This review of Simon Glendinning's splendid little book The Idea of Continental Philosophy will appear in the next issue of The Philosophers' Magazine.
The Idea of Continental Philosophy: A Philosophical Chronicle, Simon Glendinning (Edinburgh University Press) £14.99 / $22 (pb).
In 1958, several of Britain’s leading philosophers, most of them from Oxford, were invited by their French counterparts to attend a colloquium at Royaumont, north of Paris. The aim, as one of the organisers put it, was “to help us ‘Continentals’ get to know analytic philosophy better.”
Unfortunately the event turned out to be less a meeting of minds than a dialogue of the deaf. Summing up proceedings, one of the locals complained that all the British visitors had done was exercise their “right not to interest themselves in what is going on elsewhere” – on the “Continent” in other words. This was most clearly the case in the paper delivered by the grey eminence of Oxford philosophy, Gilbert Ryle.
Ryle’s talk, “Phenomenology versus The Concept of Mind”, began with what he cheerfully acknowledged was a “caricature” of the work of Edmund Husserl. Ryle said he couldn’t care less whether this caricature bore any resemblance to what Husserl actually thought or wrote; he was much more interested in describing as clearly as possible the “wide gulf that has existed for three-quarters of a century between Anglo-Saxon and Continental Philosophy”.
The major difference between the way things were done in Oxford and elsewhere, Ryle argued, was that British philosophers were allergic to the idea that their subject was the “Science of sciences” (a view he was able to pin on Husserl by means of an abusive translation of the German word Wissenschaft). In fact, it’s not a science at all, he went on – philosophy differs from scientific inquiry not in scope or rank, but in kind. Ryle attributed the Anglo-Saxon disinclination to “puff up” philosophy in this way to the Oxbridge college system, which ensured that philosophers were kept in daily contact with actual, working scientists. Grandiose claims to intellectual pre-eminence begin to look rather silly once the “post-prandial joking begins”.
According to Simon Glendinning, this paean to High Table-talk played an important role in cementing the self-image of Anglo-Saxon, analytic philosophy. It also helped to promote a particular conception of the fundamental gulf or division in the “contemporary philosophical culture”.
Ryle’s peroration at Royaumont is an important piece of evidence for the case Glendinning develops in his brief but hugely rich and provocative new book. His central claim is that there is simply no such thing as “Continental philosophy” at all. There is no “internal glue” strong enough to hold together figures as disparate as Hegel, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Adorno, Buber and Deleuze. Rather, the “Continental” tradition is a projection on the part of analytic philosophy, a movement that defined itself by its dislikes and a systematic misunderstanding of its neighbours.
The figure of the Continental philosopher in this story plays much the same role that the Sophist did for the ancient Greeks – it’s the embodiment of everything that is foreign to philosophy proper and must therefore be expelled. But if, Glendinning argues, sophistry was never merely a foreign body but rather a standing threat to philosophising as such, then the attempted expulsion will never succeed. “The idea of Continental philosophy [is] a false personification of (every) philosophy’s own interminable possibility: the possibility of failure and emptiness”.
This isn’t to say, however, that there aren’t fundamental differences or fault lines in our philosophical culture – there are. The point is that the idea of an unbridgeable gulf between analytic and Continental philosophy only serves to obscure some real and philosophically substantive divisions. For Glendinning, the most profound of these is that between naturalism and anti-naturalism, between those who believe that philosophy is essentially continuous with the natural sciences and those who don’t. Looking at things this way puts a rather different complexion on the history of philosophy in the second half of the twentieth century, and requires that we line up phenomenologists such as Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty with canonically analytical figures like Wittgenstein, Austin and, yes, Ryle himself.