Meta-Philosophy

Analytical/continental: again and agin

It has become fashionable recently to declare that the analytic/continental split has no meaning because analytical and continental philosophy cannot be defined clearly enough to be distinguished from one another. We are directed to the massively heterogeneous discourses conducted, particularly, in the name of analytical philosophy today. What could conceivably be excluded?

Plenty. The problem is not with defining analytical and continental philosophyâ€--that'€™s easy--€”but defining them in ways which do not show how lame they are. If we are willing to look, not with a sincere eye but with a coldly honest one, the nature of each is plain. (I discussed all this in more detail a couple of years ago in Continental Philosophy Review and also in my Reshaping Reason, now out in paperback).

No definition to be sure, is without counterexamples; there are always borderline cases and sports. But in general, if you are an analytical philosopher, you believe something like the following:

(1). The goal of all philosophical inquiry is truth;

(2). Truth is a property of certain Saetze (English has no equivalent for this term, so essential to Frege and the Logical Empiricists; I can't even get the umlauts to work here.It includes propositions, sentences, and beliefs).

(3). Therefore the goal of all philosophical inquiry is a set of Saetze.

These all incorporate substantive philosophical commitments, to which (with a few honorable exceptions) analytical philosophy adheres without argument. Lame!

In particular, what is and is not a Satz is a matter of grammatical structure: Saetze are Saetze in virtue of their form. That form, being basic, is unchanging. So analytical philosophy, seeking what the Germans call Satzwahrheit (another concept for which English, so conveniently impoverished, has no word), reduces things to invariant structures. This, then, means abstracting away from their pasts and their futures and treating them sub specie aeternitatis.

Which, given the nature of our cognitive apparatus, is not merely an abstraction but a falsification--€”if we include under "€œfalsification"€ abstracting away from necessary features of a thing. For there is nothing we know which we do not come to know. Search your mind and heart as you will; everything you find, every thought you have, and every awareness, has its history. There is no cognitive content which does not have, in Hegel’s words, a Before and an After which differ from its Now.

Analytical philosophy, reducing both thought and objects to invariant structures, thus pursues Wahrheit within the framework of a prior falsification. Lame indeed. But easily defined.

There are, of course, people who are identified as analytical philosophers who do not hold the above three claims. Donald Davidson is a prominent example. But there are not many like him, and I would say that they are mis-identified as analytical philosophers, just as crocodiles can be misidentified as alligators.

There is one analytical philosopher that I know of who is upfront about his adherence to these three claims, and about his reasons for it, and that is Quine. The rest of them don’t even seem to know they believe them, or that they are substantive.

Continental philosophy can be defined, then, in opposition to this: as philosophy which is committed to the view that everything that philosophers deal with has a past and a future, and that rigorous philosophy can never forget this. That they are thus fixated on temporality often comes as a surprise to continentals, for the focus has been disguised by partiality: continentals focus either on the past (Hegel) or on the future (everybody else), but never on both, and so it is not clear to them that they are focusing on temporality at all. Lame yet again.

It is, of course, no sin to be lame. I myself am lame in various ways, including physically. But sin, serious sin, lies in remaining lame by choice.

meta-philosophy is self refuting, but perhaps pragmatically useful

Dear all,

Below is a post cut and pasted from my home blog.  If I was capable of being more obnoxious face to face with people, maybe my posts would be less obnoxious.  I don't know; I'm trying to improve in both regards.  If I was writing the below now, I'd communicate my respect for Derrida and Rorty as philosophers more, but I'll just leave it as is.  Please feel free to bust me about what's there now, I won't dispute you.

I'm interested if anybody agrees that the "Theory Wars" in English should be better characterized as a war between two Heideggers, rather than as they are by the anti-theorists in Theory's Empire and by the pro-Theory people writing in the Chronicle (that's all I've read about it).  I'm also interested in what anybody has to say about the critique of the theory-theory in this context.

Jon

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Though recent controversial book Theory's Empire: An Anthology of Dissent (which you can order here) contains a wealth of very interesting critiques from writers all over the world, there really was one important lacunae.

One of the central debates in recent analytical philosophy concerns the extent to which people utilize tacitly known theories in interpreting one another.  Defenders of the "theory-theory" argue that we do.  On this view, when I understand a person's action I do so by subconsciously deriving predictions from an internalized theory about the way environmental factors, beliefs, and desires interact for humans.  The "simulation theory" denies this and holds that when interpreting others we put ourselves in the others' place and see what we would do.  Traditionally, the theory-theory's biggest weakness is the way it is implicated in the old school cognitivist belief that thought is essentially linguaform (for important critiques of this see, Dreyfus' What Computers Still Can't Do, and Varela, Thompson, and Rosch's The Embodied Mind).  [Note: the essay on this in Steven Stich's otherwise excellent (and sadly neglected by philosophers of language) Deconstructing the Mind is really unfortunate because he presents himself as defending a version of the theory-theory that does not have the reasoning processes be linguaform.  Since that is precisely what is most at issue between the two approaches, it is not really clear what he is defending.]

(1) Here is an interesting performative contradiction.  If the theory-theory is false about normal human interpretation, then it seems less likely that literary interpretation needs the kind of overarching theoretical foundation that Paul De Man and Stanley Fish convinced a generation of non-philosophy department humanities professors that it did.  The interesting thing here is that the theories encouraged by De Man and Fish came from French thinkers of the 1968 revolt, all of whom (according to Renault and Ferry's French Philosophy of the Sixties: An Essay on Anti-Humanism) were Heideggerians (and many English Department anti-theorists are not anti-theory per se, but rather just against the literary importance of this kind of theory, something articulated by the director of the literature program at the Sorbonne, in his essay).  Here is the strange phenomena; The best critiques of cognitivism (see above) also come out of the Heideggerian tradition, albeit one that completely bypasses Derrida and leads through Merleau-Ponty to Dreyfus and Varela.  So I think the theory debate in English Departments might be better cast as a debate between two Heideggers. 

(2)  Once I was in a conversation with a Lacanian, and he asked me if I was an "analyst."  First I thought he was asking if I did Freudian Therapy, a perfectly normal question for a Lacanian.  But it quickly became clear that he called everyone working in the tradition of "analytical philosophy" an analyst.  When I told him that my undergraduate training was in continental philosophy (mostly the Frankfurt School and Italian Marxism from Douglas Kellner and Harry Cleaver, but a fair share of other stuff too from Louis Mackie and Bob Solomon), but that with the exception of aesthetics, my graduate work was on analytical figures, the Lacanian jerk just said "you're an analyst."  When I said I didn't think there was any way the distinction could be made correctly, he just walked away (at least he didn't force me to have dozens of shock treatments like the real Lacan did to the hapless Antonin Artaud).

Here is something that is very interesting to me- as explicit, substantive theoretical commitments, nobody is a phenomenologist and nobody is an analytical philosopher. Ever since J.L. Austin, nobody has believed the original shibboleths of analytical philosophy, and ever since Heidegger (I'm not an expert, my take on this is almost entirely Dermot Moran's presentation of Heidegger's critique of Husserl) no one really accepts the original shibboleths of phenomenology (I can blog on both of these things if necessary, just go with me on this).

This suggests an anti-theory-theory take on the importance of theory.  There is no contentful recipe or algorithm for good interpretation, and any meta-philosophical attempts to devise them end up being ludicrously wrong.  From the standpoint of justifying one's interpretations they don't work because they are false and grossly simplify human (and literary and philosophical) interpretation into something linguaform, which it is not (incidentally, I think there is enough textual evidence to argue that Derrida was moved by this very point in his repeated unheeded injunction that deconstructionism was not a technique).  However, from the standpoint of discovering an interesting interpretation they can still be pragmatically useful. 

So analyticly trained philosophers in the U.S. learn really well to look at the world the way Bertrand Russell did, and develop the ability to use logic and learn to play really well Plato's definitions game. Continentally trained philosophers learn really well to look at the world the way Husserl did, learning how to do close readings as Husserlians should.  Both learn very early on that the respective philosophers were wrong, and that the way they were wrong shows that since their key doctrines are false, they do not justify the kind of interpretation being engaged in.  Nonetheless, in both cases being forced to think like those philosophers can be an extremely important part of philosophical development.  (1) Russell and Husserl's greatness in part consists in the fact that the way they were wrong opens up lots of new vistas for thought (they serve the role of Descartes' evil demon in this respect), (2) maybe spending a time thinking like them makes one philosophically stronger in some sense, (3) since most philosophy just isn't that good (we share a discipline with Kant for God's sake), maybe inculcating false meta-philosophical justifications allows those of us who are not going to shake the world, but who still need to teach undergraduates, to still do something marginally useful (i.e. great philosophy is sui generis, certainly lacking an algorithm for discovery or justification, but the mediocre philosophy that characterizes 98% of analytic and continental professors' writings may actually be made more worthwhile by those mediocre philosophers inculcating false meta-philosophy).

This is very interesting to me because a lot of our video game book is explaining how  video games show Bertrand Russell to be mistaken about so many things.  The way out of that morass lies with good philosophy of science, language, and mind exemplified by Mark Wilson and cognitive science in Merleau-Ponty's tradition (Alvin Noe and Herbert Dreyfus figuring very prominently, and Evan Thomson figures prominently in the next book we will right).  So to do a good job with the books, I find myself finally integrating the analytic and continental training I've had, and learning a lot more of continental philosophy in the process.  I know in the case of the writers I love (both analytic and continental) inculcating overarching meta-philosophical theories (that they explicitly reject!) are part of making them who they are in the sense of a context of discovering interpretation. But at the end of the day, I think the relevant theories can be justified or critiqued without reference to meta-philospohical theory.

Unfortunately, I left my copy of  Theory's Empire in Baton Rouge.  I'd really like to see to what extent the authors are arguing that exclusive focus on French philosophers of the 60's is pragmatically bad, rather than arguing that such philosophies are false.  If I'm right it might be beside the point for the purpose of many of these debates.  However in philosophy, learning the the history of the refutation of the linguistic doctrines supporting analysis is an essential part of being an analytical philosopher today.  And from Moran I gather that learning the history critiques of Husserl is an essential part of continental training.  Philosophers need to embody programmatic meta-philosophies at a point in their career, but then need to spend the rest of their career learning how to interpret given the falsity of these meta-philosophies.  I don't know if literary interpretation is analogous.

(3)  One more thing that this suggests for cognitive science.  The theory-theory is for some reason very psychologically plausible to people.  I think that there are probably evolutionary reasons why people are likely to construe their own cognitive processes in overly precise, linguaform ways.  So maybe the theory-theory correctly maps a bit of ideology humans tend to believe about the way they interpret, while also being a false description of they way they actually interpret.  This seems exactly analogous to schools of philosophy. What we really do is in some deep sense non-linguaform and non-algorithmic, but maybe to do this non-theoretical interpreting we need to have a false theory about what we are doing.

Gulping Down the Truth

Günter Grass’s 2006 revelation that he had served in the SS as a 17 year old draftee caused a firestorm. To be sure, Grass had always acknowledged some degree of service to Nazi Germany. He had even admitted that “I belonged to the Hitler Youth, and I believed in its aims up to the end of the war.” But the SS? That seriously heightened his involvement with the Nazis, which of course is why he had kept it secret for so many decades.

My sense of the firestorm, however, was that most of Grass’s critics were conservatives who had attacked him for many ears, on many different grounds. Most people who didn’t already hate Grass understood that a 17 year old draftee was more manipulable than a grownup, knowledgeable Nazi—such as Heidegger, who freely joined the Nazi Party at the age of 43.

Still, firestorm it was. And something seemed strange to me about it. Where was Habermas? Though he was one of Grass’s old comrades in arms, fighting many good fights with him (such as their struggle against precipitous German reunification after the fall of the Wall), Habermas was conspicuously absent from Grass’s defense team. No op-eds  could I find; no feuilleton contributions, not even a letter to the editor on behalf of Grass.

Having been Habermas’s colleague for a couple of years, l knew only too well how much he likes to weigh in even on matters that don’t concern him. And these attacks on an old comrade certainly did. Where was he? Was he ill? Had he turned on Grass? What was going on?

The November 2006 edition of the German cultural magazine Cicero told me.

It had long been known that Habermas, like Grass, had been in the Hitler Youth. But according to Cicero he, too, had a higher level of involvement than he had acknowledged, though hardly as high as the SS. He had been a squad leader. And towards the end of the war, one member of his squad—one Hans-Ulrich Wehler---had been blowing off meetings. This could have been mere adolescent busyness—but it also might have signaled a loss of faith in the Führer and his Reich. After all, one did not openly resign from any Nazi organization. (What reason would you give? “I don’t like you guys any more?“)

So, the Cicero article continues, Squad Leader Habermas wrote a letter to Recalcitrant Member Wehler, urging him to get more active in the Youth. And there was, apparently, more: Habermas urged Wehler not to give up faith in the Endsieg, the ultimate victory of the Fatherland, etc., etc., yada-yada.

The story continues that many years later, Wehler—who had become a history professor at the University of Bielefeld—and Habermas were having a friendly dinner. Wehler cheerily reminded Habermas of that long ago letter, which he had recently found again in his papers—and which, just for old times’s sake, had brought with him to the dinner. What fun!

Habermas asked to see it; read it quickly; wadded it up.

And swallowed it.

Philosophers claim to seek the truth; some of them (far too many) claim to find it. But none, to my knowledge, has ever simply gulped it down. “A truth cannot lose anything by being written down,” Hegel wrote (in the Phenomenology). But the Truth can—for if the only evidence for a truth is its written testimony, he who destroys the testimony has diminished the Truth by subtracting something from it.

Just about the time Grass’s revelations hit the media, Habermas was thus involved in a scandal of his own—a ridiculous one, to be sure, but still scandalous enough to require him to lie a bit low when his old comrade came under for more serious attack. So Habermas didn’t come to the aid of Grass.

But he did come to the aid of himself. Unfortunately his defenses—most credibly from the mouth of Wehler—didn’t really do the job. According to Wehler (summarized at http://www.ksta.de/html/artikel/1161673298988.shtml), Habermas was never a squad leader in the Hitler Youth, just a member; the letter merely contained boilerplate about the Endsieg, not genuine enthusiasm; and the whole thing happened when Habermas was only 13 or 14.

But this defense of Habermas doesn’t go through, because the real scandal was not in 1943, or whenever, but during that dinner with Wehler many years later—when Habermas destroyed the evidence. And that he did so is not in dispute (though according to Habermasians, it was not by swallowing it; Habermas simply threw the letter in a waste can).

It ain’t the crime, Jürgen—it’s the coverup. Even if you can swallow the truth, your gulping just becomes another thing that needs to be hidden. Cover-ups must be invented to cover cover-ups, and so on forever.

Yada-yada.

[Author: John McCumber]

How should professors counsel PhD students about work in the BGN sector?

An interesting analysis at Leiter Reports about academic placement of Michigan PhD graduates.

I wonder what we should do as professors regarding the chance that some of our students will pursue careers outside academia in the BGN (business, government, NGO) sector.

Even though most graduate students begin their graduate careers intending to pursue an academic career, I advise them to broaden their outlook from the start, so that they come to think of academia as only one of the job markets for which their training qualifies them.

This is not so much an empirical question as to what our students want, as a normative question as to our obligation as professors toward guiding them, given the difficulties of the academic job market. There’s also what I would say is the salutary effect on us of seeing other careers as worthwhile and rewarding options for them; this helps us keep academia in perspective: an important part of our society, but not its pinnacle or something everyone need aspire to join, even with advanced degrees.

In sum, we can’t be responsible for what our students desire, but shouldn't we encourage them to  consider other options from the start, not just as a last-minute fall-back position?

Welcome to Meta-Philosophy

I thought we should switch gears from "Outside Philosophy," which had as its organizing principle that people who were philosophers but employed outside philosophy departments might like a group blog. But while we had some interesting posts, we didn't really generate enough of an author base to sustain a viable web presence. So I thought we'd try "Meta-Philosophy," as a place for anyone interested in reflections on the practices and institutions of philosophy, regardless of employment. I will probably repost some discussions from other blogs to get things going.

2007 National Humanities Awards

President Bush today awarded the national humanities medals.(see here)

Most of them were awarded for efforts of behalf of "liberty." I am pleased to report that no philosopher got one.

[Author: John McCumber]

Philosophy's Crazy Thing

A few years ago, I published a book on the history of American philosophy after World War II called Time in the Ditch: American Philosophy and the McCarthy Era. It was a history of social pressures placed on philosophers by political forces. Since philosophers like to think that philosophy is independent of low things like politics, my book was not very popular in some parts of the profession. This I expected; some of these philosophers actually believe what they think.

Other aspects of its reception I did not expect, however. One of these is that six years after its appearance, my small book would be part of a growing literature. There are now three other histories which deal with political pressures which were placed on philosophers during the Twentieth Century, and which may have affected the subsequent development of philosophy itself:

Michael Friedman A Parting of the Ways (Open Court, 2000)

Aaron Preston Analytic Philosophy: the History of an Illusion (Continuum 2007)

George Reisch How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science (Cambridge, 2005)

Not that any of the other authors copied me, or even followed me. Friedman’s book came out before mine. As far as I know, the other two books were already underway when my book appeared.

This is a classic case of convergent research. All four books, begun independently, use similar methodology to arrive at their answers: namely, that who wins and who loses in philosophy is determined not solely by who has the better arguments. Also in play are political forces which have nothing to do with phiulosophical merit.

They have to do with Crazy Things.

These books apply historical methodologies first developed in the philosophy of science to philosophy itself. Basically, what you do is: you go back to some watershed turning point in the history of science—say, Einstein’s rejection of the Quantum Theory. Then you try to figure out what was really going on among scientists at that time. What you find at these turning points, as Arthur Fine once put it to me, is not merely disinterested argument, but “all sorts of crazy things.” The next part of the job, after several decades, is to sort through everything, subtract what we can now recognize as crazy, and reevaluate the merits of the case.

It was inevitable that this style of historiography would come to be applied to philosophy itself. That is what Friedman, Reisch, I, and to a degree Preston have done. We took major turning points—say, Carnap’s break with Heidegger, or analytical philosophy’s rise to dominance in the United States. We tried to figure out what was really going on. And we discovered all sorts of Crazy Things.

The others may not agree, but it seems to me that our research converges around the notions that:

(a) The blanket rejection of what became Continental philosophy by what became Analytical philosophy was a Crazy Thing (i.e., politically motivated);

(b). Therefore, Analytical philosophy’s rise to dominance in the United States was a Crazy Thing;

(c). Therefore, Analytical philosophy’s present dominance in the United States just may be a Crazy Thing. 

Given that no one even seems to know what Analytical philosophy is these days, it is hard to tell just what its dominance consists in, and how much of it could survive critical scrutiny. But if philosophers want to be critically rational beings—if they want to be philosophers—they had better accept that a Crazy Thing happened in philosophy just at the time that Analytical philosophy was coming to dominance, and they need to get started thinking about it.

These four books are a good place to make that start.

[Author: John McCumber]