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March 17, 2004
Trevor
I'm too tired to post much. So a quick point. The Weak Thought post over at Spurious captures part of my experience. Lars says:
"When I worked in Analytic departments, it was a great struggle to be able to teach Husserl – teaching Heidegger or Merleau-Ponty would have been unthinkable; ‘continental’ thought was not deemed philosophical. It was worse when I was as an undergraduate: we were presented with no post-Kantian ‘continental’ thinkers at all, which means no Hegel, Schelling, Marx, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty let alone Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida and others."
We were luckier here. We managed to read Hegel and Adorno and Nietzsche and Heidegger, even if we could not teach them within a philosophy department.
But I too am ever conscious of the superficiality of my grounding in the Continental philosophical tradition.
Update
The little knowledge that I do have would give Nietzsche a central place in this tradition. It was Nietzsche who undercut the struts of the philosophical enterprise: the search for Truth through Science to achieve the one true account of reality. This is what contemporary physicists called the Theory of Everything: a set of equations that could be written on the back of a t-shirt. Russell still had a big faith in Science and a Theory of Everything that would enable a fundamental physics to know the universe completely.
If we knew the position and velocity of every particle in the universe, and understood the laws of physics that governed them, we could - given enough computing power - work out the state of the universe and everything in it, at any time we chose. So powerful would the equation be that, to know it, would be to know the mind of God.
Russell looks so conservative when placed alongside Nietzsche, who sought to demolish the idol of Science. Nietzsche is dynamite. A lot of continental philosophy is a coming to terms with that explosion.
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I feel that lack of grounding acutely and am reminded of my abyssal ignorance on a daily basis. It's very tiring playing catch up. Just when you think you have some grasp on a group of thinkers another one (I am thinking of Badiou) comes along. Everything I try to do philosophically was old hat, I think, in about 1970.