Rationalist Empiricism. Nathan Brown
illusory, but in rendering it astonishing; i.e. apparently unthinkable, yet true, and hence eminently problematic.”4 The field of this problematic, rather than its summary dismissal by dogmatic fiat, would remain the field of his investigations, and the difficulty of the question accounts for the patience with which he has engaged his philosophical project, having now worked for decades on the problems opened by his doctoral dissertation rather than rushing toward the publication his philosophical system. To recognize that the virtue of transcendentalism lies in its precise formulation of the problem of speculative philosophy, though it did not solve it, necessitates a careful and mature disposition with respect to critique, rather than a simple rejection of its imperatives.
In my view, neither “the problem of ancestrality” nor Meillassoux’s anhypothetical argument for the necessity of contingency is the real core of After Fini tude.5 Rather, Meillassoux’s most consequential argument is his reactivation of the problem of induction through refutation of its foreclosure by probabilistic reasoning, a refutation drawing upon Alain Badiou’s ontological mobilization of Cantor’s transfinite detotalization of the infinite. Through the rationalist mobilization of mathematical formalism, Meillassoux reopens a central critique of both rationalism and empiricism: Hume’s demonstration that we have neither rational nor empirical grounds for assuming the constant conjunction of causes and effects, and thus we cannot assume the necessary stability of the laws of nature. Meillassoux resolves this critique in such a way as not only to support the absolute scope of philosophical rationality but also in a manner sustaining consistency with the capacity of the physical sciences to construct adequate knowledge of the properties of objects. Hume’s supposed “skepticism” concerning the constant conjunction of cause and effect was in fact a form of pragmatism; although we cannot affirm the necessity of causal regularities through either reason or experience, we can have confidence (through the synthesis of habit) in the probabilistic regularities of events. It is not Hume’s pragmatism but its covert metaphysical implications that Meillassoux displaces by questioning the application of probabilistic reasoning as a resolution of the problem of induction, and by recognizing Hume’s “skeptical doubts” as true knowledge of the contingency of physical laws and the nullity of the principle of sufficient reason. Deploying this nullity to support the claim of philosophical rationalism to think the in-itself (the necessity of contingency) in a manner consistent with the power of empirical science to establish non-correlational knowledge of objects, Meillassoux reasserts Hume’s central argument toward a revival of both rationalism and empiricism averse to the transcendental displacement of their opposition.
THE TRANSMUTATION OF EPISTEMOLOGICAL VALUES
If After Finitude implicitly shows that the critique of the transcendental enables an unexpected alliance of rationalism and empiricism and a repositioning of their tension, rather than a repetition of their pre-critical opposition, its indications on this point hardly fell from the sky. In 1966 Louis Althusser delivered a lecture titled “The Philosophical Conjuncture and Marxist Research,” in which he used the term “rationalist empiricism” to name a tradition running, on the one hand, through the vulgar materialist ideology of “certain scientific practices (psycho-physiology, etc.),” and on the other hand from Descartes, to d’Alembert and Diderot, to Auguste Comte, and then through the work of Jean Cavaillès, Gaston Bachelard, Alexandre Koyré, and Georges Canguilhem.6 It is this second tradition of rationalist empiricism, Althusser claims, that “saved the honour of French philosophy” amid the “religious-spiritualist” reaction of the nineteenth century.7 Knox Peden’s outstanding work of intellectual history Spinoza Contra Phenomenology: French Rationalism from Cavaillès to Deleuze has shown how elements of this tradition functioned as a rationalist bulwark, steeped in Spinozism, against the dominance of phenomenology in twentieth-century French philosophy. For my part, I am interested in returning to the riddle of the compound term with which Althusser designates this tradition, and which he never explicitly followed up. How are we to understand the relation between rationalism and empiricism he alludes to but does not fully theorize, and what are its stakes for addressing the philosophical conflict between idealism and materialism? I try to solve this riddle in Chapter 2.
Althusser’s term “rationalist empiricism” alludes to a tradition of French thought focused on the epistemology of science, concerned in particular with how the empirical results of experimental scientific practice are constructed as scientific knowledge through the rational power of mathematical formalism. The apparent methodological paradox through which Althusser named this tradition would have been assimilated more readily among an audience intimately familiar with the epistemological writings of Gaston Bachelard, who declared in La philosophie du non (1940) that “rationalism and empiricism are bound, in scientific thought, by a strange bond, as strong as that which unites pleasure and pain.”8 In a passage that will be central to the present study, Bachelard argued that
the one triumphs by assenting to the other: empiricism needs to be understood; rationalism needs to be applied. An empiricism without clear, coordinated, deductive laws can be neither thought not taught; a rationalism without palpable proofs and without application to immediate reality cannot fully convince. The value of an empirical law is proved by making it the basis for a chain of reasoning. A chain of reasoning becomes legitimate by becoming the basis of an experiment. Science, the sum of proofs and experiments, the sum of rules and laws, the sum of evidences and facts, thus needs a philosophy with a double pole. To be more exact, it needs a dialectical development, since every notion is illuminated in complementary fashion from two different philosophical points of view.9
Because science involves a complementarity of empiricism and rationalism, through which “the one completes the other,” it requires a philosophy that can recognize and situate its dialectical development through an “epistemological polarity,” such that “to think scientifically is to place oneself in the epistemological field intermediate between theory and practice, between mathematics and experiment.”10
Thus, it is not only science that depends upon the mutually critical and constructive relationship between rationalism and empiricism; the relationship between science and philosophy also depends upon such a dialectic. It is only through such a dialectic that the “epistemological obstacles” theorized by Bachelard can be overcome.11 “Only too often,” he writes,
the philosophy of science remains corralled in the two extremes of knowledge: in the study by philosophers of principles which are too general and in the study by scientists of results which are too particular. It exhausts itself against these two epistemological obstacles which restrict all thought: the general and the immediate. It stresses first the a priori and then the a posteriori, misrecognizing the transmutation of epistemological values which contemporary scientific thought ceaselessly executes between the a priori and the a posteriori, between experimental values and rational values.12
Note that this “transmutation of epistemological values” has two conditions, one explicit and one implicit. Explicitly, it requires that rationalism and empiricism not be “corralled” as separate methodologies, each unable or unwilling to recognize the consequences of the other for its own practices and its own results. But implicitly, it also requires that rationalism and empiricism be held sufficiently apart that their distinct epistemological values can “transmute” one another. What is called for is not a synthesis or a displacement of the opposition between rationalism and empiricism that would go by some other name (for example, the transcendental). Rather, what is called for is a relational disjunction between methodological orientations with discrepant epistemological values. The transmutation of these values operated by scientific thought occurs “ceaselessly”—not once and for all. It is in this sense that the mutually critical force of rationalism and empiricism, as they encounter one another’s imperatives, is without grounds: it relies upon an absent place between methodological values, across which they can pass, within which they can interfere, through which they can complicate, refute, or propel one another. Reason and experience can say “no” to one another because they have not been synthesized; they can integrate each other because they are not indifferent to the other’s claims.