Merleau-Ponty, Passivity and Science: From Structure, Sense and Expression, to Life as Phenomenal Field, via the Regulatory Genome

I argue that something more is at stake in Merleau-Ponty’s engagement with science than a mere dialectic with another discipline. This is because his methodological commitments end up positioning science as a special resource for pursuing deep ontological concerns that increasingly haunt his philosophy. I show this by connecting points in the Phenomenology’s “Phenomenal Field” chapter to his methodological challenge to the view that philosophy begins from a wholly active, autonomous, reflective consciousness. I link this to issues of passivity in a way that reveals science as a potential resource for grasping reflection not as autonomous, but as an operation of and within the phenomenal field—as radical reflection. Via critical analysis of recent results about the regulatory genome, I then show how current embryology can help us conceptualize life as a phenomenal field that implicitly engenders the sorts of revelatory operations distinctive of phenomenality. This lets us position phenomenology not merely as a reflection on phenomena from above, but as a radical reflection that operates through an ‘older’ phenomenality of life. This also give insights into some difficult issues in Merleau-Ponty’s later philosophy, by suggesting a new route to them through combining his earlier philosophy with recent science