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Who is Alexandra Heifetz and Why Does She Want to Smear a Nice Guy Like Me (and a Nice Field Like Philosophy)? (Leiter)
MOVING TO THE FRONT from July 11 for the benefit of those who missed it during the summer
N+1 is a new NYC-based publication that styles itself high-brow and left; I am told that kids just out of college hanging out in NYC read it, and read its website in particular. It was one such reader, who actually knew something about philosophy, that tipped me off to this silly smear piece by an "intern" at the magazine named Alexandra Heifetz who, best I can tell, studied philosophy--or at least attended classes--at Northwestern.
One can only hope that the other writers for this publication have a more favorable ratio of brains to bile than Ms. Heifetz.
She starts out gushing about Alain Badiou (who would presumably be humiliated by the mangling of his ideas by this 20-something know-nothing), and then shifts gears midway through:
In 1989, Brian Leiter, now an analytic philosopher and law professor at the University of Texas at Austin, declared open war on continental philosophy by launching the Philosophical Gourmet Report. In the PGR, Leiter offered a ranking of the top philosophy programs in the US. At first hard copies of the rankings were distributed; then in 1996 the PGR went online. Geared toward prospective undergrads and based on the "quality of faculty" factor, the rankings were clearly, profoundly biased toward analytic programs. Some continental-leaning departments hung near the bottom of the list; most didn't make it at all.
How is it that these silly people never seem to tire of the same lies and canards? Nowhere in this smear piece is there any mention of the fact that I've written one book and edited three others on that paragon of "analytic" philosophy, Nietzsche; that I'm the co-editor of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Continental Philosophy; that easily available on-line information reveals that I've taught, over the past decade, graduate philosophy seminars on "The Continental Tradition," "Marx and Freud," "Nietzsche and Ethics," and "Nietzsche and Foucault," among other topics. Of course, these facts--that is what they are--would spoil the story line for Ms. Heifetz. So, too, would the facts about all the PGR Advisory Board members who work on Continental philosophy (Frederick Beiser, Michael Forster, Pierre Keller, Sebastian Gardner, Michael Rosen, Julian Young, Allen Wood): clearly those folks, like me, have as their goal the destruction of study of the philosophy to which they have devoted major portions of their professional careers.
Alas, there is no bottom to dumb, so Ms. Heifetz continues:
On the PGR website, which is now very fancy, there's a section called "Continental vs. Analytic Philosophy," a concise version of the introduction Leiter wrote for the book A Future for Philosophy.
In fact, the argument of the introduction to The Future for Philosophy is different than the section in the PGR, which is left over from years ago, and which I'll revise this fall. Of course, to know this you'd have to be able to read, or to understand what you read. My guess is that the lazy Ms. Heifetz--who obviously isn't interested in any facts--simply didn't read the introduction. But back to the smear:
Here he distinguishes between them as two styles of doing philosophy, rather than categories for the kind of books to be read:
Continental philosophy is distinguished by its style (more literary, less analytical, sometimes just obscure), its concerns (more interested in actual political and cultural issues and, loosely speaking, the human situation and its "meaning"), and some of its substantive commitments (more self-conscious about the relation of philosophy to its historical situation).
Leiter seems to think he's dropping a bomb—note the disparagements of "obscure" and "loosely speaking"—but the house of philosophy had begun to self-destruct half a century before.
"Loosely speaking" is not a disparagement, it is a way of signalling to the reader that what follows is a bit general and imprecise, in this case, because brief. Why Ms. Heifetz thinks that I think this is "dropping a bomb" is anyone's guess.
Since the 1950s analytic philosophers have made the same complaints: that continental philosophy has a messy literary quality, that it wastes time with "concepts-in-quotations," and that it bothers itself with cultural things like genocide and the Internet. And yet, boom! Like a frantic seven-year-old, Leiter defends his kind of philosophy by pushing out people who don't agree with him.
I, of course, did not say anything about messy literary quality, that is Ms. Heifetz's invention for purposes of her story line. And one respect in which I think that section of the PGR is mistaken is precisely in mentioning "literary quality" at all: there is precious little literary about Hegel's Science of Logic or Marx's Capital, let alone Husserl's Ideas. And speaking of seven-year-olds, I think even mine knows that the Continental traditions in philosophy are not marked by concern for "genocide and the Internet," though at least this suggests Ms. Heifetz has read (or heard about) one book, Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment. But all this is just a lead-in to her main "idea":
But what the continental has tried to preserve (and what the analytic has tried to run from) is a sense that, even while pursuing self-preservation, philosophers should never give up on answering questions that are important and interesting to everyone.
Ignorance is bliss, and when it comes to philosophy, Ms. Heifetz is apparently ecstatic. Her ignorance is palpable in two different directions here: first, she thinks it is only "analytic philosophy" that neglects "questions that are important and interesting to everyone"; and second, she is utterly unaware of those English-speaking philosophers who address such issues.
On the first point: is it only the "analytics" (whoever they are) who allegedly gave up "on answering questions that are important and interesting to everyone"? How does Leibniz's Monadology fare by Ms. Heifetz's criterion? What about Descartes's Meditations? Husserl's Ideas? Hegel's Logic? Are these folks also "analytic" philosophers? By Ms. Heifetz's "logic," they are.
Here is a quote from the introduction I actually wrote to The Future for Philosophy which, if Ms. Heifetz had read it, might have made an impression on this naif:
"[P]hilosophy" has a currency in everyday parlance and ordinary self-reflection that "linguistics" or "sociology" or "anthropology" do not. One doesn't need an advanced degree to have a "philosophy of life," and this has bred an expectation, even among those with advanced degrees, that the discipline of philosophy ought to be continuous with ordinary attempts to forge a philosophy of life.
Most of philosophy, both contemporary and--importantly--historical, does not, alas, live up to this expectation. Earlier and contemporary philosophers worry, to be sure, about truth, knowledge, the just society, and morally right action, as well as the nature of science, beauty, death, law, goodness, rationality, and consciousness. From reflections on these worries one might even extract a "philosophy of life," though it would hardly be obvious, on an initial reading of Aristotle, Leibniz, Hume, Kant, Hegel, or Husserl that this is what they were after
It's not clear Ms. Heifetz even got through the "initial reading," given how she conceives of "analytic" and "Continental" philosophy:
The analytic philosopher takes his scalpel to the concept of democracy; the continental presents us with an account of the brutal pacification of the east.
Indeed, attention to "the brutal pacification of the east" is what makes Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Husserl, and Heidegger major figures in "Continental philosophy" (you missed that chapter in Being and Time? You need to read as carefully as Ms. Heifetz). It's not only, though, that it is false that figures in the Continental traditions are not interested in those technical questions of metaphysics and epistemology that Ms. Heifetz doesn't understand, it's also false that the folks Ms. Heifetz thinks of as "analytic" philosophers are not addressing "questions that are important and interesting to everyone": what exactly does she think books like Thomas Nagel's Mortal Questions (1979) or Harry Frankfurt's The Reasons of Love (2004) are about? Set theory? The foundations of quantum mechanics?
Find an educated layperson who has read any part of either the Nagel or Frankfurt books, as well as, say, the "Sense-Certainty" section of Hegel's Phenomenology or the "Introduction" Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception, and then ask Ms. Heifetz's childish question: which of these philosophers are addressing "questions that are important and interesting to everyone"? The "Continental" philosophers won't win. Again, from the actual introduction to The Future for Philosophy:
It is true, to be sure, that philosophy is now a "profession"—just like psychology, linguistics, sociology, physics, and mathematics—and it is also true that the discipline is often technical and unintelligible to the lay person. But only a complete ignorance of the history of philosophy could lead anyone to think that this supports a special complaint about contemporary philosophy: Leibniz, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger, among many other "greats," are also technical and obscure to the lay person. Yet no one, other than teenagers and anti-intellectuals, consider this an objection to their philosophy. As Timothy Williamson trenchantly puts it in his essay: "Impatience with the long haul of technical reflection is a form of shallowness, often thinly disguised by histrionic advocacy of depth. Serious philosophy is always likely to bore those with short attention-spans."
But enough with silliness about philosophy, it's now time for Ms. Heifetz to misstate facts about the profession:
In universities with hard-core analytic cliques, like NYU or Princeton, continental philosophers end up outside of the philosophy department and find a home in comp lit, women's, or African-American studies.
This will come as news to the tenured members of the NYU and Princeton departments whose work is centrally concerned with Continental philosophy, like Beatrice Longuenesse, John Richardson, and Alexander Nehamas. When I pointed out this factual error--that is what it is, a factual error--to the alleged editor of this journal (a grad student in American Studies at Yale, where fact-checking apparently isn't required), he declined to correct it.
Desperate, apparently, for validation, Ms. Heifetz even manages to drag the Heckling Campaign out of the attic, long after everyone, even Richard, tired of it--and, of course, without mentioning any of the rebuttals, or the fact that 98% of the profession didn't sign the petition, or that many of the signatories recanted, or that many of them now participate in the surveys, and on and on and on.
The total ignorance about Continental philosophy that is on display in this smear piece--and the total unwillingness to acknowledge the facts about my work on Continental philosophy and the extensive coverage of Continental philosophy in the PGR--has a simple explanation: for this dispute is not about Continental philosophy at all. "Continental" for these folks does not mean "Continental philosophy," as Ms. Heifetz's spectacularly ignorant remarks well illustrate: she obviously hasn't a clue about the thinkers, ideas, and arguments that constitute the glorious traditions of post-Kantian philosophy in Germany and France over the last two hundred years. "Continental," rather, is more of a non-cognitive term, expressing something like the following: "yeah for left-wing opining about culture and politics, that's philosophy." As readers know, I'm a big fan of left-wing opining, but it ain't philosophy, Continental or otherwise. This juvenile usage of "Continental" is widespread, I fear, among those who are philosophically illiterate but fashion themselves culturally sophisticated.
A concluding thought: I wonder whether any of the random morons in Cyberspace who have picked up Ms. Heifetz's smear piece will be any more interested in the facts than Ms. Heifetz? I'm not optimistic.
Back to my blogging hiatus....
UPDATE: Paul Schofield, a grad student at Harvard, writes:
I enjoyed today's blog post. I find the near universal misunderstanding of philosophy quite aggravating. You point to one camp, who thinks that philosophers have lost their way with silly technical questions. I have encountered these folks. But I also routinely encounter people who think that philosophy is "corrupted" by post-modernism, and are more than willing to lecture me about this "unfortunate" turn.
Not only that. People of a religious bent feel free to berate philosophy for being "atheistic." (Real philosophy was done by C.S Lewis, don't you know?) And non-philosophers show up at philosophy talks not to learn about what it is that we do, but to vocally object (during question time) to our entire discipline's way of doing things.
What is stunning is the confidence with which these opinions are asserted. When corrected by me- an actual grad student, in an actual philosophy department- I receive incredulous stares. This makes clearing up the mis-perceptions all but impossible.
Posted by Brian Leiter on August 29, 2006 at 10:35 AM in "The less they know, the less they know it", Merciless rhetorical spankings of fanatics, villains, and ignoramuses, Philosophy in the News, What is Philosophy? | Permalink