By Jon Cogburn
I'm still processing the interesting comments on my post about Babette Babich's views about the analytic/continental split.* As is often the case, J. Edward Hackett's intervention (first comment on the thread) has been quietly gnawing at me (albeit not in an unpleasant way) for a few days now. This morning I figured out what was so interesting about it.
After noting that as a student he didn't see the radical difference between what people were doing at Dusquene and at the Pittsburgh History and Philosophy of Science center, Hackett brings up a challenge he would make to some of his continental friends:
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.
This is a really interesting contrast. Forgive me for engaging in chiasmus, but I think it can be expressed as that between the historicity of understanding and the understanding of historicity. Hackett's continental friends, following late Heidegger's historicist anti-foundationalism, assailed analytic philosophers for treating understanding as somehow outside of history.
Hackett responded with a tu quoque of the sort that German Idealists made against Kantians and that Graham Priest explores in much of his work. To the extent that the thesis isn't a vacuous triviality (a common problem with such claims), doesn't the very act of making an argument that all understanding is historical require placing ones' own understanding outside of history? For even enunciating the thesis requires talking about all possible understanding and history itself. The problem is that the kind of admonition that Hackett was facing only makes sense if the horizon of "history" plays something like the limiting role that the phenomenal realm did for Kantians (either with respect to knowledge or, as the strong correlationist has it, meaningfulness). But if history really does play such a role then the continental admonisher cannot herself either claim to know or even articulate what is wrong with analytic philosophy. For to claim that someone has transcended a limit is to transcend that very limit.
Moreover, Hackett's point is interestingly related to the early Schelling's distinction between natural and transcendental philosophy. Transcendental philosophers tried to derive a philosophy of nature from the powers of the transcendental subject to cognize. Schelling argued that one must also derive the transcendental subject from the philosophy of nature. This latter project would show how the subject arises out of nature.
What's weird is that the analytic/continental split tends to split both ways along these lines. With Schelling's nature philosophy, continentals tend to be historicist, rejecting the a prioristic nature of transcendental philosophy. This is what Hackett faced with his graduate school interactions with Heideggerians. But, against Schelling's nature philosophy, they tend to be such radical anti-naturalists that they have a difficult time making sense of the non-anthropocene except in terms of how it relates to the human. Quentin Meillassoux's After Finitude cannot be understood unless you have a sense of the tension between these two tendencies. Meillassoux himself ends up making a point very similar to Hackett's. If everything is historically situated then the transcendental subject itself is historically situated, but then we must be able to talk about a history that transcends the transcendental subject. Though he doesn't invoke Schelling, Meillassoux presents "correlationism" as an unstable mixture of transcendental and nature philosophy.
On the other hand. Analytic philosophers tend to be naturalists, but also are much more comfortable themselves using a prioristic methods that (at least according to a tradition that includes Schelling, Nietzsche, C.S. Lewis, John McDowell, and Alvin Plantinga) which naturalism seeming cannot justify.
Schelling's middle period of identity philosophy was an attempt to articulate a position that would justify both transcendental and naturalistic reasoning. If we replace "naturalistic" with "historical" we can see how J. Ed Hackett would have phenomenology play a similar role. He continues the above with:
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.
I would amend this by insisting on another Schellingian maneuver,** one recapitulated by Graham Harman's appropriations of Husserl and Heidegger. That is, once the transcendental self is understood as a thing in the world, then it is clear that phenomenology is the metaphysics of the self. Then the extent to which one is anti-anthropocentric will be exactly the extent to which one's phenomenology can be mined for a guerilla metaphysics. Schelling, of course, wasn't content to stop there, as this speculative maneuver was the basis of his argument for the existence of an autonomous nature philosophy, which identity philosophy later had to reconcile with transcendental philosophy. But identity philosophy itself was a failure. Perhaps the speculative maneuver is in itself enough to reconcile the transcendental and the natural, or as in Hackett's case, the transcendental and the historical.
[*If grading hadn't intervened, I would have responded to all of the comments by now. Barring other similarly unpleasant interventions, I should be caught up with fun stuff like this in the next few days!
**FWIW I think that Schopenhauer actually does a better job than Schelling at this. Phenomenology reveals that the self is will. But then since the self is in the world we can conclude, contra Hume's arguments against this very thing, will is in the world.]
why be anti-anthropocentric? why not embrace the kind of pragmatism/hermeneutics-of-not-knowing laid out by folks like Isabelle Stengers, Paul Rabinow, Keller Easterling, and John Caputo?
“What if the unknowable was not simply a blank to be filled or a defect to be rectified, but instead, an inescapable facet of everyday existence, which continually regenerates itself as we attempt to know and interact with the world?”
https://syntheticzero.net/2016/11/17/andy-pickering-on-cybernetics-unknowability-politics/
“That is, once the transcendental self is understood as a thing in the world, then it is clear that phenomenology is the metaphysics of the self.”
That sounds like a paraphrase of some aspects of Being and Time or a precis of the movement from Husserl to Heidegger…
I read through Babich’s interview with some mixture of loss and frustration, I have to admit. In the first instance, there’s a genuine sense that the ‘minority’ position that continental philosophy occupies within the discipline places undue burdens on continental philosophers in ways that we would expect (even as we recognize it should not be this way). Just a few examples, to ground the discussion: I’ve been told on numerous occasions that if I were ‘serious’ about a philosophical issue I was broaching, I would approach it in a more ‘rigourous’ way. And I’ve seen grad students told that their work on an aspect of continental philosophy is too abstract and technical for the audience to follow, while no one bats an eye at the bayesians, nonmonotonic logicians, or decision theorists discussing the problems that keep them up at night. I’ve had good natured and genuinely well-meaning colleagues ask me why they should care about my work in continental philosophy, while simultaneously insisting that I explain it in a manner they understand and are comfortable with. Without wishing to compare or claim equal status/standing with anyone, working in continental philosophy does seem to follow a similar pattern: to be considered equal with folks working in the mainstream, one needs to be twice as good — one needs to master one’s own area, and become competent enough in the mainstream work to code switch or pass.
Add to this the kind of cherry picking that Babich gestures towards — to take one example: Dreyfus reads Heidegger’s B&T in terms of certain pragmatist concerns while jettisoning all of Division II of B&T as incoherent (since it problematizes his focus) — and it’s hard not to feel discouraged at the state of things. On any number of issues (enactivism, inferentialism, semantic relativism, epistemic and hermeneutical injustice….) the mainstream turns to ‘continental philosophy’ ‘as a source of inspiration or as providing a first pass to be ‘precisified’ through various formal techniques, while dismissing contemporary continental philosophers as unrigorous or not serious enough….
How heartbreaking, then, to see Babich turn on other continental philosophers whom she considers ‘closeted analytic philosophers’! I’m one of those philosopher’s who self-identifies as ‘continental’ but I am certain (based on personal interaction, no less) that Babich would call me an analytic wolf who’s fleeced a continentalist. What’s so heartbreaking is that she just seems to embrace the ghettoization of continental philosophy, while disparaging those who have put in the hard work to learn to talk to their philosophical neighbours (and develop enough skin to overlook or accept the infelicities in conversation)
Let me be clear: I don’t begrudge her a philosophical disagreement in approach — I honestly believe that thousands of flowers should bloom. What makes me feel so despondent is that she resolutely refuses to accept that continental philosophy is actually done in many voices, many languages, and not primarily the ones she prefers. My sense is that she’s fallen prey to her own ‘no true Scotsman’ fallacy here: failure to satisfy a criterion she takes to be essential is sufficient to be an analytic philosopher in disguise. This feels like the equivalent of calling someone a Philosophical Oreo. But I see no reason to believe that she has any more authority over what counts as continental philosophy than I do, or Taylor Carmen, etc. Not only is it silly to insist on such an idea, it further marginalizes folks working in continental philosophy: now they are neither analytic (because, you know, they aren’t rigorous enough, speak funny, and in foreign languages, etc.) nor are they accepted as continental philosophers (because they deign to try to persuade people that there’s something rich and important in their area — because they try to leave a ghetto that their philosophical parents once resented but now find very comfortable indeed).
Sadness all around, I’d say. Had Babich pointed out that one of the things that continental philosophy is truly great at is experimentation, at connecting the act of thinking with all those things that go along with it, the emotional rhythms and drives, had she gestured towards what really is on the verge of extinction (philosophical experimentation, the effort to synthesize various object domains or approaches, and the risk taking all this involves), I would have been happy. I would have embraced her ‘historical sense’ if she’d gestured towards the way ‘history’ makes the analytic philosopher’s appeal to ‘intuition’ philosophically respectable. I would have supported the idea that philosophy has an open horizon where more is possible than what we can currently see. What we got instead was an insistence that what was done in the past was good and valuable. But a great deal of practices that were once good and valuable don’t continue; sometimes because they’ve yielded better and more valuable things; sometimes because something changes and the once good and valuable no longer is. If there’s something to talk about, it would be these kinds of questions — especially if the great things come from experimentation: repeating the experimental process ad nauseam will cease to be interesting after all, especially when the outcomes (both the failures and the successes) have been well internalized.
off the soapbox. hopefully someone finds something halfway interesting here….
As I am the inspiration of this post, I have made these comments in passing, and have faced this switch-hitting status multiple times. Now, I don’t care as I am more influenced by those concerns in pragmatism that one can work out in either American or Continental. I mostly prefer the American philosophical label, and if I were to die tomorrow, I would like to be known as a pragmatic phenomenologist more than someone who works in Continental. Anominal is absolutely right. Too clear for the continentatlist, too un-rigorous for the analytic. It’s a very sad state of affairs.
I must say, however, after publishing “Phenomenology for the 21st Century,” I have embraced this divide-fence-sitting. I finally made up my mind what phenomenology is. It’s a refinement procedure to get at intuitions of the intentional relationship. For me, this embraces both a cognitivism and non-naturalism about the irreducible contents in experience. Phenomenology leads to a form of epistemic intuitionism. There, I said it. I feel much better now. Now, I can relax because I do not think this is strange to say though it certainly doesn’t sit well with other CP purists. I do not think that employing the resources of W. D. Ross about moral experience is a bad thing or that Ross can be made consistent with Scheler.
I’m pragmatically committed to the existence of a transcendental subject, too. I’ll get flack for that later. Time to enjoy the holidays.
sympathetic to most of this except the bit about Bert and the enactivists and all, I’m with Rorty here (pace Heidegger/ians) that there is much public value in the institutionalizing/instrumentalizing (bastardizing even) of more avant-garde ventures and that most of us will be such under-laborers, also not sure what we are to test much of continental philo against?
https://syntheticzero.net/2014/05/30/avital-ronell-on-the-test-drive/
My Dreyfus remark was bound to raise an eyebrow. In any event, you’re right to point out that he has done more to make phenomenology a vital contributor to a number of discussions than anyone else I can think of (off the top of my head of course). Still, it’s odd to realize that his interpretation and subsequent engagement with phenomenological motifs is really based on about 150 pages of a 400 page book (and not even the most interesting 150 pages!), especially when most of us encounter Dreyfus’ work as extended commentary on B&T.
I think your question about what touchstone to test continental philosophy against is exactly the right one. I don’t have an aster for it, myself. But I’m pretty sure that performing the same old rituals and observing the shibboleths of older generations isn’t it.
“performing the same old rituals and observing the shibboleths of older generations isn’t it.” indeed, Bert clearly is in some sense working against Heidegger (who would likely see such pragmatism as ‘mere anthropology’), as say Manuel DeLanda is working against Deleuze, but as with works by folks like Malabou at some point I think we need to get off the page/screen and test these proto-types in the 3D world which pushes back (if you will).
part of why I’m attracted to folks like Paul Rabinow, Isabelle Stengers, Annemarie Mol and all who take their work out into the field.
as for “he most interesting…pages” I guess the proof is in the pudding what effects/assemblages can we make of such materials?
Love the ageism.
And Jon Cogburn’s cats!
What cats? What ageism?
I would be interested in hearing your response, Babette. Truly. Especially since I’m happy to learn from my mistakes or to think through an issue more carefully than I might have done otherwise. But I usually find ”hit and run’ comments like the one posted in your name above to be more mystifiying than instructive.
A brilliant piece