Is there a way to move beyond correlationism?
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Is there a way to move beyond correlationism?
I am writing this new topic to address some of the claims in Meillassoux's book, After Finitude. In this book, at least in the initial parts, he deals with the problem of knowledge since Kant, proposing the idea of correlationism. By this notion, Meillassoux means:
"...we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other" (p. 5). Or more specifically, "Correlationism consists in disqualifying the claim that it is possible to consider the realms of subjectivity and objectivity independently of one another" (ibid.)
The purpose of this idea is to discover "mediatory" regions that make the subject-object relation possible. In Heidegger, for instance, co-propriation of man and being still reflects the idea of correlationism. In Foucault attention was shifted to language and power. In phenomenology, the idea of “consciousness” serves as the correlate between the subject and being.
These correlates sound like a circle: we can be sure that there is an object in the external world, such as a tree, but we are at the same time confined to our consciousness of the tree. So although we are turned towards the outside, we are never actually getting outside of the correlate.
In a sense, it may sound impossible to jump beyond correlation:
“Consciousness and its language certainly transcend themselves towards the world, but there is a world only insofar as a consciousness transcends itself towards it” (p. 7). The reason for this encasement is that we perceive the world “relative” to us. Can you think of an object without really trying to place it within the human world? To perceive that the object exists in itself?
To perfectly understand an external world without humanity, one has to think about some radical situations. One could think of a time when there was no human subjectivity to feel the universe. To see or experience the creation of the Sun. This condition is called “ancestrality” by Meillassoux.
Yet, he acknowledges that to a dogmatic thinker, the creation of the Sun is a totally meaningless event. Well, you were not really there to experience the heat or the light!
As I read it, his line of ideas deals with the divergence between philosophy and science. Philosophy is correlational and science is non-correlational because it can talk about events that preceded the existence of humanity.
These notions, however, require deeper considerations. Yet, if Foucault, for instance, was a correlationist, what is a “remedy” for a language and power analyst? Should s/he find a non-correlational way of looking at human life? But how? Do you find correlationism a plausible theory at all?
Thank you!
2023/2024 Philosophy Books of the Month
Mark Victor Hansen, Relentless: Wisdom Behind the Incomparable Chicken Soup for the Soul
by Mitzi Perdue
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Rediscovering the Wisdom of Human Nature: How Civilization Destroys Happiness
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March 2023