and produced by the constituting activity of consciousness or life, is rejected by Merleau-Ponty, as is the notion of a static or constituted meaning inherent to nature. Both notions are premised on the concept of meaning as merely passive given, whether a product of life or a static given of nature. Such a reductive sense of passivity is prevalent in certain theories of meaning, such as empiricism, which posits a simple sensory given; positivist biological accounts, which posit the organism as determined by causal reflexes and environmental factors; and social constructivism, which is premised on the idea that meaning in human life is fixed by socially constituted norms that precede individual human lives or acts. This “bad ambiguity,” as Merleau-Ponty terms it, is a mere external relationship between activity and passivity, constituting and constituted, such as in naturalism, where human sense is passively determined by nature; or, conversely, idealism, where nature is a passive being constituted by consciousness.
Beyond this concept of a passivity tout court, which Merleau-Ponty rejects outright, we can identify three crucial concepts of passivity in Merleau-Ponty’s thinking. In keeping with the phenomenological reduction, Merleau-Ponty rejects the notion of a positive given before which consciousness or life is passive simpliciter. In his criticism of a reductively physiological account of the reflex in The Structure of Behavior, Merleau-Ponty argues that even the most putatively direct stimuli are only ever explicable in terms of responsiveness in the organism. Against the idea that the organism is a mechanical system of reflexes impacted by the impressions of an external world, Merleau-Ponty discloses that the stimulus and the response are mediated coefficients of a coordinated sensorimotor loop. This avoids the metaphysical dualism of an organic perspective and an external reality in-itself, as well as the question of how a mere mechanism could be sensitively alive to its environment. This critique of passivity tout court can be extended to social constructivism, or structuralism, which takes the person to be a passively inscribed social subject, because, as Merleau-Ponty argues, the very issue of our subjectivity is how we take up our inherited cultural traditions.
The first operative concept of passivity in this philosophy is therefore the notion of environmental or static passivity, whereby the living activity of the organism or the person and the givenness of its environment are moments in a holistic interrelationship. The relationship between environment and organism is transcendental, preceding and mediating its two terms. Here we can think of the way that an organism’s environment is always an expressive production of its living acts, but also how its acting body is always sensitive and responsive to this environment. This organism-environment relation, what Merleau-Ponty calls a “structure” or “form” of behavior, exhibits the logical structure of intentionality, insofar as consciousness is not a pure activity but a relationality. This concept names the ontological co-givenness of activity and passivity as a living relation between organism and environment, self and world, but it cannot explain the genesis of this structure.
In order to explain how the organism-environment relation is not self-constituting, a further concept of genetic passivity is required.3 This concept explains how vital and conscious activities emerge out of processes that are not yet fully formed modes of activity. Where the static concept of passivity situates the organism and environment as continuously temporally related, the idea of genetic passivity is premised upon a conception of this relationship as developmental and therefore punctuated by discontinuous temporal events (SB, 125/136). This notion hinges on decisive events that inaugurate new meaning structures, such as pivotal developments in the organism-environment relationship, or formative moments in the emergence of personhood. The key insight of The Structure of Behavior, and the conceptual linchpin of the Phenomenology of Perception, is the concept of a “decisive now,” a moment that becomes the formative “true present” for all events that follow (PP, 87/114). The “decisive now” does not simply elapse, but remains active as the structural dimension according to which present modes of activity and awareness have a sense. The sediment of the past in the present does not simply repeat the past but serves to open new fields as possibility, such as the infant learning to move his body, then gesture, and later speak. Each new sedimentation folds a new possibility of movement into the body, while potentially serving as a scaffold for more differentiated movements, such as grasping, waving, writing, sculpting, caressing, and so many more. We catch the work of this genetic passivity only retrospectively, just as we can change habits only through the slow and uncertain work of forming new habits, rather than through transparent self-awareness or purely active self-control.
Despite the developmental character of genetic passivity, it remains conceived of as a vestigial constituting activity in much of Merleau-Ponty’s work. Specifically, there is some ambiguity about whether the sedimenting power is a capacity (pouvoir) of the living body or of human consciousness. According to this view, the organism would be both self-enacting and yet emergent. This is circular reasoning, because to hold this position we must simultaneously posit the organism as both possessing and being preceded by this power of temporal synthesis. Even if we cede this synthetic power to an ancestor, the embryo, the parent, the seed, et cetera, we arrive at a regress of genetic acts. The notion of development as a constituting activity, therefore, falls into a regress that presupposes a constituting act of a more basic order, ad infinitum. To overcome these issues of a problematic logic of constitution, a final notion of radical or generative passivity is required.
This generative concept of passivity, drawn from the later lectures Child Psychology, Institution and Passivity, and Nature, points at the emergence of sense from nonsense and activity from nonactivity, and thus names a potency or possibility (puissance) of being. To understand the logic of this emergence, Merleau-Ponty rejects the classical alternative of constituting activity and constituted reality in favor of understanding the emergence of form in life and experience as a movement from nonsense to sense. Initially, the passive generativity is not a meaning-constituting activity of the body or of consciousness, but a sedimenting movement that these activities will come to have inherited as their own activity. This notion rejects the principle that meaning emerges from a determinate moment in the past, whether a locus of preexisting meaning or a meaning-making power, thus undermining the fundamental premises of mechanist, vitalist, and idealist accounts. Admittedly, there is a fine distinction between genetic and generative passivity, but while both concepts explain forms of living existence according to a logic of developmental becoming, the notion of generative passivity can uniquely account for how these developments are not originally activities of the body or consciousness.
Generative passivity is an aporetic structure, not merely an epistemological blind spot that limits our finite consciousness, but—connecting to central insights of Bergson, Deleuze, and Derrida—a metaphysically incomplete, open, and ungraspable origin to movement and activity, what Merleau-Ponty calls an absolute past or a time before time, a radical source of all possibility. The true “past” of life and consciousness, says Merleau-Ponty, is not a chronological past, but an ontological past of “nature,” a “past that has never been present” (PP, 252/289), a “retrograde becoming of the true.”4 This ontological past is not a “retrospective illusion” or mere projection of consciousness.5 This paradoxical “time before time” is, as I will demonstrate, understood as “dimensions,” which are not fully formed structures or given moments but a more radical becoming beyond and between structures that enables and shapes possibilities of meaningful events and activities within structured or “instituted” space and time.6
Overcoming the dualism of fact and essence, Merleau-Ponty deems this movement of instituting-instituted an “experimental Platonism,” akin to what Deleuze sometimes calls transcendental empiricism. Like developmental passivity, it is possible to catch a glimpse of this “nature” at work retrospectively, particularly in the emergence of life from nonlife, or in the emergence of personal significance out of vital significance, or in the birth of new cultural and political movements. Learning is a moment of generative passivity par excellence, because the event of insight is a happening that first of all structures a new field of possibilities, such as when the child learns to move upright and thus begins to enter into the space of the adult world, when
