Meillassoux's After Finitude

A Critical Analysis and a Panenexperientialist Seizure of the Necessity of Contingency

This essay was written during summer, but not released then. I publish it now due to the recent publishing hiatus of this project. What follows is more technical than what I usually publish.

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…so long as we continue to believe that there is a reason why things are the way they are rather than some other way, we will construe this world as a mystery, since no such reason will ever be vouchsafed to us.

In an interview published on Urbanomic in 2021, Quentin Meillassoux stated his understanding of the question of being:

…to say it quite brutally, I’m not really sure that the philosophical thinking of being qua being, in the tradition that goes from Aristotle to Heidegger, has ever really addressed what I mean by ‘being’. For me, being means that something is and not that which something is. For example that there is an ashtray on my table, and not what this ashtray may be. The distinction may seem rather classical—traditional and perhaps banal—but, surprisingly, it isn’t at all.

[...]

For me, to think being, then, is to think that there is that being rather than not, but also that there is being rather than not—whatever mode might be attributed to it. To address being is to address the ‘there is’, not modes of being…¹

This declaration should bear striking resemblance to the question of experience that has been addressed throughout the first phase of this project (See e.g. The Magical Flower of Winter, The Epistemic and the Ontic, Experience and Immersion and On the Horizon). My own investigation into reality as experience takes as its cornerstone what I have termed the ontic, the that-ness of experience, that there is something to be at all. This term stands in opposition to the epistemic, what we abstract from our experience. Meillassoux calls himself a ‘speculative materialist’, a position entangled with the movement of ‘speculative realism’ that was briefly on the rise in the 2010s. The focus of these positions on materialism and realism should indicate that Meillassoux arrives at a quite different philosophy than the one I have outlined, which in part comes out of a critique of materialism and realism. In this essay I will in the first section present an overview of the argument for his speculative materialism in After Finitude. In the second section I will commandeer the central part of his argument and show its compatibility with the position I have described as Holistic Panenexperientialism, and furthermore I will argue that holistic panenexperientialism is the more coherent consequence of the argument.

The following terminology, Meillasoux’s own definitions taken from Harman’s discussion of Meillassoux’s Berlin Lecture in Harman (2015) p. 99-100, will be assumed in the rest of this essay: 

• Realism - “every position that claims to accede to an absolute reality…”

• Materialism - every position that claims to accede “to an absolute that is at once external to thought and in itself devoid of all subjectivity.” 

• Correlationism - “every form of de-absolutization of thought that, to obtain this result, argues from the closure of thought upon itself, and its subsequent incapacity to attain an absolute outside itself.”

• Speculative - “every philosophy that claims, on the contrary, to attain such an absolute.”² 

Overview

In what follows, all quotations are from Meillassoux (2008), unless otherwise specified, and I will mark with numbers in parentheses specific points that will be addressed in the Seizure section below. Meillassoux opens his After Finitude by giving a critique of how the correlationist position deals with the problem of “ancestrality”. To start off, the correlationist position is his overarching term for the analytic and phenomenological landscape of philosophy (or any philosophy that disavows naive realism), the paradigm of inseparability of being and thought, that we have no access to the objective except as subjective (1). Essentially, the correlationist position is that since we cannot think the thing in itself separate from thought, the thing in itself cannot be an absolute. Next, “ancestrality” refers to “any reality anterior to the emergence of the human species - or even anterior to every recognized form of life on earth.” According to Meillassoux, the correlationists solution to ancestrality is this: 

[F]or the correlationist, in order to grasp the profound meaning of the fossil datum, one should not proceed from the ancestral past, but from the correlational present. This means that we have to carry out a retrojection of the past on the basis of the present. What is given to us, in effect, is not something that is anterior to givenness, but merely something that is given in the present but gives itself as anterior to givenness. The logical (constitutive, originary) anteriority of givenness over the being of the given therefore enjoins us to subordinate the apparent sense of the ancestral statement to a more profound counter-sense, which is alone capable of delivering its meaning: it is not ancestrality which precedes givenness, but that which is given in the present which retrojects a seemingly ancestral past. To understand the fossil, it is necessary to proceed from the present to the past, following a logical order, rather than from the past to the present, following a chronological order. (2)

Meillassoux argues that ancestral statements either have a realist sense or no sense at all, and concludes based on this that the correlationist position ends up as senseless (3). To the question “Did the accretion of the earth happen 4.56 billion years ago?”, the correlationist will answer “in one sense yes, in another sense, no.” “Yes”, in that the event in question is inter-subjectively verifiable, thus “objective”, but “No”, in that what the truth of the statement refers to cannot have existed in the way described. Meillassoux thus concludes that “an ancestral statement only has sense if its literal sense is also its ultimate sense.” (4)

Next, two models of correlationism are presented. The weak model “de-absolutize[s] the principle of sufficient reason by disqualifying every proof of unconditional necessity..” Necessity and the absolute go hand in hand, and by the correlationist inseparability of being and thought, the correlationist in the weak model rejects necessity, i.e. that there can be something independent of thought, and thereby also rejects the absolutization of the principle of sufficient reason, which states that everything must have a reason or cause. In lieu of any necessary entity (the absolute), the principle of sufficient reason cannot be universal. The correlationist in the strong model goes further and builds on this in absolutizing, not the thing in itself, but the correlation between being and thought, i.e. “nothing can be except in relation to thought” is the new absolute, and not just an epistemological claim. Another way Meillassoux sums up the strong correlationist position is in the belief that “it is unthinkable that the unthinkable be impossible.” This takes us to “the existence of a regime of meaning that remains incommensurable with rational meaning because it does not pertain to the facts of the world, but rather to the very fact that there is a world.” Strong correlationism “confines itself to thinking the limits of thought, these functioning for language like a frontier only one side of which can be grasped.” (5) and “[i]t then becomes clear that this trajectory culminates in the disappearance of the pretension to think any absolutes, but not in the disappearance of absolutes…” The correlation is now absolutized, and because this absolute is ungrounded we are in the reign of “unreason”.

Meillassoux’s next move is to try to recover a more solid absolute from the strong correlationist position, an absolute that is independent of thought, albeit not an absolute entity. He introduces facticity, which in the essay Time Without Becoming is defined as “the absence of reason for any reality; in other words, the impossibility of providing an ultimate ground for the existence of any being.” Another way to understand facticity is as “the 'un-reason' (the absence of reason) of the given as well as of its invariants”, and as a capacity to be other: “this capacity-to-be-other cannot be conceived as a correlate of our thinking, precisely because it harbours the possibility of our own non-being.” (6) Thus, if we absolutize facticity, we recover an absolute that is independent of thought, thus escaping the correlationist circle: “Our task was to uncover an absolute that would not be an absolute entity. This is precisely what we obtain by absolutizing facticity - we do not maintain that a determinate entity exists, but that it is absolutely necessary that every entity might not exist. This is indeed a speculative thesis, since we are thinking an absolute, but it is not metaphysical, since we are not thinking any thing any (entity) that would be absolute.” By this, that every entity might not exist, what facticity translates to is the necessity of contingency, hence After Finitude’s subtitle, An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. 

A supporting argument for the necessity of contingency is that it leads to an answer for why there is something rather than nothing: “it is necessary that there be something rather than nothing because it is necessarily contingent that there is something rather than something else.” Meillassoux thus takes the absolutization of facticity to necessarily lead to the existence of something. (7) A further supporting argument for the necessity of contingency is that by its translation into the principle of unreason, it becomes “‘anhypothetical’ because in questioning or contesting its absolute validity one must assume its absolute truth.” Thus we get locked into a constraint that forces the principle of unreason to be absolute, for in positing the contrary we have to assume its truth. (8) 

What follows next is a proposed solution to Hume’s problem of whether the same effect can be expected from the same cause all things else being equal, i.e. whether the laws of physics are contingent or necessary, acausal or causal. Most resolutions of this problem assume the truth of causal necessity, and rather argue for why this truth should hold. The speculative solution denies the truth of causal necessity, so that anything may happen even when all things else are equal. Rather than explaining causal necessity, Meillassoux’s speculative way is to explain the manifest stability of physical law given their contingency. What must be shown is that, contrary to the Kantian transcendental ‘solution’, acausality does not contradict the existence of consciousness or imply the destruction of all representation. The path to achieving this lies in recognizing that the necessity of laws cannot be inferred from the stability of laws, as doing so relies on probabilistic and frequentist reasoning of the kind that changes in physical law due to their contingency would “have to have been noticed by now”, but, Meillassoux argues, probabilistic reasoning is meaningless in this context because chance and probability presupposes the non-contingent. The presupposition lies in that in order to assign a probability we need to conceive of a totality against which an outcome is considered. In order to assign a probability of ⅙ to each face of the dice, we need to conceive of the totality that is all six faces. Probabilistic reasoning presupposes a numerical totality, which cannot be achieved when the extension is the infinite, which is what is under consideration in the space of contingency. Meillassoux finds support for this in Cantor’s transfinite: “the (quantifiable) totality of the thinkable is unthinkable.” Totalizability is thus an assumption for probabilistic reasoning, the truth of which cannot be known a priori, thus the stability of physical law does not imply their necessity. (9) The speculative solution to Hume’s problem is thus that we can’t expect causality to hold, and that there are no “reasons” yielding to probability that we can refer to in arguing against the contingency of physical law. The final step in this line of argumentation would be to derive non-totalization, i.e. the absolute non-existence of the totality, from the principle of unreason: “…a properly factial resolution of Hume's problem would require that we derive the non-totalization of the possible from the principle of factiality itself.” This is also motivated by ancestrality, which depends on the absolutization of mathematics for its realist solution of making sense. The absolutization of mathematics would constitute the crown jewel of a materialism or realism that once more instigates the direct contact between thought and things in themselves. The absolutization of mathematics is identified with the “Galilean-Copernican decentring wrought by science [...] stated as follows: what is mathematizable cannot be reduced to a correlate of thought.” The mathematically containable is given an existence independent of us. (10)

The Wittgensteinian belief in the problems of philosophy being pseudo-problems and the task of philosophy as dissolution relies on the principle of reason: “But we now know that the contemporary belief in the insolubility of metaphysical questions is merely the consequence of the continuing belief in the principle of reason - for only someone who continues to believe that to speculate is to seek out the ultimate reason for things being thus and so, also believes that there is no hope of resolving metaphysical questions. Only someone who believes that the essence of the answer to a metaphysical question lies in discovering a cause or a necessary reason can estimate, rightly, that these problems will never be resolved.” The argument for the principle of unreason and the necessity of contingency is thus aimed at laying this conception to rest and providing for a return to the absolute. Meillassoux concludes that Kant’s legacy took a wrong turn: it was a Ptolemaic counter-revolution, re-centring the dependence on thought, and not a Copernican revolution, which decentred the subjective. This is the schism of modern philosophy, blamed on Hume and “the destruction of the absolute validity of the principle of sufficient reason.”

Seizure

In this section I will be responding to a number of Meillassoux’s phrasings and arguments. Most central will be number 7, where the argument is commandeered in service of holistic panenexperientialism, a philosophy wherein it is not something that is necessary due to the necessity of contingency, but experience. 

(1) Meillassoux’s classification of correlationism can of course be construed as a massive over-generalization. But is it truly thought that is correlated with being? How does thought, consciousness and experience differ? Is thought experience conceptualized, is it the capacity to abstract, or is it something else? No such definition or distinction is provided by Meillassoux, but I guess it does not matter too much. We can already here start a critique that will run throughout Meillassoux’s argument: The idea that thought can be uncorrelated with being, the idea of something objective, of “something in itself” completely independent, where is this idea from? Any encounter one has ever had with anything, whether concrete or abstract, has occurred experientially. Can anything as such be said to exist outside experience, when experience is the ground of any and all ontological and epistemological evidence? Isn’t the absolute-objective “in itself” an abstract and theoretical inference that points outside experience, but whose evidence always and forever is found inside it? Isn’t abstract theory founded on belief in lieu of any experience? What this boils down to is the givenness of the idea of objectivity, which brings us naturally to point two.

(2) Ancestrality and givenness provides the conundrum of retrojection. Givenness seems a term highly synonymous with experience, that givenness is that background against which both the abstract and concrete occurs: “the quality of being beyond question”. The framing of ancestrality in terms of givenness presents a conundrum in itself: any ancestral statement is also an idea, an abstract theoretical inference that stretches beyond experience, the given, to which we may attach evidence we find in our experience (through models and data), but none of this takes away from the non-experiential nature of abstract theory (which is not to say that abstract theory is not a phenomenon in experience). The ancestral conceptual cluster provides a conceptual ground for us finding ourselves in the kind of universe we do, with the kinds of structures we observe, and to this conceptual ground we infer the existence of a physical ground in correspondence. No experience has been had or will be had of this projected physical ground, except as instrumental data shaped to fit with the conceptual model. We never leave the space of the theoretical in talking about the ancestral, for there can be no such thing as absolute certainty, for this is not how normative discourse operates. 

(3) Meillassoux states that any ancestral statement either has a realist sense or no sense at all. Is it without sense that in our efforts at explaining the world as we experience it, we construct elaborate abstract, theoretical and logical frameworks from which we can project beyond the given? Is it without sense that these projections are useful in explaining our experience, but are nevertheless categorically different from reality as we experience it? 

(4) We do not have to accede to an absolute and independent reality in order for ancestral statements to have sense, and claiming that this has to be the case relies on a conception of language and science, the epistemic in general, to hinge for its efficacy on some non-normative standard, thus presupposing the absolute in its capacity to provide certainty and grounding for the epistemic. However, no such ground is needed for making ancestral statements meaningful upon realizing the epistemic as holistic and normative. The interested reader can consult On the Horizon for more details. 

(5) Does identifying the limits of something from within imply a beyond? What is it that convinces us that there is a beyond to that which we find limits for? Thinking the limits of thought does not imply a beyond, this is an ontic projection. Only from an external point of view can a beyond or outside be meaningfully ascertained, but there is no external point of view to thought itself. 

(6) Meillassoux states that facticity as “un-reason” and the capacity-to-be-other makes us capable of thinking our own non-being, and this is what shows the way “outside” to an absolute being uncorrelated with thought. “Thinking our own non-being” can be interpreted in two senses: First, thinking ourselves as something other certainly hypothesizes our own non-being, but only indirectly, and this hypothetical does not separate from thought. Second, we may attempt to think our own non-being directly, but we will quickly realize that we face an obstacle. Any attempted thought of non-being gains its meaning from the contrast with being, so non-being, just as “nothing”, cannot be thought of by itself. As stated in On the Horizon: 

…existence, being or experience can have no real negation, as negation rests and depends on there being a pre-existing background in which the idea and its negation both exist. But existence itself cannot then be negated for there is no other space or background for the act of negation to bring us to. As such, there can be no real “nothing” as “nothing” is not what it is except against something to contrast, and this something at its foundational level is of course experience.

(7) In an interview in Harman (2015), Meillassoux summarizes his argument for the necessity of contingency and that it leads to the necessary existence of things: 

I make this demonstration in two steps: (1) the contingency of the correlation, which correlationism needs in order to refute absolutist subjectivism, cannot itself be thought as a correlate of thought. Thus there is necessarily contingency, whether I think it or not; (2) contingency can be thought only as the contingency of something that exists (this is the first Figure of the factial: a demonstration that there ought to be something rather than nothing). Hence, there are necessarily contingent things, whether I exist to think them or not. It is an eternal necessity that there be contingent things, whereas thought (like every being) is contingent with respect to them.

But that there can’t be nothing does not necessarily imply something. Things are derived from experience, and the that-ness of experience cannot be negated, and as such is the very it that is necessarily contingent! Though it may not be the absolute Meillassoux argues that it is, the necessity of contingency does lead to a necessity for existence, but not of something, but rather of experience. This is where the necessity of contingency can be seized to work in favor of panenexperiantialism. 

(8) Does positing the contrary to the principle of unreason really presuppose its truth? Positing the contrary to the principle of unreason amounts to supposing that there is a reason for the given, thus an absolute ground for it. Yes, the principle of unreason cannot as such be contested without presupposing an absolute ground that provides reason, but this is not the same kind of absolute as what the principle of unreason stands for, thus contesting it does not presuppose its “truth”, but another “truth”. 

(9) What Cantor’s transfinite reveals is the inexhaustibility, non-totalizability and non-graspability of the real infinite, the continuum, the Whole. The transfinite is our approximation to the ontic, the that-ness of experience, but only ever an approximation, because the ontic is non-epistemisable. 

(10) The question of ancestrality can only have a realist sense, and its resolution depends on the absolutization of mathematical discourse. This absolutization is taken as provided by the conceivability of independent existence afforded by the mathematical. However, on realizing the epistemic as holistic and normative, the question of ancestrality inevitably co-depends on mathematics, but mathematics too will be seen to be normative. Any independence of existence the mathematical may provide is always provided in experience, subject to the normativity all experience is bound by. The deepest meaning of “what came before us came before us” is its literal meaning, but its literal meaning owes no allegiance to an independent absolute, but to a normative projection that has proved useful for us. 

Conclusion

I have in the preceding focused on specific parts of Meillassoux’s After Finitude: his conception of correlationism, his materialism, his arguments for the necessity of contingency and his mathematical resolution of the question of ancestrality. Meillassoux presents an argument that he conceives as breaking the circle of correlationism, an argument he mistakenly takes to lead to the absoluteness of factuality, contingency or unreason, an argument that all the while more coherently leads to the absoluteness of that-ness. The mistake is traced to conceiving of non-that-ness as possible, but that-ness is not negatable. That Meillassoux conceives the absolutization of contingency as a materialism is a strange occurence, but it all falls on his seeing nothing but things, on the metaphysical assumption he is unable to rid himself of.

In the interview with Harman he states this clearly: the necessity of contingency means that something must exist and not nothing. But it doesn’t have to be a something! Even his realization of the priority of the ‘there is’, that-ness, over ‘what is’, what-ness, is solely aimed at things, and not what things are derivative of. Meillassoux is led to a materialism of facticity and contingency because this is what he is focused on at the outset, he seems to be dogmatically bound to the material, to things, to entities. This also explains how he arrives at the negatability of that-ness, because he conceives it as that of things, and not the primary experience of which things are derived. Meillassoux fails to see that the inferences of science and thought, and the ancestral in particular, are inferences that, while useful, are not real in the sense that they can be experienced, and (inter-subjectively) verified in experience. It is the possibility of thinking one’s own non-being that opens the faultline to the in-itself. But this path only works for the solipsist! Meillassoux also claims that the correlationist must presuppose absolute possibility in order to deny the in-itself. But holism counters this: the only absolute is that-ness! But on that-ness as irreducibly experiential, thus of containing subjectivity, “materialism” must be said to be a highly misleading name, regardless of the speculative realist’s (re)definition of this term.

With Meillassoux’s metaphysical assumption exposed, his argument for the absoluteness of contingency still succeeds, though contingency coherently leads to the that-ness of experience, of existence, a view he seems symphatetic to in the 2021 interview, and not the ‘there is’ of material things, things that derive from the whole that is experiential reality. I will close this essay with a quotation from Barad (2007), that knits together some of the threads of the above critique with some of what is on the line in how we conceive of reality:

We don't obtain knowledge by standing outside the world; we know because we are of the world. We are part of the world in its differential becoming. The separation of epistemology from ontology is a reverberation of a metaphysics that assumes an inherent difference between human and nonhuman, subject and object, mind and body, matter and discourse. Onto-epistem-ology—the study of practices of knowing in being—is probably a better way to think about the kind of understandings that we need to come to terms with how specific intra-actions matter. Or, for that matter, what we need is something like an ethico-onto-epistem-ology—an appreciation of the intertwining of ethics, knowing, and being—since each intra-action matters, since the possibilities for what the world may become call out in the pause that precedes each breath before a moment comes into being and the world is remade again, because the becoming of the world is a deeply ethical matter.

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References

Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway. Duke University Press.

Meillassoux, Q. (2008). After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. Continuum. [2006]

Meillassoux, Q., Kahveci, K. & Çalci, S. (2021). Founded on Nothing: An Interview with Quentin Meillassoux. Urbanomic. URL=https://www.urbanomic.com/document/founded-on-nothing/ 

Harman, G. (2015). Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making (Second Edition). Edinburgh University Press.

1. Meillassoux et. al. (2021), emphasis added.

2. My usage of speculative in On the Horizon is as such incommensurable with Meillassoux’s definition.