Sunday 15 August 2010

ancestral home

Is it a mistake to look for evidence to settle this problem and to lay it along with the ghost in the machine and all the other spooks that gibber about the corridors of philosophy. Quentin Meillassoux thinks so:

Because although phenomenologists can say that consciousness is originally correlated and open to a world, what can they say about a pre-human and pre-animal reality- about ancestrality, this domain of non-correlation, because lacking any subject? How are the sciences able to speak so precisely about this domain, if this domain is no more than a retrospective illusion?
(3729-time_without_becoming.pdf available on Speculative Heresies blog/resources)

Mind you he does not propose this as an answer to the correlationist conundrum, he's just sayin'.

What would Timothy Sprigge say to this? He has no less than 19 entries in the index for 'fiction, pragmatic'. There is 'device, pragmatic' with ten entries and 'truth, pragmatic' with 9 entries. T.S. has got it covered. On page 23 introducing us to the idea he remarks:
Two somewhat different sorts of notional judgement may be distinguished. The first kind acts as a substitute for a real judgement, by appropriately relating us to the way things are if this real judgement is true, and by its potentiality for developing into this real judgement when we are enough in earnest. We may say of such a notional judgement that it is, to borrow a phrase from Husserl, intuitively fulfillable.


Well then Master Quentin you may be a starry Normalien but are you in earnest?

On one hand, it seems impossible to refute the argument of the correlational circle- to forget that when we think something, it is we who think something- but on the other hand, it seems impossible to have a correlationist understanding of the natural sciences.


You see the difficulty is; we have cognitions, we slice and dice according to our needs and unless we have a philosophy which can support adequation to the real then we fall back to the perception of our perceptions. Science will become a pragmatic fiction. Q.M. proposes the Principle of Factiality. I will get back to you on that.

2 comments:

elisa freschi said...

Dear Ombhurbhuva,
as usual, my poor intellect struggles to understand your complex arguments and I beg for mercy. Do you mean that we face to opposite problems, on the one hand phenomenology cannot explain what precedes the "arousal" of consciousness (i.e. "ancestrality"), on the other natural sciences cannot ground the existence of their object, that is, an unexperienced reality?

elisa freschi said...

I meant "two" opposite problems.