Habit enables the soul to hold content without immersion or indifference.

Evidence

Habit allows the soul to appropriate a certain content without losing itself or becoming immersed in that content, but also without being indifferent to it: neither within the soul nor outside it. Moving between the inside and the outside, between ‘interior’ and ‘exterior’, the soul establishes its ‘rational liberation’: ‘Thinking, too, however free … no less requires habit and familiarity (Geläufigkeit) (this impromptuity or form of immediacy), by which it is the property of my singular Self.’ — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 578

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the dual relation of habit — neither absorption nor detachment — that grounds thought’s freedom.
• XREF: Connects to reader’s brain work: habituated skills become ‘second nature’ exactly as thinking requires automatized subroutines to become property of the self. — connects to: Habit, following Aristotle, is an alteration that does not corrupt but forms spirit. — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,…, 428; Habit makes the soul regain a second nature; Habit both restores vitality and sedates the subject it sustains — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,…, 610 (+3 more)
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how does ‘rational liberation’ through habit square with the common view of habit as unfree repetition? The passage seems to invert that.

Broader Connections

• Habit transforms contingent acts into essential determinations of being. #expands (0.80) — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 601
• Habit enables the incarnation of the divine in the human #expands (0.75) — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 1257
• Mindfulness involves being aware without judgment. #complicates (0.72) — Dan Harris, 10 percent Happier, 1130