The great promise of speculative realism is that it proposes to break open the prison gates of our own all-too-human assumptions, and to bring us into contact with what Quentin Meillassoux calls the great outdoors (le Grand Dehors):
the absolute outside of precritical thinkers: that outside which was not relative to us, and which was given as indifferent to its own givenness to be what it is, existing in itself regardless of whether we are thinking of it or not; that outside which thought could explore with the legitimate feeling of being on foreign territory – of being entirely elsewhere.1
Speculative realism endeavours to move beyond the framework of the merely human. It seeks an outdoors, an outside, an elsewhere. Such a search is not as easy as it sounds, however. For we usually bring our own habits, assumptions and viewpoints along with us, no matter where we go. Tourists never truly encounter foreign territory: for them, everything is always either just like home, or else interestingly ‘exotic’ because of its differences from home. But home remains the unvarying point of reference.
In order to avoid being just intellectual tourists and actually to reach the great outdoors we need to escape the habit of always referring things back to ourselves. Going somewhere else is only the first step. We must also remove our own presuppositions about whatever it is that we encounter elsewhere. As Eugene Thacker puts it, it is not enough just to consider the world-in-itself, in contradistinction to the world-for-us.2 That just reproduces the old binaries of subject and object, and of mind and matter. Rather, Thacker says, we must actively seek to approach the world-without-us: the world insofar as it is not ‘given’ to us, and that subsists following ‘the subtraction of the human from the world’.3 This means that we must bring our own thought to the point where it is beside itself, or outside itself. Speculative realism asks us to displace ourselves, so that we may encounter things that absolutely resist being cast in terms of our own habits, assumptions and categories of thought.
All four of the original speculative realist thinkers – Quentin Meillassoux, Iain Hamilton Grant, Graham Harman and Ray Brassier – address the basic situation of the world-without-us: a world that is not made in our image, or to our measure. For Iain Hamilton Grant, even our most abstract theoretical thinking is still an expressive power of Nature itself, on the same order as stellar fusion and planetary convulsions.4 This means that thought, no less than these other eruptions, is propelled by primordial forces that it cannot grasp or recuperate on its own account. For his part, Graham Harman envisions a world of mysterious objects, none of which can be entirely plumbed by any other.5 Things continually beckon to one another from their depths, shining with an aesthetic allure that cannot be cashed out in the form of knowledge or comprehension.
Meillassoux, meanwhile, insists on what he calls the ancestral: the traces of ‘events anterior to the advent of life as well as consciousness’.6 These traces take no account of us; they cannot be regarded as ‘given’ to us, or as existing ‘for us’, in any way, shape or form. The discovery of the ancestral marks an ‘aporia’ for correlationism. And finally, Ray Brassier reminds us that human thought, no matter how grandiose or transcendental it conceives itself to be, is nonetheless bound to physical embodiment, and hence to mortality. It will someday come to an end:
Sooner or later both life and mind will have to reckon with the disintegration of the ultimate horizon, when, roughly one trillion, trillion, trillion (101728) years from now, the accelerating expansion of the universe will have disintegrated the fabric of matter itself … Every star in the universe will have burnt out, plunging the cosmos into a state of absolute darkness and leaving behind nothing but spent husks of collapsed matter. All free matter, whether on planetary surfaces or in interstellar space, will have decayed, eradicating any remnants of life based in protons and chemistry, and erasing every vestige of sentience – irrespective of its physical basis.7
The speculative realists thus all write of forces, things, and stretches of time that exceed our grasp – not just empirically, but necessarily and intrinsically. I can imagine the world continuing beyond my own death; but can I imagine there no longer being a ‘world’ as the correlate of my imaginings? I can understand that things may exceed the limits of my own understanding; but can I understand the existence of things that are not ‘given’ in the first place, and hence not understandable even in principle? Questions like these challenge the very limits of pragmatic, human-centred, correlational thought.
The traditional correlationist response to such challenges has been to recuperate them self-reflexively. For I can think even my own inability to think. In this way, every failure or aporia becomes yet more evidence for the power of the mind, and the necessity of the correlation. Kant himself is the master of this strategy. In The Critique of Judgment, he describes the experience of the Sublime. We are overwhelmed when we encounter forces that are capable of destroying us:
Bold, overhanging, as it were threatening cliffs, thunder clouds towering up into the heavens, bringing with them flashes of lightning and crashes of thunder, volcanoes with their all-destroying violence, hurricanes with the devastation they leave behind, the boundless ocean set into a rage, a lofty waterfall on a mighty river, etc., make our capacity to resist into an insignificant trifle in comparison with their power.8
And yet, Kant says, we are ultimately confirmed in our own self-consciousness by confrontations of this sort. Sublime spectacles ‘elevate the strength of our soul above its usual level’, Kant says, ‘and allow us to discover within ourselves a capacity for resistance of quite another kind, which gives us the courage to measure ourselves against the apparent all-powerfulness of nature’.9 Even – or especially – when I face up to the prospect of my own imminent destruction, I triumph. For I thereby affirm the transcendent power of the human mind: its power precisely to imagine such a fate. The power of nature is overmatched by my own power to envision its power. The very fact that I can conceive a limit demonstrates my superiority to this limit.
Kant’s recuperative move is repeated again and again in the subsequent history of Western philosophy. Indeed, Hegel turns this Kantian argument against Kant himself, through a kind of philosophical jiu-jitsu. For Hegel argues that the exteriority of ‘things in themselves’, their resistance to being grasped by the understanding, is a limit posited by the understanding itself.10 It is we alone who attribute to things the status of escaping their correlation with us. Exceeding the correlation is, for Hegel, itself a correlational category imposed by our own minds. In this way, we are trapped more firmly than ever within what Meillassoux calls the ‘correlationist circle’. Kant’s claim about the Sublime applies only to our feelings; it describes an affective recognition, not a cognitive one. But Hegel turns Kant’s demonstration into an epistemological principle that applies to cognition or the understanding. In this way, nothing is allowed to escape the correlation. Hegel eliminates the very possibility of a world-without-us, or of an Outside that is neither positively nor negatively ‘relative to us’.
From a strictly logical point of view, the key correlationist assertion – that I cannot think or speak of something without thereby turning it into a correlate of my thought – is undoubtably a sophism. As Brassier puts it,
To say that I can think of something existing independently of my thought need not be flagrantly contradictory once I distinguish the claim that my thoughts cannot exist independently of my mind, which is trivially true, from the claim that what my thoughts are about cannot exist independently of my mind, which simply does not follow from such a trivial truth.11
Nonetheless, it is nearly impossible to put this logical distinction into actual practice. Whenever I think and speak of things insofar as they exist entirely apart from my thinking of them, I risk falling into a performative contradiction. For do I not produce a relation between myself and a thing simply by the act of pointing to it? Whenever I approach a thing in this way, I appropriate it as my ‘intentional object’ (as the phenomenologists would say). The problem is only compounded when we consider that most thoughts and speech acts go well beyond simple designation. To think of something means to understand it in a certain way, to place it within the complex order of what Kant called the categories of the understanding. To speak of something means to enmesh it within the relational web of language.
In other words, once I have accepted the phenomenological principle that ‘all consciousness is consciousness of something’, I am no longer able to separate things from my perception of them.12 I may well concede in principle that things transcend my own conceptions of them; but I cannot detach them altogether from my own conceptions. Even though ‘what my thoughts are about’ is logically independent of the thoughts themselves, I am unable to make this separation in practice. I remain trapped, performatively if not conceptually, within the correlationist circle.
The speculative realist thinkers all take this performative dilemma seriously. But they differ greatly in their strategies for getting around it. Brassier remains on the terrain of epistemology. He places his bets on the disjunction between commonsense beliefs and the discoveries of physical science. Brassier claims that ‘scientific representation’, in contrast to all other modes of understanding, adopts ‘a stance in which something in the object itself determines the discrepancy between its material reality – the fact that it is, its existence – and its being, construed as quiddity, or what it is’. Our concepts of objects never coincide with the objects themselves. But Brassier claims that the scientific method – with its rational procedures and its openness to continual empirical revision – is uniquely able to evade the threat of performative contradiction. It can step outside of the corrrelationist circle, because it is bound to the ‘game of giving and asking for reasons’ envisaged by Wilfrid Sellars and Robert Brandom. Bound in this way, scientific discourse is forced to acknowledge, and continually correct for, the unavoidable discrepancy at the heart of its own formulations.
Meillassoux invokes physical science in a radically different way than Brassier does. For Meillassoux puts his faith in ‘the absolutory capacity of modern science – that is to say, Galilean science, which proceeds via the mathematization of nature’.13 In other words, Meillassoux seeks to reestablish ‘a Cartesian rather than a Kantian conception of experimental science’.14 Brassier’s notion of science is still (via Wilfrid Sellars) a Kantian one. It doesn’t claim to access the nonhuman real directly, but rather values science because its verification procedures can be rationally grounded. Science is an inherently ‘self-correcting enterprise’, allowing or forcing us to exercise ‘normative commitments that underwrite our ability to change our minds about things, to revise our beliefs in the face of new evidence and correct our understanding when confronted with a superior argument’.15 In other words, science is still finally a human enterprise – albeit one that relies upon ‘man qua rational agent, not anthropological object’. It is from within the human, rational realm that science is able to approach a nonhuman and nonconceptual reality.
Meillassoux, to the contrary, values science only on the grounds of its recourse to mathematical formalization. He is not concerned with the way that the self-correcting scientific method would allow us to asymptotically approach a nondiscursive reality. Rather, Meillassoux privileges mathematics as a form of absolute knowledge, which unequivocally provides information about things in themselves, as they exist entirely apart from us:
All those aspects of the object that can give rise to a mathematical thought (to a formula or to digitalization) rather than to a perception or sensation can be meaningfully turned into properties of the thing not only as it is with me, but also as it is without me.16
Meillassoux’s effort to justify attributing this power to mathematics is still a work in progress. Basically, he argues, rather astonishingly, that mathematics is able ‘to grant us access to the Kingdom of the dead … to tell us what death looks like in our world’.17 It is bound up with the ‘dead matter’ that is all there is to the world, according to Meillassoux, outside of the correlation with human subjectivity. Mathematics has this power because it is ‘founded upon signs devoid of signification’ that can be iterated endlessly: ‘the singular ontological import of mathematics proceeds precisely from the fact that, unlike ordinary meaning, it makes systematic use of signs that are effectively devoid of all signification’.18 Mathematical formalism thus supposedly stands apart from any sort of subjective or intrinsic meaning whatsoever. It follows, according to Meillassoux, that mathematical measurement and description uniquely picks out ‘what belongs to the world alone’, independently of the meanings that we impose upon it. Mathematics is therefore the royal road to the great outdoors.
Grant and Harman approach the performative dilemma in an altogether different manner, without calling upon the authority of mathematics or science. Grant agrees with Brassier that our conceptions of things are always different from, and inadequate to, the things thereby conceived.19 But Grant rejects Brassier’s claim that scientific representation can work to take account of, and diminish, this difference. Instead, Grant breaks down the very dichotomy between my limited, correlational conceptions of things and the things themselves. For the former, no less than the latter, are finite products of Nature’s own boundless productivity. Conceptions, like objects, are never adequate to the forces that impel them; for this reason, all correlations between them fail. But conceptions and objects alike are nonetheless products of these impelling forces. My very cognitive performance, or conceptual production, is itself derived from the excess that it is unable to contain or represent. Following Schelling, Grant inverts Kant’s account of a Sublime encounter with the overwhelming power of Nature. Instead of discovering a supposed counterpower20 of my own mind that would overmatch Nature’s power, I come to realize that my own mental power cannot be opposed to that of Nature, for it expresses Nature’s unbounded power already. Any correlation between thoughts and things is dissolved, because they must both be referred back, in the same way, to the processes that continually generate them.
Harman makes no attempt to find a noncorrelational form of knowledge, because he maintains that any such knowledge is impossible. For ‘the real is something that cannot be known, only loved’.21 The sole ‘access’ that we have to objects – or for that matter that objects have to one another – is allusive and ‘indirect’. The world is filled with ‘ghostly objects withdrawing from all human and inhuman access, accessible only by allusion and seducing us by means of allure’.22 Harman here comes close to Alfred North Whitehead’s notion of the prospects that entities raise for us (or for other entities) as ‘lures for feeling’ – though as far as I know he never cites this particular aspect of Whitehead’s thought. For Harman, aesthetics precedes epistemology. Causation – or, more generally, any form of influence – is indistinguishable from seduction.
It is at this point that I would like to introduce the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947), as offering another approach to the dilemma of the world-without-us. There is at least a certain sense in which Whitehead is already a speculative realist avant la lettre – though one of a different sort than any of the current group. As Harman has often noted, Whitehead unquestionably breaks with anthropocentrism since he refuses to privilege any sort of human or rational subject.23 Unlike the Kantians and the phenomenologists, Whitehead does not give any special treatment to the way that the world exists for us. What’s more, he describes his own metaphysical system as ‘a recurrence to that phase of philosophic thought which began with Descartes and ended with Hume’: in other words, he self-consciously reverts to what Meillassoux calls ‘the absolute outside of precritical thinkers’.24
I will not go into the details of Whitehead’s ‘speculative scheme’ here: they are less important than his overall project. Like the great pre-Kantian philosophers, he begins with issues of sensation, perception and thought. But he does not see these as especially human categories, nor as rational ones. Rather, he formulates his principles in such ways that they refer equally to all entities in the cosmos: to the ‘most trivial puff of existence in far-off empty space’ as much as to human beings, or to God.25 Whitehead elaborates a mode of explanation with sufficient generality that it can be applied alike to commonsensical human self-understanding, and to the paradoxical discoveries of relativity and quantum mechanics. Rather than asking the epistemological question of how things themselves differ from human projections upon them, he asks ontological questions about the generic qualities of both human and nonhuman entities. By formulating his approach in this way, Whitehead seeks to overcome what he calls the bifurcation of nature.26 This is his term for the division between the nature apprehended in awareness and the nature that is the cause of awareness. The ‘nature which is the fact apprehended in awareness’ holds within it the greenness of the trees, the song of the birds, the warmth of the sun, the hardness of the chairs, and the feel of the velvet. The ‘nature which is the cause of awareness’ is the conjectured system of molecules and electrons which so affects the mind as to produce the awareness of apparent nature.
The poet and the phenomenologist recognize only the nature which is the fact apprehended in awareness; the scientist, on the other hand, sees this as mere illusion, and instead recognizes only the nature which is the cause of awareness. For Whitehead, both of these separate positions are needlessly limited; we need a single account that accommodates both. ‘We may not pick and choose. For us the red glow of the sunset should be as much part of nature as are the molecules and electric waves by which men of science would explain the phenomenon’.27 We get nowhere when, like the phenomenologists and other correlationists, we dismiss the molecules and electric waves and concentrate only on the red glow of the sunset. But we also get nowhere when, like the scientific reductionists, we dismiss the poetic feelings of the sunset altogether, and treat the molecules and electric waves as the only relevant actualities.
One good way to understand philosophical distinctions is to use them as tests: trials to which we can submit our own hypotheses. Speculative realism offers us one such test: it asks whether we remain trapped within the correlationist circle, or whether we have found a way to go beyond it and enter foreign territory. Whitehead offers us a somewhat different test: he asks whether we continue to accept the bifurcation of nature, or whether we have found a way to avoid abusively picking and choosing. These tests are not mutually exclusive. In posing his test about the bifurcation nature, Whitehead also steps outside of the correlationist circle. Any philosophy that (in the wake of Kant) divides the world into two, privileging the human subject on the one hand, and opposing it to a world of nonhuman objects on the other, thereby perpetuates the bifurcation of nature – no matter which side of the dichotomy it picks. But the inverse of this is not necessarily true: it is possible to reject correlationism, without for all that overcoming the bifurcation of nature.
By way of conclusion, let us see how the four major speculative realist thinkers differ in the ways that they implicitly respond to Whitehead’s test.
Harman easily passes Whitehead’s test. Though Harman does not explicitly mention the bifurcation of nature, he discusses a similar distinction posed by the British physicist Arthur Stanley Eddington, who was a student of Whitehead’s and an associate of Einstein. Eddington draws a famous contrast between a table as it is viewed by common sense, and the same table as it is understood by modern physics. Eddington’s first table is ‘a commonplace object of that environment which I call the world … It has extension, it is comparatively permanent, it is coloured; above all it is substantial’.28 Eddington’s second table, in contrast, ‘is mostly emptiness. Sparsely scattered in that emptiness are numerous electric charges rushing about with great speed’, i.e. electrons circling atomic nuclei. Harman proposes a third table in contrast to either of these. He insists that neither of Eddington’s bifurcated formulations is able to ‘exhaust the table’s reality … The real table is a genuine reality deeper than any theoretical or practical encounter with it.’29 Harman and Whitehead thus agree that both the phenomenological and the scientific descriptions of an entity are partial and limited. But where Harman concludes that both descriptions are therefore false, Whitehead concludes that both are therefore true – each in its own particular way. Harman’s mysterious ‘real objects’ are quite different from both what Whitehead calls ‘actual entities’ and from what he calls ‘societies’ or ‘enduring objects’.30 Nonetheless, like Whitehead, Harman constructs a vision of the world that rejects the bifurcation of nature.
Grant also resists the bifurcation of nature. There are clear affinities between Grant’s conception of nature’s productivity and Whitehead’s designation of Creativity as ‘the universal of universals characterizing ultimate matter of fact’.31 Through his rereading of Schelling, Grant seeks to forge a Naturphilosophie according to which ‘nature is considered the condition under which alone anything that can exist does so’.32 The result is not so much to erase the bifurcation of nature per se, as to suggest that both of its sides – the red glow of the sunset, and the molecules and waves – are produced by the same processes, and in analogous ways. The forces of nature are always already at work prior to any division. Both sides of the bifurcation – subjective phenomenology and objective physical qualities – are natural products in the same way. They are both are produced out of, and alike ultimately dissolved back into, nature’s groundless productivity.
Meillassoux, on the other hand, knowingly fails the Whiteheadian test. He opens After Finitude precisely by reviving the old Cartesian division – regarded by Whitehead as the initial source of the bifurcation of nature – between mathematically formalizable ‘primary qualities’ that characterize the thing in itself, and ‘secondary qualities’ that only exist in relation to us. Meillassoux also consistently describes the world-without-us as not having ‘any subjective – thinking, psychological, egoic, sensible, or vital – traits’.33 In this way, Meillassoux reasserts the classical opposition between rational, active mind and, on the other hand, matter conceived as mechanistic, passive and inert. Of course, Meillassoux gives this opposition a strange new content. On the one hand, the brute materiality of lifeless nature is subject to the rule of Hyperchaos, which can make anything whatsoever happen for no reason at all.34 On the other hand, human thought alone is able to attain an ‘intellectual intuition of the absolute’.35 But both of these terms require the bifurcation of nature as their underlying condition.
Brassier is the most ambiguous of the speculative realist thinkers when it comes to Whitehead’s test. As a scientific rationalist, Brassier explicitly rejects what he calls ‘the kind of philosophical aestheticism which seems to want to hold up “aesthetic experience” as a new sort of cognitive paradigm wherein the Modern (post-Cartesian) “rift” between knowing and feeling would be overcome’.36 This seems like a refusal to grant any validation whatsoever to the phenomenological, experiential side of the bifurcation of nature. For Brassier, it would seem, we can only overcome the bifurcation by categorically rejecting one side of it. But the situation is actually more complicated than this. For Brassier also argues that what Wilfrid Sellars calls the ‘manifest image’ of man cannot simply be replaced by the more accurate ‘scientific image’. Rather, Brassier agrees with Sellars that the two images need to coexist. For ‘the manifest image is indispensable insofar as it provides the structure within which we exercise our capacity for rational thought’.37 Without the manifest image, Brassier says, quoting Sellars, ‘man himself would not survive’, and the normativity that grounds scientific discovery would become impossible.38 Brassier seeks to purge scientific rationality of its ‘anthropological’ attributes, including its ties to any experiential or affective basis. But he also insists that ‘normativity is not found but made’, and therefore that it has ties to what, for the moment, remain human practices.
In short, Harman and Grant both pass Whitehead’s test. Meillassoux unequivocally fails it. Brassier’s is the most fascinatingly ambiguous case. Brassier is clearly opposed to the spirit of Whitehead’s proposition, as he unequivocally supports the scientific demystification of all phenomenological and narratively meaningful claims.39 This puts him firmly on one side of the bifurcation of nature. But in pragmatic terms, Brassier cannot altogether dismiss the phenomenological side of the bifurcation, since he needs it precisely in order to reach the point where he is able to abandon it. Whitehead would surely have rejected both Brassier’s bleak nihilism and his excessive rationalism vis-à-vis science; but the tension between these two sides of the bifurcation of nature is precisely what makes Brassier’s thought so rich and compelling.
Notes
1.Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier (London: Continuum, 2008), p. 7.
2.Eugene Thacker, In the Dust of This Planet (Winchester: Zero Books, 2011), pp. 2–4.
3.Thacker, Dust, p. 5.
4.Iain Hamilton Grant, Philosophies of Nature After Schelling (London: Continuum, 2006).
5.Graham Harman, Guerrilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things (Chicago: Open Court, 2005).
6.Meillassoux, After Finitude, p. 9.
7.Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 228.
8.Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 144.
9.Kant, Judgment, pp. 144–5.
10.G. W. F. Hegel, The Encyclopaedia Logic: Part I of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, trans. T. F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting and H. S. Harris (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991), pp. 80–108.
11.Ray Brassier, ‘Concepts and Objects’, in Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek and Graham Harman (eds), The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism (Melbourne: re.press, 2010), p. 63.
12.Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 56.
13.Quentin Meillassoux, ‘Iteration, Reiteration, Repetition: A Speculative Analysis of the Sign Devoid of Meaning’, this volume, p. 151.
14.Ibid., p. 155.
15.Ray Brassier, ‘The View from Nowhere’, Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture 8(2) (Summer 2011): 9.
16.Meillassoux, After Finitude, p. 3.
17.Meillassoux, ‘Iteration’, p. 157.
18.Meillassoux, After Finitude, pp. 163 and 183 (emphasis added).
19.Iain Hamilton Grant, ‘How Nature Comes to be Thought: Schelling’s Paradox and the Problem of Location’, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 44(1) (January 2013): 24–43.
20.Ibid., pp. 24–5.
21.Graham Harman, The Third Table (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2012), p. 12.
22.Ibid., p. 12.
23.Alfred North Whitehead, Modes of Thought (New York: Free Press, 1938).
24.For Whitehead, see his Process and Reality (New York: Free Press, 1978), p. ix; for Meillassoux, see After Finitude, p. 7.
25.Whitehead, Process, p. 18.
26.Alfred North Whitehead, The Concept of Nature (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2004), pp. 26–48.
27.Whitehead, Nature, p. 29.
28.A. S. Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958), pp. xi–xii.
29.Harman, Table, pp. 9–10.
30.For Whitehead’s distinction between actual entities, which he considers the ultimate elements of reality, and societies, or the objects we encounter in the world, and which are composites of many actual entities, see Process, pp. 31–6.
31.Ibid., p. 21.
32.Leon Niemoczynski and Iain Hamilton Grant, ‘Physics of the Idea: An Interview with Iain Hamilton Grant’, Cosmos and History 9(2) (2013): 35.
33.Meillassoux, ‘Iteration’, p. 120.
34.Ibid., p. 150.
35.Meillassoux, After Finitude, p. 82.
36.Ray Brassier, ‘Against an Aesthetics of Noise’. Available from http://www.ny-web.be/transitzone/against-aesthetics-noise.html [accessed 23 March 2015].
37.Brassier, ‘View from Nowhere’, p. 8.
38.Ibid.
39.Ray Brassier, ‘I Am a Nihilist Because I Still Believe in Truth’, 2011. Available from http://www.kronos.org.pl/index.php?23151,896 [accessed 23 March 2015].