Rationalist Empiricism. Nathan Brown
scientific knowledge. And this critique has a speculative function insofar as it preserves the autonomy of philosophy to think the ontological in a manner that is not delimited by empirical science (this is the very criterion of distinction between the ontological and the ontic).
Does this not simply separate the empirical (science) from the rational (philosophy)? Was it not our project to think the productivity of their methodological relation? But what I have tried to show is that science itself involves a mutually critical and productive relationship between reason and experience; Bachelard’s epistemology theorizes science as not simply empiricist but also profoundly rationalist. And philosophical speculation itself, as I try to show in Chapters 2 (Meillassoux) and 3 (Hegel), involves an alternation between the experience of what happens in thought and rational determinations of what has to be said. Indeed, this alternation is not only internal to the speculative arguments of particular thinkers, but also historical in its dynamism. Thus, both “empirical” science and “rational” speculation involve a transmutation of epistemological values between rationalism and empiricism. Part of the burden of speculative critique—against the grounding operations of transcendental critique—is to sustain the autonomy of science and philosophy, according them their own terrain (ontic/ontological) while also thinking their consistency. I hope to show that this distribution of the relation between science and philosophy has important consequences for understanding the relation between idealism and materialism.
That is finally the burden of the chapters that follow: to show how materialism relies upon the powers of speculative critique made possible by what I call, after Althusser, rationalist empiricism. I pursue that project across chapters on methodological exceptions in Descartes and Hume (Chapter 1), on the Althusserian criteria of materialism inherited by Meillassoux (Chapter 2), on the ungrounded, genetic epistemology of Hegel’s Science of Logic (Chapter 3), on the displacement of Hegel’s speculative idealism by Meillassoux’s speculative materialism (Chapter 4), on the metrological redefinition of the kilogram considered through Hegel’s theory of measure (Chapter 5), on contemporary digital photography considered through Whitehead’s theory of prehensions (Chapter 6), on the recessed concept of “structure” in Plato’s Timaeus (Chapter 7), on the relation of Badiou’s theory of the subject to the problem of induction (Chapter 8), on the criterion of immanence in communist theory (Chapter 9), and on the concept of “separation” (Scheidung) as the crux of the rationalist and empiricist dimensions of Marx’s Capital (Chapter 10). Thus the book develops an account of rationalist empiricism relevant not only to ancient, modern, and contemporary philosophy but also to art and political theory.
These chapters are organized into four sections focusing primarily upon (I) epistemology; (II) ontology; (III) “structure” in science, art, and philosophy; and (IV) political theory. Among these, the role of the third section of the book requires further explanation. In these chapters on metrology (Chapter 5), digital photography (Chapter 6), and Plato (Chapter 7), I offer examples of how thinking in terms of rationalist empiricism might illuminate practices in contemporary science and art, and I then pursue a concept of structure latent in the Timaeus that I view as consonant with those examples. What unifies these chapters is their common concern with the codetermination of the material and the ideal. I am interested in how rationally determined quantities and structures both emerge from and are inscribed within material objects and devices, while configurations of experience enabled by the latter give rise to the new possibilities of rational determination. Rather than “apply” the concept of structure I derive from Plato to my engagements with the redefinition of the kilogram and the art practice of Nicolas Baier, I lead with these case studies and then position a reading of Plato within the field of conceptual problems they raise, while offering a Coda at the end of Part III to render legible the retroactive relevance of the concept of structure derived from the Timaeus to the two previous chapters. Indeed, Chapter 7 was composed from the perspective of theoretical questions raised by those previous chapters, and many of the philosophical questions I pursue in this book came into focus not only through my reading of Bachelard, Althusser, Meillassoux, Hegel, or Marx but also and equally from studies of contemporary scientific practice and my encounter with Nicolas Baier’s photography. Thus, I hope Chapters 5 and 6, on science and art, will not be viewed as digressions from the main line of the philosophical argument, but rather as central to its genesis and articulation. The attention of those chapters to concrete practices is integral to my own effort to mediate the claims of reason and experience.
I want to emphasize that the term “rationalist empiricism” is not intended to promulgate some kind of theoretical brand name or methodological school. Insofar as it relies upon the methodological gap between rationalism and empiricism in order to sustain the critical implications of each for the other, rationalist empiricism is not itself a unified method. Rather, it is an orientation toward philosophical problems that seeks to intervene in and unsettle the methodological unity of the tradition. It is also an orientation toward political problems that seeks to intervene in and unsettle any programmatic unity of theory and praxis. Taking up such problems through their relation to the tradition involves engaging contemporary texts, the history of philosophy, and political theory not only in terms of one’s own “position,” but in terms of certain methodological approaches that do not necessarily cohere into a position or align with a single philosophical school. Relations among genuinely different forms of rationalist empiricism will emerge in the interstices of the chapters that follow, in ways that will often remain implicit. Perhaps there is an important relationship between Hegel’s method and Althusserian epistemology that the latter would come to disavow; perhaps there is an unspoken structuralist materialism in Plato’s Timaeus that is obliquely resonant with the operations of contemporary digital photography and computational modeling; perhaps recent developments in communist theory share more with epistemological debates in contemporary philosophy than one might imagine; perhaps Whitehead’s process philosophy is closer to Bachelard’s “rationalist” philosophy of science than one might have thought. The implications of these possibilities, latent in the constellation of chapters that follows, will not always be directly spelled out. What interests me are the different configurations rationalist empiricism can exhibit and how such an orientation can traverse real discrepancies between philosophical priorities and positions, transforming itself in the process.
Of the figures I engage with, it is Whitehead to whom I wish I could have devoted more sustained attention, given his import for my thinking about philosophical speculation. But at least I can close this introduction with the passage from Process and Reality that best formulates the vocation of speculative critique. Indeed, it is the finest definition of philosophy that I know:
Philosophy is the self-correction by consciousness of its own initial excess of subjectivity. Each actual occasion contributes to the circumstances of its origin additional formative elements deepening its own peculiar individuality. Consciousness is only the last and the greatest of such elements by which the selective character of the individual obscures the external totality from which it originates and which it