… I just finished Bernstein’s Beyond Objectivism and Relativism. Bernstein’s thesis is that modernity has lost consciousness of higher orders of reason, and that the best postmodern thought, beneath all apparent chaos and contradiction, is a shared concern for trying to recover that higher reason and figure out how to put it back into practice. The fact that this is a shared problem that belongs to our time is as important to him as the content of that problem. This is Bernstein’s ethic, and I love it. It gives his writing warmth and generosity. He’s always asking: How do we agree? What are our shared concerns?

In Bernstein’s view modernity confuses all reason with episteme and all practice with techne. He argues that above all determinate reason and method is phronesis, which is a far more open mode of reasoning, which justifies rather than proves, and resolves in dialogue. While episteme tends toward determinacy, phronesis tends toward pluralism. Since phronesis provides episteme much of its ground, episteme loses its coercive force once phronesis enters the picture. It turns out that phronesis governs not only the humanities and the social sciences but also the hard sciences, most conspicuously when science goes into crisis and revolution. The revolution is resolved when scientists are able to leave the too-human deliberation of phronesis and return to the comfortable determinacy of episteme and experimental techne.

Bernstein suggests that postmodernism’s real telos – or best telos – is not relativism but the reestablishment of awareness and practice of phronesis in our culture. I’m sure Bernstein would admit that it’s pretty obvious that many postmodernists are charlatans inclined toward relativistic readings. The real horror of relativism is not that they deprive us of the solidity and stability of truth, but that they deprive us of the ability to appeal to reason. Relativism undermines dialogue, always at first in the name of defense against rational coercion. Every belligerent nation calls its military its “defenses.” The telos of relativism is escaping rule of reason and replacing it with alternate forms of social and political coercion. This also seems to be the telos of most forms of absolutism, including perennialism. The perennialists use gnostic claims to destroy dialogue, and that is why I resist them even while I agree with them superficially on their metaphysical conceptions.

To put it in dialectic form, there’s objectivism/absolutism that claims that truth is determinate and existent, there’s relativism that claims that determinate truth is non-existent and that pluralistic opinion is all that exists, and there’s the synthesis that transcends objectivism/absolutism vs relativism by asserting that episteme is determinate, but that truth is more than episteme. When episteme is brought under phronesis in dialogue, truth becomes both reasonable and pluralistic. A new, truer opposition emerges: 1) dialogue, and 2) anti-dialogue sustained by the false dichotomy of absolutism versus relativism.

I’ve come to the point where I see Christ as the embodiment of dialogue. Dialogue requires mutual respect: seeing your neighbor as yourself, essentially a fellow subjective being who as such deserves consideration – who in dialogical “fusion of horizons”, where the conversation has itself through its participants, your dialogical partner can be seen not only as like yourself (a fellow subject), but literally as yourself while your being is bound up in the being of dialogue). This happens only where two (or more) are gathered in the spirit of reason to come to an agreeable resolution through dialogue (dia- ‘through’ -logos ‘speech, reason’) rather than appealing to coercive force. As long as disrespect and willingness to coerce is lurking in the background, dialogue cannot happen. Using coercive force against dialogue = anti- + through-logos = antichrist … and so on.

When I think of Judaism as a tradition that 1) under the pressure of its many crises, developed an ever-increasing sensitivity to differences in perspective (particularly across lines of power and powerlessness, being at home and being the homeless, alien other) and 2) learned the enormous importance of intersubjective appeals established by formal law to preserve solidarity (which is of particular importance to the weak and vulnerable) and continuity of their tradition – and then in that light, consider Christ’s message that the telos of the tradition and its law is (or ought to be) the understanding of other human beings as essentially subjects/mind/spirit, I am able to make more immediate and coherent sense of Christianity and of our own culture. To put it in Gadamer’s terms I’m able to appropriate the tradition that has formed me and bring it to conscious life.

One other point of interest you: Bernstein sees American Pragmatism as a key to emerging from postmodern anarchy with our reason intact. I’ve found numerous connections between Nietzsche’s thought and the the ideas of the Pragmatists. It seems that the pragmatic insights were central to the zeitgeist of the mid- to late-19th Century.

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