Democracy to Come: Politics as Relational Praxis by Fred Dallmayr (review)

Thaddeus Kozinski

The Review of Metaphysics, Volume 72, Number 1 (Issue No. 285), September 2018, pp. 128-130 (Review)

Published by The Philosophy Education Society, Inc.

For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/736118

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which preceded it, but as something that “tore itself decisively away from a past in order to establish itself in its own and definitive reality.” The transition to modernity was not simply undergone but consciously willed. To be modern, Brague insists, is to want to be modern and to know one’s self as such. The passage to modernity is a choice—a repudiation of the past—a rupture in the unbroken continuity of history. If we attempt to define it, its description would contain reference to the conquest of nature, application of mathematical physics, and technology that gives control. But one cannot live by modern science alone. A return to the perspective of the Middle Ages is inevitable. What sort of Middle Ages? Not one devoid of modern industrial achievements or devoid of contemporary medicine. Alfred Loisy is quoted as saying, “[Early Christians may have] expected the Kingdom of God but it was the Church that came.” The Middle Ages conceived of man as a creature of God. The subject of origins, says Brague, has to be raised anew. What or who made man? Who or what deserves to be called man’s creator? Distinguishing between the idea of “creation” and “Creationism,” which rests on a naïve reading of Genesis, Brague funds inspiration in the biblical narrative that tells us that God looked upon his creation and found that it was good—thus attesting to the value of what exists. The natural sciences may describe reality, but it is not theirs to say that it is good or bad. Much of this perspective is affirmed in the May 2017 Paris Declaration, “A Europe We Can Believe In,” signed by thirteen prominent European intellectuals, including Rémi Brague, Pierre Manent, and Robert Spaemann, whose works have been reviewed within these pages.—Jude P. Dougherty, The Catholic University of America

DALLMAYR, Fred. Democracy to Come: Politics as Relational Praxis. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. 192 pp. Cloth, $29.95—Dallmayr’s latest book follows a series of multidisciplinary works on political theory, globalism, political theology, religious studies, history, anthropology, metaphysics, ethics, and spirituality, including, since 2013: Being in the World: Dialogue and Cosmopolis; Mindfulness and Letting Be: On Engaged Thinking and Acting; Taming Leviathan: Toward a Global Ethical Alliance; Humanizing Humanity: For a Global Ethics; Freedom and Solidarity: Toward New Beginnings; Against Apocalypse: Recovering Humanity’s Wholeness; On the Boundary: A Life Remembered; Critical Phenomenology, Cross-Cultural Theory, Cosmopolitanism. If his previous books are anything like this one, they not only, as a whole, examine politics from a staggering variety of disciplines and perspectives, but perform this incredible feat of erudition and integration. Alasdair MacIntyre has taught us that today’s philosopher must have a mastery of not only his own tradition of rationality but also several others—and from the inside, on their own terms, like learning

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another language. What one learns from reading Dallmayr, who certainly lives up to MacIntyre’s tough criterion, is that this global and multilensed approach is simply what is required now for an adequate treatment of political theory and praxis in the contemporary world. In the first chapter, Dallmayr writes in a dialectic mode, examining modern “classical” thinkers influential in both the paradigmatic rise of democracy and its theoretical discourse, such as Montesquieu, Leibniz, and Tocqueville, and contrasting them with more recent thinkers, Samuel Huntington, Claude Lefort, and Daniele Archibugi. What he argues is that the quantitative, empirical, and institutional definition and explanation of democracy, the “scientific” account of its emergence as the dominant Western paradigm preferred by Huntington and today’s academic political scientists, is essentially wrong, and that the “classical theory of democracy” needs to be recuperated, though “in a novel form.” Here he states the main thesis of the book: “This means that the community of people (mislabeled ‘sovereignty’) has to be acknowledged as the ultimate ‘source’ of power and legitimacy (potential), although this source can never be fully or concretely instantiated. At the same time, the orientation toward well-being—that is, the ‘good life’ or ‘common good’—has to be accepted again as the ethical yardstick of democratic politics. What modernity adds to this classical notion is simply the role of individual agency on the level of both rulers and ruled, and the fact that the ‘good life’ cannot simply be presupposed or imposed, but must be searched for in dialogical interactions. Yet, in order not to decay into selfishness, individual agency has to be integrated into an ethical and relational context.” The second chapter is an examination of several conceptions of democracy that Dallmayr finds wanting, including minimalist, agonist, deliberative, and “apophatic” (Derrida). In this chapter, and throughout the rest of the book’s examination of other democratic theorists, theories, and praxis throughout modern history and around the world, Dallmayr’s evaluative scheme and criterion is centered in “potentiality and relationality,” and idea borrowed from the Bulgarian-French scholar Tzvetan Todorov: “Democracy means the balanced correlation of three main factors: the people (founding community, potentiality), individual political actors and policymakers, and shared political goals (telos or purpose). . . . [E]ach of these factors can give rise to antidemocratic derailments: the ‘people’ to reactionary ‘populism’; individual actors to neoliberalism or ‘hyper-liberalism’; the collective purpose to ‘messianism’ or the policy of ‘imposing democracy by bombs.’” The rest of the chapters constitute a historically informed, geographically diverse, and multidisciplinary analysis of several political theorists, themes, and situations, foremost of which being Todorov and Dussel’s analysis and critique of the Eurocentric domination and colonialism of the Americas. Grounded in their critique of the “underside of modernity,” Dallmayr goes on to examine the Arab Spring’s failed attempt at democratization, the debates on the role of Confucianism in 130 ELIZABETH C. SHAW AND STAFF

contemporary Asian constitutions and culture, the affinities of Ghandi’s conception of democracy and strategy of resistance to oppression with the author’s, and the ontological and theological implications of the “paradigm shift from Eurocentric modernity to global transmodernity.” “Simply put, the center in democracy is everywhere and nowhere because it manifests itself only in the relationship of elements which has to be constantly renegotiated and rebalanced. . . . To this extent, one can say that democracy is a dynamic happening or continuous relational creation (creation continua).” The book culminates in a fascinating study of the advaitic (nondual) thought of the Hindu-Catholic philosopher and theologian, Raimon Panikkar. Dallmayr suggests that, following Panikkar, if Being itself is fundamentally relational yet nondual, “neither one nor two,” and more of a “rhythm and dance” than a static, completed reality, one in which human beings are invited creatively to participate, then democracy itself is best seen as a creation continuna.—Thaddeus Kozinski, Wyoming Catholic College

DAVIS, Duane H., and William S. Hamrick, editors. Merleau-Ponty and the Art of Perception. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2016. xxv + 336 pp. Cloth, $95.00; paper, $26.95—This volume makes a unique and welcome contribution to the ever-expanding subfield of Merleau-Ponty studies. For while the French phenomenologist’s project developed in a constant (if sometimes subtle) dialogue with art, and thus while most secondary work that is not explicitly devoted to this aspect of his thought still at least touches on it, the centrality of art to Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology is typically not put into as sharp a focus as it is in this collection. For here it is not so much a matter of “aesthetics” as that is conventionally understood, as it is of aesthesis in the sense of sensory perception. As coeditor Davis expresses what he calls “the organizing principle of this volume,” Merleau-Ponty’s “account of perception is his account of art, and vice versa.” The claim— which Davis develops in unusually strong terms in a long introduction (Hamrick offers a shorter, supplementary introduction)—is that for Merleau-Ponty there is an essential intertwining or relation of reversibility between perception and art, and that consequently there is as yet untapped insight concerning the basic nature of his reinterpretation of phenomenology, as well as of its broader implications, to be gained from approaching his work in this light. Introductions aside, there are eleven essays that aim in various ways to substantiate this claim. While roughly half of these essays approach Merleau-Ponty from distinctly theoretical or exegetical perspectives, a distinguishing feature of the volume is that many of the contributions are authored by artists and others situated outside philosophy narrowly