speculative realism

Speculative Realism is a philosophical current taking its name from a conference held at Goldsmiths College, University of London in April, 2007. The conference was moderated by Alberto Toscano of Goldsmiths College, and featured presentations by Ray Brassier of Middlesex University, Iain Hamilton Grant of the University of the West of England, Graham Harman of the American University in Cairo, and Quentin Meillassoux of the École normale supérieure in Paris. Credit for the name “speculative realism” is generally ascribed to Brassier, though Meillassoux had already used the term “speculative materialism” (matérialisme spéculatif) to describe his own position.

Speculative Realism focuses in providing a robust defense of philosophical realism in the wake of the challenges posed to it by post-Kantian critical idealism, phenomenology, post-modernism, deconstruction, or, more broadly speaking, “correlationism“.

While often in disagreement over basic philosophical issues, the speculative realist thinkers have a shared resistance to philosophies of human finitude inspired by the tradition of Immanuel Kant. Unlike most realists, they also tend to develop theories that depart markedly from the views of everyday common sense. For instance, Brassier upholds a radical nihilism of a world without meaning, Grant defends a primordial stream of matter that is “retarded” to give rise to individual entities, Harman holds that no two objects can have any direct causal interaction, and Meillassoux believes that the laws of nature are absolutely contingent and that God does not exist, but may exist in the future.

Brassier

Brassier is strongly critical of much of contemporary philosophy for what he regards as its attempt “to stave off the ‘threat’ of nihilism by safeguarding the experience of meaning — characterized as the defining feature of human existence — from the Enlightenment logic of disenchantment”. According to Brassier, this tendency is exemplified above all by philosophers strongly influenced by Heidegger and Wittgenstein. Unlike more mainstream philosophers such as John McDowell, who would press philosophy into service in an attempt to bring about a “re-enchantment of the world”, Brassier’s work aims to “push nihilism to its ultimate conclusion”.

According to Brassier, “the disenchantment of the world understood as a consequence of the process whereby the Enlightenment shattered the ‘great chain of being’ and defaced the ‘book of the world’ is a necessary consequence of the coruscating potency of reason, and hence an invigorating vector of intellectual discovery, rather than a calamitous diminishment”. “Philosophy”, exhorts Brassier, “would do well to desist from issuing any further injunctions about the need to re-establish the meaningfulness of existence, the purposefulness of life, or mend the shattered concord between man and nature. It should strive to be more than a sop to the pathetic twinge of human self-esteem. Nihilism is not an existential quandary but a speculative opportunity.”

Harman

Harman, through an interpretation of the tool-analysis of Heidegger’s Being and Time, Harman sets out to develop what he calls an object-oriented philosophy. Taking the tool-analysis as the defining moment in twentieth-century continental philosophy, Harman finds in Heidegger the roots of a metaphysics of things which does justice to the things themselves. Although working from within it, he finds the broad history of phenomenology to be deficient in that it constantly subordinates the independent life of objects to our (human) access to them. Against the Kantian tradition, his object-oriented approach considers the neglected real life of objects to be fertile ground for a resurgent metaphysics. Emphasizing the notions of substance and occasional cause (see occasionalism), he affirms the autonomy of objects while aiming to reveal their shadowy underground life and covert interactions. Cutting across the phenomenological tradition, and especially its linguistic turn, Harman deploys a brand of metaphysical realism that attempts to extricate objects from their human captivity and uncover a strange new subterranean network of object relations.

Meillassoux

In his book After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency , Meillassoux argues that post-Kantian philosophy is dominated by what he calls “correlationism,” the often unstated theory that humans cannot exist without the world nor the world without humans. In Meillassoux’s view, this is a dishonest maneuver that allows philosophy to sidestep the problem of how to describe the world as it really is prior to all human access. He terms this pre-human reality the “ancestral” realm. In keeping with the mathematical interests of his mentor Alain Badiou, Meillassoux claims that mathematics is what reaches the primary qualities of things as opposed to their secondary qualities as manifested in perception.

Meillassoux tries to show that the agnostic scepticism of those who doubt the reality of cause and effect must be transformed into a radical certainty that there is no such thing as causal necessity at all. This leads Meillassoux to proclaim that it is absolutely necessary that the laws of nature be contingent. The world is a kind of hyper-chaos in which the principle of sufficient reason is abandoned even while the principle of non-contradiction must be retained.

For these reasons, Meillassoux rejects Kant’s so-called Copernican Revolution in philosophy. Since Kant makes the world dependent on the conditions by which humans observe it, Meillassoux accuses Kant of a “Ptolemaic Counter-Revolution.”

Grant

Grant was initially known as a translator of the prominent French philosophers Jean Baudrillard and Jean-François Lyotard. His reputation as an independent philosopher comes primarily from his book Philosophies of Nature After Schelling . In this book, Grant heavily criticizes the repeated attempts of philosophers to “reverse Platonism,” and argues that they should try to reverse Kant instead. He is highly critical of the recent prominence of ethics and the philosophy of life in continental philosophy, which in his view merely reinforce the undue privilege of human being. Against these trends, Grant calls for a renewed treatment of the inorganic realm. [>>]

Grant views Plato and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling as his major allies among classic philosophical figures, and generally opposes both Aristotle and Kant for what he sees as their tendency to reduce reality to its expressibility for humans. Along with Plato and Schelling, Grant is heavily influenced by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze.

Speculative realism has close ties to the journal Collapse, which published the proceedings of the group’s inaugural conference, and has featured numerous other articles by the speculative realist thinkers.