This post is a translation of a review of Après la finitude (After Finitude), the debut book of Quentin Meillassoux. The original is Quentin Meillassoux: A New French Philosopher (Graham Harman, 2009).
Meillassoux is sometimes funny and witty, as a continental philosophers aspire to.
It offers bold readings of the history of philosophy—Aristotle is not realist enough, Hume not skeptical enough. It shows bursts of scathing wit, as when drawing wry parallels between the anti-Darwinian reveries of creationism and major schools of present-day philosophy.
What is this wry parallel? We will see.
The very title After Finitude will be enough to startle present-day continental thought, since human finitude has been perhaps the central credo of the field from the time of its birth.
Okay. How does that work? Basically, "continental philosophy" has been based on the idea that humans are finite and can know nothing absolute, since absolute knowledge should be true everywhere, everywhen, and to know that requires one to check it for an infinite amount of time, at an infinite amount of places, and after thinking an infinite number of thoughts about it.
But what about math?
No Platonism! Math is just thought-patterns that humans have managed to reproduce faithfully through the years. It does not point to a higher reality, and it does not lead to absolutely true knowledge, only knowledge that is currently useful.
"After Finitude" means just "Get over this talk of finitude! Humans can know absolute things.".
One of the typical features of recent continental thought is its contempt for so-called “naïve realism.” The human being is now firmly established as the point of entry for all serious philosophy... The notion of an objective world-in-it-self seems to elude our grasp. Nonetheless, few authors have faced this predicament with full-blown absolute idealism à la Berkeley—if not quite “naïve,” such extreme idealism strikes most of us as gratuitous and bizarre amidst the undeniable blows of the world. This leaves philosophy in an ambiguous position, neither realist nor idealist.
Time for a philosophy dictionary:
- Metaphysics: What exists? How do they exist?
- Realism: There is a reality that exists even if everyone died.
- Descartes' realism: I think, therefore I exist. I can prove that God exists. Since God won't cheat me about something so fundamental as metaphysics, my realist belief about the world is true. Therefore naive realism is true. Oh and souls exist as a ghost in the shell of the physical body.
- Idealism: Everything is thought up, and if nobody ever thinks about something, it would no longer exist. If everybody dies, the universe disappears as well.
- Berkeley's extreme idealism: Everything is a thought in the mind of God. God is literally dreaming up the world. Even you would stop existing if God stops thinking about you.
- Hegel's absolute idealism: Yes, everything is made of rational thought, and there is actually just one big thought: the world spirit. You and me, trees and birds, stones and songs, are all aspects of the world spirit. The world spirit is debating itself on a journey of self-discovery, with the end point being total enlightenment and everything will be wonderful.
- Kant's transcendental idealism: Let's compromise! Things are real, and they exist even if nobody is alive, and there is also a world of ideas in our minds. However, these two worlds are separated by an impenetrable wall, and all we can know are what things look like to us ("their givenness"). Nothing at all can be known about the things in themselves. Not even causality, space, and time. Everything we know about the things are like colors: they don't exist in the things, but are our mental projections on the world. A world without us would have no color, causality, space, time, etc.
- Schopenhauer: Kant is right. We know neither ourselves nor things as they are in themselves, but merely as they appear.
- Immanent: can be checked by experiences. Scientific.
- Transcendental: can't be checked by experiences. Unscientific.
- Dogmatic: Don't question the axioms.
- Critique: What if better axioms.
- Skeptic: Axioms all suck if I look closely.
- Heidegger: If I take everything that humans have ever written about how the world appears to them ("phenomelogy"), I can figure out a bit more what the world is.
- Derrida: There is nothing outside the text. Things might be real, but not only can't we know about them, it's not even fun to talk about them. Let's talk about texts and read them extremely carefully.
For those entities that exist prior to all human life, Meillassoux coins the term “archifossil,” and describes them as having “ancestrality” (24–26). In his view, the correlationists will always be at a loss when trying to deal with the ancestral archifossil. Their likely maneuver is a predictable one... They will say that “the physical universe is not really known to precede the existence of humans, or at least the existence of living creatures; the world has meaning only as given to a living or thinking being”. They will try to reduce scientific statements about ancestral stellar explosions and mudslides to the means of scientific givenness of these events, just as in positivism or verificationism.
So correlationists leave scientists practice what they do, but always add a little clause that changes their meaning completely. Instead of "Earth formed 4.5 billion years ago." it is "Earth formed 4.5 billion years ago, it appears to me."
Now we can understand how some Kantian philosophers can sound like anti-Darwinian creationism:
Confronted with the arche-fossil, every variety of idealism converges and becomes equally extraordinary – every variety of correlationism is exposed as an extreme idealism... And our correlationist then finds herself dangerously close to contemporary creationists: those quaint believers who assert today, in accordance with a ‘literal’ reading of the Bible, that the earth is no more than 6,000 years old, and who, when confronted with the much older dates arrived at by science, reply unperturbed that God also created at the same time as the earth 6,000 years ago those radioactive compounds that seem to indicate that the earth is much older than it is – in order to test the physicists’ faith. Similarly, might not the meaning of the archifossil be to test the philosopher’s faith in correlation, even when confronted with data which seem to point to an abyssal divide between what exists and what appears?
In plain words:
- The young-earth creationists claim that the world really is 6000 years old, and those ancient fossils were just God's test on our faith in young-earth creationism.
- The correlationists claim that the properties (such as weight and shape) of fossils could not really exist before humans came along, and those ancient fossils were just a test on our faith in correlationism.
If we look through the aperture which we have opened up onto the absolute, what we see there is a rather menacing power – something insensible, and capable of destroying both things and worlds, of bringing forth monstrous absurdities, yet also of never doing anything, of realizing every dream, but also every nightmare, of engendering random and frenetic trans- formations, or conversely, of producing a universe that remains motionless down to its ultimate recesses, like a cloud bearing the fiercest storms, then the eeriest bright spells, if only for an interval of disquieting calm. We see an omnipotence equal to that of the Cartesian God, and capable of anything, even the inconceivable; but an omnipotence that has become autonomous, without norms, blind, devoid of the other divine perfections, a power with neither goodness nor wisdom, ill-disposed to reassure thought about the veracity of its distinct ideas. We see something akin to Time, but a Time that is inconceivable for physics, since it is capable of destroying, without cause or reason, every physical law, just as it is inconceivable for metaphysics, since it is capable of destroying every determinate entity, even a god, even God. This is not a Heraclitean time, since it is not the eternal law of becoming, but rather the eternal and lawless possible becoming of every law. It is a Time capable of destroying even becoming itself by bringing forth, perhaps forever, fixity, stasis, and death.
Why? Because there is no necessary reason for anything to be. Imagine a game of "why":
- Why do stars shine?
- Because stars are doing nuclear fusion.
- Why do nuclears fuse?
- Because laws of atomic physics
- Why laws of atomic physics?
- Because laws of string theory.
- Why laws of string theory?
- ...
Far from abolishing the value of the absolute, the process that continues to be referred to today as ‘the end of absolutes’ grants the latter an unprecedented licence – philosophers seem to ask only one thing of these absolutes: that they be devoid of the slightest pretension to rationality. The end of metaphysics, understood as the ‘de-absolutization of thought’, is thereby seen to consist in the rational legitimation of any and every variety of religious (or ‘poetico-religious’) belief in the absolute, so long the latter invokes no authority beside itself... Whereas a Christian disciple of Kant at least needed to demonstrate that the Trinity is not logically contradictory, even this minimal obligation has now vanished. Strong correlationism’s apparent modesty to-ward the absolute has in fact opened the gates to every possible form of arbitrary belief.
Basically, if philosophers forbid us to do metaphysics rationally, they leave space for people to do metaphysics by making stuff up without any pretense of rationality. And thus we get irrational religions again.
I am reminded of Borges' story (Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius) about a fictional country where Berkeley's idealism is true. In such a place, metaphysics is just a kind of creative writing.
The fact that every philosophy is by definition a dialectical game, a Philosophie des Als Ob, has caused them to multiply. There is an abundance of incredible systems of pleasing design or sensational type. The metaphysicians of Tlön do not seek for the truth or even for verisimilitude, but rather for the astounding. They judge that metaphysics is a branch of fantastic literature.
Primary qualities are thought to be properties of objects that are independent of any observer, such as solidity, extension, motion, number and figure. These characteristics convey facts. They exist in the thing itself, can be determined with certainty, and do not rely on subjective judgments... Secondary qualities are thought to be properties that produce sensations in observers, such as color, taste, smell, and sound. They can be described as the effect things have on certain people.
The unequivocal relinquishment of the principle of reason requires us to insist that both the destruction and the perpetual preservation of a determinate entity must equally be able to occur for no reason. Contingency is such that anything might happen, even nothing at all, so that what is, remains as it is.
Once that is claimed, Mei goes on to study what could be contingent. Whatever is contingent is possible, and whatever isn't contingent (except the law of Chaos) is impossible. He offers a "proof" that contradictory creatures, if they exist, must live forever, and even Daddy Chaos cannot kill it. But such a creature is not contingent, therefore contradictory creatures cannot exist.
Let us suppose that a contradictory entity existed – what could possibly happen to it? Could it lapse into non-being? But it is contradictory, so that even if it happened not to be, it would still continue to be even in not-being, since this would be in conformity with its paradoxical ‘essence’. It would exemplify the truth of the proposition: ‘what is, is not, and what is not, is.’ Perhaps it might be objected that in such a case, one could neither say that it is or that it is not? But this is not an option, since we are already assuming that such a contradictory entity exists. Therefore, by hypothesis, this entity exists, and so we must be content simply to examine the way in which this contradictory entity can exist. But it then becomes apparent that one of the defining characteristics of such an entity would be to continue to be even were it not to be. Consequently, if this entity existed, it would be impossible for it simply to cease to exist – unperturbed, it would incorporate the fact of not existing into its being. Thus, as an instance of a really contradictory being, this entity would be perfectly eternal.
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