Continental Philosophy

A Contemporary Introduction

Andrew Cutrofello

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134548200
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Continental Philosophy: A Contemporary Introduction is ideal for students coming to the topic for the first time. It introduces the origins and development of the tradition, tracing it from Kant to the present day. Taking a clear thematic approach, Andrew Cutrofello introduces and assesses continental philosophy's relation to fundamental questions in philosophy, such as ethics, humanism, phenomenology, politics and metaphysics, centring the book around the following questions:

• What is knowledge?

• What is moral obligation?

• For what should we hope?

• What is 'man'?

• What is critique?

Andrew Cutrofello's style is lively and engaging. He also introduces the major as well as the lesser-known thinkers of the continental tradition: from Kant, Mill and Nietzsche and Husserl to Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre Levinas, Bataille and Kristeva.

1
The problem of the relationship between receptivity and spontaneity: how is truth disclosed aesthetically?

In the Introduction I suggested that by tracing the intuition/concept dichotomy back to a more primordial spontaneous receptivity, phenomenologists made the question, “How is truth disclosed aesthetically?,” more fundamental than the Kantian question, “What can I know?” To do justice to this claim it would be necessary to reconstruct the history of the concept of phenomenology from Kant’s contemporary Johann Heinrich Lambert (1728– 1777)—the first writer to use the German term Phänomenologie—to Husserl and the phenomenological movement which he founded. Lambert took phenomenology to be a science of appearances. Kant borrowed the expression to refer to the doctrine concerning the motion or rest of matter with respect to a perceiving subject (MFNS 191). Hegel went further, conceiving of his “phenomenology of spirit” as a reflection on the process whereby the Kantian doctrine of the transcendental ideality of appearances is first posited and then overcome by a subject who discovers that the concept of the thing in itself is untenable. Hegel criticizes Fichte and Schelling for thinking that Kantian dualisms can be overcome simply by taking the possibility of intellectual intuition for granted. Instead, he seeks to show how a sustained reflection on the difference between intuiting and thinking culminates in an identification of the two in absolute knowing. In contrast to Hegel, Husserl suggests that phenomenology neither ends in absolute knowing nor begins in intellectual intuition per se. By ignoring the contribution that sensible intuition makes to the awareness of particular facts, the practicing phenomenologist discloses an accompanying categorial intuition of the ontological structure of the world. By generalizing the methodological “reduction” by which factual contents are put out of play, Husserl is led to characterize phenomenology as the scientific study of ideal essences disclosed in eidetic intuition. Heidegger’s conception of the aesthetic disclosure of truth is indebted to Husserl’s conception of categorial intuition, but unlike Husserl he comes to emphasize the way in which truth is revealed in works of art. The question of how to reconcile artistic truth with scientific truth is taken up not only by Heidegger but by Bachelard, who objects to Bergson’s overestimation of the epistemic worth of pre-scientific intuition. Like Bachelard, Sartre focuses on the role played by the imagination in human cognition, reaching a different conclusion than Heidegger did about its ontological import. Merleau-Ponty (like Bergson) defends the view that scientific truth must be interpreted phenomenologically through the lens of a more primordial perceptual truth. By contrast, Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze all reject the phenomenological conception of truth as givenness in favor of a conception of truth as difference.

1.1 Kant’s vigilance against fanaticism

And such a deal of skimble-skamble stuff As puts me from my faith.

(The First Part of Henry the Fourth, III, i, 152–3)

An important motive for Kant’s insistence that human beings are incapable of intellectual intuition was his worry about a particular kind of madness that he calls “fanaticism,” or Schwärmerei. As long as thought remains tethered to the conditions of sensible intuition, it cannot claim any extra-ordinary insight into “things hid and barr’d…from common sense” (Love’s Labor’s Lost, I, i, 57). But once the possibility of intellectual intuition is conceded, the door is open to any sort of extravagant claims—such as those put forth in the mystical writings of Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772). In his eight-volume Arcana Coelestia (1749–1756) Swedenborg claimed to have met with the dead and hence to be able to say what the next life would be like. What gave the “precritical” Kant pause was the idea that his own attempts to prove the existence of an intelligible realm of spiritual beings—i.e., a realm inhabited by God and departed souls—was perfectly compatible with Swedenborg’s visionary ravings. This realization prompted him to ask in his “Dreams of a Spirit-Seer Elucidated by Dreams of Metaphysics” (Träume eines Geistersehers, erläutert durch Träume der Metaphysik, 1766), first, how Swedenborg’s fanaticism was to be explained, and, second, whether human reason itself might be susceptible to an analogous condition.

In the first part of the essay, Kant asks whether it is possible to establish the existence of immaterial “spirits” which, though “present in space,” do not exhibit the property of “impenetrability” by which we know material substances to exist (DOSS 310–11). Though the hope for immortality has led many philosophers—such as Kant himself—to try to prove that such substances do in fact exist, a chastened Kant now argues that the question entirely transcends the limits of human knowledge, and that we must remain content with a “moral faith” in a future life (DOSS 337–8, 359). The proper task of the metaphysician is not to extend human cognition—as the young Kant, trained in the dogmatic Wolffian tradition, had thought—but to develop “a science of the limits of human reason” (DOSS 354). In the second half of the essay, Kant offers an explanation as to how Swedenborg’s visions might “have arisen from fanatical intuition” (DOSS 347). He conjectures that in ordinary perception there is a certain “motion of the nerves” of the brain, and that “the lines indicating the direction of the motion” converge in a “focus imaginarius” outside the subject in space, “whereas in the case of the images of imagination,…the focus imaginarius is located within me.” What happens in cases of visionary “madness” is that, for some pathological reason, imaginary objects appear to exist outside the subject because this is where the focus imaginarius comes to be located (DOSS 333).

In the first Critique, published fifteen years later, Kant suggests that human reason is susceptible to a similar malady. The transcendental illusions to which reason is naturally prone arise because reason extends the “lines of direction” of the rules of the understanding so as to make them converge in a focus imaginarius that lies beyond the bounds of possible experience (CPR A644/B672). The aim of Kant’s transcendental dialectic is to show that the “objects” which we place at these imaginary foci only have subjective validity for regulating the use of the understanding and not an objective validity that would arise from a constitutive use of the ideas of reason. Thus the conclusion of the transcendental analytic—that any attempt to extend the categories of the understanding beyond the bounds of possible intuitions can only come up against the limiting concept of nothing—remains in full force (CPR A292/B348).

Had Swedenborg understood why it seemed as if he could perceive objects that were really just figments of his own imagination, he could have prevented himself from being deluded by them; instead, he fell into fanaticism, insisting on the veracity of his visions.

Reason is subject to an analogous temptation, not only because transcendental illusions continue to persist even after they have been subjected to critique, but because of the practical interest that we have in the immortality of our souls and the reality of a God who unites happiness with virtue (CPR A811/B839). In order to avoid succumbing to fanaticism, it is necessary to distinguish “subjectively sufficient” practical grounds for moral faith from the “objectively insufficient” speculative grounds for proving the existence of God and the immortality of our souls (CPR A822/B850ff.).¹ As Kant puts it in the preface to the second edition of the Critique: “I had to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith” (CPR Bxxx). Corresponding to the cognitive distinction between faith and knowledge is the affective distinction between the sublime mental state of enthusiasm {Enthusiasm} for unpresentable ideas and the excessive enthusiasm of fanaticism. Thus it is the task of critique both to promote enthusiasm and to curb it so that it does not give way to the madness of fanaticism—“a delusion of being able to see something beyond all bounds of sensibility, i.e., to dream in accordance with principles (to rave with reason)” (CPJ 156, 154).²

1.2 Nietzsche’s commemoration of Dionysian intoxication

Anon he finds him Striking too short at Greeks.

(The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, II, ii, 468–9)

Far from worrying that the fervor of religious enthusiasm might give way to fanaticism, Nietzsche longed for an experience of Dionysian intoxication not yet tempered by the sobriety of the will to truth. The problem with Swedenborg is not that he suffered from delusions but that his madness was Christian in character. In Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality (Morgenröte: Gedanken Über die Moralischen Vorurteile, 1881), Nietzsche extols madness as a state of mind that has always been sought by the most exceptional individuals (D 13–15). But he characterizes Christianity as an inherently life- denying religion that seeks consolation for human suffering in a future life rather than in this life. In The Gay Science (Die Fröhliche Wissemchaft, 1882, 1887), Nietzsche credits Kant with seeing that every attempt to extend the use of the understanding beyond the bounds of possible experience leads, literally, to nothing. But instead of abolishing the Christian conception of a realm of spirits, Kant preserves it as an object of faith: “like a fox who loses his way and goes astray back into his cage. Yet it had been his strength and cleverness that had broken open the cage!” (GS 264). Thus Kant ends up making the exact same mistake as Swedenborg, allowing the lines of direction of human understanding—and more importantly of human willing—to converge outside the world, that is, in nothing. In order to overcome this will to nothingness—what Nietzsche calls “nihilism”—it is not enough to recognize that “God is dead,” for this is simply a way of revealing the nihilistic character of the orientation toward transcendence (GS 167). To affirm new values, we must bend the lines of direction of the will back toward the will itself. This can be accomplished by affirming the “eternal recurrence” (or eternal return) of every single moment of time (GS 230).

In Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (Jenseits von Gut und Böse: Vorspiel einer Philosophie der Zukunft, 1886), Nietzsche subordinates the epistemological question, “What can I know?,” to the diagnostic question, “What in us really wants ‘truth’?”—thereby making psychology the proper ground of a genuinely critical philosophy: “psychology is now again the path to the fundamental problems” (BGE 9, 32). Nietzsche agrees with Kant that the possibility of experience presupposes synthetic a priori judgments, but he considers all such judgments—not only those that Kant relegated to the dialectical illusions of reason—to be fictions that serve a particular form of life: “it is high time to replace the Kantian question, ‘How are synthetic judgments a priori possible?’ by another question, ‘Why is belief in such judgments necessary?’—and to comprehend that such judgments must be believed to be true, for the sake of the preservation of creatures like ourselves; though they might, of course, be false judgments for all that!” (BGE 19; cf. 12). Because life requires illusion, the advent of the will to truth—the unconditional will not to be deceived—represents a symptom of decline. Nietzsche traces the beginning of this decline back to Socrates, Plato, and Christianity (“Platonism for ‘the people’”) (BGE 2). The only way of overcoming European nihilism is to overturn Platonism through a fundamental “revaluation of values” (BGE 117).

In Twilight of the Idols, Or, How to Philosophize with the Hammer (Götzen- Dämmerung, oder: Wie man mit dem Hammer philosophirt, 1889), Nietzsche characterizes the entire history of European philosophy as a series of responses to Plato’s metaphysical distinction between a sensible realm of appearances and an intelligible realm of forms. Kant’s denial of intellectual intuition represents a turning point in this history because it transformed Plato’s “true world” into something unknowable and thus—in Nietzsche’s view—expendable. By repudiating the appearance/reality distinction, post-Kantian positivists were able to revive the Greek spirit of “cheerfulness” (TOTI 23). But even the positivists did not go far enough, because they continued to think of nature—the “apparent world”—as somehow retaining its ontological integrity even after the illusion of a true world had been unmasked. To overcome this last remnant of Platonism, it is necessary to recognize that “Along with the true world, we have also done away with the apparent!” (TOTI 24). That is, in doing away with dogmatic metaphysics, we simultaneously undermine the truth claims of empirical science: “physics, too, is only an interpretation and exegesis of the world (to suit us, if I may say so!) and not a world-explanation.” To look at science through the lens of art and art through that of life is to trace the will to truth back to the “will to power,” the surging forth of life’s tendency to “discharge its strength” (BGE 21). In the end, all phenomena are expressions of the will to power. Hence to the question concerning the “intelligible character” of the world, Nietzsche gives what he regards as a genuinely critical response: “‘will to power’ and nothing else” (BGE 48; my italics).

1.3 Bergson’s intuition of duration

I summon up remembrance of things past

(Sonnet 30)

According to the French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859–1941), when we use language to describe phenomena, we subject them to conceptual demarcations that are appropriate for distinguishing objects in space but that are inapplicable to the lived duration of consciousness (TFW ix, TCM 89–90). As a result of our habit of thinking spatially, we falsely ascribe to our own mental states properties that pertain exclusively to physical objects (TFW 70). In order to avoid this illusion of “subreption” (as Kant would have called it), we must return to the “immediate data of consciousness” as they are given in intuition. By doing so himself, Bergson claims to be able to determine the boundaries of science in a different way than Kant had, and to resolve metaphysical problems concerning free will, the relationship between mind and body, and the nature of life.

In his first book, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, 1889), Bergson argues that it is a mistake to claim—as late-nineteenth-century psychophysicists had— that conscious sensations or “intensities” admit of quantitative measurement in the same way that spatial “extensities” do (TFW 1ff.). Kant paved the way for psychophysics by claiming that just as every appearance of outer sense must have an extensive magnitude, so every sensation that we intuit through inner sense must have a degree of intensity or intensive magnitude. But, according to Bergson, sensations are wholly qualitative in character, exhibiting differences in kind but not differences in degree. The fact that we do ascribe degrees of intensity to them—as when we say that the pain in a tooth is increasing—is a consequence of the inevitable fact that we associate our sensations with the quantifiable extensities which they represent. For example, when we say that a particular sensation of warmth is more intense than another, it is only because we have learned that the former can be correlated with a heat source whose temperature is measurably higher than that which causes the “lesser” sensation of warmth, and because measurably distinct heat sources bring about different kinds of physiological reactions in our bodies (TFW 46–7). Likewise, when we try to lift a heavy object we feel a different sensation from the one that we feel when we try to lift a light object, and it is our recognition of this fact that encourages us to say that one sensation of effort has a greater degree of intensity than another. From a purely physical point of view, lifting a heavier object does require a greater amount of muscular activity than lifting a lighter one. But being aware of a greater extent of muscular activity is not the same thing as feeling sensations of greater intensity: “the apparent consciousness of a greater intensity of effort at a given point of the organism is reducible…to the perception of a larger surface of the body being affected” (TFW 24). “Examine whether this increase of sensation ought not rather to be called a sensation of increase” (TFW 48).

Not only is it impossible to assign a degree of intensity to our sensations, but it is equally impossible to isolate any individual sensation from the manifold to which it belongs.³ To do so, it would be necessary to treat the manifold as a collection of discrete units, and thus to apply numerical concepts to it. But according to Bergson, the concept of number is no less restricted to the order of extensity than geometrical concepts are, for in order to count a collection of objects it is necessary to juxtapose them to one another in a homogeneous medium of some sort—and only space can provide such a medium: “every clear idea of number implies a visual image in space” (TFW 79).⁴ Kant thought that time was a homogeneous medium distinct from space, and that just as the intuition of space made geometry possible, so the intuition of time made arithmetic possible. But Bergson claims that the very idea of time as a homogeneous medium—like the concept of intensive magnitude—is based on a confusion of the qualitative life of consciousness with the quantitative order of space. Kant repeatedly insists that we can only represent time by drawing a line in space. For Bergson, this limitation is due to the fact that the very concept of time is (to borrow Kant’s metaphor) a bastard one, born of “the trespassing of the idea of space upon the field of pure consciousness” (TFW 98). Thus, while Bergson accepts Kant’s account of space—“we have assumed the existence of a homogeneous Space and, with Kant, distinguished this space from the matter which fills it”—he rejects his conception of time: “Kant’s great mistake was to take time as a homogeneous medium” (TFW 236, 232).

Once it is admitted that quantitative concepts are inapplicable to consciousness, the seemingly promising idea of psychophysics turns out to be a pseudoscience (TFW 70). Kant made a similar point about empirical psychology, claiming that it could not be a genuine science because, although the flow of time can be represented in terms of the mathematical properties of a line, inner sense does not reveal the existence of anything that persists in time. This is why Kant restricted the use of the category of substance—the schema of which is “persistence of the real in time” (CPR A143–4/B183)—to objects of outer sense, and why he claimed that we could only know ourselves as appearances and not as things in themselves (CPR A381; MFNS 186). Bergson agrees with Kant that the categor...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Abbreviations
• Preface
• Introduction: What Is Continental Philosophy?
• 1: The Problem Of The Relationship Between Receptivity And Spontaneity: How Is Truth Disclosed Aesthetically?
• 2: The Problem Of The Relationship Between Heteronomy And Autonomy: To What Does The Feeling Of Respect Attest?
• 3: The Problem Of The Relationship Between Immanence And Transcendence: Must We Despair Or May We Still Hope?
• 4: The Problem Of The Relationship Between The Empirical And The Transcendental: What Is The Meaning Of Philosophical Humanism?
• 5: Conclusion: What Is Philosophy?
• References