Our Second Nature
Considering the double-edged sword of habit, the origin of both excellence and addiction
“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. 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.” - Félix Ravaisson
The thoughts of the most influential French philosopher of the late nineteenth century, Félix Ravaisson, fell out of favour in the early twentieth century. The rise of behaviourism after B.F. Skinner’s disturbing yet insightful experiments drove out more subtle approaches to understanding how and why we act. Still, like so much of twentieth century science, behaviourism is a blunt instrument that attracts an even blunter metaphysical worldview. Revisiting Ravaisson is to discover lost treasure.
Written in 1838, Ravaisson’s On Habit is a tough read but intriguing and inspiring. At its heart is a contrast between habit and “the realm of destiny”, that is, the regularity of a chemical reaction or the pull of gravity. Action and reaction are bound into a necessary fatality, without which organic life could not exist. Yet despite being grounded upon inevitability, life has created something quite incredible upon these foundations: a realm of contingency, where what may or may not happen breaks free from the shackles of strict cause and effect and uncovers entirely new possibilities.
While in no position to explain the biology of habit (Ravaisson talks of an “obscure activity” behind it), he recognised both a positive and a negative aspect of repetition in the context of behaviour. By engaging in the same activity again and again, we develop a skill or grace that is impossible without that repetition - something musicians and dancers understand all too well. Yet at the same time, repeat exposure to what we want inevitably “calls for” or “invokes” our desire, thus leading us into behaving automatically. Habit therefore also underpins what we would now term addiction. His descriptions anticipate the neurobiology of the nucleus acumbens and the hippocampus, yet resist the flattening of interpretation frequently unleashed by unpacking the workings of our brains.
Ravaisson recognised a powerful role for habit, since without it there could only be the blind mechanism of instinct. This difference, he asserted, was only a matter of degree and not of kind, but in opening up a gap in the inevitable flow of causal affairs, habit stands as an intermediary that can travel between our will and our nature. What we set as our aim can become, through habitual repetition our “second nature”, as Ravaisson calls it. What we have inherited as instinctual capabilities are not indelibly inscribed into the stone of our being, we can imagine new possibilities for ourselves and through repetition carve them into new instincts of our own making.
Yet of course here lies the double-edged sword of habit, as Ravaisson was all too aware. For it is not only the wellspring of our excellences, but also the source of the mire of addictiveness. Positively, almost everything we esteem in human achievement is rooted upon competences that depend upon repetition. It sharpens a habit into something approaching the precision of instinct - in athletics, performance, artistry, we cannot help but admire the grace of those who have practiced long and hard at their art. But at the same time, there is a danger to the habitual, because nothing requires that this second nature we craft for ourselves hones our excellences. It can just as easily entrench our vices.
Thus while through our imaginative faculties we can create new ways of being that can be secured through repetition, the very same causes also carry the risk of establishing “an unreflective spontaneity”, which lies “beyond, beneath the region of will, personality and consciousness.” Our capacity to alter what is carved into the brickwork of our being cannot magically transform stone into water… but what we permit to reoccur becomes etched into our second nature, the crafted being we become, distinct from the inheritances of our birth.
For Ravaisson, habit is “equally opposed to mechanical Fatality and to reflective Freedom” - it frees us from the inevitability of the inorganic realm, even as it binds us to those actions we have opted to repeat. Choose wisely, therefore, the habits you would instil! For our second nature not only frees us from imprisonment in our first, given a chance it inevitably tunnels out the chambers of our own personal dungeons.
Thoroughly enjoyed! Thanks, Chris. Will you be looking at ritual in this context?