But, by restoring the phenomenal body, we sought neither to show the ideality of the body, nor to reintegrate it with consciousness as one of its objects. . . . One will be able to ask how we, being incarnate subjects, have the idea of science and absolute objectivity, but not how the universe of science intervenes in the universe of perception. (IP, 123/[216])
There is one multifarious world, but the very plurality of structure in this world means that there is not a consciousness that is what Madison calls “master.” Instead, there is “only a consciousness which finds itself face to face with a world of existences, one which looks about and which, at this stage, is nothing other than its look, one which lives outside of itself in the world” (Madison 1981, 18). For Madison, we are always in the position of “beginning consciousness” (1981, 17; citing SB, 110/120–21), such that clarification and interrogation are perennially endogenous to the form of our life. The ideal of objectivity remains, on one level, not a spontaneous activity of reflection, but a process of the expression of meaning, a living structure of behavior.
Instead of falling into a debater’s regress of knower and known, consciousness has a capacity for knowledge in the first place by virtue of affective contact and the expressive, not merely reflective, development of this contact.31 Immanuel Kant famously argued that though we must perceive the organism according to natural purposes, as having its own finality, this was the mere form of perception and had no purchase on reality in-itself.32 Yet a central thesis of The Structure of Behavior, as well as the later Phenomenology of Perception, is that perception is not merely cognitive or subjective, but that it is a motor-engagement with reality. Thus, to perceive is always already to be in affective contact; perception is not mere reception but a mix of activity and passivity, by which the organism opens a relation to the environment, where “the form of the excitant is created by . . . [the organism’s own] manner of offering itself to actions from the outside” (SB, 13/10).33 Other organisms are not merely passively impressed upon my sensation, but rather call for me to bodily engage with and perceive them through the movement of my body. Consciousness gains sense only in a circuit of exchange with other existences, like a “keyboard which moves itself in such a way as to offer—and according to variable rhythms—such or such of its keys to” resonate with other “melodic” forms of bodily behavior, or what Merleau-Ponty describes as sensory unities that are not sums “indifferent to the order of [their] factors,” but “whole” “constellation[s]” of meaning (SB, 13–14/10–11). Other forms are encountered not as representations, but as modulations of my own bodily rhythms of behavior.
Objectivity is an achievement and an expression, rather than a normative demand to reconcile the dynamic activity of expression with a preestablished absolute. Human reality is intelligible in the first place because of its participation in dynamically emerging structures, and not its prepossession of the structure of consciousness: “The fact of becoming conscious adds nothing to the physical structures. It must be said of these structures, and not of consciousness, that they are indispensable to the definition of man [sic]” (SB, 136/147). Consciousness is in the first place dependent on structures that have been established in advance of it. The language of consciousness need not invoke the recovery of an ideal structure, despite moments in the text that in fact assert this, but a reality that is fulfilled as an educative project, grounded in a more foundational layer of passive synthesis:
Our knowledge depends upon what we are; moral theory begins with a psychological and sociological critique of oneself; man is not assured ahead of time of possessing a source of morality; consciousness of self is not given in man by right; it is acquired only by the elucidation of his concrete being and is verified only by the active integration of isolated dialectics. (SB, 223/240)
Consciousness, as implicated in structures of existence, cannot know an ideal liberation, but only a “real” one, says Waldenfels, echoing Karl Marx by taking up a consciousness that lives by transforming itself and its world: “Wherever cognitive and practical structures or modes of organization change, there is a ‘real Umgestaltung’ [transformation] at work, and only in this way can it come to a ‘real liberation’” (1981, 25; citing SB, 221/238). Like all organic forms, consciousness is a dynamic one, built up and developed through a history of interbodily sedimentations or institutions.
The Structure of Behavior concludes with the assertion that “all the problems which we have just touched on are reducible to the problem of perception,” yet Merleau-Ponty adds that structures “exist only by their meaning,” such that consciousness itself is a structure and “the intentional life which constitutes [structures] is not yet a representation” (SB, 224/240, 224/241). As we have seen, the problem of perception of animate form can be interpreted either as an idealistic grasping of a constituted form by a constituting mind, or alternatively by understanding perception as a logic of institution where consciousness emerges from within the affective, interbodily, and coexpressive structures of living organisms. Now we can address how organic bodies exist as generative sites of “meaning” prior to conscious “representation,” investigating how each organism exists as a meaning-engendering life. Life is not a meaning-constitution but an expressive institution. The organism lives by both taking up and transforming a sense in nature, existing as the expressive enactment of meaning through a melodic, developing sedimentation of sense, what Merleau-Ponty calls in his Nature lectures, in a pivotal philosophical shift to a generative concept of passivity, an “auto-production of meaning.”
AUTOPOIESIS AND TRANSCENDENTAL VITALISM VERSUS MELODIC FORMS
Even if The Structure of Behavior remains rooted in a concept of developmental activity or genetic passivity, it nevertheless intimates a nascent but radical concept of generative passivity. In the Nature lectures investigations center on how meaning emerges prior to existing in localizable, established forms. If we can discern development and exchange of meaning in and between organic bodies, there can be no reduction of organisms to mere vital responses to environmental signals. Organic behavior is not captivated by its environment as by a “signal,”34 because it is the capacity to develop and express new meanings. Nature is the primary institution of sense, and the “auto-production” of natural meaning occurs apart from the abstract perspective and symbolic awareness of human consciousness, which imputes meaning-making to specific forms (N, 3/19). There is a question of whether this autoactivity of organic sense-making remains a transcendental principle of world-creating constitution, a deferral of transcendental subjectivity to a fixed form of the body and its vital activity.
Despite some of Merleau-Ponty’s own terms that favor a logic of constitution, there is enough evidence in The Structure of Behavior to suggest that the organic body and consciousness progressively develop through growth and education: they are primary loci of this sedimentation of meaning, although they do not initially possess the power (puissance) that enacts it. They are, rather, instituted through it. Structures of behavior emerge through developmental gestures that transformatively point back to this presensible time out of which they will have been generated. The motif of the organism as musicality that we find in Merleau-Ponty’s text expresses how we cannot think of the organism in subjective terms of constituting acts. It is a mistake to attribute a self-sufficient meaning-constituting intentionality to life: “Vital acts have a meaning; they are not defined, even in science, as a sum of processes external to each other. . . . ‘Every organism,’ says von Uexküll, ‘is a melody which sings itself’” (SB, 159/172). This motif of music calls to mind, perhaps challenging, the concept of the organism as vital enaction or poetry put forward by Francisco Varela and Evan Thompson.35
Varela conceives of the organism as an active power of self-making and meaning-constituting or autopoiesis. For Varela, biology needs to incorporate the Husserlian notion of intentionality as sense-donation (Sinngebung), and the organism is to be regarded as a creative, subject-like perspective
by accepting that organisms are subjects having purposes according to values encountered in the making of their living. This means clearly to reintroduce