Life and Habit
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Samuel Butler's concept of Habitus in his Life and Habit (1878) may be seen as analogous to Kierkegaard's understanding of repetition as a principal means of knowing. By repetition we re-cognize what has come before (how otherwise would we know it was repeated?), thereby drawing connections between a cognitive event in the past and its 'recurrence' in the present. Both thinkers were inclined to credit the means by which repetition renders a knowledge unconscious, as repeatedly playing scales on a piano results in your being able to play them without consciously thinking about every note: a potentially deeper form of knowledge. Something of the spirit of Kierkegaard's 'recollection' may also be discerned in Butler's Habitus.
