Reflective Summary

Richard J Bernstein was an American philosopher of considerable renown for his work in the unification of pragmatism and analytical philosophy and also on overcoming the ‘Cartesian Anxiety’. He belonged to the school of American pragmatism. He himself has stated that the main reason he chose to study at Yale was that their philosophy department was one of the few in the country that did not swoon and fawn over Analytical Ideology as the rest did.

He starts the book by noting the general uneasiness that has crept into our intellectual and cultural lives, highlighted not only by the stark contrast between objectivism and relativism, but also by rationality and irrationality, realism and antirealism, and the like. He also states that all contemporary thinking has been retained within these extremes, no matter how novel a philosopher may have propagated his ideas as. He attempts to draw the differences, as the book suggests, go beyond them, and then somehow also connects objectivism and relativism to other wondrous concepts like political wisdom

He states that all debate and discussion regarding this ‘complex phenomenon’ can be generalized as trying ‘to determine the nature and scope of human rationality’.

He gives examples of the philosophers Russell & Husserl, and how at one point of time both were convinced that they had the truest and most absolute methods and procedures for advancing philosophical inquiry, which, when subjected to inquiry,

‘reveal cracks and crevices in what had been taken to be solid and secure’. He then goes on to refute the ‘over- arching framework’ & ‘some permanent standards of rationality’ that we would like to think govern the planet and reprimands us for not being able to accept that ‘there is a world that is independent of our beliefs and fancies that forces itself upon us willy-nilly’.

He gives us the examples of two other prominent philosophers Popper & Feyerabend; the former is completely against any form of dogmatism, irrationality or fanaticism, and Feyerabend insists that this opposition itself is a form of dogmatism, which, while it makes sense, makes no sense at all at the same time because being against dogmatism obviously cannot be a form of dogmatism, but being completely against dogmatism with no wiggle-space is the very definition of dogmatism.

He quotes the great British Philosopher Michael Dummett, who says that from the time of Descartes, many a great philosopher like Husserl, Kant and Spinoza have tried to discover ‘a correct philosophical methodology’ and failed, but persuades us that Frege has done so, but just falls short of committing his position to it by also stating that ‘Only Time Shall Tell’.

He quotes Richard Rorty, who negates the entire idea that philosophy is the foundational discipline of culture & that there actually exists a systematic methodology for it. According to Rorty, ‘at its best, philosophy is just another voice in the conversation of mankind’. Rorty, building on the later teachings of Dewey, Heidegger and Wittgenstein, fully disapproves of the ‘Kantian conception of philosophy as foundational’.

There have been basically two fundamental positions in philosophy throughout history, one being the methodical search for absolute truths, and the other the idea that “anything’s good” even when it comes to our most fundamental beliefs. The Cartesian Anxiety, according to Bernstein, is a deep longing for certainty, the urge “to find some fixed point, some stable rock upon which we can secure our lives against the

vicissitudes that constantly threaten us”, which is in response to the harrowing realization that we cannot simply dismiss the second position and must consider it with equal gravity. Bernstein postulates that this discussion is not relegated simply to the realm of epistemology, but has infiltrated every being of our lives, the most popular example being that some of the greatest atrocities and injustices in human history have been perpetrated in the name of religious absolutes.

Bernstein further postulates that accepting our limited capacities for the comprehension of truth and the finiteness of our beliefs go hand-in-hand with knowing the truth itself, and the two realizations are not contradictory.

Gadamer was and Habernas is (a) prominent philosopher(s) of the 20th Century. Praxis, ie, action, has been actually discussed in depth and at length by philosophers for millennia (hyperbole).

Bernstein quotes Hannah Arendt’s ‘Viva Activa’ (The Human Condition) which details the threefold distinction of labour, work, and action. In the book, Arendt laments the modern-day approach of action as a materialistic/means-to-an-end output. She considers action “the highest form of human activity, manifested in speech and deed and rooted in the human condition of plurality”.

Gadamer, Feyerabend, and Wolin also express deep regret and concern over how Method has crept into hermeneutics and the Geisteswissenschaften (human sciences). E

Wolin sought to find an answer to the question, “What is Political Wisdom”. While such an answer may prove impossible to answer, reframing it, may, as he has pointed out, actually lead to some fruitful conclusion. Political science and Political wisdom are antithetical to each other. The former is empirical and logically testable; it is prevalent and provable in all situations regardless of context. Wolin argues that wisdom springs not from logic, but from incoherence and contradictoriness of experience, which makes it distrustful of rigor. He postulates that wisdom is allusive and intimative, and, as such, is rendered incomprehensible without appropriate context.

Bernstein appears to be the guardian of philosophy in the time when universal reductions are made in the name of the sciences without great proof, and also assigns to every protector of this practice ‘defender of hermeneutics’. Knowledge must be objective -- or else it is only pseudo-knowledge. He claims that this and treating numbers as cold, hard inputs may have a charm to the believers in rationality but actually fail to live up to the standards of actual scientific knowledge.

I feel that the author’s approach to objectivism and relativism is too broad. While he maintains throughout the book that the school of philosophy that he belongs to does not view philosophy as an analytical subject and is comfortable with the thought that sometimes no sense can be made out of anything, I find it hard to believe that anyone can actually take comfort in that statement. He also seems to view the sciences as too narrow and repeatedly states that it does not take into account knowledge that cannot be converted into the cold, hard figures that it accepts, but he doesn’t actually venture into the outline of what such knowledge is, and neither does he give an example of what it might look like. His view of the world is much too dramatic, and I personally find it disturbing, as analytics are what make sense of the world, and before him, I was yet to meet a man who wished not to make sense of the world.

The conclusion provided is that currently, all “forms of knowledge can be assimilated, translated, or reduced to the canons of scientific discourse”, and those that cannot be are designated as pseudo-knowledge. He also says that those philosophers that actually take up arms against their "tough-minded" adversaries in the natural sciences, do too, in some manner, share ground with the latter, as logical empiricism is now dominating even the traditional land of philosophy where the unattainable and immeasurable had found their place of peace.