Chapter 2 articulates this difficult temporal logic in Merleau-Ponty’s later works, arguing that they uncover a new philosophical terrain beyond the alternatives of mechanism and vitalism, or evolutionary contingency and finalism, because meaning emerges from a natural “past” in which vital structures were not determinate, but nevertheless had a nascent, developing sense irreducible to determinate form. I borrow Bergson’s “retrograde movement of the true” to expose how possibility is not generated in determinately given moments of activity, which I think is the underlying premise of all naturalistic, finalistic, and deterministic accounts.7 Instead, meaning is an emergent movement, not from the past toward the future, but between dynamic events. This becoming-true of sense as a process points back at an originative difference, a past more radical than a former present and thus other to the horizon of temporal moments. This is a deep, fecund past of generative possibility that is manifest in the ongoing differentiation and transformation of sense. This originary past is thus not elapsed, but neither is it determinatively present. It rather marks out a radical difference and openness to becoming, a generative passivity, in and between existing dimensions of sense. The chapter concludes with a consideration of some criticisms from Michel Foucault, who charges Merleau-Ponty with at once nostalgically positing a nature in-itself, a pristine past, while also reducing this nature to an idealized construct of human consciousness. Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy offers resources to overcome this dualism by understanding the past as radically different from the present and even from itself. The solution to this problem provocatively points toward the deconstructive philosophy of Jacques Derrida, and to the symbolic character of sense we inherit in our second nature and rebirth as linguistic persons.
In chapter 3 our discussion shifts from the institution of nature to the development of second nature through habituation. Addressing the problem of how there can be an irreducible sense of personal life if this sense is not originally constituted by human beings, we will take up different tendencies in the Phenomenology of Perception. The first trajectory in this text suggests that human meaning emerges from habit formation and a sedimenting power of the living body. Yet there is another line of reasoning here that shows how the passivity of human development cannot merely depend on human growth and learning as constituting acts, but as the Phenomenology already indicates and the later lecture courses demonstrate, becoming human draws on a more primordial becoming of meaning that can be articulated by a generative sense of passivity. The body is not a hypostatized ground of possibilities of the person, but like the person is an emergent structure. The body depends, passively, on nature’s original generativity. Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology, then, already intimates an ontology of nature.
Chapter 4 takes up the way in which we receive ourselves from other beings before we ever enjoy a sense of agency or personal independence. This originary belonging to others, what Merleau-Ponty calls syncretic sociability in his “The Child’s Relations with Others,” is crucial to understanding the passive generation of personality and, moreover, it can offer a unique explanation of human sociality. This shared, intercorporeal sense of bodily life, a sense that precedes subjective awareness, structures social relations that enable or oppress individual and group senses of agency. Against traditional liberal, voluntaristic, and structuralist, social constructivist approaches, which take the self to be either self-constituting or constituted by others, the logic of generative passivity points to the way in which shared bodily gesture functions as a pivotal, often overlooked, means of interrogating and reshaping social institutions from within. Like life, consciousness and the social world are spheres not of constituting activity, but are institutions: dynamic nexuses where sense is shaped through shared dynamics of interbodily movement, expression, and communication. Life, consciousness, and society are structures of generative passivity.
BETWEEN HUSSERL AND MERLEAU-PONTY: THE INVERSION OF PHENOMENOLOGY
Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy is an institution from within and beyond Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology: a method equally historically indebted to and yet liberated from the terms of Husserl’s thinking. Merleau-Ponty develops his notion of institution from Husserl’s concept of Stiftung in such texts as The Origin of Geometry and Husserl’s development of a radical, generative sense of passivity in his Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis. Anthony Steinbock unearths three layers of phenomenological constitution in Husserl, each of which refines and complicates the idea of meaning-constituting (Sinngebung) that is so often simplistically attributed to phenomenological philosophy.
Husserl’s phenomenology deepens the practice of phenomenology from a simple description of structures of consciousness to an understanding of the preconscious motivations that tacitly orient consciousness, and then to a deeper affective level yet, pointing behind these motivational structures to traces of an imperceptible yet perception-orienting affective life. While pointing beyond the sphere of consciousness, and thus sourcing the very origins of our descriptive powers to an affective life, Husserl pushes past the traditional limits of phenomenology as a study of consciousness. However, these deeper affective layers are ultimately defined ex negativo, as a kind of unconsciousness or “antechamber of the ego” (Husserl 2001, 166). Steinbock makes this point by working through a triple—static, genetic, and generative—logic of sense genesis in Husserl, a tripartite logic I have borrowed and transformed here in order to study Merleau-Ponty. The first mode of phenomenology is static. Phenomenology describes the modes of givenness of essential structures of consciousness. Essential features of consciousness such as embodiment and worldhood are not at this level described in their becoming, but are taken to be “finished” (Steinbock 2001, xxx, xxxvi). These structures of consciousness are not substances or essences, but rather modes of relating or meaning-constituting activities. The first object of phenomenological method is thus the activity of consciousness. Static phenomenology, despite its power as transcendental psychology, thus remains abstract.
The second mode of phenomenology is genetic. A genetic description of consciousness might articulate how one activity gives rise to another, just as one judicative act entails another in a process of deduction. The novel value of this second method comes when we observe the first genesis of one mode of activity from its prior foundations, where “one traces the origins of activity in passivity” (Steinbock 2001, xxxi). Here we might think of motivating moments of association where a perception calls up the activity of a thought, or a nagging resemblance or echo summons our perceptive attention. These motivating moments are not themselves yet modes of conscious activity, but are the alluring stirrings that occasion and invite active modes of consciousness and the givenness they accomplish. Genetic description makes it possible to explain how there is a layer of sense-constitution more basic than an act of consciousness, an operative layer of motivations and background associations that orients our conscious life behind our backs, in our sleep, and in our memory and forgetfulness.
The final mode of Husserlian phenomenology is generative, and it digs deeper than a genetic attending to motivational and habitual structures that call up activities of consciousness. In point of fact, these motivational structures are themselves modes of activity within conscious life; it is just that they are not given (except in retrospect) as intended objects of our consciousness. Generative description is subtle, because it traces the origins of these motivations to preparatory dimensions that are not so readily circumscribed within the realm of subjectivity or first person consciousness. Steinbock deftly reveals how there are traces of constitutive features in our conscious life that we do not experience ourselves as originally constituting, structures that reveal the passivity of our active consciousness. Using examples of birth and death, and the experience of home as defined by a spatial and intersubjective beyond, Steinbock discloses how Husserl’s analysis of consciousness, by asking after the ultimate roots of motivational consciousness, point to superindividual, vertically constitutive sources of meaning. Where the previous methods hypostatize an immortalized consciousness, generative phenomenology reveals