Why Analytical Existentialism Matters

[Due to technical issues with Typepad yesterday, I am running this for another day.--ES]

Analytical Existentialism is the use of an analytical style to investigate topics that matter to us as human beings capable of feelings and anxieties or joys while doing justice to our first-personal (even phenomological) perspective on these topics (recall this post on Laurie Paul; and this post on Ruth Chang). While Laurie Paul's work has revealed the potential and thrill of analytical existentialism in our times, I was introduced to analytical existentialism around 1991 or 1992 by Jeff McConnell, an instructor at Tufts. If you get a BA from Harvard, a PhD from MIT, and teach at Tufts you are not exactly obscure, but Jeff has published little (this is the only article I am familiar with). I took 'intro to philosophy' and 'existentialism' with Jeff. The 'intro to philosophy' course included Plato's Meno, Descartes's Meditations, Kant's Prolegomena (I think), and a lot of readings from Ammerman's Classics of Analytical Philosophy volume. (We may have also read from the Rorty volume.) In the course on 'existentialism' we read Kierkegaard and Heidegger and such figures, as well as some readings from analytical authors (e.g., Munitz, Nagel, etc.) on topics like 'death,' but the course was really an excuse for Jeff to try out ways to develop the most precise and rigorous was of asking the question 'why do I exist,' (as asked from the first person-perspective). 

I learned that Jeff was working on a manuscript on the topic -- why do I exist? -- by accident; once, I was accompanying John Rawls to his car in the company of Jeff after a key-note that Rawls had given at Tufts. We got lost in the College-Avenue car-park looking for Rawls' car. It was a grey and drizzly day, and I was burning to ask Rawls some questions. (The key one for me was how Rawls would answer the Nietzschean that claimed all value is will to power.) But by the time we had found the car, we were running late for dinner, and all three of us were a mixture of embarrassed, hungry, tired, and contemplative. As we were driving on Mass Ave, Rawls turned to Jeff. (They were both sitting in the front seats, so I was straining to lean forward.) 'Are you still working on why you exist?' 'Yes, Jack," Jeff said, and he added something about how he had made progress on his manuscript. I wouldn't say that Rawls snickered, but I had the distinct impression he chuckled. Quite possibly, it was a warm and generous laugh, but the conversation seems to have ended there (in my memory--for all I know Jeff said a lot more).

It is no surprise that the knowledge argument* figures in both McConnell and Paul because they are both interested in exploring the other side of the limits of science (which tends to be associated with a third person perspective; they may also be interested in non-physical facts, but I leave that aside here.) This does not make either anti-science; McConnell and Paul draw on scientific findings in their explorations. Science is, in fact, extremely good at probing the mental life that is hidden to ourselves: we are now all familiar with, say, tacit biases and inattentional blindness.+ And we might use such findings as a starting point to explore the biases produced by our disciplined, intellectual reflexes (recall). But science cannot displace analytical existentialism.**

 

One reason to welcome and encourage analytical existentialism is that it makes us more attentive and attuned to our experiences. As I see it, the main aim of analytical existentialism is not to generate the ‘input’ to arguments, data or a future science (although that is not impossible, of course), but to re-orient our attention toward the (previously) overlooked (including overlooked by science). If philosophy were a popularity contest then one would aim to make visible the most universal or pleasing of the overlooked experiences. But I would hope that one were to attempt to make visible the most salient overlooked experiences, and these may be thought very rare; I won’t offer an exhaustive list of considerations of salience, but experiences that make visible the unjust, the particular, the harmed, the cruel, the non-‘normal’ all are part of the moral project of philosophizing. For, analytical existentialism inoculates against the the dangerous consequence of systematization and generalization: the effacement of the particular. 

So, while analytical egalitarianism will always flirt with the danger of being narcissistic and self-absorbed, its point is to generate concepts that make the previously overlooked -- or those barely conscious feelings that are thought to be improbable -- available for conversation. To be clear, sometimes a new concept (or term) that is consequent to the analysis of an analytical existentialist can be part of a future science as well as make visible salient, overlooked experiences.

It's been a very long time since I visited Boston, and so I have no idea how far Jeff has advanced on his project since those days.  The example of Jeff, who in an earlier age had risked his life as a journalist covering the misdeeds of American Administrations abroad, reminds me that some philosophical lives follow the lodestone of necessity. I am not capable of following Jeff's example, and these Digressions are my compromise between such necessity and my debts to the profession. But if analytical existentialism is part of the future of philosophy, then it is likely that McConnell is the most significant philosopher I have encountered.

 

*I have never been charmed by the argument, but about that some other time.

+I thank Anna de Bruyckere for urging this on me.

**I'll say more about that some other time.

Comments

[Nick Smyth]

Hi Eric,

I found this all very interesting. Two questions. First: what would you say to a critic who (gently) chided you for inserting the word "analytical" into the name of this research program? Does this word just signal a certain style of writing, perhaps a preference for the literal over the allegorical, or for plain language over obfuscatory prose? If so, might the program not just be called "existentialism"?

Second: would you include Bernard Williams as an analytical existentialist? I suspect he'd be a good fit: many of his arguments against moral theory were grounded solidly in the first-personal experience of what it is like to confront the demands of such theories given one's prior commitments (he puts the characters of Jim, Gauguin and Agamemmnon to use here). You could even see Williams as developing a kind of practical metaphysics of the self based on commitments and projects, in a way that was enthusiastically adopted by Korsgaard (another candidate for membership in this school, I think).

[Eric Schliesser]

Well, I am the first to admit that 'an analytical style' is very vague and not helpful in a proper definition. But, to answer your first question, yes, it's related not just to a style of writing but to a way of doing philosophy and norms of evaluation that are commonly associated with the analytical tradition (diverse as it is).