• thewonder
    1.4k
    So, I'm not entirely sure that I buy that there exist two ideological camps, one with an emphasis in reason and another in subjectivity, that are thought to be mutually exclusive and incompatible. The distinction between Analytic and Continental Philosophy fails to take into consideration the decisive influence that empiricism had to play within the development of Analytic Philosophy and the obvious influence that Immanuel Kant had upon the Enlightenment. The geographical distinctions begin to make less and less sense considering that Kant is, to this very day, one of the world's most renowned German philosophers. Presenting the debate as between reason and subjectivity also seems to be a way of more or less blanketly characterizing so-called "Continental" philosophers as being somehow irrational, if not guilty of some form of individuated solipsism.

    I also just simply do not believe for it to be a philosophical dispute at all. There does not seem to be an intellectual distinction between schools of thought centered around Great Britain and Germany; There does, however, seem to be a political distinction between schools of thought centered around the United States and the United Kingdom and France.

    The easiest target for Analytic Philosophers is Jean-Paul Sartre. Despite never being required to account for the political misadventures or details of the personal life of any other philosopher, everything that Sartre has ever said, done, or been accused of is expected to be accounted for. I, too, have qualms with Sartre, but there seems to be a quite clear double-standard. No philosopher, in any given context, is ever expected to prove that they aren't somehow anti-democratic because of their willingness to discuss Plato's Republic. In any given conversation about Sartre, however, you will be expected, first, to prove that you are not a Fascist collaborator and, then, that you have no sympathy for the French Communist Party, of which, to my knowledge, Sartre was only briefly affiliated with and even later renounced.

    From the critique of Sartre, what, then, seems to generate is a tacit disdain for the French. French intellectuals become blanketly characterized as celebrating the guillotine, fanatically communist, prone to political violence, and afflicted by what is not, but is often called "malaise", namely an incapacity to cope with human relations without resorting to excessive psychological manipulation or polemical verbal onslaughts, an effective caricature of a left-wing woman.

    The Paris 8 does happen to be a university of some notoriety and not one, at that, completely without warrant. The characterization of all of so-called "French theory" as such, however, is indicative of an odd kind of chauvinism, one that harkens back to wars that only British historians still care to discuss, anti-French resentment, philosophical intransigence, a near complete and total failure to have considered the occupation during the Second World War, what is often American militarism, reactionary, in the sense of being prone to overreact to ideas outside of a person's chosen philosophy and not necessarily in the sense that communists call anything that they don't believe to be authentically communist to be "reactionary", Christian moralism, and a willingness, particularly on the part of certain Ivy League types within the upper class or even the patriciate, to use a philosophy as a whipping post.

    So-called "Analytic" and "Continental" Philosophy have nothing to do with a preference for reason or subjectivity and everything to do with neoconservatism, neoliberalism, crypto-Fascism, the aristocracy in the United Kingdom, American exceptionalism, communism, and the cult pathology engendered by its many failed attempts at recuperation. It's exclusively a political dispute that makes little to no sense, considering that Bertrand Russell, the founder of Analytic Philosophy, happened to be a socialist and a pacifist. Anymore, it's really kind of just a lot of boarding school habits left unchecked on the part of certain kinds of men of wealth, status, and power in the United States and the United Kingdom.

    It's an entirely pointless debate that, seeing that we don't still live during the Cold War, has little to no reason to any longer exist.
  • thewonder
    1.4k
    To add to this just a bit, perhaps you can say that there is such a thing as Analytic Philosophy. The supposed "Continental" Philosophy is nothing more than an empty signifier. When a philosophical category includes both Friedrich Nietzsche and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel it can no longer be held to have any meaning whatsoever.
  • Joshs
    5.2k
    The think the Continental-Analytic distinction is useful to the same extent as the science-philosophy distinction. Both point to a difference in style of approach to complex questions about the world. Analytic approaches , having emerged in close proximity to the fields of logic, mathematics and empirical science, share with those disciplines a conventionalized way of thinking that leaves its most fundamental
    presuppositions implied rather
    than explicitly articulated. Continental
    philosophy , on the other hand , likes to dig as deep as possible beneath all presuppositions , and to synthetically connect as many aspects of culture as possible within an overarching model. So it probes deeper and wider than its analytic counterpart.
  • thewonder
    1.4k

    Eh, perhaps, but I still suspect for the whole idea of Continental Philosophy just to be a way for some philosophers to get everyone whom they disagree with in the same boat.
  • Wayfarer
    20.6k
    Excellent OP, almost an article in its own right. Have a read of this review about Gilbert Ryle’s influence on the purported split between the two schools (if indeed they are that).

    A minor quibble - I think what the phenomenological approach is recognising is not subjectivity as such, but to the sense in which the first person perspective is essential to philosophy proper. That, I think, goes back mainly to Husserl, but ultimately also to Kant. But one of the reasons Anglosphere philosophy diverged from European was because of Kant’s idealist successors.
  • 180 Proof
    14k
    Once-fashionable academic ghettos (1914-1989):

    The "analytical tradition" tends to reduce philosophy down to either formal/natural science or formal/natural grammar. ('Missing the forest for the trees' as the raison d'etre :point: Means without critical ends )

    The "continental tradition" tends to inflate both socioeconomic history and discursive relativism into philosophical balloons. (To the c/literati 'everything' looks like text ... :meh: ... Ends without rigorous means.)

    Why? IMO, via heavily state-funded academes, to paralyze generations of the symbolic proletariat in the West until they (we) became thoroughly coopted by and gang-pressed into "Culture Industry" mandarins for accelerating the pacification of the (de-industralizing, de-mobilizing) proletarian devolution of the masses into precariat.
  • Olivier5
    6.2k
    Eh, perhaps, but I still suspect for the whole idea of Continental Philosophy just to be a way for some philosophers to get everyone whom they disagree with in the same boat.thewonder

    Yes, it's a one-size-fits-all xenonym meaning "not from these parts". Like "continental breakfast".
  • Ciceronianus
    2.9k
    When a philosophical category includes both Friedrich Nietzsche and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel it can no longer be held to have any meaning whatsoever.thewonder

    Substitute "philosophy" for "a philosophical category" and you may come to the same conclusion.
  • thewonder
    1.4k

    This is great!

    To give the opposition some ground, though, I have noticed that "Analytic" philosophers tend to be fairly denotative and that "Continental" philosophers tend to be fairly connotative. Take Bertrand Russell's "On Denoting" and Albert Camus's The Myth of Sisyphus, for example. Russell clearly is speaking of denotations in a very explicit manner. Camus spends the entire text speaking of "the Absurd" without ever really delineating what it is. On some level, I think that this was done to leave it open for interpretation, but I do kind of wonder as to whether it isn't so that "the Absurd" can refer to whatever Camus so desires.

    Anyways, what I wonder about all of this is as to whether it doesn't actually have something to do with the linguistic differences between English and German.

    There are obvious cultural differences between England and Germany, aside from that it probably difficult to separate language and culture in this sense, as well as that I happen to know next to nothing about linguistics, but I wonder if, engaging in some sort of pure linguistic analysis, you wouldn't find more of an emphasis on inference in German and more an emphasis on clarity in English. If anyone does happen to be a linguist, I think that this could, perhaps, be done by analyzing Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Sir Issac Newton's delineation of calculus.
  • invizzy
    149
    The way I’ve always felt about the distinction (and it sure feels real when you’re an analytic philosopher, perhaps less so for people the analytics call ‘continental’ or who use the dreaded ‘straddling the two traditions’) is that analytic philosophy attempts to get at law-like relations that are ALWAYS true. Continental philosophy is much more comfortable with things being often true or generally true (or true for some people) or fact there no such THING as ‘always true’.

    I admit though that such a law-like distinction is itself an attempt at analytic philosophy and might rankle some!
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