On Analytic and Continental Clarity (Collingwood and McGuiggan.)

We have, then, two sorts of project, the scientific and the poetic, and two corresponding norms of clarity. Scientists, whose concepts are additions to our experience or (in other words) discrete from other concepts, properly use strictly defined, technical terms to refer to these wholly new and discrete things. This use of language is appropriate to its subject matter and so is content-directedly clear. Poets, whose concepts expand or develop our experience, appropriately do not use technical terms, which would inhibit clarity for them. What is content-directedly clear in poetry is language that is stretched and grown.

What has this all got to do with philosophy? Well, Analytic philosophers often think that philosophy is engaged in the same sort of project as science. Not (normally) exactly the same project, but a project similar enough to it that similar methodologies, and so similar norms of communication, should obtain. In particular, Analytic philosophers characteristically make a virtue of using technical terms(,) as scientists do. Philosophy that fails to adhere to the norms of communication appropriate to this project—such as Continental philosophy or the more theoretical branches of literary criticism, which often ignore or even flout them—is then branded unclear, with the accusation that this is needless naturally consequent. What I have argued in this paper so far should give us reason to think that this dismissal is too quick, and so let us now take seriously Collingwood’s suggestion that “the philosopher must go to school with the poets” (EPM, 214).---James Camien McGuiggan (2022) Scientific, Poetic, and Philosophical Clarity Metaphilosophy 53:5.

McGuiggan tagged me in a twitter thread (here) introducing the paper I have quoted above. I noticed with pleasure and vanity that some of my blog posts are cited rather prominently in the paper, although (mysteriously to me) not the posts I have written on clarity in analytic philosophy (recall here on Carnap and Quine; here on Ernest Nagel). Despite this modest disappointment, I read the paper, and I am very glad I did so. It's a lovely work with lots of clever illustrations from poetry, has useful distinctions, and you get a nice introduction to Collingwood's ideas from an independently minded, but true believer. (And I found the argument an invitation go back and re-read some Collingwood in the future.)

A key distinction is the one between content-directed clarity and audience-directed clarity. Content-directed clarity involves (presentational) form that is appropriate to the content. Whereas audience-directed clarity involves the aptness/fit of the norms of communication that we adopt given our intended audience. This distinction is part of a wider taxonomy (including presentational clarity, clarity of thought, etc.), so don't complain (yet) it's not exhaustive.

Now, content directed clarity and audience directed clarity need not be opposed to or even fully independent of each other. After all, what counts as the proper presentational form apt for particular content, may well be governed, in part, by the norms our communication falls under given our intended audience. (This seems fully compatible with what McGuiggan writes, but if you think it's silly attribute the view to me.) We may, for example, think rightly that a sonnet would be best for a certain content, but decide that a carefully constructed note in Analysis would be more likely to reach most professional philosophers, and advance our careers. On a less dramatic scale such trade-offs are routine in our professional lives (due to word-count restrictions, citational practices, refereeing practices, etc.), and we make them -- sometimes not without anguish -- almost constantly in our publication practices as well as our lectures/colloquia.

If I understand McGuiggan correctly (see the second paragraph quoted above), on his view analytic philosophers criticize or disparage continental philosophy for violating the norms of audience directed clarity that analytic philosophers adhere to. And the reason analytic philosophers do so is that we (pretend my defense of synthetic philosophy is just a thought experiment) falsely assume that continental philosophers are engaged in the same underlying project, and so miss that continental philosophers are shaped by different content-directed standards. Let's call this McGuiggan's Diagnosis or if you prefer, 'McGuiggan's Diagnosis.'

What's neat about McGuiggan's Diagnosis -- and this also lends it some evidence -- is that it helps explain why some analytic philosophers think it's an okay project to translate continental works into the vernacular of analytic philosophy (say for students and for professional advancement) without thinking something really important is lost. This is a thriving genre, so pick your favorite example. (I am not being too sarcastic here because arguably my present Foucault project falls under this genre.)

As an aside, what's odd about McGuiggan's Diagnosis is that if it's true even the most fair-minded least polemical analytic philosophers somehow never grasp what continental philosophy is up to, or, more insidiously, keep quiet about it when we do and our peers attack it unfairly. So, I was a bit sad he did not engage with (say) Kolodny's work on Foucault's cryptonormativity or some of the analytics that turn Heidegger into a fellow pragmatist (and possibly share his theological aims). 

Be that as it may, since it's not uncommon to insist that continental philosophy is poetry adjacent and analytic science adjacent, I won't complain about this move. (If only because it strengthens my prediction back in 2014 (recall) that Wittgenstein will end up treated as a continental.) One problem with McGuiggan's diagnosis is that he essentializes analytic and continental philosophy. (This is notoriously a dubious move.) In particular, he claims that continental philosophy tries to expand our (possible) experience whereas analytic philosophy tries to account for additions to our experiences. Let me stipulate, for the sake of argument, that this indeed fits, say, Heidegger (an example he repeatedly uses) and your favorite philosopher of logic quite well.

So, I have two reservations (that spring from this essentialization). First, some continental philosophers and some analytic philosophers are manifestly engaged in overlapping enterprises. This is most evident in the revival of post-Kantian metaphysics among continentals and among analytics. When I disagree, say, with Meillassoux's 'speculative realism' or the object oriented ontology of Graham, the disagreements are not primarily about the worth/aims or the presentation of the project(s), it's about the contents of the position. When I disagree with, say, Badiou, I do disagree with the Marxist or revolutionary aims of the project, but I have trouble taking it seriously because of the weight and uses he places on set theory.

To be sure, there are circumstances where there is no overlap in the first order aims. Recently, using Deleuzian tools, Jeff Bell has convinced me that in the 1970s Foucault is trying to state the features that are presupposed such that a stable (what we analytics call) semantics and pragmatics (in Carnap's sense) are or appears to be possible. I don't think analytic philosophers are, at present, really engaged in that project despite our search for grounds or for the conditions of a final language, even if the metaphysical position Foucault arrives at (a pragmatism about pragmatics welded to a kind of realist semantics) is not far removed from ones I am familiar with (say, as Jeff suggests, Putnam at some time.)* That's to say we could get involved in this project. I mention this example because if it is right about Foucault it looks to me as if Foucault's special vocabulary then is primarily due to the need to account for additions to our 'experience.' (I use scare quotes there because we can't really experience directly the conditions that make semantics or even pragmatics possible; perhaps in the latter we can sense their absence when a practice breaks down or has moved on.) I don't mean to deny that, perhaps, Foucault is also interested in creating new additions -- to be a philosophical legislator --, but that's beside the point here.

Second, it's not entirely clear to me that that the contrast between accounting for an addition to experience and for expanding or developing our experience is really all that robust where it matters. By this I don't just mean that there are philosophical poets (Lucretius paradigmatically), but rather that it seems to echo a kind of context of discovery vs context of justification distinction. And the problem with that distinction, for present purposes, is that discovery is never wholly discrete from previously justified or to be justified work. That is, within science (and analytic philosophy) there are going to be moments where new terms are introduced and defined in order to make new experience possible, or to begin to classify/measure (etc.) it (with an eye toward new justification).

For related reasons, I also don't think McGuiggan's approach does full justice to the aims of conceptual engineering or ameliorative analysis in ethics and political philosophy. When 'epistemic injustice' gets complemented by 'epistemic violence' and 'epistemic pollution' these new concepts are introduced to make new diagnoses and new forms of intelligibility of one's experiences possible, but also with an aim to change the conditions that make these experiences possible (even though the term was not around). The point here is not to challenge the coherence of McGuiggan's distinctions, but to suggest that the diagnosis seems to presuppose conditions that are not always present.

 

*I also don't think Deleuze and (let me be immodest for a second) and I are busy with the same enterprise when we read historical sources like Spinoza or Hume (in remarkably similar fashion).

 

Comments

[James Camien McGuiggan]

Hi Eric, thanks again so much for this thoughtful response to (or reflection on?) my paper. It's immensely flattering, and I was quite astounded to see that you posted it something like twelve hours after I pinged you on Twitter. I won't be coming within a country mile of that insight:time ratio, and really I'm just coming here to thank you for drawing out some connections and literature that I'm not aware of.

The only point where I maybe don't follow you is in the last paragraph, concerning conceptual engineering. I think I argued in the paper that Collingwood is a conceptual engineer avant la lettre. Certainly, I would view a term such as "epistemic violence" as an expansion of our concept of "violence" into the epistemic domain. Is your disagreement that I don't do justice to the practical/political element of conceptual engineering? The conceptual engineer, that is, as you see them, wants not only to show that there can be violence in the epistemic realm but use that discovery to mitigate that violence? If so, I think you're right that Collingwood would not consider this second aim philosophical (cf., for indirect evidence, how he speaks about propaganda in The Principles of Art), though he would do so in a spirit of conceptual/disciplinary tidiness rather than a spirit of dismissiveness (i.e., he would say, "it's not philosophy, but it's no less worth doing for that"). For my own part, I don't think too much hangs on this and don't have an opinion. But perhaps I've mistaken your point altogether here.

[ERIC SCHLIESSER]

Hi James,
Thank you for your interesting and kind response. It's sufficient for my argument that Collingwood would deny (somewhat surprisingly to me) that shaping the world (as it is in mitigating projects) is philosophical.
But the more important point lurking there is that the contrast between accounting for an addition to experience and for creating the conditions for expanding or developing our experience strikes me as not sufficiently robust or encompassing to treat it as fundamental to the distinction between analytic and continental (in virtue of the fact that both sides of the contrast may be present within a tradition and that is ad hoc to deny falsifying examples as not sufficiently philosophical).

[James Camien McGuiggan]

Right, I see the point now. Collingwood would have a restrained role for world-shaping in philosophy: in clarifying (or in other words engineering) concepts, you in some sense change them - they are clarified - and this changes any actions that are based on those concepts. But not just any conceptual change counts as clarification: one could also make a perfectly clear concept different because it's, e.g., bigoted. Collingwood doesn't consider this sort of world-shaping, and he might consider it philosophy, but my sense is that he would consider it more as a political activity. I'm happy to be corrected here, though: it's a while since I've looked at the texts.

Regarding the analytic/continental divide: yes, I fully agree. Indeed I was hoping to avoid any essentialisation of the traditions, and used the example of the analytic/continental divide in the spirit of, "So, dear analytic philosopher who thinks that continental philosophy is unclear because it doesn't use technical terms: I'll concede, for the sake of argument, your characterisation of continental philosophy re technical terms, but I refuse the further step that it's thereby unclear." But in fact I think this characterisation is only somewhat true (when I give examples of philosophers using poetic language on pp. 14-15 (pp. 28-29 of the preprint), I give examples from both traditions). And even this is my personal, incidental opinion; as far as the paper goes, the more important point is the abstract one of prising apart poetic use of language and unclarity.