Actualizing Bernstein's Pragmatist Vision: Philosophy's Role in Shaping a Deeply Democratic Future

As Tara Mastrelli, Richard J. Bernstein's teaching assistant for his American Pragmatism seminar, tells the story of his final months, he was teaching his course on American Pragmatism at the New School for the last time while imagining an essay on “Pragmatism Reconsidered,” that he ran out of time to write. In this unwritten essay, Mastrelli reports, Bernstein planned to call for three mid-course shifts in contemporary pragmatists’ understanding of our past, present, and future that would steer us away from essentializing the characteristics of our diverse river of thinking, away from canonizing a short list of founders that excludes the diverse college-educated women and Black men who helped to launch the pragmatist movement, and toward John Dewey's kind of critical and reconstructive focus on transforming America's institutions, its dominant underlying culture, and its shared habits of living into those of “democracy as a way of life.” As Mastrelli suggests, actualizing Bernstein's vision of pragmatism's future requires going beyond defending its place in the academy, as an important philosophical tradition among others, to revitalizing pragmatism's role as an active, decentralized movement of metaphilosophical web-weavers, interdisciplinary liaisons, and effective critical and creative collaborators within public-inclusive, world-changing social movements toward deep democracy, from which the “pragmatist team” embedded within these various movements continuously learns in its ongoing process of theoretical and practical evolution. In this essay, I aim to sketch why Bernstein's first two mid-course corrections in how pragmatist philosophers understand our history and the requirements of our calling are necessary constituents of his third mid-course correction, which goes beyond thinking critically about the complex eco-social problems and intertwined crises that now trouble our world, to becoming active participants in world-changing projects to actualize deep democracy. Then I aim to show that the work of our pragmatist team of philosophers, in which each of us plays differing roles, includes fresh metaphilosophical, theoretical, and practical thinking, well-warranted by the contemporary sciences, recent experiences, and the findings of transformative problem-solving inquiries, about (1) who we are as human persons, (2) why we must critically revise the values, customs, and life-guiding narratives of our diverse underlying cultures, (3) why our individual attitudes and interests matter, and (4) why and how we must reconstruct democratically deficient eco-social institutions and systems into sources of active support and guidance for deeply democratic living.Bernstein's copious writings make clear why actualizing what I call “deep democracy” requires changing how philosophers, scholars in many other disciplines, and countless “everyday people” in modern societies now think about each of these matters, if we are to change how we live as socially situated and culture-imbued individuals, families, communities, organizations, nations, and participants at all levels in complex relationships within Earth's living whole.1 The breadth and depth of this local-and-global project of actualizing deep democracy show why the pragmatist philosophical team must include a wide range of thinkers who actively contribute to genealogical, critical, and reconstructive projects in differing ways while competently collaborating both with scholars in various scientific and humanities disciplines and with members of diverse “publics” within practical change projects that we help to guide, and whose outcomes we “map” and analyze as context-specific, problem-resolving experimental findings that may have more general meanings and implications for wider changes. None of us has time and gifts enough for doing all of these kinds of philosophical work well. Nor is there some central epistemic position from which our “team leaders” can comprehensively survey all of the fields in which our work for deep democracy is already going on, as well as those fields in which it is needed, and on that basis. Therefore, we should prioritize these areas and assign each of us to those projects that most need our efforts.We do, of course, have team leaders—Bernstein was one of our great ones. He helped to shape interdisciplinary and cross-tradition collaborations that have had valuable impacts, helping to make space within contemporary philosophy for pragmatists, critical theorists, and feminists, leaving us a treasure trove of books and essays, and giving wise guidance to many students and younger colleagues, including me. For example, in a Festschrift for Bernstein's seventieth birthday, Pragmatism, Critique, Judgment: Essays for Richard J. Bernstein, Seyla Benhabib and Nancy Fraser drew together essays by fifteen influential thinkers—including Richard Rorty, Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, Agnes Heller, Thomas McCarthy, Jacques Derrida, themselves, and others—whose philosophical work Bernstein had influenced (and been influenced by) within collaborative, boundary-crossing efforts to foster democratic philosophical work, including during the years and in places where authoritarian regimes in central and eastern Europe made doing this work difficult and even dangerous for those who lived there.My own relationship with Dick Bernstein grew through the New York Pragmatist Forum, which I co-founded, and also through doctoral committees at the New School, which he invited me to serve on as Reader, through a graduate student conference there at which I served as a keynote speaker, through international conferences in Iceland and China at which we both were invited participants, and through keynote panels at two Annual Meetings of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy on which we both served. Bernstein's important book, The Pragmatic Turn, was the focus of a chapter-by-chapter critique by a panel of younger scholars at the New York Pragmatist Forum, at which he generously responded to each and which became Richard J. Bernstein and the Pragmatist Turn in Contemporary Philosophy: Rekindling Pragmatism's Fire (Green), which I had the honor of editing. In turn, Bernstein's tough critical comments on my keynote presentation at the New School, in combination with his affirmation that “Judith is onto something—we must work on institutions, not just individual choices,” confirmed my dedication to the long-term project of writing Pragmatist Political Economy: Deep Democracy, Eco-Social Justice, Positive Peace, which I recently submitted for publication. The important thing to note about the kind of leadership that Bernstein practiced with me, as with Benhabib, with Fraser, and with many others, is this: he encouraged my efforts and offered me criticism, intellectual resources, and practical support, without trying to convert me to his perspective or to co-opt me into working on his projects. Nonetheless, a humbling but happy experience for me has always been finding Bernstein's footprints ahead of me on the long trail toward deep democracy.Like Richard Bernstein, I find that circling back to Dewey's large body of essays and books that emerged over the course of his long life helps me to clarify my thinking and my philosophical calling in a “downstream” era that carries forward many of the new experiences, great achievements, unresolved conflicts, and profound injustices of Dewey's later years, the first half of the twentieth century. Thus, like Bernstein, I find myself drawing on and quoting Dewey's later works in helping others to wrestle with eco-social issues and human needs of our own twenty-first-century times. Although both of us have been described as “Dewey scholars,” neither of us has been Dewey's disciple. Rather, both of us have valued Dewey's wise leadership, his still-valuable insights, and his prototypes of many intellectual, organizational, institutional, and teaching “tools” we have to as within the project of actualizing deep democracy, while that our own work, like the of many other include thinkers of the and who are to or by those who focus on and an of and pragmatist philosophers of the and in some to important into an of that a of necessary and for pragmatist and I at in Pragmatist Political that this way of thinking about how the pragmatist movement emerged is it out the influential theoretical and practical of diverse college-educated Black and in other the it critical to American thinking and metaphilosophical that American philosophers had long and first with The thinking is in its contemporary it to or to diverse who can the pragmatist movement and the project of deep democracy some of the we need now to and clear like we must diverse and we find while as he valued and 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As Nancy Fraser change democratic to more and in that can at for a more and through and institutions, while working to change the and practical outcomes of these to change how these institutions are and to change who has to and was the for effective of the American during the years of leadership, in with the which more a of as democratic institutions and systems that support and guidance from deeply democratic who are effective in and and outcomes of and institutions that can that the the institutions, and diverse attitudes of its must or within of change is even all change about deeply democratic institutional, and requires for and and shared and leadership, and the active of countless diverse to a more deeply democratic way of is to on our pragmatist our contemporary our within transformative inquiries, and our collaborating creative to find the that can help us to in transforming our institutions and both in the and in other into more and deeply democratic institutions, the of in the who are to shape even the first of own democratic and Bernstein have the of is not Rather, it a of culture-imbued values, shared habits and institutions that include but and eco-social systems for and for sources of and practical Nor a and the and practical of a democracy Rather, these and change over time as a to or including for by those to this has been for support for necessary and of for human and from those who for to its and this is a for or are to a of by of shared social meanings can even it as a and as a way of life in and as recent have in can and can out and to serve and In a “deep democracy” in shared attitudes and interests as well as shared and its with guidance from continuously democratic values, as well as new and new that a long all of us and our need now is and and that are and to and eco-social as well as institutions, and eco-social and of our and of us can help to to and to through and and and members of social movements and and diverse who to the of and to to a life of toward a future in which and all the live long and of deep democracy is an experimental can that our efforts and we may have to change course many it is a life for those of us who the of deeply democratic values, who to our and in the of and who that neither democracy can great like Bernstein, and others with and from show those of us who that in of a democracy the has may our great while we new and find and within the