Habit eventually kills because activity only persists through not-yet-achieved aims

Evidence

Human beings even die as result of habit – that is, if they have become totally habituated to life, and spiritually and physically blunted, and the opposition between subjective consciousness and spiritual activity has disappeared. For they are only active in so far as they have not yet attained something and wish to assert themselves and show what they can do in pursuit of it. Once this is accomplished, their activity and vitality disappear, and the loss of interest which ensues is spiritual or physical death. — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 609

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the deadly end of habit: total habituation removes the opposition that sustains living activity
• XREF: Ties to the reader’s plasticity work — habit as that which must be re-plasticized or it ossifies into death — connects to: Habit collapses the gap between ideal aim and its actual realization; Habit functions paradoxically as both a force of death and of life — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,…, 301; The future arises only from reanimating the familiar and habitual — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,…, 1268
• QUESTION: How does the not-yet-achieved aim map onto plasticity’s open-ended structure versus its closing into fixed mechanism?

Broader Connections

• Habit collapses the gap between ideal aim and its actual realization #corroborates (0.85)
• Habit functions paradoxically as both a force of death and of life #responds-to (0.80) — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 301
• The future arises only from reanimating the familiar and habitual #complicates (0.75) — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 1268