CONCLUSIONS
(May Reinhard: Heidegger’s hidden sources)
1.1
The foregoing investigation has shown that Heidegger’s work
was influenced by East Asian sources to a hitherto unrecognized extent.
Moreover, it seems highly probable that Heidegger, without stating his sources,
in a number of cases of central importance appropriated ideas germane to his
work from German translations primarily of Daoist classics but presumably of
Zen Buddhist texts as well.
Case 1
As the juxtaposition of relevant textual passages has shown
(see 3.2.1), Heidegger adopts almost verbatim, in order to articulate the Topos
‘Nothing’ in anon-Western way, locutions from Chapter 22 of the Zhuangzi in the
translation by Richard Wilhelm -to the effect that the thingness of the thing
cannot itself be a thing.
Case 2
The earlier formulation ‘The Being of beings ‘is’ not itself
a being’ ( SZ 6)apparently anticipates
the ‘thing ’— locution in terms of sentence structure and meaning. Drawing on
Victor von Strauss’ commentary on Chapter 2of the Laozi — and the corresponding locution in the
Shin jin mei in hazama — Heidegger then writes in further clarification of his
‘new’ thinking:‘ Being and Nothing are not given beside one another. Each uses
itself on behalf of the other’. And: ‘Nothingand Being the Same’ (see the
juxtapositions in 3.1.3).
Case 3
With respect to the topos ‘Nothing’, Heidegger obviously
formulates the synonymous topos ‘Emptiness’, drawing this time on Chapter 11 of
the Laozi in Wilhelm’s translation, which has the
thingly nature of the container consisting in emptiness (see the discussion in
3.2.2)
Cases 4 and 5
In his pseudo-dialogue ‘From a Conversation on Language’,
Heidegger adopts almost verbatim, but well hidden, two formulations from a text
by Oscar Benl on Noh drama (see2.4). While these two instances do not affect
Heidegger’s major ideas of East Asian provenance, they nevertheless provide
further evidence of the manner in which he integrates foreign ways of thinking
into his own texts without indicating their source.
Case 6
Drawing on the idea of dao in the sense of both Way and
Saying, as expressed by Richard Wilhelm and Martin Buber, Heidegger clearly
formulates his correspondence between Way and Saying (see 4.2). Further cases
beyond these can probably be adduced (see, especially, 4.3.4). Another case of
striking correspondence suggests that Heidegger conceived his key idea of
‘Appropriation’ on the model of the concluding trope of Chapter 25of the Laozi
(see 4.3.2–3). Taken together, these cases show that Heidegger very probably
thought through and deliberately elaborated his path-breaking ideas from as
early as the1920s on, drawing particularly from the above-mentioned texts of
Victor von Strauss, Richard Wilhelm, and mainly from Martin Buber’s
Tschuang-Tse, without ever giving the customary indications of the sources of
his thinking. His subsequent appropriation of East Asian ways of thinking,
effected through encoded presentations, was presumably furthered in no small
measure by his conversations with Chinese and Japanese scholars, though
obviously unbeknown to those interlocutors (see Chapters 1,2, and 7). As became
known only after his death, Heidegger’s collaboration with Paul Hsiao in the
summer of 1946 played an important role in this respect (see 1.2.2). This is
also confirmed in the connection with Hsiao’s account by the letter of 9
October 1947 in which Heidegger expresses the desire to continue his
conversations with him again soon (see 1.1).
The assumption that these correspondences are merely
fortuitous can be rejected on the basis of their nature and quantity (Chapters
2–4); they become especially numerous in the texts from the 1950s, following
the period during which Heidegger collaborated with Hsiao on translating the
Laozi.
The nature and quantity of the correspondences suggest a
deliberate appropriation of East Asian ways of thinking. It is highly
improbable that Heidegger, whose interest in East Asian thought is uncontested,
who was able to appreciate it, and even admitted being familiar with most of
the relevant texts we have mentioned, should have happened to think and write
in such a closely parallel manner in the passages adduced above merely by
chance. And the same is of course true for numerous other passages in which
Heidegger, as we have seen, thinks in a similarly East Asian way
The assumption of mere coincidence needs to be rejected also
on the basis of Heidegger’s ‘confession’ (see Chapter 5, above). In an encoded
manner, yet unambiguously, he speaks of a ‘deeply hidden kinship’ between his
own and East Asian thinking. In other words, he speaks of a connection based on
his adoption of some essential traits of East Asian thinking which, for reasons
easy to understand, he declined to reveal. In contrast, the passage from the
‘Der Spiegel conversation’ (see 1.2.3)
must be understood as a tactically necessary ‘cover-up’ man oeuvre that
turned out to be necessary for the preservation of his secret (see 5.4). [1]
Heidegger’s letter to his Japanese colleague Kojima
Takehiko, written on 18 August 1963 and published a year before the Der Spiegel
conversation (3.2.2), also speaks in favour of this interpretation. There
Heidegger indicates quite decisively, if again in an encoded manner, what has
determined his path of thinking:’ above all not a reanimation of the beginning
of Western philosophy’ [2] even though one is happy to assume the contrary in
the West.
2.1
In so far as Heidegger’s work has been influenced by East
Asian sources, it is not simply a matter of peripheral topics that are thought
about merely incidentally. In the case of the topos ‘Nothing’ (and it is a
matter bearing in mind the locution— ‘
Nothing and Being the same’—of the major idea, the ‘only
one’ the thinker needs
(WCT 50/20); a matter, then, of an idea that is new to
Western thinking, and which Heidegger owes to insight into the teachings
of dao in the Laozi and
Zhuangzi.
For Heidegger, ‘Nothing’ is not merely a nugatory nothing,
the nothingness of nihilism: it is rather the ‘Nothing of Being [Seyn]’,
fullness (see 3.1, 3.2)
He pursues this thought in his texts continually, which are
in this context striking for their repetitions and variations of ‘the Same’.
[3]
To effect a complete and conclusive clarification he
eventually (in 1969) adds the ‘simple’ formula: ‘Being: Nothing: Same’(‘SLT’
101). Corresponding Daoist — and Zen Buddhist-tinged paraphrases are to be
found (see Chapters 3 and 4), in more or less encoded form, throughout the work
that has been published so far. Whereas in the formula ‘Being: Nothing: Same’
the ‘Same’ constitutes a conspicuous key word (WCT 50/20) for a better understanding of Heidegger’
s work in general, one that holds together in a hidden way all the
identifications discussed above, thought of as corresponding silently with the
spirit of the Daoist teachings, the reader must first laboriously explicate the
identification of Way and Saying in
order to see that here, too, Heidegger’s thinking draws significantly from East
Asian sources (see Chapter 4, above).
2.2.1
The preceding investigation has not only shown what Heidegger has appropriated but also how he
has paraphrased the adopted ways of thinking and integrated them into his texts
in such a way that hardly a trace remains of their East Asian sources. We were
able to point at the beginning of the investigation to a valuable document that
now assumes considerable weight. For it shows quite explicitly how Heidegger
para-phrases a German translation of a passage from Laozi 15 in such a way that his text
eventually becomes so distant from thewording of the translation that the major
topoi of the Daoist teachings find expression in his adaptation (and diction)
as corresponding key terms in his own thinking. The document is Heidegger’s
letter to Hsiao of 9 October 1947, which came to light only after forty years
through being printed in the volume Heidegger and Asian Thought.
In this brief letter Heidegger takes Hsiao’s translation of
a passage from the Laozi, which Hsiao had carefully explained to him character
by character during their collaboration the previous year, as the basis for two
versions of his own (see 1.1 above). While the first appears to stem from the
earlier collaborative translation work, and renders understandable Hsiao’s
discomfort with such ‘transposition’ (see
EMH 126), y the second has hardly anything to do with Hsiao’s
translation, which at best stays in the background ‘like the wind-borne echo of
a distant call’(‘Conversation’, 37/131).
A comparison of the texts easily reveals to the practiced
interpreter how Heideggeris proceeding here and what his aim is. (The
discussion that follows concerns the passages quoted on pp. 2f above).The
addition of the phrase ‘the dao of heaven’ may be acceptable in the context of
a broadly conceived interpretation, [4] but this is not the case with the
question preceding it [‘who is able by making tranquil (stil-lend) to bring
something in to Being?’]. For here Heidegger would appear to go far beyond the
original text in alluding with the word stillend (not moving, in the sense of there sting of any
kind of movement)—posited as synonymous with‘ Nothing’ in the sense of ‘Nothing
and Being the Same’ (see 3.1.3) — to‘Being’. [5]
The result is that Nothing brings, through nothinging
[nichtend], beings (‘something’) ‘into Being’—something that in Daoism only dao
could do (see 3.1.2). This, then, explains the answer Heidegger appended
(referring to Hsiao’s calligraphy) to the question. His first version could now
serve well as a basis for the second. This
second version represents a creative and eloquent ‘recomposition’ influenced by the
relationships (discussed above) among wu (Nothing), yu (Being), and dao (Way/Saying), in
Heideggerian terminology, such that we have before us the keywords that
Heidegger drew from Daoist teachings as early as the 1920s and 1930s,and which
eventually, after the collaborative translation with Hsiao of the chapters in
the Laozi dealing with dao, extensively condition his subsequent thinking—
above all during the 1950s. [6]
One can see in the way Heidegger writes the verb ‘move’ [be-wegen] (playingon
dao, Way [Weg], even though the Chinese word for ‘move’ in
the Laozi text does not provide any
‘etymological’ warrant for this) an indication of how the ‘multi-layered
meaning of the Chinese text’ (Hsiao,
EMH 127) can be made ‘thinkable
and clear in a Western language’ (even in Heidegger’s idiosyncratic diction and
interpretation, which go beyond the original). Our previous investigation (in
Chapter 4, above) attempted to clarify the way this ‘moving’ [be-wegen] flowed
into Heidegger’s texts on language (with the ‘e’-trema in wëgen and other
combinations). [7]
2.2.2
In this context Heidegger’s often repeated associations of
thinking [Denken] and poetizing [Dichten] gain a special meaning, in so far as
the greatteachers of classical Daoism are poets as well as thinkers, and
Zhuangzi, to whom Heidegger owes so much, is the greatest among them. Heidegger
may well have taken Zhuangzi as a significant model to measure himself by, and
not only Hölderlin, Rilke, George, or Trakl to name just a few Western figures
who have played a similar role for him. Heidegger the poet, as opposed to
Heidegger the thinker, would not then be expected to observe the custom of
citing the sources underlying the ‘beautiful’ work, for knowledge of those, as
Thomas Mann so aptly remarks, would ‘often confuse and shock, thereby annulling
the effects of what is excellent’. That would be fine — if only Heidegger did
not lay claim to being understood and taken seriously as a thinker! But
thinking and poetizing are so closely intertwined in him that one is hardly to
be distinguished from the other. [8]
This is because thinking, as Heidegger proclaims, has to
poetize in response to the enigma of Being. [9]
Is it, therefore, so astonishing that one has had to admit — with regard to a thinking that issues in enigmas and likes to create an abundance of encoded locutions (in other words, concealed plays on Daoist teachings which have gone unrecognized) — that, as Walter Biemel has said, we have still not managed to achieve a proper dialogue with Heidegger, because the partner has not been there and we have been genuinely taken aback by this thinking?
2.3
This kind of thinking and poetizing under East Asian
influence has again taken (post-Nietzsche) as its major task the overcoming of
metaphysics, the basic trait of which Heidegger sees as ‘onto-theo-logic’ (ID
59/50). Where this thinking has from early on received its (‘silent’) directive
from is now not difficult to surmise. [10]
From ancient Chinese thought — for metaphysics, soconceived,
was never developed there. [11]
Being neither indebted to Aristotelian logic [12] nor
receptive to an ontology involving a subject-object dichotomy, nor, above all,
being conditioned by any theology, ancient Chinese thought was completely
remote from the assertion of ‘eternal truths’, which belong according to
Heidegger‘ to the residue of Christian theology that has still not been
properly eradicated from philosophical problematics’(SZ 229). On this issue,
what could be closer to the mark than Heidegger’s saying that his thinking
(under East Asian influence, to be consistent) could be ‘theistic’ as little as
‘atheistic”. [13]
Thus Heidegger, ‘as message-bearer’ of his message (see
5.3), recommends underway that the lacunae left in the greatness of the Western
beginning (see ‘Hölderlin’s Earth and Heaven’ 36) be gradually filled by the
teaching of ‘the fullness of Nothing’.
This, too, could ultimately communicate Heidegger’s
‘confession’ to us (see 5.2).
3
If one agrees with Walter Biemel’s assertion that an
interpretation must open the text up and be able to show what lies hidden in a
thinker’s thought and what it is grounded upon, [14] then the present
investigation can also be seen as a small contribution to the interpretation of
Heidegger. At any rate, the full extent of its consequences for appropriate
future interpretations cans at this point hardly be gauged. In order to gain a
new perspective from this ‘Heidegger case’, we in the West will have to devote
ourselves to non-Western thinking as thoroughly as to that of our own
tradition, not least since Heidegger has, in his own special way, demonstrated
the necessity of transcultural thinking.
Thanks to Goethe’s having rendered great service to the cause of world
literature, such a field is now, a good hundred-and-fifty years later, firmly
established; but ‘world philosophy’, by contrast, is still a long way off.
Nevertheless, Karl Jaspers sees here ‘the unavoidable task of the era’. And to
this task Martin Heidegger, too, has paid tribute in a unique way.
NOTAS
[1] Compare the different interpretation of this passage in
Cho, Bewusstsein und Natursein, 16 [who takes Heidegger’s
assertion of the irrelevance of Zen Buddhism at face value]
[2] Briefwechsel mit einem japanischen Kollegen ’, 6 [ JH,
224].
[3] On Heidegger’s view it is precisely this thought that
has been misunderstood in the West (see 3.1.1 above, especially the passage
[WL19/ US108–9] cited in note 69).
[4] This is how Hsiao seems to have understood Heidegger’s
supplement in connection with his original calligraphy of the verse for
Heidegger (see HAT 100).
[5] Compare the ‘Afterword to “What Is
Metaphysics?”’:‘“Being” (Austrag) as the soundless voice, the voice of
stillness [Stimme der Stille]’(GA 9:306, footnote f). [The note is appended to
the word ‘soundless’ in the context of the possibility of experiencing Being
through not shrinking in the face of ‘the soundless voice that summons to the
terror of the abyss’ (Wm 102).]
[6] The role the Laozi chapter may have played in
Heidegger’s ‘Discussion of Gelassenheit [‘Conversation on a Country Path about
Thinking’], which was published in1959 but supposedly written in 1944/5, is
shown, for example, by a short passage (DT 70/ GA13:51) for which Heidegger
drew, presumably before his collaboration with Hsiao, from the version of Laozi15 by Wilhelm ( Laotse,134) and/or that
by von Strauss ( Lao-Tse,74, 230f). The later versions in the letter to Hsiao would
then be simply the expression of new (and deeper) endeavours at appropriation.
[7] See section 3 of both ‘The Nature of Language’ and ‘The
Way to Language’; the coin age wëgen occurs in the latter essay (WL 129f/US
261f.
[8] See ‘What Are Poets For?’, in PLT 99–100/ Hw256; The Thinker as Poet’, in PLT 12/
GA13:84. Compare also Karl Löwith,
Denker ind ürftiger Zeit (Göttingen 1953, 1965), 11 [where Löwith
writes:‘It is for the most part undecidable whether Heidegger poetizes
thinkingly or thinks poetically, so much does he poetically condense a thinking
that is associatively disintegrated’].
[9] ‘The Anaximander
Fragment’, in EGT 5S/ Hw 343; compare
‘Logos’, in EGT 78/ VA3:25.
[10] It was not from pre Socratic thought, nor from Western
(theo-) mystical thinking, nor from Nietzsche ’s poetic thinking, nor even from
Hölderlin’s poetry that Heidegger received the essential impetus for his ‘new’
poetic thinking. One can hardly help but think that the Western thinkers and
poets he mentions simply serve to help him further, step by step, his
significant[wegweisend]work through so-called dialogue with them, without this
attempting or sustaining an authentic interpretation of them.
[11] See Hajime Nakamura, Ways of Thinking of Eastern
Peoples: India —China —Tibet — Japan
(Honolulu 1964,5 1971), 243–6; Joseph Needham, Science and Civilization in
China, vol. 2: History of Scientific Thought (Cambridge 1956, 1975),
37.
[12] Hsiao instructed Heidegger on this point; see
EMH 128.
[13] ‘Letter on Humanism’, in BW 230/ Wm 182.
[14] Walter Biemel, Heidegger,129
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