Continental Philosophy Needs Better Critics—and Defenders

Over the past month, the discourse on this platform about continental philosophy has been staring me down from the corner like Willem Dafoe’s ‘Green Goblin' mask in the first Spider-Man movie. On one level, I find the whole thing exasperating—these paths have been trod numerous times before—but on the other, I think this debate has and continues to mask interesting questions about philosophical method, ones we’ve made little progress resolving since the beginnings of the continental-analytic split in the early 20^th century.

I also suspect, at the risk of sounding self-important, that I have something valuable to add here. I’ve said little about my own intellectual background on this platform as of yet, but engaging with this specific debate demands a bit of autobiography.

I got interested in philosophy as an undergraduate largely as a result of encounters with continental philosophy. In particular, a former debate coach recommended Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation, and I later encountered figures like Marx, Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze in an introductory literary theory course. I soon became almost obsessively interested in the Western Marxist and poststructuralist traditions, and ended up doing a thesis on the relationship between Derrida and Adorno’s related but differing perspectives on the notions of “presence” and “identity” (you can find it online with relative ease, but I can assure you it is very bad).

During my junior year, I decided I wanted to go to graduate school for philosophy, but was dismayed to find that there were very few programs focused on the continental tradition. The few that were, I found out, had largely moved on from the particular debates I’d become interested in anyway, so there was virtually nowhere I could go to continue pursuing my specific set of interests.

On top of that, I was far from impervious to prevailing hierarchies of prestige in the discipline, and since I wanted to go to a “good” and even a “top” program, resigned myself to the fact I would have to pivot in the direction of analytic philosophy as currently practiced in major American universities.

To make a long story short, despite reading as aggressively as I could in preparation for applying (I graduated in 2020 just as Covid took off, and so had a lot of down-time), by the time app season rolled around, I was still hopelessly naïve about the prerequisites for gaining admission to top philosophy programs. I got rejected from every PhD program I applied to, but was extremely fortunate to be accepted with a generous scholarship into the philosophy MA program at Tufts.

There, and again skipping a lot of extraneous detail, I began to specialize in (analytic) political philosophy and metaphysics, with some sub-areas of special concern being, on the political side, distributive and ‘structural’ injustice, and on the metaphysics side, grounding, causation, and social ontology. After some two and a half intense, but intellectually generative years, plus a couple more unsuccessful rounds of PhD apps, I pivoted out of philosophy academia entirely and onto what have turned out for me to be greener pastures.

So, all of that is to say, I feel I have some unique insight to offer when it comes to the ‘continental vs. analytic’ debate. While plenty of people have engaged in deep ways with both sides, most of them have done so from a particular side, and often only with what they take to be the least offensive slice of what their counterparts have to offer (or, as we will see, snippets from or caricatures of the most offensive slice).

While I’m sure I’m not the only one, I am at minimum part of a very small group who has engaged broadly and deeply with the offerings of both camps—and in particular with what we might think of each’s most ‘egregious offenders,’ i.e. with the most ‘continental’ of the continental (Hegel, Derrida, Butler, etc.), and the most ‘analytic’ of the analytic (cloistered debates in metaphysics, philosophy of language, and so on). I have also done so with approximately equal intensity (in effect as my full-time job), and over approximately equal time periods (~2-3 years each).

The reason I feel the need to frontload my credentials like this is because the ‘continental vs. analytic’ debate attracts a lot of folks who posture as having the background necessary to approach it fairly, but in reality are just purebred analytic, or purebred continental philosophers whose understanding of the other camp is minimal to nonexistent. In fact, that describes the majority of those who have ever seriously tackled the issue. As a result, I feel it’s important to emphasize that I have a fair bit of expertise in both areas, and also have no special allegiance to either (I’m much closer to an analytic philosopher by training, but still have a soft spot for my continental roots).

This background on hand (and with apologies for the lengthy intro), we can proceed to discussing the most recent spark in the long history of explosive debates over the continental-analytic divide. That would be this essay by popular philosophy blogger ‘Bentham’s Bulldog,’ real name Matthew Adelstein.

Adelstein’s essay is typical of lazy critiques of continental philosophy. It consists in

a) sharing block quotes from prominent continental philosophers in the hope that they will read as preposterously unclear and confusing, and

b) running through a series of putatively typical and obviously invalid “inferences rules” of continental philosophy, cribbed from other writing by continental philosophers.

Let’s rebut each section in turn.

The first is easily dealt with because, as vexing to read as Adelstein’s chosen quotes might be to the uninitiated, they are easily parseable by those familiar with the concepts and debates they are referencing. Let’s look at his first quote from Judith Butler:

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

Some prerequisites for understanding this passage in depth include: the distinction between structuralism and post-structuralism, the Marxist meaning of “capital,” Louis Althusser’s concept of “structural totalities,” Antonio Gramsci’s concept of “hegemony”, as well as Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s adaptation of this last notion in their 1985 book Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, which is the main subject of this paragraph, as is clear if you read it in context.

I am skeptical Adelstein (or anyone who nodded along with his essay) did anything approaching their due diligence on this background, before dismissing what is a complex, but far from incoherent claim from a renowned expert in their field. And so I can’t be accused of appealing to authority or gatekeeping this background myself, here is an attempt to render the Butler passage in a form (somewhat) more congenial to analytic philosophers and other non-specialist readers:

On “structuralist” theories of capitalism, ‘capital’—the process by which capitalists exploit human labor in order to produce commodities for profitable sale with the aim of reinvesting those profits in further commodity production—is understood to shape the social relations of those living under capitalism in a uniform manner, i.e. by way of that economic system’s most stable macroscopic properties. Conversely, Laclau and Mouffe extend Antonio Gramsci’s concept of ‘hegemony’—roughly, the idea that capitalists manufacture consent for their preferred form of social organization through the extra-economic pursuit of political and cultural power—to argue that the macroscopic properties of capitalism must be reproduced over time via micro and meso-level phenomena (such as fights over policy in national legislatures, public relations efforts by key political actors, distributional conflicts between bosses and unions, and so on), phenomena characterized by a far greater degree of dynamism and political contestation than the more stable features of capitalism writ large. The upshot is that, while we still ought to think of capitalism as having a holistic structure, Laclau and Mouffe’s renewed account of Gramscian hegemony has shown that we need to understand that structure as encompassing phenomena that a) exist at a range of metaphysical ‘levels,’ and b) are always undergoing rapid change, change whose precise characteristics are politically contested.

What do you notice about my revised version of this passage? It is more than double the length of the original, and is chock-full of lengthy appositives and interjections. So too would be analogous attempts to translate complicated, jargon-filled prose from other fields. There is nothing special about continental philosophy in this regard, nor Butler’s passage, nor for that matter Adelstein’s dismissive attitude. It is the same attitude held by religious fanatics who dismiss research in evolutionary biology because of its, to them, baffling appearance. My point is not that (all) continental philosophy has the same epistemic standing as (all) evolutionary biology, but that Adelstein’s “objection” to the former is no better-formed than the religious fanatic’s to the latter. He does not understand the passage, and he thinks it is self-evident that no one could, or does. That is false, and it is false of the next two passages he cites as well.1

Adelstein’s next line of objection is that continental philosophers make arguments based on defective rules of inference. In his words, “they’ll start by saying some things, and have orderly norms governing the relationship between premises and conclusions. The only problem is that the norms don’t involve the use of either logic or any other sound inference rules.”

His first example of a “continental philosophy rule of inference” is “’A is not B’ (where B is the obvious thing everyone would expect it to be) ‘but instead C’ where C is some random thing that makes no sense.” He takes this passage, again by Butler, to exemplify this rule:

As a result, gender is not to culture as sex is to nature; gender is also the discursive/cultural means by which “sexed nature” or “a natural sex” is produced and established as “prediscursive,” prior to culture, a politically neutral surface on which culture acts.

Translating into a less ‘continental’ register:

The concept of gender is upstream, rather than downstream, from the concept of sex, understood to refer to an objective, biological reality. Whereas we take sex to exist mind-independently, the precise semantic content of this term is strongly dependent on our conventional understanding of gender. In fact, it is because of our “gender” concept that “sex” is conceived of as mind-independent in the first place.

Regardless of what you think of this passage’s substance, we should be able to agree it does not contain an inference on any plausible theory of inference. There is no deduction, induction, or abduction here. At most there is a series of positive claims that are related, but only in the sense that they elaborate on one another. They do not, however, entail one another, nor is there any evidence that Butler thinks they do. Adelstein is conflating a common rhetorical pattern (“A is not B, but C”) with a “rule of inference,” and suggesting that it is continental philosophers, rather than he who have confused the two.

But no continental philosopher would characterize this passage as involving an inference, nor do any subscribe to the silly “inference rule” Adelstein attributes to them. So this is just a lazy straw man. Even more egregious is Adelstein’s next example in which he claims that the following relies on the “inference rule,” “for A, B.”

For Beauvoir, women are the negative of men, the lack against which masculine identity differentiates itself; for Irigaray, that particular dialectic constitutes a system that excludes an entirely different economy of signification.

This is plainly a brief piece of exegesis contrasting Beauvoir’s views to Irigaray’s. I have no idea how Adelstein could believe it to be an “inference” that Butler believes amounts to a “decisive argument.” We’ve entered the realm of either serious confusion or deliberate obfuscation.

I’ve only covered a few of Adelstein’s examples, but suffice it to say those I’ve left out are no better than those above. Bizarrely, they include multiple passages generated by ChatGPT, one of which is only identified as such in a footnote.

I find Adelstein’s work pretty strong overall, and so have a hard time believing he sees these as genuinely well-formed objections. Instead, I suspect he simply wasn’t interested in doing any real due diligence in this case, and further relaxed his standards for rhetorical effect, in particular given continental philosophy is already unpopular among his readership. His essay doesn’t wear its identity on its sleeve, but squint and it quickly reveals itself as the sort of low-effort out-group-bashing typical of the contemporary internet.2 There is plenty to criticize continental philosophers for, but this is not the way to do it.

This is the first in a series of posts I intend to write on the continental / analytic divide. In the next, I plan to discuss some of the other responses to Adelstein, in particular those by Ellie Anderson and Sam Kriss, which, while much better than Adelstein’s initial post, I also found unsatisfying and worthy of a response. I may also discuss posts by Michael Huemer and Daniel Muñoz which defend aspects of Adelstein’s position. After that, I will try to outline in some detail my own thoughts about the differences between continental and analytic philosophy.