Berit and Mohan have offered very interesting autobiographical posts recently. I thought I would take my turn, concentrating not on the path I took to get a TT job, but on how I’ve dealt with that terrible zombie, the thing that would not die: the distinction of “analytic” and “continental” philosophy.
First, to clear the ground, I don’t think there’s a conceptual distinction to be made, no set of necessary and sufficient conditions for identity in a group that would divide the history of philosophy, or its current setup, in two distinct sets. If we take up a family resemblance position, Catarina has made some very interesting comments about possible methodological distinctions, though there’s still work to be done there. From a sociological position, there seems to be some distinction in hiring and citation networks, even when the same philosophers are discussed, but again, there’s a lot still to be done there.
What I’d like to do is instead talk about identity-formation from my “political affect” perspective. That is, I’m going to offer my story as a case study in how I became a “continental philosopher” by incorporating a set of beliefs / desires / tastes / emotional triggers, and so on, about what constitutes “the sort of thing our people do.”
I think this process is better described in terms of initiation or acculturation than it is in terms of rational deliberation. I certainly never had equal exposure to both analytic and continental philosophy in my undergraduate training, and my decision to pursue continental philosophy training at the graduate level can’t really be said to be the result of rational deliberation as to the relative merits of the two fields. One – CP – just felt right to me – I knew enough about it to know that it was a challenge I wanted to take up; the other – AP – was largely terra incognita. I suspect it’s the other way around for those who ended up in AP, but I’d be happy to hear from others with different experiences.
Like many other middle-class kids from suburban Philadelphia, I went to Penn State. I ended up doing a few majors before spending a few years in the late 70s studying Physical Education. I love sports, so the part about learning how to be a coach or gym teacher wasn’t painful, but I was aiming at a PhD in what they were just beginning to call “Kinesiology,” so what really turned me on was Anatomy, Physiology, Exercise Physiology, Biomechanics and so on. So when the PSU Physical Education department wouldn’t let me arrange an internship in Cardiac Rehabilitation, but instead wanted to force me into an internship as a high school gym teacher, I took a leave of absence to think things over. And during that time, I picked up (Cornford’s translation of) Plato’s Republic, which I remembered from an Intro to Philosophy course. I was hooked, especially by the treatment of the body: the erotic component of philosophical training; the training of the guardians; the discussion of desire, appetite, spirit, all of it.
So I found myself wanting to study philosophy. In going back to school in 1979 at age 24 I switched majors for the last time and began taking philosophy courses. My teachers at the time were Stanley Rosen, Joseph Kockelmans, Alphonso Lingis, Emily Grosholz, and Joseph Flay (later, in getting my MA at Penn State, I worked with Irene Harvey). Unbeknownst to me, I had stumbled upon one of the few centers of continental philosophy in the country! In other words, if I had been an undergraduate at, say, Pitt, I might have become a philosopher of the Pittsburghian stripe, or at Rutgers, a Rutgerian, and so on. You see, I didn’t decide I wanted to become a continental philosopher; I just wanted to become a philosopher. At the time I had no idea of the distinction between AP and CP. I just wanted to read philosophy, and I fell under the spell of these charismatic teachers and the world to which they introduced me. Again, I have the impression that everyone has a similar story: it’s not that you sit down and survey the field of philosophy and using your first-hand knowledge of the various approaches, you pick the best one. No, it’s that one day you find yourself hooked by the type of philosophy that your teachers do.
So there I was, reading Plato with Rosen, Hegel with Flay, Kant, Husserl and Heidegger with Kockelmans, Derrida with Harvey, and Deleuze and others with Lingis. I went on to Loyola Chicago to study with John Sallis, with whom I read Plato, Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida. Tom Sheehan (more Heidegger, as well as Artistotle) was another big influence on me, as well as David Ingram (Frankfurt School); Paul Davies (Blanchot and Foucault); Robert Bernasconi, who gave a visiting course on Levinas; and Adriaan Peperzek, who arrived only in my last year (1990). My dissertation was on Heidegger and Derrida’s treatments of Aristotle’s theory of time; it was directed by Sallis (currently at Boston College), and the examining committee included Charles Scott of Vanderbilt, and Davies, currently at Sussex.
So there I was, a few years later, happily doing Heidegger and Derrida’s take on the history of philosophy. I published a rather heavily modified and expanded version of my dissertation as Time and Exteriority (Bucknell UP, 1994). A variety of accidents, and the good friendship of my graduate school colleague, Miguel de Beistegui, who nominated me for the award, resulted in me becoming Leverhulme Research Fellow in Philosophy at the University of Warwick in 1995-1996. There I underwent two transformations: I met some very interesting people (Christine Battersby, Nick Land, Keith Ansell Pearson, Alistair Welchman, Judith Norman) and so read Deleuze for the first time with regard to his treatment of science and complexity theory (thus reading Manuel DeLanda and Brian Massumi). And I started reading some analytic philosophy of science and mathematics, thanks to the reading group at Warwick led by Greg Hunt and David Miller.
This was a big turning point. I had been vaguely dissatisfied with the way Heideggerians and Derrideans weren’t really that interested in science, and I wasn’t thrilled with Heidegger’s politics, to put it mildly. But I loved what they did with the history of philosophy. But suddenly here with Deleuze there was a chance to do science, politics, and the history of philosophy all together! This part of my career resulted in my second book, Political Physics: Deleuze, Derrida and the Body Politic, (London, Athlone Press, 2001) and my third, Deleuze and Geophilosophy (Edinburgh UP, 2004), co-authored with a professional geographer, Mark Bonta.
But there’s another biographical accident that has also shaped by career. One of my wife’s best friends is Amy Cohen, who is the widow of Francisco Varela. Through Amy I had the chance to meet Francisco twice, and even got to translate some of his work. It was reading Francisco’s work, and that of his collaborator Evan Thompson, that got me hooked on the enactive school of cognitive science, to which I’ve devoted a good portion of my work for the last 5 or 6 years, culminating in Political Affect (Minnesota, 2009).
The point of this narrative is not to share with you the fascinating details of my professional life, but to offer a concrete example of how we become the philosophers we are: not solely by rational deliberation, but to some large extent by biographical accident. What kind of philosophy is done at your university? What friends do you make along the way, and to whom do they introduce you? How do these experiences fit with the evolution of your intellectual, political, and personal commitment? How does all this interact with the hiring and citation networks into which you find yourself introduced?
I’d encourage everyone to do a little autobiographical writing of this sort and see whether my suspicion that acculturation rather than deliberation is the key holds for him or her as well. My hope is that people will come to see that those on the other side of the divide are not deliberately perverse in turning their backs on the one true path, but are doing the best they can in navigating the waters of their life.
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