Habitude

26 July 2007 No human-like mind, no ‘God’, could have conceived and constructed the extraordinary life of the deep ocean; surely then, the creative process must have been more like that suggested by the concept of habitude: an evolving universe in which increasingly complex forms emerge and are reinforced by a tendence for patterns / habits to persist.

26 July 2007 Thalia’s myth

23 July 2007 Landauer, anarchist visionary

2 July 2007 Review of Black Mass by John Gray.

1 July 2007 Rather personal piece on ‘the proof delusion’.

25 June 2007 What is ‘Habitude’?, updated 29 June.

15 June 2007 Next major piece to come will be returning to the main theme of ‘Dream On’: world change – and obstacles to world change – with more on what I mean by ‘Big Visions’. As a taster – and relief from spirituality stuff – the Introduction from The Culture of Cities by Lewis Mumford.

15 June 2007 Finished with ‘Habitude and “the spirituality thing”’, with new section on ‘holistic teaching’ and all that.

13 June 2007 Chronological version of index page.

10 June 2007 ‘Habitude and “the spirituality thing”’, new section (but still incomplete).

8 June 2007 ‘Habitude and “the spirituality thing”’ (incomplete).

31 May 2007 ‘Experience and belief, nonsense, and the land’ (incomplete, added to 2 June).

29 May 2007 Recap: habitude as a concept.

29 May 2007 Coming next ‘Experience and belief, nonsense, and the land’.

28 May 2007 ‘Refuting the mechanistic paradigm’.

27 May 2007 Rupert Sheldrake’s response to the question ‘What Do You Believe In?’

26 May 2007 Pending ‘Refuting the mechanistic paradigm’, see Bergson on Wm. James’s Pragmatism. Also definitions of organicism and vitalism.

26 May 2007 Reading through the material on fighthabit I was struck by its solipsistic youthfulness. We do think differently at different ages or stages of life, perhaps due to changes in cognition as we accumulate knowledge, with declining affective cognition and increasing conceptual thinking, as described in a favourite book, David Gelernter’s The Muse in the Machine.2 If one goes back to an earlier life stage, to childhood, one discovers something quite extraordinary which is seldom cherished and recorded, the ecstatic outpouring of imagination by a loved child, a child who is listened to. One such whom I know well is my granddaughter, Thalia. Together we are starting to write up her ‘Witches World’.

26 May 2007 Discovered the following in a book of Bergson’s lectures:

Ravaisson’s doctoral thesis, sustained about that period (1838), is a first application of method. It bears a modest title: De l’habitude. But it is a whole philosophy of nature that the author sets forth in it. What is [end p.274] nature? How is one to imagine its inner workings? What does it conceal under the regular succession of cause and effect? Does it really conceal something, or is it not perhaps reduced, in short, to an entirely superficial deployment of movements mechanically enmeshed in one another? In conformity with his principle, Ravaisson seeks the solution of this very general problem in a very concrete intuition; the one we have of our own particular condition when we contract a habit. For motor habit, once contracted, is a mechanism, a series of movements which determine one another: it is that part of us which is inserted into nature and which coincides with nature; it is nature itself. Now, our inner experience shows us in habit an activity which has passed, by imperceptible degrees, from consciousness to unconsciousness and from will to automatism. Should we not then imagine nature, in this form, as an obscured consciousness and a dormant will? Habit thus gives us the living demonstration of this truth, that mechanism is not sufficient to itself: it is, so to speak, only the fossilized residue of a spiritual activity. (Henri Bergson, ‘The Life and Work of Ravaisson’, in The Creative Mind (New York: Philosophical Library, 1946), pp.261-300, extract pp.274-5)

25 May 2007 Yesterday I met again Oskar, the person who told me about the McKenna / Sheldrake connection, whose website is http://www.fighthabit.org/.

23 May 2007 Next piece to come: ‘Refuting the mechanistic paradigm’.

21 May 2007 Some Sheldrake links.

17 May 2007 ‘The what?s and why?s of “capitalist” philosophy.’ (incomplete) version 1.

16 May 2007 Next to appear: a piece on ‘The whats? and whys? of “capitalist” philosophy.’ This belongs in Dream On!, the joy of writing for a web site is being free of a strict linear structure, and being able to branch out.

15 May 2007 Dream On! section 2 added.

13 May 2007 ‘Dream On!: A Philosophical Study into Why Big Visions “Fail”’, (incomplete) version 1.

8 May 2007 The next thing to appear on this site will be an essay entitled: ‘Dream On!: A Philosophical Study into Why Big Visions “Fail”’. This will be about habitude as the ‘stuckness’ of society, whereby its predominantly capitalism-serving patterns repeat without challenge or depth of awareness: of the consequences, of the absurdity, of what else is possible; such that, whereas reforms are tried, sometimes with world-changing passion on the part of campaigners, visionaries such as Rabindranath Tagore and Bill Mollison, “Fail” (the scare quotes indicating that visions can be reborn) to get their big visions to germinate, thrive and be propagated, to such an extent that the sick old growth withers away.

29 April 2007, Bibliography (MS Word download) for combined research (Rabindranath Tagore, India, Voltaire, Enlightenment, Rupert Sheldrake, Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze)

27 April 2007, Towards an Introduction

‘Habitude’, as used here, is the name of a philosophical concept, in Deleuze’s sense, in that it is a multiplicity, it totalizes its components, it has a history involving problems needing to be solved, and a present relevant to our time, our becomings. (Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. by Graham Burchell and Hugh Tomlinson (London: Verso, 1994, first published 1991), pp.15-34)

A major component of the history of habitude is the work of Rupert Sheldrake, specifically his ‘hypothesis of formative causation’ (Rupert Sheldrake, A New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Formative Causation, new edition (London: Grafton, 1987, first published 1981) and The Presence of the Past (London: Collins, 1988)). Sheldrake’s hypothesis is neatly summarised in the blurb of the later book.

According to Deleuze, philosophy is the creation of concepts, and is quite different from science, which involves the creation of functions or propositions (Deleuze, p.117). Sheldrake is a scientist, and so by Deleuze’s terminology, the hypothesis of formative causation must be a scientific notion, and not a philosophy and not a concept. In any case ‘the hypothesis of formative causation’ is rather a mouthful, and it was originally for practical reasons, in order to have a convenient handle, that I suggested it be called ‘habitude’, a word I think of as borrowed from the French. n1

Sheldrake’s ideas do not lack philosophy, or philosophers inspiring them, and one name stands out, that of Henri Bergson, whose élan vital or ‘current of life’ was crucial to Sheldrake’s challenges to Darwinian evolution and the mechanistic model of the world:

By contrast, Henri Bergson saw the purposive organizing principles of the evolutionary process as internal to the evolving forms of life. He compared the evolutionary process to the development of mind through the onward movement of the current of life, the élan vital.

This current of life, traversing the bodies it has organized one after another, passing from generation to generation, has become divided among species and distributed amongst individuals without losing any of its force, rather intensifying in proportion to its advance. … Now, the more we fix our attention on this continuity of life, the more we see that organic evolution resembles the evolution of a consciousness, in which the past presses against the present and causes the upspringing of a new form of consciousness, incommensurable with its antecedents. (Bergson, Creative Evolution, 1911, pp.27-9)

Bergson did not, however, believe that this process of creative evolution had any ultimate, external purpose. If there was a God of the evolutionary process, he was not an external God, but a god who created himself in the very process of evolution. (Sheldrake, 1988, p.53)

However, in his striving to prove some aspects of his science experimentally, Sheldrake has, I believe, lost sight of the philosophy underlying his theories. I am not entirely persuaded by Deleuze’s insistence on the separation of philosophy from science, rather I see philosophy rather as Ernst Cassirer did, as ‘the atmosphere in which [science, history, jurisprudence, and politics] can exist and be effective … it presents the totality of intellect in its true function, in the specific character of its investigations and inquiries, its methods and essential cognitive process.’ (Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Princeton University Press, 1968, first published in German, 1932), p.vii)

Deleuze begins his book by saying: ‘The question what is philosophy? can perhaps be posed only late in life, with the arrival of old age and the time for speaking concretely.’ (Deleuze, p.1) Old age had not arrived for Deleuze (1925-1995) when he wrote this; he was only 66. I gave myself this web site for my 65th birthday, and 65 is not old age these days; however, maybe it’s old enough. I intend to develop this site gradually to see where it leads, patchily at first, probably then to redraft it in more coherent form.

Having pointed to the Sheldrake component of the history of habitude as a philosophical concept, another crucial element must be mentioned, my desire or mission to draw up a design for revolutionary world change. Having explored this for three years, I still believe two components of such a change need to be brought together: a land use revolution (possibly permaculture as ‘permanent agriculture’) and a social revolution (just possibly permaculture as ‘permanent culture’, but more likely socialism/communism/anarchism). Both these elements have adherents and activist groups with a tendency towards sectarianism and fixed ideas. The socialist element is wedded to materialism, and that is a mind set I am inclined to challenge. Having offered a taster on Sheldrake, I also have something here on socialist ‘metaphysical materialism’.

6 April 2007 What is habitude? – Some dialogues may help to explain.

n1 habitude [abityd] nf habit; avoir l’~ de faire to be in the habit of doing; avoir l’~ des enfants to be used to children; prendre l’~ de faire qch to get into the habit of doing sth; perdre une ~ to get out of a habit; d’~ usually; comme d’~ as usual; par ~ out of habit. (Collins French Dictionary Plus Grammar, 2000)

It was a little later that I discovered that the word is in the English dictionary, with a more narrow definition:

habitude n. 1 a mental or bodily disposition. 2 a custom or tendency (The Concise Oxford Dictionary Ninth Edition, 1995)

2 David Gelernter, The Muse in the Machine: Computerizing the Poetry of Human Thought (New York: Free Press, 1994)

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