focus of this investigation is Merleau-Ponty’s pivotal rethinking of the concept of passivity. Merleau-Ponty’s concern with diffusing the concept of constituting activity and rooting it in the living body is directed not simply at the primacy of consciousness, but at meaning-constituting activity as such, including the vital activity of the living body. There is a line of thinking throughout Merleau-Ponty’s texts that discloses a passive genesis of sense in nature prior to a constituting activity of consciousness or the vital body. Against the idea of constituting activity, and by developing an account of what I term generative passivity, I make the case that it is possible to explain the irreducibly meaningful structures of the organism and human person according to a logic of the passive generation of sense, what Merleau-Ponty terms a concept of institution.
Rather than rejecting the uniqueness of meaning in the vital body and human consciousness, we can utilize institution to account for how these fields do in fact have irreducible senses. We can also show these senses to be derived from a temporality in nature by which distinctive dimensions of meaning develop through what Henri Bergson and Alia Al-Saji describe as a becoming-true. This movement of sense generation requires the explication of three progressively richer concepts of passivity in Merleau-Ponty’s work: a structural passivity of life; a dynamic passivity of development and learning; and a more radical, generative passivity that ontologically precedes living beings and fully determinate causal events. This draws upon Anthony Steinbock’s critical reading of three levels of phenomenological methodology in Edmund Husserl’s work, though, as we will see, Merleau-Ponty importantly diverges and builds upon Husserl’s concept of passivity, definitively moving it beyond the domain of consciousness. This investigation requires a systematic reading of Merleau-Ponty’s texts from the standpoint of how they progressively work to articulate this concept of passivity that does not name an absence or lack of meaning-making activity, but contextualizes this activity within a radically deep natural past, a past prior to already actual causal or constituting activities. Combining this generative reading of phenomenology with the logic of Bergson, we will see that Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy entails a radical reevaluation of the metaphysics of possibility.
Generative passivity is a concept that enables a rethinking of the nature-culture distinction, and puts to rest tiresome problems in attempts to “naturalize” consciousness, while providing a deepened view of psychoanalysis and the emergence of personality from the body. It also challenges liberal and social constructivist views of society, instead suggesting a deeper take on the ethics and sociality of intercorporeal dependence, oppression, and creativity. This concept also reveals not only a continuity in Merleau-Ponty’s scientific, phenomenological, and ontological works, but also a deep kinship with the philosophical becoming of Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze, and the deconstructive thinking of Jacques Derrida, as well as intimating several allegiances with contemporary critics of oppressive institutions of gender and race, especially Simone de Beauvoir, bell hooks, Gail Weiss, Shannon Sullivan, Kelly Oliver, and Cynthia Willett. Indeed, the concept of reading Merleau-Ponty’s works generatively suggests a novel approach to the philosophical projects of interpreting texts organically and creatively.
READING MERLEAU-PONTY
I draw on Merleau-Ponty’s texts from across his life, but I do so with the goal of presenting the philosophical problems opened up by them rather than the exact theses asserted in them. The prime task in reading philosophically does not involve “reducing given phenomenological motifs to what they were in their original contingency and their empirical humility,” because originary philosophical insights, in their earliest formations, are necessarily ambiguous, since they must use existing concepts to say what has not yet been said (S, 160/161). Thus, reading is an act of going from what a writer literally says to what she is attaining to think.
There is an interpretative fallacy, explains Merleau-Ponty, when “we want the meaning of a man’s works to be wholly positive,” and we reduce it to a philosophical inventory of argumentative claims. But a philosophical text, like a living body, is not simply a codex, a mere thing, but a certain kind of activity, an attempt at an original expression. Invoking Martin Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty levels a Socratic injunction at his reader to move past the positive letter and follow the original difficulties in texts, to follow the search a thinker undertakes in them and to work to further her insight:
“When we are considering a man’s thought,” Heidegger says in effect, “the greater the work accomplished . . . the richer the unthought-of element in that work.” . . . To think is not to possess the objects of thought; it is to use them to mark out a realm to think about which we therefore are not yet thinking about. Just as the perceived world endures only through the reflections, shadows, levels, and horizons between things (which are not things and are not nothing . . .), so the works and thought of a philosopher are also made of certain articulations between things said. There is no dilemma of objective interpretation or arbitrariness with respect to these articulations, since they are not objects of thought, since (like shadow and reflection) they would be destroyed by being subjected to analytic observation or taken out of context, and since we can be faithful to and find them only by thinking again. (S, 159–60/159)
The text is not a thing, but a horizon for thought, an opening to a beyond that is not ever immediately given but that presents or reorients what is given. The text is a finite entity that opens onto an infinite work; it is an inexhaustible horizon. Thus, to read a text is neither to “inevitably distort” it nor to “literally reproduce” it, because the mode of givenness of a text—like that of the passivity of all meaning in life, the central thesis in my work here—is in part posthumous, in the thinking it generates and the new domains of inquiry it marks out. Reading, like what Merleau-Ponty terms institution, also involves both a receptive and a creative endeavor, such that being honest to a thinker means holding open the possibility of thinking in her writing, rather than distilling her work into a positive actuality. Thus, to read is to resume while also transforming a thought, to institute this thought anew by following its inner logic of development and the possibilities it reveals for the first time.
This reading of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical works is distinctive from most scholarly interpretations of his corpus. A widely held view is that Merleau-Ponty’s early period, during which he wrote the Structure of Behavior and the Phenomenology of Perception, is essentially characterized by analyses of the structure of human consciousness as a world-constituting activity. This early period is often juxtaposed with Merleau-Ponty’s later works, such as the lecture courses on nature and institution and passivity, and the unfinished The Visible and the Invisible, works that are said to mark an ontological turn away from the primacy of consciousness and toward a philosophy of nature and metaphysical questions about Being. I do not share this view. I argue that though Merleau-Ponty’s works are rarely univocal, there is a line of thinking through Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy that is an attempt to abrogate the notion of a world-constituting synthetic activity and to disclose the emergence of novel forms of meaning from nature. This thinking against activity does not mean that we are passively constituted natural beings, that nature is a positive, deterministic reality in-itself, but that nature is understood as generativity, as an origin of activity that is not itself yet activity. Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical development is limited not to a rejection of constituting consciousness, but to a critique of the notion of constituting activity as such. I read Merleau-Ponty’s works as resources to think not only against the tenets of idealism, but also against vitalism, or the attempt to defer the constituting activity of consciousness to the living activities of the organic body. Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy is most coherently understood as an attempt to validate the experiential primacy and irreducibility of conscious and bodily lived-experience, while also genealogically disclosing the original non-self-sufficiency of these structures and their passive emergence from nature.
THREE CONCEPTS OF PASSIVITY
The strategy of reading Merleau-Ponty’s texts is a token of the very thesis I am asserting in this work: that meaning is never literally given or passively fixed, but is in a process of becoming that involves receptivity and transformation,
