The post-linguistic

turn
Analytic and continental philosophers
were once united in their obsession with
language. But now new questions have
arisen
by Crispin Sartwell 

‘There is nothing outside the text,’ wrote

Jacques Derrida in 1967. Like most
everything Derrida said, this notorious
declaration becomes more difficult to
interpret as one examines its context and
the context of its context. But it aptly
captures the flavour of academic
philosophy at the time it appeared, which
was also the year of Richard
Rorty’s anthology The Linguistic Turn,
which embodied an argument that the
most important philosophy of
the 20th century was linguistic
philosophy. By then, everyone but a few
reactionaries would have agreed with
that assessment. Philosophy had for
decades been relentlessly emphasising
the nature of language (as opposed to,
for example, the nature of reality,
goodness or beauty). There was some
dispute about whether there could be any
genuine philosophical questions that
were not questions about language.

Looking back on it from here, the

convergence on questions of language –
indeed, the relentless, almost-exclusive
focus on it as central to our experience,
by thinkers otherwise so different that
they could not or did not care to enter
into dialogue – seems remarkable. It is
one of the signal aspects of 20th-century
intellectual history and a useful lens
through which to view the development
of philosophy during that time.

In the 20th century, Western philosophy

split into two discourses, each with its
own canon and jargon, usually referred
to as ‘analytic’ and ‘continental’.
Mastering them simultaneously (getting
a solid handle on both Martin
Heidegger and Bertrand Russell, for
example, or both Willard Van Orman
Quine and Michel Foucault), was a very
intimidating prospect, and few had the
motivation. Almost certainly, if one was
housed, one was housed in a department
that did only one or the other. And
almost certainly, whichever side the
department was on, it was abusive
toward the other. Analysts held that
continental philosophy was not
philosophy at all, but meaningless yet
relativistic babble, something of
substantially less than no value.
Continentalists characterised analytic
philosophy as useless punctilious logic-
chopping and scientism for its own sake,
with no possibility of cultural critique or
even meaningful connection to human
life as it is actually conducted.

It is not surprising, however, that the

lines of discourse had more in common
than the participants in the ridicule
thought they did. Analytic and
continental philosophy emerged at the
same time in the Western academy, out
of a shared intellectual history (the
rationalists, empiricists and idealists,
among others). The rivalry was as
professional as it was conceptual, and
the contest was always to see which side
could get rid of the others’ professors.
But in a thousand ways through the
whole century, they were embedded in
the same zeitgeist. They had a lot of the
same obsessions, as well as a lot of the
same drawbacks, even if, by 1967, they
also had entirely different vocabularies.

A nalytic and continental philosophy

were obsessed with language, almost
entirely absorbed by it by century’s end.
And the motivation on both sides was
somewhat similar: linguistic philosophy
was going to cure the discipline of the
woolly, possibly empty, merely
speculative metaphysics of
the 19th century, the grand systems of
people like G W F Hegel, Friedrich
Schelling or Arthur Schopenhauer.
Turning from the direction of all history
or the nature of all Being itself, 20th-
century philosophers tended to focus on
the meaning of phrases like ‘the nature
of all Being itself’. When they did, many
concluded that such phrases were
without significance, or were being
terribly misused, and that philosophy
would be better off trying to clarify the
nature of language, which seemed quite
a bit more likely to pay off.

The linguistic turn was a response to a

professional and intellectual crisis that
persisted from around 1890 to 1910.
Elaborations of Hegelian and Kantian
idealism had dominated the field for the
better part of a century, and the ‘systems’
seemed to be getting ever-more
elaborate, incomprehensible and
inapplicable in any other discipline,
particularly in the sciences. For, in
comparison with the notably rapid
developments in several empirical
sciences of that era, philosophy seemed
to be stuck elaborating old ideas of
dubious relevance and even
comprehensibility.

Take the analytic side first. Its basic

thrust, as articulated by Russell
and G E Moore early in the century, was
to address and eliminate philosophical
problems by analysing the language in
which they were couched, a strategy that
both men felt was crystallised in their
student/colleague Ludwig
Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-
Philosophicus (1921). The project of that
fundamental turning-point was to clarify
the limits of meaningful language.
Moore, for one, didn’t try to explain the
meaning of existence, but the meaning of
the word ‘existence’, which he held was
not a genuine predicate. He didn’t try to
tell us what particular things there were,
but what ‘particular’ meant, with
extreme punctilious care. The
conversation moved from the nature of
the self to the meaning of ‘I’.

Just as Russell and Moore hoped, this

emphasis, and accompanying
advancements in logic, revitalised the
discipline to a significant extent and
enhanced its academic respectability,
setting off a discourse and a style of
thinking and writing that dominated
universities in the UK and the US for
most of the century. And, while it may at
times have descended into useless
technicality, the reconstituted discipline
succeeded in defining an expertise and
constraining thinkers methodologically
from sheer flights of fancy (to some
extent). ‘All genuine problems are at
least theoretically capable of being
solved,’ said the positivist
philosopher A J Ayer in 1936. But most
philosophical problems, he thought,
were pseudo-problems, to be dissolved
by close examination of the language in
which they were couched. ‘Such a
metaphysical pseudo-proposition as “the
Absolute enters into, but is itself
incapable of, evolution and progress”,’
he thought, had ‘no literal significance’,
even for the person who uttered it,
because it could not possibly be verified
by observation or experiment.

Ayer said he plucked that sentence about

the Absolute randomly from the writings
of one of the most typical and dominant
late 19th-century British
philosophers, F H Bradley. He was
asserting that almost all previous
philosophy was literally nonsense, like
‘All mimsy were the borogoves’ but less
amusing. And Ayer was saying that, if
philosophy was to have any respectable,
useful or well-defined subject matter, it
would be found in the nature and
function of language, not the nature and
function of reality.

‘Esse is percipi,’ wrote the empiricist

metaphysician George Berkeley around
1710: ‘To be is to be perceived.’ For
something to exist or be real, for
Berkeley and for many others (Immanuel
Kant, for example), was for it to play
certain roles in human perception or to
correspond to our mental imagery. In a
tribute to that style of metaphysics and a
parody of it, in 1939 Quine said that ‘to
be is to be the value of a variable.’ Now,
Quine took himself to be ridiculing the
grand pronouncements of metaphysics.
But it was hard not to hear that ‘bound
variable’ stuff as itself an ontological
theory according to which existence is
dependent on language: to be was to be
picked out by the ‘something’ in
sentences like ‘there is something that’s
tall and green’ (or, in the language of
logic, (∃x)(Fx&Gx), in which the
existential quantifier binds
the variable ‘x’).

Nelson Goodman, a colleague of Quine’s

at Harvard, summarised the approach in
his book Ways of Worldmaking (1978):
 If I ask about the world, you can
offer to tell me how it is under one
or more frames of reference; but if
I insist that you tell me how it is
apart from all frames, what can
you say? We are confined to
describing whatever is described.
Our universe, so to speak, consists
of these ways rather than of a
world.

Countless philosophical problems,

Goodman and others argued, had been
manufactured by the alleged distinction
between the world and our ways of
describing it. We could make do with the
latter, they thought, or really we had no
choice until we could leave our own
minds. Rorty summarised the
developments by the early 1970s as ‘the
world well lost’. Now we could talk
about words instead.

As analysis developed, so did the

motivation for it. In the later
Wittgenstein, for example, the centrality
of language to human experience and
culture becomes an explicit theme, and
the project of shedding light on it gains a
more intrinsic motivation. It’s no longer
primarily a matter of destroying 19th-
century philosophy, but of showing the
bases of human culture and
communication.

‘To imagine a language means to

imagine a form of life,’ Wittgenstein
declared in Philosophical
Investigations at mid-century, and to
analyse a language is to analyse a form
of life: a personality and a culture. By
the time Rorty’s The Linguistic Turn was
published, assembling the first potent
narrative of this intellectual history, it
was obvious to everyone, whether they
liked it or not, that the nature of
language and the detailed analysis of its
functioning (as in ‘the ordinary
language’ philosophy of J L Austin and
others, or the linguistic metaphysics
of Saul Kripke and David Lewis) was
the central arena of 20th-century
philosophy.

In his introduction, Rorty wrote:

The purpose of the present volume

is to provide materials for
reflection on the most recent
philosophical revolution, that of
linguistic philosophy. I shall mean
by ‘linguistic philosophy’ the view
 that philosophical problems are
problems which may be solved (or
dissolved) either by reforming
language, or by understanding
more about the language we
presently use. This view is
considered by many of its
proponents to be the most
important philosophical discovery
of our time, and, indeed, of the
ages.

As developed in the work of Donald

Davidson and Rorty himself, for
example, ideas like Quine’s and
Wittgenstein’s moved toward what came
to be thought of as ‘postmodernism’,
which had been developing for some
time in Europe. It conceived our
experience and our world as
linguistically constructed. Admittedly,
many figures would resist that
formulation, or any of these labels. But
as shown specifically by Rorty, Richard
Bernstein and Charles Taylor, for
example, the analytic and continental
traditions, with little mutual awareness,
were by 1985 beginning to coincide in
some of their conclusions.

Let’s turn now to the continental side.

Though he also bristled with hostility
toward ‘metaphysics’, Heidegger held
that ‘It is in language that things first
come to be and are.’ Here is his
definition of the human:

Man shows himself as the entity

which talks. This does not signify
that the possibility of vocal
utterance is peculiar to him, but
rather that he is the entity which is
 such as to discover the world and
[himself].

Now, that’s not the sort of thing that

Quine would say, and it’s not the sort of
sentence that Ayer would regard as
meaningful. But it centralises language
as relentlessly as they do. And, as much
as theirs did, Heidegger’s approach to
philosophy of language set off decades
of discourse.

Heidegger developed these thoughts

elaborately in later writings, such as On
the Way to Language (1959). One
interpretation of them makes language
the fundamental bottom line of human
experience and reality. This was
probably expressed most clearly in the
‘hermeneutical’ philosophy of
Heidegger’s student – and Rorty’s hero –
Hans-Georg Gadamer. The word
‘hermeneutics’ originally referred to the
discipline of textual interpretation,
especially of the Bible, and late 20th-
century continental philosophy hinted
that it should be philosophy’s successor.

‘Language is the fundamental mode of

operation of our being-in-the-world and
the all-embracing form of the
constitution of the world,’ wrote
Gadamer in 1976:

In all our knowledge of ourselves

and in all knowledge of the world,
we are always already
encompassed by the language that
is our own. We grow up, and we
become acquainted with men and
in the last analysis with ourselves
when we learn to speak … In truth
 we are always already at home in
language.

Now, again, this is not the mood, tone or

doctrine of any analytic philosopher. But
it might motivate a similarly intense and
detailed look at how language functions.

Indeed, in many ways, the

‘deconstruction’ of language in Derrida
and his ilk closely follows Heidegger
and Gadamer, while also slyly blowing
up the latters’ pretensions. Yes, Derrida
says, we are linguistic creatures all the
way down. Our language in some sense
gives us, or is, our reality; language is
our mode of access to the Universe and
ourselves, or the way we construct or
reveal them. Literary interpretation is a
good analogy for human experience as a
whole, for both are interpretive activities
performed with signs.

But terrifying problems arise, Derrida

points out. If we thought of the
experience of the world as analogous to
the act of reading, as in hermeneutics,
we’d have to acknowledge that the act of
reading produces delusion as frequently
as truth. We’d have to acknowledge that
every text that we can understand is
liable to be fraught with obscurities or
even contradictions. A lot of the
literature of the 20th century played with
ambiguity, surrealism, obscurity: if the
world and we are texts, maybe we are
more like modernist poetry than like
classical drama, more like a novel by
James Joyce than one by Jane Austen.
Maybe we are trapped in a situation that
we can’t get far enough outside of
even to see.

T he ‘postmodern’ moment, especially

the French versions of figures such as
Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, began to
focus on the ways that the linguistic
construction of reality, a structure
without foundations, is ‘always
already’ collapsing. Jean Lyotard argued
that all legitimising master narratives
had already broken down, and that the
era couldn’t make a coherent language
for itself. Jean Baudrillard argued that
the appearance/reality distinction had
only a fictional or ideological resonance
by 1980, and that we lived in a world of
signs that signified nothing, a Disney
World that encompassed all of ‘reality’.
Toward century’s close, others explored
more positive postmodern modes.
One of these was the focus on the
concept of narrative, or story, by a
number of figures, such as Paul Ricoeur
and Alasdair MacIntyre. Narrative theory
in psychology, history, and ethics –
among other applications – centralised
one particular linguistic mode,
storytelling, as central to the
construction of personality, culture and
reality, and as central as well as to value
theory. ‘Life itself [is] a cloth woven of
stories told,’ wrote Ricoeur in the
third volume of his magisterial Time and
Narrative (1984). This theory of the
human was very popular: even Nike got
onboard with their slogan ‘We are the
stories we tell.’

‘Temporality … requires the mediation

of the indirect discourse of narration …
There can be no thought about time
without narrated time,’ Ricoeur asserted,
and he used the concept to explain
personal identity as well. ‘What justifies
our taking the subject of an action, so
designated by his, her, or its proper
name, as the same throughout a life that
stretches from birth to death? The
answer has to be narrative,’ he wrote.
Narrative for many late 20th-century
figures provided a ground for
psychology, ethics, and metaphysics.
It explained simultaneously the nature of
human identity and the nature of the
world we inhabit together, rather as
‘God’ or ‘nature’ had done for previous
thinkers.

This sort of narrative theory was one

version of what, by late in the century, in
the work of influential philosophers such
as Rorty and Taylor, came to be known
as linguistic or social constructionism:
the picture of a world made in significant
measure by words. It had hopeful or
benevolent political implications: a
world that has been constructed by us
can be reconstructed by us. We could
make a better social world by focusing
on, revealing, critiquing and reforming
our languages. ‘To study persons is to
study beings who only exist in, or are
partly constituted by, a certain language,’
wrote Taylor in his
fundamental book Sources of the
Self (1989). ‘There is no way we could
be inducted into personhood except by
being initiated into a language.’

In Rorty and Taylor, Bernstein and

MacIntyre, the commonalities between
analytic and continental philosophy, and
the ocean-straddling postmodern mood,
came to be self-conscious, to put it
mildly. In them, at any rate, if not at
meetings of the American Philosophical
Association, analytic and continental
philosophy converged. Both sides
could argue about Noam Chomsky, for
example, or developments in speech act
theory. Even if few worked directly
across the border, the wall began to seem
more like a fence. You could see through
it here and there, and imagine climbing
over.

But, by the same token, the questions

they raised and the conflicts they
prosecuted began to seem less urgent. A
turn away from the linguistic turn began.
Perhaps the questions that appeared
urgent early in the 20th century had by
its end, to whatever extent they ever
would be, been answered or abandoned.
I’m not sure how much deeper or more
sophisticated the philosophical treatment
of language can go than it had gone by
the 1970s on both sides of the water.
Perhaps linguistic philosophy and
narrative theory had become as overly
refined by 1999 as German Idealism was
in 1899, and its relevance as
questionable.

In the new millennium, to take one

example of the transformed terrain,
environmental issues came to be central
in a way that seemed to render linguistic
constructionism irrelevant or seemed
simply to suggest its falsity. Though
discourse has many roles in helping
create carbon emissions, for example,
it’s the material interactions of particles,
whether known or unknown to anyone,
narrated or not, that is the heart of the
problem. Any philosophy that seemed to
undermine the reality of the natural
world, or make it a malleable human
artefact, has come to feel potentially
destructive. Indeed, scholars’ obsession
with linguistic interpretation, their notion
that everyone has always experienced
the world as though reading a book,
came to seem at a certain point to be an
artefact of privilege, as well as
fundamentally implausible.

And we are no longer a planet awash in

newsprint, but a world of imagery and
image-text hybrids of sorts not covered
in the Tractatus. We seem to be more
concerned right now about whether
we’re living in a virtual reality than
whether we’re living in a text. That all
sorts of new questions have arisen,
however, demands new reflection, but
also makes possible new histories. As
Hegel observed, you can’t really tell the
story of something until it starts winding
down.

Crispin Sartwell’s most recent book

is Beauty: A Quick Immersion (2022).