#ancestrality

Meillassoux starts off reinvigorating the difference between primary and secondary qualities, saying that “what is at stake in [bringing back this distinction] is the nature of thought’s relation to the absolute”, meaning that by focusing on this now all-but-discarded distinction Meillassoux hopes to find a way to think of the very facts you bring up in your question without reducing them to a kind of correlationism (since correlationism is opposed to thought which relates to the absolute). He notes that, while discussing secondary qualities, “the sensible only exists as a relation: a relation between the world and the living creature I am”. Secondary qualities are supposed to be the stuff of correlational thinking, the only kind of knowledge and thought that’s admitted as “true” within post-Kantian philosophy, because the realm of primary qualities, or the ‘in-itself’ (as Meillassoux refers to it: “the thing without me”), has been banished from even the possibility of being thought.

This is the direction Meillassoux wants to head in though: he wants to reinvigorate this idea of primary qualities, especially the possibility of thinking these properties. To do this, he contrasts his notion of primary qualities with that of Descartes (the latter’s being the most famous exposition of what a primary quality might be):

properties of the in-itself. In what do they consist? For Descartes, they are all of those properties which pertain to extension and which are therefore subject to geometrical proof: length, width, movement, depth, figure, size. For our part, we will avoid invoking the notion of extension, since the latter is indissociable from sensible representation: one cannot imagine an extension which would not be coloured, and hence which would not be associated with a secondary quality. In order to reactivate the Cartesian thesis in contemporary terms, and in order to state it in the same terms in which we intend to uphold it, we shall therefore maintain the following: all those aspects of the object that can be formulated in mathematical terms can be meaningfully conceived as properties of the object in itself. All those aspects of the object that can give rise to a mathematical thought (to a formula or to digitalization) rather than to a perception or sensation can be meaningfully turned into properties of the thing not only as it is with me, but also as it is without me

I know that quote is huge, but it’s super important for how Meillassoux is able to think about the mathematical description of what is given by the arche-fossil. The problem with his statement about the relation between mathematics and primary qualities is that he doesn’t explain why this relation should hold until way later in the book. The reason that ‘mathematical terms’ accurately describe primary qualities of objects is because of the fact that mathematics is explicitly grounded in upholding the law of contradiction. For Meillassoux the law of contradiction is the only certain law (for reasons I won’t get into here), and because it’s the only certain law, a branch of scientific thinking which is based upon this law (mathematics) is able to provide information about primary qualities. These mathematical descriptions are contingent for him though (keep in mind that hyper-chaos is applicable to everything) – the statement of a physical law in mathematical terms is subject to revision both due to incoming evidence that changes our understanding of the thing being described by the formula and because of contingent flux that can actually change the physical laws of reality. This is part of why carbon dating – rooted in a mathematical description of a real physical phenomena (radioactive decay) – is both able to point accurately at a ‘birth date’ for the earth, while this date is also subject to revision and change. Mathematics is able to describe the primary qualities of objects, but those primary qualities are subject to change (as long as they don’t violate the law of contradiction), and so it goes with the mathematics.

Now, Meillassoux is aware of how old fashioned this must sound: “this thesis is almost certain to appear insupportable to a contemporary philosopher is because it is resolutely pre-critical– it seems to represent a regression to the ‘naïve’ stance of dogmatic metaphysics…It is an indefensible thesis because thought cannot get outside itself in order to compare the world as it is ‘in itself’ to the world as it is ‘for us’, and thereby distinguish what is a function of our relation to the world from what belongs to the world alone”. He says that this thought, within correlational ways of thinking our relation to the absolute, is “self-contradictory” because anything which we postulate as existing ‘in-itself’ in the world, as separate from thought, is postulated within thought. This leaves us with two choices: either we can abandon the idea of the in-itself (as has usually been done) or we can work out the assumptions that make this thought self-contradictory (since the existence of a contradiction is impossible for Meillassoux) and see what happens when we abandon those assumptions. As it stands though, there’s not much reason to abandon the post-critical stance which gets rid of the idea of the in-itself, which is part of why Meillassoux begins talking about the arche-fossil and ancestrality.

For the sake of brevity (ha), I’m just going to move straight into that discussion. If you’re really confused about how Meillassoux is talking about statements like “x occurred y years prior to any givenness to humans” I really recommend looking carefully back over Meillassoux’s argument. Harman once referred to his writing as like the work of a “gem cutter” in terms of precision and inventiveness, and I agree with this too. Every. Fucking. Line. Is. Important. If you don’t do a really close reading of this text, you’re likely to miss super important parts of it.

Now we must first pay attention to what Meillassoux says his explicit interest in the ancestral statements (i.e. statements “about events anterior to the advent of life as well as consciousness”) is. He says that: “The question that interests us here is then the following: what is it exactly that astrophysicists, geologists, or paleontologists are talking about when they discuss the age of the universe, the date of the accretion of the earth, the date of the appearance of pre-human species, or the date of the emergence of humanity itself? How are we to grasp the meaning of scientific statements bearing explicitly upon a manifestation of the world that is posited as anterior to the emergence of thought and even of life – posited, that is, as anterior to every form of human relation to the world?... How is science able to think such statements, and in what sense can we eventually ascribe truth to them?” Again, long quote, sorry. But this is the problematic that Meillassoux is working within: he’s not interested in the absolute veracity of such statements or anything, but is concerned with what scientists are talking about when they posit such facts, especially as they’re based upon objects – arche-fossils – that are given in the present but whose existence tells us about the existence of the world and of facts that preceded any givenness in the world. If the correlationist is correct (simplifying things a lot), then there’s no way to take these ancestral statements literally – the earth was created however many years ago for us (meaning, for a group of scientists that all agree on this fact). Truth here, for the correlationist, is intersubjective and can’t attend to the actual existence of any object which is providing us with the information for truthful propositions. This is in direct opposition to the scientist thought: they mean this statement literally. The earth was created however many billions of  years ago, and this is not just a fact ‘for us’ because it’s a fact about something that is anterior to any givenness ‘to us’.