The Kantian Catastrophe Conversations on Finitude and the Limits of Philosophy

15: Transcendental Realism A Conversation with Ray Brassier In this conversation, Ray Brassier considers various ways in which the scope and remit of metaphysics have been transformed in the wake of Kant’s critique, especially in the work of Hegel and the twentieth-century philosopher Wilfrid Sellars. Brassier goes on to explore the relation between speculative philosophy and naturalism that lies at the heart of his ‘Transcendental Realism’, a framework that is both hugely indebted to Kant, and yet at the same time considers the boundary between the for-us and the in-itself to be porous, not impenetrable. Ray Brassier is professor of philosophy at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon, specialising in epistemology and metaphysics. He is the author of Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction and an English translator of both Alain Badiou and Quentin Meillassoux. He is working on a follow-up to Nihil Unbound currently entitled That Which Is Not. --We find ourselves ten years on from the conference at Goldsmith’s at which the Speculative Realism movement was founded. I would be interested to hear your thoughts on your contribution to this turn towards realism in continental philosophy which has expanded and diversified so much over the past decade. The conference sparked a lot of interest among people fed up by the then current state of Continental philosophy, but I don’t think it founded a ‘movement’. My understanding of the philosophical problems underlying the issue of realism has certainly advanced considerably since then. I think my main contribution has been to insist that metaphysics without epistemology is blind. This is not to disavow metaphysics but just to insist that it can’t be seriously undertaken without paying attention to epistemology. Many realists insist that metaphysical issues are independent of and irreducible to epistemological issues and conclude that metaphysics cannot be epistemologically corralled. I agree. But that metaphysics is irreducible to epistemology does not entail that it can be undertaken with complete disregard for epistemology. Given the often critical attention paid to Kant by those within the Speculative Realism movement (summed up in Meillassoux’s evocative

phrase ‘the Kantian catastrophe’), I was hoping you could say a few things about 1) whether Kant’s basic outlook (the Copernican revolution, his transcendental framework etc.) is still worth maintaining, and 2) if he is wrong, then how is he wrong? The problem is whether it is possible to go beyond Kant without regressing to pre-Kantian rationalist dogmatism or empiricist scepticism. I am more sympathetic to Kant than other ‘speculative realists’ and my worry has always been that simply rejecting Kant represents a step back rather than a step forward. So I don’t think Kant’s ‘Copernican revolution’ was a catastrophe, at least not in the pejorative sense. It was certainly a radical transformation, perhaps the most momentous in philosophy since Aristotle. For philosophical modernity, there is a before and after Kant, just as there is a before and after Aristotle for ancient philosophy. So in answer to 1): Yes, I think Kant’s basic achievement, which is the discovery of the transcendental, is not only worth maintaining but must be upheld on pain of fundamental philosophical regression. The real issue for me is whether or not Kant’s immediate philosophical heirs, principally Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, took full measure of his break with dogmatic metaphysics, whether rationalist or empiricist. To the extent that they did, they moved philosophy forward into hitherto unknown territory (a terra incognita for metaphysics) and this is the territory that philosophy must continue to explore if it is to be contemporary, which is to say, post-Kantian. But to the extent that they did not, their own explorations were hindered by metaphysical prejudices that they did not manage to overcome completely. The task for contemporary philosophy is to push forward into this terra incognita by identifying and jettisoning as many of these metaphysical prejudices as is possible. In answer to 2), Kant’s ‘error’, or better his limitation, is probably his reification of the transcendental framework: the assumption that epistemological categories and forms of intuition can be fixed once and for all. Hegel saw this limitation and tried to overcome it, without reneging on Kant’s transcendental turn. This is why he is an increasingly important figure for me. In many ways, a critique of correlationism was the sole factor unifying the participants at the 2007 conference. I was hoping you could say something about where you currently stand on the correlationism question. Do you agree with Steven Shaviro that when we ‘step outside of the correlationist circle, we are faced with a choice between panpsychism on the one hand, or eliminativism on the other’? I think it’s necessary to distinguish between a good and a bad sense of correlationism. Kant’s correlationism is an indispensable philosophical advance.

To reject it out of hand is to take a step back, not forward. Basically, Kant shows that neither thinking nor sensing suffices for knowing: knowing combines thinking and sensing. Most importantly, you can’t know objects without using concepts. But this is not to say that reality itself is conceptual; precisely the opposite. Kant’s claim is that cognitive experience has a conceptual structure, but reality in itself does not. The question then is whether the conceptual conditions for knowledge, together with the boundary between the knowable and the unknowable, are fixed and immutable (as Kant seems to have thought), or historically mutable. The philosopher who accepts Kant’s critique of cognitive immediacy, whether rationalist or empiricist, while rejecting his strictures on knowing the thing in itself, is Hegel, and I now think Hegel is Kant’s most profound critic and heir. Hegel defends the view that cognitive experience has a necessary conceptual structure, but this structure includes the discrepancy between how the world appears to us and how it is in itself. Cognitive progress is the correction of our concept of the object, what it is for us, by incorporation of the truth about what the object is in itself into what it is for us, which also means, into our experience of it. The boundary between the for-us and the in-itself is porous, not impenetrable. We can know the thing in itself; but not immediately: knowing it is a long and arduous process involving many unexpected reversals, inversions, and even regressions. Hegel is not a pre-Kantian metaphysician, a theologian of Absolute Spirit, as he is so often portrayed. What he calls the ‘becoming subject of substance’ involves a radical de-substantialization of both mind and matter. I don’t think the full extent of this de-substantialization has been properly appreciated. It means Hegel makes it possible to think both mind and matter without substance. The consequences are far reaching and I hope to explore some of them in future work. I don’t agree that the only alternatives to correlationism are either panpsychism or eliminativism. Both options represent a regression to pre-Kantian metaphysical dogmatism: either that the world is nothing but mind or that it is nothing but matter. Neither mind nor matter are properly understood in this optic. Despite rejecting the label ‘Speculative Realism’ to describe your own philosophy, do you remain a speculative philosopher? And if so, what role does speculation play in your work? I avow speculation only in the Hegelian sense. I think it means to think dialectically, which is fundamental to philosophy. A speculative proposition is one in which the subject and the predicate can change place, revealing the

interdependence between things and the determinations we attribute to them. I don’t endorse speculation in its non-Hegelian sense, which just means to make claims about the nature of reality without regard for empirical science. I’ve been working through a contemporary extension of the Kantian framework, Wilfrid Sellars’s, and my understanding of its limitations are orienting me towards Hegel, but a Hegel who is neither a classical metaphysician nor a postmodern pragmatist. Re-engaging with Hegel has given me a clearer sense of the limits of empiricist, rationalist, and transcendental stances in philosophy, and of the precise meaning of the ‘speculative’ alternative, together with its virtues and vices. You are currently working on a theoretical framework you call ‘Transcendental Realism’. I was hoping you could say a few things about what this entails, as well as the ways in which you are using the terms ‘transcendental’ and ‘realism’? My use of these terms is primarily indebted to Wilfrid Sellars, whose work I have been studying for the past seven years. In this context, ‘transcendental’ is opposed to metaphysical, where ‘metaphysical realism’ is any realism that equates being with substance. Thus, ‘transcendental realism’ is (at least partly) a realism about actualities that are not substantial. For Sellars, to be is to be an actuality that makes a difference, but this does not mean being present to consciousness or making a difference in experience. ‘Transcendental realism’ in this sense is a corollary of Sellars’s rejection of the metaphysical variant of ‘the myth of the given’, which is simply the assumption that there are self-presenting actualities. What is real or actual does not simply impress itself upon the mind, nor is it transparently manifest in experience. To be a transcendental realist in this Sellarsian sense is to claim that we can know a reality that exists independently of what manifests itself in experience, while insisting that cognitive access to this reality is conceptually (or epistemically) mediated; it is not direct or immediate. Do you regard Transcendental Realism as a critical project (in the manner of Kant’s critique of metaphysics) or as a constructive project (in the manner of metaphysics itself)? It’s both, at least for Sellars. Epistemological critique and metaphysical construction go hand in hand for him, which is why he such a fascinating figure. Epistemic analysis of the cognitive function of categories is supplemented by the construction of new metaphysical categories to flesh out our understanding of reality (this is the role of the category of ‘pure process’ in his system). This is part of what I hope to explain in the book I am trying to write about him:

Reasons, Patterns, and Processes: Sellars’s Transcendental Naturalism. Transcendental Realism appears to be Kantian insofar as it acknowledges the in itself; however, it appears to radicalise Kant insofar as it considers the in itself to be knowable (via science). Is this a fair picture? Yes. All that remains is for transcendental realism to be rendered dynamic such that the process through which the in-itself is integrated into the for-us becomes knowable. This is precisely what Hegel does. But he does so by challenging the assumption that empirical science alone accesses the in-itself. So the real issue is the question of the relation between speculative philosophy and naturalism. Adrian Johnston describes his Transcendental Materialism as, on the face of it, “an oxymoronic absurdity”. In what way is a transcendental philosophy compatible with the kind of thoroughgoing naturalism that you endorse? Sellars defends a transcendental naturalism: the mind’s knowledge of nature is conditioned by the nature of which it is a part. The a priori is not something other than nature; it is another, unfamiliar nature. But the mind is not preequipped with the concepts it needs to recognize this other nature that conditions its knowledge of empirical nature; it must acquire them through a process of construction. This is why transcendental naturalism cannot rest content with the method of reflection: the transcendental is not transparent to consciousness. It has to be part excavated, part constructed. This is problem of the relation between speculation and naturalism, which is currently preoccupying me. It seems strange to have to defend the idea of reason or rationality against other philosophers, but you have suggested that recent Continental philosophy has denigrated and reduced reason to such an extent that your attempt to rehabilitate it appears a ‘contrarian’ move. Please can you say something about this misology in Continental circles and your own attempts to rehabilitate the rational? I don’t think it’s controversial to suggest that most Continental philosophers take a dim view of reason, and of scientific reason in particular. Reason is mere calculation or logocentrism or instrumental rationality or identity thinking or representation etc. There are exceptions of course, but I think it’s true to say that Continental philosophers overall are much more interested in aesthetics, ethics, and politics than in logic or epistemology. I’m not saying that the critique of scientific rationality is uninteresting or devoid of merit. But it has been vulgarised and reduced to platitude, to such an extent that invocations of ‘rationality’ have become automatically suspect in Continental circles. I certainly don’t think science has an exclusive prerogative on knowledge and truth: I fully

espouse normative truths, in politics, ethics, and even aesthetics. That’s because I follow Plato, Kant, Hegel, and Sellars in upholding the integrity of the normative. Reason is essentially normative. But I think the suspicion of rationality as the source of justification, when accompanied by a Nietzschean reduction of truth to power and of justice to domination, leaves Continental philosophers ill-equipped to rebut appeals to supra-rational sources of authority or legitimacy, whether political, religious, or cultural. One of the most quotable lines from an interview you gave is “I am a nihilist because I still believe in truth.” The rehabilitation of the concept of nihilism on rationalist and scientific grounds was a central focus of Nihil Unbound, but does nihilism still play a role in your current work? The overarching argument of Nihil Unbound was dialectical insofar as it sought to identify the point at which the exhaustion of sense turned into a gain in intelligibility. However, I disavowed my book’s implicit dialectical structure because I was still in thrall to a dogmatic anti-Hegelianism that I had unthinkingly absorbed as a result of my prolonged exposure to French poststructuralism. But my increasing dissatisfaction with the anti-rationalism of the latter, together with my interest in upholding the privileges of conceptual rationality, led me to reappraise my attitude towards Hegel. I realized it was no longer possible to dismiss him as a neo-Aristotelian theologian of Absolute Spirit. I began to understand how Hegel’s emphasis on the necessity of thought’s ‘tarrying with the negative’ might be indispensable for my own attempt to formulate a non-Nietzschean and rationally compelling overcoming of nihilism. My prolonged engagement with Sellars has been a necessary detour in order to obtain a clearer understanding of what it might mean to give an account of concepts, thinking, meaning, and reasoning within a broadly naturalistic framework. Concepts are rules governing perception, inference, and action. To think is to connect and disconnect concepts according to proprieties of inference. Meanings are rule-governed functions supervening on the pattern-conforming behaviour of language-using animals. Lastly, reasoning is rule-governed conceptual competence. Having clarified these basic terms, I want to extend the project initiated in my first book in a follow-up currently entitled That Which Is Not. It takes as its starting point Nietzsche’s distillation of the history of nihilism in ‘How the “True World” Finally Became a Fable’. Nietzsche’s provocative suggestion is that the apex of nihilism is also its cancellation, since the abandonment of belief in an intelligible reality beyond sensible appearances abolishes the very concept of appearance. Thus nihilism does not consist in believing that only appearances

are real, it consists in not believing that reality appears. This is an un-belief in reality which cannot recognize what it denies. It leads to an aestheticization of metaphysics which relinquishes the question of truth. I want to argue that the rational overcoming of nihilism (and the repudiation of metaphysical aestheticism) requires rehabilitating the distinction between appearance and reality, or the sensible and the intelligible, but precisely in order to account for the reality of appearances, or the intelligibility of the sensible. The challenge is to understand how every appearance has a kind of reality, but only insofar as it is split from within by what it does not reveal. ‘That which is not’ is the insubstantiality proper to the intelligible form of sensible becoming. This is the rationalist thread connecting Plato and Hegel to Sellars and Badiou. The book will then try to link this negativity through which intelligible form is entwined with sensible becoming to the question of time. Nietzsche already understood that the problem of nihilism is the problem of what to do with time: Why keep investing in the future when there is no longer any prospect of reconciliation or redemption that would recompense this investment? Nietzsche’s solution – his attempted overcoming of nihilism – consists in affirming the senselessness of becoming as such – all becoming, without reservation or discrimination. The affirmation of eternal recurrence is amor fati: the love of fate. To affirm fate is to let time do whatever it will with us, but in such a way that our will might coincide with time’s. (This option has been much in vogue in contemporary Continental metaphysics.) But to reject fate requires knowing how to transform time. This transformation requires fusing thinking and sensing in an act of negation that makes becoming intelligible. Thus the book’s principal contention (contra Nietzsche) is that nihilism is not the negation of truth but the truth of negation, and the truth of negation is transformative. But it is also necessarily catastrophic because it overturns the linear coordination of origin and end, past and future. Rather than disavowing the catastrophic nature of truth, reason affirms truth’s catastrophic overturning of linear time. Thus the book proposes to resolve the problem of nihilism truthfully by insisting that it matters knowing whether or not anything matters. Knowing that nothing matters matters because it makes a difference to thinking as such. This is the truth of nihilism. The ultimate goal of this project is to connect the catastrophic temporality of truth to Prometheanism, understood (in Alberto Toscano’s words) as the articulation of action and knowledge in the perspective of totality. Prometheanism is the attempt to eradicate the discrepancy between what is humanly made and what is nonhumanly given – not by rendering the world

amenable to human whim or by merely satisfying our pathological needs, but by remaking ourselves and our world in conformity with the demands of reason. In metaphysical terms, this requires reinscribing the transcendence of time into the immanence of space. To grasp the form of formlessness (i.e. becoming) is to transform the structure of fate understood as the way in which things happen to us. The gain in intelligibility is practically transformative once one realizes, with Sellars, that thinking is not a preliminary to doing, but a kind of doing whose potencies we have yet to understand. The point at which thinking and doing coincide is the point at which idealism and materialism fuse. We tend to see Kant as a curtailer of metaphysical ambitions, and yet there is a clearly discernible hunger for a renewal of metaphysics in your work. What, if any, do you feel are the conditions under which a rehabilitation of traditional metaphysics is possible, and would this involve a break with Kant or a continuation of the Kantian project? In short, what kind of future does Kant have within the framework of Transcendental Realism? I take Kant to have shown that traditional metaphysics – in the lineage that runs roughly from Aristotle to Leibniz – cannot be continued. What is required is neither a renewal nor a rehabilitation of classical metaphysics but a transformation of the scope and remit of metaphysics in the wake of Kant’s critique. This is what Hegel, Sellars, Adorno, and Badiou, are all engaged in, albeit in very different ways, and this is why they are decisive interlocutors for me. Sellars’s ‘transcendental realism’ represents one way of engaging in this transformation of metaphysics, but it is not the only way, nor the most radical. The project sketched above is my attempt to contribute to such a transformation but it does so by drawing on all the thinkers mentioned above, as well as others. But to repeat: Kant’s destitution of traditional metaphysics is the ineluctable condition for philosophizing, not an option that one can take or leave. As a final question, what, if any, do you feel are the limits to what can be placed and performed under the category of philosophy? Philosophy as I understand it is simply the self-consciousness of theory. Philosophical thinking requires an extreme attentiveness to concepts, together with an acute conscientiousness about the process of concept formation. Philosophy is neither entirely beholden to empirical knowledge nor wholly independent of it. It is both reflexive and constructive. But it must try to integrate our multifaceted understanding of the world – social, historical, scientific, aesthetic, etc. – into something like a conceptual totality, even if only to expose the gaps and inconsistencies in our understanding. Beyond that, it is difficult to stipulate what can and cannot count as philosophy. Perhaps the

important distinction is not so much between what counts as philosophy and what does not, but between good and bad philosophy, since there will always be more of the latter than the former.