From PhilPapers forum Continental Philosophy:

2009-10-21
The analytic/continental divide
Reply to Derek Allan
Simplistically, there are four options in evaluating the divide:
1. Both schools are worthy endeavors in philosophy. 
2,3. Only XYZ school is worthy. 
4. Both are quite bankrupt. 

Insofar as the quote that "one says everything about nothing and the other nothing about everything" means something important, and insofar as they are not cross-fertilizing one another, then perhaps they're both walking up long, winding dead-ends in the maze of ignorance and wonder we all find ourselves in when we begin to ask big questions.  


Academic structures can only make things worse then. Academic institutions are essentially artificial preservation-and-duplication factories for ideas, so if bad ideas infiltrate the main assembly lines, they can hinder true intellectual achievement for - literally - ages. I believe that without academic structures, philosophy in the 20th century would have been much more vital to larger cultural and social interests - which should be philosophy's ultimate concern. Countless academics have wasted their intellectual lives in dusty departments, writing papers of no consequence whatsoever, just because the were part of the system that forces them to do so. Isolation - or solitude -  is good for a philosopher, part of the time. But after ideas have been cooked, he/she should go back to the street, the village, the jungle, what have you, and try them out. And then and there the ideas meet ideas form other realms, like music, politics, etc., fuse with them, and mutate. Without universities keeping them on life support, both schools along the divide would have long finished their cultural function. 


How much longer can students dabble in Russel and Heidegger, with the enormous challenges of 21st century life furiously unraveling outside the walls of academia? Global warming, world-shaking economic crises, ideological wars, global population explosion, etc. etc  - and 99% of philosophers have nothing to say. If they do have something to say, they say it not as philosophers, because philosophy today hardly launches you on a career of saying illuminating things to people about their lives today, i.e. "the same fundamental constituent relation in what makes us human".