337 BOOK REVIEW Human Studies 24: 337343, 2001.

Book review
Doing Philosophy in the Age of Globalization (Mondialization)
Fred Dallmayr, Beyond Orientalism: Essays on Cross-Cultural Encounter.
Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1996. 277 and xxiii pages
including references and index and Alternative Visions: Paths in the Global
Village. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998. 307 and xiii pages
including references and index.
Only connect! E.M. Forster
1.
Fred Dallmayr is a prolific, versatile, and ambidextrous thinker who has an
engaging style. The present two companion volumes under review show his
inexhaustible intellectual knack, energy and rigor for connecting myriads of
ideas and phenomena which are rarely noticed and attended to by other
scholars. They together are an incomparable exercise in global thinking.
Consistent with their pioneering spirit, Dallmayr recently launched a new series
with Lexington Books: Global Encounters: Studies in Comparative Political
Theory (Dallmayr, 1999). Indeed, he takes the idea of globalization seriously
and makes cultural border-crossing easy for others. The noble idea of making
the world a global village, which the late Marshall McLuhan coined and
propagated, is for Dallmayr neither an archaic (tribal) nor utopian slogan. For
Dallmayr, the fabric of globalization is intricately interwoven with the woof
of history and the warp of culture. In an interesting chapter on Liberating
Remembrance (AV, p. 145) in reference to Marcel Proust, he writes: the past
. . . remains a reservoir of sedimentations and hidden trends that actively
permeate the present while casting their shadow (or their light) on the future.
Dallmayr means to show the definitive way of making globalization a concrete
reality. He shows the way toward global thinking, practices what Heidegger calls
planetary thinking (planetarische Denken), and engages in planetary building
encounters (planetarischen Bauen Begegnungen) (Heidegger, 1958, p. 107).
In a symposium that honored his major life-time work several years ago,
Dallmayr (1998, p. 306) himself noted the present two books under review as
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providing clues, and pointing the way, to the new itinerary of cultural
hermeneutics which would transgress the hegemonic confines of Western
culture and open itself to the marginalized non-Western cultures of the globe.
The spirit of his philosophizing in connecting the unconnected embodies that
of Merleau-Pontys philosophical injunction: philosophy is not so much a body
of knowledge as it is the constant vigilance which refuses to let us forget the
source of all knowledge (Merleau-Ponty, 1964, p. 110). In the age of
globalization, philosophical vigilance is in demand more than ever before to
test to use the language of Merleau-Ponty again in an ethnographic context
the self through the other and the other through the self. In other words,
vigilance is indispensable to see and hear the globe in which everything is
connected synchronically to everything else.
Dallmayr is quintessentially Heideggerian. Heideggers ontology permeates
the interwoven web of Dallmayrs thought. It is no accident that Dallmayr
pays due attention to the Kyoto school of philosophy (Kitaro Nishida, Keiji
Nishitani and Masao Abe) and J.L. Mehta. Dallmayrs idea of globalization
is in significant part a definitive extension of Heideggers fundamental
ontology of Dasein as Being-in-the-world (in-der-Welt-sein), particularly
of Mitsein. Inasmuch as he centerstages (the word he uses often) or upstages
the idea of connectedness including philosophys connectedness to the world.
Dallmayr reminds us of the ancient Chinese wisdom of synchronicity which
is associated with the Book of Changes (I Ching): in the universe which is in
constant transformation, everything is connected to everything else and
nothing exists in isolation. The artistic rendition of M. C. Eschers Verbum
(1942) approximates the I Chings ecological or synchronistic chain of Being.
In the final analysis, Dallmayrs thought incarnates what Vietnamese Zen
Buddhist Thich Nhat Hanh (1993) calls Interbeing that connotes the sense
of our encompassing connectedness to the world not only to the social world
but also the natural world.
2.
Dallmayrs companion volumes of Beyond Orientalism (BO) and Alternative
Visions (AV) together constitute richly interwoven and multi-layered texts or
intertexts which are by definition both intercultural in substance and
interdisciplinary in approach, whose discussion encompasses thinkers and
topics across the continents of Europe (Western and Eastern), Asia (East and
South), Africa, and the Americas (North, Central, and South). They together
give a new meaning to the idea of Continental philosophy. They are indeed
intercontinental, that is, global. These two volumes cover a wide array of issues
and topics ranging from Eurocentrism (Orientalism) to multiculturalism, from
the center to the periphery, from universals to particulars, from essentialism
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to relativism, from homogeneity to heterogeneity, from the politics of identity
to the politics of difference or nonidentity, from hegemony to liberation, from
nationalism to global democracy. There is also a profuse list of thinkers
including Johann Gottfried Herder, Edward W. Said, Tzvetan Todorov, Georg
F.W. Hegel, Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jacques Derrida, Jrgen
Habermas, Charles Taylor, Theodor W. Adorno, Ernesto Laclau, Jean-Luc
Nancy, Wilhelm Halbfass, Mohandas K. Gandhi, Radindranath Tagore,
Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, Rajni Kothari, Ashis Nandy, Masao Abe, Tu Wei-
ming, Gustavo Gutierrez, and Amilcar Cabral.
Dallmayrs proposal for globalization or globalism, which is thoroughly
multicultural, developmental and democratic, begins with the deconstruction
of Eurocentrism, Orientalism, or what Derrida calls a white mythology. Here
it is instructive to take note of Heideggers definition of deconstruction (or
destruction) as a critical process which is neither a negation of tradition nor
a condemnation of it as worthless (Heidegger, 1982, p. 23). Rather, it is
precisely a positive appropriation of tradition itself (Heidegger, 1982, p. 23).
In Being and Time (1927) Heidegger zooms in on the temporal dimension (i.e.,
historicity) of Dasein as Being-in-the-world, although Dasein is spatially
placed in the world with other beings and things (i.e., Mitsein or Mitwelt as
spatiality). Dallmayrs analysis, which is no doubt greatly indebted to
Heideggers ontology, however, is not only historical with an emphasis on
change but also cross-cultural. The location of culture is a geophilosophical
idea.
Dallmayr is the first to acknowledge the indebtedness of his Beyond
Orientalism to Edward W. Saids pioneering critique of Orientalism. As the
title of Dallmayrs work itself suggests, however, it is also meant to go beyond
Saids diagnostic critique of Orientalism on the basis of Foucaults knowledge/
power nexus. For Dallmayr, globalism is an alternative to Orientalism. It is
not just an exit from Orientalism but also opens up an alternative entrance
which differs from Samuel Huntingtons theory of the clash of civilizations.
Although, according to Dallmayr, Huntington exits from Orientalism, he
makes no attempt to answer how the clash of civilizations might be resolved.
By globalization, Dallmayr does not mean to surf or glide on the flatland
of One World, that is, on European ethnophilosophy masquerading as
universalism. Nor is it a disconnected set of Eurocentrism, Afrocentrism,
Indocentrism, and Sinocentrism. It opposes what Said calls essentializations
(1993, p. 301), e.g., Westernizing the Western and Orientalizing the Orient.
To use the language of Cornel Wests new cultural politics of difference
(1990, p. 36), Dallmayrs globalization is a search neither for faceless
universalism nor for ethnic chauvinism. By refusing any kind of
indiscriminate fusionism (or hybridity) on the one hand and discriminate
separatism on the other, Dallmayr takes note of the following unsurpassable
passage which Merleau-Ponty (1964, p. 139)
1
wrote in his introductory
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remarks for a collection of essays in comparative philosophy he himself edited
with Hegels Eurocentric proclivity in mind:
From this angle, civilizations lacking our philosophical or economic
equipment take on an instructive value. It is not a matter of going in search
of truth or salvation in what falls short of science or philosophical
awareness, or of dragging chunks of mythology as such into our philosophy,
but of acquiring in the presence of these variants of humanity that we are
so far from a sense of the theoretical and practical problems our institutions
are faced with, and of rediscovering the existential field that they were born
in and that their long success has led us to forget. The Orients childishness
has something to teach us, if it were nothing more than the narrowness of
our adult ideas. The relationship between Orient and Occident, like that
between child and adult, is not that of ignorance to knowledge or non-
philosophy to philosophy; it is much more subtle, making room on the part
of the Orient for all anticipations and prematurations. Simply rallying
and subordinating non-philosophy to true philosophy will not create the
unity of the human spirit. It already exists in each cultures lateral
relationships to the others, in the echoes one awakens in the other.
For Dallmayr, the truth of globalization and the method of dialogue are
inseparably intertwined. As a multicultural phenomenon, postmodernism
celebrates human and cultural diversity, particularly marginalized humanity
which struggles to liberate itself from Western hegemony. To this extent,
Dallmayr sympathizes with postmodernism. However, he is weary of
postmodernisms proclivity to cultural relativism and radical alterity (or the
absolute otherness of the other) for the fear of sinking into the quicksand of
separatism which is the diametric opposite of globalism. This in no way
means that Dallmayr condones or approves of monological absolutism or
universalism. Universals without particulars are empty, while particulars
without universals are blind. Dallmayr places himself in the position of
mediation or reconciliation which splits the difference between two
extremes with no final synthesis.
Postmodern theory to paraphrase Gilles Deleuze does not totalize but
only multiplies. Difference marks the principium of multiplicity. But for
difference there would be no relationality. Arendt contends that human plurality
is characterized by the Janus-face of equality and distinction. While
equality or commonality makes human relationships possible, distinction or
difference, makes them necessary. In this regard, Heideggers Differenz as
Unterschied is a perfect fit for Dallmayrs multicultural globalism. The term
Unterschied signifies a simultaneous wordplay or interplay between difference
and relationality. Because of difference, relationality is said to be agonistic
or tensional. To use a Foucaudian formulation, what power is to resistance,
relationality is to tension which does not end in the abolition of the other.
Michael Walzer (1997, p. xii) is hardly controvertible when he says that
341 BOOK REVIEW
Toleration makes difference possible; difference makes toleration necessary.
Because ambiguity is endemic to the order of plurality or diversity, the
hermeneutics of dialogue embedded in difference is open to the idea that the
other may be right the very idea which Gadamer deems to be the soul of
hermeneutics. Insofar as dialogue is non-teleological, no one has either first or
last word. The Russian dialogist Mikhail Bakhtin speaks of the unfinalizability
of dialogue as opposed to the finalizability of Hegelian dialectics. His
dialogism approximates the ancient Chinese correlative logic of yin and yang.
3.
What is the goal of Dallmayrs multicultural globalism by way of dialogical
engagement? For him, the answer may be found in Johann Gottfried Herders
cooperative Humanitt or the cultivation (Bildung) of humanity. Dallmayr
reappropriates Herders seminal thought which has often been misunderstood
and makes it relevant to the present condition of humanity. According to
Dallmayr, Herder is not a historicist or incurable romantic, as Isaiah Berlin
portrays him, who tried to blackmail or sabotage the Enlightenment project
by engaging in parochial or nationalistic discourse. Rather, he is a consummate
humanist. Although critical of the universalizing and blandly homogenizing
aspirations of Enlightenment thought, writes Dallmayr (AV, p. 140), Herder
throughout his life persistently extolled and celebrated the topic of
humanization and human Bildung as a process of self-transcendence and self-
transformation but a transformation that can only happen in concrete and
carefully sustained relationships. In the same vein, Confucius and
Confucianism are, for Dallmayr, not an archaic figure and ideology but rather
they speak directly and relevantly for todays humanity. Confucian jen parallels
Herders cultivation of Humanitt. As the cultivation of benevolence for people
everywhere, jen cultivates the sense of the world as fiduciary community
(Tu Wei-mings expression).
As universals without particulars are empty and, conversely, particulars
without universals are blind to reiterate , Dallmayrs globalism takes
seriously what Clifford Geertz calls local knowledge, that is, local history
and local culture. Indeed, it is multicultural in the true sense of the term.
Dallmayrs discerning discussion of Amilcar Cabral, who was born in
Portuguese Guinea and educated in Lisbon, is an interesting case study in this
connection. In his attempt to re-Africanize Africa, Cabral urges a return to
indigenous roots or the indigenous cultural life of Africans themselves in order
to promote distinctly African norms of thinking and acting. As an antidote to
colonialism, re-Africanization is a refusal to subscribe to an imperialist
version of the Enlightenment project by extolling the virtues of Western-
style universalism at the expense of local or traditional modes of thought and
342 BOOK REVIEW
action (AV, p. 170). Nor it should be emphasized is Cabrals re-
Africanization Afrocentric in the sense that it is an attempt to build a
monument of negritude (AV, p. 187).
Dallmayrs refined discussion of modernization and postmodernization
particularly in reference to India, reveals what he means by globalism.
Modernization as a historical phenomenon in the non-Western or developing
areas both colonial and postcolonial is without question the process of
Westernization including so-called nation-building as a developmental
process with the ideological baggage of nationalism. However, it is neither
entirely political nor exclusively economic since it is deeply anchored in
indigenous cultural traditions and values. Continuous with modernization
as Westernization, postmodernization is the phenomenon in which
Westernization is adapted to and colored by indigenous conditions. Gandhi,
for example, must not be seen as a reactionary who yearns to return to nativism.
His psychohistory is appropriated or reappropriated by Ashis Nandy and
Rajni Kothari in particular both of whom refuse to museumize him for
India. To forget Gandhi is to reify both contemporary Indian thought and the
meaning of modernization in India, that is, postmodernization. More
importantly, the local knowledge of Gandhis truth (satyagraha) based
on compassion for justice and peace for all has a global message, for global
democracy which demands grassroots participation based on vernacular
or life-worldly experiences. Dallmayr highlights the relevance of Gandhis
truth and its relevance, in parallel to Vclav Havels phenomenological
living in truth and power of the powerless, to the contemporary world as
a global village. Gandhis truth provides us a pensive pause in rethinking
development and modernization in search of humane alternatives (Rajni
Kotharis expression). Postmodernization in India is modernization with a
human face, as it were, which is neither Marxist nor one of liberal and legal
proceduralism (John Rawlss and Jrgen Habermass).
4.
In conclusion, reading Dallmayr in these two volumes is, as always, a learning
experience for me and sharpens my wit. I only hope that I have not done
injustice to his nuanced and delicate moorings by focusing on selected
authors and topics. No doubt these volumes are a guide for the perplexed on
todays world as a global village and on what it means to globalize.
Dallmayr is a philosopher with an ecumenical and cosmopolitan mind who
never loses sight of a heterogeneous world which cannot be homogenized in
the name of globalism or global democracy. In the spirit of Camus and
Foucault, he refuses to accept the world as it is or has been but tries to transform
it by providing us with an alternative vision: to interpret the world is also to
343 BOOK REVIEW
transform it. In the end, his assiduous intellectual peregrination and globe-
trotting make him a civil servant of humanity, a friend of global community,
particularly of marginalized humanity for which we are eternally grateful. For
him, Western ethnophilosophy can no longer claim to be philosphia perennis
or prima philosphia. Nor is the end of history Pax Americana with American
English as the lingua franca.
Hwa Yol Jung
Department of Political Science
Moravian College
Bethlehem, PA, USA
Notes
1. Said (1993, p. 317) concurs with Merleau-Ponty when he writes: We can no longer
afford conceptions of history that stress linear development or Hegelian transcendence,
any more than we can accept geographical or territorial assumptions that assign centrality
to the Atlantic world and congenital and even delinquent peripherality to non-Western
regions. In connection with Merleau-Pontys lateral universals, Carl O. Scrags crafting
of transversality is instructive here (see Jung, 1995).
References
Dallmayr, F. (1998). A Response to Friends. Human Studies 21: 295308.
Dallmayr, F. (Ed.) (1999). Border Crossings: Toward a Comparative Political Theory. Lanham,
MD: Lexington Books.
Heidegger, M. (1958). The Question of Being. Trans. William Kluback and Jean T. Wilde.
New Haven, CT: College and University Press.
Heidegger, M. (1982). The Basic Problems of Phenomenology. Trans. Albert Hofstadter.
Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Jung, H.Y. (1995). The Tao of tranversality as a global approach to truth: A metacommentary
on Calvin O. Schrag. Man and World 28: 1131.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964). Signs. Trans. Richard C. McCleary. Evanston, IL: Northwestern
University Press.
Nhat Hanh, Thich. (1993). Interbeing. Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press.
Said, E.W. (1993). Culture and Imperialism. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Walzer, M. (1997). On Toleration. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
West, C. (1990). The New Cultural Politics of Difference. In R. Ferguson et al. (Ed.), Out
There. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
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