3.38
Why, in part, might this story of many gods seem odd to us? Many of us are used to the story of the One (§3.24). But, also, we think there’s an essential connection between existence and humans (or thinking and being — what Meillassoux calls correlationism[1]). This form of anthropocentrism binds all things to humans for the granting of their ‘full’ being (really, for their being at all), and thereby errs on the side of irreconcilable difference (only humans have onto-theology, and perhaps even ontology) over and above similarities between humans and all other beings.
It’s true that gods are incommensurable. Yet, they’re also incommensurably commensurable. This means that gods aren’t pure difference without similarity; gods and worlds are originarily different, yet with similarities, points in common, and points of contact. We might call this resonance.
Resonance speaks to the way that harmonies and overtones are produced from a situation in which there’s distance and differences as well as similarities that aren’t reduced to sameness.[2]
[1] Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), p. 5.
[2] Zwicky, Lyric Philosophy, LH33–4; W&M, LH37, LH47.