There's Lots of Good Continental Philosophy

For a long time I resisted the label "analytic philosopher" for myself. I had done a fair bit of metaphilosophy reading on this and come to agree with Glock's perspective wherein analytic philosophy is a sort of vague cluster concept defined by sufficient similarity along metrics of prose-style, historical-influences, kinds-of-problems-you-care-about, how seriously you take certain common sense intuitions, and so on. If you are enough like the other analytics on enough of these metrics you count firmly in, and the more dissimilar you are to paradigm analytics on the more of those metrics you are you become increasingly less clearly analytic. So Timothy Williamson is very thoroughly an analytic, Wittgenstein is fairly analytic but a bit less centrally so, Reza Negarestani is probably not an analytic philosopher but isn't maximally distinct, and Hegel is definitely not an analytic philosopher. Why did I count myself out?

Well I basically thought that on prose style I was pretty thoroughly analytic (more's the pity!) but on the rest I was mixed at best. Sure I really love Carnap but I also really love Du Bois and Zhuangzi and Rosa Luxemburg. And it's not like this is just hobbyist stuff that never comes up in my published work - I have probably done more scholarship on Du Bois' philosophy of science than all but 2 or 3 other people in the world, I have also published on Ida B. Wells-Barnett and my first real research publication was trying to expand on ideas from intersectionality theory. Hell, my only real contribution to political philosophy opens by positioning myself relative to (an interpretation of) Hegel! So on the historical influence point I think of the analytics as just one source among many, and not even the dominant one at least in my self-conception. And the questions I was concerned with, along with my reasons for being concerned with them (on this see here) just generally seemed to me more characteristic of the Marxist and Africana traditions, which analytic philosophy is not that much concerned with. Plus I don't really like or trust intuitions as a methodological basis. So all in all I thought that per the Glockian notion of analytic philosophy I was a borderline case, and probably just without the border rather than just within.

All this has combined with the fact that, despite thinking the tradition can boast some genuinely impressive intellectual achievements its practitioners ought to be proud of, I am actually pretty pessimistic about the state of the field right now.

That's changed now though. Partly because I gradually came to think that the prose style point was less insignificant than I thought. That will be expanded on below. Partly because the field has changed in the decade plus that I have been in it, and the sort of questions that interest me have (by no achievement of mine, more or less by happy coincidence) become more central and respected and so characteristic of the field. And partly because for whatever reason I am just more tapped into the social networks of analytic philosophy, especially where it borders on science studies in general, wherein I am accepted as One Of Them. And I think that social fact is more or less determinative - it massively outweighs the other factors, which while not irrelevant I think would have to be much more uniformly pointing to Not Really Analytic to count me out. All this and, I guess, as I go into my middle age I just find I care less: because I'm too old, too fat, too lazy, and too rich. So now I'm easy; I tend to just happily agree that I am an analytic and would even voluntarily identify as such in casual conversation among philosophers.

All this preamble is just to say that the Latest Discourse on social media dot com, kicked off by this piece, about Analytic vs Continental I really don't think I am that partisan - but I also understand that to many I will code as much. So it goes. As to what I think, well the title rather gives it away - I think the linked piece is wrong, and that Continental philosophy is not "largely nonsense" but rather contains plenty of good stuff. I will hedge and qualify and what not below, but there you go no buried lede - I just think that this chap is incorrect about the value of Continental philosophy. I guess the interesting thing is why though, so to that I turn.

(The last bit of throat clearing is actually so significant that it probably merits its own post, so for now I just indicate the broad contours. Basically: note that I have gestured to a definition of "analytic philosophy" but not one for Continental philosophy - that might make you think that there is some parallel implicit, wherein a different set of prose stylings and historical influences make you paradigm Continental and etc. And, well, it's actually significantly more difficult than that, there's an asymmetry here. There is not properly speaking just one "Continental" tradition, it's very much something defined by its opponents as "stuff from Europe-and-later-North-America they didn't like in a certain kinda way". It is by this point something of a distinctive social formation within anglophone philosophy as well as various European nations, so it's no longer purely an externally defined notion. But you could not so easily point to a relatively small cluster of core defining figures or a relatively unified prose style for Continental as you could for analytic. Ironically this will be not so much an issue in this blog post because I am going to do the maximally argumentatively unsatisfying thing and simply give nearly no examples at all, so you are free to think I am totally making it all up!)

This person's claim (which is following up on a previous post of theirs) is that Continental philosophy is distinctively nonsensical in some fashion that goes beyond just uses-lots-of-jargon-that-technical-specialists-know. By this it's meant that the inferential practices aren't very good (that's what the previous blog post focuses on) and the ideas are conveyed in a way that makes it difficult if not impossible to tell what point is actually being made, or even whether any sensible point is being made at all. That one can tell this partly by inspection of the prose, partly because "when one is clear on what the continental philosophers are saying, in nearly all cases, it ends up either trivial, unintelligible, or false", and partly because it's striking how many expert philosophers have themselves professed to be totally unable to understand Continental philosophy.

Re the prose intelligibility and argumentative rigour of Continental philosophy, I find myself in a somewhat awkward position. I basically think it's often worse than it ought to be, but not so bad as all that - and also that prose style and argumentative rigour, while important, are not the be-all-and-end-all so they shouldn't be given so much weight in assessing a tradition. My experience is that this position tends to make analytics roll their eyes at me a bit while Continentals think I am a hidebound enemy piling on, hence my long preamble about my own odd relationship to the traditions!

I've already argued on this blog that I think very often setting out a substantive and interesting comprehensive viewpoint is a more interesting and significant contribution to philosophy than having clever arguments therefore. I have also pointed out that as an ideal "clarity" in prose does not speak with one voice and there can be difficult trade offs in trying to achieve it. And I say all this despite actually thinking we probably ought try to generate clearer more rigorous arguments (understood in the sense of arguments that make inferential relations clear and are truth-tracking; see here for alternative conceptions). This is all consistent because: I do not think there are forced trade offs between interestingness and rigour and at-least-one-of-the-clarity-ideals, and we could cultivate pluralism at the communal level about which clarity ideal is being achieved by any given person. So we could and should be doing better to be both interesting and rigorous, and we should insist that people strive for an ideal of clarity while being clear-eyed that people can make differing choices regarding which ideal of clarity they are achieving. Since I think we could have it all, at-least-one-kind-of-clarity, rigour, and interestingness, I am not inclined to give people a break on any of them. And then more or less I think that analytics have typically more often failed on interestingness than Continentals, and Continentals more often failed on clarity and rigour. Since I have a more analytic audience I have tended here - in the above linked pessimism pieces - to spell out my worries about analytic interestingness more often. But we could just reasonably chide everyone for not being good enough. So I could just as easily have titled this blog post "There's about as much bad Continental philosophy as analytic philosophy" and then opened with the line "which is to say, most of it" and been just as truly expressing myself.

(And, yes, that does indeed include myself, see my concluding assessment of my work here or my more blunt and brief assessment here; so I realise that I am hardly in a position to look down on my peers on this front.)

So I think that leaves me in a bit of an odd position re Bentham's Bulldog's post. Because, well, I am just inclined to agree that probably if people made a bit more of an effort to write in a plain manner they could probably convey ideas which would fulfil their intellectual ambitions just as well but with a significant gain in terms of the size of the audience who could engage. People will say - accurately - that people like BB are picking extreme exemplars and much of Continental prose isn't that distinctive from contemporary analytic prose. That's true and fair. But none the less there is a difference in broad direction in the subfields and I think it is fair to say the Continental prose tends towards the more challenging. So why is that?

 

The justifications I typically hear for this more difficult prose style very frequently involve simply asserting that there is an inevitable trade off between one's ability to state deep truths and one's ability to write in a more plain fashion, and I have just never seen that well justified. I don't get why we should believe that. Sometimes people will say that it is actually just the same as any other field's technical term use, and there I think it is just wrong - technical terms in Continental philosophy, while they are terms of art which familiarity will help one get accustomed with, are never so precisely defined as they are in other fields, nor are serious efforts made to make them as such. (In other less defensive moods people will sneer at the attempt to do this in philosophy, I don't really believe the sincerity of people who claim that Continental philosophy's characteristic difficulties, where they exist, are due to just using technical terms like any other field.) Sometimes, albeit rarely, one will get aesthetic defences of distinctively Continental prose - I think it's plausibly often better than analytic prose, but honestly not that much better and frequently turgid and unbearable in its own ways. Or, alternatively and often with a more political bent, there is an assumption that that analytics must be assuming that language is an uncomplicated medium and the more characteristically Continental prose styles complicate that. But again I think that is just incorrect on both fronts - one doesn't need to be presuming the medium of language is a purely neutral and unbiased conveyer of Truths or Information or the like to think it is a good idea to speak in a more plain fashion, and nor is it at all clear to me why writing in a way that is characteristic of humanities PhDs goes anyway to helping manage language's complexities. I rather think it makes it worse.

And I also think all this is a bit besides the point, really. I think by now one's willingness to defend this prose style is genuinely constitutive of the divide, or at least it is a very significant sociological signal one uses to position oneself as analytic or Continental. Hence why I so often find a fairly hostile reception to my take here, and why I came to rate the prose style point as more significant among Glock's factors. And for reasons that are not entirely invalid (but which can also be over-played, I roll my eyes a bit when people act like having the wrong kind of humanities PhD places one among the wretched of the earth) Continental philosophers often feel rather professionally put upon - so it can appear as a matter of defending against a hostile hegemonic power trying to encroach upon the way's of one's chosen family that one defend this prose style. So I suspect that this point the very sociological fact of the division entrenches what I think is a bad feature of much of what we call Continental philosophy, since people cling to it precisely as a marker of difference.

And the BB blog post rather illustrates why! Because while not many analytics are quite so intemperate (to be fair he literally calls himself a bulldog so you know what you're getting when you click through to his blog) he probably is expressing a reasonably common intellectual habit. Analytics very frequently do tend to think ideas that are not expressed in their preferred fashion are just sophistry, not at all worth engaging with, nonsense even. And I think that is flat wrong. That's where its pertinent that my own scholarly habits involving frequently drawing from non-analytic thinkers and traditions. Indeed, in my more cynical moments I have tended to think of this as basically a major source of a career advantage I was able to leverage into a good job; the stupid analytics are too parochial to read blacks, so I can arbitrage their ignorance by just drawing on those traditions in a prose style the analytics find acceptable (I say this in nicer ways here and here). For people less cynical and more principled than me, rather than personally profiting by the ignorance of the analytics they tend to grow incensed, and want to insist on the value of the works in the traditions analytics are dismissive of. This then draws them into defences of the distinctive features of the sorts of work they like, which generates I think somewhat too broad defences of the tradition warts and all.

I think instead, without having much hope of persuading anyone, that we should rather just try and persuade people that they really can just be gaining access to interesting and valuable insights if they engage more with works taken to be Continental, or outside the analytic tradition more broadly. I have done this in my own way and for what it is worth the credit economy of publication and citation metrics has neither made me into a superstar nor punished me too harshly; it was enough to build a career on. So I don't think people should consider it professionally unviable. And personally I have found it enriching, I sincerely think that reflecting on the existentialists (especially de Beauvoir and Nietzsche, if he counts), Pippin's interpretation of Hegel, Negarestani on Carnap, and Latour on aforementioned credit economy, have simply helped me understand core aspects of my world and life and objects of professional research interest. 

I don't think this will persuade someone who is inclined to disagree. But, I guess, just as BB thinks that if you simply look at the prose it will be obvious to you its nonsense, I think that so long as one does not insist that argumentative rigour is the be all and end all of philosophical quality it'll be just obvious that Nietzsche has interesting things to say about moral psychology and metaethics, say. So with the confidence and courage of my convictions I think I have no better argument against this than just encouraging people to engage and trusting that they will find value therein (and I practice what I preach! Some of my PhD students and I recently did a directed reading on Birth of Tragedy). If you allow yourself to engage with the work, you can accept that it often has some flaws while still gaining real insight.

I hope that if people in Continental were more assured that when people say they dislike the prose style it is not because they are trying to dismiss all of value in the field they would be less defensive. Even if that didn't generate agreement it might help people at least discuss the matter in a more productive fashion.