@G H,
Quote:Aha, I knew Ted Honderich's choice of animated metaphors would be clarified someday.
"One thinks of French philosophy that it aspires to the condition of literature or the condition of art, and that English and American philosophy aspires to the condition of science. French philosophy, one thinks of as picking up an idea and running with it, possibly into a nearby brick wall or over a local cliff, or something like that." --Poked into ears across the Channel by BBC Radio in the late '90s.
The English preventions and dare I say prejudice against this French emphasis on literature and art in philosophy started with Bergson. I agree that it went overboard somewhat somewhere around the 60's and 70's but still, there is value in intuition, metaphors, synthesis and, yes, rhetoric, style and art as gateways to human reality.
Considering that philosophy includes the study and understanding of human condition, an excessive emphasis on analysis alone misses a huge part of what the human experience is about. We have a right brain too, not only a left one. Analysis is potentially and endless, deconstructive process, which never leads anywhere unless it is periodically reframed, reshaped and requestioned by 'big picture' thinkers, who are almost necessarily intuitive thinkers. Many of the intuitions a Derrida noted on a piece of paper led to countless academic careers spent analysing that bit of intuitive thinking. I'm not saying all his or anybody's intuitions are always right, but pleading for a serious consideration for other modes of thinking than the purely analytical.
Even in social sciences, where the French school(s) seriously and methodically tried to get rid of rhetoric and art when they established sociology and anthropology as sciences, in the 20-30's, but art kept cropping up in their (non-scientific) writing, because their thesis and research material included so much artistic items (myths, sculptures etc that SHOULD be seen with an artist's eye too) and because their research was an often trying and difficult human adventure, a sort of quest for sense and meaning, important enough that it needed to be said.
Nowadays, many Americans anthropologists are rediscovering the virtues of literary critique and first-person narratives. Because theur subject matter is the same as a large part f philosophy: us, humans, and our lives and thoughts, which literature or art can help approach or describe in its globality.
