Continental philosophy is mostly bad, but it's not a homogeneous category

Substacker Bentham’s Bulldog has recently published a series of critiques of continental philosophy. In his first article, he argues that continental philosophers rarely make arguments and rely instead on bare assertion and associative reasoning. In his second, he qualifies this thesis by acknowledging that some kinds of continental philosophy may be better than others, though he maintains that even the better kinds are afflicted by poor arguments and unclear thinking and writing.

I think that this amended thesis is close to the truth, but still overstated. Before we can pass judgement on continental philosophy as such, we need to interrogate the concept itself: is it even a valid concept? If so, what conditions define it? My thesis is that it is a valid concept, but not a homogeneous one. For anyone who’s not familiar with the distinction between analytic and continental philosophy, analytic philosophy is the tradition that emerged in Britain around the turn of the 20th century with the revolt of Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore against the neo-Hegelian school of British idealism in which they had been trained. Russell and Moore rejected the idealism and holism of their teachers and embraced realism and atomism in their stead, and the tradition that they inaugurated came to predominate in anglophone philosophy. Continental philosophy, meanwhile, is the tradition that emerged around the same time, most prominently in Germany and France, with roots in German idealism and phenomenology. But as we’ll see, defining these two traditions and drawing a distinction between them is not such a straightforward matter.

I have a negative opinion of the continental tradition on the whole, but there are major differences between continental philosophers, and the better ones are great philosophers. In particular, I would identify Fichte, Hegel, Nietzsche, Husserl, Sartre, and Dieter Henrich as great.¹ Not all of them write clearly, but they do all think clearly, and they all make original, worthwhile, and intelligent arguments. None of them are ultimately correct about much, but they are all worth reading, because they pose important challenges to the justificatory status of our most fundamental beliefs—for example, about subjecthood, objecthood, self-consciousness, and the principles of logic—and develop philosophical systems to answer those questions justified by arguments that are compelling, even though ultimately unsound.

Quick note before we begin: Bentham’s Bulldog quotes a passage from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and identifies it as an example of unclear continental writing. I’ve written a critique of that claim, but in order to explain the meaning of the passage I’ve had to take a detour through Hegel’s overall metaphilosophy, so I’ve moved that section to the end as an appendix that you can choose to read or not depending on how curious you are about Hegel. The TLDR is that Bentham’s Bulldog doesn’t identify which translation of the Phenomenology he’s quoting, but whichever translation it is, it contains a critical mistranslation that makes it impossible to correctly understand Hegel’s meaning. Once you consult a reliable modern translation, the passage becomes clear.

Origins of the analytic-continental divide

In order to determine whether the concept of continental philosophy is a valid one, let’s examine the history of the concept and of the associated concept of an analytic-continental divide. The notion of an analytic-continental divide in philosophy became commonplace after World War II. High-profile clashes that would later become canonical events in the history of the divide had already begun by 1911, when Russell denounced Henri Bergson on grounds that he would later summarize by charging Bergson with relying not on argument but merely on an “imaginative picture of the world” (History of Western Philosophy 2004: 722). Similarly, in 1932 Rudolf Carnap published “The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language” (republished in Logical Positivism, ed. A.J. Ayer trans. Arthur Pap), a positivist manifesto in which he critiques Martin Heidegger’s talk of “the Nothing” in his lecture “What Is Metaphysics?”, concluding that Heidegger’s claims are a pack of meaningless pseudostatements resulting from the illegitimate nominalization of the logical function of negation, which is properly understood not as a name or subject of a subject-predicate judgement, but rather as a logical operation on an existential quantifier (see this reconstruction if you want a fuller explanation of Carnap’s argument) (1966: 69-71). Both Russell’s and Carnap’s critiques are the sort of critiques of continental philosophy that would become standard among analytic philosophers.

By 1933, analytic philosophy had begun to constitute itself as a distinct tradition, as members of the Cambridge School of philosophers influenced by Bertrand Russell, G.E. Moore, and Ludwig Wittgenstein founded the journal Analysis, the first English-language journal explicitly dedicated to nothing but analytic philosophy. These clashes and incipient acts of self-constitution as a distinct tradition—initiated generally, it’s worth nothing, by analytic philosophers, not by continentals—exploded into outright hostility when war broke out, upending the lives of British analytic philosophers like A.J. Ayer, R.M. Hare, P.F. Strawson, J.L. Austin, Gilbert Ryle, Stuart Hampshire, and H.L.A. Hart, who put their philosophical work on hold to fight fascism. When the war ended, their critiques took on a new personal and political valence, as they accused continental philosophers like Fichte, Hegel, and Nietzsche of having produced irrationalist mystifications that had laid the intellectual groundwork for fascism (for a list of analytic philosophers who made these critiques, see James Chase and Jack Reynolds’ Analytic Versus Continental: Arguments on the Methods and Value of Philosophy, 2014: 14-5).

Philosophical accounts of the divide

We can get a grasp on how the notion of a divide emerged, but is it actually a genuine phenomenon? Are analytic and continental legitimate concepts distinct from one another? Continental is superficially a geographical concept, and that’s how John Stuart Mill understands it in his 1840 “Coleridge” (republished in John Stuart Mill on Bentham & Coleridge), in which he identifies Kantian and other German influences on Samuel Taylor Coleridge, writes of “the Germano-Coleridgian doctrine,” and makes the first known use of the phrase “Continental philosophers” (1962: 104, 108-11, 133-4) But a geographic account won’t do as a characterization of the modern divide. The origins of analytic philosophy are rooted in Austria (the Vienna Circle, Wittgenstein, Husserl, Bolzano, Brentano, Meinong, Mach), Germany (Frege², Hilbert, Gödel, Dedekind, Cantor), Poland (Twardowski, Kotarbiński, Tarski), and Italy (Peano). Meanwhile, analytic philosophy now thrives throughout Europe, including in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Soviet Union.

If geography won’t work, what about the next most obvious criterion: can analytic philosophy be defined in terms of analysis? In What is Analytic Philosophy?, Hans-Johann Glock argues that it cannot, because the analytic tradition has included so many different conceptions of analysis that no common account can be given that wouldn’t include virtually all of philosophy (2008: 154). Gottlob Frege conceives of analysis in terms of the relationship between arguments and functions (which he distinguishes from the relationship between parts and wholes), whereas logical atomists like the early Russell and Moore conceive of it precisely in terms of parts and wholes, i.e., in terms of iterative paraphrase of symbols appearing in propositions, which terminates in signs that resist further analysis and that stand for metaphysical atoms which are the fundamental components of the world (154-5). Meanwhile, the later Wittgenstein repudiates his earlier commitment to this decompositional conception of analysis, rejecting the idea that analysis reveals hidden components of language (157). The Oxford ordinary language philosophers follow him in this revision (157-8). And Willard Van Orman Quine rejects the very distinction between analytic and synthetic truths, and the conception of individual terms as possessing determinate meaning, on which the whole enterprise of analysis has rested (158-9).

Deflationary accounts of the divide

There have been other philosophical accounts of the divide, but I believe that almost all of them fail. There is no set of necessary and sufficient conditions that picks out all continental philosophers and no analytic philosophers. The tendency in recent scholarship has been to acknowledge this fact and to downplay the reality of the analytic-continental divide. Usually this doesn’t amount to a total denial of its reality, but there is a sense that some analytic philosophers would like to establish a sort of demilitarized zone. In its moderate form, this amounts to searching for shared roots and a common language to enable communication between analytics and continentals. For example, in A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism, Lee Braver argues that Kantian anti-realism is a central concern of the leading continentals, and that it constitutes a framework that analytic philosophers can recognize and productively engage (2007: 5-7). Similarly, Michael Rosen argues in “Continental Philosophy from Hegel” (in A.C. Grayling’s Philosophy 2: Further through the Subject) that continental philosophers centrally follow Kant in interrogating the conditions of experience and in rejecting empiricism, in the sense of a positivist, non-normative, psychologistic framework for epistemology (1998: 667).

And in A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger, Michael Friedman makes the case that the Carnap-Heidegger split was the result of a divergence between the Marburg and Southwest schools of neo-Kantianism, which forced the descendants of those schools to choose between a restricted conception of philosophy as governed by formal logic and limited to dealing only with the mathematical exact sciences, or a richer conception of philosophy as an account of concrete human existence, which can only be justified by rejecting the fundamental authority of formal logic (2000: 149-56). Carnap chose the former path; Heidegger took the latter, and that was the origin of the analytic-continental divide.

The post-Kantian German idealists are the earliest philosophers considered continental (or proto-continental), so the idea of seeking a common ground in Kant where analytics and continentals might meet is a productive one. Friedman’s account is fascinating, but it’s probably too particular to account for the divide as a whole. It’s plausible that technical problems in neo-Kantianism could have led to the divide between the Vienna Circle and Heidegger, but it’s not plausible that such a specific issue could have accounted for the analytic-continental divide in general.

Since 2000, there have also been extreme deflationary accounts of the divide that hold that it’s nothing but a sociological fact resulting from exclusionary acts taken or implicitly sanctioned by analytic philosophers for psychological, social, and political reasons. In Time in the Ditch: American Philosophy and the McCarthy Era, John McCumber argues that the predominance of analytic philosophy in the US is partly a result of the persecution of dissident philosophers during the McCarthy era.³ But he himself acknowledges that his case is circumstantial (xix), and the closest that he comes to providing direct evidence that the philosophy profession chose to embrace scientism and reject anti-scientistic and politically radical forms of philosophy in order to shield itself from political persecution is a line from an inaugural address by McCarthyite university president Raymond B. Allen threatening teachers who fail to “deal in a scholarly and scientific way with controversial questions” (2001: 39-40).

Allen made his name as a McCarthyite by getting a philosophy professor fired for being a member of the Communist Party (27-8), and he wrote a hostile response to the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association when they defended that professor, after which the Eastern Division made no more recorded attempts to defend academic freedom (34). But McCumber provides no evidence that Allen’s speech calling on teachers to deal in a “scientific way with controversial questions” in particular was widely circulated among philosophers, let alone that it shaped decisions about the future of the field. So unless we were to treat communism as a necessary condition of continental philosophy, such that fear of being identified as communist would make it impossible to do continental philosophy—which would be a silly thing to do, since there have been plenty of continental philosophers who were not communists—McCumber has not provided direct evidence for his thesis.⁴ The book also contains at least two factual inaccuracies, identified by Ted Cohen in “Philosophy in America: Remarks on John McCumber’s ‘Time in the Ditch: American Philosophy and the McCarthy Era’” (185-6). See also this devastating critique by philosopher Charles Pigden in the comment section of the Daily Nous blog.

The true account of the divide

So far I’ve been sympathetic to moderate deflationary accounts of the divide. But I do believe that the divide is real, and that the concepts of analytic and continental philosophy are legitimate and useful. There are no necessary and sufficient conditions for either, but they can be characterized in terms of average tendencies. Specifically, the best characterization of the divide is in terms of clarity of writing and epistemic rigor and methodological and metaphysical naturalism. Metaphysical naturalism is the thesis that everything that exists is identical to, reducible to, or supervenient on the things referred to in the natural sciences (or ideal versions thereof). And methodological naturalism is the thesis that philosophy should treat the natural sciences as its model and take their well-confirmed results as constraints on the range of viable philosophical positions.

Clarity of writing and epistemic rigor

Regarding clarity of writing and epistemic rigor, in “Analytic Philosophy and Cognitive Norms,” Pascal Engel observes that it’s rare for continentals to modify their claims as a result of discussion (1999: 222). He argues that analytic philosophy progresses linearly through arguments, whereas continental philosophy moves in a circle that returns to positions previously encountered. This form lends itself to the idea that any given continental philosopher’s conceptual circle can’t be broken by argument, such that the only way for continentals to oppose other continentals’ positions is by means of a transgressive leap into a new conceptual domain. Engel concludes that this accounts for the continental tendency towards melodrama and “political-philosophical messianism” (222-3).

In “German Philosophy: Language and Style,” Barry Smith argues that structural features of the German language lend themselves to long sentences and predispose German philosophers away from linguistic standardization, and towards etymological inventiveness and aesthetic pleasure in language itself (1991: 156-7). This leads to the tendency of German philosophers to create master works of philosophical art that stand on their own, almost incommensurable with the works of other philosophers, rather than participate in debate over common philosophical problems understood ahistorically, i.e., as remaining the same through the ages, as is the tendency of analytic philosophers (158). Smith also contrasts the tutorial or seminar participatory style of philosophy teaching at Anglo-Saxon universities with the lecture or homily style of passive reception at German universities, noting that German students enrolled in a lecture course are referred to as “hearers” [Hörer] (160).

One problem with unclear writing is that it wastes readers’ time. It’s reasonable to suppose that if continental philosophers wrote with the same level of clarity as analytic philosophers, readers would spend at least 50% less time interpreting and debating the meaning of their assertions. The total body of work that’s been done on continental philosophers is enormous, so their failure to write clearly has led to a staggering waste of person-hours. Regardless of whether the propositions asserted by continental philosophers are true or false, it’s independently bad for readers to spend more time than necessary trying to discern their meaning.

Relatedly, unclear writing gives the false impression of profundity, which leads to misallocations of intellectual status. Attention is a limited resource, so the more attention that readers allocate to superficially attractive but really worthless philosophy, the less they have to allocate to philosophy that’s worthwhile but unassuming and unmarketable.

Continental philosophy fosters hostility towards common sense. That’s not inherently bad—after all, appeals to common sense are often made on behalf of boorish and reactionary politics. The case for liberalism is abstract and non-intuitive, so understanding it requires suspending gut-level instinctual reactions. Similarly, many of our pre-reflective philosophical views require radical revision. But there’s also a form of common sense that’s vital: common sense defined not as the refusal to revise pre-reflective positions, but rather as the ability to have an immediate and reliable feel for how plausible and probable a given claim is. Other features of this valuable sort of common sense are a prioritization of meat-and-potatoes political goods like prosperity and freedom, and a pragmatic commitment to systems proven to work in reality. Common sense of this sort is severely undersupplied these days, as people are increasingly radicalized by bizarre internet ideologies. People prone to this sort of radicalization may be quite intelligent and inclined towards abstruse philosophical reflection, as in the case of the Zizians—but they lack common sense. As the example of the Zizians illustrates, there’s also plenty of analytic philosophy that is contrary to common sense. But a higher percentage of continental philosophy is contrary to common sense, and continental philosophy is more likely to make common sense as such an explicit object of critique.

Methodological and metaphysical naturalism

Turning to the criterion of methodological and metaphysical naturalism, Russell makes an appeal for the sort of methodological approach that I’m describing in “Analytic Realism” (originally published in French, trans. André Vellino, republished in Logical and Philosophical Papers 1909-13):

Heroic solutions have been abused in philosophy, detailed work has been neglected, and there has been too little patience. As with physics in the past, a hypothesis is invented, and on this hypothesis a bizarre world is built which is never compared to the real world. The true method, in philosophy as in science, should be inductive, meticulous, respectful of detail, and should reject the belief that it is the duty of each philosopher to solve all problems by himself. (1992: 139)

The approach that Russell is describing fits naturally with the practices of specialization and division of labor typical of the sciences. Indeed, in “Analytic and Continental Philosophy: Explaining the Differences,” Neil Levy proposes that the difference between the methodologies of analytic and continental philosophy be understood in terms of Thomas Kuhn’s distinction between normal science and preparadigm science (2003: 291-5). Normal science is science that has accepted an ontological and methodological paradigm such that it comes to be taken for granted in the field, which enables scientists to stop endlessly debating fundamentals and instead narrow their focus, adopt a problem-solving approach, and make rapid in-depth progress.

Preparadigm science, by contrast, is science that has yet to adopt a paradigm, such that it fractures into rival schools with opposing views on fundamental questions and is unable to work on problems in depth. Levy argues that analytic philosophy is like normal science, whereas continental philosophy is like preparadigm science. This distinction explains the continental preference for books over papers: unable to make the cumulative progress typical of normal science, each continental philosopher instead has to build their own system from scratch, since they have no common paradigm that they can take for granted. This continuous revolution is also characteristic of modern art, which suggests an analogy between continental philosophy and art. Levy writes, “The avant-garde artist, I suspect, typically has the goal of leading us to see the world anew, from a different perspective. Hence the constant need to revolutionize in art, to overthrow ways of perceiving before they become sedimented into habitual dispositions” (300-1). This explains the sense that continental philosophy is centrally concerned with finding “new vocabularies to express as yet unrepresented experiences” (301).

In the PhilPapers survey of philosophers, there is a statistically significant correlation between being an analytic philosopher and accepting naturalism, and between being a continental philosopher and rejecting naturalism. 50% of all respondents to the survey (a cohort comprised mostly of analytic philosophers) accept or lean towards naturalism, whereas only 28% of philosophers whose area of specialization is continental philosophy do the same.⁵

I believe that naturalism is true and that anchoring yourself to it as a fundamental orienting principle is essential for tracking the truth in philosophy. Science is the most successful epistemic endeavor in the history of humanity, so I see the commitment to naturalism as a major point in favor of analytic and against continental philosophy. Philosophy should model itself on science, not on art. Literal-mindedness is an important virtue for tracking the truth. Artistic values are great and important too, but they belong in art—to apply them as governing principles elsewhere in an attempt to make an artful work in a non-artistic field just makes for bad art and a bad work in that field. Of course, philosophical literature is perfectly legitimate, but it should be explicitly identified as literature, not as philosophy.

Conclusion

To return to the list of great continental philosophers with which I began this article, none of them are naturalists, except maybe Nietzsche in an extended sense. So that’s a mark against them. But some of them are clear writers, and they all produce novel, epistemically rigorous arguments, so I believe that they are worth reading. Most continental philosophy is bad, but it’s not a homogeneous field. To wit, clarity of writing and epistemic rigor is one of the two criteria that I’ve argued distinguish analytic from continental philosophy, so it follows that continental philosophy is nonhomogeneous with regard to one of those two criteria.

You may have noticed that my list of great continentals is almost entirely comprised of German idealists and philosophers working in the post-Kantian and phenomenological traditions. That’s no coincidence—those are, in my view, the good parts of continental philosophy. The post-Kantian German idealists are, like Kant, system-building philosophers, and they work within the conceptual framework developed by Kant. This means that it’s impossible to fully understand them without understanding Kant’s conceptual framework, the specialized terminology that goes with it, and the revisions that the post-Kantian idealists make to both. As a result, reading an excerpt of their writing in isolation will likely be an exercise in frustration. It doesn’t help that Fichte and Hegel are, unlike Kant, unclear writers. But this doesn’t mean that their arguments aren’t worthwhile—it just means that it takes background work to understand them. The systematic nature of their philosophy and its embeddedness in the Kantian tradition explain why their work seems on the surface like bad continental philosophy, but in reality is not.

In general, I understand the impulse to dismiss continental philosophy without spending too much time on it. Knowing what things are and are not worth your time is an important skill of intellectual economy. But if you do choose to opine on continental philosophy, you should do it with the same epistemic rigor with which you’d opine on anything else—and you should do it bearing in mind that it’s not a uniform tradition.

Appendix: Hegel

In his second article on continental philosophy, Bentham’s Bulldog cites a passage from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit as evidence of unclear continental writing. He doesn’t name which edition he’s quoting, and Googling portions of his version of the passage within quotation marks produces no results, so I can’t tell where he got it from. It’s close but not identical to J.B. Baillie’s 1964 translation (which renders the title as The Phenomenology of Mind). The question of which edition he’s quoting is important, because whichever edition it is, it contains a critical mistranslation that makes it impossible to correctly understand what Hegel is saying. Let’s consult the modern Cambridge edition (trans. ed. Terry Pinkard) in order to clarify things. I’ll italicize the part that’s crucially mistranslated in the version cited by Bentham’s Bulldog:

Moreover, because philosophy essentially is in the element of universality, which encompasses the particular within itself, it might seem that even more so than in the other sciences, in philosophy what is indeed salient about its subject matter, even its perfect essence, would be expressed in the goal of the work and in its final results, and that the way the project is in fact carried out would be what is inessential. In contrast, if a person were to have only a general notion of, for example, anatomy, or, to put it roughly, if he were to have an acquaintance with the parts of the body taken in accordance with their lifeless existence, nobody would thereby think that he has come into full possession of the salient subject matter of that science, which is to say, its content. One would think that in addition he would have to go to the trouble to pay attention to the particularities of the science. – Furthermore, that kind of an aggregation of little bits and pieces of information has no real right to be called science, and a conversation about its purpose and other such generalities would be in no way distinct from the ordinary historical and uncomprehending way in which the content, or these nerves and muscles, and so forth, is itself discussed. In the case of philosophy, on the other hand, this would give rise to the following incongruity, namely, that if philosophy were indeed to make use of such a method, then it would have shown itself to be incapable of grasping the truth. (2018: 3-4)

The critical phrase here is “it might seem,” “der Schein statt” in the original. Schein means appearance, and Hegel uses it as a correlate of Wesen [essence]. Schein is the external manifestation by which essence “shines” forth or shows itself, but behind which essence itself remains hidden. In other words, Schein is only a partial manifestation or semblance of essence, not the real thing itself. It’s not quite an illusion, but it’s also not the full truth—hence the phrase “it might seem” implies that what follows is not the full truth, just a potentially misleading appearance. The translation cited by Bentham’s Bulldog renders this is as “seems,” which implies exactly the opposite. In normal English usage, if you say that something “seems” to be so, you’re saying that it probably is so. So his translation inverts Hegel’s meaning.

Now that we’ve cleared that up, what is the overall meaning of this passage? Hegel starts by observing that philosophy deals with universals, i.e., general types like being rather than particular instantiations of those types like the being that is my chair. He notes that this might make it seem like it should be possible to summarize the conclusions of philosophy in abstraction from the context in which they’re derived, since philosophy seems superficially to abstract from any such particular context. In other words, he’s responding to the expectations of the reader who’s opening the Phenomenology for the first time, starting with the Preface, and hoping to find a summary of the results for which Hegel is going to argue. His message to this reader is to give up that hope, because the seeming in question is misleading. Even though philosophy deals in universals, the conclusions that it generates only have determinate meaning and truth-values in the context of the organic whole out of which they emerge.

This means that you can’t summarize the truths of philosophy by means of ordinary subject-predicate judgements. An ordinary judgement presupposes that its subject exists determinately prior to and independently of its predicate, such that the judgement just attaches the predicate to the pre-existing subject. But since the traditional subjects of philosophy are non-empirical objects like god and the soul which can’t be given to the senses, the only way to have a pre-given determinate representation of these subjects is to receive a stipulative definition of them, for example from religious or philosophical authorities (Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline Part I: Science of Logic trans. ed. Klaus Brinkmann and Daniel O. Dahlstrom, EL § 28, 30-1, 33). In Hegel’s view, this is precisely the methodology of the uncritical, dogmatic pre-Kantian metaphysics that he rejects. If philosophy is to live up to the critical spirit called for by the fact of human freedom, nothing can be taken for granted. This means that the truths of philosophy cannot be conveyed by subject-predicate judgements, but must rather be expressed by what Hegel calls speculative sentences. As Hegel discusses later on in the Preface of the Phenomenology, these are sentences in which the representation of the subject is initially indeterminate, and is then revised and made determinate by the dialectical movement towards the predicate, which reveals and makes explicit the true essence of the subject (PS ¶60-2).

This is all relevant to the Phenomenology, because the methodology of that work is one of immanent dialectical self-development. That is, its central truths are conveyed in speculative sentences, not subject-predicate judgements. In particular, the Phenomenology traces the dialectical development of the various shapes of consciousness, or ordinary common-sense epistemic-ontological theories of perception, representation, and self-representation. Hegel argues that each of these shapes of consciousness contains contradictions that undermine it and lead to a further shape of consciousness. This process repeats until finally arriving at what Hegel calls absolute knowing, which he identifies as the standpoint of philosophy. In other words, the book is an immanent critique of the pre-reflective philosophical commitments of common sense, which demonstrates to people who hold those commitments that their pre-reflective frameworks are self-contradictory, such that they must ultimately abandon those frameworks and embrace the standpoint of philosophy instead.

The point of the passage in the Preface, then, is that you can’t summarize the result of the book with an ordinary subject-predicate judgement like, “absolute knowing is the standpoint that all persons must adopt.” The standpoint of absolute knowing isn’t a pre-given representation with determinate content; it only emerges through the immanent critique of the various shapes of consciousness. This shouldn’t be too surprising—after all, few philosophers besides Hegel and his fellow German idealists have ever used any such concept as absolute knowing, so it’s no surprise that the concept has no determinate pre-given meaning and doesn’t designate any independently existing phenomenon. It only acquires meaning through the dialectic of the shapes of consciousness, such that the truth of absolute knowing can only be expressed in speculative sentences, which can only be grasped by working through the dialectic step by step. Put simply, Hegel’s point is that if you want to grasp the conclusion of the Phenomenology, then you have to read the whole book.

Incidentally, Bentham’s Bulldog writes that he’s specifically chosen a passage from the beginning of the Preface in order to demonstrate that even the portions of Hegel that don’t presuppose background knowledge fail to make sense. But the premise that the Preface does not presuppose background knowledge is false. In fact, Hegel wrote the Preface after completing the Phenomenology, and intended it as a statement of his overall metaphilosophical views, which means that it also applies to his subsequent work, the Logic. Clearly what I’ve written in this section isn’t all contained in the passage in question. But that’s no mark against Hegel, because there’s no reason to expect to fully understand a systematic philosopher’s statement of his metaphilosophy just by reading one single passage from it.

1. You might object that Fichte, Hegel, and Nietzsche predate the analytic-continental divide and therefore should not be counted as continentals. But they are at least proto-continental, in the sense that they have had great influence on the continental tradition and relatively little on the analytic tradition, their rediscovery by analytic philosophers beginning in the second half of the 20th century notwithstanding. And Bentham’s Bulldog treats Hegel as a paradigmatic continental.

2. Regarding Frege, Chase and Reynolds observe that Frege’s specifically philosophical work was only translated into English in the late ’40s, such that he had less influence on prewar analytic philosophy than is retrospectively assumed (17). Nevertheless, Frege and Husserl were in one sense or another forefathers of the analytic and the continental traditions respectively, and they engaged in productive dialogue that led to substantial agreement (Chase and Reynolds 16-22), which is why I’ve chosen them for the preview image for this article.

3. Similarly, in How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science: To the Icy Slopes of Logic, George A. Reisch argues that McCarthyism and other Cold War pressures defanged logical empiricism, robbing it of its early commitment to political radicalism and social engagement (2005: 6-8). He partially endorses McCumber’s account and suggests that the exigencies that depoliticized logical empiricism may also have contributed to the formation of the analytic-continental divide (384-6).

4. While I reject McCumber’s thesis that the analytic-continental divide emerged partly as a result of political cravenness on the part of analytic philosophers, analytics did sometimes play a willful role in creating the divide. For example, when French philosophers in 1958 organized a conference at Royaumont for the purpose of establishing dialogue with Oxford School analytic philosophers, Oxford philosopher Gilbert Ryle gave a supercilious and dismissive talk that in Glock’s words, “seemed interested less in establishing whether there was a wide gulf between analytic and ‘Continental’ philosophy than in ensuring that there would be” (63). See Simon Glendinning’s The Idea of Continental Philosophy for more details on Ryle’s talk (2006: 70-4).

5. On a more impressionistic level, it’s hard to think of any continental philosopher at all who accepts naturalism, at least in a straightforward sense. In Post-Continental Philosophy: An Outline, John Mullarkey argues that continental philosophers since the ‘80s have turned away from the phenomenological tradition of transcendence and the post-structuralist prioritization of language, and embraced immanence, materialism, and engagement with natural sciences like biology instead (2006: 2-5). He describes this tendency as “an ecstatic naturalism that restores value to levels of existence that are irreducible to classical physics” and identifies the work of Deleuze as an example (5). Whether or not naturalism is an appropriate term for this phenomenon, I don’t think that many people would classify Deleuze as a naturalist in anything like the sense in which many analytic philosophers are naturalists.

Chase and Reynolds note that Husserl is an exception among continentals in that he does engage with science, he does conceive of his philosophical project on the model of science, and he does seek in his philosophy to establish a foundation for the claims of logic and math. But they note that even he doesn’t engage with science in the manner typical of analytics, namely, with a deferential attitude that treats philosophy as constrained by the results of science and that takes its task to be the pursuit of reflective equilibrium among the various claims of different scientific domains (156-7).