deep dialectic seen by the phenomenological observer goes on behind the back of consciousness itself. Science includes in its content the road to science.
—Georg Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit1
Language is indeed the possibility of the face-to-face and of being-upright, but it does not exclude inferiority, the humility of the glance at the father as the glance of the child made in memory of having been expulsed before knowing how to walk, and of having been delivered, prone and infans, into the hands of the adult masters. Man, one might say, is a God arrived too early, that is, a God who knows himself forever late in relation to the already-there of Being.
—Jacques Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics”2
Human awareness of nonhuman organic behavior harbors a philosophical dilemma. We bear witness to original creativity and responsivity in the living body, what Merleau-Ponty terms its dynamic “structure” of behavior (SB, 137/148). Yet we understand this structure from the vantage of our own conscious perception, modeling organic behavior on the subjective perceptual motifs of occupying an individual perspective and acting to affect the world. How can we be conscious of organic behavior as such, given that these distinctions render animality intelligible within the limits of our human consciousness?3 The Structure of Behavior addresses this question, with Merleau-Ponty arguing that we are aware of organisms as distinctive “structures” or “forms” of behavior. This thinking is criticized as an account that equates this epistemological criterion of structure with an ontological criterion—the reduction of all “structures” of behavior to the synthetic structure of human consciousness.4 There is a reading of Merleau-Ponty’s early work as a proposal against an account of both human consciousness and vital awareness as transcendental, world-constituting activities. Rather than being constituting-activities, consciousness and life are defined by environmental passivity. They are organic activities that develop only by moving in, responding to, and expressing a vital environment. Consciousness itself is such an activity that emerges from this living environmental relationship, and is thus grounded in a deeper, developmental, or genetic passivity. Consciousness is instituted in a process of education within and alongside, and not beyond, these “vital” structures of behavior.
While Merleau-Ponty, according to this view, does not reduce organic forms to human consciousness, the question remains as to whether organic behavior itself is understood as a world-constituting, transcendental activity. There are some descriptions in The Structure of Behavior of the organism as enacting an active constitution of its environment, which points to a problematic vitalism and idea of transcendental synthesis in Merleau-Ponty’s early thinking. And yet, at other points, the organism’s original behavioral activities are understood as implicated in passivity, insofar as they are realized and shaped within a history of developing environmental sensitivities. According to this account, the putatively passive and active moments of environmental sensitivity and organic movement are in fact inseparable—the organic structure of behavior is reciprocally activity and passivity. In his first works, then, Merleau-Ponty already undermines a philosophy of consciousness and an autopoietic or vitalist concept of meaning-constitution.
By revealing the organism as a melodic and open-ended proliferation of developing expression, communication, and environmental sensitivity, Merleau-Ponty discloses an arena of generative passivity that precedes and passively mediates structures of vital and conscious activity. And, while Merleau-Ponty does not develop the terms to adequately characterize this institution of meaning as more than the sedimentation of activities, or what I have termed “genetic passivity,” until his later work, we can draw from some of his later terms in lectures on institution and nature in order to work out the logic of this generative passivity latent in The Structure of Behavior. This early development furnishes the conceptual kernel of the later critique of the self-sufficiency of consciousness and constituting activity.5 Vital structures of awareness, including perception, can be understood according to a logic of institution, such that our symbolic, reflective self-consciousness, that prima facie appears to exhibit a logic of constitution, is in fact a transformative institution of this affective, intercorporeal vital sense. Living form, including consciousness, is not constituted in advance, nor is it self-constituting—it will always have developed by taking up but transforming a latent sense in its natural past, and so is fundamentally an expressive and open-ended phenomenon—a “melodic” temporal structure. This early text largely privileges the genetic meaning-making structures in vital development, yet it unearths the question of a more radical past, a past that is ontologically prior to these already grounded activities of the living body and consciousness.
CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE PROBLEM OF ORGANIC FORM
If living bodies are not just physical things, but appear as original forms of meaning, does this presuppose a consciousness to apprehend them? In The Structure of Behavior, Merleau-Ponty argues that organisms are not parts of a physical world, but that putative “parts” of the organic body derive from the organism as a total form, a principle of self-organization. The organic body is not a static anatomy or a set of physiological mechanisms, but a dynamic and vital structure that appears, via this self-coordination, as a self-originating form. Merleau-Ponty uses these terms, “structure” and “form,” interchangeably to describe self-organizing systems that are indecomposable into component parts or preexisting, external causes. Form is defined as a self-regulating system in which the whole precedes the parts, in the sense that parts of the organism function globally rather than in isolation: “We will say that there is form whenever the properties of a system are modified by every change brought about in a single one of its parts and, on the contrary, are conserved when they all change while maintaining the same relationship among themselves” (SB, 47/49–50). The notion of an independently functioning part is an abstraction, because form is a circuit in which all parts interrelate. A living form can persist even when all of the parts are discernibly changed. The organism as a whole is prior to its parts, both in the ontological sense of a structure that holistically orchestrates the parts, and in the perceptual sense of form as the appearance of this structure as a meaningful figure that stands out through and against the changing organization of the parts. Yet does this very apprehension of structure as figure point back to its condition of possibility in an act of consciousness?
A living structure of behavior is irreducible to separate causes working on discrete parts because it appears as an original principle, as an expressive self-manifestation of vital meaning. Despite the terms being used interchangeably, “structure” connotes a living, immanent activity, but “form” has the idealistic connotation of a perceived figure. The notion of form, explains Merleau-Ponty, originates in Gestalt psychology as a “criticism of the ‘anatomical’ spirit in physiology” (SB, 47/50). This discovery of intrinsically meaningful structures of organization within “anatomy” leads Merleau-Ponty to assert that even the most ostensibly “physical” structures are immanent to the ontological register of conscious perception, rather than existing in an order of material things that exist in extended space partes extra partes:
But the very fact that we had to borrow the terms “figure” and “ground” from the phenomenal or perceived world in order to describe these “physiological forms”—just as above with the metaphor of melody—leads us to wonder if these are still physiological phenomena, if we can in principle conceive of processes which are still physiological and which would adequately symbolize the relations inherent in what is ordinarily called “consciousness.” (SB, 92/101)
On the one hand, Merleau-Ponty seems to recognize structures of meaning that are irreducible to a physical world or the mechanics of anatomy, and therefore moves to cede a meaning-making, intentional activity to the living body. But this move is cut short, on the other hand, because the explanation of vital structures in the terms of consciousness amounts to only an expansion of the field of consciousness to encompass the structure of organic sense-making. The language of “form” constitutes
