Philosophy and Its History

The recent dispute that unfolded on this blog with Brian Leiter concerning his spoof posting on Derrida seems to have produced some considerable interest though, arguably, Leiter's own responses to my reply to his spoof produced more heat than light. Behind this spat, however, lies a more considered dispute concerning views one might have about the nature of the history of philosophy and what kinds of thinking are worth engaging with. In relation to this, Leiter published a view of what he terms "party-line Continentalists" (or PLC) over at his Nietzsche blog.


The discussion of the phenomena of PLC is, not entirely surprisingly, painted as a thoroughly "bad thing" and is even identified as occurring in some very specific philosophy departments. The basic essence of this phenomena of PLC is that it views the history of philosophy from the vantage point of phenomenology and, in particular, from the works of Heidegger and post-Heideggerian French philosophy (including, but not limited, to Derrida). The problem with PLC, on Leiter's view, is that it obscures other historical traditions and somewhat randomly makes its preferred conception of 20th century European philosophy the depositary for reading previous elements of the history of philosophy, specifically those identified as belonging to the "post-Kantian" tradition. In opposition to PLC Leiter sets his own view of "post-Kantian" philosophy which is one that sets out to distinguish the variant strands that have emerged from German Idealism to the tendencies variously identified in somewhat sweeping terms as "post-structuralist" or "post-modernist". In fairness to Leiter, a fairness he is far from generally showing to his critics, the main aim of his opposition to PLC is to give a more differentiated view of the history of European philosophy as it has developed in the last 200 years and to suggest that it is simply false to subsume all its developments into an orthodoxy that proceeds from assumptions of a broadly Heideggerian order.


In some respects these views of Leiter's are well-known and his statement of them in this posting, whilst unusually economical and largely - though not entirely - presented without his usual lacing of insult is less notable itself than in terms of having received a thoughtful response. It is to this response and its interaction with Leiter's conception of the history of philosophy that I will now turn with the intention of adding my own general view of the way in which this decidedly important debate might profitably be advanced. Prior to turning to the reply to Leiter, however, it is worth adding that his posting on this topic was prompted by a comment an earlier posting of his had received which enunciated a view that he took to be paradigmatic for PLC. Leaving aside the scholarly issue that was involved in this exchange (which concerned the legitimacy of appeal to Nietzsche's Nachlass in interpreting his work) the cardinal point for Leiter was the accusation that his own reading of Nietzsche manifested an "analytic" tendency. It was this claim that his hermeneutic preferences were "analytic" rather than "European" that led Leiter to present his view of PLC.


It is this division of responses to the history of philosophy between "analytic" and PLC that has led David Allen to respond to Leiter over at his blog Speculative Humbug. Allen argues that whilst the division between "analytic" and "Continental" might well not be the best way to view different interpretative strategies when it comes to the history of philosophy that there is, nonetheless, something captured by these terms that Leiter is in danger of simply not grasping. In place of the division between "analytic" and "Continental" Allen argues for one between what he terms "situated" and "open" kinds of scholarly reading. "Situated" readings, on Allen's view, present the thinking of figures in relation to some specified pre-existent conception of a topic as, for example, when Heidegger is related to AI rather than being read in terms of his own specific and original philosophical contribution. This "situated" reading is what, on Allen's view, leads to a response to the history of European philosophy that is broadly concerned to view its development as part of on-going conversations that don't include the possibility of conceptual ruptures. By contrast, "open" readings are focused on trying to see what the question of the thinker one is interested in interpreting was concerned with in its own terms and remain "open" to the view that what could emerge from this will be a way of thinking that is not capable of being assimilated to pre-existent ways.


Allen has further contributions to make in his response to Leiter and his posting is certainly worth reading in full (as is Leiter's original posting). However, I want to stop at this point in order to draw some lessons from the distinctions as Leiter and Allen have provided them and think through ways in which I can suggest this argument could be used as an occasion for advance of understanding rather than being - as is so often the case, particularly when disputes concern the status of the work of Derrida - merely a basis for mud-slinging. Allen's distinction does seem to me to capture something significant even though - as he notes himself - it is something of an abstraction.


Focus on a thinker's own works to try to figure out the nature of their contribution in its own terms is surely something worthwhile even it may be - as Kant remarked of Plato - that it is subsequently possible to understand a thinker's contribution better than they understood it themselves. Further, part of the point of any scholarly work on figures from the history of philosophy, is to uncover the multiple levels at which terms and concepts may be working in texts, levels that may well only partially be assimilable to the apparent general logic of the text. In some senses, this recognition is surely shared between scholars of different schools which is why, in many Anglo-American works, you meet expressions such as "this is Locke's 'official' view" which one can contrast with other "views" expressed even within the same text. When put like this it becomes apparent, in fact, that even if you do think the first requirement is to understand a thinker in their own terms it may well not be as evident as you may have first thought what those terms are. This is the basic reason why there is a problem of interpretation at all.


When we see this I think we can note a problem with viewing the focus on the original work of the thinker, as opposed to that of "situating" them in some subsequent debate, as a clear difference between a conception that is most concerned with the thinker's original contribution as opposed to an appropriation of their work for a different project. It is not that this doesn't describe something. It surely does since, for example, to work through a "Kantian" view of punishment, something on which a few philosophers have been engaged, is to elaborate quite a bit more than what Kant himself wrote on the topic (which turns out to be precious little). So, in such a case the "Kantian" conception turns out to be one that requires engagement with a set of distinctions and problems that Kant himself had no evident interest in (even, as it were, "un" officially). So clearly there is something different going on in this case than in the one were we think instead about the pattern of Kant's comprehension of time (a rather difficult and involved topic on which Kant wrote a great deal but which is not obviously coherently collectable into a single kind of doctrine).


When these relations are set out it becomes less clear that Allen's distinction between "situated" and "open" readings really catches the difference between "analytic" and "PLC" in such a way as to restore its importance in the light of Leiter's criticism. Leiter is right to suggest that there are traditions of reading the history of European philosophy and that, within these traditions, there is room for disagreement about what, if anything, is "central" to European philosophy and, further, whether there is, coherently, any such thing as "European" or, come to that, "analytic" philosophy. But Allen is also right to think that the view that some texts can be viewed as opening up entirely new developments in the history of philosophy is part of what motivates one conception of its history and that this is opposed to a more subliminal view that regards that history through the prism of a continuum.


In a broad sense, unless there is some sense of continuity within the history of philosophy then there is a problem about saying what it is that marks a philosophical debate as being specifically one that belongs within the history of philosophy. And it is here I think that we can begin to get at what is at issue between PLC and its opponent Leiter. PLC inherits a view that Leiter's original posting referred to, the view, enunciated clearly by Marx but also emergent in the general reaction to German Idealism, of thinking that there needs to be some engagement between philosophy and "its (possibly several) others". It is not that some sense of this is entirely lacking in those who oppose PLC but the sense of it that they might possess - particularly if, like Leiter, they work on Nietzsche - is one that still has a tendency to assimilate this "otherness" to a notion that is perhaps too ready-to-hand (as Heidegger would say). So Nietzsche, for example, appeals in a broad way to notions such as "life" and "nature" as ways of gesturing at something that does not fit a "logic of the concept" and, somewhat generally put, this resistance to a logic founded on the supremacy of the concept tends to reverberate within phenomenology (even in Husserl with notions like the "life-world") and its inheritance in French philosophy. The problem the latter tradition has, however, is that it wishes to register this resistance without falling back into the "obvious" character of what it is that might be thought to resist the concept (and which is the basis of an uncomfortable engagement with Nietzsche).


So I don't take this division to really rest where Allen takes it to be and nor do I, unlike Leiter, think that PLC is simply a mis-reading of the history of philosophy. It is, though, true that there is something very odd for a Kantian such as myself engaging in debate concerning views about the history of "post-Kantian" philosophy. This is evidently because the various proponents of the view that there is something that is "post-Kantian" philosophy clearly want to distinguish this from whatever "Kantian" philosophy might be. And yet there is, as Leiter again acknowledged, from the neo-Kantians of the late nineteenth century onwards, a revival of conceptions of philosophy that are thought by their proponents to be, in various ways, broadly "Kantian". This does not mean that there are not, within these trends, divisions like that between PLC and their proponents on the one hand and those who wish for different, perhaps more assimilatory readers, on the other. Clearly, since philosophers as different as Wilfrid Sellars  and Lyotard have given extended responses to Kant there is scope within quite different kinds of philosophy for views of what his work consists in and how it might be engaged with. Amongst them, however, it might well be helpful to define even more clearly than has been done in recent years, what the "Kantian" conception of philosophy really consists in and how it relates to  the quite different views that are at work for the adherents of PLC and their opponents.


In conclusion, I do think the phenomena of PLC that Leiter refers to does exist but, unlike Leiter, I don't lament it. It requires a different practice of philosophy and this different practice motivates a different response to the history of philosophy. That does not, or should not, rule out the view that there are many other responses to the history of philosophy available. But the more differentiated conception of such history that Leiter apparently wishes to push is, as Allen states, vitiated by Leiter's fairly partisan commitment to the view that there does exist an "analytic method" that is always superior to any other one (and which he apparently thinks exists even though "analytic philosophy" itself does not!). This commitment ensures that there remains an insuperable obstacle to serious argument with others and produces a peculiar strain in Leiter's commentary. It echoes, in fact, the commitment of the most devoted adherents of PLC, that Heidegger always has the last word on any topic, the basic facet of PLC to which different conceptions of philosophy do need to continue to object. Finding a place for a view of the practice of philosophy and its history that is serious about historical engagement and yet does also think that the centre of philosophical achievement may not be Heideggerian (might even be Kantian!) is something that I would prefer to engage in. This might yet also enable a reading of Derrida that does not produce the reflexive dismissive response of Leiter.

The Real Crisis of the Humanities

There is a problem discussing the idea of a "crisis" of the humanities and this is not merely because of the tired nature of the phrase. It is also due to the way in which such "crisis" tends to get understood. Primarily, when discussing this notion, philosophers and cultural theorists have in mind a problem with some tendency or other within the humanities itself. So, to take the classic case, Husserl, the thinker of "crisis" par excellence in his late unfinished work The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology presents the nature of the "crisis" that produced such phenomena as Nazism as residing in the spread of a false form of objectivism that ensured the true spirit of scientificity was lost.


Husserl's specific form of analysis has not been followed but the type of it has tended to spread. Other classic forms of analysis that take "crisis" to reside in some deep general cultural tendency include the late, fairly awful work of Lukacs The Destruction of Reason and Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment. At least the analysis of Adorno and Horkheimer, following a certain Heideggerian root, takes the problem of their title to reside in the spread of an instrumental form of rationality, a notion that does make a lot of sense. All the same there is much about their analysis that is rightly contentious.


At present the split within philosophy between analytic and "Continental" philosophers has furthered the tendency to produce analyses that tend to take the diagnosed cultural malaise to have a more proximate cause than any of the above mentioned classic works of cultural analysis. On the analytic side, in particular, there has been for some time now a stress that the difference in philosophical approach is indicative of something very deep. It has been elevated by many to a difference between those who really believe in the "values" underpinning humanistic study as such and those (engaged in an "assault on reason") who do not. The suggestion then spontaneously emerges that the reason why policy makers and politicians can engage in cuts of the humanities is due to the way humanistic study has made itself ridiculous.


The latest manifestation of such thinking can be seen in the attitude of Brian Leiter to being challenged for publishing, on his blog, a fairly childish spoof of Derrida that some others were foolish enough to assume was an accurate finding of a manuscript. I blogged about this a couple of days ago and those interested will find, under the comments section at the close of the posting, a reply from Leiter that shows he was considerably irritated by my response but, not only does it show this, but it also reveals the reasoning behind his original posting well. As he says in this comment, the rise of such figures as Derrida, may well be the reason why there is a "crisis" in the humanities. In other words, it is due to certain kinds of philosophy and literary theory that managers, policy makers and politicians think it is alright to close humanities departments, slash budgets and generally make it difficult for such study to continue.


When such reasoning is put in such bold form its transparent absurdity really becomes apparent. It should be pretty obvious to anyone that the real "crisis" in the humanities is not one that is based on the rise or dispersal of any specific philosophy or literary theory but is rather due to a managerial culture that has little time for the activities of philosophers and cultural theorists. The fact is that these figures will see little to choose between the works of Leiter and the works of Derrida as neither of them produce anything they can see as needed. This is due to the emphasis on education having an intrinsically vocational character as it should contribute primarily to the core activities of wealth creation. This emphatic dismissal of the general point of humanistic study is the real crisis of the humanities and it does no one any service to muddle the situation by suggesting it has anything to do with one's favourite hated theory or thinker. It has nothing to do with any such theories or thinkers but with a hostility to philosophy as such and a hostility to the kinds of theorising that occur in the humanities as such. In response it would be useful if those of us in the humanities could think of ways of uniting in reply rather than giving our opponents an easier time through manifesting all the tendencies that cause us to appear divided. The attack on Middlesex earlier this year was an attack on a "Continental" dept, one that takes the work of figures such as Derrida very seriously whereas the attack on King's College London was an attack on some very analytic figures. In both cases philosophers generally responded by defending the subject. Let's try and keep that spirit rather than fostering division and suggesting that it is primarily philosophers themselves who have created the situation in which philosophy is under attack.

Leiter Reports A "Derrida Manuscript"

In what must surely count as a low-point in blogging Brian Leiter reported yesterday on Leiter Reports a "discovered" manuscript of Derrida's on Paul De Man which he apparently had forwarded to him by Professor Edward Engelmann of Merrimack College. Now I don't know the work of Professor Engelmann or have any idea what his general view is of Derrida's work but to pass off this idiotic paragraph as a "fragment" of Derrida's is worse than dishonest. The fact that Leiter saw fit to publish it on his blog as a "discovery" led others yesterday to forward it on Twitter as a "genuine" article. Leiter and Engelmann should be ashamed of themselves for this "joke" and perhaps, at a time when humanities generally is under threat, they could find better ways of spending their time.

Interrupting Derrida

I've been reading a posthumous publication of an interview with Jacques Derrida entitled Copy, Archive, Signature. Its purported "subject" is photography with the subtitle telling us that what we have here is a "conversation" on the topic. Derrida gave a lot of interviews to a lot of people on very varied occasions with rather mixed results. This one dates from 1992 and has previously appeared in German in an abridged form but has not yet appeared in French. The question of the linguistic status of the text and, indeed, of texts generally is raised in a lengthy introduction by Gerhard Richter.


However, what struck me about this text were things different to what occurred to Richter. The interview has been transcribed from a tape recording and at one point it is marked in the transcription that there "appears" to be an interruption. We come back in with some odd remarks from Derrida about rain but following these there comes a question about the "role of the gaze in the photographic portrait". To this Derrida answers with a discussion of the peculiarity of gazing. When we gaze we do not see our own gazing. This ordinary fact is, naturally, somewhat peculiar since there is something essential about ourselves that is hidden from us. The camera, if it catches our gaze, shows us something in the photograph that we never otherwise catch a glimpse of. 


Earlier in the interview Derrida had spoken about the peculiar status of giving photographs of oneself to another. Early in the 20th century "thinkers" such as Heidegger would give signed photographs of themselves to others, something that no one in such a status does now. For historical reasons that are both obvious and yet also elusive only those identified as "celebrities" now give such gifts to others. 


What is given when the photograph of oneself is given to someone else? Rather than directly answer this Derrida discusses the way in which to give such a gift one both engages in narcissism and yet also, in another way, 'interrupts' it. The engagement in narcissism occurs due to the presentation of the image of oneself to the other, a presentation that seems to say to the other, "here I am". This saying, from me to you, thus signals my importance for and to you. By contrast, however, the "interruption" occurs due to the fact that what I give in giving this image is an indication of something that is lost to me, my own gaze. This giving of what is lost to me hence, in its way, robs my narcissism of its focus, removes my self from me. This leads finally to a couple of sentences that, in my view, are some of Derrida's most beautiful:

This is like the erotics of the gaze, the exchange of gazes, gazes that cross, and that cross at the point where each one cannot reappropriate itself, and therefore already gives itself, delivers itself and gives itself up, unarmed: this is a gesture that can in certain situations be more exposed, more giving and more intense than 'making love'. In it the gaze is naked, at once naked and not seeing itself. Exposed as overexposed, like nudity.

The giving of the image of my gaze provokes, in its turn, your gaze upon my gaze, a gaze here that I do not receive and that you find does not return to you since it is as lost to you as my gaze is to me. This "exchange" follows the gift but it is not an exchange in the sense that anything returns to either of us. It is a situation of absolute loss and this loss is what disarms us. The gaze as the surrendering of one to the other, the most basic form of nudity. This reflection clearly echoes something in Levinas but, even as it does so, takes away from Levinas something. That economy would itself merit further reflection, on another occasion.

Clarity and Philosophy (III)

My previous postings on this topic have tended to concentrate on responses that have been made, and thought justified, in response to works of Jacques Derrida. For some reason, his "style" is thought to be irritating by a number of people and this irritation has been rationalised by means of allegations of obscurity and, with this, an allegation of "wilful" attempts to mislead by means of such alleged obscurity. Previous postings gave short shrift to this reaction.


A thoughtful posting over at Pea Soup pursues this question from a slightly different angle, though, once again, taking off from a response to the writings of Derrida. As is pointed out here the canon of philosophical writings includes many, not least Kant, who are writers whose work is by no means evidently "clear" and yet who we take to be worth the effort required to try to work out the sense of the texts they wrote. This does instantly show that if clarity is a mere synonym for "accessibility" then there would be a serious problem with defending quite a considerable number of works in the history of philosophy. The fact that this attitude is generally not adopted does suggest that standards of what should be understood to be examples of "clarity" in philosophy can also be very varied. Is Aristotle, for example, more or less clear than Kant? Even if "clarity" is taken as a synonym for "accessibility" then there would be varied answers here depending on which works were focused on and, even within the works, which passages and stretches of argument. Also, given that the reputations of philosophers rise and fall at different points it would seem that the basis of appreciation is not clearly tied to standards of "clarity".


A second point made in the piece referred to above is that the irritation some feel when reading Derrida is one that rises from what the author calls: "the posturing, the pretense, the thin layer of bullshit that covers such exercises of coded insider-talk". Whilst this may well indicate sentiments felt the notion of the writing in question itself containing something that clearly corresponds to this attitude is disavowed by the author of the posting. Since the writing in question is effectively "innocent" of such "crimes" then what is it that lies behind such responses? After all, some of us might feel that the prose of, say, Quine, is rather more rebarbative than that of Derrida and that it certainly addresses an "in-crowd" through its own mode of "insider talk".


The sense of "insider talk" might well get at the problem better as it suggests a feeling of exclusion on behalf of certain readers when confronted by certain types of writing. Again, that exclusion can hit different readers differently since I, for one, feel much more excluded from the writings of Quine than those of Derrida. So this sense of exclusion might well have something to do with a certain kind of expectation when confronted with philosophical prose, an expectation that is at issue in the demand for "clarity". What this expectation would refer to is a model of writing that has been picked up from certain types of philosophical writing that the reader has grown habituated to such that when a different type of style is presented the search for comprehension of the piece gets disappointed. In this case, however, the problem surely lies with the reader for importing an expected standard that might well be the right one for getting published in journals of academic philosophy and for being taken seriously at conferences held in certain places with certain types of people attending. However, surely that reflects the generalisation of a certain model without accompanying argument for the basis of this model and simply assumes the greater transparency of this model based on the experience of a selective group? In which case the standard of "clarity" has itself, as I suggested in previous postings, been significantly left under-determined.

Philosophy and Clarity (II)

Some time ago I wrote a posting on this subject in response to some musings of Nigel Warburton who tops his web-site with the citation from John Searle, "If you can't say it clearly, you don't understand it yourself". The question I addressed there was not one of arguing in some sense "in favour" of obscurity, whatever that would mean. It was rather one of positing the question of what is meant by appeals to the value of "clarity" in philosophical disputes between variant traditions. Generally speaking, the appeal to it is made by analytic philosophers arguing that some European thinker who they refer to is simply not worth reading or engaging with (and the appeal to Searle is particularly interesting in this connection given the "exchange" between him and Jacques Derrida).


For an interesting review that makes this point at some length and with some amusing moments see this piece by Mark Champagne over at Philosophy's Other.

Clarity and Philosophy

I recently had a disagreement with Nigel Warburton on Twitter concerning the topic of the relationship between clarity and obscurity in philosophy. Warburton tweeted that you should never trust philosophers who can't explain their ideas to intelligent people. That this statement is not just a one-off is confirmed by the fact that his blog is headlined by a quote from John Searle that states: "If you can't say it clearly, you don't understand it yourself". Warburton appeared surprised that anyone would challenge these comments and suggested, in response to my arguing against these views, that it would be odd to favour obscurity.

The problem with the statements by Warburton is manifold and goes further than responding merely to him. It would be possible to begin by arguing that it is not an appropriate relationship to any philosopher to "trust" them. That is, that trust involves a relation in which one responds to the integrity of someone and perhaps questions of integrity should not be at the forefront of responding to a philosopher. After all, there is nothing about moral qualities that determines the interest of thought one way or the other. This might be thought too sweeping though since surely there are some cases where one might say that revelation of some sort of moral defect prohibited serious consideration? The classic example would be Heidegger's relationship to the Nazi Party but then shouldn't we include the anti-semitism of Frege as well in such evaluations? This kind of point effectively seems to get us nowhere when considering the worthiness or otherwise of contributions to philosophy.

The second question concerns the appeal to the verdict of "intelligent people" whoever they might be. Presumably what is meant here is the notion of the "intelligent public" being people of a certain standard of education, who, despite perhaps knowing little or no philosophy, could hear something and have a basis for evaluating its importance. It's odd that this kind of standard should be invoked at all with regard to philosophy. After all, could the Principia Mathematica meet it? Is it plausible to claim that Book Zeta of Aristotle's Metaphysics could really fit it? Or that the Critique of Pure Reason which Kant declares "could never be popular" could be held to such a standard? All these works involve a technical vocabulary that has to be learnt to read them and require serious study over a long period to really be responded to with any seriousness. Nor are they alone in this as who, after all, could even claim to have got the real point of John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding without a lengthy period of reading?

Why, given that the evidence of need for continuous and dedicated study for philosophical works to be responded to, is there even the pretense that ones of any quality could easily be retailed to a general (albeit "intelligent") public? The reason appears to reside in the citation from Searle that Warburton gives, the impression that there is some form of clarity that philosophy needs to aspire to and which can be held as a test for "good" philosophy. What this clarity consists in and how it is to be measured are rarely, if ever, themselves articulated. The citation of Searle reminds some of us of one notorious occasion in which the quest for "clarity" was itself exposed to some very detailed and difficult questions, the occasion of the "debate" (if such it really was) between Searle and Derrida. The original spark of this was Derrida's piece "Signature Event Context", part of which included a response to J.L. Austin and concerned, indeed, questions about the conditions of communication. John Searle's response to this piece suggested a series of failures on Derrida's part to understand J.L. Austin and, in return, in Limited Inc Derrida demonstrates in serious detail all the ways in which his original article had been misrepresented by Searle. This dispute is one of the sources of Searle's more emphatic commitment to a "clarity" that he had apparently defended in a dispute in which he failed to show the standards of clarity that he was the the titular defender of.

Calls for clarity in philosophy are in themselves obscure since underneath them is a view of what such clarity has to consist in. It must involve the ability to translate thought into a general common medium whose own conditions of possibility are never made transparent. There is evaluation here that does not speak its own name and which can be traced back, in Anglo-Saxon countries, to an implicit approval of a standard of "common sense" that has its own institutional and historical conditions, conditions that the advocates of such a standard of intelligibility have no interest in making apparent. Only under the condition that such conditions can themselves be made stakes of a debate would be it possible to address the question of whether some philosophers are, or are not, more "obscure" than others.