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Thank you for the thorough reply. I love getting to talk about this stuff.
Derrida's a heck of a place to start if you're not already steeped in the continental tradition. He'll rapid fire off references to 10 other books and expect you to be familiar with all of them. Not that I'm at all trying to discourage you or anything, just saying that it's normal if you find him frustrating. I only understand what he's saying about half the time.
The Marcuse book on the other hand is rather short and approachable.
I think appreciating the historical/personal context they were writing in helps contextualize their pessimism a little better. They were all communist Jews who legitimately believed that the world workers' revolution was on the horizon, and then they watched Stalinism turn their Marxist ideals into a hellscape, and they lived through Nazism and WW2, and basically they watched their entire world and all their hopes for the future collapse around them in a spectacularly dramatic fashion. That's the sort of thing that would put anyone in a sour mood.
You're right, I don't disagree at all. That's by design of course. In the early 20th century, Russell and Moore and their co-conspirators thought that Hegelianism had gone off the rails, and philosophy needed a new beginning that was self-consciously modeled after mathematical logic. That was the start of the analytic school.
Analytic philosophy was my first introduction to philosophy and I think that permanently shaped how my mind works. Or maybe my mind just already worked like that and analytic philosophy was a natural fit for it, idk. But I do feel that on some fundamental level my outlook will always be analytic in some sense. I'm perpetually annoyed at how, at times, continental philosophers seem to care nothing for running basic sanity checks on their sentences (are terms well-defined, am I making any category errors, etc) (although I'm always equally as sensitive to the possibility that this is just a misunderstanding on my part, or that my whole conception of how one should "evaluate" sentences is wrong in the first place).
But nonetheless here on TheMotte I end up talking more about continental philosophy, partially because that's just what I read more of these days, and partially because continental philosophers speak more directly to the types of culture war issues that we discuss here.
I get why you say this, definitely. But at the same time, continental philosophy is so wildly heterogeneous that it's almost impossible to make generalizations about it as a whole. It varies heavily from author to author, text to text. You really have to treat each text individually and take it on its own merits.
I was just talking about how difficult Derrida is, but ironically, I think he's actually the closest to analytic philosophy out of all the "big" continental writers. His concerns and methods are ones that analytic philosophers can appreciate, once you cut through all the verbiage. Like his Voice and Phenomenon for example, it's a nice short little book that addresses the question, "do we have privileged epistemological access to the contents of our own mental states?" That's a perfectly comprehensible and "classical" philosophical question, no issues there. And he does have arguments; they're perhaps a bit difficult to extract, and they're not the most carefully rigorous, but they're there.
Nietzsche won't bullshit you. (I think we can safely call him continental. He lived before the split of course, but like Hegel he's very strongly continental coded.) Reading Nietzsche is just such an amazing and wonderful experience. He doesn't provide too many arguments per se (and it would kinda go against his whole project if he did, because he's kinda doing a postmodern performance art deconstruction of the concept of philosophical argumentation itself, which is really not nearly as dumb and pretentious as it sounds, like seriously just read him trust me), but he doesn't need to give arguments because he just like, says stuff, in plain ol' honest terms, and you're just like "damn, that is so true... how did I never think of that before..."
But then of course you do just have the really hyper-weird shit. I wrote a post yesterday where I quoted some passages from Lacan's Seminar XX and, yeah I'll admit, it's fuckin' wild. You're justified in asking, how am I to take this as anything except the ramblings of a very unwell man who is on the verge of a psychotic episode? And I'll admit, I'm not sure how much of it can be defended "rationally". I can give basic definitions of the jargon terms like "jouissance" and "Other", but in terms of justifying why these specific words were put in this specific order and what it means as a whole, such that a sane person would be justified in believing it... yeah, that's tough. But that doesn't mean I can just throw it out, y'know? Something about Lacan's ideas and terminology resonates with me. I don't know what he's onto, but he's onto something. I can't argue anyone into walking that particular path, but I know that there are other people who are interested in walking the same path.
I wish there was more rigorous work done, both philosophical and historical, about how the analytic/continental split came to be and what it means. My current pet theory is that there really is just a certain strain of mysticism in continental thought, and as such it tends to attract people who are more open to mystical thought/experience, and this shows through in the texts, although most of them would strenuously deny this. It's not clear exactly why or how this particular mode of thinking caught on when it did in European philosophy, but multiple of the big "founding fathers" of continental philosophy did flirt with mysticism, to varying degrees of overtness, and this likely set the tone for what "personality type" would be attracted to continental philosophy going forward.
Kierkegaard had his own idiosyncratic brand of existential Christianity, that one is obvious. Magee's Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition goes into detail explaining how Hegel's thought was influenced by Hermeticism. And when Heidegger in What are Poets For? is saying things like:
it's kinda like, what are we even doing here? We're not even pretending that this is "philosophy" anymore. (Actually Heidegger rejected the notion that he was doing "philosophy", he said that what he was doing was "thinking", what exactly that means is up to interpretation.)
And Hubert Dreyfus had the chutzpah to say "oh Heidegger was just doing a philosophical anthropology, the 'unveiling of a world' just means how our social practices influence how we categorize objects, nothing unusual going on here". Come on man.
The result of collecting all these spacey wordcels in one intellectual space, and giving them the freedom to be as spacey as they want without much in the way of outside checks and balances, is a very strange and unique literature that freely transitions between philosophy, history, sociology, psychology, poetry, and religious experience, sometimes all within the same paragraph. They won't announce when they're "changing modalities", that's on you to figure out. You might find it frustrating, but you can't say it's not fascinating.
But anyway. In spite of all that. All continental texts are really different from each other and you have to take them on a case by case basis. There's been increasing analytic interest over the past couple of decades in doing analytic interpretations/reconstructions of Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Marx, Derrida, all the big names, figuring out what ideas are in there that can be extracted and pressed into a more easy-to-digest form. I wouldn't say there's anything like a "bridging of the gap" between the two traditions but the interest is there. It's not all bullshit.
Well it's the weekend for me, so I now have some time to respond to this:
I do get what they lived through, though I disagree with the entirety of their political bent and find the role they played in the spread of identity-Marxism and its promulgation into Western academia to be extremely harmful (my initial comment in this thread detailing Marcuse's "solution" for the West contained a very scornful remark about how he should have just stayed in Germany and let the Nazis take him; I had the good sense to edit it out because the second I wrote it I just thought "Jesus Christ").
But the lack of self-awareness more broadly in their political scholarship really gets to me. Their writings are full of the idea that "liberalism has failed before, therefore it can fail again; and we need to put in [authoritarian system] to maintain social order". The example they loved to use in all of their writings was the liberal Weimar Republic being usurped by the illiberal Nazi Party, and they used this to argue that the liberal system was obviously insufficient to guard against such abuses. Of course, when you're usurping a liberal system yourself and subverting it to your own ends, well, to use the Weimar Republic analogy, you need to ask yourself the question: Are we the Nazis? It's not as if most Nazis believed they were horrible people doing bad things, after all; they believed they were entirely justified, and their rationale for censorship and repression was undoubtedly similar. How do you know that's not what you're doing?
I will say I think the wars of the 20th century irreparably shaped philosophy, art and thinking in ways that seem to have been a net negative (to me at least). Things start getting very strange during the inter-war period, and then go absolutely wild post-war. This was a period where the idea of jettisoning virtually every vestige of the Enlightenment became vogue, and you can see that trend exemplified in many domains like political philosophy, architecture and art. There were thinkers who advocated it beforehand, but the early 20th century was the point where it spread like wildfire, and WW2 in particular resulted in a lot of the radical German left arriving on American soil; an environment without any antibodies to their memes. Ideals like liberalism and nationalism, the notion of reason and empiricism being desirable, as well as the rationalist neoclassicism of the era, were ravaged in the fire of the wars.
Nietzsche is good. I've had a gander at some of his stuff, though like the other commenter I half-think this is cheating. Thus Spake Zarathrusta threw me badly though and I've not returned to it since.
But in general I have the sense that much appreciation of continental philosophy actually primarily relies on vibes and not coherent sense-making. You read it, you feel like it is true or profound in some deep unarticulable way, and follow the author down the garden path for that reason alone. Some of what you've mentioned here about your engagement with continental philosophy seems to confirm that belief.
This is fair; continental philosophy is a very wide-spanning term that encapsulates a lot of very different philosophical traditions. Still, they have undoubtedly influenced each other and there is a lot of crosstalk, and that broad assertion about "continental philosophy" was just meant as a description of the general trend in my experience - not excluding of course that there is some continental philosophy I can and do actually enjoy.
Also, from your other comment further down in the thread:
I have you pegged as "flighty wordcel who is way too interested in austere, self-referential literature and art" and that's meant as a compliment. The profile of your interests isn't super typical here and it adds flavour and depth to the Motte, I don't like it much when people downvote them.
EDIT: removed a section
Oh, not sure why you removed the Paul Klee section, I was going to comment on it...
Klee was an artist, not a philosopher. Most artists are frankly not very good at talking about their own work. They tend to not actually be that knowledgeable about art theory, let alone philosophy in general. That's why they're artists and not philosophers.
The Klee stuff you quoted seemed pretty bad and uninteresting and I would have nope'd out after a few sentences.
When someone is actually trained as a philosopher, and their work is recognized as philosophy by other philosophers, you can take it on good faith that there is a method to the madness. I quoted that Heidegger comment about poets for example to give an example of one of his more extreme flights of fancy, but at the same time, it's undeniable that Heidegger was extremely well-versed in the entirety of the history of Western philosophy, and (at least some of) his work makes genuine contributions to legitimate philosophical problems. (His What is Metaphysics is interesting and approachable.)
Aaaaa what a tragedy! Zarathustra is a terrible book, it's easily the worst thing he ever wrote. I don't blame people for assuming that it's a natural starting place for reading Nietzsche though. He himself insisted from the day it was published to the day he died that it was his best work. I have no idea why. He was simply wrong about that. I can only assume that he was just trolling and trying to filter people or something.
If you ever want to return to Nietzsche, I would recommend Twilight of the Idols, Gay Science, and Genealogy of Morality in that order. I think that would give you a relatively balanced overview of his project and his main concerns.
Like I've been saying, you have to make judgements on a book by book, paragraph by paragraph basis. Almost all the specific books I've recommended throughout this thread are approachable and can be read like any other book, and they do make coherent sense, such that you could explain them to analytic philosophers without too much trouble.
And sometimes you get sentences that function on multiple levels, instead of adhering to a strict "semantic meaning vs vibes-based" distinction. So, for example, when Lacan says "woman does not exist;
Womancannot be said", you can "decode" this to get the "literal" meaning of "there is no single paradigmatic successful example that women can model themselves after, unlike how an individual man can aspire to be 'The Man' (people say 'you're the man, man' but they never say 'you're the woman, girl'); social expectations for women are perpetually and irreconcilably split between the Madonna and the whore". This is how many of his commentators interpret him, especially if they're writing a "Lacan 101" type introduction. But you can also choose to just let your mind run free with the poetic, vibes-based associations. I think some continental texts are very much intended to get your brain to trigger both modes of cognition at once.Thank you, I really appreciate that. Some number of downvotes is actually a good thing. If I only ever got upvotes, then that would mean I was just agreeing with the hivemind on everything and I wasn't saying anything that challenged people and made them push back.
Hopefully this exchange isn't too tedious to you. I have obviously not gotten as deeply into continental philosophy as you have, so I hope this doesn't feel like explaining the concept of addition to an infant.
The reason why I removed it is precisely for the reason you stated: he is an artist and not a philosopher. I quoted him initially because IIRC Adorno was influenced by Klee's art and writings, but later decided that it would just be better to quote Adorno himself instead of doing so indirectly through the writings he was influenced by.
I have been working my way through The Aesthetic Dimension and already have quibbles with the approach just a small amount of the way in. Perhaps this is a mistake and perhaps I should read more before I comment, but:
On Page 2 Marcuse enumerates the following tenets of Marxist aesthetics: Art is transformed along with the social structure and its means of production. One's social class affects the art that gets produced, and the only true art is that made by an ascending class; the art made by a descending class is "decadent". Realism corresponds most accurately to "the social relationships" and is the correct art form. Etc.
Marcuse's critique is that Marxism prioritises materialism and material reality too much over the subjective experiences of individuals, and that even when it tries to address the latter its focus is on the collective and not the individual. The Marxist opinion of subjectivity as a tool of the bourgeoisie, in his opinion, is incorrect and in fact "with the affirmation of the inwardness of subjectivity, the individual steps out of the network of exchange relationships and exchange values, withdraws from the reality of bourgeois society, and enters another dimension of existence. Indeed, this escape from reality led to an experience which could (and did) become a powerful force in invalidating the actually prevailing bourgeois values, namely, by shifting the locus of the individual's realization from the domain of the performance principle and the profit motive to that of the inner resources of the human being: passion, imagination, conscience."
This claim doesn't feel meaningful to me. Subjectivity could and did become a powerful force in challenging the bourgeoisie? Would be nice to get some examples of this, but I doubt he has any concrete ones. The topic of whether focusing on one's inner world invalidates or bolsters bourgeois values is not really amenable to systematic inquiry. But I would say a person's "inner experience" is very complex, kind of nonsensical and pretty much orthogonal to any political or social system you could put in place, and as such it will never map onto anything that could exist in reality (and that includes Marxism), that's not specific to aspects of capitalism like the performance principle and profit motive. The bureaucratic machinations of a central planner are just as alien to it as decentralised market-based allocation and the incentives it creates.
I guess I can somewhat legibly interpret it if I assume the truth of the critical theorist belief that their ideas are uniquely liberating, but I think that their proscriptions for society are just as artificial as anything that came before. Human emotional experience is so disordered and contradictory that expecting it to align with any model of social organisation is a mistake. People are a hodgepodge of instincts and reflexes acquired across hundreds of millions of years of geological time, some of which are laughably obsolete; it won't agree with any principle at all. Hell, it's not even compatible with granting people liberation, whatever that means. Even if you wave a magic wand and give people full freedom the expression of their instincts will often inherently conflict with the wishes of another, and in addition humans get terrified when presented with unbounded choice, and make decisions that don't maximise utility for themselves. The full realisation of human desires is an impossible task. It will always be stultified in some way or another.
This is, to me, a good example of what I said before: "You read it, you feel like it is true or profound in some deep unarticulable way, and follow the author down the garden path for that reason alone." I can't really reason my way into the conclusion that Marcuse has reached here, and in fact the more I think about that passage the less comprehensible I find it to be. The Lacan passage seems similar, but I have not read it in full context yet so I won't judge. But the reason why analytic philosophy tends to be restricted in its scope compared to continental philosophy is because there are rules that govern what can be legibly said within that philosophical framework.
I suppose I want and need a lot more substantiation and rigour in my academic work than what many of these writers are capable of offering. If you look at my post history, that becomes very clear; I think I demand it more than even your average Mottizen does.
Not at all! There are few things I love more than getting to talk about this stuff.
The first few pages of this book are great to look at in this context because they both a) demonstrate how analytic and continental philosophy can have convergent concerns and b) they give you a feel for what's distinctive about the continental approach as a whole.
Marcuse in this book is speaking to the debate within Marxism between the humanist Marxists and the anti-humanist Marxists. The two camps disagreed on questions like: what role should individual subjectivity play in our theory of politics, does Marxism even need a "theory of the individual" at all or is everything interesting you could say about an individual exhausted by his class position, etc. These debates are similar to questions that analytic philosophers are working on today, albeit with a much less overtly political bent. François Kammerer is an analytic philosopher whose work focuses on defending illusionism about consciousness: he thinks that consciousness isn't real, he thinks that pain is as real as unicorns are. This seems like it would present a problem for any ethical theory: if there are no sentient beings, then why would anything matter? So he argues in that linked paper that it is possible to construct an ethical theory that makes no reference to subjective states of consciousness.
Marcuse is addressing similar concerns, but he takes the opposite stance: he thinks you can't have an ethics without subjectivity (and furthermore, you can't have a politics without an ethics), and thus the stance of the anti-humanist Marxists is politically impoverished.
Well, let's take a step back for a second. What is "meaningful"? The term "meaningless" is somewhat ambiguous unless we give it further clarification.
It seems to me that there are at least four different ways that a sentence can fall short of providing true, interesting, useful information:
Level 1: The sentence is either just completely grammatically incorrect and can't be interpreted as a valid sentence at all, or it's grammatically correct but it's formed in such a way that it means nothing. e.g. "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously".
Level 2: The sentence does have a meaning, albeit one that can only be interpreted in a poetic or mystical fashion. e.g. "The element of this ether, that within which even the godhead itself is still present, is the holy".
Level 3: The sentence is meaningful, but it's trivially false, or it's just uninteresting and irrelevant regardless of whether it's true or false. e.g. "Mathematical entities exist as non-spatiotemporal objects" (I would not put this sentence on this level myself; I think this is an interesting claim that one can have a valid debate about. But I think the average Mottizen, upon hearing this claim for the first time, and receiving clarification that a "non-spatiotemporal object" is very simply a real object that is not located in time or space, would say either "that's obviously false" or "even if that is true, it's irrelevant to anything that matters so I don't care".)
Level 4: A claim that coincidentally turns out to be false, but would be very interesting and worthwhile if it were true. e.g. "The LHC will find evidence of SUSY".
When you say "meaningless", it's not clear whether you're referring to level 1, 2, 3, or maybe even something in between.
My goal here is to impart to you that the majority of continental philosophy can be brought up to at least level 3, once you're familiar with a specific author's terminology and the historical context in which they were writing. Whether what they're saying is true and interesting is a separate issue that will obviously vary heavily from claim to claim. A lot of times you'll read philosophy and just come away thinking that it's dumb or wrong, as is often the case in many other fields. 90% of everything is crap. (The funny thing about philosophy is that everyone has a different opinion on which 90% of it is crap.)
But "dumb" and "wrong" are importantly different from meaningless. I get the impression that you already think that Marcuse's claims here are at least level 3. You seem to understand what the sentences are saying; you think they're wrong, but you're able to give coherent reasons for why you think they're wrong.
I think it may be helpful here to draw a comparison between Marcuse's claims about value and your own previous comments about anime. You said "I felt like the whole corruption arc was dealt with far better in Breaking Bad". Now, is this something that you could absolutely rigorously logically prove 100%? No, of course not. But does that mean the sentence is meaningless? No, that's not true either.
Granted, you prefaced the sentence with "I feel", so you could say "it's just a pure expression of my own inner subjective state, nothing more, and it's therefore unimpeachable in that regard; and all similar sentences should be interpreted likewise, even if I leave off the implicit 'I feel'". But that doesn't seem to quite tell the whole story. If you're just expressing pure arbitrary subjective feelings, then why did you have the conversation at all, and why did you structure the conversation in the manner that you did? It seems like you're giving reasons for your opinions, reasons that you have at least some expectation that other people will be responsive to: Death Note is subpar because it's not multilayered, because the characters don't have enough psychological depth. It's not a purely rational argument, but it's structured like a rational argument: it seems to exist somewhere between sense and nonsense. We have a shared intersubjective conception of what artistic quality is, and you can reasonably expect that other people will be interested to learn that e.g. a show's characters lack psychological depth. Of course, someone could always come along and flatly tell you "actually I like one dimensional cartoon villains, you can't tell me what to think". And you couldn't prove him "wrong". But that doesn't render your previous utterances meaningless.
One helpful way of thinking about some continental texts (I have to keep repeatedly stressing that there is no single interpretive framework that will apply to all continental texts) is that they're kind of like a movie review, except instead of reviewing movies, they're reviewing society and history / life itself / other philosophers / whatever. Can the critic prove to you that the movie sucked? No. But can he say "the characters were all stereotypes, and the ending was predictable"? Sure. And then you might come away thinking "actually yeah, that movie did kinda suck", even though you may not have realized it at first. Can Marcuse prove that subjectivity invalidates capitalist values? No. Can he suggest that an ethics based on subjectivity could be more humane, more tolerant of individual creativity and expression, more process-oriented than results-oriented, etc. than an ethics based on the profit motive? Yes. And that might end up changing your perspective on things.
No, I really have to disagree on this. Many people self-consciously base their own value system on the pursuit of perfectionism and efficiency. No one thinks that there's anything mystical or unarticulable about this. Therefore, its denial should not be mystical or unarticulable either.
I probably should have defined "meaningless" better and generally articulated my argument more systematically, that's my bad; I was writing down my first reaction to the passage and had not yet properly distilled how to explain my point. What I mean by "not meaningful" is that there might be no way to prove or disprove the statement, and as such it can be considered an example of a statement that's not even wrong. In terms of its utility in shining light on the world around it, it's not particularly helpful; this is the case due to the fact that it has not been and perhaps cannot ever be evaluated through reference to formal logic, mathematics, or any natural sciences. Marcuse has presented a statement of fact without proof or rigorous logical argumentation as to its validity. He's not even built his conclusion based on reasoning from other assumed priors (not perfect, but better). As such it is a bare statement.
Right, I think that this elaborates the difference between our epistemologies and our opinions on the standard that academic scholarship should ideally strive towards. I generally adhere to logical positivism (very INTP of me, I know /s), and while I don't act like this all the time in practice, I do believe that principles of falsifiability and offering up proofs/disproofs are the kinds of standards that scholarship should exemplify. As Scott describes it: "The truths of science are verifiable empirical claims and ... the truths of logic and mathematics are tautologies. These two constitute the entire universe of meaningful judgements; anything else is nonsense."
Something like "Death Note was not that good" is an evaluative judgement of quality, not a statement of fact. Every argument surrounding aesthetics will be vibes based as a result, and the point of it is not to get closer to any truth; rather, it's to impress upon someone your subjective experience and make them viscerally feel it on a deep level. The point is to impose your personal feelings on someone. The reason why people structure it like a rational argument is specifically because we assume that other people believe certain things are good too, we assume other people share our own cognitive characteristics. We create premises and then we can possibly use logical (more often, pseudo-logical) argumentation to show how these premises result in an inevitable conclusion.
Of course, there is a point beyond which you can't get much closer to agreement through this method of argumentation. Say a film critic enjoys films that are talky and philosophical and idea-based and the ordinary viewer enjoys stuff that's more action-packed. There isn't really a way for these two parties to come to any consensus on the quality of films. While it's possible to try to argue it if there's some other related point of commonality you can reason from, a big part of convincing people in this regard is trying to force them into your mental framework; to get them to understand you on a qualia-level. Discussions surrounding aesthetics proceed with the inherent assumption that truth is not what is being discussed, and as such they do not need to meet the criteria for evaluating a truth-claim. (There is a way to discuss aesthetics which is amenable to proof or disproof by appeal to the majority or analysis of human neural structure, but when most people discuss aesthetics they're not trying to make a claim about whether most people like something or not but instead getting someone else to adopt their own subjective evaluations of a piece of media.)
On the other hand, assertions such as "Art that emphasises subjective experience helps people reject capitalism" aren't of the same nature that "this show was bad" is, in that they are not value judgements. It is a factual claim about the effects of a certain course of action. This automatically raises the bar for the kinds of arguments that should be accepted when evaluating these statements. Because when you agree with that statement, you're not agreeing to adopt a certain personal evaluation of things. You're agreeing to a statement about how the world operates. Discussion of such things needs to proceed among logical or empirical lines, and if it cannot, all you are doing is relying on your own emotion or personal bias to try and divine a fact. When discussing this one cannot subject themselves to the same criteria that one would subject a movie review to.
The kinds of statements I consider meaningful are exemplified in this quote from Scott in his post about logical positivism. "[W]hat is there such that, using reason rather than emotion or made-up pseudologic, we can actually change our minds about and correctly judge as having one probability of truth rather than another?" It really doesn't matter much to me that the majority of philosophers seem to think the Vienna Circle has been invalidated; if I'm to judge the effectiveness of these principles I distinctly note that these institutions that operate under things that look and sound a lot like positivism do far better.
Perhaps that makes me a pragmatist instead.
Correct, I think Marcuse's claim is level 3 as presented in your list. It contains a clear statement of fact that can be pretty straightforwardly understood. I do believe this is true for much continental philosophy, though they fail other epistemological criteria and sets of standards.
I think we've talked past each other on this point, I don't mean to say it's mystical. What I mean is that people would accept Marcuse's claim not on the basis of formalised reason or empirical proof but on the basis of the fact that it resonates with them and they deeply feel it is true; they think it sounds right and seems reasonable in spite of the lack of concrete reasons they should believe it.
Also, the distinction I've made between a value/moral judgement and a statement of fact, as well as the different burdens of proof which should be placed on them, rears its head here. Statements such as "I base my values on the pursuit of perfectionism and efficiency" and "You should not base your own value system on the pursuit of perfectionism and efficiency" are value judgements. "Emphasising subjective experience helps people reject capitalism" is a statement about how the world works.
Haha, yeah that stuff has been on my mind a lot lately. I'm very much an NF type. I have an appreciation for both the strictly logical side and the vibes-based side.
I'd say that's basically mission accomplished then.
I don't particularly disagree with what you've said here. I just don't draw the same judgements that you do with regards to the text.
If someone writes a review of Star Wars that starts with "Star Wars is the worst movie franchise of all time.", you don't say "ah, the author has presented a value judgement as a statement of fact. Confused as he is about this basic distinction, I must now consign his words to the flames". Instead you say, "he's presenting his value judgement in a hyperbolic manner as a rhetorical tactic. If I already have preexisting reasons to trust this author's judgement, I will continue reading with the reasonable expectation that he will provide reasons for his value judgement that I may be responsive to”.
You were quite correct to say "a big part of convincing people in this regard is trying to force them into your mental framework; to get them to understand you on a qualia-level". That's part of what Marcuse is doing here. When he says "the individual steps out of the network of exchange relationships and exchange values, withdraws from the reality of bourgeois society, and enters another dimension of existence", you're not supposed to go "erm, doesn't he know there's only one dimension of existence?" You're supposed to go, "ok, he's sort of painting a picture with words here. He's communicating his value system and inviting me to share in it. Is that something I'm interested in exploring? If yes, why? If not, why not?"
If there's one thing you should take away from continental philosophy, it's that your values are not set in stone. You can choose to change them.
If you already have a strong prior against Marxism (as I do too!), then you're obviously not going to be interested in sharing his value system exactly. And that's ok! You might still be able to mine his work for concepts and ideas that you can repurpose for other ends of your own.
Right, that's another part of what he's doing. He's suggesting that his way of looking at things might have pragmatic value for advancing a certain political agenda, and this is a claim that is at least conceivably subject to empirical verification and falsification. Can he prove his claim? No. But I don't think he necessarily needs to. It's fine to just throw stuff out there and speculate sometimes. We can just chill and mull it over for a while. We're just brainstorming. Opening ourselves up to new possibilities.
The question of "standards of academic scholarship" is an interesting one. This is, again, something that will vary heavily based on context, but I'd say that in general continental authors would have some issues with your conception of academic rigor, and would be more likely to see their work as being continuous with "ordinary" thought and speech, as opposed to being distinguished by a particular kind of academic methodology. More like internet shitposters than scientists. (And your revealed preference is that you do see a place in the world for internet shitposting -- you're here, after all.)
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Just seconding this.
We need some nutters around the place to keep things interestingConventional English strongly associates quality with clarity, for good reason IMO (see C.S. Lewis and Orwell’s critiques of bureaucratese and the superiority of clear sentences and everyday Anglo-Saxon derived words, with which I largely agree).
But I do see the force of the Continental claim that writing something is not actually the same as expressing it. It can even be the reverse - an inoculation that robs an idea of all its true interest and allows you to lock it in a mental drawer without further thought.
The problem for me is that I find all the continental attempts to circumvent this process to be tedious in the extreme :) Which is why I appreciate having you around to try and indicate why it is not so.
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Which half though?
I dug into Girard just a little bit because of his recent influence on important people and came away with a strong condemnation of his entire process as incredibly moronic and I can't understand why he's given the time of day by otherwise intelligent people. "People's desires are influenced by their perception of what is desired by others" is not exactly a novel contribution to human psychology.
I can, in contrast, understand why Marx has had the influence he has had, in terms of his writings and in terms of the mechanics of the rise of the USSR.
I read Russell's A History of Western Philosophy in my early 20s and that did not help me here. Continentalists seem to get very mad at Analyticals misrepresenting them, without themselves having a consensus about what was "really" meant by any given thinker.
Just read Nietzsche. If you don't get anything out of him then don't bother with the others. He represents the "continental mind" at its best.
Never heard of him.
Think of philosophy as being like one big internet argument. (It basically is that, quite literally. Many of the questions we discuss regularly on TheMotte are philosophical questions.) There has never been any time in history when someone made a forum post on a non-trivial political question and everyone thought "yep, that's correct, there's nothing to clarify or add, he simply got it right". At minimum, there will be a dozen replies telling the guy how he actually got everything wrong. Frequently, these posts will wade into interpretive matters -- asking for further elaboration or clarification on point X, asking if in this particular sentence he meant Y or if he really meant Z, asking if his arguments really support W or if that's really what he even wanted to argue for in the first place, etc. Undoubtedly you've seen this play out many times. This is just what happens when you discuss complex matters using natural language. So it goes for philosophy in general.
Think about how people still, after all these decades, can't agree over whether pro-lifers "really" believe that abortion is murder. I mean, they even say in very plain language that they think it's murder, and people still can't agree what such utterances "really" mean! Skeptics will say, well they can't actually mean that, because it's not consistent with their other beliefs/behavior, or their arguments clearly don't support that conclusion, so they have to mean something else. On and on it goes.
Sometimes the interpretive difficulties with a philosophical text are literally at the level of "I don't know what this sentence is saying". Typically they're more subtle than that though. There's a persistent interpretive difficulty with Kant's Critique of Pure Reason for example over whether his metaphysics is a dual substance theory (two types of objects, appearances and things-in-themselves) or a dual property theory (only one type of object, but it has phenomenal and non-phenomenal properties). Kant was an unusually meticulous thinker, the CoPR is 800 pages of densely pedantic arguments, but on this one (rather fundamental) issue he simply never addressed it explicitly. When we're writing, we can't predict every question that every reader will ever come up with; sometimes we think something is perfectly clear even when it's not, or it just never even occurs to us to ask that particular question at all. I'm sure you can again think of many examples from your own experience.
That being said, although interpretive difficulties in natural language debates can never be entirely eradicated, some interpretations of a text are clearly better than others, and Russell was notorious for not being a particularly careful reader of the thinkers he profiled in A History of Western Philosophy. See this for example for a criticism of Russell's interpretation of Kant.
I feel like Nietzsche is cheating a bit. I'm familiar enough with some of his ideas to know he had some interesting things to say.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Girard
I have. Which is why I know continental philosophers seem to lean in to making it worse, as if obscurity and complexity is the point.
I'm glad some people like you do the reading to pass on some level of understanding.
Yeah, I mean I can see why you wouldn't say he's continental continental, but he's obviously not analytic either. If someone was coming from an analytic background and wanted to broaden their perspective on what philosophy is capable of being, I'd tell them to start with him.
Thank you! I'm glad there are people who enjoy these exposés.
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