The Nature of Habit and a Human Measure for AI (Part 2)

The present essay and its other, first half were given as talks in the Czech Republic in 2026, as part of a pedagogical gatheri ng, hosted by the Slovak Dominicans, on the Human Person and AI. These pieces must be read together. For the present gathering, my tone is pedagogical. A more technical version of this paper, focusing primarily on the AI questions (and presupposing much of the philosophical underpinning) will be posted in September of 2026 when I present this more technical talk for the Lyceum Institute later this year, at their conference, “Human Formation in the Digital Age.” The abstract for that paper is as follows:

The question of technology always contains within it a further question: “What is the scale of the human?” Technology is not superhuman, for it represents one of the spiritual perfections of man the practical knower. Nonetheless, like all things spiritual in man, it contains the seeds of something supra-embodied, something potentially infinitized. That is, it carries within it the siren song of the transhumanist. In establishing measures for the virtuous use of human tools, then, the question of the scale of the human is of central importance—yet that scale is itself manifold. This talk considers one dimension of it: how a solid account of habitus can articulate the measure of technology, showing that technology must be well-ordered within the human reality of habituation and the vital, internal ordering of the human person.

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In the first talk I gave, we gradually traced the itinerary of St. Thomas’s discussion of what a habit is. Considering it in its remote genus, and grasping the specific differences that bring us to a full definition, we arrived at the essential definition of what a habit is according to St. Thomas—and, I believe, according to reality as well: a quality, disposing a substance well or ill in relation to its nature (or in relation to the end), doing so by reason of a motive that is objectively difficult to change. Moreover, we saw that habits can sometimes—perhaps often—exist alongside conditions that make them resemble dispositions (in statu dispositionis). We can possess real virtue and yet still struggle against temptation, even when we are generally victorious in the end. Likewise, dispositions can sometimes be so deeply rooted that they appear to have the very solidity of an objective habit. Thus a man can cling obstinately to his opinion out of self-love, even when in fact he has no good argument for it.

In a certain sense, then, the whole category of quality is concerned with a way of being “disposed”—whether in relation to nature, or to action and passion, or to quantity. Habit belongs to the first species of qualitative disposition, indicating a disposition in relation to the substantial nature in question. But it is a very specific kind of disposition, one that possesses objective stability, as we have already said.

Why Habits are Necessary

This brings us, however, to why habits are even necessary at all. And it is to this question that St. Thomas dedicates the fourth article of the question we have been considering (ST I-II, q. 49).

What is required in order for us to have this kind of good or bad disposition in relation to our nature? St. Thomas numbers three conditions: 1˚ the distinction between what is disposed and that to which it is disposed, 2˚in a being that can be disposed in various ways 3˚ that can be well or ill disposed in relation to the nature in question.

The distinction between “what is disposed” and “that to which it is disposed” brings us to a critical point. Habit belongs to the domain of creaturely being, because it implies that “what is disposed” is in potency to being disposed well or ill. For something to be disposed, there must be something that is not yet determined, not yet disposed. Wherever we find this relation between the determinable and the determined, we are faced with a case of potency and act—for “determinability” is a real capacity to be in a determined way. Therefore, if a substance or one of its powers can be determined in some way, that substance is a created being. In other words, only God is free from habits. He has no need to be determined, for He is His own activity, always and actually “measured” to the full actuality of what He is and must be. Habit, then, is a creaturely category, precisely because a given being can be determined in various ways with regard to its nature.

This brings us to the second condition, which adds an important observation. The potentiality in question is a kind of open potentiality, able to be determined in a variety of ways and toward diverse things (possit pluribus modis determinari, et ad diversa). Here St. Thomas refers to the now-outdated theory of the heavenly bodies, whose matter was thought to be determined entirely in relation to their form, having a single circular local motion as their proper actuality. We need not retain this bit of obsolete cosmology, but we can note the underlying point: habit requires a potentiality that can be determined in more than one way.

It is useful here to note how this removes certain powers from our consideration—powers that are natural and, of themselves, determined to a single object (cf. ST I-II, q. 50, a. 3, ad 3). According to St. Thomas, these include the external senses, fixed as they are to their particular acts, depending only on our natural dispositions and on the use we make of them by our free agency. The same is commonly said of our “vegetative” powers, whose natural disposition suffices for their activity, standing in no need of an operative disposition.

We must not forget, however, our “internal senses”—cogitation, memory, and imagination—and still more the sense appetites that follow upon their apprehension. These powers do not lie in our psychology like an impenetrable layer deposited beneath intellect and will. They are sensate, and hence distinct from our rational capacities. Nonetheless, according to St. Thomas—and, I think, according to mere common sense—they are open to use by our higher faculties. One need only observe the way memory and imagination serve our intelligence and, in serving it, themselves benefit from that service. The unbiased eye should see that these powers of sense cognition and appetite are naturally fit to be drawn into the labors of intellect and will. They are therefore susceptible to various habits, insofar as they are disposed to a use that is good or ill in relation to our nature.

This already hints at our third condition: a habit is necessary precisely where such a state of potentiality can be disposed favorably or ill—whether toward the nature in question (in entitative habits) or toward its operation (in operative habits). It is only when the “determinability” of some potential whole—a whole made up of various powers and their acts—is susceptible of being well or ill ordered that we have a situation in which a habitual quality might supervene upon the substance. And this situation is met throughout our human condition in countless ways, given the many powers of soul we possess in relation to the various activities of our nature.

Habitual Order as Spiritualization of the Whole Human Person

Consider, for example, even the most basic level of our apprehension of principles. Even here we stand in need of a virtue, so that we may bring together and compare, with active awareness, the terms that compose a self-evident proposition—a proposition that is per se nota. We must be well disposed to join our simple apprehensions in a way that is ready to grasp immediate connections wherever they exist. An angelic intelligence knows what it knows with a kind of immediacy; we, by contrast, must perform a work that either is or is not well disposed toward our natural capacity for grasping the truth. To be well disposed toward this work of intellectual grasping, we need the habit known as intellectus—immediate insight (cf. Labourdette, Habitus et vertus, 103–104). Nothing is more natural than to see that every agent acts for an end, that the whole is greater than the part, that whatever is moved is moved by another. And yet the number of those who ignore or deny such principles is not insignificant.

The labor of human intelligence does not end there. We must also have an intellect well disposed to draw conclusions in the light of these principles. According to the Thomist tradition, the work of truly stable cognition of conclusions belongs to science. Science is not merely a work of observation, nor a collection of propositions that can be written down in a book. It is a habitual readiness of mind to see the necessary connections between principles and conclusions within a given domain. This is often a difficult affair; but when it is accomplished, we are aware that we have reached the conclusion of an argument that attains its end definitively and forever. Thus: every animal is a composite being; every composite being can be decomposed; therefore every animal can be decomposed—that is, is mortal. This is the per se reason for mortality, and once you truly see the inference, you possess a kind of scientific conclusion—isolated, admittedly, but grounded in certain, per se reasoning. Or take an example from theological science: every complete nature has its complete complement of powers and operations; Christ has a complete human nature; therefore Christ has a complete complement of human powers and operations. Again, the argument stands somewhat isolated within the larger structure of theological science. Nonetheless, it can furnish something of an insight into the stability of mind that may be reached by demonstration through per se attribution.

I will not detain us here with the question of the distinction among the sciences, which belongs to the more difficult matters of material logic. Instead, it may help to consider another example: the person who has a more general logical facility, namely the dialectical skill of being able to argue about any topic whatsoever, using common maxims such as these:

• Whatever is present in a genus is present to the species. If every animal is sensate, then every human is sensate.

• When the material cause is eliminated, the thing made of that matter is eliminated. People are like the matter of the city. If there are no people, there is no city.

• Contraries are suited to contraries. Wet weather and dry weather are contrary to each other. If wet weather is the cause of growth, then dry weather would be the cause of death. (In this example in particular, the non-certain nature of dialectical reasoning is more evident.)

• If something holds for a lesser reality, it holds for a greater reality. If parents should exercise great care over their household, then (for all the more reason) should the heads of state care for their duties.

In the medieval university, a great many hours were spent teaching students hosts of such dialectical maxims, so that they might engage in disputation about any topic and make progress toward some more or less stable acquisition of the truth. Although the knowledge gained at the end of such dialectical reasoning was only opinion—and hence at most a disposition, not a habit—it was nonetheless guided by a scientific art, the art of logic. This art requires the ability to order our thoughts so as to manifest how they may be illuminated by dialectical maxims. It also requires a ready and quick mind for producing counter-examples, illustrations, and the like. In other words, it requires a disposing of the imagination, the memory, the cogitative power, and intellectual knowledge itself toward the activity of seeking the truth with ready ease and objective stability.¹

Already at work in this entire process is something important for the establishment and growth of the virtues (cf. ST I-II, q. 51–52): the way a higher power gradually draws forth a new form in our lower powers. Thus the agent intellect—the primordial “light” of the mind—together with our insight into first principles, gradually gives rise to the ability to search discursively for the truth and, at times, to attain it definitively. Stabilizing our intellect and our internal senses, this process gives rise to the dispositions of opinion, the applied art of dialectic, and, at times, scientific inference in the light of the principles thus grasped. Gradually, our powers of actualization draw our potentiality into the wake of their actuality, giving shape to new habits that enable us to act in a way that is perfective of our nature.²

This is especially clear in the case of the moral virtues. It would be natural to consider temperance and courage, those virtues whose subject is so plainly bound to the “lower world” of the soul that we share with the animal kingdom. Yet even in the most intellectual of the moral virtues—prudence, which is at once moral and intellectual—the ordering of the lower by the higher is no less evident. Prudence is not a virtue that lets us understand necessary, abstract truth; it is a directive habit, an ordering that requires many parts for its perfect disposing of the agent toward acting in accord with our nature. Hence among its components are numbered such auxiliaries as memory, understanding, docility, shrewdness, foresight, circumspection, and caution. When one reads St. Thomas’s treatment of these “integral” parts of prudence (ST II-II, q. 49), one gains a real sense of the way the universal insight “act according to right reason” gradually lends its intellectual form to the various internal powers we possess, generating within them a kind of teleology toward the work of prudence as it determines the right course of human action. This is something like the gradual spiritualization—or quasi-spiritualization—of our faculties in the service of nature’s own activity in the domain of practical reason.

We could go on drawing examples. The person who has artistic ability, for instance, has a singular shaping of the powers of imagination. Under the light of intellect, the world of the senses and of particulars comes alive with many new possibilities. We need not even turn to the fine arts to see this. Consider the instructive case of a kind of “transitional species” in the art of architecture. The architect’s imagination is ordered to something no animal could ever possess, namely the intellectual ability to impart new form within particulars. And how important it is that the architect have a broad culture—founded upon many particular experiences drawn from the great canon of human building, yet ordered under the light of an intelligent craft, his particular art, which lends a kind of unified soul to his disparate experiences.

In short, to have a habit is to be ordered and alive—native to the potentiality that marks a being like our own: poor enough to be a mixture of act and potency, yet rich enough to be open to all the possibilities offered us, above all, by the intellect’s openness to the full latitude of being and the will’s openness to the full latitude of the good. To have a habit is to have a right ordering of soul that is mine—my nature making its vitality present throughout every part of my being, enabling all that I am to be human (and, in the order of grace, to be divine by participation).

The person who has the habit of theological science—or of any science, for that matter—is not a mere stamp collector who knows a great many facts. Such science is not merely a coordination of past knowledge, an accumulation of “intelligible species,” rather like a child learning the piano who can quickly strike all the right notes without yet capturing the unified “soul” of the piece. On several occasions in his commentary on these questions, Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange draws attention to this important, “living” aspect of habit. Allow me to cite one particularly luminous summary:

A first corollary: Therefore, it is impossible for us to provide a truly profound discussion concerning the nature of science, the nature of metaphysics, the nature of theology, and the division of the sciences without considering what an intellectual habit is in general. For it is not, as it were, a mechanical juxtaposition of ideas, or of intelligible species. Rather, it is a simple, vital quality of the mind, which is essentially relative to some formal object, from which the unity of this habit is derived.

For example, in Sacred Theology all things are considered under the light [of what the scholastics call] “virtual revelation”; therefore, all that it considers [and thus views under this particular light] pertain to one and the same science. Therefore, dogmatic theology, moral theology, and Catholic hermeneutics itself are one and the same vital habit. They pertain to the same spiritual power, which is, in us, a participation, or a sealing, of the knowledge possessed by God and the blessed.

However, if infused faith is lost through heresy, then man no longer adheres to revealed [truths] held on the motive of the First Truth revealing [i.e., the motive of formal faith]. Rather, he adheres to these or those dogmas, which he retains by his own judgment and his own will. Accordingly, once the influence of the formal motive of faith—namely, formal revelation—ceases in him, virtual revelation (the formal motive of theology) likewise ceases to exist for him. Therefore, when a theologian becomes a formal heretic, the habit of Sacred Theology perishes within him as a quality of the mind. All that then remains remain are various ideas that he materially coordinates out of a human motive, together with pertinacity in heresy. This corollary makes quite clear the nature of this quality of the mind (or, of the intellect).

Second Corollary: There are as many distinct sciences as there are specifically distinct scientific habits—no more, no less. By contrast, moderns often, and unwarrantedly, think that the integral parts of a single science are in fact diverse sciences. Thus, in theology, one will establish supposedly distinct disciplines of dogmatics, moral theology, and Catholic exegesis. Now, within one and the same science there can be many parts, like the branches of a plant: e.g., an inductive part (e.g., positive theology and a deductive part (e.g., speculative theology). However, if excessive specialization leads one to separate them from one another, the unity and the life of the intellectual habit itself is destroyed. Then, synthesis becomes impossible, and many difficulties arise regarding the relations of these [now supposedly distinct] sciences. And, indeed, these difficulties could only be resolved under the direction of the loftier [and unified] habit whose integral and quasi-material parts have been unwarrantedly separated [by this modern bias toward material specialization].

How different a habit now appears from a merely rote, mechanical repetition of past acts! It is, in truth, the mark of an authentic unity throughout the “organism” of the soul. This is far from our customary way of speaking about habit, yet it is the Thomist conception of this particular and most eminent kind of quality: a quality, disposing a substance well or ill in relation to its nature (or in relation to the end), doing so by reason of a motive that is objectively difficult to change.

Habit and the Question of Artificial Intelligence

It is precisely this conception of habit—habit as the living, ordered measure of our nature—that we must now bring to bear on the question of Artificial Intelligence, which is, after all, what we have gathered here today to discuss. For if to be human is to be rightly ordered through habit, then the doctrine we have been unfolding is no mere preamble to the question of AI; it is the very measure by which that question must be judged.

A complete philosophical treatment of artificial intelligence would have many parts. Where human cognition is concerned—whether speculative or practical—there are weighty metaphysical questions about the very nature of thought itself. The Thomist theory of knowledge holds that to know speculatively is to become the other as other, and that to know practically is, in a sense, to be ordered by inclination to the very deed one wills. The most central and principal question concerning AI and human knowing, then, is whether its external pattern-matching can truly be equated with the proper phenomenon that sets cognition—even the simplest sense cognition—apart from every non-cognitional kind of change and being. One would likewise have to ask whether the external execution of tasks is the same as the self-direction that human beings exercise on the basis of what they know. In other words, the deepest and most significant question concerning the relation between human agency and artificial intelligence lies at the level of the very being of intelligence and of intelligent agency.

This is the deepest question—but it does not follow that every discussion of artificial intelligence must cut to that depth. It is, in fact, a difficult thing to expound the Thomist theory of speculative knowledge, even to an audience well disposed to hear it. I propose, therefore, to work at a different level today—not because the metaphysics of cognition can be dispensed with, but because the doctrine of habit already gives us a sufficient practical measure of the human, even before that deeper question is settled. And we do stand in need of such a measure, for guidance in how to preserve human flourishing amid these rapid changes of technology and society. It is not enough merely to say, “Let us be careful; let us make it serve humanity.” We must ask what it is to be human—and what the measure of the human is by which we judge whether a given use of technology is acceptable or not.

As we have seen, following St. Thomas, to be human is to be in potency. Indeed, in the order of knowledge and love, we are a kind of ocean of spiritual potentiality. Our capacity for knowledge opens us to the being of all things—to grasp the raisons d’être of all that we experience—and it makes us capable of acting on behalf of any good whatsoever, to the degree that we apprehend it as good. As the adage from the De anima has it: in knowing, the soul is—or at least can become—all things. And we may add: in willing, the soul can come to rest in any good, whether finite or infinite.

However, we have many powers of soul: intellect and will, the cogitative power, memory, imagination, the external senses, the irascible and concupiscible appetites with their various passions. There are many ways in which all of these powers must be set in the right order in relation to our nature. As we said earlier, all of this must be “spiritualized,” or humanized—gathered into a kind of organized concert of human nature (and, in the order of grace, of “supernature”).

Let us imagine, for a moment, a person who has come to rely on artificial intelligence to make images. Allow me a personal example. Like all of you, I have used these systems to make amusing little images—quickly, and in a way that perhaps won me some recognition from friends who found them funny. I have, for instance, a picture of Garrigou-Lagrange smoking a cigar like some 1920s American watching a baseball game. It is amusing, and after a couple of prompts the system matched the image I had in my mind’s eye.

However, recently, I was joking with my research assistant. He was in a parking lot in central Pennsylvania, travelling across the state. To his amusement, there was a parking spot set aside with an image of a horse and buggy, stating “Amish parking only.” I admit, you may not be aware of who the Amish are. They are German anabaptists who lives in rural America, retaining a very simple life, only adopting technology very slow slowly, to the degree that this can be integrated into their patterns of community. They are simple but honest protestants, with long beards on their men and long dresses on their women.

Recently, however, I was joking with my research assistant, who was driving across central Pennsylvania. He had stopped in a town that happens to be named “Jersey Shore”—which struck me as funny both because he himself is from New Jersey and because, some years ago, there was a rather trashy television show by that name, chronicling the debauched summer of a houseful of young people at the New Jersey shore. In the same parking lot stood a space marked, beneath the image of a horse and buggy, “Amish parking only”—the Amish being plain, devout Anabaptists of rural America who adopt new technology only slowly, and only insofar as it can be folded into the life of their communities. You could hardly imagine two things more unlike one another. It would, I thought, make a good joke, given sufficient taste and tact.

And yet I found myself hesitating to indulge the itch—chiefly because I could tell that I was having trouble imagining possible scenes for such a joke. This happened while I was working on this very paper, and so it made me think about the way that artificial intelligence and its use were changing the way my own active imagination comes up with new and amusing sights. Marvelous as it is that AI can assemble images out of pre-existing material, we should never underestimate how marvelous it is that the human intellect, memory, and imagination can work together to form new images—sketched out creatively in our awareness, with no material whatever before us. It is an astonishing thing, and it would be a shame to lose the ability.

We must be careful with such observations, however. This is not the first technology to alter our relationship with, say, our memory. Compared with the thinkers of the thirteenth century, our memories are nowhere near so supple or so exercised as theirs. With the broad availability of printed texts, we have let the technology of the book stand in for a great deal of our own active cultivation of memory. This is a real loss; yet we have managed to build patterns of life that still require us to internalize our experience and to retain what must serve as the basis for continued human knowing and willing. We should recognize, however, the immense possibility of artificial intelligence replacing our active habituation itself—the very ordering of our internal senses in preparation for understanding, and even our discursive reasoning as such—to the degree that we substitute AI queries for active thought and reflection. It is one thing to undertake the dialectical art of examining a question critically; it is quite another to prompt an AI to do it on our behalf. Certain external benefits may well accrue from such technological mastery. But it also risks the loss of that vital interior order we have found in the very notion of habit.

Or take another sort of “technique,” similarly useful but posing similar risks: the methods of casuistry in moral philosophy and theology. This kind of general “case study,” setting freedom against law, risks treating the moral life as a kind of accountancy. We imagine a spreadsheet on which we tally up the externalized opinions of various authorities, conveniently indexed in the manuals of casus conscientiae, and so replace the living labor of prudence with an anonymized moral logic. This too is a kind of technology, and it carries the same danger: we lose our humanity by handing off its ordering to some external technique, which no longer begets within us a “right disposition.”

There is only one agent who can act upon us from outside in order to set us in “right disposition,” and that is God—yet even He does so by moving us from within. This remains true even in the supernatural order, for God does not give us grace as light passing through glass, or as the motion an author imparts through the pencil in his hand. Rather, He sets the soul in a divine order through the infused habits of habitual grace and the infused operative virtues. And even when we come to see Him face to face, He will so determine the soul that we ourselves, rightly ordered in accord with what is deepest in our nature’s own perfection, will be able to attain perfect objective union with Him through beatific knowledge and love. Even in this most intimate and divine of actions, God bestows upon us the immense dignity of being rightly disposed, in ourselves, to elicit—ourselves—the act of the vision of God. But let us note well: God Himself does not dispense with the importance of habits. Rather, He fulfills them, both in the vision of glory and in the participated supernatural ordering that will dispose our whole resurrected being toward that beatitude.

Let us, then, be on our guard against the false promises that seem to echo today the serpent’s ancient words: “You shall be like gods.” The unlimited extension of our powers by technology risks, in fact, a loss of the creaturely task of putting our whole person—ourselves, in ourselves, in all our many powers and capacities—in right order in relation to the perfection of our nature. The man who uses AI without measure becomes a potent gathering of capacities no longer governed by any stable, intrinsic principle of ordering. Man’s nature—which, when perfected, is an ordered whole directed toward its perfective ends and its final End—then risks becoming a mere heap of potentialities and nothing more. Transhumanism is always a kind of anti-humanism: a kind of killing of the human.

And so, without offering you any specific injunctions, I would like to encourage you to consider that to be human is to labor at habituation. To be human is to take up the project of setting in order, in right disposition, all that you are—in accord with your nature, and, in the order of grace (which is the supreme order), in accord with the “natural law” of your supernaturalized nature. A sound metaphysics, a sound moral philosophy, and a sound moral theology propose that humanity can find its full perfection by spiritualizing the whole of our psychic organism, without ever abandoning that very organism. They propose that we order ourselves by means of habits—qualities disposing our substance well or ill in relation to its nature (or in relation to the end), and doing so by reason of a motive that is objectively rooted and lends a solidity to who we are. In the years to come, it will fall to Catholics in particular, I believe, to bear witness that this—to fulfill the human condition, not to transcend it—is the truly dignified way forward.

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1. Because the topic of Dialectical Logic is not always discussed by scholastics, I have gathered some notes from a seminar I taught recently in a posting “An Introduction to Dialectical Logic” on To Be a Thomist.↩︎

2. In this section, in addition to the aforementioned texts from St. Thomas, I recommend to the reader the section “2. Commentary: Conditions for the Genesis of a Habitus” in “Ambroise Gardeil, Evolution and the Principles of St. Thomas” on To Be a Thomist.↩︎