It could be argue that the debate between the realists and the anti-realists revolves around a set of basic paradoxes, or perhaps antinomies, arising from our contemporary state of knowledge today. It will be recalled that Husserl claims that Nature cannot be the condition for Consciousness because Consciousness is the condition of Nature. With this claim, Husserl reveals the inner logic of correlationism. If correlationism is to be an internally consistent position, then the transcendental subject upon which it is based must be rigorously separated from the knowledge that it is to ground lest it fall into a paradox or contradiction. Like Russell’s set of all sets that are not members of themselves, this sort of self-membership to the object is grounds must be excluded.

Yet within our current state of knowledge or within the scope of our best working hypotheses, this thesis generates a set of paradoxes or apparent absurdities:

1) Consciousness is to ground knowledge, yet neurology strongly supports the claim that consciousness is grounded in the brain. How can something that is simultaneously constituted by consciousness, Husserl would put it, also be constituted by that which constitutes it? We seem to get a vicious circle here that is not at all of the virtuous or hermeneutic kind. Moreover, the research in neurology indicates that we do not get a nice one-to-one mapping between neural and cognitive states and what phenomenology purports to teach us about the nature of consciousness. Often the phenomenological analysis is mistaken. Thus, for example, we can imagine a phenomenological analysis of attraction or allure and our experience of another person being friendly or approachable. The cognitive analysis of this phenomenon, based on empirical research, indicates that experiencing someone as friendly and approachable has much to do with the degree to which their pupils are dilated. It is highly unlikely that this would ever be caught in a phenomenological analysis.

2) Again, consciousness purports to be the ground of Nature, yet evolutionary theory tells us that evolution is the ground of consciousness. Again, we find ourselves in the same circle. How are we to simultaneously think consciousness constituting nature and being constituted by nature?

3) Perhaps the most challenging case is quantum mechanics. By now most are familiar with Heisenberg’s uncertainty and the thesis that there’s a fundamental epistemic limit to what we can know at the quantum level. To all appearances, the researcher “constitutes” the observed. Unlike classical physics– and even relativity physics which is still susceptible to a realist interpretation –where the observation had no effect on the observed, in quantum mechanics this is not the case. Many quantum physicists concluded that our observations of quantum phenomena are just observations of communicable experience, and we have no idea what the reality in-itself might be behind these phenomena. Just as Ptolemy’s physics is perfectly serviceable as a description of planetary movements in a large number of cases, the thesis is that it is enough for the equations and predictions to work out, without raising the question of whether what is described in these equations refers to properties that belong to quantum “entities” themselves. But here again we find ourselves in the paradoxical circle. Quantum phenomena are to function as the grounds of the world yet they are constituted by us, the observer.

I do not know how to resolve these apparent paradoxes but I do not think they can be swept under the rug as so many correlationists would like to do. When Ben, in comments to my “Naturalism” diary describes an encounter between a supporter of Jean-Luc Nancy claiming that science is identical to faith and a Kantian claiming that science is pure speculation and therefore irrelevant, it seems to me that he describes an attitude of willful ignorance endemic in Continental philosophy whereby it is fought that one both maintains a position of superiority with respect to science, knowing a deep and fundamental (grounding) truth not known by scientists, and that therefore they can simply ignore our present or what we have found in these fields. This position of willful ignorance strikes me as being based more on a defensive posture than anything else. At some point, however, lest this entire form of philosophy eventually become entirely irrelevant, those coming from the Continental tradition will have to follow the lead of thinkers like Bergson, Merleau-Ponty, and Deleuze and stop denouncing these sciences as merely dogmatic or outside of philosophy and start taking them seriously as things that demand to be thought and which demand a critique of a certain way of doing philosophy itself.