Suppose Kant was, for his time, the great awakener of the dogmatic dream. In that case, Quentin Meillassoux is an awakener for his contemporaries who, tired of the eternal repetition of hackneyed formulas, are looking for new dawns for the future of Philosophy. Meillassoux thus constitutes a starting point for a speculative horizon that seeks to devour the world with an unusual epistemic appetite.
Although the subject that brings us here is facticity and its critique, we must acknowledge the logical and historical development of the author’s argument. Starting from the division between primary and secondary qualities, we arrive at the ontological division of the objects of the world (consciousness and language), which separates everything that is known from an unknowable outside that cannot be illuminated under any episteme. This leads us to correlationism, the irremediable ancestral statement (Meillassoux, 2015, p. 42), and the facticity of the correlation.
Since Kant, this facticity can only be described, not deduced. This point is central, for it implies that no necessity can be derived from anything external—only the stoic resignation to describe the limits of the subject–object relation, or any of the historical expressions of the primordial relation between thought and being. Correlationism surpasses Kantianism: not only do sensibility and understanding become factual, but so does the logical form of our cognition.
Unlike Kant—whose in-itself is non-contradictory, for otherwise it would be impossible to allow its existence without thinking it—correlationism describes only the logical principles of the subject, but not their absolute truth or necessity. This is its central limitation, its inferiority to Kantianism in terms of critical penetration of the thing-in-itself, which ultimately opens the way for the specter of ideology.
Correlationism thus constructs invariants of the world—reorderers of representation—that enjoy the privilege of critical impenetrability, threatened only by tepid description: «These structures are fixed: I never experience their variation, and in the case of logical laws, I cannot even represent their modification» (Meillassoux, 2015, p. 61). Such forms, therefore, can only be factual. This does not mean they cannot change, but rather that those who submit to them lack the tools to predict such changes. In this sense, these so-called laws of the world appear less as laws than as commandments, subjected to the whimsical will of divinity.
Strong correlationism is thus encapsulated in the impossibility of the unthinkable, so that irrationality does not serve as an invalidating criterion for the rational faculty, whose capacities here prove relatively meagre. Faced with such a situation, the defenseless Spirit—without weapons to resist—submits to the specter of ideology, to the infernal hordes of the rejection of truth and of intellectual complacency. Meanwhile, the weak model affirms that it is not incompatible for an outside to exist and yet remain phenomenally unknowable, whereas the strong model denies all rational access to the outside of correlation. For—and here lies a contradiction—the outside inevitably presents itself as substance, as an underlying substratum, like one who gazes into the abyss and suspects that the abyss gazes back.
Meillassoux then makes a controversial decision: not to return to metaphysics. All metaphysics assumes a necessary entity, and the author’s chaotic agenda rejects this idea. It is therefore essential for him to go beyond the Great Outside and the limits of correlation. The strong model rests on two principles: correlation and factuality—the latter being the only one that can be traversed.
Although scientific statements possess a degree of rational independence, science itself does not entirely escape ideology and metaphysics. In my view, this is not inherently negative. Without invalidating Meillassoux’s critique, I suggest considering an alternative approach: acknowledging the strength of his critique of correlationism while nevertheless returning to metaphysics. I propose an experimental metaphysics that postulates an absolute, a necessary entity—an absolute revealed gradually through increasingly complex scientific methods. Such an absolute would not only offer practical value but would also address concrete, first-order problems.
What was once deemed unreasonable may now be interpreted as a victory for the strong model, since the otherness of correlation is, in truth, irrational. Everything becomes possible—especially the temporality and historicity of the present world, which must now be regarded as an unstable entity, besieged and devoured by ineffable others that contemplate both annihilation and the birth of God.
Meillassoux’s Principle of Factuality succinctly states that the only necessity is contingency (Meillassoux, 2015, p. 119). Crucially, this is not the contingent itself, but contingency as such: a hyper-chaotic state of affairs that opens reality to the multiverse of the possible, where laws and principles achieve only provisional and temporary stability.
A central concern for the author is method. With Cartesian roots, he proposes a mathematical approach to hyperchaos, divided into two levels: primordial, unfathomable chaos, and secondary, mathematically accessible chaos. Its foundation is, of course, the polemical arch-fossil. The author is not particularly interested in the harsh conditions of the Carboniferous; he does not inquire into whether those giant scolopendrons had a phenomenology. Rather, he points to the regular decomposition of the carbon-14 isotope, which indicates with high accuracy the vital vicissitudes of those insects. It is precisely mathematics that penetrates chaos in a secondary and contingent way, for this reality is not mathematically Pythagorean but Cartesian. It does not concern entities, but phenomena. Hence the fascination with the Zermelo–Fraenkel axiomatic system and with the possibility that infinities may inhabit greater infinities.
Yet this alone does not fully summarize the chapter dedicated to facticity. This chapter is central to the text, engaging deeply with analyses of non-contradiction and contested philosophical positions. But let us briefly turn to another matter. According to correlational models, the thing-in-itself remains essentially a mystery. Old Engels reminds us that nineteenth-century chemists once considered urea to be a true «thing-in-itself.» Refined from urine, it was believed to be obtainable only in this way, a pure and distilled gift of the gods. However, when Friedrich Wöhler synthesized urea in 1828 from simple inorganic materials, a barrier for Kantianism was broken: what had been regarded as a «thing-in-itself» became a thing-for-us. Here, the scientific method achieved in the laboratory what correlationism deems impossible: a fully rational access to the no-noumenon. This compels us to reconsider certain assumptions.
The correlational approach is sensible within its own field of application, but its original sin lies in trespassing into the scientific domain to postulate unverifiable truths
In Meillassoux’s analysis of metaphysics, we begin to see how personal biases infiltrate the argument: metaphysics must be cast as the villain to redeem strong correlationism. What was originally a condition of defeat is thus mistaken for victory. Kant, confronted with Hume’s problem of causality, acknowledges that no satisfactory scientific explanation of how causes produce effects was then possible. He therefore retreats into Spirit, awaiting new scientific developments and new times. Although Schelling and Hegel surpass him, the West ultimately favors Kantianism because, for the first time, it achieves something unprecedented: a separation between science and philosophy, between truth and interpretation. From that point onward, philosophy could retreat into its ivory tower of decayed truths and sluggish rhetoric, culminating in postmodernity and, eventually, its decline.
Intersubjectivity, consensus, and truth are not identical. For Kantianism, scientific truth exists because the community of the species shares it. Yet scientific truth is universal: phenomena remain equally valid whether observed in a Black Forest hut or on the arid plains of Mars.
If science is metaphysical, I accept it as such, and I make no concessions to correlationism; I do not parley with merchants of acrimony. The correlational approach is sensible within its own field of application, but its original sin lies in trespassing into the scientific domain to postulate unverifiable truths. In Meillassoux, I detect a courtly impulse to embrace the strong model, as if he were engaged in an academic Game of Thrones. Much of the text thus becomes dense rhetoric designed to justify the unholy alliance he chose to accept.
Perhaps all this can be explained by a natural fear of being labeled a socialist—a cursed word that closes doors in European courts. The only logical justification for hyperchaos is the God to come. The author’s motive, therefore, is politics disguised as factual ontology. Dissatisfied with the current world, he advocates for a God-to-come, intended to redeem the unredeemed specters of the past. Nothing else justifies such a bold use of Cantorian conjunctivism, which raises more questions than it answers.
Let us, then, be proudly metaphysical—if metaphysics is capable of solving problems like no other form of knowledge, if it is falsifiable, and if each day it provides more reliable schemes of the universe. The choice must be clear. Let us establish a metaphysics of the sciences that grants us access to the throne of the Empyrean, overthrowing the divinity seated there, to take its place as a species.
References:
Meillassoux, Q. (2015). Después de la finitud: Ensayo sobre la necesidad de la contingencia. Caja Negra.
