Continental Philosophy

Continental philosophy is the name given, mostly by English-speaking philosophers, to the traditions that developed in Germany and France in the twentieth century: phenomenology, existentialism, critical theory, hermeneutics, structuralism and post-structuralism. The label is loose and a little odd, since it groups thinkers by geography while some of the most important of them worked in New York, Jerusalem or Algiers, and it was coined from outside. What the traditions share is a set of ancestors, above all Kant, Hegel, Marx, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, and a set of concerns: lived experience, history, the self and its freedom, and the social and political forces that shape how people think.

These philosophers wrote through two world wars, the rise and fall of Nazi Germany, the Holocaust, the end of empire in Africa and Asia and the student revolts of 1968, and their work often responded directly to those events. Many became public intellectuals in a way few academic philosophers elsewhere did. The tradition grows out of nineteenth-century philosophy and developed in parallel with analytic philosophy, from which it gradually separated; how that split happened is told in the last part of this article.

Edmund Husserl was born in 1859 in Moravia, then part of the Austrian Empire, trained as a mathematician in Leipzig, Berlin and Vienna, and taught at Halle, Göttingen and Freiburg. In his Logical Investigations (1900–1901) he attacked psychologism, the view that the laws of logic are merely facts about how human minds happen to work, a criticism he shared with Gottlob Frege. He then proposed a new discipline, phenomenology, the careful description of experience exactly as it presents itself.

Husserl's starting point was intentionality, the idea, taken from his teacher Franz Brentano, that consciousness is always consciousness of something: we do not just see, we see a tree; we do not just fear, we fear a storm. In Ideas (1913) he described a method he called the epoché or bracketing, in which the philosopher sets aside the everyday assumption that the world exists independently and attends only to how things appear and how consciousness gives them meaning. Phenomenology was meant to be a rigorous science that would ground all the others. In his last work, The Crisis of European Sciences (1936), written after the Nazi regime had stripped him of his university privileges because of his Jewish birth, he introduced the lifeworld, the everyday world of shared experience that science abstracts from and tends to forget. He died in 1938, and a Franciscan priest smuggled some forty thousand pages of his shorthand manuscripts to Leuven in Belgium, where they are still kept.

Husserl's most brilliant student, Martin Heidegger, turned phenomenology in a new direction. Being and Time (1927) asked a question he believed philosophy had forgotten since the Greeks: what it means for anything to be at all. He approached it through the kind of being that asks the question, human existence, which he called Dasein, being-there. Humans are not first detached minds looking at objects, as Descartes had pictured them, but beings already thrown into a world, using tools, caring about things, and absorbed in what one does and says. A hammer is first something to hammer with, not an object with properties. Authentic existence comes from facing one's own death and choosing one's life instead of drifting along with the anonymous crowd.

In 1929, at an international university course in Davos, Switzerland, Heidegger debated the neo-Kantian Ernst Cassirer, and many observers took the encounter as a passing of the torch to a younger, more radical generation. In 1933 Heidegger joined the Nazi Party and served for a year as rector of the University of Freiburg, giving speeches in support of the regime. He never clearly repudiated this, and the publication from 2014 of his private Black Notebooks, which contain antisemitic passages, renewed the debate about how far his politics infects his philosophy. His later work turned to language, poetry and a critique of modern technology as a way of revealing the world only as a stock of resources to be used. His influence reached from French existentialism to the Kyoto School founded by Nishida Kitarō in Japan.

Phenomenology reached France in the 1930s, and after the German occupation of Paris in 1940 it became the basis of the movement known as existentialism. Its central figure, Jean-Paul Sartre, had studied Husserl in Berlin in 1933–34. In Being and Nothingness (1943) he argued that human beings have no fixed nature: existence precedes essence. A paper knife is made to a design, but no design precedes a human being, who must make himself through choices. We are therefore radically free, and also responsible, and the attempt to deny that freedom by pretending we have no choice, which Sartre called bad faith, is a form of self-deception. His lecture Existentialism Is a Humanism (1945), delivered to a crowded hall just after the Liberation, made the word fashionable. Sartre later moved towards Marxism, sided for years with the Soviet Union in the Cold War, and strongly opposed France's war in Algeria.

Simone de Beauvoir, Sartre's lifelong companion and intellectual equal, developed an ethics of freedom that stressed how much freedom depends on others and on circumstances. The Second Sex (1949) applied this to women. Her best-known claim is that one is not born but becomes a woman: femininity is not a natural fact but a situation produced by society, in which man is treated as the norm and woman as the Other. The book became a founding text of later feminism across the world.

Albert Camus, born in French Algeria, rejected the label existentialist but is usually counted among them. The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) begins from the absurd, the clash between the human demand for meaning and the silence of the universe, and concludes that one must imagine Sisyphus, pushing his rock forever, as happy. The Rebel (1951) criticised revolutionary violence and led to a public break with Sartre. Camus won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957 and died in a car crash in 1960. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in Phenomenology of Perception (1945), argued that perception is the work not of a disembodied mind but of a living body that already knows its way about the world, an idea that has since influenced cognitive science.

A separate tradition began with the Institute for Social Research, founded in Frankfurt am Main in 1923 with private money to study society from a Marxist standpoint. Under Max Horkheimer, director from 1930, its members, among them Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm and the critic Walter Benjamin, combined Marx with Freud and with empirical sociology. In Traditional and Critical Theory (1937) Horkheimer argued that social theory should not merely describe society but aim to free people from domination, and the name critical theory stuck.

Almost all its members were Jewish, and in 1933 the institute fled, eventually to Columbia University in New York. Benjamin died in 1940 at the Spanish border while trying to escape. In exile near Los Angeles, Horkheimer and Adorno wrote Dialectic of Enlightenment (published in 1947), which argued that the Enlightenment's reason, meant to free humanity from myth, had become a tool of control, visible both in fascism and in the mass entertainment of what they called the culture industry. Marcuse stayed in America, and his One-Dimensional Man (1964) made him a hero of the student New Left. The institute returned to Frankfurt in 1950. Its leading figure in the next generation, Jürgen Habermas (born 1929), rescued a more hopeful idea of reason: in his work on the public sphere and in The Theory of Communicative Action (1981) he argued that the norms implicit in open, uncoerced discussion can ground democracy. His successor Axel Honneth built a theory of social justice around recognition.

Hannah Arendt studied with Heidegger and Karl Jaspers, fled Germany in 1933, was interned in France and reached New York in 1941. She refused the title of philosopher, preferring political theorist, but her books are among the most widely read of the tradition. The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) traced Nazism and Stalinism to antisemitism, imperialism and the breakdown of the nation-state, and described how totalitarian rule uses terror and ideology to make people superfluous. The Human Condition (1958) distinguished labour, work and action, and argued that the modern world had neglected action, the shared public life in which people appear to one another as free and equal. Reporting on the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, she described his evil as banal, the work of a thoughtless functionary more than a demonic monster; the phrase provoked fierce controversy and is still argued over.

Hermeneutics, originally the art of interpreting scripture and law, became in the twentieth century a general philosophy of understanding. Hans-Georg Gadamer, another student of Heidegger, argued in Truth and Method (1960) that we never understand a text or a past age from nowhere. We bring prejudices, in the neutral sense of prior judgements, from our own tradition, and understanding happens when our horizon meets and fuses with the horizon of the text. This was a challenge to the idea that the humanities should imitate the objectivity of the natural sciences, and it led to a famous exchange with Habermas, who worried that it gave too much authority to tradition. In France, Paul Ricoeur combined phenomenology and hermeneutics in long studies of metaphor, narrative, time and memory, arguing that people make sense of their own lives by telling stories about them. Emmanuel Levinas, born in Kaunas in Lithuania, drew on Husserl and on Jewish thought to argue that ethics, the demand made on us by the face of another person, comes before all theory.

From the 1950s a rival movement displaced existentialism in Paris. Structuralism began in linguistics, with the lectures of Ferdinand de Saussure, published in 1916, which argued that words get their meaning not from the things they name but from their differences from other words within a system. The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, who had done fieldwork in Brazil in the 1930s, applied the idea to kinship and myth. In The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949) and later studies, he argued that the myths and marriage rules of very different peoples are variations on a small number of underlying structures of opposition, such as raw and cooked, nature and culture. Others applied similar methods to psychoanalysis (Jacques Lacan), literature (Roland Barthes) and Marxism (Louis Althusser). The common thread was a shift of attention away from the free, conscious subject celebrated by Sartre towards impersonal systems that shape what individuals can think and say.

The thinkers grouped as post-structuralists both continued structuralism and broke with its hope for a fixed, scientific map of structures. Michel Foucault wrote histories of madness (1961), medicine, the human sciences, prisons and sexuality, each showing that categories which seem natural, such as the madman, the delinquent or the homosexual, emerged at particular moments together with institutions to manage them. Discipline and Punish (1975) traced the shift from public torture to the modern prison and argued that power in modern societies works less by violence than by surveillance, examination and the shaping of habits, which spread from the prison to schools, factories and hospitals. Power and knowledge, he argued, are bound up with each other.

Jacques Derrida, born in 1930 near Algiers, became known to American scholars at a conference at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore in 1966 and published three books in 1967. He argued that Western philosophy since Plato had relied on hierarchies such as speech over writing, presence over absence and the literal over the metaphorical, and that close reading shows these hierarchies to be unstable in the very texts that rely on them. This practice, deconstruction, deeply influenced literary studies, architecture and law, especially in the United States. Gilles Deleuze wrote studies of Hume, Spinoza, Nietzsche and Bergson and a philosophy of difference and becoming; with the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari he wrote Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980), which pictured society, desire and thought as networks, or rhizomes, without a single centre. The May 1968 revolt in Paris formed the backdrop to much of this work. Feminist thinkers such as Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous and Julia Kristeva, and later the American Judith Butler, whose Gender Trouble (1990) described gender as something performed, carried these ideas into new fields. In a related vein, Frantz Fanon, trained in phenomenology and psychiatry, analysed the lived experience of colonised people, a strand followed in African and Africana philosophy.

Around 1900 there was no divide. Frege and Husserl read and corresponded with each other, both attacked psychologism, and the young Gilbert Ryle lectured on Husserl at Oxford and reviewed Being and Time; the British philosopher Michael Dummett later compared the two traditions to the Rhine and the Danube, rising close together and flowing to different seas. The separation came from several causes at once. The first was method: Frege and Bertrand Russell made formal logic and the sciences their model, while Husserl and Heidegger began from the description of experience and from history. In 1932 Rudolf Carnap of the Vienna Circle published an essay that used a sentence of Heidegger's about the nothing as his prime example of a statement that looks meaningful but is not, and to many analytic philosophers this seemed to settle the matter.

The second cause was politics and exile. The Nazi seizure of power drove the Vienna Circle and many logicians to Britain and the United States, where they helped make logical empiricism the American norm, while the existential and Marxist traditions concentrated in Paris and, after the war, in Frankfurt. The third was language and institutions: after 1945 most English-speaking departments trained students in logic and the philosophy of language and seldom taught French or German texts, while French and German students read Hegel and Heidegger and seldom read Quine. An encounter between leading English-speaking and French philosophers at the abbey of Royaumont near Paris in 1958 is often remembered as a meeting at which neither side quite understood the other.

By the 1970s the split had become polemical. John Searle's exchange with Derrida over Austin's theory of speech acts, begun in 1977, was bitter on both sides. In 1992 a proposal by the University of Cambridge to give Derrida an honorary degree was opposed in a public letter signed by a group of mainly analytic philosophers, including Quine, and went to a vote of the university, which approved the degree. At the same time, much continental thought found its main English-speaking home in departments of literature, film, gender studies and political theory, not philosophy.

The label now covers a broad and argumentative field. Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière in France, Giorgio Agamben in Italy and Slavoj Žižek in Slovenia have reworked Marxism, psychoanalysis and political theology. Speculative realists, named after a workshop in London in 2007, and new materialists have tried to escape the focus on human experience shared by phenomenology and post-structuralism. Critical phenomenologists apply Husserl's and Merleau-Ponty's methods to race, disability and gender, while decolonial thinkers in Latin America and Africa ask how philosophy itself was shaped by empire.

The divide that seemed so stark in 1970 has narrowed. Analytic philosophers now write seriously on Husserl, Heidegger and Hegel, and work in the philosophy of mind on embodiment owes much to Merleau-Ponty, while many continental philosophers write in the plain style of their analytic colleagues. The distinction survives in hiring, journals and reading lists more than in any clear difference of subject. For the eras that led to these debates, see the overview of the history of philosophy.