Key Arguments

• He introduces habit as a reworking of the body schema that challenges classical intellectualist accounts of synthesis: 'Acquiring a habit as the reworking and renewal of the body schema presents significant difficulties for classical philosophies, which are always inclined to conceive of synthesis as intellectual synthesis.'
• Against mechanistic theories, he stresses that learning is systematic, oriented to the 'sense' of situations and types of response, not to fixed stimulus–response associations: 'Every mechanistic theory runs into the fact that the learning process is systematic: the subject does not weld individual movements to individual stimuli, but rather acquires the power of responding with a certain type of solution to a certain form of situation. The situations may differ widely from case to case, the responding movements may be entrusted sometimes to one effector organ and sometimes to another, and situations and responses resemble each other in the different cases much less through the partial identity of elements than by the community of their sense.'
• He rejects the view that an initial intellectual act of understanding organizes the habit and then withdraws: 'Must we thus place an act of the understanding at the origin of the habit that would first organize the habit’s elements only to later withdraw from it?112'
• In the example of learning a dance, he insists that conceptual 'formula' and recomposition are insufficient; the movement must receive a 'motor consecration': 'For example, in learning the habit of a certain dance, do we not find the formula of the movement through analysis and then recompose it, taking this ideal sketch as a guide and drawing upon already acquired movements (such as walking and running)? But in order for the new dance to integrate particular elements of general motricity, it must first have received, so to speak, a motor consecration. The body, as has often been said, “catches” (kapiert) and “understands” the movement.'
• He defines habit as 'the motor grasping of a motor signification': 'The acquisition of the habit is surely the grasping of a signification, but it is specifically the motor grasping of a motor signification.'
• Everyday examples show how tools are incorporated into the body’s voluminosity and alter its spatial field: 'Without any explicit calculation, a woman maintains a safe distance between the feather in her hat and objects that might damage it; she senses where the feather is, just as we sense where our hand is.113 If I possess the habit of driving a car, then I enter into a lane and see that “I can pass” without comparing the width of the lane to that of the fender, just as I go through a door without comparing the width of the door to that of my body.114 The hat and the automobile have ceased to be objects whose size and volume would be determined through a comparison with other objects. They have become voluminous powers and the necessity of a certain free space. Correlatively, the subway door and the road have become restrictive powers and immediately appear as passable or impassable for my body and its appendages.'
• The blind man’s cane is no longer an object but an extended sensitive zone, whose length is not used as an explicit 'middle term'; spatial positions are given by the gesture’s scope: 'The blind man’s cane has ceased to be an object for him, it is no longer perceived for itself; rather, the cane’s furthest point is transformed into a sensitive zone, it increases the scope and the radius of the act of touching and has become analogous to a gaze. In the exploration of objects, the length of the cane does not explicitly intervene nor act as a middle term: the blind man knows its length by the position of the objects, rather than the position of the objects through the cane’s length. The position of objects is given immediately by the scope of the gesture that reaches them and in which, beyond the potential extension of the arm, the radius of action of the cane is included.'
• He explicitly rejects any interpretation of this as quick estimation or objective comparison; instead, space is defined around the reach of intentions: 'This has nothing to do with a quick estimate or a comparison between the objective length of the cane and the objective distance of the goal to be reached. Places in space are not defined as objective positions in relation to the objective position of our body, but rather they inscribe around us the variable reach of our intentions and our gestures.'
• He formulates habit as a dilation and alteration of existence via incorporation of instruments: 'To habituate oneself to a hat, an automobile, or a cane is to take up residence in them, or inversely, to make them participate within the voluminosity of one’s own body. Habit expresses the power we have of dilating our being in the world, or of altering our existence through incorporating new instruments.115'
• The typing example shows that habit is neither explicit knowledge of key locations nor conditioned reflexes, but a 'knowledge in our hands' that cannot be translated into objective designations and involves a non-thematic awareness of positions: 'One can know how to type without knowing how to indicate where on the keyboard the letters that compose the words are located. Knowing how to type, then, is not the same as knowing the location of each letter on the keyboard, nor even having acquired a conditioned reflex for each letter that is triggered upon seeing it. But if habit is neither a form of knowledge nor an automatic reflex, then what is it? It is a question of a knowledge in our hands, which is only given through a bodily effort and cannot be translated by an objective designation. The subject knows where the letters are on the keyboard just as we know where one of our limbs is – a knowledge of familiarity that does not provide us with a position in objective space.'

Source Quotes

“Motricity is the primary sphere in which the sense of all significations (der Sinn aller Signifikationen) is first given in the domain of represented space.”110 [m. Habit as the motor acquisition of a new signification.] Acquiring a habit as the reworking and renewal of the body schema presents significant difficulties for classical philosophies, which are always inclined to conceive of synthesis as intellectual synthesis. It is true, of course, that what links elementary movements, reactions, and “stimuli” together in habit is not an external association.111 Every mechanistic theory runs into the fact that the learning process is systematic: the subject does not weld individual movements to individual stimuli, but rather acquires the power of responding with a certain type of solution to a certain form of situation.

Habit as the motor acquisition of a new signification.] Acquiring a habit as the reworking and renewal of the body schema presents significant difficulties for classical philosophies, which are always inclined to conceive of synthesis as intellectual synthesis. It is true, of course, that what links elementary movements, reactions, and “stimuli” together in habit is not an external association.111 Every mechanistic theory runs into the fact that the learning process is systematic: the subject does not weld individual movements to individual stimuli, but rather acquires the power of responding with a certain type of solution to a certain form of situation. The situations may differ widely from case to case, the responding movements may be entrusted sometimes to one effector organ and sometimes to another, and situations and responses resemble each other in the different cases much less through the partial identity of elements than by the community of their sense.

The body, as has often been said, “catches” (kapiert) and “understands” the movement. The acquisition of the habit is surely the grasping of a signification, but it is specifically the motor grasping of a motor signification. But what exactly does this mean?

Correlatively, the subway door and the road have become restrictive powers and immediately appear as passable or impassable for my body and its appendages. The blind man’s cane has ceased to be an object for him, it is no longer perceived for itself; rather, the cane’s furthest point is transformed into a sensitive zone, it increases the scope and the radius of the act of touching and has become analogous to a gaze. In the exploration of objects, the length of the cane does not explicitly intervene nor act as a middle term: the blind man knows its length by the position of the objects, rather than the position of the objects through the cane’s length.

Places in space are not defined as objective positions in relation to the objective position of our body, but rather they inscribe around us the variable reach of our intentions and our gestures. To habituate oneself to a hat, an automobile, or a cane is to take up residence in them, or inversely, to make them participate within the voluminosity of one’s own body. Habit expresses the power we have of dilating our being in the world, or of altering our existence through incorporating new instruments.115 One can know how to type without knowing how to indicate where on the keyboard the letters that compose the words are located. Knowing how to type, then, is not the same as knowing the location of each letter on the keyboard, nor even having acquired a conditioned reflex for each letter that is triggered upon seeing it.

But if habit is neither a form of knowledge nor an automatic reflex, then what is it? It is a question of a knowledge in our hands, which is only given through a bodily effort and cannot be translated by an objective designation. The subject knows where the letters are on the keyboard just as we know where one of our limbs is – a knowledge of familiarity that does not provide us with a position in objective space.

Key Concepts

• Acquiring a habit as the reworking and renewal of the body schema presents significant difficulties for classical philosophies, which are always inclined to conceive of synthesis as intellectual synthesis.
• the learning process is systematic: the subject does not weld individual movements to individual stimuli, but rather acquires the power of responding with a certain type of solution to a certain form of situation.
• The acquisition of the habit is surely the grasping of a signification, but it is specifically the motor grasping of a motor signification.
• The blind man’s cane has ceased to be an object for him, it is no longer perceived for itself; rather, the cane’s furthest point is transformed into a sensitive zone, it increases the scope and the radius of the act of touching and has become analogous to a gaze.
• To habituate oneself to a hat, an automobile, or a cane is to take up residence in them, or inversely, to make them participate within the voluminosity of one’s own body. Habit expresses the power we have of dilating our being in the world, or of altering our existence through incorporating new instruments.115
• It is a question of a knowledge in our hands, which is only given through a bodily effort and cannot be translated by an objective designation.

Context

Subsection '[m. Habit as the motor acquisition of a new signification.]', where Merleau-Ponty develops his positive phenomenology of habit as motor signification, using examples of dancing, driving, hats, canes, and typing to oppose both mechanistic associationism and intellectualist conceptions of synthesis.