Edmund Husserl's Phenomenology of Habituality and Habitus

Abstract

Habit is a key concept in Husserl’s genetic phenomenology. In this paper, I want to flesh out Husserl’s conception of habit (for which he employs a wide variety of terms including: Habitus, Habitualität, Gewohnheit, das Habituelle, Habe, Besitz, Sitte, Tradition) to illustrate the complexity, range and depth of the phenomenological treatment of habit. I shall show that Husserl was by no means offering a limited Cartesian intellectualist explication of habitual action, rather he attempted to characterize and identify the working of habit across the full range of human individual, embodied, sub-personal, personal experience as well as collective, social and cultural involvement. Habituality is intimately involved at all levels in the constitution of meaningfulness (Sinnhaftigkeit), from the lowest level of passivity, through perceptual experience, to the formation of the ego itself, and outwards to the development of intersubjective society with its history and tradition, to include finally the whole sense of the harmonious course of worldly life. Though it is not always fully acknowledged, Husserl’s account deeply influenced Alfred Schutz, Martin Heidegger, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Finally, I shall show that Husserl’s account is much more complex and differentiated and less ‘subjective’ than Pierre Bourdieu suggests in his own account of habitus.