Absolutising the Facticity of the Correlation

In this dialogue, Meillassoux demonstrates that correlationism is an unstable position. In the face of certain questions, it either collapses into idealism or finds itself maintaining a different kind of absolute without, seemingly, having realised it.

Dogmatic believer 

Dogmatic atheist  -> representatives of (pre-critical) dogmatic metaphysics

Both are absolutely certain that they can assert something definitive about the afterlife.

Correlationist -> represents critical philosophy

Critical philosophy begins with a critique of the conditions of human knowing - and the correlationist asserts that the knowledge that both the dogmatic atheist and the dogmatic purport to possess is not actually knowledge. (Result: ubiquitous fideism).

Subjective Idealist -> represents extreme idealism

Castigates all three for maintaining that there even is an in-itself that is radically different from our present state.

But - does this not entail the obvious contradiction of trying to think something outside of thought in order to be absolutely sure that there is nothing beyond the for us? If the subjective idealist is to be consistent, they must maintain that they cannot then conceive of death. That, accordingly, 'my mind, if not my body, is immortal'. (AF55)

Correlationist

Rejects the Subjective Idealist's argument on the grounds that the dogmatic believer, the dogmatic atheist and the subjective idealist are all too absolutist in that they all think they can make an absolute statement on the status of death. The correlationist holds, rather, that 'my capacity-to-be-wholly-other in death (whether dazzled by God or annihilated) is just as thinkable as my persisting in self-identity'. (AF56) This is due to the facticity of the correlation - which is to say, the fact that it can be described but not deduced. We simply know that the thought-world correlate exists, not that it must exist, nor that it exhausts the possibility of the real.

Speculative Materialist -> will transform facticity into an ontological doctrine

Whereas the Correlationist thinks that we cannot know which possibility about the afterlife is true, the Speculative Materialist thinks we can know that any of them could be true, and without reason - and that this is in fact an type of absolute knowledge. A statement such as 'I cannot think my own annihilation - the annihilation of the very thought I think it with - without turning it into a thought, yet, such a state may exist nonetheless in spite of my not being able to think it'. The Idealist, on the other hand would say 'I cannot think my own annihilation, and therefore it neither exists for-me or in-itself'. So for the correlationist, the possibility of death is an actual possibility of death, not simply the thought of death (as Harman points out, to say 'for me we cannot think a tree existing outside of thought, yet such a tree might nonetheless exist for me' is a simple contradiction): 'I think of myself as mortal only if I think that my death has no need of my thought of death in order to be actual'. (AF57) It is in the thought (of the thought) of death that one discovers oneself already pushing beyond the bounds of the correlationist circle.

So, facticity is only facticity if its limitedness is absolutely limited - only if the possibilities other than the thought-world correlate are possibilities that do in fact lie outside the correlate.

Here the correlationist must make a choice - either accept that she is subscribing to an idealist position and that on some points its answers even converge with extreme idealisms such as subjective idealism, or hold idealism off by openly maintaining the absolutisation of the facticity of the correlation.

'Correlationism is true only if Subjective Idealism might be wrong. But if it might be wrong, then it is absolutely true that it might be wrong, and Correlationism is no longer a merely agnostic position... The only way for Correlationism to remain different from Idealism is to replace the absolute status of the thought-world correlation [of Idealism], not with finitude and ignorance about the otherness of the world, but with absolute knowledge that the world might be other than we think.' (Harman 27)

'The correlationist's refutation of idealism proceeds by way of an absolutisation (which is to say, a de-correlation) of the capacity-to-be-other presupposed in the thought of facticity.' (AF57) 

Thus, making her into a Speculative Materialist.

Correlationist

Attempts to refute the Speculative Materialist by maintaining that, like dogmatic belief for example, this is just another false absolute. The two possibilities held by the dogmatic believer and the dogmatic atheist, and that held by the Speculative Materialist that both of these previous possibilities are really possible are discounted by the Correlationst as three possibilities of equal ignorance, not as two real possibilities.

Speculative Materialist

But in order to make this argument, the Correlationist contradicts herself, for the only way she can hold open the various different possibilities (a move necessary to make this particular argument) is with the tacit claim that the possibilities are absolutely possible. They simply cannot be possibilities for thought, or the argument against Subject Idealism must be reneged.

'The very idea of the difference between the in-itself and the for-us would never have arisen within you, had you not experienced what is perhaps human thought's most remarkable power - it's capacity to access the possibility of its own non-being, and thus to know itself to be mortal.... Consequently, you are perfectly well able to distinguish between the possibility of ignorance and the possibility of the absolute. But this possibility is always based upon the same argument - it is because one can think that it is absolutely possible for the in-itself to be other than the given, that what I believe to be really possible may not be really possible. [Argument against dogmatic belief.] Once this has been conceded, you are caught in an infinite regress, for every time you claim that what I call a real possibility is merely a possibility of ignorance, you will do so by way on an argument that works [against Idealism] only by thinking as an absolute the possibility you claim to be de-absolutising.' (AF59)

Meillassoux has the Correlationist in a bind - she must choose either to refute the dogmatic believers or the extreme idealist, but she cannot refute both at the same time.

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