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.
