Analytic Philosophy Criticized – Maverick Philosopher

Technical Philosophy, Compartmentalization, and Worldview

For many philosophers, their technical philosophical work bears little or no relation to the implicit or explicit set of action-guiding beliefs and values that constitutes their worldview. Saul Kripke, for example, is an observant Jew who keeps the Sabbath and rejects naturalism and materialism. But you would never know it from his technical work which has no direct relevance to the Big Questions. (Possible qualification: the business about the necessity of identity discussed in Naming and Necessity allows for a Cartesian-style argument for mind-body dualism. See here.)

So I would characterize Kripke as a compartmentalizer. (My use of this term does not have a pejorative connotation.) His work in philosophy occupies one of his mental compartments while his religious convictions and practices occupy another with little or no influence of the one on the other. It is not that his technical work is inconsistent with his religious worldview; my point is that the two are largely irrelevant to each other. No doubt some of Kripke's examples 'betray' his religious upbringing — e.g., the fascinating bit about Moloch as a misvocalization of the Hebrew 'melech' in Reference and Existence, p. 70 ff. et passim – but his technical work, or at least his published technical work, is not a means to either the articulation or the rational justification of his worldview.

You may appreciate my point if you compare Kripke with Alvin Plantinga. He too is a religious man and a theist, an anti-naturalist, and an anti-materialist. But all of Plantinga's books that I am aware of contribute directly to the articulation and defense of his theistic worldview. He is out to explain and justify theistic belief and turn aside such objections to it as the ever-popular arguments from evil. This is clear from the titles of God and Other Minds, God, Freedom, and Evil, Does God Have a Nature. But it is also clear from Nature of Necessity the penultimate chapter of which treats of God, evil, and freedom, and the ultimate chapter of which is about God and necessity. The same is true of his two volumes on warrant one of which includes a critique of naturalism, not to mention his last book, Where the Conflict Really Lies.

The late David M. Armstrong is an interesting case. While he respects religion and is not a militant naturalist or atheist, his technical work articulates and defends his thoroughly naturalist worldview, where naturalism is the thesis that all that exists is the space-time world and its contents. The naturalist worldview comes first for Armstrong, both temporally and logically, and sets the agenda for the technical investigations of particulars, universals, states of affairs, classes, numbers, causation, laws of nature, dispositions, modality, mind, and so on. Broadly characterized, Armstrong's agenda is to show how everything, including what appear to be 'abstract objects,' can be accounted for naturalistically using only those resources supplied by the natural world, without recourse to anything non-natural or supernatural.

For Plantinga, by contrast, it is his theistic worldview that comes first both temporally and logically and sets the agenda for his technical work.

And then there is an acquaintance of mine, a philosopher, who attends Greek Orthodox services on Sunday but during working hours is something close to a logical positivist!

This suggests a three-fold classification. There are philosophers whose

A. Technical work is consistent with but does not support their worldview;

B. Technical work is consistent with and does support their worldview;

C. Technical work is inconsistent with and hence does not support their worldview.

I will assume that (C) is an unacceptable form of compartmentalization, and that one should aim to integrate one's beliefs. But I won't comment further on (C) here. Brevity is the soul of blog. This leaves (A) and (B).

Now it has always seemed obvious to me that (B) is to be preferred over (A). Do I have an argument? But first I should try to make my thesis more precise. To that end, a few more distinctions and observations.

Philosophy-as-inquiry versus philosophy-as-worldview

I distinguish philosophy-as-inquiry from philosophy-as-worldview. These are two ideal types of approach to the deepest problems that vex the thoughtful. Roughly, a worldview is a more or less comprehensive system of more or less precisely articulated action-guiding beliefs and values. Despite the word, a worldview is more than a view; it is a guide to life. It sets goals and prescribes and proscribes courses of action. It provides an overarching context of meaning in which individual actions assume a meaning that transcends their momentary meaning. It is practical rather than merely theoretical. A worldview is something one lives by, and sometimes dies for. (Transfinite cardinal arithmetic is not a worldview: it has no practical implications. One cannot 'take it to the streets.')

Marxism is a worldview. Its theoretical claims are in the service of action, and are not for the sake of mere understanding. In the eleventh of his Theses on Feuerbach, Karl Marx tells us us that "The philosophers have variously interpreted he world; the point, however, is to change it." Marxism is worldview philosophy, not philosophy as dispassionate inquiry, and the 11th Thesis would make a fine motto for many, but not all, worldview philosophers.

The various "therapies of desire" (I allude to the title of a book by M. Nussbaum) are also worldview philosophies: Buddhism, Stoicism, Pyrrhonian Skepticism, and arguably also Christianity. Like Marxism, these therapeutic worldviews advocate change, but at the personal level: metanoia, ataraxia, nibbana. Their aim is practical: to save the individual from an unsaisfactory predicament, to deliver him from evil, ignorance, sin, suffering. Such theory as these systems contain is for the sake of the practical end.

Aristotle is perhaps the best example of a philosopher animated by the ideal of philosophy as dispassionate inquiry, much more so than his teacher Plato who combined dispassionate inquiry with soteriology at the level of the individual and political reform at the level of society.

The 'knowledge' embodied in a worldview is not knowledge for its own sake. Obviously, there are many philosophies in this worldview sense, and therefore no such thing as philosophy in this sense. There is the 'philosophy' of your crazy uncle who has an opinion about everything, the philosophy of Ayn Rand, the philosophy of Kant, the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas. Observe also that a philosophy in the sense of a worldview need not be arrived at by rational inquiry, although it may well be supported and legitimated by rational inquiry. The worldview of Aquinas is is based on the Judeo-Christian revelation, first and foremost. The most important truths, the salvific truths, are not accessible to man's reason in its current, fallen state. They are supra-rational, not irrational, and 'knowable' by us only by revelation which must be accepted by faith. The truths of revelation are cognitiones fidei. (That there is knowledge by faith sticks in the craw of post-Cartesians, but it made sense to the medievals.) Reason has it rightful role, however, but it is ancillary: philosophia ancilla theologiae.

Philosophy-as-inquiry, by contrast is rational inquiry by definition.

Philosophy as strict science

Edmund Husserl, following in the footsteps of Descartes and Kant, is perhaps the main modern example of someone who aimed to put philosophy on the sure path of science. He too wanted a worldview, but believed that a worldview worth wanting had to be one that could be established by a strictly scientific manner. He was willing to suspend his worldview needs until such time as he could achieve a rationally grounded worldview. He was so willing because he believed that intellectual integrity demanded it.

Note too that philosophy-as-inquiry need not result in a worldview. It can end aporetically, at an impasse, the way a number of the Platonic dialogs do, in Socratic nescience, even if the intention was to arrive at a worldview. And sometimes even the intention is lacking: there are philosophers who are content to devote their professional hours to some such narrow topic as counterfactual conditionals or epistemic closure principles, or anaphora. They are simply fascinated by narrowly-defined problems regardless of their wider theoretical relevance, let alone any practical upshot. They can be said to engage in hyperspecialization. There are also those less extreme specialists who are concerned with ethics or epistemology but give no thought to the metaphysical presuppositions of either.

We should also distinguish between engaging in philosophy-as-inquiry in order to arrive at a worldview versus engaging in philosophy-as-inquiry in order to shore up or defend a worldview that one antecedently accepts. This is the difference between one who seeks the truth by philosophical means, a truth he does not possess, and one who possesses or thinks he possesses the truth or most of the truth and employs philosophical means to the end of defending and securing and promoting the truth that he already has and has received from some extraphilosophical source such as revelation or religious/mystical experience. The latter could be called philosophy-as-inquiry in the service of apologetics, 'apologetics' broadly construed.

It should now be evident that (B) conflates two ideas that need to be split apart. There are philosophers whose

B1. Technical work is consistent with and supports an antecedently held worldview whose source is extraphilosophical and whose source is not philosophy-as-inquiry;

B2. Technical work is consistent with and supports a worldview the source of which is philosophy-as-inquiry.

My main thesis is that (B2) is superior to (A), but I also incline to the view that (B1) is superior to (A). But for now I set aside (B1).

But why is (B2) superior to (A)? I am not saying that there is anything wrong with satisfying a purely theoretical interest either by (i) hyper-specializing and concentrating on one or a few narrow topics, or (ii) specializing as in the case of Kripke by working on a fairly wide range of topics. What I want to say is that there is something better than either of (i) or (ii).

My thesis: Since philosophy is a search for the ultimate truth about the ultimate matters, one is not true to the spirit of philosophy in the full and normative sense of the word if one is content to theorize about minutiae that in the end have no 'existential' relevance where 'existential' is to be taken in the sense of Kierkegaard, Karl Jaspers, et. al, and their distinguished predecessors, Socrates, Augustine, Pascal, et al. One's own existence, fate, moral responsibility, and existential meaning are surely part of the ultimate matters; so to abstract from these matters by pursuing a purely theoretical interest is, if not logically absurd, then existentially absurd. In philosophy one cannot leave oneself out and be objective in the way the sciences must leave out the subject and be objective. Philosophy must concern itself with the whole of reality, and therefore not merely with the world as it is in itself. It must also concern itself with the world as it is in itself for us, in its involvement with subjectivity. Subjectivity, however, is in every case my individual subjectivity. In this way, one's personal Existenz comes into the picture.

Of course I am not a narrow existentialist who rejects technical philosophy.

What I am maintaining is that one ought not compartmentalize: one's technical work ought to subserve a higher end, the articulation and defense of a comprehensive view of things. As Wilfrid Sellars says, "It is . . . the 'eye on the whole' which distinguishes the philosophical enterprise." (Science, Perception, and Reality, 3) "The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term." (SPR 1) But I am saying more than this, and words like 'view' and 'worldview' don't quite convey it since philosophy as I 'view' it ought not be purely theoretical. Somehow, one's theory and one's Existenz need to achieve unity.

I still haven't made my thesis all that clear, but it is perhaps clear enough.

One argument for my thesis is that specialization gets us nowhere. It is notorious that philosophers have not convinced one another and that progress in philosophy has not occurred. And the best and brightest have been at it for going on three thousand years. That progress will occur in future is therefore the shakiest of inductions. Given that shakiness, it is existentially if not logically absurd to lose oneself in, say, the technical labyrinth of the philosophy of language, as fascinating as it is. Who on his deathbed will care whether reference is routed through sense or is direct? The following may help clarify my meaning.

Fred Sommers, The Logic of Natural Language (Oxford, 1982), p. xii:

My interest in Ryle's 'category mistakes' turned me away from the study of Whitehead's metaphysical writings (on which I had written a doctoral thesis at Columbia University) to the study of problems that could be arranged for possible solution.

The suggestion is that the problems of logic, but not those of metaphysics, can be "arranged for possible solution." Although I sympathize with Sommers' sentiment, he must surely have noticed that his attempt to rehabilitate pre-Fregean logical theory issues in results that are controversial, and perhaps just as controversial as the claims of metaphysicians. Or do all his colleagues in logic agree with him?

If by 'pulling in our horns' and confining ourselves to problems of language and logic we were able to attain sure and incontrovertible results, then there might well be justification for setting metaphysics aside and working on problems amenable to solution. But if it turns out that logical, linguistic, phenomenological, epistemological and all other such preliminary inquiries arrive at results that are also widely and vigorously contested, then the advantage of 'pulling in our horns' is lost and we may as well concentrate on the questions that really matter, which are most assuredly not questions of logic and language — fascinating as these may be.

Sommers' is a rich and fascinating book. But, at the end of the day, how important is it to prove that the inference embedded in 'Some girl is loved by every boy so every boy loves a girl' really is capturable, pace the dogmatic partisans of modern predicate logic, by a refurbished traditional term logic? (See pp. 144-145)

As one draws one's last breath, which is more salutary: to be worried about a silly bagatelle such as the one just mentioned, or to be contemplating God and the soul?

Intellectual Hygiene

I am all for intellectual hygiene. But it can be taken to an extreme by a certain sort of analytic philosopher who is afraid to touch anything that might in the least be infected with the murk and messiness of life as she is lived. Such types remind me of neurotic hand-washers and those who, fearful of the Chinese flu, walk around in the open air, alone, in masks.

On Continental Philosophy: Response to a German Reader

This is an edited re-post (re-entry?) from 21 February 2017 to satisfy current interest. Against my better judgment, I am allowing comments.

………………………….

The following from a German sociologist (my comments are in blue):

Perhaps you know the old joke: Analytic philosophers think that continental philosophy is not sufficiently clear; continental philosophers think that analytic philosophy is not sufficient.

Having just reread the Kritik der reinen Vernunft, I don't see Kant as an analytic philosopher. Hegel and Nietzsche certainly belong to the continental tradition. And none of the philosophers of the 20th century, who really matter to me, can be called an analytic philosopher. Doesn't "analytic" simply mean after Wittgenstein and in his tradition?

BV: As I see it, there was no analytic-Continental split before the 20th century. So classifying Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche in terms of that split is only marginally meaningful. But it is safe to say that Kant is more congenial to analytic philosophers than Hegel and Nietzsche are.

When did the split come about and what is it about?

If I were were to select two writings that best epitomize the depth of the Continental-analytic clash near the time of its outbreak, they would be Heidegger's 1929 What is Metaphysics? and Carnap's 1932 response, "On the Overcoming of Metaphysics Through the Logical Analysis of Language." In fairness to Carnap, let us note that his Erkenntnis piece is more than a response to Heidegger inasmuch as it calls into question the meaningfulness of all metaphysics. And in fairness to Heidegger, we should note that he thinks he is doing something more radical than metaphysics. Metaphysics for Heidegger is onto-theology. Metaphysics thinks Being (das Sein) but always in reference to beings (das Seiende); it does not think Being in its difference from beings. The latter is Heidegger's project.

The following are widely regarded as Continental philosophers: Franz Brentano, Alexius von Meinong, Kasimir Twardowski, Edmund Husserl, Adolf Reinach, Dietrich von Hildebrand, Edith Stein, Roman Ingarden, Max Scheler, Martin Heidegger, Nicolai Hartmann, Gabriel Marcel, Ortega y Gasset, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus. And of course there are others that are so regarded.

Note that the above are all Europeans. But being European is not what makes them 'Continental.' Otherwise Gottlob Frege, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Rudolf Carnap would have to be lumped in with them. And of course there are Continental philosophers who do not hail from Europe. So what makes the above authors 'Continental' as opposed to 'analytic'?

It is not easy to say, which fact supplies a reason to not take too seriously talk of 'Continental' versus 'analytic.'

Note that all of the Continentals I mentioned engage in analysis, some in very close, very careful analysis. (Ever read Husserl's Logical Investigations?) And please don't say that they don't analyze language. Ever read Brentano? Gustav Bergmann accurately describes Brentano as "the first linguistic philosopher." (Realism, 234) Roderick Chisholm's paraphrastic approach was influenced significantly by Brentano. No one would lump Chisholm in with the Continentals.

Will you say that the Continentals mentioned didn't pay close attention to logic? That's spectacularly false. Even for Heidegger! Ever read his dissertation on psychologism in logic?

Perhaps you could say that the Continentals mentioned did not engage significantly with the ground-breaking work of Frege, widely regarded as the greatest logician since Aristotle. I think that would be true. But does this difference suffice to distinguish between Continental and analytic? I don't think so: there are plenty of philosophers who write in a decidedly analytic style who do not engage with Frege, and some of them oppose Frege. Take Fred Sommers. You wouldn't call him a Continental philosopher. And while he engages the ideas of Frege, he vigorously opposes them in his very impressive attempt at resurrecting traditional formal logic. And yet he would be classified as analytic.

A Matter of Style or of Substance?

According to Michael Dummett,

What distinguishes analytical philosophy, in its diverse manifestations, from other schools is the belief, first, that a philosophical account of thought can be attained through a philosophical account of language, and, secondly, that a comprehensive account can only be so attained.

[. . .]

On my characterisation, therefore, [Gareth] Evans was no longer an analytical philosopher. He was, indeed, squarely in the analytical tradition: the three pillars on which his book [The Varieties of Reference, Oxford, 1982] rests are Russell, Moore and Frege. Yet it is only as belonging to the tradition — as adopting a certain philosophical style and as appealing to certain writers rather than to others — that he remains a member of the analytical school. (Origins of Analytical Philosophy, Harvard UP, 1993)

For Dummett, then, what make a philosopher analytic is not the style in which he writes: clear, precise, careful, explicitly logical with premises and inferences clearly specified, free of literary pretentiousness, name-dropping, rhetorical questions, and generally the sort of bullshitting that one finds in writers like John Caputo and Alain Badiou. Nor is it the topics he writes about or the authorities he cites. What makes the analytic philosopher are the twin axioms above mentioned.

The trouble with Dummett's criterion is that it is intolerably stipulative if what we are after is a more or less lexical definition of how 'analytic' and 'Continental' are actually used. An approach that rules out Gareth Evans and Roderick Chisholm and Gustav Bergmann and Reinhardt Grossmann and so many others cuts no ice in my book. (How's that for a mixed metaphor?)

A Matter of Politics?

I don't think so. Look again at my list. Sartre was a decided leftist, a Stalinist in his later phase. And Camus was on the Left. But everyone else on my list was either apolitical or on the Right. Heidegger was a National Socialist. Latter-day Continentals, though, definitely slouch Leftward.

A Matter of Academic Politics?

This may be what the Continental versus analytic split comes down to more than anything else. As Blaise Pascal says, with some exaggeration, "All men naturally hate one another." To which I add, with some exaggeration: and are always looking for ways to maintain and increase the enmity. If you are entranced with Heidegger you are going to hate the Carnapian analytic bigot who refuses to read Heidegger but mocks him anyway. Especially when the bigot stands in the way of career success. Although so many Continentals are slopheads, there is no asshole like an analytic asshole. That's been my experience.

A Matter of Religion?

No, there are both theists and atheists on my list. And of course there are plenty of analytic philosophers who are theists. Most of them, however, are not.

A Matter of Attitude toward Science?

This has something to do with the split. You can be a Continental philosopher and a traditional theist (von Hildebrand, Edith Stein, et al.) and you can be a Continental philosopher and a conservative (Ortega y Gasset), but is there any case of a Continental philosopher who is a logical positivist or who genuflects before the natural sciences in the scientistic manner? I don't think so. I am, however, open to correction.

Interim Conclusion

Talk of 'analytic' and 'Continental' philosophy is not particularly useful. It would be better to speak of good and bad philosophy. But what are the marks of good philosophy? That's a post for another occasion.

Back to my correspondent:

I see philosophy more in terms of art than in terms of science. This is not saying that some arguments are not better than others or that one cannot distinguish different degrees of plausibility. But the overall conception (what Heidegger calls "Seinsverständnis) is more – and something essentially different – than the sum of of plausibilities or the logic consistency of the argumentation. There is, or so it appears to me, a 'channelling' of truth that resembles more the mystical experience than the scientific recognition. Of course I've read Wittgenstein, but why should I spend precious life time reading, say, Gilbert Ryle or Saul Kripke, when I can read Hegel's Wissenschaft der Logik?

BV: As I am sure my reader knows, Hegel's Wissenschaft der Logik (Science of Logic) has been dismissed as Begriffsdichtung, conceptual poetry. So I am not surprised that he sees philosophy more in terms of art than in terms of science. His attitude is defensible: why read Kripke who is of interest only to specialists in logic and the philosophy of language and who has no influence on anything beyond those narrow precincts when you can read Hegel and come thereby to understand the dialectical thinking which, via Marx and Lenin, transformed the world?

There is also the problem that the various attempts to bring philosophy onto the "sure path of science" (Kant) have all failed miserably despite the Herculean efforts of thinkers such as Edmund Husserl. He attempted to make of philosophy strenge Wissenschaft, but he could not get even one of his brilliant students to follow him into his transcendental phenomenology. (I don't consider Eugen Fink to be a counterexample.) There is no reason to think that philosophy will ever enter upon the sure path of science. This is a reason to content oneself with the broader, looser, fuzzier approach of the Continentals.

Only if philosophy could be transformed into strenge Wissenschaft would we perhaps be justified in putting all our efforts into this project and eschewing the satisfaction of our needs for an overarching and spiritually satisfying Weltanschauung; we have no good reason to think philosophy will ever be so transformed; ergo, etc.

When [Theodor Wiesengrund] Adorno was in Oxford, he wrote in a letter home: "Here it's always just about arguments." Most of his colleagues there did not even understand what he was missing. And that's the divide!

BV: That is indeed a good part of what the divide is all about.

Well, of course this ignorance of the analytic tradition has in my case also to do with cultural nationalism. The philosophical departments here are more and more forgetting about the great German tradition. Thinkers like Hegel or Schelling, let alone Heidegger, are hardly taught anymore. I'm against this, I'm Deutsch and proud of it. Actually I want – and for me that's another reason to be against illegal immigration – Germany to become again a hotspot of art and philosophy!

BV: I agree! When as a young man I spent a year in Freiburg im Breisgau, I was there to study Kant and Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger. To my romantic young self Germany was, in the words of Heinrich Heine, das Land von Dichter und Denker, the land of poets and thinkers. You Germans can be justifiably proud of your great tradition. Without a doubt, Kant belongs in the philosophical pantheon along with Plato and Aristotle. It is indeed a shame that the analysts are suppressing your great tradition.

As for illegal immigration, if looks from here as if Angela Merkel is a disaster for Germany. Language, borders, and culture are three things every nation has a right to protect and preserve. There is nothing xenophobic or racist about it.

On Continental Philosophy: Response to a German Reader

The following from a German sociologist (my comments are in blue):

Perhaps you know the old joke: Analytic philosophers think that continental philosophy is not sufficiently clear; continental philosophers think that analytic philosophy is not sufficient.

When did the split come about and what is it about?

It is not easy to say, which fact supplies a reason to not take too seriously talk of 'Continental' versus 'analytic.'

Will you say that the Continentals mentioned didn't pay close attention to logic? That's spectacularly false. Even for Heidegger! Ever read his dissertation on psychologism in logic?

Perhaps you could say that the Continentals mentioned did not engage significantly with the ground-breaking work of Frege, widely regarded as the greatest logician since Aristotle. I think that would be true. But does this diffeence suffice to distinguish between Continental and analytic? I don't think so: there are plenty of philosophers who write in a decidedly analytic style who do not engage with Frege, and some of them oppose Frege. Take Fred Sommers. You wouldn't call him a Continental philosopher. And while he engages the ideas of Frege, he vigorously opposes them in his very impressive attempt at resurrecting traditional formal logic. And yet he would be classified as analytic.

A Matter of Style or of Substance?

According to Michael Dummett,

What distinguishes analytical philosophy, in its diverse manifestations, from other schools is the belief, first, that a philosophical account of thought can be attained through a philosophical account of language, and, secondly, that a comprehensive account can only be so attained.

[. . .]

On my characterisation, therefore [Gareth] Evans was no longer an analytical philosopher. He was, indeed, squarely in the analytical tradition: the three pillars on which his book [The Varieties of Reference, Oxford, 1982] rests are Russell, Moore and Frege. Yet it is only as belonging to the tradition — as adopting a certain philosophical style and as appealing to certain writers rather than to others — that he remains a member of the analytical school. (Origins of Analytical Philosophy, Harvard UP, 1993)

For Dummett, then, what make a philosopher analytic is not the style in which he writes: clear, precise, careful, explicitly logical with premises and inferences clearly specified, free of literary pretentiousness, name-dropping, rhetorical questions, and generally the sort of bullshitting that one finds in writers like Caputo and Badiou. Nor is it the topics he writes about or the authorities he cites. What makes the analytic philosopher are the twin axioms above mentioned.

A Matter of Politics?

A Matter of Academic Politics?

This may be what the Continental versus analytic split comes down to more than anything else. As Blaise Pacal says, with some exaggeration, "All men naturally hate one another." To which I add, with some exaggeration: and are always looking for ways to maintain and increase the enmity. If you are entranced with Heidegger you are going to hate the Carnapian analytic bigot who refuses to read Heidegger but mocks him anyway. Especially when the bigot stands in the way of career success. Although so many Continentals are slopheads, there is no asshole like an analytic asshole.

A Matter of Religion?

No, there are both theists and atheists on my list. And of course there are plenty of analytic philosophers who are theists.

A Matter of Attitude toward Science?

Interim Conclusion

Back to my correspondent:

I see philosophy more in terms of art than in terms of science. This is not saying that some arguments are not better than others or that one cannot distinguish different degrees of plausibility. But the overall conception (what Heidegger calls "Seinsverständnis) is more – and something essentially different – than the sum of of plausibilities or the logic consistency of the argumentation. There is, or so it appears to me, a 'chanelling' of truth that resembles more the mystical experience than the scientific recognition. Of course I've read Wittgenstein, but why should I spend precious life time reading, say, Gilbert Ryle or Saul Kripke, when I can read Hegel's Wissenschaft der Logik?

There is also the problem that attempts to bring philosophy onto the "sure path of science" (Kant) have all failed miserably despite the Herculean efforts of thinkers such as Edmund Husserl. He attempted to make of philosophy strenge Wissenschaft, but he could not get even one of his brilliant students to follow him into his transcendental phenomenology. (I don't consider Eugen Fink to be a counterexample.) There is no reason to think that philosophy will ever enter upon the sure path of science. This is a reason to content oneself with the broader, looser, fuzzier approach of the Continentals.

When Adorno was in Oxford, he wrote in a letter home: "Here it's always just about arguments." Most of his colleagues there did not even understand what he was missing. And that's the divide!

BV: That is indeed a good part of what the divide is all about.

BV: I agree! When as a young man I spent a year in Freiburg im Breisgau, I was there to study Kant and Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger. To my romantic young self Germany was, in the words of Heinrich Heine, das Land von Dichter und Denker, the land of poets and thinkers. You Germans can be justifiably proud of your tradition. Without a doubt, Kant belongs in the philosophical pantheon along with Plato and Aristotle. It is indeed a shame that the analysts are suppressing your great tradition.

Continental Philosophers I Respect and the ‘Continental-Analytic Divide’

From the mail bag:

I'm a new reader of your blog and about two years into my own layman's study of philosophy. By that I mean I'm just reading whatever strikes my fancy as best as I can and building up a sort of mental repertoire. It's equally exciting and frustrating. Are there any so-called 20th century Continental philosophers you like?

Although some commentators would consider some of the following philosophers to belong to the 19th century, they and their influence extend into the 20th. Here then is my list of (some) 20th century Continental philosophers who are well-worth close study.

Franz Brentano, Alexius von Meinong, Kasimir Twardowski, Edmund Husserl, Adolf Reinach, Dietrich von Hildebrand, Edith Stein, Roman Ingarden, Max Scheler, Martin Heidegger, Nicolai Hartmann, Gabriel Marcel, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus.

What is a Continental Philosopher Anyway?

Note that the above are all Europeans. But that is not what makes them 'Continental.' Otherwise Gottlob Frege, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Rudolf Carnap would have to be lumped in with them. And of course there are Continental philosophers who do not hail from Europe. So what makes the above authors 'Continental' as opposed to 'analytic'?

It is not easy to say, which fact supplies a reason to not take too seriously talk of 'Continental' versus 'analytic.'

Will you say that the Continentals mentioned didn't pay close attention to logic? That's spectacularly false. Even for Heidegger! Ever read his dissertation on psychologism in logic?

Perhaps you could say that the Continentals did not engage significantly with the ground-breaking work of Frege, undoubtedly the greatest logician since Aristotle. I think that would be true. But does it suffice to distinguish between Continental and analytic? I don't think so: there are plenty of philosophers who write in a decidedly analytic style who do not engage with Frege, and some of them oppose Frege. Take Fred Sommers. You wouldn't call him a Continental philosopher. And while he engages the ideas of Frege, he vigorously opposes them in his very impressive attempt at resurrecting traditional formal logic. And yet he would be classified as analytic.

A Matter of Style or a Matter of Substance?

According to Michael Dummett,

What distinguishes analytical philosophy, in its diverse manifestations, from other schools is the belief, first, that a philosophical account of thought can be attained through a philosophical account of language, and, secondly, that a comprehensive account can only be so attained.

[. . .]

On my characterisation, therefore [Gareth] Evans was no longer an analytical philosopher. He was, indeed, squarely in the analytical tradition: the three pillars on which his book [The Varieties of Reference, Oxford, 1982] rests are Russell, Moore and Frege. Yet it is only as belonging to the tradition — as adopting a certain philosophical style and as appealing to certain writers rather than to others — that he remains a member of the analytical school. (Origins of Analytical Philosophy, Harvard UP, 1993)

For Dummett, then, what make a philosopher analytic is not the style in which he writes: clear, precise, careful, explicitly logical with premises and inferences clearly specified, free of literary pretentiousness, name-dropping, rhetorical questions, and generally the sort of bullshitting that one finds in writers like Caputo and Badiou. Nor is it the topics he writes about or the authorities he cites. What makes the analytic philosopher are the twin axioms above mentioned.

A Matter of Politics?

I don't think so. Look again at my list. Sartre is a decided leftist, a Stalinist in his later phase. And Camus is on the Left. But everyone else on my list is either apolitical or on the Right. Latter-day Continentals, though, definitely slouch Leftward.

A Matter of Academic Politics?

A Matter of Religion?

No, there are both theists and atheists on my list. And of course there are plenty of analytic philosophers who are theists.

A Matter of Attitude toward Science?

Interim Conclusion

Carnap and Clarity

This entry is installment #2 in a Carnap versus Heidegger series. Here is the first in the series. It couldn't hurt to at least skim through it. Part of what I am up to is an exploration of the origin and nature of the analytic-Continental split. To quote from the first installment:

If I were were to select two writings that best epitomize the depth of the Continental-analytic clash near the time of its outbreak, they would be Heidegger's 1929 What is Metaphysics? and Carnap's 1932 response, "On the Overcoming of Metaphysics Through the Logical Analysis of Language." (In fairness to Carnap, let us note that his Erkenntnis piece is more than a response to Heidegger inasmuch as it calls into question the meaningfulness of all metaphysics. And in fairness to Heidegger, we should note that he thinks he is doing something more radical than metaphysics. Metaphysics for Heidegger is onto-theology. Metaphysics thinks Being (das Sein) but always in reference to beings (das Seiende); it does not think Being in its difference from beings. Perhaps in a later post I will venture to explain what that means.)

Analytic philosophers prize clarity. And rightly so. For one thing, "clarity is courtesy," as Ortega y Gasset once said. (I suppose the Spaniard would count as Continental, and not just geographically.) One more parenthetical remark before getting down to business: I wish Erich Pryzwara had received the message that clarity is courtesy. Then perhaps he would not have written anything as unreadable as his Analogia Entis. Even the charitable German Thomist Josef Pieper so characterized it.

I need waste no words defending the thesis that clarity in thought and expression are to be preferred to obscurity. Avoidable obscurity must be avoided. But there is an empty and trivial clarity. A clarity worth pursuing is a clarity with content. Clarity ought not be pursued as an end in itself or as a cognitive value that trumps every other cognitive value. While avoidable obscurity must be avoided, some obscurity is bound to be unavoidable if our inquiries are serious, sustained, and worth pursuing. Such obscurity must be tolerated.

One day in class I was praising clarity and its importance. A student responded that reality is messy. My counter-response was that, while reality is messy, it does not follow that our thinking about it should also be. On the contrary! The present point, however, is that thinking worth doing ought to penetrate as far as it can into reality, as rich, dark, and messy as it is, and if some obscurity proves unavoidable, then so be it.

Rudolf Carnap's brand of clarity is sterile, arbitrary and as artificial as fluorescent light. What he does is enforce or impose an arbitrary standard of clarity across the board without regard to differences in subject matter. We ought to say about clarity what Aristotle said about precision near the beginning of the Nicomachean Ethics: "it cannot be expected in the treatment of all subjects alike . . . ." (1094b10-15) Ethics, the Philosopher said, cannot be treated with mathematical precision. The same goes for metaphysics.

"Many words of metaphysics," Carnap tells us, are "devoid of meaning." ("The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language" in A. J. Ayer, ed., Logical Positivism, The Free Press, 1959, p. 65.) He chooses as his first example 'principle' "in the sense of principle of being, not principle of knowledge or axiom." (65) But since 'principle' in the ontological sense is not much used these days outside of scholastic circles, let me substitute 'ground' used ontologically. Thus there is a large body of literature in which truth-makers are described as the 'ontological grounds' of truths. It is clear that Carnap's accusations of (cognitive) meaninglessness apply as much to grounds as to principles. They also apply to other words and phrases in the vocabulary of truth-maker theorists such as 'makes true' and 'in virtue of.' For example, 'Peter is smoking' is true in virtue of Peter's smoking, or the fact of Peter's smoking makes true 'Peter is smoking.' Apart from truth-maker theory, 'in virtue of' has long been a favorite of philosophers. Some think it a 'weasel phrase' best banished from the vocabulary of philosophy. I disagree.

"But these words are ambiguous and vague." (65) Thus Carnap. Insofar as they have a clear meaning, their meaning is empirical, not metaphysical; insofar as they are metaphysical, they are meaningless. I would put the Carnapian argument as follows in terms of the following dilemma:

Either metaphysical grounding (as it occurs in the putative relation between a truth-maker and a truth-bearer) is a causal relation or it is a logical relation. But it is neither. It is not a relation of empirical causation. Truth-maker theorists insist on this themselves. Nor is it a logical relation such as entailment. Logical relations hold between and among truth-bearers; a truth-maker, however, though proposition-like on some theories, is not a truth-bearer. 'Truth-making,' then has neither the meaning of 'causing' nor the meaning of 'entailing.'

Yet, no criterion is specified for any other meaning. Consequently, the alleged 'metaphysical' meaning which the word is supposed to have here in contrast to the mentioned empirical meaning, does not exist. [. . .] The word is explicitly deprived of its original meaning . . . . (65)

The word 'making' is stripped of its empirical meaning, but no new meaning is supplied. The word becomes an "empty shell." (66) The associations and feelings attached to the word used in the old empirical way remain in play. But these do not give meaning to the word used in the new 'metaphysical' way: "it remains meaningless as long as no method of verification can be described." (66)

The same holds for all specifically metaphysical terms. There are one and all "devoid of meaning." (67) Carnap mentions the following: the Idea, the Absolute, the Unconditioned, the Infinite, and "the being of being," which I take to be a reference to Heidegger's das Sein des Seienden, which is better translated as 'the Being of beings.' But also: non-being, thing-in-itself, absolute spirit, objective spirit, essence, being-in-itself, being-in-and-for-itself, the Non-Ego.

These terms are meaningless because empirical truth-conditions of their use cannot be supplied. Hence the alleged statements of metaphysics which contain them are one and all pseudo-statements that are bare of sense and assert nothing. (67)

Perhaps the best response to Carnap and those of his ilk is brutal contradiction: "You're just wrong!" The words you would dismiss as meaningless just obviously have meaning and you're just obviously wrong to think otherwise.

For example, it is clear enough what it means to say that some truth-bearers need truth-makers, that a sentence such as 'Peter is smoking' cannot just be true but is true because of something external to the sentence, something external on the side of the object, not on the side of the subject, i.e., on the side of the one who asserively utters the sentence. And it is clear enough that this use of 'because' is not an empirical-causal use of the term. It is also clear enough what 'in virtue of' and 'making' mean in this context.

Another devastating response to Carnap is the obvious point that his Verifiability Criterion of Cognitive Significance cannot satisfy its own demand. "Every cognitively meaningful statement is either empirically verifiable in principle or a logical/analytic truth" is neither empirically verifiable in principle nor a logical/analytic truth. Therefore, the Verifiability Criterion is cognitively meaningless. So does it then have a merely emotive meaning? Is is a mere suggestion as to what to allow as meaningful? If the latter, then no thank you!

It's an easy rebuttal, but none the worse for that. Sometimes, simplex sigillum veri.

Carnap is to philosophy what a philistine is to the arts: just crude and ignorant . So I dismiss him as a philosophistine. I coined this word ten years or so ago in a polemic against David Stove another philosophistine whose crudity is on shameful display in his The Plato Cult.

My rule is: no polemics in philosophy. But if the other guy starts it . . . . Or the shade of the other guy . . . .

Heidegger, Carnap, Das Nichts, and the Analytic-Continental Schism

One of the reasons I gave this weblog the title Maverick Philosopher is because I align neither with the analytic nor with the Continental camp. Study everything, I say, and drink from every stream. Reverting to the camp metaphor, when did the camps become two? In dead earnest this occurred when Heidegger burst onto the scene in 1927 with Being and Time. I agree with Peter Simons: "Probably no individual was more responsible for the schism in philosophy than Heidegger." (Quoted in Overgaard, et al., An Introduction to Metaphilosophy, Cambridge UP, 2013, 110.) It is not as if Heidegger set out to split the mainstream whose headwaters were in Franz Brentano into two tributaries; it is just that he started publishing things that the analytic types, who had some sympathy for Heidegger's main teacher Husserl, could not relate to at all.

To nail my colors to the mast, I take the side of Heidegger in his dispute with Carnap and I heartily condemn the knee-jerk bigotry of the thousands upon thousands of analytic types who mock and deride Heidegger while making no attempt to understand what he is about. The cynosure of their mockery and derision is of course the notorious sentence

Das Nichts selbst nichtet. (GA IX, 114)
The Nothing itself nihilates.

This is the line upon which the analytic bigots invariably seize while ignoring everything else: its place in the essay in question and the wider context, that of Being and Time and other works of the early Heidegger, not to mention the phenomenological, transcendental, existential, life-philosophical, and scholastic sources of Heidegger's thinking.

Now, having called them knee-jerk bigots and having implied what is largely true, namely that the analytic Heidegger-bashers are know-nothings when it comes to Heidegger's philosophical progenitors, and thus having paid them back in their own coin, I will now drop all invective and patiently try to explain how and why Heidegger is not talking nonsense in the essay in question. This will require a series of posts. It will also require some attention and open-mindedness on the part of the reader as well as some familiarity with the two essays in question.

Heidegger's Alleged Violation of Logical Syntax

For Carnap it is obvious that existence and nonexistence are purely logical notions, more precisely, logico-syntactic notions. The sentence 'Cats exist,' for example, does not predicate existence of individual cats. It says no more than 'Something is a cat.' But then 'Cats do not exist' says no more than 'Nothing is a cat.' This sentence in turn is equivalent to 'It is not the case that something is a cat.'

'Nothing,' then, is not a name, but a mere bit of logical syntax. Carnap calls it a "logical particle." (71) And the same goes for 'something.' If I met nobody on the trail this morning, it does not follow that I met somebody named 'nobody.' (Bad joke: I say I met nobody, and you ask how he's doing.) If nothing is in my wallet, that is not to say that there is something in my wallet named 'nothing.' It is to say that:

It it not the case that something is in my wallet
It is not the case that, for some x, x is in my wallet
For all x, x is not in my wallet
~(∃x)(x is in my wallet)
(x) ~(x is in my wallet).

The above are equivalents. It should be obvious then, that in its mundane uses 'nothing' is not a name but a logico-syntactic notion that can be expressed using a quantifier (either universal or particular) and the sign for propositional negation. By a mundane use of 'nothing' I mean a use that presupposes that things exist. Thus when I assert that nothing is in my pocket, I presuppose that things exist and the content of my assertion is that no one of these existing things is in my pocket. (Don't worry about the fact that it is never strictly true that there is nothing in my pocket given that there is air, lint, and space in my pocket.)

I think we can all (including Heidegger) agree that in their mundane uses, sentences of the form 'Nothing is F' can be translated, salva significatione, into sentences of the form 'It is not the case that something is F' or 'Everything is not F.' The translations remove 'Nothing' from subject position and by the same stroke remove the temptation to construe 'nothing' as a name. Not that Heidegger ever succumbed to that temptation.

But now the question arises whether every use of 'nothing' fits the deflationary schema. Is every meaningful use of 'nothing' the use of a logical particle? Consider ex nihilo, nihil fit, 'Out of nothing, nothing comes.' The second occurrence of 'nothing' readily submits to deflation, but not the first. Suppose we write

It is not the case that something comes from nothing.

This removes the quantificational use of 'nothing' in 'Out of nothing, nothing comes' but leaves us with a 'substantive' use. Of course, 'nothing' cannot refer to or name any being or any collection of beings. That is perfectly evident. And Heidegger says as much. But 'nothing' does appear to refer to, or name, the absence of every being. The thought is:

Had there been nothing at all, it is not the case that something could have arisen from it.

The 'at all' is strictly redundant: it merely serves to remind the reader that 'nothing' is being used strictly. Now could there have been nothing at all? Is it possible that there be nothing at all? More importantly for present purposes: Is this a meaningful question? 'Possibly, nothing exists' is meaningful only if 'Nothing exists' is meaningful. So consider first the unmodalized

There is nothing at all

Nothing exists.

These are perfectly meaningful sentences. That is not to say that they are true, nor is it to say that they are possibly true. Suppose they are not possibly true. Then they are necessarily false. But if necessarily false, then false, and if false, then meaningful. For meaningfulness is a necessary condition of having a truth-value. 'Nothing exists,' then, is a meaningful sentence, and this despite the fact that 'nothing' cannot here be replaced by a phrase containing only a quantifier and the sign for negation.

For Carnap, however, the above are meaningless metaphysical pseudo-sentences because they violate logical syntax. If you try to translate the second sentence into logical notation, into what Carnap calls a "logically correct language"(70) you get a syntactically meaningless string:

~(∃x)(x exists).

This is meaningless because 'exists' cannot serve as a first-level predicate in a logically correct language. Existence is not a property of individuals. 'Exist(s)' is a quantifier, a bit of logical syntax, not a name of a property or of any entity. Therefore, 'Nothing exists' is as syntactically meaningless as the ill-formed formula

~(∃x)(∃x(. . . x . . .)).

Two Interim Conclusions

The first is that Heidegger commits no schoolboy blunder in logic. He does not think that a use of 'Nothing is in the drawer' commits one to the existence of something in the drawer. He cannot be charitably read as assuming that every use of 'nothing' is a referring use. The second conclusion is that Carnap has not shown that every occurrence of 'nothing' can be replaced by a phrase containing a quantifier and the sign for negation. He has therefore not shown that a sentence like 'Nothing exists' is a syntactically meaningless pseudo-sentence.

Heidegger Partially Vindicated

But now the way is clear to ask some Heidegger-type questions.

I showed above that 'nothing' has meaningful uses as a substantive, uses that cannot be eliminated by the Carnap method. And I suggested that 'nothing' could name the total absence of all beings. If this total absence is a possibility, as it would be if every being is a contingent being, then Nothing (das Nichts) would have some 'reality,' if only the reality of a mere possibility. It could not be dismissed as utterly nichtig or nugatory. Nor could questions about it be so dismissed.

One question that Heidegger poses concerns the relation of negation (Verneinung) as a specific intellectual operation (spezifische Verstandeshandlung) to Nothing:

Gibt es das Nichts nur, weil es das Nicht, d. h. die Verneinung gibt? Oder liegt es umgekehrt? Gibt es die Verneinung und das Nicht nur, weil es das Nichts gibt? (GA IX, 108)

Is there Nothing only because there is the Not and negation? Or is it the other way around? Is there negation and the Not only because there is Nothing?

I grant that with questions like these we are at the very limit of intelligibility, at the very boundary of the Sayable. But you are no philosopher if you are not up against these limits and seeking, if possible, to transcend them.

Another Misrepresentation of Meinong

This time from John Nolt in his SEP entry on Free Logic: "Alexius Meinong is best known for his view that some objects that do not exist nevertheless have being."

False for reasons already supplied. See article below.

It takes quite bit of chutzpah to shoot your mouth off about authors you never took the trouble to read or even to read about. But it is typical of analytic philosophers.

Peter Unger Introduces a Central Thesis of his New Book, Empty Ideas: A Critique of Analytic Philosophy

Here, via Dave Lull. The comments, as one ought to expect, are not very good. Here as elsewhere, and to exaggerate a bit, the best arguments against an open combox are the contents of one.

I have read large chunks of Unger's new book and I hope to provide a critical response to some of it before too long. For now I refer the interested reader to a couple of recent Unger-related entries.

Peter Unger on Betrand Russell on the Value of Philosophy

Can one Copulate one's Way to Chastity? Notes on Wittgenstein and Unger

On Throwing Latin, and a Jab at the ‘Analysts’

If you are going to throw Latin, then you ought to try to get it right. One of my correspondents sent me an offprint of a paper of his which had been published in American Philosophical Quarterly, a very good philosophical journal. The title read, Creation Ex Deus. The author's purpose was to develop a notion of creation out of God, as opposed to the traditional notion of creation out of nothing (ex nihilo). He knew that 'God' translates as Deus, and that 'out of' is rendered by ex. Hence, ex Deus. But this is bad Latin, since the preposition ex takes the ablative case. Deus being a second declension masculine noun, its ablative form is Deo. Ex Deo would have been correct. Mistakes like this are not as rare as they ought to be, and we can expect more of them in the future.

It says something that the error just mentioned was caught neither by the author, nor by the editor, nor by the referees, nor by the proofreader. It says something in particular about 'analytic' philosophers. I am sorry to report that many of them are ignoramuses (indeed, ignorabimuses) wholly innocent of foreign languages, knowledge of history (both 'real' history and the history of ideas), and of high culture generally. One name analyst implied in print that the music of John Lennon was on the level of that of Mozart. There are Ph.D.s in philosophy who have never read a Platonic dialogue, and whose dissertations are based solely on the latest ephemera in the journals. Here, as elsewhere, ignorance breeds arrogance. They think they know what they don't know. They think they know what key theses in Kant and Brentano and Meinong mean when they have never studied their texts. And, not knowing foreign languages, they cannot determine whether or not the available translations are accurate. Not knowing the sense of these theses, they read into them contemporary notions. And if you told them that this amounts to eisegesis, they wouldn't know what you are talking about.

Not all analytic philosophers are ignoramuses, of course. Hector-Neri Castañeda, for example, had a grounding in classics. When he founded Noûs, a top analytic journal, in 1967, he placed Nihil philosophicum a nobis alienum putamus on the masthead. It is a take-off on Terence, philosophicum replacing humanum. It is telling that the Latin motto was removed by Castañeda's successors after his untimely death in September, 1991. Princeton University, I understand, removed the language requirement for the Ph.D. in philosophy in 1980. An appalling development. It has been said that if you don't know a foreign language, you don't know your own.

The fact that many analytic philosophers lack historical sense, knowledge of foreign languages, and broad culture is of course no excuse to jump over to the opposite camp, that of the 'Continental' philosophers. For lack of historical sense, they substitute historicism, which is just as bad. For lack of linguistic competence, they substitute a bizarre linguisticism in which the world dissolves into a text, a text susceptible of endless interpretation and re-interpretation. For lack of broad culture, they substitute a super-sophistication that empties into a miasma of sophistry and relativism. Worse, much of Continental philosophy, especially much of what is written in French, is border-line bullshit. Indeed, to cop a line from John Searle, one he applied to Jacques Derrida, Continental philosophy gives bullshit a bad name. Some substantiation here. It is therefore no surprise that the Continental types jump to embrace every loony idea that emanates from the Left.

You can see that I am warming to my theme. I am also brushing in very broad strokes. But details and documentation are readily supplied and have been supplied elsewhere on this site. In short, a pox on both houses. Be a maverick.

What inspired this post was a query of a correspondent. He wanted to know how to render 'seize the world' into Latin. Well, we know that 'seize the day' goes into Latin as carpe diem. And we should have picked up by now that 'world' is mundus. 'Seize' takes the accusative, and since mundus is a second declension masculine noun, we get: Carpe mundum. If I am wrong about this, Michael Gilleland will correct me.

And another thing. I find it appalling that so many people nowadays, college 'educated' people, are completely innocent of grammatical terminology. Words like 'genitive,' 'dative,' 'ablative,' etc. elicit a blank stare. Grammar being a propaedeutic to logic, it is no wonder that there are so many illogical people adrift in the world.

Now have a nice day. Seize it and squeeze it.

Nausea at Existence: A Continental Thick Theory

A reader wants me to comment on the analytic-Continental split. Perhaps I will do so in general terms later, but in this post I will consider one particular aspect of the divide that shows up in different approaches to existence. Roughly, Continental philosophers espouse the thick theory, while analytic philosophers advocate the thin theory. Of course there are exceptions to this rule: Your humble correspondent is an analytic thick theorist and so is Barry Miller. Whether there are any Continental thin theorists I don't know.

Why should analytic philosophers prefer the thin theory? Part of the reason, some will say, is that analysts tend to be superficial people: they are logically very sharp but woefully lacking in spiritual depth. They are superficial specimens of what Heidegger calls das Man, the 'they': lacking authenticity, they float along on the superficies of things. Bereft of a depth-dimension in themselves, they are blind to the world's depth-dimension. Blind to the world's depth-dimension, they are blind to existence. A Heideggerian might say that they are not so much blind as forgetful: they have succumbed to die Vergessenheit des Seins. The analysts, of course, will not admit to any such deficiencies of sight or memory. They will turn the tables and accuse Continentals such as Heidegger and Sartre of being muddle-headed mystics and obscurantists who commit school-boy blunders in logic. (Carnap's famous/notorious attack on Heidegger is a text-book case.)

So we have a nice little fight going, complete with name-calling. Perhaps a little exegesis of a passage from Sartre will help clarify the issue. I have no illusions about converting any thin theorist. I aim at clarity, not agreement. I will be happy if I can achieve an exact understanding of what we are disagreeing about and why we are disagreeing. When that goal is attained we can cheerfully agree to disagree.

So let's consider the famous 'chestnut tree' passage in Jean-Paul Sartre's novel, Nausea. The novel's protagonist, Roquentin, is in a park when he has a bout of temporary aphasia while contemplating the roots of a chestnut true. Words and their meanings vanish. He finds himself confronting a black knotty mass that frightens him. Then he has a vision:

It left me breathless. Never, until these last days, had I understood the meaning of 'existence.' I was like all the others, like the ones walking along the seashore, all dressed in their spring finery. I said, like them, 'The ocean is green; that white speck up there is a seagull,' but I didn't feel that it existed or that the seagull was an 'existing seagull'; usually existence hides itself. It is there, around us, in us, it is us, you can't say two words without mentioning it, but you can never touch it. When I believed I was thinking about it, I must
[have] believe[d] that I was thinking nothing, my head was empty, or there was just one word in my head, the word 'to be.' Or else I was thinking . . . how can I explain it? I was thinking of belonging, I was telling myself that the sea belonged to the class of green objects, or that that green was a part of the quality of the sea. Even when I looked at things I was miles from dreaming that they existed; they looked like scenery to me. I picked them up in my hands, they served me as tools, I foresaw their resistance. But that all happened on the surface.

If anyone had asked me what existence was, I would have answered, in good faith, that it was nothing, simply an empty form that was added to external things without changing anything in their nature. And then all of a sudden, there it was, clear as day: existence
had suddenly unveiled itself. It had lost the harmless look of an abstract category: it was the very paste of things, this root was kneaded into existence. Or rather the root, the park gates, the bench, the sparse grass, all that had vanished: the diversity of things, their individuality, were only an appearance, a veneer. This veneer had melted, leaving soft, monstrous masses, all in disorder — naked, in a frightful, obscene nakedness. (p. 127 tr. Lloyd Alexander, ellipsis in original.)

This marvellous passage records Roquentin's intuition (direct nonsensory perception) of Being or existence. (It would be interesting to compare in a subsequent post Jacques Maritain's Thomist intuition of Being with Sartre's existentialist intuition of Being.) Viewed through the lenses of logic, 'The green sea exists' is equivalent to 'The sea is green' and 'The sea belongs to the class of green objects.' For the (standard) logician, then, 'exists' and cognates is dispensable and the concept of existence is fully expressible in terms of standard logical machinery. Anything we say using 'exists(s)' we can also say without using 'exist(s). To give another example, 'Dragons do not exist' is logically equivalent to 'Everything is not a dragon.' If we want, we can avoid the word 'exist(s)' and substitute for it some logical machinery: the universal quantifier and the tilde (the sign for negation) as in our last example.

But why would a man like Peter van Inwagen — the head honcho of the thin theorists — want to avoid 'exist(s)'? Because he wants to show that existence is a thin notion: there is nothing more to it than can be captured using the thin notions of logic: quantification, negation, copulation, and identity. He wants to show that there is no reason to think that there is any metaphysical depth lurking behind 'exist(s)' and cognates, that there is no room for a metaphysics of existence as opposed to a logic of 'exist(s)'; nor room for any such project as Heidegger's fundamental ontology (Being and Time) or Sartre's phenomenological ontology (Being and Nothingness).

And why does the thin theorist go to all this deflationary trouble? Because he lacks this sense or intuition of existence that philosophers as diverse as Wittgenstein, Maritain, and Sartre share, a sense or intution he feels must be bogus and must rest on some mistake. He fancies himself the clear-headed foe of obfuscation and he sees nothing but obfuscation in talk of Being and existence.

But as I have been arguing ad nauseam (so to speak) over many a blog post, published article and book, sentences like 'The sea is green' presuppose for their truth that the sea is an existing sea. Compare the reference above to an existing seagull. And, as Sartre has Roquentin says, "usually existence hides itself." It hides itself from all of us most of the time when we are immersed in what Heidegger calls average everydayness (alltaegliche Durchschnittlichkeit, vide Sein und Zeit), and existence hides itself from the logician qua logician all the time. For all of us most of the time, and for logicians all of the time, existence is "nothing, simply an empty form."

In fact, that is a good statement of the thin theory: existence is nothing at all, apart from an empty logical form. Sea, seagull, bench, tree, root — but no existence of the sea, of the seagull, of the bench, etc. Sea, seagull, bench, tree, root, and some logical concepts. That's it.

"Usually existence hides itself." This invites mockery from the thin theorists. What? Existence plays hide-and-seek with us?! [Loud guffaws from the analytic shallow-pates.] To the existence-blind it must appear a dark and indeed incomprehensible saying. But of course to the blind that which is luminous must appear dark. Perhaps we can recast Sartre's loose and literary formulation in aseptic terms by saying that existence is a hidden and taken-for-granted presupposition of our discourse that for the most part remains hidden and taken-for-granted. Let me explain.

'The sea is green' and 'The green sea exists' are logically equivalent. But this equivalence rests on a tacit presupposition, namely, that the sentences are to be evaluated relative to a domain of existing items. The reason we can make the deflationary move of replacing the latter sentence with the former is because existence is already present, though hidden, in 'The sea is green.' 'The sea is green' can be parsed as follows: The sea is (exists) & the sea (is) green, where the parentheses around 'is' indicate that it functions as a pure copula, a pure predicative link and nothing more. The parsing makes it clear that the 'is' in 'The sea is green' exercises a dual function: it is not merely an 'is' of predication: it is also an 'is' of existence. Therefore, translation of 'The green sea exist' as 'The sea is green' does not eliminate existence as the thin theorist falsely assumes.

In material mode, the point is that nothing can have a property unless it exists. The sea cannot be green or slimy or stinky unless it exists. This existence of the sea, seagull, etc., however, is a presupposition that remains hidden as long as we comport ourselves in Heidegger's "average everydayness" manipulating things for our purposes but not wondering at their very existence. We have to shift out of our ordinary everyday attitude in order to be struck by the sheer existence of things. Perhaps the thin theorist is incapable of making that shift. But he really doesn't need to if he has followed my reasoning.

What the thin theorist does is to substitute logical Being for real Being. Note that I am not endorsing Sartre's theory of real Being: that it is an absurd excrescence, de trop (superfluous), unintelligible, etc. What I am endorsing is his insight that real Being is extralogical, that it is not a thin notion exhausted by the machinery of logic. Thus I am endorsing what is common to Sartre, Maritain, Wittgenstein, and others, namely, that existence is real not merely logical.

But what if you are one of those sober types who has never experienced anything like Heideggerian Angst or Sartrean nausea or Wittgenstein's wonder at the existence of the world? Well, I think you could still be brought by purely discursive methods to understand how existence cannot reduce to a purely logical notion. We shall see.