P R E FA C E
i
The purpose of the series ‘The Philosophical Order’1 is not only to publish mature and accomplished works of contemporary philosophy, or indispensable philosophical documents from every era, but also essays in which it is possible to detect the sense of something new – texts which respond to the question: ‘What wound was I seeking to heal, what thorn was I seeking to draw from the flesh of existence when I became what is called “a philosopher”?’ It may be that, as Bergson maintained, a philosopher only ever develops one idea. In any case, there is no doubt that the philosopher is born of a single question, the question which arises at the intersection of thought and life at a given moment in the philosopher’s youth; the question which one must at all costs find a way to answer. This is the category to which we must assign this book by Quentin Meillassoux.
ii
This brief essay, which is a fragment from a particularly important philosophical (or ‘speculative’, to use the author’s own vocabulary) enterprise, returns to the root of the problem which provided the impetus for Kant’s critical philosophy; the problem which, through the solution which Kant proposed, can be said to have broken the history of thought in two. This problem, which Hume formulated most clearly, pertains to the necessity of the laws of nature. From whence does this putative necessity arise, given that perceptual experience, which is the source of everything we know or think we know about the world, provides no guarantee whatsoever for it?
Kant’s response, as we know, grants to Hume that everything we know comes from experience. Yet Kant upholds the necessity of the laws of nature, whose mathematical form and conformity to empirical observation we have known since Newton, concluding that since this necessity cannot have arisen from our sensible receptivity, it must have another source: that of the constituting activity of a universal subject, which Kant calls ‘the transcendental subject’. This distinction between empirical receptivity and transcendental constitution appears to be the obligatory framework for all modern thought, and in particular for every attempt to think the nature of ‘modalities’, such as necessity or contingency. The latter continue to be the objects of Deleuze’s or Foucault’s reflections. But they also underlie the distinction, which is fundamental for Carnap and the analytic tradition, between formal and empirical sciences. Quentin Meillassoux demonstrates with astonishing force how another interpretation of Hume’s problem – one which has remained occluded, even though it is more ‘natural’ – leads to a completely different resolution. Like Kant, Meillassoux saves necessity, including logical necessity. But like Hume, he grants that there is no acceptable ground for the necessity of the laws of nature.
Meillassoux’s proof – for it is indeed a proof – demonstrates that there is only one thing that is absolutely necessary: that the laws of nature are contingent. This entirely novel connection between contrary modalities puts thought in a wholly other relation to the experience of the world; a relation which simultaneously undoes the ‘necessitarian’ pretensions of classical metaphysics as well as the ‘critical’ distribution of the empirical and the transcendental.
Quentin Meillassoux then goes on to draw some of the consequences of his resumption of the fundamental problem (‘what can I know?’) towards two other problems: ‘what must I do?’ and ‘what can I hope?’ It is there that what lies beyond finitude is deployed for contemporary thinkers. It would be no exaggeration to say that Quentin Meillassoux has opened up a new path in the history of philosophy, hitherto conceived as the history of what it is to know; a path that circumvents Kant’s canonical distinction between ‘dogmatism’, ‘scepticism’ and ‘critique’. Yes, there is absolute logical necessity. Yes, there is radical contingency. Yes, we can think what there is, and this thinking in no way depends upon a supposedly constituting subject.
This remarkable ‘critique of Critique’ is presented here without embel-lishment, cutting straight to the heart of the matter in a particularly
lucid and argumentative style. It allows thought to be destined towards the absolute once more, rather than towards those partial fragments and relations in which we complacently luxuriate while the ‘return of the religious’ provides us with a fictitious supplement of spirituality.
Alain Badiou