Meillassouxs ,Prinzip der Faktualität‘ zwischen dem späten Heidegger und dem späten Schelling

Abstract

Meillassoux's “Principle of Facticity” between later Heidegger and later Schelling

This paper deals with Meillassoux’s conception of a speculative realism, especially as he develops it in his book After Finitude. The aim of the paper is to reconstruct the argument that leads Meillassoux to deduce a ,principle of factuality‘. This only absolute, the necessity of contingency, constitutes the basis of a radical realism, which does not revert to philosophy before Kant’s Critique, but overcomes the correlationism of modernity. In the second part of the paper I propose to examine the relations between Meillassoux and Heidegger on the one hand and Meillassoux and Schelling on the other. It seems that Heidegger stands up to Meillassoux’s criticism of correlationism, when he says correlationism always remains within the correlation. I try to show that Heidegger recognizes a dimension that eludes correlative thought, but he claims that the highest task of thought is precisely to try to think this un-thinkable: that is why thought must take other forms than the correlative one. Finally, I compare the,principle of factuality‘ with Schelling’s, unprethinkable Being‘, emphasizing that such a necessity of contingency constitutes precisely non-freedom for Schelling and therefore it cannot be considered as the absolute. Schelling distinguishes this necessity of contingency from the only absolute, namely God’s freedom as ,freedom to be or not to be‘. This means a freedom from the necessity of contingency, a freedom above factuality and above Being. 

Keywords: Meillassoux, Heidegger, Schelling, contingency, facticity, necessity, realism, freedom, thought, un-prethinkable