Page 240 - Contribution To Phenomenology

ETHNIC STUDIES AS MULTI-DISCIPLINE 233

The institutional and theoretical developments in such a situation can be
expected to be different from those in America we have focused on, but
may also learn from this aspect of the American experience, and, in any
case, comparisons and contrasts with what has been going on here should
be useful to all^

^ The model that emerges for me (Embree) from this discussion also fits
some recent events in American academic-professional philosophy and pertains to
what might be called schools of thought or "philosophical orientations." I am not
sure how many colleagues would welcome comparison of what might be called an
"orientational rights movement" with the Civil Rights Movement or the outcome of
what might be called "multi-orientationism" with multi-culturalism, but the similarities
are striking enough to me to wonder whether the structure fits struggles among
schools of thought within other academic disciplines if not among all cultural groups
and in any case this seems a good occasion to show briefly how the model fits.
When Phenomenology had become established by about 1960 as an imported or
migrated tendency finally adapted to a flourishing American academic situation and
was large and growing enough no longer to be ignored (Dorion Cairns had called
it an "exotic" in 1950), it was still a minority orientation. It was the eldest in a
recent continuing series of orientations diffusing if not migrating after the war from
Europe. Deconstructionism is the latest in this series. Phenomenology had been
transplanted to North America before the war. Neo-Scholasticism and also Logical
Empiricism (Positivism? Yes.) had preceded it and flourished, but with the war there
was discontinuity until Europe was back on its feet and students could again go to
France, Germany, etc. to study. This diffusion was accelerated when the demand for
college teachers outstripped the supply from the departments of the dominant
orientation from the late 1950s through the early 1970s.
Lyman: For sociology, World War II was also a watershed. Before the war,
American sociology had a "trade deficit" with Germany and France and had relied
on the ideas of the Methodenstreit School in Germany and the Durkheim School in
France. For the first three decades after 1945, the "trade deficit" was reversed as
Europrean sociology recoverd by adapting to Parsonian structural functionalism and
Lundbergian positivism. Ironically both had originated in pre-war Europe but been
elaborated in America. Only in the 1970s and thereafter did Europe once more
export sociological ideas to America.
Embree: There was little conflict among the various and still lowly populated
post-war European tendencies in American philosophy up into the 1980s. Indeed,
Don Ihde at SUNY Stony Brook and I independently and simultaneously invented
in 1978 the application of the title "Continental Philosophy" to the tacit alliance of
these small imports. I doubt that this "Rainbow Coalition" was 20% of the whole
of American philosophy then, although it might be today. The dominant orientation
was and is called "Analytic Philosophy," but is now increasingly called, in more
historical terms and from outside, "Anglo-American Philosophy," i.e., it is now
suffering the loss of status of being named by others and having its major recent
foreign source area identified (earlier there was input from Austria as well). At the
same time, what calls itself Continental Philosophy is often still called "Phenomeno-
logy and Existentialism" by the Anglo-Americans. Many non-Analysts suspected that