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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
On April 27, 2007, the first Speculative Realism (SR) workshop was held at Goldsmiths, University of London, featuring four young philosophers whose ideas were loosely allied. Over the ensuing decade, the ideas of SR spread from philosophy to the arts, architecture, and numerous disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. SR has been arguably the most influential new current in continental philosophy since the works of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari found their second wind in the 1990s. But what is SR? This book is the first general overview by one of its original members, focusing on the aesthetic, ethical, ontological, and political themes of greatest importance to the movement. Graham Harman provides a balanced but critical assessment of his original SR colleagues - Ray Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant, and Quentin Meillassoux - along with a clear summary of his own Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO). A number of central philosophical questions tie the four chapters together: What exactly is "correlationism," the chief enemy of SR? What are the stakes of philosophical realism, and is such realism better served by mathematics and the natural sciences, or by a broader model of cognitive activity that includes aesthetics? This book covers both the historical and conceptual development of the movement, providing a first-rate introduction for students, aided by helpful end-of-chapter study questions chosen by Harman himself. SR, Harman shows, is a vital and fast-developing field in contemporary philosophy.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
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Contents
Cover
Copyright
Introduction
Notes
1 Prometheanism
A Brassier at Goldsmiths
B Brassier’s Nihilism
C The Path Ahead
Notes
2 Vitalist Idealism
A Grant at Goldsmiths
B Grant’s Philosophies of Nature After Schelling
C A New Sense of Idealism
Notes
3 Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO)
A OOO at Goldsmiths
B The Withdrawn
C Objects and Their Qualities
D Vicarious Causation
E The Crucial Place of Aesthetics
Notes
4 Speculative Materialism
A Meillassoux at Goldsmiths
B Meillassoux’s After Finitude
C Glimpses of the Divine Inexistence
Notes
Conclusion: The Two Axes of Speculative Realism
Notes
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Speculative Realism
An Introduction
GRAHAM HARMAN
polity
Copyright © Graham Harman 2018
The right of Graham Harman to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2018 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press101 Station LandingSuite 300Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-2002-2
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Introduction
Though barely a decade old, Speculative Realism (SR) is already one of the most influential philosophical movements in art, architecture, and the humanities. A number of books have already been written on Speculative Realism in part or as a whole: those of Peter Gratton, Steven Shaviro, and Tom Sparrow come to mind.1 But there is still plenty of room for additional treatments of the topic, and so far no such book has been written by any of the original Speculative Realists. Thus, when Polity Press asked my advice as to who should write their planned new survey on the theme, I volunteered for the task myself – the second time such a thing has happened.2
Though I relish this assignment, there are two potentially awkward circumstances that should be addressed at the outset. The first is that I am not just the author of this book but also one of its subjects, being one of the four original speakers at the initial SR workshop (along with Ray Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant, and Quentin Meillassoux), as well as one of the authors most closely associated with the movement. The resulting need to speak about myself from time to time creates a Scylla-or-Charybdis predicament: should I insufferably refer to myself in the first person throughout this book, or even more insufferably in the third person? The solution I have chosen is as follows. When recollecting personal actions such as the giving of lectures or the writing of books, then the first person is the only real option, though I have tried to keep such reminders of authorial presence to a minimum. But when referring to my philosophical position more generally, I will refer to it impersonally as Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO). This entails a certain accidental injustice to my most prominent fellow OOO authors: Ian Bogost, Levi R. Bryant, and Timothy Morton.3 All three have views that diverge sharply from my own on certain points, and by no means do I claim to speak on behalf of them here. However, since this book concerns not OOO but the looser association of figures found in SR, it should be safe to generalize about the basic assumptions of SR’s object-oriented wing as opposed to those of Brassier, Grant, and Meillassoux.4
The second awkward question concerns the objectivity of this book. The original SR group did not last very long, and there are sharp philosophical and even personal disagreements between some of its members today. Though a total of two SR workshops were held, Meillassoux did not attend the second; he was replaced capably on that occasion by Alberto Toscano, who had moderated the original Goldsmiths event. As far as I know, the reason for Meillassoux’s absence from the second meeting was that he wished to emphasize the materialism of his position over the realism built into SR’s name. A much bigger issue is that there is a stark opposition between Brassier’s wing of SR and my own, to the point that Brassier today rejects even the name “Speculative Realism,” despite the fact that he coined it himself. His disciple Peter Wolfendale has even published a book of more than 400 pages purporting to demonstrate the intellectual worthlessness of my object-oriented position.5 I have documented these disputes at some length and will not expand on that exercise here, since this is meant to be an introductory book on Speculative Realism rather than a personal memoir.6 In any case, the present book aims to provide as fair a summary of Brassier’s position as of Grant’s and Meillassoux’s. While it is inevitable that some of Brassier’s devotees will not like my critical presentation of some of his ideas, this is simply a normal occupational hazard of intellectual life.
* * *
On April 27, 2007, an intriguing philosophical workshop was held at Goldsmiths, University of London. Entitled “Speculative Realism,” it brought together four authors working in the continental (i.e. Franco-German) tradition of philosophy who each gave an hour-long talk, appearing in alphabetical order according to last name.7 Ray Brassier of Middlesex University in London went first, followed by Iain Hamilton Grant of the University of the West of England (UWE) in Bristol. After a lunch break I went next myself, unfortunately in terrible pain from a severe throat infection. The fourth and final speaker of the day was Quentin Meillassoux of the École normale supérieure in Paris, the only non-anglophone participant in the workshop. The name Speculative Realism was coined by Brassier shortly before the event as a necessary compromise. I had known him fairly well since our first meeting two years earlier, when he invited me to Middlesex to give a lecture on Heidegger’s notoriously opaque concept of the fourfold of earth, sky, gods, and mortals.8 The following year, as I passed briefly through London as a tourist, Brassier was kind enough to host me for a night at his and his wife’s apartment in North London. It was then that he first floated the idea of a joint event involving me and Grant, saying that he found us to be a good intellectual match, though at that point I myself was unfamiliar with Grant’s work. A few months later, after he returned from a brief trip to Paris, Brassier recommended a book he had found on the shelves but not yet read: Meillassoux’s Àpres la finitude, later translated into English by Brassier himself as After Finitude.9 Unlike Brassier, I had enough free time to read the book immediately, and on the basis of my positive report Brassier threw Meillassoux’s name into the mix for a joint event as well. Enthusiastic organizer that I am, I quickly emailed both Grant and Meillassoux while on a trip to Iceland, despite knowing neither of them personally; within days I received friendly replies from both. Brassier’s longtime friend Toscano quickly got to work organizing the event for us at Goldsmiths the following year; at some point I learned from Brassier that he had also invited Toscano to join our group, though the latter declined for reasons unknown to me. In need of a name for the event, we first considered Speculative Materialism, Meillassoux’s term for his own philosophy. But given my own ardently anti-materialist positon, Brassier proposed Speculative Realism instead, and obviously that name was eventually adopted.
Is there really such a thing as Speculative Realism, and, if it exists, is it anything new? Various critics have tried to answer “no” to one or both of these questions, though as I see it the answers are clearly “yes” and “yes.” Let’s start with realism. Though this word can mean different things to different people, its usual meaning in philosophy is relatively clear: realists are committed to the existence of a world independent of the human mind. One easy way to reject realism is to adopt the opposite position – idealism – for which reality is not independent of the mind (though we will see that Grant rejects this definition of the term). The most blatant case of idealism can be found in the works of the philosopher George Berkeley (1685–1783), for whom “to be” simply means “to be perceived.” Berkeley has few literal followers today, but a more popular contemporary strand of idealism can be found in the so-called German Idealism of J. G. Fichte (1762–1814), F. W. J. von Schelling (1775–1854), and the hugely influential G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831). In our own time, the prolific Slovenian thinker Slavoj Žižek (b. 1949) is a good example of a philosophical idealist, despite his frequent signs of discomfort with this label. Alongside realists who affirm the existence of an independent world, and idealists who deny it, there are those who claim to occupy a sophisticated middle ground “beyond” realism and idealism. Perhaps the clearest examples of this in the continental tradition of philosophy are the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) and his rebellious star pupil Martin Heidegger (1889–1976). For both Husserl and Heidegger, the question of an external world is merely a “pseudoproblem.” As they see it, we are always already outside ourselves directed at objects (Husserl) or always engaged in the world through pre-theoretical practical activity (Heidegger). From either standpoint there is no possibility of considering thought or world in isolation from each other, since they are always treated as a pair existing only in mutual correlation. While analytic philosophy has always considered realism and (to a lesser extent) idealism as live options, continental thought has almost unanimously adopted Husserl and Heidegger’s view that the realism vs. idealism question is a clumsy false conflict unworthy of serious philosophical attention. In my debut book Tool-Being (2002) I called this doctrine “the philosophy of access,” since it is concerned only with our access to the world and never with the world in its own right.10 Not long thereafter, Meillassoux coined the term “correlationism” for this doctrine and traced it back to the philosophies of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) and even earlier to David Hume (1711–1776).11 I prefer Meillassoux’s term to my own because of its superior economy and stronger etymological basis, and thus I have adopted “correlationism” for my own philosophical vocabulary as well.
It is safe to say that the original Speculative Realists were united by their rejection of correlationism, though some critics have claimed – wrongly, in my view – that correlationism does not exist. Largely as a result of this disagreement, Speculative Realism is still a minority current in the continental philosophy establishment as represented in the United States by the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP), whose annual conference I have not attended since my graduate student days in 1993. In Britain, there is an analogous group called the Society for European Philosophy (SEP), though my impression has been that this group is more open to SR than is its American counterpart. SEP even invited me to give a keynote lecture at their 2011 conference in York.
There are other critics who do not deny the existence of correlationism but merely dispute that opposition to it is sufficient grounds for a unified philosophical movement; this is especially true in Brassier’s circle. Though this attitude strikes me as unjustified, it is a matter of record that the four original philosophical projects of Speculative Realism are so different in kind that they were unable to hold together for more than two years. Žižek has even claimed that the breakup of the band was inevitable: “we can discern the limitation of speculative realism, a limitation signaled in the fact that it immediately split into four orientations … Meillassoux’s ‘speculative realism,’ Harman’s ‘object-oriented philosophy,’ Grant’s neovitalism, and Brassier’s radical nihilism.”12 Yet it is far from clear that the split indicates a limitation on SR’s part. Generally speaking, the stronger a genre of thought or art, the more variations it will generate. Such important twentieth-century currents as phenomenology and psychoanalysis have remained influential largely because of the numerous different ways in which they were practiced, not because they remained rigidly governed by the authority of their respective founders, Husserl and Sigmund Freud. What still interests me in Speculative Realism after a decade of reflection is that four philosophical projects with apparently so little in common – not a single philosophical hero is shared by the group as a whole – nonetheless have a fairly obvious unity compared with the correlationist background of continental philosophy from which they emerged. All four philosophies are realisms, though this word means rather different things in each case. And all four are speculative, in the sense that, unlike the commonsensical realisms of yesteryear, all reach conclusions that seem counterintuitive or even downright strange.
As part of my effort to be balanced, I will follow the alphabetical order of speakers used at Goldsmiths in 2007. Furthermore, I will make an effort to devote approximately the same number of pages to each of the three SR orientations other than my own. When it comes to OOO, I will deliberately keep my presentation shorter, in part because I wish to avoid too much repetition of ideas I have already published elsewhere. Despite my goal of being objective, I obviously prefer my own philosophy to the three others under discussion, and will therefore make certain criticisms of the others rather than pretending to speak in the disinterested “voice of God.” Readers of this book deserve what they came for, which is a candid assessment on my part of the various Speculative Realist positions.
Chapter 1 follows Ray Brassier from his book Nihil Unbound (2008) through some more recent articles that hint at a still unpublished new version of his position. At the dawn of SR there was no specific name for the style of thinking pursued by Brassier and his circle, though “Prometheanism” seems to have become their term of choice in recent years, with “Accelerationism” used more often to refer to the strictly political thinking of Brassier’s disciples Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams.13
Chapter 2 turns to Iain Hamilton Grant, beginning with his dense but innovative book Philosophies of Nature After Schelling (2006), which reflects his deep indebtedness to the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995). An ostensibly surprising turn occurred with Grant’s second book, Idealism, co-authored with his talented younger associates Jeremy Dunham and Sean Watson. Yet we will see that what Grant means by “idealism” is not the opposite of realism but refers simply to the role of ideas in the productive power of nature itself, rather than the usual idealism of the privileged human subject. This does not mean that I accept Grant’s definition of idealism, as will be seen below.
Chapter 3 takes up the theme of Object-Oriented Ontology, which is most easily described as deriving from the joint influence of Heidegger and Bruno Latour (b. 1947). OOO is without question the strand of Speculative Realism that has had the widest interdisciplinary impact across the globe, and this seems to me an obvious strength rather than a weakness of the object-oriented current.
In chapter 4 we turn to the Speculative Materialism of Meillassoux, a lucid and powerful thinker if not – at least so far – a prolific one. It is important to cover the basic ideas of his landmark debut book After Finitude, no doubt the most famous individual work to emerge from Speculative Realism, and hence the one most frequently cited and widely translated. We will also discuss snippets of his strange and important doctoral thesis, The Divine Inexistence.
These chapters will be followed by a brief conclusion concerning how the four Speculative Realist thinkers might be divided into sub-groups among themselves. By way of preview: I will claim that Meillassoux and OOO are opposites and that Brassier and Grant are also opposites. The other combinations all entail agreement on one of the two most fundamental issues of Speculative Realism. For the benefit of students and other readers, useful study questions will be found at the end of each section.
Notes
1.
Peter Gratton,
Speculative Realism
; Steven Shaviro,
The Universe of Things
; Tom Sparrow,
The End of Phenomenology
.
2.
The first such case resulted in my writing
Bruno Latour: Reassembling the Political
for Pluto Press.
3.
Ian Bogost,
Unit Operations
; Levi R. Bryant,
The Democracy of Objects
; Timothy Morton,
Realist Magic
.
4.
For a more comprehensive picture of OOO itself, see Graham Harman,
Object-Oriented Ontology
.
5.
Peter Wolfendale,
Object-Oriented Philosophy
.
6.
See Graham Harman, “The Current State of Speculative Realism,” and pp. 77–80 of Harman,
Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making
.
7.
Ray Brassier et al., “Speculative Realism.”
8.
Graham Harman, “Dwelling with the Fourfold.”
9.
Quentin Meillassoux,
After Finitude
.
10.
Graham Harman,
Tool-Being
.
11.
Meillassoux once told me that he came up with the term in 2002 or 2003.
12.
Slavoj Žižek,
Less Than Nothing
, p. 640.
13.
Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek, “#ACCELERATE MANIFESTO for an Accelerationist Politics.”
1Prometheanism
Ray Brassier (b. 1965) is of mixed French and Scottish parentage. He completed his PhD at Warwick University, as did Grant. At the time of the Goldsmiths workshop he was employed at Middlesex University in London, which is where I first met him in April 2005. Since 2008 he has worked at the beautiful seaside campus of the American University of Beirut. He has an unusually loyal following, primarily among younger males captivated by his vision of a cold and pitiless cosmos to be probed remorselessly with the instruments of radical scientific enlightenment and radical horror fiction. The chief example of the latter is the American fright lord Thomas Ligotti (b. 1953), for one of whose books Brassier has even written a foreword.1
Here as in the other three chapters, I will begin in section A with a brief look at Brassier’s presentation at the April 2007 Goldsmiths workshop. After that, we will turn in section B to his difficult but often refreshing book Nihil Unbound. Since Brassier’s second book has yet to appear, we will attempt in section C to discern his future path by looking at two of his key recent articles.
A Brassier at Goldsmiths
Brassier’s presentation at Goldsmiths opened the conference. It runs from pages 308 to 321 in the transcript, followed by an additional twelve pages of audience questions. Though in later years he has denied any important connection between the four participants at the workshop, in 2007 Brassier was more optimistic about the group he had assembled: “The fundamental thing we seem to share is obviously a willingness to re-interrogate or to open up a whole set of philosophical problems that were taken to have been definitively settled by Kant, certainly, at least, by those working in the continental tradition.”2 As for continental philosophy and its difference from the analytic variety, a difference whose very existence he will later deny, the Brassier of 2007 still sees it in terms of two distinct sets of virtues:
some kind of communication is needed between the speculative audacity which is a characteristic of so-called ‘continental philosophy’ and the really admirable level of engagement with the empirical sciences which is a feature of the most interesting work being done specifically in the kind of Anglo-American philosophy of mind that engages directly with, or that sees its project as continuous with, cognitive science. (320–1)
Although Brassier places great importance on the natural sciences in general, he is especially enamored of cognitive science, which he views as the key to eliminating the modern thought–world dualism. As he put it at Goldsmiths: “I think that arguably the most significant philosophical development of the twentieth century is the emergence of a science of cognition: that is, the idea that the process of cognition can be re-integrated into the realm of objective phenomena studied by the empirical sciences” (320). In the years leading up to Goldsmiths, Brassier seemed to place great hope in the philosophy of Alain Badiou (b. 1937) and had even translated a number of the latter’s writings into English. Later he began to refer towards Badiou less often. My sense at the time was that this growing coolness to Badiouian philosophy had something to do with disappointment over that author’s low regard for any “science of cognition,” as revealed in Brassier and Robin Mackay’s interview of the French philosopher in the first volume of the journal Collapse.3
We return to the topic at hand. Brassier’s presentation at Goldsmiths consists of a sympathetic summary of the other three Speculative Realist positions that also includes some helpful objections to all of our work. In my opinion, his brief overview of Grant is of especial philosophical interest. In the opening pages of the transcript, Brassier goes straight to the core of Grant’s thinking: “nature is self-organizing. And the ideal structure of nature produces the structure of thinking. But if cognition is a result, a product – if it’s every bit as conditioned as any other natural phenomenon – the question then becomes whether there’s any reason to suppose that thought can limn or grasp the ultimate structure of reality at any given moment, any specific historical juncture” (310). The account of Grant here is accurate; we will see that, in his Schelling book and elsewhere, Grant treats thought as just another product of nature rather than as a privileged entity able to transcend reality as a whole. This puts him at odds with Meillassoux in particular, given the high importance granted by the latter to the human subject’s mathematical grasp of the primary qualities of things. On this point at least, Brassier sides with Grant: “the structure of material reality generates the structure of thinking. But this means that one must discount any appeal to intellectual intuition, which is to say the idea that thinking can simply transcend its own material, neurobiological conditions of organization and effectuation and grasp the noumenal structure of reality as it is in itself” (310–11). Brassier’s primary objection to Meillassoux hinges precisely on the latter’s appeal to “intellectual intuition” as a way of gaining direct access to reality. As concerns Grant, Brassier notes the risk that, if we turn thought into a product of nature, we might easily be seduced by the presently fashionable theory that the structure of human thought is simply the result of our evolutionary history: “this is a claim that fuels much of naturalized epistemology, but one that I think is metaphysically problematic, because there is no reason to suppose that evolutionary adaptation would favor exhaustively accurate beliefs about the world” (311). That is to say, “there’s no reason to suppose that evolution would infallibly provide human organisms with a cognitive apparatus that can accurately track the salient features or the deep structure of reality” (311). As Brassier notes, Grant’s more novel solution is to claim that human thought arises from thought that is already present in nature itself: “the force of Iain’s book is to try to propose what he calls a ‘transcendental naturalism’ – which claims that you can explain the emergence of the structure of ideation from the ideal structure of physical reality,” and as a result, “ideation would be capable of tracking the ideal dynamisms, the transcendental dynamisms, that underlie merely empirical or merely somatic reality” (311). And speaking of “merely somatic reality,” Brassier seems to endorse Grant’s condemnation of the “parochial Aristotelian model of physical reality” (314), whereas Aristotle ranks as one of the great philosophical heroes for OOO.
Brassier’s discussion of Grant closes with two more important objections, both of them bearing on Grant’s abandonment of the supposedly joint Aristotle–Kant “somatic” model, in which individual bodies are held to be the primary stuff of the universe. What Grant offers instead is a dynamic model in which force is primary, with individual entities being merely a derivative configuration of that force. In Brassier’s words: “what is the status of dynamism in speculative physics? Is it truly adequate to physical infrastructure? Or might it not be contaminated by certain folk-psychological prejudices?” (314). And further, given that Galileo’s mathematization of nature was so critical in replacing the Aristotelean “somatic” view of the universe that Grant disdains, “what is the relationship between the dynamic structure of the idea and the mathematical register deployed for its formalization?” (314). In his response during the question period, Grant does not address this question directly but focuses instead on challenging Brassier’s wish to eliminate as many fictitious or folk-psychological beings from the world as possible.
Brassier’s final objection to Grant matches one of OOO’s own. It touches on whether his unapologetically dynamic model of the universe leaves room for those aspects of the world that seem to be especially non-dynamic. As Brassier puts it: “this is a general point related to process philosophy: If you privilege productivity, if these ideal generative dynamisms that structure and constitute materiality can be characterized in terms of the primacy of production over product, then the question is, how do we account for the interruptions of the process? How do we account for discontinuity in the continuum of production?” (314–15). Or even more eloquently: “it seems that you always have to introduce or posit some sort of conceptual contrary, some principle of deceleration, interruption, disintensification or whatever, in order to account for the upsurges of stability and continuity and consistency within this otherwise untrammeled flux of becoming and pure process” (315). We will see that Grant tries to account for such interruptions of process in his Schelling book under the general term “retardation,” though his degree of success in doing so remains an open question.
The Brassier of 2007 reacts more warmly to OOO’s opposite approach: “Graham turns the question around by showing how the problem consists in showing how discontinuous, autonomous objects can ever enter into relation with one another …” (316). But he also poses two objections to my work. The first concerns OOO’s distinction between real and sensual properties. Brassier’s question on this score runs as follows: “what is the criterion for distinguishing sensible from non-sensible properties for any given object? Is it possible to provide such a criterion without giving it some sort of epistemological slant or formulation?” (316). His second, related question has to do with the implications of allowing existence (as OOO does) to all sorts of real and imaginary things. He worries about the inflationary results of such a flat ontology: “what would be the distinction between a hobbit and a quark here? This is a very serious metaphysical question!” (317). He proceeds to ask how we can distinguish between the real and the sensual, “given that we know that imaginary objects or fictitious entities such as the Virgin Mary or Yahweh or phlogiston seem perfectly capable of producing real effects – it’s perfectly possible for these things to generate real effects … in so far as people believe in them and do things in the world on the basis of their belief in them” (317).
The root of these objections can be found in the totally different conceptions held by Brassier and OOO as to the purpose of philosophy, and of intellectual life more generally. When Brassier asks for the “criterion” that allows us to distinguish between sensible and non-sensible properties, what he seems to mean is that we encounter a great many properties in our experience of things, some of which turn out to be true and others untrue. Therefore, we need some sort of intellectual tool that allows us to sift our accurate scientific perceptions of, say, a tree from our inaccurate or folk-psychological ones. But this is not what OOO’s distinction of real from sensual is about. OOO speaks of real and sensual not in order to distinguish accurate images of the world from impostors: it is an ontological distinction, not an epistemological one. For OOO, any perception of or relation to something consists ipso facto of sensual qualities. There is no such thing as an “accurate” perception of a thing’s real qualities, because by their very nature real qualities are not translatable into something to which we can have access. It is not a question of saying: “I see a horse, and it corresponds to a real horse outside my mind, but I also see a unicorn, which is a mere hallucination because it corresponds to nothing outside my mind.” Instead, even my perception of the horse, not just of the hallucinated unicorn, consists solely of sensual qualities. Nor are the real qualities to be obtained by the intellect rather than the senses, as Husserl thinks. The intellect has no more direct access to the real than do the senses – as Brassier would presumably be the first to agree, given his wary attitude towards Meillassoux’s intellectual intuition. Nor can we accept Brassier’s claim that objects must “know” something about each other in order to interact, at least not if “knowledge” means some sort of direct access to the things. OOO speaks instead of an indirect contact with reality, for the same reason that Socrates declares his inability to attain knowledge of anything. As for Brassier’s second question, we wonder how he can be so sure in placing Yahweh and the Virgin Mary on the same level as phlogiston. While fully in keeping with the rationalist disdain for religion, this indicates a degree of contempt for religious experience that will always be well received in the circles where Brassier travels, but which cannot do justice to the biographies of such figures as St Teresa of Avila, the Buddha, or Jalaluddin Rumi. While it is always possible that these figures are concerned with merely fictitious entities that “nonetheless” have real effects on their lives, the fragile certainty built into much religious life is a positive ontological phenomenon that Brassier simply ignores on the basis of his own atheist certitude.
We turn in closing to Brassier’s interesting remarks on Meillassoux, beginning with his concerns about intellectual intuition as a means of grasping the essence of the world directly. For Brassier, whose major intellectual commitment is to the natural sciences rather than to mathematics, knowledge always remains fallible because of its lack of “resemblance” to reality. Though at Goldsmiths Meillassoux tries to downplay the necessary role of the mathematical in understanding the world, in After Finitude he explicitly tells us that the primary qualities of things are those that can be mathematized. And furthermore, as Brassier notes: “[Quentin] explicitly wants to rehabilitate the Cartesian project, where mathematical ideation accurately describes the objective structure of reality as it is in itself, against the Kantian one, which would limit the scope of scientific cognition to the phenomenal realm” (319). This leads Brassier to puzzle over how to square the purported ability of mathematics to grasp the absolute with the fact that thought arises through processes of nature. But to understand this perplexity in more detail, we must turn to the development of Brassier’s arguments in Nihil Unbound.
Study Questions for Section A
What is the philosophical importance for Brassier of a science of cognition?
In his Goldsmiths talk, Brassier speaks against the notion of “intellectual intuition.” What does he see as philosophically dangerous in the claim that such intuition exists?
Why is Brassier wary of the recent trend of saying that the structure of human thought is the end product of our evolutionary history?
What are the reasons Brassier gives for caution against Grant’s heavily
dynamic
conception of nature?
Why does Brassier ask OOO for “criteria” to distinguish between the real and the sensual? What might OOO say in response?
B Brassier’s Nihilism
Brassier is well aware that nihilism sounds like a passé topic from the era of post-World War II existentialism. Yet he also rightly notes that, outside professional philosophy circles that merely laugh at such claims as “existence is worthless,” the topic still captures a good deal of interest from the lay philosophical public. As Brassier tells us in his straight-to-the point preface: “this apparently banal assertion [that existence is worthless] harbours hidden depths which have yet to be sounded by philosophers, despite the plethora of learned books and articles on the topic.”4 On the second page of his preface Brassier approvingly cites Jonathan Israel (b. 1946), the historian and author of Radical Enlightenment, further indicating his view that nihilism is not an adolescent indulgence but the proper outcome of full commitment to the Enlightenment project. Brassier’s sworn enemies are those contemporary thinkers who seek to moderate or redirect modern rationalism. The rationalist must be a nihilist precisely because he or she is a realist: “nihilism is … the unavoidable corollary of the realist conviction that there is a mind-independent reality, which, despite the presumptions of humans, is indifferent to our existence and oblivious to the ‘values’ and ‘meanings’ which we would drape over it in order to make it more hospitable” (xi). But note that the conclusions Brassier draws from the existence of a mind-independent reality are not the only possible ones. From the fact that there is a reality outside the mind, it need not follow that the reality inside the mind has no role other than to be eliminated by science, as Brassier seems to hold. At times his rhetoric about the worthlessness of life strays beyond the bounds of purely logical argument and veers into emotional assertion: “Philosophy should be more than a sop to the pathetic twinge of human self-esteem” (xi). As we will see in the next chapter, Iain Hamilton Grant’s philosophy draws an entirely different conclusion from realism, arguing that ideas and perceptions are products of Nature just like anything else and therefore need to be accounted for by philosophy rather than eliminated. In contrast to Grant’s relatively flat ontology in which everything is equally real, Brassier’s tendency is to celebrate all mind-independent reality while treating all realities internal to the mind as merely provisional and ultimately contemptible. This aspect of his philosophy is in my view especially dubious.
Nihil Unbound is divided into seven chapters, each of them organized as a response to one or more prominent thinkers. For our purposes it will be useful to pay attention instead to Brassier’s grouping of these chapters into three specific parts. Many of his readings of important philosophers are highly original and worth exploring in their own right. But here we will need to be selective and focus solely on those aspects of each chapter that develop his own philosophical position. When I first met Brassier in 2005, what was most refreshing in discussions with him was his openness to science and analytic philosophy, both quite rare in the continental philosophy world – though somewhat less rare these days, thanks in part to his own efforts. This balancing act is still visible in Nihil Unbound, though in more recent years Brassier seems to have lost patience with continental thought as a whole.
“The Destruction of the Manifest Image” is a fitting title for Part I of Brassier’s debut book. For it is not only an accurate description of the content of his first three chapters but a fitting introduction to his entire philosophical project. It is often possible to identify a thinker’s major commitments by detecting those opposing positions that they most viscerally loathe. Based on my past conversations with Brassier as well as his own writings, it is safe to say that he roundly detests the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and the actor-network theory of Bruno Latour (both of them pivotal influences on OOO). Though Husserl and Latour are not often grouped together, there is at least one major similarity between them: their commitment to the non-eliminability of merely apparent beings. For Husserl, the objects given to consciousness need to be taken seriously as intentional objects even if they later prove to be delusional: to be an object is to be present to some intending mind. Latour’s criterion is different, though equally false from a Brassierian standpoint: to be an “actor” (Latour’s term for object) means to have an effect on other actors. For both Husserl and Latour, Donald Duck and a blurry ghost seen in your grandmother’s attic are both legitimate personae for philosophy no less than are chemicals and atoms, to be explored on their own terms no matter how unreal they turn out to be. Brassier is a nihilist because his first reaction when encountering such claims is to attempt to eliminate such unreal entities, to demand that they be expelled altogether from the recognized universe. Like most philosophical attitudes, this one has its upside and its downside. The upside can be found in Brassier’s unshakeable commitment to fact and his deference – so rare in continental philosophy – to the tangible results of the modern physical sciences that have contributed inestimably to human knowledge over the past four centuries. While this point in isolation would merely qualify him as just another foot soldier in analytic philosophy, with its congenital addiction to science-worship, in continental thought it is enough to provoke a potential revolution. The downside of Brassier’s position was noted in an early review of Nihil Unbound by the intellectual historian Knox Peden, who on the whole is sympathetic to his fellow rationalist Brassier. As Peden sees it, one of the vices of Nihil Unbound is a tendency towards “premature refutation.”5 Though any reader of Brassier’s book will see that he is perfectly capable of offering balanced accounts of the virtues and vices of most philosophers, there are other thinkers – generally those who deny the privileged cognitive status of natural science – who seem to provoke his outright dismissal. Sometimes this applies in sweeping fashion to entire disciplines: I once heard Brassier denounce the whole of sociology as a non-science, and one searches his writings in vain for any significant concession to the cognitive value of the arts. While Meillassoux has sometimes been accused of fetishizing mathematics, in Brassier’s case natural science is always the court of final appeal. It needs to be said, however, that continental philosophy has long been in need of provocation from a figure of this sort. Heidegger’s infamous claim that “science does not think” is simply one of the most blatant continental attempts to degrade the speculative role of the sciences, and Brassier is even firmer than Meillassoux in denouncing such attitudes.6
It should be said that Nihil Unbound is not an easy book to read. Brassier shows independent speculative talent in this work as elsewhere, and for me at least, the best portions of the book are those where he speaks in his own voice and gives us his unremittingly pessimistic vision of the world. This vision can be summed up in Brassier’s signature phrase: “we are already dead.” Not only do phenomenology, actor-network theory, and other philosophies with a liberal conception of what exists fail to heed the eliminative lessons of natural science; more radically than this, science itself teaches merciless lessons about the ultimate incineration of the Earth, the burning of stars into dismal brown husks, and a final fireworks display of subatomic particles before even atoms themselves vanish without a trace. Yet the challenge this poses to Brassier is at least twofold. First, given the purported ultimate meaninglessness of everything, he will need to show why we should devote ourselves to science and nihilistic philosophy (which he explicitly advocates) and political revolution (which he recommends more vaguely) rather than to a hedonistic spirit of carpe diem or to passing the time with a charming enjoyment of sunsets and flowers. A second, related problem strikes even closer to the heart of Brassier’s philosophical ambitions. Although he agrees with Grant and OOO (and against Meillassoux’s “intellectual intuition”) that there is a permanent rift between reality itself and the scientific image of reality, he is nonetheless committed (unlike Grant and OOO) to the notion that one particular privileged discourse – that of natural science – demands our full-blown commitment. Brassier does this by way of the phrase “adequation without correspondence” (238), which occurs most prominently on the final page of Nihil Unbound, and whose ultimate source is his unorthodox reading of the French “non-philosopher” François Laruelle (b. 1937). Traditionally, philosophical realism has walked hand in hand with a correspondence theory of truth, which generally means that truth is that which “resembles” reality in some way. This notion is retained in Meillassoux’s mathematicist vision of primary qualities but is roundly rejected by Brassier (as by Grant and OOO). Having foresworn correspondence as the basis of truth, Brassier nonetheless claims that we can still speak of “adequation,” which effectively means that natural science gives us a closer, more adequate link to the real than does any other type of human thought. Aesthetics, which OOO takes to be the very pillar of cognition, is repeatedly dismissed throughout Nihil Unbound, seemingly because it deals with eliminable phenomena that lack science’s particular form of adequation to the real. While it seems to me that Brassier’s solution fails, there is no denying that he has gained a sizable following, though the interdisciplinary reach of his work has been curtailed by his dismissal of most disciplines outside the hard sciences.
Part I of Nihil Unbound is lengthy, rich, and complex. Chapter 3, on Meillassoux (49–94), is required reading for anyone interested in Speculative Realism, and is especially strong in its challenge to Meillassoux’s ability to reconcile rationalism and materialism by way of intellectual intuition. Chapter 2, which covers the Frankfurt School theorists Theodor Adorno (1903–1969) and Max Horkheimer (1895–1973), nicely foreshadows the themes of death and extinction that play such a major role at the conclusion of Brassier’s book. But we will focus on chapter 1, which in my view contains the nucleus of his philosophical position to this very day. Though the chapter is ostensibly about the discussions of the “manifest image” found in the works of Wilfrid Sellars (1912–1989) and Paul Churchland (b. 1942), we learn more about Brassier’s thought by reading his lengthy attack on the phenomenological notion of the manifest image and on Heidegger’s non-conceptual way of claiming to give us a glimpse of Being itself.
Sellars makes an appearance at the beginning of Nihil Unbound, though in a cameo role hinting at his future centrality in Brassier’s thought. Most important here is Sellars’s distinction between the “manifest image” of everyday experience and the “scientific image” so often called upon to correct our everyday views. Sellars has at least two important points to make about the manifest image. Many philosophers treat this image as obvious and immediate, a human birthright in which everyone timelessly dwells prior to any theoretical work. But Sellars, quite correctly in my view, sees the manifest image as always already woven through with theoretical inference and cognitive achievement. As Brassier puts it: “The manifest image is not the domain of pre-theoretical immediacy. On the contrary, it is itself a subtle theoretical construct, a disciplined and critical ‘refinement or sophistication’ of the originary framework in terms of which man first encountered himself as a being capable of conceptual thought, in contradistinction to creatures that lack this capacity” (3). It follows that the manifest image is simply a crude version of the scientific image available at any moment in history, and it follows further that our current commonsense manifest image is subject to possible radical revision in the light of current and future cognitive achievement, which for Brassier means primarily the findings of natural science. In addition, though the manifest image is in this respect inferior to the scientific image, it also “enjoys a practical, if not theoretical, priority over the scientific image, since it provides the source for the norm of rational purposiveness …” (6). What the last part means is that the manifest image for Sellars has a normative status pointing to the status of “persons as loci of normative agency” (6). In its own right, the manifest image has no ontological status, merely a “functional” one. OOO would call this an “overmining” strategy, since the manifest image is regarded as nothing in its own right but only as having a socio-cultural-normative purpose. Yet Brassier, much like Sellars’s eliminativist disciple Churchland, simultaneously has an “undermining” take on the manifest image, since it can be replaced by an account of human experience in terms of subpersonal neurocomputational components. This is where Brassier breaks with “much contemporary philosophizing” (6) that continues to take the manifest image on its own terms, whether this be phenomenology, existentialism, critical theory, hermeneutics, and post-structuralism on the continental side or ordinary language philosophy among the analytics. For Brassier emphatically does not wish to take the manifest image on its own terms. Instead, the manifest image ought to be reduced in both directions (downward to physical explanation and upward to cultural/normative explanation), with everything in the middle to be eliminated. In OOO terminology, Brassier proposes nothing less than the “duomining” of everyday experience, where duomining refers to the act of undermining and overmining a phenomenon simultaneously, reducing it out of existence in both directions at once (see chapter 3 on OOO below).
Brassier goes on to note, again correctly, that partisans of the manifest image often try to reduce science to their own favored domain of everyday human experience, by giving an “instrumental” or “pragmatic” interpretation of what science does: in OOO terms, such authors overmine science by treating it solely as a human practice. While this might seem to create a mere deadlock between two equally inadequate approaches, Brassier finds the scientific attitude to be clearly preferable to the manifest one. Why so? Because the partisans of the manifest image “conspicuously avoid delineating the conceptual criteria in accordance with which the structures of the scientific image might be reduced [in instrumentalist and pragmatist theories of science] to the workings of the manifest image” (6). Given that science seems to offer a plethora of such “conceptual criteria,” it is therefore the superior approach. This leads Brassier to an initially sympathetic account of Churchland’s greater willingness than Sellars to eliminate the manifest image by scientific means, though Brassier later goes on to subject Churchland to severe criticism. The details of that critique need not concern us here, but the conclusions Brassier draws from it are of interest. His first conclusion is that naturalism – the sort of philosophy that tries to ground everything in natural or scientific explanations – is not sufficiently coherent in its metaphysics, even though its “vague talk of rendering philosophy consistent with the ‘findings of our best sciences’ remains entirely commendable …” (25). Speaking of his own ambitions rather than Churchland’s, Brassier contends that “the goal is surely to devise a metaphysics worthy of the sciences,” and the enemy on this point is not just pragmatism but also “empiricism’s enthronement of experience … [as well as] naturalism’s hypostatization of nature” (25). The alternative, Brassier holds, is to focus on “science’s subtractive modus operandi … [in which] science subtracts nature from experience, the better to uncover the objective void of being” (25). Here Brassier strays far from mainstream philosophies of science. Drawing on Badiou’s concept of subtraction, he envisions a nothingness rather than a hidden being as what lies behind appearances, a model that fits nicely with the deep cosmic pessimism of Nihil Unbound’s final pages. The mission of philosophy, Brassier holds, “consists in expediting science’s demolition of the manifest image by kicking away whatever pseudo-transcendental props are being used to shore it up or otherwise inhibit the corrosive potency of science’s metaphysical subtractions” (26). For this reason Churchland, who is often portrayed by his enemies as a grim scientistic liquidator of everything that makes human life worth living, is depicted by Brassier as a humanist sell-out to those merely functional aspects of knowledge that enable the evolution and survival of our species.
Nonetheless, Brassier praises both Churchland and Daniel Dennett (b. 1942) for “having driven an irrecusable wedge between our phenomenological self-conception and the material processes through which that conception is produced” (26). It should therefore come as no surprise when Brassier directs his ire against Husserl, who drives a similar “irrecusable wedge” between the material and phenomenal worlds while reaching the opposite conclusion. For whereas Churchland, Dennett, and Brassier all wish to disintegrate the pretensions of the manifest image, Husserl treats it as the homeland of all existence and a fortiori of all knowledge. Brassier quotes Husserl’s famous passage on phenomenology’s “principle of principles,” which states that reality can be directly intuited in experience, and that such intuition is the ultimate authority in cognitive matters, given that all knowledge is grounded in our direct encounter with the world. Stated more simply, Brassier treats Husserl as a philosophical idealist, an assessment in which I happen to agree with Brassier against the phenomenologists. What Brassier fails to grasp is that there is a lot more going on in Husserl than idealism. As OOO has often argued, the real virtue of Husserl consists not in his admittedly lamentable idealist ontology but in his discovery of a strife within the ideal or phenomenal realm between objects and their qualities. Let’s say that we encounter a mailbox, one of Husserl’s classic examples. It is true that Husserl “brackets” or “suspends” the question of whether the mailbox exists in the outside world in order to examine it as a phenomenon in its own right. Husserl’s idealism stems from the fact that he rejects any possibility of a mailbox-in-itself; he holds instead that the existence of the mailbox lies solely in its being, in fact or in principle, the object of attention by some mind. On this point Husserl is merely Berkeley with an alibi, no matter how loudly his disciples claim that he is a sort of “realist” since we are “always already outside ourselves” in encountering objects in the world. The point is that these objects never encounter each other in Husserl’s world; to be an object is to be the correlate of a mental act.
Here, despite my phenomenological background and ongoing passion for the contributions of that movement, I agree with both Brassier and Meillassoux that Husserl leaves us trapped within the circle of human thought. Yet there is more to Husserl than this, even if the point is generally missed. What we find in Husserl that is nowhere in Berkeley or the empiricists is the notion that what comes first in experience is an object
