Contemporary Continental Philosophy

The New Scepticism

Stuart Sim

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138295759
• eBook ISBN: 9781351586320
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This title was first published in 2000.  Contemporary continental philosophy is a widely-used, but in many ways a highly problematic, term and its exact frame of reference is not always clear. In its more recent French manifestations in particular, it continues to arouse considerable controversy and create bitter divisions, with particularly hostile reactions to the work of Derrida and others. Much work in the recent continental tradition can be fitted into a longer-running philosophical tradition of scepticism, and scepticism has always had the power to provoke and unsettle the philosophical establishment. Presenting an overview of the philosophical landscape of the continental tradition since the 1940s, this book traces the establishment of the new, super-scepticism as an intellectual paradigm with the power to threaten and disorientate existing world-views and more traditional styles of philosophical discourse - marking the continental divide. Exploring how contemporary continental philosophy from existentialism to postmodernism can be characterised as this new, more resistant form of scepticism, Sim identifies a clutch of key themes - including "difference", "the subject", "antifoundationalism", "dialectics" - which have been obsessively worked over by key thinkers in the Existentialist-Postmodernist period and demonstrates how these have contributed to the development of a super-sceptical outlook. Presenting a new theme-led approach to provide an entry into current debates in continental philosophy, Stuart Sim reintegrates the work of Sartre into the more recent continental tradition, and suggests that something qualitatively different is now occurring in French philosophy.

PART I

MAPPING

1

From Existentialism to Postmodernism: A Brief Narrative

A narrative of contemporary continental philosophy from existentialism to postmodernism can usefully begin with the following remarks from Foucault:

During the years 1945-65 (I am referring to Europe), there was a certain way of thinking correctly, a certain style of political discourse, a certain ethics of the intellectual. One had to be on familiar terms with Marx, not let one's dreams stray too far from Freud. And one had to treat sign-systems – the signifier – with the greatest respect. These were the three requirements that made the strange occupation of writing and speaking a measure of truth about oneself and one's time acceptable. Then came five brief, impassioned, jubilant, enigmatic years ...¹

Foucault's comments are to be found in the preface to Deleuze and Felix Guattari's Anti-Oedipus, a work which goes to some considerable lengths to distance itself from ways of ‘thinking correctly’. In the five years Foucault refers to so nostalgically (even although it is only 1972 when Anti-Oedipus appears), come the anti-Vietnam war movement and the 1968 événements – as well as a sharp turn away from authority, intellectual no less than political as Foucault intimates. Foucault goes on to note approvingly of Anti-Oedipus that it ‘wastes no time in discrediting the old idols, even though it does have a great deal of fun with Freud’.² Clearly, he feels that there has been a dramatic change in consciousness in the continental philosophical world: ‘having fun’, after all, has rarely been a mainstream philosophical concern.

While Foucault undoubtedly, and as we shall see not untypically, overstates the case as to the suddenness of the change and the homogeneity of pre-1965 continental thought (Sartre had little time for Freud, for example, and Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer were already making unmistakably post-Marxist noises in the later 1940s), he is right in noting a decline in respect for large-scale systems of thought, such as those identified with Marx, Freud, and structuralism, as the century progresses. This has to be regarded as essentially a continental phenomenon. While Marx, Freud, and structuralism did have their supporters in the English-speaking world, they never dominated intellectual (and certainly never philosophical) debate in the way that Foucault signals was the norm on the continent – especially in France. Given that was the case, there was unlikely to be such a savage reaction against those authorities, and what they represented, in the English-speaking world either. What they represented was a totalizing vision. Marx enabled you to make sense of socio-historical process in general; Freud, of human behaviour; structuralism, of the myriad of sign-systems that constituted the world of human experience. In each case we were being offered a key to the inner workings of systems in a way that invited us to become adepts: Marxists, Freudians, or structuralists united in the pursuit of truth through the application of our respective authoritative methods.

What we witness as the second half of the twentieth century unfolds, is a progressive loss of faith in those authoritative methods and totalizing visions amongst a significant number of the continental intellectual community: a loss of faith that eventually crystallises into super-scepticism and the continental divide. It is not just a case of a retreat from Marx, Freud, and structuralism, but also from the larger intellectual tradition of which they are such respected and high-profile representatives. This larger tradition is dated back to the ‘Enlightenment’ of the eighteenth century, and it has become commonplace in later twentieth-century theoretical debate to speak of the ‘Enlightenment project’. Most of the poststructuralist and postmodernist community have rejected the Enlightenment project, whereas figures such as Habermas, not to mention a host of others in the English-speaking academic world, have fought a spirited rearguard action on behalf of its values. Those values might be summed up briefly as follows: a belief in liberal humanism (respect for the individual and his/her rights, for example), in the power of reason to resolve human problems, and a commitment to a progressive improvement in the material quality of life. David E. Cooper places analytical philosophy firmly within such a value system, arguing that,

The analytical enterprise might be seen as one modern dress descendant of the same Enlightenment ambition which also developed into ‘scientism’ – that of a ‘maturity’ grown into through the perspicuous representation to ourselves of principles for the rational ordering of experience.³

In a general sense, the Enlightenment project has come to be identified with the cultural phenomenon we know as ‘modernity’.

Overall, Enlightenment is a project whose goal is the liberation of humanity from oppression in its many guises (economic, political, etc.), and this will probably strike most of us as entirely laudable, leading us in turn to wonder why so many thinkers would wish to react against it so vociferously. The answer is that for many of those thinkers (including, critically enough for the purposes of this study, pre-1965 ones such as Adorno and Horkheimer), the Enlightenment project, with its cult of reason, scientistic orientation, and general optimism about human nature, has become oppressive in its turn. Seen from that perspective, what humanity needs to be liberated from now is the authority deemed to be contained in the theories of Marx, Freud, and the structuralist movement: an authority which, for such as Foucault, Deleuze, and Adorno, inhibits human creativity, and can even be held responsible for such horrors as the Holocaust. Few poststructuralists or postmodernists have a good word to say about Enlightenment, although their tendency to dismiss the many positive aspects of the project has been roundly criticised by such as Habermas (it is always worth pondering on what the world might be like had the Enlightenment project never been embarked upon). Before considering this issue further, however, it is time to construct the promised brief narrative of the various ‘isms’ that go to make up contemporary continental philosophy.

The Continental Philosophical Scene: 1940s-1990s

To telescope the narrative in the first instance: it charts a shift from existentialism, with its emphasis on the individual, to structuralism, with its emphasis on the system, through to the reaction against the totalizing trend in structuralism in poststructuralist and postmodernist thought. A concern with the individual begins to re-emerge, forming a link back to existentialism (which I wish to emphasise); although it will be a different kind of individual, in a different kind of cultural setting, that we shall find in those later movements. Phenomenology remains a source of inspiration throughout, with both existentialism and deconstruction drawing freely on the work of Heidegger in particular. Figures from the pre-war era such as the Germans Heidegger, Adorno, and Horkheimer, will continue to play a significant role on the post-war scene, although it is fair to say that German philosophy as a whole features less of the upheavals that mark out the French tradition over the period of our study.

Sartre is a dominant intellectual presence in French life throughout the first part of our period of study, with his major philosophical work, Being and Nothingness, casting a long shadow on the subsequent development of French philosophy. Rather unusually for a philosophical movement, existentialism even achieved cult status in the years following the end of the Second World War, and Sartre and his circle – most notably Simone de Beauvoir and Albert Camus – became high-profile public figures. Existentialism's popularity probably owed more to the literary endeavours of the Sartre circle (Sartre himself being a successful playwright and novelist), as well as the bohemian life-style of that circle, than on philosophically dense works such as Being and Nothingness; but some sense of that work nevertheless seeped through into the public consciousness and it remains arguably the great work of existentialist philosophy. Sartre's influence was, therefore, very hard for French philosophers to escape from during the heyday of existentialism in the 1940s and 1950s. Many experienced this influence as a form of intellectual tyranny (Foucault for one most certainly did), but Sartre's star has waned considerably since his death in 1980. Already in his later career a reaction had set in, with the Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960) finding little favour with the new generation of Foucault et al.

Existentialism is a form of philosophy that strongly emphasises individual experience, taking issue with the Cartesian model of the individual human being as a conjunction of mind and body, with mind constituting the essence. One of the generalisations that can reasonably be made about recent continental philosophy is that it is deeply suspicious of essentialism, and that anti-essentialist bias certainly can be seen at work in Sartre. Anti-essentialists query whether there can be any definable essence to being or consciousness in the sense that Descartes, for example, believed there was. Cogito ergo sum, ‘I think therefore I am’, declared that thought, or the mind, represented the essence of human being, and that this essence preceded existence – and could, in fact, exist without a physical body to house it. In Being and Nothingness Sartre takes issue with this form of essentialism by insisting that existence precedes essence, thus turning the cogito on its head.

Being and Nothingness discriminates between being-in-itself, being-for-itself and non-being, or nothingness. Being-in-itself is inert being of the type that is found in an object (a tree or chair, for example); whereas being-for-itself is what humans display – although they are also beings-in-themselves at the same time. Nothingness is the perpetual threat of non-being to which being is always exposed, and it is part and parcel of the human condition that consciousness must learn to come to terms with ‘the permanent possibility of non-being, outside us and within’.⁴ Existentialism presents us with a world where the individual is an isolated being, ‘abandoned’ into existence as Sartre puts it,⁵ for no apparent reason. Heidegger had similarly spoken earlier in Being and Time (1927) of our being ‘thrown into existence’.⁶ Given that we are abandoned into the world, and that there is no external reason for our existence (no God to give meaning or purpose to our lives, for example), it is not surprising that we experience a sense of anguish about our individual situation. ‘In anguish I apprehend myself at once as totally free and as not being able to derive the meaning of the world except as coming from myself.’⁷

The human condition is, therefore, one of absurdity (not to acknowledge this is to lapse into ‘bad faith'), and pessimism would seem to beckon. The optimistic side of th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The New Scepticism and the Continental Divide
• PART I: MAPPING
• PART II: THEMES & ISSUES
• PART III: APPLICATIONS
• PART IV: COUNTERACTIONS
• Conclusion: Living with Super-Scepticism
• Bibliography
• Index