Nature, an elusive concept
In Meillassoux’s hyper-Chaos argument, nature seems to be the ultimate loser. If words can change tomorrow, then what is the purpose of anything? Even the meaning of being alive, of engaging in praxis with the world, loses its sense in the face of impending catastrophe. A hyper-rational stance must include some pathos as a counterbalance.
From an existential perspective, this world is what genuinely matters; it is what is worth fighting for. Like many philosophical concepts, hyper-Chaos is ultimately impractical—perhaps implying the limits of what pure rationality, disembodied from the world, can tell us about the world itself.
But first, some general remarks on nature are in order. For Ducarme and Couvet (2020), nature is an elusive concept, especially in its dual character. This is reflected in a multiplicity of approaches. In general, this duality pertains to the inclusion or exclusion of the human dimension, which gives rise to a central ontological question: the task is not only to ascertain humanity’s impact on nature but also to discern how much nature there is in human beings and how much of human nature there is.
Like any concept, it remains incomplete, but it is enriched by historical and etymological debates. For the Greeks, the earliest mentions conceive of it as «the process of growth and its result» (Ducarme & Couvet, 2020, p. 2). Despite the Aristotelian distinction between physis and techné, the human capacity to create technical artifices does not place humanity outside nature.
We arrive at a central point: the birthplace of Western philosophy does not consider nature a synonym for “the wild.” That degeneration occurs later. It is Cicero who introduces the classical opposition between culture and nature, presenting nature as “an initial state devoid of human influence” (p. 2), while considering cities a locus of physical and moral degradation and thus recommending a bucolic escape.
Aside from its polysemy, in the classical world humanity was incomplete without its natural dimension. In fact, the dialectical richness of these concepts involves a duality: there is something new in civilization, everyone agrees, but nature remains the original call to return. When Hegel described Greece as the golden childhood of Man, he was referring to this original bond—shaken, yet unbroken.
This duality loses its grip with Christianity. The main creative role is now assigned to God; nature becomes a static notion because admitting flaw and change is to admit an imperfect creator. In the classical world, gods were conceived as part of nature; in Christianity, God is understood as external to creation. This includes humans, as the most exact replicas of the Creator.
As the concept loses even more of its sanctity, it becomes raw matter, a territory to be exploited by capital. Nineteenth-century Romanticism becomes a desperate act of resistance and an evocation of nature’s creative potential. Contemporary issues do not escape this polysemy; rather, they open up two somewhat new avenues of discussion. On the one hand, there is an epistemological foundation for dividing the natural sciences and the human sciences along the lines of what is “non-natural.” On the other hand, among various debates, the question of whether to include humanity within the concept remains. There is nothing new under the sun, for the most part. But science introduces an interesting variable into the discussion.
Meillassoux and the correlational circle
Quentin Meillassoux, and New Realism more generally, avoid the polemic around nature. The mere etymology of “real” would seem to indicate as much, but Meillassoux’s arguments are distinctive in this regard.
After Finitude (Meillassoux, 2017) ties the persistent debate of the naturalist circle to the lure of the arche-fossil. Despite the disappointing development of this concept in that text and others (Johnston, 2011, p. 102), it presents an unavoidable perspective on contemporary ideas of what nature is. The author captures mainstream post-Kantian philosophy in what he defines as correlationism: “the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other” (Meillassoux, 2017, p. 5).
A particular relationship with the external is implied here. What is not thought is treated as inaccessible, which suggests that a large part of what has been understood about nature can be excluded from philosophy. However, the experimental methods of the natural sciences allow us to verify physically, chemically, and mathematically realities that predate human existence. This creates a conceptual tension: how can experimental data be reconciled with the philosophical circle of correlation?
At this point of tension, the hubris of the correlational circle affirms that the hypothetical event of the arche-fossil occurred x years earlier, from the perspective of the human beings who experienced this datum. But for Meillassoux, the arche-fossil can only have a realist sense, devoid of epistemic relativism. Thus, what is external to correlation exists; how it can be accessed and what it is, that is the problem.
To answer this, we can easily return to the great metaphysical systems of modernity. A necessary being could be postulated, and the rest of the world then derived from it. For example, both atoms and consciousness are governed by the principle of sufficient reason, according to which all existence proceeds from one of these metaphysical starting points. However, the author considers a return to metaphysics unavoidable: returning to necessary beings implies that some socio-economic states of affairs are natural, necessary, and unchangeable.
Thus, nature, as we know it, can be seen as metaphysical and necessary. Although we may accept this Marxist critique, the author lacks sufficient argumentative clarity to affirm the necessity of overcoming necessity in order to transcend metaphysics. This is because the necessitarian capitalist ghost acts as bait, like an archaeological fossil, but in this case it is rarely mentioned again in other texts.
Let us take, for example, the standard model of particle physics as a bounded and prudent metaphysics. As such, it can interlace science and philosophy without immediate setbacks. For Meillassoux, however, this stance is not satisfactory because, like Kant, he finds in Hume’s problem what awakens him from dogmatic slumber.
For Hume, the problem is this: “Is it possible to demonstrate that the same effects will always follow from the same causes ceteris paribus, that is, all other things being equal?” (p. 85). Necessity is thus displaced from the external natural world to the transcendental Kantian structures. The problem now concerns the world’s closure: it moves from a healthy skepticism about the external world to the contemporary enclosure of the correlational circle.
In Meillassoux’s realism, a logical analysis of the circle reveals, behind dense rhetoric, the conclusion that we cannot know anything beyond correlation, thus making correlation an epistemic limit—but a factual limit devoid of necessity. If we cannot overcome facticity, the outside appears as a chaotic, hyper-chaotic world.
Then what becomes of the arche-fossil? What becomes of external nature? This is where Hume’s problem comes into play: we need to question the necessity of natural laws, because causality, as an epistemic category, is psychological rather than ontological. Only mental habits attribute one phenomenon as the cause of another; in our minds, the cohabitation of ideas creates the illusion of causality. Hence Hume’s famous insecurity about whether the sun will rise tomorrow: the mere repetition of dawns does not guarantee tomorrow’s dawn.
For the speculative realist, this concession of defeat—the inability of late eighteenth-century scientific instruments to affirm tomorrow’s dawn with accuracy—becomes not a psychological, skeptical, and epistemic conclusion, but an ontological and universal truth (Johnston, 2011, p. 92). This broad exercise in ontologizing will have disastrous consequences, particularly with regard to nature.
The natural necro-world of Meillassoux
If the atom were chosen as a convenient, although limited—given its chronological scope—metaphysics, Meillassoux’s idea of nature would appear ridiculous. Some choices have been made:
It is not convinced by metaphysics because resorting to it implies, politically, accepting social inequities as natural and eternal. To tackle this problem, it critically adopts Kantian critique and transforms a provisional state of epistemic affairs into a definitive victory of philosophy over scientific realism. Therefore, to remain internally coherent, the only way to break out of the closed loop of correlation must be entirely extravagant and unrepresentable: nothing suggests that physical laws cannot change at any moment.
This is why the author rejects any notion of gradual development in favor of a disembodied and static dualism. And this is a key element. Meillassoux begins humanity’s epistemic journey with the Cartesian cogito. In fact, he literally starts the book with Descartes, almost as if the cogito had descended from a chaotic heaven and then the world began to turn. As can be seen in a later conference (Meillassoux, 2016), nature is treated with disdain as a contingent link between inanimate matter and the correlational circle.
Since everything is contingent between febrile chaos and the cogito, the emergence of life acquires a new meaning. Stripped of any necessity, nature becomes a scenario of randomness, and life becomes a miracle (p. 146).
If DNA is considered a vital building block—a consensually accepted argument from the perspective of the natural sciences—then, aside from removing the miraculous aspect of life, there must be a necessary relationship between the versatility of carbon’s atomic bonds and the delicate array of amino acids essential to life. The inorganic world cannot be a scene of randomness; otherwise, life could truly be a miracle. Or, in fact, perhaps it is, but a miracle governed by graduality, involving the increasing complexity of matter, not the barren division between a dead world of chance and human thought. Carbon atoms cannot appear at tomorrow’s dawn, for example, with the structure of sulfur.
Thus, the arche-fossil is a materialist argument that crumbles the correlational edifice. Scientific dating methods determine the structural regularity of the atoms of the primitive Earth. Then, if dating posits regularity, could Hume’s problem be proven false? In fact, no—hence the limitation of scientific realism, with a confidence interval of billions of years. Material dating could mark its limitations in the past. Nevertheless, although the specter of skepticism cannot be exorcized, it is Hume who warns against misinterpreting miracles as a genuine concession to human ignorance. Such a miracle is life in the ominous light of a Meillassouxian hyper-chaotic necro-world.
The clear disdain for the natural sciences as fickle, while mathematics remains undefeated as truth, fails to understand the world (p. 154), especially the possible correlations “below” humanity in nature. This barren Meillassouxian world is composed of rancid philosophers, obstinate in their correlational circle, and of possible worlds of dead matter, without light or redemption. Here lies his dualism: the author fails to understand that, if we call correlation a victory, it is the result of a gradual process of increasing complexity, from mere rocks to human brains. Correlation is not thrown into the world as a miracle; it is, in fact, the triumph of human resilience, which stands in hubris, as if at the center of the world.
Hence the “pathetic” counterargument. If pathos is used in Greek argumentation as an appeal to affect in order to persuade, then the argument here is not about subjective impressions but about the collective and embodied position of humankind within nature. Meillassoux’s universe and cogito lack an existential dimension; it is like Putnam’s brain floating in a vat, agitating dead worlds.
We must understand Meillassoux within a pathetic register: if the world could change tomorrow, sea sand would be mere rock, not the historical saga of millions of coral polyps. Thus, in a hyper-chaotic world, a beach arising from nothing, a sunset produced by a sun born yesterday, would be devoid of beauty. This sunset would be stripped of its time, history, and romantic dimensions. It would cast its dim light only on dead matter. Since history would not exist, the sunset could not be imagined as the silent witness to a first kiss: sand would be mere rock, the sun would not be warm, and the world would be cold and senseless.
Nature acquires meaning only if it possesses a historical dimension. Only then is it recognized as a giver of life and affection, a silent witness to eons of real and existential suffering. This explains Meillassoux’s exaltation of inorganic, dead matter. If the world has only come into being yesterday, rose crimson is meaningless because it has not borne witness to lovers’ heartbreaks.
Poetic evocations aside, the “pathetic” argument against Meillassoux can be summarized as follows: if the world is contingent, what is the point of any existential engagement with it? If things can change tomorrow, why fight against inequality? Meillassoux’s world is a barren one, prone to being absorbed by capital and ideologically disposed toward that absorption. It is a world devoid of history, because history is not about the past but about faith in the future; this is the sore legacy of Meillassoux’s speculative realism.
References
Ducarme, F., & Couvet, D. (2020). What does ‘nature’ mean? Palgrave Communications, 6(1), 14. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-020-0390-y
Johnston, A. (2011). Hume’s Revenge: À Dieu, Meillassoux. En The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism. Re.press. https://philpapers.org/rec/BRYTST
Meillassoux, Q. (2016). Iteration, Reiteration, Repetition: A Speculative Analysis of the Meaningless Sign. En Genealogies of Speculation: Materialism and Subjectivity since structuralism. Bloomsbury Academic. https://philpapers.org/rec/MEIIRR
Meillassoux, Q. (2017). After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. Bloomsbury.
