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April 16, 2004
Often we hear about the continental analytic divide in academic philosophy. Most of the emphasis is on what divides. Only rarely is the commonality (the bridge over the divide?) between the different schools explored.
This paper, Pragmatism's Advantage, by Joseph Margolis from the The Rapprochement of the Anglo-American and Continental Philosophical Traditions conference is an exception. It explores the commonality.
True, there is lots of misleading guff on Hegel and Geist. But we can put to one side since it is pretty much the standard run of the mill stuff. We can also put to one side Margolis' privileging of pragmatism as the overcoming of opposition between analytic and continental philosophy. It is a standard rhetorical ploy of American pragmatists.
I sideline the Geist account of the differences between the analytic and continental schools because Margolis is able to capture some of the similarities and differences between analytic and continental philosophy: ones that resonate with my own lived experiences.
What Margolis says about the differences is the following:
"Pragmatism is poised...between the extremes of analytic and continental philosophy of the sorts now mentioned. It isolates as a distinct question the question of the right analysis of the human being as such, in the very context in which we arrive at a realist picture of the world ample enough for all intelligent life. Analytic scientism precludes constructivism: hence, precludes the Kantian and post-Kantian resolution of the Cartesian paradox."
Margolis points his finger the scientism (and, I would add its physicalist metaphysics) that has been the central core of an analytic philosophy that is beholden to the fundamental natural sciences. Margolis continues:
"Pragmatism is committed to bringing the account of the human down to scale, without yielding to any premature form of ‘naturalizing’ or to any form of privilege or ontic necessity or unexaminable faculty or, worse, the revelations of Being itself, which are (as Heidegger candidly admits) utterly alien and unbidden! .....That is the basis of its opposition to the extreme proposals of analytic scientism and Husserlian and post-Husserlian phenomenology: the one, in the direction of naturalizing; the other, in the direction of anti-naturalism."
He does rightly interpret Continental philosophy as a recoil from analytic scientism. That starts with Hegel's reaction to Kant.
Where Margolis is misleading is when he says that this recoil leads to anti-naturalism. It is misleading because not every continental philosopher recoiled from natural science by running back to God. Marx was a naturalist. Okay, so Marx was an economist not a philosopher. What about Nietzsche and Merleau Ponty then? Hell, you can even give a naturalist interpretation of Hegel's texts---I would. The same with Heidegger.
What we have in continental philosophy is a different kind of naturalism--one that is more concerned with society rather than nature: one that takes its pathway from Hegel's Philosophy of Right and Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals.
Now Margolis does acknowledge this, when he says that pragmatism as a naturalism or realism is:
"...a cousin to any corresponding movement from the continental side that recoils from vestigial privileges in the ‘corrective’ work of figures like Kant, Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger.....Once the temptations of new forms of privilege are set aside, we begin to glimpse the prospect of an abundance of continental theories that may claim a history pertinently similar to pragmatism’s history and something of a cognate idiom. There’s the clue to pragmatism’s current ‘advantage.’ I find that prospect more than prefigured in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology and, say, the Frankfurt Critical program, both of which have been judged hospitable to themes very close to those favored by pragmatism. But the evidence (often tantalizing and inconclusive) may be drawn as well from figures like Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean-Franois Lyotard, and others loosely collected as post-structuralists."
Magolis then reinforces the commonality between pragmatism and this strand of continental philsophy. After mentioning two figures who write in the spirit of the so-called ‘American continental movement,’ ---Frederick Olafson and Joseph Rouse---he says:
"Both feature a Heideggerean reading of what it is for a human being ‘to have a world’ or to investigate physical nature scientifically within the terms of a human world. ‘Having a world,’ Olafson maintains, cannot be captured by, or reduced to, the conceptual idiom usually thought adequate, in Anglo-American analytic philosophy, for the descriptive and explanatory work of the natural sciences. ... Here, I would say, we find ourselves in the neighborhood of a fresh beginning bridging the shared strengths of pragmatism and continental philosophy and directed (at least in part) against the egregious scientisms of analytic philosophy. ‘Having a world,’ I would say, is, at least initially, common ground between Husserl, Heidegger, and Dewey—and, for that matter, Hegel."
That's roughly right. Margolis talks about the common ground as what is convergent between pragmatism and phenomenology. He then goes onto sketch the differences between this commonality and analytic scientism: the subject-object duality, reductionism etc that leads to the different accounts of naturalism. Once again I would emphasis physicalism.
What then are the differences between American pragmatism and this strand of continental philosophy? Margolis is not really interested. His aim is partisan: to to establish that pragmatism wins the three-sided contest between Anglo-American Philosophy, continental philosophy and pragmatism. It is pragmatism that is the bridge that spans the divide between analytic and continental philosophy.
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