Amateur reflections on analytic v. continental

Jason has forbidden me in no uncertain terms from any commentary at all on his last post, which is a shame because as a non-philosopher I found it very entertaining. Some of us live in desirable locations, others in undesirable locations, but you know, in a deeper sense we’re all brothers and sisters. Can’t we all just get along?

I’m going to indulge myself here and do the undergrad philosophy-major thing, which all you professionals are probably going to find about as much fun as being trapped next to someone on an airplane telling you all about their “philosophy of life”. Leave now, you’ve been warned. Anyway, I think there is something to the standard division between a humanistic “wisdom tradition” and a “scientific tradition” in philosophy. There is one sense in which philosophy has historically been about “the meaning of life” – what values are or should be most central to how we live – and another sense in which it’s been about how best to describe the world. It’s the difference between culture creation and knowledge production. That humanistic/scientific distinction maps in a way onto at least the clichéd version of the analytic/continental division.

The gap between these traditions was bridged for a very long time by belief systems like Platonism, Christianity (not to mention various forms of displaced Christianity) that essentially claimed that “the truth will set you free” – contemplation of truth was the highest way of life, or at least supported the best way of life. There was an assumed harmony between truth and virtue.

The downfall of that synthesis with the advance of natural science is well known, no need to rehearse details. But I want to focus on Nietzsche in particular. Partly because I just know him somewhat better than other philosophers (not saying much). Partly because I want to use him as a sort of “type” of the continental philosophical tradition (probably unfair, but if you can’t wing it a little than what’s the point of blogs?).

Nietzsche of course makes a ferocious attack on traditional connections between truth and virtue. He wants to debunk both metaphysics and morality as destructive forms of wishful thinking born of the desire to see our particular psychology reflected in or ratified by nature. In that sense there are almost a few similarities to some variants of positivism. But Nietzsche does this in the name of a “humanist” vision of philosophy. The purpose of philosophy in Nietzsche is to create culture, not to produce knowledge. He does I think find it necessary to have particular sorts of (true) knowledge (say about human psychology) in order to effectively create healthy cultures. But that is knowledge in the service of culture, not the other way around. And of course he famously also claims that certain kinds of falsehoods or lies are psychologically necessary to the creation of healthy culture. I don’t think Nietzsche denies the truth of science, or the utility of science. His writing is full of what I think he considers empirically true and in their own way scientific claims (again, particularly about psychology, or perhaps more properly physiology). He simply thinks it’s not the point. He is indeed rather explicit in “Beyond Good and Evil” that science makes bad culture, in the sense that scientists themselves are not “noble”, not the kind of higher man Nietzsche is concerned with influencing or creating or speaking to. (He identified scientists with not just natural scientists but humanities scholars in general, e.g. philologists, historians, etc. In terms of their institutional role anyway these were the analytic philosophers of his day).

One can also point in the same book to his hilarious attack on the British empiricists. He doesn't really criticize them for being *wrong*, but for being uncultured…my translation has him railing about the “English-mechanistic doltification of the world”, “what is lacking in England…real power of spirituality, real profundity of spiritual perception; in brief, philosophy”. Show me the analytic philosophy department that makes tenure decisions based on profundity of spiritual perception.

As a side note: science does of course play a major role in Nietzsche’s idea of European culture. He feels any modern European higher culture will be deeply influenced by the desire for unmediated truth reflected in science, even though that culture will not produce “scientists” as such. Certain kinds of reliance on unquestioned tradition to ground culture may no longer be accessible to us because of our scientific and historical awareness; it is a very deep question in Nietzsche whether this is a “good” or “bad” thing.

So in answer to Jason’s question from a few days ago: “So if the conclusions don’t distinguish clear instances of analytic philosophy from clear instances of continental philosophy, what does?” The purpose does, philosophy as a humanistic discipline isn’t about producing conclusions, it’s about understanding and producing culture. Analytic and continental philosophy can share plenty of beliefs but have completely different methodologies and goals. 

Also since Nietzsche, a good deal of the hostility to science in the “continental” tradition hasn’t been necessarily been about doubting the truth of science on its own terms, or at least the predictive utility of science, but about the cultural effect of scientific assumptions. I’m talking here about the suspicion of “instrumental reason” in e.g. the Frankfurt school.

Marcus

Comments

[BL]

The audacity of this posting isn't that you've defied your brother's admonition and strayed into philosophy, it's that you've posted on Nietzsche on the blog of someone who (ahem) knows something about Nietzsche!

Having cleared my throat, let me say you've done pretty well, and quibbles on details aside, your "big picture" story about Nietzsche strikes me as mostly right.

Whether "producing culture" or "understanding culture" or being interested in and connected with the broader culture is what marks "Continental" philosophy, I'm less sure (one thinks again, I'm afraid, of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty as not quite fitting), though, given the capaciousness of the category, it probably works in some sense for most of the other major figures (though Hegel certainly takes himself to be aiming at knowledge, as does Marx, as does most of the Frankfurt School...so we'd have to temper the rhetoric on that score a bit).

[Mark]

Just a brief comment on the analytic side of this and the "Big Picture," "Meaning of Life," sort of thing. There are major figures in contemporary analytic philosophy who have and are dealing with these questions: Nagel, Nozick, and Williams come to mind off the top of my head.

[Craig]

May I suggest the following (facetious) definition of continental and analytic philosophers? Continental philosphers are those philosophers more likely to commit the vice of willful obscurantism than willful pedantry; analytic philosophers, the reverse.

This not-so-serious proposal is not wholly unconnected to Marcus's humanistic v. scientific distinction, I suppose. And it does have the merit of capturing the fact that in the mouths of analytic philosphers, "continental philosophy" is a perjorative term, and vice versa!

[Manuel Cabrera]

Your comments are very interesting. In your discussion of Nietzsche, I think you've tapped into some of the underlying motivations behind what goes on in continental philosophy (although continental philosophers have often been rightfully accused of radical relativism as well as skepticism about truth).

There are, I think, good arguments that radical moral relativism has had negative effects on our culture. In our department (UCLA), it's fairly common for us discuss relativism in the first meeting of our TA sections as a means to introducing freshman to what a philosophical debate looks like (often no matter what the topic of the course is). Partly, this is because the half-serious assumption floating around is that freshman are all naive radical relativists, especially about moral matters. Sometimes, I've adapted a kind of argument I've found given by Slavoj Zizek, who is fond of criticizing what he calls 'postmodern multiculturalist relativism'. The basic gist of the argument is that radical moral relativism has a background in solid intuitions about the need for openness to widely varying viewpoints, an openness that is, in particular, necessary for a healthy democracy. Zizek's problem is with an attitude he illustrates with reference to the discourse in our country concerning mainstream hip-hop. On one side, critics criticize it for its misogyny, violence, and fetishization of money and luxury. On the 'postmodern multiculturalist' side, people will make a 'you have to be one to know one' argument: 'well, we can't possibly understand where they are coming from, since we ourselves do not know what it is like to be an oppressed African-American, and so we are in no position to judge'. Zizek's claim is that what is posing as an open and tolerant acceptance of this music can function to reinforce racist attitudes. His point is that the above sort of attitude in fact functions to cut off debate and dialogue: if we presume that 'it takes one to know one', no room is left for rational debate about the moral and social issues concerning the relevant phenomena. And, he thinks, if this is so in a situation in which there are already power imbalances between various groups, those who already have the longer end of the stick will naturally prevail.

This is just an example of the sort of argument you suggested a Nietzschean might undertake, one that focuses on what kind of culture a belief--say, in radical moral relativism--will result in. In my experience, freshman are much more open to this sort of argument than to the standard relativism-debunking arguments you can foist on them. Maybe this means that freshman are all naive Nietzscheans...

[Marcus Stanley]

Well, I *did* ask your permission first Brian. Definitely put my head into the lion's mouth by daring to post about Nietzsche here though, glad I seem to have survived the experience.

Marx is a scientific thinker who sees himself as such, I wouldn't want to assimilate him to the story I'm putting forward here. Frankly this is in many ways true of Freud as well now that I think about it, and a "continental" tradition that doesn't include them is no tradition at all, so perhaps I shouldn't have bothered trying to fit this post into that hackneyed old analytic/ continental distinction.

On thinking about it, what bugs me about this post is that one could interpret it as positing a split between philosophers who try to create a "science of culture production" in an instrumental sense vs. "disinterested science". In other words I could be interpreted as claiming a certain utilitarianism for Nietzsche and others. Not at all what I meant. One complexity is that culture of course includes reflection and is an intellectual product, so that the act of reflecting on culture is itself the production of culture, the two cannot be separated as "end" and "means". What I think I was trying to get at here is the attempt to preserve the spiritual dimensions of contemplation, while rejecting the old metaphysical and religious groundings for it

[Marcus Stanley]

Miguel: thanks for the comment. I don't think Nietzsche is a radical relativist at all actually, although people have very misleadingly read him that way at times. (Which is hard to do in the sense that he is obviously judgemental as all hell in his own way). He is in a sense a *moral* relativist though, because he seems mainly interested in morality insofar as it is conducive to a particular sort of "health". Different sorts of moral "prescriptions" advance that health in different ways depending on the historical, social, personal circumstances of the individual; what is harmful at one time or place can be beneficial in another. But he's not a relativist about his (aesthetic, cultural?) conception of what constitutes a "healthy" or higher human being.

Another wrinkle with him is that he seems to judge success based on the production of a small minority of truly healthy or strong individuals (he implies such individuals can only ever be a minority), which implies that a moral "prescription" that harms many in a society can be "good" if it is conducive to the development of a higher few.

[Tad Brennan]

Thanks for this. Next, could we have Jason offer his amateur views on the difference between freshwater and saltwater economists?

[william lewis]

It's surprising to me that, on this and the similar post that precedeed it, no one has mentioned institutional history. One does not need go so far as John McCumber and hypothesize conspiracies to recognize that many forces, including political pressure, philosophical trends, pre and post-war immigration of european professors to certain deparments, and the modeling of philosophical practice on scientific practice in some departments (but not others) has much to do with this divide. As another recent post has (somewhat) made clear, mentors produce mentees that tend to share their mentors' view of what philosophy is. Institutions support certain types of departments. Departments and insitutions hostile to and dismissive of certain styles of philosophy tend not to produce philosophers who work in certain styles. If there is a critical mass of departments whose members write in the same style, who can talk to each other, and who can hire each others' Ph.D.'s, then a style survives at least for a little while. In this way, catholic universities, some liberal arts colleges, a few state schools and a few private universities can concentrate on history of philosophy, phenomenology and critical theory. Similarly, MIT, Rutgers and Arizona can concentrate on a certain kind of M&E (augmented, to be sure, by other pursuits). I'm pretty sure that historical explanations are where one should look to explain this divide. Objects and methodology are a dead-end as the former are shared and with the latter one can always find exceptions.

[Manuel Cabrera]

I didn't mean to imply that Nietzsche was a radical relativist, although I realize that my post wasn't clear in that regard. I was only trying to give an example of a position often imputed to and sometimes espoused by continental philosophers, one that (in the case of the sort of argument Zizek makes) is argued against by another paradigmatically continental thinker in what you call a Nietzschean manner.

By the way, I find it interesting and amusing that there are two things that many people who are interested in philosophy from both traditions (including myself) often do. One is to claim that the analytic-continental distinction is something we don't want to subscribe to. The other is to endlessly discuss what it is. I sometimes wonder what future generations will think of it, if they think of it at all.

On this note, I have for a long time wondered if there are any historical precedents for the analytic-continental divide in the history of philosophy (at least in contemporaneous self-regarding descriptions): a situation in the past in which philosophers in the European tradition (to which, as I'm using the term, I take it that both analytic and continental philosophy belong) saw themselves as divided into two or more camps between which (again, insofar as the philosophers of the period, if there is one) there were substantial stylistic and methodological differences. Perhaps someone who is better versed in the sociological history of philosophy can answer this question.

[Marcus Stanley]

Tad: Freshwater economists have a light, delicate flavor and flaky, tender, flesh. Saltwater economists have firmer, tougher flesh and a meatier flavor. Any more questions?

(Actually there is less difference than there used to be since Chicago has integrated more with Berkeley/MIT/Harvard etc.)

Truth is, I was just looking for an excuse to post about Nietzsche, I actually don't really care so much about actual contemporary differences between people who teach Hegel and people who do the analytic stuff. With that said, William Lewis' comment above seems dead on.

[Keith Douglas]

A comment on Nietzsche first. I'm not a native German speaker nor a fan of Nietzsche, but isn't a good way to express what Nietzsche is on about is to translate "Wissenschaftler" as something like "intellectual" or "scholar" rather than "scientist"?

As for the distinction, although I consider myself neither a continental nor an analytic philosopher, I find more to agree with or build upon in what is called analytic philosophy. That said, I don't find that the characterization presented is helpful - as pointed out, there are people like Nozick attempting to be "broad" in their scope. Even people like Paul Churchland have attempted to be widely encompassing and draw "meaning [sic] of life" conclusions. (I leave it to the literature to decide whether Paul is on the right track, of course. :))

I guess, although this is contentious too, I see everyone as trying to understand the world broadly construed, and so the goals aren't really different. Rather, upon some reflection, I think part of the continental/analytic difference actually lies in the attitude towards the developments in 20th century logic. Analytic philosophers seem to make use of it and think it is a largely good think; the continentals don't. Notice that this makes talk of earlier philosophers as either contential or analytic an anachronism. Of course, one can guess what someone like Hegel's reaction to _Principa Mathematica_ would be. :) The distinction also divides Wittgenstein in a way that some might like. :)

Also, as said on another thread: there is indeed a current that is different from either of those two: the pragmatists. It is my impression that some people regard them as a "middle way". This should remind us that there are other alternatives.

[Tad Brennan]

Drat you, Marcus--you gave away the answer! I had wanted to hear how well Jason could do, without your scientific, numerically-sophisticated knowledge. If I had wanted a *professional* economist's opinion, I would have sat next to one on an airplane!