Notes on After Speculative Realism (2025)

A series of somewhat coherent notes on articles on speculation, correlationism and post-critical thought.

What are post-critical ontologies Rodrigo Nunes

The problem Rodrigo Nunes addresses in this paper can be formulated as following: what remains of philosophy after Quentin Meillassoux? What is the status of speculation after the correlationist band was torn in After Finitude? In Nunes’ own words, “at the heart of this task lies the question of whether ontological claims concern what is knowable or only thinkable, and what follows from how we answer it.” Nunes goes on to examine the viability of speculation, or rather how speculation is actually grounded, in what he terms post-critical ontologies (including Harman, Brassier, Grant, Shaviro, Gabriel, Badiou). His aim is to demonstrate - contrary to Meillassoux - that these post-critical ontologies retain a minimal correlationist frame, which is precisely what enables speculation.

To cut it short, since most have likely read about After Finitude multiple times, Meillassoux’s argument goes like this:

• (In effort to overcome dogmatic metaphysics, which posited and speculated about absolute, mind-independent, objective substances) modern philosophy is locked in a transcendental axiom: the correlation of thought and being is insurmountable, meaning we cannot think being as independent of thinking.
• This renders philosophy’s relation to science problematic, as it translates every scientific statement, such as “The Great Oxidation Event began 2.460–2.426 billion years ago”, into something like “The Great Oxidation Event began 2.460–2.426 billion years ago for us,” where the “for us” undermines the status of scientific knowledge by turning a claim about being into a sense-making formula about correlation.
• Correlationists thus find themselves in a paradox: to distinguish themselves from absolute idealists, who deduce “I is absolute”, they must acknowledge the contingency of the correlation itself. Yet by doing so a correlationist has to reintroduce something independent of thought, namely, contingency as the condition for the emergence of any correlation.
• Meillassoux reckons the only way out of the paradox that erodes correlationism is to affirm the Absolute as the possibility of knowing the Great Outside of thought.
• Meillassoux draws on a pre-critical distinction between primary and secondary qualities, which is admittedly a questionable move, though still I would argue the specific basis for his (modal) collapse of thinking onto being is less important than the consequences of accepting his argument: 1) the recognition of the fact that science already produces knowledge that transcends the correlationist circle; 2) the restoration of the possibility of speculative thought—“every type of thinking that claims to be able to access some form of absolute” (Meillassoux 2008, 34). In other words, what matters is the architecture of Meillassoux’s argument, which asserts the possibility of scientific knowledge, while reinstating the possibility of speculation about necessary conditions of thought—grounded not in absolute substance, but absolute contingency, or as he phrases it the intellectual intuition of the principle of factiality.

Nunes wants to show that what Meillassoux is trying to do - ultimately reaching a dead end -is distinct from other post-critical ontologies that do not attempt to break the finitude of thought but instead problematise the relationship between ontological and epistemological inquiries. These ontologies remain “latently correlationist,” because “in perfectly (post-)Kantian fashion, they believe their ontological claims to be not knowable but only thinkable”. For that reason, being thinkable but not knowable, the status of their ontological statements is equivalent to that of second-order logics: “they cannot provide any sort of definitive empirical proof of their truthfulness”. They are concerned with ways of knowing, not with knowledge of the thing itself. The key point in Nunes’ argument is that critique - as the coupling of speculation and correlation, in his view (although historically one could argue critical theory was closer to understanding of categories than to reason’s speculation) - requires a separation between a first-order discourse on objects deemed true and a metadiscourse (second-order discourse) on how these objects appear to us. Like two circuits of sense: subjective and objective. Nunes stresses this doesn’t exclude the existence of anything outside our knowledge, but only maintains that “even if things are exactly such as they appear to us, we can never know if the knowledge we hold corresponds to the in-itself”. A thing can only ever be for us. When we revise our knowledge, we can only compare representations and concepts, never the thing-in-itself, which means the gap between knowledge and thing is in-the-last-instance undecidable. Every revision of knowledge is a new decision regarding this gap.

So basically, Nunes criticizes Meillassoux for “systematically confusing two distinct theses, ‘something only is for us on the condition that it is for us’ with ‘something only is on the condition that it is for us’“. Meillassoux would be conflating first- and second-order statements about the world and our access to world. And I would agree with Nunes - as philosophy should maintain this separation - if that were the case, but I don’t think it is. After Finitude isn’t concerned with philosophy of science that conceptualises how knowledge is revised within a discourse, nor is it arguing that there is a way of accessing objects other than through thought. Rather, Meillassoux, in a very Kantian - to be precise, a trans-Kantian - manner, wants to demonstrate that there exists a mode of thinking that both exhibits and becomes the Absolute: as “something that could be regardless whether we think it or not”.¹ Meillassoux isn’t opposing correlationism or even idealism because they fail to explain paradigms shifts in knowledge, instead he’s interested in the reason of that change. Once he asserts that the reason is the Outside, the next question becomes: how is it possible that such change based on absolute contingency (or the Outside, or th Unreason, or Hyper-Chaos) can be registered by thought? (On a side note, this opens a path of transferring the consequences of Meillassoux’s speculative materialism onto social field: where the change in the unconscious comes from, and is it possible to register anything beyond dominant system of desire?)

According to Nunes, Meillassoux overlooks that “we have never been correlationists”, and that Kant never fully closed the circle, as was quickly pointed out by Maimon, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel and others. In a post-Kantian move, critique became a first-order discourse, while proper philosophy served as metacritique, in which the correlation itself was problematised through a distinction between correlation-in-itself and correlation-for-us. This gesture, with which I agree, unearths a further entirely new plane of thought. But again, it is precisely what Meillassoux aims at from the outset: he would say that “correlationism must assume the absolute contingency outside correlation yet it has no account of why and how it has to, no idea of the type of statements or mode of thought it entails,” and “yes,” Meillassoux would continue, “post-Kantian idealism had an answer to that but the answer was to eliminate contingency by positing the absolute substance I=I”. Meillassoux’s point is not that no on tried a recursive approach to critique and correlation, but rather that these attempts ultimately failed because they didn’t follow the path to absolute contingency. This path rips apart the seemingly closed circle of correlationism, enabling scientific knowledge, on the one hand, and philosophy concerned with the conditions for thinking the Absolute (contingency itself), on the other.

Recasting the whole discussion, to understand what is it that allows post-critical ontologies to work, Nunes turns to the concept of performative contradiction: an act “in which the content of the locutionary act (what the statement asserts) contradicts the illocutionary act implicit in it (the commitment to the truth of what is asserted).” Nunes proposes to take these ontologies as intentionally committing such contradictions. However, these contradictions should not be seen as vicious flaws, but instead as as-if statements that are intended to “achieve certain effects”:

“Likewise, the effect on the listener of a statement like ‘there is no God’s-eye point of view’, which would naturally require a God’s-eye point of view in order to be verified, is that of showing that, while it should not be taken on authority as a truth that can be known (since it excludes the possibility of its own verification), it is nonetheless thinkable as true. This is exactly the way in which the residual correlationism at work in what I am calling post-critical ontologies functions.”

Here, Nunes builds on the earlier differentiation between orders of discourse: post-critical ontologies engaged in performative contradiction to be able to claim, within second-order discourse, “there is no God’s-eye point of view”. This move allows them to judge first-order statements (e.g. whether someone grounds their knowledge in a God’s-eye point of view). But this also means that ontologies are in the end undecidable, since we cannot determine their conditions of verification without an infinite regression. Nunes argues that being post-critical these ontologies affirm the undecidability of a priori ontological statements in general - “it suffices to assert their hypothetical truth, that is, their possibility”. Performative contradiction is not a negative condition here but positive. Ontologies decide upon undecidable, they think the possible, not the necessary. Last long quote before I move on to my overall commentary:

Post-critical ontologies thus correspond to a correlationism become self-reflexive: overcoming its false consciousness, realizing that to intend to know the conditions by which the given is given is still, in its own terms, to hypostasize a correlation-for-us into a correlation-in-itself – and thus to claim knowledge of the in-itself, to overstep the correlational circle. We can call metascepticism what happens to correlationism once it becomes aware of the impossibility not to posit its own presuppositions, that is, to ascribe them reality. Constructivism, in turn, is what we can call the embracing, as a positive condition, of the negative conclusion that we cannot but speculate. Now, if the truth of correlationism is metascepticism, it follows that the truth of philosophy is that it quite literally produces no truths. It is exactly because it does not produce truths that philosophy is construction; and it is only to the extent that it is recognized as not producing truths that its field is once again open to speculation.

First, I find the notion that current ontologies mark a phase of philosophy’s self-consciousness a bit patronising toward past philosophies, assuming a pseudo-Hegelian teleological (in a bad way, I will talk about better teleology in a moment) journey of thought from lack to identity that always already waited at the end. No, thought arrives in its entirety in correspondence to its problemata. When its assumptions or contradictions are later exposed, it with a new thought amid different problemata, formed at a distinct time spot, succeeding previous thought forms in their concrete contexts. A chronology and stratification of philosophical responses to particular problems is inescapable and essential.

Second, and this is my central criticism, Nunes raises an important point about the double-order performative contradiction committed by post-critical ontologies - and surely philosophy is constructivist in nature - but at the same time I feel like his framing risks making the entire philosophical discourse too idealistic (in the old, Marxist sense) and lightweight. The notion that philosophy begins with a metaontological and constructivist decision neglects the material conditions of such decision, the conditions that perform a primary selection of the virtual space for philosophical decision. By virtual space I mean here that e.g. “Gott ist Tot” has different effect as a social practice today that 150 years ago. Philosophy is much more serious than a game of arguments in a forum, you want to proceed with constructing a theory that makes sense within a social formation of its enunciation; social formation that engenders the conditions of sensibility and applicability of ontological statements. Now, Nunes by the end of the article indicates that philosophical construction has to be problematic and thematise its heterogeneity, but it only comes as an external appendix to the foundation of thought, which is performative contradiction and central place of undecidability.

At several points, Nunes writes that post-critical ontologies are not concerned with what is knowable as true, but what is thinkable as true. I don’t see a difference once you add the functor “as true”, the notion of their verifiability flattens their sense. Meanwhile, Nunes also holds these ontologies are concerned with “thinking the possibile”. But if ontologies are undecidable and hypothetical, how do we decide (<echoes of Turing’s halting problem>)? Or rather, how do we shape and direct our speculation, what does it hinge on, if all it relies on is “the negative conclusion that we cannot but speculate”?

To better approach this question, let’s keep the separation of knowing and thinking, but overlay it with the Kantian difference between concepts of understanding and ideas of reason. Knowable are concepts that pass a critical analysis against their applicability to experience, but thinkable are various types of ideas that exceed beyond the boundaries of experience, but they govern the sense of experience - they are regulative, problematic, aesthetic and teleological. Philosophical decision is then an act of locating (Jean-Yves Girard?) an idea as a differential problem for thought - similar to an attractor making gradients emerge in a gravitational field - functioning as a kind of telos. These regulative ideas are already problematic for our thought, unconsciously, before we even make them explicit, as they are generated and enforced by the social field. Ideas are already, virtually, there, technologically instantiated by social machines when a philosophy decision is taken to locate them. Thus, regulative ideas should be understood as abstract machines in the Deleuze and Guattari sense - collective, semiotic, iterable, technical schemas that initiate and organise the horizon of thought. A higher-order locus of thought that generates both concepts and ideas, the inside and the outside, which is folded back onto the social and unfolded by concrete rules of conduct (any kind of reasoning, dialogue, experimentation). Then, conceptual reasoning, making it explicit, constructing ontologies etc. is a process of determination of a virtual space we already occupy. This is what I call an implicative synthesis: if it iterates, there is a finality abstract machine (diagram). There’s always an outside to the space of reasons that recurs once the process of giving & asking for reasons halts, because meaning is generated a posteriori with regard to a priori site of reasoning: its locus. Each step of reasoning reiterates locus as its metastable unground. The question how the idea of an outside informs and problematises the space of reasoning belongs to teleology?

If ontological statement are both teleological and reflective, perhaps they should be understood in terms of Kant’s theory of aesthetic judgements - they simultaneously assert an universality, even though they cannot be definitively proven. They cannot be avoided too, any time we think, an idea that implies some totality instantiates itself and imposes on our conceptual elaboration, looping back to itself, directing towards its horizon. It’s the scheme of thought that is teleological, though it is not the end-statement or identity that cannot be further problematised (which is a Deleuzian response to determinate negation).

What emerges is a teleological closure of the coupling of the regulative idea as the schema of an outside and the regulative idea as the schema of philosophy, whereby - ideally, at least - philosophy transcends its status as a free play and acquires a material gravity. Philosophy is then not just ‘thinking but not knowing’, but a sense raised from thought’s organon and available knowledge (of the social system). Where I think I’m heading at is an analogous move that Deleuze made in relation to Kant: it is not the possibility of ontological discourse itself, but the genesis of a concrete philosophical decision that is key. Material conditions in teleological coupling with theory resolve the performative contradiction. Anyway, Nunes’ article is really intriguing and I recommend it a lot to anyone who actually got to the end of this blogpost!

PS The problem with Meillassoux is not the Absolute but his abandonment of principle of sufficient reason - but that’s another piece.

14.05.2025