Chris Bateman and Babette Babich: What is Continental Philosophy?*
Conversations re-booted and reblogged for the sake of reading.
Babette Babich:
Analytic philosophy privileges argument and persuasion, making a
case, making a claim, proving a point, persuading an opponent and so on and it
is to this extent fairly legalistic, case-focused. From this perspective it is
rather easy to wave a flag and think that waving a flag is all that is needed.
So if one one mentions Husserl or Heidegger or
Nietzsche, however one goes about it, that tends to be all the justification one needs to name oneself continental.
Chris Bateman:
Can you
provide a definition of what constitutes continental philosophy, even if such a
definition is a simplification?
Babette Babich:
We are
so very analytically minded – it is the dominant mode in philosophy after all!
– that a definition, at least a descriptive one, is certainly in order. What is continental philosophy?
Continental philosophy is thinking, it is questioning,
elaborating questions, making them more comprehensive, deeper, making them
worse, proliferating these same questions and adding more and other associated
questions. But above all, continental philosophy is a style of philosophy continuing a long tradition of contextual or interpretive, historical reflection, engaging other thinkers in that same tradition. It includes reflection, musing, quandaries, provocations. And this range of
different things has been true for quite some time going back to the beginnings
of analytic philosophy with the Vienna Circle and logical ‘analysis,’ whereby
any time one mentions Vienna it makes a difference to note that one should not
forget Freud but one does.
Chris Bateman:
Mary
Midgley, who has been a huge influence upon me, never forgets Freud, but I am
younger and sadly tend to ignore him, even though I have frequent recourse to
the Vienna Circle and the ‘logical positivists’, who I often draft in as a ‘bad
guy’ in my philosophy, because they demonstrate (as Midgley said to me in a
recent exchange) an excess of certainty that is part of the complex of problems
we face today, along with (paradoxically) a voiding of the very possibility of
certainty that is just as problematic. But you were talking about Freud...
Babette Babich:
Yes,
Freud, and today one might also add Lacan to add a layer of complexity to the word ‘analysis’ but not
less to the historical context of the term in its genesis and development. Thus
to logical positivism and logical empiricism and logical analysis one ought I
think to review the relevance of psycho-analytic investigations along with the
psychological investigations that animated so many at time at one side or the
other of psychologism, including Frege and most saliently Husserl and
Heidegger, with which names continental philosophy, rigorously speaking, begins.
Chris Bateman:
So was
the Vienna Circle the original confrontation between analytic (which they
effectively founded, riffing off Wittgenstein’s Tractatus – much to his
chagrin!) and continental, represented then as the early phenomenologists,
Husserl and his one-time assistant...?
Babette Babich:
I would
make that claim but of course historically speaking all of the members of the Vienna Circle were geographically continental and they had a background in traditional, historical and to a great extent interpretive thought that is lacking in their epigones.
To a great degree analytic philosophy is an expat philosophy and Wittgenstein only
became Wittgenstein as himself an expat, an import: Austrian wine in British
skins as it were.
But it was Carnap who was the original analytic baiter, as
it were, and in this capacity he took on Heidegger. Carnap’s analytic challenge to Heidegger’s
reflection on thinking and being, thinking and nothing, quite independently of Heidegger, as
Carnap ignored Heidegger’s context and his own argumentative concerns just as analytic philosophy has,
with a perfectly good conscience about it, been doing ever since. Thus Carnap skipped over Heidegger’s reference to the origins of philosophy with Parmenides as
this directed Plato and thus and thereby all the rest of us footnotes, as Whitehead
regarded us.
Heidegger sought to raise the question of Being, to think Being,
as he put it, thereby appropriating Leibniz’s question: why are there any
beings at all much rather than not being in the first place or at all, in order
to ask after and thereby connecting the thought of nothing (i.e. no thing at
all, no being at all) with the thought of being.
Chris Bateman:
And
these kinds of questions were bordering upon nonsense to Carnap, Quine and the
other logical positivists I suppose, since they were ‘straying into’
metaphysics which was the Vienna Circle’s bugbear...
Babette Babich:
Nonsense does not say the
half of it. Carnap zeroed in on the logical contradiction in the reifying move,
that is: the object contradiction of treating the nothing as something (I note
that Heidegger himself adverts to just this), whereby it is said of nothing
that it is: to echo Jimmy Olsen: “Holy Parmenides!”
Sartre, in an
unsung effort to come to Heidegger’s aid, for which Heidegger who did notice
this, was, predictably, ungrateful, wrote Being and Nothingness, which
adumbrated how he, Sartre, with no little assistance from Simone de Beauvoir
with whom he wrote the book (unless you ask the Fullbrooks and a number of
other scholars who would tip the balance of contributing authorship in de
Beauvoir’s favour) would have
proposed at least one answer to Carnap.
For his part, Heidegger was deeply
affected by Carnap’s attack as it highlighted what he regarded as a failure to
hear his question as such (Being and Time, after all, is
all about not hearing questions, in addition to not having
posed them to begin with, there is also the problem of not being able to see
that the questions he is talking about are questions, to which must be added
the persistence of the habit of assuming that there are no questions to be
asked in the first place.
Chris Bateman:
Very
much an inheritance from Nietzsche, I would hazard.
Babette Babich:
To be
sure! As I am fond of pointing out, Nietzsche himself claims his special
excellence to have been the asking of heretofore unconsidered, unasked questions.
In fact, Nietzsche uses this philosophical habitus as it characterizes
academics now and in his own day as the basis for one of his better jokes in
what is for me the key to his philosophy of science, namely: our assumption
that because we fail to perceive something we are justified in concluding that
there is nothing, that
there is nothing there at all, an assumption we make in perception,
as empirically as we like, and an assumption — and this is where Nietzsche
rightly ambitions to doubt more radically than Descartes and to take critique
more critically than Kant — that also obtains on the level of the concept. We
think that whatever exceeds our conceptual grasp exhausts the range of the
possible. In my thinking on the philosophy of science I would bring Eugene
Wigner and Nietzsche together right at this point, but unfortunately there is
rather a great deal to say beforehand, so I leave it at that for the moment.
Chris Bateman:
Perhaps
we should return to Heidegger... I’m curious to discover how this pans out.
Babette Babich:
Well,
Heidegger remained deeply affected, interested as he was in logic, having
written a dissertation on logic and science (he remained, as I think it
important to note, qualified to examine doctoral theses on both subjects
throughout his university career) and I think his objections to what Carnap
missed in his thinking, his questioning, illustrates the distinction between
analytic and continental philosophy. Continental philosophy uses all the
resources of language and thinking and indeed experience, this is the
life-world, this is the body, to think about the questions it raises.
Christ Bateman:
All of
which is far too messy for the logically-grounded analytic approach!
Babette Babich:
For the
most part, analytic philosophy is interested in making claims. These are also
effectively ‘answers.’ For the sake of the question as such, for the sake of questioning, continental
philosophy complicates matters. Thus, along with Nietzsche, from whom I do
argue that Heidegger did borrow this a bit, it is Heidegger who teaches us how
very difficult it is to question anything, especially as an academic,
especially as a trained philosopher without immediately jumping ahead to what
one supposes the answer to have to be, or even, as Nietzsche was terribly critically-minded in pointing out, to smuggle it in in advance with one’s
initial definition and then triumphantly, all Jack Horner about it, to pull out
the very thing one had inserted, insinuated, defined, stipulated at the start
with the appropriately exultant noises of discovery.
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