The Democracy of Objects

1.4. Objections and Replies

No doubt a number of objections will have arisen in the mind of the reader sympathetic to the correlationist line of argument. In particular, three lines of argument can be anticipated: First, that the realist ontology and transcendental line of argument proposed by Bhaskar purports to know objects a priori before knowing them; second, that it is impossible to imagine a world without men because we still imagine ourselves as being present to this world in our absence to this world; and third, in a closely related vein, that it is impossible to think anything without, as it were, including ourselves in the picture of what is to be thought. I will address each of these objections in their turn.

The first of these arguments is the easiest to dispatch. What this argument purports is that realist ontology claims to know before we know. Through this line of attack it hopes to establish the primacy of epistemology over ontology, or that epistemology is, in fact, first philosophy. For, the argument runs, how can ontology make claims about the being of being without first knowing these beings? As Bhaskar formulates this line of argument, “ontology is dependent upon epistemology since what we can know to exist is merely a part of what we can know”.[33] I suspect that this line of argument, more than any other, motivates the subordination of ontology to epistemology and the treatment of ontology as “onto-epistemology”. This seems to follow as obvious: to speak of being, we must know being and therefore an inquiry into knowledge or epistemology must precede any discussion of being. Heidegger, for example, argues that before we can even formulate the question of the meaning of being (it’s noteworthy that he formulates this question as a question of meaning rather than a question of what being is) we must first investigate Dasein's ontic-ontological pre-comprehension of being.[34] Nothing could be more obvious.

However, as Bhaskar argues,

Ontology does not tell us what objects exist, but that objects exist, that they are generative mechanisms, that they cannot be identified with events, actualities, or qualities, and that they behave differently in open and closed systems. These are ontological premises necessary to render our experimental activity intelligible. It is the job of actual inquiry to discover what objects exist. However, if inquiry is to be intelligible then it must begin with the premise that there are objects that act independently of this inquiry.

A second line of argument holds that it is impossible to intelligibly think a world without men because, in the very act of thinking such a world, we are picturing ourselves as present to this world. The thesis here is that every picturing of the world includes ourselves in that picture. However, as Quentin Meillassoux has convincingly argued, such a line of argument leads to the conclusion that the thought of our own death is unintelligible or that we are necessarily immortal. For if it is true that we cannot think the world without thinking our presence to the world, then it follows that even the thought of our own death requires the presence of our thinking, thereby undermining the possibility of dying. As Meillassoux formulates this line of argument, “I can only think of myself as existing, and as existing the way I exist; thus, I cannot but exist, and always exist as I exist now”.[36]

Such is the argument of absolute idealists that 1) denies the existence of an in-itself apart from thought, and 2) argues that the correlation between being and thought is absolute or reality itself, i.e, that there is nothing apart from correlation (Berkeley and Hegel, though in very different ways). In response to this line of argument, Meillassoux cites the agnostic—the correlationist that concedes the possible existence of the in-itself apart from thought while maintaining the index of all thought to phenomena or being-for-us—pointing out that,

While I do not follow Meillassoux in his inference from the contingency of our being to the contingency of being as such (I await a clearer formulation of this argument), I do believe his argument here hits the mark. If it is conceded that our annihilation is, in principle, thinkable, then we are also conceding that a world without humans is thinkable. For to think our annihilation just is to think a world where we are absent. Yet if this is the case, then the correlationist argument that it is impossible to think a form of being apart from thought is severely challenged.

Here it must be emphasized that Meillassoux's argument does not rest on establishing that we are annihilated with death or that we know that death entails the extinction of our being. As unlikely as it is given what we have come to know about the relationship between mind and brain, it could be that we persist after death. All that is required for Meillassoux's argument is that our extinction or annihilation be thinkable as a possibility. And if it is thinkable as a possibility—a point that seems amply supported by people's anxieties about death—then it also follows that it is possible to think a world without humans.

A final, and closely related line of argument, revolves around the reflexivity of thought. Here the idea is that it is impossible to think anything without simultaneously thinking that I am thinking it. Like the second objection, this objection revolves around the thesis that the thinker is always included in the picture of what she thinks. Thus, for example, as I think about making myself a cup of coffee, it is held that I must also be aware of thinking that I am thinking about making myself a cup of coffee. All thought, therefore, must include the thought of the thought in the activity of the thinking. As such, all thought must necessarily be reflexive or must simultaneously be aware of the object that it thinks and the fact that it is thinking this thought. And if this is the case, then it follows that the thinker must be included in the thought of any being other than thought, and that therefore it is impossible to escape the correlation between thought and being.

As Meillassoux amusingly puts it in his Goldsmith's talk, thought turns out to be like a bit of dual adhesive tape one attempts to remove from one’s finger.[38] This talk was the occasion of a conference organized by Alberto Toscano, where Ray Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant, Graham Harman, and Meillassoux each gave talks. It was here that the term “speculative realism” was used for the first time. In his talk, Meillassoux illustrated the correlationist argument through analogy to a dual adhesive bit of tape stuck to a person’s finger. Each time she attempts to remove the tape it ends up sticking to another finger, such that the tape is inescapable. Likewise, if thought indeed has this character of reflexivity as a characteristic that always accompanies thought, then it follows that correlation or thought is inescapable. Such is the import of Descartes' famous analysis of the wax in the second meditation. As Descartes writes,

Descartes' innocent little thesis here has been the source of much mischief in subsequent philosophy and is one of the root premises of correlationist thought. Whether we are speaking of Kant's transcendental unity of apperception which is treated as something that must accompany all thought[40], or Hegel's dialectical gymnastics where it is shown that the thinker is always included in the thought[41], the root of these claims traces back to Descartes' thesis that all thought is necessarily reflexive. It is this, for example, that will ultimately allow Hegel to assert the identity of substance and subject in The Phenomenology of Spirit.

However, is this seemingly obvious thesis truly so obvious? Meillassoux believes that this is a powerful argument that must be addressed. I’m not so sure. Is it self-evident that any thought must include the thinker or that the thinker is thinking the thought? While I certainly concede the thesis that in many instances we are capable of self-reflexively thinking the thought that we are thinking a thought, I am much more circumspect about the claim that all thought is necessarily reflexive. Were this the case, then it would seem that thought is impossible, for we would fall into an infinite regress. Thus, as I sit here thinking that I would like to make myself a cup of coffee, I would, if the reflexivity thesis were true, have to think that I am thinking that I would like to make myself a cup of coffee. But since it is asserted that all thought is reflexive, I would additionally have to think that I am thinking that I am thinking that I would like to make a cup of coffee, and so on to infinity. Yet if this were what truly takes place in the activity of thought, thought would be paralyzed. As Bhaskar puts it, “[i]t is possible for A to think ε and be aware of thinking ε without thinking about thinking ε; and unless this were so no-one could ever intelligently think”.[42] What we need here is something like Sartre's “pre-reflexive cogito” which thinks something without simultaneously thinking itself.[43] Yet if such a cogito is possible, and indeed it appears necessary, then we have a thinking that doesn't simultaneously posit itself but which is completely absorbed in what we are thinking.