Discuss the work of any one recent (post-war) French philosopher whose achievements you consider to have been

underrated by most recent commentators. Quentin Meillassouxs 2008 debut After Finitude is an unprecedented attempt to resurrect the kind of metaphysical philosophy rarely seen, let alone respected, since the time of Kant. Some of the ambitious claims put forward include: a defence of Lockean primary/secondary qualities; a refutation of scepticism; a demonstration of why there is something instead of nothing; and finally an answer to Humes problem of causation. As the books subtitle, An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency suggests, it is the last of these claims which forms the backbone of the arguments: Having awoken Kant from dogmatic slumber1 after noticing that experience never reveals a necessary connexion2 between cause and effect, Humes problem set the agenda for the next three centuries of philosophy, as transcendental idealism gave way to phenomenology. But postKantian philosophies placed so much emphasis on the structures of subjectivity that their responses to scepticism via this transcendental turn came at a high price; the reduction of man and world to relations between one another. And this raises the following objection:

A world is meaningful only as given-to-a-living (or thinking)-being. Yet to speak of the emergence of life is to evoke the emergence of manifestation amidst a world that pre-existed it. (p.15)

In other words, explaining how the co-propriation3 between man and world came about involves referencing a world of primary qualities pre-existing the for-us, an ancestral realm (p.10) thought to be unknowable once Kants noumenal/phenomenal distinction was first drawn. This is a massive simplification; however the focus here will be on its consequences. If it is true that scientific statements regarding the origin of life and the universe only make sense as references to a genuinely objective, rather than intersubjective world, then it behoves philosophy to demonstrate how thought can access it. And yet doing so demands the seemingly impossible:

1 2

Kant, 2008, p.6 Hume, 2004, p.37 3 Heidegger, 1969, p.38

without a view from nowhere, the distinction between the owner and the subject matter of knowledge is levelled to the point that we could never recognise an absolute truth if we saw it. Beyond the transparent cage (p.7) of human-world-relations4, anything could be true even the unthinkable; this is the legacy of an epistemology in which reality could always be other than what reason and experience tell us it is. It is also the means by which Meillassoux stages the ultimate challenge to scepticism, not by proving the existence of a hidden necessity since both reason and necessity are disqualified by the sceptic but by turning the absence of any such reason into a metaphysical absolute. [W]e are going to put back into the thing itself what we mistakenly took to be an incapacity for thought (p.53). The means by which sceptics are able to disqualify every metaphysical claim is redefined as the only absolute truth there is; and for this reason, scepticism is unable to provide a coherent reason not to believe in it.5 And yet this change of outlook (ibid) comes at seemingly too high a price:

If we look through the aperture which we have opened up onto the absolute, what we see there is a rather menacing power something insensible, and capable of destroying both things and worlds, of bringing forth monstrous absurdities, yet also of never doing anything, of realizing every dream, but also every nightmare.an omnipotence equal to that of the Cartesian God.[but] with neither goodness nor wisdom...(p.64)

In what follows, Meillassoux aims to show how this hyper-chaos (ibid) can nevertheless form the basis of rational discourse. In doing so he intends to disarm the rejection of reason exemplified by religious faith, which capitalises on philosophys failure to understand reality by laying claim to a non-rational form of direct acquaintance with it. The plurality of religious deities are hence ironically supplanted by a single blind idiot god as After Finitudes translator elsewhere notes in passing6, in a reference to the maniacal Azathoth of Lovecraftian fiction. The image of Meillassoux attempting to wrestle reason from the hands of such a deity is no doubt captivating; but the

Dubbed correlationism This is a point worth labouring (58), though regrettably there is no space to do so here. 6 Brassier, 2007, p.68
5

hyperbole with which he states his project masks its underlying goal, which is to demonstrate the incoherence of extreme scepticism, rather than its metaphysical truth. This is good news, because of course the author is unable to actually prove that his thesis is valid. There might be a hidden necessity after all, just as there might be truths only accessible to religious intuition. But while his debt to rationalism is evident, Meillassoux owes just as much to an empiricism that prizes the phenomenal world above all else. Religion has a foothold so long as the world we observe is incomplete, in the sense that its existence cannot be accounted for. If it is possible to turn this lack of reason into a means by which the for-us can be explained after all, then there is no need to posit a god-of-the-gaps in the first place. A more serious objection derives from the fact that while not every correlationist philosopher places an explicit emphasis on consciousness, they nevertheless presuppose subjectivity as an essential feature of the given, since there could be no such given without it. But if the problem of how the for-us comes into existence amounts to a reiteration of Chalmers Hard Problem of consciousness, it is not clear that Meillassoux needs to rescue metaphysics in order to solve it. After Finitude is, after all, an attempt to justify scientific discourse above all else, and yet if he succeeds in doing so, then consciousness should be open to a scientific solution like any other problem. But if it is, then it would never have been a metaphysical problem anyway, and therefore not one which poses a particular difficulty for correlationism, since it was the supposed impossibility of explaining subjectivity from within the confines of the phenomenal world the only world scientists can observe - which motivated the search for a non-correlational absolute. Meillassoux would no doubt reply that referencing a world pre-existing correlation is problematic anyway, but this is only because the transcendental conditions of observation are presupposed (hence undetectable) in the appearance of phenomena themselves, something which will simply have to be untrue if he is right. In any case, it is not clear that being forced to adopt a metaphysical position in order to make sense of ancestral statements constitutes a criticism of correlationism, or its partner-in-crime, relativism. There is nothing stopping us adopting different metaphysical views for different purposes. Other language games, besides science, function

perfectly well without the need for primary/secondary quality distinctions, though they might have metaphysical shortcomings of their own. On the other hand, the attempt to finish off the phenomenal world via a nontranscendental refutation of Hume stands as a substantial project in its own right, regardless of its applications to philosophy of mind. It is time to examine whether Meillassoux does so successfully. First of all, there is an argument for why the principle of non-contradiction is necessarily true (67-71), in order to refute the most extreme scepticism that questions even elementary logic. The argument can be summarised thus: an absolutely contradictory being would be indestructible, on the basis that it cannot become anything other than what it is due to already being what it is not. But just as such a being cannot pass out of existence, neither can it have been created, as this would imply that there was a state against which its existence could be contrasted. A truly contradictory entity envelops every contradiction within itself, including its own non-existence, so by definition it must be eternal. But defining an entity into existence is a sophistry so obvious that common sense and scepticism can share in their rejection of it.7 Admittedly, the argument only works against absolute contradiction: a square circle could exist, because its properties (squareness and roundness) are specific enough to remain mutable. Since the author admits as much later in the book (77-9), and points toward a future work for its resolution, I will not pursue this problem here. A similarly unfinished (but similarly promising) argument is Meillassouxs case against laws of nature (p.82-112). Philosophers tend to assume there must be an invisible necessity behind phenomena in order to explain the manifest stability of physical laws, on the basis that our ability to predict objects behaviour would otherwise be inexplicable. That the accuracy of these predictions should be a matter of chance seems highly implausible. But this is assuming that the behaviour of reality at every moment can be calculated probabilistically. Taking his inspiration from Alain Badious discussion of Cantors transfinite8, Meillassoux notes that, thanks to the

7 Of course, it took centuries before the paradigm example of such a sophistry - Descartes Ontological Argument was refuted (by Kant). This is because Kant wanted to maintain belief in a thing-in-itself anyway (31), whereas rejecting Descartes God by default, as Meillassoux does, entails rejecting any metaphysical argument, however reasonable. 8 Badiou, 2006, p.265

impossibility of a largest infinity in set theory, there is no way to sum up all physical possibilities in order to identify the probability of one event occurring over all others. In other words, we have no right to assume the rigid stability of nature is any less likely than chaos. Still, it might be argued that disqualifying probabilistic reasoning does not get the author far enough toward justifying scientific understanding of the natural world, having denied the existence of the physical laws supposedly uncovered and described by science. As a result, a question mark hangs over what exactly it is scientific theories are predicting, now that their subject matter lacks any essential properties whatsoever, besides non-contradiction of course. Meillassoux makes a vague appeal to empiricism as our only guide to what is or is not possible (105-6), hinting that our universe (and the laws governing it) might be the only possible one in the end. But this has yet to be justified. And perhaps doing so would go beyond the philosophers purview, because it would essentially provide the theory-of-everything that physicists occasionally claim is just around the corner. In time, a better scientific understanding of the natural world and its laws (assuming they do not change in the meantime) might provide the basis for future philosophers to finish Meillassouxs project. Presently, the argument against probability amounts to an impressive party trick, defusing previous arguments for causal necessity without justifying how the alternative can nevertheless yield knowledge. The argument for a necessary being (73-6) is slightly more problematic, and is immediately followed by what is essentially an apology by the author for its quite possibly sophistical character. This is unsurprising, since it ultimately hinges on a conflation between reality and our ability to entertain thoughts about it. The argument claims that contingency, as the only necessary principle, requires objects about which to be contingent, so to speak. Similarly, existence itself is synonymous with the existence of objects, meaning the absence of objects is equal to an absence of existence itself, an absence which is unthinkable. But contingency clearly is thinkable; hence, objects must exist. The demonstration has the misfortune of being one of the most compressed arguments in the book, comprising only four pages. Meillassoux is undoubtedly right that the contingency of objects presupposes the possible existence of other (inexistent) objects which could yet be actual; it is not so clear that the opposite is also true.

After Finitude deserves recognition both for its critique of received wisdom regarding what its author rightly views as unsolved philosophical problems, and for the new strain of realism it begins to explore. It also acts as an ambassador for modern French philosophy, crossing the analytic/continental divide in ways that will hopefully become more common as time goes on.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Badiou, A (author), Feltham, O (trans.), Being and Event (Continuum 2006)

Brassier, R, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (Continuum 2007)

Chalmers, D, The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (Oxford University Press 1996)

Heidegger, M (author), Stambaugh, J (trans.), Identity and Difference (New York: Harper and Row, 1969)

Hume, D, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Dover Philosophical Classics, Dover Publications Inc, 2004)

Kant, I (author), Fieser, J (trans.), Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (Forgotten Books 2008)

Kant, I (author), Kemp Smith, N (trans.), Critique of Pure Reason (Palgrave 2nd ed. 2007)

Meillassoux, Q (author), Brassier, R (trans.), After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency (Continuum 2008)