Meillassoux on Ancestrality, Qualities and Correlationism
[The Absolute – Introduction]
One of the key theses of Meillassoux’s work focuses on a return to thinking the Absolute. Meillassoux’s goal is as simple as it is complicated, he attempts to “refute every form of correlationism” (Meillassoux, Time Without Becoming, 2008c, p. 2) In After Finitude he sets this project of rethinking the thing ‘in-itself’ against what he sees as a philosophical culture that has become dominated by ‘Correlationism’. Meillassoux traces the philosophical turn to this correlationist tendency back to Kant’s Transcendentalism. As Meillassoux says,
“Prior to the advent of transcendentalism, one of the questions that divided rival philosophers most decisively was 'Who grasps the true nature of substance? He who thinks the Idea, the individual, the atom, God? Which God?' But ever since Kant, to discover what divides rival philosophers is no longer to ask who has grasped the true nature of substantiality, but rather to ask who has grasped the more originary correlation: is it the thinker of the subject-object correlation, the noetico-noematic correlation, or the language-referent correlation?”(Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, 2008a)
Meillassoux’s use of term correlationism refers to the philosophical charge to think the relationship between things rather than the substance in-itself and he see’s this to be “the contemporary opponent of any realism” (Meillassoux, Time Without Becoming, 2008c).
Correlationism is built on the refutation of the divide between the concepts of primary and secondary qualities. These concepts of qualities create a distinction between the properties of my encountering an object and those that are maintained when the object is considered ‘in itself’. If I burn my hand on a flame I do not sense the burning to be a property of the flame ‘in itself’ but located in my finger. The same must be said of sensations – the flavour of food does not exist in the food itself prior to its ingestion. These are considered secondary qualities. Nothing sensible – whether it be an affective or perceptual quality – can exist in the way it is given to me in the thing by itself when it is not related to me or to any other living creature. When one thinks about this thing ‘in itself’ i.e. independently of its relation to me it seems that none of these qualities can subsist.“ (Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, 2008a, p. 1)
The correlationist argument does not dispute the idea that things may posses qualities that bring about sensation. If there were nothing giving rise to the sensation of the colour red, then there would be no perception of a red thing.
“One cannot maintain that the sensible is injected by me into things like some sort of perpetual and arbitrary hallucination…The sensible is neither simply ‘in me’ in the manner of a dream, nor simply ‘in the thing’ in the manner of an intrinsic property: it is the very relation between the thing and I” (Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, 2008a)
The correlationist’s issue is with the distinction itself and here Kant’s Transcendentalism breaks with the preceding schools of thought. The issue for Kantian thought is with the assumption that the ‘subjectivation’ of sensible properties could be restricted to the object’s sensible properties, rather than extended to all conceivable properties of an object.
Meillassoux looks to return to this point in the development of modern philosophy and the Correlationist commitment, in order to readdress issues of the absolute, he looks to do so with a re-evaluation and defence of primary qualities through his concept of ‘Ancestrality’. The thesis he is proposing is as follows:
“On the one hand, we acknowledge that the sensible only exists as a subjects relation to the world; but on the other hand we maintain that the mathematizable properties of the object are exempt from the constraint of such a relation, and that they are effectively in the object in the way in which I conceive them, whether I am in relation with this object or not.” (Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, 2008a, p. 3)
He does this by presenting correlationism with a problem of ‘ancestrality’. Ancestrality, as he defines it, is the issue rising from statements made by certain branches of natural science with regard to a world prior to consciousness. Meillassoux presents us with techniques used in determining the age of materials. These measurements were once considered relative but with the perfection of the techniques they are now considered to be complete. The substances, radioactive isotopes in dating techniques, that give rise to the statements are termed arche-fossils. The techniques of measuring arche-fossils are capable of supplying the scientist with statements about a thing or event prior to the existence of terrestrial life and it is this issue upon which Meillassoux bases his concept of Ancestrality. Meillassoux asks:
“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?” (Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, 2008a, p. 21)
An important aspect of this statement is that Meillassoux asks how are we to think it’s meaning rather than how are we to think the truth. This is an important distinction which allows him to both maintain correlationism as a discreet possibility in his later arguments while continuing his attempt to think outside of the relation.
The Correlationist has no initial problem with such a statement only the charge to add an appendage of ‘for-humans’ to the scientists statement in order that both the realist (science) and the antirealist (philosophy) statements may co-exist without refuting each other; proposing that there are at least two regimes of meaning which are able to address these statements. Meillassoux however proposes that with a literal interpretation of these ancestral statements, the scientific statement must be its ultimate meaning and that the “philosopher’s is irrelevant when it comes to analyzing the signification of the statement.” (Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, 2008a, p. 14)
He states that for both the scientific statement to be true as well as the philosophers statement then the correlationist would have to maintain a “tissue of absurdities”. Most importantly to his discussion that the fossil-matter is “the givenness in the present of a being that is anterior to givenness; that is to say, that an arche-fossil manifests an entity’s anteriority vis-à-vis manifestation,”(Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, 2008a) How is it possible for the object to give givenness anterior to the existence of givenness?
When faced with this proposition the Correlationist proposes the arche-fossil as a thing that creates knowledge from the standpoint of the present and is then read back into the past, but as Meillassoux points out “This means that we have to carry out a retrojection of the past on the basis of the present” (Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, 2008a, p. 16).
This issue here is givenness. Givenness is the condition for the universalizing potentiality of any given statement. Meillassoux tells us that since Kant “objectivity is no longer defined with reference to the object in itself (in terms of the statement’s adequation or resemblance to what it designates), but rather with reference to the possible universality of an objective statement.”(Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, 2008a, p. 15) This intersubjectivity of the scientific ancestral statement is what guarantees its objectivity to the correlationist.
However what is given to us is not something that is anterior to givenness but merely something that is given in the present but gives itself as anterior to givenness. In order to give meaning to the scientific statement about the arche-fossil one has to follow the chronological succession from past to present, rather than following a logical succession from present to past. The correlationist has still failed to give any meaning to this chronological succession.
Meillassoux asks one more question of the correlationist to prove that this interpretation of ancestrality is insupportable. “ What is it that happened 4.56 billion years ago? Did the accretion of the earth happen, yes or no?” (Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, 2008a, p. 16) The correlationist will answer, yes sciences proves it is intersubjectively verifiable, but in another sense, no, the referent of the statement cannot have existed as it is described as non-correlated with a consciousness.
“the ancestral statement is a true statement in that it is objective, but one whose referent cannot possibly have actually existed in the way this truth describes it. It is a true statement, but it has no conceivable object. Or to put it another way it is a non-sense.” (Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, 2008a)
The problem of Ancestrality concludes with this - If we are able to consider the scientific ancestral statement to have any meaning, as the correlationist will propose we can, we must view the referent of its statement to be meaningful or else it can only be considered as ‘non-sense’.
