It has been the signature of Fred Dallmayr’s major intellectual inquiries over the past 50 years or so not only to critique fundamental aspects of the paradigm of transatlantic modernity but also to reassess those of its values which lend themselves to integration into a humanistic democratic vision. In earlier publications, Dallmayr predominantly focused diasapprobation on philosophical knowledge formations excessively organized around the Cartesian concepts of individual rationality in order to philosophically overcome the dualistic separation of mind from matter, the subject from the object, culture from nature, and thought from spirituality. Thereby, he had critically assessed the limits of the beliefs in the virtues of the scientific control and manipulation of nature, of secularism, and individual liberalism. Over the past 20 years or so, he has predominatly inquired into ways in which Western ethnocentricity, a major pillar of the paradigm of modernity, can be overcome by practices that involve nongovernmentally organized intercivilizational dialogues with important leading intellectuals from practically all global regions.
The publication under review is, from my perspective, nonetheless unique among Dallmayr’s intellectual accomplishments to date in that it constitutes his most interdisciplinary approach to modernity’s scarred relations between freedom and solidarity, on one hand, while simultaneously participating in the construction of a global coalition of intellectuals for assessing the conditions of possibility for reconciliations between Eastern and Western experiential forms of freedom, solidarity, and spirituality, on the other hand. Through this humanistic coalition, which includes leading figures such as Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Ghandi, John Dewey, Ashis Nandy, Henry David Thoreau, Albert Camus, Leo Tolstoy, Raimon Pannikar, Tu Weiming, and the so-called renaissance traditions from within Islamic thought (Al Farabi, Ibn Sina, Ibn Ruschd), Dallmayr explores the construction of solidarious relations on a global scale in order to overcome the traditional tensions between individual freedom and solidarity embedded in Western mainstream political, social, economic, and cultural thought.
Both Dallmayr’s critique of modernity and the construction of a global intellectual and spiritual coalition on the subject of conciliatory relations between freedom and solidarity is framed by fundamental philosophical assumptions derived from Martin Heidegger’s famous inquiries on the Seinsfrage, or on the question of Being. In this context, where one reaches out toward the meaning of Being, one cannot but share one’s freedom through collective existence, or Mitsein. Here, the Cartesian separation of ego from society, of the subject from the object, of the res cogitans from the res extensa, of mind from spirituality, of culture from nature, no longer holds. It can be overcome. The assumption of such a Heideggerian position lends itself to a critique of the laissez-faire market triumphalisms of neoclassical and neoliberal macroeconomics, respectively symbolized by the twentieth-century Austrian and Chicago schools of economics. In addition, the author argues that to the extent to which oligarchic corporate and financial elites attempt to control and manipulate the political, social, and cultural conduct in the daily lives of the masses of the people, democracy has turned into a fragile system. When, furthermore, politicians are purchased by the highest bidder, or when citizens are predominantly valued on account of their individual buying power, then Dallmayr recalls Karl Polanyi’s unexampled analysis of the dangerous separation of the economic sphere from culture, history, and ethics, while observing the simple fact that only individuals with the means to participate in consumerism exercize individual choice. Finally, Dallmayr critically addresses the pervasive cultures of violence by confronting them with a promotion of cultures of nonviolence, as evidenced by an entire series of public intellectuals and writers from the East to the West over the past two centuries. Central in this context are the reappraisals of Ghandi’s practices of nonviolent disobedience, Camus’s rejection of violence as part of the human condition, Tolstoy’s holistic view of the multiple relations between human communities and their environments, and Dewey’s pragmatic design on the relations between the self and society.
Under the impulsions of such diverse traditions, all pointing in various degrees to foundational reassessments of the predominant Western conceptions of the relations between individual freedom and solidarious practice, Dallmayr concludes that a paradigm shift is impending (p. 111) in that a consciousness rooted in individual self-interest, secularism, and anthrocentrism is increasingly poised to allow for greater ethico-religious considerations. Hinduism and Buddhism in particular lend themselves for exploring a liberation of the self from forms of Western rationality tied to utilitarian and individualistic pursuits. Combining so many traditions from all corners of the globe enabled Dallmayr to design the contours of a relational concept of “person” as the ensemble of multiple social, spiritual, and cosmic relations. But it also enabled him to offer to his readers an extraordinarily rich and productive text.
More than 80 years ago, Antonio Gramsci, one of the leading critical intellectuals of the twentieth century, wondered what would happen when the global economic axis moved from the Atlantic to the Pacific, when historically unprecedented masses of Asian peoples entered the spheres of industrial production, exchange, and consumption. Gramsci did not bring up the question of intellectuals in this context or how the shift in the global economic axis, and the challenges it would pose to transatlantic economic interests, would potentially involve challenges to transatlantic intellectual interests. Freedom and Solidarity indirectly touches on such intellectual challenges in that this book is a stark reminder of the fact that intellectuals in one territory used to impose their beliefs in particular virtues and ethics on the peoples and their intellectuals in other territories. It is also a reminder that an international division of intellectual labor in a hierarchical structure of domination and subordination controlled access to the organization of intellectual production, exchange, and consumption. In this sense, Dallmayr’s study is symptomatic of a paradigm shift in critical consciousness because it indeed points to new beginnings in a globally coordinated organization of an ethics of solidarity.
It is to the author’s credit that in Freedom and Solidarity, he views these new beginnings as part of a process in which intercivilizational actors have many tasks to consider on the subject of reconciling cultural and social practices of injustice, discrimination, and oppression—which do exist among practitioners of all major world religions—with visions of global democratic ethics. What enabled him to do so was that indigeneous intellectuals everywhere, and Tu Weiming is an excellent example, have already pointed the way in that direction. The same can be asserted with regard to Dallmayr himself. For even a cursory overview of the unexampled current revolutions in discursive formations on the subject of “global civil society,” “global civics,’’ “human rights.” and “cosmopolitan justice” will bring home the fact that Dallmayr’s enduring participation in intracivilizational dialogues has produced a most significant contribution to discourses on “spiritualized forms of cosmopolitanisms.” By doing so, he again built bridges, as so often happens, among differently situated groups with different traditions. No doubt, critical thinkers inspired by Dallmayr will expand their own bridges in the future with environmental justice and indigenous knowledge activists—among whom Vandana Shiva surely stand out—and this is be welcomed.
