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
