Skip to main content

Meillassoux, speculation and metaphysics: how my ideas fare

Enchanted by Meillassoux's distinction between what he calls the subjective metaphysician and what he calls the speculative philosophy. The former is somehow attached to the absolute character of the correlation (between thought and world), holding that the correlation itself is an absolute. Meillassoux mentions Hegel and insinuates that also Nietzsche and Deleuze would be part of this group. The latter finds the absolute not in the correlation but rather in its facticity (sort of instance of the generalized (and necessary) contingency of all things). The correlationist, in contrast, is the one who admits no absolute holding that the correlation has a primacy over any attempt to find something absolute while, at the same time, entertains a facticity. The speculative philosopher - but not the subjective metaphysician - takes these two correlationist claims on board. She is, then, the other, positive side of the correlationist criticism of the attempts to attain any sort of absolute.

The distinction is itself very interesting. I ask myself where each one of my following recent toy speculative (or metaphysical?) ideas would fare in the classification:
a) The anarché of the polemos: everything is available to desintegration through the intervention of the polemos - it makes everything up for grabs for everything else. This, I thought, would fare in the speculative side clearly and would be indeed very close to Meillassoux's idea that the contingent is necessary and there is no second order facticity. Necessity is always local and therefore at the hands of the multiple faces of the polemos. The polemos is not omniscient nor omnipresent, it is, though, omniabsent, an absence that let things (contingently) be for the moment. The polemos is the keeper of the vulnerability of things.
b) The ontology of doubt: the idea is that we can read the skeptical arguments not as entailing an epistemological indeterminacy facing an ontological determinacy but rather as establishing an ontological indeterminacy (and a respective epistemological determinacy). That is, that the world is itself made of doubts. There is no definite character of anything. So, anything can be something else. There are no truth makers but to statements concerning doubts about how things are. There are no facts or states of affairs, just doubts, just (ontological) indecision. This also seems close to Meillassoux's idea of the radical and absolute contingency of everything. And seems speculative enough - there is no appeal to the absoluteness of any correlation.
c) The metaphysics of some: the metaphysics of some holds that there are some things in the world, but nothing that can be pinpoint. The absolute is that something exists. Manuel and me toyed with this idea as a kind of metaphysical (or speculative) counterpart to what we take to be the thrust of Davidson's argument for the truth of some (in fact most) of our beliefs. This proximity could sound dangerous, we may be close to the subjective metaphysician line that correlations are absolute - say, the structure of our beliefs are absolute. But, again, as such, the metaphysics of some seems more speculative than metaphysics; indeed, Meillassoux interesting reply to Leibniz question about why there is something and not nothing is that there is something rather than something else (necessarily contingently). The absolute is not the correlation, but that there ought to be something (what is it is a matter of fact, of factuality, and maybe no speculative argument can establish).
d) Über-realism: this is where it gets a bit tricky. Über-realism has that there are perspectives and a cubist assemblage of all these perspectives in a non-underlying, non-coherent reality. Meillassoux holds that the claim that there are only relations in the world is itself correlationist (I think this is where the term may get a bit confusing). It ain't necessary for correlationism that the correlation is between thought and world. Or, maybe, Meillassoux would bite the bullet and say that any appeal to relations is an appeal to the relation between thought and world in embryo (think of Molnar claim that the intentional is the mark of the dispositional saying that there directedness towards something else is some sort of proto-thought, as the pan-psychist would have). In any case, if we accept that perspectives are relations (or prey on them) and Meillassoux's diagnosis that relations commit one to correlationism, I may be in the subjective metaphysician side here: correlations (perspectives) are somehow absolute - as they constitute über-reality. If it is so, über-realism is a sort of subjective metaphysics (and perspectivism, its sister, is maybe closer to correlationism). But I'm not happy with that. I think there is a way to show at least that, in Meillassoux's terms, über-realism is centrally committed to the facticity of all perspectives - even though perspectives are themselves necessary.

I think it is a very interesting geography to think things through.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Hunky, Gunky and Junky - all Funky Metaphysics

Been reading Bohn's recent papers on the possibility of junky worlds (and therefore of hunky worlds as hunky worlds are those that are gunky and junky - quite funky, as I said in the other post). He cites Whitehead (process philosophy tends to go hunky) but also Leibniz in his company - he wouldn't take up gunk as he believed in monads but would accept junky worlds (where everything that exists is a part of something). Bohn quotes Leibniz in On Nature Itself «For, although there are atoms of substance, namely monads, which lack parts, there are no atoms of bulk, that is, atoms of the least possible extension, nor are there any ultimate elements, since a continuum cannot be composed out of points. In just the same way, there is nothing greatest in bulk nor infinite in extension, even if there is always something bigger than anything else, though there is a being greatest in the intensity of its perfection, that is, a being infinite in power.» And New Essays: ... for there is nev

Talk on ultrametaphysics

 This is the text of my seminar on ultrametaphysics on Friday here in Albuquerque. An attempt at a history of ultrametaphysics in five chapters Hilan Bensusan I begin with some of the words in the title. First, ‘ultrametaphysics’, then ‘history’ and ‘chapters’. ‘Ultrametaphysics’, which I discovered that in my mouth could sound like ‘ autre metaphysics’, intends to address what comes after metaphysics assuming that metaphysics is an endeavor – or an epoch, or a project, or an activity – that reaches an end, perhaps because it is consolidated, perhaps because it has reached its own limits, perhaps because it is accomplished, perhaps because it is misconceived. In this sense, other names could apply, first of all, ‘meta-metaphysics’ – that alludes to metaphysics coming after physics, the books of Aristotle that came after Physics , or the task that follows the attention to φύσις, or still what can be reached only if the nature of things is considered. ‘Meta-m

Memory assemblages

My talk here at Burque last winter I want to start by thanking you all and acknowledging the department of philosophy, the University of New Mexico and this land, as a visitor coming from the south of the border and from the land of many Macroje peoples who themselves live in a way that is constantly informed by memory, immortality and their ancestors, I strive to learn more about the Tiwas, the Sandia peoples and other indigenous communities of the area. I keep finding myself trying to find their marks around – and they seem quite well hidden. For reasons to do with this very talk, I welcome the gesture of directing our thoughts to the land where we are; both as an indication of our situated character and as an archive of the past which carries a proliferation of promises for the future. In this talk, I will try to elaborate and recommend the idea of memory assemblage, a central notion in my current project around specters and addition. I begin by saying that I