🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

🫣🙃😏 Hypocritique 🫣🙃😏
🌀⚔️💫 IPA/FLŽ 🌀⚔️💫

(link, Ladders and Philosophy: Context and Scope)

Introduction

Philosophical thinking often faces a pivotal choice: whether to embrace the ladder of context that brought us to our insights, or to kick that ladder away in pursuit of a grand scope beyond it. In other words, philosophers either reconcile themselves with the tangled historical and conceptual context of their ideas, or they try to transcend it to attain a purified scope of universal truths. This distinction maps roughly onto the classic division between continental and analytic philosophy. Continental thinkers characteristically “like the ladder” – they remain mindful of the conditions and context of meaning (historical, linguistic, cultural, psychological) – whereas analytic thinkers often “trash the ladder,” disavowing context in favor of logical clarity and scope.

Two famous ladder metaphors illustrate these opposed attitudes. In Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), the philosopher likens his own propositions to steps of a ladder that must ultimately be discarded. Wittgenstein writes that anyone who understands him “eventually recognizes [these propositions] as nonsensical, when he has used them – as steps – to climb beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.) He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright.”. This striking image – tossing aside the very framework that enabled one’s ascent – epitomizes the “philosopher of scope” approach. Wittgenstein suggests that once we reach a clear view (the world aright), the supporting context (the philosophical exposition itself) can be left behind as nonsense. Many in the analytic tradition followed a similar impulse to transcend context, stripping away metaphysics, language ambiguities, and historical baggage to attain a well-defined scope of analysis.

In stark contrast, Jacques Lacan, a quintessentially continental thinker, invokes an inverted ladder that must be climbed rather than discarded. Lacan famously said: “Castration means that enjoyment (jouissance) must be refused so that it can be reached on the inverted ladder of the Law of desire.” In Lacan’s psychoanalytic framework, one renounces immediate gratification (symbolic castration) in order to ascend the structured ladder of language and law, eventually attaining a deferred, refined form of enjoyment. The ladder here is not junked; it is the very structure (the Law, the symbolic order) that makes desire and meaning possible. This metaphor suits the “philosopher of context” stance: our very pleasures and insights are reached by working within a given structure – a language, a culture, a context – rather than leaping out of it.

Between Wittgenstein’s ladder thrown away and Lacan’s ladder embraced, we find a wealth of philosophical projects either disavowing their conditions or thematizing them. In what follows, we will explore the contrast between analytic and continental philosophy through this lens of “context vs. scope” – or as we will dub it, philosophers of context (who keep the ladder) versus philosophers of scope (who trash the ladder). We will see how this dynamic plays out in the works of major figures across both traditions, including Freud, Lacan, Žižek, Wittgenstein, Carnap, Quine, Heidegger, Derrida, Adorno, Horkheimer, Ryle, Russell, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and Sellars. Along the way, we will highlight key concepts that illustrate the divide – such as esprit d’escalier, symbolic castration, jouissance (enjoyment), and the Freudian-Lacanian conception of the unconscious. These concepts, especially from Freudian psychoanalysis, often exemplify the contextual, depth-oriented approach and have been flashpoints between Freudians and anti-Freudians in debates over knowledge, politics, and even metaphysics.

We will also consider two influential intellectual schools that epitomize each side: the Frankfurt School of critical theory (with thinkers like Adorno and Horkheimer) which kept philosophy tethered to social context and psychoanalytic insight, and the Slovenian School (centering on Slavoj Žižek and colleagues) which fully aligns with the Freudian-Lacanian tradition in contemporary theory and politics. The Slovenian School’s commitment to ideological critique and the psychoanalytic unconscious illustrates a modern “philosophy of context” that doubles as political intervention. Indeed, a recently articulated position – that of the IPA/FLŽ collective (International Psychoanalysis Association / Freudian-Lacanian-Žižekian) – explicitly defines itself as a “fully Freudian alignment.” We will integrate their conceptual and political language throughout our analysis, demonstrating how a Freudian/Lacanian approach positions the unconscious as a site of social and ideological struggle, confronts the dominance of the ego, and treats psychoanalysis as a revolutionary act for individual and collective liberation.

Finally, we will reflect on the meta-philosophical differences between these approaches – their views on language, method, and the purpose of analysis itself – and conclude by assessing the ideological stakes of “keeping or trashing the ladder” in today’s intellectual and cultural climate. In an era of algorithmic control, media saturation, and political upheavals, what do we stand to gain or lose from context-rooted critique versus scope-driven abstraction? The ladder may turn out to be not just a metaphor for philosophical method, but a symbol of whether we acknowledge our entanglement in history and desire, or imagine we can step free of them.

Philosophers of Context vs. Philosophers of Scope

At its core, the divide between contextual and scope-oriented philosophies is about how a thinker relates to their own foundations. A philosopher of context remains aware of the conditions, background, and limits that shape any philosophical question. They tend to analyze those conditions directly: the context becomes part of the content of their philosophy. A philosopher of scope, on the other hand, seeks to expand philosophy’s domain by shedding its incidental baggage – they aim for generality, precision, and often a fresh start that leaves prior entanglements behind. In practice, these orientations often align with the labels “continental” (contextual, broadly European tradition) and “analytic” (scope-seeking, broadly Anglo-American tradition), though there are important exceptions and crossovers which we will note.

The phrase “philosophers of context vs. philosophers of scope” comes from Işık Barış Fidaner’s analysis of this divide. Fidaner observes that analytic philosophers effectively stole the word “analysis” itself as a trophy of their approach, even as they rejected the original Freudian analysis of the psyche (a deeply contextual endeavor) that preceded them. In other words, early analytic philosophy discarded the Freudian ladder – the idea that hidden contextual factors (unconscious desires, personal history, culture) must be analyzed – and instead redefined “analysis” to mean logical decomposition of language or concepts. They isolated what they called “continental” philosophy as an alien other, a body of thought supposedly trapped in its continent (Europe) and its historical self-reflections. Fidaner wryly notes that no one’s imagination can digest the full context of philosophy into a neat scope, and any attempt to do so results in a kind of incontinence of meaning – context leaks back in as symptoms and anomalies.

Thus, philosophers of scope often find themselves haunted by the very context they try to deny. A dramatic illustration of this is given by Sigmund Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams. Freud remarks on a peculiar occurrence in some dreams: the dream itself includes a dismissive judgment like “Oh, it was only a dream.” According to Freud, this phrase actually originates from the mind’s censorship apparatus, which, “never quite asleep,” realizes too late that an uncomfortable truth has slipped into the dream. Finding it “too late to suppress” the thought, the psyche slaps on a belated dismissal – “it’s only a dream” – to minimize the impact. Freud calls this maneuver an example of “esprit d’escalier on the part of the psychical censorship.” Esprit d’escalier, literally “staircase wit,” refers to the clever retort one thinks of only after leaving the conversation – too late to say it in the moment. Here, the psyche’s censorship comes up with its rebuttal on the staircase (after the forbidden thought already entered the dream). The phrase “only a dream” is the censor’s belated wit to deny the reality of the dream-content.

Philosophers of scope often behave like Freud’s censor: confronted with an unsettling analysis rooted in context (be it a critique of reason’s limits, or an unmasking of hidden desires), the scope-seeker will later dismiss it – “It was just metaphysics… just literature… just a joke… nothing real.” This esprit d’escalier is a telltale sign of discomfort with context. Indeed, Fidaner suggests that analytic philosophers’ tendency to label continental ideas as “dreams, jokes, accidents, masturbatory” etc. is precisely because those ideas caught them off guard, revealing something their framework couldn’t assimilate. The disdain comes too late – after the contextual insight has struck – and thus betrays an anxiety on the part of scope-oriented thinkers. In Freud’s terms, the critical judgement “it’s only X” is a defensive reaction: an attempt to regain control by trivializing the context-dependent insight.

By contrast, philosophers of context do not fear being “caught in context” – they delve into it. In Freud’s dream example, the true analyst would interpret the dream and even the self-disparaging “it’s only a dream” remark, rather than agree with the censor. This willingness to analyze the very framework of experience (rather than discard it) is what characterizes the context-philosophical ethos. Where a scope philosopher strives to transcend the messy ladder of meaning, a context philosopher strives to study its rungs and perhaps even re-purpose the ladder for further insight.

To clarify this contrast, let us examine how it manifests in various domains: epistemology (how we conceive of knowledge), language and method (how we do philosophy), and metaphysics (what we consider real or meaningful). We will see that Freudians vs. anti-Freudians is one powerful thread of this story – with Freudians insisting on depth, conflict, and context in understanding mind and society, and anti-Freudians seeking clearer, often flatter explanations. Likewise, we will trace how language is treated: whether as a transparent medium to be cleaned up (analytic scope view) or as a constitutive structure full of opacities and historical echoes (continental context view). We will survey key figures and moments where the metaphoric ladder is either kept or kicked away in famous texts – from Wittgenstein’s self-negating propositions, to Heidegger’s confrontation with the Nothing, to Derrida’s deconstruction of contextual boundaries.

Before diving into the historical narrative, it’s worth noting that neither approach has a monopoly on insight or rigor. Some philosophers of scope eventually rediscovered context (as Wittgenstein himself did later in life), and some philosophers of context have their own versions of scope or universality (as Hegel or Sartre did in different ways). The tension between context and scope is often internal to a single thinker’s work as much as it is a division between schools. Nonetheless, as a first approximation, the analytic tradition has been more inclined to “trash the ladder” of inherited context in the name of science or logic, while the continental tradition more often “keeps the ladder” – turning back to examine the conditions of possibility, the historical journeys, and even the unconscious impulses that undergird philosophy. We will now turn to concrete examples of each, starting with the context-embracing line of thought that runs from Freud’s discovery of the unconscious to critical theory and beyond.

Embracing the Ladder: Continental Philosophy and Context

Continental philosophy in the 20th century is marked by a persistent awareness of context – whether that context is history (Hegel, historicism), lived experience (phenomenology), language (structuralism, post-structuralism), or unconscious desire (psychoanalysis). Continental thinkers often retain the “ladder” – they analyze the frameworks and conditions that one might otherwise take for granted or try to leap past. This section examines several key continental figures and movements, showing how each “keeps the ladder” in their own way, thereby illustrating the philosopher of context approach.

Freud: The Unconscious and the Return of Repressed Context

At the dawn of the 20th century, Sigmund Freud revolutionized our understanding of the mind by positing that much of our thinking is not fully conscious or transparent to itself. In doing so, Freud introduced depth and context into the very concept of the self. No longer was human reason a self-contained, scope-complete entity; it was now influenced by hidden wishes, childhood experiences, cultural taboos – the context of one’s life, in the broadest sense, writes the script for one’s thoughts and dreams. Freud famously said of the ego (the conscious self) that “the ego is not master in its own house,” acknowledging that the rational mind is often the product of underlying forces rather than an autonomous legislator. This was a direct challenge to philosophies that viewed the mind as capable of detached, context-free reasoning. Instead, Freud’s psychoanalysis insisted that to truly know ourselves, we must analyze the unconscious, the latent content, the repressed background – in short, the context that our conscious narratives often ignore.

Freud’s method in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) and other works was explicitly analytic in the original sense: to analyze meant to delve into layered meanings – to take a seemingly incoherent dream or symptom and unravel the network of associations behind it (childhood memories, linguistic ambiguities, emotional triggers). In doing so, Freud kept the ladder of the patient’s personal history fully in view. Nothing in a dream was dismissed as nonsense; even the most trivial detail could be a clue to the dream’s context in the dreamer’s life. This contrasts sharply with a scope-oriented impulse to dismiss messy phenomena as “noise.” Freud even identified the psyche’s own attempt to dismiss content (the “It’s only a dream” censorship in dreams) and turned that into material for analysis. In other words, Freud analyzed the act of ladder-kicking as a symptom itself. The esprit d’escalier of the dream-censorship (belatedly trivializing the dream) is, for Freud, proof that something meaningful was trying to emerge – the ladder of context was there, even if the conscious mind tried to yank it away at the last minute.

Freud’s influence on continental philosophy was profound. By insisting that unconscious desires, drives (like Eros and Thanatos), and formative childhood events shape our conscious thought, Freud ensured that any philosophy engaging with human nature had to contend with contextual, hidden layers of meaning. Philosophers and social theorists in the continental tradition – from Herbert Marcuse (who wrote Eros and Civilization) to Paul Ricoeur (who wrote Freud and Philosophy) – took up Freud’s challenge. The Frankfurt School critical theorists, as we’ll discuss, used Freud’s ideas to analyze society and authority, seeing phenomena like mass political movements or “culture industry” entertainment as expressions of repressed desires or displaced anxieties in a social context.

In summary, Freud can be seen as a paradigmatic “philosopher of context” (even if he is typically labeled a psychologist rather than a philosopher proper). He set the template for keeping the ladder: his analytic session was a slow climb down and up the ladder of the patient’s psyche, traversing memories and associations. He did not allow the patient’s own ego to throw away those steps; if a patient said “Oh, that’s irrelevant,” a Freudian analyst would likely probe why the patient wanted to skip that rung. In this sense, Freud’s legacy in philosophy is the notion that our rational viewpoints are never self-standing – they rest upon and emerge from a lattice of personal and cultural context. The unconscious is precisely all that scaffolding that our conscious self doesn’t see, but which an analytic inquiry can reveal.

Lacan: The Symbolic Ladder and Castration

Building on Freud, Jacques Lacan in the mid-20th century reframed psychoanalysis in terms of language and structure, giving a new twist to the ladder metaphor. Lacan’s famous pronouncement that “the unconscious is structured like a language” meant that the hidden context Freud uncovered has its own order – specifically, the order of symbols, words, and differential relations. In Lacan’s theory, a child’s entry into the Symbolic Order (the realm of language, law, and social norms) is accompanied by the acceptance of limits – what he calls symbolic castration. This is not a literal castration but a metaphor for the renunciation of being the sole focus of enjoyment; the child realizes it must share the world of meaning with others and abide by rules.

It is in explaining this concept that Lacan uses his ladder analogy: “Castration means that jouissance (enjoyment) must be refused so that it can be reached on the inverted ladder of the Law of desire.”. In plainer terms, immediate gratification (raw jouissance) is sacrificed (refused) in order to gain access to a structured form of desire via the Law – a law which functions like an inverted ladder that one climbs to find a higher-order satisfaction. The ladder is “inverted” because the very act of renunciation (a step down, as it were) becomes a step up toward genuine desire. One might say Lacan stands the ladder on its head: what you give up at the bottom (unfettered infantile pleasure) becomes the top rungs of a new ladder – the structured desires that actually can be achieved within language and society.

Crucially, Lacan does not advocate burning this ladder; on the contrary, the ladder (the symbolic Law) is essential. It is the lattice that mediates between the subject and jouissance. Lacan’s whole structural approach is about understanding the framework – the network of signifiers, the big Other (i.e. the symbolic authority), the interplay of lack and desire – within which our subjectivity is constituted. He continuously revisited foundational texts (Freud’s, but also philosophical ones from Plato to Hegel) to tease out their structural dynamics, rather than throwing them away. Even Lacan’s notoriously difficult style, full of puns and allusions, reflects an engagement with context: meanings are generated by their place in a structure, not by isolated definition.

One concrete practice of Lacan’s that illustrates “keeping the ladder” is his innovation of variable-length sessions in psychoanalysis. Lacan would sometimes end a patient’s session abruptly – not to dismiss their progress, but to punctuate a moment of insight or resistance. This coupure (cut) was meant to prevent the analysand from rambling on superficially and force them to confront the crucial point that had emerged. In a sense, Lacan was saying: “Stay with that last rung of the ladder we just hit; don’t move past it too quickly.” This is the opposite of an endless, comfortable conversation (which might let the patient avoid the issue) – it keeps focus on the significant context that just came up. Such techniques underscore Lacan’s commitment to depth over breadth, context over scope: better to deeply integrate one key insight about one’s desire than to prattle on in generalities.

Lacan also reinterpreted Freud’s notion of the “censor” and denial in a linguistic vein. Where Freud spoke of esprit d’escalier in dreams, Lacan might speak of the way a joke or a slip of the tongue reveals the unconscious despite the speaker’s later self-correction. He would likely agree that the belated “only a dream” is an attempt by the ego to impose a secondary revision. Lacan’s emphasis on méconnaissance (misrecognition) means that the subject is fundamentally out-of-sync with itself – always interpreting its experience belatedly, often falsely. The cure is not to transcend this condition (impossible, in Lacan’s view) but to traverse the fantasy – effectively, to climb back down the ladder of one’s own self-deceptions and see how they were constructed. This traversal is a very context-heavy endeavor: it involves examining one’s relationship to the Other (society, the symbolic system) and the network of desires that constitute one’s world.

In summary, Lacan’s work exemplifies the continental tendency to analyze the ladder itself. He took Freud’s discovery of the unconscious (the hidden contextual lattice of the mind) and gave it a structural, linguistic formulation, thereby providing future continental thinkers – especially the Slovenian School – a robust ladder to climb in analyzing ideology and culture. Rather than simplifying or eliminating Freud’s concepts to fit some universal scope, Lacan complexified them, tying them to linguistics, anthropology, and Hegelian philosophy. This complexity is a feature, not a bug: it mirrors the complexity of human psychological context.

The Frankfurt School: Society, History, and Dialectical Context

Moving from the clinic to society at large, the Frankfurt School of critical theory (which coalesced in the 1930s at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt) represents a concerted effort to keep philosophy tied to social and historical context. Thinkers like Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and Erich Fromm were deeply influenced by both Marx and Freud. They believed that traditional philosophy (and traditional Marxism, for that matter) had overlooked how everyday life, culture, and the psyche are intertwined with economics and power. In Horkheimer’s terms, they pursued “Critical Theory” as opposed to “Traditional Theory” – meaning a form of theorizing that reflects on its own conditions and aims at emancipation rather than pretending to be a neutral, contextless description.

For example, in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), Adorno and Horkheimer famously argued that the Enlightenment’s pure reason had a self-undermining side: in seeking to dominate nature and banish myth, Enlightenment rationality itself became a kind of myth, enforcing conformity and instrumental thinking. This is a classic continental move – they turned reason back on itself, revealing the historical context (the rise of industrial capitalism, the experience of fascism and mass deception) that shaped what “reason” had become. Rather than simply laud scientific rationality as the royal road to truth (the way a scope-oriented philosopher might), Adorno and Horkheimer dialectically analyzed how reason’s triumph produced new irrationalities (e.g. the oppressive “culture industry” that manipulates mass consumers, or the bureaucratic rationality that led to horrific efficiency in the Holocaust). They kept all the ladders in view: the ladder of history (how 18th-century Enlightenment led to 20th-century barbarism) and the ladder of psyche (how human impulses for domination or submission are conditioned by society).

The Frankfurt School also explicitly integrated Freud’s psychoanalytic context into social theory. Adorno’s essays, such as “Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda,” analyzed how fascist leaders could be understood via Freud’s concepts of projection and transference – essentially reading political phenomena through the lens of psychological context. Meanwhile, Erich Fromm wrote about how social conditions foster either healthy or pathological personalities (e.g. the “authoritarian personality” needing submission). Herbert Marcuse in Eros and Civilization (1955) reinterpreted Freud to argue that a non-repressive society was imaginable, one where the surplus repression beyond basic necessity could be lifted – blending Marx’s utopian hopes with Freud’s insight about repression. Even Jürgen Habermas, often seen as more aligned with analytic clarity, grounded his communicative action theory in a very contextual idea: that the ideal speech situation (where discourse is undistorted) is a regulative ideal we can only approach by understanding and removing the distortions – the contexts of power and ideology – that actually exist. In short, critical theorists never assume a view from nowhere. They relentlessly inspect the ladder of context: economic structures, media propaganda, family upbringing, unconscious drives – all are brought into the analysis of reason, culture, and morality.

Importantly, the Frankfurt School was self-reflective about its own method and ideology. Horkheimer’s essay “Traditional and Critical Theory” (1937) argues that unlike traditional theorists, who see themselves as detached observers, critical theorists see theory as a tool situated in society and aiming to change society. Knowledge is not produced in a vacuum; it is historically and socially situated. This viewpoint exemplifies the philosopher of context stance on a meta-level: critical theorists kept the ladder of their own praxis in view, acknowledging (for instance) that their Marxist perspective came from a specific social position and served certain emancipatory interests (workers, the oppressed, etc.). Rather than claim objectivity by erasing context, they asserted validity through reflexivity and dialectics – confronting how their thought emerged from, and could impact, the social totality.

The Frankfurt School’s legacy in today’s terms is visible whenever we analyze phenomena like media narratives, algorithmic bias, or consumerist culture not as neutral facts, but as expressions of underlying power relations and psychic appeals. For instance, the way social media algorithms hook users with endless scrolling can be seen through a Frankfurt School lens as a new form of mass distraction and regression, keeping people in a “psychic exploitation” loop. Adorno might say it induces a pseudo-satisfaction that prevents real critical thought – a modern opiate of the masses. This line of critique is very much alive in the IPA/FLŽ manifesto’s denunciation of “the image that dominates desire” and “algorithmic gaze” in contemporary society. In other words, keeping the ladder in view today means seeing how even our pleasures (scrolling through perfected images on Instagram, say) are orchestrated by a context – one that may serve commercial or ideological ends.

Heidegger and Derrida: Context of Being and Text

In the realm of existential and post-structural philosophy, the focus on context takes other forms. Martin Heidegger, a pivotal continental figure, introduced the idea that our very being is “Being-in-the-world.” This means that to be human (to be Dasein) is to always already be in a context – a web of significances, practical involvements, and historical background. Heidegger rejected the Cartesian picture of a self-contained subject peering out at an objective world. Instead, Dasein has no existence apart from its world; it is essentially contextual, situated amidst tools, social roles, and temporal unfolding. In Being and Time (1927), Heidegger undertakes a “Destruktion” of the history of ontology – not to destroy past philosophy for good, but to loosen up the hold of inherited concepts and uncover the more original experiences they came from. He is in effect carefully retracing the ladder of Western philosophy, rung by rung, to see where it might have gone wrong in interpreting the meaning of Being. He does not simply throw away that ladder (even though he is critical of, say, Descartes or Kant); he engages them in a dialogue across history, showing how each epoch’s understanding of Being is both revealed and concealed by its philosophical language.

Heidegger’s later work, with its meditative essays on language, technology, and poetry, continues this contextualist bent. For example, in “The Question Concerning Technology” (1954), Heidegger examines the essence of modern technology not by a universal definition, but by exploring the historical mode of revealing that technology represents (Enframing, Gestell). He situates technology in the context of Western metaphysics and the forgetting of Being. Again, the method is to uncover how something (technology, in this case) stands on a ladder of previous understandings – e.g. seeing nature as a “standing-reserve” is the outcome of centuries of viewing being as something present-at-hand and usable. His analysis implies we cannot grasp what technology means without climbing down that ladder of context into metaphysics and up again into its modern culmination.

Jacques Derrida, a later French philosopher often labeled post-structuralist or deconstructionist, took context analysis to a new level with his idea that there is nothing outside the text. This slogan (often misunderstood) doesn’t mean there’s no reality, but that no meaning can be securely pinned down outside of a context – and contexts are in principle boundless, ever-shifting. In his essay “Signature Event Context” (1972), Derrida argues that for a written or spoken sign to mean anything, it must be iterable – repeatable in new contexts – and this very repeatability means no single context can exhaust its meaning. Ironically, Derrida demonstrates this by taking the concept of “context” itself (from linguist J.L. Austin’s speech-act theory) and showing that the boundaries of any context are porous. Thus, Derrida keeps the ladder by refusing to allow any neat cutting off of context – whenever someone tries to say “we’ve accounted for the context, now the meaning is clear,” Derrida adds another rung: what about the broader context, the implicit, the excluded? Deconstruction often involves reading a philosophical text against its grain, bringing out the background assumptions or alternative interpretations that the text unwittingly relies on. For instance, in Of Grammatology (1967), Derrida re-read Rousseau and others to show how Western thought had consistently put speech above writing, presence above absence – and yet the logic of their own arguments undermines that hierarchy. He revealed the trace of the excluded term within the text, effectively showing that the supposedly discarded ladder (writing, absence) was still there structuring the thought.

Derrida also highlighted concepts like différance – the idea that meaning is always deferred through an interplay of differences. This means any philosophical conclusion is not a final platform beyond context, but a node in a web of references that keep moving. One cannot throw away the ladder because one never leaves it; one is always on some rung, connected to others. His style of close textual reading, paying attention to etymology, puns, and margins of texts, reinforces the message that philosophy is rooted in language, and language is rooted in context. It’s notable that analytic philosophers sometimes criticized Derrida for not making clear claims; from the context/scope perspective, one could say Derrida deliberately avoided claiming a scope that would force him to abandon the nuances of context. His work remains among the most context-sensitive in philosophy – even as it shows how context itself can be unstable and internally divided.

Merleau-Ponty and Embodied Context

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a French phenomenologist, provides yet another angle on context: the context of the body and perception. In Phenomenology of Perception (1945), Merleau-Ponty argues that our primary way of engaging with the world is through our embodied situation. Abstract intellectual perspectives (like the scientific view of the body as an object) are secondary accomplishments that build on a more fundamental lived context – the Lebenswelt or life-world, which Edmund Husserl also spoke of in his later work. For Merleau-Ponty, the body is not an object we have, but the medium through which we are in the world. It is through my bodily orientation, motility, and sense-organs that things have significance for me at all. Thus perception is not a passive reception of data (scope-neutral) – it’s an active intertwining of subject and world, with the body as the pivot.

This collapses the subject-object split and means that any attempt to describe experience in fully objective (context-free) terms will miss the essence of experience. Merleau-Ponty keeps the ladder of context by emphasizing how perception is always from somewhere, by someone, for some purpose. He even critiques both empiricism and intellectualism for trying to treat perception either as raw sense-data or as a sum of judgments – instead, he shows perception is meaning-laden from the start due to our bodily attunement.

Merleau-Ponty’s idea of the “body schema” – an unconscious map of one’s body in space that guides action – could be seen as analogous to Freud’s unconscious, but focused on motor-intentional context. For example, when you walk through a doorway, you don’t intellectually calculate that your body will fit; you just “know” it in your motor-bodily know-how. This kind of knowledge is contextual, not easily formalized, yet fundamental. Philosophers of scope might try to formalize perception in terms of sense data or AI-like computations, but Merleau-Ponty would say they lose the phenomenon itself by removing the experiencing subject’s perspective. Modern cognitive science that incorporates embodied cognition and situated AI is, in a way, vindicating Merleau-Ponty’s insistence on context – recognizing that intelligence cannot be separated from the environment and body that give it content.

Husserl’s Lifeworld: The Context Restored

Although Edmund Husserl, founder of phenomenology, started with a drive for apodictic certainty (through his method of bracketing or epoché, setting aside all presuppositions), his final work The Crisis of European Sciences (1936) revealed a turn towards historical context. Husserl observed that the sciences, for all their objective success, had forgotten the “Lebenswelt” (life-world) – the world of everyday experience from which scientific abstractions are drawn. Geometry, for instance, began as humans marking shapes in the sand; over time it became an abstract, symbolically written science and lost its connection to that intuitive origin. Husserl worried that by trashing the ladder of intuitive meaning, science had become alienating – producing what he called a “crisis” in European humanity, where people no longer understand the relation of scientific truth to their lived world. His response was to restore the continuity: to show how even the highest scope achievements (like mathematical physics) are grounded in, and ultimately must return to, the context of human lifeworld for their sense.

In this late reflection, Husserl essentially kept the ladder he might earlier have set aside. Where his earlier Logical Investigations and Ideas sought the formal essences of consciousness through reduction, Crisis acknowledges that the historical tradition (from Greek geometry through Galileo to modernity) is part of the story of meaning. He began writing about the “historicity of reason” – a very un-scopelike concept, since it means reason’s very form changes with epochs. This evolution of Husserl’s thought illustrates that even a philosopher initially aiming for pure scope (transcendental, context-free structures of consciousness) can come to recognize the indispensability of context (history, culture, pre-theoretical lifeworld).

In summary, across these continental figures – Freud, Lacan, the Frankfurt School, Heidegger, Derrida, Merleau-Ponty, Husserl – we see a unifying theme: philosophy should not (or cannot) sever itself from the contexts of human existence. Whether it’s the unconscious background of thoughts, the socio-historical situation, the linguistic medium, or the bodily condition of perception, continental thinkers persistently dig into the depths rather than skating on the surface. They treat attempts to remove context with suspicion, often revealing those attempts as self-delusions or ideological moves. Many of their signature concepts – Freud’s repression, Lacan’s Other and jouissance, Adorno’s culture industry, Heidegger’s Being-in-the-world, Derrida’s différance, Merleau-Ponty’s embodiment – are essentially about how meaning arises only within networks, relationships, and histories. You cannot pluck truth out of these entanglements without, as Adorno would say, turning it into a falsehood.

Next, we turn to the other side: the philosophers of scope, who endeavored to purify and universalize philosophy by stripping away what they saw as inessential context. We will examine how their projects differ, sometimes succeed brilliantly, but also how they have been critiqued (often by the above continental voices) for possibly “trashing” too much in the process.

Rejecting the Ladder: Analytic Philosophy and Scope

On the analytic side of the ledger, the aspiration has often been to make philosophy as clear, precise, and objective as possible – more like a science or a mathematical pursuit. This frequently involved discarding the messy context of natural language, historical discourse, or introspective psychology, and instead building or analyzing formal systems and logical structures. In doing so, analytic philosophers at times explicitly rejected or ignored the contextual, dialectical style of continental thinkers. Where a continental might see a rich tapestry to interpret, an analytic might see unnecessary obscurity to cut through. This section will explore key moments and figures in analytic philosophy, illustrating the “philosopher of scope” tendency to kick away the ladder of context once a clear vantage is sought.

Logical Positivism: Elimination of Metaphysical Ladders

One of the most explicit campaigns to trash the inherited ladder of philosophy was carried out by the Logical Positivists (or Vienna Circle) in the 1920s–30s. Figures like Rudolf Carnap, Moritz Schlick, and A.J. Ayer took inspiration from early Wittgenstein and the success of the hard sciences to declare that much of traditional philosophy – especially metaphysics – was meaningless nonsense. For them, the scope of meaningful discourse was to be sharply delimited by what could be verified by logical or empirical means. Anything else (most ethics, aesthetics, speculative metaphysics, theology, and a great deal of continental philosophy) was to be eliminated or at best translated into factual or logical terms.

Carnap’s 1932 essay “The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language” is a landmark in this regard. In it, Carnap scrutinizes sentences by metaphysicians (notably Martin Heidegger’s famous line “The Nothing itself nothings”) and concludes that they are syntactically malformed and thus literally meaningless. Carnap wields logical syntax as a scythe, cutting down statements that don’t conform to the grammar of science. He explicitly mocks Heidegger’s talk of Nothingness, suggesting that once you formalize the language, such statements show themselves to be empty. In one swoop, Carnap attempted to kick away the entire ladder of traditional ontology, dismissing centuries of reflections on “Being” and “Nothing” as confused poetics. What remains is a streamlined image of philosophy: an auxiliary to science that clarifies statements and ejects the muddled ones. The analytic scope here is narrow but proudly so – it’s confined to what can be said clearly (in logical propositions or direct observations). Anything that doesn’t fit that scope, Carnap implies, is not worth climbing into at all.

Interestingly, as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes, Carnap was more tolerant of Wittgenstein’s self-proclaimed nonsensical propositions in the Tractatus, perhaps seeing them as “illuminating nonsense”. Wittgenstein, after all, had warned the reader that his own sentences were ladders to be cast off – a gesture Carnap might have viewed as an acceptable self-refutation. But Heidegger never put a warning label “nonsense” on his metaphysics – quite the opposite, he claimed profound meaning – and this likely irked Carnap to no end. So we get a scenario in analytic vs. continental polemics where the analytic philosopher says: “Your ladder is just a hallucination; there’s no higher rung beyond the empirical ground floor. Come down or I’ll knock it down.” The continental (like Heidegger) responds that “The ladder is how we ascend to understanding; without it we can’t see the broader horizon.” These are incommensurable attitudes: one treasures scope at the cost of losing traditional questions, the other treasures context at the cost of tolerating ambiguity.

The logical positivists’ program eventually evolved (or dissolved) by the 1950s – partly because its strict verificationism ran into problems (the meaning criterion could not itself be verified empirically, for instance). But their legacy endured in the analytic emphasis on formal clarity and distaste for speculative grandeur. Even today, analytic philosophers often use “metaphysics” in a more deflated sense (logical analysis of language about existence, etc.) rather than the sweeping ontologies of a Heidegger or Derrida – if they engage such ideas at all. The positivist impulse to “throw away” what cannot be scientifically analyzed has clear ideological overtones too: it aligned philosophy with a technocratic, rationalistic worldview suspicious of romantic or revolutionary excess. (Adorno called this “the jargon of authenticity” when criticizing Heidegger, but equally he warned against positivism’s narrowness – showing the Frankfurt School’s unique position of critiquing both sides.)

Early Wittgenstein: Transcending Language (Then Trashing the Ladder)

We have already met Ludwig Wittgenstein’s ladder metaphor in the Tractatus (1921). Early Wittgenstein can be considered an extreme “philosopher of scope.” His goal in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus was nothing less than to demarcate the limits of meaningful language and thereby solve (or dissolve) all philosophical problems. He presented a crystalline logical structure of language-world correspondence (the “picture theory” of propositions) and concluded with the famous propositions 6.54 and 7: that once you understand his propositions and recognize them as nonsensical steps, “you will see the world aright”, and that “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” In practice, this meant that all ethical, aesthetic, and metaphysical matters lie beyond what can be said – they show themselves perhaps (as Wittgenstein allowed for a mystical residue) but cannot be articulated. Thus the philosopher’s task is complete when he has drawn a line around meaningful discourse and shown the rest to be nonsensical. Wittgenstein even left academia and philosophizing for a time after writing the Tractatus, as if he had kicked away not just the ladder but the whole platform of philosophy and walked off.

This bold move was inspirational to the logical positivists (who interpreted Wittgenstein’s unsayable as just the meaningless), but it was also short-lived in Wittgenstein’s own development. When he returned to philosophy in the late 1920s and 1930s, Wittgenstein underwent a transformation that led to his later work, Philosophical Investigations (published 1953). In a sense, later Wittgenstein switched camps – from scope to context. He came to reject the Tractarian idea that language had one essential logical form or that words derived meaning by mirroring reality. Instead, he introduced the notion of language-games: meaning is use, and language is an ever-evolving activity embedded in forms of life. A word’s meaning is not an object it points to or a logical atomic reference; it’s how it’s used in practice by a community. This is a thoroughly contextual view of language. Understanding language now required descending into the messy everyday practices, looking at how children learn words, how words function in different activities (commanding, questioning, storytelling, etc.), and how our attunement to forms of life underpins intelligibility.

One could say that in Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein meticulously rebuilds the ladder he had once discarded – but this time not aiming for a heaven of pure logic, rather to examine the ground of ordinary usage. He famously critiqued his earlier self by showing that even naming an object (like a simple ostensive definition “This is a slab”) already presupposes a shared human context (a builder’s activity, roles of sender and receiver, etc.). The later Wittgenstein’s method was deeply therapeutic and immanent: he looked at how philosophical puzzles arise from our misuse of language outside its proper context. For instance, the classic mind-body problem, in his view, arises because we try to treat the word “pain” as if it were a private object, when really its meaning is tied to public criteria and behaviors (the pain-behavior language-game). By restoring each concept to its everyday context, Wittgenstein dissolves the illusion that prompted the philosophical problem. In effect, he’s saying: “Don’t try to step outside of all language (as I once advised); instead, look at the myriad little ladders we use in daily life – how they overlap, how they are woven into the fabric of our life-form. The attempt to see all language from above (like a logical God’s-eye view) was misguided.”

Thus, Wittgenstein’s legacy is twofold: Early Wittgenstein stands as an archetype of the scope-driven analytic who would gladly trash entire swathes of discourse as nonsensical, whereas Later Wittgenstein is cherished by many as a bridge towards more context-aware philosophy (influencing ordinary language philosophy, pragmatism, and even some continental thought). It’s telling that Wittgenstein is one of the few figures admired in both camps, albeit for different reasons. This inner dialectic in Wittgenstein’s work shows the tension: the lure of final clarity versus the reality of context-dependent meaning. One of his later remarks, apropos of philosophical targets, was: “If the place I want to get to could only be reached by a ladder, I would give up… For where I really have to reach, I must already be there.”. This cryptic statement from Culture and Value (1930) suggests that Wittgenstein realized any “ultimate” perspective (place reached by a ladder) is illusory – we are always already within the context we seek. So he would rather not pretend to climb above it. What can be reached by a ladder doesn’t interest me, he says. In a sense, he inverted his own earlier metaphor.

Russell and Ryle: Analysis vs. Ordinary Language

Bertrand Russell and Gilbert Ryle represent two different phases of analytic philosophy, but both illustrate aspects of the scope orientation – albeit with Ryle moving towards context in a way.

Bertrand Russell (along with G.E. Moore) was a pioneer of analytic philosophy in the early 20th century, reacting against the diffuse, context-heavy idealism of F.H. Bradley and Hegelian British philosophy. Russell championed logical analysis as the way forward. In works like “On Denoting” (1905) and Our Knowledge of the External World (1914), Russell sought to show that many philosophical confusions could be resolved by translating ordinary statements into precise logical forms. Famously, his theory of descriptions took a sentence like “The present King of France is bald” – which naively seems to refer to a non-existent king – and analyzed it into logical components that could be evaluated for truth without assuming a mysterious referent. By such analyses, Russell aimed to scope down language to its logical core and avoid the nebulous entities and contexts that earlier metaphysics posited. Russell had little patience for talk of “the Absolute” or “Spirit” etc. His quip about certain continental philosophers: “wherever there is nonsense, they worship it” (a paraphrase of his sentiment) exemplifies the analytic disdain for what is seen as context-heavy obscurity.

Russell’s logical atomism envisaged the world as consisting of simple, context-independent facts that our language could mirror once properly analyzed. This is clearly a ladder-trashing approach: you try to break every proposition down to atomic components, discarding any meaning that cannot be firmly grounded in logical structure or empirical datum. In his later popular writings, Russell did engage in social commentary, but even then he prized a kind of universal, enlightened viewpoint grounded in scientific humanism – far from any embrace of the unconscious or historical dialectic. He once commented that Freud’s theories were “so much trash”, reflecting his view that psychoanalysis was unscientific speculation (an esprit d’escalier dismissal, one might note, from our context vs. scope perspective).

Gilbert Ryle, a later Oxford analytic philosopher, took a somewhat different approach known as ordinary language philosophy (though Ryle’s own work was a bit earlier and somewhat distinct from Austin’s or Strawson’s). In The Concept of Mind (1949), Ryle attacked the Cartesian dualist picture of mind as a “ghost in the machine,” famously calling it a “category mistake.” Ryle argued that many traditional metaphysical puzzles (like mind vs. body) arise because we misuse language – taking a term that functions one way and expecting it to function in another. For instance, talking about “the mind” as if it were an entity alongside physical entities is a category error: mental vocabulary (beliefs, sensations, etc.) actually refers to dispositions and behaviors, not a separate ghostly substance. Ryle’s method was to examine how we actually use mental words in ordinary contexts to deflate the false images set up by philosophers. In doing so, Ryle and his contemporaries (the ordinary language philosophers) re-introduced context in a localized way: they cared about the fine nuances of everyday speech, the different “language games” (to borrow Wittgenstein’s term) employed in various forms of life.

However, ordinary language philosophy still saw itself as therapeutic scope-cleaning: by attending to ordinary context, they believed, we could rid philosophy of grand metaphysical confusions. The ultimate aim wasn’t to revel in context for its own sake, but to use it to put philosophy back on track solving only tractable, meaningful problems – often piecemeal, not systemic. Ryle, for one, replaced the big metaphysical question “What is mind?” with many smaller considerations of how mental concepts operate in language (knowing how vs knowing that, for example). He cleared out the “mentalistic myths” and left us with a more parsimonious picture of persons as behaving organisms with various capacities. Some criticize this as having thrown out something important (consciousness or qualia, perhaps) – again the charge of having kicked away a ladder without adequately addressing what was on top of it. But from Ryle’s view, there was nothing up there to begin with except confusion.

Ordinary language philosophy as a movement was relatively short-lived (1950s–60s), partly supplanted by the rise of formal semantics and the cognitive revolution. But its spirit persists in analytic philosophy’s general preference to start with concrete usage and avoid theory-heavy abstraction (unless that abstraction can be formalized). This is a more context-attuned analytic approach than logical positivism, yet still different from continental context-emphasis: ordinary language philosophers trust the everyday language that has evolved in community use (as providing clarity), whereas continental thinkers often suspect everyday understanding as saturated with ideology or hiding deeper tensions (thus requiring critique). So, one might say Ryle keeps the ladder of ordinary life but kicks away the ladder of speculative theory. It’s a selective context embrace.

Quine and Sellars: Holism and the Fusion of Images

Two mid-20th-century analytic thinkers, Willard Van Orman Quine and Wilfrid Sellars, made significant strides in closing the gap between analytic and continental sensibilities (intentionally or not) by bringing a more holistic, context-sensitive perspective into analytic philosophy, yet without abandoning the scientific outlook.

W.V.O. Quine, in his influential essay “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” (1951), attacked the analytic/synthetic distinction and the idea that each meaningful statement could be verified in isolation. He argued instead for the holism of knowledge: our statements about the world face the “tribunal of experience” not one by one, but only as a corporate body. This means each belief’s meaning and justification depend on a whole web of beliefs around it. In Quine’s metaphor, our knowledge is like a field of force with experience at the periphery; when a prediction fails, we have many choices about which beliefs to adjust (even logic itself could be revised in extremis). Quine thus reintroduced a form of context – the web or network – as central. A single term’s meaning is not atomistic (one dogma down) and a single hypothesis cannot be tested in isolation (second dogma down).

Quine, however, remained resolutely naturalistic. He wasn’t inviting mysticism back in; he was saying that our scientific theories themselves must be understood in a pragmatic, holistic way. The ladder he kept was that of empirical science as a whole, contiguous with everyday belief. He trashed the notion that philosophy had some higher, distinct ladder (like a purely analytic foundation for knowledge). In doing so, Quine inadvertently echoed some themes of continental thought: his holism resonates with the idea that meaning depends on a whole system (akin to structuralism’s view of language), and his willingness to blur boundaries between analytic and synthetic is concordant with later critiques of rigid binaries. Yet Quine did not incorporate anything like Freud or Hegel; his context was still the context of logical and empirical relations, not historical dialectics or unconscious drives. He opened analytic philosophy to contextual epistemology (later developed into coherentism, etc.), which was a departure from the ladder-kicking foundationalism of the positivists.

Wilfrid Sellars, another American analytic philosopher, made a notable attempt to synthesize the “manifest image” and the “scientific image” of humanity. In his essay “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man” (1962), Sellars describes the manifest image as the way we naturally understand ourselves and the world (in terms of persons, intentions, colors, sounds – basically the world as it manifests to our senses and commonsense). The scientific image is the theoretical picture from science (particles, fields, microphysical processes, etc., with persons seen as complex physical systems). Sellars saw the two as frameworks that need to be reconciled into a stereoscopic view – neither discarded. His famous quote summarizes philosophy’s aim as “to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term.”. This might be the analytic philosopher’s equivalent of “keep the ladder” – but notably, Sellars’ ladder has two sides (the manifest and the scientific), and he wants to join them at the top.

Sellars was critical of the “Myth of the Given,” the idea that we have some immediate, context-free foundation for knowledge (like raw sense data). He argued all perception is theory-laden and all knowledge is interdependent, a very holistic and contextually webbed view. Yet, unlike many continental thinkers, Sellars did not reject scientific objectivity; he rather invited philosophy to mediate between the lived world and the scientific world-picture. In a way, he tasked philosophy with preserving the context of human meaning (values, intentions, the first-person perspective) within the scope of a scientific understanding of the universe. This is a delicate balancing act – one could say he refused to trash either ladder (neither the everyday ladder of meanings nor the ladder of scientific theory), but tried to build a platform joining them.

Sellars’ work influenced later philosophers who blurred the analytic-continental divide, such as Richard Rorty (who advocated a kind of context-centered pragmatism, although Rorty eventually leaned toward a more relativistic view that alarmed staunch analytics) and John McDowell (whose Mind and World argues for re-enchanting nature with the conceptual, bridging Sellars’ images). In the IPA/FLŽ terms, one might analogize that Sellars did not want to fully disavow the ladder of “folk psychology” (intentionality, meanings) in favor of science; instead, he envisioned a rational, possibly Hegelian, integration – an interesting convergence with some continental aspirations (like Hegel’s sublation of different viewpoints).

In summary, the analytic tradition’s philosophers of scope exhibit a range: from those like Carnap who gleefully threw away huge chunks of traditional context as nonsense, to those like later Wittgenstein and Sellars who gradually reincorporated context (use, holistic background) while still aiming for clarity and rigor. What unites most analytic approaches, however, is a wariness of grand systems and an aversion to speculative leaps without explicit argumentation. They might differ on whether ordinary language is enough context or if formalization is needed, but they generally agree that philosophy should not become “literature” or “politics” in the way some continental thought does. This has meant that political and metaphysical questions were often sidelined in analytic philosophy’s pursuit of scope. Indeed, for much of the 20th century, analytic philosophy avoided politics, value theory, or deep metaphysics as “unscientific” – an avoidance now recognized as ideological in its own way (implicitly aligning with a liberal status quo or technocratic outlook, one could argue).

Having examined both the continental context-embracing style and the analytic scope-seeking style, we can now address some thematic contrasts that cut across specific figures. In particular, the distinction between Freudians and anti-Freudians offers a vivid case study in how these approaches diverge in epistemology, politics, and metaphysics. Additionally, reflecting on meta-philosophy – how each side conceives the nature and purpose of philosophy – will clarify why they often talk past each other. Finally, we will revisit concrete examples of the ladder metaphor in action: points in philosophical texts where a ladder is explicitly kept or kicked, and what that tells us about the ideologies at play.

Freudians vs. Anti-Freudians: Epistemology, Politics, Metaphysics

One powerful way to summarize the context vs. scope divide is through the battle over Freud’s legacy. Sigmund Freud’s ideas did not remain confined to clinical therapy; they spilled over into virtually every domain of 20th-century thought – art, literature, social theory, feminism, and philosophy. But the reception was split. Those in the continental/contextual camp often embraced or adapted Freud (even critically) because he offered tools to dig into hidden layers of meaning and power. Those in the analytic/scope camp tended to reject Freud as unscientific or irrelevant, favoring more “objective” accounts of mind and behavior (or none at all, focusing on language and logic instead). This yields a stark contrast:

• Freudians (including Lacanians, critical theorists, etc.) view human rationality as fragile, underpinned by unconscious processes; they treat knowledge with suspicion that hidden desires or social ideologies are at work. Epistemologically, they are critical (in the Kantian/Marxian sense) – knowledge is not just given, it is made and often serves interests. Politically, Freudians often align with radical or emancipatory projects: by uncovering repressions and illusions, they aim to free people from domination (be it internal or external). Metaphysically, Freudians posit entities like the unconscious, drives, the Ego/Id/Superego structure – not material objects, but dynamic constructs necessary (in their view) to explain behavior and culture. They accept that the mind is split and context-bound (by childhood, by language, by desire).
• Anti-Freudians (a broad term here for those who dismiss or minimize Freud) prefer a picture of the human mind that is either straightforwardly materialist (e.g. brain processes, behaviorism) or rational-actor (e.g. economic or decision-theoretic models), or simply focus on language and leave psychology aside. Epistemologically, they often uphold enlightenment ideals of reason and empirical science – knowledge is attainable by objective methods and not radically distorted by unconscious biases (or if biases exist, they can be corrected by method). Politically, this often maps to a more liberal or centrist stance: problems are solved by rational policy and scientific progress, rather than by radical psycho-social transformation. (Indeed, many analytic philosophers had what one might call technocratic leanings, advising governments or contributing to AI, etc., rather than critiquing ideology.) Metaphysically, anti-Freudians are typically minimalist or physicalist – they either reduce mental phenomena to physical ones or at least avoid speculative entities. Gilbert Ryle’s behaviorist approach, for example, implicitly rejects an unconscious – mental states are just intelligent capacities and behaviors, nothing “hidden in the basement.” For an anti-Freudian, the ladder of hidden depth simply isn’t needed; it’s an unnecessary construct that complicates the clear view of human nature.

These differences played out in various intellectual dramas. In psychology proper, behaviorists like John Watson and B.F. Skinner, and later cognitive scientists, were largely anti-Freudian. They saw no scientific merit in introspecting on dreams or fantasies; instead, they either ignored mental talk (behaviorism only cared about stimuli and responses) or treated the mind as an information-processing system (cognitive science) where unconscious simply meant “non-reportable computation,” not a seething cauldron of repressed libidinal impulses. In philosophy of mind, Karl Popper used Freud as a key example of an unfalsifiable theory – thus not genuinely scientific by his criterion. Popper lumped Freud with Marx as “pseudo-science” because their theories could explain any and all outcomes (a patient gets better or worse, capitalism reforms or collapses – any result is fit to the theory) and thus weren’t testable. This was a direct epistemological attack: the Freudian contextual insight was, to Popper, a failure of proper scope – it explained too much, with no clear boundary conditions. Popper’s stance influenced generations of analytic philosophers to be skeptical of Freud.

On the other hand, some more context-oriented philosophers engaged with Freud seriously. Paul Ricoeur distinguished between philosophers of understanding and philosophers of suspicion – listing Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud as the “masters of suspicion” who taught us that surface meanings can hide deeper ones. Ricoeur (a phenomenologist/hermeneutic thinker) thus validated Freud as a necessary part of the interpretive toolkit for culture. Similarly, the Frankfurt School integrated Freud because they believed enlightenment reason alone (scope without depth) would miss how people are irrationally attached to their own oppression. For example, Herbert Marcuse’s idea of “repressive desublimation” suggested that late capitalist society releases sexual pleasures in trivial forms to keep people docile (like permitting pornography and consumer indulgence as a safety valve). This is a very Freudian-Marxist notion: political control operating via enjoyment rather than just force. An analytic political philosopher at the time might have entirely ignored such psychological mechanisms, focusing instead on rational choice or justice in ideal terms (as much of Anglo-American political philosophy did, e.g. John Rawls’ Theory of Justice (1971) has zero Freud and deals with society via a rational hypothetical contract – a pure scope construction).

The split extends to metaphysics of human nature: Freudians have a rather tragic view – the subject is divided (Ich vs. Es), “not master in its own house”; sexuality and aggression constantly perturb civilization, hence Civilization and Its Discontents. Anti-Freudians often hold a more optimistic or at least neutral view of the rational agent, or they adopt a neutral physicalist stance (the mind is the brain – no room for a structurally embedded unconscious “agency” in that picture). When it comes to ethics, a Freudian might stress the role of irrational guilt (superego) or unconscious desire in moral norms, whereas an analytic ethicist might proceed with normative reasoning as if all agents were conscious, rational choosers. The esprit d’escalier phenomenon can again be invoked: after the 1960s and 70s when Freudian and Marxian ideas influenced the counterculture and critical academics, there was something of an analytic backlash in the 1980s–90s (the “culture wars”). Many analytic thinkers disparaged “French Freud and Lacan inspired postmodernism” as obscurantist or relativistic. One hears the belated dismissal: “It’s only Freud” – much like “it’s only a dream” – to wave away the idea that philosophy needs to engage the unconscious or desire.

Yet, interestingly, in recent years some rapprochement has occurred. Fields like neuroscience and cognitive psychology have partially vindicated Freud on some counts (implicit biases, defense mechanisms, etc., albeit framed in different terms). The concept of the unconscious has been reformulated in scope-friendly ways (e.g. as cognitive processes that occur without awareness). And in philosophy, figures like Slavoj Žižek – the Slovenian Lacanian – have forcefully argued that you cannot properly analyze politics or ideology without psychoanalysis. Žižek often targets analytic liberalism, saying for instance that formal democracy fails to grasp people’s irrational enjoyment (jouissance) in racism or nationalism. He introduces Lacan’s notion of “surplus-enjoyment” to explain phenomena like the attraction to authoritarian populism – something purely rational-choice or discourse-based theories can’t capture. This is a direct collision of context vs. scope: Žižek (context) insists on the psychoanalytic ladder to explain political passion, whereas a typical analytic political theorist might chalk such passions up to ignorance or economic anxiety or game-theoretic strategy, avoiding talk of subconscious enjoyment.

In the metaphysical register, Freudians extend reality to include things like the symbolic order (a shared but unconscious structure of meanings), and the Real (Lacan’s term for what is outside symbolization, often erupting as trauma). These are far from the naturalistic ontology of analytic metaphysics (which tends to discuss quarks and qualia, not the “Name-of-the-Father” or “objet petit a”!). To an analytic metaphysician, Lacan’s entities might appear as unintelligible as Platonic Forms did to Carnap. But to a Lacanian, analytic metaphysics might seem to miss the entire dimension of human reality that makes life worth analyzing – focusing on trivial puzzles like “does the chair exist when no one looks” while ignoring, say, the role of fantasy in sustaining our sense of reality.

Epistemologically, Freudians are not relativists exactly, but they believe truth is hard-won because the knowing subject is internally resistant to truth (through mechanisms of repression, disavowal, projection). Knowledge for them is often a negative thing – you know the truth when it hurts, as it were (hence psychoanalytic interpretation often initially provokes resistance or pain). Meanwhile, a classical analytic view is that if you follow proper methods (logic, observation), knowledge accumulates and is by default something people accept when shown evidence. The Freudian would retort that people can know and yet not know – “Wo Es war, soll Ich werden” (“Where id was, ego shall come to be”) implies a labor of making the unconscious conscious, suggesting truth isn’t just discovered but integrated through overcoming inner barriers.

Politically, this difference is dramatic in, say, approaches to law and crime: an analytic approach might focus on deterrence and incentives, while a Freudian-influenced approach might look at how law itself generates forbidden enjoyment and transgression (e.g. Žižek argues that prohibitions can create the desire they aim to forbid – the enjoyment of breaking the law can be an end in itself, a notion foreign to rational choice theory but central to psychoanalysis).

It’s worth noting that Freudian and Marxian thought often merged in 20th-century continental circles (Freudo-Marxism), because both were seen as unveiling hidden forces beneath surface rationality (the unconscious for Freud, class struggle/ideology for Marx). On the analytic side, both Freud and Marx were often rejected on similar grounds (unscientific, too holistic, or politically dangerous). So the split could be framed as Enlightenment faith vs. Enlightenment self-critique: analytic anti-Freudians carry the Enlightenment project of demystifying via science, but sometimes lack reflexivity about the subjects who do science (taking for granted the rational subject); continental Freudians continue Enlightenment in a radical way by demystifying the subject itself, revealing unreason at the heart of reason, thereby arguably deepening the Enlightenment project but also unsettling it.

To conclude this Freudians vs. anti-Freudians section: The “fully Freudian alignment” of the IPA/FLŽ stands firmly on the side that says we must keep Freud’s ladder at all costs. They argue that whenever psychoanalytic ideas are watered down or thrown out (as happened in mainstream psychotherapy or academic psychology), we lose a vital critical edge – we domesticate the unconscious and turn psychoanalysis into a tool of adaptation rather than emancipation. IPA/FLŽ explicitly positions itself against what it calls the “British bureaucratic superego” that tamed Freud in mid-20th century, i.e. the movement in British psychoanalysis (Anna Freud, object relations) to make analysis more about ego-adaptation and interminable discussion rather than radical breakthroughs. They describe that institutionalization as a “suffocation of Freud’s revolutionary legacy”, turning analysis into a “politics of adaptation” that neutralized the conflictual, drive-based, historic force of Freud’s thought. Instead, IPA/FLŽ calls for returning to the “revolutionary inquiry” in Freud – the idea that analysis can achieve a rupture, a liberating break both personally and socially. In doing so, they not only keep the Freudian ladder, they weaponize it for ideological critique: exposing how our contemporary “aesthetic totalitarianism” (the mandate to enjoy, to perfect oneself via images, etc.) is a new form of unfreedom that only a Freudian-Lacanian analysis can crack. This is an unabashedly contextual and political use of Freud – far from the neutral scientific scope an analyst might prefer.

By contrast, the anti-Freudian legacy in analytic thought – while seldom rallying under that banner explicitly – continues in the prevalence of cognitive-behavioral models in psychology, rational actor models in economics and political science, and a general preference in analytic ethics and epistemology for treating persons as autonomous reasoners rather than entangled bundles of unconscious conflicts. However, as mentioned, reality has a way of reasserting context: the resurgence of interest in “cognitive biases” and phenomena like confirmation bias, motivated reasoning, or implicit bias in even analytic-leaning fields shows a recognition that humans are not pure rational agents. Interestingly, these findings often parallel Freud’s insights (people believe what they want to believe, feelings can hijack reason) but are couched in the language of behavioral economics or social psychology rather than Oedipal complexes. One might say the analytic world is discovering the unconscious under new names, without acknowledging Freud – a kind of Freudian return of the repressed! The ladder returns, even if sneaked in through the back door.

We have now traversed a lot of ground comparing context-embracers and scope-seekers, in both individual thinkers and broad thematic debates. It remains to gather some meta reflections and then articulate the stakes today. Let’s next explicitly consider meta-philosophy: how each approach views language, method, and the role of analysis, which we’ve touched on but will summarize systematically. Then we will synthesize with concrete illustrations of the ladder being kept or thrown in famous texts (some we’ve already cited), and finally draw conclusions about the ideological stakes in the contemporary climate.

Meta-Philosophy: Language, Method, and the Role of Analysis

Underlying the divergence between continental/contextual and analytic/scope philosophies are contrasting assumptions about what philosophy is and how it should proceed. These meta-philosophical differences concern the role of language, the preferred methods of inquiry, and the very purpose of doing philosophy. We can outline a few key contrasts:

• View of Language: For much of analytic philosophy, language is a tool to be sharpened. It should be made unambiguous, transparent, and logically tractable. The ideal is often a “perfect language” (or at least a regimented fragment of natural language) in which philosophical problems either dissolve or can be decisively answered. Bertrand Russell, for example, sought a logically perfect language to mirror reality without the vagueness of ordinary speech. Analytic philosophers thus often engage in conceptual analysis – breaking down terms into definitions, drawing distinctions, formalizing arguments – to ensure clarity. Meaning is something to be fixed: either by reference (as early analytic philosophy assumed) or by usage (as later ordinary language philosophy argued), but in either case, once fixed, we can proceed objectively. By contrast, continental philosophers tend to see language as an object of inquiry in itself, even a phenomenon that exceeds any one speaker’s control. For them, language is not a neutral medium but the very matrix of thought – full of sedimented history, power relations, and internal tensions (e.g. Derrida’s play of différance). Rather than try to eliminate ambiguity, continental thinkers often embrace ambiguity as a sign of profundity or as a space for creative interpretation. For instance, Heidegger reveled in etymology and poetic resonance (his pun that Nothing nothings in German, “Das Nichts nichtet,” was precisely what Carnap pounced on). Lacan likewise played with words (mathême and mythème, “seminars” full of puns) to convey unconscious symmetries that a straightforward literal language could not. To an analytic philosopher, this can appear as willful obscurity; to a continental, the analytic demand for plain language can appear as naïveté, ignoring how language actually works (with its metaphors, its multiple meanings, its performative force).
• Methodology: Analytic philosophy takes inspiration from mathematics and the natural sciences in methodology. This means valuing argument, evidence, and incremental progress on discrete issues. The style is often propositional: state theses, give reasons, anticipate objections, clarify terms – essentially a scholarly debate format that can, in principle, be resolved by better arguments or new data. There’s also a division of labor: analytic philosophers specialize in subfields (philosophy of mind, of language, of science, ethics, etc.) and often pursue relatively narrow questions with the assumption that accumulating these answers will gradually fill out the big picture. In continental philosophy, method is harder to pin down because it varies widely (phenomenology’s careful description, hermeneutics’ interpretive circle, dialectics’ negation of negation, deconstruction’s reading strategy, etc.), but a common thread is interconnectedness and critique. Continental thinkers often pursue big picture questions (like the meaning of Being, the structure of subjectivity, the nature of modernity) and they do so by weaving together insights from multiple domains – art, history, psychology, literature – which an analytic might consider beyond their expertise or beside the point. The continental method is frequently reflexive: it questions its own assumptions as part of the process (e.g. Foucault’s genealogies trace how the method of knowledge itself has historical roots; Adorno’s negative dialectics insist philosophy incorporate a critique of its own concepts). Analysis, in the analytic sense of breaking problems into parts, sometimes gives way to synthesis or phenomenological wholeness in continental work. For example, Merleau-Ponty doesn’t solve a “problem of perception” by analytic deduction; he rather offers a holistic account of how perception feels and works, inviting the reader to see the phenomena anew – a method that’s part phenomenological, part evocative. This difference in method means continental works often read like narratives or arguments in the form of a journey (Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is literally a grand dialectical journey of consciousness) rather than a straightforward proof or refutation. Analytic readers can find this unsatisfying – “Where’s the clear conclusion or the rigorous proof?” – whereas continental authors might respond that forcing clarity and rigor by fiat would falsify the subject matter (you can’t, say, prove the meaning of existence; you have to evoke or enact it in thinking).
• Use of Analysis: The word analysis itself has different connotations. Analytic philosophers interpret “analysis” primarily as conceptual analysis: clarifying meanings, logical relationships, the structure of arguments. In this tradition, analysis is a reductive or decompositional exercise – analyze X means find the components or conditions of X (e.g., analyze knowledge as justified true belief plus conditions, until Gettier problems show the need for more conditions, etc.). In continental circles, analysis might more often mean depth analysis, as in psycho-analysis or social analysis, which is revelatory rather than decompositional: you analyze to reveal a hidden cause or conflict. So, Freudian/Lacanian “analysis” tries to bring out latent content (context) beneath manifest content. Marxist social analysis tries to reveal class interests or ideology beneath legal or political forms. In short, one form of analysis aims to simplify and clarify by breaking into parts (scope approach), the other aims to complexify and disclose by digging into layers (context approach). The blog by Fidaner insightfully noted that analytic philosophers “keep the word ‘analysis’ as a trophy” even as they trash the Freudian ladder, highlighting this semantic divergence. Indeed, a student of philosophy might be struck by how differently the two traditions use the term analysis: one is comfortable analyzing words or propositions, the other wants to analyze power, desire, experience. The latter can seem like not “real philosophy” to the former, and the former can seem like hair-splitting triviality to the latter.
• Aim and Audience of Philosophy: Another meta-philosophical difference lies in whom each tradition sees as its peer group and audience. Analytic philosophy, especially in the mid-20th century, became an academic discipline highly integrated with the scientific and academic community. Analytic philosophers write largely for each other and for scientists or scholars in adjacent fields, not for the general public (with some exceptions like Russell, who wrote popular books too). Clarity and explicit argument are crucial because the work is meant to be scrutinized by any rational agent; the ideal is universal intelligibility given sufficient training. Continental philosophers, historically, often wrote in ways that engage broader cultural currents and could be read (if not fully understood) by literate non-specialists. Think of Sartre being a celebrity intellectual, or Camus, or even Heidegger giving radio addresses. Their style is frequently more essayistic or aphoristic (Nietzsche), sometimes literary (Camus, Unamuno) or heavily allusive (Adorno). The aim was often not just to solve puzzles but to change consciousness or inspire new praxis. As a result, continental works can seem to straddle philosophy and literature (thus analytic critiques like that of Michael Huemer, who quipped that continental writers “won’t explicitly define their terms”, come from expecting a straightforward academic treatise rather than a possibly more rhetorical or evocative piece). The audience factor also means continental philosophers felt freer to adopt idiosyncratic voices – philosophy as an art form, one might say – whereas analytic philosophy, striving to be scientific, cultivated an impersonal tone and a professional jargon stripped of individual flair (again, with exceptions). This difference in voice and audience has reinforced mutual perceptions: analytics see continentals as indulging in quasi-poetic self-expression not proper argument, continentals see analytics as having abdicated philosophy’s traditional mission to guide the soul or critique the world, in favor of scholastic micro-problems.
• Relation to Tradition: Meta-philosophically, continental thinkers tend to be in dialogue with the history of philosophy in an explicit way. It’s common for a continental book to spend great effort interpreting past philosophers – e.g., Derrida on Rousseau and Saussure, Deleuze on Spinoza and Nietzsche, Sartre on Hegel, etc. The assumption is that progress comes by revisiting and reinterpreting the tradition (keeping the ladder of context). Analytic philosophy, especially early on, often had a more ahistorical or anti-historical stance. The logical positivists basically wanted to wipe the slate clean of history’s baggage. Even up until late 20th century, many analytic works hardly mentioned historical figures except maybe Frege or Russell – focusing instead on current problems and arguments. This too has shifted somewhat (analytic philosophy of late has become more curious about its own history and even about previously neglected figures, including some continental ones in a historical light), but the immediate post-war analytic attitude was that philosophy can make progress like science, so one needn’t constantly quote Kant or Aristotle, just as a physicist doesn’t constantly quote Newton (they cite them only for established principles). Continental authors, shaped by hermeneutic thinking, see our understanding as historically conditioned – thus one always has to engage with tradition, if only to deconstruct it.
• Ultimate Purpose: We can distill the difference in purpose as knowledge vs. wisdom (to use an old-fashioned distinction). Analytic philosophy leans towards knowledge – producing true justified answers to specific questions, enriching our store of reliable information about logic, language, mind, ethics (with ethics in analytic philosophy often being treated quasi-scientifically, as in utilitarian calculus or rational principles like Rawls’ veil of ignorance). Continental philosophy leans towards wisdom – offering overarching insights about human existence, even if they are not easily testable or universally agreed upon, and guiding how to live or transform society. For example, an analytic ethical philosopher might produce a precise argument about why a certain action is wrong under rule-utilitarianism, whereas a continental ethical thinker (say Levinas or Buber) might evoke the face-to-face encounter with the Other as the ground of ethics – a powerful vision but not “proven” in a strict sense. The analytic contribution can seem dry and narrow; the continental can seem profound but undisciplined. Ultimately, the analytic approach is ideally incremental and convergent (like science, expecting consensus on solved problems), whereas the continental is often divergent and pluralistic (different schools with different visions that might be incommensurable: e.g. existentialism vs. structuralism vs. critical theory each yields different insights rather than one cumulative result).

The meta-philosophical gap, then, is itself a kind of ladder mis-match: each side climbed different ladders, with different goals. When they looked across at each other, they sometimes saw no ladder on the other side at all – “what you’re doing isn’t even philosophy,” each claimed of the other for a time. Thankfully, in the 21st century, we see more dialogue and cross-fertilization. Analytic philosophers increasingly address issues of power, culture, and unconscious bias; continental philosophers have engaged more with language analytic clarity in some subfields (for instance, phenomenology of mind now sometimes interacts with cognitive science). There’s a sense that the “ladder fight” might be calming, as new generations find value in both approaches.

To illustrate how the metaphor of the ladder explicitly crops up, let us recall a few key textual moments already mentioned and some additional ones:

• Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, Proposition 6.54: where he instructs the reader to throw away the ladder of his propositions. This dramatic ending is a deliberate methodological statement: he believed he had shown the reader something unsayable (the limits of language) by means of propositions that ultimately cancel themselves. It’s often likened to a Zen koan or a Kierkegaardian indirect communication, perhaps not entirely foreign to continental style. But it is the canonical case of trashing the ladder. Ironically, as noted, Wittgenstein’s own later shift can be seen as him climbing back down and picking up some pieces of that ladder.
• Lacan’s Écrits, “Signification of the Phallus”: the quote on the inverted ladder of the Law of desire is a vivid instance of keeping and climbing the ladder (albeit upside-down!). It encapsulates how, for Lacan, the Law (symbolic structure) that seems to limit us is actually the very means of attaining higher satisfaction. The context (Law, castration) is not jettisoned; it’s the precondition for meaningful desire. So the next time someone says Lacanian theory is obscure, one could point to this concrete metaphor: it’s basically saying no pain, no gain in structure – you accept the pain of limits to gain the meaningful enjoyment that comes through them.
• Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams: where he identifies “it’s only a dream” as esprit d’escalier of the dream-censorship. This is a meta-level use of the ladder concept – it’s the mind’s own attempt to kick away the ladder of a disturbing dream by belatedly downplaying it. Freud’s move is to catch the psyche in the act and analyze that dismissal itself. Thus Freud turns a would-be ladder-trash moment into a deeper rung to investigate. A similar moment occurs in Freud’s Analysis Terminable and Interminable (1937) – not explicitly about ladders, but he grapples with whether analysis can have an end or goes on forever. He concedes some cases reach a conclusion (the ladder is climbed), others seem interminable (perhaps climbing forever). The IPA/FLŽ picks up this to argue for brief, intense analysis that reaches a rupture point – a leap like a lion that maybe jumps off the ladder to land somewhere new.
• Carnap vs. Heidegger (1932): not a single text but the exchange of sorts. Carnap’s “Elimination of Metaphysics” directly quotes Heidegger’s “What is Metaphysics?” on Das Nichts nichtet and declares it nonsense, advocating that we simply eliminate such talk. Here Carnap is basically sawing off the ladder of Heidegger’s phenomenological ontology and saying none of those steps mean anything. Heidegger, for his part (though he didn’t respond directly to Carnap in print) would likely say Carnap had failed to understand the question – that being and nothingness are not addressable in Carnap’s terms, since they concern the background of meaningfulness itself. This conflict is perhaps the clearest collision of scope vs. context: a logical analyst versus a fundamental ontologist. One trashing, one keeping.
• Hegel’s Ladder: Although not mentioned earlier, Hegel in his Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) famously uses a ladder-like metaphor at the end. He says that once spirit has grasped its own concept, “the phenomenology comes to an end and is absorbed into the science of the true in the form of true”. The stages of consciousness (the ladder rungs of shapes of spirit) have been sublated into absolute knowing. One might say Hegel keeps the ladder but also transforms it: the final viewpoint includes and elevates the previous ones rather than discarding them. This is distinct from Wittgenstein’s or Kierkegaard’s “throw away” or Nietzsche’s “destroy idols” approach. Hegel is the great ladder integrator – every rung had a necessary role and remains as a sub-aspect in the final concrete whole. Admittedly, Hegel’s style and approach strongly influenced some continental thought (like Marcuse, the Frankfurt School, etc.), while analytic philosophy for a long time had an aversion to Hegel (too obscure, too historicist, too un-scientific). Only in recent decades are some analytic metaphysicians and philosophers of mind engaging with Hegel’s ideas (e.g., Brandom’s work which in a way tries to fuse analytic philosophy of language with Hegelian insights).

With these examples and analyses in place, we have built a rather tall ladder ourselves – surveying history, key figures, concepts, and meta-issues. It’s time to ask: what are the ideological stakes today for being a philosopher of context or a philosopher of scope? Why does any of this matter beyond academic turf wars? We will conclude by assessing how each approach frames (or fails to frame) our current “big picture” issues – such as the digital age’s challenges, political crises, cultural shifts – and what values or dangers each approach carries.

Ideological Stakes in Today’s Climate

In the early 21st century, we live in a world of dizzying complexity: algorithmic governance, social media echo chambers, resurgent authoritarianism, global crises like climate change and pandemics, identity conflicts, and technological transformations of daily life. In such a context, the divergence between “philosophers of context” and “philosophers of scope” is not merely an academic curiosity – it has real consequences for how ideas influence society and how we understand (or misunderstand) our predicament.

Philosophers of scope, in their contemporary form, often align with a technocratic, problem-solving mindset. They contribute to analytic clarity in ethics (e.g., debates on AI ethics, bioethics), they refine legal and political concepts (justice, rights) in rigorous ways, and they often dovetail with STEM fields (philosophy of mind with cognitive science, philosophy of language with linguistics, etc.). The ideological benefit of this approach is precision and accountability: arguments can be clearly evaluated, policies can be informed by logical analysis (some analytic philosophers actively advise governments or work in think-tanks). The ideological risk, however, is a kind of blindness to underlying context – a tendency to accept the parameters of a problem as given without questioning who set them or what historic power dynamics lie beneath. For instance, an analytic political philosopher might carefully debate the fairness of content-moderation algorithms on social media, but if they ignore desire, spectacle, and unconscious libidinal investments in those media (which a context-thinker would highlight, citing how people are psychically hooked), their policy recommendations might miss the mark. In a broader sense, the scope approach can inadvertently serve the status quo: by not challenging deep-seated assumptions (because doing so would require stepping into context and perhaps normative, value-laden territory), analytic thinkers can end up fine-tuning systems that arguably need more radical change. Critics have noted, for example, that analytic political philosophy in the late 20th century largely took for granted liberal democracy and market economies as the background, focusing on questions of distribution or rights within that – whereas continental thinkers like Foucault or Derrida were questioning the very concepts of liberal subjectivity, sovereignty, etc., as historically contingent and linked to power structures. Thus, analytic philosophy’s scope restraint sometimes meant ideological myopia: not seeing how one’s own conceptual framework is part of the problem.

Philosophers of context, conversely, often align with critical or radical perspectives. They are the ones to cry that “the emperor has no clothes” when a societal narrative seems self-justifying. The Frankfurt School critiqued the “culture industry” and how mass media manipulates desires – a critique highly relevant in today’s world of ubiquitous advertising, entertainment monopolies, and addictive apps. Their intellectual heirs, like the IPA/FLŽ collective, explicitly attack what they call “aesthetic totalitarianism” – the regime of hyper-visibility, algorithmic surveillance, and the demand to enjoy that defines our digital consumer era. For instance, they note how the algorithmic systems (YouTube algorithms, Facebook feeds) constitute a new Maternal Superego: an always-watchful, always-nurturing presence that commands you to engage and enjoy infinitely. A scope-oriented thinker might analyze such algorithms in terms of fairness or privacy, but a context thinker like Žižek or IPA/FLŽ sees them as producing a psychopolitical effect – eliminating the gaps (the lack) that are crucial for desire and subjectivity, and thereby installing a subtle form of control. They argue (with Lacan) that “where there is no lack, there is no desire… the subject vanishes”. This is a profound critique: that our high-tech capitalist culture’s promise of instant, endless fulfillment (Netflix autoplay, infinite scroll, etc.) is actually suffocating our psychological freedom, making us passive. This sort of insight is something only philosophers of context, drawing on psychoanalysis and critical theory, are likely to produce. It’s an ideological call-to-arms: bring back the Father (symbolic law), bring back limits, so that genuine desire and freedom can breathe!. One may agree or not with that prescription, but it addresses something very real about our time that a purely analytic approach might fail to even register.

The ideological benefit of the context approach, then, is depth and emancipation: it can unveil hidden injustices, articulate inchoate dissatisfactions, and inspire transformative thinking. Many social movements and innovations in thought have drawn from context-heavy philosophy: feminism and critical race theory, for example, were strongly influenced by continental theorists (Beauvoir, Foucault, Fanon, etc.) who revealed how supposedly neutral structures were deeply biased and power-laden. Without those context analyses, one might never notice the ladder of patriarchy or colonialism because it had been painted as just the natural order. The ideological risk, however, is excessive relativism or paralysis: by always insisting on context’s complexity, one can become skeptical that any universal truth or progress is possible. Some critics accuse continental thinkers of fostering a kind of nihilism or perpetual “incredulity toward metanarratives” (as Lyotard put it) – which can undermine solidarity or concrete action. If everything is contextual and power-laden, how do we choose our battles or believe in any positive program? There is also the risk of obscurantism being exploited: sometimes rulers or corporations co-opt postmodern relativism to say “truth doesn’t matter” or “everything is narrative” – arguably twisting originally liberatory ideas into tools of cynicism. For instance, climate change denial or propaganda efforts often use the language of deconstruction (“who’s to say what’s true? Experts have their discourse, we have ours”) to confuse issues – a perverse borrowing of context-emphasizing arguments to erode fact. Of course, analytic philosophy counters that with insistence on evidence and clarity, so each approach checks the other’s extreme: analytic clarity counters continental over-interpretation; continental critique counters analytic complacency.

Another stake is in the realm of meta-philosophy in academia: which approach will shape the next generation? In the Anglophone academy, analytic philosophy has been dominant for decades, but we see more pluralism now. Students aware of global challenges – inequality, environmental crises, AI ethics, etc. – sometimes find analytic philosophy’s fine-grained approach too disconnected, while others find continental writing too impenetrable. The best scenario might be a synthesis: a new philosophical culture that demands both evidence and depth, both clarity and imagination. We might look to bridging figures – like Jürgen Habermas (who engages both traditions), or Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum (analytic-trained but integrating wider social perspectives), or younger interdisciplinary scholars – as models for integrating ladder and scope.

In today’s intellectual climate, there’s also the phenomenon of public intellectuals who often lean continental (Žižek, for example, is a pop culture figure commenting on daily politics via Lacanian jokes) and on the other side, rationalist commentators or popular science communicators who lean analytic (Sam Harris or Steven Pinker, who stress logic and science, albeit sometimes without deeper self-critique). The public often sees them as polar opposites: the wild radical versus the sober rationalist. Each influences different audiences – so the divide isn’t just academic, it’s cultural. For instance, in debates over free speech versus hate speech, an analytic approach might parse the legal definitions carefully and treat it as a problem of balancing harms, whereas a context approach might analyze how “hate speech” functions in maintaining power and what unconscious fears it taps into. They would propose different solutions: one might lean toward procedural justice, the other toward cultural change. Both are valuable, but if one dominates, something is lost. The ideological stake is balance: a society guided solely by scope-technocratic thinking might become efficient but soulless, blind to injustices until they explode; a society guided solely by context-critical thinking might become visionarily rich but practically stuck, or tear itself apart with constant critique.

Ultimately, the question of “keeping or trashing the ladder” boils down to a question of responsibility: Do we acknowledge the contexts (the ladders) that have enabled our thought – be it our socio-historical position, our language, our mentors, our unconscious drives – and take responsibility for them? Or do we try to leap into a supposedly pure, context-free space of understanding – risking a fall, or at least a kind of ingratitude to the past and ignorance of hidden supports? There is a famous analogy by the Hungarian scientist Michael Polanyi: he said that trying to eliminate all personal perspective in science is like trying to throw away your own ladder while you’re still standing on it – echoing Wittgenstein’s metaphor but with a twist of caution (Polanyi advocated the importance of tacit knowledge, the personal coefficient in science). The ladder, in Polanyi’s sense, is part of us.

The IPA/FLŽ manifesto ends with a rousing call: “As the unconscious is liberated, the world shall be liberated!”. This exemplifies the context-philosopher’s belief that diving into the depths of context (here the unconscious) is the key to emancipatory politics. It’s an almost millenarian hope placed in a thorough analysis (psychoanalysis turned social analysis). A scope-minded critic might retort: “This is utopian; we need concrete policies, not poetic slogans about lions leaping once” (referencing Žižek’s quote of Freud, “the lion’s leap”). And indeed, change probably needs both – structural reform (scope work) and ideological therapy (context work). One could imagine, for example, tackling climate change requires analytic input (data, rational policy frameworks) but also continental insight (why do people deny it? what fantasies about nature or growth underpin our inertia?).

In conclusion, the ideological stake of each approach is the kind of freedom and progress they offer. The analytic approach offers freedom through knowledge, clarity, and problem-solving – freeing us from superstition or confusion. The continental approach offers freedom through self-reflection, demystification, and imaginative rethinking – freeing us from unseen constraints of ideology or internal repression. In today’s cultural climate, defending humanistic values and truth itself seems to require a coalition of both: the clarity to call a lie a lie, and the critical insight to ask why the lie was attractive in the first place. We might say that to “see the world aright,” as Wittgenstein put it, we must both climb beyond some limiting propositions and hold onto the ladder of context that gave us perspective.

The ladder metaphor thus teaches a kind of intellectual humility: even when we transcend a prior stage of understanding, we should honor it (as Hegel did) rather than scorn it, lest we sever the continuity that could guide others. Conversely, we shouldn’t cling to a ladder that has gotten us high enough – sometimes one truly does need to leap to the next, or risk stagnation. Philosophers of scope and philosophers of context each guard against the excesses of the other: the former against obscurity and parochialism, the latter against shallowness and naive universalism. In the end, perhaps philosophy needs both context and scope – a ladder to climb and the courage to sometimes jump.

The ideological stakes, then, are about what vision of reason and humanity will prevail. A purely scope-driven future might be one of AI algorithms making our choices, valuing efficiency over meaning, and treating individuals as data points – unless tempered by humanistic, context-aware correctives about dignity, unconscious bias, and historical justice. A purely context-obsessed future might see grand ideological projects or perpetual revolutions that lose sight of material feasibility or common standards of truth – unless grounded by some scope discipline. The best path is to maintain a dialogue between the two modes: to never allow a ladder to become a cage, but also never to forget the ladder that lifted us. As we collectively face unprecedented challenges, this integrated wisdom – the union of analytic clarity and continental depth – could well be the ladder we need to climb towards a more free and rational world.

---

Bibliography

Primary Sources:

1. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921). – Proposition 6.54 introduces the ladder metaphor, suggesting philosophical propositions must be discarded after use.
2. Lacan, Jacques. Écrits. Paris: Seuil, 1966 (English trans. 2006). – Contains the essay “The Signification of the Phallus” with the quote: “Castration means that jouissance must be refused so that it can be reached on the inverted ladder of the Law of desire”.
3. Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams (1900). – Freud discusses dream-censorship’s phrase “Das ist doch nur ein Traum” (“only a dream”) as an esprit d’escalier of the psyche.
4. Freud, Sigmund. “Analysis Terminable and Interminable” (1937). – Freud reflects on the possible completion of psychoanalysis, a text later invoked by IPA/FLŽ.
5. Carnap, Rudolf. “Überwindung der Metaphysik durch logische Analyse der Sprache” (1932); trans. “The Elimination of Metaphysics…” in Logical Positivism, ed. A.J. Ayer, 1959. – Critiques Heidegger’s metaphysics as nonsensical, e.g. quoting “The Nothing itself nothings”.
6. Heidegger, Martin. “Was ist Metaphysik?” (1929); trans. “What Is Metaphysics?” – Poses the question of Nothing, famously stating “Das Nichts nichtet”. (Carnap’s foil.)
7. Horkheimer, Max. “Traditional and Critical Theory” (1937). – Defines critical theory’s contextual, emancipatory aims.
8. Adorno, Theodor & Horkheimer, Max. Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944). – A seminal context-based critique of Enlightenment rationality turning into myth; introduces “culture industry” concept.
9. Ryle, Gilbert. The Concept of Mind (1949). – Critiques Cartesian “ghost in the machine” as a category mistake, an analytic dissolution of a metaphysical ladder.
10. Quine, W.V.O. “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” (1951). – Holistically challenges the analytic-synthetic divide; asserts that our beliefs form a web facing experience only as a whole.
11. Sellars, Wilfrid. “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man” (1962). – Describes the “manifest” vs “scientific” images and philosophy’s task to integrate them; includes Sellars’ famous aim of philosophy as understanding how things “hang together in the broadest sense”.
12. Hegel, G.W.F. Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). – Early 19th-century work using a dialectical ladder of shapes of consciousness, ultimately sublating (keeping and overcoming) each rung in Absolute Knowing.
13. Habermas, Jürgen. The Theory of Communicative Action (1981). – Blends analytic clarity with continental social theory; proposes that undistorted communication (context of ideal speech) is the goal of rationality, implicitly keeping context (lifeworld) in view while employing scope-like universals.
14. Žižek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989). – Applies Lacanian psychoanalysis to critique ideology; exemplifies the Slovenian School’s context-driven approach to politics and culture. Quotes Freud: “the lion’s leap” in interpretation.

Secondary Sources and Commentary:
15. Fidaner, Işık Barış. “Ladders and Philosophy: Context and Scope” (Žižekian Analysis blog, 2022). – Articulates the distinction between philosophers of context (continental, Freudian) and philosophers of scope (analytic), using ladder metaphors from Lacan and Wittgenstein.
16. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: “Nothingness.” Roy Sorensen (2018). – Discusses Carnap’s critique of Heidegger and Wittgenstein’s ladder in context of the question “Why is there something rather than nothing?”.
17. Bartholomy.ooo blog: “A Taxonomy of Hate.” (2020). – Cites Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams on the phrase “it’s only a dream” as an esprit d’escalier of censorship.
18. IPA/FLŽ (International Psychoanalysis Association / Freudian–Lacanian–Žižekian) Manifesto. (2025). – A contemporary document exemplifying the fully Freudian alignment: calls for revolutionary short interventions, critique of “aesthetic algorithmic totalitarianism,” and reassertion of lack, castration, the Name-of-the-Father in opposition to today’s hyper-capitalist superego. Shows the fusion of Freudian context analysis with political action.
19. Michael Polanyi. Personal Knowledge (1958). – Although not cited above, Polanyi’s ladder analogy is noted in analysis: his concept of tacit knowledge argues against the scope-only objectivism in science (he writes that if we had to explicitly justify every step, “we would never climb the ladder,” implying we must trust implicit context).
20. Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition (1979). – Introduced the idea of incredulity toward metanarratives, encapsulating the context-philosopher’s suspicion of universalist scope narratives. This work influenced discussions of science and knowledge in a postmodern (contextual) age.
21. Huemer, Michael. “Continental vs. Analytic Philosophy” (Substack, 2021). – An analytic philosopher’s critical take on continental style (complains of lack of clear definitions etc.), representing the ongoing perception gap between the traditions.

This bibliography lists the key sources referenced or discussed, distinguishing original works (primary) from later analyses or contextual material (secondary). Each entry includes a brief note of relevance to the context vs. scope theme.