How to write continental philosophy

Continental philosophy (mostly French, German) have a very distinct taste and structure. I am writing this after getting tired of one continental philosophy book (the Topology of Violence) that has an interesting idea but screws it up by the continental philosophy style.

The Topology of Violence proposes that there are three stages of violence in human society:

1. Violence by negativity (taking something away from others), used for making self better. This is the violence in stateless societies. In this aspect, violence is like experience point in games, you get it by inflicting violence, and lose it by being violated. The boss is whoever happens to have the most exp.
2. Violence by negativity, used for preventing violence. This is the "crime and punishment" violence of a lawful state.
3. Violence by positivity. This is "too much information, too much to do, never good enough" kind of violence in modern society.

This good idea was expanded by 100 pages of boring continental philosophy. I got so tired of it, I'll now describe how to make continental philosophy.

Step 1. Find an interesting but unsettling idea.

I already described the idea of the book. Some other ideas could be:

• Modern romantic rituals are invented to increase GDP figures.
• Human happiness is the true enemy of progress.
• Progress is the true enemy of human happiness.
• Popularity of organic food is a symptom, not a cause, of the human apathy towards nonhuman nature.

It seems that the best ones tend to be very interdisciplinary: take a concept in mathematics, another in economy, another in psychology, another in anthropology, another in geology, combine them together... and you get some weird ideas like "geotraumatics": Earthquakes are the screams of earth, expressing its deep trauma bombarded by asteroids 4.4 billion years ago.

Step 2. Make it emotional.

Continental philosophy is not analytical philosophy. Analytical philosophy uses a lot of logic, and holds it to a similar standard as speculative physics (like string theory). In contrast, continental philosophy uses very little logic. Its method of thinking is not logical, but analogical and emotional.

As a general rule of thumb, if it can be understood by a computer, it's analytical, if it can be turned into a movie for humans, it's continental.

Emotional writing is not a specialty of continental philosophy, but rather generally accepted in most kinds of popular writing. The only kinds of popular writing that does not have much emotion are:

• Maps.
• Instruction manuals.
• Reports on science, mathematics, and technology.

Honestly, most human emotional writings are optimistic in some parts. It is very difficult to find something that is fully pessimistic, even Schopenhauer and Albert Camus, the two extreme pessimists, cannot help but fall into optimism in believing in some form of salvation: Schopenhauer in believing that pain can be abated by decreasing desires, and Camus in saying "one must imagine Sisyphus happy". Why "must"? Because other than this proof-by-intimidation, Camus has no other method to make the essay optimistic, and Camus wanted optimism. Without this intimidation, I see clearly that Sisyphus is miserable, and Camus is dead wrong (and plain dead, since 1960).

Thus, being optimistic is not really specific to continental philosophy. However, continental philosophy has a particular kind of optimism that is easily identifiable. It is a love of irrational, and some kind of non-rational humans.

We list a few pairs of optimistic emotions, one continental, and the other, what continental philosophers are opposed to.

• The freedom to be messy and degenerate in our DNA and biology will make life worth living and more fun and resilient against natural and artificial disasters.
  The power of knowledge and experimentation in human biology will improve human nature into something greater -- the superhuman of the future.
• The collapse of global capitalism is imminent and it will make the survivors happier.
  The circulation of capitalism will make people more productive, their lives safer, more meaningful, happier.
• Meaning of life is something that one has to make up on one's own.
  Meaning of life is a natural phenomenon that can be discovered by understanding of the universe (and the self, which is a part of the universe).
• Violence has not been suppressed in the modern states compared to past states. They have simply been transformed, but a human world liberated from violence is possible by understanding the true meaning of love.
  Violence is an unavoidable aspect of life. The struggle for existence starts in the womb and will persist as long as life. We should rejoice in our survival, for it is proof of our superiority in the struggle, and rejoice even more for the future inheritors of earth.

A word of note: there are a few philosophers who write in the emotion of the anti-continental philosophy, but in the style of continental philosophy. For example, Nick Land is like that. H. P. Lovecraft is another, if his stories are read as decorated philosophy essays.

Step 3. Use a ton of history and quotations.

The more quotations the better. Unlike mathematics, where a lot of the reasoning is done logically, and independent of other books, continental philosophy relies on other books.

The obsession with history and genealogy is started by Foucault (not the scientist, but the philosopher), who studied a lot of ideas by tracing the history of an idea. This is particularly visible in The Archeology of Knowledge. It could also be due to Nietzsche, visible in On the Genealogy of Morality.

Step 4. Use lots of word plays.

This is an important part of analogical reasoning. If there's a pun, it can be used. If there's a new word, it seems important. If etymology happens to be relevant, it seems like a discovery of an ancient truth. Take for example:

The Latin word communicare means to do something together, to unite, to give, or to have something in common. Communication is a community-building act. But after a certain point it is no longer communicative, only cumulative. Information is informative because it expresses ideas in a form. After a certain point, information is no longer in-formative but rather de-formative. It is out of form. The spamification of language is accompanied by hypertrophy of the ego, which generates communicative emptiness. It has ushered in a post-Cartesian shift.

Using etymology as a method of reasoning is probably a consequence of the obsession with history.

Alternatively: use an AI

I tried GPT-2 for creating some continuation of that piece of continental philosophy, to see if it is anymore than just word plays. Let's start:

But after a certain point it is no longer communicative, only cumulative. Information is informative because it expresses ideas in a form. After a certain point, information is no longer informative but rather deformative. It is out of form. The spamification of language is accompanied by hypertrophy of the ego, which generates communicative emptiness. It has ushered in a post-Cartesian shift. 

[GPT-2 continues]

The anarcho-positivist ideology does not deny the validity of word games, just wants to abolish them as soon as possible. Even English, which has survived for a very long time as a common vernacular and still contains some elements of common sense, is out of synch. Over time, the unsophisticated vocabulary of English has become vernacular rather than international.

Being neither human nor good at sticking to a set of rules, English-speakers face many uncertainties regarding any arbitrary set of values. Many of them, being thus open to a wide variety of interpretations, are usually simply taken as truths, or at least as necessary freedoms of expression.

Thus, for instance, the "free enterprise" system, with its...

This is quite indistinguishable! ... until I look very carefully into it, and realize that GPT-2 does not know how to stick to a topic, unlike continental philosophers. I think this "rambling" could be fixed by requiring the neural network to stick to topics over longer spans of texts, in a fractal pattern.

For example, to write a book on "the rise and fall of global capital", it starts with the topic, then generates 6 chapters, each on a different sub-topic, and each chapter has sub-sub-topics, and so on, down to the level of paragraphs, where the GPT-2 is already amazingly good.

The robots are coming for the jobs of philosophers!