The whole question of self-habituating must be seen from the look of the possibility on which appropriation depends. It depends on being-resolved at each moment, and on the appropriating of the moment. Aristotle’s saying “on the basis of acting-frequently”232 is also to be understood in this way. Here, this acting-frequently does not mean often in the sense of a duration, such that it would have ultimately become routine after a determinate amount of time. Rather, it is related to πρᾶξις as προαίρεσις: continual-repeating of προαίρεσις. The frequently is, precisely, that which characterizes the temporality of being-there. Aristotle cannot say ἀεί insofar as human being-there does not so comport itself constantly and always. It can constantly be otherwise. The always of a being like being-there is the frequently of repetition. It is the being-there of human beings, as determined by historicality, to see entirely different time-contexts in relation to which the remaining time-determinations break down.
§18. Πάθος. Its General Meanings and Its Role in Human Being-There
(
Metaphysics Δ21, De AnimaΑ1)
a) Ἕξις as Clue to the Conception of the Being-Structure of πάθος
For the understanding of ἕξις itself and the understanding of its γένεσις, we infer that it cannot be understood as completedness in the sense of routine. From there, we already see something more clearly, which now comes into question along with the πάθη themselves. The πάθη are also characters that, in their way, more proximally determine being-in-the-world, being-in-the-moment. It does not concern “spiritual states” with “bodily symptoms”; instead, the πάθη characterize the entire human being in its disposition in the world. The entire human being is the primary object dealt with in the Aristotelian psychology of De Anima, Book 1. The entire human being must be understood with regard to its being as ζωή, as being-in-a-world—thus grasped as a genuine topic not of psychology but of the discussion of the being of this being. Πάθη: we will take the analysis of fear as an example. For the Greeks, fear as anxiety is coconstitutive of the manner and mode of grasping what is and what is not. Thus Aristotle views the phenomenon of fear so broadly that he also becomes attentive to the fact that there is fear even if nothing is there that would be the direct inducement of a fear—fear in the face of the nothing. From here, the way that the Greeks view being as genuinely in the present, being as cared for in the mode of presentness, becomes intelligible.
By orienting the definition of the concept of ἀρετή to the fundamental concept of being, Aristotle defines ἀρετή, at the beginning of Chapter 6, Book 2 of the Nicomachean Ethics as ἕξις προαιρετική, ἐν μεσότητι οὖσα τῇ πρὸς ἡμᾶς,
232. Eth. Nic. Β 3, 1105 b 4: ἐκ τοῦ πολλάκις πράττειν.