traditional limits of phenomenology as a study of consciousness. However, these deeper affective layers are ultimately defined ex negativo, as a kind of unconsciousness or “antechamber of the ego” (Husserl 2001, 166). Steinbock makes this point by working through a triple—static, genetic, and generative—logic of sense genesis in Husserl, a tripartite logic I have borrowed and transformed here in order to study Merleau-Ponty. The first mode of phenomenology is static. Phenomenology describes the modes of givenness of essential structures of consciousness. Essential features of consciousness such as embodiment and worldhood are not at this level described in their becoming, but are taken to be “finished” (Steinbock 2001, xxx, xxxvi). These structures of consciousness are not substances or essences, but rather modes of relating or meaning-constituting activities. The first object of phenomenological method is thus the activity of consciousness. Static phenomenology, despite its power as transcendental psychology, thus remains abstract.
The second mode of phenomenology is genetic. A genetic description of consciousness might articulate how one activity gives rise to another, just as one judicative act entails another in a process of deduction. The novel value of this second method comes when we observe the first genesis of one mode of activity from its prior foundations, where “one traces the origins of activity in passivity” (Steinbock 2001, xxxi). Here we might think of motivating moments of association where a perception calls up the activity of a thought, or a nagging resemblance or echo summons our perceptive attention. These motivating moments are not themselves yet modes of conscious activity, but are the alluring stirrings that occasion and invite active modes of consciousness and the givenness they accomplish. Genetic description makes it possible to explain how there is a layer of sense-constitution more basic than an act of consciousness, an operative layer of motivations and background associations that orients our conscious life behind our backs, in our sleep, and in our memory and forgetfulness.
The final mode of Husserlian phenomenology is generative, and it digs deeper than a genetic attending to motivational and habitual structures that call up activities of consciousness. In point of fact, these motivational structures are themselves modes of activity within conscious life; it is just that they are not given (except in retrospect) as intended objects of our consciousness. Generative description is subtle, because it traces the origins of these motivations to preparatory dimensions that are not so readily circumscribed within the realm of subjectivity or first person consciousness. Steinbock deftly reveals how there are traces of constitutive features in our conscious life that we do not experience ourselves as originally constituting, structures that reveal the passivity of our active consciousness. Using examples of birth and death, and the experience of home as defined by a spatial and intersubjective beyond, Steinbock discloses how Husserl’s analysis of consciousness, by asking after the ultimate roots of motivational consciousness, point to superindividual, vertically constitutive sources of meaning. Where the previous methods hypostatize an immortalized consciousness, generative phenomenology reveals consciousness as intergenerational and culturally embedded (Steinbock 2001, xxxiii–xxxiv).
In the lectures on passive synthesis, Husserl shows how motivational structures of affectivity are rooted in a deeper layer of affective “associations,” a layer prior to the division between subject and object, stimulus and response, whereby an “objectlike formation” is neither the call of an outside world nor the already sensitive noticing of sensation. Rather, there is a “prior” moment that will have shown itself in and through the subsequent acts of attending that it motivates. This layer of passive synthesis undercuts the previously clear division of subject and object, of activity and passivity. Affect is shown retroactively, as generative trace, but it is not strictly speaking something we perceive or sense in the “now” of consciousness. Here Husserl’s generative method is at its furthest, revealing a level of relatedness that precedes the terms “punctual presence” and “active consciousness.” While this points to an imperceptible past of nature and perhaps an immemorial past of culture,8 Husserl nevertheless holds to the terms of “association” and an “antechamber of consciousness.”
As Immanuel Kant also suggested, prior to his reactionary Cartesian revision of the 1781 Critique of Pure Reason, there is a productive layer of imagination that undercuts the distinction between passivity and activity, sensation and understanding, body and world, a priori and a posteriori, self and other (Steinbock 2001, xl). As with Kant, however, Husserl’s profound insight is caught up in the miring dualisms of his philosophy, as Steinbock (2001) describes: “This leads Husserl to a paradoxical formulation of the process as an ‘active passivity’ in order to characterize a constitution and acquisition of sense that is, on the one hand, not nothing and is also somehow ‘subjective,’ but which, on the other hand, does not stem from ‘an activity proceeding from the ego’” (xxxix–xl). This sphere of passivity is originary but so only in relation to the “active” and “judicative” sphere (xliii). Passivity, while pointing in a radical direction, remains defined negatively for Husserl: “Husserl tends to regard passivity as basically equivalent to perceptual, prepredicative, pre-reflective, and prelinguistic experience” (xli). Despite Husserl’s audacity, he remains a thinker of consciousness. But unlike the 1787 Kant, Husserl does not thereby subordinate sensibility to the understanding, because he unearths a passive dimension of synthesis, an aesthesis that is the condition of possibility of logos.9 The distinction between the two terms emerges within the life of consciousness in this paradoxical unfolding of a passive-activity. Husserl dared, in pointing to what Laura McMahon (2014, 279–82) evocatively terms these “organic phantoms” haunting consciousness, to uncover the trace of something yet more radical than a rationalistic phenomenology of consciousness.
A key difference in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy is that where Husserl’s later texts focus on the preconditions of consciousness in a new “transcendental aesthetic,” Merleau-Ponty’s genetic and generative concepts are aimed at rooting the seeming activities of both life and consciousness in a spontaneous history of natural evolution and its transformative self-developments. Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology extends this study of natural expression beyond the terms of a lifeworld, taking up the question of the origin of sense from nonsense and the temporality of an ontologically radical past, a past that has never been present. Thus Merleau-Ponty’s work goes beyond a genetic and generative geneaology of conscious, meaning-giving acts and seeks out an inverse logic of sense in a radical prehistory, a concept of passivity deeper than the levels of passive synthesis in sensibility and, indeed, more mysterious.10 A further study would be required to adequately trace the relation of these distinctive concepts of passivity in each thinker, but Merleau-Ponty explains his own original development of Husserl’s notions of embodiment, and generative temporality, from his early visit to the Leuven archive before the Second World War, in the pages and footnotes of the Phenomenology of Perception, “The Philosopher and His Shadow,” and in exhaustive detail in his later lecture course Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology.
Though these concepts are not isomorphic in Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, particularly in Merleau-Ponty’s nuanced sense of “generative passivity,” I use the concepts of static, genetic, and generative phenomenology developed by Steinbock (1995) in his pioneering Home and Beyond to serve as three interpretative keys to work out three concepts of passivity in Merleau-Ponty’s thinking.11 The French philosopher does not privilege the position of human consciousness and of constituting activity, and indeed undermines the whole idea of constitution by proposing the concept of institution whereby life continually accumulates sense through a movement between sense and nonsense, a movement that difficultly calls into question our ideas of “past,” “nature,” and “origin.” Merleau-Ponty develops a generative conception of the past as a soil of possibility beyond the terms of conscious acts, and even beyond those of the living body’s activities, and thus inaugurates the radically new philosophy of generative passivity or institution.
CHAPTER ONE
CONSCIOUSNESS AND ANIMALITY
THE
