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7:5

(In »Intensities and phenomena in a relationalist universe«)

Kant is thus right about factiality, things might be completely different from how things stand for the moment. But Kant’s rationalism – his blind faith that everything that occurs is subordinate to a divine wisdom, and that his own human ratio is fully sufficient to embrace everything that happens given time – results in his never developing this factiality fully and not drawing the inevitable conclusion. It is thus Kant’s unfounded rationalism which forces him into determinism, not the other way around. Therefore the relationalists must also leave Kant behind and seek other allies in the history of philosophy. The syntheist Quentin Meillassoux finds such an allied thinker in the empiricist David Hume – one of Kant’s strongest rivals in the 18th century – not least for the reason that Hume provides support for the conviction that one and the same material and existential vantage point can give rise to an infinite number of different outcomes. Existence outside the correlation in question is neither stable nor fixed and therefore philosophy cannot in all honesty pretend that this is the case. Hume and Meillassoux are thereby joined in a strong factiality, from which Meillassoux constructs the philosophical school that goes under the name speculative materialism.