{"id":450,"date":"2019-12-30T14:14:13","date_gmt":"2019-12-30T14:14:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/courses.lumenlearning.com\/suny-fmcc-philosophy1\/?post_type=chapter&p=450"},"modified":"2025-12-18T14:02:16","modified_gmt":"2025-12-18T14:02:16","slug":"450","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/courses.lumenlearning.com\/suny-fmcc-philosophy1\/chapter\/450\/","title":{"raw":"5.3: Continental Philosophy","rendered":"5.3: Continental Philosophy"},"content":{"raw":"

Continental philosophy<\/h1>\r\n
\r\n
Analytic<\/a>\u00a0philosophy had comparatively little influence on the European continent, where the speculative and historical tradition remained strong. Dominated by phenomenology and\u00a0existentialism<\/a>\u00a0during the first half of the 20th century, after\u00a0World War II<\/a>\u00a0Continental philosophy came to embrace increasingly far-reaching structuralist and poststructuralist\u00a0critiques<\/a>\u00a0of\u00a0metaphysics<\/a>\u00a0and philosophical rationality.\u00a0
\r\n

The\u00a0<\/span>phenomenology<\/a>\u00a0of\u00a0<\/span>Husserl<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0<\/span>Heidegger<\/a><\/h2>\r\nConsidered the father of phenomenology,\u00a0Edmund Husserl<\/a>\u00a0(1859\u20131938), 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 \u201c<\/span>life-world<\/a>,\u201d which appeared only in his later writings. As a technique of phenomenological analysis, the phenomenological method was to make possible \u201ca descriptive account of the essential structures of the directly given.\u201d It was to isolate and lay bare the\u00a0intrinsic<\/a>\u00a0structure of conscious experience by focusing the philosopher\u2019s attention on the pure data of\u00a0consciousness<\/a>, uncontaminated by\u00a0metaphysical<\/a>\u00a0theories or scientific or\u00a0empirical<\/a>\u00a0assumptions of any kind. Husserl\u2019s concept of the life-world is similarly concerned with immediate experience. It is the individual\u2019s personal world as he directly experiences it, with the ego at the centre and with all of its vital and emotional colourings.\r\n\r\n<\/span><\/span>With the\u00a0appearance<\/a>\u00a0of the\u00a0<\/span>Jahrbuch f\u00fcr Philosophie und ph\u00e4nomenologische Forschung<\/a><\/em>\u00a0(1913\u201330; \u201cAnnual for Philosophical and Phenomenological Research\u201d) under Husserl\u2019s chief editorship, his philosophy flowered into an international movement. Its most-notable adherent was\u00a0Martin Heidegger<\/a>\u00a0(1889\u20131976), whose masterpiece,\u00a0<\/span>Being and Time<\/a><\/em>, appeared in the\u00a0Jahrbuch<\/em>\u00a0in 1927. The influence of the phenomenological method is clear in Heidegger\u2019s work; throughout his startlingly original investigations of human existence\u2014with their unique dimensions of \u201cbeing-in-the-world,\u201d dread, care, and \u201cbeing-toward-death\u201d\u2014Heidegger 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\u00a0<\/span>Maurice Merleau-Ponty<\/a>\u00a0(1908\u201361), building on the concept of the life-world, used the notions of the lived body and its \u201cfacticity\u201d to create a\u00a0hierarchy<\/a>\u00a0of human-lived experience.\r\n\r\n<\/section>
\r\n

The\u00a0<\/span>existentialism<\/a>\u00a0of\u00a0<\/span>Jaspers<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0<\/span>Sartre<\/a><\/h2>\r\nExistentialism, true to its roots in Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, was oriented toward two major themes: the analysis of\u00a0<\/span>human<\/a>\u00a0existence, or Being, and the centrality of human choice. Thus, its chief theoretical energies were devoted to\u00a0ontology<\/a>\u00a0and decision.\r\n\r\n<\/span><\/span>Existentialism as a philosophy of human existence was best expressed in the work of the German philosopher\u00a0Karl Jaspers<\/a>\u00a0(1883\u20131969), who came to philosophy from medicine and\u00a0psychology<\/a>. 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, \u201cthe illumination of existence,\u201d 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 \u201cextreme\u201d situations that define the human condition\u2014conflict, guilt, suffering, and death. It is through a confrontation with these extremes that the individual realizes his\u00a0existential<\/a>\u00a0humanity.\r\n\r\n<\/span>Jean-Paul Sartre<\/strong>\r\n\r\nThe chief representative of existentialism as a philosophy of human decision was the French philosopher and man of letters\u00a0Jean-Paul Sartre<\/a>\u00a0(1905\u201380). Sartre too was concerned with\u00a0<\/span>Being<\/a>\u00a0and with the dread experienced before the threat of Nothingness. But he found the essence of this Being in liberty\u2014in freedom of choice and the duty of self-determination. He therefore devoted much effort to describing the human tendency toward \u201cbad faith,\u201d reflected in perverse attempts to deny one\u2019s own responsibility and to flee from the\u00a0truth<\/a>\u00a0of one\u2019s inescapable freedom. Sartre did not overlook the\u00a0legitimate<\/a>\u00a0obstacles to freedom presented by the facts of place, past,\u00a0environment<\/a>, 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\u00a0<\/span>The Second Sex<\/a><\/em>\u00a0(1949),\u00a0<\/span>Simone de Beauvoir<\/a>\u00a0(1908\u201386), Sartre\u2019s fellow philosopher and lifelong companion, attempted to mobilize the existentialist concept of freedom for the ends of modern feminism.\r\n\r\n<\/span><\/span>After World War II, Sartre came to believe that his philosophy of freedom had wrongly ignored problems of social\u00a0justice<\/a>, and in his later work, especially the\u00a0Critique of Dialectical Reason\u00a0<\/em>(1960), he sought to\u00a0reconcile<\/a>\u00a0existentialism with\u00a0Marxism<\/a>.Recent trends\r\n\r\n<\/section><\/section><\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n
\r\n
\r\n
The main theme of postwar Continental\u00a0philosophy<\/a>\u00a0was the enthusiastic reception in France of Nietzsche and Heidegger and the consequent rejection of\u00a0metaphysics<\/a>\u00a0and the Cartesian\u00a0rationalism<\/a>\u00a0inherited by Sartre and his fellow existentialists. For millennia the goal of\u00a0metaphysics<\/a>, or \u201cfirst philosophy,\u201d had been to discern the ultimate nature of reality. Postwar Continental philosophy, recoiling from omnipresent images of mass annihilation, increasingly held\u00a0metaphysical<\/a>\u00a0holism<\/a>\u00a0itself responsible for the\u00a0catastrophes<\/a>\u00a0of 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, \u201cthinghood,\u201d and world.<\/span><\/span>In the 1950s, French philosophy faced a series of major challenges arising from\u00a0structuralism<\/a>, the new movement in anthropology that analyzed\u00a0cultures<\/a>\u00a0as systems of structurally related elements and attempted to discern universal patterns underlying all such systems. In his\u00a0<\/span>A World on the Wane<\/a><\/em>\u00a0(1955), for example, the anthropologist\u00a0<\/span>Claude L\u00e9vi-Strauss<\/a>\u00a0(1908\u20132009) issued a pointed indictment of philosophical method, claiming that it lacked\u00a0empirical<\/a>\u00a0grounding and was so arbitrary as to be capable of proving or disproving anything. Sartre\u2019s political missteps during the early 1950s, when he had been an enthusiastic\u00a0fellow traveler<\/a>\u00a0of the\u00a0French Communist Party<\/a>, did little to\u00a0enhance<\/a>\u00a0the credibility of his philosophical rationalism.<\/span><\/span>In his influential book\u00a0<\/span>The Order of Things<\/a><\/em>\u00a0(1966), the French philosopher and\u00a0intellectual<\/a>\u00a0historian\u00a0<\/span>Michel Foucault<\/a>\u00a0(1926\u201384) paradoxically employed structuralist methods to criticize the scientific pretensions of natural history,\u00a0linguistics<\/a>, and political economy\u2014the\u00a0disciplines<\/a>\u00a0known in France as the \u201chuman sciences.\u201d But the main target of his\u00a0critique<\/a>\u00a0was the\u00a0<\/span>anthropocentric<\/a>\u00a0orientation of the humanities, notably including philosophy. Foucault argued provocatively that \u201cman\u201d was an artificial notion, an invention of the 19th century, and that its\u00a0obsolescence<\/a>\u00a0had become apparent in the postwar era.<\/span><\/span>In later books such as\u00a0<\/span>Discipline and Punish<\/a><\/em>\u00a0(1975) and\u00a0<\/span>The History of Sexuality<\/a><\/em>\u00a0(1976), Foucault\u2019s gaze shifted to systems of power. In a Nietzschean spirit, he coined the term\u00a0<\/span>power-knowledge<\/a><\/em>\u00a0to indicate the involvement of knowledge in the maintenance of power relations. As he argued in the essay \u201c<\/span>Nietzsche, Genealogy, History\u201d (1977), an examination of the notion of\u00a0truth<\/a>\u00a0reveals that\r\n

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\u00a0<\/span>malicious<\/a>\u00a0(something murderous, opposed to the happiness of mankind).<\/span><\/em><\/p>\r\nThe movement known as\u00a0<\/span>deconstruction<\/a>, derived mainly from work begun in the 1960s by the French philosopher\u00a0<\/span>Jacques Derrida<\/a>\u00a0(1930\u20132004), displayed a similar hostility to metaphysics and its quest for totality and absolute truth. Under the sway of Heidegger\u2019s call for \u201ca destruction of the history of ontology,\u201d Derrida\u00a0endorsed<\/a>\u00a0the deconstruction of Western philosophy\u2014i.e., the uncovering and undoing of the false\u00a0dichotomies<\/a>, or \u201coppositions,\u201d\u00a0inherent<\/a>\u00a0in philosophical thinking since the time of the ancient Greeks. In Derrida\u2019s view, these oppositions result from the misguided assumption, which he called \u201c<\/span>logocentrism<\/a>,\u201d 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 \u201cmetaphysics of presence,\u201d 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 \u201ctotality\u201d and political \u201ctotalitarianism.\u201d As he wrote in an early essay, \u201c<\/span>Violence and Metaphysics\u201d (1967):\r\n

Incapable of respecting the Being and meaning of the other,\u00a0<\/span>phenomenology<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0<\/span>ontology<\/a>\u00a0would be philosophies of violence. Through them, the entire philosophical tradition\u2026would make common cause with oppression and technico-political possession.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\r\nThe French philosopher\u00a0<\/span><\/span>Emmanuel L\u00e9vinas<\/a>\u00a0(1905\u201395) attributed the misguided quest for totality to a defect in reason itself. In his major work,\u00a0<\/span><\/span>Totality and Infinity<\/a><\/em>\u00a0(1961), he contended that, as it is used in Western philosophy, reason enforces \u201cdomination\u201d and \u201csameness\u201d and destroys plurality and otherness. He called for the transcendence of reason in a first philosophy based on ethics\u2014and in particular on the biblical commandment \u201cYou shall not kill\u201d (Exodus 20:13)\u2014rather than on\u00a0<\/span>logic<\/a>. It is no small\u00a0<\/span>irony<\/a>, 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\u00a0<\/span>skepticism<\/a>, should come to equate reason with domination and to insist that reason\u2019s\u00a0<\/span>hegemony<\/a>\u00a0be overthrown.<\/span>\r\n\r\n<\/span><\/span>A powerful\u00a0alternative<\/a>\u00a0to this view appeared in work from the 1970s by the German philosopher\u00a0<\/span>J\u00fcrgen Habermas<\/a>\u00a0(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\u2019 call for a \u201cfarewell to reason.\u201d 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.\r\n\r\n<\/span><\/span>Habermas\u2019s\u00a0<\/span>The Theory of Communicative Action<\/a><\/em>\u00a0(1981) was devoted in part to developing an account of truth in terms that did not imply that there exists an \u201cabsolute\u201d truth of the kind traditionally posited by metaphysics. Following the doctrines of\u00a0pragmatism<\/a>\u00a0and reinterpreting Austin\u2019s earlier work on speech acts, Habermas contended that ordinary\u00a0<\/span>communication<\/a>\u00a0differs from other forms of human action in that it is oriented toward mutual agreement rather than \u201csuccess\u201d; that is, it aims at reaching \u201c<\/span>intersubjective\u201d 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 \u201ctrue\u201d 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\u2019s utterances as true assertions about objects and events in an \u201cexternal world,\u201d as descriptions of morally \u201cright\u201d actions in a social world of shared norms, or as \u201csincere\u201d expressions of thoughts and feelings in the speaker\u2019s \u201cinner world.\u201d In this \u201cdiscourse theory of truth,\u201d the notion of truth, far from being a misguided fiction of metaphysics, is a regulative ideal without which communication itself would be impossible.\r\n\r\n<\/section><\/section><\/section><\/div>\r\n<\/div>\r\n<\/div>","rendered":"

Continental philosophy<\/h1>\n
\n
\n
Analytic<\/a>\u00a0philosophy had comparatively little influence on the European continent, where the speculative and historical tradition remained strong. Dominated by phenomenology and\u00a0existentialism<\/a>\u00a0during the first half of the 20th century, after\u00a0World War II<\/a>\u00a0Continental philosophy came to embrace increasingly far-reaching structuralist and poststructuralist\u00a0critiques<\/a>\u00a0of\u00a0metaphysics<\/a>\u00a0and philosophical rationality.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n

The\u00a0<\/span>phenomenology<\/a>\u00a0of\u00a0<\/span>Husserl<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0<\/span>Heidegger<\/a><\/h2>\n

Considered the father of phenomenology,\u00a0Edmund Husserl<\/a>\u00a0(1859\u20131938), 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 \u201c<\/span>life-world<\/a>,\u201d which appeared only in his later writings. As a technique of phenomenological analysis, the phenomenological method was to make possible \u201ca descriptive account of the essential structures of the directly given.\u201d It was to isolate and lay bare the\u00a0intrinsic<\/a>\u00a0structure of conscious experience by focusing the philosopher\u2019s attention on the pure data of\u00a0consciousness<\/a>, uncontaminated by\u00a0metaphysical<\/a>\u00a0theories or scientific or\u00a0empirical<\/a>\u00a0assumptions of any kind. Husserl\u2019s concept of the life-world is similarly concerned with immediate experience. It is the individual\u2019s personal world as he directly experiences it, with the ego at the centre and with all of its vital and emotional colourings.<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/span>With the\u00a0appearance<\/a>\u00a0of the\u00a0<\/span>Jahrbuch f\u00fcr Philosophie und ph\u00e4nomenologische Forschung<\/a><\/em>\u00a0(1913\u201330; \u201cAnnual for Philosophical and Phenomenological Research\u201d) under Husserl\u2019s chief editorship, his philosophy flowered into an international movement. Its most-notable adherent was\u00a0Martin Heidegger<\/a>\u00a0(1889\u20131976), whose masterpiece,\u00a0<\/span>Being and Time<\/a><\/em>, appeared in the\u00a0Jahrbuch<\/em>\u00a0in 1927. The influence of the phenomenological method is clear in Heidegger\u2019s work; throughout his startlingly original investigations of human existence\u2014with their unique dimensions of \u201cbeing-in-the-world,\u201d dread, care, and \u201cbeing-toward-death\u201d\u2014Heidegger 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\u00a0<\/span>Maurice Merleau-Ponty<\/a>\u00a0(1908\u201361), building on the concept of the life-world, used the notions of the lived body and its \u201cfacticity\u201d to create a\u00a0hierarchy<\/a>\u00a0of human-lived experience.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n

\n

The\u00a0<\/span>existentialism<\/a>\u00a0of\u00a0<\/span>Jaspers<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0<\/span>Sartre<\/a><\/h2>\n

Existentialism, true to its roots in Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, was oriented toward two major themes: the analysis of\u00a0<\/span>human<\/a>\u00a0existence, or Being, and the centrality of human choice. Thus, its chief theoretical energies were devoted to\u00a0ontology<\/a>\u00a0and decision.<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/span>Existentialism as a philosophy of human existence was best expressed in the work of the German philosopher\u00a0Karl Jaspers<\/a>\u00a0(1883\u20131969), who came to philosophy from medicine and\u00a0psychology<\/a>. 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, \u201cthe illumination of existence,\u201d 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 \u201cextreme\u201d situations that define the human condition\u2014conflict, guilt, suffering, and death. It is through a confrontation with these extremes that the individual realizes his\u00a0existential<\/a>\u00a0humanity.<\/p>\n

<\/span>Jean-Paul Sartre<\/strong><\/p>\n

The chief representative of existentialism as a philosophy of human decision was the French philosopher and man of letters\u00a0Jean-Paul Sartre<\/a>\u00a0(1905\u201380). Sartre too was concerned with\u00a0<\/span>Being<\/a>\u00a0and with the dread experienced before the threat of Nothingness. But he found the essence of this Being in liberty\u2014in freedom of choice and the duty of self-determination. He therefore devoted much effort to describing the human tendency toward \u201cbad faith,\u201d reflected in perverse attempts to deny one\u2019s own responsibility and to flee from the\u00a0truth<\/a>\u00a0of one\u2019s inescapable freedom. Sartre did not overlook the\u00a0legitimate<\/a>\u00a0obstacles to freedom presented by the facts of place, past,\u00a0environment<\/a>, 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\u00a0<\/span>The Second Sex<\/a><\/em>\u00a0(1949),\u00a0<\/span>Simone de Beauvoir<\/a>\u00a0(1908\u201386), Sartre\u2019s fellow philosopher and lifelong companion, attempted to mobilize the existentialist concept of freedom for the ends of modern feminism.<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/span>After World War II, Sartre came to believe that his philosophy of freedom had wrongly ignored problems of social\u00a0justice<\/a>, and in his later work, especially the\u00a0Critique of Dialectical Reason\u00a0<\/em>(1960), he sought to\u00a0reconcile<\/a>\u00a0existentialism with\u00a0Marxism<\/a>.Recent trends<\/p>\n<\/section>\n<\/section>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
The main theme of postwar Continental\u00a0philosophy<\/a>\u00a0was the enthusiastic reception in France of Nietzsche and Heidegger and the consequent rejection of\u00a0metaphysics<\/a>\u00a0and the Cartesian\u00a0rationalism<\/a>\u00a0inherited by Sartre and his fellow existentialists. For millennia the goal of\u00a0metaphysics<\/a>, or \u201cfirst philosophy,\u201d had been to discern the ultimate nature of reality. Postwar Continental philosophy, recoiling from omnipresent images of mass annihilation, increasingly held\u00a0metaphysical<\/a>\u00a0holism<\/a>\u00a0itself responsible for the\u00a0catastrophes<\/a>\u00a0of 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, \u201cthinghood,\u201d and world.<\/span><\/span>In the 1950s, French philosophy faced a series of major challenges arising from\u00a0structuralism<\/a>, the new movement in anthropology that analyzed\u00a0cultures<\/a>\u00a0as systems of structurally related elements and attempted to discern universal patterns underlying all such systems. In his\u00a0<\/span>A World on the Wane<\/a><\/em>\u00a0(1955), for example, the anthropologist\u00a0<\/span>Claude L\u00e9vi-Strauss<\/a>\u00a0(1908\u20132009) issued a pointed indictment of philosophical method, claiming that it lacked\u00a0empirical<\/a>\u00a0grounding and was so arbitrary as to be capable of proving or disproving anything. Sartre\u2019s political missteps during the early 1950s, when he had been an enthusiastic\u00a0fellow traveler<\/a>\u00a0of the\u00a0French Communist Party<\/a>, did little to\u00a0enhance<\/a>\u00a0the credibility of his philosophical rationalism.<\/span><\/span>In his influential book\u00a0<\/span>The Order of Things<\/a><\/em>\u00a0(1966), the French philosopher and\u00a0intellectual<\/a>\u00a0historian\u00a0<\/span>Michel Foucault<\/a>\u00a0(1926\u201384) paradoxically employed structuralist methods to criticize the scientific pretensions of natural history,\u00a0linguistics<\/a>, and political economy\u2014the\u00a0disciplines<\/a>\u00a0known in France as the \u201chuman sciences.\u201d But the main target of his\u00a0critique<\/a>\u00a0was the\u00a0<\/span>anthropocentric<\/a>\u00a0orientation of the humanities, notably including philosophy. Foucault argued provocatively that \u201cman\u201d was an artificial notion, an invention of the 19th century, and that its\u00a0obsolescence<\/a>\u00a0had become apparent in the postwar era.<\/span><\/span>In later books such as\u00a0<\/span>Discipline and Punish<\/a><\/em>\u00a0(1975) and\u00a0<\/span>The History of Sexuality<\/a><\/em>\u00a0(1976), Foucault\u2019s gaze shifted to systems of power. In a Nietzschean spirit, he coined the term\u00a0<\/span>power-knowledge<\/a><\/em>\u00a0to indicate the involvement of knowledge in the maintenance of power relations. As he argued in the essay \u201c<\/span>Nietzsche, Genealogy, History\u201d (1977), an examination of the notion of\u00a0truth<\/a>\u00a0reveals that<\/p>\n

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\u00a0<\/span>malicious<\/a>\u00a0(something murderous, opposed to the happiness of mankind).<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

The movement known as\u00a0<\/span>deconstruction<\/a>, derived mainly from work begun in the 1960s by the French philosopher\u00a0<\/span>Jacques Derrida<\/a>\u00a0(1930\u20132004), displayed a similar hostility to metaphysics and its quest for totality and absolute truth. Under the sway of Heidegger\u2019s call for \u201ca destruction of the history of ontology,\u201d Derrida\u00a0endorsed<\/a>\u00a0the deconstruction of Western philosophy\u2014i.e., the uncovering and undoing of the false\u00a0dichotomies<\/a>, or \u201coppositions,\u201d\u00a0inherent<\/a>\u00a0in philosophical thinking since the time of the ancient Greeks. In Derrida\u2019s view, these oppositions result from the misguided assumption, which he called \u201c<\/span>logocentrism<\/a>,\u201d 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 \u201cmetaphysics of presence,\u201d 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 \u201ctotality\u201d and political \u201ctotalitarianism.\u201d As he wrote in an early essay, \u201c<\/span>Violence and Metaphysics\u201d (1967):<\/p>\n

Incapable of respecting the Being and meaning of the other,\u00a0<\/span>phenomenology<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0<\/span>ontology<\/a>\u00a0would be philosophies of violence. Through them, the entire philosophical tradition\u2026would make common cause with oppression and technico-political possession.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

The French philosopher\u00a0<\/span><\/span>Emmanuel L\u00e9vinas<\/a>\u00a0(1905\u201395) attributed the misguided quest for totality to a defect in reason itself. In his major work,\u00a0<\/span><\/span>Totality and Infinity<\/a><\/em>\u00a0(1961), he contended that, as it is used in Western philosophy, reason enforces \u201cdomination\u201d and \u201csameness\u201d and destroys plurality and otherness. He called for the transcendence of reason in a first philosophy based on ethics\u2014and in particular on the biblical commandment \u201cYou shall not kill\u201d (Exodus 20:13)\u2014rather than on\u00a0<\/span>logic<\/a>. It is no small\u00a0<\/span>irony<\/a>, 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\u00a0<\/span>skepticism<\/a>, should come to equate reason with domination and to insist that reason\u2019s\u00a0<\/span>hegemony<\/a>\u00a0be overthrown.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/span>A powerful\u00a0alternative<\/a>\u00a0to this view appeared in work from the 1970s by the German philosopher\u00a0<\/span>J\u00fcrgen Habermas<\/a>\u00a0(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\u2019 call for a \u201cfarewell to reason.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/span>Habermas\u2019s\u00a0<\/span>The Theory of Communicative Action<\/a><\/em>\u00a0(1981) was devoted in part to developing an account of truth in terms that did not imply that there exists an \u201cabsolute\u201d truth of the kind traditionally posited by metaphysics. Following the doctrines of\u00a0pragmatism<\/a>\u00a0and reinterpreting Austin\u2019s earlier work on speech acts, Habermas contended that ordinary\u00a0<\/span>communication<\/a>\u00a0differs from other forms of human action in that it is oriented toward mutual agreement rather than \u201csuccess\u201d; that is, it aims at reaching \u201c<\/span>intersubjective\u201d 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 \u201ctrue\u201d 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\u2019s utterances as true assertions about objects and events in an \u201cexternal world,\u201d as descriptions of morally \u201cright\u201d actions in a social world of shared norms, or as \u201csincere\u201d expressions of thoughts and feelings in the speaker\u2019s \u201cinner world.\u201d In this \u201cdiscourse theory of truth,\u201d the notion of truth, far from being a misguided fiction of metaphysics, is a regulative ideal without which communication itself would be impossible.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n<\/section>\n<\/section>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\t\t\t

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