For Quentin Meillassoux, post-Kantian philosophy may be labeled as correlational. To be is to be a correlate, due to our modes of finite perception. He and a handful of others propose various methods of either radicalizing this relation in the name of a speculative materialism (Meillassoux himself) or of breaking this relation entirely (as Ray Brassier seeks to do). There is much to be sympathetic with in the writings of both. Working under the assumption that fellow labouring is a better form of critique than refutation, I intend to develop another response to correlationism.
The thesis to be developed is that the logic of the apparently refuted Ontological Argument (capitalized, to distinguish this particular argument from general forms of ontological thought) has persisted well beyond Kant into the present day. The impressive analysis of concepts found in thinkers as diverse as Heidegger, Deleuze and to a lesser extent Badiou each involve a particular kind of logic: thought governs itself. Deleuze and Badiou in particular would immediately object that for them, thought is provoked or conditioned by encounters with forces or events; however, these encounters take place within thought - a priori judgements continue to reign, however synthetic or analytic these judgements are, or however much these thinkers critique a particular idea of judgements.
A thousand hands will fly up in objection to the foregoing, or worse, a thousand eyes will roll. The task, then, is to convince readers to launch a thousand ships instead.
What is the greatest idea? God. God must hold all perfections, and given that existence is a perfection, God must also have existence as a quality. Kant's refutation is equally well known: existence is not a predicate. An entity must first exist in order to be predicated. Rather than driving this logic to extinction, Kant merely forced it to adapt in order to survive.
The means of adaptation for the Ontological Argument was provided by Kant himself. The transcendental deduction and aesthetic are an entirely a priori consideration of epistemology; the deduction of the categories and the analysis of spacial and temporal intuitions not only limit potential metaphysical considerations, they also limit epistemological considerations. Kant carries out an overt critique of metaphysics and what could could be termed a covert critique of epistemology. The potential objects of our intuitions and categories are carefully delineated, but only after a thoroughly metaphysical concept of epistemology has been presented.
In response to metaphysical critique of epistemology (the finite, constituting subject), epistemology has since been folded into ontology. Our modes of conceiving the world have been folded into existential analyses, or the unfolding of the virtual into the actual, or the counting of the situation. Epistemology has all but disappeared as an object of study for continental philosophers, replaced by the ontological question: how are knowing and being correlated?
Kant's metaphysical analysis of epistemology allowed epistemology to be folded into ontology, but the thorough critique of the Kantian epistemological subject as an ontological subject has allowed pre-Kantian epistemology to slip through, albeit in a modified form.
The argument thus far: the classical Ontological Argument has slipped through as a strengthened form of pre-Kantian epistemology. Ontological thought operates without epistemological constraint.
Ontological thought certainly operates with ontological constraints, especially in the case of phenomenology. Phenomenology will be taken as a strong exemplar of the new species of the Ontological Argument. In the Ontological Argument, that which is analytically contained within the concept is taken to apply to an object, to a thing-in-itself. Kant breaks this connection, of the concept's unfolding vis a vis an object, but because of the loss of the epistemological constraint, subsequent thought is able to re-connect the concept's unfolding to objects. Concepts and objects correlate, and any difference is to be found within the concept itself.
The ontological restraint offered by phenomenology is the finitude of the subject-by-another-name, Dasein. Thrown into a never fully present now, Dasein encounters objects that sometimes readily fit into a comfortable world, and at other times withdraw into their own brokenness. Dasein never fully encounters itself or its world, even in anticipatory resoluteness; objects are always reticent to one degree or another. Dasein's knowledge of the world is limited by Dasein's own finite modes of perception. In other words, Dasein's concepts and practice are always somehow faulty.
But this ontological restraint is not the same as an epistemological restraint. The question of the meaning of being is submitted to a circle; only that which questions is capable of asking the question of being, and so all ontological answers will be answers for the being that questions, a being already thrown into a world with possibilities to be projected upon. This virtuous circle is the result of the folding epistemology into ontology.
What is the analogy, if not outright connection, between the existential analysis of Being and Time and the Ontological Argument? The virtuous circle of situated Dasein and being introduces a strong link between the unfolding of concepts and their objects. Thought's correlation with the world is entirely guided by thought's own abilities, by its own limits of perception. This is not to accuse Heidegger of idealism, anymore than it would be to accuse Anshelm of idealism. For Anshelm, there is something within a given concept that demands a correlate within being. Heidegger demands no particular correlate within being, but rather a correlate with being as such, however limited. Hence, Heidegger's ontology is a fierce (even if occasionally self-defeating) opponent of metaphysics, but this is at the cost of operating with an unstated metaphysical epistemology.
As blunt restatement of the foregoing, Heidegger offers no support or argumentation for his world of ecstatic time and broken tools beyond the deeply rigorous analysis of concepts. That his analysis fails in various ways, and even that it was later abandoned by Heidegger himself, are irrelevant to my argument. Heidegger's arguments can be respectfully stated as "finite thought unveils X, and therefore X is an element of finite ontology." I have no dispute with the premise, and the premise has indeed driven a great deal of worthwhile political, ethical and aesthetic thought, but the conclusion, arising as it does from a metaphysical epistemology, cannot but be a metaphysical - which is to say, religious or supernatural - conclusion.
The above should at least suggest that we return to the force of Kant's refutation of the Ontological Argument in the name of a resurgent epistemology. Kant showed that concepts can be rigorously thought that maintain no relationship to an entity in the world. Kant carefully delineated which sorts of concepts can have correlates in the world, but do so in a way that allowed his analysis to be read as a metaphysical ontology. When Kant is read in such a way, his refutation of the Ontological Argument loses its force.
The way forward should be clear. The metaphysical epistemology of Kant that so easily collapses into a metaphysical ontology needs to be replaced with a non-metaphysical epistemology, and so the distinction between being and knowing, as well as (in Brassier's words) the distinction between sentience and sapience can be grounded anew.
There will be two constructive a priori elements in this chain of reasoning. First, the argument will be made that all radically a priori thought will end in two claims. First, all concepts are unstable and impure, as per Martin Hagglund's reading of Derrida. Second, a priori thought is capable only of establishing the reign of radical ontological contingency, as per Meillassoux's use of Hume. There may appear to be an untenable tension between these two claims, but I would hope to reconcile them in due time.
Hagglund begins Radical Atheism with an attack on the law of non-contradiction. Given that all objects and concepts appear in time, the nature of time itself is a pressing question for the issue of identity. In order for the past to pass into the present, and for present to pass into the future, each "moment" must be split between what it was and it is not yet. The appearances of every concept and object, then, are also split between what they were and what they are not.
This fundamental split has important consequences for ethics and politics. Every resistance to violence is inherently split, meaning it is also always already a source of violence. Every democratic state is similarly split, meaning democracy must constantly suspend democracy in order to function - democracy is always contaminated with totalitarianism, and vice versa. The cross-contamination is so fundamental that any proposed a priori benchmarks for "lesser violence" and "greater democracy" will themselves be contaminated with greater violence and totalitarianism. Hence, a priori thought can offer no guide posts for either ethical or political action - all it is capable of is critique and destabilization of the various assurances we offer ourselves.
Meillassoux, on the other hand, takes Hume's question of causation seriously, and finds no easy solution to it. There is no causal necessity; there is no even some fundamental bias towards "order" in the universe. It can be taken as a principle that it is impossible to establish such necessity, either through invocation of experience or mathematics. Meillassoux's positive project is an ever greater and deeper
I claim that a priori thought ends in these two claims - conceptual instability and absolute ontological contingency - because these are claims may be developed without any recourse to the logic of the Ontological Argument. Hagglund's split temporality requires no instantiated structures that can only be supported by their own conceptualization (whereas Dasein, the virtual and the void all require some form of instantiation). Meillassoux, for his part, takes his project specifically as an exploration of that which exists without any particular instantiation at all. He appeals to no existential structures, no field of virtuality, no inexistent void waiting to be nominated (conceptualized).
This shared virtue of Hagglund and Meillassoux - the lack of appeal to entities or structures supported only by their conceptualization - points to the primary non-metaphysical epistemological stricture that philosophy requires.
As Ray Brassier argues in "Concepts and Objects," in order to properly conceptualize, we must have an account of conceptualization. As he puts it, in order to know what is real, we must know what what means. In order to know what what means, we must know what means is, and in order to know this, we must know what is means. For Brassier, this demands a naturalistic epistemological stricture, as opposed to a virtuous hermeneutic circle. Our accounts of conception must be able to be cashed out at both a neurocomputational and a social/symbolic level.
Rather than relying upon hermentic, existential structures that are supported only by their own conceptualization - that is, metaphysical conceptions - we must develop an account of conceptualization that avoids the idealism of the Ontological Argument. We must, in other words, turn to science - our epistemology must be indexed to contemporary or future neurology. In the least, we need an account of non-phenomenological embodied conceptualization.
A non-metaphysical epistemology would have the virtue of being resistant to collapse into a metaphysical ontology, and what also resist the development of another sort of virtuous circle - idealists can claim that there is no thought of X without conditions Y; the problem is that they collapse X into Y. A naturalistic epistemology would, by its own lights, enable the defense of the statement that X exists apart from Y, thus defeating the Ontological Argument once and for all.
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