Integral Pluralism

Beyond Culture Wars

Fred Dallmayr

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780813139456
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Social Philosophy

In addition to war, terrorism, and unchecked military violence, modernity is also subject to less visible but no less venomous conflicts. Global in nature, these "culture wars" exacerbate the tensions between tradition and innovation, virtue and freedom. Internationally acclaimed scholar Fred Dallmayr charts a course beyond these persistent but curable dichotomies in Integral Pluralism: Beyond Culture Wars. Consulting diverse fields such as philosophy, literature, political science, and religious studies, Dallmayr equates modern history with a process of steady pluralization. This process, which Dallmayr calls "integral pluralism, " requires new connections and creates ethical responsibilities.

Dallmayr critically compares integral pluralism against the theories of Carl Schmitt, the Religious Right, international "realism, " and so-called political Islam. Drawing on the works of James, Heidegger, Gadamer, and Merleau-Ponty, Integral Pluralism offers sophisticated and carefully researched solutions for the conflicts of the modern world.

1. Integral Pluralism

Holism and Difference

In traditional terminology, the world was conceived as a “cosmos,” that is, as an appealingly structured ensemble endowed with internal coherence and a high degree of intelligibility. In conformity with this conception, human societies were seen as small replicas of the cosmic order, replicas whose constituent elements were integrally related, with each fitting harmoniously into a preordained pattern. Since the onset of Western modernity, this orderly vision has been increasingly sundered or thrown into disarray. In large measure, the trajectory of modernity can be construed as a series of steadily deepening dualisms or polarities. In the course of this development, human beings have been progressively segregated from both external nature and the (ontological) backdrop of the divine—a segregation matched by the steadily more competitive and even hostile relations between individual agents as well as larger human societies or states. In sociological and anthropological literature, this proliferating process is often discussed under the labels of “differentiation” and “disenchantment.”¹ In the vocabulary of contemporary astronomy, one often speaks of the upsurge and veritable explosion of “Nova,” that is, the emergence of new planetary constellations that do not seem to fit any previously known pattern of phenomena. The question remains whether these and related developments necessarily imply a negation or rejection of “cosmos” in the sense of a coherently holistic pattern.

This, in any case, is the question raised in this chapter and in this book as a whole. In my view, the issue is not only of purely theoretical or metaphysical significance but has clear practical implications. On the assumption of a radical lack of cosmic coherence, individual human lives likewise become incoherent and unintelligible—outside the pursuit of purely private agendas or projects. In the social and political domain, the same assumption lends credence to the Hobbesian “war of all against all,” a formula rendering the traditional notion of the “good life” hopelessly obsolete or apocryphal. To a considerable extent, contemporary “culture wars,” both in the West and elsewhere, revolve around this issue. For some, the ongoing process of pluralization or dispersal requires a resolute reaffirmation of integral holism, even at the price of restoring traditional autocracies and social hierarchies. For others, the ongoing proliferation of differences and dispersed identities is an unmitigated boon—a view often bolstered by a benign neglect of the looming prospect of Hobbesian warfare and “clashes among civilizations.” As it seems to me, these two options are far from exhausting the range of available avenues; speaking more concretely, neither coercive autocracy nor social atomism is compatible with a viable sense of democracy.² For both philosophical and political reasons, I want to explore here another alternative: what I call an integral (or holistic) pluralism. Seen under these auspices, holism is not a preordained structure or pattern but rather something that emerges laterally or in tandem with the upsurge of Nova, the rise of frequently unexpected new initiatives, constellations, or events. I proceed in three steps. First, I discuss the pervasive appeal of pluralism and pluralization. Next, I review efforts to mitigate or complement this appeal along more integral or holistic lines. Finally, I offer an overview of subsequent chapters that, in different ways, articulate this alternative view.

Pluralism and Pluralization

Late modern and postmodern times are marked by growing attentiveness to processes of social as well as metaphysical and even theological pluralization and differentiation. In the West, successive waves of Reformation have led to the proliferation of the traditional unity of Christendom into a variety of denominations, sects, and religious communities. At the same time, both medieval hierarchical patterns and the uniform structure of the modern absolutist state have been forced to give way under the impact of revolutionary and semirevolutionary upheavals. Even the vaunted transparency and certitude of the liberal “law state” (Rechtsstaat) have been subject to the splintering effects of social movements and partisan ideologies. In the words of political philosopher Claude Lefort, it is precisely the distinguishing trait of modern democracy to entail the erasure of traditional “markers of certainity.”³ More recently, all these developments have been intensified by the rapid acceleration of globalization, a process thrusting familiar conceptions and worldviews into the disorienting maelstrom of multiple national or ethnic cultures as well diverse religious and ethical traditions. Needless to say—and as some observers have forcefully pointed out—globalization happens for good or ill: apart from enabling multiple contacts or interactions, the closer proximity of peoples can also lead to armed conflicts or clashes along civilizational fault lines.⁴

In the context of modern Western philosophy, probably the first major thinker to grasp the deeper implications of pluralization was the American pragmatist William James. In his 1909 study titled A Pluralistic Universe, James boldly sketches the vision of a dynamic universe—always expanding and proliferating—as a counterpoint or corrective to the conception of a static cosmos. Constantly changing and in the throes of novelty, such a dynamic universe may never be completely transparent or fully grasped by traditional conceptional categories. As James writes, in a stunning formulation: “The pluralistic view which I prefer to adopt is willing to believe that there may ultimately never be an all-form at all, that the substance of reality may never get totally connected, that some of it may remain outside of the largest [conceptual] combination of it ever made.” In this passage, the importance of constitutive elements of the world—all endowed with a distinctive “each-form”—is highlighted in opposition to a totalizing conception—an “all-form”—imposed on elements from above. James's text is emphatic in denouncing the static “totalism” or “monism” that has dominated much of traditional Western metaphysics. In such a conception, he writes, the world is a “complete block-universe through and through”; that is, it is not a “collection” of elements but rather “one great all-inclusive fact outside of which there is nothing.” An example of this view is “monistic idealism,” a system in which the “all-enveloping fact” is represented as “an absolute mind that makes the partial facts by thinking them” and where “to be” means “to be an object for the absolute.” When absolute or monistic idealism is given a religious or theological cast, God emerges as an unlimited ruler or potentate sanctioning in his totalizing nature all the blessings and all the miseries, all the good and evil happenings in the universe without discrimination.⁵

While opposing the totalizing ambitions of monism, James is equally pointed in critiquing all forms of static dualisms or dichotomies, especially those dualisms that have beleaguered modern Western philosophy—those between mind and body, between human beings and nature, or (in Cartesian terms) between “thinking substance” and “extended matter.” One of the dualisms particularly singled out in the text is that between humans and God or the divine. In strong terms, James attacks the “two-worlds” theory prevalent in forms of traditional theism. “The theistic conception, picturing God and his creation as entities distinct from each other,” he states, “still leaves the human subject outside of the deepest reality of the universe.” In this view, God, seen as eternally complete, “throws off the world by a free act as an extraneous substance” and “throws off man as a third substance, extraneous to both the world and himself.”⁶ Basically, James lays the blame for the persistence of abstract dualisms at the doorstep of (Platonic and Cartesian) rationalism or what he calls “intellectualism.” The “ruling tradition” in philosophy, in his view, has been the belief that “fixity is a nobler and worthier thing than change” and that “concepts, being themselves fixities, agree best with this fixed nature of truth.” The remedy proposed by James for this kind of intellectualism is a “radical empiricism” that breaks through the barrier between mind and matter, between reason and external phenomena. In contrast to “sense-data” empiricism, this approach sees mind not as helplessly bombarded by random stimuli but rather as itself participating in the phenomenal world. In his words: “Reality, life, experience, concreteness, immediacy—use what word you will, exceeds our [internal] logic, overflows and surrounds it.” From this angle, reality is “where things happen,” an “all temporal reality without exception” in which things are “distributed and strung along” and in which “we finite beings” are immersed.⁷

Toward the end of his study, James rearticulates the crucial distinction between a static “intellectualist” worldview—whether monistic or dualistic—and the kind of dynamic pluralism he is inclined to endorse. Basically, he notes, the distinction boils down to the difference between a “top-down” essentialism embracing everything a priori and a “bottom-up” approach acknowledging the coorigination of diversity (or “the many”). In the former perspective, “everything, whether we realize it or not, drags the whole universe along with itself and drops nothing. The log starts and arrives with all its carriers supporting it.” In the pluralist perspective, by contrast, “all that we are required to admit as the constitution of reality is what we ourselves find empirically realized in every minimum of finite life”—which means “that nothing real is absolutely simple, that every smallest bit of experience is a multum in parvo plurally related.” The difference can also be explained by using the terms “all-form” and “each-form” (previously mentioned). James argues that under a priori intellectualism, especially in its monistic guise, “the all-form or collective-unit form is the only form that is rational,” that it “allows of no taking up and dropping of connexions, for in the ‘all' the parts are essentially and externally co-implicated.” The pluralist approach, on the contrary, “lets things really exist in the each-form or distributively,” which means that “a thing may be connected by intermediary things with a thing with which it has no immediate or essential connexion.” With these formulations, James concludes, we arrive at a “plain alternative” of philosophical approaches or perspectives. In a nutshell, the issue boils down to this: is the “manyness in oneness” that characterizes our world “a property only of the absolute whole of things, so that you must postulate that one-enormous-whole indivisibly as the prius of there being many at all,” or “can the finite elements have their own aboriginal forms of manyness in oneness,” with each one of these elements “being one with its next neighbors and yet the total ‘oneness' never getting absolutely complete?”⁸

Apart from articulating different philosophical perspectives, James's text also reflects on the religious implications of his discussion. “Let empiricism [in the Jamesian sense] become associated with religion,” he states at one point, “and I believe that a new era of religion, as well as philosophy, will be ready to begin.” The reason is that a pluralistic approach, sensitive to difference, is “a more natural ally of the religious life” than intellectualism.⁹ With or without acknowledging Jamesian teachings, many contemporary philosophers of religion endorse and even celebrate a pluralistic religiosity. A prominent example is the Spanish-Indian thinker Raimon Panikkar. In one of his writings, titled A Dwelling Place for Wisdom, Panikkar remarks pointedly that, with regard to the diversity of religious traditions, “the time has come for a pluralistic attitude—for a head-first dive into the Ganges.” As he elaborates, pluralism is not equivalent to sheer factual plurality or multiplicity. Although it is clear that there are many religions that cannot be reduced to sameness, genuine pluralism means “more than the mere acknowledgement of this plurality,” namely, an ethical and religious engagement with religious difference. Paralleling James's critique of intellectualism, and especially of abstract monism, Panikkar asserts that pluralism “does not regard unity as an indispensable ideal”; nor does it cling to an “eschatological expectation” that “in the end everything will come to unity by itself.” Philosophically, the approach has no room for system building, seeing that “a pluralistic system would be a contradiction in itself.” In a Jamesian vein again, the approach “makes us aware of our contingency, our limitations, and shows us that reality cannot be fully comprehended.” In the end, religious pluralism for Panikkar entails “a nondualist, advaitic attitude which defends truth's pluralism since truth itself is pluralistic” and “cannot be expressed in terms of either unity or multiplicity.”¹⁰

Partly under James's influence, pluralism has also left its imprint on contemporary political theory and philosophy. The reason is not hard to discern: its open-ended vista is clearly more congenial than intellectualism to an age of democracy or democratization, with its corollaries of multiculturalism and the pluralization of identities. A prominent proponent of the approach is political theorist William Connolly, well known for a string of publications contesting forms of static traditionalism. In his book Pluralism, Connolly makes explicit reference to James's vision of a “pluralistic universe” composed of multiple elements and connections unable to be exhaustively mapped or grasped. By contrast to earlier—merely empirical or functional—forms of social differentiation, the book articulates the idea of a “deep” or “thick network” pluralism with quasi-ontological and even theological implications. As Connolly writes, the notion of a pluralistic universe testifies to “the highest hope that James invests in the world”—the hope or experience that, on the far side from monistic omnipotence, “a limited God participates as one agent in a larger world of imperfect plural agents of different types,” a world reducible to neither a static universalism nor a chaotic relativism. The political repercussions of this view are pervasive. Pluralism of the kind envisaged in his text, Connolly observes, “denies the sufficiency of a concentric image of culture to territorial politics”; it also alerts us “to eccentric connections that cut across the [closed] circles of family, neighborhood, and nation”—such as when ecologists in different parts of the world “align to put pressure on several states at once” or a cross-state coalition of citizens exposes and protests human rights violations in places such as Tibet, Palestine, or Zimbabwe. In these and other respects, pluralism reflects not so much fixed or predictable lines of development but rather latent possibilities inscribed in our democratic age: “To bypass pursuit of deep, multidimensional pluralism today would be to fail an elemental test of fidelity to the world.”¹¹

Though not always under Jamesian auspices, pluralism has also been strongly embraced by “postmodernists” or thinkers close to the “postmodern” persuasion. Under such labels as “difference,” “otherness,” “heterogeneity,” and “rupture,” pluralist premises have in fact been occasionally erected into firm doctrines or creeds. Carried to its logical extreme, this treatment tends to transform pluralism into radical fragmentation and grant separate elements a fixed, self-enclosed identity. This tendency is conspicuous in the work of one of the founding architects of postmodernism, Jean-François Lyotard. In his book The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard challenges and rejects all forms of traditional metaphysics, forms that, for him, are invariably marked by rationalism (or intellectualism), “logocentrism,” and a monistic teleology verging on totalitarianism. According to his text, the metaphysical preferences of the past typically found expression in a series of “grand metanarratives”—from salvation history to Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations to Karl Marx's vision of a proletarian world revolution—all of which aimed to unify all possible knowledge and experience in a comprehensive synthesis. Rebelling against these synthesizing stories, postmodernism in Lyotard's account inaugurates a radical reversal or shift of priorities: namely, from unity to fragmentation, from Platonic-Cartesian logos to “paralogy,” from homogeneity to heterogeneity, and from a common identity to the negation and dispersal of identities. Borrowing a Wittgensteinian motif, but with a postmodern twist, the text sees human language as dispersed into “language games” marked by incompatibility and incommensurability. In Lyotard's words, what postmodernism brings into view is not communication and consensual understanding but “a theory of games which accepts agonistics as a founding [foundational?] principle.”¹²

Affinities with Lyotard's founding principle can also be found in an American thinker loosely associated with the postmodern agenda: Richard Rorty. One of the central motivations of Rorty's work has always been to challenge or debunk the traditional addiction of Western philosophy to “epistemology,” the latter seen as a gateway to the acquisition of apodictic or indubitable knowledge of “reality.” Having boldly launched this attack in one of his early writings (regarding the knowledge of “nature”), Rorty subsequently extended his deconstructive effort to cognitive assumptions in a variety of domains, including history, culture, and society. Once cognition is viewed as thickly embedded in varying historical and cultural contexts, the inevitable philosophical upshot is radical contingency and fragmentation—a basic theme of Rorty's Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Following the general postmodern agenda, the text on the whole endorses the primacy of particularity over universality, of heterogeneity over unity; paralleling and even further accentuating Lyotard's approach, it insists on the diversity and incommensurability of language games, on the absence of a shared or overarching linguistic idiom. In Rorty's words, there is “no final vocabulary” available to either philosophers or ordinary citizens, no “meta-language” through which cross-cultural arguments can be reconciled or adjudicated. More astutely than Lyotard, Rorty is aware of the danger of “performative contradiction,” that is, the pretense of exempting one's own vocabulary from contingent relativity. The remedy for this danger is “irony,” which, in a way, cancels all cognitive claims. Ironists, he asserts, are so “impressed by other vocabularies,” vocabularies taken as final by other people, that they stop defending or taking seriously either their own or other people's arguments. On these premises, “the distinctions between absolutism and relativism, between rationality and irrationality, and between morality and expediency are [seen to be] obsolete and clumsy tools—remnants o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. Integral Pluralism: Holism and Difference
• 2. The Concept of the Political: Politics between War and Peace
• 3. The Secular and the Sacred: Whither Political Theology?
• 4. Postsecular Faith: Toward a Religion of Service
• 5. Religion and the World: The Quest for Justice and Peace
• 6. Hermeneutics and Cross-Cultural Encounters: Integral Pluralism in Action
• 7. A Man for All Seasons: Mahatma Gandhi's Integral Pluralism
• 8. Reason and Lifeworld: Two Exemplary Indian Thinkers
• Appendix A: Return of the Repressed
• Appendix B Disclosure and Critique
• Appendix C On Love with Distinction
• Notes
• Index