[jfengel]

"Continental philosophy" isn't useless, either, except by the definitions of those who made up the term "continental philosophy". They have a very limited notion of what "utility" is.

The things targeted as "continental philosophy" are mostly meaning-of-life questions. Those aren't "useful", but they're important to people. It's no more useless than literature or video games or skiing, which you don't need but are exactly what people do when they're not doing things that they are required to do.

Not all "continental philosophy" is done well, and the vagueness of the question means that it's hard to distinguish rigorously between "well done" and "not well done". But that doesn't diminish meaning, or value, that people find in it.

[whimsicalism]

I've spent extensive time reading modern analytic and continental philosophy (ie. post-structuralists like Deleuze, honestly even Heidegger).

Maybe it's my bent of mind but analytic philosophy just seems "reasoned" in a way that continental traditions are not.

[jfengel]

Exactly. It's "reasoned", and it's easy to think that reason is everything worth thinking about. That is, after all, reasonable.

But a huge swath of human activity isn't reasoned. A lot of human activity is spent just sitting around wondering what it all means, trying to live a "good" life, and wondering for that matter what "good" even means. Those are unscientific questions (or at least, we lack anything close to a science for discussing them), but it doesn't make them unimportant.

Those are the questions the "continentals" are usually working on. In my opinion, they're at their worst when they're trying to sound analytical about it. The more rigorous they get, the more they make it clear that they're actually pretty bad at rigor. Derrida is the most obvious example, and honestly I have only the word of his defenders that he's somehow trying to undercut rationality rather than simply being a charlatan.

In the end I treat the continentals the way I treat fans of soccer: I'm glad you're having a good time and finding meaning in what you're doing. That's worth it. But I'm gonna get irritated if you insist that I must find meaning in it as well. Maybe I will, maybe I won't, but the harder you insist the less interested I get.