Intellectual Civility and Engaged Pluralism: Remembering the Singular Accomplishments of Richard Jacob Bernstein (1932–2022)

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• Intellectual Civility and Engaged PluralismRemembering the Singular Accomplishments of Richard Jacob Bernstein (1932–2022)
• Vincent M. Colapietro (bio)

Richard J. Bernstein lived a long, full, salutary life. He enjoyed a distinguished academic career as a beloved teacher, prolific author, adept administrator, gracious colleague, and tireless interlocutor. The knit of his pensive brow when listening deeply to whomever he was engaged in conversation was nearly as memorable as the spontaneity of his contextually calibrated smile, on occasion subtly wry, not infrequently unabashedly broad. The deep resonance of his remarkable voice was no less memorable. He delighted in nature and children seemingly as much as the rough-and-tumble of intense philosophical exchanges and the exacting work of a responsible interpreter of the most challenging texts (no one could make an author such as Benedict Spinoza, Immanuel Kant, or G. W. F. Hegel, or Charles S. Peirce not only become accessible but also come alive as well as Richard). He knew just the right children's books to read to the children of students who happened to be accompanying their mother or father when visiting his summer home in Jay, New York, as he did what texts to put into the hands of his students who were struggling to find their way philosophically or professionally.

In his John Dewey Lecture, "The Romance of Philosophy" (2007), Bernstein made effective use of A. N. Whitehead's essays on education, stressing that the initial phase of any intellectual engagement when properly approached is the stage of romance. "Without romance," Bernstein, following Whitehead, insists, "precision becomes pedantry, and generalization impossible," or, at least, fecund generalizations possessing experiential salience become impossible. The ideals of rigor, precision, clarity, and subtlety cannot be gainsaid but divorced from the romance of philosophy, the affectively charged engagement with intellectual questions in their deepest human import, degenerate into purely technical skills all too often exercised [End Page 161] for the sake of professional vanity. Rooted in the romance of philosophy, however, these ideals constitute nothing less than a code of honor in and through which fidelity to one's love is effectively expressed. Technique apart from vision is empty and blind, vision apart from technique almost always an all too facile and flaccid affair.

Like his close friend Richard Rorty, Bernstein was at once a philosopher's philosopher and an author who won a readership across disciplines and fields outside of academic philosophy. If his more controversial friend garnered more attention, it was in large part because Richard was far less of a provocateur. While Rorty had the uncanny knack of a skillful polemicist who could change the conversation, often by making the conversation about him (specifically, about one or another of his more extreme claims—e.g., truth is simply what our interlocutors allow us to get away with), Richard articulated a less provocative, more qualified version of pragmatic anti-foundationalism. As he says in Beyond Objectivism and Relativism (1983), in abandoning any reasonable hope in securing "an ahistorical permanent matrix or categorial scheme for grounding knowledge," we are not necessarily abandoning any possibility of distinguishing between evidentially grounded and ungrounded claims (put more simply, between warranted and unwarranted, true or false, statements). That is, the rejection of objectivism and foundationalism does not entail a commitment to relativism and subjectivism. It is, as the title of one of Bernstein's most important books implies, necessary to go beyond objectivism and relativism.

At bottom, what distinguished Bernstein from Rorty was that Richard did not judge the Wittgensteinian concept of "language-games" to be able to do—and to do far better—all of what the classical pragmatists (Peirce, James, Dewey, and Mead) designed their conception of experience to accomplish. At the conclusion of "Experience after the Linguistic Turn" (2010), Richard quite pointedly insisted that "the dichotomy that is sometimes drawn between language and experience is just the sort of dichotomy that ought to be challenged from a pragmatist perspective." By implication, Richard is charging Rorty with betraying the very tradition to which the latter so loudly allies himself. "Philosophers working after 'the linguistic turn,'" Richard asserts, "still have a great deal to learn about experience and language from Peirce, James, Dewey...