O zvyku

The French philosopher Félix Ravaisson (1813-1900) is one of the most underrated sources of inspiration for 20th century philosophy. He is the author of an extensive treatise on Aristotle's Metaphysics (Essai sur la Métaphysique d'Aristote, vol. I, 1837, vol. II, 1845) and a survey of 19th-century French philosophy, Rapport sur la philosophie en France au dix-neuvième siècle (1867), the final chapter of which is considered a manifesto of French spiritualism. Ravaisson's most important work, however, is the short treatise De l'habitude (1838), in which he draws primarily on Aristotle, but also on French spiritualists (Maine de Biran) and naturalists of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. On the one hand, he places his analysis of habit in the context of a general philosophy of nature in order to establish what type of being can acquire habit (permanent disposition). On the other hand, he relates the phenomenon of habit to the philosophy of the spirit, since the spirit, which acquires a certain habit, ceases to be fully self-conscious and fully free, acquiring a partly unchanging "nature". The phenomenon of habit points to the ontological unity of nature and spirit. Both in the realm of nature and in the realm of freedom, which has become habit, we find the same unreflected spontaneity. Ravaisson's treatise on habit has had a significant impact on the history of French thought. Bergson, for example, elaborated his duality between immediate and mediated knowledge in the wake of the final passages of On Habit. Ravaisson's conception of habit was matched by phenomenological writers such as Paul Ricoeur in his Philosophy of the Will, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

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