Factiality, Causality, Probability

Rejection of the Principle of Sufficient Reason

Factiality = the Principle of Unreason: 'everything in the world is without reason, and is thereby capable of actually becoming otherwise without reason'. (AF53)

'Everything could actually collapse: from trees to stars, from stars to laws, from physical laws to logical laws; and this is not by virtue of some superior law whereby everything is destined to perish, but by virtue of the absence of any superior law capable of preserving anything, no matter what, from perishing.' (AF53)

Leibniz: The principle of sufficient reason contends that for everything that exists, there is a reason why it exists, rather than not existing. In order to avoid infinite regress, the principle of sufficient reason always posits at bottom a necessary entity that is caused by nothing but itself and explains all the rest.

 

Furthermore, Meillassoux argues that the principle of sufficient reason is tied to the law of non-contradiction via an inverse ratio (and that Hegel saw this - his absolutising of the law of sufficient reason lead to his devaluing of the law of noncontradiction [AF71]), and since his philosophy rejects the law of sufficient reason, it must maintain the law of non-contradiction.

This rejection leads to the notion that there is no necessary connection between one thing and anything else. If everything happens for no reason, we do not need causality to explain the world. Things can appear, disappear and change without any warning or way to predict such occurrences. 

The Principle of Sufficient Reason and Politics

Dogmatic metaphysics = the belief that at least one entity is necessary.

Necessity and ideology go hand in hand in their recourse to the principle of sufficient reason. Thus, the political consequences of the principle of unreason can only be a radical critique of all ideology: the critique of dogmatic metaphysics is akin to the critique of political ideology. 

'The critique of ideologies, which ultimately always consists in demonstrating that a social situation which is presented as inevitable is actually contingent, is essentially indissociable from the critique of metaphysics, the latter being understood as the illusory manufacturing of necessary entities.' (AF34)

If there is no foundation for necessity (i.e. a fundamental principle of sufficient reason) then nothing in the world can be argued to be necessary.

Rejection of a Necessary Entity (i.e. rejection of ‘metaphysics’ as defined in After Finitude)

Rejection of the Cartesian ontological argument for the existence of God: 'X must because because it is perfect, and hence causa sui, or sole cause of itself'. Meillassoux argues with Kant that contradiction can exist only between an already existing entity and one of its predicates. If we assume that a triangle exists, then it can only have three sides, but no contradiction exists if we attribute four sides to a non-existent triangle. 

'Thus, the subject of a proposition can never impose its existence upon thought solely by virtue of its concept, for being is never part of the subject, it is never its predicate.' (AF32) 

So, a predicate cannot ascribe being to a subject. Just because we conceive of a perfect being, it does not mean that it must also exist. Being either already is, or is not in that subject. 'There is no "prodigious predicate" capable of conferring a priori existence upon its recipient...' (AF32)

'The collapse of the principle of sufficient reason means that no metaphysical statement can ever be true. (AF65) Thus, what we most need is a kind of necessity that does not require a necessary entity (AF33), and only one possible path remains (AF51): the necessity of contingency itself.' (Harman 35)

The Principle of Non-Contradiction

The Correlationist would hold that just because we cannot think contradiction, it doesn't mean that it does not exist. In opposition to the correlationist view, Meillassoux sets out to show that contradiction is not just impossible for-us, it is impossible in its own right.

Factiality/the principle of unreason does not allow for the possibility of contradiction. For things have to be determinate and non-contradictory in order to be contingent, otherwise they cannot change into anything else. In other words, there cannot be a contradictory entity in hyperchaos, for 'this entity would also prove incapable of undergoing any sort of actual becoming - it could never become other than it is, since it already is this other. As contradictory, this entity is always-already whatever it is not. Thus, the introduction of a contradictory entity into being would result in the implosion of the very idea of determination... Such an entity would be tantamount to a "black hole of differences", into which all alterity would irremediable be swallowed up.' (AF70)

The law of non-contradiction is the single a priori truth contained in human reason.

The Necessity of the In-Itself

'It is a matter of demonstrating that it is absolutely necessary that the in-itself exists, and hence that the latter cannot dissolve into nothingness, whereas on the contrary, the realm of the for-us is essentially perishable, since it remains correlative with the existence of thinking and or/living beings. We must demonstrate that everything would not lapse into nothingness with the annihilation of living creatures and that the world in-itself would subsist despite the abolition of every relation-to-the-world.' (AF71)

Of Weak Factiality (if something exists then it must be contingent) and Strong Factiality (something must exist, and it must be contingent) only the latter can be true, for we have proven that contingency is necessary, and something must exist that is contingent in order for contingency to be necessary. And since that necessary contingent thing exists, it must be something in-itself, since the for-us is not necessary, but dependent of human consciousness which is contingent. (See AF73-76)

Thus:

'it is necessary that there be something rather than nothing because it is necessarily contingent that there is something rather than something else. The necessity of the contingency of the entity imposes the necessary existence of the contingent entity.' (AF76)

Contingency and Causality (Hume's Problem)

Let us take hyperchaos as a basic ontological truth in which laws are contingent, not necessary. Our single restriction on possible occurances is the law of non-contradiction, which is a very slight limitation. So, if anything can change at any moment for no reason, then why does the world seem to operate according to what appear to be stable underlying laws?

 

Hume's problem of induction critiqued causality, entailing his famous scepticism of the possibilty of knowledge pertaining to physical laws. Yet Meillassoux maintains (along with Jean-René Vernes) that he did not fundamentally doubt causal necessity, only the capacity of reason to prove it (which, again, leads to superstition and the fueling of ideologies). Meanwhile, dogmatic metaphysical explanations assert the existence of hidden reasons for the way things occur, and Kant's transcendental demonstration asserts that 'if consciousness exists, then this can only be because there is a causality that necessarily governs phenomena'. (AF89) (It's also how he proves a persisting 'I', the seat of conditioning, and of the transcendental apperception.)

All three don't fundamentally consider the possibility that causal necessity does not exist, but speculative materialism posits that that we need to 'believe in reason, and thereby to purge the reality of the hinterworld of causal necessity'. (AF91)

Factiality questions our traditional adherence to the thesis of causality, and Meillassoux, riffing on another tradition, quips: 'we have nothing to lose by moving from a causal to an a-causal universe - nothing except enigmas.' (AF92)

 

Causality and Probability: the Unification of Contingency and Stability

Meillassoux sets out to prove that contingency does not necessarily entail instability by means of a a back-firing reductio ad absurdum (after Lobachevsky).

According to Jean-René Vernes, the argument (Hume, Kant) that infers causal necessity from probability operates via an extension of gambler's reasoning about hidden causal factors from events found within the universe (the dice have always landed the same way up, so they must be loaded/it must be necessary that they always land this way up) to the universe as a whole (in a universe of all possible universes, with each face of a many sided die representing each universe, the die always lands with the face representing my universe up).

Meillassoux uses this argument to distinguish chance from contingency: Chance is a parasite on physical necessity, since the game of chance requires an unfaltering necessary framework (cf. Meillassoux's The Number and the Siren). 

'If from one throw to the next the dice imploded, or became flat or spherical, or if gravity ceased to operate and they flew off into the air, or on the contrary were projected underground, etc., then there would be no aleatory sequence, and it would be impossible to establish a calculus of probabilities.' (AF99)

Chance requires probability, and probability requires (physical) necessity. Contingency, on the other hand, affects the very framework in which chance occurs. Meillassoux will frame physical necessity within a greater contingency.

Verne's probabilistic argument requires a numerical totality of possible events - but Georg Cantor's transfinite renders this impossible. In order for the laws of probability to hold, there must be 'a totality of conceivable possibilities'. (AF102)

Events occurring within the universe are subject to a given totality, whether finite or infinite. But, as for the universe itself, 'when I attempt to apply probabalistic reasoning to [it], I assume without there being anything in experience that could validate this assumption - that it is legitimate to consider the conceivable as another instance of a totality of cases. Thus, I subject the conceivable to a mathematical hypothesis: I turn it into a set, however large'. (AF103)

But Cantor's theory shows us that we have no grounds for maintaining that the conceivable is necessarily totalisable. Cantor detotalised number showing that there is no greatest infinity, no Whole that would encompass all the others, for any set implies the existence of another, greater set that contains it. Hence 'the illegitimacy of extending aleatory reasoning (such as Vernes') beyond a totality that is already given in experience - we cannot extend probablistic reasoning into the in-itself.

Thus, we can use probablistic reasoning for events occurring within the universe, but simply not for the universe or the laws of nature as a whole. The contingency of laws lies not in a fragile hold over the cases they govern (their hold is perfectly secure), but only in the fact that the laws themselves can change suddenly without notice.

So we can have a universe that follows causal laws couched within a greater contingency of the maintenance of those laws. (cf. Meillassoux's criticism of randomness in Urbanomic's Document #1 - randomness is a species of chance, and it requires a stable norm to frame it.)

'...the possibilities of which chaos - which is the only in-itself - is actually capable cannot be measured by any number, whether finite or infinite, and that it is precisely this super-immensity of the chaotic virtual that allows the impeccable stability of the visual world.' (AF111)

Meillassoux, Quentin. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. trans. Ray Brassier. London: Continuum, 2008.

Harman, Graham. Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011. 

Back to main post