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 going to Munich to visit him—and to see Dachau. “I said, I can’t do this,” Bernstein recalled, “I am going to have nightmares.” But, in 1976, he decided to face his fears. He liked to recount how Habermas met him at the airport. Bernstein had been studying the origins and development of different types of camps. “I thought I was fully prepared, but I wasn’t,” he told the class. What shocked him even more than the evidence of all the dead bodies was the record-keeping.
After Bernstein recounted the visit, he asked a student to read a passage from “The Origins of Totalitarianism.” Bernstein knew the page number offhand, from repeated visits: “When a man is faced with the alternative of betraying and thus murdering his friends or of sending his wife and children, for whom he is in every sense responsible, to their death; when even suicide would mean the immediate murder of his own family—how is he to decide?”
Bernstein and Arendt last spoke in the spring of 1975. “She was very agitated at that time, because she thought that the New School was going to end philosophy,” he told me. Arendt, who died several months later, following a heart attack, at the age of sixty-nine, had reason to worry: New York’s department of education, responding to an overabundance of Ph.D. graduates without job prospects, announced plans to evaluate every doctoral program in the state, with the intention of closing down the weaker ones. The evaluation criteria appeared to favor specialized programs that trained students to do empirical research; an interdisciplinary program that sought to train theorists, like the one at the New School, seemed particularly vulnerable.
The department of education asked two philosophers to evaluate the New School for Social Research’s program: Alasdair MacIntyre and Richard Rorty. They saw value in the program, but, as Judith Friedlander details in her book “A Light in Dark Times,” the state’s rating committees nonetheless gave it an unfavorable review. Afterward, Rorty and MacIntyre sent letters to the New School’s dean of the graduate faculty, offering advice. “At this moment in the United States philosophy is to some degree in crisis,” MacIntyre wrote. He saw “the overproduction of Ph.D.’s” trained in analytic philosophy as a “major factor in distorting the job market.” Rorty recommended that the school hire Bernstein to help revive the department. But the university trustees did not want to invest in the program before the school examined it further, and, in 1977, the New School declared a moratorium on admitting new doctoral students in philosophy.
Five years later, the New School hired a new president, an administrator named Jonathan Fanton. He had gone to Yale in the sixties; he had participated in the protests in support of Bernstein. The dean of the graduate faculty asked Bernstein to join a committee that would help decide the fate of the philosophy department. Bernstein recommended that the dissident Hungarian philosopher Ágnes Heller be hired as the department’s chair. If the New School was rooted in an effort to protect intellectual freedom, its charge now was to support intellectuals who were stifled behind the Iron Curtain. Heller was appointed. She hired Bernstein, and he took over as chair in 1989. The ban on admitting doctoral students was lifted. The department became as idiosyncratic and pluralistic as the tables of contents in his books: analytic philosophers, pragmatists, phenomenologists. He told me that rebuilding the department “was like fulfilling a testament” left to him by Arendt.
In May, the morning before our seminar met for the last time, I went to see him at his apartment on Fifty-second Street. It was large and luminous, full of mid-century Scandinavian furniture that seemed to reflect his belief in the elegance of what works—and also the taste he acquired as the child of a furniture salesman. A nurse was busy in the kitchen. Carol read a book in the living room, next to her husband, who looked frail and wore an oxygen tube but spoke vibrantly, moving his hands and head in a vaguely birdlike way that he had. He was eager to begin class, and joined the Zoom meeting several minutes early. He had the oxygen tube removed. He asked the nurse for some candy. When students appeared onscreen, they asked him how he felt. “I am feeling euphoric,” he said.
The topic was “Thinking and Moral Considerations,” an essay that Arendt published in 1971. In it, she elaborates on the banality of evil. Some readers of “Eichmann in Jerusalem” were, and are, troubled by a kind of corollary to its thesis: if Eichmann’s great failing was an inability to think, does this mean that thinking is enough to keep us from moral collapse? The notion seems unlikely. But Arendt defends the idea, or some version of it, in part by deepening our conception of what thinking is, and how and when it is called for. “The manifestation of the wind of thought is no knowledge; it is the ability to tell right from wrong, beautiful from ugly,” she writes. “And this indeed may prevent catastrophes, at least for myself, in the rare moments when the chips are down.”
As the class neared its end, Bernstein reflected on his differences with his old friend. Arendt had little interest in presenting multiple sides of a story and trying to bridge them, he said. This can be infuriating, but, he said, “very frequently it leads her to a kind of brilliance.” He praised his students, and told them to write to him about anything at all. “I always loved the comment by Hans-Georg Gadamer: nobody has the last word,” he told us. “And the conversation will go on and should go on with you.” He added, “If there’s one thing I would like to leave you with, at the end of it, it’s the spirit of philosophy, and what I believe should be the authentic spirit of it, which I think, I hope that you all incorporate in your own lives. Good luck.”
He signed off and turned to Carol. “That’s it, my love!” he said.
I asked him how he felt. Great, he told me—he’d lived a good life. Then he cracked half a smile. “I have never understood the obsession in philosophy with death,” he said. “My obsession is with new beginnings. . . . I want to do more things.”
That Saturday, he would turn ninety years old. On Friday, he got an early birthday message from Habermas. “If I remember correctly it was almost exactly half a century ago when our friendship started,” Habermas wrote. “This has remained one of the very few happy events in life which I remember even after so long a period without the slightest shadow and any ambivalence. And ever since I keep thinking about your first philosophical advice: ‘detranscendentalize your view of the Kantian heritage.’ ” It was an almost comically specialized phrase for a birthday message. But it was one of great import: Habermas, Bernstein felt, was too attached to a conception of truth that is universal, without conditions. If philosophy proved anything, Bernstein believed, it was that things are never fixed, and our conversation never ends.
He spent the next several weeks grading papers. On the first day of July, he retired. He went to a house in the Adirondacks, which he and Carol had built decades before, with money from a teaching award. His family joined him. One night, before going to bed, he said to his daughter, “Today was a perfect day.” He died on the morning of July 4th. His last book, “The Vicissitudes of Nature,” was published posthumously, in the fall. The book picks up a thread that goes back to Bernstein’s dissertation on Dewey, written more than sixty years earlier: at the core both our nature and our way of being within nature is a relentless, collective conversation about what is good and what is true. ♦
