Human Studies 21: 295–308, 1998. © 1998 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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A Response to Friends FRED DALLMAYR Department of Government and International Studies, University of Notre Dame, IN 46556, U.S.A.

It is a pleasure and a privilege for me to respond to the thoughtful comments of Rasmussen and Nicholson on my work. It is also a challenging task given the probing critical queries raised – always in a friendly way – in their comments. I have known Rasmussen and Nicholson for many years, and I am aware of their busy schedules. All the more do I appreciate the time they have taken first in reading many of my writings and then in presenting their reactions and assessments. The two assessments proceed from quite different vantage points: in the one case, a perspective indebted in many ways to (Habermasian) critical theory; in the other, an outlook nurtured by (post-Husserlian) phenomenology and hermeneutics. Yet, in reading the two papers, I was struck by a concurrence of views which, I am sure, was not premeditated by the two commentators: a concurrence regarding the central theme or direction of my work. Rasmussen finds that core theme in the “odyssey of reconciling reason,” while Nicholson places the accent on mediation and friendship (even friendship with the entire world). I am touched by these formulations and by the sensitivity displayed in them. In couching my work in these terms, the two papers articulate or pinpoint something of which I have been only dimly conscious – but which, on reflection, I cannot but embrace; they show me more clearly a path on which I seem to have been traveling, gropingly, all along.

I The concurrence of views extends from the central theme of my writings to their genesis and progression. Both papers trace the original formulation of the theme to my book Twilight of Subjectivity (1981). Rasmussen sees the book as an initial roadmarker pointing “beyond possessive individualism” and Nicholson describes it as my “most characteristic and best-known book.” Again, I cannot demur. In retrospect, it seems to me indeed that Twilight set the stage or provided road signs for many subsequent explorations and “encounters.” As one should realize, “subjectivity” was for me then a stand-in

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for a broader metaphysical conception dominating much of modern Western thought: the conception of a self-constituting or “foundational” cogito (or ego consciousness) serving as underpinning of modern science, ethics, and aesthetics. To this extent, the twilight of subjectivity appeared to me closely linked with the so-called “crisis (or twilight) of modernity” – which is in no way equivalent to its demise. In tune with the Heideggerian “overcoming” of metaphysics, twilight signaled for me not a simple leap beyond or exodus from the past, but rather the task of a patient rethinking and rearticulation of metaphysical premises – and, more importantly, the concrete need to undergo and “suffer through” the agonies and traumas occasioned by modern subjectivity (as the corollary or flip-side of its accomplishments). Given this experiential character of “overcoming,” subjectivity in Twilight was by no means simply erased, but was rather the topic of extensive scrutiny and reassessment. Basically, subjectivity appeared to me then (and appears to me now) not as a foundational premise nor as an infinite goal, but as a place of contestation and interrogation, as the site of continuous learning and selftransformation. Inspired in large part by Heidegger’s “Letter on Humanism,” the book sought to steer a course between and beyond various conundrums besetting (versions of) postmodernism. Rasmussen is quite correct – and I appreciate his precision – when he distances my thought from a fashionable “post- or anti-humanism” which sometimes went so far as to proclaim an apocalyptic “end of man.” As he writes, the “twilight” discussed in the book pointed toward a “deflated concept of human beings,” a concept where humans serve as careful guardians rather than masters of the world – a role, however, which cannot be shirked. By the same token, Twilight aimed to undercut human narcissism or the self-glorification of the human subject – a narcissism which is promoted in large measure by contemporary liberalism and, more surprisingly, by stands in postmodernist thought. In the latter case, the emphasis on the “undecidability” of metaphysical questions leads sometimes to the postulation of a human agent capable of cutting through the Gordian knot of ambivalence, and hence to the endorsement of an arbitrarywillful “decisionism” and constructivism. As one should note, the accent on a “deflated” or decentered self did not lead me in Twilight to offer a brief for “communitarianism” or “communalism” – if by these terms one means a tightly knit, homogenous social fabric averse to difference. Viewing such a fabric simply as an enlarged form of egocentrism (as a subject writlarge), Twilight explored the possibility of a loosely structured, heterogeneous and self-decentering community (in opposition to traditional modes of both Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft).1 The issue of “post-individualism” or post-liberalism, I might add, was not left in Twilight to the level of broad, programmatic statements. Concretely,

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the book was animated by this question: consistently pursued, what consequences or implications would follow from a decentering of subjectivity (or an overcoming of metaphysics) in a number of philosophical and socialpolitical arenas? Thus, in successive chapters the book explored the possible effects of decentering on our understanding of intersubjectivity (with a focus on Heideggerian Mitsein and Merleau-Ponty’s intermonde); on the relation between humans and nature (with attention to an ecological politics); on theories of social development or evolution (with a sideglance at Adorno’s view of “natural history”); and on a linguistically reconstructed ethics (with a critical accent on Apel’s “transcendental pragmatics”). The connection between decentering and the so-called “linguistic turn” was further examined in greater detail in a subsequent publication titled Language and Politics: Why Does Language Matter to Political Philosophy? (1984) which discussed various contemporary modalities of that “turn.” Roughly at the same time, another publication offered a series of “exercises in contemporary political theory,” exercises which again were prompted by the question of decentering and its possible repercussions. Titled Polis and Praxis (1984), the book took up a number of prominent themes or issues in social-political thought with the intent of placing them under the aegis of a “twilight” reading. Thus, the topic of one chapter was political praxis and especially the prospects of a decentered agency, prospects which were profiled against distinguished action theories in our century (from Weber and Gadamer to Oakeshott, Arendt, and Habermas). Other chapters dealt with the status of political “power” (as seen in light of Foucault’s “power/knowledge”); with the meaning of political “liberty” (as perceived especially from the angle of a Heideggerian “ontology of freedom”); and with the political relevance of “conversation,” “communication,” and “discourse” (as these terms have been articulated by Gadamer, Rorty, Habermas, and others). As this brief review indicates, theorizing – especially political theorizing – was for me never a solitary venture. As I was traveling along my twilight path, I was keenly aware of numerous fellow-travelers in our time journeying along similar or else radically different routes – journeys which elicited some response on my part and which invariably were sources of a learning experience. As both Rasmussen and Nicholson note, even the titles of some subsequent publications – from Critical Encounters (1987) to Margins of Political Discourse (1989) to Between Freiburg and Frankfurt (1991) – were markers of intellectual engagement and of a movement in the “chiasm” or intermonde along a road which was never clearly precharted. In Rasmussen’s words, the very titles of these books “give the clue” to my itinerary, in the sense that terms like “twilight,” “margins,” or “between” suggest ways in which I have come to “read the post-Enlightenment tradition.” To be sure,

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intellectual engagement in “between” or twilight zones cannot be equivalent to a placid agreeableness or consensualism on all sides – something which would only yield (at best) a bland “fusion of horizons” or (at worst) a haphazard kind of eclecticism. Engagement for me has also meant questioning and contestation, and hence was not incompatible with the cultivation of an intellectual preference or orientation – though a preference born not out of triumphalist insight, but out of intellectual agonistics (as well as existential agony). Roadmarkers of this preference (not endpoints of a road) are two more recent books: G.W.F. Hegel: Modernity and Politics (1993a) and The Other Heidegger (1993b). Nicholson devotes the bulk of his comments to my reading of Heidegger – but also notes, regarding Hegel, that I would “eventually end up here” – while Rasmussen finds the major waystations in the “odyssey of reconciling reason” in my encounter with Hegel, Heidegger, and the Frankfurt School (an encounter which, for him, signals certain problems from the vantage of critical autonomy).

II Congruent with the view of intellectual encounter as a critical engagement (involving both responsiveness and contestation), I shall now try to respond to the main comments in the two papers – hopefully in the same friendly spirit in which they were formulated. As mentioned before, Rasmussen’s comments center around the idea of a “reconciling reason” and around the “odyssey” which that reason undergoes (or is made to undergo) in my writings. The idea of a reconciling reason goes, of course, back to Hegel – whom Rasmussen rightly calls a “much maligned” thinker. Much of contemporary post- or antifoundationalism can be seen as a concerted assault on Hegel’s philosophy which stands accused of promoting such ills as “totality,” “totalization” and perhaps even “totalitarianism,” at the expense of difference. But surely, reconciliation is not the same as totalization, as “spirit” presupposes difference. (Rasmussen rightly points to Hegel’s relentless preoccupation with the “role of diremption” or Entzweiung, with the famous “highway of despair” of the spirit.) From Hegel Rasmussen’s discussion proceeds through a general consideration of the relation of “ontology and critique” to the encounter “between Freiburg and Frankfurt,” and finally to his own critical queries. In my response to him, I want to address briefly four main points: first, the status of Hegel’s philosophy and its legacy, with special attention to the linkage of ontology and critique; next, the relation between Heidegger and Adorno with particular reference to that linkage; then, the possible contributions of Heidegger to political thought (seen under the auspices of reconciliation); and

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finally, the issue of human “autonomy” and “public will-formation” which Rasmussen raises as the major “challenge” to my arguments. Hegel’s reconciling reason is manifest in his monumental effort to heal divisions and bind up all wounds. Despite despair and diremption, in the end nothing is simply abandoned, cast aside or exiled: in its coming to itself, spirit ultimately redeems every form of “otherness” (of nature, world, and history). The same effort is also present in his conception of modernity, and especially of modern politics and the modern “state”: a conception seeking to combine the modern love of individual freedom with the public-spiritedness and Sittlichkeit characterizing the Greek polis (in its ideal mode). In my Hegel book, I presented this outlook as the “high road” of modernity, in contradistinction from a modernist cult of private self-interest and rapacious possessivism. Hegel’s élan – and this is the main point here – also carries over into the relation between “ontology and critique” (to use more current vocabulary). In the wake of the Enlightenment and its self-identification as “critique” (especially in Kant’s philosophy), Hegel pointed to the underpinnings of critical reason in the broader matrix of Vernunft (seen as reconciling reason). As he showed in his staggering and breathtaking introduction to the Phenomenology of Spirit, the conceit of a self-constituting critical epistemology is always already overtaken by the movement of spirit and its unfolding “truth.” This understanding of the linkage of Vernunft and critique – or in Gadamer’s terms: of “truth” and “method” – was largely abandoned by Hegel’s heirs and successors in the nineteenth century, including the Left Hegelians with their stress on activism. This abandonment is sometimes glibly described as the collapse or breakdown of the “Hegelian system.” (But Heidegger may have been correct when he noted (1988, p. 40) that the issue is not this so-called breakdown but the inability of Hegel’s successors to rise up to the level of his insights.) To be sure – as stated repeatedly in my Hegel book (1993a) – our presentday concern is not with any kind of Hegelian orthodoxy. Too many things have happened since his time, both philosophically and politically – precisely along the “highway of despair” – to permit a simple recuperation of Hegelian “idealism” (with its accent on absolute subjectivity and spirit). To this extent, Rasmussen seems to labor under a misapprehension when he ascribes to me a desire “with Hegel” to affirm “Geist at the center of a people’s origin.” The chapter on “Hegel’s Heirs and Critics” in my Hegel book traced the “effective history” of Hegel’s thought through successive responses or rejoinders down to our own time – showing in nuce the impossibility of a simple reaffirmation of Geist under present conditions. This impossibility, however, is coupled (as I also tried to show) with a continued relevance or effectiveness in the domain of “ontology and critique.” Using a short-hand

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formula: Geist has been canceled and “sublated” by the contemporary turn to language and world. Ever since Husserl’s discovery of the “life-world,” the “pre-conscious” underpinnings of (transcendental) consciousness have been in the forefront of philosophical preoccupations in Continental phenomenology and its offshoots. The Husserlian discovery was intensified and radicalized by Heidegger’s thematization of “world” (as implicated in human “being-in-the-world”) and also by Merleau-Ponty’s accent on “monde vecu” and later on the “flesh” of the world. At the same time, Heidegger’s and Wittgenstein’s turn to language revealed the dependence of deliberate speech acts on a prior linguistic matrix and, in the end, on the truth-disclosing potency of language as such. (The turn to language and world, I might add, was preserved in Gadamer’s Truth and Method, though with some concessions to idealism which were corrected in subsequent writings – a point to which I shall return later.) Basically, what these developments brought to the fore was the embeddedness of reason and critique in “always already” operative contexts – the latter seen not simply as “transcendental conditions of possibility” (nor as empirical causes) but as ontological conditions of “being.” Not surprisingly, this turn to context (especially in its Heideggerian formulation) has been greeted by ecological thinkers as a possible gateway to a recuperation of nature and earth, just as some feminist thinkers welcomed the same turn as a corrective to the sway of a patriarchal-masculine reason. While remaining cautious on the latter issues, the thrust of the turn coincided for me largely with the “twilight of subjectivity” sketched above.2 To be sure, the recovery of ontology (in the sense of an ontological view of language and world) is not devoid of hazards and perils – especially perils for the status of critique. Critical reason prefers to claim sovereign autonomy from context, and is likely to be frustrated by a reminder of unreflected premises. A chief weapon of reason against such frustration is to charge “ontology” with harboring an uncritical bent, and even an outright hostility to critique and possible changes resulting from critique. In political terms, this is the charge of conservatism or status quoism – labels which have often been pinned on Gadamer and the later (though not the early) Heidegger. It was precisely in light of these recurrent polemics that it seemed important to me to recover the critical component in Heidegger’s work. As I tried to show (and as Rasmussen credits me with showing), it is precisely the depth dimension of Heidegger’s thought – his attention to both “being” and “nothingness” – which calls into question any and all “ontic” arrangements and merely factual conditions. His notion of the “nihilating” force of nothingness has often been accused (spuriously in my view) of encouraging a radical “nihilism” – an accusation which clashes in any case with status-quoism. From a Heideggerian vantage point (as I see it), critique happens not through the

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denial or erasure, but instead through reflective awareness of the ontological (linguistic/worldly) conditions of reason. What has troubled me in Habermas’s work, by contrast, is precisely his attempt to exit from such conditions, including the ambiance of the “hermeneutical circle,” and hence to return to a pre-Husserlian (and pre-Hegelian) stance of critical criticism. For me, this stance surfaced in the thesis of a non-hermeneutical “objective” knowledge (science) and in the replacement of hermeneutics by the strategy of “rational reconstruction.” Even the notions of “communication” and “communicative rationality” seemed to me still infected with a lingering Cartesianism and hence insufficiently attentive to the “linguistic turn.”3 It is on the issue of critique (and its ontological moorings) that I have found greater sensitivity and intellectual nourishment in the early Frankfurt school, especially in the writings of Adorno. This sensitivity seems to be due, in large part, to the relative closeness of the early school to Hegel, and thus to the idea of a “reconciling reason” – a proximity which is evident in Adorno’s repeated Hegel studies and also in the great chapter on “World Spirit and Natural History” in Negative Dialectics. What I found particularly attractive in Adorno’s later writings is his endeavor to preserve Hegelian reconciliation in a new (thoroughly unorthodox) way with the help of such notions as “mimesis” and “recollection of nature (in the subject)” – formulas which Habermas has rashly denounced as dead-ends or an intellectual cul-desac. Particularly in the notion of a “recollection of nature” I detected echoes of a Heideggerian recollective thinking (Andenken) – and thus a pathway to a possible rapprochement of the two thinkers. As everyone realizes, of course, such a rapprochement is highly problematical for obvious (mainly political) reasons. Following Adorno himself, Rasmussen locates the distance between the two thinkers in the distinction between a “positive” and a “negative” ontology – a distinction which seems to me a “red herring” (proceeding perhaps from deliberate misunderstanding): for, presumably, a positive ontology would erect “being” into an ontic structure (ignoring both the ontic-ontological difference and the force of “nihilation”). On the other hand, Adorno’s dialectics cannot simply be “negative,” in a world-denying sense, without foiling reconciliation. On this issue, Adorno may occasionally have been sliding into incongruity (or extremism) – especially when asserting a total “nexus of corruption” or the “untruth” of the “whole” (or of everything). Although valuable as correctives to a triumphalism of spirit, such assertions in effect render “truth” and reconciliation inaccessible – except through an apocalyptic dénouement (a point which Rasmussen seems to be misconstruing when he credits the “nexus of corruption” with revealing the “consistency,” rather than the partial incongruity, of the early Frankfurt school).4

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Quandaries or incongruities of this kind prompted me to pursue and deepen my study of Heidegger’s thought – despite misgivings about his political “errancy” and the continued attractiveness of early Frankfurt theorists. When Rasmussen writes that for me Heidegger can be read “not in contradiction to the early Frankfurt school” but rather “as a compliment to Adorno and Horkheimer” and “as one who in many instances had superior insights” – I want to add that the latter instances had to do mainly with concerns about a critical negativism, not about critical theory or a critical politics in general. As it happened, what for many years obstructed my access to Heidegger was precisely his overt politics, that is, his engagement during the Nazi period – an involvement I have never ceased to deplore. Rasmussen is not quite on target when he states that I have tried to “dissociate” Heidegger’s thought from his political outlook – something which would lead back to a “two Heideggers” bifurcation (good philosopher vs. bad politician). Instead, I have tried to excavate from his work the possibility of an alternate philosophical and political reading (sometimes at odds with his politics) – which is the gist of The Other Heidegger. Rasmussen lists some of the areas where (in my view) Heidegger can make contributions to political thought: including the topoi of agency, of political community, and of the meaning of “the political” itself; he also mentions, as the perhaps most problematical contribution, the idea of a “non-sovereign” polity or democracy (an idea I have tried to distill with the help of some formulations borrowed from Claude Lefort). I still believe that Heidegger’s work contains political lessons which so far have not (or not fully) been taken to heart. Above all, there are lessons in his socalled “turning” or “Kehre” – which sometimes is misconstrued as a personal idiosyncracy devoid of political relevance. As it seems to me, his intensive struggle with Nietzsche and the will to power (including a nationalist will to power) has not been matched by contemporary intellectuals (who often prefer either to dismiss or to aesthetisize Nietzsche). Likewise, his notion of “disempowerment” or of the uncoupling of spirit and power contains a lesson which especially Western intellectuals might fruitfully ponder in our age of globalization and an emerging “global village.” This leads me to Rasmussen’s final question or “challenge” which might be rephrased in these terms: does not the mentioned “disempowerment” jeopardize and perhaps undermine the desirable political empowerment of individuals and collectivities, and especially the principle of “public will-formation” which has been the basic telos of modern democracy since the Enlightenment period? (This, by the way, is a question which Habermas also might have raised – and which he and some of his followers have in fact raised on other occasions). Rasmussen is particularly troubled by my discussion of democracy, and by the reduced or recessed role assigned to the people in that

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discussion (and in the views of Lefort and perhaps Heidegger). But here it is important to be precise. What is called into question in my discussion is not democracy, but only a conception of “the people” viewed as a “unitary metaphysical category” or a unitary agent. Democracy, of course, means rule “by the people” and, in fact, the will of “the people” is constantly and relentlessly invoked by politicians of all stripes; but the point is that, in a democracy, none of these politicians or leaders can claim to be the people or to be able to monopolize its voice. The people’s will and voice are always there – but in a recessed way; at every instance, “the people” is indeed present (and not fictional) – but present in its “absence.” In terms of popular rule, this means that “sovereignty” cannot be fully instantiated; for citizens and leaders alike, the people remain a vis a tergo (or an empowering un-power). None of this jeopardizes or “destroys” (as Rasmussen fears) public will-formation or human autonomy; but it does rob these notions of their plenitude and transparency. Every public will-formation involves the pursuit of an agenda or direction – at the expense of other possible agendas or directions which are silenced. Philosophically speaking, every exercise of will – including the cultivation of “good will” – comes at the expense of other wills and of non-will or unwill. Realization of this complexity does not stifle will-formation, but it does induce a sobriety of willing. Such sobriety, in turn, fosters a stance of political openness – which is at the heart of the “reconciling reason” thematized in Rasmussen’s paper.

III What Rasmussen means by reconciliation is discussed by Nicholson under the rubric of “friendship” – and I am grateful to him for doing so, because this is a term which is dear to me (and also more readily intelligible to non-philosophers). Nicholson very perceptively and pithily indicates the role Hegel’s philosophy has played – and perhaps was bound to play – in my intellectual itinerary. He also gives a very clear-sighted and sympathetic account of Heidegger’s importance for me, and especially of the contours of that “other Heidegger” that I have tried to excavate in my writings. I particularly appreciate the space he has devoted to my reading of Heidegger’s comments on Johann Peter Hebel, the Swabian poet and self-styled “Rhenish housefriend.” Largely ignored in the literature, these comments disclose a side of the “other Heidegger” which seems to me quite crucial in our contemporary global context: namely, the way in which one might reconcile universalism and particularism, standardized world civilization and vernacular local cultures. Many of Nicholson’s arguments parallel those found in Rasmussen’s paper, and I shall not reiterate points made before. Instead, I want to con-

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centrate on the two main queries contained in Nicholson’s presentation: the queries concerning Adorno and the status of (Gadamerian) hermeneutics. As previously indicated, the attractiveness of the early Frankfurt school derived for me in part from its political élan (its resolute anti-fascism), but also – and perhaps more centrally – from theoretical considerations having to do with the linkage of ontology and critique. On the latter issue – I must confess, however – I have always tended to prefer or foreground the work of the later Adorno, especially Negative Dialectics, over his earlier writings. In my reading, these earlier writings basically reflected a move from an initial transcendental idealism to a Left Hegelian or Hegelian-Marxist celebration of social praxis, anchored ultimately in the proletariat (as privileged subject) – a move which simply shifted self-constitution from consciousness to society. To a considerable extent, this Left or Young Hegelian shift was still operative in Adorno’s Husserl book, translated as Against Epistemology, a book which critiqued Husserlian phenomenology from the vantage of social-economic class analysis, but without fully probing the philosophical quandaries of a constitutive subjectivity (which Adorno himself had not yet properly tackled). Thus, Nicholson is quite on target when he writes that my departure from Husserl differs from that outlined in Adorno’s Husserl book. In Nicholson’s words, my concern has been chiefly to investigate “a substantive difference within phenomenology itself,” that is, the twilight of subjectivity that comes to the fore in a reflective pursuit of phenomenology toward language and world. Despite elements of kinship, my relation to Adorno thus has always been marked by ambivalence. While troubled by a totalizing negativism in some later passages, I am also uneasy about a self-affirmative praxis or practical “positivism” – which may also be the aspect separating me from versions of contemporary pragmatism. The situation regarding Gadamer is more complex. Here my reservations concerning certain formulations in Gadamer’s work, especially Truth and Method, have to do with nuances or fine shadings of emphasis; but as we all know, trouble sometimes brews in matters of detail.5 Some of Nicholson’s questions are relatively easy to answer. I have not suggested supplementing Gadamerian hermeneutics with borrowings from critical theory or structural linguistics (as proposed by Ricoeur and others) – something which tends to smack of eclecticism. More importantly: my reservations at no time and in no way amounted to a “critique of hermeneutics as such.” I am aware of those anti-hermeneutical tendencies which, as Nicholson says, are “abroad today” and “powerfully represented in major American universities.” Some of these tendencies are hold-overs from scientific positivism; others, of more recent vintage, derive from structuralism and post-structuralism, and especially from versions of “deconstruction” celebrating an “otherness” radically

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severed from interpretive frameworks. In the latter case, hermeneutics – pilloried as “logocentric” – is often brushed aside in favor of supposedly bolder moves: either a willful decisionism (styled “constructivism”) or a blind “leap of faith” or else a combination of the two. For me, these moves – apart from being barely intelligible – appear hazardous and costly: where understanding yields to non-understanding and reading to non-reading, danger looms for the humanities and humane learning (rightly dear to Gadamer). In a way, the so-called Gadamer-Derrida encounter of 1981 involved a relatively polite exchange of views and of charges and countercharges: an exchange which I have tried to sort out in the chapter in Critical Encounters (cited by Nicholson). In a subsequent letter to me, Gadamer defended or vindicated hermeneutics, while also acknowledging the need to guard against such perils as “subjectivism,” “immanentism,” and “logocentrism.” His more recent writings in fact reflect an approach which subtly steers a course between revealment and concealment, between the “good will” to understand and the legitimate claims of otherness – in a way which basically removes my earlier reservations.6 Viewed against this backdrop, Nicholson’s remaining questions become manageable, despite their intrinsic difficulty. Regarding “truth,” I am by no means willing to abandon the notion either to empirical epistemologists or to those deconstructive detractors enamored with “no-truth” (or else with the inroad of “transcendental violence”). Gadamer rightly speaks of the truth of a text or the truth of a work of art, beyond the confines of epistemic correctness or arbitrary construction. Still, considering the subtle shift in Gadamer’s outlook mentioned above, one might wish to supplement his earlier account by attentiveness to his erstwhile mentor. In my view, Heidegger’s essay “On the Essence of Truth” (“Vom Wesen der Wahrheit”) remains a crucial resource for the articulation of an ontology of truth, a resource which was further fleshed out in Heidegger’s “art-work” lectures. In this outlook, truth is a potency which always already envelops us – something which is indeed “our” comprehended truth, but at the same time is “beyond us” in the sense of a margin or receding horizon beckoning us onward. This interlacing of “inside” and “outside” or of immanence/transcendence also has a bearing on the status of selfhood, especially a selfhood conceived in terms of Heideggerian Dasein. Here I can quote Nicholson himself when he writes: “In Heidegger, Dasein is never the substratum or the subject in which either being or nothingness is grounded,” but rather “a locus in which nothingness and being can become manifest.” As it seems to me, this is also the locus toward which Gadamer’s reflections steadily point. In light of the above, the notions of “intention and meaning” also retain a sensible core – provided intentionality and intended meaning remain open to that which exceeds (and sometimes foils) a given understanding, that is, toward the horizon of truth. Thus, Nicholson

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can rest assured that my writings do not exhibit a “brave gesture of ultrapostmodernism.” Basically, hermeneutics (cum phenomenology) remains for me “the way to go,” though a hermeneutics stripped of immanentist conceit and radically open to learning – what in a more recent essay (1993c) I have called a “hermeneutics of difference.”7 Remaining loyal to hermeneutics, of course, also means to remain faithful to mediation, reconciliation, and friendship – the themes centerstaged in the two papers. In his concluding remarks, Nicholson mentions the story of a Canadian politician who adopted the name “Amor de Cosmos” and was elected under that name. I am touched by that story and take heart from it – in our grim century ravaged by immense bloodshed, world wars, holocausts, and genocide all around the globe. Yes indeed, what such a world needs more than anything else is “amor de cosmos” (never mind the philology). Nicholson is also kind enough to transfer the same name to me – which is the greatest honor anyone can possibly bestow on me. It is an honor and a challenge which I can only hope or aspire to live up to in the remainder of my life. As it happens, unbeknownst to Nicholson, I have actually in recent years made some tentative steps in the direction in which the honorary name beckons me to move – the direction of a broadened hermeneutics transgressing the confines of Western (hegemonic) culture and opening itself to the experiences of underprivileged or marginalized populations (what used to be called the “Third World”). Two recent books of mine, titled Beyond Orientalism: Essays on Cross-Cultural Encounter (1996) and Alternative Visions: Paths in the Global Village (1998), provide clues of this new itinerary – which I intend to pursue.8 What this itinerary promises or may yield (I hope) is not so much a new globalized knowledge or a global epistemology, as rather a heightened attention to difference, a greater ability to “befriend the world” in a nonpatronizing and also non-indulgent manner. Without posturing as a universal taskmaster nor encouraging viciousness, a “house-friend” of the world (in my view) would cultivate a steadfast care which is neither remote nor intrusive, spreading that “gentle lunar light” which warms without burning and which fosters what is best and highest in human beings: the capacity to love. Let me conclude with some of the lines the Rhenish house-friend used in presenting his poems to his readers: “The valley’s muse has smilingly and gently wound them into this garland; And may their worth be measured solely By the purity of friendship offering them to you.”

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Notes 1. Several years later Jean-Luc Nancy formulated such a view in terms of an “inoperative community.” See Nancy, The Inoperative Community, trans. by Peter Connor et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991); also my “An ‘Inoperative’ Global Community? Reflections on Nancy.” In S. Sparks, D. Sheppard and Colin Thomas, (Eds.). On Jean-Luc Nancy: The Sense of Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 174–196. 2. See, e.g., Carolyn Merchant, Radical Ecology: The Search for a Livable World (New York: Routledge, 1992); Maria Mies, Ecofeminism (London: Zed Books, 1993); and Karen J. Warren, (Ed.). Ecological Feminism (New York: Routledge, 1994). The status of “world” has tended to recede in structuralism and (strands of) poststructuralism – either through the reduction of world to invariant structures or through a leap into a quasi-transcendental “beyondism” (where world is always already deconstructed). 3. As I would like to add, however, these points involved strictly theoretical and never personal or political disagreements. Over the years, I have not been able to find fault with Habermas’s politics and the élan of his political engagement. Even on the theoretical level, I have always taken seriously and respected the integrity of his work – despite critical reservations. I emphasize this in the face of a facile anti-Habermasianism fashionable in some quarters. 4. Rasmussen’s misunderstanding continues when he writes: “As in Hegel where absolute spirit is seen as the end in which human consciousness comes to rest, so in the early Frankfurt school, negative critique results in a transformation which leads to a reconciliation.” Although pointing indeed in the direction of reconciliation, the early school in my view leaves the path (at least occasionally) obscure or embroiled in antinomy. 5. How much trouble nuances can generate I have found in my critical reading of Calvin Schrag’s work. I am linked with him in a long-standing affinity; see my “Splitting the Difference: Comments on Schrag,” Human Studies, vol: 19 (1996), pp. 229–238. 6. For background on some of these developments see Diane P. Michelfelder and Richard E. Palmer, (Eds.). Dialogue and Deconstruction: The Gadamer-Derrida Encounter (Albany, N.Y: SUNY Press, 1989). 7. See “Self and Other: Gadamer and the Hermeneutics of Difference,” Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities, vol. 5 (1993), pp. 507–529. In many ways, my attitude toward Gadamer parallels that toward another philosopher I greatly admire: the Canadian Charles Taylor. 8. Beyond Orientalism: Essays on Cross-Cultural Encounter (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1996); Alternative Visions: Paths in the Global Village (Lanham) M.D.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998).

References Dallmayr, F.R. (1993a). G.W.F. Hegel: Modernity and Politics. London: Sage Publications. Dallmayr, F.R. (1993b). The Other Heidegger. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Dallmayr, F.R. (1993c). Self and Other: Gadamer and the Hermeneutics of Difference. Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities 5: 101–124. Dallmayr, F.R. (1996). Beyond Orientalism: Essays on Cross-Cultural Encounter. Albany N.Y.: State University of New York Press.

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Dallmayr, F.R. (1998). Alternative Visions: Paths in the Global Village. Lanham, M.D.: Rowman and Littlefield. Heidegger, Martin (1988). Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.