READING MERLEAU-PONTY
I draw on Merleau-Ponty’s texts from across his life, but I do so with the goal of presenting the philosophical problems opened up by them rather than the exact theses asserted in them. The prime task in reading philosophically does not involve “reducing given phenomenological motifs to what they were in their original contingency and their empirical humility,” because originary philosophical insights, in their earliest formations, are necessarily ambiguous, since they must use existing concepts to say what has not yet been said (S, 160/161). Thus, reading is an act of going from what a writer literally says to what she is attaining to think.
There is an interpretative fallacy, explains Merleau-Ponty, when “we want the meaning of a man’s works to be wholly positive,” and we reduce it to a philosophical inventory of argumentative claims. But a philosophical text, like a living body, is not simply a codex, a mere thing, but a certain kind of activity, an attempt at an original expression. Invoking Martin Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty levels a Socratic injunction at his reader to move past the positive letter and follow the original difficulties in texts, to follow the search a thinker undertakes in them and to work to further her insight:
“When we are considering a man’s thought,” Heidegger says in effect, “the greater the work accomplished . . . the richer the unthought-of element in that work.” . . . To think is not to possess the objects of thought; it is to use them to mark out a realm to think about which we therefore are not yet thinking about. Just as the perceived world endures only through the reflections, shadows, levels, and horizons between things (which are not things and are not nothing . . .), so the works and thought of a philosopher are also made of certain articulations between things said. There is no dilemma of objective interpretation or arbitrariness with respect to these articulations, since they are not objects of thought, since (like shadow and reflection) they would be destroyed by being subjected to analytic observation or taken out of context, and since we can be faithful to and find them only by thinking again. (S, 159–60/159)
The text is not a thing, but a horizon for thought, an opening to a beyond that is not ever immediately given but that presents or reorients what is given. The text is a finite entity that opens onto an infinite work; it is an inexhaustible horizon. Thus, to read a text is neither to “inevitably distort” it nor to “literally reproduce” it, because the mode of givenness of a text—like that of the passivity of all meaning in life, the central thesis in my work here—is in part posthumous, in the thinking it generates and the new domains of inquiry it marks out. Reading, like what Merleau-Ponty terms institution, also involves both a receptive and a creative endeavor, such that being honest to a thinker means holding open the possibility of thinking in her writing, rather than distilling her work into a positive actuality. Thus, to read is to resume while also transforming a thought, to institute this thought anew by following its inner logic of development and the possibilities it reveals for the first time.
This reading of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical works is distinctive from most scholarly interpretations of his corpus. A widely held view is that Merleau-Ponty’s early period, during which he wrote the Structure of Behavior and the Phenomenology of Perception, is essentially characterized by analyses of the structure of human consciousness as a world-constituting activity. This early period is often juxtaposed with Merleau-Ponty’s later works, such as the lecture courses on nature and institution and passivity, and the unfinished The Visible and the Invisible, works that are said to mark an ontological turn away from the primacy of consciousness and toward a philosophy of nature and metaphysical questions about Being. I do not share this view. I argue that though Merleau-Ponty’s works are rarely univocal, there is a line of thinking through Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy that is an attempt to abrogate the notion of a world-constituting synthetic activity and to disclose the emergence of novel forms of meaning from nature. This thinking against activity does not mean that we are passively constituted natural beings, that nature is a positive, deterministic reality in-itself, but that nature is understood as generativity, as an origin of activity that is not itself yet activity. Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical development is limited not to a rejection of constituting consciousness, but to a critique of the notion of constituting activity as such. I read Merleau-Ponty’s works as resources to think not only against the tenets of idealism, but also against vitalism, or the attempt to defer the constituting activity of consciousness to the living activities of the organic body. Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy is most coherently understood as an attempt to validate the experiential primacy and irreducibility of conscious and bodily lived-experience, while also genealogically disclosing the original non-self-sufficiency of these structures and their passive emergence from nature.
THREE CONCEPTS OF PASSIVITY
The strategy of reading Merleau-Ponty’s texts is a token of the very thesis I am asserting in this work: that meaning is never literally given or passively fixed, but is in a process of becoming that involves receptivity and transformation, a mixture of activity and passivity. The notion of meaning as fixed, and produced by the constituting activity of consciousness or life, is rejected by Merleau-Ponty, as is the notion of a static or constituted meaning inherent to nature. Both notions are premised on the concept of meaning as merely passive given, whether a product of life or a static given of nature. Such a reductive sense of passivity is prevalent in certain theories of meaning, such as empiricism, which posits a simple sensory given; positivist biological accounts, which posit the organism as determined by causal reflexes and environmental factors; and social constructivism, which is premised on the idea that meaning in human life is fixed by socially constituted norms that precede individual human lives or acts. This “bad ambiguity,” as Merleau-Ponty terms it, is a mere external relationship between activity and passivity, constituting and constituted, such as in naturalism, where human sense is passively determined by nature; or, conversely, idealism, where nature is a passive being constituted by consciousness.
Beyond this concept of a passivity tout court, which Merleau-Ponty rejects outright, we can identify three crucial concepts of passivity in Merleau-Ponty’s thinking. In keeping with the phenomenological reduction, Merleau-Ponty rejects the notion of a positive given before which consciousness or life is passive simpliciter. In his criticism of a reductively physiological account of the reflex in The Structure of Behavior, Merleau-Ponty argues that even the most putatively direct stimuli are only ever explicable in terms of responsiveness in the organism. Against the idea that the organism is a mechanical system of reflexes impacted by the impressions of an external world, Merleau-Ponty discloses that the stimulus and the response are mediated coefficients of a coordinated sensorimotor loop. This avoids the metaphysical dualism of an organic perspective and an external reality in-itself, as well as the question of how a mere mechanism could be sensitively alive to its environment. This critique of passivity tout court can be extended to social constructivism, or structuralism, which takes the person to be a passively inscribed social subject, because, as Merleau-Ponty argues, the very issue of our subjectivity is how we take up our inherited cultural traditions.
The first operative concept of passivity in this philosophy is therefore the notion of environmental or static passivity, whereby the living activity of the organism or the person and the givenness of its environment are moments in a holistic interrelationship. The relationship between environment and organism is transcendental, preceding and mediating its two terms. Here we can think of the way that an organism’s environment is always an expressive production of its living acts, but also how its acting body is always sensitive and responsive to this environment. This organism-environment relation, what Merleau-Ponty calls a “structure” or “form” of behavior, exhibits the logical structure of intentionality, insofar as consciousness is not a pure activity but a relationality. This concept