Bernstein continues later by saying, "There can be no dialogue, no communication unless beliefs, values, commitments, and even emotions and passions are shared in common" (51). Dialogue rests on goodwill... however "it is a self-deceptive illusion to think that the 'other' can always be heard in a friendly dialogue" (52). Therefore, "a practical commitment to... [the avenging energeia of] communicative reason is the basis, perhaps the only honest basis, for hope (53). In the end Bernstein maintains this: the critical dialogue must be both affirmative and skeptical - affirmative of what 'we' have in common (reconciliation) and skeptical with regards to this very content (rupture). In other words, we draw our authority and stability from the past and our criticism and skepticism from the future. Drawing (closely) on Hegel Bernstein notes in this that "we come to realize that Spirit itself 'contains' its own standards of critique (315). The consequence of this is that "all effective critique is local and specific - dependent on local contexts."
Citing Peirce approvingly, Berstein writes, "it seems to me that modern science and modern logic require us to stand upon a very different platform from [Cartesian subjectivity]" (326). This comes with the tag that rationality is "intrinsically dialogical and communicative" (48).
In every instance, Bernstein swears his alligence to communicative rationality, as the space between reconciliation (the past) and rupture (the future). His qualification is this: criticism is always in the name of something. And we always need to ask, "What? What is this critique in the name of?" But remember, central to Bernstein's thesis is this: a practical commitment to communicative reason. For Bernstein, criticism, if it is to be honest, must always be performed in the name of reason. We can only assume that reason is somehow related to human beings. But Bernstein leaves this to our imagination.
One can see what Bernstein is avoiding by looking at what he doesn't discuss: the unconscious, subjectivity, ideology, and desire. All of which only receive token mention - with the possible exception of subjectivity - which he clearly does not address directly. All of the theorists that Bernstein discusses are united on one point: a rejection of the Cartesian subject.
Bernstein's thesis could be rearticulated like this: the project of democracy, which encompasses both modernity and postmodernity, must affirm what we as human beings share in common, reason, and keep a steadfast watch for the way in which this commonality is merely an illusion, and we do this through our recourse to reason. There is a similarity here between Bernstein and Balibar, who asks the question, how do we maintain a civic space of dialogue? (which culminates in an empty principle of universality - the principled equality of all people) (what Bernstein identifies as symmetry and reciprocity). This is a moment of abstract negativity, the epistemological mistake of treating regulative ideas as constitutive - in other words, there is a disavowal here, a repression - which is manifest by the reduction of the subject to the process of subjectivization... a reduction that can only end in terror. Against Bernstein's Hegelianism, the subject is not substance! In Kantian terms: Bernstein's sublime reconciliation and rupture turns into the monsterous, as a jealous history takes its vengeance on future uncertainty right here in the present. Otherwise known as the French Revolution.
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