Habitude is a philosophical concept, in Deleuze’s sense, in that it is an invented way of thinking about the world, as distinct from a scientist’s devising of a function that purports to explain something that regularly happens in the world. By Bergson-James, the scientist invents functions rather than discovering underlying truths expressible as functions. Invention is no bad thing, and I am happy to declare that habitude is a concept that I have invented. That does not mean that habitude is entirely original, because no invention ever is. The main basis for habitude is Sheldrake’s science: his ‘hypothesis of formative causation’, the notion that memory is inherent in nature, and the ‘push-pull’ tendency in the universe whereby, as it cooled and expanded after the Big Bang, forms ‘crystallised out’, and became progressively more complex the bigger and cooler the universe became, and to counter and moderate that tendency, forms resonated with similar forms such that they tended to be replicated.

Habitude as a philosophical concept does not contain an assumption, or presumption, that Sheldrake’s model is true – partly because ‘true’ is a slippery idea – rather it is a way of thinking which is worth a try, is intriguing, and has merit because it is radically different from models of the world which reinforce the capitalist world’s dominant ideology, and so could be a useful preparation for a revolution overturning capitalism.

What the concept of habitude seeks to change in Sheldrake’s science is its confusion; it simplifies the idea of memory being inherent in nature, with a stubbornness reminiscent of the Flat-Earther’s declaration that ‘it’s turtles all the way down’ (a turtle holds up the Earth, another turtle holds up that, and so on). Thus habitude assumes that every form and behaviour is due either to habit or to the emergence of new form, with the regularities which are apparently fixed (by eternal laws) being very old and deeply ingrained habits. (Sheldrake sometimes says this, but also sometimes wants to pin his morphogenetic fields on the side of science’s other field models.)

Habitude borrows from earlier philosophical concepts. It is monistic, after Spinoza, assuming that there is one substance in the universe taking many forms, and the whole can be regarded as Nature or God, depending on which word one feels more comfortable with, thus fitting happily with atheism or with deism (I am an atheist myself). But habitude does not share Spinoza’s assumption of a deterministic universe; instead it follows Bergson in crediting personal experience and common sense with providing the best approach possible to truth or reality, rather than following through on any supposedly objective model of cause and effect.

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