Beyond Objectivism and Relativism

Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis

Richard J. Bernstein

• Editore: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Anno: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780812205503
• Argomento: Filosofía
• Categoria: Metafísica filosófica

Drawing freely and expertly from Continental and analytic traditions, Richard Bernstein examines a number of debates and controversies exemplified in the works of Gadamer, Habermas, Rorty, and Arendt. He argues that a "new conversation" is emerging about human rationality—a new understanding that emphasizes its practical character and has important ramifications both for thought and action.

PART ONE
BEYOND OBJECTIVISM
AND RELATIVISM:
AN OVERVIEW

I think that Aristotle was profoundly right in holding that ethics is concerned with how to live and with human happiness, and also profoundly right in holding that this sort of knowledge (“practical knowledge”) is different from theoretical knowledge. A view of knowledge that acknowledges that the sphere of knowledge is wider than the sphere of “science” seems to me to be a cultural necessity if we are to arrive at a sane and human view of ourselves or of science.

Hilary Putnam, Meaning and the Moral Sciences

THERE is an uneasiness that has spread throughout intellectual and cultural life. It affects almost every discipline and every aspect of our lives. This uneasiness is expressed by the opposition between objectivism and relativism, but there are a variety of other contrasts that indicate the same underlying anxiety: rationality versus irrationality, objectivity versus subjectivity, realism versus antirealism. Contemporary thinking has moved between these and other, related extremes. Even the attempts that some have made to break out of this framework of thinking have all too frequently been assimilated to these standard oppositions.

There are, however, many signs that the deep assumptions, commitments, and metaphors that have shaped these oppositions, and from which they gain their seductive power, are being called into question. For along with the disquietude that is provoked by these extremes, there is a growing sense that something is wrong with the ways in which the relevant issues and options are posed—a sense that something is happening that is changing the categorial structure and patterns within which we think and act—a sense that we have an urgent need to move beyond objectivism and relativism.

My purpose in this study is to probe this complex phenomenon, to clarify what is happening, to indicate what is wrong with the intellectual and cultural matrix that has shaped so much of modern life, to show why traditional oppositions are breaking down, what new directions are emerging, and what is the evidence for and the meaning of the move beyond objectivism and relativism. Specifically, I intend to examine a number of debates and controversies that have broken out recently among philosophers. While at first glance the debates may appear to have very different subjects and emphases, all of them, in essence, have a single concern and focus: to determine the nature and scope of human rationality.

A new conversation is now emerging among philosophers—a conversation about human rationality—and as a result of this dialogue we are beginning to gain a new understanding of rationality that has important ramifications for both theoretical and practical life. A true “conversation”—which is not to be confused with idle chatter or a violent babble of competing voices—is an extended and open dialogue which presupposes a background of intersubjective agreements and a tacit sense of relevance. There may be different emphases and stresses by participants in a conversation, and in a living conversation there is always unpredictability and novelty. The contours of the conversation about human rationality, especially as it pertains to science, hermeneutics, and praxis, have recently taken on a new and exciting shape. I want not only to reveal the common themes of this dialogue—the shared assumptions, commitments, and insights—but also to do justice to the different individual voices and emphases within it.

From a manifest perspective, many contemporary debates are still structured within traditional extremes. There is still an underlying belief that in the final analysis the only viable alternatives open to us are either some form of objectivism, foundationalism, ultimate grounding of knowledge, science, philosophy, and language or that we are ineluctably led to relativism, skepticism, historicism, and nihilism. Whether we focus on the origins of analytic philosophy or phenomenology, there was an earlier period of intellectual confidence and optimism, a conviction that we had finally discovered the secure path for philosophy, the right “method” for making genuine intellectual progress, for turning philosophy into a discipline that would yield knowledge (epistēmē), instead of being the endless battleground for competing and shifting opinions (doxai). In this respect the differences between such central figures as Russell and Husserl are less significant than what they shared. Both were at one time convinced that the “real” foundation or ground of philosophy had been discovered and that the methods and procedures for seriously advancing philosophic inquiry were at hand. The fact that such claims had been made over and over again in the past—and have become a persistent theme since the time of Descartes—was taken not as evidence for the dubiousness of the project of grounding philosophy but rather as a sign of the “scandal” of philosophy that demanded resolution. But as we follow the internal development in the twentieth century of both Anglo-American and continental philosophy, we can detect increasing doubts about the project of grounding philosophy, knowledge, and language.

The movement from confidence to skepticism about foundations, methods, and rational criteria of evaluation has not been limited to philosophy. The confusion and uncertainty in philosophy exhibits and reflects a phenomenon that is characteristic of our intellectual and cultural life. In the entire range of the human and social sciences, we have witnessed the playing out of bold attempts to secure foundations and the elaborations of new methods that promise genuine knowledge, followed by a questioning that reveals cracks and crevices in what had been taken to be solid and secure. There seems to be almost a rush to embrace various forms of relativism. Whether we reflect on the nature of science, or alien societies, or different historical epochs, or sacred and literary texts, we hear voices telling us that there are no hard “facts of the matter” and that almost “anything goes.” Whether we focus on such cherished subjects in philosophy as rationality, truth, knowledge, reality, or norms, we seem to be confronted with incommensurable paradigms, theories, conceptual schemes, or forms of life. We have been told that it is an illusion and a deep self-deception to think that there is some overarching framework, some neutral descriptive language, some permanent standards of rationality to which we can appeal in order to understand and critically evaluate the competing claims that are made, and that we are limited to our historical context and to our own social practices. The dream or hope that many philosophers have had—to grasp the world sub species aeternitatus—is, we are told, a deceiving illusion that leads to dogmatism and even terror.

The problem is not just an intellectual one, nor is it restricted to parochial disputes about the meaning and scope of rationality. At issue are some of the most perplexing questions concerning human beings: what we are, what we can know, what norms ought to bind us, what are the grounds for hope. The malaise penetrates our everyday moral, social, and political experiences. The fashionable varieties of relativism that are spreading everywhere frequently lead to cynicism and a growing sense of impotence. The recent celebration of relativistic doctrines and the enthusiasm for an endless playfulness of interpretation that knows no limits has already elicited a strong reaction. It has been argued that regardless of the many errors of those who have been wedded to the concept of representation, the correspondence theory of truth, the doctrine that the function of the mind is to mirror nature, we cannot avoid the “primordial intuition” that there is a world that is independent of our beliefs and fancies that forces itself upon us willy-nilly and constrains what we can think, say, and do.¹

Confusion is compounded not only by the complexity of the issues involved and the shifting meanings of such key concepts as rationality, objectivity, realism, and norms but by the different fundamental attitudes of philosophers toward opposing positions. Consider, for example, Karl Popper’s horror at what he takes to be the rampant growth of subjectivism and relativism today. According to Popper, this is not simply an innocent epistemological deviation but an error that opens the floodgates to irrationalism and fanaticism.² Contrast this attitude with that of Paul Feyerabend, who at one time was intellectually quite close to Popper but has now turned against Popper and the “gang” of critical rationalists. Feyerabend gleefully champions “irrationality” against the type of rationality defended by critical rationalists. He claims that if one applies the standards of Popper and his followers one is forced to conclude that science itself is a thoroughly irrational discipline—and ought to be. In his recent work, Feyerabend, in ever more imaginative and wild ways, seeks to question and mock science itself and the role that it plays in our lives.³

At the heart of Popper’s apology for “objective knowledge” is a practical-moral concern that informs all of his work and rhetoric. But this is also true of Feyerabend. These competing practical-moral concerns, which reflect Popper’s and Feyerabend’s different assessments of what is taking place in the contemporary world, are far more significant than many of the technical and professional issues that divide them. Popper thinks of himself as the public defender of the “open” society, which is being threatened. He is against all forms of dogmatism, irrationalism, and fanaticism. But Feyerabend accuses Popper and those sympathetic with his doctrines of being caught in a dangerous illusion. Popper’s thinking, in Feyerabend’s view, ultimately leads to further closure and fixity, to a new, masked form of dogmatism that is the enemy of human freedom, spontaneity, and creativity. Feyerabend ridicules and seeks to undermine the “puritanical seriousness” represented by Popper. The opposition between Popper and Feyerabend, especially in what I have called their practical-moral orientations, is an extreme example of a typical contrast that occurs in a variety of different contexts and domains of discourse. (Compare the style and content of Feyerabend’s attack on “method” and “rationality” with Jacques Derrida’s punning assaults on the “metaphysics of presence.”)

Many professional philosophers, while they are critical of Popper and regard Feyerabend as irresponsible, nevertheless share the basic conviction of Descartes, Kant, Husserl, the early logical positivists, and indeed most modern philosophers, that philosophy has now finally discovered its “proper object” and the right way of going about solving philosophic problems. Michael Dummett, a leading (some would say the leading) British philosopher of our time has recently claimed:

Only with Frege was the proper object of philosophy finally established: namely, first, that the goal of philosophy is the analysis of the structure of thought; secondly, that the study of thought is to be sharply distinguished from the study of the psychological process of thinking; and, finally, that the only proper method for analysing thought consists in the analysis of language. . . . The acceptance of these three tenets is common to the entire analytical school . . . [but] it has taken nearly a half-century since his death for us to apprehend clearly what the real task of philosophy, as conceived by him, involves.

I know that it is reasonable to greet all such claims with scepticism, since they have been made many times before in the history of philosophy. Just because the scandal caused by philosophy’s lack of a systematic methodology has persisted for so long, it has been a constant preoccupation of philosophers to remedy that lack, and a repeated illusion that they had succeeded in doing so. Husserl believed passionately that he at last held the key which would unlock every philosophical door; the disciples of Kant ascribed to him the achievement of devising a correct philosophical methodology; Spinoza believed that he was doing for philosophy what Euclid had done for geome try; and, before him, Descartes supposed that he had uncovered the one and only proper philosophical method. I have mentioned only a few of many examples of this illusion; for any outsider to philosophy, by far the safest bet would be that I was suffering from a similar illusion in making the same claim for Frege. To this I can offer only the banal reply which any prophet has to make to any sceptic: time will tell.⁴

But it is not only “outsiders” to philosophy who are skeptical. Such an insider as Richard Rorty has recently argued that the real scandal of philosophy is that we are still taken in and mesmerized by the very conception of philosophy that Dummett embraces. We still assume that there is such a thing as the “proper object” of philosophy; that philosophy identifies philosophic problems that are to be solved once and for all; and that there is “a systematic methodology” for doing this. According to Rorty, if we really want to overcome the scandal caused by “philosophy’s lack of a systematic methodology,” then what is needed is a form of philosophic therapy that will rid us of the illusion and the self-deception that philosophy is or can be the foundational discipline of culture. We need to abandon the very idea that philosophy is a form of inquiry that knows something about knowing, language, or thought that nobody else knows, and frankly admit that at its best, philosophy is just another voice in the conversation of mankind.

In contrast to Dummett’s claims about the significance of Frege, Rorty interprets our contemporary situation in a radically different manner. According to Rorty, the three most important philosophers of the twentieth century are Dewey, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger. Rorty makes this claim for their importance precisely because they have helped us to overcome the very conception of philosophy that Dummett and so many professional philosophers accept.

Each tried, in his early years, to find a new way of making philosophy “foundational”—a new way of formulating an ultimate context for thought. Wittgenstein tried to construct a new theory of representation which would have nothing to do with mentalism, Heidegger to construct a new set of philosophical categories which would have nothing to do with science, epistemology, or the Cartesian quest for certainty, and Dewey to construct a naturalized version of Hegel’s vision of history. Each of the three came to see his earlier effort as self-deceptive, as an attempt to retain a certain conception of philosophy after the notions needed to flesh out that conception (the seventeenth-century notions of knowledge and mind) had been discarded. Each of the three, in his later work, broke free of the Kantian conception of philosophy as foundational, and spent his time warning us against those very temptations to which he himself had once succumbed. Thus their later work is therapeutic rather than constructive, edifying rather than systematic, designed to make the reader question his own motives for philosophizing.⁵

While Dummett likens himself to a prophet who will be vindicated by future developments, from Rorty’s perspective he looks more like an arch reactionary who is desperately trying to hold on to what has been discredited and ought to be abandoned. The contrast between Dummett’s and Rorty’s views indicates not only the most divergent and antithetical understandings of the accomplishment of modern and recent analytic philosophy but of the self-understanding of philosophy itself.

The type of opposition represented by the contrast between Popper and Feyerabend is not localized to any school of philosophy, or even to philosophy itself; the same is true of the antithesis between Dummett and Rorty. The repeated stress on these oppositions, and the swinging back and forth of the pendulum of philosophic debate in relation to them, suggests that there is a different and more penetrating interpretation of what is happening in philosophy and more generally in the range of the cultural disciplines. Like Rorty, I think we are coming to the end—the playing out—of an intellectual tradition (Rorty calls it the “Cartesian–Lockean–Kantian tradition”). But I also think Rorty misses what is now in the process of emerging.⁶ When we think and work through the most significant contemporary philosophic debates, we will discover that views which initially seem fragmentary, conflicting, and even contradictory ultimately converge and cohere. I do not want to make exaggerated claims for somethi...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part One Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: An Overview
• Part Two Science, Rationality, and Incommensurability
• Part Three From Hermeneutics to Praxis
• Part Four Praxis, Practical Discourse, and Judgment
• Notes
• Appendix: A Letter by Professor Hans-Georg Gadamer
• Bibliography
• Subject Index
• Index of Names