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Richard J. Bernstein
In recent decades, the expression multiculturalism has been widely discussed and has taken on many meanings. But a specter has haunted this discussion. Cultures are complex, changing and dynamic. Yet when we speak of multiculturalism, there is an enormous temptation to think of cultures as more or less coherent wholes, each with its own distinctive integrity that distinguishes it from other cultures whether we think of this difference in an anthropological, religious, political or ethnic manner. Individuals living within a given culture frequently feel that they gain their deepest sense of identity as members of it. So the problem of multiculturalism becomes how we are to think about it, and how to deal practically with different cultures when there are serious conflicts. These conflicts become especially acute when members of cultures think that their values and beliefs are incommensurable with each other. The
PHILOSOPHY & SOCIAL CRITICISM vol 36 nos 34 pp. 381394
Copyright The Author(s) 2010. Reprints and permissions: http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journalspermissions.nav
http://psc.sagepub.com DOI: 10.1177//0191453709358551
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I have cited virtually all the passages in which Kuhn speaks explicitly about incommensurability, although, of course, much of what he says in other places is relevant to his discussion. But these passages are instructive not only because of what they say but because of what they do not say what they are silent about. Note that in none of these passages does Kuhn define or specify what he means when he uses the expression incommensurability.3 But before commenting on Kuhn, and the fate of the expression incommensurability, I want to consider the way in which Kuhns views were radicalized and transformed by Richard Rorty in Philosophy and
Modern philosophy shaped by the Cartesian-Lockean-Kantian tradition in both its analytic and continental forms has been obsessed with commensuration. This is the quest that is characteristic of epistemology. Hermeneutics, as Rorty understands it, is not a name for a new method or discipline but is an expression of the hope that the cultural space left by the demise of epistemology will not be filled (Rorty, 1979: 315). We can bring out the force of Rortys provocative claims by seeing how he radicalizes Kuhns understanding of normal and abnormal (revolutionary) science. For Kuhn, normal science is a form of puzzle-solving in which there are accepted procedures of commensuration. Abnormal science arises when an increasing number of anomalies occur that do not seem to fit a prevailing paradigm. But for Rorty, commensuration is not exclusively a characteristic of normal science, rather it can be a characteristic of any form of inquiry where there are
. . . agreed-upon practices of inquiry (or more generally, of discourse) as easily in academic art, scholastic philosophy, or parliamentary politics as in normal science. We can get it [epistemological commensuration] not because we have discovered something about the nature of human knowledge but simply because when a practice has continued long enough the conventions which make it possible and which permit a consensus on how to divide it into parts are relatively easily to isolate. (Rorty, 1979: 321)
In short, it is the familiarity of entrenched practices that makes a discourse normal and commensurable. Practices can become normalized in any field of discourse from physics to theology. Abnormal discourse
It is little wonder that both The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature initiated so much heated and intense discussion. Almost immediately, critics of both books claimed that the views of Kuhn and Rorty sanction irrationality and lead straight to a self-defeating relativism. Karl Popper, for example, criticized Kuhn for endorsing the Myth of the Framework, a metaphor that suggests that we are prisoners caught in the framework of our theories; our expectations; our past experiences; our language and that we are so locked into them that we cannot communicate with those encased in radically different incommensurable paradigms (Popper, 1970: 56). Hilary Putnam, who is sympathetic with many of Rortys claims, nevertheless has consistently argued that Rorty leads us down the path of a self-defeating relativism. Now it is one task to sort out what is right and wrong in the tangled disputes about incommensurability and its critics disputes that preoccupied philosophers for several decades. But it is a very different question to ask why these disputes captured the imagination of so many thinkers in widely divergent fields. In Beyond Objectivism and Relativism, I suggested the beginnings of an answer when I spoke of the Cartesian Anxiety the anxiety that is generated by a grand Either/Or:
Either there is some support for our being, a fixed foundation for our knowledge, or we cannot escape the forces of darkness that envelop us with madness, with intellectual and moral chaos. . . . It would be a mistake to think that the Cartesian Anxiety is primarily a religious, metaphysical, epistemological, or moral anxiety. These are only several of the many forms it may assume. In Heideggerian language, it is ontological rather than ontic, for it seems to lie at the very center of our being in the world. (Bernstein, 1983: 1819)4
This is also the way in which many Nazis thought about Jews they really were not human; they were vermin to be eliminated. The despised other is not only incommensurable with everything that we take to be human but a dangerous threat to humanity.
In Truth and Method, Gadamer is primarily concerned with the understanding of texts, works of art and historical traditions, but his reflections have important consequences for understanding other cultures and peoples. He is certainly not claiming that all horizons, all languages, all worldviews are commensurable (as Rorty defines it). On the contrary, the hermeneutical problem of understanding arises precisely because other historical and cultural horizons are incommensurable with our own. We do not have straightforward commensurable standards for understanding, interpreting and translating what initially strikes us as strange and alien. Gadamer is not denying incommensurability, but neither is he totalizing or reifying it. Incommensurability sets the hermeneutical problem whether we are concerned with understanding a strange text, a tradition, or an alien people. The task of understanding requires imagination, learning how to listen and respond. We have to pay careful attention to differences, to be wary of glib forms of translation, to modify our prejudgments when they do not fit. We cannot leap out of our own finite limited horizon to some neutral objective perspective, to some Godseye point of view, but we can attempt to enlarge and enrich our horizon accomplishing what Gadamer calls a fusion of horizons. This is essentially a dialogical process. In his classic article From the Natives Point of View: On the Nature of Anthropological Understanding Clifford Geertz beautifully captures the spirit of this hermeneutical process when he speaks of
A continuous dialectical tacking between the most local of local detail and the most global of global structure in such a way as to bring both into view simultaneously. . . . Hopping back and forth between the whole conceived through the parts which actualize it and the parts conceived through the whole which motivates them, we seek to turn them, by a sort of intellectual perpetual motion, into explications of one another. (1979: 239)
Geertz recognizes that he is describing the hermeneutical circle, arguing that it is essential for ethnographic interpretation when he concludes his article by telling us:
Whatever accurate or half-accurate sense one gets of what ones informants are really like comes not from the experience of that acceptance as such, which is part of ones own biography, not of theirs, but from the ability to construe their modes of expression, what I would call their symbol systems, which such an acceptance allows one to work toward developing. Understanding the form and pressure of, to use the dangerous word one more time, natives inner lives is more like grasping a proverb, catching an illusion,
Because historical horizons are always changing, it makes no sense to speak of a final or complete understanding one that, in principle, cannot be revised and modified. But even with the best will in the world and the most patient detailed attempts to understand what is other and incommensurable, we may fail. There are limits to understanding; we become aware of our own finitude and fallibility. The concept of incommensurability that emerges from Gadamers hermeneutics is radically different from that of the myth of the framework. Incommensurability is a challenge to understanding; it is not fixed or static, but is changing, fluid, and open to reconsideration and revision. What Gadamer says about critical appropriation of tradition can be generalized for all understanding including understanding other cultures, religions and ethnic groups.
It is a grave misunderstanding to assume that emphasis on the essential factor of tradition which enters into all understanding implies an uncritical acceptance of tradition and sociopolitical conservatism. . . . In truth the confrontation of our historical tradition is always a critical challenge of this tradition. . . . Every experience is such a confrontation. (Gadamer, 1979: 108)
I do not want to suggest that Gadamers reflections on understanding, horizons, language and incommensurability are unproblematic. He tends, at times, to downplay the obstacles that stand in the way of understanding and the fusion of horizons. He does not account for all the ways in which understanding can fail or why misunderstanding is such a prevalent phenomenon. He has little to say about how power and media in the contemporary world distort communication. He is scarcely concerned with the material conditions that are required to engage in the type of dialogue that he describes. As Habermas once remarked, Gadamer sometimes writes as if dialogue and Aristotelian phronesis are possible in any society or culture. But nevertheless, I do think there are important lessons to learn from Gadamer about the challenge of incommensurability. There is an ethical-political horizon to his understanding of hermeneutics. Gadamer is not merely describing and elucidating the happening of understanding. He is constantly telling us what is required for genuine or authentic understanding and dialogue. Dialogue, for Gadamer, requires learning the difficult art of listening really listening and learning to hear what is different and other than us. When he stresses our dialogue with texts, traditions and works of art, he emphasizes that dialogue is a reciprocal process. But this becomes much more central when we are speaking from a second-person participants perspective where the other is not a text or a tradition, but another person who can speak back to us, who can literally answer yes or no. This is a point that
As someone who has strongly identified with the American pragmatic tradition for more than 50 years, I do not need to be warned about the temptation of philosophers to ignore the hard realities of everyday practical life. But let me meet the objection head-on. I do not think that one can appeal to philosophy to solve concrete political problems. What philosophy or more generally, intelligent self-reflection can do is to orient us in our everyday lives and in confronting concrete problems and tasks. Gadamers reflections on understanding and dialogue are relevant to the problem of incommensurability because they direct us to a practical task. One of the paradoxes of the global world that we live in is that on the one hand there are powerful tendencies toward the commonality and homogenization of everyday practices and experience, but on the other hand, these very tendencies exacerbate the sense of incommensurable hostile differences. All sorts of groups, whether religious, ethnic, or political, begin to think of themselves as self-enclosed windowless monads that are threatened by their enemies. The Myth of the Framework is not a myth for them but a living reality. One of the great dangers of the politics of identity is that it fuels this type of mentality the mentality of those who are convinced that outsiders do not really understand; that outsiders are threatening because they oppress and humiliate. A first task for philosophical reflection is to explode the Myth of the Framework, to engage in the type of philosophical or intellectual deconstructive therapy that allows us to escape from the grips of the
Notes
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 I attempted to do this in Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis (1983). See especially Part Two, Science, Rationality, and Incommensurability. The following paragraphs are based on Beyond Objectivism and Relativism (1983: 812). See my discussion of Kuhns later attempts to clarify what he meant by incommensurability in ibid. (1983: 80). See my discussion of the Cartesian Anxiety in ibid. (1983: 1625). See my discussion of Popper in ibid. (1983: 845). For a related critique of incommensurability see Donald Davidsons famous paper, On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme (19734). See my discussion of the dangerous consequences of the simplistic binary opposition of good and evil in The Abuse of Evil (2005). Jrgen Habermas, Religion in the Public Sphere (2008: 143). John Courtney Murray, We Hold These Truths (1960: 14).
References
Bernstein, Richard J. (1983)Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Bernstein, Richard J. (2005) The Abuse of Evil: The Corruption of Politics and Religion since 9/11. Cambridge: Polity Press.