Thinking Nature v. 1 /4/ - Philosophies of Nature in the differentials of Iain Hamilton Grant and Ray Brassier Himanshu Damle
In this paper, I attempt to look at the differential (as in interventionist) readings undertaken by speculative realists (A school of contemporary thought reacting against post-Kantian 'Correlationism') Iain Hamilton Grant and Ray Brassier, with the former concentrating on reading Schelling's naturalism relating to reason, while the latter claiming the constancy of thought's connection to thought. For Brassier, thought must be transcendentally separate from nature, or what he calls 'exteriority', and Grant insists on nature's thinking as plain nature. This doesn't mean 'interiority' is given weight in Grant's thought, but, on the contrary isn't a concern, as for him, the limiting factor of thinking (dichotomy in subject-object relationality) is the regionality of a particular identity attempting to grasp nature's infintude. Brassier maintains scientific statements as capable of supplying reasons for believing in the possibilities of determining thought's tracking and missing nature. He accomplishes this by clarifying notions of concept and distinguishing objects from concepts. This alien-ness of thought generates the possibilities of questioning the human production as against nature. This cardinal issue tries to answer the repercussions probably generated in the wake of either apathetic aspects of mind or the deepest powers of speculation. Not only that, a simultaneous questioning of the legitimacy of ontology and epistemology in the natural world is encountered. Grant advocates the objectifying of the self to grasp the productivity of self's thinking, but at the same time considering objectifying as an ongoing process, a kind of 'becoming'. In other words, it is the questioning of the limits of 'being' in the creation of episteme that takes precedence in Grant. Brassier on the other hand is concerned with the doing away of the dichotomy of being and thinking of meaning. This tension raises the issue of nature philosophy in a duel of 'eliminativism' and 'materialism', between the extent that calls for grounding nature without reliance on a structure undermining the discovery of contemporary science or supporting an anthropic 1
view.
Speculative Realism Before getting down to outlining the major highlights of Speculative Realism pertaining to this work, it is imperative to underline the major influences on this school of thought. These influences define the contours of Speculative Realism as mired in reactions for its own development. ... τὸ γὰρ αὐτὸ νοεῖν ἐστίν τε καὶ εἶναι. For it is the same thing that can be thought and that can be.1 −Parmenides This connotes the same-ness of being and thought, and this idea that brought itself along in post-Kantian philosophy is defined as 'Correlationism'. Even Protagoras is credited with the commencing of 'Correlationism', as he argued that objects conform to mind rather than mind to objects. Even if, Speculative Realism means different things for different thinkers, the commonality is the shared reaction to the Kantian inspired notion of finitude.
Kant thought about human finitude as
factual in that the object can only be known according to preset conditions as specified by the combination of the receptivity of intuition and the spontaneity of thought in an a priori synthesis.2 What started with Parmenides and continued with the post-Kantians has been the nutrition for the Speculative Realists. These are the two major influencing factors that stressed upon the need to shun away 'Anthropocentrism', by jettisoning the human privileging over other entities. In a way, what is advocated is the multiple (as in variegated) form of Realism as opposed to the totalitarian regime of Idealism, so dominant in most of today's philosophies. Kant sought for a conversion, a conversion of the metaphysical questions about the things-in-themselves into the transcendental questions about our 1 J. Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy. London and Edinburgh: A. and C. Black, 1892. 4th edition, 1930. 2 F. Schalow, The Renewal of the Heidegger-Kant Dialogue: Action, Thought and Responsibility. New York: SUNY Press, 1992, 341.
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access to things. These questions of the transcendental type warrant access, and is termed 'Philosophies of Access'. Even if, a successful conversion takes shape like in a leap from asking 'What is X?' to 'Under what conditions is X possible?', the resultant is drifting away from the epistemological nature of things to our experiential nature of the epistemological nature of things, leaving us with a metaphysical precipitate. Therefore, the reactionary attitude of the Speculative Realists is two-fold in trying to dispense with the conflated concepts of 'Correlationism' and 'Philosophies of Access'. If the idea of a realm of phenomena subsisting independently of us holds any weight, then it is apprehendable only if it is something-in-itself. The relation between un-objectifiable substance and unrepresentable being is dictated by reciprocity of logos and physis and this is wrought about by Difference, as it pari passu unites and distinguishes terms that it relates. This is the supreme principle of post-metaphysical thought. According to Brassier, this is gaining orthodoxy and is more insidous because it is being touted as profoundly innovative.3 This is the flavour of Meillassoux's 'Correlationism' that is surreptitious in never making us intent on knowing mind-independent realities. Brassier says,
“Correlationism affirms the indissoluble primacy of the relation between thought and its correlate over the metaphysical hypostasization or representationalist reification of either term of the relation.�4 Meillassoux goes on to bifurcate Kantian 'Correlationism' into the weak and the strong versions, the former giving credence to thinking noumena, but not knowing them, while the latter dismissing even thinking them. The weak version fits in perfectly by invoking the conditions of knowledge as in categories and forms of intuition as applicable only to the phenomenal realm and not things-in-themselves. Hegel's intervention in this regard is most worthy of a note, as he sought to 3 R. Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction. Hampshire: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007, 50-51. 4 R. Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction. Hampshire: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007, 51.
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restore back the ground that thinking had been dislodged from in its access to being. In the ensuing process, he insists on a kind of isomorphy between the structure of thinking and that being, thereby, positing itself as a retort to the strong version. In order to decimate the strong version, Meillassoux takes recourse to his 'Principle of Factuality' , which states that 'the absolute is the absolute impossibility of a necessary being' . This step isn't all that easy, for it could easily lose ground to the strong version itself if it is presupposed that there is anything outside the correlate of Thinking and Being. Thereby, the only way out here is to use the 'Principle of Factuality' to overcome the strong version from within. In other words, to rehabilitate thinking the thing-in-itself, what is required is to be able to forbid any recourse to absolutizing correlation or taking up to the 'Principle of Sufficient Reason'. He invokes his 'Philosophy of facticity' to bypass this problem. This is basically concerned with the structural invariants which are taken as purely given, of which, no change is ever encountered, but nonetheless are never absolutized. His focus lies in converting the facticity into contingency. As Brassier puts it more succinctly,
“Speculative Materialism asserts that, in order to maintain our ignorance of the necessity of correlation, we have to know that its contingency is necessary...What is absolute is the fact that everything is necessarily contingent.”5 Although there are other strands within Speculative Realism like Object Oriented Philosophy of Graham Harman, wherein he tends to think of everything that exists as objects and shunning in the process the consideration of objects as “useless fictions” by realists. But, is one prepared to go this way and destroy his convictions in no time, or is one ready to break into 'Correlationism' to expose the deficit of Phenomenology (In whatever sense, one may look at Phenomenology, the subject is always presented with the object and this is the beginning of the subject approaching the object. the very 5 R. Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction. Hampshire: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007, 67.
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elucidation of the object without the subject is not only unthinkable, but at the same time a cardinal sin in doing philosophy. Thereby, would it be wrong to claim oneself as an unapologetic metaphysician, if one tries to break this 'Correlationism', by claiming neither the prerogativeness of subjectivity and objectivity, but instead 'Objectality'. This would boil down to the position of non-philosophy and be finally able to exorcise the twin ghosts of Parmenides and Kant. Harman's is a bitter critique of Realism and advocates the complete obsolescence of Realism in times to come. But, the two thinkers mostly dealt with in this paper, are Iain Hamilton Grant and Ray Brassier. It should however be noted, that these thinkers are all united in their strife against 'Correlationism'.
Grant's reading of Schellingian Naturephilosophie
Schelling has often been at the receiving end for his idiosyncrasies or the frequent jumps that he undertook providing a lack of synthetic conflation and therefore missing on a philosophical system. He has most importantly been confined to near total oblivion in the English-speaking fraternity of philosophers and has had to face rebarbative charges against him. Although, there are some sympathetic voices emanating from the continental tradition in trying to revive his importance, like Slavoj Zizek67, who has extensively fused the German with Lacanian psychoanalysis, citing Marx's critique of speculative idealism as derived from Schellingian formulations of post-Hegelian universe of finitude-contingency-temporality.8 Zizek even goes a step ahead by crediting Schelling over Heidegger as the progenitor of 'Artificial Earth'. But, it is Grant's 'Philosophies of Nature After Schelling', which takes up the issue of graduating Schelling to escape the accoutrements of Kantian and Fichtean narrow transcendentalism. 6 S. Zizek, The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related Matters. London: Verso, 2007. 7 S. Zizek, The Abyss of Freedom/Ages of the World, trans. Judith Norman. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1997. 8 S. Zizek, The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related Matters. London: Verso, 2007, 7.
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Schelling gave a new twist to understanding nature by going past the Kantian nature as subject to necessary laws, as for Kant, nature enjoyed a formal sense.9 Kant overlooks the phenomenological deficit by arguing for subject's access to forms of intuition and categories to bear upon what it perceives. Schelling discovers the problematic by raising the issue of subject's spontaneity to judge in terms of categories. This dynamism of 'becoming' is what incites Grant to look into the materialist vitalism in Schelling's understanding of nature. Grant frees Schelling from the grips of narrow minded inertness and mechanicality in nature that Kant and Fichte had presented nature with. This idea is the Deleuzean influence on Grant.10 Kant himself pondered over this dilemma, but somehow couldn't come to terms with subject taking a leap from its determinism in crafting episteme. For, if nature was formal in its adherence to necessary laws, then splitting this boundedness to nature from subject's autonomous or self-determining cognitivity would arrest the leap from determinism. In a way, Kant falls into the pit that he tries to negotiate, but comes out in conceding to nature the generation of self-determining organisms that possibilizes disinterested aesthetic pleasure in his third critique. It didn't take Schelling any herculean effort to underline the central problems with this position of Kant, but it has taken a path of deliberate neglect of Schelling's discovery of nature as more subject than object in modern readings of the philosopher.
Grant affirms the cardinality of Schelling's naturephilosophie as the core, rather than just a phase11 as against Heidegger's proclamation of Schelling's discovery of nature as a fleeting episode, 9 M. Heidegger, Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997, 43. 10 Manuel Delanda makes a vociferous case in this regard. According to Delanda, the inertness of matter was rubbished by Deleuze in the way that Deleuze sought for a morphogenesis of form thereby launching a new kind of materialism. This is the anti-essentialist position of Deleuze. Essentialism says that matter and energy are inert, they do not have any morphogenetic capabilities. They cannot give rise to new forms on their own. As, developments in science over the last 30 years have proved beyond doubt that disciplines like complexity theory, non-linear dynamics do give matter its autonomy over inertness, its capabilities in terms of charge. (The script is extracted from Delanda's lecture during University of Columbia's Art and Technology Lectures. The lecture was titled: 'Deleuze and the Use of Genetic Algorithm in Architecture' dated 08.04.04) 11 I. H. Grant, Philosophies of Nature After Schelling. London: Continuum, 2006, 3.
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despite Heidegger paying fullest respects to Schelling for his profoundest grasp of spirit because of his commencing from the philosophy of nature.12 In a remarkable tour de force, Grant takes the accusation of Eschenmayer's against Schelling13 head on and helps resurface the identity between nature and history. This identity is derived from Schelling's insistence on freedom arising from nature, as the latter's final and most potentiating act, the idea that constantly irritated Eschenmayer. Nature is history also helped Schelling cut the umbilical cord between evolution and teleology, in that he could fix his impressions on Carl Friedrich Kielmeyer's signaling of a new epoch in natural history, thus getting over with transcendental philosophy's obsession with fixed forms. That the inertness of nature was already on the way of getting dislodged, was proved by Kielmeyer's influence on the earliest programme of the German comparative Biology, by which Schelling had himself been mightily influenced. As Kielmeyer had noted in his writings,
“I myself would like to derive all variation in the material of inert nature from a striving for heterogenesis, analogous to that in the organism, in the soul of nature.”14
Schelling and Kielmeyer15 were fellow travelers in the sense that both recognized the fundamental delusion of the Kantian possibility of using a piori principles in deducing external nature. Grant makes a very affirmative intervention in here, when he elevates Deleuzean admonition to the fact that only contemporary French philosophy offers a scathing attack on the modern philosophy since its inception by Descartes holding the verdict of 'nature not existing for itself'. This whole notion of becoming over being is wrought about by seemingly imperceptibly small and infinitely many 12 M. Heidegger, Mindfulness, trans. Parvis Emad and Thomas Kalary. London: Continuum, 2006, 233. 13 “I hold nature and history to be utterly distinct things.” (Eschenmayer to Schelling). This is taken as a translation from the original German edition of Schellings sämmtliche Werke (SW), ed. K. F. A. VII vol. 14 C. F. Kielmeyer, Natur und Kraft, Kielmeyer's gesammelte Schriften, ed. F. H. Holler. Berlin: Kieper, 1938, 56. 15 ibid. 236.
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changes.16 Or as Schelling maintains:
“Nature admittedly makes no leap; but it seems to me that this principle is much misunderstood if we try to bring into a single class of things which nature has not only separated, but has itself opposed to one another. That principle says no more than this, that nothing which comes to be in nature comes to be by a leap; all becoming occurs in a continuous sequence.”17 This continuous sequential becoming is what has made Schelling to look at forces more potently rather than at phenomena as the measure of the differentials between the things that are separated by nature, but only as factors pertaining to becoming. This is a direct supplement to Kielmeyerian account of natural history, converting the principles underlying transcendental philosophy from the phenomenal and the somatic nature to making the somatic into the phenomenal products of a priori dynamics, without making the phenomenal somatic coextensive with nature as such. Products as such, for Schelling were discontinuities in nature and therefore not in the real sense speculative, as this was based on the principle of an Idea of nature as against nature and as 'materiality is not yet corporeality' 18. As Heuser correctly noted:
“Schelling correctly noted that a universal theory of self-organization may not presuppose objects, but that they must first be constructed from the non-objective.”19 The dynamic system is therefore according to Schelling short of accepting the primacy of the 'originary being' and also the primary body which would help the others derived from it and hence, to overcome this problem and to conflate all the problems of naturephilosophie like the ontology of nature 16 G. Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley. London: Athlone, 1993, 144n. 17 Schelling, Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature, trans. Errol E. Harris and Peter Heath. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988, 133. 18 This is taken as a translation from the original German edition of Schellings sämmtliche Werke (SW), ed. K. F. A. XI vol. 19 Heuser in Zimmerli, Walter Ch., Klaus Stein and Michael Gerten (eds), 'Fessellos durch die systeme'. Frühromantisches Naturdenken im Umfeld von Arnim, Ritter und Schelling. Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1997, 285.
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or the phenomenality in nature or the self-articulation in nature's ideation, or nature transcendental with respect to its products, but immanent with respect to its forces, Schelling proposes the identity of the transcendental and the dynamic. Grant's surprising move in this reading is to pit Schelling against Plato. Grant looks up to a commentary by Schelling on Timaeus as his point of reference. The centrality of the text lies in the fact of matter in movement as alongside the primal basal matter, thus indicating a separate world soul. This also connotes the understanding of, what evolves out from the earth as a result of morphogenesis, the derivatives due to earth's own magnetic forces. With this, it becomes very difficult to rehabilitate the two-world theory of Plato, as morphogenesis takes strong hold. Grant reminds us of the peculiarity in Schelling's commentary of Timaeus by highlighting the latter's strong insistence on nature as a generative machine. If we were to go by the Platonic conception of the 'World Soul' as underlined in the Timaeus, as the being which always remains the same and is ever indivisible and the being known for its transitory-ness and divisibility, then once again, we get ensconced in the Schellingian differentiation of 'materiality' and 'corporeality'. To get out of this dual arresting, Schelling takes a recourse to Kielmeyer once again by basing his arguments on the notion of time in order to resolve the problems concerning nature's primitives. His prioritizing time helps him transcend the divisible-indivisible dichotomy conceived by space, as is the general case in reading the Platonic text in question. This would still indicate the 'lesser' timescale as proving to be no measure for the 'greater' transformations undergone by nature as far as accessibility to phenomenality is concerned. The way to negotiate this dilemma is to support the forces of nature as primary to the body as against secondary to finally displace the Kantian metaphysical foundation of the physical forces as spatial with the 'now' physical forces as temporal, thus calling for epoch breaking constructions of 'becoming'.
Schelling is prone to be misrepresented here, but as Grant makes a strong defense of his by showing that for the former, phenomenality is not illusion, but a natural production, having its a prioris 9
not in mind, but in nature and further explicating on why for Schelling naturephilosophie isn't advocating the elimination of empirical research for investigating nature, but the integration of such research at the phenomenal level, thereby extending empiricism to the unconditioned rather than thinking it as a limiting case.20 Even if not taken literally, the Platonic idea of development when arrested is evident here. To stick on to the Platonic idea of the 'World Soul', Schelling calls it the primary diversifying antithesis of nature, because it is not just being body, it is matter, the darkest of all things, the generator of phenomenality.21 This sequence in nature is derived by combining the particular phenomena by the what generates it and further going on to prove that no phenomena can enjoy the absolute status, but is always produced by the many becomings (could also be looked at as infinite becomings). If this is the way operations are carried out, the specificity of individuals could only approach approximations with the inherent disappearance of forces and matter being acted upon by these forces.
The commonsensical problem to the above dynamics would be: How the germ of an infinite revolution, the germ of an infinite decompositions into ever new products , was placed in the Universe?22
Schelling comes with a couple of solutions to answer this problem, the first of which,
deals with the prioritizing of the problem of antithesis over the specificities in differences in matter. For him, the problem of antithesis is possible only between things of one kind and having a common origin, as, only when this is so, the inert homogeneity could trigger infinite decompositions. These infinite decompositions in turn suggest the infinite divisibility of matter and hence unending becomings.23 The 20 I. H. Grant, Philosophies of Nature After Schelling. London: Continuum, 2006, 142. 21 ibid. 145. 22 Schelling, First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature, trans. Keith R. Peterson. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004, 184. 23 Grant explains this as: “Since, however, this is the case, then there can be no differences in kind, but only in degree..Ultimately, these differences in degree are, as in Kielmeyer, relations of time to units of becomings, or, as the First Outline suggests it, the problem of the infinitely fast evolution of nature. That is, 'to explain the retarding – or, in order that nature as such evolves at a finite speed, and thus exhibits everywhere determinate products (from a specific synthesis) - appear to be the highest problem of naturephilosophy'.
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second solution considers nature as a priori without giving any kind of necessity to the series of decompositions, as these series are never exhaustive. As these series are never exhaustive, a couple of consequences are derived from this infinity of series. The first being naturephilosophie neither prescribing nor proscribing empirical sciences thus highlighting for Schelling the presentation of the infinite in the finite as the highest problem of science. Secondly, as matter is always presenting itself as not an individual body, but as a series of bodies, nature is therefore always demonstrated as infinite self-decomposition. Such an analysis could only mean for Schelling the coincidence of selfrecapitulating nature with intuition, as the series progresses through the potentialities of matter thereby possibilizing humans as idealist not just in the eyes of the philosophers, but in the eyes of nature as well. In short, as long as science constructs its own models to understand nature, the understanding that science possess of nature is nothing but of ossification and when nature itself is self-capable of breaking away from any sort of objectification, it not only shuns away the understanding that science has given it due to its own constructions, but also breaks away from any kind of human manipulations whatsoever.
Kant in his third critique calls for a ground uniting nature and freedom24 and this is looked at as an unfinished project and is duly repeated by Badiou25, wherein he maintains the primacy of rethinking the univocity of ground as a major task of philosophy. Badiou dismisses Schelling's solution to the problem of naturephilosophie as a panacea and reiterates the critique of transforming ethics into physics as far as questions dealing with
'ground' are concerned. Badiou instead advocates set-
theoretical aspirations, but warning against the 'Criticism' in philosophy that has plagued the discipline ever since Kant. This could vouch for 'Classicism', but then Badiou is still not very successful in successfully dealing with his problem of ground. On the other hand, Deleuze works in the domains of 24 I. Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987, 15. 25 A. Badiou, Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, trans. Louise Burchill. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000, 46.
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nature and freedom for his ontological inquiry. He, in contrast to Badiou's 'rethinking the concept of ground' nominates 'ungrounding the ground', as this is furthered on affecting the world. This position is against Schelling's as the latter is concerned with a one-world physics and is also against Fichte's as the physical be determined by the ethical. Deleuzean stand is a one-world transcendentalism that unlike the laws of nature that rule the surface of the world, troubles the depths of it.26 This situates the Deleuzean grounds of differentiation between the transcendental and the empirical dimensions that trouble the depths of the world in some kind of 'groundlessness'. This 'groundlessness' of Deleuze pits him against Schelling, as for the latter, the transcendental is no domain, but a series of potentiations yielding forces – phenomenal product – idea. But Grant goes further than here in his reading:
“In response to the problem of ground, therefore, we have two transcendentalisms: for the Schellingian transcendental, as for dynamics, grounding consists in explicating or evolving the phenomenon to the original conditions of the construction of matter.”27 Since for Deleuze, the transcendental is the ungrounding of nature and freedom, this particular antithesis in Deleuze is projected as something that does not determine the one by the other, but in turn by compromising with the regionality of matter with ideation on the one hand and freedom on the other. If Grant's report that the above argument is borne out is true, then the conclusion that only a noneliminative idealism is capable of the philosophy of matter is reached. But, Schelling held that freedom is the final act of a potentiating nature, and this has led Eschenmeyer to criticize the former's position by branding it a complete reductionism of ethics into physics, which is justifiable. A parallel could here be reached between Schelling's position and Deleuze's. This freedom getting born of nature's selfpotentiating act is traced in the ungrounding of nature itself, as nature does not appear in its own accord, but as products and as forces. These presentations of nature on their way to achieving objective 26 G. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton. London: Athlone, 1994, 241. 27 I. H. Grant, Philosophies of Nature After Schelling. London: Continuum, 2006, 201.
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reality pass via the world of thought into the actual world. How does this become possible is answered by Schelling by first taking the cue from Parmenides, where subjectivities are to be found everywhere in nature and secondly by defining 'concept' as the synthesis of thought and thing. As Schelling says:
“All our knowledge is originally empirical precisely because concept and object arise for us unseparated and simultaneously.�28 This identification of 'concept' and 'intuition' generates transcendental philosophy for Schelling, but a possibility of 'concept' creation is not ruled out by him either and he points out to the productivity of 'concept' through a dialectics of generative process rather than a demonstrative one. The potentiation furthers and the concept is evolved in an 'Idea', this being the infinite concept, the one that oscillates between the infinite and the finitude.29 In its finitude, the nature of the concept becomes apparent, and in its absent auto-positing character, it is inserted into the series of the real, on the one hand and its reduplication, on the other, thus providing the axis of its dynamic nature.30 The idea that arises due to the potentiation of the concept therefore remains nothing other a form of syntheses, whose poles are the ideal and the real. Here is Grant's classic reading of Schelling, where the former posits for the latter the Idea taking their 'objective' from the 'unthinged', as the Idea does not have as its objects 'object'. Schelling in his concept of Idea replaces the relation of thought and thing with that of absolute and relative motion, or unending becomings. This is further corroborated by Schelling when he says in his History of Modern Philosophy that the absolute mobile is actually thought, but not as a real 'object' of thought, for 'object' is something that remains still, but, rather as mere material of thought that runs throughout the entire science, whereas, actual thinking expresses only in the progressive determination
28 Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism, trans. Peter Heath. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1978, 151. 29 - ibid, 176. 30 I. H. Grant, Philosophies of Nature After Schelling. London: Continuum, 2006, 194.
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of what in itself is the indeterminate and always the other becoming.31 Grant reads Schelling's naturephilosophie as if nature is nothing but a machine that gets to busy itself in an endless productivity and in the ongoing process churns out products that are to be the precipitates of mutations.
Ray Brassier and understanding of nature
Brassier starts his philosophical journey by undertaking the contrast between the 'manifest' and the 'scientific' images of reality. This way, he accomplishes to undermine the reality of subjective experiences through his own brand of realism that finds its culmination in the overt skeptical view he possesses towards phenomenology. He asserts the upholding of the enlightenment legacy at all costs and admonishes the thinking creatures to pursue the enlightenment legacy right through to its ends. In a slightly apocalyptic tone to begin with, he sets his aim right when he talks about the defunct subject of philosophy and then claims “...philosophy is neither a medium of affirmation nor a source of justification, but rather the organon of extinction.�32 Continental philosophy has always held Materialism and Realism as hostile to each other, but for Brassier, 'material' only denotes a blockade thus indicating a point where thought fails. His book, 'Nihil Unbound' is therefore an attempt to accolade the return to matter without assuming a pre-established harmony between the conceptual apparatus and the world. Nihilism for Brassier has nothing to do with the limitations of reason in apprehending the meaning of existence in the world nor a crisis ridden subjectivity. Nihilism is:
“the unavoidable corollary of the realist conviction that there is a mind-independent reality, which despite the presumptions of human narcissism, is indifferent to our existence and 31 Schelling, History of Modern Philosophy, trans. Andrew Bowie. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, 152. 32 R. Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, 239.
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oblivious to the 'values' and 'meanings' which we would drape over it in order to make it more hospitable.�33
Brassier asks of philosophers not to try to mend ways to suture the discordance between men and nature, either by positing the meaningfulness or purposefulness of life, as for him, nature isn't particularly benevolent. Brassier opens the first part of the book by focusing on the disjunction between reality and thought, nature and reason and strongly contends the view of thought being transcendentally separate from nature.
As briefly mentioned above, the genesis of Brassier's philosophy is from contrasting the 'manifest' and the 'scientific' images. The former being the conception of man as created by himself and the latter being the image of man as getting created by the 'complex physical system' in the words of Wilfred Sellars.34 Both these thinkers agree on the dominance of 'manifest' image controlling the way philosophy is done today, albeit in varying degrees as practiced on the continent and in the Anglospeaking countries. The shared thinking although spanning 4 decades, does not mitigate the profound hostility they both connect with philosophers as against the 'scientific' image that is held culpable for robbing a person his self-intentionality. This is the point of departure for Brassier with regards to Sellars as the latter holds the primacy of the 'manifest' image, while unable to legitimize the 'scientific' image as a substantive derivation from 'manifest' image. Brassier is against this reductionism of the 'Philosophical' with regard to the 'Scientific'. This position of anti-reductionism culled with the disjunction-ing of reason and nature is his primary import.
A lapse back into nature is a tendency that is inherent in all living things, and the overcoming of 33 R. Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, 12. 34 W. Sellars, Science, Perception and Reality. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963, 25.
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this tendency is the hallmark of development. This lapse is more like a blind conformity to nature and in a way is reason's own fatal submission to the dictates of nature. As Brassier tries to juxtapose this reason with the Enlightenment's reason (specifically taking his reading of Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment seriously), he calls this reason as a function of adaptational constraints. He does this precisely because as the two authors talk about the Enlightenment reason's drive to conceptually subsume particularity, heterogeneity and multiplicity to universality, homogeneity and unity and in the process rendering everything equivalent to everything else, but in a way such that nothing is identical to itself.35 This is conceptual identification that stipulates differential commensurability and in their own words 'amputating the incommensurable'.36 The evolution of this reason is undoubtedly the case of the confrontation between the dominated and the dominating powers that subjected the humans under the sway of the all-powerful nature. Brassier takes his reading of sacrifice from the Dialectic of Enlightenment as an attempt to propitiate these incommensurables. Adorno and Horkheimer claim in their book that enlightenment equates the living with the non-living, just as the mythical tales equated the non-living with the living. The authors accord to reason a reflexivity that is capable of understanding and resolving the incommensurability that is generated as a result of the enlightenment science's knowledge of the actual and the existence. This reflexivity of reason is purely centered on its own historicity. They claim that the reason is independent of nature by virtue of its reflexivity on its own dependence on nature and this is where science fails to reach for somehow it depicts its incapability of engaging with reflexivity. The subject that postulates absolutes is sick in their view, passively succumbing to the dazzlement of false immediacy37 and the only remedy to cure the ailment is by inaugurating a mediation in the form of 35 R. Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, 34. 36 T. Adorno and M. Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. E. Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002, 9. 37 T. Adorno and M. Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. E. Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002, 160.
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remembrance that would encompass the human history in its socio-cultural milieu. This kind of nature is different in that now, we, the humans belong in it, as compared with the earlier version, where we were excluded from nature. As we shall now see that this particular formula fits exactly what Meillassoux has referred to as 'Correlationism'. It
may be remembered that for Meillassoux,
'Correlationism' is a necessary reciprocity between mind and nature. 'Correlationism' hankers after this nature precisely in so far as the achievement of this nature would render material reality into a depository of sense fully commensurate with man's psychic needs.38 Meillassoux relates the fundamental problems in post-Kantian philosophies of natural sciences to the point where they fail miserably and calls it the 'arche-fossil'. This notion differs from 'fossil' in the consideration of traces of phenomena anterior to the emergence of life. The fundamental tenet of post-Kantianism is the idea of the world-in-itself subsisting independently of our relation to it is an absurdity. For them, objective reality must be transcendentally guaranteed and without such guarantees, world ends up as getting reduced to metaphysics. But, if the idea of a world-in-itself is to be gauged at all, it is possible only as something in-itself or as independent for-us. As Brassier put it:
“This is the reigning doxa of post-metaphysical philosophy: what is fundamental is neither a hypostasized substance or the reified subject, but rather the relationship between unobjectifiable thinking and un-representable being, the primordial reciprocity or 'co-propriation' of logos and physis which at once unites and distinguishes the terms which it relates.�39
Contemporary post-Kantian 'Correlationism' adequately identifies the 'We' as 'already outside' ourselves and therefore engaging with the world as if immersed in it. Since 'Correlationism' insists that there can be no cognizable entity independent of our relation to it, the proponents of this notion even go 38 R. Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, 40. 39 -ibid. 50.
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further in claiming that science would not help us in understanding the phenomena without taking into account this primordial relation to begin with or that science simply does not function to help us apprehend the manifestation of the phenomena in absence of this relation. Thus 'arche-fossil' does not give any credence to the set of causally linked chains integrating the web of all possible experiences linking all cognizable objects to one another, because of the anteriority of time when experiencing did not exist. Meillassoux is expected to face up to a counter-offensive from the post-Kantian camp. He does voice his response to the two most commonly held allegations against him. The allegations are firstly, the inflating of the unobserved as a negation of the correlation and secondly, the conflation of the empirical and the transcendental. The former allegation is constructed as an impotent objection to transcendental idealism, as the proponents claim that there are a lot many unperceived phenomena occurring and it becomes naive to thereby undermine the transcendental status of the correlation. 40 Although, the claim is more like a contingent lacuna in manifestation with the necessary absence of manifestation, Meillassoux defends his position by stating that it is neither, but a lack of manifestation tout court. A difference in kind between 'What is ancestral?' and 'What is ancient?' is based on degrees, where the latter attempts to negotiate in terms of synchronicity with the 'Correlation'. So, in his view, 'What is ancestral?' cannot be reduced to 'What is ancient?'. The second offense claims that the ancestral indexes a temporal dimension within which the correlational temporality itself passes into and out of being.41 No doubt, Meillassoux lends plausibility to the fact that 'Correlation' instantiates the transcendental conditions of knowledge for the spatiotemporal existence, he adds that the time in which these productions of knowledge take place is also the time when the conditions of the instantiation of the transcendental are provided for. But, the time that is ancestral is precisely where the corporeal conditions of what is the 'Correlation' pass into and out of existence and hence where there is an 40 R. Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, 53-54. 41 -ibid. 56.
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absence of the conditions of instantiation, there is an absence of 'Correlation'. One critical observation against Meillassoux is the transcendence ascribed to ancestral time as existing independently of 'Correlation' by continuing appeal to chronology. In his claim of the 'archefossil' highlighting the absence of manifestation instead of any hiatus within it, the difficulty lies in understanding how the ancestral time could function without the temporal coordinates of past, present and future. Therefore, as long as the in-itself is held to be autonomous and is construed as a discrepancy between 'ancestral' and 'ancient' time, the 'correlationist' would always be able to convert the 'in-itself' into the 'for-us'. Since Meillassoux's project consists in reasserting the possibility of thought's contact with the 'in-itself' as absolute, he chooses to invoking Badiou's stand of mathematics as ontology permitting some form of relation to a non-conceptually constituted reality, Brassier contends this route undertaken by the former as nothing but reinstating 'Correlationism' at the heart of his paradigm of speculative materialism. This backfires on Meillassoux as he inadvertently endorses his opponents' view. As Brassier succinctly puts it:
“...the emergence of consciousness marks some sort of fundamental ontological rupture, shattering the autonomy and consistency of reality, such that once consciousness has emerged on the scene, nothing can pursue an independent existence any more.�42 As Kant claimed in his Critique of Pure Reason that it is not uniformity that is a necessary criteria of 'in-itself' or 'things-in-themselves', but the possibility of consciousness and representation that require the constancy of phenomena in nature leading in and out of the tautological presupposition of the constancy of phenomena on the one hand and constancy of nature on the other. This representation or as Brassier says the problematic of representation has been accepted by the continental tradition without putting up any challenge that has encouraged relinquishing 42 R. Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, 60.
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epistemological considerations into the theoretical investigations of nature and conditions of cognition. Meillassoux, on the other hand identifies the 'frequentialist implication' argument in Kant that proves the impossibility of representation as due not to the contingency of laws. Having identified it, he proceeds to expound his 'anti-frequentialist' argument that demonstrates that the contingency of the laws of nature need not entail their frequent transformation and thereby the impossibility of their representation, as his principle concern is to show what he calls the principle of unreason# is to be in perfect compatibility with the stability of appearances and the scientific representation of nature.43
As against Kant's dictum of the contingency of the laws of nature implying a frequency of transformation that render the impossibility of representation, Meillassoux concludes that the absolute contingency of the world's physical structure is in perfect compatibility with the stability of the phenomena and thus the possibility of representation. Brassier discovers a fundamental flaw in Meillassoux's invoking the anti-frequentialist argument. The flaw is in terms of leaving the ontological status of this stability unattended, despite the latter showing that that the 'frequentialist implication' argument unable to prove the reality as totalizable and that contingency is not necessarily incompatible with the appearance of stability,44 as the former thinks the ontological status of stability to be a cardinal issue in latter's project of accounting for the ancestral claims to the conditions of possibility of science. Meillassoux is quite aware of this fact that reality in-itself is a non-totalizable multiplicity and as he says: 43 -ibid. 79. # Meillassoux wants to challenge modern philosophy’s appropriation of facticity as a limit to revealing knowledge of the absolute. Facticity tells us about the nature of the absolute. If all we can know is the contingency of facticity, then there is no reason for things to remain so rather than otherwise. Yet saying ‘everything is equally possible’ is an absolute claim, thus metaphysical. The only claim that can be made is based upon our facticity, not as limit but as absolute: the absolute is the absolute impossibility of a necessary being (Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude : An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier. London: Continuum, 2008, 60). This is the absolute truth of the principle of unreason: this is an hypothetical principle, which is a proposition that could bot be deduced from another proposition, but could be proved by argument. 44 R. Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, 82.
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“We have not established the effectivity of this un-totalization – we have merely supposed it and drawn the consequences of the fact that such a supposition is possible.�45
Thus he concedes to the fact of speculative argument, although subtle in his discourse, that would found the stability of appearances upon non-totalizability of absolute time. Journeys to be undertaken As mentioned above, Brassier takes the continental tradition to task for unchallengingly accepting the liquidation of epistemology and in the process launching a counter-scientific ontology and metaphysics of nature, where the latter is treated not just as an antidote to scientific reductionism, but at the same time taken as a corrective to the 'positivistic' naturalization of the analysis of mind, with the emergence of cognitive science as the most obvious consequence. Brassier is seen to be championing for science in relation to neurology and 'Correlationism' that somehow justifies the scientific way of thinking, but the question that remains unformulated is the difference he shares with Meillassoux's formalism and his notion of philosophical access to it. It seems that Brassier is seduced by the existence of the world and tends to ignore the importance of image by avoiding realities of image[s]. These still are images, because of the ways in which our nervous system works. Thus science may pose a threat to a certain kinds of commonsense and certain types of folk metaphysics, but at the same time, it could replace the ones threatened with a set of others. In a way, a complete theoretical/epistemological suspension is untenable. This is also a claim of 'Correlationism' as all our access to the world is mediated through the day-to-day phenomenological world of lived experiences or what Heidegger referred to as the world of 'everydayness'. But, this is not doing justice to his thought, as he explicitly maintains in his Alien Theory that in order to attain an adequate conceptual grasp of the 45 Q. Meillassoux, After Finitude : An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier. London: Continuum, 2008, 152.
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unitary nature of physical reality, it is necessary to achieve a complete theoretical suspension of the image of the world derived from perceptual intuition. In other words, physical theory has to effect a rigorously mathematical circumvention of those imaginative limitations inherent in the physiologically rooted cognitive apparatus with which an aleatory evolutionary history has saddled us. Thus, the chief obstacle standing in the way of a proper scientific understanding of the physical world would seem to be that of our species’ inbuilt tendency to process information via epistemic mechanisms which invariably involve an operation of subtraction from the imperceptible physical whole.46 The case of neurology is, a bit more difficult. One of the things that the neuroscientist will wish to explain is the neurological base of this phenomenological lived experience. If we begin from the premise that one form of science seeks to discover the causal mechanisms or agencies that underlie phenomena or effects, then the phenomenon in question for the neurologist will be this lived experience or image of the world. As a result, this image of the world cannot be dispensed with without neurology becoming unintelligible. However, even here we find stark departures from our image of the world. For example, I experience myself as a centralized agency making decisions and choices based on a transparency to myself. Yet neurology reveals that in fact “I” am a non-linear network of neurons without transparency, unity, or center. Likewise, these scientists reveal that the reasons we give for doing things are often wildly at odds with the mechanisms behind these things. Here, one gets a feeling that 'correlationists' would not give any credence to such thoughts for they are at odds with the structure of the ordinary lived experience. As Husserl rightly points out in his Ideas I:
“The existence of Nature cannot be the condition for the existence of consciousness since Nature itself turns out to be a correlate of consciousness: Nature is only as being constituted in 46 R. Brassier, Alien Theory: The Decline of Materialism in the Name of Matter. Thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Philosophy, University of Warwick, Department of Philosophy, 2001. <http://www.cinestatic.com/trans-mat/Brassier/ALIENTHEORY.pdf>
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regular concatenations of consciousness.â&#x20AC;?47 When recently asked about this particular project rehabilitating philosophies of nature, Brassier outlined it as: 1)These counter-scientific conceptions of nature represent a neo-Aristotelian resurgence in contemporary continental philosophy; 2)that the model of representation whose critique underwrites the liquidation of epistemology is a willful caricature; and 3)that a naturalized but non-adaptationist account of representation provides the basis for a conception of epistemology capable of prosecuting scientific realism and countermanding the regressive tenor of these neo-Aristotelian philosophies of nature. While this looks like the most possible route to be undertaken by Speculative Realists in future, including Grant's forthcoming work on forces and powers to integrate more of Schelling, this time the early writings of the German philosopher. There are staunch enemies of philosophies of nature, chief among them being mysticism, romanticism and the countless number of anthropic and theological thoughts creeping out the noetic morass of first causes. The theories of quantum mechanics can circumvent the notions of primary cause or primary mover, as following the works of Michio Kaku, the atoms to begin with could without the aid of any external agency start to bounce. Along such lines of thought Schelling, in his early period, focuses on forces and powers. One cannot feel a little stunned when Schelling describes the creation of the universe as a series of explosions in the First Outline. As several critiques and tributes of/to Schelling show, it is his empirical inaccuracies (due to the time period mostly) and his later articulation of freedom which dominates and over writes the very possibility of nature philosophy. The central issue for nature philosophy becomes the tension between eliminativism and materialism (in the Zizekian/Badiouian/Lacanian sense) â&#x20AC;&#x201C; between to what degree 47 E. Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophyâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;First Book: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology, trans. F. Kersten. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1982, 116.
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nature should be grounded without relying on a concept or structure which undermines the discoveries of contemporary science nor supports a anthropic view. But to return to nature philosophy – it seems that the process of realist eliminativism runs into the issue of emergence at some point and, with that conflict, the problem of freedom is re-inserted into thought. 48 In the latest interview, Brassier makes a case for Speculative Realism, which reaches specificity in post-Kantian idealism. For Brassier, 'Speculative' is typically a philosophy that begins by drawing attention to the identification between thinking and being, or, mind and reality thereby repudiating empirical naturalism and Kantian critical philosophy. Brassier thinks that Meillassoux and Grant both lend legitimacy to this paradigm even if only for lending it a singular materialist twist. The latter two thinkers retain a flavor of the appearance-reality distinction albeit in different philosophical contexts. The philosophical context for Grant is primarily based on the distinction between natura naturata and natura naturans, while the one for Meillassoux is based on the distinction between the phenomenal and mathematical properties. Brassier further quips by putting himself in isolation in the camp against Grant, Meillassoux and Harman. Brassier is committed to epistemological naturalism and even shares sympathy for the reduced subjective experience, which is not supplemented by the other three thinkers of the Speculative Realism camp. The other three thinkers in contrast to Brassier view his starting to philosophize from the contrasting positions of the 'manifest' and the 'scientific' images of reality as error prone to begin with. As Brassier says in his recent interview:
“By way of contrast, my sceptical stance towards phenomenology leads me to endorse a more austere, revisionary brand of realism that tends to undermine the reality of subjective experience, at least as ordinarily construed. Thus, given that we don’t agree that philosophy 48 This is an extracted version taken from the blog of Ben Woodard, who is a graduate student at the EGS and is working on his thesis titled “Abyssal Ungroundings and Torsional Porosities: Dark Vitalism and the Inorganic.” Incidentally, Speculative Realism is spreading its wings on the Internet in the form of blogs.
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must be ‘speculative’ or about what ‘realism’ entails, the expression ‘speculative realism’ has become singularly unhelpful.”49
Although, Grant's philosophy flirts with materialism and when he says that 'nature thinks', it is not to be taken as an equivocation of thinking and being, but must be considered as a complication of idealism or as idealism being the realism about the idea. In this case, the opposition between materialism and realism is all about the former being concerned with the interior and the latter with the outer/exterior. The problem remains with the 'Subject'- that which thinks the out there and the in here.50
49 This interview was conducted to accompany the Dutch translation of Ray Brassier's essay ‘Genre is Obsolete’. It was published in the printed edition of nY # 2, as part of a feature on Noise (2009). 50 www.himanshudamle.blogspot.com
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