I’ll keep this simple, with the intention of complicating it through the course of discussion.
Correlationism is the claim that being can be thought only insofar as it is given to thought. To posit X is therefore to posit, as Fichte said, X as posited. What this means is that human thought cannot reach outside of itself and can think neither the in-itself nor what is before-itself. Take the arche-fossil as an example, a fossil that predates the advent of human givenness (that is, the emergence of human consciousness in history). Let’s say that it’s a million years old. The correlationist has to append to this claim that the fossil is a million years old for humans. That is, that it’s only a million years old relative to our dating techniques, our scientific enterprises, our structure of thought and mode of communication, and so on. The horizon of human givenness is therefore the zero-point of history. Nothing can exist before it, at least nothing that we can veritably hold to be true, apart from a correlation with thought.
You should recognize this as Kantian idealism. In recent years, a certain collective of thinkers has tried to emancipate philosophy from this self-imposed ghetto, in order to re-approach what Schelling once called “the great outdoors,” the absolute outside of thought, the world as it is. My question for this thread is this: is there a way outside the circle? If so, what might that look like? And, more crucially, at least to my mind, if not, then what are the implications of correlationism for realism, for science, for thought itself? Are we condemned only to think within the confines of our own minds, blind to our own inadequacies, addled by an evolutionary history that cares more for adapativity than for clarity or truth? Indeed, what is truth, if thought and being are to be irreconcilably correlated?
I take these terms from Meillassoux’s groundbreaking After Finitude, and the “tradition” of thought that has organized around it, Speculative Realism.
Interestingly, Harman radicalizes the Kantian gap between subject and object=x, attributing it to the relation between any two things, between, for example, cotton and the flame that consumes it. So human subjectivity is no longer unique, no longer imposing its structure upon an indifferent world, but becomes one specific mode of finitude among others. This is Heidegger’s distinction between presence-at and readiness-to-hand multiplied and unleashed upon a world of nonhuman, indeed, even nonliving beings. But does this succeed as an escape from the correlational circle, or does it merely reproduce it in a more pernicious way?
If nothing can exist before it, how does the certainty of existing after it be postulated? If there is no before it or after it, it is not a circle, it is strictly a point. A point is non existent, it is the absolute reduction of the spaces and entities between the. The point (made and therefore existing--la descartes) therefore is an abstract tool of measure of relative space/time. Since it's non dimensional, it is not a circle, and doesn't correlate to anything. It's an absolute paradigm, with a focus, toward anti being. It is the negative come before the positive, defining its positive shadow by it's void. The projection of which creates the circle and it's appearant correlation to every conceivable being.
It’s the absolute singularity of everything. That’s the point. The circle is merely the absolute velocity of this point defining the virtual circle.
Every medium of knowing has its limitation because it stands on its own, in contrast to. If such escape is possible, then who/what will be experiencing reality, and will this question even be relevant anymore. If ‘one’ were to experience reality in its pure form, as reality, I suppose, then reality would be experiencing itself and there would be no sensation of experience at all, it would be unconscious. It will be nothing, just movement, reactions-unperceived. The people who are asking these questions want to preserve their identity, and at the same time, know the ‘true’ essence of reality, which is impossible. If you want ‘to know’ reality as it is without limitations of human perceptions then take a good nap.
Yes, but we make claims like this all the time. Take, for example, the claim (by now, platitudinous) that Homo erectus left Africa around one and a half million years ago. What do you make of it? Surely, if we are to take seriously the horizon of givenness as the constitutive limit to human knowledge, then we can’t actually mean that Homo erectus existed before the advent of its emergence. The most we can say is that, for us, it makes sense to speak as if “1.5 million years ago” is a meaningful concept. What do you think?
It seems to me that you are asking if there is a way to think without using your mind. Despite varied personal appearances on this site, doesn’t the question answer itself?
Perhaps. But I’m more interested in the advent of human givenness as the limit to human knowledge, for if it does serve as such a hard limit, then surely all questions of prehistory become nonsense. We can even push this: if it doesn’t make sense to speak of what came before the advent of givenness, then can make no more sense to speak of what eludes the structure of its receptivity. Put differently, we only perceive mid-size objects. What are we to make of the claim “atoms exist”? In the other direction, what about “the sun is 149,600,000 km from earth”? Again, if we are bound by givenness, then everything that transcends its limits must be reduced to merely theoretical speculation. Are you, James, willing to accept this?
The only limit to human knowledge is the capacity to store and access it. And I am reading “givenness” to mean “declared ontology”.
It seems to me that you are speaking of a “limit” that doesn’t really exist. So I can’t say that I accept the consequences of such a limit. But maybe I am just not following you properly.
What exactly makes you think that “givenness” forms a limit? I’m not seeing that.
Meillassoux stops at Kant? He’s French, and to not understand that he’s only changing terminology and using the ideas that were already in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness; unforgivable. That is why I always have to prepare myself before reading modern “published philosophers”, they are very hard on a weak stomach.
As to the OP question; no.
Then my own question; then what? (I already know the answer, but do you?)
Theoretical speculation? You of course mean we have to posit it’s reality and keep it within “our” “Correlational Circle” for it to exist. I hate to put it this way, but; so what?
James: I delineate what I mean by givenness in the post above. It’s also a fairly common term in contemporary continental thought. In any case, it’s meant to denote the way objects are given to thought, the way they appear to consciousness. The advent of givenness therefore refers to the historical emergence of human consciousness in evolutionary time. If we are bound by the limits of thought, then how do we make sense of claims that seem to precede the advent of givenness?
Stuart: The implication, I take it, is that we have to relegate to mere hypothesis anything that exceeds the phenomenological structure of consciousness; in a word, anything smaller or larger than a mid-size object (i.e., molecules and planets), as well as anything that precedes the historical emergence of consciousness. That seems like a pretty large price to pay for acknowledging the limits of our knowledge.
I am not sure why human givenness sets my personal limit. The fact that humans were humans and consciousness 2 thousand years ago, doesn’t really affect my starting Point for knowing. That homo erectus left Africa is, yes, Before my time, but so are Viking coastal raids. To get information about each I must trust the conclusions of others, who are in turn working with either the documents or research of others, or on devices. There’s this looking into the distance (treating time also as a kind of distance) thought devices or humans in both cases. I am not sure why these two are distinguished, for me.
Instead of distance, it might have been better for me to frame it in terms of how indirect the observations are or how many layers of interpretation/device use there has been.
“Giveness” would be the emergence of consciousness at anytime (speaking in terms of scientific time). Consciousness emerges everytime any individual posits that it has emerged in himself – such as when he was distracted and regains focus or wakes up from sleep.
It has nothing to do with the emergence of the first more or less fully human mind (as in what Moreno said).
That’s really failing to understand perspective. To barely grasp what is too small to see or too big to comprehend is no different than to barely grasp or conceptualize a concept that one is barely familiar with.
For example, for me it’s not that galaxies and atoms don’t exist beyond hypothesis it’s just that those two concepts are almost entirely meaningless to me; because I’m not a physicist, chemist or astronomer. For physicists, chemists, astronomers and such, the ideas are very real to them, they’re their bread and butter, they have richness to them that even the most freshly churned cream could never have.
Another example would be Sartre’s early philosophy, for me it’s as real as the keyboard I use to type. For the modern “published philosopher”, even most French ones, it has about as much reality as a giant research laboratory has to a simpleton; “something important is happening in there, by god, I don’t have any idea what”, or if they aren’t so honest, “it seems to be clear; ahem, that they’re making robots that will do all our cleaning for us, or, or, maybe – I mean certaintly – they’re making a new kind of candy that tastes good, but is healthy![size=85]![/size][size=50]![/size]”
There’s no price to pay for “acknowledging the limits of our knowledge” except for base simpletons who thrive on the perpetuation of stupidity.
I refer to that as “perception” and through relevance becomes the guide to choosing an ontology. And thought must exceed merely perception, else be merely circular, as you say.
But how does this escape the correlationist accusation that being must always be tied to thought, that to posit X is to always posit X as posited? Perhaps I’ve made this too complicated. The point is really quite simple. Any claim of human knowledge must always be just that: a claim of human knowledge. So we can never get outside ourselves, never say anything about, for example, the origin of human knowledge, for that claim will always still remain internal to knowledge itself. Is that clearer? I’ll hold off moving to the next step (my point about mid-sized object phenomenology) until we can get somewhere on this point.
As for Moreno and Stuart’s claims about personal starting points and human consciousness: I don’t think we ever begin from the beginning. We’re always already situated in a language that is not ours, a language we have learned, making use of concepts we have been taught, communicating with others in a discourse that is already structured according to norms that transcend our personal wills. We’re never alone in this. To do philosophy is to enter into dialogue with a whole history that precedes and will outlive you. To speak at all is to enter in precisely such a dialogue.
That’s the part I was really hoping meant something other than the obvious.
The whole point and function of a mind is to form an ontology with which it can predict relevant behavior so as to guide the body. It does that function by sensing relevant stimuli and noting associations in time and space. When something has a consistency, it is given an entity identification, cognitively, a name. The realness of the event that triggered the naming is a bit irrelevant. The function is to perceive and react accordingly. During that process an ontological map is created based upon consistency, comprehensiveness, and relevance. Whatever concepts properly fit into that map of reality, we refer to as “truth”.
But based upon those “angels of truth”, the mind can rationally deduce far more than it could ever sense and in fact, deduce specific things to be necessarily always true even if never sensed. For example, the entire field of physics could be completely deduced thousands of years ago (assuming an extreme genius at hand). Perception is then used as confirmation of what had to be true, merely unmeasured. Science merely measures and confirms whether a theory can be disproven.
So first, the mind has no intention of “getting outside itself”, but more importantly, it can and does deduce what absolutely must be “outside” through a logic verification method known as “falsifiability”. With that knowledge, it can then defend the body as per intent.
I suspect that you are thinking that the mind’s knowing capability is confined to mere guessing with no means to be 100% certain. That is popular propaganda, but just isn’t so.
It’s clear as a bell, your concern is what remains unclear.
Between you and James?.. I’ll remain glued to my desk.
For “us” that’s true, for me (and you could say the same thing, but I won’t say it for you) when I speak I only enter into the dialogue for which I’m aware I’m entering, which is why if I nearly pass out drunk and then am revived for a moment I may be quite certain that my stutterings are the result of a “profound originality”. Though right now, while philosophizing, my mind is highly aware of the ancient dialogue in which we parrot – Taking nothing away from my knowledge of it now; my knowledge of it… say yesterday or a year ago (even if sober) was likely much less, and therefore was existentially less… to me (and you could say the same thing, but I won’t say it for you).
From the vantage point of singular points of view no beyond it can escape all is muted. The point is the absolute reduction of the hermenautic circle, one whose connections to transcendence are inexplicably pulled into its kernel the point of absolute anti understanding of the negative world.
It is a difficult and ambiglus place with an outstanding sign: beware to all that enter.
Yes. I take it that is always an implication. We cannot know otherwise. The only such (objective) claims I’ve heard are from people I would classify as mystics.
Yes. I take it that is always an implication. We cannot know otherwise. The only such (objective) claims I’ve heard are from people I would classify as mystics.[/quotoe]