Against correlationism

The emergence of speculative realism is a major aspect of the ‘speculative turn’ (Bryant et al, 2011) in continental philosophy and its adjacent fields. Yet the philosophies of speculative realism's founding figures – Iain Hamilton Grant, Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux and Ray Brassier – are far too different to constitute a single school or research programme. The unity of speculative realism lies not in a common theory, but in a common enemy called ‘correlationism’.

Correlationism is the belief that we cannot think about subjects and objects independently of one another (Meillassoux, 2011: 5). Thinking about gold, oil, viruses or insects as such would be impossible, because we would exclusively encounter them in terms of how our senses, moods, interests, languages and instruments make them appear. We would thus only ever access the correlate between thought and reality, never reality as such. According to speculative realists, correlationism has been the dominant paradigm in continental philosophy since Kant. This accords with what Lee Braver calls continental philosophy's characteristic ‘anti- realism’: a tendency to bar itself from inquiring into things themselves, focusing instead on whatever it is that makes things appear and function as they do – for example the vicissitudes of discourse, power, language, ideology, history or embodiment (Braver, 2007).

For most speculative realists, this engenders problems concerning the notion of truth. The problem is not so much that anti- realism would render all interpretations equally acceptable, but rather that anti- realism can only ever prefer one interpretation over another for social, political or psychological reasons. It is constitutively unable to use reality itself as a litmus test for which arguments and interpretations ring true. For this reason and others, and in various incommensurable ways, the speculative realists argue for a rejection or overcoming of correlationism in favour of philosophies that capture reality itself rather than its mere appearances and access conditions (Grant, 2006; Brassier, 2007a; Harman, 2011; Meillassoux, 2011). In a sense, then, speculative realism seeks to reconnect with pre- Kantian (and pre- Humean) philosophies that systematically inquire into the nature of reality itself, rather than the workings of the subject that experiences it (Harman, 2018: 4).