Twentieth century western philosophy?s most notorious divide?between analytic and continental philosophy?will soon be 100 years old. At the turn of the century, Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell founded mathematical logic, initiating a new style of philosophy which no longer proceeded through grand syntheses as in Hegel, but through piecemeal logical analysis. Today, analytic philosophy predominates in the English-speaking world. Although its practitioners are preoccupied by many of the traditional problems of philosophy, their approach is informed by logic and natural science. Even when they tackle ethical or political issues, they tend to do so in a technical style, without much sense of urgency or mission. Continental philosophy predominates in mainland Europe and Latin America. Its practitioners purport to carry the torch of the great philosophy of the past. They tackle profound questions such as the meaning of life and the purpose of history in a style that is lyrical at best, obscure at worst.
This contrast has repercussions outside academic philosophy. Many post-modern writers in literary, social and feminist theory are inspired by continental philosophy, which is thus deeply embroiled in the "culture" or "science wars" that rage on many American campuses. To a lesser extent, the same goes for analytic philosophy. Alan Sokal, whose famous hoax revealed the absence of intellectual standards in certain post-modern circles, draws on ideas taken from natural science as well as analytic philosophy. There is even a political dimension to the conflict. To many on the left, analytic philosophy appears apolitical at best, an instrument of oppression at worst. Conservatives and liberals, on the other hand, have always been suspicious of the potentially totalitarian implications of continental philosophers such as Hegel and Marx.
Things are changing. More than 30 years of dialogue between the two traditions has led to a limited thaw in philosophy?s cold war. In Britain and America, continental philosophy has made a huge impact in literature and language departments. And analytic philosophy has become increasingly popular on the continent, even in France, where the great masters of the Anglo-Saxon tradition?from Henry Sidgwick to Michael Dummett?are now being translated into French. It is perhaps no coincidence that France?s flirtation with analytic philosophy coincides with the demise of Marxism and the general disillusionment with big systems of thought. From structuralism to existentialism, France has had to question the great "isms" and open its doors to the more modest projects of Anglo-Saxon philosophers.
But in spite of this limited rapprochement, the divide still exists, both philosophically and sociologically. Although no one knows precisely how to define analytic and continental philosophy, there is little disagreement about who belongs in which camp. This holds true of university departments as well as of individual philosophers. In Britain, for example, despite the influence of continental philosophy in literature and language departments, the universities of Warwick and Essex stand out as centres of continental philosophy in a predominantly analytic environment.
the division between analytic and continental philosophy is actually misleading in several respects. For one thing, continental philosophy is basically Germanophone philosophy. The dialectical, existentialist, phenomenological and hermeneutical traditions were inaugurated almost exclusively by German speakers (Hegel and Marx, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, Brentano and Husserl, Dilthey and Heidegger). The same goes for psychoanalysis, which has had a big collateral influence on continental philosophy?some observers would speak of collateral damage. Although analytic philosophers have saved most of their bile for 20th century French philosophy, the latter is largely derived from Germanophone thinkers: Sartre from Husserl, Althusser from Marx, Foucault from Nietzsche, Lacan from Freud, Derrida from Heidegger. So it seems that the analytic versus continental split can be added to the list of Anglo-German contrasts: tea versus coffee, ale versus lager, bangers versus sausage, back four versus sweeper, shame versus guilt.
But this picture will not do either. For analytic philosophy, too, is largely the invention of German speakers. Indeed, although analytic philosophy owes much to Russell, GE Moore and American Pragmatism, it owes even more to Gottlob Frege, Ludwig Wittgenstein and the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle. No one would think of analytic philosophy as a specifically Anglophone phenomenon if the Nazis had not driven many of its pioneers out of Mittel-europa. Despite these qualifications, however, the contrast between analytic and continental philosophy draws heavily on historical differences between Germanophone and Anglophone philosophy.
In 1873, long before the rise of analytic philosophy, John Stuart Mill complained in his Autobiography about the baleful influence of German philosophy: "The German or a priori view of human knowledge? is likely for some time (though it may be hoped in a diminishing degree) to predominate among those who occupy themselves with such [logical] enquiries, both here and on the continent."
At roughly the same time, Marx and Nietzsche lampooned the ahistorical and superficial nature of Anglo-Saxon empiricism, utilitarianism and pragmatism. Throughout Das Kapital Marx complains about Mill?s shallow ideas, while Jeremy Bentham is described as a "purely English phenomenon," an "insipid, pedantic, leather tongued oracle of the ordinary bourgeois understanding." About the utilitarian principle that one should promote the greatest happiness of the greatest number, Marx complains that "at no time and in no land has a homespun commonplace ever swaggered so complacently."
Nietzsche, never knowingly outdone in philosophical rudeness, looks down "not without pity" on the "indefatigable, inevitable English utilitarians." Like Marx, he deplores what he regards as false universal pretences: the utilitarians promote "English morality," not realising that the alleged "happiness of the greatest number" is, in fact, "the happiness of England." He goes on: "One has to be English to be capable of believing that human beings always seek their own advantage." (Perhaps it helps to be German to believe that the "blond Aryan beasts" should promote neither the happiness of the greatest number, nor even their own happiness, but strive selflessly to cause as much death and destruction as possible.)
Nietzsche is even more definite than Marx in blaming these shortcomings on the English national psyche. Their "profound mediocrity" is not only to blame for utilitarianism, it has "brought about a collective depression of the European spirit," in the form of British empiricism. Against the empiricist slogan, "there are only facts," Nietzsche insists that there are "no facts-in-themselves," only interpretations. A contrast thus emerges between British common sense and German profundity. In moral philosophy, it manifests itself as a conflict between a pragmatist pursuit of utility and an idealistic pursuit of "higher" goals, whether religious salvation, world revolution, or the ?bermensch. In theoretical philosophy, there is a conflict between an empiricist stress on facts and science and a rationalist stress on theory and interpretation.
how, then, has analytic philosophy added to these older Anglo-German cultural negotiations? The answer depends on what we understand by analytic philosophy. One well-known proposal is that of the Oxford philosopher Michael Dummett. He claims that the elusive "factor X," separating analytic from continental philosophy, is a concern with language. Dummett defines analytic philosophy as based on the idea that a philosophical understanding of thought can only be given by an analysis of language. This contrasts with the continental "philosophy of thought," which is independent of the investigation of language.
But this is inadequate. A concern with language does not mark off analytic from continental philosophy. Analytic philosophers such as Moore, Russell, Gilbert Ryle, HLA Hart, John Rawls and John Searle would not agree that the basic task of philosophy is to analyse language; nor would Karl Popper, who rejected the label "analytic philosophy," but whose intellectual style and context marked him out as analytic. Equally, a work of Heidegger??the most important continental philosopher of the century??bears the title On the Way to Language. For better or worse, Heidegger?s followers, from Hans-Georg Gadamer to Derrida, have reached this destination. The idea that human experience is essentially linguistic is common among these hermeneutical philosophers, who, despite important differences, see the task of philosophy as the interpretation of texts. Thus the jargon of much contemporary continental philosophy is taken not from metaphysics or psychology, but from linguistics.
So what separated analytic and continental philosophy at the turn of the century? It was a preoccupation with analysis. Analytic philosophy took off when Russell and Moore rejected the Absolute idealism of the Hegelian tradition and showed, by logical analysis of the structure of thought, that the world is made up of a plurality of real things. This argument depended on the availability of the new logical formalism first developed by Frege. But the object of study of these early analytic philosophers was the underlying logical structure of thought, rather than language itself.
Nevertheless, their successors?Wittgenstein and the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle?came to believe that the proper object of analysis is language, and that philosophical problems are to be solved by an analysis of propositions. This switch, known as the linguistic turn, has been the most striking feature of 20th century analytic philosophy. It has been greeted with hostile incredulity by many non-philosophers as well as by continental philosophers. Surely, they say, if philosophy is the profound discipline which it has purported to be for three millennia, it must deal with more than mere words, namely, the things they stand for, the essence of reality or of the human mind.
The linguistic turn has played an equally important role in analytic philosophy?s perception of its continental other. Until the rise of analytic philosophy, philosophers have tended to disparage the theories of their predecessors as false, unfounded or pointless. But according to Wittgenstein, metaphysical theories suffer from a more basic defect: they are nonsensical. It is not just that they provide wrong answers, but that the questions they address are misguided "pseudo-questions" based on a misunderstanding of how language works. (For example, the question "Is the mind a material or immaterial substance?" is nonsensical because it wrongly presupposes that the mind is a substance?when in fact, Wittgenstein argues, to have a mind is to have a distinctive set of capacities.)
Wittgenstein directed the charge of nonsense even-handedly at all philosophy, including many analytic philosophers, and even his own Tractatus. By contrast, his disciples in the Vienna Circle confined the charge to traditional philosophy, and focused on post-Kantian German philosophy??German idealism, vitalism and Heidegger. Ironically, they expressed their implacable opposition to German metaphysics in truly Teutonic fashion, describing themselves as "storm-troopers of anti-metaphysics."
In their crusade against metaphysics, the Viennese storm-troopers wielded two weapons: the new mathematical logic of Frege and Russell; and the verificationist criterion of meaningfulness, according to which a proposition is meaningless if it cannot be verified or falsified by reference to experience. In this vein, Rudolf Carnap and AJ Ayer complained that Hegel?s notion of the Absolute is a mere pseudo-concept. A sentence such as "Only the Absolute contains the truth as such" is no more meaningful than the sound sequence "Ab sur ah"?no experience could establish its truth or falsity. Similarly, Heidegger?s "We know the Nothing" is on a par with "Caesar is and." It violates the rules of logical syntax by treating the term "nothing"??a logical quantifier which indicates the absence of things??as if it were the name of a particularly mysterious thing.
But how could some of the most intelligent members of the human race??a self-image readily accepted by both analytic and continental philosophers??mistake sheer gibberish for profound insights? The positivists? answer is equally striking. Metaphysical statements have no literal meaning, because they are neither true nor false. But they constitute a kind of "conceptual poetry." They express certain emotions, or a certain attitude towards life (Lebensgef?hl). Unfortunately they do so in a misleading way, because they present these attitudes in the form of a statement about the essence of the world. Thus, metaphysicians are "misplaced poets," or "musicians without musical talent." Monistic metaphysicians are failed Mozarts, because they express a harmonious attitude to life; dualists are failed Beethovens, because they express a heroic attitude. What kind of metaphysics would a failed Elgar produce? The mind boggles.
German philosophers have greeted these semantic strictures with incomprehension of their own. J?rgen Habermas describes it as a Kannitverstan strategy?a deliberate and frivolous attempt to avoid discussion of serious issues. He claims, not without some justification, that analytic accusations of unintelligibility are often based on simple unwillingness to struggle with difficult texts. In a similar vein, Ernest Gellner suggested in Words and Things (1959) that while ordinary pretentious intellectuals?namely, continental philosophers?pretend to understand things they don?t really understand, analytic philosophers pretend not to understand things they understand perfectly well.
German philosophers have also complained that these semantic strictures condemn analytic philosophy to insignificance, a scholastic exercise incapable of addressing the profound problems of human life. While modern science allows us to understand reality in a completely rational way, the questions which matter most?morality, religion, art and the meaning of life?are treated by analytic philosophers as incapable of rational answers. Rationality is confined to what the Frankfurt school called "instrumental reason," the efficient marshalling of means in the service of ends which are arbitrary.
Many analytic philosophers have pleaded guilty to this charge. Some, like Wittgenstein and Russell, have done so wistfully, acknowledging "how little has been achieved" once the problems analytic philosophy addresses have been solved. Others have done so light-heartedly. PF Strawson and WV Quine, the two poles within analytic philosophy who agree on little else, happily join hands in condemning students who look for "inspirational or edifying writing in philosophy." Indeed, how could philosophy students possibly desire inspiration, if instead they can have Strawson?s acute observations about the use of the definite article or Quine?s deft permutations of logical symbols?
the front lines between analytic and continental philosophy have become less clear-cut. These days, hardly any analytic philosophers maintain that metaphysical theories are literally senseless simply because they can neither be verified nor falsified. Analytic philosophy?s dismissal of moral questions has also waned, mainly because of the rise of "applied ethics" (Peter Singer is the most widely known philosopher in this field), which tries to address concrete moral issues such as war, abortion, euthanasia and eugenics.
Indeed, although there is no grand synthesis, in some areas there is now a genuine give and take between the two sides. While Karl-Otto Apel and Habermas draw on analytic philosophy of language, analytic philosophers such as Bernard Williams have begun to cast a favourable eye on Nietszche. Hegelian ideas are evident in the communitarian political theories of New Labour and the attacks on foundationalism popularised by Richard Rorty (who believes that there are no foundations for knowledge). Conversely, Quine and Donald Davidson are popular among those who try to breathe new life into hermeneutics.
Nevertheless, genuine differences in philosophical outlook and style remain. While analytic philosophers have ceased to regard verifiability and falsifiability as marking the bounds of sense, many still hold that they demarcate serious scientific thought from metaphysical speculation. Even the charge that continental philosophy is unintelligible lives on in the less focused charge that it is obscure. This charge allows analytic philosophers to denounce the work of continental philosophers as mystery-mongering, oracular and gnomic, without producing any arguments.
In this vein, Bernard Williams assures us that what marks out analytic philosophy is "a certain way of going on which involves argument, distinctions, and? moderately plain speech." Unfortunately, the speech of many contemporary analytic philosophers, especially in Britain, is as plain as a baroque church. Consider the following sentence from Michael Dummett: "The articulation of the theory of truth is not taken as corresponding to any articulation of the practical ability the possession of which is the manifestation of that knowledge of which the theory is presented as a theoretical model." Indeed, many analytic philosophers regard such turgid and convoluted prose as an achievement, because it shows that their work does not suffer from the alleged superficiality of the logical positivists and ordinary language philosophers. We must distinguish, they claim, between genuine technical difficulty and obscurity.
As regards German philosophy, it has sometimes been alleged that it is impenetrable because German is an inherently obscure language (this is the anti-thesis to Heidegger?s claim that only Greek and German are suitable for philosophising). Admittedly, the hypotactical nature of German syntax lends itself to convoluted constructions, and the liberty to form nominal compounds has given philosophical Frankensteins the opportunity to create semantic monsters such as Heidegger?s "In-der-Welt-Sein" (being-in-the-world) and "Sein zum Tode" (being towards death). But these are temptations which can be?and have been?resisted. Frege?s German compares very favourably with the English of some of his contemporary followers. Nor is Frege an anomaly because he was a precursor of analytic philosophy. Similar claims can be made for Freud and Schopenhauer. And the robust insults of Nietzsche and Marx, however uninformed, are stylistically superior to Mill?s self-righteous whingeing. Even Kant, accused by Isaiah Berlin of having "ruined" philosophical language, has produced some of the most beautiful passages in the history of the subject.
if we leave behind analytic philosophers? self-serving professions of clarity, where is the rift now between analytic and German philosophy? German philo-sophers aspire to be diligent scholars wielding philological tools. No German philosopher would join Gilbert Ryle in complaining about "foot-and-note" disease. If a German philosopher emulated Dummett and published a 700-page tome about Frege without a single quotation or reference, any acclaim would be tempered by ridicule.
Analytic philosophers, especially in North America, are still prone to scientism, the view that there is no knowledge outside natural science, and that philosophy should hence adopt scientific aims and methods. By contrast, German philosophers are expected to draw on historical, social and cultural resources beyond logic, mathematics and natural science, and often present themselves as guardians of humanism. They are also inclined to regard the human sciences as a sui generis form of knowledge; indeed, this is a central plank of the hermeneutic tradition.
Analytic philosophy is often presented as the guardian of rationality. It is interested in justification and argument. But as a definition of analytic philosophy, this is again questionable. The aim of dealing with fundamental questions through rational argument goes back to Plato. This definition implies that, with the possible exception of Pascal, Nietzsche and Heidegger, all philosophers are analytic. It also sits uneasily with the fact that German philosophy has placed much greater store by the power of reason than analytic philosophers, with their empiricist hangovers. While German philosophers such as Habermas and Apel still try to show that it is possible to provide an "ultimate justification" of moral principles which would bind all rational creatures, many of their Anglophone colleagues have long since settled for various versions of moral subjectivism, scepticism and relativism.
Clarity and rationality are not the prerogative of analytic philosophers, nor are scholarship and breadth of education the prerogative of continental philosophers. Nevertheless, these slogans do mark points of contrast in a more general academic and cultural sense. This is hardly surprising, given certain brute facts about university education in Anglophone and Germanophone countries. Having to write an essay every week is no more conducive to broad scholarship than seeing your supervisor only once a year is conducive to a clear and cogently argued doctoral thesis.
Other differences have to do with the wider cultural and political context. The recent attempt to prevent Peter Singer from speaking on euthanasia in Austria shows that, there, the ethos of argumentative debate is still fragile. In German-speaking countries, the hard left and the religious right have formed a curious alliance which derides any discussion of euthanasia as "fascist." Worse still, some academic institutions and professional philosophers have not only tolerated this attack, but even supported it. Anglophone philosophers have reacted with incredulity to this outbreak of Teutonic intolerance, signing petitions in defence of Singer?s right to speak. For them, unfettered argument is the life-blood of the academy, and the possibility of questioning even the most fundamental assumptions is the hallmark of philosophy. A German philosopher, by contrast, is not expected to muster nine arguments for and ten against any given position, but to utter profound wisdoms?preferably wisdoms which are in line with a shared communal ethos (Hegel?s "substantielle Sittlichkeit").
On the other hand, it does seem to be the case that some analytic philosophers working on applied ethics have approached sensitive moral problems with a frivolousness that sets them apart, unfavourably, from the characteristically serious German moral philosophers. Applied ethicists are usually politically correct, and would therefore refuse to refer to people in wheel-chairs as handicapped. But this has not stopped certain utilitarians from telling these same people that the world would be a better place without them. One cannot help but feel that many of them treat ethical problems merely as an opportunity to try out their pet theory, or to show how clever they are.
Perhaps, then, instead of attempting to synthesise the intellectual styles of Anglophone analytic philosophy and Germanophone continental philosophy, we should wish a plague on both their houses!
