Ben Woodard
European Graduate School (egs)
Introduction
“Science, already oppressive with its shockig revelations, will perhaps be the ultimate exterminator of our human species—if separate species we be—for its reserve of unguessed horrors could never be borne by mortal brains if loosed upon the world.”1
“The ideal world presses mightily towards the light, but is still held back by the fact that nature has withdrawn as a mystery.”2
espite statements regarding its fundamental impossibility, the philosophy of nature stands as a metaphysical project not only worth pursuing, but also criti-cal to complete. This task requires not only the resurrection of a dead philosophical form but an issuing of a challenge to post-modern restrictions on thought and existence (which have remained couched in the comfortable obscurity of the term materialism) in order to interrogate the foreclosure of the relation between being and thinking resulting from the widespread limitations of correlationism, the dominant mode of contemporary philosophy. As defined by Quentin Meillassoux: “Correlationism consists in disqualifying the claim that it is possible to consider the realms of subjectivity and objectivity independently of one another.”3 In addition,
D
2006.
Norris, Christopher. Against Relativism: Philosophy of Science, Deconstruction and Critical Theory. Oxford: Blackwell, 1999.
Poole, Joseph. Earthrise: how man first saw the Earth. New Haven and London:
Yale University Press, 2008.
Perlmutter, S. et al. “Measurements of Ω and from 42 high-redshift super-novae.” The Astrophysics Journal, 517, 1999: 565-586.
Reiss, A. et al. “Observational Evidence from Supernovae for an Accelerating Universe and a Cosmological Constant.” The Astronomical Journal, 116:3, 1998: 1009-1038.
Saldanha, Arun. “Back to the Great Outdoors: Speculative Realism as Phi-losophy of Science.” Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, 5:2, 2009: 304-321.
Snow, C.P. The Two Cultures. Cambridge: Canto, 1998.
Trotta, Roberto. “Dark Matter: Probing the Archefossil.” Collapse Vol.II, 2007:
83-169.
Turow, Joseph and Tsui, Lokman. The Hyperlinked Society: Questioning Con-nections in the Digital Age. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008.
Veal, Damian. “Editorial Introduction.” Angelaki, 10:1, 2005: 1-31.
Žižek, Slavoj “Unbehagen in der Natur. Ecology Against Nature.” 2009.
Available online at: http://www.bedeutung.co.uk/index.php?option=com_
content&view=article&id=10:zizek-unbehagen-in-der-natur&catid=6:co ntents&Itemid=16).
Blogs Ian Bogost’s Blog - http://www.bogost.com/blog/
Levi Bryant’s Blog - http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/
Mark Fisher’s Blog - http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/
Dominic Fox’s Blog - http://codepoetics.com/poetix/
Graham Harman’s Blog - http://doctorzamalek2.wordpress.com/
Speculative Realism Aggregator - http://www.bogost.com/speculativerealism/
Thinking Against Nature
Nature, Ideation, and Realism between Lovecraft and Shelling
Ben Woodard
European Graduate School (egs)
Introduction
“Science, already oppressive with its shockig revelations, will perhaps be the ultimate exterminator of our human species—if separate species we be—for its reserve of unguessed horrors could never be borne by mortal brains if loosed upon the world.”1
“The ideal world presses mightily towards the light, but is still held back by the fact that nature has withdrawn as a mystery.”2
espite statements regarding its fundamental impossibility, the philosophy of nature stands as a metaphysical project not only worth pursuing, but also criti-cal to complete. This task requires not only the resurrection of a dead philosophical form but an issuing of a challenge to post-modern restrictions on thought and existence (which have remained couched in the comfortable obscurity of the term materialism) in order to interrogate the foreclosure of the relation between being and thinking resulting from the widespread limitations of correlationism, the dominant mode of contemporary philosophy. As defined by Quentin Meillassoux: “Correlationism consists in disqualifying the claim that it is possible to consider the realms of subjectivity and objectivity independently of one another.”3 In addition,
D
Meillassoux names two variants of correlationism: weak correlationism and strong correlationism. Weak correlation-ism, which Kant is the flag-bearer of, asserts the above claim while maintaining the conceivability of the in-itself whereas strong correlationism dismisses any possibility of thinking the in-itself.4
Furthermore, a scientifically coherent or non-correlationist philosophy of nature is necessary if any virulent formulation of realism is to be attempted. Such a realism will be, following the work of Meillassoux, Ray Brassier, Graham Harman and Iain Hamilton Grant, a Speculative Realism. Speculation, again following Meillassoux, “releases us from the phenomenal stability of empirical constants by elevating us to the purely intelligible chaos that underlies every aspect of it.”5 Against the domineering shadow of Kant’s Copernican revolution, our attempt at a new philosophy of nature must first discover the means to suture the breach between speculative (meta) physics and empirical knowledge, thereby forming a ground for a useful (i.e. non-naive) realism.
Towards this end this text will investigate the impossibility of (a) being or (a) thinking against nature in the fiction of H.P.
Lovecraft and how a certain phenomenological queasiness results from a radically productive nature which overrides any form of transcendental subjectivity capable of either exception from, or organizing of, nature itself. The very con-cept of being with or against nature confronts the problem of how epistemology is rooted, or not rooted, in a realist conception of nature and how realism is possible given a complex or non-totalizable nature. Our guiding thought is the following: Nature is simultaneously a productivity and an infinite set of products responsible for the generation and capability of human subjects and their capacity to think. As a master of the weird, Lovecraft was deeply aware with the horrifying possibilities of science as well as its limitations in the face of nature. Lovecraft’s investigation of the tenuous linkage between thought, humanity, and the cosmos makes his work ideal for exploring ideation and its relation to nature.
Furthermore, while the weirdness of Lovecraft’s stories would
seem to irreparably damage any attempt at realism, it in fact expands the Real as Lovecraft’s creations draw not from the supernatural but from an unbound nature.
The weirdness of Lovecraft’s fiction, along with the weird realism of the Speculative Realists (paying particular attention to Ray Brassier’s Transcendental Naturalism and Iain Grant’s Schellingian Nature Philosophy), provides fertile ground for a resuscitation of a philosophy of nature against the apparently unassailable entanglement of being and thinking (under the name correlationism) which functions as an obstruction to all forms of realism.
The Moss-Thickened Lantern or Natural-Ideation
“Self-consciousness is the lamp of the whole system of knowledge, but it casts its light ahead only, not behind.”6
“What lies beyond the light and the luminous world is for our senses a sealed book and buried in eternal darkness.”7
Taken together, these statements of Schelling suggest not only the limitation of thought in grasping the non-ideal but also affirm the a priori status of nature in itself.8 As Iain Grant notes, Schelling’s insistence on the non-priority of think-ing goes beyond assertthink-ing the a priori status of nature when Schelling reconfigures Kant’s dyad of a priori and a posterori replacing it with prius and posterius.9 The prius, or firstness, designates an originary indeterminateness of being,10 which immediately appears as a kind of nothing11 in that it is pure process, or sheer potency. The nothingness, or nothingness as such, is provisional being, a being which is only to the point that it is alien to reason, that it is nature, always moving in its being.12 This is why the “concept of becoming is the only one appropriate to the nature of things.”13 Here Schelling’s nature is differentiated from that of Kant’s noumenon as it is not merely an unknowable entity but a productivity;
Schelling’s nature is known to thought as the activity that precedes thought, an activity which is undetermined and unconstrained.14 Furthermore, Schelling dictates that “If it is
Meillassoux names two variants of correlationism: weak correlationism and strong correlationism. Weak correlation-ism, which Kant is the flag-bearer of, asserts the above claim while maintaining the conceivability of the in-itself whereas strong correlationism dismisses any possibility of thinking the in-itself.4
Furthermore, a scientifically coherent or non-correlationist philosophy of nature is necessary if any virulent formulation of realism is to be attempted. Such a realism will be, following the work of Meillassoux, Ray Brassier, Graham Harman and Iain Hamilton Grant, a Speculative Realism. Speculation, again following Meillassoux, “releases us from the phenomenal stability of empirical constants by elevating us to the purely intelligible chaos that underlies every aspect of it.”5 Against the domineering shadow of Kant’s Copernican revolution, our attempt at a new philosophy of nature must first discover the means to suture the breach between speculative (meta) physics and empirical knowledge, thereby forming a ground for a useful (i.e. non-naive) realism.
Towards this end this text will investigate the impossibility of (a) being or (a) thinking against nature in the fiction of H.P.
Lovecraft and how a certain phenomenological queasiness results from a radically productive nature which overrides any form of transcendental subjectivity capable of either exception from, or organizing of, nature itself. The very con-cept of being with or against nature confronts the problem of how epistemology is rooted, or not rooted, in a realist conception of nature and how realism is possible given a complex or non-totalizable nature. Our guiding thought is the following: Nature is simultaneously a productivity and an infinite set of products responsible for the generation and capability of human subjects and their capacity to think. As a master of the weird, Lovecraft was deeply aware with the horrifying possibilities of science as well as its limitations in the face of nature. Lovecraft’s investigation of the tenuous linkage between thought, humanity, and the cosmos makes his work ideal for exploring ideation and its relation to nature.
Furthermore, while the weirdness of Lovecraft’s stories would
seem to irreparably damage any attempt at realism, it in fact expands the Real as Lovecraft’s creations draw not from the supernatural but from an unbound nature.
The weirdness of Lovecraft’s fiction, along with the weird realism of the Speculative Realists (paying particular attention to Ray Brassier’s Transcendental Naturalism and Iain Grant’s Schellingian Nature Philosophy), provides fertile ground for a resuscitation of a philosophy of nature against the apparently unassailable entanglement of being and thinking (under the name correlationism) which functions as an obstruction to all forms of realism.
The Moss-Thickened Lantern or Natural-Ideation
“Self-consciousness is the lamp of the whole system of knowledge, but it casts its light ahead only, not behind.”6
“What lies beyond the light and the luminous world is for our senses a sealed book and buried in eternal darkness.”7
Taken together, these statements of Schelling suggest not only the limitation of thought in grasping the non-ideal but also affirm the a priori status of nature in itself.8 As Iain Grant notes, Schelling’s insistence on the non-priority of think-ing goes beyond assertthink-ing the a priori status of nature when Schelling reconfigures Kant’s dyad of a priori and a posterori replacing it with prius and posterius.9 The prius, or firstness, designates an originary indeterminateness of being,10 which immediately appears as a kind of nothing11 in that it is pure process, or sheer potency. The nothingness, or nothingness as such, is provisional being, a being which is only to the point that it is alien to reason, that it is nature, always moving in its being.12 This is why the “concept of becoming is the only one appropriate to the nature of things.”13 Here Schelling’s nature is differentiated from that of Kant’s noumenon as it is not merely an unknowable entity but a productivity;
Schelling’s nature is known to thought as the activity that precedes thought, an activity which is undetermined and unconstrained.14 Furthermore, Schelling dictates that “If it is
the task of transcendental philosophy to subordinate the real to the ideal, it is on the other hand, the task of the philosophy of nature to explain the ideal by the real”15
Schelling’s suggestions that there is something prior to thought (nature as prius) as well as that the transcendental (the most extensive capacity of thought) is thoroughly naturalized as part of nature, have serious ramifications for the trajectory of philosophy and the possibility of realism, however weird.
If thinking and the subject-that-thinks are both direct results of the Real (and not a transcendental formalization such as Kant’s concept of apperception), then the genesis of thought must be explained through natural means.
Schelling’s rejection of metaphysical formalism and his unbinding of nature make it possible to draw from a force previously foreclosed as such under Kant’s humanistic con-ceptions: the force of time. As Grant writes in his Philosophies of Nature after Schelling, Schelling’s naturalism is implicitly time-based.16 Time, as non-perceptual but deeply natural, is always non-existent to us and therefore is everything that it can be (and the ground for everything that could be) while appearing as nothing, in a kind of pure-isness “by its nature or the Idea” of time-in-itself.17 Temporality, as neither an inert formality, nor as purely that which is perceived, is then for-mulated as a time that propels itself, that functions outside of the purview of human thought and human subjectivity.
The germ of this metaphysical scaffolding lies in the churn-ing abyss of Schellchurn-ing’s deep past. This deep past indexes the ancestral time of Meillassoux, a conception of time which points to processes and beings prior to the emergence of thought. Deep time thereby denies the subsumption of deeply temporal objects and ideas under the work of transcendental synthesis, of being merely correlates of thought. Where cor-relationist time is always the time of the thinking self, for Schelling the time of the self is time conceived as an activity and not an epistemological or ontological limit.18 Immedi-ately Lovecraft’s specter is raised as space-time becomes the generator, and place of generation, for objects obscured by the long stretch of time.
Schelling’s concept of the past, which is always a process and never a being, and the Vorweltiche (the time before the world) in particular hold the possibility of the emergence of thought.19 “Everything is only the work of time, and it is only through time that each thing receives its particular character and meaning.”20 The apparently endless stretch of the past (as well as the future) draws thinking beyond its tie to sensa-tion since, against Kant, time is not merely a formalism and sensation is not the authority of epistemology. However, such speculation can lead to a certain uneasiness. As Benjamin Noys writes in his piece “Horror Temporis” “the horror of time is not simply the trifling matter of individual human finitude, but rather the recognition of scientific statements concerning cosmic timescales that precede and exceed the existence of humanity and life itself.”21 Noys’ subjects are both Meillassoux’s ancestral time and Lovecraft’s treatments of temporality as being beyond the ability of the mind to comprehend opening the possibility of an eventual genera-tion of the horrible.
As Noys and others have recognized, few authors better grasp the dangerousness of both speculation and knowledge in relation not only to the investigator’s own sanity, but in learning too much about the horridness of nature’s capa-bilities. If the lamp of Schelling’s knowledge points forward, Lovecraft’s thinking suggests a turning backwards of the light (perhaps fruitlessly) towards eternal darkness. As Lovecraft writes in the beginning of “The Call of Cthulhu”:
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direc-tion, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.22
the task of transcendental philosophy to subordinate the real to the ideal, it is on the other hand, the task of the philosophy of nature to explain the ideal by the real”15
Schelling’s suggestions that there is something prior to thought (nature as prius) as well as that the transcendental (the most extensive capacity of thought) is thoroughly naturalized as part of nature, have serious ramifications for the trajectory of philosophy and the possibility of realism, however weird.
If thinking and the subject-that-thinks are both direct results of the Real (and not a transcendental formalization such as Kant’s concept of apperception), then the genesis of thought must be explained through natural means.
Schelling’s rejection of metaphysical formalism and his unbinding of nature make it possible to draw from a force previously foreclosed as such under Kant’s humanistic con-ceptions: the force of time. As Grant writes in his Philosophies of Nature after Schelling, Schelling’s naturalism is implicitly time-based.16 Time, as non-perceptual but deeply natural, is always non-existent to us and therefore is everything that it can be (and the ground for everything that could be) while appearing as nothing, in a kind of pure-isness “by its nature or the Idea” of time-in-itself.17 Temporality, as neither an inert formality, nor as purely that which is perceived, is then for-mulated as a time that propels itself, that functions outside of the purview of human thought and human subjectivity.
The germ of this metaphysical scaffolding lies in the churn-ing abyss of Schellchurn-ing’s deep past. This deep past indexes the ancestral time of Meillassoux, a conception of time which points to processes and beings prior to the emergence of thought. Deep time thereby denies the subsumption of deeply temporal objects and ideas under the work of transcendental synthesis, of being merely correlates of thought. Where cor-relationist time is always the time of the thinking self, for Schelling the time of the self is time conceived as an activity and not an epistemological or ontological limit.18 Immedi-ately Lovecraft’s specter is raised as space-time becomes the generator, and place of generation, for objects obscured by the long stretch of time.
Schelling’s concept of the past, which is always a process and never a being, and the Vorweltiche (the time before the world) in particular hold the possibility of the emergence of thought.19 “Everything is only the work of time, and it is only through time that each thing receives its particular character and meaning.”20 The apparently endless stretch of the past (as well as the future) draws thinking beyond its tie to sensa-tion since, against Kant, time is not merely a formalism and sensation is not the authority of epistemology. However, such speculation can lead to a certain uneasiness. As Benjamin Noys writes in his piece “Horror Temporis” “the horror of
Schelling’s concept of the past, which is always a process and never a being, and the Vorweltiche (the time before the world) in particular hold the possibility of the emergence of thought.19 “Everything is only the work of time, and it is only through time that each thing receives its particular character and meaning.”20 The apparently endless stretch of the past (as well as the future) draws thinking beyond its tie to sensa-tion since, against Kant, time is not merely a formalism and sensation is not the authority of epistemology. However, such speculation can lead to a certain uneasiness. As Benjamin Noys writes in his piece “Horror Temporis” “the horror of