Pragmatism's proposal that old metaphysical categories be abandoned led to a fork in the road of twentieth-century philosophy. Exemplary of this split is Vienna emigré Rudolph Carnap's well-known analysis of certain statements from Martin Heidegger's 1929 lecture "What is Metaphysics?" as meaningless. According to Carnap, if metaphysics is capable of generating the kinds of statements found in Heidegger's lecture, then metaphysics is a language of total non-sense. But both Carnap (in his logical empiricist way) and Heidegger (in his ontological existentialist way) wanted to do the pragmatic thing of getting rid of the bad categories and questions of metaphysics. Pragmatism's injunction to abandon metaphysics might then be thought of as setting the stage for the radically different idioms of Heidegger's ontology and Carnap's logicism, or what is sometimes called the Continental/analytic divide.
We should see "Against Theory" as a literary-critical avatar of this agon of intellectual temperament, but one in which the different sides of the divide are conflated through a complex (and in some ways unconscious) inheriting of pragmatism's role in setting twentieth-century philosophy down these peculiarly incompatible paths. If the "theory" they attack is the offspring of a certain strain of French Heideggerianism—a Derridean inheritance, referenced in "Against Theory" in an Americanized, New Critically-inflected Paul de Man—then the language they adopt to attack it might be traced back to the analytic philosophy exemplified in Carnap (or perhaps the early Wittgenstein). Considering this set of inheritances, the essay's target should not be seen as the tendency in literary criticism toward theoretic generalization, for as we have already pointed out the very premise of "Against Theory" is itself a colossal generalization about the identity of meaning and intention. Rather, the essay should be read as a (complexly equivocal) attack on a whole ideology of theory as "non-sense," in which the bitingly direct sentence is designed to replace Continental wooliness.
