A Defense of the Continental Tradition

 

Once again, as happens every few years, "continental" philosophy is under attack.  I would say that this is another round in the war between "analytic" philosophers and "continental" philosophers, but I think that would give the attackers too much credit.  I've written about "analytic" and "continental" philosophy before, for instance here and here, and in those brief articles I hope I actually had something interesting to say.  Instead, in the present essay, I'll simply rehearse what everyone with half a brain should already know.

The charge against "continental" philosophy is that it is hard to understand.  In order to make this charge, someone who calls himself "Bentham's Bulldog" takes quotes from Judith Butler out of context and challenges anyone to defend her writing style.  I'm not going to defend Judith Butler here.  I'm just going to say:

Yes, if you don't bother to read something, you're not going to understand it.  

That is true of "continental" philosophy.  It is also true of "analytic" philosophy.  Here: as evidence, I took a random analytic philosopher, and isolated a random quote from his essay.  (I truly did choose at random - it took me a few seconds on an internet search.)  Here we go: from “What must be added to true belief in order to have knowledge? Answer: More true beliefs” by Richard Foley of New York University: 

    Notice, however, that there is nothing inconsistent in supposing that Sally’s
    maximally accurate and comprehensive beliefs about Pcells are neither caused by
    facts that make Pcells true nor are the products of reliable processes nor are the
    products of properly functioning cognitive faculties. Her beliefs may instead be
    the result of some mix of strange processes and unlikely events, which against the
    odds have generated completely accurate beliefs about Pcells.

Now, I can anticipate that someone will argue that Foley's statement can indeed be understood, in context.  But of course the same can be said for Butler. 

Yes, reading philosophy is difficult.  It takes work.  For that matter, much of academic writing is difficult.  If I had picked a few random sentences from a scholarly paper in chemistry, genetics, mathematics, or the politics of ancient Sumer, undoubtedly many people would be left scratching their heads.  To understand the writing of specialists often requires context, background, a familiarity with the relevant vocabulary, and, in short, a little effort - some thinking.  Sorry about that.

What is most egregious about Bentham's Bulldog's argument is that it paints with such an insanely broad brush.  If you don't like Butler, fine.  But that is not a rational reason for dismissing all of continental philosophy.  I count myself a huge fan of "continental" philosophy (though perhaps not a great fan of the term "continental philosophy").  However, I strongly disagree with poststructuralism.  But - and here's the crucial part - I actually bother to read the work of poststructuralists and argue with it.  I don't just dismiss it out of hand.  (For instance, here I argue against structuralism.  Here, I argue against Althusser.  Here and elsewhere, Derrida.  I'm particularly proud of this one, in which I take on a large group of people, which I call 'liquefactionists," and which includes many poststructuralists.  I've never taken on Butler directly, but some of what I write int he liquefactionism essay probably applies to her.)  In philosophy, to argue against someone's argument is the highest form of tribute.

"Continental" philosophy is a term describing a vast body of various literature, spanning many countries and thousands of years - a term that has been imposed on these incredibly different thinkers by British and American academics, often pejoratively, painting with an impossibly broad brush.  At first it apparently referred to philosophy from continental Europe, but now it is seen as a tradition throughout the world - consider the many Latin American "Continental" philosophers, such as the Argentine-Mexican Enrique Dussel or the Columbian Laura Quintana, Indian philosophers like Giyatri Spivak and Aditya Nigam, philosophers from the Middle East and Northern Africa, like Iran's Reza Davari Anakari or the Palestinian Edward Said - not to mention Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous themselves who were born in Algeria where there are more recent scholars like Malek Chebel.  Not to mention the important Heidegger-influenced "Kyoto School" in Japan with many prominent philosophers like Nishitani Keiji.  Pierre Bourdieu, has had a surge of influence among scholars in China.  Byung-Chul Han, from Korea, started by studying Heidegger and then developed his own ideas, which have become influential in Latin America.  One of the major centers of "continental" philosophy is now Canada.  And of course continental philosophy remains extremely popular in the UK and the USA (maybe even more than in Europe).  It's very telling that the primary example of "continental" philosophy used by its critics is the American philosopher Judith Butler, from Cleveland.  The truth is that there is no corner of the world where "continental" philosophy is not studied and practiced, and it does not take a huge amount of study to find out that "continental" was always a bit of a misnomer- that the many traditions that are awkwardly grouped together under this confusing umbrella term have always been developed in a complex dialogue with thinkers and cultural traditions from all over the globe.

Essentially, "continental" philosophy means all of the philosophy in the world other than the extremely narrow tradition known as "analytic" philosophy.  This reminds me of how "homeopathic" medicine labels every kind of medicine other than itself as "allopathic" medicine - an extraordinarily lopsided division of things.  I think when people started making the division between "analytic" and "continental" philosophy, they (the "analytic philosophers") saw themselves as the vanguard.  They thought "continental" philosophy was in the past, on its way out, and "analytic" philosophy was the wave of the future - but it didn't really turn out that way.  A lot of analytic philosophy just kind of fizzled.  Whether justly or not, people lost interest in it.  Who even is an analytic philosopher anymore?  I just did a quick google search, and the most prominent living analytic philosopher listed was Timothy Williamson, whom, to be honest, I had never heard of.  Apparently, according to his Wikipedia page, his biggest claim to fame is his articulation of the "epistemicist" position on the vagueness problem, which says that there is an exact number that distinguishes every quantitative attribute from every other, even if we don't know what number that is - for instance, there is a precise number of hairs, which, if you have less than that number, you are bald, and if you have more than that number, you are not bald.  And that may be one of the most pointless and silly opinions I have ever heard of anyone having.

But the analytic tradition, and its influence, were always pretty small.  How many great philosophers have there been, who are unambiguously part of the Anglo-American "analytic" tradition?  Off the top of my head, I can think of six: Bertrand Russell, A.J. Ayer, Derek Parfit, Willard V. O. Quine, Wilfred Sellars, and Hilary Putnam (and of these, doubtless, the greatest is Quine). Alfred North Whitehead is certainly great as well, but he sticks out from the analytic tradition - although he collaborated with Russell on Principia Mathematica, much of his brilliant "process philosophy" is difficult to categorize.  Whitehead's contention that most of the debates over epistemology are actually disguised differences in ontology feels very much at home in the continental tradition.  I feel much the same way about G. E. Moore.  He was definitely great, but was he "analytic"?  I... guess so...?  Besides these greats, I can think of a few more important analytic philosophers: J. L. Austin, Donald Davidson, John Searle....  Paul Benacerraf was, in my opinion, a great philosopher, and I see no reason not to consider him "analytic" in some sense, but he was French.  For that matter, all the founders of the analytic philosophy were certainly great, but they were from the continent, so it's debatable which side they were on: Alexius Meinong, Gottlob Frege, the Vienna Circle (Rudolf Carnap, Otto Neurath, etc.), and the Berlin Circle (Hans Reichenbach, David Hilbert, etc.).  To complete our list of analytic philosophers, I suppose we could throw in Daniel Dennett, and Paul and Peggy Churchland, if you like, and personally, I've loved Douglas Hofstadter since I was a kid.  Nowadays, Nick Bostrom too.  Jerry Fodor?  Perhaps future historians will look back and classify Eliezer Yudkowsky as an analytic philosopher?  Maybe, but I doubt it.  He certainly isn't generally regarded as one today.

Is it accurate to call, say, Ernst Zermelo, Abraham Fraenkel, and Kurt Gödel "analytic philosophers"?  I have the deepest respect for these thinkers but it seems arbitrary and capricious to categorize them this way.  They were mathematicians, certainly, and logicians, and perhaps in a sense philosophers, though not, I think "analytic" philosophers per se.  Similarly, Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrödinger certainly had their philosophical sides, but they were physicists (and Heisenberg actually grappled with Martin Heidegger's philosophy).  I also know of no convincing argument that the thinkers of the cybernetics movement, or decision theorists or game theorists should be shoehorned into the "analytic" box.

More and more philosophers of the Anglo-American world cannot be considered pure "analytic" philosophers, either because they explicitly reject the analytic tradition, or find it inadequate somehow, or because they are influenced by "continental" philosophy, one way or another.  "Analytic" philosophers have a way of coming around and finding some value in the "continental" tradition, after all - rediscovering what they had previously rejected.  Take Robert Brandom, who is now a Hegelian, along with Nicolas Rescher and John McDowell - not to mention more traditional Hegelians, like Robert Pippin and Terry Pinkard.  For that matter, we could go further back - consider, for instance, the "Ohio Hegelians" of the mid-19th century, or the founder of pragmatism, Charles Sanders Pierce, who also founded semiotics, and who learned philosophy by studying Kant, and whose philosophy parallels Hegel's in interesting ways - not mention his two more famous students, William James and John Dewey.  For that matter, I see strong continental influences even in John Locke - obviously Rene Descartes, but even Baruch Spinoza.  The more one investigates the history of ideas, the more the boundary between the Anglo-American tradition and the continental tradition reveals itself to be at least permeable - if not entirely imaginary and arbitrary. 

Of course, we must address the elephant in the room: Ludwig Wittgenstein.  As I've expressed on this website before, I think Wittgenstein had one foot in the "analytic" tradition and one foot in the "continental" tradition.  Particularly in his later work, but even in his early work (and I maintain that these are less different than are usually supposed) he cannot simply be considered an analytic philosopher.  And that largely goes for many of his followers.  Rush Rhees, besides being a Kropotkinite anarchist with Marxist sympathies, had studied Brentano deeply.  G. H. von Wright was influenced by Oswald Spengler and Jurgen Habermas.  Many of the "ordinary language philosophers" are quite continental in their outlook, whether they admit it or not.  Stanley Cavell, for instance, engaged extensively and gratifyingly with the continental traditions, both sympathetically and critically.  Gilbert Ryle was really never an analytic philosopher, being more influenced by continental philosophers like Bolzano, Brentano, Husserl, and Heidegger.  P. F. Strawson is sometimes counted as an analytic, but he was a follower of Ryle, and was quite critical of the analytics.  And his son, Galen Strawson is even more difficult to classify.  G.E.M. Anscombe seems pretty unambiguously analytic (though an ardent Catholic) - so there's another great philosopher to add to the list.    

I've already mentioned pragmatism, that most American tradition in philosophy.  The foremost representative of that school in the second half of the 20th century was Richard Rorty.  Rorty began as a follower of Wittgenstein, and then, by his own account, Wilfred Sellars's "Myth of the Given" caused him to reevaluate his ideas, and pushed him further in a direction his Wittgenstein studies were already leading him - toward the pragmatism of Pierce, Dewey, and James - which lead inevitably to the postmodern post-structuralism of Foucault and Derrida.  People like Rorty, together with the aforementioned Brandom tend to be called "postanalytic" philosophers, and the list of such thinkers is large and growing.  Perhaps the most famous is Thomas Nagel, and even some of the stars of the analytic school, such as Donald Davidson, Hilary Putnam, and Stanley Cavell might also be classified this way.  Perhaps the most radical of all is Peter Unger, a man of unimpeachable analytic credentials, who nonetheless struck out against the analytic philosophy in a vicious attack of a book titled "Empty Ideas".  

And then there are all of the mediocrities who still, after all this time, remained analytic.  The top of my list would be Saul Kripke, yammering on about whether a proper name refers uniquely to its referent.  It's not that I think that he is wrong; it's simply that I do not care whether he is right or wrong.  His philosophy does not matter.  Like so many other analytic philosophers, the importance of his work is about at the same level as arguing over exactly how many hairs on your head makes you bald.  What a decline in scope from, say, Andre Malraux considering whether the future will be Marxist or Nietzschean.  And I find that this can often be said of quite a few analytic philosophers: by rejecting everything outside of their increasingly narrow "analytic" tradition, they have narrowed the scope of philosophy to irrelevance.  If you removed all of Saul Kripke's works from every library in the world, it would take a long time for anyone to notice the difference.  And the people who did notice would be archivists and bibliophiles - not philosophers.  (A more subtle trick would be to somehow carefully replace the text in all of Kripke's books with the work of another analytic philosopher working on proper names.  Would anyone ever notice the difference?)  Is there any philosopher today who is building upon Kripke's work?  There probably is, but I have no idea who or why. 

Analytic philosophers may like to think of themselves as philosophers of science, but I think this is largely a misnomer: all too often, analytic philosophy is too narrow for science - too narrow to account for science, or even to have anything particularly interesting to say about science.  When I hesitate to call, for instance, Eliezer Yudkowsky an analytic philosopher, this is not an insult but a compliment.  Yudkowsky's ideas are too broad and too interesting to be pigeon-holed into the analytic tradition.

In addition to continental philosophers, analytic philosophers, post-analytic philosophers, and philosophers who are in the overlap, simultaneously both analytic and continental, there are also many - I would go so far as to say most - philosophers are neither in the analytic tradition nor in the continental tradition.  Does it make sense to call John Rawls an analytic philosopher?  Robert Nozick?  James Burnham?  Noam Chomsky?  I don't think it's accurate or even meaningful to say that Ayn Rand was part of the analytic tradition (you can see what I think of her here).  If anything, she seems more continental to me, as a Russian who believed in a simplistic, distorted, hollowed-out version of Max Stirner's egoism, at first heavily influenced by Nietzsche (whom she later rejected) and parallel to, yet distinct from, the existentialist tradition.

I'll stake out my position this way.  It seems to me to be perfectly possible to have it both ways: to say, at the same time, that Hegel might have had some interesting things to say, which are worth listening to, and that it was a healthy thing for the analytic philosophers to clean their ears out, as it were, to ignore Hegelian philosophy, to act as if it never existed, and to develop their ideas on their own.  It's not surprising to me that some of these erstwhile analytics, having developed their own ideas, are discovering that some of their ideas lead to concepts that rhyme with Hegelianism, and that he wasn't so stupid after all. 

It may sound as if I am anti-analytic in this essay, but I insist that I am not.  Have all the good analytic ideas already been used up?  I sincerely doubt it.  Maybe, any day now, there will be a great analytic philosopher.  I hope so.  But until then, there's no need for those who have failed to come up with a great work of analytic philosophy to strike out in ressentiment against the vast, rich "continental" tradition - that is, the multiple, intertwined heritages of global philosophical thought.  You could try being open to other ideas.  What do you have to fear?  Or you could reject all traditions, and come up with something brand new.  Who knows?  Have fun.