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Power and Habit

Matthias Haase (Universität Leipzig)

1. Creatures of habit

In the investigation of mind, Hegel complains, habit tends to be “passed over as

something contemptible”.1 Of course, no one would deny that we are creatures of

habit, in a way. But that fact about us is usually not regarded as the pride of creation.

Hegel thinks that this is a mistake. In his Philosophy of Mind, the concept of habit

marks the anthropological difference. As the culmination of the chapter on

“Anthropology”, with which Hegel begins his investigation of mind, the treatment of

habit is supposed to articulate the specific way in which the corporality of a rational

animal is its own act, in a sense in which that of a mere animal is not. We are told that

a thinking being is a being that gives itself its a nature which, for this reason, is

“rightly called a second nature”. (E §410)

Even though the talk of rationality as “second nature” has recently become a

celebrated slogan in certain quarters, the thesis that having a second nature is

distinctive of rational animals tends, in the same quarters, to be passed over. On the

received view, the difference is a matter of what, in the course of a normal

upbringing, comes to be second nature. After all, dogs can be habituated. Even the

lone wolf in its natural habitat does things habitually. There are whole books about it

– with entries entitled “eating habits”. Accordingly, it looks like the concept of habit

can’t be that through which to understand what the translations of Hegel tend to

render as “spirit” and what nowadays is often discussed under the title of the

specifically “rational”, “self-conscious” or “autonomous” way of being minded that

elevates us over the mere animals – the “brutes” or “beasts”, as the tradition calls

them. The contemporary debates in the philosophy of mind tend to be organized

around the assumption that if the anthropological difference is to come out as one

kind or principle, rather than degree, then the powers characteristic of having a mind

in the relevant sense must be shown to differ principally from what gets to be called

“mere”, “pure” or “blind habits”.

Against this background Hegel’s thesis appears bizarre. What he says might

begin to sound less outlandish once one considers the possibility that what is meant

                                                                                                               1 See Hegel, E §410.

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by “Gewohnheit” and rendered in the translations as “habit” might be what Aristotle

calls “hexis” and Aquinas translates with “habitus” and about which the latter says

that, according to the philosopher’s teaching, neither the brutes nor God have it.2 But,

of course, the mere fact that they say it too hardly makes it less strange. In the

following I want to argue that this peculiar bit of Aristotelian orthodoxy should be

saved from oblivion, since it is an intrinsic part of the proper definition of a rational

power – a dynamis metalogue. (((Sadly, it turned out that I will focus on raising the

problem to which it should, on another occasion, turn out to be the solution.)))

The assumption that the concept of habit doesn’t capture what is distinctive of

us is deeply rooted in modern approach to mind. Even Hume for whom it is all just

habit would agree that since the “beasts” have habits too, the way in which “men

surpasses the animals” doesn’t come into view as long as one just reflects on what it is

to be in a habit; one has to look at what we are in the habit to do. Of course, when the

line is drawn in the Humean fashion it is not all that elevating. As Hume has it, the

bare notion of habit already introduces the concept of reason. We are told the animal’s

“actions proceed from a reasoning that is not itself different, nor founded on different

principles, from that which appears in human nature.” For: “From the tone of voice

the dog infers his master’s anger, and foresees his own punishment.”3 So understood,

the words ‘reason’, ‘mind’ or, if you will, ‘spirit’ describe something that can be

found throughout the animal kingdom; it is just that some are, as it were, more

‘spirited’ than others. Whether we are considering how the refinement of a thinker

exceeds the capacities of “animals” or those of “children” or the “common people” –

all the same: it is just a matter of degree.4

Kant rejects this picture of human beings as vulgar. But, on the face of it, he

shares Hume’s account of what a habit is. As Kant sees it, another’s habit rightly

arouses “disgust in us”, since it is, as it were, like witnessing the brute within

breaking through:

                                                                                                               2 Aristotle, XX; Aquinas, Summa, XX That unanimity among the three is not an accident. In the introduction to his Philosophy of Mind Hegel claims that De Anima it is “still the only work of speculative interest on this topic” and that the “main aim of a philosophy of mind” must thus be to “make its lessons available again”. (E § 378). 3 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, Book I, Part III, Section XVI, p. 177. 4 As Hume puts it in famous footnote in the Enquiries, the way “men […] surpasses the animals” is to be understood by first considering the way in which “one man surpasses another”. Once the latter is clear, “the difference between men and animals will be easily comprehended”. For it is difference of the same kind: a matter of degree. See David Hume, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding, Section IX, p. 84 FN 1.

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Habit (assuetudo) […] is a physical inner necessitation to proceed in the same manner that one has proceeded until now. It deprives even good actions of their moral worth because it impairs the freedom of the mind and, moreover, leads to thoughtless repetition of the very same act (monotony), and so becomes ridiculous. – Habitual fillers (phrases used for the mere filling up of the emptiness of thoughts) make the listener constantly worried that he will have to hear the little sayings yet again, and they turn the speaker into a talking machine. The reason why the habits of another stimulate the arousal of disgust in us is because here the animal in the human being jumps out far too much, and because here one is led instinctively by the rule of habituation, exactly like another (non-human) nature, and so runs the risk of falling into one and the same class with the beast.5

Kant defines a habit is a mechanism of instinctive repetition that constitutes a

“physical inner necessitation”. Given this assumption, the only way to reject Hume’s

dictum that “reason is the slave of the passions” is to hold that reason is opposed to

habit. A few of pages before the passage just quoted we are told that “virtue” should

be entirely free of it: the “adherence to one’s duty […] should never become habit, but

always emerge new and original from one’s way of thinking (Denkungsart)”. (BA 36)

Excusable exceptions having to do with the frailty of old-age aside, all habits are

branded “reprehensible”.6

The common judgment about habit is less austere. We all have some; and it is

not that having one necessarily makes one bad person. So it might be agreed that it

would be attractive to somehow steer between the two extremes just rehearsed. But

why should the peculiar piece of Aristotelian orthodoxy be required for this purpose?

One might think that all that is needed to prevent the Aristotelian wisdom that the

virtues are acquired through habituation and are thus habits in the ordinary sense of

the word from collapsing into Humeanism is a distinction between two species of the

genus habit – as John McDowell would put it: the “bit of common sense” that the

relevant kind of habituation is not adequately described in terms of “conditioning” or

Wittgenstein’s unfortunate wording “Abrichtung”, but is properly characterized with

the more tender talk of “Bildung” and “initiation”.7 The kind of habit that is acquired

in this way is not exercised in blind, automatic and mechanical repetition; its proper

actualization exhibits the appropriate sensitivity to what is called for by the

specificities of the situation at hand.8

                                                                                                               5 Ibid., BA 40. 6 Kant, Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht, BA 40. 7 See John McDowell, Mind and World, p. 88. 8 Once this picture is on the table it is tempting to think that something along these lines would also be the charitable reading of Kant. After all, what figures in the passage I quoted above under the title of “Denkungsart” is clearly supposed to be something in the order of a hexis or habitus – some

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What is striking about Hegel’s treatment of habit is that his text resists this

way of dissolving the issue. Hegel doesn’t deny that the characterizations that are

emphasized when habit is spoken of “disparengingly” are on target. To the contrary,

he says himself that a habit is constituted through “repetition”, that it is a kind of

“mechanism”, that it is instantiated “without consciousness” and that the “form of

habit” is, as such, “open to any accidental content”. (E §410) At the same time we are

told that the element so defined is “indispensable for the existence of all intellectual

life in the individual” and that it “encompasses all levels of the activity of mind”,

including mastery of a language, knowledge, skill and virtue. Even thinking in its

highest form – contemplation – is said to involve habit.9 This is puzzling. In case one

is inclined to dismiss the puzzle due to the eccentric linguistic clothing in which

Hegel’s thought comes to us, it might help to add that the same kind of puzzle arises

once one doesn’t take it to be a mere slip when the godfather of the ordinary uses such

words as “Abrichtung”.

2. The received categorical framework  

In order to not get distracted by traditional philosophical jargon, let’s take a look at

how the philosophical landscape looks like after the linguistic turn – when all the

words have been crossed out and replaced by names for sentence schema. Our map

shall be a book that shaped like no other the reception of the Aristotelian talk of

powers, capacities and dispositions in a climate that favors the Empiricist’s rather

inhospitable attitude towards such notions.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              kind of general determination of a subject that can be actualized in infinitely many situations. What Kant insists on seems to be just the point that the commonsensical alternative emphasizes as well – namely, that it is the kind of general determination of a subject that is not manifested merely mechanically. As soon as one admits that there is also another kind of general determination by a subject – one that is inculcated by mere drill and manifested blindly, thoughtlessly and without sensitivity to what is called for by the situation at hand – it begins to look like it is only terminological issue whether on uses the word ‘habit’ as the name for the genus that encompasses both kind of general determinations of a subject or reserves it for one of them. One might think that in this way one can also do away with the apparent scandal our peculiar bit of Aristotelian orthodoxy. Perhaps the most charitable attitude to all three philosophers who appear to deny that mere animals can have habits is to read the relevant word in the former of two registers just distinguished. 9 E 3 410. The three prior examples through which Hegel introduces the concept all concern our animality and have to do directly with the body: our “upright posture ” – that is, “standing” – is the first example; “seeing” is the second, being “inured against external sensations (frost, heat etc.)” the third. To begin with, Hegel talks about “Geschicklichkeit” only in the sense of motor skills. But in the Zusätze get the example of the skill of writing. In the main text we are told that one the higher forms of habit is memory – a concept that will, around 50 sections later in the relevant section chapter on Psychology, turn out to describe knowledge of what the words of one’s language mean. Some further 50 sections later in the chapter on ethical life, just as in the Philosophy of Right – virtue is explicitly called as a “habit”.

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In The Concept of Mind Gilbert Ryle famously argues that in judging that a

performance is intelligent “we have in a certain manner to look beyond the

performance itself” and consider the agent’s “abilities and propensities of which this

performance was an actualization”. (45) Obviously, not any old “ability” or

“propensity” will do if conceiving of a performance as intelligent is to come out as

conceiving of it as an actualization of that “ability” or “propensity”. If the proposed

account of the logical grammar of the word ‘intelligent’ is to succeed, the right kind

of “ability” or “propensity” has to be singled out – as Ryle puts it, that “restricted

class of dispositional terms [that are] appropriate only to the characterization of

human beings” and concern “qualities of intellect and character” (126). The ambition

of the book is to isolate this “restricted class” by specifying the distinctive “logical

behavior” of its elements. (126) To make this more general point, Ryle focuses, to

begin with, on the two forms of intelligence that are directly concerned with

realization in action: what we know how to do and what we know to do – skill and

virtue. His aim is to bring out that they are capacities and tendencies sui generis.

Ryle approaches this task by contrasting “intelligent capacities” – and, later on in the

book, intelligent propensities such as kindness and loyalty – with what he calls

“pure”, “mere” or “blind habits”.

In the course of the investigation the manifestations of the latter are

characterized as merely “automatic” (42) and mentioned alongside “reflexes” (46). In

one passage, habit even figures as an example for the most primitive kind of

disposition – on a par with the dispositional properties of inanimate objects:

“In discussing dispositions it is initially helpful to focus on the simplest models, such as the brittleness of glass or the smoking habit of a man. To be brittle is just to be bound or likely to fly into fragments in such and such conditions; to be a smoker is just to be bound to or likely to fill, light and draw on a pipe in such and such conditions.” (43)

Of course, Ryle is far too sensible to be guilty of the vulgarity of simply equating the

cultivated affliction of being a smoker with the dispositional properties of inanimate

objects. He would reprehend speaking of the glass’s habit to break as what he termed

a “category mistake” – and not just because the glass will surely do that only once,

whereas our man is likely to do his deed again and again. In the categorial framework

Ryle lays out, “habit” is the name for a sub-species of what he calls “tendencies” or

“propensities”. The latter is distinguished from what is entitled “ability” or

“capacity” and belongs with it to the most abstract genus “disposition”.

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This abstract genus describes, roughly speaking, a general determination of a

subject that can be instantiated by at least one member of an infinite set of particular

acts of this subject while figuring as an explanatory factor for it. Ryle gives the

semantics of this generic notion in terms of a certain kind of “hypotheticals” or

“inference tickets”. The distinction between capacities and tendencies is, in turn,

explained in terms of the differences in the truth conditions of the respective

conditionals. Ryle writes:

“Tendencies are different from capacities […] ‘Would if …’ differs from ‘could’; and ‘regularly does …when …’ differs from ‘can’. Roughly, to say ‘can’ is to say that it is not a certainty that something will not be the case, while, to say ‘tends’, ‘keeps on’ or ‘is prone’, is to say that it is a good bet that it will be, or was, the case. So ‘tends to’ implies ‘can’, but is not implied by it.” (131)

Ryle illustrates the distinction between capacities and tendencies through example of

statements about dogs. But the definition just quoted seems to apply to inanimate

objects as well. What sets a habit apart from what we might call a ‘mere tendency’

ascribable to an inanimate object is, as it were, the specific way in which it is

possessed by its bearer. Habits belong together with intelligent capacities and

intelligent tendencies to a genus that does not include the dispositional properties of

the inanimate. The former three are different species of what Ryle calls “acquired

dispositions” or “second natures”. (42)

The suggestion seems to be that inanimate objects and mere organisms only

have “first natures”. Obviously this doesn’t follow on any reading of “acquired”. A

piece of metal can become brittle – say, by being frozen – and thus ‘acquire’ the

tendency to break. We must be dealing with a special kind of acquisition. A habit, just

as its intelligent counterparts, is, in Ryle’s words, the “product of practice”. (42) It is

the kind of disposition that one acquires by doing the very thing it is disposition to do.

As it turns out, the only way to become a smoker – and thus to come to smoke like a

smoker does – is by smoking.10

As Ryle sets things up, the genus second nature or acquired disposition

extends beyond the realm of the rationally minded. He writes:

                                                                                                               10 Obviously more would have to be said to rule out that a piece of rubber acquires the second nature of a certain degree of elasticity being stretched repeatedly. Let it stand as a conjecture for now that the missing element can be provided. My present concern is not the articulation of these distinctions. I just want to lay out a sub-set of the distinctions Ryle introduces within his super-category “dispositional term”.

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“The capacity to acquire capacities by being taught is not a human peculiarity. The puppy can be taught or drilled to beg, much as infants are taught to walk and use spoons. But some kinds of learning, including the way in which most people learn to swim, involve the understanding and application either of spoken instructions or at least of staged demonstration; and a creature that can learn things in these ways is unhesitatingly conceded to have a mind, where the teachability of the dog and infant leaves us hesitant whether or not to say that they yet qualify for this certificate.” (129) The contrast between these two ways of inculcating a “second nature” is precisely

what Ryle appealed to when he originally introduced the distinction between

“intelligent” capacities and tendencies, on the one hand, and “mere” or “blind habits”

on the other hand. The latter are said to be acquired through “drill” or “conditioning”,

the former through “training”. “Drill,” we are told, “consists in the imposition of

repetitions”, whereas training crucially “involves the stimulation by criticism and

example of the pupil’s own judgment”. (43) This difference with respect to the way in

which the relevant kind of disposition is acquired, is supposed to correlate with a

difference with respect to the way in which the relevant kind of disposition is

exercised. Whereas “mere habits” are instantiated merely automatically, “intelligent”

abilities and propensities are actualized with a certain “degree of head”: in exercising

the dispositions characteristic of “having a mind”, the subject “minds” what she is

doing.

The decisive task is to articulate what that ‘minding what one is doing’ comes

to. The account Ryle proposes is, of course, as controversial as his interpretations of

all the other distinctions just rehearsed – including his conditional account of

dispositions in general. But that there are the distinctions I rehearsed is generally

accepted.11 On the ground level, there is the distinction between dispositional

properties and other properties. Within the super-category “dispositional terms” we

found three binary distinctions that define sub-categories. First, there is the distinction

between “abilities” and “propensities” – “capacities” and “tendencies”, as Ryle

sometimes puts it. Secondly, there is the distinction between “acquired” and “non-

acquired” dispositions. Thirdly, there is the distinction between “rational” or

“intelligent” and “non-rational” or “non-intelligent” dispositions. In all three cases it

is matter of dispute in which domain they apply. But the following aspect of Ryle’s

framework is generally accepted. As Ryle presents it, the first two are independent of

the third. That is, they both apply to the domain of the sub-rational. This way of

                                                                                                               11 In slightly different terminology the same set of distinctions can be found in Anthony Kenny, The Metaphysics of Mind and more recently in P.M.S. Hacker, The Categorial Framework.

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organizing the class of the dispositional terms underlies the common view of the

options available when philosophizing about the mind. Even though it is highly

contested where exactly it is located and what its status is – that the division between

the minded and the mindless runs through the realm of second nature is a nearly

universally shared assumption. And it is generally agreed by all parties to the debate

that there is a brute counterpart to the distinction between skill and virtue – that is,

between being able to do a kind of thing and tending to do it.

Among those who agree with Ryle that “rational”, “intelligent” or

“conceptual” capacities and tendencies are sui generis, the main dispute is about how

that line that separates the rational from the non-rational is to be drawn and where

exactly it runs. The bone of contention concerns the question of the exact character of

the relation between our rationality and our animality – that is, the sensibility that we

‘share’, in some sense to be spelled out, with the mere animals.12 More widespread is

                                                                                                               12 Roughly speaking there are three kinds of views. According to the first, what distinguishes us from mere animals is fact that there is a power or set of powers added to the powers of sensibility that are in us just like they are in mere animals. According to the second view, rationality is not simply added to a stock of powers that remains the same; it influences and shapes the powers of sensibility and the way they are exercised. But it is possible to describe our animality while abstracting from this influence. Consequently, the picture leaves space for the idea of a brute within. According to the third view, reason doesn’t just influence with workings of sensibility, it transforms the whole way of being an animal. Sensibility takes a fundamentally different shape when it occurs in us. These three views of the relation between reason and sensibility are correlated with different accounts of the relation between habit, skill and virtue.

A version of the first has recently been adopted by Hubert Dreyfus. According to Dreyfus our practical capacities, skills and virtues display a kind of “intelligence”, but not one that is distinctive of being rationally minded. They are a kind of “embodied coping” that can be found in mere animals as well. In this respect Dreyfus account of habit, skill and virtue is like Hume’s. The distinction between our practical abilities or propensities and those of non-human animals is only a matter of their content – that is, of the specific things we are able to do – and not a matter of the form of the relation between power and act. Dreyfus view differs from Hume’s in that he thinks the power of reasoning itself cannot be conceived in this way. In Dreyfus’ picture, the power of reason appears as something added to the powers we simply share with the mere animals – something that controls the workings of our mere animals powers from the outside. Reason so conceived is, strictly speaking, not itself actualized in bodily movement; it is only exercised when we step back from action and explicitly reflect on what to do.

A version of the second view is held by Christine Korsgaard. As she sees it is a mistake to take our exercises of skill and virtue to be an operations of embodied coping that are only externally controlled by reason; they fundamentally involve and are guided by the operation of reason. Since the picture Korsgaard proposes includes the idea of a brute within and thus of a bearer of Humean habits, this claim goes together with the kind of strict opposition between virtue and habit that Kant vividly expresses in the passage from the Anthropologie that I quoted in §1. In the opening sections of Self-Constitution she characterizes her project as providing an alternative to the “rebarbative picture of the virtuous human being as a sort of Good Dog, whose desires and inclinations have been so perfectly trained that he always does what he ought to do spontaneously and with tail-wagging cheerfulness and enthusiasm” (3) According to the account she proposes a proper act of virtue must include the inevitably painful experience of “necessitation” – roughly put, a sense of the constant struggle to constitute oneself as a person by first distinguishing the inclinations within and forming a new whole.

John McDowell holds a version of the third view. Since in his picture the whole way of being an animal including all the powers of sensibilty is informed by reason, McDowell is happy to claim

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the denial that the distinctions have the status Ryle claims to have. On this view, our

thought moves in just the same logical register whether we are ascribing a skill, virtue

or a habit to a person or a disposition to a dog, a tree or a piece of stone. These objects

certainly differ in what they are disposed to do, but what ‘disposed’ means is the same

all cases.13 In the correlated books on powers, habit, skill and virtue don’t get their

own sections; they are simply subsumed under what is proposed as the proper analysis

of dispositional terms in general – that is, under the relevant counterfactual, habitual

or simple categorical, or whatever the respective account of the semantics of

disposition ascriptions might be.14 On this view, the anthropological difference is,

ontologically speaking, just a matter of degree – a question of a more complex and

multilayered arrangements of features we find on the lower rungs of the ladder of

being.

Our bit of Aristotelian orthodoxy has no place in these debates. It is the denial

of the categorial framework in which they are couched. I want to begin to cast doubt

on the established way of organizing the realm of dispositional terms by considering a

number of difficulties that arise for Ryle’s own account.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             that “conceptual capacities” – a term in his uses covers mastery of a language as well as skill and virtue – are “habits” acquired through the kind of habituation a human being undergoes in the course of a proper upbringing. However, on his view also holds that this kind of “second nature” stands opposed to the mindless or sub-rational kind of “second nature” that mere animals can have. Commenting on his use of the term “second nature”, he writes: “The only use to which I put the idea of second nature in Mind and World is to affirm that responsiveness to reasons as such is natural too. In this application, the idea of the second-natural coincides with the idea of what can be made intelligible by placement in the space of reasons. But the idea of second nature itself is not exclusively applicable to rational animals. It is no more than the idea of a way of being […] that has been acquired by something on the lines of training. It can be second nature to a dog to roll over, say, on the command ‘Roll over’. And the intelligibility of this behaviour is not in any interesting sense sui generis, by comparison with the intelligibility of, say, pricking up the ears in response to a noise or chasing a squirrel. Apart from how it originates, the second nature of dogs is just like their first nature.” (98) So just as in Ryle, it is not the idea of acquired dispositions or second nature as such that marks the difference; it all depends on what is acquired and how. 13 For such view of powers see, for instance, Lewis XX or Armstrong XX. In a different way the account of dispositions Quine XX; Davidson XX; Brandom XX; Evans XX; Smith XX – Recently normative notion of capacity that is tied to the idea of the living Millikan XX, Sosa XX. Even though it is matter of dispute what status the notion has – whether it is primitive or to be explained or eliminated by another part of the theory. For our present purposes the decisive point is this: on these view too, it holds that the step form mere animals and rational animals the notion of power remains the exactly the same. The only thing that changes is the what the relevant organism is able to do, not what it is to able – that is, what is done in exercising it, not the way power and act are related. 14 See, for instance, Mumford XX; Fara XX etc.

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3. On the very idea of a rational second nature

3.1. Vagueness in the system

Ryle approaches his prior object of investigation – the “intelligent man” – by

opposing it not simply to mere animals, but to a class that bears the title “animals,

infants and idiots”. (191) As Ryle has it, that “restricted class” of dispositional terms

that is supposed to define what it is to be rationally minded and that is supposed be

isolated by specifying the distinctive “logical behavior” of its elements express

features that characterize some, but not all human beings. Accordingly, it looks like

the line that separates us from the mere animals is, in fact, a division that runs straight

through the middle of the manifold of human beings and the acts that can be ascribed

to them. Ryle doesn’t think that this is troubling once one realizes that the distinction

between intelligent and non-intelligent is one that is “blurred” on the “edges”: “Dogs as well as infants are drilled to respond to words of command, to pointing and to the ringing of dinner bells; apes learn to use and even construct instruments; kittens are playful and parrots are imitative. If we like to say that the behavior of animals is instinctive while part of the behavior of human beings is rational, though we are drawing attention to an important difference or family of differences, it is a difference the edges of which are, in their turn, blurred. Exactly when does the instinctive imitativeness of the infant develop into rational histrionics? By which birthday has the child ceased ever to respond to the dinner-bell like a dog and begun always to respond to it like an angel?” (126)

It is not that Ryle officially endorses a Humean view of habit. He uses the word

‘habit’ only in connection with human beings. And he is far from ascribing the whole

range of human behavior that comes under this heading to the brute within. There are

all kinds of mixed cases and it is mistake to try to draw a sharp line. However, it

would seem if there is to be a distinction of the status Ryle claims – namely, a

“logical” one – then there must also be clear cases. And indeed just as Ryle takes

there to be clear cases of intelligent behavior, there is also what he calls a “mere”,

“pure” or “blind habit” and doing something “by the sheer force” of one. And in those

cases it looks like what justifies restricting the application of the term ‘habit’ to

human beings is not the character of the dispositional property itself; it seems to

reside in the fact that its bearer is suitably related to those other species of the genus

“second nature”.

I will argue that it is impossible to find any cases of intelligent behavior that

are as clear as Ryle would need them to be in order to define the purported sub-

category of dispositional terms and that the appeal to vagueness covers over a

difficulty that comes up in three ways: (i) in form of the question of how to conceive

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of the original acquisition of a rational second nature; (ii) in form of the question how

to conceive the exercise of a rational second nature; and (iii) in form of the question

how to conceive of the bearer of a rational second nature.

3.2. The original acquisition of a rational second nature

Let’s begin with the scenario of the original acquisition of a rational second nature.

Ryle’s claim that it is sensible to say that up to a certain point (that has no clear

bounderies) the infant reacts to the “the dinner bell like a dog”, might be read as

suggesting that the term “rational animal” is a phase sortal that applies to a human

being only after it has been properly brought up. But this is not the view. The infant is

already is to be counted among those whose ranks the puppy will never join, because

it also has the capacity to acquire those “intelligent” species of “second nature”. It is

“rational” in first potentiality, as one might say using Aristotelian terminology.

McDowell puts the point like this: “human infants are mere animals, distinctive only

in their potential”.15 But how are we to understand this formula? What about this

“potential” – where is it to be located in the system of dispositional terms?

In his reworking of Ryle’s system, Anthony Kenny calls this potential a

“second order ability”.16 One might think this introduces a further sub-category within

the abstract super-category “dispositional term”. But in the passage I quoted above,

Ryle talks in the same way: “teachability” is defined as the “capacity to acquire

capacities”. In Ryle’s framework a second nature is the actualization of second order

capacity which itself is first nature. This rendering gives a clearer view of the way in

which the set of distinctions that Ryle lays out are related to each other. Using the

word ‘power’ in the same way as Ryle uses the word ‘disposition’ – namely, as the

name for the abstract genus – one can say that are there are three distinctions within

the genus ‘power’: (1) There is the distinction between powers that are capacities and

powers that are tendencies. (2) There is distinction between not-acquired and

acquired powers – first and second natures. (3) There is the distinction between

rational and non-rational powers. I pointed out above that, as Ryle presents this set of

binary distinctions, the first two independent of the third. Our current concern makes

clear that it holds furthermore that this set binary distinctions forms a horizontal

network where every opposition can be applied to every pole of the other oppositions.                                                                                                                15 John McDowell, Mind and World, p. 123. 16 See Kenny, XX. In the same way Hacker, XX

  12  

This structure transpires if one endorses: (a) the thesis that rational powers are

sui generis and (b) the thesis there are non-rational second natures. For: The

distinction between not-acquired and acquired powers – first and second natures –

implies that the acquisition of a second nature is the actualization of a “second order

power” – a power to acquire powers – which itself is a first nature. So thesis (b) – that

is, the claim that there are non-rational acquired powers – entails that mere animals

can have the power to acquire powers. Thesis (a) – that is, the claim that rational

powers are sui generis – entails that the power to acquire rational second natures

must be a different, a special kind of power to acquire powers. For, if the act is sui

generis, so must be the power. So the rational/non-rational distinction also applies to

not-acquired powers or first natures. This claim, in turn, entails that the relation of an

infant to learning, say, a particular language, must be of a different kind than the

relation of the wolf to acquiring, say, the second nature to roll over on the command

‘Roll over’. In the latter case it will surely be an accident, at least as far wolf’s first

nature is concerned, when it gets, in fact, tamed by us. So its power to acquire that

second nature must be in the order of a capacity. In the case of the infant, by contrast,

it better not be an accident when it does, in fact, acquire in second potentiality or first

actuality those determinations necessary to act in second actuality in a way

characteristic of what, according to its first nature, it already is in first potentiality. In

other words: the infant’s power to acquire rational powers must be in the order of a

tendency. So the distinction between capacities and tendencies applies to not-acquired

powers or first natures.17

Let’s pause for a moment. It looks like we just derived the concept of a

rational non-acquired tendency to acquire rational second natures. As what figures

under the name “rational second natures” are such things as mastery of a language,

science, skill and virtue, what this comes to is the idea of a non-acquired tendency

towards the true and the good. But what are we talking about here? One way to

                                                                                                               17 That there must be this contrast is implied by the difference between “children” and “idiots”. As far as its nature is concerned, there is nothing wrong with the wolf that never gets to be tamed; but something must have gone wrong when a grown human never learned to speak a language etc. A little variation in the zoological casuistry will produce the reverse result. The infants power to acquire the tendency to howl and run around like a wolf better be in the order of a capacity, while the wolf puppies’ power to acquire the capacity to hunt will be in the order of a tendency. In case there is skepticism about this point: once one counts our conditioning of an individual dog as the inculcating of a second nature, there is no reason not to count our breeding of dog species that are particularly prone to developing certain dispositions in training as the installment of second order tendencies in the first nature of this mere animal species.

  13  

interpret the formula is to say that a power that is non-acquired is innate. But one

thing seems clear: what is innate is explained by nature. A mere animal’s natural

tendency to develop certain concrete discriminatory abilities that are not fully

developed at birth is traditionally called “instinct”. Now, it was, famously, Hume who

said that “reasoning” is a “species of instinct […] that acts in us unknown to

ourselves”.18 Of course, Hume presents this, in the very same sentence, as the ground

for his thesis that the “reasoning”, so understood, is something that “we possess in

common with beasts”. And one might want to reject that as vulgar. However, it would

seem that at least the bit about it “act[ing] in us unknown to ourselves” must be

admitted to be true of that assumed non-acquired tendency towards the true and the

good when it operates in the infant – unless one wants to endow the little angel with

some sort of ‘original’ knowledge and self-consciousness in second actuality. The

latter move would, of course, make the whole appeal to the idea of initiation into a

custom superfluous and, furthermore, introduce the idea of an act of knowing that is

not only not derived from sensory affection, but utterly separate from sensibility.

Such acts of knowledge are traditionally thought to define the angelic being.19

                                                                                                               18 Hume, Enquiries, p. 85. 19 The official attraction of the talk of second nature was that it promised to make space for the idea of rationality being part of nature without being explained by nature. But it hard to see how it is supposed to do this work in the present framework. Once one allows for the possibility of non-rational second natures, it looks like one can’t avoid introducing the idea of a non-acquired tendency to acquire a rational second nature. And then all the questions return: In what sense, if any, is this second order tendency rational and in what sense, if any, is it natural? On the face of it, it looks like there are only two options. Either one conceives of that tendency as a natural. In this case it would seem that all first order rational powers will be explained by nature. That was Hume’s conclusion. As he puts in the Treatise: “habit is nothing but one is the principles of nature, and derives all its force from that origin”. (Treatise, 179) Or one denies that it is natural and gives up on the project to situate rationality within nature. Now, one might think that the air of paradox dissolves by rejecting the Humean understanding of nature. But on closer inspection it is the talk of second order powers itself that leads into a dilemma – at least once it is combined with the Anti-Humean thesis that the relevant first order powers are sui generis.

On the first horn it is accepted that the power to acquire a rational second nature is a power that operates behind its bearers back. Given this assumption there are two options: either one holds that this power is rational or one holds that it is non-rational. In the latter case one infringes the principle that power and act belong to the same category. (If the act – in this case: the having of a rational second nature – is sui generis so must be the power – in this case: the second order power to acquire rational second nature.) And if one denies this principle it becomes unclear what is meant by the whole talk of categorial distinctions within the genus power. In the former case, the connection between rationality and self-consciousness is severed: there is at least one rational power whose actualization does not include the subject’s understanding of the act as an act of the power. But then the term ‘rational’ must mean something different when it characterizes the relevant first order powers or second natures. For their exercise was supposed to be self-conscious. Accordingly, the term ‘rational’ hasn’t received a stable meaning in the framework.

On the second horn it is propounded that reason or self-consciousness is never merely in potentia. On this view, the infant’s power to acquire rational second natures – specific languages or concrete, culturally specific shapes of skill and virtue – is to be conceived as being a kind of activity. It

  14  

 

3.3. The exercise of a rational second nature

The scenario of the original acquisition of a rational second nature leads to the

difficulty that on reflection it seems impossible to keep rationality or intelligence out

of what officially was supposed to be a clear case of the non-intelligent or sub-

rational. The reverse problem arises for Ryle’s account of the exercise of a rational

second nature. Here it looks like the element of habit can’t be excluded from it was

supposed to be contrasted with.

According to Ryle, it holds that even among acts of those who are rationally

minded we can find some that are done simply “by the force of habit” and that thus

belong to what is opposed to “intelligent behavior”. The smoking addict seems to be

an example. However, even these acts can be ascribed to the human being in a way in

which the acts of a mere animal can’t be ascribed to it. For, the smoker already has

rational capacities in “second potentiality” or “first actuality” whose exercise in

“second actuality” might allow him, one fine day, to overcome his affliction –

something a smoking monkey could never achieve by itself. In this case the man’s

acts are ‘his’ in a sense in which the monkeys behavior is not ‘its’, because of

something the man could and monkey couldn’t do on another occasion or a series of

occasions.

“Intelligent behavior” is supposed to differ from acts done simply “by the

force of habit”, in that the way the former relates to the power it actualizes differs

from the way the latter relates to the power it manifests. In other words: the ambition

is to define the intelligent species of the genus second nature through the logically

distinct way in which the relevant “dispositional term” unites the manifold of acts that

can be brought under it. The official formula for this difference is this: an act exhibits

the rational mindedness of its subject, if in manifesting the relevant disposition the

subject “minds” what it is doing. Intelligent behavior is characterized by the fact that

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             is, as it were, a privative or not yet fully perfect act of a self-conscious power – something like an original striving towards the true and the good. (Andrea Kern recently proposed a view along these lines and ascribed it to Kant. See Kern, XX) But this move turns the infant quite literally into a little angel. For to the extent in which one allows that the true and the good are originally for it prior to its being affected, one introduces a kind knowledge that is utterly separate from its bearer being part of nature. This is precisely how Aquinas defines the angel. It is a power of knowledge that always already in act, but in a way that the distinction between power and act still applies. For by contrast to God, the angels don’t know everything and thus can come to know more. (See Summa…..XXX)))

  15  

it is done with “care and vigilance” (136) or, as Ryle sometimes puts it, “with some

degree of head”.

Ryle assembles a whole cluster of features to articulate the content of this

formula that marks the contrast between the manifestation of a mere habit and the

exercise of skill and virtue. First, while mere habits are “single track dispositions” in

that there manifestations are “uniform” and insensitive or “blind” to the specificities

of situation in which they are manifested, skills and virtues and are “multitrack

dispositions” (46). Their exercise is not merely the repetition of the same; they are

case sensitive. Accordingly they can’t be described by just one hypothetical; a whole

set of hypotheticals would be required to articulate them. For to describe an act as

skillful is to relate what happens to a whole range of diverse situations in which the

subject would perform the same kind of act in a different way. Secondly, by contrast

to habits, “skills have methods” (134): they provide a normative standard of the

degrees of success of the act that manifests them. An analogous point holds for virtue.

Here too, there is a contrast between “correct” and “incorrect” or “defective”.

On Ryle’s own account these two features are not sufficient to define the

contrast to the sub-rational. At the very least they apply throughout the domain of the

living.20 Everything depends on a third feature that Ryle immediately mentions when

he initially states his thesis that there are two species of the genus second nature. It

introduces a sense in which the subject in behaving intelligently relates her act to the

power it actualizes and thereby to the whole manifold of acts united under it. Ryle’s

prime example of ‘minding what one is doing’ is the case of a mountaineer who

exercises his skill in challenging circumstances. As Ryle describes the scenario it

illustrates a way of exercising a power where the actualization is part of the continued

acquisition and improvement of the power exercised. Ryle writes about the

mountaineer: “every operation performed is itself a new lesson to him how to perform

it.” (43) 21 One can put the point like this: the actualization of the power doesn’t just

exclude other possible acts here and now; taken as a lesson how to perform this kind

of act, the subject excludes all his passed and possible future acts not performed in

this fashion. Accordingly one can say that the behavior is not just an act of a power; it                                                                                                                20 Even if one adds the thought that the contrast between success and failure must, in some sense, be for the acting subject, it would seem that an appropriate account of pain and pleasure would provide just that. That is, so far nothing has been said that addresses the anthropological difference. 21 I focus here on skill. But the account of virtue is supposed to be parallel. For an account of virtue along these lines see Julia Annas, XX It leads tot he same problem. For a discussion of Annas see Will Small XX

  16  

is performed as an act of the power. One might put it this way: it is not merely a

particular act; it is, in some sense, general, since it is put forward as exemplary.

Clearly, we are on the way to what might be called a formal account of the

concept of the traditional notion of self-consciousness. The whole idea that,

depending on philosophical affiliations, is expressed with such words as “self-

consciousness” or “acting on a conception of a rule” or “following it”, is contained in

the little word “as” that introduces the reflexive: the power is not just manifested or

actualized in an act of the subject; rather the subject performs the act as an act of the

power. In some sense to be determined, the general (i.e., the power) is in the

particular (i.e., the act) in a way in which it is not in the case of sub-rational

performances. In Hegelian lingo: the relation between general and particular – power

and act – is not just “in itself”, but also “for itself”: it is for the acting subject and not

just for us who describe the subject.

However, Ryle’s rendering of this traditional idea has a peculiar implication

about the relation between “habit” and the intelligent species of the genus second

nature. When discussing the scenario Ryle opposes the performance of the

mountaineer with ordinary acts of walking on pavement. The latter are presented as

paradigm cases of acting from a “blind habit”:

“When we describe someone as doing something by pure or blind habit, we mean that he does it automatically and without having to mind what he is doing. He does not exercise care, vigilance, or criticism. After the toddling-age we walk on pavements without minding our steps.” (42)

This seems awkward. It is not only that the division between things done “by blind

habit” and things done “intelligently” or “rationally” seems to run right through the

middle of what, intuitively, we can be said to know how to do. And it is not only that

what intuitively seems to be one and the same power – the power of walking –

appears to figure, depending the circumstances in which it is exercised, once as a skill

and once as a habit. The problem is that defined in this way, the very notion of skill or

know how is threatened by paradox. For, it seems that the one who still needs to learn

doesn’t really or fully have the skill. And, according to the proposal, it seems to hold

that the one who doesn’t need to figure it out acts by blind habit. It would seem to

transpire that when we act from know how, then we don’t yet know how; and when

we do know how, then we don’t act from know how. But that makes no sense.

  17  

Later on in the book Ryle amends his account by giving up on what initially

seemed to be the strict requirement that every exercise involves improvement,

innovation and criticism.22 According to the amended account, something can be an

exercise of intelligence, even though it doesn’t involve the kind of ‘minding what one

is doing’ that the mountaineer exhibits. To count as “intelligent behavior” it is enough

that the subject would exhibit the relevant kind of “care and vigilance”, if the situation

were to require it. But it is hard to see how this helps. How could what a subject

would do on another occasion define the intelligent character of what she is currently

doing?

The dilemma Ryle is confronted with comes to the surface when one turns to

the chapter on “Self-Knowledge”. There we are told that it holds, quite in general, that

the way in which a subject can come to know that she herself * is the bearer of a

dispositional property is principally the same as the way she can come to know that

another is the bearer of a dispositional property: by experience.23 It follows that the

self-ascription of a dispositional property is an act that necessarily differs from the act

that manifests the power. It is, as Ryle puts it, a “higher order act”. Ryle writes: “To concern oneself about oneself in any way, theoretical or practical, is to perform a higher order act, just as it is to concern oneself about anybody else. To try, for example, to describe what one has just done, or is now doing, is to comment upon a step which is not itself, save per accidens, one of commenting. But the operation which is the commenting is not and cannot be, the step on which that commentary is being made. Nor can an act of ridiculing be its own butt. A higher order action cannot be the action upon which it is performed.” (195) The focus on the explicit act of verbal self-description or commentary is a distraction.

The problem was that in the proposed picture the only case where relating the act to

the power is part of the act itself so that the act can be said to be performed as act of

the power is the case where the subject doesn’t fully have the power, but is in the

process of learning. But all improvement or innovation through trial and error can

only happen against the background of what one already knows how to do. And if the

latter has the status of a blind habit that can only be self-ascribed in a separate

“higher order act” that rests on some kind of observation it becomes mysterious how

it could be taken up in any process of learning or criticism.

At this point the whole endeavor threatens to collapse into a Humean view of

powers – as one might have suspected from the beginning on the ground Ryle’s

analysis of dispositions in terms of “testable hypotheticals”. For if the system of

                                                                                                               22 See p. 145 ff. 23 See p. XXX

  18  

powers or kind of “dispositions” does not include a power that is known through or in

its exercise so that every power can only be known by inference from the observation

of regular occurrences of acts, then our uniting a multiplicity of acts under the concept

of a power must itself be regarded as nothing but a “mere habit”. That was Hume’s

argument. The thesis that the anthropological difference is a matter of degree, rather

than kind or principle is just a consequence of this point. For, if the legitimacy of the

distinction “betwixt a power and its act” can’t be grounded in reason’s knowledge of

its own act, then our making this distinction has no other status than the a mere

animal’s reacting differentially to what affects it.

3.4. The bearer of a rational second nature

It will be replied that at least the second difficulty is the product of Ryle’s

interpretation of the distinction between rational and non-rational second natures and

doesn’t cast any doubt on the distinction itself. The source of the trouble appears to be

Ryle’s account of self-knowledge as a kind of “higher order act”. And that seems to

be an additional thought that doesn’t arise from what I called the “received categorial

framework”. So one might simply reject it as unmotivated and misguided.24

Let’s take a look at how Ryle gets into this rut. As I pointed out above, Ryle

focuses in his investigation of intelligence on the special character of a certain sub-

class of human acts that can be ascribed to a certain sub-class of human beings. The

special character of these acts is then defined through the special “logical behavior” of

the dispositional terms that describe what those acts manifest. This, in turn, is

supposed to define what it is to be an “intelligent man”. An “intelligent man” – by

contrast to “animals, children and idiots” – is an individual that bears those special

dispositional properties. (The “children” and the “idiot” differ from the animal by

being a potential bearer of those properties.) The question what it is to be an

individual that bears of those special dispositional properties – or for that matter any                                                                                                                24 All that seems to be needed to dissolve the air of paradox is a version of the thought that since exercises of rational second natures are situated in the “space of reasons”, it defines the kind of acts they are that the subject knows what she herself* is thinking and doing, because she determines herself to do and think it through the reasons takes to be for thinking and doing it. It is worth noting, however, that unless one opts for the Kantian austerity I sketched at the outset, rational second natures will inevitably appear in the double register that Ryle marks with the contrast between “blind habit” and “innovation” or “self-criticism”. And once on takes the paradigm of rationality or self-consciousness to be the act of stepping back and asking for reasons, then it is clear that what one steps back from can’t be ‘self-conscious’ in the same sense as the stepping back itself. As McDowell notes himself, the contrast between reflective and unreflective exercises mustn’t disappear.

  19  

dispositional properties – is not asked. It is rather the way around: we can sort

individuals into kinds by appeal to the dispositional properties they have. The general

notion of a material individual seem to be introduced on the ground level where the

dispositional properties of inanimate objects are considered.

That Ryle proceeds in this way is party explained by his conditional account

of dispositions. (The conditional account formally requires this procedure.) So one

might think that it belongs to his specific interpretation of the general concept of a

disposition and not to his distinctions within this general category. But one thing

seems to be an implication of what I called the “received categorial framework”.

Since the distinction between capacities and tendencies as well as the distinction

between acquired and non-acquired powers apply to mere animals, it looks like the

principle of individuation of a human individual will have the same form as the

principles of individuation of other kinds of animals. It follows that everything that

can be said about intelligence must come from an investigation of what is acquired

and how it is exercised.

Now, Ryle’s whole investigation starts with the insight that it is hopeless to try

to define the intelligent or rational character of acts through their objects – that is, the

thought grasped or reasons recognized. To try to do so is to assume that “capacity”

means the same whether or not we are ascribing the capacity to judge, to infer or to

recognize reason to a person or the capacity to perceive colors to a bird. This is a

mistake, since the very idea of thoughts and reasons implies a special kind of relation

between power and act. The task is to provide an account of the sense in which the

relation between an “intelligent” power and its act “involves” the subject’s

“understanding” (26). What Ryle famously opposes as the “intellectualist legend” is

the idea that this sense in which the relation between the general and the act that

instantiates it is, as one might say, ‘mediated’ by the subject’s understanding can be

spelled out by appealing to a further act or state occurring somewhere inside the

subject – namely, her considering a proposition about what is to be done. That is a

hopeless approach. Since on reflection it is clear that such a proposition must be

assumed have a general content, the appeal to the subject’s considering it cannot

provide an account of the intelligent character of her actualizing the relevant kind of

act it specifies. To the contrary, the appeal to the subject’s thought of an act-type as to

be done gives itself rise to the question what it would be for her to produce a token

that counts as an “intelligent” performance. And so we embark on a vicious regress.

  20  

Ryle’s proposed alternative is to give up on the search for a mediating act hidden

somewhere inside the subject and instead reflect on the specific way in which her

manifest act is linked to her other manifest acts of the same kind – the past and the

possible future ones. That is to say, Ryle’s aim is to elucidate the notion of being

‘rationally minded’ through an articulation of the formally distinct way in which an

‘intelligent’ or ‘rational’ power or disposition unites the multiplicity of the acts that

manifest it.

Now, that the investigation that follows in the rest of the book will not

illuminate the notion of the subject’s knowledge that she herself* is the bearer of a

dispositional property, was already determined by narrowing the focus of

investigation to the dispositional properties that a certain subclass of human beings

exhibit. If the principle of individuation of a human animal has the same form as that

of mere animal, then having rational powers can only be a further property that plays

no role in the explanation of the existence of the individual who bears it. In

consequence, the material existence of the bearer of those dispositions cannot be

known through their exercise. Ryle’s account of self-knowledge is only one way to

articulate this thought. The more general point is the denial that one can know one’s

existence as a material individual in the first person perspective. If one combines this

thought with the idea that ‘I’ refers to a material individual, then Hume’s argument

goes through.

It has be suggested that the special way in which we know our actions

provides the clue to how a thinker can know herself to be a material individual. An

intentional action, it is said, is a movement that is identical with the agent’s knowing

it. But this cannot be true on any strict reading of the talk of identity. It might be, and

I think it is, true that I’m only doing A intentionally, if I know that I’m doing it. But

this cannot be an identity of movement and knowledge. For my movement can be

described in different ways. And I know my movement only under the descriptions

under which it is intentional. The reason is that for a finite individual like me it holds

that I don’t make the conditions under which I act. It follows that I cannot know every

aspect of my movement through thought. Its partial intransparency is what makes my

action a movement in material reality. The same holds for my existence as a material

being. The deployment of the formula of being that is, strictly, identical with being

known inevitably leads to the idea that what is being known in this way is not part of

material reality. This is how Kant understands the moral law and the “Denkungsart”

  21  

he opposes to habit in the passage I quoted in §1. In doing so Kant presupposes that

the idea of a possible multiplicity of judging subjects I could be agreement with is

intelligible without appeal to the idea of my existence as a material individual.

It is in response to this phantasy that Hegel writes: “It is only through habit

that I exist as a thinking being for myself.” (E §410) It is only by appeal to habit in its

never fully transparent and in this sense “mechanical” character that the subject of

thinking becomes intelligible as an individual – one among a possible manifold of

thinkers. For individuality is not intelligible without matter. And matter can never be

fully transparent to thought. Habit must “encompass all levels of the activity of

mind”, because it is the very element that “enables the content of consciousness”,

even “religious” and “moral”, to be abscribable to an individual – to the thinker “as

this self, this soul, and no other”. It is in response to the Humean threat that Hegel

holds that having a habit is distinctive of a rational animal. But how can the latter

response be available – given the former? That was the puzzle I started with.

4. The forgotten bit of Aristotelian orthodoxy

((This is very rough. Sorry! The thesis, in any case, would simply fall out of the

argument presented – that is, if the argument is any good.))

Our bit of Aristotelian orthodoxy is the denial of the assumption organizing the

received categorial framework. That is, the assumption that the three binary

distinctions – (i) between capacities and tendencies; (ii) not-acquired and acquired

powers; and (iii) not-rational and rational powers – form a horizontal network where

every opposition can be applied to every pole of the other oppositions. The orthodox

view is that the three distinctions form a vertical system in that the first two

distinctions – (i) the distinction between capacity and tendency and (ii) the distinction

between not-acquired and acquired powers – belong only to rational powers. They

define the logical form of a rational power or dynamis metalogue.

That habit is distinctive of rational animals is follows from the denial of

something that Kant and Hume agree on in their account of habit – namely that habit

is a mechanism whose constitution is governed by instinct. As Hegel defines it, habit

is constituted by nothing but the repetition of the acts that manifest them. The formal

definition of instinct is precisely the absence of a contrast between capacity and

tendency – ability and propensity. The mere animal does what it can do. Through the

vital activity of the animal there is no distinction between the two. The difference can

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only be introduced in the description of a defective case, where something goes

wrong. Without the contrast between capacity and tendency the distinction between

acquired and non-acquired powers can’t get a foothold in the vital description of a

mere animal life. It can only be introduced by reference to us who tame or condition

them for our purposes. In the perspective of the vital description there is no difference

between reacting to a dinner bell after having been trained and reacting to the smell of

pray in the natural habitat. It is one and the same kind of act of the capacity to react to

one’s environment mediated by an act of sensory affection. That sensibility involves

the possibility of adapting to changes in the environment is the result of the fact that

the animal’s relation to its environment is the joint interaction between the powers of

perception, pleasure and desire. But this does not change the fact that there is a

multiplicity of acts where each can be judged from the outside as a successful or

successful actualization of the power. In this structure there is no place for what

formally defines the concept habit, hexis or habitus – namely, an act of the subject

that is between first potentiality and second actuality.

Properly understood, the concept of habit, hexis or habitus belongs to and is

determined by its role in the formal definition of what Aristotle entitles “dynamis

metalogue” and what nowadays tends to figure under such names as “rational”, “self-

conscious” or “conceptual capacity”. According to Aristotle’s famous formula, a

dynamis metalogue is a power for opposites – a “two-way power”. Habit belongs to

and determined by its role in this formal structure in that it is what makes it possible

to group the multiple manifestations of the power under two ways of exercising it.

Accordingly, we can say, as Aquinas does, that the concept of a two-way power

simply is the concept of a power that has a habit.25

The point of this definition, if we were to come to understand it, is that

articulation of this formal structure of the relation between power and act – general

and particular – defines the notion of self-consciousness. And it does so without any

use of the reflexive – that is, without any non-explained deployment of such phrases

as ‘performing an act as the act of the power’, ‘being that is identical with knowing’

or ‘referring to oneself as oneself’. That is Hegel’s ambition. And he takes it to be

Aristotle’s “lesson”.

                                                                                                               25 Aquinas, XX

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The first step towards appreciating the “lesson” would be to make space for a

notion of potentiality that nowhere occurs in Ryle’s system and is the one that stands

at the beginning of Aristotle’s investigation of life – in his formula that defines the

specific shape that the relation between form and matter, general and particular, take

in an organism: “soul as the first actuality of a body that is potentially alive”. What

we are getting here is the notion of potentiality that is only insofar as it is actual and

that describes at the same time a finite being.

Without this definition in the background nothing in Hegel’s treatment of

habit makes any sense. The investigation of habit in the Philosophy of Mind provides

the link to the Philosophy of Nature that concluded with the ominous remark that

mere animals “die of habit”: when the contrast between what affects it and what it

desired disappears so that the animal gets “general”, it dies. So for mere animals,

habit is not a mode of living; they only die of it. In a rational animal, by contrast, we

are told that habit is the mode of its existence as a thinking being. That is how it lives

as an individual thinker.

To make it worse, we get two heavy helpings of dialectics. The three prior

examples through which Hegel introduces the concept of habit all concern our

animality and have to do directly with the body: our “upright posture ” – that is,

“standing” – is the first example; “seeing” is the second, being “inured against

external sensations (frost, heat etc.)” the third. Now, we are told that insofar as it

“deadens” affect and feeling – for instance, feeling cold or hungry – and insofar as it

makes bodily movements routine, being habituated is a way of being “free”. Habit

makes its bearer “independent” from the immediate impressions and demands of

nature and thus enables her to turn her attention something else. And since it is

constituted through the subject’s own actions, “second nature” is a mode of being

“free” and self-determined. But insofar as “second nature” is still a kind of “nature”, it

is mode of being “unfree”. For despite being constituted through the subject’s own

action, habit is not identical with the subject, but rather something she ‘bears’ and that

is not immediately at her disposal. It is, rather, a determination of the subject that

explains her actions. So in this sense, the subject is the “slaves” of her habits. The

same kind of dialectical operation is applied to the terms “life” and “death”. Since it

is, as we have seen, that through which thinking can exist in an individual, habit is the

human way of living insofar as we are thinking animals. But since humans are also

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growing old and tired, they are no exception to the rule that animals die “of habit”.

That point was, of course, already implied by the way in which habituation constitutes

a way of being free. For habit, it was said, “deadens” the senses, affects and feelings.

When it does so completely there is no animality left and its bearer dies.

In a recent paper Christoph Menke refers to these passages as support for the

thesis that Hegel replaces an Aristotelian view of a harmonious, stable and static

relation between life and mind in the phronimos with one that presents this relation as

fundamentally contested, precarious and dynamic. As Menke reads it, the dialectic of

“freedom” and “unfreedom”, “life” and “death” through which Hegel introduces the

notion of habit in the respective sections in the “Anthropology” goes, as it were, all

the way up to the heart of Hegel’s account of autonomy and characterizes in the same

way the actuality of virtue in the community of ethical life. But this is too quick, even

if something in the vicinity turned out to be true in the end. At least, it doesn’t follow

from Hegel’s remarks in the section on habit. In fact, in they suggest the opposite.

The remark on the sense in which a habit makes its bearer “unfree” is immediately

followed by a qualification:

“The unfreedom in habit is partly merely formal, in that it only concerns the being of the soul; partly only relative, insofar as, strictly speaking, it holds only in the case of bad habits, or insofar as there is another purpose that is opposed to the habit. The habit of the right and the ethical has the content of freedom.” (E § 410)

What these qualifications bring out is that in the chapter on “Anthropolgy” habit is

regarded in a certain way – namely, in abstraction from the contrast between good

and bad habits – virtue and vice, skill and fussiness. We are considering, as it were,

the bare and formal category of what Hegel calls a “general way of acting”

(“allgemeine Handlungsweise”) – the “pure habit”, as one might put it. Given that

formulation one might say that ethical and religious – and we might add linguistic,

technical and philosophical – “content” might enter into this bare category. Of course,

now all depends on what is meant by “content” and “pure habit”. If one takes the

latter phrase to mean what Ryle means when he talks about “mere” or “pure habit”,

then “unfreedom” will characterize any second nature no matter what its “content” is

– all the way up to “ethical life”. But this is not what Hegel says. He says that

“unfreedom” is “relative” in that it holds only for bad habits. The difference in

“content” thus seems to go together with a difference in the “form” that habit takes –

that is, the kind of “general way of acting” it is. Virtue and skill are thus not “mere

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habits” in Ryle’s sense. They are different species of the genus “habit” or “second

nature”. So, in fact, the distinctions Ryle was interested in reappears – just in a

different register. But what is the principle of Hegel’s ordering of the species of

second nature?

To answer this question we have to look at the other respect in which Hegel

qualifies the talk of the “unfreedom in habit”. Hegel said that the “unfreedom” is

“partly merely formal, in that it only concerns the being of the soul”. When we

abstract from whatever explains the contrast between good and bad habits and

consider the bare category of a “general way of acting”, then habit so conceived is

revealed as an “unfreedom” of the respective subject – that is, the bearer of habit

considered in this abstraction. The same holds for the remarks on the sense in which

habit is said to be “death itself”. Here too there is the qualification, “if abstract” – that

is, considered as a “pure habit”. And once again, the one who “dies of habit” is its

bearer considered in the same mode of abstraction.

This subject of “pure habit” is called “soul”. “Soul” is Hegel’s name for a

“thinking being” insofar as it can be considered in what he calls “Anthropology”.

Anthropology, we are told, describes us thinking being only insofar as we are part of

“nature” – that is, only insofar as we are animals. Even on a cursory look at the

relevant chapter as a whole reveals that Hegel’s understanding of the word

“antropology” must be rather special. The chapter begins with quite detailed

reflections on the influence of climate, the phases of human maturation and aging and

the role of sleep, but we don’t learn how these kinds of animals lead their lifes. The

highest point we reach after the reflections on “feeling”, which become increasingly

abstract, is habituation. And there we find nothing of the colorful content displayed in

Kant’s Anthropology or, for that matter, in any book filed under that rubric.

Compared to those works Hegel’s treatment of the topic seems pure, abstract and

empty. So what exactly is the subject matter of Anthropology in Hegel’s sense?

This gets us into the dark territory of the question of the principle of

progression in Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind. For the present purposes it shall suffice to

point out that the development articulated in the book has nothing to do with phylo- or

ontogenesis. As Hegel stresses at the outset, by contrast to the ladder of animate being

presented in the Philosophy of Nature, the rungs of the ladder presented in the

Philosophy of Mind have no “real existence”; that is, in the Philosophy of Mind the

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elements displayed on higher rungs are to a large degree already present in the

elements described on the lower rungs. So when we are considering us thinking

beings in “Anthropology” and thus only insofar as we are animals, then we are

considering us in abstraction from what makes us actual. And since for an animal to

be actual is for it to be alive, this means that we are considering us, in certain sense,

in abstraction from what makes us alive. In other words: we are considering a kind of

matter of a living being.

The point of the operation is to bring out the sense in which what is described

in the earlier parts of the book depends in its actuality on what is described in the later

parts of the book. So when we are considering the subject of the general way of acting

in “Anthropology” – the bearer of a ‘pure habit’, as it were –, then we are considering

a being whose actuality is not intelligible given the conceptual resources available on

this level of reflection. The same holds for what it bears: the general way of acting

considered as a bare category, the ‘pure habit’ – it too is not intelligible in its actuality

given the conceptual resources available on this level of reflection. And since it was

defined as mode existence of an individual animal and thus as mode of living, to say

is this the same as to say that habit gets the life it gives to its bearer from elsewhere –

namely from the forms habit takes on as we move up in the system. And when we do

move up and get to the chapter on ethical life where the contrast between good and

bad habits is explained, we see that the notion of habit discussed in the chapter on

“Antropology” belongs to and is determined by its role in the formal definition of a

two way power.

This structure of the system as a whole allows Hegel to define our animality –

when considered in abstraction from what introduces the contrast between good and

bad habits – as the undetermined and identify it with what Aristotle calls the “passive

nous” or “nous in first potentiality”. The passive nous, Aristotle says in De Anima, is

potentially everything. Hegel’s chapter on “Anthropology” starts with this quote and

suggest that this defines our animality, the way we are embodied. The treatment of

habit is supposed to render this peculiar claim intelligible. Since habit, by contrast to

anything that might arise through instinct, is determined by nothing but the repetition

of acts that manifest them, one can understand our animality as the undetermined, if

one can show that seemingly merely biological characterizations of human beings are,

in fact, the product of habit. The fact that one of the first examples for habit is

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“upright position” is no accident. For, if standing for us is not the result of instinct but

habit, then our being bipedal is our act in a sense in which the dogs being all fours is

not its act. And if being bipedal is our act, then having the hands free is our act as

well. Aristotle famously says in De Anima that the passive nous is like the hand: just

like the hand, as the tool of tools, is potentially everything, the passive nous is

potentially everything. – In The History of Animals Aristotle asks whether man is

intelligent, because he has an upright position or whether he has an upright position,

because he is intelligent. His answer is, of course, the latter. Hegel treatment of habit

is the attempt to explain why this must be true. If the explanation works there can be

no sensible question how in thinking we know us as individual living beings.