Where is the Great Outdoors of Meillassoux’s Speculative Materialism?

Abstract

Quentin Meillassoux’s speculative materialism aims to define access to reality of the natural world apart from its giveness to sentient subjects. This world apart is designated by Meillassoux as the “Great Outdoors” which was marginalized as a topic of philosophy after Kant’s critiques. The question of the incommensurability of human subjects and physical objects is taken up by Meillassoux and addressed by allowing mathematizable properties of physical objects to be referred to objectively in mathematical statements. In this paper we follow the discussion with speculative materialism conducted by Deborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro in The Ends of the World (2017). These authors show that Meillassoux’s conception of the “Great Outdoors” includes, yet insufficiently explores, the notion of ancestral humanity in Amerindian myth – and intimately related to the practice of hallucinogenic trance – as the means to address the problem of said incommensurability.

Keywords

• speculative materialism
• post-colonialism
• amerindian shamanism
• hallucination
• incommensurability