on the supposed democratization of correlationism

I ran across a blog post a few days ago that seemed worth responding to briefly, but now that there’s a minute free, I can’t find the post.

The basic claim of the blog post (I don’t even remember whose it was) was that object-oriented philosophy simply democratizes correlationism, making the problem even worse by spreading it throughout the cosmos.

I’ve addressed this point before, but may as well address it again.

There are two basic features of correlationism:

1. The human/world relation is placed at the center of philosophy.

2. Finitude of the human pole.

Correlationism has both of those features. As I have argued in print, both Meillassoux’s position and mine can be viewed as attempts to get rid of half of the Kantian legacy, just a different half in each case.

My goal is to get rid of #1, and Meillassoux’s goal is get rid of #2.

For me, Kant is right about the phenomenal/noumenal distinction, and simply wrong to make this a uniquely human burden. It ought instead to be spread to all entities in the cosmos. But that’s a democratization of finitude, not of correlationism. You don’t have correlationism unless both of its chief features are present.

For Meillassoux, finitude is the problem. It is to be replaced by absolute knowledge of primary qualities via mathematization. Ultimately Meillassoux is much closer to Hegel than to Kant. He doesn’t mind the part about the human-world problem standing at the center of philosophy, and in fact he is quite hostile to/worried about panpsychism. Human thought is something very special for Meillassoux, a radical leap beyond other forms of life, let alone inanimate things. But this is all covered in my book on Meillassoux.