Heidegger and Dao

Daoism and the Human Experience

Series Editor: David Chai

Associate Professor of Philosophy, Chinese University of Hong Kong

Editorial Advisory Board

Lisa Raphals, University of California, Riverside (USA)
Robin Wang, Loyola Marymount University (USA)
Franklin Perkins, University of Hawaii (USA)
Eric S. Nelson, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Hong Kong)
Thomas Michael, Beijing Normal University (China)
James Sellmann, University of Guam (USA)
Chris Fraser, University of Toronto (Canada)
Bret Davis, Loyola University Maryland (USA)
Zongqi Cai, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (USA)
Zhihua Yao, Chinese University of Hong Kong (Hong Kong)

Daoism and the Human Experience creates a platform to explore, question,

and learn about the ways Daoist thought elucidates the human experience in
its philosophical, literary, aesthetic, and spiritual manifestations. We welcome
contributions focusing on Daoist thought itself, as well as those that explore
it within the broader context of China, East Asia, continental Europe, India,
Africa, the Americas, and the Islamic world.

Titles in the series include:

Daoist Resonances in Heidegger, edited by David Chai
 Heidegger and Dao

Things, Nothingness, Freedom

Eric S. Nelson
 BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK
1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA
29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland

BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo

are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

First published in Great Britain 2024

Copyright © Eric S. Nelson, 2024

Eric S. Nelson has asserted his right under the Copyright,

Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work.

For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. viii constitute an

extension of this copyright page.

Cover image: Lui Shou-kwan 呂壽琨, 1919–1975, “Zhuangzi” 1974.

Hong Kong Museum of Art Collection.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted

in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior
permission in writing from the publishers.

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for,
any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given
in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher
regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased
to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: HB: 978-1-3504-1190-6

ePDF: 978-1-3504-1191-3
eBook: 978-1-3504-1192-0

Series: Daoism and the Human Experience

Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd.

To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com
and sign up for our newsletters.
To Shengqing
vi
 Contents

Acknowledgments viii

Introduction 1

Part One Dao, Thing, and World 11

1 Way, Thing, and World in Laozi, Zhuangzi, and Heidegger 13
2 The Autopoietic Self-Transformation of Things in
Ziranist Daoism and Heidegger 37
3 Heidegger and Laozi’s Daodejing: The Gathering Emptiness
of Thing and Place 59
4 Heidegger and the Zhuangzi: The Uselessness and
Unnecessariness of Things 85
5 Heidegger’s Dao amidst Thing and World 107

Part Two Nothingness, Emptiness, and the Clearing 131

6 Daoist Nothingness, Buddhist Emptiness, and the Myth of “Oriental
Nothingness” 133
7 Nothingness, Emptiness, and the Clearing: An Intercultural Interpretation 147
8 The Nothing, Nihilism, and Heidegger’s East Asian Entanglements 167
9 Reimagining the Ethics and Politics of Emptiness 187

Notes 199
Bibliography 228
Index 245
 Acknowledgments

A book does not belong solely to its author. Hermeneutical transmissions, the research
of others, and myriad conversations and encounters have helped inform my thinking
and make this present work possible. I am grateful to all the teachers, scholars, and
friends who have shaped my way. I would particularly like to express my gratitude to
Emilia Angelova, Charles Bambach, Mark Cabural, David Chai, Charles Chan, Chung-
ying Cheng, Kim-chong Chong, Bret Davis, Joshua Derman, William Edelglass, Timo
Ennen, Saulius Geniusas, Siby George, Fabian Heubel, Jean-Yves Heurtebise, Jenny
Hung, Patricia Huntington, Curtis Hutt, Leah Kalmanson, Sophia Katz, Halla Kim,
Hye Young Kim, Theodore Kisiel, Sai Hang Kwok, Kwok-ying Lau, David Michael
Kleinberg-Levin, Chenyang Li, Manhua Li, Dan Lusthaus, Rudolf Makkreel, John
McCumber, Thomas Michael, Ronny Miron, Anish Mishra, Kyung-ah Nam, Richard
Nelson, On-cho Ng, Franklin Perkins, Dennis Prooi, François Raffoul, James Risser,
Frithjof Rodi, Jana Rošker, Frank Schalow, Dennis Schmidt, Martin Schönfeld, Brian
Schroeder, Yumi Suzuki, Kellee Tsai, Qingjie James Wang, Robin Wang, Youru Wang,
Mario Wenning, Ann Pang-White, Jason Wirth, Simon Wong, Tung Tin Wong, and
especially Shengqing Wu.
I am also thankful for the following research opportunities and funding sources:
the Herzog August Bibliothek (Wolfenbüttel) and the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa
where I wrote the initial draft of this book; HKUST IEG20HS01, Hong Kong Research
Grants Council (RGC) GRF 16631916, and Hong Kong Research Grants Council
(RGC) HSSPFS 36000021 for funding archival, library, and other research activities.
Readers should keep in mind that this book is a sequel to Nelson 2017 that can, of
course, be read independently as a related “intercultural genealogy.” Note that there is
some slight repetition in the text to remind readers in later chapters of earlier significant
points. Some of the short discussions of Daoism, Buddhism, other German thinkers
and writers, social-political philosophy, and Heidegger’s broader life and thought
might strike some as excursions, but they serve to contextualize, illustrate, and support
the overall argument and interpretation offered in this book. As I interpret Heidegger
in an intercultural, anarchic-egalitarian, and participatory democratic context, this
requires confronting Heidegger’s worst moments and tendencies while intensifying
the thinking of freedom as releasement.
Also note, lengthier quotations from Chinese and German language sources have
been placed in the endnotes. With both early ziranist or generative Daoism and
Heidegger, it is difficult to think with and through their sources without encountering
and engaging their words and linguistic strategies in their own sense and context.
Finally, note that parts of Chapters 1, 4, and 8 appear in substantially different forms
in Nelson 2022c: 141–62; Nelson 2022: 787–806; and Nelson 2023b.
 Introduction

1. Heidegger and the Way

Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) is a philosopher of being under and on the way. “Way”
is arguably a more elemental guiding word than being, beings, or meaning to express
the twists and turns of his thinking.1 Heidegger insisted throughout his writings that
the way toward a more decisive questioning of being, the unthought matter to be
thought, is more fundamental than any given determinate answer or expected result.
Each anticipatory indicative response remains provisional as the way itself overturns
expectations and compels reposing the question of being anew. Heidegger’s early
methodology of formal indication and its continuation as wayfaring explains the
variety, originality, and intensity of his reflections that cannot be reduced to a method
or a doctrine.2 This interpretive situation compels his readers to repose and enact for
themselves the questionability and perplexity of that which is to be thought and enter a
condition of being underway without a predetermined destination and purpose.
Thinking anticipates through expectations that can be upturned and reoriented
by what is encountered. There is no uninterrupted “royal road” of conceptualization
from thought and the subject to the truth of being. Heidegger himself confessed
that he was confronted with—playing on the senses of “Holzwege,” wooden or forest
paths—unexpected twists, turns, and dead ends. The dead end is the place where one is
forced to double back, repeat one’s steps, and take new ones. He also spoke of his own
errors and stupidities, as his pathways traversed freedom and fixation, good and evil, and
truth and errancy. Numerous publications have reconstructed these pathways through
narratives of unconcealment and concealment, social-political errancy and offense,
and private reticence and hiddenness. The thinker is not only persistently concealed
from others but remains concealed and unknown to himself. The philosopher of the
unthought in the history of metaphysics does not necessarily sufficiently confront his
own unthought. Nevertheless, thinking that would be appropriate to what is to be thought
in its event cannot sidestep arduous walks, narrow passages, and steep ascending and
descending paths. In Heidegger’s twisting byways and sideways, in the play of shadow
and light conveyed in his favorite passage from the Daodejing 道德經, a path emerges
in which thing and world would be released through their emptiness into the free
mystery of their own ways of manifesting and being. This is why philosophy, inveterately
wrapped up in its own self-referential conceptuality without adequately recognizing
2 Heidegger and Dao

that which addresses and motivates it, should ruthlessly criticize without abandoning
Heidegger’s thinking. More than this, it should be approached as an imperfect yet
insightful exemplary model that continues to speak to the present condition.
Why then write or read about Heidegger and the dao? What is this “dao”? An
initial clue is found in the Zhuangzi 莊子 that states a way is made by walking it. The
Chinese dao 道 character is composed of the radicals related to walking (辶) and
head (首). Some explanations accentuate the head as directing the feet. But the accent
here is on walking and moving, as the head follows the passage of the feet stepping
along the path and encountering the myriad things in their varying circumstances.
Relational freedom and unanxious ease (xiaoyao you 逍遥游) occur in a wandering
that recognizes and forgets things, values them in their uselessness and lets them go
in their departure, and transitions with the transformations of self and world. This
way as walked cannot be disconnected from that which is encountered on the way:
changing things, localities, seasons, and birth and death. According to the Zhuangzi,
these occur in an elemental generative nothingness (wu 無) from which attunement
occurs by emptying and forgetting the heart-mind (xin 心). Emptiness can signify
a gloomy absence of meaning in ordinary language. But, as linked with humility,
simplicity, and sincerity in early Chinese thought, it is constitutive of a free and
responsive way of life.
It is not accidental that Heidegger, who already began to think about the Daoist
way in 1919 and 1930, and early Daoists accentuated questions of the thing as that
which is to be encountered and nothingness as a way of living freely that undoes the
fixities of the self and identity. This inquiry will recount and radicalize their tactics
of questioning identity and undoing fixation. It is an attempt to critically reactivate
and reimagine Heidegger’s way in view of the early Daoist dao and, to a lesser but
still significant extent, the Buddhist dharma by (1) historically tracing and situating
Daoist and Buddhist influences operative in Heidegger’s German contemporaries and
his own thinking, (2) reinterpreting his thought from these sources (including those
unfamiliar to him), and (3) articulating the senses of the thing, generative nothingness,
and the open empty clearing for the sake of a renewed ethos of openness to things and
world, as a way of freely and responsively wandering and abiding amidst them and
the places they shape. This ethos, more elemental in its demand than recent object-
oriented philosophy and thing-theory, would recognize how things have their own
environing places and changing pathways, even if they are thought to have no well-
being or sentience of their own.
This threefold task demands a specific intercultural practice of hermeneutics (the
art of interpretation) in response to the tensions between historical circumstances
and philosophical questions. Interculturality challenges the orthodox identity-based
presuppositions that continue to dominate philosophy and its history. The heterodox
interpretive strategy deployed here is a mixture of historiographic and philosophical
inquiry, and Asian and European discourses, as we consider a variety of historically
positioned exemplary cases and traverse shifting perspectives with and beyond
Heidegger. First, archival and historical inquiry frees us to study the purportedly
“small,” semi-forgotten, and problematic questionable figures of an epoch that can lead
to a more appropriate hermeneutical contextualization and historical sensibility in
 Introduction 3

contrast to pure forms of theorizing and moralizing. The hermeneutics of words and
concepts entails examining multiple generations rather than only a single renowned
author. Engaging forgotten and semi-forgotten texts and authors can help facilitate
generational contextualization as well as their further rediscovery. Secondly, Daoist and
Buddhist texts should not only deliver raw data for European conceptual reasoning.
They offer a variety of argumentative and interpretive strategies with their own situated
specificity and philosophical stakes. Working through unthought hiddenness and the
anxieties of influence, this analysis reveals how Heidegger is unique among European
philosophers in learning from ways enacted in these sources.
What follows can be read as a reflection on Heidegger’s statement: “Releasement
toward things and openness for the mystery belong together. They grant us the
possibility of residing in the world in a wholly other way” (GA 16: 528). This constellation
of releasement, openness, mystery, things, and other ways of relational dwelling appears
throughout his discussions of Daoist sources and was developed in conversation with
them. Heidegger’s pathways to the releasement and freedom of things (Gelassenheit
der Dinge)—through the uncanniness of nothingness and the open emptiness of the
clearing—are informed by his explicit engagements and unthought resonances with
East Asian philosophies, particularly the Daodejing, attributed to the mysterious figure
of Laozi 老子 and the Zhuangzi. The early forms of these two anthologies, composed
from disparate sources, have been dated from the chaotic Warring States period
(475–221 bce). The redacted transmitted editions, used by the German translators
read by Heidegger and his contemporaries, stem from the post-Han Wei-Jin period
(220–420 ce). It is still insufficiently appreciated how the images and words employed in
late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century German editions reverberate throughout
Heidegger’s writings, giving them an aura of both familiarity and strangeness in
comparison with contemporary translations and readings.
How did this remarkable conjuncture and its concealment come to pass? Answering
this question, the first task of this study, requires a situating and singularizing
historical description. Heidegger’s interest in Daoism was part of a generational
movement—shared by Martin Buber and others—and unique in how it was adopted
into his thinking. Heidegger was aware of Daoism since at least 1919. He repeatedly
directly cited and indirectly evoked multiple translations of its two classics from
1930 (GA 80.1: 370; Petzet 1993: 18) to the final years of his life (GA 91: 667–8). It is
noteworthy, given the remarkable shift in his thinking in 1942–1944, how he explicitly
referenced and tacitly echoed—occasionally from 1919 to 1942 and with regularity
beginning in 1943—their thought-images and interpretive strategies. His pivotal crisis
and transformation of the mid-1940s, coinciding with the defeat of National Socialism,
might be described as a quasi- or semi-Daoist turn. It incorporates and systematically
reconfigures several distinctive Daoist elements based on German translations, his
translation activities and conversations with a visiting Chinese scholar, and his own
philosophical categories.
The significance of this adaptation of early Daoist sources into European
philosophy remains contentious. First, a formerly prevalent view sees this intersection
as a fortuitous personal idiosyncrasy that does not play a serious systematic role in
his thinking. Second, another—increasingly widespread—analysis holds that these
4 Heidegger and Dao

are crucial concealed sources from which his modes of speaking and thinking draw
insight, orientation, and—in the crises of the closing years of the Second World War
and early postwar period—healing and renewal. Earlier research on Heidegger and
the “East” prepared the way for this change in perceptions but are often Orientalizing,
mythologizing, and inadequately hermeneutically situated.3 They frequently fail to
appropriately recognize how these transmissions can dialogically speak back and help
us question and reimagine key themes and categories not only in Heidegger but in
European philosophy.

2. Shifting Perspectives: Heidegger’s Daoism

and Daoism’s Heidegger
The present interpretation of Heidegger and the dao has three interwoven objectives.
Its first aim is to convey a more multifaceted historical and intercultural sense of
Heidegger’s way, the Daoist dao, and the Buddhist dharma. It contests both Orientalist
fantasies about Heidegger and “Eastern wisdom” and the opinion that Heidegger had
myriad yet ultimately incidental Daoist affinities by tracing his Daoist encounters and
intersections and how they helped guide key aspects of his philosophical journey in an
elemental and systematic way. Its first mission is to map out Heidegger’s explicit and
implicit engagements with East Asian discourses concerning the thing, nothingness,
and world with the intent of articulating the conditions of an elemental encounter
with them. Second, this strategy makes it necessary to examine Daoist and Buddhist
constellations beyond Heidegger’s historically circumscribed acquaintance with them
and allow them the freedom to speak back to European transmissions and shift European
perspectives. A third interrelated undertaking, existentially the most vital as it is
compelled by our contemporary situation, is to indicate prospects of responsively attuned
and ecomimetic relations with things and within the world and, on that basis, the critical
unfettering potential of ways of being environmentally and publicly attuned in response
to existing ecological and social crisis-tendencies. These crises consist of the devastation
of earth and thing, the obscuring of sky and world, environmental degradation and
destruction, and the global climate predicament. Early Daoist philosophy and moments
in Heidegger’s thinking point toward different modes of attunement and dwelling that
can “leap ahead” (vorspringen) in “being-with” (to expand Heidegger’s early categories
beyond human existence) and nurture life in responsive attunement by sympoietically
(to adopt Donna Haraway’s expression) co-appropriating and collaborating with others
and things, self-patterning environing localities and ecosystems.
To accomplish this threefold task, this book’s opening part focuses on elucidating the
thing in its specificity and priority and Part Two on nothingness and how they mutually
form the locus of sense and world. More specifically, Part One presents a historically
informed intercultural description of Heidegger’s philosophical journey in the context
of an expansive analysis (beyond the German editions mentioned by Heidegger) of
Daoist practices of undoing fixations. Daoist discourses accentuate generativity and
fluidity, natality and mortality, responsive attunement (wuwei 無為) to spontaneous
 Introduction 5

self-naturing (ziran 自然), thingly transience and transformation (hua 化), and
the generative nothingness that nourishes the myriad things (wanwu 萬物). These
expressions and thought-images, which defy the bifurcation of concept and picture,
emerged in ancient Chinese sources mostly unfamiliar to Heidegger and other early
European readers. These documents encompass recently excavated pre-Qin era silk
and bamboo manuscripts, such as the Guodian and Mawangdui Laozi manuscripts that
have dramatically altered contemporary studies of early Chinese thought. Heidegger
also did not systematically investigate the transmitted Wei-Jin era mysterious learning
editions and commentaries of Wang Bi 王弼 (226–249 ce) and Guo Xiang 郭象
(252–312 ce). The Sinologist and translator Richard Wilhelm (1873–1930) did study
them, construing Daoism as a philosophy of the “sense of life,” and these two editions
served as the basis of every German translation available in Heidegger’s milieu.
Part Two shifts and expands the horizons of this inquiry from the Daoist thing to
nothingness, emptiness, and the clearing, drawing on Daoist, Buddhist, and modern
East Asian discourses. Heidegger’s earlier dismissiveness of Buddhism was adjusted
in the postwar period, especially regarding Zen Buddhism. This changed appreciation
is witnessed in his postwar conversations with visiting Japanese intellectuals and
his interview with the Thai Buddhist monk Bhikku Maha Mani. His modified
understanding is most evident in the 1953–1954 essay “From a Dialogue on Language.”
It marks the culmination of Heidegger’s turn from the fear and trembling of existential
nothingness to the clarity and freedom of emptiness, the open, and the clearing.
Accordingly, in Part Two, we delve into the roles of Daoist nothingness, Buddhist
emptiness, and East Asian discourses and interlocutors that helped mold postwar
Heidegger’s understanding of emptiness and clearing.
The project unfolded here offers a unique and innovative contribution in four
ways: (1) a systematic reexamination of the German language translations and
interpretations that shaped Heidegger’s linguistic context and individual engagement
with Daoism and the thing (in Part One) and Daoism, Buddhism, and nothingness
(in Part Two); (2) an analysis of the linguistic and conceptual shifts in Heidegger’s
thinking that correlate with his interactions with Daoist, Buddhist, and East Asian
texts and interlocutors; (3) a critical interpretation—with and beyond Heidegger and
his generation—of early Daoist and classic Buddhist sources as indicating models
of the self-nature of the thing and comporting oneself toward thing and world
through practices of emptiness; and (4) a Zhuangzian Daoist and “Flower Garland”
(Huayan 華嚴) Buddhist inspired critique and reimagining of the thing, nothingness,
releasement, and their contemporary import.

3. A Preliminary Overview of the Chapters

Part One’s five chapters examine varying answers to a question that recurs throughout
Chinese and German discourses: What is a thing? First, the thing in the restricted
sense signifies what is available, ready at hand, and useful. These “mere things” are
of bare significance in the availability of daily use and consumption. These are the
6 Heidegger and Dao

conventional anthropocentric categories of usefulness parodied and undermined in

the Zhuangzi and by the mature Heidegger. Second, the thing in its expansive sense
denotes “all beings” and encompasses all that is and might potentially be atoms, stones,
plants, animals, humans, spirits, gods, and heaven and earth. Chapter 1 unfolds Daoist
philosophy for the sake of resituating Heidegger’s thought, tracing the expansive image
and conception of things in texts associated with Laozi and Zhuangzi and their early
Chinese context. The expression wanwu (myriad things) points toward all existents in
their own concrete, plural, relational, and transformational generativity. Informed by
this “ziranist” or “generative” clarification of the thing, Chapters 2 to 5 track Heidegger’s
journey from a (predominantly yet not exclusively) pragmatically instrumental and
objectively represented thing (as useful instrumental tool and representational object)
to the fullness of the thing as thing that gathers place and world.
This proposed reading of Heidegger’s thing touches on a contested issue that can
be preliminarily addressed here: the appropriateness and inappropriateness of the
analysis of the thing and nature in Being and Time. I concur with Heidegger’s later
self-critique that this seminal, brilliant, and incomplete work is overly transcendental
and pragmatic, requiring a more radical step toward being and the thing that only fully
emerged after the Second World War.4 Heidegger mentioned but barely articulated
a “third” more primordial “power of nature” in Being and Time (GA 2: 70, 211) and
“nature in an originary sense” in the 1929 “The Essence of Ground” (GA 9: 155).
Heidegger noted that criticisms of the absence of nature in Being and Time were in part
correct in later self-reflections and retorted that this work did not aim at a complete
philosophical system (GA 82: 8, 293). Further, the thing cannot be simply identified
with nature, and nature with power, as Heidegger increasingly problematized in
his 1930s genealogies of phúsis and more fully recognized in the 1940s. The mature
Heidegger insisted on a turn from a still too Dasein-centric approach in the late
1920s, in which things are primarily perceived in their availability and serviceability,
toward the priority of the thing as “carrying and opening the there” (GA 82: 493–4).
This transition—whether understood as a gradual adjustment or fundamental
break—suggestively intersects with his readings of the Daodejing and the Zhuangzi.
The Zhuangzi, for instance, discloses through parables and perspectival shifts how
the pragmatically and conceptually available thing (labeled and fixed as an isolated
object) is not the dynamic thing encountered and followed in its transformations.
The “useless” free thing and the sustaining nourishing earth cannot be pragmatically
or theoretically dictated, and the very paradigm of the anthropocentric constitutive
subject is inadequate to them.
This is not the only example. Heidegger returned to Daoist-inflected interpretive
strategies and thought-images of letting beings and things be themselves, preserving
the darkness that nourishes, entering the silence in which genuine hearing happens,
emptying the heart-mind for the sake of the encounter and event, and the mystery
beyond mystery. Heidegger’s mature thinking of the ontological “event” (Ereignis) is
connected to his most mentioned line from the Daodejing. The event refers to what
is hidden coming into view, or the matter to be thought entering thinking, while it
inevitably retains dimensions of hiddenness and being unthought that escape the
subject. Heidegger’s resonances with the Daodejing and the Zhuangzi, based on a partial
 Introduction 7

degree of direct influence, allow for a reevaluation of Daoist ziran and Heidegger’s
“ziranist” leanings that culminate in the releasement of things.
The Daodejing states that all things, even the dao, follow their own ziran. What is
ziran? This expression emerged in a specific historical constellation that is profoundly
unlike yet still can speak to our situation. Two prevalent translations are spontaneity
and nature. “Nature” is inadequate to express what is meant by “ziran” and can only
be used in a highly qualified sense. Unlike the “nature” that is frequently opposed to
the human world in modern thought, and thus has an ideological and mythological
aura, ziran is enacted in all things human and nonhuman. “Ziranism” (in contrast
to reductive naturalisms) refers to the centrality of the multiplicity, spontaneity, and
transformation of self-generation and self-patterning. Daoist ziran signifies generatively
being self (zi 自) so (ran 然), autopoietic self-emerging and self-patterning, or nature
in the qualified sense of self-naturing. This sense of ziran is fundamental albeit
incompletely thought in Heidegger’s Daoist encounters. These engagements occurred
in the context of his understanding of Abendland (Occident, the evening land, Greek
hésperos and dúsis, which referred to Europe and not the “West” in the current sense)
and Morgenland (Orient, the morning land, Greek anatolḗ, the land of the rising sun).
Naturalism seeks to dictate the nature of the thing through a determining theory or
picture of what it considers true nature. It inadequately recognizes human participation
within nature. “Ziranism” expresses in contrast the need to attend to the self-unfolding
or self-dynamic of the thing that is possible through practices of emptying and realizing
the humility of the heart-mind (xuxin 虛心) and attuned non-coercive action (wuwei).
Daoist generativity does not entail naive oppositions between the organic and the
artificial, the primitive and the civilized, or the passive and the active, as inaction is
enacted in action, clarity in mystery, and simplicity in complexity. It likewise cannot be
reduced to a first principle or to causality, at least in their standard explanations, owing
to the elemental spontaneity and transformability in things themselves. Instead of an
unbroken determinate sequence, or resignation before an indifferent necessity, there
is an adaptive sense of generational change in natality and mortality that gives each
singular life its due while letting it go in death. This ziran-directed guiding strategy
entails the reconstruction of several core, and arguably the most transformative,
elements in Heidegger’s philosophy. Indeed, as this book demonstrates, Heidegger’s
anarchic and Daoist tendencies are closely interconnected in accentuating the
generative self-patterning of things. Ziran can be understood in the Zhuangzi through
images of dark watery chaos.5 This free self-patterning chaos has anarchic (without
arché or dao-archic) and—if reimagined under modern conditions—participatory
democratic implications in stressing adaptive spontaneity and collaborative or
sympoietic self-ordering by human and non-human individuals and communities;
this strategy necessitates critiquing Heidegger’s most problematic philosophical and
social-political commitments while recovering and extending moments of truth.
Chapter 6, analogous to the contextualization of Chapter 1, resituates Heidegger’s
thinking by shifting perspectives to Daoist generative nothingness (wu) and Buddhist
emptying emptiness (Sanskrit: śūnyatā; Chinese kong 空). These have their own
specificity and are not merely instances of a monolithic “Oriental nothingness” or
nihilism. Daoist nothingness and Buddhist emptiness have a variety of senses within
8 Heidegger and Dao

Daoist and Buddhist teachings that differ from the monotheistic creatio ex nihilo, the
“nonbeing” of classical Greek philosophy, and the mystical nothingness of Occidental
metaphysics and onto-theology. The systematic clarification of varieties of nothingness
and emptiness in Chapter 6 situates Chapter 7’s reenvisioning of Heidegger’s earlier
existentially oriented philosophy of nothingness and its subsequent transitions to the
emptiness and the clearing of his postwar thinking.
Chapter 8 concerns the intercultural position of Heidegger’s nothingness in its
early reception in the 1930s and 1940s by East Asian philosophers and intellectuals.
This chapter contains an exploration of the controversial and inconvenient
existential Buddhist and transnational fascistic intellectual Kitayama Junyū 北山
淳友 (1902–1962) whose philosophy of nothingness provides a counterargument to
my interpretation. Kitayama studied philosophy in Freiburg and Heidelberg during
the 1920s and remained active in Germany until 1944, providing significant clues to
Heidegger’s intercultural contexts. There are several reasons for this unusual retrieval.
First, he was directly involved in Heidegger’s German milieu, as one of the first authors
to extensively engage with the discourses of Heidegger and phenomenology, South
and East Asian Buddhism, and Japanese philosophy for two decades in Weimar
and National Socialist Germany. Secondly, Heidegger was familiar with him, and
several passages in Heidegger’s later interpretations echo Kitayama’s earlier uses
of Heideggerian categories. Thirdly, Kitayama’s problematic identification of the
nothingness of Daoism, Buddhism, and the Kyōto School with the destruction of the
liberal individual for the sake of collectivist nationalist, militaristic, and authoritarian
politics is valuable to illustrate the perils of incomplete elucidations of nothingness
and practices of emptiness.6 Emptiness does not loosen the borders between the
self and society for the sake of a determinate collective identity in classical Daoism
and Buddhism. It radically unfixes forms of substantive identity in, for instance,
the different strategies of equalizing things in nothingness (Zhuangzi) or reciprocal
interpenetration in emptiness (Huayan Buddhism) that releases both the specific
singular and the relational whole.
The concluding chapter draws out implications for a new philosophy of
nothingness, thing, and world. It reassesses the historical and political tensions of
modern discourses of nothingness by adopting the relational singular of Zhuangzi and
Huayan (which are distinctive yet complementary) to contest essentialized individual
and social realities. As collective identities are just as constructed and illusory as
individual identities, if not more so, it is a mistake with perilous consequences
to destructure and decenter the individual subject while fetishizing the collective
subject as a monological identity removed from communicative gathering and the
existential dynamics of personal and interpersonal life. The challenge is to encounter
and express connection and relatedness, and dismantle binary oppositions, without
disregarding environing locality and particularity or—to be clear—reducing them to
either particular or universal identities that systemically exclude and subjugate what is
non-identical. Since it would be negligent to avoid critical discussion of ideology and
politics in the current climate, even as ideology and culture-industry impact the most
critical consciousness and practices, the complex philosophical and social-political
contexts traced in the closing chapters entail learning from Heidegger’s insights and
 Introduction 9

failures to resituate the ethical and political roles of nothingness and emptiness,
reconsidering them with and beyond their previous incarnations.

4. Dao and Ethos: Critical Intercultural Implications

Heidegger has left a troublesome and thought-provoking legacy. The agrarian

utopianism that informed his interest in Daoism demands a differentiated ideology-
critical interpretation. His hermeneutical situation requires thinking through
ambiguity and complexity, as good and bad only appear in the finitude and
imperfection of life. Heidegger is one of the few modern European philosophers to
seriously engage with and adaptively learn from East Asian philosophy, breaking with
philosophy’s Eurocentrism in practice even if he could not do so within his conception
of Occidental philosophy (abendländische Philosophie). Heidegger, despite himself and
his problematic anti-democratic nationalist political commitments in the 1930s that
ziranist Daoism and Heidegger’s more thoughtful critics place in question, helps to
confront the continuing Eurocentrism of philosophy, its systematic distortion of the
history and practice of philosophy, and disclose other freer possibilities for thinking
and dwelling.
Daoist generative nothingness, Buddhist emptiness of form, and Heidegger’s open
clearing of being convey exemplary orientational models of being relationally free
and responsive in the world with things and environments. They disclose in their
radical moments three distinctive ways of transformatively undoing experiential
and linguistic hypostatization and of releasing self and things. As unfolded in this
ziranist philosophical reconstruction, each expresses ways of contesting sedimented
formations of reified life and thought. Daoist nurturing care (ci 慈) for things,
Buddhist loving-kindness and compassion for sentient beings, and Heidegger’s care
(Sorge) suggest distinctive indicative ways of leaping-ahead for and critical exemplary
models of caring for things and nourishing life.
There are two initial problems that confront this approach to Heidegger. First, his
formally indicative categories of care, being-with, and leaping-ahead were restricted
to human existence in Being and Time. Secondly, Heidegger described the analytic
of Dasein as ethically neutral and suspends the language of ethics, morality, and
value. This is a problem if interpreters are bound solely to Being and Time. The Berlin
philosopher Katharina Kanthack has argued that this neutrality does not entail ethical
indifference, which would signify a forgetting of care, but leads to an ethos of relational
being-with and ethical knowledge of self and other (Kanthack 1958 and 1964). This
formally emptied neutrality opens the concrete nexus of ethical questionability,
deliberation, and decision. It allowed for questioning the ethical modalities of leaping-
in (einspringen) to coercively dominate the other and leaping-ahead to care for and
nurture the other’s self-individuation. The later Heidegger provides instructive ways to
reorient and expand his earlier discourse. He speaks not of ethics, with its fixed rules
and virtues, but of ethos or “originary ethics” (GA 9: 356). He articulates an ethos more
fundamental than ethics and a worldly mortal abiding in openness to mystery that is
more originary than ethos (GA 98: 345). Most significantly, this ethos encompasses
10 Heidegger and Dao

things and their spaces. At the same time, factical existence is another key piece of the
puzzle, as intersubjective and interthingly comportments are complexly mediated by
material and social forms of life in which they serve apologetic ideological as well as
critical transformational roles.
The guiding aspiration of these chapters is to reinterpret and reimagine Heidegger’s
thinking of being and his originary ethics given their ziranist elements and our
hermeneutical situation. Its primary thesis is that, entangled with Daoist and other
intercultural sources, Heidegger’s path proceeds from the paradigmatic Occidental
philosophy of available givenness and mere presence—which conceals the open spacing
of things and seeks to logically exclude and dialectically subordinate negativity and the
nothing—to nothingness, emptiness, and the clearing in their coming to presence and
withdrawal in absence or, to accentuate its mutable verbal sense, presencing-absencing.
The nurturing darkness and mystery of nothingness and the concealing-unconcealing
openness that characterize Heidegger’s thinking of being are, when interpreted as
bearing and ethos, elemental to responsively encountering and dwelling with things
in the world-clearing. Zhuangzi’s vision of free and easy wandering indicates ways of
practicing philosophy as contesting and unraveling fixations. These practices allow
rethinking Heidegger’s pathways and reimagining for ourselves things, nothingness,
and world in the specificity of our existential condition.
 Part One

Dao, Thing, and World

12
 1

Way, Thing, and World in Laozi,

Zhuangzi, and Heidegger

I. Introduction

1. Phenomenology, Daoism, and the Thing

What is a thing? To provide a preliminary description, the thing appears to be that
which presents or manifests itself. Ordinary language and philosophical discourses of
the thing oscillate between the narrow sense of the “mere thing” as available tool and
present object, the epistemic sense of a presently existing object, and the plenitude
of the thing in its way of being. The first sense contrasts things with human beings
and living creatures. The thing is characterized by its accessibility and usefulness.
The second sense signifies anything and everything that exists. In modern German
philosophy, to introduce one example, Hermann Lotze began his metaphysics with
the question of the thing and defined ontology as the study of the real that consists
of things that “are,” and their nexus of events and relations, in contrast to those that
“are not” (Lotze 1879: 1). There is an additional third sense of things in which they are
not merely available for use or present for thought. There is an inkling in moments
of beauty, sublimity, and terror that things and the world have their own sense that
demands attentiveness. The thing places a claim on human language and thought in
these and other moments, calling for patience, reticence, and silence in encountering
it in its plain and unadorned other-power or self-so-ing.
In Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s poetic words, the encounter is with the “reluctant
beauty of small things” (Hofmannsthal 1979: 65). German language poets, such as
Hofmannsthal and Rilke, allowed the thing to shape the words and mood of the
poem. The epistemic and metaphysical thing of theorizing seems barren and deficient
compared with the encountered thing of the poets. Heidegger paired Daoists and poets
to stress their contact with things, being amidst the world, and thoughtfulness that
he adopted as models for thinking. The first five chapters trace the transitions and
implications of Heidegger’s philosophical journey from the instrumental thing of use
and the representational thing as object to the gathering thing keeping in view Daoist
sources of the self-generative creatio continua of the thing.1
14 Heidegger and Dao

His early philosophy of the thing emerged in the context of debates between
idealist and realist philosophies of the thing and his training in phenomenology as
a methodology that describes consciousness and its objects. His teacher Edmund
Husserl described phenomenology as a movement “toward the things [or matters]
themselves” (zu den Sachen selbst), defining the thing (das Ding) in the Philosophy
of Arithmetic (1891) as that which bears characteristics with unity through temporal
and spatial variation and—as what is experienced points back to who experiences—in
Ideas (1913) as the correlational object of intentional consciousness.2
Husserl’s phenomenological strategies produced several dilemmas for Heidegger.
First, the thing would seemingly designate what is most concrete while—in the
thing as object—abstracting away from the specific features and qualities that make
particular things uniquely what they are. Second, given the material, social-historical,
pragmatic, and conceptual mediations of the thing, given the mediated referential and
interpretive nexus through which it is experienced, the thing cannot be simply intuited
and described, yet we (or, at least, some) wish to encounter it as something of its own
that exceeds an anthropocentrically constituted and constructed object.
Phenomenology simultaneously promoted and prevented answering the question
of thing qua thing for Heidegger. He repeatedly reposed the question “what is a thing?”
He inquired in response to these tensions between concrete thing and intentional
object in the context of (1) phenomenologically encountering and describing the thing,
(2) confronting “Occidental” (abendländische) philosophical conceptions of the thing
(particularly in Aristotle and Kant), and—most extraordinarily—(3) engaging the
Daoist emptiness of the thing in the Daodejing, attributed to Laozi, and its uselessness
in the Zhuangzi.3
Before proceeding further, we might want to ask: what is Daoism and why is it
significant for Heidegger and his generation? The expression has a variety of historical
meanings. First, Daoism (daojia 道家) was applied to Laozi in a retrospective
construction and categorization of schools in the Historical Records (Shiji 史記) of
the Han dynasty historians Sima Tan 司馬談 (c. 165–110 bce) and his son Sima
Qian 司馬遷 (c. 140–86 bce) for whom it signified Huanglao 黃老 biopolitical-
cosmological discursive formations. Second, types of “religious Daoism” (daojiao 道教)
emerged during the late and post-Han eras that were associated with biospiritual arts
of internal alchemy (neidan shu 內丹術), the way of immortals (daoxian 道仙), and
the way of spirits/gods (shendao 神道). Third, and most pertinently here, it referred
to the teachings of Laozi and Zhuangzi, whose historical connections are unclear and
controversial, for generations of Chinese literati and modern European intellectuals.
This sense can be designated early, Lao-Zhuang, or ziranist.4
“Ziran” is a key interpretive term throughout this inquiry. What I designate
“ziranism” should not be construed as “naturalism” insofar as naturalism misses what
it would signify by limiting nature to a fixed positioned image in an enframing (i.e.,
positioning into a determining frame) world-picture that deworlds things and human
existence. Ziran is explored as an ethos and interpretive orientation that prioritizes
recognizing the spacing of the thing and the interthingly nexus in their own ways of
manifesting and being. Ziran is “nature” only in the most anti-reductive and expansive
sense of calling for an attuned and responsive comportment and recognition of the
 Way, Thing, and World in Laozi 15

autopoiesis in sympoiesis of the myriad things. Autopoiesis is not applied to but

rather reimagined through Daoist sources, as are other key expressions such as ethos.
It signifies here a dynamic, generative, plural self-formation irreducible to a closed
determinate system (which would exclude questions of ethos and ethics constitutive of
the first- and second-person perspective) or a fixed, essential individual or collective
identity. It indicates the myriad things in their relational self-so-ness, or self-generative
naturing, and interthingly nexus without reduction to restrictive epistemic and
metaphysical constructions of nature and the thing. This book proposes in this light
a ziranist interpretation and critique of Heidegger’s long-standing engagement with
early Daoist sources.

2. The Art of Tea, the Safeguarding Darkness, and the Joy of Fish
When did this encounter begin to emerge? Two anecdotes help answer this question.
An old Japanese anecdote of a gift in 1919 recounts how the young Heidegger initially
encountered Daoist conceptions of the thing and being-in-the-world in the German
edition of The Book of Tea by Okakura Kakuzō 岡倉覚三 (1862–1913). He received
this popular book as a gift in 1919 from Itō Kichinosuke 伊藤吉之助 (1885–1961).5
Okakura fuses motifs from Laozi-Zhuangzi, the Chan/Zen Buddhist dharma, and
Shintō together to draw a picture of the East Asian spirit of tea as it is enacted in
concrete ritual practices that carefully attend to the smallest details of tea, water,
utensils, and environment. One meets the world in a sip of tea.
According to Okakura, the way and art of tea-making and drinking realizes the
Daoist “art of being-in-the-world” (Kunst des In-der-Welt-Seins). This appears to be the
first hyphenated use of this expression in German. It expresses the Daoist awareness
of how self and world are relationally bound together, and it is only in practices that
freedom occurs. Freedom is not a quality of the self but is thoroughly relational. This
Daoist worldly art consists of an ethos of continual adaptation and readjustment to
the environment where one maintains relationships and makes room for things and
others without abandoning one’s position (Okakura 1919: 29). In Okakura’s chapter
on Daoism, he accentuates the role of emptiness (die Leere) in the Daodejing’s imagery
of the spatial vacuum. The reality of the room is found in its emptiness, the usefulness
of the water jug dwells in its emptiness rather than its material form, and emptiness
is all-encompassing as the space and possibility of movement (Okakura 1919: 30).
Conspicuously, and not fortuitously given the historical and linguistic evidence, these
descriptions reverberate throughout Heidegger’s thinking.
A second anecdote tells of Heidegger’s Daoist affinities a decade later in the closing
years of the ill-fated Weimar Republic. Heidegger’s friend, the art critic Heinrich
Wiegand Petzet (1909–1997), recounted how Heidegger visited Bremen in October
1930 to hold the lecture that eventually became “On the Essence of Truth” (Von Wesen
der Wahrheit) that elucidated truth as unconcealment (Petzet 1993: 18). Heidegger
enthusiastically discussed the Daodejing during the lecture and the Zhuangzi at the
subsequent dinner.
Heidegger incorporated the Daodejing into early versions of this pivotal lecture:
“those who know lightness wrap themselves in darkness” (“Der seine Helle kennt,
16 Heidegger and Dao

sich in sein Dunkel hüllt”) (GA 80.1: 370). This is Victor von Strauss’s translation of
an expression (zhi qi bai, shou qi hei 知其白, 守其黑) in chapter 28. It depicts the
sage as a streambed and template image for the world who preserves the feminine in
the masculine, childlikeness in virtue, darkness in light, and dao-like qualities amidst
the mundane world (Strauss 1870: 140; Lou 1980: 74). Heidegger elucidated here the
play of unconcealment-and-concealment, referring to the dao’s movements between
lightness and darkness. In the next sentence, he introduced another expression he
recurrently linked with the Daodejing: “the genuine search is not for that which is
only unveiled, but exactly on the contrary for the mystery (Geheimnis)” (GA 80.1:
370). The freedom of the mystery is the unconcealing-concealing “letting be of beings”
(Seinlassen des Seienden).
Heidegger referred to Strauss’s translation of chapter 28 in the third Freiburg and
Marburg version of the lecture (GA 80.1: 397), in letters and notes, and decades later in
Identity and Difference (GA 11: 138). Indeed, Heidegger persistently returns to Daoist-
inflected thought-images of letting beings and things be themselves, preserving the
darkness that nourishes and regenerates, entering the silence in which genuine hearing
transpires, emptying the heart-mind for the sake of the encounter and event of being
(instead of dao), and the twofold mystery beyond mystery.
Petzet depicts how Heidegger was still pondering Daoist thought-images after his
1930 lecture on truth. Heidegger surprised the attendees of a dinner party by requesting
a copy of a book called the Speeches and Parables of Zhuangzi (Reden und Gleichnisse
des Tschuang-tse). Buber had translated this selection around two decades earlier based
on English translations by Frederic Henry Balfour (1881), Herbert A. Giles (1889), and
James Legge (1891) and it was a familiar book among Weimar era intelligentsia.6 Otto
Pöggeler adds that Heidegger appears to be deeply familiar with Buber’s translation
of the Zhuangzi and perhaps even of his Tales of the Hasidim as well.7 Pöggeler does
not provide sufficient detail here. A second indication of this relationship is that
Buber’s “Afterword” to the Zhuangzi discussed the same sentence concerning darkness
and light from Strauss’s Daodejing. Buber writes of hiddenness (Verborgenheit) and
unhiddenness, the generative hiddenness that nurtures life, speaks to the sages, and
is encountered in abyssal solitude (Buber 2013: 110). According to Buber, enacting
hiddenness in both word and action constitutes the history of Laozi’s teaching.8
Heidegger proceeded to read and interpret the narrative of the joy of fish (yule 魚樂)
from Buber’s translation of the “Autumn Floods” (qiushui 秋水) Zhuangzi chapter.
Zhuangzi (Zhuang Zhou 莊周) and his friend the skeptic Huizi 惠子 (Hui Shi 惠施)
debated possibilities for genuinely recognizing the joy of fish while watching their
playful movements from the bridge above. Richard Wilhelm, whose translation
Heidegger also cites, construed Zhuangzi as offering a Kantian-like critical resolution
of Huizi’s dogmatic “Humean” skepticism (Wilhelm 1912: 9). This scene might be
understood as presenting a skeptical problem of knowledge in which Zhuangzi, a proto-
Wittgenstein, skeptically outdoes Huizi’s skeptical doubts about knowing, throwing
the doubter into doubt. The dogmatic skeptic assumes a priori that one cannot know,
presupposing the game of knowing and not knowing that Wittgenstein exposed in
On Certainty (Wittgenstein 1969), while Zhuangzi freely followed the fish in their
changing movements without anxiously being confined by the game of knowledge
 Way, Thing, and World in Laozi 17

and ignorance. Whereas the dogmatist presumes to inherently grasp the givenness and
essence of things, and the skeptic imagines all is text and interpretative projection,
Zhuangzi recognizes that there can be no fixed borders between interpretation and
world or fish and non-fish. That is, we are not able to establish this distinction in a
fashion that could ground either absolutism or skepticism. Huizi and the dogmatic
skeptic fixate on what is known and not known based on the hypostatization of self and
non-self as isolated substantive identities. But Zhuangzi contests the boundaries of self
and non-self, being or not being a fish, or knowing and not knowing. The Zhuangzian
exemplary genuine person (zhenren 真人) freely adopts to and responsively moves
along with the transformations of perspectives, things, and their own self.
Heidegger appears to have realized that this dialogue concerns intersubjective and
interthingly relations. Petzet describes how, on this evening in Bremen, Heidegger
delved into the implications of this encounter with the otherness of the fish for being-
with (Mitsein).9 Heidegger analyzed being-with as ethically neutral in Being and Time.
Yet this analysis is not ethically indifferent as it discloses forms of ethical and relational
knowledge of self, others, and the world (Kanthack 1958). Did Heidegger construe the
story as an allegory for interhuman encounters? Probably yes, as being-with designates
in Being and Time the sociality of Dasein, in the prospect of an authentic “we” and
in the fallenness of the “they.” It did not encompass relations with—as he described
them in 1929–30—worldless things and world-poor animals. Even so, the inkling
of an alternative way of interacting with—albeit not yet leaping-ahead for the sake
of—animals and things is glimpsed here in 1930, even if it primarily served as an image
for intersubjective interaction. Possibilities of encountering and interacting with living
and nonliving things (i.e., thing in the expansive sense that encompasses any entity)
reoccur in passages in the 1930s (such as in GA 45: 3, 29). They would be radically
transformed in Heidegger’s 1940s engagements with the Daodejing and the Zhuangzi
and postwar philosophy in which he questions the anthropocentric priority of the
human and emphasizes the centrality of the thing vis-à-vis the subject as a moment
and place of gathering world.10

3. The Thing and the Worlding of the World

We do not know how Heidegger specifically responded to Okakura’s The Book of Tea.
The thirty-year-old Heidegger was already thinking in 1919 of the verbal character of
the world, as he sought to depersonalize and verbalize reified substantives in formally
indicative (as he would soon call them) expressions such as “it worlds” (es weltet) and
“it values” (es wertet) introduced in the 1919 lecture-course The Determination of
Philosophy. He proposed there that “living in an environing world, it signifies for me
everywhere and always, it is all worldly, ‘it worlds.’”11 But this worlding character of
the world is suppressed in ordinary experience, and environmental meaningfulness
(das Bedeutungshafte) loses its meaning (ent-deutet). The living-experiencing of
the environing worlding of the world (Umwelt erleben) is de-vitalized or “de-lived”
(ent-lebt). The “it worlds” undergoes processes of substantialization as it is distilled
into and concealed in the objectness of things (res) that René Descartes had divided
into the extended thing (res extensa) and the thinking thing (res cogitans).
18 Heidegger and Dao

Heidegger examined in the next 1919/20 lecture-course Basic Problems of the

Phenomenology how world is engulfed in the reifications of lived-experiences
(Verdinglichungen der Erlebnisse) and the devitalization of life (Entlebung) (GA 58:
183). Reification signifies becoming “thinglike” in Karl Marx’s paradigmatic assertion
that persons become things and things become persons through commodification.
Typically, reification is characterized as a loss of the subject’s sense of being an
active subject and cannot apply to nonhuman beings (e.g., Lukács). But reification
is a fixation in the flow of experience, language, and environment. It is not merely
a lapse by the subject but a systematic loss of relational openness and possibilities.
In Heidegger’s analysis, by contrast, there is also a reification of things (res) and
world. Already in this early lecture-course, the thing is separated from its environing
relational worlding character and posited as an object for the subject. The thing is
“only there as such,” as a correlate of the ego, and reduced to the real as purely existing,
in the distancing theoretical attitude that he attributed to Husserl. Still, “it worlds”
is intimated in specific ways of encountering things in questions such as when one
asks (perhaps in surprise) “What sort of thing is that?” (GA 56/57: 89). The “real”
constructed in idealism, which strives to overcome the fixated “dead thing” with the
life of subjectivity, and in realism, which fixates it as ontic, is impoverished in losing
contact with the superabundance and multiplicity of the life of the thing. The life of the
thing functions as an implicit norm that shaped Heidegger’s early philosophy of the
thing. But the self-emerging thing is increasingly conceived as either a pragmatically
useful or worldless theoretical object.
Things are understood in the lecture-courses of the 1920s as objects of a constrained
notion of immediate external experience and natural scientific and theoretical inquiry
(GA 58: 51). Such objectivizing knowledge of things is an inappropriate modality for
grasping the self-world (GA 58: 223). The reification of relations is extended to the
reflexive nexus of the self-world (which is neither subject nor object) when it is seen
as consisting of an ontic nexus of things in which the self-world loses both its “self ”
and “world” character (GA 58: 232). The self exists in reification when it is subsumed
like a mere thing in this instrumental nexus as a mere object among other objects.
The objectivized neutralized thing as object in his winter semester 1929–30 lecture-
course is said to lack world: “The stone is worldless, without world, has no world”
(GA 29/30: 289). The stone, the stream, and the mountain are not world-disclosive,
not world-events. They are not the worlding of the world of “it worlds” and—unlike in
Heidegger’s later thought—cannot address me or their perceiver.
The object has two primary dimensions, and a third inadequately thought one
of non-anthropocentric nature that haunts Heidegger’s early project and compels
his subsequent turn (GA 2: 70, 211; GA 9: 155). The object is predominantly (1)
instrumentally ready-to-hand (zuhanden) in pragmatic routine in an ontic nexus of
tools and equipment or (2) objectively present-at-hand (vorhanden) for theoretical
inquiry (GA 23: 24). Things as ready-to-hand serve in Being and Time the function
of an instrumental “in order to” (um-zu) in its manipulable handiness (Handlichkeit),
conduciveness (Beiträglichkeit), serviceability (Dienlichkeit), and usability
(Verwendbarkeit) that constitute an equipmental whole (Zeugganzheit) through which
things are encountered as equipment available for routine use (GA 2: 68).
 Way, Thing, and World in Laozi 19

Things are experienced and perceived primarily as objects of use, exchange, and—
as present-at-hand—objective inquiry. Yet things are still beyond this objectification
in a subterranean third dimension that stretches from the life of the thing in 1919
to the few insufficient remarks about the natural thing (Naturding) in the late 1920s
to the thing that gathers, says (Sagen), and addresses me (spricht mich an) in the
1950s. At this juncture, however, the practical referential nexus of significance
(Verweisungszusammenhang der Bedeutsamkeit) determines the world of Dasein,
and the equipmental nexus determines things in their instrumental obtainability to
be used, only interrupted by their uselessness in breakdowns and malfunctions. This
approach is undoubtedly groundbreaking, yet it is not entirely satisfying.
Simply stated, Heidegger’s early version of relational holism centered around the
being-there of human existence and his later version centered around the thing. This
early analysis was inadequate according to his own later remarks that gave greater
priority to the thing as generating the sense of place and world. Emmanuel Levinas
noted how Heidegger’s incomplete account in Being and Time presupposes without
appropriately articulating the elemental as an inappropriable atmosphere and milieu of
air, earth, rain, sunlight, and wind that “suffice for themselves” (Levinas 1969: 132). In
freely wandering, one enjoys the fresh breeze and the sunlight not for a purposive goal
but for themselves, as the stone and the blade of grass appear in the elemental interplay
of light and shadow. Heidegger ignores how the elemental nourishes me and things as
they are encountered in non-purposive enjoyment (jouissance) (Levinas 1969: 134).
Despite the pragmatic instrumental tendencies criticized by Levinas and his later self,
Heidegger’s late 1920s explication of the thing is not merely pragmatic. Even as things
are interpreted as dominated by a referential nexus of usage and usefulness, Heidegger
also analyzes the facticity of interruptive breakdown, disorienting questionability and
uncanniness, and possibilities of other forms of relational attunement in encountering
things. There are moments that point toward a fuller philosophy of the thing.
In the 1935–37 “The Origin of the Work of Art,” the apparently natural thing, the
thing as instrumental equipmental objectness (Zeug, Gebrauchsding), and the work
(Werk) are differentiated as the artwork discloses the thing that bears and opens the
“there” and liberates it from the nexus of instrumentality. The work discloses the
constitutive role of things in the thereness of human existence (GA 82: 484–7). Even
prior to the ostensive turn (a notion Heidegger introduced in his auto-critiques of the
middle and late 1930s) to the poetic thinking and saying of being, there are indications
of intimate relations with things and their life in his account of the atmosphere of
attunement and mood—such as the thing as encountered in situations of extreme utter
boredom (GA 29/30: 132), existential anxiety, resigned indifference, or astonished
wonder—that increasingly draws Heidegger toward poetic and Daoist ways of
addressing and being responsively attuned with the thing in releasing it through
emptiness into its way of being.

4. Releasement and Being on the Way: Ethos without Mysticism

The primary objection against Daoism’s import for Heidegger appeals to German
poets and mystics. Does Heidegger’s embrace of the sensibility of the thing signify a
20 Heidegger and Dao

form of religious mystical experience or poetic “thing-mysticism” (Dingmystik)? The

latter category, popularized by Walther Rehm (1930: 297–358), has been applied to
poets of humility before reality (as in Hofmannsthal or Rilke) and the later Heidegger
who appears to share this sentiment. Heidegger’s thing primarily motivates, without
doubt, the poetics and climate of Heidegger’s discourses; it also, nonetheless, signals an
immanent elemental co-relational ethos. But what of the modern Occidental category
of religious mysticism?
Buber and Heidegger avoid and suggest alternatives to the Orientalist mystical
and occultist appropriations of their era. Buber shifted from mysticism to ethics, a
shift in which Daoist impulses played an underexplored role. We see in Heidegger’s
reflections a justified suspicion of the category of mysticism as he transitions in his
later thinking to ethos or that which is more primordial than ethos. This transformation
involves an intercultural reinterpretation of German mystical and Daoist sources.
Earlier discourses of releasement concerned the soul or the self rather than things.
This is palpable in multiple nineteenth-century and twentieth-century comparative
readings of Laozi and Meister Eckhart. Despite their distinctive contexts, these
sources link Daoist “acting without acting,” or acting from a responsive attunement of
minimal assertion and calculation (wei wuwei 為無為), and Eckhart’s “releasement”
(Gelassenheit) under the banner of mysticism.
Examining such sources reveals how the cross-cultural matching and classification
of meanings within the same linguistic community can arrive at strikingly divergent
results.12 This problematic led Schleiermacher to conclude that hermeneutics
requires both a contextualizing linguistic interpretation as well as an individualizing
psychological interpretation to form a holistic perspective on an author or text
(Schleiermacher 2012). It might be objected that this hermeneutical strategy is overly
reductive. However, although Schleiermacher’s specific interpretive model and its
psychological presuppositions are no longer adequate, interpretation still demands
both contextualizing and particularizing historical and linguistic strategies to elucidate
the said and unsaid of texts and discourses. Secondly, historically and linguistically
situating Heidegger’s thinking, as pursued here, need not lead to mere historiography
and reductive misinterpretation, since it can illuminate the being-historical event and
truth of this thinking while not ignoring its historical complicities and mediations.13
Let us reflect on a few contextualizing examples and digressions that can help situate
this analysis. In his 1870 translation of the Daodejing, Victor von Strauss translated
the “highest vacuity” (xuji 虛極) at the beginning of chapter 16 as the pinnacle of
renunciation (Entäußerung) and, in a note, added that this was what Eckhart called
secluded detachment (Abgeschiedenheit) (Strauss 1870: 85). The German American
public philosopher and pioneering intercultural thinker Paul Carus identified the
simplicity, quietude, and unity of Laozi and Eckhart in the introduction to his 1898
English edition of the Daodejing (Carus 1898: 24). It was in the comparative religious
works of the theologians Hermann Mandel and Friedrich Heiler that Laozi’s wuwei
and Eckhart’s Gelassenheit were interpreted as ways of emptying the soul (Mandel
1912: 256; Heiler 1918: 252).
The transcultural linking of Gelassenheit with the Daodejing is not new with
Heidegger. The expressions Gelassenheit and, more frequently, gelassen are already
 Way, Thing, and World in Laozi 21

found in German editions familiar to Heidegger to refer to a calm undisturbed

quietude, such as the Daodejing translations of Strauss and Wilhelm and the Zhuangzi
editions of Buber and Wilhelm.14 This expression is also seen in the commentary of
other renditions published during the Weimar Republic. Hertha Federmann’s 1920 Tao
teh king compares it with the inaction of the divine releasement of the Neo-Platonic one
and with Martin Luther’s justification through faith in contrast to justification through
works (Federmann 1920: 95). Although the Daodejing is about how sage-kings and sages
relate to things through nonaction and affairs (shi 事) through nonentanglement, these
comparisons shaped by modern Occidental constructs of mysticism and spiritualism
are not primarily concerned with things and the interthingly nature of reality.
The thing orientation of Heidegger’s conception of releasement is notably different
than typical mystical discussions that accentuate soul and self, including German
mystical discourses and the early German translations of Daoist classics accessible
to Heidegger. Heidegger’s releasement is without doubt informed by its senses in
Eckhart, Jakob Böhme, and German mystical traditions. Gelassenheit is understood
there as the calmness and serenity of the self that takes precedence over Gelassenheit
as the freedom—not of self and God but—of worldly things. The latter sense denotes
freedom as a generative, relational, and interthingly participation between existents
without any need for assertion or affirmation. Heidegger insisted on Eckhart’s
centrality, whose works he read since 1910, when Paul Shih-yi Hsiao (Xiao Shiyi 蕭師
毅, 1911–1986) and Karl Jaspers asserted the Daoist and Asian resonances of his later
thinking of the clearing of being.15 Nonetheless, as a bearing (Haltung) related to the
self-becoming and self-essencing of things, instead of the self mystically uniting with
God, Heidegger does more than evoke Daoist wuwei that was already long associated
with the French word laisser as early as the physiocrats and the German word lassen
since the nineteenth century. Wuwei is a letting that is frequently conjoined with things
and affairs in the world such that it does not only signify a minimal activity of the self,
much less a sinking of the self into itself and God. Wuwei is minimalism in an art or
way of being-in-the-world that releases and responds to affairs and things in their self-
happening (ziwei 自為).16
There are several indications yet to be elucidated that the Laozi and Zhuangzi
provide not only historical raw data or content but orientational guiding models of what
Heidegger designates poetic thinking that is closer to the happening and unconcealing
of truth than philosophy as metaphysics, onto-theology, and positivistic technique.
Laozi and Zhuangzi consequently appear to have an exemplary status alongside the
more frequently discussed Anaximander, Heraclitus, Parmenides, and Hölderlin.
Poetic ways of thinking and saying indicate possibilities of—as Heidegger articulates in
a 1955 talk—a responsively attuned disposition and way in “the releasement of things”
and “openness for the mystery” in contrast to the bureaucratic and technological
reduction of persons and things to instrumentalized usefulness.17 As an opening
association with things and mystery, it evokes if not directly utters the noncoercive
or receptive doing of Daodejing 64 as well as the “mystery upon mystery” (xuanzhi
youxuan 玄之又玄) of Daodejing 1 (Lou 1980: 2, 165–6). He directly contemplates
Laozi’s utmost mystery enfolded in mystery (Geheimnis aller Geheimnisse) in the
1957–58 Freiburg lectures “The Essence of Language.”18
22 Heidegger and Dao

Heidegger’s articulation of releasement has a distinctive tone and ethos in

emphasizing the relationship with things in addition to one’s dispositional
comportment, a connection that is found in the Daodejing. Chapter 64 distinguishes two
modalities that correlate with Heidegger’s early conception of intrahuman being-with
and his later conception of dwelling with things. This chapter describes neither acting
nor intervening in affairs (in human relations, not leaping-in) while simultaneously
assisting the myriad varieties of things in their self-nature (in human relations,
leaping-ahead).19 In the situation of Heidegger’s early thought, the solicitude (Fürsorge)
of not leaping-in (einspringen) to take away but leaping-ahead (vorspringen) to assist
individuation analyzed in Being and Time matches such passages in the Daodejing
except that it is restricted to intrahuman being-with. Heidegger’s later thought extends
this relationality beyond the human sphere. It is expansive in contrast with the still
too anthropocentric model of Being and Time in rethinking being-with and language
regarding things. Not only do human others have their unique ways of being and paths
of individuation. Things have their own concealed mystery, revealed in stillness, in
their showing forth that calls for reticence, releasement, and responsiveness.
Heidegger’s transformation is shaped by his persistent engagements with early
Daoist sources. Drawing on his co-translation of the Daodejing with Paul Shih-yi Hsiao,
who attended his Heraclitus and Parmenides lecture-courses in 1943–44, Heidegger
describes in other writings both Gelassenheit and dao in the same language of “way”
as a bringing underway (auf den Weg bringen) and moving on the way (Be-wegung).20
Letting (Lassen) is a genuine bringing about (zuwege bringen) and releasement
(Gelassenheit) into the essencing of the thing (GA 99: 31, 41). They concern the
worlding of the thing and not merely a subjective human comportment (GA 99: 40).
As examined throughout Part One, Heidegger’s most groundbreaking turning is not
the way from being to beings in the mid-1930s, but his twists and turns through his
confrontation with the philosophy of the will that emerges in the late 1930s toward the
releasement of thing and world in emptiness in the 1940s. In his mature conception of
releasement after 1943 his thought shifts away from the self ’s dispositional state toward
the priority of the thing. It is during this same period that he detected a connection
between his own problematic of technology and releasement, of instrumentally
enframed things and self-so things, and the texts ascribed to Laozi and Zhuangzi that
is unfolded from 1943 (GA 75: 43) through his final reflections (GA 91: 667).21

II. The Thing and Self- and World-Naturing

5. Wu 物 as Sacrificial, Ritual, and Patterned Event

Two Chinese books caught Heidegger’s attention during the Weimar Republic—to
which he returned with renewed dedication in the closing years of the Second World
War—through Okakura Kakuzō’s reflections on Daoism and tea (in which the thing
is natural as well as artistically sensed and cultivated) and the translations of Wilhelm
(Laozi and Zhuangzi), Strauss (Laozi), Buber (Zhuangzi), and perhaps others such as
Federmann (Laozi).22
 Way, Thing, and World in Laozi 23

Before returning to Heidegger’s thing below, two preparatory questions should be

posed: what were the early Chinese and Daoist senses of the thing such that they could
eventually interest Heidegger and his generation?23 And what are these senses on their
own terms that can help us to reevaluate Heidegger’s discourse of the thing?
The early formation of the Sinitic language during the Shang dynastic period
(c. 1600–1046 bce) is interlinked with practices of divination, ritual, and sacrifice.24
Etymology, their shifts in meanings and contexts, and linguistic and experiential
positionality help clarify words and the senses they have gained and lost. The earliest
identified uses of wu 物 in Shang divination inscriptions signified a speckled cow killed
in sacrifice.25 The character “物” combines the radicals for cow (niu 牛) and to cut/
blood on the knife (wu 勿) associated with sacrificial ritual practice, and etymologically
its early meaning was any type of moveable entity used in ritual sacrifices.26 Sacrifice
meant the death and destruction of the specific thing and the continued reproduction
of things and the cosmic ritual order as a whole.
This sacrificial and ritual context is significant for the development of early Chinese
conceptions of the thing and its forms of world-disclosure. A sacrificial entity has its
allotted time culminating in the ritual cosmic event of its sacrifice. The expression wu
became interlinked with the arising, persisting, and disappearing of the thing in its
own allotted time and with what is changing and perishable. Wu indicates accordingly
a temporalizing duration as the thing is depicted in subsequent sources as formed in
flow (liu 流) and transformation (hua).
The excavated manuscript All Things Flow in Form (Fan Wu Liu Xing 凡物流形)
from the Warring States period provides an example of the flowing and temporalizing
character of the thing.27 The text begins by posing two questions: how do things flow
into taking form and shape? How does the thing inexorably dissipate after having
taken on form? Given the mutability and conflict of contrary vital powers, the author
of the text inquires, how do constant forces operate generating form and the thing and
then disperse? That is, how is the thing individuated and fixed for a time? Wu expresses
a temporalizing formation of a changing finite form between birth and death. The
momentarily persisting thing expresses a cosmological order that transpires through
the flow of elemental primordial forces (qi 氣) and is regulated through “natural” or
“heavenly” criteria (tiandu 天度): “The hundred things do not perish as they depart
and return, dissipate and remerge.”28
Along with generation and transformation, carving and cutting, and leaving
uncarved and uncut, are images that reappear in early Chinese philosophy. The thing
was carved away from the whole of things as a particularized form in an early form of
abstraction and fixation. Yet the microcosmic thing was aligned with a macrocosmic
harmony and ritual order as is evident in the early classics and “Confucian” erudite
(rujia 儒家) sources. The semantic range of wu unfolded to include concrete forms such
as color, person, natural phenomena, living creatures (specified as shengwu 生物), and
the nonliving thing. Wu indicated by the late spring and autumn (chunqiu 春秋) period
“a thing” no longer specifically bound to sacrificial practices while often retaining an
interconnection with a ritually reproduced cosmic order (Pines 2002: 697–8).
There are, undoubtedly, diverse ways of contesting stratified dualities. A specific
interpretation of Nietzschean genealogy envisions the origin as fatefully determining
24 Heidegger and Dao

and implicitly governing all permeations: a religion born of cruelty remains cruel even
in its highest moments of love and tolerance. But his point does not only concern
“lowly origins.” As Nietzsche’s critique exposes, the highest ideas of love and tolerance
function not only as masks but as justifications for hatred and destruction against
those considered other and deemed unworthy of this totalizing love; as when Christian
universal love results in frenzied pogroms against stubbornly resistant particularity
that is posited as the negation of love. However, early Chinese genealogical thinking of
origins is concerned with different issues. It embraces all things in their differences and
transformations. It recognizes that things arise in transitional incipience (ji 幾): they
are born small and low, rise and face their zenith, and descend back into their origins.
Genealogy can trace transformations that suspend and reverse the initial meaning: the
sacrificial entity becomes its opposite by being linked with self-becoming in an ethos,
irreducible to fixed rules and virtues, of nourishing living and nonliving things. How
did this transformation occur?
The history of the thing in early Chinese philosophy offers several clues. First, wu
designated a naturally arising thing, and reality consisted of “all things” (baiwu 百物,
literally “hundred things”) in early Confucian sources and the “myriad things” (wanwu
萬物, literally “ten thousand things”) in the literature that informed the Daodejing’s
development. Early Confucian and Daoist texts can be distinguished to an extent by
the uses of baiwu and wanwu to express the entirety of things. The former is more
characteristic of extant early Confucian materials, although not later ones such as the
Xunzi 荀子 that presupposes and critiques Lao-Zhuang discursive formations, and the
latter of extant Laoist materials in which the phrase baiwu does not appear.
The early Confucian “all things” expressed both the temporal and the ritual
character of the thing. In the Analects’ Yang Huo 陽貨 chapter, section 19, Confucius
(Kongzi 孔子) famously asks, “[H]ow does heaven speak at all as the four seasons
follow their courses and all things arise?”29 Seasons and things take their generational
turns, as seasonality serves as the principal image of time in the Book of Changes (Yijing
易經) and other early Chinese sources.30 The ritual and cosmic character of the thing
is expressed in early sources such as the Book of Rites (Liji 禮記). In its nineteenth
chapter, the Record of Music (Yueji 樂記) sections 12 and 14 (2.3 and 2.5), “all things”
are portrayed as constituting a fluctuating harmonizing whole maintained through a
ritual and sacrificial order that is enacted through music and rites (Cook 1995: 45, 47).
In music as in natural harmony, things transform, discord, and are reconciled. In ritual
as in natural order, each thing finds its appropriate place and role. Music and ritual are
consequently exemplary models of governance that reproduce cosmic harmony and
maintain its order.31 For Xunzi, ‘thing’ is the most general and inclusive name.
Early Confucianism accordingly demanded looking at and reflecting on worldly
things. In the “Expansive Learning” (daxue 大學) chapter of the Book of Rites, the
“extension of knowing” (zhizhi 致知) in the “investigation of things” (gewu 格物)
implies discovering their ritual role and order in self-cultivation (shenxiu 身修).
Song-Ming Neo-Confucianism offers its own distinctive discourses of the thing. Zhu
Xi 朱熹 (1130–1200) construed the inquiry into things as an experiential inquiry
aiming at the clarification of the fundamental cosmological pattern and principle
(li 理) that organizes vital material and bodily forces (qi) and constitutes the order
 Way, Thing, and World in Laozi 25

of things. The Song era Neo-Confucian philosophy of “investigating things and

extending knowledge” (gewu zhizhi 格物致知) advocated by Zhu Xi to comprehend
the patterning principle that configures vital forces to explain the thing is a movement
away from the ziranist thing as it is of itself.
The history of ancient and medieval Chinese philosophical discourses reveals
shared overlapping yet distinctively deployed vocabularies and interpretive strategies
formed in interpretive conflicts concerning the thing and its onto-cosmological
significance. They do not have one idea of what it is to be a thing. In non-ziranist
discourses, the thing is an object of technique and mastery to be reshaped, used, and
consumed; in others, it is secondary to the investigation and self-knowing of the heart-
mind. There are sacrificial, ritual, and patterning principle cosmological explanations
of things. We now turn to the principal focus of this work, the ziranist elucidations of
the thing, as having its own self-generating sense as a transitioning relational nexus,
articulated in the Laozi, the Zhuangzi, and related excavated and transmitted sources.

6. Straw-Dogs and Ziranist Models of the Myriad Things

How then is the self as being-in-the-world disposed and attuned to things in Lao-
Zhuang discourses? Different models of nourishing the self and nurturing things occur
in the texts attributed to the enigmatic figures of Laozi and Zhuangzi, each revealing
distinct constellations between self and the thing, temporality, and the cosmos.
The received rendition of the Daodejing retains connections between the thing and
sacrifice, temporal duration, and cosmic ritual order. One passage evokes both the
sacrificial role of things and their own generational life. In Daodejing 5, heaven and
earth are described as “lacking benevolence and regarding the myriad things like straw-
dogs” (天地不仁, 以萬物為芻狗). This passage has been interpreted as conveying the
sage’s neutral indifference or even a cruel sacrificial inhumaneness toward things and
people. It has also been read as having an ethical meaning. It was explicated in the
Xiang’er 想爾 commentary (c. 190–220 ce) in moralistic language as asserting “the
good with humaneness and the bad without humaneness” (仁於諸善, 不仁於諸惡).
This commentary made sense of the passage by correlating the nurturing aspects of
dao with being in accordance with it and its indifferent aspects with lack of accordance.
The sacrificial straw-dog served accordingly as a warning established by the Yellow
Emperor (Huangdi 黃帝) of people’s futile and useless expenditure of vital forces and
life as they increase and destroy themselves and heaven does not hear them as they fail
to integrate their natural vital substance in accord with the heavenly.32
The image of the straw-dog appears to evoke cruelty and indifference in
contemporary readers yet indicates the appropriate and inappropriate timing of the
life of the thing. It is exemplary of the temporal event of the thing in its gathering and
dispersing. The thing in its self-unfolding gathering cannot be fittingly encountered
if it is conceived as a static objectified identity and presence or according to a
predetermined instrumental use and purpose. A drastically different sense of the
thing’s import is expressed in the Zhuangzi. As expressly noted in one of the narratives
regarding Confucius in the Zhuangzi’s “Heavenly Revolutions” (Tianyun 天運) outer
chapter, “straw-dog” (chugou 芻狗) is a sacrificial object that is elegantly clothed and
26 Heidegger and Dao

taken care of during the duration of the ritual and afterward left aside and trampled
back into the earth or used for kindling (Ziporyn 2020: 121). The figure of the straw-
dog in the Laozi and the Zhuangzi serves as an image of the generational life and death
of the thing.33 The Tianyun chapter clarifies this sense as it then equates Confucian
teachings to a flawed endeavor to preserve the scattered remnants of the straw-dog
after their allotted time has passed. The pursuit to hold on to the dead and the past can
only result in the living being haunted by nightmares.
Notwithstanding the sense of temporality conveyed in the “all things” passage
considered previously above, Confucius in the Tianyun could not adequately recognize
the generational revolving nature of things as events or moments in time that form
and dissipate in transformation. Rituality, righteousness, law, and measure alter over
time (禮義法度者, 應時而變者). The straw-dog functioning as the image of the thing
discloses a world and its criteria in incessant generation, formation, and dissolution.
The excavation and study of pre-Qin to early Han silk and bamboo texts have
revolutionized the study of early Chinese thought. They have proven the antiquity of
the Laozi materials that contain small yet notable differences. The close connection
between thing, generation, and transformation is expressed in the excavated Guodian
郭店 (c. 300 bce) and Mawangdui 馬王堆 (c. 200 bce) renditions of the Laozi. These
materials indicate more complex configurations of the thing operative in the early
“Laoist” context, as the thing is related to the reflexive “self ” or “so of itself ” (zi 自) in
expressions that can be translated as the self-so-ing, self-transforming, self-steadying,
and “self-guesting” of the myriad things.34

7. The Self-Naturing of the Thing

What is the early significance of the character for “self ” and “of itself ” used in such
expressions? It is thought to initially signify the nose and is used in Shang oracle
inscriptions to signify “to start from.” Concerning the thing, it refers to the face and
point of departure of the thing. The impersonal self-relational zi is not the personal
self of human agency, identity, or subjectivity (wo 我). It encompasses cosmic, human,
animal, and material entities. It signifies not only the “my ownness” (Jemeinigkeit) of
the self-world phenomenologically described by Heidegger but the “its ownness” of
each thing-world. Unlike ordinary English and German language usage, the thing (wu)
encompasses sentient and insentient beings, and each thing has its own way of being
itself (zi). The thing’s own self-relational self-world (expressed in zi- expressions in the
Chinese context) is not considered in Heidegger’s early thought, where the thing is
experienced as either instrumentally ready-to-hand (zuhanden) or objectively present-
at-hand (vorhanden), nor is it fully articulated in his later thinking, evocative of early
Daoist sources, of the responsive remembering (das andenkende Denken) of the thing
in writings such as the 1950 essay “The Thing” examined in later chapters.
Early Chinese philosophy, as seen in the early strata of the Book of Changes, was
inspired by the constantly changing natural, spiritual, and sacrificial world. The language
of the thing and the self-occurring both originate in the context of ritual sacrifice.
The natural and sacrificial orders were initially the same. The “ran” of ziran appears
to initially refer to the spirit of the thing in its ritual burning, or what remains in its
 Way, Thing, and World in Laozi 27

sacrificial transformation, and later identifies only the naturally changing thing. Ziran
signifies the temporal transformative self-so in early Daoism and is subsequently fixed
and objectified into nature as object. In its earlier senses, it does not so much name
an object or set of objects (“nature”) as much as the way in which something verbally
(“naturing”) and adverbially (“naturally”) occurs in its movements (compare Liu
2015: 75). The discourse of the myriad things and self-naturing appears to have been
systematically articulated initially in the Laozi materials, functioning as its key concepts
and becoming fundamental to ensuing Chinese philosophy, bioethical life, and aesthetic
culture.
Lao-Zhuang discourses, despite their differences, can well be described as ziranist
given their recognition of the priority of ziran and the inadequacy of translating it as
naturalism. The conclusion to Daodejing 25 (in Guodian A 11) asserts that ziran is the
key to understanding the way: dao follows or patterns itself according to its own self-
naturing (daofa ziran 道法自然). The late Han era Heshanggong (河上公, Riverside
Elder) commentary describes how this means that dao follows its own naturing
(daoxing ziran 道性自然). The myriad things are self-sufficient in their self-becoming
and self-accomplishing (wanwu zicheng 萬物自成).35
The rediscovered Heng Xian 恆先 text (300 bce) regards letting the thing happen
(wuwei)—in “neither avoiding nor partaking in it” (無舍也, 無與也)—as an
accordance with the thing’s self-happening (ziwei 自為).36 Does the early history of the
thing’s “selfing” or “self-so-ing” (zi) imply that the sage-kings and sages do or do not
step back and assist the thing in allowing it to determinate itself? Both possibilities of
responsive nurturing and neutral indifference are implied in different renditions and
interpretations of the Laozi, an assembled source formed from a textual and interpretive
multiplicity. There are noticeable differences between the Guodian and received Laozi
texts that some translations accentuate more than others. In Guodian A 6, according
to Henricks’s translation, the ancient sages are “able” (the first use of neng 能) yet are
“unable to act” (its second use in funeng wei 弗能為), allowing the myriad things
to be themselves in their own self-so-ing or self-naturing.37 In Daodejing 64, and in
Cook’s translation of A 6 (Cook 2012: 245), the sages do not dare to (coercively or
calculatedly) act (fu gan wei 弗敢為) while they expressly complement or assist (fu 輔)
the myriad things to be themselves.38 That is, the exemplary sages act and do not act by
assisting and nourishing the life of things without forced purposive intervention that
is constrained and undone by the restrictions of its aims.
Guodian A 6 could be read as implicitly stating the same message as Daodejing
64 if its first use of “able” implies able to complement and its second use unable to
coercively act (Cook 2012: 245). It could also be read to suggest the neutrality of
following dao with respect to the self-generative naturing of things, a model found in
Huanglao 黃老 and so-called “legalist” (fajia 法家) discourses.39 The received version
of Daodejing 64 indicates a correlational co-responsive attunement without compelled
or artificial action (wei) in following dao in its caring, maternal, and nurturing
functions by complementing and assisting things to occur as themselves.40 The
nurturing function that supports self-nurturing applies to persons as well as things.
Guodian A 16 and Daodejing 57 describe how the sage-kings practice noninvolvement
in affairs, non-doing, quieting, and desiring without desiring as the people self-enrich,
28 Heidegger and Dao

self-transform, self-rectify, and self-simplify of their own accord.41 How does the
sage-king let the inevitably myriad and plural people order themselves? According to
chapter 49, the sages empty and have no invariable heart-mind of their own to impose
on others; they responsively take the people’s heart-mind as their own. They do not
preferentially prejudge, treating the good and bad, the sincere and insincere alike.42
Heidegger’s distinction between the two extremes of solicitude (Fürsorge) in Being
and Time reminds us of Okakura’s description of Daoism as making place for others.
Heidegger differentiates care as (1) leaping-ahead and liberating (vorspringend-
befreiend) for the sake of promoting the other’s self-care and self-individuation, that
is, potentiality-for-being (Seinskönnen) of an individuated self and (2) leaping-in and
dominating (einspringend-beherrschenden) so as to strip away the other’s self-care and
thus possibilities of self-individuation.43 Unlike Okakura’s description of Daoism, this
making place for others applies exclusively to human being-with in Being and Time.
We will inquire later whether Heidegger eventually arrives at a making place of living
and nonliving things that intersects with the self-happening of the thing revealed in
the Laozi. What then of the thing’s temporality?
The opening lines of Guodian A 7 and Daodejing 37 express the temporalizing
constancy of dao’s operating without purposive activity as things transform themselves
(zihua 自化) and determine and settle themselves (ziding 自定). Lords and kings
emulate dao in knowing the limits of what is sufficient and in quietude. The constancy
of dao is described respectively as daoheng 道恆 and daochang 道常. Heng was
tabooed, as part of the given name (Liu Heng 劉恆) of the fifth Han dynasty emperor,
and altered to the semantically overlapping chang. Neither word designates an eternity
outside of time but rather extended and potentially infinite duration.
The earlier usage of heng signifies the temporalizing of the waxing moon and a
fecund generative and potentially infinite perpetuity; chang the temporality of
continuing and extending regularity.44 The moon goes through its phases, the earth its
seasons, and the repeating pattern is extended. The temporalizing of constancy is not
an indeterminate neutral arena. It is one wherein vital forces and things wax and wane
according to their own natures. Heng signifies persevering, long continuance, and
prosperity in the explication of the thirty-second hexagram of the Book of Changes.
If heng is interpreted as a generative temporalizing according to its early sense, then
the affective dispositional state (daqing 大情) of continuing and prospering things
(hengwu 恆物)—often translated as the enduring reality of the eternal thing from
Legge to Ziporyn—should be noted in the “Great Teacher” (Da Zongshi 大宗師)
chapter of the Zhuangzi: “to hide the world in the world, so that there is no place to
escape, is the great affection that prospers things.”45
The Daodejing teaches the generative and nourishing function of dao that sages and
kings emulate. This is not unrelated to the sacrificial sense in a text such as Mawangdui
Laozi A 13. It states, “the way generates” (daosheng zhi 道生之) and “virtuosity
nourishes” (dexu zhi 德畜之) “governed things” (wuxing zhi 物刑之) and “useful
devices” (qicheng zhi 器成之). The corresponding line in Daodejing 51 reads that they
generate and nourish “formed things” (wuxing zhi 物形之) and “potentiality” (shicheng
zhi 勢成之). While characters such as xing 刑 (to punish, govern, or form), xing 型
(model, formed pattern), and xing 形 (form, shape) were linguistically interchangeable
 Way, Thing, and World in Laozi 29

characters in antiquity, the different characters in A 13 intimate two different forms

of order expressed in the succeeding lines. Generative dao operates in Mawangdui
A 13 through “ceaseless self-offering” (heng ziji 恆自祭) instead of the more typical (in
other renditions) “constant self-naturing” (chang ziran 常自然).
The language of Mawangdui A 13 hearkens to the older sacrificial signification of
thing with its discourse of governing/punishing things, useful instrumental products,
and self-offering/sacrifice. It also points toward the ziran of the thing. In the expression
ziran, “ran” indicates temporalizing self-generativity, the entity’s being self-so in its
own temporal moment of life. This is not an underlying essence or constant substance
but an arising and dissipating nexus of relations calling for our humility and gratitude
to recognize it. Pertinently, ran is etymologically related to burn, or ignite, referring to
sacrificial burnt meat. Again, early Daoist sources show a movement from the earlier
sacrificial meaning to the integral meaning of the moment of life. In both cases, the
temporality of the thing and its relation to the cosmic whole of dao is elemental. The
way generates and nourishes the life of things, allowing them their determinations
and transformations, and their own significance in life and death. The kings and sages
emulate and participate in the generative temporalizing of dao by complementing
and nurturing things in their life and letting them depart in their death. This
intergenerational ziranist ethos entails that each generation has meaning in its own
finitude and in allowing the old to be buried and the new to be born. Such moments in
early Chinese thought intersect with the thinking of natality, generation, and mortality
in Wilhelm Dilthey (an earlier thinker of finitude and generation), Heidegger, and
Hannah Arendt.
The Heng Xian further contextualizes the senses of constancy operative in the
Guodian Laozi. The opening line asserts that in the originary state of constancy (heng),
there is no being (hengxian wuyou 恆先無有).46 This contested line could be understood
as the nothingness of or—as it has no spatial or temporal differentiation—prior to
primordial constancy. Spatiality arises from emptiness and temporality arises from
beginning such that the vital generative forces are self-generating and self-arising
(氣是自生自作) and things self-reproducing and self-reverting (zifu 自復).47 Given
subsequent interpretations of the generativity of nothingness, it could indicate the
generative spatializing and temporalizing of being emerging from emptiness and
beginning from nothingness as the indistinct and muddled is differentiated and
individuated into the temporalizing being of primal forces, things, and names that
each has its own time. This resonates with the much later “Heaven’s Portents” (Tianrui
天瑞) chapter of the Liezi 列子 (c. 300 ce, although incorporating earlier materials),
in which the initial state of things is described as muddled without separation (萬物
相渾淪而未相離) and the temporality of things as one of generative metamorphosis
(wanwu huasheng 萬物化生).
Guodian A 10 and Daodejing 32 state that “[s]hould lords and kings be able to
uphold [the way], the myriad things will bring themselves in line.”48 The myriad things
are self-ordering. More literally, zi 自 refers to self and bin 賓 visitor or guest. The
lords and kings allow the thing to be the guest of itself, allowing the thing to occur
in its own course. Its own course has been interpreted as its way of being or role in
the moral-political order of things. The Heshanggong commentary takes being a guest
30 Heidegger and Dao

as spontaneous moral obedience and submission (fucong yude 服從於德).49 Wang

Bi elucidates in his commentaries on Daodejing 10 and 32 the functioning of the
self-relation of things as a condition of the self-sufficiency, self-tranquility, and self-
contentment of things. The sovereign ruler nurtures them to this condition guided by
the example of dao.50
The early Laozi materials do not radically differentiate between interacting with
things and persons, as persons appear as a special case of rather than an exception
to things. The Laozian ethos of the sage’s letting and the thing’s naturing or selfing is
articulated in Guodian 16 (Daodejing 57): “I engage in no affairs and the people are
self-enriching. I do not (coercively) act and the people are self-transforming. I practice
quietude and the people are self-rectifying. I desire without desiring and the people
self-simplify.”51 Letting, quieting, and simplifying, concomitant with the self-becoming
of things on their own, are in the context of the Laozi practices of the self and political
rule that have multifaceted relations with Daoist biospiritual meditative practices as
well as Huanglao, so-called power-oriented “legalist” (in the work attributed to Hanfei
韓非 with its “Sovereign’s Way” chapter and two chapters on the Laozi), and anarchic
(in Zhuangzi, Liezi, and Bao Jingyan 鮑敬言) biopolitical models that contest and
dispel supremacist identarian configurations of the political.52

III. Freedom, Allotment, and Self-Naturing after the Zhuangzi

8. Freedom and Fate in Self- and World-Naturing

Ziranist Daoism is a philosophy of radical relational freedom and responsive
participation in the world. But, as reversal is part of the very movement of things and
any constellation can assume an ideological form, freedom is perpetually betrayed.
It can fall into obsessive fixation or indifferent fatalism, and anarchy into totalitarian
order (i.e., strong holism suppressing alterity and singularity), as the highest values
devalue themselves. In this section, and in Chapter 4, we consider the larger context
and consequences of Zhuangzian freedom that would eventually inspire Heidegger,
for whom “freedom is admittance into the disclosure of beings as such” (GA 9: 192),
and that allows us to critically and interculturally resituate this discourse of worldly
freedom amidst things.
What is the context and status of the Zhuangzi with its radical teaching of anarchic,
immanent, this-worldly freedom amidst the facticity of existence? The Han dynasty
historian Sima Qian in the Shiji 史記 affiliates Zhuangzi with Laozi, stating that he
illustrates the same teaching through metaphor and parody. Although the relationship
between the Laozi and Zhuangzi remains historically unclear, and they should not
be conflated given their differences, these two collections are related in expressing
variations on the prominence of the self-naturing (ziran) of things disclosed through
noncoercive responsive attunement (wuwei).53 Ziran only occurs ten times in the
Zhuangzi, and the ethos of the self-letting/other-selfing correlation is often conveyed in
other zi- expressions and in the enactment of responsive resonance (ying 應) with the
thing. While ying is only used twice in the ordinary sense of reply or response in the
 Way, Thing, and World in Laozi 31

Daodejing, it has a more vital role in the Zhuangzi and in the Heshanggong and Wang
Bi Laozi commentaries. The sages respond when affected (gan erhou ying 感而後
應) in Zhuangzi chapter 15 “Engraved Meanings” (Keyi 刻意). This chapter concerns
undoing engraved meanings as constructed fixations.
The freedom and ease of worldly responsiveness of the exemplary genuine person
arise through bracketing intentional calculative action (wuwei) and attuned or
resonant being affected (ying). This is glimpsed in the thought-images of Butcher Ding
(Paoding 庖丁) nourishing life and responding to the intrinsic nature of the ox with
the cutting of his blade or (in an example Heidegger referred to in a 1960 lecture on art)
the woodcutter’s responsive working with the wood.54 Such responsiveness has been
understood in early Chinese interpretations as (1) an undetermined free wandering
and sojourning; (2) an uncoerced music-like attunement with the thing and its
situation; (3) a (more or less deterministic) process of adaptation and accommodation
to things; or (4) an automatic reflex fatalistically determined by the stimulus.
First, given their blending of indifference and responsiveness, how are sages
and persons affected to respond by stimuli? The Wei-Jin period saw a controversy
over the emotions of sages concerning whether they completely overcame them in
affective indifference (He Yan 何晏, c. 190–249 ce) or harmoniously balanced them
from nothingness (Wang Bi). As considered below, responsive resonance as attuned
releasement in Chinese philosophical and artistic traditions resituates the subject
and subjectivity. It suggests other modalities of being affected and attuned by things
to Heidegger’s conception of Befindlichkeit (attunement, disposedness) manifested
through Stimmung (mood) through which things and world are disclosed in his
examples of encounters with disorienting disrelational limit-situations of radical
anxiety, profound boredom, as well as other oriented situations of joy, love, wonder,
and—in a complex mediated way—the poetic word and saying of his later thought.55
Secondly, given the stimulus-response model, how should freedom and
determination be understood? Zhuangzian freedom has appealed to intellectuals
searching for an alternative relational freedom distinct from German ideas of freedom
as embracing duty, necessity, and the state. It has been construed as an effortless
playful freedom that is independent of while responsive to things, as an adjusting and
adaptation to the self-nature of the thing and its interbodily and interthingly situation
or as the tranquil acceptance of the vicissitudes of one’s particular fated allotment and
whatever alteration of life and death might transpire. Adaptation raises questions,
articulated in Count Hermann von Keyserling’s 1919 A Travel Diary of a Philosopher,
concerning whether Daoist adaptation to changing circumstances is external or whole
(encompassing one’s internal and external comportment), whether it is genuine
freedom or subordination to an objective depersonalizing world order.56 The Sinologist
F. E. A. Krause more carefully differentiates strains of Daoism in his 1923 work on East
Asian philosophies and religions, identifying moments of the Zhuangzi and the Liezi
with “practical fatalism.”57
In addition to the remarkable appearance of J. G. Weiss’s 1927 Daodejing
edition in the second 1942 leaflet of the White Rose student resistance movement,
which emphasized good governance through the noncoercive self-ordering of
affairs, others linked the Zhuangzi with anti-totalitarian freedom.58 As stated in
32 Heidegger and Dao

a 1942 Sinica article by the Sinologist Werner Eichhorn, to give an example of the
hermeneutics of freedom and fatedness in the Zhuangzi in Heidegger’s linguistic
situation, dao signifies the freedom (ziran) of things in principle (Eichhorn 1942:
141). This profoundly relational freedom is opposed to linguistic and conceptual
essences and fixations such that Daoism is fundamentally incommensurable with
“Occidental” philosophy. The dao-ness of the thing can only be measured according
to and by following its changing behaviors in the comportment of wuwei (Eichhorn
1942: 142). This freedom of the dao, as fallen in the ordinary world, is concealed in
the entanglements and affairs of that world in which things appear lifeless and fixed
and destiny as inescapably fated without free and easy responsiveness. The perspective
of freedom is blurred in the perspective of differentiation and determination. The
exemplary Daoist way of life in freedom and releasement has its own critical and
transformative potential vis-à-vis the reification and alienation reproduced by the
existing social-political order. These critical categories unfolded in Marxist and
existential transmissions, including—on some readings—Heidegger’s Being and Time,
take on new senses in relation to Daoism.
Axel Honneth and Rahel Jaeggi defined reification and alienation respectively
as a forgetting of recognition (Honneth 2005) and a relation of relationallessness
(Jaeggi 2005).59 These two diagnostic concepts are frequently conceived according to
essentialized concepts of identity and the subject, disputed by Honneth and Jaeggi,
and as anthropocentric, which they fail to adequately overcome. The recognition of
the generative and transformative plurality of things offers a more suggestive non-
anthropocentric model as any autopoietic nexus, such as an ecosystem, can undergo
reification with destructive consequences and, to return to the Dialectic of Enlightenment
of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, be experienced as the alienation of the
domination of nature. No underlying collective or individual identity or subject is
required, as these reproduce the very reification under question. Ziranist ways of
dwelling, or being-in-the-world to recall Okakura’s expression, do not conceptually
negate but rather consist in shifting through these limiting conditions and standpoints
in which the freedom of dao is discovered in situations and things themselves. Ziran
does not exclusively apply to one’s own self and its freedom, except in hedonistic and
egotistical interpretations of the Warring States era philosopher Yang Zhu 楊朱. It
is disclosed in the Daodejing and the Zhuangzi in genuinely encountering things in
their own freedom. In the Daoist setting, there is a thingly autonomy that requires
appropriate attunement and recognition, contesting reification and alienation. The
dereification of thing and place is a condition of the dereification of human existence.
The self-determination of the thing appears in the Zhuangzi in their self-
transforming (zihua) and self-acting (ziwei). The adaptive and receptive disposition of
wuwei is correlated with the thing’s self-transformation by itself in chapter 11 (Zaiyou
在宥) and chapter 17 (Qiushui 秋水). The recognition of the self-acting of the thing
occurs when one does not self-act in the thirteenth “Heaven’s Way” (Tiandao 天道)
Zhuangzi chapter. Things occur and act of their own by “not self-acting” such that
“heaven does not bring the myriad things forth and they transform, earth does not
grow the myriad things and they are nurtured, the lords and kings do nothing and all
under heaven is achieved.”60
 Way, Thing, and World in Laozi 33

The Zhuangzi contested subordinating the thing’s way of being itself in its
environment, such as chaos freely existing without openings or the turtle enjoying
the muddy riverside, to an external role, e.g., having holes drilled or being displayed
at court, by emphasizing its own self-becoming that would be construed as an allotted
and singularly determined self-nature (zixing 自性). However, in addition to issues
of external adaptation and conformity, there are questions concerning internal
conformity and whether Zhuangzian freedom transcends only the former (for the sake
of internal authenticity or genuineness) or both external and internal determination.

9. Freedom with Things: Zhuangzian and Buddhist Reflections

The Wei-Jin era mysterious learning discourses of Wang Bi and Guo Xiang center
around nothingness and the thing. They are pivotal in modifying and transmitting
the ziranist Daodejing and Zhuangzi. Wang Bi’s ziran-oriented interpretation of
nothingness is examined later in Part Two. Guo Xiang stressed the singularity
of the thing. In his commentary on the Zhuangzi, he linked “lone” (du 獨) with
“transformation” (hua). In “lone-transformation” (duhua 獨化), the sole singular (du)
and self (zi) retain identity while transforming: the self retains itself and its own self-
nature in becoming other than itself in transformation.61 In Guo Xiang, the relation of
the thing to itself (as a guest of itself), individuated and potentially isolated as uniquely
lone and sole (shenqi duhua 神器獨化), is possible in interthingly mutual dependence
(xiangyin 相因). Such a vision of interdependence and independence, of harmony and
monadic self-determination to describe this relation in the categories of Leibniz, risks
for his critics bifurcating the thing between other-determined and self-determining,
identity and difference, and host and guest. The sole spontaneously self-generating
thing (zisheng 自生) is in jeopardy of monadic separation from the dynamic relational
responsive resonance of the myriad things in which its own self-determination as
world determination occurs.62
Zhi Dun 支遁 (Zhi Dao Lin 支道林, 314–366 ce), Dao’an 道安 (312–385 ce), and
fourth-century Chinese Buddhist sources informed by Lao-Zhuang and mysterious
learning teachings offer salient reference points for reconstructing philosophical
controversies involving Lao-Zhuang argumentative and hermeneutical strategies.
The Buddhist philosopher and monastic Zhi Dun fused the discourses of mysterious
learning and Buddhist “perfection of wisdom” (Prajñāpāramitā) literature prior
to the systematic formation of Chinese Madhyamaka from Kumārajīva 鳩摩羅什
and Sengzhao 僧肇 to the Tang era three treatises school (sanlun 三論) associated
with Jizang 吉藏. To jump ahead for a moment, Chinese Madhyamaka reappears in
Part Two in the context of distinguishing Daoist nothingness, Buddhist emptiness,
Heidegger’s nothing, and nothingness in Nishida Kitarō 西田幾多郎 (1870–1945) and
examining Heidegger’s lifelong interactions with Japanese intellectuals that led to a
1919 gift, a 1924 declined invitation conveyed by Miki Kiyoshi 三木清 (1897–1945) to
teach in Japan, and myriad conversations.
Zhi Dun’s thought might be described as a “Daoistic Buddhism,” a category invented
by modern scholars, in which early Lao-Zhuang Daoism is fulfilled in Buddhism
and Buddhism is deployed to resolve Daoist and mysterious learning philosophical
34 Heidegger and Dao

questions. Zhi Dun criticized Guo Xiang’s interpretation of Zhuangzi in his lost
“Discourse of Free and Easy Wandering” (xiaoyao lun 逍遙論) for the complacency,
determinism, and fatalism of its notion of complying (yue 約) with one’s endowed
particular allotment (fen 分) in the myriad transformations (wanhua 萬化). Fated
self-nature stands in tension with the freedom expressed in the joy of the fish playing
without a fixed determinate purpose, a narrative that—as noted earlier—fascinated
Heidegger and that he interpreted in relation to being-with in 1930.63 If taken as the
fixity of a predetermined character, it subverts the independence of free and easy
meandering that, it might be added, continues to resonate with the freedom of forms
of shamanistic and poetic “far-roaming” (yuanyou 遠遊) that meld spontaneity and
responsiveness and interior and exterior landscapes.64
Is freedom the freedom of enacting one’s fated self-nature and inborn character,
whatever it might be, or a freedom of transforming—in Buddhist discursive terms—the
seeds of self-nature that is ultimately empty of itself? Zhi Dun identified Zhuangzian
freedom with Buddhist prajñā. The latter perceives things as things without being
fettered by things in recognizing the self-emptiness of both somethingness and
nothingness.65 Zhi Dun’s conceptual blending contrasts with subsequent Buddhist
scholars, such as Guifeng Zongmi 圭峰宗密 (780–841 ce) in his Inquiry into the Origin
of Humanity (Yuanren lun 原人論) from the late 820s or early 830s. He criticized
the teachings of Laozi and Zhuangzi as fatalistic and unable to motivate disciplined
spiritual transformation and liberation (Zongmi 708b4; Gregory 1995: 44). If Zhi
Dun’s criticisms of Guo Xiang’s determinism are valid, then ziran, which promised in
the Zhuangzi to equalize and liberate things in their anarchic self-determination from
serving as mere sacrificial and instrumental objects, has become the self-determination
of the thing’s predetermined self-nature (zixing) in its allotted fated share. The next
chapter will examine a parallel problem of the absorption of worldly freedom into
destiny (Geschick) in Heidegger’s thinking of the 1930s.
To remain with the Chinese situation at this time, the problematic of determinism
and freedom that emerged between Guo and Zhi presents numerous interpretive
difficulties. First, the Zhuangzi itself articulates in the Inner Chapter “Great Teacher”
the significance of the self-occurring of dao rather than fixed nature in discussions of
the thing. Dao is without forced activity and fixed form (wuwei wuxing 無為無形) and
self-originating and self-rooting (ziben zigen 自本自根). The life of things transforms
without its direction being known and the exemplary sages participate and wander
amidst transforming things without escape or separation (聖人將遊於物之所不得
遯而皆存) and without calculation and anxiety regarding their purpose and outcome.
Second, the Zhuangzi does not only indicate the sole singular monadic self-determining
transformation of the thing but also mutual co-determination (sympoiesis) in the
synchronization and integration of the myriad things that Guo Xiang treats, as it were,
like a preestablished harmony that leaves each thing to solely determine itself.66 That
is, ziran refers to the self-happening of the thing as well as to its natureless and selfless
(in any fixed or substantialized sense) world-happening as a singular moment that
dynamically mirrors and reflects the whole.
 Way, Thing, and World in Laozi 35

10. Self-Relationality
The equalizing (qi 齊) of the Zhuangzi is described in the “Autumn Floods” chapter
as the “coherence and equality of the myriad things” (wanwu yiqi 萬物一齊). This
equalizing is more a transforming flowing musical harmonizing than subordination to a
fixed determinate uniformity.67 Equalization transpires in temporal and transformative
relationality and its recognition, in which “heaven, earth, and I live side by side
together, and the myriad things and I are one” (天地與我並生, 而萬物與我為一), in
relational world-naturing as well as in singular and sole self-naturing.
Kierkegaard’s Anti-Climacus claimed that the self is a relation between a relation
and a relation. The relationality of reality is even more radically expressed in Laozi
and Zhuangzi. Daoist expressions with “zi-” convey a profoundly different model of
reflexive self-relation than the self-reflection of a thinking subject that is only one of its
forms. This early variety of zi-expressions in early sources such as the Guodian Laozi
and the Heng Xian is flattened out into a notion of ziran that increasingly becomes
fixated as an objective order and object, in which the thing appears determined by
a fixed nature. This development weakens the dynamic verbal and transformative
character of early ziran discourses conveyed in the Laozi and the Zhuangzi: the thing
as irreducibly self-so of itself or self-naturing in its own transformations and flow.
In conclusion, to briefly reiterate, ziran signifies the self- and, if not monadically
isolated, the world-naturing of the thing. It is the relational thing in its temporal and
transformative self-naturing that distinguishes the thing in the Daodejing and the
Zhuangzi and indicates an aesthetics and culture of care for things in their own self-so
thereness. This need not presuppose either their sentience or internal sense of well-
being. Chapter 1 has traced the senses and philosophical implications of early Chinese
conceptions of the thing. The following four chapters examine the transformative
relational thing in Daoism, Heidegger, and his generational context.
36
 2

The Autopoietic Self-Transformation of

Things in Ziranist Daoism and Heidegger

I. Phúsis and the Thing

1. Nature, Phúsis, and Ziran

The letting releasement and responsive attunement of the thing in wuwei in early
materials related to the formation of the Daodejing and the Zhuangzi presuppose a
cosmological natural-political order of the self-generativity of things and a seasonal
temporality in which they operate. What can they signify apropos Heidegger’s ontology
or to a contemporary audience who can read both? In Heidegger’s corpus, the modern
construction and technological enframing of world, as an arena of universally fungible
and exchangeable things, are intimately interwoven with the history of Occidental
metaphysics and its early Greek origins, seemingly excluding premodern Asia.1
“Nature” and the “natural thing” are primarily interpreted from “world” in Being
and Time and are derivative concepts abstracted from Dasein’s world-relations and
way of being-in-the-world (GA 2: 60, 63). The “homogenous space of nature” is a
“deworlded” space (GA 2: 112). A pure natural thing (Naturding) without Dasein’s
world is incomprehensible (GA 82: 52). Being and Time already introduces a “prior
release” (vorgängige Freigabe) of letting the thing rest (Bewendenlassen) and a third
more elemental “power of nature” (GA 2: 84–5 and 70, 211), even while accentuating
the instrumental referential context instead of his later thingly oriented relational
context. These undeveloped alternative hints prepare the way for his more radical
thinking of nature as power in relation to phúsis in the mid-1930s, the releasement of
nature from the confines of power in the 1940s, and then his critique of an enframed
world that obstructs life by obscuring the sense of things. First, the “there” belongs to
Dasein. Later, the “there” is the gathering of the thing.
The experiential and discursive functions of ziran entail a distinctive yet intersecting
form of world-event and disclosure from Heidegger’s retrieval of the early Greek
experience and conception of phúsis (φύσις) as more elemental than any experience or
concept of “nature.” Natura is a derivative and problematic concept that he used with
reluctance. Heidegger repeatedly reimagines nature as phúsis in works such as the 1935
lecture-course Introduction to Metaphysics, revised and published as a book in 1953, as
determinate of the history of Occidental metaphysics:
38 Heidegger and Dao

what does the word phúsis say? It says what emerges from itself (for example,
the emergence, the blossoming, of a rose), the unfolding that opens itself up, the
coming-into-appearance in such unfolding, and holding itself and persisting in
appearance—in short, the emerging-abiding sway.
(GA 40: 16)

The early Greek phúō (φῠω) is related to archaic Indo-European words for birth,
earth, dwelling, and being. It designates that which is brought forth, generated, and
produced. The meaning of phúsis is that which arises and disperses (akin to ziran to
this extent). Phúsis was only later distinguished from what is artfully produced (tékhnē,
τέχνη) and from the normatively lawful (nómos, νόμος) as phúsis came to refer only to
that which materially exists. This expression encompasses in its early Greek context
not only the natural, the material, and the physical (in the subsequently reduced
senses of these words) but heaven, earth, stones, plants, humans, gods, and their works
(GA 40: 17).
Phúsis further signifies in Heidegger’s provocative reading that which is as an
emerging upsurge from being’s hiddenness and concealment, an abiding holding
sway (Walten, which typically means reign, preside, prevail), and essence (Wesen) as
essencing (Wesung) rather than as the determinate underlying idea or principle of the
thing.2 While the metaphysical concept of “essence” intones that there is something
else determining the thing, self-essencing indicates that it is in fact its own way of
existing. Such qualities of self-becoming are expressed in Daoist sources where things
emerge and transform according to their own nature, place, and time. Even the dao
of things cannot be fixed into or imposed as a determinate principle. Once more, we
find correlations between Heidegger and the Daodejing. Dao is called concealed and
nameless (daoyin wuming 道隱無名) in Daodejing 41. It holds sway without coercion
or violence (buzai 不宰) in Daodejing 10 and 51. Reinhold von Plaenckner, Wilhelm,
Georg Misch, and other German interpreters deployed the expressions “reign,”
“prevailing,” or “holding sway” (Walten) to speak of dao.3 It is a crucial feature of Greek
phúsis in Heidegger that becomes intertwined with questions of power and violent
creation in the mid-1930s. This differs from the pluralistic self-ordering of ziran where
power and violence are signs of loss and failure. Yet, as Heidegger clarified in a later
note, in which these two terms share greater affinity, phúsis is in the first place “the self-
unfolding emergence in and through which a being first is what it is” (GA 73. 1: 85).

2. Phúsis and Its Unconcealment and Saying

The word phúsis operates as a name for being itself, as that by which beings appear
(GA 40: 17), referring to being’s emerging event, emerging beings and things, and
their unconcealed truth. The emerged and the submerged, the unconcealed and the
concealed are interconnected, and truth (alḗtheia, ἀλήθεια) is thought negatively in
Heidegger’s etymological reconstruction as “not hidden” (a-lḗtheia). Lḗthē means
concealment, forgetfulness, and oblivion. It is the name of a goddess and a river in
Hades. It refers for Heidegger to a primary nonderivative refusal, obstruction, and
unsaid, while truth (or alḗtheia, which is more originary than and only inadequately
 The Autopoietic Self-Transformation of Things 39

called truth) refers to that which emerges into the openness from hiddenness and into
saying from the unsaid.
According to Heraclitus’s fragment 123, “nature tends toward hiddenness” (φύσις
κρύπτεσθαι φιλεῖ). Heidegger translated this as “emerging gives favor to self-concealing”
(GA 55: 110, 121). It might be thought that phúsis names the self-emergence (von ihm
selbst her) of beings from being, such that ontic beings can be questioned from the
ontological perspective of being and intersects with ziran as the self-emergence of
things from dao, as it shifts through things without being limited by them. The dao
nourishes and has its freedom in things, following its own self-nature and generating
exemplary models to be emulated by sages and non-sages without being confined to
one fixed rule, in Daodejing 25 (Lou 1980: 65).
Several questions should be addressed now. Heidegger mentions lógos (λόγος)
and not phúsis, in conjunction with dao. A basic guiding word (Leitwort) such as
dao operates as an originary world orienting word, as Heidegger noted (GA 11: 45;
GA 12: 187). It is striking that Heidegger reflectively and adaptively engages with
Daoist language and does not follow the widespread practice of drawing comparisons
between facets of Daoist and Occidental philosophy, beyond the statements that dao,
lógos, and Ereignis (the non-ontic appropriative event of being) operate in their own
ways as elemental untranslatable guiding words (GA 11: 45; GA 12: 187).
Heidegger’s “From a Dialogue on Language,” a key text explored in part two,
expresses hesitancy and warns of all-too-easy identifications that give an appearance
of mutual understanding without a genuine encounter occurring between two
interlocutors. As basic guiding words, each discloses a distinctive world. The relation
between Heidegger’s being and dao is much more complicated, as phúsis signifies being
as emergence and self-naturing the way dao arises of itself and generates all things
from nothingness. It is from the self-generative watery yet fecund depth of nothingness
that things emerge in early Laozi-related sources excavated in the archaeological sites
Guodian and Mawangdui. If dao functions akin to lógos (language as saying), then in
early Daoistic contexts it is nothingness (the guiding word of part two) that evokes and
structurally parallels the generative functions of phúsis.

3. The Hermeneutics and Politics of Phúsis and the Thing

Intercultural philosophy, which contests the fixated identities of orthodox philosophy,
needs to recognize both proximity and distance, resisting both totalizing fusion and
isolated particularity. It should not only co-illumine diverse perspectives and discursive
configurations. It can also self-reflectively and critically engage, confront, and
dialogically differentiate in communication (Auseinanderzetzung). Heidegger began to
address this hermeneutical problem in his 1937 “Ways to [Dialogical] Discussion.”4 In
this short essay, he considers the barriers to a genuine understanding between peoples
and reformulates, at the collective level of the French and German peoples, the earlier
themes of making room for and leaping-ahead for the other in mutual individuation,
actions that require both a lasting will to listen to each other and a reserved courage
for one’s own self-determination (GA 13: 21). Self-determination plays a multivalent
role since it is ideologically entangled with both freedom and oppression. Autonomous
40 Heidegger and Dao

self-determination has had an emancipatory import in relation to oppression. Such

concepts can also contest pathological, oppressive forms when the other is not heard
and eclipsed in ideologically driven formations of the individual and popular will, as
Arendt exposes in her 1951 The Origins of Totalitarianism.5
In Heidegger’s 1937 essay, he appears caught between the self-determining willing
of the German people (das deutsche Volk), which dominated his thinking during
the 1930s, and Gelassenheit toward others, as self-determination is problematically
connected with decisions about creatively determining the destiny and mission of the
Occident (no doubt in distinction from the Soviet East) (GA 13: 16). The prospect of
genuinely making room for and hearing toward the other in mutual co-illumination
and co-individuation is thereby distorted and undermined. It is only adjusted in
Heidegger’s shift in 1943 from the paradigm of the self-assertion and self-determination
of the will, which lacks an appropriate sense of measure and limit, to the freedom of
letting releasement that recognizes its limits vis-à-vis others.
Can Lao-Zhuang ziranist political models of sympoietically self-ordering
communities and environments be deployed to not only co-illuminate but also
transcend Heidegger’s political thinking and philosophy of nature and art? The anarchic
self-measuring social-political tendencies of specific threads of Daoist discourses are
best approximated in democratic self-organization of social-political life through the
interactions of a plurality of individuals (better articulated by Arendt than Heidegger).
These points suggest (to think with and beyond Heidegger and his agrarianism and
linguistically defined “people”) an alternative ziran-oriented philosophy of nature
and society to his conception, during the National Socialist era, of violent creative
founders and the collective identity of the people.6 Noncoercive action (wuwei) and
nonintervention in affairs (wushi) were formulated in the Warring States environment
of debates over coercive politics, in which (to summarize) “legalists” advocated
law, punishment, the force of the state, and the ultimate power of the sage-king;
Confucians endorsed the exemplary role of virtue in the moral ordering of society;
and the ziran-oriented Daoists conceived of the self-generative autopoiesis of social-
political life in which people ordered themselves with or—in more radical anarchic
moments in the Zhuangzi, the Liezi, and the admonishment of Bao Jingyan by Ge
Hong 葛洪 (283–343 or 363 ce)—without sage-kings. Heidegger is at this juncture
closer in proximity to the legalist assertion of power than anarchic (or dao-archic) self-
generation and nearer to the coercion of things in a new formation of life than their
releasement into their own self-openness.
Early Greek phúsis is depicted in Heidegger’s reconstruction as the “first beginning”
(GA 69: 142), from which Occidental metaphysics emerges. There is also the “other
beginning” that confronts this first beginning. In the postwar period, various readers
discovered the “other beginning” in early Chinese and other forms of thought. In the
period of its initial articulation, the other beginning concerns the early Greeks and
contemporary Germans (Bambach 2003). It is described in the 1935 Contributions to
Philosophy as the referral and offering/sacrifice of beings to being that—in Heidegger’s
language—essences and holds sway as an event in the clearing of self-hiddenness.7
Modern European thought has been shaped in its interactions with its others
that it typically endeavors to exclude from its own sense of history and otherless
 The Autopoietic Self-Transformation of Things 41

self-identity. The Indian and Islamic sources of science and mathematics (such as
infinity and zero as discussed later) should be too obvious to deny. There are also
intriguing intersections between the politics of nature and Chinese philosophy in
earlier forms of European thought. First, for instance, French physiocrats such as the
Sinophile François Quesnay, the “Confucius of Europe” to his admirers, had called for
“physiocracy” as government by phúsis that blended minimizing the mercantilist state,
the promotion of agriculture and agrarian communities, and economic” laisser passer,
laisser faire” and free trade, inspired in part by (a French Enlightenment appropriation
of) Confucianism and wuwei. Second, the agrarian-agricultural facets of the Daodejing
and the Zhuangzi were construed as supporting an anarchistic communal socialism in
fin-de-siècle intellectuals such as Julius Hart and Buber. If the previously discussed
accounts of Heidegger’s 1919 encounter with Daoism are accurate, it is conceivable
that Heidegger linked Daoist motifs with leaping-ahead and making room and space
for the other and, as he describes in 1937, for the thing in its openness (GA 45: 3, 29).
As in Quesnay, Buber, or Ernst Bloch, who wrote an essay (published in 1962, but
which he dates to 1926) on Johann Peter Hebel, Jeremias Gotthelf, and the agrarian
utopianism of rustic dao (“bäurisches Tao”), Heidegger would no doubt have noticed
the agrarian-environmental elements of Chinese philosophical and poetic discourses,
if not their anarchistic and libertarian Marxist self-generative spontaneity respectively
accentuated by Buber and Bloch.8
Agrarian utopian images of fields, forests, and rivers dominate many of
Heidegger’s writings. But, conspicuously, such considerations are not the focus of
Heidegger’s vision of German Dasein’s decision in 1933 or of great leaders poetically
creating and forming a people in their own self-determination from the phúsis
of being in the mid-1930s. Heidegger advocated his own distinctive version of the
politics of phúsis, a “physiocracy” interpreted in his own ontological sense, during
his initial engagement on behalf of the new totalitarian regime in which alienating
dispersion, separation, and division become the originary negativity confronting the
people’s Dasein (GA 91: 184–5). Phúsis and the emergence of the National Socialist
state as its expression are enmeshed in his early Nazi-era notes on metapolitics and
advancing effort (GA 91: 172–87) and in the 1934–35 lecture-course Hölderlin’s Hymns
“Germania” and “The Rhine” (GA 39).
Jacques Derrida, among others, explicated in The Beast and the Sovereign the
imposition of violence, power, and “sovereign potency” in Heidegger’s conception of
phúsis as holding sway (Walten) in a way that can underwrite political commitments
through the philosophy of nature.9 In the mid-1930s the establishment of beings is
conceived through “work and deed and sacrifice” (“Werk und Tat und Opfer”) (GA 65:
298). It is interconnected with the creativity and violence of nature that is activated in
order to attain the authentic self-determination and we-being of the collective Dasein
of the German people. The sources, dynamics, and consequences of this problematic
“metapolitical” and onto-political deformation of the ancient Greek notion of the
independent pólis and the modern republican notion of the popular self-determination
of a unitary general will, with its faith in a collective national will directly choosing
itself, unconcerned with individual rights and participatory public spheres, calls for its
own specific ideology-critical analysis.
42 Heidegger and Dao

Heidegger is at this moment near and far away from the wuwei-ziran insights
of the 1920s or the semi-Daoist turn of the mid-1940s. During this politically and
philosophically problematic period, Heidegger asserts the self-ordering of the people
and its imagined communal identity in contrast to individual Dasein, pluralistic
society, or mortals and things in their gathering and resonance. His thought appears
motivated by active and coercive acting (wei 為) and aggressively intervening in
entangled affairs (shi 事), as he claims that authentic transformation requires (in place
of the “anticipatory liberating solicitude” of Being and Time) a “liberating violence,”
leadership, and enduring formation.10 His thinking is at its farthest removed from the
openness and responsive releasement of things in their own self-becoming. The latter
turn is provoked (at least in part) by his subsequent engagement with the Daodejing
and its dao that encompasses and nourishes things without violating them in their
plural self-generative and mutual autopoiesis.11
An important clarification is necessary here: autopoiesis will be interpreted here
through Daoism rather than imposed on it. Daoist autopoiesis only occurs through
singulars (things) in their interaction (dao) through emptiness. It is inherently
communicative, mutual, or sympoietic. Collective organicism (as in romantic and
vitalist natural philosophy) and closed systems (as in the systems theory of Niklas
Luhmann) signify a reification, since the autopoiesis of a collective nature or society,
without alterity and singularity, is governed by a fatalistic totalizing arché rather
than an anarchically open and interactive self-ordering. Ziranist autopoiesis signifies
sympoiesis as it releases rather than imprisons the myriad things.
The thing shifts from its heretofore passive and static pragmatic characterization,
as an object for human eyes and hands, into a novel role in creative making (poēsis,
ποίησις) and the work during the early and mid-1930s. It is no longer only available as
a useful product or theoretically represented object as it now discloses world through
the work of art—albeit not yet potentially of and by itself in addressing and saying as
it does in 1949–50. The thing in Heidegger’s 1935 works is not exclusively determined
by usefulness and questionable in its breakdown. However, it is not yet autopoietic as it
is still defined by the work of being through sagely poets, philosophers, and lawgivers.
This resonates with Hanfei’s “legalist” way of legitimating the sovereign more than
the antipolitical and “anarchistic” politics of the Zhuangzi and Liezi which refuses the
sovereign and disentangles fixating perspectives.
Heidegger in his better moments (that prioritize existent beings) recognizes
the being of the thing as its existential autopoiesis such that the ontic operates in
relation to the ontological without being reduced to it. In other moments, the thing
is impoverished in relation to human existence, as in Being and Time, or subsumed
in being, as in the 1930s. The thing emerges in the latter context from being, and is
potentially sacrificed to it, or a given historical configuration of the event of being, in
what, in the politically highly problematic context of National Socialist totalitarianism,
Heidegger portrays as the creativity of originary “poets, thinkers and state creators,
who actually ground and establish the historical existence of a nation.”12
What then is the relation between phúsis (as upsurging and emerging holding
sway) and the particular thing? Already in the 1930s, Heidegger calls for liberating
the thing from being a particular carrier of properties and from the paradigm of
 The Autopoietic Self-Transformation of Things 43

representational thinking and truth as correctness and correspondence. The thing is

at work in emergence, art, and sacrifice and no longer merely sunk in impoverished
worldlessness, as in 1929. Yet is the thing ever genuinely liberated from its pragmatically
mediated and anthropocentrically determined nexus of significance? Does Heidegger
ever arrive at an appropriate interpretation of the thing as it is happening of itself (in its
ziran) and in its own world openness? Can we appropriately conceive the self-naturing
and worlding of the thing through Heidegger’s reflections?

4. The Thing, the Work, and the Poetic

There are already indications pointing toward the prioritization of the thing in his later
thought. Phúsis is called the first beginning and da-sein, as the “openness of the there,”
the other beginning, in his notes for the 1935 Frankfurt lectures version of “The Origin
of the Work of Art” that was eventually reworked for publication in 1949 (GA 82: 494).
In this work, earth is the emerging, the upsurge, and the showing forth of that which
is hidden. The clearing is an “open middle” or center that is not enclosed or encircled
by beings, as it “circles around all beings like the nothingness that we hardly know”
(GA 5: 40).
The thing can only be encountered amidst the clearing (Lichtung). This does
not primarily signify light but rather thinning out, as in an open area in a forest in
which light can then shine forth. Heidegger gives two apparently different (at least
in emphasis) yet perhaps complementary interpretations of the relationship between
clearing and the thing. One strategy prioritizes the clearing as an event of being over
things that arise and disappear within it: “In the midst of beings as a whole an open
place occurs. There is a clearing. Thought of in reference to beings, this clearing is more
in being than are beings” (GA 5: 39–40; Heidegger 2002: 30). The thing is in danger
of being concealed and lost in being, as the ontological difference moves toward
overweighing being against existent beings, whether taken sacrificially (e.g., for the sake
of transforming earth and things into a people’s homeland) or generationally—through
natality and mortality—as a “taking turns” with earth, things, and others.13 A being in
its own generation and death should be honored and celebrated rather than transmuted
into a sacrifice for the sake of legitimating idols of gods and peoples.
Another hermeneutical strategy diverges more powerfully from the degradation of
the thing for the sake of the idea and the soul in Occidental metaphysics. This strategy
prioritizes the thing as it shapes moment and place. It centers opening and clearing in
the unique relational worlding and gathering of the thing: “the thing things world.”
We think the thing in its own terms when we let the thing be in its thinging out of the
worlding of world (GA 7: 173). In the latter text, Heidegger evokes an almost Daoist
sensibility of ziran, as it is no longer the thing in the artwork (e.g., the shaped and
positioned stone in the poiesis of the sculpture) but the thing as thing (e.g., the uncut
unpositioned stone itself in its autopoiesis) that forms meaningful worlds. Each stone
can disclose from its own moment and place an interrelated environmental nexus.
How did Heidegger’s modified thinking of the thing take place? Revealingly, in the
“Origin of the Work of Art,” the thing in its thingliness, as carrying and opening “the
there” (GA 82: 494), plays an increasingly noteworthy role from the lecture’s initial
44 Heidegger and Dao

1935 version until its eventual 1949 publication. Heidegger contends, with Kant and
Dilthey in the background, against aesthetics and the precedence of subjectivity,
genius, and the artist. He emphasizes instead the role of elemental thingliness, earth,
and world in the priority of the work that discloses them. The thing is situated between
thingliness, equipmentality, and work articulated in relation to emergence and holding
sway (phúsis), craft, technique, and eventually technology (tékhnē), and creation and
creative action (poēsis) in 1935.
What about the thing in the work? Thinking confronts the greatest resistance
to determining the thingness of the thing as the inconspicuous thing intractably
withdraws from it (GA 5: 16–17). The artwork has a thingly basis and functions
as a pragmatically and symbolically mediated thing.14 The thing is not intuited or
given in itself. It is mediated in the work through equipmentality. In articulating
the “thingly character” of the work of art, Heidegger interrogated three prevailing
expositions concerning the thing: (1) as bearer of characteristics or properties (a
subject with predicates), (2) as the unity of a manifold of sense perceptions (as
aesthesis), and (3) as formed matter. The first two definitions express modern
theoretical models of objectified objectness (Gegenständlichkeit). The third,
Aristotelian, conception of the thing as formed matter was formulated according
to the model of creation and making through equipment, such that the thing is
experienced as objectively present-at-hand (1 and 2) and as pragmatically ready-
to-hand (3). The equipmental tool-being of the thing is determined by its qualities
of availability, reliability, and usability.
The materiality and equipmentality of the thing are appropriated in the artwork
such that the thingly work can bring, set forth and become world-disclosing and world-
building. Van Gogh’s boots, which Heidegger likely misinterpreted, “disclose the world
of the peasant as related to the earth”; the ancient Greek “temple arises from the earth
toward the sky disclosing a world.” The painting and the temple as truth-in-the-work
are specific manifestations of being’s emergence and unconcealing’s disclosure.
Things are derivative to work and truth, which are interlinked in a sacrificial
economy of the truth of being and its enactment in creative and violent works:

One essential way in which truth establishes itself in the beings it has opened
up is its setting-itself-into-the-work. Another way in which truth comes to
presence is through the act which founds a state. Again, another way in which
truth comes to shine is the proximity of that which is not simply a being but
rather the being which is most in being. Yet another way in which truth grounds
itself is the essential sacrifice. A still further way in which truth comes to be is
in the thinker’s questioning, which, as the thinking of being, names being in its
question-worthiness.
(GA 5: 49; Heidegger 2002: 37)

In this context, tékhnē is not merely technology or technique; it is a practical way of

knowing things. Poēsis is a making, forming, and creating things that can violently
enact—and gains its power from—the emergence, upsurge, and sovereign holding
sway of phúsis.
 The Autopoietic Self-Transformation of Things 45

Heidegger’s thinking in this essay continues to be inadequate to the ziranist truth of

the thing. This thing in the work is not the self-generative thing that offers a measure,
and this poetic creation is not the intimate word responsively bound to the happening
of the thing. The thing of the “Origin of the Work of Art” is closer to the dominion
of the instrumental and representational object of Being and Time than it is to the
formation of the free region of released things in the Bremen Lectures and related
notebooks (GA 99). In between these two points are his critical self-reflections on this
earlier account of earth, thing, and the work (GA 82: 494) and the 1943 engagement
with Daoism (GA 75: 43–4).

II. Heidegger’s Later Thinking of the Thing

in Relation to Daoism
5. The Historical and Philosophical Emergence of the Fourfold
In the 1949 Bremen Lectures, in many ways his most Daoist-inspired work, Heidegger
describes the gathering of the fourfold (das Geviert) taking place between earth and sky,
mortals and immortals. The established definition of “Geviert” is quadripartite or four-
quartered, evoking the boundless four-cornered dao without corners (dafang wuyu
大方無隅) of Daodejing 41 (Lou 1980: 112). Wang Bi’s commentaries on Daodejing 41
and 58 state that this fourfold encompasses and enfolds all things without cutting and
wounding any of them (不以方割物).
This usage was not unfamiliar to Heidegger’s linguistic community. Two Weimar-
era German translations already name this as the fourfold. Wilhelm’s translation reads:
“the great fourfold has no corners” (“Das große Geviert hat keine Ecken”) (Wilhelm
1911: 46, 103). Federmann’s translation has “a great fourfold without limiting angles”
(“ein groß Geviert, ohn Winkel endend”) (Federmann 1920: 47). A Daoist-informed
fourfold was articulated in Heidegger’s contemporary linguistic community in works
that were in part familiar to him. It is not used by Hölderlin and rarely by other poets.
Heidegger’s conception of the fourfold evokes Chinese discourses of the four-
cornered world and the world as consisting of heaven and earth (tiandi 天地), humans
and spirits (renshen 人神).15 The more typical classical Chinese expression is “heaven,
earth, and humans.” There are other sources from which Heidegger could have drawn.
Daodejing 25 adds, as Wilhelm discusses in his commentary, dao as a fourth (Wilhelm
1911: 99). The chapter speaks of the greatness of dao, heaven, earth, and the sage-
king in a fourfold relationship in which humans model themselves on earth, earth
on heaven, heaven on dao, and dao models itself on its own self-naturing. Wilhelm’s
comments on the preceding chapter identify “creatures” (Wilhelm’s translation of
the Chinese word for things) with gods and humans (“die ‘Geschöpfe’ = Götter und
Menschen”) and the “with-world” (Mitwelt) (Wilhelm 1911: 99).
What is an exemplary model in Daodejing 25 (Lou 1980: 65)? Fa 法 can signify law,
rule, method, exemplary model, and later the Buddhist dharma. In “legalism,” it means
method or tactical sensibility in ruling and invisibly deploying power. “Legalism” is thus
a misnomer. In the Daodejing, it is emulating and patterning oneself on the way and
46 Heidegger and Dao

the sages. In the German linguistic context that informed Heidegger’s understanding,
Victor von Strauss translated fa as correct measure (Richtmass). Wilhelm’s 1911
translation uses Vorbild which can be understood as an exemplary model but also as
a primordial archetypal image for all things, including humans and gods.16 Whereas
Strauss’s translation uses square (Quadrat) instead of fourfold and typically spirits
(Geister) in preference to gods, Wilhelm’s language is closer to Heidegger’s way of
speaking of the fourfold.
Other variations on varieties of earthly and spiritual entities appear in German
accounts of Chinese sources. A post-Han-era religious Daoist expression is “humans,
spirits, and immortals/transcendents” (ren shen xian 人神仙). Such immortals are
not Heidegger’s gods. They are biospiritually realized humans rather than natural
spirits. In the German context, the influential nineteenth-century Austrian Sinologist
and Japanologist August Pfizmaier describes in his 1870 book The Tao-Teaching
of Genuine Persons and Immortals how religious Daoist teachings encompass
heaven and earth (“Himmel und Erde”), genuine humans and immortals (“wahren
Menschen und den Unsterblichen”), and humans and gods (“Menschen und Götter”)
(Pfizmaier 1870: 229). A different variation of the cosmic whole is seen in Ernst
Faber’s 1877 work on the Daoism of the Liezi, construed as pantheistic naturalism. He
notes how humans complete or perfect themselves situated between heaven, earth, and
things (Faber 1877: 6).
The exemplary image—interpreted along the lines of a Daoist Vorbild rather than a
Jungian Urbild—of the fourfold is shaped in part by Heidegger’s intensive engagement
with the Laozi, Zhuangzi, and conceivably other Chinese and Japanese sources and
interlocutors in the 1940s. Pöggeler attributes this influence to “Chinese literature” in
Martin Heidegger’s Path of Thinking and elsewhere to the Daodejing, maintaining that
it plays an understated yet undeniable and striking role in Heidegger’s thinking.17 In
the confluence of the fourfold, it is not being or human existence, but the thing that
gathers and discloses world.18 Things now partake in an elemental being of their own,
a dimension missing in the predominantly instrumental analysis of the thing in Being
and Time, or the creative poetic violence of Introduction to Metaphysics and the various
1935 lecture versions of “The Origin of the Work of Art.” Although threatened and
circumscribed by its ordering in metaphysical and technological enframing (Gestell),
the thing can come to word (zu Wort kommen) in the attuned saying that conveys the
thing in its own sense.

6. The World-Gathering Thing

How can the once worldless thing come to gather words around itself in saying? As
noted earlier, Heidegger introduced the phrase “it worlds” in his 1919 lecture-course
to indicate the verbal character of world as worlding. He proposed “the nothing
nothings” in his 1929 lecture “What is Metaphysics?”; only later did he arrive at the
theme of the first 1949 Bremen lecture, revised as the 1950 essay “The Thing.” In these
latter works, he notes how “the thing things” in statements such as “the thinging
gathers” (“das Dingen versammelt”) and—contrary to the 1929 static worldlessness
of the thing—“the thing things world” (“das Ding dingt Welt”) (GA 7: 175, 182;
 The Autopoietic Self-Transformation of Things 47

GA 79: 13, 24). The thing is not a correlate of intentional consciousness, the projection
of temporalizing human existence, or the emerging sway of being. It is the thing’s
lingering time spent and earthly dwelling place (i.e., both senses of ver-weilen) that
gathers and brings near earth and sky, mortals and immortals into the fourfold
(GA 7: 170; GA 79: 17).
The word “thing” in its modern usage can signify an indeterminate object,
somethingness, or in its plural form reality. The archaic meanings of the Germanic
word ding/thing (*þenga-) include a moment or duration in time and gathering as,
for instance, in the assembling of the populace or a court to authorize a judgment
and decision. It is this sense of the thing’s temporalizing and gathering that Heidegger
accentuates in “The Thing.” Heidegger’s reformed elucidation of the thing consequently
breaks with his earlier temporal idealism that identified ekstatic Dasein as the locus of
temporalizing.
In Heidegger’s shift against the lingering transcendental idealism of his analytic
of Dasein, and toward the thing in its own ways of being as more than an intentional
correlate, time and space are then not given as merely objectively present as a neutral
arena for that which phenomenally appears as bearing qualities, as in the paradigm
of representational thinking. In distinction from the temporalizing of human being-
in-the-world in the 1924 lecture The Concept of Time, in which the “in each case for a
while at a particular time” (Jeweiligkeit) constitutes the “I am” (GA 64: 113), Heidegger
articulates in 1949 the prominence of things in the duration of “a while” (Weile) and
the nearness and proximity of place wherein humans reside. The lingering of things
gathers time as an encountered duration and their dwelling gathers space as an
encountered locality (Gegend) with its own singular configuration and life. Temporality
and spatiality are not merely external frames in which things are placed; they consist of
the co-presencing and mutual interconnecting and mirroring of things as world. The
verbal sense of the thinging of the thing is the nearing in which “world as world” is
held near (GA 7: 179; GA 79: 24). The thing discloses world and, further than this, it
gathers, carries, and opens the worlding of the world in the specificity of a durational
“for a while” and the locality of a place.19 This localizing place is simultaneously self-
generatively world-forming and world-opening. It might be the place on the way
where the wanderer tarries under the canopy of the useless tree, encountering anew
the earth below and the sky above.
What then is the relation of thing, earth, and world first thought of in terms of
strife and contest in the mid-1930s and now as nourishing generosity of the “there
is / it gives” (es gibt)? According to their archaic roots, as guiding hints for thinking,
earth means ground; the earth as the dwelling place of mortal things was named the
middle enclosure (Midgard) as distinct from the enclosure of the Æsir gods (Asgard).
World is the generational existence of the “age of man” (Welt as from old Germanic
weralt) or “world-age” (Weltalter). This etymology reveals a particular sense of place
and time. A world-age and its world-picture consist not only in a human generation;
it is a configuration of things. The thing, great because it does not live merely for itself,
generously opens and discloses world and world conceals the event of the thing as it
becomes an object (whether with or without value) in what Heidegger earlier described
as a practically determined referential nexus of significance.
48 Heidegger and Dao

7. Enframing and Releasing Things

Heidegger diagnosed in his December 1949 Bremen Lecture “Das Gestell” and in the
1954 essay “The Question Concerning Technology” how the collecting formation
(Gestalt) of modernity is an enframing positionality (Gestell) in which things and
humans are available as a standing-reserve (Bestand) of useful resources. Ge-stell
is a condition of world-denial and the neglect of things (GA 100: 23). It signifies a
totalizing collecting (ge-, which signifies gathering, in expressions such as Ge-viert, the
fourfold) and placing and positioning (stellen). It obscures and excludes other ways
in which things disclose themselves. It conceals—in an objectively fixated presence
(Präsenz as distinguished from self-presencing as an-wesen) and the apparent
givenness of availability—the occurrence of truth in the dynamic of mystery and
disclosure, concealment and unconcealment. Ge-stell functions through positioning
things as purely useful or useless. It operates as the enframing or enpicturing
structure, the totalizing framework, and technical apparatus in which things lose
their thingly character in being purely given, obtainable, and disposable in—to step
beyond Heidegger into critical social analysis—processes of production, exchange,
and consumption.20 Heidegger’s anti-totalizing analysis of enframing can serve as a
formal indicative and critical template for diagnosing and confronting the degradation
of things and their environing worlds.21
Heidegger’s analysis of enframing entails a significant shift in his thinking of the
thing. Heidegger was concerned foremost with the reification of human existence in
the 1920s, submerging the thing in instrumentality. He is concerned in 1949 with the
hardening fixation of thingly existence in which natural and human lives have become
objectified and instrumentalized, their presencing substantialized into available
givenness. These expressions involve two problems. First, according to Heidegger,
they hint at yet do not reach the hidden essencing of technology. This means that the
analysis of instrumentality and availability must lead to the question of presencing as
such. Heidegger’s elucidation of being in its coming to presence and withdrawal in
absence challenges being experienced as mere given presence. Secondly, given that
reification means to be reduced to a thing-like role, it could be asked whether the
thing can be reified. The thing can be reified if the thingness it is fixed and limited to
is different than its own manner of thingness. Heidegger marks the difference between
the thing as instrumentally and objectively present (as enframed in a fixed position
and use) and the thingliness of “it things” as world-gathering. The thing gathers world
and grants nearness in stillness; yet the thing as object-entity obscures and disfigures
the thing that it would represent (GA 98: 114–15, 119). Heidegger speaks in the 1949
Bremen Lectures of the danger of the enframing picturing of world in which things are
frozen in their positionality.22
The intimate bonds between thing, place, and world remain a key task for Heidegger,
as his notion of the thing shifts in relationship to instrumentality and usefulness. The
worldlessness of the thing is diagnosed as an absence and lack of the thing as thing in
Heidegger’s later thinking. The world-picture as enframing the thing positions, fixates,
and obfuscates the thing qua thing, leaving it and us in our encounter with it without
world. The ordering of enframing places itself above the thing that it encompasses
 The Autopoietic Self-Transformation of Things 49

and positions. Enframing positionality obscures the proximity of the world that
approaches in the thing (GA 11: 122). Things become mere facets of a reality consisting
of a standing-reserve of disposable inventory, thereby leaving the thing unnourished,
unprotected, and without its own event and truth.
The thing is necessary for nearing and encountering world and the world
that hides and violates things is a world-picture. This analysis of the enframing
of things could be called a formal indicative or critical model that indicates the
missing nearness and reality of the thing. Heidegger’s early conception of formal
indication (formale Anzeige) is of an emptying formalizing that opens the concrete
facticity and variety of ways of being.23 Formal indication is not only Heidegger’s
early conception of way. It could also be conceived of as a way of forming critical
models, to apply Adorno’s expression, to the extent that, as Heidegger articulates it
in the 1920s, it necessitates destructuring fixation (Destruktion) and differentiating
encounter (Auseinandersetzung). It thereby points toward that which is missing,
discloses closed-off and hidden possibilities. It intimates alternative ways of caring-for
and individuating existence. Heidegger’s early method of emptying through formal
indication is expanded and reoriented from human existence toward thing, place, and
world in his ensuing thinking of way that radicalizes this unfixing-opening structure.
The picturing, enframing, and positioning of the thing contrasts with its freedom
in the letting-releasement and saying that protects the thing and its truth (GA 76: 338).
Arendt notes how: “To thinking there belongs ‘Gelassenheit’—security, composure,
releasement, a state of relaxation, in brief, a disposition of ‘lets be’” (Arendt 2018b: 430).
In German mystical traditions, there are moments for God’s things to speak to us.
In that context, the letting be of things primarily means abandoning entanglements
and affairs that one learns to tolerate and accept, to open the soul to God. That is
not the Lao-Zhuang spontaneous embracing of the myriad things and the world in
their own self-becoming. Heidegger strikes a more Daoist than mystical tone in his
postwar thought in embracing one’s quotidian world-relations and pointing toward
things in a nonacting or nonintervention that allows the thing to be seen and heard.
In addition to the mystical state of mind of letting be, there is the Gelassenheit in and
of things in their own worldly occurring rather than in my own mental releasement.
Releasement, not unlike Daoist wuwei with which it is in dialogue, expresses not only a
comportment but further possibilities of things themselves granting mortals a guiding
measure (GA 13: 215).

8. The Measure of Things

Is there a measure on earth? In a range of early Chinese sources, which can help situate
early Daoism, thingly and environmental patterns provide models and measures
for humans. The legendary sovereign Fu Xi 伏羲 is said to have drawn the Book of
Changes’s eight trigrams based on observing the patterns of heaven and earth. Cang
Jie 倉頡 is said to have formed written characters based on the tracks of animals and
birds. The genuine measure (yidu 一度), according to the Yuandao, is following the
tracks (xungui 循軌) of things themselves (Lau and Ames 1998: 110–11).
50 Heidegger and Dao

The consummate measure, as expressed in the Daoistic Zhuangzi and the eclectic
Guanzi 管子 collections, is found in water (an image of the most indeterminate,
flexible, and encompassing of things) in its stillness, evenness, and clarity. Swirling
water undoes what is fixed, gathering and dispersing things through its movements.
Yet it is its stillness and emptiness that set the measure. In the Zhuangzi “Heavenly
Way” (tiandao 天道) chapter, water is taken as an exemplary measure for sages just as
the still level water (shui jing you ming 水靜猶明) provides the measure for carpenters
(dajiang qufa yan 大匠取法焉). The Guanzi “Water and Earth” chapter states that “the
water level is first among the five measures,” and as an elemental image of equalizing
and evenness, “water is the level for all things, the quality of tranquility in all life, and
the quality of impartiality between right and wrong, profit and loss.”24
For Heidegger, so-called modern Occidental thinking underscores in a variety
of ways the preeminence of the human, the mind, and the subject as the measure
of things.25 The deworlding of things is consummated in enframing. It signifies the
removal of the orientation of place, measure, and meaningfulness that is granted by
things and the localities and regions that gather around them. The modern crisis of
meaning is not due to the death of God or the subject. It transpires through the loss
of the sense of meaning-generating gathering things and the words that express their
encounter. Consequently, world, enacted and embodied in specific moments and
places, is viewed as a bare identity in the repetition of indifferent unfulfilled time and
the homogeneity of vacant space.
As Heidegger conveyed in his October 1955 lecture “Gelassenheit,” commemorating
the hometown musician Conradin Kreutzer, human releasement with respect to things
signifies making room for the releasement occurring in things themselves and in
their words prior to and after the questions and answers that restrain—evoking the
Daodejing—things and their mystery (GA 16: 527). This dimension of Heidegger’s
conception of releasement evokes the relational thing orientation of early Daoist
sources. In the language of the Heng Xian and the Zhuangzi, as shown in Chapter 1,
the “inaction” and letting of wuwei express a comportment that acknowledges the self-
acting (ziwei) of the thing.
Heidegger describes the prospect of the reflectively mindful and thoughtful
encounter with the thing: “we think of the thing as thing when we release the thing in
its thinging from the worlding of the world. In this way we thoughtfully let ourselves
be approached by the encompassing essencing of the thing” (GA 7: 182; GA 7: 20).
Heidegger’s expression “thoughtfully let” (andenkend lassen) means to allow the thing
(as it is of itself) to approach in responsive reminiscence of it in its lingering duration
and dwelling place. Genuine thoughtful thinking is an enactment of letting. To let
means the releasing-free of things and place; it is described as giving occasion to,
bringing about as bringing underway (zuwege-bringen), and releasing the enregioning
of the free region (GA 99: 61; GA 100: 23). Being and Time was centered on the ekstatic-
existential temporality of human existence. Now the temporalizing and spatializing
gathering of things, such as the stone and other “small things” that silently make up a
country path, is its moment and place. The stone expresses a world, and the dewdrop
reflects the universe. The saying of thinking is the echo of silence, the occurrence of
which remains a mystery (GA 97: 247).
 The Autopoietic Self-Transformation of Things 51

9. The Moment and Place of the Thing

Heidegger’s later expansive notion of the thing appears to intersect with Chinese images
and models of the thing and the gathering of the elemental in the thing. Nonliving and
living things are understood as a gathering of material and biospiritual forces (qi) in
the Chinese context. They do so such that there is no ultimate distinction between
internal and external, self and other, and kinds of being, insofar as they consist of a
temporary configuration of changing forces that form and dissipate. Each thing has
its own moment and place as it gathers and harmonizes in emptiness and oscillates
between the darkness (yin) from which they emerge and the brightness (yang) that
they hold.26 Strauss and Wilhelm translated qi (elemental force) as soul of nature
and life-breath, and yin-yang respectively as dormancy and activity and darkness
and light. Perhaps Heidegger’s attempts to translate the Daodejing with Paul Shih-yi
Hsiao contained this passage and reimagined it with a less metaphysical and more
poetic significance.
Darkness, hiddenness, mystery, and concealment are intertwined throughout
Wilhelm’s works. In his translation of Daodejing 65, pure life signifies concealed life
(verborgenes Leben, as he translates mysterious virtuosity [xuande 玄德]), which means
deep, far-reaching, and effective life (Wilhelm 1911: 70). Wilhelm describes elsewhere
how wonder swells up from the dark mystery of dao (Wilhelm 1925: 45). This mystery
is also described as concealment (Verborgenheit) from which the forces of life arise
(Wilhelm 1925: 61). Dao is the swelling primeval empty ground (chongxu 沖虛) in
the title of his 1921 translation of the Liezi. The thing emerges from the generative
fecund darkness of dao into the light in Wilhelm’s translation of Daodejing 42, which
mentions neither emptiness (chong 沖, rinsed or washed away), in affinity with
Heidegger’s earth and world of the 1935 “Origin of the Work of Art,” nor the earth
and sky of the 1949 Bremen Lectures. Heidegger expressed little interest in discourses
of life-forces in European vitalism, which remained biological and ontic, or in East
Asian qi-philosophy that was frequently connected with vitalism and pantheism in
his linguistic community. Nonetheless, this interculturally entangled imagery in works
familiar to Heidegger suggestively intermingles with his own discourse of earth,
world, and the moment and place of the gathering thing, even as the Daodejing is only
specifically mentioned, particularly between 1943 and 1950, in relation to the thing
and its emptiness.
Lao-Zhuang Daoism is often misinterpreted as a philosophy (or family of
philosophies) of the eternal dao. It is not about static atemporality but the continuing
dao (hengdao) operating through temporalizing things. In contrast with bifurcating
and fixating dao and thing, the constancy of the self is to be in accord—without
anxiety and disturbance—with the temporalizing meandering flow of things and
affairs. Inflexibility, rigidity, and fixation mean death for the embodied heart-mind
that is nourished and freed through an unrestricted communication and exchange.
Heidegger’s later notebooks explicitly recognize the theme of undoing fixation and
frozenness in the Daodejing. Winke I und II (his notebooks from 1957 to 1959) begins
by quoting Daodejing 43 on how the softest overcomes the hardest, the healing hidden
in stillness counters the fixated frozenness of things in restlessness (GA 101: 3).
52 Heidegger and Dao

Daodejing 43 describes how the softest breaks and overwhelms the hardest, how what
is without being (wuyou 無有) can enter even that which has no entrance (such as the
hardened and fixated), and how the benefits of acting without action and teaching
without words contrast with forced coercive active and speaking.
Did Heidegger’s extensive engagement with the Daodejing in the mid-1940s
help therapeutically undo hypostatization in his own thinking? There are questions
concerning bifurcation in Heidegger’s earlier thinking: issues of the potential
bifurcation and fixation of being and beings, the ontological and the ontic, which
threaten—as asserted by Heidegger’s critics—to coercively subsume and commit
violence to the particularity of persons and things. This is a genuine problematic in
Heidegger’s works of the 1930s. Heidegger’s late wartime and postwar reflections on
the thing point toward a different pathway: they demand—in a language that strongly
alludes to and periodically overtly refers to the Daodejing and the Zhuangzi—the
releasement of things and openness to their mystery (GA 16: 528).
What then is the mystery of the thing? It is bound to the thing’s own way of
temporalizing, spatializing, and speaking world. Neither time nor being can be
construed as things. They differ from the thing insofar as it is ontic and the ontological
cannot be conflated with the ontic. Nonetheless, Heidegger approaches the thing in
its own temporalizing as an ontic-ontological event irreducible to Dasein: “Each thing
has its own time” (GA 14: 6). Likewise, according to the 1969 lecture “Art and Space,”
“we ought to be able to recognize that the things themselves are places and do not
merely belong to place” (GA 13: 208). Each thing has its own “existential” moment
and place in which it is gathered and gathers world. This was an impossibility in
Being and Time and in his early period in which the primordial meanings of language
(Urbedeutungen der Sprache) relate to Dasein and not the thing (GA 17: 318). The
thing now can speak to and address me (“Das Ding spricht mich an”) even if not in a
human language (GA 89: 249). Human saying is entangled with the communication
and meaningfulness of things that open and configure places and localities for human
building and dwelling. One way of being-in-the-world is to inhabit, reside amidst, and
cultivate things and the environing world; the other extreme is to annihilate them and
struggle to persist amidst impoverished things and places stripped of their generative
nourishing autopoietic character.
Heidegger has accordingly shifted from the primacy of the projective constitutive
and still anthropocentric subject, elucidated as the ekstatic being-in-the-world of
Dasein in Being and Time, to the priority of the thing in encountering it. It is not
consciousness or the subject, even as embodied, enactive, and extended, but rather
things that constitute and orient a place. It is the thing that is formative of world. The
event of the thing can be described as the thingly worldly other-constitution of moment,
place, and sensibility. Things are not merely “there-for-me”; I am fundamentally
dependent on and enmeshed with things and their places in their emptiness and
materiality. These characteristics are underemphasized in the idealistic tendencies
of classical phenomenology and contemporary discourses that conceal them in the
embodiment, enactment, and extension of what remains—and much earlier than in the
final analysis—a constitutive subject. It is not phenomenology as driven by the subject
(whether conceived as consciousness or the body) that sets the measure, but things
 The Autopoietic Self-Transformation of Things 53

themselves in their myriad ways of being (thinging). The transcendental paradigm

of the constitutive subject, even when naturalized and pragmatized, underemphasizes
how the transcendental is inevitably ensnared and mediated in concrete historical life.
The philosophy of the subject occludes the thing in totalizing the subject’s perspective.
They are incapable of recognizing other-constitution of the self through the “other-
power” in things, places, mountains and rivers, environments, and open autopoietic
ecological systems.27 It is not abstracted matter, space, or unmediated objectness that
forms orienting localities where mortals abide, work, play, and linger; it is specific
concrete things that form them.
Inasmuch as the language of modern Occidental philosophy prioritizes the subject
and identity, an insight expressed in distinctive ways by Heidegger and his critics
Adorno and Levinas, other ways of speaking and philosophizing are vital. This concern
informs the language of radical non-identity and the priority of the object in Adorno’s
confrontation with identity-thinking. He regards identity-thinking as repressing
contradictions and differences that need intensification rather than dialectical
consonance, while Levinas addresses ethical alterity and priority of the other in
opposition to totality. Heidegger’s later reorientation toward the thing, drawing on the
“poetic thinking” of Daoists, poets, and thinkers, means turning to forms of poetic
saying that are mindfully attentive and responsive to the particularities of the thing.
Poetic letting and releasing, in which things are kept safe as the things that they are,
consequently form “the higher clarity that allows things to appear in their own ways
and grants mortals their measure” (GA 13: 215).
Heidegger’s later poetics of the thing would speak with things more directly
and intimately than subject-oriented phenomenology. Here, time and space are not
absolute containers in which things occur; nor are they forms of intuition (as in Kant)
or correlational intentional consciousness (as in Husserl) through which things are
constituted in experience. Time and space occur and are encountered vis-à-vis the
temporalizing and spatializing of things. This dynamic is world-formative and full of
the world in which it is concealed: hiding the thing in the world, to adjust a statement
from the Zhuangzi often construed—following Guo Xiang—as abiding undisturbed in
the pure immanence of transformation, while the thing hides in and from the world.28

III. Complications with Things

10. The Thing as Resistance, Complexly Mediated, and Withdrawing

In this concluding section, the discussion is widened as three sets of questions about
the thing, the thing in itself, and the possibility of an ethics of things are posed in
ways that set the stage for Part One’s subsequent chapters that focus on the emptiness,
uselessness, and a comportment of care and nurturing the life of things in which the
thing irreducibly exceeds pragmatically positioned raw material.
Heidegger remarked in the artwork essay how thinking seems to face the greatest
opposition from the thing in its thingness as the inconspicuous non-appearing thing
unyieldingly draws away from it (GA 5: 16–17). A difficulty concerning understanding
54 Heidegger and Dao

the thing is that its apparent givenness, simplicity, and unity hide that which resists
and escapes perception and conception of the thing, and the complex formation of the
senses and meaning that allow a thing to be merely perceived. The thing resists, escapes,
and furthermore can—depending on the thing—endanger those who approach it.
There are three ways of describing the thing’s inaccessibility from Heidegger’s
historical situation and reception that contextualize, complicate, and potentially
challenge his later philosophy of the thing.
First, the thing has been characterized as that which resists and stands over and
against (Gegen-stand) the perceiver as a facticity irreducible to the subject, thus
constituting its sense of facticity and external reality. Wilhelm Dilthey identified
the thing with force, resistance, and restraint, qualities that form the subject’s sense
of external reality, in his 1890 work “The Origin of Our Belief in the Reality of the
External World and Its Justification.” According to a later note, “[t]he thing is the
correlate of sensation, and the feeling of resistance is its condition” as the categories of
life are formed in relation to the forces and things that compel and resist the subject
hardening its sense of the facticity of reality (Dilthey 2004).
Second, the complexity of the thing seems to demand an archaeology in which
it disappears instead of a phenomenology of its appearing. The neo-vitalist Hans
Driesch argued against the direct phenomenological seeing of the thing as the lived
experience of the thing, regarding its appearance of “being-there” to be a complexly
mediated formation of sense, meaning, and the construction of experiential order
(Driesch 1938: 136). More radical is the elimination of the thing in the emerging
logical empiricist program of Rudolf Carnap in the 1920s. He analyzed the thing as a
complex interpretive fiction, formed from basic experiential and logical elements into
which it can be dissolved and reconstructed (Carnap 1924: 130). The thing consists of
projection based on matter, sensation, and abstraction.
Third, the reality of the thing outstrips the experientially, linguistically, and
conceptually mediated thing, or the symbolic thing, as in Lacan’s differentiation of thing
as signified and as beyond signification. There is something of the thing that inevitably
withdraws, as Heidegger puts it, and escapes, as Derrida points out: “Contrary to what
phenomenology—which is always phenomenology of perception—has tried to make
us believe, contrary to what our desire cannot fail to be tempted into believing, the
thing itself always escapes” (Derrida 1989: 9).
The thing has identity and unity over time and space vis-à-vis intentional
consciousness. To be fair, Husserl himself recognized in his phenomenology of the
thing the shading and appearing/non-appearing of the thing in the figure/ground
relation, and the potentially infinite variation through which the self-appearing thing
is perceived as a unity in its open and indeterminate horizon (Husserl 2003: 6, 114–15).
The hiddenness of the thing in the perception of the thing is a non-accidental facet of
the thing rather than the basis of an objection that would refute its being and meaning.
The hiddenness, potential dangerousness, and uncanniness of the thing call for
humility in the face of the depth and manifoldness of the thing and an openness to
appropriately adapt to the flowing, transforming patterns of things. The thing calls
for its own forms of “leaping-ahead,” as Heidegger described in a crucial passage in
the 1937–38 lecture-course Basic Questions of Philosophy: it is not a coercive knowing
 The Autopoietic Self-Transformation of Things 55

as mastering from which the thing qua thing necessarily withdraws and escapes.
Philosophy is not a scientific knowledge of things and their essence; nor is it purely the
inventing, forming, and imposing of concepts.
What then is philosophy? Evoking the traditional Aristotelian definition of
philosophy as the science of the essence of things while revising it in a quasi-Daoistic
fashion, Heidegger defines philosophy as a useless opening knowing in anticipatory
leaping-ahead of the self-concealing essencing of things (GA 45: 3, 29). It is here
that the openness of the thing as thing begins to surface as distinct from the thing
as available and useful for human existence (GA 45: 19–20). Intending the thing,
and hence representation, already presupposes its openness (GA 45: 24). Knowing
requires this openness of the thing and the opening making place for the thing in its
appearing and non-appearing; Heidegger analyzed this as its unconcealment and self-
concealment (das Sichverbergen). The self-reflexive or self-relational “self ” or “itself,”
expressed in the German third-person reflexive pronoun “sich,” indicates that it is an
aspect of the thing itself and not purely a failure of experience and conception that is
at stake.

11. The Question of the “Thing in Itself ”

Let us continue to question the thing. A crucial facet of the thing is the thing’s self-
withdrawal, self-concealment, and its arising and functioning from nothingness that
early Lao-Zhuang sources address. They do so without bifurcating the thing into
the appearing thing and the thing in itself in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason or the
signified symbolically ordered thing and the thing as alien, uncanny, and real beyond
signification in Lacan’s thing-theory.29
In Heidegger’s interpretations of Kant’s appearing and non-appearing thing
during the 1920s and 1930s, Kant’s thing-in-itself is a distinctive way of relating to
the thing, another perspective on it (GA 3: 33; GA 25: 99). It is an unusual relation
to or perspective on the thing, such as God as the ultimate most distant thing, since
it is removed from all attestation and unavailable in every way to human knowledge
(GA 41: 5, 130). Neither God nor things are interpreted as unconditional otherness or
Lacanian monstrousness.
As described earlier, Heidegger does have a sense of the uncanniness and violence
of nature as phúsis that he celebrated as creative in the mid-1930s. The uncanniness
of the thing appears in Heidegger in the breakdown of its usefulness, its missing
absence, and its technological annihilation. In addressing the thing’s otherness, it is
characteristically described more in the sense of awe, wonder, and the sublime than
in the sense of the alien monstrousness of Lacan’s reimagining of Freud’s thing (Lacan
1992: 43–5, 62–3).
The thing’s self-occurring and self-concealing (self in the sense of “zi” and “sich”)
require a transition from the phenomenology of (1) what appears to intentional or
embodied consciousness and appearances as describable and graspable, to (2) what
appears as resisting, escaping, and withdrawing in the self-concealment of the thing,
to (3) what does not appear at all while being at work in the self-naturing of the
thing (i.e., nothingness and emptiness). This free and easy shifting through manifold
56 Heidegger and Dao

perspectives, equalizing the myriad things, and undoing fixation and bifurcation,
is necessary for an appropriate encountering of and dwelling with the thing in the
freedom of its own becoming.
This perspective of the freedom of the thing entails a different ethos or way of
dwelling that recognizes their self-becoming as well as their anthropocentrically
demarcated use. It contrasts with the demand for the domination of nature expressed
in the early Chinese context in Xunzi’s criticisms of Zhuangzi that external and
internal nature must be actively controlled and forcefully reshaped; we see these in
the Baconian vision of the mastery of nature analyzed in Horkheimer and Adorno’s
Dialectic of Enlightenment, or in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit that deems the
freedom of the thing as self-contradictory and asserts that every free thing without a
master must be turned into controlled and useful property (Hegel 1986: 318). But in
forgetting and obscuring the life of things, the domination of nature does not lead to
the freedom of spirit from nature over which it rules, as Hegel proposed. It is, rather,
human enslavement as a piece of dominated nature, as Adorno and Horkheimer
diagnosed.30
“Nature” and things as free from the ostensive necessity of domination, sacrifice
and usefulness appear improbable amidst the prevailing devastation and plight that
is more than ecological. Yet, as Heidegger reiterates from Hölderlin, “where there is
danger, that which saves grows also.”31 That is to say, there is resistance where there
is coercion, and the danger brings forth its response. The plight itself demands
and animates the freedom of nature as—to think with and beyond Heidegger to
question the present—an exemplary image, an orienting bearing and comportment,
a responsive releasement and awaiting, a prophetic calling, and a critical social and
environmental model.

12. Questioning the Ethos of Things

The prospect of this other ethos and voice entails conceptual and existential
questions that will be considered in a preliminary way here and more fully addressed
in Chapter 5. In addition to the questions of the reality and fictiveness, fullness
and poverty, of the thing as appearing and non-appearing, there are difficulties
concerning the ethos of nurturing life or, to recall Okakura’s description, the way
and art of being-in-the-world as dwelling with and amidst things. Two questions,
informed by the critical readings of Heidegger conveyed by Levinas and Adorno,
could be posed at this juncture.
First, is it possible to be responsive to things in free and easy mimetic and
correlational relationships (which undo fixations) as opposed to slavish and fearful
ones (which establish fixations instead of shifting through them), and without
fetishism and idolatry? The former is requisite to confront the degradation of living
and nonliving things even as the latter worry—expressed by Levinas in his 1961 essay
“Heidegger, Gagarin, and Us” (Levinas 1990: 231–4)—must be genuinely addressed
and avoided. Secondly, does a change in the culture and way of inhabiting the earth
require a correlated transformation in economic and social conditions? Heidegger
admittedly inadequately interrogates material relations of production, exchange, and
 The Autopoietic Self-Transformation of Things 57

consumption under existing capitalist structures and, according to his contemporary

Adorno, obscures and mystifies them.32
The critical interrogations of Adorno and Levinas, as polemical yet observant
readers of Heidegger’s rural agrarian imaginary, indicate missing corners of the
square: the importance of not neglecting interhuman relations and the material and
political-economic circumstances of human existence. Nonetheless, despite trenchant
philosophical and social-political problems in Heidegger’s thought, confronting the
ongoing alienation, commodification, and reification of human existence calls for
contesting what has become of things and environments as well as persons in order to
encounter them with ecophronesis in a more appropriate and receptive way, as having
self-generating patterns, processes, and permutations of their own.33
Reconstructing and reimagining Heidegger’s later Daoist-informed philosophy of
the thing offers a significant formal indication, critical model, and guiding thread for
confronting the contemporary degradation of things and environments precisely in
insisting on (1) nonpurposive and non-pragmatic doing and letting, and (2) poetic
listening to and saying thing and world as the fundamental capacity for human
dwelling.34 Heidegger’s later conception does not speak of creative violent assertion for
the sake of instituting new worlds and ways of being in which being more authentically
and coercively holds sway. In the turn toward the thing, the poetic signifies attending
to and learning from things and the environing world and adopting the appropriate
exemplary words in interthingly and interworldly interpolation with them.

13. Buber and Heidegger as Thinkers of the Thing

I wish to conclude this chapter by insisting on Buber’s historical and philosophical
importance. Literature on Heidegger has distinct reasons for ignoring Buber’s writings,
even as they intersect with and inspired some of Heidegger’s conceptual usage and
linguistic play. Intriguingly, given his repeated references and debts to Buber’s
rendition of the Zhuangzi, Heidegger is not the first to draw connections between
Daoism, modern technology, and different prospects of interacting with things.35 Buber
clarified these interconnections and the significance of Daoist wuwei as a response to
the pathologies of technological modernity in his 1928 lecture “China and Us” (Buber
203: 285–9). Buber insisted on the ethical implications of early Daoist sources. Instead
of rejecting modernity, the liberating ideas of 1789, and the Enlightenment, Buber’s
vision of Daoism allows for a reorientation away from domination, power, and the
struggle for existence toward a genuine being-with-others, nurturing creatures, and
co-creating the world.
Buber was an early decisive source for Heidegger’s interpretation of Daoism.
Buber is known for privileging I-thou over I-it relationships. But, at the same time, he
elucidated alternative ways of relating to the “it,” drawing from Daoist discourses of
the thing and its mystery in the 1910s and 1920s in ways that intersect with Heidegger.
Buber remarked in a 1924 lecture “The Religious World-Conception,” given a few
months after his August Ascona lectures on the Daodejing, “to view things without
their mystery means to make them imaginary, it means to live with ghosts” rather
than with genuine things.36 We forget the thing as our names fail to grasp them and
58 Heidegger and Dao

their mystery (Buber 2013: 228). The thing is altered into a mere object of desire and
use, as described for instance in Hegel’s Phenomenology (Hegel 1986: 318), when it
is broken from the encounter and taken out of the fullness of its relational context
(Buber 2013: 232). Still, there is more to the thing than use, exchange, and consumption.
It is this corner of the square, the life and mystery of the thing articulated in Buber and
Heidegger that constitutes the primary focus of Part One of the present book.
What then of the Daoist thing and Heidegger’s thing that has begun to emerge in
the first two chapters? Is it a contingent accident that Heidegger’s turn toward the thing
in its priority as world-formative, and no longer worldlessly at-hand, coincided with
his intensive engagement with the Daodejing and the Zhuangzi during 1943–1951?
This intercultural entangled nexus is elucidated in the next chapters on the empty
and the useless unnecessary thing, with an eye toward other ways of dwelling and
encountering—in-the-world with and amidst things in the expansive sense of their
own ways of being.
 3

Heidegger and Laozi’s Daodejing:

The Gathering Emptiness of Thing and Place

I. Dao with and without Image and Word

1. Heidegger and the German Reception of Daoism

There is a long tradition of skepticism concerning Heidegger’s Daoist affinities.
Karl Löwith, a student and subsequent critic of Heidegger who taught in Japan
from 1936 to 1941, noticed Heidegger’s Daoist-sounding language and doubted its
genuineness. He questioned in his 1960 essay “Remarks on the Difference between
Orient and Occident” whether Heidegger’s releasement could overcome Occidental
subjectivity and that, with Heidegger’s earlier purposive for-the-sake-of-which and
dictates of being, it could truly come near to the non-differentiation of subject and
object in the originary unity of being-in-the-world of acting without action (wuwei)
(Löwith 1983: 600).
Measured according to the standpoint of Löwith’s claim, Heidegger offers at best
a flawed misappropriation of Daoism that cannot approach its truth. Of course,
Heidegger never presented himself as an advocate or scholar of Daoism, and his
later philosophy of the thing does not merely copy or plagiarize statements from the
Daodejing but rather reimagines them in his own philosophical discourse. Nonetheless,
Heidegger is a thinker of way and being-underway even more than being or meaning.1
He states multiple times that “way” (Weg) is the elemental word and that the step
(Schritt) between being and beings and the movement of the way (be-wegen) is the
summation of his thinking (GA 98: 57). His commonly misinterpreted quasi-Daoist (in
the ziranist sense) turn toward the thing (i.e., the thing as indicating much more than
a pragmatic worldless entity) in the 1940s is intertwined with his multiple imperfect
yet provocative engagements with the Daoist thing as articulated in the Daodejing and
the Zhuangzi.2 This interculturally mediated modern encounter with ancient sources
is without doubt a reimagining and adaptation of Daoist imagery and strategies in
Heidegger’s distinctive philosophical scene, formed by its own presuppositions,
purposes, and stakes.
The problems of German modernity shaped Heidegger’s response to Daoism,
much as they did those of his contemporaries. Alfred Döblin’s remarkable 1916
modernist-Daoist novel The Three Leaps of Wang Lun (Die drei Sprünge des Wang-
lun) began with Döblin “sacrificing” the work in dedication to the Daoist sage Liezi
60 Heidegger and Dao

(Döblin 2013: 8), a figure known for freely riding the wind. Faber and Wilhelm both
translated the Liezi, and it was a familiar text to German language audiences. Döblin’s
novel contemplated the interconnections between wuwei, social-political oppression,
and revolutionary violence through a fictionalized account of the eighteenth-century
Shandong White Lotus rebel leader Wang Lun 王倫 (Detering 2008: 45–54). This
novel helped inspire the engagement with Chinese thought in Marxist writers such as
Bertolt Brecht and Anna Seghers. Brecht’s mid-1930s reflections in the unpublished
Book of Twists and Turns (Buch der Wendungen), voiced through a fictionalized
version of the non-Daoist moral philosopher Me Ti (Mo Di 墨翟, c. 470–391 bce),
addressed Chinese philosophy, Marxist dialectics, and contemporary politics with
the question of how to appropriately intervene in the flow and transitions of things.3
Ernst Bloch’s reflections on Daoism likewise concerned utopian political questions.
Buber appealed in 1928 to wuwei against the Occidental fetishizing of power in “China
and us,” while Count von Keyserling pondered in 1919 Butcher Ding’s effortless ox-
cutting as an image of nourishing life while observing the mechanized death of the
Chicago stockyards.4
Heidegger’s interpretive encounter with these early Daoist sources in translation,
which intriguingly intersects with other Weimar-era explications of Daoism, from
Ludwig Klages on the political right to Buber and Bloch on the left, oscillates around his
concerns with the thing and the word in relation to his own hermeneutical situation.
This situation is informed by (1) technological modernity that, as an enframing world-
picture, has neutralized words of their sense and devastated nonliving and living things;
and, as traced in the previous chapter, (2) the failures—that Heidegger thematizes,
albeit insufficiently answers—of his own philosophical and political thinking of the
self-assertion of the will and creative sacrifice through the work during the 1930s.5

2. Chinese and German Images of Gathering and Emptiness

We might consider here connections between gathering and emptiness prior to
Heidegger. According to the Daodejing, the dao has neither image nor name, and yet it
evokes and resonates in the image and in the word. The primary imageless image to be
pursued in this chapter is that of gathering in emptiness, which Heidegger finds in Lao-
Zhuang sources. This imagery in the German context is not new, even as Heidegger
reimagines it in his own style of thinking. The gathering empty valley, empty ground,
and the groundless abyss are longstanding images of dao in Chinese sources and their
German language reception.
Joseph von Görres pioneered the study of mythology in Germany. He wrote in
his 1810 History of the Myths of the Asiatic World that “Dao is life, an abyss of all
perfections, contains all beings, is itself decree and exemplar, but (for the creature) is
unfathomable” (Görres 1810: 184). For Strauss in his 1870 edition of the Daodejing,
dao is the empty abyss from which all things arise and return (Strauss 1870: 188).
According to Rudolf Dvořák’s 1895 book on Chinese religions, the empty dao is
a bottomless abyss (bodenloser Abgrund) in which all the waters of the earth can
flow and gather without ever being filled (Dvořák 1895: 42). The dao generates and
nourishes; it also gathers and disperses. This gathering function is seen in a variety of
 Heidegger and Laozi’s Daodejing 61

German translations and interpretations that continue to resonate in Heidegger’s ways

of speaking.
“Gathering” is a guiding word in Heidegger’s terminology, as he interpreted the
root meaning of saying (lógos) as gathering. The early Greek gathering in saying and
the emptying of the soul of German mysticism undoubtedly play significant roles in
his thinking. Nonetheless, there is a specific emptiness of things and words in Daoist
(and, as seen in Part Two, Buddhist) sources from which Heidegger draws and rarely
explicitly mentions. His emphasis on gathering in emptiness speaks to an interpretive
model linked with Laozi, as he recurrently evokes Daoist forms of gathering in his
descriptions of the fourfold, the thing, language, and emptiness.
An image that reappears in classic Lao-Zhuang texts is that emptiness draws
together and enfolds, establishing places and forms of coming together. The dao is
the empty hollow (chong 沖) that is filled and vacated by swirling waters and the
filling and pouring out of the empty vessel in Daodejing 4 and 11 (Lou 1980: 10, 27).
The valley is an image of the empty yet fecund open where waters gather. Aperture
(kong 孔) is another Daoist thought-image of emptiness (Lou 1980: 52). Nothingness
(wu) also functions as emptiness in the figure of the empty vessel (Lou 1980: 26–7).
Klages, a figure dismissed by Heidegger as a popular philosopher (GA 29/30: 105),
takes this, in his discussion of Daodejing 11 in Spirit as Adversary of the Soul, to imply
that Daoist nothingness signifies emptiness, linking it with the Buddhist dharma and
the symbolism of the zero.6
Another term for emptiness occurs in the Daodejing and in a well-known passage
from the Zhuangzi. It states that the “fasting of the heart-mind” (xinzhai 心齋) is an
awaiting of things in stillness and emptiness (xuer daiwu 虛而待物), which Heidegger
calls to mind in the third Country Path Conversation, as the dao gathers only in
emptiness (weidao jixu 唯道集虛). This expression for emptiness (xu 虛) is often
linked with meditative or biospiritual states in which the heart-mind is emptied and
can receive the world. Xu as enacting emptiness refers in the Daodejing to a practice
interlinked with other practices of simplifying, stilling, and becoming tasteless, plain,
and bland. Comparable to the Hebrew word “hevel” (empty, vapor) in the Ketuvim
Book of Qohelet (Ecclesiastes), it can also signify vanity, futility, and falseness.
The translations of Victor von Strauss (1870), Martin Buber (1910), and Richard
Wilhelm (1911, 1912), with which Heidegger was familiar, gave readers a sense of
the prominence of emptiness in the texts ascribed to Laozi and Zhuangzi. Wilhelm
translated this passage as “the soul becomes empty and becomes capable of receiving
the world in itself. And it is the SENSE [SINN, as he translated dao, noting its archaic
senses] that fills this emptiness. This being-empty is the fasting of the heart” (Wilhelm
1912: 29). Adopting a model of mysticism, Buber translates the heart-mind’s emptiness
as a state of the soul’s detachment (Ablösung) in which the dao dwells (Buber 2013:
60). Further, Misch, a philosopher with whom Heidegger interacted in the 1920s
and whose work Heidegger knew, explored this Zhuangzi passage at length in “The
Way into Philosophy,” a 1926 study of the heterogeneous origins of philosophy in
breakthrough (Durchbruch) and life-reflection (Lebensbesinnung). Misch depicts
the pouring (ergießen) into and out of the dao’s stillness and emptiness in the self ’s
emptiness and detachment (Loslösung) (Misch 1926: 267).
62 Heidegger and Dao

The links between thing, gathering, and emptiness in Heidegger’s Gelassenheit,

as a form of dwelling, are indicative of a Daoist configuration; in particular, in how
it prioritizes gathering and dispersing movement in emptiness (as in Misch) and
openness to receiving the world (as in Wilhelm). How Heidegger engaged with the
Daoist language of emptiness will be traced in the current chapter on the emptiness of
the thing as well as in Part Two that concerns nothingness and emptiness.
The second part will delineate the interaction of Occidental, Daoist, and Buddhist
varieties of nothingness and emptiness in Heidegger and his early East Asian reception.
In the latter part, to glimpse ahead, we consider the extent to which emptiness is the
site of gathering in “From a Dialogue on Language” in which the absence of the friend,
Kuki Shūzō 九鬼周造 (1888–1941), in reminiscence is the gathering of that which
endures (namely, the memory of the friend). Likewise, the dialogue discloses how the
emptiness of language is the gathering of words; the emptiness (now using a Buddhist
informed image) of sky allows for the gathering of color and form. In the current
chapter, it is the emptiness of the thing as the site of the gathering of world that is in
question.

3. Dao as Guiding-Word
The present work centers around a Chinese word. It appears in the title of the Chinese
text, the Daodejing, most frequently mentioned and evoked in Heidegger’s corpus. The
most frequently mentioned East Asian (indeed, non-Occidental) word appearing in
his works is dao 道. Dao signifies way. It can also mean discourse, principle, teaching,
saying, and guiding, as Wilhelm points out (Wilhelm 1911: XV). Its cognate dao 導
means to guide or direct. The originary guiding word dao, which Heidegger describes
as a mystery, resonates with his own basic originary word Weg (way) with which he
stylizes his own journey in thinking.
This has a larger hermeneutical context worth considering. Heidegger’s ways of
speaking recall earlier German language interpretations of dao that inform Heidegger’s
linguistic community, while being distinctive from them.7 The art historian and
collector Otto Fischer wrote, for example, in his popular 1923 book on Chinese
landscape painting: “The Chinese designated [the sense of nature and the essence of
life] with the ancient mystery word dao. Long before Laozi and Confucius, dao, the
sense and the way, is the deepest word in which all anticipation and all knowledge
are hidden” (Fischer 1923: 165). According to Fischer, dao is not force (Kraft) but the
opposite of force; imageless, it encompasses all images; groundless and abyssal yet
containing all beings. Dao signals the emptiness, the zero point, the pivot, and the
mystery of being. Chinese art enacts the nature it depicts, following and embodying
the dao of the thing and the scene.8
Misch critiqued the phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger in 1930 from
the perspective of Dilthey’s hermeneutical life philosophy, a work that Husserl and
Heidegger mention. In it, Misch described the force of originary speech and how
lógos, as the root word of the beginnings of Occidental philosophy and the science of
logic, correlated with dao and brahma as the primordial words of the East.9 Primordial
words such as dao were depicted by Misch as a completing or perfecting holding sway
 Heidegger and Laozi’s Daodejing 63

(vollkommenen Walten) that stand between myth and philosophical breakthrough and
enlightenment (Misch 1950: 311–12). Misch’s arguments for the multiple global origins
of philosophy in 1926 and 1930 led Husserl and Heidegger to repeatedly reiterate its
exclusively Greek origins and Occidental character.10 At the same time, Heidegger
recognized the elemental world-formative force of words such as lógos and dao, but
without mentioning an Indic primary word such as brahma or dharma.
What is dao as a primordial word? Prior to Misch and Heidegger, Buber noted
that the first word is already a disintegration from the dao that it fails to name, relying
on the paradox of names in the Daodejing itself (Buber 2013: 111). Fischer described
dao as “the deep primordial lived-experience of the whole [Chinese] culture, and the
primordial word of all their thinking and perceiving” (Fischer 1920: 168). Oswald
Spengler also called dao a primordial word (Urwort), without mentioning other ones,
and defined dao as the essential conflict and tension between the primal forces of yin
and yang (Spengler 1922: 352). Heidegger focuses on a different point than these other
examples: untranslatability. He mentions in several places how the originary elemental
word dao evades translation (GA 11: 45; GA 12: 187); the question of untranslatability
and the need for respectful hesitancy is at the heart of “From a Dialogue on Language”
that will be considered later in Part Two.
The early Heidegger expresses a sense of the thing in the formation of the word.
Original words express the encounter with that which is encountered in the early
Heidegger: “The original word is a to-be-called, not a mere naming; it is much more
something that addresses what is encountered in the world as it is encountered.”11
Despite such phenomenological moments in which the thing’s life is glimpsed,
language appears to center on human existence in his thinking in the later 1920s.
In his subsequent reflections on poetic thinking and Daoist sources, the word again
resonates with that which is encountered and is called and addressed. Originary words
are formed in the address and interpolation of things. How then can such world-
forming words be related and translated?

II. The Way, the Mystery, and the Emptiness of the Thing

4. The Way and the Mystery

Heidegger remarked in “The Principle of Identity” that his own originary singular
verbal word Ereignis (being’s appropriating event) is “as little translatable as the guiding
Greek word logos and the Chinese dao […]. It is now used as a singulare tantum.”12
Ereignis signifies event in ordinary German. It is for Heidegger, in its concealment
and unconcealment and its history, the appropriating or enowning (er-eignen)
temporalizing-historicizing non-ontic event of being.
In a passage that is conceptually closely affiliated with his 1962 Zhuangzi
interpretation discussed in Chapter 4, the dao appears to function more radically than
the Greek word lógos as the inaccessible, sustaining, primordial emptying and filling
groundless ground of things. He asserts the significance of dao as way in a remarkable
passage in On the Way to Language:
64 Heidegger and Dao

The elemental word in Laozi’s poetic thinking is dao, which “properly speaking”
means way. But because we are prone to think of “way” superficially, as a stretch
connecting two places, our word “way” has all too rashly been considered unfit
to name what dao says. Dao is then translated as reason, mind, raison, meaning,
logos. Yet dao could be the way that gives all ways, the very source of our power to
think what reason, mind, meaning, logos properly mean to say-properly, by their
proper nature.13

Heidegger then turns to a Daoist phrase that occurs in other reflections in conjunction
with the releasement of things (GA 16: 528):

Perhaps the mystery of all mysteries [Geheimnis aller Geheimnisse] of thoughtful

saying conceals itself in the word “way,” dao, if only we will let these names return
to what they leave unspoken, if only we are capable of this, to allow them to do so.14

This passage, directly engaging expressions from the translated Daodejing, appears to
embrace a Daoist elucidation of the relation of saying and the unsaid that reflects an
ongoing concern of Heidegger’s philosophical pathway that has its own reversals and
turns.
In what ways? Way, mystery, and reversion to the silent evoke the language of the
Daodejing in translated forms. Heidegger proposes in this passage linking dao with—no
doubt in terms of his own understanding—the German word for way (Weg). Letting or
allowing names to revert or return to what they leave unspoken (which the mysterious
learning philosopher Wang Bi specifies as nothingness) refers (via translation)
to fan 反 as the very motility (be-wegen) of dao that stirs in its stillness and moves
through reversal. Way and the movement of way are among the most fundamental
hermeneutical categories of his thinking, through which the key concepts of being,
meaning, and human existence are interpreted. Heidegger interpreted dao repeatedly
as way and being-underway in relation to his own pathfinding and wayfaring through
dead-ends, reversals, and twisting turns. Hence, for instance, he described dao in a
1947 letter as “bringing on the way (movement).”15 This interpretation is not due to the
Chinese etymology of dao, which has nothing to do with movement per se. It is due to
the description of dao in the Daodejing as reversal, opposition, and return (fan), which
is defined as its fundamental transformative movement.16
Being underway, without a fixed and limiting determinate goal, in reversal and
turning, signifies incessant transformation and a comportment that accords with it. It
can also signify the acceptance of finitude and mortality in arising and dissolution. The
stirring of nothingness is somethingness in the “Book of the Yellow Emperor” (Huangdi
shu 黃帝書) chapter of the Liezi. As shape brings about shadow, and sound forms echo,
by the nature of what it is, nothingness—without either movement or birth—stirs and
births being; and being must, in the repetition of the patterns of things, return (fu 复)
to nothingness as finite forms revert to the formless.17
Heidegger’s “mystery of all mysteries” (“Geheimnis aller Geheimnisse”) is a reference
to the first chapter of the Daodejing (xuan zhi you xuan 玄之又玄) (Lou 1980: 2).
The word xuan 玄 can be translated into English as mystery, profundity, or darkness.
It is a recurring expression in the Daodejing and the Zhuangzi, and a key expression for
 Heidegger and Laozi’s Daodejing 65

Wei-Jin-era teachings of “mysterious learning” (xuanxue 玄學), sometimes designated

Neo-Daoism, and the Tang-era teaching of the “twofold mystery” (chongxuan 重玄).18
With Heidegger’s expression “mystery of all mysteries,” the German could be translated
as “secret of all secrets.” This differs from Wilhelm’s translation of the last lines of
chapter one of the Daodejing that speak of a yet even deeper mystery of the mystery as
the dao’s gateway or portal: “In its unity, it is called the mystery. The deeper mystery of
the mystery is the gateway through which all wonders emerge.”19
Mystery is a gateway or a site of passage in the Daodejing. Intriguingly, to reference a
source mentioned by Heidegger and presumably familiar to him, Schelling emphasizes
the image of the gateway (men 門) or portal (Pforte) in his Neo-Platonic interpretation
of the Daodejing in The Philosophy of Mythology: “Dao means gateway, the dao-teaching
is the teaching of the great gateway in being, of non-being, of that which is able to be,
through which all finite being enters into actual being” (Schelling 1857: 564).

5. Uncut Blocks, Empty Vessels, and Inauspicious Devices

Before turning to Heidegger’s readings of the empty jug, what is the broader historical
situation of Daodejing 11? What is the vessel that is in question? There are three
characteristics of the Chinese word in question that need to be adequately clarified.
Qi 器 primarily signifies utensil, instrument, or device, including the vessel
and the weapon in the Daodejing. It has multiple intriguing roles in this text that
are reflected in various English and German translations. First, in Daodejing 28,
it refers to what is produced from unfashioned material or that which is scattered
and differentiated from simplicity.20 This image reoccurs in the Zhuangzi’s “Horses
Hooves” (mati 馬蹄) outer chapter: it is the fault of the craftsperson and sage that
deficient and broken simplicity produces devices (殘樸以為器). Wang Bi comments
that when simplicity and genuineness are scattered in countless directions, devices
are born and officials arise, and sages respond to the fragmented by bringing about
reversion to simplicity.21
A significant facet of the Daodejing is the exemplary model of sustaining and
reverting to simplicity (pu 樸) that is correlated with retaining and returning to
emptiness (xu 虛) and stillness (jing 靜). The exemplary sages and sage-kings are
said to retain and enact the unbroken simplicity of dao amidst the brokenness and
differentiation of the world, perceiving the simplicity operative in differentiated things.
In chapter 37, nameless simplicity is described as lacking purposiveness and desiring,
which are limiting forms of conditioning, such that the world determines itself (天下
將自定) and, to draw on chapter 57, people simplify themselves (民自樸).
The guiding image of simplicity is the naturally occurring uncarved block. It is
also praised as plainness and blandness. Simplicity as a form of comportment is an
attunement with the self-occurring of things and persons, which are not separated
by an abyss in ziranist or (in an expansive unrestricted sense) naturalist early Daoist
discourses. Chapter 16 speaks of enacting emptiness to the utmost and safeguarding
stillness (致虛極, 守靜篤). Simplicity is correlated with emptiness and stillness in the
nineteenth chapter. Such simplicity comes to signify a biospiritual comportment and
practice in multiple Daoist transmissions, an aesthetic comportment and style in East
Asian art and poetry, and an ontological-cosmological condition.22
66 Heidegger and Dao

Second, qi signifies vessel in passages in chapters 11, 29, 41, and 67, where it serves
as an image of emptiness, openness, receiving, and dao. The word qi also designates
the empty thing and vessel. In addition to chapter 11, qi is used to describe the world
as spirit-vessel in Daodejing 29 (天下神器). Translations sometimes render this as
spiritual thing or device. According to Wang Bi, as spirit has neither form nor fragrance,
and devices are formed through amalgamations of form, the great intangible vessel of
the world has no shape or form to fit and condition it.23
The dao is the longest forming and lasting great vessel (大器晚成) in chapter 41.
Wang Bi comments on how the dao as the great vessel generates the world, without
holding onto anything in it, and thus is enduring.24 In chapter 67, it is the sage who
becomes an open and receptive vessel, an empty and thus beneficial device for the
world, and endures by stepping aside and benefiting the flourishing of things and
people.25 The empty vessel image refers in these lines to the openness and beneficial
nourishment of the thing, the world, and the sage.
Third, qi means device or instrument in passages in chapters 31, 36, 57, and 80
where it concerns use and profit, power and war, not using and deploying implements
and persons. The thing-implement is broken from simplicity. It is itself and can be
used because of its emptiness, and its use as instrumental device can be inauspicious
and destructive. Qi can accordingly refer to inauspicious and dangerous devices that
should not be utilized.
In chapter 31, weapons are exposed as inauspicious instruments, destructive to
things, and not to be used by those who enact dao except, with mourning, out of
necessity. In chapter 36 it is said that the sharp (military and punitive) weapons and
devices of the state should not be shown to the people, a statement of wisdom that the
sage should not exhibit to the world, according to the Zhuangzi chapter Quqie 胠篋.
The title is an image of human striving as it ironically means to coercively force open
an already open bag. Several Chinese interpretations informed by the Huanglao and
“legalist” models, such as the Heshanggong, take this to mean that instruments are
most effective when used while being concealed.
Wang Bi likewise explicates this chapter to mean using yet not showing instruments.
He adds the ziranist point that external coercion and punishment are to be avoided in
order to act in accordance with the nature (xing) of people.26 The xing 性 character is
composed of the heart and life radicals. It is semantically unrelated yet conceptually
linked with great nature (da ziran). It designates the characteristics and temperament
that typically make a human what it is. It is a disputed concept in early Chinese
philosophy that does not appear in the Daodejing. Wang Bi explains that deliberate
coercive action and use ruin things in the world and persons in society (Lou 1980: 196;
Lynn 1999: 33).
In Daodejing 57, it is claimed that the more devices and profits the state produces
and pursues, the greater the disorder and poverty that will result. Although this has
been interpreted as rejecting “legalist” administrative procedures, a philosophy that
accentuates the uses of tactics and techniques (shu 術), the Yulao 喻老 and Neichu
shuo xia 內儲說下 chapters of the Hanfeizi offer a legalistic interpretation that the two
handles of reward and punishment (shangfa 賞罰) are the weapons of the state to be
wielded in concealment by the sovereign. The Heshanggong commentary also takes
governing to be about concealment of use rather than nonuse.
 Heidegger and Laozi’s Daodejing 67

Wang Bi contends that the Daodejing concerns an emptied and thus impartial
comportment, commenting that all devices utilized out of self-interest belong to the
category of “sharp weapons” (liqi 利器) to be shunned as the people are allowed to
follow their natures.27 In chapter 80, a smaller and simpler state that does not use
peoples and devices is said to be preferable, existing in an agrarian plainness and
ordinariness that might have appealed to Heidegger (presumably in contrast to large
states that mobilize and consume all things). The Heshanggong commentary takes this
as the difference between promoting the devices of farming that nourish and those of
war that destroy people.28

6. Chinese Interpretations of the Empty Vessel

What then of the image of the empty vessel to which Heidegger repeatedly returned?
Chinese interpretations indicate some key facets of this image. One paradigmatic
Chinese reading is found in the Han-era Heshanggong commentary. The emptiness
of the wheel, vessel, and room are guiding images for biospiritual and biopolitical
practice. How can nothingness and emptiness become keywords in explaining the
workings of the self, the natural world, and society? They indicate a disposition of
being able to receive and accordingly use all things. The emptied body and emptied
kingdom can, by clearing away conditioning passions and desires, become the host for
and receive spirit and blessing.
A second paradigmatic Chinese reading from the Wei-Jin period suggests that
links between Laozi’s emptiness and Zhuangzi’s uselessness and imperfectionism can
be deployed to assess Heidegger’s interpretive strategy. The fundamental emptying of
the thing serves as an example of wuwei in the commentaries of mysterious learning
philosopher Wang Bi from the Wei-Jin era.
Wang Bi interprets “not” as “the nothing” from which action, being, and use arise.
Wuwei is consequently not “not action.” It is rather an acting (wei) and functioning/
using (yong 用) of and from out of nothingness (wu). Wuneng 無能 is not “not able”;
it is the capacity to receive and accept all things in nothingness (無能受物之故).
Uselessness (wuyong 無用) is the use/functioning from out of nothingness. When it
is in nothingness, the being of the vessel becomes useful (當其無, 有器之用). Being
(you 有) is then a using or functioning (yong) from nothingness.29
Wang Bi’s prioritization of nothingness, relative to being, signifies the formation
of the emptiness and openness that allows each being and thing to enact its own
nature. This priority was rejected in Guo Xiang’s Zhuangzi commentary. It criticized
the prioritizing of nothingness over being as a reification of the nothing into a first
ground or cause. Guo Xiang equalized and relativized both being and nothing,
concluding that there are only singular things in their own self-generation and self-
determination. From the distinctive perspectives of generative nothingness in Wang
Bi—and self-emptiness (śūnyatā, kong) in early Wei-Jin-era Buddhists such as Zhi
Dun—Guo Xiang’s radicalization of the ziranist strategy entails the closure of the fluid
transformative functioning of nothingness in the hypostatization and fatalism of the
thing. To modify Heidegger’s language, Wang Bi introduces a meontological difference
between beings and the nothingness of being that preserves the open clearing in which
beings stand.
68 Heidegger and Dao

Wang Bi’s primordial formless and substanceless nothingness is non-negational,

not derivative of a negation of an assertion. It is not separated as a first principle or
cause from things, as Guo Xiang appears to suggest. Nothingness is expressed in the
patterning principle (li) and reciprocation immanent to things themselves in their
self-generation and self-occurring. As Wang Bi remarked concerning the first line of
Daodejing 5: heaven-and-earth trusts the self-occurring (of things) and not moralistic
benevolence, there is no coercive intervening action or creation, only the myriad
things in their self-reciprocating self-patterning.30 Nothingness (wu), and not dao, is
the ultimate guiding word indicating the nameless. Wang Bi’s commentary on the Book
of Changes clarifies his prioritization of the nothing as functioning through dao, the
forces of yin and yang, and the myriad things:

The reciprocal processes of yin and yang are designated dao. What is this dao? It
is a name for nothingness; it is that which pervades everything; and it is that from
which all things arise. As an equivalent, we designate it dao. As it operates silently
and without substance, it is impossible to form images for it. Only when the
functioning of being reaches its apex do the merits of nonbeing become manifest.31

The merits of nothingness and emptiness will be explored further in Part Two. It
already should be noted how emptiness and the empty vessel are linked with humility
that echoes in Heidegger’s mindful attentiveness and humility in encountering things.
This modesty toward things and affairs is ubiquitous in early Chinese teachings
concerning enacting emptiness (xu) as a biospiritual or ethical practice. We might,
for a moment, consider two paradigmatic examples that link emptiness and humility
in which the empty vessel signifies the capacity to welcome and receive. First, the
Book of Changes states that the exemplary person receives others in emptiness and the
enactment of emptying is movement toward the good.32 It prescribes a comportment of
emptiness and humbleness specifically in moments of increase and plenitude. Second,
the late Han-era eclectic Confucian Xu Gan 徐幹 (171–218 ce) composed a chapter
on “emptying dao” or the “dao of humility” (xudao 虛道) in his Balanced Discourses
(Zhong Lun 中論). The empty vessel serves here as an exemplary ethical model of
virtue. The exemplary person is said to empty the heart-mind of ambitions, thereby
becoming humble, receptive, and able to appropriately respond to the situation.33 It is
unclear if Heidegger was familiar with Wilhelm’s well-known Book of Changes edition.
His language more closely matches the Daodejing. His interlinking of emptiness,
silence, reticence, and humility, the explicit association with the releasement of things
and the emptiness of the vessel, indicates Heidegger’s specific use of Daoist sources
even as they evoke aspects of teachings linked with the Book of Changes.

7. The Empty Vessel in Strauss, Wilhelm, and Heidegger (1870, 1911, 1943)
Keeping in view early ziranist readings of the vessel and thing, particularly in Wang Bi,
this chapter now turns to tracing how Heidegger repeatedly returns to the movement
of dao, the openness of the mystery, and the releasement and emptiness of the thing.
This is paradigmatically expressed in the image of the empty vessel in Daodejing 11.
 Heidegger and Laozi’s Daodejing 69

This reference reoccurs in “The Uniqueness of the Poet” in 1943 (GA 75: 43), the first
of the Country Path Conversations in 1944 (GA 77: 133–8), the 1949 Bremen lecture on
the thing (GA 79: 11–13), and “The Thing” in 1950 (GA 7: 173).
Instead of the poetic reiteration of phúsis of the work-in-the-thing that was
emphasized in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” it is its emptiness that allows the
formed vessel to function and flourish as what it is. The vessel, serving as an image of
the thing, is filled and emptied, gathering and releasing world through its emptiness.
This breath-like flow of the emptying and filling of the thing is possible because of its
emptiness, such that it cannot be separated or isolated from its environing world.
It is not accidental that Heidegger’s initial reflections on Daodejing 11 occur in
the context of the poet Hölderlin and the task of a poetic philosophizing, or since
philosophy is limited as metaphysics and onto-theology, a poetic thinking. As in the
early essay on the artwork, Heidegger seeks to establish the uniqueness, the autonomy,
of the work. The uniqueness of the poetic word is, Heidegger writes in 1939, an
existential moment in the history and disclosure of being “in which a fundamental
shaking of all metaphysical and thus also the ‘religious’ and ‘aesthetic’ and ‘political’
truth of beings begins” (GA 75: 5).
In the 1943 essay, Heidegger turns to the Daodejing through a reflection on the
experience of learning mindful attentiveness (Achtsamkeit) through “glimpsing
inconspicuous simplicity, appropriating it ever more originally, and becoming ever
more respectfully reserved before it” (GA 75: 42–3). Wilhelm’s translation of Daodejing
15 speaks of being hesitant and careful, reserved and reticent like a guest, simple
like an unworked thing, still in the midst of duration, abiding in incompletion and
imperfection, and safeguarding dao. Heidegger discussed this chapter with the visiting
Chinese scholar Paul Shih-yi Hsiao and quoted it in letters to Siegfried Bröse and
Erhart Kästner to describe the cautious reserve and stillness operative in movement.34
The poet’s mindful and respectfully reserved encounter with the inconspicuous and
modest simplicity of simple things leads back and returns to the ontological difference
between beings and being, and not to dao as in Daodejing 15.
Heidegger claims at this point that “being” in this specific difference is referred
to if not named in Daodejing 11. Informed by the thinking of being, which seeks to
mindfully encounter the simplicity of things, his translation diverges in significant
ways from those of Strauss and Wilhelm. The Chinese text uses “nothing” (wu) to
speak of the empty center of the wheel, the vessel, and the room. This nothing makes
their function and use possible.35 Wilhelm takes this to refer to spatial emptiness, while
Wang Bi elucidates it as the generative enactment of nothingness itself. Wu is rendered
as nonbeing in Strauss, as nothing and (in its final appearance) nonbeing in Wilhelm,
and as emptiness and (in its final occurrence) nonbeings in Heidegger.36
The distinctive characteristics of Heidegger’s rendition in comparison with Strauss
and Wilhelm are (1) its use of emptiness for wu; (2) the introduction of the “being
of ” the wheel, vessel, and room, bringing to the fore the use of being (you 有) in the
chapter, whereas Strauss and Wilhelm refer only to the thing; and (3) how usefulness
refers to being and being is bestowed or granted (gewährt) in emptiness.
There is a threefold relation in all three German translations that each gives its
own distinctive form and content. Strauss elucidates the relation between nonbeing,
70 Heidegger and Dao

thing, and use as one of accordance and effecting; Wilhelm of the relation between
nothing, thing, and usability as resting and touching on and giving; and Heidegger of
the granting of use through being and being through emptiness. Heidegger is neither
purely intuiting truths nor imposing his own presuppositions; he is engaging the
text within his own interpretive context. This is particularly true of his collaboration
with Xiao who published an Italian translation of the Daodejing in 1941. He attended
Heidegger’s courses and collaborated with him in 1943–1944 in translating chapters of
the Daodejing into German.37

8. The Implications of Emptiness (1943)

“The Uniqueness of the Poet” relates to the emptiness and nonbeing that safeguard
being, on the one hand, and the usability of beings, on the other. Heidegger
elucidates, in his revealing translation of this passage, the association between the
empty nothing (wu 無) and the possibility and constitution of use and the useful
(yong 用) in the context of a formulation of the ontological difference between
beings and being: whereas beings (Seiende) produce usability, nonbeing (Nicht-
Seiende) grants being (Sein). It is the empty (Leere) that grants and safeguards things
such as the wheel, the vase and the house, and their appropriate usage (Gebrauch
in Strauss’s rendition of Daodejing 11) in contrast with mere instrumental gain
(Gewinn in Strauss).38 Words such as Brauch and Gebrauch are used in related senses
in Heidegger’s later writings: they do not signify a mere customary habitus, but a
respectful, sharing, and attuned using and situated working with things. Exemplary
illustrations of such a free co-responsive attunement are found throughout Daoist
and later Chan Buddhist sources.
Heidegger’s interpretation of Daodejing 11 in the context of an interpretation of
Hölderlin expresses themes that are further unfolded over the course of the 1940s and
1950s. He finds an indicative clue in its translated words: “the hint rests on that which,
as the in-between, holds everything open in itself and expands into the expanse of the
duration [of the awhile] and the region that appears to us all too easily and frequently
as nothing” (GA 75: 43). As traced later in Part Two, and despite his reputation as a
philosopher of nothingness that is explored in chapter 8, this idea, the in-between of
the openness and emptiness of being, increasingly alters Heidegger’s earlier conception
of nothingness. It is Heidegger who cites and adopts the Daodejing in this context,
allowing the reconstruction of Daoist elements in his dialogues and lectures that
deploy this same language.
Emptiness is not a spatial vacuum, as Heidegger later notes, nor is it air pushed out
by liquid (GA 77: 131–2). It opens an elucidation of thing, place, and the temporality
and spatiality of human existence. Instead of accentuating anxiety in face of the
nothing, the emptiness of the in-between signifies the temporalizing meanwhile and
the spatializing middle. It is elucidated as an in-between of the encountered duration
of the awhile and the abiding awhile of the region. Place and space as well as the
momentary instant and time are constituted amidst this gathering and dispersal. It
is the emptiness of things and places that allows gathering and dispersion to occur
(GA 75: 43).
 Heidegger and Laozi’s Daodejing 71

Humans do not abide with things in neutral uniform space-time. They dwell
between earth and world in the continuing meanwhile, the nearness of the in-the-
midst in which persons and things are welcomed, and the thoughtful remembrance
of the absent. Mortals abide and linger in these moments and places that can, for
instance, recall the departed missing friend in a conversation on language decades
later. It is in this expansiveness, the “inner” and the “empty,” that humans receive their
ways of essencing and from which the metaphysical representation of life, spirit, and
soul derives (GA 75: 44).

III. Emptiness and the Thing between

Releasement and Enframing
9. The Empty Jug, the Thing, and Releasement (1944–1945)
The question of pragmatic usefulness has a long history in Heidegger’s writings,
occupying a crucial role in the form of pragmatic readiness-to-hand in the first
division of Being and Time and emphasized in pragmatist reconstructions of
Heidegger’s philosophy. Heidegger is concerned in his later lectures and lecture-
courses concerning the thing with distinguishing things from their instrumental use
and their technological enframing (Gestell).
Heidegger, as with other German intellectuals in the first half of the twentieth
century (notably, Buber, Keyserling, and Wilhelm, among others), associates these
ancient Chinese sources with the modern problematic of technology through notions
of thingness, usefulness, and usability.39 The first of the 1944–1945 Country Path
Conversations brings up the empty jug (Krug, the same word used in Okakura, Fischer,
and Klages) and the thing in the context of tékhnē and technological modernity.40
As previously shown, the Daodejing and related texts are concerned with their own
questions of craft, technique, suspending the will, waiting, and responsiveness to
the thing as it is of itself such that Heidegger’s country-path interlocutors evoke the
conceptual constellation of this ancient Chinese text without invoking it.
Heidegger once again poses the question of the thing, of how to illumine the thing
qua thing instead of as represented object, in the context of tékhnē. The initial approach
recalls his 1935 essay on the artwork as the thing arises from earth. The thing in the
form of the jug not only consists of earth: it is only standing (stehen) on earth through
its consisting (bestehen) (GA 77: 126). This relational coming-to-stand is sedimented
as the standing-reserve (Bestand) in which things are mere raw materials and resources
for human use. The thing as uselessly itself does not consist only of the formed matter
articulated in its classical definition; nor is it defined principally by its instrumental
readiness and theoretical objective presence, as in Being and Time.
Recalling his earlier translation and interpretation of Daodejing 11, it is the
emptiness of it as a vessel (Gefäß) that makes the jug (Krug) what it is. The emptiness
between the sides, the bottom, and the edges is the holding of the vessel as that which
holds (“das Fassende des Gefäßes”) such that the jug, as a vessel standing in itself,
is not only comprised of what compromises it, the shaped earth, but of emptiness.
72 Heidegger and Dao

This emptiness (Leere) and nothingness (Nichts) of the jug is in reality what the jug is.
And this emptiness, as that which is ungraspable (unfasslich), cannot itself be held and
grasped (GA 77: 130). How can the vessel’s reality rest in an empty nothing? The vessel
is not a pure nothingness, as the craftsperson shapes emptiness with the clay to form it.
Heidegger proceeds to referentially interrelate the thing, encountering (gegnen in
its archaic sense) the counterpart (entgegnen), and the releasement in which the thing
is recognized as “enregioned” (vergegnet) in a local region (Gegend). This description
of the varieties of the counterpart and region is even more differentiated than Buber’s
earlier usage—in his early writings on Daoism, Hassidism, and dialogical ethics—of
begegnen as encounter, entgegnen as opposition, vergegnen as mis-encounter, Ereignis
as the event of meeting, and Gegend as environment.41 Heidegger is not describing the
interethical relationship, which encompasses meeting with things as well as God in
Buber. This is the relation between the thing, the openness of interthingly interaction
(that Heidegger elsewhere calls Geding, world as the gathering of things), and place
that characterizes locality and consequently human dwelling.42
Heidegger’s initial elucidation of releasement in the first Country Path Conversation
does not refer to a state of mind such as serenity; nor does it refer to the constellation
of soul, nothingness, and God of German mysticism. This is an inquiry inspired—via
a long and complex interculturally mediated journey—by the text attributed to Laozi
as mediated by Wilhelm and others. Heidegger draws on and incorporates Daoist
elements—which operate as examples for reflective poetic thinking—in three ways: (1)
he appears to evoke while reworking in his own philosophical context the language
of German language translations and interpretations; (2) he assembles interpretive
strategies that align with and can be interpreted according to the models of releasement-
self-naturing (wuwei-ziran), resonance-responsiveness (ganying 感應), and dao as the
movement of reversal, opposition, and return (fan 反); and (3) thinking the thing is
depicted in a Lao-Zhuang style as a releasement to it in its specific essencing as a thing
in its own moment and place by patiently encountering, abiding, waiting, and not-
willing (GA 77: 133).

10. Heidegger’s Wuwei and Ziran

Can Heidegger’s thought be interpreted or reimagined as a thinking of wuwei and ziran?
No doubt, at least in part. Heidegger’s interpretive strategy historically reflects his earlier
discussion of the Daodejing and conceptually correlates with wuwei and ziran; action
(wei) and inaction (wuwei) are interpreted in the German reception of the Daodejing
as willing and not-willing, and a number of texts describe Daoism as a philosophy
of not-willing and willlessness.43 In the nineteenth-century German philosophical
scene, Arthur Schopenhauer and Eduard von Hartmann already conceived of Daoism
as entailing the suspension of the individual will.44 In a work Heidegger dismissively
mentioned in 1929, Klages contended in his 1929 Spirit as Adversary of the Soul that
Nietzsche’s critique of not-willing cannot be applied to Daoism.45
Heidegger states that this thing is not a “thing in itself ” but rather a “thing for itself ”
(GA 77: 133, 139). Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit denies that there can be a thing for
itself that is free from a master (Hegel 1986: 318). Heidegger echoes no doubt Meister
Eckhart’s language with which he was long familiar (GA 1: 218; GA 60: 316–17) and
 Heidegger and Laozi’s Daodejing 73

to whom the conversation directly refers precisely to deny that his releasement and
Eckhart’s releasement are the same (GA 77: 109). The mystical discourse of things lets
things be while aiming at suspending things for the sake of the detachment of the
soul, freeing it from sin and for union with God. Heidegger’s language of releasement
is distinctive. First, it is closer to skepticism in suspending the very compulsion for
assertion, affirmation, and positivity that consume enthusiastic mystical absorption
and speculative dialectics. Second, it is detached from monotheism and its atheistic
negation without, however, embracing the “negative pantheism” of the pessimistic
negation of the will. Heidegger could not see beyond Nietzsche’s polemical critique
of Schopenhauer and von Hartmann, who Nietzsche condemned as Schopenhauer’s
meager impoverished ape.46
If not Eckhart or Schopenhauer, much less their epigones, can the Daodejing with
its humility before things be interpreted as offering a guiding thread for thinking the
freedom toward and of worldly beings? Heidegger’s European sources are insufficient,
and he directly and indirectly draws on Daoist language. The thinking of the thing
for itself, the thing in its own essencing, and the thing as that which it is of itself in
Heidegger’s first Country Path Conversation is indicative of the ziran of the Daodejing.
This tendency is evident in its German reception and translation that asserts the
freedom and the being of itself of the thing. Strauss translated ziran as freedom (frei,
freiwillig, Freiheit), according to nature (naturgemäß), and measure of itself (Richtmaß
sein Selbst).47 Wilhelm translated it as independent (selbständig), “of itself ” (von
selber), self-exemplary (sich selber zum Vorbild), and the natural course of things
(natürlichen Lauf der Dinge).48 Strauss describes in his comments on chapter 11 how
human freedom is only found in the “freedom of being” (Strauss 1870: 120). Wilhelm
expresses the ziran of the myriad things as follows: “All creatures by themselves shape
themselves” (Wilhelm 1911: 39).
The typical ways in which the thing is represented and explained as object rushes
over the thing and neglects it as it is of itself. The thing is lost in its reduction to the
pragmatically useful and theoretically posited elements that compose it. Encountering
the thing in its own locality does not require more activity and willing on the part of
the subject. Another comportment is called for that the first and third Country Path
Conversations designate waiting. Waiting, as seen in the next chapter on Heidegger’s
third conversation and the Zhuangzi, occurs in the fasting and emptying of the heart-
mind that is freed to encounter the thing.
Stepping back from the subject and the will occurs in Heidegger in waiting
attentively and mindfully for the thing’s essencing in its own constitutive openness.
The thing is encountered temporally as abiding in the moment of its own “awhile”
and spatially as enregioning in its place (GA 77: 133). The thing is not statically given
invariably all at once, but in its movement, reversal, and counter-partnering, and in its
gathering awhile and environing region in which it abides. Pure or exemplary waiting
does not prescribe and dictate the nature of the thing to it. It does not seek to subsume
it under a worldview or theoretical picture. It releases the thing to its own way and
timing of being itself.
The thing’s abiding in the duration of its moment and in its environing locality
can also be referred to threads found in the Daodejing, and related sources, in
which the generational life of the thing is recognized and acknowledged in its own
74 Heidegger and Dao

moment and place. Early Daoism is often said to be ahistorical: yet the category of
living generations is crucial to it. Early Daoist sources suggest nourishing the living
and letting go of the dead, as only fixations, residues, and shadows remain of their
former traces. It does not annihilate or suppress all traces of what has been before.
It releases the past to itself. Heidegger appears to strike a different tone—although
one that resonates with East Asian poetics of ruins, fading life, and mourning—in
thoughtful remembrance of the absences that still address us: the abandoned tools
and overgrown ruins along the country path, the faded ghostly figure in a worn
photograph, or (in “From a Dialogue on Language”) the long-departed friend
invoked in the gathering of conversation. In Heidegger’s thoughtful remembrance of
the absent friend, it is not mere presence but the emptying that gathers and releases.
Heidegger’s pursuit of “modern archaics” (to adopt an interpretive term from Wu
2014), a strategy directed toward recuperating the past and the archaic that has been
shaped by the paradoxes of modernity, has been derided as anachronistic, melancholic,
nostalgic, provincial, and rustic.49 Such complaints are not without warrant, albeit
incomplete, and in need of complication. First, it is accurate insofar as there is a tone
of lament and loss that, nonetheless, should not be too quickly dismissed as a reactive,
provincial, and—in Jean-François Lyotard’s words, perhaps referring to a fairytale by the
Brothers Grimm—that of a small-time, little, and crafty peasant (Lyotard 1994: 113).
But, unlike the fairytale “The Peasant and the Devil,” the crafty peasant was in this case
tricked by the devil and left only with stubble. Heidegger appears naive, opportunistic,
and ideologically deluded in 1933. Bloch has noted the reactive and revolutionary
dynamics that inform Hebel and other rural peasant authors who appealed to
Heidegger (Bloch 1984: 365–84). Adorno has observed how each perspective can have
ideological and critical functions. These points are applicable to Heidegger’s case: even
if he is taken as an ideologue, which he is typically not, that ideology and its critique are
indicative of alternative moments. Rather than signifying a merely reactionary fixation
on what has been lost, as Heidegger’s critics insist, his conception of the relation to the
past can be interpreted—in its best moments—as its releasement in which memories
and past things gather. This would signify a genuine non-coercive remembrance with
respect to the past and that which is fading into the forgotten.
Secondly, the claim is one-sided. Heidegger’s articulation of the moment and
locality of the thing in his later thinking still has the threefold structure of temporality
in altered form. There is a threefold nexus of the past in thoughtful remembrance (an-
denken), the present in the current moment of encounter or its absence, and the future
in simple or pure waiting (emptied of anticipation and projection) in determining that
which makes the thing what it is in its own free self-essencing and self-naturing.

11. Drinking from the Empty Vessel and Sojourning in the Expanse
The empty jug is not indeterminate emptiness as such. It is empty of drink. The
availability and usefulness of the drink for the drinker, however, no longer characterize
the jug’s own way of being. As a being (Seiende) grants its use (GA 75: 43), the jug is a
being that grants drinking yet is not solely determined by its use by the drinker. In an
interpretive maneuver that clearly evokes the Zhuangzi, its own emptiness safeguards
 Heidegger and Laozi’s Daodejing 75

the thing from pure instrumentality. Emptiness holds the drink, preserving and
safekeeping it (GA 77: 134).
The empty jug is not merely ready-to-hand for use as in Being and Time. It grants
and allows the receiving and drinking of wine. Accordingly, by extension, the empty
wheel grants and allows the cart to be drawn along the road, and the empty room
grants and allows people and things to gather and dwell within it. Emptiness is the
condition of the thing’s self-naturing, a uselessness that grants the variety of its uses. It
grants receiving and gathering, and what is formed in receiving and gathering can be
used. Emptiness is, as a result, the prerequisite of the use and usefulness of the being
of the thing.
The drink is not simply used even if it appears so in the haste of consumption. The
drink draws from and abides in the wine and in the elemental: in the branches, in the
earth, in the sunshine and rain, in the gifts of heaven. The emptiness of the jug abides
in the expansiveness drawing from nourishing heaven and earth that are the primary
exemplars of nourishing life in the Daodejing: they are long in duration because they live
for the myriad things rather than themselves (Lou 1980: 19). Parallel to the Daodejing’s
dao, Heidegger’s expanse is limitless and unbounded; it also abides in the jug as it
moves and returns to itself evoking the dao’s way of moving. Accordingly, Heidegger’s
interlocutors recognize how the jug is itself only because it rests in this expanse and in
the elemental in vine, water, and sunshine. Heidegger delineates further how the thing
is an abiding and sojourning (verweilen) in and returning (Rückkehr) to itself. The
empty jug, he states, abides in itself and returns to itself in the moment of the while in
which it tarries through expansiveness (GA 77: 135). This signals how the dao is wide
and all-encompassing, sustaining and fostering, and moves through self-reverting and
returning, in Wilhelm’s edition of the Daodejing.
Another word has an interesting role in the German language reception of the
Daodejing and the Zhuangzi. The verb verweilen signifies a temporal abiding, lingering,
tarrying, and sojourning. The different senses of (1) abiding as appropriate moment
and (2) lingering as overstaying led to two different sets of uses in the German context.
First, it intimates the generational life of the thing and the art of freely abiding,
inhabiting, sojourning, and wandering amidst the world. Indeed, several works
deploy this expression in unfolding the way as freely and aptly tarrying in a place and
moment.50 Strauss accordingly explains in his comments how the sages abide and
tarry (verweilen) for the moment in a place and, without fixation, they do not remain
when the moment is done (Strauss 1870: 349). Heidegger’s emphasis on appropriately
abiding in a moment and place reflects this sense of verweilen, in contrast with the
haste and hurrying (übereilen) that misses encountering (Begegnung) and responding
to (Entgegnung) the thing as resonant counterpart (Gegnen) and its environing locality
(Gegend).
Secondly, the verb signifies what is to be avoided in some interpretations. August
Pfizmaier and Hertha Federmann use verweilen in the sense of inappropriately
remaining and overstaying one’s moment.51 The sages in her translation consequently
do not abide or linger (verweilen). They do not fixate the moment or place, and they
depart once their work is done. The variability and ambiguity of verweilen are shown in
Wilhelm’s various contrary uses. He utilized verweilen in the sense of the appropriate
76 Heidegger and Dao

moment in his 1911 Daodejing translation (Wilhelm 1911: 104) and in the sense of
inappropriate overstaying in his 1925 book on Laozi (Wilhelm 1925: 49).
What then is the appropriate moment and locality of the wine-jug? Heidegger
states that it is drinking in celebration, as the jug is something festive in the expansive
vastness in which people, things, earth, and heaven abide and sojourn (GA 77: 136).
This wide expansiveness is where relationships between thing and counterpart,
counterpart and releasement, releasement and being human transpire. The simple is
disclosed amidst this seemingly complex relational nexus. The simple is a mysterious
puzzle (“das Rätselhafte des Einfachen”) as it is gathered in that which is designated the
counterpart (GA 77: 138).
How should we interpret the “counterpart” in the encounter? Gegnen in its
archaic sense signifies encountering the counterpart as well as facing against what is
opposed. The counterparting (gegnen) in its enregioning (vergegnen) is not, however,
a horizon of our comportment of releasement (as in mysticism) nor of things as
objects for us (as in instrumentalism). Quite the reverse, it is things as themselves
and for themselves (GA 77: 139). Gelassenheit is defined as a letting-counterparting of
being’s event (GA 82: 551). This event concerns recalling and safeguarding things and
their sense. Heidegger’s prioritization of the thing, which his contemporary Adorno
echoed in the freedom toward and primacy of the object, is a reversal of the pragmatic
instrumentality, objectified theoretical presence, and fundamental worldlessness of
the thing in the late 1920s. Heidegger’s Daoist, early Pre-Socratic, and German poetic
sources best account for this reversal, given the direct and indirect idealism of his
philosophical training and milieu.
There is in Heidegger’s first conversation the wide expansiveness that encompasses
things, the puzzling, mysterious secret glimpsed in the simplicity of things, and
our releasement through the self-releasement of things in their own way of being
themselves, that evoke and offer a poetic-philosophical reimagining of the way (dao),
movement (fan), mystery (xuan), and being of itself (ziran).
This configuration of words and their uses is more than a coincidence given
Heidegger’s focused engagement with the Daodejing and the Zhuangzi in the closing
years of the Second World War and the opening years of its aftermath. It makes sense
given his long-term engagement with reading various translations of these texts and
discussing them with Chinese and Japanese interlocutors from 1919 to the conclusion
of his life; despite their exclusion from academic philosophy, his own definition of
philosophy as principally Greek-German, and his anxieties about not knowing Chinese.
This semi-Daoist ziranist interpretive constellation is rethought and redescribed
subsequently in the Bremen Lectures and “The Thing” as the thinging of the thing that
is also the worlding of world in which mortals fittingly or unfittingly abide and sojourn
in their building, dwelling, and saying.

12. The Priority of the Thing (1949–1950)

The four 1949 Bremen Lectures, entitled “Insight into What Is,” inquire into the
thing, enframing positionality, the danger, and the turn. They offer a diagnosis, and
hence indicate a critical model, of the suppression and destruction of the thing.
 Heidegger and Laozi’s Daodejing 77

Evoking possibly Nietzsche’s critique of an all-viewing and all-consuming historical

consciousness in which nothing can be alien in the second Untimely Meditation,
Heidegger begins these lectures with a description of the present situation in which
there is a diminishment of all distances and intervals of time and space. This is not only
a matter of consciousness; it concerns the contemporary configuration of reality that
threatens beings and their meaning formative sense.
Places and things can be interpreted as a relational continuum of singulars in which
each event—in its own hiatus—gathers and discloses world. They lose their interval
spacing as nearness and distance are lost in limiting fixed presence. All becomes
available, in Heidegger’s depiction, through travel and technological reproduction, and
media such as newspapers, radio, film, and television. Places and things are endangered
as such by forgetfulness of things and the prospect of nuclear war and the devastation
it would bring (GA 7: 168; GA 79: 3). Places and things without interval and spacing
appear to bring universal availability, a characteristic of the pragmatic ready-to-hand
in Being and Time. Yet pure undifferentiated and unspaced presence cannot bring
genuine nearness and proximity to a specific place or thing that—when freed from
mere givenness and positivity (a positivism that characterizes the metaphysical and
onto-theological tradition) into its own openness—calls for its responsive attentiveness.
The thing looks as if it is adjacent and ready-to-hand in being used and used up,
but it fails to appear as thing in such an instrumental referential nexus. It is still distant
and un-encountered in its thingliness when experienced through availability and
usefulness and represented as a merely objectively present object. Its thingliness does
not consist in its instrumental use and objectified representation as object, in which it
is obscured and forgotten. Nor can it be defined in terms of the objectness, the over-
againstness, of the object to the subject, as the thing stands in itself and has its own
barely acknowledged independence.
The thing demands to be thought in and from its own sense, its own independent
thingly self-so to recall the Daodejing. The rejection of idealism in the priority
of the thing does not presuppose the avowal of a naive dogmatic realism, since it
recognizes the formation, mediation, and relationality of the thing as elemental to
its own event and way of being. Idealism is not overcome, Heidegger notes, through
mere realism but by stepping out of the confines of this metaphysical opposition and
its presuppositions (GA 12: 100; GA 15: 293–4; GA 87: 148). Whereas idealism is
ensnared in the constitutive subject, realism is captured in ontic beings. Once again
in “The Thing” Heidegger is concerned not with the primacy of the subject, as
constitutive of meaning, or the object, as the abstract matter into which the thing and
its elemental reality are eliminated, but with the thing in the event of its own being and
in its interthingly nexus.
Heidegger’s reflections on the thing as self-standing in its emptiness, uselessness,
and consequent availability and usability are informed by a crucial chapter in the
Daodejing. In Daodejing chapter 11, the exemplary thing is the empty vessel and
thus its ziran is of a produced and not a naturally occurring thing, undoing the
distinction between the natural and the artificial that some accounts ascribe to early
Daoism. Heidegger describes how Plato and, as a result, Occidental metaphysics tend
to distinguish between produced artifacts and natural things. It then measures the
78 Heidegger and Dao

thing according to the model of creation, production, and the idea. Heidegger follows
a different track here, suggestive of a distinctively early Daoist source. The probable
implicit interlocutor of this reflection shows that the thing’s self-naturing as thing is
primary and not its natural formation or human production. Even the produced thing
concerns first and foremost the thing and its truth.
The jug is a vessel that holds formed through the artisan’s working with earth
(GA 7: 168; GA 79: 5). However, it is not only the earthly material elements and the
subjectivity and work of the artisan that form the jug. The jug is an emptiness that
holds and its being as holding emptiness is what brings it into being by means of earth
and artist. The paradigm of production and instrumental usefulness casts its net over
things. It thereby obscures the thing, the self-standing of which elicits human desire,
effort, and consumption. The Daoist ziran of the thing, Heidegger’s self-standing of the
thing, is indicative of an alternative ethos, poetics, and critical model of dwelling in the
plight and needfulness of the present situation, a situation in which humans, things,
interthingly bonds, and the adaptive self-regulating auto- or eco-poiesis of ecological
systems have been interrupted.

IV. Between Emptiness and Annihilation

13. Holding Emptiness

A standard view maintains that nihilism deploys nothingness and emptiness to
destroy sense and value, leaving humanity bereft in a cruel and indifferent cosmos. The
crises of modernity call for a renewed human or divine subject that provides meaning
to human striving. One can arrive at a different diagnosis drawing from the Daodejing,
in which nothingness (wu) generates and nourishes life, emptiness (xu) unfixes,
simplifies, and opens the heart-mind, and darkness (hei 黑) preserves the seeds that
emerge and sprout in the light and revitalizes the sleeping. The projected lighting and
framing of meaning and value are pervasive and do not answer the dangers of the
current situation. What is needed is a return to the life of things themselves in their
own myriad ways of dwelling and one best relates to multiplicity through simplicity.
Daodejing 28 recommends practicing virtuosity while remaining childlike. It
says, “[K]now light and preserve darkness” (知其白, 守其黑). Wang Bi comments
that there is no need to seek either light or darkness, as things naturally arise and
return of themselves (Lou 1980: 74). Strauss translated this as follows: “Those
who know their light wrap themselves in their darkness.”52 Buber quotes Strauss’s
translation in the afterword to his Zhuangzi edition and interprets this phrase as
expressing an image of birth and growth in hiddenness (Verborgenheit).53 Heidegger
mentions this sentence in the 1930 Bremen version of “The Essence of Truth” where
he interpreted it as concealment and unconcealment in the context of letting beings
be and the mystery (GA 80.1: 370). He refers to and quotes Strauss’s rendition several
times over decades. Heidegger elucidates this line, with Thales of Miletus in mind,
differently in Identity and Difference than in “The Essence of Truth.” He states: “To
this we join the truth that all know and of which few are capable: Mortal thought
 Heidegger and Laozi’s Daodejing 79

must sink into the darkness of the depths of the well to see the star by day” (GA 11:
138: GA 79: 93). Hiddenness and darkness must be preserved and safeguarded for
that which emerges, just as in Gelassenheit the mystery of simplicity safeguards and
nourishes the thing.
What of the emptiness of the vessel? It is not its solidity that does the holding.
The empty space, this nothingness of the jug, is what the jug is comprised of as the
holding, containing vessel. When the jug is filled, the pouring that fills it flows into its
emptiness. The empty grants the vessel’s holding. The emptiness and nothingness that
belong to and constitute the vessel is what the vessel is as a holding container that holds
and contains. The thingliness of the container does not then rest in the materiality
from which it is made. It rests in the emptiness that holds and contains.
The jug is that which holds through its emptiness. It is produced (herstellen) to
stand forth (Herstand) as this holding vessel. First, standing forth means to sprout
and emerge from darkness, whether this occurs as self-making or being formed
by others. Secondly, it means the produced thing’s standing forth transpires in the
unconcealment of that which is already present (GA 7: 170; GA 79: 7). Emptiness
is therefore the precondition of materiality and production, as the vessel’s thingness
does not consist in the material of which it is compromised, but in the emptiness that
enacts its holding.
The jug was previously associated with the festival. Here, it is linked with religious
ritual and sacrifice in which the gods approach. This is not the violent rhetoric of
pólemos and sacrifice of the mid-1930s. It is now set in the context of generosity,
gifting, and granting. The empty vessel gathers and gifts not only water and wine but
mortals, gods, earth, and heaven. The jug’s mold (Guss) and the pour (Giessen) are
etymologically related to Indo-Germanic sacrificing and gifting (ghu) as a dwelling
with the divine and in the enfolding simplicity (Einfalt) of the fourfold (GA 7: 174;
GA 79: 12). Illustrating Heidegger’s point, the Sanskrit word juhóti encompasses the
semantic range of to pour, offer, sacrifice, and worship.
Intriguingly, Wilhelm entitled Daodejing 28 as the return or reversion to
simplicity (Einfalt). He rendered the sentence translated by Strauss and quoted
by Heidegger as “Who recognizes the light and nonetheless lingers in the dark
is the exemplary model of the world” (Wilhelm 1911: 30). If this enfolding,
encompassing simplicity is scattered, then the uncarved is carved into vessels and
people are carved into the useable. How can the thing and the person retain or return
to its uncarved darkness and simplicity amidst being carved and used? That would be
the great forming that requires no cutting or, to recall Butcher Ding in the Zhuangzi,
the carving of emptiness that serves as an image of nurturing rather than of scattering
life (Wilhelm 1911: 30).
The Daoist context of an enfolding four-cornered world without cutting edges
was delineated in the previous chapter. The fourfold appears in Heidegger’s lecture
as the interval of things. It is concealed in enframing positionality and the collapse
of all distances and intervals between things in their availability, usability, and
positioning in standing-reserve that will be further analyzed in the next two
chapters.
80 Heidegger and Dao

14. Shapers of Emptiness and Annihilation

Heidegger continues stating that the artisan does not create or produce the jug qua
jug in working and shaping its bottom, sides, and edges. The artisan holds onto and
shapes the emptiness, in which the thingliness of the vessel arises and stands, bringing
it forth as the containing vessel to be filled and poured. The jug’s emptiness is that
which determines the artisan’s handling and, if this instance can be extended, human
production. This entails a dramatic consequence that Heidegger insufficiently clarifies.
It is not nature as abstract matter or useful raw material that forms the basis of human
processes of production. It is nature as the encompassing fourfold and as the self-so of
things and their world-formative interthingly relations (Ge-ding) that forms the basis
of human action and inaction.
The fourfold is thought of as an enfolding, gathering simplicity. Heaven and earth
form the interval and place of human dwelling, suggestive of the classical Chinese
conception of tianrendi 天人地. Earth signifies in Heidegger’s lecture the elemental
as it forms, bears, and fruits, nourishing waters, rocks, plants, and animals. Heaven
is depicted as the elemental of sun, moon, and stars; the alteration of the seasons
and of daylight and the darkness of night; it is hospitable and inhospitable weather,
atmosphere, and—an image of Buddhist emptiness considered in “From a Dialogue
on Language”—clouds that form and dissipate in the empty blue depth of the aether.
The gods beckon from and withdraw into the hidden holding sway of the divine
(GA 7: 180; GA 79: 17).
What then of mortals and their activities? Mortals are those beings aware of their
own death, and hence they do not include stones and animals that belong to the earth.
To this extent, Heidegger does not fully break with the anthropocentric paradigm of
Being and Time here or in the 1946 “Letter on Humanism.” The abyssal affinity and
difference between the animal and the human in the latter text improve on his earlier
account of their separating abyss (GA 29/30: 384). Its language still indicates the limits
of this confrontation with anthropocentric humanism (GA 9: 326). It is humans who
presuppose, rely on, and intervene in an interthingly world consisting of things, their
relations, and the places they gather and grant. They are no longer lords and masters
ruling over being, yet they still retain a special status in saying, safeguarding, and
shepherding beings. Humans, in the Bremen Lectures, are the workers, shapers, and
builders of emptiness and annihilation, as they are the medium and work through
which things can be formed, used, and destroyed.
Heidegger’s discussion of nuclear annihilation resonates with J. Robert
Oppenheimer’s allusion to Kṛṣṇa’s words in Bhagavad Gītā 11.32: “Now I [time, in
the original text] have become death, the destroyer of worlds” (Monk 2014: 430)
and the nuclear fears of the era. Heidegger’s analysis is distinctive in focusing on the
obliteration of localities and things in addition to human lives. Annihilation is world-
destruction targeting things, in his 1949 lecture, their interthingly nexus, and the places
that they gather. This indicates in a preliminary way an environmental questioning of
the consumption and destruction of things and localities. Such destruction does not
only occur with the use of weapons of mass obliteration, as they confirm for Heidegger
the already existing tendency toward annihilating and reducing the thing to a naught.
 Heidegger and Laozi’s Daodejing 81

Here the differences should be noted between Daoist emptiness and nothingness that
nurture and preserve things and the coercive decomposition to nonbeing revealed not
only in human economic and military activities. In such an enframing configuration of
reality, the thing’s concealed essencing cannot come into the light, its word cannot be
heard, and the thingness of the thing remains concealed and forgotten. However, the
thing is preserved in its hiddenness and darkness even as it is consumed and annihilated
in its usefulness and light. It is therefore its darkness, silence, and uselessness that
protect the thing and allow it to be itself. In a strategy strongly evocative of the reversal
of perspectives in the Zhuangzi, humans can only commence to approach the thing as
thing by shifting their limiting perspective and entering into the thing’s own region (or
“en-regioning”) such as the joyful fish in a non-anthropocentric form of being-with.
The thing’s annihilation enacts a double deception for Heidegger: first, the
supremacy and exceptionality of science that marginalizes and excludes other varieties
of encountering the real in its reality; secondly, the misconception that things are
nonetheless still things in their enframed positionality and the tacit presupposition
that they were and could potentially be the things that they are once again. Heidegger
concludes, this has not happened yet in thinking. Does he mean all thinking,
Occidental thinking (abendländisches Denken), or philosophical thinking? The answer
is uncertain here. It is contradictory in other texts that either appeal to or hesitate
before South and East Asian forms of thinking and other prospective ways of dwelling-
within-the-world. Heidegger suspects that Occidental discourses concerning China
and India are more reflective of their own presuppositions and representations than
any genuine encounter (GA 99: 138). This is a salient and helpful suspicion if it is
deployed to interrogate rather than hamper intercultural thinking.
Early ziranist Daoist sources express that the thing should be encountered through
the letting of wuwei in its moment, receptively observed and followed in its fluctuations,
and let go of its demise. Heidegger, in contrast, notes that the thing has yet to be
genuinely encountered as thing. He states in “The Thing” that if things had already
shown themselves qua things in their thingness, then the thing’s thingness would have
become manifest and laid claim to thinking. The thing qua thing remains proscribed,
nil, and in that sense is prepared for annihilation. These processes have transpired and
continue to transpire so fundamentally that things are no longer permitted to occur
as themselves in a nexus of coercive action and intervention (the wei in early Chinese
contexts that wuwei suspends). Furthermore, in their concealment in pragmatic use
and objectifying representation, they have not yet even begun to appear as things
qua things. This conclusion is either pessimistic, if it is a matter that can be answered
by thought, or indicative of an encounter yet to occur that serves as an exemplar of
waiting and a formal indicative model or guiding thread for the encounter.

15. World between Asia and Europe

How can such enframing and eradication of thing and world be thought much less
contested and transformed? The modern global situation makes it difficult if not
impossible, for Heidegger. According to Petzet, Heidegger once revealingly joked:
“Mao Tse? That is the Ge-Stell (the enframing) of Lao-tse” (Petzet 1993: 212). It appears
82 Heidegger and Dao

Laozi’s insight no longer speaks or is heard in the modern Chinese world, just as the
words of pre-Socratic thinkers and poets echo without being heard in the modern
Occident. And in the posthumously published “Spiegel Interview,” he states both that
(1) we cannot overlook the possibility that a thinking born from more primordial
transmissions might arise in Russia and China that could enable a free relationship
with technology, which—given his agrarian utopian tendencies—probably refers to
images of archaic agrarian communities, and (2) no Zen Buddhist or other Eastern
experiences can assist Europe from its own specific devastating plight.54
This much later observation is clarified in his June 1950 Black Notebooks where he
states that technology forms a different constellation and takes on a different problematic
in China, Europe, and Russia. Each—and in this passage, he speaks of Europe, East Asia,
and India—calls for their own distinctive forms of confrontation (Auseinandersetzung)
that cannot begin to be answered by mere borrowing and adopting (übernehmen) from
the other (GA 98: 368). This signifies that Europeanization and technologization have
become planetary, as he frequently remarks elsewhere, and yet the responses to this
global situation are formed relative to things, local enregioning places, and guiding
indicative words.
Heidegger’s own intercultural situation reveals the complexity of such a response
and—in contrast to the essentialism of an identical people—the need for a formally
indicative democratic and pluralistic cross-cultural thinking of the local and the global,
as opposed to the fixated identities of localist, folkish, or nationalist particularism,
and homogenizing universalism, which both fail in significant ways to appropriately
recognize the interactive participatory singular in others and things. Whereas it operates
as a pivotal expression for Heidegger in the 1930s, which he attempted to interpret
ontologically rather than anthropologically racially, he explicitly rejected folkish
(völkisch) and nationalistic principles in the mid-1940s while remaining suspicious
of the global as “inter” or “over” national that remains informed by it. He designated
the latter condition in 1969, responding to Tsujimura Kōichi 辻村公一 (1922–2010),
“world-civilization” in which the ascendency of administrative-instrumental economy,
politics, and technology has reduced everything else not merely to a secondary
superstructure but a crumbling annex, and in which human existence finds itself
homeless, whether in Europe or Asia (GA 16: 711–13).
Heidegger’s assessment might appear overly one-sided and should be resituated
in the context of critical social analysis. Modernity is diagnosed in Heidegger as
administrative-bureaucratic (which he confronted in the form of planning and the
disintegration of human existence into “human resources”) and instrumental-
technological (which he conceived through enframing positionality and standing-
reserve). This critical confrontation with modernity is developed in distinctive ways by
a range of German intellectuals: Max Weber, Buber, Spengler, and German irrationalist
worldview philosophies, “Western Marxism” and the Frankfurt school, as well as
Heidegger. Heidegger elucidates, beginning particularly in 1943 as he twists free from
the paradigm of subject and will, a unique and still apposite response to modern crisis-
tendencies, which are not due to a “mistake” but a formative destiny to be confronted
(GA 45: 24), through the priority of thing in place and world.
 Heidegger and Laozi’s Daodejing 83

The devastation of place and the plight of homelessness identified in his later
thought are not simply theoretical or technical questions. It concerns questioning,
building, and dwelling for which ziranist discourses indicate suggestive thought-
images and models. Such elemental questioning and the prospect of a more
appropriate ecophronetic building and dwelling with things in the present world will
be traced in the following chapters.
84
 4

Heidegger and the Zhuangzi:

The Uselessness and Unnecessariness of Things

I. Heidegger’s Pathways with Zhuangzi

1. Heidegger in Bremen
We will consider a few examples in this chapter that lead to insights into the historical
context and conceptual significance of Heidegger’s adaptation of the Zhuangzi and a
Zhuangzian interpretation of Heidegger.
Heidegger seems to more eagerly communicate his interests in Daoist sources and
East Asian art and culture during his visits to Bremen. There he discussed and drew
on the Daodejing and the Zhuangzi in lectures and conversations, in 1930, 1949, 1951,
and 1960. Heidegger’s cosmopolitan intercultural engagements in this culturally open
Hanseatic trading city were due in part to his shared East Asian interests with his
Bremen friend, the writer Heinrich Wiegand Petzet. According to Petzet’s biographical
Encounters and Dialogues with Martin Heidegger, 1929–1976, a cornerstone for the
study of Heidegger’s East Asian entanglements, Heidegger shared his fascination with
East Asian art, culture, and philosophy. His portrayal of Heidegger’s recitation and
interpretation of the joy of fish from the Zhuangzi at a 1930 evening gathering was
discussed earlier in the introduction to Chapter 1 (Petzet 1993: 18). To briefly sketch
a sampling of these Daoist references, which are discussed at greater detail elsewhere
in the present book, Heidegger mentioned the Daodejing 28 passage on light and
darkness during his 1930 lecture, the empty vessel of Daodejing 11 in his 1949 lectures,
and the woodcarver from the Zhuangzi in his 1960 lecture “Image and Word” (“Bild
und Wort”).
The Bremen author Hans Jürgen Seekamp, best known for his work on the poet
Stefan George, noted Heidegger’s engagement with Daoism and reflections on the
meaning of dao during his lecture given on May 4, 1951, on Lógos, in Bremen—where,
he adds, people have “a cultivated sense for Asia”—in a short 1960 article published
in the Indian publication United Asia.1 He notes that Europe has not yet genuinely
comprehended or built a bridge with Asia, despite the poetic and philosophical
inspirations of the East in the Occident and the German poets and intellectuals who
have actively embraced it.2
86 Heidegger and Dao

In speaking of potentially building a genuine bridge in the future, Seekamp

introduces Heidegger and his hesitation concerning whether genuine understanding
across distinctive languages is possible. Seekamp concludes his essay by quoting from
Heidegger’s talk: “We do not know what really is meant when we hear people say ‘Tao,’
since we do not think the word in its native language, nor can we at all imitate such a
thought.”3 Heidegger is fundamentally a philosopher of the way and its motility. Parallel
to early Daoist sources, he speaks of the way of being, nothing, things, existence, and
his own specific way, yet dao remains to an extent incommensurable with his way.
The dao speaks no doubt to the Occident that does not have ears to comprehend it.
Heidegger might hear it to some extent yet is reticent to speak of it. Perhaps he is
following the advice of Daodejing 56 that those who speak do not know and those who
know do not speak.4

2. Heidegger between Pólemos and Gelassenheit

Respectful reticence and reserve safeguard what is hidden for Heidegger. His public
reticence does not negate his extended history of attentiveness to the Laozi and
Zhuangzi. This attention seemingly disappears between 1931 and 1942, an era in his
thought of the primacy of the will. His attention resumes and takes an intriguing
and more visible turn in 1943 with “The Uniqueness of the Poet.” This initiates a
period in which he seriously studies the Daoist classics and critically reevaluates,
even if inadequately for his critics, the disastrous catastrophe of National Socialism.
He reassesses his own philosophy and the dangers of his own previous discourse of
decision, self-assertion, creative conflict and violent confrontation (pólemos), and the
primacy of the will. He systematically relied on this discursive configuration in his
early advocacy, as rector of the University of Freiburg during 1933–1935, on behalf of
the new National Socialist regime’s coercive fusion and coordination (Gleichschaltung)
of all aspects of university life and German existence, with devastating consequences.5
In the postwar period, he described this as “the greatest stupidity of his life,” although
he never adequately publicly confronted this past.6
Heidegger repeatedly claimed after the war that he broke with National Socialism
in 1934 when he resigned as rector and refused to participate in the handover of power
to the new rector (GA 16: 400; GA 102: 30). The issue is more complicated. As Lyotard
remarked, Heidegger was aware from the beginning that National Socialism was
nonsense and consciously and intentionally chose to join the movement to attempt to
influence its direction (Lyotard 1994: 113). Hannah Arendt and Elisabeth Blochmann
felt particularly betrayed by his opportunism to be on the seemingly “winning” side
of history. Moreover, Heidegger’s vision of “ontological revolution” and poetic renewal
was peripheral to the movement’s main motivations and themes. He is not a thinker of
the totalitarian racial state but of a poeticizing people. He avoids key facets of National
Socialism such as its Aryanism and repeatedly criticizes its biological, value, and
worldview commitments as vulgar.7 Heidegger likewise decried the populist elements
of the movement, complaining that it preferred boxing, cars, and radio to Hölderlin’s
poetry. Accordingly, Heidegger is better classified as a conservative elitist literati-
intellectual (Habermas speaks of “German mandarins”) and compromised follower
 Heidegger and the Zhuangzi 87

(Mitläufer) rather than as a Nazi activist, ideologue, officeholder, or—to speak from
the standpoint of our own situation—a rightwing populist.8 As Arendt and others have
analyzed, Heidegger lacked any serious engagement in and reflection on state-power
that can be checked by the self-ordering of a flourishing public sphere, open political
deliberation and participation, and legally secured individual rights. Authoritarian
sentiments, fascistic aesthetic experimentalism and expressionism, and charismatic
romanticism infused his thinking of the 1930s, as is evident in his account of artworks
and poetry.9 At the same time, the diverse abundance of Heidegger’s thought should
not be reductively condensed to this moment.
How then did Heidegger’s thinking transition from an apologetic and ideologically
driven sacrificial and violent ethics of pólemos and work, toward the freedom of letting
releasement (lassen)? From the creative violent holding sway of being as phúsis toward
the generative self-ordering of things and world in the holding sway of being? We
should call this an anticipatory shifting toward dao, while never arriving there, given
the distance and hesitation between Europe and Asia in Heidegger’s thinking. One
source of this shift is the Zhuangzi. This text reports repeated refusals of coercive
political participation and coordination. Zhuangzi is depicted in the “Autumn Floods”
chapter as preferring the life of a turtle freely and uselessly meandering on the muddy
riverbank instead of serving usefully, and embalmed and fixated, in the prince’s
court. People, things, and words freely rambling from their stratified instrumental
positionality are perceived as chaotic anarchic threats to disciplinary order. In the anti-
politics of the Zhuangzi, political service is likened to a turtle being killed, prepared,
and put on display, in contrast to it uselessly and freely enjoying its water and mud
by itself. Other passages intimate a different social form of anti-politics. There is also
an agrarian politics of egalitarian simplicity without distinctions between ruler and
ruled. This idea is expressed in passages of the Zhuangzi, the Liezi, and negatively
in Ge Hong’s “Interrogating Bao” (Jie Bao 詰鮑) chapter of the Baopuzi, where this
anarchic “Lao-Zhuang” social-political ziranist tendency is condemned in Ge Hong’s
legitimation of an authoritarian and hierarchical Confucian-legalist political order.10
Several Chinese and intercultural transmissions interpret Daoism as a philosophy
of freedom. Early Daoist sources have been repeatedly linked with individual liberty
from the coercion of state and society in the Chinese and European imagination. We
should consider a few contextualizing historical examples once again. The idea of a
free and equal self-generative and self-ordering politics was linked with anarchistic
socialism in Julius Hart and Martin Buber in fin-de-siècle Germany. In Hart’s poetic
utopian vision, dao is an anarchy in which unforced harmony is born from the conflict
and cacophony of things (Hart 1905: 51–2). The Zhuangzi was allied with anarchism
and individualism in its early twentieth-century German reception. Richard Wilhelm
described this tendency as expressing an anarchistic ideal of a golden age without rulers
(Wilhelm 1929: 40). Liang Chiang (Liang Qiang 梁强), in a 1938 German language
Jena dissertation on Chinese economics and society, described Chinese history
as a dialectic between authoritarian communalism and anarchistic individualism,
beginning with Laozi and Zhuangzi (Chiang 1938: 69). Hans and Sophie Scholl and
the White Rose student resistance appealed to Laozi’s conception of flourishing,
spontaneous, self-ordering society against the abuses of the Nazi state (Cantor 2023).
88 Heidegger and Dao

Unlike these brave students in Munich, Heidegger had failed to see in the 1930s the
crucial differences between people, state, and charismatic leadership. The exiled
German Sinologist Werner Eichhorn illuminated Zhuangzian freedom against the
background of Nazi totalitarianism (Eichhorn 1942: 140–62). While authoritarian and
conservative readings have stressed the apolitical aesthetic and subjective character of
Zhuangzi’s freedom, thereby depoliticizing it, Eichhorn understood that it operates
within the nexus of things and social-political relations with transformative political
repercussions.
Daoism offered models of worldly relational freedom in contrast to the freedom of
atomistic self-interested selves or totalitarian collective subjects legitimating the power
of the state. The German understanding of Daoist freedom, with its complex historical
transmissions, is operative in Heidegger’s reflections during the closing years of the
Second World War. Although one should beware of overstating the importance of the
Zhuangzi and its sense of freedom for Heidegger, his Zhuangzian inspired reflections
on letting, waiting, and uselessness in a defeated, occupied Germany in “Evening
Conversation: In a Prisoner of War Camp in Russia, between a Younger and an Older
Man” (1945), published in Country Path Conversations, implement a radically different
ethos of releasement (Gelassenheit) and variations on letting (lassen) with reference to
the Zhuangzi. The focus on the thing (in the expansive sense) rather than God and soul
points toward more than the Gelassenheit familiar from earlier German sources to the
modern paradigm of comparative mysticism.
Heidegger was, according to Löwith’s analysis of Being and Time, a philosopher of
usefulness, the purposive for-the-sake-of which, the thing-in-the-work, and the event of
being that are the opposite of Daoism (Löwith 1983: 600). How did Heidegger become
a thinker who evoked and addressed Lao-Zhuang forms of uselessness, freedom from
purposiveness, and letting the thing be in its own way of being? Löwith’s suspicions are
partly right. Heidegger’s semi-Daoist reflections from 1943 to 1950 are delimited by his
cultural, philosophical, and political concerns and his interpretive situation.
Heidegger’s reflections disclose considerable Daoist-related elements in his post-
1943 thinking. His postwar “thought-poems” and notebooks speak of turning between
being and nothingness, releasement while remaining oneself in transforming and
wandering, and being freely underway (his own version of Zhuangzian calm and
carefree wandering) that is complete in its own movement without goal or purpose
(GA 81: 352; GA 101: 162). He also describes the waiting in which one becomes
one’s own and people and things are granted their return to stillness.11 Several of his
thought-poems and previously unpublished notes are evocative of an interculturally
mediated Daoist “imaginary” and ethos from which Heidegger drew in juxtaposition
with his overshadowing early Greek and German sources.
The Daoist motifs adopted by Heidegger cannot be said to constitute a “Daoist turn”
as such. Still, they are symptomatic of an encounter and engagement. These traces and
touches are not accidental or contingent facets of Heidegger’s later thinking. These
facets reveal different prospects for an ethos of letting and releasing things and persons
and concern other vital motifs of his mature philosophy: usefulness and uselessness,
the thing, technology, poetic thinking, dwelling, world-disclosive elemental words,
and—as analyzed in Part Two—emptiness and nothingness.
 Heidegger and the Zhuangzi 89

3. Words, Images, and Guiding Threads

Heidegger refers more frequently to words and images associated with the Laozi,
as evident in the 1949 Bremen Lectures and in multiple discussions of the thing. He
does express, directly and indirectly, familiarity with the German language Zhuangzi
editions of Buber (1910) and Wilhelm (1912). Confirming this persistent attention
to the Zhuangzi, Heidegger evokes it throughout the 1944–1945 third Country Path
Conversation. He cited Buber’s selections from the Zhuangzi in the 1960 Bremen
lecture “Image and Word.”12 Image and word are themes in early Daoist texts that
deploy thought-images and suggestive and paradoxical words to indicate the great
imageless image and wordless word expressed in Daodejing 41.13 Another chapter,
Daodejing 14, speaks of seeing what cannot be seen, hearing what cannot be heard, the
formless forms, and the thread running through the way (Lou 1980: 31–2).
Heidegger refers in this lecture to mostly Occidental examples (Augustine, Klee,
Heraclitus) except for the instructive portrayal of the artisan of the holy “bell-stand”
from Buber’s rendition of Zhuangzi chapter 19, “Fulfilling Life” (dasheng 達生).
Once again, a Daoist text shows how the point is inaction in the sense of the “great
carving” that does not hack and fracture; instead, it accords with the thing and its spirit
while participating in its transformation. This functions as an exemplary thought-
image of nurturing and fulfilling life in the Zhuangzi. It serves as a guiding thread
(Leitfaden) for the direction of the way for Heidegger (GA 74: 185, 187). A thread is
part of a web of threads that veil and reveal in their veiling the imagelessness of the
wordless.14 Heidegger notes how the gathering of texts and words calls for a readiness
and preparation for the mysteriousness of things and their interthingly relations
that approach in conversation.15 He once again not only mentions or invokes Lao-
Zhuang sources in this lecture. Heidegger positions their words and thought-images
as elements of his own way of thinking. This is indicative of a deeper engagement. It
might be called a quasi-Daoistic shift in view of Heidegger’s undeniable differences
from Chinese varieties of Daoism and in his selective integration of specific ziranist
elements and thought-images.
In this narrative, a non-instrumental artistry serves as a thought-image for how to
interact with things. The wooden bell-stand (Glockenspielstande) emerges, as if it were
the tree itself expressed through the work of spirits, as it is shaped through a responsive
artistry born of the “fasting that calms the heart-mind” (zhai yi jing xin 齋以靜心)
without dependence on purposive pragmatic technique, skill, or calculation.16 This is a
making and using that follows and is in accord with the thing and its transformations.
This understanding leads to the question of to what extent technology could be an
adaptation to instead of a projecting and dominating of things and places.
Heidegger addresses the uselessness of things and words through the “necessity of
the unnecessary” and the “usefulness of uselessness” (wuyong zhiyong 無用之用) in
the Zhuangzi in the third of the Country Path Conversations and in his 1962 lecture
“Transmitted and Technological Language” in which he ponders the “languaging”
(the “it speaks”) of language. The connection between spontaneity and calculation,
usefulness and uselessness, appears in Heidegger’s 1945 and 1962 references to
Wilhelm’s translation of the Zhuangzi that is the primary focus of the present chapter.
90 Heidegger and Dao

The Zhuangzian “useful uselessness,” exhibited in a series of narratives in which the

useless thing (in the expansive sense of stone, tree, person, and so on) flourishes,
while the useful thing is destroyed in being used, and becomes the condition of
use, in contrast with the thing being principally characterized by its ready-to-hand
pragmatic availability and usability. Instrumental usefulness suppresses and forgets,
while presupposing the thing in the functioning (zhiyong) of its nonuse (wuyong) and
self-so-ing of itself.
Several passages help contextualize the notion of the thing and use in the Zhuangzi.
In the Zhuangzi outer chapter “Knowledge’s Northern Rambling” (zhibeiyou 知北遊),
it is noted that “what things the thing is not itself the thing” (物物者非物) and in the
outer chapter “Mountain Tree” (shanmu 山木) that the genuine person lets “things
thing without being thinged by things” (物物而不物於物).17 This need not entail a
rejection of thing qua thing if it signifies undoing the fixation of self and thing and,
by implication in the modern situation, subject and object through the recognition
of their emptiness. It is its own emptiness or nothingness and self-naturing (i.e., the
thinglessness of things) that things (gathers) the thing. The exemplary attunement with
things is one of uselessness and non-purposiveness. This lets things thing, as they are of
themselves, while remaining in a comportment that is free, at ease, and undetermined
(un-thinged) by the thinging of things.18 Zhuangzian freedom perspectivally shifts the
self who is sojourning with and amidst beings, earth, and sky.
Heidegger’s later reflections concerning uselessness diverge from its senses in the
texts of the mid-1930s. It is an expression that Heidegger recurrently revisits in his later
works, typically without either directly or indirectly referring to the Zhuangzi, where it
is coordinated with the letting go of Gelassenheit that steps back from coercive creating
and willing as well as instrumental calculation and usage. It would be overly simplistic
to describe Heidegger’s trajectory as leading from decisionist voluntarism to fatalistic
passivism. It is also insufficient to identify his thinking of releasement solely with either
medieval German mysticism or early Lao-Zhuang Daoism. Its Daoist inheritance is
clearly strong, however, as Heidegger depicts, through exemplary thought-images and
illustrative models, a way of being-in-the-world and dwelling with and amidst things,
mortals, and gods between heaven and earth. It is underappreciated the extent to which
there is a Daoist bent at work in his language of the fourfold, comprised of mortals and
immortals, heaven and earth. Likewise, his letting releasement does not signify either
an otherworldly mystical unification of the soul with God or a fixed contemplative
passivity.19 Heidegger repeatedly denies that his thought is a form of mysticism (GA 77:
109, 185). As Pöggeler describes Heidegger’s last conversations with Bernhard Welte,
Heidegger’s study of Eckhart and mysticism led him not to God and the soul but to
the things that form way and place: “God was only God in the ‘unspoken’ language of
the ‘things’ by the country path” (Pöggeler 1987: 47). Heidegger’s mature discourse of
things and pathways is directly connected with his interpretation of Daoist texts.
Letting releasement, with its clear Eckhartian roots, acquires a less monotheistic
and quasi-Daoistic tonality and style in Heidegger’s thinking. His releasement
functions in significant ways like wuwei. Its intercultural journey already associated
it with letting (laissez from old Germanic lazan) and even laissez-faire in François
Quesnay’s physiocracy that advocated government by phúsis interpreted as according
 Heidegger and the Zhuangzi 91

with natural simplicity, unfettering the self-productivity of the earth and the people,
and laissez faire et laissez passer. Wuwei is not an economic policy in early Daoist texts.
Nor is it a mystical retreat into the interiority of the inner self. Acting and attuning
from nonaction (wei wuwei) is an intra-worldly art of being-in-the-world that empties,
quiets, and simplifies the self, desire, and will with humility while releasing things to
themselves and their own essencing. This can be interpreted as a Heideggerian instance
of self-so-ness.
This ziranist bent of Heidegger’s thinking is individual oriented in the 1920s and
thing oriented after 1943. In Heidegger’s early thought, from approximately 1919 to
1930, an anarchic or libertarian laissez-faire-like moment (perhaps informed in part
by Okakura’s account of Daoist wuwei and ziran) is operative in notions of returning
to one’s own singular self-essencing and being-with, as the solicitude making room
for and helping the individuation of others. In 1929, Heidegger can speak of co-
existentially dwelling with the thing while prioritizing Dasein and the freedom of its
own self-happening. The thing here is the phenomenological correlational matter to be
encountered and thought. There is also the use of ziran-like self-happening of the truth
of being, concealing and unconcealing itself, in his 1930 Bremen lecture that draws on
Buber’s Zhuangzi. Heidegger repeatedly speaks of “helping” without producing effects,
once again evoking the Daoist sage who is described as helping and nurturing without
interventionist or coercive acting.20 In the first of the Country Path Conversations,
letting releasement is described as helping without assertively willing and effecting
(GA 77: 108). This quasi-Daoist or ziranist proclivity appears more strongly in
Heidegger’s thinking after 1943. The ziran-oriented moment occurs in recognizing the
self-essencing not only of Dasein (as in 1929) but of entities, earth, and sky. Heidegger’s
earlier and later ziranist moments give the impression of being entangled with the
Laozi and the Zhuangzi.
Heidegger’s Daoist entanglements become clearer beginning around 1943. First,
releasement is not about turning away and withdrawing into tranquility or serenity of
mind, as in Stoic ataraxia. This does not let things approach and become near in silence,
Heidegger notes around 1942/43, during a period of heightened engagement with the
Daodejing (GA 97: 33). It is not about the silencing enacted by the self but hearing into
the silent: “the silence of nature and the simplicity of all things” (GA 97: 23). Nature
exists not only through human activity and projection but through the letting emerge
and worlding of earth (GA 99: 53). What is inadequately called “nature,” insofar as
nature signifies objective presence (GA 102: 44), is not heard in acting, willing, or anti-
willing that are necessarily obstructions. It is in inaction (Nicht-Handeln)—which is
not a mere doing nothing (Nichts-tun)—that the playful open space of the clearing of
being is prepared (GA 97: 23).
Second, amidst these same reflections, Heidegger articulates a statement that
links with his other discussions related to Wilhelm’s translation of the Zhuangzi: “the
most necessary is the unnecessary and the useful is the necessary” (GA 97: 30). The
unnecessariness or uselessness of the thing is a moment of its freedom and self-naturing
in the Zhuangzi, as the translations of Buber and Wilhelm accentuate. Releasement
is articulated in the 1940s in ways that intersect with thought-images and moments
from the Zhuangzi. It is expressed as a worldly attunement and comportment of free
92 Heidegger and Dao

receptivity and responsiveness to and the safeguarding of things and world in their
own ziran-like self-happening.21
This is not all. Some of Heidegger’s reflections during this period mirror in significant
ways ideas expressed in the Zhuangzi editions of Buber and Wilhelm that were familiar
reading to Heidegger since the Weimar Republic. The list is extensive: the emptying of
the heart-mind, the unfettering letting releasement, the resonant-responsiveness, the
usefulness of the uselessness, the perfection of imperfection, the shifting of perspectives
toward the thing’s own way of being, freely and easily becoming oneself in sojourning
and wandering, and the nourishing of the life of the myriad things.

II. Emptiness, Uselessness, and Waiting

4. Letting and Healing in the Country Path Conversations

There are three dialogues in Country Path Conversations: A Three-way Conversation on
a Country Path between a Scientist, a Scholar, and a Guide (Weisen) delineated in the
last chapter; The Teacher Meets the Tower Warden at the Door to the Tower Stairway;
and Evening Conversation: In a Prisoner of War Camp in Russia, between a Younger
and an Older Man. While the first dialogue raises issues and themes analogous to “The
Uniqueness of the Poet” (1943) and “The Thing” (1950), the “Evening Conversation” is
unique among Heidegger’s works in significant ways and several of its themes are not
explicitly taken up in subsequent reflections.
It is already atypical in revolving around the Zhuangzi instead of the more typically
featured Laozi text. It is portrayed as taking place in a Soviet prisoner of war camp in
the vast Siberian forests between a younger captured German soldier and an older
one. It is geopolitical in that it is dated May 7, 1945, the date of the unconditional
capitulation of Nazi Germany, and engages in a dialogical reflection on the “German
disaster.” This refers not only to the crisis of modernity, as is more emblematic of
Heidegger’s later discourse, even while it relates the Nazi calamity that has befallen the
German people to a fundamental loss of being itself.
The conversation commences with the younger soldier encountering “what is
healing” (das Heilsame), which Heidegger elucidates in the “Letter on Humanism”
three years later.22 He encounters it in the vast expansiveness, a thought-image (yet
not a symbol) of the cosmos in the earlier conversation of the vast forest that enwraps
the unwholesomeness of the camp while remaining unattainable from within these
confines.23 Otherwise than in his discourse of the mid-1930s, this encounter is
explicitly described as not deriving from a choice, decision, or the assertion of the
will, whether individual, collective, or conceived of as happening through being. It
occurs through being “let into [eingelassen] what heals,” “of the letting of its happening
[Veranlassung].”24 This dialogue is shaped by its play on the various senses of letting,
allowing, and releasing related to the stem-word “lassen” and the complexities
of therapeutic healing, possibly evoking early Daoist responsive attunement and
nurturing things in a situation of devastation in which nothing is permitted to grow,
be nurtured, and healed. Healing concerns other- rather than self-power.
 Heidegger and the Zhuangzi 93

How then does the mystery of this letting occur in Heidegger? How can such
letting be thought, given the realities of injury and harm? The conversation is haunted
by the specter of the unwholesome as that which cannot heal (das Unheilsame), a
question taken up in the 1948 diagnosis of the pathologies of modernity in the “Letter
on Humanism” discussed in the next chapter, and the inability of deep wounds to heal:
“And what is not all wounded and torn apart in us?—us, for whom a blinded leading-
astray of our own people is too deplorable to permit wasting a complaint on, despite the
devastation that covers our native soil and its helplessly perplexed [ratlose] humans.”
This situation of covering and perplexity leading to devastation is depicted by the older
man in reference to the phenomenon of evil. Evil is interpreted in reference to fury and
malice: the “devastation of the earth and the annihilation of the human essence that
goes with it are somehow evil [das Böse].”25
The conversation continues by positioning the desolation and desertification
of National Socialism and the Second World War in relation to a more originary
devastation of earth and humanity. The older man states: “Devastation [Verwüstung]
means for us, after all, that everything—the world, the human, and the earth—will
be transformed into a desert [Wüste].”26 This desolation is “of the earth and of human
existence.”27 It has left a deserted wasteland behind: “the deserted [verlassene] expanse
of the abandonment [Verlassenheit] of all life.”28 Heidegger defined the desert in a
later letter as “the area where there is no growth” wherein “nothing is let grown” (GA
16: 563). As the Zhuangzi critiques the calculative and purposive nurturing of life
for life’s free self-nourishing, Heidegger depicts the modern condition as one where
“growing life” is obstructed and replaced by a totalizing administrative, technological
regime of calculative planning.29 The Zhuangzi text and Heidegger reveal key facets
of the problematic of nurturing life in the face of purposive regimes of instrumental
usefulness, even if they don’t appropriately express the spontaneous public and political
self-ordering that is indispensable for contesting and limiting the coercive powers of
party, state, or market.30
What then of the political circumstances of this conversation about devastation
and healing? Heidegger does not directly confront the banality of systematized evil or
his own complicity during the 1930s.31 Nonetheless, Heidegger can be understood as
“condemning” National Socialism in this way in this and other works of this era. He
does so, however, in the Black Notebooks not by itself on its own terms or by appealing
to standard criticisms. He explains it as part of a larger process that he controversially
perceives to be expressed in Americanism, communism, and globalizing modernity
itself, of which National Socialism is insufficiently confronted as another flawed
and disastrous instance.32 As for the Black Notebooks themselves, which are mostly
philosophical instead of directly political, they document the transformations in
his thinking from the ascendancy of national self-assertion through the consequent
devastation to a refusal of both the national and assertion for the sake of reticence and
releasement.
This transformation through devastation appears in the dialogue of the two
interlocutors. Given the devastation of the earth, and their own ravaged essence, what
then can these two useless imprisoned men do, and what can the German people do?
In an extended conversation concerned with waiting, that echoes the emptied heart-
94 Heidegger and Dao

mind that waits upon things in the Zhuangzi, the conversants differentiate a waiting
for “something” that is structured by anticipation and expectation (auf etwas warten,
Erwarten) and a “pure waiting” (reines Warten), without anticipation and projection,
in which one waits upon nothing (das Nichts).33 This waiting on nothing cannot be an
awaiting of or for the nothing; otherwise it could not be pure: it awaits and clings to
neither being nor nothing, but “waits on that which answers pure waiting,” the “echo of
pure coming,” evoking the Zhuangzian fasting of the heart-mind as awaiting things in
emptiness.34 Without beginning or ending, in chapter 20, there is only waiting.
The received Zhuangzi text refers to waiting numerous times. There is no reason to
wait and depend on others’ opinions or what will take place or be correct in the future.
There is an awaiting for the revolutions of the heavens and seasons. There is the waiting
for the true or genuine person (zhenren) and genuine knowing (zhenzhi 真知) in the
first section of Chapter 6. In a crucial Zhuangzi passage, vital energy is depicted as
(in Ziporyn’s 2009 translation) “an emptiness, a waiting for the presence of beings. The
way alone is what gathers in this emptiness. And it is this emptiness that is the fasting
of the mind.”35 There is the pure waiting of the heart-mind in emptiness as beings, or
that which comes to presence, gather in emptiness.
Early Chinese philosophies emphasized varieties of forceful intervening action
(wei 為), the minimization of coercive action (wuwei), or their alternation depending
on circumstances in the Book of Changes. Döblin and Brecht were concerned in
their encounters with Chinese thinking with questions of how to transformatively
intervene in and dialectically navigate the flowing transition of beings. Informed by
the Daodejing and the Zhuangzi, Buber and Heidegger questioned the very notion of
action. Heidegger discovered a different model of action and inaction in the Zhuangzi
that guided his reflections in the Country Path Conversations and the “Letter on
Humanism.” This was the transformation of acting in awaiting, in contrast with
acting in intervening and its maximization or minimization. Heidegger’s depictions
of waiting, emptiness, and gathering closely evoke this and other passages from
the Zhuangzi. Waiting is described by Heidegger in this 1945 conversation as a
“letting come,” or letting arrive, and a “safeguarding” (evoking Daoist nurturing and
preserving) that is not an expectation concerning a predicted or unpredicted future.
It is instead, like Zhuangzi’s self-emptying heart-mind, a waiting that empties the
mind of any expectation of what is to come. Without expectation and protections,
it is things that gather. The emptiness that gathers is to this extent the opposite
of nihilistic annihilation that destroys things and obscures world with devastating
technologies of war and the paradigm of all-pervasive pragmatic usefulness. It is at
this moment of the conversation that Zhuangzian themes begin to emerge that will
be sealed by the direct quotation in the conclusion.
The enactment of letting that Heidegger has in mind appears in the form of the
useless and unnecessary. It is activity and willing that appear as and set the measure
of the useful and necessary. Here there is an interpretive reversal against the
instrumentalist paradigm that presupposes and invokes Wilhelm’s translation of the
Zhuangzi: “Only one who has learned to know the necessity of the unnecessary … ”
and “the unnecessary remains at all times the most necessary of all.”36
 Heidegger and the Zhuangzi 95

5. Heidegger’s Reliance on Richard Wilhelm’s Zhuangzi

The denial of the Zhuangzi’s impact on Heidegger’s thinking would be easier to make
if Heidegger’s language did not rely on idiosyncrasies in Wilhelm’s translations.
Wilhelm was a prolific translator. His editions of the Chinese classics were a crucial
means for German readers of Heidegger’s generation to access Chinese texts, including
classical and religious Daoist sources. In addition to his translations of the Book of
Changes and several Confucian classics, Wilhelm translated into German the Liezi
列子 and The Secret [or Mystery] of the Golden Flower (Taiyi Jinhua Zongzhi 太乙金華
宗旨), a work of inner alchemy (neidan 內丹) meditative techniques that contains an
introduction written by his friend Carl G. Jung.37
Despite Wilhelm’s prolific quantity of translations and his Sinological expertise
and authority, Heidegger explicitly addresses solely the Laozi and Zhuangzi texts
and does not necessarily follow Wilhelm’s translations and commentaries even
as he is at points reacting to them. For example, Wilhelm rendered the title of his
1911 translation as The Book of the Old Master on Sense and Life (Das Buch des
alten Meisters vom Sinn und Leben). Daode 道德 signifies for Wilhelm the “sense
of life.” Heidegger does not employ Wilhelm’s life-philosophical translations of dao
as sense or meaning (Sinn) and de 德 as life (Leben) or life-force (Lebenskraft). Nor
would Heidegger accept the Kantian and life-philosophical conceptual registers
that Wilhelm deploys to introduce the Daodejing and the Zhuangzi to German
linguistic audiences. Wilhelm would portray the Zhuangzi, particularly chapter two,
as a Chinese “critique of pure reason,” contending that the paradoxes of chapter
two constituted a critique of reason that refuted skepticism for the sake of life’s
unity.38 This is partially appropriate insofar as the Zhuangzi text should be read as
skeptically undermining Huizi’s skepticism, akin to Wittgenstein’s skeptical critique
of dogmatic skepticism as presupposing language-games and forms and practices of
life in his On Certainty (Wittgenstein 1969). However, a totalizing transperspectival
unity and its view from nowhere are neither the only nor the best way to interpret
this text. Zhuangzi is portrayed in it as a free shifting participant co-transitioning
through conditions, discourses, perspectives, and worlds. He escapes the confines
of the world by immanently and freely encountering the world in its variations and
transformations. Thus, according to Guo Xiang’s commentary, Zhuangzi’s equalizing
oneness is not a mere unity. It signifies how Zhuangzian freedom anarchically
embraces each thing as singularly itself, self-ordering in its own way, and following
its own generativity (ziran).
Relying on the ubiquitous system of classification of forms of philosophy
during this period between naturalism, subjective idealism, and objective idealism,
Wilhelm classified Zhuangzi’s philosophy as a type of objective idealism that shared
family resemblances with the discourses of Heraclitus and Spinoza and promoted
a Gelassenheit not afflicted by life’s suffering.39 The Zhuangzi’s objective idealism
accordingly offers an impersonal objective overview of the whole of existence in which
all is equalized from the perspective of eternity (Wilhelm 1912: xiii). The balancing
between heaven and earth is described as a condition that is still, tasteless, released;
that is concentrated, empty, and not riveted to being and acting (Wilhelm 1912: 116).
96 Heidegger and Dao

It is worth noting that Wilhelm and Buber utilized the words Gelassenheit (as a
condition of letting) and lassen (to let) in translations familiar to Heidegger. Buber
could deploy Daoist terms of a non-indifferent and non-attached resonance with
things in order to describe the I/thou relationship to God, in his 1923 work I and
Thou (Ich und Du): the relationship, he writes, has a “Gelassenheit to all things and a
sensibility that helps them” (“die Gelassenheit zu allen Dingen und die Berührung, die
ihnen hilft”).40 “Helping things” is Buber’s construal of Daoist nourishing things. Earlier
German language authors described dao “as the primordial ground, the sustainer and
nourisher of all things” (Rotermund 1874: 12). This facet of early Daoism is taken up
into Heidegger’s language of “safeguarding” and “healing.”
There are numerous differences between Wilhelm and Heidegger. Wilhelm
categorizes Zhuangzi’s Daoism as a form of active immanent mysticism that embraces
and unites with rather than flees from life and its forces. Pantheism and mysticism
are modern Occidental homogenizing categories. Heidegger consistently rejected the
adequacy of these concepts, even as some elements of his thinking, precisely those that
have been examined with regard to Meister Eckhart and Daoism, were identified with
them by various interpreters and critics.41
Heidegger expressed skepticism concerning such categorizations and the
worldview philosophies that promoted them. Wilhelm specifies the fundamental
thought of the Zhuangzi to be “sovereign freedom,” in which the genuine person is at
one with life in an active and this-worldly form of mysticism as opposed to its passive
and other-worldly forms.42 Zhuangzi is a this-worldly mystic in Wilhelm’s depiction
who uplifts by embracing life rather than sinking away from it in self-absorption. This
indicates that the Daoist suspension of the self is world-affirming, as Klages claimed in
his 1929 response to Nietzsche’s critique of the renunciation of the will as necessarily
entailing ascetic world-denial.43
There are significant departures between how Heidegger and Wilhelm construe
basic Daoist words and concepts. Notwithstanding the clear conceptual differences
between Wilhelm and Heidegger, their interpretations are entwined in Heidegger’s
reliance on Wilhelm’s translations. Heidegger’s semi-Daoist ways of speaking draw on
Wilhelm’s poetic expressions (as illustrated in Chapter 3). It is therefore worthwhile to
trace Wilhelm’s uses of uselessness and the “necessity of the unnecessary” to consider
why Heidegger adopted his translation in this case.
In the 1945 “Evening Conversation,” Heidegger does not refer to Wilhelm’s
translation of wuyong zhiyong 無用之用 from the concluding passage of chapter
four (Renjian shi 人間世, which Wilhelm translates as “In der Menschenwelt” / “In
the Human World”) in the Inner Chapters.44 Heidegger does not refer here to the
concluding section of chapter one that he cites and discusses at length in the 1962
Comburg lecture “Transmitted Language and Technological Language.” This lecture
once more connects usefulness and uselessness to questions concerning language and
things in the epoch of the technological world-picture, which obstructs the kinds of
responsiveness and saying illustrated in the thought-images of the Zhuangzi.
The “Evening Conversation” refers to a different passage from Wilhelm’s Zhuangzi.
“Die Notwendigkeit des Unnötigen” is Wilhelm’s title for the dialogue between Zhuangzi
and his skeptical sophist friend Huizi in chapter 26 (Waiwu 外物 as “External Things”
 Heidegger and the Zhuangzi 97

[Außendinge]) of the Miscellaneous Chapters.45 Wilhelm’s expression “the necessity of

the unnecessary” (“die Notwendigkeit des Unnötigen”), adopted by Heidegger, is a
rendition of one possible meaning of the phrase in comparison with the more typically
used terms of usefulness and uselessness. This dialogue in Wilhelm’s rendition is cited
in the conclusion of Heidegger’s “Evening Conversation” without naming these two
early Chinese philosophers. Bret Davis’s translation into English states:

The one said: “You are talking about the unnecessary.”

The other said: “A person must first have recognized the unnecessary before
one can talk with him about the necessary. The earth is wide and large, and yet,
in order to stand, the human needs only enough space to be able to put his foot
down. But if directly next to his foot a crevice were to open up that dropped down
into the underworld, then would the space where he stands still be of use to him?”
The one said: “It would be of no more use to him.”
The other said: “From this the necessity of the unnecessary is clearly apparent.”46

It has been argued that Wilhelm’s translation of yong as necessity is infelicitous. Even
if this assessment is accepted, as it indicates one possible sense of this idea, given
Wilhelm’s hermeneutical situation, one could well ask what is the specific difference
between the first expression from chapter four (wuyong zhi yong 無用之用) and the
second from chapter 26 (wuyong zhi wei yong 無用之為用) and their contexts that led
Wilhelm to translate one in terms of usefulness of uselessness and the other in terms of
the necessity of the unnecessary? Why did Wilhelm mark a difference between these
two expressions when most German and English translations do not? Both phrases
are typically interpreted as the usefulness of the useless, while Wilhelm and Heidegger
mark a difference and deploy both use and necessity. It still leaves the question of why
Heidegger made the second expression the leitmotif of the “Evening Conversation.”

6. Letting, Waiting, and Releasement

The unnecessary is explicitly juxtaposed with the instrumental and technical character
of reason as ratio and modern rationality in this text, as well as with the Occidental
essence of thinking that does not allow itself to wait and let.47 Heidegger raises an issue
that will be taken up in the “Letter on Humanism,” as he reflects on “action” and its
adequacy as a measure of the human with its presuppositions identifying reason as
ratio and the human being as the rational animal. These constructions are inadequate
to the human essence understood as the being that waits and remains attentive and
responsive in that which they belong.
In the patience of waiting, Heidegger remarked, we (and we should consider who
this “we” is) are the inlet or letting in (Einlass) for that which is coming: “We are in
such a manner as though we were to first come to ourselves, in letting in [einlassend]
the coming, as those who are themselves only by abandoning themselves—this,
however, by means of waiting toward [entgegenwarten] the coming.”48 Playing on the
German word for the present moment, Gegenwart, he interprets the word according
to its two components: as a “present moment” (Gegenwart) understood in a verbal
98 Heidegger and Dao

sense as a “waiting-toward” (gegen-warten).49 The genuine present transpires as

a pure waiting (warten) toward (gegen, which can mean “in the direction of ” or
“against”) that which is to come. This pure (i.e., unnecessary and useless) waiting
does not await something; it waits without anticipations, expectations, or that which
is deemed necessary and useful.
What does patient waiting signify in this setting? Is this the emptied heart-mind
that awaits things in emptiness of the Zhuangzi? Waiting is delineated elsewhere in
Heidegger as essentially a letting. It is not a product of willing and acting, and the
silent emptiness in which the echo can be heard (GA 81: 170). In waiting, in the third
of the Country Path Conversations, we “let ourselves into, namely into that in which
we belong”; namely, “by letting things rest in their own repose,” which occurs in an
emptiness that cannot be filled.50 This letting things be themselves in their releasement
occurs through emptiness and signifies an anarchic freedom: “Freedom rests in being
able to let [Lassenkönnen], not in ordering and dominating.”51 Discarding restrictive
ways of controlling and ordering things and allowing them to pursue their own course
is a fundamentally Zhuangzian point that other contemporary readers construed
along anarchistic and libertarian lines. These modern adaptations are possible because
Daoist freedom does not belong to the monadic self, nor is it the command and will
of the subject, which better define power. Genuine freedom arises in worldly relations
with others and things in which they have room for their own freedom. Heidegger
adopts Daoist freedom to an extent in his own conception of freedom as a return to
one’s own self-essencing: freedom toward oneself and the open groundless ground that
has no fixed foundations.52
It has been argued that Heidegger’s sense of letting here might have inspirational
sources in Meister Eckhart, Böhme, and Schelling, without any need to mention Laozi
or Zhuangzi.53 However, we might recall Wilhelm’s interpretation of the Zhuangzi as
teaching a sovereign freedom and Gelassenheit amidst life. Moreover, it is Heidegger
who evokes and employs Daoist thought-images throughout this text. Heidegger’s
direct references and his circumlocutions prompt the question of the extent to which
he appropriated a range of Daoist concepts from the editions of Buber and Wilhelm.
These include wuwei (which is linked with letting and waiting in Chinese and German
sources), ziran (as a non-instrumentalized naturalness happening in and for itself),
and the wandering freedom and releasement of things. Does it vindicate speaking of
a “Daoist turn” in Heidegger or more modestly of transformative Lao-Zhuang traces
and spurs that are marked, for example, in the alteration of tone and semantic content
between the 1939–1941 (GA 96) and the 1942–1948 (GA 97) Black Notebooks? The
language of waiting, letting, and Gelassenheit barely appears in the former text that
is ensnared in geopolitical issues of will, power, and conflict. It plays an increasingly
notable role in the latter, as the will becomes the counter-image rather than the
expression and work of phúsis, indicating an adjustment in his thinking that correlates
with his intensified attention to Laozi and Zhuangzi.

7. The Unnecessary, the Useless, and an Unnecessary and Useless People

It is striking that Heidegger has his two interlocutors intriguingly rejecting the
notion of nations and nationalisms in the “Evening Conversation,” including what
 Heidegger and the Zhuangzi 99

he deems its internationalized form. In the context of rejecting nationalism, the

concluding pages articulate how the German people, a “useless,” “unnecessary” people,
must learn the necessity of the unnecessary and become a people of pure waiting,
letting and releasing things precisely in order to release themselves. Human letting is
only possible because of being’s letting be of things: “We learn letting go only in the
letting be of being” (GA 97: 153). In the Daoist context, ziran is the condition of wuwei.
Heidegger’s deployment of Gelassenheit reverberates with the word’s linguistic
heritage from Eckhart through Schelling.54 Still, Heidegger states that his thinking
of releasement is not akin to Eckhart’s turning away from the sinful earthly will to
the divine will.55 His releasement does not concern, as Böhme portrays, the worldly
detachment of Gelassenheit, suspending the sinful selfness (Selbstheit) and temptations
of earthly temporal things that hinder the soul’s intimacy with the eternal and divine
(Böhme 1732: 50, 123). This difference intersects with the Zhuangzi in which there is
no suspension of the self ’s will for a divine will nor the condemnation of creatures as
sinful and evil (Böhme 1732: 115). The thing is dependent on its own self-generative co-
creative ways of being rather than divine creation or idealist projection. The unfettered
self can transition through restrictive one-dimensional perspectives and shift with the
myriad things following their own self-naturing.
Heidegger’s letting releasement occurs much more along the lines of the German
reception of the Zhuangzi and its sense of liberation as precisely being in and with the
world, and nourishing, safeguarding, and healing the life of things. It is in this sense
an ethos instead of a mystical state. “Nourishing life” (yangsheng 養生) in the Zhuangzi
can be interpreted in relation to immanently cultivating life and therapeutically healing
life from what afflicts it. This resonates in Heidegger’s description in the third Country
Path Conversation of the letting and waiting that heals and nurtures.56 Letting releases
both things and humans into that which heals (das Heilsame). In this passage, healing
is called for in answer to an affliction: it is a way for a people that had been misled
by “false leaders” and their aims posited as “necessary” and is confronted by its own
uselessness and unnecessariness.
Heidegger accordingly has reasons for speaking of the necessity of the unnecessary.
First, it appears that for Heidegger, the useful is identifiable with the necessary
according to the instrumental paradigm that equates the two, and which is challenged
by the unnecessary that promises a unique way of dwelling and modality of being.
Secondly, the expressions das Notwendige and die Notwendigkeit do not signify the
necessary as that which must be the case or the compulsion of logical implication,
although it does signify a fateful compulsion (GA 77: 237–8).
The necessary in Heidegger’s reflections is what is urgent and needful (nötig) in
answering distress in a situation of need and emergency (Not). It is the unnecessary that
responds to this situation of needfulness, “learning to know the need [Not] in which
everywhere the unnecessary [das Unnötige] must still persevere.”57 It would be dubious
to project Heidegger’s elucidation of necessity onto Wilhelm’s initial rendering. Still, it
appears that his translation also presupposes a wider field of meanings for “necessity”
(i.e., the Chinese word yong and the German word Notwendigkeit) than a form of
logical compulsion.
Heidegger’s “Evening Conversation” ends with the confirmation of its Zhuangzian
context by explicitly quoting chapter 26 of the Zhuangzi in which Huizi and Zhuangzi
100 Heidegger and Dao

debate the meanings of the necessary and unnecessary (useful and useless), a
conversation that has reverberated throughout the conversation of the old and young
men imprisoned in a Soviet prisoner of war camp. It is evident in this conversation
that Heidegger did not appropriate Daoism to legitimate or excuse National Socialism,
but rather to confront what he now considered its destructive malice that had left
desolation and ruins in its wake.
Heidegger’s historically delimited confrontations with the destructiveness of
National Socialism, and his own initial complicity, take place here and in other
postwar reflections, as in his personal reflections of the Black Notebooks published in
GA 98. These criticisms refer to the history of being and technological modernity in
which Weimar and Nazi-era fears of a chaotic and fallen public sphere and communist
threat have been substituted with suspicions that democracy operates as another more
masked form of technological domination without perceiving its formally indicative
self-organizing propensities. There are multifarious problems with dysfunctional and
systematically distorted existing democracies. Heidegger, to briefly contemplate his
political thought, failed to sufficiently consider the normative and critical functions
of the public and private realms, elementary republics and democratic participation,
and personal rights, points incisively articulated by Arendt, no doubt with her former
teacher in mind (Arendt 1976; Arendt 2018). Heidegger’s later political reflections
express missed opportunities for a more genuine confrontation with his own past and
questions of freedom and authority. They do not refer to the anarchic spontaneity and
self-organizing tendencies of Daoist political discourses that fascinated Buber in his
1924 Ascona lectures on the Daodejing.58 Nor do they ponder Arendt’s powerful analyses
of an irreducibly plural and unrestricted public sphere, civil society, and democratic
participation with guaranteed rights safeguarding individual, interpersonal, and
interbodily life; nor do they consider—to use Habermas’s language—the colonization
of the lifeworld and public sphere by the systems of the state and the market.59

III. Heidegger and the German Reception of the Zhuangzi

8. Uselessness, Saying, and the Very Sense of Things

The Zhuangzi was enthusiastically received during the Weimar Republic due to its
spirit of freedom, breaking barriers, naturalness, and transformation. Heidegger’s
continuing attentiveness to the Zhuangzi is revealed in his later lectures held in Bremen
in 1960 (already discussed above) and Comburg in 1962. Each addresses topics at the
heart of his later thinking: of twisting free from technological enframing to genuinely
encounter images, words, and the thing in its openness, mystery, and self-thingness.
Heidegger returned to the Zhuangzi and the problematic of usefulness and
uselessness in a lecture given on July 18, 1962, on “Transmitted Language and
Technological Language.” In this discussion of learning, the limits of language, and the
appropriate words for things, Heidegger quotes at length Wilhelm’s translation of “The
Useless Tree” (Der unnütze Baum) containing the conversation between Zhuangzi
and Huizi that concludes chapter one of the Zhuangzi. Heidegger cited the entirety
 Heidegger and the Zhuangzi 101

of Wilhelm’s translation of the passage that is included with the Chinese text in the
endnote; it also reappears as a whole in a discussion of philosophy vis-à-vis poetic
thinking in the first volume of Jean Beaufret’s Dialogue with Heidegger.60 It is clear
in Beaufret that this passage of the Zhuangzi is indicative and thought-provoking for
thinking, even if distinct from the restraints of philosophy as seen in Plato’s systematic
conceptualizing of being (Beaufret 1968: 15). The image of Zhuangzi’s useless tree
appears in other writings of Heidegger, such as his late 1950s discussion of letting as
an originary doing and saying as a letting shine forth of the self-concealing clearing
(GA 101: 47).
Why might have Heidegger concentrated his attention on this passage? Given the
criticisms his philosophy of being received, Heidegger might well have identified with
Huizi’s accusation against Zhuangzi of using fantastic, grandiose, and useless words,
and responding with indications transgressing the limits of the useful. Heidegger
appeals to the Zhuangzi, as mediated by Wilhelm’s translation, to diagnose the modern
administrative technological epoch, and to ponder possibilities of reawakening a sense
of speaking with and encountering things through a form of meditative reflection
(Besinnung) that involves awakening a sensibility for the useless.61
Directly prior to quoting the Zhuangzi, Heidegger introduces the necessity of
uselessness that is found in the very sense of things. He describes this sense of the
useless as the most necessary and needful (das Nötigste) for encountering “the sense
of things” (der Sinn der Dinge) and as constituting the very sense and usefulness of the
useful (das Nützliche).62 The sense of things as things is presupposed and obscured by
the instrumentalization of things. It is the pivot and point of departure for genuine
saying and thinking that moves toward the things that address and lay claim to
them. Zhuangzi’s way of “being-with” stands open to encountering the gourd, the
tree, or the fish in their uselessness and playfulness outside of “anthropological” (i.e.,
anthropocentric) usefulness.
The repeated conversations between Huizi and Zhuangzi about uselessness, which
encompass gourds and trees, reveal in Heidegger’s portrayal the precariousness of the
inversion that makes the useful the measure of usefulness, as it is under the dominion
of the modern technological world-picture. This imposition of the measure of the
useful misses the determining power of the useless, which is not made and out of
which nothing can be made, as it is “the sense of things” disclosing themselves (GA
80.2: 1177).
Heeding the thing’s own sense shifts the perspective from anthropological
instrumentality to the barely heard thing. It is not incidental that Heidegger recognizes
uselessness and the “useless” sense-forming thing itself as the locus of sense. This thread
runs throughout Heidegger’s engagement with early Daoist sources and his own later
ziranist-inflected thinking of the thing. Heidegger deploys this Zhuangzian-inspired
conception of the useless sense of things, correlating uselessness (wuyong) with self-
so-ness (ziran, inadequately translated into and conceived in English as “nature”). He
does so to counter the instrumentalist reduction of things to technique and a pedagogy
aiming at the reduction of language to information, and to challenge the mastery and
calculation of things as useful, and the compulsion to achieve successful pragmatic
results according to the restrictive parameters of what counts as success. Learning is,
102 Heidegger and Dao

however, not imposing a measure of use on those who learn and their objects of study;
it is attending to the unspoken measure in things themselves.
Heidegger construes learning along the lines of wuwei as a non-coercive “letting
be learned” (lernenlassen). Letting be learned emerges through “transmitted language”
that is too often dismissed as merely natural prescientific ways of speaking. Nonetheless,
transmitted language is the language of quotidian life and encountering and dwelling
with others and things. To lose this contact and relationship with things is to lose what
it is to be essentially human as a worldly being. The “essentially human” does not signify
for Heidegger the anthropocentric and humanistic separation of the human from the
world, which he interrogated in the semi-Daoistic-inflected “Letter on Humanism.” It
is a dwelling with and being in the thick of the life of things.
A nontechnically reduced and impoverished language—as illustrated in poetic
saying and thinking, which the sayings attributed to Laozi and Zhuangzi express in
thought-images and turning phrases—happens as spoken and unspoken saying.
Saying is a showing and letting-appear of what is present and absent, of reality in
the widest sense.63 Such saying does not obscure things and hide world, as technical
language does in its pursuit of the domination of nature and the mastery of things
as merely “useful” and “useless.”64 Contesting the self-alienating and self-destructive
domination of things is insufficient if it does not entail cultivating an ethics and culture
of responsive co-appropriating and collaborating with others, things, and places.
Saying stays open to encountering what is unsaid and unsayable: “the nearness
of the unspoken and unspeakable.”65 This wording reformulates Heidegger’s remark
regarding Laozi in On the Way to Language: “the mystery of mysteries of thoughtful
saying conceals itself in the word ‘way,’ dao, if only we will let these names return to what
they leave unspoken, if only we are capable of this, to allow them to do so.”66 Heidegger’s
refusal of pragmatist and technocratic forms of confining and impoverishing ways of
speaking and thinking in this short lecture draws on the Zhuangzi. It remains still too
pertinent in the current danger of the ecological devastation of earth and living and
nonliving things.

9. The Hermeneutical Situation of Heidegger’s Zhuangzi

The Zhuangzi plays an intriguing role in Heidegger’s thinking in the texts “Image and
Word” and “Transmitted Language and Technological Language,” even if it is insufficient
to speak of a Daoist turn to characterize Heidegger’s later thinking. These two texts
reintroduce once again the thematic of uselessness and the sense of things that steps
beyond Heidegger’s Occidental sources of Meister Eckhart, Schelling, and Hölderlin.67
The intrinsic “self-so-ing” sense of things is a Zhuangzian perspectival shift: not only
phenomenologically showing themselves from themselves but being themselves. In
addition, for comparative and intercultural philosophers of contemporary thought,
there are partial family resemblances between tendencies in both discourses, and
Heidegger has a significant role both in the contemporary Occidental and East Asian
philosophical reception of Lao-Zhuang discourses.
We have seen in the previous section how Heidegger is concerned in this lecture with
a learning that undoes linguistic and conceptual fixations and allows for encountering
 Heidegger and the Zhuangzi 103

things themselves in their uselessness and their own significance. Zhuangzi and
Heidegger are not merely critics of linguistic reification; they illuminate destructuring
therapeutic strategies for unfixing the fixated construction and experience of thing
and world.68 Heidegger could accordingly uncover in this ancient text teachings that
resonated with his own thinking, that endeavored to unfix and loosen the modern
administrative technological framework for the sake of freely dwelling in the thick of
things and abiding amidst the world.
Heidegger’s appropriative encounter and reimagining of this Chinese text, relying
on the editions of Buber and Wilhelm, occurred in a historical situation of an increasing
attentiveness to the Zhuangzi and other East Asian sources. The writer Hermann
Hesse, who praised the translations of the Zhuangzi of both Buber and Wilhelm, wrote
of Wilhelm’s edition in 1912: “Zhuangzi is the greatest and most brilliant poet among
Chinese thinkers” and “Of all the books of Chinese thinkers that I know, the Zhuangzi
has the most appeal and melody.”69
It is worth noting that the appreciation of the Zhuangzi expressed in Buber,
Heidegger, and Georg Misch was not universal among Heidegger’s philosophical
community. Karl Jaspers, in his postwar work on the “great philosophers” that
encompasses Confucius, the Buddha, Laozi, and Nāgārjuna, does not focus on the
point of the Zhuangzi’s playful placing into question of fixations, its linguistic strategies
of liberating human dispositions that offer a radical model of the existential openness
of communication that Jaspers endeavors to articulate. Instead, he claims (no doubt
because of the apparently disrespectful treatment of Confucius): “The atmosphere
in [Laozi] is peaceful; in [Zhuangzi] it is polemical, full of arrogance, mockery,
contempt.”70
Among Heidegger’s philosophical contemporaries, two appear especially relevant.
Although figures like Klages engaged the Daodejing in ways that Heidegger might have
registered given his repeated dismissive references to his 1929 work, Buber and Misch
have the most extensive and productive philosophical relation with the Zhuangzi.
Buber translated and commented on the work as discussed previously above. Buber
also extensively engaged with the Daodejing in ways that influenced the I-it and I-thou
encounters (in those moments when stones, trees, and cats break through their mere
“it-ness”) and relationships of I and Thou.71 Further, Buber was the only one of these
philosophers to engage with the magical and preternatural forms of Daoism that
he perceived to be operative in popular literature, such as the Strange Tales from a
Chinese Studio (Liaozhai zhiyi 聊齋誌異) of the Qing era author Pu Songling 蒲松齡
(1640–1715) which he translated from English into German in 1911 as Chinese Ghost
and Love Stories.72 Just as Hasidic stories reflected its religiosity for Buber, these stories
reflected the interpenetration of the material and spiritual worlds.

10. Heidegger, Misch, and the Question of Occidental Philosophy

At this point, to conclude this chapter with an additional historical clue, it is important
to emphasize that another compelling approach to the multiplicity of philosophy was
available during the Weimar Republic. Heidegger and Husserl were reacting against
this discourse when they insisted in the 1930s that philosophy is and can only be Greek-
104 Heidegger and Dao

European. Misch is best known as the student, son-in-law, and editor of the collected
works of the hermeneutical life-philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey. He is furthermore an
underappreciated yet significant early twentieth-century intercultural philosopher,
revealing in his underrecognized 1926 work The Way into Philosophy (Der Weg in
die Philosophie) how the Zhuangzi, in “Autumn Floods” among other chapters, not
only gestures at but radically enacts the interruptive breakdown of one’s own limited
fixed viewpoint and “breakthrough” (Durchbruch)—from the everyday pre-reflective
natural attitude—that characterizes philosophy and the multiplicity of its origins in
diverse cultural milieus.
Misch equates the autumn floods, in which the great river recognizes its own
smallness, and the barriers and fixations of its limited self-conception are dismantled
by entering the sea that signifies the infinite, with Plato’s allegory of the cave as
narratives of philosophical transformation. Occidental philosophy is confronted with
its limited self-conception in entering the great sea of questioning and self-reflection.
Misch only contemplates three passages from the Zhuangzi: autumn floods in chapter
seventeen, the fasting of the heart-mind in chapter four, and the paradox of categories
on beginning and not beginning, being and nonbeing, and this and that in the second
chapter on equalizing things. Notwithstanding his problematic characterization of
Zhuangzi as a pantheistic mystic, a category that privileges homogenizing identity and
Occidental religiosity, Misch recognizes and embraces the philosophical significance
of the Zhuangzi. His broader conclusion is that the variety of arguments, dialogues, and
illustrative stories expressed in the Zhuangzi are indicative of a radical self-reflective
breakthrough and can therefore be considered genuinely philosophical.
Misch’s point in this work is that philosophy as critical self-reflection (Selbst-
Besinnung) on life and its senses has multiple origins and transmissions, of which
Occidental metaphysics and science are only one historical configuration. Husserl
and Heidegger’s denial of such a claim gives the impression of having Misch’s thesis
in mind when they contend that philosophy as science (Husserl in the Crisis) or as
metaphysics (Heidegger in Identity and Difference and What Is Called Thinking?) is
intrinsically Greek-Occidental.73 Husserl and Heidegger made, in essence, the same
statement and meant it in two different ways. While Husserl praised the Buddha in the
1920s as coming close to Socrates and philosophy, Buddhism lacked in his view the
universal systematic scientific character that could free it from myth. Ernst Cassirer
likewise in The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, in contrast to Misch’s insight into original
self-reflection, construed Buddhism and Daoism as opposed varieties of myth and
mysticism, one negating and the other embracing temporality (Cassirer 1955: 124–6).
Heidegger also did not incorporate them into the category of philosophy.74 But he did
increasingly contest this narrow category with a poetic thinking that could potentially
interact with—in respectful reserve—a greater variety of teachings.
Heidegger’s analysis of the Occidental formation of philosophy has a critical point,
as the history and legacy of philosophy as metaphysics and onto-theology is to be
confronted and contested rather than embraced. Further, he mentions how ancient
Chinese or Aztec thought are not engaged with as matters to be thought through
mindful questioning but only as objects of universal world-historical comparative
representation (GA 8: 169–70). As early as 1926 Heidegger articulated the kind of
 Heidegger and the Zhuangzi 105

suspicions about Orientalist enthusiasm for Eastern philosophy and occultism as a

reflection of one’s own spiritual impoverishment that would inform his subsequent
doubts about the Occidental adaptation of Zen Buddhism and Eastern world-
experiences (GA 16: 50, 679). Nevertheless, despite his own extensive reading of and
familiarity with East Asian sources, Heidegger hesitates to take the next step of more
genuinely and thoroughly engaging them precisely as matters to be questioned and
thought while retaining the reserve and respect owed to different configurations and
modalities of thinking.
This occurs in a historically mediated nexus. We can articulate from the
philosophical engagements of Buber and Misch, the translations of Buber and Wilhelm,
and their contexts a sense of the rich and complex reception of the Zhuangzi in early
twentieth-century intercultural discourses in German speaking countries from which
Heidegger’s Daoist-inspired reflections draw.75
Heidegger’s ziranist-informed turning in the mid- and late 1940s transpires in the
crisis conditions of National Socialism, the German defeat, and the administrative-
technocratic regime of the necessity of the useful that increasingly characterizes
modernity. This Zhuangzian turning to that which is useless and unnecessary opened
alternative possibilities and retrievals in Heidegger’s thinking in the postwar period. Let
us consider further in the next chapter what roles they played in Heidegger’s endeavors
to elucidate an appropriate manner of being-in-the-world and ethos of dwelling in
confrontation with the mechanisms of the enframing positioning of persons and things
as raw materials. This is instituted under the sway of administrative technological
modernity that systematically reproduces damaged life.76 Stepping beyond Heidegger,
the transformation of ethical and poetic dwelling also needs participatory public
realms and pluralistic political processes—the spontaneity of which philosophers and
theorists can at best only anticipate and not conceptually dictate—if we are to confront
our contemporary social-ecological predicament more appropriately.
106
 5

Heidegger’s Dao amidst Thing and World

I. The Way and the Releasement of Things

1. Heidegger’s Dao
Heidegger’s multifaceted journey guided him—via in part his mediated encounter
with the “ziranist” sources the Daodejing and Zhuangzi—to defining the openness
and mystery of the self-essencing (the thinging and worlding) of thing and world.1
Heidegger’s emergent prioritization of the thing in the mid- and late 1940s is informed
to an extent (as shown in the previous chapters) by his interaction with ziran-oriented
Daoist texts in translation that he directly mentions and indirectly uses and evokes.
Heidegger’s proximity to the idea of acting from responsive attunement (wei wuwei)
in emptiness, simplicity, and stillness with the thing in its ongoing transforming
(hua) and self-so-naturing is intimated in several of his expressions and discursive
strategies. His pathway toward the thing is opened in a formalizing and emptying that
allows oneself to be addressed by the thing in its own ways of being. This ziranist
moment intersects with his later more robust manner of addressing the thing’s life on
its own terms.
The subject is reconceived as being-there and being-in-the-world in Heidegger’s
early philosophy. It remains ensnared (as Adorno and Heidegger himself perceived)
in constitutive idealism and transcendental philosophy, which it struggles yet arguably
fails to overcome, according to his later self-critiques.2 It is only radically transformed
in the recognition of what can be elucidated as the “other-constitution,” occurring
through things and world that Heidegger articulated in the 1949 Bremen Lectures and
other works. Heidegger’s engagement with translated ziranist texts, in conjunction
with early Pre-Socratic Greek thinking and the poet of poets Hölderlin, offers one
documented source and conceivably the best explanation for this dramatic shift toward
recognizing the mystery, namelessness, and irreducibility of things as they are in and
of themselves and, further, toward sensing their own priority, which—a prospect
Heidegger observed in the Zhuangzi—liberates them from the constructed artificial
necessity of pragmatic usefulness. Given this context, Heidegger can well be said to
intimate an ethos (thought more originarily as a way of worldly dwelling and formative
way-making) and a dao of responsive releasement and attunement with things and the
environing worlds, moments, and places that they form.
108 Heidegger and Dao

It would be an overstatement to portray Heidegger’s thinking as a variety of

Daoism. Still, it is without doubt “wayist” in a European form in giving priority to the
way instead of to a rigid structure or content. This thinking of way and its movements
evokes and is at times entangled with Daoist and Chinese conceptions of dao, while
being distinct from them. This intertwinement has notable consequences for how
Heidegger’s philosophical wayfaring is to be understood. The present chapter outlines
a ziranist elucidation of Heidegger’s philosophy or, more modestly stated, its “ziranist”
dimension, expressed in at least one albeit not all corners of his thought. The initial
sections of this chapter will draw further conclusions about the Daoist background of
Heidegger’s thinking of the way, releasement, and the thing. The later sections of the
chapter examine how this interpretive situation informs his later reflections on ethos,
action, habitation, and letting.

2. Heidegger’s Thinking of the Way

Heidegger is known as the philosopher of being who relentlessly pursued this one
question throughout his life’s work. His philosophical pathway is, nonetheless,
characterized less by the question of being, the constitution of meaning, truth as
unconcealment, or the appropriating event of being, than it is by the question of
the way.3 These guiding words are repeatedly reconstituted by Heidegger along his
pathway. More noteworthy, according to Heidegger, is the way, being underway,
following darkened forest and meandering country paths, making one’s way by being
and going underway (GA 98: 390; GA 100: 41), and consequently the question and
changing locus of the happening of the event on the way: human existence as Dasein,
nothingness, being, thing, and saying word. The appropriative or enowning event
(Ereignis) as er-eignen does not signify making its own as in owning, mastering, and
taking possession; it means, on the contrary, if interpreted according to early Daoist
experiences of ziran, the becoming its own, the self-essencing, and the self-naturing of
the matter itself: being (Sein) in its historical concealments and manifestations.4 What
do essence and event mean in Heidegger’s discourse? Essencing (Wesen) does not
signify quidditas, whatness, and identity: it refers to verbally understood presencing,
worldliness, and the whiling of the while in which space and time are referred back
to the nexus of moment and place.5 In the 1930s Heidegger elaborated the being-
historical (Seinsgeschichtliche) thinking of the appropriating or enowning ontological
happening (er-eignen) of being, that is, being in its self-ownness, as an attempt to think
the letting of being in which being essences as itself and time names the unconcealing
self-essencing of being.6
Taken by themselves, without their own relational and verbal specificity in his
discourse, “being” and “meaning” are stagnant ways to interpret Heidegger’s thought.
Being, Heidegger notes, is always “being of” (in the sense of the double genitive);
beings are always “beings as” (GA 98: 193). The “of ” and “as” are encountered through
the way. Heidegger repeatedly stated that his collected works should be defined as
ways rather than works. Expressions such as “way” and “being under way” are not
merely rhetorical. They indicate a philosophical method (if taken in a wide sense not
limited to technique). Heidegger’s critique of method emerged from his reflections on
 Heidegger’s Dao amidst Thing and World 109

it as he sought a “method,” which would not be limited to method as technique and

would open concrete singular phenomena instead of obfuscating them. This was the
case from his early confrontations with Husserl’s categorical intuition and Dilthey’s
interpretive understanding, his articulation of formal indication and destructuring in
the 1920s, to his later conception of thinking as way.
In his previously unpublished reflections from 1952 to 1957 (GA 100), he recurrently
returns to the priority and significance of the way for his thinking of being and mortal
human existence. Heidegger proposes that the minimal demand of thinking is to persist
on the selfsame (selben) way without remaining in the identically same (gleichen)
place.7 As the Zhuangzi portrays shifting through myriad perspectives without fixating
on one perspective, and freely wandering without one final purposive goal, Heidegger’s
way is similarly a wandering through field and forest without a prearranged goal or
teleological purpose (GA 100: 169, 208). Heidegger elucidates thinking as traversing a
course without being trapped in one location. The selfsame can be understood as the
self-occurring way in contrast to the repetition of the identical that would occur without
movement, individuation, and difference (GA 100: 9). The step back from thinking
as representation to thinking as moving-way (be-wegen, an expression he deployed
earlier to explicate Laozi’s “reversal” [fan] as the way’s movement) is designated in one
reflection as the summation of his thinking: it steps back, not to a previous thinking
that once was but to where thinking sojourns and abides (GA 98: 57).
Heidegger defines his way as one of preliminary “preparatory thinking”
(GA 100: 12). This way does not signify “the way,” echoing the statement that the posited
fixated way is not the way, in Daodejing 1, but a movement underway and a forming
of the way.8 Preparatory thinking does not posit a beginning or project a conclusion.
It arises within the movement of the way back (“Be-Wegung des Rückweges”), a way
back that encompasses (among other elements) hearing and hearkening to stillness,
the unsayable that is the basis of saying, and responding in a saying moved by the
releasement into stillness (GA 100: 12–13, 30, 32). The Daoist connection between
emptying and safeguarding and stillness and movement in Heidegger’s thought
is confirmed in his references to Daodejing 15 in several letters that accentuate a
disposition of gentle reserve and stillness in activity and movement (Hsiao 1987: 103;
GA 16: 618; Petzet 1986: 58).
Emptying the heart-mind, reverting to stillness, and allowing the world to gather
and depart are well-known Lao-Zhuang thought-images. Returning to the releasing
freedom of stillness occupies a key role in Heidegger’s postwar reflections, as he
describes genuine thinking as an ear for and hearkening toward the stillness of the
world in which hearing attends to the gathering of the unpretentious and humble voices
of earth and thing (GA 98: 18–19). There is a sounding with the ground-tone of things
in the voicing of silent stillness, and a gathering in the stilling of stillness (GA 97: 347,
354–5). This silent stillness is said to speak as saying responds to its addressing claim.
The way back and the reversal are not then toward a proximate or first cause, a static
content, or a set origin, as in the “philosophy of origins” (Ursprungsphilosophie),
whether that origin is being or meaning, attributed to Heidegger.
The returning back movement in Heidegger’s meditations is a moving toward the
source rather than to that which is past. Heidegger’s reversing movement and stepping
110 Heidegger and Dao

back on the path toward being parallels reversal (fan) as the movement of dao, which
he himself interrelated, as examined in Chapter 3. This source is depicted as a Daoist-
like empty stillness and darkness wherein things gather world, are heard, and answered
in saying (GA 98: 404). Heidegger relies on a Daoist-informed register when the origin
is defined not only as abyssal and groundless (a vocabulary derived from German
mysticism and Schelling) but as still, simple, mysterious, empty, and dark and calling
for responsive worldly attunement. These are expressions extended throughout the
Daodejing, the Zhuangzi, and Heidegger’s late- and postwar reflections.
Two distinct elements can therefore be disentangled in Heidegger’s articulation
of stepping and moving back. First, the “way back” through the epochs of being
and its history signifies a confrontation with Pre-Socratic thinking and the history
of Occidental metaphysics. Yet, thought of as “reversing movement,” the language
deployed here is also entangled with his reading of the way (dao) as a way of reversal
(fan) in the Daodejing. This way back, doubling back, and returning movement, as
when one reaches a dead end on a path, is directed toward truth in its own reserved
hiddenness (GA 100: 14). The originary ontological event of truth is its own self-
occurring concealing-unconcealing, prior to légein, lógos, and representational
cognition. Thinking is a preparation for the disclosure of truth rather than dogmatically
positing it. The happening of truth, amidst which we can encounter and think truth,
calls for responsive hearkening and respectful reticence to it as truth. Philosophy
should become more poetic, not by writing poetry but by enacting this responsiveness
in its own way and thus becoming a thinking of the thing and matter to be thought.
As thinking is a moving underway, it is essentially preliminary, preparatory. As
it arrives at dead ends and turns that require tracking back, thinking is inexorably
confronted by the need for self-critique and sincerity amidst transformation. The
question of being is itself a preliminary, preparatory questioning and movement in the
course of this questioning (GA 100: 60). Heidegger states accordingly that his way of
thinking has been misunderstood insofar as (1) his thinking attempts to be provisional
in each place and time and (2) originary self-criticism is anchored in the recognition of
the provisional character of thinking.9 His path of thinking is not systematic and not a
metaphysical system of being that is necessarily a repetition of the forgetting of being.
It is a course of questioning (GA 100: 56).
The ways of thinking and questioning are indeterminate in the sense of being
free and unfixed. They are not arbitrary. Thinking and conversation, possibly as
glimpsed in the conversations between Huizi and Zhuangzi, call for setting out and
going on a path, without any preordained measure or criteria that would keep one
secure from journeying on byways, deserted solitary pathways, and ways that lead
seemingly nowhere (GA 100: 190). These useless paths, however, are places in which
truth becomes recognized, in contrast to the disciplinary paradigm of useful results
in which movement and journeying in truth and error are precluded and thoughtful
dialogical conversation cannot even begin. Encountering truth, which transpires as
un-concealment and un-error, necessitates encountering concealment and error
from which mindful thinking can begin to ponder and question not only others but
more fundamentally itself. Genuine thoughtful reflection (Besinnung) is consequently
therapeutic self-critique as a step that releases the next step underway:
 Heidegger’s Dao amidst Thing and World 111

Every thoughtful criticism of what has already been thought is self-criticism. It

concerns not only what precedes it but a way-formative mindful reflection that is
underway: the endeavor to indwell in the unsaid of the joining.10

Originary thinking is a letting be learned (GA 98: 395). It does not dictate but
follows the course of the questioning to thinking that which is to be thought: the
matters and things of themselves. These matters and things are no longer merely
the correlates of the intentional consciousness analyzed in classical phenomenology.
They are to be addressed with reserve as appearing and speaking from their own self-
essencing. Heidegger’s mature thinking preserves a phenomenological moment that
has been transformed into a ziranist thinking directed toward the primacy of the
thing in its own self-naturing. This self-naturing is not a conceptual definition of the
thing. Nor should it be construed as a natural determination or a sole determination
if these are interpreted as a form of natural necessity that negates the thing’s freedom
and mystery.11 Self-naturing signals openness and responsiveness toward the question-
worthy mystery of the thing. It is the thing that calls forth practices of observation,
listening, mindful reflection, and releasement.
Releasement has become a way of being open to entities and the world in Heidegger,
indicating an affinity with Daoist discourses that confirm ziran as the archetypal
model of dao, as expressed in the conclusion of Daodejing chapter 25: dao models
its self-generative ownness or self-so-ing (dao fa ziran 道法自然). Such releasement
into “naturalness” does not consist of a state of ecstatic mystical absorption or a self-
absorbed calm serenity of mind. Entering into stillness and releasing things concerns
a comportment enacted and lived in being-in-the-world, in the thick of and in reply to
them. As in his Daoist sources, releasement is above all a reserved reverent resonance
with things in the fourfold. Heidegger clarifies accordingly how it is an intra-worldly
preparation in and for the encounter, and that which presents itself in the encounter
and its “transcendence” is directed toward enregioning entities and interfolding earth
and sky rather than toward what is beyond or outside of them. Releasement is not a
form of explanation at all; nor is it a search for either proximate or first causes such as
God (GA 100: 83). It is, in affinity with wuwei, a way of being disposed toward, attuned
with, and having a “sense for” thing and world.

3. The Daodejing’s Darkness and the Zhuangzi’s Errancy

An orienting attunement does not determine the path or its destination. It has no
predetermined and fixed purpose or goal. As the way is preliminary, preparatory, and
formed in its very movement, thinking cannot predict or avoid the myriad “detour
paths, side-paths, wrong paths, forest paths, field paths” it takes as part of its journey.12
Errancy (Irre) and reversal are not only elements of movement. They are, as he
argued in the 1930 Daoist-influenced “The Essence of Truth,” elements of concealing/
unconcealing truth itself.13
Heidegger stated in the 1960s that this lecture was the decisive expression of his
later thinking that in fact aims at what is earliest (GA 102: 94). The recently published
1930 lecture version directly and indirectly engages with Daoist thought-images.
112 Heidegger and Dao

Quoting a favorite passage from Daodejing 28 concerning concealment, darkness, and

mystery, Heidegger directly proceeds to analyze how human existence already stands
in errancy (GA 80.1: 397). This passage, no longer preceded by any direct reference
to the Daodejing in its final published version, is frequently quoted and examined
in literature regarding Heidegger without any inkling of its initial Daoist-informed
context (GA 9: 196). Errancy is not simply an accidental defect. It is determinate
for the constitution of historical existence itself, as people are driven away from the
mystery to what appears usefully practicable (Gangbaren), and it recurrently forgets
and misses itself within the twists and turns of what appears immediately given and
available. Truth does not characteristically essence as itself in insistent and unreceptive
human existence, as it operates in forgetfulness, and the question arises: how then can
existence, if at all, prepare for and enter into the essencing of truth?
Freedom is the essencing of truth unconcealed in the letting of being.14 The freedom
of the essencing of truth consists of an expanding receptiveness to mystery: “knowing
lightness, one wraps oneself in darkness” (GA 80.1: 396–7). Geheimnis (mystery,
secret), as delineated in earlier chapters, is a common German translation of xuan
(mystery). Its Daoist dimension in Heidegger occurs not only in the 1930 lecture on
truth but in his later reflections on mystery and letting releasement. Heidegger’s shifts
through constitutive concealment and errancy can be given a ziranist interpretation.
His reflections on the un-essencing to the essencing of truth in expansive receptivity,
openness, and the letting of being appears as if it were a commentary on the Daodejing’s
twofold mystery, in which un-essencing and essencing are forms of self-essencing, and
concealment and unconcealment are forms of truth.
There is a two fold functioning of the un-essencing of truth in the 1930 lecture.
Human existence is confronted with and called to truth from within this fundamental
constitutive: (1) concealment (hiddenness) and (2) errancy that arises within it. Truth
is in essence the opposite of untruth and error that is to be constantly excised, in
Occidental thought. As in the Zhuangzi, the supposed great way (dadao 大道) is not a
way at all as the byway discloses the genuine great way. As indicated in the dialogues
and stories of the Zhuangzi translated by Buber and Wilhelm, the claim to truth of one
perspective and position proves itself to be falsity, and the presumed falsity (such as
the animal, the criminal, the crippled, the rural recluse, and the ecstatic shamanistic
wanderer) excluded by the philosophical schools (Confucian, legalist, Mohist, and so
on) reveals itself as a reorienting perspective. Accordingly, for instance, the infinite
is revealed in the finite and mundane in reorienting perspective-switching tales of
exemplary Daoist and Zen masters of old in the Zhuangzi, in Wei-Jin era mysterious
learning sources, and in the Tang era Chan Buddhism associated with Linji Yixuan
臨濟義玄 (?–866 ce) and other iconoclastic figures. Such writings mobilize imagery of
the infinitesimal, the disfigured and imperfect, and the erroneous as sites of uselessness
and illumination.
In Heidegger’s 1930 lectures on truth, the clearing occurs, and truth transpires,
within errancy itself. This Daoist connection continues to resonate in his later
discussions of concealment, darkness, and mystery. Once again returning to a thought-
image expressed in the Daodejing, explicitly mentioned in the context of mystery
in these early lecture versions of “The Essence of Truth” (GA 80.1: 370), it is the
 Heidegger’s Dao amidst Thing and World 113

darkest darkness that safeguards and discloses the clearing in these reflections of the
1950s (GA 100: 92). This Daoist sense of nurturing darkness reoccurs in the mid-1950s.
Heidegger continues in Identity and Difference to ponder Daodejing 28 in conjunction
with Hölderlin in a discussion of how the locus of thinking is hidden in darkness. He
describes how this darkness is not mere absence or lack. As in the Daodejing, it is the
secretive mystery (Geheimnis) that preserves. In Heidegger’s formulation, darkness is
the mystery of the clearing (Lichtung) as it holds and preserves the brightness (Lichte)
within itself (GA 11: 138). In a reflection in his notebooks on this theme of darkness
as the mystery of light, he concludes that darkening itself frees, clears, and lights the
way (GA 100: 119).

4. Three Strategies to Elucidate the Thing

What then of the thing’s mystery? The thing occupies a crucial and distinctive position
in Heidegger’s sojourn in errancy and truth, that only gradually arrives at the ziranist
mystery of things. The first four chapters delineated how Heidegger’s thing-philosophy
transitions through several intermediary positions from which three moments have been
underscored in part one of the present work: (1) the thing as instrumental, objectively
present, and worldless in regard to human existence as the ekstatic world-opening of
being-there (late 1920s); (2) the thing-in-the-work as ensnared in the creativity and
violence of the work and as offered to being (mid-1930s); and (3) the event of the “it
things” as the durational gathering of the world in the thing that conditions (be-dingen)
a unique moment and environing local region (after the mid-1940s). The present
book has traced Heidegger’s transition from the self-world of human existence and
the worldlessness of the thing to the essencing (Heidegger’s Wesen) and self-naturing
(Lao-Zhuang ziran) of the thing as thing. The first strategy, unfolded particularly in
the late 1920s, remains overly anthropocentric and subjectivistic, as Heidegger noted
in his own auto-critiques of the project of Being and Time, as the thing continues to
be an object of use and theorizing separated from animal and human life. There are
glimpses of another truth of animals and things that was underdeveloped in his early
philosophy and remains insufficiently articulated in his later thinking. The second
strategy of the mid-1930s overly emphasizes the self-generating event of being and the
being-historical deeds, works, and mission of creative poiesis. Formative violent artists,
poets, thinkers, and lawgivers sacrifice things to give shape to new worlds and ways of
dwelling. A more adequate understanding of the ecopoiesis of the interthingly nexus
requires breaking with Heidegger’s conception of poiesis during the 1930s, due to it
being bound up with a coercive collectivist ideology of the people and their homeland.
The third strategy, particularly prominent between 1943 and 1951, promises to unveil
the thing’s world-generative event, as the thing things of itself, and the needfulness of
recognizing the thing’s releasement, in its own way of being itself, in relation to human
existence and to being as such.
This third strategy has substantive implications. The ontic of the ontic-ontological
difference, the beings dissolved into being, according to Heidegger’s critics like
Adorno, is renewed in the altered conception of the thing as having its own sense
that addresses human saying. It is not the sway of sovereign being but the shift to the
114 Heidegger and Dao

worlding thing, and the prospect of reworlding the world through the self-naturing of
things. This insight into the thing radicalizes Heidegger’s critique of anthropological
and anthropocentric humanism. This is the case even while he still differentiates
and accentuates the human being as self-aware finite mortal, being’s shepherd, and
the one who says and safeguards the thing. The thing shifts from instrumental
equipmentality, the isolated separation, and neutral worldlessness of mere presence
(Präsenz), to formative gathering and worlding. It transitions from the periphery of
his early phenomenology to the center of his confrontation with the environmental
and existential destructiveness of administrative and technical modernity. The
essencing thing is no longer the conditioned appearance for consciousness or
human existence, as it gathers and conditions mortals in their essencing (GA 98:
120). Making place for things is to make place for ourselves. It is things that gather
and constitute sites in which humans can dwell and wander. This formation of place
could be demarcated—in view of the Zhuangzi—as the openness and equilibrium
of an autopoietically self-transforming, interthingly relational nexus. This nexus in
its openness and transformability differs from and can be positioned to contest the
purposive systems of systems theory, which Heidegger questioned in the form of
automated cybernetics in his late reflections (GA 102), from the enframing systematic
totalizing of metaphysics, or from the fixated nexus of instrumental usefulness that
forget the singularity of being-there and the thing. The pragmatic instrumental nexus
of availability and usefulness analyzed in Being and Time is revealed in Heidegger’s
later thought to presuppose the thingly or interthingly formation of place and world in
which mortal human existence finds itself, dwells, and builds in ways that nourish or
fail to nourish things and the conditions of life.
The thing is no longer either a pragmatically ready-to-hand or a posited-
represented object. It has come forth as that which “conditions” (be-dingen, as
grounding, standing-over-from, and object) while—in a part of a thought-poem
that echoes the Zhuangzi—we “wander quietly in that which constantly changes.”15
Heidegger deploys a thought-model from the Zhuangzi: as mortals are determined
by ceaselessly transforming things and their natural conditions, freedom means to
spontaneously and responsively wander and sojourn with and amidst things and their
shifting perspectives in emptiness, simplicity and stillness, without dependence and
fixation.
Heidegger’s most revolutionary thinking of the thing is conveyed throughout his
writings after 1943. They indicate a critical template for confronting the forgetting,
reification, and domination of things, in which they become through pragmatically
justified coercion merely useful and useless things, to the detriment of places and
human dwelling. However, there are moments in his later works that this ziranist
moment is not sustained and anthropocentric humanism, which deems things as mere
things, reasserts itself. At times, the thing, such as the stone or the table, becomes
once again a mere ontic phenomenon distinguished from the ontological-ontic being
of human existence and the ontology of being (GA 89: 7–8). Such moments, when the
reassertion of anthropocentrism and the denigration of things recur, are typically in
later expositions of the themes of Being and Time in which his own intervening shifts
and self-criticisms (such as in GA 82) are unmentioned.
 Heidegger’s Dao amidst Thing and World 115

II. Rethinking Ethos

5. Dao and Ethos

The Daodejing, the Zhuangzi, and related texts teach nourishing the life of things
without appealing to laws and prescriptive moral principles and rules that are criticized
as a loss and falling away from dao and the self-so-ness of the myriad things. There are
no fixed and fixating rules yet there are exemplary indicative models to emulate and
enact. The people emulate the sages who emulate in turn the elemental. Like heaven,
earth, and water in Daodejing 7 and 8, the exemplary sages assist and benefit things
without purposive striving or calculative technique.
Sages do not follow the prescriptions and rules of the philosophical schools:
neither the legalistic strategies and methods of maximizing sovereign power that is
more virtù than virtue, nor the universal moral principles and calculation of Mo
Di and the Mohist school (Mojia 墨家), and not the moralizing benevolence and
righteousness (renyi 仁義) associated with Confucius and the “Confucian” or “erudite
school” (rujia 儒家) that existed before and after its greatest master and teacher
Confucius. Like the so-called egoists and skeptical sophists, who are predominantly
known through polemical argumentation against them, early ziranist texts contest
conventional rule-based morality as prejudicial and deleterious. Unlike the egoists
and sophists, whose thoughts are variously incorporated into the ziranist Zhuangzi
and Liezi, they do so for what might well be described as an ethos of enacting dao in
everyday existence.
Dao indicates that which is more primordial than any morality, ethics, or originary
ethos. At the same time, its expressions and traces are exemplary for how all things
sojourn and abide: people emulate and model themselves upon the sage-kings and
sages, the sages emulate heaven and earth, heaven and earth emulate dao, and the
dao emulates its own self-naturing.16 The ziranist language of echoing, emulating,
learning, mirroring, modeling, resonating, and responding is indicative of an attuning
comportment with and amidst things and world as they follow their own changes.
Indeed, this language is also adopted in varieties of Chinese and East Asian Buddhism
such as Chan/Zen.
Such responsive attunement is delineated in a variety of ways in a philosophical
arrangement that adopts and modifies existing religious imagery. First, informed by
models of biospiritual meditation that are also at work in the meditative “art of the
heart-mind” chapters of the Huainanzi and Guanzi, the Daodejing stresses the value
of quietly staying within oneself in the simplicity of one’s own room and local place, as
in Daodejing 47, which Heidegger approvingly quoted in a 1965 letter to Ernst Jünger
(Heidegger-Jünger 2016: 32).
Secondly, employing the shamanistic language and imagery of biospiritual far-
roaming (yuanyou 遠遊), the Zhuangzi accentuates the free transformative sojourning
and wandering of the unfixated self with and amidst the transformation of things.
The unfixated self is at home in homelessness, argumentative and perspectival shifts
(chapter two), and dream-like landscapes of the sublime and the uncanny (chapters
one and seven). As several early twentieth-century German language writers (Hesse)
116 Heidegger and Dao

and Sinologists (Eichhorn) discerned, the Zhuangzi points toward exemplary instances
and models of a mutable self that is freely attuning without reification and alienation
from the relational nexus of itself and its world.

6. Ethos, Ethics, and Morality between Laozi and Heidegger

What is ethos, and can this Greek word be used to express elements of early Chinese
thinking? No doubt it designates something specifically Greek and untranslatable,
as with each elemental word. Yet, at the same time, the work of translation adopts
what was once specifically Greek or Chinese into modern German, English, and other
discourses. Then the question becomes the appropriateness of ethos in contrast with
other words such as ethics, morality, and virtue.
“Ethos” refers to custom, habit, and character in its modern usage and thus would
appear to be in no better position than these other expressions. Its older etymological
meaning is not “fixed ingrained character” (as in the Latin habitus). It is one’s way of
being and abiding in an accustomed place. Ethos denotes in this setting an abiding
moment in an enregioning local place and how one dwells within it, that is the nexus
in which character, virtue, and their absence are enacted. It is this sense of ethos that
Heidegger explicates as a more—if still not fully—originary ethics.
The Greek conception of ethos is helpful, if applied with appropriate caveats, given
the distinctiveness of early Chinese and Greek thinking and keeping in mind that dao
is more primordial than any ethos or way of life. It aids explication of the attunement
of dao that is prior to and simpler than virtue-ethics (and any ingrained or customary
moral skill or habitus) and any rule-based system of moral principles and calculations,
as evident in its critiques of Confucianism and Mohism. Lao-Zhuang virtuosity (de 德)
was construed in its early German reception variously as a form of virtue (Tugend in the
title of von Plaenckner’s 1870 translation), a morally indifferent practice of mysticism,
an anti-moralistic ethic akin to anarchistic or Nietzsche’s critiques of ethics, or an ethos
and sense (Wilhelm’s “Sinn”). Victor von Strauss described Daoist virtuosity in the
1870s as an ethos and comportment of doing and non-doing.17 Non-doing can also be
interpreted affirmatively, as in Dilthey’s depiction of the moral ideal of the Daodejing as
a profound and sublime teaching of the virtues of humility, frugality, and compassion;
Karl Jaspers’ portrayal of non-doing as the origin of Laozi’s ethos; or in Ernst Bloch’s
interpretation of dao as an orientational bearing of simplicity and life- and world-
tactfulness.18
Bloch’s point deserves further attention, as both he and Heidegger recognize a
teaching of free worldly attunement in early Daoist sources. “Orientation,” in the
Latin sense of orīrī, signifies positioning and aligning oneself according to the
rise and movement of the sun. Kant articulated in a 1786 essay the orientational
directionality of sensibility and thought that, as in his example of the sense of right
and left, could not be derived from the external world. But Bloch can speak of dao
as a sensible “tact” with worldly things, such that sensibility and exteriority cannot
be separated, as orientation in the Daoist context points toward adaptive relational
positioning with the worldly self-patterning of things. That is, orientation is not a
positioning by the subject or a point within abstract space; it is an ongoing process
 Heidegger’s Dao amidst Thing and World 117

of attunement with the changing configurations of things that the later Heidegger
calls world. To this degree, it is not incorrect to speak of this form of Daoism as
comprising a this-worldly and life-embracing orientation, ethos, attunement, and
life-praxis enacted in an ensemble of practices of emptying.
Early Daoism was frequently defined as an art of life (Lebenskunst), and the
German edition of Okakura elucidated dao as an “art of being-in-the-world” as seen
in Chapter 1 above (Okakura 1919: 29). The dao is likewise described as gathering and
dwelling—in their pre- or non-Heideggerian senses—in both the heart-mind and in
the land. Water, as an image of the highest good in Daodejing chapter 8, is depicted
as disclosing and forming the goodness of earth (Strauss) and place (Wilhelm) by its
dwelling there (Strauss 1870: 38; Wilhelm 1911: 10). These threads indicate a linguistic
web that intersects with Heidegger’s language that has its own specific configuration as
well as partaking in a generational linguistic community.
Heidegger’s critical suspicion toward ethics and moral theory is another point of
intersection with early Daoism, in its critiques of conventional morality as the decline
of the way, as interpreted in its German language reception. Heidegger rejected, often
dismissively, standard forms of moral and value theory and repeatedly denied that
his philosophy contained an ethics as a theory of moral values, worldviews, rules,
principles, or axioms. Such categories for him are external and coercive to the matter
itself of the ethical: relationship and comportment. The exceptions are those moments
when Heidegger addressed the prospect of an originary ethics, or that which is more
originary than ethics, which enacts a way of being-in-the-world, being-there, and ethos
as abiding, dwelling, and sojourning in a hermeneutical situation and specific moment
and place.
Heidegger already engaged with the question of ethos in contrast with ethics in
his lecture-courses after the First World War, particularly in his confrontations with
Aristotle’s practical and life philosophy.19 The shifting of the sense of ethos can be
traced from his initial to his later interpretations. First, ethos emerges in the more
existentially oriented thinking of the 1920s as the way in which a being exists or, more
hermeneutically speaking, as an individuated art of existing in an interpretive situation.
As Heidegger outlines in a 1930 assessment of Kant, ethics fails in actual practical
moral situations in which specific decisions are demanded (GA 31: 79). It operates, to
deploy the language of Being and Time, as a dominating leaping-in, in that it coerces
others, obscuring their possibilities instead of being an emancipatory leaping-ahead
that opens and releases their own plural possibilities for individuation (GA 2: 122).
Heidegger accordingly emphasizes prospects for authenticity and individuation and
not the virtues, rules, and principles that dominate customary moral theory and misses
the plurality and complexity of ethical life.
“Ethics” is a questionable category insofar as it is a decayed and fallen version of
what the ethical genuinely concerns, which Heidegger variously designated as an
originary ethics, ethos, and dwelling.20 In the phases of Heidegger’s trajectory, the
philosophical category of “ethics” remains in doubt while he attempts to articulate
an alternative to it called ethos or that which is more elemental than any ethos. In
1935, ethos is described as having lost its intimate bonds with phúsis, as morality has
abbreviated it to an ought without being and that which is merely ethical (GA 40: 18).
118 Heidegger and Dao

In contrast to Heidegger’s earlier destructuring criticisms of ethics, ethos emerges

more lucidly in his postwar writings. In the “Letter on Humanism,” ethos is the
“originary ethics” of the character and way wherein humans can dwell in answering
attunement with their environing place and world. Ethics, “in keeping with the basic
meaning of the word ethos,” is to “ponder the human abode” (GA 9: 354). This abode
is the opening region where finite conditional mortals abide between heaven and
earth. The open enregioning, which acts as a crossing and intersecting gathering and
jointure, is a relational contextual site that withdraws from and resists—if only in
its traces and tracks which are ever more erased and concealed—being thoroughly
enclosed, ordered, and determined as an enframed systematic totality in which each
thing has its use and value. In such a totality each thing, environing enregioning or
localizing place, and (by extension) ecosystem is defined by and positioned according
to a fixating and coercive criterion of usefulness. In 1946–1947, ethos signifies abode,
dwelling place, and the open region where humans come to their own appropriate self-
essencing (GA 9: 354).
In Occidental onto-theology only God can actually be self-essencing and it is
the absolute that self-presences to itself, according to Hegel (GA 5: 129). Genuine
essencing is understood in a quasi-ziranist manner in Heidegger as a self-generative
essencing and self-presencing through the turnings, reversals, and alterations that
make something come forth and conceal itself as what it is. Heidegger contests and
reinterprets the metaphysical discourse of essence and presence to indicate that
which it yet fails to signify: the things themselves as things necessitate openness and
releasement toward the mystery of their own manner of being.
Heidegger’s later thinking of the thing does and does not apply to human existence.
Humans still have a particular role in the adventure and household of being as
Heidegger contests anthropocentric humanism. This contestation is carried out without
fixating on a pure biocentrism that forgets humans. Humans need to be ecologically
motivated through a culture of the cultivation and nourishing of nature; they would
remain merely ontic in reductively misconstruing beings as mere biological objects.
It is in this context that Heidegger speaks of ethics in his later writings. Ethics is first
and foremost a relation between finite mortal beings who say and safeguard thing and
world. The distinctive ways in which humans, things, and world generatively presence
(an-wesen as distinguished from Präsenz) is the originary sense of ethics, according to
Heidegger in his Zollikon Seminars with the Swiss psychoanalytic psychiatrist Medard
Boss: “Standing in the demand of that which presences is the greatest demand made
upon humans. It is ‘ethics.’”21 Ethics concerns and inadequately expresses the ways in
which human beings stand in self-presencing toward each other. This interhuman
orientation does not rule out distinctive performative enactments of ethos in human
relations with thing and world, that generatively presence in their own ways according
to their own self-essencing.
“Presencing” (Anwesen) does not denote the stagnant givenness or a substantializing
of others, things, and the world. It is much more indicative of a fluctuating self-
presencing that makes an addressing claim and demand which can be heard and
unheard in propinquity and distance. Heidegger wants to think such presencing in
confrontation with and departure from the Occidental metaphysics of presence and
 Heidegger’s Dao amidst Thing and World 119

essence that ignores the communicative interval between self-naturing things. In

paradigmatic Occidental onto-theological metaphysics only God and the absolute
are genuinely self-presencing. It is early Daoist discourses that hint at an alternative
by teaching not the Godhood or absoluteness in things, as in forms of mysticism
or pantheism that conflate and reify God and world, but the freedom of their self-
happening.22 The demand to be receptive and respond to self-presencing is what
Heidegger entitled originary ethics, ethos, or a relationality more fundamental than
such expressions can appropriately indicate: “More important than all ethics is ethos.
More important than ethos is to consider its essencing as the mortal abode in relation
to the mystery.”23
What does it signify when Heidegger rejects using the term “ethics” except as
an ethos or an “originary ethics” (ursprüngliche Ethik) (GA 9: 356)? It necessitates
thinking the ethics of being in ways that no longer limit the ethical to the agency,
subjectivity, and willing that obscure the moment and place where they occur. Ethics
(as the theoretically oriented positing of norms and values) inhibits such encounters
from transpiring, in contrast with an ethics of being and the nurturing of the art of
existence. This art as poiesis cannot be purely an art of the self and its cultivation. It
concerns the disclosive encounters in which I and others exist in care and carelessness,
responsibility and irresponsibility. Ethics, in Heidegger’s analysis, is akin to the loss
of dao in the intensification of benevolence and righteousness diagnosed in the
Daodejing, resulting in the absence of what it intends. The reversal or step back is
toward openness and releasement in the mystery of the interthingly interrelationality
wherein each thing essences as itself.

7. Heidegger’s Transversal: From Embracing to Contesting the Will to Power

According to the underappreciated Berlin philosopher Katharina Kanthack,
Heidegger is a philosopher of relationality and ethos (Kanthack 1958 and 1964).
Following her interpretation, the question of what ethos signifies does not concern mere
relationality; it is about the ways in which relations are decided, deliberated, enacted,
and practiced. What then of acting in a responsive attunement with things? Relation
(Ver-Hältnis) emerges in a comportment (Verhalten) of reservedness (Verhaltenheit)
that allows something to relate in its own manner of being.24 How did Heidegger arrive
at this sense of reservedness, which already began to emerge in the 1935 Contributions
to Philosophy (GA 65: 489–90), and the releasement into world and mystery of his
later thinking? It is already intimated in 1930 and reemerges around 1943. Let us step
back to consider the intervening period that prepared the way for Heidegger’s 1940s
encounters with Laozi and Zhuangzi.
Heidegger’s early project in Being and Time articulates a leaping-ahead for the
other that enables individuation and self-individuation through a confrontation with
one’s own finitude and mortality. The latter is frequently construed as decisionistic,
and his early philosophy can be interpreted as oscillating between letting (other) and
willing (self).25 This oscillation occurs in the 1930 lectures on truth, consequently
complicating and placing in doubt the thesis that Heidegger’s pathway advances from
activist decisionism to National Socialism to passive resignation.26 Despite Heidegger’s
120 Heidegger and Dao

Daoist moments in 1930, he does not return to considering the Lao-Zhuang path of
wuwei and ziran until 1943, embracing and then endeavoring to extricate himself with
varying degrees of success from a thinking of pólemos, assertion, power, and will that
was entangled with the politics of National Socialist Germany and the philosophy
of Nietzsche. Heidegger would retrospectively describe this 1930s entanglement as
breaking him.27
This interpretive situation is revealed in Heidegger’s depiction of ethos. In a later
development of his destructuring interpretive strategy, he uncovers in the 1935
Introduction to Metaphysics how “ethos has been degraded to the ethical,” in which the
good becomes mere value and the fullness of ethical life becomes the empty formula of
mere morality, just as phúsis—the upsurge and sway of being—is narrowed to tékhnē,
the instrumental and technical manipulation and control of things (GA 40: 13, 134).
Being is perceived as and devalued into another meager value and a ghostly “ought”
and thereby separated from that which is (GA 40: 151; GA 55: 84).
The positing and affirmation of “values” and “oughts,” even in a sweeping
Nietzschean form without and against previous morality and religion, cannot save
beings from becoming mere instrumental means, as value-thinking is intrinsically
fixating, restricting, and instrumentalizing with respect to what it intends. Valuing and
value-thinking are inevitably calculative and reductive to that which the will posits as
useful (GA 6.2: 205). This extends to the will itself that is lost in the very creation and
positing of it as a value. Despite Heidegger’s decisionistic language in the early National
Socialist era, he gradually contested the discourse of decision and will—which he
linked with Nietzsche—during the late 1930s (GA 47 and 48). This created for him a
decisive turning point toward the 1943 quasi-Daoistic turn as acting from responsive
attunement (as in wei wuwei) displaces an acting out of coercive assertion (as in wei).
This critique of decisionist action, which corrects his own earlier thinking and not
merely its misinterpretation as he would have it, is extended to Jean-Paul Sartre’s
conception of existence preceding essence and the essence of the human construed as
freely chosen existence, in the “Letter on Humanism” (GA 9: 329–30).
Marxist postwar polemics associated Heidegger’s anti-humanism with Klages’s
biocentrism as reactionary expressions of decaying bourgeois life.28 Klages in his 1929
book, advocating vitalistic life-philosophy, had already critiqued anthropocentrism,
humanism, and logocentrism (as the fixation and priority of the word over action and
thing) for the sake of biocentrism (the primacy of the biological) during the Weimar
Republic. Heidegger resists interpreting human existence solely according to ontic
discourses of anthropology, biology, or psychology regardless of whether these are
construed mechanistically or “vitalistically.” The question of humanism and anti-
humanism has its own unique dynamic in Heidegger’s postwar thought as it does
not justify or draw on the primacy of either the biological or the anthropological, as
becomes evident in his confrontations with German interpretations of Nietzsche in
the late 1930s. This context, which informs his subsequent 1942–1944 Daoist turning,
deserves further attention.
Heidegger’s engagement with Nietzsche, beginning with the 1936/37 lecture-
courses (published in GA 43 and 44), is simultaneously a confrontation with his own
previous voluntarist thinking as well as with Klages’s psycho-biological thought (which
 Heidegger’s Dao amidst Thing and World 121

Klages designated “anti-logocentric” and “biocentric”), Alfred Baeumler’s political-

ideologically driven “heroic realism,” and other National Socialist anthropological
racial appropriations of Nietzsche. Heidegger explicitly critiqued these in 1941 as the
“Berlin interpretation of Nietzsche.”29 Notwithstanding his initial enthusiastic support
for the National Socialist movement within the context of the Gleichschaltung of the
university and the postwar condemnation of him as a member and follower (Mitläufer)
of the party, it is evident that Heidegger did not accept and explicitly rejected several
cornerstones of its ideology from the beginning. Heidegger’s polemical critics often
downplay—ironically, as in the recent work of Richard Wolin, relativizing the horrors
of National Socialism in an attempt to classify Heidegger as so much worse—how he
had systematically rejected the assumptions of biologism and psychologism in both
their mechanistic scientistic and organicist vitalistic forms in Being and Time and his
works of the 1930s, even as he became ensnared in the Nazi “conservative revolution”
and attempted to appropriate and justify it in his own philosophical terms.
Heidegger’s reservations continued throughout the Nazi era which was dominated
by biological organicist modes of thinking that he opposed initially in favor of a deeply
problematic existentially decisive collective will of the people (Volk) in the early and
mid-1930s and then in a more radical turn—in dialogue with Daoist images of worldly
freedom—toward the opening of being and the thing. Heidegger fatefully fell prey in
the early 1930s to the totalizing idea of a collective autopoietic people, suppressing the
plural autopoiesis of myriad relationally interactive singulars that leads to anarchic and
democratic self-organization. Heidegger would not adopt this social-political direction
expressed in ziranist moments in the Zhuangzi and the Liezi. In such moments in the
latter two texts, the interactive and transformative autopoiesis of the cacophony, chaos,
and self-movement of the myriad things entails relational individuals going through
their own changes and forming shifting self-ordering patterns. The closed totalizing
autopoiesis of destined and fated nature (as in limiting hypostatizing appropriations of
Daoist ziran), or a collective entity such as the totalitarian nation-state or Heidegger’s
self-poeticizing Volk, or systems of deterministic power or society (as in systems
theory) are varieties of reification that forget and suppress the self-naturing of the
myriad things and the self-reflexive participation of intrinsically plural individuals.
Still, it is inaccurate to categorize Heidegger’s position during this period as
vitalistic racism. Organicist tendencies of the 1930s were based on the vitalist-oriented
philosophies of Nietzsche, Hans Driesch (despite his own pacifist and anti-fascist
position), Klages and Spengler, and popularized in a directly racialized form by the
in-house party philosopher-ideologists Alfred Baeumler and Alfred Rosenberg.30
Heidegger’s letting of being represented a reversal of Nietzsche’s overcoming of
pessimism and nihilism through action for Nazi ideologues; they accused him of
fostering fearful anxiety, unheroic despair, and anti-Germanic nihilism. Heidegger
was aware of such accusations (GA 82: 277). To briefly consider an example,
according to Ernst Krieck, a leading Nazi education theorist, Heidegger’s ontology,
pacificism, psychoanalysis, and the theory of relativity, all shared a common nihilism
of supposedly Jewish origins (Krieck 1934: 23–4). He decried Heidegger’s “crusade of
nothingness” as undoing the effectivity of time and history that necessitates the natural
ground of race for its completion (Krieck 1943: 127). Krieck repeatedly returns in his
122 Heidegger and Dao

writings to the vital creativity of the moment that embraces nature (identified as race)
and that rejects the disintegrative weakness of anxiety (Angst), care (Sorge), boredom
(Langeweile), disquiet (Unruhe), and limitation (Begrenzung). Race, inadequately
expressed for Krieck in Heidegger’s ostensible existential nihilism, grounds the demand
for ordering and policing people and things, which has no time for useless existential
moods and poetic words. Radical conservative suspicions of the modernism of
Heideggerian existential anxiety continued after the war. The anti-modern modernist
poet Gottfried Benn, who like Heidegger abandoned active support for the movement
after initial enthusiasm for its assumption of power, could write a poem in the postwar
period decrying the self-concern of unreligious and anti-humanist existential anxiety
and thrownness. This philosophy failed to genuinely defend the traditional Occident,
God’s beautiful land of the middle (Benn 1951: 35, 37).
Both uncritical apologists and polemical detractors fail to recognize the complexity
of Heidegger’s position in the early years of the regime. He criticized Nazi biological
and anthropological racial discourse, questioned its populist appeals to the masses,
and ignored its militarism. Yet Heidegger was more willing to advocate other very
questionable elements of Nazi ideology, such as its charismatic authoritarian
“leadership principle,” its demand for one collective German identity, and its coercive
coordination (Gleichschaltung) of every aspect of German life that he promoted as
rector of the University of Freiburg during 1933–1934.31 After the loss of his rectorship,
and growing disfavor in the party, he heightened his objections. Heidegger interrogated
what he designated the “zoology of the will” and the fateful configuration of biological
life, the primacy of the will, and heroic-tragic voluntarist activism prevalent in popular
life-philosophy and the German reception of Nietzsche. He increasingly maintained,
against Nietzsche’s philosophy of value and the primacy of will, that affirming and
willing values and meanings cannot overcome the nihilistic predicament of the
self-devaluing of values. Nietzsche’s strategy signifies, on the contrary, nihilism’s
consummation as all of being becomes a means for willing. The will-to-power becomes
a self-consuming end for itself. The very need for will, action, and creating values is
itself the primary problem posed by Nietzsche’s “inverted Platonism” and still all too
metaphysical project, according to Heidegger’s diagnosis. The question concerning
whether willing is a monistic unity or a multiplicity of forces, raised by Deleuze, does
not address the problematic character of reducing being and reality to will and value,
fixating the subject instead of freeing it, and in this manner consummating rather than
overcoming nihilism.32
Heidegger’s intensive confrontation with Nietzsche’s philosophy of the will to power
and value in the late 1930s preceded his turn toward early Daoism in which things and
the world are freely affirmed without will, power, or values. Such a prospect is not
unique to Heidegger. It was raised earlier in the late Weimar Republic by Buber who
confronted the Nietzschean conatus and will-to-power with Daoist wuwei (Buber 2013:
285–9). It was negatively proposed yet not pursued in sufficient detail in Klages’s 1929
Spirit as Adversary of the Soul (Klages 1981: 342, 496). It is articulated in a new form in
Heidegger’s Daoist-inflected reflections of the 1940s on releasement and the thing in
which Heidegger perceived the necessity of rethinking action itself and stepping out of
the dilemma of affirming (as in Nietzsche) or negating (as in Schopenhauer) the will.
 Heidegger’s Dao amidst Thing and World 123

Both positions, and nineteenth-century optimism and pessimism in general, remain

explicitly or implicitly committed to the paradigm of the will’s supremacy.
The rejoinder to the crisis of nihilism, as a consequence of the “abandonment of
being” (Seinsverlassenheit), unfolded in his works of the 1930s (GA 65: 119), is no
longer to be sought through the affirmation or negation of the will, value, idea, and
action (GA 7: 89–90, 97). It is thought after the 1943 turn toward Gelassenheit through
figures of thought such as the “releasement of letting beings be,”33 the releasement of
stillness in regard to things (GA 53: 68), the stillness of movement/waying (be-wegen)
(Hsiao 1987: 103; GA 16: 618; Petzet 1986: 58), letting be as calling forth the thing to
world and releasing the worlding-thing (GA 98: 16); it occurs also in the releasement
of mortal habitation between sky and earth, and—in the namelessness of beginning
prior to and without moralism, humanism, and anthropomorphism—the releasement
of the letting be of the granting provided by binding or joining-together (fügend–
gönnenden) (GA 81: 142). Heidegger’s language of gathering (Sammlung) and fugue/
jointure (Fuge) indicates the specific coming together of moment and place formed by
interthingly and intraworldly interactions. It is in such places where human beings find
themselves and potentially attune and dispose themselves toward them in receiving
and dwelling.
Heidegger’s question-provoking thought-models offer traces and indications of
other ways of being-in-the-world and dwelling with things. These models are often
taken to express a need for mythopoetic re-enchantment and rediscovering wonder
in disenchanted and desolate modernity. They can be accorded a more heuristic
and minimalist interpretation and positioned as critical models to question and
confront the paradigm of mastery, domination, and control that is intertwined with
the impoverishment and subjugation of humans and the decimation of localities,
environments, and ecosystems.34 On the one hand, the constitutive subject converts all
into mere objects, including itself in mere objectness, and humans increasingly become
mere instrumental administrative-technical resources compelled by constructs of
usefulness and uselessness. On the other hand, gathering things and places, as well as
self-generative environments and ecosystems, are not only left deficient in “meaning,”
which remains an all too idealistic category, but also in their self-generative autopoietic
functioning, which forms their sense for humans that demands recultivation. It is
difficult to discover and fashion meaning and value when things and places have lost
their own self-patterning sympoietic sense.
If this is the case, mortals (as Heidegger later designates finite human existence)
do not need more willing, assertion, and activity for the sake of posited and
constructed values and purposes, since these merely reproduce the projected order
of administrative-technical deworlding positionality in which the autopoietic self-
determination of humans and things is enclosed, obstructed, and inevitably thereby
diminished. This questioning analysis of modernity intersects with the critical social
analysis of Adorno and the Frankfurt School that can be deployed to reimagine
leaping-ahead for things—in their own distances, moments, and places—with a
more explicitly critical and emancipatory orientation.35 Mortals are called to shift
perspectives from thinking of themselves as “masters of being” exercising dominion
over things—a mastery in which they have reified, enslaved, and alienated their
124 Heidegger and Dao

own self-naturing—to being “shepherds of being” in the sense of guiding, fostering,

and safeguarding (GA 9: 342; GA 82: 569). Heidegger expresses in two versions of a
thought-poem concerning releasement, which cannot be fixed as a rule or a virtue,
how granting and safeguarding are enacted through waiting and releasement: “Only
in waiting do we become our own, granting and safeguarding humans and things a
return to calm” (GA 81: 57; GA 81: 73).
Silence allows the other to speak and be heard. How might stillness help safeguard
the thing? Such stillness is not merely an aesthetic predilection; it is a condition of
genuine hearing and hearkening toward others and things. Responsive co-relating
saying, Heidegger notes, is only possible from listening. Such receptivity to the thing
in listening brings the thing to world by letting it come to and be as itself, the thing
to thing and the world to world, and in this manner potentially safeguarding it. Not
only persons, who should not be disregarded, but things and their environing localities
need to have space and be allowed to flourish.
Heidegger’s language of shepherding and safeguarding is illustrative and indicative
of an altered conception of human agency as participating in sense-forming place and
being called to responsively and ecomimetically build. As described in the 1951 lecture
“Building Dwelling Thinking,” building (bauen) has a twofold meaning: (1) erecting
(errichten) and producing (herstellen) structures; (2) and guarding (hüten), cherishing
(hegen), and nourishing (pflegen) earth, field, and life.36 Bauen in the latter sense is that
which preserves, nurtures, and safeguards, as is etymologically indicated by the Gothic
wunian and Old Saxon wuon (GA 7: 150). It is this second semantic and experiential
range of meanings that Heidegger calls to contemplate once more.

III. Resituating the Subject

8. Interrogating Humanism and Naturalism

As Heidegger noted in his 1944 Heraclitus lecture-course, “humans are those living
beings who have and are distinguished by ethos” (GA 55: 223). The question of ethos
leads into what it signifies to be human. These considerations regarding ethos led to
core issues of the 1947 “Letter on Humanism.” It was composed in reply to questions
about Sartre, existentialism, and humanism posed by Jean Beaufret in late 1946. This
short essay seeks to break from metaphysical and what we would now designate
anthropocentric humanism without, as he says, abandoning the human in the inhuman
(“un-menschlich, ‘inhuman’”) that is outside of its own self-essencing (“außerhalb
seines Wesens”) (GA 9: 319).
Fascism is notorious for its racialized hierarchy of ostensibly over- and under-
humans. Heidegger’s essay contests the exclusion of any humans based on a fixed
conception of the human, evoking his earlier criticisms of anthropological and
biological definitions of human existence. Traditional paradigmatic humanism, with its
valuing of Roman humanitas, civilized as properly human and diminishing of the other
as barbarian and less than normatively human, obstructs the human, in its belonging
to being, from being comprehended from out of itself. As specified in the Zhuangzi,
there is no recognition of the human without forgetting the human and recognizing
 Heidegger’s Dao amidst Thing and World 125

the human in the natural.37 Recognizing the self-naturing of the human entails
recognizing how it abides within the world (the natural) in its own ways of dwelling
and being itself (the human). The question for Heidegger concerns how to recognize
the belongingness of humans to being, without absorbing the human into being, and
dissolving reified subjectness while disclosing being-there for oneself (GA 82: 569).
This thematic signifies an intersection with Daoist ziranist “naturalism,” in which
“nature” needs to be elucidated as fundamentally self-generative and autopoietic, in
the subtext of Heidegger’s later writings and their intercultural reception.
Is such an intersection justified? Lao-Zhuang Daoist sources are not directly and
openly mentioned in Heidegger’s “Letter on Humanism.” Encouraged by Beaufret’s
queries, the “Letter on Humanism” addresses Sartre’s proposition that existentialism
is a humanism centered on human subjectivity and calling for committed political
action. Heidegger’s letter adopts a critical stance toward action, agency, humanism,
and subjectivity that can be interpreted without hermeneutical violence, according to
the wuwei-ziran model of reverberating attunement and self-naturing actuality.
Although the letter does not expressly refer to Daoist sources, Laozi and Zhuangzi
linger in its background as it was composed after his intensive engagement with the
Daodejing and Zhuangzi. The essay appears akin to a Daoist reflection in its interrogation
of action and letting, humanism and naturalism, living and nonliving things. Early
interpreters connected Heidegger’s anti-humanism with Daoism, foreshadowing the
extensively discussed topic of anti-humanism and dwelling-in-nature in ensuing
Heidegger scholarship and comparative and cross-cultural philosophy.38
Fritz Dehn, best known for his writings on Rilke, condemned Heidegger’s anti-
humanism in a 1948 work defending religious humanism. In “Of Humanity in
Humans,” he associated Heidegger’s philosophy of existence and a “renewed Daoism”
as varieties of an inhuman and inhumane “godless mysticism,” lacking love and
humanity, which replaced God’s personal creation from love with an impersonal and
anonymous nothingness.39 Dehn, Klaus Mann, and other critics categorized Heidegger
as a “Daoist,” no doubt as an insult. Less polemically, and with more familiarity with
Daoist sources, the art historian Hans Gerhard Evers remarked that Heidegger might
be finally reaching his goal by a “dangerous path” that eventually arrived at a poetic and
naturalistic sensibility “not distant from East Asian dao” (Evers 1951: 147). The sense
of nature and “naturalism” (bracketing its typical reductive meaning of one theoretical
explanation of nature in preference for naturing itself) conveyed in these remarks,
informed by modern intercultural readings of Laozi and Zen Buddhism, indicates
the fullness of the thing with its counterparts and region. These hint at its autopoietic
self-naturing, not restricted by a fixed use, purpose, or principle, which is suppressed
in reductive forms of naturalism that neglect the thing’s specific essencing in its own
moment and place and, hence, human ekstatic essencing as well.

9. Reimagining and Releasing Action and Agency

The “Letter on Humanism” can be interpreted through another Daoist perspective
insofar as it reimagines action and inaction in ways that correlate with coercive action
and noncoercive action. The opening lines of the letter announce: “We are still far
from decisively thinking the nature of action. Acting is only recognized as the bringing
126 Heidegger and Dao

about of an effect, the reality of which is valued according to its use. Yet the essence of
action is completion (Vollbringen). That is, to unfold something into the fullness of its
essencing” (GA 9: 313).
“The Letter on Humanism” calls for a rethinking of action in confrontation with
the traditional teleological and modern instrumentalist paradigms that truncate the
fullness of acting and letting to instrumental means for intended and purposive results.
Heidegger critiques the fixation on action, due to its enframed and instrumentalized
character. Action is envisioned as altering the condition of the world, yet it cannot
genuinely do so. Instead, it merely repeats and reinforces (compare GA 7: 97).
Heidegger argues that his critique of action and activism does not entail a mere
inactivity or a passive resignation. Acting is no longer presumed to be an instrumental
effecting or producing for the sake of a projected product or purpose. This conclusion
is perhaps informed by Zhuangzi, which is arguably the most radical illustration of
questioning conventional ways of conceiving action according to the coercive measure
of usefulness, to the extent that the early Confucian thinker Xunzi 荀子 accused
Zhuangzi of neglecting the human for the sake of the natural.40
Heidegger’s notebooks from this period further clarify his remarks in the letter.
They also reveal how they are interconnected with concepts that are interwoven with
his reading of the Daodejing and the Zhuangzi. In his self-reflections on the “Letter on
Humanism,” he notes that it does not justify a position but a way (GA 82: 566) and its very
purpose is “to protect the puzzling mystery” (“das Rätsel zu schützen”) (GA 82: 565).
He states in another revealing passage that doing is to be thought as the essence of
a poiesis that turns toward—once again using language familiar from Daoism—“the
worldly freedom of stillness.”41 From what form of poiesis does this “turning toward”
turn away from? Poiesis is no longer bound to the creative assertion and violence of
individuals and peoples, as it was in his writings of the 1930s. Creative violence is not
legitimated, and creative and poetic formation need not engage in violence for the sake
of breaking the violence of nature, as Heidegger held in the mid-1930s.42 Heidegger
perhaps learned from his extensive engagement with the Daodejing in the 1940s that
dao requires and demands no force, power, or violence, and that these in reality entail
its loss. The poetic is consequently rethought during this period as a doing, creating,
and building from stillness, emptiness, and calm. It is in such circumstances that things
are recognized to be formative of the moments and places, of environment and world,
in which humans—in Levinas’s language—elementally dwell and live from.
Heidegger proposed the necessity of rethinking the very category of action, at the
beginning of the “Letter on Humanism.” Agency itself is rethought in view of the poetic
in his subsequent reflections during the 1950s. Humans are construed as being and
acting through their ethos and poiesis of moment and place in his later writings. Poiesis
and poetic saying are not limited to aesthetic phenomena or to creative agency and
production. They are an expression of embodied being-there and dwelling in the world
that calls and brings forth world. As intimated in disclosive poetic words, the poetic is
not only an aesthetic phenomenon. It is also a disclosure of human comportment and
dwelling. More than this, in the 1951 lecture “Poetically Humans Dwell,” Heidegger
describes the poetic as “the basic capacity for human dwelling” such that the poetic is
essential to human dwelling (GA 7: 206–7).
 Heidegger’s Dao amidst Thing and World 127

What sense of the poetic is operative here? First, it ought to be noted that the
German word Dichtung has a wider range of meanings than the English word poetry
and Heidegger elucidates the poem in its verbal enactive sense of “to poetize” (dichten).
Heidegger’s later articulation of the poetic is not as the creative originary violence of
the “Origin of the Work of Art.” Poeticizing is described, in a 1937 essay on Hölderlin,
as a “formative designating of gods and the essencing of things” and poetic dwelling
as the presence of gods and the nearness of the essencing of things.43 This continuing
emphasis on human doing and speaking in his 1937 account is redirected toward an
acting and saying from thing and world in his 1951 essay in which poeticizing and
agency are thought from out of the genuine temporality of moment and spatiality of
place, rather than from an individual or collective subject, such as individual Dasein in
Being and Time or the collective German people during the Nazi era.
Poeticizing now consists primarily of a responsive encountering and being-with the
elemental, thing, and the world in moment and place, such that the human shaping and
building of homes can occur. This sense of the poetic, which is more than receptive-
expressive as conceived through the will, is existentially prior to human creative and
formative powers celebrated in the 1930s. It is also prior to the instrumental availability
of things as means in Being and Time. Pragmatic usefulness/uselessness can be set and
fixated as the calculative measure of others and things only because humans already
dwell poetically between the open measure of earth and sky. The poetic does not force
itself on the thing to rip away its secrets. It allows the thing to set its own measure to
which human dwelling and building can answer or fail to answer back.
The poetic is exemplary for dwelling and thinking, which fails to be genuinely
poetic by being drawn away from thought-images to bare concepts, as the poetic is
the site where language as patient listening occurs, and with it reserved unforced
anticipation, and the free readiness to respond carefully and attentively. Heidegger
strikes an altered tone in contrast to the priority of the self-assertive will in the 1930s.
He now accentuates the generosity, gentleness, and kindness of being that comes forth
in a bearing of respectful reserve and mindful attentiveness. The thing emerges as that
which calls forth a reticence and respect in its being encountered and thought.

10. Acting from the Way and Its Mystery

It is not coincidental that Heidegger’s references to Laozi and Zhuangzi often occur in
the context of discussions of Hölderlin and Pre-Socratic thinkers. Heidegger engaged
early Daoist sources as offering illuminating exemplars of poetic thinking and poetic
thought-images and models that intimate other ways of inhabiting and being-in-the-
world. They might even be at times guiding, given how they work their way into his
writings. Describing the Daodejing, or the Zhuangzi, as expressing forms of poetic
thinking seems inadequate to its philosophical content (GA 12: 187). However, poetic
thinking and going on a way are higher than philosophy, which Heidegger portrays
as not thinking and having lost its way. Moreover, this expression does capture the
imagistic, playful, and transformative uses of language found in these two works
and the formative role that they played in East Asian aesthetics, poetics, and ethos.44
Heidegger’s deployment of Daoism is not unfamiliar to Chinese cultural history.
128 Heidegger and Dao

It evokes the eclectic Daoism operative in Wei-Jin-era mysterious learning literati and
Tang-era poets rather than the Daoism of ascetic hermits and religious practitioners.45
Daoist correlated elements are discernibly at play in Heidegger’s later thinking.
He continues to adopt the Zhuangzian-informed language of uselessness and the
unnecessary in his notebooks. This language is also utilized to rethink action. Evoking
the Zhuangzi, as illustrated in Chapter 4, he describes how the necessary actions
of the necessary world are useless to change worldly conditions, in contrast to the
superfluous and useless which would signify its potential actual transformation. In
this context, the essencing of what humans are genuinely capable of must be thought
as formed independently of the paradigm of acting and doing (GA 97: 43). Doing and
freedom are no longer conceived as attributes of a self-assertive, essentially worldless
subject and “use” and its necessity are resituated in this context of encounter and
engagement through releasement. Doing is the coming to completion of situations and
things. It is therefore enacted beyond and cannot be fittingly conceived through the
concepts of willing, projecting, planning, calculating, and asserting of a constitutive
or self-contained subject.46 As Heidegger learned from the failure of his analytic of
Dasein in Being and Time, the fundamentally problematic nature of the unitary self
and idealistic subject remains unresolved even if it is redescribed as worldly being-
there. This problem endures in recent accounts maintaining the priority of the subject,
as promoted in the new phenomenology, in which the constitutive or transcendental
subject is unquestioned while being reconstrued as embodied, embedded, enacted,
and extended.
What is the alternative to the paradigm of the will and the subject that explicitly
and implicitly continued to inform Heidegger’s thinking of human existence in the
1920s and 1930s and from which he sought to twist free? It is only in 1943 that a more
definitive alternative begins to emerge as the constitutive and acting subject is radically
rethought from its situatedness with things, place, and world. The ethos of releasement
is crucial to this transfigured perspective. In his postwar reflections (such as GA 98
and GA 99), letting is not a privation or negation of action. It is not merely a subjective
attitude or sensibility but a responsive attunement with the event and worlding of the
thing (GA 99: 40–1). Letting functions as a precondition of appropriately understanding
action, and of enacting genuine action, modeled as responsive to situated place and as
steps in movement on a pathway. Genuine action requires the recognition of stillness.
Such stillness and inaction need not entail quietist world-denial or negation; it is the
condition of the responsiveness of world-encounter and participation. That is, stillness
allows an attuned and resonant bearing of inactive action to be practiced.
In letting and its corresponding saying, an action is not to be interpreted as
a discrete isolated moment of exertion nor taken as the expression of a coercive
and fixating identity or totality. Action does not follow from one’s own decision or
reflection, as it might appear to do in the more existential moments of Being and Time.
It is an expression of one’s comportment, ethos, and being-in-the-world. Ethos, or that
which is more original than ethos, in Heidegger’s explication of it cannot be limited
to a static form of character or habit that predetermines action, since action is to be
understood as belonging to a going, moving, and wayfaring, as making a way and
forming moment and place in mindful or unmindful interaction with things. The
 Heidegger’s Dao amidst Thing and World 129

mobility and freedom of the way cannot be predetermined and do not preclude—as
discussed earlier above—errancy, false and closed pathways, reversals, and the step
back to walk a different path. Such action does not belong to an individual or collective
subjective, as action is an event encompassing the subject. Acting is then a continuity
on a pathway and altered as different pathways are encountered and taken. Acting is
being on and enacting a way. It is a way, he states in the letter, of bringing things to their
plenitude (GA 9: 313).
The reflections on action and inaction in Heidegger and Daoist sources do more
than co-illuminate one another as Heidegger’s words evoke them. Acting without
acting is a co-responding and completing-with thing and world as they unfold in
their own essencing and presencing (in Heidegger’s discourse) or their own generative
self-naturing (in Daoist discourses). Heidegger’s description of acting as unfolding
something into the fullness of its essencing, and participating in completion, correlates
with passages attributed to Laozi. Daodejing 41 states that dao is hidden, nameless,
and brings all things to completion. Chapter 51 says that dao exercises no control
over things while bringing them into their maturity. This is called the mysterious. The
exemplary sages participate in the dao’s mystery, namelessness, and stillness, thereby
nourishing, maturing, and completing things.
The Daodejing portrays how the actions of sages are attuned with the dao’s
mystery, namelessness, and stillness. All three expressions have notable roles in
Heidegger’s rethinking of action and the human in relation to being. If humans are
to find their way into being again, he notes, then they must first learn to exist in
namelessness (GA 9: 316). Being is an unforced force operative in stillness without any
effort or compulsion, and stillness is the “mystery of the world” and the essencing of
language that co-relationally indicates and expresses the mystery without cognitively
mastering it (GA 98: 277, 288). It is the poetic word that responds to the mystery, the
nameless, and the silent. Poetic thinking and saying are not arbitrary and subjective
expressions. They are directed at encountering things in the happening of their
own truth as they themselves interact and interpolate. In this, they are forming the
interthingly nexus of the whiling moment and enregioning place in which acting as
way-making and building takes place.

11. Between Enframing and Self-so-ness

The current chapter has sketched how Heidegger’s thinking of action and ethos can
be given a ziranist elucidation. Ziran should not be construed through modern
Occidental conceptions of nature; naturalness should be instead reinterpreted through
an orienting ethos and exemplary model of the ziran receptive to the metamorphosis
of things themselves. This “naturalness” is not the reductive variety that, Heidegger
remarks, remains a tenacious obstacle to genuinely encountering and mindfully
thinking from world and thing (GA 97: 252). The thing is no longer a thing when it
is only perceived as a readily available means in pragmatic use. The thing is also more
than what is objectively conceived as presence: once the thing is explained to be a
construct or product of energy, idea, force, matter, or some other principle, it is not the
thing qua thing, but an object positioned according to the enframing world-picture of
130 Heidegger and Dao

instrumental utility. A more fitting ethos of nourishing, making space for, and caring
for, things, in Heidegger’s later thinking, guided if not solely determined by Lao-
Zhuang models of wuwei-ziran and releasement-self-presencing, is indispensable to
begin to sincerely encounter things and interthingly environments and respond to the
current ecological disaster. This is the case even if—given the complexity and enormity
of this crisis for humans and other species facing extinction—no single element is
sufficient by itself.47
What then is a thing? It is best to ask it and observe the tracks and traces of its
self-patterning path. Part One of the present work endeavored to demonstrate the
tangible scope to which there are robust ziranist tendencies effective in Heidegger’s
thinking of the thing and dwelling. This has two significant consequences. First, these
elements can in turn be deployed to reimagine and reconstruct Heidegger’s thought-
images, pathways, and models through the Lao-Zhuang philosophy of resonant
attunement, with the self-naturing or spontaneous nonpurposive self-generation
of things for the sake of a nonpurposive and non-instrumentalized nourishing
of life (yangsheng).48 Second, despite its philosophical and political problems,
Heidegger’s thinking offers (1) formally indicative—to employ Adorno’s expression
once again—critical models to question the ongoing administrative and technical
positioning and domination of the environing and human world and (2) other ways
of bearing and dwelling that leap ahead, make room for, and release others, things,
and environments from the bonds of constitutive-enframing subjects and enclosing
systems.
While Heidegger’s thinking of the thing became entangled with two books credited
to Laozi and Zhuangzi, Heidegger’s thinking of nothingness and emptiness also
intersected with Buddhist and Japanese sources and interlocutors. This work now turns
from the convergent mutually illuminating priority of the thing in ziranist Daoism and
Heidegger’s later thinking, and the innumerable senses of the thing’s mystery and self-
so-ness, to nothingness and emptiness and their senses, in the second part.
 Part Two

Nothingness, Emptiness, and

the Clearing
132
 6

Daoist Nothingness, Buddhist Emptiness,

and the Myth of “Oriental Nothingness”

I. Preliminary Indications

1. Introduction to Part Two

Part One has its point of departure in the thing, and Part Two in the nothing. The
present chapter, akin to chapter 1 earlier, provides a preparatory introduction of Daoist
and Buddhist sources that facilitate interculturally resituating and critically exceeding
Heidegger’s thinking. Before we trace the unfolding of an elemental nonderivative
nothingness in the early and later writings of Heidegger in Chapter 7, we should
accordingly consider the Daoist and Buddhist encounters with and conceptions of
nothingness with which it is recurrently interconnected in discourses of comparative
philosophy. A number of those explorations reductively apply Occidental concepts of
nothingness adopted from G. W. F. Hegel or even Heidegger, or project Orientalist
ideological and mythologized ideas of “Oriental nothingness” and nihilism (popularized
in nineteenth-century Europe) onto these conceptions. They take insufficient notice of
the multiplicity and singularity of diverse transmissions, teachings, and their historical
confrontations and entanglements.
This interculturally mediated hermeneutical situation requires respectful caution
and patient reserve, so that the matter to be thought can begin to be encountered and
speak. Heidegger himself calls for this in his postwar hermeneutics of European and
East Asian forms of thinking. Such respectful reservedness needs to make room
for and risk the encounter with the other while not precluding its possibilities for
mutual understanding. Heidegger’s intercultural reflections in “From a Dialogue
on Language” point the way in insisting that spaces be opened for encountering the
other in their own sense, while at the same time limiting the way by positing and
reifying an incommensurable experiential and linguistic abyss between the “Occident”
and the “Orient.” To think with and contrary to Heidegger once again, as Heidegger
demanded perhaps more than his critics do, this fixed border can be loosened through
the anarchic openness and emptiness that such a boundary would limit.
Heidegger does not propose or rely on a problematic conception of “Oriental
nothingness” developed by earlier philosophers such as Hegel and embraced in
East Asian philosophical discourses in response to Occidental critiques.1 He does
not dismiss or reject, but wavers in the face of identifying his own thinking of
134 Heidegger and Dao

nothingness and emptiness with Japanese notions of nothingness and emptiness in

“From a Dialogue on Language.” His thought is intertwined not only with Daoist but
also Buddhist and modern East Asian philosophies of nothingness and emptiness, as
will be traced throughout Part Two.
What then are the functions of nothingness and emptiness in paradigmatic Daoist
and Buddhist contexts? First, the early images of nature, in what is now called China,
are not the nothingness of creatio ex nihilo or the nonbeing of Parmenides and Plato.
This nothingness is, rather, generative watery chaos (perceived either as self-stirring
or as stirred by heaven), the dragon of the Book of Changes that slumbers within the
hidden depths of mountain lakes and whose ascension brings forth nourishing rain
and life, and maternal tenderness and nurturing.2 These images became linked in
the formation of the Daodejing and related sources with an emerging conception of
nothingness developed through a logic of negativity. Heidegger would be mistaken,
and Rudolf Carnap would be correct, if Heidegger were understood as denying that
nothingness becomes perceptible and conceivable through negativity and negation.
However, Carnap and the positivists are incorrect insofar as Heidegger proceeded from
Dasein to negativity during this period (GA 91: 119); that is, from a phenomenology of
existential negativity, which is encountered prior to and shapes our understanding of
conceptual negation, to the (supposed) “non-sense” of nothingness, which emerges as
something more and other than negation and as that which makes it possible. Absence
and negativity belong to Dasein and are not yet thought more primordially as elements
of the openness/hiddenness in which Dasein exists, as notes from the early 1930s
make clear (GA 91: 119, 122). As will be considered in the final chapters, Heidegger’s
thinking of nothingness might appear too positivistic when analyzed in the contexts
of Daoist generative nothingness, Buddhist emptiness, or the absolute nothingness of
Nishida Kitarō and the Kyōto School.
Nothingness as death and distance from God in Christian onto-theology, the
groundless abyss and anxiety of existentialism, the generative nothingness glimpsed
in the Daodejing and its reception, and the emptiness of early Buddhist discourses
are each distinctive and to an extent incommensurable. Their distinctiveness demands
hermeneutical respect rather than reductive totalizing speculation. Nonetheless,
Daoist and Buddhist sources reveal an intersecting movement from experiential
and linguistic negativity to an affirmative sense of the “not” and a more primordial
formative nothingness or emptiness. This interpretive situation requires a tentative
three fold distinction: (1) the existential negativity of the Buddhist therapeutic analysis
of suffering, illness, and death or of existential limit-situations and disorienting
conditions such as radical anxiety and boredom; (2) the linguistic and logical negativity
of negation that is typically construed in Occidental philosophy as secondary and
derivative to positive assertions about beings; and (3) a radical nothingness or emptiness,
as that which is in some way other or more than and irreducible to the existential and
logical negativity through which it is encountered and glimpsed. Such radical forms of
nothingness are perceived in a variety of ways: as the terrifying groundless abyss; as the
nihilistic absurd and contingent undermining all meaning and value; as an openness in
which things arise and depart; and as the primordial concealed, womblike nourishing
darkness from which the myriad things arise and return.3
 Daoist Nothingness, Buddhist Emptiness 135

In Chapter 6, we will address nothingness and emptiness as presented in

paradigmatic Daoist and Buddhist discourses so as to reassess, in Chapter 7,
Heidegger’s early existentially oriented philosophy of nothingness in the late 1920s
and its subsequent shifts. We will then follow Heidegger’s interpretive transitions from
the language of existential negativity and nothingness as abyss, to a more generative
conception of nothingness and the emptiness of the clearing and opening, that
appears to evoke Daoist and Buddhist discourses. This resonance is usually unspoken
and indirect, yet there are texts in which Heidegger directly reveals his interest in
the nothingness and emptiness of East Asian sources. Chapter 8 will then examine
the intercultural entanglements of Heidegger’s thinking of nothingness in its early
reception in the 1930s and 1940s by East Asian philosophers and intellectuals. The
conclusion briefly outlines the work as a whole and addresses several social-political
dilemmas concerning the modern discourse of nothingness, in which I outline its
critical potential despite dubious political appropriations which require the ideological
enchantment and fixation of identity that reduce dynamic relational things in their
communicative exchange and interval to homogeneity.

II. Daoism, Negativity, and Generative Nothingness

2. Negation and Nothingness in Early Chinese Philosophy

Chinese and East Asian philosophies as a whole cannot be simply identified with
nothingness and emptiness as portrayed in Hegel’s myth of “Oriental nothingness.”
Hegel’s misunderstanding is due to (1) his interests in prioritizing European spirit, as
exceptionally rational and free, and (2) his lack of radicality in conceiving negativity
and the nothing (a critique made by Adorno and Heidegger). It is also attributable to
(3) his want of historical understanding. Nothingness is not the essence of “Oriental
mind” imprisoned in abstract negativity. It emerges from specific Daoist and Buddhist
discourses that play a formative role in broader aesthetic, cultural, practical, and
intellectual tendencies. In the early formation of the Chinese language and thought,
including the background sources of the Daodejing, concrete natural phenomena
and elements like water, earth, and sky play a more fundamental role than negation
or nothingness, which presuppose various abstract conceptual developments and
their radical critique.4 Both the Daodejing and Zhuangzi engage in a therapeutic
destructuring of fixating concepts, perspectives, and positions that must have already
existed to be overcome.
What is the context of negativity and nothingness in early Chinese philosophy?
Early Confucian texts such as the Book of Rites (Liji 禮記) or the Mencius (Mengzi
孟子) illustrate the ordinary early Chinese usage of expressions that (literally
translated) signify no-thing (wuwu 無物), nonbeing (wuyou 無有), and even doubled
“no-no” to signify never (wuwu 無無). In the first Gaozi 告子 chapter of the Mencius,
phrases such as “nothing will not grow” (無物不長) and “nothing will be lost”
(無物不消) signify that all things will grow and flourish. “No being” means that no
person is without a propensity toward goodness (人無有不善), just as no water lacks
136 Heidegger and Dao

a propensity toward moving downward (水無有不下). The rare doubled not (無無)
in early texts occurs twice in the Book of Rites in the sense of “never be without” in
proper ritual activities. It is revealing that the earliest strata of the Book of Changes,
which would develop into a paradigmatic source for subsequent Chinese philosophical
reflection, do not emphasize negativity and nothingness. These will become central to
its later expositions and uses, particularly in Wang Bi’s paradigmatic commentaries.
His interpretation integrates concepts, strategies, and thought-images from the
Book of Changes and the Daodejing, extending them into an expansive philosophy of
nothingness that is at most only implicit in the earlier strata of these works.5
The negational “not” and the nothing that signifies no things or entities, to the
extent that it is derived from it, have conventional negational senses in early Chinese
sources that presuppose the priority of things and beings as present. Beings encompass
natural entities and systems as well as ghosts and spirits that are only visible to human
perception through their tracks and traces. There are two discursive families (jia 家) in
which negation and nothingness begin to take on other meanings, indicating different
ways of pondering the not and the nothing. The first is the school of names (mingjia
名家). It mobilizes paradoxical conceptual constructions that lead to what is often
described in Occidental terms as nominalist, sophistical, and skeptical contradictions.
These strategies guide Zhuangzi’s frequent skeptical interlocutor, Hui Shi (惠施; Huizi
惠子), famous for formulating paradoxes, and inform crucial passages of chapter
two of the Zhuangzi anthology. The second is the lineage of the way (daojia 道家)
that was identified with the Daodejing in antiquity and linked with either the Yellow
Emperor (Huangdi 黃帝) in practically directed Huanglao 黃老 teachings or with
the Zhuangzi. The expression daojia 道家 was used by the early Han-era historian
Sima Qian to explain these varieties of Daoism.6 Religious Daoist movements (daojiao
道教) which link elemental forces with spiritual forms (gods, spirits, and immortals)
and accentuate practices of biospiritual self-transformation (inner training and inner
alchemy) emerged in the late and post-Han period.7
The paradoxical and mysterious expressions of the Daodejing, a mystery that is to
be doubled rather than resolved, lead to a radical insight into the nature of things and
exemplary comportments instead of skeptical doubt or suspension of belief. They open
into the abyss beyond concepts instead of merely skeptically doubting and questioning
concepts (compare Buber 2017: 535). The not and the nothing do not only function
in negational and paradoxical expressions in the Daodejing and Zhuangzi collections.
Two other semantic registers are involved here. The not-x indicates forms of practice
and attunement such as in the “action without action” of wei wuwei 為無為, the non-
knowing of wuzhi 無知, the non-desiring of wuyu 無欲, the emptied heart-mind of
the Zhuangzi’s wuxin 無心 that is also used in Chan Buddhist discourses, and the
non-entanglement in affairs of wushi 無事. The “non-” (wu) signifies a transformation
of action, desire and knowing, rather than a mere negation. These transformative
practices are already linked with enacting emptiness, simplicity, and stillness. They
point toward an attunement or an accord with dao of heaven and earth, the elements,
and the myriad things, as a primordial occurring of nothingness.
Such practices and operative states of nothingness are linked with early forms
of biospiritual and meditative practices, which form part of the background of the
 Daoist Nothingness, Buddhist Emptiness 137

formation of religious Daoism, and conditions of emptiness expressed through a

variety of terms. Xu 虛 means a hollow space. It operates negatively as absence or lack
in Daodejing 53. It designates a practice of emptying in Daodejing chapters 3 and 16
where it is associated with silence and simplicity. Chong 沖 refers to emptiness as
washed away, filling up, and pouring forth. Kong 孔, meaning aperture or hole, refers to
emptying virtuosity (kongde 孔德) as the functioning of the dao in Daodejing 21. The
Zhuangzi text also uses kong 空, signifying empty and hollow, which is later adopted
to translate Sanskrit śūnya (emptiness).8 In the Daodejing, the Zhuangzi, and related
sources, nonbeing, no-thing, and nothingness emerge as portending more and other
than the “not” of negation and skeptical contradiction.
In the earlier oracle bone script, the homophonic mu 母 (mother) was loaned to
express negation and later distinguished as wu 毋. The early pictogram that became
wu 無 (at that time pronounced ma) pictured a shamanic person dancing, which
would later be borrowed to signify “not.” This loan-process was based on their
homophonous sound rather than meaning. The primordial sense of nothingness
was not contained in or immediately related to the wu-character as maintained in
anachronistic and speculative etymologies. It became linked with this character
through a historical linguistic and interpretive process that formed and drew on the
resonances established between “not” and the loan-characters—which were primarily
loaned due to sound—for mother and the shamanic dance. Possibly they associated
nothingness with qualities of maternal nurturing and shamanic insight, which inform
the background of the Daodejing and the Zhuangzi.
The wu character appears throughout the Daodejing, most often in the negational
grammatical form of not-x that attests to its conventional common usage. The
double not or nothing (wuwu 無無), which is not a negation of nothingness but its
functioning in the Zhuangzi, does not occur in the Daodejing.9 “Nonbeing” (wuyou)
has two occurrences in the Daodejing. It means conventional not being in chapter 19. In
chapter 43, it is said that “acting without acting” emulates the water-like permeability,
softness, and fluidity of dao, as that which has no being can enter even into that
which has no entrance (無有入無間). There are several historical reasons, based on
transmitted and excavated texts, to suspect that the darkness and fecundity of water
and the nurturing maternal womb are older images of dao than the nothingness that
became its dominant image in subsequent Chinese discourses. These include Han-
era and Song-Ming-era Confucians who adopted elements from Daoist and Buddhist
philosophy, while polemically rejecting them overall.

3. The “no-thing” and the Generative Primordiality of Nothingness

The “not-” expressions in the Daodejing occur in the form of not-x in which x is to
be perceived as an altered perspective. Only later sources isolate the not or double it
(wuwu) as nothingness per se. There are, however, indications of radical nothingness
in the nonbeing and no-thing of chapters 43 and 14.
In chapter 43, that which is without being can enter into that which is without
entrance and is sealed. Responsively attuned acting without acting emulates this
nonbeing (wuyou). Analogous to water, which is a thought-image as well as a natural
138 Heidegger and Dao

phenomenon, it freely flows with the changing myriad things without obstruction.
Being like nonbeing could mean, in a minimalistic reading, to exist like, or as if,
nothing, in the conventional sense of that which is not; thus, it would evade barriers
and conditions. If Daodejing chapter 43 is read in conjunction with other chapters, it is
clear there is more to nothingness than mere negational not being. The commentarial
transmission, including the Heshanggong and Wang Bi commentaries, construes
nonbeing to signify a more primordial self-stirring, generative nothingness.
Nothingness is completely empty yet full of generative potentiality and promise
in the notion of returning to the empty pole (wuji 無極), expressed in Daodejing
chapter 28 (復歸於無極). The Heshanggong commentary identifies abiding in the
empty pole of nothingness, along with the fullness of virtuosity and longevity of life
associated with purposive Daoist self-cultivation and biospiritual practices. In his
commentary on Daodejing chapter 55, and in a more ziranist and Zhuangzian spirit,
Wang Bi contrasts the freedom of residing in the empty pole with purposive practices
and techniques deemed restrictive and coercive. Wang Bi remarks that the heart-
mind (xin 心) should be without contention, desire, and intentional purpose, letting
itself reside in nonbeing, such that the vital forces (qi) are not coerced by striving
for virtuosity and longevity.10 They are only in accord with dao, according to his
commentary about chapter 21, in embracing them through emptiness.
Wang Bi does not reject practice to idly speculate about nothingness, as critics
contend. As also seen in sections of the Zhuangzi that destructure practices of
nurturing life (yangsheng), Wang Bi distinguishes the purposive skills and techniques
of nourishing life that undermine what they seek, from nonpurposive practices of
emptying, and an art of existence from nothingness as the empty generative source.
Appropriate use/functioning transpires only in nonpurposive and non-coerced
alignment with the use/functioning of nothingness.11 The former might be described
as the enactment of dispositional emptiness and the latter as ontological or onto-
cosmological nothingness.
Wang Bi’s expression for nothingness (literally, no-thing: wuwu 無物) occurs only
twice in the Daodejing, in chapter 14, that offers a portrait of practicing dao as an
according with it in its formless and nameless nothingness:

Looking without seeing, it is called level; listening without hearing, it is called

rare; grasping without obtaining, it is called minute. These three cannot be
examined, and are hence blended into one. Above it is not bright; below it is not
obscure. Measureless and nameless, it is returning to no-thing (wuwu). It is form
without form, the image of no-thing (wuwu), indistinct and faint. Welcoming
it without perceiving its beginning; following it without perceiving its ending.
Holding on to the ancient way is to exist in the present. Knowing the ancient origin
is to practice dao [in the present].12

The Daodejing contains, according to Wang Bi’s ziranist elucidation, a radical

therapeutic potential for the present. It provides this through emptying and unfixing the
forces of life from limiting practices and techniques and through linguistic-conceptual
strategies of destructuring and emptying words and concepts. The realization of free
 Daoist Nothingness, Buddhist Emptiness 139

nonpurposiveness is styled and signaled, yet not named or defined, through indicative
orientating concepts such as emptiness (xu), nothingness, and uselessness (buyong 不用
and wuyong 無用). These imply releasing ourselves and the myriad things from reifying
fixations of practice and language into the generativity of nothingness.13
The philosophy of nothingness is elevated into the principal teaching of the
Daodejing in the post-Han-era mysterious learning (xuanxue 玄學) movement.14 Wang
Bi does not only play a key role in its Chinese reception. The German translations that
Heidegger relied on were based on the Wang Bi Daodejing edition and commentary.
Wang Bi and later exegetists do not interpret the no-, non-, or not- (wu-x) phrases
of the Daodejing as mere negations. The no- expressions are a manner of speaking
and styling showing that which otherwise could not be shown. The “not”- operates
as an indication of the functioning of and acting according to nothingness. In this
way, wuwei is understood as acting from out of nothingness. It is emptied in not
being an acting from a particular something, and in emptiness can be attuned by
nothingness itself. Purposive action (wei) is acting from out of a conditional, fixating,
and limiting something. The wuwei of the exemplary person (junzi 君子) is an “acting
out of nothing” that responsively accords with the functioning of nothingness itself.15
Similarly, wuzhi is knowing from nothingness; wuyu is desiring from nothingness.
The “non-” in the Daodejing, according to the commentary of Wang Bi, reverses
and points toward the flowing functioning of the shapeless (wuzhuang 無狀), formless
(wuxing 無形), and nameless (wuming 無名) way (dao 道) itself. The use (yong 用)
in no-use or no-function (wuyong) of Daodejing chapter 11 and the Zhuangzi was a
Daoist thematic to which Heidegger repeatedly returned in his thinking of appropriate
use (Gebrauch) and uselessness (Nutzlosigkeit); it is interpreted as the primordial using/
functioning/operating (yong) of nothingness in Wang Bi such that “uselessness” is a
using from nothingness rather than somethingness. In his exegesis of the Daodejing,
dao and its associated generative and maternal qualities, through a tracing from
the mystery, point toward the functioning of primordial nothingness from which
all things arise and to which they all return. Early Daoist primordial nothingness is
not the indeterminate and unmediated abstraction criticized by Hegel. It is rather, in
Daodejing 40, the pivot that enacts and is enacted through all movement, arising, and
reversal (i.e., in Hegel’s language, mediation). And, in Daodejing 43, it is described as
flowing without resistance through both the hardest and emptiest of things.
The movement of reversal and return between incipient nothingness and emergent
fullness expressed in Daodejing 40 is similarly articulated in Wang Bi’s commentaries
on the Book of Changes. That movement is elucidated through a philosophy of
nothingness in ways that would mold subsequent Chinese speculative discourses that
cannot be described in detail here. Most revealing perhaps is the incorporation of
nothingness in late Warring States and eclectic Han-era Confucianism as well as its
systematic elaboration in Song-Ming-era Neo-Confucianism.
To succinctly describe why some modern interpretations incorporated
Confucianism into “Oriental nothingness,” the primary reason is early European
missionaries. They depicted Neo-Confucian literati as practicing sitting in emptiness
and conceptualizing nothingness. This Neo-Confucian discourse of “nothingness”
concerns the empty pole (wuji 無極), an expression whose earliest extant uses are
140 Heidegger and Dao

found in Daodejing 28 and the Zhuangzi before entering into the commentarial
transmission of the Book of Changes and Confucian cosmological discourses. Wuji
signifies in Zhu Xi 朱熹 the raw chaotic unformed potentiality and promise that goes
on to become the ordered realization and interfused fullness of patterning principle
(li 理) and vital energy (qi 氣) in the great ultimate pole (taiji 太極).16 Nothingness
could accordingly be retrospectively construed in East Asian contexts as a key
shared teaching of the Buddha, Confucius, and Laozi and in modern Occidental
discourses as “Oriental nothingness,” which was in philosophy criticized by Hegel, and
embraced as a relative nothingness opposed to the world of will and representation by
Schopenhauer.17

III. Buddhism and Self-Emptiness

4. The Buddha’s Emptiness

Siddhārtha Gautama meditated under the bodhi tree in stillness. He responded to
speculative questions with silence. After his awakening, the Buddha taught that
there is no substantially fixed form of the self (anātman) or things as they causally
dependently arise in becoming. He did not teach nothingness and was never regarded
as a teacher of nothingness in early and classical Indian and South Asian depictions.
“Buddhist nothingness” is predominantly a modern construction shaped and reshaped
in cross-cultural exchanges. The modern European reception of the Buddhist dharma
emphasized how it is a cult and teaching of nothingness, an impression that still
influences contemporary criticisms of Buddhist teachings. Hegel’s critique of what
he conceived to be Buddhist nothingness, Nietzsche’s worries about Buddhist and
European nihilism, and Heidegger’s repetition of Nietzsche’s remarks are exemplary
instances of European suspicions regarding the consequences of Buddhist emptiness
(śūnyatā). Such suspicions arose despite the fact that emptiness was not stressed
in the discourses attributed to the historical Buddha in the Theravāda Pāli canon
and was rarely used to designate nonbeing or nothingness in premodern Buddhist
transmissions. On the contrary, being and nonbeing are both described as empty
of essence.
European philosophers have systematically misinterpreted Buddhist emptiness.
Hegel is a primary source of such confusion. According to his assessment in the
Science of Logic, drawing on missionary accounts of this nihilistic “cult of nothingness,”
Buddhism preeminently typifies the nihilism of Oriental nothingness in which
“nothingness, the empty void, is the absolute principle” (Hegel 1986c: 84). Hegel’s
misunderstanding of Buddhism as an undifferentiated universal nihilation of anything
positive reverberates in later German discourses (as in Adorno, GS 3: 40). In its
European reception, Buddhist emptiness has been and continues to be systematically
misconstrued as a destructive nihilating nothingness. The vitalist Ludwig Klages
could describe the “nihilistic morality of Buddhism” in the 1940s as a paradoxical
abyss, a morality of flight from the world, an unwillingness to live, and the suicide
of thought (Klages 1944: 465). The European accentuation of “Buddhist nothingness”
 Daoist Nothingness, Buddhist Emptiness 141

systematically distorts its development and roles in Buddhist sources. There are
several reasons why the nothingness ascribed to Buddhism in Hegel’s narrative and
its early European reception is erroneous. We can momentarily consider here select
paradigmatic elements and phases of the history of Buddhist emptiness to help situate
it relative to nothingness in Hegel and Heidegger.
First, śūnyatā was not counted among the primary teachings of the Buddha in
the oldest discourses, as recorded in the Pāli canon or other extent canons. It is not
systematically emphasized by the Buddha at all in these works. Emptiness emerges
over time as a way to systematically explain his primary teachings of dependent
origination (paṭiccasamuppāda) and the three marks of existence: impermanence
(aniccā), existential suffering (duḥkha), and non-self (anattā).
Secondly, suñña (empty, void, zero) is frequently used in Pāli Sutta literature to
convey the conventional sense of empty rooms and places where meditative practices
occur, thereby giving it a less negative valence. It is also used—along with expressions
such as ritta (blank, vacant), tuccha (deserted, vain), and asāra (insubstantial,
worthless)—to negatively signify insubstantial hollowness, transience, and vanity.
In this way, it is used to explain the notion of “no-self ” as an emptiness of enduring
substantial selfhood (as in Samyutta Nikaya 35.85), and as a specific form of meditative
concentration and practice, as in the “Division on Emptiness” (Suññatavagga)
collection in the Middle Length Discourses (Majjhima Nikaya).18
Thirdly, in the context of Mahāyāna philosophy, the analysis of emptiness occurs
alongside discourses of mind and the tathāgatagarbha (the primordial womb, embryo,
or matrix of Buddhahood) or buddha-nature. In later kataphatic discourses of buddha-
nature (initially the potentiality for awakening occurring in a fraction of beings and
progressively in all things), emptiness did not designate a quintessential teaching.19
These tendencies are much more prevalent in East Asian varieties of the Buddhist
dharma than the apophatic emptiness deployed in Madhyamika. It is a heuristic, a
useful means, and a provisional teaching in many early and later forms and schools of
the Buddha dharma. Emptiness operates in these contexts as a means of meditatively
and linguistically destructuring fixating attachments and illusions to allow the suchness
of reality to disclose itself.
Fourthly, Madhyamaka is the teaching of the middle that there is no self-nature,
only emptiness. Along with other Buddhist teachings that prioritized emptiness as
a definitive teaching, Madhyamaka accentuated determinate practices of linguistic
destructuring and meditative emptying. They did not understand it to signify an
absolute or indeterminate generalized nothingness, contrary to Hegel’s influential
narrative. Emptiness is linked in Nāgārjuna’s Fundamental Verses of the Middle Way
(Mūlamadhyamakakārikā) with the determinate negation of substantiality and, is
always, a determinate emptiness of form, mind, self, things, dharmas, as elemental
constituents, or even emptiness itself.
What then of emptiness? Its early senses and uses also indicate how emptiness
is not the fundamental expression or experience for early forms of Buddhism, not
to mention subsequent forms that classified emptiness as a preliminary heuristic
in prioritizing mind or buddha-nature. The word has an extensive and complex
development in Indian and Buddhist thought. Śūnya derives from the root śvi: hollow,
142 Heidegger and Dao

barren, and vain. It is etymologically related to the Latin word cavus. Its earliest
meanings are no doubt principally conventional and negative: emptiness signifies the
illusory and ephemeral, the barrenness and vanity of the self and its world in early
Buddhist discourses, as recorded in the three baskets (tipiṭaka) of the Theravāda Pāli
canon.
Given such senses of the illusory and transitory in early Buddhism, how did
emptiness take on a more affirmative resonance and become one of the central
Buddhist teachings? The threefold sense of emptiness, as ordinary conventional space
and absence, as hollow transient vanity, and as a path of liberation, is made explicit in
the Theravāda commentarial tradition. The two non-systematic uses of “emptiness” in
its conventional and negative senses are still apparent in Buddhaghosa’s comprehensive
fifth-century commentarial treatise The Path of Purification (Visuddhimagga). Its later
chapters on wisdom reveal a more radical conception of emptiness: the text equates
meditation on non-self with meditation on emptiness, as the Buddha already is said to
have done, and delineates the systematic relation between emptiness as an emptying
meditative modality, ultimate emancipatory awakening, and nibbāna (nirvāṇa) as
signless, desireless, and empty (Buddhaghosa 2010: 697, 726).

5. The Emptying Emptiness of the Middle Path (Madhyamaka)

Emptiness has multiple senses in Buddhist discourses. Most basically, it can operate
either as a heuristic provisional teaching and skillful means (upāya, fangbian 方便),
leading to the purity of suchness (tathātā, zhenru 真如), luminous mind (prabhāsvara,
guangmingxin 光明心), or buddha-reality or nature (buddhadhātu, foxing 佛性), as
being empty of afflictions and defilements (kleśa). Or, as in the paradigmatic works of
Madhyamaka philosophy and perfection of wisdom (prajñāpāramitā) sūtra literature,
it can operate as fundamentally constitutive of the path of awakening and liberation
in the teachings of the greater vehicle. There is no intrinsic or independent self-nature
(svabhāva, zixing 自性), only emptiness as the determinate self-emptiness of things.
Madhyamaka prioritized emptiness as that which is middle-most between being
and nothingness. It contests hypostatized substantialism and nihilistic annihilationism,
which it dismantles through the self-contradictory consequences of affirmation and
denial. Nāgārjuna (c. 150 ce–250 ce) was one of the final “great philosophers” discussed
by Karl Jaspers in his work of this name in the 1950s (Jaspers 1966). Heidegger probably
knew little directly of Nāgārjuna or Madhyamaka, which offered one of the most
striking and influential interpretations of Buddhist emptiness. Nāgārjuna articulated
emptiness as the implication of dependent origination that can then be deployed to
systematically dismantle all (including other Buddhist) conceptions and discourses.
The opening lines of Fundamental Verses of the Middle Way express a via negativa that
would undo both “self-nature” (or self-essence) and “other-nature” (or other-essence,
parābhava): “Not from itself, not from another, not from both, nor without cause [that
is, not from neither]. Never in any way is there any existing thing that has arisen.”20 No
adequate noncontradictory distinctions can be made between self- and other-nature,
self- and other-caused, such that all events and phenomena are empty of such posited
and constructed elements.
 Daoist Nothingness, Buddhist Emptiness 143

Emptiness is shown through Nāgārjuna’s classic analysis to be a determinate

“emptiness of,” demonstrated by logically reducing each proposed position and
viewpoint about beings and nothingness to self-contradiction. While earlier Buddhist
discourses thematized practicing the correct view (samyak-dṛuṣṭi) as the first step in the
eightfold path, Nāgārjuna articulates the “relinquishment of all views” (MKK 27:30).
The analysis of views enacts liberation from fixating and limiting views: “emptiness is
the relinquishing of all views. For whomever emptiness becomes a view that one will
accomplish nothing” (MKK 13:8).
The determinate negativity of emptiness undermines views through their
contradictions without arriving at an affirmative view or perspective of being or
nothingness. Emptiness is accordingly not a view and is itself without any intrinsic
self-nature in the emptiness of emptiness. The Buddha did not offer a teaching but
a therapeutic strategy of emptying and undoing samāropa. This expression can be
translated as fixation, hypostatization, reification, or erroneous affirmation: “No
Dharma whatsoever was ever taught by the Buddha to anyone” (MKK 25.24). The
primary teaching is then not a teaching but the enactment of emptiness: “since all
existents are empty, views such as eternalism, annihilationism, etc.—where will they
occur, to whom will they occur, which of them will occur, and for what reason will they
occur?” (MKK 27.29).
The logical deconstruction of views (prasaṅga) through their inherent contradictions
and the apophatic negative therapeutic character of Madhyamaka is emphasized in
the commentarial transmission of Candrakīrti (c. 600–650). The Buddha’s teachings
heuristically negate each and all views: “This is the meaning of the Sūtra, and this
meaning is exhausted in its negation of any other agent,” such that one will cling
to neither object nor subject, form (rūpa) nor mind (citta), nor to their emptiness
(śūnyatā).

IV. Daoist-Buddhist Differences and Entanglements

6. Conflicts and Mediations between Buddhist Emptiness and Daoist

Nothingness
Chinese Madhyamaka continued to wield emptiness to disassemble views and
fixations. This deployment is evident in the nothingness of Daoist-Buddhist discourses
in the “Treatise on Emptiness as Nonsubstantiality” (Bu Zhenkong Lun 不真空論)
composed by the Jin dynasty philosopher and monk Sengzhao 僧肇 (384–414 CE).
This treatise dismantled reifying substantialist depictions of emptiness in terms of
being or nonbeing. Buddhist emptiness of form was perceived to be the realization
of the free and easy wandering (xiaoyao you) promised by Zhuangzi in an elemental
emptiness that cannot be limited to either being or nonbeing. He articulated a central
correlation between enacting emptying and emptiness: as the mind becomes emptier,
practice becomes more extensive.21
Later Sinicized Buddhist lineages increasingly classified emptiness as a preliminary
meditative heuristic that clears away obstructions and opens the buddha-nature
144 Heidegger and Dao

(originary awakening) in beings as a more advanced and perfected teaching. Huayan

is the most radical vision of relational holism that preserves each singular event. In
Huayan, overly succinctly put, each singularly unique event encompasses each and
every other event without obstruction or reduction. In Tiantai 天台 emptiness and
form, mind and reality mutually encompass one another. During the mid- and late
Tang dynasty era, in the universal buddha-nature teachings of the Tiantai philosopher
Zhanran 湛然 and in the antinomian and iconoclastic Chan rhetoric and practice of
Mazu Daoyi 馬祖道一 (709–788 ce) and Linji Yixuan, all sentient and non-sentient
natural phenomena, the ordinary everyday mind (pingchang xin 平常心), and impure
objects such as excrement are respectively specified as expressing and partaking in the
emptiness of all distinctions (including those between the sacred and the profane) and
buddha-nature as the intrinsic capacity for illumination and awakening. The thought-
image of the empty sky discussed by Heidegger can signify in Buddhist discourses
elemental emptiness and the clarity and luminosity of the one mind or buddha-
nature.22 This is the nature that is directly perceived through enacting emptiness in
meditative practices that developed into meditation on the transformation inducing
paradoxes and “great doubt” of the kōan (gong’an 公案).
Heidegger’s thinking of nothingness and emptiness as the highest expressions of
being has an analogous structure to the emptiness of nature in East Asian Buddhist
sources and their appropriation in modern Japanese philosophy, as discussed in the
following chapters. Let us first conclude this section by briefly reviewing a late Tang
dynasty–era discourse on emptiness and nothingness, before turning to this thematic
in Heidegger and then subsequently, in Chapter 7, the entanglements between
Heidegger’s nothingness and modern Japanese thought.
The ninth-century Chan and Huayan teacher Guifeng Zongmi, for example,
counterpoised them in his account of the three teachings of Buddhism, Confucianism,
and Daoism in his highly influential Inquiry into the Origin of Humanity (Yuanren
lun 原人論).23 Zongmi’s hermeneutical approach in this work and in his writings
on competing forms of Chan Buddhism influenced the development of Korean
and Japanese Chan.24 The Origin of Humanity was important for its classificatory
hermeneutics of non-Buddhist and Buddhist teachings in the subsequent history of
East Asian Buddhist dharma. It is a pivotal work for modern Buddhist studies and was
already extensively discussed and translated twice into German during the first half of
the twentieth century.25
Emptiness is not an abstract, indeterminate, generalized nothingness, as in Hegel’s
influential portrayal that lingers in Heidegger’s 1930s impressions of Buddhism.
Zongmi critiques various one-sided forms of emptiness, including Mazu’s Chan in
the Chan Prolegomenon (Chanyuan zhuquanji duxu 禪源諸卷集都序): for Zongmi,
emptiness is determinate of forms and existents. It is the emptiness of form in Buddhism,
as he understands it, and form is entangled with immediate and mediated karmic
determinations, such that the path of liberation comes from destructuring and emptying
karma, delusion, and underlying forms of “storehouse” consciousness (ālayavijñāna; alai
yeshi 阿賴耶識). The emptiness of emptiness still requires the correlation of the emptying
of emptied form that is expressed in the “of.” But, for Zongmi, all possibilities are contained
in and self-generated as naturally self-so from the empty state of nothingness to which
 Daoist Nothingness, Buddhist Emptiness 145

they revert in the teaching of Laozi. Zongmi concludes that Daoist nothingness and
natural spontaneity do not offer an adequate analysis and explanation of determinate and
karmic causal conditions and thus cannot provide an appropriate diagnosis and pathway
for their therapeutic cure that can transition through emptiness to the self-awareness of
the buddha-nature (Gregory 1995: 80–104).
The emptiness of things and the world itself entails that they infinitely arise and
dissipate without end, yet the essence of dao is not Laozi’s nothingness (which Zongmi
dismisses as arbitrary and incoherent) as thing and world have a determinate non-
spontaneous source, becoming, and outcome. The consummate teaching reveals
“nature,” deploying the more fixed notion of inherent nature (xing 性) rather than
ziran, which he critiqued as random without causal and karmic conditioning. The
emptiness of the selfless essence is the tranquil illumination of the concealed womb and
embryo of Buddhahood.26 Zongmi proposed that the Buddha “taught that all is empty”
(i.e., of any fixed intrinsic nature) for the sake of disclosing “the pure, numinous, and
awakened genuine mind, which is absolutely identical with that of the buddhas” (i.e.,
of genuine nature).27

7. Transition to Chapter 7
Nothingness is neither a mere derivative negation nor a hidden something or substance.
It constitutes the very dynamic of reality and being. Heidegger’s nothingness appears
to deeply resonate with Daoist and Buddhist conceptions of nothingness even as he
had limited exposure to the full variation considered in this chapter, which has set the
stage for elucidating Heidegger’s nothing in view of the luminous clarity of Buddhist
emptiness and the dark mystery of Daoist nothingness.
To recapitulate, Buddhist emptiness, as linked with the causal matrix of dependent
origination, or the implicit buddha-nature operative in sentient beings (in the
paradigmatic Huayan of Fazang 法藏), or all things (in Zhanran’s Tiantai), is seen as
either excluding or encompassing Daoist nothingness as a lower teaching of humans
and gods in orthodox Tang-era Buddhist discourses.28 The history of Buddhist-
Daoist interactions, which contributed to their European reception and the idea of
“Oriental” nothingness, is not only one of competition and critique. Intersections
between Buddhist emptiness and Daoist nothingness began with the introduction
of the Buddhist dharma into China during the late Han period and early Chinese
Buddhist thinkers such as Zhi Dun, Dao’an, and Sengzhao trained in ziranist Daoist
and mysterious learning discourses. It continued to resonate in Chan and Zen
practices and teachings that embraced the freedom of ziran to interrupt conventional
boundaries and karmic attachments and fixations, including the reification of merit
and sacredness in Buddhist discourses that overlook their own emptiness. The
emptiness of buddha-nature expressed in all natural phenomena was associated with
the generative nothingness operative in nature in Tang-era calligraphy, painting,
poetry, and meditative practices. The notion of a naturalistic (in the expansive
generative sense) art of existence and aesthetic of the Tang became paradigmatic
in several modern Occidental and East Asian texts read by Heidegger and others
influenced by him.
146 Heidegger and Dao

The identification of these distinctive conceptions of nothingness and emptiness

developed further with synthesizing projects that maintained the shared identify
of the “three teachings” (sanjiao 三敎) as an attempt to resolve their philosophical
and practical conflicts. Their intersections are at play in Heidegger’s encounters and
entanglements with East Asian philosophy, particularly as mediated through modern
interpretations of Zen Buddhism that were introduced to Heidegger already in 1919 in
the gift of Itō Kichinosuke and in a 1930 letter by Ohe Seiichi. However, the existential
and discursive interpretive situations that make nothingness or emptiness significant
in these divergent contexts are potentially incommensurable and unbridgeable, and at
least call for respectful hesitancy and reserve, as Heidegger notes in “From a Dialogue
on Language.” This reservedness has been criticized as an impediment to pursuing
intercultural philosophy. Yet Heidegger describes this hesitation as a necessary
hermeneutical preparation for a less superficial and more originary communication
across radically distinctive languages and ways of thinking.
 7

Nothingness, Emptiness, and the Clearing:

An Intercultural Interpretation

I. Nothingness and Emptiness in Heidegger and His Context

1. Heidegger, Negativity, and Nothingness

Heidegger remarked in his 1938–1939 reflections on Hegel that Hegel’s negativity is
not genuine negativity, since the “not” and nihilation already presuppose positivity
and are positioned as absorbable into the yes and the affirmative.1 Negative philosophy
is not negative enough as it presumes and reverts to positivity. Negativity in Hegel
must continually be put to work in the “labor of the negative,” which results in
affirmation according to an identity-driven dialectic that sublimates all difference and
resistance. In his logic, indeterminate nothingness must be determinately superseded
in becoming; Hegel is unable to think negativity otherwise than from a fundamentally
insubordinate nothingness. This has significant consequences for his confrontation
with Asian conceptions of nothingness that he perceives as a threat to proper
dialectical thought.
Hegel’s historically influential narrative of “Oriental nothingness,” construed as an
empty, idle, and static abstraction, misconstrues the senses and functions of Buddhist
emptiness and Daoist nothingness. These are relational and holistic without requiring
assimilation into an abstract systematizing identity. Hegel’s influential exposition
misses their determinate specificity: the relational interdependent “of ” character
of emptiness, the generativity and fluidity of nothingness, but also their distinctive
therapeutical deployments to undo the hypostatization of mind and world, and the
fixations that hinder the plural self-generative dynamics of autopoietic life.2
It is still the case, however, that Buddhist and Daoist discourses reveal different
existential concerns and possibilities than the histories of nothingness in Occidental
philosophy.3 Parmenides stated: “It is necessary to speak and to think what is; for being
is, but nothing is not” (B 6.1–2). An extensive line of diverse thinkers from Parmenides
and Plato to Bergson and Carnap, among others, have sought to eliminate nothingness
as an impossible, contradictory, and meaningless expression or, as in Hegel’s dialectic,
bring it under the dominion of the affirmative. In this Occidental context, in which
the nothing is a mere not and cannot be properly thought, Heidegger’s elucidation of
nothingness in his 1929 Freiburg inaugural lecture “What is Metaphysics?” appears
distinct and radical. It promised to traverse the abyss between “East” and “West” for
several early readers and drew intense condemnation from his early critics.
148 Heidegger and Dao

Heidegger elicited this intercultural attention by giving nothingness its own

determinate specificity that could not be reduced to either the dialectical negativity
of Hegel or the logical negation of positivism. His existential analysis of nothingness
in 1929 did not directly concern Buddhist emptiness or Daoist nothingness. It did
share intersecting elements that would only be intensified in Heidegger’s subsequent
reflections on nothingness as the emptiness and openness in which the releasement of
things transpires. Let us now contemplate how emptiness and nothingness unfold in
his early and later thought and their intercultural entanglements.

2. Emptiness, Formal Indication, and Destruction in the Early Heidegger

Heidegger’s later thinking of emptiness as openness reconnects, as is noted in “From
a Dialogue on Language,” with his early hermeneutics (GA 11: 90–4). Heidegger
describes hermeneutics as a practice of formal indication (formale Anzeige) in the
1920–1922 lecture-courses Phenomenology of Religious Life and Phenomenological
Interpretations of Aristotle. Its key method is the dismantling, formalizing, and emptying
of commitments and prejudices. This includes the unquestioning commitment
to universality and the theoretical stance (GA 60: 59), bound to and absorbed in a
particular context with its specific content in order to encounter phenomena in their
own concrete character.
Heidegger methodologically proceeded from the fixated givenness of mere facticity
to the categorial, existential character of the facticity of the interpretive situation
through formal indication (GA 61: 20). Formal indication, for which formal logic
fails to be sufficiently formal (GA 61: 20, 33), is analyzed as disclosing that which is
concrete through formalization and emptying (GA 61: 33). Formal indication suspends
complete and final understanding so as to open access to and free the encounter with the
matter in question (GA 60: 67). This enactment of emptying prioritizes encountering
object and the thing, even though it does not yet lead Heidegger to embrace the thing’s
ownness and priority.
The emptying of indicative-opening formalization in the early 1920s proceeds
through destructuring (Destruktion) historically stratified transmissions and the
absorbed fixated situation, thus allowing the situation to be genuinely encountered
in its own historicity as an event. This process of destructuring and emptying, which
shares features of Buddhist discursive and meditative practices of negation and
emptying, opens the encounter with beings in their concreteness and one’s own being-
there in-the-world.4 This hermeneutical strategy remains operative in Being and Time.
In the opening pages the question of the sense of being appears as the most abstract,
empty, and formal question. It is at the same time the most decisive and concrete
question for the individuation of “being-there” (Dasein) in its own concrete singular
situation (GA 2: 39).

3. Nothingness as the Temporalizing of Factical Life

Heidegger’s earliest philosophical discussions of nothingness addressed it as a non-
real conceptual object in the works of Alexius Meinong in 1912 and as nominal in
 Nothingness, Emptiness, and the Clearing 149

Duns Scotus (in fact, Thomas of Erfurt) in 1916 (GA 1: 27; GA 1: 549). These earlier
studies indicate how nothingness and negation can be meaningful and operative even
if they do not name really existing objects. An object is that which has a characteristic,
regardless of whether it actually exists (such as fictional objects), and even if its
characteristics are only negative limiting ones. Heidegger’s thinking of nothingness in
the 1920s could be interpreted as meaningful through a Meinongian understanding
of beingless and negative objects.5 This strategy is inadequate because Heidegger’s
discourse need not assume nonexisting objects and extends beyond issues of nominal
irreal objects. Likewise, his analysis departs from the schema of a relative, negative,
privative nothingness (nihil privativum) and impossible absolute nothingness
(nihil simpliciter) proposed by the late medieval Modist speculative grammarians.
Heidegger’s reflections on nothingness in the 1920s concern (1) the existential
dynamics of negativity and nothingness disclosed in ruination and radical anxiety,
boredom, and being-towards-death; and (2) how the nothingness in question is prior
to the “not” of negation and the “is” of affirmation and to the absence and presence
of (real or irreal) objects. Heidegger’s confrontation with more elemental types of
nothingness began in the early 1920s.
A key early confrontation with nothingness occurred in Heidegger’s lecture-course
held during 1922. In this work, emptiness is its possibility of movement (GA 61: 131).
Nullity is the possibility of finite factical life, to which ruination (Ruinanz) returns it.
The nothing appears as the whither or whereto (wohin) of the ruination and sudden
falling (Sturzen) of the factical life of human existence. “Factical” refers here to the
embedded, entangled, resistant, and situated nature of existence. The tendency of
factical life toward self-overturning and downfall is not an alien fate that befalls it. This
propensity is a constitutive elemental feature of its very character (GA 61: 145).
Nothingness, as other and more than the mere “not something” of pragmatic
unavailability of things and linguistic negation, is disclosed in situations of
uneventfulness, unsuccessfulness, pointlessness, and hopelessness (GA 61: 146).
Heidegger would later describe these through radical anxiety and profound boredom.
This nothingness is not revealed by a particular absence or lack in which possibilities
remain, such as an empty space that can be filled or a missing object that can be
returned. It is rather a radical non-occurring and impossibility that can consume
concerned life. Nothingness in these early lecture-courses is arrived at through
the emptying of sedimented content, allowing the concrete to be encountered. In
emptying, nothingness is formally indicated as characterizing the factical situation and
co-temporalizing of concerned life itself. The nothingness constitutively at the core
of human existence is not a negative relation to an absent object, nor mere emptiness
or indeterminateness. It temporalizes fundamentally as nullification or annihilation
(Vernichtung) (GA 61: 147).
It is interesting that the expression Vernichtung was commonly used in nineteenth-
century discussions of Buddhist nirvāṇa, construed as the extinction of the individual
soul or, more expansively, as the annihilation of the life-principle or of being itself. This
reception deployed it mostly negatively, as nihilistic. Still, it was positively interpreted
as an emancipation from the existential negativity of suffering in German pessimism
from Schopenhauer to Philipp Mainländer. Schopenhauer maintained a relative
150 Heidegger and Dao

instead of an absolute nothingness in describing his own and Buddhist conceptions

of nothingness. His critic Nietzsche recognized this, but his other critics did not. The
Neo-Kantian philosopher Wilhelm Windelband, and others, in their polemics against
disintegrative pessimism portrayed Schopenhauer as an advocate of the bliss of absolute
annihilation, linking him and Buddhism with an absolute atheistic nothingness.6
Heidegger’s theological, Neo-Kantian, and phenomenological teachers had
rejected and polemicized against pessimism. Heidegger himself initially reveals little
familiarity with or interest in the historical entanglements of German nothingness and
Buddhist emptiness (expressed in Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche), except for a
few remarks distancing his thinking from Buddhism (GA 65: 171) and in reference
to Nietzsche’s critique of nihilism. His articulation of the self-forming ruination and
fallenness of life occurs in the context of his phenomenological analysis of Christian
life and the problematic of atheism. Nonetheless, analogously to Schopenhauer a
century earlier, he arrives at a constitutive existential negativity and nothingness
that can neither be logically relativized nor dialectically controlled and sublimated.
Unlike Schopenhauer, the existential negativity of suffering life (that he identified with
saṃsāra) is not overcome through the annihilation that suspends it (nirvāṇa) but
through individuating life in the face of its uncertainty, uncanniness, and nothingness.
Heidegger’s early indifference toward Buddhism and general disinterest toward
Schopenhauer could not prevent his thought from being entangled and linked with
both in its intercultural reception, as Heidegger was accused of promoting yet another
variation of pessimistic nihilism.

4. Nothingness and Individuation or Emptiness and the Singular

Nothingness and annihilation, understood relatively from the conditional perspective
of will and representation, were linked in Schopenhauer with overcoming the
suffering self through suspending the will and de-individuation. Heidegger interpreted
nothingness in contrast, in 1922, as the structural impossibility of factical life that
compelled its individuation. They are still intertwined in Being and Time, in which
Heidegger asks: “What could be more foreign to the they-self, lost in the worried
disparate ‘world,’ than the self who is individuated to itself in uncanniness and
thrownness into nothingness?” (GA 2: 277).
In Being and Time, it is radical comprehensive existential anxiety (Angst),
grasping and trembling one’s very existence in its thrownness as a whole, which
discloses and individuates being as being-possible and being-free for (GA 2: 187–8).
Instead of being simply meaning-constituting and projective, Dasein is thrown into
the event of the “it” and the “there,” that is, into a world that it can encounter in
anxiety, boredom, and solitude as uncannily other and as nothingness. The familiar
everyday being-at-home-in-the-world falls away in uncanniness, immanently
arising from the character of existence itself (GA 2: 189). In the inexorable
interruptive disrelational potentiality of its own death, the self is thrown into the
nothingness of itself and the world (GA 2: 276–7, 308). Anxiety compels yet opens
existence in and to its possibility as that which it can only be from itself, as singular
and individuated (GA 2: 249).
 Nothingness, Emptiness, and the Clearing 151

This nothing strikes through negativity by placing existence as such into question,
yet it is not merely external or negative, as it allows existence to freely become and
be itself. It is here that Heidegger coincides with Schopenhauer to the extent that the
nothing is not purely external, arriving from the outside, and is not only a negativity
to be dialectically overcome. At the same time, evoking the model of the dark night of
the soul, this existential nothingness appears disrelational yet relative to the individual
self that is thrown into question. Nothingness and the constitutive lack of orientation
and bearing (as described in GA 27: 354) are not alien but the very condition of human
existence. They indicate the freedom and self-transformative transcendence of ekstatic
human existence as individuated to its being-there and being-in-the-world.7
Nothingness is simultaneously existential fear and trembling, a familiar thematic
from Christian and existentialist discourses, and openness and possibility. When
nothingness as openness is shifted from human existence to being, it is no longer
purely relative to the subject and the prospect of a radical nothingness emerges.
Nothingness as the radical openness of being is unusual in Occidental philosophical
and religious discourses. These characteristically denigrate nothingness as a derivative
secondary negation of existents or as a fallen distance from being, God, or positivity.
In addition to polemical accusations of Schopenhauerian pessimism and Buddhist
nihilism made against Heidegger, which stressed the nothingness of being-towards-
death, it was nothingness as empty openness, and the potential generativity of its
possibilities for being, in Heidegger’s writings of the late 1920s, that inspired Buddhist
and Daoist interpretations among European and Asian readers, including Kitayama
Junyū 北山淳友 (1902–1962), as examined in the next chapter.
Are such identifications utterly erroneous? Let us look at two examples of Buddhist
emptiness to indicate a preliminary orientation through which this question might be
answered: the Indo-Chinese perfection of wisdom (Prajñāpāramitā) sūtra literature
and classical Tang-era Huayan. The Heart Sūtra (Xinjing 心經) notably states: “Form
(rūpa) is emptiness (śūnyatā), emptiness is form.”8 Heidegger is mindful of this popular
expression of the key idea of Mahāyāna Buddhism since he discusses it in his dialogue
with a Japanese interlocutor. Heidegger’s nothingness as empty formless openness co-
resonates with the Prajñāpāramitā understanding of emptiness as the condition of
form, in which form is likewise the condition of emptiness, or it is the correlation of
emptiness (kong 空) as principle (li 理) and form (se 色) as singular event (shi 事) in
Fazang’s interpretation of Huayan.9
It might be assumed that Heidegger’s Dasein is concerned with the self, the
Buddhist dharma with the denial of the self, and that therefore they are incompatible.
The situation is more complex. Heidegger insists that the analytic of Dasein concerns
Dasein in its possibility and individuation rather than the egotistical self (GA 29/30:
8). Heidegger’s “Dasein” is not a substantive naturally or metaphysically determined
self or subject. It is determined by its way of existing in its possibilities, in nothingness,
and in openness. Possibility, nothingness and the not, and openness indicate
perspectives on how it comes to be itself, in its own manner of being, in its relations
and disruptive disrelations. Dasein’s being-there is a being held-in-nothingness (GA
9: 115); its essence rests in its ek-sistence in the openness of the “there” (GA 9: 189).
Accordingly, its genuine possibilities are awakened in the concreteness of its thereness,
152 Heidegger and Dao

which opens onto the nothing that is shaped by the elemental not and the free open
region that occurs through things. As will be tracked throughout this chapter, this
elemental “not” is more primordial than both the “not” of negation and the “is” of
assertion, and the no of Schopenhauer and the yes of Nietzsche.10 Because he does
not appropriately enter into the not-like of being, Nietzsche’s strategy of affirmation
repeats and deepens the problematic of modern nihilism instead of “overcoming” it,
as “European Buddhism.”11
In contrast to Heidegger, early Buddhist teachings of no-essential-self (anātman)
indicate practices of undoing hypostatizing attachments of the self by analyzing its
causal constitution, dependent origination, and emptiness.12 The self is broken down
into its conditional formation (saṅkhāra) and constituent elements (dharmas). The
Buddhist dismantling of fixated formations and self-conceptions of the self has a
different task than Heidegger’s contestation of the reified self. Still, it intersects at points
as a questioning of the self that leads to a different sense and culture of the self, one
that is open to singularity without self-absorbed egoism. The self ’s destructuring need
not entail its absorption into an identity or totality in either context. As articulated by
Fazang during the Tang era, for instance, meditatively destructuring the fixated self
discloses the singular as relational (as each interpenetrates and encompasses all) and
singularly itself in its own positionality relative to the whole. We will return to the
anarchic, equalizing, participatory implications of Huayan interactive pluralism in the
conclusion.

II. The German Contexts of Buddhist “Nothingness”

5. Buddhism and Nothingness in German Thought

The challenge of nothingness is that it is neither a mere naught nor something that can
be said to be. Still, the question of nothingness is even more forgotten than the question
of being that begins Being and Time. Briefly put, God creates being from nothingness
that does not operate as a primal source, as in Daoist thought, but becomes an empty
lifeless distance from God, responsible, in Augustinian onto-theology, for error and
sin in creatures. Nothingness has been predominantly denigrated in and excluded
from occidental philosophy, from Parmenides to Carnap. There are a few exceptions,
however, as in Leibniz’s interpretation of nothingness and the zero as constitutive
elements of the nature of reality and mathematics or in Schopenhauer’s articulation
of the constitutive character of nothingness. Despite such exceptional moments in the
history of European philosophy, which to an extent inform Heidegger’s distinctive
strategy, nothingness continues to be constrained and limited by the logic of affirmation
and positivity in modern European thought.
Given the relentless demand for beings as useful and representable objects in their
availability, positivity, and presence, nothingness is either construed as a moment of
negativity to be dialectically subsumed (as in Hegel’s dialectic that begins with being
and concludes with absolute affirmation) or a false substantialization of negation that
only denies qualities or existence itself to objects and nothing more, as in Bergson’s
 Nothingness, Emptiness, and the Clearing 153

1907 Creative Evolution or Carnap’s 1931 polemic against Heidegger. For Hegel as much
as Carnap, being and nothingness concern affirmation and negation, presupposing
a conceptualization and logic of being and what can be said. That is, dialectical and
logical negativity are meaningful as derivative and secondary to the presence and
positivity of being. Philosophical affirmations of presence and the positivity of the
real, the undialectical moment in Hegel and the unempirical moment in Bergson
and Carnap, suppress rather than resolve questions of empty formlessness, radical
negativity, and elemental nothingness.
First, the situation is more complicated. Presence and availability are not the only,
and not necessarily the primary, attributes of what can be expressed in language.
Words do not constitute and determine things but let them presence (GA 12: 220).
Presence signifies the concealing and unconcealing presencing and absencing of
beings and being; it is always presencing “of ” and not the static enframed presence
as availability. Words can accordingly express and indicate derivative and elemental
absence, emptiness, and nothingness in a variety of ways, which can signify and
make sense in appropriate discursive-practical contexts. Secondly, negativity and
nothingness take on at times a more constitutive role in episodes in the history of
European philosophy: for instance, in Leibniz and Schopenhauer. Heidegger was
intrigued by Leibniz’s argumentation that led beyond nothingness as merely derivative
negation and privation to an elemental presupposed and constitutive nothingness in
the very nature of things. The larger context of Leibniz’s reflections is his incorporation
of constitutive nothingness into the image of creation, the very nature and perfection of
things, and of the zero into mathematics, which he used to interpret the transformative
dyadic logic of the Book of Changes.13
Heidegger barely acknowledged Schopenhauer in his writings and lecture-courses.
His few references throughout his life are dismissive. He criticized Schopenhauer’s
rejection of university philosophy, and his trivialization of Schelling and Hegel, and
described him as a “literary writer” (Schriftsteller) who had a disastrous impact on
Nietzsche and nineteenth-century philosophy.14 But Schopenhauer’s significance
should not be denied, as he rejected the possibility of absolutizing the nothingness
related to logical negation as self-contradictory, while at the same time articulating
the positivity of negativity in existential and constitutive forms of negativity and
nothingness. Three kinds of negativity, and correlated approaches to nothingness,
can be distinguished in this context: logical negativity related to negation, existential
negativity related to woe and death, and a constitutive generative negativity that
structures the character of being itself.15
Heidegger regularly returned to the role of the nothing and negativity in Leibniz,
Hegel and Nietzsche while disregarding the pertinent discourses and controversies
unfolded in nineteenth-century German controversies over pessimism, from
Schopenhauer through Philipp Mainländer and Eduard von Hartmann to Nietzsche.16
These authors, along with Richard Wagner and other literati and artists, pursued
questions concerning Buddhist nothingness and the value of life. This discourse was
entangled with disputes over the pessimistic and nihilistic character of Buddhist
“nothingness” (“das Nichts,” as śūnyatā was rendered) and “annihilation” (Vernichtung,
as nirvāṇa was typically translated into German).
154 Heidegger and Dao

Discourses concerning European Buddhism were not, of course, exclusively about

annihilation, negativity, and nothingness. The Buddhist dharma was also a source for
ideas of embracing the ethical value of nature and creatures. The history of European
Buddhism informed visions of a new ethics that affirmed animal and vegetative life
in Ludwig Klages’s notion of “biocentrism” and in the Halle theologian and pastor
Fritz Jahr’s formulation of “bioethics.” Jahr’s 1926 and 1927 essays introduced the
expression “bioethics” and called for a bioethical imperative to respect all and not
only human life. He appealed to an ethics of relational life in which humans are seen to
be interconnected with all animals and plants in the Buddha, Schopenhauer, Wagner,
von Hartmann, and other figures (Jahr 1926; Jahr 1927). Jahr describes the Buddha’s
rebirths in animal and human forms from the Pāli Canon’s Jātakas (narratives of the
past lives of the Buddha) and von Hartmann’s depiction of the suffering of flowers.
According to Jahr, appealing to Buddhist and Christian teachings, love cannot
be limited by party, nation, or species, and compassion and duties toward animals
and plants cannot diminish those toward other humans. Jahr publicly advocated
democratization, liberalization, and the freedom of thought during the closing years
of the Weimar Republic (Jahr 1930; Jahr 1933). The idea of embracing interwoven
nature had both reactionary (Klages) and liberal (Jahr) deployments during the
Weimar Republic. The organicist vitalist and democratic pacifist Hans Driesch was
a vocal public opponent of militarism, nationalism, and National Socialism. Adorno
provides the most differentiated analysis of these tendencies in distinguishing the
identity-promoting ideological functions of archaic images (which he associated with
Wagner, Klages, Jung, and Heidegger) and the critical potential of dialectical images
of nature and animal suffering.17
European Buddhism accordingly played several different roles in the cultural
life of the Weimar Republic. Heidegger’s hermeneutical situation encompassed
philosophical contemporaries (Max Scheler, Misch, Husserl, Jaspers, among others),
public intellectuals (Klages, Theodor Lessing, Oswald Spengler), while Alfred Döblin,
Hermann Hesse, and other authors engaged South Asian Buddhist themes during
that period.18 The popular imagination often concerned Buddhist asceticism and
the relationship with nature. Whereas Döblin perceived Buddhist negativity and
asceticism as a purifying means to a free activity at one with nature (Döblin 1921),
Hesse narrated how his version of Siddhartha rejected following the Buddha’s ascetic
path for one embracing nature in his powerful novel Siddhartha (Hesse 1922). Even as
“Buddhist nothingness” is much more extensively discussed than Daoism in German
cultural and philosophical contexts, there is much less evidence of its significance for
Heidegger, except for his later discussions of Zen with Japanese interlocutors such as
Nishitani Keiji 西谷啓治 (1900–1990) in 1938 or D. T. Suzuki 鈴木大拙 (1870–1966)
and Hisamatsu Shin’ichi 久松真一 (1889–1980) in the postwar era.19
Are there earlier hints? Okakura Kakuzō’s Book of Tea, which Heidegger seems to be
familiar with at an early date, as discussed in Part One, briefly mentions the negativity
of Indian Buddhism and Nāgārjuna as one side of Zen Buddhism and then associates
Zen with Daoism in promoting a distinctively East Asian life-attitude and aesthetics
of emptiness, naturalness, plainness, and simplicity (Okakura 1919: 31–3, 44). These
are aspects of Zen that Heidegger appears attracted to in comments in later years,
 Nothingness, Emptiness, and the Clearing 155

particularly in conversations with Japanese visitors. One might suspect that there were
relevant conversations with Japanese interlocutors during the Weimar Republic given
their frequency (Yusa 1998: 45–71) and as recollections of his early friendship and
conversations with Kuki Shūzō center the conversations on language, nothingness,
and emptiness found in “From a Dialogue on Language.” Zen Buddhism was without
doubt part of Heidegger’s linguistic community and intellectual context, yet, unlike
the Daodejing and the Zhuangzi, there is little direct historical evidence of engagement
with South Asian or East Asian varieties of Buddhism during the Weimar Republic era.
What does this short decisive text itself reveal?

6. The Very Question of Nothingness

After the succinct, pivotal discussions of nothingness in Being and Time, his 1929
inaugural lecture “What is Metaphysics?” addressed nothingness as logical and
existential negativity and as constitutive of openness and possibility. This is an
interculturally entangled journey if we follow the early reception of this lecture,
Heidegger’s subsequent tendency to increasingly emphasize the integral emptiness of
being instead of the existential fear and trembling of abyssal ungroundable nothingness,
and the connections he himself establishes between nothingness, emptiness, and being
in his conversations with actual and fictionalized Japanese interlocutors.
“Occidental thinking,” insofar as one can speak of such a generalized category, tends
to reify the not and nothingness as mere negation that is secondary and derivative of the
affirmation, presence, and positivity of that which is. In Heidegger’s analysis, however,
logical negation cannot be primary, as it presupposes an elemental naught. Logical
negation is rooted in a more originary existential encounter with the negativity of the
abyss and lack of ground of the nothingness disclosed in disorienting experiences such
as the anticipation of one’s own death, radical anxiety, and profound boredom.
Heidegger’s positivistic critics construe his expression that “the nothing nothings”
(das Nichts nichtet) as a substantializing and potentially nihilistic reification of
negation. There are several reasons why this is not the case. First, it expresses the verbal
enactive character (nichten) of the nothing (das Nichts). Secondly, verbally understood
nothingness is a functioning and not an entity. It is neither the affirmation of existence
nor a something—and accordingly not the logical reification criticized by Carnap—nor
is it a meaningless null. “Nothing” is not a substantive form or idea since it is a formally
indicative or hermeneutical concept, what Heidegger later describes as a way. “Nothing,”
as a formal indication, hermeneutically anticipates and opens the experiential and
performative condition of the not-ness and negativity that makes possible acting and
thinking—including logical negation and consequently logic and science.
Heidegger’s interpretive strategy need not entail a repudiation of science or logic,
as Carnap fears (Carnap 1931). It is a reflection calling for encountering the not-
ness in which beings and any thinking about beings as present or absent, existing or
not-existing, transpires. This is the open clearing that the space of reasons as a space
presupposes. The constitutive character of elemental nothingness becomes evident in
Heidegger’s reflections on Leibniz’s nothingness, which serves as a necessary element
for the creation and enactment of nature and spirit.
156 Heidegger and Dao

7. Leibniz’s Question and Elemental Nothingness

It is not inadvertent that Heidegger’s essay circles around Leibniz’s question: why is
there something rather than nothing? Nothingness has been largely marginalized in
the history of occidental thought. At the beginnings of Greek philosophy, Parmenides
asserted that we cannot properly think nothing, as it is not. Plato explained negation
as difference, refusing to recognize more primal forms of negativity and nothingness.
Augustine and subsequent Christian philosophy tended to see nothingness as the
absence of God or, in negative theologies and dialectical philosophy, as a negative step
on the way to the absolute. Modern philosophy has likewise been hostile to nothingness.
For Husserl, thinking is inherently a thinking of something. In conventional philosophy,
from positivists like Carnap to vitalists like Bergson, “nothingness” signals an illusory
nullity. It is at best understandable through negation as a secondary derivative denial of
that which is. These suspicions of nothingness permeate modern European criticisms,
from Hegel to Nietzsche, of Buddhism, Daoism, and “Oriental nothingness” as
fundamentally nihilistic.
Given the Occidental restraints on thinking nothingness, how is it that Heidegger
could begin to thoroughly rethink nothingness in ways that intersect with Buddhist
and Daoist discourses? Heidegger ignored Schopenhauer and criticized negative
theology and Hegel’s dialectics for lacking sufficiently radical notions of negativity and
nothingness. It is Leibniz who points the way toward a more primordial nothingness
prior to all beings. Revealingly, the Leibniz and Heidegger scholar Katharina Kanthack
noted the constitutive role of negativity in Heidegger, in contrast to Scheler and
phenomenology, remarking: “Heidegger, in his mysteriously encrypted works, exposed
the ‘primordial negativism’ [Urnegativismus] of human existence” (Kanthack 1948: 42).
In the 1949 introduction to “What Is Metaphysics?” Heidegger discussed the
question of being and nothingness posed by Leibniz. Leibniz had asked, as the point
of departure of his proof of God’s existence: “why is there something rather than
nothing?” (Leibniz 1842: 409). Since nothingness is the simplest possibility, being
requires a sufficient reason to justify it. Leibniz answered that both terms, being and
nothing, could only be justified and explained through a third term, God, which is
external to and provides the ground for both. According to Leibniz’s proof in the 1714
work Principles of Nature and Grace founded in Reason, if there were no God, there
would be no sufficient reason for existence over nonexistence, and the world would not
exist, never arising from primordial nothingness. Since the world exists, its sufficient
reason (namely, God) must exist.
In Heidegger’s elucidation, rather than being or God, it is the nothing appearing
in Leibniz’s argument that provokes the greatest perplexity. Heidegger notes that
the question of why there is something rather than nothing is the most baffling of
questions. It is already perplexing in its own terms of something (beings) and nothing,
even before considering Leibniz’s further recourse to God as an external transcendent
third term that explains the movement from nothingness to being.
Heidegger describes how Leibniz’s question must be posed in a fundamentally
different sense. Leibniz’s statement that “nothing is simpler and easier than something”
(Leibniz 1842: 409) gives nothingness an elemental sense, in which beings in their
 Nothingness, Emptiness, and the Clearing 157

presence and positivity potentially become derivative to that which is not. Heidegger
recognizes how Leibniz’s question departs from the strategy of beginning with beings
and proceeding to their first cause, God, by beginning instead with the nothingness
that is not being and that is easier and simpler than being (GA 9: 382). In Leibniz’s
demonstration, this “not-being” functions as unlimited and infinite possibility from
which God creates this specific determinate order of things.
Heidegger perceives how Leibniz’s entire argumentation presupposes a primordial
nonderivative sense of nothingness in the very nature of actuality. Leibniz’s account
of creatio ex nihilo presumes a naught prior to existence and the derivative privation
and negation of existence. Leibniz recognizes this naught when he concludes that
nothingness enters into the very constitution of things, just as the zero in the zero-
one dyad is constitutive in mathematics and serves as an image of creation itself in its
possibility and actuality, emptiness and fullness. Leibniz perceived this same logic of
nothingness and creation to be at work in the Book of Changes (Leibniz 1703: 85–9).
The Book of Changes offers a model of the alternation between nothingness and being
in Chinese traditions as well, as is evident in Wang Bi’s classic commentary (Lynn
1994). Heidegger is once again drawing on a philosophical problematic that has an
intercultural history in German philosophy that he does not directly engage. Still, it
would be difficult not to notice how reflections on Chinese conceptions of nothingness
and the zero based on the Book of Changes are discussed at length by Leibniz and
Hegel, just as Buddhist nothingness is a contested topic between Hegel, Schopenhauer,
and Nietzsche.20
The mathematical notion and use of zero (śūnya), negative numbers, and infinity
(ananta), often supposed to be characteristic of modern European conceptual thinking,
were initially developed by Indian mathematicians like Brahmagupta (598–668 ce) in
relation to the philosophy of emptiness (śūnya is used for emptiness and the zero) and
eventually transferred to Europe through Islamic mathematics. These notions, which
Descartes had still refused to utilize on the principle that the nothing is naught and
only God can be infinite, revolutionized mathematics in Leibniz and his era. Heidegger
identified the application of the new mathematical paradigm in Leibniz, in which all
being and nonbeing becomes subject to mathematical projection and construction, as
a crucial element in the formation of technological modernity, but he did so without
sufficiently attending to its interculturally transmitted Indian and Arabic sources.21
Leibniz systematically applied the zero and infinity throughout his mathematical
and philosophical works. He linked the mathematical zero with nothingness, which
assumes three roles: mathematical, ontological-cosmological, and theological. Being
and all things are constituted from nothingness and God, the zero and the one, from
which its essential finitude results and its possibilities for self-ruination in error,
fallenness, and sinfulness emerge. They arise due to finitude, the nothingness within
things, and not directly from God, who has by his very idea no limits or imperfections.
Nothingness accordingly has a double function in Leibniz’s philosophical system:
elemental nothingness is pure empty and open possibility that in its actualization
becomes limiting and finite in beings. This is what creates the conditions of the
privative nothingness of the Augustinian onto-theological discourse shared by the
rationalists Descartes and Leibniz. Heidegger repeatedly returns to Leibniz’s question
158 Heidegger and Dao

and the proposed simplicity, ease and priority of the nothing. He returns not only to
the question itself but to Leibniz’s strategy and model, which reveals how nothingness
is constitutive in the elemental core of being and existence.22
We can now begin to disentangle in Heidegger’s thinking the different senses
and roles of the nothing: (1) existentially and negatively in affliction, disrelation,
and limitation; (2) constitutively of possibility; and (3) elementally in openness and
clearing. Heidegger’s discourse of nothingness thus cuts across and encompasses a
range of meanings: generative abyssal hiddenness and mystery; freedom in openness
to an infinite plenitude one cannot encompass or master; the vast empty fullness of
potentiality; existential negativity in anxiety, misery, and death; logical and dialectical
negation; and the nihilistic denial of being and sense.

8. Buddhism, Nothingness, and Nihilism in Nietzsche and Heidegger

Heidegger’s thinking of nihilism is determined by his confrontation with Nietzsche.
He consequently presupposes, even if he avoids adequately engaging, Nietzsche’s
interpretation of Buddhism as a primary exemplary vehicle of nihilism that has
been reincarnated in European modernity. Nietzsche asked in the preface of On
the Genealogy of Morals whether Europe is heading “towards a new Buddhism?
Toward a European Buddhism?” The expression “European Buddhism” reappears
in his notes for the never-completed Will to Power on which Heidegger lectured at
length in the late 1930s and early 1940s. The issue of modern European nihilism is
consequently interconnected with the notion of Buddhist nihilism in Nietzsche’s
argumentation. Nietzsche demands an active nihilism in reaction to “European
Buddhism,” an affirmative pessimism, and a “Buddhism of the deed” (Nelson
2022b: 83–96).
This is the complex setting in which Heidegger’s sparse early references to Buddhism
occur, including the remark in Contributions to Philosophy that his being-historical
thinking is the reverse of Buddhism: “The less humans are as beings-as-entity, the less
frozen they are toward the being-as-entity [das Seiende] in which they find themselves,
and the closer they come to being [Sein]. (No Buddhism! The opposite)” (GA 65: 171).
Despite their sparseness, Buddhist emptiness in these early references informs the
context in which Heidegger’s later thinking of emptiness unfolds.
Before turning to his postwar thought, why does the transition from beings and
beingness to being itself evoke Buddhism and require its denial in the situation of
the 1930s? The very next paragraph turns to the history of philosophy as a uniquely
Occidental affair. This historical reason does not seem sufficient, since the passage
itself does not mention this history and Heidegger specifically stressed here the
transition from beings as entities to being itself. Elsewhere he characterizes this as
the “not” of the ontological difference that is nonidentically the same as the “not”
of nothingness (GA 9: 123). Heidegger might have in mind here criticisms of his
thought, including by National Socialist ideologues, as advancing a new form of
nihilist pessimism through death and the nothing. For his critics, this does not
lead from beings to being but rather to mere nothingness. Buddhism destructures
 Nothingness, Emptiness, and the Clearing 159

beings-as-entities and leaves them hanging in nothingness, whereas Heidegger turns

toward being. First, the nihilistic interpretation of Buddhism misses the determinate
functioning of emptiness in Buddhist discourses and practices. Secondly, the
nihilistic indictment presented against Heidegger often evokes European imaginings
of Buddhism and Daoism.
Another motivation for this negative reference to Buddhism might be Heidegger’s
own understanding of Buddhism, which he perceives to be sufficiently proximate to
his own thinking to call for a denial. Given Nietzsche’s analysis of Buddhism, it might
be that it remains in the transformational moment of the nothing as such (as German
philosophers interpreted Buddhist emptiness), without realizing the nothingness of
being and, also, not recognizing the many forms of Buddhist practice and discourse
that lead through destructuring selflessness and emptiness to the very nature or
buddha-nature of things. It is this last point that Heidegger’s Japanese readers and
interlocutors would note, and Heidegger himself in his dialogue with a Japanese
interlocutor.
Heidegger’s references to Buddhism in relation to nihilism in the 1930s are
formed in response to Nietzsche. Heidegger quotes Nietzsche’s identification of
the teachings of the Buddha and Schopenhauer and his description of art as “anti-
Christian, anti-Buddhist, [and] anti-nihilist par excellence” (GA 6.1: 71, 285; GA
44: 68). Yet Heidegger does not explicitly address the problematic of pessimism and
Buddhism that Nietzsche inherited from Schopenhauer, which could have drawn
him into controversies over Buddhism. At the same time, Heidegger’s transmutation
of the question of nihilism would lead to, if followed through to these debates, an
altered conception. Heidegger rejects depicting nihilism as an issue of value or
meaning. It concerns the history of being itself. According to Heidegger’s analysis
of technological modernity, nihilism concerns the modern organization of life
itself. This enframing organizing of life is expressed in a fourfold dynamic of the
abandonment of being in the modern technical worldview, understood as the latest
stage of Occidental metaphysics: the destruction of the earth, the darkening of sky
and world, the flight of the gods, and the massification of humans (GA 40: 29, 34;
GA 65: 119).
Heidegger would subsequently more precisely differentiate the nothingness
that nothings (das nichtende Nichts) from the nothingness that annihilates (das
vernichtende nichtige Nichts). He did so not only to avoid associations with nihilism
and pessimism but to confront Nietzsche’s uncanniest guest of nihilistic nothingness
with nothingness as disclosive clearing (die Lichtung) and free opening region (das
Freie).23 Such nothingness does not lead to the active nihilism of arbitrary self-
assertion and self-willing, whether of an individual or collective subject, but—if we
read Heidegger with Zhuangzi—to perspectivally disassembling fixated subjects and
identities in uncovering freedom and sense within the midst of things and world. That
is, meaning is not constituted by the individual or collective subject and its identity
and mastery. It is emptying-opening, generative, and born of freedom in care and
being-with or, breaking with their earlier human-centered interpretation, contact and
interdependence with others and things.24
160 Heidegger and Dao

III. The Nothingness and Emptiness of Being

9. Nothingness, Emptiness, and Openness

What then is the relationship between beings and being that evokes the specter of
Buddhism? Heidegger makes two claims in the late 1930s regarding the relation between
being and nothingness. The first proceeds from beings to nothing to being: “Beings are
‘because’ nothing is, and the nothing is ‘because’ being (Seyn) is” (GA 67: 27). Being is
in this sense the highest word for what Heidegger seeks to communicate. The second
is that being itself “is” the nothing.25
In what sense is being itself nothingness? This is not Hegel’s assertion that they
are identical in their empty abstraction. Nor is it the nihilistic definition of being as
mere meaningless nothingness. Heidegger’s delimitation of the nothingness of being
has multiple functions that answer and offer an alternative to the previous discourses
of nothingness that continue to dominate contemporary thinking: first, on the one
hand, it signals the being-historical self-veiling and concealing of being. It indicates
the epochal refusal and devastation of being that is interconnected with the question
of modern nihilism (GA 67: 19, 143). Secondly, on the other hand, the abyssal
nothing essences as the very clearing, openness, and absencing-presencing in which
beings are.26 While the first is used to delineate the problematic of nihilism, the latter
intimates a response to the devastating nothingness of Occidental philosophy through
the clearing, the open, and the releasing nothing.
Emptiness, clearing, and the openness of the middle and between increasingly
become the key qualities through which the later Heidegger conveys the elemental
senses of being, as emptiness and nothingness become the ultimate expressions for
being. The nothingness of nihilism is not overcome by turning to forms of affirmation,
presence and positivity that fixate and reify beings. It requires moving toward the
abyssal nothingness of being in which affirmation and negation, absence and presence,
concealment and unconcealment emerge and in which their varying historical
configurations are fixated and hold sway.
Was Heidegger’s sense of Buddhism only a negative Nietzschean informed one?
Heidegger’s postwar reflections and encounters suggest not. He appreciates the ziranist
“self-so” moment of expansive open naturalness in Zen Buddhism in conversations
with prominent Japanese proponents of Zen.27 A conspicuous tendency of East Asian
Buddhism states that formlessness and form are interwoven, as emptiness leads not
to mere negativity and nothingness but to nature in its clarity and luminosity. Such
tendencies in Daoism and Chan/Zen Buddhism informed an extensive naturalistic
ethos in dwelling and aesthetic-cultural practices in painting and poetry that
highlighted stillness, simplicity, plainness, and naturalness. This sense of nature, which
he interprets through his own understanding of color and emptiness and earth and
sky, appears to be at work in Heidegger’s appropriation of East Asian thought-images
and concepts.
Zen is not the only Buddhist transmission of significance in the context of
Heidegger’s thought and its reception. There are also moments in Heidegger that
intersect with the Pure Land Buddhism that informed several Japanese interpretations
 Nothingness, Emptiness, and the Clearing 161

of his thought within and outside the Kyōto school. Pure Land Buddhism encompasses
a sense of religious devotion and a historical dimension that is thought to be lacking
in Zen Buddhism. History is the history of the decay of the dharma and human
receptivity to it until the point is reached at the “end of the dharma” (mofa; mappō
末法), when only the grace of the Bodhisattva, such as Amida Buddha (Amitābha,
the buddha of infinite light) can save fallen humanity through the “other-power” of
unrestricted compassion. These points co-reverberate with moments in Heidegger’s
later thinking and dialogues, concerning being as empty and open and the possibility
of another beginning and saving power (das Rettende) arising precisely in the limit and
the moment of maximum danger.
Could Heidegger’s thought-image of the saving new gods to-come be imagined or
reimagined in the Bodhisattvas who realize the emptiness and luminosity in each thing
and enact unrestricted forgiveness and compassion? Such questions impel us beyond
Heidegger into the metanoetics of Tanabe Hajime 田辺元 (1885–1962) who adopted
images of other-power, infinite compassion, and other Pure Land Buddhist elements.

10. Gatherings in Emptiness

Hermeneutical co-resonances between Zen and Pure Land Buddhism and modern
intercultural discourses are at play in Heidegger’s East Asian reception, in his own
responses to this reception, and in popular and academic discourses of intercultural
philosophy.28 A primary example of how Heidegger answers his East Asian
entanglements and reception is found in “From a Dialogue on Language.” The
interpretation of the priority of the empty naught unfolded in this present chapter is
confirmed by Heidegger’s reflections on the emptiness of the thing in “The Thing” and
of language in this dialogue.
This fictionalized and highly stylized dialogue is based in part on an actual one in
March 1954 with the Germanist Tezuka Tomio 手塚富雄 (1903–1983).29 The dialogue
centers on the absent friend Kuki. In this conversational meditation on emptiness, we
glimpse how absence, emptiness, and stillness allow the gathering of events, memories,
things, and words. This gathering in emptiness is indicated in various ways, from the
image of the Noh theater’s empty stage to the silence that enables genuine listening
and conversation, from the delight in the alluring stillness of iki to the emptiness that
allows recollection of the absent departed one. These ways also include the emptiness in
which form and color are configured and take shape, the open in which the mountain
appears through the gathering gesture in a Noh play, or the open clearing of being.
These senses of “nothingness” were more readily grasped by Japanese readers of “What
Is Metaphysics?” (GA 12: 102–3), as emptiness, according to the Japanese interlocutor,
operates as the highest name for being (GA 12: 103). This emptiness is not only rooted
in Buddhist philosophical conceptions of śūnyatā, but in encounters and experiences
with mountains and rivers, rocks and trees, and other things and places.
The dialogue enacts a hesitation and reticence on the side of the questioner
(Heidegger) about using Occidental concepts to explain Eastern and Japanese concepts
and experiences. This hesitation allows a dialogue to emerge, even as Heidegger in
the figure of the inquirer conveys skepticism concerning the achievement of genuine
162 Heidegger and Dao

intercultural understanding. The enquirer consequently expresses delight in hearing

the words of his Japanese interlocutor, as well as reluctance to deploy Occidental
categories such as aesthetics to elucidate iki 粋, being and nothingness to articulate
emptiness, and language (Sprache) to explain kotoba 言葉.
First, Kuki’s analysis of iki is discussed as expressing reserved hesitation and delight
before alluring stillness (GA 12: 133), a motif unfolded throughout the dialogue.
Secondly, with the Buddhist conception of emptiness and form in the background,
iro 色 is said to signify color and kū 空 the boundless emptiness of the open sky (GA
12: 129). In their mutual interplay, there can be no kū without iro, and no iro without
kū (GA 12: 97). This is drawn from the Buddhist philosophy of co-constitutive form,
which is only emptiness, and emptiness which is only form (色即是空, 空即是色), as
expressed in the Heart Sūtra.30 Iro and kū together in their mutual interplay indicate
the elemental source: the emptiness in which things appear and flourish. This is the
event of the lightening conveyance of the graciousness that brings forth and holds
sway over that which needs the nurturing shelter of that which flourishes and flowers.
Language itself is thematized as leaves or petals from koto: koto 言 (word) is cognate
with koto 事 (thing, matter, and affair). This same character in Chinese Huayan
Buddhism signifies the singular event or thing that encompasses the whole, and its
emptiness means the interpenetration of each singular. Huayan’s logic of multiplicity
might suggest that there is in emptiness (principle) an interpenetration of all singular
languages (particulars) without a common identity to be asserted or negated.
Heidegger’s dialogue remarks that there is not a common concept of language that can
be automatically applied to each language. Each language’s word for language offers
a hint, pathway, and freeing word toward encountering what discloses itself in that
language as a matter or affair to be thought. The Japanese expression for the nature or
reality of events evoked in language is kotoba (GA 12: 134). Ba literally signifies leaves
and petals; koto designates that which delights in a thing’s event and shining forth. It
is that which comes to radiant disclosure distinctively in each singular moment, in the
fullness of its own gracefulness (GA 12: 134).
Language is a saying-encountering of the thing, such as the mountain, in vastness
and stillness. Words are leaves gathering in emptiness in co-relation with things. There
is an encounter in emptiness in the appearing of a mountain, in a beholding that is
itself inapparent. Such emptiness then is said to be the same as nothingness. This is the
elemental nothingness in which mountains are mountains, again playing on Buddhist
imagery. This nothing is not a merely destructive nihilistic nothingness, as Heidegger’s
Japanese interlocutors recognize, but instead that which is other than and encompasses
both presence and absence, positivity and negativity (GA 12: 103).

11. Elemental Nothingness

Heidegger is not primarily a thinker of presence or of a negation that coercively reverts
to the identity of positivity and presence. The alleged givenness and positivity of mere
presence cannot disclose the infinite, groundless movement of presence and absence in
the clearing. Heidegger is not a philosopher of being as positively given presence. He is
rather a thinker of “presencing” in absence, nothingness, and the empty clearing that
 Nothingness, Emptiness, and the Clearing 163

lets potentialities surge forth, allows gathering to occur, and interthingly existence to
be enacted. The promise and arrival of the hidden fullness of gathering can arise only
within elemental absence (GA 7: 138, 227). As the pragmatic accessibility or theoretical
representation of beings is placed in question through the ontological difference
between beings and being, being as sheer presence is questioned through constitutive
emptiness. Things come to be seen in emptiness; they come to word in the silence that
can responsively listen. Absence, emptiness, and nothingness are not deployed as pure
or mere indeterminate negativities. They are originary disclosive names for being and
not contraries or opposites to be subsumed.
As in his source the Daodejing, absence, darkness, and mystery are in Heidegger’s
thinking that which preserve and nurture. In ways that evoke Buddhist formlessness
and Daoist ziran, such expressions signify that that which is determinate is elemental,
constitutive, and that it is what is at stake in undoing, releasement, and being exposed
in the clearing, in which the emptying-gathering of that which is absent and present
(ab- und anwesen) occurs. The clearing or opening of being is an emptiness in which
things arise and disclose themselves from themselves and address humans, calling
them in the stillness in which humans can begin to listen and respond.
Nothingness was still directly linked in “What Is Metaphysics?” with negativity
in existential anxiety in which accessibility, presence, and representation are shaken.
The original nonderivative “negativity” of nothingness is subsequently expressed
by Heidegger as the elemental abyssal condition of ground (Abgrund des Grundes)
that is the truth and event of being (GA 65: 33; GA 68: 47). It is also described as
absence and emptiness and as the open clearing of being and the gathering of time,
space, and thing. These words do not convey what is merely “negative,” understood
as inherently derivative denial and negation. Nothingness is accordingly not a mere
nothing, a derivative negation of beings, an incident of negativity to be overcome and
sublated; it indicates the generative, the elemental, and the freely occurring openness
through which being is disclosed in its appropriating or enowning ontological event
(ereignende Ereignis) and beings exist in their own ways of being.
Heidegger accordingly does not reduce ontic beings to ontological being in
ontological totalization, as several of his critics have asserted. Being is the nothingness
and clearing in which beings—through the “not” or nonidentity of the ontological
difference between being and beings—can be themselves in accord with their own
autopoietic self-naturing.31 This becomes possible in the nonidentical sameness of
the “not” of nothingness and the “not” of the ontological difference (GA 9: 123). The
“not” of the between is the opening clearing of being, in which being (Sein) and beings
(Seiende) can be encountered and thought in their distinctive difference.
Heidegger remarked in his reflections on Hegel on negativity, in which negativity
resists Hegel’s efforts to subdue it, that “[t]he not of being is the original nothing.
The not ‘of ’ being in the sense of a genetivus subjectivus. Being itself is not-like
(Nichthaft), has nothing in itself ” (GA 68: 29). Nothingness does not merely signify
the nonexistent, it signifies the “essencing” (Heidegger’s upsurgence-withdrawal and
presencing-absencing of essence) of being itself as abyssal and abyss-like (GA 68: 47).
Nothing is an elemental name for abyssal being rather than its opposite or negation.
Being and nothingness cannot be dialectically opposed and subsumed, as the “not”
164 Heidegger and Dao

and the nothing are primal elements of being and being of nothingness. Is the “not”
then more characteristic of being than the “is”? Or, what if being in its event never was
nor will be, if it neither departs nor arrives?

IV. The Not of Primordial Nothingness

12. The Priority of the Elemental Not
Heidegger commented in the Contributions to Philosophy that “[o]nly because being
essences in a not-like way does it have nonbeing as its other. Because this other is
the other of itself ” (GA 65: 267). The “not” can be described as the pivot of the way
in Heidegger and emptiness as encompassing actuality, possibility, and impossibility.
Possibility is higher than actuality, according to Being and Time (GA 2: 38), and the
not (from abyssal nothingness and empty possibilities to concrete absence, lack, and
resistance) is greater than affirmation and negation, concerning that which is present
and available (GA 65: 266).
The intertwined “not” and the nothing operate in multiple ways in Heidegger’s
discourse. The not functions as (1) ordinary linguistic, logical, and dialectical
varieties of negation with which conventional philosophy begins and ends; (2) anxiety
provoking lack, resistance, and nihilation, particularly the irresistible inescapability
of death; (3) abyssal formlessness and darkness encountered as horror or—in a
more Daoist vein—as safeguarding, healing, and nurturing; (4) generative elemental
openness that allows dynamic arising, emergence, and holding sway (phúsis); (5) open
space of the between in which beings gather and form places and localities; (6) the not
in remembrance that allows the gathering of who and what has been lost, such as the
absent passed friend who remains near in memory; and (7) the not-yet in awaiting
without expectation or calculation, in which turning and metamorphosis transpire.
The latter two operations of the not (6 and 7) are also described as stretched
between the recollection of what is no-more and the anticipation of what is not-
yet through which Heidegger articulates the holy and the divine. In a 1950 letter to
Hartmut Buchner concerning “The Thing,” Heidegger could describe the absence that
characterizes the divine (das Göttliche) as indicating both the no-more and the not-
yet, the gods that were and the gods to come.32 Correspondingly, in “From a Dialogue
on Language,” the absence indicated in farewell gathers that which endures; silence
and the stillness of breath allow the fullness of saying; the emptiness of saying gathers
words that permit things to communicate; the emptiness of things is the gathering of
world in them.
Heidegger’s thinking of the elemental “not” and not-like extends beyond the
category of meontology, or a merely negative ontology, and breaks through the
nihilism, of which he has been accused. Heidegger’s thinking of this radical primordial
“not” contests the logic of affirmation, presence, and positivity that dominates
Occidental thought. It thereby intersects with specific facets of early Lao-Zhuang
Daoist discourses of generative nothingness, Buddhist conceptions of emptiness and
nature, the releasement and receptivity expressed in German mysticism and poetry,
 Nothingness, Emptiness, and the Clearing 165

and even the nonidentity thinking of his polemical critic Adorno, while remaining
irreducible to them and offering an alternative path. Hermeneutically contextualizing
and interculturally situating Heidegger’s thinking, as enacted in the chapters of the
present book, has not limited Heidegger’s thinking to mere historiography but has
allowed us to better comprehend its own uniqueness, scope, and limits.33

13. Uncanny Guests and Other Beginnings

The present chapter undertook a twofold task. First, its philosophical task, unfolded
through a series of historical contextualizations and interpretive redescriptions,
outlined how the releasement into elemental nothingness and emptiness entails the
undoing of fixations, and opening for encountering and responding to gathering beings
and things, as such and as a whole. This can arguably be deployed as a responsive
attunement and critical model in relation to contemporary social ecological crisis-
tendencies.
Secondly, its historical interpretive undertaking was to reconstruct Heidegger’s
sojourn with nothingness and emptiness in intersection with ziranist “naturalistic”
moments in Daoist and Buddhist sources. It is naturalistic only in the expansive sense
of attending to and observing natural phenomena in their own self-naturing without
reduction to a fixed epistemological or metaphysical model of nature and the thing.
This is not nature as available, calculable, and ready for use. As Heidegger speaks of
Hebel’s dao-like naturalness, a facet of Hebel appreciated by Ernst Bloch (Bloch 1984):
“The naturalness of nature is the rising and setting of the sun, the moon, the stars,
which directly addresses humans in their dwelling in granting the mysteriousness of
the world.”34 Naturalness enacts an interpolation of address (ansprechen) and granting
and doing justice (zusprechen, literally “speaking to”) between beings that is not
restricted to intrahuman communication and an overly narrow anthropocentric ethos.
Heidegger’s ambiguous understanding of the Buddhist dharma can be interpreted
according to the ziran model. His texts reveal no interest in causal-karmic Buddhist
discourses that were opposed to anarchic ziran by Zongmi and other orthodox
Buddhist philosophers. His dialogues with Japanese interlocutors reveal affinities
with discourses of the emptiness of buddha-nature as it is expressed through natural
phenomena and poetic words, rather than in reference to redeeming bodhisattvas.
Heidegger finds poetic and philosophical inspiration in his encounters with East Asian
concepts, images, and words; he does not find religious or mystical enchantment that
would lead to a direct embrace or conversion. Such an identification with Zen or other
Eastern teachings is rejected in his interview with the Spiegel magazine (GA 16: 679).
One reason for this suspicion is expressed in the postwar Bremen und Freiburg
Lectures, in which Heidegger asked (adopting Nietzsche’s expression) whether the
uncanniest guest of nihilism derives from the East or the West. He replies that both
have opened the door to it and are equally incapable of responding to it (GA 79: 134).
However, in the Spiegel interview, Heidegger also states that possibilities of renewal and
a freer relationship with the technological world arising from archaic transmissions
in China and Russia cannot be excluded (GA 16: 677). This remark appears to refer
to agrarian utopian images of free self-organizing rural communities. In the case of
166 Heidegger and Dao

China, it is clear from related remarks elsewhere that he does not mean the idea of
a Chinese authoritarian order, mentioned in his notes on Ernst Jünger (GA 90: 400,
406); nor does it refer to Maoism, which he perceived as another form of enframing
positioning (Petzet 1993: 212). He is referring to Laozi’s dao. In a late note, Heidegger
explicitly relates Chinese self-determination and possible world-renewal with a
return to the teaching of Laozi (GA 91: 667). This passage is followed by expressions
that he recurrently deploys in relation to the Daodejing, once again revealing their
interconnectedness in his thought: the stillest stillness, the unheard and inapparent
“not-ing” of the nothing, meeting and encountering place, and a non-instrumentalizing
appropriate enregioned and attuned practice (Brauch) (GA 91: 668).
Heidegger’s “Daoist turn” is once again evident even if this turn must be a qualified
one. It is limited to a specific reimagining of its wuwei-ziran tones and their continuing
resonance in subsequent East Asian art, discourse, and practice. The genealogy of
interculturally entangled nothingness articulated in Part Two of this work discloses
how moments in Heidegger’s journey correlate and resonate in significant ways with
specific elements of Daoist generative nothingness and Buddhist emptiness of form
and self-identity. This coalescence is in part contingent and in part due to Heidegger’s
entanglements with East Asian texts and interlocutors.
 8

The Nothing, Nihilism, and Heidegger’s

East Asian Entanglements

I. The Question of the Nothing

1. Heidegger as a Thinker of Nothingness

Hegemonic forms of modern European philosophy, from Kant and Hegel to
Bergson and Carnap, find genuine or radical nothingness to be incomprehensible, as
nothingness ultimately must refer to the positivity of the being that it presupposes in
negation. Heidegger’s “the nothing nothings” (“das nichts nichtet”) is among his most
controversial statements. It has been repeatedly denounced as absurd, nonsensical, or
nihilistic since its initial articulation in 1929. This negative reception led Heidegger
to remark numerous times that he was completely misunderstood in Europe and that
it was his Japanese readers who understood what he meant to say with nothingness
(GA 11: 106; GA 12: 103; GA 15: 414): “The reaction to this writing in Europe was:
nihilism and hostility to ‘logic’. One found in it in the Far East an appropriately
understood ‘nothing’ as a word for being” (GA 15: 414). Heidegger did not note on any
of these occasions that several Japanese interpreters contended that his nothingness
adhered to the Occidental prioritization of being and had failed to come near to
absolute, genuine, or “Oriental” nothingness.
Before considering Heidegger’s nothing and its early German-Japanese reception,
what was the European situation in which he considered it misinterpreted? How
did Heidegger become a philosopher identified with nihilism despite his frequent
assertions to the contrary? This is a perceived consequence of his analyses of death
and nothingness prior to his confrontations with Nietzsche’s analysis of nihilism in
the 1930s. Heidegger’s Being and Time elucidated a primordial nullity at the heart of
human existence as thrown into the world in being-toward-death: “The projection
is not only determined as each time thrown by the nullity of its fundamental being,
but as a projection it is itself essentially a nullity (Nichtigkeit)” (GA 2: 117). After
the 1927 publication of Being and Time—with its analysis of existential anxiety and
being-toward-death (Sein-zum-Tode)—and his 1929 Freiburg inaugural lecture
“What Is Metaphysics?”—with its analysis of radical anxiety (Angst) in the face of the
impersonal self-nihilating nothingness of “the nothing nothings,” Heidegger’s thought
was identified with a nihilistic nothingness.
168 Heidegger and Dao

Multiple European and East Asian intellectuals described his thought as a

“philosophy of nothingness” (Philosophie des Nichts or Nichts-Philosophie), a negative
ontology or meontology (Wahl 1957: 154), a variety of nihilism (Meyer 1936: 86–9;
Gürster 1938: 48), a European form of Buddhism (Anders 2001: 64), and a Daoist-like
embrace of nothingness (Jordan 1932: 102; Mann 1949: 10). Three of his early critics
negatively identify Heidegger, Buddhism, and Daoism as sharing a common nihilism.
First, Günther Anders encapsulated these interpretative tendencies in a 1946 essay,
“Nihilism and Existence,” in which he criticized Heidegger’s thinking as “in a certain
sense” a modern European Buddhism that is both atheistic, skeptical, nihilistic, as well
as conservative, ritualistic, and seeking redemption (Anders 2001: 64).
Secondly, the German linguist and literary theorist Leo Jordan, who had written
about Voltaire and China in 1913, was one of the first scholars to link Heidegger with
Daoism. In a work critiquing German abstract thinking and its confusions about
nothingness, Jordan described Heidegger’s “What Is Metaphysics?” as an attempt to
renew Hegel’s logic of negativity, but that fell into a German mystical and Daoist-like
generative conception of nothingness from which all life is perceived as arising (Jordan
1932: 102, 147). Jordan noted a few pages earlier how the interconnection between
heaven, emptiness, dao, nothingness, as well as between deception and concealment—
which Heidegger might be thought to have reinvented in his recent lectures on
nothingness and truth—is as ancient as the Chinese script (Jordan 1932: 97).
Third, the exiled writer Klaus Mann, in his final 1949 essay “Europe’s Search for
a New Credo,” described Heidegger as a “mystic of Nothingness,” an “idolater of the
Nihil,” a supporter of the “nihilistic revolution” of National Socialism, and a thinker
who made a Daoist-like and unimaginable “absence” and “total nonexistence” the
basis of philosophy (Mann 1949: 10). Anders, Jordan, and Mann identified Heidegger
and Buddhism or Daoism as embracing nothingness and nihilism—without
differentiation—in similar ways.
Heidegger’s thinking of nothingness in Being and Time and “What Is Metaphysics?”
was critiqued as meaningless in positivism, as bourgeois fascistic irrationalism in
Marxism (e.g., Lukács 1951, 1955), for its depersonalizing impersonality in the name of
the interpersonal other in Emmanuel Levinas, and for the sake of radical subjectivity in
Jean-Paul Sartre (Levinas 1932; Sartre 1943; Levinas 1982). Rudolf Carnap condemned
Heidegger’s Nichts-Philosophie as reifying negation (which is inherently derivative and
secondary to assertions about facts and their logical relations) into a meaningless
pseudo-concept of nothingness and denied it even the expressive and evocative
value of poetic words.1 György Lukács contended in Existentialism or Marxism? that
the prioritization of nothingness is a fetishization not of logic but of the despair and
negativity of capitalist society. It provides an impersonal mythology for a crisis-ridden
decaying social order and thereby obscures the productivity and potentiality of the
human subject (Lukács 1951: 44–5).
Although absent in the 1932 essay “Martin Heidegger and Ontology,” Levinas’s
1935 work On Escape interrogated the impersonality of the “there is” (il y a) of being,
murmuring in the abyss of nothingness from which we are compelled to escape, yet
cannot. Sartre interprets Heidegger’s being and nothingness as “reciprocal forces of
expulsion” that constitute the real in his 1943 magnum opus Being and Nothingness
 The Nothing, Nihilism 169

(Sartre 1943: 51). Sartre concurs with Heidegger’s argument that negation presupposes
the nothing, contrary to the positivist account of negation, and the constitutive
role of nothingness in human existence (Sartre 1943: 52, 60). He contests, even so,
the apparent impersonality of Heidegger’s “nothing nothings” with the being (the
for-itself of consciousness) that is self-nihilating in the face of the absurdity and
superfluity (de trop) of being-in-itself. Nothingness is identified with the nothingness
of the subject that constitutes its radical factical freedom that it cannot escape and
is compelled to choose. Sartre intriguingly expressed the link between freedom and
nothingness by interpreting humans as active creators of being and sense from out of
their own nothingness. It is not accurate to interpret Sartre as reducing nothingness to
subjectivity, as nothingness is the unfathomable gap and impersonal point of departure
from which the dynamic of personal and interpersonal existence ensues in, for the
most part, the inauthenticity and bad faith that does not recognize its own freedom.
Heidegger’s thinking of the nothing reveals different tendencies over time, none
of which constitute an existential or Sartrean self-creation from the nothingness of
subjectivity. His “What Is Metaphysics?” showed how humans are exposed to and
shaped through the nonderivative event of nothingness. In contrast, he states in
1934/35 that humans are witnesses of being in language, and that without language,
as with stones, plants, and animals, there can be no nonbeing, nothingness, and
emptiness, thereby giving it a derivative character (GA 39: 62; GA 40: 127). Seemingly
drawing on the Daodejing and the Zhuangzi, Heidegger’s postwar thinking depicts how
humans await, witness, and say being, thing, and world in openness and emptiness.
The construal of Heidegger’s thinking as promoting nihilism misses the complex
history of his thinking of nothingness. Nearly from the beginning, Heidegger had
to contest the growing local and international perception that he was destructively
glorifying nothingness. A standard narrative states that his turn (die Kehre) was from
the temporalizing formation of the world for human existence as being-there (Dasein)
to the priority of being’s event. Another narrative, evolving after the conclusion of the
Second World War, confirmed earlier interpretations in claiming that Heidegger’s turn
consisted of a turn away from a “philosophy of nothingness” to a “thinking of being
itself ” (Sein selbst) (Naber 1947). This account is also questionable given Heidegger’s
pathway from existential nothingness to the emptiness of the clearing.
Heidegger maintained in his later 1943 postscript and 1949 introduction to “What Is
Metaphysics?” that he had been systematically misinterpreted. He maintained that his
discourse of nothingness contested rather than advocated nihilism. It did not conclude
with the priority of a destructive but rather a generative nothingness. The nothingness
encountered in attunements of radical anxiety and boredom is both a concealing
veil and a disclosive encounter. The transition through nothingness shows being to
be abyssal and groundless (abgründig). It suggests, more fundamentally, being as an
illuminating, shining forth clearing (Lichtung), openness (Offenheit), and emptiness
(die Leere). The clearing is an opening lighting center beyond beings. It encircles all
that is like the barely known nothing (GA 5: 40; Heidegger 2002: 30).
Nevertheless, Heidegger can still state in the 1943 postscript: “One of the essential
places of speechlessness is anxiety in the sense of the terror to which the abyss of the
nothing attunes humans” (GA 9: 310; Heidegger 1998: 238). Nothingness continues to
170 Heidegger and Dao

convey elements of existential horror and anxiety in relation to the abyss, as explicitly
accentuated in his 1929 lecture and in the early overall reception of his thought, and
not only in French existentialism. At the same time, Heidegger articulates dimensions
of the abyss, which is “neither empty nothingness nor a dark confusion, but the event”
(GA 79: 128).
There are dimensions of openness, associated in Kantian philosophy with the
sublime, such as the emptying of the clearing and encountering being’s calm,
encompassing, inexhaustible expansiveness in releasement. This is found in, for
instance, the emptiness (kū 空) in the 1953–1954 “From a Dialogue on Language,”
or as disclosed in the self-veiling expansiveness of the Siberian wilderness to the two
prisoners of war in the 1944/45 “Evening Conversation in a Prison Camp in Russia.”2

2. Heidegger’s Entanglements with East Asian Philosophy

How did Heidegger’s thinking of nothingness become entangled with East Asian
philosophies? The question of nothingness and emptiness in Heidegger is an intriguing
one on its own. This question is also at play in Heidegger’s reception in Japanese
philosophy and the emerging postwar field of so-called “comparative philosophy,” as
well as in Heidegger’s reflections on the emptiness of the thing in “The Thing” and
language in “From a Dialogue on Language.”3
Heidegger’s encounters with East Asian philosophy began as early as 1919, as
described earlier in Chapter 1. He has been suspected of borrowing the expression
being-in-the world (“in-der-welt-sein”) from the 1919 German translation of Okakura
Kakuzō, The Book of Tea, which he received as a gift in 1919 from Itō Kichinosuke. It
states of the Zhuangzi: “Chinese historians have always spoken of Daoism as the ‘art
of being-in-the-world,’ because it is about the present, about ourselves.”4 Heidegger’s
discourse of being-in-the-world no doubt reflects Lutheran discourses of the
fallenness, sinfulness, and suffering of “being in the world” (“in der Welt sein” without
hyphens) and yet potentially—as intimated in the Zhuangzi—also reflects a poiesis of
immanently and ecomimetically dwelling with things within the world.
Heidegger noted repeatedly in the postwar period the special affiliation between
the discourse of nothingness in “What Is Metaphysics?” and his dialogue with Japanese
philosophy. His thinking shifts between an existential nothingness and an opening
emptiness, with reference to the Japanese translation of “What Is Metaphysics?” in
“From a Dialogue on Language” and in the 1969 Dankansprache in which he mentions
that German and European philosophers had characterized this lecture as “nihilism,”
while its Japanese translator Yuasa Seinosuke 湯浅誠之助 had comprehended what it
genuinely meant to indicate.5
Heidegger became increasingly aware of emerging comparisons in the 1930s and
sought to differentiate his interpretation of nothingness and nonbeing (as being’s event)
from any form of Buddhism. This is evident in his 1935 declaration that his thinking is
the opposite of Buddhism and his repetition of Nietzsche’s critique of Buddhism and
Schopenhauer in the lecture courses of the late 1930s.6 Heidegger’s gesture of refusal
is not evident in the 1953/54 “Dialogue on Language” in which he acknowledges an
affinity and distance in addressing Buddhist emptiness in a discussion of the Japanese
 The Nothing, Nihilism 171

understanding of kū (emptiness). His figure in the dialogue states that emptiness

and nothingness are the same (“Die Leere ist dann dasselbe wie das Nichts”) and the
Japanese interlocutor responds that for the Japanese, “emptiness” is the highest word
for what Europeans mean to say with the word “Being.”7 The dialogue does not enter
into how, in East Asian Mahāyāna interpretive contexts, the identification of emptiness
with being might imply that the emptiness of emptiness is not the highest Buddhist
teaching but rather the disclosure of suchness or concealed nature, the originally
awakened Buddha-nature (tathāgatagarbha) in beings, through emptiness.
Refusal and rejection are not manifest in his 1963 televised interview with the
Thai Buddhist monk Bhikkhu Maha Mani. Denial is replaced with a mixture of
acknowledgment and hesitation, as Heidegger recognizes an affinity in speaking of
a nothingness that is not merely nothing, and of fundamental differences of language
that once again appear to entail untranslatability and linguistic incommensurability
(GA 16: 589–93). Heidegger’s correspondence with his wife also confirms his interest
and reticence in intercultural engagement. He wrote in 1955 that Indo-Germanic
categories and grammar impede properly understanding the Japanese language and
in 1966 that he avoided discussing Zen Buddhist sources since he lacked the linguistic
background to appropriately engage them (Heidegger 2008: 248, 295). Critics of
Heidegger’s dearth of substantive engagement with Buddhist discourses in the postwar
period conflate respectful reticence with refusal and rejection.
Heidegger’s earlier negative assertions in the 1930s regarding Buddhism are a
different matter. His early remarks appear mediated by the reception of Buddhism in
Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. His postwar comments focusing on Zen Buddhism are
mediated by his interaction with Japanese philosophers and the Japanese reception
of his philosophy. Heidegger had frequent contacts and dialogues with Japanese
intellectuals during the Weimar, National Socialist, and Federal Republic periods.
The Japanese reception of Heidegger’s work began in the 1920s. The 1930 Japanese
translation of “What Is Metaphysics?” was the earliest published translation of a
text authored by Heidegger. His early Japanese reception emphasized this lecture’s
thinking of nothingness. Nonetheless, unlike the early European reception, the critical
side of its Japanese reception stressed how this nothingness is still too beholden to
being in contrast with Asian (“Oriental”) conceptions and experiences of nothingness
and emptiness. That is to say, the interculturally entangled modern European and
Occidental discourses of nothingness, particularly those linked with Hegel and
Heidegger, mediated modern Japanese appropriations of Buddhist emptiness (śūnyatā)
as “Oriental” and “absolute” nothingness.8

II. Nothingness and Its Intercultural Entanglements

3. Daoist Nothingness and Buddhist Emptiness between Europe and Asia
This hermeneutical strategy is particularly evident in Nishida Kitarō, the founding
philosopher of the Kyōto school. He distinguished an “Oriental” philosophy and logic
of nothingness (as a predicate logic) from Occidental philosophy and its logic of being
172 Heidegger and Dao

(as a subject logic).9 The concept of “Oriental nothingness” was centered on the Japanese
understanding of kū (Buddhist śūnyatā). In the discourses of Asian and comparative
philosophy of this era it could be extended in the geopolitics of Japanese Pan-Asianist
discourses to assimilate and rank Asian forms of spirit in a quasi-Hegelian form of
historical development.10 This however would no doubt extend beyond Nishida’s own
intentions, given his more ambiguous and moderate political position.
The notion of “Oriental nothingness” was formulated in response to the European
dismissal of it by Hegel and other philosophers (Hegel 1986b: 210–11; Hegel 1986c: 84).
The concept could be expanded to encompass several Indian Hindu and Buddhist
forms of negativity. These include the “neti neti” of the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad
and the Buddha’s fourfold negation [catuṣkoṭi]; Daoist and mysterious learning (so-
called “Neo-Daoist”) wu 無 as well as varieties of East Asian Mahāyāna Buddhism;
and the initial pole of nothingness (wuji 無極) in interplay with the great ultimate
(taiji 太極) that developed in the Book of Changes commentarial transmission and
Neo-Confucianism.
In the situation of Japanese-German relations during the National Socialist
Era, Nishida’s thought was introduced to German language audiences in a series
of translations between 1936 (Nishida 1936, 1936b, 1939) and the more widely
available 1943 translation The Intelligible World: Three Philosophical Treatises. Robert
Schinzinger, a German student of Cassirer (PhD in 1922), helped introduce Nishida’s
thought to Germany in the early 1940s with his introduction to this translation and
in other writings. Schinzinger distinguished Nishida and Heidegger in detail in the
introduction, outlining Nishida’s recognition of how being becomes manifest in
Dasein’s being held into nothingness in Heidegger, and the degree to which Heidegger
accordingly remained captured in the Occidental metaphysical paradigm of the
supremacy of being and its logic of assertion (Nishida 1943: 30–3).
Schinzinger was not alone in addressing the affinities and differences between
Nishida and Heidegger regarding nothingness during this period. Kitayama Junyū
lived in Germany from 1925 to 1944. He initially studied with Edmund Husserl in
Freiburg before completing his dissertation on Vasubandhu’s Yogācāra metaphysics in
1929 with Karl Jaspers in Heidelberg. In his book Metaphysics of Buddhism (Metaphysik
des Buddhismus), published in 1934, he deployed the phenomenology of Husserl and
Heidegger to ontologically reinterpret consciousness-oriented Yogācāra Buddhism.11
A 1935 issue of Kant Studien noted that this dissertation attempted “to interpret and
reveal Vasubandhu teachings in the language of contemporary German metaphysical
theorists (Scheler, Husserl, and Heidegger)” (Brightwell 2015: 450).
Kitayama was conversant with Heidegger’s thinking from his studies in Freiburg,
thanking him in the preface to his dissertation, and extensively referring to his works
(including “What Is Metaphysics?”) and deploying them to phenomenologically
interpret Vasubandhu’s philosophy as an elucidation of karmic and samsaric Dasein.
In his 1934 book, Yogācāra Buddhism does not offer a psychologistic philosophy of
consciousness, as in standard portrayals of its ostensive idealism. It provides rather
an existential “analytic of Dasein” of karmically thrown Dasein, its constitution and
structures of being, and the possibility of redemption in “absolute nothingness”
exemplified by the Buddha’s path of awakening. In suffering, finitude, and mortality,
 The Nothing, Nihilism 173

Dasein (he uses Heidegger’s term) is a question to itself facing its existence toward
inevitable death and thrown abandonment in terrifying nothingness (Kitayama 1934:
78). In the existential emptiness of thirst (taṇhā) and in encountering the disorienting
questionability of relative nothingness, absolute nothingness (śūnyatā) is disclosed. It
is construed in Heideggerian language: human existence as being-there annihilates
itself in relation to its own fundamental groundlessness in the illumination of
absolute nothingness (Kitayama 1934: 194–5). In such absolute nothingness, in the
transpositional unknowing of the Buddha, freedom and creative life are disclosed as
immanent ways of Dasein’s bearing and comportment within its world.
The turn from radical nothingness to everyday life is also found in his subsequent
expositions of Dōgen Zenji 道元禅師 (Kitayama 1940: 1–15) and Laozi 老子
(Kitayama 1942) in the early 1940s. As discussed below, Kitayama attributed
Heidegger’s expression “das Nichts nichet” to Laozi in his 1940/1942 work West-
Eastern Encounter: Japan’s Culture and Tradition (West-östliche Begegnung: Japans
Kultur und Tradition). Kitayama’s changed relation to Heidegger is more overtly stated
in a 1943 article on Nishida published in Kant Studien. Kitayama maintained here that
“Occidental spirit” is anthropomorphic and intellectualist. It fixates subject and object
and neglects nothingness in prioritizing being (Kitayama 1943b: 268–9). “Oriental
spirit,” in contrast, is ostensibly cosmic, intuitive, and perceives natural and inter-
human relations as its guide. It prioritizes absolute nothingness as encompassing things
and discovering reality’s self-identity in absolute contradiction. Nishida comprehends
the reality of the world in its groundless nothingness through the unity of opposites in
the self-identity of absolute contradiction.12
The anticipated presence and positivity of an absolute perspectiveless totalizing
identity is more Hegelian (at least as widely understood) than Buddhist. Buddhist
emptiness, more akin to therapeutic skepticism than metaphysical dogmatism,
destructures rather than asserts the totalizing synthesis of identity and nonidentity that
seeks to subjugate alterity and singularity through speculative dialectic and dialetheia.13
First, a mere logic of nothingness misses its relational intimacy with the thing evident
in Daodejing 11 and Heidegger’s adaptation of the dynamic of thing and nothing.
Second, identity is a condition of concepts and representations, after all, and not things
and world. Classical Chinese Buddhism suggests an alternative to enforced identity
and totalizing unity that compulsively seeks to destroy alterity and individuality. The
relational interpenetration and resonant interpolation of particular things entail a logic
of mutual pervasion and encompassing of all phenomena in Huayan, and of mind and
reality in Tiantai, that together form the philosophical context of Zen Buddhism. Zen
Buddhist practices of meditating on the kōan (gong’an 公案) resist resolving paradoxes
into identities by heightening contradictoriness and paradoxicality into the “great
doubt” (C. dayi, J. taigi 大疑).
What then of the uncanny guest of nihilism? In their depictions of the
present state of Japanese philosophy in the 1940s, Schinzinger and Lüth caution
against nihilistic interpretations of nothingness and overly sweeping readings of
“absolute contradictoriness” in Nishida, restraining its philosophical boldness and
distinctiveness vis-à-vis Occidental discourses about nothingness. They elucidate
Nishida’s nothingness as concretion, fullness, and determinacy. In this manner,
174 Heidegger and Dao

they differentiate it from a vacant, abstract nothingness defined through negation,

and from the genuine nothingness of the fullness and completion of reality itself
(dharmakāya) and its Buddha-nature, which cannot be limited to being (Lüth 1944:
99–101; Nishida 1943: 30–2). However, this is misleading, insofar as such concepts
are conceived as positing positive objects or subjects, and since Nishida maintains
that nothingness is a predicate that cannot be reified into a subject.14 Carnap likewise
warned of the reification of negation, since it is derivative in relation to assertions
about ultimately physical objects and their various relations. Nishida’s predicate
of nothingness indicates in contrast to Carnap’s analysis the true emptiness of
things in which they have—without the fixation of essence, self, or substance or the
reification of nothingness—their own self-determination and concrete specificity
(Taketi 1940: 285).
Nishida’s genuine thinking emerges, according to Kitayama, as a radical philosophy
of nothingness that reconceives Oriental nothingness through its confrontation with
Occidental being and liberates us from the restrictions of Occidental conceptions of
being. This claim encompasses Heidegger as its culmination:

That is why we call it “philosophy of nothingness” in contrast to the philosophy of

being of the Occident from Plato to Heidegger. The nothingness that Nishida has
reached as the ultimate of all being and of thought is the ancient inheritance of
East Asian spirit. It occurs as a problem in both Buddhism and Daoism.
(Kitayama 1943b: 269)

The essential distinctiveness of Occidental and Oriental forms of nothingness is

a key theme in the intercultural philosophy of figures related to the Kyōto School.
In a 1940 German article by Taketi, the radical nihilism of “Oriental nothingness”
affirms life, world, and the act from the abyss of the present rather than denying
the present, as in Christianity and European nihilism (Taketi 1940: 278–9). In the
paradigmatic account of the varieties of nothingness by Hisamatsu Shinichi, published
in English in 1962, “Oriental nothingness” is irreducible to both logical negation and
existential nothingness. It is also self-emptying, prior to the existential negativity and
logical negation that, respectively, existentialism and positivism deploy to explain or
discard nothingness.15 Hisamatsu interpreted awakening as a return to the moments
of everyday existence, in which (adopting an expression from the iconoclastic Tang
dynasty Chan master Linji Yixuan, in turn, drawn from the Zhuangzi) the genuine
person without positionality or rank (wuwei zhenren 無位真人) abides in non-abiding,
dwelling without fixation (Hisamatsu 2002: 29–33).
Kyōto school and other Japanese intellectuals such as Kitayama deployed an
interculturally reshaped Buddhist notion of emptiness as nothingness (linked with
European ideas of nothingness and Chan-Zen Buddhist uses of wu/mu 無) to prove
the inadequacy of nothingness in Heidegger. Nishida and Kitayama appreciated
the impersonality (in contrast to the readings of Levinas and Sartre that stress the
person and subjectivity) and verbal event character of nothingness in Heidegger. Yet
this thinking of nothing as the way of encountering being (Sein) is just as limited as
the negative mysticism and theology in which nothingness reveals God. Heidegger’s
 The Nothing, Nihilism 175

nothingness was partial and limited in view of “absolute nothingness” (zettaimu

絶対無), which is the self-emptying locus or place (basho 場所) of all perspectives and
positions. This was because it still referred and was bound to being and its implicit yet
still too representational subject/object modeling of reality.
Nothingness primordially conditions the world as being stems from nothingness,
such that subject logic alone is inadequate for grasping the dialectical totality of reality
(Nishida 1936: 127). Far from being pessimistic or nihilistic in Nishida, the absolute
nothingness at the heart of Oriental culture is the genuine locus of encountering
concrete phenomena as they are in their suchness (tathātā) and thus world-
affirmation.16 In absolute nothingness, the mountain is precisely the mountain, water
is water, and beings are just what they are (Nishida 1943: 119). Nishida is referring to
the kōan ascribed to Qingyuan Weixin 青原惟信, a Tang Dynasty Linji Chan Master,
which appears in Dōgen’s Mountains and Waters Sūtra (Sansui Kyō 山水經).
After such early entanglements between Heidegger and Chinese and Japanese
philosophy from the 1920s to 1940s, Heidegger’s nihilating nothingness was increasingly
perceived as a touchstone in the emerging field of comparative philosophy, not only
in Germany and Japan but in international scholarship. Much of this literature was
more willing than Kitayama, Lüth, or Schinzinger to accentuate the affinities between
nothingness in Heidegger and Nishida or Buddhism. Takeuchi Yoshinori 武内義範,
for instance, remarked: “A way of thinking akin to Nishida’s is found in the recent
development of Heidegger’s philosophy, although there was no direct influence either
way” (Takeuchi 2004: 203). Relying on Nishida’s notion of nothingness as identity
in complete contradiction, he states: “Heidegger’s philosophy of Being meets with a
philosophy of Nothingness—because Being and Nothingness are identical in their
contradiction” (Takeuchi 2004: 204).
In an analogous fashion, multiple postwar authors linked Buddhist emptiness with
Heidegger’s nothingness. Here are a few instructive cases. First, the pragmatist Sydney
Hook proclaimed Buddhist “emptiness is empty” to be as nonsensical as Heidegger’s
“nothingness nothings,” a logical category mistake in every language (Hook 1959: 164).
Second, less dismissively, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan noted how Heidegger gave
nothingness “an active function (‘das Nichts nichtet’), which influences our being. He
even makes it one with absolute being. One is reminded of the Buddhistic conception
of the void (śūnya)” (Radhakrishnan 1953: 430). Third, Swan Liat Kwee noted in his
1953 Leiden dissertation on comparative philosophy how “the Void” has an active
creative function in Heidegger’s “das Nichts nichtet” (Kwee 1953: 184). The latter two
statements concerning self-nihilating nothingness show how it is active, creative, and
world-generative in South Asian Buddhist śūnyatā as much as with early Daoist wu 無.
This is despite the differences between these two concepts that have been recurrently
entangled and distinguished since the introduction of the Buddhist dharma into
China, as delineated previously, at the beginning of Part Two.
The interpretive strategy of the later Heidegger appears closer to Daoist generative
nothingness with its recognition of natality and mortality, the very naturalness
of things, and of practices of emptying and letting as the myriad things gather and
disperse. But Heidegger did not directly or explicitly (contrary to Jordan 1932: 102,
147) attribute generative or creative qualities to nihilating nothingness in his 1929
176 Heidegger and Dao

“What Is Metaphysics?” lecture. As the neo-orthodox theologian Karl Barth notes,

Heidegger analyzes nothingness from the perspective of human existence in 1929,
while it is Sartre who analyzes human existence in its freedom and facticity from the
point of departure of fundamental nothingness.17 Encountering nothingness in radical
anguish and boredom places beings radically into question and, accordingly, the being
of Dasein itself. Freedom as thrown transcendence into the world is disclosed in this
existential questionability and uncanniness.
Despite the latent anthropocentric and Christian background of Heidegger’s
thinking of nothingness in 1929, in which the positivity of nothingness is not yet its
full generativity, it already resonates to an extent with Buddhist and Daoist discourses,
as is evident in its reception. His account of nothingness quickly became entangled
with Asian philosophy in his early German and Japanese reception. Heidegger’s
thinking, which evokes and deploys Daoist nothingness and to a lesser degree
Buddhist emptiness, became interculturally entwined in comparative philosophy with
generative interpretations of nothingness. This is not without sources in Heidegger’s
own path of thinking, from an emphasis on existential nothingness to nothingness as
the potentially generative and nourishing emptiness of the between and the clearing
of being.

4. Nothingness, Emptiness, and the Spacing of Things

Numerous anecdotes by Heidegger and others testify that Heidegger engaged in
conversations about Japanese thought and Zen Buddhism with visiting students and
scholars from 1919 to the end of his life. Nishitani reported that he and Heidegger
had extensive discussions about Zen Buddhism during his studies at the University of
Freiburg from 1937 to 1939 and Heidegger is reported to have said after reading a book
by D. T. Suzuki that “[i]f I understand this man correctly, this is what I have been trying
to say in all my writings.”18 Heidegger mentions Zen Buddhist thought-images and
kōans in conversations and correspondence after the Second World War. This includes
referring, in the conclusion of his 1958 conversation on art with Hisamatsu (GA 16:
557), to the sound of one hand clapping and noting how it was a beloved kōan for the
great Rinzai master Hakuin Ekaku 白隠慧鶴 (1686–1769), and corresponding with
the Austrian intercultural haiku-poet Imma von Bodmershof over haiku and kōan
(Pieger 2000: 98).
More conspicuously, Heidegger directly mentions a Zen Buddhist teaching in
“From a Dialogue on Language,” as Heidegger’s fictionalized Japanese interlocutor
states that the mountain appears in emptiness. This dialogue about emptiness and
gathering raises several questions. What is the function of this use of emptiness in this
dialogue? How are nothingness and emptiness said to be “the same” (dasselbe) and
“other than all presence and absence” (“das Andere zu allem An- und Abwesenden”) as
specified in the questioner’s answer (GA 12: 103)? What is the emptiness in respectful
distancing and withdrawal (Entziehen), and in the stillness and silence (die Stille) that
calls and in which one can listen?
The two interlocutors delineate and enact a kind of emptiness as figures of
emptiness reoccur throughout their dialogue. Emptiness is seen as informing
 The Nothing, Nihilism 177

fundamental Japanese expressions. One primary example is iki 粋. It was popularized

in modernity by Kuki (GA 12: 80–6) and became familiar to Heidegger through him.19
The conversants note several images and expressions related to emptiness, such as
how in the Noh theatre the empty stage allows the gathering of the scene to occur
(GA 12: 101). Deploying familiar Buddhist imagery, kū is described as the limitless
expansiveness, like that of the sky (GA 12: 129) and as the openness and emptiness
of the sky (GA 12: 136). The clear transparent sky is the classic Buddhist image of
the empty (śūnya). Clouds are images of forms (rūpa; the Chinese character se 色
also means color, as it does in this dialogue). Together they indicate the openness in
which phenomena arise and disappear. The emptiness of hearing allows the gathering
of words in language, and the dialogue concludes with the gathering of the enduring
(GA 12: 143, 146).
Given Heidegger’s mutating phenomenology of the thing, already examined in
Part One, to what extent can emptiness be the gathering and constitution of things?
Is there an emptiness, as Heidegger pursued in the 1935 Contributions to Philosophy,
which signifies something other than the failure of anticipation and expectation, or the
empty intentionality, which may or may not be fulfilled, of classical phenomenology
(GA 65: 381–2)? Is there a more specific connection between the nothingness portrayed
in 1929 and the emptiness of language and the thing in his postwar writings that helps
illuminate his assertion that they are ultimately the same?
One contextual hint can be traced in Kitayama’s works and their reception. They
were widely cited in German discussions of Japanese thought during the National
Socialist era. These include references by the geopolitical theorist Karl Haushofer and
Paul Lüth, whose 1944 book Die japanische Philosophie relies on Kitayama’s delineation
of Nishida’s philosophy of nothingness (Lüth 1944: 97–108). Kitayama’s book West-
Eastern Encounter was first published in 1940 and substantially revised in a second
edition appearing in 1942.20 Kitayama expounds in it an East Asian philosophy of
nothingness inspired not only by Buddhist emptiness but also by Daoist nothingness
(wu 無), the primordial ground of being, of Laozi (Kitayama 1942: 40). In his 1939
article Nishida critiqued the fixation and radicalization of nothingness in Daoism,
contending that the teaching of absolute nothingness is only effectively achieved in
Mahāyāna Buddhism.21 Kitayama shares this assessment of Mahāyāna (Kitayama 1943:
3). He is, however, more willing to embrace Daoist teachings of nothingness and the
thing, as he depicts them as shaping the formation of East Asian and Zen Buddhist
culture and sensibility.
Lao-Zhuang Daoism was construed as a variety of naturalism by numerous
early twentieth-century Japanese interpreters—such as Anesaki Masaharu 姉崎
正治 (1915), Okakura (1919), and Kitayama (1942). They each emphasized its
constitutive role in Chan Buddhism and the East Asian aesthetic that embraces
naturalness through emptiness. Anesaki interprets Daoism as a harmonizing repose
in nature and the great primordial mood of the way (Anesaki 1915: 55–6). Okakura
understood it as a naturalistic this-worldly relativism and art of adoptively being-
in-the-world (Okakura 1919: 27–32). Kitayama characterizes it as a “naturalistic
nihilism” in which freedom is intuited in nothingness in stillness and non-acting
action (Kitayama 1942: 40–1).
178 Heidegger and Dao

Nothingness is the generative beginning of heaven and earth; being is the womb of
the myriad things (Kitayama 1942: 174). This nothingness is the groundless ground of
beings, silent and wordless, unspeakable and unconceptualizable, and approachable
only through an enacting of becoming empty and clear (Kitayama 1942: 24, 38–41).
Speaking of the Tang dynasty poet and painter Wang Wei 王維 (792–761), Kitayama
delineates how real space can be encountered in the emptiness of solitude and silence.
Things in the fullness of their self-being communicate in this space to the poet and
appear to the painter: “We translate this explication of space with the words of Laozi:
‘The nothing nothings’” (Kitayama 1942: 160). It is space that is emptying through
things. His exegesis evokes yet is distinctive from how Heidegger elucidates the same
eleventh chapter of the Daodejing and the “emptying” of the thing.
Kitayama proposes that nothingness (Nichts) and the non-self (Nicht-Ich)
form the essence and unity of East Asian culture (Kitayama 1942: 183). East Asian
philosophical and aesthetic-poetic sensibilities in his account reflect the insight that
“[t]he nihilation of the nothing (das Nichten des Nichts) is the activity of space that,
from the human perspective, is given as form or appearance.” Each reality is the
appearing of a shadow in light and each thing, such as the mountain or the stone, is a
throw (Wurf) through the nihilation of space (Kitayama 1942: 161). The expression “the
nothing nothings,” attributed to Laozi in reference to Daodejing 11, is a characteristic
of the spatiality in which the thing appears as shadow and throw as a nihilation of
the nothing. Kitayama analyzed the nihilating activity of nothingness as a primordial
spatiality in which things arise. The expression wuwu 無無, which he seems to have
in mind here, could be construed as “the nothing nothings” or the functioning of and
arising from nothingness in Wang Bi’s Daodejing commentary.22 This expression is
not found in the transmitted text of the Daodejing but only in subsequent Daoist and
East Asian Buddhist sources, in which it is entangled with the emptiness of emptiness
(kongkong 空空).
In classical Indian Theravāda and Mādhyamika teachings, emptiness means to be
empty of substantial selfhood (ātman), self-nature (svabhāva), and form (rūpa) in
dependent arising (pratītyasamutpāda). Emptiness operates as a world-constituting
primordiality in dharmadhatu, tathāgatagarbha (recall the previous discussion of
Zongmi), and Vajrayāna teachings. In these movements, it is given a generativity and
creativity that continue to resonate in how Kitayama interprets, as we have seen, the
“absolute” self-nihilating nothingness in the very different circumstances of Laozi and
Nishida. Notwithstanding his father’s status as a Pure Land Buddhist priest, and his
studies of Yogācāra Buddhist philosophy, teachings in which śūnyatā does not play
as all-pervasive a role as in Mādhyamika, Buddhist nothingness assumes a dominant
cultural and social-political position in Kitayama’s German writings of the 1930s and
1940s. These influential works in Nazi Germany covered Buddhism, Daoism, and—as
with other Japanese nationalist intellectuals—Shintō and the “warrior’s way” (bushidō
武士道) of the Samurai.
There are copious instances of the questionable social-political character of the
philosophy of nothingness in Kitayama’s writings. We can consider two of these
publications here. First, in Kitayama’s 1943 booklet Sanctification of the State and
Human Transfiguration: Buddhism and Japan (Heiligung des Staates und Verklärung
 The Nothing, Nihilism 179

des Menschen: Buddhismus und Japan), Mahāyāna Buddhism occupies a crucial role
for him in providing the Japanese people a universal geopolitical and georeligious
teaching of compassionate world-redemption (Kitayama 1943; Kubota 2008: 622).
It is specifically the Mahāyāna teaching of nirvāṇa (nothingness as sublime infinite
generative source) that sanctifies and is embodied in the Japanese imperial state,
replacing Hegel’s Prussian state, which transfigures and liberates humanity through its
world-historical purpose (Kitayama 1943: 31–2). As Hegel’s world-spirit culminates in
the “Germanic world” and the Prussian monarchic state, “Oriental spirit” culminates
in Imperial Japan in the Pan-Asianist philosophy of history operative in the war-time
discourses of Kanokogi, Kitayama, or Nishitani.
Secondly, a “heroic ethos” and warrior ethic of nothingness is unfolded in his 1944
book Heroic Ethos (Heroisches Ethos).23 In his interpretation of the concluding fifth book
on emptiness of The Book of Five Rings (Gorin no Sho 五輪書) by Miyamoto Musashi
宮本武蔵, an ethos without fixed principles or norms emerges in the spirit of this “real
nullity” (wirkliche Nichtigkeit), in which there is nothing at all, no knowing and no
evil, but only the good. While “relative nullity” counters the seduction of the false
and illusory, real nullity is articulated as a spontaneous and detached comportment
and ethos that exceeds the boundaries of skill and technique (1944: 110–11); this
occurs by assimilating a long series of images of perfectly attuned action, from the
Zhuangzi’s Butcher Ding nourishing life in cutting up the ox and Zen Buddhism to
this heroic ethos.
Kitayama’s philosophy of nothingness is problematic given its historical and
social-political positionality—in the intersections of Japanese-German intellectual
and ideological exchange in the 1930s and 1940s—and due to its commitment to the
priority of an attitude of neutral detachment and indifference, rather than—as in the
ethos of his Buddhist and Daoist sources—to an ethics of anarchic nurturing care and
responsive compassion to others and things through nothingness.24

5. The Emptiness of Words and Things

The question of nothingness and emptiness is at play in Heidegger’s discussions of
the emptiness of the thing that, depending on the text, explicitly or implicitly refer
to the empty vessel of Daodejing 11. As in the German edition of Okakura’s Book
of Tea, as well as in Fischer and Klages, Heidegger calls the vessel a jug (Krug; the
English translation has pitcher). It is uncertain to what extent Heidegger is cognizant
of the specificity of Japanese arguments and debates concerning his conception of
nothingness beyond the general acknowledgment and gratitude that he noted in
1953/54 and 1969.
Heidegger was cognizant of Carnap’s logical positivist and Sartre’s existentialist
responses to it. He denied their appropriateness while at the same time, due to
shifts in his own thinking, transitioning from the existential nothingness of the late
1920s (which Kitayama categorized as relative) to nothingness as the generative
clearing and emptiness of the “in-between” of beings (Seiende) and being (Sein).
Heidegger’s later thinking evokes Buddhist emptiness and Japanese discourses of
absolute nothingness, while also having an unclear relation to them. For example,
180 Heidegger and Dao

in his analysis of the Daodejing, Kitayama construed being as the womb of things
arising from nothingness; Heidegger posited nothingness as the middle term
between being and things. He stated in the late 1930s that nothingness is a saying
of being more primordial than somethingness. Nothingness for Heidegger signifies
not “not-beings” but “Being.” It is an originary saying of Being, amidst which
humans address and are addressed by things, and its immeasurable answerless
ontological event.25
Heidegger repositions his argumentation in “What Is Metaphysics?” as a
confrontation with and moment toward the potential overcoming of the “philosophy
of nothingness” and the nihilism that he locates at the core of the modern subject.
Nothingness is increasingly concomitant with the “not” of beings (Seiende) in Being
(Sein). This is not merely negative or negational in the sense of a nihil negativum, and
with the ontological difference: “Nothing is the ‘not’ of beings and hence being as
experienced from beings” (GA 9: 123; Heidegger 1998: 97). To the extent that being
(even as the Being that is not beings in the ontological difference) remains the epicenter
of his thought, Heidegger remains beholden to the Occidental paradigm of being and
has not yet arrived near the vicinity of Nishida’s genuine locus of nothingness, as
interpreted in Kitayama, Schinzinger, and Nishitani.26 Nothingness is the perspective
of beings on being; nothingness and emptiness are “the same”; still, at the same time,
emptiness is potentially (since it is spoken by his dramatized Japanese interlocutor)
the “highest name” for being (GA 12: 103). While Heidegger could comprehend the
interlocutor’s claim in his own discourse, as he too has thematized a kind of emptiness
of being, the questioner responds by expressing reserve and stepping back from the
identification of kū and Sein.
“From a Dialogue on Language” circles around the untranslatability of a language,
as the questioner repeatedly withdraws and holds back from describing iki in the
Occidental philosophical language of aesthetics, kū in the Western language of being,
or kotoba 言葉 as Sprache. Such hesitation and reserve have been interpreted both
as arrogance standing against communication and as humility and modesty toward
others. It is presented in this dialogue as enacting an emptying and stillness that allows
for a listening and entering into the other’s saying instead of a mere talking about
language and communication (GA 12: 147–9). The encounter transpires through the
emptiness of language that undoes its fixations. It is not without language insofar as
there can be no openness of beings, of that which is not a being (Nichtseienden), or of
emptiness without language (GA 5: 61; Heidegger 2002: 46).
In what sense then can one attribute emptiness to being in Heidegger’s discourse?
He claimed in the 1951 version of “Overcoming Metaphysics” that the emptiness of
beings (Seiende) is the distance and forgetting of being, while the emptiness of being
in which beings arise can never be filled up with the fullness of beings (GA 7: 94).
To return to the thing in an altered setting, Heidegger states in several versions of
his thinking of the thing that emptiness does not only allow the gathering of things;
it is the gathering (Versammlung) of the thing in empty openness that allows it to be
as a thing. Heidegger’s later elucidation of the thing appears to be mediated by his
readings of the Daodejing and the Zhuangzi. It is distinctive from the hermeneutics of
the emptiness and self-nihilation of space that Kitayama attributed to Laozi.
 The Nothing, Nihilism 181

Whereas Kitayama construes the thing as a temporary transient throw, shadow,

and fold arising through the activity of self-nihilating spatiality, Heidegger addresses
emptiness as the gathering of elements, and the fourfold (das Geviert) of sky and earth,
mortals and immortals, that allows the thing to be as what it is.27 Hisamatsu remarked
in a conversation with Heidegger on May 18, 1958, that the Occident apprehends the
origin as being and Zen as empty formlessness in which there is freedom without
restriction. Heidegger in response once again draws a connection between his own
thinking and East Asian philosophy in concurring in his response that emptiness is
neither a negative nothingness nor a lack. Spatial emptiness, which does not exhaust
emptiness, is a clearing as granting (das Einräumende) the gathering of things
(GA 16: 555).
The empty jug recipiently hosts, gathers, and offers wine (fusing imagery from
Hölderlin and the Daodejing) precisely in its emptiness. What is the relationship
between Heidegger and the Daodejing? It is the most frequently mentioned Asian text
in his works and it is evoked through numerous indirect references. Previous chapters
of this book elucidated how Heidegger extensively engaged with the Daodejing in
the early 1940s, even attempting (as discussed above) a cotranslation of the text with
the visiting Chinese scholar Paul Shih-yi Hsiao, who attended his lecture-courses.
Heidegger initiates his reflections on the emptiness of the thing in relation to Daodejing
11 in the conclusion of the 1943 essay “The Uniqueness of the Poet” (GA 75: 43–4).
There, emptiness is depicted as “in-between” (Inzwischen), which he elsewhere
described as “the openness” (die Offenheit) of being and the spacing of “the between
heaven and earth” (das Zwischen von Himmel und Erde).
In a series of reflections from the 1940s and 1950s, Heidegger engages the image of
emptiness and the “empty vessel” (expressed in Daodejing 4 and 11, and pictured by
Heidegger as an empty jug), more powerfully evoking the Daodejing than in his 1943
essay while no longer naming Laozi. In the first dialogue of the 1944/45 Country Path
Conversations (GA 77), the first 1949 Bremen lecture (GA 79), and the 1950 essay
“The Thing,” emptiness proves to be the condition of gathering of the elemental and of
materiality itself in the thing. As gathering: “The thing things world.”28 That is to say, as
much as the artwork, the thing discloses and opens a world and there is no disclosure
and openness without the thing.29
Heidegger described in “The Thing,” considered earlier in Chapter 3, how when the
jug or pitcher is filled, the liquid flows into and from its emptiness as it receives, retains,
and gives. The jug is not the physical container. Emptiness is that which conditions and
contains the materiality of the container. This emptiness, as a nothingness belonging
to the pitcher and making it that which it is, is what the pitcher is as a containing
container. This signifies that “[t]he vessel’s thingness does not lie at all in the material
of which it consists, but in the emptiness that holds” (GA 7: 171; Heidegger 1971: 167).
This emptiness is its own emptiness or self-emptying, not the voidness of generalized
physical space, which we must allow to be in its encounter and “let the jug’s emptiness
be its own emptiness” (GA 7: 173; Heidegger 1971: 168).
The emptiness, or “the void” as Albert Hofstadter translated die Leere, is what
accomplishes the vessel’s holding. The empty space, this nothingness of the jug,
is what the jug is as the holding vessel. Yet as the holding is enacted by the jug’s
182 Heidegger and Dao

emptiness, the potter who shapes and forms the vessel on the potter’s wheel does
not create, make, or produce the vessel but shapes materiality in its emptiness.
Things are shaped rather than fabricated by human practices and techniques. In not
only shaping the material clay, but also its very emptiness, the potter participates
in the forming and shaping of emptiness into a specific form. Emptiness acquires a
determining and formative character in Heidegger’s account, which is familiar from
Daoist discourses while being either absent or precluded in Occidental philosophy,
as is apparent in Hegel’s thinking of “Oriental nothingness” as a primitive opposite
overcome in Occidental becoming.

III. The Hermeneutics of Emptiness

6. Between Hegel’s Being and Laozi’s Nothingness

Heidegger’s thinking of emptiness is formed through his earlier confrontations
with Hegel’s dialectical conception of emptiness, nothingness, and negativity. Hegel
dismissed Oriental nothingness and emptiness as lacking substance, indeterminate
and unproductive in that it does not lead to the positive (Hegel 1986b: 210–11; Hegel
1986c: 84). As Heidegger argues in his 1938–1939 drafts on Hegel’s negativity, negativity
in Hegel is relative, dependent on consciousness and operating as an intermediate
means toward positivity; there is no genuine recognition of the abyssal and elemental
nothingness of being nor of the source of the negativity that he dialectically deploys
(GA 68: 3–57). Hegel’s negativity is not genuinely negative as it is conceived through
and must return to positivity and affirmation.30
According to Heidegger, nothingness needs to signify both a genuine nothingness
and at the same time the nothing of being. Hegel posits emptiness as the indeterminate
that must be overcome, while Heidegger perceives—in affinity with and perhaps due to
his reading of the Daodejing—its generative and formative character. Perhaps recalling
his early methodological ideas of hermeneutical anticipation and formal indication,
which destructures and empties absorption in a particular concretion to open the
possibilities of concreteness, Heidegger maintains that “emptiness is simply the origin
of philosophy.”31 Hegel wishes to overcome this initial emptiness and indeterminacy in
a determinate logical necessity that is constantly confronted with its own contingency
and arbitrariness.
The beginning origin (Anfang) stays with what is unfolded, despite all negation
and synthesis, whereas the beginning start (Beginn) is superseded (GA 68: 52). Hegel’s
beginning origin is being conceived through the Cartesian paradigm of consciousness
and the affirmation of the primacy of being over nothingness as its secondary
derivative negation. His system cannot escape this defining paradigm of idealism and
logicism to encounter either thing or nothing as something exceeding reflection, and
the representational object of being-as-entity. Heidegger traces how it is nothingness
that is the genuine origin, albeit repressed and unthought, of Hegel’s affirmative
deployment of negativity. Hegel fails to master the radical nothingness and negativity
that his dialectic postulates and utilizes without appropriately fathoming.
 The Nothing, Nihilism 183

Heidegger’s confrontation with Hegel’s onto-theological thinking of negativity

and nothingness does not mention Buddhist emptiness, Daoist nothingness, or their
dismissal by Hegel. It does open the space for a dialogue that was impossible on Hegel’s
terms. Heidegger’s subsequent account of formative emptiness in “The Thing,” which
draws on Laozi, indicates its determinateness to the extent that it is in the specificity of
this nothingness and emptiness that the vessel’s thingliness genuinely lies.
In addition to the Daoist background of Heidegger’s interpretation of the thing’s
emptiness, it is also worth observing how the relation of emptiness and form (which
evokes for East Asian readers the Buddhist interplay of emptiness and form or color) is
co-constitutive of reality in perfection of wisdom (prajñāpāramitā) sūtra literature. As
described previously, the Heart Sūtra asserts: “Form is emptiness; emptiness is form;
form is not different than emptiness; emptiness is not different than form.”32 Form and
emptiness are not static realities or qualities of things. These two expressions would be
better translated as forming and emptying. This analysis is particularly salient if the
emptying of Heidegger’s “The Thing” (which addresses Laozi’s empty thing) is joined
with the emptying of his “From a Dialogue on Language” (which concerns Japanese
Buddhist forms of emptiness). Earth, sky, thing, memory, and saying are sites of
gathering and world-disclosure, through their emptiness in these East Asian informed
and co-resonant texts.

7. Two Interpretations of Emptiness

As elucidated throughout Part Two of the present book, Heidegger should not be
considered a thinker of emptiness as static spatial voidness but, instead, as a thinker of
the illuminating clearing and emptying that clear, unfix, and free the way. Emptying
is enacted in a comportment and praxis. Emptying plays a twofold role in his 1950s
writings that call back to the methodological emptying of “formal indication” in the
1920s, destructuring reifying fixations and allowing things to be encountered in their
myriad concrete ways of being.
In the conclusion to “The Thing,” Heidegger reflects on both the emptying that
constitutes the thing and the emptying comportment that allows the thing to address
us as the thing that it is, in its own way of being in emptiness. There are accordingly
two functions of emptiness in this context: (1) the emptying that is the gathering of the
thing and (2) the emptying that allows the thing, as world-gathering and disclosing,
to be experientially encountered and addressed in interpolation. Emptiness is a
condition of world-disclosure and the formation of meaning in the communication
between things.
The emptiness of being is correlated with practices of emptying as attunement
and ethos in Heidegger. Emptying undoes by traversing perspectives and fixations.
It is the preparation of a pathway. The clearing of the thing is its self-emptying. This
requires a respectful and reverent (yet arguably inadequately responsive) distance and
reserve that avoids absorption and consumption. Japanese aesthetics (as interpreted
by Kuki) understands respectful reserve in the encounter as detachment (compare
Nara 2004). In the step back (der Schritt zurück), in letting distance and the genuine
between (das Zwischen, which the modern loss of distances and uniformity of space
184 Heidegger and Dao

has disrupted) to reappear with the thing, one is called by the thing as thing, and then
perhaps one can begin to hear toward it and respond more appropriately.
The distinctive yet overlapping and entangled notions of emptiness and nothingness
operate in Heidegger as the highest expressions for being. These notions are interwoven
with his understanding of Daoism and Zen Buddhism and with his philosophy’s East
Asian reception. Nothingness has an intimate relationship with the thing that cannot
be objectified into an object and its qualities. In the self-emptiness of being, the thing
and its sense are not annihilated, but rather it can be as the thing in the fullness of its
own way of being. Heidegger once again appears to echo East Asian discourses, as in
the sentence from the kōan attributed to Qingyuan Weixin mentioned by Nishida: “in
the awakening of emptiness, mountains are directly mountains, and waters are directly
waters” (Nishida 1943: 119). In the pluralistic relational logic of Huayan, this would
be the return to the particular in its very particularity as mirroring and encompassing
every other particular and the whole.
Kitayama’s 1940 German translation and commentary on Dōgen’s Genjō Kōan
現成公按 clarifies the movement from things to nothingness back to things, through
the forgetting and falling away of the self and its constructs that separate it from things.
This is the self-illumination of a holistic relational selflessness in which each thing is
singularly itself just as the dewdrop can reflect the moon (Kitayama 1940: 4, 10–11).
Still, this is neither a static abstract harmony nor a mere moment to be sublimated
into a new harmonizing order. The logic of the kōan that confronts the fixated self and
places it into question is antinomian, paradoxical, and without conceptual resolution.
Kitayama describes how it leads the meditator into a “dead-end” (Sackgasse) without
any recourse, which is fractured in a breakthrough in which the obstructing duality of
being and knowing, object and subject, falls away (Kitayama 1940: 15). As Kitayama’s
earlier works show, Heidegger and Buddhist philosophy coincide in dismantling
conceptual and experiential dualities.33
According to Kitayama’s 1943 Nishida article, with its critique of Occidental
spirit and its fixation on being, Heidegger’s thinking of being continues to conceive
nothingness in an Occidental fashion. This precludes the illumination of absolute
nothingness that is unrestricted by (and otherwise than) being no matter how radically
it might be thought (Kitayama 1943b: 268–9). This is not the decay of difference into
an “empty unity of opposites unconcerned with one another,” of which Heidegger
warned in his analysis of the essential relational strife of earth and world (GA 5: 35;
Heidegger 2002: 26). Rather, Kitayama elucidates Nishida’s absolute nothingness as
entailing an accord within complete contradiction—that is to say, a self-determination
and self-identity encountered in the intensification of cacophony, contradictoriness,
and multiplicity of singular phenomena—and reality itself. The danger here is that
such a totalizing identity of contradictions (found in readings of Hegel, the Kyōto
school, and dialetheism) does not take radical nonidentity, multiplicity, and singularity
sufficiently seriously.

8. Transforming the Philosophy of Nothingness

The Japanese reception of Heidegger’s hermeneutical strategy of approaching
nothingness embraces one of its primary elements while diverging over a second
 The Nothing, Nihilism 185

key element. First, Heidegger’s thinking is perceived as approaching “Oriental

nothingness,” far more than Hegel or Schopenhauer (despite moments of
irreducible negativity and nothingness), insofar as nothingness needs to signify
a genuine nonderivative non-negational nothingness in its own terms. Secondly,
however, the Japanese reception is divided over the adequacy of the second facet of
Heidegger’s hermeneutical strategy. Heidegger repeatedly noted the first element of
affinity in speaking of his Japanese reception. It is notable that he does not directly
mention the second Nishida-inspired critique that was known in German language
sources (Kitayama, Lüth, and Schinzinger). This situation might be glimpsed in
Heidegger’s judgment that Nishida reproduces Hegel’s dialectic or in his hesitancy
and reserve in interconnecting his own and “Eastern” encounters with emptiness
and nothingness.34
At the same time, there are ways to reply to this criticism. As one encounters
nothingness qua nothingness, Heidegger insists that it must be encountered as the
nothingness of being. This step suggests a fall back into the logic of affirmation and
being for Nishida’s early German language interpreters. Schinzinger and Kitayama
imagine a pure nothingness beyond all being. However, in Heidegger’s defense, the
nothingness of being cannot be reduced to either the positivity and presence of being
or the absence and nihility of pure nothingness. It is not secondary or derivative. It
has an elemental role as the nothingness, emptiness, and clearing that are deployed to
characterize being as being.
Heidegger’s limits teach as much as his insights. He suggestively yet inadequately
anticipates a more groundbreaking thinking of nothingness, emptiness, and the
clearing. He intimates further steps beyond the Occidental history of being, but he
cannot twist free from it. He proposes an Occidental Greco-German conception of the
history of philosophy without recognizing how this emphasis distorts its intercultural
formation.
The preceding point is applicable to both Heidegger and Kitayama, who teach
through their failures if one can draw the appropriate lesson. They are not proponents
of multi- or interculturalism in any contemporary sense. Nor are they cultural
purists in their interpretive practices, despite perhaps their own intentions given the
virulent nationalism of the 1930s and 1940s, insofar as they offer highly mediated,
interculturally, and intertextually entangled conceptions of nothingness, emptiness,
and the thing. Engaging Kitayama’s neglected philosophy of nothingness, which draws
on Heidegger, Nishida, and classic East Asian sources, resituates the complex formation
of increasingly intercultural and critical practices and discourses of emptiness and
nothingness; these are practices and discourses that cannot be subsumed under and
can potentially dismantle the reified collective subjects of nationalist discourses in
National Socialist Germany, Imperial Japan, and contemporary authoritarian and
totalitarian imaginaries.
Contrary to Kitayama, and movements such as Imperial Way Zen (kōdō Zen
皇道禅) (Victoria 2003; Ives 2009), emptiness does not stop at placing the ego
or individual in question, subsuming it into a national identity or social totality. It
more radically dismantles the very assertion and violence of identity itself. Such
hegemony-seeking totalizing identities do not empty fixations and allow the gathering
of thing, environment, and world. They require de-individuation through appeals
186 Heidegger and Dao

to substantialized and mythicized collective subjects and their sacrificial logic that
legitimates human and environmental devastation.
An alternative approach to emptying as a practice of freeing language and
attunement has emerged in this work. Emptiness is correlated with practices of
emptying. If emptiness undoes static identity by dismantling borders constructed
between subject and world, what then might be said—as a formal indication and
critical model—of emptiness, nothingness, and the clearing? Emptiness is the specific
emptiness of something. Nothingness is the emptiness of being. It is the enfolding
generative darkness and the clearing in which each thing can freely and easily enact its
own shifting, transformational course.
 9

Reimagining the Ethics and Politics of Emptiness

Emperor Wu of Liang asked Bodhidharma, “What is the first principle of sacred

truth?” Bodhidharma replied, “Vast emptiness, not sacredness.”

1. Introduction

Heidegger is principally a philosopher of formal indication, as an emptying that

points toward existential concreteness and of thinking on the way and underway. It is
this way that reveals the absence and presence (in their verbal senses), the emptiness
and fullness, of being and beings, and of sense and meaning through nothingness and
the ontological difference.1 Heidegger’s “way-ism” is historically and conceptually
entangled with his interpretations of the “way-ism” of the Daodejing and the Zhuangzi,
which indicate ways of freely-wandering-in-the-world. This work has offered a
“ziranist” critique and reconstruction of Heidegger’s thinking based on the Daoist
and quasi-Daoist dimensions of Heidegger’s own thought. The present philosophical
reconstruction of ziran 自然 formally indicates nature as inevitably myriad (singular-
plural) and transforming, demanding recognition in each moment. This sense of
ziran draws on Daoist sources to contest naturalism as the reductive, anthropocentric
projection of identity onto nature as a reified object.
The primary motivation for this book has been to outline Heidegger’s interactions
with East Asian philosophy in the context of questions of the thing and nothingness.
A second undertaking has been to suggest its critical and emancipatory potential in
leaping-ahead for the sake of things in the context of our current existential situation.
Early Chinese experiences of self-so-ness, particularly the self-naturing of the thing
(wu 物) and the nothing (wu 無), allows us to think both with and beyond Heidegger
as shown throughout this work. This means to think against Heidegger’s refusal of
democratic self-interpretation and mutual interaction, and his other prejudices, and
with his existential individualist, formally indicative, and ziranist moments in view of
Daoist, Buddhist, and critical liberatory interpretive strategies.
As discussed in the previous chapter, there are questions concerning whether (1)
the phenomenological and problematic political aspects of Heidegger or Japanese
philosophers such as Kitayama can be disentangled, (2) radical nothingness necessarily
entails or is a consequence of conservative and radical right-wing nationalist and
188 Heidegger and Dao

racial politics, and (3) the philosophy of nothingness and emptiness can have a critical
ecological (contesting the domination of nature) and emancipatory social-political
(contesting the domination of persons) potential.
This interrogative hermeneutical tracing of barely visible and forgotten episodes
and events in the intercultural history of the philosophy of nothingness leaves
additional questions that need to be further addressed on other occasions. Such
legitimate concerns encompass both (1) the reactive politics of nothingness in
German and Japanese discourses and (2) the ethical and philosophical adequacy of
a critical model and orienting ethos of nothingness.2 In the cases of both Heidegger
and Kitayama, one can repose Levinas’s concerns about Heidegger formulated in the
1930s, and the interrogation of the politics of Buddhist nothingness in imperial Japan
by Ichikawa Hakugen 市川白弦 (1902–1986) and recent critical Buddhism (hihan
bukkyō 批判仏教).3

2. Alienation, Freedom, and Self-Poiesis

The complex philosophical and social-political contexts outlined in the closing

chapters entail freely reimagining the philosophy of nothingness with and beyond its
previous forms.4 A few points can be addressed here, although it is a topic that calls
for another work devoted to it. Deconstructing and emptying the individual self while
fixating and glorifying a collective subject has catastrophic consequences, as Ichikawa
and socially critical Buddhism have demonstrated.5
There are historical hints of different pathways. The early twentieth-century Korean
thinker, reformer, poet, and Buddhist monk Han Yongun (Korean: 한용운; Chinese:
韓龍雲) (1879–1944), often called by his penname Manhae (만해; 萬海), suggested
a different way of deploying Buddhist emptiness that led to a politics of egalitarian
participation (Han 2008). According to Huayan Buddhism’s pluralistic and interactive
holism of mutually encompassing singular events, illustrated by thought-images of the
infinite hall of mirrors, rafter-and-building, and the golden lion, the genuine whole
that interpenetrates between each and all maintains the particular without reducing it
to the fixation of a universal or a particular identity. The answer proposed in this work
is to step back to retrieve the intercultural and critical elements of Heidegger’s way and
radicalize generative nothingness and opening emptiness. By doing so it is possible
to release individuals as well as things and extend it to dismantle the reification of
collective identities and authoritarian hierarchical social systems (to which Heidegger
himself undeniably falls prey), systems that can be far more destructive than the
fixations of individuals through which they operate and are reproduced.
The moment of nonidentity at work in distinctive ways in the discourses of
Heidegger, early Daoist sources, and some varieties of Buddhist teachings indicates
ways of resisting, undoing, and correcting for their own limits and fixations. Nāgārjuna
stated that emptiness is itself empty and not to be taken as another substantive view
(Siderits and Katsura 2013). Likewise, nonidentity needs to be thought as nonidentity
against the persistent repetition of identity. Nonidentity, which is not Heidegger’s
expression but Adorno’s, emerges in Heidegger’s discussions of nothingness, difference,
 Reimagining the Ethics and Politics of Emptiness 189

and event. Such ways of communicating are therapeutically justifiable, given the
constant reassertion of reductive enframing identity in such conceptualizations,
accompanied by reification and oblivion of the event of being in availability and
usefulness. Heidegger’s thinking here is an imperfect guide as it insightfully indicates
basic problems while reproducing and inadequately breaking with them.
Rahel Jaeggi offers in recent works a helpful reconstruction of alienation and
freedom for what her interpretation does and does not contain. She traced in her work
on alienation how interpretations of freedom can restrict and open our consideration
of practical possibilities. One sense of non-alienated freedom is no doubt the ability of
the self to appropriate and individuate its material and social conditions with others
(Jaeggi 2005). The freedom of non-alienation encompasses the co-appropriation of
the realities of individual and social life; we might call this, with the early Heidegger,
the self-world (Selbst-Welt) and with-world (Mit-Welt) (GA 16: 44). It would also
need to encompass the third referentiality of the environing world (Um-Welt). This
is predominantly pragmatic for Heidegger in the 1920s and subsequently extended
(through twists and turns) to the priority of thing, place, and environmental life (by
implication according to the present analysis).
Non-alienation is anticipated with reference to nature in the early Marx and in the
early critical social theory of the Frankfurt school. Marx portrayed one of its most
basic features as non-alienation from human and nonhuman nature in the Economic-
Philosophical Manuscripts and Theses on Feuerbach. Alienation is systematically
produced by a logic of use and uselessness operative between commodified humans and
things. The production of useful and enchanted things correlates with the production
of useless and disenchanted masses. Alienation is not only self-alienation but likewise
alienation from things and the metabolic environment (“nature”). Some interpreters
find a renewal of enchantment, mystification, and mythology in Heidegger, viewed as
products of social reification and alienation. But, contrary to this misinterpretation,
and, significantly for the focus of this work, Heidegger’s most radical insights empty
and encounter thing and world rather than mystify them and accordingly indicate
exemplary models of other ways of comporting oneself and dwelling.
Adorno depicted in his aesthetic writings how the meaning of non-alienation also
encompasses images of reconciliation with things and nature and the primacy of the
object.6 Another sense of freedom as non-alienation is (at least tacitly) operative in
ziranist Daoist sources and Heidegger’s later thinking. It calls for non-appropriation
by the subject and the releasement of self, others, things, and world for them to thrive
as themselves in their own event and ways of being. Mastery and domination are
contested and transformed by means of indicative thought-images of nourishing life
through co-appropriation, collaboration, and cooperation. If it is objected that the
forms of releasement of wuwei and Gelassenheit are ultimately only anthropocentric
perspectives, which human existence cannot avoid, the transperspectival priority of
the thing and the fourfold world, the daily and seasonal alternations of earth and sky,
and the usefulness of the useless, can all still be more salutary for human dwelling and
flourishing in the thick of relational things and world. Such dwelling is not merely a
purposive art or method of the self or the community: it is poiesis itself. According to
Heidegger’s late reflections, letting is fundamentally a letting go into being’s poiesis
190 Heidegger and Dao

(GA 102: 182, 385). Poietic thinking is an element of the poiesis of being, to which it is
respectfully attentive and attuned.
The preceding chapters cannot be described as interpreting or endorsing every
statement made by Heidegger. It clarifies key elements of Heidegger’s way in their
intersections and entanglements with significant Daoist (in Part One) and Buddhist
(in Part Two) themes: the way, the thing, and the nothing. These chapters offer an
interpretation of the historical and philosophical contexts, claims, and implications of
Heidegger’s “Daoist” theses: those theses of the usefulness of the useless, the perfection
of imperfection, the letting of thing and event in their own self-so character, and,
further, how nothingness and emptiness, by undoing the borders and fixations of
isolating identity, release and allow for more appropriate attunements and responsive
encounters with things, places, and world.

3. The Anarchic Implications of Daoist Nothingness

Let us next consider how the Daodejing and Zhuangzi provoked anarchistic and
libertarian interpretations in their European reception. Historically and conceptually
speaking, Daoist generative nourishing nothingness and Buddhist self-emptiness
have transformative ethical and social implications, particularly in their alignment
with an ethos of maternal natality and nurturing care in life and acknowledgment
of mortality and letting depart in death. Daoist or Lao-Zhuang nothingness is
interlinked in the Daodejing with self-generativity and nurturing mother-like care
(ci 慈) for the myriad things. Several passages in the Zhuangzi, the Liezi, and a
polemical critique of an otherwise unknown figure, Bao Jingyan (who is alleged to
advocate the abolition of ruler and ruled) by Ge Hong each indicate anarchistic and
egalitarian self-ordering models of social life. This dimension of Daoism inspired
a radical interpretation of Daoism in the early twentieth century. The brothers
Heinrich Hart (1855–1906) and Julius Hart (1859–1930), best known as fin-de-siècle
literary critics and advocates of aesthetic naturalism, promoted a Daoist inspired
anarchistic socialism that influenced their friend Gustav Landauer, a socialist
anarchist who perished in the suppression of the Munich Soviet Republic in 1919
and other intellectuals like the young Buber.
The younger Hart brother, the poet and literary theorist Julius Hart, claimed
specifically to be a Daoist and unfolded a new intercultural poetics and anarchistic
politics of Daoist nothingness. In the 1902 “Transformations” (Verwandlungen) and
the 1905 “Tao,” Hart adaptively interpreted the Daodejing as delivering a poetic,
spiritual and anarchist emancipatory message. The Daoist poetic sensibility promised
to revolutionize Occidental aesthetics and forms of life. Daoist nothingness was
conceived here through the lenses of fin-de-siècle Orientalist enthusiasm and Jewish-
Christian mysticism, with figures such as Meister Eckhart receiving a prominent role.
Hart’s revolutionary Daoist-informed mysticism would continue to resonate in the
early writings of Landauer and Buber on mystical anarchism, and in Buber’s 1910
edition of the Zhuangzi and his 1924 Ascona lectures on the political philosophy of
the Daodejing.7
 Reimagining the Ethics and Politics of Emptiness 191

Sinologists have more systematically tracked the anarchistic aspects of early Daoist
discourses. Angus Graham accentuated the agriculturalist strands expressed in the
Zhuangzi and the Liezi. Each text contains radical political moments of dismantling
the very distinction between ruler and ruled, identifying it with anarchism and
utopianism. Appealing to the exemplary ancient agricultural sage-king Shennong
神農, this tendency stressed living in simple egalitarian agricultural communities
without hierarchical leadership. Graham identified philosopher-farmers like Xu
Xing 許行, whose conception of mutually shared simplicity and self-sufficiency was
rejected for the sake of upholding hierarchical social distinction, in Mencius 3A4, with
an agriculturalist “School of the Tillers” (nongjia 農家) located at the beginnings of
the Chinese peasant utopian lineage that molded a history of peasant revolts (Graham
1989: 66–100).
Interpreted in view of its emancipatory social ecological potential, the much-
criticized agrarianism and provincialism of Heidegger’s thinking, accentuated by
Adorno and Habermas among other critics, need not entail (as shown in this work)
conservative or reactionary consequences.8 At the least, the situation is more complex.
First, historically speaking, agrarian utopian images have both reactionary and critical
emancipatory uses as they can either refer to a closed localist identity, allergic to alterity
or to a relatively equal and free self-ordering community that is open and receptive to
the world. Heidegger’s own ambiguities can lead to discarding the former elements in
favor of the latter ones. Secondly, Heidegger’s “provincial” agrarian conservativism led
to his support for and his hesitancy toward National Socialism. His refusal to relocate
to Berlin and aversion to the systematically racialized and totalitarian Nietzscheanism
(as Heidegger considered it) of powerful National Socialist party ideologues, Alfred
Rosenberg and Alfred Baeumler, indicate differences between, on one hand, his
aesthetic and rural “fascist” inclinations of the 1930s and, on the other, the politically
totalitarian and racialized fascism that remained irreconcilable with basic premises of
his philosophy. These were initially articulated in Being and Time and then developed
in the lecture-courses of the late 1930s and early 1940s that increasingly confronted
the prevailing ideological appropriation of Nietzsche. To give a brief indication of
this shift from the will to its critique: Heidegger could praise Baeumler in criticizing
Klages’s vitalistic biologistic and psychologistic reading of Nietzsche in the first
Nietzsche lecture-course, but he contemptuously gestures at the “Berlin interpretation
of Nietzsche” by 1941 (GA 49: 122). Such elements would allow his thinking to take a
radically altered turn toward thing and world after 1943 that correlates and resonates
with, even if not exclusively deriving from, his engagement with Daoist texts. These
sources allow for an intercultural and anti-totalitarian analysis of core elements of
Heidegger’s thought.
As expressed throughout this work, four key threads in Heidegger’s writings
correlate with this European reception of Daoism (that centers around nothingness,
the thing, and local agrarian forms of existence) and with a potentially emancipatory
ethics and politics (or points toward critical models thereof): (1) the emptying enacted
in formal indication contests sedimented concepts and values. In so doing, formal
indication opens the concrete particularity of phenomena, and this methodology
continues to resound in his subsequent language of opening the way9; (2) the
192 Heidegger and Dao

leaping-ahead, making room for, and nurturing the individuation of others, which is
constrained in Being and Time to other Dasein; (3) the Daoist-inflected articulation
of releasement (Gelassenheit, as a freedom and letting uncompelled by use) in his
mature thinking. This makes room for, opens the way of, and safeguards things in
their own self-essencing or self-generative life; and (4) the safeguarding, preserving,
and nurturing of interthingly places, environing regions, and—by implication—self-
generative environments that constitute the conditions of human dwelling, building,
and thinking.
These four threads intimate an adjusted attunement and comportment of responsive
freedom with things, environing localities, and world that intimate a more appropriate
environmental ethos and art of dwelling-in-the-world. Ethos here is understood as
a responsively attuned comportment and mood that transperspectivally challenges
and moves beyond the calculative anthropocentric subject toward the thing in the
positionality of its own being and saying. Such an orienting and attuning ethos is one
element of an appropriate answer to contemporary crisis-conditions if it is not taken as
fatalistic resignation and aligned with a conception of political liberty as the formation
and co-appropriation of material and social conditions in coordination with others.10
Daoism can lead to fatalistic resignation, uncaring and unnurturing indifference,
and merely reactive adaptation, as it does in some prominent interpretations, or
to embracing a worldly relational freedom in which others and things have their
own ways of becoming and are not assimilated to hidden powers and dogmatically
postulated principles of “nature” or “spirit.” The latter understanding of Daoist
sources, and a Daoist reinterpretation of Heidegger’s thinking, allows us to reorient
the human-nature relationship. In addition to a conversion in human dwelling and
ethos, for which ziranism offers critical transformative models, climate and ecological
crisis-tendencies require scientific and technological inquiry and innovation as well
as a participatory and pluralistic public sphere—as a formally indicative way taking
individuals’ communicative self-interpretation as its point of reference—capable of
contesting and potentially reorienting the systemic power of the market and the state.11

4. The Consequences of Buddhist Emptiness:

A Critical Huayan Interpretation
Secondly, based on the discussions of Part Two, what are the consequences of
Buddhist emptiness for thing (as shi 事, the singular event, matter, or phenomena) and
world? The primary purpose of Buddhist discourses and practices is not politics but
the liberation of the self from its bondage. The basic meaning of Buddhist emptiness is
the emptiness of form, nature, self-nature, and substance, rather than their generalized
absence or negation. Emptiness is not an indeterminate nothingness but, conversely,
a determinate “emptiness of ” (self, form, nature, and so on) to be enacted through
meditative and discursive practices.
Buddhist models of causal and karmic bondage, merit-making, meditative
destructuring and freedom, and so on have a variety of ethical and social-political
 Reimagining the Ethics and Politics of Emptiness 193

implications. Not all of these have been socially-politically emancipatory, as evident in

the continuing entanglements of Buddhist teachings and institutions and ethnocentric
nationalisms in modern South, Southeast and East Asia. Emptiness characteristically
plays little role in these tendencies, with the notable exception of modern movements
such as Imperial Way Zen and Japanese nationalist and Pan-Asianist thinkers such
as Kitayama.12 Structurally akin to how nothingness tends toward the idolatry of the
presence and positivity of God in mystical and negative theologies, emptiness and
nothingness circle around the reified images of the Emperor and the Japanese nation
in these discourses.13 This tendency is not limited to Kitayama writing in Germany.
The wartime Nishitani and Tanabe also deployed absolute nothingness to dismantle
the egotistical self and individual agency (which they could not differentiate) for the
sake of collective Japanese existence and the totalizing Hegelian state (at least, as they
interpreted it) embodied in the Emperor.14 Nishitani accordingly declared that “the
concentration of that total power is fundamentally impossible without a profound
ethicality that would lead each and every Japanese to extinguish their private selves
and be reduced, as a totality, to the nation-state.”15 Such fixating forms of nothingness
and emptiness are ideologically imprisoning and can no longer destructure and
release. They need to be themselves emptied, as illustrated by Mādhyamaka and Chan
therapeutic strategies.
One can well question if the ostensive “reactionary” politics of nothingness
and emptiness, insofar as such a political philosophy genuinely exists, attained
an appropriate ethics and politics of the other and the “perfection of wisdom” in
emptiness, given how śūnyatā is not only a tranquil attunement with and a letting
releasement of things but is intrinsically intertwined with an ethics and responsive
enactment of compassion (karuṇā), loving-kindness (maitrī), and generosity (dāna)
toward the suffering world. This is evidenced in paradigmatic teachings of the dharma,
such as Śāntideva’s Bodhicaryāvatāra and that Schopenhauer recognized, based on a
few imperfectly translated works, in his interpretation of Buddhism. This European
transmission occurred in an ethical language of sympathy (Mitleid) and liberation
from the will that, for Nietzsche, problematically linked Schopenhauer and the Buddha
as nihilistic and, apparently, for the early Heidegger, conditioned and limited their
understanding of it.16 It is worth noting the background of such concerns: discourses of
anti-pessimism and anti-nihilism were predominantly conservative forms of cultural
critique, as the late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century German social-
political order (which includes Heidegger in part) perceived socialism/Marxism and
pessimism/nihilism to be its utmost threats.
The interconnections between Buddhist emptiness and compassion and
responsiveness, which are perfected in the figures of the Bodhisattvas and Buddhas
who respond without conditions and limits, are crucial to its practice as an ethos. There
have been regressive and also, one should recognize, progressive or emancipatory
deployments of Buddhist emptiness in modern East Asia, that call for a more nuanced,
complex, and critical engagement with it instead of uncritical acceptance or rejection.17
For example, to briefly sketch a different encounter with Buddhist emptiness than its
ideological deployments in Imperial Japan, Manhae Han Yongun is interesting due to
his hermeneutical positionality, notwithstanding the controversies that surround him
194 Heidegger and Dao

and his perceived compromises and failures in the complex situation of colonial Korea.
He was a modernizing poet of the eros of the beloved (nim 님), a democratic socialist
and anticolonial activist, and a Seon (선, the Korean form of Chan/Zen) monk and
monastic reformer who perceived an emancipatory potential in emptiness.18
Given the complex varieties of Buddhist emptiness, we will consider only one
of many germane Buddhist models at this juncture. Classical Tang era Huayan
hermeneutical strategies and their Korean adaptation deeply informed subsequent
East Asian Buddhist transmissions and played an exemplary role in Manhae’s
modern intercultural reconstruction of the Buddhist dharma. In Manhae’s intriguing
reimagining of the Flower Garland Sūtra (Avataṃsaka Sūtra; Huayan Jing 華嚴經),
the principal sūtra of the Hwaeom 화엄 (Huayan 華嚴) Buddhist transmission that
is named after it, the emptiness of self-nature of essence and substantiality (svabhāva;
自性) signifies non-obstruction. It allows the disclosure of the unobstructed mutual
interpenetration and pervasion between particular phenomena and patterning
principle (lishi wuai 理事無礙). Between each particular (shishi wuai 事事無礙)
emptiness is elucidated as a meditative, poetic, and social-political practice, as mind
is becoming embodied material form, and form is becoming mind in mutual aid and
compassion.19 In his political writings, emptiness consequently entailed and called
for acting on equality as well as mutual interdependence. In his poetry, still widely
read in Korea, he unfolded a poetics of emptiness in which emptiness operates as the
space of erotic love, devotion to the occupied and oppressed Korean people, altruistic
compassion for suffering beings, and receptivity to things that infinitely reflect the
whole in their own concrete ways.
What then of Heidegger’s postwar reflections on emptiness? In this reoriented and
reimagined context informed by Huayan, his thinking of emptiness remains suggestive.
Heidegger’s most Buddhist informed writing, mediated through Japanese sources and
interlocutors, is “From a Dialogue on Language.” The emptiness of the thing in “What
Is a Thing?” allowed the gathering of place. In the language dialogue, emptiness is
a condition of opening for recipience, responding to, and saying toward the event.
The emptiness of language allows the gathering and saying of words, following the
Buddhist thought-image of the gathering and passing of clouds in the empty sky.
Emptiness indicates paths of undoing the fixation of words, things, places, and world,
thus making room for their other lives and possibilities and, accordingly, other ways of
human dwelling with and amidst them.
Destructuring and emptying the individual self while reifying and exalting
a collective subject (racial, national, or otherwise) that reduces individuals to
expendable resources absorbed in a stratified totality have catastrophic social-political
implications, as Ichikawa and other socially critical Buddhist scholars have extensively
described. This destiny, however, is not the necessary outcome of Buddhist emptiness,
much less Daoist nothingness. The latter is only drawn into modern nationalistic
appropriations by Pan-Asianists concerned with constructing a mythical unitary
“Oriental nothingness.”
In the anti-reductive nonidentity logic (to deploy Adorno’s expression again)
exhibited in Fazang’s prototypical Huayan discourse, to consider only one instructive
model, a pluralistic interactive holism is introduced in which particular and whole
 Reimagining the Ethics and Politics of Emptiness 195

interpenetrate and encompass one another without reduction. Huayan interactive

and non-reductive mutual encompassing is not identical with Leibniz’s preestablished
harmony of isolated singular monads that mirror each other without contact. The infinite
communicative relationality preserves the integrity of the six characteristics: wholeness
and particularity, similarity and difference, and integration and dissemination. This
comprehensive concomitance simultaneously preserves singularity. This non-reductive
relationality is illustrated in Huayan thought-images of Indra’s Net (Indrajāla), the
hallway of mirrors in which the lamp is infinitely reflected, the rafter-building relation,
and the golden lion. The genuine relational whole that interpenetrates between each
and all events maintains the significance of each particular in their own way of being,
while refusing to assimilate it to the identity of an essentialist biological organic or
systematic totalitarian unity which would deny the elemental facticity of life and world:
being myriad, interpenetrating, transpositional, and self-organizing.

5. Emptiness, Freedom, and the Political

This approach is inspired by hints in Manhae’s articulation of a personal and social

emancipatory Huayan model and the critique of identity conveyed in (if admittedly
not all) moments of Heidegger’s thinking. It indicates a different way of thinking of
emptiness as world-disclosive in emancipatory strategies and practices of emptying.
The answer then is radicalizing nothingness to release individuals as well as things
in their particularity and to expand emptiness to confront and undo the reification
and valorization of collective subjects and identities that are hierarchically centered on
ethnicity, nationality, culture, or language.
A restricted deployment of emptiness might only take apart individuals and
sacrificially negate them for the sake of the collective, as particularly evident in
Japanese nationalist discourses from the 1920s through 1940s. Yet, analogous to
the singularizing-equalizing of the Zhuangzi in which each thing is recognized as
transforming of its own accord in its own self-naturing, the fullness of emptiness in
Fazang’s pluralistic Huayan sustains the singular event as well as the interdependent
whole. This entails that fixating and totalizing collective identities should be undone
for the sake of the other and the singular where freedom is genuinely enacted. This
undoing of predetermined static identity is expressed in classical Huayan discourses
of non-reductive yet holistic relationality and in Manhae’s articulation of its radical
social democratic potential. Adopting clues from Manhae’s modern reinterpretation of
Huayan, and resonating with Zhuangzi’s equalizing and singularizing from nothingness,
Huayan emptiness embraces anarchistic and egalitarian functions that disassemble
and equalize constructed yet stratified sedimented inequalities, hierarchies, and
distinctions.20 Such insights indicate pathways, especially if loosened and unrestricted
through formal indication as way, toward more democratic and environmental forms
of life and a free and democratic (in an inclusive and participatory sense) ecological
civilization.21 Eco-fascism and other forms of eco-totalitarianism, by the very nature
of identity and power that they presuppose, cannot genuinely resolve crisis-tendencies
that want leaping-ahead releasement rather than leaping-in domination.
196 Heidegger and Dao

These brief closing considerations deserve further extensive analysis elsewhere.

These reflections nonetheless reveal a distinctively critical and emancipatory politics
of nothingness and emptiness. The enactment of emptying self and world contests the
reification of the worldly material and intersubjective formation of the self (whether
individualistic or collectivistic) and its underlying seeds and structures in ways
that offer insights into contesting not only conceptual-linguistic but social-political
reification and oppression. Buddhist self-emptiness need not and should not entail
either nihilistic indifference or political conformity. Emptiness signifies the world’s
clarity and simplicity. It has been and can be extended in ways that contest and unfix
structural inequalities and hierarchies that are not merely externally imposed upon
selves but deployed to constitute existing forms of selves and societies.
This book has sketched paths through which we can interculturally think with and
further than Heidegger on questions concerning the thing, nothingness, and emptiness.
It is important in the current climate to be clear about the political implications
of identity-thinking, given the contemporary global resurgence of authoritarian,
hierarchically stratified, fundamentalist and nationalistic politics, in which the
freedom of others requires (1) individual personal rights, (2) public participatory and
political deliberative rights (as relational rather than requiring atomized possessive
individuals or a collective general will), and (3) indigenous and intercultural rights
and solidarities are restricted and endangered. New collaborations and conjunctures
between decolonial and intercultural philosophy and critical social analysis could
begin to address these complex issues and concerns.22

6. Hundun: In Praise of Self-Ordering Chaos

Substantive features of early Daoist and Sino-Japanese Zen Buddhist sources captivated
Heidegger’s attention throughout his life, to the degree that scholars have accused him
of plagiarizing from their sources (Imamichi 2004). The Daodejing and the Zhuangzi
are texts to which he recurrently returned in an environment of communication
and exchange with East Asian students and intellectuals as well as their German
interlocutors.
Heidegger returns throughout his philosophical journey to many Daoist-inflected
thought-images such as letting things be themselves, preserving nourishing darkness,
the silence where sincere listening and harkening occur, the emptying of the heart-
mind in the encounter and the event, and the mystery of and beyond the mystery.
Heidegger’s Daoist entanglements permit this book’s reimagining of his ziranist
tendency (i.e., ziran as autopoietically self-naturing in its own way of being) that
flourishes in his later philosophy of the releasement and the priority of thing, place,
and world in their relational openness. This ziranist attunement does not preclude
more attuned and humble forms of observation, inquiry, and involved action and
participation; it would turn toward and encourage them.
Heidegger’s direct and indirect allusions to the two Daoist masterpieces of the
Daodejing and the Zhuangzi, which fascinated the younger and mature Heidegger,
focus on a threefold configuration of questions that are operative in the center of his
 Reimagining the Ethics and Politics of Emptiness 197

own thought and his broader engagement with interculturally mediated East Asian
philosophies: nothingness/emptiness, thingliness, and indicative ways of dwelling
and releasement. According to the reconstruction of Heidegger’s pathway proposed
in the present work, nothingness should not entail dismantling individuals for the
sake of a monological collective identity or a monolithic cosmic reality that misses
the ethically constitutive dynamics of the I-thou encounter and self-other relationship.
Heidegger’s key ziranist teaching, although inadequately unfolded from a Daoist
perspective, can be seen in the call to unfix, jump ahead, and allow space for beings
as a whole through releasement into nothingness and liberation from idols.23 Altering
the language of Being and Time, this ethos signifies to extend to things, to responsively
leap-ahead through emptiness and step up for beings in their own ways of being, rather
than leaping-in against them through the content and fixations of our own way of
being. Emptying fixations and opening the space of the generative freedom of things
and environments permit individuals to freely co-appropriate and individuate their
own world in less compulsive, coercive, and violent ways.24 This questioning of the
sedimented structures and anthropocentric fixations of the domination of nature
requires envisioning and nurturing different modes of attunement that nourish life.
This entails co-appropriating and collaborating with human and animal others, with
natural and artificial things, and enregioning places and environments.
Three flawed objections to early ziranist Daoism and this current in Heidegger’s
later philosophy need to be addressed. These are (1) that they assume that nature is
kind, (2) they neglect humans in prioritizing nature or being, and (3) they negate
action and intervention in the world. The ziranist ethos depicted here, as a way enacted
in the world, need not presuppose that world and “nature” are intrinsically benevolent
or compassionate: recall the statement in Daodejing chapter 5 that “heaven and earth
are not humane.” It thus signifies a sense that changing self-patterning natural systems
need to be recognized and respected in their own ways of becoming, as humans adapt
to them and act and intervene in them with unhurried reticence and humility. Humans
and their motivations are not overlooked in indifferent nature or mere biocentrism,
with its metaphysical presuppositions concerning bios and potential neglect of
intrahuman inequities, but instead find their significance in being-with things,
creatures, landscapes, and environments.
Action and intervention are not negated in mere inactive passivity; they are
reconceived through their attunement and lack of attunement, their appropriateness
and lack of appropriateness, with things, situations, and environments. One does not
leap-in, attempt to help and improve by making identical and thereby kill Hundun
(渾沌, a figure indicative of primal jumbled chaos in chapter seven of the Zhuangzi);
one does nothing, mirroring the thing, responding without storing (Ziporyn 2020: 72).
Insofar as this Zhuangzi chapter is describing mirroring responsive participation in the
world, rather than passive apathy or resigned indifference, it entails what Heidegger
analyzed as leaping-ahead for the other in their own individuation and way of being,
allowing Hundun (self-ordering anarchic or dao-archic chaos) to adhere, as it were, to
the course of its own self-generated transformations.
Zhuangzi is depicted in the “Perfect Enjoyment” chapter as crying with grief at the
loss of his wife before letting go and singing and beating a drum when Huizi visits to
198 Heidegger and Dao

console him (Ziporyn 2020: 145). This can be interpreted as another lesson in how to
nourish life, as we need to nurture self-patterning chaos to flourish. What can no longer
be nurtured due to its transformations is not rejected in indifference but generationally
let go of in nourishing care. Hundun’s fate does not entail excluding engagement and
intervention for the sake of others, in neutral equanimity or indifference, nor leaping-
in in coercive domination. Instead, it needs appropriate attunement to leap-ahead
for the sake of nurturing environments and ecosystems that should be recognized
as having their own ethical positionality. Forests, marshes, and oceans are self-
patterning sympoietic systems that humans must care for and respect. This suggests,
instead, according to the model of caring for and nurturing life that what is needed is
intervention that attends to nourishing and restoring their own self-ordering or letting
go as death and metamorphosis generate new autopoietic self-ordering relations.
Heidegger’s postwar discourse of healing and safeguarding things and places intersects
with this Daoist sensibility. In its most radical moments, ziranist Daoism is an ethos
and praxis of bio-spiritual and bio-political liberation of humans and things. Freedom
signifies participation in the anarchic chaos and fullness of life, nurturing things and
being nurtured by them in mutual interaction.
It is perhaps ironic that Heidegger can be more easily resituated in relation to
pluralistic interculturality and anti-totalitarian freedom than many of his critics who
remain ensnared in Eurocentric categories. Heidegger’s encounters and entanglements
with translated Daoist sources and Japanese thought can be said to be neither a fleeting
and accidental curiosity (as claimed in Eurocentric readings of his writings), nor can
they be appropriately understood as constituting a far-reaching “Daoist” or “East
Asian” reorientation in his philosophical journey (as in overly optimistic comparative
and transcultural interpretations). Heidegger’s singular cross-cultural journey into
things, nothingness, and language is one that can be reconstructed and reimagined
for a formal indicative and therapeutic critical modeling of a sort that can orient and
contest the present for the sake of nourishing living and nonliving things, interbodily
and interthingly places and environments, and potentially self-aware mortals who
dwell between the abyssal earth and the open sky with transitory gathering things
that—in each case—have their own place and time.
 Notes

Introduction
1 For an overview of Heidegger’s journey, see Pöggeler 1990 and Sheehan 2014. Sein is
translated as being and Seiende as a being or beings in this work.
2 On the centrality of formal indication in Heidegger’s formation in the 1920s, see
Kisiel 1993.
3 On issues of Eurocentrism and Orientalism in philosophy, see Davis 2016: 130–56;
Heubel 2020; Heurtebise 2020; and Nelson 2017. The present work uses the terms
“Orient” and “Occident” or “Eastern” and “Western” in scare quotes because of their
essentialist and problematic genealogy. They are still mentioned because they are the
discursive terms of the authors under consideration.
4 For instance, Heidegger criticizes Being and Time’s reliance on a framework of
accessibility and understandability and identifies its transcendental elements with
an inadequate appreciation of the radicality of Dasein and the truth of being in GA
82: 106, 382, 394. There is a large literature devoted to the status of transcendental
philosophy (compare Crowell and Malpas 2007). I explain the approach deployed
here (Heidegger relies on it and wishes to overcome it) in Nelson 2016: 159–79.
5 Such as the parable of killing Hundun 渾沌 (chaos) in chapter 7 or the appearance
of xingming 涬溟 (primal darkness) in chapter 11. On Hundun, see Girardot
1983. Richard Wilhelm translated both Zhuangzi passages into the psychological
language of the unconscious (Wilhelm 1912: 59–60, 80). Martin Buber’s translation
of chapter 7 does not state what Hundun is (Buber 2013: 74). His rendition of
chapter 11, more pertinently, describes non-action as becoming empty, becoming like
nothingness, giving things back into their primal condition (using Urbeschaffenheit to
render xingming) in which each thing flowers from itself (Buber 2013: 78).
6 On the ethical-political problems involved in Japanese appropriations of Buddhism
and Zen during this era, see Ives 2009. This book will only consider German-
Japanese interactions that directly shaped Heidegger’s milieu during this period and
will not engage in an analysis of the Kyōto school that would need another volume.

Chapter 1
1 Interestingly, for the present interpretation, Buber relates Daoist self-generation and
Judaic co-creation (Mitschöpfung), as both place creativity and generativity in the
world and not only in a transcendent God.
2 On complexities of defining the thing, see Husserl 1973; Husserl 2003: 6, 114–15.
Although die Sache and das Ding both refer to the thing in these statements, note
the distinctive connotations of die Sache (thing, stuff, matter, case) and das Ding
(thing, somethingness, object, entity) in German. Jacques Lacan distinguished in his
200 Notes

interpretation of Freud’s psychoanalysis die Sache as the thing represented within

the symbolic order from das Ding as the thing beyond signification and the symbolic
order (Lacan 1992: 45, 62–3).
3 On the thing in Heidegger, Daoism, and Chinese philosophy, see Cabural 2020:
570–92; Chai 2014: 303–18; Kwok 2016: 294–310; Pang-White 2009: 61–78; Perkins
2015: 54–68. On Heidegger and early Daoism, see Burik 2010; Davis 2013: 459–71;
Davis 2020: 161–96; Heubel 2020; Ma 2007; Michael 2020: 299–318; Nelson 2017:
109–57; Wang, Q. 2001: 55–71; Wang, Q. 2016: 159–74; Yu 2018. On issues of
Eurocentrism, Orientalism, and Occidentalism in Heidegger’s engagement with East
Asian philosophies, see Davis 2016: 130–56; Heubel 2020; Heurtebise 2020; Nelson
2017. For contemporary interpretations of Heidegger and Daoism, see the essays
published in Chai 2022. Note that expressions such as “Chinese” or “German” signify
in the present work a contemporary cultural-linguistic configuration and “early”
indicates preceding formations.
4 See Creel 1982 for a discussion of problems in defining “Daoism.” I historically and
conceptually differentiate different models in Nelson 2020: 4. As this book is about
translation, Chinese and German expressions are used throughout it. Except when
necessary to identify expressions and explain semantic shifts between different
languages in the main text, longer Chinese and German expressions are often
included in the endnotes.
5 Okakura 1919: 29; on the story of the gifted book and its possible influence on
Heidegger, see Imamichi 2004: 123; Davis 2020: 161.
6 Buber 1910; critical edition in Buber 2013. Buber appears familiar with the
language of Balfour, Giles, and Legge (Herman 1996: 4). On Buber’s approach
to the Zhuangzi in relation to Heidegger, see chapter 4 of Nelson 2017: 109–29.
For an overview of Buber’s translation and interpretation, see Herman 1996. On
Buber’s reception of Daoism, see Eber 1994: 445–64; Nelson 2020d: 105–20; Wirth
2020: 121–34.
7 Compare Pöggeler 1987: 52; Mendes-Flohr 2014: 5; Wolfson 2019: 14–15.
Heidegger’s familiarity with Buber’s Hassidic Tales seems less attested. On Heidegger’s
relationship with Judaism, see Wolfson 2018 and Wolfson 2019.
8 “Verborgenheit ist die Geschichte von Lao-Tses Rede” (Buber 2013: 111). It is
noteworthy that Buber stresses Laozi’s abyss beyond conceptuality in a 1964
interview with Walter Kaufman, an abyss that is far more radical than Hume’s
skeptical questioning of conceptual claims (Buber 2017: 535).
9 Petzet 1993: 18. Heidegger revisited the joy of fish again in GA 12: 78. Heidegger was
not the only philosopher interested in this dialogue of the joy of fish (translated in
Buber 2013: 87 and Wilhelm 1912: 134) during the Weimar Republic. Otto Neurath,
who had his own notable engagement with Chinese philosophy perhaps informed
by Josef Popper-Lynkeus, cited it at the beginning of his 1921 critique of Oswald
Spengler’s irrationalism and pessimism (Neurath 1921: 4).
10 There is a rich literature on place in Heidegger that insufficiently explores its Daoist
facets, such as the excellent analysis in Malpas 2008.
11 “In einer Umwelt lebend, bedeutet es mir überall und immer, es ist alles welthaft, ‘es
weltet’” (GA 56/57: 73).
12 One of the largest translation projects was from Sanskrit to Chinese. Early Chinese
Buddhist geyi 格義 refers to the investigation and classification of meanings and not
“matching concepts,” as it is frequently misinterpreted. It refers to a problem rather
than a method of translation in early Chinese Buddhism.
 Notes 201

13 Compare Maly 2020: 15.

14 Compare Strauss 1870: 101, 134; Wilhelm 1912: 116; Buber 2013: 58.
15 See the August 1949 exchange between Jaspers and Heidegger in Biemel and Saner
1990: 177–82.
16 Eckhart identified Gelassenheit with Christian relinquishment (relinquere) of the
world, detachment (Abgeschiedenheit), and the emptiness and freedom of self and
things (Eckhart 1971: 528). The letting be or releasement of self and things signified
an unchanging and unmoving constancy of the self (Eckhart 1971: 61). Things are in
this context secondary to self and God in Eckhart. Heidegger’s this-worldly thingly
oriented releasement often functions more along the lines of responsive releasement
(wuwei) to the self-so (ziran) event. On Eckhart, mysticism, and Heidegger, see
Schürmann 1973: 95–119; Moore 2019. On the problems and prospects of employing
the category of mysticism in early ziranist contexts, compare Nelson 2008: 5–19;
Wenning 2017: 554–71. On wuwei as spontaneous responsiveness, which he
identifies with syncretic Daoism, see Graham 1989: 186–93.
17 “Die Gelassenheit zu den Dingen und die Offenheit für das Geheimnis” (GA 16: 528).
18 GA 12: 187. “Essence” should be read as “essencing” in Heidegger. This and related
texts will be elucidated in subsequent chapters.
19 “輔萬物之自然, 而不敢為” (Lou 1980: 166).
20 See Heidegger’s August 1949 letter to Jaspers in which he denies Jaspers’s assertion of
Asian influence on his thought (Biemel and Saner 1990: 181). See Heidegger’s letter to
Hsiao dated 9 October 1947 (Hsiao 1987: 103) and Hsiao 1977: 119–27. Compare the
same sentence in GA 13: 51 and GA 77: 118 and the similar discussion in GA 12: 187.
21 The problematic of natural and technologically framed things is found in the
understanding of Daoism in Buber and Heidegger; see Nelson 2017: 109–29.
22 See Heubel 2020; Ma 2007; Nelson 2017: 109–57. This list does not include later
editions mentioned in the last decades of Heidegger’s life such as Jan Ulenbrook’s
1962 translation.
23 On early Chinese and Daoist conceptions of the thing, see Chai 2014: 303–18; Kwok
2016: 294–310; Pang-White 2009: 61–78; Perkins 2015: 54–68. On the notion of
“nature,” see Chai 2016: 259–74; Nelson 2020; Perkins 2010: 118–36.
24 On sacrifice in early China, see Sterckx 2011.
25 For an overview of early uses of wu, see Pines 2002: 697–8.
26 See Perkins 2015: 57; Pines 2002: 697–8.
27 For English language translations and discussions of the Fan Wu Liu Xing, see Chan
2015: 285–99; Wang, Z. 2016: 49–81, 169–74.
28 In Chinese: “baiwu busi 百物不死” (Chan 2015: 289–90).
29 The Chinese text asks: “天何言哉? 四時行焉, 百物生焉, 天何言哉?”
30 On seasonality and temporality, compare GA 3: 259: “Time’s power is expressed in
the periods of the seasons and in the rhythms of the phases and ages of life.”
31 Concerning the social-cultural importance of the Yueji, note Cook 1995: 1–96 and
Steben 2012: 105–24.
32 The Xiang’er Commentary states, “精氣自然, 與天不親” (compare Bokenkamp 1997:
82). On qi and body in early Chinese thought, see Yang 1993.
33 On the ethical and environmental implications of these straw-dog passages in the
Daodejing and the Zhuangzi, also note Nelson 2020: 58–9.
34 That is, self-so-ing (wanwu zhi ziran 萬物之自然 in Guodian A 6), self-transforming
(wanwu jiang zihua 萬物將自化 in Guodian A 7), self-steadying (wanwu jiang ziding
萬物將自定 in Guodian A 7), and “self-guesting” (wanwu jiang zibin 萬物將自賓 in
202 Notes

Guodian A 10). Note that thing is wu 勿 in the Guodian excavated texts. For the Guodian
Laozi texts and English translations, see Cook 2012: 244 and Henricks 2000: 44, 47, 54.
35 Erkes translates wanwu zicheng 萬物自成 as “All things are spontaneously
perfected” (Erkes 1946: 170). “Self-” in these linguistic constructions signifies
reflexive being itself rather than the human subject.
36 “Regarding the actions of the world: by neither avoiding nor partaking in them,
they can happen of themselves” (舉天下之為也, 無舍也, 無與也, 而能自為也)
(Brindley et al. 2013: 150).
37 In Chinese: “是故聖人能尃萬物之自然, 而弗能為.”
38 In Chinese: “復衆人之所過, 以輔萬物之自然, 而不敢為” (Lou 1980: 166).
39 Historically problematic categories such as Daoism, Huanglao, and legalism as
they are introduced in the Han dynastic era or construed in modern Sinology are
retrospective and frequently contentious terms that attempt to differentiate and unify
a series of texts, ideas, and transmissions around the same or overlapping teaching.
40 On nourishing care (ci 慈), see Pang-White 2016: 275–94; on Daoist care and
nourishing life, see Nelson 2020: 60–1. The maternal disposition of nurturing care, a
model in which the sage is disposed toward affairs and things with motherly concern,
is also interestingly discussed in the Laozi commentary in the Jielao 解老 chapter of
the power-oriented “legalist” work Hanfeizi 韓非子.
41 Guodian Laozi A 16: “是以聖人之言曰: 我無事而民自富。我亡為而民自化。
我好靜而民自正。我欲不欲而民自樸。” Note the slightly different rendition in
DDJ 57 (Lou 1980: 150).
42 “聖人無常心, 以百姓心為心” (Lou 1980: 129).
43 See Okakura 1919: 29; Heidegger GA 2: 122.
44 Wang Qingjie takes the difference to be between “living longer” and “constant
extension”; see Wang, Q. 2001: 55–71.
45 The received text reads: “若夫藏天下於天下, 而不得所遯, 是恆物之大情也。”
Legge: “if you could hide the world in the world, so that there was nowhere to which
it could be removed, this would be the grand reality of the ever-during Thing.”
Ziporyn 2020: 56 has “to hide the world in the world, so that there is nowhere for it
to escape to, then it has the vast realness of a thing eternal.” Daqing means the real
natural affections of the people in the eclectic text Yinwenzi 尹文子 (Yiwen 佚文 3).
The commentary ascribed to Guo Xiang 郭象 (Lynn 2022) supports taking the great
affection as a disposition. As there is nothing that can be distinguished from things
and their transformations, there is no difference between internal and external or
life and death, and one remains harmonious with heaven and earth and undisturbed
through the incessant transformation of things: “無所藏而都任之, 則與物無不冥,
與化無不一。故無外無內, 無死無生, 體天地而合變化, 索所遯而不得矣。此乃
常存之大情, 非一曲之小意” (Guo 1961: 245).
46 See Brindley et al. 2013: 146. On the temporality of heng, see Wang, Q. 2001: 55–71.
47 Brindley et al. 2013: 147.
48 “侯王若能守之, 萬物將自賓” (Cook 2012: 253; Lou 1980: 81).
49 Compare Erkes 1945: 181.
50 Compare Lou 1980: 22–4, 81–2; Lynn 1999: 65–7, 108–9.
51 “我無事而民自富。我亡為而民自化。我好靜而民自正。我欲不欲而民自樸。”
Compare Cook 2012: 273–5: “I serve no end and the people prosper on their own. I
act to no purpose and the people transform of themselves. I am fond of tranquility
and the people of themselves are rectified. I desire the lack of desire and the people of
themselves become innocent.”
 Notes 203

52 Bao Jingyan is unknown outside of the “Interrogating Bao” (Jiebao 詰鮑) chapter
of the Baopuzi 抱朴子 of Ge Hong 葛洪. One proposal is that Ge invented Bao for
polemical or hidden political reasons. Given Ge’s authoritarian Confucian-legalist
political discourse, and his criticisms of the disorderly moral-political consequences
of Lao-Zhuang, pure conversation (qingtan 清談), and mysterious learning (xuanxue
玄學) discourses, it appears unlikely that he was secretly advocating Bao’s anti-
authoritarian, egalitarian deconstruction of ruler and ruled. In addition to the
question of Daoist “anarchism,” varieties of biospiritual and biopolitical models are
examined in Nelson 2020.
53 On the Zhuangzi’s background, structure, and content, see Kohn 2014. On the
guiding role of generative nothingness in it, see Chai 2019. On reasons for a ziranist
reading, as distinct from mystical, skeptical, and impersonal fatalistic interpretations,
see Nelson 2008: 5–19.
54 Buber 2013: 56, 92. On Heidegger and the wooden bell stand (Glockenspielstände),
see Petzet 1993: 59, 169. Heidegger’s interest in this narrative is revisited later in the
description of Heidegger’s reading of the Zhuangzi.
55 Heidegger mentions the moods of “joy, contentment, bliss, sadness, melancholy,
anger” in GA 29–30: 96.
56 Keyserling 1919, v. 1: 535. On wuwei and fatalism, also compare Kitayama 1942:
37–9.
57 The Yangist moments adopted from the philosophy of Yang Zhu 楊朱 were
interpreted as a pessimistic deterministic egoism by Krause (Krause 1923: 88, 163).
Wilhelm describes the fatalistic side of Daoism as a degradation of Laozi and links it
with Yang Zhu (Wilhelm 1925: 104–5).
58 On Laozi and the White Rose, see Cantor 2023.
59 On reconstructing critical concepts such as alienation and ideology for the sake of a
critique of contemporary society, compare Jaeggi 2005; Jaeggi 2014. Jaeggi’s analysis
shows how Heidegger’s thinking can play a role in imagining new critical social
models (Jaeggi 2005). While Jaeggi analyzes the appropriation and individuation of
Dasein in Being and Time in her analysis of freedom as non-alienation, indicating its
limits in the need to appropriate material and social relations, I hope to outline here
the significance of Heidegger’s later thinking of non-appropriation, releasement, and
the freedom of things, spaces, environments, and regions.
60 “不自為也。天不產而萬物化, 地不長而萬物育, 帝王無為而天下功。” Ziporyn
2020: 111 translates this as follows: “They did not do anything themselves … Heaven
does no producing of things, yet the ten thousand things transform. Earth does no
growing of things, yet the ten thousand things are nourished. Emperors and kings do
nothing, engage only in non-doing, yet the deeds of the world get accomplished.”
61 Ziporyn 2003: 100. Guo Xiang reportedly borrowed from the now lost commentary
of Xiang Xiu 向秀 (Liu 2002: 105–7).
62 Guo Xiang is frequently interpreted as a philosopher of freedom and individual
authenticity (as in Ziporyn 2003). His own contemporaries, as the narratives of
the fifth-century collection A New Account of the Tales of the World (Shishuo Xinyu
世說新語) make clear, were concerned not only with his individualism but with
his determinism. On individuality and the culture of mysterious learning, note
Balazs 1964: 226–54; Yü 1985: 121–55. The interaction between the relational
whole of things (macrocosm) and the uniquely singular thing in its own moment
(microcosm), the dewdrop that reflects the universe, remains a guiding question in
the formation of early Chinese Buddhism.
204 Notes

63 This story is told by his friend the Bremen art critic Heinrich Wiegand Petzet (Petzet
1993: 18; Pöggeler 1987: 52–4). This topic is explored in greater detail below.
64 See Kroll 1996: 653–69.
65 The Shishuo Xinyu contains numerous anecdotes concerning Zhi Dun, including his
new anti-deterministic interpretation of Zhuangzi’s free and easy wandering (Liu 2002:
115–18). His lost Xiaoyao lun survives only in quotations and descriptions. It concerns
wisdom (prajñā), equalizing things in emptiness (齊萬物於空同), and the emptiness
of somethingness and nothingness that cannot be self-occurring. As it is empty of
self-nature, the nothing does not self-nothing (無不能自無). Restating the mutual
correlation between form (rūpa) and emptiness (śūnyatā) in the Prajñāpāramitā
literature, nothingness is said to occur through material existence (form) just as
material existence occurs through nothingness. See Zhi Dun’s “Preface to a Synoptic
Extract of the Larger and Smaller Versions [of the Perfection of Wisdom]” (Daxiao pin
duibi yaochao xu 大小品對比要抄序) in Taishō vol. 55, no. 2145.
66 For instance, “integrate the myriad things and make them into one” (旁礡萬物
以為一), “the myriad things are one” (萬物皆一), and so on. See the discussion
of such expressions in Hsu 2019: 219. The fatalistic interpretation of Lao-Zhuang
thought is expressed in Count Hermann von Keyserling’s 1919 work A Philosopher’s
Travel Diary. He described dao as a preestablished concord that calls for resignation
to the objective world order, in contrast to mystical unification with primordial spirit,
in Keyserling 1919, v. 1: 535.
67 “變化齊一, 不主故常” in the “The Revolving of Heaven” (Tianyun 天運) chapter.

Chapter 2
1 Concerning Heidegger’s discourse of the archaic Greek origins of philosophy, the
first and other beginning, and the pluralistic alternative of Georg Misch (in Misch
1926), see Nelson 2017: 131–57. “Occident” translates Heidegger’s “Evening Land”
(Abendland) throughout this work.
2 GA 40: 17; also compare GA 35: 19.
3 See Plaenckner 1870: 32; Rotermund 1874: 6; Wilhelm 1911: 10; Misch 1950: 312.
Rotermund notes both its natural and political functions in an interesting 1874 work
on Daoist and Buddhist ethics.
4 On intercultural co-illumination, see Wirth 2019. On Auseinanderzetzung between
distinctive philosophical and cultural forms of thinking, French and German in
this case, see Heidegger’s 1937, important yet relatively neglected piece, “Wege zur
Aussprache” (GA 13: 12–21).
5 See Arendt 1976. This pivotal work can be read as an analysis of the collectivist
nationalist and communist pathologies of modern republicanism in which the
public is reduced to the state, individuals are absorbed in society, and “the people” is
restrictively defined by race or class.
6 On the variety of Daoistic biopolitical models and their continuing relevance in a
democratic context, see chapter five of Nelson 2020.
7 “Im anderen Anfang wird alles Seiende dem Seyn geopfert” (GA 65: 230). This
sacrificial language from the mid-1930s has a more violent aura than the generosity
and gifting that emerges a decade later, although Levinas and other critics identify a
continuity between them.
 Notes 205

8 The essay is reprinted in Bloch 1984: 365–84. Buber’s politically oriented 1924
lectures on the Daodejing are published in Buber 2013: 227–68. On Buber’s
anarchistic reading of the Daodejing, see Nelson 2020d: 105–20. Buber’s thinking
of communal socialist self-organization is most developed in his writings on the
kibbutz movement. On agrarian/agriculturalist propensities in early Daoist sources,
see Graham 1989: 66–100. On Daoism and anarchism, compare Rapp 2012.
9 Derrida 2010: 319; Derrida 2017: 281. I now disagree with the claim in my first
publication on Heidegger and Daoism in Nelson 2004: 69. Heidegger does not begin
to substantively question the discourse of creative violence until his confrontation
with these issues in his Nietzsche lectures of the late 1930s and the turn toward
releasement and the thing in the 1940s.
10 See, for instance, GA 27: 220; GA 34: 42, 81. On Heidegger under National Socialism,
see Bambach 2003; Nelson 2017b: 77–88. There is a notable linguistic and conceptual
shift between the individual oriented liberation promised in caring-for in solicitude
(“vorspringend-befreiende Fürsorge”) in Being and Time and the collective violence
(“befreiende Gewalt”) of being and nature of the 1930s.
11 Arendt, Habermas, and Pöggeler interpret Heidegger’s later notion of Gelassenheit
as a response to the assertiveness of the will and collective life during the Nazi era
while reaching different conclusions about its value. Arendt sees this shift as a needed
correction and Habermas as an empty rhetoric (Arendt 2018b: 430; Habermas 1985:
168). Pöggeler notes the significant role of Daoism in this change (Pöggeler 1990:
248; Pöggeler 1987: 47–78). Concerning the will and its suspension in Heidegger, see
Davis 2007. On the distinctiveness of Heidegger’s later thought, see Pöggeler 1990.
12 GA 39: 144; compare GA 40: 66. On Heidegger, the Daoist thing, and the politics of
the thing, note Cabural 2020: 570–92.
13 On “taking turns” and environmental generational justice, see Fritsch 2020. Also note
the analysis of Heidegger and generational justice in Schalow 2021.
14 Note Adorno 1986, vol. 7: 152.
15 The expressions “heaven and earth” (tiandi 天地) and “humans and spirits”
(renshen 人神) are used in parallel in post-Han-era sources, such as the Records of
the Three Kingdoms (sanguo zhi 三國志), and in contemporary Chinese accounts of
Heidegger’s fourfold.
16 Wilhelm collaborated with Keyserling and Carl Jung in the 1920s. They shared an
agenda of uncovering archetypes, the exemplary image (Vorbild) and prototypical
primordial image (Urbild) in Asian philosophy and religion. Wilhelm preferred the
language of exemplary models in his translations. The Sinologist Erwin Rousselle was
Wilhelm’s replacement as director of the Frankfurt China Institute and a frequent
attendee of the early Ascona conferences organized around Jung and hosted by Olga
Fröbe-Kapteyn. He discussed dao as Vorbild and Urbild in the 1935 Ascona conference,
advocating the latter expression: “the dao of the universe is an exemplary model or, more
correctly, a prototypical archetype for the unified human being” (Rousselle 1935: 197).
17 Pöggeler 1990: 248; Pöggeler 1987: 47–78.
18 Arguments for the roles of interculturally mediated Daoist sources in Heidegger’s
thinking are explored further in the following chapters.
19 Malpas 2008 offers an extended analysis of space and place in Heidegger’s discourse.
20 Heidegger does not directly address political economy. On capitalism and the
domination of nature, see the paradigmatic analysis in Adorno and Horkheimer
1979. On the need to confront capitalism for the sake of critically reimagining a more
responsive and response-able environmental form of life, see the works of Donna
206 Notes

J. Haraway, such as Haraway 2013. On the necessity of critical social theory for a
contemporary critical environmental philosophy, see Nelson 2020c. On Heidegger
and ecology, compare Blok 2014: 307–32; Botha 2003: 157–71; Fritsch 2022; Schalow
2012; Schalow 2021.
21 “Critical models” can be employed to analyze the structural tensions and possibilities
of a historical constellation. It is a strategy from Adorno that Heidegger explicitly
rejected as ontologically nihilistic in a late note (GA 91: 664). I adopt it in modified
form in relation to formal indication, which thereby takes on a critical function.
22 On the Bremen Lectures, in which themes of his later thinking are first presented in
public, and the centrality of the fourfold in his later thinking, see Mitchell 2015.
23 GA 61: 33. On the centrality of formal indication in Heidegger’s early development,
see Kisiel 1993 and Nelson 2006: 31–48. Roughly put in a preliminary manner, and
in need of further explication, Heidegger’s “formal indication” empties a specific
fixed content to open a way and Adorno’s “critical model” immanently contests a
structuring system from within, according to its own dissonances and contradictions
that resist harmonizing identification. They each involve their own normativity,
which does not entail positing a fixed set of normative principles and criteria.
Habermas is correct that each discourse has its own normative presuppositions
(Habermas 1985). However, contrary to Habermas’s argument that every implicit
normativity must be made explicit and determinate in a normative system, this
normativity is anarchic to the extent that it cannot be fixed and limited to a specific
ordering of normative criteria and prescriptive rules. As Daoist sources recognize,
such ordering can in fact signify the loss of the ethical.
24 Rickett 1998, 2: 101. On water as thought-image and exemplary model, see Nelson
2020: 86. Thought-images are crucial in the history of philosophy as is particularly
evident in those philosophers who privilege the concept over the image (Plato,
Descartes, Hegel). As Walter Benjamin and Adorno have demonstrated, thought-
images are dynamic configurations that can be misconstrued and fetishized as fixed
pictures.
25 Heidegger argued that it is a later misconception to interpret the famous statement
of Protagoras that “humans are the measure” in terms of mind and subject (compare
GA 6.2: 114; GA 41: 35; GA 48: 161).
26 Daodejing 42: “萬物負陰而抱陽, 沖氣以為和” (Lou 1980: 117).
27 “Other-power” (tali 他力), a key concept of East Asian Pure Land Buddhism,
was initially developed in South Asian accounts of the bodhisattva path in the
Saṁdhinirmocana Sūtra (Jieshenmi jing 解深密經) and the Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra
(Ru lengjia jing 入楞伽經) in which the Buddha enables the ultimate realization of
bodhisattvas. In subsequent East Asian Buddhism, it is linked through universal
buddha-nature not only with the saving power of bodhisattvas but at times with the
other-power in natural phenomena.
28 Recall Chapter 1 note 42.
29 See the analysis of the thing in Kant and Freud in Lacan 1992: 55.
30 On the domination of nature, see Adorno and Horkheimer 1979. Despite their
deep conflicting differences, Adorno’s account of the domination of nature,
the submersion of things in use and exchange, and the priority of the object in
unencumbered mimetic and ecomimetic relations can be utilized to illuminate and
reimagine Heidegger’s later philosophy of the thing for a critical environmental
philosophy. On Heidegger’s ecological implications, see Blok 2014: 307–32; Botha
2003: 157–71; Fritsch 2022; Schalow 2012; Schalow 2021.
 Notes 207

31 Note Heidegger, GA 4: 21; GA 7: 32; GA 11: 119.

32 Adorno underscored the “priority of the object” and criticized Heidegger in
The Jargon of Authenticity and Negative Dialectics for an empty formalism that
reduced things and beings, as entangled in capitalist material relations, to being. For
more on Adorno’s priority of the object and its implications, see part one of Nelson
2020c. On Adorno’s critique of Heidegger in relation to Daoism, see Heubel 2020.
33 Rahel Jaeggi has analyzed how the phenomenology of the they-self and inauthenticity
in Heidegger’s Being and Time, read vis-à-vis Marx, can be interpreted as a critique
of everyday alienation that can be adopted in contemporary critical social theory
(Jaeggi 2005). Heidegger’s later confrontations with reification and alienation of
bureaucratic technological society are further sources for critical reflection on the
present, as argued throughout the present work.
34 To flesh out Heidegger’s claim that “Das Dichten is das Grundvermögen des
menschlichen Wohnens” (GA 7: 197).
35 See Petzet 1993: 18; Pöggeler 1987: 52–4; Mendes-Flohr 2014: 5; Wolfson 2019: 14–15.
36 Buber 2017: 172. Buber’s August 1924 Ascona lectures (published in Buber 2013: 227–68)
emphasized an anarchistic, messianic interpretation of the kingdom in the Daodejing.

Chapter 3
1 Several Heidegger interpreters construe his thought as a choice between the
centrality of being (Capobianco 2018) and meaning (Sheehan 2014). Both
interpretive maneuvers are overly static. Heidegger himself accentuates the priority
of way (Weg), path (Pfad), and movements of being on and underway. These
would be glimpsed through indications, traces, and tracks in contrast to fixating
interpretations of being or meaning.
2 Heidegger’s ostensive “Daoist turn” is discussed in Heubel 2020; Nelson 2017:
109–57; Xia 2017. On Heidegger and Daoism, see also Burik 2010; Chai 2022;
Froese 2006. On Occidentalism and Orientalism in Heidegger, see Heurtebise 2020.
On the early Daoist thing, see also Chai 2014: 303–18; Kwok 2016: 294–310. I take
it as an incomplete intercultural interaction with Daoist sources mediated by their
German translations by Buber, Strauss, and Wilhelm and Heidegger’s encounters
and dialogues with East Asian scholars, beginning with Itō Kichinosuke, Kuki
Shūzō, and Miki Kiyoshi in the early Weimar Republic. This third alternative differs
from arguments that there was a radical “Daoist turn” (Xia 2017), or Heidegger
in some sense plagiarized Daoist sources (Imamichi 2004), or Heidegger merely
applied his own thought, with its “Occidental” presuppositions, without any genuine
engagement or encounter.
3 On Brecht’s interpretation and appropriation of Chinese motifs, see Detering 2008.
4 Buber 2013: 285–9; Keyserling 1919, v. 2: 812–13.
5 On Heidegger’s thought during the 1930s and the question of failure, see respectively
Polt 2019 and Trawny 2014. Otto Pöggeler interconnects Heidegger’s reading of Laozi
with releasement and his transformed thinking of the thing. Note how this point is
formulated in Pöggeler 1987: 51.
6 Klages 1981: 1443. Klages could embrace Daoist emptiness in this work presumably
because it expressed biocentric (biozentrisch) attitudes, in contrast with humanistic
and logocentric (logozentrisch) ones (Klages 1981: 96, 130). Due to the Daoist
208 Notes

passages in his writing, Ernst Bloch criticized Klages for conflating the image for the
thing and breaking Nietzsche’s futurity by forcing the future to conform to the dao of
the primordial past (Bloch 1959: 341).
7 The contextualizing-singularizing (historicizing) approach of interpreting in
reference to a linguistic community and a form of ethical life is adopted from
hermeneutics. Schleiermacher proposed linguistic interpretation as one side of
hermeneutics, requiring the reconstruction of how words and sentences were
deployed in a linguistic context. It need not imply that a given particular reader read
a particular book, but the book reveals a linguistic and discursive configuration
significant for interpreting the historical context of an author’s works. On the
hermeneutics of ethical life, compare George 2020. On hermeneutical issues in
Chinese and intercultural philosophy, see Rošker 2021.
8 Fischer 1920: 165–6. Parts of this are cited and discussed in Klages 1981: 1443.
Fischer’s book is influenced by and dedicated to the life philosopher Klages. Fischer’s
works were familiar to Heidegger’s friend the East Asian art historian and collection
organizer Emil Pretorius.
9 Misch 1930: 52; Misch 1950: 311. On Dilthey’s importance for Heidegger’s
development, see Bambach 1995; Kisiel 1993. The mediating role of Misch in
Heidegger’s interpretation of Dilthey has been underemphasized.
10 Compare Misch 1926; Misch 1930; Heidegger GA 8: 228; GA 70: 107. This issue is
examined in chapters five and six of Nelson 2017. On the problematic of intercultural
philosophy, see also Lau 2016.
11 “Das ursprüngliche Wort war eine Nennung, aber nicht eines bloßen Namens;
vielmehr etwas, was in der Welt begegnet, wird angesprochen, wie es begegnet” (GA
17: 21).
12 Compare GA 11: 45; GA 79: 125.
13 GA 12: 187; Heidegger 1971: 92 (translation modified).
14 GA 12: 187; Heidegger 1971: 92.
15 Hsiao 1987: 103: “auf den Weg bringen (be-wegen).” Compare GA 16: 618; Petzet
1986: 58.
16 Daodejing 40: “反者道之動.” Compare the different uses of fan (reversal, reversion,
return, opposition) in Daodejing 15, 40, 65, 78. Wilhelm translates it in chapter forty
as return: “Rückkehr ist die Bewegung des SINNS” (Wilhelm 1911: 44). He uses
“return” throughout his translation and comments, speaking of the return to roots,
determinacy, genuineness, simplicity, origin, and nature (Wilhelm 1911: 18, 21, 30,
57, 112). Dao is also described as self-reverting (“in sich zurückkehren”) (Wilhelm
1911: 27).
17 Liezi: “無動不生無而生有” (Graham 1990: 22–3). Fan (反), fu (复), and gui (歸)
are semantically related concepts in classical Chinese thought (Maier 1991: 29). For
instance, they are interpretively linked in Wang Bi’s commentaries on the Daodejing
and the Book of Changes.
18 Inspired by Daodejing 1, “Twofold Mystery” was the name of a Tang-era Daoist
movement that adopted elements from Madhyamaka Buddhism.
19 “In seiner Einheit heißt es das Geheimnis. Des Geheimnisses noch tieferes
Geheimnis ist das Tor, durch das alle Wunder hervortreten” (Wilhelm 1911: 11).
“同謂之玄。玄之又玄, 眾妙之門” (Lou 1980: 2). On the role of the gateway in
Daoism, see Burik 2010b: 499–516.
20 “樸散則為器” (Lou 1980: 75).
21 Lou 1980: 75. Compare the different translation in Lynn 1999: 103.
 Notes 209

22 On aesthetic senses of nature in early China, see Zhao 2006.

23 Compare Lou 1980: 77; Lynn 1999: 105.
24 Lou 1980: 113; Lynn 1999: 133.
25 Lou 1980: 170–1. This is interpreted differently here than in Lynn 1999: 174.
26 Compare Lou 1980: 89–90; Lynn 1999: 116.
27 Compare Lou 1980: 150; Lynn 1999: 159.
28 Compare Lou 1980: 190; Lynn 1999: 188–9.
29 See Lou 1980: 26–7, 93–4; Lynn 1999: 69, 119–21. This interpretation of Wang Bi and
his philosophy of nothingness is developed in Nelson 2020b: 287–300.
30 “天地任自然, 無為無造, 萬物自相治理, 故不仁也” (Lou 1980: 13; compare Lynn
1999: 60). Revealingly, the Heshanggong’s one mention of self-governing (zhili) insists
that the king achieves it in people (謂人君治理人民).
31 Translation modified from Lynn 1994: 53. On the significance of yin-yang in Chinese
philosophy, see Wang R. 2012.
32 Book of Changes: “山上有澤。咸。君子以虛受人。”
33 Xu Gan: “人之為德, 其猶虛器歟。器虛則物注, 滿則止焉” (Makeham 2002: 51).
34 For Heidegger, see Hsiao 1987: 103; GA 16: 618; Petzet 1986: 58; compare Wilhelm
1911: 17. Heidegger’s rendition of these two lines from chapter 15 has been widely
discussed: “Wer kann still sein und aus der Stille durch sie auf den Weg bringen (be-
wegen) etwas so, das es zum Erscheinen kommt?” There has been little assessment
of the interplay between Wilhelm and Heidegger. Heidegger’s later references rely on
Ulenbrook’s 1962 edition.
35 The received text of chapter 11 states: “三十輻, 共一轂, 當其無, 有車之用。埏埴
以為器, 當其無, 有器之用。鑿戶牖以為室, 當其無, 有室之用。故有之以為利,
無之以為用” (Lou 1980: 26–7).
36 Compare their three versions of this passage: (1) Strauss’s translation: “Dreissig
Speichen treffen auf eine Nabe: gemäss ihrem Nichtseyn ist des Wagens Gebrauch.
Man erweicht Thon um ein Gefäss zu machen: gemäss seinem Nichtseyn ist des
Gefässes Gebrauch. Man bricht Thür und Fenster, um ein Haus zu machen: gemäss
ihrem Nichtseyn ist des Hauses Gebrauch. Drum: das Seyn bewirkt den Gewinn,
das Nichtseyn bewirkt den Gebrauch” (Strauss 1870: 51); (2) Wilhelm’s translation:
“Dreißig Speichen treffen sich in einer Nabe: Auf dem Nichts daran (dem leeren
Raum) beruht des Wagens Brauchbarkeit. Man bildet Ton und macht daraus Gefäße:
Auf dem Nichts daran beruht des Gefäßes Brauchbarkeit. Man durchbricht die Wand
mit Türen und Fenstern, damit ein Haus entstehe: Auf dem Nichts daran beruht des
Hauses Brauchbarkeit. Darum: Das Sein gibt Besitz, das Nichtsein Brauchbarkeit”; (3)
Heidegger’s rendition: “Dreißig Speichen treffen die Nabe, Aber das Leere zwischen
ihnen gewährt das Sein des Rades. Aus dem Ton entstehen die Gefäße, Aber das
Leere in ihnen gewährt das Sein des Gefäßes. Mauern und Fenster und Türen stellen
das Haus dar, Aber das Leere zwischen ihnen gewährt das Sein des Hauses. Das
Seiende ergibt die Brauchbarkeit. Das Nicht-Seiende gewährt das Sein” (GA 75: 43).
37 For his Italian translation, see Hsiao 1941. Heidegger discusses Xiao in a letter to
Jaspers in which he denies the impact of Chinese philosophy on his thinking (Biemel
and Saner 1990: 181). Xiao also connected Daoism and the problem of modern
technology in the context of his relations with Heidegger, in Hsiao 1956: 72–4; Hsiao
1977: 119–27. On Heidegger and technological modernity, see also Zimmerman 1990.
38 DDJ 11: “das Seyn bewirkt den Gewinn, das Nichtseyn bewirkt den Gebrauch”
(Strauss 1870: 51). Brauch and Gebrauch, as thing and region appropriate or attuned
practice and usage, are significant expressions in Heidegger’s later works that appear
210 Notes

rooted in German translations of Daoist text; in particular, Strauss’s translation of

yong 用 as Gebrauch (Strauss 1870: 51).
39 As examined in Nelson 2017: 109–29.
40 Buber, Bloch, and Klages provide significant points of comparison, as they belong to
Heidegger’s context and directly discuss the Daoist thing in intersecting ways.
41 Heidegger’s debts to Buber remain an underexplored topic. Heidegger was an avid
reader of Buber’s Zhuangzi and perhaps also his Hassidic Tales (Mendes-Flohr 2014:
5; Wolfson 2019: 14–15). Heidegger directly refers to Buber’s Zhuangzi and indirectly
refers to others, such as possibly I and Thou in GA 27, and mentions him in his
correspondence. They met in person in Spring 1957 at Lake Constance (Mendes-
Flohr 2014: 2–25; Pöggeler 1990: 340).
42 On Geding, see GA 73.2: 1121, 1205. Heidegger accentuates the archaic rather than
subsequent meanings in German and Dutch that concern contractual associations
and lawsuits.
43 See Wilhelm 1925: 50; Cysarz 1940: 73; Eckardt 1957: 161.
44 Schopenhauer has a few broad discussions of the Daodejing based on Stanislas
Julien’s 1842 French translation that also impacted its early German translations.
Eduard von Hartmann published an 1870 review, entitled “A Chinese Classic,”
criticizing Reinhold von Plaenckner’s 1870 German translation for distorting the
text in an overly monotheistic manner, as words such as heaven and father have a
distinctive meaning in the Chinese milieu (Hartmann 1876: 166–87).
45 Klages defends Daoist “not-willing” in contrast to “willing nothingness” in
Klages 1981: 342, 496. Klages discusses the “empty jug” with reference to Otto
Fischer’s 1920 book (Klages 1981: 1443). Emptiness is for him the zero point of
the unborn from which all arises and returns. He quotes Wilhelm’s Daodejing,
Buber’s Zhuangzi, and Wilhelm’s Liezi in this work. Heidegger briefly and
dismissively lectured on Klages’s book, and its contention that spirit is the
adversary and sickening of life, as an example of vulgar Lebensphilosophie in GA
29/30: 105. Lukács links Klages and Heidegger throughout The Destruction of
Reason, contending that Klages’s objectivizing biological vitalism and Heidegger’s
subjectivizing existential decisionism are distinctive (Klages asserts the organic
whole while Heidegger seeks it in fragmentation) yet complementary tendencies in
Nazi Germany (Lukács 1955).
46 On non-willing in Heidegger and Schopenhauer, compare Davis 2007: 19–20.
Nietzsche’s initial formulations of the eternal return of the same appear to be
composed in response to von Hartmann, the “worst of rogues,” and his “apish”
claim that death is to be accepted and that no one genuinely wants to live life again
(compare Jensen 2006: 41–61).
47 Strauss 1870: 91, 120, 126, 226, 286.
48 Wilhelm 1911: 19, 25, 27, 34, 39, 56, 69.
49 Notably in Adorno’s 1964 Jargon of Authenticity that ridicules Heidegger’s agrarian
imaginary. Adorno polemically criticizes Heidegger’s categories as reactive, yet he
also perceives how they contain a critical potential in relation to existing states of
affairs. Adorno is correct to critique the residual idealism of Heidegger’s rhetoric of
anti-idealism until Heidegger’s genuine turn to the thing’s priority in the mid-1940s
(compare Nelson 2016: 159–79). Adorno failed to adequately recognize this point in
the Jargon of Authenticity and Negative Dialectics.
50 Strauss 1870: 349; Wilhelm 1911: 104; Eckardt 1957: 97.
51 Pfizmaier 1870: 285; Federmann 1920: 12, 57.
 Notes 211

52 “Der seine Helle kennt, sich in sein Dunkel hüllt” (Strauss 1870: 140). It can also
be translated as it was previously: “those who know lightness wrap themselves in
darkness.” On the question of darkness and light, also compare Burik 2019: 347–70.
53 Buber 213: 110. The hiddenness (Verborgenheit) and concealment (Verbergung)
of dao appear in a variety of German translations (Buber 2013: 113; Federmann
1921: viii). Heidegger’s remarks in 1930 indicate a familiarity with the use of
these expressions in Buber’s Zhuangzi. There are other sources. Wilhelm notes the
self-concealment (sich-verbergen) of the sage in namelessness (Wilhelm 1911: iv).
Plaenckner links “verborgen” (hidden) with “geborgen” (protected) that shares a
common linguistic stem meaning safeguard and borrow (Plaenckner: 1870: 271).
This might well be a source for Ernst Bloch’s use of “geborgen” in speaking of Laozi
as a sage “secured only in the ungraspable” (“nur im Unfaßbaren geborgen”) and
“always invisibly on the way of dao” (“ständig unsichtbar auf dem Weg des Tao”)
(Bloch 1959b, 2: 1444). Heidegger differentiates this language more extensively than
Buber, Bloch, and others. He mobilizes a variety of expressions based on the stems
of borgen and bergen. This includes the stem bergen (hold, hide, conceal), entbergen
(unhold, unhide, unconceal), and verbergen (burry, disguise, obscure), a language
that he deploys in his interpretation of early Daoism.
54 Heidegger, GA 16: 677, 712. These issues reappear in Heidegger’s previously
unpublished notes. For instance, intercultural East-West conversations require
first understanding oneself in GA 91: 467–8 and Laozi is seen as a source of
Chinese renewal and world-renewal in GA 91: 667. These two tendencies are
not contradictory if the former, self-understanding, is the condition of the latter,
encountering and learning from the other.

Chapter 4
1 Seekamp 1960: 71–2. This lecture was published in GA 80.2: 1041–63.
2 Seekamp names in one grouping: “Novalis, the two Schlegels, Schopenhauer, Paul
Deussen, Karl Eugen Neumann, Martin Buber, Theodor Lessing, Carl Gustav Jung,
and Karl Friedrich Duerckheim” (Seekamp 1960: 72).
3 Seekamp 1960: 72. Compare Ernst Bloch’s claim that Laozi’s dao appears to be
simultaneously the easiest category to grasp and the most incomprehensible from the
European perspective (Bloch 1959b, 2: 1445). Bloch also defines dao as a variety of
life- and world-tact (Bloch 1959b, 2: 1438).
4 “知者不言言者不知” (Lou 1980: 147–8).
5 On pólemos, see Fried 2008. On Heidegger’s 1933–1935 engagement on behalf of
National Socialism, his subsequent disenchantment, and his unfolding conservative
elitist critique of it, compare Bambach 2003; Habermas 1989: 431–56; Nelson 2017b:
77–88; Polt 2019.
6 Heidegger stated that it was “die größte Dummheit seines Lebens,” according to
Petzet 1993: 37.
7 On Nietzsche’s roles in Heidegger, National Socialism, and the controversies of the
1930s, see Bernasconi 2013: 47–54.
8 To summarize, Heidegger was condemned as a “follower” (Mitläufer) by allied
authorities, the fourth and lowest level of complicity and guilt between “lesser
offender” (Minderbelastete) and “exonerated” (Entlastete). Heidegger maintained
212 Notes

after the war that he was unfairly identified with the movement given his marginality,
the short duration of his active involvement, and the reintegration of more seriously
engaged National Socialists into West German society and politics. Contemporary
rightwing populists have appealed to Heidegger for intellectual legitimation. Yet
Heidegger is an ambiguous source. He was an intellectual elitist critical of what he
considered the vulgar elements of national socialism, preferring the poetic word
to film, radio, and illustrated magazines (GA 40: 78; GA 47: 78). He rejected the
category of race and advocated an anti-democratic and metaphysically transformed
republican discourse of the collective self-determination and general will of the
people that ultimately remained modernistic.
9 The aesthetic and charismatic dimensions of fascism were trenchantly diagnosed
early by Benjamin, Helmut Plessner, and others. On the unrestricted public sphere
and political participation as the basis of democracy, see Habermas 1990; Habermas
1994; Habermas 2022. Habermas is legitimately concerned with Heidegger’s flawed
politics while overextending this concern to his entire thought, thereby missing the
significance of Heidegger’s turn toward releasement and the thing (Habermas 1985;
Habermas 1989).
10 On self-ordering agrarian tendencies in early Daoism, see Graham 1989: 66–100.
An analysis of varieties of Daoist anti-politics and anarchistic politics is developed in
chapters one and five of Nelson 2020. Sloterdijk emphasizes Daoist anti-politics in his
1989 portrayal of “Eurotaoism.”
11 Compare GA 13: 27; GA 81: 23, 39, 57–8, 75, 215.
12 GA 74: 185. Also compare Petzet 1993: 169.
13 “大象無形” and “道隱無名” (Lou 1980: 113).
14 Heidegger states: “ein Gewebe eines Schleiers ist, der enthüllt, indem er verhüllt,
nämlich das Bildlose des Wortlosen” (GA 74: 186).
15 “Solche Sammlung verlangt eine Bereitschaft für das Rätselvolle der Sachen und
Sachverhalte, die uns im Gespräch an-gehen” (GA 74: 186).
16 See Nelson 2017: 120. Herman translates “wooden bell-stand” as “chime-post”
(Herman 1996: 59). Compare Guo 1961: 658–9.
17 Compare the account of these two statements in Perkins 2015: 63, 67.
18 On the questions of freedom and determinism that this potentially raises, recall the
previous discussion of determination and freedom in Guo Xiang and Zhi Dun.
19 For a detailed account of Gelassenheit in Eckhart and Heidegger, see Schürmann
1973: 95–119; Moore 2019.
20 “Dies Helfen [of the thinking of being] bewirkt keine Erfolge” (GA 9: 311; GA 13: 33).
21 On the development and significance of Heidegger’s discourse of willing, not-willing,
and Gelassenheit, see Davis 2007.
22 The “Letter on Humanism,” examined further in the next chapter, provides a
reflection on action and the problematic of activism that can be related to Daoist
themes, as I initially explored in an inadequate way in Nelson 2004: 65–74. The letter
questions the nature of the human in relation to nature and the inhuman that is also
operative across the Zhuangzi. On humanism and anti-humanism in the Zhuangzi,
see Perkins 2010: 118–36; Wenning 2014: 93–111.
23 GA 77: 206; Heidegger 2010: 133.
24 GA 77: 206; Heidegger 2010: 133.
25 GA 77: 207–8; Heidegger 2010: 134.
26 GA 77: 211; Heidegger 2010: 135.
27 GA 77: 212; Heidegger 2010: 136.
 Notes 213

28 GA 77: 212; Heidegger 2010: 137.

29 GA 16: 563. On purposive and nonpurposive nourishing life (yangsheng),
see Nelson 2020: 24–48.
30 On public and political participation, see Habermas 1990; Habermas 1994. For a
more radical approach, compare Rosa Luxemburg’s critique of Leninism and
dictatorship for a proletariat public in Luxemburg 1922: 108–14. On the anarchistic
and radical democratic implications of Lao-Zhuang ziranist Daoism, see Nelson
2020: 100–18 and Rapp 2012.
31 On these issues, compare Arendt 2006 and Arendt 2018b: 419–32.
32 On Heidegger’s early enthusiasm for and increasingly ambivalent and critical
response toward National Socialism, see Nelson 2017b: 77–88.
33 GA 77 227; Heidegger 2010: 140. On waiting without expectation and will, and
the releasement of the worlding of world and pure arrival, see GA 97: 183. On
Heidegger’s conception of world and its development, see Trawny 1997.
34 GA 77 227; Heidegger 2010: 140.
35 The received text reads: “若一志無聽之以耳而聽之以心無聽之以心而聽之
以氣。聽止於耳​心止于符。氣也者虛而待物者也。唯道集虛。虛者心齋
也” (Guo 1961: 186). Ziporyn’s revised 2020 translation states that it is “a vacuity,
a waiting for the presence of whatever thing may come. The Course alone is the
gathering of this vacuity. This vacuity is the fasting of the mind” (Ziporyn 2020: 37).
36 GA 77: 220; Heidegger 2010: 143.
37 Wilhelm 1921, and Wilhelm 1948. Jung credited Wilhelm as a great inspiration in his
life and thought, in “Richard Wilhelm: In Memoriam” in Jung 1966: 53–62.
38 Wilhelm 1912: 9; also note Nelson 2017: 67.
39 Wilhelm 1912: xiii, xxi, 8; ix, 116.
40 Buber 1962: 131. I show ways in which Buber’s I and Thou is informed by his earlier
interpretation of Zhuangzi in Nelson 2017: 109–29. On this Daoist dimension of
Buber’s classic work, see Wirth 2020: 121–34.
41 On Heidegger and Meister Eckhart’s mysticism, see Schürmann 1973: 95–119; Moore
2019. The anarchy of Heidegger’s releasement described by Schürmann is more likely
due to Heidegger’s ziranist debts than the mysticism that seeks to overcome things as
well as the attachment to them.
42 Wilhelm describes how the Zhuangzi conveys the practical consequences of a
“sovereign freedom” that is rooted beyond the entangling affairs of the world in
the one. This leisurely unforced independence is free from every conditioning and
limiting purpose, will, and striving (Wilhelm 1912: xiv).
43 Klages 1981: 342, 496. More recently, several works have emphasized the world-
affirmative moment in Zhuangzi in relation to Nietzsche, such as Froese 2006 and
Shang 2006.
44 See Guo 1961: 186; Wilhelm 1912: 36.
45 See Guo 1961: 936; Wilhelm 1912: 203–4.
46 GA 77: 239–40; Heidegger 2010: 156.
47 GA 77: 220; Heidegger 2010: 143.
48 GA 77: 227; Heidegger 2010: 147.
49 GA 77: 227; Heidegger 2010: 147.
50 GA 77: 229; Heidegger 2010: 149.
51 GA 77: 230; Heidegger 2010: 149.
52 See GA 96: 32, 91, 101, 162. In GA 97, this way of speaking is more closely
interconnected with letting and concepts familiar from early Daoism.
214 Notes

53 Compare, for instance, Wohlfart 2003.

54 On the development and significance of Gelassenheit in Heidegger, see Davis 2007.
55 GA 77: 109: Heidegger 2010: 70.
56 On the significance of “nourishing life” in the Zhuangzi and nourishing co-creation
in Buber, one of Heidegger’s sources for understanding Zhuangzi, see chapter four of
Nelson 2017.
57 GA 77: 237; Heidegger 2010: 155.
58 On Daoist self-ordering as an environmental, ethical, and political philosophy, see
Nelson 2020. On the problems and prospects of Daoism for environmentalism, see
D’Ambrosio 2013: 407–17. On Buber’s anarchistic approach to Daoism, see Buber
2013: 227–68; Nelson 2020d: 105–20.
59 On how the forces of the state and capital systematically undermine and limit
the public sphere, see Habermas 1990. On lifeworld and colonizing systems, see
Habermas 1981, vol. 2. Arendt, Adorno, Habermas, and others have outlined the
centrality of public and political participation since the 1940s. Heidegger rejected
liberalism as overly narrow, dispersing and alienating the people from itself
(GA 91: 176–7, 184–5). I argue in Nelson 2020c that liberal (in the sense of rights-
oriented political liberalism as distinct from economic possessive individualist
liberalism and neoliberalism) and social democratic political projects should be
reoriented through alterity and nonidentity.
60 See Guo 1961: 39–40; Wilhelm 1912: 7; and Heidegger, GA 80.2: 1177–8. Compare
Beaufret 1968: 15.
61 “[D]en Sinn wecken für das Nutzlose” (GA 80.2: 1176).
62 “Darum wirft die Besinnung, die ihm nachsinnt, zwar keinen praktischen Nutzen ab,
gleich wohl ist der Sinn der Dinge das Nötigste. Denn ohne diesen Sinn bliebe auch
das Nützliche sinnlos und daher nicht einmal nützlich” (GA 80.2: 1177).
63 “[D]as Sagen als das Zeigen und Erscheinenlassen des Anwesenden und
Abwesenden, der Wirklichkeit im weitesten Sinne” (GA 80.2: 1193).
64 Heidegger’s concerns here intersect with those of his critics such as Adorno and
Horkheimer 1979. On Heidegger’s appropriation of Daoism in the context of
Adorno’s critique, see Heubel 2020. On Adorno’s philosophy and ethics of nature
deployed at points in the present book, see Nelson 2020c.
65 “[D]ie Nähe des Ungesprochenen und des Unaussprechlichen bringt” (GA 80.2: 1195).
66 GA 12: 187; Heidegger 2009: 92.
67 For a stronger version of the argument for a Daoist turn in Heidegger, see Xia 2017.
68 Zhuangzi and Heidegger contest experiential reification and linguistic fixation through
a variety of destructuring strategies: paradoxes, reversals of perspectives, and goblet
words (zhiyan 巵言, expressions that spill over when full and refill when empty) in
Zhuangzi (Wang Y. 2003), and paradoxical and poetic ways of speaking in Heidegger.
On destructuring linguistic reification in Heidegger, see Rorty 1993: 337–57.
69 Hesse 1988: 158. On the German literary and intellectual fascination with Daoism
during the troubled Weimar Republic, see Detering 2008: 31–2.
70 Jaspers 1966: 112. Concerning the Zhuangzi’s treatment of Confucius and critique
of Confucianism, see Chong 2016. For an insightful interpretation of the Zhuangzi’s
deconstructive and emancipatory uses of language, see Wang Y. 2003.
71 There are numerous discussions of Buber and Daoism, including Eber 1994: 445–64;
Herman 1996; Nelson 2020d: 105–20; Wirth 2020: 121–34.
72 Chinesische Geister- und Liebes-Geschichten (Buber 2013: 131–226). Buber’s Chinese
translations based on English sources were widely read and discussed by the literary
 Notes 215

modernists during the Weimar Republic. Heidegger’s familiarity with the writings of
these movements is unclear.
73 See Heidegger in GA: 8: 136; GA 11: 9; Husserl 1962: 331. Issues concerning
the Eurocentric definition of philosophy are examined in Davis 2016: 130–56;
Heurtebise 2020; Nelson 2017.
74 Compare Davis 2016: 130–56; Heurtebise 2020; Nelson 2017.
75 It is beyond this book’s scope, yet the German philosophical reception of Daoism
has continued unabated since Buber and Heidegger, in the utopian thinking of Bloch
(Bloch 1959b, 2: 1032, 1438–50), Peter Sloterdijk’s “Eurotaoism” (Sloterdijk 1989), and
Ernst Tugendhat’s reconceptualization of varieties of mysticism (Tugendhat 2003).
76 The administrative aspect of modernity, crucial to its analysis in Max Weber and
the Frankfurt school, is frequently underemphasized in accounts of modernity
in Heidegger. For a detailed portrait of Heidegger’s therapeutic diagnosis of the
pathologies of modernity, compare Zimmerman 1990.

Chapter 5
1 Heidegger and German translations of the Daodejing utilize two different expressions
for mystery: Geheimnis means mystery as secret and Rätsel mystery as a puzzling
riddle. Whereas much of twentieth-century Occidental philosophy is an attempt
to reductively resolve the mystery, or dismiss it as nonsensical (the mystery does
not exist), Heidegger is one of the few to emphasize preserving and nurturing the
mystery for the sake of world, thing, and human dwelling.
2 For examples of self-criticism, see GA 82. Concerning Heidegger’s notion of being-
there and his critique of the subject, see Raffoul 1998. On Heidegger’s difficult path
to overcoming constitutive idealism, see Nelson 2016: 159–79. This book offers an
alternative to Adorno’s assessment that Heidegger failed to overcome constitutive
idealism and identity-thinking.
3 On arguments for the priority of being or meaning, see Capobianco 2018 and
Sheehan 2014. This debate appears misguided, given how Heidegger prioritizes a
way in which these key concepts are rethought and is concerned with the sense of
being rather than mere being, as if it were some sort of agent, or the transcendental
(and hence ultimately anthropocentric) constitution of meaning. Heidegger himself
ultimately rejected the logical, causal, transcendental, and semantic understanding of
being’s relationality as inadequate to its event character (GA 82: 552).
4 “Appropriating event” (Ereignis) does not refer to a conventionally understood ontic
occurrence but should be interpreted in an ontological, singular, and verbal sense
(Ereignung, er-eignen, GA 82: 552). Concerning the notion of the appropriating or
enowning non-ontic event in Heidegger and its implications, compare Maly 2020;
Nelson 2007: 97–115; and Raffoul 2020.
5 That is: “an-wesen-Weltisch-Weilen” (GA 98: 115). Its verbal character is noted on
the following page.
6 See GA 6.2: 353; GA 67: 130. I interpret the “ownness” of er-eignen along ziranist
lines as an autopoietic occurring “as” or “on its own.” “Autopoiesis” is not an
expression used by Heidegger and indeed he is a critic of “cybernetics,” its closed
systematic form. Still, it can be helpful in clarifying Daoist ziran and Heidegger’s self-
presencing if understood from their own contexts. I take autopoiesis to be plural and
216 Notes

interactive instead of as a closed totalizing system (as in Luhmann and his heirs). It
signifies being sympoietically self-generative in relation to contexts and conditions
in contrast to a determined collective or systemic self-reproduction (by “nature” or
“society”) that excludes singularity, normativity, alterity, and thus ethos.
7 “Auch der geringste Denkversuch muß wenigstens dieses Eine vermögen: immer
auf dem selben Weg zu bleiben; und dies sagt: nie an der gleichen Stelle zu stehen”
(GA 100: 9).
8 “Das vorläufige Denken ist noch kein Weg; es bleibt bei der Bewegung, beim Bauen
eines Weges, im Bauen kommt der Weg am ehesten zum Vorschein” (GA 100: 185).
On way-building, see GA 10: 77; GA 79: 133.
9 “An meinem Weg verkennt man bisher immer wieder—wissentlich oder
unwissentlich—zwei wesentliche Be-stimmungen: 1. daß dieses Denken überall und
stets sich als vor-läufiges versucht; 2. daß in dieser innegehaltenen Vorläufigkeit die
ständig ursprüngliche Selbstkritik verankert ist” (GA 100: 55).
10 “Jede denkende Kritik des schon Gedachten ist Selbstkritik. nicht eine voraufgehende
nur, sondern die wegbauende Besinnung unterwegs—der Versuch, dem Ungesagten
der Fuge einzuwohnen” (GA 100: 174; compare GA 102: 22).
11 Chinese transmissions indicate how the freedom of ziran can be construed as a
natural determination that calls for adaptive conformity. Spontaneous natural
necessity and fatalism are issues in readings of the naturalization of ziran, in both
the Balanced Discourses (Lunheng 論衡) of Wang Chong (王充) or in the previously
discussed “sole determination” of Guo Xiang. Compare Ziporyn 2003: 56.
12 “Umwege, Seitenwege, Irrwege, Holzwege, Feldwege” (GA 100: 92).
13 GA 80.1: 397. On error, errancy, and freedom in failure in Heidegger, although
without noting its Daoist elements, see Trawny 2014.
14 “Die Freiheit als das entbergende Seinlassen enthüllte sich als das Wesen der
Wahrheit” (GA 80.1: 396).
15 Heidegger describes varieties of conditioning by the thing (bedingen) in, for instance,
GA 101: 51. The later lines are from a thought-poem that in German reads: “dahin
uns bedinge das wesende Ding? ruhig zu wandern im stetigen Andern … ” (GA 97:
261).
16 Daodejing 25: “人法地, 地法天, 天法道, 道法自然” (Lou 1980: 65).
17 See Strauss 1870: 122, 176; Strauss 1879: 111.
18 Dilthey 2000: 4; Jaspers 1957: 299; Bloch 1959b, 2: 1438. Daodejing 67 refers to
frugality (jian 儉), humility or nonassertion with respect to the world (不敢為
天下先), and maternal-like nourishing care (ci) (Lou 1980: 170). Dilthey and
other German authors call ci compassion. On the underappreciated roles of care
in the Daodejing, which speak against interpretations positing a stance of neutral
indifference, see Pang-White 2016: 275–94. On interpretations of ethics in the
Daodejing, see D’Ambrosio 2022.
19 As in the lecture-courses published as GA 61; GA 62; GA 18.
20 GA 9: 183–7: GA 55: 214, 223. For an overview of ethics and its problems and
prospects in and after Heidegger, see Raffoul 2010: 220–81.
21 “Das unter dem Anspruch der Anwesenheit Stehen ist der größte Anspruch des
Menschen, ist ‘die Ethik’” (GA 89: 273).
22 The recognition of the free (unclosed) self-generative autopoiesis of the myriad
things is primarily a question of originary ethics and orienting ethos rather than
self-reproducing totalities. This recognition need not require religious or mystical
experiences or entail a theological position concerning gods, God, or the unity of
 Notes 217

God and world. Heidegger himself never renounces his 1927 definition of philosophy
as a-theological and his insistence on the abyss between a thinking of being/beings
and a thinking of God/creatures (GA 80.1: 181–206).
23 “Wichtiger als alle Ethik ist das ethos. Wesentlicher als das ethos ist, sein Wesen als
den sterblichen Aufenthalt im Ver-Hältnis des Ratsals zu bedenken” (GA 98: 345).
On Heidegger’s evolving conception of ethos, see also McNeill 2006.
24 GA 98: 345. See also the discussion of will and reserve in Davis 2004: 288.
25 A good example of Heidegger as a decisionist can be found in Habermas 1989: 431–56.
26 Habermas one-sidedly depicts Heidegger’s sojourn as a development from heroic
activist decisionism in Being and Time through his embrace of National Socialism;
then, due to the conflicts and failures thereof, in Habermas’s account, Heidegger
subsequently switches toward the ostensibly passive fatalism and resignation of
Gelassenheit (Habermas 1989: 431–56).
27 For a detailed account of the problematic of pólemos in Heidegger, compare Fried
2008. On Heidegger’s thinking in the 1930s, see Polt 2019.
28 This is particularly the case in Lukács, who portrayed Heidegger and Klages as
distinctive yet complementary expressions of the decay of bourgeois thought into
fatalism and irrationalism (Lukács 1951; Lukács 1955).
29 Compare GA 43: 26–7; GA 49: 122; Bambach 2003: 275; Bernasconi 2013: 47–54.
30 For a nuanced account of holism, organicism, and vitalism during the National Socialist
period, see Harrington 1996. A polemical critique is articulated in Lukács 1955.
31 See Heidegger’s speeches and correspondence as rector, including the notorious
rectorial address “The Self-Assertion of the German University,” in GA 16: 81–274.
32 GA 6.2: 306; GA 50: 158; GA 67: 208–9. Deleuze’s counter-argumentation that
Nietzsche affirms a multiple pluralistic instead of unitary willing does not
address Heidegger’s underlying concerns that are directed at the priority of will
and value as such (Deleuze 2006: 143, 191, 204). Heidegger’s confrontation with
Nietzsche is more radical than Deleuze’s pluralistic reconstruction, insofar as
will and value as such express truncated and problematic forms of being- and
dwelling-in-the-world.
33 “Gelassenheit des Sein-lassens” (GA 75: 308). That is, letting-releasement correlates
with the letting functioning of being that opens and allows the self-being of
specific concrete beings. This strategy, intriguingly, and I have demonstrated non-
accidentally, correlates with the Daodejing’s insight that the dao nourishes things and
allows them to flourish as themselves. This exemplary ziran-wuwei model is enacted
by sages through the practice of acting (in attunement with things) without acting
(from the constructions and assertions of the self).
34 Three further points, which extend beyond this book’s scope, should be mentioned.
First, Heidegger and Adorno coincide in this analysis in ways that deserve a more
detailed account than can be offered in this work focused on Heidegger and Daoism.
Second, in addition to reimagining the classic Marxist concepts of alienation and
ideology in social terms (Jaeggi 2005 and 2014), such concepts can be rethought in
the anti-anthropocentric perspective of the domination of nature that was implicit
in their formation in the early Marx and made explicit by Adorno and others. Third,
shifting ethos and dwelling is one crucial aspect of questioning and imagining
alternatives in our current environmental plight. Another necessary aspect, not
articulated in Heidegger, concerns the political economic and material relationalities
that need to be interrogated for an extended confrontation with current ecological
crisis-tendencies. This entails that neither is sufficient by itself. Both ethos and
218 Notes

material relations need to be considered together within a given form of life, thereby
making the task not only pressing but much more complex.
35 On Adorno’s continuing significance for confronting the present crisis-tendencies
concerning the environment and the natural world that encompasses and threatens
humanity, see part one of Nelson 2020c.
36 GA 7: 149, 153; also compare GA 78: 149.
37 Zhuangzi: “夫復謵不餽而忘人, 忘人因以爲天人矣。”
38 Such as Cho 1993: 143–74. Heidegger’s engagement with nature has been compared
with, to give another example, the Japanese poet Matsuo Bashō 松尾芭蕉 whose
“poetry is characterized by its closeness to nature and the simple life as well as to the
thoughts of Laozi and Zen Buddhism” (Pieger 2000: 172).
39 Dehn 1948: 44–5, 53. Recall the previously quoted critique of Heidegger’s Daoist-
like nihilism by Klaus Mann (Mann 1949: 10). Another example of the early critical
response to Heidegger’s letter as a justification of atheistic mysticism against Sartre’s
atheistic humanism is found in Krüger 1950: 148–78. On the inhuman and human in
ziranism, see Nelson 2014: 723–39.
40 Xunzi: “莊子蔽於天而不知人” (Li 1994: 478; also compare Nelson 2014: 723–39).
41 “Das Tun wendet sich so nicht in die Untatigkeit und das bloße Gleitenlassen; das
Tun als Wesen der poiesis wendet sich in das weltische Freyen der Stille” (GA 98: 65).
42 Compare the 1935 accounts of violence in GA 40: 115–32; GA 65: 282.
43 GA 4: 42. Also compare GA 45: 3, 29. On the contexts, developments and shifts in
Heidegger’s reading of Hölderlin, see Bambach 2022.
44 On the early Chinese aesthetics of nature, see Zhao 2006. On the formation of
aesthetics in mysterious learning discourses, with their new sense of affective
subjectivity, and in the six kingdoms period, compare Cheng 1997.
45 On the sensibility of Wei-Jin mysterious learning literati, see Yü 1985: 121–55.
46 Heidegger and Adorno provide two different routes to contest the constitutive
transcendental subject and conceive alternatives to it that can be interpreted as in
part complementary. Adorno’s critique is unfolded from Against Epistemology to
Negative Dialectics through a critique of German Idealism and phenomenology.
Adorno contends that Heidegger never adequately overcame this paradigm, while
the current work shows how Heidegger’s Daoist moments intimate alternatives.
47 As noted previously, a transformation of both the art of dwelling or being-in-the-
world and the material-social conditions of human societies is necessary given the
enormity of the environmental devastation that is currently occurring (this problem
is considered in Nelson 2020c). The art of the self and the transformation of material-
environmental reproduction are interconnected in specific configurations of the
domination of nature and in dwelling as poiesis.
48 The distinction between purposive and nonpurposive forms of Daoism is
made in Creel 1982: 1–24. The Zhuangzi and Wang Bi criticize purposive and
instrumental techniques of nourishing life as contrary to its genuine nourishing
(see Nelson 2020: 24–48).

Chapter 6
1 See Hegel 1986b: 210–11; Hegel 1986c: 84.
2 On water in early Chinese discourses, see Allen 1997; on images of primordial chaos
at the origin of things, see Girardot 1983.
 Notes 219

3 The present book extensively examined previously in Part One how Heidegger picked
up on the Daodejing’s language of darkness and concealment. It is also interesting
that the Chinese reception of tathāgatagarbha (rulai zang 如来藏) accentuated its
concealed womblike nature as well as its storing character, in contrast to Tibetan
interpretations that focused on the image of its being the embryo of Buddhahood.
Rulai 如来 is a translation of “thus-come” (Sanskrit tathāgata) and the character zang
藏 signifies both to conceal and to store.
4 The most penetrating study of this topic remains Graham 1989.
5 On Wang Bi’s life and thought, see Lynn 2015: 369–96. Some points in this section
relate to previous research concerning Wang Bi’s interpretive strategies and
philosophy of nothingness in Nelson 2020b: 287–300.
6 Recall that a flexible pluralistic conception of Daoism resists more essentialist
conceptions that would constrain it to one unitary philosophical or religious
tendency that would exclude the others.
7 Religious varieties of Daoism are, according to my flexible pluralistic conception, also
genuine forms of Daoism. They should not be dismissed in the name of a “classical”
or “philosophical” Daoism, given the biospiritual elements in the latter, as well as
how interconnected and complex their historical relations have been.
8 All these expressions occur in the Zhuangzi and subsequent Lao-Zhuang texts such
as the Liezi 列子 and Wenzi 文子, texts that were heavily edited during the Han
and post-Han eras. Not all these expressions appear in the Daodejing, suggesting an
earlier textual formation. I take the Daodejing to be prior to the Zhuangzi, which
presupposes and incorporates a more extensive variety of linguistic development,
philosophical argumentation, and hermeneutical strategies.
9 On why this cannot mean the negation of nothingness in the Zhuangzi, which would
undermine its significance, see Chai 2019: 4. On wuwu 無無 and xuwu 虛無 as the
generative and destructuring functioning of nothingness in Zhuangzi and Wang Bi,
see Nelson 2020: 87.
10 Lou 1980: 146; Lynn 1999: 156.
11 Lou 1980: 195, 2; Lynn 1999: 31, 52.
12 My translation of Daodejing 14 (Lou 1980: 31–2).
13 On generativity of nothingness, compare Chai 2019. On Daoist and deconstructive
strategies, see Burik 2010.
14 On nothingness in mysterious learning discourses, see Chai 2010: 90–101.
15 Lou 1980: 93; Lynn 1999: 119.
16 Neo-Confucianism had an ambivalent and contested reception of wuji (the pole of
emptiness) due to its perceived proximity to Daoism and Buddhism. Lu Xiangshan
陸象山 critically debated with Zhu Xi on the orthodoxy of wuji, which he considered
an external non-Confucian teaching. Later heterodox “left-wing” neo-Confucians
such as the Ming era philosophers Wang Ji (王幾, style name Wang Longxi 王龍溪)
and Wang Gen 王艮 revealed the philosophical and social radicalness of negativity
and nothingness. Huang Zongxi 黄宗羲 offered a paradigmatic critique of the
popularity, heterodoxy, and dangerousness of the teachings of Wang Ji and Wang
Gen in his The Records of the Ming Scholars (Míngru Xuean 明儒學案), accusing
them of undermining Wang Yangming’s teachings by conflating them with Chan
Buddhism (Huang 1987: 165).
17 See Hegel 1986b: 210–11; Hegel 1986c: 84. Schopenhauer embraces negativity and
nothingness in a more radical fashion than Hegel yet understands it as a relative
expression (compare Schopenhauer 1977, vol. 2: 504–5 and Nelson 2022b: 83–96).
220 Notes

18 This negative language (rittakaññeva, tucchakaññeva, asārakaññeva) is used to

describe form and perception as vacant, vain, and insubstantial, like foam and
bubbles formed in water, in passages such as Saṃyutta Nikāya 22.95. The Buddha
describes the emptiness of self and world in Saṃyutta Nikāya 35.85: “because it is
empty of self and of what belongs to self that it is said, ‘Empty is the world.’”
19 Recent critical Buddhist studies have critiqued “buddha-nature” and tathāgatagarbha
as an East Asian substantialist aberration from “original” South Asian Buddhism.
However, such expressions were already operative in proto-Mahāyāna South Asian
Buddhist movements such as the Mahāsāṃghika Tathāgatagarbha Sūtra. Classic
Tang dynasty–era forms of Chinese Buddhism, such as Huayan, with its non-
reductive mirroring and mutual encompassing of particularities, did not understand
buddha-nature as a fixed or static substance. Nor did they oppose buddha-nature to
dependent origination and causal conditioning or principle to particularity. Dynamic
mutually encompassing nature is disclosed through causality and emptiness. A clear
example is Fazang’s golden lion thought-image in which the gold (buddha-nature)
operates in and through the causal conditions of the formed statue of the lion. On
buddha-nature and Huayan, compare Hamar 2007.
20 MKK I.1. This text is cited as MKK plus chapter and verse numbers based on two
different translations: Garfield 1995 and Siderits and Katsura 2013. For a more
detailed account of the practical and determinate logic of emptiness, see Nelson 2023.
21 Sengzhao stated, “心彌虛行彌廣” (T1858: 160c23). On the practical orientation of
emptiness in Nāgārjuna and Sengzhao, compare Nelson 2023.
22 See Heidegger, GA 11: 97, 129. Even within radical Hongzhou-style Chan, Mazu
more frequently employs the language of buddha-nature, whereas Linji is depicted as
disenchanting it and as expressing a performatively enacted emptying that undoes all
distinctions, revealing the genuine person without rank who freely dwells with things
and conditions through emptiness.
23 T45n1886; English translation and commentary in Gregory 1995.
24 On Zongmi’s hermeneutical schematization of Chan Buddhist lineages, see
Broughton 2009.
25 Haas 1909: 491–532 and Dumoulin 1938: 178–221.
26 The dynamic matrix of buddha-nature or the tathāgatagarbha (Gregory 1995: 134–40).
27 Gregory 1995: 163. Genuine nature is interpreted in Zongmi’s revised Huayan
model of the four dharma-realms and the difference/particularity maintaining
mutuality and reciprocity between singular event and patterning principle. Genuine
nature and buddha-nature in Huayan, as indicated by Fazang’s analyses of the
thought-images of the golden lion, the hall of mirrors, and rafter and building,
are not statically existent; nor are these thought-images opposed to dependent
origination and the causal matrix of reality, as critical Buddhist arguments against
the East Asian buddha-nature paradigm maintain.
28 On Fazang’s life, thought, and practice, see Chen 2007.

Chapter 7
1 GA 68: 47; also compare GA 66: 293.
2 Early Daoist autopoietics has been interpreted in the sense of functional-structural
systems theories of maintaining equilibrium. This approach, stressing collective
rather than interactive ordering, can be overly reductive, deterministic, and
 Notes 221

inadequate for recognizing an ethos of interdependent freedom and nurturing care in

responsive attunement (compare Nelson 2020).
3 On thinking “existentiality” in intercultural ways, see Kalmanson 2020.
4 The experiential and structural affinities and differences between the emptying of
destructuring and formal indication in Heidegger, and negation and emptying in Chan
Buddhist discursive and practical strategies, are examined in Nelson 2017: 225–52.
5 Concerning Meinong on nothingness, negative objects, and negation, see Jacquette 2015.
6 Windelband 1880: 355. On German pessimism, see Beiser 2016. On Buddhism,
nothingness, and constitutive negativity in Schopenhauer, see Nelson 2022b: 83–96.
7 GA 29/30: 8. For a reconceptualization of freedom as world-appropriation, see
Jaeggi 2005.
8 “色即是空, 空即是色。” See Taishō vol. 5, no. 220, 22a18 (Mahāprajñāpāramitā
Sūtra; Da bore boluomi duo jing 大般若波羅蜜多經); Mattice 2021: 204. On the
Heart Sūtra, its relation to perfection of wisdom discourses, and importance in East
Asian Buddhism, see Mattice 2021.
9 Principle is at times directly identified with buddha-nature; more accurately,
buddha-nature can only signify the complete interpenetration between principle
and event without obstruction or duality. Emptiness is the entry into principle in
Dushun 杜順 in his Meditative Approaches to the Huayan Dharmadhātu (Huayan
Fajie Guanmen 華嚴法界觀門). I interpret buddha-nature as the entire dynamic of
reality (the gold in the golden lion in Fazang’s thought-image) that encompasses the
mutual encompassing of emptiness and form, or principle and event. On Fazang and
Huayan, compare Chen 2007. On buddha-nature in Huayan, see Hamar 2007.
10 On the originary not and not-ness (Nichthafte) of being, compare GA 9: 360; GA 65:
266–8, 481; GA 68: 102; GA 87: 64.
11 Schopenhauer has a deeper understanding of the “not” than Heidegger suggests here.
For a detailed discussion of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche on Buddhism and nihilism,
see Nelson 2022b: 83–96.
12 Buddhist “no-self ” is misinterpreted in European discourses as advocating an
absolute or generalized negation of the self in any sense giving rise to paradoxes in
using and thinking the expression “I.” This critique is exaggerated as no-self does
not deny and seeks to free the conditional self by contesting fixations of the self
as ego, essence, and substance. It thereby illuminates and transforms the ordinary
conventional understandings of the self in the first- and second-person (I and thou)
perspective instead of eliminating it. It shares some features with the critiques of
the self in Hume, Nietzsche, and existentialism that contest constructed forms of
the subject that are fixated as ultimately real. Buddhism typically does not solely
deconstruct the self, as its negative mediative and linguistic strategies are correlated
with discovering the relational interdependent self and freedom in compassion.
The correlation of emptiness and compassion is evident in Madhyamaka (the
emptiness school) as described in Śāntideva’s description of the bodhisattva path in
the Bodhicaryāvatāra (Śāntideva 1998: 105–32).
13 This connection was discussed in Leibniz’s 1703 article on binary mathematics
published by the Académie royale des sciences (Leibniz 1703) as well as in his
correspondence and writings concerning Chinese philosophy that he interpreted
through Jesuit sources (see Nelson 2011: 377–96).
14 Compare his remarks, from 1921/22 to 1951/52, in GA 61: 66; GA 55: 20, 151; GA 8: 42.
15 Significant alternatives were developed in rejoinder to Heidegger, such as Sartre’s
constitutive nihilation as formative of subjectivity rather than being (Sartre 1943).
222 Notes

16 For an overview, see Beiser 2016. He does not discuss the role of Buddhism in these
controversies over pessimism.
17 Compare Habermas 1995: 128 and Nelson 2020c: 25–89. In the opening chapters of
the latter book, I trace Adorno’s analyses of nature as ideology and as critique.
18 Hans-Georg Gadamer credited Theodor Lessing’s Europa und Asien, which he
describes as dilettantish, with awakening his interest in Eastern thought during the
Weimar era (Gadamer 1993: 480).
19 Compare Yusa 1998: 56; Petzet 1993: 153, 166–7; Heidegger, GA 16: 553–7, 712.
20 There is little discussion of how the cross-cultural question of nothingness intersects
in their works. See Nelson 2011 on Leibniz, the Book of Changes, and the zero and
Nelson 2022b on Schopenhauer, Buddhism, and nothingness.
21 For example, in GA 41: 94; GA 79: 158. The opposition between the history
of Occidental philosophy as metaphysics and “non-Occidental” philosophical
discourses—held in varying forms by Heidegger, Derrida, and Rorty—can no longer
be maintained and requires a committed reimagining of the history of philosophy as
an intercultural historical formation.
22 See GA 6.2: 357; GA 9: 382; GA 49: 199; GA 74: 23.
23 GA 81: 351, 356; also compare GA 65: 102.
24 On the subject in Heidegger, see Raffoul 1998. On expanding the initially much
narrower formally indicative concepts of care and being-with, see Kanthack 1958 and
Kanthack 1964.
25 See GA 67: 27; GA 69: 140; GA 74: 23.
26 Compare GA 5: 40; GA 9: 114; GA 68: 45–6; GA 74: 24, 28; GA 81: 351.
27 Such as Tsujimura Kōichi, Nishitani Keiji, Suzuki Daisetsu Teitarō, and Hisamatsu
Shin’ichi. See GA 16: 553–7, 712; Petzet 1993: 153, 166–7.
28 On Buddhism and Heidegger in the Japanese context, see Umehara 1970: 271–81.
29 Tezuka’s comments on their meeting and Heidegger’s dialogue are translated in
Buchner 1989: 173–80. Tezuka addresses the Buddhist character of nothingness/
emptiness, as not negative, more clearly than Heidegger: ku 空 signifies emptiness,
sky, and the open (Buchner 1989: 176).
30 See Taishō vol. 5, no. 220, 22a18, and Mattice 2021: 204.
31 In speaking of irreducible difference and nonidentity, Heidegger’s discussion of the
otherness of being (GA 65: 267) is being redescribed in part in the language of his
critics (namely, Adorno and Levinas) in order to respond to the specific criticism of
ontological totalization.
32 On the not-more and the not-yet, compare GA 7: 138; GA 8: 104. On remembering the
flight of the gods of old and awaiting the arrival of the gods to come, see GA 39: 100.
33 Historicizing as singularization through contextualization is a strategy articulated by
Dilthey (compare Nelson 2019: 10–36). On problems of contextualization regarding
Heidegger, see Maly 2020: 15.
34 GA 16: 543; also compare GA 12: 246 on saying as showing, in which “address”
expresses the said and “granting” expresses the unsaid.

Chapter 8
1 Carnap 1931: 241. Carnap’s verdict on Heidegger’s nothing (see Nelson 2013: 151–6)
was shared by various positivists in the early 1930s: Oskar Krauss, David Hilbert,
 Notes 223

Otto Neurath, and A. J. Ayer (Hilbert 1931: 485–94; Krauss 1931: 140–6; Neurath
1933: 8; Ayer 1934: 55–8).
2 For the former, see GA 12: 80–146; for the latter, see GA 77: 204, 218, 230.
3 On Heidegger and comparative and intercultural philosophy, see Buchner 1989;
Davis 2013; Heubel 2020; Ma 2007; Nelson 2017; and Yu 2018.
4 Okakura 1919: 31; see also Imamichi 2004: 123; Davis 2013: 460–5.
5 “Juassa … hat verstanden, was diese Vorlesung zeigen wollte” (GA 16: 712).
6 Heidegger remarked against those who identified his thought with Buddhism:
“Kein Buddhismus! das Gegenteil” (GA 65: 171). Compare GA 7: 113; GA 43: 111.
7 “Für uns ist die Leere der höchste Name für das, was Sie mit dem Wort ‘Sein’ sagen
möchten” (GA 12: 103).
8 This signifies that modernity and anti-modernity are interculturally mediated
discursive and social-political configurations. This complex interpretive situation
demands a critical intercultural hermeneutics that does not essentialize either
one’s own or the other’s positionality, in contrast to both monoculturalism and
multiculturalism (see Nelson 2017).
9 Nishida 1936: 126–7; also compare Nishida 1987. The present discussion of Nishida
only focuses on the initial German translations and studies of his work between
1936 and 1944. For an insightful overview of nothingness in Heidegger and Nishida,
see Krummel 2018: 239–68.
10 Pan-Asianism was, to be brief, typically “anti-colonial” in contesting Eurocentrism
and Western colonialism, as well as nationalist in construing Japan as the inheritor,
restorer, and culmination of “Oriental” culture and spirit that could defend Asia
against Occidental encroachment. Kitayama and Kanokogi Kazunobu 鹿子木員信
were among the most active pan-Asianist intellectuals in Germany. Kanokogi
wrote his dissertation with Rudolf Eucken in Jena in 1912 on “The Religious” and
appears much more willing to directly advocate fascist ideology as director of the
Japaninstitut in Berlin and subsequently in Japan (on Kanokogi, see Szpilman
2013: 233–80). Interestingly, Karl Löwith met Kanokogi during his time in Japan
and thought poorly of him and other Japanese nationalist intellectuals for how
they blended Confucius, Hegel, Hitler, and Shintō (Löwith 2016: 117–18). Löwith’s
experiences in Japan inform his skepticism concerning uncritical appropriations of
Eastern thought.
11 Published in 1934 as Kitayama’s Metaphysik des Buddhismus; Versuch einer
philosophischen Interpretation der Lehre Vasubandhus und seiner Schule. Kitayama
was among several rightwing Japanese intellectuals such as Kanokogi who studied in
Germany and were active in German-Japanese relations during the National Socialist
era. On Kitayama’s links with German rightwing discourses and National Socialism,
see Brightwell 2015: 431–53. On the intermixture of phenomenological and völkisch
(racial and nationalist) geopolitical and georeligious predilections in Kitayama’s
philosophy of religion, see Kubota 2008: 613–33. Wolfgang Harich, an East German
communist philosopher after the Second World War who helped Kitayama edit
his German publications during the first half of the 1940s, describes Heidegger’s
influence on Kitayama and his activities in Germany, in Harich 2016.
12 See Nishida 1943: 140. On the early German language reception of Nishida’s
philosophy of nothingness: Kitayama 1943b: 274; Lüth 1944: 99–101; Schinzinger
1940: 38 and Schinzinger in Nishida 1943: 30–2.
13 In contrast to my therapeutic quasi-skeptical reading, which stresses freedom in non-
assertion and non-affirmation rather than doubt, Graham Priest offers a (somewhat
224 Notes

reifying and identitarian) metaphysical account of Buddhist negation and emptiness

in Priest 2018.
14 Schinzinger 1940: 31; Taketi 1940: 283–5; Imamichi 2004: 46.
15 A paradigmatic elucidation of “Oriental nothingness” is found in Hisamatsu 1960:
65–97 (also compare Hisamatsu 1994 and Hisamatsu 2002). On negation and
nothingness in Continental and East Asian thought, see also Dastur 2018.
16 On Buddhism as world-affirmation, note Nishida 1939: 10–11 and Schinzinger’s
introduction to Nishida 1943: 51–2. Tathātā (thusness or suchness) designates
in classical Buddhism either the negative breaking-off of discourse in emptiness
(śūnyatā) or reality as such as disclosed through emptiness.
17 Barth concludes that Heidegger’s nothingness is crypto-theological, whereas Sartre’s
is thoroughly atheistic (Barth 1950: 395).
18 Compare Buchner 1989: 169–72; Davis 2013: 460–5.
19 On Kuki and aesthetic theory, see Nara 2004.
20 Kitayama’s West-Östliche Begegnung: Japans Kultur und Tradition was initially
published in 1940 and revised and expanded in 1942.
21 Nishida 1939: 17. On how Nishida’s circle of influence interpreted being and
nothingness in early Chinese thought, compare Imamichi 1958: 54–64.
22 On the strategies of Wang Bi’s philosophy of the nothing, see Nelson 2020b: 287–300.
23 The relationship between nationalist politics and the idea of nothingness in the Kyōto
School is a highly contested one. On Kitayama’s political context and motivations, see
Brightwell 2015: 431–53; Kubota 2008: 613–33. On the social-political problems of
modern Japanese discourses of “nothingness,” compare Ives 2009 and Osaki 2019.
24 There is a profuse literature on the intersections during this era between German
and Japanese thought, and between Japanese philosophy and politics, including
Brightwell 2015; Kubota 2008; Ives 2009; and Osaki 2019.
25 The German text states: “das Nichts anfänglicher und wesender (ursprünglich
das Seyn er-eignender) als das ‘Etwas’? … Nichts hier besagt: überhaupt nicht ein
Seiendes, sondern: Sein … Das Nichts entspringt nicht aus der Ab-sage an das
Seiende, sondern ist anfängliches Sagen des Seyns, Sagen der Neinung in der Er-
eignung” (GA 74: 24).
26 Note the assessment of Heidegger’s nothingness as a radical yet insufficient step
toward śūnyatā as absolute nothingness in Nishitani 1966, Nishitani 1983, and
Nishitani 1989.
27 On the fourfold, see Mitchell 2015. On the East Asian contexts and resonances of the
fourfold, see Part One.
28 “Das Ding dingt Welt” (GA 7: 182; Heidegger 1971: 178).
29 GA 5: 54. Much more could be said (than can be said in the confines of this chapter)
about the complex interconnections between “work” and “thing” in the 1934/35 “The
Origin of the Work of Art” and the 1950 “The Thing.” Concerning the significance of
the thing, see also Wang Q. 2016: 159–74.
30 “Hegels Negativität ist keine, weil sie mit dem Nicht und Nichten nie ernst
macht, – das Nicht schon in das ‘Ja’ aufgehoben hat” (GA 68: 47). On Heidegger and
Hegelian dialectic, note the helpful discussion in Kanthack 1968: 538–54.
31 “‘Das Leere’ ist also schlechthin der Anfang der Philosophie” (GA 68: 57).
32 “色不異空, 空不異色; 色即是空, 空即是色。” See Taishō vol. 5, no. 220, 22a18;
compare Mattice 2021: 204.
33 Kitayama 1940 concerns Zen Buddhism. Non-duality is a significant facet of
Buddhist argumentation, emphasized in Vasubandhu and Yogācāra (Kitayama 1934).
 Notes 225

Heidegger’s radical transformation of philosophy has been interpreted as contesting

and overcoming the dualities (such as subject and object, ideality and reality) that
structure previous Occidental philosophy (Kanthack 1964).
34 On nothingness in Nishida and Heidegger, see Krummel 2018: 239–68.

Chapter 9
1 Heidegger’s thinking of being and beings, sense and meaning-formation, is
structured through the emptiness and openness of nothingness and the ontological
difference (compare GA 9: 134; GA 29/30: 521; GA 68: 20). Heidegger’s way resists
being reduced to the priority, presence, and positivity of either being or meaning.
His later thinking contests being as presence, insofar as this prevailing paradigm
forgets and suppresses indications of Daoist-like absence (as illustrated in Part One),
concealment, darkness, mystery, and namelessness.
2 On the contemporary ethical and political implications of Daoist nothingness, see
my account of the anarchistic and democratic potential of ziranist Daoist biopolitics
in Nelson 2020: 110–18. I argue there for ziranist eco-democracy in opposition to
eco-authoritarian tendencies. On Daoism and anarchism, also compare Rapp 2012.
3 Compare Levinas 1932; Levinas 1982. On Levinas and Heidegger on sociality and
otherness, see Angelova 2010: 171–91. On critical Buddhism, see Ives 2009.
4 On the hermeneutics of reimagining, see the works of Donna J. Haraway.
5 Namely, the denial of individual and participatory rights, and militaristic nationalism
and imperialism (Ives 2009; Osaki 2019).
6 See part one of Nelson 2020c for an analysis of the loss of nature, and critical models
of alienation from and reification of nature, in the later Frankfurt school and the
environmental implications of Adorno’s dialectic of nature.
7 Writings collected in Buber 2013.
8 See Habermas 1985 and 1989. On Heidegger and Adorno in relation to National
Socialism and Daoism, see Heubel 2020.
9 On the emptiness of formal indication in Heidegger and Chan Buddhism, see Nelson
2017: 225–52.
10 For a nuanced reconstruction of freedom as appropriation of and participation in
material and social life, which intersects with aspects of Heidegger’s more subjective
and limited interpretation of individuation in Being and Time, see Jaeggi 2005. On
early Daoist spontaneity, self-ordering, and participation as sources for democratic
theory and practice, see Nelson 2020: 100–18.
11 The complex mediations between ethos, science, worldview, and politics indicate the
need of developing a more adequate and comprehensive critical environmental and
social theory and practice.
12 On the political entanglements of Japanese Buddhism and the Kyōto school, see
Heisig and Maraldo 1995, Ives 2009, and Osaki 2019; on Kitayama, see Brightwell
2015: 431–53; Kubota 2008: 613–33.
13 Compare Victoria 2003: 120–4. The exponent of “soldier Zen,” Gorō Sugimoto
杉本五郎 (1900–1937), stated in his popular, posthumously published work Great
Duty (Taigi 大義): “The reason that Zen is necessary for soldiers is that all Japanese,
especially soldiers, must live in the spirit of the unity of the sovereign and subjects,
eliminating their ego and getting rid of their self. It is exactly the awakening to
226 Notes

the nothingness of Zen that is the fundamental spirit of the unity of sovereign and
subjects. Through my practice of Zen, I am able to get rid of myself. In facilitating the
accomplishment of this, Zen becomes, as it is, the true spirit of the imperial military”
(Victoria 2003: 124).
14 Note Heisig and Maraldo 1995: 186, 194, 264, 273, 281, and 303. Löwith noted the
fascination with Hegel while in Japan (Löwith 2016: 117–18).
15 Heisig and Maraldo 1995: 194.
16 On Nietzsche and Buddhism, see Wirth 2019. Despite Heidegger’s expressions
of interest in Zen Buddhism, he discussed and expressed Nietzschean suspicions
concerning Buddhism on several occasions (GA 7: 113; GA 43: 111; GA 44: 68;
GA 65: 171).
17 On the problematic of diagnosing progress and regression in a pluralistic context
without a predetermined teleology of history, compare Jaeggi 2023. Pluralism
is insufficient if it does not explicitly take an intercultural turn that contests
the remnants of colonialism, and the Eurocentrism of theory and philosophy
which predetermines and limits the multiplicity of available options and genuine
possibilities.
18 For samples of Manhae’s poetry and political thought, see Han 2005 and Han 2008.
19 Compare Han 2008: 154. Conflicting Tang dynasty era interpretations arose
concerning which Huayan teaching is ultimate. The third Huayan patriarch Fazang
prioritized, as the characterization of the primary reality-realm (dharmadhātu, fajie
法界), the mutual non-obstruction, interpenetration, and responsive interpolation
between each phenomenal particular (shishi wuai fajie 事事無礙法界). These
preserve both the uniqueness of the singular event and the interpenetrating
character of the self-patterning whole; the fifth Huayan patriarch and Chan Buddhist
Guifeng Zongmi 圭峰宗密 (780–841) prioritized, as the ultimate reality-realm
(or characterization thereof), the non-obstruction and interpenetration between
patterning principle and particular phenomena (lishi wuai fajie 理事無礙法界).
20 On Huayan and democratic socialist equality, see Han 2008; on Daoism and
critical social theory, note Fritsch 2022, Nelson 2020c, and Wenning 2011: 50–71.
It is also important to recognize countertendencies, such as the prominence of
contemporary Chinese and Western Confucian discourses, in deploying an arché
(such as hierarchical merit, relationality, rituality, and politeness) to critique liberty,
equality, democracy, and human rights. More critical progressive conceptions of
Confucianism, which do not reject democracy and rights in the name of authority
and rites, were promoted by modernizing new Confucians such as Carson Chang
(Zhang Junmai 張君勱) in the coauthored 1958 “New Confucian Manifesto” and
in other works (Nelson 2017: 43–76). On the ethical and cross-cultural elements of
Confucian relationality, compare Kalmanson 2020.
21 On “ecological civilization,” see Schönfeld and Chen 2019.
22 Habermas and Jaeggi described the first two dimensions (individual-personal
and public-deliberative) with respect to processes such as the colonization of the
public sphere, reification, and alienation (Habermas 1990; Habermas 1994; Jaeggi
2005). Habermas 2022 and Jaeggi 2023 engage current dilemmas and pathologies.
Still, less anthropocentric and Eurocentric perspectives are needed that offer more
adequate accounts of the third intercultural dimension. This requires an approach
that promotes both decolonial and intercultural conceptions and practices of the
public, democratic will-formation and deliberation, as well as the protection of
individual and political rights from state, market, and other oppressive forces.
 Notes 227

Whereas indigenous subaltern voices and a critical intercultural discourse contest the
oppression of individuals and groups, uncritical uses of multiculturalism can serve
to legitimate essentialist identity, nationalist politics, and social-political oppression
by placing existing cultural norms and practices outside of intercultural publicity,
dialogue, and critique.
23 Heidegger: “das Raumgeben für das Seiende im Ganzen; sodann das Sichloslassen in
das Nichts, d. h. das Freiwerden von den Götzen” (GA 9: 122).
24 A politics of material, environmental, and social liberty would require exemplars
and models of the non-reification of creatures, things, and world, as well as the
non-alienation of human selves (compare Jaeggi 2005). Although Heidegger cannot
be described as a democratic thinker, his thought has noteworthy implications—as
argued throughout this work—for our tenuous contemporary situation.
 Bibliography

1. Complete Works of Heidegger

Heidegger, Martin. 1975–ongoing. Gesamtausgabe, 102 volumes. Frankfurt: Klostermann.
[cited as GA plus volume number].
GA 1: Frühe Schriften (1912-1916), ed. F.-W. von Herrmann, 1978.
GA 2: Sein und Zeit, ed. F.-W. von Herrmann, 1977.
GA 3: Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik, ed. F.-W. von Herrmann, 1991.
GA 4: Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung (1936-1968), ed. F. W. von Herrmann,
2nd edn. 1996.
GA 5: Holzwege (1935-1946), ed. F.-W. von Herrmann, 2nd edn. 2003.
GA 6.1: Nietzsche I (1936-1939), ed. B. Schillbach, 1996.
GA 6.2: Nietzsche II (1939-1946), ed. B. Schillbach, 1997.
GA 7: Vorträge und Aufsätze (1936-1953), ed. F.-W. von Herrmann, 2000.
GA 8: Was heisst Denken? (1951-1952), ed. P.-L. Coriando, 2002.
GA 9: Wegmarken (1919-1961), ed. F.-W. von Herrmann, 3rd edn. 2004.
GA 10: Der Satz vom Grund (1955–1956), ed. P. Jaeger, 1997.
GA 11: Identität und Differenz (1955-1957), ed. F.-W. von Herrmann, 2nd edn. 2006.
GA 12: Unterwegs zur Sprache (1950-1959), ed. F.-W. von Herrmann, 1985.
GA 13: Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens (1910-1976), ed. H. Heidegger, 2nd edn. 2002.
GA 14: Zur Sache des Denkens (1962-1964), ed. F.-W. von Herrmann, 2007.
GA 15: Seminare (1951-1973), ed. C. Ochwadt, 2nd edn. 2005.
GA 16: Reden und andere Zeugnisse eines Lebensweges (1910-1976), ed. H. Heidegger, 2000.
GA 17: Einführung in die phänomenologische Forschung (Wintersemester 1923/24), ed. F.-W.
von Herrmann, 2nd edn. 2006.
GA 18: Grundbegriffe der aristotelischen Philosophie, ed. M. Michalski, 2002.
GA 23: Geschichte der Philosophie von Thomas von Aquin bis Kant (Wintersemester
1926/27), ed. H. Vetter, 2006.
GA 25: Phänomenologische Interpretation von Kants Kritik der reinen Vernunft
(Wintersemester 1927/28), ed. I. Görland, 3rd edn. 1995.
GA 27: Einleitung in die Philosophie (Wintersemester 1928/29), ed. O. Saame and I. Saame-
Speidel, 2nd edn. 2001.
GA 29/30: Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik: Welt – Endlichkeit – Einsamkeit
(Wintersemester 1929/30), ed. F.-W. von Herrmann, 3rd edn. 2004.
GA 31: Vom Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit: Einleitung in die Philosophie, ed. H. Tietjen,
2nd edn. 1994.
GA 34: Vom Wesen der Wahrheit: Zu Platons Höhlengleichnis und Theätet (Wintersemester
1931/32), ed. H. Mörchen, 2nd edn. 1997.
GA 35: Der Anfang der abendländischen Philosophie (Anaximander und Parmenides)
(Sommersemester 1932), ed. P. Trawny, 2012.
GA 39: Hölderlins Hymnen “Germanien” und “Der Rhein” (Wintersemester 1934/35), ed.
S. Ziegler, 3rd edn. 1999.
 Bibliography 229

GA 40: Einführung in die Metaphysik (Sommersemester 1935), ed. P. Jaeger, 1983.

GA 41: Die Frage nach dem Ding: Zu Kants Lehre von den transzendentalen Grundsätzen
(Wintersemester 1935/36), ed. P. Jaeger, 1984.
GA 42: Schelling: Vom Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit (1809), ed. I. Schüssler, 1988.
GA 43: Nietzsche: Der Wille zur Macht als Kunst, ed. B. Heimbüchel, 1985.
GA 44: Nietzsches metaphysische Grundstellung im abendländischen Denken: Die ewige
Wiederkehr des Gleichen, ed. M. Heinz, 1986.
GA 45: Grundfragen der Philosophie. Ausgewählte “Probleme” der “Logik,” ed. F.-W. von
Herrmann, 2nd ed. 1984.
GA 46: Zur Auslegung von Nietzsches II. Unzeitgemässer Betrachtung, ed. H.-J. Friedrich,
2003.
GA 47: Nietzsches Lehre vom Willen zur Macht als Erkenntnis, ed. E. Hanser, 1989.
GA 48: Nietzsche: Der europäische Nihilismus, ed. P. Jaeger, 1986.
GA 49: Die Metaphysik des deutschen Idealismus, ed. G. Seubold, 2nd edn. 2006.
GA 50: Nietzsches Metaphysik/Einleitung in die Philosophie – Denken und Dichten,
ed. P. Jaeger, 2nd edn., 2007.
GA 53: Hölderlins Hymne “Der Ister,” ed. W. Biemel, 2nd edn. 1993.
GA 55: Heraklit, ed. M. S. Frings, 3rd edn. 1994.
GA 56/57: Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie, ed. B. Heimbüchel, 2nd edn. 1999.
GA 58: Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie (Wintersemester 1919/20), ed. H.-H.
Gander, 1992.
GA 60: Phänomenologie des religiösen Lebens, ed. C. Strube, 1995.
GA 61: Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles: Einführung in die
phänomenologische Forschung, ed. W. Bröcker and K. Bröcker-Oltmanns, 2nd edn.
1994.
GA 62: Phänomenologische Interpretation ausgewählter Abhandlungen des Aristoteles zu
Ontologie und Logik, ed. G. Neumann, 2005.
GA 63: Ontologie: Hermeneutik der Faktizität, ed. K. Bröcker-Oltmanns, 2nd edn. 1995.
GA 64: Der Begriff der Zeit (1924), ed. F.-W. von Herrmann, 2004.
GA 65: Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) (1936–1938), ed. F.-W. von Herrmann,
2nd edn. 1994.
GA 66: Besinnung (1938/39), ed. F.-W. von Herrmann, 1997.
GA 67: Metaphysik und Nihilismus, ed. H.-J. Friedrich, 1999.
GA 68: Hegel, ed. I. Schüssler, 1993.
GA 69: Die Geschichte des Seyns, ed. P. Trawny, 1998.
GA 70: Über den Anfang, ed. P.-L. Coriando, 2005.
GA 73: Zum Ereignis-Denken, ed. P. Trawny, 2013.
GA 74: Zum Wesen der Sprache und Zur Frage nach der Kunst, ed. T. Regehly, 2010.
GA 75: Zu Hölderlin/Griechenlandreisen, ed. C. Ochwadt, 2000.
GA 76: Leitgedanken zur Entstehung der Metaphysik, der neuzeitlichen Wissenschaft und
der modernen Technik, ed. C. Strube, 2009.
GA 77: Feldweg-Gespräche (1944/45), ed. I. Schüssler, 2nd edn. 2007.
GA 78: Der Spruch des Anaximander (1946), ed. I. Schüssler, 2010.
GA 79: Bremer und Freiburger Vorträge, ed. P. Jaeger, 2nd edn. 2005.
GA 80.1: Vorträge, Teil 1: 1915 bis 1932, ed. G. Neumann, 2016.
GA 80.2: Vorträge. Teil 2: 1935 bis 1967, ed. G. Neumann, 2020.
GA 81: Gedachtes, ed. P.-L. Coriando, 2007.
GA 82: Zu eigenen Veröffentlichungen, ed. F.-W. von Herrmann, 2018.
GA 87: Nietzsche: Seminare 1937 und 1944, ed. P. von Ruckteschell, 2004.
230 Bibliography

GA 89: Zollikoner Seminare, ed. P. Trawny, 2017.

GA 90: Zu Ernst Jünger, ed. P. Trawny, 2004.
GA 91: Ergänzungen und Denksplitter, ed. M. Michalski, 2022.
GA 96: Überlegungen XII-XV: Schwarze Hefte 1939-1941, ed. P. Trawny, 2014.
GA 97: Anmerkungen I-V: Schwarze Hefte 1942-1948, ed. P. Trawny, 2015.
GA 98: Anmerkungen VI-IX: Schwarze Hefte 1948/49-1951, ed. P. Trawny, 2018.
GA 99: Vier Hefte I: Der Feldweg/Vier Hefte II: Durch Ereignis zu Ding und Welt
(1947–1950), ed. P. Trawny, 2019.
GA 100: Vigiliae I, II/Notturno: 1952/53 bis 1957, ed. P. Trawny, 2020.
GA 101: Winke I, II: Schwarze Hefte 1957-1959, ed. P. Trawny, 2020.
GA 102: Vorlaufiges I-IV: Schwarze Hefte 1963-1970, ed. P. Trawny, 2021.

2. Correspondence and Other Cited Works of Heidegger

Biemel, Walter, and Hans Saner, eds. 1990. Martin Heidegger/Karl Jaspers: Briefwechsel
1920–1963. Frankfurt: Klostermann and Munich: Piper.
Heidegger, Gertrud, ed. 2008. Heidegger: Letters to His Wife, 1915–1970. Cambridge:
Polity.
Heidegger, Martin. 1971. On the Way to Language, tr. P. Hertz. New York: HarperCollins.
Heidegger, Martin. 1998. Pathmarks, tr. W. McNeil. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Heidegger, Martin. 2002. Off the Beaten Track, tr. J. Young and K. Haynes. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Heidegger, Martin. 2010. Country Path Conversations, tr. B. Davis. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
Petzet, Heinrich Wiegand, ed. 1986. Martin Heidegger-Erhart Kästner: Briefwechsel
1953–1974. Frankfurt: Insel.
Pieger, Bruno, ed. 2000. Martin Heidegger/Imma von Bodmershof, Briefwechsel 1959–1976.
Stuttgart: KlettCotta.
Quinn, Timothy S., ed. and tr. 2016. Martin Heidegger and Ernst Jünger: Correspondence
1949–1975. London: Rowman & Littlefield.

3. Other Cited Works

Adorno, Theodor W. 1986. Gesammelte Schriften, 20 volumes. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Adorno, Theodor W. and Max Horkheimer. 1979. Dialectic of Enlightenment. London:
Verso.
Allan, Sarah. 1997. The Way of Water and Sprouts of Virtue. Albany: State University of
New York Press.
Anders, Günther. 2001. Über Heidegger. Munich: Beck.
Anesaki, Masaharu. 1915. Buddhist Art in Its Relation to Buddhist Ideals. New York:
Houghton Mifflin Company.
Angelova, Emilia. 2010. “Utopia, Metontology, and the Sociality of the Other: Levinas,
Heidegger, and Bloch.” Journal of Contemporary Thought 31: 171–91.
Arendt, Hannah. 1976. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt Brace.
 Bibliography 231

Arendt, Hannah. 2006. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. London:
Penguin.
Arendt, Hannah. 2018. The Human Condition, 2nd edition. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Arendt, Hannah. 2018b. Thinking without a Banister: Essays in Understanding, 1953–1975.
New York: Schocken.
Ayer, A. J. 1934. “The Genesis of Metaphysics.” Analysis 1.4: 55–8.
Balazs, Etienne. 1964. “Nihilistic Revolt or Mystical Escapism: Currents of Thought in
China during the Third Century AD.” in his Chinese Civilization and Bureaucracy,
226–54. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Bambach, Charles. 1995. German Philosophy and the Crisis of Historicism. Ithaca: Cornell
University Press.
Bambach, Charles. 2003. Heidegger’s Roots: Nietzsche, National Socialism, and the Greeks.
Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Bambach, Charles. 2022. Of an Alien Homecoming: Reading Heidegger’s “Hölderlin.”
Albany: State University of New York Press.
Barth, Karl. 1950. Die kirchliche Dogmatik: Die Lehre von der Schöpfung. Zurich:
Evangelischer Verlag A. G. Zollikon.
Beaufret, Jean. 1968. La Naissance de la philosophie. Guéret: Les Presses du Massif Central.
Beiser, Frederick C. 2016. Weltschmerz: Pessimism in German Philosophy, 1860–1900.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Benn, Gottfried. 1951. Probleme der Lyrik. Wiesbaden: Limes Verlag.
Bernasconi, Robert. 2013. “Heidegger, Nietzsche, National Socialism: The Place of
Metaphysics in the Political Debate of the 1930s.” In François Raffoul, Eric S. Nelson
(eds.), The Bloomsbury Companion to Heidegger, 47–54. London: Bloomsbury.
Bloch, Ernst. 1959. Erbschaft dieser Zeit. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Bloch, Ernst. 1959b. Das Prinzip Hoffnung, 3 volumes. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Bloch, Ernst. 1984. Literarische Aufsätze. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Blok, Vincent. 2014. “Reconnecting with Nature in the Age of Technology: The Heidegger
and Radical Environmentalism Debate Revisited.” Environmental Philosophy 11.2:
307–32.
Böhme, Jakob. 1732. Der Weg zu Christo. Amsterdam: n. a.
Bokenkamp, Stephen R. 1997. Early Daoist Scriptures. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Botha, Catherine F. 2003. “Heidegger, Technology and Ecology.” South African Journal of
Philosophy 22.2: 157–71.
Brightwell, Erin L. 2015. “Refracted Axis: Kitayama Jun’yū and Writing a German Japan.”
Japan Forum 27.4: 431–53.
Brindley, Erica, Paul R. Goldin, and Esther S. Klein, tr. 2013. “A Philosophical Translation
of the Heng Xian.” Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy 12.2: 145–51.
Broughton, Jeffrey, tr. 2009. Zongmi on Chan. New York: Columbia University Press.
Buber, Martin. 1910. Reden und Gleichnisse des Tschuang-tse. Leipzig: Inselverlag.
Buber, Martin. 1962. Schriften zur Philosophie. Munich: Verlag Lambert Schneider.
Buber, Martin. 1990. Pointing the Way: Collected Essays. Amherst: Prometheus Books.
Buber, Martin. 2013. Schriften zur chinesischen Philosophie und Literatur, ed. Paul
Mendes-Flohr und Bernd Witte. Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus.
Buber, Martin. 2017. Schriften zu Philosophie und Religion, ed. Ashraf Noor. Gütersloh:
Gütersloher Verlagshaus.
Buchner, Hartmut, ed. 1989. Japan und Heidegger. Sigmaringen: Thorbecke.
232 Bibliography

Buddhaghosa. 2010. The Path of Purification (Visuddhimagga), tr. Bhikkhu Ñáóamoli,

4th edition. Colombo: Buddhist Publication Society.
Burik, Steven. 2010. The End of Comparative Philosophy and the Task of Comparative
Thinking, Heidegger, Derrida, and Daoism. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Burik, Steven. 2010b. “Thinking on the Edge: Heidegger, Derrida, and the Daoist Gateway
(Men 門).” Philosophy East and West 60.4: 499–516.
Burik, Steven. 2019. “Darkness and Light: Absence and Presence in Heidegger, Derrida,
and Daoism.” Dao 18.3: 347–70.
Cabural, Mark Kevin S. 2020. “Daoism and the German Mission in Martin Heidegger’s
‘The Thing.’” Frontiers of Philosophy in China 14.4: 570–92.
Cantor, Lea. 2023. “Laozi through the Lens of the White Rose.” Oxford German Studies
52. 1: 62–79.
Capobianco, Richard M. 2018. Heidegger’s Way of Being. Toronto: University of
Toronto Press.
Carnap, Rudolf. 1924/1925. “Dreidimensionalität des Raumes und Kausalität: Eine
Untersuchung über den logischen Zusammenhang zweier Fiktionen.” Annalen der
Philosophie und philosophischen Kritik 4.3: 105–30.
Carnap, Rudolf. 1931. “Überwindung der Metaphysik durch logische Analyse der
Sprache.” Erkenntnis 2.1: 219–41.
Carus, Paul, tr. 1898. Lao-Tze’s Tao-teh-king. Chicago: Open Court.
Cassirer, Ernst. 1955. The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 2. New Haven: Yale
University Press.
Chai, David. 2010. “Meontology in Early Xuanxue Thought.” Journal of Chinese Philosophy
37.1: 90–101.
Chai, David. 2014. “Meontological Generativity: A Daoist Reading of the Thing.”
Philosophy East and West 64.2: 303–18.
Chai, David. 2016. “Rethinking the Daoist Concept of Nature.” Journal of Chinese
Philosophy 43.3–4: 259–74.
Chai, David. 2019. Zhuangzi and the Becoming of Nothingness. Albany: State University of
New York Press.
Chai, David, ed. 2022. Daoist Resonances in Heidegger. London: Bloomsbury.
Chan, Shirley. 2015. “Oneness: Reading the ‘All Things Are Flowing in Form’ (Fan Wu Liu
Xing) 凡物流形 (with a translation).” International Communication of Chinese Culture
2.3: 285–99.
Chen, Jinhua. 2007. Philosopher, Practitioner, Politician: The Many Lives of Fazang
(643–712). Leiden: Brill.
Chen, Shou 陳壽. 1975. Sanguozhi 三國志 [Chronicles of the Three Kingdoms]. Beijing:
Zhonghua Shuju.
Cheng, Yu-yu 鄭毓瑜. 1997. Liuchao qingjing meijue 六朝情境美學 [The Aesthetic Realm
in the Six Dynasties]. Taipei: Liren Shuju.
Chiang, Liang. 1938. Die chinesische Wirtschafts- und Sozialverfassung zwischen Freiheit
und Bindung ein Überblick bis zum Jahre 1937. Würzburg-Aumühle: Triltsch.
Chiao, Kwan-Hua. 1937. Darstellung der Philosophie des Dschuang Dsi. Urach: Bühler.
Cho, Kah Kyung. 1993. “Der Abstieg über den Humanismus: West-Östliche Wege im
Denken Heideggers.” In H. H. Gander (ed.), Europa und die Philosophie, 143–74.
Frankfurt: Klostermann.
Chong, Kim-chong. 2016. Zhuangzi’s Critique of the Confucians: Blinded by the Human.
Albany: State University of New York Press.
 Bibliography 233

Cook, Scott. 1995. “Yue Ji 樂記: Record of Music: Introduction, Translation, Notes, and
Commentary.” Asian Music 26.2: 1–96.
Cook, Scott. 2012. The Bamboo Texts of Guodian: A Study and Complete Translation, vol. 1.
Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Creel, Herrlee G. 1982. What Is Taoism? and Other Studies in Chinese Cultural History.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Crowell, Steven Galt, and Jeff Malpas, eds. 2007. Transcendental Heidegger. Stanford:
Stanford University Press.
Cysarz, Herbert. 1940. Das Unsterbliche: Die Gesetzlichkeiten und das Gesetz der
Geschichte. Halle: Niemeyer.
D’Ambrosio, Paul J. 2013. “Rethinking Environmental Issues in a Daoist Context Why
Daoism Is and Is Not Environmentalism.” Environmental Ethics 35.4: 407–17.
D’Ambrosio, Paul J. 2022. “Approaches to Ethics in the Laozi (Lao‐Tzu).” Philosophy
Compass 17.2: e12810.
Dastur, Françoise. 2018. Figures du néant et de la négation entre orient et occident.
Paris: Les Belles Lettres.
Davis, Bret W. 2007. Heidegger and the Will: On the Way to Gelassenheit. Evanston:
Northwestern University Press.
Davis, Bret W. 2013. “Heidegger and Asian Philosophy.” In François Raffoul, Eric S.
Nelson (eds.), The Bloomsbury Companion to Heidegger, 459–71. London: Bloomsbury.
Davis, Bret W. 2016. “Heidegger on the Way from Onto-historical Ethnocentrism to
East-West Dialogue.” Gatherings: The Heidegger Circle Annual 6: 130–56.
Davis, Bret W. 2020. “Heidegger and Daoism: A Dialogue on the Useless Way of
Unnecessary Being.” In David Chai (ed.), Daoist Encounters with Phenomenology,
161–96. London: Bloomsbury.
Dehn, Fritz. 1948. Vom Menschlichen im Menschen. Berlin: Haus und Schule.
Deleuze, Gilles. 2006. Nietzsche and Philosophy. New York: Columbia University Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 1989. Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction. Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 2010. The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. I. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 2017. The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. II. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Detering, Heinrich. 2008. Bertolt Brecht und Laotse. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag.
Dilthey, Wilhelm. 2000. Allgemeine Geschichte der Philosophie: Vorlesungen 1900–1905.
Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.
Dilthey, Wilhelm. 2004. Späte Vorlesungen, Entwürfe und Fragmente zur
Strukturpsychologie, Logik und Wertlehre (ca. 1904-1911). Göttingen: Vandenhoeck &
Ruprecht.
Döblin, Alfred. 1921. “Buddho und die Natur.” Die Neue Rundschau 32.2: 1192–200.
Döblin, Alfred. 2013. Die drei Sprünge des Wang-lun. Frankfurt: Fischer.
Driesch, Hans. 1938. “Das ‘Ding.’” Synthese 3.4: 136–42.
Dumoulin, Heinrich. 1938. “Genninron: Tsung-mi’s Traktat vom Ursprung des Menschen.”
Monumenta Nipponica 1.1: 178–221.
Dvořák, Rudolf. 1895. Chinas Religionen. Münster: Aschendorff.
Eber, Irene. 1994. “Martin Buber and Taoism.” Monumenta Serica 42: 445–64.
Eckardt, Andre. 1957. Laotses Gedankenwelt nach dem Tao-te king. Baden-Baden:
Lutzeyer.
Eckhart, Meister. 1971. Die Deutschen Werke, vol. 2, ed. Josef Quint. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer.
234 Bibliography

Eichhorn, Werner. 1942. “Die dauistische Spekulation im zweiten Kapital des Dschuang Dsi.”
Sinica 17: 140–62.
Erkes, Eduard. 1945. “Ho-Shang-Kung’s Commentary on Lao-Tse.” Artibus Asiae 8.2/4:
119–96.
Erkes, Eduard. 1946. “Ho-Shang-Kung’s Commentary on Lao-Tse II (Continued).”
Artibus Asiae 9.1/3: 197–220.
Evers, Hans Gerhard. 1951. Das Menschenbild in unserer Zeit. Darmstadt: Neue
Darmstädter Verlagsanstalt.
Faber, Ernst. 1877. Der Naturalismus bei den alten Chinesen. Elberfeld: R. L. Friderichs.
Federmann, Hertha, tr. 1920. Tao teh King: Vom Geist und seiner Tugend. Munich:
C.H. Beck’sche Verlag.
Fischer, Otto. 1923. Chinesische Landschaftsmalerei. München: Wolff.
Fried, Gregory. 2008. Heidegger’s Polemos. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Fritsch, Matthias. 2020. Taking Turns with the Earth. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Fritsch, Matthias. 2022. “Heidegger’s Dao and the Sources of Critique.” In Hiroshi Abe,
Matthias Fritsch, and Mario Wenning (eds.), Environmental Philosophy and East Asia:
Nature, Time, Responsibility, 49–73. London: Routledge.
Froese, Katrin. 2006. Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Daoist Thought: Crossing Paths In‐Between.
Albany: State University of New York Press.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1993. Wahrheit und Methode: Ergänzungen. Tübingen: Mohr
(Paul Siebeck).
Garfield, Jay. 1995. The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way: Nāgārjuna’s
Mūlamadhyamakakārikā. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
George, Theodore. 2020. Responsibility to Understand: Hermeneutical Contours of Ethical
Life. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Girardot, Norman J. 1983. Myth and Meaning in Early Taoism: The Theme of Chaos (Hun-
Tun). Berkeley: University of California Press.
Görres, Joseph von. 1810. Mythengeschichte der asiatischen Welt. Heidelberg: Mohr
u. Zimmer.
Graham, A. C. 1989. Disputers of the Tao: Philosophical Argument in Ancient China.
La Salle: Open Court.
Graham, A.C., tr. 1990. The Book of Lieh-Tzu: A Classic of the Tao. New York: Columbia
University Press.
Graham, A. C., tr. 2001. Chuang-Tzu: The Inner Chapters. Indianapolis: Hackett.
Gregory, Peter, tr. 1995. Inquiry into the Origin of Humanity: An Annotated Translation of
Tsung-Mi’s Yuan Jen Lun with a Modern Commentary. Honolulu: University of Hawaii
Press.
Guo Qingfan 郭慶藩. 1961. Zhuangzi jishi 莊子集釋 [Collected Annotations to
Zhuangzi]. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju.
Gürster, Eugen. 1938. Die Zukunft der Freiheit. Zürich: Europa-Verlag.
Haas, Hans. 1909. “Tsungmi’s Yuen-zan-lun: Eine Abhandlung über den Ursprung des
Menschen.” Archiv für Religionswissenschaft XII: 491–532.
Habermas, Jürgen. 1981. Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns: vol. 1.
Handlungsrationalität und gesellschaftliche Rationalisierung; vol. 2. Zur Kritik der
funktionalistischen Vernunft. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Habermas, Jürgen. 1985. Der Philosophische Diskurs der Moderne: Zwölf Vorlesungen.
Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Habermas, Jürgen. 1989. “Work and Weltanschauung: The Heidegger-Controversy from a
German Perspective.” Critical Inquiry 15: 431–56.
 Bibliography 235

Habermas, Jürgen. 1990. Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit: Untersuchungen zu einer

Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Habermas, Jürgen. 1994. “Three Normative Models of Democracy.” Constellations 1.1: 1–10.
Habermas, Jürgen. 1995. Die Normalität einer Berliner Republik: Kleine politische Schriften
VIII. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Habermas, Jürgen. 2022. Ein neuer Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit und die deliberative
Politik. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Hamar, Imre. 2007. “The Manifestation of the Absolute in the Phenomenal World: Nature
Origination in Huayan Exegesis.” Bulletin de L’Ecole Francaise d’Extreme-Orient 94:
229–50.
Han, Yongun. 2005. Everything Yearned For: Manhae’s Poems of Love and Longing, tr.
Francisca Cho. Somerville: Wisdom Publishing.
Han, Yongun. 2008. Selected Writings of Han Yongun: From Social Darwinism to Socialism
with a Buddhist Face, tr. And ed. V. M. Tikhonov and Owen Miller. Folkestone, UK:
Global Oriental.
Haraway, Donna J. 2013. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Harich, Wolfgang. 2016. Frühe Schriften, vol. 1: Neuaufbau im zerstörten Berlin. Marburg:
Tectum Wissenschaftsverlag.
Harrington, Anne. 1996. Reenchanted Science: Holism in German Culture from Wilhelm II
to Hitler. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Hart, Julius. 1905. Träume der Mittsommernacht. Jena: Diederichs.
Hartmann, Eduard von. 1876. Gesammelte Studien und Aufsätze gemeinverständlichen
Inhalts. Berlin: Carl Duncker’s Verlag.
Hegel, G. W. F. 1986. Phänomenologie des Geistes. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Hegel, G. W. F. 1986b. Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte. Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp.
Hegel, G. W. F. 1986c. Wissenschaft der Logik, vol. 1. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Heiler, Friedrich. 1918. Das Gebet: Eine religionsgeschichtliche und religionspsychologische
Untersuchung. Munich: Reinhardt.
Heisig, James W., and John C. Maraldo, eds. 1995. Rude Awakenings: Zen, the Kyoto School,
and the Question of Nationalism. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
Henricks, Robert G. 2000. Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching: A Translation of the Startling New
Documents Found at Guodian. New York: Columbia University Press.
Herman, Jonathan R. 1996. I and Tao: Martin Buber’s Encounter with Chuang Tzu. Albany:
State University of New York Press.
Herskowitz, Daniel M. 2020. Heidegger and His Jewish Reception. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Hesse, Hermann. 1922. Siddhartha: Eine Indische Dichtung. Berlin: Fischer.
Hesse, Hermann. 1988. Die Welt im Buch: Leseerfahrungen, vol. 2. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Heubel, Fabian. 2020. Gewundene Wege nach China: Heidegger-Daoismus-Adorno.
Frankfurt: Klostermann.
Heurtebise, Jean-Yves. 2020. Orientalisme, occidentalisme et universalisme: Histoire et
méthode des représentations croisées entre mondes européens et chinois. Paris: Eska.
Hilbert, David. 1931. “Die Grundlegung der elementaren Zahlenlehre.” Mathematische
Annalen 104.1: 485–94.
Hisamatsu, Shinichi. 1960. “The Characteristics of Oriental Nothingness.” Philosophical
Studies of Japan 2: 65–97.
Hisamatsu, Shinichi. 1994. Die Fülle des Nichts: Vom Wesen des Zen, tr. Takashi Hirata and
Johanna Fischer. Stuttgart: Neske.
236 Bibliography

Hisamatsu, Shinichi. 2002. Zen Talks on the Record of Linji. Honolulu: University of
Hawaii Press.
Hofmannsthal, Hugo von. 1979. Gesammelte Werke in zehn Einzelbänden, vol. 1.
Frankfurt: Fischer Verlag.
Honneth, Axel. 2005. Verdinglichung. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Hook, Sidney. 1959. “Pragmatism and Existentialism.” The Antioch Review 19.2: 151–68.
Hsiao, Paul Shih-yi [Paolo Siao Sci-Yi], tr. 1941. Il Tao-Te-King di Laotse: Prima
Traduzione da un testo critico cinese. Bari: Laterza & Figli.
Hsiao, Paul Shih-yi. 1956. “Laotse und die Technik.” Die Katholischen Missionen 75: 72–4.
Hsiao, Paul Shih-yi. 1977. “Wir trafen uns am Holzmarktplatz.” In G. Neske, Erinnerung
an Martin Heidegger, 119–27. Pfullingen: Neske.
Hsiao, Paul Shih-yi. 1987. “Heidegger and Our Translation of the Tao Te Ching.”
In G. Parkes (ed.), Heidegger and Asian Thought, 93–103. Honolulu: University of
Hawaii Press.
Hsu, Chiayu. 2019. “The Authenticity of Myriad Things in the Zhuangzi.” Religions 10.3:
218–39.
Huang, Zongxi. 1987. The Records of the Ming Scholars, tr. Julia Ching. Honolulu:
University of Hawaii Press.
Husserl, Edmund. 1962. Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die
transzendentale Phänomenologie. Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff.
Husserl, Edmund. 1973. Ding und Raum: Vorlesungen 1907. Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff.
Husserl, Edmund. 2013. Transzendentaler Idealismus: Texte aus dem Nachlass (1908–1921).
Dordrecht: Springer.
Imamichi, Tomonobu. 1958. “Das Seinsproblem in der Philosophie des Ostasiatischen
Altertums.” Jahrbuch für Psychologie und Psychotherapie 6: 54–64.
Imamichi, Tomonobu. 2004. In Search of Wisdom: One Philosopher’s Journey. Tokyo:
International House of Japan.
Ives, Christopher. 2009. Imperial-Way Zen: Ichikawa Hakugen’s Critique and Lingering
Questions for Buddhist Ethics. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
Jacquette, Dale. 2015. Alexius Meinong: The Shepherd of Non-Being. Dordrecht: Springer.
Jaeggi, Rahel. 2005. Entfremdung: Zur Aktualität eines sozialphilosophischen Problems.
Frankfurt: Campus.
Jaeggi, Rahel. 2014. Kritik von Lebensformen. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Jaeggi, Rahel. 2023. Fortschritt und Regression. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Jahr, Fritz. 1926. “Wissenschaft vom Leben und Sittenlehre.” Mittelschule 40.45: 604–5.
Jahr, Fritz. 1927. “Bio-Ethik: Eine Umschau über die ethischen Beziehungen des
Menschen zu Tier und Pflanze.” Kosmos: Handweiser für Naturfreunde 24: 2–4.
Jahr, Fritz. 1930. “Gesinnungsdiktatur oder Gedankenfreiheit? Gedanken über eine
liberale Gestaltung des Gesinnungunterrichts.” Die neue Erziehung 12: 200–2.
Jahr, Fritz. 1933. “Gedanken über die liberale Gestaltung des Gesinnungsunterrichts.”
Die neue Erziehung 15: 200–2.
Jaspers, Karl. 1957. Aus dem Ursprung denkende Metaphysiker: Anaximander, Heraklit,
Parmenides, Plotin, Anselm, Spinoza, Laotse, Nagarjuna. Munich: Piper.
Jaspers, Karl. 1966. Anaximander, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Plotinus, Lao-Tzu, Nagarjuna,
tr. Ralph Manheim. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Jensen, Anthony K. 2006. “The Rogue of All Rogues: Nietzsche’s Presentation of Eduard
von Hartmann’s Philosophie des Unbewussten and Hartmann’s Response to Nietzsche.”
Journal of Nietzsche Studies 32: 41–61.
 Bibliography 237

Jordan, Leo. 1932. Schule der Abstraktion und der Dialektik: Neue Wege begrifflichen
Denkens. München: Reinhardt.
Jung, Carl G. 1966. The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature. Princeton: Princeton University
Press.
Kalmanson, Leah. 2020. Cross-Cultural Existentialism: On the Meaning of Life in Asian and
Western Thought. London: Bloomsbury.
Kanthack, Katharina. 1948. Max Scheler: Zur Krisis der Ehrfurcht. Berlin: Minerva-Verlag.
Kanthack, Katharina. 1958. Vom Sinn der Selbsterkenntnis. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Kanthack, Katharina. 1964. Das Denken Martin Heideggers: Die grosse Wende der
Philosophie, 2nd edition. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Kanthack, Katharina. 1968. “Das Wesen der Dialektik im Lichte Martin Heideggers.”
Studium Generale 21.6: 538–54.
Keyserling, Graf Hermann. 1919. Das Reisetagebuch eines Philosophen, 2 vols. Darmstadt:
O. Reichl.
Kisiel, Theodore. 1993. The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Kitayama, Junyū. 1934. Metaphysik des Buddhismus: Versuch einer philosophischen
Interpretation der Lehre Vasubandhus und seiner Schule. Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer.
Kitayama, Junyū. 1940. “Genjō Kōan: Aus dem Zen-Text Shōbō genzō von Patriarch
Dōgen.” Quellenstudien zur Religionsgeschichte 1: 1–15.
Kitayama, Junyū. 1942. West-östliche Begegnung: Japans Kultur und Tradition. Berlin:
De Gruyter.
Kitayama, Junyū. 1943. Heiligung des Staates und Verklärung des Menschen: Buddhismus
und Japan. Berlin: Limpert.
Kitayama, Junyū. 1943b. “Die moderne Philosophie Japans: Ein Beitrag zum Verständnis
der ‘Nishida-Philosophie.’” Kant-Studien 43.1/2: 263–74.
Kitayama, Junyū. 1944. Heroisches Ethos: Das Heldische in Japan. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Klages, Ludwig. 1944. Rhythmem und Runen. Leipzig: J.A. Barth.
Klages, Ludwig. 1981. Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele, 6th edition. Bonn: Bouvier
Verlag.
Klein, Esther. 2010. “Were There ‘Inner Chapters’ in the Warring States? A New
Examination of Evidence about the Zhuangzi.” T’oung Pao 96.4: 299–369.
Kohn, Livia. 2014. Zhuangzi: Text and Context. St. Petersburg: Three Pines Press.
Krause, Friedrich. 1923. Ju-Tao-Fo: Die Religiösen und Philosophischen Systeme Ostasiens.
München: Reinhardt.
Krauss, Oskar. 1931. “Über Alles und Nichts.” Philosophische Hefte 2: 140–6.
Krieck, Ernst. 1934. Wissenschaft, Weltanschauung, Hochschulreform. Leipzig: Armanen-
Verlag.
Krieck, Ernst. 1943. Heil und Kraft: Ein Buch germanischer Weltweisheit. Leipzig:
Armanen-Verlag.
Kroll, Paul W. 1996. “On ‘Far Roaming.’” Journal of the American Oriental Society
116.4: 653–69.
Krüger, Gerhard. 1950. “Martin Heidegger und der Humanismus.” Theologische
Rundschau 18.2: 148–78.
Krummel, John W. M. 2018. “On (the) Nothing: Heidegger and Nishida.” Continental
Philosophy Review 51.2: 239–68.
Kubota, Hiroshi. 2008. “Strategies in Representing ‘Japanese Religion’ during the
National Socialist Period: The Cases of Kitayama Junyû and Wilhelm Gundert.”
238 Bibliography

In Horst Junginger (ed.), The Study of Religion under the Impact of Fascism, 613–33.
Leiden: Brill.
Kwee, Swan Liat. 1953. Methods of Comparative Philosophy. Leiden: Leiden University
Dissertation.
Kwok, Sai Hang. 2016. “Zhuangzi’s Philosophy of Thing.” Asian Philosophy 26.4: 294–310.
Lacan, Jacques. 1992. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis,
1959–1960. London: W.W. Norton.
Lau, D. C. and Roger T. Ames, tr. 1998. Yuan Dao: Tracing Dao to Its Source. New York:
Ballantine Books.
Lau, Kwok-Ying. 2016. Phenomenology and Intercultural Understanding: Toward a New
Cultural Flesh. Cham: Springer.
[Leibniz, G. W. 1703] Leibnitz, Godefroy-Guillaume. 1703. “Explication de l’arithmétique
binaire, qui se sert des seuls caractères O et I avec des remarques sur son utilité et
sur ce qu’elle donne le sens des anciennes figures chinoises de Fohy.” Mémoires de
mathématique et de physique de l’Académie royale des sciences 3: 85–9. Paris: Académie
royale des sciences.
Leibniz, G. W. 1842. Œuvres de Leibniz, vol. 2. Paris: Charpentier.
Levinas, Emmanuel. 1932. “Martin Heidegger et l’ontologie.” Revue Philosophique de la
France et de l’Étranger 113: 395–431.
Levinas, Emmanuel. 1969. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, tr. Alphonso
Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press.
Levinas, Emmanuel. 1982. De l’évasion. Montpellier: Fata Morgana.
Levinas, Emmanuel. 1990. Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press.
Li, Chenyang. 1999. The Tao Encounters the West: Explorations in Comparative Philosophy.
Albany: State University of New York Press.
Li, Disheng 李滌生. 1994. Xunzi jishi 荀子集釋 [Collected Explanations of Xunzi]. Taipei:
Xuesheng shuju.
Liu, An, and John S. Major, tr. 2010. The Huainanzi: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of
Government in Early Han China. New York: Columbia University Press.
Liu, Jung-Hsien 劉榮賢. 2004. Zhuangzi waiza pian yanjiu 莊子外雜篇硏究 [A Study
of the Outer and Miscellaneous Chapters of Zhuangzi]. Taipei: Lianjing chuban shiye
gufen youxian gongsi.
Liu, Xiaogan. 1994. Classifying the Zhuangzi Chapters. Ann Arbor: Michigan.
Liu, Xiaogan. 2015. “Laozi’s Philosophy: Textual and Conceptual Analyses.” In
Liu Xiaogan (ed.), Dao Companion to Daoist Philosophy, 71–100. Dordrecht: Springer.
Liu, Yiqing. 2002. Shih-shuo Hsin-Yü: A New Account of Tales of the World. Ann Arbor:
Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan.
Lotze, Hermann. 1879. Metaphysik, vol. 1. Leipzig: Hirzel.
Lou, Yulie 樓宇烈. 1980. Wang Bi ji jiao shi 王弼集校釋 [Collection of Wang Bi’s Works:
Critical Edition with Annotations]. Beijing: Zhonghua Shuju.
Löwith, Karl. 1983. Weltgeschichte und Heilsgeschehen: Zur Kritik der Geschichtsphilosophie.
Stuttgart: Metzler.
Löwith, Karl. 2016. Mein Leben in Deutschland vor und nach 1933: Ein Bericht. Stuttgart:
Metzler.
Lukács, György. 1951. Existentialismus oder Marxismus? Berlin: Aufbau Verlag.
Lukács, György. 1955. Die Zerstörung der Vernunft: Der Weg des Irrationalismus von
Schelling zu Hitler. Berlin: Aufbau Verlag.
 Bibliography 239

Lüth, Paul. 1944. Die japanische Philosophie: Versuch einer Gesamtdarstellung unter
Berücksichtigung der Anfänge in Mythus und Religion. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr.
Luxemburg, Rosa. 1922. Die russische Revolution: Eine kritische Würdigung, ed. Paul Levi.
Berlin-Fichtenau: Gesellschaft und Erziehung.
Lynn, Richard J., tr. 1994. The Classic of Changes: A New Translation of the I Ching as
Interpreted by Wang Bi. New York: Columbia University Press.
Lynn, Richard J., tr. 1999. The Classic of the Dao and Virtue: A New Translation of the
Tao-te Ching of Laozi as Interpreted by Wang Bi. New York: Columbia University Press.
Lynn, Richard J. 2015. “Wang Bi and Xuanxue.” In Xiaogan Liu (ed.), Dao Companion to
Daoist Philosophy, 369–96. Dordrecht: Springer.
Lynn, Richard J., tr. 2022. Zhuangzi: A New Translation of the Sayings of Master Zhuang as
Interpreted by Guo Xiang. New York: Columbia University Press.
Lyotard, Jean-François. 1994. “Nietzsche and the Inhuman,” interview with Richard
Beardsworth. Journal of Nietzsche Studies 7: 67–130.
Ma, Lin. 2007. Heidegger on East-West Dialogue: Anticipating the Event. London:
Routledge.
Mair, Victor H. 1991. “[The] File [on the Cosmic] Track [and Individual] Dough[tiness]:
Introduction and Notes for a Translation of the Ma-wang-tui Manuscripts of the Lao
Tzu [Old Master].” Sino-Platonic Papers 20: 1–68.
Makeham, John, tr. 2002. Xu Gan: Balanced Discourses. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Malpas, Jeff. 2008. Heidegger’s Topology: Being, Place, World. Cambridge: MIT press.
Maly, Kenneth. 2020. Five Ground-Breaking Moments in Heidegger’s Thinking. Toronto:
University of Toronto Press.
Mandel, Hermann. 1912. Die Erkenntnis des Übersinnlichen ein Grundriss der
systematischen Theologie: System der Ethik als Grundlegung der Religion. Leipzig:
Deichert.
Mann, Klaus. 1949. “Europe’s Search for a New Credo.” Tomorrow 8.10: 3–11.
Mattice, Sarah A. 2021. Exploring the Heart Sutra. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
McNeill, William. 2006. The Time of Life: Heidegger and Ēthos. Albany: State University of
New York Press.
Mendes-Flohr, Paul. 2014. “Martin Buber and Martin Heidegger in Dialogue.” The Journal
of Religion 94.1: 2–25.
Meyer, Hans. 1936. Das Wesen der Philosophie und die Philosophischen Probleme: Zugleich
Eine Einführung in die Philosophie des Gegenwart. Bonn: P. Hanstein.
Michael, Thomas. 2020. “Heidegger’s Legacy for Comparative Philosophy and the Laozi.”
International Journal of China Studies 11.2: 299–318.
Misch, Georg. 1911. “Von den Gestaltungen der Persönlichkeit.” In Wilhelm Dilthey
and Max Frischeisen-Köhler (eds.), Weltanschauung Philosophie und Religion in
Darstellungen, 81–126. Berlin: Reichl & Co.
Misch, Georg. 1926. Der Weg in die Philosophie: Eine philosophische Fibel. Leipzig:
Teubner./1950. Revised and expanded edition. Bern: A. Francke.
Misch, Georg. 1930. Lebensphilosophie und Phänomenologie: Eine Auseinandersetzung der
Diltheyschen Richtung mit Heidegger und Husserl. Bonn: Cohen.
Misch, Georg. 1950. The Dawn of Philosophy: A Philosophical Primer. London: Routledge
and Kegan Paul.
Mitchell, Andrew J. 2015. The Fourfold: Reading the Late Heidegger. Evanston:
Northwestern University Press.
Monk, Ray. 2014. Robert Oppenheimer: A Life inside the Center. New York: Anchor.
240 Bibliography

Moore, Ian Alexander. 2019. Eckhart, Heidegger, and the Imperative of Releasement.
Albany: State University of New York Press.
Naber, A. 1947. “Von der Philosophie des “Nichts” zur Philosophie des “Seins selbst”:
Zurgrossen Wende im Philosophieren M. Heideggers.” En Gregorianum 28: 357–78.
Nara, Hiroshi. 2004. The Structure of Detachment: The Aesthetic Vision of Kuki Shūzō with
a Translation of “Iki no kōzō.” Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
Nelson, Eric S. 2004. “Responding to Heaven and Earth: Daoism, Heidegger, and Ecology.”
Environmental Philosophy 1.2: 65–74.
Nelson, Eric S. 2006. “Die formale Anzeige der Faktizität als Frage der Logik.” In Alfred
Denker and Holger Zaborowski (eds.), Heidegger und die Logik, 31–48. Amsterdam:
Rodopi.
Nelson, Eric S. 2007. “History as Decision and Event in Heidegger.” Arhe 8: 97–115.
Nelson, Eric S. 2008. “Questioning Dao: Skepticism, Mysticism, and Ethics in the
Zhuangzi.” International Journal of the Asian Philosophical Association 1: 5–19.
Nelson, Eric S. 2009. “Responding with Dao: Early Daoist Ethics and the Environment.”
Philosophy East and West 59.3: 294–316.
Nelson, Eric S. 2011. “The Yijing and Philosophy: From Leibniz to Derrida.” Journal of
Chinese Philosophy 38.3: 377–96.
Nelson, Eric S. 2013. “Heidegger and Carnap: Disagreeing about Nothing?” In François
Raffoul, Eric S. Nelson (eds.), Bloomsbury Companion to Heidegger, 151–6. London:
Bloomsbury Press.
Nelson, Eric S. 2014. “The Human and the Inhuman: Ethics and Religion in the Zhuangzi.”
Journal of Chinese Philosophy 41.S1: 723–39.
Nelson, Eric S. 2016. “Heidegger’s Failure to Overcome Transcendental Philosophy.”
In Halla Kim and Steven Hoeltzel (eds.), Transcendental Inquiry: Its History, Methods
and Critiques, 159–79. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Nelson, Eric S. 2017. Chinese and Buddhist Philosophy in Early Twentieth-Century German
Thought. London: Bloomsbury.
Nelson, Eric S. 2017b. “Heidegger’s Black Notebooks: National Socialism, Antisemitism,
and the History of Being.” Heidegger-Jahrbuch 11: 77–88.
Nelson, Eric S. 2019. “Introduction: Wilhelm Dilthey in Context.” In Eric S. Nelson (ed.),
Interpreting Dilthey: Critical Essays, 10–36. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Nelson, Eric S. 2020. Daoism and Environmental Philosophy: Nourishing Life. London:
Routledge.
Nelson, Eric S. 2020b. “Language and Nothingness in Wang Bi.” In David Chai (ed.),
Dao Companion to Xuanxue 玄學 (Neo-Daoism), 287–300. Cham: Springer.
Nelson, Eric S. 2020c. Levinas, Adorno, and the Ethics of the Material Other. Albany:
State University of New York Press.
Nelson, Eric S. 2020d. “Martin Buber’s Phenomenological Interpretation of Laozi’s
Daodejing.” In David Chai (ed.), Daoist Encounters with Phenomenology, 105–20.
London: Bloomsbury.
Nelson, Eric S. 2022. “Heidegger and the German Reception of the Zhuangzi.” In
Kim-chong Chong (ed.), Dao Companion to the Philosophy of the Zhuangzi, 787–806.
Cham: Springer.
Nelson, Eric S. 2022b. “Schopenhauer, Existential Negativity, and Buddhist Nothingness.”
Journal of Chinese Philosophy 49.1: 83–96.
Nelson, Eric S. 2022c. “Thing and World in Laozi and Heidegger.” In David Chai (ed.),
Daoist Resonances in Heidegger: Exploring a Forgotten Debt, 141–62. London:
Bloomsbury.
 Bibliography 241

Nelson, Eric S. 2023. “Emptiness, Negation, and Skepticism in Nāgārjuna and Sengzhao.”
Asian Philosophy 33.2: 125–44.
Nelson, Eric S. 2023b. “Martin Heidegger and Kitayama Junyū: Nothingness, Emptiness,
and the Thing.” Asian Studies 11.1: 27–50.
Neurath, Otto. 1921. Anti-Spengler. Munich: Callwey.
Neurath, Otto. 1933. Einheitswissenschaft und Psychologie. Vienna: Gerold & Co.
Nishida, Kitarō. 1936. “Brief an den Schriftleiter der Zeitschrift Risō.” Cultural Nippon 4.2:
123–8.
Nishida, Kitarō. 1936b. “Logik und Leben.” Cultural Nippon 4.4: 365–70.
Nishida, Kitarō. 1939. “Die morgenländischen und abendländischen Kulturformen in alter
Zeit vom metaphysischen Standpunkte aus gesehen.” Abhandlungen der Preussischen
Akademie der Wissenschaften. Philosophisch-Historische Klasse 19. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Nishida, Kitarō. 1943. Die intelligible Welt: Drei philosophische Abhandlungen. Berlin: De
Gruyter.
Nishida, Kitarō. 1987. Last Writings: Nothingness and the Religious Worldview. Honolulu:
University of Hawaii Press.
Nishitani, Keiji. 1966. “Preliminary Remark” to Heidegger, “Two Addresses.” The Eastern
Buddhist 1.2: 48–59.
Nishitani, Keiji. 1983. Religion and Nothingness. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Nishitani, Keiji. 1989. The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism. Albany: State University of New
York Press.
Okakura, Kakuzō. 1919. Das Buch vom Tee. Leipzig: Insel.
Osaki, Harumi. 2019. Nothingness in the Heart of Empire: The Moral and Political
Philosophy of the Kyoto School in Imperial Japan. Albany: State University of New York
Press.
Pang-White, Ann A. 2009. “Nature, Interthing Intersubjectivity, and the Environment:
A Comparative Analysis of Kant and Daoism.” Dao: A Journal of Comparative
Philosophy 8.1: 61–78.
Pang-White, Ann A. 2016. “Daoist Ci 慈, Feminist Ethics of Care, and the Dilemma of
Nature.” Journal of Chinese Philosophy 43.3–4: 275–94.
Perkins, Franklin. 2010. “Of Fish and Men: Species Difference and the Strangeness of
Being Human in the Zhuangzi.” The Harvard Review of Philosophy 17.1: 118–36.
Perkins, Franklin. 2015. “What Is a Thing (Wu 物)? The Problem of Individuation in Early
Chinese Metaphysics.”. In Chenyang Li, Franklin Perkins (eds.), Chinese Metaphysics
and Its Problems, 54–68. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Petzet, Heinrich Wiegand. 1993. Encounters and Dialogues with Martin Heidegger,
1929–1976, tr. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Pines, Yuri. 2002. “Lexical Changes in Zhanguo Texts.” Journal of the American Oriental
Society 122.4: 691–705.
Plaenckner, Reinhold von, tr. 1870. Lao-Tse Tao-Te-King: Der Weg zur Tugend. Leipzig: F.
A. Brockhaus.
Pöggeler, Otto. 1987. “West-East Dialogue: Heidegger and Lao-Tzu.” In G. Parkes (ed.),
Heidegger and Asian Thought, 47–78. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
Pöggeler, Otto. 1990. Der Denkweg Martin Heideggers, 3rd edition. Pfullingen: Neske.
Polt, Richard. 2019. Time and Trauma: Thinking through Heidegger in the Thirties. London:
Rowman & Littlefield.
Priest, Graham. 2018. The Fifth Corner of Four: An Essay on Buddhist Metaphysics and the
Catuṣkoṭi. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
242 Bibliography

Radhakrishnan, Sarvepalli. 1953. History of Philosophy: Eastern and Western. London:

Allen & Unwin.
Raffoul, François. 1998. Heidegger and the Subject. Amherst: Humanity Books.
Raffoul, François. 2010. The Origins of Responsibility. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press.
Raffoul, François. 2020. Thinking the Event. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Rapp, John A. 2012. Daoism and Anarchism: Critiques of State Autonomy in Ancient and
Modern China. London: Bloomsbury.
Rehm, Walter. 1930. “Wirklichkeitsdemut und Dingmystik.” Logos 19: 297–358.
Rickett, W. A., tr. 1998. Guanzi: Political, Economic, and Philosophical Essays from Early
China, 2 volumes. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Rorty, Richard. 1993. “Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and the Reification of Language.” In
Charles Guignon (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, 337–57. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Rošker, Jana S. 2021. Interpreting Chinese Philosophy: A New Methodology. London:
Bloomsbury Publishing.
Rotermund, Wilhelm. 1874. Die Ethik Lao-tse’s mit besonderer Bezugnahme auf die
buddhistische Moral. Gotha: Perthes.
Rousselle, Erwin. 1935. “Lau-Dsi’s Gang durch die Seele, Geschichte und Welt: Versuch
einer Deutung.” Eranos-Jahrbuch III: 179–205.
Śāntideva. 1998. The Bodhicaryāvatāra, tr. K. Crosby, A. Skilton. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1943. L’Être et le néant. Paris: Gallimard.
Schalow, Frank. 2012. The Incarnality of Being: The Earth, Animals, and the Body in
Heidegger’s Thought. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Schalow, Frank. 2021. Heidegger’s Ecological Turn: Community and Practice for Future
Generations. London: Routledge.
Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph. 1857. Sämmtliche Werke 2.2: Philosophie der
Mythologie. Stuttgart: Cotta.
Schinzinger, Robert. 1940. “Über Kitarô Nishidas Philosophie.” Monumenta Nipponica
3.1: 28–39.
Schleiermacher, Friedrich. 2012. Vorlesungen zur Hermeneutik und Kritik. Berlin:
De Gruyter.
Schönfeld, Martin, and Xia Chen. 2019. “Daoism and the Project of an Ecological
Civilization or Shengtai Wenming 生态文明.” Religions 10.11: 630–45.
Schopenhauer, Arthur. 1977. Zürcher Ausgabe Werke in 10 Bänden, 10 volumes,
ed. Arthur Hübscher. Zürich: Diogenes.
Schürmann, Reiner. 1973. “Heidegger and Meister Eckhart on Releasement.” Research in
Phenomenology 3: 95–119.
Seekamp, Hans-Jürgen. 1960. “A Literary Bridge between Germany and Asia.” United Asia:
International Journal of Asian Affairs 12: 71–2.
Shang, Ge Ling. 2006. Liberation as Affirmation: The Religiosity of Zhuangzi and Nietzsche.
Albany: State University of New York.
Sheehan, Thomas. 2014. Making Sense of Heidegger: A Paradigm Shift. London: Rowman
& Littlefield.
Siderits, Mark and Shōryū Katsura. 2013. Nāgārjuna’s Middle Way:
Mūlamadhyamakakārikā. Boston: Wisdom Publications.
Sloterdijk, Peter. 1989. Eurotaoismus: Zur Kritik der politischen Kinetik. Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp.
 Bibliography 243

Spengler, Oswald. 1922. Der Untergang des Abendlandes; Umrisse einer Morphologie der
Weltgeschichte, vol. 1. Munich: Beck.
Steben, Barry D. 2012. “The Culture of Music and Ritual in Pre-Han Confucian Thought:
Exalting the Power of Music in Human Life.” [Ajia Bunka Kenkyū] アジア文化研究
38: 105–24.
Sterckx, Roel. 2011. Food, Sacrifice, and Sagehood in Early China. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Strauss, Victor von, tr. 1870. Lao-Tse’s Tao Te King. Leipzig: Verlag von Friedrich Fleischer.
Strauss, Victor von. 1879. Essays zur Allgemeinen Religionswissenschaft. Heidelberg: Carl
Winter’s Universitätsbuchhandlung.
Szpilman, Christopher W. 2013. “Kanokogi Kazunobu: Pioneer of Platonic Fascism and
Imperial Pan-Asianism.” Monumenta Nipponica 68.2: 233–80.
Taketi T. 1940. “Japanische Philosophie der Gegenwart.” Blätter für Deutsche Philosophie
14.3: 277–99.
Takeuchi, Yoshinori. 2004. “The Philosophy of Nishida.” In Frederick Franck (ed.),
The Buddha Eye: An Anthology of the Kyoto School and Its Contemporaries, 3rd edition.
Bloomington: World Wisdom.
Trawny, Peter. 1997. Heideggers Phänomenologie der Welt. Freiburg: Alber.
Trawny, Peter. 2014. Irrnisfuge. Berlin: Matthes & Seitz.
Tugendhat, Ernst. 2003. Egozentrizität und Mystik: Eine anthropologische Studie. München:
CH Beck.
Umehara, Takeshi. 1970. “Heidegger and Buddhism.” Philosophy East and West 20.3:
271–81.
Ulenbrook, Jan, tr. 1962. Lau Dse, Dau Dö Djing: Das Buch vom Rechten Wege und von der
Rechten Gesinnung. Bremen: Carl Schünemann Verlag.
Victoria, Brian. 2003. Zen War Stories. London: Routledge.
Wahl, Jean. 1957. Traité de métaphysique. Paris: Payot.
Wang, Youru. 2003. Linguistic Strategies in Daoist Zhuangzi and Chan Buddhism: The
Other Way of Speaking. London: Routledge.
Wang, Qingjie James. 2001. “Heng and Temporality of Dao: Laozi and Heidegger.”
Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy 1.1: 55–71.
Wang, Qingjie James. 2016. “Thing-ing and No-Thing in Heidegger, Kant, and Laozi.”
Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy 15.2: 159–74.
Wang, Qingjie James. 2020. “On Chinese Receptions and Translations of Heidegger’s
Dasein.” Continental Philosophy Review 53.4: 449–63.
Wang, Robin. 2012. Yinyang: The Way of Heaven and Earth in Chinese Thought and
Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wang, Zhongjiang. 2016. Order in Early Chinese Excavated Texts: Natural, Supernatural,
and Legal Approaches. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Wenning, Mario. 2011. “Daoism as Critical Theory.” Comparative Philosophy 2.2: 50–71.
Wenning, Mario. 2014. “Heidegger and Zhuangzi on the Nonhuman: Towards a
Transcultural Critique of (Post) humanism.” In Neil Dalal, Chloë Taylor (eds.), Asian
Perspectives on Animal Ethics: Rethinking the Nonhuman, 93–111. London: Routledge.
Wenning, Mario. 2017. “Mysticism and Peace of Mind: Reflections on Tugendhat and
Daoism.” Frontiers of Philosophy in China 12.4: 554–71.
Wilhelm, Richard, tr. 1911. Lao-tse: Tao te King: Das Buch des alten Meisters vom Sinn und
Leben. Jena: Eugen Diederichs.
244 Bibliography

Wilhelm, Richard, tr. 1912. Dschuang Dsi: Das wahre Buch vom südlichen Blütenland.
Nan Hua Dschen Ging. Aus dem Chinesischen verdeutscht und erläutert. Jena: Eugen
Diederichs.
Wilhelm, Richard, tr. 1921. Liä Dsi: Das wahre Buch vom quellenden Urgrund. Jena: Eugen
Diederichs.
Wilhelm, Richard. 1925. Lao-Tse und der Taoismus. Stuttgart: Frommann.
Wilhelm, Richard. 1929. Chinesische Philosophie. Breslau: Hirt.
Wilhelm, Richard, tr. 1948. Das Geheimnis der Goldenen Blüte: Mit Einem Europäischen
Kommentar von Carl G. Jung. Zürich: Rascher.
Windelband, Wilhelm. 1880. Geschichte der Neueren Philosophie in ihrem Zusammenhange
mit der allgemeinen Cultur und den besonderen Wissenschaften, vol. 2: Von Kant bis
Hegel und Herbart. Leipzig: Breitkopf und Haertel.
Wirth, Jason M. 2019. Nietzsche and Other Buddhas: Philosophy after Comparative
Philosophy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Wirth, Jason M. 2020. “Martin Buber’s Dao.” In David Chai (ed.), Daoist Encounters with
Phenomenology, 121–34. London: Bloomsbury.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1969. On Certainty. Oxford: Blackwell.
Wohlfart, Günter. 2003. “Heidegger and Laozi: Wu (Nothing): On Chapter 11 of the
Daodejing.” Journal of Chinese Philosophy 30.1: 39–59.
Wolfson, Elliot R. 2018. The Duplicity of Philosophy’s Shadow: Heidegger, Nazism, and the
Jewish Other. New York: Columbia University Press.
Wolfson, Elliot R. 2019. Heidegger and Kabbalah: Hidden Gnosis and the Path of Poiēsis.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Wu, Shengqing. 2014. Modern Archaics: Continuity and Innovation in the Chinese Lyric
Tradition, 1900-1937. Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center.
Xia, Kejun 夏可君. 2017. Yige dengdai yu wuyong de minzu: Zhuangzi yu Haidege’er
de dierci zhuanxiang 一個等待與無用的民族: 莊子與海德格爾的第二次轉向
[A Waiting and Useless People: Zhuangzi and Heidegger’s Second Turn]. Beijing:
Beijing daxue chubanshe.
Yang, Rur-Bin 楊儒賓, ed. 1993. Zhongguo gudai sixiang de qilun yu shenti guan 中國古
代思想的氣論與身體觀 [The Concepts of Qi and Body in Chinese Ancient Thought].
Taipei: Juliu chubanshe.
Yates, Robin, tr. 1997. Five Lost Classics: Dao, Huanglao, and Yinyang in Han China. New
York: Ballantine Books.
Yu, Jie. 2018. The Taoist Pedagogy of Pathmarks: Critical Reflections upon Heidegger, Lao
Tzu, and Dewey. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Yü, Ying-shih. 1985. “Individualism and the Neo-Taoist Movement in Wei-Chin China.”
In Donald Munro (ed.), Individualism and Holism: Studies in Confucian and Taoist
Values, 121–55. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Yusa, Michiko. 1998. “Philosophy and Inflation: Miki Kiyoshi in Weimar Germany, 1922-
1924.” Monumenta Nipponica 53.1: 45–71.
Zhao, Jianjun 趙建軍. 2006. Zuowei Zhongguo gudai shenmei fanchou de ziran 作為中國
古代審美範疇的自然 [Nature as an Aesthetic Category in Ancient China]. Beijing:
Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe.
Zimmerman, Michael E. 1990. Heidegger’s Confrontation with Modernity: Technology,
Politics, and Art. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Ziporyn, Brook. 2003. The Penumbra Unbound: The Neo-Taoist Philosophy of Guo Xiang.
Albany: State University of New York Press.
Ziporyn, Brook, tr. 2020. Zhuangzi: The Complete Writings. Indianapolis: Hackett
Publishing.
 Index

action/acting, way-making 125–9 Book of Changes (Yijing 易經) 24, 26, 28,
Adorno, Theodor 49, 53, 74, 123, 130, 189, 49, 94, 134, 136
205 n.20, 206 n.21, 206 n.23, 207 The Book of Five Rings (Gorin no Sho 五
n.32, 210 n.49, 217 n.34, 218 n.35, 輪書) (Miyamoto Musashi 宮本武
218 n.46 蔵) 179
agency 124, 126, 127 Book of Rites (Liji 禮記) 24, 135
alienation 188–90 The Book of Tea (Okakura Kakuzō 岡倉覚
All Things Flow in Form (Fan Wu Liu Xing 三) 15, 17, 154, 179
凡物流形) 23 Book of Twists and Turns (Buch der
Anesaki Masaharu 姉崎正治 177 Wendungen) (Brecht) 60
annihilation, emptiness and 80–1, 94, 149, Brecht, Bertolt 60
150, 153 Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad 172
anti-humanism 120, 125 Buber, Martin 3, 16, 199 n.1, 211 n.53
anxiety (Angst) 122, 150 Daodejing 103
aperture (kong 孔) 61, 137 on Daoism 57, 103
appropriative/enowning event (Ereignis) on Gelassenheit word 96
108, 215 n.4 on hiddenness 16, 78
Arendt, Hannah 86, 205 n.11 “The Religious World-Conception” 57
autopoiesis 7, 15, 42–3, 121, 163, 198, 215 on things 72
n.6, 216 n.22, 220 n.2 Zhuangzi 89, 103, 112
and sympoiesis 42 Buddhism 1–3, 5, 220 n.19
Daoism and 8, 33–4
Baeumler, Alfred 121, 191 European 154, 158–9, 168
Balfour, Frederic Henry 16 nihilistic morality of 140
bamboo manuscripts 5 no-self 221 n.12
Bao Jingyan 鮑敬言 190, 203 n.52 nothingness and emptiness 134, 140–5,
Barth, Karl 176, 224 n.17 152–5, 192–5
Beaufret, Jean 101, 124, 125 perfection of wisdom 33
Befindlichkeit (attunement, disposedness) and self-emptiness 140–2
31 Zen Buddhism 160–1, 171, 173, 176,
being-with/being and beings 9, 17, 22, 52, 184
59, 108, 187, 225 n.1 Zhuangzi and 33–5
Benn, Gottfried 122 Butcher Ding (Paoding 庖丁) 31
Bhikkhu Maha Mani 5, 171
biocentrism 120, 154, 197 Cang Jie 倉頡 49
bioethics 154 care (ci 慈) 9, 190, 202 n.40
Bloch, Ernst 60, 116–17, 207 n.6, 211 Carnap, Rudolf 134, 153, 168
n.53 Carus, Paul 20
Blochmann, Elisabeth 86 Chinese philosophy
Bodmershof, Imma von 176 of dao in the Daodejing 60, 64
Böhme, Jakob 21, 99 images of gathering and emptiness 60–2
246 Index

interpretations of empty vessel 67–8 dao 道 2, 38, 96, 107–8

landscape painting 62 as empty vessel 66, 68
negation and nothingness in 135–7, 139 and ethos 9–10, 115–16
Confucianism 23–6, 41, 116 freedom of 32
and Oriental nothingness 139–40 gathering in emptiness 60–1
counterparting (gegnen) 76 as guiding-word 62–3
images of 60
Dao’an 道安 33 objectives 4
Daodejing 道德經 1, 3, 16, 196–7 darkness, sense of 15–16, 78–9, 111–13
the dao in 60 Dasein-centric approach 6, 9, 37
darkness 111–13 decisionistic language 120
emptiness in 61, 71 Dehn, Fritz 125
event in 6 Derrida, Jacques, The Beast and the
Gelassenheit with 20–1 Sovereign 41
guiding word dao 62 desertification 93
mystery in 65 destruction of thing 23, 76, 80, 148
not- expressions 137–40 Dialectic of Enlightenment (Adorno and
nothingness 136–7 Horkheimer) 32, 56
in The Philosophy of Mythology 65 Dialogue with Heidegger (Beaufret) 101
poetic thinking 127–8 Die japanische Philosophie (Lüth) 177
qi 器 in 65–6 Döblin, Alfred 59–60, 94, 154
self-naturing in 28–9 Dōgen Zenji 道元禅師 173
thing and world 1, 24, 59 Dvořák, Rudolf 60
translation of 16, 20, 27, 64
way of reversal in 110 earth and humanity 47, 80, 93
wuwei and ziran 72–4 East Asian Philosophy 31, 51, 103, 105
ziran 7, 72–4 Daodejing (see Daodejing 道德經)
Daoism 2, 3, 14, 74, 217 n.34 Heidegger’s entanglements with 170–1
anti-humanism with 125 of nothingness 134, 135, 154, 168, 177,
autopoiesis 42–3 187, 197
Bloch on 60, 116–17 Zhuangzi (see Zhuangzi 莊子)
Chinese sources 5 Eckhart, Meister 20, 72–3
Daoistic Buddhism 33–4 Gelassenheit 20–1, 201 n.16
emptiness of 7–8, 15 Eichhorn, Werner 32, 88
ethics and moral theory 117–18 elemental nothingness 162–5
in European philosophy 3–5 emptiness 2, 3, 15, 29, 50–3, 221 n.4. See
freedom 88 also empty vessels
German modernity 59–60 of beings (Seiende) 180
image and word 89 in Buddhist contexts 134, 192–5
Lao-Zhuang 33, 51, 90, 177 of Daoism 7–8, 15
Laozi on 14 between Europe and Asia 171–6
nothingness of 7–8 functions of 183–4
pluralistic conception 219 n.7–8 gatherings in 60–2, 161–2
purposive and nonpurposive forms Hegel’s negativity 182–3
218 n.48 in Heidegger context 148
religious 14, 136 hermeneutics of 182–3
sense of life 5 holding (containing vessel) 78–9
Ziranist 9, 10, 30, 130, 197 and humility 68
Daoistic Buddhism 33–4, 143–5 implications of 70–1
 Index 247

Madhyamaka teaching on 142–3 Fundamental Verses of the Middle Way

openness of being 160–1 (Mūlamadhyamakakārikā)
political implications 195–6 (Nāgārjuna) 141
of self and world 220 n.18
and the singular 150–2 gatherings in emptiness 60–2, 161–2
spacing of things 176–9 Gautama, Siddhārtha 140
Theravāda and Mādhyamika teachings George, Stefan 85
of 178 German contexts, Buddhism and
of words and things 179–84 nothingness in 152–5
empty vessels 65–7 Giles, Herbert A. 16
availability and usefulness of the drink Gotthelf, Jeremias 41
74–6 Guo Xiang 郭象 5, 33, 34, 67, 95, 203 n.62
Chinese interpretations of 67–8
in Daodejing 181 Habermas, Jürgen 100, 191, 205 n.11, 206
expansiveness 75–6 n.23, 212 n.9, 217 n.26, 226 n.22
and nothingness 72 Hakuin Ekaku 白隠慧鶴 176
religious ritual and sacrifice 79 Han Yongun. See Manhae
shaping of 80–1 Hart, Julius 87, 190
the thing, and releasement 71–2 healing 92–4, 99
enregioning (vergegnen) 76 Heart Sūtra (Xinjing 心經) 151, 162, 182,
Ereignis (being’s appropriating event) 63 221 n.8
errancy 111–13 heaven and earth 25, 32, 45, 49, 75, 76, 80,
essencing (Wesen) 108 95, 178, 203 n.60, 205 n.15
ethos 9–10, 15, 217 n.34 Hebel, Johann Peter 41, 165
action and 126, 128–30 Hegel, G. W. F. 133, 179
conception of 116 negativity in 147
dao and 115–16 Oriental nothingness 147, 172
ethics and moral theory 117–18 Heidegger, Martin 209 n.36, 211 n.8, 211
Laozian 30, 116 n.54, 218 n.38–9, 218 n.46
without mysticism 19–22 “Art and Space” 52
European Buddhism 154, 158–9, 168 Basic Problems of the Phenomenology
“Europe’s Search for a New Credo” 18
(Mann) 168 Basic Questions of Philosophy 54–5
Evers, Hans Gerhard 125 Being and Time 6, 9, 17, 19, 28, 37, 71,
expansiveness 75–6 80, 113, 114, 119, 127, 150, 167,
168, 199 n.4
Faber, Ernst 60 Black Notebooks 82, 93, 98, 100
fascism 124–5, 195, 212 n.9 in Bremen 85–6, 107
Fazang 法藏 151, 194–5 Bremen Lectures 76–7, 80
Federmann, Hertha 21, 45, 75 on Buddhism (see Buddhism)
Fischer, Otto, Daoism 62, 63 “Building Dwelling Thinking” 124
fourfold conception 45–6 communal identity 42
freedom 15, 30–3 Contributions to Philosophy 40, 119,
alienation and 189 164, 177
essencing of truth 112 Country Path Conversation 61, 71–3,
of stillness 109 92–4, 98
stimulus-response model 31 and Daodejing 15–17, 38, 51–2, 60,
with things 33–4, 98 64–5, 70, 215 n.1
of ziran 145, 216 n.11 on Daoism (see Daoism)
248 Index

The Determination of Philosophy 17 hiddenness (Verborgenheit) 3, 16, 38–9,

empty vessel in 68–70 54, 78–9, 211 n. 53
“The Essence of Truth” 78–9 and darkness 78–9
“Evening Conversation” 96–7, Hisamatsu Shinichi 久松真一 174
99–100 Historical Records (Shiji 史記) (Sima Tan
fourfold, conception of 45–6 司馬談) 14
“From a Dialogue on Language” 5, 39, History of the Myths of the Asiatic World
148, 161, 176, 180 (Görres) 60
“Gelassenheit” 50, 62, 76, 99 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von 13
and German intellectuals 71 Hofstadter, Albert 181
Hölderlin’s Hymns 41 holding vessel 78–9
Holzwege 1 Honneth, Axel 32
Husserl and 62, 63 Hook, Sydney 175
Introduction to Metaphysics 37–8, 120 Hsiao, Paul Shih-yi (Xiao Shiyi 蕭師毅)
on joy of fish (yule 魚樂) 16, 200 n.9 21, 22, 69, 181
“Letter on Humanism” 80, 92–3, 97, Huanglao 黃老, Daoism 27
102, 118, 123, 125, 126, 212 n.22 Huayan Buddhism 8, 144, 162, 188, 192–5,
Nietzsche’s philosophy 120–2 220 n.27, 221 n.29, 226 n.19–20
on nihilism 158–9 Hui Shi (惠施; Huizi 惠子) 136
“On the Essence of Truth” 15, 112–13 Huizi 惠子 (Hui Shi 惠施), dogmatic
“Origin of the Work of Art” 43–5 skepticism 16, 17
“The Origin of the Work of Art” 19 humanism 80–1, 112, 124–5
Petzet on 16, 17, 85 Hundun 渾沌, (self-ordering anarchic/
“Poetically Humans Dwell” 126 dao-archic chaos) 7, 33, 196–8, 199
Pólemos and Gelassenheit 86–8 n.5
“The Principle of Identity” 63 Husserl, Edmund 14, 62, 63, 103–4
“The Question Concerning Ideas 14
Technology” 48 Philosophy of Arithmetic 14
reliance on Wilhelm’s Zhuangzi 96–7
on things 18–19 (see also thing(s)) images
as thinker of nothingness 167–70 of dao 60
“The Uniqueness of the Poet” 70, 86, and word 89
92, 181 Imperial Way Zen (kōdō Zen 皇道禅) 185
On the Way to Language 63–4 Itō Kichinosuke 伊藤吉之助 15, 146, 170
“What is Metaphysics?” 46, 147, 155,
156, 161, 163, 167–72, 176, 180 Jaeggi, Rahel 32, 189, 203 n.59, 226 n.22
words and images 89–92 Jahr, Fritz 154
writings 1, 3, 41 Japanese philosophy, nothingness 170–1,
Wuwei 72–4 176–7, 184–5
and Zhuangzi 17, 85, 90 (see also Jaspers, Karl 21, 103, 142, 116
Zhuangzi 莊子) Jordan, Leo 168
Ziran 72–4, 90–1
Heiler, Friedrich 20 Kanokogi Kazunobu 鹿子木員信 223
Heng Xian 恆先 27 n.10
hermeneutics (the art of interpretation) Kanthack, Katharina 9, 119, 156
2–3, 20 Keyserling, Hermann von 31, 205 n.16
Heroic Ethos (Heroisches Ethos) 179 Kitayama Junyū 北山淳友 8, 172–5, 177,
Heshanggong (河上公) 27, 67, 68, 136, 139 185, 223 n.11
Hesse, Hermann 154 on Genjō Kōan 現成公按 184
 Index 249

philosophy of nothingness 178–9 modernity 82, 223 n.8

on things 180 mortals 79–80, 123
writings 178–9 moving-way (be-wegen) 109
Klages, Ludwig 60, 61, 103, 120, 210 n.45 myriad things 6, 24–6, 204 n.66
on nihilistic morality of Buddhism self-ordering 29
140–1 mysterious learning (xuanxue 玄學) 64–5,
Spirit as Adversary of the Soul 122 112
koto 事 162
Krause, F. E. A. 31 Nāgārjuna 142–3, 188
Kreutzer, Conradin 50 National Socialism 3, 86
Krieck, Ernst 121–2 desertification of 93
Kuki Shūzō 九鬼周造 62, 162, 177 destructiveness of 100
Kwee, Swan Liat 175 horrors of 121
nature/naturalism 7, 14, 37, 124–5
language 23, 102, 120, 162 necessity of the unnecessary 98–100
Lao-Zhuang Daoism 33, 51, 90, 177 negative philosophy 135–7, 139, 147–8
Laozi 老子 3, 6, 20, 173 Neo-Confucianism 24, 25, 139, 219 n.16
on Daoism 14, 16 Nietzsche, Friedrich 24, 72, 73, 96, 116,
emptiness 67 120–2, 140, 150, 152–3, 158–9, 191
ethos 30, 116 nihilism 7, 121–3, 133
self and nurturing things 25 Buddhism and Daoism 159, 168
in On the Way to Language 102 Heidegger’s references to 159
legalism (fajia 法家) 27, 45–6 Nietzsche’s analysis of 158–9
Legge, James 16 nothingness and emptiness 78, 180
Leibniz’s question and nothingness 156–8 “Nihilism and Existence” (Anders) 168
letting be learned (lernenlassen) 102 nirvāṇa 142, 149, 150, 153, 179
letting releasement of things 97–9, 123 Nishida Kitarō 西田幾多郎 33, 171,
Levinas, Emmanuel 19, 53, 56, 57 173–5, 177, 180, 184
Liang Chiang (Liang Qiang 梁强) 87 non-alienation, freedom of 189
Liezi 列子 29, 60, 64 nothingness (wu 無) 2, 3, 7–8, 61
Lotze, Hermann 13 anarchic implications of 190–2
Löwith, Karl 59, 223 n.10 in Being and Time 167, 168
Lukács, György 168 in Buddhist contexts 134, 171–6
Lyotard, Jean-François 74, 86 in Chinese Philosophy 135–7
of Daoism 7–8
Madhyamaka Buddhism 141 East Asian Philosophy of 177
emptiness 142–3 elemental 162–5
Mahāyāna Buddhism 141, 171, 172, 177 emptiness and 72, 78
Mandel, Hermann 20 between Europe and Asia 171–6
Manhae 188, 193–5 in German thought 152–5
Marx, Karl 18, 189 in Heidegger context 147–8
“Martin Heidegger and Ontology” heroic ethos 179
(Levinas) 168 Huayan interpretation 194–5
Mazu Daoyi 馬祖道 144 and individuation 150–2
Mencius (Mengzi 孟子) 135 Japanese philosophy 170–1
Me Ti (Mo Di 墨翟) 60 Kitayama’s 8
Miki Kiyoshi 三木清 33 Leibniz’s question and 156–8
Misch, Georg 38, 61, 62–3, 104 Nishida’s notion of 171, 173–5
Occidental philosophy 104–5 nonidentity 188
250 Index

Occidental and Oriental forms of self-emergence of things 39, 87

171–4 thing, work, and poetic 43–5, 69, 120
openness of being 151, 160–1 physiocracy 41
political implications of 224 n.23, 225 Plaenckner, Reinhold von 38, 210, 44, 211
n.2 n.53
spatiality and temporality of things 29, poeticizing 127
176–9 Pöggeler, Otto 16, 90, 205 n.11
as temporalizing of factical life 148–50 poiesis 113, 119, 126, 189–90
transforming the philosophy of 184–6 preparatory thinking 109
Wang Bi on 67, 68 pre-Qin era 5, 26
presencing (Anwesen) 118–19, 153, 162
object 18. Compare also thing(s) Pure Land Buddhism 161–2, 206 n.27
Occidental philosophy (abendländische Pu Songling 蒲松齡 103
Philosophie) 9, 14, 32, 53, 59, 81,
103–5 Qingyuan Weixin 青原惟信 175, 184
Occidental spirit 173, 179, 182, 184 qi 氣 (material force) 23, 140
Okakura Kakuzō 岡倉覚三 15, 22, 177 qi 器 (utensil, vessel) 65–6
on Daoism 28 Quesnay, François 41
On Certainty (Wittgenstein) 16–17, 95
ontological revolution 86, 118–19 Radhakrishnan, Sarvepalli 175
Oppenheimer, J. Robert 80 Record of Music (Yueji 樂記) 24
Oriental nothingness 7, 133–5, 172, 182, Rehm, Walther 20
184. See also nothingness (wu 無) relational freedom 2
Confucianism into 139–40 releasement of things (Gelassenheit der
nihilism of 174 Dinge) 3, 21–2, 50, 73, 97–9, 111,
Oriental spirit 173, 179, 184 123
originary ethics. See ethos religious Daoism (daojiao 道教) 14
originary thinking 111 reservedness 119, 133, 146
Origin of Humanity (Yuanren lun 原人論) reversing movement 110. See also errancy
(Zongmi) 144 Rosenberg, Alfred 121

The Path of Purification (Visuddhimagga) sacrificial ritual practice 23

142 Śāntideva, Bodhicaryāvatāra 193, 221 n.12
“The Peasant and the Devil” 74 Sartre, Jean-Paul 120, 125, 168–9, 176
pessimism 121, 123, 149–51, 153, 158–9 Schelling, Friedrich 65
Petzet, Heinrich Wiegand 15–17, 81–2 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 20, 173, 208 n.7
Encounters and Dialogues with Martin Schopenhauer, Arthur 72, 149–51, 153,
Heidegger, 1929–1976 85 210 n.44
Pfizmaier, August 75 Seekamp, Hans Jürgen 85, 86
The Tao-Teaching of Genuine Persons Seghers, Anna 60
and Immortals 46 self-determination 32–4, 39–41, 166, 184
phenomenology 14, 54, 55, 177, 203 n.33 self-emptiness 140–2, 184, 190, 196
Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel) 32, 56, self-generating event of thing 113
58, 72 self-naturing of thing 26–30, 114, 125
The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms freedom and fate in 30–3
(Cassirer) 104 self-ordering anarchic/dao-archic chaos
phúsis 38 196–8
ethos and 117 self-presencing 118–19
hermeneutics and politics of 39–43 self-relationality 35
 Index 251

selfsame (selben) way 109 nature and 56

self-so-ness 129–30, 187 as object 14, 18–19, 25
Shang dynastic period 23 phenomenological strategies of 14
shepherding and safeguarding 124 place for 51–3, 77, 114
Shishuo Xinyu 204 n.65 poetic words and 13
Sima Qian 司馬遷 14, 30, 136 priority of 76–8
Sima Tan 司馬談, Historical Records (Shiji questioning 55–6
史記) 14 reification of 18
Sinitic language 23 releasement of 3, 21–2, 50, 72, 73, 98
Sojourning/lingering (verweilen) 75–6 ritual and cosmic character of 24
Song-Ming Neo-Confucianism 24 sacrificial entity 23
Speeches and Parables of Zhuangzi (Reden self-acting of 32
und Gleichnisse des Tschuang-tse) self-determination of 32
16 self-generating event 113
Spengler, Oswald, dao 63 self-naturing of 26–30
stillness, things 50, 61, 65, 109–11, 123, sense of things as 101
128–9, 140, 161–3 straw-dogs 25–6
stimulus-response model 31 thingliness of 43, 44, 48, 77
Strauss, Victor von 16, 20, 46, 51, 60, 61, thinking of 48, 73, 101, 114, 118, 130,
209 n.36 180
empty vessel in 68–70 uselessness of 89–90, 98–100
light/darkness 78 in the work 44
on sojourning (verweilen) 75 and world 1, 2, 5, 13–14, 17–19, 14,
on virtuosity 116 107
ziran, translation of 73 ziranist/generative 6
suñña (empty, void, zero) 141 thing-mysticism 20
thinking (thought) 1, 3–4, 81–2, 110–11.
Takeuchi Yoshinori 武内義範 175 See also preparatory thinking
Tanabe Hajime 田辺元 161 The Three Leaps of Wang Lun (Die drei
Tang dynasty era 144, 220 n.19, 222 n.19 Sprünge des Wang-lun) (Döblin)
Tezuka Tomio 手塚富雄 161 59–60
thing(s) 5–6, 199 n. 2 tianrendi 天人地 80
animal and human life 113 Tiantai 天台 Buddhism, emptiness 144
annihilation 81 transmitted language 102
Buber and Heidegger on 57–8 A Travel Diary of a Philosopher
caring for 9 (Keyserling) 31
carving and cutting 23 “Treatise on Emptiness as
in Chinese philosophy 24 Nonsubstantiality” (Bu Zhenkong
description 13, 72 Lun 不真空論) (Sengzhao 僧肇)
emptiness of 71–2, 179–84 143
enframing and releasing 48–9 truth, essencing of 112
ethos of 56–7 Tsujimura Kōichi 辻村公 82
explaining strategies of 113–14
form and shape 23 unthought 1, 3
freedom with 33–4, 98 useful uselessness 67, 89–90, 100–2, 127,
gathering and emptiness 62 128, 139
measure of 49–50
myriad 24 virtuosity (de 德) 116
mystical discourse 73 von Hartmann, Eduard 72, 154, 210 n.44
252 Index

waiting 73, 88, 93–4, 97–8 words

Wang Bi 王弼 5, 33, 65 emptiness of 179–84
on the Book of Changes 139 and images 89–92
on Daodejing 30, 45, 139, 178 world
light/darkness 78 Asia and Europe 81–2
on nothingness 67, 68, 138 freedom and responsive participation
nurturing life (yangsheng) 138 in 30–3
world as spirit-vessel 66, 67 self and 2, 15
Wang Gen 王艮 219 n.16 as spirit-vessel 66
Wang Ji 王幾 219 n.16 thing and 1, 2, 5, 13, 46–7, 113–14, 123
Wang Lun 王倫 60 world-civilization 82
Wang Wei 王維 178 worlding of the 17
wanwu (myriad things) 5, 6, 24 wuwei 無為 21, 27, 32, 37, 49, 67, 72–4, 94
the way 1–2 acting out of nothing 139
being-in-the-world 15, 59, 108–9, 123 wu 物 23
conceiving action 126
event on 108 Xu Gan 徐幹, Balanced Discourses (Zhong
mature thinking 111 Lun 中論) 68
moving-way 109 Xunzi 荀子 24, 126
and mystery 63–5
preparatory thinking 109 Yang Zhu 楊朱 32, 203 n.57
releasement 111 Yogācāra Buddhism 172, 178
reversing movement 110 Yuasa Seinosuke 湯浅誠之助 170
selfsame 109
Wei-Jin era 5, 31, 33, 65, 67, 112, 128 Zen Buddhism 160–1, 171, 173, 176, 184
Weiss, J. G. 31 zero (śūnya) 157
West-Eastern Encounter: Japan’s Culture Zhanran 湛然 144
and Tradition (West-östliche Zhi Dun 支遁 (Zhi Dao Lin 支道林)
Begegnung: Japans Kultur und 33–4, 204 n.65
Tradition) (Kitayama Junyū 北山淳 Zhuangzi (Zhuang Zhou 莊周) 10, 14,
友) 173, 177 16–17, 214 n.68
Wilhelm, Richard 5, 16, 38, 51, 60, 61, 205 and Buddhist reflections 33–5
n.16, 209 n.36, 211 n.53 imperfectionism 67
Daodejing 51, 65, 69 text teachings 103
empty vessel in 68–70, 79 useful uselessness 67, 89–90, 98–100
on Gelassenheit word 96 Zhuangzi 莊子 3, 6, 28, 87, 196–7, 219 n.8
Liezi 列子 95 action and inaction in 94
The Secret of the Golden Flower (Taiyi dao in 2
Jinhua Zongzhi 太乙金華宗旨) 95 emptiness in 61
on sojourning (verweilen) 75–6 equalization 35
for things 45 errancy 111–13
“The Useless Tree” (Der unnütze freedom and fatedness in 30–3
Baum) 100–1 “Heaven’s Way” (Tiandao 天道) 32, 50
Zhuangzi 91–2, 94–7, 103, 112, 213 Heidegger’s thinking in the texts 102
n.42 “Horses Hooves” (mati 馬蹄) 65
ziran 73, 89–91 “Knowledge’s Northern Rambling” 90
will to power 119–24 Laozi and 30
Wittgenstein, Ludwig 16–17, 95 lone-transformation 33
Wolin, Richard 121 “Mountain Tree” (shanmu 山木) 90
 Index 253

nothingness 136–7, 219 n.9 Zhu Xi 朱熹 24

nurturing life 93 ziran 自然 7, 26–7, 32–4. See also self-
objective idealism 95 naturing of thing
poetic thinking 127–8 Daoist texts 107
self-determination of the thing 32 and naturalism 14, 27, 30
stimulus-response model 31 of the thing 29, 72–4, 77, 78
usefulness and uselessness in 100–2 Ziranism 7, 14, 192
waiting in 94, 98 Zongmi Guifeng 圭峰宗密 34, 144–5,
ziran in 30 165
254
255
256