Being Inclined: Félix Ravaisson's Philosophy of Habit 2019951159, 9780198844587

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Being Inclined

Being Inclined Félix Ravaisson’s Philosophy of Habit MARK SINCLAIR

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Mark Sinclair 2019 Excerpts in Chapter 1: Copyright © Journal of the History of Philosophy. This article was first published in Journal of the History of Philosophy 49.1 (2011), 65–85. Reprinted with permission by Johns Hopkins University Press. The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2019 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2019951159 ISBN 978–0–19–884458–7 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198844587.001.0001 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A. Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

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Acknowledgements Parts of Chapter 1 are a distant echo of my ‘Ravaisson and the Force of Habit’, Journal of the History of Philosophy 49/1 (2011) 65–85, Copyright © Journal of the History of Philosophy, reprinted with permission by Johns Hopkins University Press. The first two sections of Chapter 6 develop my ‘Is There a Dispositional Modality? Maine de Biran and Ravaisson on Agency and Inclination’, History of Philosophy Quarterly 32/2 (2015) 161–79. I am grateful to the editors of these journals for permission to reproduce material. Despite the literal sense of the term, a ‘monograph’ is never really an individual enterprise, even though the responsibility for any errors in this book is mine alone. I am grateful to Tullio Viola, Dave Deamer, Tom O’Shea, and Jenny Bunker for having read sections of the manuscript. Two anonymous reviewers at Oxford University Press offered a great number of clear-sighted suggestions that helped to whip the manuscript into shape. James Clarke, during long conversations in Berlin, set me straight on several fundamental issues, and I have profited from collaborations with Delphine Antoine-Mahut, Marco Piazza, Jeremy Dunham, Daniel Whistler, and Clare Carlisle. Frank Chouraqui, Christopher Satoor, Christophe Perrin, and Christopher Paone have offered helpful comments on my previous work on Ravaisson. Some of the book was written on research leave granted by the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at Manchester Metropolitan University, and there I owe much to the support of Keith Crome, Melanie Tebbutt, and Anna Bergqvist. While on research leave, I wrote some of the book in Gorze, Lorraine, and my stay there was made possible by Florent Jakob and Marie Baudry. I am also indebted to Anna Marmodoro for invitations to discuss my work on tendency and inclination with the metaphysics of powers research group at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and to audiences at the universities of Essex, York, Liverpool, Liège, Toulouse, and Durham for their comments on papers concerning habit, Ravaisson, and nineteenthcentury French philosophy more generally.

Abbreviations I cite Ravaisson’s texts according to the following abbreviations in round brackets, with the page reference of the English translation, when available, following the French page reference after a forward slash. AD

CP

DMA

EMA EMAII J

MM

OH

OTD

PF

‘Rapport addressé à M. le ministre de l’Instruction publique et des cultes’, 28 December 1853, published in 1853 as De l’enseignement du dessin dans les lycées (Paris: Dupont); translated by M. Sinclair as ‘The Art of Drawing According to Leonardo da Vinci’ in Félix Ravaisson, Selected Essays, ed. M. Sinclair (London: Bloomsbury, 2016) 145–58. ‘La Philosophie contemporaine: Fragments de philosophie par M. Hamilton’, La Revue des deux mondes 1840, pp.397–427; translated as ‘Contemporary Philosophy’ by J. Dunham in Ravaisson, Selected Essays, 59–84. De la Métaphysique d’Aristote, manuscript. Long sections of this manuscript, with the original pagination in the margins, are published in R. Belay and C. Marin, De la nature à l’esprit (Paris: ENS Editions, 2001), 201–13. I refer to this 2001 pagination after a forward slash. Essai sur la Métaphysique d’Aristote (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1837). Essai sur la Métaphysique II (Paris: Joubert, 1946). ‘Fragments de Ravaisson’ in Dominique Janicaud, Ravaisson et la métaphysique: une généalogie du spiritualisme français (Paris: Vrin, 1997 [1969]), 236–68. ‘Métaphysique et morale’, Revue de métaphysique et morale 1, 1893, 6–25; translated as ‘Metaphysics and Morals’ by M. Sinclair in Ravaisson, Selected Essays, 279–94. De l’habitude/Of Habit in Ravaisson, Of Habit ed. C. Carlisle and M. Sinclair (London: Continuum, 2008). For the sake of economy, I cite the pagination of only the English translation in this bilingual edition of the text. ‘L’enseignement du dessin d’après M. F. Ravaisson’ in F. Buisson (ed.), Dictionnaire de pédagogie et d’instruction primaire I (Paris: Hachette, 671–84); translated by T. Viola and M. Sinclair as ‘On the Teaching of Drawing’ in Ravaisson, Selected Essays, 159–87. La Philosophie en France au XIXème siècle (Paris: Hachette, 1889, 3rd edn [1867]).

xii PP

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 ‘La Philosophie de Pascale’, La Revue des deux mondes 80 (1887) 399–428; translated as ‘Pascal’s Philosophy’ by M. Sinclair in Ravaisson, Selected Essays, 253–78. ‘Testament philosophique’ was first edited and published by Xavier Léon in Revue de métaphysique et de morale 9/1 (1901) 1–31; translated as ‘Philosophical Testament’ by J. Dunham and M. Sinclair in Ravaisson, Selected Essays, 295–336.

I also cite the work of Albert Lemoine as follows: HI

L’Habitude et l’instinct: études de psychologie comparée (Paris: Germer Baillière, 1875).

Introduction This is a book about the philosophy of habit elaborated by Félix Ravaisson, who was perhaps France’s most influential philosopher in the second half of the nineteenth century. Ravaisson’s 1838 Of Habit,¹ his doctoral dissertation, accounts for habit in a way that provides the basis for a philosophy of nature and a general metaphysics. Of Habit does this according to a strong sense of habit as tendency or inclination: an acquired habit as a principle of action is not merely a power to act or a skill in action, but rather gives, as the Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid had already argued in the preceding century, ‘inclination and impulse to action’.² According to this strong sense of habit, our actions are not just facilitated, but led and anticipated by a principle operating prior to voluntary decision. This book shows, however, that Ravaisson accounts for the nature of habit as inclination in an original way, and within a metaphysical framework quite different from those of his predecessors in the philosophical tradition. This philosophy of inclination, of being inclined, is of great import for contemporary philosophy, and for the contemporary metaphysics of powers in particular, as the book also shows. We commonly talk of being inclined to do something (‘I’m inclined to think . . . ’), or, using the nominal rather than adjectival form, of having an inclination to do that thing (‘My inclination was to . . . ’). But such talk is as opaque as it is familiar. The word derives from the Latin inclinare, which means to bend, turn or cause to lean, as when one bends a spoon or leans a plank of wood against a wall. Given that we cannot readily point to anything within ourselves that is leaning away from a vertical or horizontal line, it seems—a fortiori, if mind is irreducible to spatial bodies—that we can talk about our own inclinations or leanings only in a figurative sense. This metaphorical origin increases the difficulty of defining the term, a difficulty

¹ In order to avoid the repetition of either the preposition ‘of ’ or the word ‘habit’ in my sentences, I sometimes refer to the text by its original title: De l’habitude. ² Thomas Reid, Essays on the Active Powers of Man, ed. K. Haakonssen and J. Harris (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), III, iii, 3, p.88.

Being Inclined: Félix Ravaisson’s Philosophy of Habit. Mark Sinclair, Oxford University Press (2019). © Mark Sinclair. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198844587.001.0001

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apparent in the Oxford English Dictionary: an inclination is a ‘tendency or bent of the mind, will, or desires towards a particular thing’, a ‘disposition’ or ‘propensity’ to think and behave in certain ways. Inclination, thus, is in some sense teleological, since it is oriented towards an object or goal, but whether this principle affects the mind in general or the will or desires in particular is an open question. Moreover, rather than providing an intensional definition by specifying a genus according to differentia—in the manner in which a chair might be defined as a type of seating that has not only a base but a back—the entry resorts to a list of synonyms: an inclination is a tendency, bent, disposition, propensity. What, then, is an inclination if the word is at least partially synonymous with these other terms? What is it to be inclined? It might be assumed that inclination is merely a mechanical principle that is wholly opposed to a principle of freedom and autonomy. Such a supposition structures Immanuel Kant’s moral philosophy from top to bottom. For Kant opposes duty, together with the freedom and autonomy it presupposes, to inclination (Kant’s German term, commonly translated as ‘inclination’, is Neigung), which is, according to his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, a ‘habitual sensual desire’.³ Rather than ‘inclination’ serving to define a strong sense of habit, as in Reid, here habit serves to define inclination: an inclination is sensual desire acquired, like all habits, through experience, and that has something of the force of habit. In any case, given that habit, for Kant, is where ‘the animal in the human being jumps out far too much’ and where we ‘run the risk of falling into one and the same class with the beast’, inclination belongs to what is heteronomous, thoughtless, and ultimately mechanical in the human being.⁴ The force of habitual inclination may not be irresistible, since Kant distinguishes passion as a more or less irresistible mode of inclination from a more general sense of the term: ‘inclination that can be conquered only with difficulty or not all by the subject’s reason

³ Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, trans. and ed. Robert B. Louden in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant: Anthropology, History and Education (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), §73, p.352. ⁴ Kant, Anthropology, §12, p.261. See also Howard Caygill, ‘Inclination’ in A Kant Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995). and Adriana Cavarero, Inclinations: A Critique of Rectitude (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016), p.27. Cavarero’s rich and interesting work also departs from a Kantian position, but it does not pose the metaphysical question of how inclination is to be conceived if it is to be revalorized, and her broad claim that ‘philosophy, in general, does not appreciate inclination’ (p.1) pays no attention to the work of Ravaisson.

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is passion’.⁵ It nevertheless remains the case that inclination, for Kant, is a mindless, mechanical principle. Is there not, however, a sense in which inclinations, as the late Paul Hoffman asked in his 2011 ‘Reasons, Causes, Inclinations’,⁶ are irreducible to both ‘reasons’ and mechanical ‘causes’ in action? Concerning ‘reasons’, in the terms (deriving from the work of Donald Davidson) that constitute the ‘standard story’ within the contemporary philosophy of action, a primary reason for an action consists in the conjunction of a mental attitude, a ‘proattitude’ (e.g. wanting, desiring, or valuing something) with the belief that acting in a certain way promotes what the agent wants or values.⁷ It is difficult to equate being inclined with reasoning in this sense, given that inclination seems to operate independently of reflective awareness and explicit beliefs. If we do not want to admit unconscious beliefs into our psychology,⁸ then it seems that we have to accept that inclinations do not rationalize, i.e. do not provide reasons for, actions. However, if being inclined towards an action is quite different from the voluntary pursuit of a clearly posited goal, even if it is acquired as a result of the latter, do we have to accept that inclinations operate merely as mechanical, efficient causes, such that the resulting event would no longer be the voluntary pursuit of a goal, and thus no longer, strictly speaking, an action at all? Thus understood, inclination would not be a principle of action, but a principle of non-agential events and causal processes. But do we have to accept this and the dualist philosophy that it presupposes, a philosophy that pits freedom against our animality? Ravaisson’s thesis in Of Habit is that inclination is irreducible to either reasons or mechanical causation. The thesis is not merely one among many in his work, for it has a fundamental significance in his philosophical anthropology; inclination as irreducible to reasons or mechanical causes lies, he argues, at the root of the will, and at the origin of all action. Moreover, the thesis transcends the domain of psychology in a narrow sense and acquires a general metaphysical significance: all dispositions, capacities, or powers, he holds, are to some degree a function of inclination or tendency ⁵ Kant, Anthropology, §73, p.353. ⁶ Paul Hoffman, ‘Reasons, Causes and Inclinations’ in Emotion and Cognitive Life in Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy, ed. M. Pickavé and L. Shapiro (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 156–75. ⁷ Donald Davidson, ‘Actions, Reasons, and Causes’, Journal of Philosophy 60/23 (1963) 685–700. For Davidson’s approach as the standard story, see David Velleman, ‘What Happens when Someone Acts?’, Mind 403 (1992) 461–81. ⁸ I argue that we should not in Chapter 1 below.

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(which, as we will see, he takes to be, if not identical to, then at least continuous with inclination). And since, as he also holds, nothing in the world exists without dispositions or capacities, nothing exists without being inclined. To be, on this account, is to be inclined. Rather than simply having an account of inclination as a specific response to a narrowly circumscribed question, Ravaisson’s philosophy as a whole is, taking the genitive as an objective genitive (genitivus objectivus), a philosophy of inclination, one that understands inclination as irreducible to reasons and any form of efficient, mechanical causation. This book addresses Ravaisson’s philosophy as a philosophy of inclination. It develops, philosophically and historically, Hoffman’s attempt to determine whether there exists ‘a middle ground between reasons and causes by which our behaviour or our choices might be influenced’, and to discover an ‘intelligible notion of inclining that is intermediate between providing a reason and being a mechanical cause’. The book extends the historical range of Hoffman’s concern to ‘gain a better grip on medieval and early modern notions of how our will can be inclined, disposed or incited’.⁹ The result of Hoffman’s initial scoping of the history of medieval and early modern philosophy is that a strong, consistent idea of inclination as irreducible to reasons or mechanical causation is not to be found where ideas of inclinatio are prominent, most notably in the work of Aquinas and Leibniz. This is a controversial claim particularly in relation to Leibniz—who sloganizes concerning ‘inclination without necessitation’—but this book argues

⁹ Both quotations: Hoffman, ‘Reasons, Causes and Inclinations’, p.158. Hoffman does not mention Ravaisson, and, oddly, consider habits and inclinations to be different things: we should not think of inclinations, as the term is used by these philosophers, to be dispositions or habits to act in a certain way. That is, they are not like being soluble or like being a smoker. Instead we should think of them as incipient actions or movements that will attain a certain outcome unless something intervenes. (ibid., p.161) Inclinations, Hoffman seems to argue, attain their manifestation unless something stops them doing so, whereas dispositions or habits require the presence of something else in order to be realized; salt requires a liquid in which to dissolve, the smoker cigarettes to smoke. But the example of smoking clearly undermines the distinction proposed between inclination and habit: the smoker’s tendency to smoke—as any smoker knows—is quite different from the solubility of salt in that, when cigarettes are available, it will attain a certain outcome, namely smoking, unless something intervenes, namely the will. Being a smoker, even when one is not smoking, is to live according to a kind of incipient action, by a tendency or inclination to smoke. In contrast, although we can say—in the rarefied terms of the contemporary metaphysics of powers—that salt is ‘disposed to’ dissolve in water, it seems reasonable to assume that it has no drive or need to be dissolved in it.

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that a compelling and original idea of non-mechanical inclination is advanced by Ravaisson in the nineteenth century. Ravaisson more resolutely holds to the idea that inclination is irreducible to both reasons and mechanical causation, and although his approach is not without its own hesitations and obscurities, what he does say on this issue is, I argue, at the very least worthy of comparison to the work of his better-known forebears. The present study aims to develop the growing body of work on Ravaisson in English,¹⁰ and to contribute to the growing appreciation of nineteenth-century French philosophy,¹¹ but at the same time it appeals to his work in order to respond to contemporary philosophical questions. The book highlights the relevance of Ravaisson’s thinking for attempts to account for habit within the philosophy of action, and for notions of embodiment that challenge traditional dualist oppositions of mind and world. Most directly, it addresses the accounts of tendency and inclination that have gained ground in theories of causation and the metaphysics of powers. Causes only tend towards their effects, rather than necessitating them, as several recent theorists of causation have argued. Moreover, contemporary authors have attempted to explain tendency theories of causation according to a tendency theory of powers: powers or dispositions only tend towards their typical manifestations rather than necessitating them, and this is why causes only tend towards their effects. Ravaisson’s own account of inclination and tendency in habit as ‘a disposition, a virtue’ (OH 25) can, I argue, serve to illuminate and develop these positions in contemporary metaphysics, just as they can shed light on his philosophy. But before outlining this aspect of the project in more detail, it is necessary to situate briefly Ravaisson’s life and works within the French philosophical tradition.

¹⁰ See, for example, Clare Carlisle, ‘Between Freedom and Necessity: Félix Ravaisson on Habit and the Moral Life’, Inquiry 43/2 (2010) 123–45; Leandro M. Gaitán and Javier S. Castrasana, ‘On Habit and the Mind-Body Problem. The View of Félix Ravaisson’, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 2014, https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2014.00684; Tullio Viola, ‘The Serpentine Life of Félix Ravaisson: Art, Drawing, Scholarship and Philosophy’ in Et in imagine ego: Facetten von Bildakt und Verkörperung, ed. U. Feist and M. Rath (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2012) 155–74; Jeremy Dunham, ‘From Habit to Monads: Félix Ravaisson’s Theory of Substance’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy 23/6 (2015) 1085–105. ¹¹ Note that German (Die Gewohnheit (Cologne: August, 2016) and Italian (L’abitudine, Turin: Ananke, 2009) translations of Ravaisson’s De l’habitude have appeared in the last decade, and a volume of Maine de Biran’s work has also recently appeared in English: Pierre Maine de Biran, The Relationship between the Physical and the Moral in Man, ed. D. Meacham and J. Spadola (London: Bloomsbury, 2016).

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Ravaisson’s Life and Works Ravaisson—whose full name became Jean-Gaspard-Félix Laché RavaissonMollien¹²—is ‘a thinker who has not, at least in the English-speaking world, enjoyed the fame which his enormous philosophical influence deserves’,¹³ but the main reason for this is that his influence was a function of his official positions within the national education system and was disproportionate to the relatively little that he published in philosophy. Ravaisson was not a prolific philosophical writer, at least not after the early years of his career in the 1830s. His complete major works number no more than three, but as Arthur Lovejoy wrote in Mind in 1913, they were all regarded as ‘masterpieces’¹⁴ in France. These are his two volume (1837 and 1846) Essai sur la Métaphysique d’Aristote, his primary doctoral thesis in 1838 De l’habitude, and La Philosophie en France au XIXèmesiècle, a report on French thought commissioned as part of a Ministry of Public Instruction series on the progress of the arts and the sciences for the 1867 Paris Exposition Universelle. These are his principal philosophical texts, but his early writings also include his 1838 secondary dissertation in Latin on Speusippus,¹⁵ an 1840 survey of the European philosophical scene entitled ‘Contemporary Philosophy’,¹⁶ as well as the 1856 ‘Essay on Stoicism’ that rehearses the second volume of his Essai sur la Métaphysique d’Aristote. Later in his long career there is an 1887 essay on ‘Pascal’s Philosophy’, the 1893 ‘Metaphysics and Morals’ written as the inaugural article in the Revue de métaphysique et ¹² For a longer account of Ravaisson’s life and work in English, see my introduction to Félix Ravaisson, Selected Essays (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 1–29. For the best source on Ravaisson’s life in French, see Louis Léger, ‘Notice sur la vie et les travaux de M. Ravaisson-Mollien’ in Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académie des Inscriptions et de Belles-Lettres 45 (1901) 327–72. ¹³ Newton P. Stallknecht, Studies in the Philosophy of Creation with Especial Reference to Bergson and Whitehead (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1934), p.40. See also, L. Susan Stebbing, Pragmatism and French Voluntarism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914), p.24: ‘although by no means a prolific writer and little known outside France’, Ravaisson ‘has nevertheless exerted a profound influence on the current of French philosophy which, as he foretold, is setting in the direction of a spiritualist dynamism’. ¹⁴ Arthur Lovejoy, ‘Some Antecedents of the Philosophy of Bergson: The Conception of “Real Duration” ’, Mind XXII (1913) 465–83, p.468. ¹⁵ Ravaisson, ‘Speusippi de Primis Rerum Principiis Placita Qualia Fuisse Videantur ex Aristotele’ (Paris: 1838). On this secondary thesis and its relation to Ravaisson’s work on Aristotle, see Dopp, Félix Ravaisson, pp.221–4, and Alain Petit, ‘Le Symptôme Speusippe: le spectre de l’émanatisme dans la pensée métaphysique de Ravaisson’, Cahiers Philosophiques 129/2 (2012) 57–65. ¹⁶ This text, and all of the remaining texts mentioned in this paragraph, are available in Félix Ravaisson, Selected Essays.

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de morale, and his Testament philosophique, an attempt to draw together a metaphysics, aesthetics and ethics, which lay unfinished on Ravaisson’s desk when he died at the turn of the twentieth century. In addition to the Testament, Ravaisson left a great number of notes and other manuscripts, which are currently being catalogued at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.¹⁷ Ravaisson’s philosophical career divides into two distinct periods. The first spans the opening years of his philosophical activity until 1840, a period in which he had secured all the honours necessary to establish a successful university career. In 1834 he was the remarkably young laureate of a competition organized by the Académie des sciences morales et politiques on Aristotle’s Metaphysics and its historical reception, with a dissertation— De la Métaphysique d’Aristote—that he would later publish in a revised and expanded form as Essai sur la Métaphysique d’Aristote. In 1836 he won first place in the agrégation, the competitive examination for positions in the national education system. In 1838, at the age of 25, he gained his doctorate, with an obviously brilliant thesis that nevertheless met opposition due to its condensed aphoristic style and to its distance from the orthodoxy of Victor Cousin’s ‘eclectic’ philosophy.¹⁸ Soon after this, Ravaisson declined a position at the University of Rennes, and he would never teach philosophy in the state system. This decision was possibly motivated by horror of the provinces, and by ‘preferring a life more worldly, more elevated, more brilliant, far from the near impoverishment of professors’.¹⁹ That Rennes was the only academic post open to him, however, is a sign that his relations had soured with Cousin, who dominated the discipline of philosophy that he

¹⁷ This work is being undertaken within the framework of a new edition of Ravaisson’s Œuvres philosophiques to be published by Hermann, Paris. ¹⁸ Ernest Bersot, then a student at the École Normale, later wrote this about the thesis defence: Ravaisson, nourished early on by Aristotle and endowed with a mind strong enough to penetrate the concision of this great genius, was tempted to imitate this concision and wrote a doctoral thesis, Of Habit, in the manner of the master. This thesis . . . much troubled the judges and I can still remember Jouffroy’s profound consternation and the vivacity with which he protested against this novelty. But the thesis was remarkable, remarkably defended; Ravaisson obtained his doctorate, his text provoked curiosity outside, and many desired to obtain the key to this language; many, in turn, wanted to use it. (Cited in Patrice Vermeren, ‘Ravaisson en son temps et en sa thèse’, Les Études Philosophiques, 1 (1993) 65–86, p.71) ¹⁹ Jacques Billard, ‘Introduction’, in De l’habitude: Métaphysique et morale (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France), 1–103, p.14.

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had done so much to establish in the French education system.²⁰ Already in 1837 Ravaisson was seen to be one of Cousin’s ‘victims’.²¹ In 1838 Ravaisson became principle private secretary to the Minister of Public Instruction, who was one of Cousin’s political enemies. Later, Ravaisson occupied highranking positions within the ministry, such as Inspecteur général des bibliothèques, a newly created position which involved cataloguing the holdings of exceptional interest in libraries throughout France, and Inspecteur général de l’éducation supérieure. Ravaisson, then, was not just a philosopher and classicist, but an archivist and educational administrator. He was also a painter—who exhibited at the Paris Salon under the name Laché—with a lifelong interest in the pedagogy of drawing. His proposals in this connection, proposals which resisted the encroachments of ‘technical drawing’, were enacted in the 1850s under the Second Empire.²² Even though he had no formal archaeological training, the wealth and peculiar combination of his interests led to his nomination in 1870, only weeks before Prussian troops laid siege to Paris, as Curator of Classical Antiquities at the Louvre. In this role, he made an important contribution to the conservation and curation of the Venus de Milo, about which he wrote two long essays.²³ These essays, like much of his other work in archaeology and the history of religions, are not erudite excursions from his philosophical concerns, but are rather an expression of the philosophy that he had first presented in the 1830s.²⁴ The second period of Ravaisson’s philosophical career begins in 1863 with his nomination—which was unusual given that he had not taught²⁵— as president of the jury of the agrégation in philosophy when it was reinstated after having been suppressed earlier in the Second Empire. This

²⁰ On Cousin—who, though king of philosophy in France, was more of a rhetorician than a philosopher king—see Patrice Vermeren, Victor Cousin: le jeu de la philosophie et de l’état (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1995). ²¹ Mme Poret, wife of the philosopher Hector Poret, who had introduced Ravaisson to philosophy at the Collège Rollin, wrote to her husband in 1837: ‘Your Cousin is the greatest acrobat I’ve ever known. Poor Ravaisson has now also become one of his victims. Fortunately, he already knew him well enough so as not to be surprised by his caprices’; cited in Vermeren, ‘Ravaisson en son temps et en sa thèse’, p.85. ²² On Ravaisson’s struggle against more utilitarian conceptions of the teaching of drawing, see J. Canales, ‘Movement before Cinematography: The High-Speed Qualities of Sentiment’, Journal of Visual Culture 5/3 (2006) 275–94. ²³ For a lively account of Ravaisson’s role in the curation of the Venus de Milo, see Gregory Curtis, Disarmed: The Story of the Venus de Milo (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2003), and for Ravaisson’s later essay on the Venus de Milo, see Selected Essays, pp.189–228. ²⁴ On this point, see the ‘Introduction’ to Ravaisson, Selected Essays, p.23. ²⁵ See Louis Léger, ‘Notice sur la vie et les travaux de M. Ravaisson-Mollien’, p.357.

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was (and still is) a position of considerable influence, since the president selects the topics and the successful candidates in the examination. It was by means of this position that Ravaisson was able to promote his vision of a ‘spiritualist’ philosophy to a generation of students. Year after year—as Bergson remarks in the admirable (but sometimes unreliable) 1904 speech he delivered when replacing Ravaisson at the Académie des sciences morales et politiques²⁶—students studied closely his 1867 report, La Philosophie en France au XIXème siècle, in order to pass the agrégation. A rough idea of the philosophy that Ravaisson promulgated in the text can be gained from its final paragraph: If the genius of France has not changed, there will be nothing more natural for her than the triumph of the high doctrine that teaches that matter is only the last degree and, so to speak, the shadow of existence, over systems that reduce everything to material elements and to a blind mechanism; which teaches that real existence, of which everything else is only an imperfect sketch, is that of spirit [l’esprit]; that, in truth, to be is to live, and to live is to think and to will; that nothing occurs without persuasion; that the good and beauty alone explain the universe and its author; that the infinite and the absolute . . . consist in spiritual freedom; that freedom is thus the last word on things, and that, beneath the disorder and antagonisms which trouble the surface where phenomena occur, in the essential and eternal truth, everything is grace, love and harmony. (PF 282–3)

Ravaisson named the doctrine he proclaims here a ‘spiritualist realism’, since traditional ‘idealism’, he claims, like materialism, succumbs to abstractions, and passes over the real activity of mind that is being in the highest sense and that constitutes the essence of all things. He also named this panpsychic position (‘to be is to live, and to live is to think and will’) a ‘spiritualist positivism’ in attempting to reclaim the idea of a positive philosophy from August Comte.²⁷ Ravaisson clearly hoped that his views would be developed by others, and in the following decades the work of the leading French

²⁶ I cite Bergson’s works according to the pagination of the original editions presented in the margins of Œuvres (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1959). ‘La Vie et l’œuvre de Ravaisson’ in La Pensée et le mouvant (1934), 253–91, p.267; tr. M. Andison, The Creative Mind (New York: The Wisdom Library, 1946), p.275. ²⁷ Even Comte himself, as Ravaisson argues, had come to see that life cannot be explained by the laws of the inorganic realm and thus that what is higher cannot be explained by what is lower; see PF 243.

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philosophers he had in many ways influenced and inspired—including Jules Lachelier, Émile Boutroux, and Maurice Blondel, as well as Henri Bergson—came to show, as the great historian of French philosophy Henri Gouhier put it, ‘how far and correctly Ravaisson saw’ with regard to the future of French thinking.²⁸ Ravaisson has the distinction, in fact, of having founded a school. Nineteenth-century French spiritualism predates him, and begins in the work of Pierre Maine de Biran, from whom he learnt much; but within that spiritualist tradition Ravaisson’s work gives rise to the ‘school of contingency’. Jules Lachelier’s 1871 doctoral thesis Du fondement de l’induction (dedicated to Ravaisson); Emile Boutroux’s 1874 doctoral thesis De la contingence des lois de la nature (also dedicated to Ravaisson); and Henri Bergson’s 1888 doctoral thesis Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (dedicated not to Ravaisson but to Lachelier) are all concerned, in different ways, with ideas of contingency.²⁹ If in modal doctrines ‘contingency’ in the most general sense names the state of that which exists without having to exist (I exist right now, but I might not tomorrow, and I probably will not exist in 2070), in the ‘school of contingency’ it takes on a more specific sense: contingency is here contrasted with ideas of causal necessity and determinism. As Bergson put in in his recently published lecture 1904–5 course at the Collège de France: What could contingency be, supposing that it exists and is conceivable? To believe in contingency is to believe that the future . . . is not absolutely determined by the present; it is to suppose that what is going to happen in a moment does not derive necessarily from what exists right now. To believe in contingency is to believe that in given circumstances, in determinate conditions, many events are possible. To believe in contingency, is to admit that what a given person at a given moment with, for example, determinate motives and motivations in a determinate situation, and also with a determinate character, is going to do is not absolutely determinate.³⁰

²⁸ Henri Gouhier, ‘Introduction’ in Maine de Biran, Œuvres choisies (Paris: Aubier, 1942), p.22. ²⁹ One might also include Alfred Fouillé’s La Liberté et le déterminisme (Paris: Ladrange, 1872) as formative in French ‘contingency theory’. ³⁰ Henri Bergson, L’Évolution du problème de la liberté: cours au Collège de France 1904–05 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2017), p.99.

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The idea of contingency was advanced by the French contingency theorists in order to account for human freedom, but not as a principle of absolute spontaneity or chance that stands opposed to a principle of necessity. Contingency is rather a certain flexibility or elasticity in causal processes that do not necessitate. The French contingency theorists attempt to find this principle of elasticity not only in the mind, but also in biological processes and even in the laws governing the inorganic realm.³¹ In this way they attempt to render intelligible how a principle of human freedom can be instantiated in the physical world. The school of contingency, as Pascal Engel has put it, thus addresses ‘very classical questions’ in the context of post-Kantian philosophy but ‘what is distinctive’ about it ‘are the particular answers that French philosophers gave to this question’.³² Ravaisson’s answer relies, as I will show, on his philosophy of inclination and tendency, and on his claim that we have direct experience of inclination as a sort of contingent force, as a force of contingency, that is irreducible to mechanical necessity, and which is already at work, in varying degrees, throughout nature as a whole. This is not to deny that in Of Habit Ravaisson appeals to an idea of necessity, a ‘necessity of attraction and desire’ that is contrasted with mechanical necessity. However, since he conceives of it as a matter of degree— habits increasingly become a function of necessity, and life as it develops increasingly escapes the clutches of necessity—this form of necessity, I argue, is no real necessity at all, but a way of speaking of a form of ‘contingency’. It is in this light that Ravaisson’s official but problematic promotion of a generalized, Leibnizian notion of moral necessity in 1867 should be understood. A generalized notion of moral necessity in all action would be incompatible with Ravaisson’s earlier account of the specificity of habitual action, and it is from the perspective of the earlier text that we have to understand his ambiguous claim in 1867 that moral necessity does not exclude contingency and freedom. Once we study the detail and the development of Ravaisson’s philosophy, it is not, pace Fabien Capeillières in an important study of the work of Émile Boutroux, ‘inappropriate’ to call ‘Ravaisson’s doctrine a ³¹ These ideas were influential outside France, and they seem to make one of their most notable reappearances in the metaphysics of Charles S. Peirce, even though it is not clear exactly what he had read of his French forebears. On this issue, see Claudine Tiercelin, ‘Peirce’s Objective Idealism: A Defense’, Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 34/1 (1998) 1–28, p.17. ³² Pascal Engel, ‘Plenitude and Contingency: Modal Concepts in Nineteenth Century French Philosophy’ in Modern Modalities: Studies of the History of Modal Theories from Medieval Nominalism to Logical Positivism (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1988), 179–238, p.180.

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“philosophy of contingency”’.³³ Boutroux develops Ravaisson’s ideas, certainly, but on the question of contingency, as I will show, he remains faithful to the spirit, if not wholly to the letter, of his teacher’s work.

Of Habit’s Structure Before offering some methodological remarks and detailing the plan of the present book, it is important to describe here the nature and structure of Ravaisson’s Of Habit as a whole. It is a short, dense text which looks more like an ancient philosophical poem than a doctoral thesis. It begins with six dense, lapidary paragraphs offering a preliminary characterization and definition of habit. The fundamental claim of these passages is that if ‘habit, in the widest sense, is a general and permanent way of being, the state of an existence considered either as the unity of its elements or as the succession of its different phases’, then in a narrower, more proper sense, it is ‘not merely a state, but a disposition, a virtue’ (OH 25). In a narrower sense, that is, habit is a power of reproduction as well as conservation; an acquired habit does not merely record past change, but is an active bearing towards future change. In the terms that Ravaisson will introduce later in the text, habit is a function of tendency or inclination, ‘a tendency, an inclination’ (OH 51) to repeat—in the case of habits of action—an act already performed. The topic of Ravaisson’s dissertation is not only acquired habits but also the capacity to acquire them. Aristotle’s example of the stone thrown in the air a thousand times which does not acquire the habit of rising shows that the acquisition of habit ‘supposes a change in the disposition, in the potential, in the internal virtue of that in which the change occurs’ (OH 25). The acquisition of habit depends not just on repetition but also on a disposition, virtue, or power. In this respect, Ravaisson’s approach is fundamentally Aristotelian, and these opening remarks develop his 1837 presentation in Essai sur la Métaphysique d’Aristote of Aristotle’s account of hexis (EMA 449–50): hexis is a virtue or power that is both the condition of and developed by repeated acts, by ethos.³⁴

³³ See Fabien Capeillières, ‘To Reach for Metaphysics: Émile Boutroux’s Philosophy of Science’ in Neo-Kantianism in Contemporary Philosophy, ed. R. Makreel and S. Luft (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2010), p.207. ³⁴ I return to this reading of Aristotle in Chapter 3 below.

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Ravaisson placed these opening paragraphs in Part I, but they do not really belong within it, and they rather stand as an introduction to the text as a whole, just as, to borrow Joseph Dopp’s splendid analogy,³⁵ the portico protrudes from a Greek temple. Part I proper—which, to continue the analogy, is like the side passage, the pteroma, between the outer colonnade and the inner chamber of the temple—consists of four numbered sections, and traces the degrees to which habit emerges in nature as a whole, in and across the inorganic, vegetal, and animal realms. This part moves from the inorganic realm on which habit apparently has no purchase to the animal realm, where, Ravaisson argues, it affects all the basic functions of life. In this way, Part I leads towards the inner chamber of the temple, the cella, whose mysteries are exposed in Part II. For, in concluding Part I, Ravaisson notes that its philosophical task consisted only in recording the results or the effects of the power that is habit, since only these effects, and not the power itself, are accessible to us in the objects of experience; ‘[w]e see only the exteriority of the actuality of things; we do not see their dispositions or powers’ (OH 39). Dispositional properties, Ravaisson seems to say, are irreducible to categorical properties, and whereas we can immediately apprehend the latter through the senses, we have no direct epistemological access to the former in things, living or dead. But we have, Ravaisson also claims, direct access to the power of habit in consciousness. In the same concluding passage of Part I, the project of Part II is announced thus: ‘it is only in consciousness [conscience] that we can aspire not just to establish’ the ‘apparent law’ of habit ‘but to learn its how and its why, to illuminate its generation and, finally, to understand its cause’ (OH 39). The aim is to gain knowledge not just of the fact that habit operates, but of how, or, better, why it does; the aim—although this may not be the best formulation of Ravaisson’s position³⁶—is to describe the power of habit as a cause that gives rise to visible effects. According to this structure, Of Habit, we might say, addresses the effects of habit in nature before it elucidates the nature of habit; but everything it says about the latter is supposed to confirm and even justify what it says about the former. As Gabriel Madinier put it, ‘the subjective analysis’ of habit in Part II, after the ‘objective analysis’ in Part I, ‘necessarily begins at the point where an inside has to be posited in order to account for the

³⁵ Joseph Dopp, Félix Ravaisson: la formation de sa pensée d’après des documents inédits (Louvain: Éditions de l’Institut Supérieur de Philosophie, 1933) p.225. ³⁶ The conclusion of Chapter 4, below, returns to this issue.

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outside’.³⁷ But if the subjective analysis begins where the objective analysis ends, that subjective analysis also ends where the objective analysis begins. For in concluding the work, Ravaisson attempts to draw back his interpretation of the nature of habit as tendency or inclination to a Leibnizian interpretation of the law of inertia according to an idea of tendency, of a tendency to persist. This move, as I show, allows Ravaisson to offer by means of a method of analogy a unified philosophy of nature as a whole rather than just an account of living beings subject to the power of habit.³⁸

Methodological Remarks A sizable body of secondary literature on Ravaisson exists in French, including several monographs, collected volumes, and special editions of journals. The two most important monographs, which both contain previously unpublished notes from Ravaisson’s manuscripts, are those of Joseph Dopp and Dominique Janicaud. Dopp’s 1933 Félix Ravaisson: la formation de sa pensée d’après des documents inédits offers a genetic account of Ravaisson thinking in its development up to the 1840s. In contrast, Janicaud’s Ravaisson et la métaphysique: une généalogie du spiritualisme français focuses on Bergson’s reception of Ravaisson’s ideas, and thus on the development of those ideas in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The present study is indebted to both Dopp’s and Janicaud’s work, but, given that it is interested in the fate of Ravaisson’s thinking, it overlaps more with the latter. Its original contribution, however, rests on its taking as its guiding thread Ravaisson’s notion of inclination, and it is with this guiding thread that the book offers new perspectives on his work and its reception.³⁹ Jean Cazeneuve’s La Philosophie médicale de Ravaisson (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1958) is an important historical study of Ravaisson’s synthesis of the animist and vitalist philosophies of Jean-Baptiste van Helmont, Georg Ernst Stahl, Paul Joseph Barthez, and Xavier Bichat, and was crucial for Chapters 1 and 3 in particular of this study. In its attempt to highlight the contemporary relevance of Ravaisson’s thinking, my approach is comparable to that of François Laruelle in his little-read but remarkable ³⁷ Gabriel Madinier, Conscience et mouvement (Paris: Alcan, 1838), p.272. ³⁸ I address this issue in Chapter 2 in particular. ³⁹ The Bergson scholar Jean-Louis Vieillard-Baron replied to a recent paper I presented by exclaiming: ‘il faut reconstruire toute l’œuvre de Ravaisson selon cette idée d’inclination’. This book is precisely such an attempt.

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doctoral thesis Phénomène et différence: essai sur l’ontologie de Ravaisson (Paris: Klincksieck, 1971). In the context of French post-structuralist philosophy in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and in response to the work of Heidegger in particular, Laruelle’s ‘free essay’ and ‘reinterpretation’ returns to Ravaisson’s ideas in order to discover an avant-garde philosophy of being as difference within them.⁴⁰ Despite an apparent ‘vapidity [fadeur]’ in its form, despite ‘its unbearable and so unmodern mildness’, Ravaisson advances, argues Laruelle, a philosophy from which contemporary thought has much to learn. This is true, but my concern for inclination, for being inclined, is not reducible to Laruelle’s concern for an idea of difference as prior to any notion of identity, even though my approach, just as much as his, brings the autonomy of the modern self or subject into question.⁴¹ At the beginning of the twentieth century there appeared well-informed English-language surveys—by, most notably, Arthur Lovejoy, L. Susan Stebbing, and J. Alexander Gunn⁴²—of nineteenth-century French philosophy. Ravaisson features prominently in these surveys, but the decline of Bergson’s philosophical ‘glory’⁴³ meant that the ‘spiritualist’ tradition he developed fell into obscurity. Subsequently, Ravaisson’s philosophy has often been characterized, following Stebbing,⁴⁴ as a kind of synthesis of Maine de Biran’s voluntarist psychology with Schelling’s philosophy of nature and philosophy of the absolute. This is not false, but it is no less crude for that, and any list of Ravaisson’s main philosophical influences has to include Aristotle and Leibniz also. Ravaisson begins as an Aristotelian much impressed by Leibniz’s dynamics and the metaphysical framework of Schelling’s philosophy at the turn of the nineteenth century, and in De l’habitude his position has developed by means of a critical engagement ⁴⁰ Laruelle, Phénomène et différence, p.11 and p.9 respectively. Laruelle advances a ‘critique of transcendental ontology by means of a conception of expression and difference’ (p.11). ⁴¹ Without referring to either Ravaisson or Laruelle, Cavarero (Inclinations, p.11) makes a similar contrast between an account of inclination and a philosophy of difference: In fact, even today, despite the apparent decline of the post-modern, one must resist the temptation to break the subject down into fragments, turning its pretense of unity into a feast of difference. Instead of continuing to fragment the subject, one could try . . . to incline it. Instead of breaking its vertical axis into multiple pieces, one could try bending it, giving it a different posture ⁴² Arthur Lovejoy, ‘Some Antecedents of the Philosophy of Bergson: The Conception of “Real Duration” ’, Mind XXII (1913) 465–83; and J. Alexander Gunn, Modern French Philosophy: A Study of the Development since Comte (London: Fisher & Unwin, 1922). ⁴³ On Bergson’s rise and fall, see François Azouvi, La Gloire de Bergson (Paris: Gallimard, 2007) and Giuseppe Bianco, Après Bergson: portrait de groupe avec philosophe (Paris: PUF, 2015). ⁴⁴ See Stebbing, Pragmatism and French Voluntarism, p.23.

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with the work of Maine de Biran. In the course of this study, we will return to all of these philosophers to determine how Ravaisson has responded to them, but I argue that the originality of his philosophy rests on his notion of inclination and tendency that is, in the end, irreducible to any of his principal philosophical sources. This is precisely why his work merits a monograph in English of its own. Ravaisson’s work is neither an uncreative synthesis of existing positions nor solely of interest as a source of Bergson’s philosophy.⁴⁵ Here, again, Laruelle sees clearly, even though his account of Ravaisson’s central intuition differs from the one presented in this study: ‘Ravaisson’s thinking, understood from its own perspectives, is rigorously original and, as to its central intuition, cannot be explained by the authors whose traces are to be found in his text.’⁴⁶ Ravaisson’s own philosophy of inclination, I argue, cannot be explained by and goes beyond the authors whose ideas he develops. In order to grasp the originality of Ravaisson’s position, the present book situates his work in relation to the French tradition of philosophical reflection on habit in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Ravaisson develops Biran’s 1802 prizewinning dissertation at the Académie des sciences morales et politiques, The Influence of Habit on the Faculty of Thinking,⁴⁷ and later in the century habit became the ground on which competing philosophical schools did battle. After a hiatus of several decades, Ravaisson’s metaphysics of habit was followed by Albert Lemoine’s posthumous 1875 L’Habitude et l’instinct: études de psychologie comparée, which, as will see, is critical of what it takes to be the excesses of Ravaisson’s spiritualist position; by Léon Dumont’s mechanistic and proto-behaviourist reaction in ‘De l’habitude’ a year later; by Victor Egger’s 1880 ‘La Naissance des habitudes’, which celebrates and develops the approach of Lemoine, whose 1875 text he had edited; by Bergson’s mechanistic conception of habit in the second chapter of Matter and Memory (1896); by Jacques Chevalier’s 1929 L’Habitude: essai de métaphysique scientifique, whose rich scientific documentation does not preclude a return to a more metaphysical and Ravaissonian treatment of habit; and then by the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Paul Ricoeur, French phenomenologists concerned with the lived body (le corps propre) as ⁴⁵ As even a French philosopher of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s acuity seems to have thought. On this point, see Janicaud, Ravaisson et la métaphysique, p.11. ⁴⁶ Laruelle, Phenomène et différence, p.15. ⁴⁷ Pierre, Maine de Biran, Influence de l’habitude sur la faculté de penser, ed. G. RomeyerDherbey (Paris: Vrin, 1987); partially translated as The Influence of Habit on the Faculty of Thinking, trans. Margaret Donaldson Boehm (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1970).

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irreducible to the body as physiological and scientific object. At issue within the work of all of these authors is whether habit can be understood as a third-person, objective principle, and whether it can be explained mechanically, purely in terms of efficient causation. This French tradition of reflection on habit involves not just the philosophy of mind, but also the ‘philosophy of body’, and, by extension, a philosophy of nature as a whole. It can even be said, following Gerhard Funke in his magisterial 600-page volume of the Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte in 1961 on Gewohnheit, that the variety of texts on ‘the problem of habit’ in France in the nineteenth century expresses ‘a concern for a deeper general conception of actuality [vertiefte allgemeine Wirklichkeitserfassung]’.⁴⁸ At issue within this tradition, Funke suggests, is the very meaning of actuality or existence itself. This observation is particularly apposite in Ravaisson’s case, for his reflection on habit as inclination is, as will become clear, a reflection not just on beings, but on being, which is somehow different from beings, even though it is common to them all. To be, for Ravaisson, is to be inclined; and this account of being must have been one of the reasons why, in the following century and on the other side of the Rhine, another thinker much concerned with revealing the still-hidden originality of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, namely Martin Heidegger, held Ravaisson in particularly high esteem. It is in this sense, in any case, that this book is concerned with not just with Ravaisson’s phenomenology of habit, and, that is to say, with his account of the experiential features of acquired habits, but also with his metaphysics of habit, by which I mean his explanation of those features in non-physical and non-physiological terms. Ravaisson’s philosophy of inclination accounts for the experiential features of habit in terms of force, activity, and, ultimately, according to a notion of being. Three further methodological remarks are necessary here. First, the book does not pretend to offer a complete assessment of Ravaisson’s thinking throughout his career. It focuses on what it takes to be the most fundamental concept in Ravaisson’s metaphysics, namely inclination, and examines the published texts and unpublished notes, both early and late, that illuminate it. This focus means that the book does not address how this philosophy of inclination informs Ravaisson’s philosophy of art, and I reserve this question for another study.

⁴⁸ Gerhard Funke, Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte: Bausteine zu einem historischen Wörterbuch der Philosophie (Bonn: Bouvier, 1961), p.11.

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Second, although in its particular chapters the book is sensitive to the development of Ravaisson’s ideas, as a whole it does not adopt a purely chronological approach to his thinking. The most obvious sign of this is that the book does not address first the interpretation of Aristotle that Ravaisson worked out in the mid-1830s before directly addressing philosophical questions in his own terms in Of Habit. Instead, at several points, the book returns to Ravaisson’s work on Aristotle (the second volume of which was published only in 1846) in order to determine what might be Aristotelian in his own philosophy of habit and inclination. Third, the aim to assess Ravaisson’s philosophy of inclination in the light of contemporary debates in metaphysics carries certain risks. It risks that a proper appreciation of his ideas in their nineteenth-century French situation suffer at the hands of an all too contemporary appropriation, one that mines texts for interesting ideas and arguments, but that is blinkered by its own historical situation. Yet, if it is true that ‘contextualism’ and ‘appropriationism’ are two competing approaches in Anglophone history of philosophy, this book does not have to choose between them, and, to an extent, requires both.⁴⁹ The approach of this study is contextualist, since the brevity and elliptical style of De l’habitude entail that Ravaisson’s philosophy of inclination, which knowingly but often cryptically develops the work of previous thinkers, has to be historically and contextually elucidated in order to be understood in its specificity. Moreover, Ravaisson’s ideas concerning habit have to be distinguished carefully from those of his successors, and from the influential but misleading interpretations of De l’habitude advanced by later thinkers. The present study is not, for all that, purely contextualist, an instance of antiquarian history for its own sake, since it also seeks to appropriate Ravaisson’s ideas in relation to present-day concerns. The approach of the book, then, is at once contextualist and appropriationist, but in combining both its method is most fundamentally ‘hermeneutic’, if we take that label to name approaches in the history of philosophy that recognize that philosophy advances, and can only advance, by means of a living dialogue with the past. From this hermeneutic perspective, the dichotomy of contextualism and appropriationism appears, in the end, as ⁴⁹ On ‘contextualism’ in contrast to ‘appropriationism’ and on the question of method more generally in the history of philosophy, see the interesting collection of essays Philosophy and its History: Aims and Methods in the Study of Early Modern Philosophy, edited by Mogens Lærke, Justin E. H. Smith, and E. Schliesser (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), and Maria Rosa Antognazza, ‘The Benefit to Philosophy of the Study of Its History’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy 23/1 (2015), 161–84.

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a false dichotomy.⁵⁰ Appropriations without context are empty, one might say in echoing Kant, while contexts without appropriation are blind. Contextualization is and has to be, to a degree, a form of appropriation, for it is never possible to escape the present horizons from which the historian views the past context; if one attempts to, one ends up no longer seeing clearly where one is and how one’s own perspective is conditioned. Similarly, appropriation, in order to be appropriate, i.e. in order to develop presentday philosophy, has to pay attention to the past context, for otherwise it risks becoming a pointless reassertion of present prejudices. This book instantiates the view that the history of philosophy requires both approaches, and that rather than being diametrically opposed, contextualism and appropriationism differ merely by degree. Hence some of the individual chapters of this book are more contextualist or more appropriationist than others.

Plan of the Book With the aim of grasping the specificity of Ravaisson’s conception of tendency and inclination in habit, Chapter 1, ‘Obscure Activity’, first situates his approach in relation to earlier nineteenth-century French thought. Ravaisson’s thinking is based on what he names the ‘double-law’ of habit: ‘active habits’, such as the acquisition of a motor skill, which often require the will in their acquisition, and ‘passive habits’, such as becoming used to a sound or climate, which seem to be more independent of the will, both involve a decline of conscious awareness in their acquisition. Ravaisson takes up this law from Xavier Bichat and Maine de Biran, and the chapter shows how he argues, more deliberately than either of his predecessors, that the double-law resists both psychological and physiological explanations. The acquisition of both forms of habit, he claims, can be explained only by an ‘obscure activity’ that is neither purely active nor purely passive, neither purely mental nor purely physical. It is this obscure activity that he interprets, against the background of a Leibnizian conception of force, as tendency and inclination. It is specifically the tendency or inclination that Ravaisson discovers in habit that he takes to be inexplicable by mechanical and

⁵⁰ Lærke, Smith, and Schliesser name this approach ‘Continental’ (‘Introduction’, Philosophy and its History, p.3), as characterizing the historical method of ‘Continental Philosophy’, but I prefer, doubting whether something as unified as ‘Continental Philosophy’ exists, the name ‘hermeneutic’.

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materialist accounts, and the chapter concludes by assessing his argument in the light of recent neuroscience and theories of neuroplasticity. After studying the antecedents of Ravaisson’s account of habit in nineteenth-century French thinking in Chapter 1, Chapter 2, ‘After Of Habit’, examines the reception of this account in later nineteenth- and twentieth-century French philosophy. With the same concern to appreciate the specificity of Ravaisson’s ideas, the chapter first examines Albert Lemoine’s rejection in 1875 of Ravaisson’s Reidian conception of habit as a ‘principle of action’. It then addresses Bergson’s misinterpretation of De l’habitude in his 1904 speech on the life and work of his predecessor at the Académie de Sciences Morales et Politiques. Bergson sees the ‘fossilised residue of a spiritual activity’ where Ravaisson saw grace and spontaneity, a vital, non-mechanical tendency or inclination. The chapter shows how this misinterpretation of Ravaisson expresses the more mechanical and dualist conception of motor habit that Bergson develops in his teaching and in his 1896 Matter and Memory. The chapter then turns to the account of motor habit advanced in the 1940s by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who explicitly criticizes the intellectualism in Bergson’s conception of habit as a ‘fossilised residue of a spiritual activity’. Merleau-Ponty’s own account of what he terms l’habitude motrice says more, as I show, about the acquisition of habit than about the status of a motor habit once acquired, and is really a treatment of skill acquisition rather than a discourse on habit. Whether tendency or inclination can be located within an acquired motor habit is a question that another French phenomenologist concerned with le corps propre, ‘the lived body’ or ‘one’s own body’, answers directly, but negatively: there is no such thing, argues Paul Ricoeur, as a ‘force of habit’ irreducible to a mechanical force. The success of Ravaisson’s philosophy of habitual inclination, which involves a quite particular notion of an embodied mind, depends on a rebuttal of this claim, and I attempt to develop the all too slight phenomenology of inclination in Of Habit in order to show how it can, indeed, be rebutted. In conclusion, I show how contemporary MerleauPonty-inspired accounts of pre-reflective, embodied action as a form of ‘coping’ can be extended by Ravaisson’s concern for tendency and inclination in habit. Chapter 3, ‘Second Nature as Philosophical Method’ turns to the broader metaphysical framework in which Ravaisson advances his doctrine of inclination, and it assesses his claims concerning reflection on habit as a method of establishing a non-dualist, monist metaphysics. The first three sections of the chapter examine Of Habit’s attempt to expose a continuum underlying

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traditional distinctions between the will, habit, instinct, and the inorganic realm. On this basis, the final section argues that this account of habit as method of metaphysics subtly transforms Schelling’s account of the artwork as the ‘organon and document’ of philosophy within his idealist system at the turn of the nineteenth century. Schelling characterizes the artwork as bearing witness to an original identity of conscious and unconscious principles, and the chapter draws out the perhaps surprising parallels between his Kantian conception of purposiveness without purpose in the work of genius and Ravaisson’s account of a certain purposiveness without purpose, an embodied purposiveness, in habit. Chapter 4, ‘Inclination without Necessitation’, is the first of two chapters assessing the modal status of Ravaisson’s notion of tendency and inclination. The initial two sections of the chapter focus on Ravaisson’s response to Leibniz’s ideas about ‘inclination without necessitation’ and ‘moral necessity’. Leibniz’s sloganizing concerning inclination without necessitation excludes only metaphysical and not physical, mechanical necessitation, but he also contrasts the latter with a moral necessity. This contrast is important for Ravaisson, since in Of Habit he characterizes the modal status of habit as a ‘necessity of attraction and desire’, and then in 1867 he proclaims the advent of a new spiritualist philosophy, a new philosophy of contingency and spontaneity, under the aegis of a Leibnizian doctrine of moral necessity. I argue here that Ravaisson was more Leibnizian than he consistently can be, but the third section of the chapter argues that he was less Leibnizian than a recent reading has supposed, a reading according to which he adopts a form of monadological metaphysics in De l’habitude. In responding to Leibniz’s ideas about substance, Ravaisson is interested, I argue, not in what the philosopher of Hanover says about beings—as monads, as distinct from body, as without causal relations to each other, etc.—but rather in what he says about being as being inclined. The final section of the chapter attempts to determine how reflection on being serves to illuminate the very notion of inclination, and to what extent Ravaisson understands and reflects on the difference—the ‘ontological difference’ as, for a while at least, Heidegger will later name it—between being and beings. Chapter 5, ‘Tendency and Time’, attempts to draw out the particular temporal sense of Ravaisson’s notion of tendency and inclination. It shows how Ravaisson’s account of tendency and inclination in habit implies, even though it does not explicitly elaborate it, a notion of durée, of duration, as a non-linear, non-quantifiable lived time. The first section of the chapter shows first that Bergson’s famous account of duration in his 1888 doctoral

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dissertation, Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, translated as Time and Free Will, departs from Ravaisson’s explicit remarks about quantity and space in his own doctoral dissertation half a century earlier. The second section shows that Bergson’s notion of duration takes up Lemoine’s L’Habitude et l’instinct, which itself developed Ravaisson’s more oblique remarks concerning habit and durée. Lemoine enables us to see, with and after Ravaisson, not only that habit involves a non-linear notion of time as duration, but also that the most fundamental form of habit is durée understood as a primitive contraction of past, present, and future. On this basis, Chapter 6, ‘Is There a “Dispositional Modality”?’, returns to the question of the modal sense of Ravaisson’s notion of inclination by turning to the contemporary metaphysics of powers. It assesses Stephen Mumford and Rani Lill Anjum’s argument that powers, as inherently a function of tendency or inclination, have a modal status irreducible to more familiar notions of necessity or possibility.⁵¹ Powers have what they term a sui generis ‘dispositional modality’, and this is, they claim, a phenomenological datum within our experience of agency and proprioception. I argue that Mumford and Anjum’s appeal to voluntary agency as involving a non-necessary relation between cause and effect is unconvincing: not only can there be no inner, proprioceptive experience of the empirical contingency that they describe, but their focus on this form of external nonnecessity obscures a more primitive and internal necessity in agency brought to light by Ravaisson’s predecessor, Maine de Biran, in his own polemic against David Hume’s skepticism. Moreover, as I show in the third section of the chapter, Mumford and Anjum’s official conception of tendency is restricted by their inheritance of a tradition, one that goes back to J. S. Mill, according to which a tendency can be adequately characterized according to the possibility of prevention and interference in a process. Such an approach, I argue, will only ever justify an idea of conditional necessity rather than any modal value wholly irreducible to necessity. That said, Mumford and Anjum’s basic idea concerning the ‘dispositional modality’ is a useful corrective to Ravaisson’s resort to a Leibnizian notion of moral necessity when attempting to reflect on tendency and inclination, even though any defence of a strong notion of tendency as possessing a sui generis modal value requires us to look, following De l’habitude, to actual experience of what we would ordinarily describe as tendencies and inclinations. ⁵¹ Steven Mumford and Rani Lill Anjum, Getting Causes from Powers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

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In this way, I hope to illuminate not just Ravaisson’s philosophy as a philosophy of inclination, but also what is required metaphysically if we grant, following recent developments, ideas of tendency or inclination a pivotal role in the metaphysics of powers. But in order to understand Ravaisson’s philosophy of habit as a philosophy of inclination, it is necessary to turn first to his predecessors in the lineage of nineteenth-century French thinkers concerned with habit.

1 Obscure Activity In Of Habit, Ravaisson bases his reflections on an apparent, empirical ‘law’ of habit. This apparent law is, he claims, a ‘double law’, a law describing two related empirical regularities: The continuity or the repetition of passion weakens it; the continuity or repetition of action exalts and strengthens it. Prolonged or repeated sensation diminishes gradually and eventually fades away. Prolonged or repeated movement becomes gradually easier, quicker and more assured. (OH 49)

Experience shows us that through their continuity or repetition sensations can decline to the point where we are no longer aware of them at all. To our dismay, sensory pleasures often fade, whereas time can bring us to the point where, happily, we hardly notice pains at all. Experience also shows us, in contrast, that bodily actions and movements gradually involve less effort in their repetition, and thus become easier—when, of course, physical fatigue is not an overriding factor. In learning to play, say, a musical instrument, we are witness, in our own selves, to a development that can appear miraculous, however minor the miracle may be: previously demanding actions can now be performed quickly, with ‘feeling’ and without hesitation or deliberation. The actions become more assured while being carried out with less and less conscious control. In a word, a word used to describe habitual action only later in the nineteenth-century, action becomes increasingly automatic. The features of ease, celerity, and assurance that Ravaisson adduces in the passage above correspond, in fact, to those of ‘efficiency’, ‘fastness’, and ‘autonomy’ in recent psychological analyses of automaticity.¹ ¹ For an analysis of automaticity to which we will return, see Agnes Moors and Jan de Houwer, ‘Automaticity: A Theoretical and Conceptual Analysis’, Psychological Bulletin 132/2 (2006) 297–326. For more historically informed remarks on the term as arising in nineteenthcentury psychology, see Adam Crabtree ‘ “Automatism” and the Emergence of Dynamic Psychiatry’, Journal of the History of the Behavioural Sciences 39/1 (2003) 51–70. Crabtree dates the first occurrence of the term in English to the year of Ravaisson’s De l’habitude, 1838.

Being Inclined: Félix Ravaisson’s Philosophy of Habit. Mark Sinclair, Oxford University Press (2019). © Mark Sinclair. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198844587.001.0001

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The principle aim of this opening chapter is to assess Ravaisson’s explanation of this double law according to a notion of ‘obscure activity’, a notion that leads him to reflect on tendency and inclination in habit. To this end, and in order to grasp the specificity of his position, the first two sections show how Ravaisson takes up the accounts of habit advanced by his nineteenth-century French forebears Xavier Bichat and Maine de Biran. On this basis, the chapter turns to Ravaisson’s arguments against rival ‘physical and rationalist’ (OH 43) explanations of the double law. The third section of the chapter relates his critique of rationalist or intellectualist conceptions of habit to early modern animist doctrines, such as those of Georg Ernst Stahl and Claude Perrault, for whom habit was a crucial question. The concluding section addresses Ravaisson’s rejection of purely physiological explanations of habit, a rejection which may seem adventurous and ill-informed given more recent neuroscientific developments, but which, I argue, is as necessary now as it was then.

1.1 Bichat and Biran on the Double Law of Habit Ravaisson remarks in a footnote that ‘most of the authors who have examined habit’ (OH 125, n. 23)—including Bichat, Biran, and Destutt de Tracy in France, and Dugald Stewart in Scotland—have articulated some form of the double law, and he traces its first discussion back to Joseph Butler’s 1736 Analogy of Religion, which distinguishes ‘active’ and ‘passive’ habits in moral life.² At the turn of the century in France, however, the distinction was studied beyond the moral sphere: the different effects of repetition or continuity on sensation and action were studied at length by Biran in his 1802 Influence of Habit on the Faculty of Thinking, which critically developed the ideas of the vitalist physiologist Marie François Xavier Bichat in his 1800 Physiological Researches on Life and Death. Ravaisson is closer to Biran than Bichat, both philosophically and historically, but it is important to present here what the Physiological Researches has to say about habit.³ In the years prior to his early death in 1803 at the age of 31, Bichat published three major works that ensured he would become the

² See Joseph Butler, Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1902), p.102. ³ It is all the more important in that Chapter 5 below returns to the temporal sense of Bichat’s account of habit.

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most influential French anatomist and physiologist of the early nineteenth century: A Treatise on the Membranes in General and of Different Membranes in Particular; Physiological Researches on Life and Death; and a General Anatomy.⁴ Bichat develops—his father had studied medicine and surgery at Montpellier—the ideas of the vitalist school led by Paul-Joseph Barthez, but his work on the nature and functioning of membranes, which founded the modern science of histology, led him to consider human life not as governed by an overarching, single vital principle, but rather as differentiated according to the separate functioning and discrete organization of particular tissues. Bichat’s doctrine is vitalist (taking this epithet to describe those doctrines according to which biological life is irreducible to both matter and the principle of the mind) but it has been described more precisely as ‘plurivitalist’ as a result of its concern for the particularity of life in different organs and tissues.⁵ The plurivitalist spirit that produced his work on membranes, however, carried over into his major theoretical proposal in the Physiological Researches a year later, namely, his distinction between organic and animal life. It is in attempting to justify this fundamental division of physiological phenomena that Bichat turned to the question of habit. Life, as Bichat famously defines it, is the ‘unity of functions that resist death’, but within life in general, organic life, which is ‘common to vegetable and animal’, is distinct from animal life, which is ‘peculiar to the latter’.⁶ The organic functions are those of nutrition—assimilation and excretion— while animal life consists of the higher sensory and motor functions. Whereas the living being is ‘almost passive in the first order of functions, it becomes active in the second’;⁷ the animal, in its animal life, ‘is the inhabitant of the world, and not, like the vegetable, of the spot which gives birth to it’.⁸ Bichat appeals to a variety of phenomena in order to support this distinction: Articles II and III of the Researches discuss the symmetry and harmony of the organs of animal life in contrast to the asymmetry and

⁴ Traité des membranes en général et de diverses membranes en particulier (Paris 1799)—A Treatise on the Membranes in General and of Different Membranes in Particular, trans. J. Coffin (Boston, MA : 1813); Recherches physiologiques sur la vie et la mort (Paris: 1800)—, Physiological Researches on Life and Death, trans. T. Watkins (Philadelphia, PA: 1827); and Anatomie générale appliquée à la physiologie et à la médecine, 4 vols., (Paris: 1801)—General Anatomy, Applied to Physiology and Medicine, trans. G. Hayward (Boston, MA: 1822). ⁵ For a discussion of Bichat’s work under this heading, see the chapter entitled ‘Le Plurivitalisme de Bichat et Buisson’ in Jean Cazeneuve, La Philosophie médicale de Ravaisson, 35–49. ⁶ Recherches physiologiques, p.4/p.12. ⁷ Recherches physiologiques, p.4/p.13. ⁸ Recherches physiologiques, p.4/p.13.

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disharmony of those of organic life, while Article IV discusses their respective modes of duration in action: organic life is continuous—the continual round of assimilation and excretion—whereas animal life is characterized by intermission of action. Article V, however, addresses the ‘General Differences of the Two Lives with Respect to Habit’ in observing that there is an ‘independence of habit enjoyed by the one, compared to the influence it has on the other’.⁹ Only animal life, then, is subject to the power of habit, but in distinguishing feeling, le sentiment, from judgement, Bichat describes the double effect of habit on animal life thus: [h]abit acts in an inverse ratio upon these two things. Feeling is constantly blunted by it, whereas judgement on the contrary owes to it its perfection. The more we look at an object, the less we are sensible of its painful or agreeable qualities, and the better do we judge of all its attributes.¹⁰

We find here a version of Ravaisson’s double law of habit, but for Bichat it is judgement that is perfected through habit, while sentiment declines in intensity. Bichat does not merely state this double law, for he also attempts to explain it, to account for why and how habit ‘blunts the sentiment’, and why and how it ‘perfects the judgement’. Concerning feelings, and those of pleasure and pain are Bichat’s leading examples, when these are not absolute—an absolute pain would involve serious damage to the tissues of the body, and coitus, Bichat suggests, is an example of absolute pleasure—they are relative, and decline over time through being continued or repeated. We become accustomed, habituated to them, and, subject to the power of habit, they ‘naturally tend to their annihilation’.¹¹ Nothing changes in the sensations themselves—‘affections of the eye, of the tongue, and the ear, are at all times the same from the same objects’¹²—yet what is felt, le sentiment, declines in intensity. This decline is the effect of habituation, which through continuity or repetition brings about not a physical difference but a psychological difference: ‘the centre of these revolutions of pleasure and pain, and of indifference, is by no means seated in the organs, which receive or transmit the sensation, but in the soul’¹³, i.e. in the mind of the person experiencing the feeling. The difference consists in becoming indifferent to a given sensation. How, then, to explain ⁹ Recherches physiologiques, p. 4/p.13. ¹¹ Recherches physiologiques, p.41/p.50. ¹³ Recherches physiologiques, pp.40–1/p.49.

¹⁰ Recherches physiologiques, p. 37/p.46. ¹² Recherches physiologiques, p.40/p.49.

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these ‘revolutions’ in the mind? Bichat claims that our feelings, when not absolute, are relative precisely because they are intrinsically relational or comparative: the action of the mind in each several sentiment of pain or pleasure, which was the effect of a sensation, consists in a comparison between this sensation and that which preceded it, a comparison that is not the result of reflection, but the involuntary effect of the first impression of the object.¹⁴

Any present sentiment, for Bichat, is the result of an unthematic, involuntary comparison of the present sensation to those in the immediate past, such that ‘the greater the difference between the actual and the past impression, the livelier will be the feeling’.¹⁵ Thus, when the difference between the sensation in the present and that in the immediate past declines, so too does the intensity of the feeling, and it is in this way that the most acute pains and the most delightful pleasures fade into indifference. The identity of a present feeling, then, is constituted by the degree of difference of the present sensation from those that preceded it, and Bichat contends that this degree of difference is, though not consciously judged, automatically gauged by or in the mind. These brief reflections on involuntary mental operations in Article V remain undeveloped. Bichat offers neither an explanation of what (faculty of the mind) carries out the unthematic, pre-voluntary comparison constitutive of sentiment, nor an account of how this form of comparison relates to voluntary acts of comparison. Still, with this hypothesis concerning habituation Bichat aims to explain more active habits of judgement also. His account of how ‘habit blunts feeling’ is, in fact, the only explanation he provides for how ‘habit perfects judgement’. Habit perfects the judgement in that it has already blunted feeling, and has thus weakened the obstacles to the effective operation of judgement. For Bichat, habit acts therefore only indirectly on judgement. In traversing a meadow, we may at first be overwhelmed by a general fragrance, without being able to distinguish the scents of particular flowers, ‘but in a short time from habit the first sentiment is weakened, it is soon afterwards altogether effaced’, and then it is possible to ‘distinguish the scent of each particular plant and form a judgement at first impossible’.¹⁶ Our activity in judging is perfected, that is, by not being ¹⁴ Recherches physiologiques, p.41/p.50. ¹⁶ Recherches physiologiques, p. 44/p.52.

¹⁵ Recherches physiologiques, p.41/p.50.

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overwhelmed by our passivity, by no longer being perturbed by the vivacity of sensation. The year before Bichat’s Physiological Researches on Life and Death left the presses, the Institut de France announced in October 1799 an essay competition in which candidates were to ‘determine what is the influence of habit on the faculty of thinking, or, in other words, show the effect that frequent repetition of the same operations produces on our intellectual faculties’. No prize was awarded to any of the submitted dissertations the following year, but Pierre Maine de Biran—a former bodyguard of the king who after the fall of Robespierre became administrator of the Dordogne region and served on the Council of the Five Hundred before Napoleon’s coup d’état—was encouraged by the jury to submit a reworked version of his dissertation to the competition as re-advertised in April 1801. In 1802 Biran was announced the winner, and his reworked dissertation was published later that year. This was Biran’s first significant published work, and, although he later published essays on Leibniz and his contemporary Pierre Laromiguière,¹⁷ it remained the only major philosophical text he published in his lifetime. He did not see fit to publish any of his three later prizewinning essays—at the Institut de France once more in 1805 (Mémoire sur la décomposition de la pensée), at the Berlin Academy in 1807 (De l’aperception immédiate), and at the Academy of Copenhagen in 1811 (Rapports du physique et du moral de l’homme)¹⁸—and he spent his philosophical career ceaselessly attempting to write and rewrite a masterwork. With the exception of the published dissertation of 1802, Maine de Biran, according to Henri Gouhier’s witticism, ‘is a one-book philosopher, and this book he never wrote’.¹⁹ Biran’s 1802 dissertation professes to adhere to the tenets of Ideology, the psychological and physiological ‘science of man’ predominant in postrevolutionary France. According to Antoine Destutt de Tracy, one of the two principal leaders of the Ideological school, ‘Ideology’, understood as the science of thought, replaces ‘metaphysics’ and even ‘psychology’, since it no ¹⁷ ‘Leibnitz’ in Maine de Biran, Œuvres XI-1 Commentaires sur les philosophies du XVIIe siècle, ed. G. Romeyer-Dherbey (Paris: Vrin, 1990) and ‘Examen des leçons de philosophie de Laromiguière’ in Œuvres XI-3 Commentaires sur les philosophies du XIXe siècle, ed. J. Ganault (Paris: Vrin, 1990). ¹⁸ Maine de Biran, Œuvres III, Mémoire sur la décomposition de la pensée, ed. F. Azouvi (Paris: Vrin, 1988); Œuvres IV, De l’aperception immédiate, ed. I. Radrizzani (Paris: Vrin, 1995); and Rapports du physique et du moral de l’homme, Œuvres VI, ed. F. C. T. Moore (Paris: Vrin, 1984). ¹⁹ Henri Gouhier, Les Conversions de Maine de Biran (Paris: Vrin, 1946), p.6.

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longer pretends to attain knowledge of essences, causes, primary principles or the nature of the soul. Ideology contents itself with observing effects, and with drawing the practical consequences of these observations. Destutt de Tracy distinguished, however, between rational Ideology, which directly examines the operations of the mind, and physiological Ideology, which studies the physiological conditions of thought. He focused on the former, while his colleague at the Institut, Pierre Cabanis, concentrated on the latter. Both philosophers considered their approaches as complimentary, rather than antagonistic, and they saw themselves as continuing Condillac’s philosophy. Their question concerning the influence of habit on the faculty of thinking was Condillacian in spirit.²⁰ Condillac’s 1754 Treatise on Sensations was, in the words of its author, ‘the sole work where man has been stripped of all his habits’,²¹ and this in order to isolate a supposed first principle of the mind, sensation in its pure state, and then to account for the genesis of higher faculties as a transformation of this principle: memory, for example, is weakened sensation, attention a dominant sensation, while having two sensations together is comparing and judging them. John Locke, Condillac’s principal influence, proposed a genetic analysis of ideas that traces their origin back to sense experience, but the French philosopher goes a step further in applying the ‘historical method’ to our mental faculties themselves: not only are there no innate ideas, as Locke had argued, but, after passive sensation, there are no innate mental faculties, since, as transformations of sensations, they are merely acquired habits. The Institut’s competition concerning the influence of habit on the faculty of thinking, then, was raised against this background, and it was one of its many efforts to test and develop Condillac’s claims in relation to the higher, intellectual faculties of the mind.²² Although Biran’s dissertation contains many professions of Condillacian faith, it expresses the first stirrings of a new philosophical orientation that would lead him to break with the Ideologists by 1805.²³ For reflection on the double effects of habit serves to highlight an irreducible form of activity, and ²⁰ It was ‘fidèle à l’esprit de Condillac’, as Gouhier puts it; Les Conversions, p.69. ²¹ Condillac, Traité des sensations (Paris: Fayard, 1984), p.287. ²² The previous competition organized by the Institut, for which Biran worked on an entry, concerned the influence of signs on the faculty of thinking, which was another Condillacian question. Biran’s preparatory notes have been published as ‘Notes sur l’influence des signes’ in Œuvres I, Écrits de jeunesse, ed B. Baertschi (Paris: Vrin, 1998), 240–309. ²³ For a short account of the developments of the idea of the will and activity in French philosophy from Condillac to Maine de Biran, see Ravaisson’s ‘Contemporary Philosophy’ (CP 22-7/71-5).

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thus an essential duality, in experience. The dual effects of habit make manifest a difference between, as Biran writes in the introduction to the 1802 dissertation, ‘active’ and ‘passive’ impressions: among the repeated impressions which gradually weaken, some continue to fade away and even completely vanish, whilst others, in becoming more indifferent, not only conserve all their clarity, but often acquire even more distinction. This fact alone, which is beyond contestation, would be enough, perhaps, to reveal an essential difference in the character of sensations, which deteriorate and vanish, and perceptions, which become clearer, even if we did not know in any other way this difference.²⁴

Passive sensations fade over time, whereas active perceptions become more assured, clear, and precise. The two different effects of repetition or continuity cannot be ascribed to the same ‘faculty’, since ‘we would have to suppose that this unique faculty can become at once more inert and more active by the same process of habituation’.²⁵ This would be absurd, and so we have to posit a duality of fundamental principles. Though they are compounded in experience, reflection on habit thus serves to isolate, as if by a process of chemical extraction or distillation, passive and active faculties in the mind. Habit thus serves as a method of psychological analysis, as a method for the correct decomposition of the faculties of the mind.²⁶ Bichat, as we have just seen, used habit as a means of distinguishing animal life from organic life, and Biran’s account has a comparable analytical and methodological purpose given its concern to distinguish the active from the passive.²⁷ Perception differs from sensation in that it requires an active grasp of passively received sensation, but Biran considers this active grasp in a physical and corporeal, rather than merely intellectual sense. This is why ²⁴ Influence, p.163/p.87. ²⁵ Influence, p. 163/p.87. ²⁶ See Mémoire sur la décomposition de la pensée, Biran’s prize-winning essay at the Institut de France in 1805. ²⁷ This was remarked by Jean-Marie Dégerando in his 1803 review of Biran’s dissertation: see, Influence, 353–9, p. 354: The distinction of passive faculties and active faculties, too little recognized and reflected on by philosophers, is the ground of this theory. In illuminating it in a new light, he deduces from it the most profound results. This method of Citizen Maine Biran corresponds in a way as fortunate as it is remarkable with the Treatise on Life and Death that we owe to the young and famous philosopher, object of our most legitimate regrets, the Citizen Bichat; the two authors seem to have the same perspective, the one on physiological phenomena and the other on intellectual phenomena.

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Biran writes of the effects of habit on perception and movement rather than on judgement. According to the long introduction to the 1802 dissertation, each of the five senses, to varying degrees, admits of a distinction between passively receiving an impression and actively apprehending it; but actively apprehending that sensation requires voluntary bodily movement, i.e. voluntary operation of the organs of the different senses. In touching something, for example, I have to move my hand voluntarily in order to feel the resistance offered by a thing. For Biran, in such voluntary movement, I not only feel the resistance of things, but I also become aware of myself as a voluntary agent. Whereas passive impressions occur ‘in me without me’,²⁸ the bodily activity essential to perception necessarily involves an awareness of the self as a willing agent. Such is the first outline of the psychology of the will that Biran develops in his later works: the effort of physical movement comprises both my awareness of resistance and my awareness that it is ‘I who moves, or who wants to move’. The voluntary agent and the resistance it meets are the ‘two terms of the relation necessary to ground the first simple judgment of personality: I am’; and these two terms are given through an awareness of effort, through what Biran terms here an ‘impression of effort’, which admits of degrees.²⁹ Given that it is constituted by the unity of passivity and activity, as the identity in difference of will and resistance, this conception of effort as an impression is problematic. In his later work Biran will argue that effort is not felt or sensed, and is rather a ‘primitive fact’ of a different order, one which involves an immediate apperception of the self as a ‘hyper-organic’ force that cannot be separated from the body as an efficient cause in the world is separable from its effects.³⁰ Biran’s reflection on habit serves as a method for his own fundamental philosophical designs, but it is not quite the case that ‘the sole goal’ of the 1802 dissertation is that of ‘establishing the soundness of the philosophy that inspires them’.³¹ Not only does Biran offer original conjectures concerning ²⁸ Influence, p. 135/p.55. ²⁹ The five quotations: Influence, pp.135–6/pp.55–6. ³⁰ See De l’aperception immédiate, particularly the footnote on p.57 and Janicaud, Ravaisson et la métaphysique, p.24: In placing effort in the category of impressions, Biran maintains it as passivity in relation to an extrinsic agent: the body transmitting sensation from the outside. In the notes, written just before the printing of the dissertation, he begins to separate effort from a simple modification, but he is still far from according to effort the foundational—strictly hyper-organic—role that it will acquire subsequently in his more well-known works. ³¹ Georges Le Roy, ‘Maine de Biran’ in Maurice Merleau-Ponty (ed.), Les Philosophes célèbres, Paris: Mazenod, 1956, 234–41, p.237.

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habit in Part I³² that are interesting in their own right, but these conjectures, as we will see, also bring into question his own fundamental philosophical presuppositions. The conjectures are proposed tentatively, and in the Introduction Biran had professed to be concerned solely with the influence of habit precisely because ‘we know nothing of the nature of forces’ which ‘manifest themselves to us only through their effects; the human mind observes these effects, follows the thread of their diverse analogies, calculates their relations when they are capable of measurement; and that is the limit of its power’.³³ Such epistemological scepticism concerning forces or causes Biran clearly inherits from the Ideologists, Condillac, and, before him, the British empiricist tradition.³⁴ Still, it is not the case that, in contrast to Ravaisson’s explicit metaphysical ambition to reveal the why of habit, ‘Biran remains with the how’—even if thus ‘remaining with the effects does not exclude that his [Biran’s] study depends on certain presuppositions concerning causes’.³⁵ That is to place too much emphasis on Biran’s official caution, and to pay insufficient attention to what he says in both the body of the text and in the notes that he added to the text before its publication. Biran does not merely presuppose certain causes of habit, for he offers, albeit tentatively, original explanatory hypotheses concerning habits of both sensation and movement. Biran first presents a ‘hypothesis’ to account for habituation, for the decline of sensations through their continuity or repetition; a conjecture that, although it is offered ‘not in order to discover the secret of nature, but to clarify further the facts, and to reveal what binds them’,³⁶ involves a ‘principle’ or force operative in sensation. Biran posits a non-voluntary activity belonging to a ‘principle of life’ which ‘ceaselessly maintains in the organized whole

³² Biran gives the title ‘On Passive Habits’ to this first part of his text, whereas the second part examining the ‘Repetition of the Operations Grounded on the Use of Voluntary and Articulated Signs’ is entitled ‘On Active Habits’. That this distinction between active and passive habits is misleading—given that the first part examines the habits of perception and motor action—was already remarked by Destutt de Tracy in his report on Biran’s dissertation; cf. Influence, p.338. It seems that Biran did not want to name motor habits ‘active habits’ precisely because something other than voluntary activity is involved in their acquisition. ³³ Influence, p.132/p.52. ³⁴ Biran rehearses Condillac’s expression of this scepticism in the introduction to his first major work, the 1746 Essai sur l’origine des connasissances humaines (Paris: Vrin, 2014, ed. J.-C. Pariente and M. Pécharman); Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge, trans. H. Aarsleff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). ³⁵ Janicaud, Ravaisson et la métaphysique, p. 16. Emmanuel Blondel (‘Ravaisson lecteur de Maine de Biran’ in Ravaisson, ed. J-M. Lannou, Paris: Kimé, 1999, p. 24) offers a similar remark to that of Janicaud in claiming that in relation to an explanatory account of habit Maine de Biran ‘is here not essential [ne serait pas ici l’essentiel]’. ³⁶ Influence, p.164/p.88.

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that it animates, and in each part of this whole, several inner movements, which do not reveal themselves to direct observation, are intangible to the individual in his natural state and do not, properly speaking, belong to the sphere of his activity’.³⁷ ‘Passive impressions’, then, are not absolutely passive: there is a secret activity—which occurs ‘in me without me’, i.e. independently of the will—that lowers or lifts the tone of the sense organ, thus accommodating itself to the sensation and establishing a sort of ‘equilibrium’ with it.³⁸ The faculty of sensing tends to, or strives for, this equilibrium, and the rupture of the equilibrium when the source of the sensation is removed produces a certain distress or disquiet, as when, asleep on a road journey, we wake when the car has come to a stop: ‘as the tone of the organ lowers, it will make a sort of effort to raise it up and to return to it the action it received; the impotence of this effort produces trouble, malaise, worry, desire’.³⁹ Biran presents this hypothesis in dismissing both materialist and intellectualist explanations of habituation. Concerning the former, ‘the weakening of our continuous sensations does not depend on mechanical (and so to speak material) causes’;⁴⁰ there is no evident material change or mechanical process that could account for why the sensation remains constant while the sentiment or feeling declines, and it is not clear how any such hypothesis could account for the need we have for the sensation that has declined in intensity. Concerning the latter, ‘it is not necessary to search for its causes in judgments or perceived comparisons between one state and another’.⁴¹ We do not experience making such judgements or comparisons, and if habituation was a function of judgement, of any sort of intellectual activity, it would, again, be hard to understand why habituation involves a desire for a now absent sensation. In a handwritten note in his copy of the published dissertation, Biran makes it clear that Bichat is one of the targets of this critique: ‘Bichat supposes that sensations are altered by habit only as a result of (involuntary) comparisons between the present state and the one that precedes it. This view involves a false use of the term “comparison” and a confusion of affective sensation with perception.’⁴² Bichat was right to reject materialist and intellectualist accounts, but the very idea of an involuntary, unconscious comparison is, Biran claims, a contradiction in terms, one that illegitimately introduces what belongs to active perception—comparative judgement—into the realm of sensation. Biran critically responds to Bichat, but there is, it is important to note, a peculiar irony in their respective ³⁷ Influence, p.164/p.88. ⁴⁰ Influence, p.167/p.90.

³⁸ See Influence, p.164/p.88. ⁴¹ Influence, p.164/p.88.

³⁹ Influence, p.172/p.97. ⁴² Influence, p.302.

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positions on habit: Biran, the philosophical psychologist supposedly working under the metaphysical and epistemological constraints of the Ideological school, criticizes Bichat, the physiologist, for offering an insufficiently vitalist account of habituation. Biran’s concern to root out part of the ‘secret’ of habit in his chapter on the ‘Influence of Habit on Perception’ is also vitalist, but more so in the text as published than in the dissertation submitted to the Ideologists judging the competition. In the body of the text, under three separate headings, Biran identifies three ‘causes’ or ‘principal circumstances’ (this is Biran’s way of avoiding speaking of causes) of the influence of habit on perception. First, he rehearses Bichat’s argument in claiming that the weakening of sensation in habituation facilitates the movement of the organs, and thus the precision and facility of the perception: it is only when a child is no longer ‘shocked, irritated, hurt’ by its sensations that it can come to perceive clearly.⁴³ To skip to the third circumstance, this is the ‘association of movements and impressions in a common center’.⁴⁴ Our ordinary perceptions involve the coordination of the different sense organs, since ‘there is not one that is not a combined result of several others’, and since the perceiver does not ‘separate his memories from his impressions and perceives only in comparing’, as Biran admits after Bichat. Biran attributes these operations to the imagination— traditionally understood after Aristotle as the ‘common sense’—and notes that in addition to the ‘habits of the senses’, there are ‘habits of the imagination’ that operate in or on our ‘perceptive faculty’. These habits of the imagination include associations and ‘memories’ and even ‘judgements’ which, by virtue of repetition, ‘are confused in an impression’, in an apparently ‘indivisible sensation that the eye seems to receive naturally in opening itself to the light’.⁴⁵ Biran evidently considers both habituation and the habits of the imagination, alone or together, as insufficient to explain the habits of perception and movement. For his second ‘circumstance’ describes an ‘increasing facility and precision of the movements in the organs’ themselves. There is an ‘education of the organs, which are commonly supposed to be solely passive (sensibles)’ that ‘begins by the development of their own or an associated motility’.⁴⁶ It is this education of the organs that allows both general motility and perception to become more assured, prompt, and precise. Now, in the body of the text Biran does not provide a positive explanation of how this ⁴³ Influence, p.175–6/p.101. ⁴⁴ Influence, p.182/p.105. ⁴⁵ All quotations since the last footnote: Influence, p.183/p.106. ⁴⁶ Influence, p.177/p.103.

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education occurs, but in a footnote he added to his dissertation after it had won the prize he reflects on the ‘weakening of the impression of effort’ in the acquisition of a motor habit ‘and on the sort of analogy that it might have with the sensitive alteration, which equally results from habit’. It is necessary to quote this footnote at length, for it is crucial, as will become clear, to Ravaisson’s development of Biran’s position: could one not conjecture that the repeated exercise of the same movements makes the parts (of the body) even more mobile, more irritable, in converting them into artificial loci [foyers] of force, like the vital organs or those of cold-blooded animals are their natural loci? In accepting this hypothesis it is also possible to explain the precision and the increasing facility of repeated movements that fall back into an order opposed to that of the will, namely into that of instinct (for is it not a particular instinct of motor organs that makes the body of the viper, cited by Perrault, slither towards the hole to which it customarily retires? Is it not still an instinct, this tendency, this need, this involuntary desire [prurit] that we feel for habitual movements?) At the same time, this would explain, I own, the imperceptibility of the movements that, since they no longer depend, at least no longer in such a direct manner, on the cerebral center, no longer affect the system as a whole by the general relations on which the lively consciousness of impressions depends. It would be here that we would find an analogy between sensitive degradation and the weakening of effort: for it is known that bodily parts constantly irritated can in certain cases isolate their own sensibility from general sensibility, and then the animal no longer feels. Could this effect of concentration not be applied to both sensible and motor organs, according to their dispositions or their habits? Muscles frequently exercised acquire, certainly, more volume and mass, and yet the easier movements are also less noticed [aperçus]; this would indicate that they have a form of life proper to them, a veritable effect of concentration. With this hypothesis, we would have no need to have recourse to an infinitely rapid succession of judgments and of volitions corresponding to a series of habitual movements, but it would suffice to admit, in most cases, an original volition, a single impulsion of the motor center; and all the rest would be executed by the determinations proper to the organs themselves.⁴⁷

⁴⁷ Influence, pp.178–9.

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There is a certain force in the organs of the body that makes them more mobile, readier for movement, a force that can become a ‘tendency’, a ‘need’ and involuntary ‘desire’ to act. By means of the repetition of originally willed movements, there is an ‘effect of concentration’ in this force. This effect of concentration is what Biran names a ‘determination’: ‘this change itself which persists and more or less outlives the impression we call in general a determination, and as there are two classes of impressions, there will be two sorts of determinations, one for feeling, the other for movement’. A motor determination ‘is a tendency of the organ or the motor center to repeat the action of the movement which has occurred for the first time’,⁴⁸ a tendency constituted by a ‘lively force [une force vive] inherent in the organs’ that allows willed actions to involve less effort the more they are repeated.⁴⁹ A sensory determination, in contrast, is the tendency that the secret, obscure activity resident in the sense organs has to harmonize itself with a particular sensation. Biran’s stated aim in his Introduction was to bring ‘physics into metaphysics’,⁵⁰ and in this he was influenced not just by Cabanis, but also by the Swiss naturalist and philosopher Charles Bonnet, whose 1760 Essai analytique sur la faculté de l’âme was concerned with the physiological conditions of psychological experience. A passage from the Essai stands as an epigraph to the 1802 dissertation: ‘What are all the operations of the soul, if not movements and repetitions of movements?’⁵¹ Bonnet speculated that psychological phenomena are the result of vibratory movements of fibres in the nervous system, and he consequently accounted for the acquisition of habit as the result of ‘determinations’, understood as a changed state in the dispositions of nerve fibres, that produce a ‘tendency toward reproducing that same movement, or a disposition to execute that same movement’.⁵² The Influence of Habit on the Faculty of Thinking, then, bears and even advertises the influence of Bonnet’s physiology, but it is crucial to observe that Biran does not endorse a neurological explanation of the notion of a determination. Instead, he appeals directly to an idea of a ‘lively force’ rather than to anatomical changes. If Biran brings physics into metaphysics, this physics in and of itself contains—or at least leads to—its own kind of ⁴⁸ Influence, p.149/p.69. ⁴⁹ Influence, p. 148/p.69. ⁵⁰ Influence, p.132/p.52. ⁵¹ Influence, p.126/p.46. ⁵² Charles Bonnet, Essai analytique sur les facultés de l’âme (Copenhagen: C. and A. Philibert, 1760), p. 57. See also Harry A. Whitaker and Yves Turgeon, ‘Charles Bonnet’s Neurophilosophy’ in Brain, Mind and Machine, ed. H. Whitaker, C. U. M. Smith and S. Finger (New York: Springer 2007), 191–212.

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metaphysics in so far as both forms of habit are accounted for in terms of a tendency which, he seems to claim, can be understood in neither mechanical nor mental, neither material nor ideal terms.

1.2 Ravaisson’s Law of Continuity Biran, as we have just seen, develops Bichat’s approach, but Ravaisson, in turn, as it is the task of this section to show, develops the conjectures of The Influence of Habit on the Faculty of Thinking. Ravaisson’s formulation of the ‘double law’ of habit is drawn almost word for word from the 1802 text, and his explanation of the law critically prolongs and develops Biran’s conjectures. This debt does not pass unacknowledged: Of Habit contains fourteen references, predominantly in the ‘subjective analysis’ of Part II of the text, to Biran’s work. These footnotes have three different modes, and refer to (1) precise passages of the original Henrichs edition of Biran’s 1802 text; (2) that text in general; or (3) Biran’s work as a whole with the term passim. Biran’s philosophical texts that Ravaisson would have been able to consult include not only the three published in his lifetime—including the essays on Laromiguière (1817) and Leibniz (1818)—but also his 1820 Nouvelles considérations sur les rapports du physique et du moral chez l’homme, which had been edited by Victor Cousin in a volume of his work published in 1834.⁵³ In 1838, then, Ravaisson had access to, and acknowledges his debt to, Biran’s work, both early and late; and within his 1840 survey of early nineteenth-century European thinking, Ravaisson will present Biran as the reformer, even the saviour, of French philosophy (CP 416/74). Biran’s philosophy of the will provides an epistemological and metaphysical first principle offering a way out, Ravaisson contends, of the impasse created by Cousin’s Eclecticism, which had attempted, improbably, to synthesize Scottish common-sense philosophy and German Idealism with the hope of gaining knowledge of an ‘absolute’ by means of a Baconian ‘experimental’ psychological method.⁵⁴ ⁵³ Œuvres Philosophiques de Maine de Biran, ed. V. Cousin (Paris, 1834). Three volumes were added in 1841. As Emmanuel Blondel notes (‘Ravaisson lecteur de Maine de Biran’ in Ravaisson, ed. J.-M. Le Lannou, Paris: Kimé, 1999, 15–32, pp.15–16), Biran’s 1818 Réponses à Stapfer and the 1818 Note sur les deux révélations were also included in this 1834 volume. Ravaisson may well also have been familiar with the 1809 Nouvelles considérations sur le sommeil et les songes, which Cousin had published in the Mémoires de l’Académie in 1837. It is not known whether Cousin granted Ravaisson access to Biran’s papers. ⁵⁴ For more on this, see the Introduction to Ravaisson, Selected Essays, pp.9–10.

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Part II, Section II of De l’habitude develops Biran’s explanation of the double law of habit with the claim that both its forms occur by virtue of an ‘obscure activity’: continuity or repetition brings about a sort of obscure activity that increasingly anticipates [prévient de plus en plus] both the impression of external objects in sensibility and the will in activity. In activity, it reproduces the action itself; in sensibility, it does not reproduce the sensation, the passion—for this requires an external cause—but calls for it, invokes it; in a certain sense it implores the sensation. (OH 43)

There is an obscure activity that, in sensation, allows the organs, and consequently the sensing subject, to find a kind of equilibrium with a given sensation. In adjusting the sense organ to the given sensation, this activity anticipates, calls for, or implores the latter. This need or ‘desire’ (OH 43) for the sensation becomes particularly manifest when its source is removed. These claims do not simply reproduce The Influence of Habit on the Faculty of Thinking, for Biran had argued that the absence of a sensation to which we have become accustomed will produce ‘distress, malaise, disquiet, desire’ in us as a psychological effect of a non-psychological, vital determination.⁵⁵ Ravaisson, in sharp contrast, argues that the desire is that determination, that habitual tendency itself.⁵⁶ It is not simply desire that we experience in the absence of the sensation, but rather the ‘impotence of desire’ (OH 43); the impotence makes manifest the desire that was already there. Desire is thus not to be opposed to a vital force as a psychological to a physiological principle; the ‘principle of life’ is rather of the same nature as desire understood as a psychological reality. For this reason, we should be wary of Ravaisson’s apparently Biranian separation of the principle of habit from the psychological principle of will in his account of habits of movement and perception. He writes initially that as effort declines in the repetition of active movements, and as the action becomes swifter and more assured, ‘it is not action that gives birth to or ⁵⁵ Thus, Biran, in a footnote, deliberately distinguishes needs and faculties: there is a ‘real difference between the principle of instinct, of appetite, and that of reasoned determinations, grounded on experience; between vague desires and the will that aims towards a goal, between needs and faculties’; Influence, p.172. ⁵⁶ As Blondel puts it: ‘This Biranian “determination” is not a desire; it is physiological, not psychological, and Maine de Biran takes care not to mix up the domains, even if they illuminate each other. Ravaisson will conserve the term desire for the ground of being, and not for a particular state of being’ (‘Ravaisson lecteur de Maine de Biran’, p.26).

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strengthens the continuity or repetition of locomotion; it is a more obscure and unreflective tendency, which goes further down into the organism, increasingly concentrating itself there’ (OH 43). This is ‘a tendency, an inclination that no longer awaits the commandments of the will but rather anticipates them, and which even escapes entirely and irremediably both will and consciousness’ (OH 43). An unreflective desire to perform the action, a tendency or inclination that often brings about the action, Ravaisson seems to claim, takes the place of will and thus conscious awareness as the cause of an action.⁵⁷ Habit allows an action to leave the ‘sphere of the will’ (OH 55). Ravaisson’s qualifies all these claims, however, later in the text: it is ‘at least not the reflective will’ (OH 71) that is operative in habitual action. As Cazeneuve has noted, the word volonté clearly has two senses for Ravaisson: ‘a weak sense, in which it applies to all the degrees of thought’, and even to apparently unconscious organic processes, and ‘a strong sense which applies only to human, free and reflective will’.⁵⁸ The strong sense is Biranian, but the weak sense is the one that is most proper to Ravaisson’s own thinking. The weak sense is most proper to Ravaisson’s thinking because his basic position is that the acquisition of a motor habit shows that there is a continuous scale or spectrum that underlies, and gives the lie to, any sharp contrast between the voluntary and the involuntary: it is by a succession of imperceptible degrees that inclinations take over from acts of will. It is also by an imperceptible degradation that these inclinations, born from custom, often decline if custom [coutume] comes to be interrupted, and that the movements removed from the will return to its sphere after some time. The transition between these two states cannot be sensed; its dividing line is everywhere and nowhere. (OH 57)

The acquisition of a motor habit shows us actions becoming ‘less and less’ conscious, ‘more and more’ involuntary—and this ‘less and less’ and ‘more and more’ are the signature of Ravaisson’s thinking in Of Habit.⁵⁹ As a result ⁵⁷ Ravaisson also writes in this passage that ‘it is not in the will but in the passive element of the movement itself that a secret activity gradually develops’ and that ‘habit exercises only an indirect influence on the simple acts of will and intelligence, in pulling down the obstacles before them, and in securing the means for them’ (OH 43). ⁵⁸ Cazeneuve, La Philosophie médicale de Ravaisson, p.86. ⁵⁹ As Jean Beaufret puts it ‘ce “de plus en plus” . . . “de moins en moins”, c’est tout Ravaisson’; Notes sur la philosophie en France au XIXème siècle (Paris: Vrin, 1984), p.19. That said, the phrase seems to echo Leibniz in the Nouveaux essais: ‘All our undeliberated actions result from a conjunction of minute perceptions; and even our customs and passions, which have so much influence when we do deliberate, come from the same source; for these tendencies come into being gradually [car ces habitudes naissent peu à peu]’; Leibniz, Nouveaux Essais sur

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of actions that were originally willed and reflective, facility in the action can gradually become a pre-reflective desire, tendency, or inclination to carry out the act. This inclination can never be wholly separate from the reflective will, since there is no clear dividing line separating the two. Desire on Ravaisson’s account is not involuntary but rather pre-voluntary, if we understand the prefix ‘pre’ to mean that desire is both continuous with and irreducible to reflective will. Hence, in truth, the will can have no ‘sphere’. It is this lex continuitatis, this law of continuity, that grounds not just Ravaisson’s critique of Biran but also his account of inclination and tendency as shading into each other on a continuous scale. On this point, it is important to observe that although the OED defines tendency and inclination in terms of each other,⁶⁰ in ordinary usage ‘inclination’ seems to carry an idea of liking and desire, and even love, which ‘tendency’ often does not. It is probable that I like what I am inclined to do, probable that I want to do it, whereas ‘tendency’ is more orectically (from the Greek orexis, meaning desire or appetite) neutral, for I often do not want to do the things I tend to do. This would explain why ‘inclination’ is more easily applied in psychological contexts than it is to inanimate things; the ascription of tendencies to non-living things is not prima facie strange. The more fundamental reason why ‘tendency’ has a broader extension, however, seems to relate to a different emphasis in its intensions. To grasp this, consider that ‘tend to’ can have the purely statistical, ‘nominalist’ sense of a patchy, ‘gappy’ performance: the phrases ‘I tend to go for a drink after teaching on a Friday’, or ‘I have a tendency to go for a drink after teaching on a Friday’, can speak only of what has generally happened in the recent past, just as ‘It tends to rain in May’ easily reduces to a statement of what has happened in May in the past. When we take ‘tend to’ in such a purely statistical sense, however, we forget that the verb tendere in Latin carries the sense of a trying or attempt, of an ongoing effort and directedness towards a goal, and thus that the verb says something about how and why the patchy performance is realized. This sense of tendency comes to the fore when we speak of a ‘tendency towards’ something, a phrase followed by a noun rather than the infinitive of a verb. These senses of ‘tendency to’ and ‘tendency towards’, and the relation

l’entendement humain, GIV, 6, II, I, §15; Leibniz, New Essays on the Human Understanding, trans. P. Remnant and J. Bennett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). ⁶⁰ Not only, as we saw in the Introduction (p.2 above), does the OED define ‘inclination’ as ‘a tendency of bent of the mind, will, or desires towards a particular thing’, but it defines ‘tendency’ as a ‘leaning, inclination, bias, or bent towards some object’.

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between them, are treated in a signal fashion in Descartes’s discussion in Le Monde of what we now call centrifugal force: I have already said several times that all bodies turning in circles tend always to move away [tendent toujours à s’éloigner] from the centres of the circles they describe; but here it is necessary for me to determine more particularly in what directions the parts of matter tend [vers quels costez tendent les parties de la matière] which make up the heavens and the stars. And to this end you must know that when I say of a body that it tends in some direction [tend vers quelque coste] I do not wish it to be imagined on that account that it has in it a thought or a will which carries it there, but only that it is disposed to move in that direction: whether it does move there in actuality, or whether some other body prevents it from doing so; and it is principally in this latter sense that I use the word tend [que je me sers du mot de tendre], because it seems to signify some effort, and all effort presupposes resistance.⁶¹

In saying that bodies tend to move away from the centres of the circles they describe, Descartes seems to use ‘tend to’ in a statistical sense: bodies describing circles do not always move away from the centre of the circle— witness the movement of the planets in our solar system—but they often do so, and they always do so when something else does not intervene. However, the word ‘always’ in the first sentence indicates that Descartes has in mind not only the patchy statistical reality but also a force that produces that reality, a force internal to the mobile. This force he describes with the idea of a body tending in a certain direction, which is not just movement in a certain direction but a trying or striving, a certain form of effort, a non-voluntary effort, which keeps the mobile in movement in that direction. Descartes’s position is, therefore, that a ‘tendency towards’ can account for ‘tendency to’ in a statistical sense, and this even though he later hollows out his concept of ‘tending towards’ by retreating from the idea that there is any active force internal to the mobile.⁶² ⁶¹ Descartes, Le Monde in Œuvres de Descartes, C. Adam and P. Tannery (eds,), 12 vols. (Paris: Leopold Cerf, 1897–1913), vol. xi, pp. 84–5. ⁶² See Principles of Philosophy (Principia philosophiæ 3.56, Œuvres de Descartes, viii, p.108), where Descartes states that the striving (conari) in inanimate things towards some motion ‘merely means that they are positioned and pushed into motion in such a way that they will in fact travel in that direction, unless they are prevented by some other cause’. In any case, recognizing that a tendency towards something can explain a tendency to do something allows us to see that it is not true that Descartes’s Le Monde confuses two senses of tendency that are

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Ravaisson understands both ‘tendency’ and ‘inclination’ as a force or power capable of producing some kind of empirical regularity, but understands them as gradated: tendency takes over from the will, and inclination takes over from tendency in the acquisition of a habit. Inclination is thus less voluntary and more a function of desire than tendency, but the difference is merely one of degree without any clear dividing lines between them. Hence in the 1840 ‘Contemporary Philosophy’, Ravaisson attempts to ward off voluntarist interpretations of tendency itself by presenting desire and love as its pre-voluntary truth (CP 425/80). Descartes and other early modern philosophers may have taken tendency to be a function of a voluntary striving, a conatus, but Ravaisson’s point is that although it is continuous with reflective will, it is irreducible to the latter, and is just as much a function of love, which ‘desires and possesses at the same time’ (OH 75). He thus advances a notion of a continuum of will— tendency—inclination—desire—love, and it is on this basis that in Part II, Section III (OH 61) he can present tendency, inclination, and desire as synonyms. That said, he normally—but not always—approaches the conceptual doublets desire–love and tendency–inclination in different contexts: desire–love is what precedes the will and makes it possible, as we will see in Chapter 3, whereas tendency–inclination is rather produced by habit. The overlapping terms will, tendency, inclination, desire, love are also continuous with the three features of the automaticity of habitual action— namely ease, celerity, and assuredness—that earlier in this chapter we saw Ravaisson describe. An action can begin voluntarily, but through repetition it first becomes easier, and can then be completed more quickly, with more assurance, i.e. less conscious control. This lack of conscious control can become a tendency or inclination that ‘anticipates’, i.e. replaces and precedes, the commandments of the will. Ravaisson’s gradualist account of the distinction between the voluntary and the involuntary is, in fact, one that has been endorsed in contemporary psychological studies of automaticity. Moors and de Houwer, for example, reject ‘all-or-none’ conceptions of the distinction, even though this carries the disadvantage that ‘as a gradual concept, automaticity loses its ability to distinguish one type of process (automatic) from another (non-automatic), for any process can be labelled automatic to some degree’.⁶³ If will, tendency, and inclination overlap on a

wholly different and without relation to each other. For that claim, see T. H. Champlin, ‘Tendencies’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 91 (1991), 119–33, p.125. ⁶³ Moors and De Houwer, ‘Automaticity: A Theoretical and Conceptual Analysis’, p.300.

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continuum, then a purely voluntary action is, indeed, merely a limit idea that cannot be realized in experience. But if Ravaisson’s conception of tendency and inclination, and consequently of desire and love, is a conception of automaticity, then this is a strong conception of automaticity, one that adds features to those regularly discussed in the psychological literature, such as ‘efficient’, ‘unintentional’, ‘uncontrolled’ and ‘unconscious’. Bargh names these commonly discussed features the ‘four horsemen of automaticity’, but he has also claimed that another feature of automaticity is that an action can come to completion without conscious control, a feature he names ‘autonomy’.⁶⁴ Ravaisson goes even further in this direction, since for him an automatic action can occur without having to be initiated by an act of reflective will in the first place. It is this feature that clearly distinguishes habit in the strong sense from bodily skills. The principle that brings about action prior to and in anticipation of the reflective will, is, precisely, the obscure activity that can become, beyond any principle of ease, a tendency and inclination. Ravaisson’s conception of the continuity of the principle of tendency and inclination with consciousness and the will clearly distinguishes his explanation of the features of acquired habits from that of Biran. One of the later Biran’s favourite philosophical maxims is Herman Boerhaave’s homo est duplex in humanitate, simplex in vitalitate,⁶⁵ that man is simple in his biological life, but double in his humanity. For Biran, this means that the primitive fact of consciousness, which is the dual fact of the will meeting resistance, is preceded by a pre-existing vital, physiological realm. Ravaisson rejects this distinction of sharply contrasted strata, and he rejects its expression in Biran’s conjectures about the force operative in habit. These conjectures can be described as vitalist precisely because Biran’s obscure, vital force was supposed to be entirely separate from the genuine activity of will, which is proper to the conscious mind. It is this separation and thus Biran’s vitalism that Ravaisson rejects.⁶⁶ For Ravaisson, the force of habituation and motor habit is not the property of a mind in abstraction from the body, nor of the body in abstraction from the mind. It is a force continuous with the will that somehow resides, as Biran had said of his vital force, in the ⁶⁴ J. A. Bargh, ‘The Ecology of Automaticity: Toward Establishing the Conditions Needed to Produce Automatic Processing Effects’, American Journal of Psychology 105 (1992) 181–99. ⁶⁵ Hermann Boerhaave, Praelectiones academicae de morbis nervorum (Leiden, 1761), II, p.497. On this point, see also Moore, The Psychology of Maine de Biran, p.105. ⁶⁶ This is Cazeneuve’s thesis in La Philosophie médicale de Ravaisson, but it is seldom stated clearly elsewhere.

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organs of the body. The ‘obscure and unreflective tendency’ that is the force of habit ‘goes further down into the organism, increasingly concentrating itself there’ (OH 53). Ravaisson’s position also differs from Biran’s in that he claims that the force or obscure activity is of the same nature in both forms of habit. Certainly, habituation requires no explicit exercise of will, but it nevertheless produces a desire in us for the sensation; and desire, for Ravaisson, is continuous with will. Sensation declines and motor action becomes more prompt but this is ‘by one and the same cause: the development of an unreflective spontaneity, which breaks into passivity and the organism, and increasingly establishes itself there, beyond, beneath the region of will, personality and consciousness’ (OH 43). In contrast to Biran’s concern for different causes of the two forms of habit, Ravaisson attempts to provide a unitary explanation that undercuts his predecessor’s dualistic framework. Certainly, habits of movement and habits of sensation are distinct in that the former are not acquired by means of the will; trying to get used to the annoying hum of the fridge by focusing on it rather than thinking about something else will only prolong the process of getting used to it. Nevertheless, for Ravaisson, there is an identity underlying desire in sensation and desire in originally willed movements. Life, as Biran might have put it, is a ‘story of two agonistic powers’, namely activity and passivity, but these ‘have a common trait, and this trait explains all the rest’ (OH 42). Biran had argued that the same ‘faculty’ could not be responsible for both forms of habit, since if it were ‘we would have to suppose that this unique faculty can become at once more passive and more active by the same habit’.⁶⁷ This argument, however, fails to apprehend that motor habits consist in the victory of pure activity and, that is to say, of purely conscious activity as little as sensory habituation results from an increase in passivity. Both forms of habit occur by means of a certain kind of spontaneity that is neither purely passive nor purely active. Biran’s argument also sits uncomfortably with other aspects of his analysis. He named the different forces underlying the two forms of habit as two species of ‘determination’, which suggests a kind of generic unity underlying them. He also repeatedly claims a certain ‘analogy’ between the two forms of habit.⁶⁸ Furthermore, although his official position is that reflection on habit allows us to isolate an active from a passive faculty (even though the progress of habit itself effaces the dividing line between activity and passivity), he

⁶⁷ Biran, Influence, p. 163/p.87.

⁶⁸ See, for example, Biran, Influence, p.179/p.104.

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suggests in one passage that activity and passivity are in fact unified from the ground up: It is thus, by enveloping our motive force in the extreme facility of its products, that habit effaces the demarcating line between voluntary and involuntary acts, between the acquisitions of experience and the operations of instinct, between the faculty of feeling and that of perceiving; and when we want then to make clear the differences separating these faculties, habit, which always tends to confuse them, shows us them indivisibly unified even in their cradle.⁶⁹

Biran attempts, in fact, to justify his psychological dualism by means of the double law of habit precisely because of the difficulty of isolating a level of pure passivity in experience; ‘there is hardly any impression that does not result from the mutual support’⁷⁰ of activity and passivity. For Ravaisson, however, this is a metaphysical fact that stands as clear evidence against the psychological dualism that Biran proposes. Nothing like pure passivity is given in experience because activity and passivity always work together as ‘proportionately and inversely related’ (OH 39); the more an experience is passive, the less it is active, and vice versa. Just as there is, for the human being, no pure activity of movement or perception that would exist without a measure of passivity, so too there is no such thing as a purely passive impression: ‘in every sensation . . . motility and perception have a role’ (OH 41). It seems, in the end, that Biran aims to mobilize his reflection on habit to support his distinction of passive and active impressions, whereas, properly understood, such reflection undermines this very distinction. In this sense, there is some truth to Le Roy’s claim that the ‘sole goal’ of Biran’s reflection on habit is that of ‘establishing the soundness of the philosophy that inspires it’.⁷¹

1.3 Against Intellectualism: Ravaisson among the Animists With his account of the force of habit as an ‘obscure’ or ‘secret activity’, Ravaisson develops and delimits Biran’s thinking. He develops it since ⁶⁹ Biran, Influence, p.179/p.104. ⁷¹ Le Roy, ‘Maine de Biran’, p.237.

⁷⁰ Biran, Influence, p. 136/p.56.

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conjectures in the prizewinning essay of 1802 have become pivotal philosophical theses thirty-six years later, and ideas consigned to a footnote constitute the kernel of Ravaisson’s 1838 doctoral dissertation. He delimits it in challenging the vitalist and dualist philosophy that structures Biran’s conjectures, in showing that the obscure activity is not wholly distinct from the principle of activity that is the will.⁷² In order to grasp in more detail Ravaisson’s position, however, it is necessary to assess his more developed critique of what he names in the final paragraph of Part II, rival ‘physical and rationalist’ (OH 44) accounts of habit. The term ‘rationalist’ here stands for positions that he had criticized in the preceding paragraph: The attempts made to explain the increasing ease and certainty of the movement, and the disappearance of sensation, by the progress of attention, of will and of intelligence, might still be considered capable of a certain level of success. But if the sensation disappears in the long run because attention tires of it and turns elsewhere, how is it that sensibility increasingly demands this sensation that the will abandons? If movement becomes swifter and easier because intelligence knows better all its parts, and because the will synthesizes the action with more precision and assurance, how is it that the increasing facility of movement coincides with the diminution of will and consciousness? (OH 43–4)

Given that Of Habit does not cite theories appealing specifically to a faculty of reason, the broader term ‘intellectualist’ is more appropriate than ‘rationalist’ to describe the positions Ravaisson criticizes. Still, whatever term we choose to use, it is clear that Ravaisson forces together quite different explanations of habit acquisition under the same heading. To address attention in relation to habituation first of all, the fact that taking our mind off something can help us to become accustomed to it may help to explain sensory habituation, but it is unable to explain how attempts, even the most determined, to regain faded pleasures by focusing all the more intently on their source come to nothing. Theories of attention also struggle to account for how we have a desire for a sensation that becomes ⁷² As Janicaud writes, Ravaisson ‘transforms mere allusions’ in Biran’s text ‘into fundamental propositions’, and what ‘in Biran was only a hypothetical perspective becomes with Ravaisson the law of a unique development’; Ravaisson et la métaphysique, p.30. See also Beaufret, Notes sur la philosophie en France au XIXème siècle, p.20: ‘Cela donc qui, pour Biran, n’était qu’un aspect du phénomène (aspect qu’il n’avait d’ailleurs explicitement souligné que dans le cas de la sensation) prend donc maintenant pour l’ensemble une signification causale.’

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manifest in the absence of that sensation. The progress of attention could only offer a partial explanation of habituation, and would leave key aspects of it unexplained. Concerning attention in motor habit, it would be impossible to deny that attention is able to focus elsewhere once a bodily skill or habit is acquired, and that this lack of attention is a necessary constituent of even the most minimal definition of automaticity. This is, however, merely a phenomenal feature of automaticity in habit rather than an explanation of it. The feature leaves us in need of an explanation of why attention is able to focus elsewhere, and this is presumably why Ravaisson does not even mention attention in relation to motor habit in the passage cited above. He does respond, however, to an intellectualist idea of the ‘progress’ of the will and intelligence in motor habit acquisition, to the idea that there is an increased efficiency and celerity of will and intelligence to the point where they would no longer operate consciously. Accounting for habit in this way certainly has the advantage of parsimony; no other faculty or force would be required to account for it, and there would be no need to introduce theories of physiological change as conditioning habit acquisition. Such accounts, however, neither correspond to nor explain our experience. They do not correspond to it, since we have no direct awareness, by definition, of such unconscious acts of mind. They do not explain experience, since the hypothesis enlightens us not in the slightest about how it is possible to have thoughts without being aware of them. Accounts in contemporary cognitive psychology of automaticity in terms of ‘algorithm strengthening’, it should be noted, suffer from both these defects. Competing accounts signalling a cognitive development from ‘algorithm computation’ to ‘single-step memory’ retrieval also overintellectualize habit in conceiving it as a form of intellectual memory, and provide no more of an explanation of what causes the development to occur.⁷³ It may appear that the target of Ravaisson’s critique here is the idea of unconscious judgement presented by Locke in his discussion of threedimensional perception. We think we see a three-dimensional object when, Locke supposes, only a two-dimensional surface with varied shadow and colour really appears to sight. We are no longer aware of making a judgement about a three-dimensional object from these two-dimensional ⁷³ On the algorithm-strengthening view and the single-step memory retrieval view, see Moors and De Houwer, ‘Automaticity: A Theoretical and Conceptual Analysis’, pp.300–1. Of course, if ‘cognitive psychology is founded on the metatheoretical assumption that responses to stimuli are mediated by information processing’ (p.297), then Ravaisson’s account of habit challenges cognitive psychological approaches.

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visual cues because the celerity of the action of judging is such that we no longer notice it; ‘a settled habit, in things whereof we have frequent experience, is performed so constantly, and so quick, that we take that for the Perception of our sensation, which is an Idea formed by our judgment’.⁷⁴ For Locke, ‘the Ideas we receive by sensation, are often by grown People alter’d by the Judgment, without our taking notice of it’.⁷⁵ This occurs as a result of ‘an habitual custom’ that ‘alters the appearances into their causes’. This unconscious operation of judgement in visual perception is an instance of a more general law of habit: ‘[h]abits, especially such as are begun very early, come, at last, to produce actions in us, which escape our observation’.⁷⁶ Habit, in general, makes our actions unconscious. Three-dimensional perception, then, is a product of habitual, unconscious judgement.⁷⁷ Locke’s theory, then, fits the idea of a progress of intelligence, if not that of a progress of will. Perhaps surprisingly, in 1853 Ravaisson seems to endorse it. Within a report written for the Ministry of Public Instruction on the teaching of drawing in schools, published as De l’enseignement du dessin dans les lycées in the following year, he claims that: in truth, we do not really see objects, and not even the real forms of objects, but rather the signs that, most of the time, represent the things to us in shorthand. But given that these signs are in a necessary and constant relation with the things that they represent, the things that we have a constant need to calculate—without even noticing that we are doing so, as is the case with everything habitual—, we think we see what the appearances allow us, in fact, only to divine. (AD 17/152)

An apparent commitment to a representational theory—and, as is clear in the context, a causal and intromission theory—of perception leads Ravaisson to accept the Lockean hypothesis that objective, three-dimensional experience is constituted by unconscious ‘calculations’, unconscious judgements. The retinal image, and then the psychological qualia that we directly experience, are two-dimensional, and it is only the unconscious work of the mind ⁷⁴ Locke, Essay 2.9.9. ⁷⁵ Locke, Essay 2.9.8. ⁷⁶ Locke, Essay 2.9.10. ⁷⁷ As John P. Wright has noted (‘Ideas of Habit and Custom in Early Modern Philosophy’, p.28), although Locke does not explicitly describe these judgements as involuntary, it is difficult to see how they could be voluntary. A voluntary action, for Locke, is one performed ‘consequent to . . . [an] order or command of the mind’ (Essay 2.21.5), and we have no awareness of commanding, i.e. willing, such judgements. It is hardly surprising that elsewhere (Essay 2.33.18) Locke seems to admit, with the example of ingrained prejudices, that mental ‘acts’ carried out from inveterate habit are involuntary.

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that makes us think that we really have three-dimensional experience. This position clearly contrasts with his apparent rejection of intellectualist explanations of motor and perceptive habits in 1838, but it does not contradict it. For three-dimensional perception, on Ravaisson’s account, is not a motor habit, but one that, although it colours sense perception, is purely intellectual, purely a matter of judgement or the association of ideas. Three-dimensional perception is, as Biran had it, a ‘habit of the imagination’. Ravaisson, then, does not reject the Lockean idea that mental acts can become unconscious and involuntary through repetition. On the contrary, Of Habit, Part II, Section V, which concerns the operation of habit in the ‘sphere of the abstract understanding and pure reason’ (OH 67), argues that mental acts also can become a function of inclination, and that ‘this inclination, into which the activity of the understanding and imagination is gradually absorbed, is natural spontaneity’ (OH 73). Inclination also operates in the higher reaches of the mind. All that Ravaisson is concerned to deny in Part II, Section V is that inclination in habitual mental operations, and in the operation of habit tout court, can be explained by the particular psychological process that is the association of ideas. For association itself requires explanation, and it can be explained only as a form of habit: ‘it is not the association of ideas that explains habit; it is rather by the law, by the principle of habit that the association of ideas can be explained’ (OH 73). In this connection, within a passage containing the text’s sole reference to David Hume, Ravaisson criticizes the Scottish philosopher’s early conception of the association of ideas in the Treatise on Human Nature, according to which there are ‘qualities’ inherent in ideas themselves that produce an association between them, which ‘upon the appearance of one idea naturally introduce another’.⁷⁸ On Ravaisson’s contrasting account, habit as an obscure activity is the sole power required to account for such association: the ‘passive movements of the understanding’, as when ideas come to be associated without any mental effort, ‘become, more and more, an inclination’ (OH 73). Ravaisson’s other Scottish target here is Dugald Stewart,⁷⁹ as he ⁷⁸ David Hume, A Treatise on Human Nature, eds. D. F. Norton and M. J. Norton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007, p.12), 1.1.4. Ravaisson seems, in fact, not to have read Hume’s different account in the first Enquiry. ⁷⁹ Ravaisson refers (H 123, note 64) to the passage of Stewart’s Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind (Edinburgh: Thomas Constable, 1854), vol.2, p.258, that responds to Reid’s characterization of habit as denominating tendencies of both body and mind: ‘With this observation I cannot agree, because I think it more philosophical to resolve the power of habit into the association of ideas, than to resolve the association of ideas into habit’.

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makes clear some thirty years later and with all due modesty, when characterizing in 1867 the singularity of his own argument in relation to Scottish philosophy: Reid had said, but without attempting to prove it, that the association of ideas must be grounded in habit. In contrast, Dugald Stewart, tending much more than his teacher to an explanation by means of phenomena alone, . . . was of the opinion that it is rather habit that must be explained by the succession and the association of ideas. The author of a thesis Of Habit, submitted in 1838 to the faculté des lettres de Paris, in drawing the association of ideas back to this phenomenon, explained habit by the inclination one has to repeat and imitate oneself—an inclination that itself can be reduced to the tendency, to the effort of all things to persevere in the actuality that constitutes their very being. (FP 174)

Chapter 2 returns to Ravaisson’s further claim that the force of habit can be reduced to the principle of inertia, but it is clear that his position is that tendency and inclination are the primary explanans of the phenomena of not just sensory habituation and motor habit, but of mental habits also, including the association of ideas. Ravaisson does not deny that habit operates in thought. Instead, following Biran, his claim is simply that habits of the understanding and the imagination are not sufficient to explain sensory habituation and habitual motor action. It is necessary, he holds, to posit a principle producing habitual facility and tendency that is resident in the organs themselves. In order to understand Ravaisson’s position on specifically the will (in contrast to the understanding) in habit, it is necessary to turn to the early modern ‘animist’ physiologists cited in Of Habit. Animism was a reaction to Cartesian iatro-mechanism, and makes of the soul—rather than a principle of life independent of the soul, as the vitalists later held in response to animism—the principle of all bodily functions, including the apparently involuntary and unconscious ones such as digestion and circulation. Although, as Cazeneuve notes, ‘when Ravaisson criticizes “rationalist” theories, he does not identify animism with the latter’,⁸⁰ it seems to be theories of the will in animist accounts of habit acquisition that he criticizes. His concern to criticize these theories may even have led to his exaggerations, which we noted above (pp.40-1), concerning habit leaving the ‘sphere’ of the will. ⁸⁰ Cazeneuve, La Philosophie médicale de Ravaisson, p.68.

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Ravaisson refers to the 1735 ‘Essay concerning the Motions of our Eyes’ by William Porterfield, President of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, which argues that some bodily actions are voluntary but unconscious: the uniform motion of our two eyes in focusing on a single object is a voluntary action that has become unconscious and, in a sense, necessary, through habit. ‘This uniform Motion by Use and Habit’, he holds, ‘at last becomes so necessary, that the Eyes cannot be moved differently; long Custom rendering many Actions necessary, which were not so essentially, nor from the Beginning.’⁸¹ This necessity is not, however, a physical or ‘intrinsical Necessity’, but a ‘moral necessity’⁸² that does not make the actions ‘mechanical and independent of our Will’.⁸³ Other motions which are ‘no doubt voluntary . . . of which we are every bit as little conscious’ include the regular blinking of the eyelids.⁸⁴ Ravaisson cites approvingly this notion of a ‘moral’, non-mechanical necessity,⁸⁵ but although he does not explicitly do so, it seems that he would qualify the Scottish physician’s voluntarism. It is not just conscious awareness but also the will that declines in the acquisition of a habit: ‘[c]onsciousness feels itself expire along with the will . . . , by a gradation and degradation which are continuous’ (OH 43). Ravaisson’s inheritance of Biran’s voluntarist psychology, with its fundamental claim that consciousness is a function of the will, entails that he is unable to accept the claim that consciousness could decline in the acquisition of a habit while the will remains as it was. One of the sources of Porterfield’s ideas was the French comparative anatomist and animist physiologist Claude Perrault, author of the 1680 Essais de physique, and he offers a conception of will in habit that is closer to Ravaisson’s own position.⁸⁶ In response to the obvious objection to

⁸¹ William Porterfield, ‘Essay concerning the Motions of our Eyes: Part I, Of their External Motions’, in Medical Essays and Observations, published by a Society in Edinburgh, vol. 3 (Edinburgh, 1735), p.154. ⁸² Porterfield, A Treatise on the eye, The Manner and Phaenomena of Vision, 2 vols. (London, 1759), Vol 2, p.154. ⁸³ Porterfield, ‘Essay concerning the Motions of our Eyes: Part II, Of their Internal Motions’, in Medical Essays and Observations, published by a Society in Edinburgh, vol. 4 (Edinburgh, 1737), p.214. ⁸⁴ Porterfield, ‘Essay concerning the Motions of our Eyes: Part II, Of their Internal Motions’, p.213. ⁸⁵ For more on this, see Chapter 4 below. ⁸⁶ On Perrault’s conception of habit, see, again, John P. Wright, ‘Ideas of Custom and Habit in Early Modern Philosophy’, p.31, and his ‘Perrault’s Criticisms of the Cartesian Theory of the Soul’, in Descartes’ Philosophy of Science, eds. Stephen Gaukroger, John Schuster, and John Sutton (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 680–96. On Perrault’s animism more generally, see François Azouvi ‘Entre Descartes et Leibniz: l’animisme dans les Essais de physique de Claude Perrault’, Recherches sur le xviie siècle, vol. 5, 1982, pp.9–19.

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animism that we have no knowledge of voluntarily controlling our digestion or circulation, Perrault distinguishes between knowledge which is ‘clear, explicit and distinct’ and knowledge that is ‘obscure and confused’. This is the forerunner of the distinction, which Ravaisson celebrates (OH 124, n.12), between logos and logismos articulated later by George Ernst Stahl (1659–1734), the most renowned of the animist doctors. Yet Perrault also distinguishes—and this Ravaisson does not note in Of Habit—between two modes of volition as well as two modes of knowledge: just as we have . . . two sorts of thinking, one explicit and one confused, so too we have an explicit will, which is the only one we know, and another, which is confused and which we do not apperceive, which presides over actions which are of the highest necessity, which relate directly to our conservation, and of which it is rarely the case that the explicit will is master.⁸⁷

This distinction illuminates Perrault’s claims that acquired habitual actions are guided by the will, and that the movement of the heart, like the motions of our eyes, is an action ‘absolutely under the control of our will’.⁸⁸ Perrault, asserts that the will has an absolute control over voluntary movements, but acknowledges that the will with this ‘absolute control’ is confused and does not belong to reflective thought. Ravaisson, in contrast, asserts that an acquired habit leaves the ‘sphere of the will’, whereas, by his own lights, the will can have no sphere. Both thinkers, in opposing senses, risk exaggeration, and both risk contradicting themselves. In the end, if Perrault would accept the notion of a continuous scale underlying the distinction between confused and explicit volition, his position—abstracting from his claims that all instincts are acquired habits, to which Chapter 3 of this study returns—would be indistinguishable from that of Ravaisson.

1.4 Against Materialism: On Plasticity and Neurophilosophy As we have just seen, Ravaisson criticizes ‘intellectualist’ accounts of habit acquisition, in terms of the development of attention, the will, or the

⁸⁷ Perrault, Essais de physique (Paris: Coignard, 1680), p.294. ⁸⁸ Perrault, ‘Du bruit’, Œuvres diverses de physique et de mécanique de Mrs. C. & P. Perrault, 2 vols. (Leyden, 1721), Vol. I, p.277.

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understanding, but this does not entail that he is more inclined to accept materialist hypotheses. He criticizes physical explanations of both forms of habit: [t]he gradual weakening of the sensations and the increasing ease of the movements could perhaps by explained hypothetically by some change (which anatomy has not yet discovered) in the physical constitution of the organs. But no organic modification can explain the tendency, the inclination whose progress coincides with the degradation of sensation and effort. (OH 44)

Ravaisson does not, then, dismiss in principle the possibility of the discovery of organic changes accompanying motor habits and habituation, but the parenthetical remark that anatomy has not yet discovered these changes refers to the fact that the neurophilosophy of the time, such as that of Charles Bonnet, was no less hypothetical than the speculations concerning the increasingly easy passage of nervous fluids or ‘animal spirits’ through the nerves advanced by Cartesian psychophysiology in the preceding century. Descartes had argued that brain filaments were reformed and rearranged by the motions of animal spirits, so as to alter the gaps between pores through which they flow. The animal spirits ‘trace figures in these gaps’, and when the patterns of input are stronger or more frequent, the alterations in the pores are more enduring.⁸⁹ Although it is possible, Ravaisson asserts, that such organic changes could explain the decline of sensation and the ease of movement, they will be unable to account for the tendency or inclination manifest in either form of habit, the tendency ‘whose progress coincides with the degradation of sensation and effort’. Sensation can decline in intensity and action can become easier, but what remains in principle inexplicable in physiological terms is the need or desire for the sensation in the case of passive habituation, and the tendency or inclination to repeat a motor action. It may appear that Ravaisson makes a concession to the neurological speculations of his day in holding that only tendency or inclination, in contrast to facility, in habit remains inexplicable in physical terms. This position, however, would be scarcely consistent with his continuist view—expressed

⁸⁹ Œuvres de Descartes, vol. xi, p. 178. See John Sutton et al, ‘Applying Intelligence to the Reflexes: Embodied Skills and Habits between Dreyfus and Descartes’, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 43/1 (2011), 101–34, and Dennis Des Chene, ‘From Habit to Traces’ in A History of Habit, ed. T. Sparrow (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2013), 121–32.

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everywhere in Of Habit—that tendency in habitual action is continuous with any skill, aptitude, or facility; voluntary action, skills, tendencies, and even tics, for Ravaisson, denominate different positions on a spectrum that shade into each other and that are not wholly separate. If facility, but not tendency, were explicable physiologically, then both could not be thought as occupying positions on a spectrum offering no clear line of demarcation between them. It seems, therefore, that Ravaisson’s claim can be only that physiological changes may offer a partial explanation of an acquired skill, whereas they are increasingly insufficient in relation to habitual tendency. Physical changes may accompany the development of a skill or capacity, but they are not sufficient to explain it; and a skill, if it involves more than increased knowledge, more than merely knowing how to do something, i.e. if it involves a decline in conscious awareness, must involve to a degree the force of habit. Thus clarified, Ravaisson’s position resembles Thomas Reid’s sceptical response to physiological explanations of habit in the chapter ‘Of Habit’ of his 1788 Essay on the Active Powers of Man.⁹⁰ Reid contends that although ‘habit differs from instinct . . . in its origin’, since habits are acquired through experience, both operate in some sense automatically, and both are equally inexplicable in physical terms: I see no reason to think, that we shall ever be able to assign the physical cause either of instinct or of the power of habit. Both seem to be parts of our original constitution. Their end and use is evident; but we can assign no cause of them, but the Will of him who made us. With regard to instinct, which is a natural propensity, this will perhaps be easily granted but it is no less true with regard to that power and inclination which we acquire by habit. No man can show a reason why our doing a thing frequently should produce either facility or inclination to do it.⁹¹

We may find it strange to suppose now that it would be harder to account physically and causally for instinct than for habit. In the light of modern biology, it is easier to think that instincts are ‘hardwired’ in the biological constitution of the organism. In any case, Reid’s claims about facility or ⁹⁰ Of Habit refers to Reid’s text in its pivotal Part II, Section II; see OH 125, n.127. ⁹¹ Reid, Essay on the Active Powers, III, iii, 3, p.90.

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inclination in habit are not restricted to eighteenth-century biology. The claim is not just that it was not possible to adduce at the time a physical cause for why our doing something frequently produces a facility, propensity, or inclination to do it, but that no one could ever reasonably hope to do so. Reid affirms not only that eighteenth-century knowledge of the biological structure and mechanics of the human being was insufficient to account for the two principles, but also that such knowledge, even as it advances, never will be able to account for them. There must, as he argues ‘be a cause of the power of habit’⁹² to produce facility or inclination from repeated voluntary movements, but, given the impossibility of accounting for this cause physiologically, we may just as well invoke God, ‘the will of him who made us’, in order to explain it. Reid’s assertion that neither facility nor inclination can be explained physiologically contrasts prima facie with Ravaisson’s more nuanced and apparently narrower claim, but this difference is more apparent than real, and not just because the French philosopher holds facility to be continuous with inclination. For at the beginning of his section ‘Of Habit’, Reid defines— as the Introduction to the present study noted—habit in a proper sense, and that is to say habit as a principle of action, as inclination: Habit is commonly defined, A facility of doing a thing, acquired by having done it frequently. This definition is sufficient for habits of art, but the habits which may, with propriety, be called principles of action, must give more than a facility, they must give an inclination or impulse to do the action, and that in many cases, habits have this force, cannot be doubted.⁹³

A habit of art, i.e. a skill, such as being able to touch-type, is a power or disposition, an ability, that does not bring itself to its own manifestation, and merely comes into operation at the command of the will. A tendency, inclination, or proneness to carry out an action, in contrast, is more independent of the will. As Reid remarks insightfully, it often ‘requires a particular will and effort to forbear it’, and it even ‘makes us uneasy in the omission of it’.⁹⁴ Skills make actions easy; tendencies, unexercised, can make the agent uneasy. Reid, thus, does not need to deny that skills have a physiological basis in order to advance his claim that habits—in the proper, strong sense as principles of action—are not open to physiological explanation. ⁹² Reid, Essay on the Active Powers, III, iii, 3, p.90. ⁹³ Reid, Essay on the Active Powers . . . , III, iii, 3, p.88. ⁹⁴ Reid, Essay on the Active Powers . . . , III, iii, 3, p.89.

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Allowing for the possibility of at least partial physiological explanation of our facility in action in this way may well make his position more appealing and tenable. There is, however, a fundamental inconsistency, even a paradox in Reid’s account of habit, and it seems to be one that Ravaisson exploits in advancing his own position: the Scottish philosopher presents both instinct and habit as ‘mechanical principles of action’ while denying that a physical and mechanical cause can ever be found for them. Habit and instinct as mechanical principles cannot be explained mechanically! Given this denial, it may be unfair to claim that, with his classification of habit and instinct as mechanical principles, Reid has, in effect, decided everything in advance, and foreclosed any other non-reductive reflection on habit.⁹⁵ If Reid really did believe that his notion of propensity or inclination in habit was a mechanical principle, it is hard to fathom why he would have such confidence that physical explanations would always fail. Perhaps the word mechanical in Reid’s analysis is merely shorthand for ‘no attention, no deliberation, no will’, since he uses it ‘for distinction’s sake’,⁹⁶ and describes habit and instinct as ‘a kind of mechanical principles’⁹⁷ rather than simply as mechanical principles tout court. This may also go some way to explaining why Reid accepts the common usage according to which ‘we call many things actions of the man, which he neither previously conceived nor willed’, when ‘in the strict philosophical sense, nothing can be called the action of a man, but what he previously conceived and willed or determined to do’.⁹⁸ If Reid really did believe that habit was a mechanical principle, it may well have been more difficult for him to accept the common usage, and more difficult for him to conceive habit as a principle of action. If he could be made to say that although there is no deliberation or reflective, voluntary consciousness in the operation of an acquired habit, habit is nevertheless not unintelligent, then his position would be close to that of Ravaisson. On these grounds, it can be said that Ravaisson’s critique of physiological explanations of habit is more consistent than Reid’s. From either philosopher, however, we require a reason why habit in the form of tendency or inclination remains inexplicable in physiological terms. Reid does not provide one. The claim that we have ‘no reason to think that we shall ever be ⁹⁵ In my ‘Ravaisson and the Force of Habit’ (p.76), I claimed with undue haste that Reid’s characterization of habit as a mechanical principle of action had decided everything in advance. ⁹⁶ Reid, Essay on the Active Powers, III, i, 1, p.78. ⁹⁷ Reid, Essay on the Active Powers, III, ii, 3, p.106. ⁹⁸ Reid, Essay on the Active Powers, III, ii, 3, p.106.

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able to assign the physical cause’ is hardly justified by the observation that ‘no man can show a reason why our doing a thing frequently should produce either facility or inclination to do it’, for I might not be able to do something today, but have reason to believe that I will be able to do it tomorrow. For his part, in the concluding paragraphs of Part II, Section II of De l’habitude, Ravaisson does not provide a reason for the insufficiency of physiological explanations of habit as directly or as clearly as he might have, but the explanans in the statement concluding that section is, in fact, the explanandum inexplicable by physiology: ‘the law of habit can be explained only by the development of a Spontaneity that is at once active and passive, equally opposed to mechanical Fatality and to reflective Freedom’ (OH 44). In both forms of habit, Ravaisson argues, there is a form of activity that constitutes a kind of in-between underlying voluntary activity and the passive resistance it meets; and because it is an activity, though obscure, this principle is intrinsically related to the will. Ravaisson’s reasoning, then, is that habit is inexplicable in physiological terms because it is the operation of a graduated principle that belongs neither to the reflective mind nor to the physical body. Habitual action, on his account, is still action, i.e. something carried out in some sense by an agent, for habit is not a principle wholly external to the voluntary agent. A habitual act is still something that, in however minimal a sense, I do rather than something that happens to me, even if the selfhood involved here is not that of a reflective consciousness.⁹⁹ Contemporary neuroscience, of course, has had some success in understanding and localizing neural activity in habits. In reviewing recent work, Ann Graybiel reports how habits—‘sequential, repetitive, motor, or cognitive behaviours elicited by external or internal triggers that, once released, can go to completion without constant conscious oversight’—constitute a ‘broad array of behaviours [that] can engage neural circuits interconnecting the neocortex with the striatum and related regions of the basal ganglia’.¹⁰⁰ Research findings have suggested differing brain substrates for procedural ⁹⁹ In ‘Explaining Actions with Habits’, American Philosophical Quarterly 43/1 (2006), 57–69, Bill Pollard has defended something like this claim: even though habitual actions may be ‘dependent’ on causal processes, ‘be they processes in the perceptual system, the brain or the muscles’, when explaining action through habits we are not offering a causal or physical explanation, but rather accounting for ‘the action . . . in terms of one of its formal properties, namely that portion of the agent’s career of which that action forms a part’ (p.57). The idea of habits being ‘formal properties’ of action is, however, ambiguous, and Ravaisson is concerned to explain habit, and not just to analyse what we are doing when we explain an action by habit. ¹⁰⁰ Ann M. Graybiel, ‘Habits, Rituals, and the Evaluative Brain’, Annual Review of Neuroscience 31 (2008) 359–87, p.161 and p.375 for the two quotations respectively.

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(‘knowing how’ as a function of habit) and declarative (‘knowing that’) memory, namely the basal ganglia and the medial temporal lobe respectively, but not as independent systems, for they run in parallel rather than sequentially. Ravaisson, to be sure, does not have to deny that any of this patterned neural activity takes place, just as he would find no difficulty in admitting that there is brain activity every time we think. Yet just as, on his account, the thinking mind is irreducible to cerebral events, so too habit as a principle continuous with consciousness is irreducible to shifts in the functioning of particular neural circuits. An acquired habit, he argues, does not become a third-person process after being acquired in the first person. Tendency and inclination certainly take over from the will, but in this process an ‘it’ does not take over from the ‘I’. Ravaisson’s argument concerning the irreducibility of tendency and inclination in habit to mechanical explanation can be expressed not just in terms of his gradualist conception of automaticity, but also according to his strong conception of automaticity as a power or capacity that can bring itself, without external stimuli, to its own realization. An acquired habit, on Ravaisson’s account, is not a blind, dead reaction to external stimuli, but rather self-propelling. As a function of tendencies and inclinations that operate in advance of the reflective will, and that thus ‘anticipate’ the latter, acquired motor habits are automatic in that they bring themselves into operation. Despite our ordinary talk about automatic cars and washing machines, mechanical things cannot do this, for the laws of mechanics presuppose that things move, like the pistons in a car engine, only because something else makes them move. In this sense, Ravaisson’s account of tendency and inclination in habit draws on Leibniz’s account of force: By ‘force’ or ‘power’ [la Force ou Puissance] I do not mean the ability or the simple faculty [simple faculté] that is only a bare possibility for action and that, being itself dead as it were, never produces an action without being excited from outside. Rather, I mean something midway between ability and action [un milieu entre le pouvoir et l’action], something which involves an effort, an act, an entelechy—for force passes into action by itself so long as nothing prevents it.¹⁰¹

¹⁰¹ Die philosophischen Schriften von Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, 7 vols., ed. Carl Immanuel Gerhardt (Berlin: Weidmann, 1875–90; reprinted Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1978), vol.4, p.472/ Leibniz’s ‘New System’ and Associated Texts, ed. and transl. Roger Woolhouse and Richard Francks (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p.22.

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In his 1834 prizewinning essay at the Académie des sciences morales et politiques, De la Métaphysique d’Aristote, Ravaisson had celebrated at length Leibniz’s notion of force as the highest development of Aristotle’s metaphysics: ‘with him a being has to be the cause and the active cause of its development; it has to aspire and tend towards it, it has to bring itself out of rest and indifference’, and ‘what was still lacking before him, was the moment of tendency, effort, intermediate between power and the act’ (DMA 250/206). Before he turned to the question of habit, a notion of tendency was already central to Ravaisson’s understanding of metaphysics and its history. Moreover, Leibniz may have also have motivated Ravaisson to address the question of habit according to an idea of tendency, since the New Essays presents the French habitude as synonymous with tendance and force.¹⁰² That said, Ravaisson will qualify Leibniz’s conception of force in 1840 by stressing that tendency, inclination, desire, and even love take over from effort and the will in an acquired habit: Leibniz said: action has its source in the antecedent disposition already inclined to action; the active force has for its ground and substance tendency; it is tendency that constitutes the reality of acts and movements. We believe we give these propositions their inner and true sense by saying: the will has its source and substance in desire, and it is desire that constitutes the reality of the very experience of will. (CP 425/80)

Tendency and inclinations, as we have seen, are to be thought of as continuous with the will and effort but irreducible to them. Ravaisson’s critique of physiological explanations of habit, then, is based on a Leibnizian, dynamic conception of spontaneous force, but contemporary voices in the philosophy of the neurosciences might respond by claiming that Ravaisson thinks according to a narrow, perhaps solely mechanistic conception of physiology, and that he has not taken sufficient notice of the plasticity of neural connections that recent research has brought to light. The multiple structures of the brain are not only adaptable, but also apparently self-adapting. In the event of brain damage, for example, a different area of the brain can take over the activity formerly localizable in the now

¹⁰² On this point, see Julia Jorati, ‘Leibniz’s Ontology of Force’, https://marcsandersfoundation. org/wp-content/uploads/Leibnizs-Ontology-of-Force.pdf, accessed 6 May 2019, and forthcoming in Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy.

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damaged area.¹⁰³ But is it the case that the ‘neuroscientific concept of plasticity’ has ‘much in common with far older notions of disposition, habit and tendency’ in calling into ‘question mechanistic accounts of nature’, as Clare Carlisle suggests?¹⁰⁴ Ravaisson, for his part, can agree that the brain adapts to situations without this having any bearing on his fundamental position, for he is concerned with how habit is continuous with the voluntary mind. Just as the experience of volition resists explanation in neurological terms,¹⁰⁵ so too, for Ravaisson, the tendency or inclination that follows on from the will in an acquired habit is irreducible to neural events, even if it is accompanied by them. Neurological ‘plasticity’, it should be underlined, has no obvious parallel in the experience of tendency and inclination in habit; a tendency to repeat an action after its continuity or repetition hardly mirrors and is hardly even relatable to one region of the brain taking over from another in the execution of a particular function. These two sets of phenomena are quite different, and given that each seems to be able to occur independently of the other, it would be arbitrary to try to explain the one by the other. Were the neuroscientist still to suppose that the brain as the site of nonmechanical, spontaneous events can somehow explain tendency and inclination in habit, a metaphysics and not merely a physics of habit would still be required. It would still be necessary to account for the force or causal process through which non-necessary,¹⁰⁶ non-mechanical neural events come to pass. To satisfy oneself with a neuroscientific and materialist explanation of habit without addressing these issues is simply to pass the buck. If the neuroscientific concept of plasticity somehow recalls these notions of tendency and inclination, this is only because ultimately it has to fall back on metaphysics even when trying to reject and replace it. ¹⁰³ On this, see also Cathérine Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain?, trans. S. Rand (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008). ¹⁰⁴ Clare Carlisle, On Habit (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), p.22. See also Carlisle’s remarks on the neurosciences in ‘Between Freedom and Necessity: Félix Ravaisson on Habit and the Moral Life’. ¹⁰⁵ The neuroscience of volition is, of course, an emerging area of research. See, for example, Patrick Haggard, ‘Human Volition: Towards a Neuroscience of Will’, Nature Reviews Neuroscience 9 (2008), 934–46|doi:10.1038/nrn2497. ¹⁰⁶ Catherine Malabou argues that brain plasticity, in all its different modalities, offers a middle term between fixity and necessity, on the one hand, and abstract freedom on the other; see What Should We Do with Our Brain?, p.19. This is to presuppose, of course, that the metaphysical question of freedom and necessity can be addressed by talking about what happens in and to the brain. This seems to represent a significant move away from Malabou’s less physiological—and from our perspective, more philosophically interesting—conception of plasticity in The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality, Dialectic (Abingdon: Routledge, 2005).

2 After Of Habit Chapter 1 examined Ravaisson’s challenge to vitalist, intellectualist and materialist accounts of habit in earlier nineteenth-century French thinking and in early modern philosophy more generally. The present chapter takes the opposite historical approach, in that it assesses responses to Ravaisson’s account of habit—particularly motor habit—within later nineteenth- and twentieth-century French thinking. As the Introduction to this study showed, in the wake of De l’habitude a succession of French philosophers addresses the question of habit, and this chapter assesses the arguments of, in particular, Albert Lemoine, Léon Dumont, and Henri Bergson towards the end of the nineteenth century, and then those of the twentieth-century French phenomenologists Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Paul Ricoeur. The chapter assesses their responses, explicit and implicit, to Ravaisson’s ideas, and it will show how these ideas have often been subject to partial assessment and misinterpretation. Tracing in this way the inheritance of Ravaisson’s conception of habit as tendency and inclination serves to clear away the historical obstacles to an adequate understanding of his ideas, and helps to determine the specificity of his approach as a viable option in the philosophical interpretation of habit. The first section of the chapter examines Albert Lemoine’s critique of Ravaisson’s conception of habit as tendency and inclination in his 1875 L’Habitude et l’instinct. The second section turns to the misinterpretation of Ravaisson’s conception of habit as a ‘fossilised residue of a spiritual activity’ in Bergson’s 1904 speech on Ravaisson’s life and work, and how this misinterpretation expresses the dualist—the at once mechanist and intellectualist—conception of habit acquisition that he develops in his teaching and then in his 1896 Matter and Memory. The third section turns to the French phenomenological school in the twentieth century, and assesses the accounts of habit and the lived body, le corps propre, in the work of both MerleauPonty and Paul Ricoeur, the latter of whom, as we will see, clearly acknowledges the importance of Ravaisson’s work. In response to both MerleauPonty and Riceour, as well as to Lemoine and Bergson, I argue that tendency or inclination in habit is primitive and irreducible, and that a philosophy of Being Inclined: Félix Ravaisson’s Philosophy of Habit. Mark Sinclair, Oxford University Press (2019). © Mark Sinclair. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198844587.001.0001

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the lived body ought to take it into account. In conclusion, I show how tendency and inclination can and should be taken into account within the framework of present-day Merleau-Ponty-inspired phenomenological conceptions of pre-reflective agency as an ‘absorbed bodily coping’.

2.1 Lemoine’s Critique of Ravaisson Albert Lemoine (1824–74) taught at the universities of Nancy and Bordeaux, and then at the École Normale Supérieure, and worked across the boundaries of philosophy and psychology.¹ After a thesis on Charles Bonnet, he wrote two books on an author and theme very dear to Ravaisson, L’Animisme de Stahl (1858), and Le Vitalisme et animisme de Stahl (1864). Although he is of ‘modest notoriety’, as one commentator has put it, ‘Lemoine is far from being a marginal figure’² in nineteenth-century French philosophy. Ravaisson’s 1867 report on French philosophy cites Lemoine for his work on Stahl (FP 172), sleep (FP 195), madness (FP 197), mind and body (FP 200), and language and communication (FP 204–5).³ In the 1870s, Lemoine turned to the question of habit, but he does not return Ravaisson’s compliment. The 1875 L’Habitude et l’instinct: études de psychologie comparée cites Reid and Maine de Biran, but not Of Habit.⁴ In one sense, this is peculiar, since Lemoine clearly responds to Ravaisson’s text as the most recent substantial philosophical treatment of habit. L’Habitude et l’instinct was written after the same interval (thirty-six years) that separated Of Habit from Biran’s Influence of Habit on the Faculty of Thinking. In another sense, it is understandable, given that Lemoine responds critically to De l’habitude, and that in the mid-1870s Ravaisson’s power and influence were at their peak. Even though Ravaisson did not dominate philosophy in the way that Victor Cousin had earlier in the century, Lemoine must either have thought it prudent not to criticize directly Of Habit or have intended to add

¹ For a short biographical sketch of Lemoine, see Anne-Marie Drouin-Hans, ‘L’Épistémologie d’Albert Lemoine (1824–1874)’, Romantisme 25 (1995) 75–84, pp.83–4. ² Drouin-Hans, ‘L’Epistémologie d’Albert Lemoine’, p.75. ³ See Albert Lemoine, Stahl et l’animisme (Paris: Baillière 1858), Le Vitalisme et l’animisme de Stahl (Paris: Baillière, 1864), Du sommeil du point de vue physiologique et psychologique (Paris: Baillière, 1855/2nd edn 1865), L’Âme et le Corps, études de psychologie morale et naturelle (Paris: Didier, 1862), L’Aliéné devant la philosophie, la morale et la société (Paris: Didier, 1862), De la physionomie et de la parole (Paris: Baillière, 1865). ⁴ As Drouin-Hans shows (L’Épistémologie d’Albert Lemoine, p.77), Lemoine never refers to Ravaisson, and not even in his texts on Stahl.

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references to Ravaisson once the work was finished. He was not able to review the work as a whole, however, since he died in 1874 before he completed it, and, according to its editors, only the first part of the text concerning habit was apparently complete, whereas the second part on instinct required significant editorial intervention.⁵ L’Habitude et l’instinct expresses scepticism—in the second main section, ‘Les Habitudes volontaires’, which concerns habits acquired voluntarily— about the very idea of habit as a ‘principle of action’: [w]hen we make of habit, like Thomas Reid, a principle of action, when we represent it as a force, capable of special acts, distinct from either instinct or the will, we use a sort of very common metaphor that is quite legitimate and quite innocent. But we should not take it literally [à la lettre], for it could become the cause of grave errors. (HI 53)

It would be a mistake, Lemoine claims, to consider habit as a principle in its own right that is wholly independent of the will. In the pathological phenomena of madness, in somnambulism or intoxication, there may be a complete absence of will, but normally ‘it would be truer to say that the will is never completely absent from the actual exercise of l’habitude volontaire’ (HI 56). Although ‘in principle, the will can withdraw itself completely and abandon l’habitude volontaire . . . in reality this hardly ever occurs’ (HI 56). The pianist, writes Lemoine, has the general will to do what she is doing, and she lets habit takes over her performance to the degree required for the successful execution of the piece. The will ‘lets go of the tensed spring’ that is an acquired voluntary habit; but letting go is still an act of the will, and this ‘abdication of the will in favour of nature or habit is never definitive, and the will can always regain [resaissir] the government which it gave up [desaisi] wisely [à bon escient]’ (HI 57). Because the will lets go and can take back control, it is not unreasonable to think that in some form it is always present, and thus that motor habit occurs according to a will that is not so much ‘imperative’ as ‘permissive’. In habit, there is a ‘permissive will’—Lemoine borrows the phrase from Leibniz in his Theodicy (HI 56)— rather than an absence of will and its replacement by another principle. An acquired habit, for Lemoine, is the combination of this permissive will with a trained, modified nature. ⁵ The text was edited by Victor Egger—who would go on to write an important article on habit (‘La Naissance des habitudes’, Annales de la Faculté des Lettres de Bordeaux 1(1880) 209–23), to which Chapter 6 returns—and Elie Rabier.

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In what sense is this a critique of De l’habitude? Although Ravaisson does not directly describe habit as a ‘principle of action’, his debt to Reid’s position is obvious, given that he understands habit in a strong sense as tendency and inclination that can ‘anticipate’ the will. That said, according to his conception of continuity, Ravaisson does not hold that habit is wholly distinct from will and nature, and he can accommodate the doubtless important idea of the permissive will in habit without having to renounce in any way the idea of inclination. Perhaps Lemoine’s ‘permissive will’ is just another way of saying what Ravaisson means by tendency and inclination, taking both as a function of the will in a wider sense of desire. Without further argument at least, there is no incompatibility in the two approaches. Lemoine develops his critique, however, in the following section of the book, which concerns not habitudes volontaires but habitudes de la volonté, i.e. the habits ‘that the will itself contracts in the government of its own conduct’. Here Lemoine rejects the thesis that we ‘end up no longer willing the acts that we originally wanted with more energy . . . by virtue of an irresistible, impersonal and involuntary desire’ (HI 62) that is the instantiation of habit. If that were the case, habit would present a dilemma: [i]f habit reduced the will gradually and ended up by destroying it, substituting for it an irresistible leaning, we would have to accept either one of two hypotheses: either, given that morality is inseparable from the will, and that both morality and will are inseparable from freedom which is not to be found in desire, the habitual act, born from this irresistible desire, has no moral value; as an act, first of all in an essentially voluntary fashion, is repeated and tends to become habitual, it tends also to become indifferent; its morality declines so much that vice and virtue will merge into the innocence of instinct. Or else morality can exist without freedom, and even though necessity invades the soul, the latter finds a higher morality in a sort of grace. (HI 63)

Lemoine states briskly that no ‘reasonable person (intelligence raisonnable)’ (HI 63) could possibly accept the first horn of the dilemma, according to which habitual acts have no moral value, without recognizing that this is precisely Immanuel Kant’s position in his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View: ‘as a rule, all habits are objectionable’, since they amount to ‘thoughtless repetition of the same act’.⁶ Moral acts have to be guided by the ⁶ Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, trans. Robert B. Louden in Günter Zöller and Robert Louden (eds.), Immanuel Kant: Anthropology, History and Education (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p.261.

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will, for Kant, but habitual acts, however useful they may be, lack such guidance and are at best amoral. For Lemoine, this first horn of the dilemma is untenable, but the second, professed by ‘great minds and beautiful souls’, amounts to a ‘mysticism’ more explicit than the covert mysticism in the first horn that ‘annihilates the will in habit and desire’ (HI 64). According to this second horn, there is a higher form of morality in habitual acts, which is a ‘sort of grace’. Such a claim amounts to mysticism, for Lemoine, since ‘common sense and the law understand nothing of the subtle obscurities of this philosophical grace that would remove from the agent freedom of action and to which the merit of an action would be attributed.’ (HI 64) Common sense can only treat with scepticism the invocation of a super-rational and superpersonal principle such as grace to account for non-voluntary habitual action. The law has to reject it outright, for otherwise we would have to accept the habit of committing criminal acts as a defence in a court of law. The dilemma, for Lemoine, is fortunately a false dilemma, for in the becoming habitual of an action, repetition certainly makes the ‘act easier and the agent more capable of reproducing it’ but the ‘will does not destroy itself by its own acts’ (HI 72). That is, ‘an act, which originally was only the result of a primary and unique act of will, does not stop being voluntary and free as it was in the past, just because it is frequently repeated and becomes habitual’ (HI 63). In an acquired habitual action, the will ‘has transformed itself neither into instinct, nor into an acquired nature, nor into habit’, but simply ‘stops commanding, and no longer wills’ because it has trained nature, the bodily nature of the agent, to act in its place: [t]he habits of the organ or the mind are nothing else than that organ or that mind trained [dressé] and determined by the will; it is nature, it is instinct modified in its primary direction, but respected in its essence. Beyond that, habit is only a word or a metaphor. (HI 66)

Lemoine’s position, then, is that there is no such thing as habitudes de la volonté, habits of will, and that the phrase is without a real referent. Although in the first pages of his book, Lemoine describes habit not just as a ‘facility’, but also as a ‘disposition, a tendency to reproduce the acts already executed’ (HI 10), his considered position—without ever providing a substantial argument for it—seems to be that habit is only ever a function of facility, and that Ravaisson’s Reidian conception of habit as a principle of action giving ‘inclination’ or ‘impulse’ is an error and exaggeration. It is precisely because the will has trained the body to serve its own ends in

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habitual motor action that the acquisition of habit is not a form of self-renunciation on the part of the will. How exactly does Lemoine’s development of his position relate to Ravaisson’s doctrine? With the second horn of his dilemma, Lemoine clearly has Ravaisson in mind, for De l’habitude indeed conceives of habit as a function of grace: habit is ‘a law, a law of the limbs, which follows on from the freedom of spirit. But this law is a law of grace’ (OH 57). Habit, as a law of the limbs following on from reflective freedom can be conceived as grace, as a gift that comes to the human agent from outside the sphere of the reflective, self-determining will. Grace can be understood first as a certain non-mechanical effortlessness in gesture and movement, and it is an aesthetic category in this sense in Ravaisson’s work. In his writings on art after Of Habit, Ravaisson will interpret grace as a more fundamental aesthetic category than beauty, as ‘more beautiful than beauty itself ’ (see OTD 672/162). In 1838, however, Ravaisson interprets the effortless grace in an acquired habitual action not in aesthetic but in explicitly theological terms. Within Part II, Section IV, Ravaisson cites the ‘profound words of a profound theologian: “Nature is prevenient grace.” It is God within us, God hidden solely by being so far within us in this intimate source of ourselves, to whose depths we do not descend’ (OH 71). If habit naturalizes spirit, it also, Ravaisson claims, divinizes spirit in that it opens spirit to an extra-personal power interpreted here as a divine grace. In the acquisition of a habit a natural force comes to act with and for me, and thus Ravaisson can argue that habit reveals that nature prior to the reflective will is—and the profound theologian cited is François Fénélon—a form of prevenient grace, i.e. a form of grace that, traditionally understood, precedes human freedom, leads the will in the right direction, and makes possible the ability to choose salvation (OH 123, n.61). Ravaisson’s epistemological warrant for invoking God in this connection is not obvious, but Lemoine’s critique relates to Of Habit’s apparently fatalistic assertions about a form of necessity in habit, about habit as a ‘necessity of desire, love and grace’ (OH 75). Chapter 4 will show exactly why Ravaisson’s assertions concerning necessity in 1838 cannot be taken at face value, but Lemoine seems not to notice that when Ravaisson states that habit follows on from freedom, he means that it is continuous with conscious freedom rather than opposed to it. Lemoine’s claim that either ‘the habitual act, born from . . . irresistible desire, has no moral value’ or that morality ‘can exist without freedom’ ignores Ravaisson’s claim that a form of freedom— though removed from ‘reflective freedom’ (OH 55)—is to be found in desire. In order to criticize his predecessor’s position, and to attack the very notion

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of habit as a principle of action in Of Habit, Lemoine would have to reject the thought that there are degrees of freedom. Certainly, if prompted, he may well have done so; the idea may well not have satisfied him or the broader Kantian, deontological philosophical spirit of the new Third Republic.⁷ It remains the case, however, that Lemoine attacks a caricature of Ravaisson’s position rather than that position itself. Still, we might think that Lemoine rightfully exposes the excessive optimism in Ravaisson’s moral evaluation of habit. Ravaisson seems to minimize discussion of bad habits, and to forget that habit can be as much a principle of addiction, which undermines and enslaves us, as it is a principle of grace. In this sense, habit is, according to an ancient Greek word, a pharmakon, at once poison and cure.⁸ Ravaisson, however, does not wholly deny the possible negative effects of habits: graceful movement can become the convulsive phenomenon that we name tics (OH 51). Moreover, his claim that the primary goal of education is to inculcate good habits—‘the very secret of education . . . consists in attracting someone towards the good by action, thus fixing the inclination for it’ (OH 69)—presupposes the possibility of bad habits. The idea of education as formation of habit is Aristotelian, and Ravaisson’s positive moral evaluation of habit in 1838 derives from his analyses of the philosopher’s ethics and psychology a year earlier in Essai sur la Métaphysique d’Aristote. There he wrote that habit is essential to the moral life, for if the ‘first conditions of practising the good are the natural dispositions towards the good’, these natural dispositions are easily led astray. Natural virtue, ignorant and changeable [mobile], can be led astray by the deceits of sensuousness [voluptés trompeuses]; it can be led away from the good by apparent goods. To keep it on the right path, an invariable habit has to be made from the disposition, the tendency in the soul. (EMA 450)

In order for our natural inclination towards the good not to be led astray, a form of will is necessary ‘that is not light and mobile like the passions, but which proceeds from a firm and unshakeable disposition’ (EMA 450). Of all

⁷ On the importance of Kant in the ‘new spiritualism’ of the 1870s and afterwards, see Fabien Capillières, ‘To Reach for Metaphysics: Émile Boutroux’s Philosophy of Science’. Note that when Bergson, in 1889, restates the idea of degrees of freedom, he will be subject to very much the same Kantian critique. See, in particular, Gustav Belot, ‘Une Nouvelle Théorie de la liberté’, Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger 30 (1890), 361–92. ⁸ On these points, see ‘Addiction and Grace’, Catherine Malabou’s preface to Of Habit (OH vii–xx).

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such acquired dispositions, of all such ‘acquired habits, the strongest and most durable is the one into which, through its exercise, the constant and essential inclination of every soul toward felicity and the good has been transformed’ (EMA 450–1). Aristotle’s claims that practical wisdom, phronēsis, cannot be forgotten by the agent, and that phronēsis requires habit, allow Ravaisson to conclude that ‘habits par excellence are virtuous habits’ (EMA 451). So Ravaisson emphasizes the excellence of habit as a means of attaining moral virtue and also claims that the habits of virtue are the most excellent habits, the strongest and most durable of habits. None of this excludes the possibility of habit leading us astray, but Ravaisson certainly downplays that possibility. That he does downplay the possibility of habit leading us astray leaves him open to Lemoine’s charge of ‘mysticism’. Nevertheless, L’Habitude et l’instinct provides no compelling arguments either against the existence of tendency and inclination in habit—the terms are not directly discussed after the opening pages—or for its own voluntarist position. This aspect of Lemoine’s text, it should be noted, will be entirely forgotten by his student and editor Victor Egger, when he celebrates Lemoine’s work in his 1880 ‘La Naissance des Habitudes’. Egger celebrates Lemoine’s text, as we will see in Chapter 5, for emphasizing that ‘habit is the power of repetition’, i.e. the condition of the possibility of repetition, ‘before being its result’.⁹ The acquisition of habit is conditioned by ‘a tendency, a power, a virtuality’,¹⁰ a tendency to reproduce the act, even an act performed only once. Lemoine may well have wanted to reject the idea of tendency and inclination in habit, but his main champion ignores this aspect of his analysis, and even seems to consider it scarcely compatible with his conception of the power of habit as making repetition possible.

2.2 Bergson on Habit and Of Habit We have just seen that if Albert Lemoine implicitly rejects Ravaisson’s account of habit, he does this without recognizing that Of Habit does not quite advance the position that he criticizes. Ravaisson apparently enjoys more favourable treatment in Bergson’s 1904 speech on the life and work of his predecessor at the Académie des sciences morales et politiques, but this tribute explicitly misinterprets Of Habit when appearing to endorse it. ⁹ The two quotations: Egger, ‘La Naissance des Habitudes’, p.1 and p.2. ¹⁰ Egger, ‘La Naissance des Habitudes’, p.3.

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Within an often genial survey of Bergson’s work, Bergson devotes only one paragraph to Of Habit, a paragraph which concludes thus: motor habit, once contracted, is a mechanism, a series of movements which determine each other: it is the part of us that is inserted into nature and which coincides with nature; it is nature itself. Our inner experience shows us an activity in habit that has passed by insensible degrees from consciousness to unconsciousness and from will to automatism. Should we not then picture nature to ourselves in the form of an obscured consciousness and dormant will? Habit thus gives us the living demonstration of the truth that mechanism is not self-sufficient: it is, so to speak, only the fossilised residue of a spiritual activity [le résidu fossilisé d’une activité spirituelle].¹¹

This, Bergson contends, is the essence of Ravaisson’s account of motor habits: voluntary, deliberate action is gradually taken over by bodily mechanisms. Habitual acts can, therefore, be understood as the ‘fossilised residue of a spiritual activity’, as the dead, rigidified record of a previously active mental principle. Bergson seems undecided whether habit is more like sleep than death, but he advances here at least three key points: (1) habitual movements are mechanically determined, and become ‘automatic’ in a mechanical sense; (2) the process by which voluntary movements ultimately become mechanical is gradual; (3) since habitual and mechanical movements were once controlled by the will, it is possible to claim that mechanism is not selfsufficient or a fundamental philosophical principle. With this interpretation of De l’habitude, Bergson acknowledges a hermeneutic difficulty: ‘[t]hese ideas, like many we owe to Ravaisson, have become classic. They have penetrated our philosophy, and a whole generation has been impregnated by them to such an extent that we find it difficult, today, to reconstitute their originality’.¹² Ravaisson’s ideas, Bergson seems to say, had been so influential over the years in so many philosophical developments that it is hard to ascertain what they were in their own right. Still, this observation hardly justifies the infelicity of Bergson’s interpretation. For in relation to the first of the three points, the basic intention of Ravaisson’s reflection, as we saw in Chapter 1, is precisely to overturn the classically modern conception of habit ¹¹ Bergson, ‘La Vie et l’œuvre de Ravaisson’, p.267/p.275. ¹² Bergson, ‘La Vie et l’œuvre de Ravaisson’, p.267/p.275.

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as a ‘mechanical’ principle of action. Recall that, for Ravaisson, ‘although movement, as it becomes a habit, leaves the sphere of will and reflection, it does not leave that of intelligence. It does not become the mechanical effect of an external impulse, but rather the effect of an inclination that follows from the will’ (OH 55). When I become proficient at playing a piece of music on the piano, such that I no longer have to think reflectively about the movements of my hands and fingers, those movements do not become a mechanical phenomenon opposed to the conscious will. An inveterate habit can resist my best new intentions, but goal-oriented voluntary activity is not replaced by a mechanical process; the former is rather incorporated into our pre-reflective actions, which have their own form of embodied intelligence, a form of intelligence, in this case, in the hands. Bergson remains true to Of Habit in recognizing that the development of motor habit occurs by ‘insensible degrees’. Still, this development does not terminate in dead, mechanical movement. It may seem that Ravaisson asserts something like this when he claims that ‘habit is . . . the infinitesimal differential or the dynamic fluxion from Will to Nature’ and that ‘Nature is the limit of the regressive movement proper to habit’ (OH 59). But if nature is a limit here, it is one that, like a Kantian idea, will never be realized, for the progress of motor habit, as we have seen, shows that there can be no clear dividing line between habit and nature: ‘between habit and instinct, between habit and nature, the difference is merely one of degree, and the difference can always be lessened and reduced’ (OH 59). Moreover, nature in Of Habit includes the realms of life; the ‘lower limit’, as Ravaisson writes in concluding the text, towards which habit descends is ‘the spontaneity of nature’ (OH 67). Far from ‘replacing spontaneity with fatality’, habit ‘is a state of that spontaneity itself ’, as Émile Boutroux—Ravaisson’s ‘most faithful disciple’¹³—holds in the conclusion to his own doctoral thesis, the 1874 On the Contingency of the Laws of Nature.¹⁴ Thus, if habit acquisition involves a certain naturalization of mind, this naturalization is not a ‘fossilization’. The naturalization of spirit is at once a ‘spiritualisation of nature’,¹⁵ since ‘in descending gradually from the clearest regions of consciousness, habit carries with it light from those regions into the depths and dark night of nature’ (OH 59). Habit spiritualizes nature, as well as naturalizing spirit,

¹³ Denise Leduc-Fayette, ‘Loi de grace et de liberté’, Les Études philosophiques Jan.–Mar. 1993, 25–34, p.25. ¹⁴ Boutroux, De la contingence des lois de la nature, p.170. ¹⁵ Janicaud, Ravaisson et la métaphysique, p.68.

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but the nature in question, although a ‘dark night’, is not dead, as Chapter 3 of this study will show in more detail. In this sense, Ravaisson can write that the acquisition of habit amounts to the ‘invasion of the domain of freedom by natural spontaneity’ (OH 77). Bergson’s 1904 tribute is certainly a ‘perceptive appreciation’¹⁶ of Ravaisson’s thinking in other respects, but on the question of habit it is unfaithful to De l’habitude. It is, it would seem, principally for this reason that Bergson briefly considered rewriting the speech before its publication in response to those who suspected he had ‘Bergsonified’ Of Habit.¹⁷ ‘It seems’, as Janicaud put it, ‘that Bergson was a victim of a sort of optical error, as if a mirror had come between the model and the canvas, forcing the artist to paint his own self-portrait.’¹⁸ We learn more about the origin of this optical error, however, in studying the genesis of Bergson’s own conception of habit in his teaching of the 1880s and 1890s. Bergson gave two lectures on habit within courses on psychology, the first in the academic year 1887–8 at his Clermont-Ferrand lycée, the second in 1892–3 at the Lycée Henri-IV in Paris.¹⁹ These two lessons show Bergson emerging from the influence of Ravaisson’s ideas towards his own position in Matter and Memory, and they show what motivates his misinterpretation of De l’habitude in 1904. The first lesson does not cite Of Habit, but Bergson takes up Ravaisson’s rejection of materialist explanations of habit: To ask why we contract habits is to ask what the difference is between brute matter and organized matter. We gain nothing by saying with the materialists that all habit has its origin, its cause in a displacement or a new grouping of nerve cells or of the elements that compose them, for the same

¹⁶ Gary Gutting, French Philosophy in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p.12. ¹⁷ As Jacques Chevalier writes in the foreword to Bergson’s speech published in the 1933 edition of Ravaisson’s Testament philosophique, p.2: The author [Bergson] had originally considered making some corrections. Then he decided to have the pages printed as they were, even though they would still be exposed, as he told me, to the reproach that had been made to him of having ‘Bergsonified’ Ravaisson ever so slightly. But this was perhaps, added Bergson, the only way of clarifying the subject, by prolonging it. ¹⁸ Janicaud, Ravaisson et la métaphysique, p.50. ¹⁹ Cf. Bergson, Cours I: Leçons de psychologie et de métaphysique, ed. H. Hude (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1999, 2nd edn), pp.237–47 and Cours II: Leçons de psychologie, Leçons de morale, psychologie et métaphysique, ed. H. Hude (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1992), pp.265–75. These cours have been collated from student transcripts, and they can be cited as Bergson’s work only with obvious reservations. On this point, and for a full account of the status of the transcripts, see the preface to the four volumes (Cours I, pp.5–11) and the introductions to the first two (pp.13–22 and pp.5–13 respectively).

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problem always arises: ‘How is it that once the disruption [l’ébranlement] has occurred, things do not return to their natural state, as is the case with brute matter?’²⁰

Habit acquisition cannot be explained solely in material and thus neurological terms, for we would still require an explanation of why the material change is recorded—of why, that is, the nervous system does not revert to its original state. Habit acquisition can be explained only by an extra-material force or principle. This principle, as Bergson supposes in ascribing the insight not to Ravaisson but to Aristotle, belongs to the principle of organization, i.e. of life itself: [w]e owe to Aristotle a theory of habit that relates this mode of activity to life in general. Aristotle notes that habit is proper to animate beings. Inert matter does not contract habits. A stone thrown in the air ten thousand times, as he says, does not learn to climb any more than a flame learns to fall.²¹

This is the passage of Aristotle’s Eudemian Ethics to which the first page of De l’habitude refers (OH 25). But even a living being thrown into the air a thousand times does not acquire the habit of rising, and this means that a living being is not able to convert every repeated or continuous action to which it is subject into a habit. The action has originally, even if only in a weak and minimal sense, to be voluntary, and a disposition or power able to be gradually transformed by the voluntary repetition is necessary for a motor habit to be acquired. But if, for Bergson, habit can be explained only by a disposition that belongs to life, any ambition to account for this principle will remain frustrated: we would have to search for the origin of habit, to ask how it is possible, whence derives this marvellous property of living, thinking and more generally organized beings, a property that entails that a change, once having occurred, brings about a disposition in the living or organized being to reproduce it. This problem is insoluble, for it is the problem of life. Living and contracting habits are one and same thing.²²

²⁰ Bergson, Cours I, p.247. ²¹ Bergson explicitly attributes this insight to Aristotle only in the second of his lectures on habit: Cours II, p.268. ²² Bergson, Cours I, p.247.

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Bergson’s position is positivist in spirit: reflection on the force of habit will remain as inconclusive as vitalist claims concerning the principle of life. Such metaphysical claims address ‘insoluble problems’ in that they surpass anything that could be verified by experience. Here Bergson seems to be unpersuaded by Ravaisson’s claim to gain epistemological access to the principle of habit, and thus to learn ‘its how and its why, to penetrate its generation, and to understand its cause’ (OH 39). Of Habit argued that experience offers us epistemological access to a natural spontaneity that is the very principle of habit, but this Bergson seems to reject. In his second lesson on habit five years later, in 1892–3, Bergson develops his views. The lesson discusses several nineteenth-century philosophical authors concerned with habit—including Maine de Biran and William James, as well as Ravaisson—with the claim that habit poses a ‘serious problem’ and even a paradox for philosophical reflection, since it can be ‘envisaged from two entirely different points of view’:²³ supposing that habit is a simple mechanism, it seems that this mechanism has its origin in consciousness, or at the very least in thinking. And on the other hand, intelligent, as it seems to be, in its origins, habit is intelligent in the end that it pursues. It seems destined to create mechanisms, but mechanisms that the will can use, mechanisms that facilitate the development of the will. Inertia in itself, habit seems to have freedom as its origin and freedom for its end.²⁴

An acquired motor habit (and this is what Bergson here means by ‘habit’) is the operation of an inert mechanism, and cannot therefore be the actual operation of freedom in the body and world. Still, it is related to freedom not just because it results from an originally voluntary action, but also because it enables the setting of further, higher goals, in the way that getting to Grade 1 with the piano allows me to pursue Grade 2. Bergson concludes the lesson in claiming that both perspectives of inertia and freedom—relating respectively to the conservation and creation of habits—should be maintained in order to do justice to the phenomena of habit, but before this he examines ‘dynamic’ and ‘mechanistic’ conceptions of habit, which, he claims, both privilege one perspective over the other.

²³ Cours II, p.267.

²⁴ Cours II, p.268.

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From a dynamist perspective, habit occurs only in the animate world and ‘is . . . spontaneity or free activity imitating mechanism. Ravaisson goes further still and ends up seeing in every mechanism a form of habit.’²⁵ Bergson is here more faithful to Ravaisson than he will be in 1904: an acquired motor habit is not simply mechanistic, but a form of spontaneity that ‘imitates’ mechanism, i.e. that can give the appearance of mechanism but is irreducible to it. The ‘mechanism’ which Bergson opposes to his version of Ravaisson’s dynamism, however, is traced back to the physiological speculations of Descartes and Malebranche concerning the increasingly easy passage of the ‘animal spirits’ as a result of physical modifications of the body.²⁶ Such physiological ideas rely, Bergson now argues, on a notion of force—in contrast, it would seem, to vitalist claims concerning the principle of life— that is ‘verifiable’: It seems hardly contestable that inertia is the ground, the essence of habit once it is contracted. Indeed, this proposition is verifiable on an experimental basis; it is not a hypothesis. We know that, as an organism becomes habituated to new conditions of existence, more or less profound modifications occur in its tissues; that these modifications are conserved; and that the habit contracted is nothing but this modification having become stable.²⁷

Inertia is no longer an unverifiable principle that is presupposed in materialist explanations of habit. This force, he now argues, is manifest in the mechanical nature of organic phenomena in so far as material changes are preserved in a body that contracts a habit. Inertia, however, exists beyond the organic realm, and on this point Bergson refers to the ‘ingenious’ arguments advanced by Léon Dumont in his extended essay ‘De l’habitude’, which appeared in the inaugural 1875 issue of the Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger. It is worthwhile to review Dumont’s arguments in response to both Ravaisson and Albert Lemoine in order to determine how Bergson has been influenced by them. Dumont acknowledges that Ravaisson’s thesis ‘rightfully’ is ‘highly regarded’,²⁸ but his decision to use his predecessor’s title is no homage, for he aims to replace Ravaisson’s metaphysical speculations with positivist

²⁵ Cours II, p.269. ²⁶ See Cours II, pp.268–9. ²⁷ Cours II, p.270. ²⁸ Léon Dumont, ‘De l’habitude’ in Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger, vol. 1 (1876) 321–66, p.322.

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sobriety. Ravaisson explained habit in terms of ‘irreducible faculties’, as a ‘virtue’, and since ‘he is unable to find, beyond the world of living beings, substances, individual energies capable of being modified in their power, Ravaisson denies that habit is possible in the inorganic realm, and he barely grants it any access to vegetal life’.²⁹ This will not do, asserts Dumont, since it does not explain how a principle of habit can appear without having its ground in the beings lower than it. Ravaisson fails to answer the ‘need of generalization that is the beginning of science’, the need to ‘reduce the facts of the universe to principles as few and as simple as possible and consequently to fill in the merely apparent abyss between the inorganic world and the realm of living beings’.³⁰ This is hardly a fair response to Ravaisson’s metaphysical project, since—as will see in the following chapter—he attempts to reduce the force of habit to the principle of inertia understood in a dynamic, activist sense. In neglecting this aspect of Ravaisson’s project, Dumont is influenced by Lemoine’s assertion the year before, as we will also see, that habit is coextensive with life and that it is not to be found in the inertia determining the inorganic realm, an assertion made without reference to Ravaisson’s attempt to connect inertia and inclination in habit. Like Lemoine, then, Dumont ignores Ravaisson’s attempt to interpret inertia actively; but unlike Lemoine, Dumont considers the resulting position to offend the basic principles of scientific method. Science can tolerate no absolute break between the inorganic and the organic. If we recognize, Dumont argues (in taking up a suggestion of August Comte³¹), that habit exists in the inorganic realm we have a way to cross the chasm dividing the two realms. An acquired habit amounts ‘merely to a change in phenomena’, i.e. to material changes, and is recorded according to the ‘universal law of inertia’ understood as a ‘mechanical force’.³² Habit, Dumont argues, exists in all the manifestations of inertia, and not just within the organic realm: the increasing ease with which a key turns a new lock, just as the increasing ease with which a garment lends itself to the forms of the body, are phenomena of the same order as the acquisition of a motor habit. This claim presupposes a much-reduced notion of habit: for Ravaisson, as we have seen, habit is both a principle of conservation and of reproduction. No one, for obvious good reason, expects a garment or a key to reproduce an action in and from themselves; the key has to be placed in the lock and turned, just as the garment has to be worn. In attempting to find habit in the ²⁹ Dumont, ‘De l’habitude’, p.322. ³¹ See Dumont, ‘De l’habitude’, p.323.

³⁰ Dumont, ‘De l’habitude’, p.323. ³² Dumont, ‘De l’habitude’, p.323.

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inorganic realm, Dumont precludes consideration of habit as a veritable principle of action. To return to Bergson, in contrasting dynamism with mechanism he counterposes Ravaisson’s essay to that of Dumont, and he attempts to occupy a position halfway between them. Although he clearly prefers Dumont’s mechanistic conception of an acquired habit, he just as clearly considers him to have exaggerated in his further, proto-behaviourist claim that the will, when it is the origin of habit acquisition in the human realm, can itself be understood according to the laws of association, and thus as itself a function of mechanical inertia.³³ Bergson ends his lecture by underlining that a habit, at least in the human realm, requires freedom and consciousness if it is to be formed in the first place: ‘we will therefore say that the conservation of a habit manifests inertia; but that the formation of this habit . . . demands the intervention, either manifest or hidden, of the effort of freedom’.³⁴ Habit involves the concordance and cooperation of freedom and mechanical inertia, and thus Bergson affirms that both the poles of freedom and mechanical necessity are essential to habit. In this light, it is evident that when Bergson characterizes Ravaisson’s conception of habit as the ‘fossilised residue of a spiritual activity’ in 1904, in one sense his approach is well intentioned: he is attempting to defend Ravaisson’s ideas against the kind of mechanical materialism proposed by Dumont. Habit cannot be explained as the mechanical conditioning of reflex actions, as Ravaisson himself will underline much later in his Philosophical Testament. On the contrary, reflex actions are to be understood as the lowest manifestation of a more active principle. Ravaisson perhaps has Dumont’s position in mind when he rejects the ‘hypothesis’: one much in favour today, of reflex movements, which would be absolutely machine-like responses of bodies fixed to impressions and solicitations from the outside, movements with which the scholars who have recourse to them claim to explain not only what we call involuntary phenomena, but also, as they hope, the phenomena that appear to depend wholly or partially on the will. (PT 73/304)

Whatever the case may be, the position on habit that Bergson works out in these lectures of 1892–3 is reproduced a few years later in Matter and

³³ See section III of Dumont’s ‘De l’habitude’.

³⁴ Bergson, Cours II, p.275.

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Memory. The position is well described in the first lines of the 1911 preface that was written for its English translation: ‘[t]his book affirms the reality of spirit, the reality of matter, and tries to determine the relation of the one to the other with a precise example, that of memory. It is therefore clearly dualistic.’³⁵ Bergson professes a philosophical dualism, albeit one of a particular kind, and he will, in a first movement of his thought at least, discover differences of nature where his predecessor had found only differences of degree. The dualism is first advanced by means of the distinction of two forms of memory. For Bergson, the past ‘survives under two distinct forms: first, in motor mechanisms; secondly, in independent recollections’, and these two forms, although they work together in experience, are at least ‘theoretically independent’ of each other.³⁶ The past can either be recollected in ‘episodic memory’ as individual episodes occurring at a specific point in time, episodes which are unrepeatable in their singularity, or it can be taken up and repeated by means of the habitual actions of the body. In learning a poem by heart, to take the example that Bergson borrows from the psychological literature of his day, it is possible to recollect any particular reading of the poem, whereas the result of the process is not a recollection in this sense at all. It is rather an acquired aptitude, a motor habit, which becomes a ‘second nature’ that I might believe to be primary or innate were I not able to recollect the particular instances of reading: ‘like a habit it is acquired by the repetition of the same effort. Like a habit, it demands first a decomposition and then a re-composition of the whole action. Lastly, like every habitual bodily exercise, it is stored up in a mechanism.’³⁷ In order to become habitual, the motor task has to be decomposed by means of intellectual

³⁵ Bergson, Matière et mémoire in Œuvres, ed. A. Robinet (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1959), p.1 (I cite the original pagination of Bergson’s texts in the margins of Œuvres); Matter and Memory, trans. N. Paul and W. Palmer (New York: Zone, 1991), p.9. ³⁶ Both quotations: Matter and Memory, p.82 and p.86/p.78 and p.81. ³⁷ Matter and Memory, p.82/p.80. Bergson recognizes that the example is artificial, since this sort of language use is perhaps not the clearest example of a habit. Repeating a passage of text learnt by heart perhaps requires the operation of thought, whereas less intellectual motor habits can take place without conscious thought, and without conscious thought even having initiated them, as we have seen. We might, therefore, consider knowing a text by heart to be a hybrid phenomenon, straddling both habit and a more intellectual form of memory. Bergson is, however, trying to overturn a psychological orthodoxy that takes this perhaps hybrid example to offer a model for understanding memory in general. He argues that when psychologists claim that a phase of ‘consolidation’ is essential to the ‘encoding’ of potentially merely short-term memories as long-term memories, they have failed to grasp the difference in kind between motor habit and episodic memory: the latter not only has no need for consolidation, but it cannot be consolidated, for when it is consolidated, it is no longer episodic and has become a habit. For more on this point, see Chapter 4, ‘Memory’, of my Bergson (Routledge, 2019).

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analysis, and then recomposed gradually in its repetition. In learning the poem by heart, the speaker first separates the words and syllables, so as to be able to learn them individually, before they are recomposed as a whole once he or she has developed the habit of pronouncing them without hesitation. Once acquired, the new habit can be explained in third-person, neurological, and mechanistic terms: ‘[t]hese movements, as they recur, contrive a mechanism for themselves, grow into a habit, and determine in us attitudes which automatically follow our perception of things’.³⁸ Bergson maintains this objective and third-person explanation of an acquired habit even when, over a decade later, he accounts for the specificity of habitual action—in a manner that recalls Lemoine’s notion of ‘permissive will’—by distinguishing two forms of unconsciousness. The consciousness of a falling stone, for example, is non-existent (une conscience nulle), whereas that proper to habitual action is a negated or annulled consciousness (une conscience annulée): When we accomplish mechanically an habitual action, when the sleepwalker plays out automatically his dream, unconsciousness can be absolute; but it derives, this time, from the fact that the representation of the act is held in abeyance by the execution of the act itself, which is so perfectly similar to the representation and inserts itself in it so exactly that no consciousness can surpass it. The representation is blocked by the action. The proof of this is that if the carrying out of the act is stopped or hindered, consciousness can surge forth.³⁹

Habitual action involves the possible presence of a representation directing the action, a representation of the goal that will emerge if the bodily drive to perform an action is in some way hindered. Habit holds at bay the power of ‘hesitation and choice’⁴⁰ that is consciousness. Whatever may be the virtues of this account of awareness in habitual action, it is limited by being a negative characterization that supports rather than challenges Bergson’s ontological dualism of mechanical nature and the freedom of thought.

³⁸ Matter and Memory, p.86/p.84. ³⁹ L’Evolution créatrice in Œuvres, p.145; Creative Evolution, trans. A. Mitchell (London: Macmillan, 1911), p. 151. ⁴⁰ Creative Evolution, p.145/p.151.

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2.3 Habit and the Lived Body Although it is supposed to characterize Ravaisson’s own account of habit, Bergson’s idea of a ‘fossilised residue of a spiritual activity’ is a pithy expression of his own dualistic conception of an acquired motor habit. Merleau-Ponty later understood Bergson’s phrase in this sense: without questioning the veracity of the phrase as an interpretation of Ravaisson’s ideas, he criticizes it as an expression of an ‘intellectualist’ conception of habit acquisition. He criticizes it on the basis of his conception of the lived body, le corps propre, as the primary site of our understanding, agency, and subjectivity, which his The Phenomenology of Perception reveals by drawing out the deficiencies of both ‘intellectualist’ and ‘realist’ accounts of embodied agency. In a chapter devoted to the spatiality of the lived body, to the sense in which the lived body occupies and understands space, Merleau-Ponty turns to the question of habit and specifically to the issue of motor habit, l’habitude motrice. ‘The phenomenon of habit’, as he writes in signalling the methodological importance of this reflection on habit, ‘is just what prompts us to revise our notion of “understand” and our notion of the body.’⁴¹ Realist or mechanistic theories of the acquisition of motor habit fail to see that the ‘learning is systematic’, and does not consist in the reconditioning of individual reflexes. But do we ‘have to place at the origin of habit an act of the understanding which would organise its elements in order to withdraw itself later’, ‘as Bergson thinks we should when he defines habit as “the fossilised residue of a spiritual activity” ’?⁴² Here Merleau-Ponty is evidently less concerned with Bergson’s characterization of acquired motor habits than with what the phrase conveys about their acquisition. The phrase, he argues, supposes that motor habit acquisition is necessarily guided in the first instance by reflective thought, by means of an ‘intellectual synthesis’. For Merleau-Ponty, the progress of habit does not—or at least does not necessarily—consist in acts that were once theoretically determined now

⁴¹ Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), p.169; Phenomenology of Perception, trans. C. Smith (Routledge: London, 1962), p.144. ⁴² Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p.167/p.142. In La Structure du comportement of 1939 Merleau-Ponty had already noted that ‘Bergson sometimes comes back to a purely motor notion of action. Habit is only the “fossilized residue of a spiritual activity”, the active gesture merely the “motor accompaniment” of thoughts’ (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1990), p.176; The Structure of Behaviour, trans. A. L. Fisher, Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1963, p.163).

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occurring without any reasoning or process of the understanding, since ‘it is the body which “catches” and “comprehends” movement: the acquisition of a habit is indeed the grasping of a significance, but it is the motor grasping of a motor significance’.⁴³ The organist accustoming herself to an unfamiliar instrument does not proceed by means of the intellectual decomposition and recomposition that Bergson describes, but rather adjusts her body, and lets her body adjust itself, to the new arrangement of the stops and pedals. There is a kind of prospective power, a general power of adaptation within the lived body itself, and the development of this capacity in the acquisition of a habit is a ‘rearrangement and renewal of the corporeal schema’.⁴⁴ There is intelligence in the acquisition of habit but this is not a function of reflective consciousness. Merleau-Ponty’s critique seems justified, given the dualist framework of Matter and Memory. Although Bergson allows that the activity of spirit can be a matter of degree, motor habit acquisition can occur only by means of a spiritual activity, given that the latter is the sole principle of novelty and creativity in opposition to matter, which is a principle of lifeless repetition. But the more important question, for us, is whether this critique applies also to Ravaisson’s conception of habit. Passages like the following may suggest that it does: in reflection and will, the end of movement is an idea, an ideal to be accomplished: something that should be, that can be and which is not yet. It is a possibility to be realized. But as the end becomes fused with the movement, and the movement with the tendency, possibility, the ideal, is realized in it. The idea becomes being, the very being of the movement and of the tendency that it determines. Habit becomes more and more a substantial idea. The obscure intelligence that through habit comes to replace reflection, this immediate intelligence where subject and object are confounded, is a real intuition, in which the real and the ideal, being and thought are fused together. (OH 55)

Ravaisson here describes the acquisition of habit as beginning from reflective thought, from the ideal and ideas which are then somehow gradually fused with the body in the acquired habit. If he supposes that habit

⁴³ Phenomenology of Perception, p.169/p.143. ⁴⁴ Phenomenology of Perception, p.169/p.143.

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acquisition has to begin in this way, Ravaisson seems to have passed over the cognitive dimensions of the lived body, our bodily ability to learn.⁴⁵ In order to address this issue fully, we should note that the very idea of le corps propre derives from Maine de Biran, whose importance for Ravaisson we have already noted. In 1807, Biran distinguished between: the secondary objective knowledge that the individual acquires successively from the external parts of his body in studying them with his hands and eyes and the internal knowledge of the parts obeying the same will, acquired in the first deployment of effort, a knowledge without which the self does not begin to exist for itself.⁴⁶

There is a body for me, given not through the external senses but through an inner sense, and this body is the condition of the body as object. Biran developed his view in the most deliberate manner in his Essai sur les fondements de la psychologie, which he began in 1811 and appears to have intended to be a masterwork developing his earlier dissertations, but which he failed to publish even after reworking it in 1822. In the section entitled ‘Origin of the Knowledge that One Has of one’s own body’, he proposed ‘a completely new point of view according to which I consider the primary knowledge of one’s own body’.⁴⁷ In order to grasp the primitive fact of consciousness, he argues, we have to recognize that there are ‘two sorts of outsides, or two objects, two elementary terms, the one relative to internal immediate apperception, the other relative to intuition or external perception’. The body has its own kind of resistance or inertia, distinct from that of worldly objects, as well as its own kind of spatiality that is irreducible to the spatiality of other things. This is ‘a sort of vague extension without limits or figures, . . . a mode of purely internal space that is . . . the inherent form of the proper object of internal apperception’. When acting, I do not have a precise knowledge of the locations of my members, but rather have a vague, prethematic understanding of their position and possibilities. Later psychologists ⁴⁵ Merleau-Ponty, it should be noted, does not discuss Of Habit in any of his published texts or lectures, not even in his course on Maine de Biran and Bergson in 1948–9, when both authors featured in the programme for the agrégation; see Maurice Merleau-Ponty, L’Union de l’âme et du corps chez Malebranche, Biran et Bergson (Paris: Vrin, 1997). It would seem that Bergson’s interpretation of De l’habitude strongly influenced Merleau-Ponty, since he is reported to have claimed at his thesis defence that Ravaisson was of interest only as a precursor of Bergson. On this point, see Janicaud, Ravaisson et la métaphysique, p.11. ⁴⁶ Biran, De l’aperception immédiate, p.120. ⁴⁷ Maine de Biran, Essai sur les fondements de la psychologie, p.141.

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will talk of this as a ‘body schema’ or ‘body image’ but, for Biran, it cannot ‘be represented in the form of an image’,⁴⁸ nor does it have an explicit distinction of parts. This vague, non-imagistic understanding of space is not a derivative and less precise mode of external spatial representation; on the contrary, it is primary, and it is only on its basis that I can isolate objectively the particular position of what I already understand to be my body. That Biran advances an idea of le corps propre does not entail that he and Merleau-Ponty say the same about it,⁴⁹ but he offers at least the outlines of an original phenomenology of bodily awareness and bodily being that brings to light the inadequacy of traditional conceptions of embodied agency. It is no exaggeration to claim, following Michel Henry, that ‘Maine de Biran is the first philosopher to have understood . . . the derivative and secondary character of any objective conception of the body’.⁵⁰ It is uncertain whether Ravaisson, in 1838, had read any of Biran’s texts on the idea of le corps propre, and the phrase does not, it seems, anywhere appear in Ravaisson’s published work. Still, when he writes that ‘it is within the immediate organs of movements that the inclinations constituting the habit are formed, and the ideas are realised. Such inclinations, such ideas become more and more the form, the way of being, even the very being of these organs’ (OH 57), he has arrived at a position similar to that of Biran. The body is the site of habitual tendencies and inclinations. The habituated body is not a mere anatomical object, because it is the inclinations that it has acquired.⁵¹ There is, however, an emphasis on impropriety, dispersion, and dissemination in Ravaisson’s approach. His is a conception not simply of a unified lived body, but of a body that is multiple, diffuse, and driven by centripetal forces, but this against the background of a unitary spiritual principle: the progression of habit leads consciousness, by an uninterrupted degradation, from will to instinct, and from the accomplished unity of the person to the extreme diffusion of impersonality. There is, therefore, a single force, a single intelligence that is, in the life of man, the principle of all its functions and forms. (OH 65) ⁴⁸ All quotations in this paragraph: Maine de Biran, Essai sur les fondements de la psychologie, pp.139–42. ⁴⁹ Merleau-Ponty’s L’Union de l’âme et du corps chez Malebranche, Biran et Bergson offers a critical engagement with Biran in this connection. ⁵⁰ Michel Henry, Philosophie et phénoménologie du corps: essai sur l’ontologie biranienne (Paris: PUF, 1965), p.182. ⁵¹ We will not be able to understand fully how inclinations inhabit and animate the body until section 4.4 below: ‘Being Inclined’.

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There is a single spiritual force composed of an uncountable number of gradations that descend and disperse all the way into natural instinct and bodily being. How, then, would Ravaisson respond to Merleau-Ponty’s critique of intellectualist conceptions of habit acquisition? It is because Of Habit offers something other than the mechanistic physiology involved in Bergson’s conception of an acquired habit as a ‘fossilised residue’ that it does not preclude the idea that habits can be acquired prior to the operation of reflective thought. Ravaisson certainly describes the acquisition of habit as the incorporation of ideas, and he pays scant attention, beyond his remark concerning tics, to bad habits, to habits that are, at least sometimes, not acquired deliberately. Many bad habits we have contracted despite our best intentions. Still, Ravaisson does not assert that habit acquisition must arise from such ideas, just as MerleauPonty does not state that it cannot do so. Ravaisson underlines that motor habit acquisition supposes a principle operating prior to reflective consciousness: ‘[t]o be precise, it is not action that gives birth to or strengthens the continuity or repetition of locomotion; it is a more obscure and unreflective tendency, which goes further down into the organism, increasingly concentrating itself there’ (OH 53). Chapter 5 will return to this issue in more detail, but Ravaisson’s position is that the identification of the different instances as instances of the same movement in the acquisition of a habit is carried out by a principle that is prior to reflection and the reflective will. There is a synthesis in habit, but this synthesis, as we will see, is a ‘passive synthesis’ rather than an intellectual, active synthesis. For both Ravaisson and Merleau-Ponty, an acquired habit is not simply a ‘fossilised residue’ and it is for this reason that the acquisition of a new habit does not necessitate the intervention of an intellectual synthesis. In defending Ravaisson in this way, another question arises, one that turns the tables on Merleau-Ponty: is it true that the ‘whole problem of habit’⁵² is addressed by a reflection on the acquisition of a skill or facility in movement, as when the organist learns to play with a different arrangement of stops and pedals? What sense, in other words, can we make of Ravaisson’s emphasis on habitual tendencies from the perspective of Merleau-Ponty’s brand of phenomenology? This strong sense of habit, it seems, is marginalized in Merleau-Ponty’s approach. We should not be misled by the English translation on this point, for it renders Merleau-Ponty’s concern for ‘dispositions

⁵² Phenomenology of Perception, p.170/p.144.

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stables’ as ‘stable dispositional tendencies’, which gives the impression that the French philosopher has an idea of tendency in mind. In truth, MerleauPonty is so little concerned with the nature of acquired habits that it can even be said that his reflection on l’habitude motrice is not really a discussion of habit. It is merely a reflection on skill acquisition, with little concern for the nature of an embodied skill once acquired beyond the fact that it remains as a power to acquire new ones. Certainly, there is an implicit appeal to an idea of habitual tendency within Merleau-Ponty’s treatment of the case of the phantom limb: if ‘the problem how I can have the sensation of still possessing a limb which I no longer have amounts to finding out how the habitual body can act as guarantee for the body at this moment’,⁵³ then the problem may well concern the tendency of the habituated body to act in and know its world in the way that it has acted prior to the loss of the limb. Merleau-Ponty does not, however, develop this point, not in the Phenomenology of Perception at least, according to an idea of tendency or inclination.⁵⁴ Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of habit acquisition and the lived body lacks an account of tendency and inclination in a habit once acquired. But do we need such an account? Another French philosopher working within the phenomenological tradition, namely Paul Ricoeur, seems to answer this question negatively: tendency or inclination is not intrinsic to habit. In his 1950 The Voluntary and the Involuntary, within the sections on habit that conclude the chapter concerning ‘Bodily Spontaneity’, Ricoeur writes: Ravaisson compares habit with desire: it is ‘the invasion of the domain of freedom by natural spontaneity’. However, it is not true that habit is not only a knowing-how [savoir-faire], but also a tendency to do something [tendance à faire] (ordinarily we speak of the ‘force of habit’).⁵⁵

⁵³ Phenomenology of Perception, pp.97–8/p.82. ⁵⁴ See, in this connection, Elisa Magri, ‘The Problem of Habitual Body and Memory in Hegel and Merleau-Ponty’, Hegel Bulletin, https://doi.org/10.1017/hgl.2016.65, 1–21. Magri ‘disagrees’ with this reading of Merleau-Ponty, which I first proposed in an article of 2011, but without saying where Merleau-Ponty discusses habit in a strong sense as a ‘principle of action’ (p.18, n.14). ⁵⁵ On this reading of Ravaisson, although he does not grasp how Ricoeur challenges Ravaisson’s thinking on this central issue, see Benoît Thirion, ‘La Lecture ricœurienne de Ravaisson dans Le Volontaire et l’involontaire’ in Les Études Philosophiques, 2002, no. 3, pp. 371–90. In ‘L’Être et l’habitude dans la philosophie française contemporaine’ in Alter, 12/2004, 149–72, Claire Marin sees the problem more directly, and the whole of this section is indebted to her article.

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A skilled craftsperson can have the greatest facility in her actions, but this facility is not a tendency to perform that action in such a way that the action would occur without the intervention of the will. Being skilled does not mean being inclined to practise that skill; ‘technical habits of high sensorymotor complexity can be extremely automated yet entail no tendency towards their realization’. For Ricoeur, habit is not a function of tendency or inclination, for ‘habit does not have the power of creating genuine sources of action, energies similar to those of need’.⁵⁶ Habit does not produce need or ‘inclination’⁵⁷, since the repetition of action can produce fatigue, aversion, and even revulsion; ‘developing needs’ is thus a ‘secondary effect of habit for which revulsion can be substituted’.⁵⁸ Ricoeur does not deny that there is a form of spontaneity in the intelligence of the lived body that is, strictly speaking, involuntary, and that ‘sometimes anticipates, sometimes awes, and sometimes perturbs our voluntary actions’. In an acquired skill, it can be said that ‘I neither know nor will the structure of what I am able to do in detail.’⁵⁹ The habituated body takes over, with a plastic, adaptable, cognitive capacity, from consciousness and the will. Nevertheless, the habitual and, in a sense, spontaneous action does not occur tout seul, i.e. by itself, without being ‘triggered’ or ‘unleashed’ by the will. Habit is certainly a ‘power [pouvoir]’,⁶⁰ but it is not a tendency or inclination. Even though he makes no reference to L’Habitude et l’instinct, Ricoeur seems thus to restate Lemoine’s critical position with regard to Ravaisson. Instead, however, of challenging just the notion that habit is a principle of action, he directly attacks the idea that there is tendency or inclination in habit. Although Ricoeur writes that the ‘intuitions of that great philosopher are the source of many of the reflections in this book’,⁶¹ he thus seems to reject the essence of Ravaisson’s position. Yet, like those of Lemoine, Ricoeur’s reasons for rejecting the idea of habit as inclination and a principle of action are questionable. The claim that habit does not necessarily involve need or desire is easily rebutted, since Ravaisson can retort that if revulsion is present, or even just if need or inclination is absent, then a habit in the strong, Reidian sense has not developed. That it has not developed in one instance does not mean that it cannot in another: I may not have a need to ⁵⁶ ⁵⁷ ⁵⁸ ⁵⁹ ⁶⁰ ⁶¹

Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature, p.262/p.291. Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature, p.260/p.288. Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature, p.260/p.288. Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature, p.264/p.293. Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature, p.264/p.293. Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature, p.387/p.307.

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lay bricks when I am in the habit of doing so, and be happy not have to work on the building site when the lottery win finally arrives. In contrast, I may need to play the piano if I know how to play, and feel out of sorts if I cannot get my hands on one. Moreover, Ricoeur’s account of ‘habitual spontaneity’—which he admits is ‘enigmatic’—as surpassing and surprising explicit knowledge approximates to Ravaisson’s own notion of spontaneity in habit. Furthermore, Ricoeur’s critique is qualified considerably by his recognition—a recognition that goes beyond anything that Lemoine was prepared to countenance when he rejected the existence of habitudes de la volonté—that all habits of the lived body carry within themselves the risk of ‘a fall into automatism’.⁶² There is both an ‘automatization of structure’ within an acquired habit and an ‘automatization in the release of a habit’. With the former, a habit loses the plastic, adaptable aspect of its operation, and becomes increasingly fixated on one objective. It can thus even become a rigid response to particular stimuli. For Ricoeur, ‘it is the peril of daily life to make us resemble vegetables and even minerals . . . . Ossification is a threat inscribed in habit, but not its normal destiny.’⁶³ Ossified habits are not constructed from particular reflexes to stimuli, but are a degradation of the spontaneity of the lived body, rather than of will and conscious activity, as Bergson had claimed with his notion of fossilization. There can be ‘mechanical acts (acts machinaux)’⁶⁴ within an acquired habit, but these are a degeneration of the supple intelligence of the lived body. ‘Automatization of release’ denominates motor acts that are triggered without an act of will. Although this is a ‘more serious displacement of the will’, we should not, Ricoeur argues, overestimate their ‘mechanical aspect’. In this connection, he develops, in effect, Lemoine and Bergson’s claims about the permissive will and an ‘annulled’ consciousness in habitual action. The ‘fiat’ of the conscious will is not wholly overcome by mechanistic reflexes, as we might ordinarily think, but rather becomes a ‘covert toleration’. Automatization in the release of a habit is still an ‘attitude’, and not just the lack of an attitude: we are not, strictly speaking, overcome by automatism, we fall back on it. Repetition of daily cycles of action saves the trouble of inventing. For reasons of economy we appeal secretly to old resources and yield to

⁶² Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature, p.373/p.296. ⁶³ Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature, p.377/p.300. ⁶⁴ Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature, p.376/p.299.

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them. Thus it is imprudent to speak of a force of habit as a force identical with itself that sometimes overcomes our best intentions. This way of reducing the mechanical to the incoercibility of reflex is erroneous: inertia is itself an adopted attitude.⁶⁵

Automatization in release is a combination—in normal, non-pathological cases—of this default of consciousness and ‘a certain inertia, which is the principle of the automatic’. We let this inertia take over, and in this way there is an ‘imitation of the thing by life, of inertia by spontaneity’. Such inertia is an ever-present danger in all habit: ‘inertia cannot be expelled from life’ and the ‘resignation [démission] of freedom . . . finds its temptation in the very nature of habit’.⁶⁶ Ricoeur, then, denies the existence of tendency or inclination in motor habit, but then asserts that the spontaneity of the lived body in habit is intrinsically threatened by a fall into automatism, mechanism, and inertia. On this point he refers to Ravaisson: the nineteenth-century philosopher leads us to recognize that ‘habit both invents and yields to the fundamental inertia of matter’.⁶⁷ In the light of our reading of Bergson, it is not difficult to recognize here another misinterpretation of De l’habitude that fails to recognize the dynamism of habit according to Ravaisson.⁶⁸ In the conclusion of the text, as we have seen, Ravaisson writes that habit is the ‘invasion of the domain of freedom’, precisely not by a deadening principle of conservation, but by ‘natural spontaneity’ (OH 77), a natural spontaneity that is continuous, he argues, with the dynamic force of inertia governing the inorganic realm. The distinction is subtle, but Ricoeur opposes the spontaneity of life to an in some sense automatic, mechanical force of habit, whereas Ravaisson argues that the force of habit, a non-mechanical force, is the spontaneity of life. According to Of Habit, before an acquired motor habit becomes in any sense fossilized or ossified, it is moved more and more by a tendency or inclination that is continuous with the reflective will but irreducible to it. There is a certain automaticity in habit, but the supposed mechanism within it, as he will write in 1893, is ‘more apparent than real’ (MM 448/288). If a habit were genuinely mechanical, it would not, as we saw in Chapter 1, be automatic, i.e. self-moving, because it would be an element of a dead

⁶⁵ ⁶⁶ ⁶⁷ ⁶⁸

Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature, p.379/p.301. Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature, p.379/p.301. Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature, p.386/p.307. Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature, p.387/p.307.

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mechanism that would only come into movement by being made to move by something else. Ravaisson’s approach can certainly benefit from the detail in Ricoeur’s account of our cognitive corporeality, and his account of how the lived body outruns and surprises the conscious agent in habitual performance, but the two approaches are not mutually exclusive, and there is no reason to exclude a dynamic conception of habit in a phenomenology of the lived body. It seems that Ricoeur’s failure to grasp Ravaisson’s intentions on this issue is determined by the fundamental dualism of the voluntary and the involuntary that shapes his project as a whole: on his account, a habitual motor action is either triggered voluntarily or the result of complicity of the resignation or self-abnegation of free will with a principle of inertia. Ricoeur’s account represents an advance in relation to Matter and Memory precisely because it is a philosophy of the lived body, but his philosophy maintains Bergson’s dualistic approach.⁶⁹ In everyday life are there not many phenomena, which we might naturally discuss with the terms ‘tendency’ or ‘inclination’, that occupy the middle ground between the two extremes of the voluntary or the involuntary? When, after moving house, I continue to take the turning to the old house when walking home, do I merely conjoin a present volition, to go home, with the ‘old automatism’ of going to the old house?⁷⁰ If volition is involved in this action, is it not somehow rooted in my tendency to respond to the given situation by taking the old path? The gestures a familiar person tends to make in conversation, the phrases I have often heard before with which she composes her thought, may well seem to be neither simply voluntary nor involuntary; at the very least, it is not obvious that what is not wholly voluntary in these actions is simply involuntary. The unnaturalness of claims that such acts become actes machinaux when they occur without conscious volition should not be forgotten. The idea that habitual acts appear to me to be self-moving in the mechanistic sense that they occur all by themselves, wholly without me, in the sense that someone or something else performs them, is doubtless strange. It is, at least, stranger in relation ⁶⁹ In this connection, see Claude Romano, ‘The Equivocity of Habit’, Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 38/1 (2017) 3–24, p.8: ‘[e]ven Ricœur [ . . . ] in some sense remains a prisoner to the choice between habit as the selection of those movements best suited to a task and/or as the identical reproduction of monotonous movements’. See also Jakub Čapek, ‘Ravaisson and Ricoeur on Habit’ in Scott Davidson (ed.), A Companion to Ricoeur’s Freedom and Nature (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2018), 37–58, p.53: Ricoeur’s dualistic approach is ‘guided by the “regulative” idea of a unified subject . . . which combines self-knowledge and self-determination’. ⁷⁰ Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature, p.382/p.304.

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to motor habits than it is in relation to phenomena that might appear to approach third-person phenomena, such as reflexes or drug addiction.⁷¹ Note also, to conclude this section, that when habitual acts are really presented as machine-like, as when Chaplin in Modern Times helplessly continues his staccato motions on the assembly line when the conveyor belt has come to a stop, we tend to laugh. In Laughter, his essay on the meaning of the comic, Bergson argues that ‘attitudes, gestures and movements of the human body are subject to laughter precisely in the way that the body makes us think of a mere machine’.⁷² The face of the slapstick comic actor, for example, is ‘all the more comic, the more nearly it suggests to us the idea of some simple mechanical action in which its personality would forever be absorbed . . . . Automatism, inelasticity, habit that has been contracted and maintained [pli contracté et gardé], are clearly the reasons why a face makes us laugh.’⁷³ We have to qualify Bergson’s position here on the basis of Ravaisson’s argument that automatism, inelasticity, and habit are one thing, mechanism another. When we laugh at Chaplin having become something like a machine, we are laughing at a gross caricature of human behaviour. We are laughing not at the norm, but at an habitual, relatively inelastic, and perhaps automatic norm that has become exaggerated and abnormal. We are laughing at something ridiculous, even uncanny, which ordinarily habit is not. It is not really habit that we laugh at—it takes a special kind of vision to draw humour from the ordinary and the mundane—but rather something much less spontaneous and less lifelike, which is an exaggerated expression and caricature of habit. That said, Bergson’s account of the comic has the salutary result—one that he did not perhaps quite intend—of leading us to see that, far from representing the truth of the body, mechanism, as a philosophy of human embodiment, is intrinsically ridiculous. It leads us to see that mechanistic ideas about the human being are a bit of a joke.

2.4 Coping with Being Inclined Ricoeur rejects Ravaisson’s account of tendency in habit but, in the end, he does not provide compelling or unambiguous reasons for doing so. Like ⁷¹ For an argument concerning the distinction of habits from behaviours such as reflexes, addictions, and compulsions, see Bill Pollard, ‘Explaining Actions with Habits’, American Philosophical Quarterly 43/1 (2006), 57–69. ⁷² Bergson, Le Rire in Œuvres, p.23; Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, trans. C. Brereton and F. Rothwell (London: MacMillan, 1911), p.29. ⁷³ Bergson, Le Rire, p.19/Laughter, p.25.

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Lemoine, he falls back into dualist ideas—and is this not one of the most fundamental habits of modern thought?—without adequately engaging with Ravaisson’s dynamism and critique of mechanistic doctrines. There is still work to do in this study in order to make more intelligible the notion of tendency or inclination, but far from it being the case that a philosophy of the lived body obviates the need for an account of inclination, the former, I argue, should be supplemented with the latter. The claim with which I conclude this chapter is that contemporary phenomenological accounts of embodied agency also require this supplement. On the basis of the work of Merleau-Ponty, Hubert Dreyfus has famously distinguished between ‘two distinct kinds of intentional behaviour: deliberative, planned action, and spontaneous, transparent coping’.⁷⁴ The latter includes ‘habitual activity such as driving to the office or brushing one’s teeth, unthinking activity such as rolling over in bed or making gestures while one is speaking, and spontaneous activity such as jumping up and pacing during a heated discussion or fidgeting and drumming one’s fingers during a dull lecture’.⁷⁵ All of these activities can be thought as habitual, and not just the first two examples, but, for Dreyfus, in habitual bodily coping— in ‘fully absorbed coping’ at least—there is no conceptual thinking guiding the action. The action is still an action, and it is not a blind causal reaction to stimuli, but Dreyfus’ position is that there is no propositional thought or even conceptual mindfulness at work when we are absorbed in an activity. Dreyfus draws his position from passages like this in Merleau-Ponty: For the player in action the football field is not an ‘object’, that is, the ideal term which can give rise to an indefinite multiplicity of perspectival views and remain equivalent under its apparent transformations. It is pervaded with lines of force . . . and is articulated in sectors (for example, the ‘openings’ between adversaries) which call for a certain mode of action and which initiate and guide the action as if the player were unaware of it. The field itself is not given to him, but present as the immanent term of his practical intentions; the player becomes one with it and feels the direction of the goal, for example, just as immediately as the vertical and horizontal planes of his own body. It would not be sufficient to say that consciousness inhabits this milieu. At this moment consciousness is nothing other than

⁷⁴ Dreyfus, ‘Refocusing the Question: Can There Be Skillful Coping without Propositional Representations or Brain Representations?’, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 1 (2002), 413–25, p.417. ⁷⁵ Dreyfus, ‘Refocusing the Question’, p.417.

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This example of a game of football may represent an extreme case, but Merleau-Ponty shows us, according to Dreyfus, that ‘consciousness’ in skilled activity is a preconceptual absorption in the ‘flow’, in ‘protonormative forces of attraction and repulsion’. Amidst absorption, there is no explicit self-consciousness. Deliberation and reflective self-consciousness can even undermine the operation of mastery in the flow.⁷⁷ In claiming that this absorbed coping is not ‘mental’ or ‘minded’, Dreyfus is operating with a rather narrow conception of mind that Ravaisson would dispute. Mind, spirit, or intellect does not stop, as Of Habit argues, at deliberation and reflection. Moreover, Lemoine’s, Bergson’s, and Ricoeur’s notions of habitual action requiring a certain form of consciousness—a permissive will, an annulled consciousness, or a certain attitude of letting go—are all significant contributions to the phenomenological literature and serve to underline that in the experience of habitual action there is no negation of consciousness. Dreyfus also exaggerates in another way: skilled performance seems to involve elements of activity that require utmost levels of concentration and attention. As John Sutton et al. put it, in evacuating ‘psychology entirely from action’, Dreyfus runs the ‘risk of . . . neglecting the complex interplay between embodied dynamical factors and cognitive factors’ in action. They argue that: Even in the most habitual activities—brushing teeth, washing hands, weaving through a crowd—we often retain significant levels of care, attention, and kinetic awareness. Even if the initiation of the habitual action is now outside our sphere of attention, the exercise of many habits intrinsically involves certain kinds of monitoring.⁷⁸

⁷⁶ Merleau-Ponty, The Structure of Behaviour, p.181/p.168. ⁷⁷ See Hubert Dreyfus, ‘The Myth of the Pervasiveness of the Mental’ in J. Schear (ed.) Mind, Reason and Being-in-the-World: The Dreyfus-McDowell Debate (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), 15–40, p.22. ⁷⁸ John Sutton et al., ‘Applying Intelligence to the Reflexes: Embodied Skills and Habits between Dreyfus and Descartes’, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 43/1 (2011), 101–34, p.88.

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The skilled craftsperson, to offer another example, when hammering nails into wood, may well be absorbed in her task. Still, particularly for the first few blows, she will probably also be trying to keep an eye on the nail so that she does not miss it and strike her fingers. Dreyfus’ dichotomy, then, between deliberative planned action and spontaneous coping is reductive, and an overreaction to intellectualism in the philosophy of action. For Sutton et al., there is—and here they draw on Nathan Brett’s 1981 paper ‘Human Habits’—a ‘continuum of cases’ that will range from more channelled and stereotyped responses to nearly identical situations, ‘to those in which attentiveness and variation are an essential part’.⁷⁹ Ravaisson had, of course, already advanced a strong version of this claim, and his position is that in any given action, different levels of intelligence will be at work; there are ‘simultaneous series of the states of will and consciousness within the parts’ (OH 61) of any movement. The different levels of consciousness involved in the acquisition of a particular habit—in so far as the action becomes less and less consciously directed— help us to see that in a particular action different levels of the continuum of desire are at work all the way up to reflective will and awareness. In this way, Ravaisson offers precisely the ‘common framework for habits and skills, in which different cases may vary on a range of distinctive dimensions’ that Sutton et al. claim, rightfully I think, is necessary.⁸⁰ From Ravaisson’s perspective, however, it would be a mistake to conceive of what is at stake in this more sophisticated account of habitual action as, to cite the title of the paper by Sutton et al., ‘applying intelligence to the reflexes’. It would be a mistake, at least if we were to interpret reflexes as merely mechanical responses to stimuli. Ravaisson’s position is not that sometimes forms of attention and thought accompany otherwise mechanical aspects of a habitual action. His claim, instead, is, first, that what we might take to be merely mindless movement is always minded to a degree according to a continuous scale; and, second, that the less minded an aspect of action is, the more it has been taken over by tendency and inclination that is continuous with rather than opposed to consciousness. It is this conception of a continuum of tendency and desire that, I contend, should structure any reflection on absorbed, pre-reflective action. Ravaisson certainly does

⁷⁹ Nathan Brett, ‘Human Habits’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy 11 (1981), 357–76, p.369. ⁸⁰ Sutton et al., ‘Applying Intelligence to the Reflexes’, p.89.

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not provide us with anything like a phenomenology of perception, but if the claim that there are ‘quasi-normative’ forces of attraction and repulsion in the absorbed elements of an action is to be grounded philosophically, then we can and should conceive these forces according to the force of habit, according to the tendencies of the habitual agent. There is, in the experience of agency, coping with being inclined.

3 Second Nature as Philosophical Method The first two chapters of this study have shown how Ravaisson’s reflection on tendency and inclination in habit has a singular status in the history of French thought. Of Habit develops Biran’s idea about habitual tendencies in crucial ways, from a less vitalist and more animist perspective, as Chapter 1 argued, and this original perspective, as Chapter 2 argued, did not receive a full and wholly fair hearing from later French thinkers reflecting on habit. The present chapter moves to the broader metaphysical framework of Ravaisson’s ideas, and to his claim that reflection on habit constitutes the method of metaphysics. ‘Habit’, he argues, ‘can be considered as a method—as the only real method—for the estimation, by a convergent infinite series, of the relation, real in itself but incommensurable in the understanding, of Nature and Will’ (OH 59). Modern philosophy has struggled to comprehend how mind can interact with body or how freedom can be instantiated in a mechanistic world, and it has thus been led to the thought that the relation between nature and the will is unintelligible, ‘incommensurable in the understanding’. Habit, however, can allow us to grasp a ‘convergent infinite series’, i.e. a continuum, that underlies the supposed opposition of these two principles. On Ravaisson’s account, habit—which here means the experience of habit mediated by philosophical reflection—is not just a method of metaphysics, but the only adequate method of metaphysics in that it allows us to grasp the relation and the fundamental unity of nature and will, of mind and world. Reflective thought alone, left simply to its own devices, is incapable of this. Hence Ravaisson can claim that ‘habit is an acquired nature, a second nature that has its ultimate ground in primitive nature, but which alone explains the latter to the understanding’ (OH 59). If habit, as is commonly said, is a second nature, it is a second nature that has the virtue of making the primary nature that precedes and grounds it comprehensible to us. The idea of habit as a second nature, it is important to note, is suggested by the epigraph to Of Habit, which is a passage from Aristotle’s On Memory

Being Inclined: Félix Ravaisson’s Philosophy of Habit. Mark Sinclair, Oxford University Press (2019). © Mark Sinclair. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198844587.001.0001

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and Recollection: hōsper gar phusis, ēdē to ethos. In leaving the passage untranslated, Ravaisson invites reflection on the original sense of the Greek terms. The phrase concerns ethos—which denominates customary, habitual action as well as the initial training that might produce customary action¹—and phusis, ‘nature’, which, of course, in English, as in Greek, is a polysemic term.² The phrase is usually translated—following a custom deriving from the early Roman writers³—with the phrase ‘second nature’, but if in translating it thus we take the phrase as a definition of habit,⁴ the definiens risks becoming oxymoronic. Taking ‘second’ (the species defining difference) to mean acquired in the course of a life, and then ‘nature’ (the genus) to exclude everything thus acquired (we commonly contrast, of course, ‘nature’ with ‘nurture’ in this sense), the definition would account for habit as an acquired type of that which cannot be acquired. This will clearly not do (even though Ravaisson can speak loosely of habit as an ‘acquired nature’ (OH 59)), but attention to the original text reveals that the Greek word deutera, second, does not appear within it. Rather than saying that habit is a second nature, the Greek says only that habit is like— hosper—nature and it thus offers merely a comparison of ethos and nature. ‘Just as nature, so too habit’ is a more literal rendition of the passage, and, translated thus, Aristotle’s phrase presents an analogy rather than an oxymoronic definition.⁵ Aristotle’s dictum is more careful and philosophically sober than its traditional translation, but it seems nevertheless to have its origin in a poetic simile, for a discussion of moral incontinence in the Nicomachean Ethics cites the fifth-century Greek poet Euenus: ‘ethos is a kind of physis, since as Euenus said “ethos in the end becomes man’s nature” ’.⁶ Incontinence by bad habit, Aristotle holds, is better than incontinence by nature, since a bad habit is less immutable and resistant to

¹ See, in this connection, Nicomachean Ethics II, i. ² On this point, see, for example, J.-P. Morel (ed.), Aristote et la notion de nature: enjeux épistémologiques et pratiques (Bordeaux: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 1997). ³ See Bonnie Kent, ‘Habits and Virtues’ in The Ethics of Aquinas edited by S. J. Pope (Washington DC, Georgetown University Press, 2002), 116–30, p.116. ⁴ Jean-Pierre Morel argues in ‘L’Habitude: une seconde nature?’ (in J.-P. Morel (ed.), Aristote et la notion de nature, 131–48) that the phrase ‘offers a definition’ (p.131). ⁵ On the word ēdē in the phrase, literally translated as ‘already’, see Morel, ‘L’Habitude: une seconde nature?’, p.135. ⁶ Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1152a32-4. On this, see also Thornton C. Lockwood, ‘Habituation, Habit, and Moral Character in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics’ in T. Sparrow and A. Hutchinson (eds), A History of Habit: From Aristotle to Bourdieu (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2013), 19–36, p.21.

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discipline than a bad nature, but often the gap between the two is negligible, such that one might even say that ethos becomes phusis. Aristotle’s analogy derives from a poetic simile or metaphor, but it is no less serious and considered for that. In On Memory, and still more clearly in Rhetoric, he explains what grounds the analogy: ‘that which has become habitual becomes as it were natural; in fact, habit is something like nature, for the distance between “often” and “always” is not great, and nature belongs to the domain of “always”, habit to the domain of “often” ’.⁷ Nature is what happens always, which seems to imply, in modal terminology, that natural phenomena occur according to a form of necessity; heavy unsupported objects, for example, always fall and have to fall. Habit, in contrast, belongs to the domain of the ‘often’, of the ‘in most cases’, hōs epi to polu: if I am in the habit of going to the cinema on a Friday, I usually go, but it is not invariable and I do not have to. In comparing habit to nature, then, Aristotle’s point seems to be that habitual acts occur—in the appropriate circumstances—with a frequency or regularity that is at least comparable to the regularity in the phenomena of nature that science describes with its laws. According to natural regularity, an event in some sense has to occur, whereas according to habitual regularity, the event, as an action, only tends to occur; but it is precisely because the difference between tendency and necessity, between the ‘always’ and the ‘often’ is not great, that habit is like nature. In this way, Aristotle presents a statistical interpretation—one that follows from his statistical interpretation of modal notions in general⁸—of the difference between nature and habit. He vacillates, however, on the exact regularity of nature, which, as Jean-Pierre Morel notes, means that he ‘seems to hesitate on the exact regularity of habit’.⁹ Elsewhere Aristotle characterizes the majority of the phenomena of the sublunary world as occurring hōs epi to polu, and thus he does not exclude some form of non-necessity, of contingency from the natural world. Natural events occur either always or often, as he writes in other places.¹⁰

⁷ Rhetoric, trans. J. H. Freese (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), I, x, 1370a. The same argument is outlined in a more condensed fashion in On Memory and Recollection at 452a30–1. ⁸ On Aristotle’s statistical interpretation of modal notions, see, for example, S. Knuuttila (ed.), Reforging the Great Chain of Being (Dordrecht: D. Riedel, 1981). ⁹ J.-P. Morel, ‘L’Habitude: une seconde nature?’, p.138. Morel seems to get the problem the wrong way round (in that it is the regularity of nature that Aristotle has trouble determining), but the point still stands. ¹⁰ See Physics II, 5, 196b10–11 and, Physics, II, 8, 198b34–6 as well as another passage in Rhetoric: 1, 10, 1369a32–b2.

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Ravaisson invites us to recognize, then, that Aristotle does not directly give voice to the commonplace that habit is a second nature, and rather relates habit and nature by means of a statistical analogy. This is the real Aristotelian background to the traditional idea of second nature that Ravaisson appropriates in reflecting on habit as a method of metaphysics, as a method of revealing primary nature. The first three sections of this chapter examine exactly how Ravaisson uses reflection on habit to posit a fundamental continuity underlying habit and nature as a whole. The first section focuses on his argument for the continuity of habit with instinct, while the second addresses his concomitant claim that the progress or the ‘history of habit’ (OH 77) (i.e. habit acquisition) allows us to recognize a form of desire as constituting the condition, the prehistory as it were, of consciousness. The third section examines Ravaisson’s consequent attempts to establish the continuity of the lower levels of the organic and inorganic realms by grounding his interpretation of tendency and inclination in an ‘activist’ (i.e. according to an idea of active force), Leibnizian interpretation of the law of inertia. At issue here is whether the law of ‘inertia’ governing the inorganic realm and the law of habit can be understood as expressions of one and the same metaphysical principle. I examine Ravaisson’s argument that they can be understood as fundamentally the same, and on this basis the fourth section examines the affinity of Ravaisson’s metaphysical project with F. W. J. Schelling’s work at the turn of the nineteenth century. Schelling had claimed to discover an original identity of the apparently opposed principles of mind and nature, and this fourth section of the chapter shows how Ravaisson’s reflection on habit subtly transforms the German philosopher’s promotion of art in 1800 as the ‘organon and document’ of such a discovery.

3.1 Habit and Nature In Part II, Section III of De l’habitude, within seven paragraphs separated from the rest of the text by line breaks, Ravaisson discusses the relation of habit to instinct and thus nature. If habit is a ‘second nature’—or an ‘acquired nature’, as Ravaisson has Galen (OH 121, n. 36) say—then it is necessary to know what our primary nature is such that habit can, in some sense, become it, or at least approximate to it. Taking the principle of nature in us to be instinct, the task is now, after having brought to light an essential continuity between voluntary action and habit earlier in Section III, to show that continuity also unifies, lower down the scale, habit and instinct.

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What is ‘instinct’? As the OED has it, instincts are ‘fixed patterns of behaviour in most animals’, patterns of behaviour that are innate rather than acquired. Instinct in the singular is the principle that produces these (relatively) fixed behaviours; instinct is a ‘natural propensity to act without conscious intention’. Instinctive actions may seem purposive, in that they have a specific function and seem to occur for a ‘reason’, but they are not carried out purposefully or deliberatively, and, that is to say, with a goal posited theoretically. For Ravaisson, instinct is composed of the ‘primitive tendencies constituting our nature’ (OH 57), whereas habits are the tendencies acquired by continuity and repetition. Instinct as tendency, however, differs from habit as tendency not only in its origin, but also in its operation: [l]ike habit, instinct is the tendency towards an end without will and distinct consciousness. Only, instinct is more unreflective, more irresistible, more infallible. Habit draws increasingly near to, perhaps without ever attaining, the reliability, necessity and perfect spontaneity of instinct. Between habit and instinct, between habit and nature, the difference is merely one of degree, and this difference can always be lessened and reduced. (OH 57 & 59)

Habit is like instinct, but instinct is more reliable in the attainment of its goals; instinctive actions—ducking out of the way of a projectile, for example—are like habitual actions, but are produced more automatically, more spontaneously, more reliably, such that they may appear to be produced by a form of necessity. Instinct is the domain of an ‘always’ or ‘almost always’, whereas habit is the domain of the ‘often’; but the almost always and the often are the product of the same metaphysical principle, namely tendency. The difference in the operation of habit and instinct is not a generic difference, a difference in kind, but merely one of degree—a degree that can always be reduced, since habitual acts can increasingly acquire something of the reliability and infallibility, or quasi-infallibility at least, proper to instinct. There is no clear dividing line between the operation of habit and instinct, and for this reason Ravaisson can claim that ‘habit transforms voluntary movements into instinctive movements’ (OH 59). Yet, in another sense, this is merely a façon de parler. The assertion is clearly a contradiction in terms if habitual and instinctive movements are defined by their different origins. Albert Lemoine underlines this point in his 1875 L’Habitude et l’instinct: ‘habit is never identical (ne se confond jamais) to instinct’ because ‘it always

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must be brought back to its origin, because the individual acquires the habit himself, whereas he receives his primary nature’ (HI 107–8). Ravaisson does not have to deny this difference in origin, even though some habits—though certainly not all—can become so inveterate that we would think of them as instinctive if we did not know their origin. Ravaisson’s consistent thought is simply that there is no clear dividing line between habit and instinct in their operation. It is not possible to state, he argues, exactly where the increased infallibility and promptitude of instinct begin and where those of habit end, and vice versa. For Ravaisson, this epistemological impossibility is the result of a metaphysical continuity. Ravaisson cannot really hold to the contradictory claim that habits become instincts in the course of a life, to the thesis that what is acquired becomes innate in a single life, and he no more claims that all instincts were once habits. In Part II, Section III, he expresses his opposition to the latter thesis: ‘[t]he most involuntary functions of life, those of nutrition for example, are not old habits transformed into instincts’ (OH 65 & 67). A footnote attributes the thesis to Charles Perrault (OH 122 n. 52), who had claimed that ‘obscure and confused’ knowledge involved in vital functions derives from ‘clear, explicit and distinct’ knowledge and volition, and that it becomes obscure and confused in the course of a life precisely by means of habit. When the soul first begins to exercise any action, it must attend to it by way of clear and distinct thoughts, but once it has mastered the action through repetition, it can attend to other things. All basic bodily functions, including what we take to be the instinctive ones, such as those belonging to respiration and blood circulation, are thus, for Perrault, acquired habits. After having once been consciously directed, the movement of the heart, like the motions of our eyes in blinking and focusing, is ‘proof of the power of habit’, for ‘although it is performed by voluntary muscles, the long habit which the animal has exercised in performing this movement . . . makes it form a resolution never to interrupt it’.¹¹ This aspect of Perrault’s animism was rejected by Stahl: not all forms of the pre-reflective, unconscious intelligence that he names logos originally belonged to logismos, conscious reason. Logos, for Stahl, is as original a principle as logismos, and is not simply derivative of it. In rejecting Perrault’s account of habit, Ravaisson is demonstrating his Stahlian allegiance, and, indeed, in the next footnote of the text he defends the ‘spirit and the letter’ of Stahlianism, which has been ‘almost

¹¹ Perrault, ‘Du bruit’, p. 277.

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always misunderstood’ (OH 122 n. 53) by the French ‘vitalist’ tradition in particular. On Ravaisson’s reading, Stahl asserts neither that all bodily functions are controlled by the conscious will nor even that all bodily functions were once controlled by the conscious will, but only that there are different degrees of the will and intelligence operative throughout what we name instinct, habit and voluntary action.¹² Ravaisson’s position on habit and instinct, then, is delicately poised. On the one hand, he follows Perrault in asserting that habit can mediate between the will and instinct: ‘like effort between action and passion, habit is the dividing line, or the middle term, between will and nature; but it is a moving middle term, a dividing line that is always moving, and which advances by an imperceptible progress from one extremity to the other’ (OH 59). The progress of habit shows us that habits can become quasiinstinctive in their operation, and that there is, in fact, a continuity underlying habit and instinct. This continuity may obscure the fact that some of the functions that we now might name instinctive may well be merely acquired habits. Perhaps none of these functions will ever be wholly natural, wholly devoid of the influence of habit, and Ravaisson accepts that habit ‘modifies nature’ (OH 31). However, against Perrault, and with Stahl, Ravaisson rejects the thesis that all instinctive functions were once voluntary and have become instinctive through habit. In this way, Ravaisson’s position contrasts with Blaise Pascal’s well-known pensée on second nature, which is not cited in Of Habit: ‘habit is a second nature that destroys the first. But what is nature? Why is habit not natural? I very much fear that nature itself is only a first habit, just as habit is a second nature.’¹³ Pascal’s fear is exaggerated: habit, as a second nature, may well destroy the first in transforming it, but nature is never entirely a first habit, even if there is no definite limit to the influence of the latter. Ravaisson rejects the claim that our ‘primary nature’ is always and already a ‘second nature’, that ‘this first nature was once a second’, as Friedrich Nietzsche puts it.¹⁴ Though delicately poised, and although he exaggerates when he states that habits become instincts, Ravaisson’s position in Of Habit is clear. Things become more complicated when we consider that Perrault’s thesis that all instincts are old habits is more convincing in the framework of an ¹² On Ravaisson’s reading of Stahl, see Cazenueve, Ravaisson et la philosophie médicale, particularly pp.83–97. ¹³ Blaise Pascal, Pensées, tr. A. Krailsheimer (London: Penguin, 1995), p.32. ¹⁴ Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben’, Kritische Studienausgabe, eds. G. Colli and M. Montinari (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1988), p.270.

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evolutionary theory. Rather than positing that all our instincts were gained through our own efforts in childhood, through the course of an individual life, an evolutionary theory accepting the inheritance of acquired characteristics could assign the work of instinct acquisition to generations past.¹⁵ Such an evolutionary theory is traditionally discussed as Lamarckism, after JeanBaptiste Lamarck. In his later work, Ravaisson may appear to entertain some version of the theory. In the 1867 report on nineteenth-century French philosophy, he remarks that recent discoveries seem ‘to explain to a certain degree, by a gradual transformation of intellectual and voluntary acts, the generation of instincts; a theory formerly proposed, without the support of sufficient experiential proofs by Lamarck, and renewed very recently by Herbert Spencer and Charles Darwin’ (FP 204). There is no attempt here to distinguish the competing evolutionary theories of Lamarck, Spencer, and Darwin, but only a suggestion that the heritability of at least some habits has gained some scientific credibility. In the Philosophical Testament, over thirty years later, Ravaisson repeats the suggestion: let us add that the acts tend to continue and repeat themselves in such a way as to give rise to the habits fixed by heredity. And from heredity, combined with the tendency towards the best, there can arise from generation to generation, as Lamarck and Darwin have indicated, increasingly more perfect species. (PT 305)

Perhaps some habits, Ravaisson suggests, can be transmitted and fixed by heredity. From this perspective, the ascending scale of beings described within the ‘objective analysis’ of habit in Part I of De l’habitude could be understood within an evolutionary framework relying on the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Certainly, Ravaisson expresses scepticism, on more than one occasion, concerning the possibility of the derivation of life from the inorganic,¹⁶ but life in its internal development could perhaps be explained by the combination of the heredity of some acquired characteristics with a ‘tendency towards the best’, a progressive drive as the motive force in their acquisition. ¹⁵ As Cazeneuve puts it: ‘a theory like that of Perrault’s, though it is prior to that of Lamarck, can only be properly defended (ne se defend bien) in the framework of evolutionism’; La Philosophie médicale de Ravaisson, p.73. ¹⁶ ‘One has tried in vain to prove by experience what is called the spontaneous generation of inert organic corpuscles coming together and arranging themselves into organized bodies endowed with life, and even with feeling and thought’ (J 243). Janicaud also (J 175) cites another note in Ravaisson’s archive to this effect that bears the title Transformisme, but does not reproduce it in his volume.

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Has Ravaisson in this way contradicted his denial in 1838 that ‘[t]he most involuntary functions of life, those of nutrition for example’ are ‘old habits transformed into instincts’ (OH 65 & 67)? Given that he did not explicitly restrict his denial to the acquisition of habits only in the course of an individual life, if he accepts Lamarckism as a commitment to the theory that all instincts were once habits, then he has contradicted his early view. But, and as Cazeneuve argues, in the 1867 report and in ‘Philosophical Testament’, Ravaisson wants only to indicate that his position is compatible with transformism, the basic idea of evolutionary change, and with the idea that some habits could be inherited and thus become instincts.¹⁷ Ravaisson would indeed have been ‘loath’¹⁸ to accept Lamarckism in general, given that Of Habit is quite clear why some instinctive processes can never have depended on voluntary consciousness: Not only do they seem never to have depended on our will, but they have never been able to depend on it; they are composed of imperceptible movements and organic alterations that stand outside the sphere of imagination and understanding. But habit leads voluntary movements to the same state, transforming them into instincts. (OH 67)

Some instincts are so removed from clear and distinct conception—from the imagination and the understanding—that it is implausible to suppose that they could have once been voluntary and conscious, in the narrow sense of those terms. And when, in the final sentence, Ravaisson states that habit transforms voluntary movements into instincts he is saying only, as we argued above, that some habits can gain something of the reliability and infallibility of instinct. That Ravaisson writes a treatise on habit, and does ¹⁷ Ravaisson’s position that there may be some transmission of habits, but that not all instincts can have been acquired by habit, is Darwin’s in the On the Origin of Species (London: Penguin, 2009, p.190): If we suppose any habitual action to become inherited—and it can be shown that this does sometimes happen—then the resemblance between what originally was a habit and an instinct becomes so close as not to be distinguished. If Mozart, instead of playing the pianoforte at three years old with wonderfully little practice, had played a tune with no practice at all, he might truly be said to have done so instinctively. But it would be a serious error to suppose that the greater number of instincts have been acquired by habit in one generation, and then transmitted by inheritance to succeeding generations. It can be clearly shown that the most wonderful instincts with which we are acquainted, namely, those of the hive-bee and of many ants, could not possibly have been acquired by habit. ¹⁸ Cazeneuve, La Philosophie médicale de Ravaisson, p.74.

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not reject outright the idea that some now natural capacities have been acquired, does not commit him to a Lamarckian position.

3.2 The Prehistory of the Will Reflection on habit, as we have seen, grants access to a continuity underlying not only the will and the obscure activity in habit, but also habit and the still more obscure activity in instinct. The ‘history of habit’ (OH 77)—according to the penultimate paragraph of De l’habitude—presents voluntary activity acquiring something of a natural spontaneity through habit. This history, however, allows us to deduce something about the prehistory of habit, of what must precede conscious awareness and make it possible. Part II of De l’habitude, in descending the chain of beings that Part I had ascended, arrives at the question of what must proceed consciousness by focusing on a ‘vicious circle’ in Biran’s voluntarist psychology: ‘if effort implies resistance, resistance in turn only manifests itself in effort. How are we to get out of this circle, and where are we to find its beginning?’ (OH 61). Biran engaged the problem in a footnote to the 1802 habit dissertation: if, in the ‘primitive fact’ of effort, will requires resistance, while resistance requires will, it seems difficult to account for the origin of conscious effort and thus consciousness. This issue of the ‘origin of human knowledge (la connaissance humaine)’¹⁹ arises because Biran has inherited from Condillac and the Ideological school the idea that body and world exist prior to and independently of consciousness. Le fait primitif of voluntary consciousness is not, for Biran, the most primitive fact tout court, for animal life is prior to consciousness and the will. On this basis, if will presupposes resistance and resistance the will, it is hard to see how consciousness can arise, for both, mysteriously, would have to arrive at once. Biran responds to the difficulty in 1802 by suggesting, vaguely, that there is a passage from unconscious, instinctive behaviour to voluntary action: the first movements of the sentient being are determined by instinct, an internal force that is quite real, quite independent . . . of the will strictly

¹⁹ Biran, Nouveaux essais d’anthropologie in Œuvres X-2, Dernière philosophie, ed. B. Baertschi (Paris: Vrin, 1989), p.161. As Janicaud notes, Biran’s adoption of the problem of the origin of voluntary consciousness demonstrates the ‘absence of any questioning of the conceptual frameworks of Ideology’ (Ravaisson et la métaphysique, p.26).

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speaking; but the movements whose execution must subsequently be guided by the will cannot take place by the instinctive act without the individual being aware of it by this particular impression (which we name effort).²⁰

There is, in other words, a kind of effort that mediates between instinct and voluntary consciousness, and that makes possible the latter. Instinct, as Biran has it, is blind and devoid of consciousness, but there is a kind of higher mode, a development of instinct that involves a form of effort, and this would thus awaken voluntary consciousness. This response is unsatisfactory, not least because the idea of a non-voluntary effort undermines the specificity of the idea of effort, as the unity of will and resistance, in his philosophy.²¹ He returns to the issue in more detail in the early 1820s in his last attempt to write a major work, the Nouveaux essais d’anthropologie. Here he advances an idea of a form of spontaneous movement ‘which constitutes the intermediary between instinct and will, and which, as the term of the development of purely animal life, is only the beginning of active life, and only opens its circle’.²² Spontaneous movements are ‘those which the physiologists’—and Biran refers to Bichat in this connection—‘recognize as produced by a direct action of the brain, or emanating from it’, whereas ‘instinctive movement’ is ‘produced by a reaction of the same centre’, i.e. of the brain, to external stimuli. Instinctive movements are reactions, whereas spontaneous movements are actions, even though involuntary. It is in this supposed form of cerebral action that Biran considers that it is possible to find the origin of the will and consciousness. Instinctive movement, which cannot itself give rise to voluntary consciousness, is succeeded by a kind of spontaneous movement that forms a bridge to voluntary movement: [e]xecuted by voluntary muscles, under the direct influence and action of the cerebral centre, spontaneous movements seem to unite all the physiological conditions of animal contractility, and yet they are not voluntary; they never will be voluntary for the animal who passes from instinct to spontaneity; they are not voluntary, but they are ready to become it for man, in whom alone pure spontaneity, still blind, can be transformed immediately into free and intelligent will.²³

²⁰ ²¹ ²² ²³

Biran, Influence, pp.138–9. On this point, see Janicaud, Ravaisson et la métaphysique, p.26. Biran, Nouveaux essais d’anthropologie, p.161. Biran, Nouveaux essais d’anthropologie, p.162.

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The domain of a physiological, pre-voluntary spontaneity that constitutes animal life, Biran argues, is closely related to habit. In training animals to carry out non-instinctive actions, ‘the organization of the animal ends up by bending itself through repetition, and being carried out by a pure spontaneity, as we ourselves carry out all our habitual movements’, and ‘in this way the domain of spontaneity can be enlarged, in truth, but in joining up immediately with that of no less blind, no less necessary habits’.²⁴ Biran here seems to consider both habit and instinctive spontaneity as blind and necessary, but if that is the case, it seems hard to understand how this supposed physiological spontaneity can constitute a bridge to voluntary consciousness. Biran’s theory is problematic, and within the general framework of his philosophy there are still two heterogeneous principles, one physiological or organic, the other, as Biran puts it, ‘hyper-organic’. In the end, if homo est duplex in humanitate, simplex in vitalitate, according to Boerhaave’s dictum, which, as we have seen, he liked to cite, then the genetic problem of how human knowledge can arise on the basis of animal life will remain without a solution. Ravaisson states his own response to the problem in Of Habit after having posed the problem of circularity a second time: ‘[w]ill, in general, presupposes the idea of the object; but the idea of the object equally presupposes that of the subject’ (OH 61). In order to move, the will requires knowledge of the resisting part of the lived body that is to be moved; but all knowledge, according to Biran’s voluntarist psychology, supposes the will. It is necessary to recognize, therefore, that: effort necessarily requires an effortless antecedent tendency, which in its development encounters resistance; and it is at this point that the will finds itself in the self-reflection of activity, and is awakened through effort. The will, in general, presupposes a prior inclination—one that is involuntary—in which the subject that develops from it is not yet distinguished from its object . . . . Desire is a primordial instinct, in which the goal of the act is fused with the act itself, the idea with the realization, the thought with the spirit of spontaneity; this is the state of nature—it is nature itself. (OH 61)

Pace the Biran of 1802, Ravaisson contends that the principle of spontaneity, the tendency prior to voluntary consciousness is effortless, and that in meeting a form of pre-voluntary resistance this tendency then gives rise to the will. It may appear that this—with the claim that resistance subsequently ²⁴ Biran, Nouveaux essais d’anthropologie, p.163.

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gives rise to the will—restates rather than resolves the circularity problem but to see why this is not the case, it is necessary to recognize that Ravaisson overstates his case in describing this inclination and tendency as involuntary and effortless. His conception of continuity makes such terms, again, mere façons de parler. His aim is precisely to overturn the opposition between an organic stratum that excludes effort and a ‘hyper-organic’ stratum of the will. His real position is that there is a ‘pre-voluntary’—rather than involuntary—tendency that is irreducible to pure will and effort, but which is nevertheless continuous with them.²⁵ This pre-voluntary spontaneous tendency is not physiological, not localizable in the brain, as Biran had it, but spiritual, continuous with voluntary consciousness, and this is why Ravaisson speaks of the ‘sprit of spontaneity’ rather than simply spontaneity tout court. In this way, he destroys rather than solves Biran’s problem: there is no need to worry about how the will emerges from the organic, because the organic is already spiritual, though not purely voluntary or conscious, in its essence. In the 1840 ‘Contemporary Philosophy’, it should be remarked, Ravaisson seems to underplay his critical response to Biran’s problem of circularity, and to ascribe his own position to his predecessor: Effort supposes, as Maine de Biran himself recognized, an anterior tendency that, in its development, provokes resistance; this is original activity, prior to effort, which, reflected by resistance, comes into possession of itself and posits itself in voluntary action. (CP 425/80)

The idea of a pre-voluntary tendency, inclination, and desire was already, Ravaisson suggests, advanced by Biran himself. In one sense, this generous reading is conditioned by its context: ‘Contemporary Philosophy’ presents Biran’s philosophy of the will as able to lead French philosophy out of the impasses of Eclecticism, and Ravaisson’s polemical intentions against Cousin’s Eclectic school left little room for detailing his critical development of his predecessor’s position. Ravaisson, however, seems also to have been thinking of another aspect of Biran’s treatments of the problem of the origin of knowledge. In an appendix to the 1805 Mémoire sur la décomposition de la pensée, his second prizewinning essay at the Institut de France, Biran ²⁵ Again, this is why he writes in Part II, Section IV that ‘it is not the will—or at least it is not reflective will—that works out and devises in advance the very production of movement’ (OH 71).

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addresses the question of the existence of the self, le moi, when it is not actively willing.²⁶ It is not possible to accept either that the self always wills, and is thus always conscious, or that it emerges ex nihilo each time that it wills, and thus it is necessary to admit ‘the soul, as a virtual force pre-existing movements carried out, felt and willed’: This force that I can neither localize nor confuse with a point of the brain, nor conceive outside the self without denaturing the idea of it, I call soul in so far as I conceive it as virtual and in the anticipation [attente] of the act, and the self as soon as it begins to act with a feeling of itself, and it is this beginning alone that is important to determine; it is here and only here that is to be found the origin of science identified with existence itself, not ontological or abstract but real or felt.²⁷

We can know nothing of this soul as a virtual force, a force anticipating its own realization, but it is necessary to posit it, particularly if we are to avoid the equally unverifiable, but for the Biran of 1805 less tenable, and more abstract (more ontological as Biran puts it here) notion of a soul substance.²⁸ Biran draws this idea of a virtual force from Leibniz, whose dynamics he takes up in one of the few works published in his lifetime, namely his 1819 Exposition du système de Leibniz. Biran recognizes that, for Leibniz, force is not merely an empty potentiality, but a force that will come to realize itself unless something other prevents it doing so; it is not just an empty capacity, but a readiness to act, a tendency to act.²⁹ Thus, when Ravaisson claims in 1840 that Biran had recognized that the will is preceded by tendency, and then refers to Leibniz to elucidate the point (CP 425/80), he is not over-interpreting his French predecessor, and illegitimately ascribing Leibnizian insights to him. He only omits to mention that Biran’s dualism, as we have seen, prevents him from conceiving this tendency as the very essence of instinct and thus nature. ²⁶ The pages of the unfinished Nouveaux Essais d’anthropologie in which Biran discusses the problem of the origin of human knowledge are, in fact, a reworking of this appendix of the 1805 text. ²⁷ Biran, Mémoire sur la décomposition de la pensée, p.428. ²⁸ In this connection, see Marc Parmentier, ‘Maine de Biran, Leibniz et le virtuel’, Methodos 16 (2016), https://journals.openedition.org/methodos/4529, accessed 8 May 2019 . ²⁹ See Biran, Exposition du système de Leibniz in Œuvres de Maine de Biran, vol. XI-1, Commentaires et marginalia, dix-septième siècle, ed. Christiane Frémont (Paris: Vrin, 1990), p.146: ‘La véritable force active renferme l’action en elle-même; elle est entéléchie, pouvoir moyen entre la simple faculté d’agir et l’acte déterminé ou effectué : cette énergie contient ou enveloppe l’effort (conatum involvit), et se porte d’elle-même à agir sans aucune provocation extérieure’.

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From the beginning to the end of his career, and particularly in the late Nouveaux essais d’anthropologie, Biran aims to oppose, as essentially different, ‘desire, or any impassioned tendency of the soul towards objects beyond and outside its power, and will, or the essentially and purely active mode of spirit’. Will, for Biran, is pure will, whereas desire is a ‘mixed or composed mode, in which action and passion are combined’.³⁰ For Ravaisson, in contrast, and as we saw in Chapter 1, desire is continuous with the will.

3.3 Inclination and Inertia Reflection on habit as a ‘second nature’, as we have seen, reveals the continuity of will with instinct in human nature, as well as the tendency and inclination that precedes reflective consciousness and makes it possible. It also allows us, by the ‘most powerful of analogies’ (OH 65), as Ravaisson goes on to claim, to recognize continuity across the whole of organic nature, ‘in the series of kingdoms, of genera, of species’ (OH 67) beyond the human being. The continuity between ‘reflective Freedom’ and ‘natural spontaneity’ discovered in the ‘subjective analysis’ in De l’habitude Part II allows us, that is, to claim that the hierarchy of beings described in the ‘objective analysis’ within Part I is conditioned by the same continuity writ large: ‘in its progress to the heart of the internal life of consciousness, habit presents in a successive form the universality of the terms that mark in the exterior world, in the objective and immobile form of space, the progressive development of the powers of nature’ (OH 65). It is not possible to apprehend continuity in the spatial world beyond us directly,³¹ but the temporal continuity of will, habit, and instinct ‘presented in the reality of the progression of habit’ (OH 65) gives us an idea of the fundamental structure of the world beyond us: The whole series of beings is therefore only the continuous progression of the successive powers of one and the same principle, powers enveloping

³⁰ Biran, Nouveaux essais d’anthropologie, p.140. ³¹ See OH 67: In space, the distinction of forms implies limitation; there is no difference that is not determinate and finite. Nothing, therefore, can show that there is an absolute continuity between the limits, and, consequently, that from one extremity of the progression to the other there is the unity of one and the same principle. The continuity of nature is only a possibility, an ideality that cannot be demonstrated in nature itself.

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one another in the hierarchy of the forms of life, powers which develop in the opposite direction within the progression of habit. The lower limit is necessity—Destiny, as might be said, but in the spontaneity of Nature; the higher limit is the Freedom of the understanding. (OH 67)

Embodied human nature is a microcosm, an instantiation of a principle governing nature as a whole. Ravaisson is well aware that his argument offers no proof or empirical demonstration, but the ‘analogy of habit’ (OH 67) is, he argues, the best basis we have for the construction of a philosophy of nature that could ground the multiplicity of natural phenomena in a unitary principle. ‘Nature’ in Of Habit denominates the domains of living beings, but the ‘philosophy of nature’ that Ravaisson attempts to establish in the text extends beyond the organic realm. Certainly, Part I of De l’habitude admits that ‘habit is not possible within this empire of immediacy and homogeneity that is the Inorganic realm’ (OH 29), since habit can occur only in living beings, which require a principle of heterogeneity and organization. Part II, however, qualifies this negative statement with the ‘analogy of habit’: [t]he most elementary mode of existence, with the most perfect organization, is like the final moment of habit, realized and substantiated in space in a physical form. The analogy of habit penetrates its secret and delivers its sense over to us. All the way down to the confused and multiple life of the zoophyte, down to plants, even down to crystals, it is thus possible to trace, in this light, the last rays of thought and activity as they are dispersed and dissolved without yet being extinguished, far from any possible reflection, in the vague desires of the most obscure instincts. (OH 67)

Without contradicting his earlier statement that habit does not exist in the inorganic realm, Ravaisson attempts to find an analogue of habit in that realm, i.e. some kind of natural spontaneity and obscure activity.³² In a footnote appended to this passage, Ravaisson refers, in fact, to J. G. Herder’s claim in his Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man that the ‘crystal ³² On this issue, see Roger Bruyeron, ‘Remarques sur un passage du texte de Ravaisson’ in Ravaisson, edited by J. M. Le Lannou, 33–46 (Paris: Éditions Kimé, 1999). In ‘From Habit to Monads: Félix Ravaisson’s Theory of Substance’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 23:6 (2015) 1085–105, Jeremy Dunham, in contrast, ‘cannot see’ (p.1096) how Ravaisson’s two claims are compatible, but this without mentioning Ravaisson’s distinction between habit and the analogy of habit.

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shoots with more promptitude and regularity than the bee constructs its comb, or the spider her web. In the stone it is only a blind, organic instinct, which is infallible’ (OH 123, n. 55). Crystals, thus, can be understood as the most primitive form of organization and instinct, as forming a bridge between the lowest levels of inorganic beings and the domains of life. Hence, although habit does not exist in the inorganic realm, it would not be wholly arbitrary that mineralogy speaks of the ‘habits’ of crystals to describe their characteristic external shape. Ravaisson has, in fact, borrowed more from Herder in this connection than his concern for crystals, for the German philosopher had already taken up from Leibniz in particular a method of analogy to discover a unity underlying all created beings, a unity of which man is the summit: from stones to crystals, from crystals to metals, from these to plants, from plants to brutes, and from brutes to man, we here see the form of organisation ascend; and with this powers and forces of the creature have become more various, till at length they have all united in the human frame.

‘It is’, for Herder, ‘anatomically and physiologically true that the analogy of one organisation prevails through the whole animated creation of our Globe.’³³ It is not immediately obvious, however, that Ravaisson’s analogy of habit can stretch to the inorganic realm if, as he says in Part I, within it ‘there is no determinate substance and no individual energy where potentiality could reside’ (OH 29). ‘Homogeneity’, as he writes in an Aristotelian and Leibnizan mode, ‘excludes individuality; it excludes veritable unity, and consequently veritable being.’ However, as he also writes, although ‘[i]n a homogenous whole’ ‘there is not a being’, ‘there is doubtless being’ (OH 29). Now, the idea of being without beings, being without beings in the fullest sense, is certainly obscure, but Ravaisson is grappling here with an aspect of the traditional Aristotelian problem of the nature of matter: things with only an accidental and indeterminate form, such as mud or unhewn rock, are not nothing, even if they have only a lower and derivative existence. This admission that there is being in the inorganic realm is important, for it allows us to be sure that Of Habit’s concluding assertion applies to being as such and in general, including the organic realm: ‘the disposition of which habit consists, and the principle engendering it, ³³ J. G. Herder, Outlines of Philosophy of the History of Man, trans. T. Churchill (London: 1800), p.41 and p.51 for the two citations.

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are one and the same thing: this is the primordial law and the most general form of being, the tendency to persevere in the very actuality that constitutes being’ (OH 77). In its broad scope, this claim echoes Herder’s claim concerning a Grundkraft, a fundamental power which in its development shapes matter into ever more perfect forms that culminate in man. By ‘the disposition of which habit consists’, Ravaisson seems to mean the power, the tendency or inclination, that constitutes an acquired habit; by the ‘principle engendering it’ he seems to means habit as the general power to acquire particular habits. But acquired habits as tendencies and the power to acquire them express the ‘most general form of being’, namely a ‘tendency to persevere’ in being, which is the principle of all being and all beings, even those of the inorganic realm, which are not really ‘beings’ in a strong sense. Note also that when writing of the tendency to persist in movement within the inorganic realm in Part I, Ravaisson had stated that ‘[t]his tendency to persist in movement is inertia’ (OH 27). Clearly, in concluding Part II and the text as a whole, Ravaisson attempts to ground habit understood as tendency and inclination in a principle of inertia that he takes to govern, as is traditionally thought in modern philosophy, the inorganic realm first of all. Ravaisson’s argument, then, is that the analogy of habit allows us to grasp inertia, the most fundamental law of being governing the inorganic realm, as the same principle that makes possible the phenomena of habit. If that were not his argument, what he does say would imply that there is no inertia in the inorganic realm, which is absurd. Ravaisson does not state his argument as explicitly as he might in 1838, but he returns to the issue in his 1867 report, La Philosophie en France au XIXème siècle: ‘Kepler was the first to introduce’ inertia ‘into mechanics, of which it became the first principle, and in which Leibniz shows a persistent tendency, which is certainly opposed to the will, with its changing resolutions, but which is, at bottom, of an analogous nature’ (FP 265). Still, this concern to reduce tendency and inclination in habit to an inertial force is perhaps counter-intuitive: does not ‘inclination’ suggest a certain lightness of being, whereas inertia is all heaviness and immobility? If inertia has something to do with inclination, is this not solely in so far as it was interpreted by Johannes Kepler as an inclinatio ad quietem, a tendency towards rest and immobility? If would be scarcely possible to reconcile inertia and inclination in this sense with what Ravaisson takes to be the natural spontaneity in tendency and inclination. However, Ravaisson draws his law of inertia not from Kepler, but from Leibniz, who transforms

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Kepler’s doctrine.³⁴ For Leibniz, ‘just as there is a natural inertia opposed to motion in matter, so there is in body itself and indeed in every substance, a natural constancy opposed to change’.³⁵ In addition to inertia as a passive force, a passive resistance to motion and greater motion, there is an active force that maintains a body in the ‘series of changes’ that it has begun. According to this active force, a body has no preferred states of motion, and ‘prefers’ only to continue in the motion that it finds itself. Leibniz does not call this active force ‘inertia’—for, given that it is active and a vis viva, it is not inert—but it accounts for the persistence in the motion that we find in body: I admit that every object perseveres in its state until some sufficient reason for change arises. That is a principle approaching metaphysical necessity; but it is not the same thing whether we assert that something simply perseveres in its state until something happens to change it—a case which also arises when the subject is quite indifferent in regard to both states—or whether, on the other hand, we assert that it is not indifferent but possesses a power accompanied by an inclination to preserve its own state and thus to resist actively causes that would change it.³⁶

For Leibniz, the mobile in constant rectilinear motion is not forceless, having once had force imparted on it. On the contrary, it persists in its motion because it is actively striving or tending to do so: ‘a body retains an impetus and remains constant in speed . . . it has an endeavour to persevere (perseverandi habere nisum) in the series of changes it has once begun.’³⁷ An endeavour or striving, as an activity, is required to account for Newton’s first law of motion, and the inertial, rectilinear motion of classical mechanics is just as much a product of an internal drive or tendency as accelerated motion.³⁸ There is, thus, for Leibniz, no such thing as Kepler’s inclinatio

³⁴ On this point, see Howard R. Bernstein, ‘Passivity and Inertia in Leibniz’s Dynamics’, Studia Leibnitiana XIII/1 (1981) 97–113, p.104, and Marius Stan, ‘Newton’s Concepts of Force among the Leibnizians’ in Reading Newton in Early Modern Europe, ed. M. Feingold and E. Boran (Leiden: Brill, 2017) 244–89. ³⁵ Leibniz, ‘De ipsa natura’ in Die philosophischen Schriften von Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, vol. IV, 504–16, p.511; ‘On Nature Itself ’, Philosophical Papers and Letters, ed. L. Loemker, 498–508, p.503. ³⁶ Leibniz to De Volder, 24 March/3 April 1699, Die philosophischen Schriften von Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, vol. II, pp.168–75/Philosophical Papers and Letters, p.516. ³⁷ Leibniz, ‘De ipsa natura’, p.511; Philosophical Papers and Letters, p.503. ³⁸ Bernstein, ‘Passivity and Inertia in Leibniz’s Dynamics’, p.108.

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ad quietem in beings, but only a vis passiva seu inertiae, which prevents a resting body from self-moving, together with an active tendency to persist.³⁹ Of Habit, then, attempts to ground the law of habit in the law of inertia understood as the product of an active force, and in 1834 Ravaisson had already celebrated both Spinoza and Leibniz for the thought that everything strives to persevere in being (DMA 251/206). Certainly, the analogy of habit in 1838 qualifies the idea of a ‘tendency to persevere’ or ‘striving to persist’: ‘tendency’ or ‘striving’, as we have seen Ravaisson state in ‘Contemporary Philosophy (CP 425/79), is to be understood as a pre-voluntary inclination, desire or love, rather than as voluntary endeavour, and thus ‘persevere’ has to be understood as the persistence of that inclination rather than persistence of voluntary endeavour. But even with this qualification, is not the attempt to reduce life, the domain in which habit occurs, to a law, the law of inertia, governing the inorganic realm overly reductive? That it is reductive is Albert Lemoine’s argument in his L’Habitude et l’instinct: The tendency to persist in their way of being is the universal law and the fundamental character, not of being in general and of all beings, as has often been said, but only of the beings that are not alive. It belongs to the living being, to the plant which vegetates or to the mind which thinks, to tend towards change, to develop itself continually. (HI 13)

Lemoine does not refer to Ravaisson directly, but, implicitly, his argument is that a concern to present a general metaphysics incorporating the inorganic realm has led the author of De l’habitude to misconceive the nature of the living, and to drag, as it were, the living into the realm of death. In response to this critique, it is important to note first of all that Ravaisson does not deny that change is essential to all the domains of being; on the contrary, immediately after stating that ‘the tendency to persist in movement is inertia’ (OH 27), he says that ‘from the lowest level of existence the following are found together: permanence; change; and, in change itself, a tendency towards permanence’ (OH 27). The tendency towards permanence in no way excludes change, and the idea of a tendency towards change, if it excludes a tendency towards permanence, is problematic, for it says nothing of the way in which life, through habit, establishes and repeats itself. The second point to note is that Lemoine’s attempt to

³⁹ On this point, see Stan, ‘Newton’s Concepts of Force among the Leibnizians’.

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overturn the primacy of a tendency to permanence in the organic realm seems to stem from an unnecessarily static conception of inertia: If it is true, as contemporary science affirms, that all of the physical or chemical phenomena of nature are reducible to various forms of movement, and that movement does not emerge spontaneously from the inert heart of the mobile, it is understandable that habit has no place in the inorganic realm. (HI 14)

It would seem that it is because Lemoine opposes inertia, understood as a tendency towards permanence, to spontaneity and movement that he considers it necessary to assert the primacy of a tendency towards change in beings. If this is a response to Ravaisson, it is one based on a misinterpretation, for Of Habit does not follow the affirmations of nineteenth-century science concerning inertia, but rather, as we have just seen, those of Leibniz, according to whom there is an innate, active tendency in the mobile. This tendency is not inert, i.e. dead, and it is related, Ravaisson argues, to the spontaneity that appears increasingly in the organic realm. It is this dynamic interpretation of the law of inertia that enables Ravaisson to ground the force of habit, as a natural spontaneity, in the most basic law governing the inorganic realm. It is what allows him to present a philosophy of nature as a whole that incorporates reflective freedom, inclination, and inertia.

3.4 Habit as Organon of Philosophy Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time—which, among many other things, is a long discourse on habit—features the claim that ‘if habit is a second nature, it prevents us from knowing our first’. Habit facilitates our practical lives and mental operations, but it ‘conceals from us almost the whole universe, and prevents us from knowing ourselves’,⁴⁰ and in concealing even itself it leads us to believe that our habitual operations are natural.⁴¹ Habit may not ⁴⁰ Marcel Proust, The Captive/The Fugitive, vol. 5 of In Search of Lost Time, trans. C. K. Scott Montcrieff and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D. J. Enright (London: Vintage, 1996, p.621. For a study of Proust’s inheritance of the nineteenth-century French philosophical reflection on habit, see Erika Fulöp, ‘Habit in À la recherché du temps perdu’, French Studies 68/3 (2014) 344–58. ⁴¹ As Hume puts it in his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding: ‘custom, where it is strongest, not only covers our natural ignorance, but even conceals itself, and seems not to take place, merely because it is found in the highest degree’ (6.1). In this connection, see also Carlisle, On Habit, p.2.

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destroy primary nature, as Pascal had said, but it conceals it, and the task of literature and philosophy—if both, in different ways, are to reveal the truth —consists in lifting the veils of habit. Ravaisson, for his part, can accept that habit leads us to consider its own operations as natural, and thus that it can mislead us, but Of Habit allows us to recognise its epistemological virtues: the experience of habit allows us to argue that there is a continuum underlying what we distinguish as inertia, instinct, habit, and will. Consequently, the analogy of habit allows us to posit that unity throughout nature as a whole. In this sense, for the philosopher at least, habit is more like a window than the curtain hanging before it. Even in the abysses that seem forbidden to it, the last and fading rays of light that habit draws from consciousness illuminate, in the deepest heart of nature, the mystery of the identification of the ideal and the real, of the thing and thought, and of all the contraries that the understanding separates, which are fused in an inexplicable actuality of intelligence and desire. (OH 63)

Reflection on habit, that is, allows us to overcome the fundamental dualisms of modern philosophy and surpass the limits of the faculty of the mind that is the ‘understanding’. This concern for an original identity—one that is inexplicable and inaccessible to the understanding, i.e. to conceptual thought—prior to any opposition of mind and world signals in the most obvious fashion the influence of F. W. J. Schelling’s Identitätsphilosophie on Ravaisson in the 1830s. The basic structure of Ravaisson’s text recalls Schelling’s project in the 1800 System of Transcendental Idealism: the objective analysis of habit in Part I of De l’habitude offers a brief philosophy of nature, whereas Part II offers a philosophy of spirit, what Schelling terms in 1800 a ‘transcendental philosophy’. The highest task of philosophy thus consists in somehow demonstrating the original identity uniting nature and spirit, but whereas Schelling had argued in 1800 that the artwork, as the work of genius, grants an intuition of and thus experiential access to this identity, Ravaisson in 1838 accords this role to habit. It is not art but habit that stands as what Schelling had described as the ‘organon and document’ of philosophy. Although neither Of Habit nor the 1837 Essai on Aristotle contains any explicit reference to Schelling, Ravaisson in the 1830s clearly had familiarity and affinity with the German philosopher’s work. Ravaisson sums up his

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1834 prizewinning essay on Aristotle—for which the brief included relating the Metaphysics to contemporary philosophical concerns—by claiming that: [w]e do not want to profess here Schelling’s system: this system has not been formulated. Still less do we want to adopt Hegel’s absolute idealism: he conceived being as pure spirit, while the higher principle of force contains in a higher unity: thought, will, love. Our approach is based, without accepting its monadological hypotheses, solely on a Leibnizian idealist-realism brought to life and organised by modern science and in which Aristotelianism has enjoyed its latest regeneration. (DMA 270–1/213)

Ravaisson claims not to profess Schelling’s system, not because he is critical of it, but rather because the Munich philosopher, Germany’s greatest living thinker, does not yet have one, because his philosophy is in development. That said, what Ravaisson does claim to profess here is still Schellingian: the idea of an ‘idealist-realism’, of finding the identity of the ideal and the real, goes back to the German philosopher.⁴² What exactly is known of Ravaisson’s first-hand knowledge of Schelling’s work? There exists some evidence suggesting that Ravaisson had bought or intended to buy a copy of the System of Transcendental Idealism in 1835,⁴³ but in that year he also had the opportunity to develop his understanding of Schelling’s ideas, since he translated the Munich professor’s critical essay on the work of Victor Cousin. In his brief introduction to this translation, Ravaisson describes Schelling as ‘the greatest philosopher of our century’.⁴⁴ One can speculate about why Ravaisson then omitted explicit reference to Schelling in his published works of 1837 and 1838. Given that he would once again be candid about Schelling’s importance within his survey of European thinking in the 1840 ‘Contemporary Philosophy’, after having gone to study with him in Munich in 1839, if this was an expression of the anxiety of

⁴² See Dopp for the claim that Ravaisson’s apparent Schellingian Leibnizianism is inspired by Rixner’s Schelling-influenced reading of Leibniz in his 1829 Handbuch der Geschichte der Philosophie; Félix Ravaisson, p.111. ⁴³ As Janicaud reports (Ravaisson et la métaphysique, p.98, n. 5), in Ravaisson’s manuscripts an 1835 note was found with the title and price of two books by Schelling, including the System des transcendentalen Idealismus, which suggests, at the very least, an intention to buy the books, which he had perhaps previously borrowed from a library. ⁴⁴ Ravaisson, ‘Jugement de Schelling sur la philosophie de M. Cousin, et sur l’état de la philosophie française et de la philosophie allemande en général’, Nouvelle Revue Germanique 3 (1885) 3–24, p.3.

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influence, the anxiety was clearly temporary. It is likely that Ravaisson’s stance was the expression, above all, of political prudence on the part of a doctoral candidate, since from the beginning of the 1830s Cousin had come under attack for Germanizing French philosophy.⁴⁵ Whatever the case may be, it is worthwhile to examine briefly Ravaisson’s productive reception in De l’habitude of Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism, for it allows us to perceive more clearly the contours of Ravaisson’s own position. Tracing the analogies and disanalogies between their respective positions allows us to understand how Ravaisson’s particular choice of habit as method leads to a rather different philosophy of identity from that of Schelling. If Ravaisson’s work is Schellingian, it is by no means a servile reproduction of the German philosopher’s views. Bergson was right to discern a ‘natural affinity’ between the ideas of Schelling and Ravaisson more than a direct influence of the German on the Frenchman.⁴⁶ On the basis of the philosophy of nature Schelling developed in the 1790s, the System of Transcendental Idealism posits nature as an objective and unconscious productive principle. Nature is the domain of unconscious activity, unconscious thought, whereas spirit is the domain of activity and thought having risen to consciousness of itself. That said, self-consciousness, on the account that Schelling borrows and develops from Fichte, is never entirely transparent to itself, since the productive act—the ‘intellectual intuition’—by which the self is posited precedes conscious awareness as its condition. In order to justify the supposition that the principle of nature and the principle of spirit are one and the same, and thus that nature is merely ‘mind in a condition of dullness’,⁴⁷ philosophy needs to be able to show, from the perspective of self-consciousness, the unconscious and the conscious principles, mind and nature, in an original unity. Left to its own devices, philosophy cannot positively represent this unity because thinking always occurs from a position where the identity of the subjective and the objective has already been lost in the emergence of consciousness. Schelling,

⁴⁵ As Dopp notes: Félix Ravaisson, p.155. ⁴⁶ Writing on the supposition that Ravaisson had read the System of Transcendental Idealism, Janicaud (‘Cousin et Ravaisson, lecteurs de Schelling et Hegel’, Les Études philosophiques, 451–66, p.461) puts it well: ‘Ravaisson, with a fine and delicate mind, responsive to suggestions more than to demonstrations . . . was all the less inclined to display his readings of Schelling in that these reflected—according to Bergson’s happy expression—less an influence than a “natural affinity”, a “community of inspiration”.’ ⁴⁷ Schelling, System des transcendentalen Idealismus, Werke 9.1 (Stuttgart: FromannHolzboog, 2005), p.149; System of Transcendental Idealism, trans. Peter Heath, ed. M. Vater (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1978), p.92.

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however, borrows from the early Romantics the idea that art is a means of understanding that which cannot be an object of knowledge: art can show what philosophy cannot say.⁴⁸ Schelling’s systematic concern with the philosophy of nature and the philosophy of spirit thus reaches its zenith with the philosophy of art. The final section of the 1800 text is entitled ‘Deduction of a Universal Organ (eines allegmeinen Organs) of Philosophy, or: Essentials of the Philosophy of Art according to the Principles of Transcendental Idealism’. Philosophy requires an organ, an implement, something with which it can fulfil its highest task, something without which it remains incomplete and unsystematic. The work of fine art, for Schelling, is this organon, i.e. it can make present an original unity of the conscious and unconscious principles, in so far as it is the work of genius. Genius, as Kant had argued in the locus classicus of the modern concept, namely his Critique of Judgment, is that through which ‘nature gives the rule to art’.⁴⁹ Fine art cannot be the product of rational rules, since, on Kant’s account, it is irreducible to conceptual intentions. The non-rational, non-conceptual rule operative in fine art production is ‘nature’, the gift or natural ‘talent’ of the artist. In the production of fine art, by means of genius, the principle of nature thus cooperates with intention and taste, and thus with mind. The production of the artwork begins consciously, with an intention to create, but the element of conscious thought in the finished work of art cannot be clearly separated, even conceptually, from what Schelling takes to be unconscious thought, from nature. Nature begins unconsciously and ends, at its highest point, in conscious philosophical and scientific knowledge, whereas the production of the artwork begins consciously but has an least partially unconscious product: ‘the I is conscious according to the production, unconscious with regard to the product’.⁵⁰ It is due to this unity of conscious and unconscious principles in its finished product, as a unity that begins in consciousness, that Schelling can write of art these celebrated lines: Art is at once the only true and external organon and document of philosophy, which ever and again continues to speak to us of what philosophy cannot depict in external form, namely the unconscious element in ⁴⁸ On this point, see Paul Guyer, ‘Knowledge and Pleasure in the Aesthetics of Schelling’ in Interpreting Schelling ed. L. Ostaric (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 71–91. ⁴⁹ See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, ed. N. Walker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), }46. ⁵⁰ Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism, p.313/p.220.

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acting and producing, and its original identity with the conscious. Art is paramount to the philosopher precisely because it opens to him, as it were, the holy of holies, where burns in eternal and original unity, as if in a single flame, that which in nature and history is rent asunder, and in life and action, no less than in thought, must forever fly apart.⁵¹

The work of genius grants a form of access to the basic unity that philosophy, left to its own devices, can only posit hypothetically. In the production of the work of genius there is an ‘identity of the conscious and the unconscious in the self, and consciousness of this identity’.⁵² Fine art production offers not the intellectual intuition through which, for Schelling, the self posits and apprehends itself in inner sense, in abstraction from nature, but rather a ‘real intuition’, a real intuition that is an ‘aesthetic intuition’.⁵³ Ravaisson also speaks of a ‘real intuition’, but as available in habit rather than art: ‘the obscure intelligence that through habit comes to replace reflection, this immediate intelligence where subject and object are confounded, is a real intuition, in which the real and the ideal, being and thought are fused together’ (OH 55). This ‘real intuition’ is not the intuition of a worldly entity or principle separate from the self, but rather an intuition of one’s own embodied spiritual being. This intuition is, therefore, not simply real, but at once real and ideal. Thus, Ravaisson could have described habit as offering an ‘ideal-real’ intuition, which is what Schelling will search for in his Identitätsphilosophie after the System of Transcendental Idealism.⁵⁴ Nevertheless, as with the production of the work of genius, in the contraction of a habit it can be said that ‘the I is conscious according to the production, unconscious with regard to the product’; the production of a motor habit is conscious, whereas its product, the acquired habit, becomes less and less conscious, more and more automatic. A contracted habit shares another characteristic with Schelling’s Kantian account of the work of genius: purposiveness without purpose. As Schelling has it, nature and fine art have a purposiveness without purpose in two different ways: ‘nature begins as unconscious and ends as conscious; the process of production is not purposive, but the product certainly is so’, whereas in genius ‘the self must begin (subjectively) with consciousness, and ⁵¹ Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism, p.328/p.231. ⁵² Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism, p.312/p.219. ⁵³ Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism, p.325/p.227. ⁵⁴ See, for example, Schelling’s 1802 Fernere Darstellungen aus dem System der Philosophie in Vol. IV of Sämtliche Werke, ed. K. F. A. Schelling, Stuttgart/Augsburg: Cotta, 1856–61. I am grateful to Daniel Whistler for drawing this issue of an ‘ideal-real intuition’ to my attention.

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end without consciousness or objectively’.⁵⁵ Nature does not proceed teleologically (because it is not conscious mind), but ends up with products that at least look as if they were produced for a clear purpose. Fine art, in contrast, proceeds consciously as art, but as fine ends up with products that look irreducible to conceptual intention. A motor habit is comparable to the work of genius in this regard in that, once contracted or produced, it is no longer guided by any explicit, reflective purpose, but it is still, in a sense, purposive. This is not, on Ravaisson’s account, simply because it was once formed purposefully; this would make its purposiveness external to it, and an acquired habit would thus become a mere tool. A contracted habit has purposiveness without purpose because voluntary activity is taken over by tendency and inclination, as an embodied, non-mechanical, intelligence that, although it is not goalless, does not require its goal to be posited mentally as an ideal to be realized: ‘in reflection and will’, as we have seen Ravaisson argue, ‘the end (la fin) of movement is an idea, an ideal to be accomplished . . . But as the end becomes fused with the movement, and the movement with the tendency, possibility, the ideal, is realised in it’ (OH 55). That habit should be analogous with genius in these ways may appear strange.⁵⁶ How, one might ask, can there be such a close analogy between what Kant describes as a principle of originality and a principle of custom and routine? It is necessary to recall that habit, on Ravaisson’s account, as something other than a mechanical principle of action, as a principle of spontaneity, is not inimical to life. It is rather coextensive with living nature, and goes in its direction: ‘if . . . the characteristic of nature, which constitutes life, is the predominance of spontaneity over receptivity, then habit does not simply presuppose nature, but develops in the very direction of nature, and concurs with it’ (OH 31). Certainly, feelings in their first flush are deadened by habit, and the thrill of performance is reduced by routine, but this does not prevent habit, which is no mechanical rigidification, from possessing a purposiveness without purpose akin to that in fine art. For Ravaisson, this purposiveness without purpose in both domains expresses itself as grace, which, as we have noted, can be understood as a certain artful effortlessness. Grace, which belongs to movement and is ‘more beautiful than beauty itself ’, is the fundamental concept in his aesthetics, but ⁵⁵ Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism, p.313/p.219. ⁵⁶ That said, in drawing out the parallel between habit and genius, and thus between Of Habit and The System of Transcendental Idealism, I merely develop Janicaud’s brief but pregnant remark that the ‘immediating mediation of habit recalls somewhat the free production of artistic genius that “reflects conscious activity as if it was unconscious” ’; ‘Victor Cousin and Ravaisson, lecteurs de Schelling et Hegel’, p.462.

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in Of Habit, as we have seen, it also describes habitual inclination: habit is a function of ‘desire, love and grace’ (OH 75). After Ravaisson, Bergson often speaks of habit negatively, even as a subject of ridicule, but what would be the grace of the dancer that he describes in Time and Free Will without habit?⁵⁷ Grace is not necessarily opposed to habit, and seems in fact to require it; the appearance of effortlessness is possible only with practice and habit. Of course, one may accept this point concerning grace but still consider that the production of ‘higher’ arts require a principle of genial novelty opposed to habit rooted in history. But Ravaisson’s reflection on habit as grace allows us to discover in it a principle of openness, indetermination, and novelty, a stable spontaneity that extracts the new from the old. As he writes in 1837, we can ‘discover in habit the very pleasure of novelty [retrouver dans la coutume le plaisir même de la nouveauté]’ (EMA 450). In this sense, genius would be a particular prolongation of habit rather than opposed to it. In recognizing that Ravaisson presents, without explicitly declaring it, an account of habit as purposiveness without purpose, it is easier to see how De l’habitude offers a Romantic, Schellingian philosophy of habit. The principal difference separating Of Habit from the System of Transcendental Idealism, however, lies in the French philosopher’s signature adverbial phrases de plus en plus, de moins en moins: it is precisely because an acquired habit becomes more and more automatic, less and less conscious that ‘habit can be considered as a method—as the only real method—for the estimation, by a convergent infinite series, of the relation, real in itself but incommensurable in the understanding, of Nature and Will’ (OH 59). This convergent infinite series, i.e. this continuum, is quite different from Schelling’s absolute identity in 1800. Prior to the opposition of nature and will, there is not, as Hegel infamously put it, a ‘night in which all cows are black’, but a kind of halflight that follows from the light of consciousness, a half-light in which all shades into grey. Dopp was thus right to note that Ravaisson’s vision of a continuum underlying nature and will differs markedly from Schelling’s more Manichean metaphysics in the System,⁵⁸ but it is important to note that in its introduction, Schelling describes the odyssey of consciousness

⁵⁷ Bergson, Time and Free Will, p.12/pp.11–13. ⁵⁸ Dopp, Félix Ravaisson, p.241: ‘Ravaisson was always distant from the Manicheanism in which the German philosophy of the time bathed.’ Janicaud is thus also right to note that ‘it would be vain to seek a servile imitation or a literal fidelity with regard to Schelling: the site of identity (or of identification) is removed from the transcendental ego towards an autonomous moment [instance]—habit—which links the inorganic and the organic, the psychological and the ontological’ (‘Victor Cousin et Ravaisson: Lecteurs de Hegel et de Schelling’, p.463).

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within it as ‘a graduated sequence of impressions, whereby the self raises itself to the highest power of consciousness’, and that he aims to ‘present every part of philosophy in a single continuum’.⁵⁹ This suggests that it would have not been impossible for him to arrive at Ravaisson’s consistently continuist position, and that, perhaps, it is Schelling’s employment of art as a method that prevents him from arriving at it. Genius does not present its product becoming more and more independent of the will and consciousness, and thus less and less consciously directed. In any case, it is on the basis of his account of continuity that Ravaisson can hold, in the penultimate paragraph of De l’habitude, that there is only an ‘imperfect identity’, and not an absolute identity, of nature and will in this world: habit is enclosed within the region of opposition and movement. It remains beneath pure activity, simple apperception, unity and the divine identity of thought and being; and it has for a limit and final end the imperfect identity of the ideal and the real, of being and thought, in the spontaneity of nature. The history of Habit represents the return of Freedom to Nature, or rather the invasion of the domain of freedom by natural spontaneity. (OH 77)

In the divine, Ravaisson contends, which resides above and beyond this world, there is a pure identity of thought and being, but in this world here below, there is merely an increasing proximity, by means of the acquisition of a habit, to the spontaneity of nature.⁶⁰ This is the most that Ravaisson says about the divine in Of Habit, but we should note in conclusion that habit also serves to interpret the relation of a divine principle to the finite world and thus to understand the Christian mystery of creation.⁶¹ The basic thought, which seems to motivate Ravaisson’s

⁵⁹ System of Transcendental Idealism, p.25/p.2. ⁶⁰ The ontotheology that Ravaisson presents here is, therefore, quite different from that of the System of Transcendental Idealism, although a fuller study of Ravaisson’s relation to Schelling would have to determine the extent to which it is already influenced by the German philosopher’s later work. In this connection, see Gaëll Guibert, Félix Ravaisson: d’une philosophie première à la philosophie de la révélation de Schelling (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2007). ⁶¹ See also Beaufret, Notes sur la philosophie en France au XIXème siècle, p.21: This method, which allows the inferior to be determined as the result of the successive decline of a superior term which tends to annul itself in it without ever abolishing itself entirely, is also going to allow us, in generalizing, to interpret metaphysically the very mystery of being such as Christian revelation presents it.

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explicit interest in the history and philosophy of religion from the 1840s, is described in the clearest fashion in the 1867 report: [w]e can understand the origin of an existence inferior to absolute existence only as the result of a voluntary determination, by which this high existence has from itself moderated, deadened, extinguished, so to speak, something of its all-powerful activity. Can we not say that what the first cause concentrates of existence in its immutable eternity is unfolded, so to speak, by it, relaxed and diffused in the elementary conditions of materiality that are time and space; that it establishes thus, in some way, the base of material existence, a basis on which, by the continuous progress that constitutes the order of nature, from one degree to the next, from one species to the next, everything returns from material dispersion to the unity of spirit? (FP 279)

We can understand the relation of the finite world to a divine principle as the result of a kind of relaxation of divine activity. The acquisition of habit—even if Ravaisson does not say this explicitly—serves as a kind of schema of this. Hence it can be said, following Pascal Engel, that ‘every time we contract a habit, we renew in us something of God’s act of creation’.⁶² But this analogy of habit, an analogy of habit with divine creation, has a double aspect, in that habit not only naturalizes or realizes spirit in matter but also allows spirit to pursue more elevated goals. Habit allows spirit to descend, but also, indirectly, climb the scale of existence. Hence Ravaisson’s doctrine of kenotic creation has two aspects, as Denise Leduc-Lafayette has underlined: the ‘ontological kenosis’, which is God’s original act of creation, is doubled by a ‘historical kenosis’,⁶³ in which, as Ravaisson puts it in 1887, the divine principle lowers itself into the world so that He can lead ‘humanity back, reborn, to the extremity of perfection for which it was made’ (PP 423/272). It is according to this idea of divine ‘condescendence’ that Ravaisson engages with evolutionary doctrines, particularly in his Testament philosophique. The scale of beings is first created from top down, as it were, but after this initial creation, on the basis of material existence there is progress that ⁶² Pascal Engel, ‘Plenitude and Contingency: Modal Concepts in Nineteenth Century French Philosophy’, p.187. For more on Ravaisson’s theology see the Introduction to Ravaisson, Selected Essays. ⁶³ See Denis Leduc-Fayette, ‘La Métaphysique de Ravaisson et le Christ’, Les Études philosophiques 1984/4, 511–27.

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involves the production of new forms of life, new rungs on the ladder that God has already created. There is a ‘creative ascent’ (T 80/307) in nature. In evolutionary doctrines, Ravaisson rejects only—in the same spirit as his critique of attempts to derive the organic from the inorganic, to derive life from death—theories considering teleology and theology to be otiose; ‘the idea of an invisible cause is the only one that can explain, however incomprehensible its content may be, organic formation, an idea which transformism, while claiming to explain this formation by means of a vague notion of evolution, pretends it can do without’ (T 69/302). If transformism, the basic idea of evolutionary change, fails to grasp that ‘in the beginning there is the best’ (T 69/302), and that the evolution of life amounts to some form of teleological pursuit of the good, then it will, from Ravaisson’s perspective, be blind and nihilistic, since it will attempt to explain the higher by the lower.⁶⁴ Ravaisson’s approach may well have been at once too teleological and too theological for Bergson, but it is clear that it was an inspiration for his Creative Evolution in 1907. ⁶⁴ See T 54/296: ‘Smallness is also that to which their whole philosophy is reduced and we would not go far wrong if we called it nihilism. Men of nothing, common men have no difficulty admitting that everything was formed from nothing.’

4 Inclination without Necessitation Chapters 1 and 2 of this study examined the place of Ravaisson’s account of tendency and inclination in the history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century French conceptions of habit. Chapter 3 focused on the broader metaphysical framework and the philosophy of nature that Ravaisson establishes by means of reflection on habit as inclination. The present chapter further elucidates Ravaisson’s notion of inclination by addressing how it is to be understood in relation to the fundamental philosophical problem of free will. Of Habit makes important claims in this connection. The final sentence of the pivotal Section II of Part II contrasts the force of habit with a material and mechanical necessity, on the one hand, and a notion of freedom, on the other: habit, as an acquired tendency or inclination, is a function of ‘a Spontaneity that is at once active and passive, equally different from mechanical Fatality and from reflective Freedom’ (OH 55).¹ Clearly, the three key terms are capitalized in order to underline not just their importance in the text but also that Ravaisson’s approach challenges an established and familiar opposition in modern philosophy of the freedom and autonomy of mind to a dead mechanical world—the idea of fatalism here naming not an attitude of resignation, but rather what we now call determinism.² Given that it is somehow both active and passive, the Spontaneity of which Ravaisson writes is not an absolute spontaneity grounding a ‘liberty of indifference’, according to which the will is entirely free from all determination

¹ Both versions of the English translation have ‘equally opposed to’ for Ravaisson’s également différente, which is both unhelpful and unfaithful in stating mere difference as an opposition. Mea culpa. ² In French, the words déterminisme appears only later in the nineteenth century. On this point, see A. Lalande (ed.), Vocabulaire technique et critique de la philosophie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997, p.223) and Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Hacking examines anti-necessitarian doctrines in nineteenth-century France, and thus covers some of the same ground as this chapter, but his concern for chance and probability never becomes a direct inquiry into the nature of the force— tendency, inclination, propensity—that produces chance events and statistical probabilities, which is our concern in this study.

Being Inclined: Félix Ravaisson’s Philosophy of Habit. Mark Sinclair, Oxford University Press (2019). © Mark Sinclair. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198844587.001.0001

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by motives or causes.³ The acquisition of a habit may begin from freedom in this sense, but Ravaisson contrasts the spontaneity in an acquired habit with the principle of ‘reflective freedom’. The spontaneity in an acquired habit is so far from such a principle that in Part II, Section III Ravaisson is even able to equate it with a form of necessity. This is not a mechanical necessity, ‘an external necessity of constraint, but a necessity of attraction and desire’ (OH 57). Of Habit glosses this idea of a necessity of attraction and desire as follows: ‘it is the final cause that increasingly predominates over efficient causality and which absorbs the latter into itself. And at that point, indeed, the end and the principle, the fact and the law, are fused together within necessity’ (OH 57). Ravaisson does not contradict here what he said at the end of the previous section of his text about habit being irreducible to ‘mechanical fatality’. For his claim is that the form of necessity that a habit increasingly adopts in its acquisition, as its spontaneity becomes more and more a tendency and inclination, is a function not of efficient causality (and thus ‘mechanical fatality’) but rather of final causality. Of Habit claims, then, that there is a form of necessity in inclination. Necessity, along with actuality and possibility, is one of the traditional categories of ‘modality’, and so here we encounter the modal sense of Ravaisson’s account of tendency and inclination. The realization or manifestation of an acquired habit is more than simply possible, given that this manifestation is not just one possibility among a potentially infinite number of equals. The manifestation tends to occur on the basis of the agent’s now pre-voluntary spontaneity, its pre-voluntary desire that it occur. That said, if habitual action in some sense has to happen, it is neither logically necessary, in the way that necessarily 2 + 2 = 4, nor physically necessary, in the way that that one ball supposedly has to move, according to the laws of impact mechanics, when struck by another. The necessity in an acquired habit, Ravaisson contends, is of a different order, and rather than being blind and mechanical, it involves attraction and desire, which are both psychological and teleological principles; both presuppose the pursuit of an object or goal that attracts and is desired. The idea of such a non-mechanical necessity is sketchy in Of Habit, but Ravaisson has not invented it, since the eighteenthcentury Scottish animist physiologist William Porterfield contrasted physical or mechanical necessity—which he termed ‘intrinsical necessity’—with the ‘moral necessity’ in an acquired habitual action. The uniform motion ³ See Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. N. Kemp Smith (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) A445/B 473, A 553/B 561.

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of our two eyes, for example, in focusing on a single object becomes automatic, and ‘at last becomes so necessary, that the Eyes cannot be moved differently’, and yet this is a form of necessity that does not make that action ‘mechanical and independent of our Will’.⁴ Ravaisson, as we saw in Chapter 1 of this study, qualifies this idea of the predominance of the will, and argues that the reflective will is replaced by desire, but he seems to assert no less—and perhaps more intelligibly, precisely because his position is less voluntarist—that the now habitual operation is a function of a certain form of necessity. Porterfield’s account of habit as a function of moral necessity is clearly important for Ravaisson, but the general idea of a moral, spiritual necessity contrasting with forms of physical or logical necessity is older than the Scottish thinker, and it found its most prominent early modern expression in the work of Leibniz. In his later work, Leibniz frequently accounts for free decisions as ‘morally necessary’ but not ‘metaphysically necessary’. Ravaisson’s idea of acquired habit as inclination without a necessity of constraint has, therefore, a Leibnizian heritage, and his gloss of the idea subtly transforms, as will become clear, a passage from Leibniz’s Monadology. Ravaisson does not explicitly acknowledge this debt to Leibniz’s notion of moral necessity in Of Habit—which contains only one direct reference to Leibniz, in relation to his dynamic account of inertia as a tendency to persist (OH 119, n. 2)—but he more than makes up for this omission in the 1867 report on the history of French thought: the final section of the text, which presents Ravaisson’s conception of an emergent French philosophy able to grasp that ‘fatality in this world is only an appearance’ and ‘spontaneity, freedom its truth’ (FP 269), firmly pins it colours to the mast of Leibniz’s distinction of mechanical and moral necessity. The present chapter makes a first attempt—‘first’ because Chapter 6 returns to the issue from a more contemporary perspective—to examine the modal sense of Ravaisson’s notion of tendency and inclination, and it does so in examining his inheritance of Leibniz’s philosophy. The opening section, before turning specifically to Leibniz’s doctrine of moral necessity, addresses his related sloganizing concerning ‘inclination without necessitation’ when defending the possibility of free acts, both human and divine. The second section focuses on Ravaisson’s inheritance of these doctrines, and the contrast between his conception of habit as a necessity of attraction and desire in 1838 ⁴ Porterfield, ‘Essay concerning the Motions of our Eyes: Part II, Of their Internal Motions’, p.214. See also J. P. Wright, ‘Ideas of Habit and Custom in Early Modern Philosophy’, p.34.

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and his promotion of a more general Leibnizian idea of moral necessity in the 1867 report. In the light of Émile Boutroux’s 1874 On the Contingency of the Laws of Nature, I argue that with its idea that an acquired habit can become more and more necessary, Ravaisson’s notion of tendency and inclination as a ‘necessity of attraction and desire’ in 1838 is no real necessity at all, and that the same holds for his later attempt to conceive of ‘contingency’ under the Leibnizian heading of ‘moral necessity’. On the question of moral necessity, Ravaisson is more Leibnizian than he needs and ought to be, but in the third section of the chapter, I show how the basic framework of Ravaisson’s metaphysics is much less Leibnizian than one commentator has recently supposed. Although Ravaisson develops his account of tendency and inclination—and thus of desire and, in the end, of love—as the ‘substance’ of the voluntary self against the background of Leibniz’s philosophy, this by no means implies that he accepts a form of monadological metaphysics. Ravaisson, I argue, takes up from Leibniz not his conception of beings—as monads—but his conception of being as tending to be, as being inclined. Ravaisson’s conception of being, I argue, is crucial for his notion of inclination, and crucial for understanding how habitual inclinations inhabit the body. The final section of the chapter attempts to determine how reflection on being serves to illuminate the very idea of inclination, and to what extent Ravaisson understands and reflects on the difference—the ‘ontological difference’ as Martin Heidegger will name it—between being and beings.

4.1 Leibniz on Inclination and Moral Necessity The idea of a necessity of attraction and desire draws from Leibniz’s notion of a moral necessity, but the more fundamental contrast of inclination with ‘mechanical fatality’ in Of Habit also recalls Leibniz’s sloganizing concerning ‘inclination without necessitation’. When attempting to affirm human freedom and refute charges that his philosophy is fatalistic, Leibniz often claims that the reasons, motives, or causes of free choices ‘incline’ but do not necessitate. He does not, for all that, ‘give much explanation of the difference between inclining and necessitating’, as Robert Adams remarks,⁵ and this lack of elucidation has occasioned more critical verdicts: Arthur Lovejoy, for one, describes the sloganizing as ‘misleading if edifying phraseology’, merely ⁵ Robert M. Adams, Leibniz: Determinist, Theist, Idealist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994) p.34.

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a ‘verbal distinction’, one ‘absolutely meaningless in the light of [Leibniz’s] other doctrines’,⁶ and he questions Leibniz’s sincerity in speaking thus.⁷ If Ravaisson were attempting to draw from Leibniz’s conception of inclination without necessitation, he would be attempting to develop one of the least defended aspects of his German predecessor’s philosophy. The key point here is that the necessity Leibniz excludes from freedom, particularly in the canonical definition of freedom in the Theodicy, is merely logical or metaphysical necessity: I have shown that freedom, according to the definition required in the schools of theology, consists in intelligence, which involves a clear knowledge of the object of deliberation, in spontaneity, whereby we determine ourselves, and in contingency, that is, in the exclusion of logical or metaphysical necessity. Intelligence is, at it were, the soul of freedom, and the rest is as its body and foundation. The free substance is self-determining and that according to the motive of the good perceived by the understanding, which inclines it without necessitating it: and all the conditions of freedom are comprised in these few words.

According to this traditional definition, a free choice, must, first, be made knowingly, clear-sightedly. It must, second, be spontaneous, which here means self-determined, determined by the motives, reasons, or causes internal to the agent, rather than determined by other things; as Leibniz will say some pages later, ‘an action is spontaneous when its source is in him who acts’.⁸ It must, third, be contingent, which means not logically or metaphysically necessary. Something is logically or metaphysically necessary if its negation implies a contradiction, and thus an alternative to the choice made must be possible—in the sense of being conceivable without contradiction—if that choice is to be free. Thus, as Adams puts it, the ‘centrepiece’ of Leibniz’s argument that ‘the motive of the good . . . inclines . . . without necessitating’ is really ‘an appeal to the internal coherence of alternatives for choice, rather than a claim about the nature of the chooser’.⁹ It is because ⁶ Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being, p.174. ⁷ On this issue of sincerity, see Adams, Leibniz: Determinist, Theist, Idealist, pp.50–2. ⁸ ‘The spontaneity of our actions can therefore no longer be questioned; and Aristotle has defined it well, saying that an action is spontaneous when its source is in him who acts . . . Thus it is that our actions and our wills depend entirely upon us’; Essais de Théodicée in Die philosophischen Schriften von Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, vol. 6, §301/Theodicy, trans. E. M. Huggard (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1952), pp.309–10. ⁹ Robert Adams, ‘Moral Necessity’ in Leibniz: Nature and Freedom, ed. D. Rutherford and J. A. Cover (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) 181–93, p.188. For Adams’ analysis, which

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alternatives are logically possible that Leibniz holds that the good perceived inclines without necessitating, but this sense of possibility does not preclude the choice being determined according to a form of necessity. The choice can be physically or causally necessary without being metaphysically necessary, and spontaneity in Leibniz’s sense does not preclude causal determination in a ‘free’ choice, since it excludes only determination from without the agent’s own motives or reasons. Leibniz rejects the liberty of indifference, what he calls the ‘indifference of equilibrium’ that exempts us from determining reasons, and he seems to have always maintained a compatibilist position, according to which all events are determined, although some actions are nevertheless free in that they are self-determined.¹⁰ This explains why he is able to describe the will with mechanical analogies, particularly that of the balance. Leibniz pictures ‘inclining’ according to the image of a balance that is tipped or inclined to one side or the other by the preponderance of weights; ‘reasons in the mind of a wise being, and motives in any mind whatsoever, do that which answers to the effect produced by weights in a balance’ and they never fail to do so.¹¹ The causes or reasons that incline the will, like weights in a balance, are both conscious and unconscious: our free choices are determined not just by clear perceptions and practical judgements of a good to be attained, but by an infinite number of petites perceptions, by insensible perceptions, which Leibniz also calls ‘insensible inclinations’.¹² ‘Several perceptions and inclinations’, he writes, ‘contribute to the complete volition, which is the result of their conflict. Some of them are separately imperceptible; the mass of these makes an uneasiness which pushes us without our seeing why.’¹³ Inclinations, both sensible and insensible, ‘push’ in volition, just as one side of the balance is pushed down by the weight upon it. Certainly, Leibniz attempts to limit the analogy when in response to criticism he emphasizes that the mind is active in choosing: ‘a balance is merely passive, and mov’d by the weights; I do not examine here, of what he takes to be Leibniz’s other main theory of contingency, namely the conceptual containment theory of truth, see the final section of ‘Moral Necessity’ and Leibniz: Determinist, Theist, Idealist, pp.22–46. ¹⁰ In Leibniz on Causation and Agency (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), Julia Jorati classifies Leibniz’s compatibilism as an ‘agent causal compatibilism’ whereby ‘free actions are caused by agents rather than by events internal or external to agents’ (p.115). ¹¹ The Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence, ed. H. G. Alexander (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1956), p.55. ¹² On this point, see Jorati, Leibniz on Causation and Agency, p.22. ¹³ Leibniz, Nouveaux Essais sur l’entendement humain, ed. A. Robinet and H. Schepers (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1962), p.192; trans. New Essays on the Human Understanding, ed. P. Remnant and J. Bennett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p.192.

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whereas agents intelligent, and endowed with will, are active’, and thus, ‘properly speaking, motives do not act upon the mind, as weights do upon a balance; but ’tis rather the mind that acts by virtue of the motives, which are its dispositions to act’. But the mind’s activity, on Leibniz’s account, does not entail that it is somehow less determined by its motives than the balance by its weights, for, as he puts it, ‘if the mind should prefer a weak inclination to a strong one, it would act against itself, and otherwise than it is disposed to act’; and acting against itself, Leibniz seems to imply, though conceivable, is not the actual way of the world.¹⁴ A free choice made independently of motives would contravene the fundamental principle of sufficient reason, according to which every event has a cause. Leibniz, then, attempts to qualify his mechanical analogies of the will. Ravaisson, however, is resolutely opposed to any interpretation of inclination in action as mechanistic, and this is why he is able to criticize Leibniz in the 1893 ‘Metaphysics and Morals’ in the following terms: It is perhaps due to not having as profound an awareness of what is special and superior in the order of thought that Leibniz attempted, vainly, to replace with his pre-established harmony between the body and the mind their real union, and to explain the free decisions of the will by a preponderance of motives which transports to the spiritual sphere a mechanism of the corporeal world that is itself more apparent than real. (MM 18/288)

Leibniz abstracts the spiritual from the corporeal domain, which is consequently interpreted as a dead mechanism, but this supposed mechanism of the corporeal world is more apparent than real. It is more apparent than real not because it is a mere appearance—a well-founded phenomenon, as Leibniz puts it—but rather because it does not really exist as a phenomenon; what we take to be mere mechanism—and the following section of this chapter examines this claim in detail—is, in truth, of a different order. Hence, when Leibniz understands the operation of volition according to the preponderance of motives by analogy with the preponderance of weights in a balance, he only compounds the problem of his mechanistic interpretation of nature in transposing it into the spiritual domain. On this evidence, as Paul Hoffman remarked,¹⁵ an attempt to find in Leibniz a notion of inclination as lying somehow between intellectual reasons and mechanical causes would be fruitless. Rather than finding a ¹⁴ Both quotations, Leibniz, ‘Fifth Letter to Clarke’, The Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence, p.59. ¹⁵ Paul Hoffman, ‘Reasons, Causes, and Inclinations’, p.169.

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middle ground between both, he collapses the one into the other in that he sees no difference between them: reasons are mechanically determining reasons and thus necessitating causes. However, a full answer to the question of whether Leibniz’s ideas can help to formulate an account of inclination as irreducible to mechanical, efficient causation, on the one hand, and reasons or final causation, on the other, requires attention to the Hanover philosopher’s doctrine of moral necessity, which is prominent in writings from the last ten years of his life.¹⁶ After the idea of inclination without necessitation, the doctrine of moral necessity is another one of Leibniz’s strategies to make room for a sense of freedom.¹⁷ In the Theodicy, for example, he distinguishes moral necessity from physical causation, and thus from physical necessity as much as from a logical necessity characterizing mathematical truth: M. Hobbes is no more willing to admit talk of a moral necessity, because in effect everything happens by physical causes. But there is reason, nonetheless, to make a big distinction between the necessity that obliges the wise to do good, which is called moral, and which has a place even in relation to God, and that blind necessity by which Epicurus, Strato, Spinoza, and perhaps M. Hobbes have believed that things exist without intelligence and without choice, and consequently without God, who in effect would not be needed according to them, since according to that necessity everything would exist by its own essence, as necessarily as two plus three must make five. And that necessity is absolute, because everything it carries with it must happen, whatever one does; whereas what happens by a hypothetical necessity happens in consequence of the supposition that this or that has been foreseen or resolved, or done in advance; and moral necessity carries an obligation of reason, which always has its effect in the wise. This species of necessity is happy and desirable, when one is carried by good reasons to act as one does; but necessity blind and absolute would overturn piety and morality.¹⁸

Leibniz approaches a variety of different historical philosophical positions in this passage, but the important point is that he subsumes both physical causation and the necessity of mathematical truth under the generic heading of ‘blind and absolute necessity’. Moral necessity, in contrast, is ¹⁶ Although Hoffman refers in a footnote (p.168, n.18) to Michael Murray’s ‘Spontaneity and Freedom in Leibniz’, he does not pursue his inquiry concerning inclination in the direction of Leibniz’s account of moral necessity. ¹⁷ For Jorati’s argument that there are four such strategies, and that they are all at bottom the same, see Chapter 5 of Leibniz on Causation and Agency. ¹⁸ Leibniz, Theodicy, ‘Reflexions’ on Hobbes, §3.

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not blind, for ‘one is carried by good reasons to act as one does’, and Leibniz characterizes it as a function of a certain kind of obligation that always ‘has its effect’, i.e. is infallible in the agent who acts knowingly. Although, as Michael Murray notes,¹⁹ Leibniz occasionally speaks of moral necessity in a deontic, jurisprudential sense, as signifying what one ought to do, what a moral agent has to do in order to be good, in this passage, and others like it in the Theodicy, as well as in the fifth letter to Clarke, the phrase evidently has a metaphysical meaning, one which concerns how a decision is made and not just what decision should be made. Moral necessity describes how volition operates, even in those cases where it acts mistakenly, and not just—as we saw with Leibniz’s treatment of the idea of ‘inclination without necessitation’ above—the logical possibility of alternatives to that decision. Murray shows how seventeenth-century Catholic theologians familiar to Leibniz, mostly Spanish Jesuits, had promoted an idea of moral necessity in attempts to circumvent ‘intellectualist’ and ‘voluntarist’ accounts of volition. According to the former, the will does not have the divine power to be a self-moved mover, and it forms a volition only when caused to do so by a practical judgement that a course of action is the right one to undertake. According to voluntarists, however, the intellectualist idea that the practical intellect determines choice attacks the freedom of the will, which should be thought in terms of an absolute spontaneity. The idea of necessitas moralis was mobilized in order to steer between these two positions by fusing an acceptance that the will infallibly follows the last practical judgement with a denial that the judgement—as Murray puts it, at least—‘causally determines’²⁰ the choice of the will. Murray cites the following 1663 passage from the Jesuit Sebastián Izquierdo as indicative of attempts to tease out distinctions between metaphysical, physical, and moral necessity: Thus, a subject has a metaphysical necessity to act when . . . if it failed to happen, two contradictories would be given, which is certainly repugnant. Something is physically necessary, however, when it could not fail to happen naturally and without a miracle, even if it could happen miraculously. Thus, finally, something is morally necessary when, by way of inclination, that which usually, or always, or almost always is accustomed to occur, cannot fail to happen, even if it can fail absolutely or in light of a law of nature.²¹

¹⁹ Murray, ‘Spontaneity and Freedom in Leibniz’, p.201. ²⁰ Murray, ‘Spontaneity and Freedom in Leibniz’, p.203, with the author’s emphasis. ²¹ See Murray, ‘Spontaneity and Freedom in Leibniz’, p.203.

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The metaphysically necessary is that whose negation implies a contradiction, whereas the physically necessary is what must occur according to the laws of nature. The morally necessary, in contrast to both, is that which cannot fail to happen even though neither the laws of logic nor the laws of nature necessitate it; its infallibility is a function of inclination rather than law. As Murray has it, the ‘moral necessitarian view itself spawned a host of variants in the seventeenth century’, but this one is indicative of the problems it faces: here inclination, as the principle of moral necessitation, is understood, vaguely, in statistical terms, but how what usually happens could be consistent with what has to happen, i.e. with any form of necessity is left unexplained. The statistical interpretation merely spells out the problem of trying to dissociate ‘infallibly following’ from ‘causally determining’. Statistically, there can be no difference between the two, since in both cases the expected result occurs each time. On Leibniz’s own account, in so far as it concerns being ‘carried by good reasons’, moral necessity operates according to final causes, whereby something is done because of the perceived value of a reason, i.e. a goal or purpose that is the object of choice. According to the Monadology, the domain of goals, of final causes, is the soul, whereas the corporeal world, whose ‘wellfounded phenomena’ are to be explained according to the mechanical laws of causal impact, is the domain of efficient causation: Souls act according to the laws of appetitions, ends, and means. Bodies act according to the laws of efficient causes or of motions. And the two realms, that of efficient causes and that of final causes, are harmonious with each other.²²

Hence in his fifth letter to Clarke, Leibniz can describe the soul as the domain of moral law, in contrast to body as the domain of mechanical law: All the natural forces of bodies are subject to mechanical laws, and all the natural forces of minds are subject to moral laws. The former follow the order of efficient causes, and the latter follow the order of final causes. The former operate without liberty, like a watch; the latter are exercised with liberty.²³

²² Leibniz, Monadology §79 in Philosophical Essays, ed. R. Ariew and D. Garber (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989), p.223. ²³ Leibniz, The Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence, p.124.

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That Leibniz now distinguishes volition from a mechanical process contrasts sharply with his analogy earlier in the letter of volitional inclination with a balance. Yet he has not suddenly abandoned a compatibilist position for a libertarian position, for although he does not describe moral law in terms of moral necessity in this passage, elsewhere in the letter he clearly promotes the latter. The necessity in Leibnizian moral necessity means, as Adams puts it, that ‘the value or apparent value of an end, or some analogue of apparent value, is sufficient of itself to determine the action of a substance’.²⁴ God—and from 1707 Leibniz began to speak of God’s action as morally necessary²⁵— chooses the best because it is the best, and humans choose the best because they perceive it to be the best. There is certainly no logical contradiction in another action being carried out, and the action is therefore not metaphysically necessary, but the perceived value of the end leads no less infallibly, necessarily, to the action. According to moral necessity, a perceived value is not just the necessary condition, but also the sufficient condition of a choice or volition. This sufficiency in Leibnizian final causation, as Adams argues, is primitive, which is to say, inexplicable by anything else, and thus inexplicable in terms of blind mechanical causation: Leibniz ‘supposed that “because it seemed to s to be the best thing to do” can function . . . as part of a bottom layer of explanation and causation’, and there is ‘no further mechanism to explain how final causation works’.²⁶ According to Leibniz’s mature position, souls are constituted such that they choose what appears to them to be the best, but to attempt to explain this according to an idea of efficient causal process, as a blind mechanism, would be to attempt to explain away what is peculiar to human agency. For the later Leibniz, therefore, there is a difference—one that he considers to be of ethical and religious significance—between being led or pulled by the good and being pushed by a mechanical impact in a process of efficient causation, even though both processes involve necessitation. On this last point, we should not be confused by his claim in the New Essays that moral ‘followings’ are a function of inclination without necessitation:

²⁴ Adams, ‘Moral Necessity’, p.185. ²⁵ See Adams, ‘Moral Necessity’, p.181. ²⁶ Adams, ‘Moral Necessity’, p.185. This, even though a younger Leibniz had privileged efficient over final causation, in writing that ‘even final causes can be referred to efficient causes, that is, when the agent is intelligent, for then it is moved by thought’: Textes inédits d’après des manuscrits de la Bibliothèque provinciale d’Hanovre, ed. G. Grua (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1948), p.28.

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For it must be admitted that when one thing follows from another in the contingent realm, the kind of determining that is involved is not the same as when one thing follows from another in the realm of the necessary. Geometrical and metaphysical ‘followings’ necessitate, but physical and moral ones incline without necessitating.²⁷

This claim that both physical and moral processes are a function of inclination without necessitation supposes that necessitation here means only metaphysical necessitation. It also shows that Leibniz can sometimes treat the difference between the types of ‘following’ in the physical and moral domains as relatively unimportant; there is not, one might think, a great deal of difference, a difference of which one can make a great deal, between the two. It is because of passages like this that it seems hard to disagree with Adams’ conclusion that Leibniz’s doctrine of moral necessity, though involving interesting views concerning the way in which choices are made, is ‘unlikely to lead us to a much softer reading of his determinism’.²⁸ Leibniz’s doctrine of moral necessity, then, would make him no less of a compatibilist, even though his compatibilism would involve determination by final rather than efficient causes. Julia Jorati has developed this reading by arguing that contingency, for Leibniz, is not opposed to necessitation, but merely to ‘value-neutral necessitation’.²⁹ Contingency, for Leibniz, is here moral necessitation. Murray demurs, however, and argues that ‘certain theological texts give us good reason for thinking, at least, that it is the necessity, in addition to the blindness, that is troubling’³⁰ in necessitarian doctrines for Leibniz. In these texts, Leibniz asserts the independence of human will from divine determination in order to preserve human freedom and to protect God from culpability for human sin; ‘if this were called into doubt,’ Leibniz affirms, ‘then not only would human liberty be denied and the cause of evil things be thrust into God, but it would also fly in the face of the testimony of our innermost experience and consciousness’.³¹ The troubling implications of ‘straightforward compatibilism for the problem of evil’ were obvious at the time, Murray contends,³² and Leibniz the theologian would have reason to be more libertarian than compatibilist. But, in the end, it seems that Murray is attempting to draw a general conclusion from Leibniz’s engagement with ²⁷ ²⁹ ³⁰ ³¹ ³²

Leibniz, Nouveux Essais 2.21.13, p.178. ²⁸ Adams, ‘Moral Necessity’, p.192. Jorati, Leibniz and Causation and Agency, p.132. Murray, ‘Spontaneity and Freedom’, p.206. As cited in Murray, ‘Spontaneity and Freedom’, p.206. Murray, ‘Spontaneity and Freedom’, p.214.

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the problem of evil for which the Hanover philosopher offers no genuine support. Symptomatic of this is that when Murray writes that whether or not Leibniz can help us think beyond full-blown compatibilism ‘depends on whether tolerably good sense can be made of Leibniz’s appropriation of moral necessity’ and whether ‘there is space for a modality that is weaker than physical necessity’, he seems to conflate different issues.³³ There clearly is space for such a modality, as Leibniz shows, in that being pulled is different from being pushed; moral necessity is different from physical necessity. But the question is whether moral necessitation as being pulled rather than pushed can make us any the less determined; and there is little, once scrutinized, in Leibniz’s thinking that leads to a positive response to the question.

4.2 Ravaisson on Moral Necessity With his account of moral necessity, then, Leibniz conceives of inclination as irreducible to mechanical, efficient causation, and as a form of final causation. This final causation does not have to be a function of the pursuit of clearly posited and conscious goals: Leibniz’s notion of insensible inclinations as petites perceptions, obscure perceptions, allows for the kind of subconscious desire, subconscious telic causation that Ravaisson promotes in reflecting on habit. But how exactly does Of Habit take up this notion of inclination as moral necessity in conceiving of habit as a necessity of attraction and desire, and in stating that ‘in everything, the Necessity of Nature is the chain on which Freedom unfolds itself. But this is a moving and living chain; it is the necessity of desire, love and grace’ (OH 75)? Ravaisson’s gloss of such an idea of necessity—‘it is the final cause that increasingly predominates over efficient causality and which absorbs the latter into itself. And at that point, indeed, the end and the principle, the fact and the law, are fused together within necessity’ (OH 57)—subtly transforms the terms of Leibniz’s Monadology, according to which, as we have just seen ‘souls act according to the laws of appetitions, ends, and means’, ‘[b]odies act according to the laws of efficient causes or of motions’, ‘[a]nd the two realms, that of efficient causes and that of final causes, are harmonious with each other’. Instead of harmony between the two domains, for Ravaisson, in the acquisition of habit, there is absorption of the one in the other. This

³³ Murray, ‘Spontaneity and Freedom’, p.214.

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notion of the ‘absorption’ of final causality is another way of addressing the embodiment of intention in an acquired habit, a way that emphasizes our attraction to the goal pursued and our desire to realize it, rather than that goal itself. The more a purpose is embodied in an acquired habit, the more the desire to realize it becomes a matter of necessity. Ravaisson rejects, then, Leibniz’s dualism of domains, but in seeking to transform the Hanover philosopher’s position, he risks deforming his own. For Ravaisson’s considered position, as he makes clear in the penultimate paragraph of De l’habitude, is not only that habit spiritualizes nature, but also that it naturalizes spirit, infusing the latter with a form of natural spontaneity: ‘the history of Habit represents the return of Freedom to Nature, or rather the invasion of the domain of freedom by natural spontaneity’ (OH 77). On this account, a principle of spontaneity was never foreign to nature, so the progress of habit cannot simply consist in final causation being absorbed into a preexistent realm of mechanical, unspontaneous efficient causation. The natural spontaneity in habit lies somewhere on a continuous spectrum between the poles—which are but limit concepts and thus ideals unable to be realized in experience³⁴—of libertarian freedom and an at least apparent necessity. That spontaneity admits degrees allows Ravaisson to claim that it is also to be found in the organic realm: life in general ‘implies the opposition of receptivity and spontaneity’ (OH 31), and spontaneity ‘is the initiative of movement’ that ‘seems evident when movement recommences after having ceased, and in the absence of any external cause’ (OH 35). Spontaneity in this sense is a form of pre-voluntary, preconscious self-moving that comes increasingly to the fore the higher one climbs in the scale of beings. In the development of life there is a ‘progressive exaltation of spontaneity’ (OH 35): [i]n the inorganic world, reaction is exactly equal to action; or, rather, in this completely external and superficial existence, action and reaction merge; it is one and the same actuality, from two different points of view. In life, the action of the external world and the reaction of life itself become increasingly different, and appear to be increasingly independent of one another. (OH 37)

According to this increasing spontaneity, the higher one climbs in the scale of life, the less does Newton’s third law of motion, according to which for

³⁴ See, in this connection, Funke, Gewohnheit, p.445.

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every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, apply. Given that it appears in biological life, spontaneity in Ravaisson’s sense is not the absence from causal determination of the pure or reflective will, even though it is the absence of mechanical, efficient causal determination.³⁵ And given that spontaneity is the principle of free will, Ravaisson’s position is that there exist degrees of freedom; there is a loss of ‘reflective freedom’ (OH 55) in the becoming morally necessary of an acquired habit, but not a loss of freedom tout court, since that acquired habit, for Ravaisson, has its own form of spontaneity. According to the objective analysis, in the organic realm, a form of ‘freedom’ (OH 37) gradually emerges. In one sense, therefore, Ravaisson’s contribution in 1838 to the notion of moral necessity consists in the claim that it occurs according to a continuous scale: an action in its repetition becomes morally necessary as it becomes a habit, even though it was not necessitated at its origin. This contribution, to be sure, is hardly anti-Leibnizian given that the Hanover philosopher is prone to seeing continuity everywhere and occasionally writes of degrees of freedom and spontaneity.³⁶ Yet this contribution to the idea of moral necessity seems to lead to its destruction: the idea of an action becoming necessary entails that no action is ever necessary strictly speaking. Something cannot, in truth, be more or less necessary—it is either necessary or it is not—and a necessity of degree is no real necessity. Speaking of a necessity in this context would be merely a manner of speaking, merely an attempt to speak of that which underlies and stands between the traditional opposition of freedom and necessity. In concluding the fourth section of Part II, Ravaisson writes: [t]he whole series of beings is therefore only the continuous progression of the successive powers of one and the same principle, powers enveloping one another in the hierarchy of the forms of life, powers which develop in the opposite direction within the progression of habit. The lower limit is necessity—Destiny, as might be said, but in the spontaneity of Nature; the higher limit is the Freedom of the understanding. (OH 67)

³⁵ Murray’s observation (‘Spontaneity and Freedom in Leibniz’, p.195) that: [c]areful attention to the way in which figures in the history of metaphysics use the word ‘spontaneous’ . . . is useful in getting to the heart of their respective positions on freedom, because it allows one to discern just what kinds of determination each figure takes to be consistent or inconsistent with freedom is particularly apposite in Ravaisson’s case, not only because a notion of spontaneity is pivotal in his metaphysics, but also because he could have done more to clarify it. ³⁶ On this point, see Jorati, Leibniz on Causation and Agency, p.57.

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There is apparently a certain kind of necessity in the lower reaches of the scale of beings. That said, this destiny or necessity is in the ‘spontaneity of nature’, so perhaps even that is no real necessity at all. Ravaisson seems, in fact, to be feeling his way towards the idea that necessity is a mere limit concept, the theoretical end point of a continuum that cannot be reached in experience. There is, in the end, no consistent doctrine of moral necessity in Of Habit, and the necessity of attraction and desire brings us to the idea of a modal notion that might somehow stand between traditional doctrines of necessity and possibility. This is a modal notion that, as we will see shortly, Boutroux will name ‘contingency’. This is hardly a violent interpretation of De l’habitude, but, unfortunately, Ravaisson’s 1867 report challenges it, for moral necessity here seems to characterize not just acquired habits, but all action per se and even all non-agential causal processes. After an extensive report on the history of French thinking in relation to the history of philosophy more broadly, the concluding section of the text heralds an emergent French philosophy, but it does this under the aegis of Leibniz and his notion of moral necessity. It is necessary to cite passages at length here in order to gain a sense of the development in Ravaisson’s position since 1838: Everything has a reason, as Leibniz said. This entails that everything has its necessity. And, indeed, without necessity, no certitude; and without certitude, no science. But there are two sorts of necessities: an absolute necessity, which is logical necessity, and a relative necessity, which is moral necessity and which can be reconciled [se concilie] with freedom. (FP 267)

In the name of science—which allegedly depends on what will certainly happen, rather than on what tends to happen, or on what might happen— Ravaisson seems to accept a doctrine of universal necessity, with the proviso that there are two different forms of necessity. After discussing absolute necessity, he accounts for moral necessity as follows: Another sort of necessity is that which determines one to do the best; this necessity hardly excludes, like the first, freedom: on the contrary, it implies it. The sage cannot not do good. Is he any the less free for that? Less free is rather he who is enslaved by the passions, he who floats without certainty between good and evil. The sage, in choosing the good, chooses it infallibly, but at the same time with the most free will. This is perhaps because the good, the beautiful, is in reality nothing other than love, which is the will in all its purity, and that wanting what is truly good, is to will oneself [se vouloir soi-même]. (FP 268)

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The wise person, knowing what the good is, always does good and acts according to a moral necessity. It is interesting to note that thirty years earlier, in presenting Aristotle’s ethical doctrine, Ravaisson had argued that this necessity was a function of habit: the sage cannot not do good because she has developed good habits, and in order ‘to stay on the right path, it is necessary to make of disposition, of tendency, an invariable habit of the soul’ (EMA 449). This contrast of tendency with habit seems to be based on Aristotle’s contrast of what happens always with what happens for the most part. But in 1867, Ravaisson no longer foregrounds the question of habit, and is concerned instead to emphasize that the invariability or necessity in the wise agent amounts to real freedom, a freedom more fundamental than the liberty of indifference. Being willing to commit evil is not genuine freedom, but rather to be determined by passions other than a desire for the good. Ravaisson thus aims to preserve a higher sense of freedom while criticizing the liberty of indifference. That said, it is hard to see in what sense this higher form of freedom is, in any real sense, freedom at all, precisely because it is a function of necessity.³⁷ Ravaisson attempts to support this position with the idea that wanting the good, having a tendency towards the good, is our innermost nature. When we desire the good and not evil, we act in conformity with our nature rather than doing violence to it. We are thus self-determined rather than determined by things beyond us. But Ravaisson also elaborates this point according to an idea of love. The suggestion—and it is indeed merely a suggestion, rather than an argument—seems to be, first, that love constitutes the prior ground and unity of the objective good desired and the desiring subject; and,

³⁷ It could be argued that here Ravaisson tries to combine an essentially modern evaluation of freedom as a positive characteristic with an older, ancient notion of free will as a human imperfection. As Bergson will put it in 1904: [t]he Ancients had an intuition of freedom, which was systematised throughout their philosophy, but they made little of this freedom in the sense of free will [libre arbitre]. This is easily understandable in the light of what we have just said: if being endowed with free will consists in oscillating between good and evil, between ignorance and knowledge, free will is a last-resort, a stop-gap [pis-aller]; it is a means for elevating ourselves from ignorance to knowledge and from evil to good, but it would be better to be in the good and in knowledge and not to have to arrive at it, and consequently free will in their thought is rather a sign of inferiority, it makes us superior to animals, but inferior to the gods. The real sage, who would be a god in the end, could do without free will and would be superior to those possessing it. When we move from Antiquity to Modernity, we follow the real invention of the idea of freedom, free will becoming a sort of creation, and this creation being, as a creation, what makes of man a god, which is an idea absolutely opposed to the ancient idea. (L’Évolution du problème de la liberté, p.72)

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second, that because the object desired, as loved, already belongs to the nature of the desiring, loving subject, determination by the good accords with self-determination. Given that the good is grounded in love, and given that love belongs to the voluntary self, to will the good is, at bottom, to will oneself. With this suggestion, Ravaisson aims to preserve a sense of freedom as self-determination, and it is in this sense, it seems, that he writes that ‘moral necessity . . . does not preclude, but rather implies that the cause that is said to be determined by it is determined by itself ’ (FP 270). Failing to pursue the good is thus contrasted with real independence and selfdetermination: In us, the will, full of this love that is its internal law, but also in commerce with sensibility, which presents images to it of the absolute good altered in some way by the milieu in which they are drawn, often errs—uncertain about this infinite good to which, entirely free, it would always tend— towards those imperfect goods to which it gives away a part of its independence. In nature, to which we belong by the inferior elements of our being, the will, illuminated only partially by the light of reason [une lueur de la raison], appears to fall under the spell of the given form representing nature, which it seems to obey in a wholly passive obedience. (FP 270–1)

Here the pursuit of the infinite good, i.e. what is good in itself, according to the love that is the ‘law’ of the will, is contrasted with the pursuit of the imperfect and merely apparent goods offered by the senses and only partially illuminated by the light of reason. The latter is a passive submission to the senses, whereas the former is, by implication, a genuine form of independent activity and self-determination. In other words, pursuing the genuine good is genuine autonomy—literally, giving the law to oneself—whereas pursuing the merely apparent goods offered up by the senses amounts to mere heteronomy. This, it would seem, is the most Ravaisson ever says about the meaning and possibility of evil, and his ideas are indeterminate in important respects. They present both ethical and metaphysical problems: the suggestion that love is autonomous is perhaps counter-intuitive, for we might ordinarily think that real love and self-control are antithetical. Moreover, what sort of power the will has to either consent to or reject the demands of love and the other passions remains obscure. Of course, it is hardly fair to expect precision in a manifesto—which gave birth to a philosophical movement, as Ravaisson intended—at the end of an official report on the achievements

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of French thought. We should even be cautious before attributing the views expressed in this final section of the report to Ravaisson himself, for the emergent French philosophy he describes may not be exactly the one he hoped to elaborate. In order to understand better this account of freedom, it is important to note that here, just as in 1838, Ravaisson is concerned with how freedom can be instantiated in the world. One may, with good reason, regret that Ravaisson did not say more about what ‘reflective freedom’ is and how it is possible, and how we can claim to have knowledge of it, but his fundamental aim—and in this he follows Schelling—is to overcome the modern antithesis of a mechanically determined nature and a wholly undetermined, capricious freedom of the will, an antithesis that renders any understanding of how freedom inheres in the world quite impossible.³⁸ His concern, in other words, is to show that human freedom and nature are not principles opposed to each other. Le moral—which has a broader sense than the English ‘morality’, and which it would be better to translate as ‘mind’— resides also, he argues, in nature as a whole: Nature, now, is not, as materialism taught, all geometry; and thus all absolute necessity and fatality. Le moral enters into it; it is as if mixed with absolute necessity, which excludes contingency and will, and with relative necessity, which implies them. That is not all: le moral is the principal form. (FP 269)

What we take to be mechanical necessity, merely efficient causation in worldly processes, is instead a function of final causation and moral necessity, which is a ‘relative necessity’. The physical involves the moral, and thus there is ‘contingency and will’ within it. The physical is already telic in its nature, and is already constituted by a certain flexibility or plasticity amenable to direction by the will. Hence: [f]atality in this world, at least according to the regular course of things, and putting accidents to one side, is therefore just an appearance; spontaneity, freedom is the truth. Far from everything occurring according to ³⁸ In the words that Émile Boutroux uses to describe his own project in his 1874 De la contingence des lois de la nature, the primary task is to ‘challenge the postulate that renders inconceivable the intervention of freedom in the course of phenomena, the maxim according to which nothing is lost and nothing is created’ (p.149), a maxim that is the mechanical principle of the conservation of force.

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brute mechanism or chance, everything occurs by the development of a tendency to perfection, to the good, to beauty. (FP 269)

There is a tendency towards the good and perfection in minds, and in everything else, but Ravaisson’s argument is not, to be sure, that fatality is an appearance in the sense that it is an appearance of another domain, the domain of the freedom of mind and final causes. His argument is rather that what we take to be efficient causation is really, in the reality before our eyes, a form of final causation. Thus: in the end what one calls physical necessity is only, as Leibniz said, a moral necessity that in no way excludes, that on the contrary implies, if not freedom, then at least spontaneity. Everything is ruled [réglé], constant, and yet radically voluntary. (FP 271)

In concluding thus his discussion of moral necessity, Ravaisson seems to refer to the beginning of the Theodicy where Leibniz writes that ‘physical necessity is founded on moral necessity, that is on the choice of the wise, worthy of his wisdom; and that the one as well as the other must be distinguished from geometrical necessity’. For Leibniz, the laws of nature, the source of physical necessity, depend on God’s free choice, and are thus produced by moral necessity.³⁹ For Ravaisson, in contrast, moral necessity describes the operation of nature itself once created. If, for him, moral necessity is also a ‘divine providence’ (FP 270) this is in a pantheistic, emanatory, and kenotic sense of the continual presence of the divine even in the lowest, inorganic reaches of beings. The ground and justification for Ravaisson’s philosophy of nonmechanical necessity lie in his reflection on habit in 1838, but given that there—in the objective analysis— Ravaisson wrote of existence ‘being freed from necessity’ (OH 33) and—in the subjective analysis—of habitual actions becoming necessary, the necessity of attraction and desire was no real necessity at all, since it was always a matter of degree. A necessity of degree is no real necessity, as we have said. Can one say the same about Ravaisson’s generalized doctrine of moral necessity in 1867, given that he writes of nature that ‘it is as if mixed with absolute necessity, which excludes contingency and will, and with relative necessity, which implies them’ (FP 269)? Is

³⁹ See Adams, ‘Moral Necessity’, p.187.

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this mixture of absolute necessity and relative necessity, which Ravaisson takes to imply contingency, not just another way of saying that there is no real necessity in nature? Bearing in mind that the traditional notion of moral necessity, as Murray shows, has been used in strained and strange ways in the tradition, and that we can even wonder whether it is the necessity in the notion of moral necessity that Leibniz himself brings into question, we have grounds to respond affirmatively to that question. We find more grounds for the same affirmative response in noting that the 1867 generalized notion of moral necessity cannot be read back into Of Habit without radically undermining its project. The idea of a general necessity in action can make no sense of what in 1838 the notion of a necessity of attraction and desire was supposed to interpret and illuminate, namely habit. Ravaisson turned to Leibniz’s doctrine of moral necessity through Porterfield’s reflection on habit, as we have seen, but in 1867 a ‘necessity of attraction and desire’ can no longer specify habit, for it is already present in all volition and action. The main remaining difference between voluntary action and habitual action would be the degree to which we are self-aware in performing the action, but Ravaisson, of course, said much more than this about the specificity of habit in 1838. Undermining Of Habit in this way is neither a philosophically attractive nor a textually justified option. But if we cannot viably read Of Habit in terms of the Report, we have to read the Report according to Of Habit. This entails criticizing Ravaisson’s 1867 doctrine of moral necessity, while interpreting it as generously as possible. In this light, Janicaud was right to note ‘the conventional and rhetorical aspect of certain developments, and certain positions’ in the later Ravaisson, ‘particularly in the Report’.⁴⁰ That said, reading the Report generously requires us to ask whether Ravaisson’s idea of a necessity that does not exclude ‘contingency and will’ might harbour a modal notion that is irreducible, at bottom, to any traditional notion of necessity. Émile Boutroux’s generosity in relation to Ravaisson is evident in his dedication of The Contingency of the Laws of Nature to him, a dedication, untranslated in the English edition, that goes beyond any mere academic formality: ‘To Mr Félix Ravaisson, Member of the Institute, General Inspector of Higher Education, very respectful homage of gratitude and devotion’. That a philosophy of contingency is irreducible to any necessitarian doctrine is precisely the lesson that he draws, ever so gently, and with

⁴⁰ Janicaud, Ravaisson et la métaphysique, p.116.

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all due respect, from Ravaisson’s thinking. ‘The higher one climbs the scale of beings’, Boutroux writes, ‘the more one sees develop a principle that, in a sense, resembles necessity: the attraction for certain objects. But it is not pushed by something already realized; it is attracted by a thing that it not already there, and that, perhaps, will never be’.⁴¹ The necessity of attraction and desire is only the resemblance of necessity and not a real necessity, for the end that attracts might never be realized. We are free, Boutroux supposes, not to realize it: the idea of necessity . . . would, at bottom, be the translation, in the most abstract language possible, of the action exerted by the ideal on things . . . It would be the most material symbol of moral obligation and aesthetic attraction, and that is to say of a necessity felt and consented to [consentie et sentie].⁴²

Boutroux is so close here to Ravaisson that he does not even categorically deny that contingency can be understood as a moral necessity; attraction and desire are a necessity to which we consent, an obligation to which we are attracted. This quasi-necessity is present not just in human habit but throughout the whole of nature. There is contingency, i.e. a lack of determination in nature, a certain form of flexibility and elasticity, which is indicated by ‘marks of creation and change’, and this contingency ‘lends itself to the idea of a freedom that descends from super-sensible strata so as to merge into phenomena and to direct them in unforeseen ways’.⁴³ In the place of Newtonian necessary physical laws,⁴⁴ there is a primacy of final over efficient causation within nature, and thus le moral exists in nature also. But just as the realization of our goals is never necessary, so too natural processes are not, in the end, necessary. Boutroux, ‘Ravaisson’s most faithful disciple’,⁴⁵ does not betray his teacher in advancing this doctrine of contingency, and in gently leading it away from any idea of necessity, but only expresses the real, unencumbered truth of his teacher’s doctrine. ⁴¹ The quotations so far in this paragraph: Boutroux, De la contingence des lois de la nature, p.154. ⁴² Boutroux, De la contingence des lois de la nature, p.154. ⁴³ Boutroux, De la contingence des lois de la nature, p.151. ⁴⁴ On Boutroux’s critique of the laws of conservation of force, see Laurent Fedi, ‘Bergson et Boutroux, la critique du modèle physicaliste et des lois de conservation en psychologie’, Revue de métaphysique et de morale 30/2 (2001), 97–118. ⁴⁵ Denise Leduc-Fayette, ‘Loi de grâce et de liberté’, Les Études philosophiques Jan.–Mar. 1993, 25–34, p.25.

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4.3 Tendency as Substance and Reality We have seen, then, that Ravaisson appeals to Leibniz’s doctrine of moral necessity indirectly in 1838 and directly in the 1867 report, but also that his account of tendency and inclination cannot, in the end, be reconciled with any necessitarian doctrine. Chapter 6 of this study returns to the issue of the modal status of tendency, by showing how Stephen Mumford and Rani Lill Anjum’s claim that tendency is a sui generis modal value all of its own, irreducible to traditional ideas of possibility and necessity, is a useful corrective to Ravaisson’s appeal to an idea of moral necessity. Here, however, it is necessary to examine another aspect of Ravaisson’s reception of Leibniz’s ideas that is crucial to his notion of tendency and inclination, namely the idea that tendency constitutes the ‘substance’ of the soul. Ravaisson clearly develops this notion of substance in relation to Leibniz, and one recent study has even suggested that Of Habit adopts the basic metaphysical framework of Leibniz’s mature monadological philosophy. According to Jeremy Dunham in an interesting recent article, the 1838 text presents a ‘Leibnizian monadism’, a ‘pluralist substance metaphysics’, and although there is some vagueness in these terms—‘pluralist substance metaphysics’ fits Aristotle’s metaphysics as much as Leibniz’s—the claim seems to be that Ravaisson has populated the sphere of existence with a multiplicity of ‘windowless’ spiritual entities that are distinct from body and without any direct causal relation to each other. Dunham contends that the scholarly consensus taking De l’habitude as a work of post-Kantian philosophy influenced to a significant degree by Schelling’s philosophy of identity is ‘incompatible with the text’⁴⁶—incompatible with, in particular, Ravaisson’s notion of the ‘substance’ of the self in Of Habit. Although there is barely a page in Ravaisson’s work that does not bear the influence of Leibniz’s ideas, we have already encountered much in the French philosopher’s thinking that might make such a reading appear implausible. Most notably, in 1834 Ravaisson states that ‘without accepting his monadological hypotheses [sans accepter ses hypothèses monadologiques]’, he works ‘on the elementary basis of a Leibnizian idealist-realism [sur la base élémentaire du réalisme-idéaliste Leibnizien’ (DMA 271).⁴⁷ From the beginning, as we saw in Chapter 3, Ravaisson approaches Aristotle according to the guiding threads of Leibniz’s dynamism and in a certain

⁴⁶ Dunham, ‘From Habit to Monads’, p.1085.

⁴⁷ See Dopp, Félix Ravaisson, p.111.

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‘spiritual affinity’ with the metaphysical framework of Schelling’s philosophy of the ‘ideal-real’. Of course, the idea of a non-monadological Leibnizianism is vague, particularly given how much of the Hanover’s philosopher’s work influences Ravaisson’s thinking. It is not obvious how Ravaisson can claim to reject Leibniz’s monadological hypotheses while in the same text he celebrates Leibniz’s notion of being as activity and tendency. Moreover, it is not logically or practically impossible that Ravaisson in 1838–40 came to accept Leibniz’s monadology more fully (stranger things have happened in the course of philosophers’ careers) when he writes a dissertation about an issue, namely habit, rather than about another philosopher, namely Aristotle. Dunham’s reading responds, in fact, to a certain development in Ravaisson’s thinking. For, earlier in the 1830s, Ravaisson had been critical of the idea of substance, whereas Of Habit undeniably presents a doctrine of the self as substance, and the 1840 ‘Contemporary Philosophy’ shows that this doctrine is developed in relation to Leibniz. Ravaisson’s account of substance changes, then, in the 1830s, and it is crucial to determine what exactly Ravaisson might mean by ‘substance’ throughout this period, and in what sense his doctrine might be Leibnizian. The texts show, I argue, and as Dopp already argued in 1933, that ‘the term substance is employed by Ravaisson in a very new sense’.⁴⁸ The force and originality of Ravaisson’s Aristotle interpretation earlier in the decade resides, as Paul Ricoeur has highlighted, in its non-‘substantialist’⁴⁹ reading of the Metaphysics. For Aristotle, being, to on, is said in many ways, but, for Ravaisson, the highest and primary sense is not being according to the categories, with ousia—traditionally rendered as ‘substance’—first among them, but rather being as dunamis and energeia, ‘potency’ and ‘activity’.⁵⁰ In 1834, Ravaisson even claims that ‘the idea of substance was not present’ in Aristotle’s response to the basic question of metaphysics; ‘it was not in substance, the passive subject of universal change, that Aristotle situated the identity of all existence and all thought, but in energeia, pure actuality’ (DMA 237/45). In Metaphysics Zeta, Aristotle certainly leads the question ti to on—‘what is being?’—back to the question tis hē ousia,⁵¹ but Ravaisson’s approach challenges the translation of ousia by substantia, since ousia derives ⁴⁸ See Dopp, Félix Ravaisson, p.271 and the whole section ‘L’Amour, “substance” de l’âme’, p.33. ⁴⁹ On this point, see Paul Ricoeur, ‘De la métaphysique à la morale’ in Revue de métaphysique et morale 98 (1993) 455–77 (p.456), an essay responding to, and preceded by a reprint (437–54) of, Ravaisson’s inaugural essay ‘Métaphysique et morale’ for the journal in 1893. See also Claire Marin, ‘Acte et puissance. Ravaisson et Ricoeur, lecteurs d’Aristote’ in De la nature à l’esprit, ed. R. Belay and C. Marin (Paris: ENS Editions, 2001), 37–64, p.45. ⁵⁰ See, for example, Metaphysics, 1026a33. ⁵¹ Metaphysics 1028b6.

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from a participle form of the verb ‘be’ (einai), whereas substantia is a translation of a different Greek word, namely hupostasis.⁵² Ousia is more faithfully translated as ‘beingness’, given that this nominal form maintains a relation to the participle. If in Aristotle’s ontology there is something corresponding to the idea of substantia as a passive subject, the passive core of a being that bears its attributes, then this is, Ravaisson suggests, the hupokeimenon. Aristotle posits this both as a physical subject of change and as that of which attributes are predicated,⁵³ but it is not, for Ravaisson, being in the highest sense. In 1834, then, Ravaisson rejects the idea that substance or subject—understood either as the passive, invisible ‘core’ of a being or as a passive, formless indeterminate substrate in the case of absolute change, i.e. something’s coming into existence—constitutes being in the most fundamental sense for Aristotle. In the 1837 first volume of his published essay on Aristotle, Ravaisson also denies that the soul is a substance. He writes approvingly of what he took to be the Philosopher’s non-substantial and hylomorphic conception of soul or spirit: it is ‘not a substance . . . , a subject’, but ‘a form, the form of a singular (un seul et unique) body whose individuality and life it constitutes’ (EMA 420). This is one basic way in which Ravaisson rejects Leibniz’s monadological hypotheses, at least as these are standardly interpreted on the basis of his French texts such as the ‘New System’.⁵⁴ For Ravaisson, the soul is not distinct from body; it is not one thing distinct from another thing, but unified with the body as its form. Consequently, there is no need to invoke a Leibnizian principle of pre-established harmony to account for their apparent interaction. In 1837 Ravaisson already begins to use the term ‘substance’ more positively, however. He attempts to make ‘substance’ as the traditional translation of ousia do untraditional work, to speak of activity, of what he takes to be being in the most fundamental sense, rather than of a passive subject or substrate. As he will write in 1887, Aristotle teaches that ‘substance and energy are the same’ (PP 404/256). Or as he puts it in more detail here:

⁵² On this history, see Jean-François Courtine, Les Catégories de l’être (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2003), particularly, Chapter 1, ‘Les Traductions latines d’OUSIA et la compréhension romano-stoïcienne de l’être’, 11–77. ⁵³ See Physics I 190b11–17, and Metaphysics 1029a2–4. ⁵⁴ Other, less standard readings of Leibniz’s metaphysics exist in the literature. See, for example, Pauline Phemister, Leibniz and the Natural World: Activity, Passivity and Corporeal Substances in Leibniz’s Philosophy (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005) for an anti-idealist and more materialist reading of his doctrine as a whole. I am indebted to one of the anonymous reviewers for drawing this to my attention. Ravaisson may well have fewer objections to this less idealist, and perhaps more ‘idealist-realist’ Leibniz, but that is not a question I can pursue here.

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What then is being, properly speaking? It is, Aristotle responds, to act [agir]. Quod enim nihil agit, nihil esse videtur, as will be said after him. Action is the good, because it is the goal of everything. It is also what precedes everything. And action is soul. Thus soul is the only, the true substance. Body is the virtual, the soul is the actuality [l’acte] that is its end [fin], and the end is also the principle. (EMA 443)

To be sure, it is not Ravaisson’s metaphysical doctrine and his critique of traditional ‘substantialist’ interpretations of Aristotle that have changed since 1834 in this passage, but only the sense that he lends to the term ‘substance’: it now names being as activity, the activity of spirit that ‘is’ being in the highest sense. It is in this active sense that in Of Habit ‘substance’ names the activity of will—the glory of modern philosophy, for Ravaisson, consisting in its having conceived the essence of activity not just as thought but as will—and, more specifically, the activity of desire that is continuous with and presupposed by will: ‘voluntary movement finds not only its matter [matière], its substance, but also its source and origin in desire’ (OH 61). The claim here is not that voluntary movement finds its source and origin in a passive substrate, since desire is a form of activity, and since, as he will argue in the 1840 essay ‘Contemporary Philosophy’, ‘the passive substrate of phenomena is only an abstraction formed by the imagination’ (CP 427/81). Certainly, the word ‘matter’, used metaphorically, is unfortunate, since it might suggest the idea of such a passive substrate, but this presumably is why Ravaisson omits it when restating his position in the conclusion of the 1840 essay (CP 425/80). It is also in this active sense that, as we saw in Chapter 3, Ravaisson speaks of love, prior even to desire, as the substance of the soul: Will constitutes only the form of the action; the unreflective freedom of Love constitutes all its substance, and love can no longer be distinguished from the contemplation of what it loves, nor contemplation from its object. This forms the source, the basis and the necessary beginning: this is the state of nature, whose primordial spontaneity envelops and presupposes all will. (OH 71)

It is possible, in a metaphorical sense, to describe love thus understood as the ‘core’ of the soul, but this ‘core’ is not a passive subject or substrate, but rather the principle of all voluntary activity. It is not ‘a mode, but the substance of the soul’ (CP 426/80), as Ravaisson expressly declares in 1840. The soul is, at bottom, nothing, ‘no-thing’, besides love.

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In ‘Contemporary Philosophy’, Ravaisson returns to this issue of the substance of the self within the discussion of Maine de Biran’s philosophy towards the end of the essay. Here he seems to approve of Biran’s hypothesis of the soul as pre-existing tendency or virtual force,⁵⁵ but he also evidently disapproves of another thesis of the later Biran, namely that we cannot know ourselves as substance. For Biran, ‘substance is the passive subject of modifications’, and since ‘we know ourselves only as free activity . . . we will never know what we are in the passive ground of our being’. In rejecting this aspect of Biran’s thinking, Ravaisson is perhaps more Biranian than he knows, for he seems to be unaware that, in one of his final ‘conversions’, Biran ends up positing the existence of a ‘substance-force’, and not just a virtual force, as the essence of the soul, the pre-existing soul that we have to posit as the condition of the voluntary self.⁵⁶ Biran, in other words, comes to conceive the idea of substance in his later work as force, as activity. Yet Ravaisson goes still further than Biran in arguing that we have direct knowledge, immediate experience of this ‘substantial reality’ that is nothing but the fundamental, pre-voluntary activity of the soul that is desire and even love. It is not really the case, then, that Ravaisson’s doctrine of substance is ‘far’ from Schelling’s assertion that ‘the person who cannot think activity or opposition without a substrate cannot philosophize at all’.⁵⁷ Ravaisson wrote ‘Contemporary Philosophy’ shortly after consulting with Schelling in Munich in 1939, and it celebrates the German philosopher for finding ‘in action, in personality, in freedom, the base of any future metaphysics’ (CP 421/77). When Ravaisson writes that ‘[t]he passive substrate of phenomena is only an abstraction formed by the imagination and that there is true reality only in the internal activity of spirit’ [CP 427/80), it is clear that he has learnt his Schellingian lessons very well. Rather than being far from Schelling, he is once again paraphrasing him. With the idea of substantial reality, Ravaisson does not want to say that the will has its ground in some thing or substrate, either material or spiritual, but only that the will is grounded in tendency conceived as inclination, desire, and love. Of course, Schelling is Leibnizian in his emphasis on activity, as is Ravaisson. Whether Leibniz himself holds consistently to the thought that substance is force and ‘no-thing’ besides is, in fact, a matter of controversy in

⁵⁵ See Chapter 2 above. ⁵⁶ See Henri Gouhier, Les Conversions de Maine de Biran, p. 218, and Marc Parmentier, ‘Maine de Biran, Leibniz et le virtuel’. ⁵⁷ Dunham, ‘From Habit to Monads’, p.1099.

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Leibniz scholarship.⁵⁸ For his part, in 1834, Ravaisson turns to Leibniz after criticizing accounts of substance in Descartes and Spinoza, according to whom ‘substance is the term to which reason, without perceiving it directly, refers any real manifestation; it is a mysterious x, hidden in a depth that is inaccessible to intuition’ (DMA 247/205). This position is completely opposed to Aristotle’s doctrine: Absolute being, for Aristotle, is precisely the actuality and the reality that thinking grasps immediately as a whole, and with which it is identical. In Cartesianism, and in Spinozism above all, which is a form of Cartesianism [le Cartésianisme conséquent], life somehow has a role on the surface of the world, but at heart, there is immobility and an absolute night. (DMA 248/205)

Thankfully, Leibniz ‘came to draw philosophy from this abyss’ of deathly doctrines of substance as a passive substrate with his idea that ‘all substance . . . is essentially active’; ‘it is a force, and its very existence lies in its development’ and ‘in this way Aristotelian actuality and reality are brought back into being’ (DMA 249). Although he denies Leibniz’s ‘monadological hypotheses’ in 1834, Ravaisson celebrates his conception of substance as activity. In so doing, given that he rejects at the same time Leibniz’s ‘monadological hypotheses’, he seems to take this conception of substance not as a ‘hypothesis’, but as a ‘primitive fact’, as Maine de Biran put it, of introspection or ‘intuition’, as a phenomenological datum in and of experience. In 1840 his response is only slightly less enthusiastic: Leibniz said: action has its source in the antecedent disposition already inclined to action; the active force has for its ground and substance tendency; it is tendency that constitutes the reality of acts and movements.—We believe we give these propositions their inner and true sense by saying: the will has its source and substance in desire, and it is desire that constitutes the reality of the very experience of will. (CP 425/80)

The inner truth of Leibniz’s account of substance as tendency is the idea that the will is grounded in desire: tendency, for Ravaisson, is not, at bottom, a

⁵⁸ On this point, and for a non-substantialist reading of Leibniz, according to which substance is force, see Jorati, ‘Leibniz’s Ontology of Force’.

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striving or effort, but, as we have seen, an easier and more graceful desiring and loving. This positive appropriation of Leibniz’s doctrine of substance does not, however, preclude a more critical response. In the concluding pages of his 1867 report—written, as we have noted, under the aegis of Leibniz— Ravaisson becomes more forgiving of Descartes and critical of Leibniz on this particular point: By spiritual action, by thought, by will, do we have to understand, as we do for sensible qualities, the mode of a subject from which it differs? Leibniz, at least if we follow the letter of his expressions, would have understood it thus; he would not have dared to follow Descartes in the audacious idea according to which thought is not a mode of the soul, but its substance, its very being [l’être même]. (FP 275)

This is certainly a controversial and perhaps ungenerous reading of Leibniz, given that Ravaisson otherwise appropriates positively Leibniz’s statements that force and its temporal development entirely constitute substance, but it serves to clarify Ravaisson’s own position: the activity of spirit should not be considered as the mode of a more fundamental subject, but rather as constituting the substance, the being of the soul. Ravaisson’s interest in a Leibnizian idea of substance as tendency or force, then, does not commit him to any kind of dogmatic, uncritical, or precritical (i.e. pre-Kantian) notion of the soul as substance, as something distinct from body.⁵⁹ Moreover, it does not commit him to any other particular aspect of Leibniz’s ‘monadological hypotheses’. Certainly, in the penultimate paragraph of ‘Contemporary Philosophy’, Ravaisson claims to have ‘located the soul in a tendency or immortal desire that determines itself unceasingly, like a living law, by a ruled sequence of external manifestations’ (CP 426/81), and he acknowledges in a note that he is thus paraphrasing Leibniz, who says that ‘the nature of substance consists, in my opinion, in this ruled tendency from which phenomena arise in order’.⁶⁰ One of Ravaisson’s purposes here is clearly to appropriate positively Leibniz’s statement that substance is nothing but tendency, ‘no thing’ other than tendency. But does the French philosopher thus accept at the same time a doctrine of a plurality of immortal souls that would unfold their own ⁵⁹ Whether or not Leibniz himself is ‘dogmatic’ in this sense. ⁶⁰ See Dunham, ‘From Habit to Monads’, p.1099.

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experiences from within themselves without causal relations to each other? We might expect Ravaisson to make the point clearly if he had in 1840 overcome his resistance to Leibniz’s ‘monadologial hypotheses’, but if we suppose on the basis of this paraphrase that Ravaisson has changed his mind in 1840, and then apply this change of mind retroactively to Of Habit, we should not be indifferent to the costs of doing so. Ravaisson’s emphatic affirmations in 1838 that reflection on habit allows us to grasp the ‘mysterious identification’ of nature and will, of the real and the ideal, would be merely the Schellingian letter of a wholly Leibnizian spirit, and thus they would be misleading assertions. The idea of habit—and with this idea of habit Ravaisson departed from Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism, as we saw in Chapter 3, Section 4—as the ‘only real method of metaphysics’ would also become an empty claim, for, as Leibniz shows, one does not need to reflect on habit to construct a monadological metaphysics. As we argued, one does need to reflect on habit to establish the sort of identity philosophy that Ravisson presents in Of Habit. By the same token, Ravaisson would become a thinker, unlike Maine de Biran, with little of interest to say about the mind–body problem, about embodiment and an incorporated intelligence that ‘goes further down into the organism, increasingly concentrating itself there’ (OH 53). If Ravaisson did present some kind of monadological metaphysics, in order to understand our ordered world and the relation of particular substances to each other, he would have to appeal to a higher principle— to a principle of pre-established harmony, as Leibniz put it—coordinating them. He never makes such an appeal, but this is not surprising given what we have seen he comes to say of Leibniz’s thinking in 1893: It is perhaps due to not having as profound an awareness of what is special and superior in the order of thought that Leibniz attempted, vainly, to replace with his pre-established harmony between the body and the mind their real union. (MM 18/288)

This affirmation of mind–body union gives us reason to think that Ravaisson had never given up on the Aristotelian conception of the human soul as the form of the body that he promoted in 1837. This would explain why in Of Habit Ravaisson can write in the fourth section of the subjective analysis, when moving from the consideration of motor habit to habits of mind: ‘as soon as the soul arrives at self-consciousness, it is no longer merely the form, the end or even the principle of organisation; a world opens within that

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increasingly separates and detaches itself from the life of the body’ (OH 67). Everything that Ravaisson said, that is, about motor habit in the subjective analysis prior to Part II, Section IV, was about the soul as the life and form of the body, whereas Section IV addresses the highest aspect of the soul, which Aristotle termed nous. Ravaisson’s tone in the passage cited above is certainly more negative about Leibniz than it is in 1834 and 1840, perhaps remarkably so, but this critique complements rather than contradicts his more positive approach. He could still make in 1893 the positive remarks he made in 1840 concerning Leibniz’s account of tendency, just as he could have made the same critical delimitation of Leibniz’s pre-established harmony in 1840. To suppose that the remarks in 1893 are the words of a thinker who has radically changed his views in old age would be to suppose, given his initial suspicions in the 1830s about Leibniz’s monadological hypotheses, not only that Ravaisson has radically changed his mind twice, but also that he moves from a first thesis to a second opposed to the first, and then back to the first thesis he had just opposed. This is not, of course, impossible, but it scarcely strengthens the supposition. What Janicaud has described as the ‘implicit character of most of the fundamental orientations’⁶¹ of Ravaisson’s thinking, together with the great influence that Leibniz has on it, gives rise to the possibility of interpreting the 1838 text as advancing a monadological doctrine. But doing so also has the non-negligible consequence of making Ravaisson’s work in 1838–40 much less important and relevant for contemporary post-Kantian concerns than it can be. For all that it has the salutary result of leading us to appreciate the extent of Ravaisson’s Leibnizianism, reading Of Habit as offering a monadological metaphysics undermines too much, I submit, that is important about it.

4.4 Being Inclined Ravaisson’s doctrine of substance, I have argued, is not ‘substantialist’. Substance, for Ravaisson, is not some thing. But what is the exact sense of the claim that substance is the ‘very being’ of the soul? Within the philosophical tradition, the ‘expression “substantia” ’, as Heidegger remarks in 1927,⁶² ⁶¹ Janicaud, Ravaisson et la métaphysique, p.80. ⁶² Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1984, 15th edn), p.94/Being and Time, trans. Macquarrie and Robinson, 1995), p.88.

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can sometimes speak of things, of beings, sometimes that by virtue of which, in the most fundamental sense, things or beings are, namely being, which is not ‘itself ’ a being. More often than not the term names, vaguely, both at the same time. In Ravaisson’s use of the term there is certainly some ambiguity, but he seems to rely on its ontological sense: substance constitutes the most fundamental reality, but given that this fundamental reality is tendency or, more profoundly, desire and love, it seems that he understands the ideas of both substance and reality as denominating not particular things—particular substances or realities—but that by virtue of which particular things exist, i.e. their substance, their reality. This is why he can write of substance as synonymous with the ‘very being’ of the soul in 1867: ‘thought is not a mode of the soul, but its substance, its very being [l’être même]’ (FP 275). It is also why he can write in 1840 of the soul that ‘[b]efore acting by thought, it acts by being and in being [par l’être et dans l’être], and this is all there is that is real in the will’ (CP 425/ 80). L’être, being—but being conceived as a tending to be, a being inclined— constitutes the reality and prior condition, i.e. the being of the will. It is also why in 1838 he can write that in the acquisition of a habit ‘the idea becomes being, the very being [l’être même] of the movement and of the tendency that it determines’ (OH 57), and that the tendency in habit becomes ‘more and more the form, the way of being, even the very being [l’être même] of those organs’ (OH 57) involved in a now habitual movement. This persistent reflection on l’être même presupposes that there is a difference—one that is no ordinary difference between two things—between beings and that by virtue of which they are, namely being. Being or existence is not a ‘real predicate’, as Kant had shown: the thought of 100 dollars and the thought of 100 existent dollars are in no way different. Existence, for Kant, cannot add anything to the concept of a thing; it adds no determination to the ‘reality’, i.e. to the essence of a thing.⁶³ But if being is not a real predicate, quality, or characteristic of a being, it is not simply the most empty, indifferent, and indefinable (since there is no genus higher than it) of concepts, and it is not derived by induction from everything that exists. It is in some sense ‘prior’ to beings, given that it is that by virtue of which, that according to which, things are. Without being, there would be no beings, and Ravaisson conceives being in this sense as activity. ‘To be’, after all, is a ⁶³ For more on this, see Martin Heidegger, Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1975), pp.35–57; The Basic Problems of Phenomenology (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, trans. A. Hofstadter, 1988), pp.27–43, and also Uygar Abaci, ‘Kant’s Theses on Existence’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy 16/3 (2008) 559–93.

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verb, the infinitive form of a verb, and Ravaisson understands ‘being’ in a verbal rather than simply nominal sense. Being is not something, a passive substrate, but the activity by which things are. It is for this reason that he was able to write the following in an undated note concerning the difficulties of thinking about being: Language deceives by making Being itself an attribute (it is), as if it were an affection, and also making it a subject, as if it were a covered stone [pierre vêtue]. It is neither kath’autó nor its other. Both transform [métamorphosent] it and materialise it into a dead thing. (J 238)

Being is not a real attribute or predicate, but nor is it the subject, the thing or core of which attributes are predicated. The subject–predicate structure of language leads us astray in both ways, and the primary task of thinking about being is to avoid reifying and mortifying it in these ways. It must have been due to Ravaisson’s Aristotelian, ‘activist’ interpretation of being that Heidegger held Ravaisson, as Jean Beaufret has related, in ‘particularly high esteem’.⁶⁴ There is much in Ravaisson’s interpretation of Aristotle, in fact, that Heidegger would have admired. Ravaisson’s interpretation of being in the sense of dunamis and energeia as higher than being according to the categories, with ousia highest among the latter, would have met his approval. Moreover, in the 1920s Heidegger presents a more trenchant version of the critique of Aristotle’s theological suppression of the movement that is the life of things—of Aristotle’s ‘metaphysics of presence’ as a metaphysics guided by the idea of pure energeia—that Ravaisson tentatively sketches, as Chapter 5 will show, in 1834.⁶⁵ Heidegger would also have appreciated Ravaisson’s account of Aristotle’s situation in the history of philosophy: in conceiving being as activity and movement, Aristotle surpasses the abstractions of Plato’s thinking, before Greek ⁶⁴ Beaufret, Notes sur la philosophie en France au XIXèmesiècle, p.18. For the story of Heidegger enthusing about Ravaisson when meeting Frédéric de Towarnicki, the first thinker from France to visit him after the Second World War, see de Towarnicki’s À la rencontre de Heidegger: souvenirs d’un messager de la Forêt-Noire (Paris: Gallimard, 1993), his Martin Heidegger: Souvenirs et chroniques (2002) and the introduction to his edition of Ravaisson’s De l’habitude (Paris: Payot, 1997). ⁶⁵ On both these points, see, for example, ‘Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles: Anzeige der hermeneutischen Situation, ed. G. Neumann (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2013)/‘Phenomenological Interpretations in Connection with Aristotle: An Indication of the Hermeneutical Situation’ (trans. John van Buren), in Heidegger, ed. John van Buren, Supplements: From the Earliest Essays to Being and Time and Beyond, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2002, 111–46.

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philosophy falls into the materialist doctrines of the Stoics and Epicureans, and then returns to the generality of the Idea in Neoplatonism.⁶⁶ As Heidegger will argue a century later, Aristotle represents the summit of Greek philosophy—if not of Greek thinking as a whole—and he is, simply stated, ‘more Greek’⁶⁷ than Plato. In 1834, Ravaisson even argues that ‘the history of philosophy represents the progressive awakening of being’ (DMA 267),⁶⁸ and thus he might appear to present something like a history of being in the later Heidegger’s sense. Ravaisson will flesh out this history of being as consisting of three essential stages: after Aristotle’s apprehension of being as activity, the genius of modern philosophy consists, with Descartes, in its discovery that the activity of being is will, whereas the task of contemporary thinking is to recognize, after Pascal, that the activity of will is preceded by, and has its ‘substance’ in, the easier activity of tendency, inclination, desire, and love (MM 11–18/ 283–91). This progressive and apparently optimistic ‘history of being’ certainly contrasts with Heidegger’s later accounts of the ‘oblivion’ of being after the initial promise of Presocratic thinking, but Ravaisson’s immanent critique of modern voluntarism could serve as a productive contrast to Heidegger’s reading of the nineteenth-centuries philosophies of the will as the final fulfilment of the modern metaphysics of subjectivity and of the philosophical tradition as a whole.⁶⁹ In any case, when Ravaisson advances a Leibniz-influenced idea of substance in 1840, he is concerned to develop not what Leibniz says about beings—i.e. about beings as monads, as divorced from body, etc.—but rather what he says about being itself, as force and tendency, as a tending to be. This is not to say that the French philosopher adequately gets to grips with the ‘ontological difference’ between being and beings.⁷⁰ With the phrase l’être même, Ravaisson seems to speak of being in distinction to beings, but when ⁶⁶ See EMAII and Boutroux, ‘La Philosophie de Félix Ravaisson’, Revue de métaphysique et de morale 8/6 (1900), 699–716, p.701. ⁶⁷ Heidegger, Nietzsche vol. 2 (Pfullingen: Neske, 1961), p.409. ⁶⁸ As cited in Marin, ‘Acte et puissance’, p.58, n.5. ⁶⁹ For a reading of nineteenth-century notions of activity in the German Idealist tradition, to which Ravaisson is clearly indebted, as challenging aspects of Heidegger’s Geschichte des Seyns, see Frank Fischbach, L’Être et l’acte: enquête sur les fondements de l’ontologie moderne de l’agir (Paris: Vrin, 2002). ⁷⁰ See Heidegger, Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) (Klostermann: Frankfurt am Main, 1989), §266, pp.465–9/Contributions to Philosophy: On the Event, trans. R. Rojcewicz and D. Vallega-Neu (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2012, pp.366–9) for remarks on the inadequacy of the idea of the ‘ontological difference’ for reflections on the ‘relation’ of being and beings.

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he writes simply of l’être, it is unclear—and this ambiguity is as unavoidable in French as it is in the Greek to on—whether he speaks of beings or that by virtue of which they are.⁷¹ When, for example, Ravaisson affirms at the beginning of De l’habitude that the ‘la loi universelle, le caractère fondamental de l’être, est la tendance à persister dans sa manière d’être’ (OH 26), it is more natural to translate this as a concern for the fundamental character of a being or beings, rather than being itself. Although the idea of a ‘way of being’ might seem metaphysically loaded in Ravaisson’s hands, the phrase was typically used in early modern philosophy to describe, without any particular metaphysical commitments, the state of a being. In contrast, when Ravaisson returns to this idea in concluding Of Habit, it is natural to translate the key phrase as ‘the primordial law and the most general form of being, the tendency to persevere in the very actuality that constitutes being’ (OH 77), i.e. as concerning being and not just beings, since now he speaks of the actuality that constitutes l’être, of the being of beings, and not just of beings.⁷² Even when Ravaisson explicitly distinguishes being from beings, the idea of being itself as distinct from beings is problematic. When he writes of the inorganic realm, as we saw in Chapter 3, that ‘in an homogeneous whole there is doubtless being [il y a de l’être], but not a being [un être]’ (OH 28 & 29), he risks reducing being to a material substrate, since ‘individuality’ and ‘veritable unity’ (OH 29) do not exist at this level, but matter does. The sans doute suggests he is not quite stating his own view here, and it cannot be his view given his reading of Aristotle and what he goes on to say about l’être véritable, real being(s), within the organic realm in the following section of the text. ‘Everything that changes is in nature,’ he writes, ‘just as everything that exists is in being. Yet only the living being is a distinct nature, just as it alone is a being. It is therefore in the principle of life that nature, as well as being, properly subsists’ (OH 31). True being and thus true beings are to be found only in the domain of life, and thus it is only in a derivative sense that inorganic matter can be said to exist. Still, what Ravaisson means by saying that beings are in being, dans l’être, is obscure. As Daniel Panis has observed, taken in any literal sense, such an affirmation makes of being a kind of receptacle in which all things are; but a receptacle is still something, and thus ⁷¹ It is not until French translations of Heidegger’s work that the use of l’étant to translate das Seiende, and thus to name beings in contrast to being, l’être, became established. ⁷² This translation, though faithful, invites the question of how being, and not just beings, could possibly be governed by a law that would somehow be more fundamental than it, as. Daniel Panis remarks: ‘Le mot ‘être’ dans De l’habitude’, Les Études Philosophiques, Jan.–March 1993 61–4, p.61.

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Ravaisson would have got no closer to grasping the ‘real’ difference between being and beings. Moreover, it is undeniable that—despite his 1834 critique of Aristotle’s notion of pure energeia as a denial of the movement that is the life of things—the later Ravaisson is caught up in a problematic that the later Heidegger addresses under the heading of the ‘ontotheological constitution of metaphysics’: Ravaisson conceives being as presence and then as that which is most present, which is the soul or thinking in the guise of the divine. Underdeveloped as it may be, Ravaisson’s conception of habitual dispositions as constituting the ‘very being’ of the agent allows us to gain a better understanding of how he could hold that those dispositions establish themselves in the organ of the body. Dispositions are not things, on Ravaisson’s account, and thus it is not possible to discover them in dissecting a living body. Dispositions inhabit the organs of the body as being inhabits beings, as being is the active principle of beings. The claim that in a habit ‘the idea becomes being [être], the very being [l’être même] of the movement and of the tendency that it determines’ (OH 57), and also that the tendency in habit becomes ‘more and more the form, the way of being, even the very being [l’être même] of those organs’ (OH 57), presupposes a notion of what Heidegger will term the ontological difference. These claims will remain incomprehensible without reflection on the distinction between being and beings, and without recognizing, however difficult it may be to do so, that this distinction is not that between one thing and another. The notion of habitual dispositions as constituting the ‘very being’ of the agent also allows us return to a point noted in the Introduction to this study, namely Of Habit’s description at the end of Part I of habit as a cause. ‘Only in consciousness’, as Ravaisson writes there, can we ‘aspire not just to establish its apparent law’, the apparent law of habit, ‘but to learn its how and its why, to illuminate its generation and, finally, to understand its cause’ (OH 39). If being as tendency and inclination is the cause of habitual phenomena, this is only in a very particular sense, for it cannot be separated from its effects and is contemporaneous with them. The concluding sentence of De l’habitude draws on and draws out this point: ‘the disposition of which habit consists, and the principle engendering it, are one and the same thing: this is the primordial law and the most general form of being, the tendency to persevere in the very actuality that constitutes being’ (OH 77). The disposition—a term which here seems to names both a habitual, statistical regularity and the force producing it—and the principle allowing for the development of that disposition through continuity or repetition are, in fact, one and the same, for they are both a function of being, being

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understood as tendency and inclination. Habit in this sense is not a hidden cause of which only the effects are available to us; rather, it constitutes the being of those beings it inhabits. Being in this sense is activity, tendency, and inclination, which we must somehow already understand in our experience of beings. Ravaisson, to be sure, does not dwell on the issue of how we have access to l’être même of beings, in its identity with and difference from beings themselves, but his approach supposes that we must have a pre-philosophical, intuitive access to being, and that this access makes possible our engagement with beings. In this way, in any case, he renders redundant Hume’s worries in his first Enquiry concerning habit or ‘custom’ as a principle: By employing that word [custom] we pretend not to have given the ultimate reason of such a propensity. We only point out a principle of human nature, which is universally acknowledged, and which is well known by its effects. Perhaps we can push our enquiries no farther, or pretend to give the cause of this cause; but must rest contented with it as the ultimate principle, which we can assign, of all our conclusions from experience.⁷³

Hume’s hesitations here are perhaps due to a reluctance to renounce the possibility of some kind of materialist explanation of habitual propensities, but Ravaisson allows us to see that his concerns are otiose: the propensity that is habit is the very same ‘thing’ as the principle producing it, and this ‘thing’—which is really no thing, for it is being as tendency and inclination— is primitive, unanalysable, and thus inexplicable in terms of anything else.

⁷³ David Hume, Enquiries Concerning the Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1902), p.44.

5 Tendency and Time Part of the task of Chapter 4 was to examine the modal sense of Ravaisson’s account of inclination in habit, and it argued that on his account inclination is irreducible, in the end, to any necessitarian doctrine. The chapter argued that there is inclination without any form of necessitation in habit. The present chapter aims to elucidate further Ravaisson’s notion of inclination by examining its temporal sense. It addresses the way in which his account of tendency and inclination in habit might lead to and perhaps presuppose a conception of time that would somehow be irreducible to common, linear notions of time as recorded by clocks, and as consisting of a series of instants, with a present instant surrounded by distinct past and future instants that are, respectively, no longer and not yet. That Ravaisson’s work suggests something like this was observed in 1913 by Arthur Lovejoy in ‘Some Antecedents of the Philosophy of Bergson: The Conception of Real Duration’ published in Mind. Lovejoy showed that the pivotal account of time as real duration [la durée réelle] in Henri Bergson’s 1888 doctoral dissertation (published a year later), Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, translated as Time and Free Will, departs from Ravaisson’s remarks about time in his own doctoral dissertation, published half a century earlier. The idea of duration as time irreducible to the quantified time recorded by clocks is, Lovejoy shows, inspired to a degree by Of Habit’s account of measurement and quantification as inherently spatial. All Bergson had to do, Lovejoy argued, was draw the consequences from Ravaisson’s analysis: if quantification is spatialization, and if time is different from space, then time—in its primitive, original form named ‘duration’—must somehow be irreducible to quantification and thus to time as recorded and quantified by clocks. Lovejoy’s analysis is important, but he does not refer to the principal concern of Ravaisson’s doctoral thesis, namely habit, and thus he does not ask how it is specifically reflection on habit that leads the author of De l’habitude to reflect on time in a manner that would be significant for

Being Inclined: Félix Ravaisson’s Philosophy of Habit. Mark Sinclair, Oxford University Press (2019). © Mark Sinclair. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198844587.001.0001

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Bergson fifty years later. This is perhaps unsurprising given that Time and Free Will offers no explicit reflection on the nature of habit, but this chapter shows that on the issue of duration there is a missing historical link—a link ignored not just by Lovejoy but also, it seems, by all Bergson commentary¹—between Ravaisson and Bergson. This is Albert Lemoine’s reflections on the relation of time and habit in the 1875 L’Habitude et l’instinct, a text which we first examined in Chapter 2. There we saw that Drouin-Hans was right to note that ‘Lemoine is far from being a marginal figure’² in nineteenth-century French philosophy, and this chapter will show that in developing Ravaisson’s reflection on habit he promotes the sort of non-linear conception of time that Bergson develops later in Time and Free Will. The second section of the chapter shows how Lemoine takes up some of Ravaisson’s more oblique remarks on duration in habit in order to advance his own notion of durée, after the first has clarified, in developing Lovejoy’s analysis, what Bergson has accepted and rejected in Ravaisson’s explicit remarks on time in Part II, Section I of De l’habitude. Addressing the issue historically in this way leads to the philosophical question of how the account of inclination in habit that Ravaisson promotes involves or even requires a conception of duration, of a form of temporality that is more original than clock time; and to the question of how, conversely, a conception of an original time prior to clock time might necessarily involve a notion of habit. In posing this latter question, the third section of the chapter shows that although Bergson’s Time and Free Will does not explicitly reflect on the nature of habit, his reflections on time extend nineteenth-century philosophies of habit from Ravaisson all the way back to Biran and Bichat. In this way, I argue that two of the grand philosophical themes in nineteenth- and then twentieth-century French thought, namely habit and time, have a common root in a conception of duration as an original synthesis or contraction of past, present, and future. The final section of the chapter asks how this notion of duration and the sort of Bergsonian conception of freedom that is dependent on it, might impact on the idea of tendency and inclination in habit.

¹ There is, for example, no mention of Lemoine in the new critical edition of the Essai by Arnaud Bouaniche: Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2007). ² Anne-Marie Drouin-Hans, ‘L’Epistémologie d’Albert Lemoine’, p.75.

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5.1 Quantification as Spatialization The primary immediate ‘datum’ of consciousness brought to light by Time and Free Will—by its second chapter, which was, in fact, written before the first³—is that of an experience of time as irreducible to quantification and measurement. Bergson claims that time as a primary datum of consciousness is transformed when we quantify and measure it, and this claim depends on the analysis of number in the first pages of the chapter. In order to have a ‘clear idea of a number’⁴ it is necessary to represent the parts of the numerical quantity, the unities of which the number is composed as a sum, as coexistent and simultaneous. Coexistence, however, amounts to spatial juxtaposition, since the meaning of, say, the number 8 is given in the mental representation of eight things next to each other. Any clear conception of number, Bergson argues, requires a vision or intuition in real or represented space. Bergson’s argument in these pages borrows heavily from Of Habit. At the beginning of Part II, just before the subjective analysis of habit, and in preparation for it, Ravaisson accounts for the nature of consciousness and its principle faculty, the understanding, thus: the understanding grasps quantity only under the particular and determining condition of distinguishing parts—that is, in the form of the unity of plurality, of discrete quantity, of number. The idea of distinct parts is, in turn, determined within the understanding only under the still more particular condition of distinguishing the intervals separating them; in other words, the understanding represents number only within the plurality of the limits of a continuous quantity. Yet continuity can be grasped by the understanding only on the basis of coexistence. Continuous, coexisting quantity is extension. Thus quantity is the logical, knowable form of extension; and the understanding represents quantity to itself only in the sensible form of extension, in the intuition of space. (OH 39 & 41)

Quantity implies number, number implies coexistence, coexistence implies extension, and extension implies space. Hence, if Bergson takes this argument as a given in 1888, it is presumably because he expected his examiners to be

³ On this point, see Chapter 2 of my Bergson (Routledge: Abingdon, 2019). ⁴ Bergson, Essai, p.54/p.79.

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familiar with it in Ravaisson’s work.⁵ We might also assume that Bergson expected his examiners to see that Of Habit opens up the possibility of his own account of duration. For if we are willing to accept that time is genuinely different from space, on this basis of Ravaisson’s analysis it is possible to conclude that time in its most fundamental sense is irreducible to quantification, and something other than what it is when represented by means of the spatial image of a line on which a present moment is surrounded by past and future ‘instants’. Ravaisson does not explicitly develop this point. He seems instead to be influenced by Kant’s claims that number also relates, and perhaps more essentially, to time. In the Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics, Kant came to hold that ‘geometry is based on the pure intuition of space’, whereas ‘arithmetic produces its concepts of number through successive addition of units in time’.⁶ Kant seems to say that geometry relates to the pure a priori form of space, while arithmetic relates to the pure a priori form of time. In the Critique of Pure Reason, he had said something perhaps similar though rather more obscure. Although ‘the pure image of all magnitudes (quantorum) for outer sense is space’, time is necessary for the application of the concept of magnitude to appearances. The ‘rule’ or ‘schema’ of this application is what Kant calls number, ‘a representation which comprises the successive addition of homogeneous units’, and ‘number is therefore simply the unity of the synthesis of the manifold of a homogeneous intuition in general, a unity due to my generating time itself in the apprehension of the intuition’.⁷ Ravaisson seems to borrow from these claims of the Critique of Pure Reason, a text which he cites in the same passage, when he writes that ‘addition is possible only in time’ (OH 41): if diversity is represented only in the plurality of the divisions that I establish within extension, and through which I reflect my own unity, then it is necessary, in order to represent the totality or wholeness of that extension, that I combine the different parts, bringing them together. This addition is successive; it implies time. (OH 41)

⁵ Bertrand Russell famously criticizes the argument, and Bergson for taking it as a given; see ‘The Philosophy of Bergson’, The Monist 22 (1912) 321–47. For H. Wildon Carr’s response to this critique together with Russell’s rejoinder, see Carr, H. Wildon, ed. 1914. The Philosophy of Bergson (Bowes and Bowes: Cambridge). ⁶ Kant, Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics, trans. G. Hatfield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p.35. ⁷ Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A142–3/B182.

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Quantification is intrinsically spatial, but it somehow also requires time. Although it is expressed more directly than Kant’s corresponding claim in his first Critique, this assertion is still vague. If Ravaisson means only that counting takes time, we might wonder how this distinguishes counting from any other mental activity; but if he means that quantification has a more essential relation to time, we could do with an argument for why that is the case. Of Habit does not dwell on this issue, but moves on to argue that the time supposed by quantification can itself be measured, and that such quantification of time requires an extra-temporal principle: [b]ut in time everything passes and nothing remains. How to measure this uninterrupted flux and also this limitless diffusion of succession, if not by something that does not change, but which subsists and remains? And what is this, if not me? For everything that belongs to space is outside time. Substance, at once inside and outside time, is found within me, as the measure of change and permanence alike, as the figure of identity. (OH 41)

The idea that quantification, although intrinsically spatial, also requires time has led Ravaisson to claim that the measurement of time itself requires an extra-temporal principle, the ‘substance’ of the self. A footnote (OH 120) appended to this passage refers to the Critique of Pure Reason, but if, as Lovejoy supposes, Ravaisson has led us back ‘to the Kantian Ego, to the “Synthetic Unity of Self-Consciousness” ’,⁸ this is not a faithful rendition of the German philosopher’s doctrine, given that Ravaisson apparently commits the paralogism of applying the category of substance to the ‘subject’ who thinks.⁹ For Kant, it is not possible to know of the thinking subject itself as a substance. Chapter 4 of this study showed that Ravaisson’s doctrine of substance is not ‘substantialist’. Rather than posit a passive subject or substrate as the ground of beings, Ravaisson conceives substance as desire and love, as a form of activity, and as being in a verbal sense. That said, Ravaisson’s account of substance relies on one of its traditional senses: substance means identity over time, permanence, constant presence. Substance ‘in me’ is ‘at once inside and outside time’, and for this reason it can be ‘the ⁸ Lovejoy, ‘Some Antecedents of the Philosophy of Bergson’, p.470. ⁹ On Kant’s doctrine, see Ian Proops, ‘Kant’s First Paralogism’, The Philosophical Review 119/4 (2010) 449–95.

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measure of both change and permanence’. Although permanence is not itself something permanent, substance not itself something substantial, i.e. a substance, the thought of the former leads, perhaps inevitably, to the latter. Ravaisson, however, writes not of a substance, but of a ‘substantial subject [sujet substantiel]’ (OH 41), of a subject whose being is substance. The substantial subject that is the self is, in the terms of Aristotle’s physics, that in which change occurs but ‘which itself does not change’ (OH 25). In 1840 Ravaisson endorses Maine de Biran’s position that we have a direct experience of this permanence of the self: Maine de Biran showed that from the first inner experience that reveals us to ourselves, we have along with the feeling [sentiment] of our present power an assured sense [pressentiment] of its permanence: we are revealed to ourselves as a durable force. From the first experience, we therefore believe that we are, in the absolute of our being, what we know ourselves to be in the transitory and relative fact of a present action. (CP 424/79)

This claim that we have an immediate sense of our permanence is controversial, all the more so in that there is a clear difference between being durable and being permanent. We could easily consider, as Bergson will, that we have a certain duration, a persisting capacity to endure, but deny that this amounts to an experience of permanence. In any case, the subject thus understood is not the lowest level, as it were, of explanation, since, rather than constituting, as a passive subject or substrate, the ground of beings, being as activity, as ‘substance’ (as Ravaisson will say from 1837), constitutes the being of the subject. Hence Ravaisson’s Aristotelian concern for a permanent, unchanging subject of change in the self does not contradict his claim, which we discussed in Chapter 4, that the ‘passive substratum of phenomena is an abstraction formed by the imagination’ (CP 427/81). Ravaisson’s support for a notion of permanence is perhaps the most important way in which his project from the late 1830s onwards serves to re-establish rather than challenge traditional metaphysics; ‘Ravaisson aims only to restore what is best in a timeless metaphysics [ce qui est meilleur dans la métaphysique éternelle]’,¹⁰ as Janicaud put it, and this timeless metaphysics is dependent on an idea of timelessness. In 1834, it is crucial to note, Ravaisson perhaps did not have quite the same commitment to an ontology

¹⁰ Janicaud, Ravaisson et la métaphysique, p.118.

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and theology dependent on a primary sense of being as permanent presence, since he criticized Aristotle’s guiding ‘theological’ idea of pure energeia as, in effect, a denial of the movement that is the life of things. With Aristotle’s notion of the divine as pure actuality, ‘everything is immobilized in an identity without difference, which looks rather like [qui resemble beaucoup] an abstract identity’. It is necessary that ‘this formula be shaken so as to be enlarged; being and non-being, the finite and the infinite have to be reconciled in a superior unity’ according to the idea of a ‘coincidence in the absolute of the actual and the possible’. For Ravaisson, the ‘absolute is Spirit or rather Force which develops ceaselessly and passes eternally from potentiality to actuality’ (DMA 167–8/204). The absolute, in other words, is permanently in a sort of movement. Laruelle was right to observe that in 1834 Ravaisson enacts a ‘destruction of substance for the sake of an ontology of movement’.¹¹ In 1837, in the first published volume of his work on Aristotle, Ravaisson seems to withdraw this critique of Aristotle’s ontotheology. The metaphysics that he consequently establishes and restores leads him into a position concerning time in Of Habit that is barely consistent with his analysis of quantification: if quantification is spatialization, it is difficult to see what the measurement of time carried out by the substantial, timeless self could be if it is supposed to treat time in its own terms and not reduce it to space. Lovejoy had a point, therefore, when he noted that after an interesting analysis of quantification as spatialization, Ravaisson seems to have succumbed to ‘self-contradiction’¹² in his reflection on time and the self. It is also true that ‘all’ that Bergson had to do subsequently is to deny first that time in its most original sense can be quantified, and second that the quantifying self stands outside this original time. This was clearly a major theoretical leap, but Ravaisson nevertheless prepared Bergson for it. The manner in which Bergson departs from Ravaisson becomes clear when we observe how Time and Free Will criticizes the notion that quantification requires time. This notion is merely the result of habit: ‘[w]hat leads us astray [ce qui fait illusion] on this point is the habit we have contracted of counting in time, as it seems, rather than space’.¹³ It is ‘incontestable’ that we can count—when, say, playing hide and seek—from 1 to 20 in time, and that in a sense ‘we will have thus counted moments of ¹¹ Laruelle, Phénomène et différence, p.125. ¹² Lovejoy, ‘Some Antecedents of the Philosophy of Bergson’, p.470. ¹³ Bergson, Essai, p.53/p.78.

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duration rather than points of space’. Still, the number 20 will be a genuine quantity, i.e. a sum, only in ‘fixing in a point of space each of the moments that we count’.¹⁴ From Bergson’s perspective, Ravaisson’s thesis that any clear idea of number requires an intuition of space should have led him to see that the unities perceived in space, the unities that make possible a clear idea of number, have to be simultaneous, and that succession in time is antithetical to this simultaneity. Although Ravaisson’s account of time appears within a text concerned with the nature of habit, Bergson’s argument is that he has fallen foul of our habitual ability to ‘count’ in time, which is not genuine counting.¹⁵

5.2 Habit and Duration In his reflection on time in Part II, Section I of De l’habitude, Ravaisson accommodates a notion of timeless substance. Still, there are other aspects of Ravaisson’s reflection on habit that are important for Bergson’s philosophy of the durational self. Lovejoy notes that the conclusion of the work contrasts ‘the extensive unity of logical or mathematical forms’ that ‘science defines’, with the ‘intensive, dynamic unity of reality’ that ‘nature constitutes’ (OH 75). This seems, indeed, to foretell Bergson’s distinction of the extensive realm of quantity and the intensive realm of pure quality that is the realm of duration according to Time and Free Will. But Lovejoy does not ask how reflection on habit might imply a conception of duration irreducible to quantified time, and he is more concerned to cut Bergson down to size, historically and philosophically.¹⁶ Bergson ‘fell into another contradiction not less obvious’ than the one that beset Ravaisson, since given that it is ‘only by the aid of the category of number that either time or anything else can be represented as anything but mere unity, a blank Identität der Identität’, he ‘obliterates the distinction between the temporal and the eternal, between ¹⁴ Bergson, Essai, p.54/p.79. ¹⁵ That habit obscures the true nature of psychological faculties is a constant Biranian theme. According to Biran’s 1802 dissertation, habit is: the general cause of our progress on the one hand, of our blindness on the other . . . It is to habit that we owe the facility, the precision, and the extreme rapidity of our movements and voluntary operations; but it is habit also which hides from us their nature and quantity. (Maine de Biran, Influence, pp.100–1/p.49) ¹⁶ In his 1913 essay Lovejoy ends his treatment of Ravaisson abruptly and turns to the ideas about time of two students of Charles Renouvier, L. Dauriac and G. Noel, ideas that were also, Lovejoy argues, important for Bergson. It is not possible to address the significance of Renouvier’s neo-criticist school for Bergson here.

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change and immobility, between a sequence and a totum simul’.¹⁷ Bergson’s development of Ravaisson’s epistemological claims has supposedly led us into an eternal night in which—according to Hegel’s famous words—all cows are black. The claim, however, that thinking in general demands the category of quantity, and thus that a notion of time as duration would require the application of that category in order to be intelligible is an unjustified presupposition. Bergson rehearses Ravaisson’s epistemological claim that ‘[o]nly what we can figuratively represent in the field of the imagination is clearly intelligible to us; only what we describe to ourselves in an imaginary space can be conceived distinctly’ (OH 41). However, he also follows Ravaisson in denying that clear and distinct conception exhausts intelligibility and philosophical method. It is possible that Of Habit exaggerates on this point, and that we should accept Descartes’ claim that clear and distinct conception can occur independently of the imagination (I can understand but not imaginatively represent the concept of a chiliagon), but Bergson will develop Ravaisson’s distinction of ‘intuition’ and imaginative conception, and his concomitant claim that the fundamental truths of existence are apprehended intuitively.¹⁸ Among the other aspects of De l’habitude that suggest a conception of a non-quantifiable immediate experience of time, the first is the set of elliptical opening remarks concerning habit as a principle that exists in or even as time. According to the opening paragraph, habit is ‘the state of an existence considered either as the unity of its elements or as the succession of its different phases’ (OH 25), with the second half of the disjunction suggesting that habit unifies a being over time. The third paragraph announces that the text addresses ‘not simply acquired habit, but habit that is contracted, owing to a change, with respect to the very change that gave birth to it’ (OH 25), and this suggests that the relation of an acquired habit to its acquisition in the past is in question. The fourth paragraph develops this point: if it [i.e. an acquired habit] is related, insofar as it is habit and by its very essence, only to the change that engendered it, then habit remains for a change which either is no longer or is not yet; it remains for a possible change. This is its defining characteristic. Habit is not, therefore, merely a state, but a disposition, a virtue. (OH 25) ¹⁷ Lovejoy, ‘Some Antecedents of the Philosophy of Bergson’, p.471. ¹⁸ The most direct source of Ravaisson’s critique of imaginative thinking is Maine de Biran (see, for example, Maine de Biran, Mémoire sur la décomposition de la pensée, p.326), but that Ravaisson uses the term ‘intuition’ instead of Biran’s ‘apperception’ suggests the influence of Schelling’s critique of the ‘understanding’.

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Habit persists after the change that gave rise to it, but it is not merely the register of past change, since it is a power capable of shaping what is to come, an active comportment towards the future. The temporal sense of this claim that ‘habit remains for a change which is either no longer or not yet’ is intriguing, all the more so in its relation to Ravaisson’s claims that we ‘contract’ (OH 25) habits, and that the habits thus contracted ‘anticipate’ (OH 51) volition in a motor habit. This perhaps entails a peculiar sense of the past as contracted such that it somehow persists in the present, just as ‘anticipating’ the will might involve a non-linear conception of the future as something other than a series of instants that have not yet occurred. Ravaisson also holds that time belongs to the domain of life and that inorganic things are ‘somehow outside time’ (OH 35). A motivation for this restriction of time to an ‘inner sense’ proper to life—which Bergson will reenact in Time and Free Will¹⁹—could be that ‘time’, for Ravaisson, means not just time in general, the quantifiable time in which things appear, but a lived time peculiar to the biological and psychological domains wherein habit occurs. Moreover, Ravaisson writes repeatedly of habit according to an idea of durée, which may seem to name and describe the experience of a nonquantifiable lived time. The ‘duration of movement’, the ‘duration of change’ in the living being is, Ravaisson writes, a ‘relative permanence’ (OH 79) and thus is a kind of enduring.²⁰ Duration in this sense is not just a section of quantifiable time, as when we say that the match lasts for ninety minutes, but is rather a lasting, a persevering or perdurance of the past in the present. In one passage, Ravaisson writes ‘continuity and repetition—that is, duration’ (OH 49), and this suggests that in habit there is a form of enduring that is a capacity to contract a habit from the repetition of an action, or from the repetition or continuity of a sensation in the case of habituation. If this is what Ravaisson intended, duration and habit would somehow be the same. Together they may both imply a critical delimitation of a vulgar, linear notion of time. On the basis of all of these remarks, and without denying that Ravaisson promotes an idea of the self as possessing a non-temporal, absolute permanence ¹⁹ In 1889 Bergson restricts duration to psychological life, but later, of course, he will apply it to biological life also. ²⁰ This sense of durée did not arrive de novo in Ravaisson’s work, for Maine de Biran already writes of the enduring of the self in voluntary effort in, for example, Essai sur les fondements de la psychologie: ‘Un sentiment identique et immédiat de l’existence personnelle, ou d’une durée qui peut être considérée comme la trace de l’effort fluant uniformément, de même que la ligne mathématique est la trace du point qui flue’ (Biran, Essai sur les fondements de la psychologie, ed. F. C. T. Moore, p.240). In L’Individualité persévérante (pp.229–35), Anne Dévarieux shows how Biranian durée is distinct from succession and irreducible to any measure.

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outside time in Part II, Section I of De l’habitude, one might suppose that his reflection on habit entails a notion of its ‘relative permanence’ involving a psychological, lived temporality. In L’Habitude et l’instinct, Albert Lemoine appears to draw precisely this lesson from Ravaisson. The first part of the text, the part concerning habit that he was able to complete, contains the following account of habit and time: [f]or the living being, the intelligent, rational and free being, capable of habit, the three elements of time are fused together [solidaires] with each other. For that being, is it not true to say that the past is no longer, nor even that the future is not yet; if it lives in the present, it lives in the present by the past and for the future. Its past is not abolished; it carries its past within itself in its very present, and with this past anticipates the future. For it, the past is accumulated and is summarised in the present; it holds the past within itself in its entirety in the form of habit, hexis. (HI 26)²¹

As we saw in Chapter 2, L’Habitude et l’instinct does not anywhere mention Of Habit directly, but here Lemoine proposes a non-linear notion of time that seems to prolong Ravaisson’s reflections: habit, which he also takes as coextensive with life, is temporal such that the past remains in the present and anticipates the future. The past remains, and it remains for a future which is not yet, as Ravaisson had said; but the past remains and anticipates the future in a way that undermines our common-sense conceptions of time according to which the past is no longer and the future not yet. These ideas prefigure the account of duration in Time and Free Will, and it would seem that Bergson has been influenced by Lemoine, for he refers to L’Habitude et l’instinct in his lectures on habit at the Lycée Henri-IV in 1892–3.²² What Lovejoy considers as the ‘characteristic Bergsonian phraseology about the “indivisibility” of duration, the “interpenetration” of moments, ²¹ In L’antagonista necessario: la filosofia francese dell’abitudine da Montaigne a Deleuze (Milan: Mimesis Edizioni, 2015, p.179) Marco Piazza dicusses Lemoine’s conception of habit without drawing out the temporal sense of the French philosopher’s ideas, but my concern for the latter grew in recent conversation with him. It should also be noted that no discussion of the temporal, durational sense of habit appears in Gerhard Funke’s magisterial study of habit, even though it devotes a long section to Ravaisson (Gewohnheit, pp.440–64) and cites Lemoine’s book in the list of French works concerned with habit (p.16). ²² Bergson (Cours II, p.275) refers to Lemoine’s text in the bibliography that follows the text of the lectures on habit. It is theoretically possible, but unlikely, that Bergson had not read Lemoine’s text until after writing his doctoral dissertation.

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the innocence of the elements of our temporal consciousness of all “reciprocal externality”’²³ derives, in fact, from Lemoine. Bergson will also expand on Lemoine’s remarks, slightly earlier in his 1875 text, about the nonindifference of the living being, the living being subject to habit, to the passage of time: the passage of time changes the very ‘nature’ of living beings, and does not merely alter, as with dead, inorganic things, ‘the relations of their elements’ (HI 16). For the living being, then, time is not a kind of empty container through which that being, always identical to itself, would pass. Instead, it somehow constitutes the very essence of the living being. It is time in this psychological sense that Lemoine names durée: ‘habit establishes precisely an indissoluble solidarity between the different moments of flowing duration [la durée qui s’écoule]; it consists in making the past endure [faire durer le passé] and in prolonging it indefinitely in the present’ (HI 59). In order to grasp how Lemoine’s approach develops that of Ravaisson, it is necessary to recognize that habit as a disposition is not a passive state, whether material or psychological, of something. Ravaisson emphasizes this (OH 25), and it is also what Lemoine emphasizes in accounting for habit with the Greek term hexis.²⁴ If a habitual disposition were merely a material or psychological state, then we could conceive it both as having been caused by repetition or continuity in the past and as causally determining the future in a mechanical sense. Lemoine clearly wants to say more than this. His claim is that in a hexis there is a presence of the past in the present. He claims that the past is contracted within the present: ‘[n]o other word of our French language expresses better what it has to say than the vulgar expression: contracter une habitude. By habit, indeed, the past is really contracted in the present and perpetuates itself within it’ (HI 26). We contract habits not simply in the general sense of acquiring them, and not simply because we often acquire them despite ourselves, in the involuntary way that we contract an illness, but, most profoundly, because in acquiring a habit we synthesize the past in the present with a view to the future. How exactly to understand these notions of contraction and synthesis? Consider a motor action, such as, again, learning to play a piece of music on the piano. From the many different instances of playing we gain an

²³ Lovejoy, ‘Some Antecedents of the Philosophy of Bergson’, p.471. ²⁴ For a dynamic, activist reading of hexis, see also Pierre Rodrigo, ‘The Dynamic of Hexis in Aristotle’s Philosophy’ in Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology (special issue: Habit, eds. C. Carlisle and M. Sinclair) 42/1, 6–21.

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unreflective capacity to reproduce the act and perhaps even a tendency to reproduce the act that anticipates our conscious intentions when sitting at the piano. Habit as a disposition is the power, a synthetic power, to isolate something identical in the different instances of playing, and thus to develop itself as a capacity to produce acts of that sort in the future. From repetition, the power of habit produces something new, namely a difference, a change in that power itself. The acquisition of a motor habit may well involve the will and conscious deliberation, but the synthesis contracting the past into the present and future that is operative here is not, for Ravaisson, an intellectual synthesis, since it is prior to episodic memory and reflection. It occupies a middle ground between pure activity and pure passivity; ‘it is not action that gives birth to or strengthens the continuity or repetition of locomotion; it is a more obscure and unreflective tendency, which goes further down into the organism, increasingly concentrating itself there’ (OH 53). Lemoine may well resist Ravaisson on this point, since, as we saw in Chapter 2, he is unwilling to accept that habit is a principle of action that surpasses reflective will and reason. It is not by accident that in the passage cited above he holds habit to belong to ‘the intelligent, rational and free being’ (HI 26). Lemoine argues that if the will is no longer ‘imperative’ in an acquired habit, it is still ‘permissive’ (HI 56), i.e. somehow still guiding the action, and reason can always return to reclaim its rights. Yet, given that the permissive will is not imperative, i.e. not fully active, it would seem that Lemoine has to accept that there is a form of pre-intellectual, pre-rational activity in habit, which can be conceived—in borrowing an oxymoron from Edmund Husserl—as a passive synthesis.²⁵ It is a synthesis, and thus active; but not wholly active in that it is not voluntary. Lemoine is all the less able to reject the idea of such a not entirely active synthesis in that he recognizes that if, in one sense, habit results from repetition, in another and more profound sense, repetition presupposes the power of habit. Aristotle’s claim in Rhetoric (1369b6) that to ‘act by habit is to do something because one has already done it’ amounts to ‘a sort of paralogism’. It takes ‘the cause for the effect, and the effect for the cause’ (HI 3). Victor Egger—Lemoine’s student and then editor of L’Habitude et l’instinct—underlined the significance of this insight in his 1880 ‘La Naissance des habitudes’: the major achievement of the 1875 text is to

²⁵ On this point, see Gilles Deleuze, Différence et répétition (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1968), p.101/Difference and Repetition, trans. P. Patton (London: Athlone), p.76.

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show that ‘repetition, from its beginnings, needs habit for its explanation’.²⁶ Egger has some reason to consider this an original idea, since it contrasts not just with Aristotle’s approach in the Rhetoric but also with Ravaisson’s Aristotelian pronouncement in the introduction to Of Habit: ‘habit is thus a disposition relative to change, which is engendered in a being by the continuity or the repetition of this very same change’ (OH 25). That said, Ravaisson also announces here that an acquired habit ‘supposes a change in the disposition, in the potential, in the internal virtue of that in which the change occurs’ (OH 25), which means that he recognizes that habit in a more fundamental sense is the condition of acquired habits. Moreover, the title of Egger’s paper already leads us back to Ravaisson’s recognition later in Of Habit that, as we have just seen, tendency ‘gives birth’ to repetition. Tendency is the product of repetition, certainly, but that is only in so far as a more basic tendency has preceded repetition as its condition. In this light, Lemoine’s insight appears more like a clarification of Ravaisson’s view than a development of it. Lemoine elaborates Ravaisson’s view, but the philosophical significance of the view elaborated may not be immediately obvious. Why, one should ask, is it not possible to account for the acquisition of motor habits by means of an associationist psychology, by means of a traditional account of the association of ideas as an involuntary and pre-reflective process in the mind? It might seem reasonable enough to claim that the mind associates a particular instance of a repeated movement with its developing power to perform said movement by means of pre-voluntary and pre-reflective processes of association. From Ravaisson’s perspective, this approach begs the question on two levels. First, the power of association is itself an effect of habit in the mind—habit in the mind that Ravaisson examines in Of Habit Part II, Section IV—rather than its cause; if we are to account for how and why association occurs, we have to recognize that it is a function of the force of habit and not vice versa. Second, it would not be possible to associate any particular instance of movement with a developing capacity to carry out that movement if I had not already spontaneously identified this instance of playing as an instance of the associative habit in question.

²⁶ Victor Egger, ‘La Naissance des habitudes’, Annales de la faculté de lettres de Bordeaux 1 (1880) 1–15, p.1. For a recent study of Bergson’s relation to Egger, see Riccardo Roni, Victor Egger e Henri Bergson. Alle origini del flusso di coscienza (Edizioni ETS: Pisa, 2016).

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Such identification is the condition rather than the result of any process of association.²⁷ It is precisely in this sense that repetition—which supposes the identification of the same in the different instances—presupposes habit as a synthetic power. The synthesis making repetition possible is not posterior to the individual repeated actions, but prior to them, in that it makes possible the repetition of the action as repetition of the same action. Without this prior synthesis, without what Ravaisson describes as an obscure tendency, a tendency independent of the reflective will or consciousness, the acquisition of the motor habit simply could not occur. The synthesis precedes, and is the condition of possibility of, particular moments in the acquisition of a habit: the number of times that I have carried out the act in the past, my action now, and my actions in the future. From this perspective, then, habit as a disposition or virtue, as a tendency or inclination, is a kind of synthetic power that is a continual contraction of the past into the present, in such a way that the past lives on within it and preforms a future.

5.3 Duration and Habit Lemoine does not develop his claim concerning duration and the contractive power of habit by claiming that the peculiar temporality of habit brings to light the very nature of original time, of duration as such. He might well have done so had he lived beyond 1874. But if Bergson’s account of duration is developed against the background of an idea of habit, how does this inform his own account of habit? Bergson may seem to echo L’habitude et l’instinct when in Matter and Memory he claims that ‘the past survives under two distinct forms: first, in motor mechanisms; secondly, in independent recollections’.²⁸ Although this notion of a survival of the past in habit echoes Lemoine’s thinking, the conception of an acquired habit as operating mechanically amounts to rejecting his conception of habit as hexis. For this reason, it is not surprising that Bergson wonders whether it is legitimate to describe habit as a form of memory at all.²⁹ The idea of a survival of the past in the mechanical, neurological changes in which, on Bergson’s account, an acquired habit consists is merely figurative or metaphorical. We might just ²⁷ As Bergson will argue at length in Time and Free Will and Matter and Memory, associationism always presupposes what it attempts to explain. See, again, Chapter 2 of my Bergson for more on this. ²⁸ Bergson, Matter and Memory, p.224/p.81. ²⁹ Bergson, Matter and Memory, p.229/p.82.

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as well claim that the piece of paper I have folded has its own memory, and that the past survives in the folded paper because its present state is a record of the causal change effected on it. In the end, if an acquired habit is to be conceived as a form of memory, if the present of an acquired habit is to be conceived as prolonging the past in any significant sense, then it is necessary to grant the existence of a power synthesizing the past, present, and future in a way that challenges our ordinary, linear conceptions of time. This, however, Bergson does not do when he reflects on the nature of motor habit in Matter and Memory.³⁰ But what of Time and Free Will, where Bergson first develops the idea of duration? Habit here is a principle of ‘fallenness’ and inauthenticity, as we have already seen. We fall into the habit of counting in time rather space, i.e. of counting without making present the sense of our counting, just as, to take two of the many examples in Time and Free Will, we have contracted the habit of seeing time in a linear fashion, in space, and just as we fall into the habit—one that David Hume was unaware of when reflecting on our habitual belief in causal necessity³¹—of identifying force with necessary connection.³² Nevertheless, when Bergson attempts to reveal the experience of duration by contrasting an immediate experience of the bell ringing the hour, in which I do not distinguish each ring of the bell from the others, with a less immediate conceptual counting of the individual sounds whereby I place each sound side by side and thus spatialize time, he appeals to a retention, i.e. a contraction of time in experience that is itself, perhaps, a form of habit: the sounds of the bell certainly reach me one after the other; but one of the two alternatives must be true. Either I retain [je retiens] each of these successive sensations in order to combine it with the others and form a group which reminds me of an air or rhythm which I know: in that case I do not count the sounds, I limit myself to gathering [recueillir], so to ³⁰ In his ‘Habitual Body and Memory in Merleau-Ponty’, Man and World 17 (1984) 279–97, Ed Casey generously affirms (p.280) that Bergson’s notion of habit memory is original and opens up new possibilities for philosophy, but Lemoine had opened up more fruitfully these possibilities twenty years earlier. ³¹ Chapter 6 of this study returns to Hume in the light of more recent anti-necessitarian conceptions of causation. ³² Bergson, Time and Free Will, p.53/p.78, p.81/p.158, and p.142/p.216 respectively. Elizabeth Grosz claims, in contrast, that ‘[f]rom his first text, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, Bergson understands habit and its capacity to transform living beings into free beings’ (Grosz Habit Today: Ravaisson, Bergson, Deleuze and Us’, Body and Society 19/2–3 (2013), 217–39’, p.226). It is possible to read Time and Free Will between the lines as a reflection on the nature of habit, but it is necessary to read the lines when doing so.

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speak, the qualitative impression produced by the whole series. Or else I intend explicitly to count them.³³

There is a qualitative gathering or contraction of the past in the present that is prior to the quantitative separation of distinct and isolated moments that I can then count. There is what Bergson names a ‘qualitative multiplicity’ in immediate experience—a qualitative multiplicity that is no absolute identity, no ‘night in which all cows are black’—that is prior to numerical, quantitative multiplicity. Concerning this retention or contraction of the past in the present, Gilles Deleuze asks: [h]ow are we to explain that—in the case of Bergson’s clock strokes—we feel ourselves, indeed, so close to the mystery of habit, yet recognize nothing of what is habitually called habit? Perhaps the reason lies in the illusions of psychology, which made a fetish of activity . . . . It asks how we acquire habits in acting, but the entire theory of learning risks being misdirected so long as the prior question is not posed—namely, whether it is through acting that we acquire habits.³⁴

The retention of the past in duration belongs to habit, but we fail to see this because of intellectualist interpretations of habit and its acquisition. From Ravaisson’s perspective, Deleuze is right to suggest that habit as a synthetic, contractive power is not the product of pure, conscious activity, but we can answer his question more fully in retracing the distinction between habituation and more active habits in nineteenth-century French philosophy, which we examined in Chapter 1. Habituation is even less active, less a product of will and conscious activity, than motor habits, and its analysis in nineteenth-century French philosophy depends from the beginning, however implicitly, on a notion of habit as a temporal, contractive power. To grasp this, consider first that Of Habit claims that the same ‘obscure activity’ is operative in habituation as in motor habits: In activity, this reproduces the action itself; in sensibility it does not reproduce the sensation, the passion—for this requires an external cause—but calls for it, invokes it; in a certain sense it implores the sensation. (OH 51)

³³ Bergson, Time and Free Will, p.59/p.122. ³⁴ Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p.100/p.73.

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Chapter 1 showed that Ravaisson’s hypothesis is less vitalist (in the strict sense of the term as naming a principle wholly separated from the mind) and more animist than Biran’s, since he considers this obscure activity, although it resides ‘within the indeterminate multiplicity of the organism’ (OH 57), to be continuous with the will and consciousness. Biran had, as we also saw, responded to Xavier Bichat, who had explained habituation with the hypothesis that all perception is constituted by an implicit, involuntary comparison ‘in the soul’, which compares the present sensation with those preceding it. Habit ‘blunts’ or ‘enfeebles’ sensation, because ‘in proportion as the same sensations are repeated, the less impression do they make upon us, because the comparison between the present and the past becomes less sensible’.³⁵ That is, when there is no difference between the present sensation and those preceding it, we no longer perceive the present sensation. Here Bichat relies on the temporal sense of habituation: in order to ‘compare’ the present with the immediate past, I must have somehow retained the past in the present; and given that the ‘comparison’ of immediate past and present is not an act of conscious, reflective judgement, it must be a function of a pre-reflective retention, a pre-reflective synthesis of the past in the present. Bichat leads us to the thought that habituation is possible only on the basis of a contractive power of retention, of the kind of prolongation or enduring of the past in the present that Bergson discusses in Time and Free Will. Although Ravaisson does not explicitly draw out its temporal sense, he can be understood to complete Bichat’s thought by arguing that the contractive power in habituation involves a form of anticipation of what is to come, a synthesis of the future with the present and past that forbids us speaking of original time as a series of now-points: ‘nows’ no longer and not yet that surround the present. According to this lineage in French philosophy, habituation presupposes a primordial synthesis of time itself that we can name: durée. From this perspective, duration constitutes the common origin of quantifiable clock time and habit in all its forms. Lemoine seems to adopt this position when he writes that, for the being ‘capable of habit, the three elements of time are fused together’. The fusion or original contraction of past, present, and future makes habit possible; it constitutes a condition of the possibility of the acquisition of particular habits. But is it not also possible to say—as Deleuze suggests—that durée itself, as a contractive power, is itself a form of habit, even the most fundamental form of habit, and thus that ‘it holds’ the

³⁵ Bichat, Physiological Researches on Life and Death, p.40/pp.49–50.

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past and future within the present ‘in the form of habit, hexis’, as Lemoine (HI 26) also writes? In this light, Time and Free Will is a book that, despite appearances, addresses the key nineteenth-century philosophical question of the nature of habit. To be sure, habit thus understood is not a habit, as least not if a habit is necessarily contracted in time. Habit in this sense does not name acquired habits, but rather the power to acquire them; it is, in Egger’s phrase, the ‘power of repetition rather than its result’.³⁶ This power is the contraction that is time in its original, non-quantifiable sense: a contraction that ‘carries its past within itself in its very present, and with this past anticipates the future’.

5.4 Tendency, Time, Freedom What impact does this idea of time as the most fundamental form of habit have on the notion of tendency and inclination in Ravaisson’s work? Let us return to Of Habit’s concluding claim: ‘the disposition of which habit consists, and the principle engendering it, are one and the same thing: this is the primordial law and the most general form of being, the tendency to persevere in the very actuality that constitutes being’ (OH 77). We have seen that this attempt to ground the force of habit, as a power of reproduction as well as conservation, in the law of ‘inertia’ was dependent on an activist, Leibnizian ontology. On this account, being, understood as activity and as a drive to maintain itself in activity, is the very principle of habit. However, after studying Ravaisson’s account of quantification as spatialization together with his remarks on habit as durée, which Lemoine and Bergson develop, it is possible to understand the conclusion to the 1838 text in another manner: if the disposition of which habit consists and the principle engendering it are one and the same, and if this disposition is intrinsically durational in the sense that we have described, then the most fundamental law of being is duration. On this interpretation, Of Habit is, ultimately, a book about being and time, about being as time in a sense prior to clock time in that it shows that habit, as a principle of both conservation and reproduction, is grounded in the contraction and anticipation that constitutes duration. But what do we gain with this temporal interpretation of Ravaisson’s work? If, as we first noted in the Introduction to this study, a tendency to do something is to be explained by a tendency towards something, by a kind of force or drive, then now we see that our tendencies to do things can be explained by duration ³⁶ Egger, ‘La Naissance des habitudes’, p.2.

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understood as a drive that is constituted as a unity of anticipation and contraction. This drive, as a ‘tendency to persist’, is not an occasional persisting, but a drive towards the future that retains the past. It is a kind of stretch or stretching that is a self-stretching, since it is not stretched by an external agency, by anything standing outside it. This temporal tendency to persist would constitute our very existence, and it would be the condition of possibility of any of our particular tendencies or inclinations, whether innate or acquired. Understood in this way, Ravaisson’s grand concluding sentence would not risk reifying and naturalizing the human being by grounding a psychological principle, habit, in a physical principle, namely the law of inertia, a principle apparently germane only to the inorganic realm. On the contrary, from this perspective he appears to ground a physical principle in a primarily psychological principle. The most fundamental law of being, one that applies to all beings, is duration, which would have to be a principle that obtains beyond the human mind.³⁷ Time and Free Will, as its English title says very clearly, is also a book about freedom. Bergson offers an account of freedom on the basis of his idea of duration. He attempts to occupy a middle ground between determinist and libertarian positions, and to reveal a sense of free will prior to the availability of alternative intellectual possibilities in action. Suffice it to remark here, as a promissory note for further study, that this thoroughly temporal sense of freedom may well develop the intuitions underlying Ravaisson’s own account of freedom according to an idea of moral necessity, which, as Boutroux rightly argued, was only apparently a form of necessity. If tendency and inclination in habit are grounded in time as duration, if tendency and inclination are, at bottom, nothing but duration, and if duration can be conceived as a principle of freedom (but freedom prior to any libertarian construal of it), then perhaps we have a further reason and another means to avoid the necessitarianism into which Ravaisson apparently fell back in 1867.

³⁷ After denying that duration exists beyond the mind in Time and Free Will, Bergson will grapple with the question of how duration obtains in the world beyond the individual psyche throughout his career. On this point, see, for example, Chapter 2 of my Bergson.

6 Is There a ‘Dispositional Modality’? Chapter 4 of this study argued that Ravaisson’s necessity of attraction and desire in 1838 is no real necessity at all, precisely because it is a matter of degree: habit can become more and more necessary in its acquisition, which entails that the necessity is never absolute, and never wholly distinct from reflective freedom. This is Ravaisson’s fundamental position, which is not invalidated or overridden by his official proclamations in the 1867 report, La Philosophie en France au XIXème siècle, concerning a generalized, Leibnizian notion of moral necessity. On the contrary, the idea of degrees of necessity underlies and makes sense of his claims concerning moral necessity in 1867. But tendency or inclination in habit is no more reducible to the modal category of possibility than it is to that of necessity, since the realization of a tendency, in that it tends to occur, is not merely one possibility among a plurality of equals. This leads us to ask whether tendency or inclination is somehow a modal category all of its own, a sui generis modal category that stands between necessity and possibility. In this way, Ravaisson’s work leads to an issue with which, in the contemporary metaphysics of powers, Stephen Mumford and Rani Lill Anjum have recently grappled. The argument of their 2011 Getting Causes from Powers is that powers are intrinsically tendential, and that tendency has a modal status irreducible to more familiar notions of necessity and possibility. Tendency is ‘an irreducible sui generis modality . . . something between pure necessity and pure contingency and that is reducible to neither’. Although ‘the idea of something irreducibly tending towards certain outcomes has not attracted many adherents in modern philosophy . . . it is . . . the core modal notion’.¹ Moreover, like Ravaisson, they argue that what they term ‘dispositionality’ or the ‘dispositional modality’ is a psychological datum in agency, one on which a theory of powers beyond the psychological domain can be constructed by analogy. On their account, powers as such,

¹ Stephen Mumford and Rani Lill Anjum, Getting Causes from Powers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p.viii.

Being Inclined: Félix Ravaisson’s Philosophy of Habit. Mark Sinclair, Oxford University Press (2019). © Mark Sinclair. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198844587.001.0001

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and not just psychological powers, are a function of tendency, of being disposed or being inclined. The ‘metaphysics of powers’, it should be noted, seems to derive its current denomination² from a concern that ‘disposition’ has a narrower extension than ‘power’, from the idea that having a disposition to do something, to be disposed to do it, can imply having a tendency to do that thing.³ A power is a capacity or ability, such as salt’s capacity to dissolve in water, a bridge’s capacity to bear a load, or my ability to drive a car; whereas disposition, and the adjectival locution ‘being disposed to’, can suggest a more specific power that is a tendency or inclination to act in the sense that is the object of the present study.⁴ On Mumford and Anjum’s account, however, ‘power’ and ‘disposition’ are, in the end, synonymous, because the tendential quality ascribed to dispositions in the narrow sense already characterizes powers in general. This is to say—though Mumford and Anjum do not state this explicitly—that ordinary intuitions concerning the difference between powers as capacities in general, on the one hand, and tendencies or inclinations, on the other, register a difference of degree and not in kind. This chapter addresses Mumford and Anjum’s arguments concerning the ‘dispositional modality’ in order to investigate further the modal status of Ravaisson’s own conception of tendency and inclination. At the same time, the chapter shows that reference to nineteenth-century French philosophy, to Maine de Biran as well as Ravaisson, allows us to criticize but also to develop the contemporary philosophers’ claims concerning tendency as a sui generis ‘dispositional modality’. The first section of the chapter examines Getting Causes from Powers in its own terms, but the second section argues that Maine de Biran’s account ² The word ‘disposition’ is absent, for example, from two recent collections of essays in the field: Ruth Groff and John Greco (eds.), Powers and Capacities in Philosophy: The New Aristotelianism (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012) and Anna Marmadoro (ed.), The Metaphysics of Powers: Their Grounding and Manifestation, (London: Routledge, 2010). In contrast, in 1998 Stephen Mumford could name his contribution to what is now generally named the ‘metaphysics of powers’ Dispositions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). ³ As Barbara Vetter notes, in a psychological sense ‘disposed to’ can often mean little more than ‘willing to’, but it can have a much stronger tendential sense; see Vetter, Potentiality: From Dispositions to Modality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), p.67. ⁴ Alexander Bird (‘The Limitations of Power’ in R. Groff and J. Greco (eds.), Powers and Capacities in Philosophy, 25–47) distinguishes between dispositions and powers in a different way: the disposition of solubility is merely what happens when salt comes into contact with water, whereas the power does the philosophical work in having to explain why salt behaves thus. This, however, fails to notice that in ordinary language a ‘disposition’ (the disposition of solubility, for example) can serve to explain as well as record what actually happens.

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of necessity in agency brings into focus the limitations of Mumford and Anjum’s appeal to voluntary agency. Biran claims, pace Hume, that there is a form of necessity internal to action, in the relation of the will to bodily movement (though this necessity is not a necessary connection), and he thus helps us to see that the supposed non-necessity which Mumford and Anjum signal is merely a statistical fact given in outer experience. In order to locate experience of something like a dispositional modality, we must instead focus on our actual experience of tendency, of being inclined, and this, following Ravaisson’s lead, in habit. The third section of the chapter address the limitations in the conception of tendency that Mumford and Anjum inherit from a tradition that goes back to J. S. Mill, in so far as they conceive tendency merely negatively, merely in terms of the interference in and prevention of the normal realization of a process. On this basis, the fourth and final section of the chapter turns to the positive development of their account of tendency in their 2018 What Tends to Be: The Philosophy of Dispositional Modality.⁵

6.1 The ‘Dispositional Modality’ In Getting Causes from Powers, Mumford and Anjum remark—at the risk of confusion—that they use the term disposition in a ‘non-tendential sense’,⁶ which is to say that their account of tendency or being disposed is supposed to characterize all powers as such, and not just a narrow subset of them. They do not proceed by reflecting on a particular subset of powers—on habits as powers, for example—and they do not begin even by focusing on psychological powers. Instead, Getting Causes from Powers begins on the basis of a non-necessitarian conception of causation in general: there is no necessity in causation, they argue, since the typical result of any causal process, such as striking the match on the box to light it, can be prevented by other, external factors, such as rain. In any process, power A—the power of the match head to be lit in conjunction with the movement of my hand— could be present, but the typical production of effect B—the flame—could be interrupted, diverted, or swamped by other factors. The final section of the chapter will return to the historical precedents for this view, but ⁵ Anjum and Mumford, What Tends to Be: The Philosophy of Dispositional Modality (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018). ⁶ Mumford and Anjum, Getting Causes from Powers, p.4.

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Getting Causes from Powers presents the ‘bold thesis’ that ‘the possibility of prevention leaves no room for any kind of necessity in causal production’.⁷ The possibility of B not happening because it is prevented by C or D means that no necessity—logical, metaphysical, or physical—is to be found in the causal process. As Mumford and Anjum also put it, A can be sufficient for the production of B, without it being a sufficient condition of B, i.e. without it necessarily producing B, precisely because external factors can intervene to prevent the occurrence of B. There is no necessity in a causal process, but given the cause A, the effect B is not merely one possibility among others. For Mumford and Anjum, given A, B tends to occur, and they aim to translate this statistical statement into a metaphysics of powers that can ground a theory of causation: powers only tend towards their effects, rather than necessitating them, and as thus tendential, they possess a peculiar, sui generis modality that is irreducible to notions of necessity or possibility. The power to be lit by the striking of the match is manifest in the action of the striking of the match, but this power can be overridden by another, namely the power to extinguish flame belonging to rain; and this shows that power A does not necessarily produce its typical effect. This claim involves a—questionable—distinction between the manifestation of a disposition and its typical effect, and Mumford and Anjum follow George Molnar in holding powers to be polygenic, i.e. to work jointly to produce effects, and pleiotropic, i.e. to make the same contribution whenever manifested.⁸ On this basis, Getting Causes from Powers models causal processes by means of vectors, and this by analogy with forces in classical physics. In the figure below, the central line represents a time slice of a causal process; the individual vectors (the arrows) a, b, c, and d represent the different powers manifesting in a causal situation according to both their intensity (the length of the line) and direction; and the capital letters F and G represent what the vectors are aimed at, namely different effects (say, the match lighting or not lighting) across a unitary quality-space, which is the background against which events can occur.

⁷ Mumford and Anjum, Getting Causes from Powers, p.53. ⁸ See Gorges Molnar, Powers: A Study in Metaphysics, ed. S. Mumford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 194–8 and Mumford and Anjum, Getting Causes from Powers, p.144. The distinction between manifestation and effect is problematic, precisely in that manifestations are now no longer empirically manifest. For criticism of the distinction, see Jennifer McKitrick, ‘Manifestations as Effects’ in A. Marmodoro (ed.), The Metaphysics of Powers: Their Grounding and Manifestation, 73–83.

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a F

b

d

G

c

The varying strength or intensity of the powers, represented by the length of the arrows, can be summed, and thus in this instance a, b, and c combined win out over d, and so the resultant effect will be towards F rather than G, but in a weaker way than if vector d had not interfered with a, b, and c. This is not to say that F will necessarily happen, since another power—power e, say—could intervene to prevent its realization. The overall dispositional situation at the point of time represented by the diagram⁹ only tends towards the production of the effect. The use of vectors to represent powers has been criticized in many ways,¹⁰ but our immediate concern is to determine whether it helps to make intelligible the idea of tendency. Mumford and Anjum’s basic point is that powers in their manifestation do not necessitate an effect, since they can always be overridden by a different vector pointing in a different direction. However, although it is easy to grant that any disposition or cluster of dispositions in given circumstances (D to M in C, in short) can be overridden by another opposing disposition or cluster of dispositions (D to not–M in C), it is more difficult to accept the ontological and modal consequences that Mumford and Anjum claim to be entailed by this. As Troy Cross has remarked,¹¹ the possibility of overriding is just a truth about how vectors are summed, and there is no argument in Getting Causes from Powers for why the summing of vectors operates in anything other than a necessary fashion, according to anything other than the modal category of necessity. On the contrary, Mumford and Anjum seem to presuppose that vectors are ⁹ For Mumford and Anjum’s remarks on the difficulties involved in this time-slice representation of dispositions, see Getting Causes from Powers, p.26. ¹⁰ Mumford and Anjum (Getting Causes from Powers, p.40) discuss Nancy Cartright’s critique of the vector model, but see Luke Glynn’s review of Getting Causes from Powers in Mind 121 (484):1099–106, for a further critical response. ¹¹ See Troy Cross’s Notre Dame Philosophical Review of Mumford and Anjum’s 2010 contribution to The Metaphysics of Powers: Their Grounding and Manifestation. ed. A. Marmodoro (London: Routledge): https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/the-metaphysics-of-powerstheir-grounding-and-their-manifestations-2/, accessed 11 May 2019.

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summed by necessity: the argument that powers do not necessitate their effects because they can be prevented or interfered with by other causes relies on a notion of what necessarily happens when the preventer or interferer is present. Otherwise, Mumford and Anjum would have to admit that exactly the same set of vectors, i.e. exactly the same cluster of dispositions—including the powers disposing to a particular effect as well as those disposing away from it—can produce a particular effect on one occasion but a different effect on others. This admission would make the summing of vectors arbitrary, merely a matter of custom, and would entail a version of the Humean account of causation that Mumford and Anjum officially criticize. There is nothing, it would seem, in the summing of vectors that leads to an idea of tendency irreducible to necessity. Tendency, in other words, cannot be located outside individual powers, according to their interrelation. But can tendency or the ‘dispositional modality’ be located within those individual powers themselves? Mumford and Anjum do not state clearly whether they consider each individual power in and of itself to be a tendency, but when considering the ‘unlikely’ case of a single power—a ‘lonely power’—that manifests without a manifestation partner, and thus without any form of stimulus, they hold that ‘it would dispose towards its manifestation’.¹² Tendency could exist, then, within a particular power, rather than simply in the way that powers interrelate, but nothing in the visual form of the vector, i.e. the arrow, illuminates what this tendency is, and Mumford and Anjum do not expand on the point in Getting Causes from Powers. The vector analysis, as Jennifer McKitrick has underlined, does not describe powers prior to their manifestation but powers in their manifestation (which is not the same as the typical effect). The vectors do not represent as yet unmanifested powers, and Getting Causes from Powers offers no account of how they come to be manifested.¹³ Mumford and Anjum certainly question the ‘ “passivist” view of the world . . . , in which all the sources of animation must come from outside the objects’, and they are tempted to think of powers as ‘released or unleashed rather than only stimulated’. This idea of release or unleashing suggests that a power is somehow, in a Leibnizian sense, a drive internal to a thing trying to push forward towards its manifestation, which will occur if nothing else

¹² Mumford and Anjum, Getting Causes from Powers, p.36. ¹³ See Jennifer McKitrick’s contribution to the Book Symposium ‘Causes as Powers’, Metascience 2013 (DOI: 10.1007/s11016-013-9783-5).

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intervenes; and this explains how a ‘lonely power’ can ‘manifest itself ’.¹⁴ But they offer no means of conceiving how this pushing forward could occur, and it certainly cannot be conceived in terms of their official idea of tendency, which concerns the relation of an already manifested power to others, the possibility that a power can be counteracted by others. Questions about how and whether a power exists prior to its manifestation, and how it comes to its manifestation, fall outside their vector analysis. Mumford and Anjum, then, offer a theory of powers as tendencies to support a non-necessitarian account of causation, but this theory seems to lack positive content in so far as their anti-necessitarian arguments tell us nothing about what the purported dispositional modality ‘actually’ is. They say only what it is not: a tendency is a power that does not necessitate an effect, and it does not because another effect is possible. Certainly, the possibility of a power’s producing its typical effect is more than one possibility amongst a potentially infinite number of equals, more than a mere abstract logical or metaphysical possibility; and that may seem to be a claim with positive content. When Mumford and Anjum attempt to cash the claim out, however, they do so only in terms of statistical regularities and probability: dispositions are ‘reliable, tend to manifest’, and ‘disposed to happen with a non-negligible probability’.¹⁵ With their ‘dispositional modality’, then, Mumford and Anjum are offering a kind of propensity theory of probability without saying anything positive about what propensities or tendencies are. In their later What Tends to Be: The Philosophy of Dispositional Modality, Mumford and Anjum state this explicitly: they prefer a theory where ‘probabilities are determined by singular propensities determined by the intrinsic dispositions of things’, but they do not present anything like a ‘fully developed’ theory of propensity, and rather content themselves with noting that a variety of propensity theories have been advanced in the literature.¹⁶ In the end, it is only because they attempt to explain causation with a realist theory of powers that they can claim that their anti-necessitarian arguments about causation justify their ontological and modal innovation; if powers, understood as real characteristics of things, explain causation understood as irreducible to necessitation, then powers themselves must have ¹⁴ Mumford and Anjum, Getting Causes from Powers, p.37. ¹⁵ Mumford and Anjum, Getting Causes from Powers, p.181. ¹⁶ Mumford and Anjum, What Tends to Be, p. 102. For a survey of different forms of the propensity interpretation of probability, see Donald Gillies, ‘Varieties of Propensity’, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 51 (2000), 807–35.

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a modal value other than necessity. Nevertheless, at this stage of their argument, the idea of the dispositional modality is merely an inference, and an inability to say anything positive about what is being inferred might lead us to question what motivates the inference, namely the explanation of causation in terms of a power realism. Perhaps the ability or capacity of a particular power to be prevented from causing its typical effect by another power is a positive characteristic of the first power, but it is far from obvious how that ability or capacity resembles anything we might understand as a tendency, particularly if, following Thomas Reid, we take ability to be quite different from tendency or inclination. Mumford and Anjum openly discuss the problem of what we can meaningfully say about ‘dispositionality’, and the problem is all the more acute in that, for them, it is the most primitive or basic form of modality in things; it is ‘the core modality from which the other two standard modal operators draw their sense as being limit cases on a spectrum’. Our idea of natural possibility—as distinct from logical possibility—derives from the dispositions that things have, in that for an event to be naturally possible, something must have the disposition to produce that event. When we consider those dispositions whose manifestation is less and less frequent, then ‘we reach the idea of a pure contingency as an ideal, limiting case’. At the other end of the spectrum, our idea of natural necessity—again, as distinct from logical necessity—is an ‘extrapolation’ from an ‘idea of what dependably happens with hardly any exceptions’,¹⁷ and this idea originates in what is disposed or inclined to happen. How, then, to say something concrete and positive about what this primitive, unanalysable and sui generis dispositional modality ‘actually’ is? Chapter 9 of Getting Causes from Powers addresses the question head-on with the claim that dispositionality is known directly from experience, from our own exercise of power. There is a direct experience of power in agency, and the modality of this power is not necessity but rather the ‘dispositional modality’. With the first claim Mumford and Anjum aim—and this is a project they share with a variety of recent philosophers¹⁸—to challenge Hume’s sceptical arguments concerning the experience of causal power in agency. All we experience in agency, Hume claims, is the constant conjunction of a volition with a physical movement that succeeds that volition, and we have no internal impression of an apparent

¹⁷ All three quotations, Mumford and Anjum, Getting Causes from Powers, p.182. ¹⁸ Their eclectic list of twentieth-century philosophers includes Martin Heidegger, Brian O’Shaughnessy, and Tom Baldwin; see Getting Causes from Powers, p.205.

 ‘ ’

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energy or force connecting them—but this sceptical position is built on an ‘implausible’ separation of volition and bodily movement that a ‘reunificationist’ account of agency can overturn.¹⁹ There is, for Mumford and Anjum, a simultaneity of volition and act, and not a precedence of the one in relation to the other. When you will to raise your arm, it is not that ‘you will to raise your arm, and then, sometime later, your arm rises. The temporal priority condition loses all credibility here.’ Wishing to act, in the sense of idle thinking about acting, can certainly precede the act, but genuine willing, they hold, is simultaneous with the bodily movement, and need not ‘be . . . a distinct and observable mental episode’.²⁰ In the experience of resistance—however slight that resistance may be—there is an experience of force or active power, and not just of a conjunction of discrete events; activity and passivity, force and resistance are inseparable. Our sense of proprioception—a sense of effort irreducible to the other five senses—shows, Mumford and Anjum contend, that the two are ‘integrated closely’, such that they are no ordinary, separable relata: lifting an empty box that I thought was heavy, my body adjusts itself immediately to the amount of effort required in order to meet the resistance. Here: the willing and the movements . . . must be an entirely integrated process. It could not be, for instance, that the volition has already been and gone. One could not successfully act it out if it had, because it is only once one has the proprioceptive information available that one knows exactly what must be done.²¹

These brief remarks about agency and proprioception deserve development, but their claim that there is a direct experience of force or power in agency leads to the further claim that this force or power is a sui generis form of modality. Any one of my powers has a ‘limited class of outcomes, out of all those that are merely possible,’²² and yet the realization of a member of this particular class of outcomes is not necessary, precisely because any power can be defeated or prevented from manifesting itself. When, to take their examples—examples whose surreal nature indicates that Mumford and Anjum are imagining experiences in order to defend an already prepared

¹⁹ ²⁰ ²¹ ²²

Both quotations: Mumford and Anjum, Getting Causes from Powers, p.204. Mumford and Anjum, Getting Causes from Powers, p.206. Both quotations: Mumford and Anjum, Getting Causes from Powers, pp.208–9. Mumford and Anjum, Getting Causes from Powers, p.210.

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thesis, rather than drawing a thesis from attention to experience—I try to push over a well-built wall or ‘resist the power of an oncoming train’, our experience shows us that ‘we do not have enough power to overcome some obstacle. Such an experience does not illustrate causal necessitation.’. Things only tend to fall over when I push them, and it is in this supposedly common experience of tendency that we experience the dispositional modality: ‘our actions only dispose or tend towards their outcomes, never guaranteeing them, and everyone knows what this means’.²³ Now, even if we are sympathetic to Mumford and Anjum’s reunificationist sketch of agency, and accept that there is some direct experience of force in voluntary action, this appeal to the allegedly obvious fact of the dispositional modality is hardly convincing. It is hard to see how the appeal to the defeasibility of intentions provides what Mumford and Anjum are explicitly looking for: an account of what the dispositional modality is rather than what it is not. We remain with the idea that the dispositional modality is dispositional because the effect does not have to occur and because it will to some degree probably occur. Certainly, Mumford and Anjum now claim that we have direct epistemological access to a principle that underlies and grounds statistical regularity: we somehow ‘perceive’ or ‘experience’²⁴ the dispositional modality in our actions; we perceive our intentions tending to be realized. But how exactly this proprioceptive perception differs from external sensory perception is never clearly spelled out, and there is still no positive description of what this perception or experience is; each time they attempt to say what it is, they say only what it is not. Notwithstanding their appeal to the obvious, and although they claim that the dispositional modality is ‘the modality with which we are most familiar’,²⁵ in Getting Causes from Powers Mumford and Anjum’s idea of tendency or inclination, i.e. of dispositionality, remains without positive content. Consequently, they seem unable to provide a convincing response to the Humean objection that the only thing I experience concerning the realization of my intentions is the external result of my action. It is hard to defeat the claim that I have a sense that my intended outcome may not be realized only because I know my intentions have in the past occasionally been defeated, and only because of a customary association of the present with the past. Pointing to a supposedly obvious immediate experience that, in the end, has no positive content hardly represents a successful way of challenging such a Humean position. ²³ The last three quotations: Mumford and Anjum, Getting Causes from Powers, p.210. ²⁴ Chapter 9 of Getting Causes from Powers is entitled ‘Perceiving Causes’, and it contains a three-page section entitled ‘Perception and the Dispositional Modality’. ²⁵ Mumford and Anjum, Getting Causes from Powers, p.212.

  ’   

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6.2 Necessity in Biran’s Reunificationist Account of Agency Mumford and Anjum claim that their ‘reunificationist’ conception of agency develops a long tradition going back to Locke, without mentioning Maine de Biran, whose work in the first decades of the nineteenth century represents one of the richest moments of this tradition. We have, of course, already examined many aspects of Biran’s philosophy, but here the aim is to assess his claim that there is, pace Hume, a direct experience of force in agency, a force that he considers to be a force of necessity. This section focuses on the main elements of Biran’s critique of Hume’s sceptical position on agency in the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding as a way of illuminating the French philosopher’s own conception of necessity in agency and, consequently, as a way of evaluating Mumford and Anjum’s claims. Biran develops his critique of Hume at a time when he was just coming into his own as a philosopher—at the time when he was breaking free of the naturalism and sensualism of the Idéologues. This is no accident: Hume presents the most sceptical of all the empiricist treatments of willpower, and Maine de Biran becomes biranien, precisely in showing, contra Hume, that and how awareness of willpower is the fundamental fact, le fait primitif, of all consciousness. Biran first sketches his critique in his 1805 Mémoire sur la décomposition de la pensée, his second winning entry to a competition organized by the Académie des sciences morales et politiques. It is developed in his next significant work, the 1807 On Immediate Apperception, his winning entry to a competition organized by the Academy of Berlin on the question of whether we have an immediate, non-sensory knowledge of self. Both of these texts remained unpublished, but Biran’s critique of Hume was so important to his philosophical enterprise that in 1817 he actually decided to publish a version of it. This is remarkable because Biran published little and was always involved in endless attempts to write and rewrite a masterwork. In 1817, Biran added as an appendix to his ‘Examen des Leçons de philosophie de M. Laromiguière’, his essay ‘Hume’s Opinion on the Nature and Origin of Causality’.²⁶

²⁶ Maine de Biran, Œuvres vol. XI-2, Commentaires et marginalia; dix-huitième siècle, ed. B. Baertschi, Paris: Vrin, 1993: ‘Opinion de Hume sur la nature et l’origine de la notion de causalité’, 37–49. An earlier version of the essay is available as ‘Examen des doutes de Hume sur l’idée de pouvoir, d’énergie et de liaison nécessaire, et sur l’origine que peut avoir cette idée dans le sentiment interne de l’effort, ou du pouvoir efficace de la volonté dans les mouvements du corps’, 3–31.

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Biran takes up several points of Hume’s analysis in Section VII of the Scottish philosopher’s first Enquiry in order to unveil and rebut the presuppositions that underlie it. Here I address three key moments of Hume’s analysis and Biran’s response to them. First, Hume sets up his analysis of ‘the influence of volition over the organs of the body’ with the claim that ‘this influence is a fact, which, like other natural events, can be known only by experience’.²⁷ Strangely, Hume begins his analysis by admitting what he will go on to deny, namely that the influence of the will on the body is a fact, and he denies it by treating the relation between the will and the body as akin to the relation between two external objects between which the necessary connection is not present in experience. Maine de Biran responds thus: ‘That this is a fact is already enough for us; but is it a fact of experience of the same order as the other operations of external nature? I deny the equivalence.’²⁸ Hume considers inner experience on the model of outer experience and the relations between objects, and this approach is integral to his claim to offer a ‘Newtonian’ science of the mind turning a Baconian inductive method proper to the modern natural sciences to the advantage of psychology. This approach, for Biran, is a ‘naturalistic’, reifying, and unjustified presupposition that deforms the entirety of Hume’s analysis. The difference between inner and outer experience is, for Biran, radical, and conscious experience must be considered from a genuinely first-person perspective. As he puts it later in the work that most resembles the masterwork that he wanted to write, the Essai sur les fondements de la psychologie, written mostly in 1814–15: To look inside oneself, to reflect, is not to look outside oneself or to represent objects. In assimilating the value of the data or laws of internal experience, Hume gives up, from the outset, on finding what he is looking for, or rather he doesn’t want to find anything, and deliberately blocks out the light.²⁹

For Biran, we know of the ‘fact’ of effort, of the influence of the will on the body, not by means of perception, by what Hume terms ‘experience’, but rather by an ‘immediate apperception’, a form of awareness that is wholly ²⁷ Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 7.10. ²⁸ De l’aperception immédiate, p.119. ²⁹ Biran, Œuvres VII, Essai sur les fondements de la psychologie, ed. F. C. T. Moore (Paris: Vrin, 2001), p.165.

  ’   

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different from objective knowledge. To have failed to recognize the epistemological distinction between these different modes of knowledge is Hume’s original sin. This sin allows Hume to claim that ‘this influence’ of mind on body ‘can never be foreseen from any apparent energy or power in the cause, which connects it with the effect, and renders the one an infallible consequence of the other’.³⁰ In separating volition from the subsequent movement, Hume’s position is that we have no experience of a causal relation or necessary connexion underlying the temporal succession of the two terms. Just as we experience, to follow Hume’s classic example, the white ball hitting the red ball on the billiard table, and the red ball consequently moving, but without experiencing any causal connexion or transfer of energy between the two, so too in the experience of voluntary bodily movement there is one event, the volition followed in time by another event, the physical movement, without any experience of the former having caused the latter. This is often taken to be the point where his construal of agency is at its most implausible. It would seem that action thus amounts to willing—a willing that is really no more than a wishing—and then somehow waiting for a movement to occur. Biran draws from this implausibility a fundamental lesson concerning causation as such: ‘the relation of causality is wholly different from that of succession’.³¹ The presupposition that causality, if it exists, must be a matter of succession or a sequence is another unjustifiable motivation for the scepticism Hume professes. The causal force or power in our action is not prior to the effect, but is rather present in it: ‘the energy internal to the cause . . . is directly felt in the effect or the movement produced’.³² It is felt— apperceived—exactly when the movement is produced, and not beforehand; anything that occurs beforehand would not be a volition, an act of will, but rather a mere wish. Biran thus denies one of the essential elements of Hume’s analysis of causation: a necessary condition of A causing B, as Hume famously argues in A Treatise of Human Nature, is that B immediately succeeds A.³³ Mumford and Anjum, we should note, also replace succession with simultaneity in their analysis of causation, but they find causal simultaneity in worldly causal relations and not just in the relation between the will and bodily movement—the magnet, to offer one ³⁰ Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 7.10. ³¹ Biran, De l’aperception immédiate, p.117. ³² Biran, De l’aperception immédiate, p.119. ³³ David Hume, Treatise of Human Nature 1.3.14, ed. D. Norton and M. J. Norton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

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of their examples, is certainly causing the piece of paper to remain on the fridge door, but it is not causing it to remain on the door before it remains on the door, but rather at the same time.³⁴ Biran, in contrast, contents himself with the Humean sceptical claim that if worldly, body-to-body causation exists, we have no epistemological access to it, and seems not to ask whether body-to-body causation is simultaneous like agential causation. In this regard, Mumford and Anjum’s arguments represent a significant development in relation to Biran’s position. The third moment in Hume’s analysis that Biran attacks concerns our knowledge of the alleged process through which volition affects the body: ‘we are so far from being immediately conscious’ of how the mind affects the body, argues Hume, ‘that it must forever escape our most diligent enquiry’.³⁵ Hume does not deny, to be sure, that we have an experience of effort, but he does deny that we have any knowledge of how this is related to its effect.³⁶ We know neither why only some of our bodily organs can be directed by the ‘soul’ nor how the soul affects the parts that it can direct, particularly when we consider what ‘we learn from anatomy’, namely ‘that the immediate object of power in voluntary motion is not the member itself which is moved, but certain muscles, and nerves, and animal spirits, and, perhaps, something still more minute and unknown’.³⁷ We might think we feel an immediate power to move our limbs, but in physiological reality our will does not have to act on the limb as a whole, but rather on a host of intermediaries, beginning with the brain—and we have no immediate experience of this. Biran responds first by attacking the claim that we have to know how the will moves the body in order for us to know directly that it moves the body.³⁸ We may as well claim, Biran argues, that we can see only if we know the physiological processes according to which we see, which is absurd. Moreover, to know and explain how the soul moves the body in the way demanded would amount to presenting an ‘external image or representation’³⁹ of the relation of two separate entities—and such picture-thinking ³⁴ See ‘Simultaneity’, Chapter 5 of Getting Causes from Powers. ³⁵ Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 7.10. ³⁶ Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 7.15 n. 13. ³⁷ Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 7.14. ³⁸ When Edward Craig holds that with this argument Hume employs a ‘gratuitously strong condition’ (‘The Idea of Necessary Connexion’ in Reading Hume on Human Understanding, ed. P. Millican, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, 211–29, 216) for the possibility of discovering power in voluntary agency, he echoes Biran’s claim that what Hume ‘advances in the form of an incontestable argument is a purely gratuitous hypothesis’ (Œuvres vol. XI-2, Commentaires et marginalia; dix-huitième siècle, p.7). ³⁹ Biran, Commentaires et marginalia; dix-huitième siècle, p.7.

  ’   

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can only obscure the primitive, inexplicable fact of voluntary consciousness as given in immediate apperception. To worry that we have no knowledge of the causal process though which volition affects the body is to presuppose that it is a process in the sense of a relation between two distinguishable events; and this worry presupposes Hume’s first two assertions, namely that we know of agency as we know of external objects, and that causation is successive. This resistance to Hume’s scepticism gives rise to another key philosophical breakthrough: to claim that there is no interval, no process between my volition and the movement of my body, is to claim that I move my body directly; that I do not act on it, as it were, from the ‘outside’. This makes sense only in distinguishing my primary experience of the body as it is given to me pre-objectively in internal apperception from the secondary physiological object that my doctor may examine. It requires a distinction between, in Maine de Biran’s words, le corps propre, my own body or the lived body, and the body as object. There is a difference: between the images that the anatomist or the philosopher makes of the different positions of the organs, or of their play in a phenomenon such as muscular contraction, and the feeling that the individual has of these produced contractions, or of the power that effectuates them in a freely determined effort, . . . between the objective secondary knowledge of the external parts of his body that the individual acquires successively in surveying them by sight and touch and the necessary internal knowledge of the parts subject to the same will.⁴⁰

In moving my arm I do not occasion in my brain a chain of causal events that terminates with the displacement of the arm. I move my hand immediately, and I can do so because my hand belongs to my lived body. Biran does not deny that objective neurological processes unknown to the agent occur in action, but his point is that these processes are not the means by which the agent moves her own body. Maine de Biran’s basic philosophical position, which he will refine in several failed attempts to write a masterwork, is this: there is an immediate apperception of power in its unity with resistance, and the primary resistant term is not the body as anatomical object, but rather the body as le corps

⁴⁰ Biran, De l’aperception immédiate, pp.120–1.

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propre. The most fundamental or ‘primitive fact [fait primitif]’ of consciousness is the unity in duality of will and resistance: will is what it is only in relation to resistance, and vice versa. This entails that if volition is actually present, then by necessity the intended bodily movement occurs; ‘the only necessary link [liaison] is that which originally takes place between a living force and a resistance or inertia that is overcome’.⁴¹ This is not a necessary connexion between two things, but it is necessity none the less: when I will to raise my arm, my arm by necessity rises. I might find myself in a strait jacket, but I can still effect minimal movement and tension in my arm. On this basis, Biran can claim that when Hume concludes that ‘our idea of power is not copied from any sentiment or consciousness of power within ourselves, when we give rise to animal motion, or apply our limbs to their proper use and office’, Biran responds that he is insufficiently attentive to experience, and, in the end, denying an evident fact.⁴² Untested presuppositions and naturalistic theories have occluded the unity—a peculiar unity in duality—of agency. Biran has a good case against Hume, but he has, I contend, an even stronger case against Mumford and Anjum’s own anti-Humean claims. Getting Causes from Powers argues that Hume was looking for the wrong thing in searching for necessity in causation, and that the distinct modal value of agency is the dispositional modality. To Mumford and Anjum’s appeal to the phenomena of failure and prevention, Biran would object that they have failed to recognize ‘what distinguishes the primitive facts furnished by inner experience from the secondary or derived facts that habit alone or repeated induction can erect as laws of nature’.⁴³ The realization of my intentions, as Hume had already argued, is a matter of external fact, a matter of objective experience, and I have a sense of whether my intention is likely to be realized before I realize it only through having tried such a thing in the past. In any action, my intention, of course, may fail, and, to follow Mumford and Anjum’s strange example, I may not be able to push over the wall as I intend; but this takes nothing away from the primary or primitive necessity of my will having an immediate effect on my body. Playing pool, ⁴¹ Biran, De l’aperception immédiate, p.120. ⁴² Hume, Enquiry Concenring Human Understanding, 7.15. Ultimately, such a denial cannot be met with an argument, as Biran will write in the Essai sur les fondements de la psychologie: ‘What should we say to someone who denies a visible or tangible fact? Perhaps nothing. We should only make him see or touch what he denies, and if he persists in saying that his senses lead him into error, all discussion will end there’; Maine de Biran, Œuvres vol. VII, Essai sur les fondements de la psychologie, ed. F. C. T. Moore, Paris: Vrin, 2001, p.165. ⁴³ Biran, Œuvres vol. XI-2, Commentaires et marginalia; dix-huitième siècle, p.8.

   

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I intend to pot the black, and if I am in the habit of playing, then it is, perhaps, likely but by no means certain that I will succeed; but if I do try to pot the black, i.e. if there is effort, my will necessarily has an effect on my body. Maine de Biran helps us to see that Mumford and Anjum base their analysis on a secondary phenomenon that is given only in objective or ‘external’ experience. Small wonder, then, that their claims concerning a direct experience of the dispositional modality in the experience of agency are not convincing—they attempt to persuade us that we have an inner, proprioceptive experience of an aspect of action that is only given in outer experience. Biran’s approach allows us to recognize that Mumford and Anjum make an unjustifiable claim about the dispositional modality by passing over a more fundamental or primitive modality of powers.

6.3 On Prevention and Interference Maine de Biran offers compelling arguments against Hume’s sceptical construal of agency, but he also leads us to see that the defeasibility of intentions has no bearing on the necessity in voluntary action, a necessity that binds volition to bodily movement. Mumford and Anjum ignore this form of necessity when they claim that we have a proprioceptive experience of a non-necessity in voluntary agency, but we could never have an inner, proprioceptive experience of the non-necessity that they describe. That nonnecessity—the non-necessity in the realization of intentions—is merely an empirical, statistical fact, and is not given in any inner experience of apperception or proprioception. Still, Mumford and Anjum’s notion that tendency or inclination is a sui generis modality is, I think, salutary, one that can prevent us falling back, as Ravaisson clearly does in 1867, on an idea of necessity (of ‘moral necessity’) when attempting to understand the modal status of tendency and inclination. Ravaisson can accommodate, and in fact has already given voice to, Mumford and Anjum’s idea that the dispositional modality forms a spectrum at the ends of which stand necessity and possibility as limit cases. There is, of course, a fundamental difference in these two conceptions of tendency as possessing a spectral modal status all of its own: Ravaisson conceives of the spectrum as spanning the distance between motives and volition. The agent, argues Ravaisson, is increasingly inclined to pursue a perceived good the more that the action has become habitual; but this inclination is the prior condition of volition. Mumford and Anjum, in

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contrast, conceive of the spectrum as bridging the gap between volition and the subsequent realization of intentions. However, because there is—despite their appeals to the obvious—no positive experience of this non-necessity available in agency, their conception of tendency is and remains merely negative: it is conceived merely in terms of the typical realization of powers being not necessary and not just possible. In short, Mumford and Anjum attempt to find something positive in failure, but fail to do so, whereas Ravaisson points us to a direct, positive experience of being, as it were, carried away by an inclination in the acquisition of a habit. Ravaisson’s approach shows that if we are searching for the experience of a modality other than necessity, then we have to look towards our actual experience of tendencies as pre-voluntary principles of action. Reflection on purely voluntary action will not provide what we are looking for. Maine de Biran argued that in effort there is a direct apperception of the force of the will in its unity with resistance, and Ravaisson develops Biran’s position by arguing that in the decline of effort in the acquisition of a habit there is an apperception of this voluntary force becoming less and less voluntary, and more and more of a tendency. Interestingly, at one stage in their argument, Mumford and Anjum criticize ‘volitionism’ and its improbable assertion that all bodily movements—when, for example, playing football or driving a car— are governed by particular and preceding acts of will. They suppose that it is not ‘necessary for an act to be intentional’,⁴⁴ which is to say that in action there is a form of intelligence that cannot be reduced to explicit, discrete acts of mind. Unfortunately, they do not develop this point by offering a phenomenology of skilled or habitual experience, and they do not illuminate the difference between power or capacities in general and tendencies or inclinations in particular. But if, following Ravaisson, we begin inquiries in the metaphysics of powers with inclinations in this narrow sense, we do not, to be sure, have to remain within the confines of a philosophy of only a particular subset of powers, at least not when we accept his claim—one that Mumford and Anjum may well approve—that all dispositions, even the least tendential of capacities, are to some degree a function of being inclined. Rather than offer a genuine phenomenology of tendency in agency, Mumford and Anjum import a notion of tendency as the possibility of prevention and interference from a tradition concerned with physics rather than psychology, a tradition that goes back to J. S. Mill at least. As they admit, their ‘innovation’ concerning the ‘dispositional modality’ amounts to ⁴⁴ Mumford and Anjum, Getting Causes from Powers, p.205.

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‘the reassertion of a very old innovation’,⁴⁵ and returning to some of their sources brings into focus the limitations of their own position. Mill writes this about tendencies: If, for instance, it were stated a law of nature that a body to which a force is applied moves in the direction of the force, with a velocity proportioned to the force directly, and to its own mass inversely; when in point of fact some bodies to which force is applied do not move at all, and those which do move (at least in the region of the earth) are, from the very first, retarded by the action of gravity and other resisting forces, and at the last stopped altogether; it is clear that the general proposition, though it would be true under a certain hypothesis, would not express the facts as they occur. To accommodate the expression of the law to the real phenomena, we must say, not that the object moves, but that it tends to move in the direction and with the velocity specified. We might, indeed, guard our expression in a different mode, by saying that the body moves in that manner unless prevented, or except in so far as prevented, by some counteracting cause, but the body does not only move in that manner unless counteracted; it tends to move in that manner even when counteracted; it still exerts, in the original direction, the same energy of movement as if the first impulse had been undisturbed . . . . These facts are correctly indicated by the expression tendency. All laws of causation, in consequence of their liability to be counteracted, require to be stated in words affirmative of tendencies only, and not of actual results.⁴⁶

That the basket of a functioning hot-air balloon does not fall is an exception to the law according to which heavy bodies fall to the ground. On Mill’s view of science, however, laws can tolerate no exceptions. For this reason, he rejects any conception of laws as true only under a ‘certain hypothesis’, and subject to a ceteris paribus qualification: a body falls all other things being equal, and that is to say, if no other forces act on it that prevent or interfere with its fall. Scientific laws, for Mill, would thus have no real hold in the empirical world, where usually other things are not equal. Hence, the law should be expressed in terms of things tending to fall.⁴⁷ But ⁴⁵ All three quotations: Getting Causes from Powers, viii. ⁴⁶ J. S. Mill, ‘On the Definition of Political Economy and on the Method of Investigation Proper to It’ in Collected Works, vol. IV, 309–39, pp.337–8. ⁴⁷ J. S. Mill, A System of Logic Ratiocinative and Inductive (1872), Book III, ch. 10, §5, in Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, ed. J. M. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973), vol. VII, p.445. ‘With regard to exceptions in any tolerably advanced science, there is

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Mill goes one step further with an idea of tendency: he does not content himself with the idea that laws express statistical regularities, what usually happens rather than what always happens, for his more metaphysical idea is that laws express forces or capacities that produce the statistical regularity. In this sense, force is already, whether counteracted or not, tendency. So Mill wants to incorporate the irregular empirical realization of laws into the formulation of laws themselves, since he cannot tolerate laws having exceptions due to interference and prevention. In order to do this he claims, that tendencies as naming patchy or ‘gappy’ empirical phenomena can be explained by capacities or forces—‘tendencies’—tending in a certain direction towards a goal. This is what Mill means when he writes that the body ‘tends to move in that manner even when counteracted; it still exerts, in the original direction, the same energy of movement as if the first impulse had been undisturbed’. Mill is not saying that sometimes the body moves when it is not moving, but rather that it is somehow exerting a force that would result in its typical movement were the brakes—i.e. counteracting forces—taken off it. As Nancy Cartwright puts it, Mill is thus ‘ready to distinguish laws about tendencies, i.e. fixed capacities, from the more common idea of tendency laws, i.e. laws that say what tends to happen, or happens for the most part’.⁴⁸ He postulates the former in order to explain the latter. Cartwright’s translation of Mill’s tendencies as ‘fixed capacities’, however, indicates that this conception of ‘tendency’ hardly requires any grand modal innovation. Mill’s powerful tendencies, it seems, operate according to conditional necessity in that the power will manifest, i.e. will necessarily manifest, unless another power comes to intervene. Mill is not prepared to accept that laws have exceptions and are subject to ceteris paribus conditions, but the idea of a tendency towards that he invokes in order to explain that things, in a statistical sense, tend to happen in a certain way is indistinguishable from a force having the modal value of conditional necessity. It is hardly surprising, as Mumford and Anjum acknowledge, that ‘elsewhere in the same work he leans more towards a necessitarian outlook, when all factors are taken into account’.⁴⁹ Mill defines a notion of ‘total cause’ thus:

properly no such thing as an exception. What is thought to be an exception to a principle is always some other and distinct principle cutting into the former.’ ⁴⁸ Nancy Cartwright, Nature’s Capacities (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), p.178. ⁴⁹ Mumford and Anjum, What Tends to Be, p.42.

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The cause, then, philosophically speaking, is the sum total of the conditions positive and negative taken together; the whole of the contingencies of every description, which being realised, the consequent invariably follows.⁵⁰

This seems, indeed, to express a conditional necessity view of causation: the consequent ‘invariably’, i.e. necessarily, follows when everything is in place, i.e. ceteris paribus. Mill’s tendencies towards are really necessities. Moreover, in themselves, individually, they cannot explain the liability of empirical laws to be counteracted, since counteraction supposes the interaction of different tendencies; and Mill gives us no reason to think that this interaction could occur according to anything other than invariable laws. The problem here is not, pace Champlin, that Mill ‘failed to observe’ the ‘distinction between a tendency in a certain direction and tendency to do something’, which are different not only syntactically—since ‘tend towards’ is followed by a noun, whereas ‘tend to’ is followed by an infinitive—but also ‘separate in meaning and not logically connected’.⁵¹ When Mill writes, as we saw above, that ‘the body does not only move in that manner unless counteracted; it tends to move in that manner even when counteracted; it still exerts, in the original direction, the same energy of movement’, he may seem to use the locution ‘tend to’ oddly, when ‘tend towards movement’ would have been more appropriate. This use of ‘tend to’—as we saw above in Chapter 1 with reference to Descartes’s Le Monde—relies on an original etymological sense of the verb as an endeavour or trying, and thus it relies on the fact that ‘tend to’ already implies the idea of ‘tending towards’ something, at least if the latter phrase is understood not just in the empirical sense of moving in a certain direction, but as naming a kind of effort and force. The two expressions can be logically connected in that the one can explain the other: the force that is a tending towards in Mill’s sense can explain, at least in conjunction with other forces, a gappy, patchy statistical reality.⁵² But here we approach the real problem of Mill’s analysis: a tendency towards something, conceived in a positive sense as a drive internal to the thing,

⁵⁰ J. S. Mill, System of Logic (Longmans: London, 1925), III, v, 3, p.217. ⁵¹ Champlin, ‘Tendencies’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 91 (1991) 119–33, p.123. ⁵² As Champlin acknowledges: what makes it easy to overlook this distinction is that often, where there is a tendency towards something, especially if the tendency is not pronounced, there will be a tendency for something to occur which is correlated with the tendency towards something; for example, if new housing in Britain tends towards the traditional it will tend to be made of bricks. Champlin, ‘Tendencies’, p.124

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cannot in isolation explain a tendency to do something, since counteracting forces are necessary to account for the patchy statistical performance. The instances when a power does not produce its typical effect can be accounted for in terms of that power being overridden by another power. If there are no counteracting forces, a tendency will by necessity produce its typical effect. There is, then, nothing in Mill’s notion of tendencies that can license the claim that tendency has its own modal status that is irreducible to necessity. In addition to Mill, Mumford and Anjum acknowledge the influence of Elizabeth Anscombe and Peter Geach. The former concluded her inaugural lecture ‘Causality and Determination’ with the remark that the ‘most neglected of the key topics in this subject are: interference and prevention’, while the latter recognized that any causal ‘uniformity is defeasible by interference or prevention’.⁵³ Mumford and Anjum also respond to Daniel von Wachter’s 2003 ‘The Tendency Theory of Causation’, which deliberately develops Anscombe and Geach’s suggestions by interpreting not just law but also causation according to an idea of tendency. Von Wachter proposes ‘a non-Humean theory of causation with “tendencies” as causal connections’. ‘We should’, he argues, ‘stop saying that causes are sufficient for (or “necessitate”) their effects,’⁵⁴ because whether the cause produces its effect depends on whether or not something else intervenes. That itself: depends on whether there are things around that can and do intervene, for example non-living things, animals, ghosts, gods, etc. That nothing intervenes is therefore not a fact about the nature of the cause, and therefore it is in no sense true to say about a cause that it is sufficient for its effect.

Von Wachter, like his predecessors, makes his notion of tendency dependent on the possibility of prevention and interference: there is nothing in the nature of a cause taken on its own that shows that it will necessitate its effect, and this because of the possibility of intervention. The effect only tends to occur, and the relation between cause and effect can be ‘best explained by assuming the existence of tendencies’ rather than necessities, with tendency understood as ‘a bias of the world toward carrying on in a certain way’. At time t1 there is a tendency towards state S at t2, if ‘S is a state ⁵³ Elizabeth Anscombe, ‘Causality and Determination’ in Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981), 133–47, p.147, and Peter Geach, ‘Aquinas’ in G. E. M. Anscombe and P. T. Geach, Three Philosophers (Oxford: Blackwell, 1961), 65–125, p.103. ⁵⁴ Von Wachter, ‘The Tendency Theory of Causation’, https://epub.ub.uni-muenchen.de/ 10628/1/wachter-tendency-th-1.pdf, p.21 (accessed 12 May 2019).

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of affairs that came about if things developed according to the tendency’.⁵⁵ If this is a definition of ‘tendency’, it is obviously circular, but tendency is here, again, a tendency towards that can be counteracted by other tendencies. As a ‘bias’, it is a kind of force that will attain its realization unless a counteracting force comes to impede its realization. In fact, von Wachter explicitly considers classical Newtonian forces as tendencies. He invokes forces to explain the nonnecessary nature of causation, but, like Mill, he gives us no reason to think that forces interact according to anything other than conditionally necessary laws. After von Wachter, Mumford and Anjum’s major innovation, in grounding a tendency theory of causation in a metaphysics of powers, consists in the claim that tending towards has its own modal value irreducible to any idea of necessity, even of conditional necessity. However, as we have argued, this is a claim that they cannot justify, in so far as they too consider tendency merely according to the possibility of prevention and interference. Mumford and Anjum complain that their forebears fall back into a notion of conditional necessity, but in the end, the dispute is merely a dispute about words: the tendency that they term the dispositional modality is exactly what their forebears would have been happy to consider as a conditional necessity.⁵⁶ The dispute is about words and not a dispute about tendencies in so far as all parties agree with Mill that tendencies are tendencies towards whose tendential nature consists in a capacity to be counteracted. Hence when Anna Marmodoro objects to Mumford and Anjum that a conditional necessity view can account for the ‘modality of dispositions’, all parties agree, in truth, on the fundamentals.⁵⁷

6.4 Tendency beyond Conditional Necessity In their recently published What Tends to Be: The Philosophy of Dispositional Modality, Anjum and Mumford have developed their position in

⁵⁵ Daniel von Wachter, ‘The Tendency Theory of Causation’. The four quotations: p.1, p.9, p.11, and p.11 respectively. ⁵⁶ See ‘The History’ in Anjum and Mumford, What Tends to Be. Mumford and Anjum do not explore Ravaisson’s work or nineteenth-century French philosophy more generally, but they do have a faint link to it: they acknowledge (Getting Causes from Powers, ix) that their ideas concerning tendency owe much to A. N. Whitehead, whose ideas in this regard were influenced by Bergson, who, of course, was profoundly influenced by Ravaisson. ⁵⁷ Anna Marmodoro, ‘Aristotelian Powers at Work’, in Causal Powers, ed. J. Jacobs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017, 57–76), p.68. See also Marmodoro, ‘Dispositional Modality visà-vis Conditional Necessity’, Philosophical Investigations 39/3 (2016) 205–14.

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response to critics. Now they distinguish between an ‘external’ and ‘internal’ principle of tendency, which together constitute a ‘deeply tendential’ notion of tendencies.⁵⁸ They add, that is, a stronger notion of tendency to the one that they had already defended in Getting Causes from Powers. Although they now acknowledge that the official sense of tendency advanced in the 2011 book is, indeed, external, and although their claims about a direct experience of the dispositional modality in agency do not feature in the new book, they do not retract their basic claims about tendency and the possibility of prevention. In fact, they respond to the argument presented in this chapter (and initially in a 2015 article) that the possibility of prevention cannot lend a positive sense to the idea of tendency thus: The external principle of tendency is not only saying that causes do not necessitate their effects. If it only said that, we would be subject to Sinclair’s (2015) objection that we fail to say what the dispositional modality is: we only say what it is not. The external principle contains the positive component of a cause that typically has an effect, which is what Glynn (2012) identified as the directedness component of the dispositional modality. Causes are for their effects: they dispose towards their manifestations where, as we said, disposing is less than necessity and more than pure contingency.⁵⁹

The positive component of the external idea of tendency is, then, that the cause typically has an effect. This is a statistical, empirical expression of what they take to be the directedness of forces as tendencies. But the idea of directedness adds nothing to the traditional idea of force as a conditional necessity. One can hold a conditional necessity view of tendencies, of course, and happily admit that they are ‘directed’ towards certain outcomes. So ‘directedness’ does not provide any additional positive content to the idea of the dispositional modality, and in concluding the paragraph the authors again have to resort to saying what the dispositional modality is not (‘it is less than necessity and more than pure contingency’) in an attempt to specify it. Even more tellingly, one passage of What Tends to Be implicitly acknowledges that an external notion of tendency as the possibility of prevention cannot justify their modal innovation: Mill’s claim that a body ‘will move

⁵⁸ Anjum and Mumford, What Tends to Be, p.42. ⁵⁹ Anjum and Mumford, What Tends to Be, p.13.

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unless prevented looks like some concession towards a conditional necessity view’⁶⁰ of tendency. Indeed it does, but this response to Mill implies that a non-conditional necessity view of tendency will have to see in tendency something more than the possibility of prevention and interference. This is exactly what Anjum and Mumford achieve with their new, internal notion of tendency, which turns their ‘tendential view into a deeply tendential one’.⁶¹ According to this internal principle, ‘when there is a tendency towards E, without anything necessitating that it is so, E can be produced. It also means that there can be a tendency towards E, and yet E is nevertheless not produced, even though nothing was stopping it.’ Now the issue is not just the possibility of prevention, but a force internal to something that can: (1) produce an effect without necessitating the latter; and (2) not come to its manifestation even though nothing was stopping it. It is not clear that (1) does more than restate the external principle of tendency, particularly if we take non-necessitation to be constituted by the possibility of prevention. If Anjum and Mumford mean something else by ‘without necessitating’, they need to say what it is. However, (2) is genuinely informative: a strong notion of tendency, if it is not to be reduced to a notion of conditional necessity, will have to consider a tendency as a force that may not come to its manifestation for no other reason than it does not. ‘The deeply tendential view’ that they offer ‘suggests . . . that the conditions can be non-trivially right for a certain effect, but that the effect still does not occur’.⁶² This is not to say that anything can happen, at any time, and that pure contingency has replaced pure necessity, but only that the force or power in its manifestation is intrinsically and primitively a function of tendency rather than necessity, such that two particulars of identical kinds will not have to respond in the same way to exactly the same circumstances. As Anjum and Mumford argue, this notion of internal tendency can ground the common interpretation of radioactive decay as an intrinsically probabilistic process in which there is nothing necessitating that the atom decay at any particular moment in time.⁶³ Here Anjum and Mumford finally arrive at a notion of tendency irreducible to conditional necessity. This is a crucial development, and it helps to illuminate Ravaisson’s own position. It is significant in this connection that, despite his flirtation with an idea of moral necessity, Ravaisson never

⁶⁰ ⁶¹ ⁶² ⁶³

Anjum and Mumford, What Tends to Be, p.42. Anjum and Mumford, What Tends to Be, p.17. Anjum and Mumford, What Tends to Be, p.18. Anjum and Mumford, What Tends to Be, p.19.

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explicitly endorses a conditional necessity conception of tendency. He never explicitly endorses the idea of tendency as a power that will come to its manifestation unless something else prevents it from manifesting itself. He does not endorse this classical view even when discussing and appropriating, as we saw in Chapter 1, Leibniz’s conception of force as tendency. Leibniz, recall, accounted for active force as: (1) a force that can pass into action without external stimulation; and (2) a force that will pass into action unless something prevents it. Ravaisson endorses (1) but not (2), and this, I think, is no accident. For him, the force of habit does not have to pass into action even when nothing prevents it from doing so, and existence does not consist of a clash of brute necessities, with only the strongest among them winning the battle to manifest. Existence, on his account, as we have seen, is a form of natural spontaneity and relatively effortless grace. Despite his all too official pronouncements in 1867, this spontaneity, grace, and inclination are irreducible to any form of necessitation. The attraction and desire gained in the acquisition of a habit, of which we have, Ravaisson argues, a direct experience as continuous with but irreducible to the will, are not the force of an absolute compulsion leading unfailingly to an attempt to realize its goal. In a 2017 paper ‘Habit and Intention’, Christos Douskos apprehends something of this contingency in habit. He writes that ‘if S is in the habit of a-ing in C’—where C names particular circumstances or stimulus conditions, S, the subject with the habit, and a the habitual action—‘then S is likely to undertake a when circumstances C obtain’. In other words, ‘habit does not necessitate its manifestation when the relevant circumstances obtain’, and thus ‘the modal force of a habit ascription is not that of a conditional “If C obtains, S a-s” ’, i.e. when C, S does a.⁶⁴ The manifestation of a habit never has to occur, even if it is not prevented from manifesting, and thus no conditional analysis of dispositions describing what happens in certain circumstances can adequately account for the force of habit. But we have to be clear about the reason for the inadequacy of any conditional analysis of habit ascriptions: it is not because habits, like other powers or dispositions, can be interfered with in the sense of being masked or finked.⁶⁵ Habits—in a strong sense of the term that Douskos contrasts with skills, and as providing an explanation of an action—falsify conditional analyses for another more ⁶⁴ Douskos, ‘Habit and Intention’, Philosophia 45/3 (2017) 1129–48, p.1133. ⁶⁵ See C. B. Martin, ‘Dispositions and Conditionals’, The Philosophical Quarterly 44/174 (1994) 1–8.

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fundamental and more internal reason: the manifestation of a habit does not have to occur, and it may not for no other reason than that it does not. This we have to understand as a primitive, inexplicable fact of tendency and inclination. Is this not, perhaps, what David Hume had some intuition of when in A Treatise of Human Nature he characterizes the force of habit operative in the association of ideas, the force of habit that he describes as a proneness or propensity, as a ‘gentle force, which commonly prevails’?⁶⁶ There may well be a difference, that is, between a gentle force and a weak force. Is the association of ideas ever really a function of necessity, even a conditional necessity? When someone says ‘strawberries’, is it really necessary that I think of cream? Will I always think of cream unless something else stops me doing so? Do I not just tend to think of cream, in a sense which is just primitive? If so, Hume’s attempt to discover the origin of the idea of necessary connection in the association of ideas will fail. He would have been trying, fruitlessly, to ground an idea of necessity in tendency, which is something quite different. Douskos does not go this far, and does not recognize the significance of his own insights. For in the same footnote he contents himself with the observation that the ‘modal force’ of habit is ‘best conveyed by a habitual sentence’. In linguistics, habitual sentences are those in the present simple tense that state general facts (‘It rains in Manchester’), in contrast to episodic sentences that refer to specific events (‘It rained in Manchester yesterday’). ‘Habituals’ do not necessarily ascribe anything that we would obviously consider as a habit to their subjects, but rather describe events across the whole range of a statistical, frequential spectrum: ‘Water boils at 100 degrees centigrade’ is true all the time; ‘I drink wine with my evening meal’ is true, arguably, if I usually drink wine with my evening meal; ‘Alfred builds houses’ is true if he has built at least one house, and is still true if Alfred does not habitually build houses; and ‘Mary handles the mail from Antartica’ can be true even if she has never handled any mail from Antartica at all. The semantics of habitual sentences is controversial, but their truth, as Fara has argued in ‘Dispositions and Habituals’, seems to tolerate permissible exceptions: it is still true that I drink wine with my evening meal, even though occasionally there is no wine left in the rack and I drink water. On this basis, however, we can see what is wrong with Douskos’s approach, and

⁶⁶ David Hume, Treatise of Human Nature 1.1.4, ed. D. Norton and M. J. Norton, p.12.

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why it undermines his own attempt to distinguish habits from skills: attempting to account for the modal force of habits in terms of habituals is to account for habits in terms of what they are not, or, at least, in terms of what is much weaker than them. Certainly, habituals can describe habits, and when they do, they seem to carry an implicit sense of tending to do something, or being inclined to do it: ‘I drink with my evening meal’ can be just shorthand for ‘I tend to drink wine with my evening meals’. Any statistical interpretation of that phrase, as we have seen, begs the question of what produces the frequency and possible regularity, i.e the question of the force of habit as tendency and inclination. Appealing to habituals in order to account for the modal force of habit, therefore, only leads back to our fundamental question concerning the modal status of tendency and inclination. To conclude, it is true that the non-necessity that we experience in habit may have an analogue in the phenomenon of radioactive decay to which Anjum and Mumford draw our attention in What Tends to Be, in so far as that decay is essentially probabilistic rather than deterministic, essentially a matter of tendency rather than necessity. But without reflecting on the indeterminism specifically in habit, Anjum and Mumford find themselves without much of an argument for their internal notion of tendency. They ask ‘[W]hat argument is there for the positive component of the theory?’ and answer that ‘[h]ere we have nothing to offer that is immediately original’.⁶⁷ Ravaisson, in sharp contrast, and in an original way, argues that the experience of habit directly shows us that tendency and inclination are continuous with but irreducible to the will, and that it is because of this that tendency can somehow determine in and from itself—though this principle is not choice as a function of rational, voluntary deliberation—to act or not to act. The experience of habit is the experience of gradually being carried away from voluntary activity by tendency and inclination. Anjum and Mumford do not offer any metaphysical interpretation of their internal principle of tendency, but rather, in the course of their book, attempt to persuade us that it exists by means of its ‘explanatory utility and power’⁶⁸ in particular philosophical domains, in relation to particular philosophical questions. It is not possible to assess their arguments in this connection here, but suffice it to note the contrast to Ravaisson’s position on this point also: on the basis of interpreting tendency in habit as continuous with the will, De l’habitude ⁶⁷ Anjum and Mumford, What Tends to Be, p.20. ⁶⁸ Anjum and Mumford, What Tends to Be, p.23.

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sketches a philosophy of nature and a general, graduated panpsychic metaphysics. There is tendency, and thus a form of mind, all the way down in nature. ‘Nothing happens’, as he writes in the 1867 report, ‘without persuasion’ and ‘freedom is the last word on things’ (FP 282–3). Ravaisson’s argument for this panpsychic position is indirect and analogical, but the analogy of habit has the advantage of allowing us to recognize the possibility of degrees of consciousness in nature all the way down into the inorganic realm, degrees of consciousness that are the degrees of tendency and inclination constituting the being of all that is.⁶⁹ ⁶⁹ On pansychism in general, see Skrbina, Pansychism in the West (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), which does not mention Ravaisson, and, more recently, the work of Phillip Goff, starting with his Stanford Encyclopaedia entry: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/, accessed 12 May 2019.

Conclusion On Ravaisson’s account, as we have seen from the beginning of this study, tendency and inclination constitute a principle continuous with, but irreducible to, the will. Tendency and inclination—which are also continuous with each other in that tendencies possibly become inclinations in the course of the development of motor or sensory habits—cannot, therefore, be understood in any kind of voluntarist or libertarian sense, as a function of reasons or intellectual choice. Inclination and tendency in motor habit are purposive, but this, as Chapter 3 argued, is a purposiveness without purpose, a prereflective purposiveness that is not, or is no longer, the pursuit of a clearly represented goal. As forms of purposiveness without purpose, tendencies and inclinations, as Chapters 2 and 4 showed, are instantiated in the thickness and obscurity of the lived body, at a remove from the pure will and understanding. For Ravaisson, habitual tendencies and inclinations are in the body as being is in beings. They inhabit the body, but not the body considered in the third person as an anatomical object, as being inhabits beings. Motor and sensory tendencies constitute l’être même, the very being of my body. Tendencies and inclinations cannot be understood in a voluntarist or libertarian sense, but they can no more be adequately understood from a necessitarian perspective. Chapter 1 elucidated and expanded on Ravaisson’s argument that interpretations of habit in terms of mechanical necessity betray the vitality and spontaneity in habit as well as the first-person (but the first-person here is no longer the self-reflective I) experience we have of it. Chapter 4 showed that Ravaisson’s real position, the one that underlies and conditions his official endorsement of Leibniz’s ‘moral necessity’ in 1867, is that in its acquisition a habit increasingly adopts what is merely an apparent necessity of ‘attraction and desire’ according to a continuous scale. Precisely because this occurs by degrees, no habitual response is ever genuinely necessary. Something cannot be necessary by degrees, and so tendency and inclination in De l’habitude are not really a function of necessity but rather of what Ravaisson’s inheritors, and Boutroux first of all, conceive under the heading of contingency: a kind of elasticity and lack of determination in final causation. What Hume described as the ‘gentle force’ of habit,

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which for Ravaisson is animated by desire and love, does not ‘force’ its manifestations to occur, at least not if by the verb ‘to force’ we mean ‘to necessitate’. The realization of habitual tendencies and inclinations, as Chapter 6 argued, at once with and against Stephen Mumford and Rani Lill Anjum, is in no sense a necessity, and not even a conditional necessity. Tendencies and inclinations do not have to realize themselves even if there is nothing beyond them preventing their realization. It is not by accident, we argued, that Ravaisson never endorses the classic early modern description of tendency as a force that will come to its realization unless something else stops it doing so. Tendency, from the perspectives opened by Of Habit, is not a conditional necessity, but a primitive, sui generis modal category. With all of this, I hope to have made a strong case for the importance of Ravaisson in the history of modern French philosophy, and also for his relevance in contemporary metaphysics and the philosophy of action. At the same time, I hope to have shown that the questions of habit and inclination belong to the fundamental problems of metaphysics. But here I pose one final question and make one final observation, both of which point beyond the limits of this study. Chapter 5 suggested that the most basic form of habit, and thus the most basic form of tendency and inclination, is time itself, time understood as a lived, non-quantifiable time that nineteenth-century French philosophy names durée, duration. If, as we have seen, a tendency to do something in a statistical sense of the term can be explained by a tendency towards something, by a kind of force or drive, our tendencies to do things can, therefore, be explained, at bottom, at the very bottom, by duration as a drive that is constituted as a unity of anticipation and contraction. This unity of contraction and anticipation is a passive synthesis (for it is not the result of voluntary activity), and an immanent synthesis (for it is not a synthesis of already isolated temporal moments). This synthetic drive, as a ‘tendency to persist’, is not an occasional persisting, but a drive towards the future that retains the past. As we saw, it is a kind of stretch or stretching that is a selfstretching, since it is not stretched by any external agency. But if duration is a function of tendency as a tendency to persist, a tendency to persist that is a drive towards the future, how to reconcile that thought with the idea that tendencies do not have to manifest themselves, that they have a modal value different from necessity? Is the passage of time not necessary, something over which we have no control? Is it not inexorable? The passage of my time, my duration, certainly feels like one of the things that I cannot change—but although it feels necessary while I am alive, it will come to its end.

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Index For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages. Adams, R.M. 129–31, 136–7 Anjum, R.L. see Mumford, S. animism 51–3, 100–1 Anscombe, E. 204 Aristotle 7–8, 15–18, 35, 60, 116–17, 148, 175–6 on dunamis and energeia 158–9, 168–9 on hexis 12, 73 on phronesis 73 on ‘second nature’ 95–8 on the soul 155–6 on ‘substance’ 149–53, 167–8 on theology 158–9, 168–9 attention 29–30, 47–8, 53–4, 57, 92–4 attitude 3, 77–9, 87, 90, 92 automaticity 24, 43–4, 48, 59, 88–9 autonomy 2–3, 14–15, 24, 43–4, 126–7, 143 Barthez, P. 14–15, 25–6 Beaufret, J. 158–9 Bergson, H. 8–10, 14–17 on evolution 124–5 on freedom 182 on grace 121–2 on habit 20, 62, 69–81 on humour 90 on memory 177–8 on number and space 165–6, 169–70 on time 21–2, 163–4, 168–74, 177–81 Bichat, X. 14–15, 19–20, 25–9, 31, 34–5, 38, 105, 164, 180 biology 55–6 Biran, P. M. de 10, 15–17, 39–41, 63–4, 95, 168 on agency 22, 184–5, 193–200 and dualism 44–5, 104 on the double law of habit 19–20, 25, 29–38, 45–6, 164, 180 on the lived body 82–3, 154–5, 171–3

on the soul 108, 152 on tendency prior to effort 104–9 Bonnet, C. 37–8, 54, 63–4 Boutroux, E. 9–10 on contingency 11–12, 128–9, 141, 146–7, 182 on habit 71–2 Capeillières, F. 11–12 Carlisle, C. 60–1 Cartwright, N. 202 causation efficient causation 3–5, 11, 132–6, 138–9 final causation 136, 138–9, 144–5, 147, 212–13 Humean accounts of 187–8, 195–6 and necessitation 185–6, 189, 198–9, 201 and powers 189–90 and succession 195–7 and tendency 203–5 Cazeneuve, J. 14–15, 39–40, 51, 103 Champlin, T.H. 203–4 Chaplin, C. 90 Chevalier, J. 16–17 Christianity 123–4 Comte, A. 9–10, 76–7 Condillac 29–31, 104 contingency 10–12, 21, 97, 128–30, 137, 144–7, 183–4, 190, 206–7, 212–13 Cousin, V. 7–8, 38, 63–4, 107–8, 117–18 custom 40, 48–9, 52, 95–7, 121, 162, 187–8, 192 Darwin, C. 101–2 Deleuze, G. 179–81 Descartes, R. on brain states 54, 75 on clear and distinct conception 170–1 on substance 152–4 on tendency 41–3, 203–4

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desire 1–2, 33–4, 36–7, 39–41, 43–5, 47, 54, 60, 65–8, 85–7, 93, 98, 106–10, 114, 116, 121–2, 126–9, 138–9, 141–3, 151–7, 159, 167–8 and necessity 11–12, 21, 126–9, 141, 146–7, 183, 207–8, 212–13 Destutt de Tracy, A. 25, 29–30 determinism 10, 126–7, 137, 210–11 dispositions 3–5, 13, 36–8, 68–9, 131–2, 161, 184, 187–90, 200, 205, 208–11 Dopp, J. 13–14, 122–3, 148–9 Douskos, C. 208–10 Dreyfus, H. 91–2 Dumont, L. 16–17, 62, 75–7 Dunham, J. 148–9 drive 79, 102, 113–14, 181–2, 188–9, 204, 213 duration 21–2, 26–7, 163–6, 168–74, 177–82, 213 Egger, V. 16–17, 69, 175–6, 180–1 elasticity 11, 90, 147, 212–13; see also contingency ethos 12, 95–7 Euenus 95–7 evolution 101–3, 124–5 freedom 2–3, 9, 11–12, 57–8, 65–8, 71–2, 74, 77, 79, 85, 88–9, 95, 109–10, 115, 123, 126–8, 130, 132–4, 137–40, 142–5, 147, 151–3, 164, 182–3, 210–11 Geach, P. 204 Gouhier, H. 9–10, 29 grace 9, 20, 65–6, 68, 121–2, 138, 153–4, 207–8 Graybiel, A. 51 Gunn, J. A. 15–16 habituals 209–10 Hegel, G. W. F. 117, 122–3, 170–1 Helmont, J.-B. van 14–15 Heidegger, M. 14–17, 21, 128–9, 156–61 Herder, J.G. 110–11 hexis 12, 173–4, 177–8, 180–1 Hoffman, P. 3–5, 132–3 Hume, D. 22 on agency 184–5, 190–9 on the association of ideas 50–1 on causal necessity 178 on habit as a principle 161–2 humour; see Bergson on humour

identity, philosophy of 14–15, 20–1, 31–2, 98, 116–25 Ideology 29–30 inertia 13–14, 51, 74–7, 82–3, 87–90, 98, 112–15, 128, 181–2 inheritance of acquired characteristics instinct 20–1, 36, 46, 53, 55–7, 64, 66, 71–2, 83, 98–111 intuition 81–3, 116, 118–20, 152–3 and space 165–6, 169–70 Jorati, J. 137 Janicaud, D. 14, 72, 146, 156 Kant, I. 18 on being 157–8 on ethics 67–8 on inclination 2–3 on genius 119 on habit 65–6 on number 166 on the self 167 kenosis 124 Kepler, J. 112–14 Lamarck, J.B. 101–4 Laruelle, F. 14–16, 168–9 Leibniz, G.W. on force 13–14, 19–20, 59–60, 98, 108–9, 112–15, 181, 188–9, 207–8 on harmony 132, 138–9, 150, 155 on inclination 4–5, 21, 128–33 on moral necessity 11–12, 21–2, 128–38, 141–7, 183, 212–13 on permissive will 64 on substance 152–6, 159–60 Lemoine, A. 16–17, 21–2, 62–70, 75–6, 79, 86–7, 90–2, 99–100, 114–15, 163–4, 172–8, 180–1 lived body 16–17, 20, 62–3, 80, 106, 197, 212 Locke, J. 29–30, 48–50, 193 love 9, 41, 43–4, 60, 67–8, 114, 117, 121–2, 128–9, 138, 141–4, 151–2, 156–7, 159, 212–13 Lovejoy, A. 6, 15–16, 129–30, 163–4, 167, 169–71, 173–4 Madinier, G. 13–14 Marmodoro, A. 205 McKitrick, J. 188–9

 Merleau-Ponty, M. 15–17, 20, 80–1, 83–5, 91 Mill, J. S. 22, 184–5, 200–4 Morel, J.P. 97 Mumford, S. 22, 148, 183–4, 196–202, 209 Murray, M. 134–5, 137–8, 145–6 necessity 4–5, 11, 22, 53, 65, 67–8, 77, 97, 99, 110, 113, 178, 183–5 moral necessity 11–12, 21–2, 52, 126–7, 182 neuroscience 19–20, 58–61 Nietzsche, F. 101 novelty 81, 121–2 ‘obscure activity’ 19–20, 25, 37, 39–40, 44–7, 50–1, 57–8, 81, 84–5, 100–1, 104, 110–11, 120, 174–7, 179–80 ‘ontological difference’, the 21, 128–9, 156–7, 159–61 Panis, D. 160–1 Pascal, B. 27, 101, 115–16, 159 permanence 114–15, 167–8, 172 Perrault, C. 25, 36, 52–3, 100–1 petites perceptions 131–2, 138; see also ‘obscure activity’ Porterfield, W. 52, 127–8, 146 possibility 22, 59, 81, 99–100, 120–1, 127–8, 130–1, 134, 141, 148, 183, 186, 188–90, 199–200, 205–7 powers 1, 3–5, 13, 22, 45, 55, 109, 111, 140, 183–92, 198–200, 205–6, 208–9 propensity 1–2, 55, 57, 99, 162, 189 proprioception 22, 191, 199 Proust, M. 115–16 purposiveness without purpose 20–1, 120–3, 212

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quantification 21–2, 163, 165–7, 169, 181 Reid, T. 1–3, 20, 51, 55–8, 63–7, 86–7, 189–90 Ricoeur, P. 16–17, 20, 62, 85–92, 149–50 Schelling, F.W.J. 15–16, 20–1, 98, 116–23, 144, 148–9, 152–5 second nature 20–1, 95–8, 101, 109 space 109–10, 124, 163–4 and clear and distinct ideas 170–1 of the lived body 80, 82–3 and number; see quantification Speusippus 6–7 Spinoza, B. 114, 133, 152–3 spiritualism 8–10, 14–17, 21 spontaneity 11, 20–1, 45, 49–50, 57–8, 71–2, 74, 85–6, 88–9, 99, 104–7, 109–10, 112–13, 115, 121–3, 126–8, 130–1, 134, 138–41, 145, 151, 207–8 synthesis as duration 164, 213 in habit 80–1, 84–5, 174–7, 180 and number 166–7 Stahl, G. E. 14–15, 25, 52–3, 63–4, 100–1 Stebbing, L.S. 15–16 Stewart, D. 25, 50–1 substance 21, 60, 75–6, 108, 111–13, 128–30, 136, 148–60, 167–71 Sutton, J. 92–4 teleology; see final causation time; see duration virtue 5, 12, 68–9, 75–6, 171, 175–7 vitalism 45, 63–4 Wachter, D. von 204–5 wisdom 68–9, 145