A MAP OF TWENTIETH-CENTURY
PHILOSOPHY
BY HANS BYNAGLE
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SURVEYING THE PHILOSOPHICAL LANDSCAPE To appreciate adequately the dynamics of scope and perspective in philosophy . . . it is helpful, even essential, to have at least a basic orientation to the philosophical landscape. For the uninitiated, this can pose some difficulty. Even to get a sense of the major philosophical traditions, to say nothing of countless lesser schools and movements both within and outside the major traditions, is not altogether easy. Familiarizing oneself with the labels that are conventionally attached to them is not difficult, but this is only minimally useful. One needs to be able to place these labels, metaphorically speaking, on at least a rough philosophical map, a map that represents something of the general character of the major philosophical "regions" and how they relate to one another. It is hard, however, to provide much help in this regard within a brief compass--the compass, for instance, of this introduction. The major philosophical traditions are notoriously difficult to characterize in a nutshell, at least in a way that is meaningful apart from a more detailed antecedent acquaintance with them. Generalizations, especially, are perilous and apt to be misleading. Fortunately, one can begin to sketch a philosophical map, albeit a very rough one, in terms that are largely geographical (a circumstance that makes the metaphor of a "map" somewhat more than just a metaphor). The major divisions of philosophy, while they do not by any means fall neatly along geographical boundaries, do accord to a significant extent with geographical regions, at least in terms of their dominance. So an elementary geographical schema can make a somewhat useful starting point, provided one keeps in mind from the outset that as a philosophical map it is very rudimentary indeed. THE MAJOR DOMAINS WESTERN AND NON-WESTERN The most basic division to begin with is that between Western and non-Western philosophy. With regard to non-Western, one may think particularly of eastern and southern Asia, highlighting perhaps China and India, which have the most substantial philosophical traditions. Non-Western also takes in parts of western Asia (the Middle East), and certainly includes other parts of the world not usually considered part of "the West" (a term I take to refer chiefly to Europe and the Americas). A case in point would be Africa, insofar as we are thinking of native philosophies. Despite its broader connotation, "non-Western philosophy" has often been used interchangeably with "Eastern philosophy." (The term "Oriental," incidentally, is sometimes used to designate philosophies of Far Eastern Asia only, and sometimes to encompass also philosophies of southern Asia, mainly India, and even those of the Middle East. The broader use seems unwise, since "Oriental" ordinarily brings to mind China and Japan and their near neighbors.) CONTINENTAL AND ANGLO-AMERICAN The line between Western and non-Western philosophy is one that runs through most of the history of philosophy. The next line we need to draw, demarcating major areas within Western philosophy, represents a modern development with roots going back several centuries but dating primarily from the present century. This line serves to divide the philosophical tradition that dominates most of the European continent, known accordingly as Continental philosophy, from the dominant philosophical tradition of England, the United States, and some other countries subject to strong British or American influence (such as Canada and Australia) known as Anglo-American philosophy. This line is perhaps less "clean" even than the previous one, but it does mark a real and well-recognized division. So far, then, we have demarcated in rough fashion the following philosophical regions: non-Western and Western, and within Western, Continental and Anglo-American. When I wrote the original version of this introduction for the first edition, just over a decade ago, I could add to this philosophical geography, with similarly rough precision, two other major realms. The first was Marxist philosophy, which at that time dominated the Soviet Union and the countries of Eastern Europe. This realm constituted a large and quite active domain, identifiably Western but relatively isolated from both the Continental and Anglo-American domains; extensive contacts between philosophers on either side of the divide, at least, were uncommon. Today, as a result of convulsive political and social changes in the region it once dominated, Marxist philosophy can hardly be said to exist as a distinct domain, at least not in geographical terms. SCHOLASTICISM AND MARXISM A second domain that ten years ago seemed important enough to recognize along with the others named so far was labeled Neo-Scholasticism. This philosophy disrupted the tidiness of our mapping scheme, because it overlapped geographically the two regions already labeled Continental and Anglo-American. Neo-Scholasticism--the name derives from Scholasticism, referring to the various philosophical "schools" of the medieval period, from which this tradition takes its primary inspiration--had been for almost a century the reigning though by no means exclusive orientation among Catholic philosophers. It had a sufficiently large following both in Europe and in the Americas (North as well as South) to be ranked among the major extant traditions of Western philosophy. Though Neo-Scholastic philosophy certainly has not suffered the traumatic dislocations experienced by Marxism since 1985, erosions of its status and stature that were already well under way a decade ago have continued to the point where, arguably, it no longer merits recognition at the level of major philosophical domains. If the respective fortunes of Marxism and Neo-Scholasticism imply that we need to take erasers to the old map, however, it might be well if our erasures were incomplete, leaving something of the old patterns discernible through the gaps and smudges. Neither domain has vanished entirely by any means--and who knows what their future may yet be? More to the point for present purposes, many reference works listed in this guide antedate the developments of the last decade and still reflect the older realities. It remains important, accordingly, to know what those realities were. We'll keep Marxism and Neo-Scholasticism, therefore, on our "short list" of the major traditions it's most useful to be aware of, and will say something more about them below. To sum up, then, we have distinguished five very broad domains that either dominate the philosophical landscape presently or did so until recently: Non-Western, Marxist, Continental, Anglo-American, and Neo-Scholastic. WESTERN PHILOSOPHIES 1. CONTINENTAL The terms "Continental" and "Anglo-American" have been in currency for many years to distinguish the main twentieth-century philosophical traditions of the non-Communist West, yet they are something less than official names for well-defined movements. . . Until the late 1980s, "Continental philosophy" was frequently used as practically synonymous with two related movements, Phenomenology and Existentialism. This is hardly feasible anymore. It was always true that the term could be used in a wider sense to encompass other movements that have flourished on the European continent, including, for instance, an older strain somewhat inadequately labeled Idealism, with roots especially in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century philosophies of Kant and Hegel, and a more recent movement that goes by the name of Structuralism. An important development in the last ten years, however, has been the meteoric rise to prominence of several newer philosophical positions or orientations originating primarily in Europe, especially in France. Among the labels most commonly associated with them are Post- structuralism, Deconstruction, and Postmodernism. All of these currents have a strongly interdisciplinary character and all tend toward left-of-center political and social positions. They have generated so much interest and discussion not only on their home ground but in the United States, Britain, and other strongholds of Anglo-American philosophy that it becomes necessary to speak of a significant blurring and bridging of the boundary between the Continental and Anglo-American domains during the past decade. It's probably true, as some have observed, that Anglo-American interest in (and certainly enthusiasm for) these newer Continental currents runs much stronger in departments of literature, communication, women's studies, multicultural studies, and others than it does in philosophy departments. If only because of the presence of this wider interest in the academy, however, it's harder now than formerly for Anglo-American philosophers . . . simply to ignore Continental philosophy.
I can offer here only the most rudimentary characterizations of a few of the main strands of Continental philosophy already mentioned, beginning with Phenomenology. Founded around the turn of this century by Edmund Husserl, Phenomenology is essentially a philosophical method, one that focuses on careful inspection and description of phenomena or appearances, defined as any object of conscious experience, i.e., that which we are conscious of. The inspection and description are supposed to be effected without any presuppositions, and that includes any presuppositions as to whether such objects of consciousness are "real" or correspond to something "external," or as to what their causes or consequences may be. It is believed that by this method the essential structures of experience and its objects can be uncovered. The sorts of experiences and phenomena that Phenomenologists have sought to describe are highly varied, including, for instance, time consciousness, mathematics and logic, perception, experience of the social world, our experience of our own bodies, and moral, aesthetic, and religious experience.
Existentialism, unlike Phenomenology, is not primarily a philosophical method. Neither is it exactly a set of doctrines (at least not any one set) but more an outlook or attitude supported by diverse doctrines centered about certain common themes. These themes include the human condition, or the relation of the individual to the world; the human response to that condition (described often in strongly affective and preponderantly negative terms such as "despair," "dread," "anxiety," "guilt," "bad faith," "nausea"); being, especially the difference between the being of persons (which is "existence") and the being of other kinds of things; human freedom; the significance (and unavoidability) of choice and decision in the absence of certainty; and the concreteness and subjectivity of life as lived, over against abstractions and false objectifications. Existentialism is often thought to be anti-religious (and is, in some of its versions), but there has in fact been a strong current of Christian Existentialism, beginning with the figure often credited with originating Existentialism, the nineteenth-century Danish philosopher Kierkegaard. Existentialism's relationship to Phenomenology is a matter of some controversy, but at least one can say that many of the later Existentialist thinkers, Sartre among them, have employed Phenomenological methods to arrive at or support their specific variations on Existential themes. While Existentialism has been on the wane since the 1960s, it has enjoyed exceptional prominence, even popularity, for a philosophical movement, in part because of its literary expressions by writers such as Sartre, Camus, de Beauvoir, and Marcel.
Structuralism is an interdisciplinary movement united by the principle that social and cultural phenomena, including belief systems and every kind of discourse (literary, political, scientific, etc.), are best understood by analogy with language, itself best understood as a structure of relations among its component parts. Just as in language the crucial determinant of meaning (according to the early structural linguist Ferdinand de Saussure) is neither individual words nor their reference to things outside language but their interrelationships within the linguistic structure, so the crucial element in all social and cultural phenomena is the underlying structure that determines the functions of the various parts. A good deal of Structuralist analysis has been concerned with a kind of unmasking, that is, with revealing political, social, or psychological phenomena as (allegedly) not what they seem or what participants believe them to be but as determined by structures often concealed from view.
This unmasking impulse persists with the group of thinkers sometimes designated Post-structuralists, who both rejected certain presuppositions of Structuralism and added their own more radical ideas about the fundamental role of language in constructing all human perceptions and conceptions of reality. A particular form of this unmasking tendency is Deconstruction, introduced in the work of Jacques Derrida, who is generally counted among Post-structuralists. Any attempt to define Deconstruction must labor in the shadow of Derrida's apparent rejection in advance of all such attempts. Nonetheless, it has seemed fair to many interpreters to characterize it as a form of textual criticism or interpretation whose aim is to unmask and overcome hidden "privileging" that occurs in texts of all kinds. This privileging, for example the privileging of reason, the masculine, the sacred, the literal, the objective, etc., entails the exclusion, suppression, or marginalization of their opposites--passion, the feminine, the profane, the metaphorical, the subjective, etc.--while at the same time it must presuppose these opposites to sustain or even to make sense of the privileged concept. In this way, it is maintained, texts regularly undermine their own assumptions. As a reading technique uncovering alleged hidden agendas behind the ostensible meaning of a text, Deconstruction takes the further step of denying that the text has a definite meaning. This has become a key thesis for the currents of literary theorizing and criticism that followed in Derrida's wake.
"Postmodernism," finally, has come into vogue as the name for a rather diffuse family of ideas and trends that in significant respects reject, challenge, or aim to supersede ,'modernity": the convictions, aspirations, and pretensions (as they are now seen to be) of modern Western thought and culture since the Enlightenment. In architecture, where the term first gained currency, it signified the rejection of the highly rationalized, sterile functionalism of modern architecture in favor of an eclecticism that is often playful and, by mixing seemingly incongruous styles, mocks its own seriousness. In philosophy and adjacent disciplines, Postmodernism has come to mean, somewhat analogously, a rejection of the modern mind's confidence in rationality, including, for instance, its pretensions to the attainment of universally valid and objective truth and its confidence in the achievability of progress. As expounded by the French thinker Jean-Francois Lyotard, it also entailed a profound suspicion and abandonment of what he called "metanarratives," grand narratives or theories purporting to disclose the overall meaning of history and to assign particular events and phenomena, and to deny to others, a place in the grand scheme of things. For Lyotard, such "totalizing" metanarratives, whether offered by religion, Marxism, Darwinism, psychoanalysis, or whatever, need to be deconstructed as coercive and oppressive in their purpose or effect. Certain Anglo-American philosophical strains also meet under the banner of Postmodernism. The American philosopher Richard Rorty, notably, developing themes from Pragmatism and certain quarters of Analytic philosophy and bringing these together with Continental themes, challenged the modern rationalist presumption that philosophy or any branch of knowledge can find secure foundations or achieve genuine representation of reality. 2. ANGLO-AMERICAN (ANALYTIC) This provides a handy transition to our closer characterization of Anglo-American philosophy. It is not uncommon to equate Anglo-American philosophy with what is called Analytic or Analytical philosophy, but the term is also used in a broader sense to encompass other movements that have flourished chiefly on British and American soil, for instance Pragmatism, Naturalism, and Process Philosophy. There is much to be said for the wider meaning, which avoids the suggestion that philosophy in England and America is more monolithic than it really is. The equation of Anglo-American with Analytic is also unfortunate from another point of view, in that Analytic philosophy has become the dominant mode of philosophizing in some other areas as well, notably the Scandinavian countries, to say nothing of the inroads it has made in areas where other approaches still dominate the field (the other side of the blurring and bridging of the Continental/Anglo-American boundary), e.g., in Germany. However, given all those qualifications and others, there is no question that Analytic philosophy is the most important philosophical current within the Anglo-American sphere. It is also the one most often contrasted with (and actively opposed to) the Continental movements described above. What Analytic philosophy is is not so easy to say. I believe it is possible to distinguish at least three variants, though they probably represent points on a spectrum rather than discrete alternatives. In the widest and loosest sense, Analytic philosophy is hardly more than a philosophical style, one that takes extreme care with the meanings of words (sometimes with precise definitions of terms and consistency in their use, sometimes with the nuances of ordinary language), that tends to present arguments in meticulous step-by-step fashion (often endeavoring to leave nothing implicit), and that pays close, sometimes minute, attention to logical relations (often using logical symbolism or specialized logical terminology to render such relations transparent). In a narrower sense, "Analytic philosophy" designates a philosophical outlook that holds that the primary task or even (in its more extreme version) the only proper task of philosophy--the primary or proper method for attacking philosophical problems--is analysis of one sort or another: of meanings, of concepts, of logical relations, or all of these. We can call this the methodological version. Finally, one may occasionally encounter the term "Analytic philosophy" in contexts where it is reserved for one or more specific doctrines regarding the outcome of correct philosophical analysis. While the Analytic tradition (in either of the two wider senses) owes a great deal to certain specific doctrinal versions--and to major figures who propounded them, such as Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, and Ludwig Wittgenstein--it would be incorrect to say that Analytic philosophy is the dominant orientation among British and American philosophers if one has in mind this narrower meaning. In fact, it is not clear that this is true under any but the widest meaning distinguished above. Common to those who subscribe to the Analytic approach, whether in the broadest sense or a narrower one, is the conviction that to some significant degree, philosophical problems, puzzles, and errors are rooted in language, and can be solved or avoided, as the case may be, by a sound understanding of language and careful attention to its workings. This has tended to focus much attention on language and on its close relative, logic, as objects of study for their own sake. (The relationship between language and logic is itself a question subjected to considerable inquiry and debate.) Detractors are apt to point to this concern--they might say an obsession--with language and logic as one aspect of the trivialization of philosophy with which they charge the Analytic movement. Many who are generally loyal or sympathetic to Analytic philosophy may agree that it tended to draw philosophy away from "deep" questions. In any case, the last two to three decades have seen, on the one hand, increased self-searching as to the limitations of the Analytic approach, and on the other, more efforts to apply it to such deeper questions--about the meaning of life, for instance, or the nature of the moral life--in a way that takes them seriously. There has also been more extensive application to "real-life" moral and social issues, so that Analytic approaches and perspectives are well represented in the burgeoning literature of professional ethics, bioethics, and political and social thought. 3. MARXIST We turn now to Marxist philosophy, whose recent precipitous decline we have previously noted. Like other aspects of Marxism, such as economics, this philosophy derives its impetus and its fundamental ideas from the writings of Karl Marx and his associate, Friedrich Engels, despite the fact (ironically) that Marx himself considered philosophy an activity proper only to the pre-Communist order. (While this is one notion of Marx that clearly has not been taken up in Marxist philosophy, there is some continuity between it and the prevalent hostility in Marxist philosophy toward other philosophical positions, which are regarded as not simply mistaken but as manifestations of class interests and instruments of political struggle.) Marxist philosophy is not easily summarized, but its two central tenets can be readily identified by their conventional labels: dialectical materialism and historical materialism. The former asserts the primacy of matter as the fundamental reality and attempts to state general principles concerning the organization and development of matter. The latter is a theory about history and attempts to state general principles concerning the development of human thought and society in the historical process. Marx's well-known thesis concerning the primacy of economic factors in history is one ingredient of historical materialism. In most Communist countries, Marx's thought was wedded to that of Lenin and known accordingly as Marxism-Leninism. The crude map with which we began indicated the dominance until recently of Marxist philosophy in the Iron Curtain countries, but it has really been far more widely dispersed than that. We have already noted its presence in the non-Western world. . . Nor has Marxist philosophy been confined to the Communist world. Marxist philosophers were found in many countries, and still are, if considerably fewer in number now, often combining their Marxism with other philosophical orientations. A well-known instance of this is Jean-Paul Sartre's attempt to wed, rather incongruously on the face of it, a somewhat unorthodox Marxism to French Existentialism. An important German movement, the Frankfurt School, associated with the names of Adorno and Habermas (among others) and represented in the United States for a while by Marcuse, developed ideas and themes from Marx without accepting, unless severely qualified, key Marxist dogmas such as historical materialism. Acquaintance with Marxism in the non-Communist West has tended to be more by way of such exponents working outside than those working inside the Communist sphere. With the fall of communism and the breakup of the Soviet Union and its East European alliance in the early 1990s, Marxism lost not only its status as the official philosophy of the countries concerned but much of its cultural and ideological influence. Is it dead in this region? It would be premature to say. Defenders of orthodox Marxism still remain in Russia and elsewhere, and may be regaining strength as these countries struggle with their transitions to capitalism. Others are striving to develop compromise positions, combining various strands of Marxist thought with other ideas and orientations, including Eastern-Orthodox Christianity and pre-Communist Russian philosophies as well as Continental and Anglo-American philosophical positions. Still others reject Marxism in toto. In any case, the era when one could simply label this region "Marxist" on one's philosophical map is over and does not seem about to return, though the future is unknown. 4. SCHOLASTICISM We turn, finally, to Neo-Scholasticism. Like the labels connected with other philosophical traditions we have discussed, "Neo-Scholasticism" has a somewhat variable denotation. Not uncommonly, it is used interchangeably with "Neo-Thomism," a term derived from the name St. Thomas Aquinas, a Medieval philosopher whose thought was revived in spirit and to a considerable extent in substance by Catholic thinkers in the mid-nineteenth century, and given quasi-official status in Catholicism by a papal encyclical in 1879. Insofar as Neo-Thomism is the major force within Neo-Scholasticism, the equation is not too far wrong. But in a stricter sense, Neo-Scholastic philosophy harkens back to medieval Christian philosophy more generally, and may draw on and seek to develop the views of other philosophers besides St. Thomas, such as Bonaventure, Duns Scotus, and William of Ockham. Like its medieval ancestor, Neo-Scholasticism. owes a great deal to Aristotle (St. Thomas is often credited with achieving a great synthesis of Aristotelian philosophy and Christian theology) and to other classical philosophers. However, it has also interacted with contemporary currents in both the Anglo-American and Continental spheres, depending to some extent, as one might expect, on the setting in which it is pursued. Neo-Scholasticism largely lost its quasi-official status with the Second Vatican Council of the early 1960s, and its institutional support within Catholicism gradually weakened in the years following. Catholic philosophers now tend to represent a wide range of philosophical positions and orientations. . . Symptomatic of the trend is the change of title in 1989 of the American Catholic Philosophical Association's journal from New Scholasticism to American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly. This concludes our brief overview of the main philosophical traditions that characterize the present and recent philosophical landscape. Dozens, even hundreds of lesser movements within, without, and overlapping the boundaries of these traditions have not been mentioned, let alone described. Nor have I said anything, beyond a bare mention here or there, about historical schools and movements that may have been among the major philosophical alternatives in their time, but have since died out, been absorbed, or reduced to minor outposts on the philosophical landscape. Feminist Philosophy This overview is incomplete, nonetheless, without some discussion of feminist philosophy. It would be inaccurate, or at least premature at this point, to place this as a major philosophical tradition alongside the five described above; on the other hand, it is too important a part of the contemporary philosophical scene to go unmentioned here. As a movement or perspective within philosophy, feminist philosophy is broadly concerned with philosophical issues surrounding sexual differences. There is considerable diversity and sometimes disagreement within it, however, regarding the levels at which these issues are important. Some feminist philosophers are centrally concerned with political and social inequalities between men and women and with the philosophical groundwork necessary or helpful for combating those inequalities. Others undertake a more "radical" (i.e., fundamental) critique of traditional philosophy (and other domains of knowledge, such as science) as allegedly dominated by masculine concerns and categories, and are concerned to assert the value and legitimacy, and perhaps the superiority, of women's ways of being, knowing, and doing that are different from those of men. These feminist philosophers have proposed distinctively feminist epistemologies, ethics, and metaphysics. Such ground-level concerns overlap with concerns about equality, of course, and often complement them; but the two can also collide--for example, when some who insist on the radical nature of gender differences interpret "equity feminists" as purchasing equality at the price of suppressing those differences (thus maintaining the essential subordination of feminine to masculine). Feminist philosophy is not independent of the traditions previously described; many who claim the feminist label identify strongly with one or another of the Anglo-American, Continental, Marxist, and even Neo-Scholastic traditions. (Whether there is a specifically non-Western form of feminist philosophy I am not sure.) Even when such identification is not strong, or is explicitly rejected, the various groupings and viewpoints identifiable within feminist philosophy--liberal, Marxist, radical, psychoanalytic, existentialist, socialist, postmodern, Christian--clearly differ in the extent to which they draw significant support, inspiration, conceptual frameworks, terminology, etc., from one or several of these traditions.
General:
20th Century Thinkers:
Adapted from Hans Bynagle, "A Map of Twentieth-Century Philosophy," Philosophy: A Guide to the Reference Literature, 2nd edition (Littleton, CO: Libraries Unlimited, 1997). Reprinted by permission of the author. |