more thoughts on the Meillassoux interview

I’ve sent Meillassoux the translated version of the interview. Along with the additional personal stories we learn about him, the strictly philosophical portion of the interview is very helpful for the clarification of how he sees himself as differing from Badiou, Žižek, and indeed from my own position. The latter can only count as “naive realism” from his standpoint, though he makes clear that the same holds for the scientistic versions of philosophy.

In certain moods, Meillassoux is inclined to say that there are many different paths for escaping correlationism. In this interview he expresses the “harsh” version of his standpoint (“harsh” is his own term), according to which his proof is the only way out of the woods.

One of the things I find hardest to understand about scientistic S.R. (and its favored authors such as Ladyman/Ross and Metzinger) is its constant refrain that whereas speculative philosophy remains trapped in everyday prejudices and manifest images, the natural sciences are able to teach us counterintuitive things.

Well, the sciences definitely teach us counterintuitive things. But it would be hard to be more counterintuitive than Meillassoux, and it’s noteworthy that while he has thousands of admirers, I’ve only met one or two genuine disciples: it’s simply too strange for most people to follow Meillassoux on the hyperchaos point (which he has renamed “Superchaos,” by the way). However, let me stress that I think the admirers will turn into followers in droves within 20 years, because I think Meillassoux has provided philosophy with a truly new option— it’s simply one that takes awhile to digest.

But back to the “counterintuitive” point. It is certainly true that the Copernican system and continental drift were counterintuitive. But how are Spinoza, Leibniz, Bergson, and Whitehead not counterintuitive? How is Kafka not counterintuitive? It is empirically quite false to claim that only the natural sciences are capable of counterintuitive results; all of the great works of human thought achieve this goal.

My objection is not to the sciences, whose greatness needs no praise from me, but to the assumption that all intellectual value arises from the sciences alone. To believe this, you have to have a bad ontology— one that is needlessly aggressive in its wish to burn down the woods so that nothing but soil remains.