Structure of Behavior

by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, John J. Wild (Foreword), Alden L. Fisher (Translator)

" Notre but est de comprendre les rapports de la conscience et de la nature, organique, psychologique ou mme sociale. On entend ici par nature une multiplicit d'vnements extrieurs les uns aux autres et lis par des rapports de causalit. " Dans cet ouvrage publi en 1942, complt en 1945 par la Phnomnologie de la perception, " s'affirme pour la premire fois une philosophie existentielle o le mode d'tre ultime du pour-soi ne s'avre pas tre, en dpit des intentions et des descriptions contraires, celui d'une conscience-tmoin " (A. de Waelhens, Prface). La structure du comportement se place au niveau de l'exprience non pas naturelle mais scientifique et s'efforce de prouver que cette exprience, c'est--dire l'ensemble des faits qui constituent le comportement, n'est pas comprhensible dans les perspectives ontologiques que la science adopte spontanment.

Genres: Philosophy, Psychology, Nonfiction, Psychological

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1942

About the author

French phenomenological philosopher, strongly influenced by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger in addition to being closely associated with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. At the core of Merleau-Ponty's philosophy is a sustained argument for the foundational role that perception plays in understanding the world as well as engaging with the world. Like the other major phenomenologists Merleau-Ponty expressed his philosophical insights in writings on art, literature, and politics; however Merleau-Ponty was the only major phenomenologist of the first half of the Twentieth Century to engage extensively with the sciences, and especially with descriptive psychology. Because of this engagement, his writings have become influential with the recent project of naturalizing phenomenology in which phenomenologists utilize the results of psychology and cognitive science.

Merleau-Ponty was born in Rochefort-sur-Mer, Charente-Maritime. His father was killed in World War 1 when Merleau-Ponty was 3. After secondary schooling at the lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris, Maurice Merleau-Ponty became a student at the École Normale Supérieure, where he studied alongside Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Simone Weil. He passed the agrégation in philosophy in 1930.

Merleau-Ponty first taught at Chartres, then became a tutor at the École Normale Supérieure, where he was awarded his doctorate on the basis of two important books: La structure du comportement (1942) and Phénoménologie de la Perception (1945).

After teaching at the University of Lyon from 1945 to 1948, Merleau-Ponty lectured on child psychology and education at the Sorbonne from 1949 to 1952. He was awarded the Chair of Philosophy at the Collège de France from 1952 until his death in 1961, making him the youngest person to have been elected to a Chair.

Besides his teaching, Merleau-Ponty was also political editor for Les Temps Modernes from the founding of the journal in October 1945 until December 1952.

Aged 53, he died suddenly of a stroke in 1961, apparently while preparing for a class on Descartes. He was buried in Le Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.

Reviews

[0 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Originally written in 1938 for his minor habilitation thesis at the École normale supérieure and published in 1942, this inaugural book comprises the first of the two books that Merleau-Ponty completed in his lifetime--the second being Phenomenology of Perception, written and published in 1945 as his major doctoral thesis. In this sense, the two books are meant to be read back-to-back as prequel and sequel, because together they provide two complementary perspectives on the central topic which Merleau-Ponty pursued his entire life--the relationship between consciousness and nature, the nature of consciousness and the consciousness of nature--from the outside, a scientific perspective, the phenomenon of "behavior"; from the inside, a phenomenological perspective, the phenomenology of "perception." The Phenomenology begins by assuming that readers have already familiarized themselves with the Structure of Behavior, and so very little effort is made there to demonstrate the insufficiency of the reflex response or the constancy hypothesis, which is the work of this book.

The translation by Alden Fisher obscures the rigorous and analytical intent with which the text was written: in the original French, the book unfolds as a series of numbered propositions, each of which are explicated in subsections and further sub-subsections. Ironically, the book which introduces the idea of "structure" (imported from the Gestalt psychology of Wertheimer, Koffka, Goldstein and Köhler) to phenomenology, as it currently exists in its English form, has been stripped of its original analytical structure. This has contributed to the difficulty of Merleau-Ponty's dialectical style, which seems to meander back and forth between opposing views, following each along their paths in order to reveal their contradictions and their gaps, through which he propels himself into a descriptive phenomenological method.

The book functions largely as a critique of the ontological, methodological, and epistemological assumptions of classical science, which is meant to prepare readers to embrace the phenomenological method advanced in Phenomenology of Perception. The main target is behaviorism--the kind that dominated the early 20th century, the behaviorism of Sherrington, Pavlov, and Watson, a mechanistic, reductive, physicalist behaviorism according to which organic behavior is decomposed into atomic units, nervous reflexes, which are then joined together "partes extra partes" to recompose the total organism which we encounter in naive perception. This kind of behaviorism defines behavior as a mechanically determined response to a mosaic of environmental stimuli which act upon the organism's sensory receptors to trigger a motor response according to universal scientific laws which can be expressed in a mathematical equation.

Merleau-Ponty attempts to reveal the absurdity of such an approach by relying heavily upon the work of Gestalt psychologists (Gestalt being the German word for form or structure) who, in opposition to the behaviorists, begin not from the smallest constituent parts of the organism, but from the organism as a unified totality, whose parts are internally related to each other, and so constitute a dynamic living structure which establishes an emergent level of functioning that supercedes any attempted reduction to an assembly of juxtaposed composites (echoing Aristotle's assertion that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts). Merleau-Ponty introduces the idea by comparing the coordination of the organism's nervous system to the coordination of musical notes in a melody:

"The coordinated elements are not only coupled with each other, they constitute together, by their very union, a whole which has its proper law and which manifests it as soon as the first elements of excitation are given, just as the first notes of a melody assign a certain mode of resolution to the whole. While the notes taken separately have an equivocal signification, being capable of entering into an infinity of possible ensembles, in the melody each one is demanded by the context and contributes its part by expressing something which is not contained in any one of them and which binds them together internally. The same notes in two different melodies are not recognized as such. Inversely, the same melody can be played two times without the two versions having a single common element if it has been transposed. Coordination is now the creation of a unity of meaning which is expressed in the juxtaposed parts, the creation of certain relations, the creation of certain relations which owe nothing to the materiality of the terms which they unite."

Or again:

"We will say that 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."

The emphasis on the formal structure which is constituted by the relation between the parts seems to lead Merleau-Ponty to endorsing a kind of pure functionalism, but he is careful to admit that the material substrate which composes a form makes a difference to the functioning of the structure itself. An organism made of silicon chips would not be the same as an organism made of flesh and blood, even if they functioned the same exact way (and, by necessity, owing to the inseparability of form and matter, they would not).

In addition, it seems as if Merleau-Ponty is endorsing a simple holism which would merely be the opposite of a reductivism, but this is far from the case. Merleau-Ponty insists on a dialectical relationship between the whole and its parts, the parts and their whole, such that neither necessarily takes precedent over the other. What matters is the extent to which an organism's parts are integrated amongst each other, a dynamic relationship in which total integration is never absolutely achieved-- episodes of illness, injury, and surprise threaten the organism with disequilibrium and disintegration into separately functioning parts. But such separation is uncharacteristic of the normal functioning of a healthy organism. Reflexes, far from being the natural form of organic behavior, are in fact pathological limit-cases. Behaviorism's insistence upon the reflex as the foundation of all behavior is an anthropomorphic projection upon the observable facts, which is motivated by the tendencies of scientists to ontologize the ideal constructs they creates for themselves in order to manipulate things with greater precision.

The philosophical implications Merleau-Ponty draws from Gestalt psychology go far beyond what Gestalt psychologists themselves were willing to affirm. Having established the difficulties of analyzing organic behavior with a universal and linear causality--owing to a multitude of simultaneously intersecting dynamic organic functions, and the interdependent functioning established between each of the organism's parts--Merleau-Ponty is led to posit that organisms exhibit a "circular causality" which problematizes classical notions of cause and effect (which appears to be supported by the evidence given) and simultaneously to insist upon doing away with the notion of causality altogether. Here, the last 80 years of scientific and philosophical work done on dynamic complex systems (AKA chaos theory) suggests otherwise. If Merleau-Ponty and the Gestalt psychologists were elaborating a kind of ancestral systems theory before its current formal manifestation, the determining factor in their differing conclusions is their allegiance to the scientific method. Gestalt psychologists are led to affirm the notion of form as a natural principle inherent in reality and therefore amenable to scientific study, while Merleau-Ponty insists that the notion of form ought to shatter the scientific method itself--and this is where the book takes a drastic turn.

After spending nearly 200 pages outlining what will become the basis of much of contemporary systems theory using the notion of form, Merleau-Ponty reminds us that the Gestaltist theory of form was initially drawn from the scientific study of the perceptual world, and that all forms are perceived forms. If the theory of forms requires us to recognize that physiology is not reducible to physics, that psychology is not reducible to physiology, and that a detailed study of behavior must make references to the value which stimuli have for an organism, to the organism's entire perceptual milieu (its Umwelt), and to certain ideal equilibriums which the organism tends towards establishing as sensory-motor "norms," Merleau-Ponty concludes from this that form ultimately belongs to a perceptual reality, and not to the reality of which classical science speaks. In other words, Merleau-Ponty effects a critical turn on scientific ontology, characteristic of Husserl: the world of science is ultimately a perceived world that has forgotten itself as a perception. The formulas, laws, and constructs which science discovers are merely articulations of the perceived world. Of course, the scientist or the naturalist will respond that our perceptions are secondary effects of the primary physical forces which science discovers...but the phenomenologist will respond that such discoveries occur entirely within the transcendental realm of perception. We are here facing something like a chicken-and-egg problem posed in terms of consciousness and nature (which came first?), but to make such a division between the two terms, such that one has an ontological or transcendental priority over the other is already to forget the foundational doctrine of intentionality--namely, that consciousness and its objects are always correlated. Merleau-Ponty is careful to distance himself from Kantian idealism as much as from scientific realism, but he merely replaces Kant's representational conscious with Scheler's affective (non-representational) perceptual consciousness. The world is not an object of my thought, but it is nevertheless the inexhaustible correlate of my perception. What this position ought to lead Merleau-Ponty to endorse is the shared reality of phenomenology and science--they are both explications of the perceived world. But at this juncture in his thought, he is too quick to align "science" with the classical science of Descartes, Newton and Galileo (which the behaviorists have inherited and which, in any case, as Merleau-Ponty himself acknowledges, has already been surpassed by the theory of relativity, quantum physics, non-Euclidean geometry, and the sciences of biology, psychology, and sociology). The limitations of classical science are collapsed into the failures of the scientific project itself, at the expense of Husserl's initial formulation of phenomenology as the first science. Perhaps he saw the "crisis" of which Husserl wrote as an opportunity to inject phenomenology into the history of science; in any case, he writes as if he saw it as a replacement.

Perhaps there is no resolution to be had here. Merleau-Ponty has beautifully, painstakingly elaborated a conplex, three-tiered emergent ontology of matter, life and mind, only to--frustratingly--reveal that the entire world described exists as a correlate of perceptual consciousness, as a *function* of perception. The question then becomes: is the world entirely contained by its appearance to a perceiver (or an intersubjective community of perceivers), or can we imagine a world which exists prior to our perception of it? If we weren't around to perceive a soap bubble or the process of electrolysis, would they still have a form? Or is form merely an effect of our perceptual capacities? Merleau-Ponty is not clear on these points.

And I think these questions are some of the most difficult and frustrating questions for his readers, because he will seemingly endorse contradictory views, writing that of course the world transcends its perceptual appearances--this is in fact the mark of reality, what makes the world an inexhaustible horizon of experience and not an idea I possess completely--but its transcendence is revealed only from within the immanence of the perceptual relationship. Starting from perception, we can discover that we are nothing more than a bundle of complex and intersecting physiological processes that has evolved at a late point within the deep history of the universe--but such a discovery is available only to a perceiver. And ultimately, I think this is the right answer, but it requires doing away with the notion of constituting consciousness as the ultimate source of the world and of the world as merely a perceptual correlate which is immanent to consciousness. Merleau-Ponty will come to affirm this position. But here, in 1938, we are left with a transcendental subject which, despite not being a Cartesian thinking subject or a Kantian representational subject, is still a Husserlian constituting subject--even if what it is constituing are affective, obscure, and perspectival perceptual forms instead of complete objects, it is still the ultimate source, consciousness is the first principle, even if it is not a completely subjective consciousness in the traditional sense, but one which is subject to failure, incompleteness, finitude, and unconsciousness.

Structure stands midway between mind and matter, substance and subject, as a mediating term and as the nascent mode of existence from which all dualities will later be born in reflective thought, but it is still a function of life, of perception--if we perceive it in non-living forms, it is because our perception put it there...but we would not see it there if the appearance of the thing itself did not already suggest it to us, if it were not already structured...and hence, the doorways to phenomenology are opened...

[eesenor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Merleau-Ponty continues the Phenomenological project where the early Heidegger and the early Sartre leave off, at an account of lived embodied experience.

[Steven H · Rating 5 out of 5]

THE FRENCH PHENOMENOLOGIST PHILOSOPHER CRITIQUES BEHAVIORISM

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) was a French phenomenological philosopher; he died suddenly of a stroke in 1961 at age 53.

He wrote in the Introduction to this 1942 book, “Our goal 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… among contemporary thinkers in France, there exist side by side a philosophy, on the one hand, which makes of every nature an objective unity constituted vis-à-vis consciousness and… sciences which treat the organism and consciousness as two orders of reality and, in their reciprocal relation, as ‘effects’ and as ‘causes.’

"Is the solution to be found in a pure and simple return to critical thought? And… is there nothing justified in the naturalism of science---nothing which, ‘understood’ and transposed, ought to find a place in a transcendental philosophy? We will come to these questions by starting ‘from below’ and by an analysis of the notion of behavior… By going through behaviorism… one gains at least in being able to introduce consciousness, not as psychological reality or as cause, but as structure.”

He observes, “The organism cannot properly be compared to a keyboard on which the external stimuli would play and in which their proper form would be delineated for the simple reason that the organism contributes to the constitution of that form… Since all the movements of the organism are always conditioned by external influences, one can, if one wishes, readily treat behavior as an effect of the milieu. But in the same way, since all the stimulations which the organism receives have culminated in exposing the receptor organ to the external influences, one could also say that the behavior is the first cause of all the stimulations.” (Pg. 13)

He points out, “I execute the proposed task without knowing what I am doing, just as habits acquired by one group of muscles can be transferred immediately to another: my handwriting on the blackboard resembles my handwriting on paper although the muscles concerned in each case are not the same. There is something GENERAL in our reflex responses, which precisely permits these effector substitutions.” (Pg. 30)

He says, “there is no reason for asking what guides the chronaxic mechanism and orients it toward ‘ordered’ movements. When such movements are produced, it is because the necessary conditions for them are united… It is useless to posit a ‘shunting power’ ‘hidden behind’ the cerebral mechanisms by which ordered behavior is realized; and the problem of order has no meaning if we make it a second problem of causality.” (Pg. 50)

He summarizes, "Behavior, inasmuch as it has a structure, is not situated in either of these two orders. It does not unfold in objective time and space like a series of physical events; each moment does not occupy one and only one point of time; rather, at the decisive moment of learning, a ‘now’ stands out from the series of ‘nows,’ acquires a particular value and summarizes the groupings which have preceded it as it engages and anticipates the future of the behavior; this ‘now’ transforms the singular situation of the experience into a typical situation and the effective reaction into an aptitude. From this moment on behavior is detached from the order of the in-itself… and becomes the projection outside the organism of a POSSIBILITY which is internal to it. The world, inasmuch as it harbors living beings, ceases to be a material plenum consisting of juxtaposed parts; it opens up at the place where behavior appears.” (Pg. 125)

He concludes, “The object of the preceding chapters was not only to establish that behavior is irreducible to its alleged parts… Does not the cogito teach us once and for all that we would have no knowledge of any THING if we did not first have a knowledge of our thinking and that even the escape into the world and the resolution to ignore interiority … which is the essential feature of behaviorism, cannot be formulated without being transformed into consciousness and without being transformed into conscious and without presupposing existence for-itself…

"Thus behavior is constituted of relations; that is, it is conceptualized and not in-itself, as is every other object moreover… behavior is not a thing, but neither is it an idea. It is not the envelope of a pure consciousness and, as the witness of behavior, I am not a pure consciousness. It is precisely this which we wanted to say in stating that behavior is a form.” (Pg. 127)

He asserts, “Thus behavior remains defined… as an imitation of things; consciousness remains a part of being. The integration of matter, life and mind is obtained by their reduction to the common denominator of physical forms. It matters little that the ultimate explanation is always physical if the physical structures posited in nerve functioning imply relations just as complex as those which are grasped by consciousness in the actions of a living being or a man. A complex physical structure is less ‘material’ than the atoms of consciousness of the old psychology.” (Pg. 135)

He summarizes, “In the preceding chapters we have considered the birth of behavior in the physical world and in an organism; that is, we have pretended to know nothing of man by reflection and have limited ourselves to developing what was implied in the scientific representation of his behavior. Aided by the notion of structure or form, we have arrived at the conclusion that both mechanism and finalism should be rejected and that the ‘physical,’ the ‘vital’ and the ‘mental’ do not represent three powers of being, but three dialectics. Physical nature in man is not subordinated to a vital principle, the organisms do not conspire to actualize an idea, and the mental is not a motor principle IN the body; but what we call nature is already consciousness of nature, what we call life is already consciousness of life and what we call mental is still an object vis-à-vis consciousness.” (Pg. 184)

He concludes, “the behavior of another expresses a certain manner of existing before signifying a certain manner of thinking. And when this behavior is addressed to me… when the ‘cultural objects’ which fall under my regard suddenly adapt themselves to my powers, awaken my intentions and make themselves ‘understood’ by me---I am then drawn into a ‘coexistence’ of which I am not the unique constituent and which founds the phenomenon of social nature as perceptual experience founds that of physical nature.

"Consciousness can LIVE in existing things without reflection, can abandon itself to their concrete structure, which has not yet been converted into expressible signification; certain episodes of its life, before having been reduced to the condition of available memories and inoffensive objects, can imprison its liberty by their proper inertia, shrink its perception of the world, and impose stereotypes on behavior; likewise, before having conceptualized our class or our milieu, we ARE that class or that milieu.” (Pg. 222)

This book (which was part of the basis for awarding his doctorate degree) will interest not only those studying Merleau-Ponty, but those looking for critical analyses of behaviorism.

[Lauren · Rating 3 out of 5]

Incredibly dense and packed with lots of abstract theory made this a rewarding, yet difficult read. Though the philosophy he does in this book lays the foundation for what's to come in some of his later works, I still prefer his other books.

[Andrea · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sono i pittori - certi pittori - che ci hanno insegnato, secondo le parole di Cézanne, a vedere i volti come pietre. Il significato umano è dato anteriormente ai pretesi segni sensibili. Un volto è un centro di espressione umana, l'involucro trasparente delle tendenze e dei desideri altrui, il luogo di comparsa, il punto di appoggio appena materiale di una quantità di intenzioni. Di qui viene l'impossibilità, per noi, di considerare un volto o un corpo anche morto come una cosa. Si tratta di entità consacrate, non di "dati visibili". Si potrebbe essere portati ad affermare che, dopo il corpo dell'uomo, sono gli oggetti d'uso creati dall'uomo che compongono il campo della percezione iniziale. E difatti stupisce la loro preponderanza nell'uomo adulto. La realtà ordinaria è per lui una realtà umana, e quando avviene che degli oggetti d'uso - un guanto, una scarpa, col loro carattere umano, posti in mezzo ad oggetti naturali, sono visti per la prima volta come come - quando gli avvenimenti della strada - un assembramento di persone, un incidente - guardati dai vetri di una finestra che ne trattengono il rumore, sono ridotti alla condizione di puro spettacolo, e rivestiti da una specie di eternità, abbiamo l'impressione di penetrare in un altro mondo, in una realtà surreale, perché si rompe per la prima volta la solidarietà che ci lega al mondo umano, e al di là di esso scorgiamo una natura in sé. (III. L'ordine fisico, l'ordine vitale, l'ordine umano, p.183)

L'intensa ricerca filosofica di Merleau-Ponty, incentrata su un continuo ricominciamento del concetto di percezione, ha inizio con questo denso testo, La struttura del comportamento, in cui il corpo la fa da padrone come medio generale tra il concreto e l'astratto, tra l'esperienza e il pensiero.

In quest'opera tale analisi viene condotta con uno spiccato interesse e un costante confronto con i progressi della psicologia di inizio secolo, con le teorie, principalmente, del Behaviorismo e della psicologia della Gestalt. Merleau-Ponty conduce il lettore all'analisi delle scoperte e delle concezioni che sono state elaborate intorno ai riflessi e agli stimoli e ne mette in discussione l'esasperato scientismo (si pensi agli studi del comportamentismo stesso, basati esclusivamente sul meccanismo "Stimolo-Reazione") in modo da restituire al corpo quel ruolo da protagonista incompreso dall'Empirismo e sottovalutato dall'Intellettualismo.

La prospettiva non appare a me come una deformazione soggettiva delle cose, ma al contrario come una delle loro proprietà, forse la loro proprietà essenziale. È la prospettiva che fa sì che si che il percepito possegga in sé una ricchezza nascosta e inesauribile, che si presenti come una "cosa". In altre parole, quando, si parla del prospettivismo della coscienza, l’espressione è equivoca. Può significare che alla conoscenza primitiva sarebbe dato soltanto la proiezione prospettiva degli oggetti, e in questo senso l’espressione è inesatta, poiché le prime reazioni del bambino sono adattate per esempio alla distanza degli oggetti; il che esclude l’idea di un mondo fenomenico che si mostri, all’origine, privo di profondità. Il prospettivismo non è qualcosa di subito, ma qualcosa che fin dall’inizio è conosciuto come tale. Anziché attribuire alla percezione un coefficiente di soggettività, le conferisce al contrario la garanzia di comunicare con un mondo più ricco di quella parte dell’oggetto che noi conosciamo, cioè con un mondo reale. I profili della mia scrivania non si danno direttamente alla coscienza come apparenze prive di valore, ma come "manifestazioni" della scrivania. Così, quantunque la coscienza ingenua non confonda mai la cosa con il mondo in cui essa ci appare, e anzi proprio perché non fa mai questa riproduzione soggettiva. La coscienza ingenua non immagina che il corpo o "rappresentazioni" mentali siano come uno schermo tra sé e la realtà. Il percepito viene colto in modo indivisibile come "in sé", cioè come dotato di un contenuto che non potrei mai esaurire, e come "per me", cioè come dato in carne ed ossa attraverso i suoi aspetti momentanei.(IV. Le relazioni tra l’anima e il corpo e il problema della coscienza percettiva, p.204)

Da acuto osservatore della realtà circostante, Merleau-Ponty qualifica con chiarezza la sua filosofia della percezione come prospettivismo, mostrando che l'osservare le cose da un determinato punto di vista non costituisce un limite, bensì un'opportunità per il soggetto di cogliere una ricchezza di significati assolutamente particolare e per niente banale. E in questo la nozione di corpo gioca un ruolo per nulla scontato, sicché molte persone ne sottovalutano l'importanza, o meglio lo trascurano per focalizzarsi piuttosto sugli "impulsi razionali", su tutto ciò a cui si può facilmente trovare una spiegazione. Infatti, Merleau-Ponty stesso si accorge che il corpo non ci mette semplicemente in contatto con la realtà, ma ci restituisce un modo originario di vivere tutto ciò che ci circonda: è questo, oltretutto, il problema che tenterà di risolvere nella Fenomenologia della Percezione liberandosi dagli errati pregiudizi del Razionalismo e dell'Empirismo per reimpostare totalmente la ricerca filosofica sulla base della percezione, intraprendendo un viaggio verso un orizzonte che ancora oggi fa riflettere colui che si approccia alle sue opere.

Se dovessimo trovare un problema a questo testo, probabilmente si potrebbe solo chiamare in causa la piuttosto trascurata, nonché sfortunatamente unica, edizione italiana del testo, piena di sviste e di refusi che potrebbero un poco infastidire il lettore. Tuttavia, l'importanza di questo testo resta tale, e quindi merita comunque di essere letto, compreso e fatto proprio.

[Steve Battle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Merleau-Ponty (MP) presents a philosophy for the future. We live in a world shaped by dualisms, body and mind, hardware and software, even science and religion. MP takes a surgeon’s knife to cartesian dualism and the distinctions we continue to make between matter, life, and mind. The argument here is that these are not different things, but three ways of understanding the world. This book does not try to explain consciousness, which remains ineffable, but to discern its structure.

The corpuscular matter of Descartes is quite unlike the modern scientific conception. Cartesian mechanical philosophy conceived the universe as being a simple machine where causal effects could only be achieved by direct physical contact (Kochiras, 2013). Newton’s physico-theological force of gravity (McGrath, 2018) with its mysterious action at a distance overthrew this orthodoxy in the fundamental sense of what kinds of things could be admitted within scientific theory. Who doesn’t delight in that child-like sense of magic at work when they play with magnets? Is consciousness really very different? Might a wider conception of science encompass the concept of a mental field? MP argues that while reality is not an illusion (an unnoticed tram will run you down whether or not you believe in it), physical form is a construct of perception. Physical Form is about seeing relationships between things which enable us to grasp the world, but nevertheless are not literally out there. Physical form is observer relative; the ant doesn’t perceive the table as such, because the table belongs to the human milieu of “use-objects.”

Life was once understood in terms of vitalism, but science is beginning to unlock the mysteries of life. Breaking the genetic code is akin to putting the edges of the puzzle together first, but the remainder of the puzzle remains. MP discusses life in the round and introduces us to a cybernetic conception of the living taken up three decades later by Maturana and Varela in Autopoiesis (Maturana, 1980). “We speak of vital structures when equilibrium is obtained by conditions the system itself brings into existence.” The organism creates and delimits its unity through circular causality, creating a new discontinuity in the world between self and non-self.

The mind is reducible to the structure of behaviour. The subjective and objective just different ways of understanding the world. What we commonly think of as internal mental phenomena are circular processes that support a dynamic and intimate connection between subject and object. “One must go back to Kant for the idea that the perception of point o, is at point o.” Neither external nor internal, these phenomena (hence phenomenology) are equally situated in the outer world as formed by the inner self. Furthermore, there is no need in this model for a symbolic representation to mediate perception because perception encompasses the entire feedback loop between subject and object. Representation would only introduce a barrier, a screen onto which the world is projected, breaking the cycle and thereby collapsing it to the linear process of input - process - output.

So MP concludes that consciousness is scientifically comprehensible, but perhaps only to a future science able to adapt and accommodate it. There is no yawning void between empirical observation and introspection; we can discover the continuity between them grounded in an enriched conception of the structure of behaviour.

Kochiras, H. (2013). The Mechanical Philosophy and Newton’s Mechanical Force. Philosophy of Science, 80(4), 557-578.

McGrath, A. (2018). The Clockwork God: Isaac Newton and the Mechanical Universe, Gresham College Lecture.

Maturana, H. And Varela, F. (1980). Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living. Vol 42 of the Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science. D. Reidel Publishing Company.

[Saul Carrera · Rating 4 out of 5]

Prepare for a rigorous critique of early 20th c. physiological and psychological theories (Pavlov, Sherrington, Goldstein, etc.). A bit overwhelming for those without a scientific background. Still plenty of footnotes and references. it is worth reading past the first half, after which you really get into the originality of Merleau-Ponty's account of form, structure, and behaviour.

[Karim Kadry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fucking amazing

[Drenma (Bea) · Rating 3 out of 5]

Je fais mon memoire de Master 2 sur ce precieux livre. Il est trés compliqué mais philosophiquement riche

[Jesse]

An extremely dense read, and a lot of references to classical psychology. It is a very interesting read though, and full of clues of the direction Merleau-Ponty will later take his thoughts.

[Rodger Broome · Rating 5 out of 5]

Merleau-Ponty provides an insightful critique of behavioral science perspectives and provides a phenomenological perspective as an alternative view. He demonstrates both in breadth and depth how a holistic view of embodied lived-experience is a superior approach to understanding behavior over the reductionistic approaches based scientistic approaches based on the philosophy of logical-positivism.