The Birth of Sense. Don Beith

passive synthesis, Husserl shows how motivational structures of affectivity are rooted in a deeper layer of affective “associations,” a layer prior to the division between subject and object, stimulus and response, whereby an “objectlike formation” is neither the call of an outside world nor the already sensitive noticing of sensation. Rather, there is a “prior” moment that will have shown itself in and through the subsequent acts of attending that it motivates. This layer of passive synthesis undercuts the previously clear division of subject and object, of activity and passivity. Affect is shown retroactively, as generative trace, but it is not strictly speaking something we perceive or sense in the “now” of consciousness. Here Husserl’s generative method is at its furthest, revealing a level of relatedness that precedes the terms “punctual presence” and “active consciousness.” While this points to an imperceptible past of nature and perhaps an immemorial past of culture,⁸ Husserl nevertheless holds to the terms of “association” and an “antechamber of consciousness.”

      As Immanuel Kant also suggested, prior to his reactionary Cartesian revision of the 1781 Critique of Pure Reason, there is a productive layer of imagination that undercuts the distinction between passivity and activity, sensation and understanding, body and world, a priori and a posteriori, self and other (Steinbock 2001, xl). As with Kant, however, Husserl’s profound insight is caught up in the miring dualisms of his philosophy, as Steinbock (2001) describes: “This leads Husserl to a paradoxical formulation of the process as an ‘active passivity’ in order to characterize a constitution and acquisition of sense that is, on the one hand, not nothing and is also somehow ‘subjective,’ but which, on the other hand, does not stem from ‘an activity proceeding from the ego’” (xxxix–xl). This sphere of passivity is originary but so only in relation to the “active” and “judicative” sphere (xliii). Passivity, while pointing in a radical direction, remains defined negatively for Husserl: “Husserl tends to regard passivity as basically equivalent to perceptual, prepredicative, pre-reflective, and prelinguistic experience” (xli). Despite Husserl’s audacity, he remains a thinker of consciousness. But unlike the 1787 Kant, Husserl does not thereby subordinate sensibility to the understanding, because he unearths a passive dimension of synthesis, an aesthesis that is the condition of possibility of logos.⁹ The distinction between the two terms emerges within the life of consciousness in this paradoxical unfolding of a passive-activity. Husserl dared, in pointing to what Laura McMahon (2014, 279–82) evocatively terms these “organic phantoms” haunting consciousness, to uncover the trace of something yet more radical than a rationalistic phenomenology of consciousness.

      A key difference in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy is that where Husserl’s later texts focus on the preconditions of consciousness in a new “transcendental aesthetic,” Merleau-Ponty’s genetic and generative concepts are aimed at rooting the seeming activities of both life and consciousness in a spontaneous history of natural evolution and its transformative self-developments. Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology extends this study of natural expression beyond the terms of a lifeworld, taking up the question of the origin of sense from nonsense and the temporality of an ontologically radical past, a past that has never been present. Thus Merleau-Ponty’s work goes beyond a genetic and generative geneaology of conscious, meaning-giving acts and seeks out an inverse logic of sense in a radical prehistory, a concept of passivity deeper than the levels of passive synthesis in sensibility and, indeed, more mysterious.¹⁰ A further study would be required to adequately trace the relation of these distinctive concepts of passivity in each thinker, but Merleau-Ponty explains his own original development of Husserl’s notions of embodiment, and generative temporality, from his early visit to the Leuven archive before the Second World War, in the pages and footnotes of the Phenomenology of Perception, “The Philosopher and His Shadow,” and in exhaustive detail in his later lecture course Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology.

      Though these concepts are not isomorphic in Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, particularly in Merleau-Ponty’s nuanced sense of “generative passivity,” I use the concepts of static, genetic, and generative phenomenology developed by Steinbock (1995) in his pioneering Home and Beyond to serve as three interpretative keys to work out three concepts of passivity in Merleau-Ponty’s thinking.¹¹ The French philosopher does not privilege the position of human consciousness and of constituting activity, and indeed undermines the whole idea of constitution by proposing the concept of institution whereby life continually accumulates sense through a movement between sense and nonsense, a movement that difficultly calls into question our ideas of “past,” “nature,” and “origin.” Merleau-Ponty develops a generative conception of the past as a soil of possibility beyond the terms of conscious acts, and even beyond those of the living body’s activities, and thus inaugurates the radically new philosophy of generative passivity or institution.

      CHAPTER ONE

      CONSCIOUSNESS AND ANIMALITY

      THE PROBLEM OF CONSTITUTING ACTIVITY IN THE STRUCTURE OF BEHAVIOR

      The deep dialectic seen by the phenomenological observer goes on behind the back of consciousness itself. Science includes in its content the road to science.

      —Georg Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit¹

      Language is indeed the possibility of the face-to-face and of being-upright, but it does not exclude inferiority, the humility of the glance at the father as the glance of the child made in memory of having been expulsed before knowing how to walk, and of having been delivered, prone and infans, into the hands of the adult masters. Man, one might say, is a God arrived too early, that is, a God who knows himself forever late in relation to the already-there of Being.

      —Jacques Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics”²

      Human awareness of nonhuman organic behavior harbors a philosophical dilemma. We bear witness to original creativity and responsivity in the living body, what Merleau-Ponty terms its dynamic “structure” of behavior (SB, 137/148). Yet we understand this structure from the vantage of our own conscious perception, modeling organic behavior on the subjective perceptual motifs of occupying an individual perspective and acting to affect the world. How can we be conscious of organic behavior as such, given that these distinctions render animality intelligible within the limits of our human consciousness?³ The Structure of Behavior addresses this question, with Merleau-Ponty arguing that we are aware of organisms as distinctive “structures” or “forms” of behavior. This thinking is criticized as an account that equates this epistemological criterion of structure with an ontological criterion—the reduction of all “structures” of behavior to the synthetic structure of human consciousness.⁴ There is a reading of Merleau-Ponty’s early work as a proposal against an account of both human consciousness and vital awareness as transcendental, world-constituting activities. Rather than being constituting-activities, consciousness and life are defined by environmental passivity. They are organic activities that develop only by moving in, responding to, and expressing a vital environment. Consciousness itself is such an activity that emerges from this living environmental relationship, and is thus grounded in a deeper, developmental, or genetic passivity. Consciousness is instituted in a process of education within and alongside, and not beyond, these “vital” structures of behavior.

      While Merleau-Ponty, according to this view, does not reduce organic forms to human consciousness, the question remains as to whether organic behavior itself is understood as a world-constituting, transcendental activity. There are some descriptions in The Structure of Behavior of the organism as enacting an active constitution of its environment, which points to a problematic vitalism and idea of transcendental synthesis in Merleau-Ponty’s early thinking. And yet, at other points, the organism’s original behavioral activities are understood as implicated in passivity, insofar as they are realized and shaped within a history of developing environmental sensitivities. According to this account, the putatively passive and active moments of environmental sensitivity and organic movement are in fact inseparable—the organic structure of behavior is reciprocally activity and passivity. In his first works, then, Merleau-Ponty already undermines a philosophy of consciousness and an autopoietic or