Quentin Meillassoux’s Speculative Materialism as a Manifestation of the Rationality of Non-one

Abstract

This article has a twofold aim. First, it attempts to reconstruct and critically analyze arguments provided by Quentin Meillassoux, a contemporary French philosopher, for his central philosophical thesis: only contingency is necessary. By this thesis, Meillassoux means that the main property of the absolute – reality which is independent of thought – is a possibility to be otherwise. It leads Meillassoux to the relinquishing of the principle of a sufficient reason. He argues that everything – even the laws of nature – has no reason to be what it is or to preserve its identity and existence. Such an extreme statement, surprisingly, is a part of Meillassoux`s attempt to contest irrational fideism. Such fideism is legitimized by the philosophical view which Meillassoux calls “correlationism”. It is a model of all de-absolutizing philosophies which assert the inability of thought to know the thought-independent reality, thus undermining the possibility of rational knowledge of the world. Secondly, this article aims to identify and make clear a specific type of rationality in which Meillassoux elaborates his arguments. We call it the rationality of non-One and try to show that it can propose an alternative to the classical Western rationality, structured by the metaphor of the One. The rationality of non-One can be an essential tool in the intellectual defense of rational knowledge when such a type of knowledge is questioned and undermined both by philosophical arguments of correlationism and by different forms of irrationalism. Such rationality presents a non-unifying form of rational thinking that avoids some controversial elements of Western reason. At the same time, such rationality does not become irrational because it preserves the principle of non-contradiction and tries to be consistent with scientific, especially mathematical, knowledge.

Keywords

• rationality
• speculative materialism
• quentin meillassoux
• ontology