of communication, or when a new concept destabilizes and restructures a field of inquiry. Learning is an experience where confusion, a furtive beckoning, or nonsense portentously explodes into a new domain of sense, transforming the very field from which it emerges, taking up recasting previous indeterminacy into new determinate meaningful dimensions, like the body finding a new balance in a new vehicle or regaining and reshaping a previous balance through the incorporation of a prosthesis. We experience this striving and its accomplishment of new activities as a power (puissance) that exceeds and grounds us, announcing itself to us, inviting us to assume and inhabit it, to take it on as one of our active capacities (pouvoir). According to this concept of generative passivity, we cannot say that the past now harbors the future in utero. We can say, however, that the past will have become the structural basis of the present, albeit in an unfinishable way, so that the future remains radically open to the evolution of new forms of life because of this very latency or potency of the past. Our true nature is difficult to name conceptually, because this passive origination of sense obscures itself in its own temporal becoming.
SUMMARY OF CHAPTERS
This work comprises four chapters, two on life followed by two on personhood. Chapter 1 is a discussion of how life points to deeper dimensions of genetic and generative passivity, and chapter 3 similarly sounds out these institutions of personhood in habit. Chapter 2 develops the logical core of our study: the concept of generative passivity, investigating the radical becoming of meaning in life and challenging the methods of mechanism as well as vitalism and autopoiesis. Chapter 4 similarly develops a radical notion of intercorporeal possibility with respect to our ethical and political lives, raising specific challenges to social constructivist and liberal models of social personhood. In a brief conclusion, resources for rethinking naturalizing consciousness and also for grounding ethics in intercorporeal life are put forward.
In chapter 1, “Consciousness and Animality: The Problem of Constituting Activity in The Structure of Behavior,” I present Merleau-Ponty’s early philosophy not only as a critique of consciousness as constituting activity, but also as a critique of any attempt to defer constituting synthesis to the vital activity of living organisms. Contrasting my reading of Merleau-Ponty with the autopoietic notion of Francicso Varela and Evan Thompson, I argue that a “vital structure of behavior” in the organism cannot be a self-sufficient source of meaning. Such an account, I argue, serves only to defer a constituting activity of consciousness to life. I argue that this move to understand consciousness as a living structure must incorporate a concept of genetic passivity, insofar as organic structures must grow and develop in relation to other organisms, particularly other animals. Like these organisms, consciousness develops by moving in, responding to, and expressing a vital environment.
Chapter 2 articulates this difficult temporal logic in Merleau-Ponty’s later works, arguing that they uncover a new philosophical terrain beyond the alternatives of mechanism and vitalism, or evolutionary contingency and finalism, because meaning emerges from a natural “past” in which vital structures were not determinate, but nevertheless had a nascent, developing sense irreducible to determinate form. I borrow Bergson’s “retrograde movement of the true” to expose how possibility is not generated in determinately given moments of activity, which I think is the underlying premise of all naturalistic, finalistic, and deterministic accounts.7 Instead, meaning is an emergent movement, not from the past toward the future, but between dynamic events. This becoming-true of sense as a process points back at an originative difference, a past more radical than a former present and thus other to the horizon of temporal moments. This is a deep, fecund past of generative possibility that is manifest in the ongoing differentiation and transformation of sense. This originary past is thus not elapsed, but neither is it determinatively present. It rather marks out a radical difference and openness to becoming, a generative passivity, in and between existing dimensions of sense. The chapter concludes with a consideration of some criticisms from Michel Foucault, who charges Merleau-Ponty with at once nostalgically positing a nature in-itself, a pristine past, while also reducing this nature to an idealized construct of human consciousness. Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy offers resources to overcome this dualism by understanding the past as radically different from the present and even from itself. The solution to this problem provocatively points toward the deconstructive philosophy of Jacques Derrida, and to the symbolic character of sense we inherit in our second nature and rebirth as linguistic persons.
In chapter 3 our discussion shifts from the institution of nature to the development of second nature through habituation. Addressing the problem of how there can be an irreducible sense of personal life if this sense is not originally constituted by human beings, we will take up different tendencies in the Phenomenology of Perception. The first trajectory in this text suggests that human meaning emerges from habit formation and a sedimenting power of the living body. Yet there is another line of reasoning here that shows how the passivity of human development cannot merely depend on human growth and learning as constituting acts, but as the Phenomenology already indicates and the later lecture courses demonstrate, becoming human draws on a more primordial becoming of meaning that can be articulated by a generative sense of passivity. The body is not a hypostatized ground of possibilities of the person, but like the person is an emergent structure. The body depends, passively, on nature’s original generativity. Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology, then, already intimates an ontology of nature.
Chapter 4 takes up the way in which we receive ourselves from other beings before we ever enjoy a sense of agency or personal independence. This originary belonging to others, what Merleau-Ponty calls syncretic sociability in his “The Child’s Relations with Others,” is crucial to understanding the passive generation of personality and, moreover, it can offer a unique explanation of human sociality. This shared, intercorporeal sense of bodily life, a sense that precedes subjective awareness, structures social relations that enable or oppress individual and group senses of agency. Against traditional liberal, voluntaristic, and structuralist, social constructivist approaches, which take the self to be either self-constituting or constituted by others, the logic of generative passivity points to the way in which shared bodily gesture functions as a pivotal, often overlooked, means of interrogating and reshaping social institutions from within. Like life, consciousness and the social world are spheres not of constituting activity, but are institutions: dynamic nexuses where sense is shaped through shared dynamics of interbodily movement, expression, and communication. Life, consciousness, and society are structures of generative passivity.
BETWEEN HUSSERL AND MERLEAU-PONTY: THE INVERSION OF PHENOMENOLOGY
Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy is an institution from within and beyond Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology: a method equally historically indebted to and yet liberated from the terms of Husserl’s thinking. Merleau-Ponty develops his notion of institution from Husserl’s concept of Stiftung in such texts as The Origin of Geometry and Husserl’s development of a radical, generative sense of passivity in his Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis. Anthony Steinbock unearths three layers of phenomenological constitution in Husserl, each of which refines and complicates the idea of meaning-constituting (Sinngebung) that is so often simplistically attributed to phenomenological philosophy.
Husserl’s phenomenology deepens the practice of phenomenology from a simple description of structures of consciousness to an understanding of the preconscious motivations that tacitly orient consciousness, and then to a deeper affective level yet, pointing behind these motivational structures to traces of an imperceptible yet perception-orienting affective life. While pointing beyond
