Speculative realism
Based on Wikipedia: Speculative realism
In April 2007, four philosophers gathered at Goldsmiths College in London to declare war on an idea that had dominated Western thought for over two hundred years. Their target? The notion that humans can never really know anything about reality as it exists independent of human minds.
This might sound like an abstract academic squabble. It's not.
The question at stake is whether the universe existed before humans evolved to perceive it, whether mathematical truths would remain true if no one was around to think them, and whether philosophy has any business talking about reality at all—or whether it should limit itself to talking about human experience of reality. The speculative realists said philosophy had been stuck in a kind of cosmic narcissism for centuries, and it was time to break free.
The Kantian Prison
To understand what these four thinkers were rebelling against, you need to understand Immanuel Kant. Writing in the late 1700s, Kant made an argument that seemed modest but turned out to be devastating. He said that we can never know things as they are "in themselves"—only as they appear to us through the lens of human perception and cognition.
Think about it this way: when you see a red apple, you're not experiencing the apple directly. You're experiencing your brain's interpretation of light waves bouncing off the apple's surface, filtered through your eyes, processed by your visual cortex, and assembled into the concept "red apple" using categories your mind brings to the table. The apple-in-itself, independent of any observer, remains forever unknowable.
This seems reasonable enough. But Kant's insight metastasized across philosophy. If we can only ever access the correlation between our thinking and the world—never the world itself—then what's the point of asking what the world is really like? Philosophy gradually retreated from questions about reality and focused instead on questions about human experience, language, culture, and interpretation.
The speculative realists gave this retreat a name: correlationism. It's the view that we only ever have access to the relationship between thinking and being, never to either one considered on its own. And they thought it had turned philosophy into an elaborate exercise in navel-gazing.
The Ancestral Problem
Quentin Meillassoux, a French philosopher and one of the four original speculative realists, posed a devastating challenge to correlationism. Consider the Big Bang. Scientific evidence tells us the universe began roughly 13.8 billion years ago. Earth formed about 4.5 billion years ago. Humans appeared maybe 300,000 years ago.
So what was happening during those billions of years before any human mind existed to correlate with reality?
A strict correlationist faces an awkward choice. Either they must say that statements about the early universe are meaningless because there was no human consciousness to correlate with—which seems absurd. Or they must perform philosophical contortions to explain how we can meaningfully talk about events that predate human thought while still maintaining that we can only know the correlation between thought and being.
Meillassoux called these pre-human events "ancestral" and argued that our ability to make meaningful scientific claims about them proves that correlationism is wrong. Reality must be accessible to thought in some way that doesn't depend on the correlation.
Four Rebels, Four Philosophies
Here's the thing about speculative realism: it's less a unified movement than a loose coalition of thinkers who agreed on what they were against but disagreed—sometimes violently—about what they were for. The four philosophers who met at Goldsmiths went on to develop radically different systems.
Meillassoux and Radical Contingency
Meillassoux's solution to the correlationist trap is wonderfully counterintuitive. Rather than arguing that the laws of nature are necessary and mind-independent, he argues that the only necessity is contingency itself. Everything could be otherwise. The laws of physics could change tomorrow for no reason at all.
This sounds unhinged until you think about it carefully. Meillassoux points out that we have no rational justification for believing that the future will resemble the past—this is the problem of induction that David Hume identified in the 1700s. The sun has risen every day of recorded history, but we cannot prove it will rise tomorrow. We simply assume the laws of nature are stable.
Meillassoux says: what if they're not? What if the only thing we can know for certain is that nothing is certain? He rejects the Principle of Sufficient Reason—the idea that everything must have a cause or explanation—and argues that reality is fundamentally without reason. Things are the way they are for no reason, and they could be completely different for no reason.
The strange upshot is that this gives us access to reality independent of human thought. We can know something absolutely true about the universe: its radical contingency. The necessity of contingency is not a human projection but a genuine feature of being itself.
Harman and the Secret Lives of Objects
Graham Harman, an American philosopher working in Cairo, took a completely different route. Where Meillassoux focuses on contingency and mathematical reasoning, Harman focuses on objects—all objects, from electrons to nations to fictional characters.
Harman argues that philosophy has systematically mistreated objects. Some philosophers "undermine" objects by saying they're really just collections of smaller parts (atoms, quarks, strings). Others "overmine" objects by saying they're really just bundles of properties or relations. Both approaches deny objects any independent reality.
For Harman, objects are irreducible and inexhaustible. When fire burns cotton, the fire doesn't access the full reality of the cotton—it only interacts with certain features (flammability, texture). The cotton's full being withdraws from the fire. And this is true of all interactions: objects never fully touch each other. They interact through what Harman calls "sensual vicars"—simplified caricatures that mediate all causation.
This might sound mystical, but Harman grounds it in a reading of medieval Islamic philosophy, particularly the occasionalists who believed that God must intervene in every moment to connect causes and effects. Harman secularizes this: objects are separated by an ontological gap that can only be bridged indirectly.
The result is object-oriented ontology, often abbreviated as triple-O. It's a flat ontology where humans have no special privilege. A rock's relation to a river is just as philosophically interesting as a human's relation to a painting. Reality is a democracy of objects.
Grant and the Powers of Nature
Iain Hamilton Grant, a British philosopher, looked further back for his inspiration—all the way to Plato and the German Idealists, particularly Friedrich Schelling.
Grant argues that Western philosophy made a wrong turn when Aristotle distinguished between form and matter in a way that made matter philosophically invisible. We've been obsessed with formed bodies ever since—with things that have definite shapes and boundaries. But Grant wants to recover the Platonic sense of matter as dynamic, generative power.
He calls his position "transcendental materialism" and contrasts it with "somatism"—the philosophy of bodies. Somatism asks: what kinds of bodies exist? Transcendental materialism asks: what powers produce bodies in the first place?
Grant finds allies in Schelling, who tried to develop a philosophy of nature (Naturphilosophie) that would understand nature as a productive force rather than a collection of inert objects. The goal is what Grant calls "speculative physics"—not a physics of bodies, but a physics of the All, investigating the forces and powers that underlie all physical reality.
Brassier and Cosmic Nihilism
Ray Brassier, who taught both Grant and coined the term "speculative realism," took the darkest path of the four. His book "Nihil Unbound" argues that philosophy has been in denial about a fundamental truth: the universe is inherently meaningless, and extinction is the ultimate horizon of all thought.
This isn't adolescent despair dressed up in philosophical language. Brassier argues that the scientific worldview, taken seriously, reveals a cosmos indifferent to human concerns. The sun will eventually expand and incinerate the Earth. The universe will end in heat death. All life will cease. Meaning is not a feature of reality but something humans project onto it.
Rather than finding this threatening, Brassier says we should embrace it. Nihilism isn't a problem to be solved but a truth to be acknowledged. Philosophy, he argues, is the "organon of extinction"—it exists precisely because life is conditioned by its own inevitable end. Thought is conjoined not with Being, as traditional philosophy would have it, but with Non-Being.
Where other philosophers try to ground meaning in life, vitality, or experience, Brassier grounds thought in death and nothingness. It's a bracing antidote to philosophies that try to make the universe feel cozy and meaningful.
The Movement Splinters
The original speculative realism conference was followed by two more—one in Bristol in 2009 and one at Georgia Tech in 2010. But by then, the cracks were showing. The four thinkers had never really agreed on much beyond their opposition to correlationism, and their positive projects pulled in incompatible directions.
Brassier eventually distanced himself from the movement entirely, dismissing it as an "online phenomenon" more interested in generating buzz than doing serious philosophy. The others continued developing their individual systems, and a cottage industry of secondary literature grew up around them.
Object-oriented ontology proved particularly fertile, attracting followers who applied its insights to everything from video games to architecture to ecology. The "flat ontology" idea—that all objects deserve equal philosophical consideration—resonated with scholars interested in moving beyond human-centered frameworks.
Parallel Developments
Speculative realism didn't emerge in a vacuum. Around the same time, an Italian philosopher named Maurizio Ferraris was developing what he called "New Realism," which shared many of speculative realism's concerns about correlationism but approached them from a different angle.
Ferraris focuses on the distinction between epistemology (what we can know) and ontology (what exists). Correlationism, he argues, conflates these two domains. Just because we can only know things through our cognitive apparatus doesn't mean things don't exist independently of that apparatus. The table exists whether or not anyone is looking at it; our epistemological limitations don't constrain ontological reality.
Graham Harman later acknowledged that Ferraris had been advocating realist positions in continental philosophy before the speculative realists came along, making it an "inadvertent injustice" that he wasn't included in their founding moment.
The Vitalist Challenge
Not everyone bought the anti-correlationist project. Eugene Thacker, a philosopher of biology and media, argued that speculative realism faces a particular challenge when it comes to life.
Thacker noticed that throughout the history of philosophy, thinkers have tried to understand life by relating it to something else—time, form, spirit. Life as temporal process. Life as organized form. Life as spiritual principle. But this displacement means we never quite get at "life itself."
He identified what he calls a "vitalist correlation" in some speculative realist thinking—a tendency to ground philosophy in some notion of vital force or living process that smuggles correlationism back in through the side door. If you make life the foundation of your philosophy, aren't you still privileging a particular domain of being over others?
Thacker's conclusion is characteristically stark: life is not only a problem for philosophy but a problem of philosophy. The category might be fundamentally unstable.
Process and Vibrant Matter
Some thinkers responded to speculative realism by reviving older philosophical traditions. Process philosophy—associated with Alfred North Whitehead, Henri Bergson, and more recently Gilles Deleuze—emphasizes becoming over being, change over stasis, relations over substances.
Steven Shaviro argued that Whitehead offers the best synthesis of continental and analytic approaches. Whitehead's philosophy of "prehensions" (a kind of non-conscious grasping that all entities engage in) and "nexus" (the webs of relations that constitute reality) provides tools for thinking about a world that isn't centered on human experience.
Jane Bennett, in her influential book "Vibrant Matter," pushed further into what she calls "vital materialism." She argues that the distinction between living and non-living matter is less sharp than we think. Matter is vibrant, active, agentic. A power grid, an omega-3 fatty acid, a hurricane—these aren't inert objects waiting to be acted upon by human subjects. They have their own efficacy, their own kind of agency.
This might sound like mysticism, but Bennett grounds it in a careful reading of both philosophy and science. The goal is to decenter the human without falling back into a mechanistic picture where matter is just dead stuff obeying laws. Everything is doing something.
The Dark Enlightenment Connection
There's a more troubling thread in speculative realism's intellectual genealogy. Nick Land, a British philosopher who taught at the University of Warwick in the 1990s, influenced several figures associated with the movement, including Brassier and Grant.
Land's early work was a kind of accelerationist Nietzscheanism—celebrating capitalism's dissolution of traditional structures, embracing technology's dehumanizing potential, rejecting conventional moral frameworks. After leaving academia, he became associated with the "Dark Enlightenment" and neoreactionary politics.
This doesn't mean speculative realism is inherently politically compromised. The four core thinkers have diverse political commitments, and many of their followers are engaged in progressive projects. But the connection illustrates how anti-humanism in philosophy can serve different political ends. Decentering the human can be a move toward ecological awareness and respect for non-human beings—or it can be a move toward indifference to human suffering.
What's at Stake
At first glance, speculative realism might seem like exactly the kind of abstract philosophical debate that has no bearing on ordinary life. Who cares whether we can know things-in-themselves?
But the stakes are higher than they appear. If correlationism is right, then claims about climate change, evolution, or the age of the universe are ultimately claims about human cognitive structures rather than about reality itself. Science becomes a sophisticated language game rather than a way of accessing how things really are.
Speculative realism insists that reality is accessible to thought—that when scientists say the universe is 13.8 billion years old, they're making a claim about something that existed long before any human was around to think about it. This matters for how we understand science, how we relate to the non-human world, and whether philosophy has anything to contribute beyond analyzing human concepts and practices.
The movement also reflects a broader cultural moment. After decades of postmodern skepticism about truth and reality, there's been a widespread hunger for philosophical frameworks that take the world seriously. Speculative realism offered one response to that hunger—a way of being a realist without returning to naive pre-Kantian dogmatism.
The Ongoing Conversation
Speculative realism as a unified movement is largely over. The original four thinkers have gone their separate ways, and the label has become almost meaningless through overuse. But the questions it raised continue to energize philosophical debate.
What is the relationship between thought and reality? Can philosophy contribute anything to our understanding of the non-human world? What would it mean to develop a truly post-anthropocentric metaphysics? These questions aren't going away.
And perhaps that's the movement's lasting contribution: not a set of answers, but a reopening of questions that philosophy had convinced itself were closed. The door to metaphysical speculation, long barred by Kantian caution, has been kicked open. What we find on the other side is still being explored.