The Birth of Sense

Generative Passivity in Merleau-Ponty's Philosophy

Don Beith

• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780821446263
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Phänomenologie in der Philosophie

In The Birth of Sense, Don Beith proposes a new concept of generative passivity, the idea that our organic, psychological, and social activities take time to develop into sense. More than being a limit, passivity marks out the way in which organisms, persons, and interbodily systems take time in order to manifest a coherent sense. Beith situates his argument within contemporary debates about evolution, developmental biology, scientific causal explanations, psychology, postmodernism, social constructivism, and critical race theory. Drawing on empirical studies and phenomenological reflections, Beith argues that in nature, novel meaning emerges prior to any type of constituting activity or deterministic plan.

The Birth of Sense is an original phenomenological investigation in the style of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and it demonstrates that the French philosopher's works cohere around the notion that life is radically expressive. While Merleau-Ponty's early works are widely interpreted as arguing for the primacy of human consciousness, Beith argues that a pivotal redefinition of passivity is already under way here, and extends throughout Merleau-Ponty's corpus. This work introduces new concepts in contemporary philosophy to interrogate how organic development involves spontaneous expression, how personhood emerges from this bodily growth, and how our interpersonal human life remains rooted in, and often thwarted by, domains of bodily expressivity.

CHAPTER ONE

CONSCIOUSNESS AND ANIMALITY

THE PROBLEM OF CONSTITUTING ACTIVITY IN THE STRUCTURE OF BEHAVIOR

The 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 the living body within the synthetic terms of consciousness. “Form,” which is a term uniquely 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 dynam...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction. In the Shadow of Philosophy: The Problem of Passivity in the Philosophy of Merleau-Ponty
• 1. Consciousness and Animality: The Problem of Constituting Activity in The Structure of Behavior
• 2. The Passivity of Life: The Problem of the Genesis of Possibility in Institution and Nature
• 3. The Passivity of Second Nature: The Genesis of the Person in the Phenomenology of Perception
• 4. The Intercorporeal Institution of Agency: Merleau-Ponty’s Generative Psychology and Politics
• Conclusion. The Hidden Nature of Passivity
• Notes
• References
• Index