Analytic philosophy in Jacobin and the Analytic philosophy wars- a brief comment

There’s an article in Jacobin magazine attacking Analytic philosophy, arguing that the dominance of analytic philosophy is, at least partly, the result of an attempt to depoliticize Philosophy through McCarthyism. Being that I am an Analytic Philosopher, I know nothing of history and therefore cannot refute it. Jokes aside, I think there’s probably truth to it, though how much is a question for a more learned hand.

A reckoning has been brewing within philosophy about analytic philosophy’s (comparative) social irrelevance since the fifties. That reckoning threatens to boil up at times, but sadly never quite does. It all just keeps brewing. Analytic philosophy is all too often socially irrelevant. Even when Analytic Philosophy does have quite radical social conclusions, [e.g., egalitarianism in political philosophy] the social urgency of these questions is inadequately conveyed. Even the philosophers who are working to address Analytic Philosophy’s social irrelevance all too often attempt to address it through neurotic middle class identitarianism rather than through radical egalitarianism founded in solidarity.

However, this is not my topic. I just have one thing that I want to say about debates about Analytic philosophy and its rivals, one point that, while not at all solving the issue, sorely needs to be made. I think it casts questions about Analytic Philospohy’s social relevance in a different light.

There’s a widespread narrative that says that Analytic philosophy is a betrayal of history and heritage- that Continental Philosophy is carrying on the tradition of Plato and Kant, while Analytic Philosophy is a rupture with “the great questions” - a false path branching off into irrelevance and semantic squabbling. This just isn’t true. Analytic Philosophy, particularly as it is carried on now, is gst closer to the “historic” concerns of philosophy than contemporary Continental Philosophy- I have nothing against Continental Philosophy, but if you pick up writing by a contemporary Analytic Philosopher, then compare it to Aquinas, Hume, Aristotle, Plato, Kant, Descartes or Spinoza, and then you pick up writing by a contemporary Continental Philosopher and make the same comparison, contemporary Analytic Philosophy is much closer in style to the historical approach of the discipline. That includes the practice of semantic squabbling.

Here’s some of the start of Spinoza’s ethics:

“I. By that which is self-caused, I mean that of which the essence involves existence, or that of which the nature is only conceivable as existent.

II. A thing is called finite after its kind, when it can be limited by another thing of the same nature; for instance, a body is called finite because we always conceive another greater body. So, also, a thought is limited by another thought, but a body is not limited by thought, nor a thought by body.

III. By substance, I mean that which is in itself, and is conceived through itself: in other words, that of which a conception can be formed independently of any other conception…”

Here’s the start of the Critique of Pure Reason:

That all our knowledge begins with experience there can be no doubt. For how is it possible that the faculty of cognition should be awakened into exercise otherwise than by means of objects which affect our senses, and partly of themselves produce representations, partly rouse our powers of understanding into activity, to compare to connect, or to separate these, and so to convert the raw material of our sensuous impressions into a knowledge of objects, which is called experience? In respect of time, therefore, no knowledge of ours is antecedent to experience, but begins with it.

But, though all our knowledge begins with experience, it by no means follows that all arises out of experience. For, on the contrary, it is quite possible that our empirical knowledge is a compound of that which we receive through impressions, and that which the faculty of cognition supplies from itself (sensuous impressions giving merely the occasion), an addition which we cannot distinguish from the original element given by sense, till long practice has made us attentive to, and skilful in separating it. It is, therefore, a question which requires close investigation, and not to be answered at first sight, whether there exists a knowledge altogether independent of experience, and even of all sensuous impressions? Knowledge of this kind is called à priori, in contradistinction to empirical knowledge, which has its sources à posteriori, that is, in experience.

I picked these two philosophers because they’re favorites among Continental Philosophers, if any philosophers were to be closer to the Continental approach, you’d think it was them. Yet these are very, much more like David Chalmers or Thomas Nagel than like Judith Butler or Byung-Chul Han. That is not to denigrate Butler or Han- in some ways, perhaps, it is to praise them for being part of something genuinely new. But the narrative that Analytic philosophy is a break with The Great Questions of earlier philosophers is silly.

The historical reason for this narrative is that it reflects the self-conception of Logical Positivism but:

A) Logical positivism has not been important for longer than the career of almost any living philosophy. At this point, equating logical positivism with Analytic Philosophy would be, chronologically, even more vapid that equating Continental Philosophy with Sartre.

B) Logical positivism was never really as iconoclastic as it claimed, at least in regard to the questions it chose to grapple with.

Okay, but if Analytic Philosophy continues the history of Philosophy in a more straightforward way than continental philosophy, why don’t Analytic Philosophers read their history? Fair question, but in an odd way I think the very directness with which analytic philosophy just keeps on asking the same questions as, say, Descartes in makes actually reading Descartes a secondary thing.

If Analytic Philosophy isn’t radical enough- and it surely isn’t- I would suggest that the problem isn’t that it’s uprooted from history. On the contrary, the problem is that it continues on from the history of philosophy too seamlessly.