Continental Philosophy Quotes

I had four hundred thousand pages of continental philosophy and lit theory in my head. And by God, I was going to use it to prove to him that I was smarter than he was.

Too often, contemporary continental philosophers take the “other” of philosophy to mean literature, but not religion, which is for them just a little too wholly other, a little beyond their much heralded tolerance of alterity. They retain an antagonism to religious texts inherited straight from the Enlightenment, even though they pride themselves on having made the axioms and dogmas of the Enlightenment questionable. But the truth is that contemporary continental philosophy is marked by the language of the call and the response, of the gift, of hospitality to the other, of the widow, the orphan and the stranger, and by the very idea of the “wholly other,” a discourse that any with the ears to hear knows has a Scriptural provenance and a Scriptural resonance. ("A Prologue", Journal of Philosophy and Scripture 1.1, Fall 2003, p. 1).

Modernity could be identified with the gradual disappearance of ritual, of those kind of communal bonds founded upon a symbolically shared sense of guilt.

True philosophy consists in relearning to look at the world. Maurice Merleau-Ponty

For Habermas, scientism means science’s belief in itself: that is, ‘the conviction that we can no longer understand science as one form of knowledge, but rather must identify knowledge with science’.

In Beauvoir’s writing, the emancipation of women, an emancipation that on her view can come to full flower only in the wake of a certain transformation in the human being, is linked with a certain transformation in the conventional understanding—both continental and analytic—about how to inherit the tradition of philosophy.

To utter a word and meaning nothing by it is unworthy of a philosopher. Berkeley

Assimilation is sometimes the most effective kind of assassination.

Miracles enable us to judge doctrine, and doctrine enables us to judge miracles.

We live with – and within – a gap between knowledge and wisdom. It is time philosophers, and everyone else, started to try and think about that gap. Maybe more than our personal peace of mind is at stake.

You can't skip over nature by logic. Logic presupposes three possibilities, but there are millions! Cut away a million, and reduce it all to the question of comfort! That's the easiest solution to the problem!

… ‘Truth,’ Hegel says, is seen as the end of thought. It is revealed where thought attains its telos, which is something to be determined by thinking itself. The truth is not something external to thought to which it may correspond and which would allow the possibility of the skeptical question, but is rather the immanent goal thought is itself directed towards…

You know you’re in a college town when there’s a restaurant called “Pancakea.” The establishment was a pancake/coffee house, and Choo, Molly, Sig, and I were sitting in a booth arguing about the place and its name and their relative merits. I thought the name was a take on panacea, implying that pancakes are a cure for everything. Sig thought the owner wanted the place to become the IKEA of pancakes. Molly thought that given how large the pancakes were, the title might be a riff on Pangea, the first continental landmass. We all agreed that the owner was probably an ex-college student who couldn’t get a job with his or her major, but we couldn’t agree on whether that major was philosophy, marketing, anthropology, or just heavy drinking.

The continental philosopher comes to a philosophical conversation looking to have a communal experience where both sides learn from each other. Their perspective is often that we may be on different paragraphs but we are all on the same page. They’ll often speak in stories as an attempt to create a world where everyone listening works together to create agreed upon language/inside jokes/slang. By contrast, the analytic philosopher often comes to a philosophical conversation looking to win an argument. They often have a set of patterns, labels and pre-packaged arguments. To them, clever double speak and long drawn out narratives are not profound. They’ll often label it halfway through as just a bunch of made up gibberish that leaves things even more confusing than before. It is as if the analytic philosopher says to the continental philosopher ‘you are speaking gibberish’ and the continental philosopher responds with ‘exactly.

...there is a felt gap here-the gap between knowledge and wisdom- that cannot be closed through empirical enquiry. That is, the question of the meaning of life in not reducible to empirical enquiry. This felt gap between knowkedge and wisdom is the very space of critical reflection. In philosophy, but also more generally in cultural life, we need to clip the wings of both scientism and obscurantism and thereby avoid what is worst in both Continental and analytic philosophy.

Philosophy has an image problem. Philosophers are thought to be mystics, religious figures, bullshit artists—anything divorced from reality... Why is philosophy held in such contempt by many physicists? ... one part of the answer probably lies in the split between the two major branches of modern Western philosophy, Analytic and Continental philosophy. Continental philosophers tend to be much more suspicious of scientific claims about knowledge and truth than are their analytic colleagues. Yet the distinction between the two kinds of philosophy is not apparent from a distance—most scientists have never heard of the analytic-Continental divide. So, given that most of the highly visible philosophers in the public sphere today are Continental, and given the attitude that some (not all) Continental philosophers have toward science, it’s not terribly surprising that scientists often have disdain for all philosophers, and sometimes even think that they can do philosophy better than the philosophers can.

Deism” in its own day referred not to a superficial theological doctrine but to a comprehensive intellectual tradition that ranged freely across the terrain we now associate with ethics, political theory, metaphysics, the philosophy of mind, and epistemology. It was an astonishingly coherent and systematic body of thought, closer to a way of being than any particular dogma, and it retained its essential elements over a span of centuries, not decades. In origin and substance, deism was neither British nor Christian, as the conventional view supposes, but largely ancient, pagan, and continental, and it spread in America far beyond the educated elite.

Here, the asking of the question who we are is in fact more dangerous than any other opposition found at the same level of certainty about man (the final form of Marxism, which has essentially nothing to do with either Judaism or even with Russia; if somewhere a non-developed spiritualism is still slumbering, it is in the Russian people; Bolshevism is originally Western; it is a European possibility: the emergence of the masses, industry, technology, the extinction of Christianity; but inasmuch as the dominance of reason as an equalizing of everyone is but the consequence of Christianity and as the latter is fundamentally of Jewish origin (cf. Nietzsche's thought on the slave revolt with respect to morality), Bolshevism is in fact Jewish; but then Christianity is also fundamentally Bolshevist! And what are the decisions that become necessary on that basis?). But the danger of the question "Who are we?" is at the same time--if danger can necessitate what is highest--the sole path by which to succeed in coming to ourselves and thus in initiating the original salvation, that is, the justification of the Occident on the basis of its history. The danger of this question is in itself so essential for us that it loses the appearance of opposition to the new German will.

In a move that is at odds with what I am calling the Unmooring thesis, Heidegger wants to show that modern philosophy is the “logical” consequence of Plato’s humanistic legacy. For Kant, as for the Greeks, [A5] thinking (as Logos—forms of judgment—categories—reason) gets the upper hand in establishing the perspective for interpreting beings as such. Additionally, following Descartes’s procedure, thinking as “thinking” comes to dominate; and beings themselves become [A1] perceptum (represented) or object, in accordance with the same [legacy] historical reason. Therefore thinking cannot get to a [ICS] ground of Da-sein; i.e., the question of the [A2] truth of be-ing is unaskable here.45 The Greeks allowed thinking to get “the upper hand” in the correct ascertainment of the Forms until it came to dominate interpretation completely, eliminating A2 Unconcealment Truth (rendering it “unaskable”) and radically altering man and Being. The very essence of man itself changes, in that man becomes subject. . . . Man becomes that being upon which all that is, is grounded as regards the manner of its Being and its truth. Man becomes the relational center of that which is as such. But this is possible only when the comprehension of what is as a whole changes. (Heidegger, QT 128; see also 151; Heidegger, PR 76–77)

We saw in the preceding section how Heidegger identifies Plato’s transformation of A2 Un-concealment Truth into R2 Correspondence Truth with its concomitant R4 Bivalence as the beginning of humanism. Its completion occurs in modern philosophy’s doctrines of A5 Active Knower and A1 Dependence, which mark the fulfillment and thus the conclusion of philosophy as metaphysics for him.

Philosophy today faces a dilemma similar to the situation at the end of the eighteenth century. As we are now divided between analytic and continental branches, so philosophy was then split into rationalism and empiricism.

Interestingly, the topic that I believe can best initiate this twenty-first-century rapprochement comes from the same figure who solved the parallel problem in the eighteenth century: Immanuel Kant. In fact, the seed for the reconciliation can be found in the very idea that forms the core of the Critique of Pure Reason and the linchpin of its rationalist-empiricist synthesis; namely, the idea that the mind actively organizes experience. This idea, along with its various interpretations and ramifications, forms an important thread of what has become known as anti-realism in analytic philosophy.

Jürgen Habermas currently ranks as one of the most influential philosophers in the world. Bridging continental and Anglo-American traditions of thought, he has engaged in debates with thinkers as diverse as Gadamer and Putnam, Foucault and Rawls, Derrida and Brandom. His extensive written work addresses topics stretching from social-political theory to aesthetics, epistemology and language to philosophy of religion, and his ideas have significantly influenced not only philosophy but also political-legal thought, sociology, communication studies, argumentation theory and rhetoric, developmental psychology and theology.

The typical analytic complaint about continental philosophy is that it is unrigorous, muddleheaded, subjectivist, inattentive to science, and written in impenetrable prose. The typical continental complaint about analytic philosophy is that it is superficial, reductionistic, anal retentive, inattentive to human concerns, and boring.

When living in Denver, me and my friend Tony – who’s actually up here now and does amazing photography and helped us with the photoshoot for this collection – we did this funny thing on the anniversary of the stock market crash. It was a protest at a mall in Denver, and we called it “Black Friday is the new Black Monday”. We wanted to make the hipster thing into something else, we wanted to see what potential it had. Because we were fascinated by Paris 68, we made these pamphlets that said stuff like “Real hipsters riot”. We tried to encourage that mythology of the hipster from Sorbonne, Paris. This guy you see in Godard movie. We went into Urban Outfitters, threw a bunch of shit, flipped over things, went outside, shot a bunch of fireworks. That was pretty cool. The IEF was grounded in certain theoretical premises of insurrectionist theory, continental philosophy, and critical theory. It was definitely all over the damn place.

The loss of white ethno-cultural confidence manifests itself in other ways. Among the most important is a growing unwillingness to indulge the anti-white ideology of the cultural left. When whites were an overwhelming majority, empirically unsupported generalizations about whites could be brushed off as amusing and mischievous but ultimately harmless. As whites decline, fewer are willing to abide such attacks. At the same time, white decline emboldens the cultural left, with its dream of radical social transformation. ... From a modern perspective, the most important figure to emerge from this milieu is Randolph Bourne. Viewed as a spokesman for the new youth culture in upper-middle-class New York, Bourne burst onto the intellectual scene with an influential essay in the respected Atlantic Monthly in July 1916 entitled ‘Trans-National America’. Here Bourne was influenced by Jewish-American philosopher Horace Kallen. Kallen was both a Zionist and a multiculturalist. Yet he criticized the Liberal Progressive worldview whose cosmopolitan zeal sought to consign ethnicity to the dustbin of history. Instead, Kallen argued that ‘men cannot change their grandfathers’. Rather than all groups giving and receiving cultural influence, as in Dewey’s vision, or fusing together, as mooted by fellow Zionist Israel Zangwill in his play The Melting Pot (1910), Kallen spoke of America as a ‘federation for international colonies’ in which each group, including the Anglo-Saxons, could maintain their corporate existence. There are many problems with Kallen’s model, but there can be no doubt that he treated all groups consistently. Bourne, on the other hand, infused Kallen’s structure with WASP self-loathing. As a rebel against his own group, Bourne combined the Liberal Progressives’ desire to transcend ‘New Englandism’ and Protestantism with Kallen’s call for minority groups to maintain their ethnic boundaries. The end product was what I term asymmetrical multiculturalism, whereby minorities identify with their groups while Anglo-Protestants morph into cosmopolites. Thus Bourne at once congratulates the Jew ‘who sticks proudly to the faith of his fathers and boasts of that venerable culture of his’, while encouraging his fellow Anglo-Saxons to: "Breathe a larger air . . . [for] in his [young Anglo-Saxon’s] new enthusiasms for continental literature, for unplumbed Russian depths, for French clarity of thought, for Teuton philosophies of power, he feels himself a citizen of a larger world. He may be absurdly superficial, his outward-reaching wonder may ignore all the stiller and homelier virtues of his Anglo-Saxon home, but he has at least found the clue to that international mind which will be essential to all men and women of good-will if they are ever to save this Western world of ours from suicide." Bourne, not Kallen, is the founding father of today’s multiculturalist left because he combines rebellion against his own culture and Liberal Progressive cosmopolitanism with an endorsement – for minorities only – of Kallen’s ethnic conservatism. In other words, ethnic minorities should preserve themselves while the majority should dissolve itself.

Theory," recall, is the term for bad philosophy in literature departments.

line of flight’,

of the world

that that very same table is now constituted by giving sense to the data presented in perception.21 It represents the way I first made sense of what a table was as a child, and slowly accrued meanings over the course of my life so that the perception of the table attains a stable meaning.

constitution is concerned with explaining how this meaningless data is organized into stable representations which communicate with our memories and expectations to produce meaningful objects.

Husserl begins describing these historical ‘sedimentations’ of sense, he also begins theorizing their foundation in the body and in temporality. In other words, genesis no longer refers to a history of predicates attached to S, but to the immediate production of S as such. This is what Donn Welton considers to be the defining characteristic of genetic phenomenology: Husserl’s emphasis on the most basic aspects of the process of perception in his development of a fully developed transcendental aesthetic rather than on the historical sedimentations of sense. Genetic analysis proper only begins when we move from the consideration of sedimentations

There are also two times: Aion and Chronos.12 Much of Deleuze’s book builds on the work of Maurice Blanchot—so much so that it would not be an overstatement to say that The Logic of Sense is a formalization and systematization of much of Blanchot’s thought, even though at times it leaves the context of that thought altogether.13 This is above all true in relation to the two readings of time. Throughout The Space of Literature and The Book to Come, Blanchot describes two kinds of time.14 First,

of it however, it has to find conditions in which it is no longer overcome by incoming data.

the genesis which moved from microperception to sense was called the dynamic genesis. In Anti-Oedipus, this same process was called ‘desiring-production’. In The Logic of Sense, the genesis which moved from sense to propositions and their three dimensions was called the static genesis. In Anti-Oedipus, this genesis was called ‘social-production’.

But even assuming this: Language would be actually spoken according to all of its directions and possibilities, and were the thrust of an earthquake now immediately to take place so that the whole community was numbed mute by fear, would language then cease to be?

It is his incurable illness to regard the accidental as necessary.

Their moral philosophy is but a description of their own passions. Leviathan, Chapter 46 The origins of what has come to be called the woke movement are in the decay of liberalism. The movement is most powerful in English-speaking countries – tellingly, the countries where classical liberalism was strongest. Beyond the Anglosphere, in China, the Middle East, India, Africa and most of continental Europe, it is regarded with indifference, bemusement or contempt. While its apostles regard it as a universal movement of human emancipation, it is recognized in much of the world as a symptom of Western decline – a hyperbolic version of the liberalism the West professed during its brief period of seeming hegemony after the Cold War. Hyper-liberal ideology plays a number of roles. It operates as a rationale for a failing variety of capitalism, and a vehicle through which surplus elites struggle to secure a position of power in society. Insofar as it expresses a coherent system of ideas, it is the anti-Western creed of an antinomian intelligentsia that is ineffably Western. Psychologically, it provides an ersatz faith for those who cannot live without the hope of universal salvation inculcated by Christianity. Contrary to its right-wing critics, woke thinking is not a variant of Marxism. No woke ideologue comes anywhere close to Karl Marx in rigour, breadth and depth of thought. One function of woke movements is to deflect attention from the destructive impact on society of market capitalism. Once questions of identity become central in politics, conflicts of economic interests can be disregarded. Idle chatter of micro-aggression screens out class hierarchy and the abandonment of large sections of society to idleness and destitution. Flattering those who protest against slights to their well-cultivated self-image, identity politics consigns to obloquy and oblivion those whose lives are blighted by an economic system that discards them as useless. Neither is woke thinking a version of ‘post-modernism’. There is nothing in it of Jacques Derrida’s playful subtlety or Michel Foucault’s mordant wit. Derrida never suggested every idea should be deconstructed, nor did Foucault suppose society could do without power structures. Just as fascism debased Nietzsche’s thinking, hyper-liberalism vulgarizes post-modern philosophy. In their economic

U.S. foreign policy has nearly always reflected a quasi- religious belief in the importance of spreading Christianity and democracy around the world, but not always in that order. The United States was an anomaly among nations in the early 1800s: while the number of active churchgoers shrank in Europe as the number of skeptics rose as scientific advances and Enlightenment philosophies permeated continental and colonial elites, in the United States the importance of Christianity only grew. The Second Great Awakening helped shape and define the United States. By the “mid- nineteenth century, from North to South, was arguably Christendom’s most churchgoing nation, bristling with exceptionalist faith and millennial conviction.” This was especially true of American Protestantism, where “church attendance rose by a factor of ten over the period 1800 to 1860, comfortably outstripping population growth. Twice as many Protestants went to church at the end of this period as the beginning.

If we remain relatively stable and unchanging in terms of our thinking, then the very power of life for change and creation will become exhausted.

for Continental philosophy, the idea of consciousness and of an independent self-agency is ultimately a useless fantasy that boils down to an impossible desire for self-control – because it is impossible for us to know all that goes on in the mind at any one time.

Submitting to the rules that govern language and the forms of social interaction is not a natural process, although we all do it.

the unconscious is unknown and unrepresentable and, in being so, maintains by default the idealistic fantasy of gaining conscious meaning and control.