Garcia interview in French

Looks like there was an original French version of the interview. As will be seen even from the English, Dr. Garcia positions himself as follows:

“…les thèses que je défends en métaphysique (qui sont proches du courant qu’on appelle le « réalisme spéculatif » de Quentin Meillassoux ou Graham Harman) font partie du même univers mental que les romans que j’ai écrits ou que j’aimerais écrire.”

On a related note, here’s another way to contrast Meillassoux’s conception of the thing-in-itself with my own.

It must always be remembered that Meillassoux admires the correlationist starting point in a way that I don’t. For Meillassoux, any realism that doesn’t survive the test-by-fire of the correlational circle is just a naive realism that hasn’t risen to the correlationist challenge. Meillassoux sees himself as having given a proof that the thing-in-itself exists rather than simply asserting it as the naive realists do.

Someone wrote in a few months ago and claimed that I can’t say that Meillassoux remains committed to the correlational circle, since he ends up proving the thing-in-itself. And true enough, this is what Meillassoux would also say in his own defense; as you’ll see in the interview I did with him in the Edinburgh book, he’s not at all happy with my claim that his position towards the thing-in-itself is not significantly different from that of German Idealism.

But it needs to be noted that Meillassoux’s concept of the thing-in-itself is already a post-Kantian version of it. Meillassoux’s thing-in-itself exceeds, not human access, but only the human lifespan. Mt. Everest exists in itself because it was there before humans were alive and will still be there even if all humans are exterminated.

But remember, that’s not all that “thing-in-itself” means. The thing-in-itself, in Kant’s conception of it, doesn’t just exist before we are born and after we die. The point is that even while we are alive, indeed even while we are staring directly at it, it is more than our knowledge of it.

However, that’s the side of Kant that I like, not the side that Meillassoux likes. Meillassoux is committed to immanence and absolute knowledge and opposed to finitude, which he sees as the breeding ground of superstition and mysterious hidden reasons.

One consequence is that Meillassoux focuses too heavily on temporality in his examples of the in-itself. He has to point to the pre-human age (ancestrality) or pre- & post-human ages together (diachronicity) to try to shock the reader into seeing the limits of the correlate, even as he downplays the spatial remoteness of a vase falling in a lonely country house. He also has no interest in the part-whole relations within a single instant as studied by mereology; there is no layered universe in Meillassoux as you find in someone like DeLanda with his multitude of scales– for Meillassoux, what is immanent in the field of awareness is what there is, with the simple bonus that it might continue to be that way even after you’re dead.

In short, I think Meillassoux’s thing-in-itself is a concept of the thing-in-itself that remains fatally tainted by its origin in the human-world correlate. It’s simply not an in-itself at all, even if it outlasts my lifespan and that of all humans. The fact that absolute knowledge of mathematized primary qualities strikes some as epistemologically and politically desirable does not mean that it’s possible. (One of the interesting things about Meillassoux, Badiou, and Žižek is that all are great admirers of Heidegger, yet Heidegger’s central ideas leave virtually no trace on any of them, not even by way of reaction. It’s an interesting problem, in fact, how they can all admire Heidegger so much yet make so little use of him. Admiration plus relative indifference is not the most common thing in the history of philosophy, as far as I can recall at the moment, on the fly.)

One other point about After Finitude… I think people are making too much of the point that Meillassoux jumps too quickly from the conceivability of my death to the contingency of everything else. The “conceivable mortality of the idealist subject” part of the book is more just a rhetorical device, not the main line of Meillassoux’s proof. The main line of the proof is that something might exist outside the correlate no matter how contradictory this might sound. And this means that both sides of the correlate are contingent, not just the “subject” side.

However, I think this proof fails for a different reason, as explained in my book. The in-itself is first reduced to meaninglessness by Meillassoux, but then it needs to have meaning in order to undercut subjective idealism. But the problem with this is that you can’t first say “the notion of an unthought tree is meaningless, because that very notion is already a thought” (Meillassoux supports the correlationist at this stage and opposes naive realism) and then say “but maybe there’s an unthought tree anyway.” Because on Meillassoux’s own terms, the latter phrase is only speaking about a tree that is thought, not about an unthought tree. He’s already broken that sword, and can’t now bring it back into the battle.

In short, once you concede the correlational circle’s ability to suck all statements into its vortex and turn them into statements about thoughts, you can’t then use one of those very statements to escape the circle.

I conclude that Meillassoux’s “strong correlationism” is an impossible position, and therefore so is the “speculative materialism” that he generates by reversing it. In my view you have to choose between naive realism, (Kantian) weak correlationism, and subjective idealism. I choose the second option, for reasons drawn from Heidegger’s tool-analysis, and simply expand it so that the finitude of reality governs inanimate beings no less than it does humans.

Stated differently, I try to radicalize weak correlationism, while Meillassoux tries to radicalize strong correlationism. He tacitly holds that I can’t do the former because weak correlationism is inconsistent; I explicitly hold that he can’t do the latter because strong correlationism does not exist: it is merely idealism in sheep’s clothing.

If people still don’t think there’s a real difference between OOO’s approach to the thing-in-itself and Meillassoux’s, consider the following piece of anecdotal evidence. When asked to name the most underrated thinker in the history of philosophy, Meillassoux answered “Reinhold, Jacobi, Maimon.” This tells you something further about his attitude toward the Kantian an sich. I suppose my own current vote would for most underrated would be Brentano, who has many influences but is in many ways basically a modernizer of Aristotle. I admire Aristotle more than Hegel, while for Meillassoux it is clearly the reverse. (Both are great, of course, but you’re going to prefer one or the other, and that’s going to have consequences).