Beyond Idealism: The New Materialism
It has been a minute since I made a post. Part of this has to do with me writing for The American Sun, and I penned a number of high-profile pieces back-to-back for them. Another part of this is that since the last major post, the one on Heidegger's refutation of German Idealism, I have been doing quite a bit of reading for this follow up article. Since the late 90s/early 2000’s, there has been a trend of continental philosophers rejecting German Idealism and embracing realism. For those who are unfamiliar with these terms, I would recommend reading the previous piece on Heidegger. There are two questions: why are continental philosophers leaving Idealism, and what are they leaving it for? Here we will consider two prominent post-Idealist philosophers, give an overview of how they reject Idealism, what they put in its place, and then we will hypothesize why rejecting Idealism has become a trend and the implications thereof.
Alain Badiou
Alain Badiou, the mentor of Slavoj Zikek, and expert in both Lacan and Cantor, is the first thinker we shall look at. On the first page of Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, Badiou is explicit with his political motives: “This return to the old doctrine of the natural rights of man is obviously linked to the collapse of revolutionary Marxism, and of all the forms of progressive engagement that it inspired…in the domain of ‘philosophy’, they have rediscovered the virtues of that ideology constantly defended by their former opponents: humanitarian individualism and the liberal defense of rights against the constraints imposed by organized political engagement.”1 Seeing his fellow radicals retreating into liberal morality after the historical failures of revolutionary Marxism, but finding himself unable to become a left-liberal, Badiou seeks to revivify the anti-humanist tradition of the 1960s. While there is a lot in Badiou that deserves our attention, it is his anti-humanism that we are interested in because it is on this point that he breaks completely with German Idealism.
What is “anti-humanism”? At first glance it reads like the philosophy of the Terminator, some extreme and cringe form of nihilism. However, anti-humanists are not committed to a negative appraisal of human life and are often activists on behalf of human life. Badiou names three notable anti-humanists of the 1960s, Foucault, Althusser, and Lacan, and speaks to us how “Michel Foucault…maintained a particularly rigorous commitment [engagement] to a revision of the status of prisoners, and devoted to this question much of his time and the whole of his immense talent as an organizer and an agitator. Althusser’s sole purpose was to redefine a genuinely emancipatory politics. Lacan himself—beyond the fact that he was a ‘total’ clinical analyst who spent the best part of his life listening to people—conceived of his struggle against the ‘normative’ orientation of American psychoanalysis, and the degrading subordination of thought to the ‘American way of life’, as a decisive commitment.” 2 Given the activist history of the anti-humanists of the 1960s, regardless of whether or not we share their political commitments or positively appraise their efforts, it cannot be said that anti-humanism means a disregard for human value or human life. Anti-humanism, which is the same as “The New Materialism”, is defined by its displacing of the human subject as the center of philosophy. Every philosophy is built like a solar system, with there being a center, a sun, around which all other considerations revolve. God is the center of Christianity, or the human self in German Idealism.
Before we can think a center after the human subject, let’s examine why Badiou rejects the human subject as the center. Drawing from Foucault and Lacan, two key arguments can be drawn:
1). “Michel Foucault outraged his readers with the declaration that Man, in the sense of constituent subject, was a constructed historical concept peculiar to a certain order of discourse, and not a timelessly self-evident principle capable of founding human rights or a universal ethics.”3
“Man”, the word we use to refer to all human beings across all time and all space, is imagined to be a constant. However, how humans are is affected by material conditions and these conditions come to dominate discourse about the human subject. Our behavior, desires, fears, and hopes are dependent on material conditions. For example, what we do each day is dependent on what occupations we have and what occupations we have are dependent on the economic regulations, tax structures, and legal codes are in place. What occupation we have quickly interpolates us, our occupation makes us a subject. Someone who cooks for a living becomes a cook, someone who mops for a living becomes a janitor, and someone who manages a company becomes a businessman. These are not simply jobs, but subjects and each of these subjects are assigned moral worth, desires, fears, and hopes. Even if the cook, janitor, or businessman rejects the bundle of associations attributed to their subject, since the self is conditioned by its material environment, it cannot but eventually give into its interpolation. The cook begins to sleep in, stay up late, desire 2am bar hopping with fellow cooks, and see his worth connected to how well customers like his food. Though we can wax about the nature of “Man”, every man we meet has behavior, desires, fears, and hopes that are shaped by material conditions. In short, “Man” is an abstraction that distracts from the material conditions that are real.
2). Lacan provides a second reason why “Man” needs to be decentered, as “he showed that the subject had no substance, no ‘nature’, being a function both of the contingent laws of language and of the always singular history of objects of desire. It followed that any notion of analytic treatment as a means for the reinstatement of a ‘normal’ kind of desire was a fraud, and that, more generally, there existed no norm that could ground the idea of a ‘human subject’, a norm whose rights and duties it would have been the task of philosophy to articulate.”4
To ascribe rights, duties, norms, or, especially its relationship to objects (the Not-I in Fichte), the subject has to be a coherent “thing.” Saying the human subject must have a meaning, there has to be a referent to the refence, there has to be something to which the word “subject” points to. What Lacan discovered is that “human subject” is a reference without a referent, because what is usually taken to be the referent is a bundle of discordant desires with no coherent unity and whose desires are severed from the object cause of desire. Your desires are caused by the objects you are surrounded by, making you entirely dependent upon your environment (which includes, most of all, language), but you reify these desires, thinking them to originate from the unity you call you, and thus construct an imaginary subject. There is no Withered Rose for Lacan, simply a multiplicity that is at war with himself and constructed a subject to cope with being a non-being. Like the argument from Foucault, and they are similar arguments, there is no place for Idealism because there is no place for the human subject.
If the human subject is not the center, what is? For Badiou, the center changes depending on situation. Situations are the normal state of affairs, the mundane and un-exceptional. In a situation there are centers, but these are fabricated by the socio-political structure instantiated by the dominant forces. However, in the midst of situations arise events. All animals are placed into situations, but “there is only a particular kind of animal, convoked by certain circumstances to become a subject. This is to say that at a given moment, everything he is—his body, his abilities—is called upon to enable the passing of a truth along its path.”5 During the event, circumstances change the subject-less human animal into a subject. Whether it is Saint Paul on the road to Damascus, a Jacobin during the French Revolution, or Galileo observing the stars, a new subject comes into being and this new subject becomes the center of that event which arose out of that situation. Badiou develops a system of ethics around this idea of the event, specifically around fidelity to the event, but for our purposes we will stop here. Eliminating the human subject, German Idealism has become an impossible project and in its place is a new materialism.
Quentin Meillassioux
Unlike Badiou, Meillassioux frames his project a purely philosophical one, with political concerns as only supplementary arguments for his philosophical position. What Meillassioux, who was a student of Badiou’s, is trying to work through in After Finitude, is a way beyond correlationism. “Correlationism” is the term which Meillassioux uses to refer to all post-Kantian philosophy (German Idealism and its rivals). By “correlation” Meillassioux means, “the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other. We will henceforth call correlationism any current of thought which maintains the unsurpassable character of the correlation so defined.”6 Thinking and being, as we mentioned in the post about Heidegger and Idealism, are collapsed into one because it is impossible (so the Idealist argument goes) to separate a being from our thoughts about that being, so much so that there ceases to be a distinction between the two. German Idealism is a variant of correlationism that paints the correlation as one between subject and object; the “linguistic turn” with Wittgenstein and Derrida put the correlation as one between signifier and signified; phenomenologists represented the correlation as between consciousness and objects of consciousness, which is similar to Idealism but, for reasons that would take us afield, is importantly different.
So, why is Meillassioux trying to get beyond correlationism? His concern is the question of how to reconcile correlationism with modern science, which is capable of producing statements about events that happened prior to the advent of consciousness? His question is, “How are we to grasp the meaning of scientific statements bearing explicitly upon a manifestation of the world that is posited as anterior to the emergence of thought and even of life -posited, that is, as anterior to every form of human relation to the world?”7 Remember, if correlationism is true, then statements about the origin of the universe or the origin of life cannot be literally true, because this would mean that beings can exist independently of thought, but even thinking this possibility would reduce that statement (the universe began 13.5 billion years ago, or that life originated on earth 3.5 billion years ago) to an object of thought for us, and thus we would be forced to say, under the constraint of correlationism (of any variety) that “the universe began 13.5 billion years ago for us”, or something comparable. For the correlationist, the scientist making a claim like the previous does not really know what he is saying and needs the correlationist to come in and clarify the findings. Meillassioux is not happy with this arrangement but is equally not happy with returning to the world before correlationism (the world of dogmatism), in which philosophers claimed to be able to define the nature of beings with absolute knowledge. Plato, Aristotle, and their students are just as unacceptable.
Why is dogmatism, also known as “naive realism”, not an option? Because:
“…a refusal of dogmatism furnishes the minimal condition for every critique of ideology, insofar as an ideology cannot be identified with just any variety of deceptive representation, but is rather any form of pseudo-rationality whose aim is to establish that what exists as a matter of fact exists necessarily. The critique of ideologies, which ultimately always consists in demonstrating that a social situation which is presented as inevitable is actually contingent, is essentially indissociable from the critique of metaphysics.”8 There exists a problem, however, because without the ability to say that there are matters of facts that exist necessarily, there is a space opened up for non-metaphysical religions which ground themselves in fideism, not rational argumentation. Since the end of ideology came about with the impossibility of stating matters of fact, replaced dynamic social conditions subject to change at any time, “the end of ideologies has taken the form of the unqualified victory of religiosity”, as it has become impossible to say that God does not exist (this is dogmatism) or that Jesus Christ did not rise from the dead (this, too, is dogmatism).9 Faith has become immune to reason, and fanatism is an ever-present concern throughout After Finitude.
Meillassioux is tasked, then, with finding a way to justify scientific statements in such a way that escapes the logic of correlationism while positing enough realism to critique fanatical statements (“No, God did not tell you to wage jihad”), but all the while not positing enough realism that leads to the return of ideology (“No, you cannot say that history’s end is capitalism and liberal democracy”). To do this Meillassioux finds a way to make absolute statements, without deriving an absolute (an essence, a god, a world spirit, etc.). His absolute statement is that the one thing necessary is contingency: that all beings possess, necessarily, contingency. If it is possible to speak about beings having necessary traits, then it means that it is possible to disentangle beings from thought, breaking out of correlationism and thus making scientific statements about events prior to the advent of consciousness possible. If it is true that all beings are necessarily contingent, then it also becomes possible to critique fanaticism and ideology, as both rely on the premise that something is necessary (God in the case of fanaticism and social arrangements in the case of ideology).
To prove his case, Meillassioux gives us the following thought experiment:
“Let us suppose that two dogmatists are arguing about the nature of our future post-mortem. The Christian dogmatist claims to know (because he has supposedly demonstrated it) that our existence continues after death, and that it consists in the eternal contemplation of a God whose nature is incomprehensible from within the confines of our present existence. Thus, the latter claims to have demonstrated that what is in-itself is a God who, like the Cartesian God, can be shown by our finite reason to be incomprehensible for our finite reason. But the atheist dogmatist claims to know that, on the contrary, our existence is completely abolished by death, which utterly annihilates us.
It is at this stage that the correlationist comes along to disqualify both of their positions by defending a strict theoretical agnosticism. All beliefs strike her as equally legitimate given that theory is incapable of privileging one eventuality over another. For just as I cannot know the in-itself without converting it into a for-me, I cannot know what will happen to me when I am no longer of this world, since knowledge presupposes that one is of the world. Consequently, the agnostic has little difficulty in refuting both of these positions - all she has to do is demonstrate that it is self-contradictory to claim to know what is when one is no longer alive, since knowledge presupposes that one is still of this world. Accordingly, the two dogmatists are proffering realist theses about the in-itself, both of which are vitiated by the inconsistency proper to all realism - that of claiming to think what there is when one is not.
But then another disputant intervenes: the subjective idealist. The latter declares that the position of the agnostic is every bit as inconsistent as those of the two realists. For all three believe that there could be an in-itself radically different from our present state, whether it is a God who is inaccessible to natural reason, or a sheer nothingness. But this is precisely what is unthinkable, for I am no more capable of thinking a transcendent God than the annihilation of everything - more particularly, I cannot think of myself as no longer existing without, through that very thought, contradicting myself. 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. Consequently, my mind, if not my body, is immortal. Death, like every other form of radical transcendence, is annulled by the idealist, in the same way as he annuls every idea of an in-itself that differs from the correlational structure of the subject. Because an in-itself that differs from the for-us is unthinkable, the idealist declares it to be impossible.
The question now is under what conditions the correlationist agnostic can refute not only the theses of the two realists, but also that of the idealist. In order to counter the latter, the agnostic has no choice: she must maintain that my capacity-to-be-whollyother in death (whether dazzled by God, or annihilated) is just as thinkable as my persisting in my self-identity. The 'reason' for this is that I think myself as devoid of any reason for being and remaining as I am, and it is the thinkability of this unreason - of this facticity - which implies that the other three thesis -those of the two realists and the idealist - are all equally possible. For even if I cannot think of myself, for example, as annihilated, neither can I think of any cause that would rule out this eventuality. The possibility of my not being is thinkable as the counterpart of the absence of any reason for my being, even if I cannot think what it would be not to be. Although realists maintain the possibility of a post-mortem condition that is unthinkable as such (whether as vision of God or as sheer nothingness), the thesis they maintain is itself thinkable - for even if I cannot think the unthinkable, I can think the possibility of the unthinkable by dint of the unreason of the real. Consequently, the agnostic can recuse all three positions as instances of absolutism - all three claim to have identified a necessary reason implying one of the three states described above, whereas no such reason is available.
But now a final disputant enters the debate: the speculative philosopher [this is Meillassioux]. She maintains that neither the two dogmatists, nor the idealist have managed to identify the absolute, because the latter is simply the capacity-to-be-other as such, as theorized by the agnostic. The absolute is the possible transition, devoid of reason, of my state towards any other state whatsoever. But this possibility is no longer a 'possibility of ignorance'; viz., a possibility that is merely the result of my inability to know which of the three aforementioned theses is correct - rather, it is the knowledge of the very real possibility of all of these eventualities, as well as of a great many others. How then are we able to claim that this capacity-to-be-other is an absolute - an index of knowledge rather than of ignorance? The answer is that it is the agnostic herself who has convinced us of it. For how does the latter go about refuting the idealist? She does so by maintaining that we can think ourselves as no longer being; in other words, by maintaining that our mortality, our annihilation, and our becoming-wholly-other in God, are all effectively thinkable. But how are these states conceivable as possibilities? On account of the fact that we are able to think - by dint of the absence of any reason for our being - a capacity-to-be-other capable of abolishing us, or of radically transforming us. But if so, then this capacity-to-be-other cannot be conceived as a correlate of our thinking, precisely because it harbours the possibility of our own non-being. In order to think myself as mortal, as the atheist does - and hence as capable of not being - I must think my capacity-not-to-be as an absolute possibility, for if I think this possibility as a correlate of my thinking, if I maintain that the possibility of my not-being only exists as a correlate of my act of thinking the possibility of my not-being, then / can no longer conceive the possibility of my not being, which is precisely the thesis defended by the idealist. For I think myself as mortal only if I think that my death has no need of my thought of death in order to be actual. If my ceasing to be depended upon my continuing to be so that I could keep thinking myself as not being, then I would continue to agonize indefinitely, without ever actually passing away. In other words, in order to refute subjective idealism, I must grant that my possible annihilation is thinkable as something that is not just the correlate of my thought of this annihilation. Thus, the correlationist's refutation of idealism proceeds by way of an absolutization (which is to say, a de-correlation) of the capacity-to-be-other presupposed in the thought of facticity…”10
Following this thought experiment, Meillassioux responds to potential objects and fine-tunes his argument, but this thought experiment remains at the core of his thesis.
Why This Trend?
It is commonplace to explain the popularity of German Idealism in the mid-late 20th century via the collapse of Marxism. Like the New Materialism of Badiou, Marxism emphasized the supremacy of material conditions albeit in a strictly economic sense. It was said that given the economic conditions of the modern world, the communist revolution would be inevitable. Seeing that the revolution did not occur, the supposedly scientific historical materialism was discredited. However, the Idealism that replaced it, represented by Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse, was only able to deliver “left-liberalism”, and was unable to prevent the rise of religious fanaticism and radical traditionalism in the 90’s and early 2000’s. Ideology, if it is appropriate to call Idealism that, failed, and it was necessary to return to materialism which, although not fully successful, at least produced the USSR and the South American “Pink Wave.”
Although I am not a disciple of either Badiou or Meillassioux, I do welcome the trend reflected by them: the turn away from ideology and towards material conditions. Material conditions are not all there is, but they are among the most important when it comes to political considerations. Russel Kirk once said, “Ideology provides sham religion and sham philosophy, comforting in its way to those who have lost or never have known genuine religious faith, and those not sufficiently intelligent to apprehend real philosophy”, and I wholly agree with him. Hopefully the trend in continental philosophy will trickle down and more people will put aside ideology for real philosophy, true religion, and considering political matters in terms of the material conditions that give rise to contemporary problems.
Badiou, Alain. Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. Verso Books. 2013. 4,5
Badiou, Alain. Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. Verso Books. 2013. 7
Badiou. Ethics. 5
Ibid. 6
Ibid. 41
Meillassioux, Quentin. Translated by Ray Brassier. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. Continuum Publishing. 2010. 13
Meillassioux, Quentin. Translated by Ray Brassier. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. Continuum Publishing. 2010. 21
Meillassioux, 57
Ibid. 76
Ibid. 91-94