Freedom and Solidarity

Toward New Beginnings

Fred Dallmayr

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780813165790
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

The prevailing Western paradigm is modernity: a model focused on individual liberty, secularism, and the scientific control of nature. This worldview emerged from the break with the medieval and classical past and advanced a philosophy in which the solitary mind opposes the rest of the world. Although there is a simple appeal in this binary structure, history has shown that it is neither socially nor politically innocuous.

In Freedom and Solidarity, noted political theorist and humanist Fred Dallmayr seeks to bridge the gap between the self and the outside world. Drawing on new scholarship and his work with the World Public Forum Dialogue of Civilizations, a global, nongovernmental organization of distinguished thinkers, he challenges dominant worldviews and heralds new possibilities for political thought and practice. Dallmayr argues that while we need not reject all the values of modernity, it is imperative that we resist the simplifications inherent in dualism and fundamentally reassess the notions of freedom and solidarity.

Engaging a breathtaking array of influential thinkers, including Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Henry David Thoreau, Gandhi, Albert Camus, John Dewey, and Dimitry Likhachev, Dallmayr explores the possibility of a transition from the modern paradigm—a mode of life presently in decay—toward a new beginning in which freedom and solidarity can be reconciled, making it possible for humanity to flourish on a global scale.

1

Twilights and New Dawns

Revaluation and De(con)struction

Are you co-conspirators in the current folly of nations who want . . . to be as rich as possible?

—Friedrich Nietzsche, The Dawn

Guiding humankind back into the dawn of another beginning.

—Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language

An old adage holds that “times change and we ourselves change with them” (tempora mutantur et nos mutamur in illis). This means that even in the ordinary course of things, temporal changes require participants to adjust and to modify their attitudes and beliefs accordingly. This requirement or challenge is immensely increased in extraordinary times, especially in what I have called times of paradigmatic or holistic shifts. In these situations, not only partial facets but an entire constellation of ideas and practices are in flux and in process of giving way to a new configuration of life. For people caught in transit or in the transition between paradigms, the change involves an unusually heavy burden fraught with all kinds of derailments and misunderstandings. Above all, such people need to distance themselves from or loosen the hold of traditional conceptions or categories—without having available to them ready-made substitutes. There is often the temptation to misconstrue new possibilities simply as aggravated forms of older perspectives; at other times, novelty may be identified with iconoclasm, and open horizons confused with anarchistic or destructive impulses. Importantly, misconstrual or mislabeling is not only the work of onlookers; rather, people undergoing the transition—perhaps undergoing it most intensely—likewise do not have a superior standpoint and thus may flounder in their self-descriptions.

Among Western thinkers deeply embroiled in the most recent transition, two stand out from the rest: Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger, the former serving in a way as precursor or pacemaker of the second. Although clearly anticipating and foretelling a new era, Nietzsche’s work was still embedded in many ways in the constellation of nineteenth-century thought: its anti-idealism and tendential natural scientism. Although straining against Enlightenment rationalism, his thought often preserved remnants of Cartesian binary dilemmas: the binaries of mind and matter, of cogito and world. Although critical of Cartesian individualism, his writings often celebrate a radical solitude uncontaminated by worldly intrusions (thus seemingly endorsing a “negative” concept of liberty). At the same time, however, in the teeth of a relentless denunciation of modern democracy as a form of “herd mentality,” his work adumbrates a higher form of human community: the ideal of an undomesticated solidarity of genuine friends and spiritual seekers. The endeavors launched by Nietzsche were pursued and intensified by Heidegger in the changed twentieth-century context—a context marked by the rise of phenomenology, existentialism, and hermeneutics. Due to his long apprenticeship with Edmund Husserl, Heidegger from the beginning charted a way beyond the modern Cartesian binaries of mind/matter and subject/object. What he found beyond these binaries was the Aristotelian notion of “being”—to be sure, a notion that had to be thoroughly rethought and reconstituted and thus to be cleansed of the heavy dust of traditional metaphysics. As is well known, of course, Heidegger also did not escape the mislabeling of his efforts—both by himself and by others. In this chapter, I want to illustrate these two thinkers’ anticipatory outlook by focusing on a limited number of their writings.

Revaluation of All Values

Among Nietzsche’s voluminous texts, many seem to be composed for all times and places. In some cases, however, the title already discloses a futuristic perspective. This is particularly true of Beyond Good and Evil, subtitled Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. The book is easily one of Nietzsche’s most notorious and contested writings. It has been wildly greeted and extolled by so-called free spirits—unconcerned with any notion of “freedom” not reducible to self-interest. It has been harshly deplored and rebuked by custodians of “tradition”—unconcerned about the heavy patina covering traditional moral doctrines. No doubt, both reactions find ample support in many passages of the text—a text that refuses to proceed in linear fashion, preferring instead a style of continuous innovation and anticipation. This innovation—one cannot fail to recognize—is carried forward by a moral pathos, notwithstanding the harsh denunciation of dominant moralities or moralisms. In Nietzsche’s words, “Whether it is hedonism or pessimism, utilitarianism or eudeamonism—all these ways of thinking that measure the value of things in accordance with pleasure and pain . . . are ways of thinking that stay in the foreground and naivetés on which everyone conscious of creative powers and an artistic conscience will look down not without derision, nor without pity.” Seen against this background, the “overcoming of morality” and even the “self-overcoming of morality” are for him the name of “that long secret work” that has been “saved up for the finest and most honest” to serve eventually as “living touchstones of the soul.”¹

The work to which Nietzsche here refers is the transformation of philosophy in general, including moral philosophy, and of prevailing ways of life. It is to the transformation of philosophy that some of the most eloquent passages of the text are devoted. Appealing to a “new species of philosophers” that is coming up, he describes them as a species no longer tied to fixed dogmas or doctrines: “As I unriddle them, insofar as they allow themselves to be unriddled . . . these philosophers of the future may have a right (it might also be a wrong) to be called ‘attempters’ (Versucher). And this name itself is in the end a mere attempt (Versuch) and, if you will, a temptation (Versuchung).” One of the main things the new philosophers have to do is to disentangle themselves from prevailing schemata and formulas and to open themselves to the advent of new possibilities and horizons. As Nietzsche indicates, our hope and aspiration have to reach out “toward spirits strong and original enough” to escape from inveterate habits of thought—that is, “to provide the stimuli for opposite values and to revalue and invert ‘eternal values.’” Differently put, the hope goes out “toward forerunners (Vorläufer), toward men of the future who in the present tie the knot and constraint that forces the will of millennia upon new tracks.” These precursors or anticipatory thinkers will be able “to teach man the future as his will, and to prepare great ventures and overall attempts (Versuche) of discipline and cultivation by way of putting an end to that gruesome dominion of nonsense and accident that has so far been called ‘history’—the nonsense of the ‘greatest number’ being merely its ultimate formula.”²

The schemata from which future thinkers are supposed to extricate themselves are mainly (though not exclusively) the binary divisions bequeathed by Cartesian philosophy: the binaries of subject and object, mind and matter, cogito and world. The very opening of Beyond Good and Evil casts doubt on the basic premise of modern Western philosophy, Descartes’s radical doubt: “It has not even occurred to the most cautious [modern thinkers] that one might have a doubt right here at the threshold where it was surely most necessary—even if they vowed to themselves ‘de omnibus dubitandum.’” A central premise of Cartesian doubt is the ego cogitans, the availability of an “I” that thinks, but this availability is far from clear. There may be some “harmless” observers, Nietzsche comments, who still believe in “immediate certainties,” for example, “in the ‘I think’ (or as the suspicious Schopenhauer put it ‘I will’)—as though cognition here got hold of its object purely and nakedly as a ‘thing in itself’ without any falsification on the part of either the subject or the object.” But this assumption does not hold up to scrutiny. “When I analyze the process that is expressed in the sentence ‘I think,’” Nietzsche continues, “I find a whole series of daring assertions that would be difficult, perhaps impossible to prove; for example, that it is I who thinks, that there must necessarily be something that thinks, that thinking is an activity and operation on the part of a being who is thought of as a cause, that there is an ego and, finally, that it is already determined what is to be designated by thinking—that I know what thinking is.” Observations of this kind lead Nietzsche finally to a daring postsubjectivist formulation (which in some ways anticipates Heidegger’s later thought). “I shall never tire,” we read, “of emphasizing a small terse fact which superstitious minds hate to concede—namely, that a thought comes when ‘it’ wishes, and not when ‘I’ wish, so that it is a falsification of the facts of the case to say that the subject ‘I’ is the condition of the predicate ‘think.’ Rather, it thinks; but that this ‘it’ is precisely the famous old ego is, to put it mildly, a supposition, an assertion, and assuredly not an ‘immediate certainty.’”³

The critique of the Cartesian cogito leads Nietzsche also to remonstrate against the modern conception of free will and free action that portrays the self as the autonomous cause of effects. For Nietzsche, this portrayal is due largely to a “grammatical habit” that holds: “every activity requires an agent; consequently . . .” It is above all the infusion of “the synthetic concept ‘I’” into acting and willing that has led to “a whole series of erroneous conclusions”—to such a degree that “he who wills believes sincerely that willing suffices for action.” Ever since the onset of modernity, the notion of “freedom of the will” has in fact been the linchpin of philosophical thought. For Nietzsche, the desire for such freedom—in the “superlative metaphysical sense”—still “holds sway unfortunately in the minds of the half-educated.” Rigorously pursued, it reflects a desire “to bear the entire and ultimate responsibility for one’s actions, to absolve God, the world, ancestors, chance, and society,” and thus to emerge ultimately as the causa sui capable “with more than Münchhausen’s audacity, to pull oneself up into existence by the hair, out of the swamp of nothingness.” What is neglected in this conception is the deep complexity of such notions as will and free will, the fact that the latter is “the expression for the complex state of delight of the person exercising volition,” a person who commands and at the same time obeys the willed order. Above all, what is sidelined is the awareness that the body is not an instrument of the cogito but rather “a social structure composed of many souls.”⁴

As one should note, Nietzsche, in critiquing the customary notion of freedom as causation, does not endorse the opposite notion of unfree will or substitute heteronomy for autonomy, determinism for freedom. The basic point is that notions such as cause and effect, sequence, freedom, and purpose are interpretations, not empirical explanations; but when we treat this arsenal of concepts like an objective reality, “we act once more as we have always—mythologically.” Generally speaking, while distancing himself from the cogito, Nietzsche does not simply take the side of the opposite pole of “extended matter”; to this extent, his attitude, although friendly toward science, is ambivalent regarding claims of scientific “objectivity.” With considerable vehemence, Beyond Good and Evil denounces the vogue of scientific “positivism” that at the time (the 1880s) was sweeping Europe. Nietzsche speaks of the ascent of “hodgepodge scholars who call themselves ‘philosophers of reality’ or ‘positivists’” and who suffocate young scholars’ talents for creative thinking. As a result, “science is flourishing and her good conscience is written all over her face,” but philosophy has been reduced to “theory of knowledge” or epistemology that is no more than a “timid epochism and doctrine of abstinence.” For Nietzsche, there is some gain but mostly a loss in this change of academic fortunes. He writes: “However gratefully we may welcome an objective spirit—and is there anyone who has never been mortally sick of everything subjective and his accursed ipsissimosity [self-centeredness]—in the end we also have . . . to put a halt to the excessive manner in which the ‘unselfing’ [othering] of the spirit is being celebrated today as if it were the goal itself and redemption.”⁵

A central feature of modern science bemoaned by Nietzsche is its penchant for dissecting analysis and ultimately its “atomism” neglectful of connections. As he writes, one must declare war, even “relentless war,” against the “atomistic need” that surfaces in places where one least expects it. In this battle, one must also give a “finishing stroke” to the kind of atomism bequeathed by Christian religion: the “atomism of the soul,” which regards the latter as “indivisible, a monad, an atomon.” In exorcising this legacy, he cautions, it is not at all necessary to get rid of the “soul” itself and thus to renounce one of “the most ancient and venerable hypotheses”—as happens frequently “to clumsy naturalists [positivists].” Rather, what is needed is a rethinking and reinterpretation of the “soul-hypothesis,” which leads to such notions as “mortal soul” or “soul as subjective multiplicity” or “soul as social structure of drives and affects.” This line of thought leads Nietzsche to one of his most important insights: that far from atomistic dispersal, concepts, ideas, and words form part of a coherent grammar of thought, of an interconnected paradigm or constellation: “Individual philosophical concepts are not anything capricious or autonomously evolving, but grow up in connection and relationship with each other; however suddenly and arbitrarily they seem to appear in the history of thought, they nevertheless belong just as much to a system as all the members of the fauna of a continent.” The same connectedness also prevails among diverse philosophers or philosophies of a period. As under an “invisible spell,” they always “revolve in the same orbit”; in fact, their thinking is far less a discovery than “a recognition, a remembering, a return and a homecoming to a remote, primordial, and inclusive household of the soul.”⁶

Just because of the internal cohesion of paradigms, transition from a present paradigm to an impending paradigm is exceedingly difficult—to some extent perhaps impossible. The latter restriction applies also to Nietzsche’s work. Despite strenuous efforts to overcome modern philosophical binaries or dualisms, he embroiled himself in some other binaries (which were not always an improvement over those left behind). As far as I can see, there are especially two binaries structuring his thought: those of higher versus lower rank and of solitude versus mass society (the two being closely interconnected). His commitment to rank order—even caste order—is emphatic and sometimes even taken as the key tenet of his thought. As Beyond Good and Evil proclaims, “Every enhancement of the type ‘man’ has so far been the work of an aristocratic society, a society that believes in the long ladder of an order of rank and differences in value between man and man, and that needs slavery in some sense or other.” Rank order for Nietzsche involves a “pathos of distance,” an “ingrained difference between strata” where the ruling caste “looks afar and looks down upon subjects as instruments.” The order of rank is closely connected with the famous (or notorious) distinction between “master morality” and “slave morality” that gives rise to the difference between “good” and “bad” or between “noble” and “contemptible” (not to be confused with the dichotomy of “good” and “evil”). As Nietzsche elaborates, master morality “in the severity of its principle” dictates “that one has duties only to one’s peers, that against beings of a lower rank, against everything alien, one may behave as one pleases or ‘as the heart desires,’ and in any case ‘beyond good and evil.’” Where this principle is rejected or...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: Reenvisaging Freedom and Solidarity
• 1. Twilights and New Dawns: Revaluation and De(con)struction
• 2. Letting-Be Politically: Heidegger on Freedom and Solidarity
• 3. The Promise of Democracy: Nonpossessive Freedom and Caring Solidarity
• 4. Markets and Democracy: Beyond Neoliberalism
• 5. Rights and Right(ness): Humanity at the Crossroads
• 6. “Man against the State”: Community and Dissent
• 7. Faith and Communicative Freedom: A Tribute to Wolfgang Huber
• 8. Between Holism and Totalitarianism: Remembering Dimitry Likhachev
• 9. Freedom as Engaged Social Praxis: Lessons from D. P. Chattopadhyaya
• 10. Freedom and Solidarity (Again): Reimagining Social Democracy
• Notes
• Index