dynamic form, founded in the natural world. On the one hand, consciousness is a structure that develops naturally, but on the other hand, it purportedly grounds nature as the (symbolic) synthesis of structure as such.14 This antinomy of founding-founded short-circuits every attempt to explain perception:
Every theory of perception tries to surmount a well-known contradiction: on the one hand, consciousness is a function of the body—thus it is an “internal” event dependent upon certain external events; on the other hand, these external events themselves are known only by consciousness. In another language, consciousness appears on one hand to be part of the world and on the other to be co-extensive with the world. (SB, 215/232)
As scientists, this is the inextricable epistemological predicament: our perspective on the world is biased because it must come from within the world.15 As phenomenologists, though, the world is not a positive, external being, and consciousness is not an estranged, monadic perspective. Perception and perceived, in The Structure of Behavior, are related dialectically, because conscious perception is itself an emerging and developmental “structure” of behavior. Consciousness, where form comes to appear as such, begins as just another emergent, genetically passive “structure” in a universe of dynamic, developing forms.
It is a developed human consciousness that is uniquely attuned to the “structure of structures,” by virtue of its own capacity to apprehend perceptual objects but also the ability to grasp its own act of perception symbolically. Invoking Hegel, Merleau-Ponty argues that nature is a “hidden mind,” and that “the object of biology cannot be grasped without the unities of signification which a consciousness finds and sees unfolding in it” (SB, 161/174). Human, symbolic behavior is capable of recognizing whole-part relations as such, and transposing these relations into different perceived structures, like oil drops, animal reflexes, and human consciousness.16 Human consciousness is not beholden to the meanings in its immediate environment, but is free by virtue of its ability to detach itself from this immediate concern and unite different significances in “a single common nucleus of signification” (Toadvine 2007b, 20; citing SB, 122/133), such as the way that a melody, its notational representation, and the movements of the hands on the instrument are all united as one theme. The appearance of nature in distinctively meaningful forms is accomplished by the ability of human consciousness to transpose and unite different perceived characteristics, such as shapes and sounds, or names and things, as explicitly unified forms, thematic figures of meaning. Whereas animals are instinctively captivated by their environment, fixed by an “a priori of the species,” the human can simultaneously occupy a “multiplicity of perspectives” (Toadvine 2007b, 4; citing SB, 122/133). The human “symbolic order,” explains Ted Toadvine, gains ideality and creativity, such that “human behavior no longer has a signification but is itself signification” (2009a, 36; citing SB, 122/133). Even though it depends on the vital significances of its environment (Umwelt), the human has always already passed these significances over in a movement of symbolic transcendence toward the world (Welt) of symbolic forms. Toadvine contends that the autonomous significances of the vital and physical orders are assimilated into a human order, and thus epistemologically distorted. Yet we can see that in the very admission of a “multiplicity of perspectives,” Merleau-Ponty has invoked alterity and incompleteness as definitive of consciousness, features to which consciousness owes its original significances, even if these significances are passed over in the synthetic apprehension of symbols or objects.
Human consciousness does not take the form of an all-encompassing survey, or “pensée de survol,” because consciousness is characterized by static passivity, inextricably embodied in a physical milieu, and given to itself in a vital environmental setting (Umwelt). Even when we render this embeddedness in physical and animal nature explicit in abstract thought or scientific symbolization, these dimensions have merely receded into the background. Consider, for example, the way I do not notice that the seemingly timeless truths of mathematics are operations that I move through as a body and that take time, or conversely as these abstract thoughts disappear when I stub my toe or encounter grief in sudden difficult news. Consciousness retains a prethetic and lived connection to its physical and vital participation in structures of nature, even though it is only thematically aware of these significances as symbolic forms.
We can better understand what is going on in The Structure of Behavior if we separate the voice of the scientist (empiricist) and the voice of the idealist philosopher (rationalist) from that of the phenomenologist. The scientific method of mechanistic, empirical analysis loses the meaning of form by seeking to analytically disassemble structure into analyzable units. Transcendental consciousness, which Merleau-Ponty is criticized for veering toward in his critique of this empiricist reductionism, possesses the ideal unity of structure, the thematic “structure of structures.” The rationalist or idealist can account for the unity of form, but not for the emergence of the awareness of this unity. What the transcendental explanation of consciousness cannot account for is precisely how consciousness participates in the world as a structure, emerging in and learning from the order that it purportedly epistemologically grounds. There is another account of consciousness in Structure that entails that consciousness is a structure of genetic passivity, that it comes to be alongside and within physical and vital structures without prepossessing them; this form of awareness is attuned to the synthetic third term, which links perceiver and perceived, without claiming to usurp it. This third term is neither a constituted form nor a constituting activity, but rather the very relation of structuring out of which these terms emerge. Merleau-Ponty’s term “structure,” despite its realist connotations, in fact names a dynamic process of development in which constituted form and constituting activity are not yet decipherable as determinate, distinct moments. So consciousness, far from meeting itself in the world and finding there a plenitude of ideal forms correlate to its own constituting structure, encounters its own genetic passivity in the face of a world bearing an “autochthonous sense,” toward which it is always in a standpoint that requires education (PP, 466/504). Going against a fundamental claim of Heidegger, we can perhaps assert that it is fundamentally the human, as world-conscious, who finds herself in the original position of being poor in world, insofar as she must suffer through embryological and early affective development, borrowing and learning from encounters with other beings in order to ever possess anything like a thematic knowledge of the world.17
Bernhard Waldenfels argues that Merleau-Ponty escapes the circularity of a philosophy of consciousness because the consciousness of form is a “decenterized” consciousness. Consciousness is not decentered by way of being amalgamated into an external, naturalistic order, but rather by being resituated on “another scene” whereby “the known is outweighed by the experienced, the intellectual by the structure” (Waldenfels 1981, 30). The circularity is avoided because consciousness is genetically passive in its imbrication in and emergence from a world of dynamic form that exceeds its possession and cannot be known in advance. Outstripped by the emergence of this phenomenal being into which it must find educative development, consciousness is ontologically weakened. While this is “certainly not a radical revision” of consciousness, for Waldenfels it nevertheless represents a “weakening of the principle of consciousness” (26).
There are two ways to interpret Waldenfels’s claim, which pertain to whether form is regarded as actual but unknown to consciousness, or whether form is more radically a potentiality that cannot be circumscribed by consciousness. On the first view, that of the transcendental idealist, consciousness is decentered because there is a universe of form in which it has no privileged starting point. Notice here that consciousness retains the conceit of an epistemological prepossession: the light of consciousness is not bright enough to shine everywhere—though it could be. Consciousness is originally decentered, but its tendency as symbolic form is to be centering. Earlier structures anticipate later ones, so it can be said that the animal signal is just an impoverished version of the symbol, that amovable vital structures are not yet conscious. All forms are privative modes of conscious form. So Waldenfels can assert that the idea of consciousness is still the synthetic linchpin of the world, but each consciousness must nevertheless find itself genetically in process as an experience of the world: here transcendental consciousness and empirical consciousness remain separate and distinct. According to this