{"id":9798,"date":"2012-11-18T11:34:06","date_gmt":"2012-11-18T16:34:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=9798"},"modified":"2012-11-18T16:46:43","modified_gmt":"2012-11-18T21:46:43","slug":"pluth-correlationism-thinking-being-meillassoux","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2012\/11\/18\/pluth-correlationism-thinking-being-meillassoux\/","title":{"rendered":"pluth correlationism thinking being meillassoux 2\/4"},"content":{"rendered":"

correlationism<\/span>\u201cthe 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\u201d (Meillassoux 5)\u2014that is, we never have access to being as it really is, except through the medium of thought, which, precisely as a medium, distorts what it targets.<\/p>\n

One way to oppose correlationism<\/span> would be with a na\u00efve realism, which supposes that access to what is other than thought is possible and even relatively unprob-lematic\u2014that the relation of being to thought can be immediate. Meillassoux, by contrast, wants to hang on to the idea that there is something problematic about this relation.<\/p>\n

Na\u00efve realism, according to him, does not sufficiently appreciate the weirdness presented by our ability to make meaningful claims about, for example, what preceded the emergence of any conscious being whatsoever, as we do when we make meaningful statements about the nature of the universe before the existence of humanity.<\/p>\n

Meillassoux claims that it is being\u2019s ability to be \u201cmathematized\u201d that gives us a way out of correlationism, and this also requires us to reconsider the Kantian turn in philosophy, whose essence can be described as follows: \u201cbeing and thinking must be thought as capable of being wholly other\u201d\u2014as good a definition of what Meillas-soux understands as correlationism<\/span> as there is (Meillassoux 44). Yet a strong correlationism<\/span> goes further than this, positing a strong separation of thinking from being, making thought into something radically other than being\u2014not superior to it, not a cause of it, but typically more of a sub-being, a mere epiphenomenon, appearance, fiction, or illusion, as it would be for a Nietzschean as well as for an eliminative or reductionist materialist.<\/p>\n

In this case, thinking would have access only to what it produces, while being would continue on, independent of and indifferent to what is (rightly or wrongly\u2014it hardly matters) thought about it.<\/span><\/p>\n

What I want to show next is how Meillassoux\u2019s project, precisely in its most compelling gesture\u2014its reconsideration of a kind of mathematical realism, its evocation of the Galilean mathematization of nature as a continued inspiration for thought\u2014over-looks an opportunity to make a more vigorous materialist claim about the union of thinking and being.<\/p>\n

Consider more closely the relationship between thinking and being that is asserted in Meillassoux\u2019s work. Being is said to be mathematizable, and so correlationism<\/span> is wrong, because mathematics shows us how the \u201cParmenidean postulate\u201d can be returned to: it shows us where \u201cbeing and thinking are the same\u201d (Meillassoux 44).<\/p>\n

Yet this does not mean that mathematics is, or is even part of, the really real. Mathematics is a thinking. It is through mathematics that being and thinking are sup-posed to be joined together. Yet this still amounts to an imbalanced union, because Meillassoux\u2019s way out of correlationism<\/span> does not allow for anything like a \u201cknowledge in the real\u201d\u2014an idea I will discuss via the notion of lalangue<\/strong> in the next section. It is doubtful that Meillassoux wants to say that being itself knows anything about mathematics. It would be erroneous to say that the real knows the laws of physics and chemistry. And there is also no need to posit a subject in the real who knows these laws. The formal languages we use for such laws are not at all etched into the heart of things either. Must it then be said that such formal expressions of laws \u201ccorrelate\u201d to the real? Yet this cannot be what Meillassoux wants to say!<\/p>\n

This leads me to conclude that the way in which Meillassoux articulates the relation of mathematics to thinking poses a problem for his speculative materialism. While he says of his work that it refutes correlationism<\/span>by bringing thinking and being back into a union with each other (via mathematics), this relation turns out to be one-directional and therefore not as far from correlationism<\/span> as it is possible to go.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s agree that being is mathematizable. This still leaves being ultimately unaffectedby its mathematization\u2014and therefore, mathematics does not show us where there is an interactionand interrelation\u2014not to mention union\u2014of thinking and being. (If there is not even a strong interaction between thinking and being, it is hard to see how there could be a meaningful union . . . unless Meillassoux really meant to go all-out Parmenidean<\/strong> on us, by claiming that thinking is being, and vice versa: the monist direction, in other words. But I see no evidence for this in what I\u2019ve read of him.)<\/p>\n

The hard sciences, and mathematics, can only take us from one kind of correlationism<\/span> to another, it seems. What is needed, for a different sort of materialism, one of human practice, is a reconsideration of the status of the so-called \u201chuman\u201d sciences.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

correlationism\u201cthe 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\u201d (Meillassoux 5)\u2014that is, we never have access to being as it really is, except through the medium of thought, which, precisely as a medium, distorts what it targets. … Continue reading “pluth correlationism thinking being meillassoux 2\/4”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45,65,24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9798","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-badiou","category-dia-mat","category-lacan"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9798","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9798"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9798\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9815,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9798\/revisions\/9815"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9798"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9798"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9798"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}