Obscure Activity

This chapter examines Ravaisson’s ‘double law’ of habit: ‘active habits’, such as a motor skill, and ‘passive habits’, such as becoming used to a sound or climate, involve a decline of conscious awareness in their acquisition. The chapter shows how Ravaisson takes up this law from Xavier Bichat and Maine de Biran, and how he argues that the double law resists both psychological and physiological explanations. 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 specifically the tendency or inclination that Ravaisson discovers in habit that he takes to be inexplicable by mechanical and materialist accounts, and the chapter assesses his argument in the light of recent neuroscience and theories of neuroplasticity.