Continental Philosophy Book

Just as I expected, it all starts with Kant.

Critchley faced a damned difficult task, but, as with so many of the authors of these marvelous Oxford Press A Very Short Introduction series, he has managed to turn his 127 page allotment into a reasonable exposition upon what the murkily-etched Continental Philosophy is all about. While ever at pains to point out how unsound both geographically and methodologically the allusions to a European-based system of thinking are (and as opposed to a similarly ill-configured Anglo-American Analytic competition), Critchley does manage to bifurcate this modern philosophical split into competing strains of thought derived from the Critical Philosophy of Kant and its unforseen removal of all ballasts from the foundations of meaning. Basically, there is a chain that runs something like Benthamite->Knowledge->Critically Destructive->Reformist that comprises the Analytical side, and another that plays out along the lines of Coleridgean->Meaning->Hermaneutically Reconstructive->Traditional that can suitably be applied to the Continental opposite. Whereas the first-named has determined to discard metaphysics completely, aligning its stars with burgeoning modern science and using logic and language as its boundary determiners, the titular branch, obsessed by the idea of nihilism that is attendant to the removal of meaningful surety and infused by an alienating technology, seeks ways of combing the traditions and methods of the past that they might be deconstructed, reconfigured, and reintroduced as potentials for stabilizing and empowering mankind in an emancipatory manner. Whether it be Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Foucault or Derrida, each, in their own way, has that end in mind. And in the outlining and historical tracing of these connected Continental philosopher threads, Critchley has put together a suitably readable and thoughtful presentation of the Continental evolution through idealism, phenomenology, critical theory, and structuralism.

I've noticed that a few reviewers have objected to what they determine as an authorial preference for the Analytics even whilst professing an impartiality'particularly prevalent in his final chapter cautions to the two divergent sides, and in which these doubters have detected an unequal weight of seriousness. While not sufficiently knowledgeable to be able to counter these critiques, I will offer up an opinion to the effect that I found Critchley's bias to have been appreciably neutralized throughout; indeed, in the seminal chapter regarding the meeting-of-differing-minds between the Viennese Logical Positivist Carnap and the Phenomenological wunderkind Heidegger, my estimation is that the author did an exemplary job of positioning the latter's (much ridiculed) metaphysics-contra-metaphysics within the framework of the competing arguments and taking care to point out the nourishing qualities and potentiality within a thought that seeks to harness, in this case through Being, the stabilizing effect of a meaning attuned to a nature that, even then, many felt was slipping away from our understanding. YMMV, of course, but the lean towards Anglo-American modes of thinking was subtle enough that I rarely took note of it.

The author laments that philosophy has come to be so configured into these twin pillars emphasizing Knowledge via epistemology, and Meaning via hermaneutics, driven primarily by their respective doctrinal engines of logical analysis and phenomenology. That knowledge and meaning were once combined as a whole in the philosophical search for truth and man's modes of living in such upon this world, from the dimmest days of the Greeks through to the Enlightenment, is the fuel for Critchley's push for a near-future reconciliation between the estranged pathways. Finding hope in those who have been trying to reach across the aisle'Rorty, Cavell, et al'a recombinatory effort strikes him as a fruitful and desirable goal for modern philosophy to attain to: curbing the scientistic proclivities of the Analytics, and the obscurantist tendencies of the Continentals, that we might be able to realize that human life needs as much wisdom as intelligence if it is to be lived in a manner copacetic to our ofttimes unfathomable emplacement within the natural world.