I think there's a danger of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and also conflating the excesses of Critical Theory and deconstructionism with continental philosophy more broadly. Sartre, Hegel, Husserl, Bergson, Jaspers etc. really do make real arguments which can be argued against, and shouldn't be dismissed out of hand as gibberish or chicanery.
This is the basis of a lot of anti-contiential polemics: They find the most verbose and confusing post-structuralists like Derrida and Butler and stereotype the entire discipline.
For example, a statement like "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." is really far off the mark.
Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty, Hans-Georg Gadamer, etc. are all very very explict they do believe reality "exists" independently. They just think our *access* to it is mediated by embodiment, language, culture, history, etc. They reject the idea that we can truly have access the outside world (the "view from nowhere") looking "in".
In the case of Heidegger, what are you thinking of when you say he believes in an independent reality beyond the being-in-the-world we have access to (including less conscious access like 'ready-to-hand' sense), with the nature of being-in-the-world always historical, dependent on successive "dispensations of being"? Do you mean something like the "Ereignis" mentioned in section II at https://www.beyng.com/docs/TomSheehanFacticityEreignis.html with the comment "Being is always dispensed by Ereignis, but this dispensing source is, of its very nature, intrinsically hidden"?
It seems to me one major thematic difference of analytic vs continental philosophy is that most analytics tend to accept notion that human activity is ultimately a consequence of some underlying physical layer of reality, the notion of the "causal closure of physics" discussed in point (4) at https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/naturalism/#ModSciCauInf , even if they do not think this layer exhausts all reality (eg David Chalmers is not a physicalist and believes in distinct set of metaphysical truths about phenomenal consciousness, but does tend to accept the view that human behavior is derivable from physics). Whereas continentals tend to treat the world of humans and their meaning-making as fundamental and not derivable from anything else (nicely encapsulated in the two diagrams in the post at https://everythingstudies.com/2017/03/06/science-the-constructionists-and-reality/ , and Sellars on the 'scientific image' vs. the 'manifest image' is also very relevant here), and so to reject claims of causal closure of physics. One can find occasional exceptional cases of more continental-oriented thinkers who do accept causal closure, like Mark Fisher (who would not have considered himself a continental philosopher per se, but cited them more often on his k-punk blog and other writings), but they are rare, and Fisher himself noted that most continentals accept some notion of non-compatibilist "freedom" on p. 9 of his article at https://incognitumhactenus.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/incognitumhactenus-vol2.pdf which references Heidegger--
'We can distinguish conservative and radical strands of the existentialist inheritance, even as we must recognise that they often interweave. To the reactionary, Fredric Jameson points out that Heidegger’s “diagnoses of ‘modernity’”, his call “for a purgation of the decadent habits of bourgeois comfort by way of anxiety and fear of death” was “part and parcel of a whole conservative and anti-modernist ideology embraced by non-leftist intellectuals across the board in the 1920s”.[xi] The other, leftist, strand of the existentialist legacy, meanwhile, was tied up with Sartre’s assertion of absolute human freedom. After being rejected by successive waves of continental thought, Sartrean voluntarism, or some version of it, has been rehabilitated in recent years, via the work of thinkers such as Badiou, Zizek and Peter Hallward. However sophisticated these accounts are, they all ultimately rest on the claim that freedom is attained when mechanical causality is suspended. Freedom is conceived of in terms of a rupture with the mechanical causality that obtains at all times in the natural world, and which reigns in the social world when it calcifies into what Sartre called the practico-inert.'
Maybe because of this different orientation alone, I find Fisher to be a much more comprehensible read than most continentals in spite of his use of a lot of the same style of writing and vocabulary, I don't get the sense that he is trying to elevate pragmatically useful human-level categories into absolute capitalized philosophical principles (like 'The Event' in Deleuze or Badiou) or to generalize the fuzzy historical nature of human-level categories into claims about all truth-claims, even those of math and physics, being equally fuzzy and historical.
>major thematic difference of analytic vs continental philosophy is that most analytics tend to accept notion that human activity is ultimately a consequence of some underlying physical layer of reality, the notion of the "causal closure of physics"
Depends what you mean: If you mean “Which continental philosopher best reflects the analytic respect for explicit, clear conceptual definitions?”, it is hard to do better than Husserl. He was trained as a mathematician, and his work reads much closer to Frege than to Derrida. His work is dense and challenging, but not because he is vague and unclear with his concepts.
If you instead mean “Which continental philosopher are clear to read, and avoid the obscurantism associated with later post-structuralist writing?”, Maurice Merleau-Ponty (particularly his early essays), Hannah Arendt, and Simone de Beauvior are all pretty accessible.
Most of BB's examples seem to be poststructuralist theory, which, while they are the most prominent in terms of virtue signaling, are completely different from phenomenology, existentialism, German idealism, or even vanilla structuralism, which are, at worst, incomprehensible in completely different ways.
What single book would you (or someone else) recommend reading, for someone who's skeptical of the value of continental philosophy, to quickly demonstrate valuable and underappreciated insight from the discipline? Doesn't have to be a primary source, you can recommend a "plain English" secondary source summary/paraphrase/etc.
First, I want to say it's a mistake to think of it as one discipline. There are multiple overlapping intellectual movements that now get characterised as "continental philosophy". I've got an interest in existentialism, but that's quite different to the postmodern critical theory that BB is criticising. That said, here are three short, accessible works that might be called "continental". You can read each in less than an hour:
Nietzsche - Beyond Good & Evil - Apophthegms and Interludes (https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/4363/pg4363-images.html#link2HCH0004). The whole book is worth reading, but I point to this chapter of short aphorisms to demonstrate why people enjoy reading Nietzsche, and to give a sense of the kind of positions he takes.
Let's take Sartre to begin with. He has an argument against immutable character. He gives the overview of the position like so:
"What do we mean by saying that existence precedes essence? We mean that man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world – and defines himself afterwards. If man as the existentialist sees him is not definable, it is because to begin with he is nothing. He will not be anything until later, and then he will be what he makes of himself. Thus, there is no human nature, because there is no God to have a conception of it. Man simply is. Not that he is simply what he conceives himself to be, but he is what he wills, and as he conceives himself after already existing – as he wills to be after that leap towards existence. Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself."
And then later he presents some more arguments for this. Like:
"the existentialist, when he portrays a coward, shows him as responsible for his cowardice. He is not like that on account of a cowardly heart or lungs or cerebrum, he has not become like that through his physiological organism; he is like that because he has made himself into a coward by actions. There is no such thing as a cowardly temperament. There are nervous temperaments; there is what is called impoverished blood, and there are also rich temperaments. But the man whose blood is poor is not a coward for all that, for what produces cowardice is the act of giving up or giving way; and a temperament is not an action. A coward is defined by the deed that he has done. What people feel obscurely, and with horror, is that the coward as we present him is guilty of being a coward. What people would prefer would be to be born either a coward or a hero."
Is this a convincing argument? That's up to you to decide. But it is a clear position with a clear argument.
***
Now let's take Husserl. In this typical passage, he gives some arguments for why the past, future and present have a different character:
"The time-species of past and future are uniquely characterized by the fact that they do not define the elements of sensible representation with which they are combined as do other supervenient modes, but alter them. A louder tone C is still the tone C, and so is one that is softer. On the other hand, a tone C which has been is no tone C, a red which has been is no red. Temporal determinations do not define; they essentially alter in a manner wholly similar to determinations such as “imagined,” “wished,” etc. An imagined dollar, a possible dollar, is no dollar. Only the determination “now” is an exception. The A existing now is indeed a real A. The present does not alter, but on the other hand it also does not define. If I add “now” to the idea of man, the idea acquires no new characteristic thereby; in other words, the “now” attributes no new characteristic to the idea of man."
Again, you're free to disagree, but (if you're sufficiently literate) it's clear he has a definite point and he's putting an argument forward for it. Unlike Butler, he can't be accused of being vague or relying on impenetrable web of references to prior works.
***
OK, so perhaps it's just the existentialists and phenomenologists who are (relatively) cogent. But no, we see that continental philosopher supreme, Hegel, can also be perfectly well understood:
"The expression Magnitude especially marks determinate Quantity, and is for that reason not a suitable name for Quantity in general. Mathematics usually define magnitude as what can be increased or diminished. This definition has the defect of containing the thing to be defined over again: but it may serve to show that the category of magnitude is explicitly understood to be changeable and indifferent, so that, in spite of its being altered by an increased extension or intension, the thing, a house, for example, does not cease to be a house, and red to be red."
Again, in context there was a larger point he was trying to make, but I take this in isolation to show that he's engaged in much the same kind of conceptual engineering that analytical philosophers do.
My comment will probably seem extremely obtuse to you and for that I apologize in advance. However, I find your examples so fascinating that I simply cannot remain silent. What is fascinating is that personally i see not a shred of anything that can be called an argument in Sartre’s writing you presented here, I only see bare assertions. Please, and I ask that of you without a hint of irony, point out to me, at what exact line of your quotation does an argument occur. I reread it several times and fail to see it.
It's a good question. Let me give a simpler form of each argument.
Sartre:
1. People think that essence precedes existence: that they have an immutable character that causes them to act like they do.
2. What do people mean by "essence"? They mean character judgements like "heroic", "cowardly".
3. But we know someone is a coward because they do cowardly deeds, cowardice is found in giving up, just as genius is found in the production of great works. No one is a coward before they've done an act of cowardice.
4. And so, for people, their existence precedes their essence.
Husserl:
1. The experience of a thing in the moment has a character distinct from the same thing in the future, past or imagination.
2. How can we demonstrate this? Consider that you can't now hear a musical note that played in the past just as you can't give me a dollar that you merely imagined.
Hegel:
1. The idea of "magnitude" isn't synonymous with "quantity".
2. Why? Because quantity can be indeterminable, while if something varies in magnitude that if something varies in magnitude, that magnitude is determinable.
1. What does it mean for something to vary in magnitude? If something varies in magnitude it can have a greater or less extent without changing what it is.
2. How can we demonstrate this? Consider that a house can be bigger or smaller, a red can be brighter or paler without ceasing to be a house or the colour red
In each of these cases, they're following an argument of the form "X is the case, and you can see this by considering Y". You might disagree with any of their premises (I certainly do for some of these) but it seems they're doing more than just asserting. You can convert these to a formal argument if you wanted:
1. Either existence precedes essence, or essence precedes existence.
2. If essence precedes existence, cowards could be cowards without ever doing anything cowardly
3. Cowards can't be cowards without doing anything cowardly
4. Therefore essence precedes existence.
1. A or B
2. If B then C
3. Not C
4. Therefore A
I'll note that despite is popularity while he was a alive, there are now very few die-hard Sartreans out there. So don't think that many people consider this a knockdown argument. But it really is an argument that can be given a valid form.
Thank you, this is very enlightening. You may see that I later changed my comment to be about Sartre in particular, because upon further consideration I had to admit that there is an argument in other examples (however I still don’t understand Hegel’s). I would still say that in Sartre’s case it would have been much easier to understand, had he not ommited all logical connectives. It seems to me that as it is written know you still need to “know where to look” to recover the structure of the argument.
When we think about what makes text easy to understand, we can see there are at least two things that can be understood:
1. What a person is arguing for? What are they trying to say?
2. Why do they believe the things they are saying? Why do they understand things the way they do?
In Sartre's case, Existentialism is a Humanism was a work for a public audience defending his position, he wanted to clarify what he actually believed, and that was more important for him than surfacing the structure of his arguments.
The structure of the argument could not be more surfaced. It's extremely explicit. And yet, if you heard this article spoken to you in a lecture hall, would you follow along? If you heard—
"Imagine that Smith realizes the entailment of each of these propositions he has constructed by (f), and proceeds to accept (g), (h), and (i) on the basis of (f). Smith has correctly inferred (g), (h), and (i) from a proposition for which he has strong evidence."
—you'd quickly be thinking, "wait a moment, what was (f) and what was (g)?"
It really is an excellent piece, but out of context, or not read carefully and slowly, it's not more understandable than Sartre.
BB would have a much more defendable thesis if it was just that Butler is a bad writer who dresses up weak points in difficult prose. But he wants to make a claim about continental philosophy writ large but he hasn't actually read enough of it to be able to speak authoritatively here.
it might be a more defendable thesis but it would still be a faulty one. half of his examples of Butler’s bad writing are not by Butler, they are generated by ChatGPT. he doesn’t actually engage with Gender Trouble beyond quote mining it, reading it poorly, and then making a snarky comment or two about the writing style. he rarely addresses the actual claims.
I think some of your criticism is way too strong, for example, in my experience, ordinary people have just as hard a time understanding analytic philosophy. The other day I tried explaining my arguments against essentialism and why words do not have necessary and sufficient conditions to my father. He is generally a pretty smart and intelligent man, and he literally could not understand the arguments. It’s not that he thought they were incorrect. He just couldn’t understand them. Given that this is true of analytic philosophy. It won’t surprise me a bit if you could not understand, dense philosophical topics without already being well worsed in the relevant philosophical disciplines. I understand that you think Continental philosophy is different because your friends who understand the topic cannot explain it to you but in my experience, this is in fact true of many other disciplines, many of whom you regard as obviously valid.
Many of the passages you Lampoon as poorly written while certainly not easy to understand are not so obscure that you can’t get a rough idea of what the author is trying to communicate. In addition, a lot of your complaints about arguments that are not valid appear to be actually complaints about people making statements that are accepted as true in continental philosophy. If somebody tries defining sandwiches in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions and I writing for an audience of a community of people who reject essentialism, simply respond by mentioning that words don’t have necessary and sufficient conditions and simply group together things with a family resemblance, this is not technically an argument but I don’t think anyone would consider it bad practice, just as it is not considered bad practice to mention Chesterton’s fence without including all the arguments for it, if I’m talking in a community where everyone already accepts it. Now I do expect that many of the assumptions that are common to continental philosophy are incorrect, but given that they are mostly writing for an audience of fellow Continental philosophers. There’s nothing unreasonable in making statements that all of them except and treating them as valid arguments, the same way my hypothetical statement against essentialism would be treated as a good rebuttal. If a community of people with very idiosyncratic assumptions and view points is writing for itself It’s unavoidable to have many of these controversial assumptions treated as obviously true and this is not a problem by itself. obviously, it is a problem if the assumption itself is false but that’s a different problem and should not make treating controversial assumptions that your readers accept as valid inherently problematic as a strategy.
your complaint that if a statement is similar to something that sounds a little conservative, that shouldn’t be a problem with, it seems like it’s complaining about criticising something by making a hostile analogy, even though that’s a pretty accepted form of argumentation. obviously, the argument won’t convince you. If you think that the analogy is not valid or the problematic thing is actually fine, but if a sufficiently small number of continental philosophers hold that view, it’s not surprising or unreasonable that they don’t need to go out of the way to specify these as live options.
to be clear, I’m not myself a fan of Continental philosophy, and while I think there must be quite a bit of valid knowledge in it. I do think the majority of it is probably nonsense. however, I think your criticisms are way too strong and at the very least are guilty of weakmaning instead of steelmaning.
I don't really have any interest in defending Derrida and Butler. But I'll always laugh when analytic philosophers act like being verbose, jargon-y, and unintelligible to the lay reader is a uniquely continental phenomenon:
“The stimulus meaning of a sentence is the ordered pair of its affirmative and negative stimulus classes: the class of stimulations that would prompt assent and the class that would prompt dissent. The ordered pair is definable for any sentence, whether or not the sentence is observational. It can, however, be expected to be relatively stable only for the observation sentences, since the stimulations occasioning assent or dissent to other sentences are too much influenced by collateral information.” - W.V.O. Quine, Word and Object (1960)
“A meaning-theory adequate to a language L must be compositional, in the sense that the semantic value of any complex expression is a function of the semantic values of its constituents. Yet compositionality cannot by itself account for our understanding of sentences in contexts of indirect discourse; we must, therefore, incorporate into the theory an account of sense that goes beyond truth-conditions.” - Michael Dummett, The Logical Basis of Metaphysics (1991)
“An essence of an object x is a property P such that for any world W, x has P in W if and only if x exists in W. A world-bound individual has an essence that includes existence only contingently, but God, being necessary, has existence essentially.” - Alvin Plantinga, The Nature of Necessity (1974)
“A theory is ω-consistent if there is no formula φ(x) such that the theory proves ¬φ(0), ¬φ(1), ¬φ(2), … while also proving ∃x φ(x). A consistent, recursively axiomatizable, and ω-consistent theory cannot decide all arithmetical truths expressible in its own language, as Gödel’s Second Incompleteness Theorem demonstrates.” - Michael Resnik, Introduction to Logic (1987)
Now, if you're an anayltic philosopher reading this, and you go "Wait a second- all those paragraphs make perfect sense to me!" Congrats- that's largely what continental philosophers experience when they read the above passages by Butler and Derrida.
"Now, if you're an anayltic philosopher reading this, and you go "Wait a second- all those paragraphs make perfect sense to me!" Congrats- that's largely what continental philosophers experience when they read the above passages by Butler and Derrida."
The difference is that I could easily explain the terms "if and only if", "essence", "world-bound" and "contingently" in very precise terms and then the Plantinga quote would immediately make sense to anyone. The only way an intelligent person could fail to understand the Plantinga quote is if they are not familiar with the definition of either of these terms. This is not at all the case with Butler or Derrida - a continental philosopher could never give me the necessary and sufficient conditions of their main terms of art.
you didn’t even bother to construct a straw man! you just decided, absent any evidence, that a continental philosopher couldn’t define their terms and their conditions.
But that is a flaw of analytic philosophy, not a strength of it— words do not behave in the way that mathematical symbols do.
What will look like a precise definition in every context will come unstuck in some contexts, and will slowly unhinge from the objective world you’re attempting to define precisely. Skepticism around this being anything other than a fool’s errand is very old indeed; the idea it arrived after the Second World War would be a bit of a mistake in itself.
To phrase it in a non-continental way: I think you can see this as a mathematical error, if you really want. What you’re calling “a precise definition” only really works if a word is the same sort of thing as a number— that “five” is the same thing as “5”.
But in practice, words work in loads of different systems which connote loads of different things, and switch between one and the other frequently. They denote a big hazy cloud of meaning, which maps to other big hazy clouds in a multidimensional space. Words are vectors— if you tried to represent “five” mathematically, you’d end up with… well, you’d end up with its representation in ChatGPT, which encodes its interrelation with other concepts in I think literally billions of different ways. And even that’s not enough, because the mathematical code which is described doesn’t have to correspond to any meaning external to itself!
So what you see as a reason analytic philosophy is robust is exactly why I’d see it as hopelessly insufficient. It is a means to attempt to describe reality from rigid axioms through natural language, which collapses because natural language isn’t really that sort of thing.
“Continental philosophy” sometimes feels like code for “people who have noticed this,” but bluntly in the age of LLMs I think they have a lot more of value to say than the analytics do. And it’s not because they reject the natural world— it’s because they have honestly engaged with this property of natural language, which you have not
I understand there are various objections to the famous Sokal hoax, e.g. supposedly Sokal badgered the journal authors into publishing his paper, and they did it to be polite.
It occurs to me that a better test might be to show philosophers a passage from a real philosophy paper, and also show them an AI-generated passage which was generated using a very outdated and unsophisticated language model, and see how reliably they can guess which is which.
Kind of like a combination of the Sokal hoax and a Turing test. How many parameters do you need to add to the language model before guessing accuracy drops below 60% say? If the answer is "not very many", that suggests that scholars in that field are basically bullshit generators.
This test could help differentiate between jargon-heavy fields which have actual intellectual content, and jargon-heavy fields which are nothing but hot air.
If you read much Derrida, you could immediately pick it out. Repetition (citationality) is a structure of all signs, structures, utterances, such that you cannot avoid it. In its absence, there is no meaning at all. Thus, at a very basic level, it is obvious that it cannot be wholly voluntary. Reading even a few essays by Derrida would make it clear that his interest is what is beyond the limits of language, not what language can somehow exceed.
And of course Quine and Plantinga are generally considered accessible, enjoyable prose stylists by analytic philosophers. Everybody knows Dummett (or McDowell etc.) is a headache, but the continentals are able to make those distinctions too.
Fair enough. I’m very much a lay person about philosophy but I’m trying to read the most important writers like Descartes , Leibniz, Hume , Locke and Kant because they have important philosophers for politics and science. I also like Karl Popper because I think he is very relevant to people in science. But I haven’t yet read many of the other analytic philosophers.
Well put. I'm by no means an expert in Continental philosophy but the claim that it's particularly obscurantist (presumably in opposition to analytic philosophy) is, I think, unfair. Analytic philosophy is hard to read!
OK but how often does it really happen that you read a paper in analytic philosopher and come away thinking "I have no clue what this guy's position is" or "I have no clue what this guy's argument is". I have read at least 300 papers of analytic philosophy and I remember it happening 2, maybe 3 times. That's a gigantic difference to continental philosophy, where this happens constantly.
That almost never happens to me, but I already know quite a bit about the discipline, and I think it would actually happen pretty frequently if you are a total lay person when it comes to analytic philosophy, so it’s not surprising if people who don’t know much about Continental philosophy have the same issue. This is especially true because your sense of what positions exist or can exist and what steps in an argument or logical moves. Make sense is also heavily affected by previous knowledge of a philosophy tradition. I think on most subjects, somebody who didn’t know any analytic philosophy could not even understand the differences between the various positions at least when you zoom in beyond the most general of distinctions.
"and I think it would actually happen pretty frequently if you are a total lay person when it comes to analytic philosophy,"
When you think back to the very first works of analytic philosophy that you read - maybe it was Naming and Necessity or some other classic, maybe something else. Did you really feel that you had no idea what's going on? I had the feeling "OK, there are some terms in here that I don't know the definition of, but generally I know what this paper/book is trying to tell me".
Whereas, when I first read Derrida or Lacan at university, I felt like I don't even see the main point of the text, often not even after talking about it in class afterwards.
My situation is not a perfect analogy since I had already read a lot on Wikipedia and the Stanford Encyclopedia of philosophy before reading the literature not to mention, even when I began reading the literature, I would frequently have read textbooks or other introductory material in University but I still had quite a few basic misunderstandings of the literature, like thinking that non-supernatural varieties of moral realism had to be arguing for the idea that moral must be universally, motivating. I will grant you that that’s a much smaller confusion and every other thing that comes to mind is also a similarly small confusion, but in my experience even when they are actively trying intelligent, people genuinely have trouble understanding me when I try to explain relatively basic things in analytic philosophy. In any case, even if it is true that analytic philosophy is easier to understand for a beginner that would hardly prove that continental philosophy is worthless, especially since Continental philosophy originally developed a tradition of being obscure for completely reasonable motives like not wanting the government to censor them. It’s not like there are not a bunch of disciplines like advanced theoretical Physics, where a beginner can’t really make heads or tails of anything. I remember reading a brief history of time by Stephen Hawking and coming away with a huge number of misunderstandings and confusions, even though he is genuinely a brilliant man with good ideas and the book was specifically meant for a general audience instead of his fellow physicists. In general, I don’t think the ability of a beginner to understand something is a very good test of its accuracy and I suspect these two things are mostly uncorrelated.
OK but take theoretical physics: Surely the maths behind it is so complicated that I would not understand anything if I were to read a physics paper, granted. But if I listen to an expert in the field, like Sean Carroll, trying to explain what the Everettian interpretation of QM is and why we should accept it, then it makes pretty good sense. I'm sure I have some false beliefs about QM, as you did after reading Hawking, but it's certainly not like I literally don't understand what people are talking about, if it's properly explained to me.
When my university professor tried to explain Derrida, on the other hand, it sounded like very close to unintelligible, despite the professor being competent. To me this is highly suggestive that the problem isn't in me, but in Derrida.
I think I disagree with you regarding whether intelligibility to an outsider should be considered a reasonably strong signal of accuracy, but in any case, as I mentioned in my original comment, your argument would seem to suggest that my father should conclude that analytic philosophy is nonsense since he couldn’t understand a pretty basic argument, despite me trying to explain it to him, 3 4 different times with different words. Sure maybe the problem is with me and a better communicator would have succeeded, but then again how do you know that the problem is not with your Prof. since I’m generally good at communicating stuff with my father, so it’s not like I am uniformly communicating badly with him. And in many ways, my father was the ideal audience since he has an interest in philosophy, even if much weaker than mine and has read some ancient greek philosophers and from personal experience can do a pretty good job holding up the other end of an argument on applied ethics, so knows more than the average person of the street.
I do think that it’s probably true that continental philosophers are far more obscure in their writing than optimal and this obscure language sometimes muddles their own thinking and makes it hard to notice mistakes, but given how little I know of the discipline, I would take my own opinion with a healthy dose of scepticism. However, in any case, even if my opinion is entirely correct, that’s a far cry from establishing that all of Continental philosophy is worthless and does not contain any hidden nuggets of wisdom. BB is trying to argue for an extremely strong conclusion here and given how many intelligent people have dedicated their lives to continental philosophy I would be shocked if he is right to dismiss the entire discipline. I also don’t think that a few bad apples is much evidence against the entire discipline since it’s not like analytic philosophy doesn’t have a good chunk of work arguing for obviously ridiculous positions like the existence of Libertarian free will or the idea that consciousness is not physical. Given that we are aware that there is a lot of valuable analytic philosophy even if the overwhelming majority of it is mistaken or nonsense, we should not be so quick to dismiss the entirety of continental philosophy either.
I think this is different in kind. The difficulty of understanding some analytical philosophy is because many fields are technical as is say mathematics
I think a lot of continental philosophy would be much easier to understand for somebody with the relevant background knowledge, so I think in fact, the field is technical in the relevant sense. This impression is based on the fact that for many continental thinkers whom I dismissed at first reading analytic interpretation of them or even introductory material on them, made it clear that actually to some extent they actually were plenty understandable if you had the background knowledge and were in fact, saying valuable stuff, even when I disagree with it.
I guess we all have to refer to personal experience here.
I have read quite a bit of Continental philosophy and analytical philosophy and social science.
Based on that reading and hence with non trivial background I covers that I do feel that there is a very real difference in the quality of argumentation.
I don’t actually disagree with that in my experience. There is generally a lot of insight in continental philosophy, but it’s also mixed in with a lot of rubbish and while to some extent I think that’s also true of analytic philosophy. I would agree that there is a very real difference in quality. I just think Continental philosophy should not be dismissed outright as opposed to merely viewed with greater scepticism. I would also agree that the arguments are often either badly formulated or worded in such an obscure fashion that it’s very difficult to make head or tails of them, even when that’s quite avoidable. Now I do often have that issue with analytic philosophy as well, and I do think often the issue is less that the arguments are bad and more that they are badly presented and I do think that a lot of the better analytic interpretations are actually not mere interpretation, but steelmaning where the quality of the writing is actively improved by changes or additions, but I think that even the original has a lot of valuable inside quite frequently. Also part of the issue is that if your arguments are constituted by somebody with a highly inaccurate world view, the arguments will automatically be improved if you reformulate them in the context of a more probable world view.
All that is unsurprising to me if you were under the impression that I think Continental philosophy is not more obscure than it needs to be. Then I’m sorry for the miscommunication. I think a lot of it is actually technical, but I absolutely do think that they don’t put enough effort to be clear and even appear to actively prefer being obscure.
This is a bit embarrassing. Not only are these criticisms of analytic philosophy a century old, but the praise of analytic philosophy makes me feel like Ayer is sliding you $20's, and the fact that you conclude an entire school of philosophy is nonsensical because you cannot understand it, and, besides that, expect a reader to agree with you based on a few mid-book excerpts, betrays a philosophical tribalism along with a total lack of intellectual humility. Who is this post for?
Regarding some of the jargon. I know people who will e.g. say "orthogonal" instead of "independent" or something similar. To an outsider, that will be hard to understand if they have no training in mathematics, yet for the target audience it actually makes things clearer.
As an outsider, can I be confident that the jargon in continental philosphy is not like this?
If you ask me what orthogonal means, and I’m definitely the kind of person who would say “orthogonal” to a non-mathematician, I can explain it, or replace it with another word you know that works in the context.
But with many of these jargon terms they don’t seem explicable in the same way, and in fact when they’re picked up by the larger culture there folk meanings tend to devolve into ideas that are just bad, and even I can tell the original academic usage had more to it. See, for instance, “toxic masculinity”
But that’s also true of loads of scientific words— see evolution, fitness, relativity, information, entropy.
The collapse of useful meanings into less useful ones is not unique to continental philosophy. And in some ways analytical philosophy might struggle with it more, because if you can embed an erroneous assumption into your big spool of precise definitions— the fact that meanings decay is a reason to be sceptical of a programme of precise definition in the first place
When I was a wee lad during Obama's first term, the post-structuralists seemed like super smart people that I, a high schooler/early college student, lacked the education to understand. Also, there were snarky people on tumblr with thousands of followers posting quotes by them! Obviously I was the problem, right?
But now, as a grizzled 31 year old, my position is that they are, indeed, cons. All of them! For the reasons you say! It's an "emperor has no clothes" situation. The reason why they are so popular is because they have the allure of sophistication, and the people who "understand" them signal their sophistication by pretending to understand them. Which they themselves create other works, borrowing on others' analysis, using the same silly methods you have outlined here, furthering the signaling cycle.
Because when you actually reduce their ideas to their simplest forms, many of them are interesting, but the quality analysis doesn't really go farther than the summary. And sometimes the insight is either false or trivially true. I think a lot of these thinkers are basically journaling out loud, with no sense of quality control. I think there's a reason their best work is related to film study, which a medium that is not strictly textual.
I think it's no coincidence that online lefties and academics who like these thinkers also have something of a non-sequitur political opinion. These continental philosophers just rely on vibes man. References. The simulation of analysis, that crumbles under basic scrutiny. Sure, social media has rotted the brain of stupid people, but a lot (not all!) continental philosophy has rot the brain of smart people. Analytic philosophy has its own problems, but they are much more nuanced, and you can control for them because you can identify them. But with continental, you can't do that because the problems are so bad, as is the scholarship.
Re, "The reason why they are so popular is because they have the allure of sophistication, and the people who "understand" them signal their sophistication by pretending to understand them. Which they themselves create other works, borrowing on others' analysis, using the same silly methods you have outlined here, furthering the signaling cycle."
Ive always wondered about this. When the graduate students present stuff to their advisors or defend their dissertation, presuming its all nonsense, isnt it striking that they're able to keep the charade up. You would think that eventually the cycle of pretending to understand something and then having to pretend-reply to that would lead to an awkward moment where it would be obvious to the parties that they have just been pretending to understand each other, no? How do you imagine this works in the real world without it collapsing?
It’s my understanding that a lot of these thinkers are interpreted subjectively, in contradictory ways, etc. And the specific sorts of PhD that implement their analysis is really specific and about, like, specific works of fiction. I think you’re presuming a greater presumption of truth than these people are.
Im glad you wrote this because this is something Ive been thinking about a lot. I think Ive realized that the problem with continental philosophy as a methodology is not the concept but the execution. I think the notion of having philosophy that articulates intuitions rather than precise arguments is valuable. There are a litany of particular articulations of cosmological arguments, for example, but theres probably really only a couple intuitions underlying them. Therefore, the problem with the writings of most Continental philosophers is not the concept of Continental philosophy but rather the writing. For however "literary" their works are supposed to be, they write like dogshit.
David Bentley Hart stands as, to me, one of the only writers Ive read with an aversion to analytic philosophy whose methodological preferences are justified. Its cool that when he decides to write a towering treatise on the philosophy of mind he does it in the form of a platonic dialogue between various greek gods. Its wonderfully whimsical that some of Hart's best observations on the philosophy of religion and metaphysics comes from the mouth of his magical talking dog in "Roland In Moonlight." As such, I am more than willing to accept ambiguity from his works because they are always at the very least beautiful or humorous, as a resuly. However, the problem with most Continental thinkers is merely that they are terrible writers whose tradition allows them to hide the banality of their thoughts.
I will always be inclined to agree with Kierkegaard's criticism of Hegel in Fear and Trembling:
"For my part, I have expended no small amount time on understanding the Hegelian philosophy and I also believe that I have more or less understood it: I am foolhardy enough to believe that if, despite me having taken the trouble, there are various points at which I do not understand him, then he himself has not been sufficiently clear."
Cool disco elysium pfp. Hey man, my whole point was not anti-style or ambiguity or continental philosophy--it was against the shit writing that permeates a lot of continental work. Thats my point with the Kierkegaard quote. Hes the father of existentialism. Hes in the tradition of continental philosophy and I love the literary element of his work; I would despise if Kierkegaard was forced to write in an analytical style. But many of the authors in this tradition are not being literary or stylistic, they are simply writing poorly. The reason there is so much ambiguity and dogmatic disagreement among readers of Kant or Hegel is due to a lack of clarity not an abundance of literary elements. Kierkegaard on the other hand is ambiguous because of his literary qualities--the fact that his works are composed by pseudonyms which represents different characters and ideas. Im overgeneralizing a bit because substack comments aint dissertations but clearly my point wasnt a knock on continental philosophy as such, seeing as I provided two examples of the tradition being done well in Hart and Kierkegaard.
All the quotes, other than the ones you fabricated, are perfectly intelligible if you happen to know anything about structuralism and structural linguistics, which all those people were responding to. The premise of structural linguistics is that meaning is relational, not atomistic, as in a word only has meaning due to it's correlations and anti-correlations with other words and concepts. If anything else, LLMs have confirmed this interpretation of semantics contra Chomsky's. Now, I think Derrida for example was wrong and a total disaster for the humanities, but all these people were making perfectly intelligible points. I would say, you'd be better off studying structuralism rather than post-structuralism, however.
To my understanding, the fact LLMs work merely requires patterns in language use.
Under any coherent theory of semantics, we would have such patterns (since if, e.g., certain words refer to certain items in an external world, such as “monarchies”, we would expect to see those words surrounded by common neighbors, such as “kings”, “queens”, etc.).
So it seems hard to suggest LLMs prove structuralism over other theories. Indeed, note that LLMs are fairly good at programming/formal languages, which do not seem to embody a structuralist theory of semantics.
I’ll admit I don’t know structuralism or Chomsky’s views in any real detail, though.
Chomsky maintained forever that the connectionist approach embodied by neural nets was mistaken and to this day maintains they're not doing actual language because they don't use his syntax based approach. Programming formal languages are still premised on correlations and anti correlations between signs you just happen to have some of those being set to zero or one instead of something in the middle. Only the structuralists, people like Umberto Eco, predicted that you could build a machine that could learn language and semantics purely through learning the oppositions and positions of words within human culture.
Programming languages aren't based on their signs. They actually do have a formal invented syntax, which parsers are based on, and the programs written in the language are based on acceptance from the parser.
LLMs do learn programming languages sort of the same way they learn human languages (except easier because you can use automated verification), and that means their internal representation is based on signs, but that's not how the languages were developed.
This is an abysmal piece, and it unfortunately reflects terribly on you. You are trying to make histrionic pronouncements without engaging with any morsel of seriousness with a single author or even text, and yet lumping together the inchoate multiplicity of 'continental philosophy.' This doesn't meet any serious standard of rigor demanded of philosophy. You are young, but trying to clickbait and get attention at the expense of content is a pathological gesture that indicates you are more interested in attention-seeking sophistry than philosophy.
I think this is a good post, but I also think you're missing a lot of the point of continental philosophy (which, to be clear, I think many other people miss the point of — including people who like continental philosophy)!
In my view, continental philosophy (...or at least continental philosophy of the twentieth century that post-dates the OG existentialists, so structuralism and post-structuralism), more than anything else, is about *yarn-spinning*. It's about pointing out alternate ways of organizing thoughts about conventional subjects that nonetheless do some amount of explanatory work, in order to disorient their reader and to understand that so much of what we take for granted is arbitrary, in at least some significant respects. This requires inventing a new lexicon, and insofar as you engage with the work of others, utilizing *their* lexicon.
Consequently, continental philosophers usually do not aim to make any one point about conventional topics of inquiry in particular, and therefore rarely give thoroughgoing arguments. This makes it 100% less useful than analytic philosophy in most relevant respects (I, in the end, do favor analytic philosophy to continental philosophy), especially for, e.g., determining "policies" on things to institute. But when conceived in a more proper place of trying to plumb the depths of different ways of potentially organizing *thought* and *society, whether in concept or in reality, I do think it's edifying, and a solid well to draw from when doing things like analyzing art (which is why literary theorists love Derrida, especially).
Therefore, I somewhat fear that you're judging continental philosophy by the standards of analytic philosophy when (at least the better and more scrupulous people engaged in) continental philosophy does not even attempt to claim such standards for the field. And, while I do think that the standards analytic philosophers use do make their work directly applicable to other fields of inquiry (and therefore make their work, in a sense, better in the end), I don't think these are the standards that make sense to apply to every *type* of human activity.
For various reasons, there is and should be a place for creative storytelling about metaphysics, society, etc., and continental philosophy does that in spades (just so long as politicians aren't making decisions based on such fables with such indeterminate correspondence to reality etc lol).
"It's about pointing out alternate ways of organizing thoughts about conventional subjects that nonetheless do some amount of explanatory work, in order to disorient their reader and to understand that so much of what we take for granted is arbitrary, in at least some significant respects."
Uh...why would anyone want to do that? This sounds even more pointless than I thought. Idk, I don't understand how this is supposed to work. I want to be able to appreciate continental philosophy, but I don't understand this goal at all. Can you elaborate on this?
Unless these alternate ways of organizing thoughts do even more explanatory work or are actually more plausible ways of accurately representing/describing those subjects than the 'conventional' thoughts, then I don't see how the mere existence of these alternatives show that what we take for granted is arbitrary.
Part of continental philosophy is trying to explain concepts we don’t have language for, mainly consciousness. Each philosopher is creating his or her own vocabulary for the concept they’re communicating.
Pick any of them. You’re reading their explanation for consciousness. Some are similar or different but Heidegger has Dasein. Lacan has the Big Other. Kant has the thing-in-itself. It’s the generation of language and a vocabulary to explain something we can’t explain - something before the most basic observable fact.
If you had to compare continental philosophy to some other category, I wouldn’t choose analytic philosophy. It’s closer to quantum physics. We know there must be something beyond what we know but we can’t really get close enough to see it or to explain it. The explanation is that we don’t know what it is. That’s continental philosophy.
Yeah, one important thing I forgot to add is that I do think matters about continental philosophy is that... I do think a lot of the time, claims it makes LOCALLY and about SPECIFIC subjects pass the sniff test and are basically (likely to be) correct. Like... Foucault to pick a basic example I do think was broadly right about how we've psychologized punishment/"rehabilitation" and gets at a lot of the dynamics pretty well, even if I think the exact causal story he tells in Discipline and Punish is still woefully incomplete. There's not a lot one can do with this "fact" on its own, but it does function as a useful shorthand for the dynamics at play in other settings and contexts... like "a Foucauldian analysis of the novel One Day in the life of Ivan Denisovich" I can imagine will definitely make certain kinds of claims that can be reasonably agreed with or disagreed with. Doing such analysis may not be the most important thing for people to do, but I still think it's okay *to* do!
Analytics are usually just not that interested in the things continentals write about, like critical theory, philosophy of history, culture, politics, existentialism etc. and when they are interested they usually end up recapitulating the work of continentals in slightly clearer language. That’s more or less what happened with analytic metaphysics, which analytics originally dismissed the need for entirely. Maybe if they were able to come up with more interesting ideas on their own there wouldn’t be an appetite for continental philosophy, but they aren’t so there is.
Every idea that comes out of philosophy comes from analytic philosophy. You have to actually be saying something to be stating an idea. Repeating gibberish slogans doesn't count.
Buddy, just because a work is not written in simple language does not make it gibberish. That’s anti-intellectual stupidity. I don’t like Judith Butler or Derrida’s writing styles, but they were obliviously saying something. Continental ideas have had a massive influence on the world for better or worse (e.g. Marxism, Nietzscheanism, deontology, existentialism, gender theory, all of sociology etc.) and it’s ridiculous to deny that these are in fact real ideas that have real content. How many analytic ideas have had anywhere close to the same influence? Very few, because most analytics are mostly uninterested in things most people care about.
> Buddy, just because a work is not written in simple language does not make it gibberish. That’s anti-intellectual stupidity.
Continental philosophy defense seems to consist mostly of people calling you stupid for not being able to read it; I imagine these people as being very snooty, perhaps wearing a beret and smoking cloves.
Sometimes when I see quotes from it I do understand it perfectly well. And yet… they are obviously just saying stuff and then proceeding like it's true because they said it without ever demonstrating anything.
My parents were philosophy PhDs (one analytical and one Ancient Greek) and I don't think I ever encountered anything like these nonstop obscurantist French and Germans from them.
Did you read past the first two sentences of what I said? There is plenty of genuine word salad in continental philosophy but there’s also plenty of valuable ideas. Not having the patience to determine which philosophers have something useful to say and which don’t and just dismissing the entire discipline offhand, as BB does, is what is stupid.
It’s also just not true that they never demonstrate any of their claims. A lot of it is very speculative and abstract, sure, but that doesn’t mean they don’t make arguments for their positions. They clearly do. It’s just the job of a good faith reader to be able to sift through it and figure out which have merit and which don’t.
Hm, I'm not sure if writing one post means he's dismissing the entire genre offhand.
Like, Latour wrote a paper in which he was very sympathetic to this. He disclaimed his own deconstruction of science because right-wingers were using it to claim climate change was fake because all science is fake.
Also, I realize much of it is translated and translation severely affects how much something is readable in English.
I personally think I understand Butler (or like, Spivak) and when I see people doing these takedown quotes of her I understand them okish. But I don't understand a single Derrida paragraph I've ever seen.
…But I also know there was a fad for him in Japan once, because the Japanese translations of his books make sense and are readable!
Marxism is more influential than Nietzscheanism. And Marx was at least sometimes a very very clear writer and easy to understand. And most people actually use the more clear part from Marx like historical materialism (like the famous and respected historian Eric Hobsbawm), analysis of capitalism, and other practical stuff he wrote like his analysis of the ground level revolutionary activities around that time.
Deontology is older than Kant and Kant contributed to it but i think Kant's unclarity (or hard to understand writing) made multiple respected Kantian or neo-Kantian philosophers claim very different things like... some Kantians are like "animal welfare is good and animal rights exist" while others like "animals rights don't exist and animal welfare doesn't matter but you should still not be cruel to animals because it will be against your dignity because cruelty is a vice".
One Kantian guy Jason Kucinsiski is like a libertarian capitalist while some Kantians are social democrats or social liberals!
John Rawls was one of the most influential analytic philosophers of the 20th century because of his political philosophy. Analytic philosophers love political philosophy.
When I was about your age, I thought the same thing. Then I took a class on Gadamer in grad school.
That class completely changed my mind about the value of Continental philosophy. I realized that my problem wasn’t Continental philosophy per se; it was specific philosophers like Butler and Derrida.
I think most professional philosophers take the same view. They may occasionally take potshots at other traditions, but they do not completely dismiss them.
As for clarity, I have found the analytics not much better sometimes. Rendering arguments in formal logic can actually obscure their real meaning. One can get focused on puzzles instead of the big picture.
Keep in mind that most Continental classics were written in another language, too. Translation adds a barrier that makes difficult ideas more difficult to understand.
I would not be so quick to dismiss Continental philosophy, for these reasons.
No one else will ever hate the continental philosophers quite as much as me, I think. I was going to write my master's thesis debunking some of the asinine garbage Derrida puked out, but ended up with an advisor whose career was built on his nonsense. I pushed back and pushed back and pushed back until one meeting she told me, "Alexander, these things have already been decided." One would point out the bandwagon fallacy, but something something logocentrism so don't worry about it.
I threw in the towel: a move I'm neither proud nor ashamed of. I had another semester of college hanging over my head if my thesis didn't pass, after all. (And those hypocrites talk about power dynamics.)
I ended up writing about Nietzsche and Derrida. I turned the jargon knob to eleven, quoted all the right people, and, for my own private revenge, purposefully introduced a bunch of contradictory statements. Oh, and I learned a new rhetorical move! If you're worried that, say, Nietzsche's writing objectified women, you can take care of the problem by including the sentence, "Of course, we shouldn't take this to mean Nietzsche's writing objectified women." Problem solved!
And that's only one data point in years of being told to take Freud seriously, take Marx seriously, take the claim "writing existed before speech" seriously. (I would have sold a kidney to have known the term "motte and bailey.") It left an extremely bitter taste in my mouth. English departments are a joke.
Some of Karl Marx writings aren't hard to understand though. I do recognise that that hegelian dialectics stuff is terrible. But his analysis of capitalism seems quite relevant today. Liberal democracies are falling apart slowly.
I would consider marx as sometimes more analytic and sometimes more contintental.
Marx's analysis of capitalism mistakes solvable problems for fundamental contradictions because, despite his pretense of scientific objectivity, he just really doesn't want capitalism to be workable.
@alexanderkaplan, how would these conversations actually go down? Would you advisor say something and you would just say, "I dont know what you just said" or "Can you rephrase that in language that is more clear" and they just wouldnt/couldnt make themselves comprehensible? Please give more detail.
Communicating clearly with my advisor wasn't the issue. It was more along the lines of me saying, "I want to write a thesis critiquing stupid ideas A, B, and C, which strike me as obviously incorrect," and her saying "No. You shouldn't do that." After one particularly bad meeting it started to sound a lot more like "No. I won't let you do that," and I decided I didn't care enough about a graduate thesis no one will ever read to spend another semester starting over from square one. I threw in the towel, wrote something she would agree with, and got out.
I think there's a danger of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and also conflating the excesses of Critical Theory and deconstructionism with continental philosophy more broadly. Sartre, Hegel, Husserl, Bergson, Jaspers etc. really do make real arguments which can be argued against, and shouldn't be dismissed out of hand as gibberish or chicanery.
This is the basis of a lot of anti-contiential polemics: They find the most verbose and confusing post-structuralists like Derrida and Butler and stereotype the entire discipline.
For example, a statement like "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." is really far off the mark.
Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty, Hans-Georg Gadamer, etc. are all very very explict they do believe reality "exists" independently. They just think our *access* to it is mediated by embodiment, language, culture, history, etc. They reject the idea that we can truly have access the outside world (the "view from nowhere") looking "in".
In the case of Heidegger, what are you thinking of when you say he believes in an independent reality beyond the being-in-the-world we have access to (including less conscious access like 'ready-to-hand' sense), with the nature of being-in-the-world always historical, dependent on successive "dispensations of being"? Do you mean something like the "Ereignis" mentioned in section II at https://www.beyng.com/docs/TomSheehanFacticityEreignis.html with the comment "Being is always dispensed by Ereignis, but this dispensing source is, of its very nature, intrinsically hidden"?
It seems to me one major thematic difference of analytic vs continental philosophy is that most analytics tend to accept notion that human activity is ultimately a consequence of some underlying physical layer of reality, the notion of the "causal closure of physics" discussed in point (4) at https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/naturalism/#ModSciCauInf , even if they do not think this layer exhausts all reality (eg David Chalmers is not a physicalist and believes in distinct set of metaphysical truths about phenomenal consciousness, but does tend to accept the view that human behavior is derivable from physics). Whereas continentals tend to treat the world of humans and their meaning-making as fundamental and not derivable from anything else (nicely encapsulated in the two diagrams in the post at https://everythingstudies.com/2017/03/06/science-the-constructionists-and-reality/ , and Sellars on the 'scientific image' vs. the 'manifest image' is also very relevant here), and so to reject claims of causal closure of physics. One can find occasional exceptional cases of more continental-oriented thinkers who do accept causal closure, like Mark Fisher (who would not have considered himself a continental philosopher per se, but cited them more often on his k-punk blog and other writings), but they are rare, and Fisher himself noted that most continentals accept some notion of non-compatibilist "freedom" on p. 9 of his article at https://incognitumhactenus.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/incognitumhactenus-vol2.pdf which references Heidegger--
'We can distinguish conservative and radical strands of the existentialist inheritance, even as we must recognise that they often interweave. To the reactionary, Fredric Jameson points out that Heidegger’s “diagnoses of ‘modernity’”, his call “for a purgation of the decadent habits of bourgeois comfort by way of anxiety and fear of death” was “part and parcel of a whole conservative and anti-modernist ideology embraced by non-leftist intellectuals across the board in the 1920s”.[xi] The other, leftist, strand of the existentialist legacy, meanwhile, was tied up with Sartre’s assertion of absolute human freedom. After being rejected by successive waves of continental thought, Sartrean voluntarism, or some version of it, has been rehabilitated in recent years, via the work of thinkers such as Badiou, Zizek and Peter Hallward. However sophisticated these accounts are, they all ultimately rest on the claim that freedom is attained when mechanical causality is suspended. Freedom is conceived of in terms of a rupture with the mechanical causality that obtains at all times in the natural world, and which reigns in the social world when it calcifies into what Sartre called the practico-inert.'
Maybe because of this different orientation alone, I find Fisher to be a much more comprehensible read than most continentals in spite of his use of a lot of the same style of writing and vocabulary, I don't get the sense that he is trying to elevate pragmatically useful human-level categories into absolute capitalized philosophical principles (like 'The Event' in Deleuze or Badiou) or to generalize the fuzzy historical nature of human-level categories into claims about all truth-claims, even those of math and physics, being equally fuzzy and historical.
>major thematic difference of analytic vs continental philosophy is that most analytics tend to accept notion that human activity is ultimately a consequence of some underlying physical layer of reality, the notion of the "causal closure of physics"
Not without reason!
Who would you say is the clearest such philosopher?
Depends what you mean: If you mean “Which continental philosopher best reflects the analytic respect for explicit, clear conceptual definitions?”, it is hard to do better than Husserl. He was trained as a mathematician, and his work reads much closer to Frege than to Derrida. His work is dense and challenging, but not because he is vague and unclear with his concepts.
If you instead mean “Which continental philosopher are clear to read, and avoid the obscurantism associated with later post-structuralist writing?”, Maurice Merleau-Ponty (particularly his early essays), Hannah Arendt, and Simone de Beauvior are all pretty accessible.
Thanks )
Beside definitions I would include clear chains if reasoning )
Most of BB's examples seem to be poststructuralist theory, which, while they are the most prominent in terms of virtue signaling, are completely different from phenomenology, existentialism, German idealism, or even vanilla structuralism, which are, at worst, incomprehensible in completely different ways.
I challenge BB to read Husserl's The Phenomenology of Time-Consciousness and get back to us.
He loses me at Phenomenology....🤣
You beat me to it.
What single book would you (or someone else) recommend reading, for someone who's skeptical of the value of continental philosophy, to quickly demonstrate valuable and underappreciated insight from the discipline? Doesn't have to be a primary source, you can recommend a "plain English" secondary source summary/paraphrase/etc.
First, I want to say it's a mistake to think of it as one discipline. There are multiple overlapping intellectual movements that now get characterised as "continental philosophy". I've got an interest in existentialism, but that's quite different to the postmodern critical theory that BB is criticising. That said, here are three short, accessible works that might be called "continental". You can read each in less than an hour:
Barthes - The Death of the Author - (https://writing.upenn.edu/~taransky/Barthes.pdf). Short, highly influential essay in the philosophy of literature.
Nietzsche - Beyond Good & Evil - Apophthegms and Interludes (https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/4363/pg4363-images.html#link2HCH0004). The whole book is worth reading, but I point to this chapter of short aphorisms to demonstrate why people enjoy reading Nietzsche, and to give a sense of the kind of positions he takes.
Sartre - Existentialism is a Humanism (https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/sartre/works/exist/sartre.htm). This short work is adapted from a lecture and lays out Sartre's existentialist position in plain language. Very accessible.
Thank you!
I think analytic and continental philosophy are best thought of as different writing styles than different disciplines.
Liam Bright suggests "Basically Pleasant Bureaucrat" and "Sexy Murder Poet" as alternate names.
Good question
I was going to write a comment on BB's post, but Pelorus took the words right out of my mouth.
You probably would like the book Cynical Theories by Helen Pluckrose... its a great critique of a postmodernism....
And Kierkegaard
So what's an example of one of their real arguments?
Let's take Sartre to begin with. He has an argument against immutable character. He gives the overview of the position like so:
"What do we mean by saying that existence precedes essence? We mean that man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world – and defines himself afterwards. If man as the existentialist sees him is not definable, it is because to begin with he is nothing. He will not be anything until later, and then he will be what he makes of himself. Thus, there is no human nature, because there is no God to have a conception of it. Man simply is. Not that he is simply what he conceives himself to be, but he is what he wills, and as he conceives himself after already existing – as he wills to be after that leap towards existence. Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself."
And then later he presents some more arguments for this. Like:
"the existentialist, when he portrays a coward, shows him as responsible for his cowardice. He is not like that on account of a cowardly heart or lungs or cerebrum, he has not become like that through his physiological organism; he is like that because he has made himself into a coward by actions. There is no such thing as a cowardly temperament. There are nervous temperaments; there is what is called impoverished blood, and there are also rich temperaments. But the man whose blood is poor is not a coward for all that, for what produces cowardice is the act of giving up or giving way; and a temperament is not an action. A coward is defined by the deed that he has done. What people feel obscurely, and with horror, is that the coward as we present him is guilty of being a coward. What people would prefer would be to be born either a coward or a hero."
Is this a convincing argument? That's up to you to decide. But it is a clear position with a clear argument.
***
Now let's take Husserl. In this typical passage, he gives some arguments for why the past, future and present have a different character:
"The time-species of past and future are uniquely characterized by the fact that they do not define the elements of sensible representation with which they are combined as do other supervenient modes, but alter them. A louder tone C is still the tone C, and so is one that is softer. On the other hand, a tone C which has been is no tone C, a red which has been is no red. Temporal determinations do not define; they essentially alter in a manner wholly similar to determinations such as “imagined,” “wished,” etc. An imagined dollar, a possible dollar, is no dollar. Only the determination “now” is an exception. The A existing now is indeed a real A. The present does not alter, but on the other hand it also does not define. If I add “now” to the idea of man, the idea acquires no new characteristic thereby; in other words, the “now” attributes no new characteristic to the idea of man."
Again, you're free to disagree, but (if you're sufficiently literate) it's clear he has a definite point and he's putting an argument forward for it. Unlike Butler, he can't be accused of being vague or relying on impenetrable web of references to prior works.
***
OK, so perhaps it's just the existentialists and phenomenologists who are (relatively) cogent. But no, we see that continental philosopher supreme, Hegel, can also be perfectly well understood:
"The expression Magnitude especially marks determinate Quantity, and is for that reason not a suitable name for Quantity in general. Mathematics usually define magnitude as what can be increased or diminished. This definition has the defect of containing the thing to be defined over again: but it may serve to show that the category of magnitude is explicitly understood to be changeable and indifferent, so that, in spite of its being altered by an increased extension or intension, the thing, a house, for example, does not cease to be a house, and red to be red."
Again, in context there was a larger point he was trying to make, but I take this in isolation to show that he's engaged in much the same kind of conceptual engineering that analytical philosophers do.
My comment will probably seem extremely obtuse to you and for that I apologize in advance. However, I find your examples so fascinating that I simply cannot remain silent. What is fascinating is that personally i see not a shred of anything that can be called an argument in Sartre’s writing you presented here, I only see bare assertions. Please, and I ask that of you without a hint of irony, point out to me, at what exact line of your quotation does an argument occur. I reread it several times and fail to see it.
It's a good question. Let me give a simpler form of each argument.
Sartre:
1. People think that essence precedes existence: that they have an immutable character that causes them to act like they do.
2. What do people mean by "essence"? They mean character judgements like "heroic", "cowardly".
3. But we know someone is a coward because they do cowardly deeds, cowardice is found in giving up, just as genius is found in the production of great works. No one is a coward before they've done an act of cowardice.
4. And so, for people, their existence precedes their essence.
Husserl:
1. The experience of a thing in the moment has a character distinct from the same thing in the future, past or imagination.
2. How can we demonstrate this? Consider that you can't now hear a musical note that played in the past just as you can't give me a dollar that you merely imagined.
Hegel:
1. The idea of "magnitude" isn't synonymous with "quantity".
2. Why? Because quantity can be indeterminable, while if something varies in magnitude that if something varies in magnitude, that magnitude is determinable.
1. What does it mean for something to vary in magnitude? If something varies in magnitude it can have a greater or less extent without changing what it is.
2. How can we demonstrate this? Consider that a house can be bigger or smaller, a red can be brighter or paler without ceasing to be a house or the colour red
In each of these cases, they're following an argument of the form "X is the case, and you can see this by considering Y". You might disagree with any of their premises (I certainly do for some of these) but it seems they're doing more than just asserting. You can convert these to a formal argument if you wanted:
1. Either existence precedes essence, or essence precedes existence.
2. If essence precedes existence, cowards could be cowards without ever doing anything cowardly
3. Cowards can't be cowards without doing anything cowardly
4. Therefore essence precedes existence.
1. A or B
2. If B then C
3. Not C
4. Therefore A
I'll note that despite is popularity while he was a alive, there are now very few die-hard Sartreans out there. So don't think that many people consider this a knockdown argument. But it really is an argument that can be given a valid form.
Thank you, this is very enlightening. You may see that I later changed my comment to be about Sartre in particular, because upon further consideration I had to admit that there is an argument in other examples (however I still don’t understand Hegel’s). I would still say that in Sartre’s case it would have been much easier to understand, had he not ommited all logical connectives. It seems to me that as it is written know you still need to “know where to look” to recover the structure of the argument.
When we think about what makes text easy to understand, we can see there are at least two things that can be understood:
1. What a person is arguing for? What are they trying to say?
2. Why do they believe the things they are saying? Why do they understand things the way they do?
In Sartre's case, Existentialism is a Humanism was a work for a public audience defending his position, he wanted to clarify what he actually believed, and that was more important for him than surfacing the structure of his arguments.
Let's compare that to some excellent analytical philosophy, Gettier's famous short paper, Is Justified True Belief Knowledge? (https://fitelson.org/proseminar/gettier.pdf)
The structure of the argument could not be more surfaced. It's extremely explicit. And yet, if you heard this article spoken to you in a lecture hall, would you follow along? If you heard—
"Imagine that Smith realizes the entailment of each of these propositions he has constructed by (f), and proceeds to accept (g), (h), and (i) on the basis of (f). Smith has correctly inferred (g), (h), and (i) from a proposition for which he has strong evidence."
—you'd quickly be thinking, "wait a moment, what was (f) and what was (g)?"
It really is an excellent piece, but out of context, or not read carefully and slowly, it's not more understandable than Sartre.
But its a problem when a “philosopher “ like Butler spouts nonsense and not wisdom 😎
BB would have a much more defendable thesis if it was just that Butler is a bad writer who dresses up weak points in difficult prose. But he wants to make a claim about continental philosophy writ large but he hasn't actually read enough of it to be able to speak authoritatively here.
it might be a more defendable thesis but it would still be a faulty one. half of his examples of Butler’s bad writing are not by Butler, they are generated by ChatGPT. he doesn’t actually engage with Gender Trouble beyond quote mining it, reading it poorly, and then making a snarky comment or two about the writing style. he rarely addresses the actual claims.
I think some of your criticism is way too strong, for example, in my experience, ordinary people have just as hard a time understanding analytic philosophy. The other day I tried explaining my arguments against essentialism and why words do not have necessary and sufficient conditions to my father. He is generally a pretty smart and intelligent man, and he literally could not understand the arguments. It’s not that he thought they were incorrect. He just couldn’t understand them. Given that this is true of analytic philosophy. It won’t surprise me a bit if you could not understand, dense philosophical topics without already being well worsed in the relevant philosophical disciplines. I understand that you think Continental philosophy is different because your friends who understand the topic cannot explain it to you but in my experience, this is in fact true of many other disciplines, many of whom you regard as obviously valid.
Many of the passages you Lampoon as poorly written while certainly not easy to understand are not so obscure that you can’t get a rough idea of what the author is trying to communicate. In addition, a lot of your complaints about arguments that are not valid appear to be actually complaints about people making statements that are accepted as true in continental philosophy. If somebody tries defining sandwiches in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions and I writing for an audience of a community of people who reject essentialism, simply respond by mentioning that words don’t have necessary and sufficient conditions and simply group together things with a family resemblance, this is not technically an argument but I don’t think anyone would consider it bad practice, just as it is not considered bad practice to mention Chesterton’s fence without including all the arguments for it, if I’m talking in a community where everyone already accepts it. Now I do expect that many of the assumptions that are common to continental philosophy are incorrect, but given that they are mostly writing for an audience of fellow Continental philosophers. There’s nothing unreasonable in making statements that all of them except and treating them as valid arguments, the same way my hypothetical statement against essentialism would be treated as a good rebuttal. If a community of people with very idiosyncratic assumptions and view points is writing for itself It’s unavoidable to have many of these controversial assumptions treated as obviously true and this is not a problem by itself. obviously, it is a problem if the assumption itself is false but that’s a different problem and should not make treating controversial assumptions that your readers accept as valid inherently problematic as a strategy.
your complaint that if a statement is similar to something that sounds a little conservative, that shouldn’t be a problem with, it seems like it’s complaining about criticising something by making a hostile analogy, even though that’s a pretty accepted form of argumentation. obviously, the argument won’t convince you. If you think that the analogy is not valid or the problematic thing is actually fine, but if a sufficiently small number of continental philosophers hold that view, it’s not surprising or unreasonable that they don’t need to go out of the way to specify these as live options.
to be clear, I’m not myself a fan of Continental philosophy, and while I think there must be quite a bit of valid knowledge in it. I do think the majority of it is probably nonsense. however, I think your criticisms are way too strong and at the very least are guilty of weakmaning instead of steelmaning.
I don't really have any interest in defending Derrida and Butler. But I'll always laugh when analytic philosophers act like being verbose, jargon-y, and unintelligible to the lay reader is a uniquely continental phenomenon:
“The stimulus meaning of a sentence is the ordered pair of its affirmative and negative stimulus classes: the class of stimulations that would prompt assent and the class that would prompt dissent. The ordered pair is definable for any sentence, whether or not the sentence is observational. It can, however, be expected to be relatively stable only for the observation sentences, since the stimulations occasioning assent or dissent to other sentences are too much influenced by collateral information.” - W.V.O. Quine, Word and Object (1960)
“A meaning-theory adequate to a language L must be compositional, in the sense that the semantic value of any complex expression is a function of the semantic values of its constituents. Yet compositionality cannot by itself account for our understanding of sentences in contexts of indirect discourse; we must, therefore, incorporate into the theory an account of sense that goes beyond truth-conditions.” - Michael Dummett, The Logical Basis of Metaphysics (1991)
“An essence of an object x is a property P such that for any world W, x has P in W if and only if x exists in W. A world-bound individual has an essence that includes existence only contingently, but God, being necessary, has existence essentially.” - Alvin Plantinga, The Nature of Necessity (1974)
“A theory is ω-consistent if there is no formula φ(x) such that the theory proves ¬φ(0), ¬φ(1), ¬φ(2), … while also proving ∃x φ(x). A consistent, recursively axiomatizable, and ω-consistent theory cannot decide all arithmetical truths expressible in its own language, as Gödel’s Second Incompleteness Theorem demonstrates.” - Michael Resnik, Introduction to Logic (1987)
Now, if you're an anayltic philosopher reading this, and you go "Wait a second- all those paragraphs make perfect sense to me!" Congrats- that's largely what continental philosophers experience when they read the above passages by Butler and Derrida.
"Now, if you're an anayltic philosopher reading this, and you go "Wait a second- all those paragraphs make perfect sense to me!" Congrats- that's largely what continental philosophers experience when they read the above passages by Butler and Derrida."
The difference is that I could easily explain the terms "if and only if", "essence", "world-bound" and "contingently" in very precise terms and then the Plantinga quote would immediately make sense to anyone. The only way an intelligent person could fail to understand the Plantinga quote is if they are not familiar with the definition of either of these terms. This is not at all the case with Butler or Derrida - a continental philosopher could never give me the necessary and sufficient conditions of their main terms of art.
you didn’t even bother to construct a straw man! you just decided, absent any evidence, that a continental philosopher couldn’t define their terms and their conditions.
But that is a flaw of analytic philosophy, not a strength of it— words do not behave in the way that mathematical symbols do.
What will look like a precise definition in every context will come unstuck in some contexts, and will slowly unhinge from the objective world you’re attempting to define precisely. Skepticism around this being anything other than a fool’s errand is very old indeed; the idea it arrived after the Second World War would be a bit of a mistake in itself.
To phrase it in a non-continental way: I think you can see this as a mathematical error, if you really want. What you’re calling “a precise definition” only really works if a word is the same sort of thing as a number— that “five” is the same thing as “5”.
But in practice, words work in loads of different systems which connote loads of different things, and switch between one and the other frequently. They denote a big hazy cloud of meaning, which maps to other big hazy clouds in a multidimensional space. Words are vectors— if you tried to represent “five” mathematically, you’d end up with… well, you’d end up with its representation in ChatGPT, which encodes its interrelation with other concepts in I think literally billions of different ways. And even that’s not enough, because the mathematical code which is described doesn’t have to correspond to any meaning external to itself!
So what you see as a reason analytic philosophy is robust is exactly why I’d see it as hopelessly insufficient. It is a means to attempt to describe reality from rigid axioms through natural language, which collapses because natural language isn’t really that sort of thing.
“Continental philosophy” sometimes feels like code for “people who have noticed this,” but bluntly in the age of LLMs I think they have a lot more of value to say than the analytics do. And it’s not because they reject the natural world— it’s because they have honestly engaged with this property of natural language, which you have not
You have entirely missed the point.
I understand there are various objections to the famous Sokal hoax, e.g. supposedly Sokal badgered the journal authors into publishing his paper, and they did it to be polite.
It occurs to me that a better test might be to show philosophers a passage from a real philosophy paper, and also show them an AI-generated passage which was generated using a very outdated and unsophisticated language model, and see how reliably they can guess which is which.
Kind of like a combination of the Sokal hoax and a Turing test. How many parameters do you need to add to the language model before guessing accuracy drops below 60% say? If the answer is "not very many", that suggests that scholars in that field are basically bullshit generators.
A good baseline might be this tool, it's very old and doesn't even use LLMs (I believe): https://www.elsewhere.org/journal/pomo/
This test could help differentiate between jargon-heavy fields which have actual intellectual content, and jargon-heavy fields which are nothing but hot air.
One test is to give people a Derrida paragraph, and a rewrite to its opposite, and see if they can tell which is which. I can't.
https://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000024.html
If you read much Derrida, you could immediately pick it out. Repetition (citationality) is a structure of all signs, structures, utterances, such that you cannot avoid it. In its absence, there is no meaning at all. Thus, at a very basic level, it is obvious that it cannot be wholly voluntary. Reading even a few essays by Derrida would make it clear that his interest is what is beyond the limits of language, not what language can somehow exceed.
And of course Quine and Plantinga are generally considered accessible, enjoyable prose stylists by analytic philosophers. Everybody knows Dummett (or McDowell etc.) is a headache, but the continentals are able to make those distinctions too.
Fair enough. I’m very much a lay person about philosophy but I’m trying to read the most important writers like Descartes , Leibniz, Hume , Locke and Kant because they have important philosophers for politics and science. I also like Karl Popper because I think he is very relevant to people in science. But I haven’t yet read many of the other analytic philosophers.
Well put. I'm by no means an expert in Continental philosophy but the claim that it's particularly obscurantist (presumably in opposition to analytic philosophy) is, I think, unfair. Analytic philosophy is hard to read!
OK but how often does it really happen that you read a paper in analytic philosopher and come away thinking "I have no clue what this guy's position is" or "I have no clue what this guy's argument is". I have read at least 300 papers of analytic philosophy and I remember it happening 2, maybe 3 times. That's a gigantic difference to continental philosophy, where this happens constantly.
That almost never happens to me, but I already know quite a bit about the discipline, and I think it would actually happen pretty frequently if you are a total lay person when it comes to analytic philosophy, so it’s not surprising if people who don’t know much about Continental philosophy have the same issue. This is especially true because your sense of what positions exist or can exist and what steps in an argument or logical moves. Make sense is also heavily affected by previous knowledge of a philosophy tradition. I think on most subjects, somebody who didn’t know any analytic philosophy could not even understand the differences between the various positions at least when you zoom in beyond the most general of distinctions.
"and I think it would actually happen pretty frequently if you are a total lay person when it comes to analytic philosophy,"
When you think back to the very first works of analytic philosophy that you read - maybe it was Naming and Necessity or some other classic, maybe something else. Did you really feel that you had no idea what's going on? I had the feeling "OK, there are some terms in here that I don't know the definition of, but generally I know what this paper/book is trying to tell me".
Whereas, when I first read Derrida or Lacan at university, I felt like I don't even see the main point of the text, often not even after talking about it in class afterwards.
My situation is not a perfect analogy since I had already read a lot on Wikipedia and the Stanford Encyclopedia of philosophy before reading the literature not to mention, even when I began reading the literature, I would frequently have read textbooks or other introductory material in University but I still had quite a few basic misunderstandings of the literature, like thinking that non-supernatural varieties of moral realism had to be arguing for the idea that moral must be universally, motivating. I will grant you that that’s a much smaller confusion and every other thing that comes to mind is also a similarly small confusion, but in my experience even when they are actively trying intelligent, people genuinely have trouble understanding me when I try to explain relatively basic things in analytic philosophy. In any case, even if it is true that analytic philosophy is easier to understand for a beginner that would hardly prove that continental philosophy is worthless, especially since Continental philosophy originally developed a tradition of being obscure for completely reasonable motives like not wanting the government to censor them. It’s not like there are not a bunch of disciplines like advanced theoretical Physics, where a beginner can’t really make heads or tails of anything. I remember reading a brief history of time by Stephen Hawking and coming away with a huge number of misunderstandings and confusions, even though he is genuinely a brilliant man with good ideas and the book was specifically meant for a general audience instead of his fellow physicists. In general, I don’t think the ability of a beginner to understand something is a very good test of its accuracy and I suspect these two things are mostly uncorrelated.
OK but take theoretical physics: Surely the maths behind it is so complicated that I would not understand anything if I were to read a physics paper, granted. But if I listen to an expert in the field, like Sean Carroll, trying to explain what the Everettian interpretation of QM is and why we should accept it, then it makes pretty good sense. I'm sure I have some false beliefs about QM, as you did after reading Hawking, but it's certainly not like I literally don't understand what people are talking about, if it's properly explained to me.
When my university professor tried to explain Derrida, on the other hand, it sounded like very close to unintelligible, despite the professor being competent. To me this is highly suggestive that the problem isn't in me, but in Derrida.
I think I disagree with you regarding whether intelligibility to an outsider should be considered a reasonably strong signal of accuracy, but in any case, as I mentioned in my original comment, your argument would seem to suggest that my father should conclude that analytic philosophy is nonsense since he couldn’t understand a pretty basic argument, despite me trying to explain it to him, 3 4 different times with different words. Sure maybe the problem is with me and a better communicator would have succeeded, but then again how do you know that the problem is not with your Prof. since I’m generally good at communicating stuff with my father, so it’s not like I am uniformly communicating badly with him. And in many ways, my father was the ideal audience since he has an interest in philosophy, even if much weaker than mine and has read some ancient greek philosophers and from personal experience can do a pretty good job holding up the other end of an argument on applied ethics, so knows more than the average person of the street.
I do think that it’s probably true that continental philosophers are far more obscure in their writing than optimal and this obscure language sometimes muddles their own thinking and makes it hard to notice mistakes, but given how little I know of the discipline, I would take my own opinion with a healthy dose of scepticism. However, in any case, even if my opinion is entirely correct, that’s a far cry from establishing that all of Continental philosophy is worthless and does not contain any hidden nuggets of wisdom. BB is trying to argue for an extremely strong conclusion here and given how many intelligent people have dedicated their lives to continental philosophy I would be shocked if he is right to dismiss the entire discipline. I also don’t think that a few bad apples is much evidence against the entire discipline since it’s not like analytic philosophy doesn’t have a good chunk of work arguing for obviously ridiculous positions like the existence of Libertarian free will or the idea that consciousness is not physical. Given that we are aware that there is a lot of valuable analytic philosophy even if the overwhelming majority of it is mistaken or nonsense, we should not be so quick to dismiss the entirety of continental philosophy either.
I think this is different in kind. The difficulty of understanding some analytical philosophy is because many fields are technical as is say mathematics
I think a lot of continental philosophy would be much easier to understand for somebody with the relevant background knowledge, so I think in fact, the field is technical in the relevant sense. This impression is based on the fact that for many continental thinkers whom I dismissed at first reading analytic interpretation of them or even introductory material on them, made it clear that actually to some extent they actually were plenty understandable if you had the background knowledge and were in fact, saying valuable stuff, even when I disagree with it.
I guess we all have to refer to personal experience here.
I have read quite a bit of Continental philosophy and analytical philosophy and social science.
Based on that reading and hence with non trivial background I covers that I do feel that there is a very real difference in the quality of argumentation.
I don’t actually disagree with that in my experience. There is generally a lot of insight in continental philosophy, but it’s also mixed in with a lot of rubbish and while to some extent I think that’s also true of analytic philosophy. I would agree that there is a very real difference in quality. I just think Continental philosophy should not be dismissed outright as opposed to merely viewed with greater scepticism. I would also agree that the arguments are often either badly formulated or worded in such an obscure fashion that it’s very difficult to make head or tails of them, even when that’s quite avoidable. Now I do often have that issue with analytic philosophy as well, and I do think often the issue is less that the arguments are bad and more that they are badly presented and I do think that a lot of the better analytic interpretations are actually not mere interpretation, but steelmaning where the quality of the writing is actively improved by changes or additions, but I think that even the original has a lot of valuable inside quite frequently. Also part of the issue is that if your arguments are constituted by somebody with a highly inaccurate world view, the arguments will automatically be improved if you reformulate them in the context of a more probable world view.
I did a lot of work on Habermas
He's probably at the more intelligible end and he definitely stacks real problems and has interesting things to say
But
It's hard work deciphering some of it and it need not be so hard - it's a function of his primary intellectual tradition
And
He's writing about key theories in ways that clearer exposition would likely have revealed
But
Just my personal 2c
All that is unsurprising to me if you were under the impression that I think Continental philosophy is not more obscure than it needs to be. Then I’m sorry for the miscommunication. I think a lot of it is actually technical, but I absolutely do think that they don’t put enough effort to be clear and even appear to actively prefer being obscure.
Or in Butler’s case weakwomanning 🤨
This is a bit embarrassing. Not only are these criticisms of analytic philosophy a century old, but the praise of analytic philosophy makes me feel like Ayer is sliding you $20's, and the fact that you conclude an entire school of philosophy is nonsensical because you cannot understand it, and, besides that, expect a reader to agree with you based on a few mid-book excerpts, betrays a philosophical tribalism along with a total lack of intellectual humility. Who is this post for?
People like me who value clear writing ✍️
gag it
just opened a book of analytic philosophy at a random page and it said “the ground’s grounding of the ground grounds the ground in the ground”
Regarding some of the jargon. I know people who will e.g. say "orthogonal" instead of "independent" or something similar. To an outsider, that will be hard to understand if they have no training in mathematics, yet for the target audience it actually makes things clearer.
As an outsider, can I be confident that the jargon in continental philosphy is not like this?
I address that in the post--see the Chomsky quote, for instance, and the stuff I say after. You can also just see the nonsense ways they argue.
Chomsky was just confounded because he was devoted to a bad theory of semantics.
If you ask me what orthogonal means, and I’m definitely the kind of person who would say “orthogonal” to a non-mathematician, I can explain it, or replace it with another word you know that works in the context.
But with many of these jargon terms they don’t seem explicable in the same way, and in fact when they’re picked up by the larger culture there folk meanings tend to devolve into ideas that are just bad, and even I can tell the original academic usage had more to it. See, for instance, “toxic masculinity”
list a word that doesn't seem explicable here
exteriority
phallogocentric
abyssal alterity
I would love an explanation of abyssal alterity. I assume alterity has some technical meaning but I’m very curious what work ‘abyssal’ is doing there.
Hamiltonian, vector space, spin network, causal relatedness in the context of a causal graph, iganstate just to name a few of the top of my head.
it's "eigenstate"
But that’s also true of loads of scientific words— see evolution, fitness, relativity, information, entropy.
The collapse of useful meanings into less useful ones is not unique to continental philosophy. And in some ways analytical philosophy might struggle with it more, because if you can embed an erroneous assumption into your big spool of precise definitions— the fact that meanings decay is a reason to be sceptical of a programme of precise definition in the first place
When I was a wee lad during Obama's first term, the post-structuralists seemed like super smart people that I, a high schooler/early college student, lacked the education to understand. Also, there were snarky people on tumblr with thousands of followers posting quotes by them! Obviously I was the problem, right?
But now, as a grizzled 31 year old, my position is that they are, indeed, cons. All of them! For the reasons you say! It's an "emperor has no clothes" situation. The reason why they are so popular is because they have the allure of sophistication, and the people who "understand" them signal their sophistication by pretending to understand them. Which they themselves create other works, borrowing on others' analysis, using the same silly methods you have outlined here, furthering the signaling cycle.
Because when you actually reduce their ideas to their simplest forms, many of them are interesting, but the quality analysis doesn't really go farther than the summary. And sometimes the insight is either false or trivially true. I think a lot of these thinkers are basically journaling out loud, with no sense of quality control. I think there's a reason their best work is related to film study, which a medium that is not strictly textual.
I think it's no coincidence that online lefties and academics who like these thinkers also have something of a non-sequitur political opinion. These continental philosophers just rely on vibes man. References. The simulation of analysis, that crumbles under basic scrutiny. Sure, social media has rotted the brain of stupid people, but a lot (not all!) continental philosophy has rot the brain of smart people. Analytic philosophy has its own problems, but they are much more nuanced, and you can control for them because you can identify them. But with continental, you can't do that because the problems are so bad, as is the scholarship.
(Great post BB)
Re, "The reason why they are so popular is because they have the allure of sophistication, and the people who "understand" them signal their sophistication by pretending to understand them. Which they themselves create other works, borrowing on others' analysis, using the same silly methods you have outlined here, furthering the signaling cycle."
Ive always wondered about this. When the graduate students present stuff to their advisors or defend their dissertation, presuming its all nonsense, isnt it striking that they're able to keep the charade up. You would think that eventually the cycle of pretending to understand something and then having to pretend-reply to that would lead to an awkward moment where it would be obvious to the parties that they have just been pretending to understand each other, no? How do you imagine this works in the real world without it collapsing?
It’s my understanding that a lot of these thinkers are interpreted subjectively, in contradictory ways, etc. And the specific sorts of PhD that implement their analysis is really specific and about, like, specific works of fiction. I think you’re presuming a greater presumption of truth than these people are.
"The allure of sophistication" -- yes, basically you're saying it's a kind of scam or con. I agree.
In addition, some philosophers had psychiatric disorders that caused them to write incoherent nonsense. I have described this issue in my article:
https://open.substack.com/pub/tackleandsucceed/p/name-the-evil-philosopher
Im glad you wrote this because this is something Ive been thinking about a lot. I think Ive realized that the problem with continental philosophy as a methodology is not the concept but the execution. I think the notion of having philosophy that articulates intuitions rather than precise arguments is valuable. There are a litany of particular articulations of cosmological arguments, for example, but theres probably really only a couple intuitions underlying them. Therefore, the problem with the writings of most Continental philosophers is not the concept of Continental philosophy but rather the writing. For however "literary" their works are supposed to be, they write like dogshit.
David Bentley Hart stands as, to me, one of the only writers Ive read with an aversion to analytic philosophy whose methodological preferences are justified. Its cool that when he decides to write a towering treatise on the philosophy of mind he does it in the form of a platonic dialogue between various greek gods. Its wonderfully whimsical that some of Hart's best observations on the philosophy of religion and metaphysics comes from the mouth of his magical talking dog in "Roland In Moonlight." As such, I am more than willing to accept ambiguity from his works because they are always at the very least beautiful or humorous, as a resuly. However, the problem with most Continental thinkers is merely that they are terrible writers whose tradition allows them to hide the banality of their thoughts.
I will always be inclined to agree with Kierkegaard's criticism of Hegel in Fear and Trembling:
"For my part, I have expended no small amount time on understanding the Hegelian philosophy and I also believe that I have more or less understood it: I am foolhardy enough to believe that if, despite me having taken the trouble, there are various points at which I do not understand him, then he himself has not been sufficiently clear."
This is a profoundly infantile take that betrays your inability to engage with style. Read Jameson
Cool disco elysium pfp. Hey man, my whole point was not anti-style or ambiguity or continental philosophy--it was against the shit writing that permeates a lot of continental work. Thats my point with the Kierkegaard quote. Hes the father of existentialism. Hes in the tradition of continental philosophy and I love the literary element of his work; I would despise if Kierkegaard was forced to write in an analytical style. But many of the authors in this tradition are not being literary or stylistic, they are simply writing poorly. The reason there is so much ambiguity and dogmatic disagreement among readers of Kant or Hegel is due to a lack of clarity not an abundance of literary elements. Kierkegaard on the other hand is ambiguous because of his literary qualities--the fact that his works are composed by pseudonyms which represents different characters and ideas. Im overgeneralizing a bit because substack comments aint dissertations but clearly my point wasnt a knock on continental philosophy as such, seeing as I provided two examples of the tradition being done well in Hart and Kierkegaard.
All the quotes, other than the ones you fabricated, are perfectly intelligible if you happen to know anything about structuralism and structural linguistics, which all those people were responding to. The premise of structural linguistics is that meaning is relational, not atomistic, as in a word only has meaning due to it's correlations and anti-correlations with other words and concepts. If anything else, LLMs have confirmed this interpretation of semantics contra Chomsky's. Now, I think Derrida for example was wrong and a total disaster for the humanities, but all these people were making perfectly intelligible points. I would say, you'd be better off studying structuralism rather than post-structuralism, however.
To my understanding, the fact LLMs work merely requires patterns in language use.
Under any coherent theory of semantics, we would have such patterns (since if, e.g., certain words refer to certain items in an external world, such as “monarchies”, we would expect to see those words surrounded by common neighbors, such as “kings”, “queens”, etc.).
So it seems hard to suggest LLMs prove structuralism over other theories. Indeed, note that LLMs are fairly good at programming/formal languages, which do not seem to embody a structuralist theory of semantics.
I’ll admit I don’t know structuralism or Chomsky’s views in any real detail, though.
Chomsky maintained forever that the connectionist approach embodied by neural nets was mistaken and to this day maintains they're not doing actual language because they don't use his syntax based approach. Programming formal languages are still premised on correlations and anti correlations between signs you just happen to have some of those being set to zero or one instead of something in the middle. Only the structuralists, people like Umberto Eco, predicted that you could build a machine that could learn language and semantics purely through learning the oppositions and positions of words within human culture.
Programming languages aren't based on their signs. They actually do have a formal invented syntax, which parsers are based on, and the programs written in the language are based on acceptance from the parser.
LLMs do learn programming languages sort of the same way they learn human languages (except easier because you can use automated verification), and that means their internal representation is based on signs, but that's not how the languages were developed.
This Chomsky quote is gold.
This is an abysmal piece, and it unfortunately reflects terribly on you. You are trying to make histrionic pronouncements without engaging with any morsel of seriousness with a single author or even text, and yet lumping together the inchoate multiplicity of 'continental philosophy.' This doesn't meet any serious standard of rigor demanded of philosophy. You are young, but trying to clickbait and get attention at the expense of content is a pathological gesture that indicates you are more interested in attention-seeking sophistry than philosophy.
I think this is a good post, but I also think you're missing a lot of the point of continental philosophy (which, to be clear, I think many other people miss the point of — including people who like continental philosophy)!
In my view, continental philosophy (...or at least continental philosophy of the twentieth century that post-dates the OG existentialists, so structuralism and post-structuralism), more than anything else, is about *yarn-spinning*. It's about pointing out alternate ways of organizing thoughts about conventional subjects that nonetheless do some amount of explanatory work, in order to disorient their reader and to understand that so much of what we take for granted is arbitrary, in at least some significant respects. This requires inventing a new lexicon, and insofar as you engage with the work of others, utilizing *their* lexicon.
Consequently, continental philosophers usually do not aim to make any one point about conventional topics of inquiry in particular, and therefore rarely give thoroughgoing arguments. This makes it 100% less useful than analytic philosophy in most relevant respects (I, in the end, do favor analytic philosophy to continental philosophy), especially for, e.g., determining "policies" on things to institute. But when conceived in a more proper place of trying to plumb the depths of different ways of potentially organizing *thought* and *society, whether in concept or in reality, I do think it's edifying, and a solid well to draw from when doing things like analyzing art (which is why literary theorists love Derrida, especially).
Therefore, I somewhat fear that you're judging continental philosophy by the standards of analytic philosophy when (at least the better and more scrupulous people engaged in) continental philosophy does not even attempt to claim such standards for the field. And, while I do think that the standards analytic philosophers use do make their work directly applicable to other fields of inquiry (and therefore make their work, in a sense, better in the end), I don't think these are the standards that make sense to apply to every *type* of human activity.
For various reasons, there is and should be a place for creative storytelling about metaphysics, society, etc., and continental philosophy does that in spades (just so long as politicians aren't making decisions based on such fables with such indeterminate correspondence to reality etc lol).
"It's about pointing out alternate ways of organizing thoughts about conventional subjects that nonetheless do some amount of explanatory work, in order to disorient their reader and to understand that so much of what we take for granted is arbitrary, in at least some significant respects."
Uh...why would anyone want to do that? This sounds even more pointless than I thought. Idk, I don't understand how this is supposed to work. I want to be able to appreciate continental philosophy, but I don't understand this goal at all. Can you elaborate on this?
Unless these alternate ways of organizing thoughts do even more explanatory work or are actually more plausible ways of accurately representing/describing those subjects than the 'conventional' thoughts, then I don't see how the mere existence of these alternatives show that what we take for granted is arbitrary.
Part of continental philosophy is trying to explain concepts we don’t have language for, mainly consciousness. Each philosopher is creating his or her own vocabulary for the concept they’re communicating.
Pick any of them. You’re reading their explanation for consciousness. Some are similar or different but Heidegger has Dasein. Lacan has the Big Other. Kant has the thing-in-itself. It’s the generation of language and a vocabulary to explain something we can’t explain - something before the most basic observable fact.
If you had to compare continental philosophy to some other category, I wouldn’t choose analytic philosophy. It’s closer to quantum physics. We know there must be something beyond what we know but we can’t really get close enough to see it or to explain it. The explanation is that we don’t know what it is. That’s continental philosophy.
Part of analytical.philosophy is explaining consciousness. It's not like they are ignoring the subject.
Not saying analytical philosophy is ignoring it. It’s a different way of writing about it and framing arguments.
But yeah it’s like, you would think continental philosophy is gibberish if you think it’s analytical philosophy.
Yeah, one important thing I forgot to add is that I do think matters about continental philosophy is that... I do think a lot of the time, claims it makes LOCALLY and about SPECIFIC subjects pass the sniff test and are basically (likely to be) correct. Like... Foucault to pick a basic example I do think was broadly right about how we've psychologized punishment/"rehabilitation" and gets at a lot of the dynamics pretty well, even if I think the exact causal story he tells in Discipline and Punish is still woefully incomplete. There's not a lot one can do with this "fact" on its own, but it does function as a useful shorthand for the dynamics at play in other settings and contexts... like "a Foucauldian analysis of the novel One Day in the life of Ivan Denisovich" I can imagine will definitely make certain kinds of claims that can be reasonably agreed with or disagreed with. Doing such analysis may not be the most important thing for people to do, but I still think it's okay *to* do!
Okay I think I gotcha, thanks!
Strong agree!!
I have to say, although I do sympathize with the perspective, I also object to it. Have written my response up here: https://enrichedjamsham.substack.com/p/arguing-for-continental-philosophy
Analytics are usually just not that interested in the things continentals write about, like critical theory, philosophy of history, culture, politics, existentialism etc. and when they are interested they usually end up recapitulating the work of continentals in slightly clearer language. That’s more or less what happened with analytic metaphysics, which analytics originally dismissed the need for entirely. Maybe if they were able to come up with more interesting ideas on their own there wouldn’t be an appetite for continental philosophy, but they aren’t so there is.
Every idea that comes out of philosophy comes from analytic philosophy. You have to actually be saying something to be stating an idea. Repeating gibberish slogans doesn't count.
Buddy, just because a work is not written in simple language does not make it gibberish. That’s anti-intellectual stupidity. I don’t like Judith Butler or Derrida’s writing styles, but they were obliviously saying something. Continental ideas have had a massive influence on the world for better or worse (e.g. Marxism, Nietzscheanism, deontology, existentialism, gender theory, all of sociology etc.) and it’s ridiculous to deny that these are in fact real ideas that have real content. How many analytic ideas have had anywhere close to the same influence? Very few, because most analytics are mostly uninterested in things most people care about.
You see influence. I see a Rorschach test.
> Buddy, just because a work is not written in simple language does not make it gibberish. That’s anti-intellectual stupidity.
Continental philosophy defense seems to consist mostly of people calling you stupid for not being able to read it; I imagine these people as being very snooty, perhaps wearing a beret and smoking cloves.
Sometimes when I see quotes from it I do understand it perfectly well. And yet… they are obviously just saying stuff and then proceeding like it's true because they said it without ever demonstrating anything.
My parents were philosophy PhDs (one analytical and one Ancient Greek) and I don't think I ever encountered anything like these nonstop obscurantist French and Germans from them.
Did you read past the first two sentences of what I said? There is plenty of genuine word salad in continental philosophy but there’s also plenty of valuable ideas. Not having the patience to determine which philosophers have something useful to say and which don’t and just dismissing the entire discipline offhand, as BB does, is what is stupid.
It’s also just not true that they never demonstrate any of their claims. A lot of it is very speculative and abstract, sure, but that doesn’t mean they don’t make arguments for their positions. They clearly do. It’s just the job of a good faith reader to be able to sift through it and figure out which have merit and which don’t.
Hm, I'm not sure if writing one post means he's dismissing the entire genre offhand.
Like, Latour wrote a paper in which he was very sympathetic to this. He disclaimed his own deconstruction of science because right-wingers were using it to claim climate change was fake because all science is fake.
Also, I realize much of it is translated and translation severely affects how much something is readable in English.
I personally think I understand Butler (or like, Spivak) and when I see people doing these takedown quotes of her I understand them okish. But I don't understand a single Derrida paragraph I've ever seen.
…But I also know there was a fad for him in Japan once, because the Japanese translations of his books make sense and are readable!
Marxism is more influential than Nietzscheanism. And Marx was at least sometimes a very very clear writer and easy to understand. And most people actually use the more clear part from Marx like historical materialism (like the famous and respected historian Eric Hobsbawm), analysis of capitalism, and other practical stuff he wrote like his analysis of the ground level revolutionary activities around that time.
Deontology is older than Kant and Kant contributed to it but i think Kant's unclarity (or hard to understand writing) made multiple respected Kantian or neo-Kantian philosophers claim very different things like... some Kantians are like "animal welfare is good and animal rights exist" while others like "animals rights don't exist and animal welfare doesn't matter but you should still not be cruel to animals because it will be against your dignity because cruelty is a vice".
One Kantian guy Jason Kucinsiski is like a libertarian capitalist while some Kantians are social democrats or social liberals!
John Rawls was one of the most influential analytic philosophers of the 20th century because of his political philosophy. Analytic philosophers love political philosophy.
When I was about your age, I thought the same thing. Then I took a class on Gadamer in grad school.
That class completely changed my mind about the value of Continental philosophy. I realized that my problem wasn’t Continental philosophy per se; it was specific philosophers like Butler and Derrida.
I think most professional philosophers take the same view. They may occasionally take potshots at other traditions, but they do not completely dismiss them.
As for clarity, I have found the analytics not much better sometimes. Rendering arguments in formal logic can actually obscure their real meaning. One can get focused on puzzles instead of the big picture.
Keep in mind that most Continental classics were written in another language, too. Translation adds a barrier that makes difficult ideas more difficult to understand.
I would not be so quick to dismiss Continental philosophy, for these reasons.
No one else will ever hate the continental philosophers quite as much as me, I think. I was going to write my master's thesis debunking some of the asinine garbage Derrida puked out, but ended up with an advisor whose career was built on his nonsense. I pushed back and pushed back and pushed back until one meeting she told me, "Alexander, these things have already been decided." One would point out the bandwagon fallacy, but something something logocentrism so don't worry about it.
I threw in the towel: a move I'm neither proud nor ashamed of. I had another semester of college hanging over my head if my thesis didn't pass, after all. (And those hypocrites talk about power dynamics.)
I ended up writing about Nietzsche and Derrida. I turned the jargon knob to eleven, quoted all the right people, and, for my own private revenge, purposefully introduced a bunch of contradictory statements. Oh, and I learned a new rhetorical move! If you're worried that, say, Nietzsche's writing objectified women, you can take care of the problem by including the sentence, "Of course, we shouldn't take this to mean Nietzsche's writing objectified women." Problem solved!
And that's only one data point in years of being told to take Freud seriously, take Marx seriously, take the claim "writing existed before speech" seriously. (I would have sold a kidney to have known the term "motte and bailey.") It left an extremely bitter taste in my mouth. English departments are a joke.
Some of Karl Marx writings aren't hard to understand though. I do recognise that that hegelian dialectics stuff is terrible. But his analysis of capitalism seems quite relevant today. Liberal democracies are falling apart slowly.
I would consider marx as sometimes more analytic and sometimes more contintental.
Marx's analysis of capitalism mistakes solvable problems for fundamental contradictions because, despite his pretense of scientific objectivity, he just really doesn't want capitalism to be workable.
@alexanderkaplan, how would these conversations actually go down? Would you advisor say something and you would just say, "I dont know what you just said" or "Can you rephrase that in language that is more clear" and they just wouldnt/couldnt make themselves comprehensible? Please give more detail.
Communicating clearly with my advisor wasn't the issue. It was more along the lines of me saying, "I want to write a thesis critiquing stupid ideas A, B, and C, which strike me as obviously incorrect," and her saying "No. You shouldn't do that." After one particularly bad meeting it started to sound a lot more like "No. I won't let you do that," and I decided I didn't care enough about a graduate thesis no one will ever read to spend another semester starting over from square one. I threw in the towel, wrote something she would agree with, and got out.
Take Freud seriously. Yes.
TRUTH NUKE