Accueil
"On 5 October 1999, when pressed for her current views on the prospect of a European union, Margaret Thatcher remarked, "All the problems in my lifetime have come from Continental Europe, all the solutions have come from the English-speaking world'. Despite its evident falsehood, this statement expresses a deep truth: namely, that for many inhabitants of the English-speaking world, and indeed for some living outside it, there is a real divide between their world and the societies, languages, political systems, traditions, and geography of Continental Europe." (p.XI)
"I trace Continental philosophy to the reception of the work of Immanuel Kant in the late 18th century, who in many ways is the final great figure common to both Continental and analytic traditions and also announces the parting of their ways." (p.XIII)
"Its critique of scientism resides in the belief that the model of the natural sciences cannot and, moreover, should not provide a model for philosophical method, and that the natural sciences do not provide human beings with their primary and most significant access to the world. One finds this belief expressed in a whole range of Continental thinkers, such as Henri Bergson, Husserl, Heidegger, and the philosophers associated with the Frankfurt School from the 1930s onwards. This worry about scientism is legitimate, but in recent decades it has also risked being conflated with an anti-scientific attitude." (p.XV)
"For most of [academics philosophers], the very idea that philosophy might be concerned with the question of the meaning of life or the attainment of a good and happy human life is something of a joke, and furthermore a joke in rather poor taste. Such questions are relegated to the realm of what is patronizingly called "folk psychology". For the most part, professional philosophy has happily conceded this terrain to the vast and ever rising tide of books on "mind, body, and spirit, those rows of brightly coloured New Age titles that sit embarrassingly near the ever shrinking philosophy sections in high street book stores." (p.3)
"We live in a scientific world, a world where we are expected to provide empirical evidence for our claims or find those claims rightly rejected. The scientific conception of the world, which dates back to the early decades of the 17th century in England and France, dominates the way we see things and, perhaps even more importantly, the way we expect to see things. We expect to see things somewhat like spectators in a theatre where we can inspect them theoretically the Greek word for a theatre spectator is a theoros. Things are present as objects that are empirically and immediately given in the form of sensations or representations. Science gives us knowledge of the nature of such things. [...]
In a science-dominated world, what role does our professional philosopher assign to philosophy ? This can in part be answered by recalling the Greek word for knowledge, episteme. Philosophy becomes epistemology, the theory of knowledge. That is, it is overwhelmingly concerned with logical and methodological questions as to how we know what we know, and in virtue of what such knowledge is valid. Philosophy becomes a theoretical enquiry into the conditions under which scientific knowledge is possible. In the scientific conception of the world, the role of philosophy moves from being, as it was for Plato, the queen of the sciences, where theoretical knowledge was unified with practical wisdom. It becomes rather, in John Locke's formula at the beginning of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding in 1689, an under-labourer to science, whose job is to clear away the rubbish that lies in the way to knowledge and scientific progress. Philosophers become janitors in the Crystal Palace of the sciences.
The job of a janitor is respectable enough, but what of the question of wisdom ? The problem here is that science is wonderful: it provides us with a truer, better account of the way things are, what contemporary philosophers are fond of calling a "naturalistic ontology". Furthermore, through the work of science's helpmeet, technology, our lives have been transformed and improved to an extent unimaginable to someone from the ancient world, or even indeed to our great-grandparents. Science is therefore not only wonderful, it is effective. Yet, despite this or perhaps because of it the question of wisdom still nags at us, it still irritates like an appendix we believed we no longer needed.
The question is: does the scientific conception of the world eradicate the need for an answer to the question of the meaning of life ? Does the body of knowledge require the appendectomy of wisdom ? In a certain extreme view it does, and some philosophers might argue that all questions must either be answerable through empirical enquiry or be rejected as spurious. As such, it might be claimed, the question of the meaning of life can be answered causally or empirically through Darwinian evolutionary theory. In this picture, life is explicable on the basis of certain causal hypotheses, such as natural selection: that is, human cognition is the outcome of evolutionary dispositions. There is even a branch of philosophy called "evolutionary epistemology" that attempts first to reduce all philosophical questions to epistemological questions, and secondly to claim that all such questions have to be answered with reference to evolutionary dispositions.
I take a less extreme view of the relation between knowledge and wisdom, or between scientific enquiry and what we might call humanistic enquiry. I do not think that the question of the meaning of life is reducible to empirical investigation. It is just not a causal matter. There is, I think, a gap between knowledge and wisdom: not an explanatory gap that might be closed by producing a better, more comprehensive theory, but more of a felt gap. If all epistemic worries are to be resolved empirically by scientific enquiry, then we might feel that even if one fine and beautiful morning all those worries were resolved, then this would somehow still be irrelevant to the question of wisdom, to the question of knowing in what exactly a good human life might consist.
The paradox [...] is that the scientific conception of the world does not close the gap between knowledge and wisdom, but makes us feel it all the more acutely. I would even wager that this paradox is at its most acute in scientifically and technologically highly developed societies. It is in advanced Western societies that the gap between knowledge and wisdom seems to widen into an abyss. In this sense, the speculative question of the meaning of life is a consequence of luxury and affluence. Perhaps it was ever thus philosophy only arises once the basic exigencies of life have been provided. As Bertolt Brecht said, "food first, then ethics". True enough. But the curious fact about human beings is that when you give them food, even more food than they can eat, when you shower them with every earthly blessing, then they will concoct new miseries for themselves, new neuroses and pathologies, and even a new 'science( to deal with those new neuroses and pathologies: psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, aromatherapy, reflexology, or whatever. It is when the force of this paradox begins to be felt existentially that the neglected question of the meaning of life comes back with a real and frightening vengeance: I seem to have everything I need and want, but what is the point of my life ?" (pp.4-7)
"Ancient philosophy was characterized, amongst other things, by an identity, or at least an attempted integration, of knowledge and wisdom: namely, that a knowledge of how things were the way they were would lead to wisdom in the conduct of one's life. The assumption that ties knowledge and wisdom together is the idea that the cosmos as such expresses a human purpose, and therefore that knowledge of nature would be part and parcel of what it means to be human. This is what is called the teleological view of the universe, where each natural thing can be explained in terms of what Aristotle called its final cause." (p.7)
"In the modern world, through the extraordinary progress of the sciences from the 17th century to the present, this unity has split apart. René Descartes is already writing in 1641, in Meditations on First Philosophy, "the customary search for final causes is utterly useless in physics." [...] As Max Weber expresses it some two and a half centuries later, the scientific revolution, in its undeniable truth, produced a disenchantment of nature. Nature is no longer the visible expression of some "world soul" in which humans also participate. Rather, nature is sheer, impersonal objective "stuff", which is law governed, causally explicable, but completely cut adrift from human intentions." (pp.8-9)
"The appeal of much that goes under the name of Continental philosophy, in my view, is that it attempts to unify or at least move closer together questions of knowledge and wisdom, of philosophical truth and existential meaning. Examples are legion here, whether one thinks of Hegel on the life and death struggle for recognition as part and parcel of the ascent to absolute knowing; Nietzsche on the death of God and the need for a revaluation of values ; Karl Marx on the alienation of human beings under conditions of capitalism and the requirement for an emancipatory and equitable social transformation ; Freud on the unconscious repression at work in dreams, jokes, and slips of the tongue and what that reveals about the irrationality at the heart of mental life ; Heidegger on anxiety, the deadening indifference of inauthentic social life, and the need for an authentic existence; Sartre on bad faith, nausea, and the useless but necessary passion of human freedom; Albert Camus on the question of suicide in a universe rendered absurd by the death of God ; Emmanuel Levinas on the trauma of our infinite responsibilities to others." (p.9)
"Of course, that is not to say that such concerns are entirely absent from mainstream Anglo-American or analytic philosophy. Although it might be fair to say, in my terms, that much of the latter is dominated by the question of knowledge, conceived scientifically or naturalistically, at the expense of the question of wisdom, this would not explain a figure like Ludwig Wittgenstein, for example, whose enormous appeal as a thinker might be said to be based on the way philosophical truth comes together with a certain conception of existential meaning, indeed a certain way of life. That is, the animating desire of Wittgenstein's work might be said to be therapeutic." (p.11)
"In brief, what Frege and Husserl took from Bolzano is the idea that thoughts are not subjective mental experiences, but have an objective content that is capable of analysis. Whereas what is taken from Franz Brentano is the intentionality thesis: namely that every thought is directed towards objects in the world and not locked up in some cabinet of consciousness. These two ideas fuelled the rejection of scepticism, relativism, and what was called "psychologism", the view developed in Germany in the early 19th century that all logical and philosophical problems are reducible to psychological mechanisms. Husserl held to a psychologistic account of logic and arithmetic until Frege persuaded him otherwise. It is the critique of psychologism, as well as the categorical rejection of any attempt to reduce philosophy to empirical science, that unites Frege's philosophy of language and Husserl's phenomenology. So, by this account, the origins of analytic philosophy have the same historical vintage as the origins of Continental philosophy, have a similar geographical source in German-speaking Central Europe, and share a common philosophical enemy. [...]
This is Michael Dummett's strategy in his influential 1993 book Origins of Analytical Philosophy." (pp.14-15)
"I believe it is necessary to begin with Kant, who, as I said above, is the final great figure common to both analytic and Continental philosophy and who announces the parting of their ways. To begin with, there are two rather simple reasons for beginning with Kant rather than Husserl: first, 20th-century developments in Continental philosophy are largely unintelligible without reference to their 19th-century precursors, especially Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche. This is particularly the case with French philosophy since the 1930s, which might well be described in terms of a series of returns to Hegel (in the work of Alexandre Kojève and the early Jean-Paul Sartre), Nietzsche (in Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze), or Marx (in Louis Althusser). Second, the history of 19th-century nonAnglophone philosophy is, in Britain at least, woefully underrepresented in undergraduate syllabuses, where it is still possible to receive a degree in philosophy without having read much, if anything, of Germanophone philosophy between Kant and Frege." (p.16)
"Much of the difference between analytic and Continental philosophy simply turns on how one reads Kant and how much Kant one reads. That is, whether one is solely preoccupied with the epistemological issues of the First Critique or Critique of Pure Reason (1781), or by the greater systematic ambitions of the Third Critique or Critique of the Power of Judgement (1790)." (p.17)
"If one focuses on the First Critique, then one is usually concerned with the success of the argument of the transcendental deduction: here Kant tries to show that in order to experience objects at all we have to presuppose the operations of what he calls the "categories of the understanding", and hence a human subject who understands, that is, who unifies the blooming, buzzing confusion of perceptual experience under concepts. Thus, as Kant puts it, "objects conform to concepts and not concepts to objects." Such a reading of Kant will be guided by the question of whether he successfully provides a valid foundation or grounding for empirical knowledge and meets the challenge of the scepticism of David Hume. Kant claimed that Hume awoke him from his "dogmatic slumber", by showing that if we take the sceptical challenge seriously, then we can never be sure whether our concepts, based as they are in fleeting sensations and impressions, adequately correspond to objects in themselves and produce knowledge. Kant's response is to turn the whole issue round by acknowledging that, although we can never know things-in-themselves, the objects of our representations conform to the concepts we have of them in a manner sufficient for knowledge." (p.17)
"Read in this light, Kant's major philosophical contribution is to epistemology and, by implication, philosophy of science. Indeed, this was how he was overwhelmingly read by the school of Neo-Kantianism that dominated German and French academic philosophy between 1890 and the late 1920s. It was this epistemological reading of Kant in the work of Peter Strawson and others that dominated the Anglo-American reception of Kant until fairly recently.
However, the ambition of the Third Critique is rather different. Kant attempts to construct a bridge between the faculties of the understanding (the domain of epistemology whose concern is knowledge of nature) and reason (the domain of ethics whose concern is freedom), through a critique of the faculty of judgement. Judgement would be the mediator between the realms of nature and freedom and would harmonize the elements of the critical philosophy into a system. If one takes this route, then the burning issue of Kant's philosophy becomes the plausibility of the relation of pure and practical reason, nature and freedom, or the unity of theory and practice. As we will see below, this is precisely the route followed by German idealism [...] Arguably, it is this route that Continental philosophy has followed ever since." (p.19)
"In 1784 Hamann wrote his Metacritique of the Purism of Reason, where he criticized Kant for formalism, namely for his overvaluation of the formal character of knowledge, and for the belief that reason could be separated from experience, the a priori could be divorced from the a posteriori. Hamann's critique foreshadows that of his friend, and indeed longtime housemate, Freidrich Heinrich Jacobi, as well as that of Hegel, and takes the following shape: that Kant's critical philosophy breaks down into a series of vicious dualisms (form versus content, sensibility versus understanding, reason versus experience, nature versus freedom, the pure versus the practical, and so on), and that the primacy of practical reason is a mere empty formalism of abstract duty. For Hamann, in another uncanny prediction of later philosophical developments, namely the linguistic turn, the separation between reason and experience, or form and content, is impossible because thought depends on language, which is, of course, a mixture of both. Where exactly do you draw the distinction between concepts and intuitions in the actual use of language ? He writes not only does the entire capacity to think rest upon language but language is also in the middle of the misunderstanding of reason with itself.
So, if reason must criticize all things, there must also be a meta-critique of reason. But if that is so, then what prevents this meta-critique from becoming scepticism, radical and total scepticism ? [...] As I will try and argue below, it is the concept of nihilism that best permits one to distinguish analytic and Continental philosophy." (p.20 et p.22)
"The pantheism conflict began with the publication of Jacobi's Letters on Spinoza's Doctrine in 1785, which was his correspondence with Moses Mendelssohn concerning G. E. Lessing's shocking late confession of Spinozism. [...] Jacobi's point is, first, that Spinoza's philosophy is the paradigm of rationalism, and furthermore that the latter, if consistently adhered to, leads to atheism. So, contra Kant the Aufklarer, reason leads to the collapse of any basis for religious belief or moral life. If that is so, Jacobi adds, then we have a clear, and rather stark, choice to make: either to embrace the rational atheism of Enlightenment, or to reject it through an irrational leap of faith. Jacobi finds an inspiration for this in his reading of Pascal." (pp.22-23)
"Jacobi weighs in in 1799 with his Letter to Fichte. In this text, we find the first philosophical employment of the concept of nihilism. For Jacobi, simply stated, Fichte's position, known as Fichtean idealism, is nihilism. What he means by this must be understood with reference to the deflationary effects of the Kantian critique of traditional metaphysics outlined above, which not only denied human beings cognitive access to the speculative objects of classical metaphysics (God, the soul), but also removes the possibility of knowing both things-in-themselves and what Kant described as the (noumenal) ground of the self, having no phenomenal presence. Jacobi's basic thesis is that Fichte's reworking of Kantian transcendental idealism leads to an impoverished egoism which has no knowledge of objects or subjects in themselves. It is nihilistic because it allows the existence of nothing outside or apart from the ego, and the ego is itself nothing but a product of the (free power of imagination). Jacobi protests, in an extraordinary passage,
If the highest upon which I can reflect, what I can contemplate, is my empty and pure, naked and mere ego, with its autonomy and freedom: then rational self-contemplation, then rationality is for me a curse - I deplore my existence.
Against what he sees as the monism of Fichtean idealism, Jacobi argues for a form of philosophical dualism, where beyond the philosophical preoccupation with truth (die Wahrheit) lies the sphere of the true (das Wahre), which is only accessible to faith or the heart. Once again, Jacobi's critique of Fichte is strongly reminiscent of Pascal's critique of Descartes, where nihilism is the accusation levelled by a Christian worldview at a secularizing rationalism. Thus, the existential choice that faces us, which cannot be rationally proven but upon which we must wager, is between Fichtean idealism, which is nihilistic because it offers knowledge of nothing outside of the ego's projections, and Jacobian dualism, which he describes self-mockingly as +chimerism, because it claims that God is the essence of reason without being able to demonstrate this rationally. Jacobi concludes,
But the human being has such a choice, this single one: Nothingness or a God. Choosing Nothingness, he makes himself into a God; that is, he makes an apparition into God because if there is no God, it is impossible that man and everything which surrounds him is not merely an apparition. I repeat: God is, and is outside of me, a living being, existing in itself, or I am God. There is no third.
In denying God we risk turning the human being into God. That is, there is a Promethean temptation in Kantian and Fichtean idealism, where the human being turns into some replica of God, creating from nothing (it is worth recalling that Mary Shelley's novel, Frankenstein (1819), was subtitled The Modern Prometheus, where something monstrous stalks the scientific rationalism of the Enlightenment).
To show some of the implications of this thought in the Continental tradition, let me give a couple of further examples. If nihilism is the accusation of philosophical egoism, where all that was solid in the preKantian world-view melts into air, then one finds a bizarre confirmation of Jacobi's critique in the egoism of Max Stirner's extraordinary book, The Ego and its Own (1844) [...] What is denigrated by Jacobi as nihilism is anarchistically celebrated by Stirner as individual liberation. If I am nothing, Stirner argues, then I am not nothing in the sense of emptiness, but I am the creative nothing, the nothing out of which I myself as creator create everything.
As the perverse consequence of his attempt to show that Hegel's and Ludwig Feuerbach's critiques of religion are still fatally entangled with religious modes of thinking, Stirner answers the question "what is man?" by transforming the ego into a replica of God. The human being becomes the self-caused cause, the causa sui of medieval theology. To anticipate the existentialism of Sartre, in whom Stirner finds a curious echo a century later, in a godless, nihilistic world human beings are possessed of a passionate freedom to become godlike. This is why Sartre concludes Being and Nothingness by stating that man is a useless passion." (pp.26-27)
" [Salomon] Maimon's criticisms were published in 1790 as Essay on Transcendental Philosophy. His central argument is that the Kantian dualism between understanding and sensibility at the core of transcendental idealism is so drastic and deep that it prohibits the possibility of interaction between a priori concepts and empirical intuitions. This means that the argument of the transcendental deduction is invalidated by the very dualisms that Kant posits in order to carry out that deduction. [...]
How do we overcome the pernicious dualisms of the Kantian system ? What is required is some higher, unifying principle that would be immune to these criticisms. It is with this question that Fichte and German idealism begins. Fichte located this unifying principle in the activity of the subject. The dualism of theory and practice is unified in the self-reflection of the subject, its consciousness of freedom. This was the view that Fichte explored in the celebrated The Doctrine of Science (1794). For the young Schelling, on the contrary, the unifying principle was the notion of force or life, expressed in his early philosophy of nature. For Hegel, it was the notion of Spirit, for Arthur Schopenhauer it was the notion of the Will, for Nietzsche it was Power, for Marx it was Praxis, for Freud it was the Unconscious, for Heidegger it was Being." (p.29 et p.31]
"Although analytic philosophy is often powerfully associated with certain places, say Oxford or Princeton, it denotes a commitment to a certain method of philosophizing, to certain standards of argumentation, clarity, and rigour, whereas Continental philosophy would seem to denote a commitment to a certain place regardless of methodology. Thus, for Williams, the distinction between analytic and Continental philosophy rests upon a confused comparison of methodological and geographical categories." (p.32)
"Stanley Rosen, with his tongue firmly in his cheek, deftly summarizes the stereotypical representation of the distinction between analytic and Continental philosophy as follows: precision, conceptual clarity and systematic rigour are the property of analytical philosophy, whilst the continentals indulge in speculative metaphysics or cultural hermeneutics, or, alternatively, depending on one's sympathies, in wool-gathering and bathos." (p.34)
"The gulf that separates the analytic and Continental traditions was most succinctly stated during the irritable and infamous discussion that followed Gilbert Ryle's paper at a conference on analytic philosophy in France in 1960, where in response to Maurice MerleauPonty's plea "notre programme n'est-il pas le même ?" [...] Ryle answered, "J'espère que
non)." [...] that is so revealing of an ideological prejudice that surely should have no home in philosophy. [...] The paradox here is that the young Ryle began his career as an exponent of phenomenology, his first publication was a strikingly thorough review of Heidegger's Being and Time, published in Mind in 1930, and he lectured extensively at Oxford in the 1930s on Bolzano, Brentano, Frege, Meinong, and Husserl." (p.35)
"A. J. Ayer eloquently demonstrates the gulf that separates analytic from Continental philosophers with the following reminiscence from his autobiography:
it might have been expected that Merleau-Ponty and I should find some common ground for discussion. We did indeed attempt it on several occasions, but never got very far before we began to wrangle over some point of principle, on which neither of us would yield. Since these arguments tended to become acrimonious, we tacitly agreed to drop them and meet on a purely social level, which still left us quite enough to talk about." (p.35)
" [Ayer and Bataille] met in a Parisian bar in 1951, with Merleau-Ponty. Apparently the discussion lasted until three in the morning, and the thesis under discussion was very simple: did the sun exist before the existence of human beings ? Ayer saw no reason to doubt that it did, whereas Bataille thought the whole proposition meaningless. For a philosopher committed to a scientific view of the world, like Ayer, it makes sense to say that physical objects like the sun existed prior to the evolution of human beings. Whereas for Bataille, more versed in phenomenology, physical objects must be perceived from the position of a human subject in order to be said to exist." (p.36)
"Although there is no consensus on the precise origin of the concept of Continental philosophy as a professional self-description, it does not arise as a description of undergraduate and postgraduate courses in philosophy before the 1970s. It is clear that this happened in the USA before Britain, where the first postgraduate courses in Continental philosophy were offered at the universities of Essex and Warwick in the early 1980s. In the American context, and to a lesser extent in Britain, the term Continental philosophy replaced the earlier formulations Phenomenology or Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy." (p.38)
"The reason why "Phenomenology" is replaced with "Continental philosophy" is not absolutely clear, but it would seem that it was introduced to take account of the various so-called poststructuralist Francophone movements of thought that were increasingly distant from and often hostile towards phenomenology: to a lesser extent the work of Jacques Lacan, Derrida, and Jean-François Lyotard, and to a greater extent Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault." (p.39)
"Despite this unquestionable hegemony, there are universities in the UK, Ireland, Canada, and Australia that specialize in Continental philosophy and many more in the USA, mostly amongst the Catholic universities, with some notable exceptions. In philosophy departments and faculties where the analytic tradition is dominant, there is often a course or paper on Modern European Philosophy, Post-Kantian Philosophy, or Phenomenology and Existentialism, courses that were often initiated as concessions to student demand." (p.40)
"The reception of Continental thought in the Englishspeaking world has, for the most part, taken place outside of philosophy departments." (p.41)
"The notion of Continental philosophy as a professional self-description is more contested and corrosive because it overlays a more ancient cultural meaning, and goes back to debates about the relation of Britain and the English-speaking world to the European Continent, debates which are all too much alive in contemporary British politics." (p.41)
"Two long essays by John Stuart Mill on Jeremy Bentham and Coleridge that appeared in the London and Westminster Review in 1832 and 1840 respectively. In connection with the German influences on Coleridge, Mill speaks of "Continental philosophers" and the "Continental philosophy". [...] Mill thinks Bentham asks of any ancient doctrine or received opinion, "Is it true ?" ; whereas Coleridge asks, "What is the meaning of it ?". So, the "Continental philosophy" is concerned with meaning, whereas its Benthamite opposite is concerned with truth." (p.42)
"Bentham is the great subversive or "in the language of continental philosophers, the great critical thinker of his age and country". Such subversive critique proceeds by using methods of logical analysis and empirical good sense to ask after the truth of "things practical". For Mill, Bentham is a sort of practically minded extension of Humean scepticism carried over in particular into the areas of law and government. To his great credit, Bentham used these critical gifts in a socially reformist spirit, to improve the common weal. Coleridge, on the other hand, was not concerned with asking after the truth of things, but after their meaning. As such, the method is not destructive of received doctrine and tradition, but rather offers a hermeneutic reconstruction of the meaning of such doctrines and traditions. In contemporary terms, thinking of the influential work of Quentin Skinner, one would call this a contextualist approach to matters. That is, if we want to understand the meaning of a specific practice, event, or indeed text then we have to reconstruct its historical emergence and place it in the complex web of social and political life. In this sense, surprisingly perhaps, it is the Coleridgean-Continental philosophy that is conservative of tradition and the great enemy of social upheaval, whereas it is Bentham who is destructive of tradition and the friend of social change and progress. One is used to thinking of the distinction between traditions or tendencies the other way round, where analytic philosophy is conservative and stuffy in a sort of senior common room, leather arm-patch sort of a way, and Continental philosophy is its funky, streetwise, leather-jacketed obverse. Interestingly, we shall have occasion to meet an analogous political division in the conflict between Carnap and Heidegger, where the former is reformist and progessive, whereas the latter [...] is reactionary and conservative.
Seen in this way, the distinction between analytic and Continental philosophy is not a geographical distinction between different places, like Britain and the Continent, but is rather a difference that is internal to what might be called the English philosophical mind."." (p.43 et p.45)
"[For Mill] a truth common to the Continental philosophy is the necessity for antagonistic modes of thought. Namely, that the truth is not to be found in any part of the whole, but through the reflection on the whole as such. Although Mill makes no mention of Hegel, this is a very Hegelian thought, close to Hegel's notion of dialectics . In the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel writes the true is the whole , meaning by this that if one is to attain real wisdom and knowledge in things philosophical (what Hegel calls Absolute Knowing ), then one must view the vast variety of theses and positions that make up the history and present of philosophy as each expressing a grain of truth. To pick one grain from the pile is to risk missing out on the rich bread that one can bake from a whole batch of grain.
Mill compares the need for such antagonism or dialectics with the checks and balances that are an essential part of a liberal and democratic system of government. One justification for a competitive party system in government is that it is the duty of the opposition to continually examine the policy and legislation of the party of government, and vice versa when the roles are reversed, as they must be. In Mill's hopeful view, then, the error in philosophy is mistaking part of the truth for the whole, or, as Hegel puts it, of placing fear of error higher than the desire for truth. In this sense, it is not a question of deciding whether Bentham or Coleridge is right, but in seeing both philosophical tendencies as the combined expression of a larger truth . namely that human beings are concerned by questions of both knowledge and wisdom : they require both spectacles to look through and eyes to see with. Philosophy requires both critical and logical destruction and patient hermeneutic reconstruction. That is, analytic and Continental philosophy are two halves of a larger cultural whole." (pp.47-48)
"The gulf between analytic and Continental philosophy is the expression of a deep cultural divide between differing and opposed habits of thought -let's call them Benthamite and Coleridgean, or empirical-scientific and hermeneutic-romantic." (p.48)
-Simon Critchley, Continental Philosophy. A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 2001, 148 pages.
