When you mentioned correlationism, I was reminded of the paper “Concepts and Objects” by Ray Brassier that was the topic for a reading group on the older TPF in 2015, and that I had been unconvinced by and had extensively critiqued from a Wigginsian sortalist perspective.
I was thereafter surprised when googling “Ray Brassier” together with “Graham Harman” to see that Graham is indeed mentioned in the Speculative Realism Wikipedia page as having been one of the participants (alongside Brassier) at the second conference on the topic at UWE Bristol.
This led me to ponder how much kinship there may be between Brassier and Harman’s speculative realism and to what extent both my response to Brassier and your current attitude towards Harman may betray our shared “correlationist” proclivities.
One immediate reaction I had to your suggestion that “So the darkness under objects is for me the darkness of their unwritten future” is that this matches my appeal to Aristotle’s epieikeia when a general rule is shown not to fit a new unanticipated case. The ineliminable “darkness under objects” is like the ineliminable “epieikeia” (as enabled under, for instance, the discretionary power of jury nullification, as I had argued in the other thread) when the normatively governed conceptual/normative “net” that is meant to capture the constitutive relations between phenomena (or the internal order of a Heideggerian totality of equipment, or the ethical/legal norms of a practical form of life) happens upon a recalcitrant phenomenon (by the lights of our epieikeia, or practical deliberation).
Regarding the retreat of the tool, say the hammer that drops out from consciousness when it performs its duty smoothly, I interpret this as simply a moment of salience where the focus is the nail being driven into the plank. Since hammers exist as instruments for driving nails, hammers and nails (and wooden planks, etc.) are constituted by “lateral” (in-order-to) relations between items belonging to totalities of equipment. But totalities of equipment hang together in for-the-sake-of-which (Worumwillen) relations to Dasein, or “transversal” relations, in Bitbol’s sense, to our practical form of life, or Umwelt.
I had always (maybe naïvely) interpreted Heidegger’s intimations regarding Zuhandenheit and Vorhandenheit as the denial that the former can be reduced to the latter, or that the latter could be ontologically prior in the sense that, say, a hammer could be conceived as existing (as such) independently of the way it fits within a practical form of life (and hence of its specific placement in a totality of equipment). I don’t, though, view this claim as necessitating that a non-rational form of life has ontological primacy over a rational one, since I view the latter to be a modification of, rather than an accretion over, the former. I therefore resist the opposite claim that a pre-rational or a-rational Zuhandenheit is a foundation for Vorhandenheit. I rather view the latter as a different moment rather than a different stage in the constitution of objects as what it is that they are (not in-themselves but for us, for purposes either of practical engagement or of theoretical inquiry.) There remains the uncontroversial fact that, qua animals, we are able to make use of objects without the need to thematize them, through skillful coping. This shows that thematization (the Brandomian moment of making things explicit in thought or in discourse) is optional in practice, but not that it is constitutionally optional, as it were.
I think my main residual difference with you is that you view revision of belief always to constitute a disclosure (and/or creation) of a new aspect or face of an object, or of the world, whereas I am making a distinction between mundane revisions (e.g. I wrongly thought that there was milk in the fridge but, as I may discover through looking, there isn’t any remaining) and conceptual revisions (e.g. We were seeing something as such or such object, but in the particular case our conceptual net isn’t apt as to capture the phenomenon (or lead the practical judgement) in the way that it should.
Coming back to the charge of correlationism, that may be a bullet that you and I ought to be happy to bite. The only reason why, it seems to me, Graham, Brassier and Meillassoux might find correlationism objectionable is because they seemingly think that it doesn’t accommodate the sort of scientific ontology that their speculative realism and/or object-oriented ontology demand but we seemingly both are happy to relinquish those in favor of “parochial”, “pragmatist” and/or “anthropocentric” (and non-fundationalist) conceptions of all empirical and practical domains.
In the earlier TPF thread on Brassier, the problem of ancestrality (i.e. the alleged mind-independence of Meillassoux’s arche-fossil) came up, and it was briefly revisited in the pragmatism thread. There are two ways to construe mind-independence that John Haugeland distinguished in his paper Truth and Rule-Following. There is, we might say, to put it crudely, causal independence, and conceptual independence. We do grasp that there were stars, planets, electrons, etc., and the Earth once was a barren rock. Earth did not depend on us (and our rational form of life) existing (i.e. our actually having evolved) for it existing as (or simply being) a planet, orbiting the Sun, having such and such an atmosphere, etc. But the question of anything counting as a planet or as an electron is conceptually dependent on our present scientific practices. In fact, the very fact that the ancestral lifeless period was past at all (and not just earlier than us along in the smooth undifferentiated order of the physicist’s B Series) and hence also that its physical albeit lifeless determinations are causally independent of our present intellectual and practical activities, both conceptually depend on the categories of substance, temporality and causality that normatively structure our rational lives. And I’ve always been with you in insisting that our rational lives encompass both our minds and our world(s) as conceptually and ontologically, dependent (in Haugeland’s non-causal sense) on one another.