Two types of philosophy
The two dimensions of concepts
I like to think of concepts as having two dimensions: a cognitive one, and a conative one. Take the concept of the moon. The cognitive dimension would be the definition of the moon, factual descriptions of the moon, and so on. The conative dimension is more affective, embodied; it's how we feel about the moon, the emotions it arouses in us, our intimate relationship with it, how we live it, and so on.
Metaphor as conative collision
It's important to distinguish between these two dimensions, otherwise it can be hard to understand things like metaphors. Metaphors often rely on the conative dimension of concepts. As Harman says, when we make a metaphor, we're not just noting a similarity between the properties of two objects, or just creating an imaginary object whose properties are a mixture of those of the two objects. When we make a metaphor, we grasp the conative dimension beneath the cognitive dimension; we make the conative dimension of the two concepts meet, they clash, they transform, etc. Victor Hugo, in saying that the moon is a golden sickle in the field of stars, profoundly alters the conative dimension of the night sky; the crescent moon now has a different feeling for us, its conative dimension transformed by mixing with that of the sickle. We haven't just noticed a superficial resemblance between the moon and the sickle, we now “experience” the moon and the sickle differently, as being closer to each other in our sentimental world; we feel the sickle in the moon, the sickle tinges our feeling of the moon.
Worldview: lines vs colors
All this to say that I don't think a subject is ever purely cognitive, there's always a conative dimension too. And the conative dimension is of profound importance. If we think of our “worldview” as a drawing, omitting the conative dimension would be like having made only the lines without adding the color.
And I think we can use this distinction to identify two types of philosophy: one that deals more with the cognitive, and one that deals more with the conative.
Analytic philosophy: expertise in lines
Analytic philosophy strikes me as a type of philosophy that is more concerned with the cognitive. To use the drawing-worldview analogy again, I see a core activity of analytic philosophy as examining lines looking for bits missing, or bits that don't fit to restore harmony by bringing order, precision, completeness, and clarity (making it adequate) while avoiding/eliminating inconsistencies, dilemmas, incoherences, paradoxes, and contradictions (making it more congruent).
Expertise in colors
It's extremely interesting, but analytic philosophy tends to neglect colors.
We have an emotional relationship with certain themes, even with existence in general. Things are things “for us” beyond their definition, we live them, they're charged with attitude, they're experienced. We have a relationship with the world and things, we have a certain way of “being in the world”, a certain way of living the world and things, a certain way of treating them emotionally. We have a certain way of inhabiting the world, and the world and things have a certain way of inhabiting us.
Take death, an analytic philosopher will be happy to tell you about his long, ultra-precise and watertight definition of death, whose coherence has been tested and improved after many teleporter thought experiments. But all this does not address the “lived meaning” of death, its embodied aspect.
Philosophy that deals with the conative seeks to grasp our relationship with things, to study tensions, to deepen it, to transform it, etc. When Epicurus says that death is nothing to us, because when we exist, death is not, and when death exists, we are not, he's not building a big cognitive edifice of coherent definitions, he's seeking to touch our intimate relationship with death and transform it.
Calling for a complete philosophy
Analytic philosophy is awesome; it's all I've done from morning to night for several years. But if we're not careful, we may realize that rather than quenching our vague thirst for “deeply important answers”, we've spent decades debating whether particles arranged chair-wise form a chair.
Analytic philosophy tends to treat the conative dimension as purely decorative. The only conative thing accepted is curiosity, the rest is contemptuously relegated to the rank of poetry. But the philosophical nature of a question is precisely the depth of our affective relationship with its theme!
The conative dimension is not simply “decorative”. The questions addressed by philosophy are usually addressed precisely because of their conative dimension. What could be more misguided than to answer a philosophical question by ignoring the conative dimension as being decorative, when what has motivated this question is precisely this conative dimension, this tension in our affective relationship to this theme?
If we ignore the conative dimension, why deal with free will and not socks? I say this as a joke, but in fact, analytic philosophy is increasingly dealing with subjects that are less and less “deeply meaningful”, so why not socks soon? I don't think this is a bad thing, it's very interesting to improve our conceptions, whatever the subject. But I think it's indicative of a philosophy that increasingly sees improving conceptions as its goal rather than its tool for a deeper quest.
The desire to add rigor to the search for deepening and improving the conative has gradually led to the conative being sidelined in favor of a simple enterprise of cognitive improvement of conceptions. What we end up with is a discipline which, founded to address human experience, forgets about human experience and loses itself in the fetishization of its tools. Enormous formal edifices have been created, with ever-increasing precision and coherence, but these edifices provide no answer to our initial thirst, or even trample it scornfully underfoot.
For a long time, I treated non-analytic philosophy as simply “bad philosophy”, philosophy done without rigor. But you have to understand that non-analytic philosophy sometimes doesn't deal with the same things. Addressing human experience, the intimate relationship with things and existence, cannot be done with the same methods as improving conceptions.
(The charge of “bad philosophy” or “non-rigorous philosophy” is generally not a good criticism of cognitive non-analytic philosophy either, but that will be the subject of another post).
During my analytic phase, I literally came to see philosophy as just a game. On my old blog, which I used to run during this phase, I used to say that philosophy was just a game, and that I wasn't even sure I believed what I was saying. Philosophy, for me, was simply the construction of systems to accommodate “intuition data” and the search for contradictions in other people's systems. I didn't really take the activity seriously; after all, my edifice didn't have many concrete consequences, and everyone could have their own edifice different from mine (as long as it was coherent) depending on their arbitrary choice of foundations and personal intuitions. A nice puzzle, that's how I treated philosophy.
(Of course, I'm exaggerating; analytic philosophy didn't always seem like a game to me, and I consider that I discovered some things of profound importance. Analytic philosophy does more than improve conceptions, and it sometimes uses this to answer some questions. But sometimes it's good to stretch the point).
At one point, I had finished building my edifice, I published a long post (3h reading time) giving a unified exposition of my positions on the main questions of the main branches of philosophy. After publication, I felt a strange sense of unease. Not the simple sense of emptiness you feel after achieving a big goal and wondering what you're going to do next, it was the feeling that my initial thirst that had brought me into philosophy hadn't been quenched; I'd spent years playing puzzles! That vague thirst for deep answers to my place in the world and my relationship with it, I hadn't addressed.
To come along and say “voilà! free will, which I've defined in this way because it best accommodates the desiderata of an accountant of free will, doesn't exist because of this formal contradiction”, resolves absolutely nothing of our human experience.
Analytic philosophy tends to look down on such things as “human experience”, “intimate relationships” and “affective tension”.
It sometimes says that, since these things don't fit neatly into their framework, they are pseudo-questions that are best eliminated or will naturally dissolve as conceptions improve. But this is false. We inhabit the world in a certain way, the world inhabits us in a certain way, and our tensions or disorientation are what's most real to us, far more than a watertight definition of free will. Pushing this under the carpet solves nothing; at best, it impoverishes our humanity, and at worst, it leaves us feeling thirsty.
Analytic philosophy sometimes says that these problems are the domain of the arts. But this is false. Even if art can be transformative, it has trouble with articulation. Philosophy allows us to lay down human experience, analyze it and discuss it; art immerses us in something, whereas philosophy articulates it and gives it a reflexive depth.
We need a philosophy that is both an expert in lines and colors, a philosophy that enables a complete worldview. A drawing without good colors is inert, and a drawing without good lines is shapeless. I'm not seeking to enter into a war of camps (analytic vs non-analytic), but to call for a enlargement.
[…] the partial but very real loss of the concept of philosophy as a way of life, as a lifestyle choice, and also as a therapy. The personal and communal aspects of philosophy have been lost. What's more, philosophy has sunk further and further down this purely formal path, in the search, at all costs, for novelty for its own sake: the philosopher's aim is to be as original as possible, if not by creating a new system, then at least by producing a discourse that, in order to be original, is intended to be highly complicated. The more or less skilful construction of a conceptual edifice becomes an end in itself. Philosophy has thus become increasingly remote from people's concrete lives.
Philosophy as a Way of Life, Pierre Hadot