what correlationism reminds me of

Just today, I realized that correlationism is structured like Meno’s Paradox, and fails just as badly. In other words, the correlationist basically says this:

*You can’t think the unthought by thinking it (because then it’s a thought).

*You can’t think the unthought by not thinking it (for obvious reasons).

*Therefore, you can’t think the unthought.

The problem is that “think” is used equivocally here.

I’ve been pondering over this problem because the “Stove’s Gem” critique (which Brassier first referred to and I myself used in Prince of Networks) works better against absolute idealism than against the skeptical version of correlationism.

The latter version says something like this: “Who knows if there’s a world outside thought? All I’m saying is that if you try to think it, you automatically convert it into a thought.”

This attitude holds that to say (a) “the tree that lies outside thought” really means the same thing as (b) “the tree that lies inside thought”, since (a) is a thought, after all. But the two statements are not the same at all.

It would be nothing but a trivial word game, if not for the fact that most continental philosophy is grounded on the rather flimsy notion that to think things-in-themselves converts them into things-for-us.

The point is that you don’t just have the options of saying something or not saying it. There is also a way of saying something without saying it: we allude to it. The same is true of thinking: it is quite easy to think of something without thinking it in the full-blown sense: “The tree that exists outside thought” is such a case. Here, I allude to the tree. As Levi wonderfully put it earlier this fall, my inability to “know” the tree in the full sense is turned from an obstacle to realism and metaphysics into the very condition of it.

Imagine that someone says: “I don’t understand Obama.” It would be just stupid to respond: “That’s a contradiction. If you didn’t understand Obama, you wouldn’t even be able to form a sentence about him.”

You can read the book for a more polished version of these points (when the book comes out). But it still amazes me that so many brilliant thinkers have been willing to bet entire philosophies on such a flimsy and implausible starting point as the correlational circle. It will seem amazing someday.