Habit

Plato's treatment of habit precedes any systematic doctrine and is carried on in the course of examining something else, chiefly the education of the guardians in the Republic, the regulation of the young in the Laws, and the nature of memory and knowledge in the Theaetetus. In none of these places does he give habit a name comparable to Aristotle's hexis. What he offers instead is a picture. The soul, before it has come to the use of reason, is shaped by what it is made to do, to see, and to imitate; and the impressions left by these early encounters harden into a disposition that is difficult to alter once reason arrives. The bearing of this thought on education is treated in the chapter on EDUCATION.

The Republic makes this picture central to its account of civic formation. Music, gymnastic, and the regulation of stories told to children are not preparations for virtue but the first stages of its formation; the child who has been brought up among well-ordered images will, when reason is at last able to grasp the account of the good, find his soul already inclined toward what the account commends. The Laws extends this concern with characteristic thoroughness to drinking, to song, to the festivals of the city, all treated as instruments by which habits of pleasure and pain are laid down before any argument about pleasure and pain is possible. The Theaetetus offers a different but related image: the wax tablet of the soul, on which what is perceived leaves an impression that persists and by which later perceptions are recognized. Habit, on these pictures, is the mode by which the soul retains what it has undergone, and there is a sense in which Plato treats the retention of impression and the retention of disposition as variants of a single phenomenon.

This looks very different from the later scholastic treatment. Plato does not argue that habit is a middle term between potency and act, nor does he classify it among the qualities. He seems to assume, rather than demonstrate, that what the soul is habituated to it becomes; and the political consequences of this assumption, rather than its metaphysical elaboration, are what he is concerned to draw out. The legislator who neglects the habits of the young has given up, in effect, the hope of a well-ordered city, for once the young have been badly habituated no law and no later instruction will easily recover what has been lost.

Aristotle's account of moral habituation, on which the whole subsequent tradition draws, takes over Plato's concern with early training and supplies the conceptual apparatus Plato had declined to provide. Where Plato is content to describe the soul's plasticity and to draw the political inference, Aristotle identifies habit as a settled disposition with a definite place in the taxonomy of qualities, and the Nicomachean Ethics becomes, in part, a working out of what Plato had presupposed.

Aristotle places habit at the center of moral psychology by arguing that the virtues are not innate endowments but acquired dispositions, formed through the repeated performance of the actions that express them. We become just by doing just acts, courageous by doing courageous acts, temperate by doing temperate acts. The repetition of right action under rational guidance gradually produces a stable disposition, which Aristotle calls a hexis, from which virtuous action then flows as a matter of second nature, and with pleasure rather than reluctant effort.

The account contains a distinction of considerable importance. The person who does the right thing reluctantly, overcoming contrary inclinations by force of will, has attained continence but not virtue. The person who is truly virtuous acts well and finds satisfaction in doing so; desire and reason are in accord. Habit is the mechanism by which this accord is achieved: through repeated acts chosen with the guidance of reason, the appetitive part of the soul is gradually trained to desire what reason approves. The fully virtuous person neither needs to suppress appetite nor acts against it; the whole soul has been brought into alignment. The connection between this account of habit and the doctrine of the mean is treated more fully in the chapter on VIRTUE AND VICE.

The implications for education follow directly. Children cannot be virtuous in the full sense because they lack the rational development needed to grasp the reasons for virtuous action; but they can be habituated to right action, and this habituation prepares the ground for virtue when reason matures. The legislator and the educator who care about the formation of character must attend primarily to what habits the community encourages, since, as Aristotle writes, it makes no small difference whether we form habits of one kind or of another from our very youth.

Aristotle's account of moral habituation provides the framework within which Aquinas will develop his scholastic theory of virtues as habits, and to which William James will return when he attempts to give the same analysis a neurological foundation. The question of whether habituation by itself, without grace, can produce virtue in its highest form is one that Augustine and Aquinas raise against the purely naturalistic account.

Epictetus understands moral habituation as, above all, the training of assent. The central Stoic discipline is what he calls prohairesis: the faculty of choosing how to respond to the impressions that experience presents. Every impression that arises may be assented to or withheld from, and the repeated practice of withholding assent from false impressions, above all from the impression that external things are genuine goods, gradually produces a person for whom correct response has become second nature. The habit being cultivated is not a trained appetite in the Aristotelian sense but a disciplined will.

The difference from Aristotle's account is instructive. Aristotle aims to align the passions with reason so that desire and right action coincide; Epictetus aims to discipline assent before passion has the opportunity to arise as a powerful force. The Stoic sage is not a person whose appetites have been ordered and moderated but one whose orientation toward external things has been so thoroughly reformed that the occasions for disruptive passion are greatly reduced. The goal is not moderation of desire but a relative detachment from the things that give rise to it. Whether this ideal is psychologically attainable is a question the tradition has found difficult to settle; the relation between Stoic apathy and Aristotelian virtue is considered in the chapter on EMOTION.

What Epictetus prescribes is a habit of vigilance. The practice is daily and unremitting; every moment of inattention permits false impressions to reassert their hold, and every indulgence reinforces the assumption that externals matter morally. Correct response must be practiced even in small circumstances, and the student must be alert to the first motion of a false impression. "Make it your study," he writes, "to confront every harsh impression with the words, 'You are but an impression, and not at all what you seem to be.'"

Epictetus carries Aristotle's framework of moral habituation into the daily practice of Stoic discipline, with a rigor and exactness that the Nicomachean Ethics does not attempt. Marcus Aurelius will show what this practice looks like in the concrete circumstances of a demanding public life; Augustine will argue that no such program of self-discipline, however carefully maintained, can reach the depth of the disorder it is intended to cure.

Marcus Aurelius presents something that neither Aristotle nor Epictetus provides: the actual record of moral habituation under the conditions of a particular life. The Meditations are a private journal of self-correction, not a systematic treatise, in which the emperor returns daily to the principles of Stoic philosophy in order to re-establish the orientation that the pressures of imperial life continually disturb. The text shows what it means in practice to cultivate a habit of mind rather than merely to hold a set of theoretical convictions.

The entries return repeatedly to the same themes: the brevity of life, the indifference of external goods, the duty to serve the community without craving recognition, the necessity of attending to what is within one's power. These themes are not being worked through for the first time; Marcus knows them thoroughly. What the journal records is the effort of habitual re-application, the daily renewal of an orientation that must be actively maintained rather than once established and then retained passively. Virtue, on this showing, is not a condition achieved and secured but a discipline requiring constant renewal. The relation between this understanding of virtue and Epictetus's account of the discipline of assent is considered in the chapters on COURAGE and on TEMPERANCE.

What is distinctive in Marcus is the role of memory and deliberate repetition. He returns to the same formulas and the same arguments not because he has forgotten them but because the habit of recalling them is itself the practice. The exercise of returning to principles, of confronting the day's temptations and irritations with the resources that Stoic philosophy provides, is the concrete form that moral habituation takes in a life like his. The Meditations are honest about how often this renewal is needed, and how often the press of circumstance has interrupted it.

Marcus Aurelius shows the practice of moral habituation in the concrete, without Aristotle's systematic analysis or Epictetus's sharp theoretical argument. Augustine will inherit this tradition's account of the will's role in habit formation while insisting that no such program of daily self-renewal can reach the disorder at the root of the human will, a disorder that requires a kind of help the philosophical tradition had not contemplated.

Augustine brings to the analysis of habit a concern that the philosophical tradition had not adequately addressed: the condition of a will that knows what is right and is unable to choose it. The Confessions are in part a narrative of bad habit's power over a self that would be free. His account of his own inability to renounce sexual pleasure, even when his intellect fully endorsed the life of continence, illustrates a state that differs from both Aristotle's continent person and the Stoic sage. The issue is not that appetite overpowers reason but that the will itself is divided: it wills the better and yet chooses the worse, habitually and with accumulating necessity.

The analysis that emerges is theological in character. Habits of sin form readily and tighten their hold with each repetition; each choice that confirms a disordered habit makes the next such choice more likely and the alternative less available. The chain of bad habit is not merely psychological but moral, in that it reflects a disordering of the will's love. No program of habituation in right action, however carefully designed and consistently maintained, reaches the root of this disordering; what is required is the reorientation of love itself, which Augustine holds to be the work of grace rather than of natural effort. The Stoics achieved much through disciplined practice, and their achievement was real; but they could not achieve the conversion of the will's fundamental orientation. The question of what grace adds to natural virtue is treated in the chapter on VIRTUE AND VICE.

Augustine's analysis does not amount to a denial that good habits are possible or beneficial. It is a diagnosis of what the experience of habit formation reveals about the condition of the will after the Fall: that the will is not the transparent instrument of reason that the philosophical tradition tended to assume, and that moral formation proceeding from reason and deliberate practice alone will encounter, in many persons, a depth of resistance that such means cannot overcome.

Augustine's account of the divided will and the compulsive power of bad habit provides the basis on which Christian moral psychology will be developed by Aquinas, who attempts to incorporate both the Aristotelian account of natural habituation and the Augustinian account of its limits within a single framework that finds room for both natural virtue and supernatural grace.

Aquinas gives the scholastic theory of habit its fullest development in the Summa Theologica, drawing primarily on Aristotle's account of hexis while integrating Augustine's concern for the limits of natural habit formation and the necessity of grace. For Aquinas, habits are qualities that perfect or diminish the faculties to which they attach: intellectual habits order and improve the operations of the intellect, moral habits order the appetitive powers toward or away from right reason, and the theological virtues, being directed toward supernatural ends, require a cause beyond natural habituation.

The distinction between acquired and infused virtue is fundamental to Aquinas's account. The natural moral virtues, prudence, justice, courage, and temperance, may be acquired through the repeated performance of virtuous acts, as Aristotle had argued; and they are genuine virtues, properly ordered to the goods of natural human life. But the virtues directed toward eternal beatitude, the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity, as well as the supernaturally perfected versions of the natural virtues, are infused by God and cannot be produced by any amount of practice or habituation. Natural effort prepares the soul to receive such infusion; it does not substitute for it. The bearing of this distinction on the question of the relation between nature and grace is considered in the chapter on SIN.

Aquinas also develops the psychological structure of habit within his broader account of the soul and its faculties. Different habits attach to different powers: habits of the intellect to the speculative or practical intellect, habits of desire to the will and the sensitive appetite. The unity of moral virtue requires that these habits be mutually ordered, and the virtue of prudence, which Aquinas regards as the charioteer of the moral virtues, plays an indispensable role in ensuring that the particular virtues operate in the service of a well-ordered whole. One cannot have any moral virtue in its full form without prudence.

Aquinas's synthesis brings together Aristotle's analysis of natural habit formation and Augustine's account of its insufficiency for supernatural ends into a framework that remains the standard reference for Catholic moral philosophy. William James will later approach the same phenomenon of habit from an entirely different direction, treating the formation of neural pathways rather than the ordering of soul faculties as the relevant explanatory framework.

Hume's most significant contribution to the theory of habit is his extension of the concept from the moral to the epistemological domain. The tradition from Aristotle through Aquinas had treated habit primarily as a feature of the will and the appetitive powers, a condition of character relevant to the question of virtue and vice. Hume argues that custom and habit, rather than rational inference, are the foundation of our most basic beliefs about the world. When we conclude that one event will follow another because it has regularly done so in the past, we are not reasoning from any principle of necessity discoverable by the intellect; we are following the habitual expectation produced by repeated experience. "Custom, then, is the great guide of human life."

This analysis extends to the beliefs that philosophy has traditionally considered most fundamental. Our conviction that causes produce their effects, that the external world continues to exist when we do not perceive it, and that the self persists through time are all, on Hume's account, products of habit and custom rather than of demonstrative reason. The philosopher who reflects rigorously on these matters finds no rational foundation for the beliefs; but after the momentary vertigo of this discovery, he returns to custom just as the unreflective person has continued to follow it throughout. The relation between Hume's skepticism and the question of knowledge is treated more fully in the chapter on KNOWLEDGE.

Hume is not despairing about this situation. Habit is what makes ordered life and useful inference possible; without the habitual expectations that experience generates, no planning, prediction, or practical action could be maintained. The recognition that our beliefs rest on habit rather than reason is a philosophical discovery, not a practical instruction. It does, however, pose a significant challenge to any moral theory that places rational insight or rational deliberation at the foundation of virtue, since Hume's analysis suggests that reason plays a far more subordinate role in human life than the Aristotelian and Stoic traditions had assumed.

Hume transforms the concept of habit by applying it to belief as well as to conduct, and in doing so challenges the rationalist assumption that reason is the foundation of both knowledge and virtue. William James will inherit this naturalistic approach and extend it, with the resources of nineteenth-century psychology, into a comprehensive account of habit as a physiological phenomenon with moral and social consequences.

Hegel's treatment of habit occurs in two connected places. In the Philosophy of Mind he identifies habit as the passage by which the soul, having first been subject to sensation and feeling as something imposed, comes to possess itself in these determinations and to be at home in them. In the Philosophy of Right he returns to the idea at paragraph 151 and uses it to characterize the relation of the individual to the ethical order. Habit is called "second nature" because through it what began as external requirement is taken up into the agent's own being, so that duty is no longer opposed to inclination but is the very shape inclination has come to take.

The formulation carries considerable weight in Hegel's larger argument. Abstract freedom, on his account, is not yet freedom; a will that merely chooses among possibilities, without being settled in any of them, remains empty. What gives freedom content is the system of institutions, family, civil society, and the state, within which choice is concretely exercised; and what reconciles the agent to these institutions is the habituation by which their requirements cease to be felt as alien. The good person is not the one who knows the law and submits to it as to an external command, but the one whose desires, expectations, and daily bearing are so ordered by the ethical substance of his community that acting well is the spontaneous expression of his character. Hegel is therefore at pains to distinguish this second nature from the mere mechanism of habit as dullness or automatism. Habit in the ethical sense preserves the activity of the will; it is an activity that has become unreflective only in the way that skilled performance is unreflective, not in the way that stupefaction is. The bearing of this distinction on Hegel's account of freedom is treated in the chapter on LIBERTY.

There is a cost to this account, and Hegel does not disguise it. Habit is also the form in which spirit sinks into mere natural existence and loses the vigor of opposition. An individual wholly habituated is no longer a distinct personality but a specimen of a type; a people wholly habituated has ceased to be historically alive. Hegel reads the decline of ancient ethical communities as the moment at which their habits, once the living shape of freedom, have hardened into customs that persist without the spirit that animated them. The theme is pursued more fully in the chapter on CUSTOM AND CONVENTION.

Hegel's account transforms what had been chiefly a moral-psychological idea into a social-historical one. William James inherits the thought that habit is the form in which the past concretely persists in the present and applies it to the individual nervous system; Marx inherits its social-historical side and redirects it toward the question of how settled forms of life come to be experienced as natural. Both of these developments can be read as partial retrievals of Hegel's characterization of habit as the mode in which spirit makes itself at home in the world.

William James gives habit its most celebrated scientific treatment in the Principles of Psychology, grounding the analysis that Aristotle had developed in moral terms in the emerging physiology of the nervous system. Habit is, for James, the mechanism by which complex sequences of behavior become automatic, freeing conscious attention for the novel challenges that require deliberate thought. Every repeated action leaves the neural pathways slightly more accessible; every act of resistance leaves them slightly less so. Character formation is therefore, in James's account, a physical process as much as a psychological one, laid down in the actual structure of brain and nerve.

The social implications of this analysis are, in James's view, as important as the individual ones. Habit maintains the social order by keeping persons in the roles and occupations for which their early formation has fitted them. Lawyers, soldiers, and laborers are held in their respective places partly by the habits formed in youth; and without this general habituation to established roles and expectations, each generation would be required to renegotiate the entire social fabric from the beginning. Habit is "the enormous flywheel of society, its most precious conservative agent." Whether this characterization is offered approvingly or descriptively is a question that later readers have found ambiguous, but the observation itself is made with the confidence of someone who regards the stability it describes as on balance beneficial. The bearing of this claim on the question of social change and reform is considered in the chapter on CUSTOM AND CONVENTION.

James's practical prescriptions follow from his physiological account. New habits must be launched as strongly and decisively as possible, without exception from the beginning, so that the neural groove may deepen as rapidly as possible; and the aspiring person must seize every opportunity for virtuous action, even in small matters, because each unrealized opportunity is a loss that cannot be fully recovered. After the age of thirty, James warns, the character is largely set; the plaster has hardened. The urgency of his counsel reflects his conviction that character formation is both consequential and constrained by the physical medium through which it operates.

James returns to the Aristotelian insight that character is formed through repeated action, now interpreted through the lens of nineteenth-century physiology and evolutionary science. Freud will inherit this biological orientation while redirecting its attention toward the habits that form below the level of consciousness and before the capacity for deliberate self-formation has developed.

Freud's contribution to the theory of habit turns on his analysis of what he calls the repetition compulsion: the tendency of persons to repeat patterns of thought, feeling, and behavior, often patterns that cause distress or damage, without conscious intention and frequently in defiance of conscious desire. The clinical evidence for this tendency, drawn from the observation of neurotic patients who reenact painful relational patterns in the transference and in their daily lives, suggests that many of the most significant habits persons have are not chosen by deliberate practice but laid down in early experience, before the person possesses any capacity for the kind of voluntary self-formation that Aristotle and James had described.

The therapeutic implications follow directly. If the habits most relevant to a person's suffering were formed in early childhood through processes largely unconscious and quite outside the person's control, then the prescription to form better habits through deliberate practice will not reach the problem. What is required is to bring the unconscious repetition into consciousness, where it can be recognized for what it is and, potentially, modified. This is not a guarantee of transformation; the analysis of unconscious dynamics does not automatically produce freedom from them. But it is a precondition, on Freud's account, for any genuine change in the deeply habitual patterns that govern a person's life. The relation between Freud's therapeutic method and the broader question of the will's freedom is considered in the chapter on WILL.

The critique of the voluntarist tradition is implicit throughout. Aristotle's prescription of repeated virtuous action, James's advice to launch new habits decisively and without exception, and Epictetus's discipline of daily assent all assume that the person is in a position to choose which habits to cultivate, that conscious intention has the reach required to shape character. Freud's account of unconscious repetition raises the question of how far this assumption holds, particularly for the patterns that govern the most intimate and consequential dimensions of a person's life.

Freud does not deny the importance of habit but relocates the formation of the most significant habits to a domain that precedes and in large measure determines the scope of conscious choice. Whether this relocation undermines or merely complicates the traditional account of moral formation through deliberate practice is a question that the century following Freud has not settled.