Chris Bateman and Babette Babich : Last of the Continental Philosophers*
Conversations re-booted and reblogged for the sake of reading. 
Chris Bateman: You have suggested that despite the growing number of academics
claiming to wave the continental philosophy flag, the art of continental
philosophy is dying out. What would you say characterises this
tradition, and why do you think so many feel the need to ‘claim’ the
term for their work?
Chris Bateman:
Ha, well they are certainly bound together as concepts since ‘continental’ has typically meant ‘not analytic’, but you’ve convinced me in the past that there are practices at the heart of continental philosophy that make it more than just a shadow term.
BB:
A few weeks ago, I was very pleased to have been invited to give one of two presentations for the very first meeting of a series of 13 lectures on Nietzsche —Nietzsche plus ‘Mr. X’ variations – evenings scheduled throughout the year 2016-2017 at Columbia University, that glorious movie-icon (thank you, Woody Allen) of a campus in New York City.
Taylor himself regards himself as ‘continental’ as his analytically formed colleagues at Columbia (those trained in both the US and the UK) would also describe him. But if Taylor is continental, the consequence and this would be no accident, is that work such as mine and approaches to philosophy like my own are thus left without any kind of designation. Thus an automatic exclusion of the kind of philosophy I happen to do turns out to follow from appropriating the term ‘continental’ to describe the work Taylor does.
My blog post adverted to this difference, using the language of M&E and such. And from the organizer, my elegant host, Professor Bernard Harcourt, who trained at Chicago and who now teaches at the Law School at Columbia, came a strong email response in reaction to my blog post, which arrived in my in-box, as I was still writing my lecture.
‘Oh no!’, it read, don’t mention the analytic-continental divide. Everyone there, the email message went on to reassure me, would be firmly on the continental side.
Well I wasn’t sure how that could be true when the other main speaker was analytically trained and where the entire event was to be held at Columbia, boasting, as it does, a solidly analytic philosophy department.
Chris Bateman:
You’re almost suggesting the prevalence of philosophers claiming to work in the continental tradition is a tactic to exclude continental practice from consideration at all, a kind of colonial appropriation?
BB:
You folks have the REF in the UK, we have the Leiter Report, and it all comes to the same foregrounding of analytic approaches for everything and everyone, including analytic approaches to continental philosophy.
Chris Bateman:
Yes, I see, and the trouble with this it that analytic philosophy has a clear footprint – the construction of logical argumentation – quite distinct from continental philosophy which, as you have stressed to me, has roots in philology and the hermeneutics of language, all of which is antithetical to the analytic methods. So if you foreground analytic methods you can’t then simply add continental – analytic with continental is not like having a quarter pounder with cheese, it’s more like having white and red wine together, which does not make rosé.
BB:
True! Alas!
A few years ago, the graduate students were inspired to organize a conference to get folk to come and talk about the (supposed) fortunes of the analytic-continental divide, and to so so proceeded to invite analysts (mostly) to speak (remember these are not folk who will agree with this designation but who are nevertheless trained in this same analytic tradition but prefer to focus on so-called continental themes, being, as they are, open-minded and also wishing to be in line for what few pluralistic jobs there are), so it was that Nancy Bauer and Rae Langdon, to mention several external speakers, and I too, as an alumna, was also invited.
The program at Boston College has in the interim (meaning post-Gadamer, and post-Taminiaux), hired only ‘safer’ sorts of continental-folk in addition to analytic folk.
And all of their younger hires enjoy, as is largely the case everywhere, including Fordham where I teach, a more rather than less explicitly ‘analytic’ formation: these younger scholars are trained in, understand and use the language, and share the concerns of the analytic tradition. Or else they focus on religion (I am not sure what this focus entails as it is not theology or literature).
For this reason, and this is the reason to parallel the REF and the Leiter brigade, the standing recommendation in philosophy at BC and everywhere, as at Fordham and to be sure you might recognize this from your position in the UK is to hire ever more analytic people, and they could not be more clearly blunt about it, even when it came to staffing continental positions.
This hardly means one will have many positions for Heidegger (certainly not) or Nietzsche experts (why? when nearly everyone thinks they can teach Nietzsche, and do). The point here is only that when you do have a position it will be filled by an analyst, however counter-intuitive that may seem to be.
Chris Bateman:
In terms of my position in the UK, I have no involvement whatsoever with the philosophy establishment, which is why I tend to describe myself as an ‘outsider philosopher’, and don’t get paid to teach philosophy at all (although that doesn’t stop me sometimes teaching philosophy when I am supposed to be teaching game design or narrative!). Yet I still encounter what you’re describing. I had a rejection from The British Journal of Aesthetics, which is a crowd of analytic philosophers that I have great respect for, and which sent me the greatest rejection letter I’ve ever had the pleasure to read in the past. But for this paper the rejection clearly hadn’t understood my paper at all, and it wasn’t until weeks afterwards that I realised that I’d inadvertently written in a broadly continental style and was lacking any analytic argument at all. Which is a shame, really, as it was a great paper – but one for which there might be nowhere it might be able to fit. That’s not quite the same as your remarks about hiring analysts for continental positions, but I think it points to a related problem – that there are ways of doing philosophy that don’t even look like philosophy when analytic philosophy is taken as primary.
BB:
Thanks for that clarification, and indeed I well believe that you would bring philosophy into your courses! As for the example you give it makes sense to me as a parallel because the problem is to be sure not merely the exclusion of classical sorts of continental philosophy but all kinds of things that don’t fit an increasingly narrower analytic mode. I am just keenly attuned to the analytic co-opting of the continental tradition as I have long written on this topic, and like your account of the BJA (a journal I likewise admire, although I do understand it as exclusively analytic) – and you do seem to take the engagement in good stride but that could also be because you have a buffer of another, new and growing field (I am kind of crashing your discipline a bit at the moment in the course I am teaching on digital philosophy, so I have huge respect for this).
But the problem is actually the same sort of thing that, so it would seem, drove Brexit and the recent presidential elections in the US and that is digital media to be precise, the social matters but very specifically in terms of both lability (anyone can edit) and backlash (only certain edits are tolerated). But social media also has a very personal or harsh side. Thus, I have recently encountered a stunning bit of hostility from the persons of, on Facebook, Brian Leiter, who insisted, contra the notion of a difference between the analytic and the continental, that there is only a matter of doing ‘good’ philosophy, and still more recently, on Twitter, Barry Smith who insisted on the very same non-existence of the analytic continental (calling it “an old divide,” such that supposedly it “no longer” matters as such) and likewise insisting on only “good philosophy.”
Chris Bateman:
This is one of those rhetorical moves that lacks internal consistency, for it cannot be ‘good philosophy’ to think that context cannot matter. Only if you have committed to analytic philosophy’s uncomfortable alliance with the sciences does this kind of claim even seem plausible. And I have to question the motive behind denying an evident conflict, since there is clearly a strategic choice being made in this denial.
BB:
As recent as these unpleasant encounters were, the tactic is old and has been at work as long as I have studying it. I like to compare it with Rumpole of the Bailey (largely because I am fond of Rumpole) and the smear tactic that worked wonders in antiquity but has really come into its own with social media, whether Facebook, or Twitter, or Wikipedia Usertalk back and forthings.
Chris Bateman:
Well don't get me started on Wikipedia (given my recent book...) or we'll never get back to the topic at hand! What happened with this purportedly analytic-continental conference in the end?
BB:
Yes, of course: back to Columbia. Well, I am as cowardly as the next academic and when my host asked me not to mention something, even something I am passionate about, I could not but take his request to heart, suffering as I do from such exclusions has not meant that I have gotten used to the same (quite the contrary!), and when I read my lecture, in deliberate deference to my host’s sensibilities as he had made them clear, I trimmed out the reference to the analytic and the continental (I did leave a slide, the video of the event shows only my slides during my talk, featuring a comparison with M&Ms, a type of candy that may, if you are lucky, be unobtainable in Manchester), even though it was the one of the most important points I had to make in talking about and between Nietzsche and Heidegger on the assigned topic of Heidegger’s Nietzsche.
The answer involved philological hermeneutics and although Seyla said she wanted an answer, in fact, the complexity of the account needed was not desired. But Columbia put it on YouTube — one can see the M&Ms for oneself if one likes.
I regret to report that there is practically no place on Earth one can hide from M&Ms these days – which makes the parallel with analytic philosophy all the more apposite, I suppose! If, as I am suggesting, logical argumentation is at the heart of the analytic methods, can you express the essence of the continental practices in philosophy?
BB:
Continental philosophy includes a historical sense, a sense of historical context which it does not name ‘the history of philosophy.’ If Heidegger writes about Anaximander he is not reflecting on philosophy’s history as if this were a thing once done, passé, whereas we now, today, do some other sort of thing when we ‘do’ philosophy. At the same time the continental tradition also emphasizes everything that has to do with context, with interpretation, as a difference that makes all the difference.
Chris Bateman:
This indeed was the trouble with my paper for the British Journal of Aesthetics... I wanted to make a point about creative works that were art-like, sport-like, and game-like, and how this was historically situated, and how this could not be hidden away by asking “what is art?” or “what is a game?” as if it were only a matter of some kind of observational analysis. The paper, rather impishly, was entitled “Can a Rollercoaster Be Art?” – which was about the most analytic aspect of its construction, and even then I confess halfway through to having built a Trojan horse... and that’s not what an analytic philosopher wants to read, not even close.
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