Speculative Realism Today

Remarks for the Korean translation of Speculative Realism

Graham Harman

Speculative Realism has shaken up our conception of continental philosophy over the past 16 years, since it was first launched at an even in London in April 2007. In spring 2005, when I was still not very well known, and was the author only of my first book Tool-Being (on Heidegger), Brassier made one of the first lecture invitations I ever received: to Middlesex University in London, where he was then employed. The event was enjoyable. In early 2006, I happened to stay overnight at Brassier’s home in London due to a strange indirect flight schedule I had from Nice to Barcelona. He asked me at the dinner table whether I was familiar with the work of Iain Hamilton Grant, and I said I was not. In fact, I did already know of Grant as the English translator of works by Jean Baudrillard and Jean-François Lyotard, though I was forgetting it at the moment. He proposed bringing the two of us together for a joint discussion, and I responded positively to the idea. A couple of months later, Brassier returned from a brief trip to Paris, and told me about a new book called Après la finitude by someone named Quentin Meillassoux, who he said was a disciple of Alain Badiou. Brassier had heard about Meillassoux from Nina Power some years earlier, but had just picked up his newly published book and recommended it to me, though he had not yet read. I immediately ordered Meillassoux’s book, took it to Iceland on a conference trip, and read the whole book in a few days. What an impressive piece of work! I recommended it highly to Brassier, who had not yet read his copy due to work commitments. This led him to sugest that we have an expanded meeting including both Grant and Meillassoux. I decided to write to both of them immediately, and both responded positively. Brassier got to work with his longtime friend Alberto Toscano at Goldsmiths, University of London, who was able to arrange the event for the following spring. This was the birth of Speculative Realism. A follow-up meeting was held at Grant’s city, Bristol, in 2009, with Toscano replacing Meillassoux who could not be persuaded to travel to England for a second event. These were the events that gave rise to the short-lived Speculative Realism movement, but the effects have been permanent, even though Brassier in particular has spoken dismissively on later years of the idea that he himself created.

The context for the birth of Speculative Realism is as follows. The analytic/continental split in philosophy goes back roughly a century or more, and has led to two separate disicplines that follow differing models of what it means to be a philosopher, with analytic philosophers behing like, and seeing themselves as, practitioners of something like a science. They focus on highly technical and specialized research problems, using short journal articles as their primary medium, and engaging in debate mostly with recent work by other analytic philosophers. The continental tradition generally views itself as a humanities discipline, with frequent references to the arts and literature, and orienting itself primarily according to the major works of French and German thinkers of the past two centuries, with mastery of European languages and the history of philosophy viewed as essential in this subdiscipline. Much has been said and written about the analytic-continental dispute, whether it really exists, and if so, then whether it should continue to exist. I will not discuss these questions today, but mention them only to explain what Speculative Realism added that was new to the contemporary philosophical scene. In analytic philosophy, realism was always a live philosophical option: just consider the way that Bertrand Russell took a realist position against the British Idealisms he once admired but later turned against: the work of F.H. Bradley in particular. The realism of analytic philosophy was guided primarily by the natural sciences, and by advanced mathematics and logic. By contrast, the continental tradition took its orientation from the shared view of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidedegger that the so-called “real world” was a muddy pseudo-question. Human beings were always already engaged with the world, which supposedly meant that phenomenology was not an idealism. But beyond this, scientific discourse on the relations between objects in the world could not be philosophically primary, since what comes first must be the givenness of the world to the human being, whether we call it “intentional consciousness” (in Husserl’s case) or “Dasein” (in Heidegger’s). There were still a handful of realist positions in the continental tradition, but they initially did not go very far. Nicolai Hartmann was perhaps the earliest, but the way in which Hartmann was completely overshadowed by his contemporary Heidegger shows the low status of realism in continental philosophy as a whole. Later came the efforts in the 1990s of Maurizio Ferraris in Italy, later joined by the young German Markus Gabriel, and the Mexican-born Manuel DeLanda in the United States. These were important steps leading to Speculative Realism, the first focused group effort to bring a realist perspective to continental philosophy.

But realism can mean a number of different things, even if we limit it to the ontologically realist claim that a world exists outside the mind. Ferraris and Gabriel are interested in realism mostly as a weapon against relativism: it is important to them not only that the real exists outside thought, but that thought can know it by using the appropriate techniques. For DeLanda, it was mostly a question of using Deleuze, Guattari, and cutting-edge modern science to speak about virtual phase-spaces that existed outside human awareness, but which could also be elucidated by using a range of mostly scientific tools. In Speculative Realism, there was and is a lively dispute about these assumptions as well.

The central shared concept of the Speculative Realists was what Meillassoux criticlaly termed “correlationism.” The correlationist is someone who holds that we do not have access to the world outside of thought, or thought outside of the world, but only of the primal correlation or rapport between these two zones. It is often mistakenly assumed that Meillassoux despises correlationism, and that his reference to the universe as it was prior to the emergence of human thought, he is appealing to scientific realism against the correlationism of Husserl and Heidegger. In fact, this is not the case. Meillassoux admires correlationism deeply, and he thinks the philosopher’s task it to account equally for the insights of correlationism and of scientific realism. Perhaps the clearest formulation of the correlationist argument is this: “We cannot think of something outside thought without turning it into a thought.” Therefore, every thought we have is actually a thought about thought. To say that the universe was created 14 billion years ago, as an astropysicist would say, really means (for the correlationist) that the universe was created 14 billion years ago for us. Note that Meillassoux sees this as a very powerful argument against realism of the sort defended by Ferraris, Gabriel, and DeLanda, though he does not name them specifically. Meillassoux does not reject the correlationist argument as the other three would, but tries to radicalize it in such a way that we come out of the tunnel with a renewed speculative philosophy able to deal with reality directly. The primary qualities, he contends, are the ones that can be mathematized. Here he shows his allegiance to his mentor Badiou, even if they take rather different paths toward similar goals.

Henec the title of Meillassoux’s book, After Finitude. Whereas Ferraris and Gabriel are most worried about relativism in philosophy, Meillassoux is most worried about finitude, a concept that appears in Kant and is further emphasized by Heidegger. It is Meillassoux’s view that the recent popularity of finitude in continental philosophy is the biggest obstacle to philosophical progress. This is why he often seems close to Hegel, who also critiques Kantian finitude in the name of a new sort of infinity in which Kant’s noumenal realm can be integrated into a dialectical process and thereby resolved and put behind us. However, Meillassoux would claim that his philosophy is more open to something outside thought than Hegel’s, though for Meillassoux this outside can still be mastered by mathematical thought.

Whereas Meillassoux is optimistic about mathematics as the best intellectual route to realism, Brassier favors the natural sciences. But whereas it is easy to see why someone might think that mathematics gives us direct access to the real, the sciences face a more obvious situation of theory change that has challenged philosophers of science for a century. For instance, Newton’s laws of gravitation seemed for two centuries to be eternal truths, until Einstein’s general relativity overturned Newtonian physics in the early twentieth century. In turn, Einsteinian relativity is still incompatible with quantum theory, meaning that neither of these theories will end up being viewed as eternal truths, but only as temporary stages of a broader and still unknown theory of physics. There are those who still argue against this, saying that there are mathematical truths in Newton’s theory that are retained in Einstein’s later theory. However, powerful arguments against this standpoint have been made by people such as Thomas Kuhn, who points out that since central terms such as “matter” and “energy” no longer mean the same thing for Einstein as they did for Newton, the two scientific theories are incommensurable, and therefore it is hard to speak of any isomoprhism between science and the reality it describes. More importantly for us, despite Brassier’s vehement commitment to science as the privileged mode of access to reality, his position includes a surprising amount of sympathy for the Kantian finitude that Meillassoux rejects. Just consider the fact that Brassier insists on a permanent gap between reality and any theory we might make of it. He famously turns this to nihilist purposes, claiming that the goal of all knowledge is to bring us ever closer to an awareness and embrace of the ultimate extinction of the universe, whereas Meillassoux makes a strange but rather ingenious optimistic argument that we must await the possible arrival of a virtual God who does not exist, but might exist in the future and resurrect the dead and heal all the unjust suffering that occurred prior to his coming into existence. Meillassoux even argues that before this God arrives, there must be a Christ-like mediator, a temporary messiah who spreads the possible good news and then reverts to become a normal citizen after God one day possibly arrives.

Although Brassier and Meillassoux represent the rationalist wing of Speculative Realism, with one of them preferring science and the other mathematics, we have seen that they are in some respects opposites when it comes to the debate over finitude. But both are opposed to the very different take on correlationism offered by my own object-oriented ontology (or OOO, for short). For me, the problem with correlationism is not the finitude it defends, since I hold that Kant and Heidegger made a permanent forward step with their awareness of finitude. My complaint about them is different. Namely, both Kant and Heidegger limit fiitude to a special condition of the human being. For Kant, it is only we poor tragic humans who are aware of the thing-in-itself but know that we can never reach it, while for Heidegger the same is true of human Dasein’s reation to Sein, being, which can only be addressed indirectly through poetic language.

Stated differently, OOO holds that the current deadlock in philosophy comes from the fact that the thought-world relation is taken as the starting point for all serious philosophy. Yet OOO holds that all relations are finite, not just the relation between thought and world. It doesn’t matter that fire and cotton may not be “consciously aware” of each other. Conscious awareness and finitude, after all, are not the same thing; even if all conscious awareness is finite, not all finitude occurs in the realm of thought. Instead, the key point is that any relation at all (even if thought is not one of its terms) fails to exhaust the full reality of its terms. When fire burns cotton, to use the favorite example of medieval Islamic philosophy, it interacts with only a limited range of cotton-qualities, the ones that are relevant to burning. If a cotton ball happened to encounter water rather than fire, the water would have engaged with a totally different range of cotton-qualities, and the same is true for an insect, a cat, or a human. Stated differently, all relations are on the same footing, ontologically speaking. Some have complained that this is impossible: we have immediate access to our own thought’s relation to the world, but do not have immediate access to what it is like for cotton or fire when they interact. But this is not really true. We do not have immediate access to the reality of our own thought, but only to the appearance of it to us: otherwise, we would have perfectly transparent access to out own conscious life, meaning that neither phenomenology nor psychoanalysis would be needed at all, though in fact they are needed. Moreover, we do not even have direct access to our own finitude. When I open my eyes, I do not see “finitude”; instead, I must deduce my finitude, using arguments such as Kant’s, and can deduce the finitude of fire and cotton and indeed of other humans, using exactly the same arguments. For OOO, human thought turns out to be just one especially interesting kind of object among many others. Thought is no longer the privileged starting point of philosophy. This idea is not completely new, of course. It was pioneered by Alfred North Whitehead, the greatest recent philosopher who has never really fit into either the analytic or continental traditions. The problem with Whitehead, OOO suggests, is his unwillingness to accept Kantian finitude, since he has a purely relational conception of entities in which they do exhaust each other by means of their mutual relations.

When speaking of Meillassoux and Brassier, we spoke only of the tension between thought and world, which in OOO is expanded into a more general tension between objects and relations whether or not thought is on the scene. But OOO also offers a second principle that we do not find in either Meillassoux or Brassier, though we do find it in strong form and Husserl. This is the distinction between objects and their own qualities. Historically speaking, many philosophers have consciously or unconsciously accepted the British Empiricist idea that an object is nothing more than a “bundle of qualities.” Objects are treated as if they were merely nicknames for a set of qualities that appears together so often that we assume that they belong together in a cluster. The object is supposedly nothing over and above this cluster of traits. But this is precisely what Husserl’s phenomenology rejects. For Husserl, an object remains the same object even as it experiences many changes of properties. In technical terms, an object shows many different “adumbrations” (the term in German is Abschattungen). What this means is that an object is not just an empiricist bundle of qualities, but can gain some qualities and lose others while still remaining the same. It is exactly what Aristotle said long ago about the difference between substances and their qualities: Socrates sitting and Socrates standing are both the same Scorates. Husserl’s innovation is that he develops this same distinction at the phenomenological level, which Aristotle (who existed long before Desartes and modern philosophy) never really took seriously as a self-contained dimension of reality. But Husserl limits himself in the reverse way, by also denying any difference between the phenomenal and the real: any thing-in-itself that could never be thought is, in Husserl’s view, an absurdity.

This means that OOO approaches reality by means of two separate dualisms rather than one: real vs. phenomenal (which we call “sensual”) and objects vs. qualities. This yields a fourfold structure of real objects, real qualities, sensual objects, and sensual qualities, which has has several key implications. One of them is that along with hidden real objects and their real qualities, and preceivable sensual objects and their sensual qualitie, there are also hybrid pairings: real objects with sensual qualities (as seen in Heidegger’s tool-analysis and in aesthetics), and sensual objects with real qualities (as when Husserl says that intentional objects also have essential qualities). Husserl does not see that these essential qualities of phenomenal things must be real, and therefore hidden; nonetheless, the sensual object-real qualities pairing is one that he seems to have discovered.

But more generally, what OOO is really about is a critique of literalism. The literalist is someone who holds (implicitly or explicitly) that an object is the same as its sum total of qualities. Anti-literalism, which I recommend, is focused on the insight that there is always a fracture or fault-line between objects and their qualities. For OOO, this fracture comes in four different kinds, corresponding to the four different types of object-quality pairing. This not only gives us a way to speak of truths that are not quite knowledge, which is something that the philosophy of science needs in order to account adquately for theory change. And it not only implies that aesthetics and philosophy deal with a form of cognition that is somehow different from knowledge. It also provides a new cosmic map in which the usual pair of space and time is expanded into a fourfold of time, space, essence, and eidos, each of them arising from a different kind of object-quality pairing.

In closing, I would like to speak briefly of the philosophical position of Grant, who deals with somewhat different issues. For Grant, who is heavily influenced by both Deleuze and the German Idealist F.W.J. Schelling, the key insight is that nature is a single productive power. Thought, too, is just another product of nature, and therefore is not ontologically special in a way that most modern philosophers (including Meillassoux and Brassier) assume. This productive nature is fundamentally one, and it breaks up into individual objects only when it encounters “retardation,” though if nature is inherently one, it is not clear why it should ever meet with obstacles that turn it into many. Grant also has a different and more positive sense of the word “idealism” than the other Speculative Realists do, which is why his follow-up book (with his younger colleagues Jeremy Dunham and Sean Watson) was a defense of the British Idealists ultimately rejected by Russell. For Grant, idealism does not mean the priority of thought, but the priority of the idea in nature itself. In this way, idealism becomes a positive term in his philosophy.

In a short lecture like this one, it is impossible to go into detail on all of these rich philosophical positions. To get such detail, it is necessary to read my book, and I hope you will all do so with enjoyment.

『사변적 실재론 입문』 화상강연과 대담 영상
 강연과 대담 : https://bit.ly/3ygJgLo
 질의응답 : https://bit.ly/3KZwj01