Human Studies 21: 273–281, 1998.

273
© 1998 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

The Dallmayr Symposium

Fred Dallmayr: The Odyssey of Reconciling Reason

DAVID M. RASMUSSEN
Department of Philosophy, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA 02167, U.S.A.

In Twilight of Subjectivity (1981) Fred Dallmayr plots a course which takes

him through an unbelievably productive period from 1981 to the present. I
propose to honor Professor Dallmayr, whose uncanny ability has manifested
itself in an attempt to rethink the post-enlightenment tradition, by following
his work of this period through a series of reflections that begin with Hegel
and end with Heidegger.
In Twilight of Subjectivity, Dallmayr makes the argument that we are “be-
yond possessive individualism” (Dallmayr, 1981, p. 8). Although Nozick’s
entitlement theory and Sartre’s early writings are said to be representative
of possessive individualism, critiques by Voegelin, Althusser, Foucault and
Derrida set the stage for a kind of post- or anti-humanism which transforms
the very idea of what it is to be human. Dallmayr, rather than being a strict
antihumanist, wants to have a deflated concept of human beings; not a “master
of reality” but rather, following Heidegger, a “shepherd of being.” Merleau-
Ponty, Adorno and, above all, Heidegger substantiate this view. Dallmayr
wants to establish an idea of intersubjectivity “once the subject is removed
from the cornerstone of social analysis.” He argues that a reinterpreted un-
derstanding of Mitsein will provide the basis for this view. Here, the crux of
the argument is to show that Löwith and Theunissen are essentially wrong
in their egological interpretations of the early Heidegger. The later Sartre,
Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, Lukács and Adorno are brought to the fore to support
this argument. The discussion ends with a typology of modes of sociality
including communalism, association, movement and community.
This reconstructed view of intersubjectivity will lead to a different view
of the relationship between human beings and nature, reflecting Marx’s view
of the humanization of nature and the naturalization of man. Here Dallmayr
relies on Derrida and Ricoeur to provide him with a non-teleological un-
derstanding of the relationship between human beings and nature. From this
analysis it is concluded that we can get another understanding of politics and
the good life.
274 DAVID M. RASMUSSEN

The good life can neither be engineered nor imposed although it is anti-
thetical to human effort. When it arrives, it is liable to overtake us during
the night, not like a thief but like a wealthy benefactor; at its approach,
we are likely to discover that we have been heirs all along – but of riches
we did not suspect or did not fathom in this form (Dallmayr, 1981, p.
173).

I submit that if one were to think through this post-enlightenment thesis

about politics and the good life, about ego-identity and intersubjectivity, the
argument originally presented in Twilight of Subjectivity would not suffice.
Rather, it would be necessary to rethink the place of Hegel in the political
order. It would be necessary to reconstruct Nietzsche’s possible contribution
to politics. It would be necessary to rethink the contributions of the Frankfurt
school, both early and late. Finally, it would be necessary to come to terms in
a much more comprehensive way with the claim that in spite of Heidegger’s
political excesses, his thought makes a fundamental contribution to politics.
It is this odyssey, which at its heart rests on the claims of a reconciling reason,
which I wish to follow.

The very titles of Dallmayr’s recent books give to the clue to this Odyssey:
from Twilight of Subjectivity (1981) to The Other Heidegger (1993b) includ-
ing Margins of Political Discourse (1989) and Critical Encounters (1987) on
the road Between Freiburg and Frankfurt (1991). The very choice of terms
– “twilight,” “margins,” “between,” “other” – suggest ways in which Pro-
fessor Dallmayr wants to read the post-enlightenment tradition. The terms
are modest in their own right, but in their modesty they make a major claim
about the way the post-enlightenment tradition should be read. Following this
reading, one encounters the rehabilitation of a much maligned Hegel and the
political reappropriation of a scorned Heidegger. Dallmayr would rehabilitate
Hegel against the claims of his followers; he would undermine the claims of
later critical theory by reasserting the claims of critical theory in its original
form; he would even, against the critical interrogation of Heidegger’s politics,
sustain a Heideggerian politics.
Dallmayr’s interpretation of Hegel asserts the primacy of reconciliation
over the atomization of civil society. Although, in Dallmayr’s view

. . . Hegel’s work is relentless in underscoring the role of diremption

in individual and social development – to the point of denouncing and
 THE ODYSSEY OF RECONCILING REASON 275

rejecting facile or utopian remedies (like the abolition of private prop-

erty). . . . [T]he maturation of consciousness is portrayed as the “highway
of despair,” leading finally to a “speculative Good Friday” (Dallmayr,
1993a, p. 249).

For Dallmayr, Hegel’s work does not end there, not with the atomization of
modern society. “Yet, as has also been shown, despair is not Hegel’s last word;
in the midst of divisiveness, his work holds out the promise of reconciliation”
(Dallmayr, 1993a, pp. 249–250). It is this promise of reconciliation, a pol-
itics of reconciliation, the need for a “public Sittlichkeit,” that characterizes
Dallmayr’s entire corpus.

II

How to articulate that politics of reconciliation in a post-Hegelian context,

this becomes the task that marks Dallmayr’s approach. Now the task of artic-
ulating a reconciling reason that finds its embodiment in a Hegel-like form
of Sittlichkeit requires an intense and nuanced approach to modern and/or
post-modern thought. It is this position which finds its most mature expres-
sion in the last two works, Between Freiburg and Frankfurt and The Other
Heidegger, although evidence of its development can be traced to early es-
says on, for example, Adorno. In a word, it is a thesis about the relationship
between critique and ontology. Dallmayr takes the position that the debate be-
tween critical theory and hermeneutics, the Gadamer/Habermas debate which
was inaugurated with the publication of Wahrheit und Methode (Gadamer,
1960/1989) in the early sixties, represents a certain, if distorted, relationship
between critique and ontology.

While vigorously asserting ontological claims (and even the primacy of

“being over consciousness”), Gadamer’s arguments were not free of ide-
alist overtones reminiscent of a subjectivist hermeneutics (as well as the
legacy of Geisteswissenschaften). Idealist streaks were clearly present in
the continued centerstaging of human consciousness – evident in such
terms as hermeneutical consciousness or “effective historical conscious-
ness”; at the same time, the portrayal of historical tradition sometimes
intimated a solid framework or else the unfolding of a steady teleology
– a process privileging continuity of meaning over discontinuity and
rupture (Dallmayr, 1991, pp. 24–25).

Habermas, in this view, doesn’t fare any better. “Basically, Habermas’s ‘exit’
from hermeneutics relied on epistemological premises of a dubious or at least
276 DAVID M. RASMUSSEN

contestable sort” (Dallmayr, 1991, p. 25). Dallmayr questions Habermas’s

reliance on “empirical science” and his replacement of hermeneutics with
“rational reconstruction” as well as his version of the “linguistic turn”. So the
hermeneutics/critical theory debate ends up, in this view, mired in “subjective
hermeneutics” on the one side and “objective-universal knowledge” on the
other. Neither case is said to be tenable.
What some may find surprising, but which is certainly at the heart of
Dallmayr’s claim about the close relationship of critique and ontology, is
his Heideggerian turn. That is to say, Dallmayr finds the proper relationship
between critique and ontology first in the position of the Heidegger of Sein
und Zeit (Heidegger, 1986/1962) and later in the Heidegger of the Beiträge
zur Philosophie (Heidegger, 1989). For Dallmayr, Heidegger in his initial
phase is post-critical, in the sense that “fundamental ontology was not alien
to, but rather a precondition of possible critique” (Dallmayr, 1991, p. 27).
Hence, the Heideggerian program of Destruktion of classical ontology “does
not carry the merely negative sense of an emancipation from the ontological
tradition; instead, it seeks to pinpoint the positive potential and accordingly
also the limits of that legacy” (Dallmayr, 1991, p. 28).1 Heidegger, after Sein
und Zeit, in the postulation of the Seinsfrage is interpreted to have deepened
the relation of ontology and critique. The encounter with nihilism in “What
is Metaphysics?” (Heidegger, 1967/1977, pp. 1–19/95–112) is thus said to
deepen the relationship between ontology and critique by sustaining the posi-
tion that the confrontation with “the nothing” opens the way to the ontological
experience of being. And finally, in the Beiträge, Heidegger deepens the re-
lationship between ontology and critique by further critiquing the remnants
of the Cartesian cogito and further exploring the primacy of the ontological
experience of being.
Now, if it is true that behind Gadamer lies a more originary expression of
the relation between ontology and critique in his mentor, Heidegger, the same
case, says Dallmayr, can be made for Habermas. “In a way, the move from
Habermas to Adorno and Horkheimer parallels the turn from Gadamer to
Heidegger: just as the latter’s (ontological) radicalism was to some extent sub-
dued and confined in Gadamer’s hermeneutics, so the tensions and predica-
ments besetting the early Frankfurt School were streamlined and ‘smoothed
out’ in Habermasian epistemology” (Dallmayr, 1991, pp. 31–32). Here Dall-
mayr focuses originally on Horkheimer’s 1937 essay “Traditional and Crit-
ical Theory” (Horkheimer, 1982, pp. 188–243) which highlighted critique.
Dallmayr follows this early notion of critical theory through the relative dis-
enchantment of Horkheimer and Adorno with the Hegelian overtones of the
project, to the critical theses of Dialectic of Enlightenment (Adorno and
Horkheimer, 1969/1977) and Negative Dialectics (Adorno, 1966/1973). In
 THE ODYSSEY OF RECONCILING REASON 277

particular, it is with Adorno’s notion of non-identity in the latter work that

Dallmayr is fascinated. One might speculate that it is with this notion that
a rapprochement between Heidegger and Adorno is anticipated. But this ap-
proach is not without its problems. There is for example Adorno’s critique
of Heidegger’s concept of ontology. Adorno’s well-known negative ontology
was opposed to Heidegger’s “positive” ontology which, Adorno believed,
plays too easily into the sanctified political structure of the day.
Whatever one makes of that difference, and Dallmayr is quite willing to
acknowledge it, the task is to locate the enterprise of earlier critical theory,
to be distinguished from Habermas, and the preoccupation with critique and
ontology in the thematic which I referred to a moment ago, namely, in the
idea of a reconciling reason which was authored in modernity originally by
Hegel.
Dallmayr states: “In my view, a major strength and attraction of that first
generation resided in its resolute attachment to this issue, notwithstanding
the difficulties of its articulation” (Dallmayr, 1991, p. 91). He goes on, “The
central problem, as I see it, consists in the totalization of the ‘nexus of corrup-
tion,’ a feature which is closely linked with, and actually a corollary of, the
expulsion of absolutes (chiefly Hegel’s absolute spirit)” (Dallmayr, 1991, p.
91). In Dallmayr’s view this is the consistency of the early Frankfurt school.
As in Hegel where absolute spirit is seen as the end in which human con-
sciousness comes to rest, so in the early Frankfurt school negative critique
results in a transformation which leads to a reconciliation. It would appear
that Dallmayr believes this idea of transformation, the necessary moment in
the overcoming of instrumental reason, requires a form of reconciliation akin
to Hegel’s notion of absolute spirit.

III

As was already hinted in Twilight of Subjectivity, Heidegger was to be the

most central thinker in Dallmayr’s reading of post-modernity. It is important
to note that not only does Dallmayr think that Heidegger’s move beyond the
modern Cartesian subject holds the promise of a new form of intersubjec-
tivity, Heidegger also provides the link to the tradition of critical philosophy
by sustaining the association between critique and ontology. This means that
Heidegger is not to be read in contradiction to the early Frankfurt school,
but rather as a compliment to Adorno and Horkheimer and, one might add, as
one who in many instances has superior insights. Beyond that Dallmayr wants
to make the claim that Heidegger can be read as one who makes a substan-
tial contribution to politics. This is, of course, Dallmayr’s most controversial
claim and it is necessary to pay close attention to it.
278 DAVID M. RASMUSSEN

Dallmayr interprets Heidegger’s thought since the publication of Sein und

Zeit to be characterized by “the struggle with overcoming metaphysics and,
as a corollary, the political implications of this move” (Dallmayr, 1993b, p.
46). If this is the case then it would follow for Dallmayr that the lectures
on Hölderlin, Schelling, and Nietzsche present a Heidegger who turns away
“from the concern with resurgence or hegemony toward an acceptance of
the disempowerment of spirit – not only as an external calamity but as the
proper indigenous path of spirit” (Dallmayr, 1993b, p. 47). In doing this,
Dallmayr claims that “he parted company with the long-standing preoccu-
pation of Western thought with rule and dominion and particularly with the
spirit’s right to rule (epitomized in the Platonic philosopher-king)” (Dallmayr,
1993b, p. 47). The result was, “[o]nly by abandoning the right to rule, by
enduring dispersal and submission – he slowly came to realize – could spirit
of any kind be salvaged and subsist as a generous source of human empow-
erment” (Dallmayr, 1993b, p. 47). Like Hegel, Heidegger came to a rupture
and reorientation which led to “Die Kehre” (Heidegger, 1962, 1977, pp. 37–
47). Further, Dallmayr speculates “one of the most damaging effects of the
polemical dismissal of Heidegger is the silencing or dismissal of the need
for Kehre” (Dallmayr, 1993b, pp. 48). Ultimately, the political significance
of Heidegger’s turning was two-fold: “the turning involved first of all a move
away from anthropocentrism and a man-centered will to power, as it is re-
flected in global power politics and planetary technology. At a more concrete
level, the turning involved a stand against the domestication of the earth,
particularly under the auspices of a native or national culture” (Dallmayr,
1993b, p. 48).
Dallmayr takes the controversial position that Heidegger’s thought can
be dissociated from Heidegger’s personal political action. Again, the word
“ontology” comes to the fore. Therefore, Heidegger can be used to rethink
the political. As such, his post-Cartesian reconceptualization of the subject –
the subject that is as Dasein – is considered to be fundamental. This notion

challenges or decenters the customary focus of action theory on de-

sire, will, or deliberate intentionality (a focus particularly prominent in
Weberian sociology); instead, the accent is shifted to ontological partici-
pation in which the actor is released at least partially from the dictates of
an instrumental pursuit of objectives. This shift, one should note, does
not cancel action or remove moral-political responsibility, but it does
highlight the complex preconditions of action beyond the confines of
purposive goal attainment (Dallmayr, 1993b, p. 58).
 THE ODYSSEY OF RECONCILING REASON 279

Along with this reconstruction of the political contribution of the Heideg-

gerian critique of subjectivity, Dallmayr includes Heidegger’s critique of tech-
nology as set forth in “The Question Concerning Technology” (Heidegger,
1962/1977, pp. 5–36/287–317) with its reexamination of poesis, and in
Gelassenheit (Heidegger, 1959/1966), which allows a “releasement toward
things” as contributions to modern political self-understanding. And finally,
Heidegger’s encounter with Eastern thought is said to make a lasting contri-
bution to Western political understanding.
A consideration of Heidegger’s contribution to politics would not be com-
plete if one did not confront Heidegger on democracy, as Dallmayr does. It is
clear that Heidegger is opposed to any kind of popular sovereignty. In order to
confront that issue Dallmayr attempts to reverse the question by questioning
the modern concept of democracy. Thus liberal democracy is juxtaposed to
popular democracy.

By relying on isolated individuals or groups, liberal democracy bypasses

the issue of representation, of the mise en forme of the political, of the
framework making politics possible in the first place. Popular democ-
racy, by contrast, insists on such a framework; it even erects this frame-
work – “the people” – into a unitary foundation and ultimate reservoir of
meaning. In doing so, however, popular democracy neglects the fragility
of this grounding, the elusiveness of “the people” as political commu-
nity, the fact that democracy is erected on an “empty space,” an “absent
site” (Dallmayr, 1993b, p. 105).

It is to Heidegger’s notion of politics as a kind of “overcoming”, an overcom-

ing of notions of “people” or Volk which provides the hint for what could be
considered Heidegger’s contribution to democracy.

IV

My aim in this essay was not to critique Professor Dallmayr’s work but to
honor it. But one could not honor it completely if one omitted critique. As I
suggested above, the most controversial of Dallmayr’s interpretative moves
was the one which attempted to unearth an authentic Heideggerian politics
against or within the by now familiar understanding of Heidegger’s political
involvement.
My question is the following: can one overcome the dilemma of modern
politics without asserting a strong notion of autonomy? Dallmayr has de-
fended Hegel over Kant, early critical theory over later critical theory, Adorno
over Habermas, and Heidegger over Gadamer in order to make the case for a
280 DAVID M. RASMUSSEN

reconciling reason which can contribute to our understanding of the political.

Further, Dallmayr makes his argument consistent by taking it to its ultimate
end, by making the case for Heidegger in the context of modern political
democracy. As one might expect, it is to the community that Dallmayr turns
his attention. Like Hegel, Dallmayr is fascinated with the question regard-
ing the founding of communities. With Hegel, Dallmayr affirms Geist at the
center of a people’s origin. In his use of Heidegger, Dallmayr appropriates
this element of the German tradition with its quasi-religious overtones. Dall-
mayr is one with Heidegger in his critique of the classical German concept
of the “people” or Volk. Dallmayr states: “[f]or Heidegger, the overcoming
of metaphysics also implies the overcoming of ‘the people’ or ‘folk’ as a
unitary metaphysical category” (Dallmayr, 1993b, p. 103). I’m suspicious of
this move. I’m somewhat suspicious of the manner in which it is postulated
in Hegel. For Hegel this notion of Geist which could be associated with “the
people” had a secular origin in Montesquieu but could be associated with a
more quasi-religious notion of spirit which would overcome the notion of a
“people” whose destiny it was to be absorbed in the modern state. At issue
is the question of the formation of a valid public will-formation, a question
which has persisted in Western thought since Augustine’s critique of classical
civilization in his City of God (Augustine, 1984).
Reading Dallmayr reading Heidegger, the resolution of the problem of a
valid public will-formation is not resolved by reference to a form of public
autonomy; rather the “voice” of the people “speaks in the language of silence
and reticence” (Dallmayr, 1993b, p. 103). At issue in this overcoming of the
notion of a people is clearly an idea of autonomous democratic will-formation
as destructive. As Hegel had his suspicions regarding the excesses of the
French Revolution, Heidegger had his reservations regarding the formation
of the modern German democratic state. By endorsing this path from Hegel
to Heidegger, one must account for not only its fears but also its excesses in
its attempt to stamp out a notion of valid public will-formation which seems
to presuppose the notion of autonomy.
I shall conclude at this point, because my quarrel is not really with Profes-
sor Dallmayr per se but with the particular tradition he appropriates. However,
to the extent that he wishes to appropriate that tradition in political terms, he
will have to chronicle more effectively the manner in which the formation of
public (and private) autonomy is not only left unaccounted for in that tradition
but undermined. That, it seems to me, is the challenge presented to Professor
Dallmayr’s attempt to construct a Heideggerian politics.
 THE ODYSSEY OF RECONCILING REASON 281

Acknowledgment

My special gratitude goes to Richard A. Lynch for reading this essay.

Notes
1. Dallmayr is quoting Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, paragraph 6, p. 22. Dallmayr provides his
own translation, which varies from the published translation cited above. The published
translation, to be found on page 44 of the English text, is as follows: “But this destruction
is just as far from having the negative sense of shaking off the ontological tradition. We
must, on the contrary, stake out the positive possibilities of that tradition, and this always
means keeping it within its limits; . . .”

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