The Birth of Sense - Don Beith Series in Continental Thought

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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 soap bubble constitutes the limit of what is finite for the animal, and therewith the limit of its world; what lies behind that is hidden in infinity.10

      Despite the undeniable way in which the environment is relative to the life of the organism, this need not entail that the organism creates this relation by way of a world-constituting act. Yet Merleau-Ponty’s appropriation of von Uexküll’s notion of an a priori structure of transcendental subjectivity in organisms amounts to doubling down on the privileged activity of human consciousness, first by imputing to the organism a subject-like activity, dichotomizing organism and environment; second by arguing that this organic perspective is in fact a “form” that is recognizable and explicable only within the human domain of symbolic consciousness. Even though human consciousness is encountered as a structure, a type of form among other forms (vital, physical), consciousness is nevertheless the unique condition of possibility of form as such. And this is because, when conceived as a unity in difference, a figure against a background, or a melodic temporal extension, all invoke the precedence of a synthetic moment: a perceiving consciousness that can hold these otherwise different moments together under a theme as such, or a symbol. Where the form of organic life was a living relationship with the environment, the unique character of human consciousness is the ability to perceive this relationship explicitly, in symbolic form. The bifurcation of organism and environment, and their formal unity as figure-ground, for example, is a distinction derived from consciousness, not from the vital expressive life of the organism. This adherence to a philosophy of consciousness is one of the most common criticisms leveled at Merleau-Ponty,11 one he himself took seriously in his later work.12 However, for various reasons to be explored, this cannot be a straightforward criticism.

      As a criticism of reductive scientific methodologies, M. C. Dillon (1998, 69) and Scott Churchill (2008, 174) contend that The Structure of Behavior comes down on the side of idealism, by privileging perceived form over the ideas of preexisting natural causes. There are physical structures, Merleau-Ponty claims, but “it should not be concluded from this that forms already exist in a physical universe and serve as an ontological foundation for perceptual structures” (SB, 144/156–57). Gary Madison detects a Hegelian influence in Merleau-Ponty, who dialectically concludes that “what one designates by the name of life is already the consciousness of life,” because “the very description of form presupposes a consciousness which takes note of it” (1981, 16). Indeed, Merleau-Ponty includes a reference to the perceived in the notion of form, in that “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” (SB, 144/156). The difficulty here is that in spite of moving synthesis into immanent “physical” and “vital” orders, Merleau-Ponty nevertheless subjugates these orders to an idealizing consciousness of form, such that, as Bernhard Waldenfels notes, “in the course of a transcendental turn consciousness expands to become a universal milieu, and phenomenology assumes the role of an ‘inventory of consciousness’” (1981, 154).13 If physical and vital structures owe their synthetic conditions to the symbolic activity of consciousness, Merleau-Ponty’s account has, in the end, rendered organisms and the perceived world no different than objects entirely constituted by human consciousness. A deeper reading of The Structure of Behavior, however, subtly suggests itself.

      The criticism that conceiving of vital structures as forms reduces the organism to a construct of human consciousness meets with complication, because the hypothesis

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