Inclination without Necessitation

The chapter focuses first on Ravaisson’s response to Leibniz’s account of freedom and his modal doctrines. It shows that Leibniz’s account of moral necessity in free acts was important for Ravaisson, since in Of Habit he characterizes the modal status of habit as a ‘necessity of attraction and desire’, and then in 1867 he proclaims the advent of a new spiritualist philosophy, a new philosophy of contingency and spontaneity, under the aegis of a Leibnizian doctrine of moral necessity. The chapter argues that Ravaisson adopted more from Leibniz’s ideas than his own official proclamations can support, but it also shows that he does not adopt a form of monadological metaphysics in De l’habitude. Ravaisson is interested not in what Leibniz says about beings—as monads, as distinct from body, as without causal relations to each other, etc.—but rather in what he says about being as being inclined.

After Of Habit

This chapter examines the reception of Ravaisson’s account of habit in later nineteenth- and twentieth-century French philosophy. The first two sections examine its reception in the work of Albert Lemoine, Léon Dumont, and Henri Bergson. The third section examines its reception in the work of the French phenomenologists and theorists of the lived body, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Paul Ricoeur. The chapter shows how Ravaisson’s account of inclination relates to these notions of the lived body. In conclusion, it shows how contemporary Merleau-Ponty-inspired accounts of pre-reflective, embodied action as a form of ‘coping’ can be extended by Ravaisson’s concern for tendency and inclination in motor habit.

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.

Tendency and Time

This chapter addresses the temporal sense of Ravaisson’s notion of tendency and inclination, in showing how it implies a notion of duration, as a non-linear, non-quantifiable lived time. The chapter shows first that Bergson’s famous account of duration, Time and Free Will, departs from Ravaisson’s explicit remarks about time as irreducible to quantification in his own doctoral dissertation half a century earlier. The second section shows that Bergson’s notion of duration takes up Lemoine’s L’Habitude et l’instinct, which itself developed Ravaisson’s more oblique remarks concerning habit and durée. Lemoine enables us to see, with and after Ravaisson, not only that habit involves a non-linear notion of time as duration, but also that the most fundamental form of habit is durée understood as a primitive contraction of past, present, and future.

Second Nature as Philosophical Method

This chapter addresses the broader metaphysical framework in which Ravaisson advances his doctrine of inclination, and assesses his claims concerning reflection on habit as a method of establishing a non-dualist, monist metaphysics. The first three sections examine Of Habit’s attempt to expose a continuum underlying traditional distinctions between the will, habit, instinct and the inorganic realm. On this basis, the final section argues that this account of habit as method of metaphysics subtly transforms Schelling’s account of the artwork as ‘organon and document’ of philosophy within his Identitätsphilosophie at the turn of the nineteenth century. Schelling characterizes the artwork as bearing witness to an original identity of conscious and unconscious principles, and the chapter draws out the perhaps surprising parallels between his Kantian conception of purposiveness without purpose in the work of genius and Ravaisson’s account of a certain purposiveness without purpose, an embodied purposiveness, in habit.

Conclusion

On Ravaisson’s account, as we have seen from the beginning of this study, tendency and inclination constitute a principle continuous with, but irreducible to, the will. Tendency and inclination—which are also continuous with each other in that tendencies possibly become inclinations in the course of the development of motor or sensory habits—cannot, therefore, be understood in any kind of voluntarist or libertarian sense, as a function of reasons or intellectual choice. Inclination and tendency in motor habit are purposive, but this, as ...

Is There a ‘Dispositional Modality’?

This chapter returns to the modal sense of Ravaisson’s notion of inclination. It assesses Stephen Mumford and Rani Lil Anjum’s argument that powers, as inherently a function of tendency or inclination, have a modal status irreducible to more familiar notions of necessity or possibility. The chapter assesses their appeal to voluntary agency in the light of Maine de Biran’s critical response to Hume’s sceptical account of agency. It shows how Mumford and Anjum’s official conception of tendency is restricted by their inheritance of a tradition focusing on the possibility of prevention and interference in a process. Such an approach, I argue, will only ever justify an idea of conditional necessity rather than any modal value wholly irreducible to necessity, although the idea of a ‘dispositional modality’ is a useful corrective to Ravaisson’s resort to a Leibnizian notion of moral necessity when attempting to reflect on tendency and inclination.

Introduction

This chapter introduces the main argument of the book, namely that in his 1838 Of Habit Ravaisson brings to light a middle ground between reasons and causes, a middle ground through which our behaviour and our choices are influenced. Ravaisson, that is, provides an intelligible notion of inclining that is intermediate between providing a reason and being a mechanical cause. This notion of inclination is original, and it is important for contemporary work in the philosophy of action and the metaphysics of powers. In order to introduce the book’s argument, the chapter describes briefly Ravaisson’s life and works and then the structure of Of Habit. It concludes with some remarks on methodology, a literature review, and summaries of the individual chapters of the book.