The organism is a finitude, an individual activity of making itself within a material world not ordered to its own survival. To be organic is to be a certain mode of care or valuation of self in an oppositional world.36 This is a bodily activity, which is most readily understood by the organism’s metabolic capacity to convert parts of the environment into itself.37 The organism constitutes itself by regulating its body as a stable principle of exchange with the environment:
As a consequence, we discover the elusive notion of a “constitution of an identity” as the governing of an autonomy principle. Metabolism keeps organisms materially in a steady flux: their substance in no moment is one and the same but at the same time they constantly keep their identity—and this unchanged identity is kept exactly by the means of an underlying exchange. (Varela and Weber 2002, 112–13)
The organism’s living activity, according to this view, is free creation limited by “substrate” dependence and bounded by death. Evan Thompson links this idea to enaction in cognitive science, whereby an organism unfolds the terms of meaning: “Sense-making = enaction. Sense-making is viable conduct. Such conduct is oriented toward and subject to the environment’s significance and valence. Significance and valence do not pre-exist ‘out there,’ but are enacted, brought forth, and constituted by living beings. Living entails sense-making, which equals enaction” (2007, 158). The organism is a power of acting to be understood according to these subjective, transcendental categories (Varela and Weber 2002, 113).
In the autopoietic view, this melodic time is something self-made that transcendentally constitutes its own field of sense. This supports a reading of The Structure of Behavior, which I do not share, but which finds support in the second chapter that distinguishing vital from physical and symbolic forms of existence, the organism is transcendentally self-constituting.38 In this view, the antinomy of past and future, passive and active causes entails that the organism effects its own sense and temporality. Echoing Varela and Thompson, this reading of Merleau-Ponty holds that vital structure of behavior names an ontologically irreducible temporal intentionality.39 A vital structure neither strictly continues a past nor constitutes time anew, but exhibits an irreducible horizon of temporality and sense that somehow relates to a natural past while transcending it: “It does not seem possible to understand life by a regressive analysis which goes back to its conditions. It will be a question of a prospective analysis which will look for the immanent signification of life” (SB, 160/173). This antinomy of the priority of active constitution and passive conditioning, futural or past causes of meaning, cannot be resolved because the mediation future and past is a transcendental condition of the field of life. Here Merleau-Ponty would be following Hans Jonas by paradoxically naturalizing what is transcendental. Yet vital meaning is transcendentally given and so cannot have natural antecedents:
The ideal structure of behavior allows us to link the present state of the organism with a prior state taken as given, to see in the former the progressive realization of an essence already legible in this latter (without ever being able to go beyond the limit or make the idea of a cause of existence). (SB, 160/173)
The so-called physical precedents are in fact meaningful from the standpoint of a particular form of vital awareness.
The organism, as vital structure, does not belong to a physical order that precedes it, and its life is an “equilibrium . . . obtained, not with respect to real and present conditions, but with respect to conditions which are only virtual and which the system itself brings into existence” (SB, 145/157). Organic activity is not a cause or “event” at a specific moment in time, but the transcendental givenness of a meaningful relation of time in the organic horizon of a life. This transcendental constituting activity of life furnishes sense for the references “future,” “now,” “before,” or “origin.” There are
animal essences—. . . walking toward a goal, taking, eating bait, jumping over or going around an obstacle—unities which reflexology did not succeed in engendering from elementary [physical] reactions, and which are therefore like an a priori of biological science. (SB, 157/170)
An organism’s grasping at food is not simply a series of muscular contractions or reflex stimuli, but an internally ordered and intrinsically meaningful task. Merleau-Ponty writes that there can be no “universe of naturalism that is self-enclosed,” because “perception is not an event of nature” (SB, 145/157). To explain the synthetic unity of activity and passivity within time, an origin for this order must be transcendentally posited outside of chronological time and empirical nature.
Yet the chronological and the transcendental temporal registers presuppose each other, such that the transcendental principle that is the orienting field of time must be born at a specific moment in time. While the insight that life projects its meaning into the past is valuable, this transcendental explanation of life precludes the birth and becoming of life in a natural past that is radically prior to the temporal horizon of the organism. There are powerful resources in The Structure of Behavior to conceptualize developmental structures of life, but there is not a full-fledged account of how the meaning of life becomes necessary, how its irreducible structure nevertheless begins as a moment of facticity.
There is no way to describe, within this transcendental view, how or why a vital structure emerges—it remains an advent and epiphany, a mysterious and irreducible expression of the living body. Passivity remains genetic here, because organic development is itself an activity that constitutes a temporal field. The question of the origin of the meaning of life, then, remains unanswerable within transcendental philosophy or vitalism because of this temporal circularity:
Since the physico-chemical actions of which the organism is the seat cannot be abstracted from those of the milieu, how can the act which creates an organic individual be circumscribed in this continuous whole and where should the zone of influence of the vital élan be limited? It will indeed be necessary to introduce an unintelligible break here. (SB, 158/171; my emphasis)
This transcendental field is said to constitute the temporal sequence of a specific organism entirely, and yet it needs a specific, determinate birth. It is this fact of birth, the origination of activity from passivity, that the transcendental account cannot explain. This ontological break, I think, points to an origin of sense in nonsense and a more radical, unintelligible past.
A second, more difficult reading of The Structure of Behavior is available to us, where we can posit that life both has an irreducible meaning and owes its origins to processes of emergence and development.40 Here, life is originally incomplete and must temporally develop, where this development is oriented by a generative passivity that is temporally and ontologically the outside of life. Notably, Merleau-Ponty remarks that we can objectify these moments of becoming only in retrospect, after new orders of meaning developmentally emerge in life:
In order to make a living organism reappear, starting from these reactions, one must trace lines of cleavage in them, choose points of view from which certain ensembles receive a common signification and appear, for example, as phenomena of “assimilation” or as components of a “function of reproduction”; one must choose points of view from which certain sequences of events, until then submerged in a continuous becoming, are distinguished for the observer as “phases”—growth, adulthood—of organic development. One must mentally detach certain partitive phenomena from their real context and subsume them under an idea which is not contained, but expressed, in them. (SB, 152/165)
Vital structures are not preexisting forms but emerge genetically through development. In regarding life, we are prompted to notice (Merleau-Ponty problematically says “choose,” but then qualifies this by saying that we must choose according to the vital structure’s own expression) stages where a new meaning comes on the scene and transfigures the sense of the body: flexion, for example, becomes grasping, and at some point grasping becomes expressive gesture, which in turn becomes language, then art, and then more. Life exhibits an immanent signification that is not natural mechanism any more than