Pragmatism, Critique, Judgment: Essays for Richard J. Bernstein

Extract

Pragmatism, Critique, Judgment: Essays for Richard J. Bernstein. Edited by Seyla Benhabib and Nancy Fraser. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. 400p. $80.00 cloth, $32.00 paper.

This festschrift for Richard J. Bernstein succeeds in celebrating his career, not only through the editors' insightful introduction and the excellent biographical essay by Judith Friedlander but also through 13 significant essays and an excerpt from Shoshana Yovel's novel that speaks with keen philosophical insight on radical evil. As the editors say, one of the distinctive contributions of Bernstein to philosophy is a view of social critique that encompasses normative as well as empirical and interpretive dimensions and that employs a form of pragmatic reason both dialogical in nature and political in its implications (p. xiii). The contributors draw upon Bernstein's approach to salvage what Jerome Kohn, in his fine essay based on Kant's Critique of Judgment, understands to be a “common world” that is “fit for human habitation” (pp. 270–74). The latter is the location for self-creation and for the freedom that sustains it. Nonetheless, self-creation is threatened by the totalitarian mind, which is intent upon using its freedom to destroy all freedom. As a counter, the essays in this volume embrace what the editors refer to as Bernstein's “Deweyan view of philosophy as the self-reflection of democratic society” and thereby make self-creation the centerpiece of human flourishing (p. viii).