The Absolute Contingency

Quentin Meillassoux,a new French thinker,names “correlationism” for the dominant ontological background of continental philosophy after Kant which asserts that we cannot argue about philosophy problems out of the relation between thought and being.The weak correlationism represented by Kant admitted the existence of thing-in-itself,but denied the possibility to know it.Whereas,the strong correlationism represented by Heidegger emphasized that we cannot think thing-in-itself for its nonexistence.As a result,philosophers could only talk about the external world in the anthropocentric way.Meillassoux tries to out of the dilemma by using the notion of absolute contingency,which is the ontological principle of his speculative materialism,to confront the finitude and facticity of correlationism.He critically analyses the primary and the secondary qualities of things and concludes the reason of correaltionism turn originally from the distinction between phenomenal world and transcendental world,which is Kant's solution to Hume's problem of causation.Therefore,Meillassoux reviews the issue of causation and asserts the idea that anything could happen without any reason instead of sufficient reason principle and uses the principle of factiality to break through the circle of correlation internally.Thus,there exists definitely being outside which is dependence of thought.All laws of nature are contingent and the only necessity is the contingency.Such viewpoints mentioned above are viewed as the ontological principle of speculative materialism.However,defenders of Kant will oppose to the Meillassoux's proposal for the hyper-chaos in phenomenal world aroused by contingency.For responding to Kant's epistemology,Meillassoux offers the non-totality as the epistemological ground of speculative materialism with Cantor's transfinite numbers.The thesis also contains Harman's object-oriented ontology which is different with speculative materialism.What Meillassoux's intention is confirm the capacity of thought to think the being independence of thought and finds the principle of contingency.Harman emphasizes the equality and interaction between living things and non-living,and eventually moves towards the causal chain of the mutual effect of object-object.Although the mathematizing methodology is still an open question to explain epistemology of contingency,but speculative materialism offers a new direction of a promising philosophy and inspires another pattern of our philosophical thinking.