4.5: Continental Philosophy

Continental philosophy

Analytic philosophy had comparatively little influence on the European continent, where the speculative and historical tradition remained strong. Dominated by phenomenology and existentialism during the first half of the 20th century, after World War II Continental philosophy came to embrace increasingly far-reaching structuralist and poststructuralist critiques of metaphysics and philosophical rationality. 

The phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger

Considered the father of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), a German mathematician-turned-philosopher, was an extremely complicated and technical thinker whose views changed considerably over the years. His chief contributions were the phenomenological method, which he developed early in his career, and the concept of the “life-world,” which appeared only in his later writings. As a technique of phenomenological analysis, the phenomenological method was to make possible “a descriptive account of the essential structures of the directly given.” It was to isolate and lay bare the intrinsic structure of conscious experience by focusing the philosopher’s attention on the pure data of consciousness, uncontaminated by metaphysical theories or scientific or empirical assumptions of any kind. Husserl’s concept of the life-world is similarly concerned with immediate experience. It is the individual’s personal world as he directly experiences it, with the ego at the centre and with all of its vital and emotional colourings.

With the appearance of the Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung (1913–30; “Annual for Philosophical and Phenomenological Research”) under Husserl’s chief editorship, his philosophy flowered into an international movement. Its most-notable adherent was Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), whose masterpiece, Being and Time, appeared in the Jahrbuch in 1927. The influence of the phenomenological method is clear in Heidegger’s work; throughout his startlingly original investigations of human existence—with their unique dimensions of “being-in-the-world,” dread, care, and “being-toward-death”—Heidegger adheres to the phenomenological principle that philosophy is not empirical but is the strictly self-evident insight into the structure of experience. Later, the French philosophical psychologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–61), building on the concept of the life-world, used the notions of the lived body and its “facticity” to create a hierarchy of human-lived experience.

The existentialism of Jaspers and Sartre

Existentialism, true to its roots in Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, was oriented toward two major themes: the analysis of human existence, or Being, and the centrality of human choice. Thus, its chief theoretical energies were devoted to ontology and decision.

Existentialism as a philosophy of human existence was best expressed in the work of the German philosopher Karl Jaspers (1883–1969), who came to philosophy from medicine and psychology. For Jaspers as for Dewey, the aim of philosophy is practical. But whereas for Dewey philosophy is to guide human action, for Jaspers its purpose is the revelation of Being, “the illumination of existence,” the answering of the questions of what human beings are and what they can become. This illumination is achieved, and Being is revealed most profoundly, through the experience of “extreme” situations that define the human condition—conflict, guilt, suffering, and death. It is through a confrontation with these extremes that the individual realizes his existential humanity.

Jean-Paul Sartre

The chief representative of existentialism as a philosophy of human decision was the French philosopher and man of letters Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80). Sartre too was concerned with Being and with the dread experienced before the threat of Nothingness. But he found the essence of this Being in liberty—in freedom of choice and the duty of self-determination. He therefore devoted much effort to describing the human tendency toward “bad faith,” reflected in perverse attempts to deny one’s own responsibility and to flee from the truth of one’s inescapable freedom. Sartre did not overlook the legitimate obstacles to freedom presented by the facts of place, past, environment, society, and death. However, he demanded that one surmount these limitations through acts of conscious decision, for only in acts of freedom does human existence achieve authenticity. In The Second Sex (1949), Simone de Beauvoir (1908–86), Sartre’s fellow philosopher and lifelong companion, attempted to mobilize the existentialist concept of freedom for the ends of modern feminism.

After World War II, Sartre came to believe that his philosophy of freedom had wrongly ignored problems of social justice, and in his later work, especially the Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960), he sought to reconcile existentialism with Marxism.Recent trends

The main theme of postwar Continental philosophy was the enthusiastic reception in France of Nietzsche and Heidegger and the consequent rejection of metaphysics and the Cartesian rationalism inherited by Sartre and his fellow existentialists. For millennia the goal of metaphysics, or “first philosophy,” had been to discern the ultimate nature of reality. Postwar Continental philosophy, recoiling from omnipresent images of mass annihilation, increasingly held metaphysical holism itself responsible for the catastrophes of 20th-century history. The critics of metaphysics argued that only a relentless castigation of such excesses could produce a philosophy that was genuinely open toward Being, “thinghood,” and world.In the 1950s, French philosophy faced a series of major challenges arising from structuralism, the new movement in anthropology that analyzed cultures as systems of structurally related elements and attempted to discern universal patterns underlying all such systems. In his A World on the Wane (1955), for example, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009) issued a pointed indictment of philosophical method, claiming that it lacked empirical grounding and was so arbitrary as to be capable of proving or disproving anything. Sartre’s political missteps during the early 1950s, when he had been an enthusiastic fellow traveler of the French Communist Party, did little to enhance the credibility of his philosophical rationalism.In his influential book The Order of Things (1966), the French philosopher and intellectual historian Michel Foucault (1926–84) paradoxically employed structuralist methods to criticize the scientific pretensions of natural history, linguistics, and political economy—the disciplines known in France as the “human sciences.” But the main target of his critique was the anthropocentric orientation of the humanities, notably including philosophy. Foucault argued provocatively that “man” was an artificial notion, an invention of the 19th century, and that its obsolescence had become apparent in the postwar era.In later books such as Discipline and Punish (1975) and The History of Sexuality (1976), Foucault’s gaze shifted to systems of power. In a Nietzschean spirit, he coined the term power-knowledge to indicate the involvement of knowledge in the maintenance of power relations. As he argued in the essay “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” (1977), an examination of the notion of truth reveals that

all knowledge rests upon injustice, that there is no right, not even in the act of knowing, to truth or a foundation for truth, and that the instinct for knowledge is malicious (something murderous, opposed to the happiness of mankind).

The movement known as deconstruction, derived mainly from work begun in the 1960s by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), displayed a similar hostility to metaphysics and its quest for totality and absolute truth. Under the sway of Heidegger’s call for “a destruction of the history of ontology,” Derrida endorsed the deconstruction of Western philosophy—i.e., the uncovering and undoing of the false dichotomies, or “oppositions,” inherent in philosophical thinking since the time of the ancient Greeks. In Derrida’s view, these oppositions result from the misguided assumption, which he called “logocentrism,” that there is a realm of truth that exists prior to and independently of its representation by linguistic and other signs. Logocentrism in turn derives from the “metaphysics of presence,” or the tendency to conceive of fundamental philosophical concepts such as truth, reality, and being in terms of ideas such as identity, presence, and essence and to limit or ignore the equally valid notions of otherness, absence, and difference. Because of this tendency, Derrida concluded, there is a necessary relationship between the metaphysical quest for “totality” and political “totalitarianism.” As he wrote in an early essay, “Violence and Metaphysics” (1967):

Incapable of respecting the Being and meaning of the other, phenomenology and ontology would be philosophies of violence. Through them, the entire philosophical tradition…would make common cause with oppression and technico-political possession.

The French philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas (1905–95) attributed the misguided quest for totality to a defect in reason itself. In his major work, Totality and Infinity (1961), he contended that, as it is used in Western philosophy, reason enforces “domination” and “sameness” and destroys plurality and otherness. He called for the transcendence of reason in a first philosophy based on ethics—and in particular on the biblical commandment “You shall not kill” (Exodus 20:13)—rather than on logic. It is no small irony, then, that Continental philosophy, whose roots lay in the attempt by Kant, Hegel, and their successors to defend reason against the twin excesses of dogmatism and epistemological skepticism, should come to equate reason with domination and to insist that reason’s hegemony be overthrown.

A powerful alternative to this view appeared in work from the 1970s by the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas (born 1929). Although agreeing with the French Nietzscheans that traditional metaphysics was obsolete and, in particular, that it did not provide a path to absolute truth, Habermas did not reject the notion of truth entirely, nor did he accept the Nietzscheans’ call for a “farewell to reason.” While acknowledging that the notion of truth is often used to mask unjust power relations and partisan class interests, he insisted that the very possibility of such an insight presupposes that one can conceive of social relations that are just and interests that are held in common by all members of society.

Habermas’s The Theory of Communicative Action (1981) was devoted in part to developing an account of truth in terms that did not imply that there exists an “absolute” truth of the kind traditionally posited by metaphysics. Following the doctrines of pragmatism and reinterpreting Austin’s earlier work on speech acts, Habermas contended that ordinary communication differs from other forms of human action in that it is oriented toward mutual agreement rather than “success”; that is, it aims at reaching “intersubjective” understanding rather than at mastering the world through instrumental action. The process of constructing such an understanding, however, requires that each individual assume that the utterances of the other are for the most part “true” and that the other can provide reasons to support the truth or validity of his utterance if called upon to do so. Specifically, individuals must interpret each other’s utterances as true assertions about objects and events in an “external world,” as descriptions of morally “right” actions in a social world of shared norms, or as “sincere” expressions of thoughts and feelings in the speaker’s “inner world.” In this “discourse theory of truth,” the notion of truth, far from being a misguided fiction of metaphysics, is a regulative ideal without which communication itself would be impossible.