I have recently taken an interest in the huge chasm that separates Analytic and Continental philosophy, albeit the chasm seems to be narrowing. I am reading several books on the topic right now, and I not sure how many conclusions I have been able to draw yet. However, I still wanted to raise some questions in this post, along with one strong claim. And, perhaps, I will have some stronger claims in the future.

 There is one strong claim I will make at this moment. Technically, it is more accurately an admonition. I have repeatedly heard people, who have taken sides in this debacle, claim that the opposing side is simply wrong. Then, I have found out that many of these people have not even read any of the prominent philosophers from the opposing side. I find this fact disturbing. It is certainly one thing if someone avoided a certain group of philosophers because time does not allow us to read everything. We have to be selective to a certain extent. But it has become commonplace to criticize the other camp without seriously considering what is being said. My admonition is that we should maintain academic integrity and charity. I imagine that a lot of this undue criticism is a result of philosophical genetics; those we have aligned ourselves with [our mentors] have criticized the other way of doing philosophy and we have followed suit. Without doing the rigorous process of understanding a philosopher for ourselves, we have not yet earned the right to criticize that philosopher. And we are all guilty of this sometimes, but we need to become more conscientious to avoid it in the future.

 

In talking with people that I know who are studying philosophy, I have heard several excuses or reasons for why they choose not to read the other side. I will mention the main ones here. 1) “I don’t have time.” Of course, no one has time to read everything. However, we could, at least, look to some second hand literature to see if a topic we are studying has been addressed by the other tradition. The second hand literature could lead us to the primary sources where our topic is discussed. This way we could see what they might have contributed to the discussion. Furthermore, to the Analytic philosophers, is it really reasonable to jump from Kant to, say, Russell when doing the history of philosophy? Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger should not be easily dismissed. We might not agree with them, but we cannot simply ignore them.

 

2) I have heard many people from the Analytic tradition claim that the Continental authors are too difficult to understand, almost like they are trying to be obscure. This one seems bizarre to me. I thought philosophy was supposed to be hard work Again, we do not have time to read and thoroughly understand everyone, but we should not skip over an entire group of philosophers either.

 

3) One main criticism I have heard from the Continental folks directed at the Analytic tradition is that analytic writing is boring, and it is divorced from the human condition. In other words, analytic writers have devoted so much time to precision and rigor that their arguments have no value for human beings. There are those who probably enjoy doing logic for logic’s sake and have no interest in humanity. But it seems that this criticism is overstated because analytic philosophy does not require that one not deal with the human condition. Moreover, the reason why sometimes analytic writing comes off as boring is due to the goal of being precise and clear. Some analytic writers probably have sacrificed interesting writing for clear writing, but this ‘sacrifice’ is not necessarily an automatic result of analytic philosophy. Clarity and precision should not be seen as something horrible. We should want people who read what we write to understand what we are saying. There are ways, which we will be fine tuning forever, to write clearly, yet make it interesting.

 

There are some real differences between Analytic and Continental philosophy that might not ever get resolved. However, this possibility is not a reason to ignore the other tradition. We should be willing to engage philosophers in any tradition and try to learn what we can from anyone. We should be willing to regularly re-examine our own starting points and beliefs, and, if necessary, get rid of some. We should try to find points of contact and continue to narrow the breadth of this chasm that separates two types of philosophy.