the real mystery in Meillassoux

As I’m finishing up this book, I think the biggest mystery in Meillassoux (not the point I disagree with most, which is his defense of the strength of the correlationist argument) is why he has any concept of laws at all.

Hyper-chaos, of course, means that anything can happen at any time without reason. The downfall of the principle of sufficient reason should mean that everything is autonomous and disconnected, not linked in any way with anything else that happens.

But that’s not what Meillassoux says. It is only laws that have no sufficient reason. It is at the level of worlds that the transfinite considerations of Cantor make it impossible to call things probable or improbable.

In the intra-worldly sphere, laws do exist. It is true that these laws can change at any moment for no reason, but they are laws nonetheless, however transient and unreliable. If I pull my keys from my pocket and they turn into a dove and fly from the room, this is certainly possible for Meillassoux. But the more I look at his writings, this sort of ‘chaotic’ event can’t happen directly. What must happen is that the laws of nature governing such things must change– which can happen, of course.

What difference does this make? The difference this makes is that Meillassoux’s hyper-contingency, contrary to what I used to think, doesn’t seem to to operate in intra-worldly settings. Within a world, it is perfectly possible for two things to be connected by a law. If Meillassoux adds that the law is “not necessary,” all that really means is that it might change: i.e., it’s not necessarily eternal. But it remains necessary for as long as it is not abolished.

In short, there is a dualism in Meillassoux’s thought between time and any given instant. The instant is governed by laws, and thus by sufficient reason, and every absence (such as a distant star or the inside of a refrigerator when no one is looking) is merely a lacuna: one could perceive these things if only one were there.

All of the philosophical problems arise, in Meillassoux’s view, when we start looking at time. It is time that can bring about any chaotic change. It is time that, by raising the possibility of an ancestral realm prior to thought itself, makes the initial challenge to the thought-world correlate.

But it would be easy to imagine another Meillassoux, one who simply dispensed with “laws” altogether. They don’t actually do much work in his philosophy other than to split the intraworldly realm (where laws are operative) from the level of changes in world (which amount to a sudden transformation of laws without reason). But it remains unclear why there should be a difference between the worldly and the intraworldly in the first place.

In any case, it’s been a great pleasure to spend more time with all of Meillassoux’s published writings. The metaphor he uses that really struck me this time (I’m not sure why it left little impression before) is that his is a “non-Euclidean philosophy”. Just as Lobachevski created a new geometry by showing (in spite of his initial hopes) that Euclid’s parallel postulate can be cancelled and a consistent geometry will still result, Meillassoux hopes to show that a consistent philosophy can result from showing that the fact that the laws of nature can change suddenly for no reason does not entail that they must change frequently.

It’s not a philosophy I’ll be able to accept, but it’s one that a lot more people might conceivably start to accept than is currently the case. Is it possible to imagine a Meillassouxian School that takes this fork in the road? I think it is, and in fact I still expect such a School to emerge.

One last point… There’s an interesting moment in the interview when he completely rejects my claim that he resembles the German Idealists (despite his admitted admiration for them). As Meillassoux observes, he actually offers a proof in After Finitude for the existence of things-in-themselves.

But does he, really? I say no.

What Meillassoux claims to prove is that the things-in-themselves would exist even if all humans were extinguished. Thus, the things can exist without us.

However, in order for something to be a thing-in-itself, it is not enough simply that it exists when we aren’t looking at it. The real question is: what is it when we are looking at it? And for Meillassoux, the answer is clear: the things themselves can be exhaustively known by thought, in absolute fashion. There are no secret, unfathomable depths to the things; philosophy is a philosophy of immanence.

My claim is that no “philosophy of immanence” can also be a philosophy of things-in-themselves. If you think the things are exhaustible by knowledge, you are simply defining the things as having a character that is able to appear exhaustively in the phenomenal sphere. The world is filled with images, and some of them happen to be true and others happen to be false. I suspect that Bergson in Matter and Memory is the source of this idea of Meillassoux’s; he has told me that Bergson is one of his hidden sources, and simply from reading ‘Subtraction and Contraction’ you can tell how important Matter and Memory was to him.

But in speculative realist terms, this is also one of those points that divides the group in half. For Brassier also, there is no difference in kind between thoughts and things. If something is known scientifically, it is known in adequate fashion (with perhaps some provisos added for the ever uncompleted labor of science). Here too, the world is made up of images: good scientific images and bad folk images. It’s a completely different theory from Meillassoux, but they are both confident in the ability of human thought to plumb the depths of things. Compare my position and Grant’s with the other two here, and you will see that we say the opposite.

I’m not sure when Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making will be published, but I would guess Fall 2011. The long appendix of excerpts from L’Inexistence divine will be a nice bonus for readers of that book.