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George Berkeley, H.P. Lovecraft, ibn Sīnā, Immanuel Kant, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Quentin Meillassoux, Speculative Realism
Over the past several years I have moved steadily away from any views that see value at the heart of reality, especially natural reality – views that often lead one to some sort of God as the author of these values. I haven’t yet mentioned a recent book that helped crystallize these atheist-ish thoughts for me. That is After Finitude by Quentin Meillassoux (may-ah-SOO) – a book that basically kickstarted the Speculative Realist movement.
After Finitude is full of a great many ideas, not all of which I agree with. But I think the most important of Meillassoux’s ideas is what he calls ancestrality. Meillassoux says, “I will call ‘ancestral’ any reality anterior to the emergence of the human species – or even anterior to every recognized form of life on earth.” (AF 10) Meillassoux thinks that philosophy since Kant has not done justice to the existence of ancestral reality: too often, we place human (or even other animal) subjects at the centre of our thought, when they are not at the centre of the universe, spatially or (especially) temporally. Kant and his successors put us in a place where “the world is only world insofar as it appears to me as world…” But this, Meillassoux thinks, makes no sense if – as natural history and scientific cosmology tell us – there was a time when there were no subjects.
Such a subject-centred worldview could make sense on the terms of George (Bishop) Berkeley, since for Berkeley there is a subject – God – who predates the existence of the world. But unfortunately for Berkeley, no such God has been found. So Meillassoux does not, to my recollection, bother to talk about him. (These last claims about Berkeley are my interpolations, not Meillassoux’s, though I think he would agree with them.)
Meillassoux helped me crystallize what a non-theistic universe looked like. I agree with ibn Sīnā as MacIntyre describes him, that atheists’ disagreement with theists involves not merely one entity, but the nature of the whole world. And while I have reasons not to call myself an atheist, I do accept the fundamental premise that there is no God. That entails some very important points about how to see the world.
Especially, value is not something out there in the world, especially the natural world. The world outside us is normatively inert. This is what H.P. Lovecraft saw: the universe does not give a crap about us. The existent world is not inherently bad, but it is also not inherently good. It is merely indifferent. This is something we do learn from the conclusions of natural science – and we learned it early. In the 17th century Johannes Kepler had already proclaimed that the idea of an infinite universe – as opposed to one with a fixed, rational centre – “carries with it I don’t know what secret, hidden horror”. He hoped that idea wasn’t true – but it turned out it was. According to Akeel Bilgrami, William Blake raged against Isaac Newton’s theories on similar grounds: they stripped value and meaning from the natural universe. And yet over the centuries we have come to agree that Newton was right about most things.
Meillassoux’s point implies a darker (and very Lovecraftian) point that he does not state explicitly: if subjectivity has a beginning, it also likely has an end. Our era presents us with the horrific threat of a human extinction in the coming centuries or even decades, thanks to climate change, nuclear war and/or emerging diseases. But even if we survive those, eventually the sun will go nova and flare out; if we somehow manage to escape the solar system in a heroic feat of engineering, there will still be the heat death of the universe. Such events are unimaginably far in the future, but at some point, eventually, they mean there will be no more human beings – or other subjects. The universe will go back to the subject-free ancestral reality. And that interferes with another way of finding meaning: through a hoped-for utopia. When Simone Weil says that “to orient oneself toward an absolute good down here, one must place it in the future”: well, it’s really not going to be very absolute, since it faces its own end in the eventual death of the human race.
For all these reasons, for a while I was thinking of my cosmology as one that basically follows Meillassoux. I no longer think that way, though. It was the Kyoto School’s Nishida Kitarō who moved me away from Meillassoux, and next time I’ll discuss how.
I came to eudaimonism via nihilism, as I may have commented before. I tend to think people who say the nonexistence of God should have far-reaching consequences for our view of the world are right. But I think nihilism (and Lovecraft’s pessimism) only make sense as sort of an after-image of monotheism. When you’re surrounded by a culture that believes in objective moral values rooted in a divine valuer, then the absence of that divine subject undermines all of morality.
Much of our moral language implies the kind of moral value that only makes sense in a theistic context. I was struck by this when reading Michael Huemer’s book on Ethical Intuitionism. The whole way he phrased the question about moral realism was as a question about whether goodness is an objective property of things or states of affairs (if I remember correctly). This language makes complete sense in a theistic context but is a very strange way to think about ethics in a non-theistic context.
Among the many arguments of Aristotle’s that I don’t find compelling, one that I find fairly compelling is the argument that all humans in fact want happiness, as the ultimate end towards which we choose other things. If this is true, or even mostly true (if only most humans want happiness as an ultimate end) then it’s a perfectly adequate basis for ethics (I’m defining ethics as a generally applicable heuristic for humans to make decisions). If there are general truths about what causes humans to be happy, then there is an objective basis for ethics. If it turns out that pro-social behaviors are part of what makes an individual human happy (and I think it does), then those ethics won’t look terribly dissimilar from the ones we’ve inherited.
There still is not an objective property of goodness, unless we qualify it as “good for humans.” Similarly, to talk about rights or moral laws as objectively existing things doesn’t make a lot of sense, unless we go through a fairly intricate process of deriving them from what promotes human happiness, and the notions that we’d end up with at the end of that process might be somewhat different from what currently goes under the name of “rights” and “moral laws.” Or it might turn out to be very similar.
I agree with Asa that Amod’s invocation of the “Lovecraftian” (as in one of Amod’s responses to me in a previous post: “the material universe that preexisted living beings […] is a cold meaningless Lovecraftian void”) is “sort of an after-image of monotheism”.
The “Lovecraftian” shares this “after-image of monotheism” quality with the “Satanic”—especially the dark-romantic variety of Satanic more than the rationalist variety—that Amod discussed in a recent post. Particularly, the “coldness”, “meaninglessness”, “indifference”, and “horror” qualities of the Lovecraftian cosmos are just the projection of an opposite emotional mood that Christianity typically projects onto the cosmos, namely “warmth”, “meaningfulness”, “benevolence”, and “beatitude”.
The Lovecraftian cosmos, like the Christian cosmos, is impossible for me to take seriously because it is so obviously a projection of certain emotions in order to establish a certain mood. Lovecraft was, after all, a pulp fiction writer in the business of creating mood, and it’s interesting to think of Christian mythopoesis (and that of other traditions) as being in the business of creating mood in its own way.
My own vision of the past, present, and future cosmos is without any emotional mood; it’s just a model, and, like a geological model or architectural model or molecular model, doesn’t have any associated mood. So it’s neither Lovecraftian nor Christian. I like to think of it as scientific, insofar as the model is based on the best current knowledge, regularly updated. My developing cosmic vision can evoke emotions, but I’m able to process those emotions and not subtly project them onto the model.
I’m interested to see where Amod is taking this in the next post.
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