different gradations of life forms

For Aristotle, you could say that the big jumps go something like this: stone-plant-animal-human. His threefold theory of the soul allows for just this sort of hierarchy.

For Descartes it’s simply stone or human, nothing in between. Unless you’re a full-blown thinking subject, then your screams while being tortured are no better than the squeaking gears of a machine in need of oil (e.g., monkeys stabbed with knives). Descartes is no poster boy for animal rights.

For Heidegger in 1929/30 it’s stone-animal-human. His threefold of worldless/poor in world/world-forming allows no evident room for plants.

For Meillassoux in The Divine Inexistence, the scheme is very important for his argument, and for him the radical jumps proceed from matter through life to thought (and on to a fourth world, but that’s the onset of perfect justice rather than a new sort of creature; he thinks humans are already the highest possible creature). The use of the term “life” might suggest that Meillassoux is talking about plants, but it’s clear from many passages in the manuscript that he is referring to outright sentience, not to life in the sense of nutrition and reproduction.

So, Meillassoux ends up with basically the same schema of possible types of entities as the Heidegger of 1929/30 (as opposed to those of Aristotle or Descartes). His series runs in three steps: inanimate matter, animals, humans. The status of plants is unclear in Meillassoux’s argument, and though that might sound like a silly objection, the schema plays such an important role for him (as you will all soon see) that I’d have liked a bit more clarification on that point.

I’m starting to think that the most important aspect of his philosophy might be not hyperchaos (though that’s certainly a good candidate), but rather the Cantorian argument against measuring the probability of various events such as the sudden advent of the inexistent God or perfect justice or the rebirth of the dead (he actually quotes Pascal approvingly when the latter says that resurrection of the dead would be less incredible than the fact that any of us were born at all). This was always the weirdest aspect of his philosophy for me as a reader, but early on I started to like it instinctively for reasons that were hard to articulate. After four years of digesting that idea, I am becoming a bit better at articulating my reasons for liking it, and will outline them in the book.

My initial view is that there’s more about ethics than about politics in this book. Meillassoux is very clearly of the Left (see his fierce remarks about Sarkozy and neoliberalism in the interview), but others of the Left may be bothered by his warnings in the book against attempting to bring about perfect justice through political action. He’s not quite Badiou on the political front. (But of course, I agree with him here.)