Sara Heinämaa
Contemporary philosophy is often divided into two approaches or orientations: analytic philosophy and continental philosophy. In popular scientific debates, one speaks about two philosophical blocs and camps, and this parlance is further associated with the discourse of two cultural worlds, one scientific and the other humanistic.1
The relation between these two philosophical approaches is often presented as oppositional and exclusionary. On the one hand, the core of twentieth-century philosophy is thought to consist of the arguments of Carnap, Ayer, Russell, Sellars, and Davidson and, on the other hand, it is believed to be centered in the works of Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault, and Deleuze. Canonical figures are associated with sets of criteria: exactitude, consistency, and veracity, on the one hand, and extremeness, depth, and creativity, on the other.2 Analytic philosophy is characterized as “systematic” and “argumentative,” and it is said to build on the model of science, whereas continental philosophy is characterized as radical, and its goals are associated with those of poetry and religion.3 Hermeneutics is usually included in the category of continental philosophy, and thus it is often contrasted with the analytic methods of scientific philosophy.4
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, a number philosophers worked to dismantle this simple oppositional notion of philosophy rooted in logical positivism and the political antagonisms of postwar Europe. Several works, for example, Paul Ricœur’s The Rule of Metaphor (1975), Richard Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1980), and Jacques Derrida’s Limited Inc. (1972), worked to undo the exclusive distinction between two philosophical orientations.5 Since the late 1990s, the opposition has started to intensify again; occasionally, the division is presented as a profound gulf that characterizes the whole field of philosophy. The reasons for its reemergence, however, are not in any new theoretical innovation or thoroughgoing work in argumentation or interpretation. Rather, the opposition seems to have gained ground because it serves as an efficient tool in the distribution of academic positions and resources.
The aim of this chapter is to illuminate the distinction between analytic and continental philosophy and thereby to clarify the position of hermeneutics within the field of philosophy. I will argue that rather than being philosophical or empirical in nature, the analytic–continental distinction operates rhetorically and serves regulative functions. The two terms, “analytic” and “continental,” do not describe any real entities (theories, traditions, schools, methods, practices, styles of philosophizing), but operate ideologically and normatively by commending (and annulling) philosophical activities, hierarchizing philosophical interests and prescribing choices of sources and research materials.6 This suggests that no clarificatory end is served and no descriptive task accomplished when hermeneutics is classified among “continental approaches.” Rather than being conceived as a philosophical school or as a component of a philosophical tradition, hermeneutics should be seen as a scholarly method that serves interpretative, ontological, and critical inquiries.
The first thing to notice is that neither analytic nor continental philosophy is an organized philosophical program or a unified philosophical tradition, such as Stoicism or pragmatism. Both sides include several theoretical and practical interests and many ways of posing questions and answering them, some of which are in explicit conflict with one another. Moreover, plurality on both sides does not simply mean diversity of topics and methods, but also diversity of metaphilosophical views; that is, on both sides, we find several different conceptions of the goals and tasks of philosophy.
What today is called “analytic philosophy” does not merely denote philosophies that proceed by explication of individual concepts or by analysis of propositions and inferential structures but covers a variety of methodologically divergent inquiries into concepts and conceptual systems, systematic as well as historical. The field includes Russell’s and Moore’s classical analyses, and Tarksi’s and Turing’s paradigmatic definitions, but also the principled critique that Wittgenstein leveled against the examination of isolated concepts and propositions as well as the inquiries that Ryle, Sellars, Austin, and Searle developed on the basis of Wittgenstein’s critical remarks.
Moreover, analytic philosophy also includes approaches that are motivated by very different philosophical interests than Russell’s aspiration for scientific exactitude and Moore’s defense of common sense. Putnam’s background, for example, is deeply in the tradition of American pragmatism; Davidson’s anomalous monism and McDowell’s conceptualism are both grounded on Kantian intuitions; and the causal theories of meaning developed by Fodor and Dretske have metaphysical ambitions.
Historically, one can say that Russell’s and Moore’s common attack on British Idealism and Hegelianism gave a general orientation to analytic philosophy.7 Today, however, several new developments with transcendental and even idealistic undertones have emerged within the field, for example, McDowell’s Kantian conceptualism or Brandom’s synthesis of pragmatism and Hegelian Idealism (cf. Habermas [1999] 2003).
Correspondingly, the field of “continental philosophy” includes several types of inquiries. Usually, the origin of the approach is traced back to the phenomenologies of Husserl and Heidegger, and further to German Idealism.8 But such unidirectional geneses fail to account for the factual heterogeneity of the field. “Continental philosophy” includes, not only phenomenology, existentialism, and deconstruction, but also Bergsonian metaphysics, French epistemology, and history of science and the radically empiricist and materialist approaches of Deleuze and his followers.9
Continental philosophy is known for its exchanges with the arts and for its engagement with revolutionary politics (cf. Rorty [1986] 1991; 1991), but it is important to note that the field also includes explicitly scientific and scholarly enterprises, for example, Husserl’s philosophical science, Ganguilhem’s philosophy of biology, and Gadamer’s hermeneutics. Thus, the contrast between art and science, or that between creation and discovery, is not sufficient to make the distinction. Rather, what must be realized is that the scientific (or nonscientific) character of philosophy is understood in different ways in the two fields, and in multiple ways on both sides.
One starting point of analytic philosophy is the idea of exact science that suggests mathematical analysis and the mathematized natural sciences as models for philosophy. Many analytic thinkers have abandoned the logical positivist principles of explication, analysis, and construction, but the model of exact science still dominates the discourse on the scientific character of philosophy on this side of the dividing line.10
At the heart of continental philosophy, on the other hand, we find Husserl’s demand for rigor. This idea is very different from the idea of exactitude, and in his The Crisis of European Sciences Husserl famously uses his concept of rigor to question the model of the exact natural sciences and to demonstrate its limits. What Husserl meant by rigorous science is a science that is free from unexplored assumptions and unfounded postulates (Hua1, 25). His point was not that our sciences or philosophies factually proceed without preconceptions, but he argued that the practices of the sciences essentially involve and are regulated by the goals of justification, and that no scientific project can proceed without providing evidence for its theories and interpretations (e.g., Hua1, 11).
Philosophy for Husserl was that particular part of the scientific undertaking that accounts for the ultimate presuppositions of being that ground the special sciences and are taken for granted in their positive investigations. He argued that its task of philosophy is to explicate the different senses of being that are presupposed by the sciences, for example, physical being, living being, historical being, and human being. The regulative goals of perfect evidence and complete justification guide this undertaking, and they imply that the philosopher, as a factual person, must be able to live in the suspension of final judgments (e.g., Hua1 §5, 54/13).
The origin of the division between analytic and continental philosophy is usually traced back to the difference between the new philosophies that Husserl and Frege developed in parallel at the turn of the twentieth century.11 Both presented a strong critical response to the psychologistic philosophies of logic and mathematics that dominated the nineteenth century, and both grounded their responses in the tradition of Leibniz, Kant, Bolzano, and Lotze.12 What we have then is a division in the face of a common problem and in the context of a shared tradition.
In his Origins of Analytic Philosophy, Michael Dummett compares the philosophies of Frege and Husserl to two large rivers, and writes that they “rise quite close to one another and for a time pursue roughly parallel courses, only to diverge in utterly different directions and flow into different seas” (Dummett 1993, 26). The core of Dummett’s picture is sound: Frege and Husserl shared fundamental philosophical problems, and their methodologies grew out of a common philosophical insight. For the understanding of subsequent developments and our contemporary situation, it is important to note that a central element shared by both “forefathers” was the critique of empiricist and relativist approaches to ideal being.
The psychologistic philosophers of the nineteenth century argued that logical laws are based on the empirical regularities of the human mind, or rational thinking more generally.13 Thus, the law of the excluded middle, for example, would capture a contingent regularity that characterizes the workings of the human mind or would be grounded on some such regularity. Frege and Husserl argued that the type of validity that characterizes logical laws rules out all psychologistic accounts of logic. Whereas logical laws are exceptionless and hold universally and absolutely, empirical generalizations hold, at best, by the highest probability and do not cover all the possible cases over which they regulate. Logical laws are known a priori and demonstratively, but empirical laws are known a posteriori, and the validity of such laws is induced from singular cases of experience.
Both Husserl and Frege contended that psychologistic grounding of logic rests on a fundamental misunderstanding. The laws of logic do not regulate mental acts or psychic processes of reasoning but regulate ideal objects—meanings, thought content, propositions—and relations between such objects. No psychological empirical regularity can account for or ground such ideal laws (e.g., Hua18 §22 77–79/49–51).
This antipsychologistic argument does not simply concern logic as one discipline among others but concerns the possibilities of scientific thinking in general—insofar as sciences comply with, or aim to comply with, the laws of non-contradiction and consistency. In other words, Frege’s and Husserl’s philosophies of logic had far-reaching implications for epistemology and the philosophy of science as well as for the sciences themselves, both natural sciences and human sciences. If the law of non-contradiction that regulates the objects of scientific thinking and debating only holds with the highest probability and for the maximum number of all cases, then it is possible that we must accept as scientific a claim that explicitly negates its own content—and such a claim may emerge in political science, or in medicine, as well as in physics.14 This was the absurd relativist consequence of psychologism, and it demonstrated to Husserl and Frege that the psychologistic line of thinking had to be subjected to a fundamental critique.
The problem proved more general than it first seemed. The skeptical and relativistic thought pattern that Frege and Husserl attacked under the guise of psychologism also took other forms and foci. Rather than reducing the ideal objects of logic to the psychic processes in individual reasoners, some theorists reduced them to the dispositions of the human kind or to the hardwired structures of the human species. In other words, psychologism shared a general reductionist orientation with anthropologism and biologism.
Husserl questioned these thought patterns in his Logical Investigations. Unlike Frege, he developed detailed arguments against different forms of empiricism influential at the turn of the century. He attacked Avenarius and Mach for their biologistic assumptions and Sigwarth and Erdmann for their anthropologist contentions. Finally, he argued that not just empiricist doctrines, but also historicist and idealist theories suffer from the same confusion in so far as they identify logical laws with regularities that concern factual matters, such as historical cultures of the peoples or the composition of the human species (e.g. Hua18 §37 130–131/83).
However, the alternatives that Frege and Husserl presented to empiricist philosophies of logic differed in crucial respects. For Frege, the foundation of logic is in formal semantics. For Husserl, the sufficient foundations of logic and all sciences can only be provided by phenomenology, which is to be conceived as a rigorous science of the ideal structures of transcendental consciousness. Frege took a traditionally Platonist position in the metaphysical debate concerning the ontological status of numbers, concepts, and other ideal objects.15 He did not present a positive account of how our factual psychic acts and mental processes relate to such objects. Husserl, for his part, took the task of developing phenomenology as a fundamental science that is able to answer for the ideal and normative character of all sciences by accounting for the constitution of ideal objects. His phenomenology also offered a theory of the relations between our mental acts of thinking as real occurrences in the spatiotemporal world and the ideal contents that are thematized in logic, epistemology, and phenomenology.16
Hermeneutical studies deal with several supra-mental and trans-cultural objects, not only with the contents of texts and other signifying materials, but also with the linguistic meanings of words and sentences and their parts. These are all ideal objects, according to Husserl, and require specific methods for their study. The interpreter does not proceed by inductive generalizations or by explanations in terms of causal dependences, but uses the hermeneutic methods that are suitable for the identification of the ideal senses of words, texts, and their contexts and for the interpretation of such units.
Philosophical works, Heraclitean fragments, biblical writings, or the novels of Jane Austen, for example, can of course be read in many different ways, studied with diverse interests and goals and approached from varying social and historical contexts. We may, for example, have purely historical-literary interest in Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, but we may also want study the main characters of the novel and their mutual relations with emancipatory feminist goals. Moreover, we may want to illuminate the relations that Austin’s work has to its contemporary literature or alternatively clarify the relations that it has to its social-political context, or we may want to study the work in abstraction from both contexts and relate it to the traditions of Western literature. Such differences of reading do not compromise the unity and singularity of the object under investigation. Interpreters working with diverse interests in different social-historical contexts may develop varying interpretations of the text, but they do not thereby construe different objects of study. One and the same target—the content of the text or the meaning of the word—is shared by all of them, and their possible agreement or disagreement concerns this unity.
In the hermeneutic circle, the meaning of the text or the process of interpretation may come to illuminate also the character of the interpreter. She may, for example, need to question her original assumptions in the attempt to make sense of the text and may thereby realize that she has entertained untenable assumptions or tacit preconceptions about the text or its contexts. All this may advance her self-understanding as a scholar or thinker and may help her to develop herself as an interpreter. However, the truth about the texts remains one thing and the truth about the interpreter another, and the main aim of the scholarly undertaking is to illuminate the former.
In the phenomenological-hermeneutical tradition, we can find some dismissive comments about logical positivism and logical empiricism.17 Husserl condemned positivism as a form of self-forgetful thinking; Heidegger denounced the preoccupation with epistemology and science; and following them, Gadamer questioned the adequacy of verificationism and the idea of truth as an outcome of a method. These critical interventions do not, however, differ in their mode of discourse from the critiques that continental thinkers leveled against one another. Husserl did not just attack the biologism of Mach and Avenarius but also the anthropologistic tendencies that he saw looming in Heidegger’s existential hermeneutics. Derrida problematized Austin’s assumptions about normativity, yet the main target of his deconstruction was Husserl, and his main rivals were Ricœur and Foucault (e.g., Derrida 1988, 38–39).
We cannot find the idea of two opposite approaches or traditions—one analytic and the other continental—in phenomenological or hermeneutical classics or in their descendants. The successors of Lacan and Deleuze could perhaps be accused of lacking interest in the contributions of the analytic forefathers, but they cannot be criticized for polemical critiques, untenable generalizations, or phantasmatic constructions concerning the analytic-constructivist method of thinking.
The historical roots of the antagonistic divide are in diagnostic statements that prominent British philosophers put forward after the Second World War and between the two wars. These statements did not, in the first place, concern academic life on the continent, or in American universities, but concerned certain developments in British academia.
British philosophers had a habit of attacking one another with ironic and sarcastic formulations, and the Hume-spirited accusations of nonsensical metaphysics ruled widely among logical empiricists, positivists, and postpositivists.18 However, the main distinction that the postwar British thinkers wanted to make was between academic philosophy practiced at the universities and colleges, on the one hand, and the “continental orientation” that had become popular among British intellectuals, on the other hand.19
Bertrand Russell’s The History of Western Philosophy (1945) is probably the best known of such interventions. In this popular scientific work, Russell presented a series of accounts that appraised some philosophical classics and contemporaries, and condemned others. Moreover, Russell’s history rendered a unidirectional development that had a beginning in Socratic questioning and reached its peak in the logical atomism of the twentieth century.20 In order to establish a direct line of inheritance, Russell had to close off many byways and detours. The most contentious and antagonistic, and least reasoned, judgments that he passed concerned Bergson’s vitalistic metaphysics (Russell [1945] 1967, 881).21
Russell was not alone in his contempt for philosophers who risked the integrity of the field by neglecting the techniques of analysis and construction. Also, the early logical positivists in Austria and Germany attacked philosophies that took such risks. Schlick denounced Husserl’s phenomenology by writing that its recourse to intuition makes him feel “almost disgust” ([1918] 1974, 136); and Carnap notoriously dismissed Heidegger’s fundamental ontology as pseudo-theoretical (1931). However, the focused and argumentative attacks by German and Austrian positivists lacked the overarching motive that we find in Russell’s teleological account of Western philosophy.
Even more far-reaching than Russell’s intervention were the evocative and politically charged judgments that the Oxford philosopher Gilbert Ryle passed on phenomenology after the Second World War and between the wars ([1928] 2009, [1946] 2009, [1962] 2009, 1970). What Ryle shared with Russell was not so much a stringent method or an atomistic ontology, but a cultural-political worry.22
The best known of Ryle’s verdicts is the lecture “Phenomenology versus The Concept of Mind” that he gave in 1958 in Royaumont.23 In this paper, Ryle set out to explain “the gulf” between “Anglo-Saxon” and “continental” philosophies by reference to the purported fact that the study of logic had been neglected in continental departments of philosophy during the twentieth century ([1962] 2009, 189).
The paper was Ryle’s contribution to the philosophical conference La Philosophie Analytique that a group of French philosophers organized with the aim of creating connections between different philosophical approaches in postwar Europe. In addition to Ryle, also Austin, Ayer, Quine, and Strawson took part in the exchange. Leading continental phenomenologists and historians of philosophy, such as Alquié, Berger, Brun, Merleau-Ponty and Van Breda, were present as well as a group of continental logicians.24
The style of Ryle’s address was self-asserting and sarcastic, but derision was a typical verbal trope in his presentations and was not targeted at the audience in Royaumont (e.g., Ryle [1957] 2009, 268). However, in the context of the meeting, Ryle’s politically charged formulations and his arrogant approach gave a strong antagonistic character to the distinction that he set to make between Anglo-Saxon and continental ways of philosophizing. Ryle rejected Husserl’s idea of phenomenology as a foundational science, and added rhetorical force to his critical remarks by assimilating Husserl to Hitler:
I guess that our [British] thinkers have been immunized against the idea of the Mistress Science by the fact that their daily lives in Cambridge and Oxford Colleges have kept them in personal contact with real scientists. Claims to Fuehrership vanish when postprandial jokes begin. Husserl wrote as if he had never met a scientists—or a joke.
(Ryle [1962] 2009, 189)
For the participants associated with phenomenology—Merleau-Ponty, Berger, Wahl, and van Breda—the similes that Ryle used to establish the distinction between two philosophical approaches suggested not only philosophical illiteracy but also, and more alarmingly, historical ignorance or political tastelessness. The statement about “Fuehrership” was especially disquieting, since Husserl, of Jewish descent, had been banned from German universities and academic institutions of publication and cooperation already at the beginning of 1930s and had lived in isolation from 1933 till his death in 1938 (Van Breda [1959], 2007, 40).
Ryle’s intention, however, was not to give a fair account of Husserl or his philosophy. He began his talk by characterizing phenomenology as a belated form of “Platonised Cartesianism” and by criticizing it for a wide misuse of the term “meaning” (2009, 188). Ryle did not pretend to clarify phenomenological concepts or to present arguments against the theses of the phenomenologists. Instead, the main part of his speech concerned his own work and its background in the analytic approaches of Russell and Wittgenstein. The function of phenomenology was merely to serve as a foil for Ryle’s own philosophy of mind (1949). The short two-page discussion of phenomenology ends with the following words: “This caricature of Husserl’s Phenomenology is intended to show up by contrast some of the predominant features of recent philosophy and in particular of the philosophy of mind in the English-speaking world” (2009, 188).25
Van Breda, the founder and custodian of the Husserl Archives in Leuven,26 presented the first comments in the discussion that followed Ryle’s presentation. He suggested that if Ryle had studied Husserl’s works and manuscripts in some depth and had acquainted himself with the history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophy, also outside of the British universities, he could have avoided the simple opposition between Anglo-Saxon and continental approaches. Ryle declared that it was not in his interest to establish if his caricature of phenomenology corresponded with Husserl’s writings (Cahiers, 87, cf. Merleau-Ponty [1960] 2005, 61).
The discussion continued by the critical and clarificatory questions presented by Quine, Ayer, and Merleau-Ponty, and by the replies that Ryle gave to these queries. Both Ayer and Merleau-Ponty pointed out thematic and methodological connections between phenomenology and Ryle’s declaredly analytic philosophy of mind,27 but Ryle dismissed these suggestions systematically (Cahiers 1962, 93, 94, 96; cf. Merleau-Ponty 1992, 65, 66, 68). When Merleau-Ponty suggested that Ryle’s philosophical project might still be quite close to those of Wittgenstein and Russell, Ryle simply replied: “I certainly hope not” (Beck et al. 1962, 98, cf. Merleau-Ponty 2005, 67).28 Ryle’s main interest was in presenting his The Concept of Mind, and the contributions of the Oxford school more generally, as an original philosophical breakthrough.
This brief glance at the early history of twentieth-century philosophy indicates that the roots of the opposition between analytic philosophy and continental philosophy are in the cultural-political antagonism of postwar Europe. It suggests that the opposition operated as a polemical and rhetorical means in the promotion of certain methods and in the struggle for hegemonic position in the academia. The source of the divide would thus not be in the epistemological, ontological, or methodological debates at the time, but in scientific-political undertakings. This further suggests that the normative contrast between “analytic philosophy” and “continental philosophy” is not a secondary or derived usage of the terms but belongs to their “linguistic home.”
In this regard, the terms “analytic philosophy” and “continental philosophy” resemble those seemingly non-normative words that Robert Brandom discusses in Making It Explicit (1994). Brandom argues that several theoretical and philosophical terms function in a similar manner as pejorative/complimentary terms, such as “Jewish,” “Western,” “Republican,” and “Muslim”: these words serve identificatory, classificatory, and descriptive ends, yet simultaneously imply evaluative judgments about the persons and practices at issue.
Brandom declares that the task of the critical thinker is to examine the material inference of her own operative terms and to subject them to critique: “In Reason’s fight against thought debased by prejudice and propaganda, the first rule is that material inferential commitments that are potentially controversial should be made explicit as claims, exposing them as vulnerable to reasoned challenge and as in need of reasoned defense” (Brandom 1994, 126).
Following this rule will help us dismantle the opposition between “analytic philosophy” and “continental philosophy,” but it may also allow us to trump the whole distinction for more specific and informative characterizations.