“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Tuesday, May 3, 2011

The Trouble with Matter 2: Big Trouble


Still with me? The problem with “matter-for humans” exposes a deeper problem, that matter is matter-for anything. In other words, matter isn't what it's cracked up to be, some kind of real substrate of things that emerges as those things. It's part of the as-structure, ontologically secondary to objects.

“Matter” is correlationist in that it's always correlated to some entity. Matter is the “out-of-which-it's-built” of an object. It is the object's past, or a past object. When you study it directly, it ceases to be matter.

This is one big reason why if you're an eliminationist, if you don't stop at some metaphysical substrate such as prime matter, you end up with equations in the void—you end up, pretty much, with idealism.

Since correlationism is hostile to the idea of dogmatic metaphysics, it is at risk of ending up with nothingness, if it goes the materialist route.

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