Empirical Realism or Speculative Realism? The Future of Transcendental Philosophy

Empirical Realism or Speculative Realism? The Future of Transcendental Philosophy The very cornerstone of Kant’s critical project, namely, transcendental philosophy, suffers frequent attack. This assault has only increased with the resurgence of realism in contemporary continental philosophy, namely, so-called “speculative realism”. Speculative and “new realist” movements are unsatisfied with Kant’s “empirical realism” that must always be coupled with a “transcendental idealism”. As Quentin Meillassoux, the apparent originator of speculative realism, decries, philosophy from Kant to phenomenology is “correlationism”, namely, the compulsion to think of objectivity only as something always and necessarily correlated with subjectivity. Contemporary realisms do not find Kant’s empirical realism robust enough. There is rather a desire for a “metaphysical realism”, i.e. a realism in which being, rather than correlated with thought, radically precedes thinking, in which being is metaphysically prior to any subjective representation of the same. Centuries before contemporary realisms took aim at Kant, Schelling had already sought a “higher realism”. Schelling, however, unlike today’s speculative realists, did not wholly abandon the transcendental project, but he rather argued, in accord with his notion of “the inverted Idea [die umgekehrte Idee]”, for what I will dub an “inverted transcendentalism”.