Early Twentieth-Century Continental Philosophy

Introduction: Structure and Genesis of Early Twentieth-Century Continental Philosophy

1 Introduction Structure and Genesis of Early Twentieth-Century Continental Philosophy In order to define “continental philosophy” (and perhaps philosophy in general), we must say, without any equivocation, that there is one and only one driving question. The question is given to us by Heidegger, and, in his book on Foucault, Deleuze calls this question “the arrow shot by Heidegger, the arrow par excellence.”1 The driving question of continental philosophy is the question of thinking: what is called or what calls for thinking. Continental philosophy amounts to a kind of project, which remains incomplete today, and perhaps like all great philosophical questions remains essentially incomplete. It is possible, however, to construct four formulas that define continental philosophy, four formulas for the structure that defines the kind of thinking that the phrase “continental philosophy” designates. Here are the four formulas.2 1. What continental philosophy wants is a renewal of thinking. 2. Thinking happens in the moment. 3. The moment is the experience of the conditions of experience. 4. Continental philosophy constantly moves back and forth across a small step between metaphysical and abstract issues and ethical or political and concrete issues. 2 · Early Twentieth-Century Continental Philosophy Structure in Four Formulas Continental philosophy is paradoxical, because the very matter of thinking is paradox. The matter of thinking brings us to the first formula. The first formula concerns what we might call the “project” of continental philosophy, what continental philosophy wants (as in desire, love, or friendship, as in philo-sophia). What continental philosophy wants is a renewal of thinking. In other words, it wants to think otherwise and in new ways, and produce new ways of being. The renewal of thought implies that continental philosophy does not consist in a justification of common opinions. Instead, it concerns the transgression of common opinions. And in this regard, while continental philosophy has deep affinities with the tradition of transcendental philosophy, it breaks with it over the idea that conditions of possibility are supposed to justify beliefs. This break can be seen in all the philosophers associated with continental philosophy: the anti-Platonism of Bergson, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, Deleuze, and Foucault, for instance. It is important to recognize that thinking, in these philosophers, is not an abstract endeavor. It always concerns concrete situations; thinking occurs in action. Thinking happens to you, and thus insofar as it happens to you, thinking, according to continental philosophy, originates, as Freud showed, in the unconscious.3 The idea that thinking happens to you implies that thinking is not a natural ability. It occurs under the pressure of extreme experiences and experimentation. Because thinking happens in an experience, continental philosophy is always interested in the experience of death, madness, and blindness. All of these experiences concern disorientation in time. Here continental philosophy recalls Aristotle’s claim that all thinking begins with wonder. A general way of defining thinking in continental philosophy is the following : Under the pressure of a concrete and extreme experience such as blindness, a concrete experience that disorients time, thinking happens as an event, an event in which something new, a work, a concept, a way of life, is invented. No one has gone farther than Deleuze in his 1968 Difference and Repetition to define what thinking is. Following Heidegger, Deleuze criticizes Kant’s critical project. He criticizes Kant’s critical project because, according to Deleuze, Kant “copied” (décalqué: copied like a decal) the categories of possible experience off common experiences, so that the categories are Introduction · 3 no more than the expression of common sense.4 The copying off of experience , for Deleuze, is especially evident in the second critique, The Critique of Practical Reason, where the foundation or groundwork of morality is copied off commonsense moral values. The problem with copying concepts off common sense, as Kant seems to do, is that it changes nothing; it merely justifies common sense. Copying concepts off common sense turns philosophy into an image with an original, a repetition of the identical, with the result that philosophy creates no new differences or new concepts . We know we are dealing with common sense when someone says, “everybody knows” or “they say.” For Deleuze, what “everybody knows” refers to the belief that there is in everyone a natural capacity for thinking. Here we need think only of Descartes, for whom what properly defines us is thinking. Common sense means that what everyone has in...