CC#10: Husserl and the history of analytic and continental thought

In Eric’s post of a few days ago (here), he continues with his argument that Moritz Schlick ought to be considered the “rightful father of analytic philosophy,” contrary to the more frequent claim that this honor belongs to Frege. This post led me to think yet again about the historical roots of the analytic-continental divide.

The usual story as I would tell it, simplified as it is, was that one could mark the bifurcation with Frege’s critique of Husserl’s habilitation dissertation, On the Concept of Number. In his critique, Frege rejected Husserl’s strong psychologistic tendencies. On this telling, we begin with shared concerns and problems in the foundations of mathematics but then divergence arises as Frege and Husserl set out addressing these problems and concerns, with Husserl taking up the issue  along Brentano’s psychologistic lines, and Frege (and subsequently Russell) rejecting this approach and moving in a decidedly realist direction.

This story of the diverging approaches of Husserl and Frege supports the claims of those who read continental thought as being more anti-realist than analytic thought, though there are notable exceptions of course (Deleuze, among others, is more appropriately placed among the realists while the later writings of Putnam have a strong anti-realist flavor).

Thanks to Eric’s post, and to his recommendation of an excellent essay by Abraham Stone, “Heidegger and Carnap on the Overcoming of Metaphysics,” (this and other essays can be found here), I am beginning to rethink the history of the analytic-continental divide.

Stone’s essay really needs to be read in its entirety, but in short he argues that Heidegger is wrongly lumped in with Husserl in a camp that Carnap opposes (with Carnap’s “apparently” dismissive reference to Heidegger from his “Overcoming of Metaphysics” essay ushered in to support this reading) when in fact Carnap and Heidegger, Stone argues, are each critical of Husserl, and for very similar reasons: namely, both Carnap and Heidegger believe Husserl’s efforts to move beyond problems in Kant’s thought (i.e., the notion of the Ding an sich) in the end calls upon a pre-Kantian metaphysics when Husserl argues for the sphere of pure consciousness.

Carnap, Stone claims, shares Heidegger’s misgivings with Husserl on this point and they will each subsequently set out to overcome metaphysics in ways that are consistent with the spirit of Kant’s project. Put briefly, they each seek to maintain the aspiration of traditional metaphysics to provide knowledge of the possibility and unity of science while, following Kant, limiting the scope of this metaphysics (that is, they deny to metaphysics, in contrast to Husserl, a supersensible sphere or object), and they both seek to save Kant’s practical philosophy and make it possible to think human freedom.

Where Carnap and Heidegger differ, and here is where I think Stone would see the emergence of the contrasting approaches of continental and analytic philosophers, is in how each addresses the problem of “what constitutes a responsible and therefore clear and significant use of language.” For Heidegger, on Stone’s reading, this consists of attending to the historical and grammatical roots of the language we speak, carelessly, every day, while for Carnap it consists of purifying our everyday language of its errors and contradictions through the construction of a formal language in what Carnap calls pure semantics. In doing this we can avoid the pseudo-problems we are naturally led to by the carelessness of everyday language. Carnap’s reference to Heidegger in his “Overcoming of Metaphysics” essay is thus, Stone argues convincingly, not a quick dismissal of Heidegger but rather an acknowledgement of their differences, differences that stem from profound agreements on many shared concerns and problems.

On this reading of twentieth-century philosophy, after Heidegger and Carnap there are two different methodological approaches to the “responsible and therefore clear and significant use of language” – there is the historical-grammatical analysis that derives from Heidgger, and then there is the logical analysis that derives from Carnap (and Schlick and the Vienna Circle). Examples of the first approach include Derrida, Foucault, and many others in continental thought who do archaeologies, genealogies, hermeneutics, deconstructive analyses, etc., of discursive practices, texts, narratives, and so on. Examples of the second approach include Quine, Davidson, Kripke, Lewis, and others who set forth formal languages and semantic theories that seek to rid everyday language of its ambiguities and contradictions while offering a robust account of the meanings (or intensions) of everyday language (e.g., one of the benefits of possible world semantics, Lewis argued, was precisely that it could account for the meaningfulness of counterfactual claims, among many other things).

This is a compelling story, and it may very well be the best account of the history, but I’m still drawn to the influence of Husserl and in particular to what I take to be his realist call to “return to the things themselves.” A strong case can be made, for example, that Deleuze’s realism and some of his key concepts, especially “transcendental field,” “immanence,” and “life” as they appear throughout his writings but especially in his final published essay “Immanence: A Life,” are themselves elaborations and reworkings of Husserl’s understanding of the transcendental sphere of pure consciousness. It is possible the Carnap-Heidegger criticism of Husserl can at this point simply be extended to Deleuze. I think one can read Badiou’s criticisms of Deleuze, and Meillassoux’s as well (namely that Deleuze is a strong correlationist), along these lines. I think those criticisms can be circumvented (and have argued so here). In any event, I’m still strongly inclined to see Husserl as central to our understanding of contemporary continental thought.