My friends in the English department often ask me to explain the difference I so often talk about between analytic and continental philosophy. For some odd reason they want to relate our discipline with theirs in an effort, maybe, to understand both better. Thus, I welcome the opportunity offered by Schuylkill's general theme this year to give a very general and un-rigorous presentation on Philosophy, intended for the University Community at large.
One fine, if annoying, tradition in philosophy is that of hedging our bets. It's the fine art of being slippery. And we actually think it's motivated by a wish to be exacting. Accordingly, I should begin such a paper by saying that neither analytic nor continental philosophy are truly cohesive, unified, groups; much which seems inconsistent flows under their banner, as does much disagreement. However, today, few groups of any merit are cohesive and unified, if they ever were. Even science isn't unified any more. So much for fine print bordering on the platitudinous.
This paper has four sections. The first section places analytic and continental philosophy within a historical tradition, specifically in relation to Kant. The second details analytic philosophy, particularly with relation to 'the linguistic turn' and 'ordinary language' philosophy. The third juxtaposes what I take to be a continental response in terms of Heidegger's view of language and Foucault's view of power/knowledge, and shows some of the disrepute in which these are held. The last reviews some recent journal articles on the subject, and delivers a summation and prognosis.
I. You all know about the Pre-Socratics, of which I think fondly of Heraclitus, so often quoted despite the fact that no one can "step into" his "same river" twice. You know about the martyrdom of Socrates which is supposed to stand at the head of a rather ascetic and unassuming tradition of contemplation for contemplation's sake. But perhaps you don't know about Descartes, the founder of "modern philosophy," and the most armchair of the armchair philosophers. Doubting all that can be possibly doubted, no matter how he tried he couldn't bring it about that he ceased to exist. He thought, and this established the idea of himself as innate to himself. Of course John Locke wasn't having any of this. He announced that his mind was a tabula rasa (blank slate) endowed instead with certain "capacities" and filled in like an empty cabinet by the world of sense.
Thus the rationalist/empiricist tradition was born. Through many torturous turns it persists into the analytic and continental divide. Indeed, it is still an open question whether analytic philosophy has ever left this early beginning or whether it remains, as according to Joseph Margolis (Temple), "Pre-Kantian" (Historied 57). Margolis argues that analytic philosophy, to the extent that it does not eschew "all cognitive privilege" and a "principled disjunction between an independent actual world and the world we experience and claim to know," is Pre-Kantian, particularly most forms of "externalism"--the view that all thought contents are individuated at least partly by "external" factors in the environment. In contrast, it is difficult to find an example of what I would call "Continental" philosophy that does not accept these claims--i.e., the denial of a privileged epistemic stance or "God's eye view," and something like the symbiosis between mind and world--though, perhaps not in Margolis' full-fledged sense of "symbiosis" (Historied 57).
Kant is supposed to have fused the rationalist and empiricist traditions into his empirical idealism and transcendental realism, but somehow he went wrong. On the one hand, Kant's "Copernican Revolution" (his empirical idealism) gives the subject efficacy: "We must therefore make trial whether we may not have more success in the tasks of metaphysics, if we suppose that objects must conform to our knowledge" (Critique bxvi). But, on the other, Kant's transcendental realism gives the world a bite: for example, in Kant's own refutation of (material) idealism: "Thus perception of this permanent [in me] is possible only through a thing outside me and not through the mere representation of a thing outside me" (Critique b274-279). He pursued the best of both the idealistic and realistic worlds and, somehow, failed to make them cohere.
Kant stands at what I would like to call the nexus of
the analytic and
continental divide. It could have ended before it began. But it
was not to
be, partly because Kant is so difficult to understand. German
idealists took
one horn of the idealism/realism dilemma; British empiricists
took the
other. They have been stretching the bull between them ever since.
II.
Analytic Philosophy
logical
Ordinary language
--------
Continental Philosophy
phenomenology
existentialism
hermeneutics structuralism
deconstructivism
neo-Thomism neo-Marxism
Table 1-1. (Adapted from Follesdal 193).
The table is accurate if misleading. Clearly, continental philosophy has enormous variety. But that is part of the problem with it: it is dis-unified. Continental philosophy no longer provides a united front against Anglo American philosophy, or as Follesdal puts it, "Analytic philosophy has dominated in the English-speaking world for the last sixty years and is now encroaching upon the continent" (193).
This way of approaching the analytic/continental divide is via the so-called "linguistic turn," which if you believe Michael Dummett, has its genesis shortly after Kant with Gottlob Frege. Philosophy of language saves us (as Wittgenstein put it) from "the bewitchment of grammar":
Philosophy is concerned, not to establish truths of a very general kind, not even truths which can be arrived at by ratiocination alone, but to rectify certain kinds of misunderstanding, the misunderstandings we have of our concepts; and this means our misunderstandings of our language, since to possess a concept is to be the master of a certain fragment of language (Dummett 438).
Dummett argues compellingly, if somewhat needlessly, that Frege is the "fountainhead of analytical philosophy" (440), not Wittgenstien, Russell, or the Vienna Circle. Revived interest in Frege has effected a rapproachment of "orientation" among British and American schools of thought.
"Ordinary language" philosophy (a statement of which is quoted above) or to use Morris Schlick's famous phrase that "by means of philosophy statements are explained, by means of science they are verified" (56) replaced metaphysics, the branch of philosophy concerned to detail what is. (Metaphysics is the phoenix of philosophy: perpetually dying and reappearing.) "Logic" with its insistence on deductively valid formal rules of inference obscured more general epistemologies as the pre-eminent way in which we come to know anything. Language replaced thought (at least to the extent that there is no other way to talk about thought, and a public language must individuate our thought content). Verification replaced "meaning," in terms of a statement being true if it can "in principle" be verified and false if not. And when verificationism began to have problems because, for example, verifiability is both too strong and too weak (Hempel), or because there is no principled disjunction between "statements of meaning" and "matters of fact" (Quine), "use" replaced verification (as in Wittgenstien's widely interpreted dictum "meaning is use.")
It is important to note that "ordinary language" philosophy is, thus, a technical term as well as a philosophical maneuver, and it has little to do with the 'ordinary' language of the man in the street (far from it, it was often highly technical and jargonized). It also has very little to do with the ways that many continental philosophers speak of different 'discourses' which speak through human beings or in which people invest themselves (as we shall see in the next section).
In another example, John McDowell (Pittsburgh) disagrees with Dummett that language has the "principle functions" of "instrument of communication" and "vehicle of thought," but only so he can argue other "principle functions":
the feature of language that really matters is rather this: that a natural language, the sort of language into which human beings are first initiated, serves as a repository of tradition, a store of historically accumulated wisdom about what is a reason for what (McDowell 126).
Although McDowell labels our second (linguistic) nature "Bildung," which for Hegel means a more robust historicized social interaction, it seems clear to me that Mcdowell's vision is rather more like Kant's attenuated notion of a second nature which answers the dialectic of reason. Since free will contradicts the necessity of nature, we must suppose a "second nature" which "which puts [man] himself into another order of things" (Grounding 57). Of course, I don't mean to settle the issue here. The point I wish to make is that most analytic philosophy appears asocial (methodologically solipsistic) and unhistoricized (insistent on tacitly invariable "first principles") in addition to following a logically rigorous method, and being foremost concerned with semantic or linguistic issues (at its best).
III. As you can see, analytic philosophy has much in its favor. (I continue to count myself both an analytic and a continental philosopher--if that's possible.) But contrast it with the (clearly) continental philosophy of Martin Heidegger. His work is historicized (strongly), socially contiguous (to the point of denying any subjective/objective distinction), logically unrigorous (it appears to work through coherence rather than traditional logic--as I will explain below), and also concerned with semantic or linguistic issues but rather as an elucidation not as a replacement for metaphysics.
In fact both analytic and continental philosophy are highly
concerned
with "linguistic analysis." They just mean a very different thing
by it.
Thus, Heidegger:
Our proposed way to language is woven into a speaking that
would
like to liberate nothing else than language, liberate it in order
to present it, giving utterance to it as something
represented--which straightway testifies to the fact that language
itself has woven us into its speaking (Way 398).
For Analytic philosophers, language is something to be explained, or avoided (paradoxically) by other forms of 'discourse': it is not something which requires liberation. It is not some pent-up primal force requiring us as its instrument. We (at best) constitute our idea of ourselves by using public terms we learn when we are growing up (after all, there is no private language): but language remains a tool, we remain its controller. We use it to communicate our thoughts, recasting it in our image. The "way" to language (or anything else) is through careful, deductive or inductive arguments based on clear premises and conclusions which follow by certain "forms of inference": but for Heidegger,
"Truth" is not a feature of correct propositions that are asserted of an "object" by a human "subject" and then "are valid" somewhere, in what sphere we know not; rather, truth is disclosure of beings through which an openness essentially unfolds [west] (Essence 127).
I am not sure why this notion appeals to me, except for the sense that analytic philosophy sometimes manufactures closed and, therefore, moribund possibilities. It is sometimes better to have live ones even if they are obscure. There is also the sense in which analytic philosophy's "Mr. Spock" approach remains cold, elusive, idealistic, impractical and above all arbitrarily privileged (maybe it's the egalitarian in me whose nerves are grated). Such opinions are hardly limited to Heidegger, vis. Foucault who elaborates:
We should admit rather that power produces knowledge...that power and knowledge directly imply one another; that there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations. These 'power-knowledge relations' are to be analyzed, therefore not on the basis of a subject of knowledge who is or is not free...In short, it is not the activity of the subject of knowledge that produces a corpus of knowledge,...but power-knowledge...that determines the forms and possible domains of knowledge (27-28).
Foucault's practical "real-politik" observation seems obvious to the converted. I think it means something like this. Knowledge is power, and power relations inevitably constitute a "specialty" or "profession" which themselves are primarily concerned with 'knowledge' (through the physical enactment of discipline). Every political system has a make-up by which some knowledge (and practices) are coveted and others are marginalized until they "disappear." Whatever the interpretation, the unconverted remark in some such way: "What does modus ponens have to do with power relations?"
This is a particularly good example of the kind of thing that occurs in analytic philosophy. The analytic philosopher will say that if you have a rule of the form 'A>C', i.e., a conditional (which means, alternatively, A implies C, If A then C, A is necessary for C, and so on), and you have supplied the antecedent (A), then the consequent C, just follows. Diagrammatically this is known as modus ponens or more colloquially, conditional elimination:
A>CA
-----
C
and this is correct so far as it goes. It has nothing to do with external, contextual, contingent relations such as what is meant by 'power relations'. It is a deductively valid inference form for any A and any C. And by this is meant something which invariably and necessarily follows.
What the analytic philosopher seems to see as above question and what the continental philosopher is going to point out as contingent are the very assumed notions of what it means to have a rule of the form A implies C, to have an A and to have a C. "Of course," they will say "if you make enough assumptions, then you will get invariant fixities and necessarily valid forms." I suspect, though I cannot show here, that behind every specifically analytic philosophy there are some such tacitly assumed governing assumptions (and probably behind some "continental" ones too). Surely, the analytic philosopher might respond that we have to make some assumptions. And, this is probably true. It is when these "posits" lose their contingency that dogmatic problems arise.
Only within a given field of discourse is modus ponens not subject to power relations. Or, to put it another way. Only within certain power relations (both political and practical) does modus ponens appear independent of 'power relations'. I like this field of discourse, and more or less this set of power relations, it appears extremely viable and apt to solve a varied and large number of problems. But, I don't claim that it has some absolute or universal nature, nor that it will be viable in all contingencies and situations.
This is as close as I will get to an actual argument against analytic strategies (as opposed to merely explaining them). Yet, if the general attitudes of many philosophers is any good indication of the analytic/continental divide, the point is already made. Specimens aren't hard to find, vis. Dummett:
And despite the fact that Ryle had started his career as the English exponent of the philosophy of Husserl, and had in 1929 published a critical but highly respectful review of Sein und Zeit [Heidegger's Being and Time], the enemy, at the time when I was a student, was not Heidegger; Heidegger was perceived only as a figure of fun, too absurd to be taken seriously as a threat to the kind of philosophy practiced [sic] in Oxford (437).
Dummett suggests not only that many analytic philosophers think badly of Heidegger, but that in contrast to Dummett's days as a student, they now perceive him as "the enemy."
Other opinions aren't hard to find. In a rare talk with Michael Tye (Temple), in which we argued whether one of my many tirades on realism was "unintelligible," I asked him what he thought the difference between analytic and continental philosophy is. He replied (to his credit) that he didn't think that there was much of a difference any more, but that in general, analytic philosophy is any philosophy which is "clear," implying, I think, that continental philosophy is any philosophy which is "unclear." Another outspoken student in the department boasts of using Heidegger's Being and Time as a doorstop. (He only has a copy because he was once required to take a class in Continental philosophy).
I don't suppose personal opinions would matter so much, if they weren't so prevalent.
IV. If recent journal articles are any indication, the analytic and continental divide is an on-going concern. Ratio recently published a special issue devoted to the topic, and it wasn't at all difficult to find articles from just this last year in Review of Metaphysics and Philosophical Forum. One can easily become immersed in many philosophical quagmires in the course of what is intended to be a short paper. However, a quick review of this literature will provide for some good concluding remarks.
Fundamentally, the analytic and continental divide is alive and well (at least in the opinion of their strongest adherents). There are at least a few views that constitute a kind of "holding action" or "diplomatic parlance" between the two "domains." Christopher Norris has recently remarked on much of this literature which includes many "pragmatist" or "post-analytic" thinkers, most prominently Rorty, Davidson and Quine. The extent to which pragmatism affords an alternative to the analytic/continental divide has always interested me. Yet, I think much of the current work is either too new to be decisive, or it is subject to the same old problems.
For example, Joseph Margolis (Temple) takes a hard line against these new critics in a paper provocatively titled "A Biopsy of Recent Analytic Philosophy." Margolis charges what I have been saying all along, that analytic philosophy "though technically scrupulous," holds on to certain "fundamental philosophical convictions" (Biopsy 161). He analyzes three prominent analytic strategies vis., naturalism, postmodernism and physicalism. I want to take the first and the second as examples. The specifics of these arguments are to detailed to entertain here, but there main strategy is the same one which I have been calling "continental," and this is worth pointing out.
First, Quine's naturalism (the theory that explanation is "causal") fails to replace epistemology with psychology because it uses an epistemological argument (Biopsy 163). Epistemology is only "naturalized" when it is assumed.
Similarly, Davidson and Rorty reject "standards of interpretation" or interpretive tertia--a view known as "postmodernism." But Davidson's realism fails to provide substantive theses concerning justification and truth (Biopsy 166-167), as I think all forms of realism must. Realism isn't a substantive doctrine. It merely says that there is something logically independent of the human mind. This logical independence prohibits it from being a substantive doctrine, if what you mean by a "substantive doctrine" is something you can draw logical inferences from. Reality is only "postmodern" when it is assumed.
Thus, we have placed the analytic and continental device at a historical juncture which tries to figure out the relation between the mind and the world. Kant tried to join the two, but was unsuccessful. Instead what developed was a united front of analytic philosophy along the lines of the "linguistic turn" and "ordinary language" philosophy against a disunited front of many "continental" philosophies. The continental strategy works best to point out the tacit assumptions of analytic philosophy, particularly in regard to language and the supposed hegemony and independence of certain discourses through a strong notion of the relation between power and knowledge. Finally, recent developments are either too new to sew up the analytic and continental divide, or they are subject to the same problems of tacit assumptions.
My feeling is that the divide can never be sewn up, nor should it. Although attempts to do so are just as helpful as anything else in philosophy, philosophy is dialectical (like political systems). It needs an 'other' to pit itself against. What happens when we get rid of the tacitly fundamental convictions of what I have been calling analytic philosophy? Obscurity. But it is a pregnant obscurity. Where do we go from here? Well, it is the same old story. Philosophy will develop new posits which will congeal into invariant truths until the world/future philosophy finds a counterexample, and the process starts anew.
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