The relationship between being and thought, despite its various historical manifestations, has traditionally been the main unresolved problem in philosophy. In fact, modern philosophies, summarized in the term correlation, tend to be hesitant about the possibility of a radical outside to this dialectical pair. In layperson’s terms, the conundrum is this: how can thought escape itself? We only know the domains within the gaze of thought, and thus matter becomes thought-matter, an object in Kantian terms.
But a correlational relation is a bond of closedness, albeit a pulsating mystery. The word beyond exists. The modern response was to hide behind the Jerichoan walls of epistemology. To be true is to be acknowledged by an intersubjective community of philosophical peers; to be true is to be an anthropological truth.
This beautiful and authentic, unbothered world is a true paradise of the uncritical, and some magical world-objects as Meillassoux would put it in his work After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, such as consciences and language, rule this dystopia. To venture beyond the walls is to be metaphysical, and to be metaphysical is to ascertain a truth criterion in the arche-fossil.
By the fossil, Meillassoux understands “not just materials indicating the traces of past life, according to the familiar sense of the term ‘fossil’, but materials indicating the existence of an ancestral reality or event; one that is anterior to terrestrial life. An arche-fossil thus designates the material support on the basis of which the experiments that yield estimates of ancestral phenomena proceed” (p. 25).
This is hardly a problem for philosophy, but a daily reality for science. It raises another conundrum: how can we recognize as truth, and for philosophy, facts about the world that existed before human existence? How can we regard reality as though witnessing it? This challenges the aforementioned intersubjective truth community because experimental facts need to be recognized as absolutely realist and objective, not only for the community but for nature itself.
Of course, science makes mistakes; theories are built from the remnants of old ones. Nonetheless, some regularity must remain. Entities must stay stable; otherwise, a centuries-old compass rose (assuming it was calibrated to star movements) would be completely useless for those lost at sea. Regarding the reliability of science, the problem of meta-induction arose in the last century. The consistency or inconsistency of experimental facts divides the community between those who accept them (the optimists) and those who do not (the pessimists).
For Meillassoux, the arche-fossil is a central tenet because an ancestral statement can only be absolutely realist: “either this statement has a realist sense, and only a realist sense, or it has no sense at all” (p. 36). And that is his downfall, because a seemingly trivial argument is totally incompatible with philosophy—both as a somewhat naive core of concepts about, and as the performative existence of the philosopher.
Let’s imagine this as a meme: Saruman is seated atop his marble tower of philosophical wisdom, glaring at the uninformed masses of lowly scientific orcs. “You, science, may have your experimental fact; but we, philosophers, operate in a deeper and more fundamental dimension of ontological realms. Experimental data can ascertain millions of years in the past, but only—and just only—from the point of view of correlation (!), only millions of years in the past from the perspective of humans.”
Science, which resolves problems and creates (albeit with deviations) a better life for humankind, must bow to the empty truth of academic philosophy. You can see, readers, the deep problem that Meillassoux—a philosopher—has raised: how to keep his job without denying the realist sense of archaeology? The solution? A very philosophical one: words, invented concepts, and deeply hollow rhetorical arguments. Let’s briefly narrate the history of the forgetfulness of arche-fossils.
For Meillassoux, we cannot return to necessary entities, nor can we escape his scope; we can only focus on areas of reality that can be apprehended by sensory experience. Thus, intersubjective experience finds its limit in written history—saber-toothed tigers exist in thought, like a mermaid in Locke, albeit science provides data about them. We cannot be sure of their existence outdoors. A saber-toothed tiger is a Kantian noumenon that makes human sense only as a phenomenon, logicized by a transcendental (intersubjective) macro-subject.
But let’s say we take a walk, and by some mishap, a saber-tooth fang punctures our shoe. Well, pain often solves the mystery of the noumenon. So, for Meillassoux, this kind of data exists, but we cannot acknowledge any necessary entity beyond the correlation. To acknowledge would be to return to metaphysics—the posit of essential entities. And necessary entities permit, for example, the claim that capitalism is a natural and perfect socio-economic order. So yes, Meillassoux, we don’t have fundamentalism in our time. You win…
Correlationism, then, is the solution. In the dense Chapter 3 of After Finitude, the author concludes that if we cannot posit any necessity of the outdoors, then the outdoors-beyond is without necessity. It’s time to resurrect the old Humean argument about necessity: “can one establish that in identical circumstances, future successions of phenomena will always be identical to previous successions?” (p. 140)
Because the correlational outdoors is devoid of necessity, we cannot talk about any necessary being; even the logical laws of cognition can be changed. What happens here is that an epistemological and psychological argument has become ontological. And the healthy doubt of Hume has become an absolute—an absolute hyper-chaos.
The statistical stability of nature’s laws is only a fortunate fact; nothing prevents them from changing tomorrow. What about the arche-fossil? Because it is impossible for science to be technical without a recognized stability of entities, this raises the aforementioned problem of meta-induction—the failure of theories to explain the past—dividing the scientific and philosophical communities between pessimism and optimism regarding experimental data.
But for science to function, it must be meta-inductionally optimistic, because being pessimistic is like saying that the electronic device you’re holding now is a miracle. And miracles, to be miracles, must be statistically rare. So, the overwhelming success of technology—even if not mirrored in theoretical coherence—indicates that entities are stable. Can this stability change in the near future? The majority of the scientific community doesn’t think so. But even if it does, everyday science doesn’t care. The Meillassouxian argument, the supposed bane of metaphysics, is itself a truly metaphysical one.
For Meillassoux, reality beyond correlation can be accessed through Cartesian means, such as epistemic mathematical formulas. In this debacle of the arche-fossil, the author continues to widen the gap between experimental facts and philosophy. There was a fantastic mathematician, Georg Cantor, who discovered that there are infinities larger than others. So, the argument—indispensable in modern set theories, but written only on paper—becomes an ontological law. Hyper-chaos is then found in set theory, not in the arche-fossil.
Mathematics and logic can posit the most quixotic entities, but mathematics and logic don’t create the world. They predate nature; the true nature is born in struggling individuals. Only when a being perceives, processes, and emits information from and for the environment is a truly experimental fact possible. Physics can posit more than twenty dimensions, and chemistry can formulate nonexistent substances, but only biology and complex biochemical molecules initiate the world. Only biology is concrete because, although many far-fetched theories can be formulated, the final criterion of truth rests in struggling individuals. Individuals begin as one but evolve into complex systems, such as the biosphere and the climate.
So, as individuals, we must recognize that understanding our philosophical existence requires acknowledging arche-fossils. Among many arche-fossils, only those related to living matter prompt us to consider the unique living formation that is humanity: the first and only chance for nature to think itself! Humans and humble rocks share the same atoms. How can arrogant philosophy even dare to draw a line between thought and matter? There are many fertile grounds for philosophy, but we cannot allow this postmodern stance to reduce science to just another form of truth.
Philosophy offers deep and beautiful reflections across many fields of knowledge. It especially excels in posing questions about beginnings and endings. But in the middle zone, experimental data and philosophy must be humble. An arche-fossil has a realist meaning, and only a realist meaning. Meillassoux betrays empirical science when he attempts to resolve the conundrum of the arche-fossil, only to present the quixotic and improbable argument that physical laws could suddenly change tomorrow.
