Table Of ContentIn memory of Martin Schönfeld (1963–2020)
vi
List of Figures
1.1 Taiji symbol 37
2.1 Heidegger’s fourfold 55
2.2 Daoism’s fourfold 56
2.3 Waying and Dao 57
List of Tables
2.1 Three Essentials of Socrates, Schelling, Heidegger, and Dao 64
Contributors
Steven Burik is currently Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Singapore Management
University. His research interests are mainly in comparative philosophy, continental
philosophy (Heidegger, Derrida), Chinese philosophy (Daoism), and critical thinking.
His works include The End of Comparative Philosophy and the Task of Comparative
Thinking (2009), a co-authored textbook on critical thinking, and articles in various
journals and books. His most recent work is an edited volume (with Ralph Weber and
Robert Smid) titled: Comparative Philosophy and Method: Contemporary Practices and
Future Possibilities (2022).
David Chai is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Chinese University of Hong
Kong. He is the author of Reading Ji Kang’s Essays: Xuanxue in Early Medieval China
(2022) and Zhuangzi and the Becoming of Nothingness (2019). He is editor of Daoist
Encounters with Phenomenology: Thinking Interculturally about Human Existence
(2020) and Dao Companion to Xuanxue [Neo-Daoism] (2020). His research covers
the fields of ancient and medieval Chinese philosophy, aesthetics, metaphysics,
phenomenology, and comparative philosophy.
Daniel Fried is Associate Professor at the University of Alberta, where he specializes
in comparative approaches to the intellectual history of China and Europe. His latest
book Dao and Sign in History (2018) was an examination of Daoist semiotics in early
and medieval China; he is currently working on the print culture of the Northern
Song dynasty. He is a past president of the Association of Chinese and Comparative
Literature and is co-editor of Routledge Studies in Comparative Chinese Literature and
Culture.
Jay Goulding is Professor in the Department of Social Science at York University.
His expertise lies in classical Chinese and Japanese philosophy, hermeneutics and
phenomenology. Among his many publications, he participated in celebrations of the
ninetieth anniversary of the Department of Philosophy at Beijing University, edited
China-West Interculture: Toward the Philosophy of World Integration, Essays on Wu
Kuang-Ming’s Thinking, and contributed a paper to the fortieth-anniversary volume of
the Journal of Chinese Philosophy. His most recent work includes a special festschrift
paper for the Journal of Chinese Philosophy on Cheng Chung-Ying and Hans-Georg
Gadamer entitled “Cheng and Gadamer: Daoist Phenomenology.”
Fabian Heubel has been a member of the Institute of Chinese Literature and
Philosophy at Academia Sinica since 2001 and a Research Fellow there since 2013.
x Contributors
He also teaches at the Institute of Philosophy at Goethe-University in Frankfurt. His
main research interests center on critical theory, contemporary German and French
thought, interpretations of Chinese philosophy in Western sinology, and classical
and contemporary Chinese philosophy. His most recent books include Gewundene
Wege nach China: Heidegger-Daoismus-Adorno (2020), Was ist chinesische Philosophie?
Kritische Perspektiven (2021), and Self-cultivation and Critique: A Transcultural
Perspective on the Late Foucault (in Chinese, 2021).
Eric S. Nelson is Professor of Humanities at the Hong Kong University of Science
and Technology. He works on Chinese, German, and Jewish philosophy. His latest
books include Levinas, Adorno, and the Ethics of the Material Other (2020), Daoism
and Environmental Philosophy: Nourishing Life (2020), Levinas, Adorno, and the Ethics
of the Material Other (2019), and Chinese and Buddhist Philosophy in Early Twentieth-
Century German Thought (2017). He is also the editor of Interpreting Dilthey: Critical
Essays (2019) and co-editor with François Raffoul of the Bloomsbury Companion to
Heidegger (2016).
Graham Parkes was born and raised in Glasgow and educated at Oxford and the
University of California Berkeley. He taught Asian and comparative philosophy
at the University of Hawaii for twenty-five years, punctuated by three years as a
visiting scholar and fellow at Harvard. He is now a Professorial Research Fellow at
the Institute of Philosophy, University of Vienna. He has published extensively in
the fields of Chinese, German, Japanese, and environmental philosophies. His most
recent book is How to Think about the Climate Crisis: A Philosophical Guide to Saner
Ways of Living (2020), and he is the editor of the critically acclaimed Heidegger and
Asian Thought (1987).
Geling Shang is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Grand Valley State University.
The author of Liberation as Affirmation: The Religiosity of Zhuangzi and Nietzsche
(2006), his main areas of research are Chinese and comparative philosophy,
particularly the concepts of “throughness” (tong 通) and “interality” (jian 間),
resulting in a philosophical territory he calls “interalogy.”
Mario Wenning is Professor Titular at the Loyola University Andalusia and Vice
President of the Karl Jaspers Society of North America. His work focuses primarily on
social and political philosophy as well as aesthetics from an intercultural perspective.
His work has appeared in a wide variety of journals, including Comparative Philosophy,
Journal of Chinese Philosophy, Philosophy East and West, Confluence, and Studies in
Philosophy and Education. He is currently completing a book manuscript on natural
agency East and West.
Jason M. Wirth is Professor of Philosophy at Seattle University, and works and teaches
in the areas of Buddhist philosophy, aesthetics, continental philosophy, environmental
philosophy, and Africana philosophy. His recent books include Nietzsche and Other
Contributors xi
Buddhas: Philosophy after Comparative Philosophy (2019), Mountains, Rivers, and the
Great Earth: Reading Gary Snyder and Dōgen in an Age of Ecological Crisis (2017),
Commiserating with Devastated Things: Milan Kundera and the Entitlements of
Thinking (2015), and Schelling’s Practice of the Wild: Time, Art, Imagination (2015).
He is the associate editor and book review editor of the journal Comparative and
Continental Philosophy.
Acknowledgments
My thanks to Graham, Jay, Eric, Jason, Daniel, Steven, Geling, Mario, and Fabian, for
helping me amplify the echoes of Daoism permeating Heidegger’s thought. Thanks
also to Colleen Coalter and Suzie Nash at Bloomsbury, and the University of Hawaii
Press for permission to reprint Graham Parkes’ chapter “Thoughts on the Way: Being
and Time via Lao-Chuang,” which originally appeared in his Heidegger and Asian
Thought (1987: 105–44).
Editor’s Introduction
The question of Martin Heidegger’s (1889–1976) relationship with East Asia is as
important as it is misinformed. The studies by Graham Parkes (1987), Reinhard
May (1996), and Lin Ma (2008) have helped dispel the cloud of mischaracterization
surrounding Heidegger’s interaction with the texts and persons from China and Japan.
From the East Asian side of the story, the reception of Heidegger has been uneven. For
example, the first scholar from East Asia to visit Germany and study with Heidegger
was Tanabe Hajime in 1922, the first article to be written about Heidegger was also
by Tanabe Hajime in 1924, while the first translation of Being and Time appeared in
Japanese in 1939 (the first English translation only appeared in 1962). The situation
in China was very different. Although Chinese students and scholars visited Heidegger
in Germany, studying his works in China proved untenable during the 1950s and
1960s. Despite the eagerness of the Japanese to engage Heidegger, it would be fair to
say Heidegger was not as drawn to their thought as he was to ancient Chinese Daoism
(i.e., the Daodejing 道德經 and Zhuangzi 莊子), despite a few remarks of his that
might indicate otherwise.
According to Otto Pöggeler, in December of 1945 “Heidegger suffered a breakdown
and had to be taken to a sanatorium for three weeks” during which time he began
translating Laozi’s Daodejing.1 Andrew Mitchell, however, states Heidegger’s health crisis
occurred many months later. The source of this crisis was the result of being “brought
before a commission of university professors assembled by the French authorities then
occupying Germany for the purpose of establishing political accountability during
the war … [in July of 1946] shortly after meeting with the de-nazification committee
Heidegger suffered a nervous breakdown.”2 What is more, under the care of Dr. Viktor
Emil Freiherr von Gebsattel (1883–1976), “Heidegger’s letters of the time show the
effect that Gebsattel had upon him, giving the lie to the standard account reported
by Heinrich-Wiegand Petzet and confirming Hugo Ott’s contention that Heidegger’s
stay with Gebsattel lasted three to six months, not three weeks as Heidegger reported:
‘Heidegger’s sojourn in Badenweiler lasted from February to the end of May 1946.
After that time, the psychotherapeutic treatment continued with Gebsasttel.’”3
Heidegger’s encounter with Daoism began well before his breakdown: the 1930
Bremen lecture “On the Essence of Truth” (Vom Wesen der Wahrheit, published in
1943) to be precise. It was after this lecture, during the discussion session, that
Heidegger asked for a copy of the Zhuangzi, and upon being presented with Martin
Buber’s edition, he launched into a discussion of the famous story in chapter 17 on the
2 Daoist Resonances in Heidegger
joy of fish.4 Buber’s partial translation of the Zhuangzi into German was first published
in 1910 and was appropriately entitled Speeches and Parables of Tschuang-Tse (Reden
und Gleichnisse des Tschuang Tse). Buber’s Zhuangzi text would go through several
revisions, once in 1918 and again in 1951; however, Buber based his translation on
the English translation carried out by Herbert Giles in 1889.5 According to Irene Eber,
Buber gave a series of private lectures on the Daodejing in 1924, yet they were never
published and remain a typewritten manuscript entitled “Talks with Martin Buber in
Ascona, August 1924, about Lao-tzu’s Tao Te Ching.”6
Heidegger would publicly refer to Buber’s Zhuangzi translation several more times
after his 1930 lecture. In his 1960 Bremen seminar entitled “Word and Image” (Bild
und Wort), he discussed Zhuangzi’s story of the bell-stand maker from chapter 19,7 and
the text came up in conversation with Chang Chung-Yuan when he visited Heidegger
in Freiburg in 1972.8 Besides these stories, others include the 1962 lecture “Traditional
Language and Technological Language” (Uberlieferte Sprache und Technische Sprache)9
wherein Heidegger talked about the theme of uselessness, a theme that arose during
a conversation between Zhuangzi and his friend Huizi in chapter 1 of the Zhuangzi.
Another story, from chapter 26 of the text in which Huizi declares Zhuangzi’s words to
be useless, finds its way into Heidegger’s “Evening Conversation in a Russian War Camp
between a Young and Old Man” from 1944 to 1945.10 The import of these references
to Daoist uselessness, according to Eric Nelson, is that they serve as “a response to the
crisis conditions of National Socialism and German defeat and the technocratic regime
of the necessity of the useful … [hence they] opened up new possibilities and retrievals
of his own thinking for Heidegger in the Post-war period.”11
Of course, Daoism is not limited to the Zhuangzi; there is also Laozi’s Daodejing. Of
the eight lectures Heidegger gave in Bremen during the 1950s, his lecture “The Thing”
(Das Ding) is well-known amongst Daoist scholars insofar as it borrows the analogy of
the clay jug from chapter 11 of the Daodejing.12 Later, in 1958, in his contribution to the
Festschrift for Dr. Gebsattel, Heidegger referred to chapter 28 of Laozi’s text.13 Indeed,
Heidegger would have been constantly reminded of the Daodejing while looking at
the calligraphy written by Paul Shih-Yi Hsiao hanging on his study wall since it was
couplet taken from chapter 15 of the Daodejing.14 Whereas Buber’s German translation
of the Zhuangzi would have been the only one available to Heidegger, the Daodejing
was readily accessible through the translations by Victor von Strauss (1874), Alexander
Ular (1903), Richard Wilhelm (1911), and Jan Ulenbrook (1962).15
We know Heidegger was familiar with Wilhelm’s edition of the Daodejing by way
of the following remark from Petzet: “He [Heidegger] himself holds to Lao-tzu, but he
knows Lao-tzu only through the German mediators—for example, Richard Wilhelm.”16
We also know, again via Petzet, that Heidegger was no stranger to Ulenbrook’s
translation:
I knew how highly Heidegger esteemed Lao-tzu. But only after he died did I learn
that at one point he began translating the Tao Te Ching. When Ernst Junger was
about to start his trip to East Asia in 1966, Heidegger included a saying of the
old sage in his letter to Junger. I am grateful to Junger for being able to quote
that saying at the end of this chapter devoted to Heidegger’s relationship to the
Editor’s Introduction 3
Far East … It is the forty-seventh chapter of the Tao Te Ching and reads, in the
translation by Jan Ulenbrook.17
Roughly twenty years earlier, in a letter dated October 9, 1947, to Paul Shih-Yi Hsiao,
Heidegger paraphrases Hsiao’s translation of chapter 15 of the Daodejing.18 These lines
would become the famous calligraphic scrolls hanging on Heidegger’s study wall.
Chapters 7, 18, and 76 would also be discussed with Hsiao and demonstrate Heidegger’s
acquaintance with this text.19 In total, Heidegger mentions Laozi in the following
volumes of his Complete Works (i.e., Gesamtausgabe): page 138 of Band 11 (Identität
und Differenz (1955–1957), page 181 of Band 12 (Unterwegs zur Sprache (1950–1959),
pages 617 and 618 of Band 16 (Reden und andere Zeugnisse eines Lebensweges (1910–
1976), page 43 of Band 75 (Zu Hölderlin: Griechenlandreisen), and pages 93 and 146 of
Band 79 (Bremer und Freiburger Vorträge).20
In light of the above evidence, is this enough to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt
that Heidegger’s comportment toward Daoist philosophy was anything but fleeting?
Is it fair to say the resonance Heidegger felt with Daoism was genuine? This book
will answer in the affirmative with the condition that we do not presume the entirety
of Heidegger’s corpus bears the stamp of Daoist philosophy. Indeed, since Elisabeth
Hirsch published her paper in 1970 on Heidegger and East Asian thought,21 scholars
have consistently pointed to the explicit and unacknowledged influence of Daoism on
Heidegger’s later thought. As Heidegger himself said, “it has seemed urgent to me that
a dialogue take place with the thinkers of what is to us the Eastern world.”22 What is
more, “by thinking the clearing and characterizing it adequately, we reach a realm that
can perhaps make it possible to bring a transformed European thinking into a fruitful
engagement with East Asian ‘thinking.’”23
And yet, when Heidegger says he was skeptical about “what his Japanese friends made
out of his philosophy” and that “he has difficulty believing blindly that thoughts in a
language so foreign would mean the same,”24 one has to question his sincerity in having a
dialogue with the Eastern world. Such being the case, Petzet rightly points out it “would
be a mistake to want (as some have) to construct, overzealously though with good
intentions, a kind of thought-harmony that would span the peoples and to attempt a
direct equation of [Japanese] Zen with Heidegger’s many paths of thinking.”25 Heidegger
is partly to blame for the confusion surrounding his comportment to the East when he
states, as he did in his interview for Der Spiegel in 1966, that there is no point in turning
“to Zen or other Eastern experiences of the world”26 if the West is to free itself of the chains
of technology preventing it from thinking the question of Being. Just three years earlier,
in 1963, Heidegger met with Bhikku Maha Mani, a Buddhist monk from Thailand, in
Freiburg, after which they recorded an interview to be broadcast on television. In their
pre-interview conversation, the monk asked Heidegger what he thinks needs to be done
“to overcome the pre-disposition and the prejudice so that unity is restored beyond the
dichotomy? Heidegger answers that the way can be opened only through releasement
toward things and openness to the mystery.”27 This resulted in the following:
[Heidegger asked the monk:] What does meditation mean for Eastern humanity?
The monk’s response is quite simple: Meditation means ‘to gather oneself.’ The
