THE NOTION OF EMERGENCE presented in the previous chapter can be linked to ideas developed by Merleau-Ponty in his first and underestimated book, The Structure of Behavior, published in 1942. What I am calling dynamic co-emergence is the sort of emergence that best describes what Merleau-Ponty means by form, namely, a whole that cannot be dislocated from its components but cannot be reduced to them either. Merleau-Ponty uses the notion of form to characterize what he calls the three orders of matter, life, and mind. He states that matter, life, and mind “participate unequally in the nature of form,” that they “represent different degrees of integration and . . . constitute a hierarchy in which individuality is progressively achieved” (1963, p. 133). Reviewing these ideas and connecting them to more recent theoretical and empirical developments will help lay the groundwork for the enactive strategy of addressing the explanatory gap by going back to the roots of mind in life and then working forward to subjectivity and consciousness.
Merleau-Ponty’s goal in The Structure of Behavior is “to understand the relations of consciousness and nature: organic, psychological or even social. By nature we understand here a multiplicity of events external to each other and bound together by relations of causality” (1963, p. 3). Merleau-Ponty’s concern is for what we today would call the explanatory gap between consciousness and nature. His strategy is to introduce a third term, something that does not fit the (Cartesian) consciousness/nature dichotomy in modern philosophy and science, something that will force us to revise how we think about matter, life, and mind. This third term is behavior: “taken in itself, it is neutral with respect to the classical distinctions between the ‘mental’ and the ‘physiological’ and thus can give us the opportunity of defining them anew” (1963, p. 4). A thorough investigation of behavior will reveal that we need to conceive of natural processes (material, living, and mental) as unities or structured wholes rather than simply as multiplicities of events external to each other, bound together by efficient causal relations. The word “behavior,” of course, is not Merleau-Ponty’s; he uses the French comportement, which better conveys his thought in the present context. The behaviorist connotations of “behavior” are strong in Anglophone philosophy and psychology, and Merleau-Ponty is no behaviorist. On the contrary, The Structure of Behavior (La Structure du Comportement) includes an extensive critique and rejection of behaviorism. He states the reason for this critique at the outset: “By going through behaviorism . . . one gains at least in being able to introduce consciousness, not as psychological reality or as cause, but as structure” (1963, p. 5).
“Structure” in Merleau-Ponty’s usage is synonymous with “form” (a concept he takes from Gestalt psychology, though he thinks Gestalt psychology does not understand it properly). He states, “there is form whenever the properties of a system are modified by every change brought about in a single one of its parts and, on the contrary, are conserved when they all change while maintaining the same relationship among themselves” (1963, p. 47). According to this conception, “[f]orm . . . possesses original properties with regard to those of the parts that can be detached from it. Each moment in it is determined by the grouping of the other moments, and their respective value depends on a state of total equilibrium the formula of which is an intrinsic character of ‘form’” (1963, p. 91). Thus organizational closure, in which processes recursively depend on each other for their own generation and realization, and constitute a system as a unity, is a type of form in Merleau-Ponty’s sense.
By analyzing certain psychological and physiological theories of his time, Merleau-Ponty argues that behavior cannot be decomposed into parts understood as separate elements, whether these be stimulus and conditioned response according to behaviorism or isolable nerve circuits according to neurophysiology. He calls such decompositional explanation “realistic analysis” or “mechanical thinking”; it treats wholes as exhaustively analyzable into parts externally related to one another. Neither life processes (the province of biology) nor mental processes (the province of psychology) can be understood through realistic analysis because (i) these processes are nondecomposable structures of behavior or forms of comportment; (ii) form or structure is constituted by the reciprocal determination of whole and part; and (iii) such reciprocal determination is recognizable only to “dialectical thinking,” but not mechanical thinking.
The claim that behavior has to be understood dialectically brings us to Merleau-Ponty’s conception of dialectical relations.1 As is clear from the way Merleau-Ponty opposes mechanical and dialectical relations, part of what it is to be mechanical is to be linear, and part of what it is to be dialectical is to be nonlinear. Early in the book he writes: “the relations between the organism and its milieu are not relations of linear causality but of circular causality” (1963, p. 15). Later he gives the following definition of mechanical relations:
A mechanical action, whether the word is taken in a restricted or looser sense, is one in which the cause and the effect are decomposable into real elements which have a one-to-one correspondence. In elementary actions, the dependence is uni-directional; the cause is the necessary and sufficient condition of the effect considered in its existence and its nature; and, even when one speaks of reciprocal action between two terms, it can be reduced to a series of uni-directional determinations. (1963, pp. 160–161)
Hence a mechanical relation between A and B is one in which (supposing A to be the cause of B): (i) A determines B (A is the necessary and sufficient condition of B); (ii) B does not determine A (uni-directional dependence); and (iii) every element of A that is causally efficacious on B stands in a one-one mapping with some resulting element of B (one-to-one correspondence). Conditions (ii) and (iii) make the relation a linear one. By contrast, a dialectical relation is one in which: (i) A determines B, and B determines A (bi-directional dependence or reciprocal determination); and (ii) neither A nor B is analyzable into discrete, causally efficacious elements that stand in a one-to-one correspondence (nondecomposability). Furthermore, dialectical relations are dynamic, not static. Hence (iii) A alters B, and B alters A; (iv) A is altered by B as determinant of B, and B is altered by A as determinant of A; and (v) it makes sense derivatively to speak of A making what A is via B, and B making what B is via A (Priest 1998, p. 163). Given these kinds of close interdependencies, A and B can also be regarded as parts of a larger global whole or pattern when they are dialectically related. Hence (vi) what A is a part of is what B is a part of (Priest 1998, p. 43).
It is on the basis of this conception of dialectical relations that Merleau-Ponty can assert: “The genesis of the whole by composition of the parts is fictitious. It arbitrarily breaks the chain of reciprocal determinations” (1963, p. 50). That such reciprocal determination implies what complex systems theory today tries to describe in terms of nonlinearity, self-organization, circular causality, and structural coupling is evident in what Merleau-Ponty goes on to write immediately after his explanation of mechanical relations quoted above:
On the contrary, as we have seen, physical stimuli act upon the organism only by eliciting a global response which will vary qualitatively when the stimuli vary quantitatively; with respect to the organism they play the role of occasions rather than of cause; the reaction depends on their vital significance rather than on the material properties of the stimuli. (1963, p. 161)
To say that the organism’s global response varies qualitatively when the stimuli vary quantitatively is to say that stimuli act upon the organism as control parameters, which upon reaching a certain critical threshold induce a global qualitative discontinuity in the organism (a bifurcation in phase space). To say that stimuli play the role of occasions rather than cause is to say that they act as triggering conditions but not as efficient causes. To say that the organism’s reaction depends on the vital significance of the stimulus is to say that the informational stimulus is not equivalent to the physical stimulus. The latter is definable independently of the organism; the former is not. The informational stimulus is the stimulus as informed by (the form or structure of) the organism. It cannot be described as “input” definable independently of the organism because it is already relational, definable only in relation to the organism, or specifiable only against the background of the organism’s structural coupling with its environment. Thus Merleau-Ponty continues:
Hence, between the variables upon which conduct actually depends and this conduct itself there appears a relation of meaning, an intrinsic relation [emphasis added]. One cannot assign a moment in which the world acts on the organism, since the very effect of this “action” expresses the internal law of the organism. The mutual exteriority of the organism and the milieu is surmounted along with the mutual exteriority of the stimuli. Thus, two correlatives must be substituted for these two terms defined in isolation: the “milieu” and the “aptitude,” which are like two poles of behavior and participate in the same structure. (1963, p. 161)
These remarks can be related to my earlier discussion (in Chapter 3) of meaning and information, understood from the perspective of autonomous systems. Something acquires meaning for an organism to the extent that it relates (either positively or negatively) to the norm of the maintenance of the organism’s integrity (De Preester 2003, p. 202). Such maintenance is a function of what Merleau-Ponty calls the “internal law of the organism,” which, in our terms, means the organism’s autonomy. Biological autonomy thus necessarily includes the bringing about of norms. To appreciate this point we can refer back to Figure 3.3 (see Chapter 3). This figure attempts to depict how organizational-operational closure generates a circular and dialectical relation between an autonomous system and its correlative domain of interactions or milieu. On the one hand, operational closure is the mechanism (principle of pattern formation) for an emergent identity or “self.” On the other hand, the realization of a “self” through closure is simultaneously also the specification of a correlative environment, a domain of interactions or milieu. This milieu constituted through closure is intrinsically meaningful for the “self” that is also so constituted. Meaning is intrinsic to the coupling of organism and milieu, and thus surmounts their mutual exteriority.
When Merleau-Ponty writes that the two poles of behavior (organism and milieu) participate in the same structure, he means, first, that behavior or comportment is a structured whole, a dynamic pattern, and, second, that milieu and organism participate in this structure not as stimulus and reaction but as situation and response. Behavior is a kind of dialogue in which the organism has an “aptitude” to respond to situations as in effect questions that need answering. Behavior is, as it were, dialogical and expresses meaning-constitution rather than information processing. It follows that behavior does not exist in the nervous system or in the body (1963, p. 161) any more than a conversation exists in the individual speakers (or their brains) or a jazz improvisation exists in the individual instruments or soloists.
These points can be linked to theoretical and empirical developments that have taken place since Merleau-Ponty’s time. Merleau-Ponty’s first point, stated in contemporary language, is that behavior is morphodynamic. Morphodynamics is a branch of dynamic systems theory concerned with the emergence of form or structure (Petitot 1992, 1995, 1999). The basic idea is that “structures are essentially dependent on critical phenomena, i.e., on phenomena of symmetry breaking which induce qualitative discontinuities (heterogeneities) in the substrates . . . Discrete structures emerge via qualitative discontinuities . . . a system of qualitative discontinuities in a substrate is called a morphology and dynamic theories of morphologies belong to what is called morphodynamics. There is therefore a close link between the concept of ‘structure’ and morphodynamics” (Petitot 1995, p. 231; emphasis in original).
A contemporary formulation of Merleau-Ponty’s second point is that behavior is a collective phenomenon comprising brain, body, and environment, not something that resides inside the nervous system. It therefore needs to be characterized by collective variables and order parameters that cut across the brain, body, and environment. This idea is an important theme of research in embodied dynamicist cognitive science (Chiel and Beer 1997; Thelen and Smith 1994; Thelen et al. 2001). Kelso’s work can serve as a useful example. In certain experimental paradigms involving intentional motor behavior and cortical activity (Bressler and Kelso 2001; Kelso et al. 1998), he has shown that the same collective variable of relative phase expresses “an abstract order parameter isomorphism between brain and behavioral events that cuts across the fact that different things are being coordinated” (Kelso 1995, p. 276). In other words, at a morphodynamic level, the same form or structure is taken to characterize certain sensorimotor behaviors and brain activities. Merleau-Ponty’s thesis that “behavior is a form” (1963, p. 127) can thus be mathematically elaborated and empirically substantiated by morphodynamical science. Merleau-Ponty’s thought toward the end of his life also moved in this morphodynamical direction, when he spoke in his 1959–1960 lectures of a “phenomenal topology” of nature (2003, p. 264).
In the penultimate chapter of The Structure of Behavior, Merleau-Ponty sketches a rudimentary phenomenal topology of matter, life, and mind, or as he calls them, the three orders of the physical, the vital, and the human. He begins by considering the notion of form or structure in physics. A physical form, like a soap bubble or a convection roll, is a structural stability established in relation to given external conditions (1963, p. 145) and thus stands out as a qualitative discontinuity in the material substrate. Already at this level, analytical reductionism is to be rejected:
[E]ach local change in a [physical] form will be translated by a redistribution of forces which assures us of the constancy of their relation; it is this internal circulation which is the system as a physical reality. And it is no more composed of parts which can be distinguished in it than a melody (always transposable) is made of the particular notes which are its momentary expression. Possessing internal unity inscribed in a segment of space and resisting deformation from external influences by its circular causality, the physical form is an individual. It can happen that, submitted to external forces which increase and decrease in a continuous manner, the system, beyond a certain threshold, redistributes its own forces in a qualitatively different order which is nevertheless only another expression of its immanent law. Thus, with form, a principle of discontinuity is introduced and the conditions for a development by leaps or crises, for an event or for a history, are given. (1963, p. 137)
This description of physical form as introducing a principle of discontinuity and the conditions for development by “crises” has been borne out by theoretical developments after Merleau-Ponty. Particular developments are René Thom’s “catastrophe theory,” which mathematically describes abrupt transitions and qualitative discontinuities in physical systems (Thom 1975), and Jean Petitot’s (1992) extension of Thom’s work to a morphodynamical “physics of phenomenality,” which aims to bridge the gap between the microphysical substrate and the macrophysical, phenomenal modes of manifestation of matter (see Petitot and Smith 1996).
Whereas the physical order is characterized by the emergence of physical forms as qualitative discontinuities in a material substrate, the vital order is characterized by the emergence of living structures in the physical order. Like physical structures, living structures, too, obtain stability in relation to external influences, but they do so in a different way:
The physical form is an equilibrium obtained with respect to certain given external conditions . . . Doubtless certain physical systems modify the very conditions upon which they depend by their internal evolution . . . But action which is exercised outside the system always has the effect of reducing a state of tension, of advancing the system toward rest. We speak of vital structures, on the contrary, when equilibrium is obtained, not with respect to real and present conditions, but with respect to conditions which are only virtual and which the system itself brings into existence; when the structure, instead of procuring a release from the forces with which it is penetrated through the pressure of external ones, executes a work beyond its proper limits and constitutes a proper milieu for itself. (1963, pp. 145–146)
This transition from physical structures to living structures is the transition from matter to life, from physics and chemistry to biology. The simplest living structures are metabolic structures. If we combine Merleau-Ponty’s account with the theory of biological autonomy (Ruiz-Mirazo and Moreno 2004; Varela 1979, 1997a), then we can say that a living cell differs from a dissipative physical structure in three main respects. First, a living cell dynamically produces and maintains itself through the continual chemical synthesis and breakdown (anabolism and catabolism) of material compounds, including those that make up its own membrane boundary. In so doing, it also endogenously controls and regulates its own external boundary conditions, whereas a dissipative physical structure (such as a candle flame) does not. Living structures are self-producing and self-regulating unities, and so they have a qualitatively different type of morphodynamics from dissipative physical structures. In a living cell, the endogenously produced organization of the system also actively controls the flow of matter and energy that keeps the system away from thermodynamic equilibrium.
Second, the material and energetic demands of this entire process orient the cell of necessity toward the environment, not simply in the sense of real and present conditions, but also in the sense of conditions that need to be actualized (effected or procured)—in other words, virtual conditions. Organisms shape the physicochemical environment into a milieu (an Umwelt). A milieu, from the standpoint of what is present and real at the physicochemical level, is virtual, something needing to be actualized, and actualized moreover at another level, the level of vital norms and meaning.
This last point brings us to the third respect in which living structures differ from mere physical structures: whereas physical structures can be expressed by a law, living structures have to be comprehended in relation to norms: “Thus each organism, in the presence of a given milieu, has its optimal conditions of activity and its proper manner of realizing equilibrium” (1963, p. 148). A living cell or organism “modifies its milieu according to the internal norms of its activity” (1963, p. 154).
Bacterial (prokaryotic) cells, the simplest autopoietic systems on Earth, can be used to illustrate this conception of living structures. Escherichia coli (E. coli) is a kind of bacteria that has motile, rod-shaped cells. When swimming in the presence of a sucrose gradient, these cells will tumble about until they hit upon an orientation that increases their exposure to sucrose. At this point they will swim forward, up-gradient, propelled by their flagella, toward the zone of greatest sucrose concentration. While sucrose is a real and present condition of the physicochemical environment, the status of sucrose as a nutrient is not. Being a nutrient is not intrinsic to the physicochemical structure of the sucrose molecule; it is a relational feature, linked to the bacterium’s metabolism. In Merleau-Ponty’s terminology, the status of sucrose as food is virtual. It is something actualized at another level. Specifically, it is enacted or brought forth by the way the organism, given its autonomy and the norms its autonomy brings about, couples with the environment. Sucrose belongs to the physical order; sucrose-as-nutrient belongs to the living order. Sucrose has meaning and value as food but only in the milieu that “the system itself brings into existence” or “constitutes for itself.”
In order to give a full and complete account of the bacterium’s activity in swimming up the sucrose gradient, it is not sufficient to refer simply to the local molecular effects of sucrose as it traverses the membrane and gets taken up internally. Although these local effects are indeed crucial, they are at every step subordinated to and regulated by the global maintenance of autopoiesis. In other words, the local molecular effects happen as they do because of the global and organizational context in which they are embedded. And it is this global level that defines the bacterium as a biological individual and sucrose as food.
Living structures are thus ontologically emergent with respect to mere physical structures. They constitute a new order of nature that is qualitatively distinct from the merely physical order. This new order is marked by two generic characteristics. The first is that an organism is an individual in a new and precise sense that goes beyond the earlier notion of physical individuality. Although Merleau-Ponty earlier stated that “the physical form is an individual” (1963, p. 137), he now states that an organism “is an individual in a sense which is not that of even modern physics” (p. 154). A physical form is an individual in the sense of being an invariant topological pattern in a changing material substrate (like a convection roll or soap bubble). Individuality in this case corresponds to identity of form through material change. A living form, in the autopoietic sense, is one whose own organization (defining network of relations) is the fundamental, morphodynamic invariant through material change. An autopoietic system is a circular network whose constituent molecular processes both produce and embody that network. Individuality in this case corresponds to a formal self-identity—to an invariant dynamic pattern that is produced, maintained, and realized by the system itself, while the system undergoes incessant material transformation and regulates its external boundary conditions accordingly. An autopoietic system is thus an individual in a sense that begins to be worthy of the term self. The second generic characteristic marking the living order is that the relation between organism and environment is meaningful and normative. As Figure 3.3 depicts, meaning (or significance or information) is implicated once there is the coupling of a co-defined self-pole and environment-pole, and such coupling is intrinsically normative (in the biological sense of norms discussed above).
I will develop this account of life in more detail in Part II. It can be summarized now, using the theory of autopoiesis to elucidate Merleau-Ponty’s account, by saying that living structures are those based on autopoiesis.
Merleau-Ponty’s third order is the human order. The human order has originality in that its most typical structures and forms of behavior are symbolic.2 Symbols or symbolic structures do not exist in isolation but belong to symbol systems. In these systems each symbol is related not simply to what it symbolizes—the thing or event, for instance, for which it stands—but also to other symbols. These lateral relations among symbols open up the possibility of varied expressions or representations of the same thing. Symbols imply the mental ability to grasp something as an invariant under a diversity of aspects and perspectives. Thus symbols imply the ability to grasp something as an object, in the phenomenological sense of something that remains invariant through perspectival variation and is graspable by the subject as also being available to other subjects. Yet what is especially distinctive about human symbolic behavior for Merleau-Ponty is that it is directed not toward things or objects as such but toward “use-objects”—things endowed with culturally constituted meanings. Thus symbolic behavior implies the enactment of a whole new kind of milieu. This milieu is no longer vital situation-response but “perceived situation-work” (1963, p. 162).3
The pair “perceived situation-work” comprises more than the pair “perception-action”—even as this second pair is understood today by dynamic sensorimotor theories, which maintain that perception and action constitute one another instead of being merely instrumentally related as means to end (Hurley 1998; Noë 2004; O’Regan and Noë 2001a). The difference between the two sets of pairs is that the structure “perceived situation-work” is essentially intersubjective.
By “perceived situation” Merleau-Ponty means perception of the actions of other subjects, upon which is founded the perception of things as cultural use-objects. Merleau-Ponty maintains that the “original object” of human perception, both developmentally (first in ontogenetic time) and phenomenologically (the most fundamental or primordial in the constitution of experience), is the intentional action of another human subject (1963, p. 166). Human perception is primarily directed toward how intentions are expressed in other human beings rather than toward objects of nature and their sensory qualities. Human perception grasps intentions as “experienced realities,” not as objects in a detached or intellectual sense. As Merleau-Ponty points out, anticipating subsequent research in developmental psychology, the infant’s first experienced realities in visual perception are the face and gestures of the mother or caregiver. The mother’s face is not an object or a mere collection of sensory qualities, but a center of intentional expression and action (see, for example, Meltzoff and Moore 1998; Stern 2000; Trevarthen and Aitken 2001). Perception is thus first and foremost physiognomic, and later it is directed toward things as use-objects. Perception never loses its physiognomic quality; it remains physiognomic not simply in its nascent phases, but in its mature phenomenal character (an idea that gains importance in Merleau-Ponty’s subsequent writings).
By “work,” Merleau-Ponty means activities (ensembles of intentional actions) that transform physical and living nature and thereby modify the milieu or produce a new one (1963, p. 162). Work is forward-looking and creative or productive. By altering the present milieu, work in effect negates it in favor of a new one. (Merleau-Ponty uses the word “work” instead of “action” precisely to convey this Hegelian idea.) The correlative form of perception required for work is perception that presents its object not as something simply there now (something present and actual), but as something of use that can change other things (something oriented in relation to the future and possibilities).
Whereas living structures are ontologically emergent with respect to physical ones, the human structure “perceived situation-work” is emergent with respect to living structures. It represents a new kind of dialectical relation between organism and milieu, or self and world. For this reason, Merleau-Ponty states: “although all actions permit an adaptation to life, the word ‘life’ does not have the same meaning in animality and humanity; and the conditions of life are defined by the proper essence of the species” (1963, p. 174). A key feature of human life is the ambiguity of its dialectical relation to its milieu. The human milieu is social and cultural, and it is created by human beings themselves. Our symbolic forms of behavior enable us to create social and cultural structures to which we are committed. Yet we refuse to let ourselves become identical to them; we are always trying to pass beyond them and create new things. In Merleau-Ponty’s words: “use-objects and cultural objects would not be what they are if the activity which brings about their appearance did not also have as its meaning to reject them and to surpass them” (1963, p. 176; emphasis omitted). This self-surpassing mentality is a structural precondition for cultural forms in the first place (even while it is always already reciprocally constituted by them in any of its concrete instances). Exemplified in the human order, this mentality is emergent not simply in relation to the living order overall, but also in relation to higher animals (1963, pp. 175–176).
With these ideas, Merleau-Ponty passes from a static and genetic phenomenology of form or structure to a generative phenomenology of intersubjectivity and culture (or from a phenomenal topology of nature to a phenomenal topology of culture.)
In this book, I follow Merleau-Ponty’s lead, beginning with life, development, and evolution (Chapters 5–7), then proceeding on to consciousness (Chapters 8–12), and finally discussing empathy and enculturation (Chapter 13).
Let me return to the overall goal of The Structure of Behavior, which is to bridge the explanatory gap between consciousness and nature by revising how we think about matter, life, and mind. The burden of Merleau-Ponty’s argument has been to show that the notion of form can both integrate the orders of matter, life, and mind and account for the originality of each order. On the one hand, nature is not pure exteriority, but rather in the case of life has its own interiority and thus resembles mind. On the other hand, mind is not pure interiority, but rather a form or structure of engagement with the world and thus resembles life.
The first side of this story begins with matter and life. Given the notion of form as Merleau-Ponty presents it, we can no longer understand nature in Cartesian fashion as simply “a multiplicity of events external to each other and bound together by relations of causality” (1963, p. 3). This conception of nature as sheer exteriority (partes extra partes, as Merleau-Ponty puts it) is already surpassed by the morphodynamical notion of form at the physical level. Form, so understood, “is no more composed of parts which can be distinguished in it than a melody (always transposable) is made of the particular notes which are its momentary expression” (1963, p. 137).
It is at the vital level, however, that interiority arises. Interiority comprises both the self-production of an inside, that is, an autopoietic individual, and the internal and normative relation holding between this individual and its environment (the “intrinsic relation” that surmounts the “mutual exteriority of organism and milieu”—Merleau-Ponty 1963, p. 121).
As we have seen, this sort of interiority—the self-production of an inside that also specifies an outside to which it is normatively related—arises through autopoietic closure and the thermodynamic requirements of basic autonomy. Thus autopoiesis is a condition of possibility for the dynamic emergence of interiority (Varela 1991, 1997a). As just remarked, however, this emergence of an inside is also the specification of an outside. Thus the dynamic emergence of interiority can be more fully described as the dynamic co-emergence of interiority and exteriority.
Nevertheless, there seems to be an asymmetry here, for it is the internal self-production process that controls or regulates the system’s interaction with the outside environment (Varela 1991). As we have seen, the thermodynamic requirements of basic autonomy in its autopoietic form entail that the system actively regulate its external boundary conditions, that is, how matter and energy flow through the system. The capacity for such regulation in turn entails that the system be not simply an internally self-producing system, but also an interactive agent in its environment (Ruiz-Mirazo and Moreno 2004). Hence, although inside and outside are dynamically co-emergent, they do not share the same symmetrical relation. As Moreno and Barandiaran explain: “the (self) generation of an inside is ontologically prior to the dichotomy in-out. It is the inside that generates the asymmetry and it is in relation to this inside that an outside can be established. Although the interactive processes/relations are necessary for the maintenance of the system, they presuppose it (the system) since it is the internal organization of the system that controls the interactive relations” (Moreno and Barandiaran 2004, p. 17).
Merleau-Ponty’s point is that once we recognize this sort of interiority and the normativity it includes, then we can no longer regard life as a mechanism in the classical sense (an arrangement of parts externally related to each other through efficient causal relations). Rather, we must then see nature as having a kind of inner life, for which the classical notion of mechanism is completely inadequate. This line of thought thus points away from Descartes, who radically severed mind from biological life, toward Aristotle, for whom mind and life belonged together under the heading of soul or psyche (see Chapter 8).
The second side of the story is the rethinking of mind, and in particular human consciousness, that runs alongside this rethinking of nature. Consciousness is not an interior state of the mind or brain that stands in a linear causal relation to sensory input and motor output. It is a form or structure of comportment, a perceptual and motor attunement to the world. In our human case, this attunement is primarily to an environment of meaningful symbols and the intentional actions of others. Merleau-Ponty uses the following example to illustrate these ideas:
For the player in action the football field is not an “object,” that is, the ideal term which can give rise to an indefinite multiplicity of perspectival views and remain equivalent under its apparent transformations. It is pervaded with lines of force (the “yard lines”; those which demarcate the “penalty area”) and articulated in sectors (for example, the “openings” between the adversaries) which call for a certain mode of action and which initiate and guide the action as if the player were unaware of it. The field itself is not given to him, but present as the immanent term of his practical intentions; the player becomes one with it and feels the direction of the “goal,” for example, just as immediately as the vertical and the horizontal planes of his own body. It would not be sufficient to say that consciousness inhabits this milieu. At this moment consciousness is nothing other than the dialectic of milieu and action. Each maneuver undertaken by the player modifies the character of the field and establishes in it new lines of force in which the action in turn unfolds and is accomplished, again altering the phenomenal field. (1963, pp. 168–169)
This conception of consciousness as skillful attunement to the environment resonates strongly with contemporary dynamic sensorimotor approaches to perceptual consciousness. In these approaches, perceptual experience is the skillful exercise of sensorimotor knowledge (Noë 2004; O’Regan and Noë 2001a). I discuss the dynamic sensorimotor approach to perceptual consciousness in Chapter 9 and return to Merleau-Ponty’s idea of skillful, attuned consciousness at the beginning of Chapter 11.
So far I have presented only one side of Merleau-Ponty’s view, the one he describes as “the point of view of the ‘outside spectator’” (1963, p. 184). This perspective is the one adopted by the empirical sciences (physics, chemistry, biology, and psychology) in viewing matter, life, and mind as part of nature. Merleau-Ponty adopts this perspective in order to enrich it with the notion of form. The other side of Merleau-Ponty’s view, however, is to step back and look at how form becomes constituted as an object for scientific cognition in the first place. What is the mode or manner in which form appears, and what is the epistemological origin of this mode of givenness? This question is philosophical and expresses the perspective of transcendental phenomenology. Thus the other side of Merleau-Ponty’s view is that of the inside participant, who refuses to be satisfied simply with an outsider’s or spectator’s perspective on matter, life, and mind but who aims also for a transcendental phenomenological understanding of how they come to be constituted for consciousness.
Adopting this second perspective, Merleau-Ponty puts forward the following argument: (i) The notion of form is borrowed from the perceived world; (ii) the notion of form is encountered in physics only to the extent that physics refers us back to perceived things; (iii) hence, the notion of “physical form” cannot be the real foundation of the structure of behavior, in particular of behavior’s perceptual structure; and (iv) the notion of form is conceivable only as an object of perception (1963, p. 144). In other words, Merleau-Ponty argues that naturalism needs the notion of form (and has come to recognize this need through its own inner development), but this notion is irreducibly phenomenal. Hence naturalism cannot explain matter, life, and mind, as long as explanation means purging nature of subjectivity and then trying to reconstitute subjectivity out of nature thus purged.
There is something important in this argument, but we need to be careful. In particular, we need to guard against making it into an argument for metaphysical idealism—that physical forms are constructions out of a preexistent consciousness. Rather, the argument needs to be understood as expressing a transcendental line of thought. When we ask the constitutional question of how objects are disclosed to us, then any object, including any scientific object, must be regarded in its correlation to the mental activity that intends it. This transcendental orientation in no way denies the existence of a real physical world, but rather rejects an objectivist conception of our relation to it. The world is never given to us as a brute fact detachable from our conceptual frameworks. Rather, it shows up in all the describable ways it does thanks to the structure of our subjectivity and our intentional activities. Michel Bitbol presents a clear statement of this transcendental attitude:
What is then the central idea of transcendental philosophy? It is to construe each object of science as the focus of a synthesis of phenomena rather than as a thing in itself. And it is to accept accordingly that the very possibility of such objects depends on the connecting structures provided in advance by the procedures used in our research activities. Thus something is objective if it results from a universal and necessary mode of connection of phenomena. In other terms, something is objective if it holds true for any (human) active subject, not if it concerns intrinsic properties of autonomous entities.
Here science is not supposed to reveal anything of a preexistent underlying absolute reality, nor is it a more or less random aggregate of efficient recipes. Science is rather the stabilized byproduct of a dynamic reciprocal relation between reality as a whole and a special fraction of it. Defining this special fraction of reality qua subject is the reverse side of its actively extracting objectlike invariant clusters of phenomena.
Somebody who shares this attitude is metaphysically as agnostic as empiricists, but as convinced as realists that the structure of scientific theories is highly significant. For, from a transcendental standpoint, the structure of a scientific theory is nothing less than the frame of procedural rationalities that underpin a certain research practice (and that, conversely, were constrained by the resistances arising from the enaction of this practice). (Bitbol 2003, pp. 336–337)
Bitbol’s formulation acknowledges that active experiencing subjects do not remain unaffected by the objectivity they help to constitute, but are rather reciprocally affected and constituted by it. As Husserl recognized, although the life-world is the horizon and ground of all experience, and must therefore be presupposed by science, science also “streams into” the life-world (Husserl 1970, pp. 113, 138). Merleau-Ponty, however, sometimes seems to lose sight of this point, particularly in his discussion of the relation between physical form and phenomenal form in The Structure of Behavior. To see what I mean we need to consider his argument for the priority of the phenomenal in light of theoretical and empirical developments since his time.
Merleau-Ponty first introduces the argument midway through the book when discussing the relation between behavior and the brain. Having argued against an atomistic conception of nerve functioning and for the necessity of a dynamic and structural (morphodynamic) account of brain processes (1963, pp. 60–91)—thus anticipating views of the brain as a complex, self-organizing system—Merleau-Ponty indicates that two different meanings are possible in this analysis (1963, pp. 91–93). On the one hand, by characterizing brain processes topologically, one could aim to maintain the priority of the nervous system in relation to mind. In this view, psychological phenomena are physiologically localized, not topographically in the anatomical space of the brain’s components, but topologically as dynamic forms or patterns of neuronal activity, visible as “figures” against the “background” of activity in the rest of the brain (and body). In this way, as Merleau-Ponty points out, “a rigorous ‘isomorphism’ could be maintained” between psychological and physiological phenomena (1963, p. 92). This thesis of psychoneural isomorphism, classically associated with Gestalt psychology (see Köhler 1947), animates today’s dynamic systems approach:
If thoughts, according to the theory, must be expressed in terms of ϕ-like [relative phase-like] collective variables that characterize dynamic patterns of spatiotemporal activity in the brain, then the following conclusion appears logically inescapable: an order parameter isomorphism connects mind and body, will and brain, mental and neural events. Mind itself is a spatiotemporal pattern that molds the metastable dynamic patterns of the brain. Mind-body dualism is replaced by a single isomorphism, the heart of which is semantically meaningful pattern variables. (Kelso 1995, pp. 288–289)
The second meaning Merleau-Ponty discerns is that an analysis of brain and behavior using the notion of form might also refer us back to the phenomenal notion of form. Merleau-Ponty explains this line of thought as follows:
But the very fact that we had to borrow the terms “figure” and “ground” from the phenomenal or perceived world in order to describe these “physiological forms” . . . leads us to wonder if these are still physiological phenomena, if we can in principle conceive of processes which are still physiological and which would adequately symbolize the relations inherent in what is ordinarily called “consciousness” . . .
The function, “dot on a homogenous ground,” or more generally, the function, “figure and ground,” has a meaning only in the perceived world: it is there that we learn what it is to be a figure and what it is to be a ground. The perceived would be explicable only by the perceived itself, and not by physiological processes. A physiological analysis of perception would be purely and simply impossible . . . Since this structure of behavior and the cerebral functioning which supports it can only be conceived in terms borrowed from the perceived world, the latter no longer appears as an order of phenomena parallel to the order of physiological phenomena but as one which is richer than it. Physiology cannot be completely conceptualized without borrowing from psychology. (1963, pp. 92–93)
According to this line of thought, the notion of form is irreducibly phenomenal and descriptive, not physiological and causal. Nevertheless, it is impossible to characterize neural functioning physiologically without this notion. Thus the phenomenal domain supplies the meaning of physiological constructs, and hence there cannot be any one-to-one equivalence between the phenomenal and physiological domains.
Once again, there is something important in this line of thought, but we need to proceed carefully. It is true that the notion of phenomenal form is conceptually and epistemologically prior to the notions of physical and physiological form. For example, the scientific theories of morphogenesis (Thom 1975) and morphodynamics (Petitot 1992) take as their main primitive a phenomenal notion of “qualitative discontinuity” (discontinuous variations in qualities). This notion can be rigorously described phenomenologically, following Husserl’s Logical Investigations, in terms of the distinction between “separated” and “blended” sensible qualities (Husserl 2000, vols. 2, 3: §8, pp. 448–450). But this notion can also be given a mathematical expression in topology and can then be used to give an account of perceptually salient, macrophysical forms (see Petitot and Smith 1996). This morphological account is not only descriptive, but also explanatory, because it can be used to establish a bridge between microphysical accounts of the material substrate and macrophysical, phenomenal forms.
That there is a science of “pheno-physics” (qualitative physics of phenomenal morphologies) implies that “qualitative discontinuity” and “form” do not have meaning “only in the perceived world.” First, phenomenal form is mathematically describable and hence has meaning in mathematics. Second, this mathematical morphology can be given physical and physiological content, through morphodynamic models of macrophysical and neurophysiological systems (see Petitot 1994, 1999). Hence it is also not the case that the perceived is “explicable only by the perceived itself.” On the contrary, the perceived is explicable by mathematical models that link brain processes and behavior at morphodynamic levels. Merleau-Ponty apparently did not envision the possibility of such developments (at least not in 1942). Here he was undoubtedly influenced by Husserl, who expressly doubted that there could be mathematical descriptions of phenomenal forms. Neither thinker, however, even Husserl the mathematician, could have foreseen the advances in topology and differential geometry that would make such a description possible (see Petitot 1999; Roy et al. 1999, pp. 54–56). These new developments can also be taken to support Merleau-Ponty when he writes, “A physiological analysis of perception would be purely and simply impossible,” if by “physiological analysis” he means an analysis at a strictly neuronal level independent of any higher-order, morphodynamic level of explanation.
The issue of isomorphism is complex and will surface again at various points later in this book.4 Suffice it to say here that if isomorphism is interpreted simply as a working hypothesis for trying to characterize neural activity in relation to psychological processes, then it is hard to see how Merleau-Ponty’s assertion that the physiological cannot be completely conceptualized without borrowing from the phenomenal could stand as an objection. One can acknowledge that physiological concepts have origins in the phenomenal world, yet nonetheless maintain that there may be isomorphisms at a certain level or of a certain type between physiological phenomena and perceptual phenomena. As we have seen, morphodynamics takes this approach, as does Varela (1999) in his neurophenomenology of time-consciousness, discussed in Chapter 11. Furthermore, Merleau-Ponty seems to miss the key point that the notion of form is enlarged and enriched in meaning when extended from the phenomenal domain into mathematics, physics, and biology. This enrichment need not leave the phenomenal notion unchanged but can circulate back to modify and reshape it.
When Merleau-Ponty criticizes what he calls naturalism or realism, it is really objectivism he has in mind. Objectivism maintains that “structures can be found in a nature taken in-itself (en soi) and that mind can be constituted from them” (1963, p. 140). Objectivism tries to purge nature of subjectivity and then reconstitute subjectivity out of nature thus purged (see Husserl, 1970, pp. 20–100). The problem with this way of thinking is that it forgets that physiological processes, as describable phenomena of scientific investigation, are also constituted in the phenomenological sense. This critical point, however, holds at a transcendental level of analysis. Hence, Merleau-Ponty’s argument seems best interpreted as an argument against the objectivist who would try to nullify the transcendental status of consciousness by appealing to psychoneural isomorphism.
The point here would have to be something along the following lines: because of the transcendental status of consciousness (that consciousness is always already presupposed as an invariant condition of possibility for the disclosure of any object), there is no way to step outside, as it were, of experiencing subjectivity, so as to effect a one-one mapping of it onto an external reality purged of any and all subjectivity. It is in this transcendental sense that the phenomenal world is richer than any region of scientific objects—even the presumed “universal” region of physics. And it is only from this transcendental standpoint that Merleau-Ponty’s reversal of the order “physical → vital → human” or “matter → life → mind” makes sense. Mind emerges from matter and life at an empirical level, but at a transcendental level every form or structure is necessarily also a form or structure disclosed by consciousness. With this reversal one passes from the natural attitude of the scientist to the transcendental phenomenological attitude (which, according to phenomenology, is the properly philosophical attitude).
If we follow Merleau-Ponty’s lead, but combine it with the more recent developments reviewed in this chapter and the previous one, then we can begin to envision a different kind of approach to matter, life, and mind from objectivism and reductionism. Starting from a recognition of the transcendental and hence ineliminable status of experience, the aim would be to search for morphodynamical principles that can both integrate the orders of matter, life, and mind, and account for the originality of each order. This approach is precisely what Varela envisioned in calling for a “neurophenomenology” in mind science (Varela 1996).
The rest of this book takes up this task. I begin in Part II by reconsidering the nature of life or living being. For phenomenology, living being is living subjectivity; for biology, it is living organisms. The subject matter of the next three chapters is living being in this full sense.