Merleau-Ponty, Correlationism, and Alterity

Robert Booth

doi:10.22329/p.v12i2.5032

Abstract

A common commitment amongst speculative realists holds that phenomenology is irredeemably hostile to nonhuman alterity because phenomenology is correlationist. Since phenomenologists deny unmediated access to the modality of the in-itself, their correlationism purportedly consists in subsuming the more-than-human world into one’s own (narrowly anthropocentric) intentional horizon, a move that promises correspondingly disastrous environmental implications. Merleau-Pontian phenomenology appears to be especially guilty in this regard since Merleau-Ponty argues that taking our situated embodiment sufficiently seriously entails that any other entity encountered must always take the form of an “in-itself-for-us.” In this paper, I argue that the charge of correlationism against Merleau-Pontian phenomenology can be disarmed because it is either false or insubstantial. In either case, I argue, if we are to remain sufficiently open to more-than-human alterity to evade the dangerous sort of anthropocentrism that anticorrelationists rightly speak against, we would do well to retain the very subject-object ambiguity that motivates the correlationist charge against Merleau-Pontian phenomenology in the first place.

Highlights

Speculative realism is widely recognized to be a diverse movement united only by its formal rejection of correlationism and the desire to overcome it in one way or another (Sparrow 115; Shaviro 65)
There are several strands to the criticism that, in this manner, correlationism leads to the sort of dangerous consequences mentioned at the outset, three of which I will examine in turn
To clarify: this is not because any belief about a given entity can be put to a subjective court of appeal which somehow reasons to its ultimate justification, but rather because the fideism that allegedly results from correlationism “legitimates de jure every variety whatsoever of belief in an absolute, the best as well as the worst” (Meillassoux 46)

Summary

Correlationism

Speculative realism is widely recognized to be a diverse movement united only by its formal rejection of correlationism and the desire to overcome it in one way or another (Sparrow 115; Shaviro 65). Timothy Morton calls correlationism “anthropocentrism in philosophical form” (“Everything” 164) for some of the above reasons, but he contends that the correlationist focus on acts of meaning constitution turns us away from concern for the world itself by imposing a mistaken human exceptionalism If objects exist only for subjects, and subjects are effectively ubiquitously human, philosophy is purportedly drawn away from concern for “the real world” and instead towards description of “my world.” This would prove disastrous in terms of a reduced push to address other entities on their own terms. Correlationism cannot obviously decentre the human perspective in the manner necessary for serious environmental concern.3 In these ways philosophy, since the second Copernican turn—or “Kantian catastrophe” (Meillassoux 124)—appears to have been hopelessly and dangerously introverted because, even in acts of radical reflection, it cannot escape the “correlationist circle” (Meillassoux 5). - 41 Robert Booth problematically incompatible with nonanthropocentric epistemic engagement with the more-than-human world.

Why Regard for Alterity Requires Something Like Correlationism

To clarify

Tensions Between Anticorrelationist Realism and Alterity