The Realist Challenge: Thinking the Reality of Language after Deconstruction

This chapter shows that realism and linguisticism are but two sides of the same medal. Naïve realism takes an entity, such as ‘matter’, ‘objects’, or ‘numbers’, to be simply given, thus constituting a kind of origin. While linguisticism presents an updated version of Kant’s critique of realism, it also asserts either that we cannot speak to an extra-linguistic real or that language is determined by the real, of which it cannot speak but toward which it nevertheless tends. While the first option seals us within linguistic idealism, the second tends to think of language in terms of a medieval semiology and a negative theology of the real. This chapter shows how speculative realists share in this negative theology and then turns to deconstruction and to Derrida’s engagement with Pierce’s semiology to develop a thinking of the reality of the sign.

Kantian Realisms: The Noumenal, Causation and Grounding

This chapter outlines a strong version of ‘realism’ against what Meillassoux labels ‘correlationism’. It suggests, however, that the critiques made by certain realists of the Kantian noumenal can be answered. It begins by defending Kantian ‘empirical realism’ against the critiques of some realists. Then it moves on to claim that Kant’s arguments for transcendental idealism are stronger than those for Bhaskar’s transcendental realism. The chapter suggests, more controversially, that if one takes seriously Kant’s notion of ‘spontaneous causation’, it is possible to offer a Kantian defence of the ‘grounding’ of the phenomenal in the noumenal. Finally, it argues that Kant offers a stronger form of realism than is generally supposed by his critics.

Before Infinitude: A Levinasian Response to Meillassoux’s Speculative Realism

This chapter argues that like Meillassoux, Levinas opposes correlationism—a term encompassing both idealism and anti-realism in philosophy. However, Levinas’s attempt to overcome correlationism differs markedly from that of Meillassoux. Whereas Meillassoux argues that mathematizable, scientific discourse can determine facts about reality independent of human thought or awareness, Levinas appeals to an ethical experience of the other that remains correlated with awareness but transcend human rationality. Their attempts to overcome correlationism are thus reverse images of each other: whereas Meillassoux uses reason to transcend experience, Levinas appeals to experience to transcend reason. Taken together, these disparate approaches point to a more nuanced understanding of correlationism and its possible overcoming.

The Ecstatic Realism of the Late Schelling

This chapter extracts from the philosophy of the late Schelling, a form of realism called ‘ecstatic realism’. After providing an overview of Schelling’s role in the rise and fall of German idealism, it turns to Schelling’s interpretation of kenosis and its corresponding ontology. It shows that the presupposition of Schelling’s ecstatic realism is an idealism that renounces itself, and can only do so because it necessarily asserts itself at the expense of the real. This dynamic defines the paradoxical relation of negative and positive philosophy in Schelling’s late writings and offers an alternative to the either/or of idealism or realism gripping contemporary debates about correlationism.

The Radical Contingency of Temporality, Correlation and Philosophy: Merleau-Ponty’s Indirect Ontology contra Meillassoux’s Hyper-Anthropocentric Idealism

This chapter first analyses Meillassoux’s critique, in After Finitude, of subject-object correlation and phenomenology. It then traces connections between passivity, radical reflection, and indirect ontology in Merleau-Ponty, to show how Meillassoux, contra Merleau-Ponty, takes the activity of thinking for granted and neglects passivity, in ways that lead to ontological confusions and assumptions about being's determinate character. The latter troubles Meillassoux’s ancestrality problem and leads him to overlook a radically contingent being indicated within correlation itself. The final section clarifies and supports this claim via physics, specifically the measurement problem in quantum mechanics—a concrete problem that Meillassoux does not discuss when he broadly invokes mathematics and science to support his position.

Empirical Realism and the Great Outdoors: A Critique of Meillassoux

Meillassoux argues that Kant’s ‘correlationist’ proscription of independent access to either thought or being prevents an account of the meaning of ‘ancestral statements’ regarding reality prior to humans. This chapter examines three charges on which Meillassoux’s argument depends: (1) Kant distorts ancestral statements’ meaning; (2) Kant fallaciously infers causality’s necessity; (3) Kant’s transcendental idealism cannot grasp ‘the great outdoors’. These charges are rejected on the following grounds: (1) imposes a Cartesian misreading, hence Meillassoux’s false assumption that, for Kant, objects don’t exist without subjects; (2) misreads Kant, who infers causality’s necessity from the possibility of experience; (3) casts Kant’s idealism as subjective, ignoring his perspectival portrayal of it.

Pessimism, or The Importance of Indifference, Time and Suffering in Realist Ontologies

There is a growing body of work that reclaims pessimism as a robust philosophical position central to the development of modern philosophy and, as this chapter argues, to the re-emergence of realism within continental philosophy. Specially, this chapter contends that pessimism is best understood as an anti-correlationist realism, its concern for the unhappy and suffer-laden character of human life emerging from an ontological commitment to a world indifferent to and independent from human life. In addition, pessimism connects the assertion of a realist ontology to questions of suffering, violence, and time, highlighting the dangerously ideological character of optimistic or anti-realist metaphysics. This emphasis on realism as ideology critique marks pessimism’s key contribution to our understanding of realism.

Being (with) Objects

This chapter explores some of the ambivalent potential of Graham Harman’s object-oriented ontology for thinking about human beings as objects and about being with human beings as objects. In particular, it employs feminist phenomenological theories of objectification, such as those of Beauvoir, Young, and Bartky, as both already object-oriented and as already contesting the idealist tendencies opposed by Harman. Objectification often produces ‘double-consciousness’, and objectified human beings inhabit a site of ontological duality, often knowing themselves as objects for others. The chapter suggests that the absence of these analyses in object-oriented ontology constitutes an important oversight since such work not only draws attention to object relations among human beings but also points to ways of understanding human relations with non-human objects.

Introduction: Continental Realism – Picking Up the Pieces

This introductory chapter provides a historical overview of the emergence of new realist movements in contemporary continental philosophy, focusing in particular on speculative realism and materialism, object-oriented ontology, and transcendental nihilism. Provided also is a conceptual introduction to recent realist critiques of the correlationism of post-Kantian philosophy as well as its supposed fideism, anthropocentrism, and anti-scientific bias. This introduction also contains an overview of the volume and the included chapters.

Merleau-Ponty and the Challenge of Realism, or How (Not) to Go beyond Phenomenology

This chapter seeks to demonstrate both the strengths and the limits of phenomenology when faced with the new realists’ challenge. The first part focuses on the Husserlian phenomenological method and shows that once the role of the reduction and the relation between evidence and motivation are properly understood, phenomenology leads to a form of what Lee Braver has called ‘transgressive realism’. The second part shows that the trajectory of Merleau-Ponty’s later philosophy out of phenomenology, as well as his development of a dimension of depth or latency, provide us with an ‘outside’ akin to Meillassoux’s ‘hyperchaos’ or Harman’s ‘inner life of objects’, but one that need not be completely detached from the world or from experience to maintain its integrity or exteriority. As a result, Merleau-Ponty’s position avoids the problems of motivation and modesty detailed in the first part.