A few days ago on LDS-Phil
someone asked about the "more traditional/generally accepted views"
on universals. Jim Faulconer lamented that in the English speaking
world it often seems like people assume philosophy is
Analytic Philosophy of the Anglo-American style. He even joked
about starting an organization, "Philosophes sans frontières,"
dedicated to the recognition that what people mean, when they say,
"accepted views" really means "the currently dominant view in North
America and Britain." Put an other way, I suppose, Continental
philosophers don't get the respect they deserve. (grin) At
the risk of phenomenologists becoming the Rodney Dangerfields of
the philosophy world, perhaps this ought to be discussed. I
noticed this weekend while reading through a few blogs and papers
that this is a constant refrain in certain ways. Over at
The Will to Blog, for instance, we
read of how analytic philosophers often judge Continental
Philosophy on the basis of what English professors say.
One of the annoying tendencies I've run into time and time again when talking to analytic philosophers about recent continental philosophy is that they don't actually posses any first hand knowledge of the tradition, and yet they quickly reject continental thought as "fuzzy". More often than not, they rely on what they hear from English professors. Now, it strikes me as incredibly stupid to reject continental philosophy on the basis of some stuff you heard from somebody in an English department. I certainly wouldn't reject something on the basis of second hand knowledge. So what's the deal?
As the author notes, many of those in literature departments have little familiarity with phenomenology. This dramatically affects how they read Derrida and many other figures in Continental Philosophy. Now I'm hardly qualified to mount a defense against ignorant analytic philosophers of Continental thought. I'd note that when this discussion has come up that Jim points out in Europe there is no distinction between Continental Philosophy and Analytical Philosophy. There is just philosophy, with the same philosophers often doing work in both areas.
When did this divide arise? I think that those pointing towards phenomenology are perhaps correct. The style of philosophy that arose in the Anglo-America tradition appears (to me at least) to have downplayed phenomenology. Simply put, many Analytic philosophers haven't read carefully and critically Hegel, Husserl, or Heidegger. Nietzsche is often looked askance at as a mere irrationalist. Kierkegaard is not typically read at all. The entire hermeneutic question is downplayed often as a descent to relativism, for reasons I've never understood. After all similar questions have been raised by both pragmatists as well as various neo-Kantians within the American tradition.
My guess, were I to make one, is that the difference came to a head
with the entire Derrida - Searle exchange. At a certain point it
became clear that they were talking past one an other. Derrida,
recognizing this, as well as recognizing that ground Searle wished
to debate from, decided to take the discourse in an entirely
different direction. While I love the text that resulted,
Limited Inc., I must admit that
in many ways Derrida truly wasn't nice in the rejoinder. Further
the result was not just to enrage Searle but to anger quite a few
other figures. Not only did Searle not allow his essays to be
reprinted in the book with Derrida's texts, but a movement arose to
prevent Derrida from receiving an
honorary doctorate from Cambridge. I think that most of his critics
misread him. But one must confess that the style of his
writing hasn't helped him. Some of his
critics praise his early work but attack more recent works in a
manner that I think suggest they missed the point. At the same
time, however, Derrida could have played much nicer with his
friends.
But of course the damage had been done. Even those unread on phenomenology seemed quite willing to make statements about Continental philosophy. Further the popularity of reading difficult philosophers like Heidegger, Nietzsche or Derrida by social scientists and English professors made things quite a bit worse. Since they were often unable to read the texts carefully and critically, there often became a grab-all in which various misreadings became characterized as what these philosophers taught. Since many Analytic philosophers encountered these figures not in a philosophical context but in context of political pablum or worse, there became a guilt by association. (Akin, I suspect, to those disbelieving in God simply because they didn't like fundamentalist Christians) By the time Alan Sokal played his hoax on a non-peer reviewed postmodern journal of cultural studies, the stereotype of what Continental Philosophy was had already become entrenched in the academy. It has become what literary figures had deemed it to be. (Never mind that most philosophers wouldn't trust these figures to lay out what other difficult philosophers say.)
So, perhaps a call is in order for Analytic Philosophers to actually engage with Continental Philosophy? I suspect that more philosophers studying Continental Philosophy in the US have read the main Analytic Philosophers than the opposite. Perhaps I'm wrong, and since I don't work in the academy I'm far from the one to ask about how things actually are there. But I must confess a certain weariness of hearing the snide comments and asides from those in Analytic Philosophy.
For those not quite up to speed on the controversy, an old New York Times article from 1994. (It has the added interest of having a comment from old Saturday Night Live comedian Chevy Chase on Derrida. Apparently his sister is a scholar who studies Continental Philosophy.) An other article, by the same author, was printed in the Los Angeles Times in 1991.
I should also note that it is perhaps unfortunate that these debates as often as not come to orbit Derrida, Lacan, and a few others. Yet just as Analytic Philosophy includes more than simply Searle, Quine, Davidson, and a few others, so too does Continental Philosophy. While one can turn to Derrida to read of différance one can also read Deleuze writing about difference. Philosophers like Ricouer (one of my favorites) are all too often overlooked.
A few final thoughts before I retire for the evening. First off I confess I think that most analytic critics of Continental thought haven't read much of the literature themselves and are at best replying to muddle headed thinking of people in the humanities with little training in critical thought. Those that rise above this are, often as not, merely aping existing critiques of Continental thought or worse yet a broad "postmodernism." So they have read, for instance, Habermas' The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity but have not engaged in the authors themselves nor read those arguing how Habermas misread Heidegger, Derrida or others.
Having said all that, clearly not all critics fit into those categories. Consider, for example, Hugh Mellor, who was one of those seeking to prevent the honorary degree for Derrida. In an interview with Cognito he said
Some of Derrida's early work was interesting and serious. But this isn't the work he has become famous for, and which led to him being put forward for an honorary degree. That is much later work which seems to me wilfully obscure. If you spell out these later doctrines plainly, it becomes clear that most of them, if not false, are just trivial. Take the fact that the writing down of a signature must have been present at whatever time in the past it was done. Now you can make this truism sound mysterious, as Derrida does. But there's nothing mysterious about it: it's just trivially true that if an action leaves a trace, then the trace will always be of something in the past that was once present. So one objection is that Derrida goes in for mystery-mongering about trivial truisms. But he also mixes these truisms up with silly falsehoods, which, if believed and acted on, would cripple intellectual activities of all kinds. The excesses of deconstructionism have been especially unfortunate, because they imply that writings have no intrinsic meanings that are fixed or constrained in any way by the writers' intentions or the conventions of their language; that writings are open to endless and arbitrary reinterpretation by their readers. This is obviously false, and has the most absurd implications. In the law, for instance, it implies that because a statute has no intrinsic meaning it could be reinterpreted so as to sanction, or to forbid, any course of action whatsoever. That is nonsense, but if people really believed it, it would sanction all sorts of arbitrary and authoritarian practices by the state. So it is either just nonsense, if it's not believed; or it's very dangerous, if it is believed. I'm sure Derrida himself doesn't believe most of the nonsense he is famous for, but if you filter that out, the rest doesn't add up to anything worthy of an honorary degree.
Now I disagree with Dr. Mellor, although this does, I think get back into Heidegger and I'll not bore people with my reasons. But clearly he has read Derrida and his criticisms are about both style and significance.
Some more criticisms can be found in the blog Maverick Philosopher. There he critiques Continental Philosophy on the basis of verbage and overgeneralization. The first critique is of a philosopher I confess I've not read. Alain Badiou's Manifesto for Philosophy. Not having read him, I can't comment too much. It sounds, to me, though a critique not of Analytic Philosophy but of positivism's announcement of the end of metaphysics. Surely it is true that what the positivists meant by that is radically different from what Heidegger means by it. Indeed that sounds rather uncontestable. The critique though is summed up by, "Tell us what your thesis is. Say something definite." (emphasis mine) But that is exactly what seems incorrect to do, if we buy Heidegger. So this critique, while certainly well read, seems also to engage in a certain question begging that is common among Anglo-American Analytic Philosophy. Of course for all I know the book is horrible and engages in mere ambiguous name dropping.
His second critism is of Deleuze's Nietzsche and Philosophy. I confess that while I've read Deleuze, I've not read this particular book. (Alas, there is far more to read than I have time) Part of the criticism is quite fair: a dense and perhaps unneeded style to make a point. However, I must confess, that I've read plenty of Analytic philosphy which is quite dense and difficult to read. Personally I find Kant far harder to make my way though than Derrida. But that is me. (I must wonder though, when he holds up Sarte as an example of a French philospher who decided whether he wanted to be a literary writer or a philosopher and picked one -- not that I like Sartre too much. But if anything I'd say he is the least like this) I do agree with the criticism though. The French do often like to demonstrate philosophical points. They adopt a rhetoric of philosophy quite unlike those "acceptable" in the Anglo-American tradition. I'd merely point out that this tradition has some history, as Voltaire and Rousseau demonstrate. I'd also suggest that the assumption that the Anglo-American way of doing philosophy is the best way may not be correct. But it is, I think, the number one reason why Continental Philosophy is hard for many and perhaps irritating for many more.
A couple things.
1.) Maverick Philosopher's criticisms of both works are off the mark. His readings are simplistic at best. You are correct that, as Maverick Philosopher fails to notice, Badiou is talking about positivism.
2.) I find it interesting that, today, analytic philosophers don't read continental philosophers (or much of anything that was written before Frege, except maybe Hume). For instance, how many analytic philosophers have read Meinong? Yet, how many have read "On Denoting?" Husserl is a particularly interesting case, because in the beginning, you would have been hard pressed to find a distinction between early Husserl and early analytics. Husserl was heavily influenced by Frege, particularly in his critique of psychologism, and influenced Russell. It's Husserl's later work that analytics would find offensive.
The history of the split is actually very interesting, particularly as it relates to some issues and concepts that are currently important in analytic philosophy (e.g., intentionality, a concept that lost most of its significance in continental philosophy long ago, but which, when it was significant there, was much maligned by positivists). Also, the fact that the two traditions essentially arose from the same two people, namely Brentano and Frege, is very interesting (Meinong, Russell, and Husserl all being either heavily influenced by, or students of both). The treatment of the concept of "truth" in both traditions is also interesting, particularly when looking at the history of the split.
I think your comments on Husserl are quite correct. As you say, there is a lot of similarity between Husserl and Russell on many points -- especially how Russell develops knowledge by acquaintance.
My own theory, and I'm probably not the best qualified to make it, is that the big divide arose with the rediscovery of transcendence in Continental Philosophy. That was primarily with Heidegger who takes the immanent aspect of phenomenology and changes it to this transcendent aspect "outside" of experience in a certain way. At that point I think empiricists, for whom sense-data functioned in a fashion not that far from Husserl's immanent origin of phenomena, really found themselves unable to understand what was going on.
Unlike some in the Continent, I don't see this as that unique. I personally think Levinas is doing philosophy not that far removed from the Jewish tradition in the 12th - 16th centuries. Indeed he quotes or paraphrases them a lot. And I think most acknowledge that while Levinas thought he was splitting from Heidegger he simply misread Heidegger and reinvented what Heidegger was already doing.
I also think that people the last 10 years have realized that a lot of what French philosophy in particular was doing bears a lot of resemblance to medieval neoPlatonism. Sikka's Forms of Transcendence is my favorite book along those lines. But most of the texts in the so-called "theological turn" in French philosophy also quote these same figures. (Meister Eckard, pseudo-Dionysus, etc.)
One other quick thought. I agree with your comments on intentionality. Indeed I think that a lot of Derrida's demonstration in Limited Inc. is about the problem of intentionality of the Searlean sort. A great, and perhaps more readible for Analytic philosophers, set of papers on this is the ongoing Dreyfus/Searle debates regarding intentionality. Once again they both end up misreading each other. I think Dreyfus had going on the thought, "well Searle can't possibly mean that," and mistakenly read Searle as adopting more phenomenology than Searle was. (And, as I recall, Dreyfus has admitted to this) The debate became a little more heated towards the end. But it really is illustrative of the gap between the two traditions. Since Dreyfus is an American philosopher at the same school as Searle, it probably is a more approachable way of seeing the divide. (Once again remember that both misread each other though)
Not all of Dreyfus' papers are online, but quite a few of the rejoinders to Searle are. Searle has up a few of his rejoinders to Dreyfus as well.
One more brief thought. The Dreyfus and Searle debate and misunderstanding is extremely illustrative for a wide variety of reasons. However the greatest is that Searle was doing logical analysis while Dreyfus thought they were doing phenomenology. This makes me think back to the old Heidegger - Carnap debate over the "death of metaphysics." Specifically Carnap had quite a few criticisms of Heidegger's Introduction to Metaphysics. To do the one sentence distorting summary, the basic divide was over the meaning of "nothing." For Heidegger the nothing was something "positive" while for Carnap it wasn't.
I think the debate between Carnap and Heidegger ends up being the real divide between phenomenology and logical analysis. In Analytic Philosophy in the Anglo-American tradition, logical analysis remained, albeit transformed after the death of positivism. In Europe phenomenology of the Heideggarian sort reigned supreme. So perhaps that debate over "nothing" really was the real divide and start of the conflict between Analytic and Continental philosophy.
Of course the roots of that divide therefore go back earlier into German neo-Kantianism. And perhaps it is not at all surprising that a lot of the "middle ground" between the two traditions often is found among neo-Kantians.
BTW - in the initial post I talk about transcendence as being the source of the Continental break. Rereading it one can come away thinking that I'm mistaken about Husserl and transcendence. Certainly Husserl claims transcendental ideas. However I think his ideas aren't really transcendental in the way we now tend to see the term. Once again the notion of the "nothing" is tied to this rethinking of transcendence and, in my opinion, is why European philosophy ends up making this return to neo-Platonism and thereby Plotinus.
Welcome to all those who are visiting via the Philosopher's Carnival. Since this includes many people who haven't visited here before, you may be interested in the continuation of the above in two more posts. (here and here)
I've closed comments in order to avoid spam since I don't check this older blog as much anymore.
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