Nathan Brown over at Speculative Heresy has an interesting response to Peter Hallward’s critique of Meillassoux’s After Finitude. I have not yet read Hallward’s critique of Meillassoux in Radical Philosophy, but Nathan summarizes the points as follows:
In his recent review… Hallward charges Meillassoux’s work with four major flaws:
1) An equivocation regarding the relation between thinking and being; or epistemology and ontology.
2) An equivocation between metaphysical and physical or natural necessity.
3) A confusion of pure and applied mathematics.
4) An inability to think concrete processes of social and political change.
To the fourth charge I would add an inability to think concrete processes of natural or physical change. Nathan attempts to show how these charges come up short against Meillassoux. It seems to me that these criticisms apply equally to Badiou and Meillossoux, bringing the two perilously close to idealism. Meillassoux, I think, fares a bit better but still runs into similar problems. I confess that I’m sympathetic to all of Hallward’s critiques here, as is evident from my posts on this blog years ago grappling with Badiou’s ontology.
November 19, 2008 at 2:26 am
“To the fourth charge I would add an inability to think concrete processes of natural or physical change.”
You’ve made a similar claim before with respect to Badiou… or perhaps it only concerned the political scope of his work. Either way, it confuses me because natural/physical change has received a very substantial mathematical articulation, most notably in the field and sub-fields of dynamics, in terms of differential equations. Deleuze, who I’m guessing you’d pose as the wise alternative to Meillassoux/Badiou, clearly drew a great deal from these areas of research (this is reflected in much of his vocabulary and its internal relations) and I fail to see how Badiou and Meillassoux couldn’t follow suit. In fact there are a great deal of potential correspondences between some of the ‘agents’ of change in both (I’m thinking of Badiou’s event and Deleuze’s nonsense).
On the other hand, I’m not sure what kind of natural or physical change you’re referring to so my comment could be entirely off-base.
November 19, 2008 at 2:37 am
Dana, the problem as I see it isn’t so much the mathematics (I applaud Badiou’s rehabilitation of maths against romanticist obscurantism), rather the problem lies in reducing ontology to mathematics. It is here where I see Badiou falling into idealism. In other words, while the physical sciences are certainly mathematical (no argument here), Badiou has the maths doing all the work and the material element contributing nothing. Where math is a priori and deductive (Badiou’s famous deductive fidelity), the atomic properties of a hydrogen atom behaving in a specific experimental context are neither a priori or deductive. You have to provoke the hydrogen atom in that particular context to discover these properties. There is something of being here that differs from the mathematical while nonetheless being formalizable. This, I think, is what is ultimately missing in Badiou– the contingency and concreteness of a world in its logos. I therefore see Badiou repeating a classical metaphysical gesture of having form, morphe (in Badiou’s case maths) dominate matter, hyle, such that the hyle contributes nothing of significance and can simply be ignored. While you are absolutely correct to point out that maths play a special role in Deleuze’s differential ontology, Deleuze’s entire account of individuation and actualization is geared towards undermining the form/matter distinction such that hyle is generative of form. Badiou, I think, is beginning to overcome these problems in his most recent work with his account of appearance and intensity, but to truly respond to the problem I think he would have to entirely scrap the ontology of Being and Event.
November 19, 2008 at 3:39 am
I’m not sure Badiou is equating being with the discipline of mathematics wholesale. My interpretation is that mathematics is simply the language in which being as presentation receives its most rigorous formalization. Deduction is the fidelity that is specific to mathematics per se, but this doesn’t mean that it is the ONLY fidelity to science, for example, as a truth procedure. There is a definite contextual process in a physics experiment, not to mention a wide array of terms that helps contextualize what is observed, i.e. what some image of a particle collision actually means. I don’t think he’d deny this. It’s something about the concrete particularity of this process that you claim escapes maths, but I can’t tell what exactly it is you’re talking about. I’ll give it a shot though…
If it’s the lived engagement in scientific discovery that you’re referring to, I’m not sure Badiou thinks this is readily mathematizable either. In this case, you don’t necessarily disagree. The difference is, since it’s not mathematizable and hence not capable of being sensibly articulated in the language of presentation, he defines this process [of evental nomination and fidelity aka subject of truth procedure] as what is NOT being-qua-being, an operation, whereas you would say it still has some being. Still, it’s hard to say Badiou is so dismissive of something he ties quite closely to truth.
November 19, 2008 at 4:35 am
Badiou, equates ontology with mathematics, clearly stating that maths says what can be said of being. I am not talking about the lived experience of scientific discover, but the difference between being and existence. Math gives us nothing but formal possibilities. By contrast, existence is material actuality. Certainly ontology has something to do with existence, the “there is”, in addition to formal possibility. This entirely falls outside of the picture in Badiou’s ontology, co-opted instead by the formal possibilities explored by mathematics. While I certainly agree that science is an important truth procedure for Badiou, it is his ontological claims and their inadequacy I’m referring to. For a sense of what I’m talking about you might consult Adorno’s Lectures on Metaphysics. While I do not endorse Adorno’s position, he does a very good job discussing the tension between form and matter, essence and existence, and the dismissal of matter and existence throughout the history of philosophy. Badiou, as I see it, is a continuation of this trend.
November 19, 2008 at 4:40 am
Put a bit differently, Badiou aptly captures the whatness (essence) of being (maths), but not the thisness (existence) of being (its actuality). In my view, any ontology that hegemonizes being under whatness (form/essence) is necessarily inadequate and invites a sort of rationalist a priorism that turns us away from the world. An adequate ontology necessarily requires a robust account of existence or actuality, of material being, where existence is not simply functioning as that which fills a variable in an equation– f(x) = 2x where x is the variable –but is making a genuine contribution in excess of essence or form.
November 21, 2008 at 2:18 am
Just thought I’d point out that Badiou does indeed make room for ‘matter without form’ in his ontology. This is inconsistent multiplicity, or the void, as is explained in his section on Aristotle. Hence the excess over form you attribute to material being might correspond precisely with his excess of the void. Additionally, inconsistent multiplicity is in a certain way generative of form, or at least retroactively determinable as prior to it.
There’s a salient Lacanian overtone to this gesture and your generally dismissive regard for Badiou strikes me as odd in that you still appear to find some use in the work of the former. As you are probably aware, deprecating Badiou as an a prioristic idealist and anti-actualist is in complete contradiction with his own description of his project–dialectical, materialist and actualist (support for the latter being part of his argument against Deleuze). Perhaps it’s because his conception of what mathematics is doing differs quite drastically from your own.
Do you disagree? Maybe I’m missing the idealistic core of mathematics. Still, and despite your reference to the “contingency and concreteness of a world in its logos”, I have a lot of trouble thinking of how “concrete processes of natural or physical change” can be better conceived than in the language of (mathematical) physics. Badiou is calling for philosophy to give up the thought that it can do better and I take it you wholly reject this stance.
November 21, 2008 at 12:01 pm
Even if there is an ‘excess’ in Badiou, there certainly isn’t in Meillassoux. This is where Badiou and Meillassoux clearly differ it seems. For Meillassoux, there is only the ‘absolute’ contingent moment – Nothing else. There is no conditioning by nature whatsoever. The previous moment need not contain any of the seeds of the growth of the next moment. Meillassoux’s ontology is one of absolute ex nihilo irruption. While mathematical physics may well be able to conceive of natural and physical change, it certainly seems as if the type of mathematical ontology proposed so far by Meillassoux (admittedly this is only a glimpse, After Finitude is merely a prolegomena) gives an unsatisfactory conception of such change.
It seems to me that the comment – ‘To the fourth charge I would add an inability to think concrete processes of natural or physical change’ – is absolutely spot on and really presents the key problem with Meillassoux’s ontology. Also any attempt to ‘think concrete processes of social and political change’ without being able to ‘think concrete processes of natural or physical change’ would certainly start from an unconvincing foundation. (However, social and political change is certainly not Meillassoux’s concern so far – he need never mention Politics in his entire career and this should not necessarily mean that we can critique his ontology for this lack)
November 21, 2008 at 12:02 pm
I did not call for “matter without form”, but said something quite different. I said that throughout the history of philosophy matter has been hegemonized by form, such that matter contributes nothing, i.e., clay is put in a mould forming a brick such that understanding the mould says all that is relevant or important about the bricks. The issue of inconsistent multiplicities is something quite different in Badiou, and, I think generates a number of serious problems of its own vis a vis the question of the relationship between inconsistent and consistent multiplicities, or how we get from one to the other… Badiou, of course, attempts to understand this in terms of what he refers to as “the transcendental”, though I don’t think it quite does the jobs for reasons I’ve outlined in the past.
I’m not sure why you would suggest I am dismissive of Badiou. I have written a good deal about him here, have published on his work, and have presented on his work on a number of occasions. The fact that I find some problems with his ontology is simply a part of what takes place in philosophy. Meillassoux and Hallward, as well, have some problems with Badiou’s ontology– ergo the reason they’re developing their own ontologies –that doesn’t entail that they’re dismissive or depracating of Badiou. I’m surprised you miss the idealistic dimension of mathematics, as idealism and maths have often been deeply woven together. One need only think of Plato or Leibniz to see this. You also misconstrue my point when you write, I have a lot of trouble thinking of how “concrete processes of natural or physical change” can be better conceived than in the language of (mathematical) physics. You’ll note that I never said otherwise. What I did say is that maths cannot exhaust the whole story and is just a part of the story. As for my assertion that criticizing (not “depracating”) Badiou’s position as leading to an a prioristic idealism, clearly a philosopher’s description of his position (dialectical materialism, actuality) can be at odds with where that system actually leads. In other words, for any philosophy there is the level of what the philosophy says it’s doing or how it self-referentially describes itself, and what that philosophy is actually doing. By analogy with psychoanalysis, this would be the difference between ego-discourse or how the analysand describes or represents himself, and what the analysand’s speech actually says in the course of his sessions. Nor do I think my understanding of maths differs markedly from Badiou’s. Indeed, as I said initially, one of the things I find most appealing in Badiou is his rehabilitation of maths in philosophy, and his treatment of math as something other than a language or a construction. That said, I do not think that maths can exahust ontology, which is quite different from saying that maths have no place in ontology. I am not, at any rate, somehow rejecting the claim that investigation of nature should somehow exclude mathematics.
November 21, 2008 at 12:03 pm
Hallward, as I mentioned in the post, pretty much sums up the issues I find in Badiou… Perhaps if you focused on those four criticisms…
November 21, 2008 at 5:42 pm
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