References
- I cite Bergson's works according to the pagination of the original editions presented in the margins of Œuvres (Paris: PUF, 1959). ‘La vie et l'oeuvre de Ravaisson’ in La pensée et le mouvant (1934), 253–291, p. 267; tr. M. Andison, The Creative Mind (New York: The Wisdom Library, 1946), p. 275.
- Félix Ravaisson, Of Habit, ed. and trans. Clare Carlisle and Mark Sinclair (London: Continuum, 2008). For reasons of economy I refer only to the pagination of the English translation in this bilingual edition with the abbreviation H in square brackets, as the original French text will usually be on the preceding page.
- I return to this issue in the conclusion.
- La pensée et le mouvant, p. 267; The Creative Mind, p. 275.
- Thomas Reid, for example, states this distinction clearly within the section of his Essay on the Active Powers of Man (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1788) entitled ‘Of Habit’ (III, iii, 2). On the general point concerning modern philosophy see the Editors’ Introduction to Of Habit.
- I return also to this issue in the conclusion, but see Reid, Ibid., for the distinction between facility and inclination or proneness, and H 51 for Ravaisson's discussion of tics.
- See Emmanuel Blondel, ‘Ravaisson lecteur de Maine de Biran’ in Ravaisson, ed. J.M. le Lannou (Paris: Kimé, 1999), pp. 15–16 for a list of all of Maine de Biran's texts, both published and unpublished, that Ravaisson may have consulted.
- Thus Ravaisson writes that “the lower limit” towards which habit descends “is necessity—Destiny, as might be said, but in the spontaneity of nature” [H 67].
- All of these designations can be found in Sections II and III of Part II of the text, but see Claire Marin's ‘L'activité obscure de l'habitude’ in Ravaisson, ed. J.-M. Lannou (Paris: Kimé, 1999) for a more extensive treatment of them.
- Dominique Janicaud, Ravaisson et le métaphysique: une généalogie du spiritualisme français (Paris: Vrin, 1997; first published by Martinus Nijhoff, 1969), p. 68. All translations are my own unless otherwise stated.
- Gary Gutting, French Philosophy in the 20th Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 12. It is not surprising that an author concerned principally with the 20th century makes such a claim given that Bergson's misinterpretation has never been remarked within English-language scholarship concerned more directly with the 19th century (see, for example, L. Susan Stebbing, Pragmatism and French Voluntarism, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914); Ben Ami Scharfstein, Roots of Bergson's Philosophy, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943); Frederick Copleston, A History of Philosophy Vol. 9: 19th and 20th Century French Philosophy, (London: Continuum, 1999). See, however, Dominique Janicaud, op. cit., for a book-length engagement with Bergson's interpretation of Ravaisson's thinking, and particularly Chapter I (pp. 39–50) for a critique of his interpretation of De l'habitude. The second and third sections of this essay extend and develop Janicaud's approach.
- As Jacques Chevalier writes in the foreword to Bergson's discourse published in the 1933 edition of Ravaisson's Testament philosophique (Paris: Boivin & Cie. 2008), p. 2: “The author 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”.
- Cf. Bergson, Cours I: Leçons de psychologie et de métaphysique, ed. H. Hude (Paris: PUF, 1999, 2nd ed.), pp. 237–247 and Cours II: Leçons de psychologie, Leçons de morale, psychologie et métaphysique, ed. H. Hude (Paris: PUF, 1992), pp. 265–275. 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).
- See L'Influence de l'habitude sur la faculté de penser in Oeuvres de Maine de Biran, Vol. 2, ed. G. Romeyer-Dherbey, (Paris: Vrin, 1987) for Maine de Biran's early dissertations on habit. The 1802 dissertation has been translated by M. D. Boehm, as The Influence of Habit on the Faculty of Thinking (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1970; originally published by Williams and Wilkins, Baltimore, 1929). On Ravaisson's inheritance of the ‘double law’ of habit, see the Editors’ Introduction to Of Habit (H 8f); Clare Carlisle ‘Between Freedom and Necessity: Félix Ravaisson on Habit and the Moral Life’ in Inquiry 53, no. 2, 2010. 123–145; and my ‘Ravaisson and the Force of Habit’ in The Journal of the History of Philosophy, vol. 49, no. 1 (2011) 65–85.
- Bergson, Cours I, p. 247.
- Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics, II, ii. As Bergson will write: “We 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. What, then, is habit?” (Cours II, p. 268).
- See Charles Bonnet, Essai analytique sur les facultés de l'âme (Copenhagen: C. and A. Philibert, 1760), and Harry A. Whitaker and Yves Turgeon, ‘Charles Bonnet's Neurophilosophy’ in Brain, Mind and Machine, ed. Harry Whitaker, C. U. M. Smith and Stanley Finger (New York: Springer, 2007).
- Bergson, Cours I, p. 247.
- Cours II, p. 267.
- Cours II, p. 268.
- Cours II, p. 269.
- Cours II, p. 265.
- For a reading of Aristotle's own concept of hexis in an active sense, see Pierre Rodrigo's article in this volume. On Bergson's reading of Ravaisson on this point, see also Alexandra Renault, ‘L'habitude chez Bergson: une esquisse du concept phénoménologique de Stiftung?’ in Alter, 12/2004, 79–103, p. 82.
- See Cours II, p. 268f.
- Cours II, p. 270.
- See Cours II, p. 270 and Léon Dumont, ‘De l'habitude’ in Revue philosophique de la France et de l'étranger, 1876, vol. 1, pp. 321–366. For a defence of Dumont's arguments see Jacques Chevalier, L'habitude: essai de métaphysique scientifique (Paris: Boivin & Cie, 1929).
- Cours II, p. 275.
- Matière et Mémoire, p. 161; Matter and Memory, trans. N. Paul and W. Palmer (New York: Zone Books, 1991), p. 9. I refer to this text below with the abbreviation MM and with the English pagination after the forward slash.
- Both quotations: MM 82 and 86/78 and 81.
- MM 82/80.
- MM 86/84.
- It is also offered, of course, with the intention of protecting pure memory in the sense of recollection from such physiological approaches, but Bergson's distinction, it should be noted, has not always served such an intention in the 20th century: the successes of the contemporary neurosciences in discovering physical changes occurring within different forms of habituation have only encouraged the pursuit of physical explanations of ‘the other form of memory’, memory as recollection. See, for example, Larry Squire and Eric Kandel's reference to Bergson's distinction in Memory: From Mind to Molecules (New York: Scientific American Library, 1999), p. 14.
- L'évolution créatrice, p. 145; Creative Evolution, trans. A. Mitchell (London: Macmillan, 1911), p. 151.
- Ibid.
- Merleau-Ponty, L'union de l'âme et du corps chez Malebranche, Biran et Bergson (Paris: Vrin, 1997), p. 87.
- See, for example, MM 86/82: “In truth it no longer represents our past to us, it acts it; and if it still deserves the name of memory, it is not because it conserves bygone images, but because it prolongs their useful effect into the present moment”.
- MM 227/82.
- MM 169/152.
- ‘La conscience et la vie’ in L'énergie spirituelle, p. 13; Mind Energy, trans. H. Wildon Carr (London: Macmillan, 1920), p. 17.
- Vladimir Jankélévitch, Henri Bergson (Paris: PUF, Quadrige, 1959), p. 171.
- L'énergie spirituelle, p. 13; Mind Energy, p. 17.
- L'évolution créatrice, p. 128; Creative Evolution, p. 134.
- On this point, see Renault, art. cit., p. 92.
- L'évolution créatrice, p. 184–5; Creative Evolution, p. 193.
- Renault, art. cit., p. 92.
- L'énergie spirituelle, p. 22–23; Mind Energy, p. 29.
- One may certainly complain, following Cathérine Malabou, that Bergson's mechanical conception of the brain, particularly as it is expressed in the “metaphor of the central telephone exchange is today outdated because it completely fails to capture plasticity and does not take into account synaptic and neuronal vitality”, What Should we do with our Brain, trans. S. Rand, (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), p. 34. But the approach of the contemporary neurosciences is still much closer to Bergson's thinking than it is to Ravaisson's, given that for the latter “no organic modification” [H 53] can explain the tendencies of the habituated body.
- Jankélévitch, op. cit., p. 116: in response to this problem “Bergson offers, in the fourth chapter of Matter and Memory, pages that are amongst the most obscure and the most awkward (embarrassantes) of his work as a whole”.
- Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), p. 167; Phenomenology of Perception, trans. C. Smith (London: Routledge, 1962), p. 142. I refer to this work henceforth in the notes as PP, with the English pagination after the forward slash. In La structure du comportement of 1939 Merleau-Ponty had already noted: “Bergson sometimes comes back to a purely motor notion of action. Habit is only the ‘fossilised residue of a spiritual activity’, the active gesture merely the ‘motor accompaniment’ of thoughts” (Paris: PUF, 1990), p. 176; The Structure of Behaviour, trans. A. L. Fisher, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963), p. 163.
- PP 169/143.
- Ibid.
- See Janicaud, Ravaisson et la métaphysique, op. cit., p. 11.
- PP 170/144.
- For this debate see the exchange between Dreyfus and McDowell in Inquiry 2007, vol. 50, no. 4, pp. 338–377.
- Thomas Reid, op. cit., p. 117.
- PP 97–98/82.
- Paul Ricoeur, Le volontaire et l'involontaire (Paris: Seuil, 2009), p. 364; trans. E. Kohak, Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and Involuntary (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1966), p. 289. I refer to this work henceforth as VI, with the English pagination following the forward slash.
- See VI 369/293.
- VI 373/296.
- VI 381/304.
- VI 377/300.
- VI 379/301.
- VI 386/307.
- VI 387/307. On this reading of Ravaisson, see Benoit Thirion, ‘La lecture ricoeurienne de Ravaisson dans Le volontaire et l'involontaire’ in Les Études Philosophiques, 2002, no. 3, pp. 371–390, and Claire Marin, ‘L'être et l'habitude dans la philosophie française contemporaine’ in Alter, 12/2004, 149–172.
- VI 382/304.
- For further arguments—arguments issued from a very different perspective—concerning the distinction of habits from behaviours such as reflexes, addictions and compulsions, see Bill Pollard, ‘Explaining Actions with Habits’ in American Philosophical Quarterly, 43 (2006), 57–69.