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
