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Quentin Meillassoux and the Ethics of Chance

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Quentin Meillassoux and the Ethics of Chance System and/as Contingency: Quentin Meillassoux and the Ethics of Chance Kevin Kennedy It is no longer philosophical to base, upon what has been, a vision of what is to be. Accident is admitted as a portion of the substructure. We make chance a matter of absolute calculation. We subject the unlooked for and unimagined, to the mathematical formulae of the schools.1 What object is served by this circle of misery and violence and fear? It must tend to some end, or else our universe is ruled by chance, which is unthinkable.2 Introduction: philosophy and contingency In Paul Auster’s postmodern detective story ‘City of Glass’, the main character Quinn, a writer turned detective, is tasked with investigating a man called Peter Stillman, who is about to arrive at Grand Central Station. Waiting on the platform, Quinn is horrified when two men emerge from the train, who both match the photo of Stillman he was given, each heading in a different direction: ‘[W]hatever choice he made — and he had to make a choice — would be arbitrary, a submission to chance. Uncertainty would haunt him to the end.’ 3 Quinn’s horror in the face of this absurd encounter is reflective of ________________________ 1. Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Mystery of Marie Rogêt’, in Tales of Mystery and Imagination (Ware: Wordsworth Classics, 1993), p. 115. 2. Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Adventure of the Cardboard Box’, in The Complete Sherlock Holmes (New York: Bantam Classics, 1986), p. 91. 3. Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy (London: Penguin Books, 2006), p. 68. IJFrS 17 (2017) 72 KENNEDY philosophy’s traditional response towards notions of chance and contingency. This response is hardly surprising, given that philosophy’s primary task, it would seem, has always been to construct coherent and stable systems of thought, in which the unruly and unpredictable nature of chance simply has no place. Perhaps the most ingenious attempt to integrate chance within an over-arching philosophical framework is Hegel’s dialectical model of history, in which what at first appears to be chance is retroactively revealed as a necessary step within the unfolding of spirit. 4 Even though chance is acknowledged, it is ultimately shown to be the illusory product of a deeper, coherent reality. Hegel thereby offers a sophisticated version of a specific conception of chance that has dominated Western thought for millennia — from Plato to Einstein to much of contemporary science — in which the contingent is merely the product of our ignorance of an underlying system.5 In this positivistic scenario, the two Stillmans Quinn is faced with in Auster’s story will turn out to be necessary, if initially bewildering clues to solving the case. Post-Hegelian philosophy has been a lot less optimistic towards reason’s ability to systematize the contingencies of life and existence. Thinkers as varied as Nietzsche, Freud and Adorno deny that rational thought could ever penetrate the apparent inconsistencies or accidents of language, thought and history, to discover a system that would lay bare the absolute nature of reality. Emblematic for this stance is Nietzsche’s conception of chance as a negation of purpose, origin and teleology.6 In this system-critical scenario, Auster’s Quinn would have ________________________ 4. ‘Spirit does not toss itself about in the external play of chance occurrences; on the contrary, it is that which determines history absolutely, and it stands firm against the chance occurrences which it dominates and exploits for its own purpose.’ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of History: With Selections from the Philosophy of Right, trans. by Leo Rauch (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1988), p. 58. 5. Einstein’s famous quote ‘God does not play dice with the universe’ neatly encapsulates this idea. 6. ‘That my life has no aim is evident even from the accidental nature of its origin’, Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Notes 1873’, in The Portable Nietzsche, trans. by Walter Kaufmann (London: Penguin Classics, 1994), p. 40. MEILLASSOUX AND CONTINGENCY 73 to affirm the arbitrariness of his choice concerning the real Stillman, and accept the impossibility of ever getting to the bottom of the mystery, as the contingency of his choice could never be remedied by an underlying system. In recent years, the relationship between contingency and systematic claims to the absolute has again come to play an important role in Continental philosophy, most notably in the work of Quentin Meillassoux. Meillassoux’s thought is based on a quasi-radicalization of Alain Badiou’s conception of the event. For Badiou, chance is ‘la pensée pure de l’événement’, a radical occurrence that breaks with the pre-existing parameters and rules of every system, be it philosophical, political or ethical. 7 Meillassoux takes this idea one step further, arguing that this radical contingency is itself the ultimate ‘ground’ of being, the only possibility we have of rationally establishing the absolute nature of reality. In this reading, chance no longer features as a disruption of systematic aspirations, but becomes itself the foundation of the system. In other words, a systematic, rational approach to understanding the nature of the universe has to be based on the recognition of its absolute contingency. From this angle, returning once more to Auster’s story, the existence of the two Peter Stillmans no longer appears as an obstacle to solving the case, but becomes the solution itself, an illustration of the radical contingency of being. In the following, I want to take a closer look at how the relation between systematicity and the contingent is developed in Meillassoux’s work. I will show that a specific demand for systematic knowledge underlies not only his ontology, but also his ethics, which, as I shall argue, come into conflict with his own systematic aspirations in certain key areas, most notably in his attempt to derive an ethico- political model of subjectivity from his theory of contingency. Furthermore, I want to establish whether Meillassoux’s monism of chance, by systematizing contingency and declaring it a universal ________________________ 7. Alain Badiou, L’Aventure de la philosophie française: depuis les années 1960 (Paris: La fabrique, 2012). 74 KENNEDY principle, does not in fact deprive the contingent of its contingent character, introducing a reductive stability that condemns the subject to a passive waiting ultimately lacking in ethical significance. The necessity of systematicity In his daring reading of Mallarmé’s famous poem Un Coup de Dés jamais n’abolira le Hasard, which sets out to excavate the poem’s buried (and previously unrecognized) systematic structure, Meillassoux offers a succinct history of modern philosophy’s attempt to think a systematic absolute, which he divides into three broad phases, each of which produces a specific subjective position.8 The nineteenth century is defined by its belief in overarching meta- narratives, political teleologies and all-encompassing systems of knowledge, such as those of Marx or Hegel, that ‘vectoris[e] de nouveau le sujet par un sens, par une direction libérée de l’ancienne eschatologie’. The twentieth century, in turn, is characterized by a rejection of such absolutizing systems, those ‘Grands Récits morts’, resulting in an all-pervasive disenchantment with the absolute, leaving the subject devoid of hope for the future.9 At the dawn of the twenty- first century, however, Meillassoux detects a return to an ‘époque ensevelie sous nos désabusements’, that is to say, a rediscovery of the nineteenth century’s aspirations to absolute knowledge, by which, it seems, Meillassoux is referring to his own philosophy. Although Meillassoux’s published output to date is compara- tively sparse and does not constitute a completed philosophical system in itself, there has been significant speculation concerning what ________________________ 8. ‘La thèse selon laquelle la “démarche du poète” dans le Coup de dés “n’est pas systématique et ne procède pas par calcul” […] trahit une position de principe qui ne tire son évidence que du large consensus avec lequel on récuse désormais cette hypothèse.’ Quentin Meillassoux, Le Nombre et la sirène: un déchiffrage du 'Coup de dés' de Mallarmé (Paris: Fayard, 2011), p. 13. 9. Meillassoux, Le Nombre et la sirène, p. 205. MEILLASSOUX AND CONTINGENCY 75 Graham Harman calls Meillassoux’s ‘massive, unpublished philo- sophical system’.10 Regardless of whether this system already exists or not, a system-building tendency is, in any case, apparent in all of Meillassoux’s published works, a tendency that is by no means incidental. For Meillassoux, our current philosophical/political climate is dominated by two seemingly opposed, but in fact interdependent worldviews: scepticism/pluralism and dogmatism/fanaticism, both of which are a direct result of the twentieth century’s rejection of metaphysics and the concurrent relativization of knowledge: ‘Le fanatisme contemporain ne saurait donc être tenu simplement pour la résurgence d’un archaïsme violemment opposé aux acquis de la raison critique occidentale, car il est au contraire l’effet de la rationalité critique.’11 By rejecting the possibility that thought could ever lay bare the fundamental parameters of existence (regardless of whether one calls this fundament god, matter or spirit), twentieth-century philosophy effectively and unwittingly opened the door to a paralyzing relativism, devoid of argumentative leverage in the face of religious dogmatism or new-age obscurantism: ‘la fin de la métaphysique, en chassant la raison de toutes ses prétentions à l’absolu, a pris la forme d’un retour exacerbé du religieux’ (AF 62; italicized in the original). In other words, critical philosophy’s seemingly reasonable rejection of an absolute system facilitated a re-emergence of the absolute, yet devoid of reason and systematicity. Thus, Meillassoux argues, an incontrovertible, binding system of thought is needed, which would re-enable us to ground our claims in absolute certainty, without falling back into the metaphysical/pre- critical dogmas of the past.
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