[Bups-dis] Fresh topic: Let's have some more cults.

[Pete Wolfendale]

I appologise for not expanding on my comments sooner, and I'm glad
that Duncan has picked out some salient points that I can start
responding to.

Firstly, I'd like to tackle the issue of philosophical clarity, and
the nature of 'good philosophy'. One of the points I'm trying to get
across is that, although there is indeed both good and bad philosophy
on either side of the line, I also think there is clear and unclear
philosophy, and that although it might be justifiable to say there is
more unclear, or hard to get into material on the continental side, it
isn't to the extent that it's often portrayed in the analytic
tradition. Why would this be the case? Well, because if we consider
the analytic tradition is functioning more like a research program, we
find that the very integrity of that program does not just include
core metaphysics and terminology, but also (much as Wittgenstein
identitfies in On Certainty) a whole set of practices of justification
that are not separable from stylistic concerns; additionally we find
that the standard educational practices, such as what perspective on
the history of philosophy is taught (whether you skip Hegel, Bergson,
Husserl and Heidegger, or skip Russell, Carnap, Quine, Davidson and
Dummett), actually constitutes these practices, and as such often the
ease with which particular texts can be assimilated.

Again, this may seem a bit confusing, but I'll elaborate through
taking a particular example. The example I'm going to pick up is that
French philosophy that seems to be just posturing that constitutes for
many the unassimilable aspect of 'continental philosophy'. I'm pleased
that you've included Heidegger here too.

One has to remember that the french educational system, particularly
during the early and mid 20th century was very different to that of
our own philosophy departments. It was customary to spend a lot of
time working up to ones doctorate such that one did a lot of
exegetical work on a variety of thinkers (meaning it was customary to
actually publish books, sometimes a whole bunch of books as in
Deleuze's case) before getting the doctorate and doing one's own work.
This meant it was also usual to be fluent in a number of disciplines
outside of around philosophy, including the sciences, mathematics,
psychology, psychoanalysis, anthropology etc.

Because of this, one has to remember that people like Derrida,
Deleuze, Foucault, Nancy, Sartre, Bataille, Badiou, Laruelle, Levinas
and others were not academic charlatans trying to make a quick buck by
writing indecipherable nonsense, but were heavily involved in the
academia of their day. That this academia was very different from our
own makes for certain problems of translation.

For instance, most of these thinkers were steeped in the philosophical
terminology and problematics of Husserlian phenomenology, as well as
the Heideggerian philosophy that came out of it. Additionally, there
were a whole bunch of thinkers who we rarely read today who played a
large part in constituting these terminologies and problematics, good
examples being:-

Gaston Bachelard - who did much important work in the philosophy of
science and whose notion of the epistemological break was taken up by
Kuhn. It is worthy to note here that we rarely recognise the french
tradition in the philosophy of science, despite it being in many ways
more advanced than the austrian tradition.

Georges Canguilhem - who again did much work in the philosophy of
science, particularly in the history and philosophy of biology and
medicine. Canguilhem was enormously influencial on Foucault.

Jean Hyppolite - who resurrected the thought of Hegel for a new
generation, moving away from the misinterpretations of the British
Idealist that Russell and Moore were reacting against.

Ferdinand de Saussure - Father of structural linguistics (and thus the
whole tradition of synchronic linguistics). He was very influential
outside of linguistics, his ideas being taken up by the structuralist
thinkers Levi-Strauss, Barthes, Lacan and Althusser, and then by the
post-structuralist (who are still structuralist) Foucault, Derrida and
Deleuze.

Henri Bergson - whose work in the philosophy of psychology, biology,
evolution, religion and time was far ahead of his time. Bergson was
unfortunately smeared by Russell, who portrayed him as a nonsensical
mystic (sound familiar), crippling his reception in the UK. This is a
complete characture, as anyone who reads Bergson can see. Bergson's
work, despite introducing terms and ideas that are at odds with a lot
of ordinary conceptions, is very clear and lucid. His writing is so
good in fact that he received a nobel prize for literature in 1927,
not because his philosophical books are literary (a la Derrida) but
because they were well written and widely accessible to the public
(creative evolution was immensly popular). In addition to this he was
a very close friend of William James, who was a great fan of his work.
On top of this, he was very well versed in the science and
particularly the psychology of his day, going so far as to reference
psychological papers in his work. He also had a noteworthy
correspondence with Einstein. Bergson was very influential on many
French phenomenologists like Sartre, Levinas and Merleau-Ponty, but
beyond this was crucial for Deleuze.

These are just a few examples, but they are important because non of
them was in the least obscurantist, and all were well respected for
rigour and clarity. Yet, because they are not taught as standard in
our philosophy departments, we are not immersed in the terminology
that their intellectual heirs take from them and use without
continually defining it. This is not meant to be a criticism of our
teaching practices specifically, but is meant to highlight a point.

People like Foucault and Sartre are paragons of clarity, at least in
most of their work, but this is sometimes overlooked because people
find their problems and terms unfamiliar.

Turning to Heidegger, I challenge anyone to pick up Being and Time and
tell me its anything other than amazingly rigourous. Yes, it is
difficult. Yes, Heidegger invents a whole plethora of very complicated
terminology, but he defines it all in an orderly way. This book is a
parallel to the critique of pure reason, yet many people don't get
beyond childish snickering at phrases like the worlding of the world.
Heidegger was writing in response to Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard,
Nietzsche, Husserl and even Aristotle, and was well versed in them
all. There is no lack of rigour there, and there is more clarity than
those who have not intensively studied the former thinkers would think
at first.

Heidegger's later work is somewhat more difficult, but even so, it is
his earlier work that was most influential in setting up the
terminology. Particularly his understanding of the ontological
difference - the difference between beings and the Being of beings.

I will explain this last bit because I personally think it is very
clear and very important.

Heidegger takes it that we have forgotten the question of the meaning
of Being. This means that we have stopped inquiring into the nature of
the existence of all existent entities, but have fallen into
metaphysics, which he classifies as the categorisation of different
kinds of beings. This insight holds very strongly against people in
the modern analytic tradition like Strawson and Michael Ayers. These
philosophers are interested in the ontological priority of physical
objects, which they take to be a particular category of entities.
Ayers would put forward a system of categories like 'thing', 'stuff',
'group', 'event', and divide all beings among them. Heidegger's point
is that approaches like this (which Aristotle is the best example of
in fact) forget the question of the Being of all beings, and what can
be said about the way in which every given thing 'is'.

This is something which gets laughed off by many analytic philosophers
as the most rediculous wooly thinking. I've heard people say this is
stupid because Being is not a predicate, and thus can't be inquired
into. If this person had read Heidegger they'd find the statement
'Being is not a Predicate' in the introduction. Heidegger's point
would be that just because we have existential quantifiers and a set
of rules for manipulating them doesn't mean we know what it is to be
(not in some wishy washy humanist 'what am I' kind of way either). To
think that an existential quantifier fills a hole in your ontology is
just to assume that logic already gives you the structure of the
world... that ontology is constrained by logic, and all that's left
for you to do is work out the different kinds of Being.

To say it again, if you haven't read and familiarized yourself with
Heidegger (like virtually everyone in France had), reading Derrida
will require more work on your part.

This whole point works in the opposite direction too. I've met people
studying Adorno and Heidegger and similar who have absolutely no idea
what Frege, Russell, Kripke and Davidson are going on about, and who
can't see any interest at all in it, because they aren't involved with
the discourses these thinkers are taught in.

To finish the point off, I do understand that there is a greater
tendency towards unclarity, if unclarity is understood as requiring
more work to read, in the continental tradition, not that it can be
understood as a tradition in the same sense as the analytic tradition.
Despite the fact that I've just gone over a lot of the points of
connection between thinkers in continental philosophy, it is still the
case that its a lot more disparate. There are plenty of people who've
read none of what I've just listed, or only selected bits, and have
read a whole different set of work (the Frankfurt school being a good
example). What I'm trying to get at, is that sometimes what is counted
as having greater clarity is actually just having more stringent
standards internal to the research programs' own discourse, which
isn't necessarily to be more clear outside of that discourse. There
are few places in which this striving for 'greater clarity' becomes
more hostile and oppressive than in engagements with 'French
Philosophy'.

All of this being said, I don't want to write like either Derrida or
Deleuze. Neither do I want to write like Davidson or Dummett. I'd
rather write a book than a paper, I'd rather be straightforward than
performative, but I'd rather lose the logical notation too. I don't
want to write analytic philosophy, and I don't want to write
continental philosophy. I just want to write philosophy.

Now to answer three remaining points:-

1) The devil is in the details: It often is, I admit. The problem is
that if you structure a research program entirely, or primarily around
details you end up 'not seeing the wood for the trees'. This can
actually lead to a certain sociologically rooted hostility to general
speculation, which I think is misplaced in philosophy, given that its
what we do best.

2) Individuation: When I was talking about the difference between
picking out and individuation, I was referring to the distinction
between reference, i.e. the ways in which we think, talk about and
represent entities, and the individuation of these entities in
themselves, to use the Heideggerian insight I was plowing earlier, the
Being of beings, their real principle of unity. This isn't something
which is alien to the analytic tradition entirely; there is a big
debate between conceptualists who try to bring down identity and
discontinuity to the ways we refer and those realists who try to do
the opposite. My point is that there is a middle between these
positions, whereby we recognise that the ways things are individuated
are not only prior to the way we refer, but also might explain the way
we refer without us having to assume that our referring is isomorphic
with structure of things in themselves.

My own personal answer to this question is to do with process
philosophy, and the idea that if we view all entities as processes
(rather than breaking them up into categories), we can understand the
specificity of interactions between kinds of processes (such as our
referring activity) in a way which does not privilege any kind of
entity, i.e. make particular features or our human experience (such as
a rate of the flow of time), a constraint upon the way every given
thing is. This approach does raise certain problems for mereology, but
more seriously denies the reality of identity, as well as allowing for
a certain objective vagueness, all of which mean we would have to
think a difference between logic and ontology.

3) Psychologism, Logic and the ability to talk non-logically: I'm as
against psychologism as anyone else, but I believe that making logic a
constraint on ontology is just as bad as any idealist (in fact, I
think its less bas than Hegel's idealism), because it takes particular
historical structures (no matter how stable they appear, I still think
the behavioural moves we make in discourse have material and
historical conditions) and patterns the world on them. It's just like
making the world structured like the mind (idealism). Your latter
point is good, as I think you've hit on the interesting issue:-

"There is something to it though when you consider that
our ability to talk about aspects of the world which aren't logical (if
there are such things) is extremely limited to the point of being
impossible, as sensible discourse presupposes logical structure (no?)"

Sensible discourse may have purely contingent constraints that are
nonetheless practically necessary. We might think of logic as being a
much stronger version of the rules you find at board meetings (having
to go through the chair, taking turns, etc.). It might not be
obviously, but the important thing is that we can actually have a
sensible discussion, using the rules of logic, about whether or not
the world is structured in accordance with logic, e.g. 'is identity a
real feature of the world?'. This would seem to belay those who take
logical form to be a transcendental condition of discourse. The
argument that we have to assume that the world is logical in order to
talk about it has no force is we can talk about its own validity. This
is funnily enough the problem Wittgenstein was trying to get around in
the Tractatus, his conclusion being that we correspondence held only
if we couldn't correspond to a 'fact' of correspondence.

This is an awfully long email, and I'm sorry if it's tiresome. I think
you're right about the break-up of analytic philosophy. However, my
hope is that I can just do philosophy, and happily reference Quine and
Heidegger, Wittgenstein and Deleuze, and not get ignored by either
side, and I think this is still a way off, as the attitude toward
French philosophy (and the 'french' Heidegger) shows.

Pete