Man and World 30: 199–215, 1997.

199
c 1997 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

The origins and crisis of continental philosophy

ANTHONY J. STEINBOCK
Department of Philosophy, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, Carbondale, IL
62901-4505, USA

Abstract. When contemporary continental philosophy dismisses, with the discourse of post-
modernism, the role of origin, teleology, foundation, etc., it is forsaking its own style of
thinking and as a consequence is no longer able to discern crises of lived-meaning or to engage
in the transformation of historical life. I address this crisis by characterizing continental
philosophy as a particular style of thinking, generative thinking. I then examine the meaning
and origins of philosophical thinking by drawing, for strategic reasons, on Jacques Derrida’s
essay “Cogito et histoire de la folie.” For not only has the very question of “origins” come
under fire through various post-modern readings of Derrida, but Derrida’s own point of critique
concerning Western metaphysics depends upon a specific understanding of origin that I call
origin-originating. In the final section of this paper, I interpret the crisis within continental
philosophy as a forgetting the “point” of origin-originating within the generative structure of
experience.

To concern oneself with the founding concepts

of the entire history of philosophy, to
de-constitute them, is not to undertake the
work of the philologist or of the classic
historian of philosophy. Despite appearances,
it <a systematic and historic questioning> is
doubtless the most audacious way of preparing
a step outside of philosophy. The step “outside
philosophy” is much more difficult to conceive
than is generally imagined by those who
believe they made it long ago with cavalier
ease, and who in general are swallowed up in
metaphysics in the entire body of discourse
which they claim to have disengaged from it.
Jacques Derrida1

1. Introduction

Persuaded by the perspicacious critiques carried out by such figures as Jacques

Derrida, Michel Foucault, François Lyotard, and a host of others, many the-
orists belonging to that catch-all field known as “contemporary continen-
tal philosophy,” have forcefully challenged the traditional notions of origin,
200 ANTHONY J. STEINBOCK

foundation, the absolute, teleology, essence, etc. This tendency is felt most
poignantly today in the discourse of “post-modernism.”
Initially these challenges had an emancipatory function because they lib-
erated one from the illusion of a static beginning of things outside of time,
from a one-sided relation of foundation in the sphere of social relations that
could justify a politics of authoritarianism, from a fixed end to history where
the outcome of meaning is already determined in advance, and from an a-
historical essentialism that ultimately vitiates novelty and otherness. Such
critiques are not only understandable, but justified.
Yet when contemporary continental philosophy dismisses altogether the
role of origin, teleology, the absolute, etc., it is forsaking its own style of
thinking. When it does this, it is no longer capable of discerning crises of
lived meaning or of engaging in the generation and transformation of historical
life. This denial throws continental philosophy itself into a crisis and makes it
unable to detect itself as in crisis, and to do anything about it. While we speak
quite liberally of a “crisis” of continental philosophy, I suggest that this crisis
is two-fold: There is a crisis of continental philosophy in the sense that crisis
is peculiar to its own style of thinking, and there is a crisis of continental
philosophy in the sense that it is in or undergoing a crisis.
This paper address the nature of this crisis by characterizing continental
philosophy as a particular style of thinking, namely, generative thinking (sec.
2), examining the meaning and origins of philosophical thinking by draw-
ing, for strategic reasons, on one of Jacques Derrida’s essays (sec. 3), and
interpreting the crisis within continental philosophy (sec. 4).

2. Continental philosophy as a generative style of thinking

What is continental philosophy such that it could undergo such crises? How
does one distinguish this distinctive type of philosophy, called continental
philosophy, from other philosophical approaches? Is continental philosophy
really all that distinctive?
It would be misleading to define continental philosophy merely by the
figures that it draws upon, by its subject matter, or by its geographical bound-
aries. In the first place, although continental philosophy does claim a vast
array of thinkers, from Hegel to Freud, from de Beauvoir to Irigaray, from
Marx to Lukacs, from Scheler to Levinas, from Arendt to Derrida, it does
share of a host of other figures with other traditions like analytical philosophy
and pragmatism: Kant, Husserl, Wittgenstein, James, Santayana, and even
Hegel, just to name a few. By itself the figures upon which one draws are
not sufficient to distinguish continental philosophy from other philosophical
traditions.
 THE ORIGINS AND CRISIS OF CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY 201
In the second instance, while continental philosophy is renowned for its
treatment of phenomenology, existentialism, critical theory, feminism, liter-
ary criticism, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, etc., it also overlaps with the
content of other areas. To choose just one example, if Michael Dummett is
correct in claiming that analytical philosophy is distinctive by holding that
a philosophical account of thought can only be achieved through a philo-
sophical account of language, and that a comprehensive account can only be
achieved in this way,2 then would one not have to include here the later works
of Heidegger (after all language, he maintains, is the “house of Being”) and
the majority of Derrida’s work? Has not Habermas mutatis mutandis also
made a “linguistic turn” of sorts within critical theory, requiring that he,
likewise, be included here?
Finally, continental philosophy is defined even less by its geographical bor-
ders, and I have in mind here, “the continent.” The appellation, continental phi-
losophy, is misleading in some ways, for it really designates a movement that
took place in North America, a movement that was inspired by philosophies
(such as phenomenology and existentialism) and by thinkers like Husserl,
Heidegger, Scheler, Bergson, Kierkegaard, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Ortega y
Gasset, etc., that originated on “the continent.” These philosophers, however,
did not practice continental philosophy (at least in this restrictive sense), they
just did philosophy.3
It is not necessary to develop this line of thinking any further by surveying
still other countries on the continent and their philosophical leanings. Suffice
it to say that we will not gain anything more than a superficial understanding
of continental philosophy if we try to grasp its meaning by identifying it by
its geographical borders, its subject matter, or its figures, merely.
There is a simple but decisive reason for this. Continental philosophy is
distinctive not in terms of what and whom it treats, or where it is practiced,
but in terms of its style of approach. This style of approach has to do with an
appeal to experience, the rootedness of experiential meaning in a context, and
the commitment not only to detecting crises in meaning, but to addressing
those crises, contributing to the generation of lived meaning through the
critical intervention in the lifeworld. This style of approach I call generative
thinking.
Generative thinking is a critical engagement with or the appropriation of the
generative structure of experience. The generative structure of experience has
three fundamental components: origin as the origin-originating of meaning,
normative teleology, and crisis within an experiential context. For reasons of
space, I cannot elaborate upon the generative structure of experience here. I
only want to make the following points:
202 ANTHONY J. STEINBOCK

First, the concept of origin taken dynamically means that “origin” cannot
be understood in a reductively simple manner, for the origin is always with
us, originating. That the origin is originating not only suggests that we can
never return to a simple origin, but equally important, we can never remove
ourselves from it. Phenomenologically speaking, that the origin is originating
means that already in the simple institution of meaning there is an excess that
extends beyond the so-called simple origin, surpassing it in such a way that
the surplus over it retroactively accomplishes the simple meaning and guides
further experience. It motivates or guides future experience in an orientated
manner.
Second, the first pleasure, the first vision, etc., opens rather than closes
meaning in such a way that every other experience will be situated and ori-
entated by this originating. In its normative-teleological function, the origin-
originating guides experience according to its sense, without it having to be
formulated explicitly as a principle or without having to conclude rationally
from it. Thus, the dancer or choreographer can be led by the norms of his
or her art without having “to apply” these norms, and he or she can point
out that a particular movement or gesture is amiss in the experience itself
without being able to identify the “right way” to do it or without the meaning
of the dance becoming an object of a separate consciousness. Nevertheless,
at the root of any such recognition or felt conflict is the origin-originating
that functions guidingly, in this case, the meaning of the dance in its specific
orientation (the normative teleology of meaning).4
Accordingly, the origin-originating simultaneously insinuates beyond itself
a directedness or orientation from within the experience itself such that it
guides, motivates, or solicits future experiencing; in this way, there is a nor-
mative, teleological structure endemic to meaning in its origination. Because
the meaning is still in excess of its historical determination (but originating
with a directedness in that determination), the implicit normative meaning can
be deepened or overcome through a new historical determination, being inte-
grated into or even instituting a new origin-originating and new teleological
structure.5
Finally, and related to the former point, because the origin of meaning is
originating with a directedness that promises more than it can actually fulfill, it
becomes susceptible to a crisis in that origination of meaning. The experience
of crisis not only presupposes that there is a directedness of meaning within
a historical context, but that the discrepancy is an occlusion or frustration
in the becoming of lived meaning. In fact, one cannot experience a crisis
of lived meaning if one were to import somehow an a-historical standard;
it could not be seen as a crisis in meaning, but only as a merely different
meaning. Moreover, one could not experience a crisis if the future were
 THE ORIGINS AND CRISIS OF CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY 203
not open at all, and the totality of meaning had been worked out (as is
suggested by Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit). There is only the possibility
of crisis if there exist orientations of meaning that are not random, and the
possibility of generating new structures of meaning as guided by an origin-
originating. Accordingly, there is no possibility whatsoever of experiencing
a crisis without presupposing the generation of meaning in the generative
framework of origin-originating and normative teleology.
The critical edge of generative thinking that allows one to address and
redress a crisis in experiential meaning lies precisely in the difference between
the origin-originating/normative teleology of sense and the concrete historical
reality. Likewise, critique must somehow be both immanent to and beyond
the present context. (I will explain the nature of this “immanent” and “tran-
scendent” critique below).
I have sketched the generative structure of experience to make this point:
Continental philosophy is a certain style of thinking called generative think-
ing; and generative thinking is the critical assessment of the origin-originating
and its directedness as a normative teleology in relation to lived experience; it
is thus able to detect crises within lived experience and to articulate the ways
in which it could be or should be otherwise. Once the relation between the
orientation of the origin-originating of lived meaning is expressed as irrec-
oncilable with the directedness of the actual historical situation, this relation
becomes susceptible to historical transformation. Continental philosophy is
such a style of thinking that is both sensitive to the oriented origination of
meaning and the critical assessment of crises.

3. Getting the point: Philosophical thinking and the origins of meaning

Generative thinking is engaged in the generation of meaning through criti-

cal, contextual analysis of experience; it not only presupposes the origin of
meaning as originating, which is to say, its teleology of sense, but identifies
discrepancies of meaning as crises in the direction of future transformation.
If it is correct to characterize continental philosophy as a style of generative
thinking, then continental philosophy cannot forsake the generative structure
of experience.
While contemporary continental philosophy wants to embrace notions like
critique and crisis (and it does so when it describes continental philoso-
phy as in crisis), notions like “origin,” “telos,” and “norm” have fallen of
late into disrepute.6 And when understood statically, simplistically, there is
good reason for it. But by understanding them in a truncated sense and
by summarily dismissing them, they become affirmed in the very way in
which they were opposed and result in a reactionary relativism, “dogmatic
204 ANTHONY J. STEINBOCK

anti-foundationalism,” and mere play, which is to say, implicitly nihilism.7

Mere relativism and nihilism become, then, just other forms of adhering to
reductively simple origins and static essences. This uncritical reaction within
contemporary continental philosophy has left it unable to undertake crisis
thinking in any radical sense, since outside of the generative context I have
described, there is no possibility of experiencing or addressing crisis. The
extent to which continental philosophy is abandoning crisis thinking uncrit-
ically, which is to say ultimately generative thinking, by denying the role
of origin as originating and normative teleology as the directedness or ori-
entation of meaning that makes a difference, and is not completely open or
arbitrary, it is undergoing a crisis of its own meaning. It is unable to grasp a
crisis in principle and is therefore unable to account for its own experiences
of crisis.
In order to discuss the generative structure of experience in relation to
philosophy and to show in what sense continental philosophy is in crisis,
I turn to Jacques Derrida and in particular to his essay, “Cogito et histoire
de la folie.” I do this for two reasons. First, the very question of “origins”
in continental philosophy (and thus of “telos,” and by implication, “crisis”)
has come under fire through various wide-spread, post-modern readings of
Derrida. It will be suitable, then, to take up the question concerning the
origination of meaning through one of Derrida’s works. It will become clear
that Derrida’s point of critique depends upon a certain understanding of
origin that I have called origin-originating within the generative structure of
experience. Second, Derrida addresses in an incisive manner the questions
concerning origins and thinking. This is important because an investigation
into the meaning of contemporary continental philosophy must grasp the
meaning of philosophical thinking.
Derrida’s approach to the question of origins and thinking in “Cogito et
histoire de la folie” is a three page passage from Michel Foucault’s hallmark
work, Folie et Déraison: Historie de la folie à l’age classique.8 In these three
pages, Derrida reads not only the difficulty of Foucault’s whole work, but a
difficulty peculiar to “Western metaphysics” itself Derrida cites Foucault’s
project as an attempt to write a history of madness itself, and not to write
about madness from the objectifying perspective of rationality, e.g., from
the contemporary perspective of the rational philosopher or the psychiatrist.
Because Foucault’s project also implicitly concerns the advent of reason (in
opposition to madness), Derrida reads in it the problem of the very source or
origin of the meaning of reason.
Descartes and the Cartesian cogito, alleges Foucault, carried out the expul-
sion of the possibility of madness from thought itself.9 By separating madness
from sensation and dreams in his first Meditation, denouncing madness from
 THE ORIGINS AND CRISIS OF CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY 205
the inferiority of thought, Descartes excludes the possibility of madness by
decree, marking, according to Foucault, the “advent of a ratio.”10 This Carte-
sian act is a sign of the classical event that separates madness and reason, and
interns madness by reason.
According to Foucault, classical reason reifies madness. On the one hand,
we have the language of (classical) reason, order, objectivity, rationality,
expressed in the jailer of unreason or the discipline of psychiatry, and on
the other, there is madness, which is to say, silence.11 Wanting to escape the
trap of classical reason that strives to objectify madness, Foucault attempts to
write a different kind of history, an “archaeology of silence.”
Derrida finds at least three major difficulties with Foucault’s articulation
of the separation of reason and madness in the classical age and the problem
concerning the archaeology of silence. First, even though an archeology of
silence claims to circumvent the dangers of writing a classically rational
history of madness, all the same an archaeology is a logos, a logic, an organ-
ized language such that an archaeology of silence could only repeat the act
perpetuated against madness. Second, the split between reason and madness
in the classical age is not originary but a subsequent, determined reason and
determined madness; it cannot account for the historicity of thinking through
which a historically determinate reason and madness are first articulated.
Third, and related to the former point, Foucault misunderstands a distinction
between (1) the cogito as a determinate act of reason set against madness in
a natural phase of doubt, and (2) a critical, hyperbolic Cogito, an inaugural
thinking, that concerns the advent of meaning in general.
I would like to focus on the third of these objections, not as a commentary
on Foucault or his work, but in order to discern Derrida’s insight into the origin
of meaning and in particular into the origination of the meaning of thinking.
It is important to do this because at issue is the meaning of contemporary
thinking called continental philosophy.
Because the silence whose archaeology Foucault wants to undertake “is
not an originary [originaire] muteness or nondiscourse, but a subsequent
silence,” a different project must be discerned behind the archaeology of
silence.12 This posterior project, as it were, becomes the most anterior one of
all since it seeks a “source [source] of a reason more profound than the reason
that issued forth during the classical age.”13 This more profound reason is
not one that simply occurs earlier in time, say, in the Middle Ages. Both
classical and medieval divisions between philosophy and non-philosophy
remain superficial according to Derrida because they stay on the surface of
a reason divided against itself since the dawn of its Greek origin. Both the
classical and the medieval divisions between reason and madness are still
206 ANTHONY J. STEINBOCK

ruptures within a dialogue between a “determined reason” and a “determined

madness.” Addressing this level alone, they remain superficial.
True, the separation and connection between reason and madness in the
Middle Ages is less determined, less elaborated than a subsequent, classical
one because the former has not had the occasion to appropriate its own deter-
minations, or for that matter, those of the Modern period or even those of the
contemporary period.14 The question concerning origins, the question con-
cerning the meaning of meaning, must instead approach the “common root” of
historical determinations, or as Derrida also calls it, “this unitary foundation”
[ce fondement unitaire] that is much more ancient than the medieval period,
more “ancient” because as a “founding unity” [une unité fondatrice] it already
carries within it the determinations of the Middle Ages (and the Greek, the
Modern, etc.). Being more ancient in this way does not mean that it essential-
ly occurred “before” the Middle Ages – merely in the history of philosophy.
Rather, all transformations that ensued are “late and secondary” with respect
to “the fundamental permanence of the logico-philosophical heritage.”15 This
permanence is the opening of meaning as originating “behind” or with every
historical determination of that meaning, but without being reducible to it.
This origin can happen at any time, is qualified by that time, but is not equated
with that time.16
For Derrida, the investigation into reason and madness requires reaching
the origin of the creative act by which reason sheltered itself from madness,
constituting itself as a barrier against madness; it is a matter of reaching “this
origin from within a logos that preceded the split of reason and madness,”
a logos that permitted a dialogue between what were later called reason and
madness. “It is therefore a matter of reaching the point at which the dialogue
was broken off, dividing itself into two soliloquies, what Foucault calls . . .
the Decision.”
The Decision, writes Derrida, is both an originary act of order and a schism
through which reason and madness are linked and separated. He calls this
decision a “dissension” in order to emphasize the decisive activity of an
differentiation interior to meaning in general.17
The act of Decision, the decisive act, is a creative emergence that has
developed this way peculiar to the West, and we have taken it up in such a way
that it puts us on the track that Derrida calls the history of Western metaphysics
in which – in this formulation of the situation – reason distinguishes itself from
madness, privileges itself over madness, and in its hegemonic appurtenance
of madness to reason, asserts itself as fixed (present); in so doing, it forgets
the very splitting which produced reason and madness. Foucault, on Derrida’s
view, risks forgetting this splitting in his very archeology of madness, and thus
risks entrenching us even deeper in the history of Metaphysics. By tipping
 THE ORIGINS AND CRISIS OF CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY 207
the scales in the direction of a madness speaking for itself, Foucault’s project
appears emancipatory. But in the excitement of the ostensible liberation of
madness from reason, one still presupposes with much more facility and
insidiousness a madness and a reason that are still subsequent and already
determined, thus making it that much easier to cover over the opening of
reason and madness. Derrida: “In order to account simultaneously for the
origin (or the possibility) of the decision and for the origin (or the possibility)
of its narration, it might have been necessary to start by reflecting this originary
logos [ce logos originaire] in which the violence of the classical era played
itself out. The history of logos before the Middle Ages and before the classical
age is not . . . a nocturnal and mute prehistory.”18
While decisive – because this is the way the history of Western thought has
unfolded and is the way its meaning has been manifest – the heritage of the
West was not decided in advance, the emergence could have gone in some
other direction without being separated into reason and madness. Neverthe-
less, for us, the “decision” has been decisive, it is the ongoing historicity of
Western thinking itself. Derrida refers to this decisive act as a “point,” though
he later qualifies it not as a point in time, but as a “temporal originality in
general.”19
Derrida finds an exemplary expression of this point, this decisive act in the
critical, hyperbolic doubt of the cogito. Let me take up this exemplary act by
turning to Derrida’s assessment of Descartes. In rereading Descartes, Derri-
da finds in the first Meditation that Descartes has an absolutely hyperbolic
moment which gets us out of natural doubt and leads us to the hypothe-
sis of the evil genius; we move from a naive, natural phase of doubt, to a
philosophical, critical phase of doubt.20
In one respect, the hyperbolic Cogito is mad because it cannot be encom-
passed by a subsequent reason, though it is presupposed by any rational or
mad act. This is why, writes Derrida, the Cogito is not human in the sense of
anthropological finitude, but playing on Descartes’s metaphors, demonic. The
hyperbolic Cogito is super-human or übermenchlich, to employ Nietzsche’s
expression, because its effort consists in trying to grasp that which emerges
in and through humanity but which is simultaneously beyond human factici-
ty; it wants-to-say-the-hyperbole: the absolute opening, the historicity proper
to philosophy, the movement of temporalization itself. Its madness is more
rational than determinate reason, for it is closer to the wellspring of sense,
and by the same token, “Reason in general” is madder than any determinate
madness, because here reason is closer to nonmeaning.21 This Cogito is not
a comforting resting point. Opening and founding the world by exceeding
it, “nothing is less reassuring than the Cogito at its proper and inaugural
moment.”22
208 ANTHONY J. STEINBOCK

Descartes’s problem (and Derrida doubts whether this can ever be com-
pletely avoided) was to have made the hyperbolic moment reassuring, in
Descartes’s case, by reflecting the cogito through God, inaugural thinking is
mollified as onto-theo-logy Thought, which at the height of its hyperbole,
announces itself to itself, frightens itself and reassures itself; the uneconom-
ic, energetic, absolute opening is taken over by economy and regulation.
Such a takeover becomes expressed historically as the determinate distinc-
tion between controlling reason and controlled madness, which in turn leaves
out of account the “source point” as uneconomic opening. This interminable
rhythm of awakening and imprisoning Derrida understands not as an alter-
ation in time, but as the very movement of temporalization itself and perhaps
the destiny of philosophy.23
Meaning-to-say-the-hyperbole, in any case, is a bold attempt to draw back
to a “point” in relation to which all determined oppositions between reason
and madness as actual historical structures can appear as relative, and in which
meaning and non-meaning have their common origin.24 But what does it mean
to draw back to or to return to this absolute zero-point which is temporal
originality? It cannot mean starting from zero, for this would imply ignoring
temporal originality, the process of generativity through which reason and
madness have come to be for us in this way and the way in which we, in turn,
attempt to work back toward the origin-originating as such. A total bracketing
of history would always have to be inadequate to the task because the more
we try to approach the “origin,” the more the origin is originating through
these actions, embroiling our efforts. Instead, it must be a matter of how we
take up the origin-originating, the style of reason, thinking, or the style of
philosophy through which we take “it” up. In his If on a Winter’s Night a
Traveler, Italo Calvino expresses the effort in this way:

But every moment of my life brings with it an accumulation of new facts,

and each of these new facts brings with it its consequences, so the more I
seek to return to the zero moment from which I set out, the further I move
away from it: though my actions are bent on erasing the consequences
of previous actions and though I manage to achieve appreciable results
in this erasure, enough to open my heart to hopes of immediate relief, I
must, however, bear in mind that my every move to erase previous events
provokes a rain of new events, which complicate the situation worse than
before and which I will then, in their turn, have to try to erase. Therefore
I must calculate carefully every move so as to achieve the maximum of
erasure with the minimum of recomplication.25

This erasing or this bracketing is still a way in which the origin is origi-
nating. Given this structure of origin-originating, it was perhaps misleading
 THE ORIGINS AND CRISIS OF CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY 209
for Edmund Husserl to call the origin of philosophy a primordial institution
[Urstiftung]. Primordial could imply that something happens once and for all,
and is not in the unique process of originating. But it is nonetheless clear from
his analyses on the teleology of meaning, and of normality and abnormality,
that in order for something to function teleologically, guiding our actions, it
has to be appropriated in experience and made an origin and a telos.26 For
this reason it would make more sense to adapt a term that appears frequently
in Husserl’s later writings within a generative context of phenomenology,
namely, stamm.
Stamm – meaning among other things, root, stem, genealogical lineage,
place of return – is distinct from what is merely primordial or “ur.” Stamm is
literally radical in the sense of radix; it implies not only that meaning “stems”
or originates from a decisive phase, that it has its “roots” there, serving as a
“common root,” but that it is more than this particular, determinate historical
phase. It is not a simple origin, having taken place once and for all, it does not
sketch out a univocal, linear path from here to there, rather it is an originating-
origin which bears repeating; it is not only a stemming-from, but a returning
toward, a toward-which that implies a teleological orientation. What we would
call a Stammstiftung would be an accomplishment of sense that needs to be
returned-toward in order to be what it is.27
On the one hand, the task of thinking the origin-originating would entail, as
Calvino puts it, attempting to achieve the maximum of erasure with the mini-
mum of recomplication (what Husserl would call the reduction). On the other
hand, there is a sense in which this recomplication becomes historically mean-
ingful; through “careful calculation” we appropriate the origin-originating of
meaning in general, what we call history, and in particular, the history of
Western metaphysics.
The returning, then, is not and cannot be a blanket return back to a sim-
ple point, since the so-called “point” is temporal originality itself. Because
temporal originality is originating even in the returning to its teleological
sense, the returning must be nothing other than an appropriation of inaugural
thinking. Descartes’s Modern idea of philosophy is, for example, such an
appropriation of this thinking; even though it ostensibly founds a new starting
point for philosophy, a new “simple” origin, it is, as Husserl writes really a
“relative” primordial institution in relation to the institution of philosophy;
it is a transformed, appropriated institution [Umstiftung].28 In putting forth a
sense of philosophy that is ostensibly “external” to the origin, viewed gen-
eratively it co-creates the origin and the telos as telos through the historical
development. It returns to the origin by originating it, “complicating the situ-
ation”; it could not be farther from the origin, but at the same time could not
be more intimate to it.
210 ANTHONY J. STEINBOCK

4. The crisis in continental philosophy

What is the role of contemporary continental philosophy as generative think-

ing? Of course, we could attempt to locate a simple origin of continental
philosophy in the early Twentieth century with Husserl and phenomenology,
and a host of other European thinkers and movements. Or, because they were
simply doing philosophy, and not “continental philosophy” as such, we might
wish to locate the origin of continental philosophy in the United States with
the determination of it as “other” from the perspective of the dominant dis-
course of Anglo-American philosophy; or again more positively, we might
wish to locate its origin with the founding of the Society for Phenomenology
and Existential Philosophy (SPEP) in the early 1960s. In this case, continen-
tal philosophy would be understood provisionally as a simple origin, or what
Husserl calls a relative primordial institution. But it is also an Umstiftung, an
historically transformative, appropriative institution of the meaning of think-
ing. In doing this, continental philosophy appropriates to itself an origin that
extends beyond its simple origin. It takes a stand with respect to the direct-
edness of sense in appropriating Nietzsche, Marx, Hegel, Wollstonecraft,
Kant, Plato, etc., and they become part of the tradition of continental phi-
losophy, retroactively, through a kind of deferred action or Nachträglichkeit.
As Husserl suggests in his late “Krisis” writings, Plato becomes “our” Plato,
Hegel “our” Hegel, etc. This first person plural possessive does not imply
exclusivity, but rather, expresses the process of taking up and making the
origin and teleological directedness of sense.
To speak precisely, there is not really a debate between continental philos-
ophy, analytical philosophy, pragmatism, etc., since ultimately they are all
styles or manners of taking up the origin-originating of thinking in general.
The crucial question concerns rather how they return ahead to the generation
of thinking, how they should both appropriate and become appropriate to the
origin of thinking in its present forms.
Derrida has suggested that the present form of thinking is Western meta-
physics. Western metaphysics not only generates binary oppositions (such
as reason/madness, presence/absence, interior/exterior, masculine/feminine,
speaking/writing, etc.,) but privileges one side as a manner of controlling
the other; this control results in and is sustained by a forgetting of the con-
tribution of the subordinated side to this very distinction, and is ultimately
sustained by a forgetting of the “point” (temporal originality) of the division
itself. Derrida’s “careful calculation,” or as he calls it, his “strategy” of appro-
priating and challenging the history of Western metaphysics is formulated
under the well-known expression of “deconstruction.” Deconstruction is not
an attempt to escape Western metaphysics, or to criticize it by importing a
standard of measure from outside of Western metaphysics. There is no choice
 THE ORIGINS AND CRISIS OF CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY 211
but to inhabit metaphysics because we have no language, syntax or lexicon
that would be foreign to this history.29 Decisive is how or the style in which
we inhabit it. He writes: “The movements of deconstruction do not destroy
structures from the outside. They are not possible and effective, nor can they
take accurate aim, except by inhabiting those structures. Inhabiting them in
a certain way, because one always inhabits, and all the more when one does
not suspect it. Operating necessarily from the inside, borrowing all the strate-
gic and economic resources of subversion from the old structure, borrowing
them structurally, that is to say without being able to isolate their elements
and atoms, the enterprise of deconstruction always in a certain way falls prey
to its own work.”30
But if we necessarily inhabit metaphysics, must there not be a space, play,
elbowroom, or leeway [Spielraum] for the critique of metaphysics within
metaphysics in order to say, as Derrida does say, that metaphysical thinking
provokes a crisis in thinking, a crisis in the meaning of meaning in gener-
al? Without this leeway, Western metaphysics would have to be completely
taken for granted, without any possibility of detecting a crisis. How is the
detection of crisis possible, even for the deconstructionist who identifies the
hegemony of metaphysics over our thought? Some-“thing” must be guiding
the critique and disclosing metaphysics as a kind of crisis within thinking
in general. Metaphysics, while “decisive,” in the sense I explained above,
cannot be the ultimate context of originating-origin. And Derrida, too, says as
much: “Of course, the designation of that impossibility <of formulating the
movement of supplementarity within Western metaphysics, i.e., of escaping
the language of metaphysics> escapes the language of metaphysics only by a
hairsbreadth [pointe]. For the rest, it must borrow its resources from the logic
it deconstructs. And by doing so, find its very foothold there.”31
The origin-originating of thinking is internal to Western metaphysics itself.
This is why one can undertake an immanent critique of metaphysics. But the
origin-originating is not reducible to metaphysics. The hairsbreadth or fine
line [pointe] itself is the interval between hyperbolic thinking or historicity
and the history of philosophy, the difference between Reason in general
(which is the wellspring of determined reason and madness) and already
being-determined reason and madness. And it is this point, this difference
which both can and does function guidingly for Derrida’s critique. This
difference is not a remainder, it is not a third thing, but opening, generativity,
excess, surplus. Derrida explains: “By separating, within the Cogito, on the
one hand, hyperbole (which I maintain cannot be enclosed in a factual and
determined historical structure, for it is the project of exceeding every finite
determined totality), and, on the other hand, that in Descartes’s philosophy (or
in the philosophy supporting the Augustinian Cogito or the Husserlian Cogito
212 ANTHONY J. STEINBOCK

as well) which belongs to a factual historical structure, I am not proposing

the separation of the wheat from the tares in every philosophy in the name
of some philosophia perennis. . . . The historicity proper to philosophy is
located and constituted in the transition, the dialogue between hyperbole and
the finite structure, between that which exceeds the totality and the closed
totality, in the difference between history and historicity. . . .”32
By virtue of this generative difference between historicity and history,
which is immanent to/exterior to Western metaphysics, it is possible to discern
an originating and directedness of sense, and to detect in Western metaphysics
a crisis of thinking. This difference is at the very heart of the origination of
philosophical thinking, saturating determinate forms of reason and madness.
Even Derrida’s deconstructive analysis must presuppose this generative struc-
ture of experience that I elaborated above, and thinking as generative thinking.
For in his analysis, it is the difference between the origin-originating and our
present reality, between historicity and history, which is both immanent to
and escapes the history of Western metaphysics, that enables him to get his
foothold for a critique of Western metaphysics from within Western meta-
physics.
We have already become acutely aware in contemporary continental phi-
losophy that it is a profound mistake to think that we could innocently return
to a fixed origin. But our situation is different today. Today the crucial mis-
take lies in assuming that because the bracketing or erasure is never complete
that we can therefore never get back to “the origin” – with the result that
all thinking can only become cynicism, and all action only random play that
merely “disrupts” hegemonic discourses. Resulting statements and reactions
like these paradoxically still hold onto Western metaphysics by presupposing
the origin to be something static, eternal, or punctual, and do not understand
origin dynamically as origin-originating. Yet the very same extent to which
and the very same reason that we can never completely return to the “origin”
is the very same extent to which and the very same reason that the “origin”
is always with us, originating; hence it is as Derrida calls it, an “originary
presence,” or “fundamental permanence.” Hyperbolic thinking did not just
occur back then, but can always already occur at any time, with Descartes or
with us in the present. Likewise, the same extent to which we can never “get
back” to the origin is also the same extent to which we can never escape the
origin, either. Even if we wanted to.
When contemporary continental philosophy begins to reject any talk of
origin or telos in its challenge to essentialism, foundationalism, metaphysics
of presence, etc., it denies itself implicitly the possibility of any meaningful
critique and of crisis thinking. It can only pronounce “crisis” naively, which
is to say, entrench thinking deeper in what it seeks to escape. Not because it
 THE ORIGINS AND CRISIS OF CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY 213
denies a simple origin and a fixed telos, but because it assumes them, and in
taking them for granted in this way, takes them up in the form of relativism
and mere play. In the final analysis, static origin and mere play are just two
expressions of the same objectivism. One is unable to challenge metaphysics
from the difference between historicitv and history, and one risks becoming
totalitarian rather than emancipatory. To risk totalitarianism in this sense
would amount to acceding the movement of historicity, radical thinking, to
history and a determinate reason, closing the gap, attempting to encompass
the “absolute opening” by a closed, determined totality. Nothing could ever
be in crisis, because there would be no prospect for the generation of meaning
and the determination of new historical structures. There would be no “point”
to crisis thinking, no “point” to historical transformation. If this happens, and
it is happening, then continental philosophy is missing the point. It is in crisis.
To employ both Husserl’s and Derrida’s formulation, the crisis of contem-
porary continental philosophy consists in a “forgetting of origins,” not just
its simple origin in the Twentieth century, but is radical, root origin, the dif-
ference between history and historicity; it is a forgetting of the generative
structure of experience.33 It is true that the crisis affecting contemporary con-
tinental philosophy does concern contemporary thinking, how we envision
contemporary thought, and how we will situate it in the history of philosophy.
But this can be taken in a much too narrow sense if we only mean by conti-
nental philosophy, a particular academic discipline confined to the present, a
field merely different from, say, analytical philosophy. Continental philoso-
phy is a style of thinking, an appropriation and generation of origins. When
origins is understood generatively as origin-originating, continental philos-
ophy necessarily goes beyond a thinking confined to the Twentieth century,
and appropriates the history of Western thinking, together with its modes of
domination and its crises. It appropriates the Decision – Western metaphysics
– but it also implicitly takes up the “absolute opening.” And if this is done
critically, it will bear a responsibility to the difference between history and
historicity, i.e., generativity. This difference is only a point, a fine line, to be
sure, but it is a fine line that makes an infinite difference where generative
thinking is concerned.
Generative thinking is not cynicism or an excuse for the way things are,
but a radical type of responsibility for origins-originating, a directing the
directedness, and unending task, a perpetual beginning (a “fundamental per-
manence”), precisely because the “drawing back” or the “return” is never
complete, because originating is in process, because we are living in and
through generativity as we undertake and take up the task of thinking.
This generative thinking cannot merely be the thinking peculiar to Western
metaphysics which abstracts thought from our rootedness in the environing
214 ANTHONY J. STEINBOCK

world, it must also be the critical intervention in history transforming our

socio-political lifeworld. Accordingly, generative thinking is a style of living
as well, and a unique responsibility; it is a responsibility, ultimately, to the
absolute opening.
I believe it is possible to characterize this absolute opening, this infinite
point, along with Emmanuel Levinas as Infinity, with Jean-Luc Marion as
God, or with Max Scheler as the Holy, without falling into theism or onto-
theo-logy. Continental philosophy as a mode of generative thinking would
bear an ethical responsibility toward this Infinite difference; it would be – and
dare I say, should be – the “point” to its unique style of taking up origins-
originating.34

Notes
1. Jacques Derrida, L’écriture et la différence (Paris: Seuil, 1967), p. 416; Jacques Derrida,
Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978),
284, translation slightly modified.
2. See Michael Dummett, Origins of Analytical Philosophy (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1994), p. 4.
3. One might even wish to claim that today the continent is less engaged in “continental
philosophy” than, say, North America. Germany has made the “linguistic turn” in Dum-
met’s sense, and in a much more limited sense, to be sure, there is a movement in France
by the Centre de Recherche en Épistémologie Appliquée (CREA) – basically “analytical
philosophy” – which has been called in the French journal, Le Débat, “La philosophie
qui vient” – “the philosophy of the future,” or “the philosophy to come.” See Le Débat,
Novembre-Decembre, 1992.
4. See Max Scheler, Vom Ewigen im Menschen Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 5, ed., Maria Scheler
(Bern: Francke, 1954), 198 ff. And see my Home and Beyond: Generative Phenomenology
after Husserl (Evanston: Northwestern Univesity Press, 1995), esp., Chapter 10.
5. For a further clarification of this point, see Home and Beyond, chapter 9.
6. For just two examples, see Crises in Continental Philosophy, ed., Arleen B. Dallery
and Charles E. Scott (New York: SUNY Press, 1990), and Questioning Foundations:
Truth/Subjectivity/Culture, ed., Hugh Silverman (New York: Routledge, 1993).
7. I take the expression “dogmatic anti-foundationalism” from Steven Galt Crowell’s excel-
lent article, “Dogmatic Anti-Foundationalism.” Semiotica 100-3/4 (1996), pp. 361–82.
In order to emphasize the significance of a generative phenomenology of and the
possibility of a transcendental phenomenology of the social world in contrast to Husserl’s
Fifth Cartesian Meditation, I used, in Home and Beyond, the expression “non-foundational”
synonymously with “co-foundational.” But given what I understand now as the current
crisis of continental philosophy, I would no longer use the expression “non-foundational” to
articulate the co-relative and axiologically asymmetrical generative structure of homeworld
and alienworld.
8. Michel Foucault, Folie et Déraison: Historie de la folie à l’age classique (Paris: Plon,
1961), pp. 54–7.
9. Derrida, L’écriture p. 71; Writing, p. 45.
10. Derrida, L’écriture p. 74; Writing, p. 47.
11. Derrida, L’écriture, pp. 55–6; Writing pp. 33–4.
12. Derrida, L’écriture, p. 62; Writing, p. 38, my emphasis.
13. Derrida, L’écriture, p. 59; Writing, p. 36, translation slightly modified.
 THE ORIGINS AND CRISIS OF CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY 215
14. Derrida, L’écriture, pp. 62–3; Writing, p. 39.
15. Derrida, L’écriture, p. 63; Writing, p. 39.
16. Derrida, L’écriture, p. 62; Writing, p. 38.
17. Derrida, L’écriture, p. 62; Writing, p. 38.
18. Derrida, L’écriture, p. 63; Writing, p. 39.
19. Il s’agit moins d’un point que d’une originarité temporelle en général.” Derrida, L’écriture,
p. 86 fn. 1; Writing, p. 309, fn. 24.
20. Derrida, L’écriture, pp. 78, 81; Writing, pp. 50, 52. From this point of view the sleeper or
the dreamer would really be more mad then the mad, for the latter are not always wrong,
while for the dreamer, the totality of ideas becomes suspect. This moment within a natural
doubt is only relative and prepares the reader, according to Derrida, for an absolutely
hyperbolic moment. “. . . everything previously set aside as insanity is now welcomed into
the most essential interiority of thought.” Derrida. L’écriture, p. 82, Writing, p. 53.
21. Derrida, L’écriture, pp. 95–6; Writing, p. 62.
22. Derrida, L’écriture, p. 87; Writing, p. 56.
23. Derrida, L’écriture, pp. 93–6; Writing, pp. 60–2.
24. Derrida, L’écriture, p. 86; Writing, p. 56.
25. Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, 1981), pp. 15–6.
26. See my “Phenomenological Concepts of Normality and Abnormality,” Man and World,
Vol. 28, 1995, pp. 241–60. And see my “The New ‘Crisis’ Contribution: A Supplementary
Edition of Edmund Husserl’s Crisis Texts,” in Review of Metaphysics, Vol. 47, March,
1994, pp. 557–84.
27. See my Home and Beyond, pp. 194–96.
28. Edmund Husserl, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale
Phänomenologie: Ergänzungsband. Texte aus den Nachlass 1934–1937, ed. Reinhold M.
Smid, Husserliana, vol. 29 (Boston: Kluwer, 1993), pp. 399, 417, 419–20.
29. Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie (Paris: Minuit, 1967), 148. And see L’écriture, pp.
411–13, Writing, pp. 280–81.
30. Derrida, De la grammatologie, p. 39; Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), p. 24.
31. Derrida, De la grammatologie, pp. 442–43; Of Grammatology, p. 314.
32. Derrida, L’écriture, pp. 93–4; Writing, p. 60.
33. See for example, Derrida, L’écriture, pp. 96–7; Writing, p. 62.
34. A slightly different version of this paper was presented at the conference, Self-Awareness,
Temporality and Alterity, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark, December
5–7, 1996.