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Idiom: Inventing Writing Theory
Rationalist Empiricism: A Theory of Speculative Critique
Honorable Mention, Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies, Modern Language Association
Twenty-first-century philosophy has been drawn into a false opposition between speculation and critique. Nathan Brown shows that the key to overcoming this antinomy is a re-engagement with the relation between rationalism and empiricism. If Kant’s transcendental philosophy attempted to displace the opposing priorities of those orientations, any speculative critique of Kant will have to re-open and consider anew the conflict and complementarity of reason and experience. Rationalist Empiricism shows that the capacity of reason and experience to extend and yet delimit each other has always been at the core of philosophy and science. Coordinating their discrepant powers, Brown argues, is what enables speculation to move forward in concert with critique.
Sweeping across ancient, modern, and contemporary philosophy, as well as political theory, science, and art, Brown engages with such major thinkers as Plato, Descartes, Hume, Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, Bachelard, Althusser, Badiou, and Meillassoux. He also shows how the concepts he develops illuminate recent projects in the science of measurement and experimental digital photography. With conceptual originality and argumentative precision, Rationalist Empiricism reconfigures the history and the future of philosophy, politics, and aesthetics.
Twenty-first-century philosophy has been drawn into a false opposition between speculation and critique. Nathan Brown shows that the key to overcoming this antinomy is a re-engagement with the relation between rationalism and empiricism. If Kant’s transcendental philosophy attempted to displace the opposing priorities of those orientations, any speculative critique of Kant will have to re-open and consider anew the conflict and complementarity of reason and experience. Rationalist Empiricism shows that the capacity of reason and experience to extend and yet delimit each other has always been at the core of philosophy and science. Coordinating their discrepant powers, Brown argues, is what enables speculation to move forward in concert with critique.
Sweeping across ancient, modern, and contemporary philosophy, as well as political theory, science, and art, Brown engages with such major thinkers as Plato, Descartes, Hume, Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, Bachelard, Althusser, Badiou, and Meillassoux. He also shows how the concepts he develops illuminate recent projects in the science of measurement and experimental digital photography. With conceptual originality and argumentative precision, Rationalist Empiricism reconfigures the history and the future of philosophy, politics, and aesthetics.
- GenresPhilosophy
272 pages, Paperback
First published January 5, 2021
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May 21, 2021
In this book, Nathan Brown draws on a sweeping array of thinkers to investigate some of the deepest ontological and epistemological questions in philosophy with penetrating clarity and impressive command of the extensive topics he covers. If “Rationalist Empiricism: A Theory of Speculative Critique” sounds like a double paradox to you, it’s probably because it is. But, like Hegel, Brown thinks the apparent identity of opposing terms can be rationally productive. Brown’s mission is to show how these contradictory philosophical approaches—rationalism vs empricisim, speculative philosophy vs critique—mutually propel each other to produce knowledge. What I found striking in this story is how so often the key moment in an argument came in between the two sides of a contradiction. He’ll say that the “transmutation of epistemological values” happens in the gap between Rationalism and Empiricism or that “exemplary exceptions” exist in the space between philosophical systems or that justice is rendered within that lag between Philosophy and political urgency. While it was hard for me to orient myself to this liminal or interstitial theoretical space, there was something compelling about it nonetheless.
If you want a better idea of the content you’ll find in these pages you can read my comments on the main points below.
Brown draws on Meillassoux’s work claiming Humean Empericism and Cartesian Rationalism mutually reinforce one another in light of Kantian Idealism’s failure to transcend the two. He ties this idea of a mutually reinforcing dialectic between rationalism and empiricism into the philosophy of science. Modern Science’s definition of what constitutes an object of scientific knowledge embodies the Rationalist Empiricist principle of an ungrounded “transmutation of epistemological values” between the a priori and a posteriori as opposed to the Kantian principle of grounded transcendental conditions. Science does this by specifying the conditions of objectivity in terms of technological, experimental processes which are subject to rational design. These conditions therefore incorporate both empirical and rational criteria and, because these processes and designs are always open to future critical re-evaluation, remain “ungrounded”. Brown draws heavily on Kant, Bachelard, and Althusser in this initial section.
The next session is about science’s standards for a “rigorously specifiable object of knowledge” drawing on Marx’s distinction between the concrete-in-thought vs concrete-in-reality , Althusser’s schema of recursive, self-critical development of scientific knowledge, and the history of standardizing the measurements for a gram and a meter.
He then argues in favor of retaining the philosophical idea of the object in-itself so long as we understand it as conveying the sense of an object’s independence from human perception or knowledge as opposed to a stricter sense of independence as such. Nothing is independent in that sense since all objects are relational and, in fact, better understood as processes which have achieved a certain degree of stability. Brown uses the billions of years old process of Earth’s accretion to illustrate this point.
He follows this with an attack on Kant’s argument in his Critique of Judgment for the transcendental concept of the purposiveness of nature—which is supposed to ground the unity of natural law in consciousness. Brown claims this concept is actually arrived at inductively despite the deductive guise Kant gives it. And since the 3rd critique shows that the solution to the problem of induction Kant proposes in the 1st critique “requires a supplement” which he is unable to give deductively, Kant is unable to meet the Humean challenge of securing our knowledge of matters of fact a priori.
Brown illustrates how empiricism and rationalism necessarily engage with each other thorugh two “exemplary exceptions” in Hume and Descartes’s thought—they are exceptions in the sense that they don’t really fit in with the rest of their respective arguments (in fact the exceptions contradict them and both thinkers mention that before discussing them anyway). They are the problem of the “absent shade of blue” Hume brings up in his Treatise and the thought experiment involving wax in Descartes’s Second Meditation. Brown is interested in the philosophical space which exists between systems through which thought traverses as it rethinks the world in terms of other systems.
The next sections highlight the rationalist and empiricist aspects of Meillassoux’s philosophy through his treatment of the Problem of Induction which he reactivates (making him empiricist) and ontologizes (making him rationalist). In ‘After Finitude’, Meillassoux attacks the Humean/probabilistic answer to the problem of induction on the grounds that transfinite set theory and Russell’s Paradox demonstrate probabilistic thinking is inoperative at the level the problem is posed: the level of a total universe of cases. Meillassoux’s own answer is that not only can we not know a priori the uniformity of nature but we cannot do so because it is in fact not uniform; it is necessarily contingent.
Brown proceeds to make a distinction between two kinds of Rationalist Empiricists: idealists and materialists. Brown is looking for a dialectical materialist rationalist empiricism which he finds in Meillassoux whose work progresses in a dialectical fashion with materialist commitments to (1) the adequacy of our knowledge to mind-independent objects and (2) the real’s primacy over thought. He wants to resuscitate what is materialist in Descartes, namely, the claims about mathematics’ capacity to rationally describe external reality by formalizing the distinction between the primary qualities of objects and their sensory correlates.
The sections on Hegel’s Logic were difficult for me because, well it’s Hegel, and also I haven’t read it. But that said, Brown has some very insightful and clear commentary on the speculative critique of Hegel, particularly with respect to—what Brown call’s—Hegel’s “cogito”: the unity of consciousness immanently (and not transcendentally) deduced in the unfolding of thought’s movement.
In the middle three chapters he applies the Rationalist Empiricist framework (a philosophical approach which dialectically holds together the theoretical and factual in a rationally productive way) to three case-studies of sorts: the historical refinements to the standard meter and kilogram in science, the art of Nicolas Baier, and Plato’s Timeaus. I thought the point was best put in the chapter on scientific measurements in which rationally structured experiments provide results which are, at the same time, consequences of accepted scientific concepts and the basis for future refinements in theory. This made it much clearer how Brown sees the contradictory standpoints of Rationalism and Empiricism as mutually propelling each other.
The penultimate chapter concerns the political dimensions of Rationalist Empiricism—a relation already implicit in the theory vs practice dialectic. First, Brown engages with Meillassoux and Badiou on questions of truth, contingency, and action. Secondly, Brown interrogates Althusser’s concept of Structural Causality, its roots in Spinozist substance metaphysics, and its failure to understand the “conjuncture” (Lenin’s “current moment”) as a ‘lack’ instead of as ‘the whole’, and gives a very interesting defense of left-communism against Althusser’s reductive caricature. Finally, Brown asserts the centrality of the concept of “separation” in Marxist Political Economy—an idea that gets attention from Fredric Jameson and Leibowitz but few others. Essentially, separation is the basic characteristic of capitalist social relations: labor is separated from property, the producer from the product, use-value from exchange value, etc. Separation grounds the “double freedom” of the worker and produces the social division of labor which “value” expresses.
If you want a better idea of the content you’ll find in these pages you can read my comments on the main points below.
Brown draws on Meillassoux’s work claiming Humean Empericism and Cartesian Rationalism mutually reinforce one another in light of Kantian Idealism’s failure to transcend the two. He ties this idea of a mutually reinforcing dialectic between rationalism and empiricism into the philosophy of science. Modern Science’s definition of what constitutes an object of scientific knowledge embodies the Rationalist Empiricist principle of an ungrounded “transmutation of epistemological values” between the a priori and a posteriori as opposed to the Kantian principle of grounded transcendental conditions. Science does this by specifying the conditions of objectivity in terms of technological, experimental processes which are subject to rational design. These conditions therefore incorporate both empirical and rational criteria and, because these processes and designs are always open to future critical re-evaluation, remain “ungrounded”. Brown draws heavily on Kant, Bachelard, and Althusser in this initial section.
The next session is about science’s standards for a “rigorously specifiable object of knowledge” drawing on Marx’s distinction between the concrete-in-thought vs concrete-in-reality , Althusser’s schema of recursive, self-critical development of scientific knowledge, and the history of standardizing the measurements for a gram and a meter.
He then argues in favor of retaining the philosophical idea of the object in-itself so long as we understand it as conveying the sense of an object’s independence from human perception or knowledge as opposed to a stricter sense of independence as such. Nothing is independent in that sense since all objects are relational and, in fact, better understood as processes which have achieved a certain degree of stability. Brown uses the billions of years old process of Earth’s accretion to illustrate this point.
He follows this with an attack on Kant’s argument in his Critique of Judgment for the transcendental concept of the purposiveness of nature—which is supposed to ground the unity of natural law in consciousness. Brown claims this concept is actually arrived at inductively despite the deductive guise Kant gives it. And since the 3rd critique shows that the solution to the problem of induction Kant proposes in the 1st critique “requires a supplement” which he is unable to give deductively, Kant is unable to meet the Humean challenge of securing our knowledge of matters of fact a priori.
Brown illustrates how empiricism and rationalism necessarily engage with each other thorugh two “exemplary exceptions” in Hume and Descartes’s thought—they are exceptions in the sense that they don’t really fit in with the rest of their respective arguments (in fact the exceptions contradict them and both thinkers mention that before discussing them anyway). They are the problem of the “absent shade of blue” Hume brings up in his Treatise and the thought experiment involving wax in Descartes’s Second Meditation. Brown is interested in the philosophical space which exists between systems through which thought traverses as it rethinks the world in terms of other systems.
The next sections highlight the rationalist and empiricist aspects of Meillassoux’s philosophy through his treatment of the Problem of Induction which he reactivates (making him empiricist) and ontologizes (making him rationalist). In ‘After Finitude’, Meillassoux attacks the Humean/probabilistic answer to the problem of induction on the grounds that transfinite set theory and Russell’s Paradox demonstrate probabilistic thinking is inoperative at the level the problem is posed: the level of a total universe of cases. Meillassoux’s own answer is that not only can we not know a priori the uniformity of nature but we cannot do so because it is in fact not uniform; it is necessarily contingent.
Brown proceeds to make a distinction between two kinds of Rationalist Empiricists: idealists and materialists. Brown is looking for a dialectical materialist rationalist empiricism which he finds in Meillassoux whose work progresses in a dialectical fashion with materialist commitments to (1) the adequacy of our knowledge to mind-independent objects and (2) the real’s primacy over thought. He wants to resuscitate what is materialist in Descartes, namely, the claims about mathematics’ capacity to rationally describe external reality by formalizing the distinction between the primary qualities of objects and their sensory correlates.
The sections on Hegel’s Logic were difficult for me because, well it’s Hegel, and also I haven’t read it. But that said, Brown has some very insightful and clear commentary on the speculative critique of Hegel, particularly with respect to—what Brown call’s—Hegel’s “cogito”: the unity of consciousness immanently (and not transcendentally) deduced in the unfolding of thought’s movement.
In the middle three chapters he applies the Rationalist Empiricist framework (a philosophical approach which dialectically holds together the theoretical and factual in a rationally productive way) to three case-studies of sorts: the historical refinements to the standard meter and kilogram in science, the art of Nicolas Baier, and Plato’s Timeaus. I thought the point was best put in the chapter on scientific measurements in which rationally structured experiments provide results which are, at the same time, consequences of accepted scientific concepts and the basis for future refinements in theory. This made it much clearer how Brown sees the contradictory standpoints of Rationalism and Empiricism as mutually propelling each other.
The penultimate chapter concerns the political dimensions of Rationalist Empiricism—a relation already implicit in the theory vs practice dialectic. First, Brown engages with Meillassoux and Badiou on questions of truth, contingency, and action. Secondly, Brown interrogates Althusser’s concept of Structural Causality, its roots in Spinozist substance metaphysics, and its failure to understand the “conjuncture” (Lenin’s “current moment”) as a ‘lack’ instead of as ‘the whole’, and gives a very interesting defense of left-communism against Althusser’s reductive caricature. Finally, Brown asserts the centrality of the concept of “separation” in Marxist Political Economy—an idea that gets attention from Fredric Jameson and Leibowitz but few others. Essentially, separation is the basic characteristic of capitalist social relations: labor is separated from property, the producer from the product, use-value from exchange value, etc. Separation grounds the “double freedom” of the worker and produces the social division of labor which “value” expresses.
July 30, 2024
Nathan Brown gives Meillassoux's ontology the epistemological rigor it deserves by way of Althusser and Bachelard and extends the potentials of after finitude through a subtractive dialectic inspired by Badiou. In an inventive reading of the Timaeus, Brown presents a genetic account of structure as a subtraction from the dialectic of the sensible and the intelligible, the empirical and the rational. As brilliant as Brown's work is, it suffers from the same issues that we find in Meillassoux and Badiou's work: affirming the legitimacy of scientific statements without affirming scientific realism. Essentially, science can provide us with ontic knowledge of being, but science cannot itself know being, or at the very least know the most crucial aspect of what being is: the absolute necessity of contingency. "Speculative critique is that approach to philosophy which recognizes
that it neither grounds nor is grounded by science. It coordinates its philosophi-
cal concepts with the history of science, without delimiting what can be thought
according to scientific history." Pg 112. Despite the anti-phenomenological orientation of Badiou, Meillassoux, and Brown, they still wind up affirming the Heideggerian doxa in which science is only a "regional ontology".
that it neither grounds nor is grounded by science. It coordinates its philosophi-
cal concepts with the history of science, without delimiting what can be thought
according to scientific history." Pg 112. Despite the anti-phenomenological orientation of Badiou, Meillassoux, and Brown, they still wind up affirming the Heideggerian doxa in which science is only a "regional ontology".
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