Meillassoux’s April Berlin lecture now available in English

HERE. That link will start an immediate download. It’s not clear who posted it, but it’s now being linked to widely enough on Twitter that its release can be considered a fait accompli. And besides, the tape recording of the lecture has already been available online for awhile.

I won’t write too much here, because I’m in the midst of writing a longer response to Meillassoux’s piece that will come out some time in 2013.

It’s an important essay, though in my opinion one that is not moving in the right direction. Meillassoux introduces a new general term, “subjectalism,” by which he intends to put me and Iain Grant in the same box as idealism (both Hegel and Berkeley), insofar as we all “absolutize the subject.”

However, this is simply an equivocal use of the term “absolutize.” Idealists “absolutize” the subject in the sense that they exclude all things-in-themselves beyond accessibility to the subject. Meillassoux claims here that a position such as mine also “absolutizes” the subject because I treat all objects as subjects.

The latter point is already stickier than Meillassoux’s essay acknowledges. But even if my position were read as a straightforward panpsychism, it could not be said that idealism and panpsychism “absolutize the subject” in the same sense.

1. Idealism absolutizes the subject by not allowing for any reality that could exceed its accessibility to thought.

2. Panpsychism “absolutizes” the subject by saying that there is nothing that is not a subject. But this is not a subset of the first point. If stones and cardboard boxes have minds, this does not mean that they are exclusively thinking things, any more than humans are exclusively thinking things just because we think.

Furthermore, we cannot accept Meillassoux’s claim to escape Group 1 above. For it is also the case for his philosophy that nothing exceeds its accessibility to thought. The primary qualities of things can be mathematized; hence, the primary qualities of things can in principle be exhaustively known. The only sense in which Meillassoux escapes idealism is that his things continue to exist even if all subjects are sleeping or killed. But this isn’t the deepest meaning of the in-itself. The deepest meaning of the in-itself is that the things exceed us even when we are alive, awake, and staring directly at them. The things are not exhausted by our access to them, because our access to them is a translation. This is the good side of Kant– the part of Kant that German Idealism was wrong in attempting to overcome.

The consequence of the equivocation is that Meillassoux, in his attempt to rule out “vitalist” critiques of correlationism (such as mine or Grant’s) lays undue stress on the need for a full-blown dualism between thought and what he calls “dead matter.” However, dead matter isn’t really what interests Meillassoux. What interests him, instead, is the opportunity this dead matter gives for absolute knowledge.

Restated, I hold that “subjectalism” does not refer to any genuine unified philosophical position. The real problem, instead, is epistemism. Epistemism comes in two brands: mathematism and scientism. The first kind holds that direct access to the world is possible. The second kind holds that it may not be possible at any given moment, but is still a telos governing our scientific progress towards direct access to the world. (Sometimes scientism tries to convert itself into mathematism, as in the case of so-called “strucutral realism,” which holds that a certain amount of mathematical content survives through all scientific theory change.)

“Subjectalism” does not exist, because idealism and pantranslationism (a more fair term for my position than “panpsychism”) cannot be unified in the manner that Meillassoux attempts. But epistemism is a genuine reality, and a much more important battle line, because this is possibly the key issue on which recent debates in our sector of continental philosophy have hinged

1. There is the object-oriented approach, which holds that all relation (including knowledge) is translation, and therefore direct access to reality is simply not a plausible goal. The word philosophia already acknowledges this by not calling itself sophia. Socrates rejected all claims to knowledge, and this was not just a coquettish stunt. The recent overemphasis on the Parmenidean claim that “being thinking are the same” (ignoring for now any debate on the translation of that phrase) has overstated the wisdom part of philosophy and understated the love.

2. The opposite position, which I call epistemism, regards itself as the heir of rationalism, the Enlightenment, and a certain manner of critiquing “ideology” from the standpoint of direct access to the truth. Unfortunately, it does not have such direct access to the truth, not even in principle. It is over-reliant on Hegel and Lacan, and praises Heidegger in passing while assimilating very little from Heidegger (as described in the opening to my recent essay on Badiou’s Theory of the Subject).

Nonetheless, anything by Meillassoux is worth reading, and this piece does a lot to sharpen the choice that lies before us.