Mindfulness and Letting Be: On Engaged Thinking and Acting

Mindfulness and Letting Be: On Engaged Thinking and Acting is a protest against the extreme mindlessness or thoughtlessness of our age, a malaise covered by manipulative cleverness and by minds filled to the brim with opinions, doctrines, marching orders, and ideologies. Rather than concentrating on a self-contained "mind," Fred Dallmayr pleads for an act of "minding" about oneself, one's fellow beings, society, and the world. What is required for such mindfulness is not a predatory reason, but a kind of reticence or "mind-fasting" as preparation for a genuine attentiveness able to "let be" without aloofness or indifference. Dallmayr explores the benefits of such mindfulness in the fields of philosophy or theory, practical conduct, language use, art works, historical understanding, and cosmopolitanism, and the insights that arise will be of benefit to students and scholars of continental, social, and political philosophy.