A Philosophy Professor’s Final Class

A blackandwhite photograph of Richard Bernstein seated in a chair and his hands clasped and resting on his legs.

Photograph by Edu Bayer

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This past spring, the philosopher Richard J. Bernstein taught his final two classes at the New School for Social Research, in New York, where he had been a professor since 1989. One was a course on American pragmatism, the tradition to which his own work belongs. The other was a seminar on Hannah Arendt, who, late in her life, was Bernstein’s friend.

Years ago, when I got my Ph.D., I was Bernstein’s student. I still am, in a way. And so I asked him if I could audit the class on Arendt and write about it. He said that he didn’t like passive auditors—I would have to participate fully. That requirement struck me as a good description of what Bernstein had done all his life.

He was already in his seventies when I first met him, in 2008, but he still appeared more energetic than most of his students. You’d hear him coming down the hall, engaged in animated conversation, and then he’d stroll confidently and generously into the classroom, a small man in a black turtleneck, his sleeves rolled up, his wavy white hair swept gently back. He had a distinctively raspy voice that was somehow always half ironic and yet deeply sincere, and which sounded more streetwise than the other professors. Even a foreigner like me, from Barcelona, could hear the Brooklyn in it.

Bernstein grew up in Borough Park in a family of Jewish immigrants who owned a furniture store. He went to the University of Chicago, where he wrote an undergraduate thesis on love and friendship in Plato’s works. One of his classmates was Richard Rorty, who would go on to become philosophy’s most prominent postwar pragmatist. (Another classmate was Susan Sontag.) Rorty went to Yale for his Ph.D. and urged Bernstein to follow him there. Bernstein did, writing his dissertation on the pragmatist John Dewey’s philosophy of experience—a daring choice, given Dewey’s diminished status at the time. The German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, echoing a comment Lessing made of Spinoza, told me that Dewey was generally regarded back then as a “dead dog.”

The great insight of classical pragmatists was to recognize that we conduct intellectual inquiries in the same way that we go about living and acting in the world. We clash with the world when we test our theories in the field and when we argue with our political enemies. Truth may be elusive, but our experience is real, and it forces us to think, to argue—possibly, to change. This conception of truth, and the social process by which we attempt to reach it, is more democratic, Bernstein believed, than trying to transcend our point of view by reasoning our way toward some supposedly universal perspective.

At Yale, Bernstein reconnected with Carol Lippit, whom he’d known in high school and who had become one of Yale’s few female graduate students. They married in 1955. Bernstein stayed at Yale to teach; in 1964, he went to Mississippi for Freedom Summer and wrote a short dispatch about it for The Nation, marvelling at the passion of the young and at the bravery of the Black Mississippians he met. Of a gathering of voting-rights activists, he wrote, “Whenever in future I think of what democracy can mean in the concrete, the image of that meeting in Eaton precinct will come to mind.”

About six months later, he was denied tenure. Students picketed Yale’s administrative offices in protest, and the so-called Bernstein Affair became national news. Just why he was denied tenure was murky; he’d published plenty and was a beloved teacher. One theory held that the department’s analytic philosophers—those who, broadly speaking, looked to formal logic to resolve philosophical questions—were pushing out the so-called continental types, whose work they deemed squishy and subjective. (“Yale Issue Seen as a Basic Rift; Dispute Traced by Some to Philosophic Cleavage,” the Times reported.) But Bernstein always maintained that the departmental politics at play were more complicated.

In any case, he was not really a partisan of any camp. He had an unusual ability to put philosophers from different traditions into dialogue. This was an intimate pursuit as well as an intellectual one: Arendt, Rorty, and Habermas were not only his philosophical interlocutors but his friends. Bernstein never coined the sort of phrase that becomes common currency outside the world of contemporary philosophy, like Arendt’s “banality of evil,” Rorty’s “linguistic turn,” or Habermas’s “communicative action.” He was, in a way, a backstage philosopher, indispensable to the play unfolding under the lights.

Above all, he was a teacher. His final Arendt seminar would bring together many of the questions that had mattered to him most. Fittingly, he would explore these questions in dialogue with others—in dialogue, especially, with Arendt, a brilliant thinker and departed friend whose journey through life had been buffeted by the major traumas of the twentieth century. The course would be conducted on Zoom and would proceed chronologically, from Arendt’s early Jewish writings to her late essays, with multiple sessions devoted to her books “The Origins of Totalitarianism” and “The Human Condition.” The course would allow Bernstein both to share Arendt’s insights with another group of students—there were fourteen, including me—and also to reëxamine his differences with her. Arendt made a sharp distinction between the social and political spheres, a distinction that, somewhat notoriously, prompted her to argue against the federal government’s forceable desegregation of schools after Brown v. Board of Education. Bernstein believed that the political and the social were inseparable.

The seminar’s first class—which was delayed a week, because Bernstein wasn’t feeling well—was a lecture on Arendt’s life. Born in 1906 in Germany, she studied, in the nineteen-twenties, at the University of Marburg, where she had an affair with a professor, Martin Heidegger, who would become one of the twentieth century’s most influential philosophers and, in 1933, a member of the Nazi Party. When Hitler assumed power, Arendt fled Germany for Paris, where she spent several years working for an organization that helped send young Jewish refugees to Palestine. In the spring of 1940, the French government rounded up “enemy aliens,” including Arendt, and moved them into internment camps, Bernstein told us, drawing an analogy with the Japanese Americans who were interned in the U.S. soon afterward. Arendt escaped; the women who remained behind, Bernstein noted, were sent to Auschwitz by Adolf Eichmann, who would become Arendt’s most famous subject.