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Habits

Locke's belief is that Nature equips us with a portfolio of inclinations, desires and aversions to guide us into action that in most circumstances is good for us. For example,

In certain special situations, however, these innate guides would if left unattended let us down. They would lead us to act in a way that would do us harm. For example, ... It is in these circumstances that reason has occasion to intervene.

The role of reason is to oppose our innate inclinations or desires when following them would do us harm.

"It seems plain to me," says Locke, "that the principle of all virtue and excellency lies in a power of denying ourselves the satisfaction of our own desires, where reason does not authorize them."

Instilling this power to resist irrational desires is the point of education, he believes. It is a power "to be got and improv'd by custom, made easy and familiar by an early practice":

"He that has not a mastery over his inclinations, he that knows not how to resist the importunity of present pleasure or pain, for the sake of what reason tells him is fit to be done, wants the true principle of virtue and industry, and is in danger never to be good for anything. This temper therefore, so contrary to unguided nature, is to be got betimes; and this habit, as the true foundation of future ability and happiness, is to be wrought into the mind as early as may be.." (Section 45)

Locke goes into the practical detail of how this is most efficiently to be acheived. He thinks rote-learning - making children repeating verbal formulations of the rules to be inculcated - a poor idea and insists instead on the importance of repeated practice: Instead of the "charging of children's memories, upon all occasions, with rules and precepts" you should make them do it [the action or programme of action to be taught] over and over again, 'till they are perfect…" ( Section 64)

Education is a matter of adjusting the responses the individual makes to the circumstances s/he encounters, and it is best achieved by practice.

Locke has clear (but, as is usual with Locke, not necessarily mutually consistent) ideas about how the linkage between desires and action works, and how educational strategies might be expected to re-engineer them. One mechanism involves drilling, as I have suggested. But he is also insists that "good and evil, reward and punishment, are the only motives to a rational creature: these are the spur and reins whereby all mankind are set on work, and guided," (Section 54) pointing I think to the involvement of at least one other type of mechanism, one which gives a key role to pleasure and pain ('those never enough admired springs of action', (Bentham))

Whatever mechanisms Locke might have in mind, education is understood as (somehow) concerned with re-engineering (eg through drilling) the links between innate inclinations and desires on the one hand and action on the other. It is the adjustment of habits.

So Locke of course is no logical behaviourist. We are sets of habits, but behind our habits, and responsible for maintaining them, he thinks there are mechanisms. But for Locke, that is what habits rest on - mechanisms. Those mechanisms establish and maintain a person's habits, and in an important sense, the character of a person is the set of habits they display.

The 18th Century concept of the person was of a portfolio of habits moderated to some extent by reason.

By a habit was understood an action or sequence of action (or thought, or sequence of thought) which was, in the person possessed of the habit, reliably triggered by a particular situation. Sometimes, it was thought, an action flowed simply from habit. Sometimes 'reason' played a role.

This is a way of thinking of the human being that runs throughout the early Enlightenment.

Butler for example dwells at length on the connection between a person's "character" - understood as a set of habits - and the role of education: its task he believes is to mould a person's habits, and thus mould the person, so as to prepare them for eternal life:

'We are capable," he says, "not only of acting, and of having different momentary impressions made upon us, but of getting a new facility in any kind of action, and of settled alterations in our temper or character. The power of the last two is the power of habits. "

(Joseph Butler, The Analogy of Religion, 1st published 1736, Ungar edition, New York, 1961, Frederick Ungar, p.71. )

Rousseau's conception of the aim of education was not quite the same, but like Locke and Butler, it was still a matter of addressing the portfolio of habits a child possesses. His message is that a person is born with a perfectly good set of habits, which education can so easily corrupt.

And Hume, towards the end of the Early Modern period, is to be found maintaining essentially the same conception of the human being - that a human being's 'character' is a set of habits - and that education, specifically moral education, is a matter of adjusting them.

"The end of all moral speculations is to teach us our duty; and, by proper representations of the deformity of vice and beauty of virtue, beget correspondent habits, and engage us to avoid the one, and embrace the other."

Hume, An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals Sec. 1 Para. 8/11 p. 172 gp. 172
http://www.librairie.hpg.ig.com.br/LB-DavidHume04.htm

Another way of putting the point that education in the early Modern period is essentially to do with adjusting habits is to say, as we have seen Locke say, that its role is to inculcate appropriate rules of behaviour. Locke was discussing the general education of children. But the same way of thinking is there in the 18th Century approach to the much more specialised education of the artist.

The teaching and learning strategy of Sir Joshua Reynolds is illustrative.