each conscious being suffers the misfortune of having to reach conscious awareness through bodily experience. This transcendental account is operative at various points in The Structure of Behavior.18
The second option is a “radical revision” of the idea of consciousness from the perspective of the phenomenologist, and with thoughtful reading we can find that this, too, is operative in The Structure of Behavior.19 This view takes form, and its corresponding consciousness, not as the form of all reality, but as genetic passivity, itself an emergent reality. Consciousness is possible and symbolically transposable into a multiplicity of perspectives not because there is a preestablished identity of mind and world, or because of a teleological purpose or pure meaning in nature, but rather consciousness comes to be within matrices of difference. Consciousness and nature are not original identities, but terms defined by difference. Form is not an ideal unity, but emerges dynamically through new expressive interplay and difference between living, dynamic structures. In this reading, nature is not a “universe” of forms, though it may appear this way in retrospect, from the standpoint of an already established consciousness. Instead of existing statically, form, including consciousness itself, is emergent, becoming, and diacritical. Form is novel not only perceptually, when we discover a new form for the first time, but also ontologically, in the sense that we witness its very emergence as form. Consciousness itself emerges as a form of behavior when it is educated, and it is educated by the manifestation of other forms—it does not prepossess a symbolic capacity to apprehend form and the figure-ground relation. I interpret Merleau-Ponty’s argument that form has a meaning only within an ontology of the perceived world as a claim that the very meaning of form must be discovered, indeed learned, from the developing structure of perception (SB, 92/102). Consciousness is doubly decentered: not only must it discover forms by perceiving them, but it must also discover within perception what form is. In other words, consciousness cannot a priori reduce the meaning of other beings, like animals, to the terms of its own awareness, because its awareness of the figure-ground structure is a learned aptitude, acquired through familiarity with these structures themselves. This aptitude points back to a more original, dynamic difference. Indeed, consciousness is bodily, and it develops generatively out of preconscious, embryological phases, is born, and then must be progressively learned; and this learning owes its earliest familiarity with the world not to a reflection on symbolic meanings, but to a vital, affective, and interbodily life.20 This grounding in vital, organic life undergirds our symbolic consciousness and thus exceeds our capacity to ever ultimately thematize it. Already operative in The Structure of Behavior is a push toward this “radical revision” of consciousness that Waldenfels finds lacking there, precisely because consciousness is a structure of radically revising its terms of what form is. Consciousness is passive not only in the genetic sense, inasmuch as it owes its ontological origins to preconscious, nonsymbolic forms, but also in the generative sense because it is out of these forms that its symbolic capacity establishes and maintains its symbolic, figure-ground orientation. Consciousness is animated by these original bodily becomings, and this field of differences is a condition of possibility for consciousness, but a dynamic one that is manifest only in its particular expressions. This transcendental field is not universal and homogeneous, because conditions of possibility must, paradoxically, expressively, and uniquely institute new forms in order to be manifest as preconditions. Consciousness presupposes this expressive distance or passivity, a dynamism prior to consciousness that nevertheless affectively awakens us to fields of generative difference. These fields of difference, or institutions, are irreducible to conscious or ideal forms.
This amounts to a revision of the notion of a priori conditions in transcendental idealism. There is a genuine gesture of idealism in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, and it comes as a counterpoint to the empirical scientist. Against the scientist, writes Merleau-Ponty, consciousness cannot be the “analogue of a force” or a “thing,” but against the transcendental philosopher, consciousness cannot be the “cause” of experience (SB, 4–5/2–3). Critical philosophy must surrender the notion of a “pure and simple return to transcendental thought” precisely by affording a place to the discoveries of science (SB, 4/2). Structure is phenomenal, and therefore continually offers the philosopher an “opportunity to define [concepts] anew” (SB, 4/2). Here philosophy proceeds by “starting ‘from below,’” which is a reminder that consciousness does not begin as the analytic mastery of the scientist nor as the all-encompassing sense-ground of the transcendental idealist. We find a reference to communication and an imperative to understanding in our nascent consciousness of the developing form of organic bodies. Consciousness must be educated by these and other dynamic forms in order to develop its aptitude for symbolic form. It is easy to overlook the myriad relationships that effect this education. Kelly Oliver (2009) compellingly uncovers the way that the presence of animals in our lives is primordially educative, focusing not on the difference between human and animal essence, but on the actual relations, particularly the unacknowledged pedagogical relations, between humans and animals.21 Consciousness is not an original possession that can then delineate its difference from animals, because anything like this difference, or indeed the ability to posit differences as such, is effected out of a prior affective and nonthematic relationship. Human thematic awareness emerges from its behavioral, bodily orientation to other living bodies, and consciousness bears the trace of this animality in its educative life.
This interpretative strategy requires reading Merleau-Ponty’s claims about consciousness in his early text against each other, because they do not all cohere,22 and Merleau-Ponty does oscillate between a hypostatic and a more radical vision of structure, and necessarily thereby, of consciousness. This strategy of reading as critical engagement with the “unthought” in a work is something Merleau-Ponty himself advocates in his late commentary on Husserl, “The Philosopher and His Shadow.” Later in his career, Merleau-Ponty focuses on how consciousness is ballasted by the preconscious sense-engendering capacity of being itself, what he terms institution.23 In his later period, Merleau-Ponty develops more fully this notion of a consciousness that finds its footing within a more primordial “jointing and framing of being,” such that there is a passivity within consciousness that propels and orients it (S, 181/179). Going against some conclusions Merleau-Ponty himself explicitly reaches in this text, we should infer that consciousness reads, rather than inscribes, form in nature, because consciousness is a developed structure of animal behavior. And reading, like consciousness, is a bodily developed, shared, and expressively performed activity.
THE EPISTEMOLOGY OF FORM: LEARNING TO PERCEIVE (AS) ANIMALS
Now we are in a place to attend to the question of how consciousness, which can grasp vital forms as thematic objects, is itself a species of vital development, realized through sensitivity to and education by other animate bodies. We understand organic forms through ongoing contact and learning, not by possession of a taxonomic form of animality as such, although it is true that the specific character of our bodily engagement with reality limits the parameters of this engagement. Like the organism’s dependence on an environment and other organisms, so, too, our consciousness cannot be its own ground, and depends on bodily engagement with other living beings for our habits to become educatively grounded.
In The Structure of Behavior, Merleau-Ponty signals that form is in the first place a reality that appears, rather than one that is known. Form is not an object of consciousness, but marks the very transformation that is coming to consciousness, suggesting that symbolic consciousness is grounded in a vital institution of perception. Not yet existing at the level of thought, form is perceived by consciousness as an original, preconceptual expression of sense: “Therefore this phenomenon must still be conceptualized. The structure of behavior as it presents itself to perceptual experience is neither thing nor consciousness; and it is this which renders it opaque to the mind” (SB, 127/137–38). Merleau-Ponty is seeking what Waldenfels calls a third dimension that undergirds the distinctions of fact and essence, materialism and idealism. Form, despite its intellectualist connotations, points to a sense of the autofigurative character of the perceived in its emergence for, and not prepossession by, a knower: “This notion saves us from the alternative of a philosophy which juxtaposes externally associated terms and of another philosophy which discovers relations which are intrinsic to thought in all phenomena.