Habit both restores vitality and sedates the subject it sustains
Evidence
Habit makes teleological accomplishment possible, yet renders that achievement null and void. Once the end is reached, the subject disappears: ‘it is the habit of living which brings on death, or, if put quite abstractly, is death itself’. What fulfils, destroys. Living is exhausting, and building the mechanisms of body and spirit also brings exhaustion. That is why the motions of body and spirit must be channelled into the shape of habit. For it is habit that draws the line between using and exhausting one’s forces; it offers leisure in the midst of carrying on, establishes a reservoir of potential energy to guarantee that the individual can continue. Yet at the very moment that habit awakens and restores, it puts to sleep. — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 610
Categorization
- DEEPTHINKING: Habit as simultaneously reservoir of energy and anaesthetic — fulfilment destroys; a genuinely paradoxical structural claim about how any achieved equilibrium becomes its own negation.
- XREF: connects to: Habit functions paradoxically as both a force of death and of life — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,…, 301; Adaptation itself is a theoretical activity combining contemplation and exercise — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,…, 512; Habit makes the soul regain a second nature (+3 more)
Broader Connections
- Habit is the organic being’s effort to maintain unity through synthesizing differences
#expands(0.82) - Habit enables the soul to hold content without immersion or indifference.
#expands(0.80) — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 578 - Habit transforms contingent acts into essential determinations of being.
#expands(0.78) — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 601