Simmel as a Theorist of Habit

The Journal of Classical Sociology has recently made available online a new translation, by John D. Boy, of Simmel’s classic essay on “The Metropolis and the Life of the Spirit” (better known to sociologists and urban studies people in previous translations as “The Metropolis and Mental Life”). Boy has an intriguing argument, in the translation’s introductory remarks, for why returning to Simmel’s original “spiritual” language and moving away from the “psychological” language of early translators (e.g., the German “geist” could be translated as either “spirit” or “mind”) is more faithful to Simmel’s original intellectual context and aims.

Here I would like to focus on a neglected aspect of the essay, namely, the implicit theory of habit (and its relation to the intellect and emotions) that Simmel deploys in the introductory paragraphs to set up the main argument that follows. Thus, this post can be read as a companion to previous disquisitions on habit and habit theory in this blog (see here, here, and here) and as a supplement to Charles Camic’s (1986) earlier point about the centrality of the concept of habit for most of the classical social theorists in sociology (Simmel is not one of the theorists treated at length in Camic’s classic paper) and the related story of how the idea was excised from the sociological vocabulary in the post-Parsonian period. In fact, concerning Simmel’s essay on the metropolis, in particular, it bears mentioning that one of the very earliest works influenced by Simmel’s approach (published in American Journal of Sociology in 1912) took the title “The Urban Habit of Mind” (Woolston, 1912).

Simmel on Habit and Metropolitan Life

Simmel argues that the rapid succession of novel and unpredictable stimuli in the city breaks previous habits of sensation developed in a non-urban context. Therefore, Simmel subscribes to the idea that habits are more easily developed whenever people are exposed to repetitive, internally consistent stimuli. In the more predictable non-urban setting, where each new sensation is a lot like the previous one, people can develop habits of sensibility that render them less susceptible to experience sensations in a powerful way. Simmel thus subscribes to the psychological principle that, as we develop habits of sensibility via the exposure to repetitive sensations, these fade from consciousness: “Lasting sensations, slight differences and their succession according to the regularity of habit require less consciousness” (Simmel, 2020, p. 6, emphasis added).

The city disrupts this equilibrium. It does so primarily by increasing the novelty and the unpredictability of sensory stimulation. This “intensification of nervous stimulation” is brought about “by the rapid and constant chance of external and internal sensations” (ibid, italics in original). Thus, the converse psychological principle applies: If habits are created via exposure to repetition, then exposure to novelty and non-repetition increases “consciousness” (which Simmel conceptualizes here as opposed to habit). For Simmel, people “are creatures of difference; their consciousness is stimulated by the difference between the current sensation and the ones preceding it” (ibid, emphasis added).

The disruption of habits of sensation in the city via the intensification of sensory stimulation serves as the primary psychological contrast to small-town life:

In producing these psychological conditions in every crossing of the street and in the tempo and multiplicity of its economic, occupational and social life, the metropolis creates a strong contrast to small-town and country life with its slower, more habitual, more regular rhythm in the very sensory foundation of the life of our souls, due to the far larger segment of our consciousness it occupies given our constitution as creatures of difference (ibid, boldface added).

This sets up a contrast, Simmel argues, between the calculative intellect (which Simmel associates with non-habitual cognition) and more spontaneous affect and emotion, which Simmel associates with the “more unconscious” strata of the psyche. In this way, small-town life “is founded upon relationships of disposition and emotion that have their root in the more unconscious strata of the soul and are more likely to grow out of the quiet regularity of uninterrupted habits” (ibid, emphasis added).

Thus, Simmel makes another equation here, linking habit to emotion, affect, and drives (and other residents of a more vitalistic, “dynamic” unconscious) and habit, which is separated from mental functions associated with intellect, which, for Simmel, are the more “transparent and conscious higher strata” of our inner life. This dualistic approach to habit, which distinguishes it from higher intellectual functions, seems to owe a lot to Maine de Biran’s early nineteenth-century reflections on the subject, which also made such a distinction between habit and the intellect (de Biran, 1970; see the discussion in Sinclair, 2011), one that would be criticized by Félix Ravaisson (2008).

Simmel’s reasoning and series of dualistic linkages here lead him to an odd, and seldom noted, conclusion: People who live in the city, insofar as they are forced to use “the intellect” to perform actions that would otherwise (in a non-urban context) be driven by habit, are therefore less “habit-driven” than non-urban people! This what is behind his famous “protective organ” argument, whose linkage to the habit/intellect contrast has not been noted before. For Simmel, city dwellers have to develop a way to deal with the sensory barrage in a way that prevents them from “reacting according to…[their] disposition.” Instead, “the typical metropolitan person relies primarily on…[their] intellect” (ibid). And “this intellectuality, which we have recognized as a defense of subjective life against the assault of the metropolis, becomes entangled with numerous other phenomena” (ibid).

Conclusion

The phenomena that Simmel went on to link to urban life, inclusive of the money economy, the blasé attitude, individualism, liberty, the division of labor, cosmopolitanism, fashion, and the rest, are well-known to students of Simmel’s foundational essay. Less well-known, however, are how the core premises of the piece are built on Simmel’s much-neglected (but explicitly laid out) assumptions of how the habit links to the intellect, consciousness, sensation, and emotion.

References

Camic, C. (1986). The Matter of Habit. The American Journal of Sociology, 91(5), 1039–1087.

de Biran, P. M. (1970). The Influence of Habit on the Faculty of Thinking. Greenwood.

Ravaisson, F. (2008). Of Habit. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Simmel, G. (2020). The metropolis and the life of spirit. Journal of Classical Sociology, 1468795X20980638.

Sinclair, M. (2011). Ravaisson and the Force of Habit. Journal of the History of Philosophy, 49(1), 65–85.

Woolston, H. B. (1912). The Urban Habit of Mind. The American Journal of Sociology, 17(5), 602–614.

Habit versus Skill

Habit versus Skill Ascriptions

Habit and skill tend to be run together in social theory and the philosophy of action (Dalton, 2004). However, there are good conceptual and empirical reasons to keep them distinct (Douskos, 2017b). Notably, the ascription of skill and habits entail different things about action, and only one (habit) is explanatory in the way outlined in a previous post.

When we ascribe a skill to an actor, we are usually interested in making a purely descriptive statement of “capacity ownership” but not putting the action in a larger explanatory scheme. This is generally because skill ascriptions, in contrast to dispositional habit ascriptions, usually speak of potential and not occurrent actions. When we ascribe a skill to an actor, we are simply saying that they can perform it, not that they regularly do so in response to the solicitations of a given context. This gets at the difference between capacity and tendency ascriptions (Schwitzgebel, 2013). Thus, when we say that a person is proficient at something (e.g., playing the piano, tennis, proving mathematical theorems), we do not necessarily mean they are in the regular habit of doing it. A person can possess a skill (being proficient at speaking a foreign language) without being in the habit of exercising it. In this case, the skill (while possessed) does not count as a habit.

In this way, the requirement of having a history of previous repetition and exercise does not work in the same way for habits and skills (Douskos, 2017a). In the case of skills, the link between past repetition and current exercise is a matter of the contingent way biological nervous systems “learn” given their natural constitution (e.g., via Hebbian tuning requiring multiple exposures). If we lived in a world like that portrayed in the science fiction film The Matrix, where skills (e.g., being able to fly a helicopter) can be downloaded directly into the motor cortex of people hooked up to the system in a matter of seconds, then a history of repetition would not be required for skill possession. This is different from the conceptual linkage between a history of repetition and habit ascription. When we explain an action by saying it is a habit, we are necessarily placing it in such a causal history, which requires by conceptual necessity a history of previous repetition (Douskos, 2017a, p. 509).

The same goes for the dispositional nature of actions we call habits. The explanatory advantage of habit explanation is the tight link to context, which allows us to refer to people’s inclinations even before we see them occurring. Thus, action counts as a habit when the agent is disposed to produce it in a given context (as well as reasonably similar contexts). In the case of skill, a person can have the capacity without having the disposition to exercise it in any given context. A skill can become a habit by acquiring this dispositional profile (we get into the habit of playing the piano in the evenings), but it need not have this dispositional profile (we can know how to play the piano without it being triggered regularly by a given context).

In sum, even though current skill possession implies some previous history of skill acquisition via repetitive activity, it does not mean that the skill exercise is a regular practice right now (habit). Nor do we mean the skill is exercised regularly when the person encounters a given set of conditions (disposition). Only habits have these two features.

In this last sense, dispositional (habit) ascriptions are more general than skill ascriptions since they need to be added if we want to explain the occurrence of skilled action. Thus, we may differentiate ascriptions of habitual skills to explain a given action from pure capacity ascriptions that simply posit a person’s capacity to do something. Also, habits can explain action, even if nothing about the action is exceptionally skillful. For instance, we can account for Sam’s habit of regularly driving at 8:00 am by pointing out that the action is a component of Sam’s “driving to work habit,” even if Sam is not a skillful driver. In this sense, calling something a habit implies a holistic and historical take on the action (indicating a regular history of repetition and disposition manifestation) that is partially orthogonal to how well (in the normative sense of skill) an action is performed. Thus, there are both skillful and not necessarily skillful (but still “automatic”) types of habit ascriptions, both of which can be used to explain action.

Habit, Techniques, and Skill

In a recent paper, Matthews (2017) argues that the core or prototypical members of the habit category are what Marcel Mauss called techniques (1973). Ways of being proficient at an action (e.g., tying your shoes), acquired via an enculturation process requiring training and repetition (see here for further discussion). These include both “behavioral” techniques, such as playing the piano, typing, riding a bike, and “perceptual” or “mental” techniques. However, the latter is less central members of the habit category for most people (despite being as pervasive as overt action habits) since habit is usually associated with over action or practice, even though both overt and covert “actions” can become habitual (Matthews 2017: 399). However, the most maximal conception of habits can easily extend the concept to the standard mental items (such as beliefs, desires, emotions, and the like) that figure as part of folk psychology. In that respect, there is no reason to restrict the use of habit to overt actions, even when acknowledging that semantically, over behaviors are more central members of the habit category than covert mental actions, such as believing a proposition or making an aesthetic or moral judgment.

Habitual actions, due to repetition and reinforcement, tend to acquire the facility and fluidity that we associate with skills, even though not all habits are necessarily skillful. So if habits are techniques, they tend toward the skilled end of performance, or at least toward the “good enough” end in performing their assigned function. However, the conceptual distinction between habits and skills needs to be kept since habit ascriptions and skill ascriptions buy you different things from an action theory point of view (Douskos, 2017b). A habit ascription entails conceptually entails a previous history of repetition, regularity of current performance, and a dispositional profile tied to context. It is habit ascription, not skill ascriptions, that offers a workable alternative to the intentionalist idiom when it comes to the explanation of action. All that is implied by skill is flexibility, fluidity, and proficiency in acting. As such, skills are a type of action (e.g., more or less skillful) but in themselves are not a resource for explaining action.

The main reason some analysts tend to insist on the “skilled” nature of most habits, however, is to move away from the misleading idea that only fixed, repetitive action patterns count as habits (Pollard, 2006). Habit theorists in the American-pragmatist (e.g., Deweyian) or French-Aristotelian (Ravaisson, Bourdieu, Merleau-Ponty) mold like to emphasize that when they speak of habit, they speak of flexible dispositions that adapt to their current context of enactment (and thus are different on each occasion) and not mechanical repetitions. As such, sometimes, we find these theorists equating habits and skills or proposing that all habits are skillful or creative (Dalton, 2004).

However, it seems like considering habits as dispositions clarifies their flexible, non-repetitive, non-mechanical nature, without getting into the conceptual hot water (and ultimately unproductive conundra) that equating habits and skills does (Douskos, 2017a, 2017b). As such, I propose to place proficiency as a core characteristic of habit, not skill. Proficiency is a weaker criterion because, while respecting the classic observation that the repetition of habitual action results in facilitation, it does not imply that such facilitation necessarily leads to “skillful” enactment. As noted, many habits are not particularly skillful but get to the point of being “good enough” to get the job done.

References

Dalton, B. (2004). Creativity, Habit, and the Social Products of Creative Action: Revising Joas, Incorporating Bourdieu. Sociological Theory, 22(4), 603–622.

Douskos, C. (2017a). Pollard on Habits of Action. International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 25(4), 504–524.

Douskos, C. (2017b). The spontaneousness of skill and the impulsivity of habit. Synthese. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1658-7

Mauss, M. (1973). Techniques of the body∗. Economy and Society, 2(1), 70–88.

Pollard, B. (2006). Explaining Actions with Habits. American Philosophical Quarterly, 43(1), 57–69.

Schwitzgebel, E. (2013). A Dispositional Approach to Attitudes: Thinking Outside of the Belief Box. In N. Nottelmann (Ed.), New Essays on Belief: Constitution, Content and Structure (pp. 75–99). Palgrave Macmillan UK.

Habit as Prediction

In a previous post, Mike Strand points to the significant rise of the “predictive turn” in the sciences of action and cognition under the banner of “predictive processing” (Clark, 2015; Wiese & Metzinger, 2017). This turn is consequential, according to Mike, because it takes prediction and turns it from something that analysts, forecasters (and increasingly automated algorithms) do from something that everyone does as the result of routine activity and everyday coping with worldly affairs. According to Mike:

To put it simply, predictive processing makes prediction the primary function of the brain. The brain evolved to allow for the optimal form of engagement with a contingent and probabilistic environment that is never in a steady state. Given that our grey matter is locked away inside a thick layer of protective bone (e.g., the skull), it has no direct way of perceiving or “understanding” what is coming at it from the outside world. What it does have are the senses, which themselves evolved to gather information about that environment. Predictive processing says, in essence, that the brain can have “knowledge” of its environment by building the equivalent of a model and using it to constantly generating predictions about what the incoming sensory information could be. This works in a continuous way, both at the level of the neuron and synapse, and at the level of the whole organism. The brain does not “represent” what it is dealing with, then, but it uses associations, co-occurrences, tendencies and rhythms to predict what it is dealing with.

In this post, I would like to continue the conversation on the central role of prediction in the explanation of action and cognition that Mike started by linking it to some previous discussions on the nature and role of habit in action and the explanation of action (see here, here, and here). The essential point that I wish to make here is that there is a close link between habit and prediction. This claim may sound counterintuitive at first. The reason is that the primary way that habit and practice have been incorporated into contemporary action theory is by making habit, in its “repetitive” or “iterative” aspect, a phase or facet of action that looks mainly backward to the past (e.g., Emirbayer & Mische, 1998). Because prediction is necessarily future-oriented, most analysts think of it as also necessarily non-habitual and thus point to other non-habit like processes, such as Schutzian “projection,” that implies a break with habitual iteration. These analysts presume that there is a natural antithesis between habit and iteration (which at best may bring the past into the present) and anticipation of forthcoming futures.

Rethinking Habit for Prediction

The idea that habit is antithetical to prediction makes sense, as far as it goes, but only because it hews closely to a conception of habit that accentuates the “iterative” or repetitive side. But there are more encompassing conceptions of the role of habit in action that emphasize an iterative side to habit and an adaptive, and even “anticipatory” side. Here I focus on one such intellectual legacy of thinking about habit, which remains mostly unknown in contemporary action theory in sociology. It was developed by a cadre of thinkers, mainly in France, beginning in the early nineteenth century and extending into the early twentieth century. This approach to the notion of habit characteristically combined elements of Aristotelian, Roman-stoic, scholastic, British-empiricist, Scottish-commonsense, French-rationalist, and German-idealist philosophy, and then-novel developments in neurophysiology such as the work of Xavier Bichat. Its two leading exponents were Pierre Maine de Biran (1970) and the largely neglected (but see Carlisle (2010) and Sinclair (2019)) work of Félix Ravaisson (2008). These thinkers exercised a broad influence in the way habit was conceptualized in the French tradition, extending its influence into the work of the philosophers Albert Lemoine, Henry Bergson, and more notably, Maurice Merlau-Ponty (Sinclair, 2018).

The Double Law of Habit

The primary contribution of these two thinkers, especially Ravaisson, was developing the double law of habit. This was the proposal that habit (conceptualized as behavioral or environmental repetition) had “contradictory” effects on the “passive” (sensory, feeling) and the active (skill, action) faculties: “sensation, continued or repeated, fades, is gradually obscured and ends by disappearing without leaving a trace. Repeated movement [on the other hand] gradually becomes more precise, more prompt, and easier” (de Biran, 1970, p. 219)

In other words, facilitation in the realm of perception leads to “habituation,” meaning that experience becomes less capable of capturing attention. We become inured to the sensory flow, or in the case of experience that generate feelings (e.g., of pleasure, disgust, and so forth), the feelings “fade” in intensity (e.g., think of the difference between a first-year medical student and an experienced surgeon in the presence of a corpse). This is an argument that was deployed by Simmel to explain the “deadening” effect of urbanism on sensory discrimination and emotional reaction, generative of what he called the “blase attitude” in his classic essay on the “Metropolis and the Life of the Spirit.”

When it comes to action, on the other hand, habituation via repetition leads to the opposite of passivity; namely, facilitation of the activity (becoming faster, more precise, more self-assured) and the creation of an automatic disposition (e.g., triggered in partial or complete independence from a feeling of “willing” the action) equipped with its own inertia and bound to continue to its consummation unless interrupted. Habituated action “becomes more of a tendency, an inclination” (Ravaisson 2008: 51). This is the double face (or “law”) of habit.

Prediction as Attenuation

Trying to puzzle out these apparently contradictory effects of habituation led to a lot of head-scratching (and creative theorizing) both on the part of de Biran and Ravaisson and subsequent epigones like Bergson, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Ricoeur. Nevertheless, it becomes clear that a solution to the “double-law” puzzles emerges when the predictive dimension of both perception and action is brought to the fore. The case of “perceptual attenuation” considered below, for instance, provides the mechanism for the “fading” of the vibrancy of experience whenever we become proficient at canceling out the error produced by those experiences via top-down predictions (Hohwy, 2013). Here the “top” are generative hierarchical models instantiated across different layers in the cortex, and the bottom is incoming sensory stimulation from the world (where the job of the model is to infer the hidden causes of such stimulation).

That is, as experience is repeated and the distributed, hierarchical generative models tune their parameters to effectively figure out what’s coming before it comes, we begin to preemptively cancel out prediction error. Cancelation of prediction error leads to subsequent perceptual attenuation, such that incoming sensory information no longer commands (or requires) attention. The result is that attention is freed to concentrate on other more pressing things (e.g., the parts of the experience that are still producing precise error and thus demand it). In this respect, sensory and feeling attenuation is the price we pay for becoming good at predicting what the world offers. Prediction is at the basis of “passive” habituation (the first face of the double law).

Prediction as Facilitation

But what about the facilitation side? Here prediction, in the form of what is known as active inference, is also at play. However, this time, instead of prediction in the service of canceling out error from exteroceptive signals, the acquisition of skill turns into our capacity to cancel out prediction error emanating from our action in the world, for instance, via proprioceptive signals that track the sensory consequences of our activity. Repeated activity leads us to form increasingly accurate generative models of our action (the dynamic motor trajectory of our bodies and their effectors) in a particular environment. This means that we can anticipate what we are going to do before we do it, leading to the loss (via the mechanism described above) of the feeling of “effort” or even “willing” at the point of action initiation (Wegner, 2002), which is a phenomenological signature of habitual activity.

This is consistent with the idea that Parsonian “effort” rather than being the sine qua non of truly “free” action partially unmoored from its “conditions” (as the Kantian legacy led Parsons to implicitly assume) actually points to poorly performed (because badly predicted) action, in other words, action that is driven by generative models that are not very good at anticipating our next move. This is action that is at war with the environment not because it is “independent” from it, but because (due to lack of habituation an attunement to its objective structure of probabilities) is partially at war with it, and thus disconnected from its offerings (Silver, 2011).

The connection between habit and prediction becomes clear. On the one hand, repetition results in the attenuation of sensory input. While this was usually referred to as the “passive” side of the double-law, we can now see, drawing on recent work on predictive processing, that this is only a seeming passivity. At the subpersonal level, attenuation happens via the successful operation of well-honed generative models of the environmental causes of the input, working continuously to cancel out those incoming signals that they successfully predict. These models are one set of “habitual tracks” laid out by our experience of consistent patterns of experience.

On the “active” side, which is more clearly recognized as “habit,” proficiency in action execution also comes via prediction, but this time, instead of predicting how the distal structure of the world, we predict the same world we “self-fulfill,” as we act. Moving in the world feels like something to us (proprioception), and as we repeat activities, we become proficient in predicting the very sensory stimulation that we generate via our actions. The two sides of the double-law, which show up in contemporary predictive cognitive science as the difference between “perceptual” and “active” inference (Pezzulo et al., 2015; Wiese & Metzinger, 2017), are thus built on the predictive capacities of habits. This was something that was anticipated by Ravaisson when he noted that

[A] sort of obscure activity that increasingly anticipates both the impression of external objects in sensibility and the will in activity. In activity this reproduces the action itself; in sensibility it does not reproduce the sensation, the passion…but class for it, invokes it; in a certain sense it implores the sensation (Ravaisson 2008: 51).

Habit is thus the confluence of what has been called perceptual inference (predicting incoming signals by tuning a generative model of their causes) and active inference (self-fulfilling incoming signals via action so that they conform to the model that already exist), in other words, prediction as it facilitates our engaged coping with the world, is the nature of habit. More accurately, to the extent that we can predict the world, we do so via habit.

References

Carlisle, C. (2010). Between Freedom and Necessity: Félix Ravaisson on Habit and the Moral Life. Inquiry: A Journal of Medical Care Organization, Provision, and Financing, 53(2), 123–145.

Clark, A. (2015). Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind. Oxford University Press.

de Biran, P. M. (1970). The Influence of Habit on the Faculty of Thinking. Greenwood.

Emirbayer, M., & Mische, A. (1998). What is agency? The American Journal of Sociology, 103(4), 962–1023.

Hohwy, J. (2013). The Predictive Mind. Oxford University Press.

Pezzulo, G., Rigoli, F., & Friston, K. (2015). Active Inference, homeostatic regulation and adaptive behavioural control. Progress in Neurobiology, 134, 17–35.

Ravaisson, F. (2008). Of Habit. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Silver, D. (2011). The moodiness of action. Sociological Theory, 29(3), 199–222.

Sinclair, M. (2018). Habit and time in nineteenth-century French philosophy: Albert Lemoine between Bergson and Ravaisson. British Journal for the History of Philosophy: BJHP: The Journal of the British Society for the History of Philosophy, 26(1), 131–153.

Sinclair, M. (2019). Being Inclined: Félix Ravaisson’s Philosophy of Habit. Oxford University Press.

Wegner, D. M. (2002). The Illusion of Conscious Will. MIT Press.

Wiese, W., & Metzinger, T. (2017). Vanilla PP for Philosophers: A Primer on Predictive Processing. In T. Metzinger & W. Wiese (Eds.), Philosophy and Predictive Processing.