Correlationism

[matty]

@"Quentin Meillassoux

After Finitude[/i] (2008),"]…the central notion of modern philosophy since Kant seems to be that of correlation. By ‘correlation’ we mean the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other. We will henceforth call correlationism any current of thought which maintains the unsurpassable character of the correlation so defined. Consequently, it becomes possible to say that every philosophy which disavows naive realism has become a variant of correlationism.

It’s tempting to say about Meillassoux’s declaration, “well, yes, and?” However, I do think that his book touches on an issue that goes to the heart of modern philosophy, undermining some of the self-satisfied distinctions between competing philosophical paradigms that have preoccupied academic philosophers (and, evidently from this board, plenty of amateur philosophers) during the last two centuries or more.

In effect, even those philosophers (and those of us) who consider themselves beyond Kant are ineluctably trapped in his originary correlational premise. As Meillassoux puts it:

…ever since Kant, to discover what divides rival philosophers is no longer to ask who has grasped the true nature of substantiality, but rather to ask who has grasped the more originary correlation: is it the thinker of the subject-object correlation, the noetico-noematic correlation, or the language-referent correlation? The question is no longer ‘which is the proper substrate?’, but ‘which is the proper correlate?’

Philosophy, then, is trapped in a linguistic consciousness, unable to account for knowledge other than by a series of clever parries and side-steps. Strangely, Meillassoux’s solution, so far as he has sketched it, seems to be a renovation of metaphysics through its intense radicalisation, but I’m not especially convinced by that. Rather, I can’t help thinking that the answer is less philosophy not more…

[Only_Humean]

@matty

Philosophy, then, is trapped in a linguistic consciousness, unable to account for knowledge other than by a series of clever parries and side-steps. Strangely, Meillassoux’s solution, so far as he has sketched it, seems to be a renovation of metaphysics through its intense radicalisation, but I’m not especially convinced by that. Rather, I can’t help thinking that the answer is less philosophy not more…

This is an interesting theory but… I find it hard to see where to go from there. Possibly because my thought has been so poisoned with correlationism, of course What are the substrates that were being examined pre-Kant?

[matty]

I don’t really know where to go with it, either - log off quickly, I suppose!

There’s a guy called François Laruelle who is famous for developing something called ‘non-philosophy’, but I haven’t quite got into that yet. There’s quite an interesting debate between Laruelle and Derrida (available at faculty.virginia.edu/theorygroup/docs/laruelle-derrida.pdf), where the latter is totally baffled! Actually, reading it back, what I wrote about Meillassoux sounds exactly like what I would have written about Derrida and differance at an earlier time.

@Only_Humean

What are the substrates that were being examined pre-Kant?

So far as I can tell, he considers all pre-Kantian philosophers, to a greater or lesser degree, as ‘dogmatic’. It’s oversimplifying enormously, clearly, but that basically pre-Kantian philosophers accept reality as not needing to be given for us - usually, it was given for God. Descartes complicates things enormously with substance and dualism, but for some reason I can’t figure out Meillassoux doesn’t think that is correlational.