[citation needed] The pragmatic and dialogical ethos that pervades his works has also been displayed in a number of philosophical exchanges with other contemporary thinkers like Hannah Arendt, Jürgen Habermas, Richard Rorty, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jacques Derrida, Agnes Heller, and Charles Taylor.
Throughout his life Bernstein actively endorsed a number of social causes and was involved in movements of participatory democracy, upholding some of the cardinal virtues of the American pragmatist tradition, including a commitment to fallibilism, engaged pluralism, and the nurturing of critical communities.
His classmates included Susan Sontag, Philip Roth, Mike Nichols, George Steiner, and the person who would become one of Bernstein's closest friends and philosophical interlocutors, Richard Rorty.
[1][a] This was a time when interest in Dewey was reaching an all-time low, partly due to the rising influence of analytic philosophy and the prejudiced conviction that there was not much to be learned from the Classical American Pragmatists.
[citation needed] One of the reasons he decided to go to Yale was because it was one of the few departments that resisted this questionable ideology, offering a stimulating atmosphere where thinkers like Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche were read with the same enthusiasm and seriousness as Wittgenstein and Carnap.
[10] Professor Paul Weiss summed up the inconformity of the philosophical community when he stated that "the committee came to its conclusion slowly and conscientiously, but that does not mean that its decision was not stupid, unfair, dismaying, and one from which it will take this university and the department a long time to recover.
In 1976, while spending a semester at Haverford, Habermas asked Bernstein to join him in directing a seminar to be held in Dubrovnik in support of eight dissident Yugoslavian Marxists of the Praxis group who had been dismissed from Belgrade University because of their political views.
This gesture of solidarity became an international institution, attracting, over the years, a group of intellectuals including Albrecht Wellmer, Charles Taylor, Anthony Giddens, Cornelius Castoriadis, Richard Rorty, Alain Touraine, Agnes Heller, and the young graduate students Seyla Benhabib, Nancy Fraser, and Judith Butler.
"[18] In his 1983 book Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis, Bernstein diagnosed a serious issue that affects much of modern philosophy as it oscillates between two untenable positions; on the one hand, the dogmatic search for absolute truths, and on the other, the conviction that "anything goes" when it comes to the justification of our most cherished beliefs and ideas.
"[19] He calls this problem the Cartesian anxiety, a mostly unacknowledged existential fear that seems to lead us ineluctably to 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".
[20] Although in philosophy this Cartesian anxiety mostly shows up in the discussion of epistemological issues, Bernstein points to something much deeper and universal with this notion, something that permeates almost every aspect of life and has serious ethical and political consequences.
Bernstein's strategy to exorcise the Cartesian anxiety is to challenge its underlying assumption, namely, that the only type of foundations that can support our knowledge of the world and our everyday practices must be unshakeable and eternally fixed.
Appealing to the ancient tradition of practical philosophy, and some of its contemporary proponents like Hannah Arendt, Jürgen Habermas, and Hans-Georg-Gadamer, Bernstein is able to show that acknowledging our finitude and the fallibility of our beliefs and convictions is not incompatible with truth, knowledge, or getting things right.
"[22] Indeed, more than a specialized scientific or epistemological doctrine, fallibilism is an ethical and political stance, the outlook on life we need to cultivate if we want to exorcise the Cartesian Anxiety and overcome the grand Either/Or between relativism and foundationalism that affects contemporary culture.
"[24] One can view Bernstein's project as an attempt to democratize phronēsis and show the great importance of cultivating dialogical communities where different arguments and opinions are taken into consideration and decisions are the result of a process of serious communal deliberation.
In addition to pragmatic fallibilism and judgment, Bernstein also highlights the importance of cultivating an engaged pluralism, an ethos that was also central for the classical American pragmatists, particularly James and Dewey.
In his 1988 Presidential Address to the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association, Bernstein defined engaged pluralism as the genuine willingness to listen to others, "being vigilant against the dual temptations of simply dismissing what others are saying by falling back on one of those standard defensive ploys where we condemn it as obscure, wooly, or trivial, or thinking we can always easily translate what is alien into our own entrenched vocabularies.