Behavior as Form (Neither Thing Nor Consciousness)

The signature thesis of Merleau-Ponty's The Structure of Behavior — articulated at the end of Ch II and grounding the rest of the book: behavior is irreducibly a form, situated in neither of the two classical orders (in-itself / for-itself; physical / mental; thing / consciousness). The category of form (forme) is what MP introduces in Ch I §Conclusion as a new philosophical category — covering inorganic and organic alike — and what Ch II §Conclusion deploys to refuse both behaviorism and intellectualism in a single move.

Definitional anchor (SB Ch I §Conclusion, raw 682): "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." Form is transposability + integral modification under partial change.

The thesis-statement (SB Ch II §Conclusion, raw 1284): "It is precisely this which we wanted to say in stating that behavior is a form. … behavior is not a thing, but neither is it an idea." And the load-bearing methodological caveat (raw 1286): "But precisely for this reason the notion of form is ambiguous" — Ch III is required to think form in itself.

Key Points

  • The book's title-concept. La Structure du Comportement is asking what kind of being structure has, where structure is (i) indecomposable (against atomism) and (ii) not vital force (against vitalism).
  • Form is a new philosophical category, not a Gestalt-psychology technical term. SB Ch I raw 682: "It is not a question of risking one hypothesis among others, but of introducing a new category, the category of 'form,' which, having its application in the inorganic as well as the organic domain, would permit bringing to light the 'transverse functions' in the nervous system of which Wertheimer speaks and whose existence is confirmed by experience without a vitalist hypothesis." The category-introduction language is explicit.
  • Refuses both poles jointly: behaviorism (behavior as thing among things, sum of reflexes) AND intellectualism (behavior as projection of constituting consciousness). "There is, then, no behavior which certifies a pure consciousness behind it" (raw 1278) AND the cogito blocks behaviorism in principle (raw 1284). Both denials force the positive: "this is precisely what we wanted to say in stating that behavior is a form."
  • Opaque to the mind (raw 1282): "The structure of behavior as it presents itself to perceptual experience is neither thing nor consciousness; and it is this which renders it opaque to the mind." The opacity is not a deficit — it is constitutive of the phenomenon.
  • Form is irreducible to part-sums: the title-thesis at SB Ch I raw 670, that "the object of biology is to grasp that which makes a living being a living being … not the superposition of elementary reflexes or the intervention of a 'vital force,' but an indecomposable structure of behavior."

What the Concept Does

The category of "form" performs three argumentative jobs in SB:

  1. It dissolves the antinomy of mechanism and vitalism. Both treat behavior reductively: mechanism reduces to physical parts; vitalism reduces to a vital force. Form is a third term — irreducible to parts, but not added to them as a force. The category is what MP needs to do justice to the empirical phenomena (transverse functions, transposable space-traversal, field-of-forces equilibria, functional reorganization after lesion) without committing to either pole.

  2. It refuses the substantial divide between mental and physical. Behavior is neutral with respect to this divide (Introduction, raw 342: "neutral with respect to the classical distinctions between the 'mental' and the 'physiological'"). The category of form is what gives that neutrality philosophical content: form is not a thing-property, not a consciousness-property; it is the structural property that both sides need but that neither side can give itself.

  3. It sets up the Ch III rotation to ontology. By Ch II §Conclusion, MP has used "form" descriptively-methodologically. But "the notion of form is ambiguous" (raw 1286) — Ch III is required. There the descriptive-methodological "form" gets rotated into an ontological category: matter, life, and mind are three orders of significations (cf. three-orders-of-signification).

What It Rejects

  • Behaviorism / Watson / Pavlov: behavior as sum of reflexes, atomistic interpretation (Introduction raw 342; Ch II throughout)
  • Intellectualism / projective theories of empathy: behavior as projection of constituting consciousness (Ch II §Conclusion raw 1278)
  • Mechanism: productive causality between parts (Ch I §Conclusion raw 712)
  • Vitalism / Bergson's élan vital: vital force as added principle (Ch I §Conclusion; Ch III raw 1520)
  • Anatomical realism / longitudinal-arc reflex theory (Ch I throughout)
  • Functional reductionism: dissolving form into chronaxic distribution (Ch I raw 696)
  • All forms of "causal thought" at the level of behavior (Ch I §Conclusion raw 712: "we renounce mechanistic realism along with finalistic realism, that is, … all the forms of causal thought")

Stakes

If "behavior is form" is accepted, the entire philosophy of mind / philosophy of biology landscape is reconfigured. The classical problem ("how does the mind arise from / interact with the body?") is shown to be misposed: behavior is already the integrated phenomenon, neither mind nor body but their structural unity. The mental and the physical are abstractions from this structural unity; the question is not how to relate them but how to articulate what they are abstractions of.

This is what Phenomenology of Perception will then attempt to do positively. SB names form as the third term; PoP tries to give it phenomenological content via the lived body, motor intentionality, and the intentional arc. The 1942 thesis "behavior is form" is the negative-and-programmatic form of what PoP and Nature will later flesh out.

Problem-Space

The problem-space SB enters here is the Cartesian dualism of the in-itself and the for-itself, which MP locates as still operative in his contemporaries (Sartre's L'Être et le néant will name it explicitly three years after SB). MP's move is not to deny the dualism but to show that behavior is what the dualism cannot accommodate — and therefore that the dualism itself must be reformulated.

The problem-space recurs across MP's corpus:

  • Phenomenology of Perception: the lived body as the integrated third term (motor intentionality; "I can" rather than "I think").
  • Nature lectures: the philosophy of nature as the deepening of the integrated-third-term project, drawing on Uexküll, Schelling, Whitehead.
  • Visible and Invisible: the flesh as the chiasmic ontology — neither thing nor consciousness but their reversibility.

Connections

  • the title-thesis of merleau-ponty-1942-structure-of-behavior
  • grounds three-orders-of-signification — Ch III's rotation of "form" into ontology (form as three orders of signification)
  • grounds realism-as-well-founded-error — Ch IV's resolution depends on behavior-as-form
  • contrasts with behaviorism (Watson, Pavlov, Thorndike — Ch II)
  • contrasts with intellectualism (Brunschvicg, Lachelier, Lagneau — Ch IV)
  • contrasts with mechanism / vitalism / materialism / mentalism jointly (Ch I §Conclusion; Ch III throughout)
  • seed for motor-intentionality (PoP) — behavior as form as the seed of the lived body's structural integration
  • seed for the late ontology of wild-structure / wild-being / chiasm
  • applies gestalt-principles-of-unification to behavior and to the mind/body problem
  • engages Goldstein's Aufbau des Organismus — the organism as idea, Erkenntnissgrund/Seinsgrund distinction
  • engages Köhler — appropriative-with-criticism; adopts the field-of-forces hypothesis but warns it is one model among possible ones
  • enacts MP's "immanent critique with auxiliary-hypothesis diagnostics" — see propaedeutic-dialectic
  • closing thesis of SB Ch IV §Conclusion: "the duality of the notions of structure and signification" (raw 2048) — behavior-as-form is the phenomenon that duality is the duality of

Open Questions

  • Whether "form" in 1942 is already the late-ontology category that flesh / chiasm will name, or only its conceptual ancestor. The relation is genealogical: SB Ch I's form is the operative version that PhP will embody (in body-schema) and that Nature/V&I will ontologize (as flesh, dimension, element).
  • Whether the opacity to the mind (raw 1282) is a transient feature (we will eventually understand) or constitutive (form just is what resists complete intellectual grasp). MP gives both readings at different moments.
  • The relation to wild-structure (Morris 2024). Morris reads "classical Structure of Behaviour-style structures" as spatial-redistribution — a characterization that fits Ch III's soap-bubble / oil-drop physical-form examples but may understate the temporal-discontinuity germ at SB Ch III raw 1360. See claims#sb-ch3-contains-wild-structure-germ (candidate).

Sources

  • merleau-ponty-1942-structure-of-behavior — Ch I §Conclusion raw 682 (definitional); Ch II §Conclusion raw 1284 (the thesis-statement); Ch I §Gestalt Interpretation raw 670 ("indecomposable structure of behavior"); Ch I §Conclusion raw 712 (the renunciation of causal thought).