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HERMENEUTICS, PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHY AND THE ONTOLOGY OF COMMUNITY: WITTGENSTEIN, GADAMER AND BERNSTEIN

Núria Sara Miras Boronat

1. Introduction. How Modern Philosophy Became a House of Horrors

A spectre has been haunting Modern European thought: the Spectre of “Cartesian Anxiety”. This spectre has multiple faces and reappears in unsuspected forms, often thought to have been left behind. Yet in all its disguises, Cartesian anxiety has always had the same effect. It paralyses philosophers, it blocks their creative resources and even the bravest of them feel imprisoned in their own philosophical system much like a frightened child would feel in a house of horrors. As Bernstein has pointed out, it was Descartes himself in Meditations who described the horrible emotions that accompanied his philosophical journey. There is a myriad of criticisms of Descartes’s strategy to seek the ultimate foundations of certainty. I think most critics would agree with Bernstein’s diagnosis that Cartesian anxiety is caused by the profound conviction held by modern philosophers that their main task must be “the search for an Archimedean point upon which we can ground our knowledge.”1 In my opinion, Bernstein offers us the most exquisite and precise description of this pathology:

The terrifying quality of the journey is reflected in the allusions to madness, darkness, the dread of waking from a self-deceptive dream world, the fear of having “all of a sudden fallen into very deep water” where “I can neither make certain of setting my feet on the bottom, nor can I swim and so support myself on the surface”, and the anxiety of imagining that I may be nothing more than a plaything of an all- powerful evil demon.2

The diagnosis and therapy against the issues caused by modern epistemology can be found in what I consider to be Bernstein’s masterpiece, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism (1983). In this book Bernstein uses the metaphor 126 NÚRIA SARA MIRAS BORONAT of “constellation” taken from Adorno to put the philosophers that he considers to be the most important of the 20th century into “conversation”: Hannah Arendt, Jürgen Habermas, Richard Rorty, and Hans-Georg Gadamer.3 His use of this metaphor allows us to approach a problem from different angles. For each philosophical issue there is more than one position, and each position is better understood by seeing it in the constellation of other possible positions than when taken into consideration alone.4 I think that Bernstein’s approach to philosophy using the metaphors of constellation and conversation is his main strength against the dangers associated to the modern theory of knowledge. Modern philosophers start their philosophical journey alone and end up alone. Bernstein, on the contrary, chooses the best partners for his philosophical odyssey and upon doing this he ensures that his adventure will result in epic beauty. In my interpretation, Bernstein’s most important contribution to the debate between objectivism and relativism is the conclusion that this dichotomy has a distorted nature since its birth. Furthermore, Bernstein also states that the most dangerous effect of this debate is its paralysing power when it comes to constructing our lives within the realm of practical reason. To overcome Cartesian anxiety it is necessary to propose an epistemology whose main demand is not to reach absolute certainties by means of isolated examination of opinions, prejudices, traditions and authorities. This alternative epistemology was provided by the so-called “linguistic turn” of the 20th century; however, this new method was not immune to the dangers of Cartesian pathology. The epistemology of the linguistic turn states that the fundamental conditions of our knowledge are given by the fact that we belong to a certain community, tradition, culture or form of life. We get to know the world because we are social beings and we gain access to it through language, habits and social interaction. But then we are at risk of replacing Cartesian solipsism with cultural solipsism. The risk of the epistemology of the linguistic turn can be summed up as follows: just when we think that the Cartesian ghost is fleeing through the front door, it enters again through the open window. This is what I call the negative “ontology of community.”5 The “ontology of community” is a view of the community as a closed and well-defined whole, having the kind of stable identity that a res extensa has. This label is used here, therefore, as a critique to the theoretical reification of a communal identity. Reification has the perverse result that it makes our habits of thought depend entirely on the community in which we grow, thus making it impossible to transcend the boundaries of our culture. But there is a positive use of the label “ontology of community” provided by philosophical hermeneutics. This ontology of community allows us to envision an open community whose main task and purpose is “the constant recovery and transformation of community” in the sense of Dewey’s “reconstruction of democracy.”6 My contention is that the