After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency by Quentin Meillassoux
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I haven’t read any clearer reading of the philosophical tradition in a while, and that’s saying quite a bit. While Meillassoux is mostly interested in the philosophical tradition, and its constraints (extending it somewhat to religion and science) he is able to dance within that tight framework and come up with a clear summation of the larger picture.
Many thinkers tend to fight in the nitty-gritty, and that’s most likely because in the process of spending so much time learning what the “greats” have said, they become invested themselves. And because academia encourages people to disagree with one another. How else could they jockey for position?
I agree with most of the comments around; that Meillassoux has managed to say something different. And how he says is intensely fascinating. He sums up the aesthetic goals of so many familiar names: Kant, Hegel, Descartes, Leibniz in so many terms. He brings us around to Badiou and demonstrates in slightly different terms, Badiou’s genius and how that enables us to begin to formulate a new beginning, one that does not rely on Being or totalization in order to guarantee meaning. He leaves us then with a new project, one in which to find a new totem to anchor as the absolute reference, one that isn’t Kant’s old hat.
While I find his book and direction exhilarating, and agree with his reading (especially how he puts many terms) I do believe that there are other ways to put the pieces.
Here is another conception of philosophy: Philosophy isn’t so much about truth as it is about managing complexity. Much of the time you do need to have some way of organizing discourse so as to be able to relate to one another. This much is certainly how people interact with one another or how discourses are able to connect. Meillassoux ultimately wants us to find an anchor as to how to arrange understanding… the anchor he finds for us is to match whatever mathematics does, which in itself is very intriguing. I suppose math is a safer bet for legitimacy than any of the traditional absolutes to which philosophy has in the past adhered. The last pages of his book is basically an outline of a non-metaphysical but speculative absolute based off facticity should look like. I’d like to find out how this kind of speculation works too. But I think Meillassoux goes a little too far in his search for Truth and tosses some of the baby out with the bathwater because in a way, he takes too much for granted even though in another way, he takes nothing for granted.
I don’t believe that consciousness or causation or non-contradiction are necessary even if I find that the connection of the parts is what is most interesting as to what meaning is. In a way, perhaps that still makes me a correlationist in Meillassoux’s book… because I don’t adhere to the absoluteness as being external to our experience…that Meillassoux so wishes to determine. Yet if any axiometric is available — as Meillassoux admits — then why facticity? Why science? Certainly not the form of science! Science will not permit the asking of questions it cannot answer, because that is bad science. So he must be talking about the content science produces and in what way this kind of dia-chronicity should be found to be meaningful or not…perhaps as meaningfulness can be modifications of how we understand ourselves today, rather than as positions to be justified by where we are now, that reversal of a reversal he calls the counter-revolution of Ptolemy’s revenge. It sounds good to speak by naming “where we are” in this way, but then again, I am not so sure we even yet know where we are now. In this way then, I think I don’t really even show up on his radar because he takes the productivity of meaning in its mechanics to be beyond question, at least in this inquiry.
Meillassoux also didn’t talk about certain other positions contemporary philosophers have taken either. I’d be interested in hearing him on that regard.
All the same this is a highly charged book. It requires a familiarity with the tradition, and a willingness to consider thoughts from another angle, a difficulty many of us have if we are not able to distill this vast amount of information into its more fundamental terms.
