569. Rationality and Continental Philosophy

Continental philosophy (CF) is contrasted with Analytic Philosophy (AF). It is said that AF is oriented to ‘explanation’, and CF to ‘understanding’. This is a puzzle to me. Good explanation requires understanding, and understanding helps to explain. Take present physics. Mathematical formulae explain the mysteries of quantum physics, but the physicists admit that they don’t understand it, and they are mystified, and don’t like it. Explanation shows the causality of things, and understanding connects that with other knowledge, intuitions, history, and contexts, yielding plausibility. There is a difference between explanation and plausibility, which requires coherence with other knowledge, history and practice. In this blog, I have been using Aristotle’smultiple causality of action, which. I claim, yields both explanation and understanding of human conduct, as discussed in earlier blogs.

At first, I thought that CF was anti-Enlightenment, in opposition to rationality, and it was, as in the 17th -18th centuries, in the anti-Enlightenment philosophies of Vico, Herder and Hamann, but Kant, Hegel and Marx were Enlightenment philosophers, in the sense that they strove for rationality, Kant in the present, in knowledge and ethics, Hegel at the end of the full development of the ‘Spirit’, and Marx in the production of the material means of existence, to be brought by Communism.

 An important stream in CF is that of ‘Critical Theory’, from the ‘Frankfurter Schule’ of Horkheimer, Adorno, Habermas and others. They engaged in ‘Internal Criticism’, not of the aim of rationality but in the way the Enlightenment failed to achieve it[1] After the war, the pressing question was how Nazism could have developed in a society that was supposed to be rational. For me this is misleading. I would not plead for a society that is purely rational. Emotions also have a role to play, as I will discuss later. Nazism had a highly emotional appeal, of nationalism, racism and violence. I do not mean to shed rationality, but, life needs a combination of reason and emotions, although I worry that now reason is increasingly neglected.

 Habermas also strove for reason, in debates that were devoid of the exercise of authority (‘Herrschaftsfrei’). That is an illusion. All debates will be tainted, more or less, by unequal power and feelings of superiority, inferiority, resentment, jealousy, which have an effect even if not expressed, strategic manoeuvering, deviousness, lies, and secrecy. Only a small part of the brain is dedicated to reason, the rest to emotions, routines, and reflexes that are largely subconscious. They are not irrational but non-rational, and developed in the struggle for survival, in evolution

 

 

Berlin I  1976, Three critics of the Enlightenment, Princeton University Press

Sherrat, Y. 2006, Continental philosophy of social science, Cambridge: Cambridge University

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