7/4/2017 On Dark Realism: Part One | Techno Occulture

On Dark Realism: Part One

Posted on June 29, 2017

On Dark Realism
The question for speculative realism then becomes: of what does
speculation consist? The answers to this are as diverse as the field of
speculative realism itself. What they have in common, however, is a
desire to break with the recollective model of knowledge as well as the
authority of phenomena, and to engage problems that are, roughly
speaking, metaphysical in nature.

Tom Sparrow, The End of Phenomenology: Metaphysics and the

New Realism

For me there is no natural or supernatural, weve been imposing human

categories on the Real for so long that the these categories of thought have
become reality rather than Real. Now that the actual Real is resisting our
categories of thought we are left pondering all our idiotic axioms. The Real is
what resists our explanatory explanandum; that is the only viable realism. Its
so dark and unknown that we must start from the beginning, erase the human
categories of thought and begin negotiating and communicating with the
resisting forces of the Real. This is not a War but an admission of absolute
alterity in all relations. The non-human other is speaking to us, but we are not
listening. Time to enter the dark

Reading a recent essay by Eugene Thacker on Mark Fishers last book before
his untimely death The Weird and the Eerie, he reminds us of a statement by
H.P. Lovecraft from that horror writers short story 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 direction,
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.

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This notion that our brains (Mind) were not evolved to correlate all the
contents of our cultural knowledge, but were instead evolved to help us
replicate our species and to survive in a hostile environment is a part of this
limiting factor of the Mind. The other is what R. Scott Bakker terms the
problem of medial neglect. As Scott puts it:

The problem is basically that the machinery of the brain has no way of
tracking its own astronomical dimensionality; it can at best track
problem-specific correlational activity, various heuristic hacks. We lack
not only the metacognitive bandwidth, but the metacognitive access
required to formulate the explananda of neuroscientific investigation.

A curious consequence of the neuroscientific explananda problem is the

glaring way it reveals our blindness to ourselves, our medial neglect. The
mystery has always been one of understanding constraints, the question
of what comes before we do. Plans? Divinity? Nature? Desires?
Conditions of possibility? Fate? Mind? Weve always been grasping for
ourselves, I sometimes think, such was the strategic value of
metacognitive capacity in linguistic social ecologies. The thing to realize
is that grasping, the process of developing the capacity to report on
our experience, was bootstrapped out of nothing and so comprised the
sum of all there was to the experience of experience at any given stage
of our evolution. Our ancestors had to be both implicitly obvious, and
explicitly impenetrable to themselves past various degrees of
questioning.

This inability of the brain to track its own astronomical dimensionality; it can
at best track problem-specific correlational activity, various heuristic hacks, is
the same thing H.P. Lovecraft meant when he spoke of the inability of the
human mind to correlate all its contents. This acute blindness to the reality
within and without, to the intrinsic and extrinsic facets of our own singular
being and the Real or Outside is to be faced with the fact that move and have
our being within an absolute darkness of which we know nothing. Like Platos
mythical cave fantasists we project a fantasy reality onto the darkness of the
cave walls and call that our world. Where Plato erred is in adding the notion
that while we sit in the dark there exists behind us and outside us, beyond the
universal chaos of time and space some other world a world of pure forms
(eidos, Ideas, substantial forms, etc.) that are the true sources of all our fake
copies. So that the task of philosophy was to guide us back, to remember that
this other immortal realm exists and that this is where our true home is beyond
time and space. Problem is that Plato made this up; or, should we say he
provided in his time a secularization of the mysteries of the Pythagorean-
Orphic traditions that had been passed down through hundreds of years of
Greek history from the early Shamans of those long forgotten sects and cults
of the mysteries. Nothing is ever made out of whole cloth, instead Plato
attributed his discoveries to his mentor Socrates so that Plato as a novelist of
Ideas became for all intents and purposes the first Science Fiction author.

As Scott says above our ancestors, and such thinkers as Plato assumed they
were providing us a way of grasping the world with thoughts, concepts, etc.,
when in fact they were providing us only an ignorance of our ignorance. On
providing the process of developing the capacity to report on
our experience, one that was bootstrapped out of nothing thinkers like
Plato provided a mere fiction and human fabrication of axioms, concepts,
mind-tools: a set of evolving meanings to defend ourselves against
this blindness medial neglect. Instead of providing us a way of confronting
the Real, they masked it leaving us in a human made world, one that enforced
the recollection of knowledge (technics) as the Real. But sadly we began to
take these fictions of reality as the Real as knowledge of things as they are in

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themselves, while forgetting the little problems and resistances that didnt fit
or cooperate or mesh with these tidy and orderly little axioms, concepts,
notions, etc. That is till later philosophers and then scientists began to realize
the accumulation of errors in our linguistic world of cultural and symbolic
exchange.

By the time Immanuel Kant came along the divisive state of philosophy and
philosophers about this state of affairs was so great that two schools of thought
had pitched their tent at the extreme poles of this quandary: the empiricists and
rationalists. On the one side were those that believed all knowledge came from
experience, on the other were those who believed it came from Reason alone.
(Of course I have reduced this to a cartoon, but the general outlines are in that
statement.) What Kant did was not to try to reconcile these two worlds of the
empirical and rationalism, but rather to turn the tables on the world itself. For
him neither experience or Reason held any absolute priority, rather we must
turn to the source of knowledge in the categories of thought themselves. So he
began documenting the schemas (forms) within the mind that impose and
restrict (limit) what we can know about experience and Reason (knowledge).

In Kants Inaugural Dissertation hed show that Newtonian science is true of

the sensible world, to which sensibility gives us access; and the understanding
grasps principles of divine and moral perfection in a distinct intelligible world,
which are paradigms for measuring everything in the sensible world. So on
this view our knowledge of the intelligible world is a priori (based on
theoretical deduction rather than experience) because it does not depend on
sensibility, and this a priori knowledge furnishes principles for judging the
sensible world because in some way the sensible world itself conforms to or
imitates the intelligible world. 1

This would lead to the notion that whatever the so to speak Real World is in-
itself we can know nothing, all we can know is the way the world is given to
us by our Mind (i.e., the actual world disappeared and was replaced by how it
conformed or imitated the inward forms, categories of thought within the
intelligible residing a priori within us). All this would form what Quentin
Meillassoux in his work After Finitude. Meillassoux would set as the main task
of that work a way out of Kants correlational circle, saying,

The first decision is that of all correlationism it is the thesis of the

essential inseparability of the act of thinking from its content. All we
ever engage with is what is given-to-thought, never an entity subsisting
by itself.

This decision alone suffices to disqualify every absolute of

the realist or materialist variety. Every materialism that would be
speculative, and hence for which absolute reality is an entity without
thought, must assert both that thought is not necessary (something can
be independently of thought), and that thought can think what there must
be when there is no thought. The materialism that chooses to follow the
speculative path is thereby constrained to believe that it is possible to
think a given reality by abstracting from the fact that we are thinking it.
(AF, 36)

The point of the first statement is that we never touch the Real, all we ever
know is the our own fictions of reality rather than the Real (i.e., the brain
patterns and shapes and processes the real world then gives us its interpretation
of that world, so that when we see things what we are seeing is only what our
brain has given us rather than the thing as it is in-itself.) We live according to
Kant in a Hall of Mirrors closed off in a circle of thought about reality rather
than actually knowing it as it is. Its this problem of being cut off from the Real
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that is at the heart of all philosophy since Kant. What Kant did is force thought
to turn inward upon itself, to state that all we can ever know of the world is
what is given to us: a world for-us rather than a world out there independent of
the mind. This would come to be known as the Anti-Realist position of which
all philosophers whether of the Continental or Analytical divide would have to
deal with, overcome, accept, or in general come to terms with.

As Meillassoux shows us in that second paragraph the problem for both realist
and materialist philosophers is simply put: How do we think thingswithout
imposing or conforming them to our a priori categories? If the world is
independent of our Mind how to think it without these categories of thought. Is
that possible? This paradoxical task is at the core of most current speculative
realisms and materialisms, one that as of yet has no solution. Which leads one
to ask: Is there a solution to this paradox or not?

The Phenomenological Moment: Husserl and Heidegger

Before we set off down this rabbit hole lets dig a little deeper into just what
correlationism is within current philosophical circles that are tackling this
issue. During the Twentieth Century Continental philosophy would almost
become synonymous with phenomenology as set forth in the works of Edmund
Husserl and Martin Heidegger his pupil. They would inherit all the issues and
problems of Kant and Kants heirs, the German Idealists. As Tom Sparrow
tells us,

Many phenomenologists will fight tooth and nail against the claim that
phenomenology necessarily ends, or should end, in idealism. They will
argue that this claim completely misses the radical program of
phenomenology, or they will assert that phenomenology operates outside
the idealism/ realism schema and, consequently, cannot be idealism.
However the phenomenologist resists the charge of idealism, their
resistance will be premised on the claim that phenomenology does not
recognize the subject/ object dualism as fundamental, but rather subject
and object always come as an inseparable pair.2

Quentin Meillassoux would describe such thinkers who insists on the

irreducible dependency of subject and object, thinking and being:
the correlationist. (Sparrow, p. 86) In Meillassouxs terms there are both a
strong and weak version of this correlationist stance in philosophy.
The strong view of correlationism is the view that the in itself is neither
knowable nor thinkable, while the weak view (Kants position!) states that the
in itself is thinkable but not knowable. (Sparrow, pp. 35-36) Of course this
second positions begs the question: What is the difference
between thinking something and knowing it?

After Kants short lived belief that we could follow Platos advice and know
the eternal forms residing in the intelligible world hed come to deny it, saying
that our understanding is incapable of insight into an intelligible world, which
cleared the path toward his mature position in the Critique of Pure Reason
(1781), according to which the understanding (like sensibility) supplies forms
that structure our experience of the sensible world, to which human knowledge
is limited, while the intelligible (or noumenal) world is strictly unknowable to
us. So the divide between thinking and knowing is one of limits. We are
limited only to the way our brain (Mind) structures the world for-us through
the schemas or categories of thought and sensibility. Outside that we can know
nothing of what the world is in itself. We can think it but not know it in fact or
act.

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Edmund Husserl would introduce the concept of the epoch a suspension of

the natural attitude, which as Sparrow argues is essential to phenomenology,
drives a correlationist wedge between the world as it is represented in
consciousness and the world as it stands outside of consciousness (Sparrow,
p. 36). This would lead to the notion of intentional objects:

Intentional objects are objects in the sense that they make up the
objective side of the subject/ object correlation. They give themselves
through their various appearances as transcendent unities, even though
this unity is always only judged transcendent from within immanence.
They are what intentionality takes to be objective, what it means, as
Husserl puts it, even though their absolute transcendence remains
phenomenologically unconfirmed. (Sparrow, p. 36)

The point here is that we never leave the correlational circle, that for all his
prowess in developing the phenomenological method Husserl in the end failed
to provide a way out of the Kantian dilemma. Its as if mind independent
reality is like a Black Box we can peer into only indirectly rather than ever
perceiving directly so that Husserl fails in showing how intentional objects are
actual objects with independent lives all their own. Of course in Quantum
physics the same black box problem came to be partially solved by stipulating
that reality is only what can be measured and quantified once a particle leaves
the black box. But that leaves the black box intact and unknown, a problem
that remains a problem for philosophers. Whatever the actual world is it is not
the intentional unity of phenomenological thought about objects. It is only
thought about thought-objects, not actual objects which are forever closed off
in that black box outside the Mind.

Martin Heidegger would following his mentor take another stab at this black
box problem. As Sparrow suggests Heideggers path unlike his mentor would
lead him on a philosophical quest for truth, attempting to access the way things
are without the distortion of our brains (Mind) distorting lens. This would lead
Heidegger to examine the distorting lens, to critique the very structuring
process which maps the world and provides our awareness of it, in this way he
believed that the way forward in mitigating distortion, is to first examine the
instrument or means of access to truth (Sparrow, p. 37).

In Heideggers view phenomenology is never merely a matter of description; it

is always a problem of interpretation, or hermeneutics. (Sparrow, p. 38)
Ultimately Heidegger against his mentors belief in ever substantiating the
truth and validity of mind-independent objects without the need of
presuppositions would lead him in the opposite direction. As Sparrow
describes it

Heidegger gives up on the dream of philosophy without presuppositions

and asserts instead the necessity of presuppositions. And furthermore,
Heideggers fusion of Dasein and being, phenomenology and ontology,
guarantees that his method will not aim at establishing the transcendent
reality of objects, but instead will reveal the utter bankruptcy of our
traditional belief in the independent existence of this reality. (Sparrow, p.
39)

This is the Anti-Realist position which would be taken up by the postmodern

thinkers from Foucault to Derrida and such contemporary thinkers as Slavoj
Zizek. This road led back to German Idealism. In Heideggers view realism is
predicated on a false presupposition, namely, that the world of objects exists as
present-at-hand, objectively independent of Daseins access to them, and that
Dasein exists as an isolated subject or cogito. (Sparrow, p. 39) Yet, as Sparrow
ironically puts it: Given this assessment, it is curious that Heidegger asserts
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that entities exist independent of Daseins disclosure of them. He certainly

does not provide the evidence to support this claim. (p. 39) Ultimately the so
called phenomenology of Heidegger led not to and understanding of the Real,
but more often Heidegger, like Nietzsche and Hegel, abandons the noumena
and the realism that depends on their autonomous existence in favor of an
ontology that echoes Hegels objective idealism. As Sparrow tells us when
Heidegger writes as though he is a realist, this is his way of describing
phenomenologically how objects in the world present themselves as if they
existed independent of their manifestation to Dasein. Their absolute existence
remains suspect. (Sparrow, p. 43)

Sparrow provides a reading of what might be best termed the last

phenomenologist, the philosopher Merleau-Ponty for whom the Real is that
which resists the phenomenological reduction. This negative appraisal and
affirmation of realism as resistance leads Sparrow to conclude: If the
reduction is indeed impossible, then the viability of the phenomenological
method itself is undermined. (Sparrow, p. 48) As Sparrow states it:

Like so many phenomenologists after Husserl, Merleau-Ponty is

compelled to reassure his readers that, despite appearances, there is a
world that exists beyond the world of perception. It is there before any
analysis of it. And yet, at the same time, he contends that it is not
possible to experience either subject or object as distinct from each other.
The objective world is nothing other than the world of perception.
(p. 49)

In other words the world is bound to the correlational circle of being given for-
us. The independence of the world is not independent of our perception of it, it
doesnt exist independent of that perception but only within that perception of
perception. So much for an independent world. In his harshest critique of
phenomenology Sparrow concludes:

If it is conceded that the reduction or intentionality, or even the reduction

to intentionality, is the sine qua non of phenomenology, it would still be
the case that phenomenology cannot yield metaphysical realism. This
means that any phenomenology which claims to practice a
phenomenological method and I have argued that this is the only
meaningful sense of what phenomenology is must be a form of
correlationism. A phenomenology without a method can only remain a
style of philosophy, and insofar as it lacks the methodological tools
necessary to establish realism one ill-equipped to deliver the real on its
own terms. Phenomenology, as such, ends in correlationism, if not
idealism or antirealism. (p. 51)

So if phenomenology was a dead end for realism then what comes next? Is
there a path forward, a way out of the correlational circle that is not an
idealism or anti-realist project?

This is already too long, Ill need to provide a second or third post to allow for
more detail Ill take up Speculative Realism in the next post, then conclude
a third post dealing with my own notion of dark realism.

On Dark Realism: Part Two | On Dark Realism: Part Three

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1. Rohlf, Michael, Immanuel Kant, The Stanford Encyclopedia of

Philosophy(Spring 2016 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL =
<https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2016/entries/kant/&gt;.
2. Sparrow, Tom. The End of Phenomenology: Metaphysics and the New
Realism (Speculative Realism EUP) (p. 86). Edinburgh University
Press. Kindle Edition.

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