Reviews for Kierkegaard's Upbuilding DisCourses

The average rating for Kierkegaard's Upbuilding DisCourses based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2009-03-07 00:00:00 Jacob Davis Structured as a series of essays, The New Constellation explores the 20th century philosophical undertaking as a set of investigations into recurring tensions that present both affinities and aversions to the aporias of post Kantian philosophy. Each essay stands on its own as a lucid exposition and critical assessment of such philosophers as Levinas, Derrida, Foucault, Heidegger, Rorty and Habermas, but taken together, each also builds upon the other to paint a picture of the challenges of their shared modern/postmodern horizon. The book starts with essays that sketch out the development of enlightenment rationality as instrumental rationality and its critical appraisal by American and Continental philosophers. Defined in a variety of ways by differing and sometimes opposed philosophical schools, instrumental rationality is probably best understood as a kind of convergence of language games in which the affinities of capitalist production and exchange, along with technological innovation, scientific methodology and the bureaucratic state come to dominate the legitimation criteria of cultural, political and philosophical reasoning. These initial essays not only describe the philosophical development of theories of instrumental rationality, they also provide an overview of common themes and limits in the appraisals of the instrumental rationality and the attempts to secure other forms of thought against its dominance. The book then launches into more detailed essays of specific philosophical projects through which Bernstein elaborates on the critique of instrumental rationality in Levinas, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida and Rorty. Bernstein in each essay offers a highly sympathetic read to each of these philosophers which enables him to draw out important insights and contributions while demonstrating the limits of their own philosophical project. So Heidegger, for example, provides a compelling but eventually abstract description of the history of being as enframing that, because it privileges poesis over phronesis as a revealing of being, fails to provide an answer to the question: what is to be done. In Bernstein's estimation, Foucault, Derrida and Rorty fair only slightly better than Heidegger. Each draws upon the insights of Levinas where the marginal, the other and the otherness of the other enable these philosophers in their own ways to develop powerful critical tools to critique social dominations. Yet, as Bernstein argues, each still faulters in providing a guide beyond their own idiosyncratic answers to the challenge: what is to be done. They each find themselves in a philosophical dead end. Their projects each clearly favor a critical stance against systems of power and domination, but each also finds himself unable to provide positive direction or justify why an ethics of the other can even be privileged over against systems of domination. Bernstein lets the attractions and aversions of this constellation of philosophers stand while trying to paint a picture through Habermas, James, Dewey and Peirce of a gesture toward a more robust, if fallible, pragmatics that enable one to discern an ethical direction. This gesture toward pragmatics admits of error and practices a kind of humility in its attempts to orient an ethical stance within community and communication that provides for reconciliation but does not close off otherness, difference and non-identity. He is clearest in this gesture in the appendix where he describes the American Pragmatist school of philosophy as a source for further consideration of a dialogical approach that enables the philosopher to discern between the marginalized other in a differend and a marginalized other presenting a discourse that legitimately holds no sway between ethical actors. On their own, each essay is well worth reading. Taken as a whole, this new constellation provides some deep insights and challenging problems for anyone interested in the philosophical projects of the 20th Century.

Review # 2 was written on 2007-04-10 00:00:00 Amanda Hoeschele Bernstein's book is one of the more accessible (albeit still challenging to those not steeped in the postmodern tradition) works on postmodern political theory. The work is well worth grappling with. He helps identify some of the characteristics of postmodernism and then explores the contributions that this makes to political discourse. The Other is an important theme among Postmodern thinkers. It arises, inter alia, from the very nature of language as such thinkers understand it. A key concept is the notion of binary oppositions. To use colors in the spectrum as an example. White is defined in terms of black, but we do not think of white as black--even though black is critical for white's meaning. In a sense, black is pushed to the side and becomes Other. Bernstein says that (71): "This is the theme [in Postmodern thought:] that resists the unrelenting tendency of the will to knowledge and truth where Reason--when unmasked--is understood as always seeking to appropriate, comprehend, control, master, contain, dominate, suppress, or repress what presents itself as 'the Other' that it confronts. It is the theme of the violence of Reason's imperialistic welcoming embrace." A classic binary opposition relevant here is Same/Other or Identity/Difference. The first term in each is privileged or "valorized." The second becomes Other, whose meaning is hidden or repressed. Rational ideals of the Modern era have it that we must try to explain all things, that there are underlying explanations to account for everything. We try to make "Same" or explain all components of a particular arena in common terms. However, the idea of binary oppositions in language means that Same can only be defined in terms of Other (remember, the color white can only be defined in terms of the color black--black becomes Other to white). By trying to reduce everything to Same, we are repressing Other. There is a striking political metaphor here, according to Bernstein. He claims that (71): "For the 'logic' at work here is the 'logic' at work in cultural, political, social, and economic imperialism and colonization--even the 'logic' of ethical imperialism where the language of reciprocal recognition and reconciliation masks the violent reduction of the alterity of 'the Other' (l'autrui) to 'more of the same.' What is at issue here is acknowledging the radical incommensurable singularity of the Other (l'autrui), to recover a sense of radical plurality that defies any facile total reconciliation." For the postmodern analyst, the suppression of the "Other" is a form of violence. What is needed is a "letting be." Jacques Derrida, a major Postmodern figure, calls out for ". . .the respect for the other as what it is: other. Without this acknowledgment, which is not a knowledge, or let us say without this 'letting be' of an existent (Other) as something existing outside me in the essence of what is. . ., no ethics would be possible" (quoted on 184-185). And Derrida clearly wants an ethics of tolerance and "letting be." We must never cease questioning; we must not allow one truth to become dominant and, thus, to disallow other truths to coexist. This questioning thrust is as much in order in the politico-social realm as in the literary or philosophical realm. The task for democratic theory today is to think through how to do justice to both universality and particularity, sameness and difference, to conceive and develop practices in which we recognize the indeterminableness of conflict and nevertheless can learn to respect the otherness of the other. The postmodern thinker would argue that democracy is only possible if we resist the temptation to marginalize/suppress/oppress/repress Other. That is, a "letting be" and tolerance of Other/different is mandated if we are truly to experience freedom in a democracy. This is a challenging book-not a quick read. But Bernstein is more accessible than many other writers. Well worth confronting to address the many issues at stake.