I've been making slow progress on my MA work with the College of the Humanities and Sciences, but early this morning I finished a 7-page paper on the relationship between habit and freedom, reviewing the reading and discussions that kept me occupied for all of July. I can now proudly announce that as of today, I'm actually just one class shy of being done! Woo-hoo!
My final course will explore the relationship between work and leisure, which is the inquiry that inspired my entire educational program. Interestingly enough, to get here, I had to work my way through the concepts of habit and virtue, since leisure is considered the opposite of the Protestant Work Ethic. My major author that I'll get to read at the end of the course is American economist Thorstein Veblen, who wrote the work The Theory of the Leisure Class. I've dipped into that volume already, reading an excellent chapter on the effect of disposable income. I'm excited to read it in toto!
And now, without further ado, here is the paper I wrote to wrap up my penultimate class:
Habit and Freedom
The discussions in this course considered the effect of habit on human freedom. Do habits stifle freedom? Or do they strengthen the will to make judgments and act according to its own decisions? Accordingly, how should we develop habits to serve the good of freedom? And finally, can we fashion a society that builds upon these principles? The major authors in these discussions included Plato, Aristotle, Epictetus, St. Thomas Aquinas, William James, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Samuel Beckett.
Habit and Freedom: Habit Stifles Man
The relationship between habit and freedom is confusing. Habits are originally freely chosen actions that become, in the words of Plato, “like a second nature (Republic 330).” If they are freely chosen, it would seem contrary to reason that habits could be considered as stifling freedom. Yet that is exactly the position taken by several modern thinkers, including Kant, Mill, Hegel, and Hume.
Kant draws a distinction between types of habits, and says that habitual actions which have become customs by frequent repetition cannot be considered truly moral habits, since they involve only the elective will — that is, the choice to perform this or that customary action is made without the use of reason. On the other hand, rational actions can be judged as moral or immoral, since only rational actions can be considered as whether or not they should become universal laws — that is, a decision that everyone should choose when presented with the same circumstances — the Categorical Imperative. In this sense, the Categorical Imperative is a universal rational habit — whenever you encounter a certain set of circumstances, you make the same decision, over and over. This can be considered stifling, yet eminently rational at the same time.
Mill says that habit leads us sometimes to do things that we no longer desire, merely because that’s what we learned to do back when we did desire it. This includes performing actions that are hurtful, what we would consider “bad habits.” Examples of this may include the psychological phenomena of binge-eating when presented with stressful situations, or cutting oneself to get attention.
Hegel, whose philosophy describes the dialectical struggle that suffuses history, warns that habit kills man, inasmuch as when he ceases to struggle or work in order to achieve some end, he ceases to have any reason to continue (cf. 132-133). Tolstoy counters with the description of a soldier who tired of life outside the regiment, and sought the reassurance of regular military life as a soothing existence:
Here in the regiment, all was clear and simple. The whole world was divided into two unequal parts: one, our Pavlograd regiment; the other, all the rest. And the rest was no concern of his. In the regiment, everything was definite: who was lieutenant, who captain, who was a good fellow, who a bad one, and most of all, who was a comrade. The canteenkeeper gave one credit, one's pay came every four months, there was nothing to think out or decide, you had only to do nothing that was considered bad in the Pavlograd regiment and, when given an order, to do what was clearly, distinctly, and definitely ordered — and all would be well. Having once more entered into the definite conditions of this regimental life, Rostov felt the joy and relief a tired man feels on lying down to rest (221).
Habit and Freedom: Habit Frees Man
The counter view of the Western Tradition is that habit frees man — but in a sense somewhat different than may be expected. This freedom which habit provides is not freedom from everything, but freedom to do something rather particular: freedom to develop virtue.
Dewey points out that freedom defined as the removal of external control is not true freedom, but has the potential to leave man at the hand of caprice and fancy; thus, education’s aim is “the creation of the power of self-control (116).”
Hegel concurs with this definition of freedom, criticizing the notion that “a limitation of caprice and self-will is regarded as a fettering of freedom. We should on the contrary look upon such limitation as the indispensable proviso of emancipation (172).” He argues that following the community’s laws is a true expression of freedom, since the law of the community is meant to reflect the collective will.
Habit and Freedom: Beckett’s Three Options
Samuel Beckett’s brilliant play Waiting for Godot, its own plotline based on repetition, offers three approaches toward how habit affects man. He proposes first that habit leads to predictability:
VLADIMIR: But behind this veil of gentleness and peace, night is charging and will burst upon us - pop! like that! just when we least expect it. (Silence. Gloomily.) That's how it is on this bitch of an earth.
Long silence.
ESTRAGON: So long as one knows.
VLADIMIR: One can bide one's time.
ESTRAGON: One knows what to expect.
VLADIMIR: No further need to worry.
ESTRAGON: Simply wait.
VLADIMIR: We're used to it. (546-547)
A second possibility is that habit leads to repetition of meaningless and insignificant actions:
VLADIMIR: (sententious). To every man his little cross. (He sighs.) Till he dies. (Afterthought.) And is forgotten.
ESTRAGON: In the meantime let us try and converse calmly, since we are incapable of keeping silent.
VLADIMIR: You're right, we're inexhaustible.
ESTRAGON: It's so we won't think.
VLADIMIR: We have that excuse.
ESTRAGON: It's so we won't hear.
VLADIMIR: We have our reasons. (560-561)
Finally Beckett echoes Hegel’s suggestion that habit is the “great deadener” of man, once he realizes that the struggle is over and it is pointless to continue:
VLADIMIR: I don't know what to think any more... Was I sleeping, while the others suffered? Am I sleeping now? Tomorrow, when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of today? That with Estragon my friend, at this place, until the fall of night, I waited for Godot? That Pozzo passed, with his carrier, and that he spoke to us? Probably. But in all that what truth will there be?
(Vladimir looks at Estragon.) He'll know nothing. He'll tell me about the blows he received and I'll give him a carrot. (Pause.) Astride of a grave and a difficult birth. Down in the hole, lingeringly, the grave digger puts on the forceps. We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries. (He listens.) But habit is a great deadener. (He looks again at Estragon.) At me too someone is looking, of me too someone is saying, He is sleeping, he knows nothing, let him sleep on. (Pause.) I can't go on! (579-580)
The Effect of Youthful Habits
Nearly every author in the Western Tradition recognizes the importance of habitual actions learned in youth. William James felt that early-developed habits can serve as a straitjacket, in that habits that we acquire early on will later hold us back from trying new experiences. This can be countered by providing a wealth of opportunities to the young person. James suggests therefore that
the great thing is to strike the iron while hot, and to seize the wave of the pupil's interest in each successive subject before its ebb has come, so that knowledge may be got and a habit of skill acquired -- a headway of interest, in short, secured, on which afterward the individual may float (711-712).
Dostoyevsky’s Father Zossima says that a habit like monastic detachment from objects actually strengthens man in the face of temptations and challenges later in life, by subduing “my proud and wanton will and chastis[ing] it with obedience (164-165),” a freedom of spirit is achieved. This freedom of spirit, reminiscent of the Buddhist concept of Nirvana, is much more easily attained in youth than after a life of wanton satisfaction of desire.
John Locke, first describing a concept that William James would later give scientific backing in Psychology, warned that educators ought to carefully guide the mental connections that young people make, for their influence in later life is considerable:
This is the time most susceptible of lasting impressions; and though those relating to the health of the body are by discreet people minded and fenced against, yet I am apt to doubt, that those which relate more peculiarly to the mind, and terminate in the understanding or passions, have been much less heeded than the thing deserves: nay, have, as I suspect, been by most men wholly overlooked.
9. Wrong connexion of ideas a great cause of errors. This wrong connexion in our minds of ideas in themselves loose and independent of one another, has such an influence, and is of so great force to set us awry in our actions, as well moral as natural, passions, reasonings, and notions themselves, that perhaps there is not any one thing that deserves more to be looked after (249).
Habits of Increasing Perfection
In the Categories, Aristotle says that growth toward virtue builds upon itself. He explains that a bad man who begins to practice good habits will be encouraged and find the good habits ever easier to perform, saying that “as this process goes on, it will change him completely and establish him in the contrary state, provided he is not hindered by lack of time (18).” In other words, the more just acts I perform, the easier it is for me to perform further just acts.
Epictetus, providing an excellent warning to students of virtue, says that it is critical to show actual progress in performing such virtuous acts, not simply to point to one’s learning about virtue:
...when you say, "Take the treatise on the active powers, and see how I have studied it." I reply, "Slave, I am not inquiring about this, but how you exercise pursuit and avoidance, desire and aversion, how you design and purpose and prepare yourself, whether conformably to nature or not. If conformably, give me evidence of it, and I will say that you are making progress: but if not conformably, be gone, and not only expound your books, but write such books yourself; and what will you gain by it?” (103)
Epictetus then echoes Aristotle’s teaching that good acts engender further good acts:
If then you wish not to be of an angry temper, do not feed the habit: throw nothing on it which will increase it: at first keep quiet, and count the days on which you have not been angry. I used to be in passion every day; now every second day; then every third, then every fourth. But if you have intermitted thirty days, make a sacrifice to God. For the habit at first begins to be weakened, and then is completely destroyed (161).
Plato’s advice for growing in virtue is that the body must be worked as well as the mind in order to keep proportion in perfection:
...we should not move the body without the soul or the soul without the body, and thus they will be on their guard against each other, and be healthy and well balanced. And therefore the mathematician or any one else whose thoughts are much absorbed in some intellectual pursuit, must allow his body also to have due exercies, and practice gymnastic; and he who is careful to fashion the body, should in turn impart to the soul its proper motions, and should cultivate music and all philosophy, if he would deserve to be called truly fair and truly good (Timeaus 474-475).
Francis Bacon, previewing Locke’s advice that educators guard against youth developing undesirable mental connections, suggests that habits should be evaluated even as they are being developed, lest bad ones be formed:
...the ordering of exercises is matter of great consequence to hurt or help: for, as is well observed by Cicero, men in exercising their faculties, if they be not well advised, do exercise their faults and get ill habits as well as good; so as there is a great judgment to be had in the continuance and intermission of exercises (69).
Habit and the Laws of Society
The interaction of habits and laws is complex. Aristotle, Plutarch, Tacitus, and their successors all held that law gains its force from the customs and habits of the people that live under the law. St. Thomas Aquinas explains that this is why changing laws should be done only for very serious reasons:
...when a law is changed, the binding power of the law is diminished, in so far as custom is abolished. Therefore human law should never be changed, unless, in some way or other, the common welfare be compensated according to the extent of the harm done in this respect. Such compensation may arise either from some very great and very evident benefit conferred by the new enactment, or from the extreme urgency of the case, due to the fact that either the existing law is clearly unjust, or its observance extremely harmful (I-IIq97a2).
When the laws of the state do not reflect the customs and habits of the citizenry, the state is in trouble. Rousseau gives a striking example of how strongly habits can contend with laws:
As before putting up a large building, the architect surveys and sounds the site to see if it will bear the weight, the wise legislator does not begin laying down laws good in themselves, but by investigating the fitness of the people, for which they are destined, to receive them. Plato refused to legislate for the Arcadians and the Cyrenaeans, because he knew that both peoples were rich and could not put up with equality; and good laws and bad men were found together in Crete, because Minos had inflicted discipline on a people already burdened with vice...
Most peoples, like most men, are docile only in youth; as they grow old they become incorrigible. When once customs have become established and prejudices inveterate, it is dangerous and useless to attempt their reformation; the people, like the foolish and cowardly patients who rave at the sight of the doctor, can no longer bear that any one should lay hands on its faults to remedy them (402).
St. Thomas, providing a philosophy of the just state, says that laws needn’t try to make men perfect by upholding a standard that is too high, but should seek to improve men gradually, otherwise they might grow discouraged by the difficulty of abiding by the law and therefore reject the laws altogether:
The purpose of human law is to lead men to virtue not suddenly, but gradually. Therefore it does not lay upon the multitude of imperfect men the burdens of those who are already virtuous, namely, that they should abstain from all evil. Otherwise these imperfect ones, being unable to bear such precepts, would break out into yet greater evils; thus it is written... (Matthew 9:17) that if new wine, that is, precepts of a perfect life, is put into old bottles, that is, into imperfect men, the bottles break, and the wine runneth out, that is, the precepts are despised, and those men, from contempt, break out into evils worse still (I-IIq96a2).
Some in history have proposed that laws ought not be the basis of the state, but rather habit and custom. Plutarch describes the approach of Lycurgus, who didn’t prescribe any laws at all, but rather trusted to the power of education:
Lycurgus would never reduce his laws into writing; nay there is a Rhetra expressly to forbid it. For he thought that the most material points, and such as most directly tended to the public welfare, being imprinted on the hearts of their youth by a good discipline, would be sure to remain, and would find a stronger security, than any compulsion would be... One benefit among many that Lycurgus obtained by his course was the permanence which it secured to his laws. The obligation of oaths to preserve them would have availed but little, if he had not, by discipline and education, infused them into the children's characters, and imbued their whole early life with a love of his government. The result was that the main points and fundamentals of his legislation continued for above five hundred years, like some deep and thoroughly ingrained tincture, retaining their hold upon the nation (38, 63-64).
Lycurgus sounds like the ideal leader, one who presided over a state built upon the virtue of its citizens. Is such a state possible in our contemporary pluralistic world community? In my view, this Utopia is unachievable as long as the dominant understanding of freedom seems to be “freedom from” rather than “freedom to”.
