Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis by Richard J. Bernstein (review)

806 BOOK REVIEWS Divine Being as communicated charity. Faith under its numerous modalities is always constituted objectively by the same reality, the participated life of God. This is the case whether it be the faith infused at baptism, the faith which gives the necessary impetus to assent to the formulation of revealed truth, faith experienced in its obscurity in the active night of the soul, faith as the ray of contemplation which purifies in the passive night, or the faith which illuminates at the summit of mystical union. And this virtue of faith is only one of three modalities under which the transcendent Deity penetrates the soul, the other two being hope and charity. All three jointly permeate the soul, each purifying its corresponding faculty, bringing the subject into intimate embrace with the already possessed Triune Divinity. Although Wojtyla does not emphasize these last-mentioned points, this in no way detracts from the merits of his study. The monograph is indeed filled with numerous keen insights into the thought of the Mystical Doctor, which can be enriching both to the beginner and to the expert in mystical literature. By his ascension to the Papacy, John Paul II has enabled this work to reach a wider audience with its light upon the figure and thought of Saint John of the Cross. ELIZABETH WILHELMSEN Wheaton College Norton, Massachusetts Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis. By RICHARD J. BERNSTEIN. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983. Pp. xviii + 284. $27.50 (cloth); $9.95 (paper). Richard Bernstein's great talent as a writer has been to bring together intellectual currents which appear to flow in opposite directions. In Praxis and Action, he explored the developing consensus about the inadequacies of the Cartesian " spectator view of knowledge" and a!:>out the importance of agency in knowing as well as living, while in Restructuring Social and Political Theory he went beyond this largely negative project to argue that such diverse philosophical traditions as linguistic analysis, Marxism, phenomenology, and critical theory were actually creating new and convergent paths through the problems of the age. But, as he says in the introduction to Beyond Objectivism and Relativism, he has since come to se.e the themes of the earlier books as "gravitating toward the complex network of problems concerning the character, dimensions , and texture of human rationality and irrationality." Thus he BOOK REVIEWS 307 finds himself in the midst of the "rationality debates" and trying to handle the spectre of relativism which haunts twentieth century culture. His solution turns on recognizing that this spectre springs, in great meassure , from the pursuit of an impossible objectivity. Contemporary philosophy of science provides the entree for the argument . At the dawn of the Enlightenment, Rene Descartes promised in the Discourse on Method that the demon of doubt would be banished if only we learned how to order our thoughts correctly, and it became a cultural given that human beings could reach sure and immutable knowledge of things and persons through the application of sound method. Of course, this given has, like all others, had its nay-sayers, but the 0pposition has usually come from the romantics least interested in science itself. In the last quarter century, however, it has centered among philosophers who have studied the history of science with care and sympathy . The most obvious point of difficulty was with the social sciences when thinkers like Peter Winch noted the strange predicament of Western anthropologists trying to study other societies with methods foreign to the people under observation. If the scientific approach had limited value in bridging the gap between ways of perceiving, it looked as though the social sciences had lost their claim too have universal validity, and, by common acceptance, their claim to be sciences. Next Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions brought the challenge into the donrnin of physics, which usually stood as the very model of a science. Whatever his ambiguities and inconsistencies, he demonstrated that physics had no neat line of progress in which independent scientific methods led to new theories whose pure truth replaced the errors of old theories. Scientific revolutions seemed, after Kuhn, to be more like the changes...