Billy Joel is the patron saint of the analytic/continental divide

I think the worst thing that the analytic/continental split does to philosophical education is propagate unearned contempt among students.

For example I still rememember taking a class around fifteen years ago where the professor apropos nothing brought a copy of Heidegger's Being and Time to class and just read random passages while making faces. The rest of us laughed, wallowing in the joy of a contempt we had done nothing to earn.

But this happens in the other direction too, where kids into continental philosophy feel confident dismissing out of hand some very non-trivial percentage of post World War II English language philosophy. And it's just a s spiritually corrosive.

Now here's the strange thing. In his penetrating essay on Billy Joel,* Slate culture critic Ron Rosenbaum delves into the nature of this corruption..

Rosenbaum discusses quite a number of songs, but the clearest is probably his discussion of the song at right:

It('s Still Rock 'n Roll to Me) shows how completely, totally clueless Billy Joel is. It suggests he wrote it because he thought people regarded him as an outmoded relic because he doesn't wear the right hip-signifier clothes. That it's a matter of his wide ties vs. New Wave skinny ties, that it's because his car doesn't have white-wall tires or because he doesn't dress "like a Beau Brummell" or hang out with the right crowd or look like Elvis Costello.

He thinks people can't stand him because he dresses wrong or doesn't look right.

Billy Joel, they can't stand you because of your music; because of your stupid, smug attitude; because of the way you ripped off your betters to produce music that rarely reaches the level even of mediocrity. You could dress completely au courant and people would still loathe your lame lyrics.

It's not that they dislike anything exterior about you. They dislike you because of who you really are inside. They dislike you for being you. At a certain point, consistent, aggressive badness justifies profound hostility. They hate you just the way you are.

Finally, earned contempt has it's aesthetic place.

I'm not saying, by the way, that contempt can't make for great art. Dylan's "Positively 4^th Street," for example, is one of the most contemptuous songs ever written, but it redeems itself through the joyfulness of its black-humored eloquence and wit. And Springsteen lost something when he lost his contempt and became a love-for-the-common-people would-be Woody Guthrie.

Maybe Schopenhauer on Hegel might be an example of this? I don't know. In any case, in philosophy there is always going to be some selective pressure supporting unearned contempt just because it's a great excuse to not have to read a lot of stuff.  sBut it's a thoroughly obnoxious pose.

[Notes:

*Full disclosure. I actually like Billly Joel, but then I'll put up with just about any level of spiritual depravity as long as the melodies are catchy. I"m trying not to think about what the analogous philosophical vice would be.]