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
