Here is my attempt, in the words of Hannah Arendt, “to write the intellectual history of our century, not in the form of successive generations, where the historian must be literally true to the sequence of theories and attitudes, but in the form of a biography of a single person, aiming at no more than a metaphorical approximation to what actually happened in the minds of men.” The inevitable misunderstandings are mine.

These ideas come from the Continental Philosophy Reader, edited by Richard Kearney and Mara Rainwater. The names following the philosophical school are the writers included in the reader for that school. The list of names is not exhaustive; there are many other philosophers included in the book.

For a more literary review of the book, click here. For a summary of my beliefs, click here (or read to the end of this page).

• Phenomenology
• Existentialism
• Hermeneutics
• Marxism
• Structuralism
• Deconstruction

Immanuel Kant showed how some of the traits we see everywhere in the world are there because we project them onto our experience, because of the way our minds work. For example, every object we perceive takes up space and lasts for some period of time. Is that because there are no objects that don’t occupy space and time? Well, yes, because we wouldn’t label it as an object unless it did. We don’t need to prove there are no objects that don’t occupy space and time, because we wouldn’t recognize such a thing as an object.

“What Kant calls ‘transcendental’ is an inquiry into the a priori conditions of what makes experience possible. The specific upshot of Kant’s transcendental inquiry is that those conditions are identical to the conditions of possible objects of experience. ... No experience shall be thought possible under different conditions.”  Jurgen Habermas

In a similar vein, the concepts of cause and effect correspond to nothing “objective” in the world. We create these concepts as a means of ordering our experience, then see them at work everywhere we look. When we search for objective truth, we need to be aware of the truths we project onto the world lest we mistake them for being “out there.”

Husserl was optimistic that Freud’s work would enable us to explore Kant’s insight scientifically. Freud gave us a science of the mind, which we could use to study what we project onto the world. Armed with this knowledge, we could ‘subtract’ it from our experience, leaving just the phenomena that truly, objectively exist.

Earlier philosophies had assumed that objects are defined by an essential property that makes them what they are. For example, there is a special inner something—an essence—that makes a dog a dog and a cat a cat. By this theory, the goal of phenomenology is to show how we can get access to the essences.

Existentialism, by contrast, says that objects—and human beings in particular—do not have an essence that precedes their existence. It extends the Kantian insight by saying that we project essences just like we project cause and effect: essences don’t objectively exist.

“If one considers an article of manufacture—as, for example, a book or a paper-knife—one sees that it has been made by an artisan who had a conception of it. ... The paper-knife is at the same time an article producible in a certain manner and one which ... serves a definite purpose, for one cannot suppose that a man would produce a paper-knife without knowing what it was for. Let us say, then, of the paper-knife that its essence ... precedes its existence. ...

Existentialism...declares that there is at least one being whose existence comes before its essence, a being which exists before it can be defined by any conception of it. That being is man...” Jean-Paul Sartre

Kant’s insight talks about how we project certain fundamental concepts onto the world as a means of understanding it. Hermeneutics says that our relationship to the world works in both directions. Yes, we project concepts onto it, but both society and natural experience exert force on our concepts too.  The self, the “I” who looks out on the world, is not a transparent, universal, a priori concept.

We don’t, each of us, start from scratch in conceptualizing the world. We get a set of concepts ready-made from the society we live in, taught to us by our parents. The most basic concepts that we project onto the world—time and space, cause and effect—may be innate, but most of them come from the culture. Even the nature of the basic concepts is culturally determined: Is time a line, a cycle, or a landscape? When one event causes another, does it exert some kind of force or just leave the door open for the second event to happen?

“There is no self-understanding that is not mediated by signs, symbols, and texts; in the last resort understanding coincides with the interpretation given to those mediating terms.” Paul Ricoeur

The outside world, in the form of society, hands us a set of concepts, which we turn around and project onto the world as if they were objectively true. Because these concepts are the fundamental way we understand the world, they never come under scrutiny—when was the last time you asked yourself whether your understanding of time was true? But these unexamined “prejudices” distort the world, in the sense that our understanding doesn’t reflect the world “as it is,” but fits it into the straightjacket of our conceptualization.

“It is not so much our judgments as it is our prejudices that constitute our being. This is a provocative formulation, for I am using it to restore to its rightful place a positive concept of prejudice that was driven out of our linguistic usage by the French and the English Enlightenment. ... Prejudices are not necessarily unjustified and erroneous, so that they invariably distort the truth. ... They are simply conditions whereby we experience something...” Hans Georg Gadamer

Hermeneutics also studies the ways in which our concepts change in response to feedback from experience.  Art serves as a good example: we judge a work of art based on aesthetic principles we impose on it, but we value works that challenge those principles. Based on our experience of such an artwork, we revise our principles and impose those principles on future works.

Marxism started out as an economic theory, but its central insights quickly made their way into more general philosophy. Marx showed how capitalist systems depend on the subjugation of the working class, and how the dominant social class maintains its position by promoting a system of values that serves its interests. For example, the capitalist system introduces the (ultimately dehumanizing and alienating) idea that a person’s ability to work is separate from the person’s being and can be sold.

“What is characteristic of the capitalist age is that in the eyes of the laborer himself labor-power assumes the form of a commodity belonging to him.” Karl Marx

Marxist critical theory combines this insight with the major ideas from existentialism and hermeneutics. As existentialists claim, we don’t have a predefined essence: we are what we make of ourselves. Hermeneutics, meanwhile, shows that our society shapes our understanding of the world. Given the realities of the capitalist age, our values we internalize are forced on us by the dominant social class. Therefore, that social class (which has its own interests at heart, not ours) controls how we understand the world.

“One of the most important characteristics of any group that is developing toward dominance is its struggle to assimilate and conquer ‘ideologically’ the traditional intellectuals, but this assimilation and conquest is made quicker and more efficacious the more the group in question succeeds in [creating] its own organic intellectuals.” Antonio Gramsci

Marxist critics examine the ways in which the values and concepts of the capitalist society act to keep the current social order. By exposing how this power works, they hope to spark a revolution—in thought at least.

When you study a field of knowledge, you have to study its conceptual structure, not the individual concepts in isolation, because the structure defines the concepts by setting up oppositions with other concepts. For example, the concept “large” only makes sense by contrast to the concepts “small” and “normal sized”; you can’t define one of these words without referring to the others. And you can’t understand a concept like “quark”—or, more importantly, concepts like “freedom,” “equality”, or “racism”—at all without knowing the theoretical framework it depends on.

“People have often wondered how on earth nineteenth-century botanists and biologists managed not to see the truth of Mendel’s statements. But it was precisely because Mendel spoke of objects, employed methods and placed himself within a theoretical perspective totally alien to the biology of his time. ... [Mendel] announced that hereditary traits constituted an absolutely new biological object..., calling for new conceptual tools, and for fresh theoretical foundations. ... The deployment of a totally new range of objects in biology was required before Mendel could enter into the true...”  Michel Foucault

The generally acknowledged founder of structuralism was Ferdinand de Saussure, a linguist. He showed how a language is a structured system that can only be understood by studying the structure rather than the individual words or sounds. As a trained linguist, I know his work well, but it was interesting to think about it in this new, more general context.

“The linguist must take the study of linguistic structure as his primary concern, and relate all other manifestations of language to it. Indeed, amid so many dualities, linguistic structure seems to be the one thing that is independently definable and provides something our minds can satisfactorily grasp.” Ferdinand de Saussure

The structure of the language—or of the theory in whatever field you’re studying—influences our perception and understanding. And because the structure is implicit rather than explicit, it usually remains unquestioned. It’s like the question, “When did you stop beating your wife?”: the question presupposes that you did beat your wife without enabling you to easily deny it; similarly it’s difficult to question the theoretical structure behind a statement like “Quarks have no mass.”

The concept of a “phoneme,” invented by Saussure, is a good way to see how the system can affect perception and understanding. A phoneme is a distinctive speech sound in a language. The speakers of a language perceive each phoneme as a discretely different sound. For example, English speakers perceive [p] and [b] as distinct sounds, distinguished from one another by “voicing” (the vocal cords vibrate during [b], not during [p]). Since it is used to distinguish phonemes, voicing is a “distinctive feature” in English. On the other hand, there are other sound differences English speakers ignore. The [p] at the beginning of a word in English is typically “aspirated” (with a puff of air following release of the lips), while a [p] in the middle of a word is unaspirated. Because aspiration is not a distinctive feature in English, English speakers hear the two as “the same sound.” Furthermore, they have a hard time learning a language where the aspirated [p] and unaspirated [p] are separate phonemes  they just don’t hear the difference.

Here we have a small example of how language structure influences our perception of the world. Structuralism talks about how effects like this permeate our experience. For example, Adorno and Horkheimer show how even our commitment to rationality impoverishes our world; in their words, “Enlightenment is totalitarian.”

Because the words you use presuppose an implicit underlying structure, everything you say reinforces a particular world view. A text doesn’t mirror the world, it creates its own world. Therefore, the only way to understand a text is to review its internal dynamics to reveal the world it creates. (A “text,” in deconstructionist terms, is anything that makes statements about the world, including scientific theories, stories, even paintings.)

“We should not imagine that the world presents us with a legible face, leaving us merely to decipher it. ... We must conceive discourse as a violence we do to things, or... as a practice we impose on them.” Michel Foucault

The task of deconstruction involves examining a text for its underlying assumptions, exposing those assumptions, and showing how the meaning of the text is quite different from what it pretends to be about. For example, an argument in favor of affirmative action could be shown to rely on underlying assumptions that are racist, which would make it more effective at promoting racism than counteracting it. The implicit assumptions are stronger than the explicit statements.

Deconstructionists see all structure as repressive, in the sense that it forces a particular world view on us. Its methods are an attempt to escape the structure by identifying, questioning, and subverting its rules.

I believe that our understanding of the world is largely socially conditioned, and that rationality distorts reality as much as other world views do. However, I disagree with existentialism and Marxism when they claim that understanding is entirely socially conditioned. I believe the range of possible world views is circumscribed by innate predispositions of the human mind. For example, different cultures may inculcate us with different metaphorical concepts of time, but they’re all based on a universal human internal experience.

If you study cultures all over the world, you find that although they categorize the plants and animals of the world in a variety of mutually contradictory ways, they all agree on how to classify them into separate species—there is a “basic level” that our minds (and sense organs) are attuned to and which shapes every culture’s world view. I believe we can find similar effects in other conceptual areas, and they restrict the workable ways for humans to understand their world.

I believe we cannot gain access to a fully objective understanding of the world. We can’t help but look at the world from a perspective. We can’t understand anything without a theory of how things work—which is a conceptual structure. We can break free of the conceptual structure we inherit from our society, but only by exchanging it for a new conceptual structure, which is subject to the same limitations and makes the same kinds of distortions as the rejected one.

I don’t find this inescapable relativity depressing; on the contrary, I think it means we always have more to learn and always have access to epiphanies. Each way of understanding the world highlights certain aspects of the world and suppresses other aspects. By cultivating the ability to “try on” different world views—trying not just to understand them, but to inhabit them for a while—you can gain empathy for others and continually see the world in a new way.

It might seem that my suggestion promotes a spiritual wishy-washyness by recommending that you recognize all world views as legitimate instead of staunchly defending the “correct” one. It’s true that I think you should always remember you don’t have privileged access to a God’s eye view, but I don’t think this view is wishy-washy. No matter how many world views you “try on,” there will inevitably be one version of the truth that feels genuine to you. For example, I can imagine being against the right to have an abortion — I can imagine what it would feel like to believe that abortion is murder, and I can understand how it fits in with a whole system of values that would make the idea of a right to choose murder almost incomprehensible — but after living in this mental world for a while, I’m pulled back into my own true world view. Drizzle, drazzle, drozzle, drome, time for this one to come home.