[contingency – an introduction]

Meillassoux’s task after elaborating a sort of “scientific materialism” based on his concept of ancestrality is to find another grounding for the absolute in the “principle of factiality”. He moves on from this materialist critique of correlationism to focus on establishing another rebuff to the correlationist refusal of the absolute.

Meillassoux calls factiality “the absence of reason for any reality; in other words, the impossibility of providing an ultimate ground for the existence of any being.” (Meillassoux, Time Without Becoming, 2008c, p. 8) Meillassoux claims factiality to be the “very principle that allows correlationism to disqualify absolutizing thought”, as absolute.(Meillassoux, The Immanence of the World Beyond, 2008b, p. 52)

He does this by developing the subjectivists’ charge of the correlationist circle as absolute in-itself (nothing can be thought external to the relationship to the world exactly because it is thought). The subjectivists propose an idealist absolute which consist in the absolutisation of the correlation itself. The subjectivist claims, “these relations… are determinations not only of humans or of the living, but of Being itself.” (Meillassoux, Time Without Becoming, 2008c, p. 7) The argument the correlationist will produce to defend itself is that of factiality, which Meillassoux claims is the “weak-spot in the circle-fortress.” (Meillassoux, Time Without Becoming, 2008c, p. 7)

In maintaining factiality, that which we can conceive as the contingency of the correlation, i.e. its possible disappearance (the destruction of mankind), Meillassoux claims that “the correlationist must admit that we can positively think of a possibility which is essentially independent of the correlation, since this is precisely the possibility of the non-being of the correlation.” (Meillassoux, Time Without Becoming, 2008c, pp. 8-9) He then expands on this using the analogy of death: “to think of myself as a mortal, I must admit that death doesn’t depend on my own thinking about death. Otherwise, I would be able to disappear only on one condition: that I remain alive to think of my disappearance, and turn this event into a correlate of my access to it.”

Meillassoux argues that it is not the correlation that is absolute but the factiality of the correlation that constitutes the absolute. Facticity “will be revealed to be a knowledge of the absolute because we are going to put back into the thought itself what we mistakenly took to be an incapacity in thought.”(Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, 2008a) In other words the:

“absence of reason inherent in everything as a limit that thought encounters in its search for the ultimate reason, we must understand that this absence of reason is, and can only be the ultimate property of the entity. We must convert facticity into the real property whereby everything and every world is without reason, and is thereby capable of actually becoming otherwise without reason. We must grasp how the ultimate absence of reason, which we will refer to as 'unreason', is an absolute ontological property, and not the mark of the finitude of our knowledge.” (Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, 2008a, p. 54)

It is through this that Meillassoux claims to have revealed the condition for thinking the great outdoors of the correlation. Meillassoux has discovered a “performative contradiction” in the correlationist’s claim, in order words the epistemic position of the correlation can’t be claimed without having its conclusions undermine the assumptions they require for their articulation. The Principle of factuality reveals the irredeemable ontological truth hidden in modern philosophy “to be is not to be a correlate, but to be a fact: to be is to be factual – and this is not a fact” (Meillassoux, Time Without Becoming, 2008c, p. 10)

Meillassoux now has the issue of dealing with factiality as absolute and not as limit. His answer is to propose it as time - “very special time.” (Meillassoux, 2008c, p. 10) This very special time is called “hyper-chaos”. This time is not a physical time and not an ordinary chaos. Chaos usually denotes randomness and disorder, hyper-chaos or surchaoses “contingency is so radical that even becoming, disorder, or randomness can be destroyed by it, and replaced by order, determinism, and fixity.” (Meillassoux, 2008c, p. 11)

Hyperchaos simply denotes that everything either could or could not change without reason; it could remain in perpetual flux or could remain in the same state for an indefinite duration. It is totally conceivable that in Hyperchaos a world could end up completely made up of fixed objects, without any becoming whatsoever.
Hyperchaos denotes a time whereby everything could be abolished just as readily as everything could persist in an eternal becoming. From the vantage of hyperchaos, everything is contingent – even disorder and becoming themselves.
Here the charge to the philosopher is to think the ‘may-being’ of this hyperchaos rather than the being, the correlation or the becoming being of past schools of thought.

Now we are ready to start to re-approach the concepts of the laws of nature. We have stated that all laws are contingent, because all laws are just facts, you can’t prove their necessity so there is no reason why they endure as they do. They do not govern time but are themselves governed by a “mad time” and the principle of sufficient reason has been completely abandoned. (Meillassoux, 2008c, p. 11)
When faced with the question why is it that we don’t experience these laws changing at every instant, that on the contrary they remain remarkably stable. Meillassoux’s response is that one cannot propose probabilistic logic to laws themselves, but only to the physical objects already subject to those laws.

**Hume's Problem