the scope of today’s work

Meillassoux’s reflections on identity in L’inexistence divine. He doesn’t cover the topic elsewhere to this degree; it’s a subtle reflection on the relation between identity and non-contradiction. And it is here that we see Meillassoux take a distance from Hegel, whom he greatly admires. (We were talking last September about how Nietzsche is the source for Foucault whom Foucault doesn’t write about much; I asked Meillassoux if Hegel plays a similar role for him, and he didn’t just say yes, but “Yes!”, as though it hadn’t occurred to him before but really hit the spot.)

Seeing this longer work also gives one great respect for his editorial skills. He had tough choices to make when writing After Finitude, but seems to have chosen wisely. The themes he left out of the shorter work are either too involved or too singular to have fit into a brief treatise like that one.

The most unusual thesis in Meillassoux’s philosophy, I think, is not the radical contingency of everything. That’s certainly a surprising result, but one can imagine intuitively what a radically contingent world would be like, just as one can even imagine (though perhaps while laughing out loud) a virtual god who does not currently exist but might someday appear, radically innocent of allowing past evils to have occurred.

I think his strangest thesis is actually the one about the non-totalizability of possible worlds. Yes, anyone with 5 minutes’ training in transfinite numbers can understand the argument. But if we try to imagine a “Meillassouxian” tradition of philosophy based on what is really a flat-out destruction of the laws of probability for metaphysical questions, we start to see the outlines of some very strange possible successors for Meillassoux.

In any case, it is my opinion that this is the point in After Finitude to which too little attention has been paid. Whenever I ask people if they understand it, they say “oh yeah,” but then they simply repeat Meillassoux’s Cantorian argument. But I don’t get the sense that anyone has succeeded in grasping the actual consequences of it. That’s one of the things I’ll be trying to do in the book.

One of the false breakthroughs of recent scientistic philosophy is the notion that “ideas don’t need to be intuitively plausible in order to be true.” It’s a false breakthrough because the tactic here is simply to replace “intuitive plausibility” with “mathematical plausibility,” and hence plausibility is still involved. But this allows people to get away with crunching ideas that they don’t really grasp and that don’t make any sense, and even worse— it allows them to mock the people who are trying to do the hard work of making the really important ideas intelligible. It’s the equivalent of the famous “shut up and calculate” interpretation of quantum theory, which may yield practical benefits, but is ultimately a way of dodging the really interesting questions.