⩩ 10
What we do, we do over and over, and what we do over and over comes to take care of itself. It “is done,” it “does” itself. It becomes habit, and habit is a terrific force in human affairs, from the micro- to the macroscopic. Habit is not the thing done, like going for a walk, but the way of doing it, namely over and over, habitually. Habit is essentially adverbial, implying duration, repetition across time.
This mode is expressed in our grammar, as it were having its own shelf on the wall of our language. Take singing: I sing, I sang, I had sung, I used to sing. It is something I did again and again, repeatedly. It has nothing to do with place in time, past present or future, as you can see by noticing that it exists in every tense. For instance, notice the difference between “I am eating breakfast” and “I eat breakfast,” say, at 7 am. The one is an event, the other a rule, a norm, a habit. In the slang of linguistics, this mode is not a “tense” but an “aspect”: it is about again-and-again-ness, repetition in time, regularity.
But it is not only that it is expressed in our grammar: in the way it is expressed a specific connection between use and regularity is shown to us. We say something like “I used to walk but now I ride,” where “used to” means that I did it regularly for a time. But we also say “I am used to eating breakfast,” where that means eating breakfast is my rule, my norm, my default. It is what I do without thinking and what I am at home in doing. One conclusion to draw from this is that what we do regularly we become accustomed to; an observation that may take us deeper is that both ideas — regularity and the subsequent feeling of normality — are expressed by forms of “use.”
“Use” and its derivatives: the problem of action is expressed here in its most basic form. We use a thing, but in using it we get used to it, and what we are used to we do not see or think of. The usual, the “in its place” goes unperceived. The habitual is below our notice, — which means that, when it comes into awareness, when it becomes visible to us, it comes as a surprise. It makes an entrance. In other words, “use and surprise” go together, are two sides of one coin, and I go with Emerson in counting them among the forms of experience, and, indeed, among the “lords of life.”
It also means that, for any given thing we use there is a question: do we use it, or are we getting used by it? Which is therefore a perennial question, and one that applies even if there is no thing that we use. By its nature action reproduces and reiterates itself, seconds itself, making a template of itself, a script, becoming a pattern, a usage, a behavioral structure with a life of its own, — one across from which we can and have to ask: does it serve us, our end, or we it? This question is inevitable. We exhale habits and scripts. We exude them. Individually we perspire them, and big, shared ones are the foundation and crossbeams of our social world. A school, a ship, a discipline, an institution is a culture, a habitat, an environment defined by its habits, its “forms and usages,” as Melville says in describing those of sailors on the sea.
So let us think of action through habit and let us think of habit as a norm, a usage, a custom. We have many habits — when we wake, how we get our food, who and what we honor — but while we can think of ourselves as having habits, a plurality of customs, we can also think of the whole of our behavior as one custom, a single continuous habit.
Let us look for an image of this idea, something that can make it living and sensible to us. We can picture it as a path we walk, and this is in fact a culturally preferred and historically justified metaphor for what we are talking about. An all-encompassing practice and habit of living is a way of life, with all that entails: we are in motion, we can be on the path or have lost the path, and we change paths; we can turn around, or convert; — and any letters that find us along the way will be footnotes.
But the best way, I think, to picture habits in general and this singular all-encompassing habit in particular might well be clothes. There are several reasons for this.
Clothes are an excellent, perhaps paradigmatic example of something we do over and over again, putting them on at the start of each day and taking them off at the end. In that we put them on and take them off, inhabit them and detach from them, our relation to clothes mirrors our relation to our habits in judgment. We can’t ever really go without clothes or habits, but we can take them off, separate from them enough to question their use, their goodness.
More, now as throughout history, clothes are irresistibly linked to way of life. Consciously or unconsciously, what we wear expresses our values, our character, our station in society. And in fact, this connection between habit generally and clothes specifically is grounded in our natural history, the connection preserved at several places in language, even in our language.
In English, fashion stands both for way in a most general sense and for clothes specifically. In an only slightly older form of English, a habit was a coat, a jacket generally, and still today it is associated with the dress peculiar to monks and nuns. Still more suggestive, custom is a nextdoor neighbor to costume. As far as I can tell, the reasonable guess as to their proximity is that, as the bright, interesting clothes worn at seasonal religious festivals in Italy were a prominent element both of the festivals themselves and the life of the cities in which they took place, the word custom left its more general meaning of practice (in which dress plays a role) and came to be applied specifically to the distinctive clothes themselves, after which it passed through French into English, with minor modifications, as costume.
Now, the fact of habit is at the center of action, and so we must ask ourselves: what are our habits? What should our habits be? How should we dress?
Did a part of this essay resonate with you? Make you think of something you have seen, heard or read? Have another angle on the topic? Please leave a comment.
You are reading Footnotes, by Garrett Allen, a series of philosophical-ish short essays. You just read ⩩ 10, which is part of chapter 2, on the “Firsthand.” Here are some highlights from the first chapter (on the Stagestranger).
⩩ 1 Headsup
⩩ 3 Speechless
⩩ 6 Whim
⩩ 7 Mistake
If you enjoyed one of them or the series as a whole, please consider passing it along to a friend. And if a friend passed it along to you, welcome. By subscribing you can have these notes delivered to your inbox, too. If you would like, stay abreast.
A big shoutout as usual to Danny at breakfastswerved for his ink. See his drawings for the series here.
Emerson describes “Use and Surprise” as “Lords of life” in his poem “Experience,” which prefaces his essay of the same title.
If you’ve come this far: thank you for reading my work and spending time with me. I would love to hear from you.
The habits and clothes connection is gold. Thanks!
I love this line: "We exhale habits and scripts." Love the knowledge you dropped about the words "fashion," "habit," "costume," etc., too. And thanks for the journaling prompts. :)