What Can Analytic and Continental Philosophers Learn From Each Other? (part 3 of 5)
what does "continental philosophy" actually mean?
This is the third portion of the invited talk I gave at Virginia Commonwealth University to their Philosophy Club in 2016. The topic I was invited to address was the question in the title. You can watch or listen to the full talk in the videorecording. The talk itself runs nearly two hours, so I am breaking the transcript up into multiple parts, which I will post here sequentially. You can also read the already published first and second parts of the transcript of the talk.
What about continental philosophy? I don’t think there is any such thing as “continental philosophy” in a strict sense myself, because there isn’t one single coherent perspective to it. And I will admit too, that there is what we could call a “continental schtick” or a “repertoire”, if you go in some continental circles, or read certain journals. It’s not just confined to students, but often found among some professors, where they just use some jargon, invoke some key doctrines.
It used to be very popular, when I was a graduate student, that we had to “deconstruct” everything. Now it’s much more in terms of “rhizome,” and if you ask people “what does that mean?” they’ll tell you about grass and roots but there isn’t a lot there. There are some people who do it really well. Those people are pretty rare. There’s a lot more people just talking about this sort of stuff than doing something I would say that’s very rigorous.
Historically I would say the existence of what we call “continental philosophy” is the product of a history, prior to analytic philosophy attaining dominance in Britain and America. There used to be a lot of interaction and influence between French- and German- and English-speaking philosophical circles. You can see this reflected in — just look at you know correspondence between people like [William] James and [Henri] Bergson for an example. Then there was also a stronger focus on figures in the history of philosophy. So that allowed kind of a shared formation, you could say, or a shared set of reference points.
But with the rise of analytic philosophy in Britain and the United States, there was much less of that. There was a tendency to set aside non-analytic philosophers as sort of unimportant, as merely “historical,” as not really philosophy but something masquerading as philosophy. Ryle was a great example of making those sort of claims, as he engaged in an attempt to try to have a dialogue with with continental philosophers.
Continental Philosophy As Alternative To Analytic
The newer continental thought made its way into the American academic scene in significant part through two main sources. One was Catholic schools, because there’d been a long-standing connection. Some of them have gone analytic. Many of them went analytic fairly late. And then also sort of radical schools like the New School in New York, right?
Eventually in 1962 you see the Society for Phenomenological and Existential Philosophy being created as sort of a counterweight to the APA [American Philosophical Association], which was felt to be so analytic, and so hostile to continental philosophy, that they wanted to have their own space. I’m not sure that was really the case. You know, looking back at it historically, there were still panels on on people in the continental tradition at the APA. And I’m not sure that that’s really the the case quite so much today.
But there was for a while kind of this this rivalry, and there ends up being sort of — this goes to why [continental philosophy] would be more oriented with literature, and with other humanities fields or studies fields right — there’s a lot of interconnections and overlaps with other movements, like Marxism, Feminism, Africana philosophy. And there’s a lot of tie-ins with with other fields as well.
So what ends up developing is a kind of sense of opposition, of being an alternative. Philosophy being in a crisis. And the analytics are not doing a good job with philosophy. They’re actually maybe doing anti-philosophy. This is the kind of stuff people talked about quite a bit when I was in graduate school. And the idea was that, by doing continental philosophy, you were doing something that was restoring philosophy to what it was supposed to be.
Continental philosophy — as as we understand it here — is really, I would say, more of an Anglo-American thing than what actually happens in Europe. It’s a pretty selective cross-section of European philosophy, leaving out a lot of contemporary people who aren’t fitting into that vein historically. Even with that, even with confining it like that, I still don’t think there’s an internal coherence to it. I think it’s more something defined by opposition to analytic philosophy — because we can say that there are a lot of different approaches within continental philosophy.
Different Ways To Identify Continental Philosophy
It used to be that we would talk in terms of “the three Hs of phenomenology.” Who would those be? Three H guys. . .
Audience Member: Husserl, Heidegger, and Hegel.
Yeah — very good! And now if you if you actually read them you find out that they mean very different things by phenomenology. Even Heidegger and Husserl, there’s a huge difference between them, and in their approach.
Another way that we would talk about it sometimes is as the “hermeneutics of suspicion.” Paul Ricoeur came up with this this great phrase, and he said that continental philosophy has an attitude of suspicion, of de-masking — you know, pulling back the veil from things. And so he talked about Marx doing so with economic life, Freud doing so with desire and sexuality, Nietzsche doing so with power, and and all sorts of other things.
Another way you might think about it is — I don’t know if you’ve any of you have ever seen Richard Kearney’s pretty decent Continental Philosophy Reader. Have any of you ever seen that in a bookstore? It’s kind of a standard text for for continental philosophy classes, and it covers the 20th century. So he divides it into three main groups.
From phenomenology to hermeneutics. There is historically a continuity there, starting out with Husserl going to Ricoeur — there’s some some continuity, although he leaves out quite a few of the people who would fit in there.
marxism to critical theory — okay that makes sense too if you know what you know what those are teaching.
And then from structuralism to deconstruction. That’s the kitchen sink or the the junk drawer, rather.
You know, the junk drawer, it’s a miscellaneous drawer. Anytime you have a classification — or those of you who do budgets, I don’t have to tell any of you who actually do budgets, always have a miscellaneous expenses category because everything that you can’t fit into the other ones, that goes in there right? That’s that category, “structuralism to deconstruction” That’s everybody from De Saussure to Derrida, and a whole bunch of other people in between who don’t really have much in common with each other methodologically. A lot ends up being left out in any attempt to corral in figures that we take to be continental philosophy.
Specialization In Sub-Areas of Continental
It’s also important to point out that there while there are some philosophers who place themselves in, you know, they self-identify as continental philosophers and they can say very well informed things about and applying the key ideas and approaches of many of the canonical thinkers — that’s a tough task. It’s very difficult to survey the field of even “official,” we might call it, official continental philosophy, and to be proficient in all those thinkers. So it’s more the exception than the rule. There tends to be a lot of specialization among continental philosophers. And it’s similar in analytic philosophy, right? People specialize in this area rather than that area.
In this case, it’s more often in terms of texts and thinkers. So somebody might, for example, say that they’re a phenomenologist. And they focus on Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. And they’ll know some basic ideas of Heidegger and Sartre and Levinas and Marion, because those are people that you’re probably going to have to teach, and people still talk about. But they will never have read more than snippets of other major phenomenologists. There’s you know quite a big literature on Max Scheler, or Edith Stein, or Gabriel Marcel, or Dietrich von Hildenbrand, just to name a few.
Now that’s just in phenomenology! That’s not even talking about, say hermeneutics or psychoanalytic theory, or you know we can add more and more and more. There’s a lot of this this specialization. Some people even just specialize in one text of a major thinker. You know “I only work on on this later work of Heidegger — don’t ask me about Being and Time.”
Continental Philosophy and History
So I’d like to point out that within this wide spectrum that we’re defining as continental philosophy, there’s some really varied attitudes towards philosophy’s history.
Some of these thinkers just seem to mine the past thinkers and texts for ideas. They strip them out of their context. They’re only interested in them insofar as they’re part of some, you might say, liberatory agenda. Gilles Deleuze is a great example of somebody like that.
I would say some situate their own work through some really serious and thoughtful engagement in their continuity with past thinkers. Somebody who’s a contemporary example of that would be Giorgio Agamben, if you’ve ever read his stuff. When he teaches classes, he’s teaching Aristotle and Augustine, Hobbes a lot — he places his thought in continuity with the past.
Some see the past thought as something to overcome. Heidegger you could say saw things that way
We should also point out too, that there’s a lot of crosstalk and critique among continental thinkers. They can often be tougher on each other than they are towards any analytic because it’s sort of like a family battle.
Conclusion (For This Part)
So is there any sort of essence that we can point to as “continental philosophy”? I don’t think so. I mean, do you? Did you, after all those sort of talking points, see anything in there that we could find as an essence, or maybe even a characterization?
Everyone knows about Wittgenstein and family resemblance, right? Games — there’s lots of different kinds of games. That’s the closest we’re going to come to for what continental philosophy counts as. So I don’t know that this chart is actually that useful in some respects.
That’s the end of the third portion of my talk. I hope you found it interesting, informative, and thought-provoking.
Gregory Sadler is the president of ReasonIO, a speaker, writer, and producer of popular YouTube videos on philosophy. He is co-host of the radio show Wisdom for Life, and producer of the Sadler’s Lectures podcast. You can request short personalized videos at his Cameo page. If you’d like to take online classes with him, check out the Study With Sadler Academy.