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.
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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’.