Richard J. Bernstein
Beyond Objectivism and Relativism

Introduction

Bernstein introduces the idea that the old debates over the Dichotomies may no longer be useful. What may be more helpful is philosphical therapy that helps us get over the concepts of Dichotomies.

Sections of this Guide

1. Overview
2. Readings
3. The Cartesian Anxiety
4. Going Beyond the Dichotomies
5. Science + Hermeneutics + Praxis = Practical Discourse?
6. Questions
7. Bibliography

Overview

• Richard Bernstein (1925? - ) American philosopher.
• Bernstein and Rorty are two of the increasing number of philosophers coming to believe that the old core philosophical debates between topics like objectivism and relativism may simply be pointless.

Readings

• Part One (pp.1-49)
• Part Four (pp.171-231)

The Cartesian Anxiety

• Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy (1641) began with a stance of radical skepticism, casting aside all previously assumed beliefs about the nature of the world in a soul-searching quest for certain knowledge. Descartes claimed to have come to doubt all the beliefs of his youth, and build up from a new foundation his own permanent structure of science. His anxiety in abandoning all beliefs of which he had any reason to doubt led him to seek for an Archimedean point of fixed immoveability upon which to base all of his subsequent philosophy. His famous statment Cogito, Ergo Sum (I think, therefore I am) was the unshakeable point that he established as the foundation for his subsequent arguments for the existence of God and the natural order.
• Bernstein identifies the anxiety of Descartes in searching for an immoveable epistemological foundation as the archetype of Foundationalism. Descartes sought for a belief that would bear him up in the dark midnight of the soul when doubts assailed him. Bernstein sees the foundational quest as being motivated by this dread, the fear that if we do not find an unassailable foundation for our beliefs we will be swallowed up in the madness and chaos of relativism, the idea that we can trust no beliefs, that we are unsure of everything and can count on nothing. According to Bernstein, this dread is the reason why the struggle between objectivism and relativism is so intense, because the growing suspicion is that there is no God, philosophy, or science that can form this foundation.
• Bernstein explores the many forms the Cartesian anxiety and the objectivism/relativism internecine struggle has taken in recent years, linking the thoughts of many major figures (including Gadmaer, Habermas, and Rorty).

Going Beyond the Dichotomies

• Bernstein spends most of the book relating the many trends in recent philosophy which have led many thinkers to conclude that the debate between the dichotomies can have no useful outcome.
• The point that Bernstein makes is that we must engage in therapy rather than more attempts at systematic philosophy. We need to go beyond the debates over objectivism and relativism to a new viewpoint.

Science + Hermeneutics + Praxis = Practical Discourse?

• Bernstein ultimately believes that we must go beyond the dichotomies of objectivism/relativism, etc., and that elements of science, hermeneutics, and practice can fruitfully inform a new interdisciplinary approach that he terms practical discourse.
• Bernstein combines key elements of the philsophies of his major thinkers (Gadamer, Habermas, and Rorty, among others) to develop his notion of the kind of goal we can therapeutically aim at. It includes the features of healthy mutual debate, community, communication, solidarity, public freedom, and affinity. He terms this kind of society a "dialogical community."
• Practical discourse would require that "...we dedicate ourselves to the practical task of furthering the type of solidarity, participation, and mutual recognition that is founded in dialogical communities." (p.231) He acknowledges the enormous difficulties of the task, recognizing the trends that systematically undermine, distort, and block such communities from coming into existence. It seems that in many ways the very conditions of social life today preclude the development of dialogical communities. He nevertheless points out the fact that the need for such communities (characterized as having both healthy dialogue and solidarity) is a deep-seated need in the human psyche.

Questions

• What institutional patterns would have to be directly attacked and torn down for Bernstein's practical discourse to result in dialogical communities? Is there hope that the current system of academic disciplines would voluntarily accomodate the kind of moves that he seems to call for?
• Can telecommunication in Ricoeur's sense lead to the creation of virtual communities made up of disparate individuals from many different groups? Does this process inevitably lead to the concretizing of such new communities in new disciplines that then become part of the problem?

Bibliography

Bernstein, Richard J.  The Restructuring of Social and Political Theory.  New York: 
   Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976. 

Bernstein, Richard J.  The New Constellation: the Ethical-Political Horizons 
   of Modernity/Postmodernity.  Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991.