A New School Pragmatist

in 1984, ira katznelson, the american political scientist and historian, and Dean of the Graduate Faculty at the time, asked Richard J. Bernstein to join a very special “Enabling Committee” that had the mission to save and rebuild the Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science at the New School. For Bernstein, the invitation became the opportunity to honor the friendship he had with Hannah Arendt, who in the last conversation they had together in the Spring of 1975, just months before she died, kept coming back to the same theme: the uncertain fate of the New School. It was Arendt who initially invited Bernstein to the New School in 1972 with the hope of recruiting him to the Graduate Faculty. The faculty and students, however, didn't reach consensus and ultimately decided against going forward with the offer, a decision that Arendt explained with her characteristic wit in a letter to Bernstein: I don't think that the opposition is due to Byzantine intrigues—if there were intrigues, they certainly weren't Byzantine. The reason as I see it is very simple. I just reread your book Praxis and Action, which I also use for a discussion of Marx in the seminar and I was again struck by the freshness and originality of your thought. The first reaction of the academic milieu to somebody who quite obviously strikes out on his own is always negative, and a number of our doctoral students are already quite fixed in their thought habits, and react the same way as the faculty. I must say that I find this only natural. One shouldn't get bitter about it and one should not acquire persecution complexes. All academic thinking, whether right, left or middle, is conservative in the extreme. Nobody wants to hear what he hasn't heard before. (Arendt)Two decades later, the New School realized they needed someone like Bernstein to rebuild the Graduate Faculty, a pragmatist who represented the best of the American philosophical tradition, not only in terms of theoretical skill or technical dexterity, but in the sense of embodying an ethos, a way of life characterized by a very specific set of virtues. If Bernstein's pragmatism is unique, it is so in a very special sense, closer in spirit to that “subterranean tradition of philosophy” (Bernstein, Ironic Life 105) that first emerged in the late fourth century BCE with the various Hellenistic schools and whose purpose was to make a difference in how we live our lives. To see Bernstein's work in the context of his life, his philosophy as a reflection and outcome of experience rather than as the result of detached intellectual gymnastics, is the purpose of this paper. In particular, I am interested in the way New York City shaped Bernstein's own version of pragmatism with its commitment to pluralism, openness, and the dialogical ethos.In his famous lectures on pragmatism, William James argues that pragmatism, as he understands it (all backwards, according to Peirce), is not a philosophical doctrine or set of theses but something like an attitude, an ethos. There is nothing particularly new, he claims, about the pragmatic orientation: “Socrates was an adept at it. Aristotle used it methodically. Locke, Berkeley, and Hume made momentous contributions to truth by its means” (James 379). What characterizes the pragmatic ethos is its commitment to the facticity of human existence, the way it “turns way from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins” (James 379). Bernstein approvingly quotes Hilary Putnam when he claims that the key concerns of pragmatism are (1) fallibilism, (2) anti-skepticism, and (3) the dissolution of the fact/value dichotomy. Yet this overview of the pragmatic “way of thinking,” despite its perceptiveness and explanatory value, is still too stiff and academic to really capture the nuances of what is, above everything else, an ethical and existential standpoint. What we need is a real-life model, and who better than Bernstein to flesh out the traits of a genuine pragmatist?Is a pragmatist born or made? The answer seems to be simple enough: if pragmatism is truly an ethos, then we must follow Aristotle, Hegel, and Dewey in saying that for a man to be virtuous, he has to be shaped by the practices of a community and acquire a second nature. Judith Friedlander, author of A Light in Dark Times: The New School for Social Research and Its University in Exile, has called Bernstein a “New York Philosopher,” and she is absolutely right (Friedlander). Bernstein is a creature of the city, not in the sense of inhabiting it (although that is obviously true), but in the richer sense of embodying the spirit of the Capital of the World—“unruly, musical, self-sufficient,” as Walt Whitman immortalized it in his poem “Mannahatta.” Bernstein's pragmatism began to take shape well before he joined a small study group at Yale to discuss Dewey's Experience and Nature in the 1950s, or even before he attended the University of Chicago with such illustrious colleagues as Richard Rorty, Susan Sontag, and Philip Roth. His peculiar sensibility was initially molded not by Peirce's seminal essays or James's lectures on pragmatism but by his experience as a child in Borough Park, growing up as the youngest of three children in a second-generation Jewish immigrant family that struggled to have their piece of the American Dream, working hard and giving back to the community, making sure the kids would have the best education possible. As he recalls it, “growing up in New York was an exciting experience; it was an optimistic time—a time when many of us had a deep conviction that somehow we could make a significant difference in shaping a better America and a better world” (Bernstein, Ironic Life 18). When not in school, young Bernstein would spend his time helping his father at the furniture store and dreaming about the day when the Brooklyn Dodgers would finally win the World Series, which eventually happened in 1955 when they beat their archrivals, the New York Yankees.New York kids are quite special: young pioneers of urban life, the street is their playground, and they soon become fiercely independent and adaptable. In “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids,” Richard Rorty describes how at age 12, he would work as an unpaid office boy carrying drafts of press releases from the Workers’ Defense League office off Gramercy Park to the Brotherhood of Pullman Car Porters office on 125th Street. He would ride the subway by himself, reading the documents he was carrying, mostly about workers’ struggles and corporate oppression, a lesson in social justice. If Rorty sought refuge from the world in the 42nd Street Public Library and its rare collection of nineteenth-century volumes on the botany of the orchids of the eastern United States, Bernstein took it to the streets, running errands for his large extended family and working in a bakery in his last year of high school, a job he treasured, not because of the 75 cents an hour he earned, but because he got to take home baked goods at the end of the day. While Rorty was reinforcing his inner fortress, nourishing his “private, weird, snobbish, incommunicable interests” (Rorty 6), Bernstein immersed himself in the noise and turmoil of diversity, becoming a pluralist in the process. New York, as E. B. White famously put it, is like poetry: it compresses all life, all races and breeds, into a small island and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines. The island of Manhattan is without any doubt the greatest human concentrate on earth, the poem whose magic is comprehensible to millions of permanent residents but whose full meaning will always remain elusive. . . . The collision and the intermingling of these millions of foreign-born people representing so many races and creeds make New York a permanent exhibit of the phenomenon of one world. The citizens of New York are tolerant not only from disposition but from necessity. The city has to be tolerant, otherwise it would explode in a radioactive cloud of hate and rancor and bigotry. If the people were to depart even briefly from the peace of cosmopolitan intercourse, the town would blow up higher than a kite. (White 29, 47)By the time he went off to college in Chicago, Bernstein had already learned a lesson in life that would prove definitive for his later philosophical outlook, shaping his sensibility in a direction that attuned him to pragmatism and the dialogic spirit that would eventually distinguish his whole philosophical outlook. We are talking here about temperament, the emotional character or state of mind that is expressed in behavior, a particular constituent of human experience that intrigued William James, who in “The Present Dilemma of Philosophy,” laid out a fascinating typology of philosophical temperaments, divided in two main camps, the tender-minded and the tough-minded. Tender-minded philosophers are rationalistic, intellectualistic, idealistic, optimistic, religious, free-willist, monistic, and dogmatical. The tough guys, on the other hand, are empiricist, sensationalistic, materialistic, pessimistic, irreligious, fatalistic, pluralistic, and skeptical (James 365). James goes on to concede that most of us “have no very definite intellectual temperament, we are a mixture of opposite ingredients, each one present very moderately” (James 364). Now, is Bernstein a tender-footed Bostonian or a typical Rocky Mountain tough? The answer is simple enough and clear to anyone who knew him or has read his work: He is a New York pragmatist, neither tender nor tough but a rare combination of both, a no-nonsense Brooklynite with the chutzpah to call things by their name, attentive to the facts of life but also to the meaningfulness that pervades human experience, more empiricist than rationalist but never fatalistic or pessimistic. Bernstein is a realist, not for metaphysical or epistemological reasons—or some uncritical loyalty to facts—but because he, like James, Dewey, and his good friend Rorty, is sensitive to the precariousness of the human condition, the way the world constantly sabotages our plans, dreams, and aspirations, “teaching us by practical jokes, mostly cruel” (Peirce 154), as both Hegel and Peirce knew all too well.When Bernstein returned to New York in 1989, life had made him a cosmopolitan pragmatist, one who felt equally at home discussing the work of philosophers from both sides of the Atlantic, listening to unexpected harmonies and dissonances between traditions often pitted against each other. The kid from Borough Park had studied in some of the most prestigious philosophy programs in the English-speaking world, including two Ivy League institutions (Yale and Columbia); married the love of his life, Carol Lippit, a PhD student in English literature at Yale, whom he had known since his days as a student at Midwood High School; spent time in Jerusalem as a Fulbright Scholar; befriended and engaged in dialogue with thinkers like Gadamer, Habermas, Arendt, Derrida, and Charles Taylor; helped create one of the best undergraduate philosophy programs of the United States at Haverford College; and published four books and many articles. Now he joined an institution that matched his temperament and outlook, a sui generis school that was founded in 1919 by a group of educators and intellectuals who sought a progressive alternative to the repressive and stifling dynamics of higher education institutions. John Dewey, Alvin Johnson, and Horace M. Kallen were among its prominent founders, but it was Herbert Croly, editor of The New Republic (a magazine of politics and culture that gave voice to the progressive movement), who convened a planning committee to draft its manifesto, a fascinating piece of history entitled “A Proposal for an Independent School of Social Science for Men and Women” (Katznelson 401). Filled with reformist candor, the piece is a must-read for anyone interested in the history of the New School and its entwinement with progressivism, the conception of an institution whose mission was to promote the reconciliation of theory and praxis that was threatened by the über-specialization of higher education, thus its call for “teachers who have first-hand knowledge of the world of actual endeavor and are prepared to apply their several specialties to the current issues of the day” (“Proposal for an Independent School” 3). “Knowledge at the service of reconstruction” would be another way of expressing the founders’ vision of the New School, a place where the Social and Political sciences would develop their full potential unhampered by the bureaucratization of academic life that was an inevitable result of the administrative demands of large, centralized universities. In a striking passage that is as relevant today—or perhaps even more—as it was a hundred years ago, the founders elaborate this point: Our larger institutions, where the Social and Political sciences receive the most attention, have developed a peculiar obstacle to free investigation as an inevitable result of their great size and complexity and the variety of their aims. The great universities embrace in a single organization undergraduate colleges, graduate departments, scientific, technical and professional schools, all of which have to be held together and conducted by a particular class of officers, who rarely teach or engage in scientific investigation, but who devote a great part of their time and thought to the exigencies of administration. Simplicity, uniformity and routine inevitably appear to them the essential of university organization, rather than the unaccountable enthusiasm of scientific progress, and the spontaneity and variety of methods which characterize the best teaching. They unwittingly hamper the free expansion of education by their well-meant attempts to standardize it, and they often fruitlessly dissipate the energies of the more original men in the institution. (“Proposal for an Independent School” 6–7)Specialization and bureaucratization are two forces that alienate academic life by forcing the divorce of theory and praxis that the founders so vehemently denounced in their manifesto. Combined, they have the Social and Political sciences to and such that they have or no to the great of a all the it its own (“Proposal for an Independent School” of we hear of that other of the progressive John Dewey, with his on and the need to get back to the of The on the however, in the last of the in a passage that the and high that the very days of the New School. The founders that a school would become the of the best thought in would in from the of of and would be a of the like it has this is the hour for the and New York is the because it is the greatest social in the world and of its own and in (“Proposal for an Independent School” would like to in this passage for a High as a of the that is a that to our and The or by the was in the into a where what ultimately is not the way and with human or and conversation of but the of the in which one to in the New School at a of great turmoil and to his colleagues and rebuild the philosophy in what he had learned from his experience at he set out to shape a that in the best spirit of the by the founders, pluralistic, and philosophy became the of the a great that was later in other when Bernstein became Dean of the Graduate Faculty. It would not be an to say that his great at was a result of his philosophical and temperament, his as he has called it in a number of and which he as an ethos, a of the that us to take our own and be against the of what are saying by back on one of where we it as or or we always what is into our own (Bernstein, New is not and Bernstein's version is a to both and the of that is often with of thought a than a philosophical but one that still has to great to the conversation between and One of Bernstein's great intellectual is that we the of and that has held us for so we to be we find permanent for our and knowledge claims or we the of everything we and whole conception of up for one in which the for fixed is no and the for into the for better to with an world. the of this are ethical and existential rather than epistemological or Bernstein is a pragmatic because he is of the of life and is that we be to if we from and the of the human Bernstein's The of an and philosophical of from to a that his temperament and the need to in dialogue with the to on the full well that the only way to is a sense of and perhaps by the of his own Bernstein us that the book is as a and a a of to about the by the Bernstein's in tradition, to has never that of the or the of he is too and for The of his to his to with the practical of the to things that to all of things that a whether it be the of the of in the on the to in political or the of a due to a of but also of is what Bernstein's pragmatism and his with thinkers and schools of thought. In the of Bernstein us that his for and that the of and (Bernstein, of Nature ethical of Bernstein's is in his call to where and hard work are put at the service of is what he has in The of a one that the to absolutes and a that where and a that has the to live with and a that is with a with James when he that human experience is of (James which is coming from a New like “The greatest social in the world” as the New School founders it, him everything he needed to about diversity, about people from and to reach some of a always at the of the of E. B. is a that New York at The whole is . . . it should have (White it that is what is so the spirit of and the that community is always a before never an end we the of Bernstein's for the of and is what Hannah Arendt called the to to to When asked about the or the current political Bernstein didn't things are and a sense of and well be the of the and Bernstein, by and to or always a of often us that is very a work in special a of that a between the and the particular, is what Aristotle called of the Bernstein's as well as his pragmatism have by his experience, as the kid from Borough Park who up the as the cosmopolitan who the world the best of the American philosophical as an who has shaped the of various as a and who about a group of particularly and It is no that he has left such a in our philosophical community, and that when he is no with his pragmatic as he called it, seems more than