Continental vs. Analytic Philosophy: The differences, in 35 points
What are "Continental" and "analytic" philosophy?
1) Continental philosophy is mainly German, French, and Italian. (After the middle ages, it developed primarily in what had been the Latin Western Roman Empire, and it is continuous with its Latin heritage in a way that British philosophy from Bacon and Hobbes on was not). "Analytical" philosophy started out in Vienna and is mainly English-language. (Polish philosophy, important in logic and philosophy of language before 1945, is part of this tradition also). Contemporary works of philosophy outside these languages, or in English and not the other three but following the tendencies and traditions of them, is usually secondary, consisting mostly of commentaries or less important works. For reasons that will of course live in infamy, Germany's importance in philosophy largely ended some time after the war with the passing of major thinkers who came of age before it; and so today, Continental philosophy is largely French and Italian.
2) A full understanding of the differences would take account of the governmental and political differences separating England, the British Commonwealth nations, and the United States from France and the Continent. These would include the English common law vs. Roman (statutory) law traditions, the rise of industrial and financial capitalism in England and the social conditions that facilitated this development and that would be equally pronounced in the Atlantic colonies that became the United States, perhaps the most purely bourgeois society to date, as well as the specificity of the French Revolution and the republican tradition that it was part of, as distinct from the liberal tradition of England and the United States. No doubt the former is more fertile ground for certain kinds of intellectual inquiry and their ability to inform various political projects, to which we must contrast the typically skeptical intellectual climate of the English-speaking world, which allows for the profound anti-intellectual tendencies in American social and political life, as well as, perhaps, the tendency there toward ad hominem counter-arguments and claims, abetted by the discourse of a universality that is an inclusion of particularities.
3) Continental philosophy is much more often, and much more, political, and in a different way. Beginning with Hegel, political philosophy proper tends to be replaced by social theory. (Sociology as a science is a product of much the same time and arose in Germany and France). Social theory may be critical, whereas political philosophy is theory of the best form of government or way of governing and so essentially advice to princes. Common people read it only because they imagine themselves, perhaps as voters, as sharing the concerns of the prince and thinking from his point of view.
4) Yet, the politics/government distinction surely depends either on their virtual identification via some form of the revolutionary project, or (and today far more tenably) the migration of “the political” to art. This yields the conjunction in terms of the theory/practice distinction of social theory on the one hand and artistic practices, which may be critical, or visionary, or both, on the other.
This new epistème emerged after the French Revolution and was intensified after World War I (and the Bolshevik Revolution), and again since 1968. Two events in the world of ideas marked the years 1966-67: the 1967 publication in France of Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, and the conference at Johns Hopkins University that first introduced “French theory” to the United States, where in the 50 years since it has driven much of the most creative and important scholarly work in the humanities (outside Philosophy) in the United States. In France, it was in Philosophy as an academic discipline proper that this work was largely done, while in America it was called “theory” and the tacit understanding always was that one “did theory” by discussing artworks. This meant that a new discipline emerged, whose name simply is “theory,” but almost always it is at once “social theory” and a theory of texts or artworks of some kind. In both countries, the period after 1968 was one of relative quiescence and retrenchment. In the US, there are signs that this period has ended, with new opportunities and dangers, in a context of much anxiety.
The US has a sharp divide between scholarly and popular presses that France does not have, and there are many more people who read contemporary “philosophy” (France) or “theory” (US) without having or needing the alibi that doing so is their profession. However, the rise of the Internet is certainly a portent, and conjoined with automation, we can predict that before long new articulations of spaces and modes of inquiry will emerge, with effects on social movements that are hard to predict.
5) Ethical, aesthetic, and political concerns predominate in Continental philosophy along with metaphysical or ontological ones, and all these areas tend to be motifs that function at least latently as a unity.
6) Continental philosophy has roots in medieval as well as ancient philosophy that the English/American tradition appears not to have.
7) Doubtless the marginalization of Eastern Europe and Russia in this regard has to do in part with the importance of the Latin legacy, as well as simply more advanced societies historically in economic and social terms. The Latin legacy in philosophy is partly the legacy of philosophy in Latin, that is, in late antiquity and the middle ages but also through the seventeenth century.
8) The project of modern social theory has in part been a critical understanding of modernity.
9) Because of (2) and (4), as well as its political importance on the Continent, Marxism has played an important role in this tradition, and as philosophy, whereas in England and America it is more often economics, history, maybe sociology. As the role of Marxism has declined, other more or less left-wing philosophical tendencies have taken its place in what is for historical reasons recently a less unitary manner. (It is necessary, however, to define “left” in thought. I suggest it allows of and often combines three axes: (a) hierarchy/equality, (b) authority/liberty, and (c) tradition/modernity. It is on (b) that the English and French traditions diverge, because the former understands liberty as property and limitation of power (Hobbes, Locke, Montesqieu), while the latter is democratic (Rousseau, Hegel) rather than individualistic. This is why the Continental tradition has been largely rationalist. The meeting point of both ideas of liberty is freedom of speech, press, and the arts. Today, uses of the philosophy of language in the analytical tradition to reread Heidegger with Hegel may well be fruitful in making possible a new liberal republicanism that moves beyond the sterility and impasses of the English/American “limits to power” idea (which is Hobbesian at its basis, taking up the Christian “original sin” idea on the basis of the colonialist project, where a sovereign and (effectively) monarchical state must manage the lives, and attendant opportunities and risks, of all of its subject-citizens, who in fact are only subjects and not citizens, as they are ruled by a professionalocracy whose judgments are unquestionable at the point of enunciation and application, and only contestable through the almost always futile, or exhaustively expensive, recourse of law courts or the expression of opinion about matters to be decided at the ballot box, where the individual of course has an infinitesimally small capacity to affect the outcome.
10) Continental philosophers have a sense of history and of the present moment as part of it in a critical way.
11) It also is more apt to betray the heritage of "religious" concerns, with what might be called "what we ultimately care about," or the ethical problem of what is the good life, etc. A sense of history and the crises of modernity may or may not play a role in them.
12) Indeed, religion arguably will only survive in Hegelian fashion through self-transcendence. This certainly does include the concept of God. (All Nietzsche meant was this concept and those connected to it are no longer intelligible; at least if there is a God, we have badly theorized him). Such a project could be very vital. It will save what can still be called “religious” but in a way far more robust and vital than what can be said in its old language. It will do that through the contemporary Continental tradition and its heritage, but may also use the resources of the analytical tradition (after all, “God” is a name, as well as a concept, if this name has a meaning or sense and not only a reference as designating some kind of person), and the result will be intelligible as the heritage of, among other things, the philosophical possibilities and questions of the Latin middle ages.
13) English-language philosophy has centered, from the first days of analytical philosophy proper with Russell, around philosophy of language, logic, epistemology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of natural science, which can be epistemological or interpretive.
14) One reason is that Americans, being essentially practical, care little about abstract or hypothetical questions or theories, and so intellectual Americans usually are most interested in history and natural science, which they tend to use in ways that are epistemological naive, thinking too that answers to “what” imply “why.”
15) English-language philosophers often are solving technical problems or what seem to be such. In contrast, Continental philosophers wear their relevance on their sleeve.
16) The English language in philosophy appears to lend itself to a kind of clarity and precision that risks being pedestrian or pedantic. And so you may read it and say, It may well be true, but why should I care? By contrast, the German language lends itself to allusiveness and plurivocity based on the compound character of words, while the French and Italian languages lend themselves to a clarity that is lucid and compelling, and at worst rhetorical, as well as to relationships of implication between thoughts intrinsic to a sentence in the form of multiple clauses in quasi-logical syntactic subordinations or coordinations.
17) French thought is revolutionary in its sensibility, and can combine the mathematical and the poetic, being very well-suited to both. Italian thought is typically scholarly and classicist, though in some ways Italy is in philosophy almost a suburb of Paris, or its smaller twin city. In Marxism and phenomenology in particular, it was similarly fruitful, and sometimes went further, though usually with less notoriety. Today most Italian philosophy is to a greater or lesser degree on the left and is either Marxist or left-Heideggerian or both. German thought was said to achieved a philosophical revolution after Napoleon, but in fact it is more part of a culture of inwardness, lending itself to a melancholy that German intellectual men guard, from their provincial towns in a nation of them, like a precious stone.
18) American philosophy differs from British in being heavily influenced by pragmatism. The British are not egalitarian enough for that, and their greatest universities show signs of the aristocracy that is uniquely surviving in their land. Pragmatism is surely one philosophical tendency which easily spans any divide between bourgeoisie and proletariat, except that, as in early Heidegger, its idea of work is that of the medieval workshop or the self-employed businessman, who thinks of himself as a worker and not a capitalist, whose work is organized autonomously, and is meaningful (as proletarian labor generally is not, and its paradigmatic form until recently, assembly-line work, is a radical negation of).
19) Deep are the differences between the English-speaking peoples and speakers of the other European language. It is the UK that is the odd man out in Europe, perhaps as much as though in a very different way than Turkey and the little corner of remnant Muslim countries, and more so than Russia, more than Spain and Portugal. The differences include the common law rather than Roman legal system and the dominant political heritage on the Continent of the French Revolution, which did not much influence England or any of its former colonies, including the US.
20) The differences of English philosophy from philosophy on the Continent antedate Russell and stem at least from Hobbes, as well as Bacon’s ideas of science. Descartes (the first modern French year zero revolutionary) vs. Hume: certitude or skepticism. Spinoza, Rousseau, Hegel: a very different political tradition from Hobbes and Locke. England and America are today in political economy the lands of extreme “liberalism” (or libertarianism, or neoliberalism, to use contemporary terms), and this has deep cultural, philosophical, and political roots. The French Revolution led to socialism, the American one led to a liberalism that has always threatened, in ways that may be at best comical, to make social life itself unmanageable and impossible. Taking that tendency to the limit, one could not even reason or do philosophy except as a Robinson Crusoe, since there would be no social life, and philosophers need it as much as prisoners. The philosophy of Hobbes is the ultimate origin of the American police state, since it holds that everyone is dangerous (or sick, in the therapy ideology whose crypto-moralism is based on a Protestant/romanticist avoidance of the very ideas of justice and responsibility, as moral illnesses are treated in a manner that gives nothing to understand). Locke showed why we can no longer worship liberty: it is based on property and nothing more.
21) American philosophers who want to cross or straddle the divide usually are steeped in, or commentators on, Kant, Hegel, or Heidegger. Most interesting European philosophy since 1960 escapes them, and they do not and would not know what to do with it, because they do not share its concerns. Often they express this by saying it is simply rhetorical nonsense. The English speakers after all, though lacking a national academy of language as the French have, are horribly tied to Protestant notions of propriety and the first thing they do when entering a conversation with you is do a grammar check to make sure you are following all the rules rightly. Their philosophy is half about that in a way.
22) Given the near-exclusivity, and the above-defined differences of specialty, European philosophers interested in taking account of logic, philosophy of language, or philosophy of science should read the better Anglos. They can very well read and use them and ought to much more so. That is the exchange or crossing that would be fruitful. English and American philosophers need not bother unless they care about problems of social theory and contemporary society and non-parliamentary approaches to "the political," or an ethics or aesthetics based partly on it.
23) The sharp divide in philosophy is consonant with differences in other fields, including psychoanalysis and psychiatry.
24) The implicit addressee of English and American philosophy is (not other scholars but) the sovereign, singular or plural. (Business and professional “ethics” are a form of this). The addressee of Continental philosophy is the common educated person.
25) Philosophy itself can and will bridge the philosophy/poetry divide, and this is not a question of style but a political project.
26) Maybe the question that divides the traditions is, does history exist, or only nature?
27) A related question is the possible role of philosophy in everyday life. (Hint: Using it as therapy is not an answer).
28) As globalization cannot but privilege the English and European traditions in thought while also hybridizing them, the future of philosophy in other languages (e.g., Spanish and Portugeuse, Russian, Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese) will depend partly on what philosophers working in these traditions are able to do with the traditions that have been dominant until now. Obviously, relying principally on ancient religious traditions in these languages would be a dead-end, and would probably mostly interest Anglophone partisans of some “New Age” therapeutic “spirituality.”
29) Among the distinctive feature of European thought is the valorization of notions of exceptionality or transcendence. This first emerges clearly in Plato with his metaphor of enlightenment as involving exit from a “cave” wherein remain the masses. Doubtless because as a language it is related to Greek and Latin, Sanskrit thought shares this, and it originated the idea of “spirituality” as transcendence of the material life of sensate bodies. Chinese thought lacks these notions of transcendence and consequently has a fundamentally pacific and conservative character, identifying the good with harmony. There may be much value in exploring these differences and looking for alternatives that do not depend on mere nostalgia or antiquarianism.
30) What is, or can be, called “Jewish philosophy” divides in three ways: (1) Between what counts as such to philosophers, and to rabbis, most of whom have no philosophical training (on this basis, there are arguably is only one twentieth-century religious Jewish philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas; the others, including Buber and Rosenzweig, Heschel and Soloveitchik, are not philosophers but something else, and worth reading for other reasons; perhaps they are each just as much a philosopher as Camus is in L’Homme Revolté (The Rebel), meaning they say interesting and suggestive things that are imprecise and legitimated more by reference to canonical literary works than by argument; and (2) Among those for whom academic philosophy or philosophy proper matters, between German and French traditions. The French tradition centers around the figure of Levinas, but also includes contemporary philosophers with an interest in Judaism or some idea of it, and who are not all Jewish. (These include Derrida and Lyotard). The most important precursor in French (and Italian) philosophy today is Heidegger, and Nietzsche is also important. In the more distinctively German tradition, Kant is still the central figure, and Kierkegaard a secondary one. Rabinically-trained American Jewish philosophers often refer only to figures in the German tradition exclusive of Nietzsche and Heidegger and to no French thinkers at all. Consequently, their thinking bears the more moralistic cast that is common to Kantian rationalism and Kierkegaardian “existentialism.”
31) The third way in which “Jewish philosophy” divides is most important: Among the great Jewish philosophers of the last century, what is remarkable is that a number of them are political philosophers: Arendt, Benjamin, Adorno and Horkheimer, Strauss. Not only might it seem that most secular Jewish intellectuals have been highly concerned with political questions, and they on the whole more interesting and influential than their religious counterparts; it may be that the most vital questions of our age are not ethical but political ones. And I think that is in fact the case. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, the importance of both socialist and nationalist movements to Europe’s most prominently excluded population was testament to this. But there was only greater thinker of any social movement in this period, and of course it was Marx. And I venture to suggest that the primacy of religious and ethical concerns is challenged less by that of scientific than political thought. That is:
32) Continental philosophy since Hegel is characterized by what might be called the Primacy of the Political. In some sense, all interesting and important philosophy today is political philosophy, whatever else it is.
33) The above-described orientation to some extent mirrors that of those few among predominantly analytic American philosophy departments that have chairs in areas of Continental philosophy: they are almost all German in orientation, and these scholars are historians of philosophy specialize in commentaries rather than original philosophical theories. The more original thinkers are in other departments (like Judith Butler who teaches in a Rhetoric department, and some others whose appointments are in literature departments), at the (mostly) lesser universities on the Continental circle (but in this respect Notre Dame and the New School for Social Research stand out).
34) If “Jewish philosophy” has a future, it will not be defined by Judaism unless what that is undergoes some radical shifts. (And if that were to happen, it is philosophers with a knowledge of traditions and canonical texts who would be best able to articulate these shifts). One possible avenue for this would of course be through political philosophy. Yet, it is hard to imagine what that could mean that would be specific to the State of Israel rather than to broad international concerns, and in any case, Judaism is not a separate civilization and the Jewish people have always been fated to play some set of roles in the larger one. There is one civilization today, and it is capitalist, and culturally it is predominantly European and English-speaking but with various hybrids, and this of course can be very fruitful. What philosophers who belong to any particular cultural tradition should do is draw upon that tradition where it seems useful to do so and abstract from it elements of a philosophy with a universal address, since of course there is no other kind.
35) As for theology, it is a branch of philosophical metaphysics, and since the concept of “God” is essentially the same in the three Abrahamic religions, there can be no Jewish, Muslim, Catholic, Protestant, or Orthodox Christian Philosophy that does not engage with the other works in this broad and singular tradition. Should it not be enough that we are philosophers when we are thinking and whatever else we are (even if it is in some sense more fundamental) when we are doing whatever else we are doing? The question of priority is meaningless simply because it is only askable from within a standpoint that already answers that question. And partisans of “existentialism” and other “irrationalisms” should be reminded that a Jew praying in a synagogue, a Catholic receiving communion, etc., is not an irrational person though praying is not reasoning but something else. The same is true of making love: it is not a rational activity, and yet it is not really an irrational one, since it hardly requires abrogating the laws of non-contradiction and the excluded middle. That irrationality that is worth its name attempts to deny reason on its own grounds, and to assert not that this or that phenomenon or activity is so structured as to defy rational explanation, but that all phenomena and activities are, even and especially those we take to be rationally explicable. So irrationalism is not doing something that does not involve reasoning; it is believing something that is contrary to reasoning and that you would not do if you had been thinking clearly or perhaps even thinking at all.
Questions
1) What is the characteristic relationship of philosophy to history?
2) Is it not true that every great philosophy invents a new manner of thinking and therewith also a new form of life? This would make of a philosopher an auteur and a new philosophy an artwork of a kind. (One cannot say that analytical philosophy excludes this possibility, for Wittgenstein is certainly an auteur in this sense, as are Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Montaigne, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, and, in France after Sartre: Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, Badiou). That philosophy takes thinking as its object is perhaps the most incontrovertible proposition. That philosophy is “theory,” aside from invoking the question, What is mathematics? may not follow. Montaigne has no theory but a practice of writing. Foucault raises the question of history and theory’s historical character in a different way than Hegel. Heidegger, and also Wittgenstein, suggest a practice of inquiry that is not theoretical exactly but clearly still philosophical.