Analytic versus continental
Analytics say that continentals hide behind a barrage of opaque theory in favor of forming actual arguments. Continentals say that analytics make diagrams mapping out narrowly defined sequences of logic to avoid saying anything meaningful about the world. Both are correct. The fact that the Western philosophical tradition has grouped, in like-to-like fashion, into two aisles with a vast gulf in between would be unsurprising to Rene Guenon, who viewed philosophy and metaphysics as two entirely separate things which could never meet even when carried to their most extended states. Guenon believed that the last Western philosophers1 who maintained a semblance of metaphysics were Aristotle and Plato: the first, for his insistence on the equivocality of being in the hylomorphic sense, where the many analogous states of being fail to exhaust or fully represent the underlying substance of being (Aristotle would lay the foundation for Guenon’s own hierarchy of being, though he viewed the framework as a didactic tool rather than a structural one); the second, for his glimpse into the foundational structure of reality through dialectics and his doctrine of the nous which mirrors the Eastern buddhi or suprarational intellect.
Guenon maintains a strict separation of principle when envisioning the relationship between philosophy, theology, science, and metaphysics. Under such a separation, at no point may the individual eclipse the universal. The claim inherent in this stratification is that no domain which professes to deal in the realm of the rational can also stake an argument to universal truth, for these two things operate on fundamentally different levels of existence. Since metaphysics is derived from pure intellect2, it takes on the nature of the universal. The various satellite disciplines to metaphysics, any of the rational and empirical modes of inquiry which belong to the domain of the individual, then become not invalid but wholly differentiated in their real area of work; they serve different purposes entirely.
“Metaphysical truths can only be conceived by the use of a faculty that does not belong to the individual order, and which, by reason of the immediate character of its operation, may be called ‘intuitive’, but only on the strict condition that it is not regarded as having anything in common with the faculty which certain contemporary philosophers call intuition, a purely instinctual and vital faculty that is really beneath reason and not above it.”3
He also writes extensively on the tendency of the philosophical mind to apply categories belonging to the realm of the individual to the universal. Among these categories are contingency and the act of being subject to either time or place, all of which lack a counterpart at the universal level. Metaphysics, then, is that which can be grasped at any time by any person, independent of the contingencies of empiricism which cling to imaginal concepts while declaring them objective. Since metaphysics exists on a plane of timelessness, formlessness, and a complete privation of manifestation in general, to prescribe such features as a method for uncovering universality is in err.
“Besides, why do modern Westerners, when they imagine they are conceiving the Infinite, always represent it as a space, which can only be indefinite, and why do they persist in confusing eternity, which abides essentially in the ‘timeless,’ if one may so express it, with perpetuity, which is but an indefinite extension of time, whereas such misconceptions do not occur amongst Orientals? The fact is that the Western mind, being almost exclusively inclined to the study of the things of the senses, is constantly led to confuse conceiving with imagining, to the extent that whatever is not capable of sensible representation seems to it to be actually unthinkable for that very reason.”4
In this regard, Guenon perceives little difference between Western philosophy (which purports to contain metaphysics when it can only really contain contingent approximations of it, or else self contained systems of extended individual analysis) and the physical and natural sciences, nor does he detect much of a difference between these disciplines and the various theological tones in the admixture of the Western tradition. Instead, he directly separates such disciplines in accordance with the level of universality that their domains can contain, all of which fail to approach that of metaphysics. Evidence for this distinction comes from the discontinuous nature of the philosophical tradition, which contains and discontains science at various points and degrees throughout history, as well as the fictitious unity between the various hard and soft sciences which the prevailing paradigm of mechanistic materialism tends to vastly understate. The conclusion wrought from a distinction of this nature between the individual and the universal is that even the scholastic tradition, that in the Western lineage which best preserves metaphysics, is limited because it views metaphysics merely as the greatest of all philosophies. For something to be the greatest of a contingent order it necessarily loses its universal quality. The extent of the degradation from the scholastics to the present divide speaks volumes about the continued fall from universality of the Western intellect, as we in modern academic philosophy have all but lost Aristotle and find many of his claims indefensible in view of the mechanistic models. In fact, Guenon states that the first division whence the sciences began to systematize and consequently absorb metaphysics was Cartesian, a fall from the hierarchical into the dualist which began in no small part to introduce mechanistic physics to the Western stage.
“The point of view of the sciences, as we have shown, belongs to the individual order ; the general is not opposed to the individual, but only to the particular, since it is really nothing else than the individual extended ; moreover the individual can receive an indefinite extension without thereby altering its nature and without escaping from its restrictive and limiting conditions ; that is why we say that science could be indefinitely extended without ever joining metaphysic, from which it will always remain as completely separate as ever, because metaphysic alone embraces the knowledge of the Universal.”5
If we are to separate the domains of the individual and the universal once again, the continental intuition of the analytic narrowing the field of truth to intense scrutiny of language and definitions, of thought experiments and rational abduction, proves clairvoyant. This is the purest crystallization of a trend towards the reduced and quantifiable, where access to truth is mediated by formalist conventions, statistics, and linguistic atomism. It is the domain of the individual extended maximally towards the particular. Conversely, the argument that the continentals make word salad that is solely grasped by undergrads holds true6 as well because this is the act of mediating truth through stylistic license; the proclamation that truth is fluid and adaptable to a particular philosophical program steeped in the idiom of its contemporaneity and detached from definitional boundaries. It is the realm of the individual brought towards maximal generality (if you think this claim is bold, consider how many continentals have a grand theory of everything). Indeed, much of the post structuralist tradition would be equally denied by Guenon as Russell.
Guenon would also consider Hermes Trismegistus to be one of the last philosophers who understood the contours of the true metaphysics.
“The intellect is truer than science” Aristotle, Posterior Analytics
Introduction to the Study of the Hindu Doctrine, p. 116
Ibid, p. 119
Ibid, p. 111
For what it’s worth, I am heavily on the continental side of the rift, for regardless of who is correct they are far more interesting to read.