Nurture over Nature: Habitus from al-Farabi through Ibn Khaldun to 'Abduh.

• Author: Naaman, Erez
• Position: Critical essay

Habitus is a logical and ethical Aristotelian concept that was first introduced to the Islamic world through the translation of Greek philosophical works into Arabic in the ninth century. Following its introduction and until the nineteenth century, thinkers and scholars of the Islamic world naturalized it creatively in various intellectual systems. In ethical usage, habitus is a disposition that, once acquired and well established through a process of accustoming, allows humans to perceive and act in certain ways without deliberation or reflection. This concept explained how humans transcended their inborn natures, and as such it was amenable to employment in manifold fields and contexts. The present article studies significant applications from the ninth to the nineteenth century by thinkers of the Islamic world, who fleshed out the Aristotelian concept and used it for their own purposes. Among other things, it shows that the two main trends of naturalization involved application of the concept to religious Islamic discourses and to the study of humans and their society, anticipating modern Western sociological usage. In Memory of Wolfhart Heinrichs I have been brought up to do so, and it has become part of my character: For I have found that nurture holds the reins of nature. --Anonymous poet of the North-Arabian Fazara tribe (1) I

"Nature versus nurture" is an old and perennial problem. From antiquity to the present the balance of nature and environment in shaping the human character has been ceaselessly questioned. The degree to which acquired--in contrast to inborn--character traits make us who we are, and enable us to master various skills and to function properly in certain social environments has been often disputed. The habitus concept, traced back to Aristotle, has played an important role throughout its long history in discussions related to this question. The concept has gained considerable currency in the social sciences and humanities since the 1970s, especially for its role in the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu's theory of practice, and numerous Western scholarly works have applied it in various fields.

It is little known, however, that through the translation of Greek texts, habitus was appropriated and naturalized from the ninth century C.E. on by Muslim and non-Muslim scholars in various intellectual systems and environments. This goes hand in hand with what we know about the trajectory of Greek knowledge in general in the Islamic world, as shown by A. I. Sabra in a formative article in which he explained this enormously creative process. (2) Much earlier, the polymath Ibn Khaldun (d. 808/1406) had pointed in this direction, expressing pride in the achievements of Muslims:

[The Muslims] desired to learn the sciences of the [foreign] nations. They made them their own through translations. They pressed them into the mold of their own views. They took them over into their own language from the non-Arab languages and surpassed the achievements of [the non-Arabs] in them. (3) We shall later see that Ibn Khaldun was (justly) proud of his own achievement in applying the habitus concept. Indeed, hundreds of years before habitus became a full-fledged sociological concept in the modern West, Ibn Khaldun demonstrated brilliantly how crucial the acquisition of a suitable habitus was for the proper functioning of humans in their social environment. Remarkably, even in the 1880s the reformist Muhammad Abduh applied the concept in articles he wrote, basing himself on the work of thinkers of the medieval Islamic world.

The habitus concept as an acquired set of dispositions, enabling social agents to function successfully in a given field and becoming their "second nature," was used effectively by Bourdieu in his theory of practice. (4) He was not the first Western social scientist to employ the concept, (5) but his elaboration of it provoked a significant theoretical debate that connected it with earlier uses and criticized it. (6) While Bourdieu showed little interest in the genealogy of the concept, the idea of acquiring a well-established disposition through habituation is not at all a modern one and goes back to Aristotle's [epsilon][xi][iota][zeta]. The Romans translated hexis into the Latin habitus to refer to rather stable traits of character or expert knowledge acquired through habituation and practice. (7)

In his discussion of quality (Categories 8b25-9al3), Aristotle differentiates between habitus and condition according to the criteria of length of time and changeability: habitus (e.g., of justice in a person) both lasts a long time and is hard to change, while condition (e.g., of hotness in a person) does not last a long time and is easy to change. Elsewhere in Categories (1 lbl6-13b35), Aristotle employs hexis in a different, albeit related, sense. One of the four ways by which things are opposed to one another is habitus and privation. This opposition is spoken of in connection with the same thing, e.g., sight and blindness in connection with the eye. (8) In Metaphysics (1022b4-14), concentrating on the process and nature of "having," Aristotle discusses hexis as the intermediate state between the one who has and the thing had. Considered from the perspective of the agent, this state is an action; from the perspective of the patient, it is the undergoing of an action. E.g., hexis is the state between a person who has (= wears) a garment and the garment had (= worn). Another sense of the term is a disposition by which something is well or badly disposed, either independently (e.g., one is well disposed by health) or in relation to something else (e.g., one is well disposed by health compared to another). Hexis is also the disposition of a part of the disposition of a whole. Hence, the excellence of a certain part is also the excellence of the whole thing. (9) Far from being a philosophical concept devoid of practical application, the practical aspect of hexis is visible in Aristotle's ethical writing. He makes it clear that excellences of character (as well as their opposites, or the various sorts of expert knowledge)--to find expression in behavior--result from habituation and are hexeis (pl.). Humans possess natural capacities to achieve excellences of character through habituation that requires one's engagement in activities. Once acquired, the benefit of hexis is realized solely through practice. (10) In short, Aristotle discusses habitus {hexis) in relation to (1) length of time and changeability in qualities; (2) opposition of things; (3) process and nature of having; and (4) the ethical implications of quality acquisition. These aspects are connected to logic and ethics.

The concept's premodern history in the West has been studied, particularly its use by Scholastic philosophers--most notably Aquinas--in addition to its Aristotelian provenance.'' In what follows I will attempt to shed light on habitus in the Islamic world, from its introduction to the nineteenth century, focusing largely on its ethical aspect. (12) My major goal is to present--diachronically, to a large extent--significant cases of its employment to show how it was naturalized in various disciplines, discourses, and environments with due sensitivity to context. I should state at the outset that this article is not, and cannot be, a full treatment of the topic. Due to limited space and other limitations, I have treated partially, or even neglected, some cases, disciplines, contexts, and periods. Nevertheless, I would like to think that the present article contributes to a better understanding of this important and understudied concept as employed over a long period of time and in different areas dominated by Islam.

II

The translation of Aristotle's works into Arabic introduced the concept of habitus to the Islamic world. The concept appeared in late ninth-century Arabic translations of Aristotle's Categories, Nicomachean Ethics, and Metaphysics and soon afterward began appearing in works composed by indigenous philosophers and philosophically informed authors. The translations made by Ishaq b. Hunayn (d. 289/910) and Ustath (fl. third/ninth century) allowed philosophers such as Abu Nasr al-Farabl (ca. 256-339/ca. 870-950) to familiarize others with the concept and apply it in new ways. (13) The term commonly--although not exclusively--employed in medieval Arabic philosophical works to express the idea of a well-established disposition acquired through habituation is malaka, lexically meaning "possession." (14) Also employed is hay'a, "disposition," often interchangeably with malaka. Similarly, the alternative terms qunya ("acquired disposition"), hal ("state"), and hal lazima ("inseparable state") may convey the technical sense of habitus. (15)

Based on his relatively few surviving works, the pioneering philosopher al-Kindl (d. ca. 252/866) apparently made no use of habitus. He did employ qunya, not as a technical term denoting habitus but in the lexical sense of "possession," referring to abstract and material objects. (16) This is somewhat curious, for he was familiar--directly or indirectly--with Aristotle's Categories, Metaphysics, and Nicomachean Ethics, which he discussed in Risalat al-Kindi fi kammiyyat kutub Aristutalis. (17) Moreover, in Risalat al-Kindi fi hudud al-ashya' wa-rusumiha, he glosses hal, "condition," as a quickly vanishing quality, but omits malaka to which it is opposed in Categories. (18) Remarkably, al-Kindi does not use malaka (or an interchangeable term) in his most important extant ethical work, Risalat... al-Kindi fi l-hila li-daf' al-ahzan. In one particular place, he speaks of four types: the hedonist, the gambler, the bandit, and the effeminate. Each of them pursues practices considered by the type as desirable but which other people find reprehensible. This relativity leads al-Kindi to maintain that the pursuit of desirable or reprehensible sensible objects is not inherent in...