The Analytic and the Continental
What’s in a philosophy?
If one must philosophize, then one must philosophize; and if one must not philosophize, then one must philosophize; in any case, therefore, one must philosophize.
While Alfred North Whitehead once asserted that all of Western philosophy is but a footnote to Plato, I don’t think it’s controversial in any way to claim that his young protege and later rival (the author of the quote above) deserves an encyclopedic entry of his own. True, Aristotle responded to much of Plato’s work, but we don’t today (totally) credit Caesar for August’s accomplishments. A disciple can stand on his own, dammit!
It’s with these two philosophers, the pillars of so much thought and collective metaphysical agitation, that I begin a sort-of-critique of philosophies.
That word.
The generative source of an almost untenable amount of douchery and self-absorption and solipsism… indeed a philosophy of its own.
It’s difficult to choose a precise starting point. There’s Plato and there’s Aristotle. Yes. Now what? The ethics maybe? The political philosophy? The disagreement between the two regarding the fundamental makeup of all things, as evinced by this annoyingly famous albeit still beautiful fresco? Do we then move forward chronologically, to investigate other philosophers and their respective philosophies? How they developed notions about the world and the word?
To be completely honest, while I find all of this inventory-taking interesting and worthy of much analysis and requisite unpacking, the only current philosophically-tinged notion that truly and sincerely inspires any sort of wordsmithing on my part is largely superficial. Structural. An idea having less to do with philosophy than the way in which philosophy is popularly conceived. One design level up, if you will.
That notion is the still ever-present distinction between analytic and continental philosophy.
Before performing the thankless job of defining, enumerating, and arguing, it’s best, I think, to understand to what precisely the terms “continental” and “analytic” philosophy refer. Continental philosophy as-term generally applies to the work of 17th-19th century European thinkers who lived and worked in continental Europe. Analytic philosophy refers to the schools of thought most popular in the only other part of the world that seems to matter to contemporary philosophy departments: Britain and the United States. Why a term rooted in geography (continent == continental) is drawn in opposition to a term having to do with methods (analytic) is a bit unclear. It’s enough for the sake of this piece to take it for granted that, though many were not aware, geographic distinctions mattered in deeply metaphysical ways for most of recorded history (Ah… Said… a continental philosopher by today’s standards, which is to say a critic).
The truth is, “analytic” and “continental” generally refer less to a type or genre of philosophy than they do to a way of doing philosophy. If we take the popular narrative peddled by the orthodoxy (the Anglo-American Academy) as axiomatic, the analytic school traces its inception (the fundamental approaches and orientations of which the school is characteristic) to the works of Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. All three philosophers were mostly concerned with the way philosophy is structured as language, their personal avenues to truth always constructed along neighborhoods of concepts and ideas. Experience rarely mattered. Only through logical analysis, it seems their thinking went, can truth be derived (ha). Today, as professor of philosophy Gary Gutting writes, “the goals of clarity, precision, and logical rigor remained”. For departments centered on the principles of the analytic (not Kantian), small, logically sound arguments with clearly defined terms and axioms, and a straightforward, desert-dry writing style are the ultimate goal. If a philosophy department can output undergraduates who develop keen structural and argumentative abilities, that department is an analytic success. There is very little tolerance for meandering thoughts and sloppy arguments not rooted in strictly defined jargon. I am not attaching an ethical valence to this sort of philosophizing. That just seems, from personal experience and study, to be the case. Wittgenstein’s landmark Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus distills this approach in a terse less-than-100 pages. He even summarized his famous approach to the book (numbered premises and sub-premises intermixed with formal logical syntax), and in doing so expressed a sort of central tenet of the analytic school:
What can be said at all can be said clearly; and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence.
One may think, then, that because continental philosophy is adduced as diametrically opposed to analytic philosophy, its central tenets and motivating questions differ just as radically. And, to a certain extent, this is true. The continental philosophers on the whole owe the pointing of their ideological compasses to Husserl and his phenomenology. The central precept is paying attention, focusing the retinas, on experience. Concepts are not at the base level of the philosophical interrogation. The individual’s personal interactions with the world, the minutiae of physical and not-so-physical stimuli that make up the sum-total of a person, are the focal point of the divisions and sub-divisions of the continental school. Heidegger further molded the clay, and then the French helped generate existentialism, the most physical of the material philosophies. More importantly, today, for a genuinely un-understandable reason, all schools of thought not strictly analytic are lumped in with the continental, such that poststructuralism and Marxism, otherwise in unendurable tension with one another, are both considered core continental works. Even postcolonial theorists find their work, which is maybe tangentially related, lumped in with the work of 19th century thinkers. Ania Loomba, in her Colonialism/Postcolonialism, implicitly expresses this sentiment by citing one critic’s claim regarding discourse analysis:
…it is the ‘triple alliance’ between Althusserian Marxism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and Saussurean linguistics which spawns discourse analysis.
In the analytic school, of which I’m an unfortunate casualty, there is a heavy dependence on syntheses and imaginings not-so-unflinchingly tied to reason and what I always thought of as “the local”. Analytic arguments don’t generally express more than what can be expressed given their length; they are very acute in their scope. The combination of systems as large and unwieldy as Marxism, psychoanalysis, and linguistics seems suspect. The genesis of discourse analysis comes off as haphazard and inapplicable — not useable. Professor of philosophy Jim Pryor, on his website and in an article on good philosophical writing that every professor of philosophy I know cites, addresses the young undergraduate philosophers he teaches:
A philosophy paper consists of the reasoned defense of some claim. Your paper must offer an argument. It can’t consist in the mere report of your opinions, nor in a mere report of the opinions of the philosophers we discuss. You have to defend the claims you make. You have to offer reasons to believe them.
Because of the analyticist’s (trademark?) insistence on the need for theory rooted in preconceived impressions of reason, the continentalist’s maximalism, his or her ability to subsume so many different approaches and systems, is unsupportable or worse, unsound. One only needs to remember the looseness with which even as careful a thinker as Nietzsche approached his study of human nature and morality in order to understand this sort of contempt. He manages, in his Genealogy of Morality, to derive supposedly fundamental relationships between religion, human nature, history, and language by applying the preferred analytic method of his period, philology, which by today’s standards is as continental a thing as one can imagine. It is an intellectual chimera, by which one may arrive at certain conclusions through a combination of historical analysis, literary criticism, and linguistics. In philology, the assumed definition of a word and its etymology can lead to massive conclusions regarding whole groups of people. And, while the insistence on looking to language in order to understand human nature is prescient and even analytic in certain shades, the Nietzschian approach to philosophy is exactly that which the analytic school wants to protect against.
Unfortunately, this fear of the unrigorous has lead to the development of a philosophy bereft of any material or physical consequence (1). The focus on logically sound arguments allows for the filtering of the real. It is absurd to consider epistemological arguments regarding justifiability, belief, and truth without factoring in historical developments, power relations, and modes of knowledge production. And yet, that is precisely what happens in epistemology classes taught by professors, adjuncts, and graduate students trained in the analytic tradition. In Richard Feldman’s Epistemology, the “Traditional Analysis of Knowledge (TAK)”, a definition of what it means for a specific individual to know a specific proposition, is formulated in this way:
TAK. S knows p = df. (i) S believes p, (ii) p is true, (iii) S is justified in believing p.
The definition of the phrase “S knows p” is that some person S is said to know a proposition p if S believes p, p is true, and if S is justified in believing p. Feldman introduces TAK a few pages into his book and proceeds to write close to 200 pages explicating some of its various syntactic and semantic issues. At no point does history, language, or politics enter his arguments. While the continental school’s scope seems too wide, it is my firm belief that the analytic school’s is too narrow, its mislead obsession with logical validity obscuring the path to soundness, and its indifference to history vulgar.
Problems all around, I suppose.
I hesitate to agree with Brian Leiter’s claim that the difference between analytic and continental philosophy is simply one of convention. I do believe that the distinction is one based in methodology, but also that methodology is heavily inflected by diffuse configurations of ideas that are sometimes related and sometimes not. The analytic philosopher’s claim that logical concepts and reasoned arguments are almost exclusively the method by which truth can be derived, and the continental philosopher’s need to do almost-everything, are respective hurdles on the path to a more nuanced philosophy. One that is as sensitive to history as it is to reason. Whether this philosophy actually matters, whether it leads to noticeable and necessary changes in the Academy, Politics, or Society is too big a consideration to make here.
A pipe dream? Maybe… maybe…
