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8 - Habit, Ontology, and Embodied Cognition Without Borders

James, Merleau-Ponty, and Nishida

from Part II - The Enactment of Habits in Mind and World

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 November 2020

By
Jonathan McKinney ,
Maki Sato  and
Anthony Chemero
Edited by
Fausto Caruana  and
Italo Testa
Fausto Caruana
Affiliation:
Institute of Neuroscience (Parma), Italian National Research Council
Italo Testa
Affiliation:
Università degli Studi, Parma
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Summary

Habits are fundamental for embodied action. In order to contribute to an embodied account of habit formation, we will bring together the ontological approaches of William James (1842–1910), Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961), and Nishida Kitarō (1870–1945). James treats habits as key to the mind, placing them at the center of his ontology. James argues that the laws of nature characterize immutable habits of matter, and that living things are “bundles of habits.” Likewise, habits play a central role in Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology. The “lived body,” which Merleau-Ponty often refers to as the “habit body,” determines the character of experience. Nishida argues, following James, that habits structure human behavior and exemplify the continuity of reality. Nishida's nondualism fuses the embodied subject and the ontological world using habits. This has important implications for an embodied theory of habits, and thus for embodied cognitive science. We conclude by exploring ways that Nishida's work Enactivism, and ecological psychology mutually benefit when explored together.

Keywords

crosscultural cognitive scienceembodimentenactivismJapanese philosophyontology
Type
Chapter
Information
Habits
Pragmatist Approaches from Cognitive Science, Neuroscience, and Social Theory
 , pp. 184 - 203
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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