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CHAPTER ONE

CONSCIOUSNESS AND ANIMALITY

THE PROBLEM OF CONSTITUTING ACTIVITY IN THE STRUCTURE OF BEHAVIOR

The deep dialectic seen by the phenomenological observer goes on behind the back of consciousness itself. Science includes in its content the road to science.

—Georg Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit¹

Language is indeed the possibility of the face-to-face and of being-upright, but it does not exclude inferiority, the humility of the glance at the father as the glance of the child made in memory of having been expulsed before knowing how to walk, and of having been delivered, prone and infans, into the hands of the adult masters. Man, one might say, is a God arrived too early, that is, a God who knows himself forever late in relation to the already-there of Being.

—Jacques Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics”²

Human awareness of nonhuman organic behavior harbors a philosophical dilemma. We bear witness to original creativity and responsivity in the living body, what Merleau-Ponty terms its dynamic “structure” of behavior (SB, 137/148). Yet we understand this structure from the vantage of our own conscious perception, modeling organic behavior on the subjective perceptual motifs of occupying an individual perspective and acting to affect the world. How can we be conscious of organic behavior as such, given that these distinctions render animality intelligible within the limits of our human consciousness?³ The Structure of Behavior addresses this question, with Merleau-Ponty arguing that we are aware of organisms as distinctive “structures” or “forms” of behavior. This thinking is criticized as an account that equates this epistemological criterion of structure with an ontological criterion—the reduction of all “structures” of behavior to the synthetic structure of human consciousness.⁴ There is a reading of Merleau-Ponty’s early work as a proposal against an account of both human consciousness and vital awareness as transcendental, world-constituting activities. Rather than being constituting-activities, consciousness and life are defined by environmental passivity. They are organic activities that develop only by moving in, responding to, and expressing a vital environment. Consciousness itself is such an activity that emerges from this living environmental relationship, and is thus grounded in a deeper, developmental, or genetic passivity. Consciousness is instituted in a process of education within and alongside, and not beyond, these “vital” structures of behavior.

While Merleau-Ponty, according to this view, does not reduce organic forms to human consciousness, the question remains as to whether organic behavior itself is understood as a world-constituting, transcendental activity. There are some descriptions in The Structure of Behavior of the organism as enacting an active constitution of its environment, which points to a problematic vitalism and idea of transcendental synthesis in Merleau-Ponty’s early thinking. And yet, at other points, the organism’s original behavioral activities are understood as implicated in passivity, insofar as they are realized and shaped within a history of developing environmental sensitivities. According to this account, the putatively passive and active moments of environmental sensitivity and organic movement are in fact inseparable—the organic structure of behavior is reciprocally activity and passivity. In his first works, then, Merleau-Ponty already undermines a philosophy of consciousness and an autopoietic or vitalist concept of meaning-constitution.

By revealing the organism as a melodic and open-ended proliferation of developing expression, communication, and environmental sensitivity, Merleau-Ponty discloses an arena of generative passivity that precedes and passively mediates structures of vital and conscious activity. And, while Merleau-Ponty does not develop the terms to adequately characterize this institution of meaning as more than the sedimentation of activities, or what I have termed “genetic passivity,” until his later work, we can draw from some of his later terms in lectures on institution and nature in order to work out the logic of this generative passivity latent in The Structure of Behavior. This early development furnishes the conceptual kernel of the later critique of the self-sufficiency of consciousness and constituting activity.⁵ Vital structures of awareness, including perception, can be understood according to a logic of institution, such that our symbolic, reflective self-consciousness, that prima facie appears to exhibit a logic of constitution, is in fact a transformative institution of this affective, intercorporeal vital sense. Living form, including consciousness, is not constituted in advance, nor is it self-constituting—it will always have developed by taking up but transforming a latent sense in its natural past, and so is fundamentally an expressive and open-ended phenomenon—a “melodic” temporal structure. This early text largely privileges the genetic meaning-making structures in vital development, yet it unearths the question of a more radical past, a past that is ontologically prior to these already grounded activities of the living body and consciousness.

CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE PROBLEM OF ORGANIC FORM

If living bodies are not just physical things, but appear as original forms of meaning, does this presuppose a consciousness to apprehend them? In The Structure of Behavior, Merleau-Ponty argues that organisms are not parts of a physical world, but that putative “parts” of the organic body derive from the organism as a total form, a principle of self-organization. The organic body is not a static anatomy or a set of physiological mechanisms, but a dynamic and vital structure that appears, via this self-coordination, as a self-originating form. Merleau-Ponty uses these terms, “structure” and “form,” interchangeably to describe self-organizing systems that are indecomposable into component parts or preexisting, external causes. Form is defined as a self-regulating system in which the whole precedes the parts, in the sense that parts of the organism function globally rather than in isolation: “We will say that there is form whenever the properties of a system are modified by every change brought about in a single one of its parts and, on the contrary, are conserved when they all change while maintaining the same relationship among themselves” (SB, 47/49–50). The notion of an independently functioning part is an abstraction, because form is a circuit in which all parts interrelate. A living form can persist even when all of the parts are discernibly changed. The organism as a whole is prior to its parts, both in the ontological sense of a structure that holistically orchestrates the parts, and in the perceptual sense of form as the appearance of this structure as a meaningful figure that stands out through and against the changing organization of the parts. Yet does this very apprehension of structure as figure point back to its condition of possibility in an act of consciousness?

A living structure of behavior is irreducible to separate causes working on discrete parts because it appears as an original principle, as an expressive self-manifestation of vital meaning. Despite the terms being used interchangeably, “structure” connotes a living, immanent activity, but “form” has the idealistic connotation of a perceived figure. The notion of form, explains Merleau-Ponty, originates in Gestalt psychology as a “criticism of the ‘anatomical’ spirit in physiology” (SB, 47/50). This discovery of intrinsically meaningful structures of organization within “anatomy” leads Merleau-Ponty to assert that even the most ostensibly “physical” structures are immanent to the ontological register of conscious perception, rather than existing in an order of material things that exist in extended space partes extra partes:

But the very fact that we had to borrow the terms “figure” and “ground” from the phenomenal or perceived world in order to describe these “physiological forms”—just as above with the metaphor of melody—leads us to wonder if these are still physiological phenomena, if we can in principle conceive of processes which are still physiological and which would adequately symbolize the relations inherent in what is ordinarily called “consciousness.” (SB, 92/101)

On the one hand, Merleau-Ponty seems to recognize structures of meaning that are irreducible to a physical world or the mechanics of anatomy, and therefore moves to cede a meaning-making, intentional activity to the living body. But this move is cut short, on the other hand, because the explanation of vital structures in the terms of consciousness amounts to only an expansion of the field of consciousness to encompass the structure of organic sense-making. The language of “form” constitutes the living body within the synthetic terms of consciousness. “Form,” which is a term uniquely proper to “symbolic,” human consciousness, seems to elide the vital structure of self-effectuating organization in the living body itself.⁶ The difficulty lies in explaining the organic body as a dynamic structure that is reducible neither to causal explanation, nor to an abstract form constituted by consciousness.

In The Structure of Behavior, Merleau-Ponty articulates three forms of structure: physical, vital, and symbolic. The first and most basic structure is that of a “physical” thing, the form of a self-ordering whole, where “each local change in a form will be translated by a redistribution of forces which assures the constancy of their relation; it is this internal circulation which is the system as a physical reality” (137/147). The formation of an oil drop, for example, is the manifestation of an “internal whole” or intrinsic principle of organization, because the oil forms a convex shape that is preserved as a whole when its specific parts are manipulated (91/100). In one sense, starting from the term “structure,” Merleau-Ponty identifies physical “structures” as genuinely spontaneous, self-regulating systems. Yet insofar as structure is defined according to the perceptual logic of form, this seems to reduce the world to a structure of consciousness, namely, to the perceptual form of a whole, a figure that stands out against a background of changing perceptual adumbrations: “Thus, far from the ‘physical form’ being able to be the real foundation of the structure of behavior and in particular of its perceptual structure, it is itself conceivable only as an object of perception” (144/156). Apprehending the physical form as a unity across its different manifestations is an act of perceptual synthesis. Describing these phenomena simultaneously as both structure and form generates a dualistic tension between form as self-constituting and form as constituted by consciousness. This concern holds only so long as we explain perception as a logic of constitution. Instead, as we will later see, we can also conceive of perception and the existence of the thing as an intertwined logic of institution. Though the focus of our study here is not on physical things, Jane Bennett’s (2010) Vibrant Matter has brought the physical world to life and phenomenologically explored the hidden life of things, revealing the animate character of physical structures of behavior with a thinking reminiscent of Aristotle’s concept of natural substance as self-moving, self-revealing physis.

Organic bodies, the second structure of behavior, are more complicated in their self-organization than things in the physical order. “Vital” structures appear as meaningful wholes that both reflect and expressively shape their environments. Where a physical structure enacts a whole only with respect to itself, through preserving relations among its parts, the organic body manifests itself as an open whole that is vitally responsive to the world. We see the environment expressed inwardly in the organism, through the sensitive behaviors of its body, like a dog that pants in heat, sheds fur in summer, and growls when threatened. Correspondingly, we find in the world a site of the organic body’s outward expression, its incorporation of the world into its bodily space of behavior, in the changes the organism renders in its environment, such as the bird’s nest, the ant’s hill, or humanity’s roads, words, and laws (SB, 148/161). Perceptually, the organism can be the figure, as its sensitive behaviors reflect its environmental situation; or, conversely, the environment can serve as the figure in which the organism’s transformative behavior is manifest. There is what I call a static passivity in the organism, insofar as its activity is mediated and contextualized by environmental passivity. This passivity is not a mere inert given but exists in equilibrium with the functions of the organism. Neither pole here is ontologically prior: the organism’s sensitive reception of the environment is a function of its activity. Conversely, the organism’s vital activities must always respond to and occur within its environment, rather than constituting the environment:

One cannot assign a moment in which the world acts on the organism, since the very effect of this “action” expresses the internal law of the organism. The mutual exteriority of the organism and the milieu is surmounted. . . . Thus, two correlatives must be substituted for these two terms defined in isolation: the “milieu” and the “aptitude,” which are like two poles of behavior and participate in the same structure. (SB, 161/174)

Where the physical structure was a Gestalt qua dynamic bodily whole, the whole of the organism is the bodily environmental unity of its behavior. The organic body is not a self-contained response to its surroundings. Rather, its very living activity is an openness to and transformation of those surroundings—in the organism the “physical” order is always already subtended by vital values. The organism’s bodily behaviors and the environment are not related as two separate things, interior perspective and external world. The notion of behavior undercuts this dichotomy by situating the organism’s environment and behavior as a reversible figure-ground relation. Unlike the case of physical structure, there cannot be the issue of consciousness simply imputing form to a material body in the physical world, because of the structure of static passivity by which the organism relates to and transforms the environment around it. The environment reflects the organism’s transformative activity in the changes enacted there, while the organism is a distinctively aware body for which the environment uniquely matters. There is no significance of the environment in-itself, distinct from the organism’s behavioral relatedness to the environment, yet the organism exists only as a distinctive inflection of an environment. This figure-background distinction points to a third term, consciousness, through which we can symbolically encounter and separate these abstract moments of activity and passivity in the organism.

Consciousness, the third, but perhaps first in terms of finalistic priority, structure, or form of behavior, is the structure that can perceive self-organizing wholes as explicit forms. Merleau-Ponty opposes consciousness to the vital structure, which merely reacts to more generalized and undistinguished “themes” without ever having them as explicit objects, or reflectively distinguishing these forms from its own activity of apprehending and relating to them (SB, 108/118). This attentive ability to distinguish specific forms, the figure-ground distinction, is fundamental to explicitly apprehending structures as meaningful forms, because it allows meaningful figures to be disclosed by allowing other appearances in the perceived field to withdraw into the background. Merleau-Ponty uses the ontology of the Gestalt not only to explain how a form precedes its “parts,” but also to explain the relationship between different levels of form or structure.⁷ Physical structure is the background to a supervening vital order, for example. So when we see the organism, we look past or beyond its parts, anatomical processes, and simple sensible qualities to see the organism in its vital, environmental situation. As a synthetic unity of figure against background, however, the Gestalt cannot actively ground itself. A third term, between figure and background, organism and environment, is “presupposed,” which mediates this figure-ground relation: the synthetic activity of consciousness of form, which alone can attentively discern the appearance of form. Merleau-Ponty is often criticized for the circularity of this alleged thesis, because consciousness is at once described as a structure realized in nature while at the same time being described as the privileged perspective to which all natural forms—physical, vital, and symbolic—refer.⁸ Is this the remnants of a transcendental philosophy, a humanist activism of consciousness in the face of reductionist biology? Or in the insight that form is a dynamic structure, is Merleau-Ponty already discovering structures of meaning-making in the perceived world, the organic body, and self-consciousness?

In The Structure of Behavior, there are express statements that structures are situated within the epistemological parameters of consciousness. On the one hand, Merleau-Ponty imputes an almost human form of awareness to organisms as self-constituting forms. Taking up an argument from Jakob von Uexküll, Merleau-Ponty in places makes the strong claim that organisms have a perspective through which their environment is expressed, and in which it matters. But on the other hand, organisms do not respond to a world thematized as such, but as Uexküll argues, merely react to the signals of their environments, because the organism constitutes its environment in an immediately lived, nonthematic manner:⁹

The space peculiar to each animal, wherever that animal may be, can be compared to a soap bubble which completely surrounds the creature at a greater or lesser distance. The extended soap bubble constitutes the limit of what is finite for the animal, and therewith the limit of its world; what lies behind that is hidden in infinity.¹⁰

Despite the undeniable way in which the environment is relative to the life of the organism, this need not entail that the organism creates this relation by way of a world-constituting act. Yet Merleau-Ponty’s appropriation of von Uexküll’s notion of an a priori structure of transcendental subjectivity in organisms amounts to doubling down on the privileged activity of human consciousness, first by imputing to the organism a subject-like activity, dichotomizing organism and environment; second by arguing that this organic perspective is in fact a “form” that is recognizable and explicable only within the human domain of symbolic consciousness. Even though human consciousness is encountered as a structure, a type of form among other forms (vital, physical), consciousness is nevertheless the unique condition of possibility of form as such. And this is because, when conceived as a unity in difference, a figure against a background, or a melodic temporal extension, all invoke the precedence of a synthetic moment: a perceiving consciousness that can hold these otherwise different moments together under a theme as such, or a symbol. Where the form of organic life was a living relationship with the environment, the unique character of human consciousness is the ability to perceive this relationship explicitly, in symbolic form. The bifurcation of organism and environment, and their formal unity as figure-ground, for example, is a distinction derived from consciousness, not from the vital expressive life of the organism. This adherence to a philosophy of consciousness is one of the most common criticisms leveled at Merleau-Ponty,¹¹ one he himself took seriously in his later work.¹² However, for various reasons to be explored, this cannot be a straightforward criticism.

As a criticism of reductive scientific methodologies, M. C. Dillon (1998, 69) and Scott Churchill (2008, 174) contend that The Structure of Behavior comes down on the side of idealism, by privileging perceived form over the ideas of preexisting natural causes. There are physical structures, Merleau-Ponty claims, but “it should not be concluded from this that forms already exist in a physical universe and serve as an ontological foundation for perceptual structures” (SB, 144/156–57). Gary Madison detects a Hegelian influence in Merleau-Ponty, who dialectically concludes that “what one designates by the name of life is already the consciousness of life,” because “the very description of form presupposes a consciousness which takes note of it” (1981, 16). Indeed, Merleau-Ponty includes a reference to the perceived in the notion of form, in that “far from the ‘physical form’ being able to be the real foundation of the structure of behavior and in particular of its perceptual structure, it is itself conceivable only as an object of perception” (SB, 144/156). The difficulty here is that in spite of moving synthesis into immanent “physical” and “vital” orders, Merleau-Ponty nevertheless subjugates these orders to an idealizing consciousness of form, such that, as Bernhard Waldenfels notes, “in the course of a transcendental turn consciousness expands to become a universal milieu, and phenomenology assumes the role of an ‘inventory of consciousness’” (1981, 154).¹³ If physical and vital structures owe their synthetic conditions to the symbolic activity of consciousness, Merleau-Ponty’s account has, in the end, rendered organisms and the perceived world no different than objects entirely constituted by human consciousness. A deeper reading of The Structure of Behavior, however, subtly suggests itself.

GENETIC PASSIVITY IN THE STRUCTURE OF CONSCIOUSNESS

The criticism that conceiving of vital structures as forms reduces the organism to a construct of human consciousness meets with complication, because the hypothesis of The Structure of Behavior is also that consciousness itself is a structure or dynamic form, founded in the natural world. On the one hand, consciousness is a structure that develops naturally, but on the other hand, it purportedly grounds nature as the (symbolic) synthesis of structure as such.¹⁴ This antinomy of founding-founded short-circuits every attempt to explain perception:

Every theory of perception tries to surmount a well-known contradiction: on the one hand, consciousness is a function of the body—thus it is an “internal” event dependent upon certain external events; on the other hand, these external events themselves are known only by consciousness. In another language, consciousness appears on one hand to be part of the world and on the other to be co-extensive with the world. (SB, 215/232)

As scientists, this is the inextricable epistemological predicament: our perspective on the world is biased because it must come from within the world.¹⁵ As phenomenologists, though, the world is not a positive, external being, and consciousness is not an estranged, monadic perspective. Perception and perceived, in The Structure of Behavior, are related dialectically, because conscious perception is itself an emerging and developmental “structure” of behavior. Consciousness, where form comes to appear as such, begins as just another emergent, genetically passive “structure” in a universe of dynamic, developing forms.

It is a developed human consciousness that is uniquely attuned to the “structure of structures,” by virtue of its own capacity to apprehend perceptual objects but also the ability to grasp its own act of perception symbolically. Invoking Hegel, Merleau-Ponty argues that nature is a “hidden mind,” and that “the object of biology cannot be grasped without the unities of signification which a consciousness finds and sees unfolding in it” (SB, 161/174). Human, symbolic behavior is capable of recognizing whole-part relations as such, and transposing these relations into different perceived structures, like oil drops, animal reflexes, and human consciousness.¹⁶ Human consciousness is not beholden to the meanings in its immediate environment, but is free by virtue of its ability to detach itself from this immediate concern and unite different significances in “a single common nucleus of signification” (Toadvine 2007b, 20; citing SB, 122/133), such as the way that a melody, its notational representation, and the movements of the hands on the instrument are all united as one theme. The appearance of nature in distinctively meaningful forms is accomplished by the ability of human consciousness to transpose and unite different perceived characteristics, such as shapes and sounds, or names and things, as explicitly unified forms, thematic figures of meaning. Whereas animals are instinctively captivated by their environment, fixed by an “a priori of the species,” the human can simultaneously occupy a “multiplicity of perspectives” (Toadvine 2007b, 4; citing SB, 122/133). The human “symbolic order,” explains Ted Toadvine, gains ideality and creativity, such that “human behavior no longer has a signification but is itself signification” (2009a, 36; citing SB, 122/133). Even though it depends on the vital significances of its environment (Umwelt), the human has always already passed these significances over in a movement of symbolic transcendence toward the world (Welt) of symbolic forms. Toadvine contends that the autonomous significances of the vital and physical orders are assimilated into a human order, and thus epistemologically distorted. Yet we can see that in the very admission of a “multiplicity of perspectives,” Merleau-Ponty has invoked alterity and incompleteness as definitive of consciousness, features to which consciousness owes its original significances, even if these significances are passed over in the synthetic apprehension of symbols or objects.

Human consciousness does not take the form of an all-encompassing survey, or “pensée de survol,” because consciousness is characterized by static passivity, inextricably embodied in a physical milieu, and given to itself in a vital environmental setting (Umwelt). Even when we render this embeddedness in physical and animal nature explicit in abstract thought or scientific symbolization, these dimensions have merely receded into the background. Consider, for example, the way I do not notice that the seemingly timeless truths of mathematics are operations that I move through as a body and that take time, or conversely as these abstract thoughts disappear when I stub my toe or encounter grief in sudden difficult news. Consciousness retains a prethetic and lived connection to its physical and vital participation in structures of nature, even though it is only thematically aware of these significances as symbolic forms.

We can better understand what is going on in The Structure of Behavior if we separate the voice of the scientist (empiricist) and the voice of the idealist philosopher (rationalist) from that of the phenomenologist. The scientific method of mechanistic, empirical analysis loses the meaning of form by seeking to analytically disassemble structure into analyzable units. Transcendental consciousness, which Merleau-Ponty is criticized for veering toward in his critique of this empiricist reductionism, possesses the ideal unity of structure, the thematic “structure of structures.” The rationalist or idealist can account for the unity of form, but not for the emergence of the awareness of this unity. What the transcendental explanation of consciousness cannot account for is precisely how consciousness participates in the world as a structure, emerging in and learning from the order that it purportedly epistemologically grounds. There is another account of consciousness in Structure that entails that consciousness is a structure of genetic passivity, that it comes to be alongside and within physical and vital structures without prepossessing them; this form of awareness is attuned to the synthetic third term, which links perceiver and perceived, without claiming to usurp it. This third term is neither a constituted form nor a constituting activity, but rather the very relation of structuring out of which these terms emerge. Merleau-Ponty’s term “structure,” despite its realist connotations, in fact names a dynamic process of development in which constituted form and constituting activity are not yet decipherable as determinate, distinct moments. So consciousness, far from meeting itself in the world and finding there a plenitude of ideal forms correlate to its own constituting structure, encounters its own genetic passivity in the face of a world bearing an “autochthonous sense,” toward which it is always in a standpoint that requires education (PP, 466/504). Going against a fundamental claim of Heidegger, we can perhaps assert that it is fundamentally the human, as world-conscious, who finds herself in the original position of being poor in world, insofar as she must suffer through embryological and early affective development, borrowing and learning from encounters with other beings in order to ever possess anything like a thematic knowledge of the world.¹⁷

Bernhard Waldenfels argues that Merleau-Ponty escapes the circularity of a philosophy of consciousness because the consciousness of form is a “decenterized” consciousness. Consciousness is not decentered by way of being amalgamated into an external, naturalistic order, but rather by being resituated on “another scene” whereby “the known is outweighed by the experienced, the intellectual by the structure” (Waldenfels 1981, 30). The circularity is avoided because consciousness is genetically passive in its imbrication in and emergence from a world of dynamic form that exceeds its possession and cannot be known in advance. Outstripped by the emergence of this phenomenal being into which it must find educative development, consciousness is ontologically weakened. While this is “certainly not a radical revision” of consciousness, for Waldenfels it nevertheless represents a “weakening of the principle of consciousness” (26).

There are two ways to interpret Waldenfels’s claim, which pertain to whether form is regarded as actual but unknown to consciousness, or whether form is more radically a potentiality that cannot be circumscribed by consciousness. On the first view, that of the transcendental idealist, consciousness is decentered because there is a universe of form in which it has no privileged starting point. Notice here that consciousness retains the conceit of an epistemological prepossession: the light of consciousness is not bright enough to shine everywhere—though it could be. Consciousness is originally decentered, but its tendency as symbolic form is to be centering. Earlier structures anticipate later ones, so it can be said that the animal signal is just an impoverished version of the symbol, that amovable vital structures are not yet conscious. All forms are privative modes of conscious form. So Waldenfels can assert that the idea of consciousness is still the synthetic linchpin of the world, but each consciousness must nevertheless find itself genetically in process as an experience of the world: here transcendental consciousness and empirical consciousness remain separate and distinct. According to this view, consciousness is the governing ideal of reality, though ironically each conscious being suffers the misfortune of having to reach conscious awareness through bodily experience. This transcendental account is operative at various points in The Structure of Behavior.¹⁸

The second option is a “radical revision” of the idea of consciousness from the perspective of the phenomenologist, and with thoughtful reading we can find that this, too, is operative in The Structure of Behavior.¹⁹ This view takes form, and its corresponding consciousness, not as the form of all reality, but as genetic passivity, itself an emergent reality. Consciousness is possible and symbolically transposable into a multiplicity of perspectives not because there is a preestablished identity of mind and world, or because of a teleological purpose or pure meaning in nature, but rather consciousness comes to be within matrices of difference. Consciousness and nature are not original identities, but terms defined by difference. Form is not an ideal unity, but emerges dynamically through new expressive interplay and difference between living, dynamic structures. In this reading, nature is not a “universe” of forms, though it may appear this way in retrospect, from the standpoint of an already established consciousness. Instead of existing statically, form, including consciousness itself, is emergent, becoming, and diacritical. Form is novel not only perceptually, when we discover a new form for the first time, but also ontologically, in the sense that we witness its very emergence as form. Consciousness itself emerges as a form of behavior when it is educated, and it is educated by the manifestation of other forms—it does not prepossess a symbolic capacity to apprehend form and the figure-ground relation. I interpret Merleau-Ponty’s argument that form has a meaning only within an ontology of the perceived world as a claim that the very meaning of form must be discovered, indeed learned, from the developing structure of perception (SB, 92/102). Consciousness is doubly decentered: not only must it discover forms by perceiving them, but it must also discover within perception what form is. In other words, consciousness cannot a priori reduce the meaning of other beings, like animals, to the terms of its own awareness, because its awareness of the figure-ground structure is a learned aptitude, acquired through familiarity with these structures themselves. This aptitude points back to a more original, dynamic difference. Indeed, consciousness is bodily, and it develops generatively out of preconscious, embryological phases, is born, and then must be progressively learned; and this learning owes its earliest familiarity with the world not to a reflection on symbolic meanings, but to a vital, affective, and interbodily life.²⁰ This grounding in vital, organic life undergirds our symbolic consciousness and thus exceeds our capacity to ever ultimately thematize it. Already operative in The Structure of Behavior is a push toward this “radical revision” of consciousness that Waldenfels finds lacking there, precisely because consciousness is a structure of radically revising its terms of what form is. Consciousness is passive not only in the genetic sense, inasmuch as it owes its ontological origins to preconscious, nonsymbolic forms, but also in the generative sense because it is out of these forms that its symbolic capacity establishes and maintains its symbolic, figure-ground orientation. Consciousness is animated by these original bodily becomings, and this field of differences is a condition of possibility for consciousness, but a dynamic one that is manifest only in its particular expressions. This transcendental field is not universal and homogeneous, because conditions of possibility must, paradoxically, expressively, and uniquely institute new forms in order to be manifest as preconditions. Consciousness presupposes this expressive distance or passivity, a dynamism prior to consciousness that nevertheless affectively awakens us to fields of generative difference. These fields of difference, or institutions, are irreducible to conscious or ideal forms.

This amounts to a revision of the notion of a priori conditions in transcendental idealism. There is a genuine gesture of idealism in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, and it comes as a counterpoint to the empirical scientist. Against the scientist, writes Merleau-Ponty, consciousness cannot be the “analogue of a force” or a “thing,” but against the transcendental philosopher, consciousness cannot be the “cause” of experience (SB, 4–5/2–3). Critical philosophy must surrender the notion of a “pure and simple return to transcendental thought” precisely by affording a place to the discoveries of science (SB, 4/2). Structure is phenomenal, and therefore continually offers the philosopher an “opportunity to define [concepts] anew” (SB, 4/2). Here philosophy proceeds by “starting ‘from below,’” which is a reminder that consciousness does not begin as the analytic mastery of the scientist nor as the all-encompassing sense-ground of the transcendental idealist. We find a reference to communication and an imperative to understanding in our nascent consciousness of the developing form of organic bodies. Consciousness must be educated by these and other dynamic forms in order to develop its aptitude for symbolic form. It is easy to overlook the myriad relationships that effect this education. Kelly Oliver (2009) compellingly uncovers the way that the presence of animals in our lives is primordially educative, focusing not on the difference between human and animal essence, but on the actual relations, particularly the unacknowledged pedagogical relations, between humans and animals.²¹ Consciousness is not an original possession that can then delineate its difference from animals, because anything like this difference, or indeed the ability to posit differences as such, is effected out of a prior affective and nonthematic relationship. Human thematic awareness emerges from its behavioral, bodily orientation to other living bodies, and consciousness bears the trace of this animality in its educative life.

This interpretative strategy requires reading Merleau-Ponty’s claims about consciousness in his early text against each other, because they do not all cohere,²² and Merleau-Ponty does oscillate between a hypostatic and a more radical vision of structure, and necessarily thereby, of consciousness. This strategy of reading as critical engagement with the “unthought” in a work is something Merleau-Ponty himself advocates in his late commentary on Husserl, “The Philosopher and His Shadow.” Later in his career, Merleau-Ponty focuses on how consciousness is ballasted by the preconscious sense-engendering capacity of being itself, what he terms institution.²³ In his later period, Merleau-Ponty develops more fully this notion of a consciousness that finds its footing within a more primordial “jointing and framing of being,” such that there is a passivity within consciousness that propels and orients it (S, 181/179). Going against some conclusions Merleau-Ponty himself explicitly reaches in this text, we should infer that consciousness reads, rather than inscribes, form in nature, because consciousness is a developed structure of animal behavior. And reading, like consciousness, is a bodily developed, shared, and expressively performed activity.

THE EPISTEMOLOGY OF FORM: LEARNING TO PERCEIVE (AS) ANIMALS

Now we are in a place to attend to the question of how consciousness, which can grasp vital forms as thematic objects, is itself a species of vital development, realized through sensitivity to and education by other animate bodies. We understand organic forms through ongoing contact and learning, not by possession of a taxonomic form of animality as such, although it is true that the specific character of our bodily engagement with reality limits the parameters of this engagement. Like the organism’s dependence on an environment and other organisms, so, too, our consciousness cannot be its own ground, and depends on bodily engagement with other living beings for our habits to become educatively grounded.

In The Structure of Behavior, Merleau-Ponty signals that form is in the first place a reality that appears, rather than one that is known. Form is not an object of consciousness, but marks the very transformation that is coming to consciousness, suggesting that symbolic consciousness is grounded in a vital institution of perception. Not yet existing at the level of thought, form is perceived by consciousness as an original, preconceptual expression of sense: “Therefore this phenomenon must still be conceptualized. The structure of behavior as it presents itself to perceptual experience is neither thing nor consciousness; and it is this which renders it opaque to the mind” (SB, 127/137–38). Merleau-Ponty is seeking what Waldenfels calls a third dimension that undergirds the distinctions of fact and essence, materialism and idealism. Form, despite its intellectualist connotations, points to a sense of the autofigurative character of the perceived in its emergence for, and not prepossession by, a knower: “This notion saves us from the alternative of a philosophy which juxtaposes externally associated terms and of another philosophy which discovers relations which are intrinsic to thought in all phenomena. But precisely for this reason the notion of form is ambiguous” (SB, 127/138).

Renaud Barbaras argues that The Structure of Behavior remains installed on the level of a criticism of the objective sciences and thus does not adequately see “the impossibility of conceiving its constituting work in terms of an intellectual possession” (2004, 5). Barbaras (2004, 5) sees Merleau-Ponty as troubled by a Kantian schema.²⁴ We can, however, read this text as elucidating consciousness not as an inviolable transcendental perspective, but as a field of phenomenal, diacritically becoming meanings.²⁵ Form or structure is not an invariant law or reality unto itself, but rather a “dialectical moment” of coming into being (SB, 142/153). Consciousness does not impose form upon what it encounters, and it does not itself remain unchanged in this exchange. Perception is at once receptive and creative, in this view, because habitual sensitivity is a mode of expressive creativity.²⁶

Following this more radical take on consciousness, Gary Madison argues that Merleau-Ponty refuses to take the “short cut” of transcendental philosophy because the world “is not a spectacle produced” by “consciousness in perfect possession of itself.” It is precisely the question of “what exactly is a concept before it has become conscious of itself,” which Madison (1981, 16–17) sees as vexing transcendental philosophy and calling for the more radical grounding of structure as dynamic emergence of meaning. The point here is that consciousness has unconscious or nonconceptual origins, that the past of consciousness is not only the chronological past of the living present, but a more radical past of genetic passivity. This “past” that is nature is not the past of consciousness, not a past of meaningful figures or symbols, but rather a vital past that cannot be present as the object of consciousness. There is a trace of this past in our interbodily, vitally oriented life. Qua vital behavior, each organic body, whether human or not, is a unique locus of behavior. Merleau-Ponty situates human and animal alike in a sphere of expressive, unique forms. Rather than lacking the worldly being of humans, animals express another kind of relation to existence, which must be taken up positively, in its own right: “In a philosophy which would genuinely renounce the notion of substance, there would be only one universe which would be the universe of form: between the different sorts of forms invested with equal rights” (SB, 133/144). Yet the bodies of nonhuman organisms do not simply appear in human terms. The animal, both specific animals and our own animality as such, is not the object of consciousness, but a kind of vital, bodily comportment whose significance orients but cannot be translated into an abstract, symbolic form. There is thus a new sense of the transcendental in The Structure of Behavior, not in a universal constituting consciousness, but in the specifically novel, irreducible bodily expressed meanings that arise in each vital structure.²⁷ This expressive vitality of form also reflects a Derridean concern and tells against the blanket dichotomy of humanity as opposed to an animality as such, eliding the unique haecceity of animate form.

The challenge with this new conception of the transcendental is that the parameters of organic meaning-making are inassimilable to human consciousness, despite being open to encounter with it:

Behaviorism, solipsism, and “projective” theories all accept that behavior is given to me like something spread out in front of me. But to reject consciousness in animals in the sense of pure consciousness, the cogitation, is not to make them automatons without interiority. The animal, to an extent which varies according to the integration of its behavior, is certainly another existence; this existence is perceived by everybody. (SB, 126–27/137)

Kelly Oliver asserts that while Merleau-Ponty offers resources to abrogate a privileged conscious ground for humans, he does not extend abstract consciousness to animals, but resituates human and animals alike on a terrain of behavior. In place of an ontological difference between humans and animals, there are idiosyncratic differences that must be understood from within the communicative, expressive relations between specific “structures” of life.²⁸

Ted Toadvine sees in this strand of Merleau-Ponty’s early work an attempt to conceive human and animal alike as “a melodic unity [that] aims to respect the originality and irreducibility of the animal level of structure” (2007b, 1). The challenge lies not in explaining how human consciousness has a nonhuman past, but rather how anything like human consciousness emerges and attains to science from within animality.²⁹ Here Waldenfels sees “decisive significance” in Merleau-Ponty’s search for “a mode of access to phenomenology via the empirical field of the behavioral sciences” rather than “an appeal to an intellectualism of pure form and consciousness” (1981, 23).

In his reading of The Structure of Behavior, Bernhard Waldenfels (1981, 22) held that Merleau-Ponty merely weakens the concept of consciousness without abandoning it. We can see, though, that instead the vital body is the ground that allows for a living contact between animals and ultimately serves as a basis for consciousness as a structure of behavior. It is only later that the animal can be known as a specific figure or form, as a symbolic representation of this prethematic bodily ground. Just as the “physical” environment is a ground for the vital activities of the animal body, the animal body is a lived, affective ground of the structure of consciousness. Conciousness is an institution that takes up and transforms this affective institution without supervening upon or superseding it. We tend to hypostatize the structure of lived embodiment as an object of reflection, but this tendency is a “motivated error,” because “reflexive thought . . . encounters only significations in front of it. The experience of passivity is not explained by an actual passivity. But it should have a meaning and be able to be understood” (SB, 216/233). The lived body does not belong to the order of symbolic structure; it is a vital, living institution of structure.

Merleau-Ponty explains the task of his philosophy in Structure as making this passivity of the understanding explicit, rendering the “bodily conditioning of perception, taken in its actual meaning” (216/218), open to phenomenological study. This means looking into the bodily origins of consciousness and symbolization, uncovering the motivational and affective structures that enable an objective standpoint without themselves being objects for objectivating operations:

The body in general is an ensemble of paths already traced, of powers already constituted; the body is the acquired dialectical soil upon which a higher “formation” is accomplished, and the soul is the meaning which is then established. The relations of the soul and the body can indeed be compared to those of concept and word, but on the condition of perceiving, beneath the separated products, the constituting operation which joins them and rediscovering, beneath the empirical languages—the external accompaniment or contingent clothing of thought—the living word which is its unique actualization, in which the meaning is formulated for the first time and thus establishes itself as meaning and becomes available for later operations. (SB, 210/227)

It is a bodily contact with and orientation to an other—prior to distinguishing it as other—that affectively enables this meaningful relatedness. Just as any “structure” always has a futural reference, so, too, consciousness as structure, and via its bodily ground, is open to new modes of contact. Thus, prior even to the static passivity of the organism-environment, unity is embodiment as an open, dynamic, and potent site of exposure, that is, of the organism as genetically passive, as aptitude for interbodily engagement through which its structures of behavior will educatively emerge. The structure, before it is a fixed form, is that name we give to an original site of emergent meaning—the Gestalt of a structure beckons our awareness; it presents a figure of sense, but as a nascent, unformed sense:

What is profound in the notion of “Gestalt” from which we started is not the idea of signification but that of structure, the joining of an idea and an existence which are indiscernible, the contingent arrangement by which materials begin to have meaning in our presence, intelligibility in the nascent state. (SB, 206–7/223)

Meaning is inherently expressive, which means that consciousness is not a synchronic grasping of a meaning before it, but rather a process of meaning coming to be through an engaged movement of differentiation.³⁰

In his later lecture course Passivity, in the introductory section, “The Problem of Passivity,” Merleau-Ponty comments on The Structure of Behavior, and remarks that the issue of consciousness is not of how it can possess an objective relation to a foreign world, but rather of how such consciousness can ever attain to objectivity given its incarnation in the world of expressively phenomenal structures:

But, by restoring the phenomenal body, we sought neither to show the ideality of the body, nor to reintegrate it with consciousness as one of its objects. . . . One will be able to ask how we, being incarnate subjects, have the idea of science and absolute objectivity, but not how the universe of science intervenes in the universe of perception. (IP, 123/[216])

There is one multifarious world, but the very plurality of structure in this world means that there is not a consciousness that is what Madison calls “master.” Instead, there is “only a consciousness which finds itself face to face with a world of existences, one which looks about and which, at this stage, is nothing other than its look, one which lives outside of itself in the world” (Madison 1981, 18). For Madison, we are always in the position of “beginning consciousness” (1981, 17; citing SB, 110/120–21), such that clarification and interrogation are perennially endogenous to the form of our life. The ideal of objectivity remains, on one level, not a spontaneous activity of reflection, but a process of the expression of meaning, a living structure of behavior.

Instead of falling into a debater’s regress of knower and known, consciousness has a capacity for knowledge in the first place by virtue of affective contact and the expressive, not merely reflective, development of this contact.³¹ Immanuel Kant famously argued that though we must perceive the organism according to natural purposes, as having its own finality, this was the mere form of perception and had no purchase on reality in-itself.³² Yet a central thesis of The Structure of Behavior, as well as the later Phenomenology of Perception, is that perception is not merely cognitive or subjective, but that it is a motor-engagement with reality. Thus, to perceive is always already to be in affective contact; perception is not mere reception but a mix of activity and passivity, by which the organism opens a relation to the environment, where “the form of the excitant is created by . . . [the organism’s own] manner of offering itself to actions from the outside” (SB, 13/10).³³ Other organisms are not merely passively impressed upon my sensation, but rather call for me to bodily engage with and perceive them through the movement of my body. Consciousness gains sense only in a circuit of exchange with other existences, like a “keyboard which moves itself in such a way as to offer—and according to variable rhythms—such or such of its keys to” resonate with other “melodic” forms of bodily behavior, or what Merleau-Ponty describes as sensory unities that are not sums “indifferent to the order of [their] factors,” but “whole” “constellation[s]” of meaning (SB, 13–14/10–11). Other forms are encountered not as representations, but as modulations of my own bodily rhythms of behavior.

Objectivity is an achievement and an expression, rather than a normative demand to reconcile the dynamic activity of expression with a preestablished absolute. Human reality is intelligible in the first place because of its participation in dynamically emerging structures, and not its prepossession of the structure of consciousness: “The fact of becoming conscious adds nothing to the physical structures. It must be said of these structures, and not of consciousness, that they are indispensable to the definition of man [sic]” (SB, 136/147). Consciousness is in the first place dependent on structures that have been established in advance of it. The language of consciousness need not invoke the recovery of an ideal structure, despite moments in the text that in fact assert this, but a reality that is fulfilled as an educative project, grounded in a more foundational layer of passive synthesis:

Our knowledge depends upon what we are; moral theory begins with a psychological and sociological critique of oneself; man is not assured ahead of time of possessing a source of morality; consciousness of self is not given in man by right; it is acquired only by the elucidation of his concrete being and is verified only by the active integration of isolated dialectics. (SB, 223/240)

Consciousness, as implicated in structures of existence, cannot know an ideal liberation, but only a “real” one, says Waldenfels, echoing Karl Marx by taking up a consciousness that lives by transforming itself and its world: “Wherever cognitive and practical structures or modes of organization change, there is a ‘real Umgestaltung’ [transformation] at work, and only in this way can it come to a ‘real liberation’” (1981, 25; citing SB, 221/238). Like all organic forms, consciousness is a dynamic one, built up and developed through a history of interbodily sedimentations or institutions.

The Structure of Behavior concludes with the assertion that “all the problems which we have just touched on are reducible to the problem of perception,” yet Merleau-Ponty adds that structures “exist only by their meaning,” such that consciousness itself is a structure and “the intentional life which constitutes [structures] is not yet a representation” (SB, 224/240, 224/241). As we have seen, the problem of perception of animate form can be interpreted either as an idealistic grasping of a constituted form by a constituting mind, or alternatively by understanding perception as a logic of institution where consciousness emerges from within the affective, interbodily, and coexpressive structures of living organisms. Now we can address how organic bodies exist as generative sites of “meaning” prior to conscious “representation,” investigating how each organism exists as a meaning-engendering life. Life is not a meaning-constitution but an expressive institution. The organism lives by both taking up and transforming a sense in nature, existing as the expressive enactment of meaning through a melodic, developing sedimentation of sense, what Merleau-Ponty calls in his Nature lectures, in a pivotal philosophical shift to a generative concept of passivity, an “auto-production of meaning.”

AUTOPOIESIS AND TRANSCENDENTAL VITALISM VERSUS MELODIC FORMS

Even if The Structure of Behavior remains rooted in a concept of developmental activity or genetic passivity, it nevertheless intimates a nascent but radical concept of generative passivity. In the Nature lectures investigations center on how meaning emerges prior to existing in localizable, established forms. If we can discern development and exchange of meaning in and between organic bodies, there can be no reduction of organisms to mere vital responses to environmental signals. Organic behavior is not captivated by its environment as by a “signal,”³⁴ because it is the capacity to develop and express new meanings. Nature is the primary institution of sense, and the “auto-production” of natural meaning occurs apart from the abstract perspective and symbolic awareness of human consciousness, which imputes meaning-making to specific forms (N, 3/19). There is a question of whether this autoactivity of organic sense-making remains a transcendental principle of world-creating constitution, a deferral of transcendental subjectivity to a fixed form of the body and its vital activity.

Despite some of Merleau-Ponty’s own terms that favor a logic of constitution, there is enough evidence in The Structure of Behavior to suggest that the organic body and consciousness progressively develop through growth and education: they are primary loci of this sedimentation of meaning, although they do not initially possess the power (puissance) that enacts it. They are, rather, instituted through it. Structures of behavior emerge through developmental gestures that transformatively point back to this presensible time out of which they will have been generated. The motif of the organism as musicality that we find in Merleau-Ponty’s text expresses how we cannot think of the organism in subjective terms of constituting acts. It is a mistake to attribute a self-sufficient meaning-constituting intentionality to life: “Vital acts have a meaning; they are not defined, even in science, as a sum of processes external to each other. . . . ‘Every organism,’ says von Uexküll, ‘is a melody which sings itself’” (SB, 159/172). This motif of music calls to mind, perhaps challenging, the concept of the organism as vital enaction or poetry put forward by Francisco Varela and Evan Thompson.³⁵

Varela conceives of the organism as an active power of self-making and meaning-constituting or autopoiesis. For Varela, biology needs to incorporate the Husserlian notion of intentionality as sense-donation (Sinngebung), and the organism is to be regarded as a creative, subject-like perspective

by accepting that organisms are subjects having purposes according to values encountered in the making of their living. This means clearly to reintroduce value and subjectivity as indispensable organic phenomena, a theory of the organism as the dynamics of establishing an identity and, hence, as a process of creating a materially embodied, individual perspective. (Varela and Weber 2002, 102)

The organism is a finitude, an individual activity of making itself within a material world not ordered to its own survival. To be organic is to be a certain mode of care or valuation of self in an oppositional world.³⁶ This is a bodily activity, which is most readily understood by the organism’s metabolic capacity to convert parts of the environment into itself.³⁷ The organism constitutes itself by regulating its body as a stable principle of exchange with the environment:

As a consequence, we discover the elusive notion of a “constitution of an identity” as the governing of an autonomy principle. Metabolism keeps organisms materially in a steady flux: their substance in no moment is one and the same but at the same time they constantly keep their identity—and this unchanged identity is kept exactly by the means of an underlying exchange. (Varela and Weber 2002, 112–13)

The organism’s living activity, according to this view, is free creation limited by “substrate” dependence and bounded by death. Evan Thompson links this idea to enaction in cognitive science, whereby an organism unfolds the terms of meaning: “Sense-making = enaction. Sense-making is viable conduct. Such conduct is oriented toward and subject to the environment’s significance and valence. Significance and valence do not pre-exist ‘out there,’ but are enacted, brought forth, and constituted by living beings. Living entails sense-making, which equals enaction” (2007, 158). The organism is a power of acting to be understood according to these subjective, transcendental categories (Varela and Weber 2002, 113).

In the autopoietic view, this melodic time is something self-made that transcendentally constitutes its own field of sense. This supports a reading of The Structure of Behavior, which I do not share, but which finds support in the second chapter that distinguishing vital from physical and symbolic forms of existence, the organism is transcendentally self-constituting.³⁸ In this view, the antinomy of past and future, passive and active causes entails that the organism effects its own sense and temporality. Echoing Varela and Thompson, this reading of Merleau-Ponty holds that vital structure of behavior names an ontologically irreducible temporal intentionality.³⁹ A vital structure neither strictly continues a past nor constitutes time anew, but exhibits an irreducible horizon of temporality and sense that somehow relates to a natural past while transcending it: “It does not seem possible to understand life by a regressive analysis which goes back to its conditions. It will be a question of a prospective analysis which will look for the immanent signification of life” (SB, 160/173). This antinomy of the priority of active constitution and passive conditioning, futural or past causes of meaning, cannot be resolved because the mediation future and past is a transcendental condition of the field of life. Here Merleau-Ponty would be following Hans Jonas by paradoxically naturalizing what is transcendental. Yet vital meaning is transcendentally given and so cannot have natural antecedents:

The ideal structure of behavior allows us to link the present state of the organism with a prior state taken as given, to see in the former the progressive realization of an essence already legible in this latter (without ever being able to go beyond the limit or make the idea of a cause of existence). (SB, 160/173)

The so-called physical precedents are in fact meaningful from the standpoint of a particular form of vital awareness.

The organism, as vital structure, does not belong to a physical order that precedes it, and its life is an “equilibrium . . . obtained, not with respect to real and present conditions, but with respect to conditions which are only virtual and which the system itself brings into existence” (SB, 145/157). Organic activity is not a cause or “event” at a specific moment in time, but the transcendental givenness of a meaningful relation of time in the organic horizon of a life. This transcendental constituting activity of life furnishes sense for the references “future,” “now,” “before,” or “origin.” There are

animal essences—. . . walking toward a goal, taking, eating bait, jumping over or going around an obstacle—unities which reflexology did not succeed in engendering from elementary [physical] reactions, and which are therefore like an a priori of biological science. (SB, 157/170)

An organism’s grasping at food is not simply a series of muscular contractions or reflex stimuli, but an internally ordered and intrinsically meaningful task. Merleau-Ponty writes that there can be no “universe of naturalism that is self-enclosed,” because “perception is not an event of nature” (SB, 145/157). To explain the synthetic unity of activity and passivity within time, an origin for this order must be transcendentally posited outside of chronological time and empirical nature.

Yet the chronological and the transcendental temporal registers presuppose each other, such that the transcendental principle that is the orienting field of time must be born at a specific moment in time. While the insight that life projects its meaning into the past is valuable, this transcendental explanation of life precludes the birth and becoming of life in a natural past that is radically prior to the temporal horizon of the organism. There are powerful resources in The Structure of Behavior to conceptualize developmental structures of life, but there is not a full-fledged account of how the meaning of life becomes necessary, how its irreducible structure nevertheless begins as a moment of facticity.

There is no way to describe, within this transcendental view, how or why a vital structure emerges—it remains an advent and epiphany, a mysterious and irreducible expression of the living body. Passivity remains genetic here, because organic development is itself an activity that constitutes a temporal field. The question of the origin of the meaning of life, then, remains unanswerable within transcendental philosophy or vitalism because of this temporal circularity:

Since the physico-chemical actions of which the organism is the seat cannot be abstracted from those of the milieu, how can the act which creates an organic individual be circumscribed in this continuous whole and where should the zone of influence of the vital élan be limited? It will indeed be necessary to introduce an unintelligible break here. (SB, 158/171; my emphasis)

This transcendental field is said to constitute the temporal sequence of a specific organism entirely, and yet it needs a specific, determinate birth. It is this fact of birth, the origination of activity from passivity, that the transcendental account cannot explain. This ontological break, I think, points to an origin of sense in nonsense and a more radical, unintelligible past.

A second, more difficult reading of The Structure of Behavior is available to us, where we can posit that life both has an irreducible meaning and owes its origins to processes of emergence and development.⁴⁰ Here, life is originally incomplete and must temporally develop, where this development is oriented by a generative passivity that is temporally and ontologically the outside of life. Notably, Merleau-Ponty remarks that we can objectify these moments of becoming only in retrospect, after new orders of meaning developmentally emerge in life:

In order to make a living organism reappear, starting from these reactions, one must trace lines of cleavage in them, choose points of view from which certain ensembles receive a common signification and appear, for example, as phenomena of “assimilation” or as components of a “function of reproduction”; one must choose points of view from which certain sequences of events, until then submerged in a continuous becoming, are distinguished for the observer as “phases”—growth, adulthood—of organic development. One must mentally detach certain partitive phenomena from their real context and subsume them under an idea which is not contained, but expressed, in them. (SB, 152/165)

Vital structures are not preexisting forms but emerge genetically through development. In regarding life, we are prompted to notice (Merleau-Ponty problematically says “choose,” but then qualifies this by saying that we must choose according to the vital structure’s own expression) stages where a new meaning comes on the scene and transfigures the sense of the body: flexion, for example, becomes grasping, and at some point grasping becomes expressive gesture, which in turn becomes language, then art, and then more. Life exhibits an immanent signification that is not natural mechanism any more than it is the projective construct of living awareness, but exhibits, rather, a becoming-true, the institution of meaning.

Against the transcendental or autopoietic view, I contend that the environment-engendering activity of the organism is not a pure self-making. The beaver does not simply react to a fixed world, nor does it create one de novo. The organism is not passive, because the environment it receives is always already transformed by its living activity. This living activity is in the first place a passive moment, a gathering of what is afforded by its environment. The organism is spontaneous insofar as it is a gathering of what was the environment into a new sense—but this “was” is only in retrospect, the past of a present, for there is no environment prior to the environment engendered by life. The environment is already a kind of ontological and temporal background, out of which organic activity figures as a meaningful sense; as biologist R. C. Lewontin explains:

Are the stones and the grass in my garden part of the environment of a bird? The grass is certainly part of the environment of a phoebe that gathers dry grass to make a nest. But the stone around which the grass is growing means nothing to the phoebe. On the other hand, the stone is part of the environment of a thrush that may come along with a garden snail and break the shell of the snail against the stone. Neither the grass nor the stone are part of the environment of a woodpecker that is living in a hole in a tree. That is, bits and pieces of the world outside of these organisms are made relevant to them by their own life activities. (1993, 84)

Behavior involves an activity of the organism engendering an environment, not out of nothing, but rather, as Lewontin has described it, as an interpretative activity.⁴¹ Thompson (2007, 122) thoughtfully draws upon James Lovelock’s idea of ecopoiesis here, to gesture beyond the organism as autoconstitutive. We can further understand this concept as a retropoiesis insofar as what counts as environmental relation is futural, in that it will only ever have been revealed by transformative developments that simultaneously recast organism and environment. The moment of passivity out of which activity emerges takes time, and so the ecological relation to the environment is situated in a “past” that was never present. Vital activity does not simply receive an already formed environment, nor does it spontaneously create one; it transforms what is previously nonsense, a potential for sense that is not the sense of life, into a vital, lived one, like the electrochemical gradients that become neural pathways, or the way sounds become gestures and gestures mutate into meanings.

We cannot so sharply distinguish between poietic expresser and expressed, constitutor and constituted, except in retrospect. This ordering is reversible: it functions by a self-organizing principle, which, in shaping, is shaped by what it shapes. Body and world form an ambiguity irreducible to exact forms. The organic and the environment are terms established and put en route by a more basic phenomenon: the movement of organic development itself. This movement is not an exchange between creative power and material dependence, as Varela might have it, because here activity and passivity are ontologically, and not externally, related, what Merleau-Ponty will later describe as ineinander or entrelacement. The organism is an expression of the “physiognomy” of its environment, a new figure that arises out of an environmental background. This background is not made of determinate things, except in retrospect: “The truth is that there are no things, only physiognomies. . . . [Structures] are lived as realities, we have said, rather than known as true objects” (SB, 168/182). The organism is not in its environment as a thing in a container, but rather its living “action” and environmental “milieu” are internally related, the organism as expression and manifestation of the milieu. The environment is not composed of objects, partes extra partes, but it is nevertheless the ontological temporal background and spatial scaffold of vital forms.

Activity and passivity implicate and point back to each other. On the one hand, there is this activity that is also passivity, because the organism’s first activity is to render itself sensible to the environment. On the other hand, the reception of the environment is not a passive matter of impression: “The excitation itself is already a response, not an effect imported from outside the organism; it is the first act of its proper functioning” (SB, 31/31). The organism undergoes the environment, yet this passivity is always a function of the vital activity of its own organism:

When the eye and the ear follow an animal in flight, it is impossible to say, “which started first” in the exchange of stimuli and responses. Since all the movements of the organism are always conditioned by external influences, one can, if one wishes, readily treat behavior as an effect of the milieu. But in the same way, since all the stimulations which the organism receives have in turn been possible only by its preceding movements which have culminated in exposing the receptor organ to the external influences, one could also say that the behavior is the first cause of the stimulations. (SB, 13/10)

The Structure of Behavior presents this movement out of which active and passive, individual and environment, are dialectical moments. Consciousness can reflectively isolate active and passive moments, but only after these aspects are achieved and can be objectified, rather than in their coming-to-be and developmental structuration. Organic behavior, including human consciousness, does not begin as a moment of synthetic activity, but as the birth of a blend of receptivity and activity in a decisive “now,” which, both irreducibly creating and continuing, inaugurates behavior.

We encounter this blend of activity and passivity when we discover other organic bodies within their sense “instituting” life and the very environments that organisms responsibly fashion. Kelly Oliver sees the melodic becoming of animal life as sharing in many of our forms of sense-making:

Already in behavior we find futural projections, responsivity, interrogative gestures, imitation, imagination, interpretation, expression, pleasure, and ultimately even logos and culture. Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of behavior also points to a transformation in what we might consider access to world and world formation. (2010, 212)

Just as I might get to know my friend by seeing her at home with family, at work on a painting, or in discussion, so, too, the beaver is much more than a mute set of rodent actions to study in a laboratory: I find it in the sharp ends of chewed aspen and birch rampikes, in the dam of tree and plastered mud that it repairs with its yearlings (if I come too close to it, it will express itself aggressively, slapping its tail on the water, upsetting the whole pond to warn me off and alert the others of my presence), or by how this dam forms a ford in a stream and causes a low-lying area to fill with water, transforming it into a wetland for other organisms to inhabit. The point is not that the beaver has an experience of shaping a world akin to my self-consciousness, so caution is needed in using terms like “poiesis,” “culture,” or “logos” here, nor is it that I have conscious access to organic life directly, but rather that our organic bodies encounter each other within the cocreative, communicative institution of nature. Nature is not a cold order of things, but a living nexus of mutually developing and overlapping transformations within and between institutions.

Organic behavior partakes in this natural potential to unfold new meanings, but these meanings are not purely creative acts by the organism, as Varela would have it, because they hinge upon timing and place. We can infer this from Merleau-Ponty’s analogy to the organism as a melody, because here the organism’s potential for expression depends on the sense of its environment, just as the melody hangs on the timbre and rhythm of the notes in the opening bar:

Thus we are led to a type of coordination very different from that [of a machine]. Here the coordinated elements are not only coupled with each other, they constitute together, by their very union, a whole which has its proper law and which manifests it as soon as the first elements of excitation are given, just as the first notes of a melody assign a certain mode of resolution to the whole. While the notes taken separately have an equivocal signification, being capable of entering into an infinity of possible ensembles, in the melody each one is demanded by the context and contributes its part in expressing something which is not contained in any one of them and which binds them together internally. . . . Coordination is now the creation of a unity of meaning which is expressed in the juxtaposed parts, the creation of certain relations which owe nothing to the materiality of the terms which they unite. (SB, 87/96)

The first “notes” or environmental meanings do not deterministically give what will come next, because here these meanings are already correlates of the organism’s vital activity, but they do anticipate and call for (what will become) distinctive modes of expression. The first bars, or the head, of an improvised jazz tune, for example, give an orientation (sens) for what follows without rigidly determining it, allowing for improvisation and collaboration.