How Continental Philosophers "Argue"

On the unseriousness of the discipline

Seeing a continental philosopher making arguments is like seeing a dog in a sweater. You suspect it happens occasionally, but it’s rare enough that it surprises you. And dogs weren’t made to wear sweaters.

For those who don’t know, continental philosophy is a particular strain of philosophy that grew out of Europe and was tragically imported to America. Prominent authors include Hegel, Sartre, Butler, and Heidegger. While analytic philosophers strive to be clear, continental philosophers don’t; as

Michael Huemer

says “Continental writers are generally much less clear about what they’re saying than the analytic philosophers. They won’t, e.g., explicitly define their terms before proceeding. They use more metaphors without any literal explanation, and they use more idiosyncratic, abstract jargon.”

If you read continental philosophy, you’ll notice something strange about the jargon. The prose will be unintelligible; the stylistic equivalent of tar. While you suspect that the author is under the impression that they’re making an argument, and there are some words present that suggest that they are engaged in the arguing enterprise (e.g. thus, therefore, etc), you have no clue what the argument is supposed to be, and suspect that if the author was forced to put their argument in premise conclusion format, they could not do so. You suspect similarly that if you got five different readers, and asked them the number of premises in the argument, you may very well get five different answers.

For example, from Judith Butler, you’ll get sentences like this one.¹ Brace yourself for the immaculate, dreamy prose:

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

Powerful stuff I’m sure! To avoid accusations of cherrypicking, I opened up to a random page from Butler’s Gender Trouble, and was greeted to this beauty:

The Lacanian appropriation of Lévi-Strauss focuses on the prohibition against incest and the rule of exogamy in the reproduction of culture, where culture is understood primarily as a set of linguistic structures and significations. For Lacan, the Law which forbids the incestuous union between boy and mother initiates the structures of kinship, a series of highly regulated libidinal displacements that take place through language. Although the structures of language, collectively understood as the Symbolic, maintain an ontological integrity apart from the various speaking agents through whom they work, the Law reasserts and individuates itself within the terms of every infantile entrance into culture. Speech emerges only upon the condition of dissatisfaction, where dissatisfaction is instituted through incestuous prohibition; the original jouissance is lost through the primary repression that founds the subject.

Big if true!

Or, to take a randomly selected paragraph from Derrida’s Of Grammatology (and I apologize for pelting you with so many instances of such bad writing—hoping it will give you some sense of the genre):

The epoch of the logos thus debases writing considered as mediation of mediation and as a fall) into the exteriority of meaning. To this epoch belongs the difference between signified and signifier, or at 1east the strange separation of their “parallelism,” and the exteriority, however extenuated, of the one to the other. This appurtenance is organized and hierarchized in a history. The difference between signified and signifier belongs in a profound and implicit way to the totality of the great epoch covered by the history of metaphysics, and in a more explicit and more systematically articulated way to the narrower epoch of Christian creationism and infinitism when these appropriate the resources of Greek conceptuality.

I certainly agree with Derrida that some debasement of writing is occurring; though he and I would differ as to the source. As to the rest, well…

Now, while continental philosophy doesn’t really make arguments, what it does isn’t altogether different from making argument. It’s a hideous admixture of literary analysis, gibberish, and argument. They start by saying some things, then say other things that they suggest follow from the earlier things, and have orderly norms governing the relationship between premises and conclusions. The only problem is that the norms don’t involve the use of either logic or any other sound inference rules. For this reason, I thought I’d describe some of the tools of the trade—the sorts of inferences that they make.

One way continental philosophers argue is by brazenly asserting “A is not B,” (where B is the obvious thing everyone would expect it to be) “but instead C” where C is some random thing that makes no sense. They act as if they’ve established by this that A is C and anyone who thinks it’s B is naive, even though they’ve given no argument for it and the assertion is barely intelligible. For example, “to be human is not purely biological, but instead is instead always made coherent and legible through the social arrangements in which one partakes—to partake in being and have one’s being partaken by the Other; to, in other words, exceed and transgress the categories from which being is drawn.”

I just made that example up. But continental philosophers will fire off a sentence like that, without explaining what they mean, and then act like they’ve proved their thesis beyond reasonable doubt. If you assert that something is not a second thing but a third thing, this is taken to be beyond doubt. It is taken to be an argument when it is not. An example of this from Butler:

As a result, gender is not to culture as sex is to nature; gender is also the discursive/cultural means by which “sexed nature” or “a natural sex” is produced and established as “prediscursive,” prior to culture, a politically neutral surface on which culture acts. This construction of “sex” as the radically unconstructed will concern us again in the discussion of LéviStrauss and structuralism in chapter 2.

Got that?

Another bogus continental philosophy rule of inference: saying “for A, B” and then acting like you’ve established B. For example “for Beauvoir, the feminine is not something that operates within the bounds of juridicality, but rather exceeds and is subsumed by juridicality.” Then one will carry on as if they have established the thesis that the feminine is not within the bounds of juridicality, or whatever. An example from Butler:

For Beauvoir, women are the negative of men, the lack against which masculine identity differentiates itself; for Irigaray, that particular dialectic constitutes a system that excludes an entirely different economy of signification.

That this is not a decisive argument should go without saying. Noting that someone else believed P is not automatic proof of P. This remains true even if you weirdly rephrase “A believed B,” as “for A, B.”

A third method of argument: word association. Continental philosophers will start by making some vague statement about a thing. Then, they will chain it together with other words that sound vaguely similar—as if they’ve made a compelling argument. For example, “for Derrida, everything is always juxtaposed against its opposite—being against non-being, the masculine against the feminine. Femininity is always defined in relation to masculinity—the opposite, the unequal, the empty space against which masculinity is compared—the feminine juxtaposed against the masculine other. The feminine is constructed through negation, rendered coherent and intelligible through social relations, yet always exceeding any notion which would have enabled Her to be intelligible.” Or, for an example from Butler:

Irigaray would maintain, however, that the feminine “sex” is a point of linguistic absence, the impossibility of a grammatically denoted substance, and, hence, the point of view that exposes that substance as an abiding and foundational illusion of a masculinist discourse. This absence is not marked as such within the masculine signifying economy—a contention that reverses Beauvoir’s argument (and Wittig’s) that the female sex is marked, while the male sex is not. For Irigaray, the female sex is not a “lack” or an “Other” that immanently and negatively defines the subject in its masculinity. On the contrary, the female sex eludes the very requirements of representation, for she is neither “Other” nor the “lack,” those categories remaining relative to the Sartrian subject, immanent to that phallogocentric scheme.

Another favorite argument is “X, if you rephrase it, can be made to sound vaguely conservative or vaguely like the sort of thing that a person who believes we can know some things are objectively the case would think, so not X.” Continental philosophers will rephrase their opponents’ arguments uncharitably, note that the rephrased statement sounds like the sort of thing that all their continental friends sneer at, and then act like they’ve refuted them. For example²:

Against these biologically essentialist notions of what it is to be a cat—a mirror of essentialist notions of gender—for Derrida, what it is to be a cat always exceeds the bounds of legibility. The cat, in its gaze, inaugurates an abyssal alterity that refuses containment within the discursive categories through which the human seeks mastery. To name the cat, to delimit it as animal, is already to participate in the violence of metaphysical enclosure: the reduction of the singular to the general, the living presence to the concept. Derrida’s cat, standing naked before him, is not merely a creature of fur and flesh but a site of exposure—an event of being that destabilizes the human subject who would presume to know it. In that moment of being-seen, the cat becomes an other that cannot be appropriated, a question that resists every taxonomy, every logos. To ask what it is to be a cat is thus to confront the trembling of ontology itself, the point at which the category of “the animal” dissolves into différance—an endless deferral in which both “cat” and “human” are unmade and remade in the play of their mutual incomprehension.

This is generally a Motte and Bailey. Continental philosophers will start with some utterly trivial observation, like that people think different things. Then they’ll swiftly move to totally insane conclusions, and when pressed go back to banal observations.

Another favorite kind of argument is the argument from scare quotes. They’ll put views they like in air quotes and act like they’ve refuted them. From Butler:

This problem is not ameliorated through an appeal to the category of women for merely “strategic” purposes, for strategies always have meanings that exceed the purposes for which they are intended.

Anything which is put in air-quotes is as if it’s been infected by anthrax. You must immediately distance yourself from the thing or risk being infected by the air-quotes. What other work is putting strategic in quotes doing? It is notable that in Butler’s book, quotation marks appear 2,112 times and are almost never used to actually quote anyone.

Finally, a last method of arguing is to have some scare-word that is both poorly defined and not argued against. Then, one will treat the fact that something is associated with the scare-word as giving it bad karma. An example from Chat-GPT:

What we witness in the panini is not merely a culinary artifact but the culmination of the neoliberal project’s ontological violence. The panini, in its sleek compression between the indifferent jaws of the press, reveals the logic of flattening that defines our epoch: the erasure of texture, the homogenization of taste, the disciplining of the mouth into docile consumption. It is, in every sense, the neoliberal sandwich—one that privatizes the act of nourishment into a transactional event between the subject and the commodity.

To ask whether the panini “tastes good” is already to capitulate to neoliberal subjectivity, for “taste” here is no longer sensuous discernment but a marketized metric of pleasure. The problem is not that the panini is bad; it is that the panini is neoliberal. And in being neoliberal, it participates in the grand conspiracy of flattening: of time into productivity, of affect into branding, of being into having.

There are, of course, more tools of the trade. But hopefully I’ve given a picture of how continental philosophers can go about writing very long books that purport to make arguments without ever actually providing reasons that should convince someone who doesn’t agree. There are genuine patterns connecting their premises to conclusions; the only problem is those methods don’t involve giving reasons.

Now, I have no doubt that somewhere in continental philosophy, there are some arguments that aren’t completely terrible. Most likely some people have given arguments for some things at some point. But the field is mostly bogus. Sokal and his followers gave strong evidence for that when they submitted nonsense papers with fake citations and got published. As Chomsky says:

Since no one has succeeded in showing me what I’m missing, we’re left with the second option: I’m just incapable of understanding. I’m certainly willing to grant that it may be true, though I’m afraid I’ll have to remain suspicious, for what seem good reasons. There are lots of things I don’t understand -- say, the latest debates over whether neutrinos have mass or the way that Fermat’s last theorem was (apparently) proven recently. But from 50 years in this game, I have learned two things: (1) I can ask friends who work in these areas to explain it to me at a level that I can understand, and they can do so, without particular difficulty; (2) if I’m interested, I can proceed to learn more so that I will come to understand it. Now Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, Kristeva, etc.—even Foucault, whom I knew and liked, and who was somewhat different from the rest—write things that I also don’t understand, but (1) and (2) don’t hold: no one who says they do understand can explain it to me and I haven’t a clue as to how to proceed to overcome my failures. That leaves one of two possibilities: (a) some new advance in intellectual life has been made, perhaps some sudden genetic mutation, which has created a form of “theory” that is beyond quantum theory, topology, etc., in depth and profundity; or (b) ... I won’t spell it out.

…

So take Derrida, one of the grand old men. I thought I ought to at least be able to understand his Grammatology, so tried to read it. I could make out some of it, for example, the critical analysis of classical texts that I knew very well and had written about years before. I found the scholarship appalling, based on pathetic misreading; and the argument, such as it was, failed to come close to the kinds of standards I’ve been familiar with since virtually childhood.

Now, it’s certainly possible that I’m missing something. It’s possible that you really need prose like concrete, sentences that go on for days, random words borrowed from other languages, and writing that’s unintelligible to everyone outside the field to communicate certain insights. But, well, when I talk to continental philosophers, this possibility seems rather remote. They seem confused in the way non-philosophers are, as well as to have stacked vast new confusions on top of the standard ones. When they try to explain their arguments, they either come out unintelligible, trivial, or false.

For example, continental philosophers seem to mostly agree that reality is subjective—that there is not a world out there but only beliefs that people have. They rarely state this belief in plain English but they’ll often take pot-shots at the belief that there’s an external world. But this is very confused. The world isn’t just what people think about it; there were dinosaurs even before people knew about them. There are likely many true scientific theories that we don’t know about, which couldn’t be true if truth was just being believed.

And indeed, if there were just beliefs and no external reality, then one wonders how we got here. Normally when people say there’s no objective truth, they are confused, and seem to think that it follows from the fact that people disagree about some domain that there are no objective facts about it. But it does not. The fact that continental philosophers have converted on this loony-toons belief seems like a problem for the discipline—it would be like if half of physicists thought the Earth was flat.

And when you can figure out what’s being said by continental philosophers, it is always very confused. I came across this paragraph from Butler:

If one “is” a woman, that is surely not all one is; the term fails to be exhaustive, not because a pregendered “person” transcends the specific paraphernalia of its gender, but because gender is not always constituted coherently or consistently in different historical contexts, and because gender intersects with racial, class, ethnic, sexual, and regional modalities of discursively constituted identities.

That one who “is” (not sure why that’s in air quotes) a woman is not only a woman isn’t because gender isn’t constituted coherently. Presumably the property of being more than 5 feet is constituted coherently—both precise and objective—and yet being more than 5 feet isn’t all I am. This is because people have more than one property, so just listing a single property won’t exhaust every property they possess. This is a very simple point, and if one writing about the subject does not grasp it, then there is reason to question one’s competence.

It would be surprising if the people with deep wisdom were unable to write clearly, nor communicate their insights in words with fewer than seven syllables. Clear writing and clear thinking tend to go together. And in light of the completely bogus methods of argumentation, the prospects for continental philosophy housing deep insights strike me as rather dim. If you have serious things to say, you do not need to play word games. The jargon exists not to express arguments but to cover up their absence.

It wouldn’t be so outrageous if continental philosophy was part of the literature department. But it’s not—it’s part of philosophy. If you explain to someone that you are interested in philosophy, they will think you are one of those guys—that you like people like Derrida, rather than abhor them. It would be rather like if astronomy and astrology were located in one department.

There are, of course, other fields that have similarly confused ways of writing. Critical studies, for example, and various kinds of criticism. But it’s particularly annoying in philosophy, because a clear field based around clear and rigorous thinking is stained by association with the bogus charlatanism that masquerades as serious insight.

1. I’ll mostly discuss Butler in this article because Butler wrote in English and so there’s less risk of translation errors, and wrote more recently and thus better encapsulates the modern genre

2. Chat-GPT made this example—sadly the AI is better at mocking continental philosophy than I am.