i) Introduction
ii) Analysis and Argumentation
iii) Clarity
iv) Obscurity
v) Deconstruction
vi) Conclusion
Many analytic philosophers stress the point that analytic philosophy isn't about the sharing of views or positions: it's about the sharing of philosophical tools and a basic commitment to clarity. All this is regardless of what position a particular analytic philosopher may advance.
In
his book,
What
is Analytic Philosophy?,
Hans-Johan Glock elaborates on this position in the following:
“Philosophy
is not about sharing doctrines, but about a rational and civilised
debate even about one's own cherished assumptions.”
It
can be seen that Glock doesn't use the words “analytic
philosophy” at the beginning of the passage above. However, he does
conclude by saying the following:
“Such
a debate remains easier among analytic philosophers than between
analytic and continental philosophers.”
Of
course it's also the case that many analytic philosophers do actually
“share doctrines”. However, it's just that the sharing of philosophical
tools and practices is deemed to be more important than sharing
doctrines. It also follows from the sharing of philosophical tools
and a commitment to clarity that there can be “rational and
civilised debates even about one's cherished assumptions”. That is,
the sharing of philosophical tools and a commitment to clarity
enables (or allows) rational and civilised debate.
Of
course certain questions arise here:
i)
Do analytic philosophers really share many - or indeed any -
philosophical tools?
ii)
Is there genuine civilised debate between all analytic philosophers
at all times?
Many
philosophers have of course questioned this assumption that analytic
philosophers share tools. Others may question the deepness or
genuineness of the “civilised debate” too. This basically means
that there will be exceptions to i) and ii) above and no
one should expect otherwise. However, on the whole, it's easy to see
that most analytic philosophers do indeed share many tools and
practices.
As
for civilised debate.
This
runs parallel to an account of science as a whole which can be
distinguished from any accounts of individual scientists. That is,
individual scientists can be very unrepresentative individuals: they can falsify experimental data, stick dogmatically to their
theories, be paid by big business, let their politics influence their
science, etc. Nonetheless, unrepresentative scientists certainly
aren't the norm in science. (All this will partly depend partly on
which science we're talking about, which period of scientific
history, the country in which scientists work, etc.)
The
same kinds of distinction can be made between individual analytic
philosophers and analytic philosophy itself. There may indeed be
unrepresentative analytic philosophers. It may even be the case that
poor standards (however that's defined) are sometimes displayed
within books or even papers. However, as with science, none of this is really true of analytic philosophy as a whole.
Analysis & Argumentation
In
broad terms, it can be said that Philosopher X is an analytic
philosopher simply because he uses the tools of analytic philosophy
and indulges in philosophical analysis. Of course we'd need to
specify exactly what the tools of analytic philosophy are and what,
precisely, philosophical analysis is. Indeed these issues have caused
a lot of dispute – especially in the last couple of decades (though
arguably before that too).
Ironically
enough, analytic philosophers have also provided analyses of the
words “philosophical analysis” and subsequently asked some
questions about the term.
For
example, Professor Barry Dainton and Professor Howard Robinson have
this
to say about philosophical analysis within the tradition of
analytic philosophy:
“...
there are many different conceptions of analysis to be found within
the analytic tradition. For some 'analysis' means an investigations
into concepts. For those impressed by Russell's theory of
descriptions, analysis is a matter of revealing the true but
concealed logical form underlying ordinary language statements. For
others it is a matter of carefully studying the way expressions are
actually used in ordinary language, with a view to dissolving rather
than solving philosophical problems.”
These
are very different accounts of philosophical analysis. However,
surely we can count them all as still being philosophical
analysis. Though this raises the questions as to what
types or examples of philosophy bypass analysis altogether; and,
indeed, how that is even possible.
One thing that analytic philosophers do share is a commitment to
argumentation. That is, the “investigation into concepts”
mentioned above will also usually involve argumentation of some kind.
The same is true of Bertrand Russell's approach and the stress on the
expressions of ordinary language. All these approaches will include
argumentation and be defended with argumentation.
Argumentation,
then, is opposed to simply making statements or offering “occult
pronouncements”. That is, when someone engages in
argumentation, that simply means that he's defending or justifying
what it is he has said.
In
much continental philosophy, on the other hand, there are many
statements which don't appear to be the result of prior argument.
That is, they aren't conclusions of claims or premises which
themselves contain arguments, data, or empirical evidence. At its
worst, such philosophy makes philosophical pronouncements that aren't argumentatively defended or justified.
Of
course here I've simply shifted the debate from an account of the
words “philosophical analysis” to references to “argument”,
“justification” and the like. So it can now be said that
analysis either is argumentation or that it includes argumentation.
Clarity
The
idea that analytic philosophy isn't a matter of doctrines is again stressed by the European
Society for Analytic Philosophy. It
writes:
“Analytic
philosophy is characterised above all by the goal of clarity, the
insistence on explicit explanation in philosophy, and the demand that
any view expressed be exposed to the rigours of critical evaluation
and discussion by peers.”
It
can be said that the notions “clarity” and “explicit
explanation” may simply be relative to analytic philosophers and
what they take these words to mean. In other words, analytic philosophy may only be clear to analytic
philosophers and the explicit explanations found in analytic
philosophy may only work that way according to analytic philosophers. This may mean that those on the outside (including educated people) may not appreciate or recognise the clarity or take the
explanations to be explanations. Of course this is a sceptical view
of both analytic philosophy and the passage above. Nonetheless, even
if clarity and these explicit explanations are relative only to
analytic philosophers, it's surely still the case that most analytic
philosophers have the “goals” of clarity and explanation in mind. And
that takes analytic philosophers one step beyond many continental
philosophers; who, it can be argued, often revel
in obscurity and pseudo-profundity.
The
final passage in the above also seems to explicitly and strongly tie
all analytic philosophy to a university setting in that it stresses
the “critical evaluation and discussion by peers”. Presumably
these peers will be fellow academics. This also highlights the fact
that analytic philosophy is more closely tied to university departments than continental philosophy. Of course there
have also been many continental philosophers who've been professors
or academics. However, when it comes to analytic philosophy,
virtually every well-known (or not so well-known) analytic
philosopher has made his name at some university or other. Indeed
analytic philosophy outside of a university setting seems to be like a fish
out of water.
Analytic
philosophers rationalise this extreme universitycentric bias by
stressing the technicalities and specialisms of the subject. They may
say that most physicists and biologists, for example, are also tied
to - and reliant upon - universities. Yet even in the case of
physicists and biologists there have been far more people who've done
good work outside universities (including the many great “amateur
scientists” from the 17th century onward) than analytic
philosophers. Of course once a philosopher
has established himself in a university (or in a handful of
universities), then he's free to move beyond academia. However, even
this is very rare within analytic philosophy. It seems, then, that
contemporary analytic philosophy really is a university phenomenon
and that partly explains the European Society for Analytic
Philosophy's reference to the “critical evaluation of peers”.
Obscurity
To
repeat: Hans-Johan Glock referred to “rigour, clarity, scholarship
and intellectual honesty” in the passage above.
Of
course these virtues aren't the sole domain of analytic philosophy.
After all, Aristotle, Hume and Descartes, to take only three
examples, predate analytic philosophy. There were also 20th century
continental philosophers who were rigorous. However, many continental
philosophers have indeed been obscure and unclear. But this simply begs the question as to what analytic philosophers mean by
the words “unclear” and “obscure”.
So
let's go into a little more detail as to what the word “clarity” may mean
within a philosophical context. Let's quote the American philosopher
Gary Gutting here. He writes:
“My
concern, however, is about the obscurity that arises because authors
do not make a sufficient effort to connect their novel concepts to
more familiar (even if technical) concepts that would all an informed
and conscientious reader to make an assessment of their claims. The
result is writing that is hermetic
in the sense that it cuts itself off from the very issues of common
concern that it is trying to address.”
First
things first. It will be said that this is a gross
generalisation. Is this passage meant to be about all
continental philosophy? After all, I doubt that Gary Gutting had
Frege, Husserl, Carnap, Wittgenstein and others in mind when he wrote
the above. Indeed I doubt that what he says can be applied to (much
of) Michel Foucault, Jürgen Habermas, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and
other continental philosophers. And that's because Gutting actually
had Gilles Deleuze, Jaques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas in mind.
In
the passage above there's also a hint (rather than an explicit
statement) that such uncertainty and obscurity is quite deliberate.
That is, such philosophers
“do
not make a sufficient effort to connect novel concepts to more
familiar concepts”.
This
means that the writing Gutting has in mind is intentionally
“hermetic”. In other words, there can be philosophical writing
styles which are unclear or even obscure - yet not deliberately so.
This could apply to a philosopher like Kant or perhaps to certain
works by Husserl. For example, I doubt that Kant went out of his way
to be unclear or obscure. Yet Kant is indeed often unclear (depending on
translations) because of his writing style, his academic audience and
the complexity of the issues he was addressing. Nonetheless, his
writing is rarely rhetorical or oracular; as much continental
philosophy is.
So
why the deliberate obscurity or unclarity? John Searle comments on
this in a seminar he once gave in which he referred to Michel
Foucault; whom he classed as a “good friend”. This is Searle's
account
of the conversation:
Searle:
“Why the hell do you write so badly?”
Foucault:
“Look. If I wrote as clearly as you do, people in Paris wouldn't
take me seriously. They'd think that I was childlike. Naive.”
Searle went on to say:
“You've
got to be 10% incomprehensible otherwise people won't think it's
deep. They won't think you're a profound philosopher.”
Many
commentators have also accused these philosophers of hiding mundane
or trite ideas under pretentious prose. Others have even said that
“nothing is hidden” because effectively there's
nothing to hide.
Or as Hugh
Mellor
(at Cambridge
University) said about Jacques Derrida: this stuff is “bullshit”. Mellor
also wrote:
“That
is much latter work which seems to be willfully obscure. If you spell
out these later doctrines plainly, it becomes clear that most of
them, if not false, are just trivial.”
Mellor
then added that Derrida "goes in for mystery-mongering about
trivial truisms”. Having said that, before those words Mellor had
also said that “some of Derrida's early work was interesting and
serious”. However, “this isn't the work he has become famous
for”.
Of
course a lot of analytic philosophy is also “trivial”. It's also
the case that some analytic philosophers hide that triviality under
prose which is “willfully obscure”. Then again, such analytic philosophy won't be trivial or willfully obscure in the same way in
which Derrida's later work is. That is, it won't be poetic, vague and
oracular.
Instead, analytic triviality is hidden within forests of jargon, schema, symbolic letters, footnotes, references, “backward
Es” (to quote Hilary Putnam), words like ceteris
paribus and the like. In other words, basic analytic academic prose will be
used to hide the trivialities. In Derrida's case it's a different
kind of obscurity; though, in the continental tradition, it can be
equally academic.
Mellor
also said that some of Derrida's “doctrines” are “simply
false”. Well, Mellor most certainly must believe exactly the same thing about many doctrines offered up by analytic philosophers. However, I
suppose that he must also believe that even though they are false,
they aren't also “trivial”. And my bet is that he certainly won't
see them as being examples of what he calls “mystery-mongering”.
Deconstruction
Despite
Gary Gutting saying that Derrida and others deal in “obscurity”
and don't make the effort to communicate to those
outside their own particular philosophical cults, he nonetheless does
understand one of Derrida's positions: namely, that “every concept
deconstructs itself”.
Now
whether or not this is true (or whether or not it can
be true), this position on self-deconstructing
concepts
may partly explain Derrida's obscurity or unclarity. After all, if
all concepts do indeed deconstruct themselves, then isn't that fact
(sous
rature!)
going to be reflected in Derrida's prose itself? Or, to be more
accurate, if Derrida believed that concepts deconstruct themselves,
then he might have wanted to display that reality within his philosophical prose. Indeed isn't that precisely
what Derrida did attempt to do? In other words, since Derrida (at
least at one point in his career) emphasised what he called
philosophical and/or linguistic “play” (i.e., “the
play of the sign”),
then it seems that Derrida himself might have embraced
obscurity or at least arcane
play.
Gutting
also says that French philosophers believes that “contradictions
can never be avoided”. Here again, if some French philosophers really do
believe this, then surely they're going to display (or reflect) that
truth in
their philosophical prose. And won't that very acknowledgement and
highlighting of philosophy's (or language's) inherent contradictions
inevitably lead to an unclear or even obscure prose style?
On
the other hand, one can indeed have Mellor's “trivial truisms”
which are expressed in a prose which is bizarre and strange. This
suggests, then, that obscurity and unclarity are sometimes chosen, rather than
forced upon a philosopher by either the world/nature or by inherent
philosophical contradictions.
Then
again, it can be argued that even if a philosopher stresses and
acknowledges such inescapable
contradictions,
it's still possible to do so in a prose which isn't obscure. Think
here of Graham Priest, for example, who upholds a dialethic
position on logic and philosophy in which what he calls
“contradictories”
and “inconsistencies”
are
acknowledged and even embraced. Nonetheless, all this is carried out
in a prose which is both clear and unpretentious. Having said that, a
distinction can be made here between embracing and acknowledging
contradictories
and actually displaying them in one's prose. In addition, physicists who
concentrate on quantum mechanics can also express their physics in a
prose which is clear and unpretentious. In this case - and perhaps in
Priest's too - it is the world/nature itself which is bizarre and
strange, not the prose which describes that world.
Conclusion
It's
not a surprise that the “debate” between analytic philosophers
and other analytic philosophers is “easier” than the debate
“between analytic philosophers and continental philosophers” (as
mentioned in the Glock passage above). After all, debate between
biologists and physicists is harder than between physicists and
physicists. Then again, you'd expect - prima facie -
that a debate between analytic philosophers and continental
philosophers would be easier than between biologists and physicists
because, after all, we're talking about philosophers debating with
other philosophers here (even if from different traditions). Having said that, both biologists and physicists are scientists – so
the same can be said about them.
At it's most extreme, if analytic philosophers and
continental philosophers use different tools and technical terms, do
philosophy in a different way, and don't even discuss the same
issues, then it's not a surprise that there's a lack of debate
between the two traditions.
As
it is, however, things aren't always this bad. Apart from the fact
that some philosophers on the continent have also been analytic
philosophers, even when they aren't, some of the issues both
traditions have discussed have indeed been the same. However,
it's still the case that the same issues have been - and still are - discussed in very different ways.
***************************
Note:
1) There
are of course many other areas of this subject which might have been
discussed. For example, the following quote has enough material in it for
an entire piece. (Incidentally, this passage is a reaction to the words of John Searle mentioned above.) So I'll simply quote it as concluding food for thought. :
“I
agree that the sort of literature in question has awful prose and it
could be clearer. However, I've become weary of the way much of the
analytic tradition fetishizes 'clarity'. This is how they subject
themselves to criticism of their own: the focus on thinking about
aspects of the world that are the most intelligible. But the most
intelligible isn't necessarily the most important. There's something
extremely artificial about avoiding ambiguity at all costs, as
language itself is ambiguous. If in considering the world in its most
meaningful depths we find obstacles within the language to express
it, must we give up the world? A little ambiguity is inevitable,
perhaps even desirable.
“If
continental philosophy sins in obscurantism, analytic philosophy sins
in superficiality."
- Federico Amadeo
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