcgUirK university of nordland James.mcguirk@uin.no Paul ricoeur claims in freedom and nature that delimiting the domain of habit is deeply challenging, owing to the fact that we tend not to know exactly what it is that we are asking about. habit, he says, is not like acting, sensing or perceiving but is more akin to a way of sensing, perceiving and so on. it has to do with settled or dispositional ways of engaging the world that provides a form to our world relations. But what is the status of these ways of acting etc.? in ordinary discourse, habits are often thought of as good or bad and even as important to shaping our personal and social identities. But they tend also to be thought of as actions in which the free exercise of reason is deeply attenuated, as automatic responses conditioned over time which are triggered by the environment such that we act 'before we know what we are doing '. In what follows, I want to offer some reflections about the nature of the relationship between habitual action, reason and knowledge. i will draw mostly on the phenomenological tradition in asking the question whether habits denote performances in which thinking is absent or whether they involve a spontaneity in which the embodied and embedded subject comes to expression as subject. in doing so, i will (1) sketch an outline of the largely negative view of habit that tends to dominate specialized and ordinary understandings of the matter before, (2) looking to phenomenological insights that offer a more positive view by integrating the notion of habit with discussions of embodiment and hermeneutic consciousness. here, i will refer to the work of merleau-Ponty and ricoeur, for whom habit is an irreplaceable way of knowing the world. my claim is that these phenomenological resources are not only important in establishing the centrality of habit for identity formation, as husserl and merleau-Ponty do, but that they entail a unique form of knowing or exercise of reason which is dynamic, attentive and imaginative.

Habit: Time, Freedom, Governance

Body & Society, 2013

This article investigates the place that habit occupies in different ‘architectures of the person’, focusing particularly on constructions of the relations between habit and other components of personhood that are marked by time. Three such positions are examined: first, the relations between thought, will, memory, habit and instinct proposed by post-Darwinian accounts of ‘organic memory’; second, Henri Bergson’s account of the relations between habit, memory and becoming; and, third, the temporal aspects of Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus understood as a set of hereditable dispositions. These different ‘architectures of the person’ are considered with regard to the role they accord habit in trans-generational mechanisms of inheritance; the historicised forms of embodied personhood that they propose; and the manner in which they account for the emergence of a capacity for freedom that can (partially) offset the weight of the inherited past. It is argued that the imputation of s...