A bridging philosopher.
This is how his friend, the Mexican philosopher Carlos Pereda, described it a few years ago, thinking about the link between currents of thought that flow through different causes but that, thanks to his work, meet or at least intersect for brief moments.
We are talking about Richard J. Bernstein, the New York thinker who died on July 4 at his country home in the Adirondack Mountains and whose philosophical career spanned more than seven decades from his days as a student at the Universities of Chicago, Columbia and Yale to his stays as a professor at Haverford College and, finally, at the New School for Social Research in New York.
Born in Brooklyn on May 14, 1932 into a family of working-class Jewish immigrants, Bernstein (or Dick, as his colleagues, students and friends affectionately call him) absorbed the vibrant energy of the city from an early age, its essence “unruly, musical and self-sufficient”, as Walt Whitman once described it.
His work, divided into more than 12 books and dozens of academic articles, is the best testimony of his restless and curious temperament, of a particular sensitivity that allowed him to detect resonances between disparate thinkers and traditions.
Hence precisely his reputation for building bridges, especially between American pragmatism and continental philosophy, feeling comfortable talking about Wilfrid Sellars, Richard Rorty and Robert Brandom, but also about Hannah Arendt, Hans-Georg Gadamer and Jacques Derrida.
Although some see reflected in his work a dialogical instinct, an effort to gather and merge ideas from different currents of thought in a kind of general and totalizing synthesis, the truth is that for Bernstein both harmony and dissonance weigh, or rather , it is precisely through the game between one and the other that the possibility of a genuine philosophical encounter opens up.
For this reason, the pages of his books are marked by a certain expansive tension, by the instability typical of any dialogue space where the parties express themselves but also expose themselves, where the agreements are provisional and contingent and therefore the space of questioning joint remains open.
More than dialogues, Bernstein's books are true philosophical parties;
in them there is consideration but also hubbub;
Between his paragraphs, all kinds of voices are filtered, comments at the wrong time, strange dissonances, awkward silences and the occasional intemperate laugh.
And it is that the model of his philosophy should not be looked for in the platonic dialogues or in the refined discussion clubs of the Ivy League, but in the New York subway cars, or in the deafening bustle of
the Jewish
dinner
on Second Avenue which he used to visit with his friend Harold Bloom for juicy and equally outrageous triple decker pastrami.
More bebop than symphonic music, Bernstein loved playing host to the most colorful characters;
from Socrates to Judith Butler, passing through his beloved classical pragmatists and more recently Freud and Spinoza.
But his was not a display of eccentricity, nor a need to shock, it was simply his way of being: that is why he enjoyed so much his interaction with the students, the informal conversations in the corridors of the New School or the innumerable trips around the world that led him to extend his bonds of friendship from Patagonia to Canada, from the former Yugoslavia to China and Japan.
That is why it was not strange to see him dance tango in Buenos Aires with his beloved wife Carol or accompany a group of Monos de Calenda in Oaxaca—his philosophy of him was always outside, in the open air,
From his support for the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s to his most recent reflections on the concept of nature and climate change, Bernstein was an intellectual committed to the causes of his time, always insisting on continuity between theory and praxis. in the importance of anchoring thought in the vicissitudes of our concrete experience.
Bernstein's bridges connect distant thinkers and traditions but also regions, feelings and experiences, the lives of all those who have been touched by his work and thought.
A weaver of relationships: between analytical and continental philosophy, between north and south, between distant academic disciplines, between past, present and future.
The summer sun hides over the trees of the Adirondacks.
Dick finishes his dinner in the garden and smiles as he tells Carol, "Today has been a perfect day."
It's the eve of the 4th of July, the party, the parades, and the fireworks coming up—Dick is ready for the last goodbye to him.
Santiago Rey,
a Colombian philosopher, was a student and research assistant of Richard J. Bernstein for several years at the New School for Social Research in New York.