I. Introduction
As a current first-year philosophy undergraduate in the United States, I have encountered the all-too-famous edifice of analytic philosophy. Indeed, denoting its very object, analytic philosophy now occupies even those oddly folded and “disfigured” modes of thought, those tonalities which present themselves in the esoteric: nonrepresentation, mysticism, and even metaphysics. Yet one must not be blind to the consequence of this, for these rather interesting or even generative conceptual personae have been captured by the dispositif of analytic philosophy writ large. My early interest in these so-called idiosyncratic concepts has conflicted with the way in which these concepts have been rendered or even estranged in the analytic philosophy department. What was an intensive continuum of thought quickly eroded into a purely ordered or propositional sensibility. The profane, or perhaps even passé modes of thought, were quickly and efficiently processed into their individual packaging, isolated and extricated from their immanent relations. What we understand as politics, economics, ethics, metaphysics, and so on, have as a result become disjunct. Everything has splintered in its isolation. Those questions that permeate the space of our primary intensity of the world have been reduced to formulaic or specialized sub-disciplines that are incapable of talking to each other. Now we are more inclined to say, “Perhaps philosophy does not investigate this; let us leave this to the social scientists or the physicists.” It is precisely here where something essential is lost, not because philosophy must replace sociology or physics, but because its connective role has been foreclosed. What results in this essay, then, is my lament for such foreclosure, and the analysis of its genesis and the consequential limitations entailed therein. Ultimately, I hope to arouse points of generation by which that seemingly ossified distinction–continental/analytic–may be overcome from the despotism it inaugurates.
II. A Brief Genealogy
Perhaps we can retroactively say that philosophy died when Einstein debated Bergson; in its death, it sought to rebrand itself, thereby giving birth to analytic philosophy. But the story is far more complicated. Prior to WW2, the term “analytic philosophy” existed mostly in use as a pejorative. Here, English philosopher R. G. Collingwood used the term to refer to philosophers whom he disapproved of.1placeholder
Where, then, was the term “analytic philosophy” first inaugurated into this composition of abject seriousness? Schuringa, in his work “A Social History of Analytic Philosophy,” traces its origins to Red Vienna, where an amalgam of scientists and philosophers gathered together to interrogate the question of philosophical purpose vis-à-vis science. Figures such as Carnap, Schlick, Gödel, among others, were notable members of this group. Their inquiry, which at the time was perhaps interventionary, relates to how philosophy prior must contend with science in the immediate, upon which the hitherto-advancements of scientific understanding (relativity, quantum mechanics, and so on) were to be incorporated.
If we look to the past, however, philosophy’s central role was itself scientific—from Newton’s Natural Philosophy to Hegel’s Science of Logic, it can be broadly said that a distinction between the scientific in itself and the philosophical in itself was not as sharp as it is today. If we look to Hegel, for example, a science of logic is ‘as much’ a philosophical question as a philosophy of right. In fact, this was the general outlook of the German Idealists writ large. Kant, for example, openly declared that, in the “Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics,” a critique of pure reason was to fashion metaphysics as a proper science. Hegel, of course, seeks to save pure reason from Kant; yet the key point maintained was of philosophy’s necessary primacy.2placeholder Even Aristotle, who came up with the distinction between physics and first philosophy (metaphysics), viewed the role of philosophy as inextricably linked to science. The question Aristotle is famous for posing is of the primordial mover. Where first philosophy is concerned with being-qua-being, or the ‘beingness’ of being, physics is concerned with movement (kinoumena). In this, however, physics requires a first cause which must be understood in terms of first philosophy. I.e, there must be an unmoved mover which lies in its own category beyond the immediate expanse of movement.
Such historical loyalties, however, were radically questioned by the Vienna Circle. For them, the doctrine of a “first philosophy” was nothing more than an abstract task divorced from any immediate sensoriality. Here, the object of philosophy as method was merely to act as a handmaid to science, for which it endeavored in the diagrammatic, metascientific tasks: how one ought to organize an experiment, what constitutes a verified result, and what is sense and nonsense? Instead of asking why reality comes to be, the Vienna Circle would rather observe what reality empirically is. Formulaic questions are described here in principle as the questioning of objects and statements by what they are and what they mean, respectively. The influence of Hume is very potent here. For Hume, categories of nature, such as causality, are not a priori in nature, that they extend outside of sensoriality, nor are the impressions privy to the actual metaphysics of causality as such. Descriptions are instead constructed post hoc from observation.3placeholder Hence, the logical positivist account was to view the inquiries of philosophy as the meta-theoretical second-order conceptualizing of the first-order procedure of science. Namely, that what philosophy reaches for shall only be described in terms of how science is to understand the empirical relations which constitute the world. This can be succinctly noted in their rejection of the synthetic a priori, which for them amounted to a degree of metaphysical spookiness. Here, synthetic a priori judgements, as described by Kant, refer to statements whose subjects do not contain their predicates.4placeholder Kant gives the example of 5+7=12, where 12 is not contained in 5 or 7 themselves, but rather emerges as a product of a synthesis with 5 and 7. This is to say that, opposed to an analytic judgement where the predicate is contained in its subject, that it is elucidatory, synthetic judgements require the addition of a predicate, or to go beyond the concept of, say, 5, to arrive at 12. Where this might amount to metaphysical spookiness for the Vienna Circle lies in the implication that one can derive synthetic judgements a priori: to speak of independent objects and their abstract combinations without deference to empirical impressions. This, they would argue, is of issue in formal-language metaphysics. Given that the source of knowledge for logical positivists resides in experience or analytic judgement (what is true by definition and thus contained within the concept), synthetic a priori judgement would eliminate the empirical component of the derivation of a truth claim, relegating it purely to the domain of language constructs. Much can be said about Kant’s “proto-positivism” in his critique of pure reason. Here, Kant’s disposal of dogmatic metaphysics of pure reason can be referred to analogously to the project of the logical positivists. The preservation of metaphysics by Kant, however—such as the transcendental subject, or the general doctrine of transcendental idealism writ large—exists in stark opposition to the logical positivists, and can be understood as a major point of departure. More potently, though, we see here a departure from Frege’s logicism that sought to reduce mathematical concepts to purely logical properties. Here, the Vienna Circle is skeptical: how could one formulate, independently of experience, a synthetic judgement? If a statement is not true by definition or by verification, then that statement is nonsense. Just as I may be able to provide, via definitions, axioms, propositions, and demonstrations, the veracity of, say, any abstract metaphysical position, so too could I prove absurd entities such as the existence of a 3-armed Laplace demon speaking Chinese as god. Here, questions that can not be solved analytically or through verification are to be referred to as “Pseudo-problems.”5placeholder The power of this method, therefore, rests in identifying these “pseudo-problems.”
Yet one might notice something sinister here with such a treatment of philosophy. How can one at all incorporate propositions that can not be necessarily “measured” or defined in any substantive way? For example, how do we deal with our current state of fascist decay, or interrogate the very object that informs the negativity of modernity? Let us investigate the early political project of the Vienna Circle to answer this.
In the beginning, particulates of socialist thought occupied the Vienna Circle (although it was not universal). If we look to Marx, in fact, we might find some commensurability with the epistemology of the Vienna Circle. In “The German Ideology,” Marx describes the general doctrines of his project as verifiable from pure empiricism.6placeholder One can therefore say that a disciplined study of the world was patently Marxist. On this edge, the Vienna Circle’s chief goal was to essentially “unify” science under the “scientific world conception.”7placeholder In their manifesto, they explicitly argue for a “new organization of social and economic relations.” More interestingly, they say that the scientific world conception aligns with the “unification of mankind”8placeholder and the possibility of a reformed future. Indeed, there was something vividly political and optimistic here. What may be said to be analogous to Marxism in this instance, outside of their anti-metaphysics, was this general project of internationalism. More closely, an implicit social teleology is born, one in which the unification of mankind would emerge precisely out of the natural tasks of the scientific world conception. Just as we might call “proletarian consciousness” the dialectical predicate of historical change in the capitalist mode of production for Marx, the scientific world conception exists on a similar register of teleological motifs. But one should notice the critical departures from Marx. The general “methodology” of the Vienna Circle was to study objects independently, or analytically, and thus scientifically. The difference between analysis and dialectics must be highlighted here. For a Marxist Dialectician, the subject is informed by the world, which is to say that one can only speak of a subject in relation to the historical conditions that give rise to its ontology. One is reminded of the famous Marxist maxim: “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.”9placeholder This is to say that one can not speak of a subject without first understanding the conditions by which a subject is produced and reproduced. But the Vienna Circle insists on the contrary: an independent study of both (subject and history), only to then be able to inform each other ex post facto in this terrain of unified science. Concepts of ideology, subjectivity, and so on, which later purchase concepts such as the unconscious, are hard to verify in any capacity. To summarize, where the aforementioned concept of “proletarian consciousness” would exist as the dialectical negative of capitalism, the scientific world conception thinks in terms of positivity, in that it exists to extend or create the future out of its independent condition, namely, that its subjectivity is not constituted by the milieu it is situated in.
“A scientific description can contain only the structure (form of order) of objects: not their ‘essence’ … objectively experienced qualities—redness, pleasure—are as such only experiences.”10placeholder
It is, however, the case today that rarely do people associate the Vienna Circle with socialism. Typically, conceptions of the Vienna Circle exist on the register of scientific neutrality; that is, the Vienna Circle does not dabble in anything “ideological.” But notice, still, how this is somewhat of a Marxist attitude? For Marx, his ‘political theory’ was itself to dispose of ideology. Ideology for Marx was the very tool by which the ruling class would obscure materiality from the masses. In this way, dialectical materialism was to act as an antidote, merely describing the world and its processes as they come to be. Per Kolakowski, the Marxist critique of ideology anticipates the logical positivist move of this “logical neutrality” which was/is dominant in bourgeois modes of thought.11placeholder But those in the American milieu during the time of McCarthyism possessed an opposite conception. For Americans, Marxism appears at once as prophetic, dogmatic, and deprived of criticality. Propaganda pieces about the Soviet Union promulgated notions of ideological indoctrination and a general, yet poignant, inability to think scientifically.12placeholder The spirit of this era can be said to have been the perfect conditions for the germination of the liberal ethos, from which the Vienna Circle, via organizations such as RAND, was able to affirm ideology as such.13placeholder This is perhaps the point Zizek makes with regards to how the very conditions of truth, what might appear to us as “sensible” or removed from “ideology,” are themselves purely ideological.14placeholder
For philosophy became truth for truth’s sake, by which the political goings-on were already sorted by the Enlightenment Modernists. We can borrow from Jameson to say that liberalism operated as a “vanishing mediator” in the formation of scientific truth. Here, liberalism installed itself as the neutral mediator of scientific truth by giving men the “ready-made liberty” of truth discovery. In any sense, one needn’t problematize the political apparatus, for its veracity is necessary for the very discursive conditions of scientific truth. Therefore, to question the political apparatus would be to jeopardize the project of science itself. Thus, conforming to this new intellectual paradigm, analytic philosophy’s grip over American institutions spread quickly and with much reciprocity. McCarthyism’s brutal reign over American intellectual life led to the purging of Marxists, Phenomenologists, Existentialists, and so on. Especially against Marxism, Analytic philosophers were able to offer an alternative scientific world view that was compatible with individualist/marginalist logic tailored for the proper discourse.15placeholder Interestingly, we can think of logical positivism as the American opposition to Scientific Marxism. The subject no longer becomes a formation of a greater historical context but, rather, is turned agential. A potent example here is Carnap’s concept of observation language; instead of considering dialectics as a motor of history from which the ontogenesis of subjectivity is informed, Carnap turns the subject into a simple sensorial receiver in which scientific theories must be articulable in accordance with such sensoriality.16placeholder That is to say that the subject no longer is stamped by history but, rather, dictates what is or is not legitimate regardless of the discourse the subject is situated in.
Russell, Moore, Wittgenstein, Whitehead, and more all come to mind as defenders and purveyors of this worldview.17placeholder The scope of this essay prohibits a truly thorough analysis of their work, so I shall only present an ant’s view. In this, what became of the dominant status of analytic philosophy was not constrained to the Americas, but also occupied the totality of the anglophone world. In their faculties, developments of the logico-analytic method, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, etc, ultimately turned social study into a kind of gamified, reductionist, rules-based order in which the central aim of philosophy was to determine the qualifiers of sensibility and sufficiency. Disposing of metaphysics, many of the old philosophical questions were inarticulate. In the Einstein-Bergson debate, for example, the question of the “qualitative multiplicity” of time was murdered by Einstein’s insistence that time was a purely geometric, quantifiable relation that has no deference to Phenomenology. For Einstein, time was to be described as a quantitative, four-dimensional space-time manifold for which objects curve a field by their mass-energy.18placeholder Physical objects, in this instance, obeyed the spatio-temporal paths set by this geometry (geodesics). In this sense, Bergson’s concept of duration (durée), wherein time must be understood beyond merely its spatialized aspects, away from habituations of time, as an intuited qualitative multiplicity19placeholder could be described as utterly profane, spooky, and so on. Herein saw the triumph of reason over intuition as described by some commentators. Bergson, a celebrated philosopher before this debate—who, with Woodrow Wilson, outlined the League of Nations—slowly decayed into relative obscurity. Frustratingly, Bergson did not deny the mathematics of Einstein’s equations, or even their veracity therein as an apt definition of spatialized time. For Bergson, the issue was not with the quantitative order itself, as it was the implication that time for an individual can be wholly reduced to a quantitative order—that only intellect exists. Nonetheless, misconceptions surrounding Bergson’s philosophy spread.
From here, we can identify forms of naive scientism, such as those of Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and other public-facing intellectuals, as vague offshoots of this deference to science. Even with the plain fact that these thinkers often engaged in metaphysical speculation, as even was the case with Einstein’s general rejection of the uncertainty principle, their views were advertised and disseminated as scientific. The ruthless slander against philosophy, both ideologically and intellectually, saw the rise of the analytic tradition, for which ostensible rhetorical/metaphysical nonsense was supplanted with “rigorous” semantic investigation with the linguistic philosophers, and evidential verification with the logical positivists. But now it has been deformed, at least publicly, into a spectre of influencer-intellectuals who lack training in philosophy as such. This is the “armchair”20placeholder tendency of analytic philosophy, and this ostensible democratization of thought, which Schuringa notes as an element of analytic discourse. In this democratization, many analytic philosophers have claimed that the distinction between analytic and continental philosophy has faded. This, therefore, implicates this notion of ideological neutrality that has been claimed by philosophers today.
III. Instrumentizing Neutrality
The myth of analytic philosophy as a value-free confrontation with the world around us is most perverse, especially in the conditions that manifestly describe philosophy’s role as strengthening intellectual resilience, curiosity, and criticality. Just as a math degree today is seldom a degree for math’s sake, philosophy has received the same treatment. For as the Vienna Circle described Philosophy’s second-order role in knowledge production, it has been made apparent that the university acts to merely supply the individual with the ability to appropriate tools, much in the role of the presocratic sophists, in the attainment of an aim informed by capital, and/or figuralities. Here, one can only describe the first-order ontology of capital—it is the intellectual relativizing of philosophy within the backdrop of capitalist axiomatics. I am reminded of Alex Karp and Peter Thiel, both of whom have degrees in Neoclassical Social Theory and Philosophy, respectively. Both Karp and Thiel, founders of Palantir, have appropriated certain philosophical tools to diagnose, assess, and construct solutions to various problems espoused by the highest bidders. They have rendered the world into questions of technique. What we can say is that the original intention of the relentless pursuit of truth by the Vienna Circle, or analytic philosophy writ large, quickly turned into the instrumentalization of philosophy to enact, or build, a new world for those with power. In this sense, the diagrammatic purpose, or the virtuality of these tools, was to be wielded as an accelerant to capital.
Critical theory, too, is not at all absolved. For instance, contemporary critical race theory has, in the most reductionistic sense, enforced various institutions that can only be understood as antithetical to an anti-racist project. This apparent paradox is not the product of happenstance but instead the consequence of a discipline being captured by a certain logic. This is all to say that philosophy for philosophy’s sake and value-freeness as objectivity are absolute impossibilities when ideas are imposed, co-opted, and ultimately inform the execution of “hypothetical imperatives.” This is to recognize that the forces at play are never truly contradictory per se, as though there is a canceling out, but rather expressive and operative, all colliding and moving within a field. What makes us particularly vulnerable, then, is the insistence on maintaining the analytic/continental distinction in the academy. If such a distinction is to be made, especially at the expense of the world-out-there, then the acceleration of decay will only intensify, and there will be nothing left to study.
But beyond condemning the intellectual assault on continental philosophy by analytic philosophy, we must ask why it has persisted even in its proclaimed absence. We can draw a line here to the famous quote by Jameson and Zizek, later rephrased by Fisher, that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”21placeholder Perhaps here we can say: “It is easier to imagine the end of philosophy than the end of analytic philosophy.” Schuringa notes that the apolitical nature and the social anchor of analytic philosophy have made it invincible to any true crisis. As he argues, “post-analytic” philosophy does not itself exist, contrary to what is said today, in that there is still an articulable thing that operates as analytic philosophy itself.22placeholder
Just as capitalism exists on the register of simulacrum, obscuring the real beneath it,23placeholder analytic philosophy has made itself the “common mode of philosophical thought.” Here, we must not question its historical and sociopolitical standing. It is as though we are occupying a kind of spectacle in which escape is rendered impossible by the very modes in which emancipatory appeals are captured. Should one write within the discipline a self-aware critique, one can only imagine a book reviewer writing of the theoretical “implausibilities” of the polemic, or its lack of clarity thereof. The normative dimension is transformed into a descriptive necessity: it is the case that philosophy requires certain prosaic conformities so as to “express its ideas properly and without obfuscation.” I.e., before one even begins, one is told how one is to begin. Chomsky, for example, has accused thinkers like Lacan of overt French eccentricity, who amounted to nothing but utter nonsense. Here, the possibility of transgression or even generation is extinguished, for the central aim, at least for Chomsky, is to approach an already existent, but not-yet-known, transcendental object out there somewhere. This is an old form of Platonism that has persisted throughout time, now seeing its revival in present discourse. As such, the exploratory object of analytic philosophy assumes an object it has yet to attain, and thus, the tracings of a proper philosophy must follow a course directive. It is as though to imagine one with a compass on an unknown road: it would be absurd for the driver to head south when the destination is north.
But perhaps we must begin to recognize that this object does not exist, that perhaps the key motive for which many have exhausted their intellectual wits exists purely as an objet petit a—a constantly vanishing object. This is to say that analytic philosophy is stuck in a triangle, a construct, a world within a world which prohibits it from addressing the world itself: the body of the earth. This bondage of analytic philosophy to formalities is precisely what constrains, and hence makes impossible, any true discourse between it and the rest of philosophy.
IV. Unknowing Knowingness: Cannibalized Logics
Meltdown is a term used by the Accelerationist philosopher, Nick Land, to describe the ultimate deterritorialization of the human being into cybernetic flows of techno-capital.24placeholder I make such a reference to sketch out the implicit antihumanism within analytic philosophy, or to at least say a kind of humanism that does not care for itself. One might accuse, then, some forms of analytic philosophy of an implicit nihilism by which, in accordance with the mode of thought presented, one is relegated to the purely technical domain. At first impression, one might say that such a claim is preposterous; given the present efforts by analytic philosophers to explore ethical quandaries on very real day-to-day topics, one might feel affirmed. One of the more infamous examples is Nick Bostrom’s now-defunct “Future of the Humanities Institute.” These efforts have received significant funding, supplying much ad hoc reasoning for certain practices in society today, especially in Silicon Valley. But this is the fundamental issue which I claim is operative with such a treatment of applied ethics: considerations for ‘metasystemic’ flaws are not commonplace. Metaethical theories are turned into purely academic exercises. In this sense, just as McKinsey consultants do, ethicists tend to optimize a system that should not be optimized. Consider the case of ethics with insurance claims: ethicists set the criteria of what is or is not ethical vis-à-vis dispute procedure; yet, seldom are they ever tasked with the question of insurance as an institution. In a Foucauldian lens, we can say this too about hospitals, schools, and so on; for who writes the ethics codes for these institutions? At the very least, these codes are informed by work done by professional ethicists who, more or less, consider the necessary conditions for an institution to run effectively, hardly questioning the logic of its predicate. This is all to say that the central practice of problemization is wholly absent from the procedure. Thus, I ask: is this not, therefore, a patent danger in the germination of insidious systems? There exists a pronounced taboo when a professional ethicist goes against the institution. Enron, Wells Fargo, Purdue Pharma, DuPont Chemical, all come to mind. Ethics has itself been captured by the episteme of our current discourse, or perhaps even the economic mode of production.
We can speak more grossly about prosecutors and lawmakers who, despite extensive training in philosophy, opt to defend a system of unreasonableness. This is to say that, similarly to the time of the Hellenistic Sophists, philosophical training has been appropriated for technical ends. Jobs in academia for PhDs with specializations in ethics are rare, if not impossible, to get in our current job market. It is, then, techno-singularity which is the ultimate endpoint of this cooptation, for all domains of knowledge acquisition have been captured by capital. For if one is to consume oneself too much into what one does for the sake of merely doing that thing, one becomes cannibalized by the logic of one’s actions. It is a kind of “monotopic bondage,” a purely mechanical endeavor that permeates the substratum of such a moment. Never truly knowing what form of exchange one is engaging in when endeavoring in philosophy, many gain rhetorical skills to then become organized bodies for capital.
V. Of Nonsense
Adorno and Horkheimer, in “The Dialectic of Enlightenment,” spoke of the stupidity of cleverness. Well-reasoned individuals proclaimed the impossibility of Hitler. They described with data how fascism in the West was impossible. It is in making sense that we often find the most troublesome blindness; therefore, we should always be cautious of knowingness, for it leads one to dismiss that which does not fit into the convention of knowiness as such. Once knowingness translates into incredulity, all hell breaks loose. Hitler, for example, is a phenomenon that can not be accurately measured. There is nothing to accurately capture and stratify into comprehensible pieces of categoricality. Instead, Hitler is the culmination of micro-fascistic crystallizations and the libidinality operative therein.25placeholder One can only speak of these things theoretically, not “objectively” in the sense of measured velocities. That is to say that one can only provide commentary on their emergence by which assumptions of rational human conduct must be disposed of. Here, we have to live in the territory of nonsense.
“Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” is a nonsensical statement. It is nonsensical in that there is no articulable, epistemologically coherent, and logically consistent meaning that can be derived. What is then made of this phrase by philosophers of language? It is thrown out, dismissed, and ignored. It was, in fact, the key project of early Wittgenstein to find the limits of the world through linguistic sensibility.26placeholder In the Tractatus Logico Philosophicus, he notes that anything that exceeds a propositional, logically consistent representation shall be relegated as nonsense. Indeed, one must not exert any effort in decoding the nonsensical. It must simply be ignored, for there are coherent statements which must be analyzed—it is so, for Wittgenstein, that the limits of the world are the limits of language. Why then does it seem that we live in a nonsensical world? Why then does it seem that our world leaders are guided by nonsense? It is because they are, for they are not men of reason but rather slaves to their libidinal impulses, their passions, and so on. Nonsense affects the world as a figural force which can not be wholly captured by linguistics.
How are we to contend, therefore, with the forces of nonsense when operating purely on the register of sensibility? The only tools supplied by analytics are intellectual. One is not allowed to formulate one’s own nonsense to get something done. This is what I fear the most. Even for Chomsky, who has made valiant political proclamations, there exists a lack of a sufficient answer for how we must deal with the regurgitation of nonsense. It is not enough to simply be equipped with well-reasoned argumentation. It is pleasurable to envision a situation in which sense triumphs over nonsense, but the staticity of such a desire petrifies any political possibility. It is here, then, that I proclaim that, in typical Deleuzo-Guattarian fashion, we must look at what a concept does. Even the nonsensical must be understood and exhaustively interrogated—sometimes even employed. How can we be watchful of the world-out-there if we only give time of day to the sensical domain? This appeal to sensibility has embedded itself in American culture. For instance, discussions surrounding fascism are tight-lipped, with many on the left-liberal tradition denouncing leftists for being too quick with the word. Typically, there exists a stereotype out there of leftists who call everything fascistic: the familial structure is fascistic, certain cultural customs are fascistic, and so on. Analytic philosophers and the general public might say in this instance that leftists are nullifying the word, turning it into something meaningless, just as we have, for example, done with the term “OCD.” In this appeal to sensibility, whereby we must constrain words to a set of sufficient conditions, we risk, with much blindness, the actual activities of society today. Hegel reminds us that philosophy always comes too late, that it paints grey on grey.27placeholder Insofar as we understand philosophy as merely an analytical device, not a site of generativity, we incur the consequences of a world that moves. If this is the aim of analytic philosophy, then all it can do is paint grey on grey, to merely interpret the world, for how does one independently study the not-yet-here? I would rather not descend into this form of virulent nihilism, which forces us into a domain of passivity.
But we need not dispense with all of analytic philosophy, for how are we to solve the Collatz Conjecture, figure out the A.I. alignment problem, or, among other things, construct the cure to cancer? We require philosophies of science in order to inform how science is to be done. Indeed, it is the technical knowledge of society that hinges on analytic philosophy—regardless of your ideological affinities, everything requires technique. As Ellul would point out, an outright abolition of technique is impossible.28placeholder But without the right interface between cultural theorists and analytic philosophers, these techniques may themselves be steered by far more perverse forces. If it is at all our intention to dispel capitalism, or to emancipate ourselves from the logic of capitalism, or to defend ourselves from the machine of capitalism, we require technical knowledge. Hence, we must argue for the preservation of the technical knowledge of diagrammatic, abstract fields for the sake of constructing our new world. We have to ensure that we do not allow ourselves to merely dismiss the intellectual products of these fields on account of our moral disgust, lest we at once fall victim to the technical products which have been wholly captured by capitalism. I claim that analytic philosophy needs to be reterritorialized.
VI. Beyond Foreclosure
There are economic constraints to the study of continental philosophy or critical theory. What jobs are out there for those with a philosophy degree, if not on hospital ethics boards? Certainly, there are no jobs in academia, especially for us continentals. One has to ask: What does a philosophy degree get you? If you are not able to contribute to Capital, least of all produce surplus value, then your role is useless. Philosophers who attempt to critique the situation are rarely given the ability to do so. Thoughtful theoretical sketches are doubly impossible with the culture of publish or perish. The spectacle farm, which has germinated from this culture, has produced vapid pieces of “philosophical literature” which, at their heart, are never the fault of philosophers, but rather describe the very conditions by which philosophers must reproduce themselves. It is in some sense where innovations of thought hardly ever occur in the academy. It is mostly in para-academic spaces where experimentation is possible. If one is to work on a PhD dissertation on critical theory at, say, Harvard, one will face only an uphill battle. Imagine the mental affliction, the damage that the body incurs when arguing with a dissertation committee on the legitimacy of critical theory. It is painful, and I can not imagine this being productive.
Perhaps my call to action is twofold: we must open new spaces for thought outside of the academy, but we must also recapture the academy to allow for truly rigorous experimentation. The latter is a laborious effort, as it would require graduate students and professors to risk their careers to go against the institutional paradigm. There are associated risks, and many have families to feed. Thus, the former task of para-academic spaces offers an insurance policy for radical thought to percolate. Our digital era does not require editorials for memetic dissemination. We have already seen wonderful things come out of non-traditional academic spaces. As a matter of fact, I myself was seduced by the wonderful work of those outside of the academy. It is how I got into philosophy in the first place. This can work; we must simply do more. We must open up new horizons of thought by allowing ourselves to overcome, just as Nietzsche overcame good and evil, the distinction between analytic and continental philosophy.. What faces us is a rather brutal system that has endlessly been able to capture the flows of radical thought. It has not been enough for analytic philosophers today to say their movement no longer exists; we must radically go beyond the limits of thought imposed by it.
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Schuringa, Christoph, ed. “The Making of Analytic Philosophy.” In A Social History of Analytic Philosophy. Verso Books, 2025.
Zizek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. New York, NY: Verso Books, 2008.
Schuringa, Christoph, ed. “The Making of Analytic Philosophy.” In A Social History of Analytic Philosophy. Verso Books, 2025.
See also Hegel, The Science of Logic, The Phenomenology of Spirit, etc
Hume, David. “Of Probability; and the Idea of Cause and Effect.” In Treatise of Human Nature, 73–73. London: Oxford Clarendon Press, 1896.
Kant, Immanuel. “Of the Distinction Between Analytic and Synthetic Judgements.” In Critique of Pure Reason, translated by Marcus Weigelt, 43–48. Penguin Group, 2007.
Hahn, Hans, Otto Neurath, and Rudolf Carnap. “The Scientific Conception of the World: The Vienna Circle.” In Empiricism and Sociology, edited by Marie Neurath and Robert Cohen, 298–318. Dordrecht: Reidel, 1973.
Marx, Karl, and Fredrich Engels. “Feuerbach Opposition of the Materialist and Idealist Outlook.” Essay. In The German Ideology, 7–7. Paris: Foreign Languages Press, 2022.
Hahn, Neurath, Carnap. The Scientific World Conception
Hahn, Neurath, Carnap. The Scientific World Conception
Marx, Karl. “Preface.” Essay. In A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, translated by S W Ryazanskaya. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1859.
Hahn, Neurath, Carnap. The Scientific World Conception
See Kołakowski, Leszek. Main Currents of Marxism. Translated by P.S Falla. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978.
Schuringa, A Social History of Analytic Philosophy, The Making of Analytic Philosophy
Schuringa, A Social History of Analytic Philosophy, The Making of Analytic Philosophy
See Zizek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. New York, NY: Verso Books, 2008.
Schuringa, A Social History of Analytic Philosophy, The Machinery of McCarthyism
Carnap, Rudolph. Theory and Prediction in Science, 1946.
Hahn, Neurath, Carnap. The Scientific World Conception
Einstein, Albert, Robert W. Lawson, Ḥanokh Guṭfroind, and Jürgen Renn. Relativity: The special and general theory. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2019.
Bergson, Henri. Time and Free Will. Translated by Frank Lubecki Pogson. London: GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD, 1950.
Schuringa, A Social History of Analytic Philosophy, Modal Logic and the Return of Metaphysics
This quote is inexact. The reader might want to consult Jameson’s The Seeds of Time, Jameson’s Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, and Fisher’s Capitalist Realism,
Schuringa, A Social History of Analytic Philosophy, Elements of Analytic Philosophy
See also Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation
See Land, Nick. “Meltdown.” Essay. In Fanged Noumena, 441–59. Urbanomic, 2012.
See Félix Guattari, “Everybody Wants to Be a Fascist,” in Chaosophy, ed. Sylvère Lotringer (Semiotext(e), 2007), 152.
See also Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico Philosophicus
See Hegel, G.W.F. “Author’s Preface.” Introduction. In Philosophy of Right, 20–20. Ontario: Batoche Books Limited, 2001. Quote not verbatim.
Ellul, Jacques. “Human Technique.” Essay. In The Technological Society, translated by John Wilkinson, 418–418. New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1904