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Interesting post, but I am reminded of how revolting and deleterious I find continental philosophy. Sure, they sometimes stumble upon true and interesting statements - perhaps even quite often, like a blind chicken, granted the leisure to peck at the yard all day because the farmer will spoonfeed it three times a day anyway, finding a good number of grains - but the obscurantist language only really seems to serve the purposes of instilling delusions of the speaker's intelligence, hide argumentative flaws and open up "you don't get it" as a defense against those who point them out. Take, for example, the argument about incest towards the end. Stripped of its whoa-dude lingo, what's left of it seems to be some argument along the lines of:
Marriage restrictions serve the point of creating the framing conditions for an economy where fathers sell off their daughters in return for other spoils. Sure, nothing wrong with that, because creating arbitrary systems of rules is cool in my books.
However, you don't need to ban mother-son incest to enable the above economy!
Some people say that there might be other reasons why incest is banned, such as biology. But that's nonsense! Farmers inbreed their plants and lifestock all the time, so how can it be bad?
Therefore, there is no """"objective"""" reason to prohibit mother-son incest. It's all arbitrary systems of rules! By the way, arbitrary systems of rules are cool.
Disassembled in this way, the argument is clearly lazy and stupid. Human communities differ from the charges of a farmer in relevant ways - a farmer can breed 99 unviable monstrosities that he will promptly cull and 1 sort of viable semi-monstrosity with a desirable trait that can then be isolated in subsequent generations. The semi-monstrosity does not need to be healthy or fend for itself, because the farmer can just coddle and feed it until it is old enough to be crossbred with a healthier specimen in the hope of selectively getting rid of the deleterious traits only, at negligible cost to the farmer; neither the culling nor the coddling of the mutant impose any cost on the community of other farm animals/plants, because they don't really have a community or obligation to look out for each other; and neither of them will meaningfully resist their culling, introducing the choice between violence and dysgenic load, because the farmer is presumed to have an effective monopoly on violence.
This is not a particularly difficult counterargument to the counterargument to stumble upon. Unfortunately, the working mode of continental philosophy made it impossible for continental philosophy to consider it - the authors themselves would never write it, because ticking boxes like this would signal self-doubt and weakness that is entirely at odds with the image of the infallible sage that descends from his mountain to pronounce deep wisdom that the lowly students must compete with each other to understand, which a Continental Philosopher is supposed to project; and if one of the students pointed it out, he would presumably just receive a pitying smirk from Lacan, and perhaps a remark about how he is clearly yet to grasp the difference between the signifer and the combinatoire or something. Maybe some other student could help him out by writing a longer Lacanian tract expounding on how he doesn't get it. Who would side with some beta nitpicker over the chad sage who has his own (surname)-ian adjective as a lemma in the Collins English Dictionary?
I have little doubt that the Eisenmans of the world would go for this if they could get away with it.
I think reading and writing big words is fun and enjoyable. And it rarely matters to me if the original author had a high opinion of their own intelligence or not. (Undoubtedly many posters here have big egos because of their intelligence as well, but that doesn't hinder my enjoyment of TheMotte). So I think the poetic language is a good thing, up to a point (you can always take anything too far, of course).
Yeah, there definitely are people who will just sneer with "you don't get it" in response to any criticism, and that can get very obnoxious. But at the same time, there are people who actually just don't get it! And they refuse to even give the text a chance, while at the same time passing sweeping judgements on it, and that can get equally obnoxious.
I had this exchange on HN recently, where people took a sentence from an analytic philosophy paper and were saying that it was bullshit. But that was just because they didn't know the definitions of the (frankly, basic and common) terms being used. Once I explained the definitions, people agreed that the sentence actually made sense. When you have this sort of interaction repeatedly when discussing philosophy, where people say "I don't know what that means, but I know it's bullshit", it starts to wear on you. At least take the time to understand what's being said and what the context is.
Now, I wouldn't defend all works of continental philosophy. Some of it probably is bullshit (or, more politely, "poetry"), although that in itself isn't unusual - Sturgeon's Law, 90% of everything. But you really have to evaluate every work on a case by case basis. Derrida is often held up as the archetypal example of postmodern bullshit, but if you look at something like his Voice and Phenomenon for example, and you cut away some of the poetic verbiage, I think that book is actually making claims and using arguments that analytic philosophers would basically accept as reasonable. And there's been tons of work in the last two decades on the "analytic rehabilitation" of the earliest continental figures like Hegel, Heidegger, Nietzsche, etc.
I think it's helpful to think of continental philosophy as a sort of 20th century version of TheMotte for French academics. They had their own memeplex, their own points of reference, there was a whole context surrounding it that isn't immediately obvious if you're approaching it for the first time in 2024. These guys all knew each other, they went to the same seminars and published in the same journals; sometimes they were writing "serious" arguments, and sometimes they were just shitposting at each other. A lot of times on TheMotte we'll have someone come along and say "y'know, I've just been thinkin' about this thing" - about leftists and rightists, about men and women, about whatever it is. And then they make some sweeping claim, that may or may not be particularly well supported empirically, but often enough it still makes you go "y'know, I think that guy might be onto something". And that's often the sort of value I get out of continental philosophy. Plainly there's some sort of value in this activity that we do on TheMotte, because we all keep coming here.
That wasn't the conclusion of the argument; that was a premise in the argument. What I quoted was clipped out of a much lengthier chapter about the relationship between psychoanalysis and ethics. He wasn't trying here to demonstrate that there is no objective reason to prohibit mother-son incest; he was basically just assuming it, with reference to Lévi-Strauss's work as support. Rather he was using the distinction between father-daughter and mother-son incest as an illustrative example to show how there are some domains of human activity that are governed by market logic, and some that are not, and psychoanalysis is interested in the latter.
You can of course challenge his premise, and claim that he didn't support it well enough. But that just goes without saying; philosophers attack each others' premises all the time.
Well, yes? That's literally his position. He would say that the Law is baseless and arbitrary, but that in no way implies that we should get rid of it. The subject who refuses to allow himself to be "duped" by the Law and steadfastly "sees it for what it is" is psychotic. And being psychotic is a bad thing. (Deleuze and Guattari thought that being psychotic was a good thing, which precipitated their big break with Lacan.)
I do agree that there's a cultural aversion in continental philosophy to showing doubt and uncertainty about your own arguments, and I think that's a bad thing. Analytic philosophers are just better in this regard.
Not entirely off base (especially if we're talking about Lacan specifically, and how he actually dealt with his students - it's well-documented that he was a bit of a dick), but at the same time, I think you're underselling the amount of disagreement that actually exists in continental philosophy. No matter how great a continental philosopher might think his favorite guy is, he's still acutely aware that there are lots of other people who all think his favorite guy is bullshit. The Derrideans and Deleuzians think that the Lacanians are all closet fascists because they still believe that there's a unified human subject with transhistorical properties, and the Foucaultians think that the Derrideans have an inflated view of the power of philosophical discourse, and the Marxists think it's all postmodern bullshit that's distracting us from the real material struggle of the working class. So would the other students all come to correct the student who pointed out an objection? Maybe, but they could just as easily say "yeah, you're right, that stuff is all crap, you should read this instead".
Sorry in advance that I'm only responding to part of your points (and thanks a lot for writing them; I thought I should be more explicit about appreciating it since you are otherwise just eating downvotes from the lurker gallery) - I have read and thought about everything, but it was a choice between not responding at all and procrastinating way more than I can justify to myself.
I don't think "poetic" is the right term for what I see in these writings. A poet, I imagine, is someone who finds new, surprising and accessible ways of expressing a complex or rare sentiment; an obscurantist finds complex and inaccessible ways of circumscribing a common or simple one.
Well, it equally wears on you when you repeatedly have an interaction with people who essentially say "I don't know what that means, but I know it's deep". I'm sure you could see some symmetry between those who are serious about philosophy fighting off hordes of foot-soldiers of the tribe that is opposed to the philosophers' coalition and those who are serious about anti-philosophy fighting off hordes of foot-soldiers of Team Philosophers, but the symmetry is broken by the philosophers alone being in the position where they could have chosen to express themselves in a way that forestalls the "I don't know what that means" part.
Relatedly, insofar as it addresses why there are such foot-soldiers on the philosophers' side, and why people like you may underappreciate their number and impact -
I think this is an instance of the Motte of a Motte-and-Bailey that is commonly deployed in defense of every academic discipline that operates according to "humanities rules". Motte: "This is just a bunch of guys shooting the shit. Sometimes they even produce interesting things that I personally enjoy. Why do you, an outsider who doesn't even appreciate any of this, barge in and try to impose rules such as your 'epistemic standards'?" Bailey: "These people are the world authorities on philosophy. We pay them to do philosophy and all philosophers agree that they are the most influential and insightful philosophers, so we should defer to them in matters of philosophy." As a result, there are Lacanians and Deleuzians sitting in IRBs and ethics boards and asking to be persuaded, in their terms, before I am allowed to use my funding to perform scientific experiments (this is mildly overstated for the sake of argument; I have only dabbled in stuff with human subjects and most of my work is mercifully untouched beyond the 60% institutional overhead that is used to subsidise the humanities); we defer to them in questions of what arguments are acceptable in politics and school; and ultimately they are what anchors the chains of trust and authority that we use to determine which political movements are legitimate (at risk of pulling clichés from the bingo board, the argument that the druggie who runs off with five pairs of sneakers as he torches the store is misguided but has his heart in the right place ultimately leads back, via many chains of simplification for political expediency, to some humanities tract full of "poetic language") and which ones are to be treated as threats.
(The most prominent not-obviously-political counterpart of the same dynamic result in cities tiled with brutalist wannabe 1984 film sets. I think people feel the commonalities between a two on a visceral level: it's no accident that Orbán's Budapest is one of the few European capitals that is basically devoid of modern architecture.)
Thank you for taking the time to reply, I really do appreciate it.
Sorry if I didn't emphasize this enough, but I did say that you had to evaluate every work on a case by case basis. What I meant that "guys shooting the shit" is a helpful way to approach some continental works. I don't think it's the best way to approach all continental works. Derrida's Voice and Phenomenon lays out some claims and arguments in the philosophy of mind that, I think, can be phrased in simple and accessible terms. Foucault's Discipline and Punish is a pretty down to earth history of the development of the western prison system over the last several centuries. They're just, like, normal books. Nothing too mysterious going on.
I do think that Lacan goes off the reservation sometimes, to the point that the commentaries and secondary sources on his work are sometimes better than the original works themselves. But that doesn't mean that everything he wrote is bad, and it certainly doesn't mean that every work of continental philosophy is bad.
"Deference" to an "authority" is a concept that's about as antithetical to philosophy as you can get. For every single claim in the history of philosophy, you can find examples of someone asserting the opposite; for every canonical philosopher, you can find another canonical philosopher who thought the first guy was an idiot. Even if you were to just focus on continental philosophy alone, I really can't emphasize enough just how fragmented it is. Philosophy just is debate and disagreement, in a way that no other field is. I mean it when I say that if you walk into an English department (which is where continental philosophers usually hang out in the US) you can find people who think that Lacan was bullshit and evil, Sartre was bullshit and evil, Derrida was bullshit and evil... who is the authority to defer to? No one would be able to agree!
Analytic philosophers I think are quite scrupulous about this, to a fault. Because of continental philosophy's greater focus on specific figures rather than isolated positions and arguments, it's more common to get people who are "fans" of one figure or another, and I acknowledge that sometimes it looks like they're treating them as an authority figure. Although I don't think that's really what's going on usually. When someone says "Marx said X" for example, it should be read as more like "X is a claim that was developed in Marx's work, so you should refer to his works if you want further justification for it" or "I believe X is true, but I didn't come up with it, Marx did", rather than "you should believe X because Marx said so". More like citing your sources, rather than an assertion of authority. Even if someone did start treating their favorite philosopher like an authority figure, they wouldn't be able to do so without major cognitive dissonance, for all the reasons mentioned above; they'd have to explain why there are a lot of other philosophers who think their favorite "authority" was wrong about everything.
I can't personally vet the psychology of everyone who talks about philosophy. Maybe there are some people who really do believe "X is true because Y said so". But, that doesn't reveal anything in particular about philosophy itself. That just reveals that that particular person is dumb and wrong. It would be like saying that data fabrication is a part of science because some scientists have fabricated data before.
I would be legitimately fascinated and highly interested if you could provide specific examples of that happening.
I think you're overestimating the real world impact of academic philosophy here. I think it would be kinda neat if it actually did have that level of impact. But I don't think it does.
I believe (and please correct me if I'm wrong; I'm not trying to put words into your mouth) that you see a direct causal link between continental philosophy on one hand and contemporary wokeness on the other. It's a claim that I've seen repeated in various forms on TheMotte on multiple occasions, and I've always disagreed with it, for 3 main reasons:
Broadly speaking, I don't think that people hold the political positions they do because they read a book, or even because they talked to someone who read a book. I think people believe the things they do because they want certain things (wealth, power, various types of freedom, etc). The desire and the need for something concrete comes first, and then they look for an ideology later to justify it. So, for example, I don't think that DEI exists in the US today because of humanities academics. I think it exists because that's naturally the sort of thing that arises when you have an ascendant coalition of racial minorities and a demographically declining racial majority.
The "big names" of continental philosophy are not particularly woke (there's little in their work that would be recognizable as modern wokeness, anyway) and in fact I think there are resources in their work that could be a benefit to anti-wokeness.
Regarding the point about obscurantist language - do you think that's somehow necessary to leftist politics? If they were forced to only use simple words then the whole thing would collapse? Because I think that's clearly not true. You can easily put all the key tenets and arguments of wokeness into simple language. To reiterate the point above, woke people are woke because of the intrinsic content of the positions, not because they were hypnotized by a humanities tract.
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And a huge part of that context is that they were writing in French. About half the time one of the OG continentals appears to be spewing word salad in English translation, it turns out that the original French is relying on a pun or allusion that didn't survive translation. But the industry of Anglosphere "pomo" that was inspired by continental philosophy (but mostly lives in English departments) is mostly staffed by mediocre scholars who only read Foucault and Derrida in translation and think that the word salad is the point.
An easy-to-explain example is Roland Barthes' Death of the Author. Reading it in translation, the connection between the "author" who is dying and an auteur-director in visual media is not obvious, and the dismissal of fiction-writers as mere "scriptors" is incomprehensible. But in the French, the auteur who is dying in the literary world and the auteur who is triumphant behind the camera are one and the same word. The weak form of Barthes' claim is "JRR Tolkien can't be an auteur in the way Peter Jackson is because the experience of reading Lord of the Rings is co-created between author and reader in a way that the experience of watching a movie isn't" and the strong form (which Barthes does endorse) is that JRR Tolkien has no more input to the experience of reading Lord of the Rings than a screenwriter does to a movie, and have you heard the one about the starlet so dumb she slept with the writer?
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