Habit unites passive contemplation with active exercise in organic adaptation

Evidence

The dialectical movement uniting the inorganic components of the environment to the components of the organism is what Hegel calls ‘theoretical’. Every vital mechanism of adaptation is already in itself a certain modality of θεωρε!ν in the double meaning Aristotle emphasizes: to contemplate and to exercise. The living being is at once identical to and different from its non-living origins and surroundings. Because sameness and alterity are related, habit becomes a condition of adaptation in a double sense, being a form of contemplation – absorbing the environment, passively lending itself to what is given – and a kind of exercise, informing and transforming the surroundings, appropriating the given conditions for its organic functions. — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 512

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• DEFINE: Clarifies how Hegel fuses Aristotle’s two meanings of theoria — contemplate and exercise — into a single account of habit as adaptation; directly feeds the reader’s plasticity question about when receptivity tips into agency.
• XREF: Builds toward the reader’s core question in the MOC thread: this double meaning of theoria names the precise hinge where plastic receptivity (absorbing environment) flips into shaping power (exercising on it), echoing chs 55-58 on sensation as conserving alteration.

Related

• Adaptation itself is a theoretical activity combining contemplation and exercise (similarity 0.90)
• The physically weaker dominate nature by deliberate adaptation rather than strength (similarity 0.88)
• Every organic cell contracts habits, making contemplation a primordial bodily function (similarity 0.84)
• Habit is the organic being’s effort to maintain unity through synthesizing differences (similarity 0.83)
• Habit is the condensation of an organism’s environment into its constitution. (similarity 0.80)
• Habit transforms contingent acts into essential determinations of being. (similarity 0.80)
• Habit is the process whereby contingent determinations become essential (similarity 0.79)
• Habit is spirit’s reduction of nature into possessable logical determinations (similarity 0.79)
• Habit functions paradoxically as both a force of death and of life (similarity 0.79)
• Hegel’s reading of Aristotle may yield an anthropological interpretation of substance itself (similarity 0.79)
• Habit’s relation to what one has resists infinite regress of having (similarity 0.78)
• Hegel’s active and passive nous reciprocally mirror one another as plasticity (similarity 0.78)
• Habit precedes and results from the practice it makes possible (similarity 0.78)
• Habit is the hinge connecting Greek substance-subject, self-feeling, and soul as work of art (similarity 0.78)