By Jon Cogburn
Friend of the blog Chris Bateman recently hosted a two part (Part One HERE and Part Two HERE) interview with Babette Babich about the fate of continental philosophy. As with many interventions by Babich, (1) readers are not unlikely to find it equally exhilarating and infuriating, and (2) Joe Bob says check it out.
The occasion of the interview is remarks by people like Brian Leiter and Barry Smith to the effect that there is no longer a distinction between analytic and continental philosophy, just one between good and bad philosophy.* Not surprisingly, good philosophy is the type done by friends of Leiter and Smith. Bad philosophy tends to be that which takes seriously the French post-structuralist tradition. When friends of friends of Leiter and Smith (e.g. Richard Rorty, Samuel Wheeler, Lee Braver. . .) take seriously the post-structuralists one either maintains a respectful silence or makes excuses in the way one later makes excuses for an embarrassing in-law at Thanksgiving Dinner.
In the United States it used to be easy to make the distinction. Continental philosophy was a triangle with three legs: German idealism, critical theory, and phenomenology (initially thought about broadly enough to include existentialism, later to include hermeneutics, and later post-structuralists like Derrida). Every department had one or two people working in the intersection of these areas and if you worked in one of them were kind of grouped with the pragmatists, Thomists, and transcendental idealists who were displaced by the growing hegemony of analytic philosophy in the post War period. But two things happened. First, the Baby Boomer star system in academia (so effectively described in the novels of David Lodge) infected both analytic and continental philosophy. The result of this was that the organization devoted to continental philosophy (SPEP) in many ways replicated the hierarchy of analytic philosophy through a set of schools primarily devoted to Continental philosophy, which are not officially ranked, but nonetheless loosely ranked in the minds of all continental philosophers, as are the scholars who teach there. This was almost certainly unavoidable, given the wretched exigencies of our (well, the Baby Boomers') age. Second, the analytic/continental divide became implicated in the culture wars of the 1980s. Continental philosophers were much better at working with other humanities professors and so when the humanities came in for a sustained assault during the Reagan administration, analytic philosophers were able to protest that what was wrong with the humanities wasn't wrong with them, and many were willing to throw their continental colleagues under the bus. These two things ended the era where each department had one or two people working in continental department. Some still do, but the norm became two sets of institutions occupied by people hostile to one another. There are notable exceptions (increasingly so) such as Memphis, the University of New Mexico, and Vanderbilt but for the most part PhD students go through their graduate careers either taking no classes in analytic philosophy or no classes in continental philosophy.
Recently, a third thing has happened. People trained in analytic philosophy have started taking note of figures that constituted the initial three legs of the continental stool, canonically Brandom, McDowell, and Beiser and their students on German Idealism, analytic Marxists and assorted Nietzsche scholars on critical theory, and Dreyfus and his students on phenomenology (though, Sam Wheeler and Paul Livingston's brilliant and heroic endeavors notwithstanding, this doesn't encompass post-structuralism as a mainstream endeavor yet). This has led to the absurd situation where Leiter Reports ranks (at least the last time I checked, maybe it's changed) "continental philosophy" with no input from specialists in French philosophy! Or the kind of thing where people who have been working in the continental tradition for years are briskly condemned as "bad philosophy" by the Leiters of the world.** And journals which are suddenly open to writing on continental figures reject articles by noted philosophers (such as Babich) who have long worked in that tradition. This third development is the context for Bateman's and Babich's conversation. It's great stuff. Again, Joe Bob says check it out.
I do have one quibble with Babich's characterization of analytic and continental philosophy. I think that in characterizing continental philosophy she tends to characterize what the Mighty Dead of that tradition have done and in characterizing analytic philosophy she tends to characterize what standard academic philosophers get up to. But if you do this, then of course analytic philosophy ends up looking stupid when contrasted to continental philosophy. It's dangerous too as we might lose sight of the fact that philosophy is egregiously difficult, so much so that most of it is going to be mediocre. The problem with analytic philosophy isn't that the overwhelming majority of it is mediocre, but that the self appointed (though widely recognized) mandarins of analytic philosophy don't have enough humility to recognize this. I would hate to see Babich unwittingly recapitulate this vice.
Consider her first pass at characterizing continental philosophy:
Continental philosophy includes a historical sense, a sense of historical context which it does not name ‘the history of philosophy.’ If Heidegger writes about Anaximander he is not reflecting on philosophy’s history as if this were a thing once done, passé, whereas we now, today, do some other sort of thing when we ‘do’ philosophy. At the same time the continental tradition also emphasizes everything that has to do with context, with interpretation, as a difference that makes all the difference.
The problem is that in both traditions it's very, very hard for academics to publish work that genuinely engages in dialogue with historical thinkers in the way Babich characterizes Heidegger's engagement with Anaximander. Unless you have a very big name in continental philosophy most of what you do is either write book reports or slavishly apply one of the Mighty Dead's thinking about x (say Husserl on perception of time) to some passing phenomena y (e.g. solitary confinement). For analytic academics doing history, it's very hard to engage in dialogue for characteristically different reasons. Your task is to take into account all of the context yet still come up with a charitable argumentative reconstruction of some bit of the historical figures text. "Charity" here is such that it is more charitable to attribute trivial truths than interesting falsehoods.*
It's only if we turn to the idiosyncratic figures in both traditions that we find people who are both attentive to context and skilled at entering into dialogue with the Mighty Dead. Perhaps Babich can be read as only claiming that the norms of continental philosophy render such figures are slightly less idiosyncratic. That seems fair to me, but I'm not sure what follows from that. Babich also characterizes continental philosophy in this manner:
Continental philosophy is thinking, it is questioning, elaborating questions, making them more comprehensive, deeper, making them worse, proliferating these same questions and adding more and other associated questions. It includes reflection, musing, quandaries, provocations, sometimes it includes comparisons. . .
Again, I do think this might characterize the Mighty Dead and some of the idiosyncratic thinkers in both traditions. But I don't think it characterizes a generic paper you are going to hear at SPEP any more than it characterizes a generic paper you are going to hear at the APA. One might take it to characterize SPEP keynotes and not APA keynotes, but not in my experience. The European philosophers I have seen at three SPEP conferences didn't stand out in this way in their talks and the continental keynotes I've seen at specialty conferences haven't done this any more than analytic keynotes.
Nonetheless, I think Babich is on to something. One of the things that is weird and distinctive about analytic philosophy is the way in which we tell stories where the main character of the story is not a person but a thesis. For us, it is entirely normal to organize a philosophy of religion class in terms of the various peregrinations of the thesis that God exists. The thesis gets attacked, defended, and morphs and changes (e.g. "what is meant by 'God' here?") as a result. I don't think that this leads to the ignorance of context so much as an eye for a different kind of context. We teach, many, many, classes like this, organized around a central concept or thesis.
Continental philosophers tend, on the other hand, to tell their stories in terms of individual philosophers' attempts to make sense of the world. One is a candidate for the Mighty Dead because one's attempts at sense making leaves a perspective from which it is useful for others to share. Thinking this way is helpful because the inability to divorce particular theses from the other commitments and questions raised by the thinker helps keep to the forefront both the holistic nature of content and the broader stakes at issue with respect to that thesis. The negative is that it can inculcate too much deference to the Mighty Dead.
Ironically, this difference makes analytic philosophy much more Hegelian than continental philosophy. A well taught class in analytic philosophy is always to some extent doing the kind of thing Hegel invented in Phenomenology. Continental thinkers are more likely to teach that book, but far less likely to instantiate it. Equally ironic is the fact that post-humanism comes out of continental philosophy. Once again, continental philosophers are much more likely to teach it, but much less likely to instantiate it. What could be more post-human than taking the key dramatis personae in philosophy to not be humans?
I don't think the distinction between whether to organize narratives around positions or people is the only difference, but I think it's an important one. With Graham Harman, I think we would be much impoverished if we were to lose either tradition in this respect or in the others I haven't considered. As such, I do not want the divide to be "overcome." I'd rather instead that we respect, learn from, and sometimes write about one another. This cannot be done without to some extent putting one anothers' texts in Procrustean beds of our own disciplines' design. But, pace Leiter and Smith, and with Babich and Bateman, we can do this without distorting one another.
[*Who are they to judge? I mean, really.
In the concluding passage of The Problems of Philosophy Bertrand Russell argues that the main function of philosophy is to give us an expanded sense of possibility and to help inculcate epistemic modesty. He was correct about this, and as a result, wholly independent of Babich and Bateman's interesting interventions, we ought to conclude that something has gone dreadfully wrong in academic philosophy.
**I know what I'm talking about here. I used to be a Leiterite about this stuff until I actually took the time to read the "bad philosophy" in question. It's taken about a decade to get acculturated to the point where I can publish on both traditions. To be clear, I am an analytic philosopher writing about continental philosophy (of the sort Leiter mocks). This is not the best way to make friends and influence people. Leiterites usually think that you've become stupid and continental philosophers usually don't want or need the help. Bon Scott actually sang about this kind of thing (with respect to the French reception of Speculative Realism in particular).
***Analytic work on "the affection argument" is a prime example of this. On contemporary interpretations, Kant is not making an error because he specifically talks about noumenal causation. No matter that on this interpretation Kant neither has much of anything worthwhile to say to Hume nor could be a motor of German idealism in the way understood by the German idealists. The tradition from the idealists through Jonathan Bennett, P.F. Strawson, Wilfrid Sellars (and McDowell and Brandom, who continue this) all interpreted Kant as saying philosophically interesting and important falsehoods. I can't for the life of me see how it's more charitable to save Kant from this rich tradition by systematically denuding his texts of philosophical interest. Of course contemporary Kant scholars don't for a second think that this is what they are doing. But this is only possible because of the typical analytic construal of philosophical problem space in a way that doesn't take seriously the German idealists added to a lack of appreciation for how the kind of radical semantic indeterminacy that yields equally supportable mutually inconsistent readings is characteristic of great philosophical texts.]
I often get weird looks with the wholly analytic MA, but Continental Ph.D. I specifically chose my route to try and overcome what everyone in Pittsburgh was going on about. Our Continental professor would bring us to the HPS center at Pitt, but he himself was educated at Duquesne. We didn’t understand what the big fuss was about that divided these two universities at the time.
What’s more, I have asked on occasion for Continental friends to tell me why I should embrace the historical/hermeneutic nature of understanding. In effect, I am asking for why I should accept the “thesis.” This is an alien move, one built upon arguing rather than simply interpreting texts to favor or find wisdom in them. I’ve always been dissatisfied with Heideggerians telling me that I need to embrace the historicity of understanding while they themselves assume their own phenomenological efforts sufficient to assume there’s a historical limit to the understanding.
For me, the contact or bridge-building is in the fact that some theses can be about what we experience or put an experience of something front and center. When that happens, one can dissolve the borders of what authors narratively say and what the thesis is. The concern with experience, however, can only work with phenomenology.
As for Babich, the second definition on offer above presupposes a lot. It is rather broad, and at that point, it’s only complicating matters, making them worse.
`In what follows, metaphysics is thought as the truth of what is as such in its entirety, and not as the doctrine of any particular thinker. Each thinker has at any given time his fundamental philosophical position within metaphysics. Therefore a particular metaphysics can be called by his name. However, according to what is here thought as the essence of metaphysics, that does not mean in any way that metaphysics at any given time is the accomplishment and possession of the thinker as a personality within the public framework of creative cultural activity.’ -Heidegger, `Nietzsche’s word: God is dead’
Thanks for the remarks. The remarks on Hegelianism and post-humanism in analytic philosophy were particularly interesting.
The claim that continental philosophy tends to be more figure-oriented, analytic more thesis-oriented, does a good job capturing the distinction as it plays out among ordinary practitioners of each kind of philosophy. But where arguably, the thesis or case-oriented character of analytic philosophy captures the practice of its most exemplary practitioners (e.g. Carnap, Quine, Kripke), the thinker-oriented characterization of continental philosophy only captures an exceedingly common way of falling away from the ideal, the reasons for which are aptly captured in the above quote. Thus, the characterization ends up pitting analytic philosophy at its most characteristic against a common failing of continental philosophy.
I take Dr. Babich to have intended to contrast the traditions at their most characteristic; and when Dr. Babich talks about continental philosophy `including a historical sense’, I’m sure she has something like the above quote in mind. There is certainly analytic work that does this, too (For me, Catarina Dutilh Novaes and E. J. Lowe come to mind). But this historical sense seems to be part of `ideal’ continental practice in a way that simply isn’t essential to analytic work (I say this even though my own work is now pretty squarely within analytic philosophy).
Ha! Thanks, that’s very nice and thought provoking. From what you write, I think it’s pretty plausible that I did the same thing that I worried that Babich was doing.
Re: Your mention of the “radical semantic indeterminacy” of the great works and analytic philosophy “doing the kind of thing Hegel invented.”
Here’s how I see things:
Hegel showed us that philosophy proceeds by preserving the truth of the theses and antitheses it sublates. Here, “truth” does not mean accuracy or correspondence with the way things are so much as it means depth or importance, and “thesis” does not mean a crisply articulable claim whose truth value is in question and for which we may adduce equally crisp claims as evidence so much as it means a deeply rooted world-picture defined by a complex of normative, epistemological, metaphysical, etc. commitments. Hegel shows us that to advance from a thesis to antithesis and to their sublation, philosophers need to assume that there is something deeply important about the views being sublated, and it is our job to find and preserve it as we go on.
But to do this, philosophers cannot assume a forensic attitude, automatically thinking there is something wrong and looking for it. Yet such an attitude is what analytic philosophy consists in. This forensic approach is one of assuming that a point of view can be exhausted as a series of propositions, the truth values of which are fixed but unknown or unsettled, and it’s up to us to figure out which ones are the false ones. But I take Hegel as showing us that, in fact, we should take the truth (importance, depth) as known, and consider the meaning of its articulations as unsettled — “radical semantic indeterminacy.” The meaning gets settled when we understand how the vocabulary or concepts that are used succeed in expressing the perspective’s deep importance. And it is only after appreciating this relationship — between the perspective and its conceptual manifestation — that limitations of the perspective or its expression come into view, in order to be overcome.
In Hegel’s eyes, that is, analytic philosophy does things backwards, or inside out, or . . . you get the picture.
I try to discuss some of the issues here: https://terenceblake.wordpress.com/2016/12/10/do-analytic-philosophers-have-continental-qualia-on-babette-babich-in-conversation-with-chris-bateman/
An honest question from an enthusiast and layperson…
Is there a such thing as “interdisciplinary philosophy?” If there isn’t, which I’m presuming there is not … is it for practical reasons?
I ask because from an “outside” point of view I can see an opportunity for some sort of interdisciplinary relationship between the different “types” of philosophy (analytic, continental, et al).
Of course there are differences, but do those differences need to be explicated? (Again, honest question).
Great stuff!
I quite like what you are saying about “the forensic approach” of assuming something is wrong and looking for it. This is why I’ve never found it very useful to give papers at APAs. The official story is that picking at each other’s papers allows us to instantiate Socratic dialectic and in some kind of bizarre evolutionary sense be part of getting closer to the truth. It certainly doesn’t work that way for me. My papers and books have only ever been helped by conversations with people who are basically sympathetic to the overall project and want to help it succeed. I think I’ve only ever been helpful to others when I have the same stance. I accept that the norms of discourse might be helpful for others beyond whatever rams get when they bash their heads into each other (assuming that’s helpful for the rams). But for lots of us it doesn’t.
Have you read Rober Brandom’s “Reason in Philosophy: Animating Ideas”? His account of the importance of Hegel vis a vis analytic philosophy is mutually illuminating with yours. For Brandom, the semantic tradition in analytic philosophy is committed to the “two-step” theory of meaning, where we confront a particular first and then, second, decide whether a universal/concept applies to the particular. While this picture is a fine idealization for all sorts of uses (such as formal logic and certain forms of computational implementation) it’s also profoundly misleading. In particular. Here are a few. It doesn’t explain how our interaction with particulars leads us to develop new concepts (this is related to what Badiou is worried about in Being and Event). Nor does it explain how concepts themselves have histories. Nor does it permit important varieties of conceptual indeterminacy. And it gives rise to McDowell’s version of the myth of the given, which is the failure to explain how non-conceptualized particulars could have normative force on us to make it the case that it is more or less correct to apply different concepts to them.
Hegel is so difficult in part because it just is difficult to think about thinking without the idealizations of the two step theory.
I would cavil a little bit at a few things you write though. First, I meant to say that all great works of philosophy exhibit a certain kind of indeterminacy in the sense that they permit mutually inconsistent yet deep interpretations. This is why (if humans continue to help matter become spirit) Kant will still be read two hundred years from now. The three critiques will continue to be such that radically different people find it productive to enter into conversation with them, and interpret them differently according to their needs. Analytic history of philosophy in effect idealizes this away. I think it’s a very helpful and probably often necessary idealization when producing an interpretation. But when you add it to the way the principle of charity operates in analytic history of philosophy, the results are often less than impressive. I don’t know why anyone should care about a Kant who has nothing interesting to say to Hume and who the German Idealists had nothing interesting to say to.
Second, at least by one understanding of the dialectic, I think Hegel would take analytic philosophy to be necessary. On one account the three stages are understanding, reason, and speculative. The first stage is where we naturally think of things in terms of the kind of idealizations that most analytic philosophers don’t take to be idealizations. We assume the laws of excluded middle and non-contradiction and forget about vagueness. We assume the two step theory of knowledge. This gets us in trouble and reason’s totalizing ability allows us to gain some cognizance of this trouble. This is all very Kantian so far. But Hegel does not think the Kantian pull back works and introduces speculation as the third moment.
The thing is though, as with Kant, this is just the way things work. We’ll never truly escape the hegemony of understanding. We can overcome it in particular cases, but as finite creatures we are always going to be forced to view large chunks of reality through it’s lenses. Because of this, I think that the proper Hegelian response is to view analytic philosophy as always part of the dialectic. We need philosophers of the understanding pushing self reflective forms of understanding as far as they can go. But I agree with you that there’s a real problem if this part is taken to be the whole.
Graham Harman differentiates analytic and continental philosophy in terms of analytics tending to assimilate philosophy to the natural sciences and continentals assimilating philosophy to the arts (including literature). Like all such divisions, there are important counterexamples and overlapping cases, but I think it’s basically correct about something. At least in caricature, early analytic philosophers wanted to be done with most of the history of philosophy. Strawson and Bennett and Sellars all killed this off because their deep engagement with Kant led them to do better analytic philosophy than anybody else. I think the moral of this is that philosophy of the understanding itself needs philosophers of speculation. Of course Kant didn’t think he was a philosopher of speculation, but I agree with the German Idealists that he was in spite of himself. For Hegelian reasons, same is true of the great analytic philosophers as well I think.
A thought: instead of “analytic philosophers do X and continental philosophers do Y”, wouldn’t it be more productive to think in terms of multiple traditions instantiating various concerns, priorities, methods, etc.?
It’s not that there is no distinction of traditions in philosophy, it’s that there are loads. I suppose you sometimes you see this noted in terms of ‘continental’ philosophy–it’s not Continental philosophy it’s hermeneutics/phenomenology/critical theory/german idealism/post-structuralism, or whatever. But it is usually assumed that there is an opposed, reasonably homogeneous analytic side of the coin. Why?
Of course, self-conceptions are important, even those that involve a little self-deception. And presumably the A/C distinction serves various disciplinary purposes (not to say psychological needs). And it may well be that there is a ‘core’ analytic tradition. But in trying to formulate an historically informed, critical conception of the philosophical tradition, why play that tune? (Who benefits?)
A lot of what’s being said in this thread is interesting, maybe even true, but deeply Procrustean. Or am I missing something?
Thanks for your thoughtful reply!
You’re right to see analytic philosophy as part of the dialectic. Thank you for the reminder. I was being unsubtle.
The problem with analytic philosophy, I take you to be saying, is not that it idealizes (see: bivalence, excluded middle, non-contradiction, self-identity, compositionality, atomism, etc.) but that it forgets, or simply fails to see, that its idealizations are idealizations. Every worldview must idealize in this way, or in other ways, but must also come to such a state of maturity that it sees the idealizations for what they are — but without discarding any insight the idealizations might express, or disparaging their fruitfulness in certain contexts. I think this is exactly right.
I think I see now where we differ regarding radical semantic indeterminacy. You see the great works as permitting mutually inconsistent but deep readings. I see the appearance of mutual inconsistency more as a manifestation of expressive limitations than as a manifestation of genuine disagreement. Correlatively, I see philosophical advances — say, from Hume to Kant to Hegel, or from one Putnam to another — more as expressive or expositional advances than as substantive ones. I know this looks crazy. But I have my reasons, which I won’t trot out here.
Thanks for the Brandom reference, by the way. I’ll check it out. I find much in Brandom that helps me articulate my sense of these things, but I often find his let’s-just-reverse-the-order-of-explanation approach too blunt. To my sensibilities, his approach is another version of the worldview that engenders the representationalism and compositionalism he wants to overturn. This worldview assumes that philosophical explanations (which we don’t have a good grip on) must be modeled on empirical ones (which we do have a good grip on), where the explanans and explanandum are intelligible independently of one another, externally and asymmetrically related. (Philosophical explanations — the thought runs — are like empirical ones, just on some other level or about some other elements.) Maddeningly, to my mind, Brandom seems to recognize his reliance on this model (see, for example, footnote 6 in his Introduction to Articulating Reasons), but he never explores what his project might look like if he were to shed this natural and understandably seductive but ultimately troublesome view.
http://onlyagame.typepad.com/only_a_game/2016/12/babich-and-bateman-3.html