Continental Philosophy Is, Indeed, Rigorous

I grow tired of the trope that analytic philosophy (AP hereafter) is somehow better written or more clear than continental philosophy (CP hereafter). I’m usually not bothered by it and I roll my eyes. But there’s no imagination here from analytic philosophers about how wrong they could be, so here’s a reversal. Let’s develop a philosophical conception of rigor that undergirds CP and then absolutize that conception of rigor to generalize about aspects of AP. I should also say that this is a critique of the Divide as it stands in North America. With discussion from colleagues in Europe, 20 or 30 years ago, a philosopher had to be a Heideggerian or Hegelian. So the inverse in Europe may be that analytic philosophy has to vie for pride of place in much the same way the analogy could be extended to Continental philosophy in the United States. This is why I qualify these comments.

1. In many forms (but certainly not all forms), analytic philosophy reduces the complexity of lived-experience to moments only of epistemic significance. This tendency (as this is not a singular proposition generalizing to all cases where outliers and exceptions are known to even this author) means many analytic philosophers often think of philosophy as advancing truth-apt claims defended by logical argumentation about claims we know. Philosophy for them is both the assessment of claims and the idea that one essential tool for the assessment of claims is to reproduce logically the reasoning of various positions. Most often, assessing these claims requires making assumptions about how one might communicate a philosophical problem, and it is in making those assumptions that I often find the privileged position of the epistemic subject. Let me explain.

One might find examples in philosophy of action where it is understood that S will Φ if and only if S has desire D to satisfy and if S has means M to satisfy D. Such an example is written to formalize the position of “S”, the epistemic subject and most often even if the problem does not intend to be construed epistemically, this formalization assumes the implicit presence of an epistemic subject. Such a formalization is that whatever concepts are assumed in a claim, the formalization extricates the subject oftentimes outside of time and in some type of ahistoric conceptualization similar to Plato’s Forms. In this way, philosophical problems are often transformed into timeless abstractions. They are cut away from the dimensions of lived-experience in which neither the phenomenological, existential, hermeneutic, and historical dimensions of lived-experience find purchase. Such philosophical problems are about truth-apt claims and arguments that are preserved in these timeless formations, and what guides the inquiry is a commitment to which position, argument, and claims are true against other accounts that are not true.

The Continental philosopher, by contrast, assumes that philosophy is not an attempt at formal knowledge just described, but one of understanding. In thinking this way, there are philosophical problems, but they find importance not in seeking out timeless truths from arguments, but learning how the concepts in a problem have a certain historical development and trajectory and how these various developments should be understood so that the philosopher can be guided in their act of understanding the world. By emphasizing understanding, we also understand the experiential dimension of the types of concerns generally relegated to CP. In a problem, CP often regards the analysis of a concept through paying attention to the context, history, and language as that which mediates our efforts at understanding. We are then guided by understanding to make sense of what we are experiencing.

2. This privileging tendency of AP means that epistemic significance is privileged more than the under-theorized elements of, say, subjectivity and embodiment (these are just two concepts picked at random that I feel are better articulated by CP methodology). Of course, again, one could easily defeat this proposition if we treat it like a singular proposition rather than a generalization. In so doing, by saying that analytic philosophy has taken up issues outside the formal positioning of epistemology means that those philosophers are trending to be more rigorous in the way I define rigor below in 6. One might say if we were to search the terms ‘subjectivity’ and ’embodiment’ in Philpapers, then would not we get back hundreds of articles on these themes written in analytic philosophy? Yes, we do. Again, this talk is one of tendency and perhaps the tendencies are shifting in real time to the point that what I am saying here will no longer come to pass. I hope so! I hope this post on this blog becomes obsolete someday because both AP and CP begin to merge and borrow from each other.

3. In keeping with these trends when they do occur, the analytic philosopher then privileges the epistemic subject over any other form of lived-experience, analytic philosophy is less phenomenologically rigorous and existentially relevant. The difference in methods drives this wedge, and I speculate that there are larger aspects of American culture that make these differences more prominent.

4. English monolinguists who haven’t studied the complexity of translating texts play up clarity and rigor of the one language they read and write even though they have no knowledge of philosophy written in other languages. This is so egregious that analytic philosophy programs most often do not require the study of other languages in their Ph.D. program. As Americans, we see nothing wrong with this fact. Consider the following analogy. The fact that everyone speaks Latin to a Roman is no reason that a Roman shouldn’t learn to speak other languages. The hegemony provided by our American geopolitical position (and the ownership of an active stockpile of 4000 nuclear warheads) is still no excuse to never learn languages. Because of our superpowerness, other people learn English. In finding the world learning our language, there is less motivation for Americans to learn other languages. English is the language of commerce, too. The fact that we happen to speak this language and get on fine while the world learns our language is often internalized uncritically by Americans at large. It’s even true in how we push off foreign language education until middle school or high school, and even then our foreign language educations is nothing like Europe. I think this backdrop explains why most analytic philosophy supervisors and committees do not make their doctoral candidates learn languages. In fact at some analytic philosophy departments, one might substitute a research method class from either the social or natural sciences to replace the requirement of learning another foreign language.

5. In not studying other languages, analytic philosophers typically do not have the patience to engage in exegesis of a text, so they outsource the burden of any hermeneutic responsibility for their own views (sometimes this jokingly becomes the hiring of what has now become affectionately known as the token Continental of an otherwise overwhelmingly large analytic department). They lack hermeneutic rigor and historical rigor, and often the desire to do it–though this is not true for those in analytic philosophy that engage in history of philosophy. There is a great deal of sympathy Continentals often receive from analytic historians of philosophy about this point.

6. In over-selling the falsehood that AP writes more clearly than CP, analytic philosophers are unaware that their methodologies lack:

a. phenomenological rigor

b. existential relevance

c. hermeneutic rigor; and

d. historical rigor.

By contrast, Continental philosophy offers resources for a-d. In doing so, CP is more rigorous than AP. The point of this exercise is to show that there are rigorous standards internal to CP that get missed when AP stereotypes it. A-D should be regarded as methodological reasons to study CP over AP in my opinion.

Of course, some aspects of CP writing are not understood by their analytic critics. Some deconstructionists write texts performatively and attempt to show their deconstructive commitments about language in the creative writing of their texts. Caputo’s texts seem to dissolve right before the reader. As Caputo is writing how deconstruction applies in a philosophical domain, he chooses to implement deconstructive tendencies as you read him where he is applying it.

In phenomenology, the phenomenologist sets out to describe aspects of experience that previous vocabularies have not captured (or have not attempted to capture), so often the phenomenologist must be playful with language and invent some new neologism to make sense of what has been concealed by a lack of careful attention to describing experience. So one cannot conclude that CP is committed to ambiguity without knowing the context in which the philosopher is using language.

The playfulness to which language is used also carries more leeway in terms of types of philosophical writing. Sartre’s novel, Nausea, contains existential descriptions of dread and anguish. It’s appropriate to write existential and phenomenological descriptions using novels as sites whwere that description takes place. In this way, novels, plays, and short aphorisms are accepted as possible literary presentations of philosophical insight, too.

7. I think that a pluralist conception of philosophy might try to synthesize elements from AP and CP. Synthesis is superior to one of myopic focus. Clearly, the same argument can be made that in looking at the tools provided by CP one could reverse the ambiguity of language charge often made about CP generally by analytic philosophers who often do not read or engage in it. In such a reversal, one might claim that a-d are, in fact, better. They offer more tools for what people think philosophy should be doing. From the point of view from the other humanities subjects, CP has had the greater effect in subjects like literature, religious studies, history, gender studies, African American studies, and art to name a few.

Some stereotypes of CP are perpetuated by those that inherit them from their doctoral supervisors or professors. Perpetuating this stupid AP/CP Divide is like the debate between SNES and Sega Genesis. The debate is moot as the world is changing around us. When philosophy departments are shut down and closed in a world of financial exigency that does not value its study, administrators make no distinction between AP and CP. In more practical terms, academic philosophers should be better united and embrace more pluralism about what philosophy can be from the narrow-minded thinking perpetuated by the Divide. However, if one wants to advance the claim that ‘AP is written more clearly than CP’, then it’s necessary to turn it upside down. It is very easy to do so because all one has to do is prioritize the Continental tradition’s methodological commitments like I do in 6 and contrast those commitments with how they are lacking in AP. In doing so, I am borrowing the same reasoning from when the old bias against CP rears its ugly head.

So the next time when a scholar of CP finds themselves at the end of this clear writing charge from proponents of AP, my advice is to reverse that criticism. Show how it is that CP is, indeed, rigorous.

This old bias against CP in total requires some implicit commitments on behalf of those making it. These dismissive persons against CP typically offer up that ‘AP is written more clearly than CP’ as a way to police the boundaries of what is proper philosophy. Because of the rigor of clear writing, the claim is that generally educated adults with no background training in philosophy could understand analytics better than Continentals. When put to scrutiny, it’s not clear that generally educated smart adults reading H. P. Grice on meaning, Russell on logical atomism, or Tarski’s T-conditions would understand it any better than what being-in-the-world is for Heidegger. Instead, what’s true for even very intelligent people is that both AP and CP have invented neologisms, rhetorical styles, and methods that are internal to each tradition. Being trained in one is not a reason to discount the other and while many pay lip service to this idea, very rarely do people commit to it in practice. It’s a good idea to be trained in both and to read across the Divide.