3.9 - Benhabib, Seyla - Philosophy at the Crossroads (en)

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Philosophy at the Crossroads

Philosophy at the Crossroads

by Seyla Benhabib

Source:

PRAXIS International (PRAXIS International), issue: 3 / 1985, pages: 350-364, on www.ceeol.com.
http://www.ceeol.com/http://www.ceeol.com/


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Praxis International350

COMMENT

PHILOSOPHY AT THE CROSSROADS*

Seyla Benhabib

Philosophy is its own time grasped in thought.1 Hegels well-knownphrase contains the seeds of its own dissolution. While Hegel himself viewed hisown system as grasping in thought the spirit of the new age, and as reunitinginto an encyclopaedia of the philosophical sciences logic, epistemology,morality, jurisprudence, and aesthetics, which the Kantians had taken apart,

nineteenth-century philosophers from Marx to Nietzsche and Kierkegaard drewquite the opposite consequences. If philosophy was its own time grasped inthought, then it had to become a science of the society of the presentsoargued Marx. If philosophy was its own time grasped in thought, then it had tobecome a moral genealogy of bourgeois-Christian civilization, maintainedNietzsche. If philosophy was its own time grasped in thought, according toKierkegaard, it could no longer affirm the absolute but had to deal with theparadoxeven more, the absurditythat I, this concrete, finite individual,could claim to stand in an immediate relationship to the absolute. So absurdseemed Hegels self-assurance to Kierkegaard that he named his own tortured

attempts to step outside the Hegelian system Concluding Unscientific Postscript.The title is revealing: not a script but a postscript, not scientific butunscientific. Kierkegaard might as well have added not concluding butinconclusive. Since the end of the nineteenth century we have thus becomefamiliar with various sublations of philosophy into social theory, genealogy,and the discourse of the absurd.

In our days a new Aufhebung of philosophy into poetry, literary criticism,playful prose, cultural anthropology and the like is being advocated. RichardRorty has recently declared the end of philosophy as a master discourse ofepistemic justification and validation, which would allow us, in our capacity as

professional philosophers, to specify the universal, transhistorical, context-independent criteria of scientific, moral, and cultural practices.2 With thischaracterization of philosophy as a master discourse of justification, Rortygoes back from Hegel to Kant, and to the neo-Kantian tradition on theContinent and in the Anglo-American countries. While Hegelian philosophy,with its attempt to synthesize the given corpus of knowledge into a system of theabsolute, appears as one last aberration in a long history to be overcome by itsown internal contradictions, according to Rorty, it is the Kantian and theneo-Kantian understanding of philosophy which has dominated the professionand which has provided it with its raison dtre.Whatever the idiosyncrasies of

* Critical review of Richard J. Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, andPraxis (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983). References are given in the text inparentheses.


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Praxis International 351

Rortys version of the history of philosophy, and they are many, he isundoubtedly correct on one point. Those who have accepted Kants concernwith the demarcationbetween philosophy and mainly the natural sciences, andwho have found plausible his justification of philosophy as a meta-discourseconcerned with the quaestio juris, have seen the task of philosophy in thetwentieth century in the clarification, distillation and systematization of thelogic and language of these sciences. Rorty maintains that attempts totranscendentalize, absolutize or more humbly to reconstruct the logic andlanguage of that one paradigm of successful knowledge have failed. Instead oftreating the paradigm of Galilean-Newtonian natural science as one morevocabulary among others that enables us to cope with the world, that is topredict and control it, philosophers have tended to argue that the contingentsuccess of modern natural sciences rested on something else, and mostcommonly upon the fact that this language mirrored, represented realityand the essences of things.3 The mind, declares Rorty, is not the mirror ofnature, but at the most our creative capacity to generate new vocabularies todeal with a contingent universe. If we take the pragmatic-hermeneutic turnof the late Wittgenstein and Heidegger, and of John Dewey, we will move fromthe master discourse of epistemology to the edifying conversation of mankind.The task of philosophy is not to ground, justify, or legitimize the possibility ofconversation berhauptand an sich but simply to keep the conversation going.4

It is at this point that Richard Bernstein enters the debate with his new book,

Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis. Writingfrom a perspective that accepts both the sublation of philosophys claim to thetotality, and Rortys metacritique of epistemology, Bernstein neverthelessargues that what we are faced with at the present is not yet another end ofphilosophy but the emergence of a new understanding of rationality. Bern-steins work provides a sobering antidote to the current mood of epochal crisisin philosophy, and to temptations to seek its facile sublation in one or anotherdiscipline. As I will argue below, however, even among the adherents of thisnew paradigm of rationality, radically different conceptions as to how to carryon philosophy continue. These strong disagreements cast doubt on Bernsteins

claim that Gadamer as well as Rorty, Habermas as well as Arendt share the samevision, and that they furthermore, in some deep sense are engaged in the sameproject. Even if ones sense of epochal crisis is tempered by Bernsteins newwork, I, at least, remain unconvinced that there is a consensus at the present asto where to go from here. Contemporary philosophy remains at the crossroad,and the path that leads beyond objectivism and relativism is not as clearlymarked as one would have wished.

II

In the Preface toBeyond Objectivism and RelativismBernstein writes that thespirit of our times is characterized by a movement beyond objectivism andrelativism (xiv). Bernstein defines objectivism as the view that there existssome permanent, ahistorical matrix or framework to which one can ultimatelyappeal in determining the nature of rationality, knowledge, truth, reality,

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goodness, or rightness (8). The relativist, by contrast, argues that there is nosubstantive overarching framework or single metalanguage by which we canrationally adjudicate or univocally evaluate competing claims of alternativeparadigms (8). Bernstein is careful to distinguish objectivism from meta-physical or epistemological realism. An objectivist may, but need not be, commit-ted to the theses that (a) there is a world of objective reality that existsindependently of us and whose nature or essence we can know; and/or (b) thatthere is a fundamental distinction between what is out there and ourknowing activity. Kant and transcendental philosophers like Husserl areobjectivist in the sense of believing in the presence of such a permanent,ahistorical matrix; they are not objectivist in the sense of being epistemologicalor metaphysical realists (9ff). Likewise, a relativist need not be a subjectivist orconversely. The work of the late Wittgenstein can be described as relativistbecause he accepts the irreducible plurality of conceptual schemes and languagegames, which are rooted in the multiplicity of life-forms. He is not a subjectivisteither in the Husserlian sense of advocating the constitution of theseframeworks by the activity of knowing subjects nor in the more mundane senseof believing that all is relative to the subjects preference, taste or bias.According to Bernstein, while neither absolutism nor subjectivism are a liveoption for us now, the choice between a sophisticated form of fallibilisticobjectivism and a nonsubjective conception of relativism does seem to be aliveand indeed a momentousone (13).

This last statement is in some ways misleading. If I read Bernstein correctly,his argument is not so much that there is indeed a choicebetween a fallibilisticobjectivism, of the kind advocated by Popper and Lakatos, and a nonsubjec-tive conception of relativism, as represented by Peter Winch and CliffordGeertz. Bernstein is arguing that, when the claims of each position are thoughtthrough to their end, then the hermeneutical dimension of science, bothnatural and social, will be recovered (31). Part Two of Bernsteins book,Science, Rationality and Incommensurability, intends to show that thevarious debates on rationality, which have reigned in the philosophy of thenatural sciences since the publication of Thomas Kuhns The Structure of

Scientific Revolutions, and in the social sciences since Peter Winchs The Idea of a Social Science, when interpreted correctly, result in the recovery of thathermeneutical dimension which leads beyond objectivism and relativism.

What exactly is meant by the recovery of the hermeneutical dimension ofscience? For Bernstein this dimension becomes visible in the wake of thedebates between Popper, Lakatos, Kuhn and Feyerabend. Bernstein summa-rizes the conclusions to be drawn from these debates as follows: (1) TheCartesian dream or hope that we could discover the clear and distinct ideaswhich would summarize the essence of the new sciences of nature is vacuous.One substantive result, writes Bernstein, of recent work in the philosophy

of science has been to show us that any abstract statement of what are supposedto be the permanent rules, methods, or standards of scientific inquiry turns outto be untrue to actual scientific inquiry or consists merely of pious generalities.This is one reason why it is so important to turn to a concrete examination ofhistorical practices and standards that have been hammered out in the course


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of scientific inquiry (72). (2) No statement of rules for advancing, testing andevaluating competing hypotheses and theories is adequate to define what isacceptable or unacceptable in concrete situations of research. (3) The study ofthe history of science, and generally the history of human inquiry, is vital tounderstand the continuity and differences in human rationality. (4) The mostimportant consequence of these developments is an appreciation of thepractical character of rationality in science . . . In speaking of the practicalcharacter, I want to underscore the role of choice, deliberation, conflictingvariable opinions, and the judgmental quality of rationality (74. My em-phasis).

The recovery of the hermeneutical dimension of the sciences has a two-foldmeaning. First, the actual practice of the scientific community in testing,constructing, revising hypotheses and theories is not unlike the practice of amoral agent who is confronted with choice, deliberation, and judgment infacing moral situations and dilemmas. The distinction between theoretical andpractical rationality, between the hypothetico-deductive algorithmic modelof choice, which natural scientists, according to some accounts, ostensiblyfollow, and the model of moral choice, which is context-dependent andsensitive, interpetive and focused on particulars, no longer holds. Second, thereconstruction of the history of science itself is a hermeneutical inquiry. Inwriting the history of any scientific episode, for example, the historian isconfronted with a problem of understanding. If scientists of the seventeenth

century believed that theological as well as alchemistic arguments served asepistemic reasons in their justification of hypotheses, the historian is facedwith the question as to what counts as a standard of rationality in such aninquiry. Should he or she accept the self-understanding of the scientist of theperiod, and maintain that even if for us today, theological and alchemisticarguments do not serve as epistemic reasons, we should accept the standardof rationality practiced by these scientists? Or should he or she treat such casesas instances of scientific irrationality? Furthermore, suppose there is adiscrepancy between our rational reconstruction of the methodology ofscientific research programs and the actual historical sequence, and that the

implicit rationality of the episode differs from the imputed rationality con-structed by the sociologists and historians of science. Should he or she, likeLakatos, assume that socio-psychological factors were responsible for thisdeviance and that such a discrepancy is to be imputed to non-epistemicfactors?5 But would this not be question-begging? That is, would we not beassuming that rationality is what we implicitly, from our vantage point, take itto be?

Bernsteins answer here would be that such discussions are paradigminstances of hermeneutic logic. To speak of begging the question betrays anon-hermeneutic understanding of understanding. Since all understanding

operates within a certain framework, and with certain standards, it is inevitablethat the researcher would bring his or her standards to bear on the inquiry.What is absolutely essential is to distinguish between enabling or disenabl-ing prejudices, and to develop a sensitivity to the subject-matter, such that inreconstructions a genuine dialogue takes place, one in which we are as much


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willing to learn from our subject-matter as we are willing to criticize.I want to suggest that Bernsteins thesis of the hermeneutic dimension of science

can be stated in astrongand weakversion. The strong version would concludethat in the wake of the post-empiricist philosophy of science no interesting orsignificant differences remain between the natural and the social sciences. Thedefenders of the weak version, while admitting that a reconstruction of the logicof the natural sciences in terms of a canon of rational choice is untenable, wouldmaintain that there are still significant differences between a mathematicizedphysics, chemistry, and molecular biology on the one hand, and sociology,anthropology, history, and psychology on the other hand. Furthermore, theywould argue that these differences have theoreticaland not only moral import. Itis all the more important to address this question since some of the unresolveddisputes between Gadamer and Habermas, as well as Rorty and Habermas,concern the logic of the social and human sciences, and their relations tophilosophy.

It is unclear whether Bernstein wants to defend the strong or the weakversion of this issue. Does he mean to say that the natural sciences themselvesoperate with the double hermeneutic which A. Giddens and J. Habermas, forexample, would only like to attribute to the social and the human sciences? 6

The double hermeneutic in these sciences means that the researcher is alreadyconfronted with a pre-interpreted subject-matter. The social scientist cannotignore the ordinary language in which meanings are always already found in the

social world. What is more, the social actors themselves may in turn adopt thelanguage of social science to explain their situation and condition, such that adialogue or communication between subject-subject is intrinsic to thesesciences. It seems that, according to Bernstein, in the wake of the post-empiricist philosophy of science, the thesis of the double hermeneutic is nolonger sufficient to draw the distinction between the natural, and the humanand social sciences. In defense of their claim, Habermas and Giddens, however,might reply that the double hermeneutic is true of the history, sociology orphilosophy of science, since these are themselves social and human sciences,but not true of the practice of natural sciences themselves. Habermas, for

example, writes:

Let me add that with the distinction between sciences which are based onhermeneuticalproceduresand those which are not, I am not advocating a dualismbetween ontologicalfeatures of different domains or regions of reality . . . What Iadvocate, instead, is the methodologicaldistinction among sciences which eitherdo or do not rely on understanding what is said as the condition for access to theobject domain. Although all sciences have to, of course, cope with problems ofinterpretation on the metatheoretical level . . . only some of these with ahermeneutic dimension of research have to cope with interpretation on the basiclevel of the generation of their data . . . In this methodological definition ofhermeneutically based sciences, I am at odds with Rortys conception ofhermeneutics as an act confined to abnormal discourses.7

Habermas here is advocating the weak thesis of the distinction between thenatural and the hermeneutics sciences.


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For a strong version of the thesis compare now the following statements byRorty:

I am basically in agreement with Hesse on the point on which she is at odds withTaylor and Dreyfus. I agree with her that the demise of logical empiricism meansthat there is no interesting split between the Natur-and the Geisteswissenschaften.8The idea that only a certain vocabulary is suited to human beings or humansocieties, that only that vocabulary permits them to be understood is theseventeenth century myth of natures own vocabulary all over again . . . Weshould look at any new development within the human sciences with twoquestions in mind: Does it increase our capacity to predict and to control? Does itincrease our sense of what it is important to consider in moral deliberation? Weshould avoid asking several other other questions, for example, Is it reallyscientific? Is it an instrument of domination? or Is it liberating?9

As these statements indicate, there is a crucial dispute here, and it is notobvious that what Bernstein names the recovery of the hermeneuticaldimension of science can help settle it. Bernstein wants to assume a middleposition between Rorty and Habermas. While agreeing with Rorty that thepost-empiricist philosophy of science is deeply questioning the categoricaldistinctions that separate even the hard natural sciences from what Habermascalls the historical-hermeneutical disciplines,10 unlike Rorty he also wants toinsist that questions concerning the nature of the social and human sciences canbe debated on cognitive-theoreticaland not merely moral-pragmaticgrounds.11

Although this particular debate is not at the center of Bernsteins concerns inBeyond Objectivism and Relativism, I have called attention to it, for it points to acrucial issue. Bernsteins concern is to sensitize us to the emergence of a newway of looking at rationality. The failure of attempts to define transhistorical,transcontextual criteria and rules of rationality need not lead, in his opinion, toa relativism, where anything goes. This would be repeating Nietszches mistakein thinking that because God is dead all is permitted. Even if there are nocriteria of rationality in the strong sense desired by the objectivist, there arecontext-immanent, practice-internal standards, rules and reasons, whichadmittedly change over time, but which govern and should govern our action

and inquiry. Aristotles insistence that it is the mark of a true gentleman not toseek more certainty than the subject matter permits is crucial here. In thissense the lines between theoretical and practical rationality, between the canonsof reason employed in our inquiries into nature and the canons of moraldeliberation and judgment, are more fluid than have hitherto been assumed.

Granted this insight, the central problem remains. At the meta-level thereappears to be indeed a convergence between Rortys pragmatic-contextualism,Gadamerian hermeneutics and Habermass communicative or discursiveconcept of rationality (I will deal with Hannah Arendt below). None the lesssignificant differences persist between them around two sets of issues. I believe

these differences in turn call into question the apparent meta-theoreticalconvergence. First, there are unresolved disputes concerning the characteriza-tion of conceptual shifts, or the meaning of rational learning-processes. Second,and closely tied to the first, is each thinkers conception of the interchangebetween philosophy and the human and social sciences.


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III

To elucidate the nature of the dispute between Habermas, Gadamer andRorty on the question of conceptual change, I will first outline Habermassposition. Habermas has developed a research program of rational reconstruc-tions, whose goal is to combine the interpretive-hermeneuticunderstanding ofhuman action and cognition with an objectivating-theoretical approach. Thereconstruction of the internal logic of the object of study, be it the developmentof world-views, the development of moral judgment, or the ontogeneticacquisition of cognitive, linguistic or sociomoral competencies, is the first step.The second is to outline the transition from one world-view to another, fromone stage of moral, interactive or communicative competence to another, as aninternally motivated learning sequence. It is assumed that learning is aprocess of problem-solving in which the learning subject is actively involved,and furthermore, that there is a cumulative or irreversible logic to this processsuch that a subject who has moved from interpretation X

1to interpretation X

2

of a problem can explain in the light of the second interpretation why theformer is false, but not vice versa.12 This is the Piagetian idea of sequences orstages that structure the cognitive, moral, interactive competencies of subjectsinto equilibrated wholes which become increasingly abstract, complex,general, and reversible in the course of development. Habermas even namessuch rational reconstructions a transcendental philosophy carried on with

empirical means, for these reconstructions are supposed to identify formal,universal structures that govern the learning processes of subjects for good,i.e., cognitively defensible, reasons.13

Compare this approach with Rortys claim that history has proved Galileo tobe right and Cardinal Bellarmine wrong not on any deep conceptual grounds,but simply because Galilean science turned to be more successful in copingwith the world, i.e., in predicting and controlling it.14 On Rortys account, ifthere is a learning process in this sequence, it is simply that it pays off toadopt a mathematical science of nature rather than to view nature as Godsrevealed book.

Consider then what a Gadamerian approach to the same issue might be.Gadamer might insist that being the heirs of the Galilean, mathematical scienceof nature, our initial prejudices might be in favor of upholding the rationality ofGalileo over Bellarmine. A deeper inquiry might reveal to us the limits of ourown prejudices, such that we may enter into an imaginative conversation withthe Christian-Ptolemiac tradition Bellarmine stands for. Suppose we still wantto know who is rightGalileo or Bellarmine? What criteria or standards are weto appeal to? Our tradition provides no guide in this respect, for bothBellarmine and Galileo appeal to tradition to defend themselves. Galileo, no lessthan Bellarmine, believed that nature was the Book of God, albeit written in

mathematical language. Traditions are not coherent wholes; incommensurableinterpretations of the same tradition belong to the normative logic of traditions.Apart from enlightening us about the range of possible human interpretations,and urging us to extend the limits of our horizon, can a hermeneutic philosophyhelp settle this dispute?15


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Between Habermass program of rational reconstructions, Gadamersmodel of a fusion of horizons, and Rortys vague concept of learning ascoping, there are significant conflicts which point to unresolved disputesabout the nature of rationality and the meaning of historical change. Habermassubscribes to a strong concept of rationality as an internally motivated learningprocess, in the course of which formal and narrative elements interact.Abstraction complexity, generality or decentration are formal-universals insuch learning processes that can be isolated from the narrative account of thereasons that also enter into such processes of learning. Another way offormulating this is that for Habermas the narrative logicof the reasons advancedin cognitive or interactive learning processes is less significant than their formalfeatures, that is, the level of cognitive and interactional operations employed.Neither Rorty nor Gadamer would accept such a strong separation betweenformal and narrative elements of learning processes. Rorty, in particular,dismisses this aspect of Habermass work as a transcendental hangover, andargues that there are no constraints on inquiry save conversational ones . . .But objectionsconversational constraintscannot be anticipated. There isno method for knowingwhenone has reached the truth, or when one is closer toit than before.16 I want to press these differences between Habermas, Rortyand Gadamer further by turning to the character of the interchange betweenphilosophy and the human and social sciences.

It is clear that a dispute between Galileo and Bellarmine cannot be settled by

traditional means of philosophical argumentation alone. To pass a reallyreasoned and defensible judgment on the question of who was right, we wouldhave to know a great deal more about this period, the history of the two men, theinstitutional position of the Church, the relationship of Galilean science todevelopments in ballistics and engineering, the rise of capitalism, the shift tothe mechanized world-view, etc. We would have to immerse ourselves in bothinternalist and externalist accounts, drawn from the history and sociologyof science. Franz Borkenau would be no less relevant to such a study thanKoyr; nor Edgar Zilsel less relevant that Dijksterhuis.17 This proves thecorrectness of Bernsteins observation that the study of the history of science,

and generally the history of human inquiry, is vital to understand the continuityand differences in human rationality (74).

Such an exchange between philosophy and the human and social sciences isencouraged by Habermass program of rational reconstructions. In fact, insuch a program there is a genuine hermeneutical interplay between theconstruction of empirically relevant social-scientific theories and philosophicalargumentation. It is not my intention to defend here the details of this program.When applied to phylogenesis in particular, such a program runs all the risks ofa Whiggish account of history, according to which what triumphs alwaystriumphs for good reasons. There is every reason to want to know what has been

forgotten and repressed in history as well as what has been remembered forgood reasons. However, I do want to defend the spirit behind this approach,which preserves the intention oftruthwithout giving up the hope that meaningcan also be gleaned from truth.

Rorty collapses meaning and truth. What allows us to cope as well as what


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is hammered out in history may well be meaningful but not true. Ourneuroses, since they help us to deal with a painful reality, are meaningfulwithout thereby being true. Patriarchy, nationalism, racism are also meaning-ful since they equally allow us to cope with a contingent universe, in addition tohaving been hammered out in history, but this makes them neithercognitively defensible nor morally right.

Gadamer, by contrast, defends meaning at the expense of truth. Philo-sophical hermeneutics is neither a methodology of the human sciences nor atheory of rationality, although it has implications for both. Ultimatelyhermeneutics remains a mode of philosophical reflection, the final goal of whichis ourBesinnung, namely coining to our senses, by recovering a sense of our owncontingency, finitude and the transitoriness of being. Like any world-philosophy, the truth of such a system is not open to confirmation or refutation.It illuminates our being-in-the-world at one point in time. As long as its lightextends longer than our shadow, we bask in it. It cannot be proven untrue; it iseither forgotten or becomes irrelevant to the spiritual concerns of the times.

Admittedly, a more sympathetic reading of Gadamers project is bothpossible and plausible. This is the one that Bernstein follows. In an illuminatingdiscussion he writes: Although the concept of truth is basic to Gadamersentire project of philosophical hermeneutics, it turns out to be one of the mostelusive concepts in his work. After all, a primary intention ofTruth and Methodis to elucidate and defend the legitimacy of speaking of the truth of works of

art, texts, and tradition. Gadamer tells us that it was not his aim to play offMethod against Truth, but rather to show that there is an entirely differentnotion of knowledge and truth which is not exhausted by the achievements ofscientific method and which is available through hermeneutic understanding(151).

If one chooses this reading of Gadamer which emphasizes the elucidation of adifferent conception of truth than the one prevalent in the Kantian-Cartesiantradition, however, it also follows that philosophical hermeneutics has to enterinto a serious exchange with the human and social sciences. For if there is anentirely different tradition of knowledge and truth, whose cognitive claims we

deem valid, then philosophys role cannot merely be uncovering the groundupon which these sciences rise. If we immunize philosophy as a metadisciplinefrom such interchanges, then the distinction between truth and meaningcollapses. If we want to keep this distinction, then the privileged status ofhermeneutics and its claim to universality is suspended, in the sense that ourfinal judgment on both issues can result from the give and take betweenphilosophy and the specialized sciences. Rorty wants to distinguish betweenhermeneutics as a method and as an attitude.18 I am suggesting thathermeneutics can only retain its claim to truth in so far as it is not merely anattitude but a method as well.

I owe this admittedly unusual way of distinguishing between truth andmeaning to Hannah Arendt, although her manner of differentiating betweenthem is epistemically questionable. Arendt goes back to Kants differentiationofVerstand from Vernunft. According to her, the intellect (Verstand ) desires tograsp what is given to the senses, but reason (Vernunft ) wishes to understand its


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meaning. Cognition, whose highest criterion is truth, derives that criterion fromthe world of appearances in which we take our bearings through senseperceptions, whose testimony is self-evident, that is, unshakeable by argumentand replaceable only by other evidence.19 Arendt here is developing a theory oftruth as correspondence that is unshakeable by argument and replaceable onlyby other evidence. This view, it seems to me, only holds of such epistemicbanalities as sensations, pains, and itches, but even in this domain of experienceintersubjective argumentation and validation plays a greater role than Arendtadmits. Nevertheless, it is Arendts attempt to elucidate the distinctionbetween Verstand and Vernunft that interests me here. Her point can becaptured in another way.

There are two traditional ways of conceptualizing the relationship betweenthe intellect and reason which we can associate with Kant and Hegelrespectively. According to Kant, reason asserts its rights against the under-standing by delimiting the bounds of sense beyond which knowledge shouldnot venture. Thought, which is reasons activity, rightfully pushes theunderstanding to its limits, in order to uncover another realm which ismeaningful even if it can be proven neither true or untrue. The regulativeIdeas of God, the soul and the world have this function. They enable us to thinkof an intelligent purpose that governs the whole, of our freedom as moralbeings, and of our dignity as creatures of a noumenal Kingdom of Ends.

Hegel rejects this Kantian distinction between understanding and reason,

knowledge and thought, truth and meaning. On his view, the Kantianepistemological project is hopelessly circular; it is futile to want to determinewhat one knows before one embarks upon the path to knowledge. The result ofHegels epistemological critique of Kant is the extension of the concept ofscience beyond the paradigmatic examples of Newtonian physics andEuclidian geometry. Hegel not only argues that Kants concept of science islimited, but maintains that the reference to experience cannot alone be the basisof science. Hegels own concept of a philosophical science is hopelesslyobscure. Ultimately, it seems to refer to a self-referential thought-process,claiming reflexivity, comprehensiveness and closure. If one danger of the

Kantian program, as Rorty rightly points out, is the positivist atrophy ofphilosophy, the greatest danger of Hegels program is the self-immunization ofphilosophy against the knowledge-claims of the sciences altogether.

Is there a third alternative that avoids both the positivistic atrophy ofphilosophy and its speculative self-immunization against the empirical world?Rorty suggests that since both alternatives are so obviously unacceptable, weshould reject them along with the pairs of dichotomies in which they have beenembedded. Gadamer carries on the spirit of the Hegelian critique of Verstandand of the specialized sciences, while rejecting the closure of the dialectic.Nevertheless, he shares with Hegel the sense of philosophy as the self-reflection

of thought upon its times. Habermas is suggesting a third alternative thatpreserves the distinction between truth/meaning, intellect/reason, knowledge/thought without eliminating philosophys role of self-reflection upon the times.

In the tradition of critical social theory, this role of philosophy betweenscience and reflection has been named critique.20 Critical social theory


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differs from the master discourse of epistemology, for its task is not to elucidatethe foundations and validity claims of the specialized sciences alone. Criticaltheory questions the activity of the sciences in two respects: first, it uncoversthe relation between the constitution of the object domains of the varioussciences and the life-context and interests out of which they arise (Enstehungs-zusammenhang). Second, critical inquiry analyzes the social context in whichthe knowledge produced by the sciences is put to use (Verwendungszusam-menhang). The purpose of both analyses is to render the sciences themselvesmore reflexive about the genesis and social validity of the knowledge theyproduce. The assumption, which critical theory proceeds from and whichRorty denies, is that there is a relationship between these two contexts. Themode in which a science theoretically conceptualizes the object domain and theinterests it serves are intimately related. Here critical theorists follow Marxscritique of political economy, which showed that the inability of classicalpolitical economy to think some concepts like value to their end was related tothe epistemic standpoint assumed by these theorists. Whether or not such ananalysis can be successfully carried out is, in my opinion, an open question.Rortys metatheoretical arguments, which often reveal little sensitivity for theinternal problems of theory-constitution in the social sciences,21 cannot settlethe issue. His sharp separation between the two questions Is it reallyscientific? and Is it emancipatory? is not an advance of the argument. Onemust be able to show in the case of concrete instances in the social sciences (and

maybe even in the natural sciences) that a theorist was not guided by certainkinds of implicit interests which in turn led to biased and, in the final analysis,unscientific assumptions, concepts, and theory constructions.

Critical social theory, precisely because it sensitizes the specialized sciencesto their contexts of genesis and application, also enters into a dialogue withthem. New modes of theoretical conceptualization, new categories andmethods of research are suggested. The best-known example in this respect isthe attempt by the Frankfurt School in the 1930s to synthesize psychoanalysis,political economy, sociology, cultural theory and philosophy into a researchprogram that could illuminate the character of the new social formation which

they named state capitalism. As a result of this research program, philo-sophical concepts like autonomy and freedom, for example, were given aconcrete, historical and social content. The implicit social-historical precondi-tions of the Kantian concept of autonomy as well as the implicit ego psychologyupon which it rested were thereby brought to light. The purpose ofHorkheimer and Adorno was to preserve autonomy as a norm even whileindicating the historical, sociological and psychological biases that Kantsinitial formulation contained. This model of interchange between philosophyand the sciences represents a genuine alternative to the positivist atrophy ofphilosophy on the one hand and its self-immunization against empirical reality

on the other. Unlike in positivism, in the tradition of critical social theory thetruth claims of the sciences are not accepted at face-value. Neither arephilosophical concepts, however, seen as expressions of eternal verities and oftimeless world-views. Such meaning-claims about the human condition aretested against the result of the sciences, while the implicit, unstated meaning-


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claims of the sciences themselves are brought to light. In this sense, the researchprogram of critical social theory still remains a live option for us.

Although Hannah Arendt herself was primarily concerned with the problemof meaning, and with the light that thought could throw upon the humancondition, in her actual practice she followed a collaboration betweenphilosophy and the sciences that is quite akin to the spirit of critical theory, evenif radically different in its substantive conclusions. Her work on The Origins of Totalitarianismgave an account of a period approaching its end by making usaware of a new form of political domination that had become possible in thetwentieth century. The fundamental concepts of Arendts work, like totalitar-ianism, the public space, and the much-disputed distinctions betweenlabor, work and action, or between the social and the political realms, are allhybrid concepts which combine the search for meaning with an empiricallyinformed social analysis. They all have a philosophical as well as an empiricalresearch-guiding value, as the many debates still surrounding her work attest.

Thus, Hannah Arendts writings, even if not her methodological self-reflections, point to that spirit of interchange between the search for meaningand the constraints of truth which I am claiming is also central to critical socialtheory. Rorty may also welcome this blurring of lines between discourses andthe emergence of abnormal discourse. Since, however, he sees no compellingcognitive issues either in the actual practice of, or in methodological reflectionupon, the sciences that should interest us in our capacity as philosophers, he

would questionas he frequently doesthe legitimacy of the whole enter-prise. The position of philosophical hermeneutics is admittedly ambivalent inthis respect. Gadamer, on the one hand, looks fondly upon the many attemptsto make hermeneutics relevant to the practice of the human and social sciences.On the other hand, in a personal communication to Bernstein, appended to thebook, he sides with Rorty against Habermas and writes: To this extent, I shareRortys criticism of Habermass claim to scientific status (263). Now I intendreally to begin reading Habermas and Rorty again; perhaps I can still getsomething into this old head. Admittedly, to make me into a sociologist issomething no one will succeed in doing, not even myself (265).

This disconcertingly charming admission diverts from the central problem,namely, how is one to evaluate the cogency of Gadamers various claims ontradition, authority, community, and solidarity? As Bernstein also observes,All of these tensions and problems come into sharp focus in Gadamerselucidation ofpraxisandphronesis. He has opened us to many questions that hedoes not adequately answer . . . if we turn our attention to the status of theshared principles and universals required for the exercise ofphronesis, . . . or tothe legitimate causal explanations that need to be confronted in seeking tounderstand and explain the dynamics, conflicts, and contradictions of contem-porary society . . . then we are led beyond philosophical hermeneutics (169).

IV

In the final section of his book entitled Beyond objectivism and Relativism:The Practical Task, Bernstein discusses the moral and political implications


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that follow from the metatheoretical debates on rationality. He claims that thecentral themes of dialogue, conversation undistorted communication, com-munal judgment (223) entail a practical-moral project, one that points to thecreation of communities where such virtues flourish. Bernstein sees acircularity in this vision, comparable to the hermeneutical circle (226). For thevery virtues that are to flourish in such communities are themselves presup-posed in order to bring them about. Social change, we may add, alwayspresupposes cultural as well as social resources that are embedded in thecollective memory and practice as well as the political culture of our societies.

Bernsteins use of the concept of community, which in English usage doesnot invoke the sharp distinction familiar in Continental sociology betweenGemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, raises some puzzles. Is the emphasis on thisconcept meant to suggest the abdication of general societal reform? Or is it thatthe nature of power relations have changed in such fashion in our societies thatwe have to focus on what Foucault has named micro-practices? In a strikingpassage that is compatible with both readings, but which seems to invokeFoucault indirectly, Bernstein writes: What we desperately need today is tolearn to think and act more like the fox than the hedgehogto seize upon thoseexperiences and struggles in which there are still the glimmerings of solidarityand the promise of dialogic communities in which there can be genuine mutualparticipation and where reciprocal wooing and persuasion can prevail. Forwhat is characteristic of our contemporary situation is not just the playing out of

powerful forces that are beyond our control, or the spread of disciplinarytechniques that always elude our grasp, but a paradoxical situation where powercreates counter-power (resistance) and reveals the vulnerability of power,where the very forces that undermine and inhibit communal life also createnew, and frequently unpredictable, forms of solidarity (228).

I think Bernstein would agree that the implications of this rich and suggestiveobservation cannot be dealt with at the level of metaphilosophical analysis hehas pursued in this work. Furthermore, I believe that not all of thephilosophical positions discussed by Bernstein would lead to a fruitful strategyfor thinking about the problems of our societies. At the level of concrete

normative social and political theory, the clash between Gadamers concept ofauthority and Arendts concept of participation and power, between Haber-mass insistence on formal, institutional norms of justice and Rortys Oakeshot-tian call for the growth of an analogue of civil virtuetolerance, irony, and awillingness to let spheres of culture flourish without worrying too much abouttheir common ground, their unification,22 would become visible.

As I was reading these final sections, a question kept recurring in my mind.Bernstein, in this section in particular, frequently employs phrases like Rortysvision is quite comparable to Gadamer and Habermas (204); all three areconcerned to show what is vital to the human project and to give a sense of what

dialogue, conversation, questioning, solidarity and community mean (206).Does this emphasis on vision and a common human project imply thatevery philosophy is ultimately aWeltanschauung, and that it is at this level thatphilosophical positions, like the various Gestalts of consciousness in HegelsPhenomenology, reveal their truth? They are each correct but somehow


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incomplete ways of looking at the world.Bernstein also uses another metaphor to describe his approach. This is not

vision but conversation. Gadamer, Habermas, Rorty, and Arendt can be readas different voices in a coherent conversation (181). In this sense, theexegetical logic ofBeyond Objectivism and Relativismcan be seen as illustratingthe new concept of rationality as practical, open discourse and communicationwhich the book expounds. Only, I suppose where Bernstein sees a commonvision or hears a coherent conversation, I have to look harder beyond thedifference to see the commonality; and where Bernstein like a superb maestrocoordinates all the strings into a harmonious quartet, I keep wondering whichstrings are out of tune. Hence my sense that philosophy is at present at thecrossroads, and that there are many but not equally desirable paths to befollowed. One point is clear, however, no one who is seriously concerned aboutwhere philosophical conversation on this side of the Atlantic in particular hasbeen going, and who wants to resist attempts to end philosophy, can ignoreBernsteins book and his elucidation of what is still possible and desirable for usas thinkers and as moral beings.

NOTES

1 G.W.F. Hegel, Hegels Philosophy of Right, trans. and with notes by T.M. Knox (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1952). Preface, p. 11.

2 Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press,

1979).3 Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, pp. 131 ff.4 Rorty, Pragmatism, Relativism, and Irrationalism, Proceedings and Addresses of the

American Philosophical Association53 (1980): 734.5 See Ernan McMullin, The Rational and the Social in the History of Science (forthcom-

ing), pp. 17-18.6 Cf. Anthony Giddens, Studies in Social and Political Theory(New York: Basic Books, 1977),

p. 12; most recently, J. Habermas, Interpretive Social Science vs. Hermeneuticism, inSocial Science as Moral Inquiry, ed. by Haan, Bellah, Rabinow and Sullivan (New York:Columbia University Press, 1983), pp. 251 ff.

7 Habermas, Interpretive Social Science vs. Hermeneuticism, p. 269.

8 Rorty, A Reply to Dreyfus and Tayior,Review of Metaphysics34 (September 1980): 39.9 Rorty, Method and Morality, in: Social Science as Moral Inquiry, pp. 164-165.

10 Richard J. Bernstein, The Restructuring of Social and Political Theory (Philadelphia:University of Pennsylvania Press, 1976), p. 221.

11 Bernstein,Restructuring Social and Political Theory, p. 227.12 Habermas, Interpretive Social Science vs. Hermeneuticism, p. 262.13 Ibid., p. 260; for an analysis where this transcendental claim is moderated, see Habermas,

The Theory of Communicative Action: Reason and the Rationalisation of Society, vol. 1, trans.by T.A. McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), pp. 2-3.

14 Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, pp. 328 ff.15 Bernstein addresses this issue. He writes: When it comes to the validation of claims to

truth, then the essential issue concerns the reasons and arguments that we can give tosupport such claimsreasons and arguments that are of course fallible and anticipatory, inthe sense that they can be challenged and criticized by future argumentation (BeyondObjectivism and Relativism, p. 154). In the rest of this passage, however, he borrows thephrase hammering out from Rorty, which is really too vague to help us clarify what to do


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when confronted with traditions, which have indeed been hammered out in history, butwhich nevertheless are not any less objectionable, i.e., patriarchy, racism, to name but a few.Cf. Bernstein: We judge and evaluate such claims by the standards and practices that have

been hammered out in the course of history (154).16 Rorty, Pragmatism, Relativism and Irrationalism, p. 726.17 Cf. Franz Borkenau, Der bergang vom feudalen zum brgerlichen Weltbild, European

Sociology Series (Ayer Co., 1974); A. Koyre, tudes Galilennes (Paris: Hermann, 1966);Edgar Zilsel, Die sozialen Ursprnge der neuzeitlichen Wissenschaft, ed. by W. Krohn(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1976); Dijksterhuis, The Mechanization of the World-Picture(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961).

18 Rorty, A Reply to Dreyfus and Taylor, p. 39.19 Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, vol. 1. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich,

1978), p. 57. Bernstein rightly criticizes Arendts concept of truth and particularly heremphatic distinction between truth and opinion, cf. p. 221. The pairs truth/opinion;

truth/meaning, are not equivalent however.20 Cf. Max Horkheimer, Traditional and Critical Theory (1937) in: Critical Theory, trans. by

Matthew J. OConnell and others (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972), pp. 188-244.21 Cf. the statement, Rather than repeating these, let me merely suggest that anthropologists

like Geertz, sociologists like Hughes and Reisman, psychologists like Erikson, andhistorians like Foucault, dont much care whether they are practicing an art or asciencewhether they are finding their way about or helping to discover essence byoffering a true theory, A Reply to Dreyfus and Taylor p. 45. Even if these theorists maynot be concerned with discovering essence, they certainly are concerned with offering a truetheory.

22 Rorty, Habermas and Lyotard on Post-Modernity, Praxis International 4, No. 1 (April1984): 38; for a critique of the political implications of Rortys position, see my Epistemologiesof Postmodernism: A Rejoinder to Jean Francois Lyotard,New German Critique, No. 33 (Fall1984), pp. 103-126.

3.9 - Benhabib, Seyla - Philosophy at the Crossroads (en)

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