Introducing Continental Philosophy E-Book

Christopher Kul-Want

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Graphic Guides
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 107

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

What makes philosophy on the continent of Europe so different and exciting? And why does it have such a reputation for being 'difficult'? Continental philosophy was initiated amid the revolutionary ferment of the 18th century, philosophers such as Kant and Hegel confronting the extremism of the time with theories that challenged the very formation of individual and social consciousness. Covering the great philosophers of the modern and postmodern eras – from Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida and Deleuze right to up Agamben and ?i?ek – and philosophical movements from German idealism to deconstruction and feminism – Christopher Kul-Want and Piero brilliantly elucidate some of the most thrilling and powerful ideas ever to have been discussed.

Leseprobe

Published by Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre, 39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP email: [email protected]

ISBN: 978-184831-775-8

Text copyright © 2013 Christopher Kui-Want Illustrations copyright © 2013 Icon Books Ltd

The author has asserted his moral rights.

Edited by Duncan Heath

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Thinking creatively

What is Continental philosophy?

A distinguished company

Continental vs. Analytic philosophy

The value of logic

A shared history

Against repression

The limitations of theory

Into the unknown

Experience and the Self

The search for structure

Suspicion of universal truths

The fantasy of consciousness

The symbolic order

The Trojan horse of communication

The unconscious: a blind spot

The universal medium of exchange

“Incalculable relations”

“They do not know it, but they are doing it”

Kant and the unknowable

Kant’s Copernican revolution

The power of the new

Alterity: the Other

The sublime

Nietzsche’s verdict: God is dead

The death of metaphysics?

Metaphysics and language

A question of perspective

The spectre of nihilism

Absurd metaphysics

Kant withdraws

Metaphysics by the back door

The colonial “Other”

Re-thinking the unknown

The will to power

Love thy neighbour?

The birth of the Overman

Heidegger: the end of modernity?

The threat of technology

Hegel: history’s perfect conclusion

Masters and slaves

Being and Time

The problem with modernity

Dasein

The limits of understanding

Art as a sign of the end

The puzzle of Communism’s failure

The Frankfurt School

Consumption as desire

Oppositional art

Walter Benjamin and “high Capitalism”

Violence and the law

Striking against Capitalist logic

The power of montage

Alienation visible

The storm of progress

Further influence of Nietzsche

A philosophy of expenditure

The plenitude of excess

Fiction and reality in psychoanalysis

“I myself do not exist …

Sartre: Existentialism and authenticity

Nausea: the chaos behind language

Freedom of choice

Fighting terror with commitment

Existentialism and Marxism

1968: the watershed

Refusing fixed meaning

Collapse of the ideologies

Evental occurrences

The “trace” of Communism

Lyotard: the question of knowledge

Information overload

The limits of the mind

Rancière and the unheard voice

Derrida: the metaphysics of presence

Saussure’s limitless meanings

Deconstruction

Derrida the juggler

“Peut-être”

Thinking about friendship

Back to Nietzsche

Phallo-logocentrism

Woman cannot lack

Jouissance

A void in representation

The subject as producer

The private and the political

Producing producers

Biopolitics: multiple forces of power

Monitoring for normality

The terrorist state

Separating violence and the law

The power of language

“As if not”

Neither in heaven nor in hell

“I would prefer not to”

The black hole of the bourgeoisie

The alterity of death

Language at degree zero

Deleuze: “schizoanalysis”

Anti-Oedipus

The Metamorphosis: schizophrenic desire

The body without organs

Pure immanence

Casting off the shackles

Glossary

Further Reading

About the Author

Acknowledgements

About the Illustrator

Index

Thinking creatively

As the great Continental philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche asserted, we only begin to think and live creatively when we no longer expect the world to answer and mirror our assumptions about ourselves. Otherwise we are likely to become dull and complacent:

HAIL, CONTINUAL PLODDERS, HAIL! LENGTHEN OUT THE TEDIOUS TALE, PEDANT, STILL IN HEAD AND KNEE, DULL, OF HUMOUR NOT A TRACE PERMANENTLY COMMONPLACE, SANS GéNIE ET SANS ESPRIT! (‘LACKING CREATIVITY AND NO WIT!’)

What is Continental philosophy?

“Continental philosophy” is a name for the desire to exist beyond the kind of comfortable self-delusion that Nietzsche satirizes. If we remain relatively stable and unchanging in terms of our thinking, then the very power of life for change and creation will become exhausted.

WHAT WILL RESULT IS A MERE REPETITION OF THE SAME MONOTONOUS THING, A KIND OF LIVING DEATH.

Continental philosophy is based on the intuition that thinking can oppose inertia and the intractable wish to stay the same.

“Continental philosophy” refers to a radical form of philosophy developed by European thinkers writing in the period from the 18th-century Enlightenment to the present day. The major thinkers in Continental philosophy originated from Germany and northern Europe, but by the mid-20th century this type of thinking had largely shifted to France. As Alain Badiou, one of France’s leading contemporary philosophers, observes:

ALL OF FRENCH PHILOSOPHY IS, IN REALITY, A DISCUSSION OF THE GERMAN HERITAGE WITH ITS FORMATIVE MOMENTS IN THE 1930S AND 1940S. Alain Badiou

The close connection between French 20th-century philosophy and earlier German thought is shown by the fact that nearly every major French philosopher of this period has published books on the great German philosophers Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche and Heidegger.

A distinguished company

The incredibly fertile seam of thinking that Continental philosophy represents is indicated by a roll call of its major philosophers.

FROM GERMANY AND NORTHERN EUROPE THIS INCLUDES: THE MOST SIGNIFICANT FRENCH PHILOSOPHERS IN THE CONTINENTAL TRADITION COMPRISE:

Immanuel Kant Johann Gottlieb Fichte Friedrich Schelling Georg W.F. Hegel Arthur Schopenhauer Friedrich Nietzsche Edmund Husserl Martin Heidegger

Georges Bataille Maurice Merleau-Ponty Jean-Paul Sartre Roland Barthes Maurice Blanchot Jean-François Lyotard Michel Foucault Jacques Derrida Gilles Deleuze Luce Irigaray Jean-Luc Nancy Jacques Rancière Alain Badiou

Since contemporary French philosophy has been engaged in a long-running conversation with psychoanalysis and the Marxist* intellectual tradition, the list of Continental philosophers also embraces the psychoanalysts Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva, as well as Karl Marx and the Frankfurt School of philosophy, especially Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin and Jürgen Habermas.

Today, Continental philosophy is not exclusively French. Significant contributions have been made by Slavoj Žižek, from Slovenia, as well as Italian philosophers such as Giorgio Agamben and Gianni Vattimo.

Continental vs. Analytic philosophy

Today it’s common to refer to two predominant types of philosophical thought: Continental philosophy and Analytic philosophy. The term “Continental philosophy” was first coined in the 1950s in Britain by university departments of Analytic philosophy as a term of criticism and even abuse. Universities in the US followed suit in the 1960s and 70s.

CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY REPRESENTS WHAT WE ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHERS WISH TO REJECT.

Although the term “Continental philosophy” stems from the second half of the 20th century it was not a term that any of the philosophers, themselves, would have recognized when they were writing in the 18th, 19th and first half of the 20th centuries.

The two traditions of Analytic and Continental philosophies are often opposed to each other and there have been many disputes between the differently aligned philosophers about each other’s work. These disputes have had a significant effect on the academic agendas and staffing of university departments of philosophy over the past four decades.

ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY CONTINUES TO PREDOMINATE IN DEPARTMENTS OF PHILOSOPHY IN THE US AND EVEN IN EUROPE.

While Continental philosophy has something of a presence in university departments of philosophy, its influence is felt more in the humanities, in the fields of literary studies, art theory and cultural studies.

The value of logic

Analytic philosophy traces its origins to the philosophies of Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) and Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951). In the early decades of the 20th century at Cambridge University these founders of the Analytic tradition subjected the structures of reasoning in both mathematics and language to a critique of logic.

WE USED LOGIC TO TEST THE EFFECTIVENESS OF MATHEMATICS AND LANGUAGE IN TERMS OF MEANING.

Today, Analytic philosophy is a broad subject area encompassing many interdisciplinary concerns. However, in the 1950s there was the belief that Analytic philosophy represented prized values of logical rigour and clarity as a means of gaining, if not objectivity, then at least some form of impartiality. In contrast, Continental philosophy was seen, at best, as a branch of literature and poetry and, at worst, as a form of sophistry disguising its lack of rationality through an opaque and difficult language.

A shared history

Both Analytic and Continental philosophy trace their origins back to German philosophy and, before that, to Descartes in the 17th century and ultimately to ancient Greek philosophy (the pre-Socratics, Plato, Aristotle et al). Given these shared histories, the perceived differences between the two approaches are not always so clear.

TODAY, THERE ARE PHILOSOPHERS SUCH AS THE AMERICANS RICHARD RORTY AND HUBERT DREYFUS WHO WORK ACROSS BOTH TRADITIONS. AND THE ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHER WITTGENSTEIN’S IDEAS ABOUT LANGUAGE AS A FORM OF GAME-PLAY WHOSE STRUCTURE IS CONSTANTLY CHANGING HAS RESONANCES FOR CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY.

Setting entrenched views and clichéd dichotomies aside, this book will focus on French philosophy and what it inherited from the mid-20th century onwards from its German predecessors.

Against repression

The first issue that Continental philosophy wishes to tackle is that of repression, or unfreedom, as this applies both to individuals and society.

REPRESSION CAN BE DEFINED IN ITS WIDEST SENSE AS AN ADHERENCE TO FIXED VALUES AND IDEAS ABOUT HOW TO THINK AND BEHAVE AND, ULTIMATELY, EXPERIENCE LIFE … … IRRESPECTIVE OF WHETHER THIS IS ADOPTED CONSCIOUSLY OR NOT, AND WILLINGLY OR NOT.

Following this, the second issue for Continental philosophy is how to think, write about and, finally, affirm the possibility of freedom from repression – but without resorting to preconceived ideas dictating what the experience of freedom might consist of, or be like, for that would lead to further repression.

For the purpose of analysing individual and social forms of repression Continental philosophy makes use of an actively interpretative (sometimes called hermeneutic*) and historical approach that aims to understand its origins and structural operations.

THIS IS NOT NECESSARILY TO DISSOLVE THE THINKING THAT SUSTAINS REPRESSION, BUT RATHER TO OPEN IT UP TO ITS OWN CONTRADICTIONS, ELISIONS AND IDEALISTIC FANTASIES.

The first philosopher to adopt this approach was Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). Using the term “genealogy” to refer to an analysis of forces of power and ideology*, Nietzsche inquired into the development of a repressive tendency in Western thinking beginning with Plato’s philosophy in the 5th century BC, followed by the introduction of Christian theology.

The limitations of theory

Insofar as Continental philosophers view repression as a continuing burden within the history of the West, they offer ways of thinking about how to overcome this condition. This involves acknowledging the role of the unconscious (hence the engagement with psychoanalysis).

WE ALSO ADMIT THAT THEORY WILL ONLY GET US SO FAR. THAT’S WHY WE HAVE A PROFOUND INTEREST IN ART, LITERATURE AND BORDERLINE PSYCHOLOGICAL STATES.

Many of the great Continental philosophers develop elaborate systems and structures of their own, but their work is also infused with a literary style that deliberately thwarts simple ideas of transparent clarity, so as to allow language its own sense of artifice, play and fluidity.

To this end many Continental philosophers develop a philosophy that embraces stories, epigrams and aphorisms (Nietzsche, Benjamin, Barthes, Derrida). Alternatively, they adopt a dense, complex language of phrasing and sentence that is often difficult and resistant in a deliberate attempt to step outside what is familiar and taken for granted (Heidegger, Adorno, Derrida, Deleuze).

TOGETHER, ALL OF THESE ASPECTS GIVE THE TEXT AN UNSTABLE CHARACTER THAT IS IRREDUCIBLE TO A SINGULAR MEANING.

Continental philosophers were by no means the first to introduce such literary strategies into their writing. The book On Nature (Phusis) by the Greek philosopher Heraclitus (535–475 BC) plays with sentence structure and is written in a series of epigrams and aphorisms that employ rhyme, assonance and puns. One of Heraclitus’ poetic epigrams is:

OVER THE SAME RIVERS, STEPPING INTO THEM DIFFERENT AND AGAIN DIFFERENT WATERS FLOW.

Another, that plays on several meanings of the Greek word bios, is: “The bow (bios): its name is life (bios), its work is death.” In both of these epigrams Heraclitus uses layered metaphors to undermine any stable sense of meaning to existence. Thus, in the first epigram the river and the person who steps into it a second time never remain the same; while in the second epigram death is the work of life.

Into the unknown

Both Nietzsche and Heidegger admired Heraclitus. For them, Heraclitus’ ability to embrace opposites and his understanding that there are always different points of view and perspectives about “reality” struck a deep chord. Above all, however, they respected Heraclitus’ view that creativity and change are about stepping into the unknown.

IF YOU DON’T EXPECT THE UNEXPECTED YOU WON’T FIND IT OUT.

About Heraclitus Nietzsche eulogized: “In his proximity I feel altogether warmer and better than anywhere else. My doctrine might in the end have been taught already by him.” (Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is, 1888)

Experience and the Self

The issue of experience – the experience of repression or, alternatively, an independence from repression – lies at the heart of Continental philosophy’s concerns. Inevitably, this raises questions about how experience may be represented and who is representing it.

IN TURN, THIS LEADS TO QUESTIONS ABOUT THE CONCEPTION OF THE