Bernstein’s Distorting Mirrors: A Rejoinder

[This rejoinder was originally published in Soundings in 1984 (vol. 67, no. 1).]

It is a large compliment to have one’s views expounded and criticized by Richard J. Bernstein. Bernstein’s three books, Praxis and Action (Philadelphia, 1971), The Restructuring of Social and Political Theory (New York, 1976) and Beyond Objectivism and Relativism (Philadelphia, 1983) constitute jointly a remarkable achievement, a trilogy which is no less than a narrative interpretation of the history of recent philosophy and social theory from the nineteenth century to the present. The epigraph to Bernstein’s this-worldly commedia might well be E. M. Forster’s “Only connect.” For one of Bernstein’s singular talents is for seeing hitherto unnoticed or underemphasized connections between thinkers who, until he took them in hand, had appeared to have little in common. Bernstein uses this talent to extraordinary synthetic and reconciling effect. So within a single overall unifying argument in Praxis and Action such heterogeneous figures as Marx, Kierkegaard, Dewey, Carnap, and Strawson all play a part; and in Beyond Objectivism and Relativism Winch, Kuhn, Gadamer, Habermas, Rorty, and Arendt are almost as improbably recruited as cooperative dramatis personae in Bernstein’s philosophical theatre.

The recurrent pattern in these dramas is one which Bernstein himself characterised aptly in the final paragraphs of The Restructuring of Social and Political Theory as a movement towards a climax of theoretical reconciliation. Two or more of Bernstein’s philosophical characters are first brought on stage and the apparently incompatible character of their views is then exhibited with great clarity, so that we seem to be confronted with an unavoidable choice, an either/or. But then somehow or other a transformation occurs, a reconciliation is after all effected and instead of the either/or of conflict we have a both/and, a new harmony. How are these reconciliations effected? Is there a genuine overcoming of what was after all only apparent opposition? Or is it the reconciliation that is illusory? “In the final analysis” claimed Bernstein “we are not confronted with exclusive choices” (Restructuring p. 223). How is such a final analysis to be arrived at and defended?

Bernstein’s synthetic conclusions are always reached th[r]ough the detail of his interpretative narration of particular theorists and theories. Two examples which illuminate that mode of interpretation are his accounts first of Kuhn and later of Habermas. For much in Bernstein one way or another is a response to Kuhn’s thesis that in certain key episodes in the history of the natural sciences there occur not only moments of exclusive choice, but moments in which such choice is between alternative bodies of theory so different in their conceptual structures, in their characterisations of the relevant empirical data, and in their identifications of what problems are central that no theory-neutral standards can be found by which one can be shown to be superior to its rival or rivals. Indeed part of the disagreement between the contending parties in such cases concerns how the disagreement between them is to be resolved. And of course such radical disagreements occur in philosophy as well as in the sciences.

It does not follow that, whenever such incommensurability of rival bodies of theory is encountered, rationality is necessarily devoid of resources. Each of the two (or more) bodies of theory will bring to such encounters some history of progress and achievement in solving what each takes to be the key problems that have been identified from its own point of view, but also some history of bafflement in the face of its own problems—some greater or lesser degree of failure. And it may be that one of the contending bodies of theory will turn out to afford possibilities of understanding both the achievements and the limitations of its rival(s)—achievements and limitations, that is, judged by the standards of that rival—which that rival body of theory cannot provide either concerning itself or concerning its theoretical opponents. So it was that the rational superiority of Galilean and then of Newtonian mechanics over medieval impetus theory was vindicated by their ability...