After more than an hour, Bernstein let us go. I wondered why he pressed on; nobody would have faulted him for taking time off, or even cancelling the class. Did he feel compelled to complete the circle in his life, coming back to Arendt and to these questions? Did the alternative strike him as pointless or simply boring? Perhaps, I thought, the most important reason was that, for him, having these arguments was the only path to truth, however provisional and contingent. This was our one hope for understanding the world.
One day, during a session on “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” Bernstein told the story of his first visit to a concentration camp, at Dachau, in the mid-seventies. He went to Germany to visit Habermas, whom he had met in 1972, the same year that he met Arendt. Habermas was spending some time in Middletown, Connecticut, and Bernstein had just read his book “Knowledge and Human Interests,” which draws on the thinking of Marx, Freud, and the American pragmatist Charles S. Peirce—an uncommon reference at the time, especially for a European philosopher—in its effort to set out a new basis for critical social theory. Bernstein, who published a book about Peirce before leaving Yale, invited Habermas to give a talk at Haverford.
“I was not in the habit of immediately accepting invitations over the phone from a colleague unknown,” Habermas told me, in an e-mail, in German. But he found that Bernstein’s “friendly and direct demeanor” disarmed him and showed that they had much to discuss with each other. “So I allowed myself to be overpowered,” he said. Bernstein picked him up from the airport, and they liked each other from the start. “The beginnings of a philosophical conversation would effortlessly emerge from an everyday observation, or from helpful practical advice,” Habermas recalled. “By the time we arrived on campus—along the way we passed through ‘Black’ neighborhoods, which immediately provided fuel for the first political conversations—via the Northline, we were almost already friends.”
The two philosophers agreed that the seed of sectarian politics seemed to lie within the rational project of modernity: people had tried to establish the one true political system on the basis of reason when, really, all politics had to be rooted in a social give-and-take with others. But Habermas argued that, in the process of rationally justifying our moral and political beliefs to one another, the force of the better argument could lead us to moral and political norms that transcend the limits of our communities. Bernstein would not go that far. To think like that, he maintained, one would have to believe that there was a fundamental difference between the way we know the world and the way we decide how to behave—or, in Kantian terms, between theoretical and practical uses of reason. A mistake, in his view.
Still, their shared commitment to philosophical dialogue was the basis for a lifelong friendship. Habermas called Bernstein “a genius of finding a kernel of truth in the philosophy of the other.” After Habermas gave his talk at Haverford, Bernstein considered go
