Angelaki

Journal of the Theoretical Humanities

ISSN: 0969-725X (Print) 1469-2899 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cang20

Realism, Anti-Realism, and Materialism

Raoni Padui

To cite this article: Raoni Padui (2011) Realism, Anti-Realism, and Materialism, Angelaki, 16:2,
89-101, DOI: 10.1080/0969725X.2011.591589

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 ANGEL AK I
journal of the theoretical humanities
volume 16 number 2 june 2011

uentin Meillassoux, in his first book After

Q Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of
Contingency, presents a controversial new read-
ing of the critical turn through a concept he
calls ‘‘correlationism.’’ Meillassoux wants to wake
philosophy from its ‘‘correlationist slumber’’ of
wallowing in the themes of finitude and limitation
into the possibility of a speculative materialism.
Following in the footsteps of his teacher Alain
Badiou,1 Meillassoux challenges us to overcome
the critical turn in philosophy. The goal of this raoni padui
paper is not to review his book but instead to
answer the polemical confrontation he levels
against critical philosophy through the concept REALISM, ANTI-
of correlationism.2 My thesis in this paper will be
that Meillassoux’s polemic, although an impor- REALISM, AND
tant occasion for us to rethink our relationship to MATERIALISM
the critical turn, is ultimately misguided in its
failure to accurately distinguish three aspects rereading the critical turn
present within the concept of correlationism:
(a) the largely epistemological question of realism after meillassoux
or anti-realism, (b) the question of materialism,
and (c) the separation of critical philosophy from
of entities and objects, but that such a vision
the sciences. In order to do so, in the first part of
of philosophy does not preclude materialism or
the paper I will briefly describe Meillassoux’s
a stance against empirical objectivity.
reading of the critical turn as correlationism.
Next, I will show how it does not argue for the
necessary unity of realism and materialism, and
how the anti-realism of the critical turn is not
1 meillassoux’s notion of correlation
necessarily antithetical to materialism. Finally, Meillassoux believes that philosophy since Kant’s
I will show that although Meillassoux is correct critical turn has succumbed to a form of thought
in understanding that the critical turn had he entitles correlationism.3 This concept is
something to do with a separation between supposed to encompass all modes of philosophiz-
philosophy and science, such a separation is ing that claim the primacy of the relation between
ultimately a restriction of philosophy itself that being and thinking over the related terms,
does not imply the crypto-idealism he accuses it ultimately maintaining that we only have access
of. My conclusion is that Kant’s transcendental to being in its relation to thinking, but never
turn does imply some form of anti-realism and a to being in-itself.4 There are many ways in
separation between philosophy and the science which this relation can be established, and

ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN1469-2899 online/11/020089^13 ß 2011 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/0969725X.2011.591589

89
 realism, anti-realism, and materialism
correlationism accommodates different forms of
thought, from its precursor – the empiricist belief
that to be is to be perceived, through an idealism
that believes that only what is within Geist can be
actual, up to a phenomenological ontology that
claims that Being is the horizon in which Dasein
understands beings. However different such
methods may be, they all involve some form of
critical distance from the naı̈ve realist position
whereby something can be understood as existing
radically independent of its relation to thought,
discourse, or language. To illustrate this point,
Meillassoux brings up the problem of ancestral-
ity,5 that is, of a statement whose literal meaning
refers to the existence and manifestation of
something radically anterior to human thought
or life as such. The response to and interpretation
of a statement such as ‘‘the earth was formed 4.56
billion years ago’’ is the telltale sign of whether
or not a philosophy is correlationist. Literally,
such an ancestral statement should mean exactly
what it says: that there actually was something
in existence prior to the existence of human
thinking, and that this happened in a time
completely independent of human, transcenden-
tal, or phenomenological time. If one begins to
qualify the ancestral statement by showing that
the meaning of such a notion of existence is
grounded within Dasein, or language, or that the
naı̈ve clock-time of such scientific statements is
derivative of a more original internal time-
consciousness, and so on, one is succumbing to
the correlationist thesis. Meillassoux claims that
correlationism is unable to comprehend the literal
meaning of such scientific statements, and that
since Kant’s critical turn we have learned to
compensate for this insufficiency by calling any
manner of direct realism ‘‘naı̈ve’’ or ‘‘dogmatic.’’
To this name-calling there is added a second-level
transcendental sphere in which the true (veri-
table) meaning happens in distinction to the naı̈ve
literal meaning. The correlationist is not a naı̈ve
idealist either, for she does not claim that being is
reducible to thought; instead, the claim is always
a more nuanced one of equi-primordiality or of
co-belonging. Against weak forms of subjective
idealism, the strong correlationist claims that
being is always already in relation to thinking.
Against such a tendency, Meillassoux wants to
return philosophy to its ability to access the
in-itself, what he calls ‘‘the great outdoors,’’6 and
this would mean acknowledging that the true
meaning of the ancestral statement is nothing
but its literal meaning. Although the correla-
tionist restriction to the facticity of the relation
between thought and being hides behind the piety
of finitude, it is Meillassoux’s contention that
it masks a crypto-idealist thesis in which nothing
can be without its relation to a world, or be
understood without the horizon of human
understanding.
According to Meillassoux, such a correlationist
turn was inaugurated by Kant’s so-called
‘‘Copernican revolution.’’ However, while Kant
claims his fidelity to the Copernican decentering
of thought, the actual outcome of the Critique of
Pure Reason is ultimately a betrayal of such
a Copernican turn. At the very moment when
the mathematical sciences were able to begin to
comprehend the world in ways that were
explicitly detached from the anthropocentric
model – that is, to access a dehumanized and
decentered cosmos – Kantian critical philosophy
initiated what Meillassoux calls a ‘‘Ptolemaic
counter-revolution’’7 in reaction to scientific
realism. In Meillassoux’s words:
While modern science discovered for the first
time thought’s capacity to accede to knowl-
edge of a world indifferent to thought’s
relation to the world, philosophy reacted to
this discovery by discovering the naivety of
its own previous ‘‘dogmatism’’, seeing in the
‘‘realism’’ of pre-Critical metaphysics the
paradigm of a decidedly outmoded conceptual
naivety. The philosophical era of correlation
corresponds to the scientific era of decenter-
ing, and corresponds to it as its very solution.8
There is something essentially reactive in the
transcendental turn, a counter-revolutionary and
ultimately conservative re-centering of human
thought at the very moment when thought is able
to relate to a de-sacralized and demystified world.
Meillassoux’s positive project is an attempt to
reconnect philosophy to the ‘‘great outside’’ of
the inhuman and ultimately contingent world
through a speculative materialism that resolutely
gives up on the well-established gestures of
90

philosophical finitude. Meillassoux provides a
precise step-by-step argument that guides his
reader to thought’s ability to think the absolute.
First, through the critique of the understanding
of facticity maintained by correlationism
Meillassoux establishes the principle of factiality,
that is, the claim that the contingency implied by
facticity is itself necessary and ultimately abso-
lute. Next, drawing on Badiou’s work in ontology
and mathematics, Meillassoux claims that
Cantor’s transfinite number can do the work of
thinking the absolute – in the precise sense of the
absolute necessity of contingency alone.9
2 correlationist facticity: ontological
or epistemological?
Meillassoux’s maneuver against correlationism
towards speculative materialism is typical of the
history of materialism: against the hypostatization
of thinking, he affirms the primacy of being over
thinking, or the primacy of the real over its
knowledge. However different their attempts to
think such a priority have been, thinkers such as
Marx, Adorno, and Althusser have claimed this
very primacy to be at the heart of the materialist
gesture.10 But Meillassoux’s challenge to the
correlationist turn, the ancestral statement,
suffers from a slippage between the analytically
distinct concepts of materialism and realism.
When he defines his project of a speculative
materialism, he uses the two terms together:
This decision [the correlationist turn] alone
suffices to disqualify every absolute of the
realist or materialist variety. Every materi-
alism that would be speculative, and hence for
which absolute reality is an entity without
thought, must assert both that thought is not
necessary . . . and that thought can think what
there must be when there is no thought.11
But the ontological primacy claimed by materi-
alism is not identical to the epistemological
primacy of the real over its thought claimed by
realism. While Meillassoux is attempting to
create a philosophy that is simultaneously
materialist and realist, the necessity of such an
endeavor is not so clear. The priority of being
over thinking does not need to be defended in an
91
padui
epistemological way, that is, by a speculative
proof that ‘‘thought can think what there must be
when there is no thought.’’ One can maintain
a materialist standpoint, namely, that the entity
and the real are ontologically prior to thought,
while denying the direct and immediate access of
thought to such an entity. In other words, one can
be a materialist and an anti-realist at the same
time. As Lee Braver has shown in A Thing of this
World: A History of Continental Anti-realism,12
thinkers after the Kantian turn, especially Hegel,
Heidegger, Foucault and Derrida, have generally
agreed on an anti-realist standpoint. The Kantian
restriction of philosophy to the sphere of relation
and access has been accepted insofar as we do not
believe in the direct access to the world as it is
in-itself without the mediation of thought,
language, discourse, or socio-historical factors.
But anti-realism does not imply a crypto-idealist
thesis about the non-existence of entities beyond
access and relation.13 Kant’s gesture is unequi-
vocal in this regard: the fact that thought cannot
think X without its own mediation in no way
implies that X cannot exist without thought’s
mediation. Stated more simply: the claim that
we cannot have immediate access to the world
does not imply its non-existence. And for those
worried about the mysticism or (as Meillassoux
calls it) the fideism that can rush in to occupy this
vacuum of non-knowledge, the claim of access
is not all-or-nothing. The denial of immediate
knowledge of the in-itself simply implies that
mediate knowledge, together with a critical
investigation of such structures of mediation,
will generally do quite well in matters empirical.
The facticity implied in human finite knowl-
edge seems to waver between an epistemological
and an ontological position. On the one hand, the
claim that thinking is finite can be seen as simply
a modest epistemic one that denies our knowl-
edge of the world as it is in itself without the
synthetic and relational modes of cognition.
This epistemological claim, if it is to be believed,
must be grounded in a defense that Kant called
a deduction. If its defense presupposes the claim
that this correlation is universal and necessary,
facticity becomes a form of transcendental
ignorance and is rendered ontological and
absolute. It is precisely this slippage between
 realism, anti-realism, and materialism
the epistemological and the ontological that is
at the heart of Meillassoux’s argument for the
principle of factiality. In order to maintain the
correlational character of knowledge, that is,
that we cannot know the absolute (the in-itself),
we must presuppose that the facticity of this
correlation is itself absolute: ‘‘We must show why
thought, far from experiencing its intrinsic limits
through facticity, experiences rather its knowl-
edge of the absolute through facticity.’’14
According to Meillassoux, it is the necessary
contingency of the factical encounter that is itself
absolute. His claim is that the epistemological
anti-realism presented by the correlationist circle
itself implies or presupposes an ontological thesis,
insofar as ‘‘it already presupposes an implicit
admission of the absoluteness of the contin-
gency.’’15 The principle of factiality, which states
the necessary contingency of givenness, its pure
possibility of being-otherwise, is in Meillassoux’s
reading simply the explicit articulation of that
which the correlationist must implicitly presup-
pose in her claim that the in-itself cannot be
known. If Meillassoux is able to argue that the
facticity that grounds correlationism necessarily
implies the ontological commitment he identifies
as the principle of factiality, then the necessity of
contingency must be thought.
Of course, a strong correlationist will reply
that we must be simply agnostic here, and claim
neither the necessity nor the contingency of
facticity. Meillassoux, foreseeing any such coun-
terarguments that simply maintain an agnostic
‘‘essential ignorance’’16 vis-à-vis the in-itself,
responds directly to this complaint. But in his
answer to this objection, he once again seems to
assume that correlationism is essentially a claim
about knowledge, an epistemological position that
needs grounding:
The truth is that you are only able to think this
possibility of ignorance because you have
actually thought the absoluteness of this
possibility, which is to say, its non-correla-
tional character. Let me make myself clear,
for this is the crux of the matter. So long as
you maintain that your skepticism towards
all knowledge of the absolute is based upon
an argument, rather than upon mere belief
or opinion, then you have to grant that the
core of any such argument must be
thinkable.17
Meillassoux is asking the correlationist to
present an epistemological deduction, a ground-
ing for their claim that the in-itself cannot be
thought. In so doing, he is able to maintain that
only if one can think the being of an in-itself
(in this case, the principle of factiality itself) can
one make the distinction between the in-itself
and the for-us. However, as Peter Hallward has
also noted, this argument seems to involve an
‘‘equivocation regarding the relation of thinking
and being, of epistemology and ontology.’’18
In saying that we have no access to the in-itself
we do not mean to say that there can be no
in-itself, because we have no access to it. This
conclusion could only be elicited if the correla-
tion were a skeptical knowledge claim that
needed to be defended. But it is precisely this
epistemological grounding that is criticized by
most of the correlationist tradition, from Hegel
to Heidegger to Derrida. The ontological and
materialist question of whether or not being
precedes thinking and its skepticism towards the
absolute is not ‘‘based upon an argument,’’ that
is, it is not grounded within an epistemological
deduction. Materialism is an ontological thesis
that posits that being can be independent of
thinking, while realism posits the thinkability of
this being independent of thinking. If correla-
tionist skepticism is an anti-realism, it does not
necessarily need to be an anti-materialism.
In the argument from facticity, Meillassoux
moves from one to the other, claiming that the
existence of something prior or independent of
thought (materialism) can only be maintained
if we can think or access being prior to thought
(realism). This move is clearly illegitimate,
insofar as it involves the claim that there can
be matter prior to thought if and only if one
can think the being of matter prior to thought.
In other words, it is grounding ontology in an
epistemology.
It is certainly true that the restriction of
philosophy to access and relation has historically
coincided with the rise of epistemology as first
philosophy (often in an explicitly neo-Kantian
vein). And as Rorty showed long ago in
92

Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature,19 repla-
cing epistemic access with the priority of
language or psychology fares no better in getting
us out of the representational problem of
mirroring the world. When Meillassoux chal-
lenges correlationism to answer directly the
question of the existence of the earth prior to
human thinking, the correlationist answer will
undeniably be to undermine the necessity,
fruitfulness, or even possibility of such an
answer. But such an undermining, correctly
understood, should imply a displacement of the
philosophical question away from such episte-
mological concerns. It is what Ian Hacking has
called undoing instead of denial.20 Both Hegel’s
protest against Kant21 and Heidegger’s protest
against Husserl,22 although owing quite a bit
to their predecessors, essentially repeat this
anti-epistemological gesture. The anti-realism of
most correlationists is actually an anti-epistemol-
ogy. The most dangerous moment of dogmati-
cally claiming that being is prior to thinking is
waking the skeptic from her dogmatic slumber,
who will immediately ask: ‘‘what access do we
have to the knowledge of such a being, such an
entity, such an object independent of thought?’’
These questions will begin the interminable
debate between dogmatism and skepticism that
Kant wanted to avoid in the first place.
Answering such questions at face value in
epistemological terms is what both correlation-
ism (in its good moments) and materialism have
attempted to avoid. As Adorno shows in
Negative Dialectics:
It is by passing to the object’s preponderance
that dialectics is rendered materialistic. The
object, the positive expression of non-identity,
is a terminological mask. Once the object
becomes an object of cognition, its physical
side is spiritualized from the outset by
translation into epistemology.23
Kant’s restriction thesis can and has been
interpreted in epistemological terms (often by
Kant himself). But it need not be so. The
restriction of philosophy to the problem of access
and relation allows for a different materialist
possibility, one which hides within the idealist
tradition.
93
padui
3 materialism without realism
I am not claiming that there can be no unity
between materialism and realism. In fact, there
have been many forms of such a unity, and while
Meillassoux attempts to provide a speculative
one, we could find in Bruno Latour’s work a
theory of scientific networks that is simulta-
neously materialist and realist,24 even if his
realism ultimately accepts more ‘‘constructivist’’
aspects of the scientific process. But materialism
does not necessarily have to be realistic, for the
problem of realism is an epistemological one
arising from a particularly Cartesian problematic
in Kant. The scientific and epistemic problem of
objectivity brought forth by Meillassoux, namely,
objectivity in the sense of an objective truth
independent of subjective contamination, is a fear
that only developed in the nineteenth century
through the mutation of the use of the term
‘‘objective’’ that is found in Kant’s own writ-
ings.25 The idea that truth must be something
found only when thought’s mediation or relation
is erased has a history co-extensive with the
critical turn. Meillassoux fails to see that the
ancestral question itself, as a problem of scientific
or epistemic realism, is really a product of
the very tradition he is trying to overcome.
Moreover, the attempt to join realism with
materialism has been plagued by the possibility
of the epistemological problems of skepticism.
And as we have seen in the analytic tradition
of realism, it will probably have to turn to
pragmatism26 or to methodological naturalism27
in order to answer its own demands (neither of
which appears as a possibility for Meillassoux).
But there is another tradition of materialism that
develops precisely through an anti-realist reading
of the idealist tradition that has been better
at avoiding such predicaments.
When Adorno protests against the spiritualiza-
tion of the object in its translation to an epistemic
object of knowledge, he is echoing the opening of
Marx’s first thesis on Feuerbach, which famously
begins:
The chief defect of all previous materialism
(including Feuerbach’s) is that the object,
actuality, sensuousness is conceived only in
the form of the object or perception, but not as
 realism, anti-realism, and materialism
sensuous human activity, praxis, not subjec-
tively. Hence in opposition to materialism the
active side was developed by idealism – but
only abstractly since idealism naturally does
not know actual, sensuous activity as such.28
Marx claims that materialism fails if it thinks of
the world merely as an object of knowledge,
whether as an object of experience, perception,
contemplation, or mathematical description.
The reason for this is that it can only do so at
the expense of a misrecognition of the fact that
experience, perception, contemplation, and other
modes of access and relation are themselves
activities. Although Meillassoux protests against
the finitude and facticity produced by Kant’s
restriction of knowledge, he does not adequately
identify the actual reason why Kant develops the
hypothesis that a knowing subject cannot have
immediate access to the world. The reason for
such a restriction is related to the fact that the
mind is no longer seen as a passive wax tablet
upon which the world leaves its imprint.
Thinking is an act, it does things to the world,
it is not simply a mirror to the world. The
correlationist move of Fichte and Hegel was
not to attempt to put together thinking and the
world, but to show thought’s contribution to
the production of world. If gluing back together
the thinking and being separated by thought’s
abstractive capacities were the goal of critical
philosophy, Meillassoux would be correct in
claiming that the last two centuries have been
abject failures. But Marx is clear in this first
thesis that the side of activity and praxis was
developed by idealism, not by the contemplative
forms of materialism. True, he is quick to
complain that such a development, viewed
from the inverted lens of idealism, locates the
determination and constitution on the side of
the subject and of thought. But the idea that
knowledge is activity we ultimately owe to Kant
and to Fichte’s reading of Kant29 – that is,
precisely to the correlationist move that
Meillassoux wants to overturn.
The recognition that thinking is an existent
activity places philosophy in relation to its non-
philosophical field. Philosophy cannot take its
step back to the pure space of observation and tell
us what the real world looks like. That is, thought
as the attempt to critique its time by a certain
form of removal or critical distance is necessarily
related to the activity and activation of the social
praxis within which it is imbedded. In the words
of Althusser: ‘‘It is counter to philosophy that
Marxism insists that philosophy has an ‘exterior’ –
or better expressed, that philosophy exists only
through and for this ‘exterior.’ This exterior
(which philosophy wishes to imagine it submits to
Truth) is practice, the social practices.’’30
Philosophy is rendered materialistic by maintain-
ing that being is somehow prior to thinking.
But idealism (in setting up the correlational turn
and positing the activity of thought) responds by
stating that the being that is prior to thinking
is nothing but thought itself. In doing so, it splits
thinking into two and shows us another path to
materialism. For by saying that the being prior
to thinking is nothing other than thought itself,
and that thinking is itself an activity, we are
again at the materialist moment. Thinking as act,
as practice, is the always already exterior and
existing aspect of thought. Abstract thought, or
thinking that believes to be purely abstracted
from and unrelated to this prior domain, is really
only the product of such real activity. Within this
idealist tradition, we can claim the priority of
being over thinking as the priority of thinking-
as-act over thinking-as-thinking-about; that is,
the priority of the process and activity of thinking
over its representational and referential content.
This allows one to bypass the entire epistemic
problematic of trying to leap over thought’s
mediation in order to get to a world that is
independent of thought. Remember that
Meillassoux claimed that any speculative materi-
alism must show that ‘‘absolute reality is an
entity without thought.’’31 Meillassoux is here
driven to the epistemological game of trying to
erase thought, which is unreal, in order to get
to a reality that is beyond thought. It is precisely
the temptation to think of thought as outside of
reality that the materialist tradition has para-
doxically avoided by taking the anti-realist and
anti-epistemological turn. Materialism should
treat thinking not merely as a relation of access
to be overcome in our attempt to grasp the ‘‘real
world’’ but as an actual activity. Such a project
has a closer lineage to the critical idealism
94

inaugurated by Kant (that Meillassoux calls
correlationism) than to any realism concerning
ancestral statements.
4 critical philosophy and the sciences
of objects
However, we have still not answered the charge
that Meillassoux mounts against correlationism’s
reactive or counter-revolutionary tendency to
deny the validity of the sciences to access
the world as it is in-itself. The conservative
re-centering of the finite subject at the heart of
philosophy is read by Meillassoux as a fearful
response against the recognition that the sciences
were suddenly usurping the previous space of
philosophy – namely, the ability to state the
truth about the world. Meillassoux is certainly
correct in stating that the critical turn involves
a restriction of philosophy to relation, or
co-relation. Kant himself defines transcendental
philosophy as a shift away from the object itself
as the subject matter of philosophy and towards
our relation to the object: ‘‘I entitle transcen-
dental all knowledge which is occupied not so
much with objects as with the mode of our
knowledge of objects.’’32 The correlation that
Kant sets up between the transcendental unity of
apperception and its objects includes a restriction
to the sphere of relation. The thing-in-itself is
really a byproduct of such a restriction, for it is
that which is allowed to occupy the empty place
of the object understood as existing beyond
relation:
Now a thing in itself cannot be known through
mere relations; and we may therefore conclude
that since outer sense gives us nothing but
mere relations, this sense can contain in its
representation only the relation of an object to
the subject, and not the inner properties of the
object in itself.33
While philosophy becomes a philosophy of access
and of relation, it simultaneously attests to a
limitation of philosophy itself. The thing-in-itself
is nothing but an acknowledgement of an
untenable and problematic realism, namely,
that the object itself, beyond our relations, is
unknown and beyond the sphere of philosophical
95
padui
knowledge. What Kant is pointing to through the
thing-in-itself is the following: since philosophy is
restricted to the sphere of access and relation,
we demarcate that sphere from the one that is
beyond relation and access. In other words, the
thing-in-itself is what it would be like to know
an object when it is not known, or to relate to
something to which we can have no relation.
What we find here is a delimitation of the
sphere of philosophy, above all in the notion
that it does not deal directly or immediately
with objects. Such a direct relation to objects can
happen in two ways, both of which are, after
Kant’s critique, non-philosophical: first, the
empirical-realist relation to objects of experience
within the domain of the experimental sciences
and, second, the transcendent and speculative
relation to the objects of special metaphysics
(God, World, Soul). According to Kant, philoso-
phy is not experimental science, nor is it theology
or speculative physics.34 The proper domain of
philosophy is not knowledge and the under-
standing, but thinking and Reason. The relation-
ship between concepts and intuitions, that is, the
sphere of the understanding, is not for Kant the
proper domain of philosophy: ‘‘Philosophical
knowledge is the knowledge gained by reason
from concepts.’’35 Reason, as the true domain
of philosophy, is the source of principles that do
not themselves relate immediately to objects of
experience, but only mediately through the
understanding, which is why Kant unequivocally
states that the principle of the unity of reason, for
example, ‘‘does not prescribe any law for objects,
and does not contain any general ground of the
possibility of knowing or of determining objects
as such.’’36 Philosophical thinking, within the
domain of Reason, is a second-order knowledge
that reflects upon the reflection upon experience.
Kant’s argument is roughly the following:
philosophy’s realm is thinking and Reason, but
Reason does not prescribe laws or ground for
objects, the understanding does that, therefore,
philosophy does not deal directly with objects.
This puts philosophy in a secondary, mediate
relation to the understanding – a relation that is
simultaneously one of ground and dependency.
That is, philosophy depends on the understand-
ing’s relation to objects in order to produce the
 realism, anti-realism, and materialism
functions and relations upon which it works, but
it also brings the understanding under the unity
of principles and system. Philosophy simulta-
neously grounds and is conditioned by our
relation to the world of objects. Nevertheless,
it does not prescribe principles, grounds, or
determinations to those objects themselves.
Fichte and Hegel’s rewritings of Kantian
critical philosophy deepen the severance
between philosophy and empirical objects.
German idealism should be understood not as
working towards a more all-encompassing
absolute, but instead towards a more restricted
and closed absolution from the sphere of
objects. In the second introduction to the
Wissenschaftslehre, Fichte is quick to defend
his project of science from misinterpretations that
fail to distinguish between the two series that are
operative in the work, the spontaneously realist
series of the self and the reflective, second-order
idealist series of the philosopher reflecting on
the self:
The philosopher says only in his own name:
Everything that exists for the self, exists
through the self. The self, however, itself
says in its own philosophy: As surely as I am
and live, something exists outside me, which is
not there by my doing. How it arrives at such
a claim, the philosopher explains by the
principles of his philosophy. The first stand-
point is that of pure speculation; the second,
that of life and scientific knowledge (in a sense
contrasted with that of the Science of
Knowledge).37
Philosophy as science is a second-order reflective
knowledge that must be differentiated from
science that relates directly to objects.
Meillassoux would object here, and show how
Fichte begins to create the grounding relation
between the transcendental field and the realist-
empirical field, claiming that philosophy
grounds the naı̈ve and dogmatic realist position.
However, one must notice that the transcenden-
tal, or philosophic-reflective second series, only
grounds the realist claims of the empirical realist,
it does not, and could not, ground the truth
or determinations of the objects of such a
realism. The intelligibility of the realist claim
is grounded in the idealist science, but the objects
about which the claim is rendered ‘‘realistic’’ are
outside the immediate scope of philosophy.
Meillassoux is correct to show that the literal
statement of the ancestral claim is hereby severed
from its correlational meaning, but such a
severance actually is the recognition of a non-
philosophical space – a delimitation of philoso-
phy. In one breath Fichte grounds realism
in idealism, in another he acknowledges a non-
philosophical ground: ‘‘The second is only
intelligible on the basis of the first; realism has
grounds, indeed, apart from that, for we are
constrained to it by our own nature, but it has no
known and comprehensible grounds.’’38 Despite
Fichte’s famous protests against Kant’s thing-in-
itself, in the separation between philosophical
grounds from these unknown and incomprehen-
sible grounds of realism, Fichte is pointing to the
space external to philosophy in the same way that
Kant’s thing-in-itself did.
It is only with Hegel, though, that we get an
explicit distinction between the condition and
ground and an articulation of the inversion of
grounding relations within the sphere of philoso-
phy.39 Philosophy is an inverted world when
related to the genetic materialism of the experi-
mental sciences. Although philosophy comes too
late, that is, it arrives always after the fact of our
workings on and relations to the world, it reverses
this dependency, this condition, into an indepen-
dence or grounding. Here is an example from the
Philosophy of Nature:
Not only must philosophy be in agreement
with our empirical knowledge of Nature, but
the origin and formation of the Philosophy
of Nature presupposes and is conditioned by
empirical physics. However, the course of a
science’s origin and the preliminaries of its
construction are one thing, while the science
itself is another. In the latter, the former
can no longer appear as the foundation of the
science; here, the foundation must be the
necessity of the Notion.40
Philosophy is understood by Hegel as always
already conditioned by and presupposing empiri-
cal scientific knowledge. Nonetheless, philosophy
inverts such a relation and turns such origin and
96

condition into a product by grounding the claims
of our realist and materialist sciences. This is
because philosophy for Hegel does not deal with
finite objects, but with our relation to finite
objects after they have already been negated. If
one wants to comprehend what an object is, or
how old the world is, or when human beings came
to inhabit the earth, the experimental sciences,
not philosophy, should be one’s true ally.
Although those statements may be correct, their
truth, which involves an inversion of the condi-
tion/ground relation once they have made their
entry into the correlational circle, is articulated
within philosophy.41 But this ultimately means a
separation or restriction of philosophy, since it
must await such negations of the sphere of
finitude in order to be self-grounding. In other
words, philosophy’s ground, which is absolute for
Hegel (that is, self-grounded and unconditioned),
is simultaneously and necessarily conditioned.
In this sense, the passage from the philosopher
who was against all ‘‘tenderness for the finite’’ to
the one most adamantly pious about our
ontological finitude is no great leap. The
ontological difference is used by Heidegger
precisely in order to maintain the proper
ontological space for philosophy against the
positive sciences that relate directly to their
specific ontic domain. In his early lecture course
on The Basic Problems of Phenomenology,
Heidegger uses the ontological difference as this
critical stance between the positive sciences and
philosophy we have already seen in Kant, Fichte,
and Hegel:
Only by taking this critical stance do we keep
our own standing inside the field of philoso-
phy. Therefore, in distinction from the
sciences of the things that are, of beings,
ontology, or philosophy in general, is the
critical science, or the science of the inverted
world. With this distinction between being and
beings and the selection of being as the theme
we depart in principle from the domain of
beings.42
Notice that Heidegger includes all the moves we
have identified in the critical tradition: (1) the
space of philosophy requires a separation from
the space of the sciences, (2) the space of
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philosophy is restricted and does not deal directly
with the domain of objects or beings, and (3) this
critical stance involves an inversion in grounding-
relation. These three must be understood
together in order to defend against a major
and dangerous misinterpretation of the critical
tradition: that is, the notion that critique is
a meta-discourse about objects and that such a
meta-discourse is the true, more originary ground
of the meaning of such objects. Meillassoux
correctly protests against this self-inflation of
philosophical discourse. But Heidegger is here
identifying the three moves together, that is,
philosophy is the ground of the positive sciences
if and only if there is the restriction away from
the sphere of beings and a separation from the
positive sciences. Such a restriction creates the
critical space which in turn grounds aspects
of the beings upon which it is always already
dependent. Disengaging one of the three critical
moves identified above, namely separation,
restriction, and inversion, would turn philosophy
into a meta-discourse about the whole, and inflate
the philosophy of finitude into a crypto-idealist
grounding of all naı̈ve and dogmatic realism.
My response to Meillassoux is thus simply to
divert the dangers he finds in correlationism by
redefining what is actually happening in the
critical turn. The important concept of finitude
attested to in the critical turn is not human
finitude but the finitude of philosophy itself,
that is, the notion that philosophy is conditioned
by other procedures (generally called sciences or
faculties) which operate directly upon objects.
Philosophy is so conditioned, or dependent,
because it is constituted by its severance and
separation from their specific domain. It is true,
then, that correlationist thought will not be
able to deal with the literal realist meaning of
statements such as ‘‘the universe came into being
13.5 billion years ago.’’ However, there is no
reason why it should, unless it wants to enter the
specifically scientific debate within the experi-
mental sciences about whether or not that is
correct, and leave the space of philosophy.
Critical philosophy does not necessarily imply
a grounding relation to the empirical or ontic
world, for such a grounding relation can only be
understood in conjunction to the inversion proper
 realism, anti-realism, and materialism
to its domain, and its domain only through a
severance or de-limitation that attests to its
conditionality. Althusser understood this move-
ment perfectly when he distinguished philosophy
from the sphere of objects in the first four theses
of Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy
of Scientists, and even more precisely in his late
essay ‘‘The Transformation of Philosophy,’’
where he states:
Philosophy borrows the model for its pure
rational discourse from the existing sciences.
Thus it is subjected to the ‘‘real sciences,’’
which are its condition of possibility. Yet
within its own discourse, an inversion occurs:
philosophical discourse transforms its act of
submission to the sciences and situates itself,
as ‘‘philosophy,’’ above the sciences, assuming
power over them.43
Badiou is simply following his master when he
differentiates philosophy from its conditions and
describes the danger inherent in the suturing
of philosophy to any one of these conditions.44
This should alert us to something deeply
continuous between the Kantian critical condition
and the materialism of Althusser and Badiou,
namely, the relegation of philosophy to an
operation conditioned by its separation from the
empirical domain of objects.
I will not deny that the self-restriction of the
philosophy of finitude often has, as a matter of
fact, hidden several self-inflating claims about its
ability to ground the positive sciences behind
pious deflationary humility. As Robert Pippin
notes, the double move of simultaneous humility
and arrogance is constitutive of modernity:
‘‘The modern ethos is always self-deflating as
self-inflating, and is always both at the same
time.’’45 The self-inflating piety in such gestures
is even more dangerous, Badiou and Meillassoux
remind us, when the philosopher becomes a
handmaiden to the poet or to the priest, or worst,
to the amalgamation of both, the prophet-poet,
and completely abandons her relation to the
scientist. But hopefully I have pointed towards
some ways in which Kant’s critical turn and
its subsequent development does not have the
meaning Meillassoux wants to give it through his
critique of correlationism. Critical philosophy
does imply a general form of anti-realism, and
if one pushed most critical philosophers into an
epistemological corner about the truth of the
ancestral statement, they would probably have to
answer in anti-realist terms. But they would do so
reluctantly, insofar as they do not see philosophy
as either primarily an epistemological endeavor
or as competent to decide in matters about the
objects of the empirical sciences. Critical philo-
sophy does not preclude materialism when it is
understood as distinct from realism, nor does it
undermine all claims of science about objects or
entities by showing their reducibility to relation
and mediation. If that is correct, despite the
fascinating attempt at proposing a speculative
materialism, Meillassoux’s chal-
lenge fails to argue for the
necessity of such an enterprise
and the supposed dangers of the
critical turn.
notes
I would like to thank the ‘‘Cornell Theory Reading
Group’’ for the opportunity to present and discuss
the ideas in this paper.Their conferences have been
a perfect model of what true interdisciplinary and
open inquiry in the humanities should be like.
I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewer
at Angelaki for comments on an earlier draft.
1 Badiou 157^78.
2 For an informative and sympathetic review of
Meillassoux’s book, see Harman.
3 For a more detailed presentation of the concept
of correlationism, see Harman; and Brassier
58 ^ 69.
4 Meillassoux, After Finitude 5^9.
5 Ibid. 9^14.
6 Ibid. 7.
7 Ibid.118.
8 Ibid.177.
9 This second part of the argument is criticized by
Hallward 51^57. The question of whether or not
mathematics can do the work that Meillassoux
wants it to do is beyond the scope of this paper.
However, since my goal is to deny that materialism
must involve either realism or the ability to think
98

the absolute, the argument of whether mathe-
matics can help us think the absolute ontologically
is beside the point. Although there is an interest-
ing debate to be had about whether Cantorian
mathematics can help us produce a speculative
position that is both materialist and realist,
the present paper wants to claim that we can cir-
cumvent the epistemological problems of realism
(and, for that matter, nominalism about mathema-
tical objects) by remaining within a tradition
of correlationism that is materialist and anti-
epistemological.
10 Cf. Althusser 9:
Materialism expresses the effective
conditions of the practice that produces
knowledge ^ specifically: (1) the distinction
between the real and its knowledge (distinc-
tion of reality), correlative of a correspon-
dence (adequacy) between knowledge and
its object (correspondence of knowledge);
and (2) the primacy of the real over its
knowledge, or the primacy of being over
thought. None the less, these principles
themselves are not ‘‘eternal’’ principles,
but the principles of the historical nature of
the process in which knowledge is produced.
11 Meillassoux, After Finitude 36.
12 Braver.
13 Dummett.
14 Meillassoux, After Finitude 52.
15 Ibid. 54.
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid. 58.
18 Hallward 54.
19 Rorty 213^312.
20 Hacking 57:
There are two ways in which to criticize
a proposal, doctrine, or dogma. One is to
argue that it is false. Another is to argue
that it is not even a candidate for truth or
falsehood. Call the former denial, the latter
undoing.
21 Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit 47^ 48.
22 Heidegger, Being and Time 246 ^ 47.
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23 Adorno 192.
24 Latour 1^23,145^73.
25 Daston and Galison; and Galison.
26 Putnam.
27 Quine.
28 Marx 99.
29 Fichte 29^ 85.
30 Althusser 248.
31 Meillassoux, After Finitude 36.
32 Kant 59.
33 Ibid. 87.
34 Re¤mi Brague has understood this about the
Copernican turn in his study of the concept of
world and cosmos in Western thought:
The physical world is incapable of sufficiency
as a concept of world; it is not ‘‘worldly’’
enough. Kant thus carries out an essential
uncoupling: the idea of world is liberated
from physics.The world enters into the ethi-
cal realm in the guise of the intelligible world.
(Brague 223)
35 Kant 577.
36 Ibid. 305.
37 Fichte 31.
38 Ibid.
39 For his most systematic description of this
distinction, see especially ‘‘Doctrine of Essence’’
in the Science of Logic 444 ^ 80.
40 Hegel, Philosophy of Nature 6.
41 Hegel already sees, although not in the same
respect, the distinction between Richtigkeit
and Wahrheit that would be made famous by
Heidegger. See his distinction between correct-
ness in the qualitative judgment and truth as
found through the Begriff:
It is one of the most fundamental logical
prejudices that qualitative judgments such
as: ‘‘The rose is red,’’ or: ‘‘is not red,’’ can con-
tain truth. Correct they may be, but only
in the restricted confines of perception,
finite representation, and thinking; this
depends on the content which is just as
 realism, anti-realism, and materialism
finite, and untrue on its own account.But the
truth rests only on the form, i.e., on the
posited Concept and the reality that corre-
sponds to it; truth of this kind is not
present in the qualitative judgment, how-
ever. (Hegel, Encyclopaedia Logic 249)
42 Heidegger, Basic Problems of Phenomenology 17.
Thus when Heidegger famously articulates the
correlation between Dasein and Being in Being
and Time, he simultaneously has this restriction to
the ontological domain in mind.One can quote the
famous sentence to support Meillassoux’s point
between the co-belonging thinking and being
in the correlationist thesis: ‘‘Of course only as
long as Dasein is (that is, only as long as an under-
standing of Being is ontically possible), ‘is there’
Being [‘gibt es’ Sein]’’ (Heidegger, Being and Time
255). But this statement can only be understood
with the often omitted previous sentence, which
reads: ‘‘But the fact that Reality is ontologically
grounded in the Being of Dasein, does not signify
that only when Dasein exists and as long as Dasein
exists, can the Real be as that which in itself it is’’
(ibid.). In distinguishing between Realita«t as
grounded within an understanding of being and
das Reales, the Real that exists ontically indepen-
dent of and indifferent to Dasein’s existence or
non-existence, Heidegger allows for an ancestral
statement to be correct in regards to its ontic
determination independently of the correlationist
thesis that there is only being as long as Dasein is.
43 Althusser 244.
44 Badiou.
45 Pippin 177.
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Raoni Padui
Department of Philosophy
Villanova University
800 Lancaster Ave.
Villanova, PA 19085
USA
E-mail: raoni.padui@villanova.edu