Richard J. Bernstein and the Pragmatist Turn in Contemporary Philosophy

Rekindling Pragmatism's Fire

J. Green, J. Green, J. Green

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137352705
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Epistemology in Philosophy

Richard J. Bernstein, who has played a leading role in "the pragmatist turn" in contemporary philosophy, replies to twelve younger critics in a lively conversation about pragmatism's past, present, and future as a guiding paradigm for philosophy and related fields.

Part I

Contemporary Engagements with the Classical Pragmatists

1

Hegel and the Classical Pragmatists: Prolegomenon to a Future Discussion

Michael J. Baur

As Richard Bernstein has suggested, there is a very rich and interesting story to be told about how the classical pragmatists (Dewey, Peirce, and James) understood G. W. F. Hegel, made use of Hegel, and ultimately distanced themselves from Hegel. That story cannot be told here. Indeed, the story is so rich and complicated that even its beginnings cannot be told here. But what can be provided, perhaps, is a limited, though hopefully illuminating, perspective on a few salient aspects of the relationship between the classical pragmatists and Hegel. While the following reflections offer no definitive answers about this relationship, they might at least suggest some fruitful lines of enquiry for future discussion.

John Dewey

In a famous passage from his 1930 paper “From Absolutism to Experimentalism,” John Dewey acknowledged that Hegel had left a “permanent deposit” in his thinking.¹ Scholars have disagreed on just how deeply and widely that deposit ran through Dewey’s thought over the course of his life, but none have denied that Dewey’s initial philosophical leanings were directly influenced by Hegel’s philosophy. Indeed, Hegel’s system addressed a deep personal and pragmatic need that had animated Dewey’s earliest spiritual and intellectual strivings. For Dewey, Hegel’s boldly anti-dualistic and anti-Cartesian philosophy responded to

a demand for unification that was doubtless an intense emotional craving, and yet was a hunger that only an intellectualized subject-matter could satisfy ... . [T]he sense of divisions and separations that were, I suppose, borne in upon me as a consequence of a heritage of New England culture, divisions by way of isolation of self from world, of soul from body, of nature from God, brought a painful oppression – or, rather, they were an inward laceration ... . Hegel’s synthesis of subject and object, matter and spirit, the divine and the human, was ... no mere intellectual formula; it operated as an immense release, a liberation. Hegel’s treatment of human culture, of institutions and the arts, involved the same dissolution of hard-and-fast dividing walls, and had a special attraction for me.²

Not surprisingly, Dewey’s sensitivity about the practical consequences of philosophy – his sensitivity about philosophy’s implications for “human culture, institutions, and the arts” – led him to appreciate Hegel’s intolerance for empty, abstract theorizing that was devoid of relevance for human experience as lived. In a passage from his 1897 lecture on Hegel’s “Philosophy of Spirit,” Dewey praised Hegel for his keen attunement to the real or the actual:

Hegel was a great actualist. By this I mean that he has the greatest respect, both in his thought and in his practice, for what has actually amounted to something, actually succeeded in getting outward form. It was customary then, as now, to throw contempt upon the scientific, the artistic, the industrial and social life, as merely worldly in comparison with certain feelings and ideas which are regarded as specifically spiritual. Between these two, the secular, which after all is here and now, and the spiritual, which exists only in some far off region and which ought to be, Hegel had no difficulty in choosing. Hegel is never more hard in his speech, hard as steel is hard, than when dealing with mere ideals, vain opinions and sentiments which have not succeeded in connecting themselves with the actual world.³

According to some critics, Hegel’s rationalistic and speculative apriorism is clearly evidenced by his famous dictum (found in the “Preface” to his Philosophy of Right) that the actual is the rational and the rational is the actual. But Dewey made reference to this dictum in order to arrive at a rather contrary conclusion. Far from evidencing any kind of unrealistic, speculative rationalism, Dewey claims, Hegel’s dictum illustrates Hegel’s firm commitment to overcoming all versions (especially the Kantian version) of empty, abstract, aprioristic thinking. According to Dewey:

It was the work of Hegel to attempt to fill in the empty reason of Kant with the concrete contents of history ... . The outcome was the assertion that history is reason, and reason is history: the actual is the rational, the rational is the actual ... . [I]n intellectual and practical effect, it lifted the idea of process above that of fixed origins and fixed ends, and presented the social and moral order, as well as the intellectual, as a scene of becoming, and it located reason somewhere within the struggles of life.⁴

For Dewey, the point behind Hegel’s assertion of the identity of “the actual” and “the rational” was not to suggest that “the actual” should be conceived in terms of a fixed, unchanging, rational order, but – quite on the contrary – to suggest that “the actual,” with all of its concrete variety and changeability, provided the model for understanding just what is meant by “reason” or “the rational.” For Dewey, Hegel’s dictum announces the realistic insight that “the rational” is not conceivable in terms of an empty, abstract, formalistic subjective faculty, but is nothing other than the dynamism which permeates the concrete “struggles of life” and the actual “scene of becoming.” Far from being a hopelessly rationalistic “pure” cogitator, Dewey believed, Hegel represented the very “quintessence of the scientific spirit.”⁵ Hegel quite correctly “denies not only the possibility of getting truth out of a formal, apart thought, but he denies the existence of any faculty of thought which is other than the expression of fact itself.”⁶

Dewey had a great deal of respect for Hegel’s resistance to all forms of philosophical dualism and for his correlative denial that there can be a pure “faculty of thought belonging to and operated by a mind existing separate from the outer world.”⁷ Nevertheless, Dewey did have some worries about Hegel. These worries, connected to Dewey’s deep sensitivity about the concrete practical consequences of philosophy, were forcefully expressed in his 1915 work German Philosophy and Politics. In this work, Dewey repeats his observation that Hegel’s assertion of the identity of the rational and the actual is not the assertion of an unrealistic, rationalist, idealist philosopher. On the contrary, Dewey declared, “Hegel is the greatest realist known to philosophy.”⁸ What caused Dewey to worry, however, was what he regarded as an authoritarian and nationalistic streak in Hegel’s thought. While the younger, more liberal Hegel had a healthy respect for individuality, this respect eventually gave way (in Hegel’s later work) “to the need of subordinating the individual to the established state in order to check the disintegrating tendencies of liberalism.”⁹ The mature Hegelian system, therefore, reflects a certain tendency towards “disregarding” and “depreciating” the individual as an individual.¹⁰ Worse still, Dewey claimed, Hegel’s depreciation of the individual is bound up with a favorable attitude towards nationalism, which – in turn – lends support to a pernicious penchant for militarism and bellicosity. For Dewey, “Philosophical justification of war follows inevitably from a philosophy of history composed in nationalistic terms. History is the movement, the march of God on earth through time ... . War is explicit realization of ‘dialectic,’ of the negation by which a higher synthesis of reason is assured.”¹¹

Charles Sanders Peirce

Even a cursory glance over the work of Hegel and Charles S. Peirce will reveal that the two thinkers share a great deal in common. Both emphasized the evolutionary or dynamic character of all reality; both were critical of epistemologies which relied on what (thanks to the work of Wilfrid Sellars) has come to be known as the “myth of the given”; both rejected the Kantian notion that an unknowable thing-in-itself can play a constitutive role in our cognitions; and both saw the need to develop an objective set of categories which pertained not just to our subjective thoughts about reality, but to concrete reality itself. And yet Peirce was also a severe critic of Hegel. Some of his most direct, and revealing, criticisms of Hegel can be found in the second and third of his seven “Harvard Lectures on Pragmatism,” delivered in 1903 (the second lecture is published under the title, “On Phenomenology,” and the third is published under the title of “The Categories Defended”). In these two lectures, Peirce discusses what he calls “the Universal, or Short List of Categories,” and from the outset he makes note of the fact that he regards Hegel’s own “three stages” of categorical determination as “the correct list of Universal Categories.”¹² Nevertheless, he explicitly denies that Hegel’s account of the categories could have influenced his own thinking, either directly or indirectly; for according to Peirce, “I reached the same result as [Hegel] did by a process as unlike his as possible, at a time when my attitude toward him was rather one of contempt than of awe ... .”¹³

The “short list” that Peirce discusses in these lectures is the list of three categories that would later become known as the categories of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness (Peirce does not make use of this terminology in his second lecture, but introduces it in his third lecture). Peirce speaks of the first category (Firstness) in terms of “presentness,” “immediacy,” and the “quality of feeling”; he speaks of the second category (Secondness) in terms of “struggle,” “reaction,” and “resistance” (as when you “press with all your might against a half-open door,” or “when a man carrying a ladder suddenly pokes you violently with it in the back of the head”¹⁴); and he speaks of the third category (Thirdness) in terms of “representation,” “learning,” and “lawfulness,” making the further observation that “no modern writer of any stripe, unless it be some obscure student like myself, has ever done [this third category] anything approaching to justice.”¹⁵

Peirce argues that Hegel’s thought regarding each of these three categories is wanting in some crucial way. But the fundamental failing of Hegel’s thinking in ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Introduction
• Prelude to a Critical Conversation with Fellow Pragmatists
• 1 Hegel and the Classical Pragmatists: Prolegomenon to a Future Discussion
• Richard J. Bernstein’s Response
• 2 The Inferences That Never Were: Peirce, Perception, and Bernstein’s The Pragmatic Turn
• Richard J. Bernstein’s Response
• 3 Peirce’s Theory of Truth and Fallibilism
• Richard J. Bernstein’s Response
• 4 Bernstein’s Deployment of Jamesian Democratic Pluralism: The Pragmatic Turn and the Future of Philosophy
• Richard J. Bernstein’s Response
• 5 The Turn within the Pragmatic Turn: Recovering Bernstein’s Democratic Dewey
• Richard J. Bernstein’s Response
• 6 Dewey as a Radical Democrat and a Liberal Democrat: Considerations on Bernstein on Dewey
• Richard J. Bernstein’s Response
• 7 Democratic Community Participation: Bernstein between Dewey and an Achieved Deeply Democratic Future
• Richard J. Bernstein’s Response
• 8 Ideals after the “Pragmatic Turn”
• Richard J. Bernstein’s Response
• 9 Abstract Objectivity: Richard J. Bernstein’s Critique of Hilary Putnam
• Richard J. Bernstein’s Response
• 10 Pragmatism’s Constructive Project
• Richard J. Bernstein’s Response
• 11 Truth, Objectivity, and Experience after the Pragmatic Turn: Bernstein on Habermas’s “Kantian Pragmatism”
• Richard J. Bernstein’s Response
• 12 Now What? Richard J. Bernstein and Philosophy after Rorty
• Richard J. Bernstein’s Response
• Index