Habit is a dateless memory that resists temporal localization.

Evidence

Habit is a mode of presence that cannot be reduced to the present time of the now. In this way it is temporally unique. For I can easily say that at a certain moment I possess this or that knowledge, this or that talent, without at that moment making use of it. But everything which is, so to speak, held within me, can also at any moment have a different outcome, falling outside this fragile slice of a ‘now’, or of an instant. It is impossible to give a date to habit. Habit is a memory which, like all memory, has lost the recollection of its own origin. We never know exactly when habit began or when it actually ceases to exist. It might have disappeared before the day at which we notice its absence, notice that we could no longer do something, that we were no longer adept. — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 484

Categorization

• XREF: The dateless, origin-forgetting character of habit directly parallels the ‘plasticity’ logic the reader wants to connect to brain science — habits sediment into neural structure without a datable onset. — connects to: Habit resists dating because it is a memory without recollection of origin — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,…, 484; Habit is the preservation of a first modification without repetition of the modification — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,…, 502
• SEED: Angle: habit and memory as undatable — how we never know when a skill or disposition began, and what this implies for brain-based accounts of learning and identity.
• DEEPTHINKING: The notion that habit is a memory that has forgotten its own origin is a dense, paradigm-shifting insight about how dispositions relate to time — genuinely worth sitting with.

Broader Connections

• Habit resists dating because it is a memory without recollection of origin #expands (0.95) — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 484
• Habit is the preservation of a first modification without repetition of the modification #corroborates (0.88) — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 502