Winfried Reinhard "Fred" Dallmayr (October 18, 1928 – June 5, 2024) was an American philosopher and political theorist. He was Packey J. Dee Professor Emeritus in Political Science with a joint appointment in philosophy at the University of Notre Dame (US). He held a Doctor of Law from the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU), and a PhD in political science from Duke University. He was the author of some 40 books and the editor of 20 other books. He served as president of the Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy (SACP); an advisory member of the scientific committee of RESET – Dialogue on Civilizations (Rome); the executive co-chair of World Public Forum – Dialogue of Civilizations (Vienna), and a member of the supervisory board of the Dialogue of Civilizations Research Institute (Berlin).
Biography Dallmayr was born on October 18, 1928, in Ulm, Germany, and raised in Augsburg, Germany. World War II had a profound impact on his intellectual and political development. “I feel that, in large measure, I can trace my persistent opposition to war and violence—especially aggressive warfare—to this youthful experience.”Fred Dallmayr, On the Boundary: A Life Remembered, Lanham, MD: Hamilton Books, 2017, 10. .
In 1955, he received the degree of Doctor of Law from the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU). In 1954–1957, he attended the Institute of European Studies (Istituto Universitario di Studi Europei) in Turin, Italy, under the mentorship of Norberto Bobbio. In 1955–1956, he studied at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Illinois, US. In 1957, he was admitted to Duke University, North Carolina, US, taking the PhD in political science in 1960.
Dallmayr taught at Purdue University as an assistant professor and associate professor (1963–1971), and then as professor and head of department of political science (1973–1978). Since 1978, he taught at Notre Dame, where he served as Packey J. Dee Professor of Government. He was a visiting professor at the University of Hamburg, Germany (1971–72, 1976, and 1986). He has also been Werner Marx Visiting Professor in philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York (1988), a Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford, and a Fulbright research scholar, at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda (MSU), Vadodara, Gujarat, India (1991–1992).
During trips to India, China, Japan, Malaysia, Turkey, Egypt, and other countries, Dallmayr established close collaborative relationships with many prominent philosophers and has been able to learn in-depth their cultural and philosophical traditions. He has maintained dialogues with philosophers such as Jürgen Habermas, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault, as well as Karl-Otto Apel, William McBride, Seyla Benhabib, Iris Marion Young, David M. Rasmussen, Judith Butler, Bhikhu Parekh, Ashis Nandy, and Tu Weiming, among others.
Dallmayr died in South Bend, Indiana on June 5, 2024, at the age of 95.
Major philosophical themes Dallmayr's research interests included contemporary philosophy and political theory; especially phenomenology; hermeneutics; critical theory; deconstruction; democratic theory; intercultural philosophy; and non-Western philosophical and political thought. He has written on G. W. F. Hegel, Martin Heidegger, Gadamer, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Theodor W. Adorno; Jürgen Habermas, Karl-Otto Apel, Louis Althusser, Foucault, Derrida, Paul Tillich, Raimon Panikkar, and Enrique Dussel. Dallmayr's philosophy is characterized by the transformative impulse, fostering both the change that takes place in the development of philosophy and the role of philosophy in understanding and transforming human beings in their cultural manifestations and in social interactions.
Dallmayr's philosophy and political theory favors self-other relations over ego, dialogue over monologue, relationality over static identity, ethical conduct over the abstract knowledge of normative rules, equal democratic lateral relationships over hierarchies of domination, and intercultural and cosmopolitan perspectives over chauvinistic hegemonism. He has been a critic of liberal democracy, and has elucidated alternative conceptions of “apophatic” democracy or “democracy to come.”Fred Dallmayr, “Apophatic Democracy?” in Democracy to Come: Democracy as Relational Praxis. Oxford University Press, 2017. e-book. .
As an alternative to the dichotomies of Western philosophy, Dallmayr's overall perspective aimed to steer a course between universalism and particularism, between globalism and localism, between Western modernity and tradition, and between Western and non-Western traditions of philosophical and religious thought. He firmly upheld the transcendent or trans-mundane status of the ideas of truth, goodness and justice, while simultaneously insisting on the need to interpret these ideas and to translate them into a commitment to justice and peace among people in this world.
In developing his philosophy, Dallmayr acknowledged his debt to phenomenology, hermeneutics, critical theory, and deconstructionism. From his earliest works, Dallmayr has consistently confronted Cartesian cogito and its oppositions (subject and object, human being and world). He criticizes the egocentrism of modern Western thought, including its “anthropocentric and subjectivist thrust” and “possessive individualism.”Fred Dallmayr, “Beyond Possessive Individualism” in Twilight of Subjectivity: Contributions to a Post-Individualist Theory. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press,1981, 8ff. . Yet this critique does not mean anti-humanism and the “end of man,” as advocated by some postmodern thinkers. He does not disregard the individual subject, but rather revises it as an emergent and relational being capable of transformation. To the metaphysical paradigm rooted in individual subjectivity he opposes the emerging outlook emphasizing human connectedness, anchored in (Heideggerian) “care” (Sorge) and “solicitude” (Fürsorge). Dallmayr outlines a post-individualist theory of politics, which does not simply reject individualism but seeks to divest it of its anthropocentric, “egological,” and “possessive” connotations. Dieter Misgeld noted that Dallmayr has “a post-individualist theory of politics and post-liberal moral and political thinking as his themes, as well as a theory of embodied intersubjectivity meant to be foundational for a theory of politics.”Dieter Misgeld, “Philosophy and politics: On Fred Dallmayr's ‘Critical Encounters,’” Human Studies, March 1991, Volume 14, Issue 1: 16.
Dallmayr on Heidegger Dallmayr's brings an original interpretation of Heidegger's works. He was among the first in the English-speaking world to realize that Heidegger's philosophical work “was much broader than the particular Nazi episode.”Dallmayr, On the Boundary, 43. He has elucidated Heidegger's work in several of his own major works.Dallmayr, Twilight of Subjectivity, 56ff.; Fred Dallmayr, The Other Heidegger. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993. . He uncovered fruitful contributions of Heidegger's work, which are relevant to contemporary social and political thought. He also delineated the contours of an alternative political perspective in Heidegger's thought.
Dallmayr highlights the importance of Heidegger's critique of Western metaphysics, especially Cartesian rationalism with its focus on the cogito, which was the root of the split between mind and matter, subject and object, self and other, humans and the world. In contrast to these divisions, Heidegger's definition of human existence as being-in-the-world conceptualizes “world” in its many dimensions as a constitutive feature of existence as such. In opposition to traditional formulations, being could not be grasped as a substance or fixed concept but needs to be seen as a temporal process or happening, an ongoing disclosure (and sheltering) of meaning in which all beings participate.Dallmayr, On the Boundary, 43–4.
With Heidegger, Dallmayr goes beyond the self-centered type of existentialism. He interprets Dasein (human existence) in Being and TimeMartin Heidegger, Being and Time: A Translation of Sein und Zeit, translated by Joan Stambaugh. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1953. . as not a self-constituted or a fixed substance, but open-ended and potentially transformative, “a being moved by ‘care’ (Sorge) in an ongoing search for meaning and truth.”Fred Dallmayr, Against Apocalypse: Recovering Humanity’s Wholeness. Lexington Books, 2017, 83. .
He also explicates Heidegger’s other key concepts, such as letting-be (Seinlassen), event (Ereignis),Martin Heidegger, Das Ereignis (Event), edited by Friedrich-Wilhelm von Hermann. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2009. . and dwelling (wohnen), to move his political philosophy beyond the traditional paradigm, rooted in individual subjectivity, toward a view of human beings and society that emphasizes human connectedness and relationality. Above all, he shows that for Heidegger every substance is marked by division, every unity or community by “difference” (Unterschied). The central issue is how togetherness and separation, unity and difference “belong together.”Martin Heidegger, Identität und Differenz. Neske, Pfullingen 1957, 1978. .
Dallmayr relates what he learns from Heidegger to political philosophy, asking questions, such as: “What is the status of individualism and of traditional Western humanism?” and “How should one construe the relations between self and other human beings bypassing the options of contractual agreement and simple rational convergence?”Dallmayr, On the Boundary, 45. He focuses on the status of the individual as political agent; the character of the political community; the issue of cultural and political development or modernization; and the problem of an emerging cosmopolis, or world order, beyond the confines of Western culture.Dallmayr, The Other Heidegger; Fred Dallmayr, Between Freiburg and Frankfurt: Toward a Critical Ontology. Amherst, University of Massachusetts Press, 1991. e-book. .
He articulates from a philosophical perspective the relevance of Heidegger's diagnosis of the condition of contemporary society characterized by mass culture, the depersonalized “they” (das Man), the instrumental reason, oppressive power (Macht) and manipulative domination or machination (Machenschaft). Dallmayr shows the relevance of Heidegger as a thinker who was able to realize the dramatic situation of Western civilization and to see the root causes of its problems, which continued to escalate ever since. The qualitatively new perspective, highlighted by Dallmayr, is that contradictions and perilous tendencies in Western society are now escalating to the level of being global problems, which put us at the precipice of self-destruction—nuclear or ecological.
Dialogue and intercultural philosophy Dallmayr saw the problems of Western modernity in the monologic mindset, which was rooted in Cartesian ego cogito and became an instrumental rationality coupled with egocentric will to power and domination. He advocated for dialogue in theory and practice, as a means to overcome monologic unilateralism and for establishing the relationships of mutual understanding and collaboration, aiming for peaceful coexistence and justice. He has elucidated the dialogical motifs in the works of Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin, Gadamer, Karl Jaspers, Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Panikkar, among others.