After Finitude has determined the dominant form of Continental Philosophy. One is reminded of the saying that a ‘philosopher has only one idea’. While this may not be true, it is often the case that readers derive one essential problem from a meaningful text, as an extension of its prescriptive and analytic powers. This work actually introduces numerous new and, if not new, clear problematics that produce an immediate vertigo of thought. And while not everyone will agree with his conclusions, or even agree that there is a problem at all (and solution) there is no doubt of the novelty therein.
The book centers upon a philosophical problem that likely bothers all new entrants to metaphysics. That is, if all of reality is necessarily mediated by thinking, and if humans cannot conceive of reality without thought as part of that conception, how can philosophy account for the discoveries of modern science? This problematic is essential for multiple reasons. The first is entirely practical and historical. The Sokal affair made explicit the underlying social relationship between the European philosophical intelligentsia and scientists. I can imagine the import of this event as being diminished for the intelligentsia. The whole controversy was marked by disingenuous interests and, from a moral standpoint, the philosophical class still related working science with an obstinate form of capitalist technology. It is apparent in the moralism of late Heidegger and the skepticism of Derrida, wherein both relate the holocaust, and naturally the whole technical war economy, with an essentially alienated concept of technics. As such to oppose science was to resist reification, For contemporary readers of philosophy this social position is no longer sufficient in describing a crisis of thought. Science, despite its own conceptual modesty after Popper’s description of science as theories always open to falsification, verification and revision, has produced both concrete and counterintuitive knowledge of reality. For Meillassoux this impasse between the philosophical status quo (which extends even to much of the thought which undergirds Analytics and Philosophy of the Mind) and science is an essential problem. He notes that from a philosophical perspective scientists, even unconsciously, follow a naive realism similar to the view of Descartes. A scientist will readily admit that we acquire all sense, knowledge and information through consciousness. However the results of science, roughly equivalent to that which is mathematical--just as Descartes reduced that which subsists beyond thought as qualities and quantities of extension and as such the geometric--are real and external to any thought. Meillassoux crystalizes this difference between Science and its naive realism and what he calls Correlationism--the philosophical perspective that either there is no access to reality without some mediation by thinking, or in its more intensive form, that reality is the intersection of thought and the world--through what he calls the ancestral problem.
Science has come to make numerous propositions about phenomena, the age of the universe, the age of the earth, of fossils and so on which place them well beyond the possibility of consciousness and of being given to consciousness. Meillassoux points out that an immediate response is that this objection can be interpreted as a common and trivial objection to idealism, which is that in the case of either time or space that we can imagine a period or distance outside of possible experience for humans. The philosopher responds that one must imagine an ideal subject, rather than a real subject that could have perceived these events. Meillassoux points out what he conceives of as the ancestral is different from the ancient, which is what the question of distance in space and time implies. The ancestral is not simply distant in time but anterior in time. What this implies is that consciousness does not simply have a range of possible experience, but also a real becoming in time. Human consciousness expresses a real aggregate of possibilities in time and in a history. While this will come to problematize other arguments he makes (more to that in time), in and of itself this proposition is incredibly important and could be taken further.
Meillassoux makes clear how he imagines the transcendental subject, the whole of knowledge as an abstract totality, relates with real events. If the ancestral problematizes human thinking through its anterior existence in time, then the transcendental subject is bound by time and transformed by it, making him consistent with Heidegger and ontology in general. What makes this observation difficult is twofold. Meillassoux’s interest is in reviving materialism in a form that withstands correlationism’s core arguments. His means of accomplishing this is in rejecting the Principle of Sufficient Reason. As he reads sufficient reason, via Leibniz, it is the concept which determines the presumption that all objects have a determinate reason to be as they are and not otherwise. And while he does not say so, I assume he would find equivalent falsity in the Spinozan idea of an infinite series of causes. As Leibniz conceives it truth is either necessary or contingent. Necessary truths are those that can be derived from their definitions (as is the case with pure mathematics) and whose negative proposition (and as such its counterfactuals, which is very important to Meillassoux, given his materialist transcendental subject) would result in a contradiction. Instead Meillassoux imagines facticity as completely contingent, and that the apparent unreason in our knowledge of nature is not a lack in our being but rather that it is immanent to our thinking. While this could be taken as hypostatizing or even anthropomorphizing the present character of our thinking onto reality, Meillassoux does not mean this in a qualitative sense, as if reality had some character of non-sense implicit to it, but instead in a formal sense, insofar as the quantity and possibilities of reality embody potential ways of being extrinsic to determinate natural laws. He argues that the totality of possible worlds is transfinite and as such not conceptually totalizable. While this may appear to conflate an epistemological problem with an ontological one, it is consistent from the perspective of a concrete transcendental subject. One cannot conceive of a transfinite set of possible worlds because that set is transfinite insofar as it is bound by time and a series of events. The contingency is one which emerges and does so chaotically. We cannot possibly conceive of this transfinite set of possible worlds just as it cannot be rendered a probability, that in-itself is simultaneously rigorously contingent and does not necessitate thought.
Now the staunch correlationist will observe, as I did, Meillassoux’s emphasis on the materiality of the transcendental subject. Levi Bryant, a representative of the philosophies of givenness, raised the particularly Deleuzian problem of individuation, one which Meillassoux addresses for him insufficiently. The latter defines instantiation--as it relates to exemplification--using the concept of individuation. Individuals instantiate entities that cannot be separate from them, for instance I instantiate my voice with its particular timbre, I act in relationships and instantiate my social affect; while individuals exemplify that which can be imagined as separate from them. I exemplify a political party, I exemplify people who wear black clothing, just as my shirt instantiates this particular shade, texture and shape of its phenomenal qualities. For Bryant this return to primary and secondary qualities does not put to rest the question of the individuation of a transcendental subject. If as Meillassoux points out, the transcendental subject was born in the world and as such is determined in time and by events then one cannot ignore the question of givenness. Bryant is partially correct in identify this as the origin of Meillassoux’s conceptual problems, though it is incorrect in returning to the whole correlationist circle. One should take Meillassoux seriously in trying to think outside of this problematic, as both the practical example of Scientific enterprise as well as the pragmatic philosophical problem of the ancestral justify altered thinking. Instead one should ask why wouldn’t the birth of consciousness be imagined as contingent, even if it historical. The real ancestral is instead what is impossible to be thought by consciousness, not what could or could not have been experienced at a given time. In truth if we are to argue from the position of naive realism, if even only for experiment, then one could easily imagine a range of ancestral possibilities in our present reality more to do with the range of real human possibilities (passing the event horizon of a black hole, seeing with our eyes at the quantum level, moving beyond the speed of light) that provide ancestral problems that are answered with counterintuitive and often novel transformations of the transcendental subject (imagine the production of new elements through particle accelerators or the discovery of new exotic particles).
If one continues down this conceptual end, and here I engage in my explicit Deleuzianism, Meillassoux seems to hold on to a retrograde concept of the transcendental subject as he imagines consciousness and perception as singular and static objects. Not only do the regimes of real signs make it so that one can imagine a stratified and multiple consciousness where the possible thoughts of the transcendental subject are different depending on the individual or aggregate of individuals, but also that species and organisms have a range of mechanisms of signification, here one can imagine Von Uexkull’s bio-semiotics as a useful touchstone, that would radically transform their reality and as such the real range of their behavior. While from an epistemological standpoint it might be necessary to imagine an entirely contingent aggregation of truths unlimited by a transfinite and infinite possibility of aggregations, as well as the possibility almost entire and wholesale revision through a shocking event at an ontological level--though it is unclear what we gain from this over and against the evidence of experience (here the scientist would beg Occam’s Razor)--it seems as an extension of contingency and denial of sufficient reason that it is irrelevant how or why this or that transcendental order (be it some social group, the perception of a species of animal, or the photosynthesis of plants) has a problem of ancestrality with some phenomena in time (range of color for a given species, possibility of production, potential experiences that are anterior to their subjection) but instead that they do as indicated by their way of being. As Meillassoux stands we would only find a new philosophical impasse in relation to basic scientific practice, where the formally external order of mathematics is privileged over the qualitative reality of physical science. Instead by radically emphasizing the contingency of the transcendental subject, one can both reduplicate the previously epistemological problem of transfinite possible worlds onto the ontological through transfinite aggregates of concepts, and one could also account for the real range of input-output structures in the world by de-emphasizing our phenomenal access to various species and their signify systems, while in parallel rendering the range of socially determined regimes of conscious as more heterogeneous and in the process affirming the insights of late Wittgenstein, as in when he says “The sad man’s world is not the same as the happy man’s”.
It is worth noting, as Chomsky does, that while many philosophers take science to have affirmed the machine in the ghost in the machine, seeing in Descartes’ dualism a real mechanistic causal structure, rather than a mediate mind, the aftermath of Newton, in the history of science, was to destroy the rationalist imagination of nature as a mechanism whose truth was instantiated in working models. Instead as physics was rendered through relating forces, science came to see its truth instead in abstract theoretical models whose facticity is independently determined and whose description is rarely analogous with mechanism, as one finds in neurophilosophy and its computational metaphors. Similarly the demand for an exact materialism, in the original sense of belief that reality as matter is just as little needed as the textualist skepticism of Derrida. A philosophy surpassing correlationism would maximally account for that which occurs anterior to thought in time, as I believe Meillassoux does, however it would also engage with what it means to be anterior in time, and engage the possibility of an event existing in anteriority to a thing’s time, as this would represent many of the secondary qualities exemplified by a thing. This would give worthwhile respect to the Kantian distinction between the a priori and a posteriori which would further demonstrate the contingency and non-necessity of reality, as events as primary qualitative instantiations would be produced and affected by secondary qualities learned a posteriori in the transcendental subject.
Philosophy needs a new way of thinking, that approaches reality with a dynamism equal to it, that comes to recognize the continuum (a continuum which Meillassoux denies in favor of a difference in kind) between what we mean by matter and mind, This would be in favor of recognizing an externality to consciousness, but in doing so acknowledging the consciousness external to consciousness, in its multiple sense as Deleuze described, or in its plastic sense as Malabou has recently written of. The naive realism of science is not just an acknowledgement of a mathematical outside, but also a significant outside stratified by and relating between various species and functions. Inevitably what is represented as function may contain an unreality that divides current qualitative understanding to a greater extent than we can approximate the already extreme abstraction to that of a bat in the case of its echolocation, or a an elephant and its experience of sound and vibration through various membranes, that of a snake and its ion-channel which takes in the infrared, or a the energetic photosynthesis of a plant and its cell membranes and action potentials. As quantum mechanics suggests a vast multiverse separated both by ancient relations of time and space, as well as anterior relations of dimension; as well as universes whose physics would be determined by entirely contingent factors and whose possibilities are themselves transfinite and novel; and the possibility that the empirical and extension are effects of holographic information encoded at a subparticle level we now have present ancestral problematics, entirely outside of the essentially spatial-biological problem of sensory systems and possible experience of sensory events (i.e. living organisms cannot experience the core of a star) or the temporal-evental problem of fossils and the birth or observability of the universe (that consciousness did not or could not occur as it happened as a real line of individuation). The problem is now that reality may demonstrate entirely counterintuitive and novel laws that in terms of history instantiate a robust novelty and iterate a non-qualitative and non-empirical regime of facticity and meaningful signification. Philosophy should attain to understanding this both through epistemology and ontology (as I imagine many of these problems will come to be distinguished along these lines). And in time our semantic ascent--that is our questions about words and their ideas in-themselves, the metasemiotic aspect of language--insofar as the question of real instantiations of the transcendental subject is a question of semantic possibilities of people as they are determined empirically, will be seen as bearing on syntactic distinctions between transcendental subjects--i.e. does an isolated tribe share a transcendental subject if its syntatics were different as in the rare non I-form languages, or does an animal species possess a transcendental subject beyond a band or pack, when they possess no language or means of signification at the collective level?
In truth pragmatics has never had a problem of ancestrality and its value is instead determined by the value and novelty of its observations, both as fact and in relation to the more elliptical concept of truth, as Whitehead puts it. This is where Meillassoux does not quite understand Deleuze when he analogizes Deleuze’s life with concepts such as Hegel’s absolute knowledge or Schopenhauer’s will. Not only do lives, in Deleuze’s usage, not represent some absolute of the transcendental subject or even name the whole of sense of the world or knowledge of the world, but they are also pure virtuals, which is where events occur for Deleuze, whereas one would assume Meillassoux would locate them in the actual. What this means is that life does not name something but instead things make a life. The actual instantiates life, and as such one can exemplify a way of life in the sense of Heidegger as dasein is in-a-world, but their life is always a virtuality (a potential) in the process of being realized. Maybe he should not have used a biological term, itself so poorly defined. But his meaning should be well taken. Things are always grasping at potential, and this is true well beyond human things, an maybe beyond organisms altogether. That Meillassoux can add, through transfinite worlds to the possibilities of the world is exciting, as reality has continually proven more radical than thought. But we should not do so for a new conservative transcendentalism where the ancestral is taken only in its most limited sense as means of agreeing with an imaginary materialist science. Instead we should say it all and say it the most. That is the best that philosophy can do.
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