Anyone familiar with the post-Wittgensteinian discussion of objectivity in anglophone philosophy (from Quine, Kuhn, and Nagel to Davidson, McDowell, Brandom, and Burge) will likely regard After Finitude (2006) as taking up a problem that had long since been set aside. That tradition largely abandoned the representational dualism that opposes mind to world, whereas Meillassoux accepts it as his point of departure and seeks to break through it with his “speculative materialism.” The same will be true, I suspect, of anyone who thinks that Heidegger was on to something.
Meillassoux aims to overcome what he calls correlationism: the Kantian conviction that we can never know reality apart from its relation to thought. He argues that philosophy since Kant has been imprisoned within this correlation, and that the confinement is untenable. Consider scientific statements about events preceding life and consciousness, such as the formation of the earth billions of years ago. If correlationism were right, such statements would be meaningless because they concern a time when no correlation obtained. Yet they are meaningful and true. Hence, Meillassoux concludes, we must be able to conceive of a reality wholly independent of thought.
To achieve this goal, Meillassoux transforms what Kant called the “contingency of the empirical” into the necessity of contingency: the one thing that cannot be otherwise is that everything could be otherwise. It is necessarily the case, that is, that no law of nature is necessary. This, he believes, is a statement about the way things are independently of human cognition.
But one may argue that Meillassoux’s problem arises from a conceptual confusion. Donald Davidson, for instance, forcefully denies that we can make sense of a distinction between our “conceptual scheme” and an uninterpreted “content” or reality in itself. To compare scheme and world we must already represent the world within some scheme; thus the very idea of an external comparison is unintelligible. Yet Meillassoux presupposes precisely this distinction: either we remain inside the correlation (the “scheme”) or break through to the “absolute” (the “content”). For Davidson, that is a pseudo-dilemma. The truths of statements about the pre-human world pose no metaphysical mystery; such statements are answerable to the world through ordinary causal and linguistic constraints.
John McDowell reaches a similar verdict from another direction. McDowell criticizes the oscillation between coherentism (thought trapped within itself) and empiricism (a non-conceptual “Given”). For him, perceptual experience is already world-presenting because our conceptual capacities are shaped within the space of reasons, our “second nature.” We are not sealed off from reality by our minds; our minds just are the way reality becomes rationally available to us. Meillassoux’s conviction that objectivity requires a leap beyond the conditions of appearance therefore mistakes the very nature of experience. The world of pre-human events is not beyond our reach; rather, it is precisely what our conceptual capacities enable us to think.
Tyler Burge’s “externalism” offers a more naturalistic approach: our perceptual and cognitive capacities function properly only in causal interactions with stable surroundings. Objectivity is secured not by speculative transcendence but by the reliable operation of these capacities in a cooperative environment. Meillassoux conflates epistemic dependence with mind-dependence: from the fact that knowledge relies on our cognitive capacities, he mistakenly infers that only correlates are knowable. Yet dependence on cognitive capacities is precisely what makes knowledge of a mind-independent world possible. Furthermore, Meillassoux’s “necessity of contingency” undermines the very stability such capacities presuppose. If even logical or causal structure could collapse at any moment, then no system of representation could function reliably. His metaphysics thus defeats its own epistemic purpose.
Robert Brandom’s “inferentialism” formulates the same point in pragmatist terms. The content of a claim is its place in a network of commitments and entitlements; objectivity arises from the social practice of giving and asking for reasons. To seek a form of objectivity outside those practices is merely to misconstrue what objectivity is. The authority of our ways of knowing is normative and semantic, not dogmatic and metaphysical.
From a Heideggerian perspective, Meillassoux’s attempt to escape correlationism simply repeats the metaphysics of presence that produced correlationism in the first place. Human sense-making (Dasein) presupposes being-in-the-world, and our practical engagement with it precedes and grounds any theoretical attitude. To think we are cut off from access to the real world is already to have forgotten that reality is disclosed through existence, not grasped from outside it.
It would seem, then, that speculative realism remains bound to a picture of mind and world that much twentieth- and twenty-first century philosophy has long regarded as misconceived and unnecessary. Davidson would call the picture incoherent; McDowell would say it misconstrues experience; Burge would say it confuses cognitive dependence with subjectivism; Brandom would say it fails to understand how claims about reality acquire their content and authority; and Heidegger would say it neglects being-in-the-world.
