Rationalist Empiricism. Nathan Brown

realism of algebra.”⁴¹ Mathematical formulations of physical laws formalize relations among quantitative properties that have been, or will be, determined with particular degrees of uncertainty.

      This is part of what Bachelard means when he claims that “simple ideas are not the ultimate basis of knowledge; after a complete theory is available, it will be apparent that simple ideas are in fact simplifications of more complex truths.”⁴² The number designating the speed of light in a vacuum (c) has now been fixed exactly, but the uncertainty of its determination has shifted to the unit in which it is expressed (m/s). The scientific meaning of the value depends on this complex sense. The earth, considered as an “object in-itself,” does not have an exact age that is a quantifiable property, since the exact moment of its origin is logically impossible to specify. That is implicit in its existence as a physical, rather than logical, entity. But our knowledge of the relation between well-established quantitative ranges within which the accretion of the earth, the origin of life on earth, and the origin of humankind took place enables relational determinations and logical extrapolations from empirical measurements that are consequential. Moreover, we can say that these are true, and that the knowledge we glean from them about the relative chronology of events refers to events exterior to knowledge. Meillassoux is interested in our scientific knowledge of a physical order of time that is not subsumed by phenomenological time, that is separable from phenomenological time, and that can be known logically on the basis of empirically determined quantities:

      Science reveals a time that not only does not need conscious time but that allows the latter to arise at a determinate point in its own flux. To think science is to think the status of a becoming which cannot be correlational because the correlate is in it, rather than it being in the correlate. So the challenge is therefore the following: to understand how science can think a world wherein spatio-temporal givenness itself came into being within a time and a space which preceded every variety of givenness.⁴³

      If the empirically determined quantities that enable such thinking can be specified only with respect to metrological models of the processes concerned, knowledge of these models nevertheless enables logical inferences concerning physical, temporal relationships that are separate from the models. That is why the term “provisional objectivity” is appropriate to such knowledge.

      THE DEFAULT OF JUDGMENT

      Reference to the “in-itself” in After Finitude is complicated by another difficulty: that the term is used both to denote empirical, scientific knowledge of mind-independent objects or events and to denote speculative, ontological knowledge of being-qua-being. Here we must move beyond the epistemology of science to the question of how the speculative is related to the empirical in an ontological register. If Kant infringed upon the critical limits he had established by (1) assuming that the thing in-itself existed and (2) assuming that it was non-contradictory, Meillassoux asserts, “by way of contrast,” “non-metaphysical speculation proceeds in the first instance by stating that the in-itself is nothing other than the facticity of the transcendental forms of representation. Then, in the second instance, it goes on to deduce from the absoluteness of this facticity those properties of the in-itself which Kant for his part took to be self-evident.”⁴⁴ Here “properties of the in-itself” refers not to empirically determinable quantities assignable to properties of objects, but rather to that which is not an object: to the necessity of contingency and to the law of non-contradiction. The ontological scope of speculative rationality goes beyond the empirically determinable properties of objects (beings) to determine absolute properties of being-qua-being. Meillassoux formulates the tension between reason and experience involved in such speculative rationality most clearly in his dissertation:

      The canonical paradox of rationality is thus given in this form: reason presents itself as universal discursivity, necessary and true, thus as the thought of that which is—but that which is is given as particular and contingent. If reason is not a chimera, then it must resolve this problem: how to disengage, at the heart of the factual beings given in experience, that which, adequate to those beings, is not itself contingent?⁴⁵

      As I argue in Chapter 4, Meillassoux here reformulates the problem of the on-tological difference: whereas beings are contingent, the being of beings is the necessity of their contingency, and this is not itself a being (i.e., there is no necessary being; what is necessary is that all beings are contingent). Note that Meillassoux commits himself, in a manner I will later explore in detail, to drawing the rationalfrom the empirical: the problem is “how to disengage, at the heart of the factual beings given in experience,” that which reason can stipulate concerning what is not given in experience.

      What interests me here is the mutually delimiting purview of the rational and the empirical implicit in the relation between Meillassoux’s speculative and epistemological argumentation. All that we observe is the contingency of beings and the regularity of physical laws, yet we can rationally affirm the necessity of that contingency: its absolute rather than factical scope, its insubordination to any law, and thus the ultimate contingency of the regularity of physical law itself.⁴⁶ The empirical delimits the field of the rational, insofar as absolute contingency is not empirically manifest (but neither is it contradictory to what is empirically manifest); the rational delimits the field of the empirical, insofar as we can know that the regularity of manifestation does not delegitimate the absolute scope of the contingency of being. Absolute contingency is not ontically accessible; empirical contingency does not yield ontological truth. Science and philosophy limn different regimes of knowledge of the “in-itself,” insofar as we take this term to denote that which is independent of our capacity to determine its properties. Thus, on the one hand, we have to think the complicity of reason and experience, rationalism and empiricism, in the establishment of scientific knowledge. On the other hand, we have to distinguish the scope of that complicity from the power of speculative rationality to go beyond the field of scientific knowledge, without thereby invalidating the knowledge that science makes possible.

      In Chapter 2, I argue that Meillassoux’s speculative ontology is consistent with his scientific epistemology and that the complexity of their consistency obeys and is indeed required by materialist criteria. Here I want to note that the speculative scope of Meillassoux’s argumentation has an important critical function, insofar as it delimits the concealed dogmatism of Kant’s transcendental theory of reflective judgment. Of course, reflective judgment is supposed to be that which, within the framework of transcendental critique, cannot be dogmatic, since it “attributes nothing at all to the object.” But consider the following passage from the Critique of the Power of Judgment, which I must quote at length given its centrality as a counterpoint to our theory of speculative critique:

      we must think of there being in nature, with regard to its merely empirical laws, a possibility of infinitely manifold empirical laws, which as far as our insight goes are nevertheless contingent (cannot be cognized a priori); and with regard to them we judge the unity of nature in accordance with empirical laws and the possibility of the unity of experience (as a system in accordance with empirical laws) as contingent. But since such a unity must still necessarily be presupposed and assumed, for otherwise no thoroughgoing interconnection of empirical cognitions into a whole of experience would take place, because the universal laws of nature yield such an interconnection among things with respect to their genera, as things of nature in general, but not specifically, as such and such particular beings in nature, the power of judgment must thus assume it as an a priori principle for its own use that what is contingent for human insight in the particular (empirical) laws of nature nevertheless contains a lawful unity, not fathomable by us but still thinkable, in the combination of its manifold into one experience possible in itself. Consequently, since the lawful unity in a combination that we cognize in accordance with a necessary aim (a need) of the understanding but yet at the same time as contingent in itself is represented as the purposiveness of the objects (in this case, of nature), thus the power of judgment, which with regard to things under possible (still to be discovered) empirical laws