Analytic and Continental styles

The Question of Philosophy.

It is the difference in the reply that can be made to the question, "What is philosophy?' that constitutes the difference - and the divide - between analytic and continental styles of thinking. For analytic purposes, philosophy may be defined as, Michael Dummet defines it in the Origins of Analytic Philosophy, [1] in terms of 'the belief, first, that a philosophical account of thought can be attained through a philosophical account of language, and, secondly, that a comprehensive account can only be so attained. [2] Like Dummett, Martin Heidegger too will define philosophy in terms of thought and of language, although conceiving both conceptions as intrinsically elusive rather than clearly available. In What is Called Thinking, Heidegger reflects on the nature of thinking but declares, and repeatedly declares: 'Most thought-provoking is that we are still not thinking." And, as Heidegger admits, the claim that we are 'still not thinking" seems annoyingly erroneous: 'how dare anyone assert today that we are still not thinking, today when there is everywhere a lively and constantly more audible interest in philosophy, when almost everybody claims to know what philosophy is all about! [3]

For Heidegger just as for Dummett, philosophy is a matter of thinking, the difference is that for Heidegger, as also for Nietzsche, one cannot simply give an account of thinking: not only must we ask what thinking is, we have first to learn to think, which for Heidegger means we have to learn to listen, and he will even claim, learn to learn - and to let learn.[4] In reference to language too, [5] Heidegger is careful to remind us of the inherent ambiguity of what "plays with our speech [6] as language does: 'we are moving on shifting ground, or, still better, on the billowing waters of an ocean. [7] "Words," for Heidegger, "are not terms, and thus are not like buckets and kegs from which we scoop a content that is not there. Words are wellsprings that must be found and dug up again and again, that easily cave in, but that at times also well up when least expected. {8} Thus Heidegger can explain that "Thinking clears its way only by its own questioning advance. But this clearing of the way is curious. The way that is cleared does not remain behind, but is built into the next step, and is projected forward from it.[9] Where Dummett advances propositions, Heidegger questions the logic of propositions and raises the question of what is called thinking as what withdraws, shifts, what wells up. Where Dummett can distinguish what belongs to the analytic nature of philosophy, Heidegger speaks of what differentiates thinking from what ordinarily passes for philosophy to remind us in a book addressed to the nature of thought itself that we are "still" not thinking.

Evidently, there is a stylistic and indeed temperamental difference between the two approaches to the doing of philosophy even as an explication of the subject matter of philosophy. Temperament and style, however, do not exhaust the distinction to be made between analytic and continental approaches to philosophy for the distinction constitutes a divide: the parties in question are opposed one to another. What makes (and breaks) continental philosophy is its open embrace of philosophic questioning as questioning.
This openness to sustained inquiry opposes "analysing" (dissolving/resolving or eliminating/denying as unreal or as pseudo-problems) the perennially intractable questions of the philosophical tradition. Analytic philosophy, by contrast, features "a deflationary conception of philosophy - a conception according to which philosophical problems are pseudo-problems, problems to be dissolved not solved, {10} as John Skorupski decribes it in his contribution to a very slim volume entitled The Rise of Analytic Philosophy. The antithesis of such a smoothly, calculatedly, understated attitude, continental philosophy tends to intensify philosophic problems with its approach (resulting from Heidegger's passion for what he calls "thinking" as well as the kind of bombastic style one finds in Nietzsche or, latterly, Baudrillard.) A consideration of the role of the philosophy of science (as conceived within these two traditions) highlights the methodological and stylistic distinction between the "deflationary" philosophic project of analytic philosophy and the convicted enthusiasm of continental philosophy. To review this (superficially merely) temperamental distinction between analytic and continental philosophy, it is important to note the role of science.

Without specifically adverting to the influence of science on contemporary thought, analytic philosophy can be explicated just as Dummett explicates it above: as a matter of clarifying one's thinking and as thought is defined by language, analytic philosophy thus reduces to the analysis of language. What this definition omits, particularly as one encounters it in Dummett's defining discussion, is that the question of the cognitive referent is not to be decided by logical analysis but contemporary Western science (and the timeliness of science's authority is important to emphasize for it excludes, say, out-of-date sciences such as those derived from the doctrine of signatures [homeopathy] or astrology [as Feyerabend teased], in addition to non-Western sciences like Ayurvedic medicine or accupuncture.) In this way, analytic philosophy stands to science as scholastic philosophy once did to theology. Continental philosophy differs from analytic philosophy in its openness to questioning which also means that it is less concerned with solutions than it is with critical questioning (including the question of its own presumptions or prejudices). But this focus on critical questioning also means, at least ideally, that continental philosophy does not aspire to take its rational warrant from science itself as analytic philosophy does do. [11]

In this way, Edmund Husserl famously challenges scientific reason for the sake of the ideal of "scientific" or objective philosophy in his Crisis, and Heidegger notoriously observes that "science does not think, [12] and Friedrich Nietzsche bluntly overreaches his hand as he identifies a particular brand of methodological "stupidity" as a prime characteristic of modern science. Intriguingly, albeit counterintuitively enough, continental (rather than analytic) philosophy is thus positioned both critically and philosophically to raise the question of the nature of scientific inquiry. [13]

Analytic Philosophy: Regarding a "Deflationary" Approach to Philosophy.

The story of the analytic mode of philosophy is currently being told by analysts from Michael Dummett and L. Jonathan Cohen but also Ronald Giere and Alan Richardson to the more recent efforts of Michael Friedman. [14] In the Anglo-American context, [15] what is called analytic philosophy grew out of the so-called language philosophy that aspired to match the logically empiricist claims of the Vienna circle (and its brand of logical positivism). It was this tradition, very much in the person of Rudolf Carnap and other refugees from fascism, [16] that came to be poised against the vagaries (and the vagueness, especially the vagueness) of the historical tradition of philosophy and all it was associated with - notably Nietzsche and Heidegger but it would also include Sartre and Merleau-Ponty and would eventually be deployed against the Husserl who - given the commonalities between Husserl's and Frege's language or given Husserl's epistemologically quite respectable interests - would have placed himself more in line with Frege than with Heidegger. The distinction would turn out to be ensured by the fortunes of world history following the end of the second World War and determined by analytic philosophy's subsequent accession to power as the putatively neo-Kantian programme of deliberately redrawing philosophy in the image of science, or at least in the image of logical analysis.

Problems of philosophy would henceforth be resolved by linguistic clarification and logical analysis. In other words, to use Skorupski's analytic contention: they would be "deflated" or unmasked as pseudo-problems. Any other philosophical approach would be misguided or erroneous, and in the light of the fortunes of the academy leading to the institutional dominion of analytic philosophy: simply a bad way to do philosophy. Consequently enough, today's philosophic establishment prefers to refuse the distinction between philosophical kinds.[17] Accordingly and from an analytic perspective, it is routine to argue that there is no such thing as a merely, sheerly stylistic divide between analytic and continental philosophy. Instead, and again, one has only good and bad ways of doing philosophy. Good philosophy is well-written, well-formed and formulaic - or clearly argued and hence easy to understand (this ease of understanding counts for as much in the academy as it does on Madison Avenue and television programming), and that is of course, a matter of clarity and of arguments, judged as such and articulated from an analytic viewpoint - which is also to say, with the late Quine and Davidson, - from a logical point of view. Bad philosophy is thus anything that is not all that, i. e., every bit of what is counted as "good" philosophy - especially if it is reputed to be hard to read or understand. This is philosophy defined, as Nietzsche could have said it: for bad teeth. What can be overlooked in this championing of clarity and simplicity is that the analytic tradition itself was institutionalized rather than vigorously argued into place. It was not a triumph of clarity which gained it the professional dominance it currently enjoys. Rather than the elegantly evolutionary culmination of philosophy as a kind of Copernican (or Galilean) revolution, analytic philosophy is a revolution of the ordinally Kuhnian kind: an exactly tactical programme. Tracing the history of logical analysis shows this programme in greater detail. [18] In any case, and as some analysts might themselves concede, it was not inherently "clearer" to proceed as David Lewis or J. M. E. McTaggart would do rather than, say, to undertake to clarify ideology in terms of the Enlightenment project of reason in the manner of Adorno and Horkeimer, etc. [19] The descriptive name of "analytic' philosophy refers to language and to thought, the practical or evaluative assessment of arguments (as better and worse) - and hence it is a matter of truth and of approaching truth. This focus, as already noted, analytic philosophy shares with science. But the prime unifier between analytic philosophy and science is logic and in the case of language, the deployment of logic corresponds to a matter of formal clarity. The upshot of this formal idea has proven to have been earth- (or at least tradition-) shattering: Eliminate ambiguity, and past problems in philosophy are revealed as so many bogus or "pseudo-problems." [20] This leads to the almost unavoidable conclusion that with regard to what was once called philosophia perennis, analytic philosophy works by breaking down or very literally dissolving the entire tradition of philosophy. And, following the model of science and at least seemingly following Kant's demand to set philosophy on the path of a science, analytic philosophy could at the very least promise to make headway in philosophy - as opposed to the traditional review of always the same set of problems with which philosophy had started. In his careful precisions of the necessary extension of analytic philosophy beyond definitions that can be grounded in language - or in logic C L. Jonathan Cohen has recourse to what he calls "semantic ascent" (and semantic descent, as default). To do this, one needs to move, to use the language of the observation-correspondence rules-theory schema, from the word to the thing - especially hermeneutically ticklish when the "thing" is not an empirical object but a concept, convention, or use. Cohen characterizes the same aggressive trope of analytic philosophy in clearer terms than Skorupski's more quotable "deflationary approach," and in the process Cohen tracks this aggression back to its origins in the conflicts of the Vienna Circle itself. ... within the Vienna Circle, charges of meaninglessness were quite common in informal discussion, especially in the mouths of Schlick, Carnap and Waismann. It was not just that, by virtue of an argument about how meanings are taught, positivistic doctrines were ascribed a secure foundation in linguistic fact and metaphysical doctrines were rejected as nonsense because empirically unverifiable. Even positivistic colleagues could be accused of uttering meaningless sentences by a philosopher who was sufficiently convinced that his own views were the correct ones. After all, if you believe, as Ayer did, that all important philosophical propositions are analytic truths and that analytic truths are linguistic tautologies, then you must hold that any denial of your own philosophical thesis is a kind of nonsense, like something that is logically self-contradictory. [21] For Cohen, and recalling the mathematical structure or essence of any axiomatic system, this kind of contentiousness could not be seriously maintained just because the thing about logic, as Carnap and Schlick could not but concede, was that there could be (and there are) more than one kind of logical system (or scheme). The compelling quality of this concession was the nod it gave to mathematics, including both set theory and geometry with its alternative metrics. [22]

Interlude
To explore the analytic side of the analytic-continental divide, I challenge the methodological programme of analytic philosophy in a series of twenty-two paragraphs. This (in part) tongue-in-cheek (or teasing) provocation reviews the historical fortunes of analytic philosophy, thereby, thus providing an object illustration of the urgency of a critique of analytic philosophy by showing its inherent and hence incorrigible deficiencies as limitations operating both on the terms of continental philosophy and on those of analytic philosophy itself (the analytic programme is consummately successful, which success accounts for its dominance - and its redundancy). Following this moderately polemical exposition (for and in spite of the formative happenstance that the present author knows what strong philosophical polemic can be, she earnestly hopes the reader will be able to notice a restrained voice throughout the helpfully numbered paragraphs contra analysis below), analytic philosophy's recurrent claim of a self-overcoming - which is offered less in terms of self-criticism than as an automatic affair of innate all-inclusiveness or comprehensiveness: analytic philosophy as already continental, as already having done all the groundwork for an appropriation of continental thought, etc., will be examined in greater detail. I address the nature of the differences inevitably to be found between analytic and continental styles of philosophising and discuss the matter not of a resolution of these differences but the question of the annexation of the philosophical themes of continental philosophy on the part of analytic philosophy - an annexation which exactly because it is not dialogical or hermeneutical ablates the distinction between styles altogether. And, finally and very briefly, I attempt to look at philosophy (as such) from a questioning or continental perspective.


A Gentle Polemic Against the Analytic Approach in Philosophy. [23]

1. The project of analytic style philosophy, whether the analytic frame be that of ordinary language or logic, is clarity. By clarity is meant clarity of expression. For Ludwig Wittgenstein who coined the effective Leitmotif of analytic style philosophy in his Tractatus, "everything that can be put into words can be put clearly.[24] Thus, philosophy, "the critique of language, [25] is "the logical clarification of thoughts." This clarity may be attained by definition (or fiat), but a clearly expressed proposition is, even if a statement of a problem, surely less mysterious than an unclear statement of the same perplexity. And just as the name analysis suggests, the point is to reduce or dissolve philosophical problems. And just as the Greek origins of the word analysis can suggest and recalling Skorupski's "deflationary" impetus, the point here is to reduce or dissolve philosophical problems.

1.1. Beyond an idealized articulative clarity, analytic style philosophy enjoys the streamlining images of two additional regulative ideals: inter-subjectivity and verification. Intersubjectivity eliminates mysticism, esotericism, private languages and inaugurates (as a solipsism writ as it were upon the world) the analytic problem of "other minds." And by the simple expedient of bringing the "charwoman" or the "man in the street" - however quaint, however rhetorical in intent and practice - into the hallowed circle of Robert Boyle's gentlemen observers and the noble assurance of objectivity, the intersubjective emphasis leads not to a circularity among elite subjects, but ordinary language philosophy instead.

1.2. For the second regulative ideal, as the question of the intersection between word and object, verification is an epistemological issue, an ontological question, and for analysts, a metaphysical quagmire. The statement, "The meaning of a proposition is its method of verification" leads in its Tarskian formation to nothing else again but the ideal of clarity. With a thus impoverished empirical ideal of presumedly unproblematic reference (observation "sentences") there arepropositional objects in the world of the analyst but only patterns or atoms of experience: pink patches - or pink ice-cubes, a once-outré Sellarsism - or gruesome impressions.

2. The analytic ideal of the clarification of meaning is not only or ultimately a matter of the clarification of terms. Rather what is wanted is the reduction of problems, their revelation as pseudo-problems (non-problems). All problems that cannot be clearly stated are problematic statements. [26] Hence all problems that can be counted as such are analytic and hence lysible.

3. The success of analytic philosophy is intrinsically destructive. By definition: the philosophic project itself is repudiated in its ambitions, reduced to trivialities, and thereby overcome. This is why Wittgenstein's ideal involves disposing of the ladder (of analytic method) after reaching the heights of clarity.

4. By success is meant nothing more than the application or employment of analytic philosophy in practice. This is the triumph of use.

5. This is not true of all philosophic ventures (despite the Hegelian [both Hegel and the neo-Hegelian] inclination to assert the contrary). Hence the success of the Heideggerian project of the destruction of metaphysics does not equal or reduce to the destruction of Heidegger's project nor of metaphysics as such. Nor indeed does the success of the more notorious and more likely instance of deconstruction conduce to its own end. To the contrary.

6. At issue in the analytic project is the end of philosophy - taken in decidedly non-structuralist guise. For analytic philosophy: all of metaphysics, [27] together with the traditional problems of philosophy, is, as an accomplished and desired deed (philosophia perennis confunditur), already at an end and by definition (as meaningless or non-verifiable). What remains or is left over is to be resolved by analysis. Since traditional philosophy is set aside along with its perennial questions - these are philosophical questions disqualified as such because of their resistance to analysis/resolution - an end is also made of the tradition of philosophy. In the place of the tradition we find science. Science, for its part, is an empirical enterprise, but devoted to clarity and committed to intersubjectivity (coherence or making sense) and the logical problem of verification appears to be the principle or fundamental concern of logical analysis or (analytic) philosophy of science. Hence the received view in the philosophy of science is developed in the analysis of theories in the hypothetico-deductive programme.[28]

7. Science is a suitable subject for analysis proximally because it is itself a body (theoretically expressed) of clearly stated propositions or claims that describe for language users (intersubjectivity), the structure of the world and are either true or false in that connection (verifiability). Science itself, it is said, is empirical analysis, a prime example of the productivity of analysis. Circularities would seem to abound here, as cannot be helped when tautology is one's stock in trade, but if they are not affirmed as they are in hermeneutic "circles," they nonetheless provide the advantage of certainty. As Philipp Frank, one of the founding members of the Vienna Circle expressed the former virtue of scientific analyticity, in a statement combining the insights of Mach with the Kantian conventions of Duhem, "the principles of pure science, of which the most important is the law of causality, are certain because they are only disguised definitions. [29]

8. Empirical observation and experiment together with logical analysis is canonically held to decide the value of a claim or theory. Thus analytic philosophy of science has essentially been conducted within the spirit of the Vienna Circle. Despite Mach's "physicalism" the members of the Vienna Circle, in the words of one commentary, "wrote as though they believed science to be essentially a linguistic phenomenon. [30] This predilection for "language" be it ordinary or logical, together with a naïve view of direct observation (i. e., observation sentences) means that the analytic concern of the philosophy of science has been restricted to the analysis of theory, in a word the received view or hypothetico-deductive nomological ideal of science (theory).

8.1. Analytic statements are by definition tautologous and assert nothing about the world. This is their virtue and at the same time, this is their impotence. Empirical statements are what is wanted in science.

9. This focus on the elements of language - not Machian physical-physiological elements - dramatizes a rupture between language and world (the limits of language) which as the essence of tautology or logical linguistic self-reference is not problematic when what is analysed is language use, the game or its rules, but only when what is analysed are empirical matters.

10. The socio-historical turn in the philosophy of science, identified with, among others the otherwise analytically sensitive Hanson, Kuhn, and Feyerabend together with

(and this is what must be seen to be decisive) the so-called strong programme of the sociology of science (not knowledge) has yet to be accommodated in the philosophy of science. It is this that constitutes its continuing crisis. This crisis corresponds to its philosophical failure, a philosophical failure tied to the fundamental schizophrenia of its analytic origins. Despite a fascination with language, and thereby, in a kind of return of scholastic nominalism, with certainty and the idea of eliminating philosophical problems by the expedient of linguistic or logical clarification, a positive empirical reference remains relevant to science. This reference to empirical matters in the relevance of scientific practice is what analytic philosophers of science mean by naturalism.

11. Naturalism, which for Tom Sorell is itself a form of scientism, [31] is not philosophically distinguishable from the normative or analytic issues of verification or legitimation. The ultimate reference of the philosophy of science remains "natural" or actual science. As Rom Harré observes, as plainly as any analyst could wish, "the philosophy of science must be related to what scientists actually do, and how they actually think. [32] The imperative to express such a relation to actual scientific practice derives not from ascendent realism but rather from the socio-historical turn that comes after the linguistic turn.

12. The socio-historical turn seems unrelated to the analytic or linguistic turn. Yet the conviction held by philosophers of science from Carnap to Hempel to Suppe and beyond, that science is a formal, logical, or linguistic affair was not the result of a devotion to logic as such. Empiricism or positivism as it was understood by Auguste Comte - the first "positivist" - embraced a positive reference to facts. Thus Hacking recalls Comte's "positivity' as "ways to have a positive truth value, to be up for grabs as true or false.[33] The ultimate appeal of Wittgenstein's logical programme of linguistic therapy (analytic clarity), combined with Mach's physical critical-empiricism for the members of the Vienna Circle was in the celebration of and application to practical, actual science. Only in the era of the triumph of scientific reason would such an analytic programme work as successfully and despite patent internal contradictions as long as it has without drawing undue attention to those same contradictions.

13. For even if the project of analytic philosophy [34] had been shown to be bankrupt from a realist or empiricist or naturalist point of view, as long as science is associated with reason, and reason or rationality is equivalent to logical analysis, it will be analytic style which gives the imprimatur to proper philosophical approaches to the philosophy of science, no matter the actual success of analysis in offering an account or philosophy of science. For this reason Rudolf Haller points out, talk of verification - an analytic specialty - works as a Popperian "aqua fortis for separating good and bad talk in science and philosophy." Analytic talk remains the dominant strategy of legitimacy and distinction in the demand for clarity and coherence. And it is fundamentally flawed not just for the tastes of those who are not convinced of the salutary or edifying values of clarity and coherence but according to its own rationalistic terms as well. For there is no obvious connection between deductive (or inductive or abductive) logic (or grammar or language) and the world. Assuming without the metaphysical faith of a Mach or the teasing leap of a Feyerabend such an elemental or obvious connection as axiomatic or given, the analyst ends up so preoccupied with refining his or her logical tools, that he or she forgets having renounced contact with the world.

14. The history of scientific theory and experiment, popularly known as the "scientific revolution" is not the project of pure theory or metaphysical speculation. Instead, it is physical or ""physicalist." It is the history of factual observation (controlled experiment) and theoretical explanation. For analysts, the former are to be expressed as empirical statements and with the verification of such observations, converted into so-called protocol statements to which experimental or theoretical conclusions reduce now as theory with full-fledged ( so analytic) propositional content. This is the ideal analytic recipe that guarantees scientific control (progress). This same programme frees humanity from its (self- or deity-imposed) bonds of superstition and inhibition.

15. Yet it is just as clear from the reference to observation and experience that the history of experiment is also the history of power, manipulation, illusion. The project of experimental progress is in short that of the history of technology.

16. Separating the theoretical ideal of Newton's hypothesis non fingo from Boyle's celebration of neutral and observationally-objective (subjectively-independent or intersubjective) experiment is the tacit and practical rôle of evidence. This introduces the realist question of what evidence? evincing what? and the naturalist's but still more relevant sociologist's question of evidence obtained by and for whom? The issue of evidence is to be contrasted with theoretical truth. The last remains a matter of configured, what Nietzsche would name fingirte, hypotheses.

17. More than a conceptual net, one has an array of hypotheses and praxes, so that the infamous impotence of the experimentum crucis to decisively refute a scientific hypothesis or theory blinds one to the already given and far more pernicious matter of focal, selective choice. A given conceptual net is woven out of if not whatever we please surely what we happen to have on hand. Moreover, there is no way to imagine, beyond Duhem-Quine, as Davidson points out in his essay "On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme," that this or any other conceptual scheme represents the way things are (or are not). [35] What once represented a psychological strategy, (proto-Piercian) quiescence of belief, ataraxia, or calming, Stoic equipollence, is today a feature of crisis. What works as therapy in one context is, as the ancient Greeks knew perhaps best of all, death in another.

18. More devastating than Duhem's instrumental critique of the use of experiment is that which follows from Mach's empiriokriticismus and in his view - a perspective shared by Polanyi, Hanson, and Fleck, and historically articulated by Kuhn - the ideal of a quasi-artistic invocation of research style and experimental tactic or technique or knack (also to be heard in Mach's conviction that experimental practice could not be taught - just as artistic talent is not communicated by instruction) in the life of the researcher. The notion of scientific schools, "invisible colleges," Denkkollektiven, knowledge communities, and so on, offer particular inspiration for sociological studies and observations. [36] The question of what, in Harré's words, "scientists actually do" remains in a scientific era the ultimate issue. It is this and the tracking of the question as a matter of a research discipline - not among philosophers, analytically or otherwise inclined but scientists, albeit scientists of a social kind pursuing a discipline focussed upon scientists themselves, - which may be said to have added a kind of last straw to the woes of analytic philosophy.

19. Ultimately, the method of analysis is philosophically and scientifically impotent. Analysis has as it goes along, and this by its own rights, "less and less of what to analyze.[37] Note that reduction as such (the disgregational, dissolving, when not always dissolute gesture implied in the idea of analysis) was not opposed by Mach who was with Richard Avenarius an enthusiast of the ideal of a scheme he imagined reflected in nature itself. But in spite of this latter realist (and here: metaphysical) resonance, Mach's ideal of Denkökonomie preserved its methodic function: it was a tactical, heuristic ideal, not an analytic end that simply reduced a problem to its linguistic, logical components and left it at that as if solved, whereupon one could, as it were, throw away the ladder. For Mach, everything could be reduced if one could assume as he did and the Vienna Circle did not, that everything was convertibly elemental. The unified scheme of the received view of the philosophy of science reflected not Machian elements - constituting the physical, physiological, psychological world - but observation sentences linked by correspondence rules to theorems, beginning and ending with units of logic/language. The world here is what is symbolizable, coordinative, re-symbolizable; neither fact (Tatsachen) in the end (linked as these are with theory) nor thing (whatever a thing may be).

Disclaiming Analytic Philosophy Some argue, in the spirit of the fairness that is always more exigent in its sensitivity to those in power than it can ever imagine being sensitive to the dispossessed, that it is essential to qualify any criticism of analytic philosophy as somehow irrelevant, like upscale suburban communities and the charge of racism: it is supposed that the task is already accomplished. And quite right. Analytic philosophy is far more sophisticated than it once was. These days, one spends hardly any part of one's analytic philosophic energies analysing (according to the exactitude and focus that is an irreducible part of such methodic precision) statements such as "The cat is on the mat," but one allows oneself the still unexhausted fit of fantasy indulged in by Tom Nagel who wondered "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" (with its predictable if not quite logical sequel: "The View From Nowhere"). Let us, for the sake of argument consider an example that is no longer current but I hope useful (and even neutral). I refer to David Lewis here. Reading his"Attitudes "De Dicto' and "De Se'" we recall that he very charmingly begins with an observation against expectations - that is, ladies and gentlemen, just to be sure that you do not miss it - a joke, a piece of wit: "If I hear the patter of little feet around the house, I expect Bruce. What I expect is a cat, a particular cat.[38]

Of course, to the point of punning, the patter of little feet, not to mention the talk of expectations, refers, for speakers of ordinary idiomatic English, to children. The joke brings in Bruce, the cat, and the reference to the cat takes us to the mat and the matter of reference. Lewis's observations are about Meinongian attitudes which is to say (or to be read) as shorthand identification for psychologism (a bad thing) or intentionality (possibly a good thing, provided the intended intentionality is not that of the late Husserl but rather the early, now redeemed as the Frege-like, and almost analytic Husserl). In this case the attitudes are explained as incomplete where such expectations may be diversely filled in divers houses

(Lewis's specialty is possible worlds so an array of possible houses is no strain for him). These attitudes then are best rendered, so Lewis, as having "propositional objects." We recall that for analysts, propositions are technical devices, having, as sentences do not always have, logical objects. Note the utility of the style of this kind of talk for analytic purposes. It is because we may be expected to be concerned with whether and what we mean with what we say (the charm of this concern is not least won from precisely that clean or neat reference and conceptual - if none too taxingC ideal of analytic clarity, which in turn consists in the play between notions of the expected and what is as such, in other words and in another sense, de dicto and de se) without at the same time and in fact actually meaning anything in particular by what we are saying. Thus we talk about cats, bats, and brains in vats. The result of this linguistic explosion of deliberately irrelevant reference permits us for the first time if also and admittedly only for the nonce to consider meaning as such. This makes for entertaining reading, but this appeal does not go far - and this returns us once again to the problem at hand - with regard to the reference to the real world and when what is at stake matters as much as science does. For it is at this juncture that the analytic style, tactic and schematic, runs into the proverbial ground and it does so without necessarily drawing attention to this fact among its practitioners. The idea of going "to ground" or "seed" or "hell in a handbasket" or better, with reference to analysis, the purer fantasy-ideal (and its curiouser ambition) of a "deflationary" appproach to philosophy - whereby, as Bar-On notes above, the successful analyst finds himself at the end of the day with "less and less of what to analyze" - is manifest in the whimpering perpetuation of things as usual. This is the way the world ends in the face of everything: a kind of heat death which Nietzsche, a famously non-analytic philosopher, called nihilism. And yet many argue that hardly a practitioner of classically analytic philosophy, like a dyed-in-the-wool practitioner of the formerly received view in the philosophy of science, can be found on the books. The problem is (in the parlance of informal fallacies) a straw man. Analysis, it would seem, has long since been overcome. Against analytic philosophy as a limiting modality? Against method in the philosophy of science? Who - we might ask ourselves - isn't? Indeed, quite some time ago now, a mainstream collection appeared with the title Post-Analytic Philosophy. Contributors (and putative post-analysts) included Hilary Putnam, Richard Rorty, Tom Nagel, Donald Davidson, Thomas Kuhn, et al., all of whom were and still are said to have - and were accordingly lionized for their intellectual integrity for having done so - abjured analytic philosophy (and all its works). Yet it is evident enough, where what matters on the terms of analysis itself is style, analytic style and precisely not - such is the formal ideal - substance or content, that no one of the above is, in fact, anywhere near post-analytic and certainly none are what one would call "continental." You can be an anti-analytic philosopher, after all, and as Rorty is, without turning into a "continental philosopher." [39] It is important to note that one can persevere in one's allegiance to the analytic ideal and remain an analyst without the analytic program - and this is an essential survival strategy when its traditional adherents (Putnam, Nagel, Davidson) concede the flaws of the program. Such a righteous confidence is characteristic of established power elites and a typical retort ("argument") to a critique such as the foregoing need do no more than dispute the given definition. Thus one notes: X is averred (analysis is X). But, one counters to the contrary, analytic philosophy is in fact and also -X. Thus analytic philosophy (X) is also some other thing X' ("X" includes its opposite) and to avoid contradiction, this becomes a matter of scope. [40]

These are analytic tactics: they sidestep the question, shifting debate to formal (analytic) grounds and they do so in perfectly good conscience (albeit perhaps not in perfect good faith). Like talk of "postmodern" philosophy of science (let alone postmodern science), talk of the end of philosophy, especially of analytic philosophy, is a piece of Frances Fukayama-style overkill. For even if, politically and otherwise, these are lively times we live in at the beginning of this new century: if we are ideologically bound, by at least popular convention, to be pluralistic, to be open to new ideas, to different perspectives on east-west, to other ideologies and if we are therefore whether we like it or not, living in a "postmodern" world, it nonetheless remains the case that neither Richard Rorty and certainly not Jacques Derrida nor the unnamed demon of irrelevance, irrationalism, or relativism have genuine influence in analytic philosophy. Nor, at the end of the day, are specialists in "irrationalism" (read: continental or "hermeneutic" style philosophy) [41] hired at the university level for what few positions there are in philosophy. The dominant departments remain analytic and when they hire, and even when they hire for historical positions specified as dealing with more or less continental thinkers (e. g., Husserl, hardly ever Heidegger, never exactly Nietzsche), hire either newly minted or else retread analysts (UK phenomenologists or German trained analysts - the last being even more fun than the former.) And if (of all philosophical subdisciplines) the philosophy of science is not non-analytic, neither can it be said that the philosophy of science is postmodern (either "already" much less, let's be real: in nuce).

The Analytic-Continental Divide: The Advantage of Cooption

I have maintained that there is a difference between analytic and continental approaches to philosophy not only because it is obvious and not only because as a professor of philosophy I live on the terms of a profession dominated by this noisome distinction but because the claim that there is no such distinctive divide is politically manipulative. Claiming there is no analytic-continental divide is an important step in the analytic appropriation of the mantle (not the substance) of continental philosophy. Why should the analysts want to appropriate the themes of continental philosophy? The short answer is that analytic philosophy has exhausted itself; the extended and more conflictedly interesting answer is because continental philosophy is sexy: the grad students want it - or think they do. The difference between so-called analytic and so-called continental styles of philosophy is a contentious matter of ideology and taste - "deflating questions" as opposed to reflecting on what is question-worthy, as Heidegger would say, in a question. This difference also refers to one's scholarly formation (the depth and breadth of the same, or calculated lack thereof), and it is a matter of definition. Thus disputes that dissolve the difference (going in the presumably brave new direction of "just doing good work," or speaking only of "good" - and by neat exclusion: "bad" - philosophy), reinstate in a rather more insidious and value-laden way the same distinction. Yet the advantage of denying any difference between modalities of philosophy is considerable because once the denial is in place, continental style philosophy can be dismissed as bad or even as "just not" philosophy and this is needed both to justify one's inattention to the work done by scholars working in the contemporary tradition of continental philosophy and even more importantly because analytic philosphy wants to try its hand at themes formerly left to continental modes of thought. And such an annexation is securely underway. In addition to self-propounded and blatantly self-serving internet-posted claims [42] that analytic schools offer students the best opportunities for studying continental philosophy, there are established analytic traditions of interpreting (or criticizing) Nietzsche, Heidegger, Levinas, Foucault. What, for example, does it mean to say that a thinker like Nietzsche is already taught within the analytic tradition, as he has been, beginning with Arthur Danto and Bernd Magnus and continuing with Maudemarie Clark, Solomon/Schacht, and most recently, at a high level and in all good conscience, by Robert Gooding-Williams? How can this work? Does one generate another "New" Nietzsche, on the model of reading Nietzsche through the lens of French and German thought? [44] The answer to the narrower question here, is prima facie no, because to read a so-called continental philosopher on the terms of analytic philosophy is exactly not to read him with a continental lens - contra Leiter's opposed conviction on the matter. To answer the broader, more appropriative question, we recall that the ideal of clarity, which ideal presupposes a fundamental equality between styles of philosophical expression, typically excludes all but a certain kind of philosophy. assumes there is only analytic philosophy and that is just what philosophy is. Hence, the ruling discourse - today, indeed, for the greater part of the last century - remains scientifically-oriented or analytic philosophy. Within this discourse, i. e., for the majority of professional philosophic thinkers, a philosopher like Nietzsche is condemned because what he writes contradicts not only his own claims (a cardinal offense from a logically analytic point of view) but more grievously still, the claims of philosophy itself. If, from its earliest beginnings, philosophy is traditionally conceived in didactic contrast with popular thought, the philosophic project also challenges itself. Nietzsche's critical philosophy does the same and in addition it also undermines the means of philosophic challenge per se: questioning the tools of clear, logical thinking and rational argument by questioning nothing less than logic together with the very epistemological utility of language. Nietzsche's philosophical achievement thus resists ordering in the received historical canon of philosophy and throughout more than a century since his death, his writings have proved remarkably resistant to traditional comprehension. It has proven to be impossible to "translate" Nietzsche into ordinary language philosophy, as it were, although the analytic philosophic reception of his thought has sought to do exactly that. Apart from a sovereign failure to discuss Nietzsche or to conceive his contribution on a par with other philosophers (a failing as evident in "serious" German as well as in French or English-language professional philosophical contexts), like the salacious aspects Nietzsche detected within the supposedly scientific basis of pragmatic world calculi, the then-equivalent to what today's scientists could regard as genomic or mitochondrial altruism (cf. the first section of On the Genealogy of Morals). Nietzsche's name is mostly used to add a "bit of spice." [45] And if Nietzsche tends to be reduced to a philosopher of moral outrage and artistic excess among the majority of scholars specialising in his thought, Nietzsche's theory of truth and his concern with science seems tendentious at best. Hence of all the things Nietzsche is famous for, his critique of truth has been his greatest liability, laying him open to the gleeful sophomoric refutation that because Nietzsche claims there is no truth and as this proclamation itself claims truth, Nietzsche contradicts himself. A version of this exposée makes an appearance in almost every discussion of Nietzsche's theory of truth as a problem the interpretation first solemnly concedes and then offers to correct or else, failing to find a way out of self-contradiction, to excuse for the sake of his moral or artistic or cultural insights. Nietzsche is much better known as the philosopher of nihilism, a radical new morality, prophet of the death of God, teacher of psychology as the royal road not to the Socratic legacy of the problem of good and evil in the human heart but to the unconscious of philosophy, that is exactly not scientific (i. e., neither psychoanalytic nor cognitive) psychology but observational, popular and populistic psychologizing; and most notoriously, as the philosopher of fascist power. The last thing Nietzsche's torrential style of philosophy wins praise for is its contribution to a philosophic understanding of the Western enterprise of science or truth. Nevertheless, a number of books and essays treat exactly Nietzsche's "problem" of truth (in addition to my own rather uncompromisingly continental study discussing Nietzsche's epistemology and philosophy of science). [46] And rather than reflecting a development intrinsic to continental philosophy, the growing interest in the question of Nietzsche and truth stems from analytic philosophy. [47] Nevertheless, and regrettably, such an analytic interest in Nietzsche's theory of truth builds nothing like a "bridge" [48] between continental and analytic philosophy. [49] Thus, however intrinsically valuable, the increase in analytic interest in (not only in Nietzsche but in other traditionally named) "continental" philosophers indicates nothing like a continental turn within analytic philosophy - it is annexation without responsibility and without the rigours of a genuinely historical, authentically interpretive move. Nor is it a particular blessing in the case of Nietzsche studies because analytic philosophers typically take only as much as they can "stand" from Nietzsche, not puzzling over but instead (this is the classic analytic tactic) dismissing the rest as unsupportable while maintaining that Nietzsche (had he had sufficient sense - as he manifestly had not, hence the counterfactually rhetorical success of this claim) would have done so as well. But to test Nietzsche's philosophy not on his own complicated terms, but on the standards of logical exigence or the received discourses of the day leaves Nietzsche lacking (as it hamstrings Adorno, and Heidegger, and so many others, albeit in different ways, as varieties of so many different kinds of Todtschweigerei). Beyond questions concerning the political tactic of appropriating a popular figure or movement (endemic as it is to the rhetorical advance and practice of power), I think worth while to examine the reasons contemporary scholars who take themselves to be continental are not concerned with Nietzsche's critique of truth or theories of knowledge, but instead focus on Nietzsche's aesthetics, his (anti-) feminism, his (anti-) theology, his (anti-) political thinking. Contrary to what I have said about the legacy of continental thought as it can be found in Heidegger and others, today's continental philosophy echoes the mainstream (and analytic) approach to Nietzsche's thinking while sidestepping any reference that would take them to raise epistemological questions in Nietzsche. Constituted within the institutional bearing of the analytic tradition - from Europe to the UK to America and across the globe, including contemporary Germany and France - so-called continental philosophy increasingly reflects exactly the values and interests analytic philosophy relegates to it. [50] Analytic philosophy defines its language, its standards of rigor, its focal approach, its style as uniquely valid for crucial questions in philosophy. [51] This value idea refers to the approbation of good or quality (valid and valuable) work in philosophy. It is the difference between good (or clear) writing and what one wishes to condemn as obscure (not transparent to the reading mind, not available in advance of a text to be read or discussed). [52] Anything else is reduced to the claim that the author is making assertions or simply quoting other authors making assertions. The sheer fact that the last claim is itself an assertion (one never argues that an author makes assertions: one simply claims it to be so) is part and parcel of a transparent tradition of arrogating the pretense of the argument to itself (this one calls a conceit in a literary and only literary mode) and the other tradition, the continental and hermeneutic one, has to worry - which means to think- about how one does things with words, given the very rhetorical range of things one can do with words (and the things words do with and to the user of language in the process) exactly when the thing one is doing is philosophy, just where assertions and provocations, as well as mathematically modeled disquisitions are offered in the not-only propositional but also rhetorically adumbrated realm of argument and thought.

At issue is a single question of style. Where analytic philosophy is the only game or stylistic scheme in town, its approach rules in the academy (which is in our culture increasingly the only surviving locus of philosophy) [53] and the assertions or judgments of analytic philosophy inevitably collapses (reduces) everything else within its definitional, conceptual world-view, ken, or to use a Nietzschean word: "conviction" or perspective, which assumption Gadamer might have called an analytic prejudice. In a number of ways, the analytic reading of Nietzsche's philosophy reducing its importance to so-called "value thinking" thus crosses analytic and continental boundaries. [54] In the larger tradition of philosophy apart from Nietzsche, ethical, cultural and sociopolitical, and, above all, theological questions are treated as subsequent to logic and apart from the theory of knowledge and philosophy of science.[55] The problem is that this way of reading Nietzsche ineluctably overlooks or disregards what is most of philosophical value in Nietzsche. Contra analytic appropriations and critical corrections of Nietzsche's epistemological thinking and also exactly contra the majority of "continental" appropriations, the notion of "truth and lie" is not to be reduced to the question of morality for Nietzsche, but rather the other way round. Nietzsche is much less the moral or ethical or cultural-political philosopher he is thought to be, than he is preoccupied (from start to finish and in the most rigorously scientific manner he knew) with the question of knowledge and truth. The moral problem of science for Nietzsche is that science (scientia or knowing) itself sets the standard for all accounts of scientific theory, practice, and progress. Like religion - and every other invention of the ascetic ideal - science cannot be questioned on terms other than its own.[56]

For Nietzsche, the assumption that drives such compartmentalization is the key "conviction" or prejudice of the philosopher. In its current expression, this philosophic prejudice holds that philosophic questions on moral, political, cultural, theological, and rhetorical or philological issues are secondary issues ("values") and, so ordered, can be regarded as being without epistemological consequence. Such diverse and "soft" questions have no relevance for the philosophic questions of truth or epistemology and nothing to do with the "fact" or philosophy of science. The separation of issues of philosophic inquiry and the ideal estimation of "significance" reflects the convictions of the philosophic tradition, analytic and otherwise.[57]
It assumes a hierarchy between these separate issues (philosophy of truth is higher than moral or value philosophy) and it is the very core of what Nietzsche named "the problem of science" as a problem. [58]

Although the continental approach has nearly abandoned its own heritage by taking over its definition from analytic quarters, it can be argued that it is still possible for it to draw upon the basic historico-hermeneutic prerequisites for adverting to what Nietzsche has to offer in all its manifold philosophical complexity. This is important because as Nietzsche wrote in a late draft note on the aphorisms prefacing his Twilight of the Idols, "Everything that is simple [einfach] is just plain imaginary, it is not "true.' [59] "Rather," Nietzsche observed favoring complexity in spite of its logical inconvenience, precisely as such complexity is relevant to science and its claims about the world: "what is actual, what is true, is neither One nor yet to be reduced to One. [60] Such an interest in complexity is the heart of Nietzsche's epistemology. Rather than simplicity, inspired by the sensibility of an Ockham or the very different operational concerns of a Quine, Nietzsche contends that getting at the truth of the world is the effort to articulate the unspeakably complicated. [61] Where continental readings such as those of Heidegger or Löwith or Deleuze or Klossowski embrace and intensify the complexity of Nietzsche's thought, analytic readings by contrast, especially those concerned with Nietzsche's account of truth, simply or clarify what Nietzsche meant, or else they propose to tell us - according to the title of one demystifying recent (stolidly deflationary) book, puts it: "What Nietzsche Really Said." Even in the absence of a simple or straightforward bridge between analytic and continental perspectives, the task of reading Nietzsche in terms of his relevance to truth and the project of knowing (including exactly scientific knowing) echoes across the philosophic differences and sensibilities constituting the analytic-continental divide. In this esoteric/exoteric sense, it may be said that Nietzsche's thought persists as a kind of conceptual dynamite interior to philosophy, both continental and analytic.

From Nietzsche's Complex Truth (And Lie) to Heidegger's
Talk of Language as Speech

In most defining accounts of analytic philosophy, the "deflationary" approach to philosophy as it was described at the start is evident, as is a relative "nastiness" or contempt for continental approaches to philosophy. Thus one author contrives this demarcationalist definition: "If the term analytic philosophy is to be a useful classificatory term, it must do more work than merely to distinguish mainstream Western philosophy from the reflections of philosophical sages or prophets, such as Pascal or Nietzsche, and from the obscurities of speculative metaphysicians, such as Hegel, Bradley or Heidegger. [62] This stolidly polemical move sidelines Nietzsche as a prophet (along with a religious thinker, no less) and calumniates the Heidegger who constantly refused the metaphysical label. Yet it is, of course, incorrect to claim that continental philosophy is unconcerned with language. It is correct that it is not concerned with logical analysis - and it also seems patent that its stylistic mode invites reflection on obscurity. Both Heidegger and Nietzsche reflect on the problem of what is involved in saying difficult things, which means that both thinkers engage the question of obscurity, but are not as sanguine as analysts tend to be in their conviction that the same can be simply avoided. We see any example of this obscurity where reflects that"Language speaks by saying, this is, by showing. What is says wells up from the formerly spoken and so far still unspoken saying which pervades the design of language. Language speaks in that it, as showing, reaching into all regions of presences, summons from them whatever is present to appear and to fade.[63]

In saying things like this about language, Heidegger is hardly unaware that this same style of writing leaves him open to the charge of unclarity, and he quite plainly adverts to his own reduplicative style: "Language itself is language. The understanding that is schooled in logic, thinking of everything in terms of calculation and hence usually overbearing, calls this proposition an empty tautology. Merely to say the identical thing twice - language is language - how is that supposed to get us anywhere? [64] Heidegger answers this critical question by affirming that progress is exactly not his goal: "But we do not want to get anywhere. [65]

For Heidegger, the passion for novelty and the latest discoveries are distracting tendencies of the modern era and irrelevant to thought itself, especially to philosophy. [66] Heidegger was an indefatiguable advocate of the impracticability - the uselessness of philosophy - but he was so for a very provocative reason: "granted that we cannot do anything with philosophy, might not philosophy, if we concern ourselves with it, do someting with us? [67] This is an extraordinary query: it has something of that element which catches one up in considering the nature of philosophy and in thinking about thinking itself, particularly the kind of thinking concerning life. It was Hannah Arendt who famously recollected the rumor of Heidegger's "kingship among teachers." When she proposed this singular title for Heidegger as teacher

(and her fellow students seem, even to the extent of including Leo Strauss but certainly Karl Löwith, Karl Jaspers, as well as Gadamer, to have shared her judgment - an infectious enthusiasm that has inspired George Steiner to make her the centerpiece of his recent book on the "very" idea of the master, as polemic but also as love letter), Arendt's expression then and now reflected the excitement of thinking as a radically new and creative engagement with what invites reflection ("calls for thinking"). This was expressed as an invitation: "one can perhaps learn to think [68] In Arendt's language: "the rumor regarding Heidegger's kingship among teachers was simply this: the cultural treasures of the past, believed to be dead, are being made to speak, in the course of which it turns out that they propose things altogether different than what had been thought.[69] This is the chance to learn to think: a possibility still reserved for us, recalling what Heidegger had to say about philosophy: To philosophize is to inquire into the extra-ordinary. [70] But because as we have just suggested, this questioning recoils upon itself, not only what is asked after is extraordinary but also the asking itself. In other words: this questioning does not lie along the way so that that one day, unexpectedly, we collide with it. Nor is it part of everyday life: there is no requirement or regulation that forces us into it: it gratifies no urgent or prevailing need. The questioning is "out of order." It is entirely voluntary, based wholly and uniquely on the mystery of freedom, on what we have called the leap. The same Nietzsche said "Philosophy ... is a living amid ice and mountain heights." To philosophize we may now say, is an extra-ordinary inquiry into the extra-ordinary. Thinking thus is not a matter of arguments, nor was it the very calculating business of "making progress." Above all, perhaps, for Heidegger, philosophy was not about"solving problems," to use Karl Popper's influential (and very positivist and also very analytic) definition of the practice of philosophy. Philosophical thought for Heidegger, was to be distinguished from thinking practically or else from scientifically involved questioning. Such thinking corresponds to what Heidegger called questioning, understood as a search for understanding rather than as a search for an "answer." Philosophy for Heidegger remains where it has its origin: in astonishment. Rather than killing or blunting what is question worthy with answers however clear, however coherent, the task of philosophy for Heidegger is keep wonder alive. Although the subject matters of continental and analytic approaches to philosophy may seem similar, their stylistic approaches differ and what they they ask about is likewise different. Continental philosophy, in its many variations, and despite its recent weakening as it defers to the dominant perspective of analytic philosophy, attempts to keep the meaning of philosophy as the love of wisdom always within its purview. The pursuit of wisdom is all about meaning as it is understood by living beings. Thus the object of philosophy is often said to be the meaning of life. Analytic philosophy concerned with moral issues seeks to articulate rules and methods to resolve problems. Continental approaches to such moral questions - such as that exemplified in Nietzsche's genealogical critique of morality, emphasize the paradoxes of such issues so that even seemingly simple terms like good (even meaning I approve of this - in the simplified analysis of good) become fraught with self-interest and self-aggrandizement and what hithertofore seemed to embody altruistic motives is revealed instead as selfish and as opposed to altruism, and yet just this self interest is revealed as the essence of altruistic behaviour. In addition to its more robust characterization of the subject of philosophy - concerning life- and human-meaning, born out of history, imbued with value, and limited by the contingencies of its own cultural and historical horizon, etc., - continental philosophy also has a markedly different view of language. For continental thinkers, language is inseparable from rhetoric, metaphor, context, history, and, again, life. There, is to quote Nietzsche's amusing statement of this limitation in Daybreak, no place for us to stand to take a look at the world as it would appear to us if we did not carry around the all-too human heads we do carry around with us. There is no way to afford ourselves the dream fantasm of a disembodied, utterly objective "view from nowhere," nor can we pretend to a god's eye view. For the continental thinker, the ideal of objectivity is correlate to the subject's own perspective. Hence the objective is the subjective, the perspective of the object as regarded from the point of view of the subject.

Concluding Reflections

The great disadvantage of dissolving the academic discipline with which you are engaged is that you eventually end up with nothing to think or talk about. This is the great danger of modeling one's profession on the ideal of the sciences, which themselves aim, eventually or "in theory," to explain everything. That is the ambition to know, in Stephen Hawkings' unnervingly unsophisticated expression of the aim of science: "the mind of God." Trivially, for the philosopher, this is to talk oneself out of a job (this is more than merely cognitive redundancy) and to renounce philosophy - not, to be sure, as the Bible denounced philosophy in favor of the true knowledge of the Lord, but as a confining vessel of past mistakes, from which one has now, as a very clever fly, at last mapped an accurate flightpath carrying one out of the bottle, and out of the game. More seriously, and more reprehensibly, it is clear that be able to resolve the problems of philosophy - the possibility of knowing the mind of God - does not necessarily mean that everything then makes sense. This is because what makes sense can do so only within a particular conceptual or cognitive scheme (and this is as true for Davidson or MacIntyre as it is for Nietzsche). One can explain death: what it is, without being able to explain why a particular individual dies, much less being able to explain why some mortal beings happen to die, as all of them do, at one time rather than another: the contingent - the individual - eludes such comprehension. Beyond the question of the day and the hour is the question of the meaning of death which for its part is tied to the question of the meaning of life: in what way does the manner of our death punctuate our lives? Does it make a difference if we die at our own hands, whether in a suicide of impetuous youth or the practical choice of euthanasia for a latter management of pain and debility? If we die at a stranger's hand? If we die of cancer caused by a carcinogen disseminated from a local manufacturing plant or omnipresent in food, but differentially affecting human subjects, so that cancer is only a reaction in some of those individuals exposed to the same agent? If we die of a cancer we carry in our blood line? If we thin the ozone layer to the point that we die of cancer caused by irradiation? If we bomb ourselves to death? If we are the youth who serve an ignominious cause either in current or world-historical judgment? What, apart from the prospect, does the sheer fact of death mean for the one still living: does one simply live on in an absence or is it not much rather that the absence marks the life of the living, so that a kind of presence yet remains? What is the meaning of death? What is the meaning of love? Analytic philosophers who write on this topic - and there are far more who do so than one would have supposed, even limiting suppositions to their own account of themselves and of their lives - generate seemingly unending tomes about love. [71]

In such treatments, love is typically re-described and requalified to death, that is, to the point where the reader no longer remembers what such an analysis might have to do with the love as they might know it from their own experience in the ordinary and very real world. This tends especially to be so, because the one thing analysts tend not to begin to inquire about is the nature of love. Rather what is taken to be love is what everyone already knows or, more commonly, what the author presumes he (mostly he) knows about love, redefined or redescribed: analyzed. The tact assumption is that one knows what love is, and even more perniciously, the tacit assumption is that one knows how to love (like those who search for a soul mate, the problem is only the problem of finding a likely inspiration). However, as Nietzsche argued sustainedly throughout his later philosophy, and David B. Allison has spent a book trying to explain this rhetorically argumentative concern, [72] not everyone knows how to love (Nietzsche maintained that one needed to learn how to love just to start). But what is love? What is abundance and generosity? Forbearance and gratitude? Is love different, as Aristotle thought, for a child or a parent, a man or a woman, a beautiful friend, a clever companion? To begin to ask about love requires all the unclarity and all the paradoxes of love itself and which Gillian Rose, at the end of a life inspired by pain and the prospect of her own too-soon and all-too-knowable death, called the "work" of love.[73] If one produces a definition of love that fails to capture that paradoxical elusive essence, one will not have begun even to think of love much less to offer a philosophical account of it. And what, beyond Kierkegaard, beyond Levinas, beyond the whole of what the late Dominique Janicaud indicted as the "theological turn" in phenomenology, is the meaning of God?

What are we doing and what do we mean when we name a being defined utterly beyond human comprehension? Can we think of God? What do we think of when we think we do? How can we know something we cannot know? Can we conceive a divinity, a being greater than which is not to be imagined, an infinite, omnipotent, self-caused creator of the world and everything in it? Or is our monotheistic thought of God, as Nietzsche wondered if it might be, nothing more than a de-deification of a god-filled world, a "monotono-theism" [74] - as Nietzsche named it - little better than, and more than half way to the disenchanted universe of a science bent on replacing divinity with a singularity at the beginning: the big bang as the boy scientist's idea of God. The rationalistic justification of atheism however is itself only another kind of "better knowing." As Nietzsche would say the claim to know and the claim not to know are both overweening claims, presuming in each case to know too much. And the question of freedom, tied to the question of self or the subject, who is it that speaks whenever one speaks? One is not transparent to oneself, one has no more certain knowledge of oneself than one has of the universe, of the past or the future. If one wills one's subjugation is one less or no less subject? If we have discovered mirror neurons, have we solved the problem of consciousness or do we merely presume it, once again? If there are unconscious motivations, if we are beings whose thoughts are manifestations of brain and body functions, what can be said of freedom? What is an illusion, what is truth? what is lie? Nietzsche, who began to raise questions of this kind, as we have seen, reaped a harvest of contradictions in his philosophy - but more insights into the nature of truth and indeed of human beings who use language to think about truth than many other, more sanguine and clear philosophers. To questions like these, and certainly to ones far better framed, analytic philosophers have answers, rather a lot of them, carefully repeated in the literature. For their part

(and this should be kept in mind when reading authors like Heidegger and Nietzsche), continental philosophers tend less to answer or conclude inquiry than to compound their own (and our responding) questions - adverting to ambiguity, unclarity, complexity and all the detail that ultimately is required to begin to think philosophy as the meaning of life. It is significant that of the analytic answers given, none would seem to have purchase or staying power, not even for the analysts themselves. Hence and seemingly having exhausted their own mandate and with it their own project, analytic philosophy has begun to turn toward continental philosophy. Not, alas as rapprochement, not by inviting practitioners of continental philosophy to join the discussion, but only and all by themselves, and as if bored to tears by their own analytic themes, taking up the themes (and the names, like Nietzsche, like Heidegger and Deleuze) of continental philosophy. For the analytic tradition is intentionally bankrupt (this is the internal logic of the analytic method) but although rendered moribund at its own hand, within the profession (aka academic and editorial control) it enjoys the power of the majority or dominant tradition. To keep itself going it means to seize (but not to "think") the spiritual capital of a tradition whose own authority is denounced as that of non- or "bad" philosophy. The claim then, as it may be heard from Brian Leiter to Simon Critchley and Manfred Frank but also in almost every analytic book and review on the topic, is that anything continental philosophy can do, analytic philosophy can do better, much better.

What makes it so much better is, it goes without saying in this assertion, its much vaunted clarity. But it is claim that remain ultimately unclear, not only because unclarity belongs to the essence of what it is that continental philosophers do (and because unclarity, the very idea, is anathema to analytic philosophy) but also because the analytic method is ineliminably self-dissolving: whatever it takes into its mind, it ends up clarifying, that is, in Skorupksi's and not only Skorupski's account of it: analyzing away. Analytic philosophy as the clarification of questions or as the enterprise of problem solving works elegantly for idle problems of logic - one thinks of Russell's "tea-table" [75] - or for crossword and other puzzles (or within a closed system or defined universe of variables) but it may be that there is still yet more in heaven (and out of it) than dreamt of in such a philosophy. And continental philosophy in its best practitioners still does know this. Although there has yet to be an authentic conversation between analytic and continental philosophy, so that one justifiably speaks of a dubious estrangement - it still seems to the present author that the best way to resolve this estrangement is not to deny to acknowledge differences between one's own and another's language and theoretical concerns, all for the sake of a "conversation," if we may use Gadamer's all-too ordinary language for this indispensable and fundamentally hermeneutic engagement of one scholar with another. Not in spite of the differences but because of these differences, we might begin by speaking to one another, recognizing the divide between analytic and continental, and so including both in philosophic discourse.

---