Barbaras argues that The Structure of Behavior remains installed on the level of a criticism of the objective sciences and thus does not adequately see “the impossibility of conceiving its constituting work in terms of an intellectual possession” (2004, 5). Barbaras (2004, 5) sees Merleau-Ponty as troubled by a Kantian schema.24 We can, however, read this text as elucidating consciousness not as an inviolable transcendental perspective, but as a field of phenomenal, diacritically becoming meanings.25 Form or structure is not an invariant law or reality unto itself, but rather a “dialectical moment” of coming into being (SB, 142/153). Consciousness does not impose form upon what it encounters, and it does not itself remain unchanged in this exchange. Perception is at once receptive and creative, in this view, because habitual sensitivity is a mode of expressive creativity.26
Following this more radical take on consciousness, Gary Madison argues that Merleau-Ponty refuses to take the “short cut” of transcendental philosophy because the world “is not a spectacle produced” by “consciousness in perfect possession of itself.” It is precisely the question of “what exactly is a concept before it has become conscious of itself,” which Madison (1981, 16–17) sees as vexing transcendental philosophy and calling for the more radical grounding of structure as dynamic emergence of meaning. The point here is that consciousness has unconscious or nonconceptual origins, that the past of consciousness is not only the chronological past of the living present, but a more radical past of genetic passivity. This “past” that is nature is not the past of consciousness, not a past of meaningful figures or symbols, but rather a vital past that cannot be present as the object of consciousness. There is a trace of this past in our interbodily, vitally oriented life. Qua vital behavior, each organic body, whether human or not, is a unique locus of behavior. Merleau-Ponty situates human and animal alike in a sphere of expressive, unique forms. Rather than lacking the worldly being of humans, animals express another kind of relation to existence, which must be taken up positively, in its own right: “In a philosophy which would genuinely renounce the notion of substance, there would be only one universe which would be the universe of form: between the different sorts of forms invested with equal rights” (SB, 133/144). Yet the bodies of nonhuman organisms do not simply appear in human terms. The animal, both specific animals and our own animality as such, is not the object of consciousness, but a kind of vital, bodily comportment whose significance orients but cannot be translated into an abstract, symbolic form. There is thus a new sense of the transcendental in The Structure of Behavior, not in a universal constituting consciousness, but in the specifically novel, irreducible bodily expressed meanings that arise in each vital structure.27 This expressive vitality of form also reflects a Derridean concern and tells against the blanket dichotomy of humanity as opposed to an animality as such, eliding the unique haecceity of animate form.
The challenge with this new conception of the transcendental is that the parameters of organic meaning-making are inassimilable to human consciousness, despite being open to encounter with it:
Behaviorism, solipsism, and “projective” theories all accept that behavior is given to me like something spread out in front of me. But to reject consciousness in animals in the sense of pure consciousness, the cogitation, is not to make them automatons without interiority. The animal, to an extent which varies according to the integration of its behavior, is certainly another existence; this existence is perceived by everybody. (SB, 126–27/137)
Kelly Oliver asserts that while Merleau-Ponty offers resources to abrogate a privileged conscious ground for humans, he does not extend abstract consciousness to animals, but resituates human and animals alike on a terrain of behavior. In place of an ontological difference between humans and animals, there are idiosyncratic differences that must be understood from within the communicative, expressive relations between specific “structures” of life.28
Ted Toadvine sees in this strand of Merleau-Ponty’s early work an attempt to conceive human and animal alike as “a melodic unity [that] aims to respect the originality and irreducibility of the animal level of structure” (2007b, 1). The challenge lies not in explaining how human consciousness has a nonhuman past, but rather how anything like human consciousness emerges and attains to science from within animality.29 Here Waldenfels sees “decisive significance” in Merleau-Ponty’s 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