Being & Event Summary, Part 1

Ontology is traditionally the field of philosophy that deals with existence as such. Variously, it has attempted to describe what kinds of things exist, under what conditions these things exist, and what “to exist” means in the first place.

For some time now, philosophy has been mostly concerned with the third point, which could also be described as asking what being is. The question of being could even be described as philosophy’s central question, especially given that science has basically taken over the role of telling us what kinds of things exist. So while it is a question for physics whether or not multi-dimensional strings exist, a philosopher might insist that describing the underlying being of those strings belongs entirely to their field.

Alain Badiou presents a strange and disconcerting thesis, at least to a philosopher’s ears: ontology is not, and never has been, an element of philosophy. The question of what being is is entirely a matter for mathematics. For Badiou, ontology begins with the question of the one vs the many/multiple. The problem is, how can we think the multiple without making it just a sum of ones? In other words, how can a multiple be presented as subtracted from the one? An axiomatic, formal system can solve this problem in a way that normal language can not.

Boredom and Contingency, Part 1

An axiom: Enjoyment is the primary form of being in the world. It is our currency, our investment in the world. Enjoyment is inescapable; investment is necessary. Let us say that enjoyment is the necessary and inescapable motivation for all human behaviour.  We only do things because we find enjoyment in them.  When we laugh, kill, write, eat, wallow in depression, smoke, exercise, rape, make love, steal, read, starve ourselves, protest, capitulate, worship, hate Republicans or create spreadsheets, we do so because of an unconscious investment of enjoyment in some element of the situation.

This enjoyment is necessary. Yet it is not directly encountered in any given act; what we encounter is the pleasure of reading or the misery of starvation. Enjoyment is always mediated through other affects.

A second axiom: While enjoyment itself is necessary, any given object of enjoyment is absolutely contingent. Because we are invested in some situations and objects and not others, enjoyment requires a correlate: boredom. Boredom is the absence of enjoyment. While enjoyment constitutes our point of view, our focus on an object, boredom constitutes our peripheral vision.

Enjoyment is the unconscious avatar of necessity, because at any given moment it appears impossible to change our investments. Boredom, on the other hand, is the unconscious avatar of contingency because it stands as a constant reminder that our point of view and investments are changeable. Objects of enjoyment are wholly fungible.

Yet, enjoyment and boredom are not absolutely symmetrical. While enjoyment constitutes our point of view and is framed by boredom, they are not simply correlates. Boredom is different from enjoyment in two ways: one quantitative, the other qualitative.

Quantitatively, it is easy to see how we are uninvested in and therefore bored by the greater part of the world. We enjoy elements of a situation, often and sadly enough the minimum number of elements required in order to maintain the situation. The rest sinks beneath our vision. Objects of enjoyment are a drop in the ocean of unnoticed objects.

Qualitatively, if we accept the idea that contingency is the proper name of being, then non-investment is not only the condition of enjoyment, it also completely undermines it. The world does not maintain an a priori ratio between contingency and necessity; contingency must be the a priori truth, while necessity is an a posteriori fiction.

In Part 2, Zizek's essay "Is It Still Possible to be a Hegelian Today?"

Arche-Fossils and Apocalypse, Part 2

The notion of dia-chronic statements is one element of the dispute between Meillassoux and Hagglund. In order to properly frame this encounter, it is necessary to briefly discuss the nature of Radical Atheism. Hagglund portrays his book as a reading of Derrida, but it is also an original work of philosophy; Hagglund is, arguably, ventriloquizing his thoughts through Derrida's words. In light of this, it is acceptable to attribute the ideas and arguments of Radical Atheism to Hagglund himself, rather than constantly invoking the absent Derrida.

Hagglund's arguments rely heavily on his elaboration of temporal succession. The question is: how does one moment pass into the next? Each now cannot be annihilated by a future now, because the previous now would have passed into non-being; the future now cannot have a relation with the present now. Rather than claim that time is non-being in itself, Hagglund argues that each moment must be internally split from the very beginning; every moment is split between the has-been and the not-yet. Any given moment, therefore, cannot subsist as present in-itself.

It is the present's inability to be present-in-itself that forms the core of Hagglund's objection to the principle of non-contradiction, another of his disagreements with Meillassoux - but this issue currently lays outside our remit. Our line of reflection lies on a different path: the trace as synthesis, the infinitely finite time of survival, the impossibility of apocalypse, and finally, the conflict between that impossibility and the possibility of dia-chronic statements.

Given that every manifestation is internally split along temporal lines, the question of synthesis - that is, identity - must be answered anew. If being is not presence, if it does not persist in-itself from moment to moment, how is any given case of identity possible? Hagglund claims the trace is the "agent" of synthesis. In order for any moment to be, it must be inscribed materially - Hagglund calls this the becoming space of time. However, every inscription must be open to the succession of time and, therefore, potential alterations and erasures. This openness to succession is the becoming time of space. The material inscription of the temporal moment is referred to synonymously as the trace, spacing and différance.

The temporal split that necessitates the trace and the inscription's openness to alteration and erasure forms what Hagglund calls the infinitely finite. Temporal succession is always the moment (T) plus one. Time is T + 1, into infinity. Each future negates the past, forming a negative infinity. Hagglund accepts that only a positive infinity is a true infinity, therefore succession is finite - but an infinite finitude, without possible end. (Actually, I'm not sure if that is exactly correct)

Finitude is another mark of that which is not present in itself. All things are finite, all things are open to erasure and or alteration. This is the core of his polemic against the religious, which, in his terms, always holds one term to be above this openness. For religion, there is always one infinite, present in itself being. To be above openness, however, is to be above the very possibility of change. In other words, it be pure presence is to be changeless, motionless, lifeless.

For Kant, immorality was one of his regulative ideas. He considered it to be uncognizable because it necessarily implied atemporality, but it was thinkable as an idea. More than thinkable, it was desirable on an ethical basis. Hagglund argues that immorality is neither thinkable nor desirable, on the basis of the above; to be atemporal, to be outside succession, is to be fully present and therefore outside life. The absolute good of immortality is indistinguishable from the absolute evil of death.

Because of immortality's identity with death - its basic undesirability and subsequent self-refutation - we inevitably must affirm the mortal time of survival. Everything we do presupposes the infinitely finite time of survival, even suicide. The affirmation of mortality is utterly inescapable, and this is not a negative predicament to be mourned. Mortality is the condition of life itself, which is to say, life and death are co-implicated from the very beginnings.

The key issue in relation to Meillassoux is this insistence that the trace is the condition of life, rather than the condition of any existence whatsoever. The inscription that is the becoming space of time is always the inscription of a life. On page 19, Hagglund says the openness applies all the way up and down, "all the way down to the minimal forms of life." It "applies to all the fields of the living." Now, Hagglund does not make any explicit distinction between inanimate matter and biological life. He appears to be describing the trace as the condition of any change whatsoever, but always explicitly indexes the trace to life as such.

Leaving aside the question of Hagglund's relationship to correlationism aside for the moment, it is worth analyzing Hagglund's discussion of apocalypse in light of dia-chronicity. Kant knows that atemporal immorality - as the end of time and succession - is uncognizable, so his solution is to posit the end as an Idea, "which only appears to be the same as annihilation for us as time-bound creatures." (RA, 45 K843) Kant defends this through a reading of apocalyptic writings, noting that the word apocalypse derives from the Greek word for "revelation." It is the end of a world where the timeless truth is revealed and everything temporal is destroyed. This consummation can only be an Idea; if we try to cognize it, we end in contradiction.

Hagglund reads two of Derrida's texts on apocalypse. The first is "On a Newly Arisen Apocalyptic Tone in Philosophy." Derrida uses the word Come (Viens) against the idea of the apocalypse. It is the coming of time as the ultra transcendental condition for all events. The second text is "No Apocalypse, Not Now." Written for a conference on nuclear war, it claimed that nuclear war would destroy everything. This is the only way for time to end. Nuclear war would destroy all symbolic capacity, and the movement of survival.

Hagglund argues that the trace undermines the very idea of apocalypse, because apocalypse hinges on the distinction between temporal appearance and the thing in itself. For an apocalypse to be an apocalypse, it would have to destroy everything and reveal an indestructible thing in itself. Given that the trace is the necessary condition of being, the elimination of the trace via the elimination of the archive would be an "absolute destructibility that does not exempt anything." (RA, 46)

Significantly, Hagglund says that absolute destructibility "reinforces the radical finitude that deconstruction articulates as the condition for life in general. As a finite being I am always living in relation to the threat of absolute destruction, since with my death the entire world that opens through me and that lives in me will be extinguished." (RA, 47)

The conflict between absolute destructibility and dia-chronicity should be clear. The trace, as the condition for being in general, is indexed to the existence of the archive's inscriptions. An apocalyptic revelation is therefore impossible; with the absolute destruction of the trace/archive, no thing in itself would stand revealed. After the absolute destruction of the trace and manifestation, only nothingness would remain. In Meillassoux's terms, the nuclear annihilation of one of the terms of the correlation would also result in the annihilation of the relation itself, and therefore being itself would cease (to be is to be a correlate).

However, as we have seen, science is perfectly capable of making statements that subtract one term of the relation in order to exam the other term as it is in itself, that is, mathematically. Science is capable of formulating mathematical statements about the universe as it will be after the annihilation of humans, or even after the universe reaches a state of absolute entropy. In other words, apocalypse - the elimination of the manifestation and revelation of the pure in-itself - is entirely possible, and perhaps inevitable.

What we have here is, in fact, the beginnings of a refutation not only of infinite finitude, but also of Hagglund's conception of change (i.e., potentiality, virtuality and actuality) and even a neutering of Hagglund's critique of non-contradiction.

Arche-Fossils and Apocalypse: Part 1

Part 1: The Arche-Fossil

Martin Hagglund's effort to systematize certain aspects of Derrida's thought - those aspects he considers to be fundamental - was fortuitously timed. While Radical Atheism is primarily a polemic against religious, ethical and political readings of Derrida, it may also function as a dialogue partner with the work of Quentin Meillassoux in his popular After Finitude. Given that they overlap thematically so extensively, and that their conclusions are so diametrically opposed, a side by side comparison of the two works seems an inevitable and (hopefully) fruitful task.

Their implacable opposition is evident in the first chapters of their respective books. In After Finitude, Meillassoux develops a theory of what he calls the arche-fossil, The arche-fossil is the material support for statements about a time which existed before givenness; we can date events that took place before there was any manifestation vis a vis consciousness.

This ability forms an aporia at the heart of what Meillassoux refers to as correlationism: the idea that, in order to be, one must be a correlate. Correlationist philosophies hold that secondary - and even primary - qualities only exist as a relation between two terms, e.g., beings and being. For correlationism, it is impossible to step outside the correlation in order to view the two terms independently.

It is Meillassoux's argument that the arche-fossil demands that we do exactly this: subtract one term in order to view the other term as it is in-itself. How does this work? Everyone agrees that the solar system formed X number of years ago; but the correlationist adds the codicil ". . . for humans." This codicil is added on the belief that in order for the arche-fossil to be given, it must be given to a correlate (e.g., consciousness). For the correlationist, the arche-fossil is merely a lacuna within givenness; equivalent to events concerning distant, unobserved stars, or merely a vase falling in an empty room.

Meillassoux insists that the codicil evacuates the ancestral statement of all its sense. It must be allowed to stand as a literal statement, without any deeper meaning. To insist on the deeper meaning, to go beyond the literal and claim that, while it is a lacuna within givenness, it remains within givenness, is to destroy the literal sense. If we say that the ancestral statement is valid only for humans, this is equivalent to saying the ancestral event could not have taken place as stated: it could not have taken place in a time before givenness. The literal sense of the statement is thereby discarded.

The ancestral statement is not a statement about an absence within givenness; rather, it is a statement about an absence of givenness. In other words, if the statement "the solar system formed X number of years ago" is not taken literally, it has no sense at all.

The upshot of the argument is that science is capable of making statements about a single term of the correlation, and is utterly indifferent to the relation itself. Science is capable of thinking a time before the existence of the relation, and by implication, it is also capable of making statements about a time after the existence of the relation. These dia-chronic statements, because they subtract one term from the correlation, are capable of making (mathematical) statements about the remaining term as it is in-itself.

Up next, part 2: Apocalypse.

The Evolution of the Ontological Argument

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.

Badiou & Potted Plants

In the previous post, I discussed Meillassoux's attempt to refute Humean anxiety about causality. The die can produce numbers from 1-6, but it would be a fallacy to say it could become a potted plant because this possibility is not given. Alain Badiou's [i]Logics of Worlds[/i] offers another route.

In Book 2, Section 1, Badiou lays out the transcendental structure of determinate worlds. Worlds are local spaces that form the background of entities, and entities form points within these worlds. He argues that all appearing is governed by a handful of operators such as the envelope and conjunction.

Now, sub-section 5 concerns the ability to think, within a world, that which does not appear within that world. In other words, my ability to think the lack of tarantulas currently appearing in the world of my apartment.

His first argument is fairly straight-forward and continues on the basis of his destruction of the chimerical set-of-all-sets. If it were impossible to think the non-appearance of a being, than every being would have to appear in every world, and suddenly we would have a universe again.

LoW's complicated relationship to phenomenology appears in his second argument. If each being is being-there, than this includes the logical possibility of not-being-there. He will refer to this as a zero-degree of appearing. Again, straight forward.

The third argument is much more technical. Let's examine it in detail, and begin by quoting the function of the transcendental:

"At the core of the transcendental questions lies the evaluation of the degrees of identity or difference between a multiple and itself, or between a being-there and other beings. The transcendental must therefore make possible the 'more' and the 'less.' There must exist values of identity which indicate, for a given world, to what extent a multiple-being is identical to itself or to some other being of the same world." (p. 102-103)

So, the transcendental governs how identical X is, or different from, Y - as well as itself, X. X is more or less identical to X, and more or less different from Y. If X does not appear in a world at all - if tarantulas do not appear in my apartment - than X/hairy spiders must have a zero-level of identity with the beings within the world/my apartment. Thank God.

The third argument relies on this. Any evaluation of identity - saying that X has a strong value of identity to itself or Y - implies that this value could be nil. X could appear quite strongly, or it could appear not at all.

The value of these three arguments is that they do not rely on sense perception or on a calculation of probabilities. Remember Hume's problem: why is the world a consistent place, given that the structure of cause and effect is not empirical? Sense perception only tells us that every time we have seen the cue ball strike the 8 ball, they have interacted in such an such a manner. We can't ground necessity, and if we lose necessity, we end up with an infinite number of possibilities for the 8 ball - why should it not transform into a potted plant?

Well, we can say that not every possibility can exist in a world, because that would make that world the universe. We can also say that while we can think the sudden appearance of a potted plant in the pool-world, we have the corresponding ability to think of it not being there at all. We also have the ability to think the plant's nil-level of appearance - the possible plant has no conjunction with the pool ball.

This does not make the 8 ball-plant transformation impossible, but it shows that, once we stop thinking in terms of infinite probability, than it is no longer really thinkable.

Meillassoux on Hume

The splash that Quentin Meillassoux's After Finitude has made seems to be going through stages. Initially, at least in the blogosphere, the concern was largely with Meillassoux's idea of the arche fossil. Recently, I've started to see some engagement with his absolute contingency and divinology - Martin Hägglund's comments actually made Derrida sound attractive to me.

Still, I haven't come across commentary on my favorite section of the book, the take down of Hume. It seems to me that this chapter is the lynchpin - this is the chapter that secures what I see as a genuine realism - for my own reasons, reasons I will get to another time, I would also say this chapter secures a solid empiricism.

As far as I know, most strategies for dealing with Hume's problem of causal necessity involve dissolving it (ie, ignoring it) or shifting the terms of the problem without actually solving it. Hence, Hume's own skeptical tactic of changing the question to the origins of the belief in causal necessity, or Kant's transcendental move of claiming that, given the consistency of representation, causation could not be otherwise. Phenomenologists throw their hat into the ring by radicalizing Kant via the hermenutics of finitude.

As Meillassoux points out, all of these strategies still presuppose the necessity of causal necessity. Each of these strategies sidesteps the question of why causation itself is not simply random - if there is no necessity, then there is also no reason why wine should not spontaneously become water, or why the moon should not suddenly fly away from the Earth, etc. His goal is to evacuate existence of all necessity, while maintaining a place for the world's manifest stability.

So what is the fourth option? Meillassoux calls it the speculative option. Instead of showing the necessity of laws or God, "we must ask how we are to explain the manifest stability of physical laws given that we take them to be contingent." (p.91,92)

Why assume the necessity of the laws of nature? The standard argument goes that if the laws could change, (say, if light could change its speed) they would do so, with whatever degree of frequency you wish to claim. It is this "frequentalist implication" (FI) that must go.

Let's expand on the FI. If I were playing a game of dice, and the six side came up a thousand times in a row, I'd begin to suspect the die was loaded. If you're smarter than me, you'd begin to assume that much earlier. What about a more extreme possibility? Why doesn't the die transform into a potted plant? Why doesn't the die negate gravity and float into the air? There is no way to eliminate these possibilities, based entirely on experience. Just because X follows from Y today, does not mean it will follow tomorrow. Hence the belief in causal necessity - sooner or later, you have to assume enemy action.

This is a version of apriori reason - we know there is no aposteriori reason why the 6 six shouldn't come up a thousand times in a row - that'd be the gambler's fallacy. And we know there is no apriori reason why your die should not become a potted plant. Here is the flaw: what the FI does is conflate the possible and the whole - as Meillassoux says of the FI, "what is apriori possible [is] thinkable in terms of a numerical totality." When we say the propability of your die becoming a plant is 1:X, that X is a number in a calculable totality, known apriori, however infinite in a cardinal sense.

So the FI is an element of apriori reason. What we have to show is that apriori reasoning is illegitimate here - in fact, that the FI is a fallacy. What is the condition of refuting the FI, and therefore securing the manifest stability of nature while at the same time claiming absolute ontological contingency? We eliminate that X by showing that the absolute contingency of the world is inaccessible to probabalistic reasoning.

They key is refuting this equating of the thinkable with the possible. We can think, without contradiction, an infinite number of outcomes when we roll the die. The result could be a one, or a six, or a magically appearing seven, or a miniature unicorn. Meillassoux borrows from Alain Badiou's reading of set theory, and the upshot here is the detotalization of number. The universe, or being as such, is not totalized by an apriori thinkable set of infinite cardinals.

What in set theory is capable of doing is showing is that this numerical whole is a chimera? This is where Alain Badiou's just-translated book comes in. The argument isn't all that difficult, and is a spiritual descendant of Russell's Barber paradox. The short version - being as such is turtles all the way up, down and around. Take a set - (A, B, C). Set theory says that A, B and C are all themselves sets - A is made up of (X, Y, Z), and Z is made up of its own sets. The question that concerns us here, is there a set that encompasses all other sets? In other words, the numerical totality that would supply the X of 1:X?

The answer is no. There are two kinds of sets - reflexive and non-reflexive. Reflexive sets include themselves as an element in their set - for example, reflexive set A includes A in itself - (A, X, Y). A is an element there. Non-reflexive sets do no include themselves - take B, whose elements are (C, D). B is not an element of itself.

If there is a set of the whole, it obviously must include itself. If A includes all sets, it must include itself.

However, if we divide all sets into reflexive and non-reflexive, a problem emerges. If the set of the whole, A, includes all non-reflexive sets, B, then there must be a complete subset of non-reflexive sets. Let's call this set of all non-reflexive sets the Chimera. To quote two paragraphs from page 110 of Logics of Worlds:

"Is the Chimera reflexive or non-reflexive?. . . . Now, if the Chimera is reflexive, this means that it presents itself. It is within its own multiple-composition. But what is the Chimera? The multiple of all non-reflexive multiples. if the Chimera is among these multiples, it is because it is not-reflexive. But we have just supposed that it is. Inconsistency.

"Therefore, the Chimera is not reflexive. However, it is by definition the multiple of all non-reflexive multiples. If it is not reflexive, it is in this 'all', this whole, and therefore presents itself. It is reflexive. Inconsistency, once again."

So the Chimera can neither be reflexive or non-reflexive, and if all sets must be one or the other, then the Chimera simply is not.

What this means for our argument is that there is no numerical totality of possibilities. The FI completely depends on such a totality, and this totality does not exist. In other words, probabilistic reasoning - either apriori or aposteriori - is incapable of supplying the X that 1:X requires. There is no grand set of possibilities to choose from. The only possiblities are those that are given - the one, the two, the three, etc. The miniature unicorn and the potted plant are not given possibilies.

The admittedly strange upshot: we know that absolutely everything is absolutely contingent, but we have no valid reasons to believe that everyday relations (pool games, combustion engines, scientific experiments) will be thrown into chaos.

Ok, so why did I say at the beginning that this is the real condition for a realism? Leaving aside my allusion to empiricism, what this does is continue the Enlightenment project of demystifying the world. In other words, I think any realism must be a continuous project of seeing the world as an ever more prosaic place.

It may appear that Meillassoux's absolute contingency is anything but prosaic, as I think it is easy to latch onto it in a heroic way, such as "anything is possible," or "where there is a will, there is a way." Meillassoux himself nods in this direction when he claims that contingency is the basis of all critique of ideology. However, I think what his project does is really to throw us back onto the given world as a banal place where there are no gods to save us. These gods take many forms, especially in theory - the openness of the future, the inbreaking of an Event, or anarchic sensible becoming. I think Meillassoux shows us why we can and must dismiss these gods as attempts not to go beyond the given, but as attempts to deny or escape it. This post already seems long enough, so I'll leave it there now.