Encounters between Analytic and Continental Philosophy

A. Vrahimis

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137290205
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

This book examines the encounters between leading 'analytic' and 'continental' philosophers: Frege and Husserl, Carnap and Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Bataille and Ayer, the Royaumont colloquium, and Derrida with Searle.

1

Frege, Husserl and the Future of Philosophy

1. Psychologismus-Streit

The last decades of the nineteenth century brought with them excitement and turbulence in academic enquiry. A number of radically new ideas were emerging at the time, many of which would bring about new ways of doing science, of organising the university, and ultimately, in many cases, of perceiving the world. This revolutionary period would result in the formation of the academic discipline of psychology and the development of modern logic, among numerous other innovations.

The various revolutions in the making are reflected in the fierce disputes that concurrently arose across a number of disciplines of knowledge at the time. The simultaneous enactment of these disputes may be seen as part of a process through which these groundbreaking innovations were received by academia and gradually became incorporated into academic discourse. In many cases, the radical reactions which are to be found in these disputes failed decisively to bring about any academic consensus on the subjects in question. It is interesting to observe how in some of these disputes the commonly prevailing view did not come to be accepted by the disputants through the convincing arguments of those that defended it, but rather was dissolved through various other means.

Our primary concern in this chapter is with the dispute which emerged at the end of the nineteenth century over the demarcation of psychology from philosophy, known in the Germanophone world as the Psychologismus-Streit (Psychologism-dispute). The origins of this dispute may be traced back to the creation of the academic discipline of psychology. Its corner-stone was laid in Leipzig in 1879, when Wilhelm Wundt founded the first laboratory for experimental psychology.¹ This first step in distinguishing between a particular type of empirical, experimental research in psychology and its origins in ‘armchair’ philosophy was gradually to lead to a crisis in the world of Germanophone philosophy.

As the name Psychologismus-Streit suggests, the philosophical problem under dispute is the question over ‘psychologism’, which is roughly speaking the view that some prima facie non-psychological phenomenon (e.g. the rules of logic) is explainable in terms of psychological facts. Confusingly, as Kusch (1995) has shown, ‘psychologism’ was a term coined by its attackers, i.e. the defenders of so-called ‘anti-psychologism’, as a kind of derogatory term for an erroneous set of beliefs in philosophy.² The term ‘psychologism’ was primarily weighed as an accusation against those who were suspected to have (wittingly or not) held it. In particular, it was applied against anyone who was suspected of upholding views that had as their consequence the reduction of some aspect of philosophy to facts about human psychology.³ This term during the dispute was very often used in the discussion of the status of logical and mathematical laws, though it has since been applied to a variety of other fields.⁴

Arguably, the Psychologismus-Streit involved the reclaiming of ‘pure’ philosophy’s proper task in the face of the newly founded empirical psychology. Thus, the institutional aspect of the dispute revolved around questions such as the increasing employment of experimental psychologists in philosophy departments. Yet, what was, at the time, primarily an institutional matter of demarcating empirical psychology from ‘pure’ philosophy found expression in the form of a philosophical problem focused around the defence of, and attack against, some particular thesis which the name of psychologism was supposed to designate. The two aspects of the Psychologismus-Streit, the contingent historical facts about institutional academic politics and the more abstract philosophical questions about ‘psychologism’, are in this case so closely interlinked that it is difficult fully to appreciate the latter without having recourse to the former. That is not to say that the philosophical aspect of the dispute is explicable only as an irrationally-driven power struggle between contending professors: the squabble over philosophical chairs is also a struggle for the demarcation of one discipline from another, achievable only through theoretical rigour. In other words, it is not only the philosophical aspect that is caused by the institutional one, but also vice versa.

In a sense, the demarcation of psychology from philosophy as an answer to the philosophical problem of psychologism was to be the cause of philosophy’s crisis. This effectively consisted in a call for philosophy to redefine its purpose, not only in terms of the telos of its theoretical enquiries, but also with respect to its instrumentality in relation to academia. If philosophy was not to be psychologistic (which at the time carried with it the risk of being taken over by the empirical psychologists and their research programmes), it had to redefine its inquiry as research into a field irreducible to psychology. Psychology could claim a vast territory which had traditionally been considered philosophical ground. ‘Pure’ philosophy would be required to construct its acropolis, the standpoint to which it would fall back in defending its grounds.

The academic crisis which the Psychologismus-Streit brought about is clearly visible in some of its effects. Its upshot is exemplified by a petition,⁵ written by Edmund Husserl, Paul Natorp, Heinrich Rickert, Wilhelm Windelband, Alois Riehl,⁶ and Rudolf Eucken and signed in 1913 by a Professors’ Union (Professorengewerkschaft) of 107 philosophers⁷ demanding that the ministries of culture of Germany, Austria, and Switzerland no longer allow experimental psychologists to take up chairs in philosophy departments:

The working area of experimental psychology has increased to such an extent with the highly gratifying advance of this discipline, that it has long been recognised as an independent field which demands the full energy of a scholar. Nonetheless, independent chairs have not been created for it: instead, professorships of philosophy have been filled with men whose activity is to a great extent or exclusively dedicated to the experimental investigation of mental life. ... this situation has resulted in inconveniences for all concerned. Especially philosophy, for which interest among students is steadily growing, is severely damaged by the removal of chairs dedicated to her alone. This becomes all the more disquieting since the working area of philosophy is steadily growing larger, and since students should not be deprived of the opportunity to obtain systematic direction from their professors as well as about general questions of worldview and philosophy of life, especially in these philosophically troubled times. (Quoted in Kusch, 1995, pp. 191–192)

The ‘philosophically troubled times’ of 1913 were soon to turn into the politically troubled times of the First World War. Kusch’s (1995) unique research into the subject has shown that the beginning of the war signified the end of the Psychologismus-Streit.⁸ In other words, rather than a philosophical solution to the problem of psychologism (or even an institutional solution to the crisis given from within the bounds of the university), the causes of the end of the dispute were contingent and historical. The war had brought about the view that differences and disputes among Germans were treacherous, a view which was also embraced by academia. Thus, abandoning their prior struggles over philosophical matters, philosophers discovered a new and different way of answering the institutional crisis which the establishment of psychology as a discipline had led philosophers into: philosophy was, for a short while, to become the handmaiden of the German nation at war, praising German militarism, defending racism, and attempting to demonstrate the spiritual superiority of German culture (including philosophy) over the mere civilisations of France and Britain.⁹

2. Husserl and Frege, the grandfathers

There are two protagonistic figures behind the dispute over psychologism: Edmund Husserl and Gottlob Frege. The former was a Moravian mathematician and philosopher, whose work became the focal point of the dispute by instantiating the exemplary source for the anti-psychologistic thesis in the early years of the dispute. The latter was a mathematician, logician, and philosopher from Wismar, famous for founding modern logic, whose work, in contrast to that of Husserl, lurked in the shadow of the Psychologismus-Streit. Their encounter remains to this day enigmatic and riddled with questions which are possibly as excitingly puzzling now as they were at the end of the nineteenth century. The deep influence of both on subsequent philosophy is immense, wide-ranging, and difficult to underestimate.

Husserl and Frege are considered by many of their commentators¹⁰ to have produced work which is at the root of the two most prominent traditions in twentieth century philosophy. On the one hand, Frege, whose innovations were primarily in the realm of logic, is regarded by some to have been ‘the grandfather of analytical philosophy’ (Dummett, 1993, p. 14). On the other hand, Husserl, whose work gave rise to ‘phenomenology’, is sometimes said to have been one of the founders of ‘continental’ philosophy. Thus, for example, in his groundbreaking book on the relation between Husserl and Frege’s thought, Michael Dummett claims that

Frege was the grandfather of analytical philosophy, Husserl the founder of the phenomenological school, two radically different philosophical movements. In 1903, say, how would they have appeared to any German student of philosophy who knew the work of both? Not, certainly, as two deeply opposed thinkers: rather as remarkably close in orientation, despite some divergence of interests. They may be compared with the Rhine and the Danube, which rise quite close to one another and for a time pursue roughly parallel courses, only to diverge in utterly different directions and flow into different seas. Why, then, did this happen? What small ingredient in the thought of each was eventually magnified into so great an effect? (1993, p. 26)

There is something right, and at the same time something mistaken, about the question which Dummett raises regarding the origins of this divergence in direction between two ‘radically different philosophical movements’. Leaving aside, for now, the question of the plausibility of such a ‘radical’ distinction and assuming, for the sake of argument, that some form of differentiation between ‘movements’ is not prima facie absurd, there appears to be something intriguing in searching for the origins of the distinction in the relation between Frege and Husserl’s thought.

What Dummett is mistaken about is the type of relation that might hold between the divergence of these two movements and the encounter between Frege and Husserl. According to Dummett, it is the magnification of some ‘small ingredient’ in the thought of Frege and Husserl that gave rise to a radical divide between two philosophical movements. In other words, Dummett attributes the subsequent divergence between philosophical movements (with Dummett here assuming that this same divergence is a philosophical one, i.e. one reducible to doctrinal, methodological, or other such disagreement) to some purely philosophical ‘ingredient’, some small diaphony in the greater symphony of opinion between the two thinkers. In fact, Dummett points to the fact that Frege’s thought leads toward something which he calls ‘the linguistic turn’, that paradigm shift which led philosophers to focus on the study of language (and thus to the thesis of the priority of questions of meaning over questions of truth). Husserl’s thought, by contrast, is seen by Dummett not to necessitate the ‘linguistic turn’ because Husserl does not limit his theory of meaning to language, as Frege does.¹¹

Here, Dummett seems to confuse the purely philosophical aspect of his study with a historical aspect which does not follow from the philosophical one. Even if one were to accept the claim that Husserl’s theory of meaning is more general than the specifically linguistic one proposed by Frege, it would not necessarily follow that Husserlian philosophy is simply cut off from the linguistic turn. Similarly, Frege’s philosophy taken out of its historical context does not have as its necessary consequence the production of some ‘linguistic turn’. In other words, that Frege’s philosophy influenced the people it did and thus resulted in the ‘linguistic turn’, while the influenc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Introduction
• 1.   Frege, Husserl and the Future of Philosophy
• 2.   Questioning Metaphysics in Weimar Germany: Carnap, Heidegger, Nonsense
• 3.   Was There a Sun before Men Existed?: Ayer, Sartre, Bataille, and Merleau-Ponty
• 4.   ‘La Philosophie Analytique’ at Royaumont: Gilbert Ryle’s Ambivalent Phenomenology
• 5.   Derrida and Searle: The Abyss Stares Back?
• 6.   Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index