Maverick Philosopher

Bad Stuff: Badiou

Top o' the Stack.

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On 03/03/2023 17:29, William F. Vallicella from Philosophy in Progress wrote:

And I say this as someone who has read practically all of Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Gadamer, a crapload of Derrida (who, according to John Searle, gives bullshit a bad name) and plenty of others besides. I know Continental philosophy from the inside.

Dear Bill,

thanks for giving me a laugh-out-loud moment on a Friday evening! Maybe Searle is too concretist and therefore dismissive of everything that even smells wrong, but he's the world's great reality check . . . .

Reading through that list again, it seems that the chronological order of those philosophers (I think they are in order either of birthdate or of major works) corresponds to the declining coherence of their thinking and its connection to reality?

Thomas Beale
Health IT blog | Culture blog | The Objective Stance | ORC-ID

 

Thank you, Thomas.  May all be well with you. I made use of your note, with attribution. If you don't want me to mention you by name, just say so, and I won't.

 

It's Saturday. Tonight I shall have me a shot of Jaegermeister. Ever try this stuff?

 

Yes, the philosophers are listed in order of birth and of major works. And yes, the later Continentals can't hold a candle to the earlier ones. As for Searle, he is a brilliant critic of other philosophers' views, but his own views -- I am thinking primarily of his philosophy of mind -- are rather less impressive.

 

There is plenty of interesting material about the man and his thought in my Searle category. His outsized ego and unrestrained concupiscence landed him in some hot water.

All fine by me.

 

I had forgotten about the fall of JS ... possibly I skimmed it on your blog back when you noted it, but not all the details. It is interesting how even some of the greatest minds lack what others would consider the most basic self-awareness. Still, I like much of his writing since he cuts through crap in a similar way to Scruton (Searle has a wrecking ball, Scruton arguably a flamethrower, which can be aimed with more precision, also funnier), and so saves one some time. I doubt very much if every single thing he designates as crap really is crap (and that's before we get to atheism - e.g. phenomenology), but then that's why we have you!

 

Jaegermeister is a bit too sweet for my liking so only very occasionally. I am more of wine-drinker + occasional whiskey and even sometimes Grappa, a drink that makes no sense, except when it does.

If you know what Grappa is, then you probably know what Aperol is. Try mixing the latter with tequila, say, 2/3 tequila + 1/3 Aperol. The combo is delicious in my humble opinion and an excellent synaptic lubricant.

I will try it. I have some tequila lurking in the den of iniquity (= top of wine fridge).

BTW was just scanning your various entries on Husserl, who does interest me a lot (and more to the point, pro philosophers in my field, medical informatics). I've read some original (well, in English) matierial, pretty readable, even despite the 'continental' flavour. Anyway, your various dissections are very nice. I need to spend more time on them. I may be back with some discussion points . . . .

Fire away, when you are ready!

Scruton on Foucault

Although linkage does not entail endorsement, I do endorse the following from Powerline:

Roger Scruton’s charming and invaluable memoir, Gentle Regrets: Thoughts from a Life, includes a chapter explaining how he first started turning in a conservative direction (he wasn’t raised one—his father was a devoted semi-socialist Labourite), when he witnessed first-hand the student revolt in Paris in May 1968. He was repelled by the spectacle, and concluded that ‘whatever these people are for, I’m against.’

But what were the student protestors for? He recounts arguing with a radical acquaintance on the scene over the question:

What, I asked, do you propose to put in place of this “bourgeoisie” whom you so despise, and to whom your owe your freedom and prosperity that enable you to play on your toy barricades? . . .

She replied with a book: Foucault’s Les mots et les choses [The Order of Things], the bible of the soixante-huitards [“sixty-eighters,” as the May protestors are still known], the text that seemed to justify every form of transgression, by showing that obedience is merely defeat. It is an artful book, composed with a satanic mendacity, selectively appropriating facts in order to show that culture and knowledge are nothing but the “discourses” of power. The book is not a work of philosophy but an exercise in rhetoric. Its goal is subversion, not truth, and it is careful to argue—by the old nominalist sleight of hand that was surely invented by the Father of Lies—that “truth” requires inverted commas, that it changes from epoch to epoch, and is tied to the form of consciousness, the epistime, imposed by the class that profits from its propagation. The revolutionary spirit, which searches the world for things to hate, has found in Foucault a new literary formula. [Emphasis added.]

Style, Substance, and Michel Henry

Some philosophers write so obscurely that the problems they purport to discuss are occluded by the problems they cause the reader. One has to waste time figuring out what the author is saying, time that ought to be spent on assessing whether what is being said is true. The French are prime offenders, allergic as they are to plain talk and clarity of expression with their pseudo-literary pirouettes and their overuse of universal quantifiers.  The French Continental style draws attention away from the substance so much so that one wonders whether there is any substance beneath the stylistic flummery. And yet I sense that Michel Henry has something interesting to say about Husserl and Heidegger and so I will continue  to plough through the turgid prose of Material Phenomenology.

Worse than obscurantism in the French style, however, is the attitude of a certain sort of analytic philosopher who dismisses  as meaningless what does not instantly make sense to his shallow pate. And among these benighted souls, the nadir is reached in a positivist like David Stove.  

I coined a name for people like him: 'philosophistine.'  A philistine out of his depth among real philosophers.

The maverick philosopher, avoiding both camps, strives for clarity with content with a fidelity to reality that tolerates such obscurity as is unavoidable.

On Continental Philosophy: Response to a German Reader

This is an edited re-post (re-entry?) from 21 February 2017 to satisfy current interest. Against my better judgment, I am allowing comments.

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The following from a German sociologist (my comments are in blue):

Perhaps you know the old joke: Analytic philosophers think that continental philosophy is not sufficiently clear; continental philosophers think that analytic philosophy is not sufficient.

Having just reread the Kritik der reinen Vernunft, I don't see Kant as an analytic philosopher. Hegel and Nietzsche certainly belong to the continental tradition. And none of the philosophers of the 20th century, who really matter to me, can be called an analytic philosopher. Doesn't "analytic" simply mean after Wittgenstein and in his tradition? 

BV: As I see it, there was no analytic-Continental split before the 20th century. So classifying Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche in terms of that split is only marginally meaningful. But it is safe to say that Kant is more congenial to analytic philosophers than Hegel and Nietzsche are. 

When did the split come about and what is it about?

If I were were to select two writings that best epitomize the depth of the Continental-analytic clash near the time of its outbreak, they would be Heidegger's 1929 What is Metaphysics? and Carnap's 1932 response, "On the Overcoming of Metaphysics Through the Logical Analysis of Language."  In fairness to Carnap, let us note that his Erkenntnis piece is more than a response to Heidegger inasmuch as it calls into question the meaningfulness of all metaphysics. And in fairness to Heidegger, we should note that he thinks he is doing something more radical than metaphysics. Metaphysics for Heidegger is  onto-theology.  Metaphysics thinks Being (das Sein) but always in reference to beings (das Seiende); it does not think Being in its difference from beings. The latter is Heidegger's project.

The following are widely regarded as Continental philosophers: Franz Brentano, Alexius von Meinong, Kasimir Twardowski, Edmund Husserl, Adolf Reinach, Dietrich von Hildebrand, Edith Stein, Roman Ingarden, Max Scheler, Martin Heidegger, Nicolai Hartmann, Gabriel Marcel, Ortega y Gasset, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus. And of course there are others that are so regarded.

Note that the above are all Europeans.  But being European is not what makes them 'Continental.'  Otherwise Gottlob Frege, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Rudolf Carnap would have to be lumped in with them.  And of course there are Continental philosophers who do not hail from Europe. So what makes the above authors 'Continental' as opposed to 'analytic'?

It is not easy to say, which fact supplies a reason to not take too seriously talk of 'Continental' versus 'analytic.'

Note that all of the Continentals I mentioned  engage in analysis, some in very close, very careful  analysis.  (Ever read Husserl's Logical Investigations?)  And please don't say that they don't analyze language.  Ever read Brentano?  Gustav Bergmann accurately describes Brentano as "the first linguistic philosopher." (Realism, 234) Roderick Chisholm's paraphrastic approach was influenced significantly by Brentano. No  one would lump Chisholm in with the Continentals.

Will you say that the Continentals mentioned  didn't pay close attention to logic?  That's spectacularly false. Even for Heidegger!  Ever read his dissertation on psychologism in logic?

Perhaps you could say that the Continentals mentioned did not engage significantly with the ground-breaking work of Frege, widely regarded as the greatest logician since Aristotle. I think that would be true. But does this difference suffice to distinguish between Continental and analytic?  I don't think so: there are plenty of philosophers who write in a decidedly analytic style who do not engage with Frege, and some of them oppose Frege. Take Fred Sommers.  You wouldn't call him a Continental philosopher.  And while he engages the ideas of Frege, he vigorously opposes them in his very impressive attempt at resurrecting traditional formal logic.  And yet he would be classified as analytic.

A Matter of Style or of Substance?

According to Michael Dummett,

What distinguishes analytical philosophy, in its diverse manifestations, from other schools is the belief, first, that a philosophical account of thought can be attained through a philosophical account of language, and, secondly, that a comprehensive account can only be so attained.

[. . .]

On my characterisation, therefore, [Gareth] Evans was no longer an analytical philosopher.  He was, indeed, squarely in the analytical tradition: the three pillars on which his book [The Varieties of Reference, Oxford, 1982] rests are Russell, Moore and Frege. Yet it is only as belonging to the tradition -- as adopting a certain philosophical style and as appealing to certain writers rather than to others -- that he remains a member of the analytical school.  (Origins of Analytical Philosophy, Harvard UP, 1993)

For Dummett, then, what make a philosopher analytic is not the style in which he writes:  clear, precise, careful, explicitly logical with premises and inferences clearly specified, free of literary pretentiousness, name-dropping, rhetorical questions, and generally the sort of bullshitting that one finds in writers like John Caputo and Alain Badiou.  Nor is it the topics he writes about or the authorities he cites.  What makes the analytic philosopher are the twin axioms above mentioned.

The trouble with Dummett's criterion is that it is intolerably stipulative if what we are after is a more or less lexical definition of how 'analytic' and 'Continental' are actually used.  An approach that rules out Gareth Evans and Roderick Chisholm and Gustav Bergmann and Reinhardt Grossmann and so many others cuts no ice in my book. (How's that for a mixed metaphor?)

A Matter of Politics?

I don't think so. Look again at my list.  Sartre was a decided leftist, a Stalinist in his later phase.  And Camus was on the Left.  But everyone else on my list was either apolitical or on the Right.  Heidegger was a National Socialist. Latter-day Continentals, though, definitely slouch Leftward.

A Matter of Academic Politics?

This may be what the Continental versus analytic split comes down to more than anything else.  As Blaise Pascal says, with some exaggeration, "All men naturally hate one another."  To which I add, with some exaggeration: and are always looking for ways to maintain and increase the enmity.  If you are entranced with Heidegger you are going to hate the Carnapian analytic bigot who refuses to read Heidegger but mocks him anyway.  Especially when the bigot stands in the way of career success.  Although so many Continentals are slopheads, there is no asshole like an analytic asshole. That's been my experience.

A Matter of Religion?

No, there are both theists and atheists on my list.  And of course there are plenty of analytic philosophers who are theists. Most of them, however, are not.

A Matter of Attitude toward Science?

This has something to do with the split.  You can be a Continental philosopher and a traditional theist (von Hildebrand, Edith Stein, et al.) and you can be a Continental philosopher and a conservative (Ortega y Gasset), but is there any case of a Continental philosopher who is a logical positivist or who genuflects before the natural sciences in the scientistic manner?  I don't think so.  I am, however, open to correction.

Interim Conclusion

Talk of 'analytic' and 'Continental' philosophy is not particularly useful.  It would be better to speak  of good and bad philosophy. But what are the marks of good philosophy?  That's a post for another occasion.

Back to my correspondent:

I see philosophy more in terms of art than in terms of science. This is not saying that some arguments are not better than others or that one cannot distinguish different degrees of plausibility. But the overall conception (what Heidegger calls "Seinsverständnis) is more - and something essentially different - than the sum of of plausibilities or the logic consistency of the argumentation. There is, or so it appears to me, a 'channelling' of truth that resembles more the mystical experience than the scientific recognition. Of course I've read Wittgenstein, but why should I spend precious life time reading, say, Gilbert Ryle or Saul Kripke, when I can read Hegel's Wissenschaft der Logik?

BV: As I am sure my reader knows, Hegel's Wissenschaft der Logik (Science of Logic) has been dismissed as Begriffsdichtung, conceptual poetry.  So I am not surprised that he sees philosophy more in terms of art than in terms of science.  His attitude is defensible: why read Kripke who is of interest only to specialists in logic and the philosophy of language and who has no influence on anything beyond those narrow precincts when you can read Hegel and come thereby to understand the dialectical thinking which, via Marx and Lenin, transformed the world?  

There is also the problem that the various attempts to bring philosophy onto the "sure path of science" (Kant) have all failed miserably despite the Herculean efforts of thinkers such as Edmund Husserl.  He attempted to make of philosophy strenge Wissenschaft, but he could not get even one of his brilliant students to follow him into his transcendental phenomenology.  (I don't consider Eugen Fink to be a counterexample.) There is no reason to think that philosophy will ever enter upon the sure path of science.   This is a reason to content oneself with the broader, looser, fuzzier approach of the Continentals.

Only if philosophy could be transformed into strenge Wissenschaft would we perhaps be justified in putting all our efforts into this project and eschewing the satisfaction of our needs for an overarching and spiritually satisfying Weltanschauung; we have no good reason to think philosophy will ever be so transformed; ergo, etc.

When [Theodor Wiesengrund]  Adorno was in Oxford, he wrote in a letter home: "Here it's always just about arguments." Most of his colleagues there did not even understand what he was missing. And that's the divide!

BV: That is indeed a good part of what the divide is all about. 

Well, of course this ignorance of the analytic tradition has in my case also to do with cultural nationalism. The philosophical departments here are more and more forgetting about the great German tradition. Thinkers like Hegel or Schelling, let alone Heidegger, are hardly taught anymore. I'm against this, I'm Deutsch and proud of it. Actually I want - and for me that's another reason to be against illegal immigration - Germany to become again a hotspot of art and philosophy!

BV:  I agree! When as a young man I spent a year in Freiburg im Breisgau, I was there to study Kant and Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger.  To my romantic young self Germany was, in the words of Heinrich Heine, das Land von Dichter und Denker, the land of poets and thinkers.  You Germans can be justifiably proud of your great tradition. Without a doubt, Kant belongs in the philosophical pantheon along with Plato and Aristotle. It is indeed a shame that the analysts are suppressing your great tradition.

As for illegal immigration, if looks from here as if Angela Merkel is a disaster for Germany. Language, borders, and culture are three things every nation has a right to protect and preserve.  There is nothing xenophobic or racist about it. 

More on the French and their Pretentious Preciosity and Lack of Rigor

Cyrus contributes,

Your correspondent, M. Boisson, writes:

The French used to be praised for their clarity of expression. They are now known for their pretentious preciosity and complete lack of rigor.

Could he please provide us with an example of a clear French philosopher other than the very impressive and exceptional M. Descartes? In fact, given his first sentence, I would like at least five or six such examples. (I would prefer a dozen.) Early French philosophy writing is heavily influenced by Montaigne, and Montaigne is hardly a paradigm of clarity and philosophical rigour. He also provides an early example of quasi-literature, quasi-philosophy. (He's clearer than Deleuze, but to say so in reply is to miss my point.)

 

Please keep in mind that I'm writing as someone fluent in French (i.e. natively bilingual) and familiar with the French philosophical tradition (including the impressive skeptical one that most Frenchmen have forgotten).

I don't see how anybody can blame the Germans* for lack of rigour in philosophy. Germany gave birth to the existentialist tradition, but it also gave birth to the analytic one. It can't fairly be blamed for the one without being complimented for the other. (Indeed, it gave birth to all the major contemporary philosophical traditions. Man spricht Deutsch.)

Best,

 

Cyrus

 

*I'm using "Germans" to refer to all people who are culturally German. (That is, from the area that used to be called the Holy Roman Empire of Germany.) So, Austrian, too.

Deleuze and his Chiasmus

This excellent missive just over the transom from a long-time correspondent, the erudite Claude Boisson.  He is responding to yesterday's On Gilles Deleuze. 

Many French philosophers can surely be infuriating. They are to me too, even though I am French. In fact *because* I am French and I remember that there was a time when the French philosophers were not infatuated with Heidegger and did not try to ape his silly mannerisms. Why I mention Heidegger is explained below.

 

The French used to be praised for their clarity of expression. They are now known for their pretentious preciosity and complete lack of rigor. 

I agree entirely.

The empty chiasmus structure that you found in Deleuze (the A of B and the B of A) has indeed become fashionable in French academic writing, particularly in the literature departments.

 

Where does this fad come from? It is a fact that there has long been a rather strong rhetorical tradition in the French schools and universities. We have all been taught to write cleverly, as if we were all aspiring Voltaires. And this may conceal a lack of substance at times. 

 

But in the case of Deleuze, I suspect there may be another explanation. The post-war philosophical scene in France saw the rise of Hegel, Heidegger and Marx. And Heidegger was particularly influential in the so-called « khâgnes », which are preparations for the prestigious Ecole normale supérieure, which, de facto, does the piloting or philosophical studies in my highly centralised country. I won’t go into this extremely exotic system. 

 

So Heidegger may bear some responsibility for the love of chiasmus, at least that is my hunch. 

 

See for instance (italics in the original, as Heidegger seems to be quite pleased with himself for the profundity of his ‘thought’):

 

« Wahrheit bedeutet lichtendes Bergen als Grundzug des Seyns. Die Frage nach dem Wesen der Wahrheit findet ihre Antwort in dem Satz: das Wesen der Wahrheit ist die Wahrheit des Wesens » 

 

(Vom Wesen der Wahrheit, 1930, Gesamtausgabe Band 9, Anmerkung, page 201).

The reference checks out!  I just now re-read the Anmerkung in question. I have a whole shelf of Heidegger's Gesamtausgabe in my personal library which I will defend with my AR-15 and Remington 870 should any Antifa/BLM thugs attempt to de-colonize or de-nazify it.  (Heidegger was a member of the the Nazi Party for a time.  Does that shock you? Then it should shock you that the later Sartre was a Stalinist.)

German post-Hegelian bullshit, if you want my opinion. 

I am now writing an amateurish monograph on Heidegger, and I have numerous passages devoted to Heidegger’s infamous sophistical tricks. Heidegger sure asks big questions, but he never answers them, so, instead, he keeps writing nonsense. On four-dimensional Zetilichkeit, Beyng, Lichtung, Ereignis, Geviert, das Nichts (Das Nichts ist das abgründig Verschiedene vom Seyn als Nichtung und deshalb? - seines Wesens), the whole lot, and more. 

 

Und deshalb !!!

While I sympathize with Professor Boisson's animadversions, I myself  do not consider Heidegger's work to be bullshit. Portentous, yes, and perhaps needlessly obscure in places; but he raises legitimate questions.  But to be able to follow him, you have to have done your 'homework' in Aristotle, the scholastics, Kant, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, Wilhelm Dilthey, Franz Brentano and Edmund Husserl.   Sein und Zeit (1927), for example, blends transcendental philosophy, phenomenology, Lebensphilosophie, and existentialism in an assault on the being question raised by Aristotle as this question was transmitted to Heidegger by the dissertation Brentano wrote on Aristotle and the several senses of 'being' under Trendelenburg.  There is a lot going on, just as in the preceding sentence, but both make sense to those who are willing to put in the time.

 

Now the typical analytic philosopher simply won't do that. He will seize upon a passage taken out of context and proceed to mock and deride. What is not instantly comprehensible to them, they dismiss as meaningless.  I expand upon this theme,  with clarity and rigor, in Heidegger, Carnap, Das Nichts, and the Analytic-Continental Schism.

 

Germans are too serious and dour to be bullshitters in philosophy; I can't think of a well-known German philosopher who bullshits. The French, on the other hand . . . .  Amiel:

The thirst for truth is not a French passion. In everything, what appears is more relished than what is, the outside than the inside, the style than the stuff, the glittering than the useful, opinion than conscience. . . .

From Henri Frederic Amiel on the French Mind.

On Gilles Deleuze

Reader Hector C. poses a question:

What do you think of Gilles Deleuze? I have recently been reading Gabriel Marcel and it seems such a shame to me that such a brilliant writer should be nearly forgotten when the work of a poseur (as he seems to me) like Deleuze has become the basis of an academic industry. 

I'll take Marcel over Deleuze any day, although both display that typically French flabbiness of thought and expression that I find exasperating.    Here are some thoughts, perhaps a bit churlish, from about 15 years ago (27 May 2005, to be exact) that I just now found on an earlier version of this weblog. 

The Trouble with Continental Philosophy #2

Today’s example of objectionable Continental verbiage is taken from Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy (tr. H. Tomlinson, 1983, first appeared in French in 1962). Before I begin, I want to say that this is a book worth reading. I read it fifteen years ago, and am re-reading parts of it now. A sympathetic reader will garner some insights and suggestions from it despite the Continental slovenliness.

On p. 2, we find:

[1] Genealogy means both the value of origin and the origin of values. [2] Genealogy is as opposed to absolute values as it is to relative or utilitarian ones. [3] Genealogy signifies the differential element of values from which their value itself derives. [4] Genealogy thus means origin or birth, but also difference or distance in the origin. [5] Genealogy means nobility and baseness, nobility and vulgarity, nobility and decadence in the origin. (Numbers in brackets my interpolation.)

Ad 1. Notice the superficially clever transposition, "value of origin and origin of values." That’s typically French. The attempt to achieve a clever or showy style drives the thought. The French writer aims at literary effect first, and worries whether a coherent thought has been expressed only later, if at all. (Are there exceptions to this? Of course.) It is true that Nietzschean genealogy is concerned to uncover the origin of values. But the origin of values, as Deleuze himself says on the preceding page, is in acts of evaluation which "are not values but ways of being, modes of existence, of those who judge and evaluate..." (p. 1) So the phrase "value of origin" comes close to contradicting Deleuze’s own point on the preceding page. But whether there is a contradiction or not, there is unclarity. In philosophy, however, "clarity is courtesy" as Ortega y Gasset says somewhere. And you will notice how these writers never give concrete examples or show how any of this is supposed to work in detail.

Ad 2. It is clear that genealogy is opposed to absolute values. But in his concern to be ‘radical’ and to say something ‘shocking,’ Deleuze exaggerates and says something that is incoherent, namely, that genealogy is opposed to relative values. This is false: if values derive from acts of evaluation that are modes of existence of the evaluators, and as such expressive of the nobility or baseness, health or sickness, etc., of these evaluators, then it is obvious that values are precisely relative to these evaluating beings. The equating of relative with utilitarian values is deeply obscure, probably confused, and the context doesn’t help.

Ad 3. This is not particularly clear, but one can figure out what is meant, namely, that the difference between ascending and descending life, between noble and base modes of existence, etc., determines which values are posited.

Ad 4. The way these French writers use ‘means’ and ‘signifies’ is annoying and sloppy, but one sees what Deleuze is getting at. Strictly speaking, however, there is nothing in the meaning of ‘genealogy’ to require any particular theory of genealogical derivation such as Nietzsche’s.

Ad 5. What a miserable sentence! Strictly speaking, ‘genealogy’ means no such thing. I often get the impression with French philosophers that they cannot decide whether they want to be philosophers or literary writers. Unable to commit themselves one way or the other, they evolve an unholy and sloppy blend of verbiage that teases and frustrates more than it enlightens. There are exceptions of course such as Descartes and Jean-Paul Sartre.  The  early Sartre, up to and including Being and Nothingness, is well worth the effort.

If I could pull Deleuze up out of his grave by his lapels, I would say to him: Be clear! Say something definite! Give an argument with discernible premises and conclusion! Stop your silly-ass posturing and name dropping! Say something that can be evaluated as either true or false! But of course, these literary poseurs do not believe in truth. Their 'truth' is that there is no truth . . . .

Related:  Is Life Good?

Today’s example of objectionable Continental verbiage is taken from Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy (tr. H. Tomlinson, 1983, first appeared in French in 1962). Before I begin, I want to say that this is a book worth reading. I read it fifteen years ago, and am re-reading parts of it now. A sympathetic reader will garner some insights and suggestions from it despite the Continental slovenliness.

On p. 2, we find:

[1] Genealogy means both the value of origin and the origin of values. [2] Genealogy is as opposed to absolute values as it is to relative or utilitarian ones. [3] Genealogy signifies the differential element of values from which their value itself derives. [4] Genealogy thus means origin or birth, but also difference or distance in the origin. [5] Genealogy means nobility and baseness, nobility and vulgarity, nobility and decadence in the origin. (Numbers in brackets my interpolation.)

Ad 1. Notice the superficially clever transposition, "value of origin and origin of values." That’s typically French. The attempt to achieve a clever or showy style drives the thought. The French writer aims at literary effect first, and worries whether a coherent thought has been expressed only later, if at all. (Are there exceptions to this? Of course.) It is true that Nietzschean genealogy is concerned to uncover the origin of values. But the origin of values, as Deleuze himself says on the preceding page, is in acts of evaluation which "are not values but ways of being, modes of existence, of those who judge and evaluate..." (p. 1) So the phrase "value of origin" comes close to contradicting Deleuze’s own point on the preceding page. But whether there is a contradiction or not, there is unclarity. In philosophy, however, "clarity is courtesy" as Ortega y Gasset says somewhere. And you will notice how these writers never give concrete examples or show how any of this is supposed to work in detail.

Ad 2. It is clear that genealogy is opposed to absolute values. But in his concern to be ‘radical’ and to say something ‘shocking,’ Deleuze exaggerates and says something that is incoherent, namely, that genealogy is opposed to relative values. This is false: if values derive from acts of evaluation that are modes of existence of the evaluators, and as such expressive of the nobility or baseness, health or sickness, etc., of these evaluators, then it is obvious that values are precisely relative to these evaluating beings. The equating of relative with utilitarian values is deeply obscure, probably confused, and the context doesn’t help.

Ad 3. This is not particularly clear, but one can figure out what is meant, namely, that the difference between ascending and descending life, between noble and base modes of existence, etc., determines which values are posited.

Ad 4. The way these French writers use ‘means’ and ‘signifies’ is annoying and sloppy, but one sees what Deleuze is getting at. Strictly speaking, however, there is nothing in the meaning of ‘genealogy’ to require any particular theory of genealogical derivation such as Nietzsche’s.

Ad 5. What a miserable sentence! Strictly speaking, ‘genealogy’ means no such thing. I often get the impression with French philosophers that they cannot decide whether they want to be philosophers or literary writers. Unable to commit themselves one way or the other, they evolve an unholy and sloppy blend of verbiage that teases and frustrates more than it enlightens. There are exceptions of course such as Descartes and Jean-Paul Sartre.  The  early Sartre, up to and including Being and Nothingness, is well worth the effort.

If I could pull Deleuze up out of his grave by his lapels, I would say to him: Be clear! Say something definite! Give an argument with discernible premises and conclusion! Stop your silly-ass posturing and name dropping! Say something that can be evaluated as either true or false! But of course, these literary poseurs do not believe in truth. Their 'truth' is that there is no truth . . . .

Related:  Is Life Good?

Are Gender Studies Garbage?

If they are, they have not been proven to be by the Conceptual Penis as Social Construct 'Son of Sokal' Hoax. If you care to 'bone up' on this, this Reason article has the links for you.

Alain Badiou

Like Neven Sesardić , I too take a dim view of Badiou. Teaser quotation:

Here is what I would say to Badiou et al. Define your terms. Make an assertion and defend it. Tell us what your thesis is. Say something definite. Try to be clear. Philosophy is hard enough even when one is clear. Avoid name dropping, that mark of the pseudo-intellectual. Go easy on the rhetorical questions. If you ever find something definite to say, employ the indicative mood.

Related articles

Continental Philosophers I Respect and the 'Continental-Analytic Divide'

Maverick Philosopher: Omertà Among the Philosophers

Reading Now: <i>When Reason Goes on Holiday</i> (Encounter, 2016)

On Continental Philosophy: Response to a German Reader

The following from a German sociologist (my comments are in blue):

Perhaps you know the old joke: Analytic philosophers think that continental philosophy is not sufficiently clear; continental philosophers think that analytic philosophy is not sufficient.

Having just reread the Kritik der reinen Vernunft, I don't see Kant as an analytic philosopher. Hegel and Nietzsche certainly belong to the continental tradition. And none of the philosophers of the 20th century, who really matter to me, can be called an analytic philosopher. Doesn't "analytic" simply mean after Wittgenstein and in his tradition? 

BV: As I see it, there was no analytic-Continental split before the 20th century. So classifying Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche in terms of that split is only marginally meaningful. But it is safe to say that Kant is more congenial to analytic philosophers than Hegel and Nietzsche are. 

When did the split come about and what is it about?

If I were were to select two writings that best epitomize the depth of the Continental-analytic clash near the time of its outbreak, they would be Heidegger's 1929 What is Metaphysics? and Carnap's 1932 response, "On the Overcoming of Metaphysics Through the Logical Analysis of Language."  In fairness to Carnap, let us note that his Erkenntnis piece is more than a response to Heidegger inasmuch as it calls into question the meaningfulness of all metaphysics. And in fairness to Heidegger, we should note that he thinks he is doing something more radical than metaphysics. Metaphysics for Heidegger is  onto-theology.  Metaphysics thinks Being (das Sein) but always in reference to beings (das Seiende); it does not think Being in its difference from beings. The latter is Heidegger's project.

The following are widely regarded as Continental philosophers: Franz Brentano, Alexius von Meinong, Kasimir Twardowski, Edmund Husserl, Adolf Reinach, Dietrich von Hildebrand, Edith Stein, Roman Ingarden, Max Scheler, Martin Heidegger, Nicolai Hartmann, Gabriel Marcel, Ortega y Gasset, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus.

Note that the above are all Europeans.  But being European is not what makes them 'Continental.'  Otherwise Gottlob Frege, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Rudolf Carnap would have to be lumped in with them.  And of course there are Continental philosophers who do not hail from Europe. So what makes the above authors 'Continental' as opposed to 'analytic'?

It is not easy to say, which fact supplies a reason to not take too seriously talk of 'Continental' versus 'analytic.'

Note that all of the Continentals I mentioned  engage in analysis, some in very close, very careful  analysis.  (Ever read Husserl's Logical Investigations?)  And please don't say that they don't analyze language.  Ever read Brentano?  Gustav Bergmann accurately describes Brentano as "the first linguistic philosopher." (Realism, 234) Roderick Chisholm's paraphrastic approach was influenced significantly by Brentano. No  one would lump Chisholm in with the Continentals.

Will you say that the Continentals mentioned  didn't pay close attention to logic?  That's spectacularly false. Even for Heidegger!  Ever read his dissertation on psychologism in logic?

Perhaps you could say that the Continentals mentioned did not engage significantly with the ground-breaking work of Frege, widely regarded as the greatest logician since Aristotle. I think that would be true. But does this diffeence suffice to distinguish between Continental and analytic?  I don't think so: there are plenty of philosophers who write in a decidedly analytic style who do not engage with Frege, and some of them oppose Frege. Take Fred Sommers.  You wouldn't call him a Continental philosopher.  And while he engages the ideas of Frege, he vigorously opposes them in his very impressive attempt at resurrecting traditional formal logic.  And yet he would be classified as analytic.

A Matter of Style or of Substance?

According to Michael Dummett,

What distinguishes analytical philosophy, in its diverse manifestations, from other schools is the belief, first, that a philosophical account of thought can be attained through a philosophical account of language, and, secondly, that a comprehensive account can only be so attained.

[. . .]

On my characterisation, therefore [Gareth] Evans was no longer an analytical philosopher.  He was, indeed, squarely in the analytical tradition: the three pillars on which his book [The Varieties of Reference, Oxford, 1982] rests are Russell, Moore and Frege. Yet it is only as belonging to the tradition -- as adopting a certain philosophical style and as appealing to certain writers rather than to others -- that he remains a member of the analytical school.  (Origins of Analytical Philosophy, Harvard UP, 1993)

For Dummett, then, what make a philosopher analytic is not the style in which he writes:  clear, precise, careful, explicitly logical with premises and inferences clearly specified, free of literary pretentiousness, name-dropping, rhetorical questions, and generally the sort of bullshitting that one finds in writers like Caputo and Badiou.  Nor is it the topics he writes about or the authorities he cites.  What makes the analytic philosopher are the twin axioms above mentioned.

The trouble with Dummett's criterion is that it is intolerably stipulative if what we are after is a more or less lexical definition of how 'analytic' and 'Continental' are actually used.  An approach that rules out Gareth Evans and Roderick Chisholm and Gustav Bergmann and Reinhardt Grossmann and so many others cuts no ice in my book. (How's that for a mixed metaphor?)

A Matter of Politics?

I don't think so. Look again at my list.  Sartre was a decided leftist, a Stalinist in his later phase.  And Camus was on the Left.  But everyone else on my list was either apolitical or on the Right.  Heidegger was a National Socialist. Latter-day Continentals, though, definitely slouch Leftward.

A Matter of Academic Politics?

This may be what the Continental versus analytic split comes down to more than anything else.  As Blaise Pacal says, with some exaggeration, "All men naturally hate one another."  To which I add, with some exaggeration: and are always looking for ways to maintain and increase the enmity.  If you are entranced with Heidegger you are going to hate the Carnapian analytic bigot who refuses to read Heidegger but mocks him anyway.  Especially when the bigot stands in the way of career success.  Although so many Continentals are slopheads, there is no asshole like an analytic asshole.

A Matter of Religion?

No, there are both theists and atheists on my list.  And of course there are plenty of analytic philosophers who are theists.

A Matter of Attitude toward Science?

This has something to do with the split.  You can be a Continental philosopher and a traditional theist (von Hildebrand, Edith Stein, et al.) and you can be a Continental philosopher and a conservative (Ortega y Gasset), but is there any case of a Continental philosopher who is a logical positivist or who genuflects before the natural sciences in the scientistic manner?  I don't think so.

Interim Conclusion

Talk of 'analytic' and 'Continental' philosophy is not particularly useful.  It would be better to speak  of good and bad philosophy. But what are the marks of good philosophy?  That's a post for another occasion.

Back to my correspondent:

I see philosophy more in terms of art than in terms of science. This is not saying that some arguments are not better than others or that one cannot distinguish different degrees of plausibility. But the overall conception (what Heidegger calls "Seinsverständnis) is more - and something essentially different - than the sum of of plausibilities or the logic consistency of the argumentation. There is, or so it appears to me, a 'chanelling' of truth that resembles more the mystical experience than the scientific recognition. Of course I've read Wittgenstein, but why should I spend precious life time reading, say, Gilbert Ryle or Saul Kripke, when I can read Hegel's Wissenschaft der Logik?

BV: As I am sure my reader knows, Hegel's Wissenschaft der Logik (Science of Logic) has been dismissed as Begriffsdichtung, conceptual poetry.  So I am not surprised that he sees philosophy more in terms of art than in terms of science.  His attitude is defensible: why read Kripke who is of interest only to specialists in logic and the philosophy of language and who has no influence on anything beyond those narrow precincts when you can read Hegel and come thereby to understand the dialectical thinking which, via Marx and Lenin, transformed the world?  

There is also the problem that attempts to bring philosophy onto the "sure path of science" (Kant) have all failed miserably despite the Herculean efforts of thinkers such as Edmund Husserl.  He attempted to make of philosophy strenge Wissenschaft, but he could not get even one of his brilliant students to follow him into his transcendental phenomenology.  (I don't consider Eugen Fink to be a counterexample.) There is no reason to think that philosophy will ever enter upon the sure path of science.   This is a reason to content oneself with the broader, looser, fuzzier approach of the Continentals.

Only if philosophy could be transformed into strenge Wissenschaft would we perhaps be justified in putting all our efforts into this project and eschewing the satisfaction of our needs for an overarching and spiritually satisfying Weltanschauung; we have no good reason to think philosophy will ever be so transformed; ergo, etc.

When Adorno was in Oxford, he wrote in a letter home: "Here it's always just about arguments." Most of his colleagues there did not even understand what he was missing. And that's the divide!

BV: That is indeed a good part of what the divide is all about. 

Well, of course this ignorance of the analytic tradition has in my case also to do with cultural nationalism. The philosophical departments here are more and more forgetting about the great German tradition. Thinkers like Hegel or Schelling, let alone Heidegger, are hardly taught anymore. I'm against this, I'm Deutsch and proud of it. Actually I want - and for me that's another reason to be against illegal immigration - Germany to become again a hotspot of art and philosophy!

BV:  I agree! When as a young man I spent a year in Freiburg im Breisgau, I was there to study Kant and Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger.  To my romantic young self Germany was, in the words of Heinrich Heine, das Land von Dichter und Denker, the land of poets and thinkers.  You Germans can be justifiably proud of your tradition. Without a doubt, Kant belongs in the philosophical pantheon along with Plato and Aristotle.  It is indeed a shame that the analysts are suppressing your great tradition.

As for illegal immigration, if looks from here as if Angela Merkel is a disaster for Germany. Language, borders, and culture are three things every nation has a right to protect and preserve.  There is nothing xenophobic or racist about it. 

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What is Continental Philosophy?

I am afraid much of it fits the following 'definition':

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. It includes reflection, musing, quandaries, provocations, sometimes it includes comparisons, say, but this was a joke after all, connecting M&E — analytic metaphysics and epistemology — to M&M’s. 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.

See here to verify that the above is no parody.

Further thoughts in my Continental Philosophy Criticized category. Dip in, and see how nuanced my maverick position is.

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A London philosopher sends the following along which I take to be a quotation from Jasbir Puar:

One, I examine discourses of queerness where problematic conceptualizations of queer corporealities, especially via Muslim sexualities, are reproduced in the service of discourses of U.S. exceptionalisms. Two, I rearticulate a terrorist body, in this case the suicide bomber, as a queer assemblage that resists queerness as sexual identity (or anti-identity)—in other words, intersectional and identitarian paradigms—in favor of spatial, temporal, and corporeal convergences, implosions, and rearrangements. Queerness as an assemblage moves away from excavation work, deprivileges a binary opposition between queer and not-queer subjects, and, instead of retaining queerness exclusively as dissenting, resistant, and alternative (all of which queerness importantly is and does), it underscores contingency and complicity with dominant formations. 

The London friend then comments:

Bill, to me this reads like a parody of Continental Philosophy. What are ‘corporealities’? ‘Identitarian’? ‘Deprivileges a binary opposition’?? What other kinds of opposition are there?

Sartre has a lot to answer for.

A lot of recent Continental 'philosophy' is gibberish, and the above passage reads almost like a parody of it.  So my London friend and I agree that the above is rubbish, and as such, beneath critique.  How would one even begin to criticize writing like this?

What is Puar trying to tell us in the first sentence?  Continentals are big on verbal inflation.  So Puar can't just write bodies, she must write corporealities.  It sounds impressive to the unlettered.  She wants to give the impression that she is engaging is some really deep theorizing here. Referring to a body as  a corporeality is like referring to a method as a methodology or a truth as a verity. 

It makes some sense to say that the bodies of homosexuals have been "problematically conceptualized," to use another pretentious phrase.  To supply my own politically incorrect example,  you would be 'problematically conceptualizing' the dick of a homosexual male if you maintained that it was but a social construct.  But for a body to be problematically conceptualized  via Muslim sexualities makes no sense at all.  Is she trying to say that the bodies of homosexuals have been dubiously understood or perhaps wrongly understood by Muslims?  But then how do sexualities come into it?

Puar has a thing for the plurals of abstract substantives: corporealities, sexualities, exceptionalisms.  But we are only half-way through her meaningless opening sentence.  We are told that dubious theories about homosexual bodies somehow support U. S. exceptionalisms.  Who would have thought?  What does it even mean?

It only gets worse, so enough of this.

Now if this junk were merely the scribblings of some crackpot on her personal blog, we could ignore it.  But she is an associate professor at Rutgers University.  File this under Decline of the West.

As for Jean-Paul Sartre,  I would say say that my insular friend is not being quite fair.  A lot of important work has been done by Continental philosophers up to an including the Sartre of Being and Nothingness.  (I confess to not having studied Critique of Dialectical Reason.)  Here is a list of (some) Continental philosophers who are well-worth close study:  Franz Brentano, Alexius von Meinong, Kasimir Twardowski, Edmund Husserl, Adolf Reinach, Dietrich von Hildebrand, Edith Stein, Roman Ingarden, Max Scheler, Martin Heidegger, Nicolai Hartmann, Gabriel Marcel, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus.

I would point out to my London correspondent, who is interested in medieval philosophy and logic, that Paul Vincent Spade, no slouch of a scholar, has a lively interest in the early Sartre.  See here.

So I don't think too much can be laid at Sartre's door step.  The rot sets in in good earnest later with characters like Derrida who, according to John Searle, "gives bullshit a bad name."

John D. Caputo is another Continental 'philosopher' that I criticize in a number of entries.  He is not as bad as Puar, however.  But he is very bad!

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From the mail bag:

I'm a new reader of your blog and about two years into my own layman's study of philosophy. By that I mean I'm just reading whatever strikes my fancy as best as I can and building up a sort of mental repertoire. It's equally exciting and frustrating. Are there any so-called 20th century Continental philosophers you like?

Although some commentators would consider some of the following philosophers to belong to the 19th century, they and their influence extend into the 20th.  Here then is my list of (some) 20th century Continental philosophers who are well-worth close study.

Franz Brentano, Alexius von Meinong, Kasimir Twardowski, Edmund Husserl, Adolf Reinach, Dietrich von Hildebrand, Edith Stein, Roman Ingarden, Max Scheler, Martin Heidegger, Nicolai Hartmann, Gabriel Marcel, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus.

What is a Continental Philosopher Anyway?

Note that the above are all Europeans.  But that is not what makes them 'Continental.'  Otherwise Gottlob Frege, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Rudolf Carnap would have to be lumped in with them.  And of course there are Continental philosophers who do not hail from Europe. So what makes the above authors 'Continental' as opposed to 'analytic'?

It is not easy to say, which fact supplies a reason to not take too seriously talk of 'Continental' versus 'analytic.'

Note that all of the Continentals I mentioned  engage in analysis, some in very close, very careful  analysis.  (Ever read Husserl's Logical Investigations?)  And please don't say that they don't analyze language.  Ever read Brentano?  Gustav Bergmann accurately describes Brentano as "the first linguistic philosopher." (Realism, 234) Roderick Chisholm's paraphrastic approach was influenced significantly by Brentano.

Will you say that the Continentals mentioned  didn't pay close attention to logic?  That's spectacularly false. Even for Heidegger!  Ever read his dissertation on psychologism in logic?

Perhaps you could say that the Continentals did not engage significantly with the ground-breaking work of Frege, undoubtedly the greatest logician since Aristotle. I think that would be true. But does it suffice to distinguish between Continental and analytic?  I don't think so: there are plenty of philosophers who write in a decidedly analytic style who do not engage with Frege, and some of them oppose Frege. Take Fred Sommers.  You wouldn't call him a Continental philosopher.  And while he engages the ideas of Frege, he vigorously opposes them in his very impressive attempt at resurrecting traditional formal logic.  And yet he would be classified as analytic.

A Matter of Style or a Matter of Substance?

According to Michael Dummett,

What distinguishes analytical philosophy, in its diverse manifestations, from other schools is the belief, first, that a philosophical account of thought can be attained through a philosophical account of language, and, secondly, that a comprehensive account can only be so attained.

[. . .]

On my characterisation, therefore [Gareth] Evans was no longer an analytical philosopher.  He was, indeed, squarely in the analytical tradition: the three pillars on which his book [The Varieties of Reference, Oxford, 1982] rests are Russell, Moore and Frege. Yet it is only as belonging to the tradition -- as adopting a certain philosophical style and as appealing to certain writers rather than to others -- that he remains a member of the analytical school.  (Origins of Analytical Philosophy, Harvard UP, 1993)

For Dummett, then, what make a philosopher analytic is not the style in which he writes:  clear, precise, careful, explicitly logical with premises and inferences clearly specified, free of literary pretentiousness, name-dropping, rhetorical questions, and generally the sort of bullshitting that one finds in writers like Caputo and Badiou.  Nor is it the topics he writes about or the authorities he cites.  What makes the analytic philosopher are the twin axioms above mentioned.

The trouble with Dummett's criterion is that it is intolerably stipulative if what we are after is a more or less lexical definition of how 'analytic' and 'Continental' are actually used.  An approach that rules out Gareth Evans and Roderick Chisholm and Gustav Bergmann and Reinhardt Grossmann and so many others cuts no ice in my book. (How's that for a mixed metaphor?)

A Matter of Politics?

I don't think so. Look again at my list.  Sartre is a decided leftist, a Stalinist in his later phase.  And Camus is on the Left.  But everyone else on my list is either apolitical or on the Right.  Latter-day Continentals, though, definitely slouch Leftward.

A Matter of Academic Politics?

This may be what the Continental versus analytic split comes down to more than anything else.  As Blaise Pacal says, with some exaggeration, "All men naturally hate one another."  To which I add, with some exaggeration: and are always looking for ways to maintain and increase the enmity.  If you are entranced with Heidegger you are going to hate the Carnapian analytic bigot who refuses to read Heidegger but mocks him anyway.  Especially when the bigot stands in the way of career success.  Although so many Continentals are slopheads, there is no asshole like an analytic asshole.

A Matter of Religion?

No, there are both theists and atheists on my list.  And of course there are plenty of analytic philosophers who are theists.

A Matter of Attitude toward Science?

This has something to do with the split.  You can be a Continental philosopher and a traditional theist (von Hildebrand, Edith Stein, et al.) and you can be a Continental philosopher and a conservative (Ortega y Gasset), but is there any case of a Continental philosopher who is a logical positivist or who genuflects before the natural sciences in the scientistic manner?  I don't think so.

Interim Conclusion

Talk of 'analytic' and 'Continental' philosophy is not particularly useful.  It would be better to speak  of good and bad philosophy. But what are the marks of good philosophy?  That's a post for another occasion.

John D. Caputo's Truth Problem

As I said last Friday, the last time I read anything by John D. Caputo was at the end of the '70s.  His articles and books  struck me as worth reading at the time.  His recent work, however, appears to be incompetent rubbish.  One could say of the latter-day Caputo what Searle of Derrida: he gives bullshit a bad name.  The following from a review by Alan Worsnip:

This confusion recurs again and again. For example, Caputo treats the question of whether there is one god or many (or none) as a version of the question of whether there is “one truth or many.” But it is not. If there were to be two mayors of London instead of one, that would require a political rethinking but not a rethinking of the theory of truth. Likewise, if there were to be two gods instead of one, that would require a religious rethinking but not a rethinking of the theory of truth. Sometimes it feels like Truth is just Caputo’s vehicle to discuss the subject that really animates him—religion, and his own expansive, almost nontheistic account of it.

Caputo also persistently runs together the questions of truth with questions of knowledge of truth. For example, he complains that absolutism—the view that there are absolute truths—“confuses us [i.e. human beings] with God,” a being that can know every truth. Yet the claim that there is an (absolute) truth about some matter is entirely compatible with the claim that we may often be deeply ignorant about it. Presumably there is a true fact of the matter as to whether the number of blades of grass in the UK was either odd or even at the moment of New Year in 1972. But we will never know which it is. Indeed, it is precisely the areas in which it is appropriate to speak of ignorance that it is least plausible to claim that truth is relative to us or our perspective: being ignorant of a truth involves the capacity to be wrong about it, which means that there is some fact about it independently of what one thinks.

If the Left would cease to exist without its double standards, contemporary Continental philosophy would cease to exist without its trademark confusion of the ontological with the epistemological.  I am exaggerating, of course, but in the direction of a truth which I will leave my astute readers to reformulate in more temperate terms if they care to.

I have gone over this ground many times, but apparently one cannot say it too often.  The claim that truth is absolute, and cannot be relative to individuals or groups or historical epochs or races, or anything else, is a claim about the nature of truth.  It is a claim about what truth is. One who insists on this obvious point is not laying claim to any absolute or god-like knowledge.  I can know that truth is absolute without knowing which propositions are true.  It is not polite to say it, but say it we must:  the failure to grasp such a simple point is a mark of stupidity in someone like Caputo who has had plenty of time and opportunity to learn something about philosophy.  He's committing a rookie blunder, a sophomoric mistake.

What is the difference between analytic and Continental philosophy?

In the standard story about academic philosophy—a story which nearly everyone acknowledges to be overly reductive, yet nearly everyone continues to repeat—there are two kinds of philosophy. On one hand there is “analytic philosophy”—according to its opponents, a kind of pedantic bean-counting that alienates philosophy from its project of understanding the deep questions of life, existence and the human condition, replacing them with self-satisfied distinctions such as that between three different uses of the word “so.” On the other hand, there is “continental philosophy”—according to its opponents, a vague and pretentious approach, expressed in unclear prose which conceals a mixture of banalities and blatant falsehoods. Think of it this way: whilst continental philosophy gets better as you get drunker, analytic philosophy gets worse.

I say avoid both.  Go maverick!

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I read John D.Caputo years ago, in the late '70s, in connection with work I was doing on Heidegger. I read a couple of his early Heidegger articles and a couple of his books.  One of them, The Mystical Element in Heidegger's Thought, is in my library.  Caputo seemed worth reading at the time.  But he appears to have gone off the deep end.  This from a New York Times  Opinionator interview entitled "Looking White in the Face":

John D. Caputo: “White” is of the utmost relevance to philosophy, and postmodern theory helps us to see why. I was once criticized for using the expression “true north.” It reflected my Nordo-centrism, my critic said, and my insensitivity to people who live in the Southern Hemisphere. Of course, no such thing had ever crossed my mind, but that points to the problem. We tend to say “we” and to assume who “we” are, which once simply meant “we white male Euro-Christians.”

Postmodern theory tries to interrupt that expression at every stop, to put every word in scare quotes, to put our own presuppositions into question, to make us worry about the murderousness of “we,” and so to get in the habit of asking, “we, who?” I think that what modern philosophers call “pure” reason — the Cartesian ego cogito and Kant’s transcendental consciousness — is a white male Euro-Christian construction.

White is not “neutral.” “Pure” reason is lily white, as if white is not a color or is closest to the purity of the sun, and everything else is “colored.” Purification is a name for terror and deportation, and “white” is a thick, dense, potent cultural signifier that is closely linked to rationalism and colonialism. What is not white is not rational. So white is philosophically relevant and needs to be philosophically critiqued — it affects what we mean by “reason” — and “we” white philosophers cannot ignore it.

This is truly depressing stuff.  It illustrates the rarefied, pseudo-intellectual stupidity to which leftist intellectuals routinely succumb, and the level to which humanities departments in our universities have sunk.  We speak of 'true North' in distinction from 'magnetic North,' which is what a compass needle points to.  The difference in location between the two is called declination and must be taken into account for accurate navigation.  The phrase 'true North' has nothing to do with Nordo-centrism or insensitivity to those who live in the Southern Hemisphere.  It is just a physical fact that compass needles track magnetic North, and that magnetic North is not the same as true North.

I feel as if I should apologize for pointing out something so obvious, but in the lunatic precincts of the postmodern, the obvious gets no respect.  Does Caputo perhaps imagine that the Earth and its magnetic properties are social constructs?  I hope not.  One wonders what is going on in his head.  Perhaps he is afraid of hurting the feelings of people who live in the Southern Hemisphere by his use of 'true North.'  But for them to take offense at that phrase would be like a black person taking offense at  'black hole,' which, mirabile dictu, has actually happened. The phrase is from cosmology.  Roughly, a black hole is a region of spacetime from which nothing can escape including no form of electromagnetic radiation such as light.  Black holes have nothing to do with people of African-American descent or with black whores: 'hos' in black street idiom.  And this is the case even when 'black hole' is used metaphorically to refer to, say, a windowless office.

It is the same with 'true North.'  If used literally, it does not mean that the North is 'true' and the South 'false' or any such nonsense.  And the same goes for the phrase used metaphorically. 

People with basic common sense know that there is such a thing as taking inappropriate offense and that one should not cater to the whims of the absurdly sensitive.  In this connection I remind you of the case of the poor schlep  who lost his job because of his use of the perfectly innocuous English word 'niggardly,' which, of course, has nothing to do with 'nigger.'  By the way, I just mentioned the word 'nigger'; I did not use it. I said something about the word; I did not apply it to anyone.  (Is your typical Continental philosopher aware of the use-mention distinction?)

The purveyors of POMO need to be reminded that thinking is not association of ideas:  if you associate 'niggardly' with 'nigger,' that is your problem and no basis for an argument to the conclusion that a user of 'niggardly' is a racist. 

Should we question our presuppositions?  Of course.  That is essential to the philosophical enterprise.  But one ought to do this without absurd exaggerations ("the murderousness of 'we' ") and double standards.  I say we ought to question our presuppositions.  Who am I referring to with my use of 'we'? To those of us who aspire to be reasonable and to seek the truth.  I am afraid I don't see the "murderousness" of that.  And I don't see how a white person is barred from referring to rational truth-seekers by his use of 'we' just because he or she is a white person.

Now to our title question.  Is pure reason a white male Euro-Christian construction? This is just nonsense and is really beneath refutation.  But given the sorry state of things, refutation is needed.  Caputo is alluding to Kant's 1781 (2nd ed. 1787) Critique of Pure Reason.  And Caputo must know that for Kant 'pure' means: free of empirical elements (CPR B 3) and that pure reason is the faculty that "contains the principles whereby we know anything absolutely a priori." (CPR A 11 B 24)  This has nothing to do with racial purity.

Caputo is here instantiating the role of Continental mush-head:  he is not thinking but engaging in argument by association, which is not argument at all, any more than another Continental favorite, argument by incantation, is argument at all.

But it is worse than this because Caputo is engaged in a sort of philosophical smear job.  Here we have a great philosopher, Immanuel Kant, who is undertaking to evaluate the cognitive 'reach' of pure reason.  His project is to assess the capacity of reason unaided by sensory input to secure knowledge in special metaphysics (metaphysica specialis) whose main objects are God, the soul, and the world as a whole.  Corresponding to these objects are the highest concerns of humanity: God, freedom, and immortality.

And what does Caputo do?  He conflates the purity that Kant speaks of with racial purity and then goes on to associate, scurrilously and irresponsibly, pure reason with "terror and deportation" and "colonialism."  This of course is right out of the cultural Marxist's playbook. 

For a leftist, anything a reasonable person says is 'code' for something else. The leftist cannot take anything at face value as meaning what it obviously means.  He is out to debunk and deconstruct and unmask.  As cultural Marxists, they are out to cut through 'false consciousness' and 'bourgeois ideology.' Theirs is the hermeneutics of suspicion.  So 'pure reason' cannot mean what Kant says it means; it has to mean something else: it is a "cultural signifier" for terror and deportation and what all else.  Or if I speak of truth and of seeking truth, then my use of 'truth' really signifies power and white privilege and what all else. 

And when I refute the POMO nonsense and show that it is self-contradictory, that too cannot be taken at face-value as meaning what it manifestly means and showing what it manifestly shows; it has to be 'deconstructed' as masking some sort of power play or re-affirmation of 'white privilege.'

Is Caputo trying to convince us of certain truths?  Then he presupposes truth, in which case truth cannot be a social construct.  It is not that there are no social constructs; the point is that not everything can be.  Truth, for example.  Who constructs it?  White males collectively?   But if this is so, then that is the case  beyond all constructions, in which case truth cannot be a white male construction or a construction by any person or persons.  Truth is absolute by its very nature. 

Could reason be a social construct?  When Caputo tries to convince us of something he appeals to our reason to convince us of what he takes to be reasonable and true.  He gives arguments and adduces various considerations.  He makes assertions that purport to be true.  (And, of course, in purporting to be true, they purport to be objectively and absolutely true, which is to say: not merely true for me or for us or for this social class or that historical epoch.)  But how can Caputo, who is a  white male who enjoys all sorts of perquisites and privileges, appeal to reason if reason is a white male Euro-Christian construct?

Of course, it may be that Caputo has no intention of appealing to reason.  It could be that his POMO verbiage is nothing  but obfuscatory rhetoric that masks a bid for power for him and his ilk.  I prefer not to believe this, if possible; I met the man once and he seemed like a decent human being. 

Is Caputo appealing to a 'true reason' that is not a white male Euro-Christian construct?  But he can't do this by his own constructivist, relativist principles.  For then he would have to put a different construct in its place, say reason as a black female Afro-Islamic construct.  But then he won't be able to convince us or himself of anything rationally.  For that different construct would just be another contingent, unbinding framework.  If there is a 'true reason,' then it cannot be any sort of contingent human construct vriable across races andf sexes, regions and religions.

The problem, very simply, is that if reason is culturally or racially or in any way relative, then there is no such thing as reason. Reason is like truth in this respect.  Truth is absolute by its very nature; talk of relative truth is nonsense.  Similarly, reason is normative and  impartially adjudicative by its very nature. Talk of reason as reflective of class interests or racial biases is nonsense.  So either there is no reason or it is not a social construct.  And if it is not a social construct, then of course it is not a white male Euro-Christian construct.

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Carnap and Clarity

This entry is installment #2 in a Carnap versus Heidegger series.  Here is the first in the series.  It couldn't hurt to at least skim through it. Part of what I am up to is an exploration of the origin and nature of the analytic-Continental split. To quote from the first installment:

If I were were to select two writings that best epitomize the depth of the Continental-analytic clash near the time of its outbreak, they would be Heidegger's 1929 What is Metaphysics? and Carnap's 1932 response, "On the Overcoming of Metaphysics Through the Logical Analysis of Language."  (In fairness to Carnap, let us note that his Erkenntnis piece is more than a response to Heidegger inasmuch as it calls into question the meaningfulness of all metaphysics. And in fairness to Heidegger, we should note that he thinks he is doing something more radical than metaphysics. Metaphysics for Heidegger is  onto-theology.  Metaphysics thinks Being (das Sein) but always in reference to beings (das Seiende); it does not think Being in its difference from beings.  Perhaps in a later post I will venture to explain what that means.)

 

Analytic philosophers prize clarity. And rightly so.  For one thing, "clarity is courtesy," as Ortega y Gasset once said.  (I suppose the Spaniard would count as Continental, and not just geographically.) One more parenthetical remark before getting down to business: I wish Erich Pryzwara had received the message that clarity is courtesy.  Then perhaps he would not have written anything as unreadable as his Analogia Entis.  Even the charitable German Thomist Josef Pieper so characterized it.

I need waste no words defending the thesis that clarity in thought and expression are to be preferred to obscurity.  Avoidable obscurity must be avoided. But there is an empty and trivial clarity.  A clarity worth pursuing is a clarity with content.  Clarity ought not be pursued as an end in itself or as a cognitive value that trumps every other cognitive value.  While avoidable obscurity must be avoided, some obscurity is bound to be unavoidable if our inquiries are serious, sustained, and worth pursuing.  Such obscurity must be tolerated.

One day in class I was praising clarity and its importance.  A student responded that reality is messy. My counter-response was that, while reality is messy, it does not follow that our thinking about it should also be.  On the contrary!  The present point, however, is that thinking worth doing ought to penetrate as far as it can into reality, as rich, dark, and messy as it is, and if some obscurity proves unavoidable, then so be it.

Rudolf Carnap's brand of clarity is sterile, arbitrary and as artificial as fluorescent light.  What he does is enforce or impose an arbitrary standard of clarity across the board without regard to differences in subject matter.  We ought to say about clarity what Aristotle said about precision near the beginning of the Nicomachean Ethics: "it cannot be expected in the treatment of all subjects alike . . . ." (1094b10-15)  Ethics, the Philosopher said, cannot be treated with mathematical precision.  The same goes for metaphysics.

"Many words of metaphysics," Carnap tells us, are "devoid of meaning."  ("The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language" in A. J. Ayer, ed., Logical Positivism, The Free Press, 1959, p. 65.) He chooses as his first example 'principle'  "in the sense of principle of being, not principle of knowledge or axiom." (65) But since 'principle' in the ontological sense is not much used these days outside of scholastic circles, let me substitute 'ground' used ontologically.  Thus there is a large body of literature in which truth-makers are described  as the 'ontological grounds' of truths.  It is clear that Carnap's accusations of (cognitive) meaninglessness apply as much to grounds as to principles.  They also apply to other words and phrases in the vocabulary of truth-maker theorists such as 'makes true' and 'in virtue of.'  For example, 'Peter is smoking' is true in virtue of Peter's smoking, or the fact of Peter's smoking makes true 'Peter is smoking.'  Apart from truth-maker theory, 'in virtue of' has long been a favorite of philosophers.  Some think it a 'weasel phrase' best banished from the vocabulary of philosophy.  I disagree.

"But these words are ambiguous and vague." (65) Thus Carnap. Insofar as they have a clear meaning, their meaning is empirical, not metaphysical; insofar as they are metaphysical, they are meaningless. I would put the Carnapian argument as follows in terms of the following dilemma:

Either metaphysical grounding (as it occurs in the putative relation between a truth-maker and a truth-bearer) is a causal relation or it is a logical relation.  But it is neither.  It is not a relation of empirical causation.  Truth-maker theorists insist on this themselves.  Nor is it a logical relation such as entailment.  Logical relations hold between and among truth-bearers; a truth-maker, however, though proposition-like on some theories, is not a truth-bearer.  'Truth-making,' then has neither the meaning of 'causing' nor the meaning of 'entailing.'

Yet, no criterion is specified for any other meaning.  Consequently, the alleged 'metaphysical' meaning which the word is supposed to have here in contrast to the mentioned empirical meaning, does not exist. [. . .] The word is explicitly deprived of its original meaning . . . . (65)

The word 'making' is stripped of its empirical meaning, but no new meaning is supplied.  The word becomes an "empty shell." (66) The associations and feelings attached to the word used in the old empirical way remain in play.  But these do not give meaning to the word used in the new 'metaphysical' way: "it remains meaningless as long as no method of verification can be described." (66)

The same holds for all specifically metaphysical terms.  There are one and all "devoid of meaning." (67)  Carnap mentions the following:  the Idea, the Absolute, the Unconditioned, the Infinite, and "the being of being," which I take to be  a reference to Heidegger's das Sein des Seienden, which is better translated as 'the Being of beings.'  But also: non-being, thing-in-itself, absolute spirit, objective spirit, essence, being-in-itself, being-in-and-for-itself, the Non-Ego.

These terms are meaningless because empirical truth-conditions of their use cannot be supplied.  Hence the alleged statements of metaphysics which contain them are one and all pseudo-statements that are bare of sense and assert nothing. (67)

Perhaps the best response to Carnap and those of his ilk is brutal contradiction:  "You're just wrong!" The words you would dismiss as meaningless just obviously have meaning and you're just obviously wrong to think otherwise. 

For example, it is clear enough what it means to say that some truth-bearers need truth-makers, that a sentence such as 'Peter is smoking' cannot just be true but is true because of something external to the sentence, something external on the side of the object, not on the side of the subject, i.e., on the side of the one who asserively utters the sentence.  And it is clear enough that this use of 'because' is not an empirical-causal use of the term.  It is also clear enough what 'in virtue of' and 'making' mean in this context.

Another devastating response to Carnap is the obvious point that his Verifiability Criterion of Cognitive Significance cannot satisfy its own demand.  "Every cognitively meaningful statement is either empirically verifiable in principle or a logical/analytic truth" is neither empirically verifiable in principle nor a logical/analytic truth. Therefore, the Verifiability Criterion is cognitively meaningless.  So does it then have a merely emotive meaning?  Is is a mere suggestion as to what to allow as meaningful?  If the latter, then no thank you!

It's an easy rebuttal, but none the worse for that.  Sometimes, simplex sigillum veri.

Carnap is to philosophy what a philistine is to the arts: just crude and ignorant .  So I dismiss him  as a philosophistine.  I coined this word ten years or so ago in a polemic against David Stove another philosophistine whose crudity is on shameful display in his The Plato Cult.

My rule is: no polemics in philosophy.  But if the other guy starts it . . . . Or the shade of the other guy . . . .

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Against Historical Relativism: Adorno on What is No Longer Believable After Auschwitz

Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno is exasperating but exciting. Although as sloppy as one expects Continental thinkers to be, he is nonetheless a force to be reckoned with, a serious man who is seriously grappling with ultimates at the outer limits of intelligibility. Derrida I dismiss as a bullshitter; indeed, to cop a line from John Searle, he is someone who "gives bullshit a bad name." But I can't dismiss Adorno. I confess to being partial to the Germans. They are nothing if not serious, and I'm a serious man. Among the French there is an excess of façade and frippery. But now let's get to work — like good Germans.

Suppose we focus on just part of one of Adorno's serpentine sentences. This is from Negative Dialektik (Suhrkamp, p. 354):

Dass das Unveraenderliche Wahrheit sei und das Bewegte, Vergaengliche Schein, die Gleichgueltigkeit von Zeitlichem und ewigen Ideen gegeneinander, ist nicht laenger zu behaupten . . . .

Adorno is telling us that

It can no longer be asserted that the true is the unchangeable while the mobile and mutable is mere appearance, or that eternal Ideas and the temporal realm are indifferent to each other . . . .

So what is our man saying? He is saying that after Auschwitz — where 'Auschwitz' collects all the genocidal and totalitarian horrors of the Third Reich — one can no longer take Platonism seriously, or the people's Platonism either, Christianity. And indeed most traditional philosophy, consisting as it does, in Whitehead's phrase, of a series of footnotes to Plato. The old metaphysics is dead, the metaphysics according to which Being itself has a positive and hence affirmable character.  An experience has refuted the old metaphysics, the experience of Auschwitz.

But if it can no longer be asserted that that the true is the immutable, then it once could be asserted. And indeed, by 'assert' is intended assert with truth or at least justification. Note the ambiguity of 'assertible' as between capable of being asserted and worth of being asserted. And make a meta-note of how a broadly analytic thinker like me pedantically points out something like this whereas your typical Continental head would find my procedure boorish or somehow gauche. "How low class of you to be so careful and precise!"

But I digress. My point, again, is that if a proposition can no longer be asserted and believed, then it once could be asserted and believed. But if a metaphysical proposition was once true or believed with justification, then it is now true or believable with justification. For a metaphysical assertion is necessarily true if true at all. The structure of being cannot be contingent upon our contingent experiences, even experiences as shattering as that of the Nazi horror. (It is telling of course that Adorno, good man of the Left that he is, does not mention the Stalinist horrors which were known since 1956 — but that is a separate post.)

What I am objecting to is Adorno's apparent historical relativism. By this I mean the view that truth itself is historically conditioned and thus capable of being different in different historical epochs. Metaphysical conceptions are of course historically variable, but not their objects, the structures of being. Adorno is doing the the Continental Shuffle, sliding from the epistemic/doxastic to the ontic and back again.  That views of truth are historically conditioned is trivial and scarcely in need of being pointed out; but that truth itself is historically conditioned is incoherent.

More fundamentally, what I am objecting to is Adorno's lack of any argument for his view that historical experience can refute a metaphysical thesis and his lack of consideration of the sort of (obvious) objection I am now raising.

The Continental 'trope' or 'move' — such-and-such can no longer be believed --ought to be defended or dropped. Why, for example, should it no longer be possible to believe in God after the horrendous events of the 20th century when people believed in God at the time of the Lisbon earthquake and the time of the Bubonic plague? What is so special about these 20th century horrors? The fact of evil may well rule out the existence of God, or more generally, the affirmability of Being. But if it does, this is surely no recent development.

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The Unlimited Obfuscation of Some Continental Writers

The Unlimited Obfuscation of Some Continental Writers

I hesitate to call them philosophers.  David Gordon serves up for our delectation and instruction the following tidbit of Continental balderdash (I quote the whole of Gordon's entry and then add a comment of my own):

The philosophy of Roy Bhaskar, who died November 19, would ordinarily hold little interest for readers of the Mises Blog. Bhaskar was a Marxist, who in his later years veered off toward a fuzzy spirituality. It is worth taking note of him, though, because he was an extreme example of a besetting sin of the contemporary academic world. His prose style made him unreadable; and one of his sentences was selected by the journal Philosophy and Literature as the winner of its 1996 Bad Writing Contest. This was the winning sentence:

Indeed dialectical critical realism may be seen under the aspect of Foucauldian strategic reversal — of the unholy trinity of Parmenidean/Platonic/Aristotelean provenance; of the Cartesian-Lockean-Humean-Kantian paradigm, of foundationalisms (in practice, fideistic foundationalisms) and irrationalisms (in practice, capricious exercises of the will-to-power or some other ideologically and/or psycho-somatically buried source) new and old alike; of the primordial failing of western philosophy, ontological monovalence, and its close ally, the epistemic fallacy with its ontic dual; of the analytic problematic laid down by Plato, which Hegel served only to replicate in his actualist monovalent analytic reinstatement in transfigurative reconciling dialectical connection, while in his hubristic claims for absolute idealism he inaugurated the Comtean, Kierkegaardian and Nietzschean eclipses of reason, replicating the fundaments of positivism through its transmutation route to the superidealism of a Baudrillard.

To call this 'bad writing' and 'unreadable' is unduly charitable.   I am currently studying Erich Pryzwara's Analogia Entis, trs. Betz and Hart, Eerdman's, 2014. It is poorly written and deserves to be called 'unreadable.'  I plan to post on it later.  But if you really know your stuff and are willing to read and read and re-read and work very hard, you can more less follow what Pryzwara is saying.  His book embodies real thought.  The above passage, however, reads like a parody of Continental bullshitting.  Continentals love to name-drop.  But the above is name-dropping on stilts.

Is This a Joke?

"Principles of Non-Philosophy is a treatise on the method, axioms and objectives of non-philosophy and represents François Laruelle's mature philosophy." 

That sounds like a joke.  Maybe it is.  With Continental bullshitters you never know.

Here.  Via Andrew Sullivan.  HT: Dave Lull.   I am surprised that NDPR published a review of this book, and an uncritical one at that.

Deconstructing God: Gutting Interviews Caputo

Another in the NYT Opiniator series.  This one is particularly bad and illustrates what is wrong with later Continental philosophy.  Earlier Continental philosophy is good: Brentano, Meinong, Husserl, early Heidegger, early Sartre, and a whole host of lesser lights including Stumpf, Twardowski, Ingarden, Scheler, von Hildebrand, Edith Stein, et al.  The later movement, however, peters out into bullshit with people like Derrida who, in the pungent words of  John Searle, "gives 'bullshit' a bad name."

This is the third in a series of interviews about religion that I am conducting for The Stone. The interviewee for this installment is John D. Caputo, a professor of religion and humanities at Syracuse University and the author of “The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion Without Religion.”

Gary Gutting: You approach religion through Jacques Derrida’s notion of deconstruction, which involves questioning and undermining the sorts of sharp distinctions traditionally so important for philosophy. What, then, do you think of the distinction between theism, atheism and agnosticism?

John Caputo: I would begin with a plea not to force deconstruction into one of these boxes. I consider these competing views as beliefs, creedal positions, that are inside our head by virtue of an accident of birth. There are the people who “believe” things from the religious traditions they’ve inherited; there are the people who deny them (the atheism you get is pegged to the god under denial); and there are the people who say, “Who could possibly know anything about all of that?” To that I oppose an underlying form of life, not the beliefs inside our head but the desires inside our heart, an underlying faith, a desire beyond desire, a hope against hope, something which these inherited beliefs contain without being able to contain.

One could be forgiven for stopping right here, though I read the whole thing.  First of all, it is simply false to maintain that one is a theist or an atheist or an agnostic "by virtue of an accident of birth."  Some are brought up theists and become atheists or agnostics.  Some are brought atheists and become theists or agnostics. And so one.  It is also wrong for Caputo to imply that those brought up theist or atheist can have no reasons for their theism or atheism.  Then there is the silly opposing of beliefs and desires, head and heart.  And the talk of a form of life as if it does not involve beliefs.  Then the empty rhetoric of desire beyond desire.  Finally, the gushing ends with the contradictory "contain without being able to contain."

The interview doesn't get any better after this.  But there is an insight that one can pick out of the crap pile of mush and gush:  there is more to religion than doctrinal formulations: the reality to which they point cannot be captured in theological propositions.

Retractio 3/11.  Joshua H. writes,

As one of your loyal "continental"-trained readers, I must say I agree that Caputo's performance in the NYT elicits a rather terrible odor of self-congratulatory BS. But surely "later" continental philosophy as a whole doesn't suffer from this unfortunate illness?! Gadamer, Frankfurt School, Ricoeur, among others? Surely Gadamer-Habermas and Habermas-Ratzinger are some of the most interesting debates the discipline has produced in the last 50+ years?

As someone who, back in the day, spent his philosophical time mainly on Gadamer and Habermas and Adorno and Horkheimer and Levinas and Ricoeur, et al., I must agree that Joshua issues a well-taken corrective to what I hastily wrote above at the end of a long day of scribbling.  The later movement cannot be dismissed the way I did above.  I would, however, maintain that the quality declined as the movement wore on and wears on.

I will also hazard the observation, sure to anger many, that just as one becomes more conservative and less liberal with age, and rightly so, one becomes more analytic and less Continental, and rightly so.  It is the same with enthusiasm for Ayn Rand and Nietzsche.  Adolescents are thrilled, but as maturity sets in the thrill subsides, or ought to.

I present some reasons for my aversion to much of the later Continental stuff -- an apt word -- in The Trouble with Continental Philosophy: Badiou. 

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I found it here:

There is an old joke that goes "the Anglo-Saxon philosopher will accuse the continental of being insufficiently clear, while the continental philosopher accuses the Anglo-Saxon of being insufficiently."

Another Specimen of Bad Continental Philosophy: Slavoj Zizek on Christian Universalism

Over lunch a while back, a young friend asked me what I thought of Zizek.  "Not much," was my reply.  Here is a bit of justification, an old post (20 September 2004) from my first weblog. 

.................

Slavoj Zizek in On Belief (Routledge, 2001, pp. 143-144) has this to say:

What is perceived here as the problem is precisely the Christian universalism: what this all-inclusive attitude (recall St. Paul’s famous "There are no men or women, no Jews and Greeks") involves is a thorough exclusion of those who do not accept inclusion into the Christian community. In other "particularistic" religions (and even in Islam, in spite of its global expansionism), there is a place for others, they are tolerated, even if they are condescendingly looked upon. The Christian motto "All men are brothers," however, means ALSO that "Those who are not my brothers ARE NOT MEN." [Emphasis in the original.] Christians usually praise themselves for overcoming the Jewish exclusivist notion of the Chosen People and encompassing all of humanity – the catch here is that, in their very insistence that they are the Chosen People with the privileged direct link to God, Jews accept the humanity of the other people who celebrate their false gods, while Christian universalism tendentially [sic! tendentiously?] excludes non-believers from the very universality of humankind.

What a delightfully seductive passage!

What Zizek is saying here is that the Christian universalism expressed by "All men are brothers" excludes non-Christians from the class of human beings. Zizek supports this surprising assertion with an argument. Made explicit, the argument is that

1. All men are brothers
Therefore
2. All who are not my brothers are not men.
But
3. All who are not Christians are not my brothers.
Therefore
4. All who are not Christians are not men.

Having made Zizek’s argument explicit, we can easily see what is wrong with it. The problem is (3). Without (3), one cannot validly infer the conclusion (4). But (3) is false: no Christian holds that all who are not Christians are not his brothers; they are his brothers whether or not they accept Christianity. For whether or not they accept Christianity they are sons of a common Father, God. Or if you insist that (3) is true, I will say that there is an equivocation on ‘brother’ as between (2) and (3). In one sense, two people are brothers if they have a common father. In this sense, all men are brothers if they have a common father, i.e., God. In a second sense, two people are brothers if they are members of a common organization or religion. Two teamsters, for example, are union brothers even if they do not share a common earthly father. The same for two members of the Muslim Brotherhood.

In sum, Zizek makes a highly dubious assertion and then tries to support it with a worthless argument.

It is important to see that he really is giving an argument in the above passage, but that, like many Continentals, he argues in a slip-shod, half-baked way. It’s as if he wants the advantange of an argument without having to do the hard analytic work. In this regard, the above passage is characteristic of a lot of Continental philosophy.

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On Throwing Latin, and a Jab at the 'Analysts'

If you are going to throw Latin, then you ought to try to get it right.  One of my correspondents sent me an offprint of a paper of his which had been published in American Philosophical Quarterly, a very good philosophical journal.  The title read, Creation Ex Deus. The author's purpose was to develop a notion of creation out of God, as opposed to the traditional notion of creation out of nothing (ex nihilo).  He knew that 'God' translates as Deus, and that 'out of' is rendered by ex.  Hence, ex Deus.  But this is bad Latin, since the preposition ex takes the ablative case.  Deus being a second declension masculine noun, its ablative form is Deo.  Ex Deo would have been correct.  Mistakes like this are not as rare as they ought to be, and we can expect more of them in the future.

It says something that the error just mentioned was caught neither by the author, nor by the editor, nor by the referees, nor by the proofreader.  It says something in particular about 'analytic' philosophers.  I am sorry to report that many of them are ignoramuses (indeed, ignorabimuses) wholly innocent of foreign languages, knowledge of history (both 'real' history and the history of ideas), and of high culture generally.  One name analyst implied in print that the music of John Lennon was on the level of that of Mozart.  There are Ph.D.s in philosophy who have never read a Platonic dialogue, and whose dissertations are based solely on the latest ephemera in the journals.  Here, as elsewhere, ignorance breeds arrogance.  They think they know what they don't know.  They think they know what key theses in Kant and Brentano and Meinong mean when they have never studied their texts.  And, not knowing foreign languages, they cannot determine whether or not the available translations are accurate.  Not knowing the sense of these theses, they read into them contemporary notions. And if you told them that this amounts to eisegesis, they wouldn't know what you are talking about.

Not all analytic philosophers are ignoramuses, of course.  Hector-Neri Castañeda, for example, had a grounding in classics.  When he founded Noûs, a top analytic journal, in 1967, he placed Nihil philosophicum a nobis alienum putamus on the masthead.  It is a take-off on Terence, philosophicum replacing humanum.  It is telling that the Latin motto was removed by Castañeda's successors after his untimely death in September, 1991. Princeton University, I understand, removed the language requirement for the Ph.D. in philosophy in 1980.  An appalling development.  It has been said that if you don't know a foreign language, you don't know your own.  

The fact that many analytic philosophers lack historical sense, knowledge of foreign languages, and broad culture is of course no excuse to jump over to the opposite camp, that of the 'Continental' philosophers.  For lack of historical sense, they substitute historicism, which is just as bad.  For lack of linguistic competence, they substitute a bizarre linguisticism in which the world dissolves into a text, a text susceptible of endless interpretation and re-interpretation.  For lack of broad culture, they substitute a super-sophistication that empties into a miasma of sophistry and relativism.  Worse, much of Continental philosophy, especially much of what is written in French, is border-line bullshit.  Indeed, to cop a line from John Searle, one he applied to Jacques Derrida, Continental philosophy gives bullshit a bad name.  Some substantiation here.  It is therefore no surprise that the Continental types jump to embrace every loony idea that emanates from the Left.

You can see that I am warming to my theme.  I am also brushing in very broad strokes.  But details and documentation are readily supplied and have been supplied elsewhere on this site.  In short, a pox on both houses.  Be a maverick.

What inspired this post was a query of a correspondent.  He wanted to know how to render 'seize the world' into Latin.  Well, we know that 'seize the day' goes into Latin as carpe diem.  And we should have picked up by now that 'world' is mundus.  'Seize' takes the accusative, and since mundus is a second declension masculine noun, we get:  Carpe mundum.  If I am wrong about this, Michael Gilleland will correct me.

And another thing.  I find it appalling that so many people nowadays, college 'educated' people, are completely innocent of grammatical terminology.  Words like 'genitive,' 'dative,' 'ablative,' etc. elicit a blank stare.  Grammar being a propaedeutic to logic, it is no wonder that there are so many illogical people adrift in the world.

Now have a nice day.  Seize it and squeeze it.

 

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Nausea at Existence: A Continental Thick Theory

Nausea at Existence: A Continental Thick Theory

A reader wants me to comment on the analytic-Continental split.  Perhaps I will do so in general terms later, but in this post I will consider one particular aspect of the divide that shows up in different approaches to existence.  Roughly, Continental philosophers espouse the thick theory, while analytic philosophers advocate the thin theory.  Of course there are exceptions to this rule: Your humble correspondent is an analytic thick theorist and so is Barry Miller.  Whether there are any Continental thin theorists I don't know.

Why should analytic philosophers prefer the thin theory?  Part of the reason, some will say, is that analysts tend to be superficial people: they are logically very sharp but woefully lacking in spiritual depth.   They are superficial specimens of what Heidegger calls das Man, the 'they': lacking authenticity, they float along on the superficies of things.  Bereft of  a depth-dimension in themselves, they are blind to the world's depth-dimension.  Blind to the world's depth-dimension, they are blind to existence.  A Heideggerian might say that they are not so much blind as forgetful: they have succumbed to die Vergessenheit des Seins.  The analysts, of course, will not  admit to any such deficiencies of sight or memory.  They will turn the tables and accuse Continentals such as Heidegger and Sartre of being muddle-headed mystics and obscurantists who commit school-boy blunders in logic.  (Carnap's famous/notorious attack on Heidegger is a text-book case.)

So we have a nice little fight going, complete with name-calling.  Perhaps a little exegesis of a passage from Sartre will help clarify the issue.  I have no illusions about converting any thin theorist.  I aim at clarity, not agreement.  I will be happy if I can achieve  an exact understanding of what we are disagreeing about and why we are disagreeing.  When that goal is attained we can cheerfully agree to disagree.

So let's consider the famous 'chestnut tree' passage in Jean-Paul Sartre's novel, Nausea.  The novel's protagonist, Roquentin, is in a park when he has a bout of temporary aphasia while contemplating the roots of a chestnut true. Words and their meanings vanish. He finds himself confronting a black knotty mass that frightens him. Then he has a vision:

It left me breathless. Never, until these last days, had I understood the meaning of 'existence.' I was like all the others, like the ones walking along the seashore, all dressed in their spring finery. I said, like them, 'The ocean is green; that white speck up there is a seagull,' but I didn't feel that it existed or that the seagull was an 'existing seagull'; usually existence hides itself. It is there, around us, in us, it is us, you can't say two words without mentioning it, but you can never touch it. When I believed I was thinking about it, I must
[have] believe[d] that I was thinking nothing, my head was empty, or there was just one word in my head, the word 'to be.' Or else I was thinking . . . how can I explain it? I was thinking of belonging, I was telling myself that the sea belonged to the class of green objects, or that that green was a part of the quality of the sea. Even when I looked at things I was miles from dreaming that they existed; they looked like scenery to me. I picked them up in my hands, they served me as tools, I foresaw their resistance. But that all happened on the surface.

If anyone had asked me what existence was, I would have answered, in good faith, that it was nothing, simply an empty form that was added to external things without changing anything in their nature. And then all of a sudden, there it was, clear as day: existence
had suddenly unveiled itself. It had lost the harmless look of an abstract category: it was the very paste of things, this root was kneaded into existence. Or rather the root, the park gates, the bench, the sparse grass, all that had vanished: the diversity of things, their individuality, were only an appearance, a veneer. This veneer had melted, leaving soft, monstrous masses, all in disorder — naked, in a frightful, obscene nakedness. (p. 127 tr. Lloyd Alexander, ellipsis in original.)

This marvellous passage records Roquentin's intuition (direct nonsensory perception) of Being or existence. (It would be interesting to compare in a subsequent post Jacques Maritain's Thomist intuition of Being with Sartre's existentialist intuition of Being.) Viewed through the lenses of logic, 'The green sea exists' is equivalent to 'The sea is green' and 'The sea belongs to the class of green objects.' For the (standard)  logician, then, 'exists' and cognates is dispensable and the concept of existence is fully expressible in terms of standard logical machinery.  Anything we say using 'exists(s)' we can also say without using 'exist(s).  To give another example, 'Dragons do not exist' is logically equivalent to 'Everything is not a dragon.'  If we want, we can avoid the word 'exist(s)' and substitute for it some logical machinery: the universal quantifier and the tilde (the sign for negation) as in our last example.

But why would a man like Peter van Inwagen -- the head honcho of the thin theorists -- want to avoid 'exist(s)'?  Because he wants to show that existence is a thin notion: there is nothing more to it than can be captured using the thin notions of logic: quantification, negation, copulation, and identity.  He wants to show that there is no reason to think that there is any metaphysical depth lurking behind 'exist(s)' and cognates, that there is no room for a metaphysics of existence as opposed to a logic of 'exist(s)'; nor room for any such project as Heidegger's fundamental ontology (Being and Time) or Sartre's phenomenological ontology (Being and Nothingness).

And why does the thin theorist go to all this deflationary trouble?  Because he lacks this sense or intuition of existence that philosophers as diverse as Wittgenstein, Maritain, and Sartre share, a sense or intution he feels must be bogus and must rest on some mistake.  He fancies himself the clear-headed foe of obfuscation and he sees nothing but obfuscation in talk of Being and existence.

But as I have been arguing ad nauseam (so to speak) over many a blog post, published article and book, sentences like 'The sea is green' presuppose for their truth that the sea is an existing sea. Compare the reference above to an existing seagull. And, as Sartre has Roquentin says, "usually existence hides itself." It hides itself from all of us most of the time when we are immersed in what Heidegger calls average everydayness (alltaegliche Durchschnittlichkeit, vide Sein und Zeit), and existence hides itself from the logician qua logician all the time. For all of us most of the time, and for logicians all of the time, existence is "nothing, simply an empty form."

In fact, that is a good statement of the thin theory:  existence is nothing at all, apart from an empty logical form.  Sea, seagull, bench, tree, root  -- but no existence of the sea, of the seagull, of the bench, etc.  Sea, seagull, bench, tree, root, and some logical concepts.  That's it.

"Usually existence hides itself."  This invites mockery from the thin theorists.  What?  Existence plays hide-and-seek with us?!  [Loud guffaws from the analytic shallow-pates.]  To the existence-blind it must appear a dark and indeed incomprehensible saying.  But  of course to the blind that which is luminous must appear dark.  Perhaps we can recast Sartre's loose and literary formulation in aseptic terms by saying that existence is a hidden and taken-for-granted presupposition of our discourse that for the most part remains hidden and taken-for-granted. Let me explain.

'The sea is green' and 'The green sea exists' are logically equivalent.  But this equivalence rests on a tacit presupposition, namely, that the sentences are to be evaluated relative to a domain of existing items.  The reason we can make the deflationary move of replacing the latter sentence with the former is because existence is already present, though hidden,  in 'The sea is green.'   'The sea is green' can be parsed as follows: The sea is (exists) & the sea (is) green, where the parentheses around 'is' indicate that it functions as a pure copula, a pure predicative link and nothing more.  The parsing makes it clear that the 'is' in 'The sea is green' exercises a dual function: it is not merely an 'is' of predication: it is also an 'is' of existence.  Therefore, translation of 'The green sea exist' as 'The sea is green' does not eliminate existence as the thin theorist falsely assumes.

In material mode, the point is that nothing can have a property unless it exists.   The sea cannot be green or slimy or stinky unless it exists.  This existence of the sea, seagull, etc., however, is a presupposition that remains hidden as long as we comport ourselves in Heidegger's "average everydayness" manipulating things for our purposes but not wondering at their very existence.  We have to shift out of our ordinary everyday attitude in order to be struck by the sheer existence of things.  Perhaps the thin theorist is incapable of making that shift.  But he really doesn't need to if he has followed my reasoning.

What the thin theorist  does is to substitute logical Being for real Being. Note that I am not endorsing Sartre's theory of real Being: that it is an absurd excrescence, de trop (superfluous), unintelligible, etc. What I am endorsing is his insight that real Being is extralogical, that it is not a thin notion exhausted by the machinery of logic.  Thus I am endorsing what is common to Sartre, Maritain, Wittgenstein, and others, namely, that existence is real not merely logical.

But what if you are one of those sober types who has never experienced anything like Heideggerian Angst or Sartrean nausea or Wittgenstein's wonder at the existence of the world? Well, I think you could still be brought by purely discursive methods to understand how existence cannot reduce to a purely logical notion. We shall see.  

Blanshard on Santayana's Prose Style

Brand Blanshard, On Philosophical Style (Indiana University Press, 1967), pp. 49-50. Originally appeared in 1954. Emphasis added.
   
The most distinguished recent example of imaginative prose in  philosophy is certainly George Santayana. Santayana was no man's copy, either in thought or in style. He consistently refused to
adopt the prosaic medium in which most of his colleagues were writing. To read him is to be conducted in urbane and almost courtly fashion about the spacious house he occupies, moving noiselessly always on a richly figured carpet of prose. Is it a satisfying experience as one looks back on it? Yes, undoubtedly, if one has been able to surrender to it uncritically. But that, as it happens, is something the philosophical reader is not very likely to do. Philosophy is, in the main, an attempt to establish     something by argument, and the reader who reads for philosophy will be impatient to know just what thesis is being urged, and what precisely is the evidence for it. To such a reader Santayana seems  to have a divided mind, and his doubleness of intent clogs the intellectual movement. He is, of course, genuinely intent on reaching a philosophic conclusion, but it is as if, on his journey there, he were so much interested also in the flowers that line the wayside that he is perpetually pausing to add one to his buttonhole. The style is not, as philosophic style should be, so transparent a medium that one looks straight through it at the object, forgetting that it is there; it is too much like a window of stained glass which, because of its very richness, diverts attention to itself.

There is no reason why a person should not be a devotee of both truth and beauty; but unless in his writing he is prepared to make one the completely unobtrusive servant of the other, they are sure to get in each other's way. Hence ornament for its own beautiful irrelevant sake must be placed under interdict. Someone has put the matter more compactly: "Style is the feather in the arrow, not the feather in the hat."

It seems to me that far too much Continental philosophy is plagued by the same "divided mind" and "doubleness of intent."

A Note on Analytic Style

The precise, explicitly argued, analytic style of exposition with numbered premises and conclusions promotes the meticulous scrutiny of the ideas under discussion. That is why I sometimes write this way. I know it offends some. There are creatures of darkness and murk who seem allergic to any intellectual hygiene. These types are often found on the other side of the Continental divide. "How dare you be clear? How dare you ruthlessly exclude all ambiguity thereby making it impossible for me to yammer on and on with no result?"

Ortega y Gasset somewhere wrote that "Clarity is courtesy." But clarity is not only courtesy; it is a necessary (though not sufficient) condition of resolving an issue. If it be thought unjustifiably sanguine to speak of resolving philosophical issues, I have a fall-back position: Clarity is necessary for the very formulation of an issue, provided we want to be clear about what we are discussing.

So we should try to be as clear as possible given the constraints we face. (In blogging, one of the constraints is the need to be pithy.) But it doesn't follow that one should avoid, or legislate out of existence, topics or problems that are hard to bring into focus. It would be folly to avoid God, the soul, Mr. Bradley's Absolute, the meaning of life and all the Big Questions just because it is hard to be clear about them. To give up metaphysics for logic on the ground of the former's messiness, makes no sense to me: the good of logic is intrumental not intrinsic. (See Fred Sommers Abandons Whitehead and Metaphysics for Logic.)   We study logic to help us resolve substantive questions. If all you ever do in philosophy is worry about such topics as the logical form of 'Everyone who owns a donkey beats it,' then I say you have not been doing philosophy at all, but something preliminary to it.

Clarity, then, is a value. But it ceases to be one if it drives us to such extremes as the logical positivist's Verifiability Princiople of cognitive signicance, or the extreme of a fellow who once said that "If it cannot be said in the language of Principia Mathematica, then it can't be said." My response to that would be: so much the worse for the language of Principia Mathematica.

Continental Philosophy Criticized: Levinas

Another example of Continental obscurity in my ongoing series comes from a philosopher I mainly respect, Emmanuel Levinas. The following passage is from Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo, tr. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985, p. 106). It first appeared in French in 1982. It goes without saying that the numerals in brackets are my interpolation.

[1] The "invisible God" is not to be understood as God invisible to the senses, but as [2] God non-thematizable in thought and nonetheless as [3] non-indifferent to the thought which is not thematization, and [4] probably not even an intentionality.

Got that?  I will go through this passage bit by bit to show you what is wrong with this sort of writing and thinking.

Ad 1. To be properly formulated, this first clause must contain a word like ‘merely’ right after ‘understood.’ God is obviously invisible to the senses, and a formulation that suggests that he is not is inept. This sort of mistake is often made. For example, if what you want to say is that religion is not merely matter a matter of doctrine (because it is a matter of practice as well), then don’t say: Religion is not a matter of doctrine. For if you say the latter, then you say something that is just plain false.

Ad 2. We are being told that God is non-thematizable in thought. In plain English: God cannot be a theme or topic or object of thought. I am very sympathetic to this idea if what is intended is that God cannot be reduced to a mere object of thought whose being is exhausted by his objecthood. But since we are talking about God right now, there is some sense or other in which God is an object of thought. In some sense, we are thematizing God; we are thematizing him as a being whose being surpasses his thematicity.

You will note that I am now starting to write like a Continental philosopher. I know the idiom and can break into it when it suits me. I know their typical moves, althought they wouldn’t say ‘move’ inasmuch as that suggests something rigorous and logical like chess -- and we can’t have that. The point, however, is that there is a problem here, and Levinas and Co. don’t do enough -- or much of anything -- to bring it into the open. The problem is to explain how we can think correctly of God as nonthematizable in thought if God has this very property. Or at least that is one aspect of the problem.

Ad 3. We are being told that there is a non-thematizing or non-objectifying mode of thinking and that God is non-indifferent to this mode of thinking. But what does ‘non-indifferent’ mean? Does it mean not different, so that the non-objectifying thinking of God just is God? Or does it perhaps mean that God cares about this mode of thinking? Who knows? And that’s the problem. Levinas takes no pains to be clear about what he means.  And the context does not help.

Ad 4. Finally, we are informed that the non-objectifying mode of thinking is "probably not even an intentionality." ‘Intentionality’ is a philosopher’s term of art for the peculiar of-ness, aboutness, or directedness of (some) mental states to their objects. So what Levinas is saying is that the non-objectifying mode of thinking lacks aboutness. But then what is it? Something like a mute sensory state, a pain, for example? Clearly, there is some sense in which a non-objectifying mode of thinking about God is about God – and about nothing else. This sense needs clarification.

To sum up. I am not trying to ‘refute’ Levinas.  I like him and agree with some of his ideas in Totality and Infinity, his critique of Heidegger for example.  I am not charging him with incoherence or self–contradiction above. What I am objecting to is the lack of time and energy spent on clarification, and on setting forth clearly the problems and questions implied by his ideas. Brentano, Husserl, and the early Sartre were clear-headed thinkers. After that, the early standards go by the board.

 

More on Texts and Translations

A regular reader responds to  On Reading Philosophical Texts in Their Original Languages: 

 

Nice piece on the necessity of studying texts in their original languages. The very question puzzles me. Why would someone assume he knows what Kant said and meant by reading Kemp Smith? I don't know what shape the Kant MSS are in---are there serious problems with some works?--- but the problem of working with translations becomes even more acute with classical texts like Cicero and Aristotle. Often the texts are in bad shape with extensive lacunae and obvious ancient editioral tampering. Restorations rely on ancient paraphrases in languages like Arabic or Syriac. Or the restorations are pure conjectures (the 19th century German scholars were very quick to restore).

 

All of this is concealed in a typical English translation. The Greekless young scholar thinks he is reading Aristotle, but perhaps only 80-90% of his text is well established. Crucial passages often turn out to be corrupt in big or small ways. The scholar who wishes to be able to say "Aristotle said..." instead of "W.D. Ross' translation says..." needs to be familiar with his text at the level of the so-called critical or variorum edition, where (hopefully) all the textual problems are owned up to and the scholar can make his own informed judgment about what the best text is.

 

 For this reason, college reading editions like the Loeb texts are not good enough, because they are not critical texts. Some editors do a better job than others in noting problems, but the Loeb Greek or Latin is once again often a heavily restored text. You need to work with the Teubners or the OCT's or special critical editions by individual scholars.

 

The truly dedicated scholar should in fact go one step further back and consult the MSS themselves. Often no one has taken a good critical look at the MSS in the years since some German did the original MSS work in the 19th century. The Germans made mistakes! And they restored and otherwise edited. The MS is not the same in many ways as their transcription. With the new optical technology, it is time and overtime for scholars to revisit the MSS and recover better texts. Where some competent scholar has just done this work, perhaps new MSS work is unnecessary, but where the critical text is 100+ years old, it is not reasonable to trust it.

 

If you are a young philosopher or classicist and reading this story does not excite and challenge you, if you are too unmotivated to master a language and its texts, then for God's sake don't pretend to be doing scholarship in the history of philosophy with a bunch of translations at hand. I'm preaching to the converted, right?

The Trouble with Continental Philosophy: Tillich

Today’s example of Continental muddle-headedness is not from a philosopher, strictly speaking, but from a theologian who was influenced by a philosopher, Heidegger, and who has had a great deal of influence on philosophers. Paul Tillich (1886-1965) writes:

Atheism can only mean the attempt to remove any ultimate concern – to remain unconcerned about the meaning of one’s existence. Indifference toward the ultimate question is the only imaginable form of atheism. Whether it is possible is a problem which must remain unsolved at this point. In any case, he who denies God as a matter of ultimate concern affirms God, because he affirms ultimacy in his concern. (Dynamics of Faith; quoted from White, Eternal Quest, p. 94)

The Trouble with Continental Philosophy: Badiou

I hereby begin a series of posts highlighting various examples of objectionable Continental verbiage. Today’s example is not the worst but lies ready to hand, so I start with it. I don’t criticize the Continentals because I am an ‘analyst’; one of the reasons the Maverick Philosopher is so-called is because he is neither. The ‘analysts’ have their own typical failings which will come under fire later. A pox on both houses!

After Auschwitz: Adorno's Leftist Sensibility Illustrated from Minima Moralia

A correspondent from the Netherlands sends this passage from Theodor W. Adorno's Minima Moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben. It is from the short essay, "Herr Doktor, das ist schön von Euch."

Noch der Baum, der blüht, lügt in dem Augenblick, in welchem man sein Blühen ohne den Schatten des Entsetzens wahrnimmt; noch das unschuldige Wie schön wird zur Ausrede für die Schmach des Daseins, das anders ist, und es ist keine Schönheit und kein Trost mehr außer in dem Blick, der aufs Grauen geht, ihm standhält und im ungemilderten Bewußtsein der Negativität die Möglichkeit des Besseren festhält.

Here is the essay in toto in Dennis Redmond's translation. The italicized portion is the translation of the above German. I have interrupted the flow of the text with some comments of my own. I want to use this text to convey to you something of the mentality and sensibility of an extremely erudite and sophisticated leftist and of leftists in general. It helps to bear in mind that Minima Moralia was published in 1951.