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Bryan Cooke
Analytic – Continental Divide Conference Paper
Ladies and Gentleman,
Good Morning.
I’d like to begin as egregiously as possible. Specifically, I’d like to, if you’ll permit
me, disregard one of the indispensable rules of conference presentations. Specifically,
I’d like to begin by saying something about my audience -- about you – about those of
us who are gathered here today. I’d like to submit, that we the assembled roughly
divide into two camps. I do not, of course refer to our two Houses of contested
dignity: House Analytic and House Continental. Instead, I mean those who are
broadly interested in some sort of rapprochement between the two traditions just
mentioned and those for whom any such prospect would be a ruse, a distraction, a
chimera.
An ideal-typical reconstruction of the reasoning of the first camp might go something
like this. Today, there are “innumerable” signs that the analytic-continental divide is
fast becoming a fossil, an anachronism, a slightly embarrassing memory of the kind
you get when internecine conflicts have been long buried by a flurry of weddings and
drinking competitions. I was going to list some of these signs, at this point, but a
combination of time constraints and my not wanting to repeat what has been said by
the organizers restricts me to instead simply mentioning Robert Brandom; […] Jürgen
Habermas’s avuncular approval of Robrert Brandom; Habermas’s own inveterate
appreciation for Austin, Wittgenstein, Dewey, John Rawls amongst others. I could go
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on to say things about the respect shown to Heidegger, Gadamer, and Merleau-Ponty,
in pragmatic and pragmatic-naturalist approaches to the philosophies of both “mind”
and language; about the entire issue of the journal Mind that was dedicated to a book
by the French Wittgensteinian -- yes, indeed -- Vincent Descombes and finally, the
fact that even Alain Badiou (who I would otherwise rank just under J.G. Hamaan as
the least likely Continental philosopher to play apostle to the Analytics) has a serious
engagement with set theory that at least seems to testify to convergent interests in the
unlikeliest places.
Members of the rapprochement camp are marked, I think, by a tendency to see the
kind of things that I’ve just mentioned as breaches in whatever wall has hitherto
separated the two Schools. Of course, a belief in rapprochement need not be much
more than a belief in the possibility of a genuine dialogue between the two traditions
as opposed to an interminable Cold War. It does not mean a belief that the members
of the two Houses will actually come to agreement on any (let alone all) philosophical
questions. After all we would not expect this between members of the same tradition.
Such an agreement would be unprecedented in the history of philosophy and thus less
a rapprochement than a palace coup. But while rapprochement obviously does not
entail actual consensus between our Capulets and Montagues, the advocates of
rapprochement might give as a reason for why they looked forward to
“reconciliation” in something like the following thought: drivel, they might say, is
drivel; philosophy is philosophy. The former is common, the latter is rare; ergo, it
surely behooves philosophers of all stripes to work out a way to transcend their
idiolects and House Rules and to show solidarity in the face of a Common Enemy –-those who for whatever reason find “thinking” to be obnoxious.
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In contrast to this, the second audience-group, those who I will perhaps unfairly call
‘belligerents’ are for the most part of the opinion that any ‘overcoming’ of the divide
would be more “media-event” than event. For this camp, the apparent portents of
“reconciliation” aren’t much to write home about, unless you think that a bit of
mutual citation between eminences grises can be held to have sealed a rift that
otherwise makes a very good prima facie case for being a chasm. Thinking that
reconciliation comes so easily, according to this camp would be like thinking that
cross-cultural understanding reigned around the world because in some towns you can
get both hamburgers and kebabs.
One of the things that both groups have in common, is that they may both find
something cathartic in my attempt today to try to summarise some of the stereotypes
that each faction associates with the other. The ‘reconciliation’ camp will be able to
get a glimpse of how far we’ve come from the Bad Old Days when bigoted preconceptions reigned unchallenged. The ‘belligerent camp’, conversely, will be able to
think that at least someone articulated some of the reasons why no amount of Robert
Brandom would convince them to consort with the “other side.”
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Stereotypes
A humorous website facetiously claiming to disentangle the ‘non-philosophical’
meaning of words from their “philosophical” uses gives the “ordinary” sense of the
word “continental” as “juice, croissants, coffee” and in the opposite column the
“philosophical meaning” of ‘continental’ as “deconstructing the other”.
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When the reader cross-references the entry on “deconstructing the other” she finds
under the “ordinary meaning” a string of question marks, and under the
“philosophical meaning” a repetition of those same question marks.
As unrepresentative and devoid of serious taxonomical intentions as this website is:
these definitions are nonetheless, eloquent: Continental philosophy is defined here
principally by obscurity. Obscurity, we know, is at its worst the product of willful
obfuscation. And willful obfuscation means disguising vacuity with blather.
Assuming that this particular stereotypical trait is understood as ‘accidental’ rather
than ‘willful’ -- the first analytic stereotype of continental philosophy therefore has to
do with style or rather with the lack thereof.
Stereotypically, the writing (and speaking) style of the continental philosopher is
insufferably pretentious; the kind of portentous bombast that is always one
subordinate clause away from actual flatulence. I should note here that accompanying
the various stereotypes attending the divide is a pathos of betrayal. Thus, for my
stereotypically indignant analytic philosopher, all that is atrocious about continental
‘style’ is doubly-so because an Anglophone “continental” had the opportunity to
emulate the graceful prose of an Orwell, a Hazlitt, a Russell or a Mill. It is thus
especially perverse that anyone would instead opt for a barbaric mélange of Teutonic
portentousness, French hauteur and Italian cupidity that, for all that, doesn’t make any
sense. Of course, I invoke offensive national stereotypes advisedly, because we all
presumably know something of the role that these have played in the history of the
divide. Furthermore, the phenomenon of national stereotypes also raises one of the
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great problems that we encounter when trying to talk about the Divide. This is the
problem that something that might seem to mark the relationship between the two
Houses may actually play a more prominent role within a given tradition as opposed
to between the two. (Thus, on the topic of philosophical chauvinism we might
consider the alternately nugatory and villainous roles that Heidegger assigns to Pascal,
Descartes, and Montaigne in his history of philosophy.) Similarly, just because an
analytic deplores a continental for being abstruse, doesn’t mean that her fellow
‘contys’ can’t object to her all the more vehemently for the same reason.
2) Okay. So, if the first stereotype concerns style, and the stereotypes are supposed to
imply each other as moments in the “overall” stereotype -- the second stereotype
suggests that ‘continentals’, have an inherent weakness for “arguments from
authority.” This is not to say that continentals make arguments from authority
knowingly or with a good conscience. Everyone -- presumably, even a continental
philosopher is presumably aware that nothing is true or false simply by virtue of
having been said by St. Augustine. Nonetheless, something like a “continental”
weakness for authorities is a very important part of the negative stereotype of the
“Conti.” If a given Continental “X” knows de jure that arguments from authority are
invalid, the idea is that she nonetheless proceeds de facto as if she didn’t know this.
By peppering her prose with allusions to Mallarmé, Beckett, Dumezil’s anthropology,
cereal packets, movies and other detritus of the great shipwreck of Western culture –
she, despite her presumably good intentions loses anything resembling a coherent or
contestable argument.
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I would actually divide this point into two sub-sections 2a) and 2b). The first is what
Habermas’s Philosophical Discourse of Modernity calls “ leveling the distinction
between philosophy and literature.” By this, I mean at once an ostensibly unhealthy
focus on rhetoric as opposed to truth– something that Plato called sophistry -- and
second, a propensity to attract practitioners who have all the irritating traits of artists
(prima-donnaishness et cetera) without the redeeming capacity of producing the
occasional symphony.
(2c) The vulnerability to arguments for authority is also connected to another very
complicated piece of stereotyping concerned with the notion that there exists a
pernicious over-emphasis on history in the continental tradition. In his “What is
Analytic Philosophy”, Hermann Glock argues that the stereotype of ‘historicist’
continentals and ‘anti-historical’ analytics philosophy do not really stand up to
scrutiny. I do not have time to go into his argument here, except to say that it causes
me to think that the best way of expressing this stereotype, would be to say that
whatever a given analytic philosopher might think is the appropriate stance for a
philosopher to take towards history (and the history of philosophy) the continental
philosopher makes a mess of this because she does not have a stance towards history,
but is rather “embedded” in it. By “embedded”, I mean to deliberately recall the way
the Bush Administration’s use of this word to refer to the practice of placing
journalists in the midst of the U.S. military machine as it advanced on Iraq. I mean
thereby to invoke all the connotations this that this idea has of an intimacy that
precludes insight – the idea is that continental philosopher is so embroiled in her
historical-philological material that she lacks all objectivity and obstructs the
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emergence of all-important questions like: “is it true, are they right or just, does any
of this really mean anything?”
The combination of 1 + 2 can be used to derive “3”, which would be a lack of proper
respect for empirical data and the natural sciences.
4) A fourth, also prominent stereotype, connected to the last point would be, an
apparent tendency amongst continental philosophers to naïve relativism (in ethics as
much as epistemology) accompanied by a pig-headed refusal to see that this position
does not sit very comfortably with a state of constant though inarticulate moral
outrage. Continental philosophers, so this story goes, are like moths to the garish
light of ‘difference’ -- a word which, after all, they breathe like a mantra when they do
not capitalize like it had just won Abstract Noun of the Month for the third time
running.
5) The silliness of “stereotype four” flows into a fifth stereotype which holds that one
of the most frustrating things about Continental philosophy is that it espouses an
esoteric politics and a hermetic ethics. According to this stereotype, continental
philosophers talking about ethical or political matters mainly means these
philosophers aligning themselves with gnomic slogans such as the “the coming
community”, the “democracy-to-come”, to , “the irruption of the Messianic into fallen
time”, “the event” and other things which sound too nebulous to ever be challenged
on the grounds of coherence, meaningfulness, possible consequences or inherent
value, because they are simply too mysterious; too preposterously vague.
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Now, to the analytics:
If I started by saying that continental philosophy was stereotypically marked by
obfuscation plus vacuity, the equivalent ‘how to generate analytic philosophy’
algorithm could be expressed, I think, in the eyes of ‘continental discontents’ as the
combination of smugness with psychosis.
First, of all the most recalcitrant stereotype of the analytic philosopher is, alas,
something like that of an unreconstructed logical positivist. Obviously, this is a
particularly ridiculous stereotype -- one that couldn’t be held by anyone who’d heard
of Quine and so on. But because I am talking about stereotypes, the idea of the
‘positivist’ is a kind of launching pad for the more malicious image of the analytic
philosopher as a train-spotter, a bureaucrat of pure reason, a boffin who might be
useful if we ever needed to crack a top-secret German cipher– but who should
otherwise stick to cryptic crosswords.
This image is connected with what I’m calling analytic philosophy’s “psychosis” –
something that I know will be found preposterous for analytics who know the other
side from the pages of Capitalism and Schizophrenia – But this stereotype is
definitely one of the more prominent continental stereotypes of analytics.
Thus, by “psychosis”, I name what the accusing continental might describe as the
analytic philosopher’s habit of continuing to act as if the puzzles and language games
of analytic philosophy had some kind of purchase on the world around them. In her
malice, the stereotyping continental philosopher would point out the egregious
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analytic habit of acting as if no statement were meaningful, that had not been either
positioned with regards to or (worse) translated into the terms of one of the
innumerable analytic debates. Thus, everything must be realist or anti-realist,
consequentialist, or non-consequentialist, some ism, contra some other ism, as if these
‘isms’ could between them carve the world at its joints.
2) It may also surprise analytic philosophers that their brethern also accuse them (at
least in stereotype-land) of a weakness with regards to authority. This weakness is
allegedly manifest in one of two ways. The first, refers to the previous stereotype –a
disavowed, but nonetheless continuous and irrational deference to the way other
analytic philosophers have framed a given problem or text and 2b) through a
disingenuous tendency to invoke some extremely authoritative authorities (natural
science, logic) as if the authoritative sheen of these things were naturally conferred on
the arguments of anyone who claimed to take them seriously enough or who invoked
them with sufficient regularity, in other words: analytic philosophers. Thus, in a
stereotypical scenario, a continental philosopher who ventures a disagreement with
her analytic opponent on say, epistemology, will be “refuted” not so much by a
counter-argument as by the analytic’s haughty pronouncement that she believes in
reason, actually and not in crystal magic or flying teapots.
Related to this, is Stereotype 3) An insensitivity to differences and to context (broadly:
hermeneutic insensitivity). This is of course, in a sense, a complimentary stereotype
to the one that continental philosophers are obsessed with difference to the point of
silly relativism. By this stereotype an analytic philosopher will assume that Fichte
must be saying the same thing as Bishop Berkley because in her understandable
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eagerness to get to the nitty gritty – to the “who is right?” question she is happy to
neglect what either party actually says, along with questions of what it might take to
understand or translate an alien metaphysical idiom into a more familiar one.
(This stereotype ignores Davidson)
Fourth, for continental philosophers, analytic philosophy suffers from its own
embeddedness -- one that parallels the apparent continental embeddedness within
history/cultural discourses that I mentioned earlier. But instead of being embedded in
an historical-cultural context, the stereotypical analytic philosopher is “embedded”
either in ordinary language, or with a given analytic metalanguage – in a way that
prevents her from taking a properly Socratic, critical distance from the contents and
structure of this language. In this way, analytic philosophy betrays the Socratic
imperative to call our way of talking/thinking about things into question – (something
that quietists are obviously proud of) which is a similar accusation to the one the
analytic makes to the continental viz. her embroilment in “texts and contexts”. What
is obscured is whether any of these ways of speaking, acting, thinking are good, true,
worthy of being used et cetera.
Having run through these, we now face the question: what is to be done with these
stereotypes? Can they be discarded? If so, at what cost? Are their babies swimming
around in this potentially bigoted bathwater? In order to answer these questions, I
will now hand over to Dr. Rathbone, along with the question: what is a stereotype?