We come to praise the analytic/continental divide, not bury it

Nice meditations by Graham Harman HERE on how writing styles are inextricably tied up to different conceptions of thinking.

Harman himself thinks that philosophical texts are more like aesthetic objects in that there is an indeterminacy between content relevant formal properties and content irrelevant formal properties. Different interpretations will take different formal properties to be content relevant (see Nelson Goodman on plagiarism for why this is a constitutive norm for art interpretation). This leads to a an undermining of accounts of content that treat the differentiation between style and content as unproblematic (cf McDowell on scheme-content).

Now what's interesting in terms of the post is that this leads Harman to see the analytic philosopher's typical disagreement with him about form-content indeterminacy in terms of the literary style of analytic philosophy.

This strikes me as rather deep. . . In any case, I could not agree more with the conclusion of the post.

I’ve often quoted the following remark reported to me from the Rorty archive. Rorty joked that “every 10 years or so, a book is published with a title something like ‘Beyond Realism and Idealism.’ And it always turns out that what’s beyond realism and idealism is– idealism!”

I feel much the same way about those who claim to be “beyond” the analytic/continental philosophy distinction. If that happens, it’s simply going to mean all analytic philosophy, with a sprinkling of ambitious ex-continentals who think they can pitch Deleuze or Derrida in ways that analytics will find sensible.

So, allow me to propose a toast to the analytic/continental divide. (With one caveat: we really ought to be reading each other more. There’s always room for that.)

This makes sense to me.

The point for analytics who love continental philosophy is that while it's good and joyful that we want to partake in an analytic* (in Harman's sense) discourse about some subset of 19th century philosophy, high church phenomenology, and the Parisian 68ers, and it's good and joyful that we think students need to be learning this stuff, this is not enough. One can do all of this and still miss something central about what makes continental philosophy possible.

[Notes:  

*Let me be clear. With the exception of the very few Alphonso Lingises among us, who are weird and wonderful, people at SPEP aren't reading poetry. Many of the papers and much of the discussion of necessity instantiate the "analytic" norm. Harman doesn't dispute this. His point is that there are virtues and vices to both stylistic norms and the attendent views of thinking instantiated, and that given this it is healthy to have distinct instititutional matrixes with the different norms honored to different degrees. Most continental philosophy is not, and couldn't be, like Lingis. But one can only make sense of the way continental philosophy makes room for philosophers like Lingis by way of Harman's distinction.

**After re-reading the above I think I would argue that propositions concerning the analytic norm (e.g. that the division between content relevant formal features and content irrelevant formal features can and should be unproblematically marked in philosophical texts) are something like Vaihingerian necessary fictions. One of the things that differentiates continental philosophy is a deep appreciation of the contingency of how the distinction is marked in one's own interpretations (which will nonetheless usually be "analytic" in making a distinction with respect to the text in question) and a tolerance for writers and performers like Lingis who present their own texts as things to be taken as aesthetic objects in the very sense we are discussing.]