Every now and then, I really enjoy picking up something new by an analytic philosopher, and this week I have opened the new book Freedom Evolves by Daniel C. Dennett. Dennett is often a thoughtful and interesting person, and although I don’t always understand why he chooses his certain domain of knowledge to pursue, I do usually enjoy the way he does it. I am not very far along in his book now, but I was very disappointed by the following move:

As is the wont (I have noticed) of many American philosophers, he mentions and dismisses the work of continental philosophy - under the umbrella of “post-modernism” - in one paragraph located in the first five pages of his book.

Look around at those who are participating in this quest for further scientific knowledge and eagerly digesting the new discoveries; they are manifestly not short on optimism, moral conviction, engagment in life, commitment to society. In fact, if you want to find anxiety, despair, and anomie among intellectuals today, look to the recently fashionable tribe of post-modernists, who like to claim that modern science is just another in a long line of myths, its institutions and expensive apparatus just the rituals and accoutrements of yet another religion. That intelligent people can take this seriously is a testimony to the power that fearful thinking still has, in spite of our advances in self-knowledge. (pp. 5)

And that’s what he has to say about that. No big surprise here, we have all seen the so-called analytic-continental divide play out like this over and over again, and this kind of dismissive behavior, and wild generalization (or complete misreading, depending on how tight your focus is) is nothing new. I found myself thinking about it again, though, not fifteen pages later, as Dennett addresses his own interlocuters:

They are prepared to take whatever steps to discourage, squelch, or discredit those [among whom, him, Dennett] they see as breaking the spell [of belief in an indeterminism which provides the condition of possibility for their conception of free will] before some serious harm is done. They have been at it for many years, and while their campaigns have grown threadbare, and their simple fallacies have been exposed over and over by their scientific colleagues, the debris from their campaigns continues to pollute the atmosphere of the discussions, distorting the understanding of the general public on these topics. (pp. 19)

You see where I’m going here? For some reason I found the way this whole discussion, which is about a sort of responsibility to thought and writing, to be profoundly sad after Dennett had so quickly dismissed a couple hundred years of a certain kind of knowledge-building/writing. Naturally, he would probably say that that certain thread which followed the speculative elements of Hegel in Europe really has no claim on producing or accessing any kind of knowledge, but that is just more of the same. Later on the same page, he notes:

I agree with the critics on both left and right that there have been some unfortunate overstatements and oversimplifications by some of those they target, and I also agree that such lapses from responsibility can have truly pernicious effects. Moreover, I don’t challenge their motives or even their tactics; if I encountered people conveying a message I thought was so dangerous that I could not risk giving it a fair hearing, I would be at least strongly tempted to misrepresent it, to caricature it for the public good. (Ibid.)

Self-aware, I suppose, if not entirely honest. Either way, a giant sigh escapes here in the first twenty pages of the book.