The Birth of Sense. Don Beith

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СКАЧАТЬ search for “a mode of access to phenomenology via the empirical field of the behavioral sciences” rather than “an appeal to an intellectualism of pure form and consciousness” (1981, 23).

      In his reading of The Structure of Behavior, Bernhard Waldenfels (1981, 22) held that Merleau-Ponty merely weakens the concept of consciousness without abandoning it. We can see, though, that instead the vital body is the ground that allows for a living contact between animals and ultimately serves as a basis for consciousness as a structure of behavior. It is only later that the animal can be known as a specific figure or form, as a symbolic representation of this prethematic bodily ground. Just as the “physical” environment is a ground for the vital activities of the animal body, the animal body is a lived, affective ground of the structure of consciousness. Conciousness is an institution that takes up and transforms this affective institution without supervening upon or superseding it. We tend to hypostatize the structure of lived embodiment as an object of reflection, but this tendency is a “motivated error,” because “reflexive thought . . . encounters only significations in front of it. The experience of passivity is not explained by an actual passivity. But it should have a meaning and be able to be understood” (SB, 216/233). The lived body does not belong to the order of symbolic structure; it is a vital, living institution of structure.

      Merleau-Ponty explains the task of his philosophy in Structure as making this passivity of the understanding explicit, rendering the “bodily conditioning of perception, taken in its actual meaning” (216/218), open to phenomenological study. This means looking into the bodily origins of consciousness and symbolization, uncovering the motivational and affective structures that enable an objective standpoint without themselves being objects for objectivating operations:

      The body in general is an ensemble of paths already traced, of powers already constituted; the body is the acquired dialectical soil upon which a higher “formation” is accomplished, and the soul is the meaning which is then established. The relations of the soul and the body can indeed be compared to those of concept and word, but on the condition of perceiving, beneath the separated products, the constituting operation which joins them and rediscovering, beneath the empirical languages—the external accompaniment or contingent clothing of thought—the living word which is its unique actualization, in which the meaning is formulated for the first time and thus establishes itself as meaning and becomes available for later operations. (SB, 210/227)

      It is a bodily contact with and orientation to an other—prior to distinguishing it as other—that affectively enables this meaningful relatedness. Just as any “structure” always has a futural reference, so, too, consciousness as structure, and via its bodily ground, is open to new modes of contact. Thus, prior even to the static passivity of the organism-environment, unity is embodiment as an open, dynamic, and potent site of exposure, that is, of the organism as genetically passive, as aptitude for interbodily engagement through which its structures of behavior will educatively emerge. The structure, before it is a fixed form, is that name we give to an original site of emergent meaning—the Gestalt of a structure beckons our awareness; it presents a figure of sense, but as a nascent, unformed sense:

      What is profound in the notion of “Gestalt” from which we started is not the idea of signification but that of structure, the joining of an idea and an existence which are indiscernible, the contingent arrangement by which materials begin to have meaning in our presence, intelligibility in the nascent state. (SB, 206–7/223)

      Meaning is inherently expressive, which means that consciousness is not a synchronic grasping of a meaning before it, but rather a process of meaning coming to be through an engaged movement of differentiation.³⁰

      In his later lecture course Passivity, in the introductory section, “The Problem of Passivity,” Merleau-Ponty comments on The Structure of Behavior, and remarks that the issue of consciousness is not of how it can possess an objective relation to a foreign world, but rather of how such consciousness can ever attain to objectivity given its incarnation in the world of expressively phenomenal structures:

      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, СКАЧАТЬ