It was a Cambridge affair. At the meeting of the University Congregation in March 1992 an objection to one of the nominations for the degree of doctor honoris causa was lodged by the audible cry of ‘non placet’. A ballot of the Regent House was organised, fly-sheets were circulated and signed. On a Saturday in the middle of May over five hundred members attended the Senate House to register their opinion, voting by personal signature. The ballot was secret, but as members waited for the result it mattered where you stood and with whom you stood. Younger fellows were aware, some painfully aware, that older eyes were watching.
It was a Cambridge affair, yet, as the Regent House was deciding whether or not to award an honorary degree to the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, it was never simply or solely so. Derrida’s candidacy (and the fact that his proposal came from outside the Philosophy Faculty) had aroused strong feelings within the University, and the ensuing rumpus attracted wide interest from both the national and international media.
Academic opposition to politicians receiving such degrees was rare but at least familiar enough. But a philosopher? What was this smoke from the ivory towers? ‘Dons Ditch Deconstructionist’ might have looked good, if only the lexical background had a circulation approximating that of the newspapers. In fact the event was such that it was not only journalists who sought simplicity where there is none. From the start it was academics (‘certain academics’ as Derrida carefully but pointedly stressed later1) who most dramatically violated the very standards of intellectual responsibility in whose name the non placet had been voiced.
The terms of criticism were by no means new. Indeed, for the ‘non placeters’ the ‘Derrida affair’ was playing out a familiar drama of British letters in its relation to ‘Continental’ contacts. As Nicholas Denyer put it, for Derrida’s opponents this was just another case where a French thinker was being ‘acclaimed by many British intellectuals in spite of reservations among their philosophically educated compatriots’ (ibid., p. 103). While
the image of a ‘fissure’ (ibid.) within the British intellectual culture is apt, it is, I think, secondary to and largely explained by the fact that the same image informs the dominant picture of the contemporary philosophical culture in general, a fissure which Denyer’s observation implicitly affirms.
That is, one might turn the tables here and emphasise that those ‘British’
(or more presicely ‘analytical’) philosophers who opposed Derrida were not the first roundly to condemn the work of their ‘Continental’ colleagues, and to do so in much the same terms.
The template for the Cambridge criticism was, as I hope to show in this essay, well prepared for: the assumption of a wide gulf between
‘analytical’ and ‘Continental’ philosophy was already a commonplace. Thus, however personal and personally offensive they may have seemed, the fly-sheets’ suggestions that, for example, Derrida’s work could ‘deprive the mind of its defences’ and ‘undermine the fundamental grounds which provide… for intellectual inquiry’ (ibid., p. 101) were not unique to the case. In what we will see is actually far too common a trait to be dismissed as an occasional shortcoming on the part of the ‘analytical’ critics of what it calls ‘Continental’ philosophy, a litany of charges was brought against Derrida without citing a single supporting quote or reference. Now, if they were justified these charges would seriously question the University’s wisdom in conferring on Derrida a degree of any sort. If it was right to call his work ‘stupid and ridiculous’ (ibid., p. 108) or ‘degenerate’ in virtue of ‘its contempt for argumentative rigour’ and its ‘barbarous neologisms and idiotic word-play’ (ibid., p. 109), then, yes, it would be understandable if one despaired of one’s supposedly intelligent colleagues and their ‘appetite for known falsehood’ (ibid., p. 104) and the ‘non placet’ should have been cheered to the rafters of the Senate House.
But there was good reason why the ‘non placeters’ did not quote from Derrida’s work. There was good reason why the standards of scholarship and rigour they were claiming to defend were not, in this case, brought to bear. For all its risks and difficulties (no one ever claimed that Derrida is an easy and obvious thinker), as anyone who has made the effort to read his work discovers soon enough, there is not a single line in his work to support their principal claims.
The ‘affair’ soon spread beyond Cambridge, and beyond merely ‘British’
philosophical assessments. A letter was sent to The Times, signed by nineteen
‘analytical’ philosophers outside the UK, including W.V.O.Quine. It repeated many of the charges of the ‘non placeters’. It also repeated the basic dereliction of scholarly duty: not a sentence was cited, no references were made, no analyses of argument or lines of criticism from Derrida’s ‘voluminous writings’
(The Cambridge Review, p. 139) were pursued. Two words in the letter were placed between quotation marks, suggesting Derrida as their source:
it was claimed that Derrida’s writings ‘seem to consist in no small part of elaborate jokes and the puns “logical phallusies” and the like’,2 but, as
SIMON GLENDINNING
Derrida himself emphasised, this is a phrase which he has ‘never written’
(ibid., p. 132). Is it not a very serious deception to pass off as the work of a charlatan what is, in fact, specious invention?
As I have indicated, Derrida is not the first ‘Continental’ philosopher to have found himself on the receiving end of this kind of attack. I hope that the following examination will help to explain how the Cambridge affair over a degree of doctor honoris causa can be seen as a particularly clear case, not of what Denyer calls ‘reservations’ among those who received their philosophical education in Britain, but of the construction of a gulf between what ‘we’ (analytical philosophers) so seriously do and ‘they’
(Continental philosophers) so unfortunately do—the construction of a gulf which has led again and again to a tendency to condemn as obscurantist and mystifying works of philosophy which, in fact, have not been seriously read at all.
I
It is unlikely that anyone working in philosophy today would find it difficult to produce a list of recognisable practitioners of Continental philosophy.
Yet is it certain that to this category there corresponds an identifiable philosophical movement, approach, style, school or tradition? What holds together the authors named on such lists under this title? My supposition, explored in what follows, is that one will not find out by reading their work. As the name itself should indicate, the forces which brought about a collection of authors and texts under this title do not lie inside that collection. By the time that it became possible to speak of Continental philosophy, and to mean something other than philosophy being done in a certain geographical location, the locus of such forces was itself assuming the name, indeed was naming itself, analytical or analytic philosophy.
Of course, the idea that Continental philosophy emerges as a fruitfully distinguishable philosophical category from within analytical philosophy does not, just like that, confer any problematic status upon it. However, in what follows I will argue that at issue here has not been the identification, as it were en passant, of a distinctive philosophical approach, but exclusions of a strictly non-logical and ethically indefensible character.
Continental philosophy, as a category, is, I will suggest, part of analytical philosophy in a strong sense: it has been constructed as the defining ‘not-part’ of analytical philosophy. In psychoanalysis this would be called
‘incorporation’; i.e., where something is represented and retained ‘within’
but as an excluded outside, as a foreign body which is impossible to assimilate and which must be rejected. This essay thus comprises a sketch for an investigation of Continental philosophy as the incorporated other of analytical philosophy.
It will be important to stress that in recent years, and in significant respects, the English-speaking philosophical culture has become less concerned with, less shaped by, the idea of a philosophical rift. Nevertheless, even today labelling an author as a Continental philosopher can never be a wholly value-free gesture or merely geographical determination. On the contrary, the current use of this label carries with it the burden of an evaluative accent which has suggested not only that the author is doing work of a supposedly distinctive kind but also of an inferior quality. It is an abiding legacy of the rise of the movement which has called itself
‘analytical philosophy’ that what it has called ‘Continental philosophy’
has been so positioned as to represent all that is ‘arbitrary, pretentious and soul-destroying’ in philosophy, wherever it is written.3
This profoundly negative evaluation is, I think, now (or, for the moment, still) part of the grammar of ‘Continental philosophy’. Continental philosophy is, as it were, given to analytical philosophy as beyond the pale. It involves a kind of failure of inheritance, an abandonment of the
‘accepted standards of clarity and rigour’ which should characterise properly philosophical inquiry.4 Thus, in so far as one affirms that ‘What one does’
is analytical philosophy, then Continental philosophy will be not only What one (qua analytical philosopher) does not do, but What ought not to be done if one wants to think seriously within the central channels of the Western philosophical tradition.
I have no doubt that this view is deeply embedded in and tied up with national, political and religious currents which, for the most part, simply do not appear as such within the texts of mainstream analytical philosophy.
And in what follows I will try to at least open the debate to these issues.
However, I am equally convinced that this idea of philosophical division is not without a classically philosophical significance. To the question What is Continental philosophy? I will answer: it is the false personification, by (self-styled) analytical philosophy, of a possibility which is internal to, and which threatens, all philosophizing; the possibility of being empty.
Now, as a false personification, I take it that the historical emergence of this category betrays misunderstanding. I also think it betrays injustice.
I would like to be reasonably self-conscious about establishing this. That is, I would like this work to be part of a drift of thinking in which this injustice is removed.
II
The kind of tendency I want to explore finds one of its most dramatic and spectacular expressions in R.M.Hare’s lecture, ‘A School for Philosophers’, ‘given at a number of German centres in the summer of 1957’.5 Hare does not think of the philosophical landscape in terms of a
SIMON GLENDINNING
distinction between analytical and Continental philosophy. But he definitely thinks of it as philosophically divided. In his lecture, the ‘two different ways’ in which ‘the same subject’ is studied, ways concerning which ‘one might be forgiven for thinking…are really two quite different subjects’
(p. 107), are labelled primarily nationally, as British and German philosophy.
This lexicon may have the virtue of avoiding the ‘strange cross-classification’
of analytical and Continental philosophy.6 But Hare’s distinction is not without at least two major complications of its own. First, he virtually identifies British philosophy with work being done at ‘the older British universities’ and especially Oxford;7 and, second, he can hardly be said to identify ‘German philosophy’ with anything at all. He does speak of
‘a typical German philosopher’ and refers to ‘huge volumes’ and ‘long obscure books’ which nobody in Oxford will read, and which, as E.W.F.Tomlin noted in a rejoinder, ‘seems to be tilting at German productions’.8 But no examples or samples of such works are cited or referred to anywhere in the lecture.9 As we shall see, Hare’s argument is seriously compromised by this vagueness. Indeed, I will suggest that the distinction he insists upon lives on being free-floating.
Hare’s essay begins with a brief presentation of the merits for philosophy of the Oxford tutorial system. In such a system, he stresses, a student of philosophy will be taught ‘how to think more clearly and to the point’
(p. 108); taught, that is, ‘to express his thought clearly to himself and to others; to make distinctions where there are distinctions to be made, and thus avoid unnecessary confusion—and not to use long words (or short ones) without being able to explain what they mean’ (p. 108). These points are intended to introduce us to the basic characteristics of Oxford—and by implication British—philosophy generally. For British philosophy, Hare insists, is guided by the intellectual virtues it teaches; viz., ‘clarity, relevance and brevity’ (p. 112). Such virtues will then ensure that arguments between
‘British philosophers’ can circulate and develop through the defence and refutation of work with what he calls ‘an unambiguously stated thesis’
(p. 112). This, according to Hare, is the central characteristic and great strength of British philosophical analysis.
The unambiguously stated thesis of Hare’s paper is that British and German philosophy is ‘the same subject studied in two different ways’.
The unstated, less clear, but certainly no less unambiguous thesis is that the German philosophical way is the wrong philosophical way. Supposing, as is in fact constantly invited, the contrast to the British way is, even when unstated as such, the German way, then the latter enjoys the ‘delights of erecting, in solitary thought, imposing edifices—of writing huge volumes which only a handful of people will ever understand’ (p. 110); and the typical author of such ‘long or difficult books’ (p. 113) or ‘monstrous philosophical edifices’ (p. 115) likes, Hare suggests, to ‘collect a private coterie to listen to him’ (p. 111); and he will not be averse to ‘the turning
of philosophy into mystique’ (p. 110) or to producing ‘verbiage’ disguised as ‘serious metaphysical inquiry’ (p. 115). In short, according to Hare, the
‘typical German philosopher’ thrives on and finds ‘uplifting’ approaches and styles of thought characterized by ‘ambiguities and evasions and rhetoric’, i.e., precisely those characteristics which ‘British philosophers’ regard ‘as the mark of a philosopher who has not learnt his craft’ (pp. 112–13).
A grave nod. But who are these German metaphysicians who ‘have chosen to ignore [the] important developments [made by Vienna Circle positivism] and carry on in their old ways as if nothing had happened’
(p. 117)? The trouble is not merely that we are not told (there are, as we know, usual suspects in this game) but that not one example of the
‘German way’ is presented as an illustration. Thus the idea of philosophical division remains a kind of air-castle or, lest we forget certain developments, at least unverified. Some striking home truths are revealed on this point in a passage where Hare discusses the British philosopher’s conception of his duty as a philosopher:
We do not think it is a duty to write books; still less do we think it a duty to read more than a few of the books which others write—
for we know that, given our heavy load of teaching, to read more than the essential books would take us away from more important things. Our duty is to discuss philosophy with our colleagues and to teach our pupils to do the same—books and articles are an unconsidered by-product of this process; their content is generally quite familiar from verbal discussion years before they get published. We find out which ‘the essential books’ are by each reading a very few and telling the others about them. The result is that, if one wants a book to be read by one’s colleagues it will have to be short, clear and to the point…. The certain way to obscurity, on the other hand, is to write long obscure books.
Nobody will ever read them.
(Hare 1960:114) He later adds that British philosophers ‘find it hard to discuss philosophy with, or to read the books of, people who do not even seem worried about convincing the sceptic that their philosophical propositions mean something’ (p. 115, my italics). Thus, what Hare calls the ‘essential books’, books, that is, which will in fact be read by Oxford philosophers with any seriousness whatsoever, will prove, in practice, to be their own alone.
So much for avoiding ‘coteries’. What can one conclude here but that the very idea of a philosophical division within the European philosophical culture must, at least in part, live on being free-floating? Indeed, it is arguable that that idea can survive only for as long as the thinkers and themes which are not part of what has called itself ‘the analytical
SIMON GLENDINNING
movement’ are not only supposed not worth reading but, in fact, are not seriously read.10
Since Hare’s account is developed in ways which force him to slip from the standards of ‘rigour and honesty and clarity’ which, rightly, he upholds for philosophy generally (p. 120), he cannot have properly or satisfactorily demonstrated his unambiguously stated thesis. But perhaps he has succeeded in showing something else: namely, that ‘the rise of the analytical movement’ has at times relied on its self-authorised defenders failing to be ‘an example of the virtues’ which, officially at least, they were ‘seeking to inculcate’ (p. 116).
If this is so, then how are we to understand the division in the current philosophical culture? Perhaps what needs explaining is not ‘What distinguishes analytical philosophy from Continental philosophy?’, but how there came to be heirs of philosophy who came to call themselves
‘analytical philosophers’ and who, in doing so, cut themselves off, supposing themselves to be a world apart, from the rest of the Western philosophical community.
III
As I stated earlier, while I am not convinced that there is a philosophical rift in contemporary philosophy, I do not suppose the rift-stricken reality to have no philosophical significance at all. Put bluntly, I believe that the modern category of ‘Continental philosophy’ is best thought of as a recurrence, in determinate historical circumstances, of a figuration which has, since ancient Greek times, permeated and haunted the Western philosophical imagination in general: namely, that of the Sophist. I want to suggest why this may provide a crucial key to understanding the contemporary philosophical culture.
Between the 1850s and 1950s the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge underwent a transformation so deep and so profound as almost to defy summary.11 From fairly decadent clerical institutions in which inertia was endemic, the Universities became more or less what they still are today:
great centres of learning, staffed by-and-large by full-time career academics.
University philosophy could not but be touched by these changes. Indeed, by the end of the Second World War, the (hand-in-hand) professionalisation and development of philosophy in England had become so pronounced that the (now almost exclusively young) academic personnel began to talk of a ‘revolution in philosophy’. A history of this revolution was also emerging. And, while its focus was essentially national, it told of the emphatic rejection of specifically foreign ideas.
Geoffrey Warnock’s 1958 assessment of the development of English philosophy since 1900 presents the classic insider’s view of these developments.12 It is an exuberant and confident book. As Warnock saw
it, the philosophical culture in which he was working could now, as never
it, the philosophical culture in which he was working could now, as never