proper to “symbolic,” human consciousness, seems to elide the vital structure of self-effectuating organization in the living body itself.6 The difficulty lies in explaining the organic body as a dynamic structure that is reducible neither to causal explanation, nor to an abstract form constituted by consciousness.
In The Structure of Behavior, Merleau-Ponty articulates three forms of structure: physical, vital, and symbolic. The first and most basic structure is that of a “physical” thing, the form of a self-ordering whole, where “each local change in a form will be translated by a redistribution of forces which assures the constancy of their relation; it is this internal circulation which is the system as a physical reality” (137/147). The formation of an oil drop, for example, is the manifestation of an “internal whole” or intrinsic principle of organization, because the oil forms a convex shape that is preserved as a whole when its specific parts are manipulated (91/100). In one sense, starting from the term “structure,” Merleau-Ponty identifies physical “structures” as genuinely spontaneous, self-regulating systems. Yet insofar as structure is defined according to the perceptual logic of form, this seems to reduce the world to a structure of consciousness, namely, to the perceptual form of a whole, a figure that stands out against a background of changing perceptual adumbrations: “Thus, far from the ‘physical form’ being able to be the real foundation of the structure of behavior and in particular of its perceptual structure, it is itself conceivable only as an object of perception” (144/156). Apprehending the physical form as a unity across its different manifestations is an act of perceptual synthesis. Describing these phenomena simultaneously as both structure and form generates a dualistic tension between form as self-constituting and form as constituted by consciousness. This concern holds only so long as we explain perception as a logic of constitution. Instead, as we will later see, we can also conceive of perception and the existence of the thing as an intertwined logic of institution. Though the focus of our study here is not on physical things, Jane Bennett’s (2010) Vibrant Matter has brought the physical world to life and phenomenologically explored the hidden life of things, revealing the animate character of physical structures of behavior with a thinking reminiscent of Aristotle’s concept of natural substance as self-moving, self-revealing physis.
Organic bodies, the second structure of behavior, are more complicated in their self-organization than things in the physical order. “Vital” structures appear as meaningful wholes that both reflect and expressively shape their environments. Where a physical structure enacts a whole only with respect to itself, through preserving relations among its parts, the organic body manifests itself as an open whole that is vitally responsive to the world. We see the environment expressed inwardly in the organism, through the sensitive behaviors of its body, like a dog that pants in heat, sheds fur in summer, and growls when threatened. Correspondingly, we find in the world a site of the organic body’s outward expression, its incorporation of the world into its bodily space of behavior, in the changes the organism renders in its environment, such as the bird’s nest, the ant’s hill, or humanity’s roads, words, and laws (SB, 148/161). Perceptually, the organism can be the figure, as its sensitive behaviors reflect its environmental situation; or, conversely, the environment can serve as the figure in which the organism’s transformative behavior is manifest. There is what I call a static passivity in the organism, insofar as its activity is mediated and contextualized by environmental passivity. This passivity is not a mere inert given but exists in equilibrium with the functions of the organism. Neither pole here is ontologically prior: the organism’s sensitive reception of the environment is a function of its activity. Conversely, the organism’s vital activities must always respond to and occur within its environment, rather than constituting the environment:
One cannot assign a moment in which the world acts on the organism, since the very effect of this “action” expresses the internal law of the organism. The mutual exteriority of the organism and the milieu is surmounted. . . . Thus, two correlatives must be substituted for these two terms defined in isolation: the “milieu” and the “aptitude,” which are like two poles of behavior and participate in the same structure. (SB, 161/174)
Where the physical structure was a Gestalt qua dynamic bodily whole, the whole of the organism is the bodily environmental unity of its behavior. The organic body is not a self-contained response to its surroundings. Rather, its very living activity is an openness to and transformation of those surroundings—in the organism the “physical” order is always already subtended by vital values. The organism’s bodily behaviors and the environment are not related as two separate things, interior perspective and external world. The notion of behavior undercuts this dichotomy by situating the organism’s environment and behavior as a reversible figure-ground relation. Unlike the case of physical structure, there cannot be the issue of consciousness simply imputing form to a material body in the physical world, because of the structure of static passivity by which the organism relates to and transforms the environment around it. The environment reflects the organism’s transformative activity in the changes enacted there, while the organism is a distinctively aware body for which the environment uniquely matters. There is no significance of the environment in-itself, distinct from the organism’s behavioral relatedness to the environment, yet the organism exists only as a distinctive inflection of an environment. This figure-background distinction points to a third term, consciousness, through which we can symbolically encounter and separate these abstract moments of activity and passivity in the organism.
Consciousness, the third, but perhaps first in terms of finalistic priority, structure, or form of behavior, is the structure that can perceive self-organizing wholes as explicit forms. Merleau-Ponty opposes consciousness to the vital structure, which merely reacts to more generalized and undistinguished “themes” without ever having them as explicit objects, or reflectively distinguishing these forms from its own activity of apprehending and relating to them (SB, 108/118). This attentive ability to distinguish specific forms, the figure-ground distinction, is fundamental to explicitly apprehending structures as meaningful forms, because it allows meaningful figures to be disclosed by allowing other appearances in the perceived field to withdraw into the background. Merleau-Ponty uses the ontology of the Gestalt not only to explain how a form precedes its “parts,” but also to explain the relationship between different levels of form or structure.7 Physical structure is the background to a supervening vital order, for example. So when we see the organism, we look past or beyond its parts, anatomical processes, and simple sensible qualities to see the organism in its vital, environmental situation. As a synthetic unity of figure against background, however, the Gestalt cannot actively ground itself. A third term, between figure and background, organism and environment, is “presupposed,” which mediates this figure-ground relation: the synthetic activity of consciousness of form, which alone can attentively discern the appearance of form. Merleau-Ponty is often criticized for the circularity of this alleged thesis, because consciousness is at once described as a structure realized in nature while at the same time being described as the privileged perspective to which all natural forms—physical, vital, and symbolic—refer.8 Is this the remnants of a transcendental philosophy, a humanist activism of consciousness in the face of reductionist biology? Or in the insight that form is a dynamic structure, is Merleau-Ponty already discovering structures of meaning-making in the perceived world, the organic body, and self-consciousness?
In The Structure of Behavior, there are express statements that structures are situated within the epistemological parameters of consciousness. On the one hand, Merleau-Ponty imputes an almost human form of awareness to organisms as self-constituting forms. Taking up an argument from Jakob von Uexküll, Merleau-Ponty in places makes the strong claim that organisms have a perspective through which their environment is expressed, and in which it matters. But on the other hand, organisms do not respond to a world thematized as such, but as Uexküll argues, merely react to the signals of their environments, because the organism constitutes its environment in an immediately lived, nonthematic manner:9
The space peculiar to each animal, wherever that animal may be, can be compared to a soap bubble which completely surrounds the creature at a greater or lesser distance. The extended
