Over at Speculative Heresy, I think we get to the core of the issue in the debate between realism and anti-realism, as well as how philosophical debates should be conducted. Responding to Mikhail, Nick gives a succinct summary of Meillassoux’s argument, writing:
I think we may be talking past each other to some degree, but let me try to clarify what I’m saying.
To be clear, ‘absolute time’ is not referring to Newtonian time. Einstein empirically discredited that (and Kant and Leibniz, as you note, philosophically discredited it). Absolute time, as Meillassoux uses it, is just a short hand for a time outside of the correlationist time (again, I’ll take Kant and Husserl as being the archetypes of this view).
Now when I say that absolute time is a fundamental assumption of cosmology, evolution, etc., I mean that these sciences are speaking of a time before the very possibility of correlationist time. To deny that an absolute time outside of correlationist time exists, is to deny that these sciences are speaking about anything. They literally make no sense if we assume time (and really, existence) burst onto the scene with the emergence of thought. But to argue that absolute time exists is only to accept a very minimal definition of it – that correlationism emerged within something larger. What that something is, is undetermined so far and a problem for future work. But that it is, seems indisputable to me. (And I believe Hawking’s quote says no more and no less than that, as well.) But maybe this is another manifestation of our differend, since I take these empirical sciences to clearly show the existence of an absolute time, whereas you are more focused on the philosophical conundrums?
The problem for correlationism then, as Levi succinctly points out in his post, is that correlationism sees the mind as condition for Nature, whereas the existence of absolute time shows Nature to be the condition for mind. (Although I’d need to read Kant’s later work to see how the Opus Postumum fits into this schema. I do have Forster’s book, on your recommendation, which I should really crack open.)
As for Hawking’s quote, I think he’d need to respond to the idea of structural realism. No one is denying that theories are used to give us knowledge about reality. What the instrumentalist says is that these theories are only pragmatic and have no truth-value, whereas the structural realist will say that this is incapable of explaining the predictive success of science.
To this, Mikhail responds, remarking that:
Nick, I think I understand your position but the problem with Meillassoux’s argument succinctly is this: while it looks as though he is critiquing correlationism from “inside” by showing how it cannot account for something like arche-fossil, he in fact is critiquing correlationism from outside perspective by imposing the meaning of time on correlationism that it would not accept. As I tried to show, his refutation of correlationism rests on the assumption that correlationism does not share, i.e. that time is something that is a property of mind-independent world.
Before proceeding to parse Mikhail’s actual argument, such as it is, let’s pause to note something. Mikhail criticizes Meillassoux for critiquing correlationism from the outside. I may be mistaken in my understanding of what Mikhail is suggesting here, but I think this is a revealing moment in his understanding of philosophical methodology and what it means to critique another position. If I am reading Mikhail faithfully, for him the only legitimate critique of a philosophical position would be an immanent critique. From the standpoint of immanent critique, you work within the constraints of whatever philosophical system you happen to be working with, bringing nothing external to bear on the position. A famous example of immanent critique would be nearly any movement in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. When Hegel critiques, for example, sense-certainty in the opening of the Phenomenology, he doesn’t bring anything from outside the claims of sense-certainty to show that this position is inadequate, but rather shows how the very claims of sense-certainty itself fail to say what it purports to say, thereby generating an internal contradiction with itself. Very different examples and procedures of immanent critique can be found in the works of Derrida or in the works of hermeneuticians such as Gadamer. In all of these cases the procedure is to restrict oneself to the text and the claims of the text in analyzing the text. All of us trained in the tradition of Continental philosophy more or less were trained in this tradition of critique and hermeneutics. In far less sophisticated terms than those of Hegel, Derrida, or Gadamer, this would be the standard pedagogical practice where the professor forbids the student from rejecting the claims of Aristotle’s Physics by bringing the discoveries of contemporary physics to bear. Here the reasonable pedagogical aim is for the student to understand Aristotle in his own terms, to attend to Aristotle’s own arguments, and to develop “close reading” skills (as Adrian Peperzak always used to say to us) rather than dismissing texts from the history of philosophy outright. From this pedagogical perspective, the only legitimate critique of a philosopher’s position in a student essay would be the demonstration of an internal contradiction in that position or the failure to take account of something crucial or fundamental with respect to our experience.
While I believe this pedagogical approach is laudable in its aim of cultivating close reading skills, developing an attentiveness to text, and promoting a respect for the history of philosophy, I also think that in textually oriented philosophy programs has had the negative and unintended side effect of developing philosophy students that see this mode of textual approach as the way that philosophy as such should be conducted. That is, rather than a question of determining the truth with respect to these questions, philosophy almost entirely becomes an engagement with texts from the history of philosophy and often texts from a highly specific canon. I also think it is worthwhile to ask why this approach to philosophy has largely been embraced by private liberal arts religious schools, rather than state schools (there are, of course, notable exceptions such as Suny Stonebrook, Memphis, and Penn State). The question here, however, would be that of why Continental philosophy, with its text based approach, has found such a welcome home in private religious schools. I don’t have the answer to this question but I do have some suspicions.
read on!
Now, Mikhail contends that Meillassoux is guilty of bringing something external to bear on Kant’s position. As Mikhail puts it, “as I tried to show, his refutation of correlationism rests on the assumption that correlationism does not share, i.e. that time is something that is a property of mind-independent world.” At the outset, I find this claim to be curious. No one is debating whether or not time, for Kant is a “property of mind-independent world.” Everyone who has ever read Kant is agreed that time is not a property of mind-independent world. The question is whether or not Kant’s thesis is true. This is properly where philosophical discussion emerges. While certainly the hermeneutically informed philosopher is reasonable in claiming that we must first have an understanding of a text or philosophical position before we can critique that position, understanding texts is not the final word where texts are concerned. Were this not the case, Kant would be guilty of bringing “external considerations to bear” in his criticisms of Hume.
Mikhail goes on to write:
Now I think you are buying Meillassoux’s argument about “time before time” too easily. There’s no two types of time – “absolute time” and “time of correlation” – it is either one or the other, that’s the point. If you think time is something that is characteristic of things-in-themselves and human subjects only recognize this time and learn to measure it, then there’s no “correlationist time” – if you think that time is a relation that the mind establishes (to put it simply) between objects or events (this comes before that etc etc) the same way space is a relation, then there is no other kind of time, period. I don’t think it disproves anything about cosmology or geology, as Alexei mentioned already, that time can very well be understood in terms of “correlationist time” – Now the question whether time existed before human givenness, as Meillassoux puts it, only makes sense if you already rejected “correlationist time” – that is before you are even making your argument against correlationism, you’ve already discarded its major premise. That’s all I was trying to show.
A couple of points are worth noting here. First, I am unclear as to why Mikhail is convinced that there cannot be two types of time or why it has to be one or the other. It seems to me, at least, that it is completely possible for there to be time experienced by humans as described by phenomenologists like Husserl and Heidegger, and time as it belongs to the natural world. Certainly the sun did not cease appearing to rise and set once Copernicus discovered, in fact, that the earth revolves the sun and certainly there is no reason to suppose that time will cease to appear as it does to humans should there also be a natural time that is a property of things-in-themselves. The two positions are not inherently mutually exclusive.
Now, Mikhail claims that Meillassoux’s argument only makes sense if we’ve already rejected “correlationist time”, but it seems to me that this is a distortion of Meillassoux’s actual argument. Meillassoux’s line of argument can be summed up by quoting a single passage from After Finitude. Meillassoux writes, “…why is this [correlationist] interpretation of ancestrality obviously insupportable? Well, to understand why, all we have to do is ask the correlationist the following question: what is it that happened 4.56 billion years ago? Did the accretion of the earth happen, yes or no?” (16). For those interested in a thorough discussion of Meillassoux’s argument and his response to counter-arguments, you can refer to my posts here, here, here, and here.
So what is it, Mikhail? Did the world accrete 4.56 billion years ago or not? If one answers “yes”, then you have one of two options. You can show how, within the framework of correlationism, this knowledge is possible. I have not yet seen such an account. The realist argues, contra the correlationist, that the correlationist cannot account for knowledge claims such as this. The reason is very simple. As Kant himself claims, time is not a mind-independent property of things-in-themselves. We’re all agreed that this is what Kant claims. If you disagree, I invite you to simply consult what Kant says in the Critique of Pure Reason A35-36/B52. The whole problem is that knowledge claims about the accretion of the earth 4.56 billion years necessarily pertain to things-in-themselves because they are claims about the world prior to the advent of consciousness. From the correlationist perspective, these claims should therefore be meaningless. Yet they are not meaningless.. This entails that the other possibility is for the correlationist to renounce correlationism, go back to the drawing board, and adopt a realist position. Consequently, if you answer yes, you have one of two options: either give a correlationist account of these knowledge claims or renounce correlationism and adopt realism. Perhaps Meillassoux is bringing something “external to correlationism” to bear (namely the arche-fossil, which, note, is not the same as the fossil… read the first post linked to above), but in doing this Meillassoux is not doing anything philosophically illegitimate, but is merely evoking a readily recognized element of our knowledge– that the earth accreted 4.56 billion years ago –and asking how the correlationist can handle this bit of knowledge within their framework. His claim is that they cannot, but he could be mistaken.
The other option is for the correlationist to bite the bullet and simply affirm that knowledge claims about a world prior to the existence of life and humans are meaningless and are not knowledge at all. This, for example, seems to be the route that Husserl took. As Husserl consistently argued, following the letter of the correlationist logic, Nature cannot be a condition for Consciousness because Consciousness is the condition for Nature. Consequently, from the Husserlian standpoint, any talk of a world prior to humans or consciousness (Husserl would argue that consciousness cannot be equated with humans, taking the thesis even further to its logical conclusion) cannot but be nonsense on stilts. If one takes this route, we have a genuine “differend” in Lyotard’s sense of the term, where we have a dispute between two opposed positions that can, under no circumstances, be brought into accord with one another.
At any rate, these are the options. It is not that Meillassoux is assuming from the outset what he sets out to prove. Rather, he very straightforwardly presents his argument and why he believes arche-fossils are at odds with correlationist thought. The ball is in the correlationist court from there. One further point. Alexei jumps in and writes:
Just a couple of things, which may be totally insignificant.
RE “the time of science.” As Far as I know ‘time’ isn’t an ontological entity for the sciences either (I tried to make this point above, but clearly didn’t succeed). Time = metric/mathematical dimension in virtue of which rates of change/movement can be calculated. Although theoretically ‘primitive’ (i.e. unanalysable), it’s not an object, or structure. Time isn’t a property of anything — nor is space for that matter (See the notions of block time and Spacetime for instance — more here). I take it that this is Mikhail’s point, really. If you don’t have theoretical objects that can undergo certain kinds of transformations, you don’t have time (hence why the big bang has come up again). So honestly, much of this argument seems to be based on a distortion of how the sciences actually handle time. It’s never treated as a property, but as a dimension (which means, it’s not something objects have). Ultimately, what’s important is that time and space are a priori — independent of experience, necessary, and non-conceptual — so they are by definition independent of facticity.
Less philosophically put, the Math comes before the observation, and actually determines what it is we’re looking for, what can be observed, and what follows form it. why isn’t that enough? I mean, this is actually one of those moments where we should actually look at what scientific researchers do with time, rather than speculating about what time is independent of us humans.
While I am all for looking at how scientists actually talk about the world and what scientists actually do, I think Alexei here conflates the metrics we use to measure the world with what is measured. As I argued in my previous post, these metrics are arbitrary, but it does not follow from that that what we measure is itself a human construction. Based on my own forays into physics– and I could be mistaken here –my impression is that physicists have sided with Lucretius on this issue. That is, the position of physicists is that time and space are products of entities and therefore properties of entities, rather than the thesis that time and space are containers of entities.
Larval Subjects . 
April 28, 2009 at 12:53 am
You know what, I’m getting tired of you scoring points of my discussion with Nick here – either have the guts to engage me directly or write some positive contribution to this discussion in your own name.
April 28, 2009 at 12:56 am
You are not reading Mikhail faithfully, Mikhail never said what Mikhail is apparently saying, Mikhail wrote quite clearly in the very passage you cite that his issues were with QM seemingly offering an inside critique while doing an outside critique – seriously, Levi, are you getting some sort of sick pleasure out of twisting my every word?
April 28, 2009 at 1:03 am
I am becoming increasingly worried about your sanity, Levi – you are bypassing all of my issues with Meillassoux, instead of simply admitting that you do not understand my argument, and basically are citing the book at me. Maybe you should just post the whole first chapter of the book here in bold, I’m sure it will work just fine.
Grandpa out!
April 28, 2009 at 1:13 am
Honestly Mikhail, are you capable of anything other than ad hominem arguments and red herrings? Someone has not understood the arguments, but I don’t think that’s taking place on this end. I have, to the best of my ability, addressed your problems with Meillassoux and argued that they are ill founded.
April 28, 2009 at 1:15 am
Mikhail,
You write:
I addressed this point throughout the post and why I think your problem here is misguided. You really seem to flip out when someone answers one of your critiques. Are you always this imperious in debate?
April 28, 2009 at 1:18 am
Another whining red herring from Mikhail. First, the suggestion that I am not engaging you directly is absurd given that I’ve written two two thousand word posts on my blog directly engaging you. Second, presumably in the thesis that I should make a “positive contribution in my own name” you are taking me to task for endorsing Meillassoux’s argument. What an odd claim coming from the “Kant is the Torah” guy.
April 28, 2009 at 1:18 am
Yes, I am also very insecure and I need to always say the last word in every debate in addition to multiple names that I have to drop, accusations that I have to make, and insinuations that I must at least bring up (in addition to my casual psychoanalyzing of my enemies) – why else would I participate in a weblog discussion?
April 28, 2009 at 2:14 am
Levi,
Perhaps you can explain this to me. When Nick writes (a point you seem to agree with):
“Now when I say that absolute time is a fundamental assumption of cosmology, evolution, etc., I mean that these sciences are speaking of a time before the very possibility of correlationist time. To deny that an absolute time outside of correlationist time exists, is to deny that these sciences are speaking about anything.”
What I don’t understand is what is the point about cosmological findings and Kant. I mean, in what way is it more problematic for a Kantian to talk about events before human’s existed, than it is to talk about events that happened yesterday (let us say, an earthquake). In either case, is not the human being (scientist/theorist) forming a cohesive theory based on his/her concepts and experiences (even if they are measurements taken from instruments, or mathematical calculations). For that matter, any conclusion about events in the world a Kantian makes is already in the past, is it not? Talking about cosmology just strikes me as a rhetorical move.
To put it another way, if a Kantian is talking about “something” when talking about yesterday’s earthquake, then he/she would also be talking about “something” when talking about the Big Bang.
This is an honest question. I’m just not getting the “bite” of this argument against correlationalism.
April 28, 2009 at 2:32 am
Kevin,
Maybe I can try to clarify what I’m getting at; I’m still struggling to articulate it precisely myself. The force of the cosmological example, in part, is that it very clearly occurred prior to any entity being there to experience it. Now for a Kantian, we can’t know anything about the world in-itself. Yet the arche-fossil suggests that we do know that a time existed prior to any correlation – i.e. that we do know something about the world in-itself. It seems to me that the only way a Kantian can consistently take these findings is to deny that we actually know that something existed before the correlation. But that denial, to me, seems to fly in the face of all the evidence we have from cosmology, evolutionary theory, geology, etc. Independently of whether any specific theory is correct (e.g. the inflationary theory of the early universe), they still all point to the existence of a time before correlationism. Which is a very minimal knowledge of the absolute, but it is still only consistent with some form of realism.
I may be mistaken, but I think Levi’s take on the arche-fossil is somewhat different, although very similar. (For example, I think he’s willing to ascribe more definitiveness to specific theories than I am.)
April 28, 2009 at 2:34 am
Kvond,
You write:
If this were all the correlationist were claiming, I wouldn’t have a problem with the correlationist position. I mean, clearly it is an obvious point that humans form theories about the world, that we must relate to the world in order to test these theories, etc., etc., etc. I’m no more a fan of speculations divorced from careful investigation than the correlationist is. The thing is that the correlationist is going one step further. The correlationist is not simply making the eminently reasonable claim that we form theories and must relate to the world in order to know the world (that we can’t know the nature of the world a priori through pure speculations), but is claiming that the mind structures reality in such a way that we can never know whether or not our claims about the world pertain to the world as it is in itself or are merely phenomena. As a consequence, any knowledge claims about the world, for the correlationist, necessarily include the unstated premise or “fine print” of “for us”, e.g. “the world is this way for-us, as to whether or not it is this way in-itself, we cannot know.” The argument from the “arche-fossil” has bite with respect to this debate because it is based on a claim about time prior to the advent of any consciousness. This is a challenge because we’re all, I think, agreed with the thesis that life evolved, that the universe is ancient, and that the world accreted well before consciousness came into existence, but it’s not clear how the correlationist can admit this into their ontology. Since, from the correlationist perspective, knowledge claims are restricted to experience or the structure of consciousness, these claims should, strictly speaking, be meaningless or “dogmatic”, yet we all treat them as genuine articles of knowledge.
I have problems with the correlationist position on a number of different fronts. First, on epistemological grounds I believe 1) it renders a good deal of our knowledge incoherent (as such knowledge is excluded or rejected as dogmatic), and 2) that it situates the whole question of epistemology in the wrong place. Whereas the question of epistemology should, in my view, be a question of communities of inquirers and institutions engaging in experimentation and the use of technology to produce knowledge, the question instead gets presented as the question of how it is possible for a subject to represent an object. In my view, I think this model of knowledge shares little resemblance to how knowledge is produced or what knowledge is, so from the outset I think it’s the wrong question to be asking. I think Kuhn, Latour, Stengers, and Foucault already have a more accurate picture of how knowledge develops and is produced, even though I’d quibble with each of these thinkers on this or that issue. Second, I disagree with the correlationist on metaphysical grounds. As a good “Spinozist” (of sorts), I do not think humans have any special privileged or central place in the order of being. One of the metaphysical problems with correlationism is that it perpetually places humans at the center and the human world relation as a relation that is implicit in all metaphysical relations. I think that’s just wrongheaded. Finally third– and I’m often not explicit on these grounds –I think it’s tremendously important to not simply evaluate the propositional content of a philosophical position, but to approach philosophy as a social phenomenon organizing institutions and particular types of social relations in a particular way. In my view, the manner in which correlationism has unfolded in the history of philosophy has had a number of negative consequences at the instutitional level to how philosophy is practiced, the nature of the questions it is asking, and to the training of students. It has led to a way of doing philosophy, for example, that privileges texts over questions and problems, thereby making it more difficult to get at the truth or even recognize that there’s a problem here. As a consequence, someone like yourself who is a first rate philosopher but who is not a scholar but someone interested in truth gets pushed to the side because you are not engaged primarily in a hermeneutic of texts or the history of philosophy, but are actually trying to figure things out and aren’t afraid to take positions on issues that will exclude the sanctity of other texts.
April 28, 2009 at 2:44 am
Nick,
I don’t know that I think these theories are any more definitive than you do. I just think that we side with the best and most well supported theories available at the time while also recognizing what still remains unexplained in these theoretical frameworks (I was really delighted with your link to the 13 mysteries in the post that spawned these posts). This is why I keep writing about the difference between induction and deduction. I think philosophy tends to privilege a model of deductive argument or immediate self-evidence through our direct relationship to consicousness. Inductive arguments are much more modest and cautious. Where a deductive argument says “x, y, and z prove r” and inductive argument says “x, y, and z strongly support r”. Most of the matters we’ve been discussing concerning neurology, evolution, the big bang, etc., are inductive matters. They are strongly supported but there’s always the possibility that they’ll be overturned by subsequent experiments and evidence. However, despite the fact that that possibility exists, it is unreasonable to suggest, as you argued in the first part of your post, that we should simply dismiss these claims until they are “proven”. Inductive arguments are never really “proven”. Rather, they are supported to such a degree that it is unreasonable to reject them. Philosophy needs to take a softer position and make more room for induction imo.
April 28, 2009 at 3:50 am
Nick:
I think I agree and I disagree with this formulation of the problem as I understand it. Let’s think about it slowly – I will be playing a familiar role of a correlationist. Arche-fossil is an object, I examine this object and I find out that it is X number of year old, much older than humanity, I then conclude that this particular object was there before humanity came around (and imagine that it was there the same way it is here in my hand – I can certainly think it, it’s not impossible), but due to my correlationist theory of time (“relative time”), I cannot claim that “a time existed” there where this fossil was before correlation. If I were there to see the fossil, it would be in relation to me and other objects and therefore in time (as I understand it in my correlationism), but at this point, I can only say that as a result of my experience of this particular object, I conclude that it existed before humanity came around. I can account for the fact that it existed before humanity, scientific calculation methods tell me that this object is X number of years old. I cannot account for the claim that it existed “in time” because as a correlationist I think that time is a relation that is established between objects as I experience them, but I can certainly think this fossil as existing in time X number of years ago, even if there was no humanity there, I can easily imagine it existing in time the way it exists in time now as I am holding it and measuring its age. This is no different, for a correlationist, than to suggest that at this very moment, there exists an object in-itself that I perceive as my desk.
Now, if on the other hand, my theory of time was that it is something that exists independently of humans as a sort of absolute system of reference (like a spacial system of coordinates), then it would be very easy for me to explain how the fossil existed in time before humanity came about, but I wouldn’t be a correlationist then. In other words, the fossil question – how do you account for the fact that this fossil existed X number of years ago, before humans were around? – cannot be answered by a correlationist because it is posed based on the assumption that there was time before humans, real physical absolute time (imagine clock ticking in the background), a concept of time that does not make sense to a correlationist.
Again, by existence of a time before correlationism, I am assuming you mean not something like “time before theory of correlationims” but a “time before humans” – a correlationist would say that because it does not think that the idea of absolute time is plausible, it cannot respond to the question posed in such a way. I think this was my point in many of these discussion – you cannot claim a win for your team if an imaginary correlationist answer the question it considered nonsensical, such as was there time before humanity came around? Or, can God microwave a burrito so hot that even he himself cannot eat it?
I know that our “normal” idea of time is so commonsensical and so easy to understand, that it is difficult to imagine that someone would dispute the notion of time as something that begins at one point and just flows, and all objects are somehow found in it. I’m leaving aside here Levi’s strange idea that time somehow belongs to things-themselves (I’m assuming as a quality of a thing, maybe even primary quality, who knows?) and I am talking about our usual perception of time in terms of minutes, hours, days, years – we do say, after all, that such-and-such cosmological event took place X number of billion years ago, right?
Let me ask you my very own naive non-scientific question (and foolishly expose myself to ridicule for not knowing much science): if we measure cosmological time in years, what kind of years are they? So 13.5 billion year ago the universe came into existence – I take it to mean 13.5 billion years here are your usual years, right? My mother is 81 years old, my uncle is 75 years old, my universe is 13.5 billion years old kind of years? How did the time flow, for example, during the first billion years since the Big Bang? How about during the first million years, or first hundred years, or the first year for that matter? first twenty four hours? first hour? Are these notions of “hour” or “year” or “million years” not only meaningful in light of human experience of them projected backwards to the very beginning of time? I mean clearly I don’t know anything about science here, feel free to laugh – but I am just wondering…
April 28, 2009 at 4:12 am
Mikhail,
You write:
A minor quibble, but the arche-fossil is not an object. There is the fossil– for example this bit of carbon here –and then the arche-fossil. The arche-fossil is something that is resolutely not an object in the present, but rather something that can only be inferred on the basis of the fossil in the present. This is not a huge point, but nonetheless important for being clear about the arguments being made.
This is the obvious correlationist rejoinder, but– and I’m speaking honestly here, not maliciously –shouldn’t this move be forbidden by the correlationist theory of time? What sense does it make to talk of a time before humans, and more fundamentally a “coming-to-be” of correlationist time? The whole problem is that here you have the conditioned (phenomena) functioning as a condition for mind. But how can “phenomena” function as a condition for mind when mind is the condition for phenomena? There’s a short-circuit here. That’s the nub of the argument. Again, I’m being honest here in asking this question. I don’t see how you can get around it. It simply makes no sense to have a phenomena functioning as a condition for mind.
I think this mischaracterizes the issue. The issue isn’t about the theory of correlationism, but about the truth (or lack thereof) of correlationism. Correlationism would be true regardless of whether or not anyone formulated the theory of correlationism.
This is a fair rejoinder, in one sense. The correlationist begins with the thesis that absolute time is implausible, but the question is whether or not their argument holds up under scrutiny when presented with the counter-example of the arche-fossil. As I argued in my most recent post, the correlationist has three options: 1) presenting a correlationist theory capable of accounting for the arche-fossil without falling into contradiction (presumably what the correlationist would want insofar as they don’t wish to reject the theory of evolution), 2) relinquishing the position of correlationism altogether for a realism, or 3) rejecting the notion of ancestral statements altogether (presumably what nobody wants… I hope).
I am unclear as to why “common sense” is entering the discussion here. Neither the correlationist nor the realist has a “common sense” view of time. The correlationist theory of time departs from our “common sense” concept of time because it argues that time doesn’t belong to the world but rather is a creation of our minds. The realist position diverges from the common sense conception of time because it argues that time is very different than our experience of time, i.e., that common sense is not a reliable guide to the nature of reality. In arguing the “strange idea” that time “somehow belongs to things-themselves” I am merely taking the realist stance on this matter. Time is not a product of minds but belongs to the world itself.
As for your naive question, I am not sure why it comes up at all. Again, the realist is already committed to the thesis that our lived experience of time or common sense concept of time is not an accurate account of time, so the question doesn’t emerge in the context of this discussion.
April 28, 2009 at 4:58 am
Not sure where you’re getting this, I must have misread QM when he writes: “I will call ‘arche-fossil’ or ‘fossil-matter not just materials indicating the traces of past life, according to the familiar sense of the term ‘fossil’, but materials indicating the existence of an ancestral reality or event… An achre-fossil thus designates the material support on the basis of which the experiments that yield estimates of ancestral phenomena proceed…” [10]
Arche-fossils are clearly materials indicating something, so clearly some arche-fossil can be observable material objects, maybe I was simplifying a bit, but I don’t see anything concerning it being a resolutely not an object in the present – even “the luminous emission of a star” is very much material in that sense.
Levi, you are citing such large chunks of my comments that I am not sure what “move” this question refers to: “…shouldn’t this move be forbidden by the correlationist theory of time?”
For a correlationist, it makes no sense to talk of a “time before humans”, as I said, I thought, if we think of time as a form of intuition.
Where is this “here” – I’m being honest here, I don’t follow your questions – where do I say that I have the conditioned functioning as a condition for mind?
Again, sorry, where do I say that phenomena functions as a condition for mind?
Arche-fossil is not a counter-example to the implausibility of absolute time, absolute time cannot be discovered by experimentation, it cannot be established empirically, if it was so, we wouldn’t be talking about it as a theoretical premise, or at least that’s what I thought a “theory of time” would be. In other words, arche-fossil as interpreted by you or QM establishes some sort of a theory of absolute time, but that interpretation can be disputed and that was what I was trying to do.
To be fair, correlationist (like Kant) does not claim that time is a creation or a product of mind, it’s a form of intuition, a mode of interaction with the world (if you will), i.e. without the world there wouldn’t be time for correlationist either.
Saying the time belongs to the world itself sounds very interesting – does it belong to objects as a quality? is it a sort of a system of coordinates? how do you measure time that belongs to the world? My question was that clearly cosmology measures time in years, the same way I measure time in my commonsensical notion of time – are you saying then that cosmological time is neither correlationist nor realist?
April 28, 2009 at 5:40 am
Mikhail,
I stand corrected regarding the arche-fossil… I’m conflating the ancestral and the arche-fossil.
I am not suggesting that you’re claiming that phenomena function as a condition of mind, but that this is what the correlationist position requires if it is to introduce evolutionary and neurological claims. Being the reasonable fellow that you are, and given that you posted celebrations of Darwin’s anniversary on your blog, I assume that you support the theory of evolution and even neurology (though I’m not so sure in the latter case). The problem, as I see it, is that these are phenomena. Yet both evolution and neurology claim to account for the origins of mind, which the correlationist takes as a condition. How are we to simultaneously assert that a phenomena is responsible for the emergence of mind and that mind is the condition of phenomena? I honestly don’t see how you can have it both ways. Either nature is the condition of mind, in my view, and we have to abandon the correlationist thesis or mind is the condition of Nature and we have to abandon the evolutionary and neurological claims… Or perhaps there’s some third “dialectical” position that reconciles both, but I haven’t seen a plausible version of that third position.
The thesis is that ancestral statements are incoherent outside of positing absolute time that isn’t a product of mind. I emphasize the word “thesis” because perhaps there’s some whizbang correlationist account that can deal with this, but I haven’t seen it yet.
Yes, but when Kant claims that time is a “form of intuition” he is claiming that mind “creates” time rather than time belonging to things-in-themselves. Time, in other words, comes from mind, not the world.
According to the theory of relativity, time is a product of the velocity of objects. Time and space contract and dilate depending on the speed at which the object is moving. For example, if I am moving faster than you, time is more dilated for me. This is a physical property of you and me, not a subjective property. That is, your watch literally moves faster than my watch and you literally age faster than me if you are moving more slowly than me. The only constant here is the speed of light (so far, that might be overturned eventually). This came as a real surprise from Maxwell and played a tremendous role in Einstein’s development of the theory of special relativity. What Maxwell discovered, as I’ve mentioned before in our discussions, is that light’s speed is constant regardless of how fast anything else is moving relative to light. Speeds of all other things are variable depending on how fast they’re moving relative to one another. The real shocker came with the discover that regardless of how fast you’re moving the speed of light is always 186,000 mph with respect to your motion. This observation was what led to Einstein’s subsequent revisions of Newton and his this that time-space contracts and dilates relative to the constant speed of light. Clearly the way we measure time in terms of days and years is wildly at odds with this thesis as our common sense notion of time-space is that of a container that remains the same regardless. For example, with respect to the age of your grandmother we say that age is her age regardless of how fast she’s moving. This is not true, however, according to the physicist.
April 28, 2009 at 6:34 am
It’s sort of out of the left field, I have to admit – I mean what does it have to do with our discussion of time? I mean it probably does relate to the whole issue, but I don’t why we need to all of a sudden talk about this conditioned business. I don’t really understand what you mean when you say “phenomena functions as a condition of mind” – therefore I can’t say if I agree or disagree.
Takes as a condition of what, evolution and neurology? I don’t see how being a correlationist means that I have to deny evolution and neurology because they explain to me how mind comes into existence. And I don’t see how knowing how mind comes into existence (imagine I believed that it grew on a very special tree), somehow affects my knowledge of the functions of this mind – when I see color, I know both how I can do it (neurologically) and how I came to do it (evolutionary), yet I still see color, do I not? When I organize my perceptions spatially, I do the same – where exactly is the problem? You seem to be suggesting, and correct me if I’m wrong, that because we know what mind is (say mind=brain) and how it came to be somehow it changes what the mind does.
Again, I don’t know why you suddenly changed topic, I thought we were talking about fossils and time? As for nature conditions mind – see above, so what, mind still functions, and I don’t know if mind conditions nature is a valid correlationist options. I think I’ve said that before as long as there is a correlation between nature and mind, it’s correlationism.
Well, originally, you were talking about arche-fossils, as for ancestral statements, it’s a different matter as they are clearly not the same – again, I don’t know of any correlationist position that claims that time is a “product” of mind – saying that time is a form of intuition is not the same as saying that mind produces time – time is a result of the interaction between world and mind, I think I already wrote that before – maybe you have a different understanding of what a “form of intuition” is, I’m not sure.
Ah, I see. First of all, Kant does not just “claim” it, as you know, he goes through a series of logical steps that you need to disprove in order to disprove Kant (all that business of time is either a substance or an accident, a relation or not etc etc) – i.e. there needs to be a Bryant-Kant Correspondence here – you can’t just dismiss Kant’s position because you don’t like its implications. To be honest, I don’t think you are completely wrong here, it’s just you seem to suggest that mind somehow imposes time on objects that are otherwise timeless in Kant, is that a fair assessment? Let me ask you this: do you think that mind also imposes space on otherwise spaceless objects? if yes and you don’t think it is the case, why then is it so difficult for you to come out and say that spatial features of objects, not being part of mind’s imposition, are their primary qualities? They would clearly then be something that belongs to the object itself, right? I mean spatial features of an object, according to your dichotomy are either from mind from nature, if they are not from mind (again, assuming you went through Kant’s arguments and disproved them), they are from nature – we have us some primary qualities then, do we not?
So when the same physicist tells me that our universe is 13.5 billion years old, does he mean “years” as in our regular years, as in my mother’s (not grandmother’s, by the way) age or this cool contracting-dilating time? So this physicist is telling me something that is technically not true – I’m very confused here (honestly)…
April 28, 2009 at 6:58 am
Mikhail,
I think, maybe (I hope), we’re finally getting somewhere. You write:
These issues are all related in my view. What we’re ultimately talking about here is conditions and conditioning. If the conditions are to function as a ground of phenomena, then they cannot, in my view, themselves be conditioned by the phenomena they’re grounding. This is why I am talking about the conditioned and conditions. The conditions, as it were, must be subtracted from or separated from what they condition or ground. Without this subtraction we find ourselves in– again my view –a contradiction.
Well this is the debate: do they or don’t they exclude talk of mind arising from natural conditions. Given Kant’s claims in the B deduction about the split between empirical and transcendental subjectivity, the paralogisms, and the third antinomy, I don’t see how the Kantian can coherently claim that nature is a condition of mind as Kant understands mind. I am not, of course, denying that both you and I see color. That would be absurd. We can both agree on that much. But in my view the neurological account is radically at odds with the Kantian account here because transcendental subjectivity is, as Bryan would put it, neither phenomenal nor nuomenal. Given that any of the claims of neurology or evolution are phenomenal in the precise sense that they are cause and effect claims, the Kantian cannot consistently claim that evolution or neurology are conditions of mind.
Yes, yes, I know Kant goes through all sorts of steps to establish his position. I even carefully discussed those steps in my post “Time, Turtles, Kant, and Correlationism” which you praised. Kant’s arguments aside, we can still contest his thesis about the nature of time on different grounds. I’ve carefully tried to outline those grounds.
Within the framework of Kant’s own theory of time, what would allow us to say? We can only speak of time as it pertains to our own experience, not as it pertains to things-in-themselves. In his discussions of time and space in the Transcendental Aesthetic Kant says, as I’ve pointed out before, two contradictory things. First he claims that things-in-themselves do not at all have temporal or spatial qualities but are entirely different. Secondly he claims that we cannot know one way or another. We can refer to these two contradictory claims as the “strong” and the “weak” Kantian claims respectively. But in either case, we cannot attribute time and space as we experience them, according to Kant, to things-in-themselves. That’s just the text. I’m taking Kant at his word here. Apparently you would like to claim something different, so perhaps you’re not a Kantian after all.
See above.
That’s a good question and it had never occurred to me to wonder about it. I don’t know whether the scientist is referring to light years or to ordinary years. I’ll have to get back to you on that. In either event, the years in question pre-date the emergence of life.
April 28, 2009 at 7:23 am
I still don’t get: what do you mean when you say that evolution or neurology are conditions of mind? I thought evolution was a scientific theory that explains how I came about and neurology is a scientific theory that tell me all about the workings of my neurological systems – so even if I assume that mind=brain, neurology tells me all about how my mind works and it does so using the mind itself – what conditions what? If I study neurology and say that neurology is a condition of mind, then what about my mind’s studying of neurology, am I not in turn conditioning neurology? Can you drop the term “condition(ed)” and explain it in some different way?
I know this is my position – why are you retelling me my position? You didn’t answer my question about primary qualities – if the mind “imposes” time and space, then if you reject that position, why can’t you simply claim that time/space are primary qualities of objects? Why such hesitation when it comes to characterizing objects?
Look, I know you’ve read your Kant and can cite all sorts of cool citations, but I’m trying to have this very simple conversation about very general matters without being sent to B deductions or some such. I seriously doubt that your turtles post refuted Kant’s arguments for time/space being forms of intuitions, not offense, but I’ve read that post several times, let’s just stick with these issues, okay?
Um. usually when it’s light years, it says “light years” doesn’t it? I think that was my whole point, my mother and universe seems to be measured in the same old time of years. See here, for example, there’s a time line of the first few minutes since the Big Bang:
http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/BBNS.html
April 28, 2009 at 1:46 pm
The 13.5 billion years that our universe has existed are the same years that measure birthdays, seasonal change, etc. Meillassoux accepts this, which is why he describes an “absolute time” in which, e.g., stars, as well as you and I live and die. You need this absolute time to describe something like the appearance and disappearance of life.
Once he’s established absolute time, though, Meillassoux goes on to articulate a notion of “dia-chronicity,” which allows him to “express the temporal hiatus between world and relation-to-the-world…” (112).
The concept of time in Meillassoux is tricky, though, since absolute time most likely refers to something like the fact of hyperchaos (from the philosopher’s perspective) or to a more or less formalizable set of equations (from the perspective of the empirical science). The passage of time as it’s been understood since at least Aristotle doesn’t really get discussed (or maybe it’s just given over to the correlate).
It reminds me of Hyppolite’s comment on Hegel’s transition from the phenomenology to the logic: “the passage from the temporal to the eternal is Hegelianism’s most obscure dialectical synthesis.”
Also, light years are a measure of distance (9.4605284 × 10 to the 15th meters), not time.
April 28, 2009 at 1:59 pm
Levi: “These issues are all related in my view. What we’re ultimately talking about here is conditions and conditioning. If the conditions are to function as a ground of phenomena, then they cannot, in my view, themselves be conditioned by the phenomena they’re grounding. This is why I am talking about the conditioned and conditions. The conditions, as it were, must be subtracted from or separated from what they condition or ground. Without this subtraction we find ourselves in– again my view –a contradiction.”
Kvond: I wonder if this is strictly true, a “contradiction”. Does not this view come from the encumbered Cartesian Theatre framing of the question, “I mean something has to be causing these motion pictures” or, “These motion pictures must be causing something”. If we stand out side of the notion of a logical assertion either/or, is it not possible (probable) that these two things are co-determining, neither being the ultimate ground of the other. That is to say, both, descriptions of aspects.
April 28, 2009 at 2:06 pm
Mikhail,
You write:
I honestly find this to be a deeply perplexing remark, and I mean no offense by this. It seems to me that you are here conflating theory with the thing that the theory articulates or represents. When I say evolution and neurology are a condition of mind, I am saying that mind has a neurological base and that it would not exist at all without evolution. From a Kantian position as I understand it, this can’t work as brains and evolution are phenomena that are grounded in the mind as its their condition, not the reverse. The fact that the theory is produced by the brain doesn’t change matters at all. In my view, you’re here conflating the theory with the referent of the theory in a way that is akin to suggesting that when we have the thought of a chariot we have an actual chariot in our heads. Moreover, the fact that a theory is produced by minds does not establish the Kantian thesis that somehow reality is a creation or product of mind.
I thought I had been claiming this.
I don’t think these dimensions of Kant’s text can be set aside in these discussions. Kant’s distinction between transcendental subjectivity and empirical subjectivity in the B Deduction is especially relevant in this connection, because he’s fine with the thesis that empirical subjectivity is governed by cause and effect, but denies this of transcendental subjectivity insofar as it is transcendental subjectivity that imposes the category of cause and effect on the world, not the reverse. From a neurological perspective this sort of argument simply doesn’t work because there is no mind that is not a product of brain. Kant’s position requires a sort of condition that is outside of all this physical messiness.
April 28, 2009 at 2:07 pm
Levi: “The correlationist is not simply making the eminently reasonable claim that we form theories and must relate to the world in order to know the world (that we can’t know the nature of the world a priori through pure speculations), but is claiming that the mind structures reality in such a way that we can never know whether or not our claims about the world pertain to the world as it is in itself or are merely phenomena.”
Kvond:Well, this is the problem, as I see it. The cosmological argument (time before consciousness) is a rhetorical move. IF Kantians are talking about “something” when talking about yesterday, they are talking about something millions of years ago. Making the subject matter events before human beings does not make a difference. If there is absurdity, it is equal to each. The Cosmological argument simply is trying to point this out, but it has no additional grip in my mind (and I say this as being no fan of Kant). I think the whole thing comes down to “reference” and general concepts of correspondence.
Perhaps a Kantian would admit, just as we cannot know the thing-in-itself, it is equally be foolish to say that we have no epistemic relationship to it either. Implicit is that the “real” events in the world are responsible for causing the contents of our minds, and this causal relation must be an epistemic one (the causal effects are not random).
April 28, 2009 at 2:11 pm
[…] cases, with an eye towards why the readings of Kant matter. (I won’t address the recent hot topic concerning time and ancestrality, since I can’t devote the energy to it, especially as […]
April 28, 2009 at 2:14 pm
Kvond,
This is certainly the realist thesis, but not the Kantian thesis. For the Kantian we have no knowledge of things-in-themselves and whether they are governed by causality in the way they appear (to us) to be governed by causality. The best example of this in Kant’s thought is the third antinomy, where Kant addresses the debate between free will and determinism. Roughly summarized, Kant resolves this antinomy by arguing that while at the level of phenomena or appearances we seem to be completely determined by causality, at the level of nuomena or our being-in-itself beyond appearances there is nothing to prevent us from claiming we are free. This is because the category of causality imposed on the world by mind only functions with respect to appearances or phenomena, and we cannot know whether it pertains to things as they are in-themselves. As I’ve said before, Husserl perfectly articulates this logic when he observes that nature cannot be a condition of consciousness because consciousness is the condition of nature. This, I think, is the crux of the issue. When we start getting into matters where categories like causality have to be directly applied to mind (evolution, neurology) there’s a sort of short-circuit in the Kantian position as mind has to necessarily be exempted from the natural world as the condition of that natural world.
April 28, 2009 at 2:27 pm
Levi,
I suppose that this is why I don’t buy the Realist/Anti-Realist debate (not saying that there are not important differences being discussed). By simply positing a relation to the thing-in-itself (call it causal or not), this is already an epistemic relation. (Only when one inserts “properties” does one run into problems).
This is the way that I imagine it. If we make a sphere of the organism’s cognitions, with a definite border, and define all these cognitions, the sense of them within the sphere, recusively, but then through a force of logic recognize that our cognitions are so bound, and that the cognitions of other such spheres are so bound, we are forced to conclude that our ordered views of the world, the coherence of them, though internally consistent, can only be so through relation to what lies outside them. To speak strictly about what is outside of the sphere is denied, but what is not denied is to claim that our epistemic relations are fundamentally in relation to what lies beyond, what you want to call “the real”.
In this general landscape, the question of whether we really know the real, partially know the real, cannot know the real, are all misleading questions/debates. I say this of course with some affinity toward an anti-Kantian position.
April 28, 2009 at 2:58 pm
Kvond,
I don’t disagree with you with respect to what you say here about epistemology, but I don’t think this is the issue under debate. The question is not whether we must relate to the world to know it, whether we draw distinctions, etc., but whether that relation to the world makes things in the world what they are such that these properties cannot be said to belong to the things themselves.
April 28, 2009 at 5:06 pm
[…] Grundlegung has a post on the matter, with Levi’s always-already-there response here, plus a couple of exchanges at Larval Subjects and a continuation of the thread at Speculative Heresy. Things are […]
April 28, 2009 at 5:20 pm
Rob,
I don’t know if you can find this comment in this long thread, but I wonder if you would agree with me that “absolute time” in chapter 1 is just there, it is postulated, not really explained etc etc?
April 28, 2009 at 5:29 pm
While I don’t agree with your thesis that Meillassoux simply “postulates” absolute time (I think his whole argument from ancestrality tries to explain why correlationist time won’t work), I think you’re right that he doesn’t tell us what it is. Nick agreed with you on this point as well, pointing out that there’s a lot more philosophical work to be done on this issue. Meillassoux is aware of this as well. The issue came up at the SR conference and roundtables reprinted in Collapse III.
April 28, 2009 at 5:38 pm
Levi: “but whether that relation to the world makes things in the world what they are such that these properties cannot be said to belong to the things themselves…”
Kvond: And this for me is what is strictly silly about the notion of “properties” “belonging” to something. Aside from the Aristotlean game of analogy with real (real estate) properties, there is nothing that property ascription really does for us. From my perspective, (and when there are entrenched debates that stretch over hundreds of years I assume that these are largely debates of sematics, and therefore I seek to see how each position is right), to say that a property belongs to something is only to say that it can enter into some kind of relation, a relation that is entirely dependent upon context. At the very most we want to say something like, “Object x has (really, really has) property y (this character or aspect), which is the capacity to produce ascriptions of property z from human beings using these historically contingent crteria). This claim is fairly substantial, but cannot be categorically established because the one to one correspondence between object x and human beings may not be the entire context that makes up this relation. Variable may occur which prevent object x with property y, from producing ascription z from human beings.
The very notion of things “belonging” to things-in-themselves is a Gods’eye notion, that we can look through all of historical contingency and stare right at it in a kind of non-relational sense. This is plain silly as an categorial achievement, but one understands that all objective thought is driven by what Arthur Fine called the “Natural Ontological Attitude” (NOA) [http://facweb.bcc.ctc.edu/wpayne/natural_ontological_attitude.htm], the sense that when we have reached agreement, things really, really are that way. The mistake is to try to philosophically ground, prove, enforce, secure, demand that they must be.
If one let’s go of the entire aim to ascribe properties as somehow naturally cohering to objects, a mistake that is itself rather Cartesian Theatrish, (that statements in our minds connect to states in the world in one to one fashion, estblishing meaning), much of this controversy fades away.
I understand though that you really do want to have the authority to ascribe properties to the thing-in-itself. I just don’t see what you get out of it. The thing-in-itself is a nonsensical figment of philosophical imagination, the non-relational relation.
April 29, 2009 at 4:14 am
Levi,
I think that’s what I meant too, forget the “postulate” then…
August 26, 2009 at 7:31 am
[…] variant of realism from what he calls the “correlationist” philosophical schools. One of Meillassoux’s central arguments is that scientists talk about a past which predates the existence of subjects, and therefore one must infer that there is some […]