Psience Quest

Friend of mine put me on this Zizek quote, from his work Less Than Nothing:

What if we posit that “Things-in-themselves” emerge against the background of the Void of Nothingness, the way this Void is conceived in quantum physics, as not just a negative void, but the portent of all possible reality? This is the only true consistent “transcendental materialism” which is possible after the Kantian transcendental idealism. For a true dialectician, the ultimate mystery is not “Why is there something rather than nothing?” but “Why is there nothing rather than something?”

IIRC there was some past discussion of Transcendental Materialism or at least "New Materialism" - will see if I can dig it up but curious if anyone else had come across this line of thinking?

My understanding is that we begin with the material but then the subjective aspect is something born of that which is accounted for by physics yet goes beyond it.

What is Transcendental Materialism?

Ben Woodward

Quote:“Transcendental materialism posits, in short, a self sundering material Grund internally producing what (subsequently) transcends it.” (Zizeks Ontology, 61). The discussion always turns back to the ontogenesis of the subject (this is, admittedly, Johnston and Zizek’s interest after all). Towards the end of the text Johnston continues:

“The transcendental materialist theory of the subject is materialist insofar as it maintains that this thus generated ideal subjectivity thereafter achieves independence from the ground of its material sources and thereby starts to function as a set of possibility conditions for forms of reality irreducible to explanatory discourses allied to traditional versions of materialism.” (Zizek’s Ontology, 275).

While the one way and immanent explosion of the transcendent from the material is perfectly Schellingian, this emergence is always ideal, in terms for the subject, such as the grasp of language. Since Zizek’s Hegelian move is to make the noumenal/phenomenal split within the phenomenal itself the generation from the non-material is transcendent in so far as it transcends the non-material, making the non-material merely the pre-ideal.