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
