Realism, Anti-Realism, and Materialism

Abstract

Quentin Meillassoux has recently leveled a controversial attack on critical philosophy and the transcendental turn through his concept of correlationism. This critique is motivated by the attempt to move away from a philosophy of human finitude towards a speculative materialism. In this paper I argue that Meillassoux’s understanding of correlationism does not adequately depict the critical turn, especially in regards to the distinction between the epistemological problem of realism and the problem of materialism. I attempt to show that by reading the critical turn as anti-epistemological one can think of its turn away from things themselves towards relation and mediation in ways that are not necessarily against either science or materialism.

Keywords:

• critical philosophy
• materialism
• realism
• correlationism

Notes

I would like to thank the “Cornell Theory Reading Group” for the opportunity to present and discuss the ideas in this paper. Their conferences have been a perfect model of what true interdisciplinary and open inquiry in the humanities should be like. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewer at Angelaki for comments on an earlier draft.

1. Badiou 157–78.

2. For an informative and sympathetic review of Meillassoux's book, see Harman.

3. For a more detailed presentation of the concept of correlationism, see Harman; and Brassier 58–69.

4. Meillassoux, After Finitude 5–9.

5. Ibid. 9–14.

6. Ibid. 7.

7. Ibid. 118.

8. Ibid. 177.

9. This second part of the argument is criticized by Hallward 51–57. The question of whether or not mathematics can do the work that Meillassoux wants it to do is beyond the scope of this paper. However, since my goal is to deny that materialism must involve either realism or the ability to think the absolute, the argument of whether mathematics can help us think the absolute ontologically is beside the point. Although there is an interesting debate to be had about whether Cantorian mathematics can help us produce a speculative position that is both materialist and realist, the present paper wants to claim that we can circumvent the epistemological problems of realism (and, for that matter, nominalism about mathematical objects) by remaining within a tradition of correlationism that is materialist and anti-epistemological.

10. Cf. Althusser 9:

• Materialism expresses the effective conditions of the practice that produces knowledge – specifically: (1) the distinction between the real and its knowledge (distinction of reality), correlative of a correspondence (adequacy) between knowledge and its object (correspondence of knowledge); and (2) the primacy of the real over its knowledge, or the primacy of being over thought. None the less, these principles themselves are not “eternal” principles, but the principles of the historical nature of the process in which knowledge is produced.

11. Meillassoux, After Finitude 36.

12. Braver.

13. Dummett.

14. Meillassoux, After Finitude 52.

15. Ibid. 54.

16. Ibid.

17. Ibid. 58.

18. Hallward 54.

19. Rorty 213–312.

20. Hacking 57:

• There are two ways in which to criticize a proposal, doctrine, or dogma. One is to argue that it is false. Another is to argue that it is not even a candidate for truth or falsehood. Call the former denial, the latter undoing.

21. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit 47–48.

22. Heidegger, Being and Time 246–47.

23. Adorno 192.

24. Latour 1–23, 145–73.

25. Daston and Galison; and Galison.

26. Putnam.

27. Quine.

28. Marx 99.

29. Fichte 29–85.

30. Althusser 248.

31. Meillassoux, After Finitude 36.

32. Kant 59.

33. Ibid. 87.

34. Rémi Brague has understood this about the Copernican turn in his study of the concept of world and cosmos in Western thought:

• The physical world is incapable of sufficiency as a concept of world; it is not “worldly” enough. Kant thus carries out an essential uncoupling: the idea of world is liberated from physics. The world enters into the ethical realm in the guise of the intelligible world. (Brague 223)

35. Kant 577.

36. Ibid. 305.

37. Fichte 31.

38. Ibid.

39. For his most systematic description of this distinction, see especially “Doctrine of Essence” in the Science of Logic 444–80.

40. Hegel, Philosophy of Nature 6.

41. Hegel already sees, although not in the same respect, the distinction between Richtigkeit and Wahrheit that would be made famous by Heidegger. See his distinction between correctness in the qualitative judgment and truth as found through the Begriff:

• It is one of the most fundamental logical prejudices that qualitative judgments such as: “The rose is red,” or: “is not red,” can contain truth. Correct they may be, but only in the restricted confines of perception, finite representation, and thinking; this depends on the content which is just as finite, and untrue on its own account. But the truth rests only on the form, i.e., on the posited Concept and the reality that corresponds to it; truth of this kind is not present in the qualitative judgment, however. (Hegel, Encyclopaedia Logic 249)

42. Heidegger, Basic Problems of Phenomenology 17. Thus when Heidegger famously articulates the correlation between Dasein and Being in Being and Time, he simultaneously has this restriction to the ontological domain in mind. One can quote the famous sentence to support Meillassoux's point between the co-belonging thinking and being in the correlationist thesis: “Of course only as long as Dasein is (that is, only as long as an understanding of Being is ontically possible), ‘is there’ Being [‘gibt es’ Sein]” (Heidegger, Being and Time 255). But this statement can only be understood with the often omitted previous sentence, which reads: “But the fact that Reality is ontologically grounded in the Being of Dasein, does not signify that only when Dasein exists and as long as Dasein exists, can the Real be as that which in itself it is” (ibid.). In distinguishing between Realität as grounded within an understanding of being and das Reales, the Real that exists ontically independent of and indifferent to Dasein's existence or non-existence, Heidegger allows for an ancestral statement to be correct in regards to its ontic determination independently of the correlationist thesis that there is only being as long as Dasein is.

43. Althusser 244.

44. Badiou.

45. Pippin 177.