Meaning and F act Ray Brassier s Speculative Nihilism and its Implications for Dialectics Geran Wales Pacific University
This paper seeks to frame the proper place for the empirical phenomenon of human meaning in the scientifically disenchanted world described by Ray Brassier. I embrace Brassier's statement that "Nihilism is not an existential quandary but a speculative opportunity" but disagree with his injunction that human meaning is unimportant. Meaning should be an object of philosophy insofar as we are biologically bound to experiencing the world in a meaningful way. Brassier's work is exciting for its application of rigorous analytic techniques to continental discourse, in a manner that makes contributions to both metaphysics and philosophy of science. Philosophers would do well do desist from issuing any further injunctions to re establish the meaningfulness of existence, the purposefulness of life, or mend the shattered concord between man and nature. Philosophy should be more than a sop to the pathetic twinge of human self esteem. Nihilism is not an existential quandary but a speculative opportunity. (Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction(xi) The recent work of Ray Brassier presents a fundamental challenge to the accepted ways in which philosophy has been performed in the past century. By using the technical precision of the analytic tradition to confront the giants of continental thought, he is able to begin a conversation many would think impossible. Seeing a complementary tendency between recent French materialism and radical Naturalism (particularly the Churchill's eliminative materialism) Brassier has opened a new trajectory that could lead to a productive reexamination of the aims of philosophy in the twenty first century. Nihil Unbound calls for a new scientific nihilism to break the trend of anthropocentric relativism that he sees as the still dominant doxa in almost all philosophy. Brassier insists that we have still not lent the proper attention the challenges that science raises. Over the course of a few centuries, the longstanding assumption that everything exists for a reason, that things are intrinsically purposeful and have been designed in accordance with a divine plan, is slowly but systematically dismantled, first in physics, then in chemistry, and eventually in biology, where it had held out longest. Curved space time, the periodic table, natural selection: none of these are comprehensible in narrative terms. Galaxies, molecules, and organisms are not for anything. Try as we might, it becomes increasingly difficult to construct a rationally plausible narrative about the world that satisfies our psychological need for stories that unfold from beginning, through crisis, to ultimate resolution (Brassier Interview) Res Cogitans (2012) 3:1 Wales 88 2155 4838 commons.pacificu.edu/rescogitans Brassier asserts that philosophy's response to this challenge has largely been a kneejerk attempt to reassert the meaning of human existence, rather than confronting the much more important and interesting challenge of a world without meaning as described by science. Some philosophers, particularly those of a continental bent, will be put off by this seemingly naive statement. One could imagine our interlocutor's line of reasoning: 'Why are you giving science such little scrutiny? Any scientific claim can only be made from a human perspective and therefore is subject to the limitations of the given human narrative in which it exists. This position which, following Quinton Meillassoux, Brassier calls "correlationism" assumes that it is impossible for humans to think a world without human thought. In Brassier's attempt to strengthen Meillassoux's argument against the correlation he brings to the table a hyper existentialist argument that he claims can resolve the issue, the absolute certainty of human extinction. Rather than this taking the form of a new being towards death which can only lead to a realization of the authentic constitution of the human qua human, Brassier means this as a supremely inhuman gesture. The difference lies in concept of world. Brassier quotes Heidegger "Strictly speaking we cannot say: there was a time when there were no human beings. At every time, there were and are human beings, because time temporalizes itself only as long as there are human beings" (Heidegger, 889) At the acknowledged risk of being overly simplistic the argument is the same as that attributed to our hypothetical correlationist. Brassier, again following Meillassoux, posits that Correlationism is a stage that must be passed through in order to move forward. The interesting point is rather I see as the disjunct between Heidegger's brilliant understanding of historicity and this position. A Doxic Heideggarian would argue that due to the fact of historicity, thought that seeks to place itself outside of its historical place falls victim to transcendental fallacy. My retort to this is a simple reversal. The position that defies historicity is that which indexes existence in its totality to human experience. Take any number of scientific studies that demonstrate the fact of eventual human extinction, such as Brassier's absolute example of the death of the sun. While one could say that such a happening is solely dependent on constructs of human thought (systems of mathematics, measurements, theories, etc. and as such that this scenario simply proves the correlation, this argument would not change the fact that scientists can accurately predict the lifespan of stars, therefore doing nothing to change the status of knowledge of such an event. Rather than destroying the manifest image of human life and replace it with the scientific image, I will contend that Brassier's brash challenge opens the doors to new possibilities in dialectics. Consider the following quote. Science does not need to deny the significance of our evident psychological need for narrative; it just demotes it from its previously foundational metaphysical status to that of an epistemically derivative 'useful fiction' I think that it is possible to understand the meaninglessness of existence, and that this capacity to understand meaning as a regional or bounded phenomenon marks a fundamental progress in cognition. (Brassier Interview) This statement opens a new and interesting problem: How is a nihilist to conceive of meaning in his own experience? How, given that 'existence is worthless' did Brassier become a philosopher? Brassier has carefully separated his definitions of meaning and truth so as to avoid what he sees as Nietzsche's failure of conflating the lack of meaning with the lack of truth. While I agree with this criticism, it seems as if Brassier still misses an important point concerning the relation of the two terms insofar as he holds Res Cogitans (2012) 3:1 Wales 89 2155 4838 commons.pacificu.edu/rescogitans that he can perfectly separate and even oppose them to one another. In what follows I hope to hold Brassier accountable to his innovations by examining meaning as an empirical phenomena that must be examined by speculative thought. That is, while meaning is indeed a 'bound phenomena' that is inarguably reducible to biological processes, this fact does not erase the truth of its existence. This point makes all the difference because it holds Brassier accountable for his own thought. Brassier's brilliance lies in his reinauguration of wonder (at extinction, science and truth) as the new opening condition of philosophy. This paper will not seek to reinstate human meaning as the centerpiece of philosophical truth but to understand "bound meaning" or meaning that is understood as objectively subjective. While meaning and truth are by no means identical, Brassier's declared love of truth in this pointless world must strike those who take him seriously as particularly significant. In order to fully appreciate Brassier's development, we must see that empirically verifiable statements have a radical new meaning within this framework. Rather than being ontologically identical to any statement, those that hit upon the material workings of the world in a mathematically predictable way have a retroactively transformative nature, which I will highlight by referring to them as F(acts) F(acts) can happen in a variety of ways, but they must be bits of data that cannot be accounted for in the world in which they emerge. Take the agricultural revolution, where the discovery that plants can be strategically planted en mass causes a defining acceleration of human development. The importance of this moment is foundational. What it entails is a transformational negation of the previous conditions of life that formerly conditioned existence for humans. What is at stake in this moment is nothing less than the foundational break in reality entailed here. This is a moment when a thing happens that breaks the rules of the world, as established by its prior state. What is now necessary is to establish precisely how the correlation is broken when a F(act) happens. By treating bound human meaning as being conditioned by F(acts) we can adequately discuss meaning in all of its importance without falling back into the correlation. Now we must delve into what exactly what the definition of 'meaning' is so that we may engage with it and its preconditions. Brassier, oddly enough, declines to define the term explicitly. However, by taking his juxtapositions of meaning and truth alongside those of the 'manifest image' and 'scientific image' we can reasonably deduce what this signifies: the 'je ne se quoi' of experience that is supposedly irreducible to the facts of existence and grounds the dimension of the human. Above I claimed that the human experience of meaning is an empirically verified phenomenon. By this I mean that it has been sufficiently demonstrated that any theory of human action can only make sense a citing a faculty that produces rational reasons in excess of the facts. Take, for example, the well known Forer effect. In one elegan