Habit and the Limits of the Autonomous Subject

The Spirit–Nature Division

There is a broad spectrum of thinkers who largely conceive the world in terms of a neat divide between rational man and causal nature. Kant presents probably the most famous modern view of this, taking these two spheres to represent the essential way in which the world should be considered, that is, a causal nature (which includes animals) and a domain of spontaneous human beings. Following Kant, spontaneity, reason and autonomy became widely accepted as the defining features of humanity, though there were of course many precursors to this idea within early modern philosophy. ¹ Spontaneous subjects are free by virtue of their capacity to authorize and instantiate norms. While the terminology of autonomy and spontaneity is a long way down the philosophical track from Plato, it shares with him a canonical way of dividing the world. Humanity is distinguished by virtue of its contemplative and reflective capacities, capacities that are employed to confront a given real and fixed world. ²

The neat dividing of the world between a reflective self-determined domain and a mechanistic purely causal nature has been challenged on two main fronts in the 20th century – pragmatism and phenomenology. Many figures from these traditions or figures who have been influenced by these traditions (Honneth, Heidegger, Gadamer, Dewey, Bourdieu, Ricoeur, Foucault, Merleau-Ponty, Taylor and Dreyfus) hold that there are sense-making practices (inter-subjective, historical, habitual, political and everyday coping strategies) that are normative but cannot be understood as maintaining their hold over the subject through the reflective action of an autonomous subject. These traditions can both be characterized by their contestation of a purely rational approach to the determination of norms and values, as well as all striving in their own diverse ways to undermine what Dewey described as the traditional epistemological privileging of intellectualism. ³ This intellectualism, which characterizes Kantian and pre-Kantian thought and much contemporary philosophy, truncates human experience into merely a rational ability to form and make judgments about beliefs. Experience is as such predominantly conceived in terms of knowledge claims and is thereby disembodied and stripped of its practical orientation. This approach places nature at a distance from a disembodied knowing subject who reflects upon it. Reason’s role in such a schema is to ground and determine the standards by which our beliefs, norms and principles can be held to be true. Reason and the principles it verifies as true then ought alone to guide my action. This is what distinguishes rational man from causal nature.

For some figures in poststructuralism and phenomenology, and earlier influential figures of both traditions such as Bergson and Ravaisson, habit presents, by virtue of its connection to nature, a non-discursive resource by which philosophy could be challenged and transformed. ⁴ Habit for these figures and traditions represents the possibility for humanity to transform itself in a way that does not rely on the core animating ideal of modernity, that is, self-determining rationality. Deleuze, Bergson and Ravaisson considered habit as an opening of humanity to natural life. Bergson, in a well-known phrase, describes such an animal potentiality as being ‘pregnant with an unlimited future’ (1944: 144). By this he means that habit brings the past into the bodily character of the subject, predisposing it to act unreflectively in certain ways, thereby freeing up its cognitive potential for new experiences. ⁵ Habit provides the condition for this openness since it allows the subject, through the dispositions that it entrenches in it, to free itself for the future. Deleuze and Ravaisson also saw habit as a potentiality (through the dispersion of movement, intelligence and energy) that opens the organism, through the direction that habituation provides, to a multiplicity of vital forms issuing from nature. Habit, on this view, is a kind of mid-way between nature and spirit that allows us to ‘perceive, beneath the central unity of personality, the mysterious dispersion of force and intelligence’ (Ravaisson, 2008: 61). ⁶ It is the connection of habit to this diverse, infinite and grace-infused nature that gives habit, and hence human life, a potential plasticity.

In a similar way Dewey’s pragmatism claimed that whenever we act, we are ‘cooperating with external materials and energies’ (1922: 26). The consequence of this is that our comportments, norms, values and reasons cannot be changed by an exercise of the rational will but rather only by ‘changing objective conditions’ (1922: 29). While pragmatism and phenomenology explain the issue in different language they concur that reason and the will are unable to be abstracted from prior conditions. ⁷ For both these traditions habit intervenes between will and the execution of an outcome. Accordingly, it is the conditions that form habits that are the best place to look if one wants to change anything, from the correct upright posture to moral conduct.

This 20th-century challenging of the division between the space of reasons and the space of causes (between spirit and nature) has, like almost every contemporary problem, a precursor in German Idealism. Kant confronted the spirit–nature dualism in his moral theory. The way he dealt with it has since become one of the canonical problems in morality and ethics, that is: how to make reason a motivation for action. How does simply knowing something to be true or the right thing to do motivate action? This is where the neat division between reason and the passions came unstuck. Kant recognized that he needed to import the impetus that the passions gave us to provide the requisite motivation to action. Reason could provide the basis for sound judgment but it could not of its own accord give us the desire to do anything, so a desire had to be brought back on board but very much as the handmaiden of reason, which would not allow nature to taint the hegemony of rational self-legislation. He brings the passions back into moral judgment as an incentive to act, but not in such a way that it can be the cause of our action, which would make it, in Kant’s language, heteronomous. The passions ought instead to be merely a possible motivation for our action, which means we can make a passion the principle by which to act, or they can provide us with the requisite respect for the law. Returning the passions back to us as only a possible motivation for action did not threaten the self-legislative authority of reason.

The Kantian attempt to resolve the reason–nature distinction was immediately contested. Kant’s rational man had no origin either in the material structure of mind or in natural history. Without such a narrative, rationality was still indistinguishable from a divine gift separating us from everything else – everything else, that is, being part of causal nature. Kant’s approach did not fundamentally challenge the classical metaphysical dualism that posited two distinct types of substances – mental and material. In the philosophical tradition Fichte, in his various versions of the Wissenschaftslehre, is the first to try to formulate just how a rational subject can get itself off the ground by its own devices. The story of Fichte’s torturously complex self-positing subject need not concern us here, but what is significant is that he begins a general questioning of the privileging of human cognition as our defining feature. His criticisms of Kantian freedom and the general intellectualism of philosophy led him to posit a minded subject that was more than just a web of beliefs. His subject was necessarily embedded in concrete human praxis. Following Fichte, Hegel had sought with his notion of Spirit to further undermine the neatness of Kant’s mind–world division. Hegel employs the term ‘spirit’ in order to capture a much more diverse array of elements that he took to be involved in the formation of norms, experiences and judgments. It includes such things as social, somatic, historical and discursive features that were excluded from Kant’s approach. We will flesh out some of the detail of this later in the article.

Despite various 19th- and 20th-century attempts to erode the reason–nature distinction it remains a framing dichotomy for much contemporary thought. We see its influence in diverse figures such as Korsgaard, Habermas and a whole swathe of contemporary thinkers who still conceive norms almost exclusively as explicit, shareable and ‘ownable’ rational commitments. ⁸ Reasons gain their normative force not through individual acts of self-reflection that legislate only for oneself; crucially, those reasons are legitimate and genuinely normative when those reasons are agent-neutral, that is when they are ‘public reasons, reasons whose normative force can extend across the boundaries between people’ (Korsgaard, 2009: 191). This means that such reasons are necessarily public; they are reasons we can share. A reason to act in this sense has normative force when it can be considered and validated by others as a reason by which they too would act. A diverse collection of contemporary thinkers, such as Habermas and Brandom, appeal to variations of the idea of the ‘publicness’ of reasons in order to justify the objectivity of norms. This is a space of reasons, a reflective and rational sphere by which values, norms and morals can be seen as collective self-determined achievements. The origin and determination of norms is on this view overwhelmingly portrayed as Kantian autonomy writ large. ⁹

The socialized reason which dominates much Kantian-inspired normative theory is presented as both the condition for and the context in which all norms are framed. Of course not everything can be a norm. In order for something to count as a norm it must be able to be recognized as a reason to act by one’s interlocutors and be something that we can individually and collectively commit ourselves to. There is great debate as to what criterion serves as the benchmark for commitment – universalizability of a maxim, democratic consensus, coherence of propositions, logical reasons and so on. In its most advanced form, this view of normativity assumes a public domain supported by liberal social and political institutions, which provide the right social and political conditions for such deliberative norm formation and justification. The whole social sphere so conceived is the ‘logical space of reasons’, a social space for ‘the giving and asking for reasons’. This socialized autonomy is the latest, albeit highly nuanced, varied and sophisticated incarnation of how to conceive of what it is to be distinctly human. Despite variations in how we legitimate the reasons on offer, the space of reasons is presented as a distinctly human space that is characterized by our responsiveness to reasons. This responsiveness to reasons legitimates the views of others and those reasons ought to guide our action and ground our norms. What can count as a reason to act or what can be appealed to, to justify an action, has to be able to be considered as either collectively sanctioned or a reason we can share.

For the most part this approach to normativity assumes a division between, on the one hand, our reflective capacity as rational agents and, on the other, our affects, passions and inclinations. The former allows us to put the latter at a distance and thereby make them serve our rational purposes. This passage from Korsgaard’s recent work Self-Constitution expresses such an approach:

As a rational agent you are aware of the grounds of your beliefs and actions … being aware of them gives you some distance from them, and puts you in control. Self-consciousness … separates your perceptions from their automatic normative force.… Now you are divided into parts and must pull yourself together by making a choice. And in order to make a choice, reason needs a principle – not one imposed on it from the outside … but one that is its own. (2009: 212–13)

What this effectively Kantian view ignores or underplays is that there might in fact be a source of practices, norms and values that one cannot understand as self-consciously authorized (owned) or natural and yet is an essential element of human subjectivity. Most Kant-inspired contemporary discussions of the determination of norms concentrate on the reflective, intersubjectively negotiated and rational determination of norms (Korsgaard, 1996). (This approach tends to treat our norms as though they were the products of question and answer sessions in philosophy conferences.) Of course norms can be produced in this Kantian way but what this approach ignores is why many of the norms, values and practices, which make up much of our everyday life and culture, remain overwhelmingly uncontested in rational debates and are for the most part partitioned from our explicit commitments. Hegel’s thought, as we will see shortly, is a salient corrective to this approach. In the Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel, 1977) and in his objective Spirit he presents norms, concepts and experience as forms of life. In, for example, his notion of Sittlichkeit (ethical life), which we will discuss below, Hegel presents the vast majority of our norms as habits, that is, as dispositions to act that are cultivated by diverse but interrelated features of every society. In Sittlichkeit Hegel describes the ways in which norms are embedded in and produced by a social order. These norms get their force by establishing the identity of a subject with those norms. Central to the establishment of self-identity is the embodiment of norms in habits.

Habit, Autonomy and Identity

Standard Kantian approaches to subjectivity, freedom and normativity have difficulty accounting for the resilience of many practices and habits that characterize much of our customary life. Let’s take just one random example: arguably there are no good reasons for eating meat in the West. There is no biological necessity, the cultural necessity is difficult to support in an era of large-scale agribusiness and the overwhelming mistreatment and suffering of animals that is the result of modern mechanized farming practices would, even prima facie, make the eating of animals in the West a highly questionable practice. Because they conceive of the origin and determination of norms in a fundamentally limited way, that is, largely on the model of autonomy, Kantian framed accounts of identity and normativity cannot explain the normative force of such customs. Specifically what I want to deny is the exclusivity of the public space of reasons as the privileged sphere in which norms are established. The dualism of nature and reflective subjectivity that this approach presupposes offers a very narrow view of human life that reinforces an ontological divide between human beings, on the one hand, and nature and non-human animals, on the other, but pursuing this issue is outside the scope of this article.

Kant argued that what distinguished the human subject was its capacity to take a reflective stand on both itself and the world. However, the rationality this subject employed was detached from the world and the autonomous subject was similarly worldless. Kant failed to give an account of the distinct lived perspective by which his rational subject experienced itself and the world; indeed, the nature of his critical philosophy rendered him structurally incapable of providing such an account, since its focus was on reason’s self-grounding, about which we will have more to say in the next and final sections. By contrast Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind, The Phenomenology of Spirit and much of the Philosophy of Right present a detailed evocation of what it is to inhabit a self, a shape of life and a specific historically determined socio-political world. He is especially concerned to show why these forms of life might fail or be inadequate. It is beyond the scope of this article to present the complex and extraordinarily comprehensive way in which Hegel’s thought examines these issues. My concern in this section is to examine just one aspect of his approach: the role of habit in forging these shapes of life at the level of the individual subject and at the level of ethical life (the socio-political level). Hegel’s analysis of habit has two important implications that will be examined below: first, habit’s role in a making a norm binding on a subject undermines the model of autonomy; second, the way in which it inscribes norms as determinate elements of our self-relation makes habit central to human subjectivity. ¹⁰

Dewey in Human Nature and Conduct is particularly clear on the centrality of habit in human experience and identity:

All habits are demands for certain kinds of activity; and they constitute the self. In any intelligible sense of the word will, they are will. They form our effective desires and they furnish us with our working capacities. They rule our thoughts, determining which shall appear and be strong and which shall pass from light into obscurity. (Dewey, 1922: 25, my emphasis)

Habit, at the level of the individual subject, allows us to take possession of our feelings, desires and skilful practices. This habituation of urges, instincts and feelings is an appropriation of them; it is not an autonomous appropriation but is instead fundamentally embodied. Habit gives order and structure to the manifold of feelings that is attendant on our natural selves (Hegel, 1975: §410). The will makes its feelings its own and in so doing it allows the subject to become ‘indifferent’ to those feelings rather than the feelings determining our action. Those feelings are not thereby subservient to our rational will, in the manner they are with Kant; they are instead ‘hardened’ through repetition into an ordering of dispositions, practices and comportments that largely structures the way we experience the world (Hegel, 2007: 154). Once habituated, feelings do not lose their affectivity – that is, they still have force – but what they have lost is their externality. They can no longer be understood as drives issuing from the natural world. In habit feelings become the subject’s own; they have become constitutive features of selfhood. For Hegel, cognition organizes feelings into habits. Habits are still expressions of our material character and are felt as such by the subject but they are in effect under her control. Habits and customs are the consolidated and lived pathways in which and with which we orient ourselves, for the most part, in the world. Because they are a ‘second nature’ they are resilient and intractable. As Dewey puts it: ‘The nature of habit is to be assertive, insistent, self-perpetuating’ (1922: 58). This in effect is what Hegel means by habit being a hardening. While they may be forged by the will at the level of the individual subject, as habits they are material expressions of the subject.

The dualism of, on the one hand, autonomy and explicit normative commitments, and on the other, causal nature, is an inadequate conceptual division for understanding habit. The self-feeling that we have in habit is not an autonomous act. Practices, feelings and sensations that have been habituated into the self determine much of the character of our experience of the world. While the will is involved in this process, it does not produce what Hegel describes as ‘hardening’ of the disposition into pathways, by which we orientate ourselves to the world and ourselves in our actions, judgments and comportments through acts of rational self-legislation. We are our habits and we relate to the world through them but they cannot be conceived in terms of the nature/reason dualism.

From the perspective of Hegel’s subjective spirit, where he is concerned with psychology and the ‘soul in its uncultivated natural condition’ (Hegel, 2007: 81), ¹² habits are domains of practice or adroitness where our bodily comportments and desires are controlled. Hegel transposes this internalizing and appropriative capacity that he describes in the subjective spirit (at the level of the individual) onto his objective spirit (the sphere of politics, ethics and social organization). Habit in the objective spirit mediates between Bildung (culture) and the subject’s judgments, inclinations and dispositions. In Hegel’s social thought, habit connects a subject’s feelings to the values, ethics and duties developed in a society. This is why Hegel describes habit at this social level also as second nature. By employing the term ‘second nature’ to describe habit he is not claiming habits as a new socially determined nature. Culture, civil society, morality and the laws of the state, forms of government and so on are not meant to describe a second nature established by collective human endeavour. Second nature, at least in the objective spirit, instead describes a form of self-relation. It attempts to capture the way in which the norms of society are taken up as constitutive elements of a subject’s self-understanding. The critical issue for our purposes here is that the appropriative aspect of habit allows norms to be inscribed in one’s self-understanding without them having to be legitimated through conscious acts of reflection. Moreover, those norms are experienced by the subject as material expressions of who she is. That is, they are not abstract norms that reason either affirms or denies; they are felt expressions of identity.

In Hegel’s objective spirit habits are customs and values that are determinative of our identity. They both motivate us to act as well as structure our ethical comportments, but these ‘habituated norms’ are not expressions of or determined by explicit commitments. These values are normative but they are not commitments that we have necessarily rationally and explicitly stood behind in the Kantian sense; rather they are norms we are committed to insofar as they define who and what we are. Those norms are felt, there is a phenomenal experience or, to put it otherwise, there is something it is like to be, when one acts or judges in accordance with a norm. The nature of these normative commitments is of a different order to the type of rational deliberation that is presented by much normative theory. The habituated norms that Hegel describes are far more ingrained in us than our explicit commitments, since we act on them not through self-conscious affirmations but as if they were reality itself. ¹³ As Dewey put it: ‘As a matter of fact, it is precisely custom which has the greatest inertia, which is least susceptible of alteration; while instincts are mostly modifiable through use, most subject to educative direction’ (1922: 107). One can try to rationally justify our normative commitments but their normative force is not the result of an act of rational self-legislation. Because they are aligned with feeling, and these feelings are embodied elements of identity, these habituated norms can come into conflict with rational reflection and argument. And the nature of that confrontation is of a qualitatively different order to a rational debate about different possible principles that might guide one’s action. This is of course not to say that Hegel revises the mind–body or nature–culture dualisms, but rather that these habituated norms, as constitutive features of identity, have a powerful hold on us precisely because habits are both minded and material.

There are ostensibly no good reasons for the continuance of a great many of the routine practices of western culture: what is eaten, how we travel, how much and what we consume, and so on. At the very least, why many practices such as meat-eating remain for the most part unquestioned is not because the arguments against them are unconvincing, not perhaps even because a majority of people have no regard for the suffering of animals or for the integrity of the natural environment. Practices like these continue not because of a failure to present adequate reasons for their cessation but because of the way in which many norms become sedimented in human identity through habituation. Many of our habits, at the level of our practical identity, are binding on how we act and the ways in which we make sense of the world. That normativity is binding on us not out of mutually and rationally determined reasons that we legislate for ourselves and then act in accordance with. Rather the force of such ‘norms’ comes from their affectivity. That is, the norms function as ‘reasons’ to act or react, or as constraints on action, because those norms have come to be aligned, through the complex workings of the ethical life of a culture with phenomenal states. Norms, for the most part, cannot be considered as propositions that motivate action because they are judged to be logically valid. The normativity of many norms, that is, why they have force for us, lies in the feelings associated with the norm. ¹⁴ This embodied aspect of norms gives them a determining role in the constitution of our identity. While beliefs may be a formal structure of what it is to be a subject, at the level of self-identity those beliefs are affectively determinative of who we take ourselves to be. In the unlikely event that a norm has its origin in a purely rational domain, such a principle will motivate action, for the most part, only when we take it to be who we are, that is, when the norm can be associated with a determinate feeling. How these norms become inscribed on the subject through one’s culture is what Hegel’s discussion of the role of habit in social and political life is concerned to demonstrate. I am interpreting habits here quite broadly, in the way both Hegel and Dewey do. Habits are practices, comportments and skills of the individual. Customs are similar modes of orientating practice but they take place at the collective level. ¹⁵

What is of concern here is how a norm maintains its hold over a subject, and it does so, for the most part, by being habituated. This is of course not to say that the origin of the norm cannot be produced by rational deliberation. Indeed there may well be many norms established in this way, but our concern is why we act or respond in accordance with a norm. Habituation allows a norm to be acted on or responded to in an immediate and relatively uncompromising way. The force of many norms comes from their being, as we have already said, considered as a given feature of reality: one just eats like this, travels like this, treats other people in specific ways. In all these cases one employs and judges in accordance with a norm but it is not a reflective act of reason. We identify most practices and norms as our own and as constitutive of who we are through self-feeling, not reason. This is why, when so many arguments have been raised within the public space of reasons about problems with the industrialized farming of animals or consumerism, there has been very limited change in behaviour. The failure of these reasons to succeed in changing behaviour shows the limitations of the Kantian model of the space of reasons as the comprehensive model for norm generation and legitimation, but, more importantly, it shows the power of habit as a determination of identity.

If one is persuaded and forced to recognize that a particular practice, such as for example meat-eating is in fact a norm, not a given fact of reality but something that needs to be justified, the demand to give reasons for it causes discomfort, largely because it is an unrecognized norm that one is invested in and that is intimately bound to our sense of self. That meat-eating may be nothing necessary poses a threat to selfhood, and it is felt as such because it is a norm that is an essential part of selfhood, one that is sedimented in habit rather than in rationally deliberated and self-determined actions and values. To desist from such a practice requires a re-moulding of our actions at the level of habit, a change therefore in who and what we are and a change in the material conditions by which we live our life, not just a change in the type of reasons I give for my beliefs. Do we really need more new arguments about the benefits of using public transport rather than driving or why a predominantly plant-based diet is a superior form of ethical practice? By being attuned to the importance of habit, what we can recognize is that, in many cases, the transformation of norms requires not necessarily more reasoned discourse but the restructuring of a way of life, the creation of new patterns and pathways by which new norms can be habituated. It is these objective conditions by which the world is embodied in us and we are in it that Hegel strives to describe in the Phenomenology of Spiritand the Philosophy of Right.

The dominant Kantian approach to normativity assumes that our commitments are produced through the giving of and asking for reasons. Our commitments, on this view, have normative force only when I can consider your reasons as public reasons, that is, as reasons that can also legislate my commitments (Korsgaard, 2009: 192). In this case my not recognizing your commitment as legitimate means the commitment is irrational, unintelligible or else I wilfully ignore it. This rationalistic approach fails to recognize that the basis of the rejection of such claims as to the legitimacy of a belief is most often not on the basis of an idealized rational deliberation. The problem here is that the model of agency and subjectivity appealed to is of an autonomous subject who is radically disembodied and decontextualized, who has an abstract reason with which she can in theory construct and recognize universals to which she will commit herself. Hegel offers us a very different type of subjectivity, one that is fundamentally embodied, social and historical. The rejection of norms and practices that do not accord with our own is usually grounded affectively; the response to a questioning of one’s practices, habits and values involves a self-feeling that claims: ‘but that is not who I take myself to be’. And this ‘taking oneself to be’ is not, as with Korsgaard an identity that is ideally a coherent set of rational principles, but rather ideas and norms that are intertwined with determinate feelings. Human identity is not just an amalgam of communicative commitments but rather those commitments are ingrained in us as embodied organizational contractionsthrough the habituation of culture, custom and Bildung. ¹⁶

The transformation of what we might describe as ‘affective norms’ is not achieved simply through an agreement to some alternative more persuasive reason. That is, the transformation is not achieved by recognizing the challenge to our norms as reasons we can share and therefore that I ought to hold myself to. Accepting those reasons and holding oneself to them requires a transformation of what I feel myself to be. This brings us to the issue of the relation of habit to the problem of modernity. What we have examined, albeit briefly, is the role of habit in the individual, and how norms can be understood as habits at the level of custom. In both cases we have seen how habit undermines and transforms the spirit–nature division and the Kantian model of autonomy. What we are yet to see is how Hegel deals with the resilience of habits in modernity; after all Hegel, as the great 19th-century theorist of modernity, stresses its capacity to transform itself. How does modernity respond to the relative resilience and fixity of norms (their second-nature hardness)? This will lead us on to the related issue of the world-historical function of habit.

Habit and Modern Life

The scientific revolution of the 17th and 18th centuries began the erosion of the idea that nature had a given structure that was an expression of a divine order. The developments of the natural sciences, since Newton, have continued to strip nature of any spiritual dimension. Disenchanted nature has no teleology and is not governed by a rational structure that is mirrored in God or human reason. Nature overwhelmingly comes to be described in terms of causal laws but on its own it has no meaning and is wholly mechanical. This disenchantment of nature did not, for early Enlightenment thinkers, extend to the human mind. While early Enlightenment thought held nature to be disenchanted, human mindedness was still conceived as radically different to the material world. While mental substance was separated from causal nature, nevertheless nature had a given structure that reflective reason could discover. Reason and human thought in this early modern period was effectively still quasi-divine.

Kant’s innovation was to extend this critical scientific revolution to reason and the human mind. This resulted in what Terry Pinkard (2009) nicely describes as the ‘disenchantment of reason itself’. Reason, rather than being the expression of some cosmic order, had both to be self-grounding and to produce an order for its norms out of itself. Without delving too far into the murky depths of just how such a self-legitimation was possible, what needs to be emphasized is just how central this Kantian idea is to modernity’s own self-understanding. Kant’s critical theory provided the theoretical underpinning for modernity’s own self-legitimation, precisely because, Kant claimed, reason, conceptuality and normativity could be self-authorizing, that is they could ground themselves without appeal to anything outside the human determination of these notions.

The narrative of post-Kantian idealism is propelled forward by a general dissatisfaction with Kant’s attempt to have reason establish its own authority. Once again we cannot explore this issue in much depth since this legitimation question is one of the most contentious in post-Kantian philosophy and social theory. However this issue bears on our account of habit since part of Hegel’s response to Kant, as we have seen, is to provide the normative with a basis in a far more rounded view of human life than rational self-legislation and an abstractly autonomous subject. Kant’s practical philosophy established a complex and seemingly formal set of rules by which a rational agent should act and that a rational agent ought to recognize as the basis for her action. But no matter how adequately, universally and coherently Kant could articulate those rules, they could not establish why someone would be motivated to act in accordance with them. Hegel responds to this by examining the ways in which subjects do in fact identify with the principles that animate their culture. This identification and ownership is a far more complex and turbid process than Kant’s categorical imperative and the formula for universal law.

Hegel’s Philosophy of Rightexamines the kind of social, institutional and political setting in which the Kantian conception of freedom could be a motivation to act. What Hegel examines there is how modern life could be understood as cultivating – in collective ethical practices, communal concerns and sensibilities – the formal conception of freedom that Kant theorizes. Hegel saw modernity as no different from any other form of culture, in the sense that each society had its conceptions of right and a social and political life that cultivated those principles as dispositions that its citizens should be motivated to act in accordance with. What distinguishes modernity is that it had to cultivate dispositions towards pluralism, tolerance and an ability to make its citizens at home in a world with competing moralities. In earlier societies conflicting moral frameworks had torn societies apart and led to their collapse, the Sophoclean tragedies of ancient Greece being Hegel’s favourite examples. By contrast modernity established dispositions and institutions that allowed conflict to exist such that the conflict did not threaten modern life itself or its animating principle – self-determination. Modernity is for Hegel: a set of institutions and dispositions that an autonomous subject could be at home in, even though the modern world has no foundation beyond the human legitimation of it. That is, it is a shape of life that is self-transforming and self-determining. What Hegel does in his social and political philosophy is give the concepts of modern freedom and Kantian self-determination a shape of life that a subject could inhabit, which is far more than just an animating concept, but is a way of being in the world. This required that Kantian autonomy, and the program of his critical philosophy, be reconnected to nature and given institutions that cultivated in its citizens those ideals as dispositions.

Habit is central to the cultivation of ethical life (Sittlichkeit). Ethical life is a uniquely modern form of social relation in which the norms of our collective social life have a rationality that is immanent in culture itself. These norms govern our customary life as a ‘second nature’. The culture attunes our affects, sensibilities and dispositions through the family, education as well as the institutions and discourses of civil society. Through this enculturation the norms of society do not have to be instantiated at every possible employment of them through conscious acts of authorization and validation (Hegel, 1991: §151). For the most part we act in accordance with the prevailing norms, not through conscious acts of reflection but through the dispositions that operate in us, as what might be described as affective norms. This is the education provided by society that cultivates ethical responses so that they can be put into effect for the most part without hesitation; it gives those norms an affective immediacy. In modernity, especially with the advent of civil society, this process of the cultivation of dispositions does not necessarily justify the preservation of the status quo, because of the presence of institutional structures in which values can be contested and opposed, and this at least has the potential to prevent customs and norms from becoming atrophied. Without this dissent and contestation habits become stagnant (Hegel, 1975: 58–60). As we have seen, this is in part why Hegel describes habits as second nature, because of their propensity to become hardened and fixed. Nevertheless, in contrast to the Deleuzian and phenomenological approach to habit, which we described at the outset of the article, habit so conceived does not connect us to a re-imagined nature that provides a non-discursive resource for human transformation.

This leads us to the third Hegelian way of thinking of habit, which might be described as world-historical, that also has an important role to play in Hegel’s objective spirit, his philosophy of history and his Phenomenology of Spirit. When a form of life has grown old the habits ingrained in its subjects by a culture become pathologies that eventually, at the point of that form of life’s demise, are intuited to be inadequate and so represent the potential for the emergence of a new shape of life. The work of intuiting just how something is inadequate or discordant is the labour of the negative. Because habits are lived as second nature they are difficult to change. In Hegel’s hands that discordance, the negative, emerges when habits, practices and principles fall out of alignment with what the world has become. The negative emerges when the principles animating a culture no longer have a hold on its individuals, or where the concepts we have of ourselves and the world seem out of alignment or inadequate. This point of dissatisfaction and collapse is the basis for the transformation of a shape of life. This discordance makes us not-at-home and this forces the slow painful historical process by which ethical life and world strive to cohere. Pre-modern shapes of life violently collapsed and transformed into more adequate shapes of life that could deal with the contradictions that brought those civilizations down. Much of the narrative of Hegel’s philosophy of history presents the details of these various tumultuous transitions. But modernity, as Hegel sees it, is of a qualitatively different order; it is uniquely able to negotiate such discordance without its shape of life collapsing.

Nevertheless, even modernity has perhaps reached the point where ‘spirit now indulges itself in the world it has created’ (Hegel, 1975: 58). Modern liberal consumer culture (modernity’s most recent incarnation) is coming up against the limits of modernity’s own capacity for self-transformation. Its crisis is the failure of the animating concepts of modernity itself, that is, self-correction and self-determination. The unease that the negative evokes is the need for the collapse of this form of life. ¹⁷ What has to be faced, what is the cause of anxiety, is the limits of modern life to be able to transform itself. As we have seen throughout this article, habits want to continue; they want to repeat themselves, and when they cannot it causes unease or anxiety, because individual and collective identity is invested in their continuance and repetition. This in a sense is the state confronting modern life in the present. Habits want to repeat themselves but they are increasingly coming up against a world that threatens the continuity of those habits, but, more importantly, there is an emerging intuition that those habits are discordant. There is an unease and anxiety that this shape of life is perhaps the last human shape of life. The consumer culture and the brand of liberalism that has dominated western life since the middle of the 20th century is showing itself to be a shape of life grown old. It is a shape of life that appears unable to transform itself into a set of concepts and a culture that is adequate to the world.

The transformation and exploitation of the natural world, which has been the material result of the idea of self-determination, has brought this idea to the point where it is untenable. This is intuited in the intransigence of modern habits: consumption, transportation and the general excess that fuels consumer society. While this embodied anxiety may provide the condition for a change of custom and habits, these changes do not transform the core animating idea of modern life itself. There is a failure of coherence of the animating norms of modernity and of the self-grounding project itself. Habits cannot tell us where to go next; all they can do is indicate, through their inadequacy, the incoherence of our practices and commitments, which are in turn the markers of the irrationality of the whole. But the failure of this shape of life cannot now indicate what the next adequate shape of life will be. It is the prelude to a systematic breakdown of modernity; a breakdown that the resources of modernity, by their very nature, are unable to resolve through a rational renegotiation of its practices. The unease which is increasingly experienced in modernity’s animating norms and in the habits those norms have cultivated provides us, on Hegel’s view, with the basis for a self-comprehension, but in coming to see what we are and who we are, we see that our habits show a shape of life grown old and yet this is the only shape we can inhabit. This unfortunately has all the signs of a Greek tragedy since the resolution of the conflict is not available to the protagonists.