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80 5 The Expressivity of Animal Appearance and of Directive and Instinctual Activities When we try to survey the multiplicity of animal forms, every precipitate attempt at explanation is silenced by this profusion. In this diversity there are indeed the cases just mentioned— there is protective coloration, there is also warning coloration, and there is, to be sure, deceptive similarity; but they are all reduced to single cases in which we find a utilitarian sense of the coloration or form of the animal body to be particularly striking. But what does this one-sidedly selected cabinet of curiosities amount to in the face of the wild, exuberant profusion of form-production in the garden of creatures! —Adolf Portmann, Die Tiergestalt (1960) From the embryology of behavior and of animals’ environing worlds, as considered so far, Merleau-Ponty turns to animal activities in their mature specificity and with a view to their oriented or quasi-teleological character, as well as to mimicry, animal appearance, and the nature of instinct. His initial partner in dialogue is Edward S. Russell, whose The Directiveness of Organic Activities appeared in 1946.1 Russell holds that biological processes are irreducible to processes of a simpler order, such as physico-chemical ones, and that the living organism must be understood as a dynamic system (he refers here to Coghill) oriented toward selfdevelopment , self-maintenance, reproduction, and finally senescence, within the compass of its life cycle. Unlike inorganic systems, which tend toward equilibrium and stability, the organism tends toward a mature end state that is “a highly complex and unstable organization, which can be maintained in being only by constant activity of an elaborate and coordinated kind.”2 One hears here the echo of Gesell and Amatruda’s prin- 81 T H E E X P R E S S I V I T Y O F A N I M A L A P P E A R A N C E A N D O F D I R E C T I V E A N D I N S T I N C T U A L A C T I V I T I E S ciples of self-regulatory fluctuation and of optimal tendency, as well as, more remotely, of Spinoza’s notion of conatus, which Russell indeed explicitly acknowledges in his concluding chapter on “The Concept of the Organism,” quoting (without giving the reference) from Proposition 7 of Part 3 of Spinoza’s Ethics: “The striving by which each thing strives to persevere in its being is the actual essence of the thing.”3 Russell rejects teleology or vitalism no less than mechanism or materialism , advocating instead a “free biology” that will not shy away from recognizing that “directiveness and creativity are fundamental characteristics of life.”4 Directiveness may express itself in the three registers of behavior, physiology, and morphoplastics (as an example of the latter, Russell points to the development of an uncharacteristic thick coat by giraffes wintering largely in the open at the Hamburg zoo). He explores directiveness or orientation with regard to the complexities of wound healing, structural repairs (such as those of variously damaged larval casings ), the satisfaction of metabolic needs under unfavorable conditions, and reproduction. One of his most striking examples of directive behavior and physiology, and one that is taken up by Merleau-Ponty, is that of Microstoma, a marine fish.5 As Merleau-Ponty, following Russell, elaborates, Microstoma relies for self-defense on an array of stinging nematocysts deployed in a regular pattern over its entire body surface. It does not, however, produce these weapons but must take them from the hydra, which is dangerous to it, and which it will not generally prey on. If it is lacking in nematocysts, however, it will attack the hydra, seeking to paralyze it partially by its oral secretions, and, if successful, eating its flesh. The nematocysts of the hydra are not digested but are transported to Microstoma’s mesoderm, each by an endodermal cell, and eventually to the ectoderm, where they are properly spaced and oriented. Starving exemplars of Microstoma that have their normal complement of nematocysts still remain reluctant to prey on hydra; and when they at last do so, they eat its flesh but reject the nematocysts. If well fed but lacking their weapons, in contrast, Microstoma will reject the hydra’s flesh but ingest the nematocysts. Finally, if a laboratory strain of Microstoma that have had no contact with hydra for forty-nine...

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