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ABSTRACT
This paper shows how reflection on habit leads in nineteenth-century French philosophy to Henri Bergson’s idea of duration in 1888 as a non-quantifiable dimension irreducible to time as measured by clocks. Historically, I show how Albert Lemoine’s 1875 L’habitude et l’instinct was crucial, since he holds – in a way that is both Ravaissonian and Bergsonian avant la lettre – that for the being capable of habit, the three elements of time are fused together. For that habituated being, Lemoine claims, it is not true to say that the past is no longer, nor even that the future is not yet. This historical link between Ravaisson and Bergson, however, only sharpens the philosophical question of how a dynamic conception of habit involves and requires a conception of real duration, of a temporality more original than clock-time, and, conversely, of how reflection on duration prior to clock-time involves a notion of habit. With reference to the work of Gilles Deleuze, the paper concludes by showing that there is an internal connection between these two grand philosophical themes of nineteenth- and then twentieth-century French thought: habit and time.
Notes
1 There is, for example, no mention of Lemoine in the new critical edition of the Essai by Frédéric Worms; see Bergson (Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience).
2 Bertrand Russell (Russell, ‘The Philosophy of Bergson’) famously criticizes the argument, and Bergson for taking it as a given. For H. Wildon Carr’s response to this critique, and Russell’s rejoinder see Carr (The Philosophy of Bergson).
3 On Kant’s doctrine, see Proops (‘Kant’s First Paralogism’).
4 ‘L’idée de la substance n’y était pas exposée, ce n’était pas dans la substance, sujet passif du changement universel qu’Aristote avait placé l’identité de toute existence et de toute pensée, mais dans l’energeia, l’acte pur, la forme, dans laquelle l’être devient pensée’ (manuscript De la métaphysique d’Aristote, 237, as cited in Marin, ‘Acte et Puissance’, 45). Long sections, but not this passage, of the manuscript are printed in a separate chapter of Belay and Marin, De la nature à l’esprit, 201–13.
5 If Martin Heidegger is right to note that the ‘expression substantia functions sometimes with an ontological meaning, sometimes with an ontic meaning, but mostly with one which is hazily ontic-ontological’ (Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 94; Being and Time, 88) Ravaisson’s idiosyncrasy resides in taking the idea of substance, in principle, wholly ontologically, that is, to name not a hidden core of a thing or underlying passive substrate, but the activity of being.
6 See also the whole chapter ‘L’amour, “substance” de l’âme’ (Dopp, Félix Ravaisson, 249–78). Without referring to Dopp’s analysis, Jeremy Dunham mistakes this ‘theory of substance’ for a traditional substantialist doctrine that ‘shows how far Ravaisson was from the true voluntarist French philosophers of the nineteenth century like Biran’ and ‘from Schelling’ who ‘says that “the person who cannot think activity or opposition without a substrate cannot philosophize at all”’ (Dunham, ‘From Habit to Monads’, 1099). Ravaisson’s real position – in his 1840 essay celebrating Schelling for finding ‘in action, in personality, in freedom, the basis of any future metaphysics’ (Ravaisson, ‘La Philosophie Contemporaine’, 421; Selected Essays, 77) and criticizing the later Biran’s claim that ‘substance is the passive subject of modifications’ (424/79) presupposed by the will – is, precisely, that the ‘[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’ (427/80).
7 Aristotle’s hupokeimenon, as a participial form, does not have to be read as naming a passive subject, for, as Heidegger (Wegmarken, 260; Pathmarks, 199–200) argues, it names that which lies-before (translating hupo as ‘before’, in the sense of ‘before the eyes’) in its lying-before, and it thus has a verbal sense.
8 Is this evidence of a commitment to a monadological philosophy, given that, as Dunham notes (‘From Habit to Monads’, 1099), Leibniz also thinks substance as at once inside and outside time? Ravaisson had, in fact, concluded his 1834 Aristotle essay by describing his position as a non-monadological Leibnizianism: ‘Our approach is based, without accepting its monadological hypotheses [sans accepter ses hypothèses monadologiques], on the elementary basis of a Leibnizian idealist-realism [sur la base élémentaire du réalisme-idealiste Leibnizien]’ (Ravaisson, ‘De la Métaphysique d’Aristote’, 213), the notion of an idealist-realism indicating that this reception of Leibniz is Schelling-influenced (Dopp, Félix Ravaisson, 111, shows how it rehearses Rixner’s Schellingian reading of Leibniz in his 1822–1823 Handbuch der Geschichte der Philosophie (Rixner, Handbuch der Geschichte der Philosophie)). Two later texts indicate that and why Ravaisson always rejected Leibniz’s ‘monadological hypotheses’: in 1867 he criticizes Leibniz – ‘at least if we follow the letter of his expressions’ (Ravaisson, La philosophie en France au XIXème siècle, 275) – for not maintaining that substance is force and no-thing besides; and in 1893 he writes that
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.
9 According to Maine de Biran’s 1802 prize-winning dissertation on habit that was crucial for Ravaisson, 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 de l’habitude sur la faculté de penser, 100–1; The Influence of Habit
10 Lovejoy ends his treatment of Ravaisson abruptly also because the second part of his article is devoted to the ideas about time of two students of Charles Renouvier, L. Dauriac and G. Noel, ideas that were, Lovejoy argues, influenced by Ravaisson and important for Bergson. I cannot address the significance of Renouvier’s neo-criticist school for Bergson here.
11 The most direct source of Ravaisson’s critique of imaginative thinking is Maine de Biran (see, for example, Maine de Biran, Mémoire sur la decomposition de la pensée, 326), but that Ravaisson uses the term ‘intuition’ instead of Biran’s ‘apperception’ suggests the influence of Schelling’s critique of the ‘understanding’.
12 In 1888 Bergson restricts duration to psychological life, but later, of course, he will apply it to biological life also.
13 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, 240). Anne Dévarieux (L’individualité persévérante, 229–235) shows how Biranian durée is distinct from succession and irreducible to any measure.
14 See Drouin-Hans (‘L’épistémologie d’Albert Lemoine (1824–1874)’, 83–84) for a short biographical and bibliographical notice concerning Lemoine. As Drouin-Hans also notes (76), Ravaisson refers approvingly to several of Lemoine’s published works in his 1867 report on French philosophy.
15 Ravaisson’s dynamic conception of habit had been restated in Emile Boutroux’s (De la contingence des lois de la nature) doctoral dissertation De la contingence des lois de la nature (Boutroux, De la contingence des lois de la nature), which Lemoine may well have read before his death.
16 Marco Piazza (L’antagonista necessario, 179) discusses 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. I am indebted to him and to the anonymous reviewers of this article. 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 (Funke, Gewohnheit, Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte, 440–64) and cites Lemoine’s book in the list of French works concerned with habit (16).
17 Bergson (Cours II, 275) refers to Lemoine’s text in the bibliography that follows the text of the lectures on habit. It is theoretically possible, but highly unlikely, that Bergson had not read Lemoine’s text until after writing his doctoral dissertation.
18 Lemoine thus implicitly opposes Of Habit’s assertions that habit ‘leaves the sphere of will and reflection’ (Ravaisson, Of Habit, 57), but these assertions are to be understood in the light of Ravaisson’s notion of the continuity of pre-reflective tendency or desire with the will. For Ravaisson, in the end, the will has no ‘sphere’, for it is always present to a degree, and thus on this point Lemoine may oppose only the letter but not the spirit of his doctrine.
19 For a recent study of Bergson’s relation to Egger, see Roni (Victor Egger e Henri Bergson).
20 For an affirmation of the non-linear temporal sense of hexis, see Cathérine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 56: hexis,
is a kind of virtuality engaged in three exstases of time at once, without one dominating the others: the past (habit is prior to its being put to work), the present (habit is itself a modality of presence), and the future (habit takes the form of a task which must be fulfilled, of an expectation that rules the direction of what is to come).
21 Ed Casey (‘Habitual Body and Memory in Merleau-Ponty’, 280) generously affirms that Bergson’s notion of habit memory, even though his mechanistic approach precludes any real development of the notion, is original and opens up new possibilities for philosophy, but Lemoine had opened up these possibilities twenty years earlier.
22 Elizabeth Grosz claims, in contrast, that ‘from 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’, 226). It is possible to read Time and Free Will between the lines as a discourse on the nature of habit, as I show below, but one should read the lines when doing so.
23 Ravaisson takes up this distinction from Biran and Bichat in describing a ‘double law of the contrary influence on beings of the duration of change, depending on whether the being merely suffers the change or sets it off’ (Ravaisson, Of Habit, 37): ‘everywhere, in every circumstance, continuity or repetition – that is, duration – weakens passivity and excites activity’ (49).
24 In this way, nineteenth-century French philosophy from Bichat to Lemoine anticipates Bergson’s notion of durée in Time and Free Will. It is not possible to address here, however, how Bergson develops the notion in his later work with an increasing emphasis on the future after reflection on the past in the 1896 Matter and Memory.