For my friend Richard J. Bernstein

Abstract

It was nearly 50 years ago when Dick called me for the first time and invited me to come over to Haverford for a discussion. It is not only because of the beginning of our longstanding friendship that I start with that phone call I got in 1972 at the Humanities Center of Cornell University. It moreover led, at this first encounter, to a memorable and rather improbable discovery. The two of us had been brought up on different continents and in different societies, with different backgrounds at different schools and different universities, not to speak of a childhood and youth we spent on opposite sides of a monstrous World War, in which Dick had lost a brother; but in spite of all of these obvious distances in origin and socialization we soon discovered a broad overlap in our philosophical background and also in our present research interests. Hegel, Marx and Kierkegaard, Sartre and existentialism, even Peirce and Dewey and our present research programs in action theory and communication are the catch words to indicate this unexpected convergence of our philosophical orientations. And my surprise was soon confirmed when I read Dick's book Praxis and Action which I immediately recommended to Suhrkamp for translation.

However, the discovery of these intellectual family bonds is only half of the story; I would not have accepted the invitation to come to Haverford with Ute and our two daughters for a whole term, had Dick not been the impressive personality he indeed was—a host of overwhelming charm and an open-minded, spontaneous and inspiring partner in the ongoing ping-pong of arguments. Throughout the following years and decades, I got to know him as a sharp-minded, engaged and dedicated philosopher and teacher, as an attentive, sensitive and loyal friend and as a mind of great fairness and courage who got angry and immediately spoke up when he felt that somebody was not treated in the right way. And yet, even this friendship would not have flourished for such a long time if it had not been embedded in the broader context of relations between our families.

We enjoyed Carol's hospitality in her wide-open house, whether the families met at home—I remember our shy Judith dancing with little Daniel along the floor—or whether we were introduced to quite a few distinguished and interesting guests at dinner, first in Haverford, but in the same style later on at the upper Eastside in Manhattan or in the Adirondacks—where Dick finally spent his last days. During those memorable evenings, we met for example Jacques Derrida or Geoffrey Hartmann, or colleagues from Israel and elsewhere, who were teaching at the New School. By the way, this generous hospitality of the Bernsteins also included my son Tilmann and, my daughter, Rebekka, when they spent a year at the New School as Theodor Heuss professors. The visits were, of course, mutual: Dick has taught in Frankfurt several times; and I remember a last visit with him and Carol in Munich where he gave his great course on pragmatism; the final evening session was open to the public of the city, while the two of us were sitting at the podium, and Dick presented himself in his most admirable role. Many will remember: While he was passionately teaching the major lines of the most radical democratic traditions of the United States, the teacher himself turned into the best embodiment of what he was actually teaching—and sometimes even preaching.

Though I cannot go into the details of Dick's philosophical work in this context, let me at least mention three of his most remarkable achievements. He merits recognition (a) for the revival of pragmatism, (b) for using hermeneutics as a bridge for the analytical-continental divide and (c) for continuing the great tradition of the New School.

(a) Today, American pragmatism is present in philosophy departments all over the world. In the first half of the 20th century, Charles Sanders Peirce and William James and moreover John Dewey had been recognized as leading philosophers at least in the United States. But when I traveled through philosophy departments of prominent American Universities by the mid-sixties, this was no longer the case. At that time, most of my colleagues thought of Dewey as a “fuzzy thinker.” Most of the departments were under the impact of either the neo-positivism of Rudolf Carnap and the immigrants from the Vienna School or of Wittgenstein and the British analytical philosophy of language. Only against the background of those prevailing trends can one imagine and appreciate what it meant for these two friends, Dick Bernstein and Dick Rorty, to initiate a shift. Their insistent arguments contributed to a revival of pragmatism, which finally gained a second chance against the exclusive dominance of these other analytical approaches (which, to be honest, had indeed improved the standards of argumentation in the meantime).

(b) Apart from this success in the promotion of pragmatism and its very American roots in transcendentalism, Dick's philosophy reveals another remarkable feature: I mean his intense interest in the tradition of hermeneutics. His effort to get attention for this rather continental tradition and especially his admiration for the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer and his critics may be explained by the fact that Dick himself was a genius in the art of “Verstehen” or interpretation. This sensitivity for taking seriously the prima facie truth claims of a text was part of his general sense of fairness; in advance of any attempt of refutation he insisted on the obligation to track down the kernel of truth even in face of odd authors and texts, of strange traditions and arguments. This respect for, and devotion to the meaning of a text did not prevent him, however, to turn to the truth of the matter and to insist on differences “that make a difference,” as he repeated many times. This combination of generosity in the interpretation of meaning and of strictness in questions of truth characterizes the quality of Dick's philosophical work.

(c) Finally, Hannah Arendt and the New School are the most important chapter in Dick's philosophical career. He had met her, shortly before she died, and was deeply impressed by her strong personality. When he was offered then to become her successor at the New School, he hurried back to New York, the city of his birth. It is not easy to do justice to the happy coincidence of the various aspects of this decisive turn in Dick's professional life. There was his admiration for Hannah Arendt's person and work, his familiarity with her German philosophical background and German philosophy in general, and last but not least, his sensitivity for the impact of political immigration on these philosophers’ experience—and these features now met with the challenging task that expected him in the Philosophy Department of the New School, of that unique university, which during the Nazi period, had been a haven for so many of the most important European scholars in exile. When I was teaching at the New School in 1967, I still had the privilege to meet the last Generation of those immigrants—besides Hannah Arendt, Hans Jonas, Aaron Gurvitch, Adolf Löwe, and others—and to immerse ourselves in the unique atmosphere of this incomparable place. I am deeply convinced that nobody but Dick Bernstein would have been able to continue, by cautious steps of transformation, the profile and the spirit of that very tradition for another four, almost, five decades. And especially German universities and the German Government owe him gratitude for this particular professional and political engagement, which of course, only mirrored the deeper motivation of his extraordinary philosophical thought and practice.

Looking back at Dick's biography allows us to state, in the cautious words of Adorno, that such a life is not a failed one.