What is the purpose of the world? cultural currents and it's become a kind of runaway success. In 2006 I began to publish Collapse, this journal, and the real idea behind this, the Collapse journal, was to
become an anti-academic journal because the problem with academic journals and especially in philosophy is they tend to specialise in a very tiny area and you tend to get people who stick to their region of philosophy and endlessly pour over and analyse a very small area of knowledge. So you have all these many journals for many different subject areas and they never really overlap and philosophy never really goes outside itself. And there's also a kind of trial that you have to go through in order to get published in these journals. And I knew several people who I thought, well, in this kind of climate, they're basically unpublishable, and there should be somewhere where work in progress,
research in progress, that is philosophical work that is proposing new ideas but that isn't completed yet, but that's still exploring, can be published. so in effect to have philosophical thought published and disseminated as it's happening. And also to try to connect philosophy to other things, to try to bring together philosophers, scientists from different disciplines, contemporary artists, and to try and break this autism of philosophy by connecting with other disciplines in an interesting way. and speculative realism as I hope will become clear has a particular role in this it kind of connects philosophy to its outside
in a very interesting way in 2007 a friend of mine Ray Brassier began to talk about the work of this young French philosopher Quentin Mayersu and we translated one of his papers and in 2007 the second volume of Collapse was published, which we entitled Speculative Realism, according to this provisional term suggested by Ray for what he saw as a kind of renewal in philosophy, a new way of doing philosophy, a new kind of discussion in philosophy, which broke through some obstacles which were felt, I think, very strongly at the end of the 20th century in philosophy.
So I'm going to try to describe what's happened since this term first appeared. It was followed by this workshop in 2007 with four philosophers, Ray, Ian Hamilton Grant, Graham Harmon and Quentin. and as Martin said the term was really a kind of very provisional term to cover these four philosophers who have something in common but who each have their own separate projects so what's speculative speculative is a theoretical position that goes beyond what can be immediately
given that somehow stitches together what we know from experience in a coherent way that can't necessarily be verified empirically. So to speculate is always to go beyond. Now what can speculation have to do with realism? Well, it's precisely against a received notion of what realism is. I mean, in a certain sense, realism is all around us. Our culture is really obsessed with realism. We want to get to the real. In particular, if you think of reality TV, the idea that we're being delivered the reality of life by watching TV shows about people going about their everyday life. It's a very local and limited notion of what realism
is. So speculative realism is about a real that is outside the purview of our everyday received notion of what reality is. But it seems kind of paradoxical. Surely our knowledge is our knowledge and we can't extend it beyond. But this is in fact what philosophy had always claim to do, and indeed what science has claimed to do. What sense does it make to say that our knowledge can only be applicable to us? Realism in philosophy has been associated with a kind of naivety, so the term realist has really become a denigrated term in philosophy. To be a realist is just to kind of accept things as they are, to accept that objects
can't be broken down and analyzed any more than they already are. So philosophical thought has assumed a kind of superiority over realism, a superiority over this banal idea of what realism might be. So this bringing together of speculation and realism is the kind of common element between these thinkers who have very different perspectives otherwise. And speculative realism suggests that if there is a realism, it's a weird realism. It describes a reality that's not familiar and that doesn't necessarily obey our default way of understanding the world. And it suggests that there's a reality that's independent of thought, that thought doesn't immediately grasp.
So then the key question becomes, how can we think this real, how can we think this reality? that doesn't depend on our thinking for its existence. And each of the thinkers involved in speculative realism has developed a different strategy for overcoming the obstacles to this access to the real. In effect, you can think of them as escape routes, escape routes out of the limited, finite sphere of human knowledge. but these obstacles had really formed the mainstay of philosophy in the 20th century and they were also presented at the end of the 20th century in the form of a kind of institutional exhaustion and the idea that we were at the end of philosophy that in effect philosophy had failed at its task to go beyond
that philosophy had to cede to other forms of knowledge so it had to either become a critique or some kind of management of the other fields of knowledge and it had no real task of its own. It had failed in its task. So speculative realism, in fact, is an attempt at a renewal of philosophy per se. So what's at stake in this question of realism? The relation between thought and being. There is being, things are, but what's the relation of thought to being? And the key figure here is the 18th century philosopher Kant. Immanuel Kant. For Kant, the objectivity of being is a function of synthesis in thought.
So it's thought that forms objects, and objects can't validly be said to exist in and of themselves. And this extended into a great deal of 20th century thought. It simply became a matter in different cases where we locate the principles of synthesis. So where is it that whatever we receive is synthesized into objects? Is it in language? Is it in a social consensus? Is it historically determined? Etc. So then reality would become a question of psychology, the social, the linguistic. Reality would become a construction. We'd inquire into how humans construct reality rather than assuming that we can ask questions of reality itself.
so how did philosophy end up being bequeathed this problem which we could call the problem of access the problem of how we access something outside of our own constructions of reality philosophical rationalism for philosophical rationalism in the 16th, 17th century thought does have access to the being of things a certain discipline of thought allows us to know something about being to say something in general about beings, about everything rationalist metaphysics is an attempt to create general principles
or to discover general principles that govern how everything is and which don't belong to our minds but which belong to reality It asks the question, what can we know of beings? What can we say that's true of all beings? How can we identify laws that hold for all beings, not only beings that we encounter, but any being that we might encounter? So it's the effort to identify the laws of reality. But what Kant did was to say, we only have access to phenomena, we only have access to the appearing of being, not to being itself. and reality might appear differently to other beings we don't know we only have our own way of accessing and constructing reality of constructing objects if we had direct access
to being then we would actually meld with whatever we are thinking so you actually need this constriction this barrier between you and everything else in order for you to be able to construct an object, because otherwise you'd just become one with the object. And in fact, then you'd be God. And this is what Kant calls intellectual intuition. And he says, well, there may be other beings who have this God-like access to the things themselves, but we can know for sure that we certainly don't. We're finite. And Kantianism is a philosophy of finitude. That's important. It seeks to identify the limits of our thought. Reality as we know it is a synthesis or a construction. Our consciousness passively takes something
up from outside itself and synthesizes it in a certain way. So we can't say anything about what it was before we conditioned it, before we synthesized it. And this notion of conditioning is important. And according to Kant, our representations of objects, the phenomena that we perceive that appear to us are shaped by what he calls the forms of intuition, time and space. We make things temporal and spatial. We array the data that we passively receive into a certain form that's characteristic of our knowledge, that allows us to construct and to know objects. So something does impinge on our consciousness, but all that we can say of it
for certain is that we will form it into a certain type of object, because that's the only form of knowledge we have. So in place of metaphysics, you have a theory of conditioning. Metaphysics, as conceived by rationalism, becomes impossible. Metaphysics becomes impossible because we no longer have any guarantee that the object, as phenomena, tells us anything about the object in itself. So whereas the rationalist metaphysicians had a guarantee that thought was correlated to being because they had God. They had God to guarantee that when we think about being,
if we think about it in the right way, and this is the significance of Descartes' method, the fact that what's important for Descartes is a method of thinking, The rationalists trust that there's some guarantee that our thought can access being. In Kant, instead of metaphysics, we have critique. We have a critique of the pretensions of knowledge. The idea is to put knowledge in its place to identify its limits, to tell it what it can and can't do, and therefore to cut off unwarranted speculation. in fact Kant is a thoroughly anti-speculative philosopher in a certain sense so things such as God and freedom
and the nature of ourselves are not something that knowledge has an absolute warrant to speak about we can't integrate those things into a universal metaphysical science they're just ideas that we form on the basis of the only knowledge we have the knowledge of phenomena and we project them from what we know but there's no validity to these things and we have to accept that the objects we perceive are not separate from us but are formed by us in relation to the forms of intuition and ultimately to our grounding sense of ourselves because if we didn't have the transcendental self to pull together all these things into a unified experience then there would be no experience whatsoever
So ultimately the object and the subject are correlated with each other. They can't do without each other. And this is what will be called in speculative realism correlationism, the problem of correlationism. The idea that you can't think an object without already thinking a subject. So metaphysics becomes impossible. And we have this philosophy of access or this access problem or a description of limited access to things. So it's a theory of how, in what way we access the real, through what filters, how it's correlated with thought. It's a philosophy of finitude, of the acceptance of the finitude of thought, and it's an anti-speculative thought. And this is what's called Kant's Copernican Revolution.
Rather than the subject revolving around the objects, he says the object now revolves around the subject, to put the subject at the center. Kant already knew that the game was up for metaphysics because the Scottish philosopher Hume had already attacked metaphysics with empiricism, with skepticism. he said in fact the metaphysicians have tried to discover laws of nature metaphysical laws of nature that will hold for all time but in fact there's no way we can know that things will stay the same from one day to the next reason in itself gives us no possibility
of knowing that things will stay the same that the laws of nature will stay the same and our experience certainly doesn't because our experience is only what we've known up until now. So the synthesis we make is psychological. We can't base an account of the universe on our psychology. We can only say how we construct. We can only say, well, if I see that next to that every day, then I'm going to expect that that's going to be next to that the next day as well. so he instead of putting forth a metaphysical theory he puts forth an empirical theory a theory of how our minds bind together what we come across and experience and kant was disturbed
by this by this kind of brutal destruction of the metaphysical ambition kant says that hume woke him from his dogmatic slumbers he realized that metaphysics was a game with no stakes and yet Kant also doesn't want to give in to skepticism. So this is the problematic he faces, and this is how he comes to invent what's actually a completely new type of thought, which is the transcendental. And transcendental philosophy means a thought that asks questions not about the reality of objects we experience. It asks questions about the conditions under which they appear to us. So it's if we're inside a container that has some kind of receiver
on the outside and various mechanisms that transmit the signal to us. We can't get outside the box. All we can do is examine the way in which the data is being delivered to us. We can speculate about what might be outside the box, but we've got no basis upon which to do so. So we can't formulate laws about what might be going on outside, which would be metaphysics. For Kant, this just becomes a kind of pointless intellectual game, and we can sit inside the box and come up with our theories and argue forever. It's a kind of weightless type of argument. It doesn't go anywhere. All we can do is to operate a critique, to delimit what can validly be said to be known.
So this is Kant's systematization of this problem and the problematic that he responded to. He responded to it in such a compelling way that it really became an orthodoxy. It really became a sin qua non, something which seemed couldn't be surpassed. And later philosophers have just radicalized it further. and particularly phenomenology. Now Kant sees these mechanisms inside the box as articulating the data in terms of time and space. So what he wanted to do was to build a philosophical justification for the natural sciences and for the mathematical formulation of physics
so he could rescue it from scepticism. He could rescue it from Hume's scepticism because he wants to be able to furnish a basis for science, for having some kind of eternal, lawful form for experience. But, of course, Kant can't do it with reference to the beings themselves. He can only do it with reference to our forms of intuition, of time and space. But phenomenology takes us further because phenomenology insists that before these conceptual articulations of phenomena, there's just the pure phenomena itself. So the phenomenologist insists that we should examine precisely what's delivered to us
to remove all the filters that are imposed on the data and to just look at the phenomenon itself. And phenomenology then observes that our relation to the phenomena is intentional. We're not abstract seats of consciousness who passively receive data and construct it into spatio-temporal objects. When we get up in the morning, we see the cup of coffee. We don't see the cup of coffee as a kind of lump of space and time, as if we were some kind of scientific instrument that was registering this abstract thing. we see it first of all immediately as a cup of coffee. We see it as something to drink in order to wake us up so that we can write an essay,
so that we can further our career, so that we can increase our self-esteem. So the objects that we see are immediately connected into a web which is our life world, our projects, our relation to our projects. and this in turn especially for Heidegger is related to our knowledge of our own temporality the fact that we're going to die the fact that we're finite and the fact that we live within a certain structure of time even the division between the object and the subject is not as primary as it seems because all objects we experience, we experience intentionally within a world that's bound up with ourselves
as subjects of what we experience of ourselves as subjects, and what we experience of ourselves as subjects is bound up with the objects we use. So phenomenology, in this case, really strengthens what we call correlationism. It insists even more strongly that our knowledge is finite, and its limits are those of the human world. And the subject who experiences is always correlated with the objects which she experiences. And so Heidegger will ask the question, not what can we say about being. This question already assumes too much.
First we have to ask, what's the type of being who asks this question? What type of being is able to ask this question? And this who comes before the what. The who comes before the abstract questioning typical of philosophy. So phenomenology is a kind of second revolution in philosophy after Kant. And Heidegger develops it into what he calls fundamental ontology, which is the ontology of Dasein, of being there, which is the kind of being we are. That's the kind of being who asks philosophical questions, a being who is there in the world. so the upshot then is philosophy becomes placed squarely within the world of the human and we accept that when we speculate about how objects are in themselves
we're always fooling ourselves, we have no right to speculate and one of the effects of this correlationism is to disjoin philosophy from science science becomes a type of thought that itself is conditioned that's subject to the prior conditions of the human life world. So in that case, for the philosopher, for the correlationist philosopher, science isn't talking about how things really are. It's an instrument that we use to process phenomena and make them useful to ourselves. So science is an instrument within the human life world. We have to be there, thinking, experiencing, in order for science to work.
and we'll see how this is important to speculative realism, how this becomes a kind of locus of the objections of speculative realism to correlationism. The most important is this notion of finitude, that philosophy becomes limited to examining the relation between thought and being, and that it can say nothing of how each is apart from the other. It can't say anything about what things are or might be if they were not manifested in phenomena, if they weren't appearing to us. We're not allowed to talk about an object apart from its appearing to us. And of course, this is precisely what rationalist metaphysics sought to do. This was the ambition of philosophy, but stripped of the divine guarantee that what we think corresponds to what is.
and under threat from skepticism, we have to give this ambition up. So this becomes the orthodoxy and leads to various types of relativism, perspectivism in various forms, whether it's theories of how we're historically determined, culturally determined, linguistically determined, all the different forms that mediate between us and the reality that we can never reach. so this is the frustrating situation which seemed like an end game in which speculative realism came about is it possible to revive speculation but not as the fruitless groundless speculation that Kant tries to curb but as a speculative thought that somehow gains access to a real that's not
already correlated to our subjectivity is it possible to reconnect philosophy with other forms of knowledge, rather than philosophy having this kind of imperial reign over them. That is, philosophy as being some kind of organizer of other types of knowledge, but having nothing to say about their objects. so it's important to see that Kant doesn't only provide the problem of correlationism Kant also provides the means by which speculative realism becomes possible because of his invention
of the transcendental so if we look at the problem of access for a rationalist the problem of access between thought and being is is solved by having a divine guarantor there's something which stands in between our thought and being and which wouldn't deceive us because God wouldn't deceive us if we don't have that one other possibility is that we simply say that being and thought are the same thing. And then we end up in a form of idealism. And of course, there's many respectable forms of idealism. But they don't really answer the problem.
In empiricism and skepticism, we have access to... we can construct theories on the basis of our observations of how thought indicates or points towards or organizes or connects the objects of perception. But we realize that there's a barrier between this and any notion of these things existing in themselves. We just don't have any access to that. So we might have an image of reality, but we don't have any rational access to being itself. Now what Kant does is to introduce this layer of the forms of intuition,
so that the object we see, we see conditioned by the forms of intuition. and thought can certainly think the being behind the object, but it can only think it speculatively. And for Kant, ultimately, that doesn't mean anything. We can think it as an X, because all we know about the object, everything we know about objects, everything we know about experience is delivered to us through our forms of intuition, in time, in space. So there's this kind of stream that runs between us and whatever might be out there. And this also affects our sense of the self.
This is an important thing that we'll see throughout speculative realism, that it also alters the way in which we see ourselves. For Descartes, Descartes was able to say, of course, I think, therefore I am, But he was only able to say this on the basis of the idea that the clarity of the thought of himself could be trusted. In the transcendental we get a very different form of the cogito, a very different form of our sense of self. It's in fact bizarre, it's a kind of schizophrenic sense of the self.
because we can experience ourself in time and space. At the same time, we can have the idea, we can have the sense of our being something, but ourself, even ourself, is also an X. It's an X that marks the spot. It's something we don't know, because we don't have access to ourselves, except through the forms of intuition which are imposed on us. So we in fact condition our access to ourselves. So in other words, we don't know ourselves. We are another. Thought can think the being of the subject, but it can think of it as nothing more than the seat of all consciousness
into which experience is integrated. It can think of it as just this point, this point of consciousness, I, I, I, I, which ties everything together. so it just becomes an X and then we have the experience subject which is kind of like a film show that you're watching of yourself so it's a totally schizophrenic relation to the self that the transcendental introduces and this is adapted from this diagram in Deleuze and Guattari's book What is Philosophy? in which the passive eye is there in this section in the middle and the transcendental eye is at the top
which is in the form of a cow's head because the cow says moi moi in French. So let's just take a little sociological interlude before we continue. Speculative realism has introduced this kind of explosion in thought. There's obviously something that people were waiting for. There's some kind of dissatisfaction and some kind of desire that it's satisfied. And there's obviously an institutional element to that, that philosophy had become this kind of endless commentary that there's nothing new that can be done. The death of philosophy, all we can do is pour over text and this frustration that philosophy was contracting into this autistic world. But there's also a kind of conceptual reinvigoration that goes on.
philosophy asserting its right and ability to speculate. And as we'll see, I'll talk more about tomorrow. It's not just an academic philosophy, but there's also been a really interesting way in which speculative realism has found an audience outside philosophy. And in particular, Urbanomic have been involved in several projects with contemporary artists who have engaged with this problematic and found actual parallels with the problems that they're facing in their own practice in the philosophical problems of speculative realism. But I'm afraid today I'm just going to talk about the hardcore philosophy. And there's an interesting way in which it was also the
first web-based philosophical movement. I publish on paper, but the kind of network of contacts, the audience has been completely built up online, and there's been this kind of explosion of blogs, and there's a hell of a lot of writing out there on speculative realism. Some of it's good, some of it's not so good. But there are all these other factors which have kind of fed into the growth of this movement, which I think makes it interesting in all sorts of other ways, apart from the philosophical inherent interest in it. So what I want to do is to explore the thought of these four thinkers who spoke at this first
conference, simplifying, but hopefully not simplifying too much. And I do invite you to interrupt at any point. And then tomorrow I'd like to talk about some of the consequences of speculative realism, to talk about what is it that we can do with this thought. So I think we'll begin with some entertainment as we start to explore Quentin Mearsu's thought. I'm going to show a short film clip. It's from a film called Suspect Zero. and a group of detectives here are following up an investigation by an FBI agent who had a strange theory about a serial killer who's on the loose.
The FBI agent turns out not to have ever existed. But the crucial thing is that there seems to be no pattern to how the serial killer operates. And as you'll see, the detectives are struggling somewhat. The subtitles aren't very good.
I'm trying to see it. I'm trying to see it. He can't see it. He opens up an old wound. Yeah. What does he want? I don't know. Maybe he's got something against the Bureau or Lon. force map like the zodiac. You're welcome Tom. You're welcome Tom. Not FBI. Tom. He's baiting me. He wants me. Why? What does he want? Okay. Tom, I want you to take me through this. Explain this to me. Okay. See if this makes sense to you, okay? Each of the 45 abduction dates on these facts correspond to one of the GPS coordinates on Orion's map.
What about the two bodies we just had? I think we're going into too much detail here. I started at the wrong place. Let's try a bit further on. Ville, Iowa. Okay, female. Ville, Iowa. Just called. Okay. On Orion's map, 827. The only thing we know is there never was of Benjamin Orion, FBI. It's too bad he would have been a hell of an angel. Autopsy reports just arrived for both of your positive IDs. Bruises? Or the burn marks. We've got them here, too, on our female from Dayton. And these marks relate to the marks found on Fulcher and Speck Howe? They don't. No burn marks on Speck Fulcher, Stark.
And we have no slash circles here on these bodies. Right. My office, as soon as someone finds something useful. No luck on the behavioral specialists. But I do have a couple other leads that I'm following up on, and I'm really hopeful they're going to pan out. Great, thank you. Um, a professor of criminal biology, Professor Dates, just called. He says he's got time for you on Saturday. Thank you, Kate. You'll have to forgive me, Professor. I've been operating under the assumption that Orion is somebody's delusional fantasy on Israel. It was a student of mine. That fax you sent me, this circle with a slash throat.
It's his construct, his theory. He called it Suspect Zero. Suspect Zero. He posited a theory that a serial killer could cross the entire country without ever getting caught. Look, what makes a killer catch a long? Patterns, reputition behavior. I imagine someone with no patterns, no telltale fetishes, no rituals, It's just a random killing machine that never leaves a clue. Yeah, but a serial killer, by definition, is condemned to repetition, isn't he? I mean, isn't that what he's all about? Well, he is until he isn't. And this suspect zero, is that something that you believe in, Doctor? It's something that Ron had believed in. I mean, he swore guys like that existed, only we couldn't see them because they didn't have been the usual laws.
Like cancer, doesn't it? Or the HIV virus that tricks your immune system into thinking it isn't there. So now you're saying a guy like that could exist. Do you know the definition of a black hole? Not precisely, no. It's a celestial body with a gravitational force so strong that nothing escapes it, not even light. Well, then how do you find something you can't see? Well, it was there, and we found it. This is a perfect analogue for what Neesu tells us, philosophically. To catch a serial killer, you have to know his style, his modus operandi.
And as we know from countless detective shows, it's always in being too predictable that the killer falls into the detective's hands. What if a killer had no law to his actions, if he appeared at places which had no apparent connection one to the next, with victims that had nothing in common and each killed in a different way? Suspect zero, this is the challenge that Meir Su poses to us in philosophical form. This zero, this black hole, is the very focal point where he passes through from correlationism into its outside. The traditional question of metaphysics had been to determine the laws of nature that govern all of reality. Metaphysicians disagree on the answer, but not the question, and above all, not the posing of the question.
The assumption that reason can discover the laws of nature. As we saw, this assumption was dealt a deadly blow by philosophical scepticism. It doesn't seem that we're able to justify this demand, we're not able to meet it. And Kant responded to skepticism by creating a critical method and transcendental philosophy. And the key move of Meirsu is to turn what seemed to be a crisis in philosophy, a crisis point in the investigation, that demanded acknowledgement of thought's finitude. In other words, the detective was about to give up. The key move of Mayasu is to turn this into a positive statement. And the positive statement is as follows.
The laws that govern nature could change at any time. There's no reason why anything or any law should remain the same from one moment to the next. And this conclusion is a positive acquisition of reason. It's not a statement of failure or finitude. And this is what Quentin calls hyperchaos. Hyperchaos. And hyperchaos, as we'll see, is something that Meir-Sue says we can in fact reach, we can have knowledge of. Knowledge of a type that Kant said was impossible. It's an intellectual intuition, a direct knowledge of something that's not conditioned by the subject, a knowledge of something truly outside.
And once this knowledge is acquired, Mayer-Sue suggests, we can use it as a new foundation for a new speculative philosophy. In approaching this problem, he returns to an old distinction in philosophy between primary and secondary qualities. Secondary qualities are qualities that belong to the relation between a subject and an object. and primary qualities are those that belong to the object itself regardless of whether it's put in relation with a subject. This distinction has a ring of absurdity to a contemporary philosopher e.g. a philosopher after the correlationist's turn precisely for the reasons we've just discussed
because the collapse of rationalism, the default of any guarantee between thought and the being that it thinks has resulted in everything becoming a secondary quality. Remember that for Kant, even the mathematical relations of space and time are forms of intuition that belong to the relation between the subject and the object and not to the object itself. All that we can say about the object in itself is just this X. There is. Descartes, the rationalist, had argued that the mathematical properties of geometrical extension were primary and belong to the thing in itself as it is, without me. But he, of course, had God's guarantee that when he did mathematics, it corresponded to what was happening in being.
So this distinction between primary qualities and secondary qualities is a distinction between the properties of substance, of being as it is in itself, versus the qualities of the sensory experience, our experience of the thing. and for Kant no such distinction is possible. So Meosu's recourse to this distinction seems pre-critical or naive and this is something that we see in speculative realism over and over again is that it re-examines positions, realist positions that have been dismissed as impossible, as naive and discovers ways to give them a new speculative life and each thinker does this in different ways but this is the core I think if anything of what speculative realism means so to continue then
Quentin now defines what he calls correlationism and here's the origination of this term and in a sense it defined the enemy that's why I start with Meosu and why Meosu is in a way the central figure or the founding figure because he identifies the enemy. He identifies correlationism, the idea that we can't consider objects independently of their relation to a subject. And of course for Kant, maybe we do, in our conditioned knowledge, maybe we do grasp something of what's outside, but there's no way for us to know. There's a kind of agnosticism.
It simply holds that we can't think the subject and the object are separate and that relation is primary. What's primary to knowledge is relation. And as we've seen, we find this repeated and transformed in various forms, but it's still correlationism. The question becomes, what makes the world? What synthesizes? What constructs? so in reclaiming primary qualities Meir-Sue wants to find what he calls an outside that is not relative to us but the way Meir-Sue approaches this argument the way he tries to discover primary qualities is also important because his book begins with the reason why we must escape correlationism
and there's a particular lever that Meir-Sue uses a reason why it's imperative that philosophy break out of correlationism. And it's essentially because correlationism estranges philosophy from modern and contemporary science, and in doing so it makes philosophy a stranger to the contemporary world. And this is the core of the relation between science and philosophy in speculative realism. so he asks how is it that scientists can tell us about the origin of the universe, about things which happened billions of years ago because billions of years ago there was nothing to manifest this phenomena
no one experienced any of these phenomena so how does science if correlationism is right, how is science able to even speak about these things? We can imagine ourselves manifesting these beings, these events as phenomena to ourselves, but in fact scientists tell us that they happened, we weren't there. And he speaks about the advent of absolute dating, the fact that through the analysis of the disintegration of radioactive nuclei, you can date precisely and absolutely how old something is. And for a post-Kantian philosophy, for a correlationist, this is actually impossible.
And so what Meir-Sue wants us to do is to realize that there's a stark decision to be made here. Because it's not just that correlationism tells us, well, scientists might be wrong. that actually doesn't allow us to make any sense of what they're saying at all. Because how can we use instruments to date objects that existed before there was any consciousness to manifest them? If everything is correlation, if everything depends on the relation between the subject and the object, then it doesn't make any sense to even make such claims. And so correlationist philosophy has denuded itself of any means with which to think about our knowledge of the universe. Is it possible that we could think within this correlationist framework a supernova that happened four billion years ago?
Well, we could only do that through extending a kind of consensus model of reality. We could say, well, given the way human beings have historically and socially and linguistically constructed our world, we can all agree that this happened. But notice that that's not the same statement as saying the supernova happened and we weren't there. It's not the same statement at all. It's a completely weak statement that says nothing about the reality of the supernova whatsoever. this would be Hume's view on the matter the sceptical view on the matter would be well scientists have looked at all these different readings from their instruments
they've noticed that this reading often comes before this reading and that this reading is often above this reading and because they've seen it so many times they've kind of built up a habit of associating one thing with another and then that's produced this idea that this supernova happened. Well, that's really no good to us. That's not what science is trying to tell us about. So it actually makes it impossible to make sense of what the scientist is saying. On the other hand, of course, we could reintroduce God and say, well, God's there to ensure that what we think about, when we think about the supernova, well, God was there to see it and he's communicated it to us. So this is what Meir-Sue called the problem of ancestrality.
And ancestrality doesn't just mean that something happened a long time ago. It specifically means that something happened before it was possible for it to be manifested, before the advent of manifestation as such. But it's important to see that this is a kind of lever that he uses to prise apart correlationism. It's a particularly acute case. But ultimately, we could just as easily talk about human evolution, or in fact, any reality that science describes. So, science therefore formulates ancestral statements. How do we deal with it? And coming back to primary and secondary qualities, science cannot impute these events which happened before anyone was there to witness them
with any of the secondary qualities that belong to a relation with a subject. That means we can't say the supernova looked like this or it was really hot because there's no manifestation. There's no secondary qualities. The only way we can describe these things is in mathematical terms. And in using those mathematical terms, scientists put forward precisely as describing primary qualities, qualities that belong to the event outside any possible correlation with the subject should we finish