Meillassoux interview by Urbanomic

This is the first I heard of THIS INTERVIEW OF MEILLASSOUX by Hecker and Mackay, and I haven’t had the chance to read it carefully yet.

Just two points on the following passage wher I am mentioned by name:

“FH: Would this link to Graham Harman’s point concerning the interaction of things?

RM: The withdrawal of the object beneath the crust of adumbrations …

QM: Just like Graham Harman, or Bergson, you create a very strange world. For me, I don’t claim to prove that things are not as Bergson or Graham say. But if we want to understand science, then we have to demonstrate that mathematics speaks about things in itself without us. It speaks about what would remain if we were not there. So it is really our deaths we contemplate when mathematics describes reality.”

First, Mackay is dead wrong to say that I believe in “the withdrawal of the object beneath the crust of adumbrations.” The object beneath the crust of adumbrations does not withdraw in the least. The crust of adumbrations belongs to the Husserlian object, which Husserl calls the intentional object and I call the sensual object. Perhaps the key point in Guerrilla Metaphysics is that the Heideggerian object does withdraw and the Husserlian object does not. This is arguably the basic point of my entire position. It is simply a mistake to think that Husserl’s intentional objects hide behind their various profiles. They don’t. The intentional object is there from the start, as soon as we recognize it as such; the adumbrations are adumbrations of a pre-given intentional object. To get to the eidos of the intentional object, we subtract from its inessential and fleeting surface profiles. In short, if Heidegger’s hammer is always more than what we see of it (since it withdraws into veiled darkness), Husserl’s hammer is always less than what we see of it, since it always appears with an exact hue of brown and from an exact specific angle that can be varied freely without the intentional/sensual hammer ceasing to be what it is.

But this leads me to Meillassoux’s response: “But if we want to understand science, then we have to demonstrate that mathematics speaks about things in itself without us.”

The problem here is the ambiguity of the phrase “speaks about.” Or rather, Meillassoux’s failure to see that an ambiguity is present. For Meillassoux, who remains loyal to the correlationist argument to this extent (and to this extent only) you can’t speak about what lies outside thought, because by speaking of it you are ipso facto inside the circle of thought. He finds this to be a powerful argument, while the other three Speculative Realists find it feeble (though Brassier’s position on this point may be shifting due to his recent Sellarsian turn; we’ll have to wait for his next large-scale publication to be sure).

My counter-claim is that thinking about what is outside thought is the very essence of philosophia. Philosophy is a love of wisdom about what lies outside thought, not an immanent wisdom about what lies inside thought. To salute the initial validity of the correlational circle is to side with Meno against Socrates, and in fact I hold that the German Idealist tradition falls into the same trap.

For it is quite possible to think of something without thinking it. Logicians have made this point against Meno’s Paradox for a good long time.

In Kripke’s position, you can speak about something in sense 1 (designation) without speaking about it in sense 2 (definite description): that’s what rigid designation is.

If you don’t like Kripke, Husserl already said something similar when discussing the key role of nominal acts: to name something is not to confine yourself to an accessible list or set of qualities.

And if you don’t like modern philosophy at all, turn to Aristotle for a similar sentiment. (In fact, though I hate “X already said Y” arguments just as Levi does, I think Kripke’s position is important less for its historical originality than for the fact that he stated that position within the context of analytic philosophy. It’s a fairly classical idea.)

But more importantly, the dispute between those who think mathematics or natural science can in principle exhaust the nature of the real, and those who do not (like me), is a very important philosophical dispute. In my forthcoming book on Meillassoux it is handled directly and openly, and Meillassoux responds in the same fashion.

My question to those who think that knowledge is commensurate with the real: if you agree that knowledge of a tree does not strike roots in the ground and bear apples in the way that a tree itself does, then wherein lies the difference? What it will end up having to be is a fairly disappointing theory that the real tree is made of “matter” whereas knowledge of the tree is not. But then we need to see the metaphysics of matter that lies behind this claim; it can’t just be vaguely relied upon in unstated fashion.