Time and Memory: The Einstein-Bergson Debate's Place in the Analytic-Continental Philosophical Divide (Part Two)
ATTEMPTS AT NAMING THE A-C DIVIDE: The Broader Context of the Bergson-Einstein affair
The divide between Analytical and Continental philosophy is much like St. Augustine’s remarks upon time: we all know what it is until anyone asks us.[1] So runs the paradox: the contemporary philosophical scene in the twentieth (and now twenty-first) century is marked by a deep divide, one so thorough it leads many to ponder whether we might not be using “philosophy” equivocally if it is able to name both respective sides. And yet, when it comes time to enumerate the actual qualities of the tools and goals that have dug this entrenchment, clear and systematic treatments make themselves scarce, and we are left with a rather eclectic and often superficial series of parameters and characteristics. Quite often these historiographies leave much to be desired in terms of explanatory power. Moreover, as Bernard Williams has rather charmingly put it, the A-C divide sits upon an egregious cross-classification “rather as though one divided cars into front-wheel drive and Japanese.”[2] To be sure, many intriguing suggestions have been put forward. In terms of caricature, some of the less helpful though quite widespread characterizations assume Continental thought is defined as being loose, non-rigorous, poetic, as opposed to the rigor and clarity of analytic thought.[3] There do seem to be general stylistic differences, and when we consider that form and content are not so easily divided, such stylistic differences are surely far from meaningless or purely superficial differences, flowering from mere aesthetic taste. And yet, the assertion that “clarity” and “rigor” mark one instead of the other smells more of polemic than of useful heuristic.[4] More importantly, as Neil Levy notes while “there are important stylistic differences” that may indeed amount to differences in content, “if that were all the differences amounted to, the difficulty in bringing the two schools into dialogue with each other would be inexplicable.”[5] Others have attempted more content-based distinctions to understand the divide.[6] David Cooper notes that Continental thought tends to focus upon “cultural critique, concern with the background conditions of enquiry and … ‘the fall of the self’” all of which “have no similar prominence in the analytic tradition.”[7] Given Marxism, the Frankfurt School, and even later figures like Michel Foucault fall under the umbrella of the “Continental” there is more than a little truth to this. Conversely, Michael Dummett, for example, notes that Analytic thought can be identified in terms of thinkers who have taken the so-called “linguistic turn,” while continental thinkers (supposedly) tend to fall outside this shift to language in the twentieth century.[8] Other quite ingenious attempts have been offered, with this meta-analysis of the divide forming something of its own cottage industry.[9]
Regardless of these attempts to name a consistent content to either category of Analytic and Continental, a small but powerful band of thinkers have increasingly come to the conclusion out of this chaos that what is included under the designation of “Continental” is in fact “a highly eclectic and disparate series of intellectual currents that could hardly be said to amount to a unified tradition.”[10] As Simon Glendinning notes, in similar terms, “the more I read [of putatively “Continental” thinkers] the less sense I could make of the idea that there was a distinctive tradition of philosophy in view here at all.”[11] Indeed, in no uncertain terms: “there is no such thing as the tradition of Continental philosophy.”[12] So, where did the category “Continental” come from? This is a complex question that most certainly does not have one single answer adequate to it.[13] Among the many explanations, however, and in terms of this paper, one does stand out: it is a distinction that came to be enforced by the Analytic camp of thinkers: “Continental philosophy is an invention, or, more accurately, a projection of the Anglo-American academy onto a Continental Europe that would not recognize the legitimacy of such an appellation.”[14]
The reasons for such an invention and enforcement—an invention and enforcement that has allowed us to reach a point “at which it is as if we are working in different subjects”[15]—are likewise numerous and include topics as various as politics, reactions to the two World Wars, religion, and personal imbroglios.[16] For the sake of this paper we will focus on one theme in particular: philosophy’s relationship to the emerging disciplinary and cultural hegemony of the hard sciences, where “analytic philosophy stands to science as scholastic philosophy once did to theology.”[17]That is to say, in other words, that Analytic philosophy views itself as a handmaiden to the sciences as it helps produce a broader, more efficient philosophy of science, analyzing limits, terms and concepts, and so on. As Rudolf Carnap puts it, agreeing with a statement made by his fellow Vienna Circle member Otto Neurath, “Philosophy leads to an improvement in scientific ways of thinking and thereby to a better understanding of all that is going on in the world.”[18] More specifically, “scientism remains the most salient vision of the whole of analytic philosophy,” that is to say, that Analytic philosophy is committed to bringing out a particular matrix of problem-sets from any and all analyses in order that these sets are in some sense tractable in scientific terms and/or Analytic criteria.[19] There certainly can be remainders outside of the scientific domain (Wittgenstein’s quasi-mystical “that which is left unsaid,” or Carnap’s “poetry”) but in essence these are, like emotivism,[20] more the expression of temporary subjective states, or poetic license and can be tolerated as such. Yet, such is to be eliminated and clarified as far as possible in terms of epistemology or serious philosophizing, but certainly not reintegrated as elements contributing to the larger project of knowledge.[21] This, it seems, is a key element distinguishing Analytic from Continental thought (or, at least, Analytics certainly want it to be and so perform and iterate this distinction as if it were the case).
One of the most powerful personas driving broader recognition of this relationship to the sciences—in particular by being one of the first to begin to explicitly write histories about it—was Bertrand Russell. Yet, as David Bell has argued persuasively, Moore and Russell’s attempts to establish the history of British Analytic philosophy (starting with themselves) is similarly a bit of fanciful historiographical thinking on their part since all of their thought mirrors earlier Austrio-Germanic thought like Brentano that transcends the divide by pre-existing it.[22] Yet if there is nothing original in Russell and Moore (except perhaps their marketing), then it is not clear that except by assertion that they represent fully realized tradition as opposed to “Continental” thought. Our claim, likewise, is that the Analytic tradition, by opposing something it increasingly lumped together under the umbrella of “Continental Philosophy,” created a grouping held together loosely by what was asserted to be an anti-scientific (or anti-scientistic) mode of discourse—even if there was a dearth of positive characteristics or traditions uniting the “Continental” aggregate. As Glendinning puts it, it was originally a category “forged by exclusion.”[23] In doing so the “Analytic tradition” also strengthened itself by a performative “purification” of the “Analytic” side of things through this retroactively imposed story “of self-differentiation.”[24] Cross-fertilizations and the lack of anything actually resembling a clean origin story were eventually smoothed away by the gilded, retroactive pathway assembled through a concerted historiographic effort,[25]what Peter Simons terms “the perils of hindsight.”[26] The Bergson-Einstein debate is a key to this development that is largely overlooked. Moreover, as we are arguing, it mirrors (and combines with) the earlier Russell-Bergson debates, which as Chase and Reynolds note “were significant in the development of the [A-C] divide.”[27] As Andreas Vrahimis likewise notes that despite occurring in an era of internationalism, “there are nevertheless several aspects of Russell’s characterization of Bergson which have ended up contributing to the formation of … images of the split.”[28]It is significant that Vrahimis is willing to work at the level of “images” and “impressions.” For it is precisely by this level of vague association that Bergson was misunderstood or misrepresented by Russell (and others) and slotted into something termed “Continental” despite clear disagreements with others also thought fit to receive the sobriquet “Continental” such as Heidegger.[29]
This historiographical construct is, of course, not the only point of origin for the Analytic-Continental divide, but it is a large factor. In fact, though the Analytic tradition obviously pre-existed Positivism, to some extent the Analytic as opposed to Continental thought did not seem to exist until after WW2,[30] and perhaps not even until the mid-to-late 1950’s, but is often thought of as existing for a longer stretch of time because of positivist historiographical representations that merged with earlier historiographical constructs—in the case of this paper, in particular that of Bertrand Russell—and solidified its historical reality, linking up to other later historiographical projects for example the close associate of Einstein’s, the “Berlin Circle” positivist Hans Reichenbach’s perception of the history of philosophy thus reading the divide back into history.[31] As Chase and Reynolds thus note, “The analytic dominance in the United Kingdom and the United States after the Second World War is far too easily read back into the earlier twentieth-century philosophical history of both countries, filtering what we notice in the journals, appointments, and monographs of the time.”[32] They continue and state that Analytic thought in the 1950’s was at pains “to establish that a great deal of contemporary analytic movement is a genuine continuation of the analytic traditions long established in Western philosophy.”[33] As we are arguing, episodes like Russell-Bergson and Bergson-Einstein are often therefore thought to be a product of the split, rather than used as post-hoc examples to bolster historiographic assertions of the split itself.[34]
[1] St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions trans. Maria Boulding (New York: New City Press, 2002), book XI.
[2] Bernard Williams, “Contemporary Philosophy: A Second Look,” in The Blackwell Companion to Philosophy edited by N. Bunnin and E.P. Tsui-James (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 25.
[3] Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (London: Fontana-Collins, 1985), vi, writes: “What distinguishes analytical philosophy from other contemporary philosophy (though not from much philosophy of other times) is a certain way of going on, which involves argument, distinctions, and, so far as it remembers to try and achieve it and succeeds, moderately plain speech … it distinguishes sharply between obscurity and technicality.” And, of course, above all there stands the infamous open letter protesting the honorary doctorate being awarded to Derrida in 1992, noting his work “does not meet the accepted standards of clarity and rigor” and consists largely “of elaborate jokes and puns … tricks and gimmicks, similar to the Dadaists or of the concrete poets.” In Jacques Derrida, Points … Interviews, 1974-1994. Trans. Peggy Kamuf et al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 420.
[4] There is, however, a sense in which these terms do bear out, just as there is room for seeing aesthetics as bearing an ontological weight not often afforded to it after Kant moved it into the realm of subjective fancy away from the thing-in-itself. For example, in the journal Philosophical Review in the 1930s-1960s, a primary distinction was made between “speculative” and “critical” approaches. Speculative approaches (enumerating the Continental side of things) tend to use “substantial, broad claims about the natures of the universe and humanity.” Critical (read: Analytic) philosophy, by contrast, “tends to try and limit its substantive, philosophical commitments and spends much of its time criticizing speculative philosophy or making explicit/reconstructing existing scientific or “common sense” knowledge.” See: Joel Jatzav & Krist Vaesen, “On the Emergence of American Analytic Philosophy,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy vol.25 no.4 (2017): 772-798. Quote at 774. These terms register as less polemical and so more useful than “clarity” and “rigor.” Nonetheless, an open question remains whether or not, in supposedly limiting oneself to critique or a limited analysis, one has still committed a host of “speculative” maneuvers that merely remain unexamined in the background. As Hegel once remarked in the Phenomenology of Mind: “When engaged in the process of knowing, it is the commonest form of self-deception … to assume something to be familiar, and to let it pass on that very account.” It is often, he goes on to say, that which appears the most immediate to us that is the most mediated thing of all. G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind trans. J. Baille (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 92. This appears often as a weakness in Analytic thought.
[5] Neil Levy, “Analytic and Continental Philosophy: Explaining the Differences.” Metaphilosophy Vol.34 No.3 (April 2003), 284-304. Quote at 287.
[6] A helpful survey of a number of attempted systematic distinctions, each of which in fail, see: Todd May, “On the Very Idea of Continental (Or For That Matter Anglo-American) Philosophy,” Metaphilosophy vol.33 no.4 (July 2002): 401-425.
[7] David Cooper, “Analytical and Continental Philosophy,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 94 (1995): 1-18. Quote at 4.
[8] Michael Dummett, The Origins of Analytic Philosophy (New York: Bloomsbury, 1993), 5-7. He notes for example that language tends to be exhaustive for Frege, while for Husserl (representative of the emerging continental side), objects examined via phenomenology have some excess which is not reducible to language.
[9] Even theology has a rather large (though often understated) role to play, which is relevant (albeit tangentially) to our paper’s thesis because Russell was also actively opposing religious and theological thought in addition to metaphysics. Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2015), 290, who goes a bit further back in time and notices how the problem of evil or, more specifically, theodicy, drops out and changes in the twentieth century. As it happens this disappearance is quite thorough in the Anglo-American tradition, especially following the work of Bertrand Russell, while Continental thought will have a tendency to incorporate themes of theodicy and the problem of evil into their works. Stephen Mulhall, Philosophical Myths of the Fall (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2005), is quite similar and remarks how Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein, as exemplary figures, “explicitly aim to detach themselves from Christian theological horizons,” but in fact, in ways that mimic some of the Analytic/Continental differences at large, “engender a conception of the human condition that constantly inclines them to reiterate elements of a distinctively Christian structure of thought” (13) which is either actively pruned by Russell, or attacked when noticed. Frank B. Farrell, How Theology Shaped Twentieth-Century Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 1-19, notices a similar theological theme running through the divide, and remarks that in addition to the usual list of differences Analytic and Continental parties have inherited broad shifts in the west that occurred because of theological nominalism and voluntarism and which were subsequently passed on through Kant. Though it is not the main point of his book, each side of the divide, he notes, has reacted in their own way to this (often implicit) theological inheritance inflected via neo-Kantianism. Edward Baring, Converts to the Real: Catholicism and the Making of Continental Philosophy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2019), examines at length how Catholicism (and in particular neo-Thomism) were, curiously enough, a powerful ally for Edmund Husserl and the spread of phenomenology internationally through Europe early on.
[10] Simon Critchley, “Introduction,” in A Companion to Continental Philosophy, edited by Simon Critchley and W. Schroeder (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 5.
[11] Simon Glendinning, The Idea of Continental Philosophy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 2; esp. the analysis 69-90.This opinion is one that, like Critchley, has stuck with Glendinning for some time. Cf. Simon Glendinning, “Introduction,” in the Encyclopedia of Continental Philosophy ed. Simon Glendinning (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 3, where aporias in the designation “Continental philosophy” far from being “shortcomings of a beginner or nonspecialist” seem more like “a normal feature of the use of this label.” And, as he goes on to suggest in his introduction, the classification is inherently “vague and free floating.”
[12] Glendinning, The Idea of Continental Philosophy, 7. As becomes apparent, though, Glendinning recognizes that the assertion of the grouping of “Continental philosophy,” since it has effects on the real world, means the tradition does exist to the extent it is a self-reflexive category of othering (see especially 69-90 on the Analytic variations of the idea of Continental philosophy) or what he calls “reception-response” (10).
[13] Moreover, not all answers appear to be compatible with one another. For example, those championing that the divide is primarily philosophical in nature very often dismiss that there are any relevant political aspects to take into consideration (and vice-versa). While our analysis is obviously constrained to the length of a short essay, the different categories of the philosophical, the political, the institutional, and the personal do not seem to be antithetical. To the extent that any answer is possible at all, it seems all categories must be leveraged and combined together. Anything less than this leaves some major aspect or another out, and results in an incomplete and even faulty analysis.
[14] Simon Critchley, Continental Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 32. Cf. Glendinning, Continental Philosophy, 10-11, who comments on the term “Continental” that “it clearly signals a British source … The English word ‘continent’ … had, by the middle of the seventeenth century, already taken on its current geographic sense … but around this time [in addition] when preceded by the definite article (and often with a capitalized initial), it was also beginning to be used” as a shorthand designation for “mainland Europe, as distinguished from the British isles.” He goes on to comment that, in addition, the word retains the pejorative connotation that it indicates what “we do round here” that is, succumb to a “common taste for mystification,” of “inflated trivialities” and poetic license. In fact, “it is difficult to even articulate the idea in a language other than English” (12).
[15] Dummett, Origins of Analytical Philosophy, 182.
[16] Particularly important—and which will be brought up briefly as it intersects with the main themes of this paper—are the relationship between the category of “Continental philosophy” and the British (and American) critique of Fascism. As such, Neo-Kantianism and Idealism at large were critiqued by British thinkers (notably, for example, Moore and Russell) not merely because they represented the fuzzy hinterlands of metaphysics clouding empiricist epistemology and the like. They also were seen as rather direct scaffolding for fascist mentalities. On this, see Thomas L. Akehurst, The Cultural Politics of Analytic Philosophy: Britishness and the Spectre of Europe (New York: Continuum, 2010), 3: though “largely ignored by historians” there as “a consistently held belief among … early generations of analytic philosophers that a post-Kantian tradition of continental philosophy was the direct source of fascist ideology …. Nietzsche, Hegel, and … Hare, romantic philosophy [and these others were] in some way the ‘ancestors of fascism’ to use [Bertrand] Russell’s phrase.” Cf. Thomas L. Akehurst, “The Nazi Tradition: The Analytic Critique of Continental Philosophy in Mid-Century Britain,” History of European Ideas vol.34 no.4 (2008): 548-557. Important as well is the silencing of political engagement amongst Analytic philosophers, leaving a left-leaning vacuum that had nothing to fill it except for “Continental” thought in Critical Theory, Sartrean existentialism, and Marxist humanism (to name but a few). See: John McCumber, Time in the Ditch: American Philosophy in the McCarthy Era (Illinois: Northwestern University, 2001), esp. 33-58; Dan Howard, “Two Left Turns Make a Right: On the Curious Political Career of North American Philosophy of Science at Midcentury.” Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science Series 18 (January 2004): 25-93. The left-leaning vacuum, as Howard puts it, is all the more curious given the early allegiance of positivism and empirical philosophy to leftward politics (35=36). Otto Neurath makes it clear that Positivism was intimately linked to Socialism, where “Scientific attitude and solidarity go together.” This is because the common worker amongst the working class has a sort of no-nonsense attitude, one that has no time of day for high-flying metaphysics. Just so Neurath’s politics mean to show that “what physicists and astronomers do is only on a grand scale what Charles and Jane are doing every day in the garden and the kitchen.” Quotes taken from Jason A. Josephson-Storm, The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 251. Curiously, though, Bergson was accused of a “philosophy of democracy” by the philosopher Julian Benda, which was not meant as a compliment but to point out that he “was perhaps the only philosophy to have really been understood by the vulgar” (Quoted in Guerlac, Thinking in Time, 11). So, like nearly everything, “the people” was often more a rhetorical construct waiting to be leveraged than some absolute principle, an axiom around which to rally.
[17] Babette E. Babich, “On the Analytic-Continental Divide In Philosophy: Nietzsche’s Lying Truth, Heidegger’s Speaking Language, and Philosophy,” Articles and Chapters in Academic Books Collections 6 (2003): 63-103. Quote at 65.
[18] Rudolf Carnap, “Intellectual Autobiography,” in P. Schillp The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap (La Salle: Open Court), 23.
[19] We should not forget, however, that this has not led to agreement. It was, after all, Analytic thinkers who were largely responsible for toppling Logical Postivism in the figures of Quine, Popper, and even Kuhn.
[20] Emotivism is, of course, not a random example, but is precisely the theory taken up by Moore and later by Carnap (with pertinent differences) because of their general epistemologies in the Analytic tradition. See: Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue 3rd ed. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 14-19.
[21] Joseph Margolis, The Unraveling of Scientism: American Philosophy at the End of the Twentieth Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 11. It is significant to note, however, that Margolis continues regarding scientism that in spite of its prevalence to Analytic thought it is “no closer now to being vindicated than it was a hundred years ago. In fact, given the new emphasis on the analysis of mind, language, and culture, we are clearer now than ever before on just how difficult are the challenges.” Moreover, as is key to Margolis’ work, it is extremely important to point out that though some equate Analytic
[22] David Bell, “The Revolution of Moore and Russell: A Very British Coup?” Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement vol.44 (March 1999): 193-209 As such, despite otherwise being an excellent and detailed examination, Peter Hylton, Russell, Idealism, and the Emergence of Analytic Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), has been argued by some philosophers like Bell that it fails to justify its major premise, namely that the specific characteristics of Analytic philosophy stem from Russell and Moore’s initial rejection of British idealism. In addition, Russell has something of a reputation for treating history a bit fast and loose, especially as it involved identifying the specific differences of the A-C divide. Richard A. Watson, “Shadow History in Philosophy,” Journal of the History of Philosophy vol. 31, no. 1 (January 1993): 95-109; Cf. Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought, 288-291. Cf. also Ray Monk, “Betrand Russell’s Brainchild,” Radical Philosophy no.78 (1996): 3, where he writes: “Our logical theory? But didn’t Russell learn his logic from an Italian (Peano) and a whole lot of Germans (Cantor, Weierstrass, Dedekind and Frege)? [What Gilbert Ryle appeared to mean] when he characterizes ‘The Cambridge Transformations of the Theory of Concepts’ thus bypassing the slightly awkward fact that Wittgenstein was more Germanic than Anglo-Saxon. Wittgenstein, for all that he wrote in German and felt like an alien in Englad was, it seems, a Cambridge man through and through and not really ‘Continental’ at all.”
[23] Glendinning, The Idea of Continental Philosophy, 41.
[24] Glendinning, The Idea of Continental Philosophy, 41.
[25] As many like Andreas Vrahimis, Encounters Between Analytic and Continental Philosophy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 8-30, point out, when analyzing the beginnings as well as the paradigmatic encounters (in particular of Frege and Husserl), it is not clear that the “sides” involved are neatly aligned, or constitute anything close to a sequence of continuous tradition.
[26] Simons, “Origins and Evitability,” 296.
[27] Chase and Reynolds, Continental Versus Analytic, 23.
[28] Vrahimis, “Russell’s Critique of Bergson,” 27.
[29] Heidegger and Bergson in fact have a rather complicated relationship via the concept of time which is elaborated upon by Heath Massey, The Origins of Time: Heidegger and Bergson (New York: State University of New York, 2015), and to which we are indebted. See also: Suzanne Guerlac, Thinking in Time: An Introduction to Henri Bergson (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006); Jimena Canales, The Physicist & The Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson, and the Debate that Changed Our Understanding of Time (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2015), 143-146.
[30] See Akehurst, “The Nazi Tradition,” for a good analysis on some of the political background of the divide that was catalyzed by the war.
[31] Hans Reichenbach, The Rise of Scientific Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951), e.g.. 121-123 where he recounts some of the history of philosophy, in which both Einstein and Bergson make appearances.
[32] As James Chase and Jack Reynolds, Analytic Versus Continental: Arguments on the Methods and Values of Philosophy (Durham: Acumen, 2011), 2.
[33] Chase and Reynolds, Analytic Versus Continental, 12.
[34] Vrahimis, “Russell’s Critique of Bergson,” notes as well the general tendency to “retrospectively [relate certain conflicts] to some notion of the divide between ‘Analytic’ and ‘Continental’” rather than seeing things in terms of similarities.
[35] On the institutional side, see: Katzav and Vaesen, “The Emergence of American Analytic Philosophy,” 772-798.
[36] Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 116-117, 127.
[37] We are not arguing that there are no internal methodological continuities amongst Continental thinkers (Chase and Reynolds, Analytic Versus Continental, 6-7, for example notes there are “quasi-foundational” aspects that exist in both camps such as “norms of engagement, distinct methods,” and each “harbors distinctly different attitudes as to what are the more significant philosophical issues and questions.”
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