Habit, Renaissance Concept of

In the Renaissance, habits provided the keystone for all theories of subjectivity. It is the knowing subject that posits itself out of itself, namely, in what it knows, in order to bring back what it has known into the subjectivity of its mind. Habits have been thematized since the very beginning of philosophy. In ancient philosophy, habit indicates the disposition to certain actions or passions, which can be proper either to the individual as a hexis (which is connected with character and attitude) or to the collective as ethos (which is associated with mores and usages). The know-how that is acquired by habit is a possession – whose opposite is privation – that results from repetition and exercise of individual actions, i.e., from experience and practice, which confers stability on human behavior. In this sense, the ethos (habitudo, consuetudo) produces a hexis (habitus), namely, a determined disposition to acting, and constitutes for the human being, as Aristotle says, a second nature. Habits can be of two kinds, namely, the ones that follow the “rational principle in the proper self” and the others that are “obedient to it as a child to its father” (Eth. Nic. I,13, 1103a3-5); the former, Aristotle calls intellectual virtues, the latter moral virtues. “Virtues are engendered in us neither by nature nor yet in violation of nature; nature gives us the capacity to receive them, and this capacity is brought about by habit” (Eth. Nic. II,1, 1103a24-26).