Speculative realism

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The Speculative Realism is a philosophical current that at the beginning of the 21st century against the Korrelationismus Kant and his successors is - that is, against the thesis that there is nothing being, for which there is not even a subjective approach - and get back to traditions the classical ontology and metaphysical realism . The focus of the work of his protagonists is no longer the subject-object relationship, but the ontology of the objects. The unknowability of things postulated by Kant is not an epistemological limitation for speculative realism , but a (at the same time necessary and contingent) ontological property of things themselves. Contingency does not only prevail in relation to perception - one can perceive things in one way or another - but also in the relationships between things. In this context, the Speculative Realists question the primacy of the subject .

history

The founders of several comprehensive flow approaches that focus on a conference of the College Goldsmiths of the University of London in April 2007, presented publicly, include Ray brassier (then Middlesex University today, American University of Beirut ), which, however, sees himself outside the movement, Iain Hamilton Grant ( University of the West of England ), Graham Harman ( American University in Cairo ) and Quentin Meillassoux from the École normal supérieure in Paris .

While Meillassoux initially preferred the term speculative materialism ( matérialisme spéculatif ) to characterize his position, Ray Brassier first used the term speculative realism - probably with provocative intent.

starting point

A starting point of speculative realism is the diagnosis that modern philosophy was largely ignorant of the knowledge of modern science and did not regard it as a resource. The Constructivism and the linguistic turn in philosophy since the 1960s had more brought no additional knowledge and be of arbitrariness and self-referentiality fallen. Therefore the advocates of speculative realism demand recognition of an autonomous reality that is independent of people and their consciousness. Philosophy must cease to be only interested in how people view the world.

Representatives and positions

The representatives of speculative realism take very different positions. What they have in common is that they postulate the necessity of thinking beyond humans.

Radical doctrine of contingency

In his radical doctrine of contingency, Quentin Meillassoux from the École normal supérieure in Paris assumes that nothing in the world has a reason. While the material nature was dominated at first sight with certain laws (but that could change), is the being contingent. The world is not a continuum of rationality; it does not have to have a logical reason just because the human cognitive structure demands it. Meillassoux thus rejects not only the principle of sufficient reason , but the necessity of the existence of all logical laws with the exception of the principle of contradiction (something cannot be and not be at the same time).

A starting point of his philosophizing is the paradox of the arche-fossils , which show for modern instrumental science that there was a universe, an earth and organic life long before human consciousness; before that, philosophy in the follow-up of Kant still closes its eyes. For Meillassoux, one of the main features of Kant's transcendental philosophy is its correlationism, a kind of circular thinking that asserts the impossibility of a conceptual access to a being independent of thinking. One implication of correlationism is the correspondence theory of truth, which says that the correspondence between the knowing mind and the thing to which it relates guarantees truth. This approach leads to an anthropocentric view of things, to a world view that is contaminated by human ideas. In contrast, Meillassoux postulates the existence of a reality that exists without any reference to human thought and for no reason. He therefore also criticizes another implication of correlationism, namely the correspondence theory of truth, which says that the a priori correspondence between the knowing mind and the thing to which it refers guarantees truth.

Ontology of objects

Graham Harman and Markus Gabriel try to establish a new realistic metaphysics or ontology of objects. For them, the objects stand inside and outside of the mind, including thoughts about objects. The world is not to be equated with nature , it includes material and non-material objects such as ideas, concepts and categories.

Gabriel criticizes Kant's position of the unknowability of the world (the “ thing in itself ”) with the argument that “the world” as a totality does not really exist; there are only innumerable “fields of meaning” in which the objects appear in certain questions (e.g. under the aspect of their physical nature, i.e. in a scientific field of meaning, or under the aspect of usefulness in an economic field of meaning). Knowledge is the appropriate grasp of an object within the rules of the respective field of meaning. All phenomena - whether material or imagined - are treated equally in this concept of ontological pluralism. This avoids scientific fundamentalism as well as a purely constructivist approach.

Harman accepts Kant's position that we only have access to things as they appear to us. However, for Harman, whose role models include Heidegger , Gilles Deleuze and Bruno Latour , the perception of things is always accompanied by a “translation error”. Entities or real objects are autonomous for Harman and can be both facts and thoughts about facts. The natural sciences considered it naive to view real objects as fundamental parts of the world - as entities . In truth, they believe objects are made up of atoms, molecules, neural processes, and so on. But this is exactly what Harman considers to be an inadmissible reductionism : of all things, the natural scientists did not believe in the phenomena that one could see, but only in what one could not see: atoms , electrons , quarks , electromagnetic radiation , etc. For Harman that only represents represents a regression in the form of an infinite displacement.

According to Harman, every real object has two sides: a sensual side, with which it comes into contact with other entities, and a real side, which evades all relationships and relationships. The relationships between humans and the objects around them are no more real than the relationships between objects. Furthermore, according to Harman, the object is not a comprehensive whole, but rather has a fourfold conflictual structure: the real object, which eludes visibility (the relatively permanent essence ), with a temporal and spatial profile, and the eidos , which is ever for the viewer appears as a changing surface after removal etc. Harman does not recognize this fourfold structure of reality in being in general, but in the respective real object that coexists with other real objects.

With speculative realism and its ontology of objects ( onticology , a term from the US philosopher Levi Bryant ) it becomes possible to talk about sensual encounters between any entities. In his work The Democracy of Objects , Levi Bryant examines the “power” and “potential” of objects. With this change, the previous focus of aesthetics on human perception is no longer applicable , and the interactions between non-human instances are also becoming aesthetically relevant (e.g. interactions in and perceptions of computer networks, so-called actor-network theory , ANT).

The Italian Maurizio Ferraris , who was initially influenced by Jacques Derrida , also defended reality against what he called the arbitrariness of post-structuralist deconstructivism: this would inadmissibly confuse ontological and epistomological thinking. Social objects have an ontological status; they are independent of the actions of individuals and would e.g. B. documented in the network without being reduced to "text".

Critique of the anthropocentric understanding of nature

The speculative realists criticize that modern European philosophy and science are partly characterized by an anthropomorphic vitalism . For Meillassoux, death in particular is a reality completely independent of man's thinking about himself. The vitalists he calls this with their anthropomorphic projections of an absolutized spirit (including Fichte and Hegel ) do not recognize that man is only one thing among many.

For Iain Hamilton Grant, who is influenced by Gilles Deleuze and who ties in with Schelling's ideas, which he interprets materialistically, every thing has two sides: one that is perceptible in its singularity and one that is imperceptible. He too criticizes the anthropocentrism of philosophy according to Kant and Fichte and the suppression of the concept of reality from the philosophy of the 20th century. The privilege of man and the neglect of inorganic reality in philosophy cannot be justified by anything; nature eludes explanation by human models. Due to its material vitalism, it is the actual subject, not the human being (so-called neovitalism ).

Ray Brassier criticizes modern philosophy for trying to prevent nihilism from breaking into the world and to give it meaning by all means . He sees himself rather in the tradition of philosophical naturalism , in which laws prevail whose meaning we cannot recognize, and denies that speculative realism is a unified current.

reception

Alain Badiou sees in speculative realism the possibility of overcoming the controversies about the end or the continuation of the necessity of metaphysics and at the same time a barrier against the infiltration of religious thoughts into modern philosophy. A new concept of realism, as represented by speculative realism, is groundbreaking here. Badiou turns in Logiques des mondes: L'être et l'événement (2006) against the assumption of the existence of an overarching unity or an ontological whole; Ontologies cannot say anything about events.

The English sociologist Alberto Toscano is also influenced by speculative realism; he tries to reinterpret the ideas of historical materialism from its perspective and to extend them to phenomena such as the self-organization of matter.

In Germany, the trend became known through the series "Speculations" published by Armen Avanessian in Berlin's Merve-Verlag and through a series of lectures and workshops by the participating philosophers at the Free University of Berlin in 2012.

criticism

The editors of the Meillassoux Dictionary criticize that Meilassoux's criticism does not hit the Kantian transcendental philosophy, but the caricature of an extremely solipsistic idealism, the so-called strong correlationism, which assumes that there is only what we can think.

Brassier criticizes that one cannot use the limits of scientific knowledge as an argument for a positive ontological construction. However, it is precisely these limits of knowledge that are recognized by other philosophers as a theoretical opportunity: The resistance that reality opposes our knowledge explains why different forms of life can interact in nature without having the same possibilities for knowledge, and how human interaction arises in a social environment, which is initially given and is only interpreted and changed later. This hermeneutical approach differs above all from European constructivism. It was founded by Maurizio Ferraris, Mario De Caro and other Italian philosophers. This current, which gives answers to questions similar to and is related to speculative realism, is called New Realism ( Nuovo Realismo ). The work of Markus Gabriel is assigned to both currents.

literature

  • Armen Avanessian (Ed.): Realism Now: Speculative Philosophy and Metaphysics for the 21st Century. Merve, Berlin 2013, ISBN 978-3-88396-285-6 .
  • Ray Brassier: Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke 2007, ISBN 978-0-2305-2204-6 .
  • Levy R. Briant: The Deomocracy of Objects. Open Humanities Press, ISBN 978-1-60785-204-9 .
  • Maurizio Ferraris : Introduction to New Realism. London, New York 2015.
  • Maurizio Ferraris: Manifesto of the New Realism. Translated from the Italian by Malte Osterloh. Klostermann, Frankfurt am Main 2014, ISBN 978-3-465-04214-3 .
  • Markus Gabriel : Why the world doesn't exist. Ullstein, Berlin 2013, ISBN 978-3-550-08010-4 .
  • Iain Hamilton Grant: On an Artificial Earth: Philosophies of Nature After Schelling. London, New York 2006.
  • Iain Hamilton Grant: The Nature Of Nature. Merve, Berlin 2017, ISBN 978-3-88396-372-3 .
  • Peter Gratton, Paul Ennis (Eds.): The Meillassoux Dictionary. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh 2014. Online excerpts
  • Graham Harman: On Vicarious Causation. In: Collapse 2007, pp. 171-205 online
  • Quentin Meillassoux : Après la finitude. Essai sur la nécessité de la contingence. Paris 2006.
    • English edition: After Finitude. London, Oxford 2009.
    • German edition: After finiteness. Attempt on the need for contingency. Translated by Roland Frommel. Diaphanes, Zurich 2008, ISBN 978-3-03734-847-5 .
  • Alberto Toscano: The Theater of Production: Philosophy and Individuation Between Kant and Deleuze. London 2006.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Philosophy space: Correlationism (definition of terms).
  2. ↑ Meillassoux: After Finitude. 2009, p. 34 ff.
  3. ↑ Interview with Quentin Meillassoux
  4. ↑ Marion Regenscheit: On the life of things and their recognizability. In: Week of the day, October 3, 2012.
  5. ↑ Maurizio Ferraris: Where are you? An Ontology of the Cell Phone. Fordham University Press, 2014.
  6. ↑ See Paolo Rossi: The Birth of Modern Science in Europe. Munich 1997, p. 41.
  7. ^ Badiou on Speculative Realism (Interview 2009) ; see also his introduction to Meillassoux: Après la finitude , 2006.
  8. ^ Maurizio Ferraris: Manifesto del nuovo realismo. Laterza: Rome 2012.
  9. ↑ Markus Gabriel (Ed.): The New Realism. Frankfurt 2014.