Democratic faith. A philosophical profile of Richard J. Bernstein

1. I first met Richard Bernstein in Frankfurt in the spring of 1988, where he was a visiting professor of philosophy while I was a student. I remember as truly eye-opening the seminar he taught together with Jürgen Habermas and Karl-Otto Apel and the one he gave by himself on the authors he discussed in The New Constellation (1991). From that time on, this marvelous Geist became an important mentor for me and a dear friend, and I will always be grateful for this gift.

Dick used to refer to people he was fond of with the Yiddish mensch, meaning someone with a fine character and a certain knowledge of life based on experience. A great Aristotelian as he was, he inspires me to say that what a true mensch is one can hardly capture by a definition; rather, one has to point to an example. And I can think of no better example than Dick Bernstein himself, the warmest, most generous, wise, and dialogical person one could imagine.

2. This menschsein brings me to my topic, Bernstein's thinking about democracy. He was a true pragmatist, one of the greatest of his generation. This means that he approached issues in, say, political philosophy or epistemology not from separate methodological standpoints. Rather, for him all philosophical concepts and ideas had to be explained by reference to human practice and experience, and they found their place in a comprehensive philosophy of what he called the “dialogical character of our human existence” (Bernstein, 1983, p. xv). Democracy, from this perspective, was not simply a certain form of organizing political life, rather, it was an ethical way of life. Yet for Bernstein democracy was grounded more fundamentally still as a mode of thought—or better: as the form of thought that makes us truly human, and again the Aristotelianism in the formulation is no mistake. Bernstein was not a metaphysical foundationalist, and he tried to liberate us from “Cartesian anxieties,” but he firmly believed in the human potential and telos of us humans, and of us all, as dialogical seekers of understanding. In his eyes, all human practices, those of pursuing knowledge, of social cooperation and production (including art), or of finding a common opinion or will, had to be understood as practices of phronesis, as communal endeavors to organize our individual and collective lives through mutual understanding. This of course means rational understanding, taking rationality to be the capacity of constructing our reality through dialogue. I am interested in that core idea of his, as I believe there are important treasures to be found in what I call Bernstein's signature rationalism. One can say a lot about its anti-Cartesian or non-Kantian character, but a form of rationalism it is, as any proper Aristotelian view must.

3. The topics of praxis and phronesis occupied Bernstein throughout his career, as his early books on Praxis and Action (1971) and The Restructuring of Social and Political Theory (1976) attest. One of his finest and most lasting achievements is his great book Beyond Objectivism and Relativism (1983) that we discussed in Frankfurt at the time. The way he there steers a course between rival views uniting them in what they share is unrivaled. He argues (with Gadamer) that phronesis is “the type of judgment and reasoning exhibited in all understanding” (Bernstein, 1983, p. 40), and (with Habermas) he adds a “radical strain” that stresses the “principle of freedom that embraces all of humanity” (Bernstein, 1983, p. 188). He continues to argue that for both Habermas and Gadamer “the principle of unconstrained dialogue and communication is not an arbitrary ideal or norm that we ‘choose’; it is grounded in the very character of our linguistic intersubjectivity” (Bernstein, 1983, p. 190f.).

Bernstein himself shared this Habermasian ideal in a non-transcendental, though still rather strong, form as he held onto it as a “telos that directs us to overcoming systematically distorted communication” (Bernstein, 1983, p. 195). He considered this all-encompassing, egalitarian commitment to communication and conversation as “vital to the human project” (Bernstein, 1983, p. 206), stressing the “type of rational wooing that can take place when individuals confront each other as equals and participants” (Bernstein, 1983, p. 223) as central to this outlook.

4. I consider this type of rationalism a signature of Bernstein's thinking because he, in a pragmatist mode, preferred to call the belief in the telos of undistorted communication a “faith” rather than a transcendental truth of reason. There are many reasons for this having to do with his non-foundationalism, but an important reason was that he intended to stress the practical character of this faith. As he argued in Beyond Objectivism and Relativism, we should not be seduced “into thinking that the forces at work in contemporary society are so powerful and devious that there is no practical possibility of achieving a communal life based on undistorted communication, dialogue, communal judgment, and rational persuasion” (Bernstein, 1983, p. 227f.). Like Dewey, as he explains in his Philosophical Profiles, Bernstein emphasized the rational(ist) belief (and hope) that human beings can in principle achieve such communicative practice, in short: the “reflective faith in the capacity of all human beings for intelligent judgment, deliberation, and action if the proper conditions are furnished” (Bernstein, 1986, p. 261). The reference to proper conditions is highly important, especially when it comes to education and other institutions of public life. But the “reflective faith” referred to here is a firm practical conviction that Bernstein held onto, implying that no asocial order in the world could fundamentally destroy the capacity for egalitarian judgment and deliberation, and this faith bears comparison to the Kantian reasonable belief in the Anlage (disposition) toward the good. I see a strong, Aristotelian version of this faith at work here, one that I would not necessarily call foundationalist, but one that nevertheless holds onto a view of human nature that emphasizes something characteristic and lasting there, something that transcends human actuality and history.

One might think that this goes too far for a pragmatist, but I believe that only a conviction like that can explain Dick's constant “refusal to submit to despair” (Bernstein, 1986, p. 272), as he says about Dewey (describing himself, too). That is why he believes, quoting Dewey, that “democracy ‘is the idea of community life itself’” (Bernstein, 1986, p. 264), which means that humans only truly live in a humane ethical way if they participate in a democratic form of life. He cites Dewey's text on “Creative Democracy” from 1951 approvingly: “For every way of life that fails in its democracy limits the contacts, the exchanges, the communications, the interactions by which experience is steadied while it is enlarged and enriched” (Bernstein, 1986, p. 262). Only democracy unleashes the potentials of full human experience.

We find this strong version of the true ethical-political life in other works, too. In The New Constellation (1991), Bernstein stresses (with Habermas) that “the claim to reason has a ‘stubbornly transcending power’” (Bernstein, 1991, p. 52), and he goes on to say: “A practical commitment to the avenging energeia of communicative reason is the basis—perhaps the only honest basis—for hope” (Bernstein, 1991, p. 53). In The Pragmatic Turn (2010), he similarly stresses the ethical dimension of democracy as a telos of human life: “When the normative significance of the distinctive sociality of human beings is fully developed, it leads to the idea of democracy as an ethical form of life” (Bernstein, 2010, p. 72).

Note what this democratic faith implies—namely the firm egalitarian conviction in the equal moral and epistemic capacities of everyone. Democratic faith is a moral conviction of unconditional (I am tempted to say) “mutual respect” (Bernstein, 2005, p. 30) owed to every human being as an agent of justification with (what I call) a right to justification: “Our passionate commitment to just causes is strengthened and deepened when we are prepared to justify them by an appeal to reasons and evidence that are subject to open, public, critical discussion. This is essential for a democracy that truly cherishes freedom” (Bernstein, 2005, p. 67). In my view, the equal respect this implies for all as reason-giving and reason-deserving beings is no remnant from past metaphysical imperatives; rather, it belongs to the core of the pragmatist faith.

5. Given this kind of hope and faith, the question of evil obviously had to be addressed, mainly in dialogue with Hannah Arendt. And it is in this context that Bernstein comes back to the question of the character of the “transcending” truth about human nature expressed in the pragmatist faith in democratic reason. In The Abuse of Evil (Bernstein, 2005), we find Bernstein squaring the circle by explaining the categorical moral ethos of pragmatic fallibilism. He emphasizes that for the pragmatists, “philosophical speculation is always grounded in its concrete historical context,” while also arguing that “philosophy must be rethought in light of the new problems and conflicts that emerge” in such contexts. And he continues in italics: “But there is a vital core of the pragmatic ethos that is enduring and transcends the historical context in which it emerged” (Bernstein, 2005, p. 50). He goes on to say that Peirce, James, and Dewey thought that “once the quest for certainty was exposed,” there would be no historical going back. “But they were wrong,” Bernstein responds (in italics again): Regression is always a danger and real possibility, hence to “institute a fallibilistic ethos as living reality in people's everyday lives requires passionate commitment and persistence, because the ethos is always under threat” (Bernstein, 2005, p. 51). In my view, the transcending truth Bernstein appeals to here has two components—first, the faith in the always present, though often suppressed, potential for true human sociality, and second, the moral imperative to hold onto it even (and especially) when its realization is difficult: a context-transcending truth and imperative. This was at the core of Bernstein's Aristotelian pragmatism.

6. So that is what a true mensch is—someone who, even if the hour is dark, does not despair because they know humans can do better. Once we fully understand the structure of that knowledge or faith, so vividly expressed in the last sentences of The Abuse of Evil (Bernstein, 2005, p. 124), we understand Dick Bernstein's philosophy. But more than that, we also understand who he was, as he did not just firmly hold that faith in the powers of reason, dialogue, and democracy; he truly embodied it.