2 - Quentin Meillassoux: Supreme Human Value Meets Anti-anthropocentrism

Summary

What peculiar privilege has this little agitation of the brain which we call thought, that we must make it the model of the whole universe? Our partiality in our own favour does indeed present it on all occasions: But sound philosophy ought carefully to guard against so natural an illusion.

Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion

Reading the philosophy of Quentin Meillassoux gives one an appreciation of what it must be like to ride a donkey in a state of inebriation: in the attempt not to fall off on one side it is very easy to find oneself sliding down the other. It is easy to think, on the one hand, that Meillassoux's arguments are all spectacular, unheard-of and revolutionary, or to assume, on the other hand, that he is playing a game with his reader, and cannot possibly mean what he says in earnest. Neither of these readings is true or fair, and Meillassoux's approach to philosophy is nowhere more concisely summarised than in the following passage from After Finitude:

Philosophy is the invention of strange forms of argumentation, necessarily bordering on sophistry, which remains its dark structural double. To philosophize is always to develop an idea whose elaboration and defence require a novel kind of argumentation, the model for which lies neither in positive science – not even in logic – nor in some supposedly innate faculty for proper reasoning. (AF 103/AfF 76–7)

Meillassoux is a purposeful contrarian, the lone face gazing skywards in a crowd of people looking down at their shoes, precisely because everyone else is looking elsewhere. In this spirit, he frames the project of After Finitude as ‘to understand how the most urgent question has come to be regarded as the most idle one’ (IntDT 78).

In embarking therefore on an investigation of the figure of the human in Meillassoux's thought we shall seek to be neither beguiled nor horrified, to succumb to neither adulation nor derision. The place of the human in Meillassoux's thought is complex. On the one hand, he maintains a strong and consistent rhetoric of anti-anthropocentrism, and his fundamental philosophical project can be summarised as an attempt to break free from what he sees as the anthropocentric straitjacket of Kantian and post-Kantian ‘correlationist’ thought.