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Arche-Fossil and Ancestrality: A Defense of Phenomenology

Abstract:

This essay defends Husserlian phenomenology against Quentin Meillassoux’s critique, as

outlined in Après la Finitude or After Finitude. The latter argues against correlationism or the

commitment to a permanent relation between mind and world. Taking up Husserl’s articulations

of intentional meaning and the idealized life-world, it is argued that Meillassoux’s criticisms of

correlationism are deeply problematic on two fronts: he misapplies scientific statements,

assuming from the outset that they have something to say about a world beyond thought, and his

theory of meaning sidesteps Husserl’s own.

Meillassoux, Husserl, phenomenology, arche-fossil, realism

Introduction:

For Quentin Meillassoux, ever since Immanuel Kant distinguished noumena from phenomena,

philosophers have embraced, to some extent, the notion that the world is there for consciousness

in such a way that subjectivity can never be transcended.1 Chief among those who have

subscribed to correlationism are phenomenologists who, according to Meillassoux, hold that

“[c]onsciousness and its language certainly transcend themselves towards the world, but there is

a world only insofar as consciousness transcends itself towards it.”2 In making this case,

1Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier (New York:

Continuum, 2008), 5. 2Ibid., 7.

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Meillassoux marshals a number of scientific claims to support his view that the real non-thought

world is meaningful.3

In what follows, this essay intends to bring the conclusions Edmund Husserl reaches in

his Crisis4 and other works to bear on Meillassoux's confidence in the realism of scientific

statements and the meaningfulness of an unthought world; Meillassoux should be more cautious

about challenging phenomenological correlationism with scientific statements as if such

statements are themselves unproblematic. In order to carry out this project, this essay is divided

into three main sections. In the first, I will outline in more detail Meillassoux's approach. In the

second section I will explain Husserl's criticism of scientific idealism. In the third section, we

will examine how Meillassoux's understanding of meaning is highly problematic.

Meillassoux's Realist Project:

Concerning 'ancestral statements', that is, scientific statements about a world that pre-exists

mind, Meillassoux states that “[t]he correlationist philosopher will in no way intervene in the

content of [the statement that] . . . 'Event Y occurred x number of years before the emergence of

humans.'”5 Rather, correlationists will merely add that such a statement must be true only for a

mind or a human being. The correlationist cannot hold that the statement is true absolutely, that

is, without any relation to mind. So by modifying the statement as being true for human beings,

the correlationist allegedly avoids mixing herself up with the differences between the sciences

and philosophy. Hence, there are “at least two levels of meaning in such a statement: the

3Ibid., 11. 4Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to

Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970). 5Meillassoux, 13.

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immediate, or realist meaning; and the more originary correlationist meaning.”6 In other words,

the absolute or scientific meaning of the statement is made possible by the more primary

correlation between mind and world.

Meillassoux finds such a division of meaning problematic. Given that there is evidence –

what Meillassoux terms the arche-fossil – of a world or universe that pre-exists mind, there is

evidence that there is a “givenness of a being anterior to givenness.”7 That is, because the arche-

fossil – evidence of a world prior to thought – gives itself to the mind of a scientist or

philosopher there must be a givenness before the emergence of mind. In the same way that she

draws the above distinction between the truth of a scientific statement and the truth of a scientific

statement for human beings, the correlationist, on Meillassoux's account, goes on to construct a

distinction between logical and chronological priority. Givenness, in its most basic form, is, for

the correlationist, logically prior to givenness in the chronological/scientific form. As

Meillassoux explains, “I grasp that the correlation between thought and being enjoys logical

priority over every empirical statement about the world and intra-worldly entities.”8 From this

distinction, Meillassoux concludes that correlationists are guilty of denying that the world in fact,

literally, or really precedes thought. For them, thought makes the arche-fossil or ancestral world

possible: “it is not ancestrality which precedes givenness, but that which is given in the present

which retrojects a seemingly ancestral past.”9 That is, the claim is intersubjectively true but

literally or really false. If the claim that the universe chronologically precedes the mind is taken

to be ultimately more fundamental than the claim that the world is given to the mind, the

correlationalist will assert that it makes no sense to say that a world precedes thought. To say that

6Ibid., 14. 7Ibid. 8Ibid., 15. 9Ibid., 16.

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the world precedes thought is “a true statement, but what it describes as real is an impossible

event . . . it is a non-sense.”10

Once this is granted, the correlationist winds up contradicting herself. It is fundamentally

impossible for the statement “the world precedes thought” to be both intersubjectively true but

really or literally false. Such a statement can only be intersubjectively true if it is also really or

literally true. We cannot simply say that the statement “the world precedes thought” is true only

for those thinking in a scientific mindset precisely because the scientific mindset aims at the

establishment of truth about what is real: “[s]cience does not experiment with a view to

validating the universality of its experiments; it carries out repeatable experiments with a view to

external referents which endow these experiments with meaning.”11

A Husserlian Response:

Taking Husserl as our guide, then, we can say that Meillassoux, first of all, fails to recognize the

problems inherent in simply adopting and applying to philosophy the perceived consequences of

scientific statements. Secondly, Meillassoux does not understand the relationship between

meaning and intuition that runs through Husserl's opus. Whereas Meillassoux seems to think that

a world before thought, indicated by the arche-fossil, remains meaningful even in the absence of

thought, Husserl's phenomenology makes it clear that meaning is never on the side of the

intuition or object: unintended things in the world do not carry or give meaning. In what follows,

this essay will first examine the status of scientific statements in Meillassoux's argument before

explaining how Meillassoux's understanding of meaning in phenomenology is misguided.

10Ibid., 17. 11Ibid.

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Science and the Life-World:

Husserl opens the Crisis with a statement of what, in his day (as well as in our own), is

problematic about the sciences. With the advent of electricity, telephones, gasoline engines, and

airplanes, it seems, at first glance, that the sciences are unquestionably accurate and successful.

However, as Husserl points out, the very character of scientific investigation needs to be

reevaluated since “the whole manner in which [science] has set its task and developed a

methodology for it, has become questionable.”12 The sciences, in pursuing their own methods,

have forgotten the life-world from which they originate and marginalize or completely ignore

such pressing concerns as the “meaning or meaninglessness of the whole of this human

existence.”13

For Husserl, the problem has its roots in Galileo's method. Though Galileo would not

have been particularly aware of what he was doing or of the consequences of his works, from his

time onward, the sciences have come to privilege the ideal realm above the experiential realm:

When Galileo and modern mathematical science . . . turn around to declare that

only mathematically described nature is objectively real, and that the “subjective-

relative” domain of our actual experience or perception is a misleading

appearance of this absolute and objective realm, they forget that our new

mathematical description of nature only has sense and meaning on the basis of its

necessary origin in the ordinary world of perception and experience.14

This Galilean maneuver arose as Galileo and other like-minded scientists began to use

12Husserl, Crisis, 3. 13Ibid., 6. 14Michael Friedman, “Science, History, and Transcendental Subjectivity in Husserl's 'Crisis',” in Science and the

Life-World: Essays on Husserl's Crisis of European Sciences, ed. David Hyder and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger

(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 103.

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technology in order to measure certain aspects of the world. As these scientists measured the

world, their tools or technological items began to shape the way they perceived it. Geometry, as

the mathematics of shapes, was especially helpful for this move towards the idealization of the

world because it operates under the assumption that ideal shapes are universally transferable and

recognizable: “its ideal shapes of space-time, which are constructed according to rules that are

verifiable at all times, and which permit everyone to reproduce them identically, have absolute

and universal value with regard to the one and same world shared by everyone.”15 That is,

formulae for geometrical shapes, such as circles, equilateral triangles, and spheres are produced,

passed around, and are capable of being understood by anyone familiar with mathematical

formulae. In his effort to understand the world, Galileo used these geometric figures and took the

world to be ultimately composed of them.

However, such geometrical shapes are not themselves found within nature. They are, on

the contrary, produced through a series of idealizations of the world. Whereas most or all human

beings naturally abstract from the world and, thereby, see people, bodies, and tools, through

measuring tools and technology, mathematicians have been able to idealize the world into such

'limit-shapes' as the perfect or ideal circle, square, or sphere: “the pure forms of geometry – such

as the circle – are, as Husserl writes, “limit-shapes,” that is, identical and invariant idealities

obtained by way of a passage to the limit.”16

Husserl and Meillassoux on the History of Scientific Statements:

15Rodolphe Gasché, “Universality and Spatial Forms,” in Science and the Life-World: Essays on Husserl's Crisis of

European Sciences, ed. David Hyder and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010),

119. 16Ibid., 120, quoting Husserl, Crisis, 29.

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Returning, then, to Meillassoux's critique of correlationism, we can now take note of how he

fails to understand how the authority of scientific claims ultimately rests in the life-world.

Taking, at this point, Meillassoux's statement that “[t]he correlationist philosopher . . . will not

contest the claim that it is in fact event Y that occurred, nor will he contest the dating of this

event,”17 we can say that Meillassoux, by remaining ignorant of the history behind the possibility

of constructing a scientific statement, seems unaware that certain correlationists, such as Husserl,

would object to or at least point out certain assumptions inherent within the apparently innocent

claim that “it is in fact event Y that occurred.” Meillassoux seems to be forgetting the historical

and original significance of scientific statements. As Husserl explains,

[A] theoretical task and achievement like that of a natural science . . . can only be

and remain meaningful in a true and original sense if the scientist has developed

in himself the ability to inquire back into the original meaning of all his

meaning-structures and methods, i.e., into the historical meaning of their primal

establishment, and especially into the meaning of all the inherited meanings

taken over unnoticed in this primal establishment.18

Meillassoux needs to explain how the statements he uses come to be authoritative and

meaningful instead of unproblematically accepting their authority.

The closest Meillassoux comes to responding to or acknowledging a possible Husserlian

objection is in the potential problem he raises of how an empirical statement can challenge a

transcendental statement, that is, how the arche-fossil can challenge correlationism. Here

Meillassoux argues that the arche-fossil proves that the empirical world is the condition for the

possibility of there being anything like a transcendental realm. Since the body houses the mind,

the mind is only possible through the body and not vice versa. He then goes on to say that in

order to harmonize philosophy with science, the correlationist would add a certain codicil to the

17Meillassoux, 13. 18Husserl, Crisis, 56.

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statement. Such a codicil would indicate that the statement is true for human beings, as if without

the codicil, the statement is an unproblematic realist statement about a world without human

beings.19

Now, though Husserl would not object to the possibility of a world without mind, he

would object to the claim that we can know this world as a world divorced from mind. Though

Meillassoux seems to think it unproblematic to raise as an objection a scientific statement,

Husserl would point to the origin of that scientific statement as resting within the common life-

world. Husserl is not simply interested in adding 'for human beings' to the end of each scientific

statement. Scientific statements, insofar as they involve the application of idealities to the world,

are always already grounded in and made possible by experience of the life-world.

The Meaningful-ness of Scientific Statements:

With respect to the second problem, Meillassoux is guilty of misunderstanding phenomenology

when he states that intuitions can provide meaning. According to Meillassoux, “[s]cience does

not experiment with a view to validating the universality of its experiments; it carries out

repeatable experiments with a view to external referents which endow these experiments with

meaning.”20 But the very assumption that external referents can bestow experiments with

meaning is, in a Husserlian framework, highly problematic. If Meillassoux’s aim, in After

Finitude, is to show that a non-mental world is meaningful and can “endow . . . experiments with

meaning” then he will need to show how intuitions – perceptions or imaginations – as intuitions

are able to be meaningful on their own. Whereas, according to Peter Simons, both Frege and

19Meillassoux, 13. 20Meillassoux, 17.

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Bolzano held that the mind must grasp meanings existing entirely outside it, for Husserl,

meanings are generated by the mind but in a way that allows them to be intersubjectively

grasped.21 When I make an expression, for example, this expression must be capable of being

understood. This ability to be understood then links this expression with others beyond me and,

as a result, produces an intersubjective meaning: “individual mental acts are not the sign’s

meaning . . . . When I say It is a nice day, what this means when I say it to my neighbour or

indeed think it silently to myself is not what is in my head . . . . Meaning is intersubjective, not

subjective.”22 This happens, for instance, when I state that “the three perpendiculars of a triangle

intersect in a point.”23 In this case, though I produce the statement and express a certain

meaning, the meaningfulness of the expression lies in the expression and not in my inner

thoughts. Hence, the meaning, in this case, rests in the expression itself. But, as Husserl explains,

the meaning could never have come about had I not previously made an inner judgment about

the relation: “we could not have made the assertion, if the matter had not so appeared before us,

if, in other words, we had not so judged.”24 But once this judgment is expressed in a statement,

the meaning attaches itself to the intersubjective statement and is not confined to my inner

intentions.

Regardless, the intersubjective meanings that characterize expressions do not themselves

arise out of what is perceived or imagined. When I perceive a horse, the horse as a horse does not

grant me its meaning; rather, it is only once the horse is perceived, named, or judged that it can

become meaningful. Similarly, when a scientist identifies a rock that pre-exists the emergence of

21Peter Simons, “Meaning and Language,” in Cambridge Companion to Husserl, ed. Barry Smith and David

Woodruff Smith (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 113. 22Simons, 110. 23Husserl, Logical Investigations, II, 285. 24Ibid., 285.

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mind, the rock does not give the scientist its meaning. Rather, the scientist or geologist, as

someone well trained in studying the significance of various rocks and rock-formations and as

someone who knows what clues to follow, places her own scientifically-informed meaning on

the rock when she labels it as a rock from a certain era. As Husserl states, “the function of

meaning pertains in all cases to one and the same sort of act, a type of act free from the

limitations of the perception or the imagination which so often fail us, and which, in all cases

where an expression authentically 'expresses', merely becomes one with the act expressed.”25

While not providing the meaning, the perception or imagination, in contrast with the meaning-

conferring act, allows for the fulfillment or the non-fulfillment of the expression or meaning-

conferring act. My notion or expression about a duck might be empty – and yet still meaningful –

in the absence of a duck or it might be full – and still meaningful – in the presence of a duck. In

each case, the duck does not determine the meaning of the expression. Hence, the expression's

meaning is not on the side of intuitions. Though meanings are intersubjective – once expressed

they are open to being accepted and evaluated by others – meanings themselves do not find their

grounding in a world without thought.

Conclusion: Meillassoux and Meaning:

If we return, at this point, to Meillassoux's statement that “[s]cience does not experiment with a

view to validating the universality of its experiments; it carries out repeatable experiments with a

view to external referents which endow these experiments with meaning,”26 it should now be

clear that Meillassoux misunderstands phenomenology's correlationist project. On the one hand,

25Ibid., II, 196. 26Meillassoux, 17.

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Husserl would not deny the possibility of there being a world beyond or outside of thought. On

the other hand, he would deny that a world without thought has any meaning because, for him,

the mind constitutes the meaning of the world. Intuitions – perceptions and imaginations – can

only fulfill or partially fulfill meaningful expressions. But Meillassoux fails to both understand

the relationship between scientific statements and the world and see how phenomena become

meaningful. In each case, Meillassoux would do well to reconsider the force of his highly

speculative endeavor.