Response to Richard Bernstein

Abstract

But I find myself torn by "Varieties of Pluralism," both attracted and disturbed by it. I want something more, something more speculatively audacious (see again Dewey's call for speculative audacity with which Bernstein concludes his lecture, p. 18) than phronesi s, yet I am not sure there is something more. Within the limits imposed by the lecture there is not. I also find the lecture facing a large, ironic problem, one of -23- Bernstein's own making. Although it is public event, the lecture is not July Fourth oratory; it is learned discourse. It exists within a context consisting in part of John Dewey, Praxis and Action, The Restructuring of Social and Political Theor y, and Beyond Objectivism and Relativis m. I find it impossible to read "Varieties" without playing it off against these other Bernstein works in which he has subjected Dewey and more recently the Big four—Arendt, Gadamer, Habermas, and Rorty—to serious criticism while still finding in them insights into "the problems of men" without which we would be at great loss. My reading, then, creates and exacerbates already existing tensions in "Varieties" and accounts in part for my difficulties with it