Chris Bateman and Babette Babich: Claiming the Continental Flag
Conversations re-booted and reblogged for the sake of reading.
In this post (published 13 December 2016), Chris Bateman asked me what characterized the (alas, dying) tradition of continental philosophy and why so many philosophers feel the need to appropriate the designation for their work. The discussion continues with an exploration of the continental designation claimed by scholars who have otherwise trained in the analytic tradition.
Chris Bateman:
This still leaves open part of my original query: why, given the predominance of analytic methodology, would anyone feel the need to claim continental as part of their title?
Babette Babich:
Your question, as you first posed it, brilliantly stepped aside all the complex muck I’ve
tracked back in regarding the 'analytics' and the 'continentals,' and their
disputes and bitter histories, almost up to the veritable
‘existentialist café’ reference to Sartre, to ask why, and everything
I’ve brought back in just makes your question even more powerful, to ask
why then, after all that, one might want to claim to be continental?
And the answer, I fear, is purely venal: having to do with the getting of
posts in academic philosophy. To be sure, I wish it were something more noble or, as
they used to say when I was young, more ‘tough-minded’ than just that.
But it is not so, alas, and analytic philosophy, which already had the
greater portion of the jobs when I took a doctorate some thirty years
ago, now claims nearly all the jobs.
In fact, the late Reiner
Schürmann (1941-1993) wrote a de Tocqueville-style report on the state of philosophy
in the US (written in French for the French) claiming, as he wrote in
the mid-eighties, that the analytic move was a done deal with 90% of the academic jobs to be had (intriguingly, and this really should be specified, Schürmann actually counted, starting with the schools in just the periphery around his own university in New York, and of course academic appointments at the New School have long gone to middle of the road analytic kinds of continental thinkers, hence no one like Schürmann has been appointed to teach at the New School since has death), going back to the early 1960s. I review some of his work and current sociological analyses of such networks in an essay I wrote for an analytically formed, Pittsburgh no less, colleague and friend on the occasion of his Festschrift as only some philosophers are gifted with such distinctions (and I am not one of these): Are They Good, Are They Bad?.
Chris Bateman:
This is more than just a coincidence, though, and it’s certainly not any
kind of Spencerian survival of the fittest... it must at heart have to
do with the prevalence of (and academic bias towards) positivism in the
wake of its stricter ancestor, logical positivism. And this ties in also
with your aforementioned point that having been connected in any way
with Jesuits hurt your career – because for all that I might admire
certain contemporary positivists, my quip that they are at heart
“atheists for science” is apposite, and an unthinking anti-religious
bias goes hand-in-hand with positivism as a broad movement, just as
loving one’s country need not end in racism but all too frequently does.
Babette Babich:
One could say that my worry about continental philosophy corresponds to the standard lament: they don’t make philosophers like they used to! But it seems far too political to simply represent the ordinary decline that goes with golden age thinking (and, contrary to millenarian fantasies, the golden age in such fairy tales is never the age to come, this is Judeao-Christian thinking). And it is massively in force, whether we are atheist or not, in our ‘faith’ in technology which goes hand in glove with our conviction that we are not destroying the world beyond any possibility of remedy (the liberal consensus seems to be that we can solve everything if only we all admit that there is climate change and that we are through pollution and deforestation causing this age we name the Anthropocene, as we surely are, and yet not that we are doing anything so nefarious as ‘controlling’ the weather, heaven forfend: of course, we like to pretend (and a certain amount of amnesia is required for this pretence) that that would impossible!
Chris Bateman:
My philosophy increasingly moves against this mythos of technology as saviour, another of my inheritances from Mary Midgley, of course.
Babette Babich:
Only Peter Sloterdijk, and very gingerly at that, comes close to suggesting both the irreversibility of our environmental crisis and its, at least in significant part
militaristic aetiology in his book Terror from the Air. No one else touches this theme.
Chris Bateman:
Timothy Morton’s idea that we and the other animal species around today are the dwindling survivors of an extinction event that already happened also leans in this direction, but I agree it is rare that this perspective comes out at all.
Babette Babich:
I would also want to point to Bruno Latour’s recent work. For what is at issue, in any case, at issue is the very mortal or Heideggerian question of retrieve or reversibility, complicated by fatality as there is no chance that pollution or deforestation will be halted. Thus and, just in case everything is ‘beyond all repair’ (to use American military jargon absent its acronymic vulgarity), we can just spend all of everyone’s money and all of the earth’s remaining resources (this is the Elon Musk solution: betraying a millionaire’s sense of budgetary viability and democratic inclusiveness) to get a select few of us to Mars, or some other supposed alternate planet, there to rinse and repeat the cycle.
Chris Bateman:
Aye, I’ve found myself forced (paradoxically, from my perspective) to become a space travel opponent precisely because the ‘flee the planet’ mythos, as Lynn Margulis astutely critiqued in her final years, is exactly the wrong way of understanding the problem. For if we cannot work out how to live here on Earth, we shall not be able to live anywhere in the universe, so even if you want a future with ‘space colonies’ and the like the focus must, can only be, on learning first and foremost how to live within our terrestrial resources.
Babette Babich:
And Lynn Margulis was also one of the few academic or university scientists to criticize, on scientific grounds the official story of 9/11. Still, here we are, this is part of a continental style, adding complexities to your question which was only about why one might say that one is continental if one is not in fact continental. We can coin a new term for philosophers of this kind, the analysts who claim to be continental and call them ‘trans-Continental.’ There are a lot of these after all: almost all of those who teach Nietzsche and Heidegger would claim this title at the university level.
There are exceptions of course (but they are few) in the UK, in the US, in Canada, in Australia, and increasingly, I wrote a book about this, La fin de la penseé, in France and I was just in Berlin to see just how very true this is of Germany too.
Today’s professors, you can just read their CVs or listen to them, are analytically trained, by which I mean that they use analytic argumentation and do what is recognized as analytic. This is so far advanced that mentioning the rubric analytic to qualify the approach is unnecessary: it is the default mode. And on the basis of this, one can define or specify what analytic philosophy would call ‘really’ analytic, which last stipulating distinction is a quite analytic thing to do, whereby it turns out that being ‘analytic,’ is such a rarified thing that there are hardly any analytic philosophers. I’d be inclined to accept the argument if I did not work among them.
Chris Bateman:
Indeed – Stephen Yablo wrote a brilliant paper that influenced my engagement with the analytic practices known as ‘fictionalism’, about the difficulties entailed in shrugging off commitments with ‘really’. It emerged from his examination of discussions between Carnap and Quine – the logical positivists once again having a historical role here in making analytic philosophy what it is. This reminds me that even the disagreements within analytic philosophy move in analytic circles: the analytic methodology lurks at the foundation of academic philosophy today.
Babette Babich:
All, but all, of my younger colleagues at Fordham, even the so-called ‘continental’ ones, have analytic formations. We hire from the best places, from schools like Princeton and Oxford, and McGill if we can, not schools like Fordham. The department head once told me, not unlike the email example I began with [back in part 1], not to talk about the difference between analytic and continental philosophy to younger colleagues as it upset them. But for me what is at issue is a matter of style, what style does to philosophy and how it limits it (especially qua unacknowledged).
Chris Bateman:
By excluding entire ways of thinking?
Babette Babich:
Yes: because exclusion is the point of the distinction. Analytic philosophy does not connect with approaches such as Heidegger’s or Merleau-Ponty’s or Derrida’s ... unless in an analytic or domesticated mode. Where Husserl is more accessible to analytic approaches, the text as such is a problem for them. But when the late Bert Dreyfus made Heidegger analytic, other scholars followed suit.
When I say that the text is a problem, I am referring to hermeneutics. I note, because it is important, that one should make an exception for Foucault as one can manage to leave out all reference to Pierre Hadot and a different way of writing on ancient philosophy and so too, for more arcane reasons, Deleuze, who counts in today’s analytic modality as the new Bachelard, who was, for his part, always a name, positivistically, poetically as he was, congenial to analytic philosophy of science. So yes, there is a kind of disconnect with respect to a great many significant thinkers, but including certain names such as Simondon or Stiegler. But always, the problem seems to be the simultaneous need to exclude not only other names but often any reference to history or context at all and that is why analytic philosophy is, to my mind, a disaster.
Chris Bateman:
There are no shortages of disasters caused by philosophy either narrowing its own perspective, or being compartmentalised and shuffled off the stage where matters are discussed in public. It’s one of the reasons that I see my own role as being in part about popularising philosophy – because when it comes to avoiding disaster, philosophy is one of our best and least used tools. Do you see other disasters beyond those we’ve already mentioned?
Babette Babich:
I think there are fascinating questions and challenges involved with popularizing philosophy, something that has been a great trend in Europe for a few decades but that I have worries about. On the disaster front, I ought to underscore that (and of course all of this is in my own judgment) the analytic turn, now consummate as it is, can only be a disaster for a Jesuit school just to the extent that analytic scholars cannot offer training in the kind of philosophy that is of use to the priest-to-be. Lacking connection with theology but not less with other traditions in philosophy, between philosophical schools as well as further connections to history and to art and to poetry, all those complexifying details one might have objected to leaves us today with an impoverished philosophy. The same thing is true of Jesuit schools in the UK and so on. Maybe the better question is how can it be otherwise? Those who determine what counts as ‘good’ philosophy are analysts and they do not recognize any but their own approach to philosophy. And “there’s an end on’t.”
Chris Bateman:
The connection with theology is an important one, I think, and not because religion itself is essential, per se, but because it remains the fundamental matrix of culture, even when it is not recognised as such. There are so many people who consider themselves atheists today and think that this means they are completely outside of religion. As a result, they fail to see how their thinking is resolutely bound up with the Abrahamic traditions, and especially Christianity, which is the analytic philosophy of world religions. The result – much as with the relationship between analytic and waving a continental flag – is that we say we are not going to talk about theology, when what actually happens is that a particular theology (or rather atheology) is the unacknowledged dominion of thought on a rather wide swath of topics.
Babette Babich:
One could say that my worry about continental philosophy corresponds to the standard lament: they don’t make philosophers like they used to! But it seems far too political to simply represent the ordinary decline that goes with golden age thinking (and, contrary to millenarian fantasies, the golden age in such fairy tales is never the age to come, this is Judeao-Christian thinking). And it is massively in force, whether we are atheist or not, in our ‘faith’ in technology which goes hand in glove with our conviction that we are not destroying the world beyond any possibility of remedy (the liberal consensus seems to be that we can solve everything if only we all admit that there is climate change and that we are through pollution and deforestation causing this age we name the Anthropocene, as we surely are, and yet not that we are doing anything so nefarious as ‘controlling’ the weather, heaven forfend: of course, we like to pretend (and a certain amount of amnesia is required for this pretence) that that would impossible!
Chris Bateman:
My philosophy increasingly moves against this mythos of technology as saviour, another of my inheritances from Mary Midgley, of course.
Babette Babich:
Only Peter Sloterdijk, and very gingerly at that, comes close to suggesting both the irreversibility of our environmental crisis and its, at least in significant part
militaristic aetiology in his book Terror from the Air. No one else touches this theme.Chris Bateman:
Timothy Morton’s idea that we and the other animal species around today are the dwindling survivors of an extinction event that already happened also leans in this direction, but I agree it is rare that this perspective comes out at all.
Babette Babich:
I would also want to point to Bruno Latour’s recent work. For what is at issue, in any case, at issue is the very mortal or Heideggerian question of retrieve or reversibility, complicated by fatality as there is no chance that pollution or deforestation will be halted. Thus and, just in case everything is ‘beyond all repair’ (to use American military jargon absent its acronymic vulgarity), we can just spend all of everyone’s money and all of the earth’s remaining resources (this is the Elon Musk solution: betraying a millionaire’s sense of budgetary viability and democratic inclusiveness) to get a select few of us to Mars, or some other supposed alternate planet, there to rinse and repeat the cycle.
Chris Bateman:
Aye, I’ve found myself forced (paradoxically, from my perspective) to become a space travel opponent precisely because the ‘flee the planet’ mythos, as Lynn Margulis astutely critiqued in her final years, is exactly the wrong way of understanding the problem. For if we cannot work out how to live here on Earth, we shall not be able to live anywhere in the universe, so even if you want a future with ‘space colonies’ and the like the focus must, can only be, on learning first and foremost how to live within our terrestrial resources.
Babette Babich:
And Lynn Margulis was also one of the few academic or university scientists to criticize, on scientific grounds the official story of 9/11. Still, here we are, this is part of a continental style, adding complexities to your question which was only about why one might say that one is continental if one is not in fact continental. We can coin a new term for philosophers of this kind, the analysts who claim to be continental and call them ‘trans-Continental.’ There are a lot of these after all: almost all of those who teach Nietzsche and Heidegger would claim this title at the university level.
Today’s professors, you can just read their CVs or listen to them, are analytically trained, by which I mean that they use analytic argumentation and do what is recognized as analytic. This is so far advanced that mentioning the rubric analytic to qualify the approach is unnecessary: it is the default mode. And on the basis of this, one can define or specify what analytic philosophy would call ‘really’ analytic, which last stipulating distinction is a quite analytic thing to do, whereby it turns out that being ‘analytic,’ is such a rarified thing that there are hardly any analytic philosophers. I’d be inclined to accept the argument if I did not work among them.
Chris Bateman:
Indeed – Stephen Yablo wrote a brilliant paper that influenced my engagement with the analytic practices known as ‘fictionalism’, about the difficulties entailed in shrugging off commitments with ‘really’. It emerged from his examination of discussions between Carnap and Quine – the logical positivists once again having a historical role here in making analytic philosophy what it is. This reminds me that even the disagreements within analytic philosophy move in analytic circles: the analytic methodology lurks at the foundation of academic philosophy today.
Babette Babich:
All, but all, of my younger colleagues at Fordham, even the so-called ‘continental’ ones, have analytic formations. We hire from the best places, from schools like Princeton and Oxford, and McGill if we can, not schools like Fordham. The department head once told me, not unlike the email example I began with [back in part 1], not to talk about the difference between analytic and continental philosophy to younger colleagues as it upset them. But for me what is at issue is a matter of style, what style does to philosophy and how it limits it (especially qua unacknowledged).
Chris Bateman:
By excluding entire ways of thinking?
Babette Babich:
Yes: because exclusion is the point of the distinction. Analytic philosophy does not connect with approaches such as Heidegger’s or Merleau-Ponty’s or Derrida’s ... unless in an analytic or domesticated mode. Where Husserl is more accessible to analytic approaches, the text as such is a problem for them. But when the late Bert Dreyfus made Heidegger analytic, other scholars followed suit.
When I say that the text is a problem, I am referring to hermeneutics. I note, because it is important, that one should make an exception for Foucault as one can manage to leave out all reference to Pierre Hadot and a different way of writing on ancient philosophy and so too, for more arcane reasons, Deleuze, who counts in today’s analytic modality as the new Bachelard, who was, for his part, always a name, positivistically, poetically as he was, congenial to analytic philosophy of science. So yes, there is a kind of disconnect with respect to a great many significant thinkers, but including certain names such as Simondon or Stiegler. But always, the problem seems to be the simultaneous need to exclude not only other names but often any reference to history or context at all and that is why analytic philosophy is, to my mind, a disaster.
Chris Bateman:
There are no shortages of disasters caused by philosophy either narrowing its own perspective, or being compartmentalised and shuffled off the stage where matters are discussed in public. It’s one of the reasons that I see my own role as being in part about popularising philosophy – because when it comes to avoiding disaster, philosophy is one of our best and least used tools. Do you see other disasters beyond those we’ve already mentioned?
Babette Babich:
I think there are fascinating questions and challenges involved with popularizing philosophy, something that has been a great trend in Europe for a few decades but that I have worries about. On the disaster front, I ought to underscore that (and of course all of this is in my own judgment) the analytic turn, now consummate as it is, can only be a disaster for a Jesuit school just to the extent that analytic scholars cannot offer training in the kind of philosophy that is of use to the priest-to-be. Lacking connection with theology but not less with other traditions in philosophy, between philosophical schools as well as further connections to history and to art and to poetry, all those complexifying details one might have objected to leaves us today with an impoverished philosophy. The same thing is true of Jesuit schools in the UK and so on. Maybe the better question is how can it be otherwise? Those who determine what counts as ‘good’ philosophy are analysts and they do not recognize any but their own approach to philosophy. And “there’s an end on’t.”
Chris Bateman:
The connection with theology is an important one, I think, and not because religion itself is essential, per se, but because it remains the fundamental matrix of culture, even when it is not recognised as such. There are so many people who consider themselves atheists today and think that this means they are completely outside of religion. As a result, they fail to see how their thinking is resolutely bound up with the Abrahamic traditions, and especially Christianity, which is the analytic philosophy of world religions. The result – much as with the relationship between analytic and waving a continental flag – is that we say we are not going to talk about theology, when what actually happens is that a particular theology (or rather atheology) is the unacknowledged dominion of thought on a rather wide swath of topics.
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