Daoist Encounters with Phenomenology: Thinking Interculturally about Human Existence

329 Pages·2020·1.933 MB·English

by  David Chai (editor)

Daoist Encounters
with
Phenomenology
i
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ii
Daoist Encounters
with
Phenomenology
Thinking Interculturally
about Human Existence
Edited by
David Chai
iii
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First published in Great Britain 2020

Copyright © David Chai and Contributors, 2020

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to be identifi ed as Editor of this work.

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In Memory of our Teachers

Herbert Fingarette (1921–2018)
Henry Rosemont, Jr. (1934–2017)
Vincent Shen (1949–2018)
v
vi
CONTENTS
List of Contributors ix
Acknowledgments xii
Editor’s Introduction 1
Part One: Precursory Encounters: Unearthing
Fertile Seeds
1 Daoism and Hegel on Painting the Invisible Spirit:
To Color or Not? 9
David Chai
2 Two Portrayals of Death in Light of the Views of
Brentano and Early Daoism 31
Mary I. Bockover
3 In the Light of Heaven before Sunrise: Zhuangzi and
Nietzsche on Transperspectival Experience 61
Graham Parkes
Part Two: Early Encounters: Nourishing the Sprouts
of Possibility
4 The Pre-o bjective and the Primordial: Elements of a
Phenomenological Reading of Zhuangzi 87
Kwok-Ying Lau
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viii CONTENTS
5 Martin Buber’s Phenomenological Interpretation
of Laozi’s Daodejing 105
Eric S. Nelson
6 Martin Buber’s Dao 121
Jason M. Wirth
7 The Dao of Existence: Jaspers and Laozi 135
Mario Wenning
Part Three: Mature Encounters: A Forest of Ideas
8 Heidegger and Daoism: A Dialogue on the Useless
Way of Unnecessary Being 161
Bret W. Davis
9 Heidegger and Zhuangzi: The Transformative Art
of the Phenomenological Reduction 197
Patricia Huntington
10 The Reader’s Chopper: Finding Affi nities from
Gadamer to Zhuangzi on Reading 219
Sarah A. Mattice
11 Unknowing Silence in Laozi’s D aodejing and
Merleau-Ponty 247
Katrin Froese
Part Four: A Most Urgent Encounter: Re-Rooting
Our Futural Selves
12 Grounding Phenomenology in Laozi’s Daodejing :
The Anthropocene, the Fourfold, and the Sage 275
Martin Sch ö nfeld
Index 309
LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
Mary I. Bockover is Professor of Philosophy at Humboldt State University,
where she has taught since 1989. She created the H SU Philosophy Forum , a
community-w ide forum for discussing issues of social and moral signifi cance,
which she now cooperatively runs with the University’s Associated Students
organization. Professor Bockover serves on a number of ethics committees
in her community. She also likes to travel, especially to China, and to the
Czech Republic where she and her family spent a Fulbright year in 2004–5.
Her publications are mainly in the areas of comparative philosophy, ancient
Chinese philosophy, ethics, and identity theory.
David Chai is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the Chinese University of
Hong Kong. He is the author of Z huangzi and the Becoming of Nothingness
(2019) and E arly Zhuangzi Commentaries: On the Sounds and Meanings of
the Inner Chapters (2008), and editor of Dao Companion to Neo-Daoism
(2020). His work has appeared in a wide variety of journals and edited
anthologies. Professor Chai’s research covers the fi elds of Chinese philosophy,
metaphysics, phenomenology, hermeneutics, and comparative philosophy.
Bret W. Davis is Thomas J. Higgins, S.J. Professor of Philosophy at Loyola
University Maryland. In addition to attaining a Ph.D. in philosophy from
Vanderbilt University, he has spent more than a dozen years studying and
teaching in Japan. He is author of H eidegger and the Will: On the Way to
Gelassenheit (2007) and of more than sixty articles in English and Japanese
on Continental, East Asian, and comparative philosophy. He is translator of
Heidegger’s C ountry Path Conversations (2010) and the editor or co- editor
of J apanese Philosophy in the World (in Japanese, 2005), Martin Heidegger:
Key Concepts (2010), J apanese and Continental Philosophy: Conversations
with the Kyoto School (2011), Engaging D o ¯ gen’s Zen: The Philosophy of
Practice as Awakening (2017), and The Oxford Handbook of Japanese
Philosophy (2019).
Katrin Froese is Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies at the University
of Calgary. She is the author of Rousseau and Nietzsche: Toward an Aesthetic
Morality (2001), N ietzsche, Heidegger and Daoist Thought: Crossing Paths
In-Between (2006), Ethics Unbound: Some Chinese and Western Perspectives
of Morality (2013), and Why Can’t Philosophers Laugh ? (2017).
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