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Continental Philosophy

Husserl began from the old claim. “From its earliest beginnings philosophy has claimed to be rigorous science”, the science that “renders possible from an ethico-religious point of view a life regulated by pure rational norms”; but “I do not say that philosophy is an imperfect science; I say simply that it is not yet a science at all, that as science it has not yet begun”. He set it against the philosophy of worldviews: “Weltanschauung philosophy and scientific philosophy are sharply distinguished as two ideas”. He wanted to go to the things: “The impulse to research must proceed not from philosophies but from things and from the problems connected with them. Philosophy, however, is essentially a science of true beginnings, or origins” (“Philosophy as Rigorous Science”, 1911, tr. Lauer). After him, for Merleau-Ponty “The most important lesson of the reduction is the impossibility of a complete reduction”; for Gadamer “The very idea of a definitive interpretation [of anything] seems to be intrinsically contradictory”; and the later Sartre held that “Every philosophy is practical”, “a social and political weapon” (all as the IEP quotes them).

Heidegger called for “a destruction … in which the traditional concepts … are deconstructed down to the … sources from which they were drawn” (as the IEP quotes it), and in his lecture “Was ist das – die Philosophie?” (Cerisy-la-Salle, 1955) confined himself to the Greek origin, starting from “The Greek word philosophia indicates the direction” (as Dominique Janicaud reports it). His later thinking promised “a new ground and a new foundation upon which we can stand and endure in the world of technology without being imperiled by it” (Discourse on Thinking, as the IEP quotes it). His and Derrida’s ends of philosophy are on The end of philosophy.

Max Horkheimer set critical theory a social aim: critical conduct is “auf diese Emanzipation gerichtet”, directed at this emancipation, and has “die Veränderung des Ganzen zum Ziele”, the transformation of the whole, as its aim; “An der Existenz des kritischen Verhaltens … hängt heute die Zukunft der Humanität”, the future of humanity depends today on the existence of the critical attitude (“Traditionelle und kritische Theorie”, 1937). For Habermas the questions of morality and ethics are matters “for the discourse between citizens”, not for the philosopher (as the IEP quotes him). Derrida refused his work the name of method: “Deconstruction is not a method and cannot be transformed into one” (“Letter to a Japanese Friend”, 1983, in its published English translation); from the 1980s he held that “deconstruction is justice” (as the IEP quotes him).

The historian of ancient philosophy Pierre Hadot held that “Philosophical discourse, then, originates in a choice of life and an existential option—not vice versa”, that “There can never be a philosophy or philosophers outside a group, a community—in a word, a philosophical ‘school’”, and that “The task of philosophical discourse will therefore be to reveal and rationally justify this existential option” (What Is Ancient Philosophy?, 1995, tr. Chase). He extended the claim: “I also think that this is ultimately true of all philosophy”, since “practical reason takes primacy over theoretical reason”. The modern university he judged by the same measure: “University philosophy therefore remains in the same position it occupied in the Middle Ages: it is still a servant, sometimes of theology, sometimes of science”. Hadot wrote that his 1977 article “Exercices spirituels” “had some influence on Michel Foucault’s idea of the ‘culture of the self’, presented in his book Le souci de soi (1984)”, and the two disagreed over Descartes. Foucault, as Hadot quotes him: “Before Descartes, a subject could have access to the truth only by carrying out beforehand a certain work upon himself which made him susceptible of knowing the truth”; for Descartes “it is enough that I be any subject capable of seeing what is evident … Evidence has been substituted for askésis”. Hadot answered that each of the Meditations “is indeed a spiritual exercise”. For Foucault, the critical ontology of ourselves is to be conceived “not, certainly, as a theory, a doctrine, nor even as a permanent body of knowledge that is accumulating; it has to be conceived as an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life”, “a historico-practical test of the limits that we may go beyond, and thus as work carried out by ourselves upon ourselves as free beings” (“What is Enlightenment?”, in the English of The Foucault Reader, 1984).