【メモ】 Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency

フランス語原典：　Meillassoux, Quentin (2006) Après la finitude : Essai sur la nécessité de la contingence. Paris: Seuil.

英訳：　Meillassoux, Quentin (2009) After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. Trans. Ray Brassier. London: Continuum.

「正しい形而上学のやり方」というものがもしあるとすれば、本書はそれを体現している。大陸の哲学者には珍しく、メイヤスーの論の進め方はあたかも数学書のようである。その結論のすべてに同意できるわけではないものの、彼の強靭な思考には感銘を禁じ得ない。以下、各章のまとめ擬きと雑感。

【第一章　先祖性】

"Everything is inside because in order to think anything whatsoever, it is necessary to 'be able to be conscious of it', it is necessary to say it, and so we are locked up in language or in consciousness without being able to get out. In this sense, they have no outside. But in another sense, they are entirely turned towards the outside; they are the world's window: for to be conscious is always to be conscious of something, to speak is necessarily to speak about something. To be conscious of the tree is to be conscious of the tree itself, and not the idea of the tree; to speak about the tree is not just to utter a word but to speak about the thing. Consequently, consciousness and language enclose the world within themselves only insofar as, conversely, they are entirely contained by it. We are in consciousness or language as in a transparent cage. Everything is outside, yet it is impossible to get out." (Francis Wolff, Dire le monde, pp.11-12)

The question that interests us here is then the following: what is it exactly that astrophysicists, geologists, or paleontologists are talking about when they discuss the age of the universe, the date of the accretion of the earth, the date of the appearance of prehuman species, or the date of the emergence of humanity itself? How are we to grasp the meaning of scientific statements bearing explicitly upon a manifestation of the world that is posited as anterior to the emergence of thought and even of life - posited, that is, as anterior to every form of human relation to the world? Or, to put it more precisely: how are we to think the meaning of a discourse which construes the relation to the world - that of thinking and/or living as a fact inscribed in a temporality within which this relation is just one event among others, inscribed in an order of succession in which it is merely a stage, rather than an origin? How is science able to think such statements, and in what sense can we eventually ascribe truth to them? (pp.9-10)

We could even wager, without taking too much of a risk, that where the theory of qualities is concerned, scientists are much more likely to side with Cartesianism than with Kantianism: they would have little difficulty in conceding that secondary qualities only exist as aspects of the living creature's relation to its world - but they would be much less willing to concede that (mathematizable) primary qualities only exist so long as we ourselves exist, rather than as properties of things themselves. And the truth is that their unwillingness to do so becomes all too understandable once one begins to seriously examine how the correlationist proposes to account for ancestrality. (p.13)

What then would be a literal interpretation of the ancestral statement? The belief that the realist meaning of the ancestral statement is its ultimate meaning - that there is no other regime of meaning capable of deepening our understanding of it, and that consequently the philosopher's codicil is irrelevant when it comes to analysing the signification of the statement. (p.14)

One does not validate a measure just to demonstrate that this measure is valid for all scientists; one validates it in order to determine what is measured. It is because certain radioactive isotopes are capable of informing us about a past event that we try to extract from them a measure of their age: turn this age into something unthinkable and the objectivity of the measure becomes devoid of sense and interest, indicating nothing beyond itself. Science does not experiment with a view to validating the universality of its experiments; it carries out repeatable experiments with a view to external referents which endow these experiments with meaning. (p.17)

（ancestralityの議論に対するcorrelationistの反論1の検討）：
The objection against idealism based on the distal occurrence is in fact identical with the one based on the ancient occurrence, and both are equivalent versions (temporal or spatial) of what could be called 'the objection from the un-witnessed', or from the 'un-perceived'. And the correlationist is certainly right about one thing - that the argument from the un-perceived is in fact trivial and poses no threat to correlationism. But the argument from the arche-fossil is in no way equivalent to such an objection, because the ancestral does not designate an ancient event - it designates an event anterior to terrestrial life and hence anterior to givenness itself. Though ancestrality is a temporal notion, its definition does not invoke distance in time, but rather anteriority in time. This is why the arche-fossil does not merely refer to an un-witnessed occurrence, but to a non-given occurrence - ancestral reality does not refer to occurrences which a lacunary givenness cannot apprehend, but to occurrences which are not contemporaneous with any givenness, whether lacunary or not. Therein lies its singularity and its critical potency with regard to correlationism. (p.20)

[T]he problem of the arche-fossil is not the empirical problem of the birth of living organisms, but the ontological problem of the coming into being of givenness as such. More acutely, the problem consists in understanding how science is able to think - without any particular difficulty - the coming into being of consciousness and its spatio-temporal forms of givenness in the midst of a space and time which are supposed to pre-exist the latter. More particularly, one thereby begins to grasp that science thinks a time in which the passage from the non-being of givenness to its being has effectively occurred - hence a time which, by definition, cannot be reduced to any givenness which preceded it and whose emergence it allows. In other words, at issue here is not the time of consciousness but the time of science - the time which, in order to be apprehended, must be understood as harbouring the capacity to engender not only physical things, but also correlations between given things and the giving of those things. Is this not precisely what science thinks? A time that is not only anterior to givenness, but essentially indifferent to the latter because givenness could just as well never have emerged if life had not arisen? Science reveals a time that not only does not need conscious time but that allows the latter to arise at a determinate point in its own flux. To think science is to think the status of a becoming which cannot be correlational because the correlate is in it, rather than it being in the correlate. So the challenge is therefore the following: to understand how science can think a world wherein spatio-temporal givenness itself came into being within a time and a space which preceded every variety of givenness. (pp.21-22)

（ancestralityの議論に対するcorrelationistの反論2）
'The empirical question is that of knowing how bodies that were organic prior to becoming conscious appeared in an environment which is itself physical. The transcendental question consists in determining how the science of this physical emergence of life and consciousness is possible. Now, these two levels of thought - the empirical and the transcendental - are like the two faces of a flat sheet of paper: they are absolutely inseparable but they never intersect. But your mistake consists precisely in allowing them to intersect - you have turned a structure which should have remained flat into a Mobius strip. You proceed as though the transcendental subject - which is ultimately the subject of science - was of the same nature as the physical organ which supports it - you collapse the distinction between the conscious organ which arose within nature and the subject of science which constructs the knowledge of nature. But the difference between these two is that the conscious organ exists; it is an entity in the same sense as any other physical organ; whereas the transcendental subject simply cannot be said to exist; which is to say that the subject is not an entity, but rather a set of conditions rendering objective scientific knowledge of entities possible. But a condition for objective cognition cannot be treated as an object, and since only objects can be said to exist, it is necessary to insist that a condition does not exist - precisely because it conditions. ... [T]hese conditions cannot be said to be born or to die - not because they are eternal, in the manner of a divine substance (which would be to think of them as an object once again, albeit a supersensible one), but simply because they cannot be situated at the same level of reflection [as objects] - to do so would engender a paradox which, like that of the liar, results from a confusion between discourse and its object. ... Every attempt to subordinate them [the transcendental conditions of cognition] to the science whose exercise they allow is inherently doomed to elide the very meaning of the transcendental.' (pp.22-23)
（相対主義がメタレベルのディスコースであることとパラレル。相対主義のこのような性質を浮き彫りにするのは相対化の運動ではなく独在化の運動。一旦独在化された相対主義を再び世界を眺める一視点に引き戻すのが相対化の運動に対応する）

上に対する反論
[N]othing prevents us from reflecting in turn on the conditions under which there is a transcendental subject. And among these conditions we find that there can only be a transcendental subject on condition that such a subject takes place. What do we mean by 'taking place'? We mean that the transcendental, insofar as it refuses all metaphysical dogmatism, remains indissociable from the notion of a point of view. (p.24)

The subject is transcendental only insofar as it is positioned in the world, of which it can only ever discover a finite aspect, and which it can never recollect in its totality. But if the transcendental subject is localized among the finite objects of its world in this way, this means that it remains indissociable from its incarnation in a body; in other words, it is indissociable from a determinate object in the world. Granted, the transcendental is the condition for knowledge of bodies, but it is necessary to add that the body is also the condition for the taking place of the transcendental. (p.25)

Our question was the following: what are the conditions under which an ancestral statement remains meaningful? But as we have seen, this question harbours another one, which is more originary, and which delivers its veritable import, to wit: how are we to conceive of the empirical sciences' capacity to yield knowledge of the ancestral realm? For what is at stake here, under the cover of ancestrality, is the nature of scientific discourse, and more particularly of what characterizes this discourse, i.e. its mathematical form. (p.26)

Ultimately then, we must understand that what distinguishes the philosopher from the non-philosopher in this matter is that only the former is capable of being astonished (in the strong sense) by the straightforwardly literal meaning of the ancestral statement. The virtue of transcendentalism does not lie in rendering realism illusory, but in rendering it astonishing, i.e. apparently unthinkable, yet true, and hence eminently problematic. (p.27)

雑感：
メイヤスーの、ancestralityの議論によるcorrelationismへの批判には、二つの再批判が想定されうるように思う。

まず一つ目は、汎心論の可能性。 メイヤスーは、世界を眺める視点は身体を必要とし、身体は歴史上のある時点で出現したという前提で論を進めているが、もし汎心論が正しければ、世界と主体とのcorrelationを絶対化するspeculative idealismの道を取らずに、ancestralityの議論に反駁できるように思う（あるいは、メイヤスーはライプニッツのモナドなどもspeculative idealismの陣営に括っているので、汎心論もここに入れて考えて入れているのかもしれない。しかし、汎心論が必ずしも世界と観察主体とのcorrelationを絶対化どころか想定しているとすら言えないだろう）。

二点目は、世界を眺める視点の内在性が、知識の可謬性をもたらすということを、メイヤスーは考慮していない点。ancestralityの議論を認めた上で、なお視点の内在性による知識の可謬性を主張することができる。つまり、absoluteをそれ自体として（「我々」の相関としてではなく）思惟することができることと、correlationismが成立することは必ずしも排他的とは言えないのではないか、両者は一種のパラドクシカルな循環構造を形成していると考えられるのではないか、ということである。

【第二章　形而上学・信仰主義・思弁】

[T]o think ancestrality requires that we take up once more the thought of the absolute; yet through ancestrality, it is the discourse of empirical science as such that we are attempting to understand and to legitimate. Consequently, it becomes necessary to insist that, far from encouraging us to renounce the kind of philosophy that claims to be able to discover absolute truth solely through its own resources, and far from commanding us - as the various forms of positivism would wish - to renounce the quest for the absolute, it is science itself that enjoins us to discover the source of its own absoluteness. For if I cannot think anything that is absolute, I cannot make sense of ancestrality, and consequently I cannot make sense of the science that allows me to know ancestrality. (p.28)

But we also begin to understand how this proof [Descartes' ontological proof of the existence of God] is intrinsically tied to the culmination of a principle first formulated by Leibniz, although already at work in Descartes, viz., the principle of sufficient reason, according to which for every thing, every fact, and every occurrence, there must be a reason why it is thus and so rather than otherwise. For not only does such a principle require that there be a possible explanation for every worldly fact; it also requires that thought account for the unconditioned totality of beings, as well as for their being thus and so. Consequently, although thought may well be able to account for the facts of the world by invoking this or that global law - nevertheless, it must also, according to the principle of reason, account for why these laws are thus and not otherwise, and therefore account for why the world is thus and not otherwise. And even were such a 'reason for the world' to be furnished, it would yet be necessary to account for this reason, and so on ad infinitum. If thought is to avoid an infinite regress while submitting to the principle of reason, it is incumbent upon it to uncover a reason that would prove capable of accounting for everything, including itself - a reason not conditioned by any other reason, and which only the ontological argument is capable of uncovering, since the latter secures the existence of an X through the determination of this X alone, rather than through the determination of some entity other than X - X must be because it is perfect, and hence causa sui, or sole cause of itself.
If every variant of dogmatic metaphysics is characterized by the thesis that at least one entity is absolutely necessary (the thesis of real necessity), it becomes clear how metaphysics culminates in the thesis according to which every entity is absolutely necessary (the principle of sufficient reason). Conversely, to reject dogmatic metaphysics means to reject all real necessity, and a fortiori to reject the principle of sufficient reason, as well as the ontological argument, which is the keystone that allows the system of real necessity to close in upon itself. Such a refusal enjoins us to maintain that there is no legitimate demonstration that a determinate entity should exist unconditionally. (p.33)

We thereby grasp that what is at stake in a critique of the deabsolutizing implication (viz., that if metaphysics is obsolete, so is every form of absolute) goes beyond that of the legitimation of ancestral statements. What is urgently required, in effect, is that we re-think what could be called 'the prejudices of critical-sense'; viz., critical potency is not necessarily on the side of those who would undermine the validity of absolute truths, but rather on the side of those would succeed in criticizing both ideological dogmatism and sceptical fanaticism. Against dogmatism, it is important that we uphold the refusal of every metaphysical absolute, but against the reasoned violence of various fanaticisms, it is important that we re-discover in thought a modicum of absoluteness - enough of it, in any case, to counter the pretensions of those who would present themselves as its privileged trustees, solely by virtue of some revelation. (p.49)

"dogmatic metaphysics"に対するメイヤスーの批判は成功しているようには思えない。充足理由律は必ずしも絶対者の存在論的証明を必要とせず、したがって存在論的証明が論駁されたからといって充足理由律が論駁されたことにはならないのではないか。例えば、絶対者をある概念として明示化せず、単に「何か」があると言えばいいのである。そもそも、充足理由律を何らかの哲学の「原理」と考える必要すらない。何かの「理由」を問うことは、概念を分節化して初めて可能になるのだから、それは人間の営為と密接に関わっている。とすれば、充足理由律は、現象それ自体に関わる何らかの哲学的な原理ではなく、人間の科学的探究を導くための方法論上の指針と考えた方がよさそうだ。メイヤスーは、人間による概念の分節化に関して少々無頓着であるように思う。だから経験的内容を排除したかのように見える純論理的分析は、知らず知らずのうちに経験的な概念を忍び込ませているのだ。

【第三章　事実性の原理】

It [the correlationist cogito] is not strictly speaking a solipsistic cogito, but rather a 'cogitamus', since it founds science's objective truth upon an intersubjective consensus among consciousnesses. Yet the correlationist cogito also institutes a certain kind of solipsism, which could be called a 'species solipsism', or a 'solipsism of the community', since it ratifies the impossibility of thinking any reality that would be anterior or posterior to the community of thinking beings. This community only has dealings with itself, and with the world with which it is contemporaneous. (p.50)

the distinction between the in-itself and the for-us - is only conceivable insofar as it already presupposes an implicit admission of the absoluteness of contingency. (p.53)

The very idea of the difference between the in-itself and the for-us would never have arisen within you, had you not experienced what is perhaps human thought's most remarkable power - its capacity to access the possibility of its own non-being, and thus to know itself to be mortal. What you experience in your thought draws its redoubtable power from the profound truth which is implicated within it - you have "touched upon" nothing less than an absolute, the only veritable one, and with its help you have destroyed all the false absolutes of metaphysics, those of idealism as well as those of realism. ... In other words, one cannot think unreason - which is the equal and indifferent possibility of every eventuality - as merely relative to thought, since only by thinking it as an absolute can one de-absolutize every dogmatic thesis. (p.59)

[I]t then becomes apparent that one of the defining characteristics of such an entity [a contradictory entity] would be to continue to be even were it not to be. Consequently, if this entity existed, it would be impossible for it simply to cease to exist - unperturbed, it would incorporate the fact of not existing into its being. Thus, as an instance of a really contradictory being, this entity would be perfectly eternal.　(p.69)

ここでも疑問が一つ。メイヤスーはstrong correlationismを論駁するためにfacticityを絶対化するが、物自体は認識不可能だが思惟可能だとするweak correlationismを論駁していない。strong correlationismさえ論駁すればweak correlationsimは考える必要はないと考えたのだろうか。しかし、strong correlationismはweak correlationsimに対する論駁を含んでいるわけではないのではないか。

【第四章　ヒュームの問題】

In any case, it is astonishing to note how in this matter [causation] , philosophers, who are generally the partisans of thought rather than of the senses, have opted overwhelmingly to trust their habitual perceptions, rather than the luminous clarity of intellection. (p.91)

[B]y what right then do we conclude from this difference between the a priori and the experiential that it is the a priori that is deceptive, and not experience that is illusory? What is it that allows us claim that the constancy of experience opens onto a genuine necessity, whereas the a priori does not open onto a veritable contingency? (p.96)

Since we cannot decide a priori (i.e. through the use of logical-mathematical procedures alone) whether or not a totality of the possible exists, then we should restrict the claims of aleatory reasoning solely to objects of experience, rather than extending it - as Kant implicitly does in his objective deduction - to the very laws that govern our universe, as if we knew that the latter necessarily belongs to some greater Whole. Since both theses (viz., that the possible is numerically totalizable, and that it is not) are a priori conceivable, only experience can provide us with an assurance as to the validity of aleatory reasoning, by acting as guarantor for the actual existence of the totality which is required in order for that reasoning to work - whether in the form of a direct experience of a supposedly homogeneous object (e.g. the dice or the rope), or in the form of a statistical analysis (determination of average values and of appropriate frequencies for an identifiable phenomenon). Accordingly, the only totalities available to us that are capable of legitimating this type of aleatory reasoning must be given to us within our universe - which is to say, experientially. Kant's belief in the necessity of laws is thereby revoked as an instance of aleatory reason's unwarranted pretension to reach beyond the limits of experience.

宇宙内部の事象に関する場合と、宇宙自身の発展に関する場合とで、本当に本質的な違いはあるのだろうか。ここはもう少し考える必要がある。

【第五章　プトレマイオスの復讐】

[T]he very fact that an observer can influence the law is itself a property of the law which is not supposed to depend upon the existence of an observer. (p.114)

It is this capacity whereby mathematized science is able to deploy a world that is separable from man - a capacity that. Descartes theorized in all its power - that rendered possible the essential alliance between the Galilean and Copernican revolutions. In speaking of 'the Copernican revolution', what we have in mind is not so much the astronomical discovery of the decentring of the terrestrial observer within the solar system, but rather the much more fundamental decentring which presided over the mathematization of nature, viz., the decentring of thought relative to the world within the process of knowledge. (p.115)

The sense of desolation and abandonment which modern science instils in humanity's conception of itself and of the cosmos has no more fundamental cause than this: it consists in the thought of thought's contingency for the world, and the recognition that thought has become able to think a world that can dispense with thought, a world that is essentially unaffected by whether or not anyone thinks it. (p.116)

[O]nce one has conceded that it makes no sense to claim that what is can be thought independently of the forms through which it is given to a thinking being, then it is no longer possible to accord to science that what it says is indeed the last word about what it says. (p.122)

総評：
メイヤスーが取り組もうとしている問題は、私と同じ問題である。しかし、メイヤスーは私には合理主義成分が強すぎる。私は、論理や数学の知識も含めて、我々の知識の源泉は全て経験（個体発生だけでなく系統発生に亘る）だと考えているので、経験を軽んじる傾向の強いメイヤスーには同意できない部分は多い。メイヤスーとは違った方法、観測の形式に対する内容の先行性（優位）を論証するような方法で、彼のancestralityの問題を考えてみたい。結論に同意できるか否かに関わらず、本書は全力で考えさせてくれる哲学書である。