Name Calling; Enlightenment and Extinction, Part 5

Guy: "I think this flower is called..."
Girl: "Who gives a shit?"

In the last post, we asked a final question regarding the possibility of thinking being without recourse to a linguistic guarantor. We came to this thought as a consequence of seeing a "strong conrrelationist" thought in Meillassoux which wanted to say that mind-independent reality is contingent regardless of this statement being made. This affirmation of being to the non-conceptual space of reality forms a correlation that Brassier shows can't be made regardless of the "good" intentions Meillassoux may have had in destabilizing correlationism's inherent dualism (understanding being in terms of thought). Brassier's next step is to "unbind the void" through the thought of Alain Badiou, specifically his most popular work, Being and Event. It's with Badiou's move away from a linguistic guarantor for the disjunction between being and thinking that Brassier finds important. This is done by treating ontology not as an existential signifier but as discourse. The consequences of de-existentializing being is seeing presentation's internal structure as that of an "anti-phenomenon" which is presence's necessarily empty and insubstantial contrary. In other words, what we conceive of as "presentation" is exactly opposite of being (or presence). When we give ourselves the idea of presentation which we can find conspicuously in the "unfolding" of a musical presentation (work) (given as an example in Husserl's Internal Time Consciousness essays) we can literally describe what we think is the experience of the presence through the presentation of the musical work (presentation). But presentation is not being. What we think of as presentation happening in what we think of as "real time" is our way of thinking being by borrowing a catalog of concepts already in our conceptual lexicon and equating this idea of presentation with an idea of being. In other words, this phenomenological description relies on a historical lexicon of conceptions, or thinking in general and an equality between "presence" and what we figuratively do when we think and say something is being presented. With this being said, it's blatantly inaccurate and unfaithful to something called "being" to ascribe what we think it is to "what it is." Toward the end of the last post, I asked "Why then rely on a concept of ontology (being) in general?" This was assuming we qualified the concept of being as an existential characteristic. With Badiou, ontology becomes a claim about discourse, not about the world. As Brassier states, "Anything that is must be counted-as-one, but unity is not an intrinsic characteristic of being; it is merely the result of an operation which produces consistent multiplicity, from inconsistent multiplicity." Brassier here is explaining Badiou's use of set theory to settle the discourse of ontology a contrario a world of ontology. For example, when we see everything that compiles a tree, we see it as "tree." We see it as one thing called "a tree." This "a" functions to give unity to complexity. But because we call a multiplicity into a unity, this fact doesn't allow a leap into qualifying being. Just because we were presented something in some way doesn't mean that this says anything about being. Our presumptions about presentations don't serve as a harbinger to being. To put it more simply, "all access to being is via presentation, and presentation is always the presentations of something, never being itself" because concepts are always consistent which is incompatible with the claim that being is inconsistent multiplicity (and consequently it never being knowable and thinkable). With all this being said, the question still stands why the concept of being is still something that philosophers ponder over and something that a speculative realism should ponder over regardless of Badiou's demarcation of it into discourse, for discourse is still an attempt at explanation, or is it (we shall understand this further in the post)? While this operates at a sure distance from an existential analytic of ontology (set-theory mathematics rather than Heideggerian mythologization of finitude) it still asks of something called "being." This distance we will explain in this post through the concept of the empty set ({}). At the end though, we will find that Badiou's finding of an "event" from ontological discourse doesn't serve his own method of subtractive ontology(through empty-set theory), and that ultimately and again, the concept of being is one that is more than precarious for philsophical usage and something that can or even ought to be understood.

"Set-theory begins by declaring that non-belonging exists, a non-belonging which authorizes all subsequent belonging, but the theory neither asserts nor presupposes the existence of belonging." This is somewhat of a tricky statement to find our way around. First lets understand the concept of the empty set ({}). An empty set is a set that contains no elements but nonetheless we can see the mathematical syntax (symbolization). For Badiou, it's important to understand that the empty set represents a discourse of syntax, not of existence. According to Brassier, "It does not predicate existence of any concept, whether it be that of 'non-belonging' or 'inexistence.'...Its import is that, even in order to deny belonging, it is at least necessary to affirm the existence of a mark of belonging." So for Badiou, while using set-theory for a discourse of ontology that's at a distance from existential ontology, we are still required to use a mark to mark out this non-belonging. In other words, we affirm "the existence of a mark of non-belonging." The syntax then is in existence since it was marked. The empty set while operating mathematically instead of poetically and figuratively through Heideggerian post-religious secularized mysticism affirms its existence through non-belonging. Through non-belonging, (negation of belonging) which is presupposed by a set in general, (a set that is a multiplicity that we "count-as-one"), belonging is authorized to exist, "but the theory neither asserts nor presupposes the existence of belonging." Instead, we are in a discourse where we use a mark showing no set belonging to the empty set, which nonetheless requires a mark to show pure non-belonging. The key here is in not saying "Instead, we are in a discourse where we use a mark showing no set belonging to the empty set, which nonetheless requires the existence of a mark to show pure non-belonging." Again, existence need not be relative to the operation of set theory. To be more specific, the logic of empty-set theory is an operation, not a predication about existence. With this being said, we understand how theory here "neither asserts nor presupposes the existence of belonging" or being. Empty-set theory shows us nothing about existence, it shows us how marks are made from something that contains nothing. "The axiom of the empty-set asserts that the name of unpresentable is presented; or that there exists a name of inexistence. This nuance is crucial: asserting the existence of a name in discourse is quite different from asserting the existence of an extra-discursive concept. For it is through this nomination that presentation is able to suture itself to the unpresentable without presenting it. Thus Badious writes, 'the inaugural advent' of the unpresentable consists in 'a pure act of nomination' which 'since it is a-specific [...] consumes itself, thereby indicating nothing but the unpresentable as such.' This nomination neither marks the return of the One, since it does not make anything consist, nor does it index a multiplicity, since what it presents is strictly nothing." The key here is that empty-set theory has shown how the mark is sutured (tied) to the unpresentable without presenting it. In other words, we see a mark that happens when triggering what's unpresentable, but this mark that comes to represent what's unpresentable shows nothing about something called "presence" or "being." Instead, an operation happens where the empty-set is marked. The mark of the empty-set presents nothing nor does it make anything "exist." It indicates the unpresentable as nothing, and nothing else. This unpresentable doesn't gain a "wholly unknown other" from it's nomination. It's completely unknown and that's it. The mark indicates nothing and that's it. (It's worth noting that we (along with Badiou and Brassier) use the verb "indicate" rather than "symbolize" in this operational process.) A name is asserted, not an "extra-discursive concept." This is important to understanding subtractive ontology. Alternatively, we can say that a "mark is made, not an extra-discursive concept." From the mark of the empty-set, we then have no reason to attribute any of what happened to us (being). In this example of the empty-set, that a mark was first made and counted-as-one to first establish the empty-set that is never counted (but nevertheless presupposes a count-of-multiplicity as one) doesn't show anything about something called "existence." Nor does it show anything about "presence." It shows a process that Badiou calls "subtractive ontology," and that's it. It's the jump into an existential ontology that Brassier wants to eliminate; this desire to existentialize the mathematics of set theory. It's this existentializing of scientific concepts that creates the mysticism that creates nebulous notions of scientific disciplines. While we understand the concept of Folk Psychology, we can also understand a concept of Folk Science. The differences in what is called "ontology" is not just one example either. The callous way in which the science of Quantum Physics is used to explain things as embarrassing as "changing the way you live" is another conspicuous example.

What empty-set theory shows here for Brassier is that there is no "experience of being." While something is consistently presented (the mark which indicates the set with no elements), this doesn't account for the inconsistency of its own reality or being (the being of the empty-set). There's no understanding of what is the "presencing" within the logical operation of the nomination manifested from nothing. Instead we have an idea of this nothing that is exactly that, nothing and nothing else, and we have a mark that comes to indicate this nothing and nothing else. In other words, there's an operation that we happen to understand. What this operation was, is something that we understood. The understanding is always after an operation, and an operation is always on going on its own terms independent of thought. In this sense we can clarify the nebulous concept of being simply as "something that is just not for understanding." Whether this proves to be the case as we continue on in Enlightenment and Extinction remains to be seen. While Brassier appreciates the subtractive ontology that we just went into with empty-set theory above, he finds the "evental" conclusions drawn by Badiou to be problematic where Badiou inflates thinking to be the event and only event of being, meaning for example that "the Big Bang, the Cambrian explosion, and the death of the sun remain mere hiccups in the way of the world" because they operate at a large distance from the thinking being that Badiou privileges following the "change-the-world" syndrome experienced by many "thinkers" and naive idealists in general. "Thinking is sufficient to change the world: such is the ultimate import of Badiou's idealism." It's interesting to see how an ultimate import of "thought changing the world" can create useful objective thoughts on philosophical questions while having a possible initial import that's this embarrassing. But these aren't questions for philosophy, let alone anyone really. "Either Badiou denies that ontology is a situation, in which case he is obliged to choose between mysticism, Phenomenology, or metaphysics, or he accepts that the subtractive nature of presentation is such as to undermine all the non-ontological consequences he wishes to draw from it, specifically his theory of event." From this, we can make a good guess at where Brassier is headed; a non-correlation between being and consequence, and ultimately between being and thought. Still, how can the concept of being still be used?

Thinking and Being; Enlightenment and Extinction, Part 4

Thinking about being....and botox. (Picture has nothing to do with the post)

In the last post, we finished by saying that Brassier would establish the thought of anti-correlationism by understanding the nuanced logic given by Quentin Meillassoux in regards to the principle of absolute contingency. This is established through Mellisassoux's "figures of factuality." Brassier will establish Meillassoux's "figures of factuality" in order to further establish the logic of anti-correlationist thought then. In this post we will go into the third figure under the name of the "inconstancy of nature." We will go into this because this is where the idea of anti-correlationism finds difficulty in establishing the anti-correlationist "perspective" it wishes to achieve. Firstly though, Brassier sites Meillasoux's nuanced argument in regards to the impossibility of contradiction which breaks the "law of contradiction" from giving certain and definite outcomes to phenomena in general (providing the first principle for contingency). The argument goes like this: "If something is at once what it is and what it is not, then it cannot undergo transformation for it is already what's not...a contradictory element always exists as what it's not. It remains self-identical in being-other than itself". In other words, contradiction exists so it's not a contradiction since it has an identity. There is no contradiction if it already exists. Even if we think of something right now, and can think of its contradiction, this contradiction already exists. At the very most, one can say that 'two specific things exist at a difference from one another' but even in this statement the subject is already defined as 'two specific things' and being predicated in difference from one another. In regards to Hegel's original perspective on this, "absolute identity is capable of sustaining contradiction, since only the absolute can be identity of sameness and alterity." What is "wholly other" is already identified as just that, "otherness." Its nature is solidified in the identity of what's not, which already exists in being what's not. With that being said, the absolute envelopes the possibility of any contradiction by understanding that everything is always identified. What is contrary to what is happening is identified as a contrary nature, so this contrary nature simple exists as what is already not happening right now for instance. This argument for the non-possibility of contradiction is in order to establish the next point in Meillassoux's principles of factiality which is the necessary existence of contingency. This principle will make the correlationist's attempts at understanding being through thinking difficult. This argument goes something like this: 1. the weak interpretation,"if and only if something exists, then it exists contingently" and 2. the strong interpretation, "that it is absolutely necessary that contingent entities exist." Brassier explains the infinite regress involved in the weak interpretation of the necessity of contingency which always relies on the idea of "existence," making contingency relative to something called "existence." When trying to prove existential contingency though, one will have to put the idea of "existence" in the contingency bracket itself. This will ultimately lead to the strong interpretation where regardless of something called "existence," contingency still exists (relative to whatever "entities" mean. "Entities" and "existence" need to be explained further.) The regress that manifests from the "if and only if something exists" in the weak argument is nullified when the contingency no longer is concomitant with the idea of "existence." So far then we have a non-contradictory contingency of phenomena that is being established by Meillassoux. In this sense, contingency is absolutely necessary. But is this statement included in a realism of non-contradictory contingency? If not, is this where the "speculative" in "speculative realism" finds its place? If it is, then "speculative realism," like phenomenology, is still a descriptive science. These problems we will move onto in this post with the third figure of factiality nominated as the "inconstancy of nature." Here we will run into problems with the anti-correlationist's hopes of absolute dissociation.

The idea of the "inconstancy of nature" is to further dissociate our experience from "what's really happening" thereby fulfilling the realist interpretation. There's no better place to start understanding this anti-correlationist perspective than in Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature, specifically with his billiard ball example. Brassier explains it as such; "We cannot assume that any particular occurrence of AB - where A and B are bound together by contiguity, priority, and conjunction - instantiates a universal principle of causation...Hume's response is that our belief in causality and inductive inference more generally is merely a function of the association of ideas, and hence a psychological habit, nothing more. But habit does not provide a rational warrant for the inductive inference that the instance AB instantiates a universal law whereby it must follow A." To make this example more clear, lets establish the actual thought experiment that Hume made regarding billiard balls. When we see a billiard ball being hit into another billiard ball, we presume that the second billiard ball (B) reacted from it being hit by the first one (A) (This principle of causality is obviously established as "Law of Motion" for Newton). Hume assumes this much of the billiard balls in his thought experiment; 1. that they are in a position of contiguity (proximity), 2. that they are in a position of priority meaning that one ball is before another ball, and 3. that they are in a position of conjunction meaning that they are being perceived as being together. What's important to understand in these axiomatic relationships between billiard balls with this thought experiment is the fact that relationships first have to be perceived. But this is a problem for anti-correlationism that wants to firmly establish the dissociation between perception and reality. But if they follow Hume closely, they see that no matter how much it may be the case (high frequency) that "B follows from A", it isn't the case that this will always be the case, hence making this law of causality not a law because it can't be established universally. But who's establishing laws universally? We are establishing laws universally; The same "we" who perceive reality and are not reality. Maybe the contention put forward by anti-correlationism ought to be more in line with the desire to create laws in general. Newtons Laws of Motion are based on our never-ending perception of what always happens in experience. Newton took that much for granted in that there are beings that have to have perceptive phenomena in order to establish something like a universal law. The anti-correlationist has to think to themselves that this taking for granted of perceptual beings is a natural argument in favor of idealism. In other words, being never has to think that it's perceiving in order to perceive and ultimately come up with ideas. When Brassier states that the perception of billiard balls ostensibly showing a universal law is a "psychological habit, nothing more," what is the impetus behind seeing psychological habits as simply as "nothing more." Mental habits exists. That the association of ideas becomes a habit is something that exists. That this is then taken and nominated as a transcendental category is something else. Even if we eliminate this Kantian impulse to put habit into a transcendental category, the habit of perception still exists. Even if we nullify the universal laws understood by Newton, it's still the case that being will see things in high or low probabilities and instinctively react to these probabilities. But for Brassier and Meillassoux, these are all our presumptions, and that is the salient point in this thought experiment of dissociation. The unstated inference by correlationism is the one whereby the correlationist infers from the claim that "science's representation of reality requires the uniformity of nature the quite distinct claim that this uniformity - and hence the laws of nature- is necessary." In other words, because we (being) happen to represent nature in a uniform manner, doesn't mean that we can then make the leap to say that our representation is necessary and always the case. The difference here is between uniformity and necessity. For example, because phenomena happen all the time in high probabilities doesn't mean that it's necessarily the case that this high probability will always happen (necessarily). But this subtle distinction assumes a sort of quasi-metaphysical space for "necessity." If this is the case, then the concept of "necessity" will need to transcend its own conceptual limitations into the sphere of the arche-fossil for example. It will have to presume that what happened in the dispossessed time of the arche-fossil was necessarily contingent. While we can't assume uniformity to this arche-time, we also can't assume non-uniformity (contingency) to this time. In other words, the idea of the "necessity of contingency" has to allow for the possibility for uniformity in a time before the nervous system. This needs to be emphasized. The necessity of contingency ought not to entail a conception of a chaotic universe, but simply a conception of the universe that is completely unknowable, whose contingency could be uniform or chaotic or anything else that comes to the imagination of the thinker who can never know the contingency. For our representation though, we can't assume that uniformity is always necessary, solely because the concept of necessity "transcends" representative being. That everything can always be the case denies the possibility of uniformity, regardless of how much uniformity may always happen to us. In this sense, there's no problem with Kant's (correlationism's) transcendentalism as long as it knows that representable knowledge is always in reference to us. But this fact ought to be a harbinger for not being so interested in everything in reference to us (This is a simple question to put forward: "Why are we so interested in everything in reference to ourselves?"). By this principle of contingency, we (being) are not necessary, so why are we so interested with what happens to us? Brassier asks "Is uniformity a real feature of things-in-themselves or merely a phenomenal illusion generated by our relation to things?" The salient point for Brassier is establishing us (being) as "merely" contingent. The "merely" speaks for itself and instinctively guides the desire to wedge being from the arch-fossil.

Now the problem appears. Brassier establishes the fact that Meillassoux has established the diachronicity between thinking and being by destabilizing the necessity of uniformity that being and correlationism establishes for itself. What is left? There is a speculative opportunity that has not been reached yet for Meillassoux: "Thus, as Meillassoux sees it, the outstanding task yet to be accomplished by modern philosophy is a speculative explicitation of the dimension of diachronicity which subtends the Galilean hypothesis. It is philosophy's failure to recognize the speculative implications of science's Copernicanism which has resulted in the Ptolemaism of correlationism. In ratifying the diachronicity of thinking and being, modern science exposes thought's contingency for being: although thought needs being, being does not need thought." So then, what is the speculative opportunity for being independent of thought that Meillassoux wants to overturn in his perception of philosophy's Ptolemaism? To be more poignant, what is being without thought? If we refer to an arche-time, that's fine, but why then rely on a concept of ontology (being) in general? While we can understand the desire for a Ptolemaic counter-revolution in philosophy, what's more difficult to understand is maintaining a concept of being independent of the concept of thinking which is to be understood as concept-creation at an absolute distance from reality. But this separation of thought from being can't happen without a separation from the concept being. Being is thought because it's a concept. Brassier sees this in Meillassoux's thought. "Mellassoux's problem consists in identifying a speculative guarantor for this disjunction between reality and ideality which would be entirely independent of the evidence provided by mathematical idealization of the ancestral phenomenon in the ancestral statement." The problem is in the idea of "identifying" some sort of speculative guarantor ("guarantor": a word which we should be enormously suspicious of relative to an argument for a principle of absolute and necessary contingency) for the arche-fossil independent of being (thinking being). "If everything is necessarily contingent regardless of the truth of the thought 'everything is necessarily contingent,' then everything could be necessarily contingent even if we had no way of thinking the truth of that thought coherently." In other words, we have strong correlationism because we give ourselves the luxury of being able to say at the very least that "everything is necessarily contingent regardless of the fact of this statement being made." We are saying something about something before the evolution of the nervous system knowing that what we are saying has nothing to do with that time. If the speculative guarantor is the "ancestral statement" of absolute disjunction between thinking and "being," then the guarantor is simply a thought linguistically expressed, like every other philosophy that would like to establish a reality for a mind-independent reality. At the end of Part 1 in Enlightenment and Extinction, Brassier asks, "can we think the diachronic disjunction between real and ideal while obviating any recourse to a transcendental divide between thinking and being?" This is the question. And if it can be thought, can it be thought without being linguistically expressed, without it having to be expressed always to someone else, through a published book for example?


(At the very least, the concept of being shouldn't pertain to an arche-time. This arche-time wasn't "being.")

Oblivious Philosophers; Enlightenment and Extinction, Part 3

Assholes

In the last post we saw Brassier commending the work of Paul Churchland's Eliminative Materialism while at the same time criticizing the fact that Churchland ascribed pragmatic virtues to both the brains function (generally speaking) and a circumscribed theory of the brain based on this same ideal of pragmatism. This paved the way for the concept of anti-correlationism where Brassier wants to rigorously dismantle conceptual thought from Philosophy, and any sort of being in general. Later on, he gives a much more concrete example of this anti-correlationist gesture in the concept of the arche-fossil first prescribed by Quentin Meillassoux. What is an arche-fossil? "An 'arche-fossil' is a material indicating traces of 'ancestral' phenomena anterior even to the emergence of life." This description already functions to separate "life" from an anterior phenomena. This anterior phenomena is understood by philosophers as a potential to manifest into an us. Beyond this, philosophers in the post-Kantian style will ascribe "transcendental" properties to this anteriority by admitting that while they can't know anything that happens prior to being, they can know that certain things always had to be the case independent of our existence. It's where we find Husserl saying that Euclid's geometrical theorems would exist independent of anyone existing. The basic idea in this example is that the geometrical universe would operate the same way regardless of it being seen as having laws for us. But this can't be said for Brassier. We can't freely ascribe our laws to something that was never a matter of lawfulness. At the heart of Brassier's argument is the simple distinction between existing and not existing, and if consciousness (the nervous system) did not exist, then nothing can be said of it. What natural science discovers as existing independent of us is surely vast, and it's this vastness that philosophers are oblivious to because they think everything is in relation to them (the manifest image). We will let Brassier speak for the vastness of what natural science discovers and in doing so, we will come to understand how what has been discovered by science is minimal to the philosopher par excellence. This lack of understanding by the philosopher will further establish the nature of man to attribute everything outside of himself to himself (anthropomorphism) that we even saw in the scientific thought of Paul Churchland's placement of values upon consciousness. This anthropomorphic gesture is much more conspicuous in the philosopher than the scientist. Brassier will find it most strictly in what's understood as post-Kantian philosophy.

Science wants to understand what happens outside of human existence. This arch-fossile gesture "provides the material basis for experiments yielding estimates of ancestral phenomena- - such as the radioactive isotope whose rate of decay provides an index of the age of distant stars. Natural science produces ancestral statements, such as that the universe is roughly 13.7 billion years old, that the earth formed roughly 4.5 billion years ago, that life developed on earth approximately 3.5 billion years ago, and that the earliest ancestors of the genus Homo emerged about 2 million years ago." Brassier privileges natural science here in being able to index an arche-history where nothing can be said of it except factual observations where we happen to be included in an approximation of our historical duration (2 million years). These statements aren't based on pure reason. We can't sit around and speculate to the fact that the genus Homo emerged approximately 2 million years ago. We can come to know this through scientific discovery, in this case the dating of a variety of fossils. Not only can we know what happened prior to human existence, but we can know protentive facts like the earth being incinerated in approximately 4 billion years, and that "eventually, one trillion, trillion, trillion years from now, all matter in the cosmos will disintegrate into unbound elementary particles." This is interesting stuff for Brassier and wonders why philosophers aren't more interested in these scientific discovery's (why don't philosophers watch Carl Sagan's Cosmos seriously?) "Philosophers should be more astonished by such statements than they seem to be, for they present a serious problem for post-Kantian philosophy. Yet strangely, the latter seems to remain entirely oblivious to it." Generally speaking, philosophy understood through Kant wants to understand the conceptual intelligibility of existence, but how can conceptual intelligibility account for something that wasn't conceptual? On top of this, why do these scientific discoveries not press on the philosopher to understand himself independent of himself at the "places" of the arche-fossil? "For all their various differences, post-Kantian philosophers can be said to share one fundamental conviction: that the idea of a world-in-itself, subsisting independently of our relation to it, is an absurdity." Again, Brassier labels Kant and philosophy that has followed Kant as the philosophy of the manifest image, and rightly so. It's Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason who sets out to understand the possibility of experience by ascribing transcendental categories to consciousness. For Kant, the transcendental aesthetic isn't space and time understood independent of us, the observers, but it's understood precisely as the cognitive preconditions for experience at all. In other words, space and time exist in so far as we experience a world as space and time. Kant doesn't say that space and time exist independent of us, and in this sense he's faithful to what he can and cannot say, but his intention on the other hand is just that, an intention. More specifically, it's an intention to privilege human consciousness as something that must be understood if we are to understand experience. What we infer from Kant's project is that he's concerned with how he can know, and not merely with how things happen independent of the fact that he can know. Kant isn't settled with the fact that he is a knower, but further wants to prop the knowledge status to a transcendental level by understanding how knowledge is possible in the first place by laying down preconditions for his knowing. In modernity (20th and 21st century "continental" philosophy), these transcendental categories become aggrandized into much more absolute and less specific categories as our "pre-theoretical relation to the world, whether characterized as Dasein or 'Life', which provides the ontological precondition for the intelligibility of the scientific claims listed above." The project of Ontology in general doesn't become one of understanding phenomena in general, but of our being in general. It's these pre-theoretical relations to the world that make it possible for theory to be possible in the first place. It's not difficult to understand Heidegger as a mystical/secular-religious thinker with his emphasis on Dasein that takes on a transcendental connotation of its own by signifying something that can't be put into words, yet is put into one word that signifies that it can't signify (this is a religious gesture). It's this attitude that makes Brassier incensed. "No wonder, then, that post-Kantian philosophers routinely patronize these and other scientific assertions about the world as impoverished abstractions whose meaning supervenes on this more fundamental sub-representational or pre-theoretical relation to phenomena." One obvious example of this is when Heidegger refers to scientific time as a "vulgar" conception of time. Instead, Heidegger wants to see time as referring to our finitude. Time is specifically our finitude. It doesn't exist outside of us. In this sense, he is squarely in the spot of post-Kantian philosophy. More specifically, Heidegger religiousizes death over life in order to make "Life" more mythological since it is finite. This is only possible through our time. Throughout all this, the focus is always on the idea that we die, that we are alive, that time is here for us to die. If Heidegger's nostalagizing instincts were to be truly faithful, it would have nostalagized not thinking about being towards death (the negation of the thought), but an alterity to our existence isn't in the purview of mawkish instincts. For Brassier, this post-Kantian attitude that we have just described through Heidegger can be found in what Meillassoux calls "correlationism." "Correlationism affirms the indissoluble primacy of the relation between thought and its correlation over the metaphysical hypostatization or representationalist reification of either term of the relation." In other words, we have "Life-World" and "thought." Neither of these terms are to be privileged over one another. We live in a reciprocal "co-propriation" where thinking and being exist together. It's here where we have the cosmopolitan sloganeering of "living alongside the world" that has become the money-marketers bread for green-technology. Correlationism affirms the absolute connection between us and everything else that can possibly be outside of us. Out of all the infinite contingent possibilities that can happen in the universe, they have to be in reference to us. It's this idea that Brassier will take to task in the name of anti-correlationism in the following pages of Enlightenment and Extinction. For now though, we get a sense that the philosopher (generally speaking) is scared of what's other than himself not being relative to himself. For however much this "pre-theoretical" realm would like to dazzle the reader with a sense of something larger than himself that he will never be able to understand, this bedazzlement may have a much more vulnerable center than what is initially understood. This secularized belief of "the world being larger than me" easily makes the subject satisfied as much as the evangelical who can forever forgive their sins. If anything, it's much easier to be satisfied in the transcendental concept of Dasein than the evangelical belief system because one has to do nothing except feel that they are part of something bigger than themselves. The religious believer had to go to church. The secular believer just has to think that he's smarter than religious believers. In this sense, the secular believer extends the sphere of pride 10 fold.

These final thoughts though were made on a sociological basis which is getting away from the strict thought that Brassier is conveying. Brassier stays within the limitations of the empirico-reality when critiquing post-Kantian philosophy. For him, "we cannot extend the chain of possible perceptions back prior to the emergence of nervous systems, which provide the material conditions for the possibility of perceptual experience." In other words, we can't perceive what was before the nervous system. Scientific discourse then operates not in reference to ourselves, but reference to itself, a philosophy that is not a philosophy if you will. It can borrow terminology it makes up for itself and apply it to its own studies without having to ask where this terminology "first came from." Spontaneous creation and and study happen all the time and is applicable to something that has nothing to do with us and no one is feeling guilty for the fact that we don't first have an understanding of consciousness because no one cares that we are thinking beings. We use what comes to us spontaneously to witness the arche-fossil in scientific terms. The axioms need no axioms. No descriptive science is first needed to "work from the bottom in order to get to the top." "Getting to the bottom of things" doesn't matter. To take place anywhere at anytime is the experience of science. It's the experience that anti-correlationism will hope to establish by decentering something called "the subject" of consciousness not in order to establish it's contradictory alterity, but to do what it does, independent of the hardened philosophical dialectic that have solidified contradiction as the absolute. Where Hegel combines contradiction into the absolute, anti-correlationism will show how contradiction is not an absolute because it's not possible in the first place because the predicate of alterity is already assumed in the concept of contradiction (making an opposite not something that is "other" than what is "now"). This nuanced logic of Meillassoux we will go into in the next post. For the time being, Carl Sagan is calling with that badass German ambient music as the background theme to the Cosmos. For the self-identified philosophers, there's hot tea to be sipped on and life experiences to be discussed amongst each other where no one actually listens and everyone simply talks.