When Knowledge Becomes Habit
What Aristotle Taught Me About Sobriety
“Till that which suits a part infects the whole,
And now is almost grown the habit of my soul.”
— Coleridge, “Dejection: an Ode”
His Self and the Sun Were One
Monday we read Stevens working through that paradox in poetry—you’re the maker and not the maker, your poems are yours and the sun’s.
I learned that paradox in recovery, but not through the language I expected. Not through “I am powerless over alcohol” (though I understand why it can help to frame it that way). Through something older and stranger: Aristotle’s concept of habit.
Because here’s what I discovered: I wasn’t battling a disease I had. I was retraining who I’d become through repeated acts—and building who I’m becoming through new repeated acts.
The Mystery Aristotle Named
For years, I knew drinking was bad for me. Knew it intellectually, could articulate why, even wanted to stop. Yet I drank anyway.
This is what Aristotle called incontinence—knowing the good, doing the bad. It’s the most perplexing form of human action.
Not the person who thinks drinking is fine (no internal conflict—Aristotle called this vice)
Not the person who literally cannot resist (true compulsion—Aristotle called this morbidity)
But the person who rationally prioritizes sobriety, yet nevertheless desires to drink, and following appetite, drinks. This is the puzzle.
Why the Disease Model Falls Short
The disease model says: “You’re powerless, it’s beyond your control, it’s medical.”
This helps remove shame. It opens pathways to treatment. I’m grateful for what it solved.
But it doesn’t explain why the treatment is group therapy, virtue building (what AA calls recognizing your “character defects”), recognizing resentments and making amends.
It doesn’t explain why I could go two years sober (2016-2018), then drink, then go one year sober (2020-2021), then drink, and now I’m three months completely alcohol-free with a 95% reduction in 2025 over last year.
If it were a disease, there should’ve been a medical intervention. You could say, “See—you stopped taking your medicine, stopped doing physical therapy, and the condition recurred.”
Except I wasn’t taking medication. I wasn’t doing physical therapy.
The pattern suggests something else: I’m not fighting a pathogen. I’m retraining patterns of action.
A More Compelling (and More Classic) Frame: Habit
Philosopher Kent Dunnington (via Aristotle and Aquinas): “Rather than being things that we have (as diseases are), addictions are more like things that we become.”1
I became an incontinent drinker through repeated acts. The pattern became embodied—”second nature.” And it was exacerbated by a potent, mind-altering toxin: alcohol.
Alcohol suppressed my inhibitions and restricted my prefrontal cortex function, making it harder to practice restraint while giving me temporary benefits like sociability (I’ve always been incredibly socially awkward). It created euphoria and dysregulated my brain’s reward system, producing unsustainable spikes in dopamine and serotonin that generated more desire to do that thing again as soon as possible. It created physical suffering (hangovers) that demanded more of the toxin to restore an illusory equilibrium. Over time, alcohol progressively habituated my mindbody to see it as necessary for basic function—while ironically destroying that very function.
The problem wasn’t lack of knowledge. I knew drinking was harmful.
The problem was that true knowledge hadn’t become embodied. It was “head knowledge” not “heart knowledge”—not translated into habitual action.
More, because I started abusing alcohol before I had become a properly virtuous adult, I never began the proper habits of living well at the time when my brain was best primed for that development.
Head Knowledge vs. Heart Knowledge
Dunnington explains it this way: “What seems to be lacking...is the incorporation of knowledge into action. Insofar as habit is a kind of embodied knowledge...what interferes with the incontinent agent’s ability to act in accordance with his choice is a wrong habit or at least the lack of a right habit.”
Think of learning piano. You can know theoretically which keys to press. But until you’ve practiced enough that your fingers move without conscious thought, you don’t really know how to play—and you’ll never be able to play anything remotely difficult.
Same with temperance (sophrosyne in Greek: the virtue of rational self-governance, of desiring truly good things). I knew about it. But I hadn’t embodied it.
The Wrong Habit Was Embodied
The pattern “craving arises → therefore I drink” had become second nature through repetition. Automatic. Autonomic. It had become a vice, an evil habit.
Not because I was diseased. Because I’d practiced that pattern so many times, reinforced by powerful chemical spikes, that it became who I was at the level of embodied action.
Building the Right Habit Through Practice
Recovery isn’t curing a disease. It’s re-habituation: replacing wrong habit with right habit through repeated practice plus divine grace.
What this looks like for me:
Morning prayer—not just “help me not drink” but asking for grace to rest fully in God’s boundless and enduring love, to free me from forces outside my control, and for forgiveness for “what I have done and what I have failed to do.” And continued prayers throughout the day, and in the evening before bed.
When craving arises:
SMART Recovery technique: Recognize it as an urge, not a dictate
Mindfulness practice: Observe the pattern arise, don’t identify with it
Illeism (Coleridge’s term): “A craving is present” not “I AM craving”—seeing yourself in third person
Sit with the discomfort without acting on it—even learning to love the discomfort, knowing it’s a sign of growing strength
Weekly check-ins with an accountability partner also in recovery
Weekly SMART Recovery meetings
Each time I resist: The new habit (observe-and-release) gets stronger. The neural pathway reinforces. The old habit (crave-and-drink) weakens. And it begins to feel good experiencing the discomfort, experiencing the more gradual satisfaction of delayed gratification as my mind recalibrates and obtains new clarity that brings unexpected pleasure in beholding the beauty of the world.
Over time: What required intense conscious effort becomes easier. Not because the desire disappears entirely, but because the new pattern becomes more embodied.
Dunnington (via Aquinas): “Proper integration of knowledge into action takes practice...time and practice, which is to say that this takes habituation.”
The Virtue Being Cultivated: Temperance
I’m not just “not drinking.” I’m building the virtue of temperance—rational self-governance over desire and appetite.
For Aristotle and Aquinas, virtues are habits. Temperance is the stable habit of choosing the good regarding bodily pleasures, even when appetite pulls the other way.
The Very Reverend John G. Arintero, O.P., explains why this discipline is necessary:
This mortification is not a killing, but a healing; a rectification and a renewal. If our nature were completely healthy and well balanced, it would spontaneously submit to the superior norm which ennobles it, just as all the physical energies in a perfect organism are subjected to the plan of life: organic life to sensitive life, and this latter to rational life. But when there is an imperfection of any kind, the inferior powers readily become insubordinate and instead of the relative autonomy which they enjoy, they tend to absolute sovereignty and even tyranny. Therefore it is necessary to keep these lower powers in subjection so that they will observe right order.2
When I was drinking compulsively, my appetite for alcohol had claimed “absolute sovereignty”—it had become tyrannical. Recovery through temperance means restoring proper order: not destroying desire, but subjecting it to reason and grace.
Catholic anthropology teaches that for every vice there’s an opposing virtue. Intemperance’s opposite is temperance. As I cultivate temperance through repeated practice and grace, the virtue itself becomes the force that stamps out the vice—not by killing appetite, but by healing it, bringing it back under right order.
Not Powerless, Not Self-Sufficient
Here’s the paradox Stevens knew: “His self and the sun were one.”
Dunnington: “Habit mediates between determinism and voluntarism, between the involuntary and the voluntary.”
I’m not mechanistically determined (not a disease passively suffered). I’m not purely voluntaristic (can’t just will myself sober in a moment). I’m re-habituating myself through grace-enabled practice over time.
This is humility and co-creation held together:
Humility means receiving help from beyond yourself—divine grace, tradition, community, therapeutic tools I didn’t invent (SMART techniques, mindfulness practices, psychiatric support).
Co-creation means actively practicing the new pattern daily—my repeated acts matter, each resistance retrains the habit, my participation shapes reality.
Antifragility is the result—the virtue becomes “second nature” through practice, each pressure point strengthens the habit, what was difficult becomes easier. I grow stronger through what tried to break me.
Three Responses to Addiction
The drunk tries to control it through willpower alone. “I’ve got this, I just need to be stronger.” Fails because ego-strength is fragile.
The “powerless” person says “I have a disease, I’m passive, it’s beyond my control.” Helpful for removing shame, but incomplete—misses the role of active practice and virtue cultivation.
The person cultivating virtue says “I became intemperate through repeated acts of intemperance. I can become temperate through repeated acts of temperance—with God’s grace enabling the practice.”
The Synthesis
Not powerless over addiction as disease. Not self-sufficient through pure willpower.
Responsible for re-habituating myself with divine help.
Stevens: “His self and the sun were one / And his poems, although makings of his self, / Were no less makings of the sun.”
My temperance is my work (active daily practice). My temperance is no less the work of grace (divine help, received tradition, community support).
Both. Always both.
That’s what it means to become temperate—not to cure a disease, but to embody a virtue through practice and grace.
Dunnington goes further still: Addiction isn’t just wrong habit. It’s counterfeit worship—a misdirected attempt to integrate the self with transcendence, to find unity and meaning in the wrong place. The drunk isn’t weak; the drunk is a misdirected mystic, seeking the right things in the wrong place.
But that’s a longer conversation. (More on that another time.)
Dunnington, Kent. Addiction and Virtue: Beyond the Models of Disease and Choice. IVP Academic, 2011.
Arintero, John G. The Mystical Evolution in the Development and Vitality of the Church. Translated by Jordan Aumann, TAN Books, 1978.