CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY

The term ‘continental philosophy’ is generally applied to the work of philosophers who come from the mainland of the European continent. However, there is within the range of thinkers who might be thus described such a diversity of approaches to a wide variety of philosophical questions that it is really quite difficult to categorise them in a homogeneous manner as ‘continental philosophers’. Nevertheless, it is true that during the last one hundred years or so there has been a split between, on the one hand Anglo-American analytic philosophy and, on the other, philosophy as it has been practised by the continental tradition. This might be best described as a division which occurred at an institutional level (i.e. within the university systems of mainland Europe, the United Kingdom and the USA). If there was a key moment which served to define this split, it might be located within the work of philosophers within the analytic tradition rather than the continentals (e.g. that of Bertrand Russell and Gottlob Frege). Thus, for example, Russell, a philosophy student in Britain at a time when Hegel’s philosophy was dominant in the university system, and himself a youthful devotee of it, came to regard what he saw as the excesses of metaphysical speculation and idealism in the thought of not only Hegel but also such thinkers as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, with a distinct air of suspicion (see his A History of Western Philosophy (1946) for a good impression of his attitude). In the place of such speculation, Russell and other analytics propounded a rigorous analytical discourse which concentrated upon, for example, elucidating definitions of key philosophical notions (e.g. meaning, reference, language). Above all, one might characterise analytic philosophy’s rigour in terms of its commitment to a primarily logical form of discourse, and an accompanying commitment to a primarily metaphysical understanding of the meaning of terms such as ‘necessity’. Analytics have generally sought to clarify issues of meaning, and have usually avoided what many of them have considered (even until quite recently) to be the vague idealistic speculations characteristic of thinkers within the continental tradition (Gilbert Ryle’s famous dismissal of Heidegger’s Being and Time as not worth reading is perhaps the most notorious expression of this attitude). Continental philosophy, if one indeed ventures to define it, might better be understood by situating it within the context of specific debates about questions of knowledge, rather than characterising it in terms of its purportedly ‘speculative’ character. Such an approach is especially useful since the question of knowledge is a

concern common to both the analytic and continental traditions, and some comparison and contrast is thereby rendered possible. Naturally, there are exceptions to the account offered below, but it is certainly the case that what is discussed under the rubric of a ‘continental’ approach embodies something markedly different from the analyses of many analytic philosophers. Where analytic philosophers have tended to treat the investigation

of questions about knowledge in what may be called logical-metaphysical terms (see, for example, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s early text, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921)), a significant number of continental philosophers have conducted their research with an additional emphasis on the material/temporal factors that may be significant to knowledge. Thus, for example, Nietzsche’s account of the generation of knowledge is one which concentrates upon an analysis of the material conditions that are fundamental to its possibility. Indeed, for Nietzsche, ‘knowledge’ is thereby rendered the consequence of a series of contingent eventualities, while the logical preconditions of thinking are often taken to signify not an ontological proof of how the world is (and a criterion, therefore, of objectivity and truth) but an indication merely of a human incapacity to think about the world differently. That we must think logically, on Nietzsche’s view, does not entitle us to the further claim that the world itself ought to conform to the strictures of logical form (see Nietzsche’s notebooks, as published in The Will to Power (1968b), which contain many versions of this kind of argument), but rather pays testimony to the material conditions in which the human species developed. This point can be further illustrated by the approach of analytic

and continental commentators to Kant’s project, in the Critique of Pure Reason (1964), of elucidating the a priori conditions required for the possibility of knowledge. By the phrase ‘a priori’ Kant means independent of all empirical experience. Although, for Kant, all knowledge is knowledge about experience, it does not follow that the conditions for the possibility of having experience are themselves derived from experience. Analytic commentators (e.g. Stroud 1984:153ff.) have generally taken this independence to have a metaphysical significance. For Stroud, ‘a priori’ always means independent of experience, and concerns the subjective conditions (i.e. those features a subject must have in order to know something) which are to be found ‘in’ us. On Stroud’s view, such conditions are those properties which a mind must have in order to be capable of knowledge (1984:160). For Stroud, the subjective conditions are ‘characteristics’

or properties of human beings. They are what must necessarily be true of a mind in order for knowledge to be possible for it. The kind of necessity involved here is metaphysical, i.e. it concerns those conditions in virtue of which knowledge is possible for us. Necessary conditions, taken in this sense, need not exist prior to (i.e. before) what they are conditions for. Hence, the possibility that the sense of ‘a priori’ might also be taken as meaning preceding experience is ignored within Stroud’s account. In contrast, a thinker like Michel Foucault takes a rather different view of the meaning of Kant’s notion of the ‘a priori’, which reflects how it has been articulated within the continental tradition (see Foucault’s The Order of Things (1970, discussed below, and The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972)). Foucault takes Kant’s critical enterprise to constitute a turning

point in the history of European philosophy (as initiating the period of modernity), and considers the legacy of Kant in the French and German traditions. He therefore attempts to provide an account of what he believes to be the received (continental) interpretation of this legacy. On Foucault’s view, the classical conception of the theory of knowledge can be characterised as taking the search for its conditions as being a matter of the relationship between representations (i.e. the question of how our representations of experience map on to reality). Kant’s modern account, in contrast, does not seek to locate these conditions at the level of representation (Foucault 1970:241, 254), but instead sidesteps the issue of representation in order to address the question of those conditions ‘on the basis of which all representation, whatever its form, may be posited’ (ibid.:242, 254-5). On Foucault’s account, such a starting point is equivalent to analysing ‘the source and origin [la source et l’origine] of representation’ (ibid.:243, 256). On this view, Kant’s interest in the conditions of knowledge is one which concentrates on the matter of its prior (i.e. preceding) conditions. This point can be highlighted by turning to Foucault’s implicit attribution to Kant of a view of the subject as an ‘empirico-transcendental doublet’ (ibid.:318, 329). This view, Foucault argues, has given rise to two kinds of analysis of human knowledge: (i) a reductivist empiricism, which is interested in the ‘anatomo-physiological conditions’ of knowledge; and (ii) a form of transcendental, dialectical analysis, which examines the historical conditions of knowledge (ibid.:319, 330). Foucault sees both kinds of analysis as explaining the genesis of knowledge, not its logical/metaphysical conditions of possibility. The first seeks to elucidate the historical development of knowledge after the fact (positivism), the second to provide an account of those conditions of knowledge which history must fulfil

(dialectics) (ibid.: 320, 331). In both cases, what is analysed are the antecedent conditions of knowledge. Thus, Foucault takes the Kantian notion of the necessity which grounds the validity of our knowledge to be a matter of its antecedent conditions. The ‘a priori’, taken in this sense, is what is prior (in a temporal sense) to experience. From this comparison, it is evident that the two traditions tend to

depart from one another not with regard to the kinds of question they ask (in this case the question concerns the necessary conditions of knowledge), but in terms of how the question is dealt with. The emphasis on the significance of the temporal or material mode is not merely present in Nietzsche and Foucault (both of whom also treat ethical and political questions with an eye on the problem of power which is itself generated from an investment in a material analysis of social relations). In Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, likewise, temporality is seen as being fundamental to the success of any interpretation of the ontological question of the meaning of Being. Equally for Gilles Deleuze, temporality is taken to form the basis for the construction of an account of an ontology of ‘becoming’. Of course, as already mentioned, there are exceptions to the

account offered above, and it is worth emphasising again that it would be incorrect to read ‘continental philosophy’ as an all-embracing term which indicates a set of doctrines with regard to how philosophical enquiry ought to be conducted. Jacques Derrida, for example, has pursued an approach which does not embrace the material mode, but offers an account of processes of signification which problematises a metaphysical attitude to questions of knowledge whilst at the same time remaining both firmly within the domain demarcated by metaphysical thinking and highly suspicious of the historicised project Foucault engages in (see his criticisms of Foucault in the essay ‘Cogito and the History of Madness’ in Writing and Difference (1978)). Likewise, Jean-Franc¸ois Lyotard should really be described as a thinker who employs a range of strategies common to both the analytic and continental traditions (and indeed constructs his arguments in the light of his knowledge of the works of Russell, Frege and Wittgenstein as well as Hegel, Nietzsche and Heidegger).