SOURCE: Glenn, John D., Jr. “The Behaviorism of a Phenomenologist—The Structure of Behavior and The Concept of Mind.” Philosophical Topics 13, no. 2 (spring 1985): 247-56.

[In the following essay, Glenn argues in favor of the primacy of Merleau-Ponty's critique of scientific behaviorism in the study of his later development of phenomenology.]

For some years, studies of Merleau-Ponty's philosophy tended to concentrate on his second book Phenomenology of Perception. Recently, interest has shifted more toward his later work—particularly the posthumously-published The Visible and the Invisible. In any event, less attention has been given to his first book, The Structure of Behavior.¹ I suspect that most readers of Merleau-Ponty still begin with the Phenomenology, and read the Structure, if at all, primarily in its light. This is understandable, but unfortunate; for although these two works are in general consistent with one another,² and the Phenomenology is broader in scope, the Structure develops some ideas which are not present, or are not made thematic, in the later. And the Structure is distinctive in its methodology, as well as its content; for most of its pages there is no mention of phenomenology or phenomenological method. Rather, the phenomenological standpoint—or, more specifically, Merleau-Ponty's own unique phenomenological standpoint—emerges dialectically through a critique of behaviorism.

But if The Structure of Behavior involves a critique of behaviorism, what justification is there for my title? My suggestion is this: that through Merleau-Ponty's critique of scientific behaviorism—in particular the reflex theory of behavior developed by psychologists such as Watson and Pavlov—a position emerges which is in many respects comparable to the “behaviorism” of Ryle's The Concept of Mind, which was published seven years after the Structure. Despite various recent attempts at rapprochement between “continental” and “analytic” philosophy, this connection seems to have been generally overlooked.³

What I have termed Merleau-Ponty's “behaviorism” is characterized by his assertion that “mind” or the “mental,” as well as more specific terms such as “intelligence,” “emotion,” and “perception,” can be defined as “structures of behavior.”⁴ I want here to discuss the main aspects of this account of mind, with emphasis on its similarities to Ryle's philosophy of mind—as well as on the nature and significance of their differences.

I will begin by summarizing what I regard as the most salient features of Ryle's position. Ryle's basic concern, of course, is to overcome the traditional mind-body dualism—what he labels the “myth’ or the “dogma” of “the ghost in the machine.” According to this “myth,” a human being is a composite of a machine-like body and a ghost-like mind. Mind is “ghostly” in that it is not an object of public observation, is not directly accessible to the view of others, although a person is held to have a privileged access to his own mental states. As Ryle expresses this latter aspect of the “myth”:

A person's present thinking, feelings and willings, his perceivings, rememberings and imaginings are intrinsically ‘phosphorescent’; their existence and nature and inevitably betrayed to their owner.⁵

Ryle's critique of this dualistic legacy of Descartes employs a variety of techniques. The positive thrust of his argument is mainly supported, I think, by his demonstration that we are able to apply “mental” concepts to human beings, on the basis of their behavior—contrary to what it seems we should expect if traditional mind-body dualism were true. The general concept of a behavioral disposition is central to the alternative conception which he develops. His position, roughly stated, is that the “mental” consists of dispositions to behave in certain ways. Mind is thus an inherently public reality, although Ryle occasionally—and, to all appearances inconsistently—grants that there are some private episodes.⁶

Mind, then, is no ghost, according to Ryle. Is the body a machine? That it is not seems to be implied in a general way by his position, and more specifically by statements such as the following:

Man need not be degraded to a machine by being denied to be a ghost in a machine. He might, after all, be sort of an animal, namely, a higher mammal. There has yet to be ventured the hazardous leap to the hypothesis that perhaps he is a man.⁷

But Ryle offers no elaboration of any non-mechanistic conception of the human body—and no “philosophy of man” to provide a firm landing-ground for his “hazardous leap.” On the whole, his proposed alternative to mind-body dualism seems not to be—as has sometimes been thought—a type of metaphysical materialism,⁸ but rather a validation of the manifold ways in which common sense and common speech enable us to understand human beings.

In The Structure of Behavior, Merleau-Ponty, like Ryle, is working to overcome the legacy of Cartesian dualism. He initially addresses the broader dualism of mind and nature rather than the more specific dualism of human mind and human body; “our task,” he says, “is to understand the relations of consciousness and nature.”⁹ But it becomes clear that he regards the proper understanding of the mind-body relation as crucial to understanding the relation of mind and nature in general. A fundamental obstacle here, he suggests, is the general acceptance of traditional definitions of both mind and nature. The latter is conceived as a multiplicity of mutually external parts, bound by casual relations, with the human body being taken as an instance of nature in this sense. Mind, on the other hand, is conceived as “total presence of itself to itself.”¹⁰ In Ryle's terms, nature is thought of as mechanical, mind as an “inner,” “self-luminous” reality. The upshot of Merleau-Ponty's account is that both terms must be reconceived if their relation is to be properly understood.

To this point, the parallels between Ryle and Merleau-Ponty may seem relatively insignificant; many other philosophers have taken issue with Cartesian dualism. What is striking, I think, is the way in which both focus on the concept of behavior. Ryle's approach here is well known. But Merleau-Ponty describes his method as “an analysis of the notion of behavior.”¹¹ I must add that he does not mean a “conceptual analysis” in the Anglo-American sense; his procedure involves what might more accurately be called an analysis of the conceptualization of behavior in the sciences, and particularly in psychology. He measures some of the concepts of psychologists against their own research findings, and judges the former to be lacking. In particular, Merleau-Ponty criticizes what he calls the ‘partitive analysis” of human and animal behavior, in which such behavior—or the behaving organism itself—is conceptualized as an instance of “nature” in the sense defined earlier, and taken to be explicable through the mechanism of determinate reflexes which are externally related to their stimuli and to one another. So, where Ryle attacks dualism by arguing that mind is not a ghostly reality, Merleau-Ponty approaches the issue from the opposite direction, arguing that the animate (and in particular the human) body is no machine—that in a proper sense it is no “physical body,” since its behavior can be neither adequately conceived nor explained through the concepts and theories of physics and physiology. His account of mind is erected on this basis.

The notion of structures of behavior emerges as fundamental in Merleau-Ponty's discussion; its role in his account of mind more-or-less parallels that of Ryle's notion of a behavioral disposition in his theory. Merleau-Ponty derives the general notion of “structure” or “form”—he uses these terms almost interchangeably—from the Gestalt psychologists, whose work influenced his considerably. Negatively conceived, a form or structure is a whole which resists partitive analysis, a unity not explicable in terms of the properties of its separate parts. Insofar as an organism can, for example, respond in the same manner to “stimuli” which have the same vital significance for it even when they differ if their physical and chemical properties, and especially insofar as it can respond with actions having the same vital significance even though they differ regarded as mere physical movements, its behavior is an instance of what Merleau-Ponty calls “vital structure.” There are also, of course, mental or (to anticipate a point to be discussed later) “symbolic” structures—and even physical structures, such as soap bubbles or the distribution of electrical charges in a conductor, whose “behavior” is not explicable through that of distinct individual parts.

Of necessity, I am unable to deal here with many important aspects of Merleau-Ponty's position, or with much of the complex argumentation through which he develops it. My main purpose is to explain the basic features of the conception of mind at which he arrives. One very essential point here is that in his view mind is a superordinate structure in that it rests on vital and physical structures. More precisely, he argues that, in the hierarchy of mental or symbolic, vital, and physical structures, instances of the higher structures encompass or (to use his preferred term) integrate lower structures, in such a fashion that the lower do not function autonomously, while at the same time the higher are denied functional or metaphysical self-subsistence. Thus Merleau-Ponty replaces the rigid mind-body dualism of Descartes with a conception which is, in a rough sense, Aristotelian; vitality and mentality are conceived as “forms” which shape an appropriate “material.” The following passage (while also suggesting various other complications) conveys well this aspect of his position:

[T]he notions of soul and body must be relativized: there is the body as mass of chemical compounds in interaction, the body as dialectic of the living being and its biological milieu, the body as dialectic of the social subject and his group, and even all our habits are an impalpable body for the self of each instant. Each of these levels is soul in relation to the preceding, body in relation to the following.¹²

Although there is an Aristotelian character to Merleau-Ponty's position, he conceives the different levels of “forms” or “structure” rather differently than Aristotle. A physical form, he said—and here again a soap bubble is probably the most helpful example—is “an equilibrium obtained in relation to certain given exterior conditions.” With a vital form, on the other hand, “the equilibrium is obtained not in relation to present and real conditions, but in relation to merely virtual conditions which the system itself brings into existence.”¹³ That is, the equilibrium toward which an organism tends in one which makes possible certain distinctive types of activity, and is characterized by a kind of vital intentionality. Organic behavior must be understood as responding to a “vital milieu,” to a sphere of “objects” which the nature of the organism makes significant for it, in which “food” and “shelter,” for example, play the role of “vital categories.”

What, then, is mind? As suggested above, Merleau-Ponty conceives of mind as being constituted by symbolic forms of behavior. But this claim is developed somewhat sketchily in the Structure—and is not reiterated in his later works. Although speech may be the most obvious and most important symbolic form of behavior, in illustrating his point Merleau-Ponty first discusses another sort of example, reflecting on the relation between a musical score, an organist's gestures in response to it, and the music which is produced:

No doubt the correspondence of a certain musical sign, a certain gesture by the player, and of a certain sound is conventional … But these three ensembles, between which term by term there exist only chance correspondences, communicate inwardly considered as wholes. The style of the melody, the graphic configuration of the musical text, and the unfolding of the gestures participate in an identical structure, have in common an identical nucleus of signification … The true sign represents the signified not according to an empirical association, but inasmuch as its relation to other signs is the same as the relation of the object signified by it to other objects.¹⁴

The key notion here seems to be that of what we might call transposable structures. Merleau-Ponty conceives of such structures as being involved not only in the use of linguistic and similar systems of symbols, but also in such phenomena as a human being's ability to grasp what objects would look like if he were ‘over there’ instead of ‘here,’ and more generally in our capacity for “varied expressions of a single theme,” for adopting different points-of-view on the same matter. The liberation from the specific content of “stimuli” which characterizes human behavior by virtue of its participation in these structures, Merleau-Ponty adds, is what makes free conduct possible; it allows human beings to be open to “the truth and … the proper value of things,”¹⁵ rather than being immersed in a merely vital milieu as are lower animals.

This distinctively human form of behavior, however, does not comletely transcend the forms of vital behavior, rather, it integrates them and gives them a higher meaning. This claim—which Merleau-Ponty supports with scientific findings concerning the central nervous system—is illustrated at a more intuitive level by, for example, the way in which a house, while serving the vital need of shelter, is also a means of projecting and realizing human values,¹⁶ or that in which a meal, while providing nutrition, can also be a social ritual or even a religious rite.

A fundamental aspect of Merleau-Ponty's account of the distinctively human structure of behavior—of mind—is that he conceives it as inherently intentional, in a phenomenological sense. Human behavior is not adequately understood unless it is understood as being directed toward a sphere of objects which are significant for it. And the most primorial of such objects are, he says, the actions of other human subjects, followed by “cultural objects” and “use objects.”¹⁷ The natural “object” in the classical sense, whose primacy the philosophical tradition has generally assumed, is rather a derivative phenomenon.

Merleau-Ponty does not connect as explicitly as he could the notion that mind is constituted by symbolic forms of behavior, and this claim that human consciousness is primordially directed toward the actions of other human subjects. But it is not difficult to grasp a relation between them. Questions of priority aside, the capacity for symbolic forms of behavior and that for grasping other instantiations of such forms would seem to be intimately interrelated. But Merleau-Ponty is more concerned, in this context, with some other implications of his reasoning. His stress on intentionality, rather than self-presence, as essential to the mental, and his account of human consciousness or mentality as rooted in a variety of subordinate structures, enables him to reject as an abstraction the traditional characterization of mind as total self-presence. On this account, self-knowledge is not an a priori and unqualified property of mind, but rather an accomplishment¹⁸—and one which is, moreover, always incomplete.

There is no doubt a rich field for controversy in many of Merleau-Ponty's claims, which I have summarized quite briefly here. My chief concern is not, however, with the details for Merleau-Ponty's account of mind, but with its more general features, and particularly his claim that mind may be regarded as a “structure of behavior”—as being constituted by symbolic forms of behavior. When it is viewed at this general level, I think it is clear that there is no great difference between Merleau-Ponty's position and Ryle's conception of the “mental” as disposition to behavior of various sorts. No doubt Ryle would agree on the importance of symbols in human behavior. Perhaps the major difference here is Merleau-Ponty's stress on the intentionality of human behavior—that it must be understood as addressing a field of objects which are significant for it. I suspect that Ryle might accede to some adequately-Anglicized translation of this claim, and would agree with Merleau-Ponty that human behavior is not mere movement of a physical body; but since he lacks an account of the body, or a developed conception of intentionality, this must be regarded as a lacuna in his thought.

On the question of the public or private nature of mind, I think Merleau-Ponty's position is subtler, if less developed, than Ryle's. Like Ryle, he denies that mind is properly defined by its presences to itself, and thus made a priori inaccessible to the “external observer.” He does not, however, go to the other extreme by denying to a human being any “inner” grasp of himself, a position which Ryle's general reasoning—if not all his specific statements—seems to imply. Merleau-Ponty states his position as follows:

The mental … is knowable from outside. Better still, introspection itself is a procedure of knowledge which is homogeneous with external observation. For what it gives us, when it is communicated, is not lived experience itself, but an account in which language plays the role of a general training … and which does not essentially differ from the circumstantial training employed by the objective method. The child who is supposed to say what colors seem similar to him and the ape which has been trained to put all the tokens of the same color in a cup are in the same situation. Nothing is changed when the subject is instructed to interpret his reactions himself, which is the characteristic of introspection. When he is asked if he can read the letters written on a board … he will not rely on a vague “impression of legibility.” He will try to read or to describe what is presented to him.¹⁹

I think it is fair to say that, for Merleau-Ponty, mind as a structure of bahavior transcends the distinction between the “inner” and the “outer.” Inner life, to be intelligible to others or to itself, must be expressible through publicly-communicable meaning-structures. One might add, in the spirit of remarks made by Merleau-Ponty elsewhere, that in general speech is thought²⁰—that, contrary to most of the philosophical tradition, there is quite literally “thinking out loud”—and that, conversely, our silent thought takes the form of words, and thus is “behavior” in a broad sense.²¹ But Merleau-Ponty's basic point here seems to depend on his conception of the intentionality of consciousness (or “mind,” or human behavior)—that it is fundamentally not a self-encapsulated “inner” sphere, but is inherently of a public world. He indicates, indeed, that the openness upon such a world, and the grasp of it from a perspective which is uniquely one's own, through experiences which are in some sense “private,” are not opposed, but concordant truths.²²

This matter touches on what is perhaps the most fundamental difference between Merleau-Ponty's and Ryle's approaches—namely, that Merleau-Ponty (especially in the concluding pages of the Structure) raises the question the subject, asking for whom behavior is significant, by whom it can be grasped in its truth, whereas Ryle neglects this dimension. Merleau-Ponty often accuses certain scientific thinkers of a kind of hypocrisy on this point,²³ in that they assume their own access to a real and objective world, while developing a conception of reality which seems to shut human consciousness up within the body, thus both presupposing the standpoint and denying the rights of subjectivity. Ryle seems vulnerable to an analogous charge. Surely it is not behavior per se, but behavior observed in some fashion which is the basis for the ascription of mental predicates. But what is the status of this observer—or, more precisely, this observation? Is the latter nothing but another bit of behavior which must itself be observed if it is to provide the basis of any assertion? If so, an epistemological infinite regress would follow. A subject must somewhere be located, and in fact Ryle's discussion seems to presuppose a subject, but its status is not clarified.

Merleau-Ponty's answer is that it is the perceiving subject—and thus an embodied and behaving subject—who must fundamentally grasp the meaningfulness of the various structures of behavior. The intellectual constructions of science and the concepts of common sense and common speech are attempts to explicate an “original text” which is the perceived world itself. The perceptual world contains a “multiplicity of structures”—natural objects, animals, cultural objects, oneself and other human beings—which are not mere “subjective appearances” that ought to disappear before the objectifying gaze of science or in the face of an abstract dualism. But to point to this “primacy of perception” in Merleau-Ponty's philosophy is not only to indicate his differences from Ryle and from a world-view based on modern physical science, it is also to indicate where he differs from most of the phenomenological tradition, and to suggest a sphere of problems which are more fully addressed in Phenomenology of Perception and other works which lie beyond the scope of the present paper.

Notes

1. See, for example, Samuel B. Mallin's recent Merleau-Ponty's Philosophy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), which omits treatment of the Structure.

2. On this point I disagree with Geraets' excellent Vers une nouvelle philosophie transcendentale (La Haye: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971).

3. The few comparisons of Ryle and Merleau-Ponty with which I am familiar focus on the Phenomenology rather than the Structure, which is much more interesting in this respect. See, for example, P. Dubois, “Ryle et Merleau-Ponty: Faut-il exorciser le fântome qui se cache dans la machine humaine?” (Revue Philosophique, No. 3—Juillet-Septembre 1970, pp. 299-317.

4. Merleau-Ponty, La Structure de Comportment (3rd ed., Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1953) p. 198. Translations from this work, which will hereafter be abbreviated SC, are my own. Page references to corresponding passages in the English translation—The Structure of Behavior, trans. by Alden L. Fisher (Beacon Press: Boston, 1963)—will be given parentheses, using the abbreviation SB.

5. Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1949), pp. 13-14.

6. See, for example, his statement that our thinking often involves “internal monologue or silent soliloquy, usually accompanied by an internal cinematographshow of visual imagery.”

7. Ibid, p. 27.

8. Such a view of Ryle's position seems to be involved in Hampshire's account of its major thesis as “Not Two-Worlds, but One World; not a Ghost, but a Body …” Stuart Hampshire, “Critical Notice” of The Concept of Mind, (Mind, Vol. LIX-1950), p. 237.

9. SC, p. 1. (SB, p. 3.)

10. Ibid., p. 8 (SB, p. 10.)

11. Ibid., p. 2. (SB, p. 4.)

12. Ibid., p. 227. (SB, p. 210.)

13. Ibid., p. 157. (My italics.) (SB, p. 145.)

14. Ibid., p. 132. (SB, pp. 121-122.)

15. Ibid., p. 133 (SB, p. 122.)

16. Ibid., p. 188. In this context, Merleau-Ponty adds to his earlier assertions the somewhat Nietzschean claim that “what defines the human being is not the capacity to create a second nature—economic, social, cultural—beyond biological nature; it is rather [the capacity] to go beyond created structures in order to create others.” SC, p. 189. (SB, p. 175.)

17. Ibid., pp. 179-186. (SB, pp. 166-172.)

18. See La Structure du Comportment, pp. 237-240. (SB, pp. 220-223.)

19. Ibid., p. 198. (SB, p. 183.)

20. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (Sixth impression, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974), p. 389.

21. For an interesting parallel, see B. F. Skinner's notion of “covert behavior” in his About Behaviorism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974), p. 27.

22. See La Structure du Comportment, pp. 228-237. (SB, pp. 211-220.)

23. See, for Example, Phenomenology of Perception, p. ix.