The Legacy of Kant in Sellars and Meillassoux

Analytic and Continental Kantianism

Fabio Gironi, Fabio Gironi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351786850
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Histoire et théorie de la philosophie

Contemporary interest in realism and naturalism, emerging under the banner of speculative or new realism, has prompted continentally-trained philosophers to consider a number of texts from the canon of analytic philosophy. The philosophy of Wilfrid Sellars, in particular, has proven remarkably able to offer a contemporary re-formulation of traditional "continental" concerns that is amenable to realist and rationalist considerations, and serves as an accessible entry point into the Anglo-American tradition for continental philosophers. With the aim of appraising this fertile theoretical convergence, this volume brings together experts of both analytic and continental philosophy to discuss the legacy of Kantianism in contemporary philosophy. The individual essays explore the ways in which Sellars can be put into dialogue with the widely influential work of Quentin Meillassoux, explaining how—even though their methods, language, and proximal influences are widely different—their philosophical stances can be compared thanks to their shared Kantian heritage and interest in the problem of realism. This book will be appeal to students and scholars who are interested in Sellars, Meillassoux, contemporary realist movements in continental philosophy, and the analytic-continental debate in contemporary philosophy.

1
After Kant, Sellars, and Meillassoux

Back to Empirical Realism?

James R. O’Shea

1. At the outset of his 2008 talk on “Time Without Becoming,” Quentin Meillassoux describes his key concept of correlationism, a concept that he had expounded in his influential 2006 book, Après la finitude, published in English in 2008 as After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, in the following way. “I call ‘correlationism’ the contemporary opponent of any realism,” and he indicates that he particularly has in mind certain views shared by “transcendental philosophy, the varieties of phenomenology, and post-modernism”: namely, as puts it, the idea “that there are no objects, no events, no laws, no beings which are not always already correlated with a point of view, with a subjective access” (Meillassoux 2014, 9). Transcendental (as opposed to post-modern) correlationism, in particular, is the view that “there are some universal forms of the subjective knowledge of things” (ibid. 10). “The realist, by contrast, maintains “that is possible to attain something like a reality in itself, existing absolutely independently of his viewpoint, or his categories, or his culture, or his language, etc.” (ibid. 9).

Meillassoux is here painting in very broad strokes, but in his more detailed realist arguments against “the basic argument of these ‘philosophies of access’” he has been concerned to stress “the exceptional strength of its antirealist argumentation” (ibid. 10). In what follows, I examine how Meillassoux’s conception of correlationism in After Finitude, as I understand it, relates firstly to Kant’s transcendental idealist philosophy, and secondly to the analytic Kantianism of Wilfrid Sellars. I argue that central to the views of both Kant and Sellars is what might be called, with an ambivalent nod to Meillassoux, an objective correlationism. What emerges in the end as the recommended upshot of these analyses is a naturalistic Kantianism that takes the form of an empirical realism in roughly Kant’s sense, but one that is happily wed with Sellars’ scientific realism, once the latter is disentangled from two implausible commitments that made such a reconciliation seem impossible to Sellars himself.

2. I want to begin by asking whether Kant’s empirical realism should be taken to be a “correlationist” view in Meillassoux’s sense. The empirically real objects of possible experience, on Kant’s view, are (in the case of “outer sense”) causally interacting material objects that persist independently of our perspectival encounters with them. But of course Kant’s empirical realism is inseparable from his “transcendental idealism”: such objects are necessarily the objects of certain a priori forms of sensible and conceptual representation, namely, space and time and the categories respectively. Meillassoux’s conception of “transcendental correlationism” is clearly intended to include this primary sense in which the empirically real, mind-independent material objects of possible experience, for Kant, are “always already correlated with” or correlative to certain a priori forms of representation “in us,” as Kant is wont to put it. While this certainly seems appropriate in general, everything hangs on just how one understands these elusive but fundamental Kantian conceptions, and in particular what sort of mind-dependence of the objects of experience or “phenomena” is thought to be entailed by Kant’s transcendental philosophy.

At the outset of After Finitude, Meillassoux presents these issues vividly in terms of what he calls “ancestral” realities, an example of which would be what he dubs an “arche-fossil”: “I will call ‘ancestral’ any reality anterior to the emergence of the human species,” and an arche-fossil or “fossil-matter” are materials such as the radioactive decay of isotypes that indicate the existence of an ancestral reality or event (Meillassoux 2008, 10). In relation to correlationism, Meillassoux then formulates the philosophical “problem of ancestrality” in terms of the question, “how are we to conceive of the empirical sciences’ capacity to yield knowledge of the ancestral realm?” and thus in terms of “the nature of scientific discourse”:

how is mathematical discourse able to describe a world where humanity is absent; a world crammed with things and events that are not the correlates of any manifestation; a world that is not the correlate of a relation to the world? This is the enigma….

(Meillassoux 2008, 26)

Meillassoux proceeds to argue that the very formulation of this question, “what is the condition that legitimates science’s ancestral statements?” has as “its primary condition … the relinquishing of transcendentalism” (ibid. 27). Given that I will follow Meillassoux in rejecting “speculative” versions of correlationism, and will agree that, as I shall consider it, “correlationism is not a metaphysics: it does not hypostatize the correlation” in terms of any “ancestral Witness” taken to ground the ancestral (e.g., God, Absolute Mind, the Kantian Ego incorrectly interpreted, et al.), our primary concern becomes whether Meillassoux is right that the problem of the ancestral entails the rejection of transcendental correlationism of the Kantian varieties, however sophisticated (cf. the two transcendental “correlationist rejoinders” that Meillassoux considers and rejects at 2008, 18–26).

3. The first transcendentalist rejoinder that Meillassoux considers involves the familiar attempt to account for the existence of unperceived or unwitnessed ancestral events by introducing “a counterfactual such as the following: had there been a witness, then this occurrence would have been perceived in such and such a fashion” (2008, 19). In apparent support of this interpretive move Meillassoux might well have quoted Kant’s example in the Critique of Pure Reason about the existence of unwitnessed inhabitants of the moon that we could experience:

Accordingly, the objects of experience are never given [as things] in themselves, but only in experience, and they do not exist at all outside it. That there could be inhabitants of the moon, even though no human being has ever perceived them, must of course be admitted; but this means only that in the possible progress of experience we could encounter them; for everything is actual that stands in one context with a perception in accordance with the laws of the empirical progression. Thus they are real when they stand in an empirical connection with my real consciousness, although they are not therefore real [as things] in themselves, i.e., outside this progress of experience.

(A492–3/B521; interpolations added)¹

Meillassoux’s reply to this first transcendentalist rejoinder, however, indicates that he is understanding Kant’s empirical realism and transcendental idealism in ways that I think we ought to reject (cf. O’Shea 2012, 2016).

Meillassoux reconstructs the transcendentalist rejoinder as making the phenomenological point that what is already actually given in experience is always given against the background of aspects or regions that are not entirely given all at once in the experience, but which can or could be given by “adumbrations” (Husserl’s Abschattung) from what is actually given in the experience. On behalf of the rejoinder Meillassoux cites, for example, the existence of the unperceived backside of a perceived cube (2008: 19). Meillassoux responds, however, that this trivial account of the existence of unperceived objects or events in terms of our capacity to fill in further unwitnessed “lacunae” as implicitly present in what is already actually given (cf. 2008: 20, on the idea of “a lacunary givenness”)—this correlationist construction of mere unwitnessed lacunae in “an event occurring when there is already givenness”—does not touch the deeper problem of the ancestral, which “designates an event … anterior to givenness itself,” and which thus refers to “occurrences which are not contemporaneous with any givenness, whether lacunary or not” (ibid.):

More acutely, the problem consists in understanding how science is able to think—without any particular difficulty—the coming into being of consciousness and its spatio-temporal forms of givenness in the midst of a space and time which are supposed to pre-exist the latter…. [S]cience thinks a time in which the passage from the non-being of givenness to its being has effectively occurred—hence a time which, by definition, cannot be reduced to any givenness which preceded it and whose emergence it allows.

(Meillassoux 2008, 21)

Once we properly recognize that what is “at issue here is not the time of consciousness but the time of science” (ibid.), then, according to Meillassoux, we can see that “every variety of correlationism” is exposed as an extreme idealism” (2008, 18), whether Berkeley’s or Kant’s, by the problem of ancestral realities that exist prior to “the coming into being of consciousness and its spatio-temporal forms of givenness” (2008, 21).

It should be clear from these passages, however, that at least as far as his response to this first rejoinder is concerned (and we shall see that the second rejoinder does not alter the essential issues at stake), Meillassoux understands the correlationism involved in Kant’s empirical realism cum transcendental idealism in a way that restricts its claims to the domain of lacunae-filling constructions from some real historical or hypothetically imagined witnessings involved in some actually given conscious experience. Then it will of course be impossible to make sense, for example, of Kant’s own pre-Critical nebular hypothesis concerning the origin of our solar system within a single spatiotemporal-causal material framework that pre-existed the emergence of any human consciousness. But even internal to the first Critique this is not, in my view, the correct way to understand Kant’s “formal idealism,” as he also calls it (B518–519 n).

Kant argues that any finite, temporally discursive cognition of a world requires or (as we might put it in this context) “correlates” objectively with certain a priori forms of conceptual and sensory representation in general. As such Kant’s empirical realism is not based on gap-filling constructions from some actually given experiences, whether real or imagined, contra Meillassoux. Meillassoux takes it to be an anti-Kantian point to suggest that, as science indicates, “givenness could just as well never have emerged if life had not arisen” (2008, 22). But Kant’s transcendental deduction, for example, concerns the lawful and structural forms, described functionally at the most abstract, second-order level, that must be true of any objective world that is to be the object of experience for any sensibly receptive yet potentially self-aware experiencer of that world; and these categorial forms of unity are then argued to be applicable, a fortiori, to our human spatiotemporal form of experience in particular. Kant does not start with particular, partial sensory experiences and then seek to account for our construction of a world of objects to fill the lacunae in those states of consciousness (whether real or hypothetical). Rather, he argues that the concept of any finite subject’s being aware of a plurality of sensible states at all in the first place, and in particular being aware of it as such a plurality, entails that such a subject’s world is already validly conceived by that subject as a directly perceived, empirically mind-independent, objective world of persisting physical realities in general, all of which, whether scientifically conceived or otherwise, must exist within a single, potentially infinitely extensive and divisible spatiotemporal universe. As I will put it, Kant’s correlationism is an objective correlationism in this highly abstract and formal sense, a sense which contrasts sharply with the historically conditioned and restricted subjective correlationism that one finds in Meillassoux’s descriptions of transcendental correlationism in the passages examined above.

4. This point can be further clarified and in fact reinforced by considering Meillassoux’s formulation of and response to the “second correlationist rejoinder from a transcendental perspective.” This second Kantian rejoinder claims that Meillassoux’s arguments concerning ancestral realities involve “an elementary confusion between the empirical and the transcendental levels of the problem under consideration” (2008, 22). But, as with the first rejoinder, everything depends on how these distinctions are spelled out—in this case, the transcendental/empirical distinction. Meillassoux portrays the Kantian as responding this way:

You [Meillassoux] proceed as though the transcendental subject—which is ultimately the subject of science—was of the same nature as the physical organ which supports it—you collapse the distinction between the conscious organ which arose within nature and the subject of science which constructs the knowledge of nature. But the difference between these two is that the conscious organ exists; it is an entity in the same sense as any other physical organ; whereas the transcendental subject simply cannot be said to exist; which is to say that the subject is not an entity, but rather a set of conditions rendering objective scientific knowledge of entities possible. But a condition for objective cognition cannot be treated as an object, and since only objects can be said to exist, it is necessary to insist that a condition does not exist—precisely because it conditions.

(Meillassoux 2008, 22–23)

In response to the Kantian’s “play[ing] with the notion of condition in this way,” Meillassoux argues that, despite the above distinction between objects, which exist, and a transcendental condition, which (Meillassoux’s Kantian says) “simply does not exist,” in the end “one still has to say that there is a transcendental subject, rather than no subject,” and “that such a subject takes place” (Meillassoux 2008, 24). While following Kant in avoiding all speculative dogmatism, we must still grant that such a transcendental subject “takes place” in the sense of being “posited as a point of view on the world, and hence as taking place at the heart of the world,” as a “position in the world” (ibid. 24–25). Hence, as necessarily “localized among the finite objects” in this way, the transcendental subject “remains indissociable from its incarnation in a body” (ibid.); and therefore all of Meillassoux’s earlier objections to Kantianism based on ancestral realities that exist entirely independently of the emergence of any such perspectival givenness remain sound, he contends.

It is crucial to see exactly why and how Meillassoux’s understanding of these central Kantian distinctions is mistaken, in my view. Meillassoux is certainly right about this important point: “Granted, the transcendental is the condition for knowledge of bodies, but it is necessary to add that the body is also the condition for the taking place of the transcendental” (2008, 25). But his argument involves the following fallacious inference: (i) [This is true:] Kant’s transcendental subject requires a perspectival, spatiotemporal embodiment, as “a necessary condition”; therefore (ii) [This is false:] Kant’s “correlationist” arguments concerning the necessary forms of any potentially self-conscious, finite cognition, are arguments that depend essentially on premises concerning (or concepts pertaining to) the emergence—the “instantiation” or “appearance” in space and time—of such embodied subjects; for example, on facts such as “the eme...