Continental, Analytic, and Logical Atomism

So much has been written about the alleged “analytic-continental” divide that it seems almost futile to attempt to contribute to what appears to be a highly confused debate.  No-one quite seems to know what is meant by the terms “analytic” and “continental”, and since philosophers on both sides of the divide share so many ideas in common it can often look as though the whole split is a kind of disciplinary fantasy.

Richard Rorty seemed to hold something like this when he claimed that a continental philosopher is someone who reads Marx and Heidegger while an analytic philosopher is someone who reads Quine and Russell.   Robert Audi’s Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy is no help, defining “continental” and “analytic” first geographically and then via a list of schools of thought that have existed on each side of the divide (phenomenology/structuralism/existentialism/deconstruction vs. positivism/ordinary language/conceptual analysis). Hardly helpful.

The issue can be clarified, I think, by examining the modes of philosophy that characterize philosophical activity on each side of the divide.  Focusing on method (and not simply on content) allows us to see so much more, here.  I want to focus on one major difference that I think drives much of the antagonism between continental and analytic philosopher.

There is a strand of “analytic” philosophy which Is mostly dead, one highly influenced by Russell and the younger Wittgenstein, and one which saw the goal of philosophy as the clarification of concepts used in language.  Characteristically, this school attempted to break sentences down into their constituents and to determine the meaning and the reference of those constituents.  Logical Atomism was the view that language could be partitioned and analysed in this general way, and the hope was that traditional philosophical problems could be solved (or possibly dissolved) by taking simple expressions, determining which bits of the world correspond to them, and by examining  the entailment relations between those units of language.

Few living philosophers are logical atomists.  It is generally accepted that linguistic meaning is highly context-dependent, and that it is necessary for two speakers to share an extraordinary amount of background knowledge in order to communicate with one another.  As I understand it, the implication is that sentences cannot be isolated from their overall conversational context and disassembled for logical analysis.  The elder Wittgenstein, John Searle and Donald Davidson have done much to solidify this idea. 

Why, then, does the method of logical atomism continue to enjoy such prominence?  In particular, why does the standard “analytic philosopher” seem to treat, by default, any text as a logical argument meant to demonstrate its conclusion by means of entailment relations between the individual units of language contained therein?  Why can so many English-speaking philosophers rattle off huge lists of logical fallacies, seeming to think that this alone can lead them to discern philosophically valuable texts from bad or nonsensical ones?

I have often been guilty of a “default” adherence to this method, and this is due in large part to my training.  Yet, I (and we) must acknowledge that other forms of argument exist, ones which have wholly different validity-conditions.  Nietzsche argued, for example, that belief in a Christian god was no longer “credible” given the discovery of Christianity’s historical origins.  An Analytic Philosophy Monkey will look at this argument , utter the phrase: “genetic fallacy”, and move on.  If Nietzsche really intends to demonstrate, in a deductive fashion, the nonexistence of god, then he indeed commits the genetic fallacy.

Yet, surely he is trying to do something else.  In telling us about the dark, angry, psychologically troubling origins of Christian Good and Evil, he is trying to affect a different kind of change in his reader.  He knows full well that these considerations cannot entail the nonexistence of god.  Yet his argument seems to have a kind of importance.  This importance derives straightforwardly from its context: a Christian reader encounters it and is troubled by it. In order to understand why this is so, we must know so much more about this reader’s psychology, why he believes what he does, why his beliefs are important to him.  If we treat the argument as a straightforward logical deduction , we miss what is essentially an invitation, an opportunity to delve into this person’s life and the significance that philosophy can have for him.

The method of logical atomism thus leads us to ignore and trivialize modes of philosophy which are not quite so simple as “all men are mortal, Socrates is mortal, therefore….”.  I think that what defines a more “continental” philosopher is just their acceptance of this kind of principle: they do not seek to read texts and analyze ideas as though their component expressions can be analyzed in a logically atomic fashion.  Rather, they emphasize context, embodiment and subjectivity. 

Logical atomism is dead.  After Davidson, we should not be tempted to assume that its assumptions are valid ones.  This does not mean that we must accept the more extreme versions of relativism and/or idealism that some paradigmatically “continental” philosophers seem to slide towards.  Nor does it mean that precise, logical argument cannot retain a central place in our thinking. But we must stop assuming that all philosophical texts are meant to do the same thing.   We must accept that quite often, context is everything, and that the desire for “logical rigor” can result in a completely blinkered view of the possibilities that philosophy has for us.  Such an acceptance would surely go a long way towards reconciling the two “schools” of philosophy.