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Both movements have turned philosophy into a private game for professionals. Laymen glancing at the June 10, 1965, issue of the Journal of Philosophy will find a brace of learned analysts discussing whether the sentence "There are brown things and there are cows" is best expressed by the formula (3x)Exw (3x)Exy or by (3x)Bx-(3x)Cx. And while the existentialists speak dramatically enough about the condition of man in novels and plays, their philosophical writing is so dense that Brandeis' Henry Aiken complains: "Reading Heidegger is like trying to swim through wet sand." One typical passage of Heidegger's alleged masterwork, Being and Time, reads: "If the Being of everyday Being-with-one-another is already different in principle from pure presence-at-hand—in spite of the fact that it is seemingly close to it ontologically—still less can the Being of the authentic Self be conceived as presence-at-hand."
Philosophy cannot and need not make sense to the layman in every detail; excerpts from Aristotle or Hegel (or, for that matter, Einstein) may also seem like gibberish to the uninitiated. But it is significant that the analytic and phenomenological thinkers don't even understand one another.
As a result, philosophy today is bitterly segregated. Most of the major philosophy departments and scholarly journals are the exclusive property of one sect or another. Harvard, U.C.L.A. and Cornell are oriented toward analytic thinking, for example, while Penn State and Northwestern are among the minority leaning toward phenomenology. Despite much academic talk about the horrors of conformity, some philosophy departments are rigidly conformist. Instructors or students with the "wrong" approach are forced out. The attitude at U.C.L.A., for instance, is that "a lot of nice young people who might be wholesome philosophers of the non-analytic kind can't get through our requirements."
Many students who do make the grade in analytic courses are disappointed because they had expected more from philosophy. To some, the analytic approach is now old hat, while the older, unfashionable philosophies take on a new excitement. There are many older-line philosophers left in the U.S. who belong to neither of the two warring sides, including Yale's Paul Weiss, Chicago's Richard McKeon, the University of Texas' Charles Hartshorne, and Michigan's Abraham Kaplan, who states wryly: "The word philosophy means the love of wisdom. And the love of wisdom, I suppose, is like any other sort of love—the professionals are the ones who know least about it."
There are signs that, hesitantly and sometimes unintentionally, professional philosophers are beginning to take such reproaches to heart. At long last, philosophy may have stopped attacking the Hegelian bogey and be about ready to put its analytic tools to work on the real issues facing man.
Suggesting the glimmer of a détente, French Phenomenologist Paul Ricoeur now teaches a course in linguistic analysis at the University of Paris. Yale's John Wild recently published an article suggesting that the lebenswelt, the "life world" of experience that phenomenology investigates, is the world of "ordinary language" that the linguistic philosophers are studying.